Given Enough Rope (Haunted Series Book 20)

by Alexie Aaron

  “What was she like?” Lazar asked.

  “A bitter child. She would try to shake it off, only to have something happen and get knocked down again. But she was always kind to the old gentlemen. Never snapped like most teenagers do. I called her my prickly pear. I couldn’t believe it when she moved back to town. The town’s never been nice to her. The next thing I hear, she’s dating the recently widowed Whitney Martin. He was the football hero in his day. So handsome, charming and popular. It didn’t last long. Apparently, she dumped him for that ghost hunting fella… Ted Martin, no relation to Whitney. But I’ve never seen her happier.”

  “She seems to be a positive person. No longer a prickly pear.”

  “I expect the more you are with her, you may see the shadows of the pear now and again.”

  Tom led the boys to where the salt square was. Dieter got on his knees and stared at the crystals. “It’s pinkish. He dabbed his finger in it and tasted it. “It’s salt. Himalayan salt,” he pronounced. “Why use expensive salt when Morton’s will do?” he asked.

  Mark moved amongst the stored furniture, opened drawers and lifted the lids of the chests. He stopped and picked up two miniatures and handed them to Tom. “My grandmother found one of these at an estate sale. They are very valuable. What if someone wanted to get Edwin out of the house so they could come back and rob it?”

  “For these tiny pictures?” Tom questioned.

  “There is a silver candelabra there. Silver-plate in the trunk over there, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these paintings are valuable too.”

  “But this is just junk,” Dieter said, looking at the old furniture.

  “Oh no, according to my grandparents, old furniture fetches a pretty price if it’s a good quality,” Mark insisted.

  Tom walked to the stairs and called down, “Bea!”

  “Yes, Tom?”

  “Could you come up here a moment?”

  They waited until Bea’s head popped up. Mark helped her up into the attic. He noticed that Lazar kept a firm hand on the stair as she was climbing.

  “Okay, I’m here.”

  “Mark, you tell her.”

  “Ms. White, you have a fortune up here.”

  “I do? But this is all old junk,” Bea protested. “The only reason I didn’t put it all on a garage sale is that it’s Edwin’s. He loves his things just so. I don’t need the space, so I let him have his way. Actually, he gets his way a lot,” she admitted.

  “Do you use pink Himalayan salt?” Dieter asked.

  “No. Why would anyone use pink salt?” she asked.

  Dieter put a sample in her hand. “This is pink Himalayan salt. Cid uses it because the flavor is marvelous. But it is expensive. You can only get it at one store in town. Cid orders his online.”

  “Why would someone use pink Himalayan salt?”

  “That’s what I’m going to find out,” Tom promised. “Bea, with your permission, I would like to have someone stay with you here until we find Edwin. I’ll stay during the night, and Deputy Chambers will stay during the day. We think someone removed Edwin so they could rob your place.”

  “Oh my! Poor Edwin! Yes, please stay. I’ll put some fresh sheets on the guestroom beds.”

  “May I help you?” Dieter asked. “Mia says I’m the best bed maker she’s ever seen.”

  Bea smiled kindly. “Yes, I’d like the help.”

  Lazar held the ladder as Bea and Dieter descended. He climbed the ladder and asked if he could be of any help.

  “Actually, yes. Could you call Mia and ask her why someone would use Himalayan salt to trap a ghost?” Tom asked.

  “Sure,” Lazar said. “I could ask her, or I could tell you right now.”

  Tom’s mouth dropped open in surprise. He recovered quickly. “Please tell me all you know.”

  “Himalayan salt is halite or rock salt that is mined in Pakistan’s Punjab region. The salt mines are just about 200 hundred miles from the Himalayas. I suppose naming it this way attracts the millennials and foodies. The pink color comes from impurities in the salt. When I was first stationed in Afghanistan, my mother asked me when I was able, to go to the mines and procure a large block of the salt for my grandmother, which I did. I brought it home on leave and asked her why she needed it. She told me this story.”

  “When she was a little girl her village was besieged by angry spirits. They tried everything to get rid of them to no avail. Her mother left on a quest to find someone or something that would help them. She consulted mages and other crones as she traveled. They only knew of the deterrents she already knew of - until she ran into an old man from Pakistan. He said he would give her his family’s secret of trapping ghosts if she would teach him how to heal poisoned metal wounds. She agreed.

  My great grandmother returned to Bulgaria with a block of pinkish salt. She warmed it with the flame of a black candle and put it inside a wood box painted with lead paint. The ghosts were drawn to it like bears to honey. She waited until all the spirits were in the box and closed the lid pouring salt over the box. The spirits fought to get out, but the salt gave off an opium-like malaise to the spirits and it quieted them. Soon she was able to take the box away.”

  “Where did she take it?” Mark asked.

  “She traveled into the old forest where there was a deep well that was rarely used. She lowered the box carefully into the water and tossed in the last of the salt to poison the water. This was because she didn’t want anyone pulling the box out of the well getting water. She left a sign labeling the well as poison and came back home,” Lazar finished.

  “So, it shouldn’t be too hard to track down sellers of big blocks of this salt.”

  “They import it and make these salt lights. Supposedly the lamps cast off negative ions.”

  “Do they?” Mark asked.

  “I don’t think so. Maybe you could find out,” Lazar challenged him.

  “Ted could help me.”

  “I’m sure he could. But right now he’s busy downtown,” Lazar warned.

  “Don’t worry, all I have to do is ask, and he’ll work on the solution while he does other things. He’s a genius,” Mark bragged. “He and Cid designed the machine that I can talk to my father through.”

  “I heard about that,” Lazar said. “Ted must be very smart.”

  “I’m going to work with him when I get through college,” Mark said. “My mother already knows and approves.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  “You’re going to be testing for chloride, bromide, iodide, carbonate, and sulfate,” Ted rattled off. “But think about this a moment, it’s a block of salt. Seems to me, chloride is a given.”

  “Could, let’s say, chloride, for example, affect spirits? Giving them a malaise, quiet them down, or attract them?” Mark asked.

  Mia who had been listening in, sitting next to Ted in the construction trailer, shook her head.

  “Mia says no.”

  Mark went on to tell him about Lazar’s ghost trap.

  “That doesn’t sound like Crone magic,” Mia said.

  “No, it comes from Pakistan and…”

  “The Khewra salt mine?” Mia asked quickly.

  “Yes.”

  “I remember reading about the high spirit activity near Khewra. The old ones thought that something in the soil itself seemed to attract ghosts. I think it was in an alchemy book in the aerie library. Anyway, the stuff that turns the salt pink, when it’s warmed, could quite possibly attract a ghost. It being contained in salt though…”

  “It’s supposed to be a ghost trap,” Mark said. “I thought it was the negative ions.”

  “Each time an ocean wave crashes on the shore, negative ions are released. They make us humans feel good. In a concentrated area such as the closed box, it may make the ghosts calm or…” Ted theorized.

  “The salt is sucking out their energy,” Mia said. “Tell Tom to get to Edwin as fast as he can. The trap will eventually suck out all the energy Edwin needs to rean
imate.”

  “How long do we have considering we think he was trapped three days ago?” Mark asked.

  “Mia, how powerful a ghost was Edwin?” Ted questioned.

  “Self-sustaining. He and I tramped all around the country side for a whole day, and he never faded. Not as strong as Murphy is now, but close.”

  Ted pulled over a pad of paper and pen and began scratching out math formulas. He stopped a moment and seemed to be thinking, then answered, “A week at the most. If we think of a ghost as pure energy, it has a depletion rate. Add in the influence of the salt against the normal refurbishing attributes of the entity, and yes, Mark, you have a week to find Edwin.”

  “Mia, what happens to a ghost who dies off this way?”

  “Mark, they are already dead,” Mia reminded him. “Ted and I saw spirits that were dined upon for their energy in Sentinel Woods, but they weren’t totally depleted. They floated around in the astral breeze. Specters of specters. Sad really. If Edwin has been locked in this box, I think he will simply cease to be.”

  Mark’s silence told them of his empathy for a ghost he had never met.

  Ted put his hand on Mia’s and spoke, “Let’s take what we do know and what we can find out: the type of salt, where it’s available, and who purchased a sizable chunk. Also, who knew about the hoard of treasures in the attic? Tell Tom I’m going to give Jake the problem, but he should also use that cop brain of his and get to work.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m also going to have Inky check my work,” Ted said. “He’s presently OOBing, but I’ll have him look over to see if we can pin down a time for you.”

  “I’d appreciate it. Do I know this Inky?”

  “Inky is Ira Levisohn, a friend of ours who is helping us out on this investigation. His specialty is math,” Ted explained. “His goal is to explain mathematically why some humans can bilocate.”

  “He’s going to try and explain magic?”

  Ted was about to say something stupid about there not being any magic, but Mia put her hand over his mouth.

  “He’s going to try to find a way to use this information so that we all can travel faster,” Mia said.

  “Before I forget, Tom said, when his mother was Skyping with Brian, Brian said his grandparents were perplexing.”

  “Don’t worry, Mark. He said the same thing to us when we talked to him today,” Ted said. “Perplexing is my father’s favorite word. Actually, it’s his escape word when he’s stumped.”

  “I bet you, it’s Brian who is perplexing his grandparents and not the other way around,” Mark said, his voice getting lighter.

  “I think you hit the nail on the head,” Mia said. “Mark, are you alright?”

  “My mother says I’ve got a case of the worries. Last night, I dreamed I was on my way to football practice. My mother was driving me, and I was looking out the window at the town, and I saw that all the people were happy. I remember laughing in my sleep because everything was on track. My best friend and I were going to be on the same football team, and my father was making great strides towards coming back to us. Suddenly, the air caught fire and happiness was burned away. All that was left in my life was grief. I was a dark man, living a dark life.”

  Mia felt faint. She gripped the front of the table to wait for the nausea to pass.

  Ted was alarmed. He had never seen Mia fall so quickly into despair.

  “Mark, we’ll…”

  Mia put her hand up and took a deep breath before she said, “Mark, you and I have had similar dreams. It’s a warning? But right now, I don’t know of what. I was woken from my dream, so I didn’t get beyond the grief. Tell me, when you say you were a dark man, describe yourself to me please?”

  “I had no form, but I was solid. I moved along the town in the shadows, too grief-filled to speak to anyone. I just watched them.”

  “Thank you, Mark. You can let the dream go now. As soon as I can figure this out, I’ll call you. Right now, let’s treat it as a mutual bad dream.”

  “I’ll try. Mia, Ted, I don’t want to be a dark man.”

  “We know. None of us do,” Mia said. “You are a very special young man, Mark. You have come through some troubling times, but look at you now. Concentrate on how you got here.”

  “I got past my sorrow by believing anything was possible, even good things,” Mark said.

  “Yes. And as long as we try our best, the universe will continue to help us. Just believe.”

  “Thank you, I feel much better. I have to go now. Tom is tapping his watch.”

  “Keep us updated,” Ted said. “I’ll get back to you with anything we find.”

  The call was disconnected. Mia rose to go and check on Mason and the OOBers. Ted pulled her into his arms and held her for a long while before he said, “Tell me about the dream?”

  Mia told him. “Mike woke me because he saw me crying.”

  “How can you tell him these things and not me?” Ted asked, hurt.

  “I thought it was just a nightmare brought on by hormones. It wasn’t that it was Mike; it could have been anyone who woke me. I was so upset, I would have poured my heart out to anyone. Please don’t read anything more into this,” Mia pleaded.

  Ted reached over and locked the door of the trailer. He took Mia’s hand and led her back to the chairs and sat her down. He sat down and pulled his chair so that he sat in front of her. “I’m an insecure man. There’s something inside me that shouts that I don’t deserve all the happiness you’ve given me. I don’t deserve to be the man that lies with you and beside you when we sleep. When people meet us for the first time they are shocked that you would have chosen me to be your husband. It only deepens the doubts and feeds my insecurities.”

  Mia reached over and snagged the pad and pen from the table. She handed it to Ted. “Take this and help me solve this problem,” Mia instructed. “Write down everything you know about me - not just physical attributes, but all the crazy Cooper stuff. I know it will take some time, but we’re not budging until you do.”

  Ted wrote so fast that he doubted even he would be able to decipher the scrawl.

  “Finished.”

  “Okay, let’s put all the men you’re insecure about down and give them a symbol. Also, put your name down,” she added.

  Mia was surprised by the size of the list. She was tempted to look but knew it would defeat what she was trying to do if she argued the men on the list.

  “Finished,” Ted said.

  “Now comes time for honesty. Place the symbol of the man who was the best person to enjoy or help me with each of what makes me Mia.”

  “I’m not sure what…”

  “May I?” Mia put her hand out for the pad of paper. She tore off the list of men and set it beside what Ted had listed about her.

  “Let’s take…” Mia scanned the list and was surprised to see a few names there. “Okay, let’s take Angelo. Angelo likes that I am part birdman, so we can put the skull and crossed bones here. But he hates that I’m impulsive, so we can’t put him here.”

  Ted watched her work and noticed the honesty in her comments as she worked her way down the list.

  “Do this with all the rest of them, including yourself.”

  “I get where you’re going with this…”

  “DO IT!” Mia said sharply.

  Ted worked on the list, pulling his feelings out of the matter, as if it were a problem that needed solving. He finished and handed it back to her.

  Mia smiled. “Come and look at it with me. Who made all but this one I can’t read?”

  “I couldn’t read it either so I didn’t put anyone down.”

  “Who?”

  “Me.”

  “I see that these gentlemen and entities all like a few of what makes up me, but no one likes all of me except you.”

  Ted grinned. “I remembered what this one was. You can put me down there too,” he said, tapping the paper.

  “So scientifically, who is the best mate f
or me?”

  “I am.”

  “And you knew it the moment you met me.”

  Ted smiled.

  “Did you ever think that when people are shocked by the fact that you’re my husband, it has anything to do with their perception of me? That they are surprised that whatever they are seeing in front of them would be attached to someone of substance? That I’m not worthy of being Mrs. Theodore Martin?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Well, gee, who’s the super investigator now? I don’t let it get to me because I’ve made a list like this. I put your name down and everything about you I know. I did this before I walked down the aisle. I found out that, aside from Cid, I’m the one most suited to be your mate. I’m proud of being Mrs. Theodore Martin. I’m married to the man who loves that I pee if I laugh too hard and that I’m constantly changing. You are my rock. I trust you to grab me before I make an ass of myself. Or laugh with me when I do.”

  “I’m sorry. That you and others have had to put up with my jealousy. But I know it’s over. I can see that on paper we were meant to be together. You sprouted wings and flew to find me and bring me home.”

  “You climbed a three-story building in a thunderstorm for me. Ted, you will always be my hero and my clown.”

  Ted pulled Mia into his lap and kissed her gently and then not so gently. Mia’s arms held on to him as their passion built. Tenderness and need took them to places that filled and nourished them. When the Martins left the trailer, each knew that they would not have to revisit this conversation again.

  Ira walked smartly next to Sabine. Sabine chose to be herself in her bilocated persona so that Ira would recognize her. Ira emerged, also as himself, from his body to see Sabine waiting for him outside of the trailer.

  “Let’s go over a few things quickly as I may be a little rusty,” Sabine said to the teen. “We are invisible to all, even ghosts unless we slow down. When we move slowly, the ghosts can and may communicate with us. We can’t go over water unless there is a ley line moving through there. We mustn’t be too long from our bodies. Time is different here.”