by Kim Hornsby
Moody and the Ghost
Coming About – Book 3
by
Kim Hornsby
Moody & The Ghost – COMING ABOUT, Copyright 2019, Top Ten Press
All Rights Reserved
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales, or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Cover design by Novak Illustrations
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
SEATTLE * MAUI
“I’m not afraid of storms, for I’m learning how to sail my ship.” Louisa May Alcott
Chapter 1
It had been four long days and I still hadn’t seen, heard, or felt the presence of my ghost, Caspian. Except in my dreams. And I’d had some doozies after that kiss we shared. Dreams that made me impatient for his return to Spook Central, my house on the Oregon Coast.
Where was this ghostly man? He’d told me that when he was gone, it was like sleeping, like when he was alive. He had no idea how long he’d been away when he next appeared. For me, it was always too long because of the effect he had on me. His presence meant I could see, which was a big deal to a blind person.
I walked to the center of the bloody bedroom on the second floor, tonight, trying to summon the ghost of Jacqueline, Caspian’s wife who’d also lived over one hundred and fifty years ago. I was pretty sure the room was pitch dark. It was the middle of the night, so I had to assume there wasn’t sunshine coming in the tall windows. As I stood with my arms flung out from my sides, I imagined Jacqueline floating towards me, although I had no idea what she looked like. In my mind the apparition was transparent with big hair and lots of makeup, for some reason.
“Jacqueline? Can you come through?” I waited and listened. If she moved the curtains, I wouldn’t know. If she was floating around me, I couldn’t tell. Not visually. But, with my amazing clairvoyance, I was hoping for a feeling from what used to be my sixth sense but was now my fifth. Sight was gone now, thereby evening the playing field somewhat between me and everyone else.
“I need to ask you about Caspian.” I wasn’t sure what I needed to ask her besides ‘where the heck is that husband of yours?’ I knew she’d hated Caspian enough to attempt to kill him when they were still alive and barely married. I hoped that saying his name might rouse the ghost who usually came through in the bedroom where she stabbed him.
Then, I felt a presence.
I wasn’t alone.
The hair on my neck stood on end and I waited. It was often difficult for ghosts to break the audio barrier and be heard, a sense I now relied on. It was more common in ghost hunting for us Alives to see something but that wasn’t possible for me. I knew I should have brought the Ghost Box with me to pick up on audio but asking Carlos for that piece of monitoring equipment earlier, would have had him asking why I wanted it. I didn’t want either of my assistants to know I was coming here specifically to ask Jacqueline about Caspian. My middle of the night plan sounded like high school when you go to a friend of the boy you like to see if he likes you. I hadn’t even explained to Eve, my cousin and confidante, that Caspian and I had shared a kiss and he’d somehow fully restored my clairvoyant abilities that had lain dormant for months. Dormant sounded so much better than dead as a doornail, which described my clairvoyance for the last eight months. I’d tell Eve eventually about all that. I often kept secrets from Eve and Carlos, doling out bits of information when I felt the time was right.
The room grew frigid, as though a north wind had whistled through and left a covering of frost on everything. Would I have been able to see my breath? It was that cold.
“Jacqueline, I owe you a favor,” I said, which was true. She’d inhabited Eve’s body recently and when I’d told her to leave, I promised to do something for her in return. “What do you want me to do?”
I knew one thing she wanted and that was to kill her husband once and for all, even though Caspian was officially dead in our world. I was pretty sure Jacqueline had not been the cause of her husband’s final death and probably lamented that she hadn’t had the pleasure of offing him, even though she’d tried. “Besides get rid of Caspian.” I added.
I felt a cold hand against my neck, one of my only exposed patches of skin. The sudden cold made me recoil then recover. “I feel you,” I tried to say calmly. Unless Jacqueline jumped inside my bones and became me, I probably wouldn’t know what she was thinking by just standing here in the middle of the room talking. I couldn’t feel emotions beyond her anger which was pervasive any time Jacqueline the fireball was present. The times she’d come through, I had no inkling to what she was thinking, only that she was a mean bitch.
“Have you seen Caspian?” I asked. I knew the ghosts in this house were able to communicate between themselves. Caspian had told me they rumbled around inside the house often trying to keep out of each other’s way, sometimes talking, and in Jacqueline and Caspian’s case, arguing.
The air in the room swirled around me and I was glad I hadn’t brought Hodor, who’d be barking at the wind. “I think I banished Caspian forever,” I said, above the noise of the wind. I knew Jacqueline would like it if I’d banished the man who betrayed her lover. “He seems to be gone.” I wasn’t sure about this and secretly hoped it was not true.
Something thumped on the floor across the room by the fireplace. “Touch me again if you’ve seen Caspian recently.”
I waited in my shivering state and let my hair blow around my face until the wind stopped, the room grew warmer and I sensed the ghostly entity was gone. She hadn’t touched me again. As I rubbed my arms to warm up, I wondered what her quick departure meant.
Had I banished Caspian forever?
I returned to my room in a state of suspended grief and dread.
***
I woke the next morning from a delicious dream in which Caspian was carrying me out of the ocean, our bodies dripping with sea water, looks of lust shooting between us, his muscles probably rippling under his captain clothes. Next thing, the darn phone alarm woke me up and reminded me that my mother’s boyfriend was coming to visit Cove House today. I needed to get out of bed to start making my mother wish she’d never invited him without asking me first.
Ron was a detective in the Homicide Division in Seattle. My mother had given him a murder case on a silver platter recently, saying her theory that Mrs. Giovanni, my mother’s neighbor, was murdered, wasn’t unfounded because her famous psychic daughter had verified Mrs. G’s untimely death. My mother lied all the time with no conscience.
Angry for the alarm’s interruption, I felt around on my nightstand, turned off the increasingly loud music, and flopped back on the pillows to savor the memory of my dream. Caspian’s and my walk out of the ocean had seemed so real, not like those fuzzy dreams where one minute you’re at the Eiffel Tower and the next minute you’re driving along Malibu’s coast with a grizzly bear in the passenger seat.
Lying in bed in my half-awake state, I still felt Caspian’s breath on my face, his stubble against my cheek. Had he been inside my dream, because he sure seemed real in my subconscious? Even for me, the idea sounded ridiculous, but I was amused to think Caspian might have been in the dream with me. Although we were fully clothed in the dream, we were headed towards not being so; the alarm seemed like a cruel trick of interruptus.
I dreaded the cop’s visit today for another reason besides the fact I was being forced to
lie for my mother to save her hide. There would be hanky-panky going on in the house this weekend and after my sexy dream, that idea seemed like a slap in the face. Rachel made no secret of the fact that there was a five-alarm fire of attraction between her and the handsome detective. Ron was a new boyfriend, since I’d gone blind, at least, and I didn’t know what he looked like. I asked Eve to describe everything her eyes saw and for Ron she’d had a few words like, “GQ magazine cover. A hunk to the max, if you like that look,” she’d added.
I woke my mother who was sawing logs noisily beside me, (yes, I was sleeping with my mother even though she’d promised to move to her own room in this ten-bedroom house) and then I slipped on my Frye boots and fuzzy bathrobe to get this terrible day started. The sooner it started, the sooner it would be over. Or something like that. Maybe not quite like that but I felt like I needed a few hours of thinking time before the detective arrived with his pheromones and questions about Mrs. G’s death. Hodor, like the good Labrador Retriever he was, jumped off the bed in camaraderie and I imagined that tail wagging as soon as all four feet were under him.
“Get up, Mother. Your boy toy arrives today,” I grumbled, as I reached for Hodor and gave him a big morning hug and a kiss behind his ear.
“Really, Bryndle,” my mother said. “You better not call a decorated homicide detective that when you see him.” Rachel’s morning voice was low and husky, and I don’t mean sexy husky. She sounded like she’d been smoking cigarettes in bed all night.
“Maybe I will, maybe I won’t.” I left her with that thought as I shut the bathroom door behind me. There was no need to turn on the light. It made no difference if there was illumination. Sometimes I did it out of habit, but today, unless a certain ghost returned and brought my vision with him, I was still blind as a bat. Getting used to not having sight had been, and continued to be, a long road and the fact that Caspian’s presence gave me psychic vision, kept me from making it very far down that road. I would take two steps forward in coping and learning, then have vision when my ghost showed up. Then, I’d stumble back a step when I returned to the blackness and helplessness after Caspian’s departure.
I turned on the shower and slipped out of my robe and the T-shirt I’d worn to bed that I believed read, “No More Bad Days.” Standing under the streaming faucet, I let the hot water pelt my back, again reminding me of my wet dream about Caspian. Wet only because we’d been walking out of the ocean, of course. I had to stop thinking about that man until he returned and answered all the questions I had about what we meant to each other.
If he returned.
There’d been something otherworldly pass through me just before he vanished, something that had my clairvoyance switch on again after months of being dried up. What I’d felt from Caspian was inexplicable, almost like my whole life until that moment had been a dream and I’d just woken. I felt like I knew Caspian, had been waiting for him, and was beyond relieved to see him.
Luckily, I’d put to bed the theory that he was my bio daddy, a brief theory that had wormed its way into my wondering brain for a day but now seemed completely impossible. Had it still been a possibility, that last dream would’ve made me feel icky for passionately lusting after my dad. Aside from what I knew from Rachel about my bio dad, (which was almost nothing except he was a cowboy) Caspian had sworn he'd never had a thing with my mother and the first time he ever met her was twenty years earlier when she and I had come to this house to rid it of ghosts. When he told me this, I exhaled for a straight minute.
As I soaped my body, I thought about how Rachel, the anti-mother, had invited Ron to my house without asking me, the irritation of that assumption creeping back into my easily distracted brain. Ron seemed like a nice guy, even if he was twelve years younger than Rachel, making him closer to my age, a fact that didn’t bother me at all. I was used to my mother choosing boyfriends for various reasons every few months. I was pretty sure Ron was chosen for his looks, because he didn’t have enough money to amuse my mother with shopping and vacations, something that usually kept her out of my business.
I shampooed my hair and thought about how Ron’s visit had ruined my week already and he hadn’t even arrived. Rachel lied to a cop about an open investigation and I was to be a part of that lie. If I didn’t sell out my mother to Ron in the next few days, I was an accessory to that untruth. The night I stood in Mrs. G’s house hoping for a clue to whether she’d died naturally, I’d sensed nothing. It had been Eve who later sensed the murder, not me. Thing was, Eve did not have psychic street cred like me with a YouTube show and following, so Rachel took it upon herself to switch our names to add weight to the accusation of murder, hoping to find justice for her neighbor.
I had a big decision to make today. The shower, usually my go-to for decision making, hadn’t shed any light on what I should do when Ron talked about his case with me, which I knew he would. Rachel had alluded to the fact that this visit was partly to talk to me. I towel-dried quickly (the house was cold!) and threw on my robe. Should I lie for my mother and say I sensed the murder, knowing Eve was developing her hocus-pocus abilities to a reliable level, or rat out Rachel and be able to sleep at night knowing I told the truth?
I had no idea.
After I left the bathroom, I tugged on a pair of jeans and found a long-sleeved fuzzy sweater in my dresser drawers. I pulled on my Frye boots again and took Hodor downstairs. My morning routine was predictable. I usually let my dog out the kitchen door, got the coffee started, and came back to the door five minutes later to find Hodor waiting. Sometimes I pulled on a coat kept at the back door, tapped my way through the doorway with my cane, TapTap, and stood on the covered veranda facing the ocean beyond the cliff to breathe in the fresh Oregon air. Typically, Hodor didn’t spend a lot of time sniffing after his morning business because next on his agenda was breakfast and Labs hated to miss a meal. This early morning routine made me feel almost normal. Well, normal as a clairvoyant can feel. Moments like these where I stood waiting for my dog’s return reminded me that I could function without my eyes at the best of times. The worst of times were another story.
As I drank my first cup of coffee at the kitchen table, Hodor now fed, I fought off creeping feelings of self-pity, something I had kept at bay lately. Why was today different? Contact with Jacqueline last night might have had something to do with it, seeing my one-woman séance had been less than successful except for a touch on my neck. I’m not sure what I expected but the midnight ghostie time hadn’t provided any answers about why Caspian was gone.
My dream of Caspian had affected me too. He was a hunk that smelled good and I’d quickly gotten used to his big body in the room staring at me with those bedroom eyes. I also wanted my vision back and hoped my ghost would return to allow that. I was greedy, I knew. I had to be grateful for anything I’d had in the last months, not be greedy for more vision. I’d gotten this far and was proud of how well I’d done restructuring my life to accommodate my disability. My method of coping with Harry’s death had been unconventional and unadvised; avoiding the deep, dark emotions that threatened to pull me under. Avoidance was my new best friend even though according to my therapist in Seattle, it seemed like I was supposed to cry for months, think about how sad I was and dwell on it a lot more. Instead, when I got feeling blue, I changed the subject in my brain and did something that made me happy, like drinking coffee and thinking about the ghosts that inhabited Cove House.
I walked to the coffee maker for my second cup of coffee. I liked to use small mugs in the morning because it encouraged me to get off my butt and walk. It also reinforced my level of independence, moving around the kitchen, doing menial tasks. The other people inhabiting my house didn’t come downstairs for another few hours and my early mornings were a golden time to function on my own--trying things without someone rushing in to help me. I added cream to my mug and vowed I wasn’t going to let the dam of denial and protection burst to let in all the sadness and pity today.
Longing was another thing. Yes, avoidance worked great, but transference also was carrying me through this year. Before Caspian, I’d missed my dead husband, Harry, but I’d successfully transferred that over to Caspian. I missed him more so now that we’d shared something so profound that it had me waiting for his return like some damsel in distress from an historical romance novel. What passed between us, I couldn’t put a name on, but Caspian had restored something in me and not just my clairvoyance and lust for men, although both of those now had fully returned. This was more. This feeling was beyond my physical life, like Caspian had taken a covering off me to reveal another, more alive layer, a layer that recognized him.
At least, I’d felt alive for the first few days after he left. Since then, I’d hardly slept and now I felt like an exhausted mess. Eve kept asking me if I’d been taking my vitamin D, something highly recommended in the Pacific Northwest because of the absence of winter sunshine. I’d said yes, but obviously she could see something more. Now that Eve was tapping in to her abilities as a Primrose psychic, maybe she’d sensed the change in me. I didn’t know what to tell her about that night Caspian and I shared a smooch. He did something weird that gave me back my full meal deal of hocus-pocus. I also couldn’t admit that Caspian uttered, “remember me” in a whisper that made my skin tingle, then vanished like he knew he wouldn’t be back.
Footsteps tapped on the hall floor and I knew Eve was headed to the kitchen. I could already smell her floral scent wafting into the kitchen.
“Konnichiwa,” I called.
There was a second set of footsteps behind Eve, steps I didn’t recognize which could only belong to our house guest, Jimmy Big Ears, a man we’d originally employed as a PI and now couldn’t seem to shake because of his interest in Eve. “And Buenos Dias to you, James.” I didn’t call him Jimmy Big Ears to his face, only privately to amuse myself because Eve had told me he had abnormally large earlobes.
