by Kim Hornsby
“4, 3, 2...”
“Investigation 68, Mrs. G’s house, Seattle.” I put my hands out in front to hover over the bed. “There is evil here. And fear. The victim died in fear.” I dug deep to try to channel Mrs. Giovanni, the lovely neighbor who’d been so kind to my mother and got lots back. This was so unlike that last time I came in here with the psychic switch soldered shut. “Mrs. G. It’s Rachel’s daughter, Bryndle. Are you with us?” I waited. The room smelled musty like it had been shut up for months, which wasn’t so. “Mrs. G? I think someone murdered you. I want to prove you did not die naturally.”
Ron cleared his throat from the doorway. “Sorry,” he whispered, probably to my mother who would have shot him a look of WTF.
“Are you with us, Mrs. Giovanni? Can you let us know you’re here?” The air around me grew cold, like the heat had been sucked from the area.
Carlos’s meter clicked faster. “Anomaly over the bed,” he said.
“Teresa,” my mother said. “Who did this to you? I want to find the murderer and put you to rest.”
Normally, I’d be furious that my mother spoke during an investigation, but she was friends with Mrs. G and as I stood in the coldness of the room, I got the sense that the ghost before us was trying to contact my mother. “Can you enter me, Mrs. G? Come inside me and speak through my voice?”
Dead silence and coldness filled the room. I waited. I didn’t really want Mrs. G inside me. As well as having just entertained a ghost the night before and being fresh out of hospitality, Mrs. G had a smoker’s cough that I really did not want to be a part of.
Nothing entered me but Carlos said the anomaly over the bed was moving. I had to believe it was difficult for a ghost to enter an Alive or they’d all be doing it and loads of us would be worried about ghost invasions. “Tell us what happened the night you died.” When nothing happened, I sat on the bed and put my hands on the pillows, knowing the cops were worried I was disturbing a crime scene, but not caring. “Did someone kill you here, Mrs. G? Who was it?”
“Curtains fluttering,” Eve said.
Carlos moved to the window. Or at least I think that’s where he went.
“We feel you here.” I turned my head and spoke to Eve. “Marker and paper.”
Eve set a tablet of paper on my lap with a black marker and I held the marker over the paper. “Can you write through me? Tell me who killed you.” I waited, then set the tip of the marker on the tablet. It started to move. I closed my eyes, knowing we were filming and there was no way I could read what was being written. Eve got the message and moved in to read as I wrote.
“Gibberish, twirls, lines, some letters but not words,” she said.
My marker was now flying across the page to the end, then another line, then another. I reached the bottom of the page and turned it, this action not my own. I sensed desperation. I’d filled the whole tablet when the room became warm and my marker stopped moving.
Eve took the papers and marker from me.
“She’s gone,” I said. I was exhausted and although I felt like flopping on the bed behind me, I had to end the episode. “Mood Peeps, that’s called Automatic Writing, something we haven’t done on the show before. When an entity tries to communicate through me to write something. I have rarely experienced it but wanted to try tonight and brought the marker and paper just in case.” I cocked my head and tried to look like I was staring out into space and thinking. “Eve, can you make any sense of what was written?”
“The first pages appear to be just loops and letters, but on the third page, there are words. I think she wrote in another language. Maybe in Italian, but I’m not sure. I don’t speak that language unfortunately.”
I stood and threw my arms out, my head back. “Thank you, Mrs. G. We will be back.” I turned to where I believed the others stood watching. “Carlos. Let’s cut there and I’ll sign out now. We’re done.”
I heard the heaviest feet head down the hall and assumed the cops were on their way to the kitchen. My mother left as well. I knew this because her perfume scent was only lingering, not pervasive, as usual. When I thought they were gone, I tried one last time to contact Mrs. G knowing non-believers in the room sometimes hinder the investigation. “Mrs. G? Can you give us one last clue? Do something or tell me something to help me find who did this to you?”
We listened. My team watched. I presumed the light was on and they could see the room.
“Was it your daughter who killed you?”
I fell forward, stumbling to land on the bed. “Someone pushed me.” I got up. “Mrs. G? Did you push me, just now?” Nothing more happened. “Was it Lola who killed you? Please help us.”
Nothing more.
We waited another five minutes, me saying the same thing over and over but got nothing. I wasn’t sure how to interpret the push that led me to fall on the bed. I’d felt something on my right shoulder and was so close to the bed’s edge, as I took a step forward to get my feet under the rest of me, I hit the bed and tumbled. Did the contact mean it was Lola who killed Mrs. G or that it wasn’t? I had no sense of either.
But one thing was clear. We needed to find someone who spoke Italian.
We stood in Mrs. G’s kitchen arguing over who would take the writings to a translator. Officially, I owned the paper and it was mine.
“Bryndle, you are here helping the police,” my mother said in that voice that told me I was being a petulant child. “They will take it from here.” She must’ve taken the tablet from Eve because I heard Eve make a little noise like she wasn’t sure what to do.
“Mother,” I countered, prepared to bring out my big guns. “Just remember that I am in charge of this summoning and it was the initial prediction that you used to get Ron involved.” I said this last part like I was going to reveal her lie if she didn’t give Eve back the tablet.
“The police will find a translator, Bryndle. You agreed to helping them tonight. You don’t need to retain control of the papers.”
She was right, but I didn’t like that she’d grabbed the tablet from Eve, so I needed to be clear of this before I gave in. “Did she grab the thing from you, Eve?”
“Sort of,” Eve said, always afraid of my mother’s aggressive actions.
“Give it back to Eve, Mother, and ask her nicely for it.” I said this forcefully, knowing I had Rachel’s lie to Ron floating around in the room with us.
My mother must’ve done just that because the next thing I knew she asked for the tablet. “May I have it?”
“Bryn?” Eve asked. I loved my cousin for stretching this out like the badass she is.
“Yes, you may, Eve.”
“Oh honestly, you two,” my mother said. “I’m sorry Ron. You’d think they were ten years old.”
I smiled and had to think Eve was smiling to have made my mother say this. “I’d like to hear what I wrote, when you find a translator,” I said, cheerfully.
“Of course,” Ron said.
I reached to shake his hand and as our palms touched, I sensed something from Ron that wasn’t related to the case. Something I wasn’t happy to discover. I sensed that someone waited for him tonight.
A woman.
His wife.
Chapter 9
If Ron was married, I had to wonder if Rachel knew. Did she find out and that was why she was now burrowing in at Floatville? As we stood in the driveway in the pouring rain saying goodbye to my mother, I sensed she was withholding something. I hoped it wasn’t that her boyfriend had a tan line around his left-hand ring finger.
“Are you going to sleep at Ron’s?” I asked. Rain pelted the mega-umbrella I held over us.
“Ron’s going to work at the station. Maybe I’ll come to Floatville with you.”
Eve had told me earlier that Rachel’s house next door looked normal. Front light on, lawn recently mowed. The exterminators who’d had her house tented had to be long gone by now. Bugs too. Why wasn’t she going home? My mother had a perfectly nice house with three b
edrooms. “Why do you need to come home with us? Come on, Mother. Spill.” She’d indicated last weekend when she left Cove House, although she wasn’t fond of his small apartment, she’d been spending nights with Ron or at her house. This was strange. “Why not run across the driveway to your own house, Mother?” What was this woman not telling me?
“I’d like to wake up with you guys, make you breakfast.”
“Lie.”
“I don’t want to be alone.”
“Another lie.”
She dug in her arsenal of untruths to find something else to try but I wanted to get in the van and out of the rain. “Mother, you can come back with us and sleep with me and Hodor but I’m going to have to know the truth.” I’d had enough lies from this woman for a lifetime of forgiveness. Now I needed to know why she wasn’t going home or to her boyfriend’s place.
“I’ll tell you when we get to Floatville. Let’s get out of the rain,” she said.
“Nope.” The drive would give my mother enough time to think up a story.
“I rented my house. Money is tight.”
That made more sense than a two-week exterminator.
“And Ron’s?”
“We had a fight.”
“That’s all I needed to know,” I said. “Let’s go.” My mother helped me into The Marshmallow where Eve and Carlos waited.
“She’s coming to Floatville with us,” I said. “Her house is rented out and she fought with Ron.”
“Bryndle!” My mother sounded horrified that I’d given up her secrets.
“What? They’ll know eventually why you aren’t going home at least. How long is your house rented for?” I was thinking Airbnb for the week.
“A one-year lease.” My mother sounded like it was no big deal when really it was a huge deal to me.
The only sound inside the van was the Hodor licking something, probably on his back end, and sounding like he was really getting it clean.
“Where did you think you would live, Rachel, for that year?” My voice didn’t sound as bitchy as I wanted it to.
Carlos pulled out of the driveway and turned onto the street, the windshield wipers swiping like a metronome on the glass.
“You have two residences. I thought I’d go between.”
I gulped down my initial response about not assuming I’d take her in. You did not need to be a psychic to know that Carlos was waiting for the poop to hit the fan, or that Eve was groaning inside and saying a silent prayer that I’d refuse my mother entry to our lives.
Rachel continued. “If you’ll have me.” Her voice sounded weak. She didn’t sound like the battle axe she was. I knew this woman to be fierce, aggressive, inconsiderate. At least with me. She rarely backed down from an argument, or caved on anything, even when she realized she was wrong. Hearing her ask us if we’d have her melted something in me that I’d set up a decade ago to defend myself against. “We’ll have you. For a few days until we figure out what to do with you. But, we will not have you for a year, Mother.”
***
It was too cramped for all four of us and a large dog at Floatville. And our increasing collection of gear. We needed to work, edit a paranormal show even though Ron had called to remind us that we were not to air anything from Mrs. G’s house, a stipulation that had been set before we walked in to her house last night. We’d be charged with interfering with an ongoing investigation. Blah, blah, blah.
“Let me know when I can air the footage,” I said. “I’m thinking next month.”
He hadn’t asked to speak with Rachel and hung up before I could ask if he’d like to. After having her snore in my bed for the last five hours of supposed sleep, I wanted these two to make up and get back together but not if he was married. I’d almost asked her last night if that was what the fight was about but chickened out when my mother started crying and sniffing after she turned out the lights. If I’d been a really good daughter, I might have asked her what was wrong and we’d have sat up all night talking about how Ron cheated on her or how she worried he might have a wife, but I wasn’t set up to be daughter of the year. Too much water under the bridge and all that. And although I loved my mother and cared deeply, l did not want to hear another sad tale about a man who did her wrong. I’d heard so many tales over the years, I had become immune to tears and sob stories about lovers.
Rachel was still sleeping, not in any hurry to get out of bed, when I woke the next morning at ten. She wasn’t an early riser like me and had always loved to lie around in bed for hours in the morning, drifting in and out of consciousness. Like a cat.
Carlos, Eve, and I had breakfast at my little table, munching on blueberry bagels and cream cheese and something Eve called Surprise Fruit Salad. “I hope the surprise isn’t that the fruit is fuzzy and green,” I’d said.
“Negatory. It’s fresh produce from the joint on the corner.” Eve had just done a grocery run in anticipation of being at Floatville a few days.
But now that we were seated around the table, eating and talking about last night’s investigation, I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay in this fifteen hundred-square-foot houseboat and work.
Also, in the wee hours of the morning, while trying to find sleep, I’d worried that if Caspian was going to find me again, I might need to be at Cove House. That was his home. It had to be easier for him in the house he’d inhabited for over a century.
I’d wondered, more than once, if he couldn’t reach me because I wasn’t doing much to find his bones, something that had been part of our original deal if he’d stick around to give me sight. Now that he’d given my psychic sight back to me, and who knew how that happened, I felt beholden to use my abilities to find out where he actually died on the property. I hadn’t done that yet because the thought of his death left me feeling so despondent that I kept pushing the idea to the back corners of my mind. I did not look forward to investigating the death of this man and feeling his last moments as the life was sucked from his living body.
“Cantaloupe,” I said to Eve.
“Correct,” she countered through a mouthful of something. “That’s the surprise.”
“What time do you think the witch of the west will rise from her slumbers?” Carlos asked.
“I’ll make her get out of bed by noon,” I said stabbing something else in my fruit bowl. “I’m not exactly feeling sorry for her, but I sensed something from Ron last night that I did not like. I wish I knew exactly what it was.”
“She said they fought. Maybe you should try to get them to make up today.” Eve did not want Rachel in-house any more than I did.
“That’s the plan. If my mother can lie about her house being exterminated, I wonder what else she’s got up her sleeve.” I felt a little queasy as I put a chunk of something squishy in my mouth and tasted the sweetness of a ripe strawberry. Hodor jingled the string of bells by the door to indicate he needed to go outside. There were four people in this house--three who could take him outside and one of them was asleep.
“My turn,” Eve said rising from her chair.
“You know what?” I ventured. “I’ve been practicing going down the dock. Put the harness on him and let’s see if he can lead me to his grassy spot in the parking lot.” I stood and flicked out TapTap as an added precaution, finding my way to the coat hooks at the door. “Just a minute Hodor. Mommy is going to try this. Don’t lead me off the dock please.” I stuck my arms in armholes, realized the thing was upside down, laughed and tried again, all while Eve strapped the harness around my dog.
“Think he can pee in that thing?” Carlos asked.
“Does it cover his… area?”
“Nope,” Eve said.
“Well then he probably can.” I took the handle, opened the door, and walked outside with Hodor. “I’m not closing the door behind me in case one of you needs to do a deep-water rescue from the ocean,” I called back, taking off down the dock with my sweet dog lumbering slowly beside me.
The trip to the parking lot was dry and u
neventful. Forty-two steps. When my feet hit the gravel, I praised my dog. “Good Boy. Now go peepee.” Hodor had a favorite spot on the other side of the lot where he sniffed and eventually emptied his bladder and anything else that needed emptying. It was when I switched to holding Hodor’s leash to give him some freedom, that I heard the swish above my head. It sounded like wings flapping and as they got closer, I knew it was the crow. Stretching out my arm for it to land, I waited. When it hit my arm and hopped to my shoulder, there was a deep sense of satisfaction for me. Eve had shooed this thing away, but I liked the bird. I was pretty sure it was the same bird I always encountered at Floatville. Maybe the crow had once been someone’s pet and was used to people. I didn’t get any sense of its past but with the weight on my left shoulder I stood very still.
“Who are you, Crow?” I whispered. “I’m going to name you if you don’t stop landing on me.”
With that, it took off.
I stood thinking about a name anyhow and decided if it ever did that landing stunt again, I’d call the crow Mr. Blackwell, Wells, for short. Hodor pulled on his retractable least and I thought about how life on a houseboat was a bum deal for a Labrador retriever who belonged to a blind lady. I couldn’t take him to the park anymore or to the beach, not alone anyhow, and the house was small for a dog who loved to run. Cove House was better for him in so many ways. Probably for me too. Especially because it was where I had vision when Caspian showed up.
Since the accident, I hadn’t seen Floatville. Caspian had never come to me there. Thinking about that while Hodor did his thing, I made the decision to wake my mother, get her and Ron to either make up, or him to come clean about a wife, and head to Cove House later today. With or without Rachel.
I had to find Caspian’s bones.
Chapter 10
Rachel decided to come with us to Oregon, simply saying that Ron needed time to think about things. I decided not to press her, especially because I sensed she didn’t want to talk in front of Eve and Carlos. She said she didn’t want to be alone at Floatville, so when we loaded up and moved out, my mother was in the backseat with Eve, keeping abnormally quiet the whole way.
