“Which he could have fielded if he didn’t want to go on a shopping spree with Graham.”
Jess lifts one shoulder and then drops it. “Do you blame him? We’ve never had free rein like this to buy whatever equipment we want. I’d take advantage of it, too.”
“Yeah, well, we still could have used his help getting the rest of the baseline stuff categorized and uploaded earlier.”
Jess studies me for a few seconds. “Why are you being so negative? This is already one of our best cases. Who knows what else we could get tonight? We never get the chance to go back to a house before. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing.”
“I guess,” I grumble, but I can’t shake the feeling that it’s a big mistake.
“See? We got this.” Jess gives me a one-armed hug.
An hour and a half later, we pull up to the MacIver house. Russ and Graham are already here, waiting outside Graham’s truck, the spoils from their shopping spree spread out on the tailgate. But instead of approaching them, I grab one of our two remaining cameras and take some video and stills of the house itself. Jess takes Bear’s leash and leads him to some bushes so he can attend to his business before we begin the investigation.
Deep shadows mar the house’s weathered facade, and the windows that aren’t boarded up gape menacingly at us. Even the angel in the fountain, bent over and holding an empty stone basin, looks sinister, as if she might come to life if I look away. The subscribers are going to love this.
Shelley hops out of the truck and waves her arms at us. She’s wearing a hot-pink sweater and a knee-length white skirt with white leather knee-high boots. Obviously the perfect ghost hunting gear.
“What’s she doing here?” Jess forces the words through gritted teeth and waves back.
“I have no idea.” I turn the camera off, my good mood dulling a bit now that we have to babysit both MacIvers. “But it looks like we’re stuck with them both again.”
“Can I take back my previous statement that this was a good idea?” she quips, handing me Bear’s leash.
“Nope.”
Russ beams as we approach the back of the truck. “Check this out, guys.” He lifts up a new, top-of-the-line camera and starts talking about its features. Jess pretends to pay attention, but I can’t. I know Russ conned Graham into better tech, but I don’t care about the specifics as long as it all works.
“Will this do?” Graham asks, gesturing at the spread.
I nod, pushing back the guilt that keeps trying to make me admit that he’s a nice person. He is, damn it, but that doesn’t mean he’s not also an asshole. “Yeah, this’ll work.” I scan the equipment. We have four cameras now, half a dozen EMF meters, and the same number of voice recorders. It’s more than enough, and I make a mental note to thank Russ later. “As soon as Russ’s done showing off, we’ll get set up.”
He grimaces. “Hopefully, nothing like that will happen again. I can’t afford another set of replacement gear.”
I elbow him in the side good-naturedly. “Little pricey, eh? Only the best, if Russ has his way.” I saunter over to my team, feeling a little bit lighter than before.
“And have his way, he did,” Graham mutters behind me.
Bear, having seemingly just noticed Graham’s presence, growls. Instead of backing away, Graham reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small bag of beef jerky.
“Can he have some of these?” he asks. “I picked up some on the way here. Figured I might need to get on his good side.”
A little more of the ire I’d felt toward him softens a bit. He brought my dog, who savagely attacked him not that long ago, a snack. Well, Bear sort of savagely attacked him. If he’d been bigger, it would have been a lot worse. “Sure. That’s how Russ got on his good side when they first met.”
Russ glances over his shoulder, a cockeyed grin spreading across his face. “Yeah, Bear hated me at first, too. Had to bribe him with, what, three Big Macs or something?”
I chuckle. “Something like that.”
“At least I’m not the only one,” Graham says. He crouches and rips open the bag. Just out of Bear’s reach, he fishes out a greasy piece of jerky and tosses it to the ground. Bear pauses, sniffs the air, then darts forward and inhales the treat. By the third one, his front legs are on Graham’s knee.
“Traitor,” I mutter. Give the dog food, and he’ll love anyone. Kind of like a lot of people I know.
“At least I still have my fingers,” Graham says, grinning as he feeds my dog the rest of the bag.
“Which I guess means you probably won’t sue us for him biting you the other day, right?”
He laughs and stands up, brushing off his jeans. “Right.”
After we set up the new equipment, Jess calls dibs on Russ and Shelley, which sticks me with Graham. Again.
“No one’s splitting up this time,” Graham says, giving his sister a stern look. He probably doesn’t want her to pull a stunt like my sister did and investigate alone, even though we’ve had to do it in the past since we don’t have a huge team.
Shelley skips into the hall ahead of Jess and Russ. “I’m so glad you guys came back.”
I share a look with Russ. Her enthusiasm doesn’t sit right with the fact that we’re looking for evidence that her mom is reaching out from beyond the grave, but whatever. Maybe this is her way of separating herself from the reality of what we’re here for. Everyone has their own relationship with death. I haven’t even come close to reconciling mine. Maybe when I’m an old woman, living by myself in a little house with eighty cats and telling stories to scare all of the neighborhood kids, I’ll figure out how I see death and what it means to me, but not right now. Now, we have an investigation to do.
Graham and I wait in the kitchen until Jess and Russ finish filming an intro for tonight’s video then creep upstairs. I can’t wait to check it out—it’s the only part of the house I haven’t seen before.
“Do you live broadcast the whole investigation?” Graham asks when we’re in the upstairs hallway and out of earshot.
“Yeah. We’ll start with Jess’s feed, then split screen once we get set up so our premium subscribers can watch it live from both of our points of view.”
“How many subscribers do you have?”
I pause, focusing on the dust motes in my flashlight beam. “About eight hundred or so the last time I checked.”
Graham arches his eyebrows. “And how much does it cost to be a premium subscriber?”
“Ten bucks a month. We investigate at least twice a month and try to make sure subscribers get their money’s worth.”
He whistles. “Still, I had no idea you could make a living at this sort of thing.”
I shift from side to side, uneasy at having to justify my line of work. “When you factor in gas, hotel, food, advertising, insurance, and other day-to-day expenses, we don’t actually take home much money. What we do save, I put away for my sister for college.”
“And what about you? Are you going to go to college?”
I force a chuckle. “With what time?” I shine the flashlight down the hall. There are two closed doors on either side, just like every scary movie ever made. I wonder if we should flip a coin to see which one the axe murderer is hiding behind. “Okay. Which one’s your parents’ room?”
“The one on the end on the left.” He points down the hall. I wonder if he remembers anything about living in this house or if being here brings up feelings he’d rather leave buried. Maybe the real key to unlocking the mystery lies not in the house or in some grainy footage of a figure floating down some stairs, but in Graham himself. He probably subconsciously blocked a lot of what happened from back then—I know I have blank chunks of time from when my parents disappeared.
Graham hesitates before turning the doorknob.
I almost tell him to stop and that we don’t have to investigate this room, but if the anomaly is related to his mother, then her bedroom is a good place to start.
“Ready?” he asks
.
I turn on the camera in the harness on my chest and give him a thumbs-up. He turns the knob, and the door swings open with a creak. Faded flowered wallpaper stretches around the room. Across from us sits a long, dark wooden dresser with a woman’s silver toiletry set on it. On the far right, a king-sized canopy bed is still covered in a dusty quilt. An armoire next to the dresser on the right completes the room.
“I haven’t been in here in years,” he says, scanning the room with his flashlight. He darts a mischievous glance at me. “Matt and I used to sneak in and look for the secret passages.” He chuckles. “As much as I rip on Shelley for coming in here by herself, I’m not much better.”
My heart races. “Secret passages?” Now we’re getting somewhere.
Graham shrugs as though thoroughly unimpressed. “Yeah, a lot of these old houses have them. The maids used them to get around unnoticed.” The corner of his mouth twitches. “My grandma used to tell me how my mom used to sneak out as a kid, as if they didn’t notice.”
“Do you know where they are?” If he does, maybe that could help us find the guy who destroyed our equipment or at least give us a clue as to how he got around.
Graham shakes his head. “No. All Matt and I ever found was Grandpa’s moonshine.” His face turns red.
“Ha. Drank that, did you?”
He bites his lip. The boy’s sure cute when he does that. His dimples come out. “Just a sip. You’re gonna cut this part, right? I don’t want Dad or Shelley to see it. They’ll kill me.”
“Sure.” Nope. I pan the room with the camera and take some EMF readings. Graham approaches the dresser and picks up a picture in a brass picture frame. His fingers caress the black-and-white face, and instinctively I know it’s his mom. I turn away. Some moments are better left off camera.
Bear pulls on the leash, and I let it out. He sniffs around the room, focusing on our environment instead of attacking Graham, which is a good thing, since we seem to have reached a temporary truce. At the corner of the armoire, he stops and paws at the wood, tail in the air. I jerk back on his leash. That’s all I need, for my dog to mark his territory in Graham’s missing mother’s bedroom. Way to kill the mood, mutt.
Before we leave the bedroom, we set up another camera and ask several questions, the same ones we asked when we got our baseline readings. It can’t hurt to ask the same question twice.
We head back to the kitchen, where Shelley follows Russ around. He sighs loudly enough for me to hear him from the doorway, which is probably a signal for help, but I ignore it. He deserves it for ripping on me all the time. Besides, not that he needs it, but what guy wouldn’t like a cute cheerleader following him around? And we’re only going to be here for another day or so, at the most. It can’t hurt.
Graham’s shoulders stiffen when he notices his sister’s antics. Before he says something he’ll probably regret, I say, “Why don’t we double check the, um, batteries on our cameras before moving on?”
Russ nods and plays along, a surprised look on his face. We’ve already checked the batteries, so there’s no point in doing it again. “Good idea. New equipment has a habit of not working from time to time.”
“And I’d just gotten used to the old stuff,” Jess quips, her head bent over the EMF meter.
I choose to ignore her and open the laptop on the table. The new tech is a hell of a lot better than anything we had before. I quickly log in to YouTube and make sure the feed is up, which it is, then log in to the program I use to split the screen. There. Right now, Russ’s camera’s on, as is the one in the bedroom, but the one in the harness I’m wearing is not. I didn’t think too many of our subscribers would like to watch me typing into our computer—the glamorous side of paranormal investigating—but I’ll turn it back on after we leave the kitchen. While I’m working in here, Russ and the girls finish in the kitchen and start on the study.
“Where do we go next?” Graham asks. His gaze roams the kitchen, and his hands twitch in his lap. It’s not that I blame him for being bored, but he did volunteer for this.
I contemplate our options. There’s the other three rooms upstairs that we’ll need to hit. Even though they haven’t had any purported paranormal activity, we want to be thorough. But then I remember the last time we left our gear unattended. “While Russ and the others work on the rest of the house, we should probably finish up the outside. I don’t want to leave our stuff alone in the house without anyone around, given what happened last night.”
His face darkens. “Good idea.”
After telling the others our plan, Graham follows me outside. I turn the camera back on and film a quick intro to explain the brief intermission and where we are now. Since we hadn’t explored much earlier, I have Graham give a tour of the grounds.
“These were my mother’s rose bushes,” he says, touching the old wooden arbor fondly. “She loved roses. One of my earliest memories is being out here with her and playing in the grass while she watered her roses.” His voice is quiet, ethereal. The flashlight plays across the stark planes on his face, illuminating his grief.
I clear my throat and try to push away feeling like an intruder. He wanted us here for this. The investigation was his idea, not ours.
“I’ve seen Mr. Rasputin out here, taking care of them, but he’s the only one who does. My dad...” His hand tightens on the old wood, and his knuckles turn white. “I don’t think he’s been back since we moved out.”
Bear sniffs the ground, his tail straightening like a flag. The hackles rise on the back of his neck, and a low growl issues from his throat. This time, thankfully, it’s not directed at Graham.
Graham cocks his head in Bear’s direction. “What’s wrong with your dog?”
I shrug, one part thankful that the tenseness in the air is broken but another part feeling bereft, as if some vital clue is about to slip through my fingers. “Nothing.”
Bear lunges on the leash, pulling me toward the bushes lining the house. More roses. Graham’s mother must have really liked them.
The dog stops, his nose quivering in the moonlight. I turn on the EMF meter and take a reading. Nothing. Damn. I’d hoped with Bear’s behavior that there was something going on.
Graham peers over my slumped shoulder. “Maybe he smelled a squirrel?”
“Maybe.”
I stuff the EMF meter back in my pocket as Bear lunges again, this time catching me off guard and jerking the leash from my fingers. “Hey! Get back here!” I scramble for the leash, but he’s gone, wriggling behind the bushes like he’s on some sort of mission.
“Stupid dog,” I mutter, watching the flashes of his little body through the thorny branches. He stops between two of the bushes right next to the house and starts to dig. “I am not going in there and getting scratched all to hell just to get your wiry ass. As soon as you come out, you’re going straight in the van. Do you hear me?” Bear cocks his head from the comfort of his already sizable hole, his muzzle darkened with dirt. Then he disappears again. “I should have gotten a cat,” I mutter. “They might not listen, but at least they don’t dig holes.”
Graham laughs. “Don’t worry. I’ll get him. He like me now, remember?”
I almost tell him not to bother, but then he’s shimmying between the bushes, and he does have kind of a nice butt, so I let him go. When he reaches Bear, he crouches down to untangle his leash from the branches then stops. “What do you have there, boy?” He leans over and takes something out of Bear’s mouth.
My breath freezes in my lungs. The words themselves are innocent enough, but there’s a sense of foreboding behind them, a feeling of “oh crap, something really bad is about to happen,” that almost makes me want to turn tail and run, but I don’t.
“Meredith?” he says, his voice cautious, quiet. “Can you come here, please? I...I want to show you something.” Through the branches, I can see him sitting cross-legged, holding on to something in his lap. Bear sits at attention in front of him, his tail wagging.
&n
bsp; “Uh yeah, sure.” With my stomach lodged in my throat, I wriggle through the bushes after him until I reach him. Thorns and prickly branches tear at my sleeves and tangle in my hair, but I keep pushing through. I have to. There’s something there that I need to see. I break through the bushes and there, in the dim and shifting moonlight, cradled in Graham’s hands, is a bone. A human jawbone. Double crap.
Graham’s voice trembles. “I think I found my mom.”
Chapter 12
Police tape waves in a light breeze, yellow against the coming dawn. The police officer in charge, who introduced himself as Officer Fontaine, stands with his back to me, his thumbs hooked into his belt and his gut bulging against the confines of his dark-blue uniform. The stiff set to his shoulders paints a picture of how happy he is to be here. I imagine he’s probably scowling too—at least he was when he found out who we were. Graham’s father stares stonily at the sight.
Off to my left, Graham holds his sister, and both of them stare empty-eyed at the six-foot-long hole at the base of the house, their mother’s prized rose bushes lying in a crumpled heap next to the trellis. Shelley alternates between leaning into his embrace and pulling away, as if she can’t quite make up her mind what to do. I know the feeling. I wore it myself, as did Jess, for about six months after our parents died.
One of two crime scene techs crouches at the edge of the hole, talking quietly to the other one, who is inside. After noticing me standing there, Graham leaves his sister to join me.
“I’m sorry you got roped into all this,” he says. He runs a hand through his hair. “I don’t... I don’t know what to do right now.”
I reach out and touch his arm. “I hear you.”
“Where are Russ and Jess?” He glances at the house, where flashlights illuminate the kitchen through the windows.
“They took Bear inside and are packing up. We can’t leave until the cops say we can, so we’re kind of stuck here until then.”
The wind picks up, sharper this time, cutting through my clothes. It’s the perfect time of night and the perfect weather to find a body.
Like a Bad Penny Page 8
