The Ghoul Next Door

by Victoria Laurie

  “Call her,” Heath said suddenly, pointing to my phone, which was still gripped tightly in my hand.

  With shaking fingers I dialed and waited with a pounding heart for the line to pick up. It started ringing on my end and I took it away from my ear. Listening close, I thought I heard something coming from a few cars away.

  Heath heard it too, because he took me by the elbow and we edged down the line of cars, the ringing getting louder before it cut off. I lifted my phone to my ear again and heard Kendra’s voice message. I ended the call and redialed. The ringing started up again and we followed it down two more cars, but didn’t see Kendra. And then I saw another smudge of blood along the side of a white SUV. “There!” I said, and darted forward.

  Heath still had hold of my elbow and he checked me. “Together,” he whispered. We crept along the cars to the other end and looked around. No sign of Kendra. “Call it one more time,” he said.

  I redialed, praying we weren’t too late. We heard ringing again and it sounded like it was coming from right under our feet. I sank down low and looked under the SUV. There was Kendra, eyes open and staring at me as she lay in a pool of blood that was growing bigger by the second. I couldn’t help it, I screamed and reached for her hand. It was still warm. “Kendra!” I cried just as Heath shouted for someone to come help us.

  “Kendra!” I yelled again, willing those staring eyes to blink, to move, to not look so vacant. A sob bubbled up in my throat. “Kendra!”

  And then, like a miracle she gasped just enough to let me know she was still clinging to life.

  I got down on my belly and wiggled under the car. Behind me I could hear Heath continue his shouts for someone to get a doctor. “Oh, Kendra,” I said softly when I managed to wiggle close enough to her to put a hand on the side of her head. If she died here, I didn’t want to her to die alone. “I’m here, honey,” I said. “I’m here. Help is coming. You just have to hang on a few more seconds, okay? Just hang on, Kendra. Just hang on!”

  Her mouth opened and another bubble of noise came out. I realized her throat had been cut and wondered how she was still alive. And then her hand moved and I could see that the effort was costing her. I put my hand down toward hers and in her palm I felt her phone. I was about to close my hand over hers to reassure her when she pushed the phone into my palm and pulled it away again. And then her eyes closed.

  “Kendra!” I said sternly. “Kendra, you listen to me! You hang on, okay? You hang on!”

  But those lids didn’t open again and I couldn’t tell if her chest had stopped its feeble rise and fall. And then there were what sounded like a dozen footfalls all around the car. Heath called my name and I knew it was his hand on my calf. I knew I needed to back away from Kendra and let the medical staff do their thing, but my brain was still reeling from the fact that Kendra might’ve just died right in front of me.

  “Em!” Heath said more firmly as other people wriggling under the SUV came into view. “Come on, Em, come on out and let them help her.”

  I nodded, even though no one was looking at me—all eyes were on Kendra. On my elbows I backed out from under the SUV, and once I was clear, Heath lifted me into his arms and held me gently as I sobbed and sobbed.

  Chapter 14

  By some miracle, Kendra pulled through long enough to make it to surgery. Heath and I sat in the waiting room for hours while they worked on her, first in the ER, then in surgery. It was touch and go there for a long time, but we were told that she’d made it through the surgery and was now in a medically induced coma up in ICU. She was listed as critical, and a kind nurse told us that if Kendra was to make it out of the woods, the next forty-eight hours would be the toughest for her.

  Kendra’s producer and several people from the station came to the hospital to both see about her and cover the story. One of the anchors actually asked us if he could interview us. Heath gave him such a dirty look that the guy sort of scuttled away and avoided eye contact after that.

  The police of course were also called to the scene, and Heath and I were put into a small conference room to wait for our favorite investigator, Detective Souter. I sat numbly while we waited, not able to get that blank stare on Kendra’s face out of my mind. She’d looked so helpless. And of course I blamed myself. She’d been waiting for us, and if I’d just checked the phone I’d carried with me to Stoughton Street, I would’ve realized that it was Gilley’s and we would’ve gone right back to retrieve my cell.

  Which reminded me that I had Kendra’s cell phone. I rooted around in my messenger bag, where I’d put it while we waited for Kendra to be taken into the hospital. I was going to have to hand it over to Souter, I knew. I cringed when I realized the phone was slightly sticky, and smudged with Kendra’s blood. As I freed it from the bag, I accidentally turned the cell on. Kendra didn’t have her screen locked by a security code, and more because I was nervous and fidgety than anything else, I swiped the arrow to unlock the screen. Up came a photo I recognized. It was the one of Luke and Brook Astor at the fund-raiser. I realized Kendra must have been looking at it when she was attacked. Why?

  “What’s up?” Heath asked me just as approaching footfalls and mumbled voices alerted us that someone was coming.

  Almost without thinking, I turned Kendra’s phone all the way off, then tucked it into the folds of my shirt.

  I’m “gifted” in the cleavage department, so I was pretty confident Kendra’s cell wasn’t sticking out or noticeable. Just to be sure, I zipped up my bubble vest. No sooner had I done that than the door opened and Souter came in.

  Heath and I endured a two-hour interview with the detective. We were honest about much of what we’d been up to. I told her that we were investigating Brook Astor’s murder on our own, as we didn’t believe her theory that Luke had killed Brook, and that Kendra had come into the mix just a few days earlier, helping us research the history of the Stoughton house.

  She was very interested in the connection between that house and several other murders, and she seemed particularly intrigued by the photo I showed her of the closet before it’d been painted.

  “When was this taken?” she asked me.

  “A couple of days ago.”

  “And you didn’t call to tell me about it?”

  “You didn’t seem too keen to believe anything I said the last time we got together.”

  Souter eyed me with agitation and suspicion, but I was used to that look from her. “Going back to this afternoon, you say you got a voice mail from Kendra that she was here and waiting for you at four o’clock, and when you got here, you found blood on her car but no sign of her?”

  I explained for the third time how we’d followed the sound of her telephone to where she was hidden under the SUV. “I think she might’ve crawled under there,” I said. “To hide from her attacker.”

  “Can I see your phone?” she asked.

  I handed my phone to her. She checked all the incoming and outgoing calls and even listened to Kendra’s voice mail. I then saw her look me up and down and I realized she was probably checking me for blood splatter. I knew there was no blood on my clothes, as when I’d wiggled under the car, I’d been careful to avoid the pool of blood leaking out of poor Kendra.

  “So where’s Kendra’s phone?” Souter asked next, almost as if she could smell it on me.

  I furrowed my brow and hoped I looked confused. “Don’t you guys have it?”

  “No,” she said. “I already checked and it wasn’t on her person or in her purse.”

  “Weird.”

  “Did you see her phone when you found her under the car?”

  I scratched my head. “I don’t remember.” Turning to Heath, I said, “Did you see it?”

  “I was trying to get help,” he said. “I barely saw anything other than all that blood.”

  Souter tapped her finger against the tabletop; I figured she d
idn’t believe either of us. “Mind if I look inside your messenger bag, Miss Holliday?”

  I made a motion for her to go ahead and she rummaged through the contents, which weren’t much more than a hairbrush, some notes on our investigation, some protein bars, and a bottled water.

  Souter set the messenger bag aside and said, “Mind emptying your pockets for me?”

  She said it to both Heath and me, and with an exasperated sigh I stood up and turned out all my pockets. “If you ask for a strip search next, I’m calling my attorney,” I told her.

  She smiled, but it wasn’t nicely. “You two keep turning up at the scene of violent attacks. What else would you have me do?”

  “Believe us when we tell you that there’s a connection between all these murders,” I said, pulling up the top page of my notes from the stack of things she’d gotten out of my messenger bag. “I’m telling you, all these murders are connected and there’s an unidentified man out there who’s responsible for Brook Astor’s murder.”

  “Yeah,” she said, pretending to humor me. “And he’s right-handed.”

  I felt my temper flare and the memory of Kendra lying under that SUV flashed through my mind as vividly as if I were looking at her there and then, and I realized that she’d been lying on her back but twisted a little to the left. The wound on her neck had been deepest on the left side, which was why there was so much blood leaking out of her. I recalled she’d even had her left hand pressed up against the wound. With a jolt I realized Kendra had also been attacked by a right-handed person. “It was the same guy,” I said breathlessly.

  “Same guy what?” Souter asked.

  “The same man who attacked Brook Astor also attacked Kendra. Her neck wound was on the left side of her throat. He was a righty.”

  “Unless he cut her from the front,” Souter said.

  I looked at her like she had to be kidding. “Check it out, would you?” I snapped.

  Souter didn’t say anything and that’s when I stood up and started to gather my stuff. “I think we’re done here, unless you want me to call Mack and have him come down to tell you himself that Heath and I won’t be answering any more questions.”

  Souter closed her notebook and stood up too. “Don’t leave town,” she said, and walked out the door first.

  • • •

  Hours later, after we’d learned that Kendra was in ICU, we went home, and after checking on Gilley to make sure he was still wearing his vest, Heath and I both collapsed into bed, our own vests resting across our feet.

  I slept fitfully, plagued by nightmares about Kendra under that car, her life slipping away, so it was no surprise when I finally gave up and got up before dawn had even broken. I was restless with worry over Kendra and the fact that I felt no closer to putting all these discordant dots together. I moved out to the living room and eyed the note cards still laid out on the rug.

  Kendra’s phone was on the ottoman, where I’d guiltily set it the night before. I hadn’t had the courage to turn it on again because I’d been worried the police would be able to track it.

  But it was now four thirty in the morning and even Souter had to be asleep. Closing the door so as not to disturb Heath, I turned on Kendra’s phone. Swiping the arrow, I eyed the home screen with all of Kendra’s apps. I went right to her photos and pulled up the photo she’d had open at the time of her attack.

  Luke smiled brightly out at me and so did Brook Astor. What was it about this photo that had sparked further curiosity from Kendra?

  And then I realized something that made me gasp. I’d been calling Kendra from the car, and I knew she’d picked up the line at least once. That gurgling sound was her trying to tell me she was in trouble. It could have been immediately after her throat was cut. And the reason the sequence of events was critical was that if Kendra had been looking at this photo at the time she took my call, then the screen would have switched over to her contacts app, and when I swiped to unlock her phone, this photo wouldn’t have come up. That meant that Kendra had purposely pulled the picture up about the time we looked under the car for her.

  But why?

  Was it an accident?

  Was she feebly trying to answer her phone and she’d simply hit this photo randomly?

  I considered that and then I remembered something else. When I’d reached out to hold her hand, weak as she was, she’d pushed her phone into my palm.

  This photo on her screen was no accident. Kendra wanted me to see it. It held a clue she wanted me to see.

  But what was in the photo that Kendra wanted me to pick out?

  Or who?

  I searched the faces, all of them seemingly happy and full of fun. And then I noticed two things that I hadn’t before. One was that, almost out of view of the camera, there was a figure slightly out of focus who looked remarkably like Raymond Eades. He seemed to be pushing a wheelchair toward one of the tables, and I could see him only in profile, so I wasn’t positive it was him, but it looked enough like him to send a round of warning bells through my head.

  The second thing I noticed was that the fund-raiser itself was for the Winston Senior Center. Which I now knew was the name of the nursing home across the street from the hospital.

  “No way!” I whispered, finally making the connection. If Ray Eades was connected to the senior center, then that had to be the lead Kendra wanted to show me when she asked me to meet her there.

  Just to be sure, I fished out my phone from my messenger bag and tapped my way to my voice mails, rooting around for the first message Kendra had left me the day before. “Hey, M.J. Listen, I’m always careful when I’m working this kind of a story, and you can explain all you want about this morning, but first I think I’ve figured out the link between this Sy the Slayer and the Stoughton Street house. . . .”

  And that was it. She’d found a link between Sy the Slayer and the Stoughton Street house, and I had to believe Ray Eades was the link. He was the property manager for the Stoughton House, but how did he connect to Sy the Slayer? And what did the Winston Senior Center have to do with any of this other than maybe a place where Eades hung out? Gilley’s research showed that Eades lived a couple of blocks away from Courtney’s house on Comm Ave, so I didn’t think he lived at the center. He was pretty spry and maybe not quite old enough to be a resident there. So what was it that Kendra wanted me to see?

  I paced the floor of the living room for almost two hours, going over and over the case in my head and wondering what specifically Kendra could have found. Finally I crept into the bedroom, grabbed some jeans, a sweater, and my vest, and tiptoed out. I left Heath a note just in case he woke up, but I figured he’d sleep at least a few more hours undisturbed.

  I made my way by car over to the nursing home and avoided the spot where Kendra had been lying before I chose a slot that allowed me to see the front doors. I didn’t know what time the center opened, so I called it up on my phone and saw that it opened at eight. I had about forty-five minutes to kill, so I went in search of coffee and waited in line for nearly that long to get my cup of joe.

  I parked back in the same spot at the center and watched the clock until about five after eight; then I approached the front door cautiously. I was nervous and jumpy and couldn’t seem to settle down.

  The automatic doors opened with a whoosh and I proceeded forward, looking around, feeling very exposed. There didn’t seem to be many people about, but to my right was a desk where an elderly woman with curly white hair and a name tag that read DAISY sat. “Good morning,” she said cheerily. “Who are you here to see?”

  I bit my lip and took a chance. “The last name is Eades,” I said, thinking that maybe Raymond visited the center because he had a relative here.

  The woman’s cheery smile broadened. “You mean Raymond? Oh, he won’t be here for another half hour, but Mr. Akers is in the living room and I’m sure he’d love some
company until Raymond arrives.”

  Mr. Akers? I thought. Who the heck was that? “Oh, that sounds nice. I’d love to visit with him. Which way is the living room?”

  The woman pointed back down the hall and instructed me to take the hallway past the main entrance all the way to the end and turn right. The living room would be on my left.

  I thanked her and turned away. I was still without much of a plan and hoped that one clue would lead to another until I could figure this whole thing out.

  Following the woman’s instructions, I managed to locate the living room. There were a surprising number of residents hanging out, playing cards, watching television, or simply staring out the window.

  I eyed them with nervous apprehension. I had no idea who Mr. Akers was, so I surveyed the room, taking note of each face . . . and then my gaze traveled to one man in a wheelchair and my own legs almost gave out from underneath me. Sitting in the corner all by himself was none other than the man who’d attacked me in my out-of-body experience almost a week before.

  At that moment the old man lifted his chin and our eyes met. I swear my heart nearly hammered its way right out of my chest as he stared at me and then he broke into a grin and lifted his hand to wave at me.

  I thought about turning tail and running, but then I realized there wasn’t one hint of malice in those eyes. In fact, he looked so tickled to have caught me staring at him, and then he waved me over.

  I hesitated and he put his hand on his own heart as if he’d die if I didn’t come over to see him. Slowly and cautiously I stepped into the living room. There were loads of people and staff about. If this guy tried anything, I’d have help at the ready. When I got close enough, he said, “Hey, cutie. Who’re you looking for?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said, because I really wasn’t anymore.

  He cocked his head curiously and put his gnarled hand back over his heart. “Well then, can I pretend you’re here to see me? Lester Akers at your service, milady.”

  My eyes widened. “Lester Akers?” I repeated.