Ghost Busting Mystery

by Daisy Pettles

  Dode stared at the guy as he grabbed the rail and hopped up the slippery steps to the porch. “Lord, Jesus!” he whistled.

  To be honest, the guy did look like Jesus, long wavy brown hair. Blue eyes. Nice smile. In his thirties. His jeans were ripped at both knees. Took me a minute to realize it wasn’t Jesus, but Randy Ollis standing there in the rain.

  “Howdy,” Randy said as he put out his hand toward Dode. He smiled at me and Veenie. “’Member me?”

  “Sure do,” said Veenie.

  “Heard down at Pokey’s you ladies were having a séance. Reckoned I’d drop by and see what my next of kin had to say. Brought company too.” Randy turned and motioned for someone in the truck to roll down the window.

  The window cranked down slowly. Darnell Zikes stuck his head out. His pigtails tossed a little in the wind. He had a yellow paisley bandana tied up on top of his head like a biker’s do-rag. He waved our way with both pudgy hands.

  “Met Darnell there at Pokey’s. Told me he’s staying with you ladies a couple of days. Told me about the séance tonight. Said he’d never seen a ghost, but sure would like to see one up close.”

  Darnell hopped out of the truck. He waddled as fast as he could in his Dr. Scholl’s sliders toward the cover of the porch. He was wearing the same clothes as the night before. Blue-and-white plaid pedal pushers and a black wife beater T-shirt that read, “Save a horse. Ride a redneck.”

  “Okay if I join the party?” he asked as he shook his wet head like a dog drying off. His lazy eye meandered over the lot of us. “I mean, man this may be my only chance to do some ghost busting.”

  He introduced himself all around.

  Dode said, “I like your eye.” He pointed to Darnell’s lazy eye. “How you get it to do that?”

  “Born that way. My mama was the same.”

  Dode cocked his head. “You see sideways?”

  “Nah. I see normal. It’s just cosmetic. Doctors said I could get it fixed. Lazy muscle. The girls seem to like it. Makes me memorable.”

  Dode nodded. “It’s right handsome. I’d probably keep it too.”

  Darnell stopped pumping hands when he got to Kandy. “You look mighty familiar. We met?” He squinted at her in the low light of the porch.

  “Never,” Kandy said.

  “You sure?”

  Kandy’s lips tightened. “Very sure.”

  “All righty then. Say, where are them ghosts? We came to see them ghosts. They over there?” He pointed toward the mansion. “Cause that looks like a haunted house if ever I saw one.”

  Without waiting for an answer, Darnell jumped off the porch and ambled toward the orchard, headed toward the mansion. The rain had slowed to a trickle. He slid a little in the tall wet grass, looking back only once to urge us to follow him.

  Dode handed the rest of us flashlights. We set off into the darkness of the apple orchard like a group of vigilantes in search of Frankenstein’s monster.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Kandy didn’t bring any special equipment for dialing up the dead.

  That disappointed Veenie.

  “We’re lucky we got this here electrical storm. That’ll do the trick,” said Kandy as she wandered around the mansion’s living room. “We don’t need no fancy doohickeys or gadgets. Those are for the amateurs. If the Lord God gave you the gift, you don’t have to lay out any fancy bait for the ghosts. They come screaming at you, eager for a chat. Some days I’ll be driving peacefully down a gravel road at dark listening to some Shania Twain, and boom! I’ll pass a graveyard. Next you know I’ll have two or three of ’em crowding up next to me in the front seat of the Hyundai arguing about the weather.”

  Veenie’s eyes widened. “Is it because you got a special electrical current running through you?”

  “Yeah. Something like that,” said Kandy. She ground out the cigarette she’d been smoking with the toe of her high heel.

  Dode had taken the basket of flashlights and turned them all on. He’d placed them strategically around the room so we could see where to walk. One sat atop the fireplace mantle. A pair was sitting on their butts in far corners shining light up so the beams hit the spidery tin ceiling and fell back down in a pool around the room. Outside, the rain had died back, but the wind was whistling and creaking and thumping things around to beat the band. The place smelled like moldy baby diapers. Not as many spider webs though. I guess the forensics team had cleared a lot of them away collecting scene samples.

  Randy was taking little baby steps around the room, taking it all in. He was hugging the wall with his back. He seemed a little uneasy. “Whoa! Creepy. Can’t believe my family once owned this place. Too bad they let it all rot. You’d think the government would have sold the place or done something with it all these years.” He stopped in front of a flashlight beam. With his hair all loose and frizzy from his baseball cap and his arms outstretched, he looked like Jesus just dropped down for a visit. Kind of a comforting thought given all Veenie’s talk about ghosts and demons.

  Harry was sticking close to me. A little too close, in fact. I could smell his Brute aftershave. That stuff belonged on the deceased, as far as I was concerned. Harry was shaking a little too. He kept knocking into me. I reckoned he did believe in ghosts after all.

  Darnell had disappeared. Either he had chickened out, or he was outside on the back porch taking a leak or toking. Or he was off hoping to find a snack in the kitchen. Or maybe he left because he forgot why he was there in the first place. Stoners were like that. Fidgety.

  The room was draped in yellow police tape. Veenie had rolled up most of it and was wearing it around her body like a stripper’s scarf. The rocking chair where we found the skeleton was still there, turned back upright.

  Kandy pointed at the rocker. “That’s where she died. I can feel it.” Kandy closed her eyes and circled the rocker. She took hold of the back of the rocker and threw her head back. Her red curls bounced and her earrings shook.

  Veenie asked what we should do to help.

  Kandy sat down in the rocking chair. It creaked an awful lot. “You all make a circle around me. Hold hands. I’m going to start calling the ghost of Alta Iona. If you hold hands, it will create a positive electrical charge. She’ll know you’re friendly.”

  Veenie grabbed my right hand. Harry grabbed the other. Randy stepped up and connected to Harry. Dode completed the circle by hooking up between Randy and Veenie.

  Kandy began to moan. Then she started talking in what sounded to me like pig Latin nonsense. “Oka nojenna mimi, grantis, greatus, oh spiritus, we come as friends.”

  A crack of lightning made us all jump.

  Veenie yelled, “Alta Iona. It’s me. Veenie. Lavinia Goens. Remember me? I helped lug you out of here. Since then I learned what that rascal Jedidiah did to you. Knocking you up and all.”

  Kandy opened her eyes. “You better let me handle this, Veenie. Once we get her dialed up, you can jump in with both feet, but it might take her awhile to feel safe.”

  Kandy started in with the pig Latin again.

  I felt Veenie all jumpy, holding my hand. Keeping her trap shut was not her greatest talent. She was doing a little shuffle dance, like a kid who had to pee.

  Kandy started humming and singing. She leaned into the rocking chair, and it began to creak and pick up speed. It sounded like it might bust apart any minute. Some dust and dirt got up my nose, and I started sneezing. Veenie followed suit.

  Kandy started yapping in tongues again, and her voice grew huskier, gravelly, a bit like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. Now it was me who felt my bladder might give.

  Harry’s hand was shaking and sweating at the same time. I felt like I was holding a wet fish in my hand and that fish had started flopping, hoping to slip away. The smell of Brute was getting stronger.

  Kandy was talking pig Latin so loudly she was practically shouting now. Her eyes were open, and her head was rolling around. I reckoned she must not have spinal arthritis because I did, and nothing swivel
ed that freely on me anymore. The voice coming out of Kandy’s mouth screamed, “He killed me!”

  “Who?” screamed Veenie in return. She was all spit and fire now. Jumping around on tiptoe, jerking me around with her. It was like dancing with a Holy Roller on revival day. “Who killed you, Alta? Who?”

  The voice grumbled and rumbled and spat. She did not seem like a very happy ghost. “My husband. Jedidiah! He fed me poison, like a rat.”

  Veenie was all in now. “Why’d he do that?”

  “He was mean as snake spit, plus he hated that baby.”

  “Myrtle Mae?”

  The voice wailed. “My baby! My precious little baby!”

  We were all feeling a little knock-kneed by then. I could see Dode across from me. If his eyes got any wider, they were going to pop out of his head like hard boiled eggs. I could see his legs shaking inside the wide legs of his overalls.

  Veenie asked the voice, “But Jedidiah left town. How’d he know you were knocked up?”

  “He came back.”

  “To get you and the baby?”

  “To get the gold.”

  “Gold,” Veenie screamed. “What gold?”

  “The bank gold. I hid it from him.”

  Everything went a little quiet then. The voice disappeared, and in its place on the far wall was a womanly ghost dancing along the torn wallpaper. She floated. We couldn’t see her feet. The long dress she was wearing, or robes, we couldn’t tell because there were no details, only shadow and outline, billowed over her feet. She floated around on the wall like a bright shadow. She jerked around like an insect before fading completely away.

  Veenie lunged for the wall. “Come back! What about the gold?”

  Kandy groaned, sounding like Kandy again. Her neck snapped up, and she looked around like she wasn’t sure what was going on. “Did she appear?” she asked.

  “Yep,” I said. “We got an awful eyeful.”

  Dode sniffled and stuffed a big plug of tobacco into his jaw. “Never seen nothing like that in all my born days. God damned, that was scary.” Tobacco juice drizzled down his chin. “Better than Halloween.”

  Harry was white as a puddle of Elmer’s Glue.

  Randy was speechless, his mouth hanging open.

  Darnell shuffled into the room. He was toking on a joint held in a roach clip. The clip had a couple of tiny feathers and a dream catcher dangling from it. His eyes were bloodshot. He’d peeled back his wet yellow do-rag. His hair stood out like a Brillo pad. One of his pigtails was unraveling. “I went to take a leak. Did I miss anything?”

  Veenie asked Kandy if she could call back Alta Iona. “We need to know about that gold,” she said.

  Kandy stood up and cracked her back. “What gold?”

  Veenie danced in circles over by the wall where Alta had swung around. “Alta said Jedidiah killed her. Came back for the gold.”

  Kandy looked confused. “What gold?” she repeated.

  Randy stepped forward. He’d zipped up his red hoodie and was shivering a little. “My grandpa Ollis always said there was gold buried out here. We thought he was a little batty. His brain and tongue were both a little loose-jointed, runs in the family.”

  I spoke up. “Well the bank records Queet showed us at the library detailed thousands missing when they audited the bank after Jedidiah rowed out of town.”

  Veenie confirmed that. “That’s right. And nobody knows what happened to old Jedidiah and that money. He could have come back after the flood. Maybe he hid the cash money here at the house. The flood came along, and whoosh, it was a perfect time to disappear.”

  I asked Randy if his granddad ever said anything specific about the money. “How much? Where was it hidden?”

  Veenie wanted to know if Randy had ever seen a treasure map.

  “Oh heck,” said Randy, as he swept the Jesus hair out of his eyes. “All the papers I had I left at the library. I never heard tell of a treasure map. Just a lot of nonsense about how we was still rich, we just had to find the darn money.”

  I asked Kandy if she remembered any of the séance.

  She lit a cigarette. “Gosh, sorry, no. My brain gets turned off once a spirit gets into me.”

  Veenie protested. “We need to chat some more with Alta. About the gold and all.”

  Kandy shook her curls. “Can’t dial in more than once a night. Heck, now that she said her piece, she probably got sucked up into the Holy Hereafter. Her spirit may have gone on for good.”

  Kandy looked at Harry, who looked like a stick of chalk wearing a rumpled suit. “You got my money, sugar?” She held out her hand and wiggled her fingers. The light from the flashlights caught the fake jewels in her rings and sent little rainbows flashing onto the tin ceiling.

  Harry fumbled in his trouser pockets. He pulled out a wad of money with a rubber band around it. His hand shook when he handed the roll to Kandy.

  “Thanks,” Kandy said, as she tucked the wad into her little shoulder purse. “We could try again. Wait a couple of days. But I can’t be making no promises. You’d have to pay up front. Take your chances. You want me to take another go at it, Dode?”

  Dode cleared his throat. “Oh boy. Gosh darn it. Yep. I’d sure pay to see that again. She seemed pretty pissed. Had her dander up, all righty.”

  “Oh man!” whined Darnell. “You all got to see a real live ghost? Why didn’t you wait on me? I was gone just a minute. Nature called.” His stray eye stared at Kandy accusatively.

  Or maybe it was my imagination.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I kicked off my rain-soaked shoes and belly flopped onto my bed. And I didn’t wake up until after dawn. Sassy Sue Ann Smith, our boarder, woke me up slamming pots and pans in the kitchen.

  “Lord, God, Almighty, what are you doing?” I asked Sassy as I slid past her to put on a pot of coffee. I had a sour stomach. All that ghost talk and spirit dancing had given me nightmares. At one point, I’d shot up in bed. I was clutching the sheets over a dream that featured a giant whiskered catfish swallowing me whole. Boots had been in that one. He was either Noah or Jonah. One of those Biblical guys with a white beard. I was hoping some Cheerios might settle my stomach.

  Sassy had her back to me. She was mashing buttons on the microwave. I could tell it was her from the cloud of White Shoulders perfume. Two ripped cartons of Jimmie Dean breakfast sausages and eggs and biscuits were tossed on top of the stove. A loaf of white bread was torn open. The air near the toaster smelled like a smoldering campfire. Several pieces of scraped toast were piled atop each other on a coffee saucer. Sassy, per usual, was falling short in the homemaking department.

  Sassy whirled around. She was wearing a red, knee-length lingerie jacket with a black boa collar. She wore a black lace bustier under that. Her blonde hair was teased up so high it looked like the leaning tower of Pisa, if those Italians had thought to make it out of hay. She’d stuck in a butterfly pin here and there in an effort to keep it upright. Her face was painted with lips as large and red as slices of watermelon. The pink rouge on her cheeks looked like war paint. Her mascara had seeped into her crow’s feet, giving her more of a vulture claw look. “Making breakfast, sugar. I got a new man in my room.”

  “Course you do.” Sassy had always been a swinger.

  “Can you make us some of that good pot coffee?” she purred.

  “Making a whole pot.”

  I trudged to the refrigerator and knocked around looking for a carton of milk. I grabbed a box of Cheerios and a bowl from the cabinet.

  Sassy started humming a show tune. I think it was “Me and My Man.”

  The microwave beeped. Sassy sprung open the door. She slipped on an oven glove and pulled out two plastic trays of sausage, and biscuits and gravy, and an egg mash-up. She grabbed a giant serving spoon and used it to scoop the mess onto a pair of blue-and-white CorningWare plates. She slapped a slice of blackened toast on top of each volcano of food. She stood back and admired her work.

  “This look appetizi
ng?” she asked, her lips pursed.

  Veenie strolled into the kitchen. “Where’d you get that two-bit getup?”

  “Frederick’s of Hollywood, Little Dash of Class collection.” Sassy twirled once so we could get an eyeful. You could tell that sixty years ago she’d been a star pupil at the Twinkle Toes Tap & Twirl dance studio.

  Veenie snatched a piece of Sassy’s sausage. She tossed it in the air, then caught it in her mouth like dog kibble. She squeezed into a chair at the table next to me. “That Jimmy Dean makes some tasty meat. Ought to make fancy deserts. I bet he’d make a badass sausage cake with gravy buttercream frosting. I ought to call him up. He’d make a killing on sausage cakes with buttercream frosting. Put some bacon in there. Make them bacon layer cakes. I’d buy that stuff in bulk at the Costco.”

  I poured us all some coffee. “Sassy has a man in her room.”

  “Is he handcuffed to anything?” asked Veenie.

  Sassy made a face. “I’ll have you know he’s a southern gentleman. From the city. Louisville. The VFW was having a private party on the Belle of Louisville. He asked me for a dance.”

  The Belle of Louisville was a restored Civil War-era paddle boat and floating buffet and full-service bar that docked in Louisville and cruised the Ohio River. Lots of southern Indiana clubs rented it out for dances and big shindigs.

  Veenie stole another piece of sausage. “We talking the dance with no pants?”

  “Lavinia, I’ll have you know he drove me all the way back up here after he bought me a surf and turf dinner. This was a proper date, and I’ve just been saying thank you.” Sassy teetered down the hall with her breakfast tray to the privacy of her own room. Whoever she was dating, I reckoned she wasn’t ready to introduce us to him. Probably a wise move given that not everyone took to Veenie right away.