by K. J. Emrick
“It’s what I do. All right. Let’s get back in the van and get to that place quick as we can. There’s no sense standing around here and waiting for someone else to drive by. They won’t be able to make a call any more than we can.”
“You’re right,” Miranda said. “Plus, I haven’t seen another vehicle on this road all morning.”
Kyle tagged along behind them as they went back to the vehicle, muttering on and on about how no one ever took him seriously. Miranda did her level best to ignore him.
“Can we just leave the body there?” she wondered out loud.
“Not much choice, is there?” Jack asked her. “We can’t exactly stuff him in the van with all of that camping gear.”
“Exactly what I said. Plus, I doubt Sapphire would allow that, anyway. She’s pretty shook up about this.”
“She’s a sensitive soul,” Jack agreed. “Maybe a bit too emotional for her own good sometimes.”
Kyle snorted a laugh. “You can say that again.”
“But,” Miranda added with emphasis, “she’s not wrong. This is terrible, and we need to figure out what’s going on. Quickly.”
“I agree,” Jack said. “Let’s go.”
Chapter 3
“There it is!”
Miranda pointed to the little country house up on the left. It was just where she’d said it would be, three miles back from where they’d been with the body. The lines running from the roof to the utility pole at the side of the road would at least seem to indicate there was electricity to the place. Hopefully, that meant they had a phone.
Jean-Paul had taken over driving for the distraught Sapphire. She was better now that they had put some distance between them and the scene, but she was still unusually quiet. Miranda was grateful to her friends for agreeing to this, to help a complete stranger that they had found lying murdered in the middle of nowhere.
Miranda took a closer look at the house as they pulled onto the gravel driveway. It certainly was rustic, even for their area. It was in need of repair as well. The roof shingles were coming loose in several spots and the paint was faded to gray on the siding. A couple of the shutters were loose. By the front stairs, leaning on its posts, was a wooden sign swinging on short chains declaring this was the Blue Jay Bed and Breakfast.
The sign was painted in a cream color with the words in blue. An amateurish drawing of a blue feather across the top. The wood was dry, and the paint was cracked, like most everything else in this summer.
“I wonder how many guests they have staying in this place,” Jack said doubtfully as he and Miranda exited the van and stood taking in the surroundings. “You saw the parking lot out back? Two or three cars at most. I mean, it’s pretty isolated and it’s not particularly appealing, either. Nothing out here but the lake and camping sites. And if you’re camping, you don’t exactly need a Bed and Breakfast.”
“How come we’ve never noticed this place before?” Miranda wondered out loud.
“Are you kidding?” Kyle said as he floated around Miranda and Jack. “I don’t think anyone’s noticed this place in a long time. It’s on a road no one uses unless they want to go the long way around absolutely everything. We drove right past it without even really seeing it ourselves. Except for you, Miranda. Oh, and Jack, of course.”
Which was true. She wasn’t even sure why it had caught her attention, except that there was something about the place that resonated against her thoughts. It wasn’t quite a physical sensation. No, this was something paranormal.
Like something was going to happen here… or already had.
“Guys, I don’t like it here.” Sapphire spoke for the first time in ages. “There’s an aura, a badness surrounding this place. Oh, can’t you see it?”
She had stepped down from the passenger seat of the minivan and made her way over to them and now she stood with her arms stretched out, fingers splayed, like she was feeling invisible wisps of something otherworldly. Jean-Paul had followed her out of the van and stood just behind her, concern etching his face. He definitely looked uncomfortable with Sapphire’s antics.
Kyle went right up to Sapphire. With a mischievous grin, he pantomimed blowing a breath into her ear. “Oooooh, it’s spooooky!”
Miranda ignored him. She was just as certain as he was that Sapphire wasn’t feeling anything other than her own trepidations, but she wasn’t going to feel him breathing on her, either. After all. Ghosts didn’t breathe.
And honestly there was… something about this place.
“I’m so sorry, Sapphire.” Miranda pulled her friend into her arms, hugging her tightly. “You shouldn’t have had to see that back there.”
“Neither should you.” Sapphire snuffled back some tears. “Neither should any of us. It isn’t right.”
Then, without warning, Sapphire suddenly shuddered violently and stood up straight, snapping her head back up. She locked gazes with Miranda, her eyes wide and bright. “We need to get out of here.”
“What?” Miranda looked all around them but didn’t see anything different than before. A somewhat rundown Bed and Breakfast, a rural and peaceful area, trees all around, the sun bearing down from a clear blue sky. It was like the start of a Stephen King novel, before the freakiness starts, but there was nothing here to be worried about that she could see.
Sapphire saw the doubt in her eyes. “I don’t like it here, Miranda. Something is not right. This place just feels off. The aura is dark and it’s really frightening me.”
Kyle gave up trying to distract the distraught Sapphire by waving his hand in front of her face. “Well, if the mood isn’t dark here now, it certainly will be after you guys stride in and announce a dead body.”
They started up the steps, Sapphire hanging back a bit. Jean-Paul had his lips pursed as he looked up and down the open front porch. “I hate to agree with Sapphire in the world of the weird and wonderful, but I can not say I’m enjoying being here myself. The dead man in the lake, it is very unnerving, non?”
“Well, whether we like this place or not,” Jack pointed out, “we need to use the phone.”
Jack pushed the doorbell, and when they didn’t hear any chimes or tones from inside, he knocked. They waited. Behind them, a crow screeched, and Sapphire jumped.
“You know what?” she said in a rush, “I think I’m just gonna stay in the van, okay? I really don’t want to go in there.”
Kyle floated out of her way as she started back down the steps in a flurry of hand movements. “Don’t worry,” he snarked to her, “we’ll be sure to fill you in after we’re done.”
Jean-Paul was a little nicer about it. “It is okay, honey. You don’t have to go in with us. Look, Jack and I will go in there. We will make the call.”
“Sure we will,” Jack agreed quickly. Then he turned to Miranda. “Maybe you ought to stick around out here, too. I think our poor pooch wants to stretch his legs and do his business.”
“Mmm, as do I,” Jean-Paul said, shifting on his feet in a way that told everyone his bladder was more than full.
After they knocked again they heard someone calling just a minute! from inside, and Miranda decided Jack was right. They didn’t need all of them to make a phone call. Sapphire needed her support, and Butter needed to find a nice place to relieve himself that wasn’t the wilted rose beds along the front of the Blue Jay Bed and Breakfast.
So she kissed Jack on his cheek and told him not to be too long.
“I won’t. Listen, don’t go far, okay?” he said. “Just a little wander around for the dog. Don’t go out of sight.”
“Who, me?” she joked. They both knew her penchant for snooping and stumbling across trouble.
“Miranda, I’m serious. We have a dead body on our hands and we’re out of our usual comfort zone. Neither of us knows anything about this place.”
“I get that. I’ll just take Butter for a really quick walk. How does that sound?”
“That sounds perfect. We won’t be too long, I hope.” At tha
t moment, the door creaked open and Jack and Jean-Paul made their way inside.
For her part, Miranda walked back to the van with Sapphire and made sure she was sitting down before she opened the side door to let Butter out. He jumped down with a happy whuff and wagged his tail furiously back and forth as she hooked on his leash and then encouraged him to walk with her across the lawn to the deep stretch of trees at the edge of the property.
Before she walked away from the van she caught sight of Sapphire digging through her purse for one of her crystals. Smiling in triumph, she held up a chunk of amethyst and held it in front of her in two hands, like a shield between her and the building with its supposedly dark aura.
The crystal was rough cut, and purple, and to Miranda’s eyes it seemed wholly inadequate to protect anyone, from anything.
Chapter 4
Butter took his time finding his perfect spot. He sniffed at the grass, and sniffed at the rocks, and then at three different trees before he found one worthy for him to mark. Miranda politely gave him privacy by turning her back while she kept a tight hold on the leash.
While she waited, she whistled a mindless tune and checked out the property from this different angle. From the side she could see how big the Bed and Breakfast actually was. It sat square to the road and stretched back from there. The parking area for the guests was on the side near the back. Two cars were parked there. A red four-door, and a little blue sports model. So, as isolated as this place was there must be some draw to it.
She wondered about that. Nobody was here to fish. Not this summer, with the water that low. They might be here for camping, she supposed. As hot as the weekend had been for them, she and Jack and Sapphire and Jean-Paul had enjoyed their time in the woods away from everything. Well, at least she and Jack had. And Sapphire, too. Jean-Paul certainly hadn’t but he was here, and he was helping, and that was what mattered.
Now that Butter was done watering his trees, she should get him back to the van and check in with Jack. He must have made that phone call by now. The police should be able to make it out to where the body was in under an hour. Sooner, once Jack explained the urgency.
On the way back to the van her eyes fell on the cars in the parking area again. Something about the red car caught her attention.
She wasn’t sure what it was about the car, but Miranda knew to trust her instincts. Being psychic was so much more than reading tarot cards and getting messages from the great beyond. That was all TV stuff. Miranda had a pack of tarot cards stuffed away in her closet somewhere. She’d gotten them strictly out of curiosity and after a few days of flipping them over and over she’d decided they were as useless to her as if they had been printed in German. She couldn’t read them.
Her instincts, on the other hand, had never let her down. They served her well as a mystery novelist, and they had always served her well in matters involving ghosts and mysteries involving death.
In her life, it was surprising how often that sort of thing came up.
“Hey, Butter?” she said to the golden retriever, “how’s about we take a walk over by the lovely Bed and Breakfast for a little bit, okay?”
Butter looked over at the building now and whined in his chest. He turned away, going to the end of his leash on the opposite side of Miranda, keeping that much distance between himself and the Blue Jay B&B. Whatever she was feeling from the place, he was feeling it, too.
Miranda could see Sapphire sitting there in the front of the van, still holding up her chunk of amethyst and staring at the building, protecting herself from whatever horrible things she imagined were lurking within. First her friend was talking about bad auras, and now her dog was scared too.
She stood still for a moment, and closed her eyes, and tried to get a handle on what she had felt before. That sense of foreboding wasn’t any stronger now than it had been before, but it was definitely still there. Something was going on inside the Blue Jay Bed and Breakfast. Something unseen, maybe, but definitely ominous…
“What are you doing?”
Miranda jumped and popped her eyes open again. The voice that had spoken right in front of her face turned out to be Kyle. So there was at least one ghost here. Kyle wasn’t evil, or menacing either, even if he had a habit of sneaking up on her when she wasn’t looking.
“Kyle! I thought you were inside with Jack and Jean-Paul.”
“Meh,” he muttered, flipping a hand through the air. “I was. But Jean-Paul went off to the loo and there’s lots of guys I would follow into the men’s room but sorry to say, Jean-Paul’s not one of them. It’s the mustache, I think. I mean, unless you’re in the circus, why do you want the tips of your mustache waxed to points like that?”
Miranda chuckled to herself. Her friend had been very famous for serial dating when he was alive. His tastes ran towards buff men with cute smiles and it was obvious that Jean-Paul would never have been his type. At the moment, however, she was less concerned with Kyle’s after-death experiences with men than she was with the phone call Jack was here to make.
“So as long as you’re here, tell me what’s going on inside,” she said.
Kyle looked at her like she hadn’t been listening. “I told you. Jean-Paul went to the little Frenchman’s room.”
“That’s not what I mean. Did Jack find a phone? Did he make his call?”
“Oh, that. Um. I don’t know.”
“What? Kyle!”
“I’m sorry, Miranda, but I got bored. Like, seriously bored. I always figure that hanging out with a bona fide police detective will make my afterlife interesting and it always turns out to be nothing more than go here, or go there, or wait for this, or don’t smile at the pretty blonde woman in the scary out-of-the-way Bed and Breakfast.”
Miranda felt like she was being put through a blender listening to this conversation. “You… I mean Jack… what pretty blonde?”
“The one inside, obviously. The one he asked about using a phone. That blonde.”
For a moment, Miranda stewed in her own thoughts about Jack being in there, alone for all she knew, with some pretty blonde with perfect measurements and a bubbly personality. Then she shook that thought out of her head. She had no reason to be jealous, if that’s what this feeling was. She and Jack were together, and even when they weren’t side by side that still held true.
Still, her eyes wandered over to the front door of the Bed and Breakfast and she gave serious consideration to going there first before she went to satisfy her instinctive curiosity about the cars parked next to the building. No, she told herself. Don’t be that girl. Jack is a big boy, and he knows how to be around other women without being tempted.
Miranda had been with other men in the past. Relationships that ended badly or too abruptly or ones that had petered out without warning. She knew all about the fickle hearts of men, and the deeply emotional heart that was her own. With Jack, she didn’t have to worry about such things. He was with her, and that was all there was to it.
With a deep breath, she smiled at Kyle. “Okay. While Jack is in there with your cute blonde, how about we go check out those cars?”
“What? Why?” Kyle asked her, floating around to her other side to look that way. “They’re cars, Miranda. People drive them. There’s a few guests here. I heard them wandering around although I didn’t see any of them. They had to get here somehow. Thus, the cars.”
She gave him a sideways glance. “I know how cars work, oh all-knowing spirit guide, thank you. There’s just something about that red one that is bothering me.”
“Yes, I never much liked that color red either.”
“That’s not what I mean.” For a ghost who supposedly had access to all sorts of information from the other side that mere mortals like her didn’t, he could certainly be dense sometimes. “Just come on, will you?”
They went together across the short space of dry grass of the lawn to the parking area. The whole way, Butter kept trying to jump up on Kyle, like he wanted to play. It seemed
to amuse the dog every time he went straight through his translucent, blue friend and turned Kyle into a hazy blue blur. He would bring himself back together just in time to have Butter romp through him again. Miranda giggled repeatedly to see Kyle getting more and more frustrated as he tried unsuccessfully to dissuade the hyper doggie.
The windows of the Blue Jay stared down at them as they walked around the cars. A dilapidated trellis was nailed to the wall, dead vines hanging on in the breeze. Miranda bit at her lower lip. What was it about this red one that was bothering her? There wasn’t anything overly special about it. Just a basic Honda model, not new but not old, no bumper stickers on it and no dents or rust under the thin layer of mud around the wheel wells…
Mud.
That was it! That was what had caught her attention. In a summer that had turned dry and arid, where would somebody driving a car manage to get mud around the tires like this? It was dried, and gray, which meant it was a few days old. It definitely hadn’t come from the parking area with its noisy layer of gravel. It hadn’t come from the highway, either. The pavement was bone dry. There was only one place that Miranda could imagine a car picking up this much mud nearby, where it wouldn’t have fallen off while driving back here to the Blue Jay.
“Kyle, take a look at this,” she said, kneeling down to look more closely at the mud caked into the tread.
“Yeah,” he said, leaning down with her, his feet off the ground. “This guy really needs to take better care of his car.”
“No, I mean, what do you see?”
“Uh. Mud.”
“Exactly. Now, where do we suppose this mud came from?”
“Geez, Miranda. I would have thought that was obvious. This is probably the same car that went off the road up where the dead body was found. The only place wet enough to have mud right now is the ground close to a big body of water like that lake, even if a lot of the water has evaporated in the heat and… oh.”