“I’m going up there,” she said. “Care to join me?”
* * * *
The back room at the bar/restaurant reminded Sam of an old brothel, especially the brocade cushions in gold and burgundy on the sofas and loveseats. Tandy served them an excellent herbal tea and talked about Gloria Day.
“I have to admit some of the bad feelings were jealousy. Every time I looked at her, I thought I should start singing Memory. But I actually liked her. We both managed to get people to ball-hop on Halloween, after the Sabbat on the Gallows Hill, of course. There was plenty here for everyone. So I want you to know that I’m not leaving town. I have no intention of running.”
“Tandy,” Sam said. “We need a list of people who wear, or have recently purchased a scent you make at your store. It’s something woodsy, smells like a forest, that kind of thing.”
She found her phone and tapped a message. “I’m getting it for you.”
He leaned forward. “And what do you know about the Gullah community?”
“How did you even know we had a Gullah community?” Tandy asked, bemused. “They’re usually in coastal South Carolina or Georgia.”
“We heard there was a group here,” Devin said.
“We do have a group here now. Almost a hundred,” she said. “All good people. Some are more conventional; some have converted more or less to the Wiccan religion. They have their own language, a Creole similar to a Krio language spoken in what’s now Sierra Leone. Their religion is based on Christianity, but includes a great deal of believing in the spirits of their ancestors. I buy a lot of merchandise from them to sell at the store. Beautiful, hand-crafted masks and totems, and jewelry.”
“What about the boo-hag?” Sam asked.
Tandy smiled at that. “What about it?”
“It seems to be a popular costume.”
“Wait here,” Tandy said.
She rose and disappeared from the room, returning a moment later with a young woman, clad in black, wearing a beautifully crafted pentagram.
“Sissy, this is Special Agent Sam Hall, and Special Agents Lyle and Rockwood,” Tandy said. “Meet Sissy McCormick. She’s from Gullah country in South Carolina.”
“Nice to meet you,” Sissy said, joining their grouping by taking the chair Tandy had vacated. “My people are Gullah.”
Sissy was striking, her skin coffee-colored, her eyes a soft blue. She had dark hair, queued at the nape of her neck, wearing a black cape over a long black skirt and tailored shirt.
“You’ve chosen to be Wiccan?” Devin asked.
Sissy nodded. “Something speaks to all of us, and not always what’s in our heritage. But, basically, I follow the tenets of almost any creed. Be good to others, care for the elderly, sick, and injured, cherish all children, never offer violence. Be a good human being.”
“Nice,” Devin said. “Gullah is based on Christianity?”
“Of course, but so is voodoo,” Sissy reminded her. “And look, many fundamentalists have caused tremendous harm to others in the name of traditional religions. Every faith out there has those who choose to take it too far, or read into it what isn’t there.”
“Or use it,” Sam said. “Sissy, we’re seeing a lot of boo-hag costumes, or at least one boo-hag costume, over and over again. The boo-hag is a Gullah demon, right?”
Sissy nodded. “Some manufacturer came up with that awful costume. Red latex to look like a fleshless body, a horrible demon face. My mother was so upset. She said it’s just going to make people anti-Gullah. But it’s just part of Halloween. People dress up as crazed movie characters. They know Freddy and Jason and all those fictional killers are just from movies. They’ll know that a boo-hag is simply from legend, like a vampire or a werewolf. No true Gullah in this community would ever buy or wear such a costume.”
“Here we go,” Tandy said, slipping a pair of reading glasses from her pocket to stare at an incoming message on her phone.
Sam’s phone rang. He didn’t recognize the number, but it was local, so he answered. For a moment, there was nothing. Then he heard something like a snuffled tear.
“Sam?”
For a split second, he was confused.
Then he knew.
“Elyssa?”
He heard a sudden cry.
Then a whispered voice. “You want this one to live? Then get your wise-ass partner under control. All of you back down. Leave this alone. Let these murders go into the great cauldron of unsolved crimes. That is if you ever want to see this kid again. You back off, and she’s free on November 1. You keep it up, she dies before Halloween.”
Sam forced himself to remain calm, glancing at Rocky, who knew what the look meant. Trouble. So he worked to keep the caller on the phone, as Rocky called headquarters to run a trace through Sam’s phone.
“We want Elyssa alive,” he said. “But I have to have some kind of assurance that you’re not going to hurt her regardless of what we do.”
A soft laugh seeped through the speaker. “Trying to keep me on the line? You’re on your cell, not at police headquarters. So you’ll need some time to run a trace. It was nice that Elyssa kept this number in her phone. You were an attorney, so I would hope you understand the fine art of negotiation.”
“So negotiate,” Sam said. “I have to know that Elyssa remains alive.”
“A call every six hours. But there’ll be a new number each time. If I even suspect you’re playing me, this pretty little girl will be hanged. Maybe by the witch memorials or the cemetery, right there amidst all the tourist attractions. Or I could find another cool place. So you need to find Jenna Duffy. Actually, I wouldn’t mind seeing her hanged either. Now there’s a thought...”
“Touch her,” he said, “and you’ll face hell a thousand times here on earth before going to the real thing.”
Laughter followed his remark.
Cocky? Why not? Two people were already dead.
“Sam,” the voice said, “I’m disappointed in you. I thought you were a negotiator.”
“Okay, let’s negotiate and not threaten other people.”
He looked at Rocky, who was listening to his own phone, watching Sam with anxious eyes. Rocky nodded. They had a location.
“Okay. I agree. Don’t kill anyone else and we’ll back off. I’ll get Jenna right now, and she’ll back off.”
“Six hours, you’ll get another call.”
The line went dead.
Tandy Whitehall seemed oblivious to the tenor of the call. But Sam had risen and stepped back where only Rocky and Devin knew who’d been on the other end of the line. But he was now really interested in that scent from Tandy’s shop.
“It’s popular with a number of men in town,” Tandy said. “And a few women. Here’s the list one of my cashiers just sent me. John Bradbury bought that scent, and I guess he suggested it to a lot of his friends and coworkers.”
Sam took the phone and looked at it.
“Mortuary? Now?” Rocky asked.
“You got it.” And he handed the phone back to Tandy.
“I’ll turn myself in to the police now,” Tandy said.
“No. Sit tight, right here. You too, Sissy.”
“The call came from the mortuary,” Rocky said.
He hurried out the door, wondering just which one of the people on the list was now holding Elyssa Adair hostage there. He didn’t want Tandy calling the police. Not until he found out exactly who he was dealing with, someone that might even now be stalking Jenna, who may be stumbling into a trap.
Chapter 8
The mortuary was definitely clearing out. People were leaving in groups and singles. The ticket booth was closed. By the time Jenna walked across the porch and reached the front door, no one was around, the last of the visitors having reached the parking lot. She entered through the front door and no costumed actor greeted her.
“Detective Martin,” she shouted.
No answer.
“Micah? Jeannette? Naomi?”
N
o reply.
The silence gave her a sensation of unease, one that had nothing to do with the fact that she was accompanied by two bickering ghosts. She ignored them, allowing them to follow her as she searched the ground floor rooms, amazed that the actors and staff could clear out so quickly. Also, no one had locked up. She passed through the dining room with its array of skeletal guests. On through the kitchen, where it appeared that a massacre had taken place. Fake blood leaked from a cauldron on the stove top, body parts lay scattered on a table, but no actor-chef or cook standing around with a plastic butcher knife to put chills and thrills into the bloodstreams of attendees.
“Goodnight,” she heard someone call from the front of the house. “Last one out, lock up.”
Jenna hurried to the front door. But whichever performer had just left had done so quickly. She could just make out a dark form heading to the parking lot. She hustled back to the kitchen.
“There’s no one down here,” Gloria said, following close behind her.
“We should check upstairs,” John suggested.
“We should go to the basement,” Gloria said.
Jenna was irritated. “Stop. I’ll go up first, then we’ll go down.”
The stairway up seemed misty in the eerie black lighting used for the haunted house attraction. She moved carefully, unnerved, not wanting to be taken by surprise. One by one, she searched through the second floor rooms. Spider webs, creepy creatures, all manner of frights remained. But no one person. Where the hell was Detective Gary Martin? She heard the sound of movement coming from the back of the house. She hurried across the hall to one of the rooms that looked down over the delivery entrance to the old embalming rooms.
“Basement,” she said.
“Told you,” Gloria whispered.
“Where is everyone?” John asked.
“Good question. Detective Martin should be here,” Jenna said. “Let’s see what’s down in the basement.”
She moved quickly, hurrying down the blackened stairs. Portraits adorned the walls that started off as depictions of the living and changed to rotting skeletons from different perspectives. She ignored them and hurried around to the stairs to the basement. Her phone rang. Sam. She hit the answer button.
John screamed.
She whirled to see why.
A fist came out of the darkness, smashing against the side of her face. Her body crashing down the rest of the stairs, her phone disappearing into the misty darkness of the embalming room below.
Before the world vanished, she heard Sam’s voice through the phone.
Calling her name.
* * * *
Sam spotted the mortuary, high on the hill, glowing opaque in the strange mix of moonlight and artificial electric haze. No cars filled the parking lot. The building seemed to be alive, its upstairs windows like soulless eyes. The front door appeared to be a gaping mouth caught in a strange and twisted oblong O of horror.
“Not sure how exactly we should be doing this,” Rocky said.
“Maybe call the local police?” Devin murmured.
“No,” Sam said. “We handle this ourselves.”
The killer had threatened to kill Elyssa and now he probably had Jenna too. No time to wait for the locals.
“No police,” he said.
And neither of his colleagues argued since, among those who bought the woodsy scent from Tandy Whitehall’s shop was Detective Gary Martin. A cop gone bad? Sam didn’t know. Especially since another man associated with the mortuary had purchased the scent, too.
The head of the paranormal research department.
Micah Aldridge.
* * * *
Jenna tumbled down the stairs, feeling every bruise to her body, but managed to roll out on the floor and draw her weapon.
She heard an eerie laugh.
“You have no idea how much trouble you’re in,” a voice told her in a hoarse, eerie whisper.
Then she heard another voice. Gloria Day. “It’s a boo-hag.”
Down the steps one came. But no demon. Instead, a living, breathing person in a boo-hag costume, armed with a Smith and Weston pistol gripped by red latex-clad hands.
“Stop,” she commanded.
But the costumed person ignored her. “Throw down your gun. Now.”
A snap of sound and a system was turned on that offered first eerie music, then the deep, rugged, masculine voice of the attraction’s narrator. “And so Proctor died as well, for, as he was supposed to have said, the girls did, in the end, make devils of far too many a man and woman. It was in June of 1692 that the first of the condemned were hanged. Before it was over, nineteen would die in such a manner, and one man, Giles Corey, would be pressed to death.”
A sudden flow of light sprang from one of the niches.
She heard a sob of fear and terror.
“Auntie Jenna? Help me. Please!”
Elyssa stood in the niche, supported on a stool, a noose around her neck, a second costumed boo-hag at her side ready to rip away the stool.
* * * *
Sam came through the mortuary front door. Rocky and Devin had slipped around the house, intent on entering the basement via the delivery entrance. He moved with care. What he wanted was to barge in with guns blazing and wrap his fingers around the throat of the killer now threatening Elyssa and Jenna. But he told himself to slow down, use caution. His head pounded, ready to explode. All he could hear was Elyssa’s sobbing through Jenna’s phone, from four minutes ago.
A lot could happen in four minutes.
He climbed the porch steps and saw that the mortuary’s front door hung half ajar. He entered the foyer and looked around, certain from the acoustics and sounds made when he’d called her that the phone had dropped in the basement. He hurried through the garish decorations and around to the stairway.
A body lay on the floor right by the door to the basement stairs.
Not a prop.
Micah Aldridge.
He hunkered down and felt for a pulse. Faint. But there. He found his phone and dialed 911 requesting an ambulance and the police. He’d identified himself and asked for no sirens. His phone blinked for an incoming call. Rocky. He answered and told him the situation and that help was coming.
He left the fallen man and headed for Jenna and Elyssa.
Knowing now who he was about to encounter.
* * * *
“We’d been debating how to handle this, and honestly,” the costumed boo-hag said, “you weren’t on our original list. But that’s okay. We had you running all over looking at Wiccans and talking about the Gullah people, and don’t you love our costumes?”
Elyssa was still sobbing, but Jenna realized that struggling just caused the rope around the young girl’s neck to chaff more. Elyssa’s wrists and ankles were tied. Once the stool was kicked aside, there’d be no recourse for her.
“It’s not that I care,” the boo-hag said. “I really don’t care if the kid—or you—live or die. You couldn’t let a damned suicide be a suicide. You just had to turn it into a murder investigation.”
“You’re so sadly mistaken,” Jenna said. “The medical examiner knew immediately that John Bradbury had been murdered.”
The boo-hag by Elyssa spoke out angrily, “That’s because your good buddy Sam Hall talked the medical examiner into believing that. It could have been left a mystery, accepted as a suicide. But that’s all right. Eventually they would have blamed the Gullah people or the Wiccans. But you! Bursting in here, pushing everyone around. Here to pat poor baby cousin on the back. What made you start running around screaming murder anyway?”
“John Bradbury told Elyssa it was a murder and that you would murder more people. Then John found and told me about the way you two attacked him. And yes, you did have us investigating what might be going on in Salem. But this has nothing to do with the Gullah community or the Wiccans or history, except in whatever way you thought you could use it. This is all about greed.”
John Bradbury’s gh
ost floated over the niche where he’d been hanged, and where Elyssa was now dangerously close to meeting the same fate, swiping angrily at the air.
To Jenna’s surprise, the boo-hag moved back, as if the movement had been felt.
“Don’t you understand?” the boo-hag behind Jenna said. “We’re in complete control. So I’ll only say it one more time. Drop your gun or my pal over there will kick the stool out from under your cousin.”
“I don’t think so,” a new voice suddenly announced.
Sam.
The boo-hag whirled around. “Sam Hall. The great attorney, P.I. No—great FBI special agent now. Have you forgotten all about our negotiation?” stairway boo-hag said.
“Not at all.”
The boo-hag beside Elyssa said, “We’ve still got all the cards, Special Agent Hall. Come down here. Now. Or this girl dies.”
Jenna recognized the woman’s voice. Naomi Hardy. And she knew that their suspicions had been right. This had nothing to do with the past, nothing to do with feuds or beliefs. “Naomi Hardy. You did this for a promotion? You killed people—you probably planned on killing more people to create a real Wiccan war and send a Wiccan to prison—all for a promotion.”
The boo-hag’s head whipped around. “She knows who I am.”
“Shut up,” the boo-hag on the stairwell said.
“You know, I thought at first that it was either Micah—or even poor Detective Martin,” Sam said. “But, Jeannette, you and Naomi have to be the two dumbest murderers I’ve ever met!”
Of course, Jenna thought. Jeannette Mackey.
“Kill the stupid girl, Naomi. Do it,” Jeannette yelled.
“They’ll shoot me,” Naomi said.
Jenna thrust herself up and burst toward the niche, trying to get to Elyssa. She could make that move because Sam had her back. Luckily, Naomi Hardy stayed hesitant. The boo-hag on the stairwell raised her red latex arm to fire, but Sam slammed his arm down on hers and the weapon went cascading down the stairs.
Jeannette screamed in fury.
All Hallows Eve Page 9