by Alexie Aaron
“Okay, that you’re going to have to explain.”
“I have a friend who was nurtured to be an assassin. Little to large things were put in her way, calculated to form her into a cold-blooded killer. But one thing happened that changed everything.”
“What was it?”
“She met PEEPs, Ted in particular. She’s a negotiator between good and evil forces now.”
Jesse put together what he knew of Cid’s friends and figured out he was talking about Mia. “I’m too astounded to take this in sober. Let’s talk more on that later. How do you think the past is influencing what is happening here now?” he asked Cid.
“I think we’ll start with answering why these tables are here or why the steel steps and doors were needed for an ordinary cellar.”
The sound of heavy footsteps descending the steel staircase preceded the arrival of Wayne. “I’ve got to rework the electric, plumbing, heating, and septic system,” he said as he guided Kiki down. “This one is going to be a monster. I can smell sewage. Cancel that, it’s just Scrub and Clark.”
Kiki ignored the comment and paced off the interior before speaking, “We should pour a floor after the other issues have been taken care of. I was thinking of dropping a staircase, but the place where I want to cut through is three yards that way.” Kiki pointed to a solid brick wall.
Cid looked at the fieldstone on the other three walls and shook his head. “This brick was put in later. Perhaps there is more to this cellar than we can see,” he said, patting the brick wall.
Jesse got on his knees and dug into the ground in front of the wall with a crowbar. He stabbed and pulled back until he got down deep enough. “Brick only goes down another foot.”
Wayne cleared away the cobwebs and studied the floor joists above him. He continued to the wall. “I think you guys may be on to something. Kiki, there may be a blocked-off room or an old root cellar beyond this wall. I’m not going to recommend us opening it up until we support the floor, here and here,” he pointed out.
“Then I can have my interior staircase?” she asked.
“Unless we find an artesian well. I doubt we’ll run into that nightmare considering how deep we had to drill for the new well,” Wayne said.
Kiki smiled. She flipped open her folder and looked at her schedule. “Let’s tentatively schedule it for Thursday. Cid, I’d like your thoughts on some interior work in Cabin 3.”
SLAM!
One of the steel doors shut above them.
SLAM!
The other followed, plunging them into darkness. Wayne had already made his way to the staircase by the time the other three had their flashlights lit. He pushed up on the door to no avail. “Guys, a little help here,” he asked.
Jesse and Cid were soon at his side. After a focused effort and a count of three, one of the steel doors was opened. Wayne climbed out and pulled the other door open, securing it with a piece of wire. He looked around, trying to find the prankster. “There is no way in hell the wind closed these heavy doors.”
Kiki emerged from the cellar. “Maybe we need to chain them open when working down here. If it is a prankster, we would hear the chains move before the doors locked us in,” she suggested.
“What if it’s something else?” Jesse asked and turned to Cid. “What did your super hearing pick up?”
“Nothing unusual. I was concentrating on what the boss was saying though,” Cid admitted.
“So, we aren’t necessarily talking ghost involvement?” Kiki asked.
“At this time, I can’t say if it was either ghost or corporeal power that shut those doors. I think you should speak to your security and warn them that we may have non-personnel on-site,” Cid suggested.
“Will do. Come on, Cabin 3 awaits, Clark,” Kiki said, walking quickly up the stairs.
Faye closed her book. She liked happy endings. Her ending wasn’t happy. Finding one’s bones at the bottom of a well, not knowing how one got there, or who one was, wasn’t the type of book she indulged in. She looked at the big clock and disappeared just as the librarian’s key entered the lock on the door.
Faye drifted by her, causing Margie to pull her opened coat closed. The woman turned around, and it almost seemed like she was going to say something to Faye, but instead, she turned back and closed the door behind her.
Faye moved on to the coffee shop. Sometimes, a patron would leave a newspaper on the table of one of the booths after the lunch rush. Faye sat down and perused the Gazette while the wait staff gossiped.
“My Timmy got a job on that motel refurb. They have been hiring right and left,” the waitress at the counter said to the cashier who was counting the lunch receipts.
The cashier looked over and shook her head. “I heard the place was haunted.”
An old man, who had been nursing his cup of coffee in the corner, cleared his throat and said, “It should be, considering what happened there.”
“Mr. Eggleston, what did happen up there?” the waitress asked.
“When I heard that the local, county, and state patrol were called up there, I sent one of my cub reporters, Jeff Conroy. He came back with a story that curled my toes, and I didn’t sleep well for months.”
The cashier closed the drawer, flipped the closed sign, and grabbed a cup of coffee before walking over and prodding, “Go on, tell us.”
“Jeff parked his motorbike at the entrance of the place. He walked in unnoticed - the law there were arguing whose jurisdiction it was - over to the motor court. He saw Mrs. Luminosa Bautista lying in a pool of blood, her eldest daughter not ten feet from her. The daughter was also dead. She was lying on the ground with her eyes still open. Jeff saw a group of lawmen huddled around something in the long grass. He inched his way over, and he thought it was the youngest Bautista. I can’t remember his name right now - he used to be one of our paperboys. Jeff said he had so many holes in him that the ground was soaked with his blood. The two eldest boys lay near the women. They were riddled with bullet holes.”
Maury Eggleston looked at the horrified looks of his audience and quickly told them, “Two of the kids got away, a little girl and boy. These kids were traumatized by the time the searchers found them. One was hiding in the old graveyard up beyond the Catholic Church, and the other was in the dryer in the laundry room.”
“Oh, the poor little dears,” the waitress said. “Did they see what happened?”
“Don’t know. Jeff was found out and escorted off the property. I ended up going up there myself and followed the whole damn business for about a week. They never found out who killed them. Some suspected a traveler high on LSD, and someone else thought the missing father, but we at the Gazette made some inquiries and found out that he died in Vietnam a month before his family was killed. The surviving kids weren’t much help. Too young, too devastated. They buried Luminosa Bautista and the dead children together. The town took up a collection and that was that.”
Faye looked at the three. They sat in silence, giving the dead their respect. Faye wanted that. She wanted to know someone mourned her loss. The women were too young to know Luminosa Bautista, and yet, still they mourned.
Mr. Eggleston broke the spell by picking up his cup and draining it of the contents. “If you, ladies, will excuse me, I have a paper to oversee. My daughter may run the place, but she still likes to see me at my desk reading copy before she runs the final edition. Give my compliments to Ralph. Today’s special was truly special.”
Faye watched the staff of the diner disperse. She followed the old man out of the building and down the street. He climbed a set of cement steps and went into a tall brick building. On the door was etched Stepner Gazette. Faye entered and looked around. She found herself in an empty foyer. On the wall, behind a pane of glass, was a blackboard with white letters. It was a directory to the departments of the newspaper. She pushed her hand through the glass and ran her finger along the raised white letters until she found what she was looking for. “Newspaper Archives. Basemen
t, Room B4,” she read. “This is where I’ll start my investigation into what happened to Luminosa Bautista and her family,” she announced to the empty foyer.
A letter fell from the board. Faye picked it up and scanned the board to see where it had fallen from. It was a capital C. “Are you from Classifieds?” she asked herself. When she found the listing, the C was indeed missing but other letters had been taken and added, screwing up the word. An N from News and an L from Eggleston had been pushed into the word. Instead of Classifieds, it read “lassiNfields.” As she watched, an S popped off. Faye read “lassiNfield.” She read it again, slowly enunciating the three words she made from the letters. “Lass in field.”
She looked around her to see who was doing this. A faint glimmer of light rose and just as quickly faded. She turned back, and except for the C in her hand, the information board had been put to rights. Faye pressed the C back in. “Lass in field… lass as in girl. Who was the girl in the field?”
The lights surged for a moment and returned to normal. Faye moved through the floor and found room B4. It was occupied by an employee. She looked at the clerk and frowned. The stalwart middle-aged woman seemed very alert.
Crash! The sound of something falling at the back of the room startled the woman. She picked up a flashlight, seemingly large enough to light New York Harbor, and marched towards the sound. Faye moved quickly to the counter. There she found a computer. On the monitor, she noticed that the directory of the years of the paper had been in business was being scanned by an invisible hand. 1964 flashed. Faye saw, to her disappointment, that the papers of that year weren’t entered into the computer yet. However, it was on microfiche. Faye smiled, remembering she knew how to work a microfiche viewer. “I’ll be back tonight,” she promised whomever was helping her. “And I’ll be looking for the lass in the field.”
Footsteps announced the return of the clerk. Faye drifted upwards and moved quickly out of the building. She stopped her retreat and looked back at the Gazette. “How do I know about microfiche? Was I a reporter? Was I the Lois Lane of some big city paper? Did I wander into something while I was investigating?”
A glint of light sparkled off one of the fourth-floor windows. Could this be from the spirit who helped her inside, or was it a message from Heaven, confirming that Faye was indeed a reporter? Either way, it had her dancing three feet off the ground all the way back to the motor court.
Chapter Five
Cid made notes as he examined the wood Kiki had on-site. He looked at her order book and smiled when he read that the trim he needed was already on order and would be arriving tomorrow. Calvin was putting in quality materials, even though, in some cases, the trim boards could possibly be spattered by oil or acrylic paint. “First impressions,” he mused.
“Pardon, were you talking to me?” Wayne asked.
“No. Sorry, I didn’t know you were here. I have a bad habit of talking to myself.”
“We all do it. I call it contractor shorthand. It puts the information firmly in the noggin,” Wayne said, tapping his head. “You said, first impressions?”
“Yes, I was pondering why we’re using such expensive materials. I mean, have you ever seen an artist’s studio?”
“A bit of a mess, like my kids’ rooms. How my daughter got nail polish on the ceiling fan is beyond me. But there it is. I believe she said it was called Vixen Red.”
“Sounds like something my sister would wear.”
“Girls,” Wayne said dismissively.
“Many of the studios have bedrooms and kitchens in them. Do you think it’s wise to live 24/7 around the fumes of the oils and solvents?” Cid asked.
“Don’t know. Look at us, we’re bathing in sawdust and primers,” Wayne said. “But have you seen a better specimen of a human male?” he asked, rubbing his ample waistline.
“You’re one of a kind, Wayne, one of a kind,” Cid answered.
“As are you, Cid, as are you.”
Faye watched the two contractors. She had caught on early that neither man thought he was a gift to mankind, but from her perspective, both did add to the scenery. She was careful not to show herself in front of the man Kiki called Walrus. Even though he seemed to be able to work alongside the paranormal, she could tell that sudden appearances did make him nervous. He looked over his shoulder a lot more since Mrs. Bautista had made her anger known.
Faye waited until Cid left the storeroom and followed him to his truck. Cid opened up the back. As the tailgate was lowered, Faye appeared sitting on it.
“Well, Miss Faye, you’ve been tailing me for a while, I expect you have something you’d like to tell me,” he said.
“How’d you… Oh, I forgot about those ears of yours. What gave me away?”
“Your sighs. You sigh a lot,” Cid observed.
“I didn’t know I did that,” Fay admitted. “I didn’t want to scare the big guy by just appearing.”
“I respect that,” Cid said as he added a few items to his tool belt.
“I heard some things in town about what happened here,” Faye said and went on to report to Cid what she had found out from the diner and at the newspaper. “I’m getting help from a spirit of some kind. It hasn’t taken form yet, so I’m not sure if it’s a he or a she.”
Cid turned and studied the ghost a moment. Faye had changed her look yet again. This time, she wore sensible clothing right down to the comfortable, yet unattractive, shoes that barely brushed the ground under her. Her blonde hair was clipped back from her face. Cid had been used to seeing the ghost of Stephen Murphy, who carried the axe and wore the clothes he died in. Faye didn’t seem to be bound by any of the rules he associated with spirits. She wasn’t governed by the conventions of typical ghosts, although the emerald broach seemed to be her power center. Where it went, eventually, Faye would follow, but it seemed that the ghost didn’t have to stay that close to it.
“You’re remarkable, but I expect you know that,” Cid told her.
Faye blushed.
“Ghosts don’t normally blush,” Cid said, the smile lines forming at the edges of his eyes and lips.
“I expect there is nothing normal about ghosts. After all, we are paranormal,” Faye commented.
Cid nodded. “Well said.”
“I think I was a reporter,” Faye blurted out. “Like Lois Lane.”
“You think you were a comic strip reporter?”
“No, a real reporter. I seem to know a lot about reporter things like microfiche and where to find the back issues of papers and…”
“Slow down,” Cid ordered. “I expect most educated people of your time would know…”
Faye folded her arms and a pout formed on her face.
“Okay, okay, you possibly could have been a reporter.”
“I think I was undercover when I was killed. Maybe chasing a scandal or…”
“It’s possible.”
Faye was surprised. She had gotten used to Cid and Jesse poking holes in her theories about who she was before she died. True, most of them had been remembered heroines from books she read, but she honestly thought the stories from the remembered books were her memories. “I’m at a loss for words.”
“Another first,” Cid teased, but quickly added, “Follow your instincts and chase down this story. The more information we have, the quicker we will be able to calm Luminosa.”
“Be careful. She’s not a happy spirit.”
“I will. You too.”
Faye smiled and faded away.
“Nice exit,” Cid whispered.
Kiki drummed her fingers on the desktop. She checked for a message from Jake and found none. Frowning, she got up, grabbed her coat, and left the trailer. Having a relationship with someone you haven’t seen, via the internet, wasn’t that unusual these days. Having one with a dead person inhabiting the PEEPs computers fell into the unusual column. They had started off with a conversation while she was checking into Cid’s paranormal group. Jake and she seemed to click. It was after
a few shared movies that they watched on Kia’s laptop, that Jake admitted who, or rather what, he was.
Kiki was all too aware, if her twin sister Mimi knew, she would smirk and probably say something like, “Well, you finally found the unattainable male.” Mimi had recognized that Kiki’s years of dating men, who put their work lives first and weren’t into her for the long haul, had made Kiki fall into a comfortable pattern of disposable relationships. But this one was different. Jake didn’t woo her; they were friends. Cid had tried to explain Jake to Kiki, along with a warning, “He was very young when he died. I sincerely doubt he will mature emotionally, but anything is possible. PEEPs are used to his never answering a question directly and treating us like crap from time to time.”
Kiki held her tongue. Thinking back, she should have defended Jake. Her Jake was caring and listened. He rarely missed a date, although when PEEPs were on an investigation, his full attention was on his job. Today, it was on the top-secret invention Ted Martin was working on. Tomorrow, it could be something else, hopefully her.
Kiki stopped in her tracks and looked around her. She saw the massive undertaking of High Court’s refit and realized she was Jake in another form. She had been a ghost in all her relationships, including her family. The hard truth was that she loved the buildings she renovated like they were her children. Would they be her only testament that she had existed in this world? And if so, was it wrong? Look at the pyramids, the Great Wall of China; they were all constructed so well, they stood the test of time. It was Kiki’s turn to laugh at herself. “Me putting myself into the same category as those amazing builders.”
She wouldn’t lie to herself and deny that she was lonely at times, but it wouldn’t be enough to change her. She loved the freedom she had. Kiki could move on to the next job without clearing it at home. She could enjoy the comradery of the men and women she worked with, without the jealousy of a lover to contend with - no one to keep track of the number of late nights, or bristle when a job opportunity took her far from home.