“Oh, thank goodness, Marisa,” Nicky greeted the newcomer. Meanwhile, Joe lifted a questioning eyebrow at Dave. He shrugged, looking sheepish. Joe took that to mean that he’d had about as much luck as Vince. Having apparently come to the same conclusion, Vince, who was also looking at Dave, audibly ground his teeth.
“Everything’s all set,” Marisa said to Nicky with a quick smile. Then she switched her attention to Leonora and her voice turned brisk. “All right, let’s get you hooked up. I’ve got good feelings about tonight.”
“You don’t have a permit to film here,” Vince roared. With his face red and his eyes bulging, he looked like a balloon that was about to pop.
Other than glancing his way for the briefest of seconds, none of the TV crowd paid him any attention whatsoever. Their focus was on Leonora—a fluff of her hair, a flick of lipstick, a tug to straighten her dress. Marisa curled a hand around her arm. Leonora clutched at Nicky’s hand with seeming desperation.
“I just don’t think I can do it,” Leonora moaned.
“She’ll be fine,” Marisa said to Nicky in a comforting tone. For her part, Nicky looked less than reassured. “Nothing but preshow nerves.”
“I’m not feeling a connection.” Leonora looked wildly around the group. “Does no one understand?” Her lips parted, and she started breathing hard through them. “I’m blocked. I’m blocked.”
“Leonora. Here.” John stepped forward, produced another folded brown paper lunch bag from his pocket, snapped it open, and pressed it into Leonora’s hand. She glanced down, seemed to register what it was, then clapped it over her mouth and nose without relinquishing her grip on Nicky’s hand.
“Just do your best,” Nicky said, as calmly as though there was nothing at all surprising about this really weird behavior. If her hands hadn’t curled into fists at her sides as she spoke, Joe might have believed that she actually was calm.
Leonora’s reply was incomprehensible through the bag, the sides of which were expanding and contracting as she breathed into it. Marisa tugged on her arm. She didn’t budge.
Nicky continued in the same soothing tone: “Remember when you found that little girl who was lost in the woods? Remember when you saw that there were survivors after that boat capsized? They were saved because of you. This is nothing compared to that. Just one more day at the office.”
Leonora shuddered and shook her head.
“All right, you’re gonna make me do something I don’t want to do,” Vince threatened loudly.
“Is there somewhere I can sit down?” The pregnant lady—she was blonde, thirtyish, and hugely, scarily with child—trudged along the porch toward them. Flip-flops flapping, wearing micro-sized white shorts and a crotch-length pink tent, she was leaning heavily on the supporting arm of the other guy, who Joe saw also had red hair. She was breathing hard, perspiring. Her face was flushed and blotchy, and her eyes looked all red and puffy, like she had bad allergies or something.
“You okay?” Nicky asked as she reached them, her voice sounding strained for the first time.
“Fine,” the pregnant woman answered, pressing a hand to her belly. “For an elephant.”
Then her mouth trembled, her eyes welled over with tears, and she clapped both hands to her face. Joe realized, to his horror, that she was crying.
For the first time that night, he felt a stab of real alarm. Weeping pregnant women were way outside his comfort zone. If he hadn’t already been backed up all the way to the porch rail, he would have retreated. As it was, he was stuck. Beside him, Dave and Vince looked as horrified as he felt.
“Don’t cry, Liv,” Nicky said, patting the pregnant woman awkwardly on the arm. “He’s not worth it.”
“I know.” The pregnant lady—Liv—sobbed through her fingers. “I c-can’t help it.”
“It’s the hormones,” Leonora said, lowering the bag and sounding surprisingly normal. “I was exactly the same when I was pregnant.”
“Three minutes,” a voice called from inside the house.
“Don’t worry, Nicky, I’ll take care of Livvy,” the red-haired man said, pulling her away.
“Hold sti-ill,” the fairy godmothers chorused.
A hiss heralded the release of another toxic cloud of hair spray.
“I’m gonna have to . . .” Vince began, only to be interrupted by a coughing fit as the fumes engulfed him. Dave, caught by surprise, succumbed, too. Having retained the presence of mind to remember what the warning presaged and hold his breath, Joe had to smile. Folding his arms over his chest, resting a hip against the porch rail as he settled himself more comfortably, he discovered that for the first time in a long time, he was actually starting to enjoy himself.
“Nicky . . .” Leonora gasped over her shoulder as Marisa, with John’s help, finally succeeded in moving her.
“You can do it,” Nicky said. “There’s nothing different about this one. Karen, help them with her, would you please?” The black-haired woman nodded, then moved away to join Leonora and company. Seconds later, Nicky called after them in a sharper tone: “Don’t let her go inside until we’re ready to start. We want to get her reactions to the house from the very beginning. And one of you, for goodness’ sake, take that paper bag away from her.”
“Two minutes, Nicky. We need to get you miked,” a man called urgently through the screen. Glancing that way, Joe noticed that a TV camera inside the house was now visible. The cameraman appeared to be positioning it so that it captured anyone entering through the front door.
“Coming,” Nicky responded, and suited the action to the words. Swinging hair, spine straight as a poker, nice ass with a provocative sway to it, long-legged strides: Yep, no doubt about it, she was walking away.
Mark that down as a whiff for the home team.
“See what trying to be nice gets you? Ignored.” Openly seething, Vince stared after her, then glanced sideways at Joe. “You’re the damned Chief of Police. You handle it. They don’t want to leave, fine. Arrest them.”
Joe shot him a disbelieving look. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Hell, no, I’m not kidding you. What do you think we’re paying you for? Do your job.”
“Shit,” Joe said, catching Dave’s eye. His Number Two looked as dubious as he felt, but, hell, it was Vince’s call. With Dave following and Vince bringing up the rear, he headed semi-reluctantly toward where Nicky was now standing in the middle of a huddle in front of the screen door. A few feet away, in the middle of her own huddle, Leonora was once again breathing into the paper bag.
“Testing, one, two, three . . .” Nicky was saying into a small black microphone that had just been attached to her lapel.
“Great. We’re good to go,” a man called from inside the house.
“Not quite,” Joe said in his best authoritative tone. Nicky looked around at him. Her hair shimmered with ruby highlights as she turned her head and her hair swung away from her face. Pretty. Too bad he was getting ready to sink right to the bottom of her favorite-people list. “Like the mayor said, no permit, no TV show. I’m going to have to escort you people off the property. If you refuse to go, you leave me no choice but to place you under arrest.”
Nicky’s lips parted as she sucked in air. Joe could almost hear the sizzle as her fuse ignited. Her big brown eyes shot sparks at him. Then, boom, she whipped around and took two long strides, which put her right in his face.
“That’s it,” she said, her eyes blazing. “I’ve had it with all the aggravation. You I don’t need. Take a hike.”
Joe blinked as he absorbed the full impact of her ire, but stood his ground. As Vince had reminded him, he was Chief of Police. Vince, as mayor, was his boss. If Vince wanted these people gone, then it was up to him to make them disappear. All things considered, though, it had been more fun being an innocent bystander.
“Ms. Sullivan . . .” he began. Too late. She’d already turned her back to him and was marching back toward the door.
So much for reaso
n. He sighed inwardly.
“You in there.” He raised his voice, talking over her to the cameraman, whom he could see just inside the house. “Shut off those cameras. We’re closing you down.”
She whirled and came back, heels clicking furiously. “I don’t think so.”
He crossed his arms over his chest, and looked her over. “You’re backing me into a corner here.”
“Is that so?”
“Do you want to get arrested?”
Her lips thinned. Her face tightened. Her eyes blazed. They were practically shooting out fire now, like twin flamethrowers. Yikes, she was mad. Holding that scorching gaze, Joe practically felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.
“Listen up, you,” she said. “We’re on TV, live, in about ninety seconds. Anybody who interferes with this broadcast, from this moment onwards”—her glance slid toward Vince, who, with Dave, was standing just behind him, then snapped back to skewer Joe like meat on a shish kebab—“will be looking at a lawsuit. A huge one, I promise. Do you understand me?”
“One minute,” the voice called warningly from inside the house.
“Okay,” she called back. Her eyes narrowed, then glittered. She was in Joe’s face again, glaring up at him, radiating menace despite the fact that the top of her head reached approximately to his mouth and he outweighed her by, he guessed, at least seventy pounds. “You hear that, Barney Fife? We’re on the air in one minute. That means you’ve got a choice. You can go ahead and arrest me on live TV with millions of people watching, or you can back off.”
She jabbed a slender forefinger toward his nose for emphasis. It stopped about six inches short of its goal and stayed there like a pale arrow frozen in the air.
After this, Joe reflected as his gaze lifted from that well-manicured finger to her eyes, he was going to have to lose the shirt. She was making the Mayberry connection, too.
“Nicky, we need you in position now.” The black-haired woman gestured frantically from the doorway.
“Coming,” Nicky answered, glancing around. Then she refocused on him.
“Your call,” she said through her teeth. Her fists were clenched. Her eyes dared him. This, Joe decided dispassionately, was a woman on the edge. All it would take was one tiny little push to shove her over.
And he wasn’t about to be the one doing the pushing—not without a much better reason than he’d been given so far. Not with a live TV audience getting ready to tune in at any second. No way. No how.
She must have read the answer in his eyes. With a final warning look at him, which she then widened to include Vince and Dave, she turned on her heel and hurried toward the door.
“You gonna let her buffalo you like that?” Vince demanded under his breath. “Quit pussyfooting around. Arrest her ass.”
“Ten, nine, eight . . .” The countdown, in a woman’s voice, was coming from somewhere behind the cameraman.
“Vince, we don’t want to do this. Trust me,” Joe said, grabbing Vince by the arm when the mayor, with a fulminating look that made clear his opinion of his police chief’s lack of resolve, started to go after her himself.
“Not on live TV.”
“. . . four, three, two, one . . .”
Vince hesitated. “Goddamn it,” he said bitterly.
“This is Twenty-four Hours Investigates,” Nicky said into the camera, and Joe realized that she was on the air. Her body language had changed completely in the last few seconds; she now looked comfortable, relaxed almost, and even managed to produce a smile for the audience at home. “Thank you for joining us for this special live broadcast. I’m Nicole Sullivan . . .”
4
“THERE IS NOTHING IN the hall . . . nothing in the living room . . . nothing in the dining room,” Leonora intoned.
As Nicky had anticipated, once the camera was focused on her, Leonora had turned into the consummate professional. She was no newcomer to TV, after all, and she’d been a practicing professional psychic since the age of sixteen. Only someone as intimately acquainted with her as, say, her younger daughter, would have caught the nervous flicker in her eyes, the tension in her jaw, the jerkiness of her gestures. For whatever reason—psychic’s block or something else—Leonora was not on tonight. But she was trying, gamely walking through the house with increasingly rapid footsteps that Nicky knew signified her impatience with the lack of paranormal activity to pick up. The camera panned the magnetometer—standard ghost-hunting equipment that measured the magnetic field generally associated with the presence of spirits—that had been set up in each room: nothing. The temperature sensors likewise revealed a steady 72 degrees: no cold spots to be found. Since the house had no air-conditioning, they couldn’t even hope for a temperature drop due to a helpfully positioned vent, Nicky reflected gloomily. They were going au naturel, whether they liked it or not.
The plan was for Leonora to walk through the house, room by room, encountering and interacting with whatever ghosts were present, while the cameras rolled. So far, the plan had yielded approximately twenty-two minutes of the opposite of must-see TV: just nothing, nothing, nothing. And more nothing.
Call it Al Capone’s Vault Part II: the ghostless séance.
And Nicky’s worst nightmare.
“This is the library,” Nicky said quietly into the camera as her mother glided toward the small room next to the dining room. Despite the tall light set up in one corner specially for this broadcast, it was gloomy as all get out with its empty, dark shelving and shuttered windows. Dust lay over everything, and a cobweb adorned one corner of the coffered ceiling. Like the rest of the house, it smelled faintly musty, as if it had been shut off from light and air for a long time. If she’d been a ghost, Nicky thought, she would have wanted to hang out here.
Like the camera, her eyes followed as Leonora moved around the room, touching the fireplace mantel, a windowsill, the paneled wall itself. Behind her, out of range of the camera, Nicky was conscious of Karen and the rest of the crew watching with bated breath. If, through sheer willpower, they could have conjured a ghost out of thin air, it would have been materializing before them at that very moment. But they were as helpless to change what was happening—or, rather, what was not happening—as she was.
“Nothing. I’m getting nothing in this room,” Leonora said at last, her voice tight. Her eyes met Nicky’s for a long moment. Nicky knew that look. If the program bombed as badly as it seemed like it was going to, the bigwigs at the network weren’t the only ones who would be howling for her head: Her mother would be, too.
In the end, when the show was over and the backlash hit, this whole unbelievable debacle was going to turn out to be all her fault, Nicky realized bitterly. Why, why, hadn’t she seen this coming?
Because she’d been too eager to make tonight’s program happen, and the reason she’d been too eager was because she had known they were looking at her: CBS. They were searching for a new co-host for Live in the Morning, the long-running chatfest that most of America consumed along with their morning coffee. Quite apart from the fact that Twenty-four Hours Investigates was in crisis mode, Live in the Morning was a gig that every female television personality in the country would sell her laser-whitened teeth for. At their request, she’d sent in her audition tape, which had made enough of an impression that she’d been flown to New York for an interview. Things had gone well.
But she hadn’t been offered the job. They were keeping her in mind, they said, but they were continuing to look.
A friend in a position to know had told her that they liked her but had reservations: As a foil to Troy Hayden, the handsome, buttoned-down male host, they had envisioned a perky little suntanned blonde, not a tall, milky-skinned, sometimes too-composed redhead; the bulk of her reporting had been for news-oriented shows, from Channel 32 in Charleston where she’d gotten her start to Twenty-four Hours Investigates for A&E; and she had no experience with live TV.
Well, thanks to her own machinations, now she did. And it looked as t
hough it was going to bite her in the butt.
After this, not only was she not going to get the job, she probably wasn’t going to be working for Twenty-four Hours Investigates, either. If she didn’t get fired, it would be because they would have no reason to fire her: The news magazine would be cancelled. She would go down in the annals of broadcast history as the reporter who killed the program.
If CBS ever talked about her again at all, it would be because she was to Twenty-four Hours Investigates what the iceberg was to the Titanic.
“Leonora James—who, as most of you know, also happens to be my mother—has an amazing record as a psychic medium. On her late, much-lamented-by-fans show The Great Beyond, she was able to put hundreds of families in touch with their deceased loved ones. She has talked to Marilyn Monroe, to Elvis, to John Ritter . . .”
With the camera now zooming in on Nicky, Leonora felt free to give her daughter a baleful look, which Nicky, still talking, did her best to ignore. Then, head high, posture regal, purple caftan swirling, Leonora glided past Nicky and back out into the hall while the camera, once again focused on her, rolled silently behind.
“. . . investigated literally hundreds of hauntings,” Nicky continued. “Including Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C., where the ghost of Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, is said to still walk the boards. . . .”
In a group just inside the front door, clustered well out of camera range, Nicky caught a glimpse of the onlookers craning their necks to follow the (non) action: several members of the technical support crew; a miniskirted woman she thought was with the local weekly newspaper; the scowling, bulldog-like mayor; and the mayor’s puglike pal, a short, chunky, balding guy she took for a cop. Barney Fife, tall, dark, and brooding, was standing at the rear, arms crossed over his chest, shoulders propped against the wall. He was watching her with a sardonic twist to his mouth: She hadn’t made a friend there. He was probably planning to pounce on her once the broadcast ended and haul her off to jail—which, at the moment, was the least of her worries, she decided as her gaze scanned the group. Their expressions ranged from worried to bored to skeptical. Unfortunately, there was not one enthralled face in the lot.
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