“What’s wrong?” I asked, without much in the way of hello first.
“Wrong?”
“Did something happen with the house? With Tom?”
“Oh! That, no, everything’s fine as far as I know, I’m calling about Bakestravaganza, remember we talked about it last week? I’m just finishing the committee list and I put you down in charge of social media and marketing, so I wanted to double check before I printed these up.”
It was bad enough that Warren’s school actually had something called a Bakestravaganza. That this monstrosity required “social media and marketing” would have been laughable, had it not involved me. But I was distracted by the peas and didn’t answer right away. A fatal error. When it comes to the PTA, hesitation always equals yes.
Which was how I came to be sitting in the school cafeteria two weeks later while Katie spoke with enthusiasm to half a dozen volunteers, all of whom had probably been drafted into service against their will same as me. On the way out, Caroline Peabody touched my elbow a little hesitantly and asked if I had a second to talk about “that thing you did for Katie.”
We stopped in an out-of-the way corner of the parking lot. Caroline looked as furtive as if it was a drug deal. People were always embarrassed to tell me their ghost stories, which I thought was weird. It was one thing to keep quiet around people who would think they were crazy, but I obviously believed in ghosts.
“Katie told me you do this thing, like blessing a house, or cleansing it, or whatever? If it has bad energy?”
“I assure you I don’t have the authority to bless anything,” I said. “But tell me about this bad energy.”
It seemed Caroline had a college friend who’d just moved to the area and was in a bind. From the sounds of things, there was a nasty apparition in the house they’d just bought, but they couldn’t afford to move again.
“The worst part is, they have a young daughter, just twelve, and this spirit, demon, bad karma, whatever you want to call it, seems focused on her.”
I resisted the urge to explain that spirit, demon, and karma are not synonyms. “How so?”
“Well, the first time they noticed it, it was in her bedroom. Nothing dangerous, but creepy. She would come home from school and find her little brother’s action figures posed on her floor in awkward positions, for example.”
“Sexual positions?”
“Sometimes, but more often violent ones. At first they thought it was their son playing tricks, but then Sharon, that’s my friend, was alone in the house one day and she heard all this crashing in Avery Ann’s room. She went upstairs and all the books had been knocked off the shelf. Every last one of them. So Sharon switched Avery Ann’s room with the guest room, thinking, you know, it was the room.”
“Except it wasn’t,” I guessed. “It followed the girl.”
Caroline nodded. “You’ve seen this kind of thing before?”
“Sounds like a poltergeist,” I said. “If Avery Ann showed it she was afraid, it might have attached itself to her.”
“Is she in any danger?”
“Probably not. Do they know who owned the house before them? Who might have died in it?”
Caroline shook her head.
“That’ll make it tough,” I said. “I need a personal item from the departed, which is never easy when you don’t know who did the departing. I’d have to do some investigating first.”
“But you’ll do it?” Caroline asked. “You’ll take a look, at least?”
I agreed that I would, and Caroline gave me her friend’s number.
I talked to Sharon that same afternoon. She sounded like an idiot, but she didn’t balk when she heard my fee and a job was a job. The next day, as soon as Warren was off to school, I sat at the kitchen counter with my laptop and a cup of coffee and started to research the house.
I never knew anything about the people who had the switchel ring before Cyrus, but whoever they were, I had enormous respect and admiration for them. Doing that job before the internet must have been close to impossible. I, on the other hand, got all the modern conveniences without even having to take off my slippers: property records, old newspapers, court documents. In this case, each time the house changed hands the previous buyer was the next seller, except one: Jeffrey Litauer was the original owner, but the sales records showed it was his sister Greta who sold it. That made this Jeffrey the only owner who could have died there. He would be a good place to start.
But that was in 1958, which made it unlikely I’d find much on him apart from birth and death dates. Back before the age of social media there weren’t a lot of personal details available for anyone who wasn’t a politician, actor, criminal, or some combination thereof.
“He was a criminal!” I clapped my hands over my keyboard. Our man Jeffrey hadn’t died of natural causes. A young woman had killed him after he invited her into his house on the pretext of having puppies to give away, then attacked her. Naturally she was never charged with a crime or punished for his death. On the contrary, she got her fifteen minutes of fame from it, a local heroine, brave and strong. That all added up to a lot of frustrated intentions and anger for a spirit who was already violent when he was alive. This was definitely my guy.
I drove out the day after that to meet Sharon and have a look around the house. It wasn’t a big or showy place, but there was a fifty-thousand dollar SUV parked in the driveway. White, license plate: 2GR8KIDS. Needless to say, I immediately judged her.
My judgment was supported by the woman herself. Sharon (“Call me Sherrie!”) was trim and blond and wearing lipstick even though she was also wearing running pants. She chatted away and laughed like a donkey while she showed me around the house. Her daughter was being stalked by a poltergeist and I was supposed to care about where she got her drapes? Then again, she might have been talking about the drapes because of the poltergeist. Being a nervous-babbler myself, I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt.
I guess it was all that grating perkiness that distracted me, so that I didn’t notice the feeling of the house until we got to the staircase. That’s when I heard the footsteps behind us. I looked over my shoulder once, just in case call-me-Sherrie had a dog or a toddler I didn’t know about. There was nobody there.
I didn’t look again after that, but Sherrie didn’t know any better. She looked back once while we were going up the stairs and again as we walked down the hall. She started walking faster.
“Don’t,” I said. “He feeds off fear. He can’t hurt you if you don’t give in to it.” That last part was not quite true. Okay, not at all true. But I couldn’t have her panicking either.
She didn’t believe me anyway. She rushed through a doorway as the footsteps got louder and faster behind us. It turned out to be the door to Avery Ann’s bedroom, which was the very last place we wanted to be, since it was being used at present as Poltergeist Headquarters. But as soon as I followed her in, Sherrie slammed the door. As if that would keep him out.
Instantly, the room was filled with pounding and stamping and laughter. And not your standard-issue evil laugh, either. This was, well, dorky. There was definitely snorting involved. I usually kept it together pretty well with poltergeists, but I was unnerved by the complete lack of theatrics, the ordinary humanity in that laugh. With each burst of it, like an exhale of bad breath, came a horrible smell of rotten meat and blood.
“Is this typical behavior for him?” I called over the din.
Sherrie shook her head. “He’s made some noise here and there, but never like this.”
“My being here may make it worse. Sometimes they know what I am.”
I couldn’t tell where he was. The sounds seemed to be coming from everywhere at once. I hated feeling so exposed, and as if to punctuate that vulnerability, one of Avery Ann’s sneakers hit me right in the ass. Her things started flying at us from every direction: clothes from the floor, pictures from the dresser, books and candy wrappers from the bed. When a heavy-looking alarm clock narrowl
y missed Sherrie’s face, she started whirling around with her hands over her head. I grabbed her by the arm and pulled her into the corner, where we faced outward, shoulder-to-shoulder, the proverbial circled wagons.
The noise abruptly stopped, leaving only the sound of Sherrie’s hard, fast breathing. We stood still and waited for Jeffrey’s next move. Fifteen minutes into the job, and somehow I’d already let the poltergeist take control of the situation.
Something wet flicked in my ear (oh dear god no was that a tongue), and then there was hot breath, old and dry, like the air in a crypt.
“Boo,” it whispered.
TWO
* * *
The last thing Sherrie asked me before I left was whether I’d seen anything like this before. As a matter of fact I had, and the reminder wasn’t helping. Poltergeists didn’t usually give me much trouble—more show than substance, when it came down to it—but once in a while you got a bad one. Jeffrey was not my first bad one.
Funny you should ask, call-me-Sherrie with the 2GR8KIDS, because it just so happens that I’ve seen something very like this before. Courtesy of Helen Turner and her hideous child.
The hideous child was a surprise, which was how it all went wrong.
Up until that case, Nat and I always worked together. But this job was all the way up in Massachusetts. I would’ve had to cancel an appointment with the mediator to go. At the time, my divorce was all-consuming. I just wanted to run away from infertility (mine) and infidelity (his), as far and as fast as possible. There was no room for my brother on my priority list.
Nat saw no reason for me to go, and no reason to put the job off until I could. The client would make sure the fire didn’t go out or help him with whatever else he might need. He knew Helen would be bad, but he’d always been a little cocky, I suppose. He said he was completely fine going alone. And I wanted to believe him, so I did.
He was wrong. The client let the fire go out, and Helen attacked Nat. But he’d been attacked before. He almost certainly could have gotten the situation under control, but for one crucial, horrible mistake: he thought there was only one apparition in the house.
Helen and her three-year-old son had been killed by her husband in a murder-suicide. The husband moved on when he died. They thought the child did too. Until Roderick Turner, lurking on top of a cabinet like he was playing hide-and-seek, pushed a heavy iron gargoyle down onto my brother’s head. He giggled at the sound of it smashing Nat’s skull. Or so we heard from the client later.
After Nat’s funeral I went up there and took care of Helen and Roderick both, my first solo case. They’d long since gone through the canteen and out of this world forever. Or so I thought, until the Dodd job.
And Jeffrey was almost as bad as they were. Maybe even as bad. I wouldn’t know for sure until I did the ritual. But I’d better be ready for anything.
I was up half the night digging up information: about Jeffrey, about his house and his neighborhood, about the circumstances of his death and the time he was alive. Nothing I found was what you’d call comforting. While I walked Warren to the bus stop the next morning I was thinking about the picture I’d seen of a body, found not two miles from Jeffrey’s house, dumped in a field that was now a grocery store. The girl, Susan Weatherby, was the first victim of the killer charmingly referred to as True Colors. Her heart had been removed and nailed to her wrist, like all the others who came after her.
True Colors wasn’t very active. There had only been half a dozen victims between Susan Weatherby in 1956 and Dana Popovitch in 1988. A final body was found right as the millennium was turning, but that was assumed to be the work of a copycat. Everyone thought the original True Colors had to be dead by then.
What if they had the dead part right, but the timing wrong? What if True Colors was dead for a lot longer than they thought?
“Lyddie.”
Judging by his tone, Warren had been talking to me for a while. “Sorry Warthog, what did you say?”
“Are we going to get my Halloween costume today? Daddy said I could have the zombie one.”
“Not today. Maybe this weekend okay? We have plenty of time.” And then we were at the corner, and while we waited for the bus I had to tell Warren four times not to chase his friend Oliver into the street, in between listening to a pregnant neighbor complain, loudly and to everyone present, about her sciatica. Susan Weatherby was crowded out of my thoughts until I went for my morning run half an hour later. Susan, and True Colors, and the fact that the young woman who killed Jeffrey Litauer testified that he was babbling about “wearing his heart on his sleeve,” and “having a right to expect the same honesty from her,” before she managed to stab him with one of his kitchen knives and run screaming into the street, covered in both his blood and her own.
That was in October of 1958. After that, every victim of True Colors—all young, all female—also died in October, within five miles of Jeffrey’s house. All apparitions are more powerful around certain dates, and none so potent as the day they died. A poltergeist of Jeffrey’s caliber would have no problem summoning the energy to get very, very physical at the peak of his power.
I’d been worried that Jeffrey might be as bad as Helen and Roderick, but now I was afraid he was so much worse. What if I’d just stumbled across the world’s first undead serial killer?
These were not pleasant thoughts to have while running through the woods behind my neighborhood, alone on an isolated trail. I was relieved when I passed Amy Lin running in the opposite direction. We stopped for a couple of minutes, she jogging in place, me completely okay with taking a break and just standing there panting. She told me there was a new guy at Frank’s office who they thought would be a great match for Charlie. My neighbors had long since stopped thinking it was weird that I was a stay-at-home-aunt living with my nephew’s gay father. Everyone loved Charlie, and the ones who didn’t pretended they did, just by way of showing how tolerant and open-minded they were. Setups and attempted setups—for both of us—were not uncommon.
Of course most of these were unqualified disasters. But Amy and Frank had pretty good taste. We agreed that we should set up a dinner, something casual with plenty of attendees so neither man would notice they were being set up. Then Amy resumed her run, and there was nothing for it but to resume mine.
At least talking to her had brought me back to earth. Pleasant, safe, suburban-mom earth. All this serial killer stuff was just conjecture, and far-fetched conjecture at that. I was being ridiculous because Jeffrey had spooked me. If he was True Colors, why such long stretches between murders? I’d heard of ghosts going dormant for years before, but poltergeists rarely took breaks. I was probably just being stupid. I ordered myself to stop thinking about open chest cavities and bloody wrists and hearts in places they should not be.
Then I proceeded to think about nothing else all the way back home, where I found Martha Corey standing in her front yard, staring up into her cherry tree and sobbing.
Yes, my next-door neighbor, who was widely regarded (and by nobody more than herself) as a witch, was actually named Martha Corey. You could always tell when the local sixth-graders finished their unit on the Salem Witch Trials by the change in their attitudes toward her. What before they’d only suspected, usually while scaring each other over cups of hot cider on Halloween, they now took to be confirmed by the fact of her having the same name as one of the victims. The reasoning made no sense, of course, but Martha only encouraged it by having a black cat.
Said cat, who bore the unfortunate name of Jack Nimble, was at that moment high up in the cherry tree, screaming in his angry cat voice. Someone (“Those awful kids on Radley Street!” according to Martha) had closed him up in a cardboard box and put him there.
I got him down, but not without some cost to my dignity: as I was swinging back to the ground my shoulder, still sore from the gargoyle-smack at the Dodd house, gave out and I fell on my ass. By then I’d already delivered the box into Martha’s hands, and she was
smothering Jack Nimble with kisses (gross). She invited me inside for coffee cake and offered to “read my auspices” to uncover what the future held for me. I was afraid one or both of these things might involve entrails, and politely declined.
I was distracted all that afternoon, so much so that I accidentally spread corn relish on Warren’s apple slices instead of peanut butter. He thought this was hilarious, and ate them anyway. He found most things hilarious. Warren was as close to perpetually happy as a seven-year-old could be. He had no lingering trauma from Nat’s death. He was barely two at the time, and had no real memories of his other dad.
There was no issue about custody. Legally he was always Charlie’s, adopted after a condom broke and left Charlie’s fifteen-year-old cousin with a predicament. It would have been easy for Charlie to drift away and let Warren forget about Nat completely. But he didn’t want that. He wanted Nat’s memory preserved, and Nat’s family in Warren’s life. And considering the rest of my family, I was the only acceptable candidate for that role.
For myself, I was divorced and infertile and fond of pointing out, often with a sigh or wet eyes or both, that Warren was the closest thing to my own child I’d ever have. At the time I thought these declarations showed me for an unflinching realist rather than a self-pitying drama queen, go figure.
Not to mention Charlie needed a nanny, and I needed a place to live that didn’t include the bedroom where I’d seen my husband having sex with the hostess from Pelletier’s. It seemed natural for us to combine our resources. So I quit my “real” job as Corporate Drone #4592 and became a stay-at-home-mom-nanny-aunt. It all worked out great, except that Charlie was a nag about my other job. He wanted me to give up banishing apparitions, and it was a constant source of tension. Not that I blamed him, after what happened to Nat, but understanding it didn’t make it any less difficult to deal with.
I found that giving him some feeling of control helped calm his nerves, so I discussed every job with him as if we were in it together. And he was often helpful. For example, when we sat down that night to the dinner I only narrowly avoided burning (with much use of grown-up words that Warren also found hilarious), I asked Charlie if he had any suggestions on finding a personal item of Jeffrey’s. I knew there was a sister—the one who sold the house after Jeffrey died—but even if she was still alive, I had no idea how to approach her.
Ghost in the Canteen (The Adventures of Lydia Trinket Book 1) Page 2