by Julie Kenner
She did not believe in closet-dwelling bogeymen. Hell, she’d made her career debunking nonsense like that. More precisely, putting phony psychics, gurus and ghost busters out of business in this spooky little tourist town. And no one liked it. Not the town supervisor, the town council, the tourism bureau, and least of all, the phony psychics, gurus and ghost busters.
But thanks to the Constitution, freedom of the press couldn’t be banned on the grounds that it was bad for tourism.
She pulled her bathrobe on, relishing the feel of plush fabric on her skin, and then drew a breath of courage and turned to face the bathroom again. Her hairbrush was in there, along with her skin lotions, cuticle trimmer and toothbrush. And she still had to tug the plug and let the water run out of the bathtub. She was going back in. A cold draft was nothing to be afraid of.
Crossing the room, one foot in front of the other, she moved firmly to the door, closed her hand on its oval, antique porcelain doorknob, and opened it. The air that greeted her was no longer icy. In fact it was as warm as the air in the bedroom.
She sighed in relief as she stepped into the room. But her relief died and the chill returned to her soul when she saw the mirror, no longer coated in fog, but something else. Something far, far worse.
Written across the damp glass surface, in something scarlet that trickled in streams from the bottom of each letter, were the words “House of Death.”
Someone screamed. It wasn’t until she was down the stairs, out the door and about fifteen yards up the heaving, cracked sidewalk, that Kiley realized the scream had been her own.
She stood there in the dead of night, barefoot, clutching her robe against the whipping October wind and staring back at her dream house with its turrets and gables and its widow’s walk at the top. Such a beautiful place, old and solid. And framed right now by the scarlet and shimmering yellow of the sugar maples and poplar trees at the peak of their fall color.
Swallowing hard, she lowered her gaze, focusing on her car in the driveway beside the house. Leaping Lana was an ’87 Buick Regal—a four-door sedan in rust-brown that ate gas like M&Ms and sounded like a tank.
Kiley squared her shoulders and forced herself to march over there—even though it meant moving toward her house when every cell in her body was itching to move away from it instead. She opened Lana’s door and climbed in. She couldn’t quite keep herself from checking the back seat first, the second the interior light came on. It was clear. The keys were in the switch, because if someone was brave enough to steal Kiley Brigham’s car, she’d always thought she would enjoy the vengeance she’d be forced to wreak on their pathetic asses, and besides, who would steal an ’87 Buick, anyway?
She turned the key. Lana growled in protest at being bothered at such an ungodly hour, but finally came around and cooperatively backed her boat-size backside out into the street. As Kiley shifted into Drive, she glanced up at her house again.
There was someone standing in her bedroom window looking back at her.
And then there wasn’t. She squinted, rubbed her eyes. The image hadn’t moved, hadn’t turned away. The dark silhouette she knew she had seen simply vanished. Faded. Like mist.
“Fuck this,” she muttered, and she stomped on Lana’s pedal and didn’t let off until they’d reached the offices of the Burnt Hills Gazette, and her own office there, which held three things Kiley dearly needed just then: a change of clothes, a telephone and a spare pack of smokes.
SHE WAS SO TOGETHER BY THE time the police arrived that they actually seemed skeptical. At least until they headed back to her recently acquired house and saw the message on the mirror for themselves. Kiley preferred to stay out in the bedroom—and even that gave her the creeps—while the cops clustered around her bathroom sink debating whether the substance on her mirror was blood. One opined that it looked like barbecue sauce, and another said it was cherry syrup. At that point the conversation turned to previous cases where what was thought to be blood turned out to be something else entirely, like corn syrup with red food coloring added—a tale that the officers found laugh-worthy.
She interrupted their fun by standing as close to her bathroom door as she wanted to get, and clearing her throat. The laughter stopped, the cops looked up.
“Excuse me, but shouldn’t one of you be taking a sample of that? And maybe checking my house for signs of forced entry?”
“Did that, ma’am,” one cop said, sending a long-suffering look toward another. “No signs of a break-in. You sure the place was locked?”
“Of course I’m sure the place was…” She stopped, pursed her lips, thought it over with brutal honesty. “Actually, I forget to lock up as often as I remember.”
“Mmm-hmm. Well, at least you’re aware this was the work of an intruder.”
She frowned at him. “Well, of course it was an intruder. What else could it have been?”
“You know how folks get around here. Half the time we get a call like this, the homeowner insists some kind of ghost was responsible.”
“Especially at this time of year,” another cop said, and they all nodded or shook their heads or rolled their eyes with “isn’t that ridiculous” looks at one another.
“Well, I don’t believe in ghosts,” she managed to say, rubbing her arms against the chill that came from within. “As to how the intruder got in, I’m not even sure it’s all that important. The fact is that he did get in. And I know that because I saw him.”
“You saw him? Excellent.” Cop number one—his name tag read Hanlon—pulled out a notepad and pen. “Okay, where and when did you see the intruder?”
“He was standing right there, in that window, looking down at me when I backed the car out.”
“So you didn’t see anyone while you were inside. Only after you’d left?”
“Right.”
“And can you describe him?”
She licked her lips, recalling the misty silhouette behind the veil of her curtains. “Uh, no.”
“But you’re sure it was a male,” Hanlon said.
She narrowed her eyes and searched her memory. “No. No, I can’t even be sure of that much. It was dark. It was just a shadow, a dark silhouette in the window.” She sighed in frustration. “Has there been a rash of break-ins that I should know about, anything like this at all?” she asked, almost hoping the answer would be yes.
Hanlon shook his head. “We’ve got hardly any crime around here, Ms. Brigham. Little enough so you’d be reading about it if there had been anything like that.”
She nodded. “We’re so hungry for stories we’ve been covering the missing prostitutes from Albany.”
“You work for the press?” he asked.
“Yeah. Burnt Hills Gazette.” More people came in. Suits, instead of uniforms. They carried cases and headed for her bathroom. She watched them, her gaze unfocused. One swabbed a sample of the stuff from the mirror, dropped it into a vial and capped it. Another snapped photos. A third started coating her pretty shell-pink-and-white bathroom in what looked like fireplace soot in search of fingerprints.
The guy with the swabs took out an aerosol can of something—the label read Luminol—and sprayed it at the mirror, then he turned off the lights.
Kiley sucked in a breath when the grisly message glowed in the darkness.
“It’s blood, all right,” the guy said, flipping the light back on.
Officer Hanlon moved up beside Kiley and put a hand on her shoulder, as if he thought she might be close to losing it. “We’d probably better start thinking about who your enemies are, Ms. Brigham.”
She swallowed hard. “It would be easier to tell you who they aren’t, and it would make a far shorter list.”
The cop frowned. Another one nodded, coming out of the bathroom. “That’s probably true.”
Hanlon sent him a questioning look and he went on. “Don’t you recognize the name? She’s the chick who writes those columns discrediting all the mumbo-jumbo types in town.”
“Aah, ri
ght. Kiley Brigham. It didn’t click at first.” Hanlon eyed her. “Is this the first death threat you’ve received, Ms. Brigham?”
“You think that’s what it is? A threat?”
He shrugged. “Reads that way to me.”
Kiley sighed. “Yeah, it would be my first.”
“Wow.” His brows arched high, as if he were surprised she didn’t get threatened on a daily basis.
“Look, I’m not a demon here. I don’t eat babies or kick puppies. I just tell the truth.” She shrugged. “Can I help it if that makes the liars of the world angry?”
“Can you think of anyone in particular who could have taken their anger this far?”
“Yeah, I can think of several. Most of them hold public office, though.”
Hanlon looked alarmed by that. “I hope you’re kidding.”
“Maybe. Half. So what should I do?”
“Get yourself a security system,” the officer said. “Something that’s not going to let you get away with forgetting to lock up. In the meantime, is there someone who could stay with you tonight? A friend, relative, something like that?”
The question made her stomach ache, though she didn’t know why. It wasn’t as if she gave a damn that she didn’t have any friends or family, that she was, in fact, utterly alone in the world. She could care less. Hell, if friends were what she wanted, she’d be out making them, instead of pissing off as many people as possible on a weekly basis. Screw friends.
“Ma’am?”
She shrugged. “I’ll spend the night at my office. There’s security there. Tomorrow I’ll see about that system. Thanks for coming out.”
He nodded. “We’ll be another hour here,” he told her. “You can go, if you want. We’ll lock up when we leave.”
“Yeah, like that’s gonna do any good,” she muttered as she headed out of the room. And then she stopped in the hallway and wondered just what the hell she had meant by that. She shook it off, told herself it didn’t matter.
She had a major day tomorrow. Major.
Tomorrow she was going to bust the one New Age fraud who had eluded her ever since she’d begun her weekly series of exposés. She’d planned for this, prepared for it, set up an elaborate scheme to make it happen. And nothing as mundane as a death threat written in blood on her bathroom mirror while she was standing a few feet away wearing nothing but a towel was going to stop her from seeing it through.
CHAPTER TWO
WHEN SHE WAS AROUND, the hair on the back of his neck bristled the way a cat’s will in the presence of a killer dog. He always tensed up the instant before he saw her. It was not a case of extrasensory perception, no matter what his harebrained assistant might like to believe. More likely a case of instinctive self-preservation.
She was nearby, all right. It wasn’t a scent, exactly, though now that he was alert, he could just detect a faint whiff of that aroma that always floated around her. Not a powerful fragrance—not even a perfume or cologne. Maybe it was the soap she used or something. He only knew it was unique, an aroma he equated with his biggest headache. It shouldn’t seem like a sexy scent to him. But it did.
Jack lifted his head and scanned the dim room, but he couldn’t see her. Candles flickered from the shelves that lined the walls. Their dancing light was refracted in the slow-turning crystal prisms suspended from the ceiling, and transformed into living rainbows that crept over the walls and floor. The purple curtains that separated this room from the rest of the shop were closed, and revealed nothing.
She was out there, though. No doubt about it. The persistent little pain in the ass.
Finally, Jack refocused on the nervous woman who sat across from him, fidgeting with her purse straps. Really on edge, this one. Even more than most people were their first time. At least now he knew why; she was just another weapon in Kiley Brigham’s one-woman crusade against charlatans like him.
He barely restrained himself from cussing loud and long—not a good quality in one who purported to be in touch with the spirit world—and forced a serene smile for his new client.
“I’m sorry, Martha. I just can’t seem to get a response from your dear departed husband.”
“You can’t?”
He shook his head sadly. “It’s odd. Feels almost as if he—” Jack pinned her with his gaze “—doesn’t exist,” he said. “It’s as if you made him up, just to—I don’t know—test me or something.”
She blinked twice, gaping, and Jack saw just enough guilt in her eyes to confirm his guess.
“That’s impossible, of course,” he went on. “You wouldn’t do something like that to me, would you, Martha?”
“Of course not!”
“Maybe you’ll have better luck with another medium. I could give you some names.”
“No, thank you. I’ll just…” She let her voice trail off as she rose.
Her small wooden chair scraped over the marble tiles, a growl of discord breaking the spell of the haunting New Age music that whispered in magical Gaelic of fairies and poisoned glens and other such nonsense.
“Don’t rush off,” Jack told her, rising as well. “I insist on refunding your money. I’m not a thief, you know.”
She took a step backward, toward the curtain, clearly itching to get out of there. She actually leaned toward the curtain as she moved, actually reached behind her for it long before she was close enough to touch it. “You, uh, you can mail it to me,” she rushed on, her feet shuffling away from him, slowly but steadily.
“All right, I’ll do that. Do you want to give me your address, Martha, or shall I just save time and send the money to Kiley Brigham?”
The purple curtain flew open even as Martha kept groping for it, and he was not surprised to see Kiley herself on the other side, mad as hell, judging by the way her face was screwed up. “Damn you to hell, McCain!” Her hands were braced on her hips and she was breathing a little too fast. She did the heaving-bosom thing well. She certainly had the bosoms for it. Candlelight illuminated the hot-pink spots on her cheeks and the fire in her green eyes. Cat’s eyes, she had, and hair blacker than ink. Hell, she ought to be the one running this scam. Her exotic looks would attract customers like moths to the porch light.
Well, she’d have to dress the part, of course. Those tight-fitting, faded jeans and that T-shirt that read “Keep Your Opinions Out of My Uterus” would never cut it.
But Kiley Brigham, girl columnist, wasn’t interested in taking up his line of work. Instead, she was intent on ruining what he’d built into an incredibly lucrative business.
Martha, he realized, was long gone. Must have darted out of the room while he’d been perusing his nemesis, who, he realized, had been perusing him right back.
“Tell me something, Brigham,” he said, relaxing back into his chair. “Were you mauled by a pack of mediums as a child?”
She sent him a smirk that should have burned holes through him, but said nothing. Her probing green eyes were busy now, scanning the room: narrow, suspicious, searching. He hated to admit it made him a little nervous to have her looking around his place so closely.
“So what do you want?” he asked to break her concentration. “You come for a reading? Want me to tell your future, Brigham? Read your palm? What?”
As planned, her gaze returned to him. “How the hell did you know I was here?”
He rolled his eyes, shook his head. “I’m clairvoyant, remember?”
“And I’m a Republican.”
A grin tugged at the corners of his lips. He battled it and finally won. “So what do I have to do? Slap you with a restraining order?”
“You really think it would help?”
“Couldn’t hurt,” he said.
She bristled, but only for a moment. It seemed to him the wind left her sails far more quickly than usual. She heaved a sigh and sank into the chair the other woman had occupied.
“Did you have to scare her like that, McCain? You know how tough it is to find out-of-work actresses who come as chea
p as that one?”
He did smile now. It seemed safe. Her rage was ebbing, and in record time. It made him wonder what was wrong. “You want something to drink?”
“Not if you’re gonna try to foist some herbal, trance-inducing tea on me, I don’t.”
“Guess you’re outta luck, then.”
She rolled her eyes. “You don’t really drink that crap. You can fool everyone else in this town, including the tourists, but you can’t fool me. Why don’t you drop the act?”
He pursed his lips as if thinking it over, then said, “Nah. Business is booming these days.” He narrowed his eyes at her and leaned forward, flattening his palms to the table. “Largely thanks to that nasty little column of yours discrediting my competitors one by one on a weekly basis.”
She leaned over the table, too, her palms on the gleaming hardwood surface like his, her face only inches away. “You make a living by feeding innocent victims a line of bull. They hand over their hard-earned money for the privilege of being duped.”
“I make a living by giving people who might not listen to a therapist psychologically sound advice. I’m good at what I do. I help people. You, on the other hand, make a living putting hard-working people like me out of business. I’ll take my karma over yours anytime.”
“Karma, schmarma.” She sat back, her palms gliding in tight circles on the small round table. “You know as well as I do that there’s no such thing. No psychics, no ghosts, no magic.”
“No God?” He asked the question idly, as if he could care less.
She was silent for a long moment, so preoccupied she didn’t even notice him looking at her. Her eyes looked a little puffy, as if she hadn’t slept. There was a tautness to her face that suggested worry.
Then, her gaze still focused inward, she said, “I don’t get it, McCain.”
“Don’t get what?”
She shrugged. “Look at this picture. It’s skewed, don’t you think? You’re the crook. I’m the crusader. So how come you get the adulation and I get the hate mail?”