The Wantland Files

by Lara Bernhardt

  Something flashed across the screen, a barely perceptible blip, just before Sterling commented that he saw something.

  TJ paused the footage.

  “Did you see that?” she asked. “I thought maybe I imagined it.”

  TJ shook his head. “You did not imagine it. Definitely something there. I need to flag this portion of the recording so I can come back and analyze it further.”

  “I said I don’t want anyone tampering with my footage,” Sterling said, a scowl on his face.

  “They won’t tamper with it,” Michael said. “TJ and Stan isolate and enhance images from footage all the time. They’ll take a still image from the recording. The process doesn’t add anything to the recording at all.”

  “Then do it right here, right now, in front of me,” Sterling said.

  “It takes some time,” TJ warned him.

  “Do you have somewhere else to be? Because I thought analyzing footage was the goal for today. I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

  Something in his voice caught her attention again. Something bothered Sterling. She thought about suggesting they speak privately in her trailer but hesitated given the current rumors swirling around them. Probably best not to encourage any more speculation by disappearing into the trailer alone. She made a mental note to talk to him later.

  Stan put down his camera and went to TJ’s side. They viewed the recording frame by frame until the blur began to take shape. Once satisfied they had isolated the best frame of the image, they would magnify it as much as possible without distorting it.

  Rosie motioned to her from the living room. She gladly left the boring technical portion of the footage review behind and went to see what her stylist wanted. She preferred results to the time-consuming analysis. Interesting Sterling had caught this image when neither Stan nor TJ had. Particularly since his comment indicated he must have seen something while recording.

  Rosie stared at her phone, mesmerized by her Twitter app. “This is still blowing up. I don’t know if you should keep ignoring it. At some point, negative publicity ceases to be good publicity. You need to consider your reputation.”

  “And a catfight between Amber and me is somehow anything but negative publicity and detrimental to my reputation? No. We should ignore it and let it blow over. It will. Something else will grab attention in a day or two.”

  “At least tweet hashtag justfriends. Or something. Anything to indicate you have no interest in Sterling.”

  “I don’t have any interest in Sterling. And I don’t think we are friends, frankly. What if I wish Amber all the best? I guess I could do that.”

  “What? No. Absolutely not. She’ll spin that into passive-aggressive gloating. Like you’re rubbing her face in it.”

  “Except I don’t care about her or him in the slightest. I am indifferent. As a colleague I tried to keep him from being hurt. That’s it.”

  “Apparently you convinced him to dump her. Even Sterling says so.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Her stylist turned her phone so she could read Sterling’s latest post.

  @amberbaby @KWantland was so right about you. U r a psycho #betteroffwithoutyou

  The tweet had been posted five minutes prior.

  She stormed back to the table. “Mr. Wakefield, if you insist on taking part in this disgusting, juvenile display, I insist you leave me out of it. Including me in your tweets implies I am complicit and I am in no way—”

  TJ held up a hand. “Shhh.”

  She whirled on her junior cameraman. “Did you just shush me?”

  “I have an image. It’s a face.”

  “Kimmy, let’s focus on the footage. You and Sterling can talk about personal issues during break.”

  Blood rushed to her face. Mortified, she slunk to her chair. Michael had never once reprimanded her. Especially not in front of the crew. Face burning, hands shaking, she sunk into a chair beside TJ and blinked away tears, aware of Stan lifting his camera to resume recording.

  She noticed Sterling sneak his phone back into his jacket pocket.

  Damn that man! He stirred up nothing but trouble and left mayhem in his wake. This was the last straw. She would insist the family sleep in the house tonight and expunge any spiritual entity that dared cross her path. The episode would end, and she could send Sterling packing. She squeezed her eyes shut and fisted her hands while rage burned through her.

  Damn Michael and Hoffmeier for going behind her back and bringing Sterling on the show. She could shake things up all on her own without adding a man to the equation. To hell with them, too. She’d buy the rights back and fire anyone who tried to tell her how to run her show. Or she’d refuse to come back next season. She’d started this show from nothing, and she could start a new one. She’d—

  “I know that face,” Elise whispered.

  She opened her eyes. Elise pressed her fingers against her mouth, eyes wide, unable to look away from the image on the screen. Kimberly swung her head to see what TJ had discovered on Sterling’s footage.

  A woman’s face stared back at her. To be sure, the edges blurred into the surrounding air, translucent and undefined. But the black-and-white ethereal image included eye sockets, cold and empty. Gaunt cheekbones. The dark line of a mouth slashed below a delicate nose.

  Michael rested a hand on the table and leaned closer to the screen. “My God. That is a face. Undoubtedly, unequivocally, undeniably . . . a face. This is what you saw?”

  Sterling crooked a finger and thumb around his chin. “I didn’t see anything in particular.”

  TJ replayed the footage immediately following the blurred streak that had caught their attention. Sterling’s voice crackled from the speakers.

  “I thought I saw—”

  “You saw this while recording?” Michael asked.

  “No. Not a face. Something startled me. Maybe a moth flew in front of me. Maybe that’s the blurred image of Kimberly from a few frames earlier.”

  TJ shook his head. “Dude, do you have any idea how desperate you sound right now?”

  Kimberly turned to Sterling. “I can’t believe you captured this. We could submit this to journals as substantive proof of afterlife. And the fact that you saw it in real time—” She stopped herself. The fact that he’d seen the entity in real time while recording meant he harbored some ability to connect with spirits, despite his adamant denials that they even existed. Was he aware? Had he seen spirits before but simply refused to acknowledge it?

  This wasn’t the time to discuss it. This was something he wouldn’t want to hear or talk about on a good day. And he wasn’t having a good day. His emotions were already raw from the Amber debacle.

  “I said I didn’t see it,” Sterling insisted. “That could be anything. A blurry image is far from substantive proof. I don’t think you even know what that is.”

  “That argument might carry some weight except Elise just said she knows who this is. Elise?”

  Her researcher, still transfixed by the image, nodded and shook herself a bit. “Yes.” She pulled a copy of a newspaper article from a stack of papers. “Here. Look.”

  Kimberly took the paper, noting the haunted look in Elise’s eyes, and glanced over the article while the rest of the crew pressed close. “It’s dated May 2014. ‘Local Schoolteacher Retires After Sixty Years in the Classroom. Edna Miller presided over her final class of third graders today before her coworkers surprised her with a retirement party.’” She looked at Elise. “This is the woman who lived here before the Williamses?”

  Elise nodded vigorously. “Yes. As always, I researched the previous occupants. But she was a teacher. She loved kids. There’s nothing to indicate malice or resentment. When you said The Dark is angry and perhaps even hostile toward the children, I set this aside. But look at the picture.”

  The article included a photo of Mrs. Miller with her class of children. Kimberly stared at the pixilated likeness.

  Sterling took the image from he
r and held it beside the image on the screen. “Sure. These images are exactly the same in that both appear to have eyes, noses, and mouths. We don’t even know the image on the screen is a face. Look at it. It’s a blurry, shadowy smudge at best. We could snap a picture of Kimberly from twenty feet away, print it in a newspaper, photocopy it, and I bet it would look exactly like this.”

  Michael took the page and stared at it a long time before he spoke. “I don’t know, Sterling. I can see some uncanny similarities. I never want to rush to judgment, but this is giving me goose bumps.” He passed the article back to Kimberly. “Your thoughts?”

  “This would confirm my earlier impressions of the entity. We do seem to be dealing with a female spirit.”

  “This confirms nothing,” Sterling said.

  “I said would confirm. If true. Elise, did you learn anything else? Maybe something we dismissed before?”

  “I actually had a long talk with Dale’s brother, Frank Miller.”

  “Dale was Edna’s husband, right?”

  “That’s right. Frank is a friendly guy, glad to chat with me. He said Edna didn’t care for retirement at all. She went back to teaching the very next school year as a substitute. She and Dale had planned to travel once retired, but their finances didn’t allow for much. Plus they were in their late seventies at that point and ‘not as sturdy as they once were,’ as Frank put it.”

  “You said she died in the house?”

  “Right. Frank said Edna started getting forgetful. She called Dale several times to get her when she couldn’t find her way home after school. She couldn’t go to the grocery store alone. Would wheel her cart right out the door without paying or come back home with nothing. Really sad. She couldn’t teach anymore. Then she had a severe stroke. Dale couldn’t bear to put her in a facility, so he brought her home for as much time as she had left and hospice cared for her the last few weeks. She passed away in her sleep after a few days not recognizing even Dale. They’d been married over sixty years. Frank said it broke Dale’s heart. He didn’t know what to do with himself when Edna went before him. Frank moved him out to California, but Dale didn’t want to go on without his soul mate and declined quickly.”

  She mulled this over. “So after she passed away, Dale’s brother moved him to California, and the house sat empty until it sold?”

  “Right. Frank said the Realtor had a handyman come through and take care of a few issues. No major renovations or remodeling but some minor updating and repairs. The roof needed to be replaced. They repainted. Things like that. Frank wasn’t worried about making money from the house, so he made the minimum modifications and let it go cheap.”

  “Which allowed Danielle and Stephen to afford the move from apartment to home.” She nodded, looking around the cozy older home.

  “What are you thinking, Kimmy?”

  “Normally, spirits remain behind only when jarred from the earthly body through a traumatic experience. That didn’t happen here. She passed away peacefully. But her mind was confused. If she didn’t know what happened and somehow didn’t cross over, and then her husband moved, leaving her alone and even more confused, and then another family moved in . . .”

  Michael cocked his head. “You think that could explain it? She’s the dark entity scaring the family?”

  Elise shook her head. “Everything I read and heard indicates she loved children. She wanted children of her own so badly and never had any. So she put all her efforts into teaching. Frank said her students took the place of having her own children. Since she couldn’t have her own, she decided all children were hers.”

  She looked at Michael. “All children were hers. What if she feels that way about Danielle and Stephen’s children? What if she’s trying to take one of them with her permanently? The baby she never had?”

  Michael rubbed his arms and shivered. “That’s terrifying.”

  Rosie spoke up. “So anytime someone with memory issues dies, they stay stuck here, lost and confused forever? This is awful news.”

  Kimberly held up a hand. “Now wait. We’ve never seen anything to indicate that’s the case. Remember when we investigated the retirement community? We didn’t encounter lots of lost souls. What if this time, this particular woman became lost and couldn’t figure out what happened? And she’s still here? We don’t know what the spirit world is like, either. Maybe she became further confused after passing. She may not remember much about her previous life at this point. We just don’t know.”

  “That is the most factual statement I’ve heard come out of your mouth,” Sterling said. “You just don’t know. Yet you’re fabricating a spirit realm you have no evidence exists, and you’re imagining a deceased woman stuck there, lost and confused.”

  TJ brought a palm down onto the table. “Dude, you just don’t know. I have seen so much stuff on this show. You’ve only been here a couple of days.”

  “And you think seeing years of smudges and shadows will change my mind? Ghosts do not exist. Black-and-white. Open-and-shut.”

  “Save it for your corner, Mr. Wakefield. We do have evidence of a haunting. The most convincing piece of which you captured yourself. No worries about us using that footage. It will definitely figure prominently in our episode. The linchpin, as it were, that helped us determine the identity of The Dark.”

  “That’s ludicrous. I didn’t help with your investigation. And that’s a huge leap. This smudged image proves nothing.”

  “It does support our conclusion. And like it or not, you did help with the investigation. You were invaluable.” She gave him the widest smile she could muster.

  “Don’t put that on me. If you’re going to claim that’s a spirit, don’t associate me with the footage at all. I don’t want anyone to think I agree with you.”

  “It’s right there in front of you. Why do you keep denying it? You wanted the truth, and you discovered it. The Williamses are experiencing a haunting.”

  “You know what I’ve learned this week while I’ve been here? People don’t want the truth. Yes, I came here, excited, exuberant, ready to blow everyone out of the water with the truth. Guess what? No one wants it. They want to believe in gossip and lurid stories. And fairy tales and magic and ghosts and supernatural creatures. People want to believe they’re special, that they can communicate with the dead, that they have special powers no one else has. The truth is we’re all stuck on this planet hurtling through space and we’re all the same. Fairy tales and wishes don’t come true, just because you work hard doesn’t mean you’ll be rewarded for it, and sometimes crappy things happen to good people. I get it now. You’re not a fraud at all. You’re not out to fool anyone. You just want so badly to believe in ghosts that you see them even though they don’t exist. And so do all your pathetic fans. Guess what? There are no ghosts. And you’re not special. You’re just a regular person who wishes she were extraordinary.”

  27

  No one said anything. In the silence, Kimberly grasped her crystal and took deep breaths. If someone had told her a week ago that Sterling Wakefield could crush her feelings by calling her ordinary, she would’ve laughed. He’d been calling her a fraud online for months. Never once had she felt threatened or hurt.

  But after spending the last couple of days with him, thinking they’d developed something of a friendship—even almost allowing herself to imagine them as something more than friends—his words stung. More than she wanted to admit.

  Still no one moved or said anything. They all seemed to be waiting for her response. Somehow her mouth wouldn’t form words. She watched Sterling seethe until he met her eyes, and his scowl softened. He stormed to the couch in the living room and flopped down.

  Michael cleared his throat. “Maybe it’s time for a break.” He looked to her for affirmation.

  She couldn’t find any words to say. What had caused him to lash out like that? She felt hot energy flowing off him but couldn’t ascertain the cause. Did she really infuriate him so? Had Amber’s behavior set
him off? Was it stress from the ugly comments about him online? “Sterling Slutfield” was pretty rude. But he didn’t strike her as the type to take something like that to heart. She assumed he had much thicker skin than that. Maybe she could encourage him to rise above it.

  “Okay, since no one else will say it, I will,” TJ announced, his voice forceful. “We should finish this footage review. Look at all the amazing evidence we’ve seen on his recording already. Who knows what else we might find? I don’t think we should bail on this just because he had a tantrum.”

  Michael looked to her, and she nodded.

  “You’re right,” Michael said. “We have a job to do here, first and foremost. You and Stan keep going. Push through and see if you find anything else.” He pinched the bridge of his nose and shook his head. “I don’t think this week is going at all the way RandMeier expected.”

  Rosie rushed to her side. “That was harsh and uncalled for. I’ll go make some more tea.”

  TJ popped his headphones in place, muttering, “Told you that guy’s a douche.”

  She saw sympathy in everyone’s eyes and stood up straighter. She didn’t need coddling, or “spoiling,” as Sterling put it. She was a grown woman. This wasn’t her first brush with scandal. “TJ, that’s very vulgar language,” she told her young cameraman. “And, Rosie, I’m fine. Mr. Wakefield’s opinions are his own, he is entitled to them, and they don’t affect me in any way.” She projected her voice so that Sterling would hear from the living room.

  Rosie crooked an arm through hers and spoke softly. “How many times do I have to tell you—you couldn’t lie to save your life?”

  She forced her lips to curl into a smile. “I’m fine. Really. But I will take some hot tea since you offered. Maybe with some peppermint for my stomach?” Sterling’s words left her insides churning worse than the terrible quality of his footage.