Christmas Spirit

by Rebecca York

  Michael kept surprising her with his expertise in what she’d called cloak-and-dagger skills. And when she’d asked him about it, he’d been evasive.

  He reminded her more of a private investigator than a writer. Was he here in Jenkins Cove on some covert assignment he couldn’t talk about?

  An unsettling memory rattled her, and she went still. She remembered a handsome, smooth-talking art dealer she’d dated a year ago. Carl Whitman. He’d claimed he was interested in a relationship but she’d found out that what he really wanted was to get her paintings for a low price.

  She winced. Was Michael doing something similar? Well, not with her work. With something else.

  She clenched her hands into fists. Perhaps she was getting cold feet and was looking for reasons to put some distance between them.

  Well, maybe she should do what she should have done in the first place—see what she could find out about him.

  Pulling the chair up to the desk, she switched on the computer and opened a connection to the Internet.

  Then she went to Google and typed in Michael Bryant. It was a common name, but since he was a writer, she could sort out which one he was.

  Only, the citations weren’t what she’d expected.

  He’d written several books—one on the civil war in Rwanda, another on New Jersey mobsters and another on the rapid changes in technology.

  And he had a whole slew of articles in prestigious national magazines.

  She’d thought he was working on a novel. But all of his books were nonfiction.

  So, he’d come down here and misrepresented himself. At least, he’d let her and Aunt Sophie come to the wrong conclusions about him.

  As she scanned more notations about his career, she quickly gathered that the topics he picked were generally something he wanted to debunk or expose.

  What did that mean for Jenkins Cove? What was he really doing down here?

  With a tight feeling in her chest, she began searching for more evidence.

  One of his recent articles had been about a Chicago investment broker whose clients were getting bilked by a medium. Michael had exposed the woman as a fraud.

  The summary of the article set her teeth on edge. He’d certainly gone after the medium with a vengeance.

  As Chelsea looked for more references, she found several instances where he’d participated in chat rooms or done guest blogs. One of the blogs was by a man who was writing snide comments about the current interest in psychic phenomena.

  “I have to agree with you,” Michael had written. “There’s no scientific basis for belief in ghosts. People who claim to have seen them are obviously making a bid for attention. Take the case of a woman in Jenkins Cove, Maryland, who claimed to have seen a ghost when she was a little girl. Recently, she’s come up with another story that can’t be verified by any known facts.”

  Chelsea’s heart started to pound as she stared at the entry. It was written the week before he’d come down here.

  Michael was talking about her.

  He hadn’t come here to write something unfavorable about Jenkins Cove.

  He had come here to write something unfavorable about Chelsea Caldwell!

  No wonder he’d been abashed when she’d asked where he got his ideas. It was from his own nasty prejudices.

  Just as she finished scrolling through the snide comments he’d written on the blog, the door to the office opened, and the man himself stepped in.

  “Oh, there you are,” he said. “I thought we could…”

  She wanted to run and hide from this poseur who thought so little of her. Instead, she pushed back the chair and stood up, facing him squarely.

  ***

  MICHAEL FELT his blood run cold as he looked wildly around the room. Unable to identify the problem, he rushed toward Chelsea.

  “What is it? What’s happened?” he asked as he stepped in front of her and grasped her shoulders.

  He felt her go rigid. “Take your hands off me,” she said in a voice he hardly recognized.

  “What’s wrong?” Even as he asked the question, he had a horrible suspicion of what she was going to say.

  She stepped aside and pointed to the computer screen.

  “Did you write this?” she asked in a voice as cold as ice.

  He looked at the reply he’d made to the blog entry and repressed a groan. Detective Rand McClellan wasn’t the only one who had looked him up. Apparently, Chelsea had decided to do it, too.

  “That was before I knew you,” he said.

  “Yes, well, you should have kept it that way.”

  “That was my stupid uninformed opinion.”

  “You came to Jenkins Cove to write about me. To prove that I’d made up ghost stories to get attention—or maybe something worse.”

  He felt as if the floor had dropped out from under his feet. Still, he kept talking. “I can’t deny that. But you know that’s not what I think anymore.”

  She didn’t seem to be listening. Either that or she didn’t care what he had to say. “You’ve been using me,” she spat out.

  “No!”

  “What would you call it?”

  “I’ve fallen in love with you.”

  She answered with a mirthless laugh. “Oh, please. You saw an opportunity to get into my pants and you took it.”

  He could have argued that he’d kept himself from making love to her as long as humanly possible—given how much he wanted her. He could have told her that cold fear had gathered in his gut when he’d thought about her finding out his original motivation.

  “Why did you pick on me?” she asked in a strangely quiet voice.

  “A friend got me interested in the subject. He’s an investment broker, and he found out a number of his clients were consulting a medium and losing money every time they followed her hot tips. Some of them got bilked out of their life savings. It made me remember something I’d repressed from my own childhood, when my mom consulted a medium after my father died. The woman got a lot of money out of her before she decided she wasn’t really communicating with my dead father. I knew the woman was lying to her, and I had to stand there and watch it happen, because I was a kid and she wouldn’t listen to me. I can’t stand liars. And I thought you were one. That article in the Gazette said you’d been talking about ghosts.”

  “That was a damn lie. I never talked about it. The story got around, and the reporter assumed I had said something.”

  “Yes. As soon as I talked to you, I started doubting my assumptions.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  Ignoring the interjection, he plowed on. “And the better I got to know you, the more I realized you were absolutely honest. It only took a few days for me to realize you have a genuine gift.”

  “Thanks for the ringing endorsement. Now get out of here,” she said. “I mean, pack up your things and get the hell out of my house.”

  “You can hate me,” he said between clenched teeth, “but I’m going to stay here to protect you until we find out who’s trying to kill you.”

  “Did you make that up to get close to me?”

  “Now you’ve really gone off the deep end,” he muttered. “You think I made up someone shooting at us?”

  “Maybe you were working with him. You insisted on taking the gun away from me. Then you never did shoot back at him.”

  “Because I couldn’t see him! And then I would have announced that we were in that hole.”

  She snorted.

  Seeing that nothing he said would make any difference at the moment, he turned and left the room.

  “Pack your things and get out of here,” she called after him. “I’ll call Chief Hammer if you’re not gone in an hour.”

  Ignoring her, he walked to his room and grabbed his jacket, then walked out of the house, where he stood breathing in the crisp December air. It made his chest hurt, although he suspected that simply breathing would be agony.

  She’d ordered him out with vehemence and conviction. No w
ay was he leaving, not when he’d lose his access to her. He had to change her mind about him. How, he wondered, when Chelsea wasn’t going to give him a chance to get close to her again? And he wouldn’t even blame her.

  He should have confessed days ago. He’d tried to do it yesterday but he’d only said half of what he needed to say to come clean.

  Too bad he’d been a coward then.

  As he stared across the harbor, he heard another door in the house open.

  Quickly he charged around to the side yard in time to see Chelsea slam the door behind her and head toward the road—where the car had tried to run him over the first night in Jenkins Cove.

  As he watched her stride away from the house, a car swerved around the corner. It stopped, and he saw someone inside roll down the window, although he couldn’t tell who it was from where he was standing. Yet he sensed danger.

  “Stay away from the car,” he shouted. But either she was too far away to hear him, or she was too angry to pay attention to anything he said.

  Briskly, she walked toward the vehicle and got in as Michael’s warning died on the breeze. The car drove away.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Michael’s heart leaped into his throat.

  He had no proof that anything bad was happening—except for the telltale knot in his gut.

  With only one goal in mind, he bolted toward the vehicle.

  Lurching, the car roared away. It was a silver Honda, one of the most common cars on the road.

  His gaze dropped to the license plate, but it was obscured by mud. So, he couldn’t tell the cops what car to look for. And what would they do, anyway? He had no evidence of any crime.

  He felt numb and cold as the car disappeared. He didn’t have his car keys, and by the time he got them, the vehicle could be anywhere.

  Frustration and agony bubbled over in a string of curses. He had no idea what he was going to do. Then an image leaped into his mind.

  The psychomanteum. It was his only hope to find out who was in that car and why Chelsea had gotten inside.

  The idea that he’d turn to the psychomanteum blew his mind. Yet he dashed into the house, then up to the third floor.

  Inside the blackened room, he flipped on the light and looked around, seeing the chair, the black curtains and the mirror.

  What should he do now?

  He remembered the scene when he’d rushed in here and found Chelsea just after she’d been talking to Lavinia.

  Lavinia. The ghost who had revealed the location of the graveyard. And the ghost who had shown them the hole in the ground where they could hide, and then illuminated it so they could see the tunnel. He hadn’t seen the ghost but he’d seen that eerie glow.

  He looked around and saw a box of matches on the table to the left of the door.

  Quietly he walked around, lighting the candles; then he turned off the ceiling fixture. In the flickering light, he sat down and stared at his own reflection in the mirror.

  Now came the hard part.

  Tension tightened his chest. He would have felt like a fool doing this, except that he was desperate.

  He sat there, staring at the mirror. But nothing seemed to happen. He shifted in his seat, feeling as if the walls of the room were closing in around him.

  Finally, he spoke. “Lavinia, I need your help. Please, come to me.”

  Still, nothing happened, and Michael felt a lump of fear expand inside his chest.

  ***

  CHELSEA STRUGGLED not to give away her terror. There were two men in the car—one driving and one holding a gun. The driver was the man she’d seen hanging around down by the dock. He wasn’t anyone she knew. Not Ned Perry or Phil Cardon. But the gunman…

  She knew him. It was Dr. Janecek. He’d been at the Christmas party. And yesterday he’d treated the wound on her hand. Now he was taking her away.

  He’d called her over to the car before by saying he wanted to discuss her lab results. She hadn’t even noticed the strange driver until she was in the backseat with a gun aimed at her head.

  A few blocks from the House of the Seven Gables, the driver pulled into an empty garage and closed the door.

  “Get out,” the doctor ordered.

  “What do you want with me?”

  “Quiet,” he snarled.

  She got out of the car, trying and failing to keep from shaking.

  “Hands behind your back.”

  She took her lower lip between her teeth as the driver pressed her hands behind her. Roughly, he wound duct tape around her wrists and then her ankles. When he came at her with another piece of tape for her mouth, she couldn’t hold back a moan. For all the good it did her.

  After they had finished, he carried her to another car and dumped her in the backseat like a sack of horse feed.

  The door was open, and she could hear the men conferring a few yards away.

  She didn’t know the driver’s name. But now she wished she’d paid more attention to him. He must also have been the man Michael had seen—the man who had escaped by boat.

  “Listen, Franz, I’m tired of your acting on your own without waiting for my say-so,” Janecek said.

  “I was taking initiative.”

  “You’re working for me, not the other way around. I need you to follow orders instead of making up jobs on your own. Go back and pick up Bryant so we can take care of both of them.”

  Chelsea tried to scream, “No.” But the sound was muffled by the tape.

  She’d been angry and hurt by Michael’s betrayal when she ran out of the house. She was still angry. But now fear for him made her go cold all over.

  And fear for herself. What were they planning to do with her?

  The doctor got behind the wheel and pulled out of the garage.

  Panic flooded through her system, making her feel as though her breath was choking off.

  In the backseat, she tried to wrench her wrists apart, but it was no good. The tape was too tight and too firm. Terror threatened to sweep away all rational thought, but she struggled to rise above it, to make her mind function logically.

  She remembered coming outside and how, just before she’d gotten into the car, she’d spotted Michael.

  He’d seen her.

  Either he’d seen that the doctor had a gun, or he’d sensed she was in danger, because he came running to save her. Only it was already too late.

  Now he had no idea where to look for her.

  From the front seat, the doctor spoke to her. “You couldn’t leave well enough alone,” he said, his voice regretful.

  Her only thought was of Michael. He’d said he loved her, and like a fool she’d ignored him. Now she’d never get the chance to see him again.

  ***

  BACK AT THE House of the Seven Gables, Michael struggled against his fear and frustration. Again, his pleas were met only by silence.

  Unable to stay in the chair, he stood up and paced from one end of the psychomanteum to the other. When his agony bubbled over, he shouted, “You have to help me. Chelsea is in danger. I’ll do anything it takes to save her.”

  “Will you?”

  He hadn’t really expected an answer, which was why the voice in his ear was so startling. When he whirled around, he saw nothing. Or maybe he did. Maybe he detected a small wavering in the air.

  “Lavinia?”

  “Yes,” the voice answered. He couldn’t be sure if she’d spoken aloud or in his head. But he knew she had a thick accent. Russian or somewhere else in that part of the world.

  “You have to help me,” he gasped out.

  “Why should I?”

  ***

  FROM WHERE SHE LAY on the backseat, Chelsea could see the upper stories of buildings and the tops of trees passing by. When the view switched to only trees, she knew they were heading out of town. After what she judged was a few miles, they turned onto a bumpy road.

  Branches pressed in on either side of the car, and she felt shocked when she recognized where they were headed.
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  This was the road to the old warehouse where she and Michael had gone a few days ago.

  Silently, she called out to her only hope.

  Michael, please, I need you. I’m at the old warehouse. The place where we went the other day. The place where you fell into that trap.

  Please. Please come find me here.

  She felt she was sending the message out into a black hole, where it would never emerge into the sunlight again.

  Michael wasn’t going to find her here. She was on her own, and she had to save herself.

  The car stopped abruptly.

  Dr. Janecek got out and walked away from the car. Then she heard a scraping sound. Moments later he was back and driving into the warehouse through the open doors.

  He got out again and she could see him walking around to the trunk. He got something out, something she couldn’t see because it was below the level of the windows. Then he walked back to the trunk again. Finally, he opened the back door of the car, sat her up and hauled her out. Picking her up, he carried her a few yards away and laid her on a flat surface. A padded table.

  Next, he secured the lower half of her body to the table with straps. Then he cut the tape on her hands.

  When she tried to lunge at him, he leveled a blow to her face. Stars flashed in front of her eyes.

  Too stunned to move, she could only lie there as he secured her hands to straps at the side of the table. Then he cut the tape on her ankles and strapped her feet the way he had her hands.

  When he stepped back, staring at her, the look on his face made her stomach churn.

  “What…what are you going to do?” she asked.

  “Solve two problems at once. Too bad you were poking your nose in where it didn’t belong. If you’d just driven by a little later, we would have had that woman buried. And you never would have gotten a chance to interfere.”

  “Please. Let me go,” she begged.

  He laughed, and it wasn’t a pleasant sound. “So you can go straight to the cops? Of course not. But you’re going to help me out. I have a buyer for a heart. And you’re a match. I established that when I took that blood sample from you the other day.”