Parrish

by Shannen Crane Camp

  “And I need to transfer these tapes to the external hard drive so we have room to film tonight,” Brighton said, sounding incredibly stressed. “There’s not enough time. We need to make sure the batteries are charged and do about a million other things too.”

  She stood from the bed and looked wildly around the room. I was assuming she was on the hunt for some anti-anxiety medication.

  “Brighton,” I said, jumping off the bed and grabbing her shoulders. “It’s okay. We can get everything done in time.”

  “We haven’t even eaten!” she said. “I totally forgot!”

  “There are some fast food places right down the street. It’s not a big deal,” I said in the too-calm voice.

  “But the tapes,” she whined.

  “I’ll transfer them over,” I said. “Or I can go get the food while you do that.”

  She looked back and forth between me and the tapes, trying to decide if she really trusted me with the responsibility of transferring our hours of hard work. Then she looked out the window with a deep sigh.

  “Maybe some fresh air will be good for you,” I suggested. She looked like she’d been cooped up for far too long.

  “I hate fresh air,” she said.

  “All the more reason to go get some.”

  After a moment of inner turmoil, she relented.

  “Deacon, will you come with me?” she asked, being much bolder than she normally was.

  “No!” I yelled, not meaning to be quite so loud. “You can take Jefferson,” I quickly added, trying to be nonchalant.

  Jefferson looked over at me and grinned.

  He knew.

  “You two seriously need to learn to get along,” Brighton said, grabbing her purse and taking Deacon’s hand, which was also pretty daring for her. “If you haven’t killed each other by the time we get back, I’ll consider that a small victory.”

  “Jefferson probably needs some fresh air too,” I attempted desperately.

  I could not be left alone in the room with him at the moment. I was too unstable.

  “I feel great, actually. And I’d love to help you transfer those tapes over,” he said, tilting his chin down and looking at me through his eyelashes, the wicked grin still on his face.

  Normally I’d think the look was creepy, but now as I saw it, I just wanted to kiss him. What had happened to me? This was totally ridiculous.

  “There you go,” Brighton said, still having a minor panic attack as she looked around the room at her unfinished tasks.

  I knew she didn’t want to go get food. The only reason she’d agreed to go was because she knew she would have some alone time with Deacon to do whatever it was they did. What did they do? Awkwardly avoid eye contact with each other? Compare neurosis?

  “We’ll be back in five,” Deacon said, his eyes locked on Brighton in a non-stalker way.

  How was he related to Jefferson?

  “But—” I began, before the closing of the door cut me off.

  I glanced over at Jefferson for a brief moment, wary of being alone with him, before I sat down on the bed and began transferring our video data over to a hard drive. He gathered a few cords up and tossed them into a bag, being deliberately slow in his movements so that he could watch me.

  We worked in silence for what seemed like forever. Brighton and Deacon had to be almost done getting food.

  “We probably won’t have time to transfer all of these tapes over,” I said, trying to break the deafening silence. “But we can get enough for tonight.”

  “Good,” Jefferson answered, finally letting his eyes leave me and actually focusing on his task at hand.

  Maybe I’d actually done it. I’d shown him I wasn’t interested and he was giving up.

  “Plus Brighton can always wipe more tapes while we’re investigating.” I was no longer looking at the computer and instead watched Jefferson as his tall form moved around the room. “If we need her to.”

  “Good to have options,” he said, still not looking at me.

  His curls fell into his eyes when he bent down to grab a piece of equipment and he furrowed his brow when he hit his hand on something. He was completely distracted as he looked down at his finger in concern, trying to figure out where he’d cut it, I was guessing. And for some reason unknown to me, I stood up, strode across the small hotel room, literally pushed him against the wall, and kissed him.

  I had to stand on my tiptoes but I didn’t care. I kept my hands firmly planted against his chest as I pinned him up against the wall, not thinking at all as I kissed him vehemently. Inhaling deeply, I could smell that same cinnamon scent on him and I let my kisses trail down his neck, under the collar of his shirt, before bringing my lips back up to his.

  Somehow I had a handful of his curly hair in my grasp and I could hear him hit his head on the wall behind us as I kissed him with a little too much force, not realizing how intense I had gotten.

  His eyes were closed, so at least I knew he was enjoying himself, but two seconds later I heard the key card beep as someone began opening the door, and without a second thought, I sprinted back to the bed and jumped into the pile of computers, hoping I could convincingly look like I’d been working the whole time Brighton and Deacon were gone.

  “I wasn’t sure what you guys wanted but we’re broke so I just got the cheapest things on the menu,” Brighton announced as she and Deacon entered the room. “Plus Deacon had a panic attack because the person at the register was a woman, and I had a panic attack because they were a living human in general, so it took a while to decide whose neurosis were the worst and who had to order.”

  Jefferson was still flattened against the wall, with his eyes wider than I’d ever seen them as he stared off into the distance. His hair was a huge mess and his shirt was now untucked with the collar pulled down on one side. I wasn’t sure how I’d done all of that in such a short amount of time, but apparently I’d made good use of those few seconds.

  “What’s wrong with you, mate?” Deacon asked, barely glancing at his cousin as he set the food up on the small table in the room.

  Jefferson didn’t speak, but his eyes suddenly met mine and grew determined. He began walking quickly through the room toward me with a look that said he was about to return my favor and I panicked.

  “No!” I yelled, pointing at him and stopping him dead in his tracks.

  Who just tried to kiss a person in front of their friends? What was wrong with him?

  “What?” Brighton asked, still not looking at me.

  It was a good thing she and Deacon were so preoccupied by the food or they’d definitely know what was going on.

  Jefferson tilted his head to the side at an extreme angle like he always did, looking enormously confused and asking me a question with his eyes.

  I shook my head at him incredulously. We were not going to kiss in front of Brighton and Deacon. This was why he was so weird. A normal person wouldn’t have had to ask if that was an okay thing to do. To be fair, though, a normal person wouldn’t have just attacked him and pushed him against a wall either. I wasn’t being a very good example of “normal” at the moment.

  “Sorry,” I quickly amended, just as Brighton turned around to look at me. She glanced at Jefferson with a puzzled look at his rumpled clothing and disheveled hair, but didn’t say anything. “I thought I had erased one of our tapes by accident,” I lied.

  “Wait, you didn’t though, right?” she asked in a sudden panic, shooing me off of the bed to take over my job.

  “False alarm,” I said, trying not to touch Jefferson as I passed him to get to the food. He let his fingers trail down my back as I passed, making me shiver and also making me mad that he would be so obvious in front of everyone.

  “Thanks for getting food, guys,” I said in an uncomfortably tight voice.

  This was so embarrassing. Not only should I not have been affected by Jefferson so much, but I also definitely shouldn’t have acted
on it when he wasn’t even provoking me. This was becoming a problem.

  “The batteries are mostly charged, so I think they should be fine by the time we leave tonight,” Deacon said to Brighton, both of them still ignoring us.

  Jefferson looked away from me and silently tucked his shirt back in, biting his bottom lip as he smoothed his hair back down. Why was everything he did suddenly so attractive? Had he always been that good-looking?

  “We might want to brush up on our mimic research for tonight,” Jefferson finally said. His eyes flicked up to meet mine for the briefest of seconds before he smirked and looked away.

  I hated myself for blushing.

  “Doppelgänger,” Deacon corrected.

  Jefferson raised his eyebrows. “I guess we’ll find out who’s right.”

  “Fantastic,” Deacon said with a laugh.

  “You boys need to play nice or I’ll have to separate you,” Brighton put in from her spot on the bed.

  During the entire exchange I was silently staring at Jefferson and—not for the first time that week—thinking about how completely and utterly in trouble I was.

  Chapter 19

  I tagged my tape as I walked through the dark, quiet house holding a flashlight and a camera. “This is Sadie Smith investigating the Bray house in Boston, Massachusetts, on September ninth at 11:00 p.m.”

  Because the location was so small, both Parrish boys were stuck in the car with Brighton, but they were hardly complaining since Ally had brought some hot chocolate over for us. Deacon was wonderful and charming about the gift, actually managing to speak to a woman, while Jefferson just looked at it suspiciously, as though worried Ally might poison us.

  I had narrowly escaped being forced into another ridiculous costume by Jefferson and was now walking around the darkened house in my normal clothing. I wasn’t sure if our suddenly complicated relationship had gotten me out of costume duty or if Jefferson had unexpectedly become more reasonable. Either way, I was grateful to be free of the long flowing dresses and ridiculous wigs.

  “Try reading some of the script I gave you,” Jefferson said in my earpiece.

  I guess I hadn’t avoided all of the awful parts of the job.

  “I’m not in costume. No ghost is going to buy that I’m from their time period,” I said, feeling slightly irritated with him.

  Before investigating, we’d all decided to be extremely aware of our emotions on this particular job, since it seemed like something was messing with them. Personally, I was almost one hundred percent sure that the weird energy in the house was where my sudden attraction to Jefferson was coming from. There was no way he’d always been that hot and I’d just never noticed. Either way, we vowed to avoid saying anything too harsh to each other while at this location, thinking it was probably a result of the house’s energy and not our own opinions.

  “These aren’t lines for a character,” Jefferson assured me. “I want you to say you have a letter for Eva from Thatcher. See if you can draw her out to talk to us.”

  I never liked to give Jefferson the satisfaction of knowing he’d had a good idea. It only led to overconfidence on his part, and overconfidence for Jefferson Parrish translated into being cocky and weirder than ever. That being said, his idea with the note was actually kind of brilliant.

  “Here goes nothing,” I said with a sigh, pulling the folded letter out of my pocket and trying to balance my camera while pointing the flashlight at the paper. “Eva?” I said to the empty room. “Is there an Eva here who might want to talk to us?”

  “We should have given her a K2 meter,” Deacon said from his position in the van.

  “We definitely should have given her more than just a camera,” Brighton agreed.

  “Eva, if you’re here, you don’t need to be scared of me,” I went on, trying to sound inviting. “We just want to talk to you and find out what happened with you and Thatcher.”

  “I still don’t think this whole ghost hunt is about connecting the dots on a failed love story,” Jefferson said.

  I tried to ignore him and get back into the zone. The house was too quiet.

  “Eva, I have a letter here from Thatcher,” I said, holding up the piece of paper. “He had a message for you.”

  “Just read it,” Jefferson said.

  “I’m getting to it. Would you shut your mouth?”

  “Sade!” Brighton exclaimed. “Remember rule number one for this investigation?”

  “No snapping at Jefferson,” I recited robotically.

  “No snapping at a fellow team member,” she corrected.

  “Trust me, Jefferson is the only one I’d snap at,” I assured her.

  “She loves me,” I heard him say to Deacon in the van, which would have been a typical thing for him to say on any other day.

  Now his words just made me nervous.

  “She has a funny way of showing it, mate,” Deacon replied.

  “Yes. She. Does,” Jefferson said, injecting way too much meaning into his words.

  Had I been in the Jeep with him, I would have punched him.

  “Reading the letter now,” I said, hoping I could cut off any suspicious questions from the more sane half of our team.

  Unfortunately, because of my recent behavior, I’d allowed myself to be grouped together with Jefferson in the insanity ranking. It was never a good thing when Deacon Parrish was saner than you.

  “I will breathe in your boiled-down truth and essence. If I have to retreat within my own for that solace, I will take it. I choose drowning in madness if it is but in your glory,” I read in the most incredulous tone possible. “What in the world is this?” I asked, shock lining my voice.

  “It’s a love letter,” Jefferson said.

  “But where did you find it?” I looked at the paper like it was roadkill. “Brighton, listen to this.” I said, reading more of the eerie letter, “So let me drown and suffocate and choke in whatever of you I can take.”

  “Whoa,” Brighton said with a low whistle.

  “It’s romantic,” Jefferson said, even more defensive than before.

  “Wait,” I said. “You didn’t write this yourself, did you?”

  There was silence in my earpiece for far too long.

  “Jefferson?” I said slowly.

  “It’s romantic!” he said again, sounding very put out that I didn’t like it.

  “This is not romantic! This is why people get restraining orders.” I said. There had to be something wrong with me that I seemed to find Jefferson attractive when he was clearly a sociopath. “Do not ever let another letter like this see the light of day or they will throw you in jail.”

  “It’s poetic,” he said.

  “It sounds like you’re two seconds away from making a skin suit out of this girl,” I corrected him.

  “It’s not my fault you don’t understand poetry, Sadie,” he answered in a low, dark tone. He was no longer defensive; now he was just pissed. “It’s beautiful.”

  “Okay, we’re going to call it a night on the love letter idea,” Brighton cut in, trying to stop our fight before it started. I could hear the sound of an inhaler over my earpiece. “Sadie, why don’t you just . . .” her words trailed off distractedly.

  “Why don’t I just what?” I asked, tucking the creepy “love letter” back in my pocket so that Ally wouldn’t find it and have us all committed.

  “Wait,” Brighton said, making me instantly nervous.

  “Brighton, what is it?” I asked more urgently.

  “You’re in the living room, right?” she asked, although she knew very well right where I was since we had cameras stationed all around the house.

  “Yeah.”

  “Because I swear I just saw you looking out the front-facing window on the second floor.”

  I felt my body instantly go cold at her words and I wasn’t sure what to do. Part of me wanted to run after whatever was upstairs, but the investigator side of me screa
med to stay still and not scare it away. I held my breath, listening for any footsteps on the wood floor above me, but there was nothing. The house was completely silent.

  The rest of the group must have been holding their breath too, because nobody spoke. I took one step forward, the floor creaking under my weight.

  “It moved away from the window,” Brighton said, her voice airy and terrified. “Go after it!”

  I didn’t stop to think. Instead, I bolted up the stairs, tripping over a few of them in the process. A large hand was instantly on my back to help steady me as I skipped the last few steps, and the smell of cinnamon that hit my nose made it so I didn’t even have to turn around to know that Jefferson was behind me.

  How had he gotten inside so quickly?

  Entering the empty, tiny room on the almost nonexistent second floor, the pleasant cinnamon scent I’d just been guiltily enjoying was overpowered by the smell of rotten eggs.

  “Oh heavens!” I used my arm to cover my nose.

  Jefferson lifted his lip at the smell but didn’t do anything to block it.

  “What’s wrong?” Deacon asked from the Jeep, his voice cutting in and out over our earpieces.

  “Rotten eggs,” Jefferson said.

  “Ha! I knew it was a Doppelgänger,” Deacon said. “And you thought it was a mimic.”

  Jefferson looked at me and rolled his considerably large eyes toward the ceiling, making me smile in spite of myself. Only the Parrish boys could turn a paranormal investigation into a competition. Especially when seconds before we’d been panicked about a ghost.

  “What’s the difference?” I asked Jefferson, though Deacon was the one who answered.

  “With a Doppelgänger you get that rotten egg smell.” I could hear the grin in his voice. “And a Doppelgänger can usually only imitate . . .”

  “One person!” Jefferson exclaimed, making me jump with his sudden enthusiasm. “Whereas a mimic can imitate anyone and any environment. So I was right!”

  “Then why does it smell like rotten eggs?” I asked.

  “Well, if a mimic can imitate anything, then it can imitate smells as well, right?” Jefferson asked.