The Haunted Bones

by PM Weldon

  "So are you here," Mary said as she approached him and tapped the camera, "to take pictures for the bank?"

  "Yes and no. I'm here for the bank to make a portfolio to show a client who's interested in the whole building. But I'm tailoring the pictures to the client's tastes." He continued to stare at his tablet. "He wanted me to take shots of the interior of each store. I took pics of the other two units yesterday, but I didn't get the keys to this one 'til this morning." He looked up at her and then around at the room. "You can look around if you want. I'm basically finished. But I wouldn't go upstairs."

  "Oh?" She frowned at him. "Why? Is it messed up, up there?"

  "No…" He licked his lips. "It just feels bad. You know? How places have a certain aura about them?"

  She wanted to roll her eyes. Oh great, one of those touchy-feely people. "No, I don't."

  "Yeah, it's hard to explain." He looked back down at his tablet. "Ah, here it is. The Alley Haunt. Wow…they did a thriving business for more than twenty years."

  She stepped closer and looked over his hand at the tablet. He lowered it for her to see. "Yes, that's what I was remembering."

  He used his fingers to expand the article in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, then moved it to the right and tapped a link. That link brought up a new page with a new headline: JEALOUS RAGE FUELS MIDNIGHT MASSACRE.

  She reached out and pulled the tablet closer. He didn't seem to mind as he read alongside her.

  Mary ground her teeth together as she skimmed. That bastard, the one she sold the property to, had killed his wife, the daughter of the owners next door, and then himself. What the hell?

  "That sucks." Mr. McNally moved the article up to finish it with a brush of his finger. He sighed and started to move away.

  "Can I continue reading?" She asked.

  He let her have the tablet as he moved back to the doorway to the back rooms. She knew there was a kitchen back there and a door to the alley. The upstairs was storage and the office.

  More links brought up smaller articles on the Haunt Massacre aftermath. What the owners had in assets was absorbed by debt and the bank inherited the property after the dead daughter's family tried suing the estate. But it was hard to get milk out of a dead cow.

  She hit the close button for the tablet's Internet browser and froze when she saw a picture beneath. It was a shot of the wall. Time stamp said it was taken a few minutes ago. In the center of the shelving to the right of the mirror was a strange, ghostly image. Was it a flash flare? Or maybe something smudged on the camera's lens? She looked from the tablet to the camera. Was the image stored in there?

  "Oh… sorry." He had his hand out for his tablet. "I was doing a bit of work on one of the pictures."

  "Work?" She reluctantly returned the device to him. "That's a picture of that wall, right?" She pointed to it.

  "Mmhmm." He looked at the wall and then held up the tablet so they could look at both.

  "What is that?" She pointed at the image.

  "I don't know. But if you see it, too, then it's not just my imagination. That's why I was messing with the lighting and hue. I'm not sure about you, but it looks like a woman to me."

  Her breath caught in her throat, but luckily Mr. McNally wasn't paying any attention. "You're right. It does. I wonder why?"

  "I have no idea." He continued holding up the image for a few seconds. Then he set the tablet on the crate and took up his camera, and, to her horror, started taking more pictures of the wall.

  "What're you doing?" Her voice came out a bit high-pitched and filled with panic.

  But he didn't seem to notice. "I'm taking more shots, just to make sure it's a fluke with the light. It happens sometimes."

  "So you come across this a lot in taking pictures?"

  "Not like this." He lowered the camera. She had to admit he had a nice profile. He looked young. Had to be at least eight to ten years younger than herself. Long straight nose and a nice jaw line. She wondered how nice it would look with a metal pipe slammed into it.

  She suspected that camera wasn't an ordinary camera. It had to have some sort of x-ray attachment to show what was in that picture. If there was one thing she remembered from that night, it was how her mother looked, tied and strung up inside that wall before Mary bricked it back up. And the ghostly woman in that picture was the exact same image.

  She had to get hold of that picture, his tablet, and the camera. Looking around, she saw there wasn't much to use in the way of a weapon. The place had been picked bare, and her gun was in the car. It wasn't a problem killing him—after all, it was a bad neighborhood. Even the bank said to lock the door. Killing him and taking everything—it would all look like a robbery.

  After that, she would look into buying the building herself! That was the answer—it was there all along. The only reason she sold it was to make the money she needed at the time. Then she could demolish the wall the way she wanted and remove the remains so no one would ever find her.

  It was a perfect plan. There just wasn't anything she could use to kill him with.

  He started packing up, slipping everything back into his bag. "Sorry, but I need to go. I can't let you stay here or they'll have my head." Mr. McNally slipped the bag over his shoulder and pulled his phone out of his pocket to check the face. "Christ—it's already late."

  She balled her hands into fists. No…he couldn't go yet! "So are you giving the pictures to the bank now?"

  "Oh, these? No. I have to go through them and delete the ones that don't work. I'll have to work with them and create a portfolio. Sort of like a slideshow for the buyer."

  "So you have them saved to your tablet and camera?"

  "No. I've uploaded them to my cloud."

  His cloud.

  Sonofbitch! Of course he was using a cloud—separate storage so he could access files from different devices. So how was she going to get access to his cloud and get the pictures out of there? "Oh…uh…are you a professional photographer?"

  "Yes." He slipped his hand into his bag and pulled out a card. "I'm not a huge fan of taking pictures of weddings, but anything else I can manage. My portfolio and info are online at that url."

  She took the card. It was white and very simple. Clean. His name, which she already had, his phone number, and a website. No physical address. "No store?"

  "No. I work at home and that's private." He unlocked the door and let her out, then turned and locked it again. When he faced her, his gaze moved past her, and he frowned. "Do you have a Mercedes?"

  "Yes."

  Mr. McNally looked around the street and picked up a good-sized rock. "Hey!" he called out and then threw the rock.

  She turned to see two kids trying to use a slim jim to open her car door just as the rock hit one of them in the side of the head, missing her car. The kid hit with the projectile yelled out obscenities.

  "I'm calling the cops!" Mr. McNally shouted, and the two of them ran off. He looked down at her. "I'd get in the car and get out of this neighborhood, Ms. Smith." He offered her his hand.

  She took it, wide-eyed. "How did you…" She looked back at the now-empty street. "How did you do that?"

  "Practice." He unlocked his car and threw his bag inside. "I played baseball in high school and college. I've been working on keeping my aim sharp. I'll stay here 'til you get to your car."

  With a glance at him and a fast-beating heart, she crossed the street and got inside her car. Once it was locked, she cranked it and watched as Mr. McNally drove away.

  She looked at the business card in her hand before she pulled out and headed home.

  Three

  I dismissed the strange visitor about half an hour after leaving the old bar. I had a thousand other things crowding out trivial meetings, one of them being Myra's phone call and her job offer for the Chief Of Detective's daughter's wedding. It was a bad idea. I knew it was a bad idea. Everything about it screamed, Bad Idea!

  So…why was I actually considering it on the drive home?


  Home these days was a brownstone I'd bought in Chamblee after the divorce. Three stories and a basement, it was a good price because it sat in front of a MARTA rail for the city's transportation system. After a few months, you get used to the noise. And it was nice having the actual station a short walk away for those times I needed to head downtown for a job and didn't want to worry about parking.

  The alarm chirped when I punched in the code. I locked the door behind me, tossed my rain-soaked blazer on the couch, dropped my bags on the desk in the living room, and headed upstairs for a shower. My stomach echoed in the bathroom afterward. I couldn't remember if I'd bothered with breakfast. So if I did, it wasn't a memorable one.

  First order of business after dressing in a light shirt and loungers was a quick meal. I figured I would just eat at my desk while I took a closer look at all the shots I'd taken of that wall. I wanted to check them out right after I took them, but I wanted to do it in private, and not with a strange woman hanging around.

  I started a pot of water and grabbed a jar of some on-sale sauce. It was Thursday—so on Thursdays I made Italian. Fridays were my order-in night—Chinese, Mexican, Indian. Saturday, leftovers. And on it went. It was a way for me to pull some kind of control, some kind of order into my life. It's amazing how being shot by someone can rob you of your idea of control. When someone tries to take your life, it's the ultimate in power. One of the things I learned while becoming a detective was to always build trust with the victim's family. Empathize with them. The instructor said the closest members of the family or friends, if not suspects, would and should cooperate better with the details of the victim's life if they felt the police were on their side.

  But no one ever taught us how to survive being a victim.

  There's no manual for life after death.

  After I woke in the hospital, my body hooked to more machines than I could count, unable to move, my life wasn't my own. I slept when they drugged me, I woke when they made me. The doctors, the nurses, the hospital, all of them controlled every aspect of my days and nights before I came off the machines—and my wife controlled everything after that.

  Susan hated the Captain, my peers, all of them. Their constant questions, their whispers. They wanted to question me about what happened. They needed to know if what I had seen matched what the witness said happened. To keep us honest, she and I were kept apart. They were patient when I couldn't speak or move. They were patient when I showed improvement but my speech was still slow. They were patient when Susan told them to give me a full six months in rehab before the interviews started.

  When I could finally get out of bed on my own, talk on my own without prompting, get dressed on my own, I convinced Susan it was time. She still didn't want me to talk about it…because she knew the truth.

  She knew I couldn't remember what they wanted me to.

  I told them what I knew before the shooting. Yes I received a call with an electronic voice, telling me they had the witness. No he didn't identify himself as the Senator's Aide, Mason Ferrell. No I didn't see him there. No, he never said he killed the senator's son. No, I didn't see the witness, Llse Wallace. No, I didn't see Jimmy get shot.

  No…I never saw who shot me.

  Things just spiraled out of control after that.

  They wanted to know why Ferrell shot two detectives, spared the witness, and then shot himself. For ten months they hinged their case on the hope I would give them better detail than Llse Wallace had. I received reports through nurses and Susan that Ferrell's family filed a wrongful death suit against the department, claiming their son would never have killed himself if he hadn't of been hounded and harassed. They accused me of killing him and then shooting myself.

  Luckily the doc proved their claim bogus and the suit was dropped.

  Then the real reason for their questions surfaced. Everyone, including my wife, believed I slept with Llse Wallace because she told them we did. In court. Llse testified Ferrell had been in love with her and killed Chad Padeaus because he believed she and Chad were having an affair. And when Ferrell discovered our affair, which never happened, he came after me and Jimmy was caught in the middle.

  They took everything after that. Susan said they came into the house and took it all. Warrant in hand. My computer, my notes, my journals, my collections of photos I'd taken on vacations with Jimmy and his wife Julie. I never saw any of it again and wasn't allowed to. Getting out of the hospital became the same as starting over. Susan was helpful, if not put out because of it all. Being a lawyer herself, she understood the why of what they did, but not the soul of it.

  So I was finally free of the bonds of the medical machine, only to be bitten by the jaws of divorce. Susan had all she could take, and when I needed her the most, she abandoned me. I knew it was because she believed Llse and not me. She was a good lawyer. She could read people. And no matter how many times I protested and assured her I'd never slept with that woman, she knew I was hiding something.

  Maybe I was. I just didn't know what—until I found my notebook.

  She paid to have my things moved—the stuff they didn't take. Susan had my dad's things brought in from storage to finish out the place—no sense having her ex-husband, the poor schmuck who got his head shot, live in squalor. It was a month after that I found my notebook in the bottom drawer of the bedroom dresser.

  When I say notebook, I do mean the small flip-top I carried around with me to take notes on cases. A lot of the detectives I'd met were learning to type on their phones. But I liked it old school. I didn't know why it was in the drawer, and I didn't remember putting it there, but I do know it was one of the things my Captain specifically asked me about. Since the storage unit had been in Susan's name, they couldn't get access to it.

  Had I known this before? Had I put the book there before I stupidly went to the warehouse? I wished I could remember.

  I wished…

  I wished I had never found that book. In it, in my own detailed writing, was the truth about the affair with Llse. Every terrible day of it. Only…I hadn't been the one sleeping with her.

  Her lover had been Jimmy Herndon. My partner. My best friend. Julie's husband. I couldn't bring myself to share this with Susan. That's what I was hiding and no matter how hard I protested my innocence, no one really believed me. I mean…why believe the guy with a bullet in his brain?

  Yeah…I probably forgot to mention the bullet was still there.

  Llse stayed away from the hospital. Never texted. Never spoke to me again until after I was settled. She took a leave of absence to get away from the paparazzi and the police, none of whom believed her claim that she didn't see anything that night because she was locked in a room and handcuffed. She only heard the shots.

  Three of them.

  Three bullets.

  Jim, me, and Ferrell.

  Now I was a photographer, eking out a living. I'd dabbled in picture-taking in high school, and then in college, but never took it up seriously until my doctor suggested I rekindle a hobby as part of my therapy. Turned out I had a knack for it.

  I had just dumped a handful of pasta in the boiling water when the doorbell rang. I wiped my hands on a towel as I shuffled down the hall and looked at my surprise visitor through the door's side window.

  A smile pulled at the corners of my lips as I opened the door.

  Detective Julie Herndon stood just outside, an umbrella in one hand, and a bottle of wine in the other. "It's Thursday."

  "Meaning?"

  "You always cook Italian on Thursday, and I'm starved."

  I invited her in and shut the door. After taking her umbrella and coat and hanging them on the hall tree, I followed her to the kitchen, where she made herself at home with the wine opener and then tasted the bubbling sauce with a wooden spoon. "Oh my…that is good."

  I swatted at her hand and took the spoon. "Drain the noodles and I'll check the bread."

  After draining the delicate angel hair pasta—the only kind I used�
�she dumped it in a ceramic bowl she grabbed from beneath the cabinet, poured in the sauce, and started stirring it all together as I removed the bread and set the hot, flat pan on the small counter.

  "Talked to Myra today."

  I grabbed the bread tongs from a bowl of kitchen utensils. I didn't say anything.

  "Devan…it's a great opportunity. And you'll get to see some old friends."

  "Jewels." I lifted a large serving bowl from the overhead cabinet as she ducked under me and grabbed two wine glasses. "I'm really not in the mood to talk about this." After that, I irreverently slung the bread into the basket and handed it to her before I grabbed the bowl of spaghetti and took it into the dining room. I slammed it on the table. I didn't mean to do that, but I was suddenly pissed again.

  My display of anger didn't phase Jewels. It never did. She brought the wine to the table with the two glasses and then went back for the bread. "Not dropping it," she muttered as she went back and grabbed plates and forks.

  I poured the wine and sat down as she set the plates. After she was seated, I dumped out the noodles into our plates and then got up to grab the cheese. I was trying to calm down, trying not to get myself worked up. And the truth was, I really didn't know why I was so…mad.

  That's the last thing I remembered before I woke up on the kitchen floor with Jewels hovering over me. She had a cold, wet towel pressed to my forehead and a worried expression on her face. But somehow, she managed to smile.

  "Only five minutes that time. You're getting better."

  "Five minutes is still too long for a cop to be on his ass." I didn't try to get up just yet. I knew better. The blackouts started after I began physical therapy. The first one put me back in intensive care for a day when they couldn't wake me up. But as the months went by and I got stronger, their frequency went from four or five of them a week to one or two. And now, two years since the shooting, they were maybe once a twice a month and their duration shorter.