by Nene Adams
A fireball erupted from the police station’s roof, startling her. A column of thick, black smoke belched into the sky. Volunteer firefighters plied their hoses, sunshine striking rainbows from the jets of water directed at the burning building.
Brilliant yellow light flared in her peripheral vision. She half turned. The light disappeared as if it had never existed. She sipped her cappuccino, dismissing the incident as a sunbeam reflecting off window glass, metal, or chrome on one of the parked vehicles.
In the corner of her eye, the yellow light flared again.
This time, she didn’t try to look straight at the light. She let her gaze wander over the source in a vague sort of way, finally focusing a few inches above it—a trick she’d learned not long ago during Annabel Coffin’s haunting. For some reason she didn’t care to understand, she couldn’t see spirits except when she caught them sidelong.
Her eyes began to water. She lifted a hand to dash away tears and hoped she wouldn’t go blind. Looking at this particular apparition indirectly still felt like holding a staring contest with the sun on the longest day of the year.
The silhouette of a man—no, a woman—became visible in the heart of a searing corona of flames. An incandescent tendril reached toward her, the end questing hungrily.
Mackenzie stumbled a step backward, bumping into someone who told her she should watch where she was going. To her relief, the tendril returned to the main body of flames. She wasn’t sure the fire could harm her. She felt no heat despite the eager burning, but who knew how far a spirit might go or what powers it might possess?
Try as she might, she couldn’t make out the silhouette’s features or any other details. To her perception, the ghost might as well have been cut from a sheet of black paper. Was it even aware of her watching it? she wondered. Her pulse slowed to a steady trot instead of a gallop, only to convulse painfully when the figure turned its head to look at her.
Mackenzie froze, fixed in place by bright golden eyes. The molten color spread from corner to corner uninterrupted by irises or pupils. She sensed a definite malignancy to the spirit’s inspection. A lack of facial expression or features like a mouth or a nose didn’t stop her from understanding that nothing this spirit wanted could be good.
The businessman’s words in the coffee shop came to her: the whole wall went up in flames, just like that. She stared at the ghostly fire with new apprehension.
A smell made her gag. Smoke, burning hair, charred meat with a metallic undertone, and an unpleasant, putrid, sweetish odor clinging to her tongue and throat. Not quite decomposition—she’d smelled stomach churning roadkills—but somehow worse.
The coffee cup went into a nearby garbage container. She turned away and bent over the fountain to splash a little cool water on her face. Though she kept her eyes squeezed shut while water dripped over her cheeks and chin, she felt the spirit watching her. The skin on the back of her neck tightened, as if she’d stayed out in the sun too long.
A hand curved over her shoulder.
The touch burned.
Chapter Three
Mackenzie jumped, squawking like a startled hen, tripped and nearly fell headlong into the fountain. The same hand’s grip prevented disaster, giving her the opportunity to regain her balance, if not her dignity.
“Damn it, Ronnie!” Her joy at meeting her girlfriend was tempered by a degree of annoyance over the fright she’d been given.
A glance around the immediate vicinity showed her the fiery spirit was gone. Realizing some people in the crowd had stopped staring at the fire to take in a new drama—her aborted tumble and the appearance of the best-looking sheriff’s deputy in Antioch—she lowered her voice. If she made a spectacle of herself in public, her mother’s lecture would last until Gabriel blew his trumpet to call the faithful home.
“How are you doing?” she asked in a hoarse whisper. “Was anybody hurt?”
Veronica gave her a rueful, half-apologetic smile. “Sorry, Mac. Are you okay?” At Mackenzie’s nod, she hitched up the leather duty belt dragging at the waistband of her uniform pants. “Everybody from the department is okay. Sergeant Bloodworth lost some hair—he tried to put out the initial blaze with a bottle of water which turned out to be confiscated hundred-proof moonshine supposed to be booked into evidence—but other than that, all those emergency drills paid off. We got the prisoners out of the holding cells and the building evacuated in three minutes flat.” She beamed.
Mackenzie wanted to lean in and kiss Veronica’s sweetly smiling lips, but their relationship was new, her emotions still too tender to test in front of a dozen witnesses. Besides, she didn’t know if Veronica might appreciate a public display of affection with the boss, Sheriff Newberry, standing less than ten yards away getting primped for a televised press conference with the local news channel.
Girlfriend. The word had the power to make her giggle like a pigtailed teenager high on Sharpie fumes and caffeinated sugar. Warmth spread down her neck to her chest. Just that morning, she and Veronica had woken late and shared a shower. She swallowed and groaned inwardly. The smell of mandarin orange soap rising on the steam, slippery suds and wet touches, desire’s spark flaring higher to a flame…
Flames. The reminder of the ghost sobered her, a chill chasing off the heat of memory. Could the spirit have caused the station fire? “Did you…uh, did you see anything weird?” Veronica could see ghosts, too, but not quite in the same way.
Veronica shuffled closer. Even wearing the unflattering sheriff’s department uniform of a tan button-down shirt, polyester/rayon pants in baby poop brown, clunky shoes and her brunette hair screwed into a bun, she was lovely. “What do you mean by ‘weird?’” She inclined her head to create a small bubble of privacy around them.
“As in supernatural,” Mackenzie said. “You know, a wait-about.” She used the term Veronica’s great-aunt had coined for ghosts.
“In the station, you mean? No.” Veronica’s big green eyes stayed focused on her. “What happened?”
Mackenzie told her about the flat, black figure surrounded by spectral flames. She kept the spirit’s apparent malice to herself. Perhaps she’d been mistaken.
Veronica appeared skeptical when she finished her description. “I’m sure the station fire was caused by an electrical fault, not a wait-about. The building’s old and needs rewiring. We’ve had problems with power surges and temporary outages for months.”
Which explained the suddenness of the fire, Mackenzie thought, but not the apparition she’d seen. “Then what the hell…oh.”
Sunday school lessons and sermons from long ago ran through her mind. The Episcopal church to which her family belonged wasn’t as much into hellfire-and-brimstone preaching as the Baptists, but living in Antioch, she’d heard her share of damnation sermons. What if she hadn’t seen a ghost at all, but something else? Something more sinister.
Her skin prickled. The idea seemed ridiculous in the twenty-first century. Here she stood, surrounded by people talking on cell phones, those marvels of recent technology. Over by Sheriff Newberry, the Channel 10 News cameraman had set up for a live broadcast from Stubbs Park. In a modern setting, how could she even consider such a medieval notion? Yet having made the connection, she couldn’t forget.
“Ronnie, what if I didn’t see a ghost? What if it was a…” Mackenzie paused and finally whispered in Veronica’s ear, “A demon.”
Veronica stared at Mackenzie with a blank face. At last, she blinked and scrubbed her mouth with the back of her hand. “Let’s talk about this later. I’ve got to go back to work.” She offered a brief, unsatisfying hug and walked away toward the street.
Mackenzie didn’t know how to interpret Veronica’s expression. She quelled the urge to run after the woman. Had she said something offensive? They’d been friends for years before they became lovers, and so recently she continued experiencing shivers of “new love” anxiety. Their mutual connection to the spirit world was new, too. Better let the matter lie for now, she
decided. Let Veronica come to her when the time was right.
Now that she knew Veronica and her cousin were all right, she made her way out of the park and headed to her office, stopping at the bakery next door for a couple of their “kitchen sink” cookies to snack on—peanut butter, pumpkin granola, toasted coconut, chocolate chunks, bits of chocolate-covered pretzels, honey-roasted peanuts, pecans and raisins. Each cookie was about as big as her hand.
She took the bakery bag to her office. Bypassing the empty reception area dominated by an unoccupied secretary’s desk, potted Swiss cheese plants and an intimidating espresso machine built on heroic lines, she passed into the more private room in the back.
A Rock-Ola jukebox, her pride and joy, stood pushed against the wall near her antique desk. Another wall, the one without a window, was freshly painted, but she could have sworn she caught a whiff of the last occupant, Annabel Coffin, who had been murdered in the fifties and stuffed behind the drywall to mummify.
“Good luck wherever you are, Annabel,” Mackenzie whispered. Annabel had almost gotten her killed, but she bore no grudge.
Her cell phone rang. She answered without looking at the Caller ID, “Cross speaking.”
“Hey, Mackenzie, I heard you screwed over my brother.”
Damn. Debbie Lou Erskine, the lesbian Mussolini, calling to gloat. Mackenzie bared her teeth, but forced herself not to snarl out loud. “Always a pleasure to hear from you, Deborah Louise,” she cooed in her most saccharine sweet tone. “Had any luck getting rid of that embarrassing rash on your butt? Oh, wait. That’s right. It’s not a rash, it’s the crappy free tattoo you got from some drunk cowboy at the roadhouse, or so I heard.”
“Fuck you.”
“Not even if my life depended on it.”
Debbie Lou snorted. “Whatever, bitch. Turner says he’s going to get a million dollars from you and he’s going to buy me a brand-new trailer, and a flat-screen TV, and a truck, and a bottle of Kahlua, and we’re gonna go to Atlantic City and maybe Vegas. How do you like them apples? Guess Turner’s smarter than all y’all thought in school.”
“You and your brother are so dumb,” Mackenzie gritted, imagining Debbie Lou flouncing around in triumph, “if brains was gas, neither one of you idiots would have enough to drive a pissant’s go-cart around a Cheerio. Now don’t call me again or I’ll file a complaint with whoever’s in charge of animal control!” She stabbed the button to end the call and contemplated hurling her phone at the nearest wall. Fortunately, common sense prevailed.
Turning to her desk, she turned on her computer, frowning when her nose detected a trace of smoke in the air. From the bakery, perhaps?
Unable to shake off the creeping sense of unease, she followed the smell to its source: a wooden filing cabinet in the corner of the room. A shimmer of flame caught her eye. Heat burned her face while her blood ran cold.
Fire!
Chapter Four
Her mouth dry, Mackenzie grabbed the fire extinguisher from beneath her desk, took three steps across the room and sprayed the outside of the burning cabinet. Pull. Aim. Squeeze. Sweep. Thank God she’d paid attention to Sparky the Fire Dog’s safety presentations in middle school.
Greatly daring, she darted closer and wrenched at the brass handle on the top drawer to open it. No fire there. She tried the second drawer, rearing back as a gout of smoke and flame erupted. The heat tightened the skin on her forehead. She aimed the extinguisher and sprayed the cold, high pressure CO2 inside the drawer, sparing an anguished thought for the contents. No actual paper files were stored in the cabinet. She kept something more precious there: her late father’s collection of home movies, shot on Super 8 and irreplaceable.
Once she was certain the fire was out, she opened the window to let in some fresh air and returned to the cabinet to survey the damage. To her puzzlement, nothing appeared to be burned. The film cans were intact, if covered in residue from the flame retardant. No scorch marks, no smoke damage, no charring. A miracle. Her shoulders sagged in relief. She must’ve caught the fire in its earliest stages, before it had a chance to reach the flammable films.
She spent several minutes removing the film cans from the drawer, drying them on a towel she kept in her desk for rainy day emergencies and checking that the films themselves appeared undamaged. Satisfied her father’s precious collection was intact, she stacked the cans in a cardboard box and put them in the storage closet.
Once she settled down, she did a little more work for her business, Finders and Keepers, Inc.—locating rare and/or valuable antiques and collectibles for her clients. At four o’clock, she wrapped up a deal with a bankrupt natural history museum in Ohio for a fossilized Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton. Her client would make arrangements for payment and shipping himself. Having located the prized T. Rex in record time and negotiated a good price on her client’s behalf, her job was done.
Money in the bank, she thought as she typed out an invoice in her computer. She was in the mood to celebrate until she glanced at the clock and a dark, unwelcome thought cast a pall over her good humor. Before she could pick up Veronica and take her out to dinner, she had to visit the newspaper archives to find out about the warehouse fire last month—damn Turnip Erskine, his damned reproduction desk and his damned lawsuit.
The building housing the Antioch Bee, on the corner of Main Street and Washington Avenue, was well within walking distance. She locked her office door and set off toward the newspaper, only to be halted by the unexpected sight of her mother standing outside Mighty Jo Young’s coffee shop talking to another woman. She ran toward her.
“Mama, is everything all right? Are you okay?” Mackenzie didn’t know if she ought to be worried. Sarah Grace Cross née Maynard rarely came downtown except to renew her driver’s license every few years at the DMV office in City Hall. Seeing her here was jarring, like finding a fish up a tree.
“Oh, I’m fine, baby, just fine,” Sarah Grace replied in a slow, gliding Charleston drawl that seemed to linger forever over vowels. She presented a softly wrinkled cheek for Mackenzie to kiss. As always, the fragrance of Chantilly, her favorite perfume, surrounded her like a spicy cloud. “Did you hear about the church?”
“It was terrible, Kenzie, just terrible,” the other woman interrupted in hushed tones, her round face scrunched up with disapproval. Mackenzie recognized the gray-haired Mrs. Pennyroyal, a stalwart member of All Saints Episcopal Church and a decades-long guest at her mother’s biweekly pinochle parties. “Poor Reverend Wilde is beside himself. The statue of Our Lady was damaged, you know. Blistered paint all along the bottom. He’s certain one of those little hoodlums from the children’s choir was smoking in the chapel.” She clutched her purse to the front of her rose-printed dress. “Probably that Martin boy.”
“No, surely not, Euphoria,” Sarah Grace protested. “He’s only eleven years old.”
“Old enough for me to catch him stealing green peaches from my tree and throwing them at Mr. Boodles,” Mrs. Pennyroyal countered sharply, referring to her aged Pekingese.
Despite her desire to visit the newspaper and finish her self-appointed task, Mackenzie’s curiosity prompted her to ask, “What happened at the church?”
Sarah Grace, with frequent interruptions and exclamations from Mrs. Pennyroyal, explained there had been a fire in All Saints’ lady chapel the previous evening. “We were blessed that Euphoria was delivering a bouquet of her prize-winning Vicks Caprice pink roses for the altar and she smelled the smoke.”
“Oh, I didn’t do anything special.” Evident pride swelled Mrs. Pennyroyal’s bosom. “I’d filled a vase with water, you know, and just poured it right on the fire. Put it out like that.” She snapped her fingers. “But the damage was done. I suppose we’ll have to organize a bake sale to raise money for the repairs. I’ll start contacting the ladies on our phone tree. Sarah Grace, I can count on you for a double batch of your famous bourbon snaps, I hope?”
“Of course, Euphoria. And I’d better do the lemon bars
, too, since Sophie’s in the hospital for knee replacement surgery. Let’s not forget Maybelline Gooch. I’m still trying to get her to part with that delicious hummingbird cake recipe.”
“Good idea, Sarah Grace. Just let me find my glasses and write this down before I forget…”
Mackenzie left the two women to their discussion and continued toward the newspaper in a more thoughtful mood. A fire in the police station. A fire in the church. The warehouse fire last month. Even the weird blaze in her office today. Was a serial arsonist at work in Antioch? Or was the admittedly small rash of fires merely a coincidence?
Inside the Antioch Bee, Mackenzie sidled up to the hundred-year-old mahogany counter protecting the newsroom—the bullpen—from the public. James “Little Jack” Larkin and another reporter, Roy Hendricks, sat at their desks talking on their respective phones. Not wanting to disturb her friend, she waved at Marilyn Hayes, junior journalist and “copy boy.”
“Hey, Marilyn,” she said when the brown-haired young woman came over to the counter. “I talked to Little Jack a while ago. He said it was okay if I went looking in the archives for a story y’all did on that warehouse fire.”
“Ma Parker’s Pot O’ Soup?” Marilyn’s frown cleared. “I remember. Last month, right? I’ll set up the microfiche for you.” She sighed. “I wish Mr. Wyatt would give us the go-ahead to digitize the back issues, but he says there’s no money in the budget this year.”
Mackenzie doubted George Wyatt, the Bee’s publisher and owner, would see the value of spending any money on the project now or in the future. Before his death, her father had told her Wyatt was such a cheapskate he’d skin a flea for the hide and tallow.
She followed Marilyn down a narrow staircase to the basement housing the newspaper’s “morgue.” In this dank and gloomy place, illuminated solely by a lightbulb in a cage fixture dangling from the ceiling, were metal shelves holding reference works, paper files and stacks of microfiche-preserved issues of the Antioch Bee going back to its founding.