Poltergeist (Greywalker, Book 2)

by Kat Richardson

  “I usually cover for missing minions and then I chew them out later.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “Why?”

  “You might want to have someone stay late, in case Mark doesn’t show.”

  “And why wouldn’t he come to work?”

  “Just a feeling. Things didn’t go well at the project today.”

  Phoebe gave me a speculative look.

  “I’m just suggesting.” I stood up. “Phoebe, I know I’m going to have more questions, but I can’t think of them right now.”

  “You aren’t the only one with questions, Harper. I’ll want an explanation if Mark doesn’t show up.”

  I glanced away. “You’ll get one.”

  I collected my jacket and left the shop. It was now a quarter of eight and still raining.

  I walked a block in the rain to the statue of Lenin and used the pay phone on the side of the building behind him. The zigzag metal awning of a shop called Deluxe Junk kept me from getting soaked as I called Tuckman.

  “Dr. Tuckman, Harper Blaine. Have you received any information about Mark Lupoldi yet?”

  “No. Why? Didn’t you speak to him?”

  “He wasn’t available.” Chances were good Solis was still looking for next of kin to notify and wouldn’t catch up to Tuckman for a while, so I’d keep my knowledge to myself for now. “Look, Dr. Tuckman, I’m not sure that what you’re getting is normal activity you can—”

  He cut me off. “There is nothing normal about what happened this afternoon. That table was not acting ‘normally.’ ”

  “What’s normal about a table running around the room and climbing the walls?”

  “Exactly. Exactly,” he emphasized. “It shouldn’t have that much energy.”

  “I understand that, but what I meant is that I think there’s a bit more going on here than someone faking phenomena.”

  “What are you suggesting? That there’s a real ghost?” He scoffed. “Before I’d consider that, you’d have to prove it couldn’t be anything else—which you won’t be able to do. Don’t go chasing ghosts, Ms. Blaine. All I require is that you take the usual steps and follow the usual protocols, nothing more. Leave the ghost stories to my subjects. And when you catch up to Mark, make sure he knows I need to speak to him.”

  I could feel myself frowning and was glad of the darkness that concealed my sour expression from passersby. “If I catch up to Mr. Lupoldi, I’ll be sure to let him know,” I replied. And I hoped I wouldn’t ever see him again. I’d had as much contact with his shock and pain as I wanted. I didn’t know what the medical examiner would find, but whatever had caused Mark’s death had surprised him as much as anyone and left some freakish traces—or a lack of them.

  “Good. I’ll be very upset with Mr. Lupoldi if he doesn’t show up on Sunday,” Tuckman continued. “The group may waver if he misses two sessions in a row.” Then he hung up on me.

  I doubted the group would have much enthusiasm for Sunday’s séance once they learned Mark was dead, but that revelation would have to wait on Solis. While I was convinced they could go further unaided than Tuckman believed they could, I wasn’t sure they could go far enough to harm someone. The table had been damned frisky. What else could they do? And, as Tuckman had put it, how far would they go?

  I hoped I wouldn’t have to convince Tuckman of the existence of things that go bump in the night. If it was more than a physical saboteur, I’d have to exhaust all the prosaic options before there was any chance Tuckman would agree that his phenomena were real, and he would resist that to the end. I’d have to know how it all worked and who might have the motive as well as the ability—or not—before I could prove to him it wasn’t faked. There were days my life would have been easier if more people believed in ghosts.

  I had a strange feeling about this case. I still didn’t think Tuckman was being straight with me and that pissed me off. And I didn’t like what had happened to Mark. I tried not to make assumptions, but Solis was just as bothered as I was, and though Mark’s death wasn’t my case, it didn’t seem entirely unconnected.

  I stuffed down my misgivings and paged Quinton. I waited for him to call me back, listening to the rain play music on the metal awning. When he called, I arranged to pick up the ferret on my way home, then headed back to my truck.

  About eleven o’clock, I was stretched out on my sofa at home with Chaos snoozing in the crook of my arm while I pretended to care what was on TV. The phone rang, interrupting a commercial that featured dancing clams. I smiled, remembering Phoebe’s jibe about my absent paramour, and picked up the phone.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Hello, Harper.” The warmth in his voice was almost a caress, speeding my breath and raising heat beneath my skin all the way from England.

  “Good morning, Mr. Novak.”

  “Should I say ‘Good evening, Miss Blaine’?”

  “Do you want to sound like a Cary Grant movie?”

  “Only if it’s one of the films where he gets the girl.”

  “Wasn’t that most of them?”

  “Probably. He even got the girl in Suspicion,though he wasn’t supposed to.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. “I read the book.”

  “So . . . which ending do you prefer?”

  “I’d have liked to see the book ending. Even charming, handsome guys can be coldhearted killers—but that’s probably my cynical occupation talking.”

  “How is your cynical occupation at the moment?”

  There was a slight chill in his sigh and my rush of happiness crashed. I frowned and was glad phones didn’t have video feed. I sometimes thought his absence kept our on-again, off-again relationship from foundering completely on the rocks of my occulted life, but even fondness-engendering distance didn’t seem to be working now. “Nothing special,” I answered, “though I ran into Detective Solis today.”

  “I remember him. I recall he’s pretty fierce for a quiet guy.”

  “I wouldn’t care to be on his bad side.”

  “I hope nothing you’re doing is tangled up with any of his cases.”

  “No,” I lied. I did not want to talk about Solis or my job. “How’s Sotheby’s?”

  “I’m almost at the end of this contract.”

  He fell silent. I waited.

  “An independent valuation firm is chatting me up, though. It’s mostly insurance work, but it’s interesting, and I guess I’m getting a bit of a reputation in the right circles.”

  Another stumbling silence. “So, are you thinking of taking the offer if they make one?” I asked.

  “Maybe. I’d still have to come home for a while to satisfy the alien worker requirements. But I could be home for Christmas. I wouldn’t want to disrupt Michael’s school schedule here, but we could work it out.” Michael was Will’s much-younger brother, still in school, though studying for British college exams now—when he wasn’t cutting class to work on vintage motorcycles. “I could always look for something in the US. . . .”

  “If you’re thinking of doing that for me, Will, then you know I’ll tell you not to. If you want to come back, you have to come for yourself.”

  That was the crux of our problem: Will wanted a stable, honest relationship and the best I could offer was a catch-as-catch-can string of interrupted dates, creepy clients, and mysterious disappearances—which had almost brought our romance to an end on the first date. I wasn’t very good at separating my work from my life—especially since the Grey and its denizens didn’t respect office hours—and that was something I doubted I could break Will to, even if I’d wanted to.

  I’m not the sort of woman who wants to remodel “her man” and I wouldn’t care to be in the opposite position, either. We’d set off sparks from the moment we’d met, but Will and I didn’t have compatible lives and I could never tell him the reason and he wouldn’t believe it if I did. Which was why I was in Seattle and Will was in London. I may have fallen into bed with him the first time for all the wrong reasons—and I didn’t reg
ret it one bit—but neither of us could live our life for the other no matter how great the sex was when we managed to have it.

  Will sighed. “You’re still impossible.”

  My heart dropped and I felt cold with a childish desire to cry. I swallowed it back down, like I always have. “Yup,” I replied in a bright voice. “That’s me: Impossible Girl.”

  “Sounds like a cartoon.”

  “The kind the Korean studios make for Japanese audiences and then dub with American voices: seriously messed up.”

  He laughed. “All right, Impossible Girl. I—I have to cut this short. Maybe I’ll make it for Christmas. But now I have to go. The bloody tube’s on strike again, so I’m walking to work.”

  My turn to laugh. “You sound so British. Next you’ll be complaining about the wretched Americans, voting Labor, and insisting that ‘tire’ is spelled with a Y.”

  “Can’t vote: I’m one of the wretched Americans. OK, I’m off. I’ll call again Friday, OK?”

  “I’ll look forward to it.”

  “Me, too.” He hung up and I shivered, still holding the phone and conscious of being alone but for the ferret.

  SEVEN

  Thursday I chased down other cases and read files until three, Twhen Quinton showed up to help me install a DVD drive on my office computer. I had a DVD player on my TV at home, but I didn’t want to have to drag all the files and notes back and forth every day. Once the device was up and running, we sat down to watch a few of the discs together. I hoped Quinton would be able to point out the ghost-making machinery in action. We huddled in front of the monitor like a couple of kids watching scary movies on Halloween. All we needed was some popcorn and blankets.

  The first session hadn’t been very interesting and they didn’t improve for a while. The group had sat stiffly around the table in reduced light, meditating for a while, then just sitting and talking about Celia and getting nothing, though they did seem to establish some rapport. Eventually, they’d tried to replicate the Philip group’s technique by singing a song Celia might like—an off-key version of “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree.”

  “They sing as badly as you,” Quinton said. I dug a sharp elbow into his ribs and snorted.

  After quite a while, they got a single distinct rap, which we both suspected was caused by one the participants—possibly by accident. But even though it was plain to us that the rap wasn’t a legit phenomenon, the group seemed to be pleased with it and gave themselves credit. No one was upset by the knocking, though the Asian woman and the man in the business suit both frowned a bit. Other reactions ranged from surprise to delight, though I thought the young tawny-skinned man looked just a touch smug about it.

  It was strange to see Mark alive and well and sitting at the table with the group. He seemed a touch more solemn than the rest—more serious than I’d ever seen him at Old Possum’s. Except for Mark’s demeanor, nothing seemed odd about the early sessions.

  I made a couple of notes and we worked through more of the early recordings. The group got more relaxed with one another and their methods over time. They chatted a bit before each session. I noticed that the middle-aged couple kept their backs to each other most of the time and that the housewife tended to scowl unless she was in conversation with the young, single men—then she got coquettish. In one session, the group talked about the recent start of baseball season. One of the young men asked if Celia liked baseball and they began discussing it, elaborating on their ghost.

  The middle-aged woman—striking, blond, and buff even in a suit—broke in, impatiently: “Why don’t we just ask her? Celia, did you enjoy baseball?”

  The table jiggled side to side; then one loud rap was followed by a quieter second knock. Mark’s eyes got very big.

  We both leaned forward and peered at the screen. “Can you pause that?” I asked.

  Quinton tapped the computer keyboard and the image froze.

  “Back it up. I want to see what happened.”

  The event ran backward for an instant, then began crawling forward, frame by frame. The table rocked the same way Quinton had made it move on Wednesday. “That’s the booth controls moving the table, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “Yeah. You can see the feet of the table rising the same way they did in the lab, and the infrared camera recorded the slight rise in temperature in the rug’s coils,” he confirmed. He advanced the frame a bit farther and we could see Mark’s elbow flex off the edge of the table a little just as the first knock came. “The guy with the long hair did that.”

  I nodded. He advanced the picture. The group remained still. The second knock came. “But he didn’t do that,” I said.

  Quinton studied the frame. “No, he didn’t. I don’t see anyone else moving, so the sound wasn’t made by anyone at the table. And it sounds different. Let me take a look at that. . . .”

  He began typing and poking about in the files, using the mouse to select something from the recording’s timeline. He dragged several jagged waveform bits off to the side of the screen and enlarged them. He typed a quick tag for each one.

  “All right. Look at these and listen.” He poked the machine and it began playing the knocks while it ran a red line over the waveforms.

  “This is the knock the Indian guy made in the previous session.” It had a large lump in front and a short tail and sounded sharp, deep, and wooden.

  I glanced at Quinton. “Indian?”

  “Well, he looks Indian to me—Asian Indian, not Native American Indian—though I guess he could be Arabic or Asian. . . .”

  I considered it and logged the identification in my mind. For some reason “Indian” hadn’t even occurred to me as a tag for the bronze-skinned man with the puckish smile. No one on Tuckman’s list had a name that sounded Indian, though.

  Quinton drew me back to the knocks, pointing at the next waveform on the screen. “This is the one the long-haired guy just made—the first knock.” It was blunter in front than the first one, but otherwise very similar in shape and tone.

  “Now, this is the second knock.” The waveform was shaped like a porpoise with a long, shallow slope before a bulging round shape that tailed off slowly to a sudden, short spike. It had a more hollow sound than the others and ended with a pop almost too short to notice.

  Quinton moved the cursor down to another waveform on the screen. “This one I got from the comparison report file. It’s labeled ‘Celia’—which is the name of their ‘ghost,’ right?”

  “Yes.”

  Quinton made the last two waveforms larger. “They’re not identical, but they’re very similar. The length of the slope on the front is shorter in the comparison notes version and the decay at the end is a little shorter, too, but the basic shapes of the main waveforms are the same, right down to the sharp snap at the end.”

  “So that knock came from Celia.”

  Quinton nodded. “Yeah, I’d say that whatever Celia is, it made that noise.”

  I nibbled on my lower lip for a moment before asking, “Why are the two knocks different?”

  “I’d guess that’s caused by experience. The slope at the front is some kind of windup that you can’t hear at normal volumes, but the mics picked it up under the table. And I’d guess that pop at the end is, basically, the shutdown—kind of like pulling the plug. As they got better at making the noise, they didn’t need to wind up so long, or wait as long to pull the plug.”

  I considered that and agreed with Quinton’s analysis, though I wasn’t thinking in terms of switches and household wiring. “But what is the noise?” I thought aloud. “It’s not some object hitting the table. . . .”

  Quinton nodded. “Yeah, it’s not. Something hitting the table would have a similar waveform to the other two. In those two, the hard peak at the front is the actual impact of a fist or something on the wood and the rest of the envelope is the resonance and decay through the wood surface. The Celia knocks have that subaudible component in front of the impact on the wood, and their resonan
ce and decay are different, more like they’re happening in the wood rather than on or under it.”

  I cocked my head to the side and looked at him. “What could do that?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think . . . it actually could be a ghost?”

  He looked hard at me and frowned. “You’re serious.”

  “Yeah. What do you think?”

  “I’ve seen enough weird stuff in this town that I wouldn’t say it couldn’t be a ghost, but I don’t know.”

  I looked at the screen again and pointed at Mark. “The guy using the table tricks—the one with the long, dark hair—he died yesterday in a very nasty way.”

  Quinton looked at Mark’s image, then back at me. “What are you getting at?”

  “I’m not sure. This thing is giving me a bad feeling.”

  “Well, the guy’s dead, so . . . yeah, I can understand that.”

  “Tuckman thinks someone is faking more phenomena than they’re actually getting, but if that knock is real, then maybe they aren’t. And if they aren’t faking, what is going on? The stuff they did yesterday was a lot more impressive than this.”

  “You think it’s real? Or do you think they faked it?”

  “I just don’t know.”

  “Well, let’s see what else they can do, on camera, before you make up your mind.” He resumed the session replay.

  On the screen, Mark Lupoldi still looked surprised. The rest of the group just nodded. The female executive continued to question the ghost. “Did you go to the games with Jimmy?”

  There was a long pause before a pair of hesitant knocks sounded.

  I glanced at Quinton. He paused the replay and opened the sound window again. Expanded to a large size, the waveforms were easy to spot. Two porpoise shapes, closely connected nose to tail with only a single pop at the end of the pair.

  “That’s interesting,” Quinton noted. “These are connected and the slope on the second one is shorter, even though there’s a pause in the sound. Maybe it needs less energy to create another noise once it’s started.”

  “And the pop comes only at the end of the whole message,” I added.