Happy Medium: (Intermix)

by Meg Benjamin

  Skag nodded slowly. “I’ll see if Mr. Hampton is available for a conversation. In the meantime, you should carefully examine all the objects that were left in the house. Look for anything that might have been there in 1927. You’d be surprised at what people leave behind.”

  Ray frowned. “What are we looking for? What does a love token look like?”

  Skag’s eyebrow arched up. “I’ve no idea, never having been a lovesick maiden. Why not ask Ms. Shea?”

  Ray managed not to grimace. He had a feeling Emma wouldn’t have any more idea than he did. He couldn’t picture her as a lovesick maiden, no matter how hard he tried. “Anything else?”

  “Inspect the house. That’s the most important thing you can do at the moment. Meanwhile, I’ll do my best to find out what you’re dealing with in terms of this particular ghost.” He began to fade slightly around the edges.

  Ray wasn’t sure he wanted to watch someone become transparent. It was sort of . . . disconcerting. “How do I get in touch with you?”

  “You don’t.” Skag’s teeth flashed in the dim light. “If and when I have any information, I’ll contact you.”

  He leaned forward in his chair, as if that could slow Skag’s transformation. “What do I do if I find this love token?”

  Skag paused in mid-fade. Ray could see the texture of the chair upholstery through his chest. “You destroy it, of course. Pound it into dust. Then throw the dust into the wind.”

  Ray nodded. “And then?”

  “And then,” Skag said, his voice echoing in the room, “should any of the spirit-haunted object remain, you run like the very devil.”

  Ray blinked again, but the ghost had finally disappeared.

  Chapter 15

  Ray seemed preoccupied at breakfast. Emma hoped he didn’t regret asking her to stay with him. She really preferred Rosie’s place to her motel room, mostly because she really preferred being in Ray’s bed to sleeping alone. Finally, he raised his gaze to hers and smiled.

  Her heart gave a quick flip. Well, all right then.

  “You have anything on the agenda today?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “I was going to head back to the historical society to see if any of the other owners left interesting skeletons in the closet. So to speak.”

  He shook his head. “It’s Sunday. They’re closed.”

  “Oh hell. I forgot what day it is. I guess I don’t have any plans, then.”

  “Good. I want to go through the storeroom at the Hampton house to see if there’s anything there that predates Hampton. Maybe you could help me date stuff. I’m not sure I’ll know if something comes from the twenties.”

  “I’m not sure I will either, but I’ll try.” She took a sip of her coffee. “Are we looking for the love token?”

  He nodded. “The storeroom may the easiest place to start. Given our luck so far, I don’t know how likely we are to find anything. To tell you the truth, I don’t exactly know what a love token looks like.”

  She shrugged. “Something sweet, I guess. Romantic.”

  Ray’s grin was slightly crooked. In his low-slung jeans and gray T-shirt he didn’t look either sweet or romantic. Just very, very hot.

  “The Hampton house doesn’t exactly strike me as a romantic kind of place. And the situation with Amina Becker and Livingston Grunewald seems more like a business relationship.”

  “Maybe not from Amina’s point of view.” Emma took another in a series of deep breaths, raising her chin. As a matter of fact, going back to the Hampton house was not high on her list of fun activities. “Romantic or not, we have to start somewhere. Might as well be there.”

  He reached across the table, laying his hand over hers. “You don’t have to do this, Emma. Not if you don’t want to.”

  She frowned. “Sure I do. I mean, it’s sort of my fault that we’re having to do this at all.”

  He shook his head. “Your fault? How do you figure that?”

  She sighed. It was something she’d been thinking about for a couple of days. “It is my fault. I brought Gabrielle into your life. It wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t.”

  “You don’t know that.” He pulled her closer, running his fingers lightly up her bare arm. “We don’t know what triggered this. It might have happened whether Gabrielle was there or not. And anyway, I brought Great-grandma Siobhan into your life, so we’re even.”

  Her smile was a little more solid. “Believe me, I got the better deal. I’ll take Siobhan over Gabrielle any day.”

  “Maybe so.” He lightly touched his lips to hers. Even lightly it made her heart pound a little faster. “Shall we try this anyway?”

  She nodded slowly, gathering her courage. “Let’s.”

  ***

  Ray hadn’t been sure whether to tell Emma about Skag or not. After considering it, he leaned toward not. If he told her, he’d have to explain about Rosie and her profession, and he wasn’t ready to do that. Plus, of course, it wasn’t his story. He needed Rosie’s permission before he told anybody else what she did for a living.

  Yeah right. Mr. Ethics here.

  He sighed as he pulled into the driveway at the Hampton house. The general weirdness that had invaded his life had left him feeling more than slightly confused. He hadn’t talked to Kevin for three or four days, and he hadn’t passed on any of the progress reports he’d promised after he’d moved into the house. Somehow, he didn’t think his business partner would be delighted to hear that the house they’d sunk their savings into was inhabited by a ghost, particularly a ghost that might make the place impossible to sell.

  Beside him, Emma gathered up her purse and a couple of the printouts she seemed to carry with her everywhere. Her hand brushed against his, and he felt a brief jolt of electricity. As a matter of fact, Emma was the only thing that made this whole adventure something other than an ordeal. If he had anything to be grateful for in all of this, Emma was it.

  The storeroom was at the back of the house off the kitchen, probably a servant’s room originally. Right now it was loaded with stuff the Hampton heirs had decided they didn’t want to take with them after they’d cleared out everything saleable. And given the predatory nature of the Hampton heirs, anything they’d decided to leave behind probably wasn’t worth spit.

  He stood in the doorway, surveying the contents. A metal pole lamp leaned against the far wall, next to a pine chest of drawers that looked like it had been purchased at a discount store. A low-end discount store. Discarded armchairs and an overstuffed couch were pushed against the walls. Stacks of books leaned drunkenly across the middle of the floor, along with stacks of beat-up cardboard boxes filled with what looked like faded magazines and newspapers.

  He sighed. He should have cleaned this stuff out a long time ago, but he’d been preoccupied with getting the walls and floors done in the other rooms. With any luck, some of this crap could go to the Salvation Army or Goodwill—whoever agreed to cart it away. The rest would have to be set out for trash pickup.

  “Where should we start?” Emma stood behind him, her hands on her hips. At least she was wearing her jeans today. He’d hate to see what her usual working clothes would look like after a day spent digging through this junk room.

  “A lot of it we can take outside for trash pickup. Particularly the papers and magazines.”

  She nodded. “I guess we need to go through all those cartons, but they don’t look that old. We probably won’t find much that’s from earlier than twenty or thirty years ago.”

  He doubted they’d find much at all, except for mildew and silverfish. “You take the books, I’ll take the boxes. If you see anything that looks old or valuable, let me know.”

  She gave him a doubtful look. He could see her point. Old they might have. Valuable was a stretch.

  Three hours later, he’d managed to move about half of the boxes out to the hall. He’d
also carried four stacks of newspapers and magazines to the curb for recycling. All of them probably meant something to Hampton but not to the nieces and nephews who’d emptied the place. In this particular case, he was on the side of the nieces and nephews.

  Emma flipped idly through the pages of a photo album, one of several she’d found in a box. “Most of the pictures look like they’re from the eighties—the Hampton family, I guess. Wonder why his relatives didn’t take them.”

  “Probably didn’t care enough.” He felt a brief tug of sympathy. Nobody was left to care about Allard Hampton and his life, not even those he’d left his belongings to.

  “That’s sad,” she said slowly. “I hope somebody happy buys this place.”

  He sighed. “I just hope somebody buys this place, period.” He started to dig through another box—clippings, magazines, old business records and notebooks. “Have you found anything that seemed to be older than the Hampton stuff?”

  She shook her head. “It really is mostly junk. There’s nothing in those boxes except family memorabilia. I guess that counts as keepsakes, but it’s nothing I’d call a love token. And so far as I can tell, it has nothing to do with the Grunewalds. What about the furniture?”

  “What about it?”

  “Is it worth anything?”

  He shook his head, glancing at the scarred dresser and the worn chairs. “Too new and too cheap. I don’t think even mid-century collectors would be into this stuff. I’ll give it to Goodwill or the Disabled American Vets if I can get somebody to come pick it up. Maybe they can get a few bucks for it.”

  “Is there anything else in here?” She pushed herself to her feet, wandering to a stack of pictures leaning against the wall.

  “What you see is what you get.” He nodded toward a velvet-covered armchair in the corner. “That could be older—it looks like forties to me.”

  She turned to study the chair. “Maybe,” she said doubtfully. “That looks like a drop-leaf table over there too. Probably from earlier than that.”

  He moved another carton out of the way. The table was missing one of the sides, but under all the dust, it looked like a bona fide antique. “Keepsake?”

  She shook her head. “Can you imagine the fortune-teller giving her something like that as a way to hold on to Livingston? Not gonna happen.”

  He sighed. “Yeah, you’re right. But we need to clear out some of this junk so that we can see if there’s anything else in here that might have come from Grunewald or Amina.” He pulled two more cartons—both apparently filled with more magazines—away from the wall.

  Emma started to lift the first few pictures off the stack leaning against the wall when something chirped. She fumbled her cell phone from her pocket. “Crap, it’s Gabrielle. I’ve got to take this.”

  “Go for it.” He heaved another carton toward the center of the room. With any luck somebody might call him too. Another hour spent digging through this crud and he’d be ready for a distracting conversation with just about anyone. Even Gabrielle DeVere.

  ***

  “Good morning, Gabrielle,” Emma said brightly as she stepped into the hall. She hoped it was still morning. She hadn’t really had time to check.

  “Oh, Emma, where are you?” Gabrielle wailed. “I have things for you to do.”

  Emma rubbed her eyes. Gabrielle was living proof of the out of sight, out of mind idea. She’d apparently forgotten that Emma wasn’t at her immediate beck and call at the moment. “I’m still here in San Antonio, researching the Hampton house.”

  “The what?” Gabrielle sounded more vague than usual and possibly hungover.

  “The house we’re going to use for the show we do here. It belonged to a man named Hampton. Most recently, that is.”

  “Hampton? Oh dear, that sounds English. English ghosts are never any good. I guess we’ll have to scratch it.”

  When Gabrielle was in this kind of mood it was usually best to just go with the flow. “I’ve found some interesting information about the place. Things we might be able to use.”

  “You found something interesting about English ghosts? I doubt it. They’re never interesting.”

  Emma took hold of her temper. “Not English ghosts. The ghosts here are American. It’s a love triangle.” Sort of. If you counted Alexander Grunewald as one corner. “And a suicide.”

  Gabrielle sighed. “Oh all right, let’s hear it.”

  “It happened back in the twenties,” Emma said quickly. “A man named Livingston Grunewald lived in the house along with his mistress.”

  “Livingston? Really? See, it still sounds English, and I told you English ghosts don’t work.”

  Emma pinched the bridge of her nose. Apparently, the Grunewald part had slipped right by Gabrielle’s radar. “Livingston Grunewald isn’t the potential ghost in the house. It’s the mistress we’re interested in.”

  Gabrielle sighed again. “All right. Go on.”

  “Like I said, Livingston moved his mistress into his house. Her name was Amina Becker. But his father owned the house, and when he found out that Livingston had brought his mistress home, he wasn’t happy.”

  “Why not? He wasn’t living there, was he? That doesn’t sound logical. Unless it was some kind of ménage à trois?” Gabrielle sounded more interested than she had before.

  “No. The father didn’t live there,” Emma explained patiently. “He was just concerned about the scandal. He didn’t want the neighbors to find out.”

  Gabrielle snorted. “But that’s silly. Why would anybody care?”

  “It was 1927, Gabrielle. A lot of people would have cared. Particularly in the King William District.” Emma gritted her teeth. Probably best not to push her too far.

  “Oh very well, I suppose different times, different ideas. So this terribly unromantic father tells his son to get rid of his girlfriend. And then what happened?”

  “The son did it. He told her to get out.”

  There was a long pause on the other end of the line. Emma felt a cool breeze whispering along her bare arms even though she was standing well away from the air-conditioning vents. Maybe Amina was listening. Livingston Grunewald really had been a rank bastard. Emma might have been inclined to be more sympathetic if the phantom Amina hadn’t been throwing things around at the house.

  “And then?” Gabrielle sounded like she was talking through a mouth full of food. Great. She’s multitasking.

  “Amina hanged herself,” Emma said flatly. “She left him a note saying she couldn’t live without him. The police hushed it up, and the older Grunewald sold the house.”

  Maybe it was her imagination, but the house seemed to go still. She couldn’t even hear the birdsongs from outside anymore. And now she definitely had gooseflesh from the cold air. She hoped it was just a draft in the hall, but she was fairly certain it wasn’t. She strode quickly toward the front door.

  “It that all?” Gabrielle was still chewing.

  “Yes.” Emma stepped out onto the front gallery, closing the door firmly behind her. At least the afternoon air outside was warm. The front door had seemed to close a little more briskly than usual, but maybe there was a breeze. “As I said, I think we can do something with it. There are no pictures of Amina that I know of, but I might be able to find some stock photos that we could show while you tell the story.”

  “The twenties,” Gabrielle mused. “Flappers. Bathtub gin. I suppose that might make for something interesting. At least it’ll be different from the Victorian ghosts we’ve dealt with before in San Antonio. When can you be ready?”

  “Um . . . soon?” Emma licked her lips. Filming in the house with a real ghost might be tricky—she didn’t think they’d ever done it before. But maybe she and Ray could find the keepsake. Of course, she had no idea what they’d do with it after they did—maybe use it to get rid of the spirit before it could make any trouble.


  “We’ll need it by the end of the week. The company will come back on Saturday. Then we’ll film Sunday or Monday. You’ll need to get everything ready before then.”

  Emma did a quick survey of all the possible excuses she could come up with for delaying the filming. Unfortunately, she couldn’t think of anything that would convince Gabrielle to give them more time. “I’ll see what I can do,” she muttered.

  “Make it by Saturday,” Gabrielle snapped. And then she was gone.

  Emma turned back toward the house, staring at the darkened upstairs windows. If just retelling Amina’s story had been enough to cause a significant drop in temperature, what would happen if they actually tried to contact Amina directly with a séance? She had a feeling the next few days weren’t going to be a lot of fun.

  She wandered back to the storeroom, rubbing her arms for heat. “Does it seem cold in here to you?”

  Ray glanced up from where he was digging through one of the cartons. “Maybe a little. I’ll check the thermostat.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think it’s the air-conditioning. Maybe Amina took the opportunity to give us a little reminder that she’s still around.”

  “Amina.” He blew out a breath. “Well, if she chills the house, at least it’ll save on utility bills. What’s up with Gabrielle?”

  “More good news. They’re coming back next weekend. She thinks they’ll film a week from today.”

  Ray stood slowly. “Which means it would be a good idea to get this ghost problem under some kind of control by then.”

  “At least. Did you find anything?”

  “Not much. How are you on dating pictures?”

  “I know a little bit about art history. I can try.”

  He picked up a painting in a heavy frame, extending it to her. “Looks like something old, but I don’t know how old.”

  Emma studied the landscape—dark trees and grass, threatening sky, white blobs that might have been sheep. The wooden frame was gilded, the edge so jagged with scallops it almost looked dangerous. “The frame looks like it dates from the early twentieth century. It’s probably worth more than the picture is.”