A Dash of Murder (Pecan Bayou Series)

by Teresa Trent

  “Not exactly,” I said, as my breathing steadied. “We were down the dead tunnel and got rushed by probably a hundred or so bats.”

  Howard walked over to the door we had just so ceremoniously slammed shut. He nodded his head in the affirmative. “Good to know. I’ll need to make sure the film crew knows about the bats when we attempt filming down the dead tunnel. We’ll be filming at night, and as you know, bats are nocturnal and will probably be out on their evening hunt.”

  I reflected again on the name of the passageway from which I had just escaped. Funny how nobody seems to mention a name like that until you get near the tunnel. After my recent experience with it, I wasn’t so sure ghost hunting was for me. This was the paranormal experience more suited for seasoned investigators who wanted the bejeezus scared out of them. It was not for someone like me, who now totally owned up to the whole chicken thing.

  “Aunt Maggie, I don’t think I can go back down that tunnel again. Is there somewhere we can check out that’s not quite so creepy?”

  Howard glared. “Being a paranormal investigator is not for the weak of heart. I thought Maggie explained to you that we could be crossing into worlds unknown.”

  Great. First I get rushed by bats, and now a lecture from “Dr. Who Took My Brain.”

  “You got me, Howard. When it comes to ghost hunting, I’m just an amateur.”

  “Come on, Howard. Give the kid a break. It is creepy down that dead tunnel. I think we need a bigger team than just the two of us. How’s about we go to a nice, open place like the solarium upstairs? Not so claustrophobic-feeling, and there might be some lingering spirits up there. That was probably one of the places people were happiest here.”

  Yay for my Aunt Maggie for coming up with that one.

  “You have a point,” Howard conceded. “It might have been an uplifting experience for the patients, producing a positive energy dynamic for the spirits.”

  With Howard’s blessing, we headed up the creaking stairs to the second level of the hospital. As we ascended, a smothering heat came upon us. I sure hoped some of these lingering spirits brought a fan with them.

  “Hot enough for ya?” Maggie said. In Pecan Bayou, this phrase was Texan for “Hello” and could easily be exchanged at any time for “How do you do?” or “Have a nice day.”

  We came to a long open room with one side banked in windows. There were still a few rusty bed frames standing against the opposite wall. Thinking about the stifling heat, I wondered how anyone would want to be in this room in the times before air conditioning. There were plenty of windows for a cross breeze, but on a day like today, any breeze was a stranger. We shuffled along as my aunt looked up and around. I think she was expecting a full-fledged apparition to pop up in front of her.

  “This was the sun porch,” Howard said. “They believed lots of sunshine could cure TB. Crazy today. Many people passed on in these rooms. We are thick with paranormal activity here.” He waved around a little metal device that looked like a phaser from Star Trek.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “I’m measuring the EMF readings. Paranormal beings emit electrical signals that can be picked up.”

  “Not good if you’re ghost huntin’ at the power company though,” Aunt Maggie said.

  Even though there was plenty of light up here, I couldn’t shake the dead tunnel out of my mind. I felt like backing up, not crunching forward following Maggie and Howard through the scattered papers, broken plaster and shredded wallpaper.

  Howard went on with what was turning out to be a walking tour of the old place. “The town built this hospital back in 1911 when tuberculosis was called ‘consumption.’ The building could house one hundred patients.”

  “Did many people die?”

  “If someone was diagnosed with tuberculosis, they were required to stay at a hospital for three to five years. During this time, maybe ten out of a hundred people might die, so it wasn’t necessarily a death sentence,” Howard said.

  I reached out and touched a rusty sign. “Hmm, no smoking. It’s a wonder they even had to put that up in a tuberculosis hospital,” I said.

  “In the beginning they didn’t even know smokin’ was bad for you. They probably put it up because the smoke made the sheets stink,” Aunt Maggie said.

  We looked down the hall at the doors lined up like old soldiers waiting for their assignments. It was like some kind of macabre bedroom farce movie. In my mind, I could see spirits running in and out of the unhinged doors hanging from the doorways. Aunt Maggie fingered the tiny cross at her neck.

  “When I looked at the old blueprints,” Maggie said, “I saw a room up here that would be perfect for the angle of the cameras and what light we can produce. We can run an electric cord right out the window to the van below. “

  We walked down the hallway, which was spray-painted with more graffiti and littered with torn-off strips of wallpaper.

  “What would it have been like to have to stay in this place for five years? No family, no home. It must have been very lonely,” I said.

  We walked to Room 227 at the end of the hall. There was an overwhelming stench that seemed to permeate the air both inside the room and out in the hallway. Upon entering 227, I saw it was a corner room with windows on both sides. I stuck my head out of one window and saw dried-out vines, all brown and crunchy, climbing up the side of the building. The windows had long since broken, and nature was taking over this little corner. I pulled my head back in to feel the odor creeping into my nostrils again.

  “What stinks?” I said.

  “I don’t know. Seems like something died,” Maggie answered.

  “Lots of things died here, but this seems a little fresher.” The rotting smell mixed with heat was becoming overpowering.

  There was one piece of furniture in the room, an old dresser, that didn’t look like the fiberboard wonders we could find down at SuperWally. Always wanting to be on the Antiques Roadshow, I held my nose and went over and gave it my best unofficial expert look-over.

  “Howard, help me turn this dresser around so I can see if there is a name anywhere on it. It looks like it’s from the ’20s. I think it used to be white. Look at the little legs and the woodwork on the bottom. Too bad a drawer is missing at the top.”

  Howard walked over and tried to wiggle one side of the dresser to pull it away from the wall. He couldn’t get it to budge.

  “Hmm.” My eyes scanned up and down the front for a manufacturer’s name or the date when it was made. “Doesn’t have any markings.”

  Just as Howard and I were about to get the dresser to move from the place it had probably sat for years, we heard a clatter from outside the walls on the gravel in front of the hospital.

  Maggie looked out the window around one of the broken panes of glass. “That’s funny,” she said. “Howard, do we have a new member of the paranormal society? A woman? She’s nosin’ around out there looking through the windows.”

  “I wasn’t aware of another member. Perhaps the word of mouth got around about our trip into the unknown. You never know who will get the call to the world of spirits.”

  A woman was pacing around in the weeds below wearing a dark blue gabardine suit and flat heels. All she needed was a string of pearls to complete her look. She seemed to be looking around as if she had lost someone.

  “Excuse me,” Aunt Maggie yelled out. “Are you looking for someone?”

  The woman, who had been unaware of our presence upstairs, jumped back.

  “Um … no,” she answered. She must have thought we were the lingering spirits. She patted her head to straighten the perma-tight hairdo that lay perfectly in set curls on the back of her head. “May I ask who you are?”

  “We are members of the Pecan Bayou Paranormal Society. We are doing extensive ghost huntin’ investigations throughout the entire hospital, and it will be televised on NUTV,” Maggie yelled out the window to the woman in the weeds.

  “Paranormal? And you are walking thr
ough the entire hospital? The hospital will be the subject of a television program?”

  “Pretty near.”

  Howard popped his head out of the next window. “Do you wish to join our group in a search for the paranormal?” The woman looked up, shading the sun from her eyes, not seeming to register Howard’s kind invitation to join us loonies. Not getting an immediate response from her, Howard continued. “Or were you here for some other reason?”

  “I’m … I’m …” She rubbed her brow and straightened the oversized glasses resting on her jutting cheekbones. She reminded me of a schoolmarm shutting the door of the classroom as she reined in her students after a long, carefree summer. She continued speaking, now finding a firmer voice. “I find the presence of a group who chooses to dabble in the occult, right here in our town, outrageous!”

  The woman seemed to be composing herself as she began shaking a long, thin finger upwards at us. “You are inciting the evil of this place. Come out now.”

  “Oh dear,” said Maggie as she looked over the windowsill. “This can’t be good for our investigation.”

  “I don’t see how it could help,” I added. The woman standing below us started backing up a little and shaded her eyes to look up. I now noticed a neat, green Ford parked in the gravel lot in front of the hospital. I was surprised we hadn’t heard her pull up, but then we were busy being swarmed by bats.

  “You people are trespassing on this property.” She pulled a cell phone out of the front seat of her car. “I am calling the police.”

  “Whoa, ma’am. That’s a little extreme isn’t it?” Howard said.

  I watched her punch in the number as I wondered if she had the police on speed dial for incidents such as this one.

  “Good luck with gettin’ us arrested my dear. The officer who will probably respond to your call is related to two of us,” Maggie said.

  We were all leaning out the windows now as we watched her report our trespassing to the Pecan Bayou Police Department. I guess when the paranormal is involved, the zealots come out of the woodwork. I just wouldn’t have expected anyone out there so quickly. If I remembered right, I believe my dad said he would be over at the new hospital this afternoon going through hurricane procedures with the chief of staff. He would be tickled pink to hear about this.

  I turned back to see Howard pushing buttons on his own cell phone.

  “If we’re going to get into trouble, I better let Stan Gibson at NUTV know about it before he cancels the filming.” Howard stepped out into the hallway, narrowly missing the door hanging from one hinge.

  In a few short minutes, my father scrunched up through the gravel in his squad car. Homeland Security might have given up on the color-coded alert system, but the many shades of red my father’s face could take on were a true barometer of any impending crisis. As he looked up and determined we were the cause of his disturbance, his skin tone was somewhere between watermelon pink and fire engine red. That would mean his reaction was somewhere between “Can I help you?” and “What the hell is going on here?” Why were people so concerned about an old, dilapidated building? Maggie couldn’t wait to get in here and find ghosts, and other people, like this woman, seemed to be terrified of it. The woman below stamped over to my father’s police car.

  “Officer, you have to get these people out of this building immediately. The citizens of this town do not want them meddling with witchcraft and then putting it on television. Who would want to invest in this property or even move to this town once they knew that it is full of people who worship the occult? Tell me that! It’s just disgusting what little minds resort to.”

  Maggie bristled at the little part, pulling herself up to her full four-foot-eight.

  “Excuse me ma’am,” my father said, pulling out a small notebook from the side of his patrol car. “I didn’t catch your name.”

  “My name,” she stood up straight as if to announce it to a large crowd, “is Maureen Boyle, and I didn’t tell you my name.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Boyle.”

  “Miss Boyle!” She peered at the badge pinned to his shirt. “I will be recording your badge number. What is your name, sir?”

  “My name is Lieutenant Juddson Kelsey, ma’am,” he said in his most placating voice. Funny how I never heard much of that at home growing up, but he did seem to use it well on crazy ladies.

  “Miss Boyle,” he drawled, pure Texas, with a deliberate slowness over her last name. “Miss Boyle, what these people are doing here is with the permission of the town.”

  “Just who in the town granted this permission?”

  “Well … my boss, the Chief of Police. And I’m sure it’s fine with just about anyone on the town council.”

  “So, Lieutenant Kelsey, there was a meeting of the town council granting this film crew permission to create a ghost hunting program in this building?”

  “Not in so many words, but they pretty well all know about it.”

  Miss Boyle put her hand up to her throat, reminding me of a turkey neck at Thanksgiving. “Pretty well? Was there or was there not a meeting and a vote to allow this investigation to take place?”

  My father sighed. “There wasn’t one I was aware of.”

  “Ah ha!” snapped Miss Boyle. “I thought not.”

  “But I think they all know about the program, and a couple of them are even excited about seeing it.”

  “Sir, this is a clear case of town officials acting in their own interest and not the interest of the people they are supposed to be representing,” Miss Boyle said.

  “Miss Boyle, most people in this town are too busy trying to figure out how to put food on the table, and they really don’t care all that much about anything going on in this old place.”

  Miss Boyle raised her head and gazed into the broken windows of the hospital, and then she looked down her nose at my father. “You speak for the town now, do you? Well, I can assure you, you don’t speak for me, sir.” Miss Boyle looked up at Maggie, who was leaning against the peeling paint of the second-floor window. “The good people of this town might be a little concerned knowing about this pack of charlatans out here.”

  “That’s enough,” my father said, losing his gentle tone. “Miss Boyle, you’ve neglected to tell me just what you are doing out here.”

  “That, sir, is none of your business.”

  “Well, it seems to me that your being out here is not all that different from our friends upstairs being here, so I think it is my business.”

  Miss Boyle straightened her shoulders and tossed her cell phone back into her car. She jutted her chin out. “I am leaving, officer, as I can clearly see I am outnumbered here, and you are siding with them.”

  “I am not siding with them, ma’am. It is just that the paranormal group isn’t hurting anyone, and you are disturbing their peace.”

  “Disturbing their peace?” Her face went the color of a deep red communion wine. “Disturbing their peace? Well, I never! You will be hearing from me sir.” She scooted behind the wheel of her car. “This is far from over, Lieutenant.” She slammed the door shut. My dad watched her drive off, putting his notepad back into the front pocket of his navy blue cotton police uniform.

  “Thank you, Judd,” my aunt said.

  “Hey Dad,” I said as Ms. Boyle’s car skittered gravel behind her. “Dad, maybe you ought to come up here. There is a pretty bad smell coming from somewhere.”

  “Like what?” he shouted back.

  “Like dead things,” Maggie answered.

  “This old building is probably crawling with rats. I expect there’s a dead one in the wall, that’s all. On my way.” I turned back and remembered the dresser we had been about to move. Howard was back in from his phone call.

  “Let’s look at the back of this dresser, Howard.”

  “So we can find a dead rat for your father to arrest?”

  “Hopefully not. I just wanted to see if there was a date or a name on the back of this thing. It might be worth a lot of money,
” I answered.

  Howard stuck his phone in his pocket and walked over. Putting our hands on the sides of the dresser, we both pushed. As the ancient legs screeched across the floor, the smell increased tenfold. Once the dresser was moved, I could see a large hole punched out of the drywall hidden by the dresser. Ragged edges of plaster and lumber stuck out of the hole.

  “Good God,” said Maggie, “that’s awful.” The odor came at us full force. I expected Howard to be all over this, but the paranormal aficionado seemed to be backing away from it.

  I held my nose again and leaned over to put my head into to the hole. It was dark, but from the sparse light that filtered in from the outer room, I could see a large closet-type space. “Aunt Maggie, hand me your flashlight.”

  “Here ya go.” She stuck her arm out and extended it as far as it would go, giving me the red plastic utility flashlight. I was sure my father was wandering around downstairs. He was probably trying to remember where the stairway was from his last visit to this hospital for a disturbance call.

  I clicked the flashlight on and focused the beam around the dusty inner room.

  “What do you see?” asked Maggie.

  “A bunch of old whiskey bottles. Happy hour for the ghosts, I guess.”

  “More like happy hour for the workers here. Some of those bottles may be worth more than this tacky dresser. It was a marvelous hideaway. An orderly could climb in, take a nip, climb out, return the dresser to its place and no one would know the better.”

  There was dust dancing through the beam of my flashlight. This was probably a ventilation shaft in the building. I could see on one end of the room what looked like another tunnel leading somewhere else. There were exposed pipes and spider webs throughout the dusty hidden room. This was the inner structure of the building. I held in my breath and stepped through the hole until I stood completely in the makeshift hideaway. The stench was even more powerful, and I felt my stomach lurch. Quite possibly a rat and his entire family had come in here to die. As long as I didn’t breathe through my nose, I could stop the contents of my stomach from rising up. I explored with the light to the farthest point in the room. It looked as if there were an old suit balled up in the corner. As I bounced the light beam across it, there seemed to be much more than a suit. I stepped closer and felt something sticky under my feet. It was hard to believe that whiskey spilled in here decades ago would still be sticky. I edged closer to the pile of clothes as the odor seemed to be coming at me in waves. I covered my nose and mouth with my hand and stood in front of the discarded suit. As I looked at a tilted shoe, I saw a leg sticking in it. It was then I realized there was a man in the crumpled suit, and he was dead.