Nonie sounded so sincere in her conversation in the Richardson attic, and her responses so direct, that there was little question in his mind that he might be working with the real deal where Nonie was concerned.
Buggy had hardly spoken a word during the recordings, so Jack knew Nonie hadn’t been speaking to her. So who had she been speaking to? What had she seen up there?
If he was right and Nonie could see the dead, of course it meant the group as a whole had a leg up as far as the producers were concerned. On one hand he thought that to be a positive thing but on the other it made him feel guilty for even thinking that way. It made him feel like the group would be using her in order to get real evidence they needed to get paid. But she was the one who came with the group. It wasn’t like he’d encouraged her to join. The group had already been put together when his uncle had contacted him about leading it.
If Nonie could see the dead, what effect did that have on her personal life? Did she see them everywhere she went? Did they keep her from sleep? Did she ever have a moment’s peace?
He couldn’t help but worry about her. Whoever had talked her into joining the group had to have known about Nonie’s ability. Did it make Nonie feel used? Did doing these investigations and seeing more ghosts have any kind of negative impact on her?
There was only one way he’d be able to get answers to those questions and that was to ask her directly. He’d tried to twice before, but she’d avoided answering.
Even more amazing were the EVPs and pictures they’d captured in the plantation. No one, not even a hard-core skeptic could deny the oddity of a floating iron skillet. The EVPs captured were those of a woman saying things like, “Get,” and “What do . . .” When Jack had asked specific questions of the entity holding the skillet, he’d received direct responses, like, “Who . . .” and “make them . . .” The responses came across as angry and frustrated, which could have explained why the entity had taken after them with that skillet.
The pictures and film they captured of that floating skillet were as uncommon a find as happening upon a blue diamond in the middle of the Sierra Desert. An inanimate object moving on its own volition was often associated with poltergeist activity. But that skillet had been the only thing to move. No cabinet doors banged open and shut, no windows opened or closed on their own. Just the skillet. This made Jack lean toward the belief that they were dealing with an intelligent spirit with enough energy to manipulate inanimate objects. That was some pretty powerful stuff.
Jack would bet his entire investigative history that Nonie had been able to see who had been holding that skillet. He’d caught her shrug on one occasion as if responding to something someone said, although no one in the group had addressed her.
The full-spectrum camera had picked up a large, dark shadow attached to the skillet. Judging by the shape and size of the shadow, Jack figured it to be that of a large woman. Had it not been for the shape of breasts it would have been difficult to identify the gender of the shadow because it didn’t appear to have hair.
No doubt all of this evidence would blow the producers away. Hopefully, getting the money that the Boo Krewe earned would encourage them to continue with more investigations, given what they’d experienced with the skillet woman. Most of all, he hoped it would encourage Nonie to trust him enough to tell him what she’d seen. That way they could work in tandem instead of her having to hide her abilities.
It was obvious to him that Buggy knew about Nonie’s talent. If she didn’t, Jack didn’t think Nonie would have so openly communicated with the entity while Buggy was nearby. He didn’t want to approach Buggy behind Nonie’s back, though. Back door gimmicks weren’t his style.
Jack dropped the evidence from the stills, the video, and audio onto a jump drive, closed his laptop, and packed everything away in a carry case. With that done, he went into his bathroom, stripped, and stepped into the shower.
He had a meeting with the producers and his uncle in an hour, and he knew they would be more than pleased with their finds. Although he expected head honcho platitudes, Jack couldn’t help but feel a bit guilty and awkward about presenting the evidence. Had it not been for Nonie, they might not have gotten anything at all. She was the one who seemed to instigate most of what they picked up on audio and video.
Jack needed to talk to Nonie in order to shake away the guilt and awkwardness. He wanted to make sure she was good with all of this. But he was dealing with a chicken-and-egg theory here. He either talked to Nonie first, before the evidence was released to the public, or he got the money they’d earned, thus building some semblance of trust with the group. For most people, money spoke a hell of lot louder than a bunch of meddling questions. Considering that, he’d take the evidence to the producers, get the money for the Krewe, then call everyone together for a meeting. He’d show the entire crew the evidence, give them their money, then try to get Nonie alone to talk to her about what weighed so heavily on his mind.
Jack knew he’d be more than ready to give up this entire gig if any of it hurt Nonie in any way. And the only way he could make sure was for her to tell him. She’d agreed to have dinner with him, and for a moment he thought that might be a good time to question her about her abilities. Then he thought better of it. He wanted to have dinner with her to get to know the real Nonie, not so he could drill her about what she could or couldn’t do when it came to the dead. He wanted the dinner to be special. Just him and a beautiful, intelligent woman, each getting to know the other. The ghost stuff had to be separate. He wouldn’t discuss it during dinner unless she did, which he doubted would happen since she’d dodged his questions on so many fronts before.
He was anxious to know the real Nonie. The one that didn’t have to hide. If anything, he wanted to be a safe place for her, where she felt at ease enough to share whatever was on her mind with him. He’d never felt that way about another woman before. It wasn’t like he was a prude because he dated often enough, but rarely the same woman more than twice. It was difficult for him to find someone who held his interest for very long. Nonie was different. She was a little quiet and introspective, but when she spoke, he seemed to hang on her every word.
Jack couldn’t put his finger on what it was about Nonie that had so captured him. All he knew was she was special, and it had to do with much more than the fact that she possibly saw ghosts. What attracted him to her was Nonie simply being Nonie. With her beautiful curly brown hair, large gorgeous eyes, and her slender body. What captured him most, however, was her smile. It lit up a room and seemed to pull something out of him that made him automatically want to smile back.
As Jack stood under the shower and thought of Nonie, he had to turn the spray to a cooler setting and started working geometric equations in his head. He didn’t think it would be cool to meet with the producers and his uncle with a bulge in the front of his pants.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
When Nonie and Fezzo arrived at Clara Grubb’s, they found her pacing in her graveled driveway. Clara lived off of Grainger Street, which held an eclectic neighborhood. Some homes were old clapboards in need of paint and lawns that needed serious attention. Other homes were made of brick, a few with manicured lawns. Clara’s house was a cottage style set on piers. It was beige with white shutters and the front windows held planters with foliage overflowing in them. To Nonie, the foliage looked more like weeds than plants that might produce any flowers. But she was no horticulturist.
“Thank you so much for coming,” Clara said, when Nonie parked and opened her car door.
The woman stood there wringing her hands.
“What are you doing out here?” Nonie asked, getting out of the car. Fezzo followed her lead. “Did you lock yourself out of your house?”
“No, no. I thought I’d wait for the two of you to get here before I went inside.” She gave
Nonie a knowing look. “You know, I just thought I’d wait.”
Nonie knew Clara didn’t want to say that she was afraid to
go into her house alone in front of Fezzo. If anything weird was going on in the house, she hoped they’d witness it firsthand.
“I’m not sure why you needed us to come here, Ms. Clara,” Fezzo said. “To make sure nobody was in your house?”
“Well . . .” Clara blushed. “That would be nice, given that Anna Mae has disappeared. You never know who might be lurking around. If someone took Anna Mae, they might be looking for me next. I’d also like for y’all to take a look around the house to see if you can find anything odd. A clue maybe as to where Anna Mae might have gone.”
Fezzo raised an eyebrow. “Dat’s for de police to do, no? I’m not no detective, me. I’ll be glad to check in you house, though, to make sure nobody’s in there waiting to get you.”
“The police didn’t even come to the house to check on anything,” Clara said. “I’ve been looking at things inside over and over again. I hoped a fresh pair of eyes might make a difference.”
Fezzo shrugged. “Mah, den we’ll take a look.”
Nonie had told Fezzo the reason for coming to Clara’s back at the funeral home. He evidently wanted to hear the reason directly from the horse’s mouth.
Clara led them to the front door of her house, opened it and motioned them inside. “Please, come in.”
Judging from the furniture in Clara’s living room and the wall color, Clara was really into beige. Beige walls, beige couch, a couple of ladder-back wooden rockers. A television set in a mahogany entertainment center. Across from the living room was the kitchen. Beige Formica countertops, white cabinet doors. Except for a saddle sitting atop a sawhorse, Clara’s house reminded Nonie a little of Helen Richardson’s house. Bric-a-brac was everywhere, pictures of her family, her children and grandchildren, dogs and cats. A collection of ceramic birds sat in a curio cabinet against the far left wall of the living room. There were blue jays, sparrows, canaries, cardinals, lining the top of shelves of the curio. The bottom shelf held crystal butterflies, at least a dozen. Large and beautiful, a myriad of colors so brilliant they matched those of a rainbow.
Clara motioned them to the kitchen. “Would y’all care for something to drink? Coffee, a soft drink maybe?” She walked into the kitchen hesitantly, glancing over her shoulder every so often to make sure Nonie and Fezzo were following her.
“No thank you, Clara. I’m fine.” Fezzo said.
“Same here,” Nonie said. “Nothing for me.”
Clara nodded, her eyes flitting about the kitchen nervously. “Where . . . Where would y’all like to start looking?”
“Well,” Nonie said. “Did Anna Mae have her own bedroom?”
“Yes. It’s down the hall, second door on the right. Oh, and if y’all need the restroom, it’s the first door on the left. At the end of the hall is my bedroom. Y’all are welcome to look in there, too, if you think it’ll help.” Clara folded her arms across her chest and shifted her weight from one foot to the other.
“Aren’t you coming with us?” Nonie asked.
Clara looked over her shoulder toward the kitchen cabinets then back at Nonie and Fezzo. “Yes, I guess I’ll come with you.”
She led the way down the hall and into the bedroom on the right, where Clara flipped on a light switch. Inside was a queen-size bed neatly made, with a homemade quilt folded across the foot of it, a dresser, a small desk with a rolling chair and a vanity table with a tri-fold mirror on top of it, along with various makeup products, and a small, pink cushioned chair in front of it.
“You see what I’m saying?” Clara said, pointing to the vanity. “All of Anna Mae’s makeup is still here. She would have never left without taking it.”
Clara went to the closet door, which was to the right of the dresser, and opened it. It was filled with clothes, all neatly hung in a row. “And all her clothes are here.” She turned to the dresser and opened the top drawer. “Not to be ugly or nothing, but you see this? It’s her underwear drawer. Not a thing’s missing from it. It’s like she just vanished in thin air. I mean really, how are you going to go anywhere without fresh underwear, makeup or extra clothes? You see what I’m saying? Something’s very wrong here.”
Nonie looked around the room and tried to see it through the eyes of Anna Mae. If she was going to take a trip, surely she would have brought her stuff with her. Could she have been kidnapped? Or had she been so embarrassed over what happened at the funeral home that she decided to simply skip town and planned on buying all new clothes and accessories wherever she landed?
Nonie voiced her thoughts to Clara. “Suppose she was so embarrassed over the whole town seeing the fight at the funeral home that she just decided to skip town? Did she have her own car?”
“Yes,” Clara said. “A red Mustang.”
Nothing like flash, Nonie thought.
“I haven’t seen the Mustang either since the funeral,” Clara said. “Remember, I told you we came in separate vehicles because we each had things to tend to after the funeral. That car isn’t easy to miss. If she’d been in town, I’d have spotted it by now.”
“Maybe she decided to leave town instead,” Nonie said. “Then figured she’d buy new clothes and makeup when she got to wherever she was going.”
“She wouldn’t have done that without talking to me first,” Clara said. “We were pretty close.”
As Clara spoke, Nonie watched Fezzo walk about the room, examining a hairbrush from the vanity. He sniffed a perfume bottle.
“Suppose she was embarrassed for you, too,” Nonie offered. “She could have left to save you the embarrassment of having her around.”
“I’m telling you,” Clara said. “She wouldn’t have done anything like that without contacting me. She knows how much of a worrywart I am. No matter what happened at the funeral home, we’re cousins. It’s not like I would have ever turned my back on her. I mean, I didn’t agree with what she did, you know, with the mayor and all, and, in fact, I tried to stop her. But when Anna Mae got her mind set on something, she’d follow through with it or die.”
“Well, maybe that’s the case here,” Nonie said. “She got her mind set on getting out of town and will probably contact you once she gets settled someplace.”
Clara seemed to mull that over for a while. “Well . . . maybe. But it’s her leaving all her stuff here that has me stumped. If she did make up her mind to leave and planned on contacting me once she got to wherever she planned to go, she would have packed her belongings.”
“Let’s look at it this way,” Nonie said. “For the sake of argument, let’s say she was too embarrassed to face you after that fight and decided to head out of town. Left everything behind so she wouldn’t have to deal with that.”
“But—” Clara began.
Nonie held up a hand. “For the sake of argument, let’s run with this scenario. She leaves because she doesn’t want to face anyone. The police could be right. Let’s give it a day or two and see if she contacts you. If she doesn’t, then the police have more to work with. They can file a missing person’s report.”
At that moment a loud banging sounded from the kitchen. Clara ducked as if expecting something to come flying at her head.
“You have somebody else in you house?” Fezzo asked.
“No, it’s just the three of us,” Clara said, her eyes wide.
“Okay, y’all stay here,” Fezzo said. “I’m gonna go check it out.”
As Fezzo limped out of the bedroom, Nonie followed closely behind him and Clara behind her. Even though Fezzo had told them to stay put, Nonie was too curious to leave well enough alone.
When they walked down the hallway, the banging in the kitchen grew more frequent and louder. BAM! BAM! BAM! It sounded like cabinet doors being slammed shut with great force.
As they turned right at the end of the hall and faced the kitchen, Fezzo said, “What the heck is dis?”
Nonie and Clara piled up behind Fezzo each looking over one of his shoulders. The cabinet doors below her kitchen sink were flapping open and slamming shut agai
n and again. Fezzo’s comment seemed to agitate whatever had taken over the cabinets because the utensil drawer to the right of the stove suddenly opened on its own then slammed shut. Another drawer that contained dishtowels was yanked out so far it hung by the end of its runner.
“You see, I told you,” Clara said to Nonie with tears welling up in her eyes. “I told you there were strange things going on in the house.”
Fezzo held his arms out and stepped back, pushing Nonie and Clara back with him. “I don’t know what’s going on here, but I don’t think it’s too good,” he said. “I think we should leave.”
“Where am I supposed to go?” Clara said. “This is my home.”
“I don’t know,” Fezzo said. “But you may want to call a priest. I sure don’t know what to do with doors that open and close by themselves and drawers hanging out all wonky. I could hunt a alligator back in my day, but dis, huh, dat’s way over my head.” He turned around and looked at Nonie. “You notice anything . . . different?”
Nonie knew he was asking her if she saw any ghost doing the cabinet clatter, but the sad fact was she didn’t see a thing. “Nothing more than what you see,” she said to Fezzo.
Abruptly the cabinet doors held still, and in the sudden silence, Nonie heard two people whispering in the living room. She glanced over her shoulder and saw Guy and Helen Richardson standing in front of Clara’s entertainment center, huddled together, whispering and motioning to the kitchen.
When Guy and Helen spotted Nonie looking at them, both smiled and waved. Nonie gritted her teeth. She wanted to ask them what they were doing here, but couldn’t with Fezzo and Clara standing nearby. She glared at Guy. They had enough trouble in this place. If there was another entity in this house, Nonie couldn’t see it, which concerned her. Something strong enough to slam cabinets should have held enough energy for it to be visible to her. But nothing, not even a shadow.
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