Toe to Toe

by Deborah LeBlanc

  “Where you at, girl?” Nonie recognized the voice as Shaundelle’s.

  “In here,” Nonie called back. “Be there in a sec.” Then she said to Helen and Guy, “I need y’all to keep it down in here. Stay put and keep quiet.”

  “But why?” Helen asked. “It’s not like they can hear us.”

  “Because Nonie can hear us,” Guy said. “And it makes her all pissy when they’re talking to her and we’re talking to her at the same time.”

  “Oh,” Helen said. “Okay, I get it.”

  Nonie grabbed a dishtowel, wiped her hands, then tossed the dishtowel into the sink and headed for the living room.

  Shaundelle, Tatman, and Buggy surrounded her as soon as she entered the room.

  “Girl, I heard what happened over at Clara’s earlier today,” Buggy said. “You were there when all that went down?”

  “Oh, don’t tell me you got all the scoop,” Shaundelle said. “Tell us everything. The entire 4-1-1.”

  In that moment, Tatman walked into the house followed by Jack who was wearing black jeans, a black pullover shirt and black boots. To Nonie, he looked utterly lickable. A black computer bag hung from his left shoulder.

  Walking through the house like he owned it, Tatman bypassed Nonie and headed for her kitchen. “Got anything to munch on, Nonie? I didn’t get to eat supper yet.”

  “There’s chips, crackers and dip on the counter,” Nonie said. “Beer’s in the fridge.”

  “Beautiful,” Tatman said, rubbing his stomach.

  “Where can I set this up?” Jack said, sliding the computer bag off his shoulder.

  “What is it?” Buggy asked.

  “The evidence I showed the producers. I wanted all of you to get a chance to see it.”

  “Oh, hell, yeah,” Shaundelle said. “Put it on the coffee table so we can all sit around it and see.”

  “There’s the kitchen table,” Nonie offered.

  “Yeah, but it’ll be crowded over there. We can all see it better from here,” Shaundelle said. “We bring your kitchen chairs in here then we’ve got the couch and your big chair. We can all sit and watch theater style.” She smiled a big toothy grin and headed for the kitchen after Tatman. “Where’s the beer at?”

  “We definitely want to see the evidence,” Buggy said to Jack, “but just tell us. Are they going to shoot those two locations we investigated or not?”

  Jack smiled, showing beautiful white, straight teeth. “Both locations are a go.”

  “Woohoo!” Buggy shouted.

  “That’s what I’m talking about!” Shaundelle said, and did a little bump and grind in the kitchen. “We in the money now, honey.”

  “That’s awesome,” Tatman said. “You go, dude!”

  “It’s not just me,” Jack said. “We were all in this together. All of you did a great job collecting evidence, especially since none of you have done this before. And by the way, I found out why the Richardson house was in front of that plantation. Seems like the folks who owned the plantation were distant relatives of Helen’s. They gave her a piece of land near the road as a wedding present so she and her husband could build their own house there.”

  “That was awful nice of them,” Nonie said. She cleared off a couple of magazines she had sitting on the coffee table and motioned for Jack to set his computer bag on the table.

  “Shaundelle’s right,” Nonie said. “We’ll all get to see much better from here.”

  “What I want to see is them checks,” Shaundelle said. “Did you bring ‘em with you, Mr. Jack the Money Man?”

  “I sure did,” Jack said. He reached into a side pouch of his bag and pulled out four envelopes. He handed one to Nonie, another to Buggy, then one each to Shaundelle and Tatman as they hurried into the living room. “A grand a piece. As promised.”

  Shaundelle hugged the envelope against her large breasts then gave it a huge wet kiss. “You comin’ home with mama!” She folded the envelope and slid it down into the orange, V-neck spandex shirt she was wearing then tucked it in her bra.

  “Yes, ma’am, yes, ma’am,” Tatman said, folding his envelope and shoving it into his back jeans’ pocket. “I can get used to this.”

  Buggy slipped her envelope in her back pocket, as well, then said, “Okay, before we get started with evidence, I wanna know what happened at Clara’s.”

  “Who’s Clara?” Jack asked.

  “Didn’t you hear?” Buggy said. “They found Anna Mae Turner—”

  “Wait, who’s Anna Mae Turner?”

  “Aw, dude, you’ve got a lot of catching up to do,” Buggy said. She told him about the mayor’s funeral and the fight between Anna Mae and Hazel.

  “Oh, man,” Jack said. “Got it. Now what about Anna Mae and Clara?”

  “They found Anna Mae buried in a hole in Clara’s backyard,” Buggy announced.

  “Yeah,” Shaundelle chimed in. “They’d buried her ass up, head down.”

  “What?” Jack said.

  “For real, dude,” Tatman said. “They stuck her in this hole that was too small then poured concrete over her legs and shit so nobody would see it.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Jack said.

  “No, man. I’m as serious as a quadruple bypass. Tell him Nonie,” Tatman said.

  “Not much left to tell,” Nonie said, not wanting to get into the details of how she’d found Anna Mae. “Y’all know about as much as I do.”

  “Yeah, but the way I hears it, you was there,” Shaundelle said. “You’ve got to have more skinny on the deal than the rest of us. And what was you doing there anyway?”

  “Helping Clara with something in her house,” Nonie said, dancing around the issue as best she could.

  “And?” Buggy said.

  “And there’s not much more to tell,” Nonie said, giving Buggy a look that told her not to push the issue in front of everyone.

  “You got no more than that?” Shaundelle said. “Girl, you holdin’ back. I can sees you holdin’ back. Now fork up the goods.”

  “The only other thing I know is they found a ring near the grave,” Nonie said. “A class ring from L.S.U.. So far I think that’s the only lead they have on the case. Uncle Fezzo and I had to go down to the police station and give our statements to a couple of detectives.”

  “And did y’all see the whole thing?” Tatman asked.

  “We didn’t see her murdered and put in the hole,” Nonie said. “We just saw her in the hole.”

  “Who found her there?” Buggy asked.

  “That’s a longer story,” Nonie said. “And it’s not why we’re here. Let’s take a look at the evidence. I’d like to see what we came up with that got us each a grand, wouldn’t you? Maybe we can do it again?”

  “Hell, yeah, “Shaundelle said. “We keep going at this rate, and I’ll be able to get my own Tips and Tint shop. To hell with workin’ for the man. No offense, Jack.”

  “None taken,” Jack said.

  “Girl, you’re not going to get away with that,” Buggy said. “We’ll look at the evidence, but I want the full deal scoop about Clara and Anna Mae later on, you hear?”

  “Yeah, me, too,” Shaundelle said. “All I got was what’s been floatin’ around the Tips and Tint, and you know how them women be. They be spreadin’ rumors sideways, longways, downways, every which way they can make it up. By tomorrow they’ll be sayin’ that Anna Mae was cut up in little pieces and buried in holes all around Clara’s house. I want to know what really happened so I can set all them hussies straight.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Nonie said, and tossed Buggy a scowl. Couldn’t she take a hint for heaven’s sake?

  Jack took his computer out of his bag, set it on the coffee table and turned it on. While they waited for it to boot up, he pulled a thumb drive out of the bag and held it up. “It’s all on here.”

  When the computer sing-songed that it was booted up and ready to go, he put the drive into a USB port. “Ready?”

  “Hang on a sec, I’m coming,” Ta
tman said. “Want a beer, brother?”

  “No, I’m good.”

  After draining the first Budweiser he’d taken when he arrived, Tatman went into the fridge, grabbed another can, popped the top on it, and hurried back over to the group. “Ready,” he said, then guzzled down more beer.

  “Okay, the first thing you’ll see are some still shots we took at the Richardson house.” He ran a finger over the touch pad on his computer and clicked on a photo. “This was taken in the attic.”

  Everyone leaned in for a better look.

  “What’s all those white, blue and green squiggly lines that run across the picture?” Tatman asked.

  “It’s called ectoplasm,” Jack said. “Sometimes an entity—”

  “What you mean an entity?” Shaundelle asked. “You talkin’ about a ghost?”

  “In a way, yes.”

  “In a way?” Buggy asked. “What’s that mean? What else could it be if not a ghost.”

  “A ghost, is typically a human who’s lived before, and is either residual or intelligent,” Jack explained. “Residual is like an echo, it’s not a real ghost, but more like the reflection of a person who keeps reliving an event that happened in their life over and over. An intelligent spirit is one who’s earthbound for whatever reason. Many of them will try to interact with you in some way. We call both entities, but there is another type. An entity that was never human. That can either be a shadow person or . . .well, a demon. There are other things, like djinn, but we’ll stick to spirits for now.”

  “Oh, huh-uh,” Shaundelle said. “Nobody said anything about no demon when we got started with this gig. I don’t want no part of no demon. No, siree, you can all have the demons.”

  “I wouldn’t allow us to stay and investigate a location if I thought it had a demonic influence,” Jack said. “I wouldn’t even want the film crew there. That’s something left to people with much more experience, like demonologists, which we’re not.”

  “So go on about the ectoplasm,” Tatman said, pointing to the picture on the computer screen.

  “Sometimes an entity . . . or ghost, doesn’t have enough energy to present itself as a full apparition, so it leaves a trail of energy, like this.” He touched his computer and another picture appeared on the screen. It had a bright white ball of light over one of the cots that sat in the Richardson’s attic.

  “What the heck is that?” Buggy asked.

  “An orb,” Jack explained. “Same principal as the ectoplasm. I don’t usually put a lot of stock in orbs because many of them wind up being bugs or light reflections from a window or mirror in a room. But this one is different. It’s bright white, huge, and perfectly round. And get this.” He clicked a couple of keys, and the ball of light took flight. It circled around the cot three or four times, then shot out of view like a comet. “We caught that on video.”

  “Wow,” Buggy said. “I didn’t see any lights like that in the attic.”

  “More times than not you can’t see them with the naked eye,’ Jack said. “They typically show up on film. Now keep your eye on this cot.” He pointed to the cot in the middle of the room. Nothing happened for a long moment, then suddenly the mattress on the cot depressed, as if someone had settled onto it. In that same moment, the gray blanket that lay across the foot of the cot moved upward slightly.

  “Holy shit and crackers!” Shaundelle said. “It moved by itself.”

  “Man, bro, that’s some heavy-duty crap,” Tatman said. “No wonder the producers jumped on this.”

  Jack grinned and nodded. “Who wouldn’t. This is some great stuff, and we’re just getting started. He pulled up another file. This one looked like a bar graph with hundreds of white lines running horizontally through it. “This is an audio file. It shows what’s been picked up by the digital recorders we were carrying around to do EVPs.” He clicked a button and a vertical bar ran slowly through the horizontal white lines. He turned the volume up on the computer. “The voice you’ll hear first is Nonie’s. What you’re listening for is what comes after she speaks.”

  “I don’t know if anyone would be able to see you,” they heard Nonie say.

  What followed was an audible murmur, “Why . . . you?”

  The faintest white noise followed, then they heard Nonie ask, “Do you want me to give that message to your son?”

  Another murmur, “. . . for sure.” Then two seconds later, “ . . . television.”

  Nonie spoke again. “Okay, Helen. Thank you again for your help.”

  “ . . . welcome.”

  “Whoa!” Tatman said, looking at Nonie. “Who were you talking to?”

  “I was talking to Buggy,” Nonie said, her eyes flitting to her friend.

  “Uh- yeah,” Buggy said. “She was talking to me.”

  Shaundelle harrumphed. “Who you kiddin’? You was talking to a ghost, wasn’t you? You even said her name. Helen. We all heard it.”

  “I guessed,” Nonie said, knowing the excuse sounded lame as it came out of her mouth.

  “Bullshit,” Shaundelle said. “You was talking to a ghost. Plain as day.”

  “Would you have stuck around up there if you’d have seen a ghost?” Nonie asked Shaundelle.

  “Oh, hell to the no!” I’d have been out of that house faster than a cop after my cousin Tyree.”

  “Same here,” Nonie said.

  Nonie wanted to slap herself upside the head. She hadn’t thought things through during the investigation. If she had, she would have kept her questions simple, like Jack had taught them. She’d been so wrapped up in seeing and talking to Helen that she’d forgotten that both parts of the conversation would be picked up on audio. What a dope.

  Jack continued to click through pictures and video, bringing up the floating skillet in the plantation and the Rem Pod on the kitchen table that had squawked and blinked multicolored lights the entire time it had been set in place. Once again, he switched over to an audio file. “These are the EVPs we got from the plantation.”

  Jack’s voice came through loud and clear over the speakers of his computer. “Are you a man or a woman?”

  The response was immediate. “ . . . woman, fool.”

  “Wow,” Shaundelle, Tatman and Buggy said collectively.

  More faint white noise then, “ . . . name be Tiana.”

  Thankfully, Nonie had company during the confrontation with Tiana so she hadn’t asked any direct questions. The film clip that followed, though, showed the iron skillet swinging in midair of its own volition and caught Nonie giving someone they couldn’t see a shrug.

  “See, there you go again,” Shaundelle said. “You actin’ like somebody’s standing right in front of you. What gives, Nonie?”

  Nonie held her palms up. “I figured somebody had to be holding that skillet, so I motioned to them like I could see them. Only made sense.”

  “How come that skillet didn’t chase after you and Buggy?” Tatman asked. “Why just me and Jack?”

  “Who knows,” Nonie said. “Maybe she has a problem with men.”

  “She?” Shaundelle said, narrowing her eyes. “How you know it was a she unless you seen her?”

  Nonie bit her bottom lip for a second, then bounced back with what sounded like a plausible answer. “You heard the EVPs. Didn’t it sound like a woman to you?”

  “Yeah, it did,” Tatman said.

  “That’s all fine and good,” Shaundelle said, “but you wasn’t listening to no EVPs when you was there, so how’d you know it was a she?”

  “I said it was a she after I just heard the EVP, like you did a second ago,” Nonie said.

  Nonie felt sweat form on her forehead. Thankfully, Jack jumped in and changed the subject.

  “Well, he or she, I can tell you the producers were pretty impressed.” He closed his laptop.

  “You were a huge help,” Nonie said to him. “If it hadn’t been for you, we wouldn’t have known what to do with all that equipment.”

  Jack grinned. “I’ll take that b
eer now, if you don’t mind.”

  “You got it, brother,” Tatman said, already heading for the kitchen.

  “When’s our next hunt going to be?” Buggy asked Jack.

  “Next Saturday night. It’s an old hospital in north Louisiana. Used to be an insane asylum, too.”

  “Oh, huh-uh,” Shaundelle said. “You mean a place where they kept crazy people?”

  “The asylum was back in the forties and fifties,” Jack said. “It became a V.A. hospital after that but the state closed it down in the late nineties.”

  “Aw, hell, there’s gonna be all kinds of dead people up in there,” Shaundelle said, tapping the arm of the couch where she sat.

  “Yeah, but you can’t be running off like you did at the plantation,” Tatman said. “If we see anything moving around, you’ve got to hang with us. All for one, one for all, I say. Jack said that if he thought some place was dangerous he’d have us leave. We just have to trust him to make that call.”

  “Yeah, but if there’s gonna be crazy people running around in there, don’t you think that’s gonna be dangerous? There’s no telling what they can do. They could get all up in our heads and make us crazy, too.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Buggy said.

  “How you know?” Shaundelle asked. “You ever been in one of them crazy places?”

  “No, but—”

  “Shaundelle if you’re not up for this, we’ll understand,” Jack said. “We can find somebody to replace you on the team if you’re too scared.”

  She pursed her lips and frowned. After a long pause she finally said, “Hell to the no. Ain’t nobody gonna be getting my check but me. I took off from the plantation because it was my first time, so y’all need to cut me some slack. That boogity swinging that skillet scared the piss out of me, so I took off. But now I know what could happen so I’ll buck up and deal. Y’all will see. I’ll get all kinds of evidence of them crazy people in that aslum.”

  “Asylum,” Jack corrected.

  “Yeah, there, too,” Shaundelle said, then harrumphed. “But if I start yellin’, one of y’all best be paying attention.”

  “You can stick with me,” Tatman said.

  “Oh, I’ll stick to you like butt glue,” Shaundelle assured him. She turned to Jack. “Why an aslum? Couldn’t you find a department store or something like that? You got to get us into an old hospital and crazy place?”