Sparks

by Laura Bickle

  She gave the plastic-packaged shards to Anya. Jenna had told her how a geode is formed in the natural world, but Anya wondered how it had formed in the unnatural world…and if there had been a ghost in this bottle, like the ginger jar on Hope’s desk.

  “Is that the weirdest thing you’ve got for me?”

  “No. I’ve still got one scandalous thing and one just plain bizarre thing.”

  “Hit me with the scandal first. I’m all full up of bizarre.”

  Jenna handed her a plastic bag containing the corner of the envelope and piece of green check Anya had found in Bernie’s firebox. “We got a partial print on this. You’ll never guess who it belongs to.”

  “Wild guess… Hope Solomon, the late-night television miracle worker?”

  “No… Christina Modin, con artist.” Jenna gestured for Anya to follow her to a computer terminal. She summoned up a mug shot of a smiling blond woman with smudged blue eyeliner. The woman looked like a version of Hope, twenty years ago. Her rap sheet scrolled down the side of the page: extortion, fraud, bad checks, forgery.

  “That’s her. That’s Hope Solomon.”

  Jenna lifted her eyebrows. “Maybe. But we can’t really prove it yet. Christina Modin was involved in some seriously bad real-estate deals in Florida. Predatory lending and the like. She’s served her time. Even if you proved Hope and Christina are the same person, you can’t arrest her for just being a weasel.”

  Anya crossed her arms. “Damn. You’re good.”

  Jenna hid a smile, but Anya could see her glowing. “One last thing… There were latent prints in the carbon around the fireplace. They made absolutely gorgeous fingerprints. Just textbook.” Jenna flipped a folder open to a page displaying prints fixed on paper with adhesive tape.

  “Nice,” Anya agreed. Those were the prints taken after Bernie’s house had been tossed. “Are any of them Bernie’s?”

  “Some of them we were able to match with his military records. We found five other sets of prints, though, that were not his.”

  “Neighbors? Family?”

  She shook her head. “One set didn’t match anyone in the National Crime Information Center database. The other four belong to a former waitress, a retired postmaster, a landscaper, and a college student at Michigan State.”

  “Great. Do you have a list of names?”

  “I do, but it won’t help you much. All of them are dead.”

  Anya blinked. “Dead? Like, recently dead?”

  “The postmaster’s been dead for twenty years. The college kid’s been dead for two. Four years for the waitress, and ten for the landscaper.”

  Anya’s thoughts churned. What the hell were dead people doing at Bernie’s place? Bernie was a shitty housekeeper, but there was no reason for latent prints to have stuck around for twenty years before being cleaned off.

  “Can you tell how fresh they are?”

  “I thought you’d ask that. We estimate that the carbon they were formed in is no older than six months.”

  Anya chewed on her lip. Dead people leaving fingerprints all over Bernie’s house? She knew that ghosts could sometimes affect the physical world, but she’d never heard of them leaving prints behind. What kind of weird shit had Bernie been messing with?

  Jenna looked at her with a smile. “You really get all the interesting cases, don’t you?”

  Anya opened her mouth to respond but smelled something burning.

  She swung around to see Sparky gleefully sitting on the lab counter before the hot plate, warming his rounded belly before a foot-tall yellow flame shooting from the device. She lunged for the hot plate, unplugged the cord.

  But too late. The smoke alarm wailed overhead, and the sprinkler system kicked in.

  Jenna shrieked and tried to cover her samples with a file folder. Anya ran into the hallway to find the main override. By the time she’d grabbed the emergency phone and convinced the alarm company to shut off the sprinkler system, people had poured out of the building onto the sidewalk. The lab lay in soggy ruins, puddles on the tile floor, glass vials full of water, and an electron microscope sitting in a pool. Papers and soaked evidence bags were plastered to desks and tables.

  In the middle of it all, Jenna sat on the stool with her face in her hands, sobbing. “We’re never going to get our certification back,” she hiccuped.

  All Anya could do was ineffectually pat her shoulder. She ignored Sparky as he crawled up her pant leg, slinked over her shoulders. He tentatively licked at the water droplets on Anya’s ear, seeking forgiveness. She didn’t respond.

  He’d fucked up big time, and he knew it.

  Sparky curled around her neck and melted into the collar, his paws wrapped tightly over his head.

  ANYA DIDN’T TELL DAGR ABOUT Sparky’s incident at the lab. She muttered indifferent noises at the evening news when it reported an accident at the Detroit Crime Lab had destroyed evidence for more than thirty pending cases. The media had taken the story and run with it, with city officials decrying the lab’s incompetence and calling for another audit. Anya slunk lower in her seat as she watched the story on the television suspended over the Devil’s Bathtub bar. Sparky hugged her neck and didn’t look up.

  Jules jabbed a thumb over his shoulder at the television. “Did that screw up any of your cases?”

  “Probably,” she said. Most of the evidence from her spontaneous human combustion case had been compromised, and there was no telling if what was left would stand up in court. But she sure as hell wasn’t going to tell Jules that Sparky had a paw in it.

  Jules leaned against the bar. “That’s a crying shame. You think a city this size would be able to get some competent people.”

  Anya stared at the bar top, listening to the ice crack in her Diet Coke. “They’re very competent people, Jules. Sometimes bad luck just happens.”

  Jules snorted. “Bad luck doesn’t just happen. It feeds on carelessness.”

  “I don’t think anything careless happened, Jules.” But she didn’t believe it. She’d been careless in watching Sparky. Sparky just did what he did, following his elemental nose… and she’d failed to monitor him. It was more her fault than his.

  “The news says it was a fire. You’ve said yourself that ninety percent of fires are caused by human idiocy.”

  Anya’s jaw tightened. That struck too close to home. “Unless you’ve survived a fire, Jules, leave it alone,” she snapped.

  “Break it up, you two,” Brian said. His well-muscled arms held two black duffel bags clinking with equipment, and an orange extension cord was looped around his shoulder. “It’s time to roll out.”

  Anya hung back until Jules, Max, and Katie headed out the door. Ciro’s wheelchair wheels squeaked softly across the floor, and he reached up to pat her hand. He was dressed in his pajamas. Ciro rarely went out on runs anymore. He was too short of breath too often, and rarely left the Devil’s Bathtub. Max brought him groceries, and he had everything he needed here. Somewhere upstairs, Anya could hear a record album playing old jazz tunes. A voice warbled like a canary. Anya knew that it wasn’t the record; Ciro was never alone. Renee, the spirit of a flapper, had come with the bar, and she did her best to look after the old man. She was one of the few ghosts who actually enjoyed being seen and heard.

  “Don’t let Jules get under your skin.”

  “We’re oil and water, Ciro. I try to stay out of his way, but…” She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know how much longer this is going to last.”

  There. She’d finally admitted it. She’d tried to leave DAGR before but had come back. The city needed them, and DAGR needed her. But they all knew Ciro was the force that bound the group together.

  Ciro’s rheumy eyes crinkled. “Child, I’ve got plenty of time left.”

  “That’s not what I meant.” She blew out her breath. “I meant Jules and I… arguing.”

  “Jules is a good man.”

  “He is.” There was no disputing that. Jules meant well. “But I feel like h
e won’t look outside the box—the box where everything’s good or evil, right or wrong. It feels like there’s just too much gray out there, and he won’t acknowledge it.”

  “The two of you need to put your differences aside long enough to get the job done.” Ciro squeezed her hand. “Please.”

  She could never say no to the old man. She squeezed back. “I’ll try.”

  “Good. Now, go run with the rest of the team.” Ciro looked upstairs, where the angelic voice trilled. “I’ve got a date with an angel.” He winked, straightened the lapels of his pajamas, and rolled back to the elevator behind the bar.

  Anya put on her coat and headed for the front door, smiling. She imagined Ciro being quite the ladies’ man in his youth. She waited for the elevator doors to creak shut, and she called upstairs:

  “Renee?”

  A beautiful face, framed by a glossy bob, phased down through the ceiling, like a woman peering through the surface of water. Thick eyelashes framed doe-like Cleopatra eyes, and a string of ghostly beads dangled down from space. “Hi, baby.”

  “How’s Ciro doing?” Renee would tell her the truth.

  The ghost’s flawless skin creased over her penciled brows. “He’s weak. Weaker than I’d like to see him. Weaker than he’ll admit.”

  Anya frowned. “Thank you for watching over him, Renee.”

  “I’ll keep him out of the giggle water. But there’s only so much I can do.” Renee’s fingers passed helplessly through the plaster, and Anya could hear the frustration in her voice. “I can’t touch him. I can’t dial the telephone for help.”

  Anya nodded. Ghosts could sometimes affect things in the physical world. Poltergeists were notorious for breaking objects and harming humans. They could do that because they were powerful; most ghosts weren’t. Some ghosts could move objects with great concentration, but it exhausted them. Renee wasn’t a powerful spirit; in all the time she’d haunted the Devil’s Bathtub, the most she’d managed to do was break a few bottles as pranks.

  A horn sounded insistently outside at the curb, and Anya flinched. Upstairs, the bell sounded as the elevator doors grated open.

  Renee made a shooing gesture. “You go on. We’ll talk later.”

  She disappeared into the shadowed ceiling, and Anya reached for the doorknob. Sighing, she stepped out into the dark.

  Anya sat in Brian’s van, flipping through his case files. She’d missed the team meeting earlier in the evening, and didn’t know if they were going to be drowning demons in holy water or playing patty-cake with poltergeists.

  “Can you give me the Cliffs Notes version?” she asked.

  “This is the full-body apparition case I mentioned the other day.” If Brian was irritated by her lack of involvement in the case, he didn’t show it. He gripped the steering wheel with one hand and fiddled with his iPhone with the other. Multitasking while driving made Anya nervous, but she bit her tongue. “The figure of a woman has been seen walking through the house. She doesn’t speak or interact with the house’s inhabitants, so the preliminary theory is that it’s a residual haunting. But she’s wearing modern clothes, so that’s a stumper. No Lizzie Bordens in petticoats here.”

  “Who lives in the house?”

  “Mom and two boys, ages eight and twelve, and a grandfather.”

  “Who’s been seeing the apparition?”

  “It started with the grandfather. He thought his daughter was home early from work, tried to talk to the ghost.” Brian glanced sidelong at Anya. “His eyesight’s not too good. Both kids have seen the apparition. Mom works nights, and the ghost evidently prefers evening strolls, so she hasn’t seen it.”

  “How long has this been going on?”

  “That’s the weird thing. The house has been in the family for forty years. Not a peep of anything supernatural until two weeks ago. The ghost’s been seen almost every night since then.”

  Anya chewed on her lip. “I wonder what changed.”

  “It’s rare in the literature, but it’s not unheard of for construction or environmental changes to ‘wake up’ a ghost. I’ve never seen it happen myself, but there are at least two other ghost-hunting groups that have documented cases in which a ghost became more active when something in the house irritated it. In one situation, a family was doing extensive remodeling and disturbed the location of a hidden grave. In another, a ghost didn’t like the new owners’ taste in decorating. The ghost preferred pink carpeting and striped wallpaper to the industrial-loft look. It kept leaving handprints and nasty messages scribbled on the stainless-steel appliances.”

  “That’s assuming it’s a ghost.” Most hauntings that were proven to be more than figments of the owners’ imaginations were benign ghosts. But DAGR had seen an uptick in cases involving hostile ghosts and demons. And Anya had a run-in with the king of salamanders some months ago, nesting in the salt mine beneath the city. It was enough to cause her not to make any assumptions about the nature of the creatures they faced.

  “We won’t know for sure until we get our feet on the ground.”

  The van tooled through Islandview, east of downtown. Apartment buildings were interspersed with row houses and single-family homes. Real-estate and for rent signs peppered thin yards. Some attempts at urban revitalization had been made in this area, but the reach didn’t extend far into the west side, where brick apartment buildings decorated with graffiti sat next to dilapidated homes on trash-strewn lots.

  Brian parked beside the curb before an unremarkable house: faded yellow siding and bars on the street-level windows. Striped green-and-white awnings shaded the interior. Dogs barked somewhere in the backyard. Anya climbed out of the van, scanning the street. A group of kids comparing bikes on the other side of the sidewalk glanced at the strangers with interest. Anya waved at them, and one tentatively wiggled his fingers back before stuffing his hands in his pockets and trying to be cool.

  The house just east of the subject house appeared to be abandoned, the front screen door decorated with various neon-colored shutoff notices from the gas and water companies. Weeds sprouted up through cracks in the porch cement. Even though it was apparently trash night, as evidenced by the green trash cans piled curbside in front of the other houses, this driveway was empty. The house on the west side, however, showed signs of life. A sold real-estate sign leaned up against the side of the house, and boxes could be seen through the front window, where a sheet was making do as curtains for the new inhabitants. Lights burned in every room, and the lawn smelled of fresh-cut grass. The haunted house seemed caught between the living house and the dead one.

  Anya slung a bag of gear over her shoulder and followed Brian to the doorstep. Jules, Max, and Katie had arrived in Jules’s minivan and were chatting with the homeowner, who had opened the screen door. The grandfather, Anya guessed. He was dressed for company, in a fresh-pressed shirt and knife-creased slacks. The sharp creases contrasted with the curve of his bowed spine and the spiderweb of wrinkles crossing his face. He leaned on a cane with a white tip. Anya noted how his eyes seemed to follow the motion of people moving past him, but she was uncertain how much he could actually see.

  “Thank you for coming.” He led them into the living room. All the furniture had been pushed back to the walls, no doubt to help accommodate the old man’s slow navigation. A video-game system was connected to the television, and kids’ backpacks sprawled in the corner. A curio cabinet full of Hummel figurines and a wall of family photographs had been recently dusted. A basket of freshly folded laundry sat beside the couch, containing women’s pink hospital scrubs. “We’ll try to stay out of your way. I’ve put the boys to bed, and Sara doesn’t get off work until seven tomorrow morning.”

  Anya caught the trace of a frown around Jules’s mouth. He didn’t like to work with the homeowners present. None of them did—it constrained what they could say and do. But sometimes it couldn’t be helped. They’d simply have to be on their best behavior.

  “Tell us about your ghost,” Jules said,
pulling a yellow legal pad and pen out of his bag.

  “I haven’t seen much of her,” the old man said with a chuckle. “But the boys say she comes every night, around two. She wanders through the house, wearing white. The oldest one, Tim, tried to talk to her, but she never answers.

  “She’s not anyone you know?” Anya’s attention drifted to the family photographs. Many were old and yellowed with age.

  The old man shook his head. “No.”

  “Has anyone in the house ever been involved in the occult? Ouija boards, séances, that kind of thing?”

  Katie slid a glance to Anya, rolled her eyes. Anya noticed that she’d tucked her pentacle pendant into her blouse, so as not to alarm the old man.

  The old man frowned. “The boys know that they’d get an ass-blistering if they ever brought anything like that into this house.”

  Anya drifted away, pacing through the house. She liked to get a feel for the geography of the place before the lights went out and she started tripping over the furniture. The house was absolutely ordinary—kids’ report cards and Mom’s work schedule stuck up on the olive-colored refrigerator, cereal boxes and bowls set out for morning breakfast. Four bowls were placed around the kitchen table, suggesting that Mom joined the boys and Gramps for breakfast before school.

  “I think this one might be a bust,” Katie murmured, peering through ruffled curtains at the darkness in the backyard.

  “You don’t smell any magick here, either?” The salamander collar had remained still. Either Sparky was still cowering from Anya’s wrath, or there was nothing supernatural here that interested him.

  Katie shook her head. “Nope. And this place doesn’t have the oppressive atmosphere I feel at most serious hauntings.”

  “Your best guess?”

  “I think the boys have watched too many scary movies, and Gramps can’t see well enough to distinguish headlights washing through the windows from a real spirit.” Katie shrugged. “I’m betting on an uneventful night.”