by Lisa Cach
“Something woke me. Maybe the sound of your door. I checked your room and didn’t see you in bed. Then, when I saw you in the hall, there wasn’t time to grab my bathrobe.”
“Not a problem. Really. So, you, uh…always sleep in the buff?”
“Getting dressed for bed has never made any sense to me. Do you always sleep in ten yards of white cotton?”
“In winter, I switch to flowered flannel.”
He groaned.
“What?” she asked, knowing exactly what.
“Did your last boyfriend put up with that?”
“None of your business! But yes, he did. Wouldn’t you?”
“Hell no! I want to feel a woman’s skin against mine all night.”
A tingle raced over Megan’s shoulders and down her breasts as she imagined his hands enjoying the softness of her own skin.
They reached their rooms. “I think it’s best if we leave the connecting door open,” Case said. “Don’t you?”
“Yes, I guess so.”
They went through their separate doors, and Megan could see by the faint light from the window that the connecting door was still open. “Good night,” she called softly into the next room.
“Good night.”
“And Case?”
“Mm?”
“Thanks. For keeping me from a bad tumble.”
He was silent for a moment. “Anything for my lady. Good night, Megan. Sweet dreams.”
“G’night.”
Nine
Megan woke to sunlight streaming through her window and that most familiar bird sound in Seattle: crows. A caucus of them had taken up session in the trees of the garden and were raucously debating the state of the Crow Union.
Megan snuggled a little deeper under the covers and smiled. Some people hated crows and their noisy mischief and their stark black color that looked like ragged mourning wear. To Megan, the crows were a link to the past, to the local tribes and their legends about the clever birds. The crows belonged there as much as the salmon and the killer whales.
A crow landed on the thin ledge outside her window and cocked its head, staring in at her.
“Hey, crow,” Megan said softly, waving her fingertips. “How’re things?”
The crow blinked its shiny eye, walked the length of the ledge, and cocked its head at her again.
Curious thing!
Amused, Megan sat up. “What are you looking for, huh? You think there’s something to eat in here?”
The crow cawed, one short cry.
“Is that so?”
Curious herself, she got out of bed and walked to the window. The crow fluttered its wings at her approach but held its ground.
“Caw yourself, you nutty bird! What are you doing here?”
The crow started cleaning its beak on its toe, or vice versa. She couldn’t tell which.
Megan tapped on the window glass.
The crow jumped and stared at her, as if to ask why she had to do that.
“Sorry,” Megan said.
The crow flew off, disappearing into the trees.
Disappointed, Megan watched it go.
“Fucking crows!” came a familiar male voice from outside. Eric Ramsey.
Megan’s heart sank. She pressed her face to the glass and could see Eric down below, running and waving his arms over his head as an angry crow swooped at him, cawing. It landed on a branch, cawing still, and Eric pointed his hand like a gun and pretended to shoot it.
A lovely morning ruined.
Then Megan noticed the sun was well up in the sky, and she checked her watch: 11:50.
She’d slept more than twelve hours! Who would ever think that a house as haunted as this one would end up giving her the longest rest she’d had in two years?
Once she was showered and dressed, Megan trotted down the stairs and headed for the kitchen, her stomach reminding her that she needed to do some grocery shopping if she didn’t want curry for dinner.
As she approached the kitchen, she saw that new electrical cords were taped down on the floor, crossing from the kitchen to two rooms on the opposite side of the hall. Sounds of movement came from one of the rooms, then a soft curse. Eric popped out into the hall.
Megan stopped in her tracks, feeling as if a rabid possum had just appeared in her path. The nasty creature had put on a few pounds since she’d seen him last, and his black hair was longer, almost reaching his shoulders. His earlobes with their plugs were stretched wider, too. The Elvis Costello glasses were the same, as was the goatee. An uncertain smile was twitching on his lips.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi,” she answered, her momentary good mood draining away.
He stared at her and fidgeted.
Megan tightened her lips and stared back, silently daring him to say anything more to her.
“So, hey,” Eric said, and lapsed into silence.
She raised one brow. He wouldn’t try to act like her friend, would he?
“Some house, huh?” he tried brightly.
“Yeah.”
“Megan, I’m really sorry, you know. For what happened. I really didn’t think that you were in any danger. I mean, when had there ever been a real entity to deal with?”
“But you thought it was possible. Otherwise, why put all that time and money into SPIRIT?” SPIRIT was the Seattle Paranormal Intensive Research and Investigation Team, Eric’s pet organization. There were about twenty active members, the majority of them women, and for a short time Megan had been one of them.
“I was just hoping, you know? Like everyone else on the planet. Hoping for proof of life after death, or at least for proof of something beyond the world we see.”
“Despite what you did to me, you didn’t get the proof, though, did you?”
He took a step toward her and gazed at her with puppy-dog eyes. “No. And I lost you.”
Megan snorted. “Lost your chance to use me.”
“No, I mean more than that. We were good together. We really had a connection.”
“Is that why you persuaded me to go to the O’Neill house even after I told you about the bad vibe I was getting, and then changed the equipment settings without telling me?”
“I know, I know, the whole thing was a mistake.”
“I suspected you were up to something. It was only that poor O’Neill woman and her fear for her children that made me stay.”
“It was crazy of me. And stupid! So stupid! Especially because…” He trailed off, looking down. After a moment, he looked up again, eyes shining behind the heavy-rimmed glasses, brows pinched together in wistful meaningfulness. “Because I think I love you, Megan.”
She turned on her heel and headed back down the hall.
She had to get out of the house, away from him. He was making her skin crawl. Why couldn’t he do her a favor and go drown himself in the bay?
She hurried upstairs to her bedroom to grab her purse.
It was two years ago. More important things have happened in your life since then. Eric doesn’t matter anymore. You’re beyond that.
Somewhat calmer, she left the house. Eric’s old yellow Toyota pickup with canopy was parked next to her van, the back open to reveal a bed half full of electrical equipment. It brought back a wash of memories of her brief time with SPIRIT: riding with Eric in the cab; listening to his excitement over the pending investigation; unloading and setting up equipment and usually discovering a crucial piece had been forgotten; the feeling of embarrassment while setting up overly technical equipment in a shabby home the residents thought was haunted—and wasn’t.
Not all the memories were bad, but they left her feeling vaguely unsettled, as if there were something she should be ashamed about. Maybe the shameful part was that she had been a bit attracted to Eric at one point, flattered by the attention he gave her and his encouragement in regard to her gift. She’d even let him kiss her once, let him put his hand on her breast as they sat in the cab of the Toyota.
A shudder we
nt through her at the memory. How starved for male attention could she have been to have allowed that? And worse yet, to have put her hand over the bulge in his jeans and smiled at him when she felt the thickness of his erection?
Thank God it hadn’t gone farther than that.
She was opening the door to her van when Case called to her.
“Megan, good morning!”
“’Morning,” she said in surprise, seeing him over near the Dumpster, where a load of fresh lumber had been delivered.
Case jogged over to her. “When did you get up? I checked on you at ten, but you were still out.”
“Half an hour ago. I thought I’d go get a few things from the store,” she said, gesturing at the open van door. “Do you need anything?”
He shook his head. “You okay?”
She forced a smile. “I’m fine.”
He didn’t look as if he believed it. “You see Eric inside?”
“We said hello.”
“Everything okay there? Any problems?”
Nothing cement shoes and a trip to the pier wouldn’t fix. “Everything’s fine. How did you two find each other, anyway?”
“Match.com. I enjoyed candlelight dinners; he was looking for quiet nights at home.”
She punched his arm.
He grinned. “I went to a local conference hosted by SPIRIT and sat in on a talk he gave. He impressed me. He has a thousand explanations for why people think they see ghosts, and none of them involves dead people or evil spirits.”
“He said what you wanted to hear.”
“He was rational. And yeah, I wanted to hear that.”
She shook her head and clucked her tongue. “My, my, but you are going to have a hard time when you have to pay up on our bet.”
“I’m stocking up on rubber gloves and brushes for your year of furniture restoration. What else will you need? Paint stripper? Linseed oil? Wood glue?”
“Your entire worldview is going to crack apart.”
He snorted.
“Anything else happen while I was asleep?”
“The house has been quiet.”
“Good.”
He looked at the house and frowned with worry. “I’d better go check on Eric, though. God only knows what mischief the ghosts may be trying on him.”
“He doesn’t spook easily, I’ll say that much for him. He’ll be okay with whatever goes on, as long as he gets it on tape.”
“A cool head isn’t a bad thing to have around. Keeps the rest of us from overreacting.”
She took the comment personally. “I’ll try to keep a better grip on myself.”
He looked back at her in surprise. “What? Oh, hey, I wasn’t talking about you. I meant myself.” A pained grin curved his mouth. “You know. The heart attack thing.”
“Oh! I’d almost forgotten about that.”
“Brilliant of me to remind you,” he grumbled.
Megan laughed and got into the van. A few minutes with Case, and she was feeling much better about the day. “I won’t be gone more than an hour. Will that interfere with your plans? What are the plans, anyway?”
“I was counting on you and Eric to figure that out.”
Megan looked back at the pickup. “He probably has another couple of hours of setting up. I’m sure he has something in mind for us after that. This place is a jackpot of paranormal activity, and he always has multiple things in mind for what he wants to do.” Unfortunately, he didn’t always share those plans with his companions.
“So we’ll be busy tonight.”
“I’m sure we will be.”
She shut the door and started the van. Halfway down the drive, she stopped and stared up at the iron arch over the gate. Just what did that Latin motto say?
She grabbed a piece of paper and a pen off the floor and hopped out of the van.
“A problem?” Case called from back by the porte cochere.
“You haven’t translated the coat-of-arms thingy, have you?”
“No.”
“Okay.” She walked up closer to the scrolled gate. The coat of arms had a shield with an X through it and was supported on either side by animals that could be bears or lions, something four-legged and snarling. Atop the shield was an eaglelike bird gripping a lump of something in one of its claws, a piece of vegetation in the other. Coal and timber? Mr. Smithson had made his fortune in those industries.
The motto was in an arch underneath the coat of arms. Letter by letter, she copied it down: Ingenio experior funera digna meo.
Case walked up beside her. “Any idea what it might mean?”
“I can only guess. Ingenio sounds like ‘ingenious.’ I have no idea what experior might mean.”
“‘Experience’?”
“Yeah, maybe. The rest sounds like ‘funeral dignity me.’ Our amateur translation leaves us with: ‘Ingenious experience funeral dignity me.’ “
“Doesn’t sound too bad, sort of a ‘dignity in death’ theme. But I think we may have lost some of the finer points in translation.”
“Hey, I never said I was a Latin scholar. Where’s the branch library? I’ll go see if I can get some help,” she offered.
He gave her directions, and she drove off, feeling as if unseen presences were lifted from her shoulders the moment she passed beneath the gate.
Ten
“What is all this?” Case asked, surveying all the electronics covering the grand salon of the house. He’d been tearing out moldering lath and plaster upstairs, but curiosity about Eric’s truck full of electronics had drawn him from his labor. Watching Eric amid the power cords, screens, and light-blinking boxes, Case felt as if he were walking into a mad scientist’s lair.
“The rational applied to the irrational,” Eric said, attaching connectors between a computer and a black box.
Megan’s dislike of Eric had planted a seed of doubt in Case’s mind. In high school, it was always the smartest and most marginalized boys who created explosions in the chemistry lab.
Eric bounced on the balls of his feet and began pointing around the room in proprietary glee. “EMF meters, infrared cameras, regular cameras, digital video camera, digital video camera with night vision, motion sensors, infrared thermal scanner, regular thermometers, digital audio recorder, computer, monitors, air ion counter, barometer, electromagnetic pulse generator, EM blaster, temporal lobe stimulator—”
“Whoa, slow down! EM blaster?”
Eric grinned proudly and hefted up a one-foot black cube with vertical handles on either side. A black cone protruded from the front, looking like a part from an old-fashioned movie camera. “One of my experiments. She’s a beaut, isn’t she?”
“What the hell does it do?”
“It produces an enormous burst of electromagnetic energy, aimed at whatever you wish.”
“And what does that do?” Case asked with some trepidation, stepping out of the aim of the thing.
“Well, there are all these theories about active ghosts thriving on electromagnetic energy. My thinking is that if you give a ghost a blast of it, it might get strong enough to appear before everyone. We might finally get proof that they exist!”
The last thing Case wanted was for the ghosts to get stronger. “Are you sure that’s a wise idea?”
“How could it not be? If the power of a ghost’s manifestation was increased, we could capture evidence on our equipment that would leave no doubt about their existence. And we’d get multiple witnesses to the event. Think of it! We might have reproducible evidence of the Other Side! It’s the Holy Grail of parapsychologists everywhere.”
“I thought you were a skeptic,” Case said, his heart sinking. Was Eric as full of loony ideas as Megan?
“Oh, I am. Being a skeptic doesn’t mean that you’re completely closed to the idea of something paranormal existing. It means that you want solid, irrefutable proof that it’s real. Unfortunately, no one’s ever gotten that.”
“Why do you need Megan’s help to get it?”
Eric gave a lopsided grin. “Can’t find anything to aim my equipment at without her. Active spirit presences being as rare as they are, it would be like going hunting in the woods and firing randomly. Not a good idea.”
“I thought that even an ‘active presence’ could be explained away. Electromagnetic forces working on the brain, sleep states, all that.”
“Ah, but that’s where the EM blaster comes in,” Eric said, stroking his hand over the black cone. “When I set it off, if Megan goes nuts and you and I have a couple of unrelated hallucinations, then we’ll know that the ‘haunting’ is not an active presence with its own identity. If the same ghost appears in front of all of us, though, and if we can gather physical evidence of its presence, then we’re in business!”
Case frowned at the blaster. “Is Megan in any danger from that?”
“Nah. It might give her a temporary freak-out, but that’s all. It’s not like she has a pacemaker.”
“And if she did?”
“The blaster can scramble anything electrical. Blow a few circuits, maybe.”
“Is this thing going to piss off my neighbors?”
“You mean, is it going to blow up their TVs?”
“Scramble cell phones. Turn on microwaves. Crash computers. Set off security systems. Kill cars.”
Eric giggled. “Maybe.”
“Christ.” He scowled at the box. “You said that it was just a theory that it would make the ghosts stronger. What else might it do to them?”
“Well, it occurred to me that a blast of EM might feel to them like an electric shock does to us. So it might chase them away. Sort of cattle-prod them out of here.”
“I like the sound of that.”
“But either way, we should be able to get rid of the ghosts, if that’s what’s going on here. ’Cause if the blaster makes them stronger, then it’s more likely we or Megan can communicate clearly with them and help them figure out that it’s time to go.”