A Babe in Ghostland

by Lisa Cach

  “Naughty thing. She’s going to get what’s coming to her.”

  “The young man didn’t know who she was,” Case continued. “She ran across the lawn to him, her lips parted in an eager smile.” He traced the outline of her lips, then stroked his fingertips through her hair. “Her golden hair was down around her shoulders. And she was wearing her nightgown, the neck unbuttoned and showing the pale skin of her breast to the bright light of day.”

  Case’s hand undid the top button of her gown, then the second. His fingertips drew circles over her breast bone.

  Megan’s breathing grew heavy, her breasts tingling with the wish to be touched.

  “The man let her throw herself into his arms, and when her mouth reached up to his…”

  Megan felt the warmth of Case close to her and opened her eyes to see him within inches, his mouth above hers.

  “He kissed her.”

  Megan’s lips parted, her heart thudding. Case lowered his face a fraction closer, then drew away, leaving her untouched.

  “And when he kissed her, she fainted dead away. This scared the crap out of him, of course, and since he was a coward, he dropped her on the lawn and got the hell out of there.”

  “Some Prince Charming,” Megan said in frustration.

  “The whole house was in an uproar, the doctor was called, but no one could wake her up. Her father knew it was hopeless; he’d been cursed years ago by an evil gypsy fortune teller.”

  Megan made a noise of disapproval.

  “Or an angry Indian shaman. At any rate, they stuck her in a room in a tower and forgot about her.”

  “Bastards.”

  “People died and moved away, and the house fell into disrepair. Blackberry vines covered the yard, and roses wrapped themselves around the house. A hundred years passed, and property values went up, and a handsome builder bought the house.”

  “Of course.”

  “He hacked his way through the blackberry vines and the roses, suffering many injuries. Scrapes, pricks, slivers, you name it.”

  “Poor man.”

  “He climbed the stairs inside the house, higher and higher and higher, until he reached the attic and found a small doorway at the farthest corner. Through it, he found one last stairway, so narrow and twisting that he could barely fit his big, manly, muscular frame through it.”

  Megan giggled.

  “He emerged into the tower room, the windows on all sides covered with vines that cast their shadows on the pale, perfect woman who lay upon the bed, her body still clothed in the white gown she’d worn on the three-hundred-sixty-fourth day of her seventeenth year.

  “He held his hand near her face,” Case said, doing the same to Megan, “and felt the warmth of her breath. And as he looked at her and drank in her beauty, he began to want to touch her. Just a little bit. Maybe right here,” he said, touching her temple. “And here.” He trailed his fingertips over her jawline and then her lips. “And down here.”

  Megan felt his touch move down her throat, down over her breast bone, and then his hand flattened out and covered her breast. She closed her eyes, sucking in a breath.

  “He knew he shouldn’t. He knew she would protest if she had the chance.” He massaged her breast, catching her nipple between two fingers and pressing gently. “But she was so beautiful, he couldn’t resist. And then he kissed her.”

  Case’s mouth pressed against hers, gently at first, small, nipping caresses. Then harder, taking her lower lip between his, his tongue stroking it before delving inside. His weight came half over her, pressing her down into the mattress, his hand still at her breast.

  Megan wrapped her arms around his neck, pulling him closer. She felt the hardness of his arousal against her thigh and felt an answering rush of wet warmth between her legs. A low growl of pleasure rumbled in her throat, and the sound of it seemed to increase his passion. His mouth on hers became ferocious, devouring her, his hunger almost frightening. He threw back the bedcovers and pulled up her gown, his hand sliding between her thighs.

  He stroked her once, slowly, with the flat of his palm, the roughness of it sending shivers of sensation through her, and then she felt his fingertip dip into her core.

  The intimacy of the touch was a shock, and by reflex she grabbed his wrist, stopping him and turning her head away from his kiss. “Case, no.”

  He froze, his body tense against hers. “No?”

  She shook her head, hating the words she made herself say. “I barely know you.” But God knew she wanted to continue anyway. She could barely keep her hips from moving against his hand, still lodged between her thighs.

  “You’re killing me,” he said, his voice tight.

  “I don’t want to ever have to regret sleeping with you. Let’s get to know each other a little better first, okay? Make sure we like each other enough and won’t regret it.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Please don’t be mad at me.”

  A strained laugh answered her. “It’s not my place to be mad.” He rolled off her and stood. “Good night, Megan.”

  “Good night,” she said softly. “And Case?” she said as he moved toward the door. “Sleep well.”

  He barked a laugh and was gone.

  Fourteen

  Case got out of bed cranky and bleary. He showered and slogged downstairs, at odds with himself and the world. He got the coffee going and went outside for the Sunday Seattle Times, tossed in a plastic bag at the end of the driveway. By the time he came back inside, Eric was up.

  “Time to check the mousetraps,” Eric said cheerfully as he passed in the hallway.

  Case grunted and continued toward his pot of coffee.

  He was halfway through a microwavable sausage and pancake frozen breakfast when Eric popped his head in the door, his cheerfulness gone.

  “Case, you got a minute?”

  “Why? What’s up?”

  “Not much. Which is the problem. The electricity must have been doing some strange stuff last night. Can you come take a look?”

  “It does strange stuff every night. If I knew how to stop it, I would.”

  “I’ve got some ideas I’d like to talk over, see what you think.”

  “After I finish my breakfast.”

  “How can you eat that crap? God knows what they make it out of.”

  “Pigs’ eyeballs, I hope,” Case said, and stabbed a sausage with his fork. “Delicious!”

  Eric shuddered and left.

  Case spent another half-hour getting acquainted with the day on his own terms before setting down his coffee cup and heading for the grand salon. Above him, he heard footsteps and running water. Megan had finally arisen. He pictured her naked in the shower, water running down her body, her soapy hand washing her breasts, her belly, and the deep dark valley below.

  Christ. He was developing a serious case of blue balls, and it was his own damn fault. He was horny, but if she got to know him better, the way she wanted, there’d never be any chance of getting her into bed. He was well and truly screwed.

  He found Eric ensconced like a medieval lord behind the crenellations of his computer equipment. “So, what’s your idea?” Case asked.

  “Ah, you’re finally here! Come look at this footage from last night.”

  Curiosity at last rousing itself, Case came around the long tables of equipment to the bank of LCD screens Eric was looking at. Several of them had green-gray scenes frozen on them, and a few had screen savers running.

  “This is all the input from the night-vision cameras. Some of them were set to record all night; others were triggered by motion detectors. Look at this one,” Eric said, pointing. “This is the hallway outside the Smithson family bedrooms.”

  “Okay.”

  Eric hit a key on one of his keyboards. The scene stayed the same.

  “Wait for it,” Eric said. “It looks like the camera’s not recording because nothing is moving.”

  Case watched and waited. A shadow suddenly moved across t
he screen from left to right. “Whoa! What was that?”

  Eric replayed it, then froze the screen with the shadow in its center. “I couldn’t tell you.”

  Case leaned forward and tried to make out any detail in the amorphous shape. “Can you enlarge it?”

  “It doesn’t help.” Eric zoomed in on the image, but it became more diffuse, less easy to differentiate from the background in the grainy night-vision recording.

  “Play it again.”

  Case felt the hairs standing on the back of his neck as the shadow moved once more across the screen. Its shape changed as it moved, like a person struggling under bulky layers of cloth. Eeriest of all was the unnatural speed with which it jerked its way across the screen, as if moving in fast-forward.

  “Is this normal speed?”

  Eric nodded. The screen went white, then black. A moment later, it was back again, showing the empty hallway.

  “At least this camera came back,” Eric said. “Some of them shut off completely.”

  “Could that shadow have been a malfunction in the camera?”

  “It’s possible it could have been pixilation. I’ve never seen pixilation quite like that, but…”

  “But it could have been. Is that the only thing the cameras caught?” Case asked. There had to be at least twenty thousand dollars’ worth of equipment set up around the house, and all it had caught was a questionable shadow. The hairs on the back of his neck smoothed down.

  “I think that’s pretty much the shape of things,” Eric said, reaching again to tap keys. One by one, the screens came alive, revealing views of other parts of the house.

  The screen saver on a screen to Case’s right disappeared, replaced by Megan’s bedroom. The sheets were mussed, her robe tossed over the foot of the bed. She must have returned from her shower. Was she just off-screen, naked? Case felt a pulse of desire at the thought.

  “Eric!” Megan shouted.

  Case jumped.

  Fully dressed, she marched into the room and slammed a small piece of equipment down onto the table. “What the hell was this doing in the bathroom?”

  “Careful with that!” Eric cried.

  Case recognized what it was and turned on Eric in disbelief. “You put a camera in the bathroom?”

  “In the bathrooms and all our bedrooms. It made sense, given what’s gone on here.”

  “You should have asked!” Megan screeched. “You should have told us. You don’t just stick a camera in someone’s private space.”

  Case stared at her, wondering despite his better instincts whether her shower had been recorded. And then he realized exactly why she was so alarmed.

  “I didn’t hide the cameras. They were in plain sight,” Eric was saying.

  “Maybe in the daylight. But not at night, with the nonexistent lighting. You were hoping to get your own private peep show, weren’t you?”

  “Megan, you know this is how SPIRIT sets up investigations. You’ve set up the cameras yourself. How was I supposed to guess that you’d purposefully forget that?”

  Case broke in. “Eric, erase everything from Megan’s bedroom and from the bathroom, right now. You haven’t looked at any of it yet, have you?”

  “No,” Eric grumbled. “What type of guy do you think I am, anyway?”

  “A normal one.”

  Megan crossed her arms. “Go on.”

  Eric tapped keys. “I only set them up in case you reported that something had happened, like something crawling into bed with you. Wouldn’t you want it recorded, if you were molested in your sleep like Case said he’d been?”

  Megan leaned past Eric and tapped keys herself, double-checking that the recordings were truly gone.

  “I really thought you’d remember there’d be cameras everywhere,” Eric went on. “You know how these investigations are set up.”

  When Megan spoke again, her voice was heavy with suspicion. “You always have such good excuses for why you’ve pissed people off.”

  “Look, I’m not a bad guy. I didn’t aim the bathroom camera at the tub. I’m not a Peeping Tom pervert. Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty? You refuse to give me a fresh start.”

  “Do you really deserve one?”

  Eric made a petulant sound.

  “Whatever you think Megan should have already known about the cameras,” Case said, “you can’t deny that I should have been told where they were.”

  “You’re right. I’m sorry.” Eric looked down, his hair falling forward and hiding his eyes. “I got so caught up in tweaking the software last night, I forgot to say anything. I’m sorry.”

  His false deference further annoyed Case. “Your apologies come easy and fast. I wish you were less practiced at begging forgiveness. It doesn’t inspire confidence.”

  Eric flashed him a look that was dark with submerged anger, the intensity in that momentary glare taking Case aback. It also pissed him off—he’d respect the man a hell of a lot more if instead of seething silently, Eric would tell him to shut up.

  “Are you still going to help me try to fix the electrical issue?” Eric asked.

  “Later. I’ve got some work to do.” He strongly suspected that Eric had watched the video and seen him in Megan’s bed. Was that why Eric was so angry? Was the guy in love with her?

  The thought infuriated him, for no reason he could comprehend.

  Christ, he was a mess. He couldn’t think straight. He had to get away from everyone.

  “Case—” Megan said as he moved past her, her hand reaching out toward his arm.

  He flinched away from her touch.

  She pulled her hand back, hurt and confusion on her face.

  Case forced himself to stop and tried to smile reassuringly. “I’m sorry, what was it you wanted to say?”

  She examined his face and shook her head. “Nothing. It can wait.”

  “Later, then.”

  Fifteen

  Megan sat silently while Eric squirted blobs of contact gel onto her scalp and affixed the electrodes that would monitor her brain-wave patterns as she wore the temporal lobe stimulator.

  She was too morose to care that Eric was touching her or that she was going to invite God-knew-what into her head with the helmet. She was just glad that it was finally night and the day could be considered almost over. It had been about the longest, loneliest day she could remember.

  Case’s mood had been the source of her misery. While he wasn’t rude to her, it was also clear that he wanted to be alone today. Their cozy intimacy at the kitchen table the night before might as well have happened to different people. Apparently, sex really did destroy friendships.

  A quick drive to Antique Fancies to fetch her box of keys led to a half-hour visit with Tracie.

  Tracie said, “He’s probably got male PMS.”

  “Give me a real answer.”

  “I am! He’s in a bad mood. You don’t know why. He may have been pissed off before you came into the room. And because he’s a guy, he can’t tell you why he’s suddenly turned into an emotional warthog. All he can do is go to his burrow and grunt until he feels better.”

  “I wish he’d say something.”

  “No, you don’t, not until the grunting is done. Believe me, it’s better to wait. He’ll probably forget what was bothering him, so even if it was you, he won’t care. Guys don’t have the same long-term memory we do.”

  So Megan had come back to the house to look for clues. She’d opened a few of the trunks and desks in the various rooms but was too self-conscious to go up to the attic, knowing that Case was on the servants’ floor working. Or grunting, as Tracie suggested.

  Megan hadn’t opened anything in the Smithson sisters’ rooms, either. Although nothing ghostly had happened all day, she didn’t have the courage to stir things up in those rooms on her own. She couldn’t forget the shadow in the hallway or the way the door had refused to open to her.

  She spent her lunch in the library, reading over the papers that Case had collec
ted during his initial cleaning. She began to piece together the raw facts of the Smithsons’ lives. There was no real sense of who they’d been as people, except for the ledger where someone had written down their expenses for several months. There were three entries for visits by spiritualists.

  Eric had been as elusive as Case all day, but she saw that as a blessing. In a house the size of this one, it hadn’t been hard for three busy people to spend the day alone.

  Now, having finished with the electrodes, Eric went to his computer and was tapping keys and testing the signals. The three of them met in the grand salon, Case sitting on an old Victorian chair, legs crossed in that wide-open male style with an ankle resting atop the opposite knee, a hand holding it in place.

  His gaze met hers and he gave her a small, reassuring smile.

  She returned it, uncertainty and hope spelled out in the fragile U of her lips.

  He broke their gaze and watched Eric work, and Megan felt herself deflate. With that deflation came annoyance, with herself more than with him.

  Was she getting a crush on the man?

  She’d thought he was beginning to like her, too, but now she wondered if he had just been trying to get into her pants. Maybe now that she’d made it clear she didn’t go for casual sex, he’d lost interest. He didn’t want to get any closer to her; didn’t want to get drawn into her “flaky” world.

  She sighed.

  Maybe she should do as Tracie suggested and stop speculating. It wasn’t helping her.

  “Let’s move over to the chaise longue,” Eric finally said, lifting up her trailing wires. It was best if she lay down during this experiment, since the helmet was heavy and she needed to be relaxed.

  She sat on the edge of the couch, and Eric handed her the helmet, wires hanging from its underside like tentacles on a jellyfish. The tentacles ended in a black box, which in turn sent a cable to the computer. Megan peered inside the helmet and saw that the solenoids attached all over its surface were both smaller and more numerous than the last time. Eric hadn’t been lying about refining the device.