The show featured two other “sensers” as Duff called them. One was a woman in New Mexico who could summon up visualizations of the dead by holding objects that had been important to them—usually wedding rings or other pieces of often-worn jewelry. The other was a man from Maine named Garrick Masser who had been featured in Duff’s first show and who saw and heard the dead as they had been in their lives. Based on viewer response, there was some skepticism over the claims of the other two sensers—despite Duff staging similar tests for them and the apparent accuracy of their results in those tests—but it seemed that the relative modesty of Ann’s claims convinced many in the audience of her legitimacy.
Mike was pleased that after the show aired the number of calls he received for Ann’s services increased markedly—he was able to be more selective about the work they accepted, and was able to charge significantly more for those engagements.
For Ann, the increased attention was a mixed blessing—when Mike informed her that an infatuated teenager had set up an internet fan site, she was more alarmed than flattered. In many ways she regretted trading her anonymity for the public validation she realized had been her impetus for accepting Corey Duff’s invitation to participate in his project.
But in addition to the validation was the opportunity to get to know other people who shared her ability—and just as her internet fan doubtless scoured the web for the infrequent mentions of Ann Kinnear, so did Ann begin surreptitiously tracking the activities of Garrick Masser.
Chapter 20
A little over a week after the visit from Joe, Walt flew Ann back to West Chester. Mike and Mavis met them at the passenger terminal; Lawrence had evidently decided to sit this one out.
“Sorry about before,” said Ann.
“I’m curious to learn more about what you sensed that made you beat such a hasty retreat,” said Mavis stiffly.
As before, Joyce was waiting at the door when they arrived although this time the limo didn’t pull away after dropping them off across the street, Mike having whispered to the driver that they might not be very long.
Ann steeled herself as she crossed the street and mounted the marble steps. The sense of horrible foreboding had not been as immediately apparent upon stepping out of the car as it had been on the first visit but the sense reasserted itself as she neared the door. Again she felt the force of whatever terrible thing had happened in this house making her want to turn away. And again she felt something summoning her to the house, this time with less frenzy but no less urgency. She crossed her arms and a shiver ran through her body despite the warmth of the May morning.
Reaching the steps, she nodded to Joyce and was introduced, along with Mike and Mavis, to a new addition to the party—Mark Pironi, the seller’s agent. Then the party entered the house.
The house, although not large by Rittenhouse Square standards, was, as Lawrence had said, beautifully finished, with the entrance hall floored in black and white marble in a diamond pattern, expensive-looking oil paintings on the walls, and a staircase with an elaborately carved newel post along the right-hand wall.
Ann glanced around the foyer, her lips tight and her face pale. “Let’s start at the top,” said Ann, and they climbed the steps after her.
The third floor included the gym, outfitted with professional grade equipment. “The seller might be willing to include the equipment if you’re interested—” began Pironi but stopped when Mike gave him a slight shake of the head.
Ann circled the room quickly and then made an equally cursory tour of the small two-bedroom apartment that Joan and Esme used when they stayed overnight. “Nothing,” she said shortly and descended to the second floor.
There were four bedrooms on this floor. The front room had large windows overlooking the street and was outfitted as a study—likely a woman’s study based on the delicate furniture and light, airy decor. Ann walked behind the desk and sat down, gazing around the room then glancing across the mostly bare desk top. She picked up a silver-framed photograph—it showed a couple seated on a rustic wooden bench and, on the woman’s lap, a little girl. The man, strikingly handsome with very short gray hair and startlingly blue eyes, had his arm draped over the woman’s shoulders. The woman, with black hair pulled back from an elegantly beautiful face, was waving the little girl’s hand at the photographer, the little girl looking curiously at her own, waving hand. The man and woman were laughing—Ann could almost hear the photographer laughing with them. Behind them a green field rolled away to distant trees. No doubt the owners of the house, she thought—they looked a bit old to be the parents of such a young child but such things were getting less surprising with each generation. What did surprise her was the contrast between the obvious happiness of the people in the photographs and the distress that the house exuded. She shook her head. She wasn’t expert in understanding people when they were alive, only in understanding what they left behind once they had died.
She glanced toward the door where the group stood, looking at her expectantly. She shook her head. “Nothing.” She replaced the photograph on the desk, its place marked by a dust-free area, and crossed to the group which parted to let her pass.
The next room was obviously a guest room—as beautifully decorated as the other rooms but lacking the comfortable clutter that marked rooms used regularly. She barely stuck her head into the room before shaking her head and continuing down the hallway to what turned out to be a nursery decorated in a Beatrix Potter theme. She glanced briefly at a grouping of small photos on the dresser—mostly of the little girl alone with one or two also including the dark-haired woman—but she knew there was nothing for her to sense in this room either.
The last room on the second floor was the master bedroom. She passed fairly quickly through the bedroom itself but lingered in the walk-in closet, lightly touching the boxes and suitcases on the upper shelves and running her hands over the clothes.
“Uh, the clothes aren’t included in the sale,” said Pironi.
“Yes, we know that,” said Mavis dismissively, not taking her eyes off Ann. “Ann, are you sensing anything?”
“Not clearly. It’s not a happy place,” said Ann.
“What do you mean?” asked Mavis.
“Not happy. Sad,” said Ann shortly and moved into the hallway.
She descended the stairs slowly, almost unwillingly, to the first floor. She started to cross the foyer to the living room and then, near an antique sideboard, abruptly sidestepped and stopped. After a moment she took another step toward the living room, then jerked her head back to the center of the foyer. Mavis looked questioningly at Mike who raised his eyebrows and shrugged.
After another moment Ann shook herself, scanned the foyer, then moved into the living room. She circled the room, running her fingers over the furniture and knick-knacks then shook her head; she passed through the dining room with the same result. They returned to the foyer and crossed to the library, Ann skirting the area near the sideboard.
In the library Ann took her time, touching the furniture, sitting on the leather couch, running her hands over the book cases. At one point she squatted down and ran her hands over the rug. She also began displaying what looked to the others in the party like a nervous tic, periodically jerking her head slightly to the left or right. Then she walked to the window and looked out at the street.
“This room has a lot of anger in it. Hurtful words were spoken here and infected the space. Those feelings will color anything that happens here for a long time.”
“How can you tell about what words were spoken?” asked Mavis. “I don’t recall you sensing anything like that before.”
“No, I don’t either,” said Ann. “But an argument definitely happened here, there’s a sort of ... buzzing in the air. Like a wasp. If wasps buzz.”
“Bees buzz,” said Pironi helpfully.
“More like a wasp,” said Ann.
“Well, bee or wasp, I suppose this one is off the list,” said Mavis with an air of s
atisfaction. Experiencing a house with an unfriendly spirit was only slightly less gratifying than finding one with a friendly one. “I suppose we can go now,” she said to Ann solicitously.
“No, we haven’t seen everything,” said Ann and, leaving the library with the group following her, turned left toward the back of the house. She passed the kitchen with scarcely a glance and in the back hallway, off the kitchen, opened a door and descended a short flight of steps to the garage. One bay held a pristinely clean Porsche Carrera, the other was empty.
“Very unusual to have a garage as part of the house in Center City,” Pironi said gamely and then lapsed back into silence when Mike glared at him.
Ann became more animated as she walked around the garage, first circling the garage bays and then beginning to pat her way around the room, along the walls, across a workbench, until she came to a metal cabinet, secured with a combination lock, where she paused for a moment and then continued around the wall back to the stairway. She continued exhibiting the tic that had developed in the library. She turned and surveyed the room, then crossed to a door in the opposite corner and fiddled with the lock. “Mike, I can’t get this,” she said.
Mike crossed to the door and as he flipped the lock, which opened easily, Ann whispered, “Get Pironi out of the garage for a few minutes.”
Ann and Mike stepped out of the garage into the alley behind the house, Mike looking up at the back of the house in an appraising manner as the others joined them.
“Nicely maintained,” he said.
“Yes, no fixing up needed on this one,” said Pironi.
Mike was now walking down the alley as if to get a view of the house from the side. “Now how much of this is original and how much has been added? Because,” he said to Mavis, “oftentimes the presence of spirits is more strongly concentrated in the older parts of a building ...”
She slipped back into the garage unnoticed and crossed to the metal cabinet and stood with her hands resting on top of it. She was sure this was where the spirit was directing her. She had felt it throughout the house—not just the usual sense of the person, sometimes as they were throughout their lives and sometimes as they were in the moments of their death, but rather a communication directed specifically at her. It was largely a physical sense of being lightly pushed in a certain direction—to the garage—but light not because of a lack of urgency on the part of the pusher but because of her own inability to fully absorb the sensation.
Along with this physical sensation was a visual aspect that was different from the amorphous manifestations she was used to. She had a clear sense of a person—a woman—glimpsed just at the periphery of her vision but gone when she turned her head. It reminded her of an episode when she was little when Mike had thrown a ball to her when she wasn’t looking and it had hit her eye and torn the retina, creating a myriad of “floaters” that had taken months to settle out of her vision. She had spent a lot of time in her darkened bedroom during those months because the floaters were less noticeable in the dark—it had made her crazy to try to look at one and have it track just outside her point of focus, disappearing from sight just as she thought she would catch up to it.
She removed her hands from the cabinet and pressed them to her eyes, trying to block out the onslaught of unfamiliar sensations, when she felt a hand on her shoulder.
She dropped her hands and, whirling around, again caught that infuriating glimpse of someone, but the garage was empty.
“What do you want?” she whispered hoarsely and very faintly she heard a response ...
In there.
Ann turned back to the cabinet. “In here?”
Yes.
Ann knelt in front of the cabinet and tugged on the combination lock. “What’s the combination?” she said, only half joking.
This time there was no auditory response but Ann sensed anger and frustration. She shook her head and dropped the lock which clattered on the metal cabinet. “I can’t. It’s locked.” And she heard the voice again, growing ever more faint ...
Get it ... blue ...
Ann shook her head, “I don’t understand. Get something from the cabinet that’s blue?”
She didn’t hear the voice again but suddenly something grabbed her wrist and her hand was pulled toward the lock. She gasped and jerked her hand back, falling from her kneeling position onto the cement floor of the garage and as she did she heard the voices of the rest of the party drifting in from the alley. They mustn’t see her by the cabinet, she thought. Especially Pironi. She scrambled unsteadily to her feet and backed away from the cabinet, then, scanning the garage one more time, made her way to the door to the alley.
The voices were coming from around the corner of the building and she came up behind the group as Mike was saying, “... then during the Victorian era there was an increased interest in the occult. Consider Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—” Pironi was staring pointedly at his watch and even Mavis seemed only politely interested. Mike saw Ann who gave him a quick nod and, with obvious relief, Mike said, “Well, perhaps we should be going—” just as Ann sank to a sitting position on the ground.
“Hey, A.,” said Mike, startled, as he pushed through the group to Ann and knelt down beside her. “You OK?”
Ann shook her head to clear it. “Yes, I just got dizzy.”
“What happened?” asked Mavis.
“I don’t know,” said Ann, then, realizing that didn’t sound too believable after her earlier pronouncements about the house, added, “It’s not healthy here, we should go.”
Mike helped her to her feet while Joyce went in to get Ann a drink of water. Mike kept his hand on Ann’s arm and as they re-entered the garage he noticed her surreptitious glance around the space before they climbed the stairs to the kitchen.
Joyce had a glass of water ready for Ann and was in the process of wringing out a dish towel in the sink.
“If you feel faint it sometimes helps to put a cool cloth on your face,” she said, handing the towel to Ann but Ann shook her head.
“Thanks, I feel better now.”
“Maybe it’s the house that’s healthy and the outside that’s unhealthy,” muttered Pironi peevishly.
Mavis replied with an irritated “Hmph.”
When Mike was convinced that Ann was recovered, the group left the kitchen and headed toward the front door but turned when they realized that Ann had stopped in the entrance hall. She had squatted down and, as in the library, was running her hands across the floor. Her face was screwed up, as if she were being confronted with a foul odor. When she stood up she seemed unsteady once again, and leaned against the sideboard for a few seconds before following the rest of the party to the door. Before leaving the house she made a full turn, scanning the entrance hall, and then they stepped out into the May sunshine, Pironi locking the door behind them.
*****
After seeing off the party, Mark Pironi walked to his car which was parked on the street a couple of blocks from the Firth house. Leaning against it he pushed a speed dial on his mobile phone. The call was answered on the second ring.
“Pironi here. They just left.”
“What happened?” Pironi could hear traffic noises in the background.
“They had the psychic woman with them again, just like Joyce described, except she went into the house this time. She kept talking about which rooms were happy and which rooms were sad. I think we can safely assume that the Van Dykes won’t be making an offer.”
“What did she say specifically?”
“Hardly spent any time on the third floor. I told them you might be willing to include the gym equipment …?”
“Maybe. What else?”
“She spent a little more time on the second floor, especially in the master bedroom. Most of the time she spent on the first floor. She said the library had bad karma—she didn’t use those words exactly, but that was the sense of it. She had some kind of attack out back, had to sit down and have a glass of water. She spent a lot o
f time in the foyer running her hands over the floor.”
“Where in the foyer?”
“Near the sideboard.”
There was a pause on the other end of the line. “What did you think of her?”
Pironi hesitated. “She didn’t seem strange when she first showed up but it got a little freakish by the time she was done. I don’t think the Van Dykes would have bought anyway but she certainly put the nail in the coffin of that deal.”
“Did you get her name?”
“Ann Kinnear. Her brother was there too—Mike Kinnear.”
“OK. I appreciate you going, I like to know what people are saying about the house even if it’s crazy stuff.”
“No problem. Give my best to your dad, Biden, I haven’t seen him for a while.”
“Sure,” Biden said and disconnected.
“Asshole,” said Pironi and flipped his phone shut.
After the excitement of the visit to the Rittenhouse Square house, lunch was evidently an option again and Mavis suggested meeting up with Lawrence for a meal at her favorite Main Line restaurant.
“I want to hear all about it,” she said, “it seemed so much more vivid than our other sensings have been!”
Before Ann had a chance to object to Mavis using the word “our,” Mike said, “What do you think, A., feel up to lunch or would you like to call it a day?” Before Ann had a chance to reply, Mike turned to Mavis, saying, “I imagine that was quite exhausting for Ann.”
Ann opened her mouth to weigh in but Mavis was nodding vigorously. “Oh, I’m sure that’s true,” she said, “we could certainly do lunch another day, but this morning’s experience, it was quite extraordinary—”
Ann cleared her throat pointedly and they both looked at her expectantly. When she realized she didn’t have anything to say, she sighed and turned to look out the window.
The Sense of Death: An Ann Kinnear Suspense Novel (The Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels Book 1) Page 13