by JL Bryan
"I would invite you in, but anyway, I'll be right back." I managed to nudge her back from the door long enough to close it, and I threw the deadbolt for good measure. Hey, you're not supposed to invite vampires into your home, right?
I'm usually not that picky about my clothes. I have a few dark jackets, a few boots, a couple of things that look sort of okay when first meeting a new client. It usually isn't long before I'm crawling through their dusty attic looking for the hidden bones of a dead ancestor or something, so I don't go to a lot of trouble dressing up for the occasion.
At the moment, though, the last thing I wanted was to look like a disheveled mess and give Kara something extra to sneer about. She'd caught me on laundry day, though. Of course.
While rummaging through my clothes, I called Melissa, hoping for some kind of update about Michael's condition. She didn't answer, which wasn't surprising given how she'd last spoken to me. I didn't disagree with her, either. She had a right to blame me. All I wanted was to ditch work and go sit with him, if Melissa would allow it, but that didn't seem feasible at the moment. Not if Kara was going to do things like stalk me at home and pound rudely on my door during the middle of the day, when decent folks should be sleeping.
I managed to find some black slacks and a matching sleeveless blouse—not perfect, but passable enough under my leather jacket. I fought a brief war with my long, style-resistant hair to wrangle it into a ponytail. At the last moment, I thought to grab my own sunglasses on the way out. I didn't want to be the only one in the group uncool enough to show my eyes to the world.
Kara was knocking on my door again when I stepped out.
"Now we are late." Kara turned and started down the stairs. The Hoff stood with arms crossed, watching me, as if he'd been ordered to wait and take up the rear.
"Okay. Is Stacey waiting in the van or something?" I started down the stairs after her.
"She is not needed for client outreach." Kara led the way out the door, into an afternoon so bright that I was immediately glad I'd snagged the dark glasses. "She is only the technical manager, yes? We will call her to the site after our initial assessment, if we choose to proceed."
"Stacey's pretty good with clients, actually. Plus, she can scope out the area, think about the gear we might need—"
"I understand that you once did things differently." Kara paused at the van parked next to my Camaro. It wasn't the reliable old blue cargo van that I'd used for years, first with Calvin and then with Stacey. It was a solid black cargo van, larger and much newer, the same one I'd seen parked outside our office.
Hasselhoff Guy opened the shotgun door for Kara, and she climbed inside.
"So client outreach now consists of you, me, and the Hoff?" I gestured toward the guy, who grimaced. "Kara, I'm just not sure your frosty, angry stare is going to go down half as well as Stacey's bubbly Southern charm, at least not around here. Maybe if we were chasing ghosts in Siberia—"
"Would you like me to arrange that?" Kara asked. The Hoff closed her door and circled around to the driver side.
"What, no chauffeur service for me?" I called after him. "This is coming out of your tip, Hasselhoff."
He grunted in response before climbing in behind the wheel.
I pulled open the van's side door and peered inside. I immediately did my best not to look or sound impressed by what I saw. I can only hope it worked.
Like our van, it clearly served as a mobile nerve center, with monitors and speakers wired into the walls. Unlike ours, it had comfortable-looking bucket seats in the back, which looked capable of rotating from side to side so one passenger could attend to multiple monitors and workstations. They also looked capable of reclining into soft single beds that were undoubtedly more comfortable than the drop-down cots in our van. There was even a small, glass-front refrigerator with bottled water and snacks.
I climbed in and buckled up, trying to look nonchalant, but very curious to paw through the closed built-in storage cabinets and see what kind of gear they had with them.
Kara and the Hoff were both watching me through the small gap between their seats, which connected the rear cargo area where I sat to the cab where they were.
"What are you waiting for?" I made a scooting gesture with my hand. "Let's go. Being late is against company policy, remember?"
"What do you make of our mobile communications unit?" Kara asked.
"It's fine. Does it talk?"
"Talk?" Kara looked puzzled.
"You know. Like KITT. On Knight Rider?" I gestured toward the Hoff.
"I get it!" he snapped. "I look like David Hasselhoff. I've had the same face my whole life Do you think you're the first person who's noticed?"
"Sorry," I said. "I'm having a bad week."
"It's no vacation here, either." The Hoff abruptly stomped the gas, whipping backwards across the small asphalt parking pad that serves the somewhat-refurbished old factory where I live. He stopped just in time to avoid smashing into my neighbor's lime green El Camino.
"Second thought," I said. "Maybe you should just let the van drive itself."
"Maybe we do have a self-driving module," the Hoff said. "Tesla has a self-driving car, maybe we have one. You don't know."
"Just drive, Hayden," Kara said.
"Your name's Hayden?" I said. "It's nice to meet you. My friend Kara here is so rude about forgetting to introduce people."
"It's Hayden." He swerved out into traffic, drawing a well-deserved angry honk from a gray-haired lady in a red Corvette. "Hayden Hasselhoff."
"You're kidding me."
"I am." He didn't crack a smile, though, as far as I could tell from his reflection in the rearview.
I turned my attention to the screens on the walls. They were wafer-thin, larger than ours, and in color. I didn't see any keyboards, but I quickly discovered the screens were all touch-enabled.
A Paranormal Solutions logo glowed on each screen, a black pyramid encircled by a glittering, multi-hued ring like the planet Saturn. When I touched one, a cluster of icons replaced the logo.
I shuffled through the van's records. They were marked by date and location. If it was anything like ours, the van had a server brimming with images, sounds, and video from past investigations.
One group of files quickly caught my eye. They were related to Kara's initial study of the Lathrop Grand hotel, where they'd captured the spirit of a powerful nineteenth-century psychic medium named Ithaca Galloway. Kara had posed as a television producer with a film crew, disguising their true intentions from the hotel manager. Removing Ithaca's spirit had created a violent power vacuum among the remaining spirits at the hotel, leading to a problematic haunting that Stacey and I had been hired to resolve.
Here, I had their raw data at my fingertips. I was curious to look through it, but then my snooping revealed another file that couldn't help but draw my attention. Clay.
I touched it with my fingertip, wondering if it could possibly be about me and my personal history, scared by the idea that Kara and Nicholas might know such intimate details about me. I supposed they could have put it together from public records, if they'd really wanted to.
The screen went black. All of them did, all at once.
"What are you doing?" Kara snapped. Her face appeared on all of the screens. She was apparently speaking to me over her phone, or maybe a dashboard camera.
"I'm trying to find some music back here. Do you have anything by, uh, Prince?" I asked, thinking of the old lady in the little red Corvette.
"You like old music, do you?" Kara raised an eyebrow. "Old American pop music."
"The music of Prince is neither young nor old, but surpasses all understanding. Just the Purple Rain album would be great, thanks." I actually didn't know any of the other albums, come to think of it.
"You were not looking into our sound files."
"I was about to look into your file on Anton Clay, actually. Mind telling me what you have?"
"You must be mistaken. You have no
t been granted access to this vehicle's records." Her voice echoed three dozen times, her face looking at me from monitors on three different walls.
"I can't believe you're Skyping me from two feet away," I said. "Why don't you just turn back and talk to me?"
"I want to make sure I have your full attention. We wouldn't want your mind wandering."
"Okay. If I can't have peace and quiet, then fill me in on the case. Who's the client? What do we know so far?"
"You may read her email for yourself." Kara's dozens of faces vanished, thankfully, to be replaced by a short bit of text from the contact form on our website. A person named "Mackenzie B." had partially filled it out, including her phone number and address.
I have a problem, it said. Can someone please contact me at the phone number above?
That was all it said.
"Very funny," I said. "Who called her? You?"
"Nicholas," Kara said. "She told him there is a problem in her baby's nursery."
"I already know that part."
"Then you are all caught up, Ellie."
I rolled my eyes at her wasting my time. The screens had gone blank again, and now they didn't respond when I touched them. "So, no music back here, then? Do you have Netflix? Anything?"
"We have Baywatch," Hayden said. His tone was flat, not a trace of humor. "Every episode."
"Thanks, Hoff. I'll just sit here in silence." The woman's address was in town, so we wouldn't be driving for long, anyway.
I hummed and drummed my fingers on my armrest, until finally Hayden turned on the radio to drown me out. Talk radio came on, and we listened to a caller complaining about the pelicans in his yard.
Through the narrow slice of windshield that I could see, I watched as we drove up to a Colonial Revival house, with dormers along the roofline and a fancy broken pediment above the front door. It was two stories high, and from the style, I guessed it was about a century old.
It had been a large, attractive home in its day, but had weathered over the years. Scaffolding surrounded one corner of the house, and portions of the exterior looked recently replaced, not yet painted to match the existing gray and white tones.
"Looks like a standard shake-and-wake to me." Hayden parked in the driveway and killed the engine. "See the scaffolding?"
I hadn't heard his term "shake-and-wake" before, but it made sense. Renovating an old house is a great way to rouse any spirits who might be inside it, possibly transforming a dormant or minor haunting into a full-blown horror movie situation. Ghosts can be territorial and resistant, even violently so, to incursions on their space by the living.
Kara led the way along the brick path to the front door, but then she stopped and stood aside instead of climbing the three semicircular brick steps that led up to the door area, which was shadowed by the heavy jutting pediment above.
"You will pretend to take the lead today," Kara told me.
"Pretend?"
"This way, I can observe and evaluate your performance."
"That sounds great, Kara. Thanks." As I climbed the steps, I glanced back at Hayden, who remained a few paces behind us, slowing down now to examine a stone frog statue on the lawn. "Guess Hoff's turbo boosters aren't working today."
"Are you trying to amuse me?" Kara asked.
"Definitely not."
"In Russia, it would be considered rude to stand at someone's door this long without making yourself known."
"In Soviet Union, doorbell rings you," I said, jabbing the doorbell button. "What a country."
"What are you talking about?" She scowled. But I think she knew what I was talking about.
"Oh, look, here comes the client." I smiled and removed my sunglasses when the woman's face appeared in one of the glass panes bordering the door. She had freckles, mousy brown hair, and heavy glasses that slid toward the tip of her nose as she peered out.
"Take off your sunglasses," I whispered to Kara out of the corner of my mouth, maintaining my smile.
"No," Kara replied.
Hayden the Hoff remained on the path, looking over a shrubbery, not joining us on the steps. Too bad. He had a better personality than Kara, in my opinion. Of course, a rabid skunk with unresolved daddy issues would have a better personality than her, so the bar is low.
The lady opened the door, casting nervous looks between us. I realized she wasn't much older than me, maybe twenty-nine or thirty, but her fidgeting, worrying manner made her seem older.
I introduced myself as Ellie Jordan from Eckhart Investigations, then introduced Kara as "my new assistant," which I could tell annoyed her. Kara didn't protest, though, subdued by the presence of a client. She told Hayden to wait outside for us, and she didn't say anything else for quite a while.
Everything felt wrong, naturally. I had always met a client alone, or with Calvin, or with Stacey, and it was unsettling to have Kara here instead, watching and evaluating me.
If Michael awoke from his coma, maybe I would take him up on his crazy plan to move out west, leave the city of Savannah and all its ghosts behind.
When Michael awoke, I told myself.
"Thank you for coming out." The wiry, fidgety woman opened the door wide so we could enter. She'd given her name as Mackenzie Butler. "Sorry for the mess, we've been fixing the place up since we bought it. The baby and I have been sick off and on, and I'm behind at my job, too..."
She sniffled and coughed as she admitted us into an entrance hall. The floor was bare boards except for the paint-splattered blue tarp with a sawhorse and assorted tools on top of it. An empty doorway looked into a room off to one side, maybe the parlor or dining room, currently stripped down to wall studs and wires.
"It looks like you've done a lot," I said. We passed under the dark wooden stairs. A perfectly matching bench, almost like an old church pew, was built into the outside of the staircase, as though carved from the same great tree trunk.
"The place was so dark, and the rooms were so confined. Half our work has just been about opening up the space. Like here." Mackenzie led us into a spacious great room with a row of tall windows. The kitchen was off to one side, separated from the living area by a long bar. A sunroom with a breakfast table sat beyond the kitchen. I could see how three smaller rooms had been fused into one enormous space, with a few brick columns visible where walls had been. Everything in the kitchen was shiny and new, and the living area of the great room was fully furnished, with sofas and coffee tables parked in front of a large television on the wall. Potted plants hung inside the windows, some of them blooming.
"It's nice," I said. Kara cleared her throat, and I added, "Do you want to tell us a little about the trouble you've been having? You mentioned the nursery."
"I'm not crazy." Her eyes shifted back and forth behind her glasses, looking between Kara and me. "I've weighed the evidence."
"Nobody here thinks that," I said. "Believe me, if I told you some of the things I've seen, you would think I was the crazy one. Is the nursery down here?"
"No, upstairs, but I thought we'd talk down here. Dylan is sleeping upstairs. In my office, not in the nursery..." She drew a video monitor the size of a cell phone from her pocket. On it, depicted in shades of fuzzy blue and gray, lay a chubby infant in footed pajamas. He squinted, kicked, then resumed sleeping. "Now he goes wherever I go. He sleeps in the master bedroom instead of his room. I thought we had him sleep-trained, but after..." She shook her head.
"After what?"
"He started waking up, screaming like he was in pain. I work from home, from my office upstairs. My husband is a software architect, and he's supposed to work at Southern Logistics here in town, but now they've had him out in Houston for seven or eight weeks. Terrible timing. I'm exhausted. He can fly home some weekends, but it's not much help. I've hired some in-home help with the baby, but only during the day. If he doesn't sleep well, the nights are exhausting."
"You seem to be under a lot of stress," I said. "So what happened in the nursery?"
"I
t's been going on for at least three weeks." She glanced at Kara, who hadn't said a word since we arrived and didn't seem to have any plans to do so. I could definitely get used to that. "I'm up against a deadline, burning the midnight oil, as they say. One night, Dylan began crying. I assumed it was nothing unusual. He'd been cranky, and sick with a runny nose. Some vomiting. I watched him on the monitor, but gave him time to soothe himself. Instead, he screamed louder and louder, like someone was hitting him. And then I saw the face on the baby monitor." She waved the handheld monitor at me.
On the monitor, the infant's eyes opened, and for a moment it seemed like he was somehow staring at me through the screen.
Then he opened his mouth and began to wail.
"He's up. I'm sorry." Mackenzie dashed back toward the front staircase. I shrugged at Kara, then followed. It sounded like the main trouble was upstairs, so we were going to end up there eventually.
Kara paused to glance out the front windows, as if she wanted to verify that Hayden was still standing outside and looking bored. Then she followed the client and me upstairs.
"It's okay, little bear," Mackenzie said as she lifted the crying baby from his crib in her office. It was next to a sizable desk with two large screens, both of them filled with code that was totally meaningless to me. "You just had a nap, you're okay, sh..."
I glanced around at the bookshelves, which offered thick texts on computer programming stuff that might as well have been quantum physics or Egyptian hieroglyphs to me. I would probably have better luck with the hieroglyphs, actually.
The baby seemed to calm when she held him close.
"He's so cute," I said, which I suppose he was, but even if I were inclined to get all gushy over a baby, I surely couldn't have managed it with Kara's cold eyes staring me down. "So this is where you work?"
"This is it," she said.
"What do you do?"
"I'm part of a research group developing software to help predict protein folding. But like I said, I hardly ever leave the house now. Going to the grocery store is our big adventure for the week. Isn't it, little Dilly bar?" She nuzzled the baby, who giggled. Kara, out of the client's sight, shook her head just a little as if disgusted. Clearly, Kara had never tasted a Dilly bar from Dairy Queen.