by JL Bryan
"That does sound nice." Mackenzie smiled for the first time since we'd met, and she adjusted her glasses nervously. "You're right. The idea of having someone else here at night is comforting. I wish I had more friends in town, but we only moved in a few months ago, and we've been so busy...Well, thank you. And thanks for not calling me crazy."
"It never crossed my mind," I said. "You've obviously thought it over rationally for a long time before calling us. Unfortunately, sometimes the facts force us to believe in things we wish didn't exist."
"I've had too much experience with that in recent weeks. Can you...start tonight? Is that too soon?"
I didn't want to. I wanted to get back to the extremely important business of tracking down Anton Clay before he killed somebody or figured out how to burn down the whole city. A night creeper, a scary face in the dark who hadn't actually harmed anyone, could have waited a night or two. The city is full of troublesome but ultimately harmless ghosts.
Unfortunately, this particular ghost seemed to have an interest in a small, defenseless baby. I couldn't ignore that situation under any circumstances, which meant my attention would have to be divided between the two cases until I determined how dangerous the entity in Mackenzie's house really was.
"We'll get things started right away," I told Mackenzie. "I'll call in my tech manager and we'll watch your house tonight, if you like."
"I would appreciate it." She seemed slightly relieved, but only slightly.
Kara remained quiet until we stepped outside, leaving the client inside her house. Hayden was back in the van, lounging with his headphones and sunglasses, still looking like the Hoff.
"You did not consult with me on whether to accept the case," Kara said.
"Of course we're accepting the case. She might have an entity sniffing around her baby."
"Fortunately for you, I happen to agree with your decision. The woman seems to have a real haunting, as well as more than enough money to pay our fees, so I see no reason to turn her down. From now on, business decisions must pass through me or Nicholas first." She opened the passenger-side door of the black van and climbed up.
"Fine, whatever. Why are you putting on your seatbelt? Shouldn't we be unloading gear?"
"I have no interest in sitting in that woman's house all night," Kara said. "It smells like dirty diapers. You and your assistant can surely handle a standard observation. If you cannot, then you have no competence at all."
"We can handle it," I said, sounding angry but feeling relieved at the prospect of spending the night with Stacey, as usual, instead of Kara. I made sure not to let my happiness show, for fear Kara would change her mind just to make me miserable. "Well, now I get to waste time explaining the new case to my tech manager because you wouldn't let me bring her to the client meet."
"I pity how you suffer."
I sat in the back again and steamed in silence as we returned to the office. I texted Stacey to meet us there ASAP. I definitely needed a friend around, and I didn't have many.
The wheels in my brain were spinning overtime, trying to figure how I was going to pursue Anton Clay while being forbidden to work on that case. I just hoped Stacey's research had turned up some kind of promising lead.
Chapter Eight
At the office, I busied myself at my desk creating a new investigation file for the new client. Hayden stood behind me, watching over my shoulder and humming. He made some attempt to explain how the yet-to-be-installed PSI software system would be different, which I decided to ignore along with the rest of his presence.
The workshop area barely looked like home anymore. Everything was moved around and reorganized, the long work table shoved against one wall, furniture and ghost-hunting gear tagged with color-coded stickers.
We didn't encounter Nicholas, and fewer of the PSI agents in their black suits seemed to be poking around the office now. Those that remained huddled in a tiny group at the far end of the room, murmuring over their tablets, casting an occasional suspicious glance in my direction.
"Where did everybody go?" I asked Kara as she passed by my desk. "Back to their homes a thousand miles away, I hope."
"Data entry," Kara replied, as if that explained anything. Then she went into Calvin's office and closed the door.
Not Calvin's office, I remembered. Nicholas's office. Or, given that Kara was his superior, I supposed it was actually Kara's office now.
I felt a little sick at the thought.
Calvin was nowhere in sight. I considered taking the elevator up, maybe to help him pack, maybe to give him a little added grief about leaving. Maybe just to escape the PSI corporate agents crawling all over the place like a swarm of bean-counting pests in starchy collars.
As soon as Stacey arrived, I logged off my computer to keep the Hoff from poking around in my files. Their information tech people had probably already hacked our workstations and servers, but I didn't want to make it too easy for him.
Stacey frowned as she looked around the workshop area, which took up most of the space in our building. I could tell she hated how unfamiliar it all looked, too.
"Help me load up," I told her, steering her toward the trusty blue van. Kara wasn't about to loan us the swank PSI van, which was more than fine with me. I hoped the first night of observation would be almost like a normal case, just Stacey and I with our own gear, pretending we were independent scrappers without any weird outsiders sweeping in, taking over our lives, and preventing us from catching one of the most dangerous ghosts in the city's history, the ghost I wanted to catch more than any other.
"So we're going after a ghost who sings a lullaby..." I began to explain to Stacey, and then I noticed that Hayden was following at an uncomfortably close, clingy-guy-at-the-bar distance, still wearing his sunglasses indoors, his collar-length black hair still looking gently permed. "Can I help you, Hoff?"
"Thermal cameras are over there now." He pointed to a shiny new cage-fronted metal cabinet. "And you'll want some microphones, night vision, maybe a motion detector—"
"Yeah, we've done this before," I said.
"I'm just helping you load." He opened the cabinet.
"We're fine," I said. The guy actually didn't seem as horrible as some of the others, but Kara had obviously told him to keep an uncomfortably close eye on me, and I can't say I appreciated it.
"Hey, you look like somebody," Stacey said, squinting as she studied his face. "A guy from Dawson's Creek, maybe?"
"Think older," I said. "And with a talking car."
Stacey just looked more confused. "You mean Back to the Future?"
"I can't take it." Hayden shook his head. "Have fun heaving in those ghost traps yourselves."
"What's his problem?" Stacey asked. "Not a Christopher Walken fan?"
"Lloyd," I said.
"Who's Lloyd?"
"Just pack in some more cameras and microphones, okay? At least twelve each of the thermal and night vision cameras. Ten more motion detectors, maybe a laser grid—"
"This seems like a lot for a first-night observation," Hayden said. He plopped down into my chair and slowly spun in it as if bored, stubbornly refusing to leave our conversation. "Kara said only one or two rooms in the house are affected."
"The client is rattled. Her husband is a thousand miles away. I want her to feel reassured," I told him. Actually, we needed to smuggle out some of our high-powered gear for possible use against Anton Clay, and I didn't want to raise any eyebrows while we did it. I hoped my excuse sounded convincing.
I caught Stacey up on the case in a way that Hayden could report to Kara all he liked. Conversation with Stacey was stiff and formal now, as if the office had developed an oppressive Orwellian atmosphere. We couldn't risk being overheard discussing anything to do with Clay, even though he was the most important problem we were facing.
Finally, with our somewhat excessive amount of gear and spare batteries loaded and secured, Stacey and I climbed into the van. I worried the Hoff would try to join us, conside
ring how his job seemed to be hovering close and making me uncomfortable, but I guess they didn't want to pay him overtime. I still wasn't clear what skills he possessed aside from driving the van. Maybe that was his greatest ability.
The garage door seemed to take hours to rise. I was eager to get out of there. The stress level inside the van dropped as soon as we were on the road and away from the office, as if we'd left the dark, oppressive atmosphere of, let's say, an abandoned old mental asylum basement and emerged, relieved, into sunshine and fresh air.
Also, it felt good to be back in the driver's seat, both literally and figuratively, no longer strapped into the back seat of the big shiny black van while trapped under Kara's pale, manicured little thumb.
We stopped at a gas station nearby, where we did a quick sweep of the van for bugs, but the PSI people didn't seem to have installed any. If they had, they were too good for Calvin's detection devices.
"Wow, it's never going to be the same, is it?" Stacey asked as we pulled out onto the road again. "I feel like we don't even belong there anymore."
"I'm not sure what I'm more worried about, getting fired or actually working for Kara and Nicholas. The second one, I think. Getting fired would at least end the feeling of being trapped."
"So what are we going to do?" Stacey's face showed a hint of fear.
"We're going to protect the client's baby. And we're going to deal with Anton Clay as quietly and as quickly as we can. I don't care what Kara says or how condescendingly she says it. If Anton kills anyone else, it will be our fault."
"How? We didn't set him free."
"But we're the only ones who understand the danger he presents and have any chance of stopping him. That makes the situation our responsibility." Despite the high-minded sort of stuff I was saying, I knew I was driven less by the spirit of public service or being a responsible ghost-trapping citizen and more by the deep ache for revenge against Anton Clay that had shaped so much of my life. He'd killed my family, and just recently he'd tried to kill Michael and Stacey. He seemed determined to burn those I loved until my heart was nothing but ash. "So, speaking of Anton, what did you find today?"
"We need to do more digging, but I did learn a couple of things. Neither of these things were easy to find, by the way. It's not like they put up signs at those places with their contact information."
"I noticed," I said.
"They don't list them on major real estate sites either, for lease or for sale. You'd think the owners of old, broken-down, abandoned buildings would be eager to get rid of them or make money out of them somehow."
"That is unusual. So I assume you went to the land records office..."
"A place I love almost as much as the DMV," Stacey said. "Eventually, I found out that the old theater is owned by a company called Bastion Properties. It's not the kind of company that offers, let's say, a website or phone that you can find with a search engine, like a normal company that actually wants to do business with other human beings. Anyway, they bought it about two years ago, after it failed to develop a profitable afterlife as a nightclub. It was a foreclosure sale. The nightclub owner didn't pay much for it in the first place, but now it's worth even less, I guess."
"Any idea what Bastion Properties is planning to do with it next?"
"None. They've just held onto it for two years now. Maybe they're betting that property values will improve and they can sell it later? I don't know. Maybe if they had, you know, a website, or a phone number like I mentioned earlier...All I could turn up was a couple of passing mentions in a couple of small-town papers. Bastion was involved in renovating a rundown shopping center in Warner Robins, Georgia. They bought a small apartment building in Cairo." She pronounced this kay-row to make it clear she meant the small town in south Georgia and not the somewhat larger, somewhat older one in Egypt. "Basically small-time, rundown locations. I guess they renovate the places but maybe they take their time getting around to it. That's the best I can figure so far."
"We'll keep digging. What about the old gas station?"
"That's a little weirder. Land records indicate it belongs to something called Congregation of the Last Ministries for about seven years. Again, not a heap of info there, just a P.O. Box in Arkansas, actually. Apparently they own some real bottom-of-the-barrel properties, though. An old fairground in Tennessee, for example. A remote closed-down campground in the North Carolina mountains. The website didn't say whether it was haunted by a guy in a hockey mask, but I'd say let's avoid it just in case."
"A ministry?"
"Yeah, but maybe it's a tax shelter? They don't have a church or anything that I could find. Just that P.O. Box, and it really seems like it would be hard to hold church services inside one of those...maybe if you're a mouse preaching to other mice..."
"I don't think that's what we would discover there."
"There's a possible tie-in, or at least a similar Google result, with 'The Last Congregation' down in Texas. They were a major news story a couple decades ago."
"The cult compound," I said, remembering now. "It was a mass suicide. Sort of. The leaders drank poison, the followers mostly changed their minds and fled."
"More of a failed mass suicide, then. That has to be embarrassing, if you're one of the first people to drink poison and then you realize nobody's joining you."
"There was even a shoot-out. I remember seeing it on TV when I was a kid. You're probably too little to remember."
"I'm like four years younger than you."
"That's what I'm saying, kiddo. Okay, we'll be there in a sec."
"Already?"
"It's just about a block from Pulaski Square."
"Aw. I bet it's a cute old house."
"Yeah, except for the nursery. That room couldn't be cute and cuddly if it tried. It tries pretty hard, too. Now, did you find out what's happening with my old house?"
"It's owned by a place called A & G Properties. They're a construction and real estate company out of Augusta. They don't seem too big. They had a handful of houses for sale or lease on their website. There's contact information. Should we call them?"
"Let's focus on this new case for now." I didn't want to meet the new client while I was rattled or distracted with too many thoughts of Anton. It was hard enough to pretend I was calm and collected these days.
Pulaski is one of the least assuming squares in the downtown historic district, not one that trumpets for attention with fancy fountains or bronze statues of colonial heroes. Pulaski is just a quiet spot of lawns and brick paths shaded by enormous old trees. It's a good place to sit and read a book, knowing that tourists won't be flocking around you, since Pulaski offers no special historic attractions of which pictures must be taken.
Several beautiful historic homes surround the park. They aren't huge mansions—like the park, they don't call too much attention to themselves. Mackenzie's house was located on a secluded street nearby, a densely tree-lined lane without much traffic passing through. Last time, I hadn't been able to enjoy the view on the way in because I had been stuffed into the back of the van.
"Aw, it is cute," Stacey breathed as we parked on the brick drive beside the tall colonial house. "This is the kind of house I'd want to haunt."
"You wouldn't want to move on to the other side?"
"I dunno. You're the one who says the other side could be a construct and not a real place. Just a symbolic term for when a ghost finally gives up, accepts that it's dead, and dissipates. Like, what does Calvin say? 'What do you call a rope when it's not a knot'?"
"Uh, no. It's 'where does a knot go after it's untied?' Ghost could be like a knot of electromagnetic energy, a trace somehow left by the living. When it crosses over, it's like lightning discharging into the ground. The energy scatters, the lightning bolt ceases to be."
"That doesn't sound so appealing," Stacey said. "I'd rather think we go the Pearly Gates and see our grandmas, and then to the Rainbow Bridge to visit our dead pets. I bet my goldfish is still waiting for m
e. Rudy. I fed him too much."
We parked on the shadowy drive. As with most houses downtown, there wasn't room for much of a lawn, but bright-flowering lantana shrubs grew in brick garden beds along the back side of the house. The neighboring houses sat very close, partially screened off by old oaks.
A paint-spattered pick-up truck with a huge tool storage box and a ladder rack sat on the driveway ahead of us, crammed in behind Mackenzie's ocean-blue Chevy Volt, which quietly drank electricity from an extension cord. Meanwhile, the truck was idling, heavy smoke chugging from its tailpipe.
"I can see the future," Stacey said. "It involves some contractor guy coming out and telling us to move."
"I'll go check." As I climbed out, though, the house's side door opened and a fortyish man in paint-stained overalls emerged, shaking his head. He approached the pick-up, jangling his keys, then stopped short when he noticed the van.
"Hey, you gotta pull out!" he shouted at me, though I was less than ten feet away.
"Told ya!" Stacey shouted from the van. "I saw the future. Jacob's rubbing off on me."
"Very funny," I said. Then I asked the man, "Are you done working for the day?"
"For the day?" He shook his head. "I just came to collect my tools. We've had enough of this place."
"What do you mean?"
"I don't have to explain anything to you." He started for his truck again, waving at me to back up the van.
"Maybe you do." Instead of climbing back in, I leaned against the front of the van and crossed my arms, as if ready to hang out there all day. "Why did you quit?"
"Come on, now. I got work to do."
"I thought you just quit."
"What's your problem, girl?" He stalked toward me, spinning a thick keychain around his finger. "Like I told the lady in there, I don't have to explain myself."
"Did you see something?" I asked. "Hear something? Feel something that made you uncomfortable?"
He didn't answer right away, but he slowed in his approach, looking me over.
"Whatever it was, you need to tell me, because we're here to keep that family safe from whatever is in this house. The more we know, the better we can do our job. So we're not letting you out of here until you tell me." I straightened up, no longer leaning against the van, and balled my fists. I sized him up, too, and considered all the places where I might kick him if he turned out to be the type who would threaten a defenseless woman and her defenseless van.