Lullaby (Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper Book 7)

by JL Bryan

  "So, unlike most people in the Western world, you mean?"

  "Weakness is common," she said. "In the West."

  "Yowtch, I'm no match for your hemispheric burn. So if you're done insulting me, I'm clocking out for the day." I turned to leave, Camaro keys in one hand, freedom and sunlight waiting just ahead.

  "Ellie." Kara let my name hang in the air until I turned back to face her again. "I am sure you did not mean to leave without giving your report of last night's investigation."

  I sighed. "What do you want to know?"

  "Me? Nothing. The case is boring. You, as the investigator in charge, must file a completed I/O form for each night of your investigation. With the hourly log of your activities. It's all very standard."

  "Wait. You mean you want a written report for every night of the investigation?" My nose wrinkled. "I usually just do one big report at the end."

  "I understand this firm was run sloppily in the past," Kara said. "I have seen your records. Hayden will train you." She clapped her hands to summon the Hoff.

  Hayden grinned when he saw me. He sauntering my way like a lifeguard on his way to mount his wooden beach throne.

  "Take Ellie to her new workstation and explain our case management to her. Go slowly. It may take her some time to understand," Kara said.

  "You got it." The Hoff double-pointed at me with both index fingers while dropping a wink. "Let's whip up a fresh case file. Extra cheese, hold the mayo, am I right?"

  "Let's get it over with," I said.

  "That's the spirit." He held out one fist, clearly intending that I should bump it with my own, then just watched me with an expectant grin. He left it hanging until it became apparent that he was perfectly willing to wait all day, so I finally fist-bumped him back to get things moving. "Pow!" he said, then turned and started toward the back corner, near the storage closets, behind the nook with the coffee machine. My desk had been moved over there, well away from the central worktable, the files, and everything useful in the building.

  "You workstation is over there," Kara pointed, raising her voice to be heard over the sudden whine of a circular saw.

  "How not convenient." I pointed toward the construction area near the front, by the door to the lobby, directly opposite my new desk location. "What's going in over there? A juice bar? Home theater system?"

  "That's the new district manager's office." Hayden looked back at me, arms folded, clearly annoyed, like he was trying to hold a conversation with his car and couldn't figure out why it wouldn't reply.

  "It is for me, until the day when I am finally transferred away from the swamp and back to civilization," Kara said. "Your former employer's office was inadequately small. And it smelled like sick old man, like desperation and death. So I have assigned it to Nicholas."

  I looked over at the open door to the old office, where Nicholas now sat behind Calvin's desk. The volumes of manuscripts, arcane old books, and parapsychological research journals that had once cluttered the walls were now gone. The bookshelves themselves had been removed, and a workman was in there caulking up the rows of holes where they had been mounted.

  "Not a fan of books, Nicholas?" I asked.

  He looked up from his computer, bewildered. "Paper records are for digital scanning, followed by vacuum-sealing and archiving. They are not for adorning walls. They just collect dust."

  "You're telling me you hate books?"

  "Of course not. I hate dust. As well as interruptions." He pointed to his computer, as if he were busy with something so urgent it just couldn't wait ten more seconds.

  "And I hate making your day more difficult," I said. "I really do."

  "Waste all the time you like," Kara told me with a quick smile. "You're not going home until we have those I/O reports."

  I shook my head, walking away from Kara and Nicholas, finally joining the Hoff at my desk. He'd plopped into my chair, leaving me to stand around uncomfortably while he worked the wireless mouse at my desktop.

  "That's not my computer," I said, pointing to the sleek, alien-looking CPU with a red LOURDES TECH stylized atomic logo at the upper corner.

  "Looks like somebody got an upgrade! These things are sweet." The Hoff gushed with enthusiasm, altogether oblivious to my bad mood about all of this. Or maybe he noticed but totally didn't care. Either one seemed possible.

  "Where's all my stuff?" I pointed to the monitor, also unfamiliar. The wallpaper was just the PSI logo, a pyramid encircled by a Saturn-style ring. My usual clutter of poorly placed icons and files had vanished, replaced by only a few symbols.

  "I'm sure they migrated it over. Or, you know, compressed and archived. It should be somewhere on the server, anyway. What did you have? Lots of personal pictures and stuff?" His eyes shifted sideways toward me.

  "Yes. Lots and lots of personal pictures, plus all my fantasy football records."

  "Oh, yeah?" He brightened up. "Are you on DraftKings?"

  "No, I was being sarcastic. It's none of your business what was in my files."

  "Right on. So, here's the CaseTrackMatrix app, that takes a second to load..." He sat back as one of those annoying digital circles spun around and around on my screen, the software moving sluggishly. Hayden whistled "Red River Valley" while we waited. And waited. Finally, a featureless gray box popped up. Then the green circle began to turn again, choppily. "So, do you watch Ultimate Fighting?"

  "Let's talk less," I suggested.

  "Ha! You kill me." He leaned forward as a matrix of dull gray boxes appeared on the screen. "Here you go. Your investigation and observation logs should generate automatically from your client intake form...uh, you never filled out the client intake form." He looked up at me like I was some kind of idiot.

  "I thought that was your job," I replied.

  "My...oh, really?" He cast a worried look toward Calvin's old office. Kara stood just inside the doorway, speaking to Nicholas while keeping an eye on us. "Are you sure?"

  "Absolutely."

  "But I wasn't part of the...wait. You're just yanking my yak, aren't you?" He stood up and gave me a sly grin, like we were sharing a secret, or a moment, or something. Then he gestured toward my chair. "You can get started."

  I looked at the screen, where dozens of empty boxes waited to be filled with information, starting with the new client's name and address, and on to a battery of questions about the client's claims and my analysis of them. It looked pretty tedious and time-consuming, and apparently there was yet another form to follow.

  "Okay," I said. "But most of this is on my pocket notepad, which is out in my car." It was, in fact, in my jacket pocket. "I'll just run out and get it."

  "Don't take too long," Hayden said. "Kara likes reports to be filed timely. That's just a friendly warning, I'm not trying to pressure you or anything. But hurry."

  "Thanks for the warning."

  I made it outside as quickly as I could without running. Then I climbed into my car, cranked it up, and fled the parking lot.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Part of me felt exhausted from the long night and my tangle with the ghost in the nursery, but the rest of me felt driven to continue working so I could keep both cases moving forward.

  Instead of going home, I headed to the Bull Street library, a white neoclassical building with hefty Ionic columns out front. It was reminiscent of the Greek-temple design of the Corinthian theater, actually, but the library was done with better taste and probably more funding. While the old theater's architecture was a bit of an illusion—the back side was just simple, unadorned brick—the library was lovely from every angle.

  The library naturally keeps librarian's hours, closing in the very early evening, presumably so the librarians could all get home and read books by their fireplaces before dark. The genealogy and local history room closes even earlier. Later, I might dig into the municipal archives at City Hall, but I preferred to start at the library because, well, it's just a pleasant place to be.

  I started with the pres
ent and worked my way backwards through time. Public online records from earlythe county board of assessors make it easy to trace the ownership history of any parcel of land in the city over the past few decades. Anything earlier than that gets a little trickier, but the library offered a number of useful tools for that, with microfilm of city records going back to the eighteenth century.

  Mackenzie Butler and her husband had purchased the house from an elderly woman named Theresa Hendricks, who was still alive, or at least I couldn't find an obituary for her. I knew my clients had negotiated everything through an agent and had never actually met the woman. Soon I was digging into the history of her family.

  Theresa Hendricks was born Theresa Martin in 1935, and in 1954 married Lyle Hendricks, whose family had owned a couple of small local grocery stores at the time. They bought the house where my clients now lived and had four children, and their lives pretty much went dark from there. All four children died over the course of five years, the oldest age nine, the youngest an infant. A Savannah Morning News obituary from 1965 gave the nine-year-old girl's cause of death as "illness." The obituaries for the other children were even less specific.

  All by themselves, these events could have created a pretty awful haunting, with the child-ghosts clinging to the house in an attempt to stay close to their mother and siblings, perhaps not understanding they were dead. I could imagine the emotional trauma of so much disease and death sweeping through the young family.

  Theresa's husband had died in 1979, his death described in the paper as a "household accident." That could be a red flag. Most cases of death by ghost go down in the official records as simple accidents, the classic falling down the stairs, or slipping on a wet bathroom floor, maybe bashing your head on the corner of the counter as you go down.

  Some ghosts are more sinister. They can attempt to inspire suicide through inflicting relentless dark thoughts and dreams on the living, feeding on their emotional energy along the way. And, of course, some ghosts set fires.

  It's also possible for spirits to make people ill, particularly spirits who themselves died of illness. I'd seen ghosts induce fevers and fevered hallucinations, and ghosts who'd died of drowning create respiratory problems in another client.

  I had to keep digging to see whether the deaths in Theresa's family were a cause of the haunting or a result of it. If it looked like even older ghosts had killed the children, then Mackenzie and her baby were in grave danger. Good thing she was already in the process of moving to a hotel for a few days.

  From the tax records, I learned the current house had been built in 1908. 1n 1927, a ten-year-old boy named Eliot Johnson had died in the house after choking on a marble. His sister Portia died of an infection two years later, age eight.

  Going back even further, I found that another house had previously stood on the same lot. My whole body turned cold as I read about it, and not just because of the library's fairly serious air conditioning system.

  A family named Carlisle had lived in that house in the late nineteenth century. The father of the family, Daniel Carlisle, owned a significant share in a company that built wooden ships and sold related naval stores. He and his wife, Hannah, had three children.

  The house had burned down one night in 1889. The father was away from home at the time, but the rest of the family was there. All three children died, as well as the household's nanny and cook. The mother apparently survived, but I could imagine her grief. They sold the land rather than rebuild their home. I could not find obituaries for either Daniel or Hannah. Considering the tragedy they'd experienced, they might have moved away from Savannah altogether.

  The family killed by fire, the house burned to the ground...it definitely sounded like Anton Clay had been involved. Anton had died in 1841, almost fifty years before the fire that consumed the Carlisle children.

  My heart racing, I left the microfilm in the reader and ran out the nearest exit I could find. By the time I reached the outdoors, I'd already dialed Mackenzie's number. The day had gone gray and drizzly while I was inside the library.

  "Hello?" Mackenzie answered, and I felt instant relief at the sound of her voice.

  "Mackenzie, it's Ellie," I said. "Have you left the house yet?"

  "We're in process," she said. "The nanny is packing up Dylan's room, and I've prepared a temporary workstation for myself. I've rented an extended-stay suite with a kitchenette. It looks convenient and acceptable."

  "Okay, good," I said. "I'm digging pretty deep into the history of the house, and it's turning out to be a very dangerous place for children. Make sure you get out of there well before dark, okay?"

  "I'll be done moving to the rental suite by two p.m."

  "Sounds great. If you need any help, just let me know. And I'll need a key to your house."

  "I have a spare you can borrow. I'll bring it to the hotel with me." She took a slow, deep breath. "It's hard to believe this is all really happening."

  We concluded our call quickly. I was relieved to know she was getting out—some clients are resistant to the idea of leaving their houses, despite the disturbances. Maybe they think I'm going to root through their sock drawers or something. I'm not, I promise.

  I tried Michael's sister again, but she wasn't answering. I'd missed a few calls from the office while my phone was silenced inside the library, probably Kara or somebody calling to yell at me about the TPS reports. I didn't return those calls.

  Instead, I contacted Stacey. I'd spent a few hours at the library, which I figured was plenty of time for her to nap. She answered with an annoyed mumble that let me know I'd woken her up.

  "Time for lunch," I said. "I assume you're ready, because I'm waiting outside your door right now."

  "Huh? Seriously?"

  "Not seriously. Meet me at the place. You have twenty-five minutes to get ready."

  "That's not enough time!"

  "It's lunch, Stacey. Not dinner." I hung up to grab a quick shower and fresh clothing. I'd been awake for at least twenty-four hours by that point, but I was still anxious and keyed up rather than sleepy. There was too much to do, too many problems, not enough solutions. I felt like I was in a state of war. The danger of fire and mass death of innocents at Anton's hands was very real, and I had no idea from what direction it would arise.

  I figured that Louis, as a French restaurant with a short but regal name, would be a place of reasonably well-dressed patrons. You can't dine on escargot in sweatpants. So I put on my best Professional Ellie ensemble, a black pantsuit with my glasses, my hair back in a ponytail. I was going for the serious lawyer look, I guess.

  I drove to Broughton Street and managed to park near the restaurant.

  The little theater district was much more alive at lunchtime than it had been in the early morning. The front doors of shops stood open to invite pedestrians inside for raw free-range carrot juice, wood-fired pizza, or gouda-and-spinach burgers paired with milkshakes brewed from ultra-obscure artisan ice cream brands. Easily half a dozen coffee shops had finally opened now that it was lunchtime. Handwritten chalkboards advertised daily specials at every other door.

  The sun had broken through the clouds, bringing a moment of light and warmth as I walked up the sidewalk, which was busy now but not overly crowded.

  The entrance to Louis was shaded by a red awning with the name of the restaurant in gold script at a lower corner, more like a monogram than a sign.

  On the inside, it looked just like a French restaurant named for a Bourbon king. The little waiting area near the hostess stand offered studdedchairs that looked hand-carved from dark old wood. Either they were antiques or skillful reproductions. Most of the illumination came from the plate-glass windows at the front, supplemented very slightly by candles and sconces inside. Large rococo prints featuring women in pastel dresses strolling in pastel gardens hung in ornate golden frames on the walls, as if to say, "Hey, this is a fancy French restaurant, have you noticed yet?"

  "Bonjour," the hostess said as I ent
ered. She was a pleasant-looking lady in her forties with a head of red hair and glittery eye makeup. Her French greeting in her Southern accent sounded like bone juror, which is probably the title of some John Grisham novel. "How many in your party?"

  "I'm meeting a friend." I glanced over the smallish restaurant. Most of the tables were already occupied, some by bearded professorial types in funky and probably overpriced vintage suits, but none of them by Stacey. "May I wait at the bar?"

  "Well, of course! Carlos will take care of you." She winked as if we shared some kind of secret.

  A total of six stools—not upholstered with studded brocade like the chairs near the front, fortunately—sat in front of the little bar in the corner. Shelves and glass cabinets were stocked with sculpted glass bottles of expensive-looking spirits.

  The bartender smiled as I approached, his complexion Mediterranean, his teeth and eyes bright. He was broad-shouldered and moved gracefully, dressed in a stiff white shirt that seemed perfectly tailored to him. Maybe his appearance was why the hostess had winked.

  "What can I do for you?" he asked. Too bad—I'd been a little curious how his bonjour would have sounded.

  "Your finest sparkling water." I looked again at the shimmering rows of fancy glass bottles. "Well, maybe your second finest."

  He lay a quilted white napkin on the dark wood as I took a stool at one end of the bar. Two middle-aged women in business suits occupied the other end, and the stools in between were blissfully free of customers.

  Carlos the bartender poured bubbling water over a single oversized cube of ice in a cut crystal glass. "Are you ready for a menu?" he asked. "Or did you just come to drown your sorrows in water?"

  "I'm waiting for someone, but I can start reading about food anytime. What do you recommend?"

  "They want me to recommend the lamb shank with figs—"

  "I'm not really into lamb," I interrupted. "Or shanks. Or figs, now that I think about it."