Trespass

by Marla Madison

  “I tried to call you first, honest. I really needed to talk to you.” He looked down at the tabletop. “See, I had this idea. After you told me what happened in your last OBE, that you traveled to your neighbor’s house, I remembered something I read in one of my books. It’s possible to share an experience so you both see the same thing, only clearer. I wanted to help you.”

  If the whole OBE experience wasn’t weird enough, this suggestion sounded even crazier. My face must have displayed my skepticism.

  He added quickly, “I know it sounds wild. You didn’t tell me why what you saw in your OBE was so important to you, but I could tell it was. I thought together we could have a more intense experience, see more. I was going to sleep in my car and try to join your experience that way.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Joining forces in an out-of-body experience sounded like something out of a book about witches and other paranormal forces. Luckily, I didn’t have to respond. Detective Haymaker came in and announced Jorge was free to leave.

  Chapter 40

  TJ opened her eyes and looked around the room. Confused for a second, she remembered she had gone to her sister’s after she found out her basement was flooded. Whether TJ’s furnace would ever work again was questionable, and until the water drained and everything dried out, the electricity would be off. She and JR were meeting Richard later to pick up what they needed in order to stay at his place temporarily.

  Refreshed after the few hours’ sleep she managed in her niece’s room, she spent some time playing with JR, talking to Janeen, and taking a quick shower.

  Bill Denison hadn’t made it through the night; the surgery hadn’t saved him. Donna called to give her the news before TJ had driven all the way back to West Bend.

  Before leaving Janeen’s, she called Roland’s friend Larry, hoping to pick up their conversation where it left off the night before when the power went out.

  Larry answered on the first ring. “Yeah, TJ. You know that woman I told you about? I’m with her now.”

  Crap. Everyone had to play detective. Just what she needed, an amateur questioning one of her sources before she could. “Where are you?” After finding out they were in the coffee shop across from Roland’s hairdressing studio, TJ rushed from the house to meet them. Maybe she could still salvage the interview.

  Amanda Korby, in deference to the rain that still plagued the area, wore her dark blond hair pulled back into a tight braid coiled neatly on the back of her neck. An attractive woman dressed in black leggings covered by a long, cinnamon-colored sweater, she sat across from Larry at a table next to the window. TJ joined them and introduced herself.

  Larry looked every bit the aging hairdresser. He had his hair dyed a deep brown with strategic silver strands at his temples and forehead. He pumped her hand eagerly. “Hi, TJ. It’s great to finally meet you.”

  Not great for her if he had ruined everything by questioning Korby until she was ready to clam up. “Thanks, Larry. But could you give me a minute alone with Amanda?”

  His brown eyes registered disappointment, but he looked to Amanda, who nodded her okay and then asked to be called “Mandy.” Larry rose from the table.

  Mandy watched him leave. “He’s sensitive, you know.”

  “I’ll explain it to him later.”

  TJ ordered coffee and turned to Mandy. “Hope you don’t mind, but I have to ask you some questions that might be kinda personal.”

  “Right. You want to know about the swingers’ group.”

  “Larry said you never joined them.” TJ had a difficult time imagining a man married to this woman being bored enough to want to swing. Her smile revealed perfect white teeth and matching dimples below dramatically high cheekbones. She was nervously crumbling her napkin with fingers that ended in an elegant French manicure.

  “Can we talk—you know—off the record?”

  “Sure,” TJ said.

  “It was my husband’s idea. Colin is. . . He’s an undertaker.” She paused, apparently waiting for a reaction to the macabre career chosen by her mate. TJ didn’t comment.

  “Anyway, about sixteen years ago, he met a man who was interested in using his funeral home when members of their church needed help making arrangements for the death of a loved one. Colin was hungry for business back then because he was just getting started. They hit it off, and we had dinner with him and his wife one night. The restaurant had a piano player and a small dance floor. When the man asked me to dance, I didn’t think anything of it. When we danced I noticed Colin on the dance floor with his wife. She was openly rubbing up against him. It was disgusting.”

  “Your husband was okay with it?” TJ had never heard of a church procuring business with a funeral home, although she imagined it happened. But that wasn’t why she was interviewing Amanda, so she didn’t question it.

  Amanda huffed. “He was into her, I could tell. Right in front of me. Her husband asked if it bothered me. I told him of course it did and asked him why he didn’t get upset about it. That’s when he told me about their little group and said he would love to spend a night with me. Only he put it much more explicitly than that. I left him standing there on the dance floor, and I told Colin we had to leave. He refused and I called a cab. Colin came home later, furious with me. He said he was just trying to get the church’s business and I should have known he had no intention of joining their swingers’ group. But then, after he knew he had pacified me, he added, ‘Not unless you want to.’ Then I knew it was what he wanted all along.”

  “Did you change your mind?”

  “I told him I’d think about it.” The pile of napkin balls in front of her resembled a pyramid of spitballs. TJ could tell Amanda had slipped into the past as her fingers worked the napkin. “I knew my husband wasn’t always faithful to me. He’s very handsome and women are drawn to him. I guess I thought that swinging could be one way of controlling it, you know? At least then I would know what he was doing and who he was doing it with.”

  “You tried it?”

  “No. I considered it, but kept putting him off. Then a couple of weeks later, he told me it was a good thing we never joined them. Two of the spouses, one man’s wife and one of the husbands, fell in love and ended up killing each other in some kind of sick, suicidal pact.” She shuddered. “After that happened, the group disbanded.”

  There it was, information that could be relevant to the present. “Do you know the names of the two who killed themselves?”

  “No. I never heard the names, and they weren’t in the paper, either.”

  “Do you know how many people were in the group?”

  “I think Colin said there were four couples, but I’m not sure.”

  “Were they all members of the same church?” TJ wondered if there was a chance it was The New Followers of Christ, which could be an important bit of information.

  “I don’t think the swinging had anything to do with the church. My husband just said the couple that we met belonged to that church—the one that he hoped to get as a client.”

  “Did he get the church’s business?”

  “He did.”

  “What’s the name of the church?” she asked, nearly certain what the answer would be.

  “The New Followers of Christ.”

  Chapter 41

  After we left the police station with Jorge, Jon drove us to my house where we dropped Jorge off at his car that was parked two doors down. I was confident that Jorge had nothing to do with the attack on Carter or any of the other incidents. His alibi for the night of Sondra Jackson’s murder is what had cleared him, but it was evident that Haymaker still suspected him of stabbing Carter. It didn’t matter to me what the police thought; this thing went deeper than Jorge Paredes.

  Something about the OBE that had taken me into the house next door kept eating at me because that was where Lucian lived. Lucian, t
he boy TJ suspected had something to do with Norman’s death. She believed he was hiding something, and he was the last person to see Norman alive.

  Lisa had hinted my “dream visit” could have been precipitated not by the paranormal, but by something I already knew, something hidden in the deepest levels of my subconscious. If she was right, it was possible another OBE could be the key to jogging my memory and reveal what Lucian was hiding.

  Seeing the crime scene tape over both doors and the policeman in uniform at the curb of my house sent a chill through my veins. I had a moment of gratitude toward Jon, who insisted on helping me pack my car. A vision of Carter, bloodied and helpless on the couch, flashed through my mind as I drove away. It occurred to me I hadn’t even looked to see what it was the intruders had written on the walls.

  I settled into a hotel near Mayfair shopping center, about a mile west of my house. Jon dropped off a depressed-looking Clyde later that afternoon. I took him out of his cage and put him on a perch near the bed where he looked around and quietly chirped, “Glory be, glory be.” Sometimes it seemed like he knew more than I realized. Jon offered to take me down to the coffee shop for something to eat.

  Such a good man and so generous with his time, I would have liked to get to know him better. But now my number one priority had to be finding Norman’s killer. “Thank you, but I really need to get some rest. Let’s have dinner soon, my treat.”

  Before he left I thanked him for all his help and impulsively reached out and hugged him. He held me close for a minute then broke away and left my suite. As the door closed behind him, I felt more alone than ever. I wanted to call him back, but I didn’t want to take advantage of his generosity or send the wrong signals.

  According to TJ, Taylor had been at the hospital all night, but had vanished by the time I left. He had broken his promise to stay out of my life. I had no idea how he had known so quickly about the attack on Carter.

  I knew TJ was curious about him. What did his presence mean? I measured the warmth I felt remembering his vigil outside my room and the lovely bouquet he sent against the security I felt with Jon Engel. I shook my head. This was not the time for dwelling on relationships, especially nonexistent ones.

  My hotel suite on the tenth floor faced east and gave me a splendid view of the city even without the aid of the sun. I couldn’t see my house, but I thought I could see the black hole that had been Norman’s. I missed my best friend.

  The rain was unaccompanied by thunder and lightning today but still trickled down, increasing the city’s problems. Streets were blocked off in low-lying areas and many basements had flooded. At least I didn’t have that problem—a small compensation.

  I met Jorge at ten that night in a village deli where we had a light supper and talked about his suggestion of a shared OBE. He wasn’t pushing it any longer; in fact he tried to warn me off. But I had become desperate for answers and decided I wanted to try it. Despite my initial distrust of Jorge, I was convinced of his sincerity in wanting to help.

  “You know,” he said softly, “some say this could be dangerous.”

  “How?” The plan was that I would sleep in my bed and have Jorge sleep next to me on a blow-up bed. The house would not only be locked, but the crime scene warning was still on the door even though technically it had been released as a crime scene. And the police hadn’t confiscated my gun.

  “OBEs are risky no matter what,” Jorge answered. “A person could end up in a fugue state and not come out of it. Trying to do one together could increase the risk.”

  I was pretty sure the faction that believed in that possibility also believed sleep paralysis was accompanied by demons. I never had bought into that, and Lisa supported the fact that nothing about SP or OBEs was dangerous unless the person experiencing them already suffered from some kind of mental insecurity.

  “We’ll be careful,” I assured him, although I wasn’t all that sure it would be a harmless endeavor.

  When we arrived at my house later that night, the windows were dark, the bright yellow tape still in place, and the police presence gone. Haymaker said they had released it as a crime scene, but I wasn’t sure why the tape was still up. It didn’t matter, though. It was my house and we were going to replicate my previous “trespass” into the Krauses’ home, and I was pretty sure we could only do that here.

  It was nearly midnight. A cold, steady rain continued its relentless journey to earth, and an occasional rumble of thunder trembled in the distance. With the addition of the blood on the walls and the crime scene tape, my home looked like the setting for a scary movie.

  The electricity had gone on sometime in the afternoon. I turned up the heat as soon as we entered the house and made us some tea in an effort to bring a semblance of normalcy to the eerie night. While it brewed, Jorge followed me into the living room. We faced the bloody message smeared in Carter’s blood across the entire north wall.

  “RESTITUTION.” The last letters were smeared, but the word remained clear despite the downward path of the blood.

  “What does it mean?” Jorge asked.

  “I have no idea.” The word only had meaning to the person who tried to kill Carter and me. It must be the same person who killed Norman, Sondra Jackson, and maybe the teenager too. Lucian? It could be him, but why? I couldn’t fathom a reason. Norman had been good to him. But if Lucian were one of the intruders, that would explain how they had gotten away so easily last night; the house next door would have been a fast exit for them.

  As much as I wanted this shared OBE experience to work, I had my doubts that I could sleep in such bizarre circumstances: Carter fighting for life, my house a crime scene, and Jorge, a man I barely knew, trying to fall asleep in a bed next to mine. Talk about strange bedfellows.

  I left a small nightlight on and tucked the gun under my pillow. I couldn’t help but think that maybe we should have waited longer to try this. Something about engaging in this experiment while Carter’s blood still stained my living room didn’t feel right to me.

  When I closed my eyes I heard the rain. Always the rain. It seemed like it had been raining for weeks instead of two days. Jorge and I agreed to use the same method to induce the paralysis and then the out-of-body trip. Instead, I found myself using the sound of the rain as my line of focus. I don’t remember falling asleep. My body, badly in need of rest, sucked me right into sleep paralysis.

  I hear thunder sneaking closer to the house every minute. I’m in my bedroom, aware of my surroundings. Jorge is next to me, his breathing steady; he must have fallen asleep. Fear overwhelms me before I have time to calm myself when I feel a hand gripping my hip, its weight threatening. I try to focus on how to get my mind out of this room by forcing an OBE. I narrow my vision and concentrate on a point between my eyes. The weight of the hand on my hip slowly dissipates and I feel myself rising. I try to contain my fear. It doesn’t work—I’m terrified.

  Soon I’m no longer in my bedroom and I see the same throw and the same crucifix I saw the last time I was here. I’m in the Krause’s living room. The bedroom door is open; this time the bed is unmade. A woman wearing only a pair of black lace panties is standing next to the bed, her face turned to the door as if expecting someone. It’s Drucilla, with her dark hair trailing down her back and her heavy breasts exposed. With her right hand, she reaches into her panties and begins to caress herself. I feel like an unwelcome observer of an act that should be personal.

  I can’t wake up. I’ve come here with a purpose and have to stay in the moment. Drucilla leaves my line of vision as she climbs into her bed. Moments pass or possibly, hours. I have no concept of time; I remain here, watching.

  Then I see Lucian nearing Drucilla’s room. He’s naked and carrying something in his hand. It’s a mask, some kind of tribal thing. He covers his face with it. As he enters the bedroom, Drucilla’s smooth white arm reaches out to him, pulling him nearer the bed. Lucian turns
to her, a huge erection jutting from his groin. She grasps it in her hand while Lucian climbs into her bed.

  Horrified by the sight, I realize I’ve begun moaning and fighting to waken. For once, someone was here to help me come back to consciousness. I felt a hand on my wrist.

  “Gemma. Gemma, it’s me. Jorge. I’m here, you’re safe.”

  My consciousness returned to the room and I saw the panic in Jorge’s eyes. He had been terrified for me. I took a deep breath before answering. “I’m all right.”

  “Did you see them?” I asked.

  He sat back on the portable bed. “Who?” He rubbed his face with the sleeve of his sweatshirt. “I didn’t see anything. But I got to the paralysis. I think I was with you, but I’m not sure. We were in a dark room. That’s all I was aware of. What did you see?”

  How could I tell him? What I had seen was so depraved; Drucilla and her brother Lucian were sex partners? My mind must have made it up. But if it were true, they would want to keep it hidden. What if Norman had found out?

  Chapter 42

  TJ headed north. The rain had finally let up, and a ray of sun peeked out from between large gray clouds. Soft rumbles of thunder sounded from the southwest. The appearance of the sun would be fleeting.

  Irene Abendoth didn’t appear pleased at TJ’s return visit. Determined to find out more about the swingers’ suicides, TJ pushed past her into the living room. She could have predicted the transition in the old woman’s house. The stark, minimalist look the rooms had the last time TJ visited had been replaced by Abendoth’s lifetime accumulation of pictures and collections that belied the taste and the age of its owner.

  While TJ took a seat on an aging mauve sofa, Irene remained standing, frowning at the marks TJ’s wet feet had left on the pale gray carpeting. A decaying brown leaf clung to one of the footprints.