She thought about it for a moment, and nodded shortly.
“I worked a lot of different jobs, stores like this, some less glamorous temp stuff. Nothing notable. I’ve moved where the work is, and that’s about it.”
“A gypsy?”
“Hardly.”
“Why?”
She was quiet for a minute, and he saw a flash of what he assessed as honest pain on her face.
“I grew up, down south, in one of those little bayou shacks you see on the news whenever the floods come?”
He nodded.
“My mama raised us by herself, and she made some money doing fortunes, tarot cards, some healing, a mish-mash of things, and we would go out begging every day, getting what we could. We were pretty much dirt poor, but it wasn’t bad until mama started seeing a man who had eyes for me more than her, and she didn’t really argue much with him, because he had a regular job. I knew it was time to go. Simple as that. I took off, changed my name a few times so that they couldn’t find me, and worked odd jobs over the years until I made my way up here. I found this place,” she looked around Talismans, “and Sophie, and I knew it was where I wanted to stay.”
Roger was watching her every move as she told the story, and even detected the slight southern inflection in her voice, as if she’d worked hard to erase it, but it came back when she thought about where she’d grown up. It did explain the lack of records and her name change, though, he thought, frowning.
“Sounds like a tough time.”
“There are people who have it worse.”
“You’ve worked your way up. Now you’ll own this place.”
“Even more reason to make sure no one finds me. I’m assuming you did a little checking on me, too, didn’t you, Roger?”
He had to admit surprise at her perceptiveness, but if she’d survived this long on her own, come this far, she couldn’t be stupid.
“You said we?”
“My brother was with me, at first. We parted ways a while back. He was. . .trouble.” She didn’t elaborate. Roger could fill in the blanks.
“I wanted to make sure you were the right person for Sophie to be selling this place to,” he lied.
“I guess I can understand that. But I don’t want any of them finding me, ever again.”
“I doubt you have to worry about that.”
His phone rang. He saw Pereski’s name and number and sighed, turning to walk a few feet away to take the call.
“Paris.”
“Rog, you with your girlfriend by any chance?”
Roger’s ears pricked at the particularly greasy emphasis on the word girlfriend, and knew something was up. “I’m waiting for her here at the store, why?”
“There’s an APB out on her.”
“What the fuck for?”
“Arthur Noble, owns Noble’s, his grandson is dead.”
“Sorry to hear that, but what the hell does that have to do with Sophie?”
“Well, Alan Bledsoe went through his wife’s effects, and told us there was a receipt missing—for some necklaces at Noble’s—he was pretty pissed about it. As it turns out, the receipt was found at the new murder scene, in the alley outside – the killer apparently dropped it. The necklaces were gone. The wounds were probably made with the same weapon, though we don’t have forensics back yet, and the security system was hacked—something Sophie probably has the ability to do, so her college advisor says. Apparently your girlfriend was up at Harvard harassing him today, so he says, too.”
“Who?”
“Bledsoe.”
Roger swore under his breath. What else was Sophie up to that he had no idea about?
“She’s with you?”
Roger was chanting every curse word he knew repeatedly in his head.
“You know Sophie didn’t do this, Matt. Someone is setting her up.”
“If she has a good alibi, like being with her cop boyfriend or in a store full of people all afternoon, you have no worries. Can you bring her down or do I need to send a car?”
“I would bring her down. . .but I haven’t seen her today,” Roger had to tell him, had to tell the truth, hard and ridiculous as it was.
“I see. If you’re aiding and abetting-”
“Watch your step, Matt,” Roger warned.
“You bring her in, or we will, but either way, she’s coming in.”
Pereski hung up, and Roger’s stomach turned, but he shoved it down, facing Margaret.
“We have to find Sophie.”
“Why? What’s wrong?”
“She’s in a shitload of trouble, and I want to find her before they do.”
“They? They who?”
He didn’t answer, but took off to the back and ran up to the apartment, finding the slip of paper Sophie had written on the night before. It had the office number, and a phone number. Taking the paper, he went back downstairs, calling. No answer.
“Shit,” he bit out loudly, shocking a customer who had just walked in.
“What?” Margaret asked, sending him an annoyed look.
“I have to find Sophie—did she say where she was going?”
“Just to her four o’clock appointment.”
“There’s no answer at this Dr. Mason’s office, no answer on her cell, and she missed coming by to see you. . .it doesn’t sound like her.”
“You think something happened to her?”
“I don’t know. There was another murder, and they think Sophie might have done it. They’re looking to bring her in for questioning.”
The news set off a respectable stream of curses from the small brunette that upped Roger’s estimation a notch. “You meant the police are looking for her?”
“Yeah. We have to find out where she’s been.”
“I must have talked to her after she’d left Bledsoe’s then. She was on her way to campus to meet Dr. Mason. Why would she have gone to talk to Patrice’s husband?”
Roger pushed a hand through his hair. “I have no idea. You keep trying to call her, and let me know if you get through. I’m going to find Alan Bledsoe and see if he can tell me anything, and then I’m heading over to the campus to find Mason. Hopefully knowing where she is will give us a jump on the APB.”
“Okay,” Margaret said, nodding and looking more concerned by the minute.
On his way out, he stopped. “Mags?”
“What?”
“I may not believe in your pink rocks, but I do believe you care for Sophie, so at least we have that in common.” He didn’t wait for a response and was out the door before she might have offered one.
Chapter Six
Sophie lurched forward as they pulled up in front of one of the old houses along Salem Street in Charlestown, a little northwest of the Bunker Hill monument. Josh was a bit of a spastic driver, and she was happy to get out of the car in one piece, thinking she would take the T back home.
“This is it. They’re in the basement,” he said, nodding to the tall brick building with architecture that gave it a classic “haunted house” appeal, with its curtained windows, gables, and a front yard full of gnarled bushes.
She grabbed a box, following him along a back walkway through a small white door down musty steps to the basement. There she found a small group of people in low light, two women messing with equipment of some sort and a taller man making entry in a notebook. He looked up, saw Josh, and nodded, and then his eyes landed on Sophie.
“Bring a friend?” he asked.
“This is Sophie,” Josh said, as if Mason should know exactly who she was. Sophie rushed to clarify.
“I had an appointment with you at four, and I bumped into Josh outside your office. He thought you might not mind if I came by, but if it’s a problem, I can go.”
Dr. Mason shook his head, paying more attention to the camera in his hands than to her. “Oh, that’s right, sorry about that, no you can stay. That could work, actually. You know how to run a camcorder? Our camera person is down with the flu.”
Sophie nod
ded and followed Josh over to the table where he set the boxes.
“Not really,” she said hesitantly.
“It’s easy. This one shoots IR—infrared. You have to use a wider aperture and lens to avoid hotspots, but don’t crank it so wide that you get a lot of barrel distortion, either,” he said distractedly, handing her a camera. She looked at the small, hand-sized camcorder and then back at him.
“Huh?”
He grinned. “I’ll get it set up, and if you can turn it on and shoot, we’ll be good. Okay?”
“Uh, sure.”
Sophie had fallen down the rabbit hole—they all buzzed with activity around her, while she stood in place holding the camera, having no idea what she was supposed to be doing.
“That’s Kristen, our secretary and researcher, she keeps track of everything and writes it all down so we know the details each time we work on a job, because sometimes we have to come around several times, and she also does a lot of the background research on the history of the locations,” Josh explained as he came back to her side, “and that’s Roberta, our tech expert. She’s a whiz with the computers.”
Josh went back to what he was doing, and the young woman he’d pointed out as Kristen came to stand by Sophie for a moment, shared her admiration.
“Isn’t he wonderful? Absolutely brilliant.”
“Josh?”
“Dr. Mason,” she looked at Sophie full-on with a big grin.
Completely star-struck, was Sophie’s judgment. “What are you doing, exactly?” she said, changing the topic to something more useful.
“Well, the owner of this building wants to sell it to a condo outfit, you know? But he can’t get it to move because of the activity here in the basement.”
“What kind of activity?”
“Ghost activity,” the girl said with barely repressed glee. “There was a terrible crime here about a hundred years ago, and there are still some problems. I’m Kristen, by the way.”
“I’m Sophie. What kinds of problems?”
Mason spoke suddenly from behind them, making them both jump, and he gave Kristin some wire to run somewhere.
“Haunting problems,” he clarified. “There are different reports. Sometimes there’s crying, other times screaming, and other times the sounds of things being thrown around, like someone looking for something. They’ve come down to find the basement trashed several times, and finally stopped storing anything here. As far as we can tell, the young woman who used to live here was kidnapped, or so they thought. The records are sketchy, but there’s some indication her stepfather at the time may have reported her as a heretic of some sort—probably a rationale for abuse—and locked her in the basement. The mother went crazy looking for her daughter, and found her too late, down here. So far as we can tell from what records we found, her husband probably killed the mother, too.”
“That’s horrible, but how can you know it’s a ghost, and not rats or kids down here vandalizing or playing tricks?”
He looked at her over his glasses with a squint. “Not a believer?”
“On the fence.”
“That’s interesting. I would have thought you were a believer,” he said
“You remember me?”
“Absolutely. And I read the papers, but don’t worry,” he cut off her automatic response. “I think newspapers are for entertainment only,” he said, completely serious as he inspected some small recording device and then set it down on a table.
“Thanks. I think,” she said, unsure what to think.
“So, do you have a ghost?”
“What?”
“You wanted to see me, so I figure it was either for my clinical work or you have a ghost.”
“Right. Well, I don’t need to see you as a shrink, though some might disagree.”
He grinned at that, picking up some other device and fussing with its position on a window ledge.
“I saw something, and I’ve had a few other weird. . .experiences.” She didn’t want to be specific within earshot of the other people in the room.
“Why do you think it’s a ghost?”
“I’d rather discuss this in private,” she said. She could imagine what would happen if any one of them went to the papers with this. Maybe Roger had been right.
“Fair enough. First, how about a crash course on ghost hunting? A lot of people don’t really even recognize a ghost when they see it, though they can often feel them, their presence.”
“Have you seen many?”
“I’ve seen a lot of things.”
“How do you know if you’re looking at a ghost?”
“Well, there is some established work in this area now. The traditional scientific community rejects it, but there’s a considerable body of work that I can measure my observations against. Then there’s anecdotal experience to draw from, and my own common sense. It’s not as unusual as many people think. Many great thinkers, William James, the father of psychiatry, among others, believed in the paranormal, in ghosts. The simple fact of believing I can see an aspect of a soul that once lived in a human form is half the battle.”
“Aspect. . .” Sophie repeated. “Is that why they’re called specters?”
“Not really, though I see how you could think that. Aspect is a term I’ve used in my research, coined it, actually, much as I would talk about aspects of personality or self in my clinical work.”
“I see,” she said, though she must have looked like she didn’t since he went on.
“Think of it this way: according to mystical sources such as the Kabbala and Carl Jung, for instance, all humans have several layers that make up a unified soul.”
“Like the id, superego, and ego make up the mind?” Sophie remembered that much from her one Psych course.
“Yes! When we’re alive, we’re unified beings, more or less, but we have layers, or different aspects of ourselves, our conscious and unconscious minds, our dark sides, etc. So the soul is the spiritual blend of things like personality, emotions, thoughts, memory, dreams, beliefs, the parts of the psyche, etc. It brings the layers together into a whole that makes the person who they are. Sometimes these layers become split, parts get lost or broken in some way. The same happens to some spirits”
“Okay,” she nodded, following so far.
“When a person dies, it’s very possible for one or several of these parts of the self to remain behind, as if the trauma of dying had split apart the self. One layer would be a weak presence, a film of a person who once lived. Barely noticeable. Sometimes we call these residual hauntings, or really the faintest impression of what we think of as a ghost. Sometimes it’s a feeling, or a repetitive sound, a flash of light or something very fragile, you know? Other times, one or several strong aspects of the soul remain and they can be very powerful. In this case, based on what I know of what happened here, and what we’ve observed, I’m assuming the emotional aspect of the traumatized mother haunts this basement. The woman doesn’t know she’s dead, doesn’t know where she is or why, she simply feels. Pure emotion. She’s driven by the love for her child and fear of what happened, and anger toward the one who hurt her.”
“What about the rest of the aspects? Where are they?”
“Unknown. I suppose they move on, or they simply hang in the ether, waiting for the lost aspects to find them again. It’s really just a theory I have yet to prove. Normally the people I work for, they want the symptoms dealt with, and honestly, once the haunting stops, there’s been no way to trace them. I assume they somehow find their way back to themselves.”
“So you don’t help them, uh, cross over?”
Mason shook his head. “That assumes a theological underpinning that I believe there is somewhere that we would cross over to, right? And that I would know it’s the right thing to instruct a spirit to do, which I can’t possibly know, not having been there, at least as far as I know. If there is a light, how do I know what’s on the other side of it? I wouldn’t know where to start,” he said wit
h a short smile. “Makes for good entertainment on TV though, huh?”
“So how do you know how many aspects you are dealing with in any particular ghost?”
His face lit up and she knew she’d hit on a good question. “By what it can do. This one has enough power to move material objects, for instance, and I haven’t come across that too often, so it’s very exciting. She’s been keeping people out of the basement, contractors, real estate brokers, anyone she senses will try to disrupt this space before she finds her daughter. So, the chances are she’s mostly integrated.”
“Will you talk to her?”
Dr. Mason looked at her curiously. “No. Do you remember any of what your aunt used to do?”
Sophie’s spine tingled—she knew her aunt was a tarot reader, but how did that connect with ghosts?
“I was never really involved as a kid, and they were gone before they could share what they did with me.”
“That’s right. I’m sorry, that was insensitive of me. I can see why your aunt would have wanted to protect you as a child.”
He could? How could this guy know more about her aunt than she did? It wasn’t the time or the place, but she planned to find out.
“It’s okay. It’s been a long time,” she sufficed to say.
Dr. Mason kept looking at her and said, “Pain lasts. Which is why we have ghosts, right?”
Sophie didn’t answer that, so he moved on to her previous question.
“They rarely use language to communicate,” he tapped at his throat, “No real physical presence so no vocal cords, however, if they are strong enough, they can use their psyche to project thoughts, sometimes sounds and what appears as speech, though that’s more rare.”
“I hadn’t thought of that, the lack of vocal cords.”
“Ghosts are, in essence, remnants of energy, so they mainly communicate through channels which rely on psychic energy, like dreams, psychic activity, instinct, Ouija boards, that kind of thing.”
“Tarot?”
“Sure. I went to see your aunt for a reading once. She was well known around campus, you know,” he said unexpectedly.
“Really?”
“She did a reading for me when I was a freshman here in college. She. . .helped me with something, and in some ways she was responsible for this extra little path I’ve taken in my career. Check out the dedication in my first book sometime,” he said with a vague smile.
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