But something inside me knew that wasn’t the case. I couldn’t explain why, but I had the same eerie feeling in my dream the night before, like I was being guided by something other than my own curiosity. It was like an unseen force that was pushing me along with invisible hands, a gentle urge that was impossible to resist.
We rounded the corner and faced a mostly empty room. Inside, a stage was set up with rows of chairs, like you might find in a church. In the first row sat a woman dressed from head to toe in black, including a black veil. Her full form shuddered as she sobbed, now more silently than before. She clutched a white silken handkerchief, which she continued to dab over her streaming eyes. Apparently, she was unaware that one of the microphones was knocked from its stand onto the floor and had rolled towards her. That was responsible for broadcasting her grief throughout the building.
Ryan was right in a sense: it was a perfectly normal explanation for the mysterious cries. Yet, it still didn’t make sense why the businessmen who had passed us in the hallway didn’t react at all—they just continued chatting with one another as if nothing untoward were happening.
As I pondered that mystery, I focused on an object placed in the center of the room. A coffin. It was garlanded with flowers, and a large American flag had been draped over it. I swallowed hard as a feeling of dread washed over me. Images from my nightmare with the woman in the black veil and the white coffin and Guarda and Baron Samedi started pouring into my head.
My heart began to pound and I found my gaze riveted on the coffin. If not for the flag, it might have been exactly like the one I saw in my dream the night before.
Chapter Six
“Well, mystery solved,” said Ryan blithely as he turned and faced me with a shrug. I could tell he was disappointed the crying woman didn’t turn out to be a ghost. “Now we’d better get going before Maggie arrives,” he started as he glanced down at his watch. “Damn! We’re already late!”
“We can’t be,” I said, shaking my head resolutely. I still couldn’t take my eyes off the coffin.
“What time do you have?” Ryan held up his phone, showing the time was ten-twenty-five a.m.
I frowned as I shook my head. “That can’t be right,” I said slowly, digging into my purse in search of my phone, “because it was only half-past nine when we got here, and the meeting barely took a few minutes.”
I was still flustered by the sight of the coffin and my heart didn’t slow down one bit. Not only that, but I was probably speaking loudly enough that I could be heard on the other side of the room. Pulling my phone from the purse, I checked the time: ten-twenty-six a.m.
I glanced from the clock back to Ryan as I shook my head again. How was it possible that so much time had passed? It felt like no more than five minutes could have elapsed since we left Reginald, but it was more like twenty or twenty-five minutes. “I don’t understand,” I started.
Something was wrong. I could feel it making my skin itch. Not for the first time that morning, I was struck by the presence of something unusual.
“Pey, we need to go,” Ryan said as he tapped his foot impatiently and raised his eyebrows at me.
“Not yet,” I said. I closed my eyes and tried to get a better read on the feeling I sensed. I needed Drake. Being a ghost, his connection to the otherworld made it much easier to figure out these types of situations.
“What are you doing?”
“I… I feel something,” I replied. “There’s something weird…”
“I, for one, learned a valuable lesson this morning,” Ryan said as I opened my eyes and found him looking at me impatiently. “Just because we can’t understand something doesn’t mean it’s paranormal.”
“Well? What does it mean?”
He shrugged. “In this case? Nothing.”
But I wasn’t convinced.
I brought my attention to a long table pushed against the wall. Atop the table was a water jug packed with lemon wedges. I poured myself a glass and sat down in the back row of chairs, trying not to be distracted by the sight of the coffin or the woman.
“Peyton!” Ryan said, his frustration clearly evident in his tone. “What part about we’re late did you not get?”
But, I shook my head. “I can’t explain why, but I have a strange feeling that I can’t leave yet.”
Although I never experienced losing track of time in a very obvious way—I read about it and saw it investigated on TV. Most accounts of the phenomenon followed a familiar pattern that went something like this: a man and woman were driving down the highway when they suddenly realized it was six hours later, and they were two hundred miles away from where they’d been only second before. The paranormal authorities on such matters usually concurred that extraterrestrials were somehow involved, but I wondered. I mean, I hadn’t noticed any skinny, green guys with huge eyes wandering aimlessly around the building.
“I give up,” Ryan said as he stood at the back of the room, sucking on a lemon he’d somehow managed to extract from the jug.
“Ryan,” I said, turning around, “tell me everything you remember us doing from the time we stepped into this building.”
“Not much, honestly,” he answered with a shrug. It was strange, but he didn’t seem concerned about the time lapse at all. “We went straight to the front desk, where we met Reginald. Then we had our meeting and then we left.”
“And we spent maybe ten minutes at most looking for whoever was crying, right?”
“Yeah, that sounds pretty accurate.”
“Then how do you explain the fact that it’s almost ten-thirty?”
“I don’t know, Pey. But, how will you explain to your cousin that we’re late picking her up at the airport because you wanted to sit in on a funeral you weren’t even invited to?”
“She’ll understand,” I said, doubting my own words. But suddenly, my lack of sleep the night before started to catch up with me; I felt deeply tired, and wondered if that, too, were a symptom of the enchantment of this place. “You don’t remember anything else?”
He shook his head. “You’d better text Maggie and tell her we’re running late—”
But we were interrupted by the woman in mourning, who was now standing at the end of the row in front of me. She looked at me, but there wasn’t any expression on her face.
I suddenly felt like I shouldn’t be here. Like I was trespassing on her privacy. “Sorry if we’re intruding,” I said as I started to get up. “We’ll be on our way.”
“Like I told you before, you’re not the ones bothering me,” she said in a kindly tone that still somehow managed to make my skin prickle. Of course, I didn’t remember her telling me anything because she hadn’t spoken to either one of us. “It’s that other woman who has been bothering me, the one you came in with.”
“Um,” I started as my heart began racing all over again.
The woman I came in with? What?
Overcome with a weird feeling of vertigo, I looked over at Ryan, whose eyes were wide. I raised my eyebrows at him as he faced the elderly woman and swallowed hard.
“I’m sorry, but can you tell me what you’re talking about?” he said.
“The woman you came in with,” she responded with annoyance. “She won’t leave me alone!”
“When did we come in?” I asked, facing her. “And what did we say to you?”
The woman appeared confused as she frowned at us. “Have you lost your mind, girl?”
“Please, just answer the question,” I said, smiling at her encouragingly.
She sighed. “You came in about thirty minutes ago.” Removing her glasses, she polished them with the hem of her black button-down shirt. “You said you were searching the building for something, I believe. And when you tried to leave, that other woman—the one who wouldn’t leave me alone all morning—stood in the doorway, blocking your path.”
I didn’t understand how that was possible or if it actually happened, but I also couldn’t account for the time that passed. I
had a feeling this mystery woman, the one who had blocked our path, was somehow to blame. “What did this woman look like?”
“Well, you were there, so you both saw her!”
“I’m sure these questions seem odd but please, just humor me by answering,” I said.
The woman frowned. “Well, you were out in the hallway talking to that woman for about twenty minutes. And the woman was bundled up in shawls, wearing a pair of glasses and she smelled like tea rose perfume.”
But, of course Ryan and I were never out in the hallway for twenty minutes talking to anyone. At least neither of us had any recollection of doing so. Was this old woman lying? Or could she be crazy?
She didn’t seem crazy. And, I found it unlikely that she concocted such an elaborate story. She appeared so completely convinced by it. And her story did make sense for the missing half-hour. But the question remained: Who was this woman with the glasses? And why would she go to all the trouble of carrying on a conversation with us, only to erase our memories afterwards? I didn’t have any answers but I got totally creeped out and wasn’t sure what to do about it.
Ryan and I still hadn’t eaten breakfast and I was getting light-headed from all the confusion. And there was still Maggie to pick up from the airport…
The mourning woman left the room, her black veil bobbing as she walked. The room was now empty except for the two of us, but it didn’t feel as though we were alone. The presence I felt earlier still lingered.
“That was really weird,” Ryan said.
I nodded. “Do you get the feeling she’s still here?”
“The woman who just left?”
“No, the woman we met earlier. The one we don’t remember meeting.”
“There’s no guarantee that old woman was telling the truth.” He took a breath. “She could just be off her rocker.”
“Then how do you explain the fact that we both just lost twenty or thirty minutes of our lives and neither one of us can account for it?”
“I don’t know.”
I couldn’t say with any certainty that the tea rose woman wasn’t still here. If she could alter perception and memory, maybe she knew how to avoid being seen… and smelled.
“Look, I know you can hear us,” I said in a low voice as I glanced around and addressed nothing in particular. “Show yourself… please.”
“What are you—” Ryan started, but I raised a finger to my lips. “Pey, have you forgotten your cousin is at the airport, waiting for us to get her?”
“I haven’t forgotten,” I said as I continued to look around the room. “But this is more important at the moment.” Then I glanced at Ryan as I handed him my phone. “Could you text Maggie and tell her we ran into an… issue? Can you ask her to grab a cab or an Uber and I’ll pay the fare?”
“Really?” Ryan asked as I nodded, and he exhaled his frustration but started searching through my contacts, all the same.
“I don’t know what your game is,” I went on a little more loudly as I started focusing on the room again. “But I’m asking you to show yourself and explain why we can’t remember anything. What did you do to deceive us?”
We waited for a minute in silence, but nothing happened. No portals materialized in the air before us; no eccentric-looking ladies appeared. But the air vibrated as though a latent power controlled it, and I could feel a swelling of emotion that wasn’t mine, or Ryan’s. It was a kind of merriment that verged on being savage. Of all the inconveniences I encountered this morning—the dripping roof, Catherine, being late to the meeting with Reginald, and Reginald himself, for that matter—this was easily the strangest, and the most menacing.
“Babe, she obviously doesn’t want to show herself,” said Ryan after a respectful pause. “If she’s still here, and I’m not sure she is.”
I resented the suggestion that I’d been talking to the air for the past three minutes. I knew what I felt; I sensed we weren’t alone in the room. And I didn’t need Drake inside me to know it was real. I was sensitive in my own right, and I had to trust my instincts. But Ryan was right about one thing: if the tea rose woman hadn’t appeared already, she probably wasn’t about to.
“We should get going,” I said, rising slowly. “We should stop at Lovie’s house on our way home.” Lovie was a friend who researched witchcraft and voodoo.
“You know that’s going to make us even later for Maggie,” said Ryan, “and we’re already late as it is.”
“It’s on the way there, and it won’t take more than ten minutes. We’ll be back home by the time Maggie arrives.”
“Remind me never to ask you to pick me up at the airport,” Ryan replied.
“Duly noted.”
I remembered Lovie once mentioning that she took something called “Tincture of Nepenthe” after blacking out during a séance, in order to see what occurred during the ten minutes she was unconscious. I wondered if the same tincture could help us retrieve the memories this mysterious woman seemed determined to hide.
As we came down the stairs and stepped into the lobby, I heard a commotion on the floor below us. A group of twenty people or so were standing in front of a glass display, murmuring anxiously. Upon reaching the base of the stairs, the crowd parted, and the source of the commotion became evident. The case was open and whatever was formerly inside it, now wasn’t.
“What happened?” Ryan asked.
I glanced around, finding it interesting that moments before there wasn’t anyone in the building except the two businessmen and Reginald. Now it looked like at least twenty people were in the lobby.
A man dressed in a security guard uniform looked over at Ryan. “There was an antique sword in this case and now it’s gone.”
“Yet no one saw anyone come in and remove it,” one of the people in the crowd said. “I was standing across the lobby, talking to a coworker the entire time.”
“Lotta stuff going on in this building today,” I said to Ryan.
“How bad is the security in this place?” asked one woman. “How can anyone just walk into a museum, lift a sword and walk out?”
“Hey, now,” the guard said with an angry look. “I was patrolling this place the whole time!”
“Makes me not want to ever come back,” said an older gentleman. Several women murmured their agreement.
“Um, isn’t that?” I started as Ryan and I watched Reginald elbowing his way through the crowd of onlookers.
He strode into the center of the group with a bemused expression. “What’s all the fuss about?” he asked grandly. “What’s everyone so upset for?”
“Your security is a bad joke, that’s what,” the old man said. “Someone just stole a priceless artifact—a sword that was once wielded at the battle of Antietam!”
Reginald’s face paled at the information, but he quickly rallied. “Bloody hell,” he muttered. Then he turned to face the group of onlookers. “I’m sure there’s someone in this room who must have witnessed the sword being stolen?” He flashed a yellow grin around the room.
A girl no older than fifteen, her hair braided in pigtails and wearing a Charizard T-shirt, stepped forward shyly. “I saw who it was,” she said.
“Very good, my dear,” Reginald said as he bent down until he was eye level with her.
The rest of the crowd appeared completely shocked.
“It was a boy,” the girl said. “A boy wearing a dragon baseball cap.”
“A boy, you say?” Reginald asked. “And how old was this boy?”
The girl shrugged and looked down at the ground. “Um, probably about eleven or twelve.”
Reginald raised his brows. “I hope you know better than to tell lies, miss,” he replied. “If you’re not telling the truth, you’re wasting time that could be better spent trying to catch the real thief. There are laws against that, you know.”
“I’m not lying!” the girl insisted, reaching into her banana-colored purse and pulling out a smart phone. She studied it for a few moments, scrolling with her th
umb, before holding up a picture that showed, indisputably, a boy in a blue baseball cap standing in front of the display. In the image, he had his hands on the glass, and he was lifting the latch. She then flipped to the next picture, showing the boy removing the sword from the display by the handle.
Reginald looked at her and frowned. “And how is it that you have photos of our thief in progress?”
The girl shrugged. “I was standing in the corner over there, waiting for my aunt to finish shopping and I saw the boy. When he put his hand through the glass, I figured I should probably start taking some pictures.”
“Put his hand through the glass?” Reginald repeated as my stomach dropped down to my toes.
“How else can you explain how he took the sword without breaking the glass?” the girl asked him.
Reginald surveyed the two pictures on her phone with an air of exaggerated thoughtfulness. “And why didn’t you alert anyone when this happened?”
“There was nobody around,” she replied.
The woman who spoke first came bustling forward, looking agitated. “Let me see that,” she said. The girl held up her phone and the woman studied the image for a moment with a disconcerted expression. “I’ve seen this kid before.”
“Where?” Reginald asked. “Do you know his family?”
The woman shook her head. “I don’t know him.”
“But you just said,” Reginald started.
The woman looked at him and frowned. “I said I’ve seen him.” Then she looked at the phone again and nodded. “Yep, there’s no doubt in my mind it’s the same kid—unless he has a twin. Y’all are gonna think I’m nuts for sayin’ this but...”
“Where have you seen him?” asked Ryan.
“That’s Pebbles Ross,” the woman answered coolly.
“It can’t be,” someone else said.
“Look at the picture,” the woman responded and passed the phone around, amid a sea of gasps and comments in the affirmative.
If You've Got It, Haunt It: A ghost romance (The Peyton Clark Series Book 4) Page 6