by JL Bryan
Stacey and I reached the upstairs hall in time to see Delavius blow right past the ajar door to Steffy's room and the door to the room where Tammy was staying with the two younger ones. The bodyguard barreled directly toward the master suite, as if indifferent to everyone in the house except the one who signed his paychecks.
I went right to Steffy's room and pointed my light inside.
The girl blinked at me sleepily, still lying in her bed.
“Are you okay?” I asked her. “Did you just scream?”
“No.” Her voice was soft and drowsy. “Who screamed?” Then her eyes opened wider. “Is the evil mermaid back?”
“I haven't seen her. Everything's fine.” I turned and crossed to Tammy's room. She was stirring in there, though her son and the tiny baby—sleeping in a nest of blankets and pillows, crammed into a corner of the bed set flush against the wall—didn't seem to be awake at all.
The scream sounded again, louder now.
It came from the master suite. It was Alyssa, and now we knew what she would sound like as a horror-movie scream queen rather than a superhero or romantic lead.
Stacey and I rushed down the hall, following Delavius's trail through the open doors, through the front room where I'd spoken with Alyssa earlier in the day.
In the bedroom, Alyssa was standing against the soft, tufted headboard of her enormous bed, looking far more awake than the others, pale and shaking while Delavius tried to calm her. Our flashlights helped illuminate the room. The power was still out.
“Right there,” Alyssa was saying, pointing to a spot just beside her bed. “Looking right into my face...I can still smell her...dripping on me...” She covered her lower face like she was going to ralph all over her pillows.
“There's nobody here now,” Delavius said. He looked under the bed and inside the walk-in closet. I started checking windows to make sure they were all latched tight.
“She disappeared,” Alyssa said. “She was...one of those...you know.” She pointed at me, as if it was momentarily too difficult to remember the word ghost, or at least to say it aloud.
“Can you describe what you saw?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah.” She dropped to the bed and drew her knees close to her chin. “Sick skin, greenish-white. She was bloated and wet, like a...a corpse they just hauled out of the East River. Like in Gangster Heart.”
“Aw, that was a cute movie,” Stacey said. “You were in that?”
“The well-meaning but misguided younger sister,” Alyssa said.
“Oh, yeah! She had the glasses and frizzy hair.”
“It was an early role for me.” Alyssa looked at me. “I don't ever want to see that thing again.”
“The movie or the ghost?” Stacey asked.
“Either one,” Alyssa said.
“Your safest bet would be to leave until we're done,” I said.
“No.” She shook her head. “This is my home. My family's home. I'm not going to run away and look defeated in front of everybody.”
“Okay,” I said. “Another option is for you to move to another guest room, or maybe even the guest house—”
“Yikes, I need to clean my room over there,” Hayden said over my headset.
“There aren't enough rooms for everyone in the guest house,” Alyssa said. “Don't worry, I doubt I'll sleep again tonight. I wish the lights would come back on.” She worked the knob at a bedside lamp, but nothing happened.
“You saw her, didn't you?” Steffy asked. We all turned—nobody had noticed her slipping into the room. I mentally flipped back through our conversation, wondering whether we'd said anything that might give her nightmares. We probably had, but nothing compared to seeing the rotten, dripping corpse-woman with her own eyes.
“I did, yeah,” Alyssa replied.
“She hates us,” Steffy said. “She hates everyone.”
“Do you know what she wants?” I asked, since the girl was apparently offering up insights into the ghost's motives.
“I just know how she feels,” Steffy said. “And it's bad. Maybe she wants us to die. Everybody, the whole family.”
“Steffy!” Tammy was just catching up to her daughter. She cast an embarrassed look around the room as she entered. “Don't say things like that...and you shouldn't be in here...”
“That's okay,” Alyssa said. “I saw the same ghost you did. Now we just need it dealt with.” Alyssa looked at me.
“We're on it,” I said. “I'm wondering why the shipwreck ghosts are so angry. When the wreck happened, the big candle in the lighthouse went out. William Verish died trying to relight it. So if the ship crashed because the lighthouse was dark—”
“Them ghosts might blame us for their deaths,” Tammy interrupted. “Since it was our duty to keep that light burning. Our family.”
“Exactly,” I said.
“So what do we do?” Alyssa asked. “That's ten or twelve ghosts.”
“We have to convince them to move on.” I walked to her balcony doors and looked out onto an actual deck, not a narrow ledge with a railing like my alleged balcony at home. Beyond that lay the darkness of the ocean, the lighthouse itself invisible with no moon or stars to light it, and no lightning at the moment, either. “Maybe we'll have to light that tower one last time. Or use a light to somehow guide them onward...”
“Guide them which way?” Stacey asked.
I pointed westward, in the direction of the river and the city. “Up the river channel. That's the way they were meant go, two centuries ago.” West was also the traditional direction of death, the place where the sun set into darkness every day. This viewpoint was at least as old as ancient Egypt. I didn't see any point in taking the conversation off into symbolic and religious realms, though. My client and her family members needed just the opposite—to get grounded, to feel things would be okay and normal again. “I want to look at those family papers of yours before I finalize any plans, though.”
“There's plenty of it,” Tammy said. “Hope you like reading.”
“I do, luckily,” I said.
“No cold spots in the house now,” Hayden reported over my headset. “Looks like you guys ran it off for now.”
“Good.” I looked at Alyssa. “Our instruments indicate there's no ghost in this house anymore.”
“She'll come back,” Steffy said. “As long as we're here, she'll keep coming.”
“Well, at least she's got determination,” Stacey said, possibly trying to ease the tension of the small girl predicting supernatural doom.
“I'm going downstairs.” Alyssa hopped to her feet. She'd been sleeping in checkered flannel, I noticed. The night was getting cool. I hadn't thought about it, but I suppose I would have expected her to wear something more like the hyper-expensive lingerie in which Kara had been sleeping. Alyssa looked ready to go outside and chop wood. “Ghost hunters, do your thing. Keep the ball rolling.”
“Ghost hunters?” Tammy glared at me. “You said you were private security.”
“We are,” I said. “Paranormal issues happen to be a specialty. It comes up a lot in this city.”
“It didn't come up a lot when you was talking to me,” Tammy said.
“Clients usually like a lot of discretion about their haunted houses. And we have a non-disclosure agreement with our client, as we often do.”
“Your client?” Tammy looked at Alyssa. “You didn't want them to tell me why they were here?”
“As if I had any idea you were coming.” Alyssa shook her head. “You weren't exactly invited, Tammy.”
“Yeah, thanks for reminding me.”
“We had no special instructions about you,” I said.
“But you let us stay here, knowing there was a ghost,” Tammy said. “You didn't say nothing.”
“Yes, I did. We talked about it.”
Tammy shook her head. “What other secrets did y'all forget to mention? Is Charles Manson living in the basement?”
“You're free to leave,” Alyssa said, while lea
ving the bedroom herself.
“I want to go back to our apartment,” Steffy said. “I miss my room.”
Tammy winced like someone had twisted a knife in her. “Steffy, I explained about that.”
“But you just have to get rent and everything will be fine. You said that.”
“I said that a few weeks ago. Things changed. We didn't make it in time. But we'll be fine. I...promise.”
We couldn't do much more except stand around being awkward and intrusive, so I nodded at Stacey and we left the room.
Downstairs, Alyssa occupied the enormous couch in the two-story movie room. She was looking out at the rain through the glass wall. A powerful electric lantern on an end table lit up the room.
Her assistant Zoe had apparently slept through the screaming, but she was awake now, a pencil stuck into her messy hair. She arranged a heap of papers, thick volumes bound with metal brads, in front of Alyssa.
“Perfect,” Alyssa said. “Either this will pass the time or put me right back to sleep.”
“What are those?” Stacey asked as we stepped off the floating spiral stairs.
“Screenplays,” Zoe said.
“I have to look at these and decide which ones I might be willing to do,” Alyssa said. “The pickings are usually bad.”
“Whoa,” Stacey said. “You don't have, like, someone to do that for you?”
“Yes. Because what I want to do is trust each step in my career to some intern. That's where people mess up, you know. They get lazy, they just ask about the paycheck. You want to know what you're getting into before you let them put your name all over it. So what do I want to do? Romantic comedy in a baseball stadium – The Hot Dog Affair? Who's attached to this, Zoe?”
“They're saying Seth Rogen for the male lead.”
Zoe tossed the script aside. It landed with a smack on the floor, some pages escaping the brads and spreading out. “That was an easy read. Next?”
“Are we sure that's safe against a hurricane? This glass wall?” I asked. “Because the storms are coming...”
“It's fine.” Alyssa yawned as she waved the question away. “I had an architect design it. Go hunt ghosts, I'm working now.”
Stacey and I passed out of the room and made our way back to the bungalow, where we watched ours screens, their battery life draining until the power kicked on a little while later.
The rain continued. Stacey caught another cold spot passing through the glass hallway in front of the bungalow where we sat. We stepped out there to investigate, and it did feel abnormally cool, but it passed quickly.
Stacey pulled the parallel footage from the night vision camera. When she slowed it down enough, she found an apparition. It had only appeared for about a tenth of a second: a man-shaped shadow, the top of his head boxy as though he wore a stiff cap. It reminded me of the lighthouse keeper's uniforms I'd seen during my research for this case.
He appeared to be making his way up the glass hall. He was there for only that sliver of a second, moving forward, then he was gone.
“Looks like the keeper's making his rounds,” I said. “We could probably follow him all the way to the beach, down along the jetty...”
“...toward the lighthouse where his secret lover waits,” Stacey continued.
“While his wife and kids sleep in the house,” I added.
“It's less romantic when you think about that part,” she said. “More sleazy and urky. I wonder who the mistress was?”
“I don't know.” I thought of the white, gauzy apparition haunting the lighthouse. “Maybe we'll get some clues tomorrow.”
“I think Alyssa wants results fast.”
“I don't blame her,” I said. I took a moment to look out through the glass hallway wall toward the dark ocean beyond, churning with bad weather and evil spirits. Lightning forked above, throwing the lighthouse into momentary relief. It looked sinister at that moment, a rock prison full of dark secrets.
Then the lightning was gone, and darkness swallowed it again.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Despite the rain, Alyssa's other sister, Penny, and her grandmother, Dotty Starch, keeper of the precious old family papers, made the trip out from Lumber City to Alyssa's house. It probably took more than two hours in the extreme downpour.
I'd learned that Penny was married—to the champion quarterback from high school, Tammy had noted. She was the oldest and had four kids. When she arrived, I immediately noticed that she was the tallest of the three sisters, and actually the most striking. You would have thought she was the movie star.
Alyssa put on lots of makeup and designer labels before Penny arrived.
My attention immediately went to the grandmother, Dotty, as thickly made up as the others, her hair still miraculously blond at seventy. Well, it was probably dyed rather than miraculous, but she could have passed for fifty or even forty at a distance. She was very fit and wore a tight, low-cut blouse under a thin pink choker scarf at her neck. It looked like the family obsession with appearances went back at least a few generations.
“Would you look at this place?” Dotty said as soon as she entered. She was awed, her eyes practically falling out of their heavily mascara-lined sockets. “It's beautiful. I can't believe it.”
Penny, walking behind her, scowled. Penny's hair had a cute bob sort of look, and her clothes were attractive and conservative, but certainly not high-end designer stuff like Alyssa wore. Penny was more Macy's than Rodeo Drive. Alyssa was obviously breaking out the absurdly expensive clothes to impress her family.
Her grandmother Dotty mostly had eyes for the house, at least at the moment. The more Dotty gushed over the beauty of the expanded and rebuilt house, the darker shade of crimson Penny turned. She cut repeated glances at Tammy, who just shrugged in return.
I stayed back, observing and listening, mostly out of sight and busying myself with the camera gear downstairs. Alyssa was thrilled to point out every detail of the house. I had the sense that this was the payoff she'd originally planned for Thanksgiving—the elder relative so impressed that Alyssa cast both her older sisters into shadow. Alyssa had restored a family legacy in a way no one else could have imagined, because the cost was absurdly high.
Alyssa's assistant had hired some staff from a local temp firm, including a housekeeper and a chef. I gathered that she had these back home in Los Angeles, but didn't want to fly her chef or her personal trainer out through the worsening storms. Maybe she didn't want them to glimpse anything about her real past, either, things they could whisper to the tabloids for extra cash.
They gathered in the living room, where the chef quietly placed out cheese and fruit platters, plus fat grilled shrimp, smoked salmon, and tiny crab cakes as appetizers. There was water and wine, and Tammy helped herself to a tall glass of the latter.
Stacey, Hayden, and I generally tried to stay out of the way and out of sight, but I lingered as close as I could, waiting for my chance to speak with the grandmother.
Alyssa took her time showing off, bragging, impressing her grandmother and trying to generally cast her older sisters into her shadow within the family—I had to wonder whether she felt like Cinderella sticking it to the older stepsisters years after running off with Prince Charming.
It looked fairly petty to me, considering Alyssa's obvious and overwhelming success and the fact that her sister was literally homeless at the moment. But then, she was the one paying me to be here, and I honestly had no idea how far their alleged torment had gone. It was definitely not my business.
“What about the ghosts?” Tammy finally said. Stacey and I, in the small library off the living room, looked at each other. It sounded like we'd soon be summoned. “You ain't going to mention that?”
“Ghosts?” Dotty asked.
“Oh, yeah,” Tammy replied. “These security people around here—half of them are just here looking for ghosts. I haven't seen it, but Steffy did. And Alyssa did, and all her people that work for her—”
“T
hat's enough!” Alyssa said. “It's being dealt with. It's not a big deal.”
“That's not the song you were singing last night,” Tammy said. “Remember? When you screamed about the ghost and woke up everyone—”
“Are all of y'all serious?” Penny snapped, speaking up for almost the first time since she'd arrived. I didn't have the impression that she was shy, though—more like too livid to speak. Maybe it had to do with her long-held alpha status among the sisters being threatened. Maybe not. “Ghosts?” She gave a forced, humorless laugh.
“Oh, we're way past all that, Penny,” Alyssa said. “There are presences here.”
“Do you know who they are?” Dotty asked. “Is it...anyone I know?”
“This is too much!” Penny snapped. “What you've done here is awful, Lisa. You didn't restore it the way it was. You made it into a huge, ugly statement about yourself.”
“And what kind of statement am I making?” Alyssa said.
“That you're better than us, and running off and getting lucky in the movies means you can just come back and lord it over us. We're losers because we stayed here and had kids and normal lives. We're nobodies and you're somebody.”
“Thank you,” Alyssa said. “I enjoyed hearing you say all of that.”
“You were right about one thing all along,” Penny said. “You never belonged anywhere, and you never will. You just wait until you turn forty and Hollywood forgets all about you. Everybody will forget you, everybody but us. We'll all remember the nothing you really are, the nasty person you are inside. We'll remember this moment. I can't wait to throw it in your face.” I heard Penny's heels click as she left the room. The back door slid open. I supposed Penny was heading out to the covered back patio area, protected from the downpour, which was still coming down outside. Lightning and thunder punctuated the afternoon.
I heard more footsteps. When I happened to pass by the living room archway again—hey, there wasn't a closed door, so I wasn't necessarily spying—I saw that only Tammy and Dotty remained, munching the appetizers. The kids played somewhere deeper inside the house. I assumed the baby was sleeping up in the guest suite. Alyssa must have stalked off somewhere, too.