Berg laced his fingers on the table, his dark brown eyes moving from Matt to Carissa, gauging in his hesitation what and what not to say. “Lebec said the spirits of the dead are trapped here and need to move on,” he began. “No soul is trapped, certainly not by a building. Souls are either in living bodies or they’re gone—to wherever their souls were meant to go after death.”
“You mean hell?” Matt asked.
“I do believe in hell, Matt. Call it voluntary separation from God if you want. The point is, souls don’t need to move on because death does that for them. Has anyone close to you ever died?”
Matt looked down at the table. “Yeah, sure. I watched my grandfather die in the hospital.”
“He died, and his soul left his body. It didn’t hang around the hospital room?”
“Yeah . . . well, yeah, that’s what it looked like to me. Like he left an empty container behind.”
I smiled. “That’s a good way to put it.”
“There was no confusion when he died,” Berg went on. “Not for him, not for you.”
“No, I guess not.”
“He died, his soul departed.”
“Seemed like it.”
“You’re telling me we’re not haunted?” Carissa asked in a tiny, hopeful voice. “But people all over the world believe in ghosts.”
“They believe in the supernatural,” Berg said, “and so they should.”
“I don’t want to believe in ghosts either, but if they’re not ghosts, then—”
Matt laid a hand on Carissa’s shoulder, stopping her midsentence. He looked like a man with new questions, more disturbing ones, forming in his mind, but uppermost in his thoughts was protecting his wife.
“Let’s go watch TV, honey. That’s what we usually do about now, and these two need to get on with their work.”
Thankfully, the word demon had not crossed his lips. Neither had Carissa mentioned the word, as she surely would have had Matt relayed to her Lebec’s parting rant.
“You have a TV in your bedroom too?” I asked.
“We haven’t wired the living room for cable yet,” Matt said.
I set down my Coke and checked my wristwatch. “We’d like to take a look at your bedroom before you settle in.” It was still odd to hear Matt refer to the sanctuary as his living room, but of course it would be as soon as the rest of the pews were out and their furniture was in. A living room watched over by Michael the archangel. My kind of living room.
“Yeah, absolutely,” he said. “Follow me.”
The four of us headed back down the hall, stopping at Matt and Carissa’s open door. Matt reached around the doorframe and flipped on the light, then he and his wife stood aside and let me and Berg enter.
Their bedroom looked marginally less austere than the children’s rooms. Overhead were more acoustic tiles, two of them stained from what must have been a water leak at some point.
“Do you ever hear sounds coming from this ceiling?” I asked.
“We have, a few times,” Matt said, “but usually noises come from somewhere down the hall, in the opposite direction from the kids’ rooms. A few times we heard footsteps in the living room, and four nights ago”—he stole a glance at Carissa—“we heard a door shut. I was positive someone had broken in. It wasn’t an old-house sound, it was clearly a door slamming shut.”
“Did you call the police?”
“No, I took my baseball bat into the hall.” He gestured at the metal bat on the room’s dresser, lying ready for action in front of a flat-screen TV, this one forty-plus inches. “I checked the front door, I checked every room. Nothing. The first two times we heard loud noises, yeah, we called the cops, and they didn’t find anything either. But you can’t keep calling 911.”
“I see your point.” I gestured at a small framed photo of two children next to the TV. “Liam and Sophie?”
“Yes,” Carissa said.
I went to the Petersons’ closet and pressed my hands on the back and side walls. It was another utility closet, too small to hold two adults’ clothing, but a wide pine wardrobe on the other side of the room must have helped alleviate the problem. To cover all the bases, I looked behind the wardrobe for air vents and such, finding nothing but wall.
“What about outside?” Berg said, going to the room’s single but substantial window and pulling aside the drapes. “Do you see or hear anything in the back yard?”
“A week ago I thought I heard something or someone stepping on fallen leaves just outside the window,” Carissa said. “But when you’re laying here at night, if you’ve just woken up, it’s hard to tell where a sound is coming from.”
“I can imagine,” Berg said. “It’s getting windier out, so you might hear more outside noises tonight.” He closed the drapes and looked back to the Petersons, who were hovering like winged insects at the door. Their bedroom had become a foreign and frightening place, not a place of peace or rest. “Where are the bathrooms?”
“The one Carissa and I use is right next door,” Matt said. “Sophie and Liam use the one at the other end of the hall, and there’s a third restroom on around the corner, down the other hall.”
“Carissa, you told me you don’t hear odd sounds or banging noises when you run the water or flush the toilet,” I said.
“I’ve heard banging sounds that may be pipes,” she replied, “but never when the bathrooms are in use.”
I moved for the door, circling around the still-hovering Petersons. Berg took a last look at the room and followed me out.
“Do what you normally do at six, six-thirty,” he told them. “If you don’t see us in the kitchen or sanctuary—that’s what we’ll call the living room, all right?—we’ll be walking around, possibly outside.”
“I’m hungry again,” Matt said. “Should I fix something to eat?”
Carissa started to laugh.
“Don’t laugh, honey, we had a small dinner and I’m hungry. I’m going to make tuna salad.”
“Then I’m making coffee,” she said, striding down the hall. “I have a bad feeling about tonight.”
Berg and I stood outside the Petersons’ bedroom as the couple walked off. Both had been worn to the nub by their experiences since moving into the church. Carissa was thin and fragile, terrified. And though Matt was tall and athletic looking, his body language often contradicted the confidence he tried hard to portray in word and deed.
They had been looking forward to life in a new house, a dream house with “character,” and their dream was disintegrating.
On our way back to the kitchen, Berg and I flicked on any hall light switches we saw. TV-style ghost hunters always kept the lights off, but we weren’t dealing with human spirits trying to find their way to the other side or any such nonsense.
Besides, Berg always said that any ghost scared off by fluorescent bulbs wasn’t worthy of the term ghost.
At the kitchen counter, Matt was whipping up tuna salad in a bowl. Telling the Petersons they could find me and Berg in the sanctuary for a while, I scooped up my Coke and donuts, and my laptop, flashlight, and notebook. “Remember, we’ll have flashlights with us at all times.”
Matt smiled weakly. “And ghosts—or whatever they are—don’t carry flashlights.”
In the sanctuary, I set my coat and supplies in a pew and began to inspect the room in earnest. Berg, still wearing his coat, sat in the next pew up and checked his phone.
How tall were the room’s ceilings? Twelve, thirteen feet? Maybe more. At the front of the sanctuary, I mounted the platform and found the spot where the altar used to be, its absence marked by a faded rectangle on the floor. I looked up. Berg was watching me. I pointed down at the spot and he nodded.
A year and a half ago, after a harrowing night in a haunted house in Fort Collins, Berg had taken me aside and told me he believed I had a vocation. But I hadn’t wanted one. Recently divorced from my husband, Ian, and still working part time at his architectural firm, I’d wanted to forget that night and eve
n forget Berg. The haunted house had started out as a joke—a response to a dare by one of my friends—and ended in toppling my safe and comfortable life.
Before agreeing to take me to the house, Berg had asked if I believed in God. “Of course,” I’d replied. Then he’d asked if I believed in the supernatural.
Well, of course. God is supernatural, no?
But my supernatural, like most people’s, stayed in a secure box: in books, movies, TV shows, or stories from the ancient world fit for campfire tales. Never did it seep into the natural world. Heaven forbid.
Berg taught me about what he called the “flip side” of the supernatural. If there are angels, there are fallen angels.
And he taught me that spiritual battles take place in the most mundane of places. Those with eyes wide open will see swords drawn and held bravely aloft in business offices, parks, schoolrooms, grocery checkout lines. God’s people fight on many battlegrounds.
“Guys?”
Carissa was standing near the back pew.
“We’re taking our sandwiches upstairs, and we’ll watch TV for a while. More tuna salad is in the refrigerator, so help yourselves.”
“Good night, Carissa,” Berg said. “Try to get some rest, and remember, you’ll hear us moving around.”
I went back to the pew where I’d laid my things, polished off a donut hole, and turned on my laptop. Before I drew my sword, a little research was in order. Who or what was the Northern Colorado Paranormal Society, and who were Madame Lebec, aka Audrey Tucker, and Weston Meyer?
CHAPTER 8
The Northern Colorado Paranormal Society’s website was a slick production. Like a medical website—reassuring to the uninitiated—but with a silly Ghostbusters flair. Headquartered in Fort Collins, the society claimed “over two hundred” members, a tiny number of which it was strangely proud.
Sitting in my pew, I skimmed the home page in between sips of Coke, then clicked the Consultants link. First up was a photo and bio of Weston Meyer, the “region’s most gifted and sensitive guide to the spirit world.”
Rubbish.
I disliked him already. He was a forty-something man with brown hair, a prematurely gray goatee, and a trust-me hound-dog face. In his photo, he sat at a marble-topped desk in a fancy office, smiling warmly, inviting all suckers to fund his next new car with their paychecks.
Berg would say my assessment was harsh, that perhaps Weston was misguided but meant well, but I’d had my fill of such poisonous men, and either he was such a man or he was something worse: someone who believed in and acted on his own malarkey. If he was the latter, Berg would not be so kind to him.
I scrolled down the page and found Lebec’s photo. She too sat at a desk, though she was surrounded by the paraphernalia of metaphysical hustlers: crystals, Tarot cards, an astrological chart, runes. The whole perverse lot. Lebec, as stated in her bio, did Tarot readings and seances.
Meyer performed what he called “pure psychic readings,” without tools of any sort. Such talent.
As I continued to read, I felt a current of cold air on the back of my neck.
I froze. Set my laptop aside.
Again I felt it.
Berg had too. He turned in his seat, looked at me, and rose, pushing hard on his cane.
I stood and looked back to the room’ entrance. The hall was empty. Gripping my flashlight, I aimed it at the ceiling, hunting for a natural explanation.
Warm air rises and leaks out, and it’s a cold, windy night. The warm air was being sucked from the old building by a difference in pressure. That had to be it. How many gaps and cracks did this old place have?
“Be right back,” I said. I went to the kitchen and rooted around in the drawers and cabinets until I found a box of matches. Taking it back to the sanctuary, I found the light switch closest to the entrance, lit a match, and held it near the switch plate. The flame wavered some, but not enough to account for the breeze on my neck.
Next I found a floor register. It too was leaking cool air, something I spotted without the match, but no way could its faint whisper reach my neck as a breeze twenty-five feet away.
But then I found another vent, this one three feet above me and dumping cold air on my head like a pessimist throws cold water on a good idea. I aimed my flashlight. Clearly it possessed a louver, so it was likely a supply vent, not a return air vent. A few seconds later my leaky-church theory was confirmed when the heat kicked in and forced a flood of cold air out from the vent before the warm air began to flow.
“This church is a sieve,” I said, looking back at Berg. “A block of Swiss cheese.” Did the Petersons not think of that? Were they so skittish they’d assumed a paranormal explanation for an ordinary old-house defect?
Having scratched one small item from my “abnormal phenomena” list, I was jubilant. In the mood for more donut holes, in fact, so I went back to my pew. Two seconds later the lights went out.
“Crud, not now.”
Behind me, a floorboard creaked. I aimed my flashlight out the sanctuary and into the narthex. Nothing. I wheeled back and pointed the flashlight again, this time in the direction of the altar, running it back and forth around the platform.
“Don’t move your feet, Teagan,” Berg said.
As I strained to listen, I felt a small vibration through the floor and went rigid. Were the Petersons up? Ignoring Berg’s instruction, I spun back to the entrance, directing my flashlight into the dark hall. “Matt? Carissa?”
A tremor went through the floor. Holding my flashlight like a weapon, I circled in place, casting its beam over the entire sanctuary.
Keenly aware of my own deep-drawn breaths, of my quickening pulse, I tried to calm myself. Ignore your feelings, Berg had always told me. Separate reality from fantasy and deal only with reality.
Trouble was, there were no poltergeists or other fun and mischievous spirits in Berg’s world. Nor in mine. Not now. I’d learned too much.
Berg stood alongside me now, letting his flashlight play over the ceiling and walls.
In our business, phenomena fell into one of three camps. It was of this world, like the leaky air vent; it was nonsense perpetrated by people like Lebec; or it was from the dark side of the supernatural world—and took its joy from terrorizing the innocent.
“Could be an electrical fault,” he whispered. “Old building.”
“And the floorboards moving like someone’s walking on them?”
“There is that.”
Lights flickered in the hall and spilled into the sanctuary. The fluorescents were ticking back on. Seconds later, the sanctuary lights came on.
Wondering how the Petersons were faring, what with the lights flickering and all, I told Berg I was headed to their room. When I heard their TV, I announced myself and knocked.
The door opened several inches and Matt’s face appeared. “Everything okay?”
“I was just about to ask you the same question. Didn’t your lights go off?”
He opened the door wider. “No. They’ve been on the whole time.”
Still dressed in the same clothes from earlier in the day, Carissa was sitting on top of her bedspread, arms folded, the fingers of her right hand playing nervously on her left arm. “The lights went out?” she said. “Where were you? Are they back on?”
“It must have been an electrical fault,” I answered. “Is the sanctuary on a different circuit?”
“Sorry, I should know, but I don’t,” Matt said.
“Well, it’s windy out, and that can play havoc with an old electrical system,” I said. “Okay, just checking, sorry to bother you.”
As I turned away from the door, Carissa called me back. “You should know there’s something in our living room. The sanctuary, I mean. A presence. It’s not just the basement.”
“What makes you think so?”
Carissa swung her legs over the side of the bed and I caught sight of the large digital clock on her nightstand, the time glowing red: 8:17.
“
That’s what Weston Meyer and the Ouija board say.” Wrapping her cardigan tightly about her, she put on a pair of slippers from the end of the bed and went to the door. “Weston didn’t use the Ouija, I did. But it confirmed everything he said.”
“Did it?” I was flabbergasted. A Ouija board? Carissa seemed to be her own worst enemy.
“It said there are two spirits in the building, and one of them is that poor dead pastor.”
“Wait, your Ouija board mentioned the dead priest?”
“It didn’t say it was a priest, it said there were two spirits trapped here, that’s all. I figured one of them had to be the priest.”
Berg came up beside me. He’d overheard. “You have a Ouija board?”
Carissa nodded meekly. “I’ve been desperate for—”
“Get rid of it,” Berg snapped.
Carissa was dumbfounded.
“I mean it. Get rid of it first thing in the morning.”
“Now hold on,” Matt said, “it’s an inanimate object. I mean, Carissa might be a little flighty, but—”
Carissa recoiled. “Don’t you dare talk about me like that after what we’ve been through.”
“I only meant . . .” Matt lifted a shoulder. “Honestly, I don’t know what I meant. I don’t know anymore. But it’s not like a Ouija board—”
“And while you’re at it,” Berg said, “get rid of anything else like that in the house. Books on the occult, Tarot cards, anything. Toss it all. Bag it up and dump it.”
“Now you’re getting carried away,” Matt said, trying to suppress a cavalier smile. “Let’s try to maintain a sense of perspective. You’re talking about things, and things can’t hurt us. They can’t jump out and bite us. Why not let Carissa—”
“Have her way as long as she’s happy?” I interjected. The Petersons were foolish, and their misery was partly of their own making, but maybe they weren’t to know any better. I bit back the harsher words on the tip of my tongue. “Those things are wood and plastic, nothing more.”
Matt spread his hands. “So what’s the problem?”
Chasing Angels (Teagan Doyle Mysteries Book 1) Page 6