The Haunting

by Kathi Daley

  Thankfully, Carlton, Walter, and Alton agreed to meet us at the video arcade at five p.m. I called Woody, who agreed to meet me there. When he showed up in jeans and a sweatshirt rather than his uniform I felt confident I had made a good decision in trusting him.

  The video arcade was loud, so Woody suggested we move our conversation outside. There was a small park nearby, so we found an unoccupied bench where we could sit and talk.

  “I’m going to ask you some questions and Woody is going to listen in. Is that okay with you?” I asked.

  Woody thought it would go better if he was there in an unofficial capacity. The boys all agreed to the plan, so I asked the first of about ten questions Woody and I had prepared. I started by asking the kids to paint a picture of Mr. Weston: how he was as a person and how they all got along together. All the boys seemed to agree he was a nice old man who enjoyed their company. He didn’t get out much, but he liked having people in the house, so he’d agreed to let them use the room on the second floor. All three boys seemed to have genuine affection for him and none seemed scared of him, so I was confident the old man’s relationship with them was as innocent as it seemed.

  The boys also reported that no one else had lived in the house during the year they’d hung out at the house before Mr. Weston died, and they hadn’t seen anyone in the house since he’d passed away until Caleb and the other volunteers. They admitted they knew about the secret passageway but swore they’d never opened the door leading to the room where the skeletons had been found and had no idea what was inside it. When asked if they thought Mr. Weston knew what was in the room, they said they didn’t know. He’d just told them never to go in there—which indicated to me that he probably did know.

  By the end of the interview Woody and I were both convinced the boys really didn’t know anything about the skeletons and that Mr. Weston really had been an old man who both enjoyed the company of kids and kept two skeletons in his secret room.

  “What do you think?” I asked after the boys went inside to play games with the money I’d given them.

  Woody ran his hand through his hair. “I don’t know. It seems as if the boys had genuine affection for the old man, but we still need to deal with the elephant in the room.”

  “The skeletons.”

  “Exactly.”

  Chapter 8

  Later that evening I returned to the house with Mac, Trevor, and Shadow. We accessed the secret passage via the entrance in the woods so as not to disturb the police tape, which had not yet been removed from the front door. The sky was overcast, blocking the light from the moon, so it was a dark trek through the dense forest.

  “Did you hear that?” Mac asked.

  I paused. “I think it’s just the wind rustling through the trees.”

  “I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about that screeching sound. At first, I thought it was behind us, but now it seems like it’s in front of us.”

  I stood perfectly still and listened. The wind was blowing hard, creating a quaking sound that seemed to surround us. There was a screech, but I was certain it was simply the wind and said so. I began to walk again, slowly, so I wouldn’t trip over any of the debris underfoot.

  Thunder rolled in from the distance. I was certain we were in for a storm of some significance before the night was over. The cloud cover grew denser, blocking out even the smallest amount of light from the moon. It certainly would have been a lot easier to find our way through the forest with light from above.

  “Are you sure this is the right way?” Mac, who was following close behind me, asked as a dog howled in the distance.

  “I think so.” I tried to create a mental image in my mind of where the access door was in relation to the house when we were there last night.

  “Last night it wasn’t so dark or windy,” Mac pointed out. “Everything seems different.”

  “And crunchy,” Trevor added.

  “Crunchy?” I asked.

  “I was referring to whatever it is that’s crunching under my shoes.”

  “I’ve been trying to block that out,” Mac admitted.

  I set Shadow down on the ground. I’d carried him to this point so I wouldn’t lose him in the dark forest, but I assumed the passage was near, so it was time for him to go to work.

  “Maybe we should turn back and try again tomorrow,” Mac suggested as the first raindrops began to fall.

  “It can’t be much farther,” I answered. “My sense is that Shadow knows where to go, so we’ll just follow him. Stay close to one another. We wouldn’t want anyone getting lost.”

  Mac let out a screech when an owl hooted in the distance. The flashlights we’d brought provided a limited amount of light, though not enough to really get a feel for the entire area in which we were walking. The groaning created by the trunks of the trees as they swayed in the wind provided a creepy sort of feeling that, to be honest, we’d be better off without.

  “Do you really think the ghosts will show?” Mac asked as we stepped over a large branch that had fallen from a nearby tree.

  “I don’t know. I hope so. If I’m going to help him move on I need to figure out who he is, how he died, and how he came to be entombed in the secret room.”

  “And the other ghost?”

  “Personally, I hope we don’t cross paths. He sort of gave me the creeps. I know this is going to sound odd, but I sensed the boy was afraid of him.”

  “Can ghosts hurt each other?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “I’ve seen movies where ghosts who are connected at death can relive the moment of their death over and over,” Trevor joined in.

  “Yeah, I’ve seen those too. Of course, movies are fiction. Still, there’s something going on in that house.”

  “Again, I need to ask, should we really be doing this?” Mac asked. “No one knows where we are. It’s dark, windy, and cold, and I bet the rain is going to start coming down a lot harder before we make it back to the car. What do we really hope to accomplish?”

  “I don’t know, but I think we’re about to find out. Shadow just disappeared behind that large rock, and I seem to remember seeing a large rock when the boys showed us the entrance last night.”

  After Mac, Trevor, and I squeezed around the rock, we crawled through the small opening and then slid down the steep decline at the entrance. I remembered the boys telling us they couldn’t get out this way when it rained, and because it seemed heavy rain was imminent, I knew we needed to make it a quick visit tonight. Once we reached where the passageway leveled off, we paused to get our bearings. Shadow stopped walking and the ghost of the child appeared. He looked frightened, just as he had the previous night, but when Shadow approached he smiled and bent down to hug him. I wondered if the cat and ghost could actually feel each other, though it didn’t seem to matter; they were obviously happy to see each other.

  I took a minute to decide on my approach. He might be dead, but he was still a child, and I didn’t want to scare him off.

  “My name is Alyson,” I said in a soft voice. “These are my friends, Mac and Trevor.”

  The ghost faded away.

  “We won’t hurt you. You can trust us. We only want to help you. Will you let us?”

  The boy reappeared.

  “Are you here alone?”

  The boy nodded.

  “We want to help you move on, but you’ll need to help us do that. Can you show us something that will help us understand what you need from us?”

  The boy faded away again, but I waited. I had the feeling he was working his way up to trusting us. I supposed I understood his trepidation. Not only were we strangers, but I was probably the first person to see the boy since he died.

  “Shadow can sense you’re still here,” I finally said when the boy failed to reappear. “He wants to help you too. He hopes you’ll show us what you need. Can you do that?”

  The boy reappeared. He turned and went down the passage, with Shadow following behind. When he
came to the room where he’d been entombed he went through the door, which had been left open. He paused at one of the cabinets against the wall. The wooden boxes that had held the skeletons had been removed from the room. The open cabinet doors indicated the contents had been removed as well. I wasn’t sure what the boy wanted us to see or find, but I approached the first cabinet and began to pull out the drawers, which all appeared to be empty. I had no idea if I was even on the right track, though the boy stood patiently, waiting, so I thought there must be something to find.

  “Maybe there’s a secret compartment or a false bottom,” Trevor suggested.

  I looked at the boy. “Are you sure it’s here?”

  He nodded.

  I ran my hand slowly along the surface of every shelf, looking for whatever it was the boy wanted me to find. After a while I found a latch beneath the bottom shelf. When I pulled it a drawer popped out. Inside, I found several pads of paper that looked as if they’d been used by a child for drawing pictures. Just as I picked up the pads, the door to the passage slammed shut.

  The boy disappeared.

  “What the heck?” Mac said.

  “I thought ghosts couldn’t move objects,” Trevor seconded.

  “They can’t. At least I don’t think they can. It could have been a wind gust coming from the opening in the forest. Let’s get that door open and get out of here.”

  It took our combined strength to get the door open, but eventually we managed to get it wide enough for us to squeeze through. I tucked the pads under my jacket, picked up Shadow, and headed back down the passage. I could hear the rain pounding on the surface of the forest floor as we neared the entrance. I just hoped we hadn’t waited too long. The steep incline was slippery but not yet impassable, and we managed to make our way back into the dark forest.

  “Okay, that was weird,” Mac said when we were all out.

  “Yeah, it was. Let’s get out of here.”

  The walk back through the dark forest in the pouring rain was no picnic, but eventually, we made it back to the Jeep, where I turned on the defroster and the windshield wipers and drove toward town. I stopped at both Mac’s and Trevor’s so they could get dry clothes and then the three of us, along with Shadow, went to my house.

  ******

  The pads were filled with drawings. Based on the skill level of the artist, I assumed they were those of a child. They were dark in nature, most of them revolving around death, bloody bodies, and monsters.

  “These are really disturbing,” I said aloud.

  “They really are,” Mac agreed. “Do you think our child ghost drew them before he died?”

  I frowned. “He seems so sweet and shy, I’m having a hard time believing he would have been capable of drawing these dark images.” I turned a page. “Take this one, for example. The images at the bottom look like animals of some sort. Maybe squirrels or cats. Every one of them has a knife sticking out of it and blood flowing from the wound. Whoever drew these was seriously disturbed. I didn’t pick up that level of mental instability from the child ghost.”

  “Yet he led us to the drawings,” Trevor pointed out. “And because his remains were in the room, it’s likely he was murdered there. Maybe he was held as a hostage before he was killed. Maybe he saw and experienced horrible things that skewed his view of the world.”

  I really hoped not, but it seemed as good an explanation as any.

  “Does anyone else think it’s really strange that Woody hasn’t come up with a missing persons report that matches the remains yet?” Mac asked. “If this kid was held as a hostage before he died someone must have been looking for him. He was just a kid. It makes no sense that he could just disappear and no one would notice.”

  “Joe and Jenny Jenkins lived in the house before Mr. Weston,” Trevor reminded us. “They had foster kids. Maybe they were cruel to them. Maybe one of the kids died and they hid his remains.”

  “The kids in the foster care system are supposed to be monitored pretty closely,” I responded. “If one of them just disappeared someone should have known about it.”

  “Alyson is right.” Mac nodded. “A child in the foster care system shouldn’t simply disappear without someone noticing. There has to be something else going on. Maybe the kid was a runaway, or maybe it was a parent who killed him. We don’t even know for certain the person who hid the bodies lived in the house. The room was accessible from the forest, after all.”

  “Don’t you think the person who lived in the house would know if someone else had access to the room?” I asked.

  “Maybe,” Mac answered. “Maybe not.”

  “The kids said Mr. Weston told them never to touch the door,” Trevor said. “He wouldn’t have done that if he didn’t know what was behind it. He either was the killer or he was protecting the killer.”

  “I think Trevor’s right,” I said. “It does seem as if Mr. Weston had to have known what was in the room.”

  “Did you ever find out the cause of death for either of the victims?” Mac asked.

  “No,” I answered. “Woody didn’t know the last time I spoke to him.” I sat back in my chair and considered the situation. “We have to be missing something. We know there were the skeletons of two individuals hidden in a room at the end of a hidden passageway. We know one of the skeletons was a child’s, the other an adult’s, and based on the two ghosts I’ve seen, we’re assuming the child was a boy of around ten when he died, the adult a male with a scary energy I didn’t like in the least. Chan gave me two names and a date as a clue, so we’re assuming the boy is Bobby and the man Julius, although it could be the other way around. We’re also assuming the victims died twenty to thirty years ago, although we haven’t received forensic confirmation of that.”

  “Even if the ME doesn’t know cause of death yet he must have figured out the approximate time of death by now,” Mac said. “I imagine it would be hard to tell TOD from bones, but I think there’s a way to come up with at least a date range.”

  “Good point. I’ll call Woody tomorrow to see if he’ll tell me what he knows. We don’t even know if they died at the same time.”

  “Do you think you can get more information from the child?” Trevor asked. “It seems like he’s beginning to trust you, and he did show you where to find the drawings.”

  “Maybe,” I answered. “But I can feel the boy is scared of the man, and I also sense the man doesn’t want us snooping around.”

  “I wonder why that is?” Mac mused. “The guy’s dead. We can’t hurt him, so why does he feel threatened by our presence?”

  “Good question.”

  “Maybe the man killed the child and then someone else killed him,” Trevor speculated.

  “Even if that’s so, why would he care if we figured it out? It’s not like we can send him to prison for murder. You’d think he’d want us to help him move on.”

  “But what if he doesn’t want to move on?” Trevor asked.

  I stopped to consider that. I supposed the man could be attached to something that was keeping him there. And he might not want us to help the child move on. Maybe it was even the child he was attached to. “So he sees us as a threat to an existence he’s perfectly happy with,” I said aloud. “That actually makes sense. The boy and the man are both trapped in the house. The boy seems frightened and appears to be motivated to move on, but the man seems to want us gone.”

  “We really do need to figure out who they were and what their relationship was to each other when they were alive,” Mac said.

  “I guess until we figure out the approximate date both victims died, as well as the reason they died, we’re pretty much stuck,” I admitted. “Maybe we should pick this up on Monday. I’ll talk to Woody after school and we can meet up after that.”

  Chapter 9

  Monday, October 23

  For the first time in weeks I met Mac and Trevor for lunch in the school cafeteria instead of heading to the library for a nap. I felt like we’d hit a dead end in term
s of figuring out who’d been hidden in the hidden passage, but I wasn’t ready to give up either. What we needed was a new strategy, but first I wanted to solve Chelsea’s stalker problem. The fact that the stalker seemed to be getting bolder was causing me a fair amount of alarm, even if Chelsea wasn’t taking it quite as seriously.

  “Here’s what I know so far,” Mac said as she nibbled on a plate of French fries. “As I already told Alyson,” Mac directed her comment to Trevor, “there are three people with access to the student passwords: the principal, the teacher in charge of the computer lab, and the IT guy, who works for the district. Someone is using a different student account each time an email is sent, so I have to assume the person sending the photos has access to all the student passwords.”

  “Remind me to change mine,” Trevor commented.

  “Won’t help,” Mac responded. “The passwords are stored in a file on the server and whoever has access to them has to have access to the whole file. If we could prove a breach we could get the administration to change the password to the file itself, but Chelsea doesn’t want her dilemma brought to the attention of the school administrators. Alyson has agreed to honor her request for the time being. If, however, it appears she’s in real danger, or if the photos become inappropriate, we’ll need to tell Chelsea’s parents what’s going on despite her wishes.”

  “Okay, so how do we narrow things down?” I asked.

  “I doubt that the principal, computer lab teacher, or district IT guy have been following Chelsea around, so we need to focus in on who might have obtained the password to the file from one of them at some point,” Mac answered. “I found out that the password to the database was changed at the beginning of the school year, so that means the stalker would have had to gain access to the new password within the past six weeks. I thought about just asking the three people we know have access if they’d given it to anyone, but they’d want to know why I was asking, and short of spilling Chelsea’s secret, I haven’t come up with a good story.”