Terminal (Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper Book 4) Page 8

  “Tomorrow. Let’s head over to the client’s. Ember’s made an appointment for us to meet with the neighborhood watch guy.”

  “Ooh, an appointment. We’d better get moving.”

  While Stacey finished loading extra gear into the van—more cameras and microphones, mostly—I stepped away and called Calvin on my cell.

  “We’re about to move out,” I said. “Are you okay up there?”

  “Better than okay. There’s a Rockford Files marathon.”

  “Any words of wisdom for us?”

  “Watch out for hobo ghosts.”

  “Thanks so much.” It was strange for Calvin to keep himself so distant, as if he didn’t want any serious involvement in the case. Even his little jokes felt like deflection and detachment.

  “Any signs of the midnight photographers?”

  “No, but I suggest you stay alert for them,” Calvin said. “Conceal a few cameras watching the streets around your client’s home. See if they’re spying on you.”

  “Yeah, that would be nice to know,” I said. “See, I knew you had some words of wisdom.”

  “You caught me. Be safe out there.”

  We reached our clients’ house with a couple of hours to spare before nightfall. A golf cart was parked outside, behind Ember’s blue Ford Fusion.

  Ember answered the door in the company of a short man with a rigid posture who appeared to be in his sixties. He had a graying comb-over and wore a khaki camping vest over a starched white shirt with short sleeves.

  “Hi!” Ember said. “This is Cecil Nobson, president of our neighborhood association. I told him about the prowlers we’d seen.” That was the story Ember had given him—that we were investigating suspicious characters Tom and Ember had spotted near their home, possibly related to the break-ins around the community.

  “Nice to meet you, Mr. Nobson,” I said. He had a firm, quick handshake. “I’m Ellie Jordan from Eckhart Investigations. This is my associate, Stacey Ray Tolbert.”

  “Call me Stacey!”

  “You’re three minutes late,” Nobson said, looking at us with plain disapproval. “We like to run a tight ship around here.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “We appreciate you taking the time to speak with us. Should we sit down, or--?”

  “You’re professional detectives?” he asked.

  I passed him a business card. He spent a long moment studying it, then nodded and placed it in one of his many vest pockets.

  “I’ll show you the crime scenes,” he said. “We’d all appreciate it very much if you could find out who’s behind all this trouble. I’ve put up a few cameras myself, but all I catch is shadows and blurs, no clear faces yet.”

  “I’d like to see what you have.”

  He nodded and led us back down the steps to his waiting golf cart.

  I sat beside him in the cart with Stacey behind us, facing backwards. Nobson pulled on a pair of wraparound sunglasses and a khaki fishing hat decorated with an American flag pin. Another pin was shaped like a police badge and read NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH.

  Only then did he start up the golf cart and pull out into the street.

  “Used to be a real promising community,” he said, and I correctly guessed that those words would open a long-winded monologue. “There was supposed to be golf, swim, tennis. Old-fashioned values and virtues. There’s a word you don’t hear too often these days, ‘virtue.’ The entire concept is just gone from our culture. Everything’s so politically correct these days.”

  “Why wasn’t the community ever completed?” I asked.

  “Developers ran out of money,” he said. “They went over budget, missed deadlines, had those accidents, worker’s comp, lawsuits...”

  “What accidents?”

  “Construction injuries. An excavator fell over on a loose patch of dirt, crushed a man’s leg. Things going wrong like that. After the bankruptcy, the quality of people moving in went downhill, if you know what I mean. Tom and Ember are okay, but some houses over on the western streets have turned into rentals. And the renters don’t care about the neighborhood covenants, nor does the property management company that leases them out. All they care about is milking money for the bank. This place never got to be what it was supposed to be.” He cleared his throat as he slowed to a crawl near the end of the street, then paused at the stop sign right before the central roundabout. “The Travois family got hit,” he said, pointing at a large two-story brick house on the corner.

  “What happened?”

  “Someone broke in through their back door when they were out of town,” Nobson said. “Smashed up the mirrors, the cabinets. Took all the jewelry in the house.”

  “What did the police say?”

  “They haven’t caught anybody.” Nobson drove onto the roundabout. To the right lay some of the empty or barely developed streets of the community. He turned left, toward the inhabited streets.

  Nobson pointed out three more houses. Two of them had suffered similar break-ins—a level of destruction that reminded me of the scene in the concession stand. Stolen items included more jewelry and a collection of antique silver dollars.

  “Then you have the Watt family,” Nobson said, parking in a cul-de-sac and indicating another house, which was indistinguishable from its neighbors, all of them two stories with dormers on top and a garage on the right side, yards enclosed with the ubiquitous picket fences. “Donna, the wife, she actually saw the prowler in the upstairs hall one night. Ran back to her bedroom, locked the door, phoned the authorities. He was gone by the time the patrolman arrived, though.”

  “Did she give a description?”

  Nobson opened the glove box and brought out a red file folder with the standard neighborhood watch sign logo on the front, a cartoon villain with a black hat and narrow white eyes, a high-collared black coat concealing his face. A red circle with a slash through it were drawn over him. No cartoon villains allowed.

  He flipped through the papers inside and produced some handwritten notes.

  “Wore a dirty old hat,” he read, lifting his sunglasses and squinting at the paper. “A rag over his face, hiding everything but his eyes. Filthy coat. Pants and boots encrusted with mud.” Nobson looked up. “That’s interesting, because nobody found any dirt or mud in the carpet.” He looked down at the paper again. “Oh, yes. Left a smell of whiskey and cigars in the air.”

  “Sounds like a real charmer,” Stacey commented.

  I wondered if this was a ghost or not. I noted the location of the house, thinking I might come back and speak to Donna Watt later.

  “A couple of these were hit, too,” Nobson said as he drove us down a street of mostly uninhabited homes with overgrown, weedy lawns. “Vandalism and property destruction, since there was nothing inside to steal. They marked up the fences, too. The police don’t think the fence marks matter because they’re all over, not just on the houses that were burglarized--”

  “Wait, back up half a step,” I said, and Nobson braked.

  “You want me to back up?”

  “I didn’t mean literally. What fence marks?”

  “Didn’t I mention those?” Nobson switched off the golf cart and stepped out. “I think they’re related, personally. Not a coincidence.” He started toward one of the empty houses, gesturing for us to follow. “Come on, now. There’s nobody to lodge any trespassing complaints. Nobody’s ever lived here.”

  We followed the picket fence around to the back of the house. The yard within the fence was dense with knee-high weeds and brambles. Beyond the back of the fence lay more of the raw red-earth Martian landscape with only a few tufts of weeds. A street with no houses, just sidewalks and fire hydrants, lay beyond that.

  “Here they are,” Nobson said, leading us to a white picket near one end of the fence. “Have a look.”

  Three symbols had been scratched into the post, small and crude, as if hastily carved with a penknife. I leaned close to study them.

  They were in a column. The top symbol
looked like a letter “C” with bars extending from the tips. Beneath that was a squiggly line, as if someone had wanted to represent the rippling surface of a lake or ocean. Below that, the final symbol looked like an oval tilted forty-five degrees to the right.

  “Okay,” Stacey said, peering over my shoulder. “What do those mean?”

  “Maybe it’s a code,” I said.

  “Wait, I’m good at these,” Stacey said. “Maybe it’s see...something....oh. Or zero? See-ripple-oh?”

  “You’re right,” I said. “You are good at these.”

  Stacey punched me in the arm.

  “I was thinking gangs,” Nobson said. “They’re always spray-painting those things you can’t read.”

  “Gang tags?” I asked. “These are pretty small for that. Usually the point of a tag is to mark territory, so you want it to be visible. This seems like it’s meant to be subtle, so you don’t find it unless you’re looking for it.” I snapped a picture of the symbols with my phone.

  “Once you start looking, they’re all over,” Nobson said. “Teenagers, crooks—whoever it is, they’ve been marking up the neighborhood for a while.”

  “I’d like to see some others.”

  “We could spend all day at it.”

  “Then just the houses that have been broken into,” I said. “And a few that haven’t, so we can compare.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  We spent another twenty minutes or so driving through the community, stopping so I could take pictures of the little symbols on the fence posts. I jotted down notes about each one—whether the house had been burglarized and what had been taken, if anything.

  The last picture I took was a fence post at the back of my clients’ lawn, on the side facing the empty, undeveloped street behind the house. The symbols were small, each no bigger than my thumbnail, etched just under the lower fence railing. It wasn’t a shock that I hadn’t noticed them last time I’d stood there, since it had been the middle of the night and I hadn’t been looking for any such thing. I’d been preoccupied with the ghost I’d just pursued out of the basement.

  The marks scratched into Tom and Ember’s fence included another oval, tilted the opposite direction with hash lines through it, and a few other marks. Most troubling to me was a stick figure of a woman with an oversized skirt. Another, smaller stick figure was drawn inside the skirt area. Naturally, I thought of Ember and her advanced pregnancy. Why would anyone want to note that on the fence?

  “That’s a little creepy,” Stacey observed, standing beside me as I took a picture. “More than a little, the longer I look at it.”

  “I don’t know what you girls can do that I haven’t done.” Nobson said from where he waited a few feet away. “If you turn up anything, you’ll keep me apprised, won’t you?”

  “And you’ll do the same?” I asked.

  Nobson grunted and walked away toward his golf cart, parked in the street.

  “Do you really think ghosts might have done this?” Stacey whispered.

  “I don’t know what to think,” I said. “It seems like this place is overrun with ghosts.”

  “Then where do we begin?”

  “I’m spending the night in the basement again. We have to focus on what the clients need. Come on, we have a lot to do before sunset.”

  We climbed into the van, hurrying to visit the haunted spots we’d already identified and set up our gear before the night’s observation.

  Chapter Nine

  Alone in the basement again, I sat in the dark, on my air mattress, and waited for the banshee. My tablet was propped on my knees so I could check the viewpoints of other cameras around the house, plus the ones we’d set up around the concession stand and the old railroad tracks in the woods.

  With the reports of crime in the area, I was worried about non-ghosty types trying to steal our equipment. I’d told Stacey to check the more remote cameras very frequently.

  The time passed slowly, as it often does—few ghosts give command performances. They can be elusive when you’re looking for them, then suddenly pop out at you when you don’t particularly want to find them, like when you’re alone in your own house late at night.

  It was one-thirty in the morning before I began to sense anything might happen. The air turned cooler, and my Mel Meter slowly registered the temperature drop.

  Something scraped along the floor, not far away from me, but I didn’t see anything.

  “Hello?” I whispered, sitting up a little straighter. My heart was already picking up its rhythm, in case I’d missed the fact that I might be in danger.

  I heard it again, closer, as if someone were approaching me.

  “Ellie?” Stacey asked over my headset.

  “Shhh.” I pointed my flashlight toward the sound, but didn’t click it on just yet.

  The temperature dropped ten degrees, then another five. My Mel Meter flashed as it registered a spike of three to four milligaus. I shivered, feeling a presence in the room.

  I pulled on my thermals to see a shape several feet away, drifting closer to me. Pale and blue, almost certainly the same one I’d seen before.

  “Rose?” I asked, naming the farmer lady who’d died young and left small children behind. “Rose Whalen? Is that you?”

  The small blue form halted where it stood. It was blurry, like a low cloud or patch of fog, making it hard to see any distinguishing features or even to try to get a sense of its exact size.

  “You don’t have to be afraid,” I said. “I can help you escape to a better place.”

  The shape drifted closer, letting out a deep, mournful sigh, the sound of a girl who has suffered far too much for far too long. I felt sorry for the ghost, trapped in its own grief, unable to escape, probably lost and confused in her death for many more years than she’d actually lived.

  “It’s going to be okay...” I whispered. I was turning cold and sorrowful inside, feeling bad for her, then for myself. Suddenly I was acutely aware of just how alone I was, how I’d always been that way since my parents died, and would probably always be that way.

  In my mind I was at my parents’ funeral again. It was dreary, gray, and cold, or at least that was how I remembered it. Completely detached from myself, from everyone and everything, the voices of relatives and other adults hollow and meaningless around me.

  Alone.

  I remembered walking to the back of our little house, not much more than a shanty by the railroad tracks. My mother lay in the bed there, pale and sweating, with nobody but me to attend her. My father had died at sea a few years before. I knew my mother would be gone soon, and then there would be nobody.

  I shivered as a deep winter chill bit into my bones so hard it made every joint in my body ache. I couldn’t erase the image from my mind—my mother, feverish, delirious, close to death.

  “Ellie?” Stacey’s voice was distant. I barely heard her...but I did hear her, and it prodded me into just a little self-awareness.

  These weren’t my memories.

  I opened my eyes, though I didn’t remember closing them. I was quaking where I sat, my teeth chattering. I felt like I was freezing to death.

  “Rose...” I whispered. “Rose, back off. Leave me alone.”

  “Ellie, there’s something else in there with you.”

  “The banshee...” I managed to whisper. I was struggling to focus, to get my brain moving again under the layer of bitter frost that had buried it.

  “Not just her,” Stacey said. “There’s also--”

  A pair of large, rough, invisible hands grabbed me, lifting me off the mattress and high into the air. A male voice grunted in my ear, and I caught the scent of cheap whiskey.

  I screamed—I couldn’t help it, I was terrified. The invisible specter slammed me against the wall, cutting my scream short by knocking the air out of my lungs.

  Pain flared all through my body, a deep gouging pain like somebody was digging into my bones and joints with a rusty scalpel. Every spot that had be
en freezing cold a moment earlier now shrieked with agony. My teeth clenched together, and I had just enough air to let out a thin moan.

  I kicked out feebly with one leg, but I didn’t have enough oxygen to put any real force into it—and besides, there was nothing to kick, as far as I could see.

  Stacey shouted something over my headset, but I couldn’t make out the words through the intense pain drilling into every joint in my body.

  This second entity, the one Stacey had tried to warn me about, seemed to be attacking the banshee again...and the banshee had threaded herself all through my body.

  Whatever their beef was, I did not appreciate getting trapped in the middle of it.

  Another wave of deep, wrenching pain shook my body, my head snapping back and forth. I was shoved up against the ceiling, then finally released and allowed to fall.

  It would’ve been great if I’d landed on my nice, soft, fully inflated air mattress, but this ghost wasn’t doing me any favors. I smacked right into the concrete floor and immediately felt bruises forming all over me.

  A high-pitched shriek pierced my eardrums, bringing a fresh pain laced with terror crackling through my skull. I knew it didn’t come from me, because I was struggling to draw air after my high-speed rendezvous with the solid concrete.

  I managed to raise my head, and I saw her with my own eyes.

  The banshee was no young mother who’d died too soon, but a girl around seven or eight years old, wearing a frayed and dirty white dress trimmed with torn, crumbling lace. Her hair was a wild dark mane trailing loose ribbons as the other entity hauled her away. She stared at me with wide, desperate eyes, her irises a dusty gray color—her entire form was in whites, grays, and shadows, like an old black and white movie on faded film stock.

  She reached out one small hand toward me as he whisked her backward across the room, toward the door to the outside, as if imploring me to help her. Never mind that she’d just been oppressing me and snacking on my energy. I felt completely drained.

  The figure who carried her away was less distinct, a broad-shouldered dark shadow with the suggestion of a brimmed hat at its head, maybe a black derby hat. His form seemed larger than life but indistinct, fading to a black fog at the edges.