A Babe in Ghostland Read online

  “No one is ever ready,” she said, sitting forward. “It’s only the utter, inescapable finality of death that pushes people to let go and move on with their lives. If they think there’s a chance of talking to the dead person, they’ll obsess on that instead of on grieving. They’ll get stuck. They’ll forget that they’re here to live their own lives.

  “A lot of the people who want a consultation with a medium are exactly the people who would be better off without one,” she continued. “It’s just not good for them.” She made a wry face. “And it’s not too good for the dead person, either.”

  Case blinked, struck by the image of ghosts being tortured by the grieving of their loved ones. “Well, how about helping the police solve murders?” he tried.

  She waved her hand, dismissing the idea as she sat back, seeming to relax as she talked. “I’ve never had any information that would be of use to them. It goes against everything you see in movies or hear in ghost stories, but the dead care more about how they lived than how they died. The act of dying ceases to matter, once you’ve done it.”

  He smiled. “I kind of like that idea. Takes the pressure off. ‘Dying? Aah, it’s nothing. Not as bad as they say.’”

  “Well, not so bad afterward,” she said with dry humor.

  He laughed. “Fair enough.”

  They drove in silence a few minutes, crossing the bridge over the ship canal and turning off the main road to take a route up the back of Queen Anne Hill.

  “You haven’t given me much information about this house we’re going to,” she said before he could think of another question. “You own it?”

  He nodded. “I didn’t know how much I should tell you about it, if anything. I didn’t know if you’d prefer not to be influenced beforehand.”

  “Or was it that you didn’t want me making up stories to fit what you’d told me?”

  “It’s not that.” He glanced at her. “Or, at least, I wouldn’t expect you to do that intentionally. But the imagination can play its tricks.” He paused. “Do you need to know something about the house or what’s been going on?”

  She shook her head. “No. But I warn you, there’s a good chance I won’t be able to give you more than a few impressions of your house. And they might be wildly inaccurate. I don’t know what Eric told you, but for all I know, I’m just making up most of what I ‘see.’ It’s rare to get concrete confirmation of my impressions.”

  “I’m not expecting much.”

  She snorted. “I don’t suppose you are.”

  “You were right about the dents on my grandmother’s watch.”

  “Are you trying to flatter me now?”

  “Believe me, I could find better things to flatter you about than that.”

  She crossed her arms over her chest. “I’m not going to take that bait.”

  “You don’t want to hear what I’ve been thinking about the curve of your lips?”

  Her chin rose, and she gave him a dark look. “Case Johannsen Lambert, you will not be rude in the presence of ladies!” she said with the creaky voice of age, a tinge of England in her accent. “There’ll be no chocolates for you, my good man, if you keep this up!”

  Case gaped at her, a chill running down the back of his neck. He looked back at the street just in time to see a yellow light turn red and hit the brakes, skidding to a stop. His heart was pounding. “How the hell—”

  Megan winked at him.

  He swore under his breath.

  “Sometimes the truth seems clear,” she said in her normal voice. “Most of the time, no. As far as your house is concerned, a bit of vagueness won’t matter if there’s a scientific explanation for whatever is going on, or if all you have is a passive haunting. No danger there. And active hauntings are extremely rare, so you don’t need to worry about that.”

  “Active? Passive? What’s the difference?” he asked as the light turned green.

  “A passive haunting is a recording of events, embedded somehow in the environment. It plays over and over, seen or heard by some people, undetectable to others. There’s no consciousness behind it, and it never varies.”

  “Like what? Give me an example.”

  “Okay, a lady in white who walks down a hallway every night at ten p.m. Ladies in white are pretty popular.” She grinned. “The lady doesn’t look at anyone, doesn’t respond to voices. She’s just a moving picture. Maybe she disappears into the wall where once upon a time there was a doorway. People see her, and a legend develops, but over the years fewer and fewer people encounter her. The recording fades. Eventually, no one sees the ghost at all.

  “An active haunting is where true ghosts come in. Spirits of the dead, conscious of their environment and able to interact. Those are the ones that try to communicate or cause a bit of mischief. Make the lights flicker. Pinch women’s behinds in bars.”

  He smiled, because it was expected, but he began to feel worried despite his disbelief. Hadn’t she implied that active hauntings were trouble?

  “And then sometimes a ghost isn’t human; sometimes it’s something else entirely.”

  Goose bumps rose on his skin. “What kind of something else?”

  “I don’t know. And I don’t want to know any more than I do.” She pulled the open neck of her cardigan closed, as if she were cold.

  “You think you’ve seen such a thing?” he asked.

  She gave him a quick, false smile. “Don’t worry, I’m sure that’s not what’s going on here.”

  “Why don’t I feel reassured?”

  She shrugged, and a hint of impishness gleamed in her eyes. “Maybe I don’t want you to be. Maybe this is part of my scheme to defraud you of your money.”

  “Good luck.” He tried to sound tough, but Megan had freaked him out when his grandmother’s voice had seemed to come out of her mouth. He even remembered when his grandmother had said those exact same words, when he’d misbehaved during one of her ladies’ bridge club meetings.

  And how did she know his middle name?

  “So, what do you do in your free time?” he asked, moving back to firmer ground.

  “Hang out at graveyards. Read the obituaries. Dust my collection of Victorian mourning wear. You know, the usual.”

  “Very funny. Seriously, though, do you have any hobbies?”

  “That’s such a strange word, don’t you think? It’s almost gone out of the lexicon. People have ‘activities’ now. ‘Hobbies’ always makes me think of middle-aged men in their basements building model airplanes.”

  “You’re not going to answer, are you?”

  “I don’t really like to talk about myself.”

  “That makes you an anomaly of the human race.”

  “Just another part of the weirdness that is Megan Barrows,” she said lightly.

  “You think you’re weird?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Not in any way that matters.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “I mean, you do everything else a woman your age does, right? You date, you go out with friends, you see movies. Don’t you?”

  She looked out the passenger window again, and some of the sadness seemed to have returned to her profile. “Are we almost there?”

  Frustration surged inside him. The possibility of a night in her bed seemed more remote by the minute.

  Maybe she was too troubled, and he should lay off. A pretty face wasn’t everything.

  He made the last turn to get to his house. “This is the start of the property, at this corner,” he said, and slowed the car to a crawl. Enormous maples on either side shaded the street. His property was surrounded by a high stone wall overgrown with ivy, with a wrought-iron fence atop the wall.

  “It’s the whole block?” she asked, turning to him with her eyes opened wide in disbelief.

  Proud, he nodded.

  “It must have cost a fortune! Who can afford an entire block on top of Queen Anne?”

  “I couldn’t believe it was in my price range, either
,” he said, and turned into the driveway. He stopped the car with the nose barely inside the gate. Overhead, the iron fence atop the wall continued, making a massive arch over the drive, a coat of arms wrought in its center. The iron gates were propped open with rocks.

  “That’s it.” He nodded toward the house.

  She was silent, staring, then spoke under her breath: “Oh, Christ.”

  “Yeah, I know. I really hope you can help me.”

  Three

  Megan took one look at the house and felt her heart drop. The decrepit house before her looked as if it belonged in a freakin’ horror movie. How could it not be haunted? And haunted by something dark and troubled.

  It was built in the Queen Anne style for which the hill had been named, back at the end of the nineteenth century. The house was a jumble of asymmetrical towers and gables, porches and wings, angled roofs and gingerbread trim, all adding up to a sprawling three-story building that could have housed a family of twenty in its day.

  Now it looked as if it housed rats, bats, and all things creeping and crawling.

  The exterior was nearly devoid of paint, the brown wood smudged with faint traces of white. The roof was clearly new, but several windows over the facade of the house had been boarded over. The grounds were overgrown and thick with blackberry bushes, except for a wide swath immediately around the house that looked to have been cleared recently. The one element that should have been charming, the climbing roses, pink clematis, and wisteria, managed instead to be ominous, crawling up drainpipes and poking tendrils under the eaves.

  In front of the main entrance to the house stood an enormous green Dumpster, plastered wood poking out above its rim. Several feet to the left of the Dumpster was a post made of fresh lumber, angled two-by-fours propping it upright. Heavy power lines swooped from the nearest telephone pole to the gray electrical box affixed to it, and wires from the box swung to the side of the house. A pickup truck was parked nearby.

  “Who’s doing the work?” Megan asked.

  “I am,” he said, and drove through the gate.

  A sense of overwhelming claustrophobia descended on Megan. She gasped for air and twisted in her seat until she could see out the back window of the car. The street beyond the gate was like the air above the surface of the water for a drowning man. She could see it, but she kept moving farther away, sinking beneath it.

  She started to panic. A low cry of despair started in her throat.

  “Megan! What’s wrong?”

  She felt Case’s hand on her shoulder, warm and strong. It cut through the panic, a touch of living energy anchored in the real world. It was enough for her to remember where and who she was.

  “I’m okay, I’m okay, I’m okay,” she chanted under her breath, trying to calm herself down. She closed her eyes and let the suffocating feeling wash over her, then drain away. She knew it wasn’t her own emotion; it was something that belonged to the house.

  She turned her face toward Case and opened her eyes. She was half lying between their seats, wedged into the opening to the backseat with her seat belt undone, her body touching his.

  “What is it? What’s going on?”

  She righted herself in her seat and smoothed out her green cotton skirt, her fingers trembling. “I’ll be fine. I was just taken by surprise. It was a feeling of claustrophobia; like I had to get out of here. I can’t tell you what it was, exactly, that made me feel that way.”

  “Are you okay going on?”

  She nodded. “It’s okay,” she said, laying her fingertips on his arm to reassure him. “Really. It was just an emotion. Nothing scary about emotions, right?”

  “Spoken like a woman.”

  She laughed, although the humor did little to lessen the worry she hid underneath. She hadn’t had such a strong reaction to a place since—

  No, she didn’t want to think about that.

  As Case put the car in gear and moved forward, her gut soured with anxiety. She wanted to get this done and over with as quickly as possible and then get out of here.

  He parked the car at the side of the house at the porte cochere, the covered area of the drive that had once allowed the residents to disembark from their carriages without getting wet in the rain. Megan opened her door and got out, looking toward the grounds, then froze as she saw something from the corner of her eye. At the corner of the house, where shadow met sunlight, a figure was standing.

  A chill crept up the back of her neck.

  “It’s a mess inside, of course,” Case said, getting out on his side. “I hope your shoes will be okay. I should have told you to wear grubbies.”

  The figure, indistinct in her peripheral vision, made of shadows and light, seemed to be watching them. Waiting.

  “Megan?” Case said.

  “Shh.”

  Very slowly, she began to turn her head.

  The figure vanished.

  She turned her head fully toward the corner of the house, and there was nothing there. Disappointment and relief mingled inside her.

  “What? What did you see?”

  Megan shook her head. “Nothing. Peripheral vision can play tricks on you.”

  “What type of tricks?”

  “Your brain likes to make faces and figures out of random shapes and shadows. You know, like how people are always seeing Mary in a potato chip or Christ in an oil slick.”

  “Great. Just don’t tell me you see Satan in the water stain in the ceiling above my bed.”

  “I don’t expect to be in a position to notice it,” she said, then clamped her mouth shut. Where had that comment come from? Damn Tracie! She’d planted thoughts of sex in Megan’s head, and now they were spilling out unbidden.

  Case looked at her intensely.

  She grinned brightly. “You’re the one who wanted me here. Would you rather I try to keep everything I sense to myself?”

  “Are you going to be seeing something every two minutes?” he asked dryly. “I’m not sure my heart can take it.”

  “I don’t know, this house is…unusual.”

  He groaned softly. “I think we’re going to have to have cocktails before dinner,” he said. “The only way I’m going to get through this is if I know there’s a dry martini at the end.”

  “A lavender cosmopolitan for me,” she said.

  “Lavender?”

  “I’m a girl. I’m allowed.” And no sense telling him that it was the only cocktail she’d ever had. She didn’t want to seem like the homebody that she was.

  “Shall we?” He gestured at the wood entrance doors.

  She followed him up the three steps to the doors, waiting while he unlocked them. “You said you were doing the work on this house yourself?”

  “Me and a few of my work crews, when they’re between jobs.”

  “Your work crews? Wait a minute. Are you doing this work on the house for yourself or for someone else?”

  “I bought the house about six months ago,” he said, swinging open the door and letting her precede him inside. “I sold my very nice, very modern, very clean—let me repeat, clean—penthouse apartment downtown in order to move in here.”

  She stopped in her tracks. “Wait a minute. So that satanic water stain in your bedroom ceiling is here? You’re living here?”

  “Bright move on my part, don’t you think?”

  “Oh, dear.”

  The hall they’d stepped into smelled of dust, mice, mildew, and a faint, welcome whiff of freshly cut wood. The lath and plaster had been pulled off the walls on one side, revealing the wood studs beneath. Caged construction lights hung on a thick orange cord.

  Ahead of them, light spilled across the floor from wide openings to both the left, where Megan assumed the main entrance hall was, and the right. Doorways dotted the walls. The floor beneath her feet was made of wide wood planks, painted and worn.

  “Why did you buy it?” Megan asked. “It looks like the type of place that could bankrupt anyone trying to renovate it.”

&n
bsp; “It certainly looks that way, doesn’t it? But it’s not quite that bad. The bones are good: it was built entirely of cedar, and the foundation is solid. The worst of the damage was done by water coming through the roof, but even that didn’t touch all the rooms.”

  “But still, the cost of new wiring, plumbing, redoing all the walls and floors; it must be considerable. I get tired just thinking about all the work!”

  His hands on his hips, he stared down the hall. “What can I say? I saw the place and fell in love.” He met her eyes. “Can you understand that?”

  She nodded. “I fall in love with furniture and antique jewelry. Light fixtures. Paintings. Textiles. Oh, yes, I know all about falling in love with inanimate objects.” Only, to her, they were not without a life history of their own that she could share by running her fingertips across a surface or fastening a gold chain about her neck. But how could anyone feel a tie to a place that gave off as many bad vibes as this hulking wreck of a house?

  Case led the way through the house and brought her to the entrance hall.

  Megan gasped, suddenly understanding why the house had seduced Case.

  Two stories of intricately leaded glass lit the main entry hall and the wood staircase that climbed up one wall. An enormous bronze chandelier hung from the box-beam ceiling above. Oak wainscoting with the dark patina of a century gave way at chest height to deeply embossed copper panels.

  “It’s like a museum!” Megan whispered in awe. “You never see places like this anymore, not unless they’re historic houses with an entry fee.”

  “So you can understand how excited I was when I found it.”

  “Is the rest of it like this?”

  “Nothing as impressive as this—it is the front entry, after all—but the original finish work is still in place. Even most of the furniture is still here. There were some unfortunate updates made to the house in later years, but much of it is still as I imagine it was when it was built.”

  “So, what’s the story? It’s obviously been empty for years. How did you get it?”

  “Are you sure you want to know that right now?”