Act V (35 page)

Chapter 1

Three Months
Later

Aaron was in his new bedroom
surrounded by boxes and didn’t know where to begin. The last time
he’d moved, it had been from his off-campus apartment near NYU to
his apartment in Clearview, SC. That had been ten years ago and
back then he’d only had to move the trappings of a twenty-five year
old grad student. It was amazing how much paraphernalia you could
collect in ten years. He opened a box labeled
master bath/linens
and began to pull
out piles of sheets and towels. These he refolded and placed in the
linen closet to the right of the bathroom door, avoiding the
temptation to toss them in a pile in the closet floor. The bathroom
was pink. That had to change. What self-respecting man, especially
a good-ole-boy like Aaron would live with pink tile, pink
countertops and pink fixtures? No, this would be the first
remodeling job Aaron would tackle in the old Victorian. He’d go
with tan, brown, maybe khaki green, manly colors, anything but
pink.

Good thing he knew his way around a
hammer and saw. You had to be a decent carpenter if you wanted to
work in set design and technical theatre, his chosen profession. He
reminded himself to make an appointment with the dean of SCAD, The
Savannah College of Art and Design. He knew that there would be a
tech position opening up in their theatre set design department
soon. An old friend from his college days, Kerry Laurens, was
working as an instructor there and had clued him in that one of the
technical theatre professors would be retiring in May. They’d have
to fill the position and Aaron had the credentials and the
experience. It was his dream job. In the meantime, he’d make do. He
was due to start training as a tour director for one of the many
historical/ghost tours in Savannah, this evening. You couldn’t
swing a dead cat in this town without hitting a haunted house or
graveyard. The place was built on top of its dead, so naturally
ghosts abounded. Even the house he was now living in had a resident
ghost, supposedly. Tour directors were required to have a touch of
the dramatic and Aaron could ham it up with the best of them. It
would be a great job for a theatre man until the real thing came
along. He didn’t have a ton of money, but he’d saved up enough for
the down-payment on this house plus an extra financial pad to live
on for maybe a year. It would work out. He’d wait tables if he had
to. There was no lack of high-end restaurants here either and you
could make some pretty decent tips with a little charm. Aaron had
that in abundance.

He peeled the tape from
another box. This one was marked
master
bedroom.
Aaron lifted out a framed playbill
for
To Kill A Mockingbird
and one for
Our
Town.
Both plays had been special to him in
that they were the last two he’d done as technical director for the
Clearview Players. Aaron had loved Clearview, his home town. He’d
loved it enough to move back there after getting his master’s at
NYU. But he just couldn’t have stayed any longer. He’d gone all
emotional when he left at the end of the season. His director,
Glynnis Nuckolls, had given him a send-off to beat all send-offs.
He’d even cried when Glynnis had asked him, “Aaron, are you
absolutely sure? You know how much we’ll miss you. And nobody I can
hire will know what I want in a production like you do.” But
Glynnis had a distraction to help her go on with life after that
horrific summer. She had fallen in love. She was planning a
wedding. Aaron had tried to stay. He’d given it several months but
hadn’t been able to shake the depression that had settled over him.
He couldn’t remain in the place where so many memories tore at him
every day. There was nothing for it but to leave.

Savannah would be his new beginning.
Strange, to begin a new life in a place that held so many old
ghosts, but they weren’t his ghosts so they were perfectly
bearable. He almost looked forward to seeing his first eerie
haunting. Aaron chuckled out loud at the thought. He’d never seen a
real ghost before, didn’t really believe in them. But that wouldn’t
stop him from putting on a good show for the tourists.

*****

Frankie Edwards Cohen lay with her head
on Malachi’s shoulder and her hands teasing the dark hair that ran
in a narrow triangle from his chest to below his navel. “I’m so
sorry Mal, but I have to go.” She trailed lazy zig-zag patterns in
the hair with her fingers. “It’s a fundraiser for the Humane
Society and I’m expected.”

“
Write them a check and stay
here.” His voice was low, sexy…at its most intense when he wanted
something. “That’s all they want anyway…your money.” He laid a soft
kiss on the nape of her neck.

“
True.” She sipped at a
mostly full glass of Chablis. “But I have to keep my name on the
happy, good-girl side for public use. With everything else
happening I’ll need all the public support I can get.” She sighed.
“Can I buy you a drink tomorrow night?”

“
I’ll buy you one,” his
voice so husky, he almost growled as he crawled out of the bed,
pulling away from her grasp. “My place? Nine o’clock or
so?”

“
That should give me enough
time to make my excuses.” She wanted to pull him back down into the
bed but she knew there wouldn’t be time. “I’ll bring the wine. Oh
and Mal?”

He was pulling on shorts and a T-shirt.
“Yes?”

“
See what you can find out
about the Renoute-Haversham house, will you?”

He froze for a second. “I forgot to
tell you.” He hadn’t forgotten at all, but he’d been putting this
off until it was absolutely unavoidable.

She was instantly sitting up, her dark
eyes wide, alert? “What? Did you find something?”

“
No.” He knew this was going
to get nasty. “Frankie, I’ve searched the place three times you
know. I was about to get into the floorboards and start knocking on
wall plaster.”

“
But?”

“
I couldn’t get back in
again this time. Remember how I told you that the place had been
sold? Well, the new owner moved in today.”

“
What!” she sputtered. “You
promised me!”

Malachi ducked as a wine glass, not
quite empty sailed toward him and smashed against the wall. He
checked his watch. If Frankie could only devote as much time to him
in the sack as she did to temper tantrums, his life would be so
much more enjoyable.

Chapter 2:
Gayla

I triple-locked the doors to my new
apartment, one thumb latch and two deadbolts. I’d had the second
deadbolt installed two weeks ago when I’d moved in. You couldn’t be
too careful. I hitched my purse over my shoulder and walked to the
elevator, pressing the button three times before I got irritated
and decided to take the stairs instead. I made it down two flights
before I stopped dead. I thought back to when I’d left the
apartment only a few minutes earlier. Had I closed the door all the
way? Had I locked all three locks? I visually went through my exit
routine-one thumb latch, lower deadbolt, upper dead bolt. I
couldn’t remember for sure. I hurried back up two flights and
checked all three locks. Of course they were locked tight. I rolled
my eyes at my own paranoia and went back down the stairs not even
bothering with the elevator. As I opened the door to the street, I
resisted the impulse to turn around and check them one more
time.

This was getting ridiculous. I’m not
like my friend Eddie Tabor who has severe obsessive compulsive
disorder. He can’t leave the bathroom without washing his hands
four times and using a newly cleaned towel to dry them. (He
actually carries one with him in a Zip-Lock bag.) When we were in
high school, Eddie was late for every class right after lunch
because he had to brush his teeth and floss before he could go on
with his day. The health room nurse finally gave him a permanent
pass so he wouldn’t get into trouble. Eddie had the cleanest mouth
in school. Talk about annoying! I’m not like that. I just have this
thing about locks and I haven’t had it all my life, only the last
year or so. Of course that’s the smallest of my quirks. The others
are much more difficult to deal with and are both helpful and
troublesome at the same time.

I stepped out onto the street and felt
the heaviness in the atmosphere as the wind whipped strands of my
carrot-red hair into my face and it stuck like glue to my lip
gloss. It would rain later, of that I was certain, but maybe it
would hold off until after my little adventure with Lyssette. Then
again, if it rained now, I could avoid this whole evening.
Lyssette, my very best friend had talked me into going on this
ghost walk thing and I’d been putting her off for a month now. It’s
not that I don’t like ghost stories. It’s that I like them a little
too much. I have lived in Savannah for most of my twenty-nine years
and I’d managed to avoid going on pirate walks, ghost walks and
pirate ghost walks for that entire time. Why start now? I began to
pray for rain.

Lyssette was waiting at the curb in her
yellow, VW Bug, the old kind, rebuilt, not the new, updated model.
It still looked as new as it had in 1975, not that Lyssette or I
had been around then, but she’d bought it from a dealer a couple of
years ago. Lyssette lived from paycheck to paycheck and she
couldn’t afford to pay attention most days, but she spent more than
she would have on a new bug, getting the old one refurbished from
bumper to bumper. It was her most prized possession.

Lyssette honked the horn to get my
attention and waved me over with a very impatient gesture that let
me know she’d been waiting long enough. I folded my nearly six foot
frame downward until I could fit into the passenger side. I felt
like Michael Jordan trying to sit in a highchair. My knees almost
bent to my chest. The size thing didn’t bother Lyssette, she was
five foot two. We looked like a cartoon when we walked down the
street together.

“
Geez Gayla, What took you
so long?” she whined as I closed the door and fastened my seatbelt.
“I’ve been waiting out here for fifteen minutes.”

“
Why didn’t you just come
in?”

“
I didn’t want to have to
feed the meter.”

I stared at her. She would spend two
hundred dollars for a pair of shoes if she liked them but refused
to drop a quarter into the parking meter. It wasn’t worth arguing
over so I just shrugged. “Sorry you had to wait. I couldn’t decide
what to wear.”

Lyssette stared at my outfit. “It took
you that long to pick out white shorts and a red t-shirt?” I had
the feeling she wasn’t buying this. She squinted those blue eyes my
way. “How many times did you go back and check the
locks?”

“
I didn’t!”

She lifted both blonde eyebrows.
“Really?”

Who needed a mother with Lyssette
around? “Okay, I went back once, just once.”

Lyssette looked at the traffic flow and
pulled out never even flinching when the guy in the red Camaro sat
on his horn and screeched to a stop behind her just barely in time
to keep from plowing into us. Her philosophy of driving was much
like her philosophy of life. She figured everybody else would stop
for her so she could pretty much do whatever she wanted in traffic
and in life. “I’ll bet you had to go back and check the window
latches too.”

I dredged up all my dignity.
“I did not!” But then I started thinking that maybe I should have
checked the windows.
I shook it off. Pull
it together, Gayla!
“There’s nothing wrong
with taking precautions.”

“
Gayla, honey,” she intoned,
casually flipping up her middle finger to the Camaro driver, “It’s
been almost a year now. When are you going to get your life back?”
She took a left at the stop sign after a rolling stop. “It’s time
to get over this obsession.”

No, it was time to change the subject.
“Tell me about the ghost walk.”

“
Fine, change the subject,”
she growled. “Sooner or later you’re going to have to talk to
somebody, if not to me then a shrink, somebody that can
help.”

“
Don’t worry
Mama,”
I told her, “I’ll
work it out.”

She rolled her eyes. “If I was your
mama, young lady, you’d be married with children right now, not
traipsing around Savannah doing slimy private investigator
work.”

It was an old joke between us. My
mother, who lived just outside Savannah, hated my choice of careers
and was about to wet her pants to be a grandmother. “Yes ma’am,” I
answered with a grin. “I’ll get right on that barefoot and pregnant
thing.”

Lyssette conceded the whole argument
for the moment. “Anyway, the ghost walk’s gonna be a hoot.” She
shook her head in wonder. “I can’t believe you’ve lived here most
of your life and never went on one of these.”

“
I guess I just never got
around to it.” That wasn’t quite true and Lyssette knew it. The
truth was I loved ghost stories. They were fun, interesting and
always had a little bit of history behind them somewhere deep in
the story. There was a problem however, my vivid imagination. Ghost
stories, especially the ones with a touch of truth, scared the
bejesus out of me. When I was in my teens, I was an avid reader of
Stephen King and Dean Koontz novels. Okay, so I was a nerd. My
parents discovered me many a night, hunkered down in my covers with
the lights blazing while I took in every gruesome detail of
Carrie’s transformation from prom queen to pig-blood covered,
telekinetic murderer. Some nights they found me staring shock-eyed
into the television at some late-night horror flick hosted by
Elvira. (I always wanted to be able to wear a dress cut down to my
business in front like she did, but I don’t quite have the
equipment to support it.) The movies and ghost stories were
amazing. They fueled my imagination and therein lay the problem. At
night, the ghost stories took on a fearsome reality in my mind. I
saw ghosts behind the drapes and murderers lingering in the linen
closet waiting for me to step into the shower. I couldn’t sleep for
days after watching Joan Crawford and in “Berserk” because in my
head there was an axe murderer just around every dark corner of the
house. .I kept my night light on for weeks when I read “The Stand.”
I knew the apocalypse would come and evil forces would destroy my
world. My folks forbade me to watch or read the really scary stuff
but I always managed to anyway.