Poltergeist (6 page)

I had a strange feeling about this case. I still didn't think Tuckman was being straight with me and that pissed me off. And I didn't like what had happened to Mark. I tried not to make assumptions, but Solis was just as bothered as I was, and though Mark's death wasn't my case, it didn't seem entirely unconnected.

I stuffed down my misgivings and paged Quinton. I waited for him to call me back, listening to the rain play music on the metal awning. When he called, I arranged to pick up the ferret on my way home, then headed back to my truck.

About eleven o'clock, I was stretched out on my sofa at home with Chaos snoozing in the crook of my arm while I pretended to care what was on TV. The phone rang, interrupting a commercial that featured dancing clams. I smiled, remembering Phoebe's jibe about my absent paramour, and picked up the phone.

"Hello," I said.

"Hello, Harper." The warmth in his voice was almost a caress, speeding my breath and raising heat beneath my skin all the way from England.

"Good morning, Mr. Novak.”

"Should I say 'Good evening, Miss Blaine'?”

"Do you want to sound like a Cary Grant movie?”

"Only if it's one of the films where he gets the girl.”

"Wasn't that most of them?”

"Probably. He even got the girl in
Suspicion,
though he wasn't supposed to.”

"Yeah, I know," I said. "I read the book.”

"So…which ending do you prefer?”

"I'd have liked to see the book ending. Even charming, handsome guys can be coldhearted killers—but that's probably my cynical occupation talking.”

"How is your cynical occupation at the moment?”

There was a slight chill in his sigh and my rush of happiness crashed. I frowned and was glad phones didn't have video feed. I sometimes thought his absence kept our on-again, off-again relationship from foundering completely on the rocks of my occulted life, but even fondness-engendering distance didn't seem to be working now. "Nothing special," I answered, "though I ran into Detective Solis today.”

"I remember him. I recall he's pretty fierce for a quiet guy.”

"I wouldn't care to be on his bad side.”

"I hope nothing you're doing is tangled up with any of his cases.”

"No," I lied. I did not want to talk about Solis or my job. "How's Sotheby's?”

"I'm almost at the end of this contract.”

He fell silent. I waited.

"An independent valuation firm is chatting me up, though. It's mostly insurance work, but it's interesting, and I guess I'm getting a bit of a reputation in the right circles.”

Another stumbling silence. "So, are you thinking of taking the offer if they make one?" I asked.

"Maybe. I'd still have to come home for a while to satisfy the alien worker requirements. But I could be home for Christmas. I wouldn't want to disrupt Michael's school schedule here, but we could work it out." Michael was Will's much-younger brother, still in school, though studying for British college exams now—when he wasn't cutting class to work on vintage motorcycles. "I could always look for something in the US.…”

"If you're thinking of doing that for me, Will, then you know I'll tell you not to. If you want to come back, you have to come for yourself.”

That was the crux of our problem: Will wanted a stable, honest relationship and the best I could offer was a catch-as-catch-can string of interrupted dates, creepy clients, and mysterious disappearances— which had almost brought our romance to an end on the first date. I wasn't very good at separating my work from my life—especially since the Grey and its denizens didn't respect office hours—and that was something I doubted I could break Will to, even if I'd wanted to.

I'm not the sort of woman who wants to remodel "her man" and I wouldn't care to be in the opposite position, either. We'd set off sparks from the moment we'd met, but Will and I didn't have compatible lives and I could never tell him the reason and he wouldn't believe it if I did. Which was why I was in Seattle and Will was in London. I may have fallen into bed with him the first time for all the wrong reasons— and I didn't regret it one bit—but neither of us could live our life for the other no matter how great the sex was when we managed to have it.

Will sighed. "You're still impossible.”

My heart dropped and I felt cold with a childish desire to cry. I swallowed it back down, like I always have. "Yup," I replied in a bright voice. "That's me: Impossible Girl.”

"Sounds like a cartoon.”

"The kind the Korean studios make for Japanese audiences and then dub with American voices: seriously messed up.”

He laughed. "All right, Impossible Girl. I—I have to cut this short. Maybe I'll make it for Christmas. But now I have to go. The bloody tube's on strike again, so I'm walking to work.”

My turn to laugh. "You sound so British. Next you'll be complaining about the wretched Americans, voting Labor, and insisting that 'tire' is spelled with a Y.”

"Can't vote: I'm one of the wretched Americans. OK, I'm off. I'll call again Friday, OK?”

"I'll look forward to it.”

"Me, too." He hung up and I shivered, still holding the phone and conscious of being alone but for the ferret.

Thursday I chased down other cases and read files until three, when Quinton showed up to help me install a DVD drive on my office computer. I had a DVD player on my TV at home, but I didn't want to have to drag all the files and notes back and forth every day. Once the device was up and running, we sat down to watch a few of the discs together. I hoped Quinton would be able to point out the ghost-making machinery in action. We huddled in front of the monitor like a couple of kids watching scary movies on Halloween. All we needed was some popcorn and blankets.

The first session hadn't been very interesting and they didn't improve for a while. The group had sat stiffly around the table in reduced light, meditating for a while, then just sitting and talking about Celia and getting nothing, though they did seem to establish some rapport. Eventually, they'd tried to replicate the Philip group's technique by singing a song Celia might like—an off-key version of "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree.”

"They sing as badly as you," Quinton said. I dug a sharp elbow into his ribs and snorted.

After quite a while, they got a single distinct rap, which we both suspected was caused by one the participants—possibly by accident.

But even though it was plain to us that the rap wasn't a legit phenomenon, the group seemed to be pleased with it and gave themselves credit. No one was upset by the knocking, though the Asian woman and the man in the business suit both frowned a bit. Other reactions ranged from surprise to delight, though I thought the young tawny-skinned man looked just a touch smug about it.

It was strange to see Mark alive and well and sitting at the table with the group. He seemed a touch more solemn than the rest—more serious than I'd ever seen him at Old Possum's. Except for Mark's demeanor, nothing seemed odd about the early sessions.

I made a couple of notes and we worked through more of the early recordings. The group got more relaxed with one another and their methods over time. They chatted a bit before each session. I noticed that the middle-aged couple kept their backs to each other most of the time and that the housewife tended to scowl unless she was in conversation with the young, single men—then she got coquettish. In one session, the group talked about the recent start of baseball season. One of the young men asked if Celia liked baseball and they began discussing it, elaborating on their ghost.

The middle-aged woman—striking, blond, and buff even in a suit—broke in, impatiently: "Why don't we just ask her? Celia, did you enjoy baseball?”

The table jiggled side to side; then one loud rap was followed by a quieter second knock. Mark's eyes got very big.

We both leaned forward and peered at the screen. "Can you pause that?" I asked.

Quinton tapped the computer keyboard and the image froze.

"Back it up. I want to see what happened.”

The event ran backward for an instant, then began crawling forward, frame by frame. The table rocked the same way Quinton had made it move on Wednesday. "That's the booth controls moving the table, isn't it?" I asked.

"Yeah. You can see the feet of the table rising the same way they did in the lab, and the infrared camera recorded the slight rise in temperature in the rug's coils," he confirmed. He advanced the frame a bit farther and we could see Mark's elbow flex off the edge of the table a little just as the first knock came. "The guy with the long hair did that.”

I nodded. He advanced the picture. The group remained still. The second knock came. "But he didn't do that," I said.

Quinton studied the frame. "No, he didn't. I don't see anyone else moving, so the sound wasn't made by anyone at the table. And it sounds different. Let me take a look at that…”

He began typing and poking about in the files, using the mouse to select something from the recording's timeline. He dragged several jagged waveform bits off to the side of the screen and enlarged them. He typed a quick tag for each one.

"All right. Look at these and listen." He poked the machine and it began playing the knocks while it ran a red line over the waveforms.

"This is the knock the Indian guy made in the previous session." It had a large lump in front and a short tail and sounded sharp, deep, and wooden.

I glanced at Quinton. "Indian?”

"Well, he looks Indian to me—Asian Indian, not Native American Indian—though I guess he could be Arabic or Asian…”

I considered it and logged the identification in my mind. For some reason "Indian" hadn't even occurred to me as a tag for the bronze-skinned man with the puckish smile. No one on Tuckman's list had a name that sounded Indian, though.

Quinton drew me back to the knocks, pointing at the next waveform on the screen. "This is the one the long-haired guy just made— the first knock." It was blunter in front than the first one, but otherwise very similar in shape and tone.

"Now, this is the second knock." The waveform was shaped like a porpoise with a long, shallow slope before a bulging round shape that tailed off slowly to a sudden, short spike. It had a more hollow sound than the others and ended with a pop almost too short to notice.

Quinton moved the cursor down to another waveform on the screen. "This one I got from the comparison report file. It's labeled 'Celia'—which is the name of their 'ghost,' right?”

"Yes.”

Quinton made the last two waveforms larger. "They're not identical, but they're very similar. The length of the slope on the front is shorter in the comparison notes version and the decay at the end is a little shorter, too, but the basic shapes of the main waveforms are the same, right down to the sharp snap at the end.”

"So that knock came from Celia.”

Quinton nodded. "Yeah, I'd say that whatever Celia is, it made that noise.”

I nibbled on my lower lip for a moment before asking, "Why are the two knocks different?”

"I'd guess that's caused by experience. The slope at the front is some kind of windup that you can't hear at normal volumes, but the mics picked it up under the table. And I'd guess that pop at the end is, basically, the shutdown—kind of like pulling the plug. As they got better at making the noise, they didn't need to wind up so long, or wait as long to pull the plug.”

I considered that and agreed with Quinton's analysis, though I wasn't thinking in terms of switches and household wiring. "But what is the noise?" I thought aloud. "It's not some object hitting the table.…”

Quinton nodded. "Yeah, it's not. Something hitting the table would have a similar waveform to the other two. In those two, the hard peak at the front is the actual impact of a fist or something on the wood and the rest of the envelope is the resonance and decay through the wood surface. The Celia knocks have that subaudible component in front of the impact on the wood, and their resonance and decay are different, more like they're happening in the wood rather than on or under it.”

I cocked my head to the side and looked at him. "What could do that?”

He shrugged. "I don't know.”

"Do you think…it actually could be a ghost?”

He looked hard at me and frowned. "You're serious.”

"Yeah. What do you think?”

"I've seen enough weird stuff in this town that I wouldn't say it couldn't be a ghost, but I don't know.”

I looked at the screen again and pointed at Mark. "The guy using the table tricks—the one with the long, dark hair—he died yesterday in a very nasty way.”

Quinton looked at Mark's image, then back at me. "What are you getting at?”

"I'm not sure. This thing is giving me a bad feeling.”

"Well, the guy's dead, so…yeah, I can understand that.”

"Tuckman thinks someone is faking more phenomena than they're actually getting, but if that knock is real, then maybe they aren't. And if they aren't faking, what
is
going on? The stuff they did yesterday was a lot more impressive than this.”

"You think it's real? Or do you think they faked it?”

"I just don't know.”

"Well, let's see what else they can do, on camera, before you make up your mind." He resumed the session replay.

On the screen, Mark Lupoldi still looked surprised. The rest of the group just nodded. The female executive continued to question the ghost. "Did you go to the games with Jimmy?”

There was a long pause before a pair of hesitant knocks sounded.

I glanced at Quinton. He paused the replay and opened the sound window again. Expanded to a large size, the waveforms were easy to spot. Two porpoise shapes, closely connected nose to tail with only a single pop at the end of the pair.

"That's interesting," Quinton noted. "These are connected and the slope on the second one is shorter, even though there's a pause in the sound. Maybe it needs less energy to create another noise once it's started.”

"And the pop comes only at the end of the whole message," I added.

"Can't be sure with such a small sample, but that looks like the case." He peered at the computer's status bar. "Damn. I have to go—I have to meet someone at eight.”

"It's only six thirty," I protested.

"Yeah, but I have to do some prep and pick up some stuff first. But you know how to do this now. And I shouldn't be hanging around, compromising your client confidentiality any further.”

He seemed a little uncomfortable, but I was reluctant to see him go. It was nice to talk to someone I didn't have to lie to or be wary of. My social life had never been exhausting, but since my fall into the Grey, it had become minuscule. I don't mind most of the time—being the prickly sort I am—but I go through fits of noticing the vacuum of social contact and regretting it. No surprise that this often coincided with phone calls from Will.

I made a face. "You're right. I shouldn't keep you. And these clips aren't exactly Oscar-quality material.”

Quinton grinned. "I'd love to know how they make that noise, though. When you find out, tell me.”

"OK," I said, and watched him snatch up his backpack and coat as he headed out the office door.

I returned to the séance recordings and notes, though I had to concentrate harder now that Quinton had left. The group continued to ask Celia about baseball for a while. The knocks got more firm as they went on and the table rocked several more times, though I suspected that was still under the control of Tuckman, Terry, and Mark. There wasn't much more to that session, since the members grew tired and ended the séance early. During the review session afterward they'd been elated by the knocks, and most hoped the phenomena would get bigger soon. Mark, I noticed, had said very little once the knocks started and not much more after the session. Mark's statement in the file confirmed he'd made none of the knocks after the first one. In spite of the participants' hopes, Tuckman had worried that additional table manipulations might be too much reinforcement too soon and requested that Mark and Terry not escalate the effects until further notice.

They'd done as he asked. In the following six sessions, the knocks had become common but the table continued to move only under the secret manipulations of Tuckman and his cohort.

One month after the first Celia knocks, however, the table got into the act on its own, making a dramatic jump straight up that knocked some of the sitters out of their chairs. The jump had exceeded the height available from the magnetic pulses by several inches and left a clear gap between the table and floor on the infrared recording. Neither Mark nor Terry had claimed any responsibility for the movement. After that, the group stood at the table. As I watched the recordings, I began to put names and dossiers with faces and make note of interactions.

The phenomena became more pronounced as the sessions progressed and the group began to think of the table as Celia's primary manifestation. Celia developed a distinct personality in the knocks and table movements. She liked swing music and would sometimes cause the table to "dance" around the room in a clumsy, teetering way by lifting three legs a little and pivoting on the fourth, or hopping it with all four legs off the floor at once. She learned to flicker the Christmas lights in patterns to match the music, if she was in the mood. She liked movies and was a fan of Tyrone Power, though she liked modern films, too. The young Caucasian man—his name was Ian—who always sat with the Asian woman, Ana, suggested that Celia snuck into movie houses since she didn't need a ticket and everyone had laughed. Celia had rattled on the tabletop for several seconds, which the group interpreted as laughter. What they agreed upon was like law.

Celia's taste in films and music would change a little depending on which members of the group were present. She also had a bit of a magpie streak and often dumped the women's purses or played with their jewelry. Several times Ana's hair got caught in her swinging earrings and had to be disentangled by Ian while Ana winced.

One of the most interesting sessions occurred when Ken, the young Indian man, brought in a portrait of Celia he'd made on his computer. It was very similar to the picture of the woman I'd seen on the wall of the séance room, except that her hair was darker and the picture showed her from the hips up—her outfit was a rather provocative black dress. The table had roiled with excited knocking and teetered about on the rug as though impatient when he offered to show it off.

Ken had pulled a page from his bag and put it down on the table. The table became quiet and heavy, sinking against the floor as if the magnets had pulled it down, though the infrared indicated no such activity.