Superstition (10 page)

Stopping, she took a deep, slow breath. “There’s someone in the room. A girl, I think. I can . . . I’m getting just a glimpse of her reflection in the mirror.”

Leonora turned around swiftly, as though to catch sight of someone standing behind her.

“Is anyone here?” Leonora called softly. Nicky knew she wasn’t talking to any living person. “Tara! Tara, are you there?”

Silence.

“Lauren? Becky?” Leonora’s voice dropped into the husky, rasping timbre that told Nicky that she was once again in a dimension of her own. She was frowning, concentrating, as she called out to the spirit world.

“Yes, I can see you,” Leonora said, sounding as if she was talking to someone only a few feet away. Her voice sharpened. “Who are you?”

She was looking at a point near where she had said the bed had once been located.

Nicky found herself looking there, too, although so far as she could tell, there was nothing but empty room to see. But . . . the draft moving around her ankles had turned icy.

A quick glance at the temperature told her that it had fallen to 65 degrees. And the magnetometer was showing unmistakable signs of activity as well. Soundlessly—she didn’t want to disturb her mother when she was obviously on a roll—she indicated to the cameraman that he should pan to the sensors. The camera’s digital clock indicated that they were running out of time: only six minutes left. The way her night was going, the three dead girls would materialize right in front of them—exactly thirty seconds after they were off the air.

Ah, well.
There was no speeding this up, no regulating it. As Uncle John had pointed out to the mayor, Leonora, once set in motion, was like a runaway train. Nicky was on board now, which meant that all she could do was hang on for the ride and try to shape the experience so that it was as exciting for the viewers as possible.

“You don’t like us being here?” Leonora’s voice was barely audible now. “I understand. We’re trying to help you. Can you tell me your name?” Leonora frowned, then glanced at Nicky. “Tara. It’s Tara. She says she’s looking for the other girls—Lauren and Becky. Are they here in the house with you?”

That last question was clearly addressed to the unseen Tara. Leonora nodded, as if she was listening to someone’s reply.

Watching, Nicky discovered that she was holding her breath. She had witnessed her mother’s interactions with the spirit world for so many years that they had long since ceased to be anything out of the ordinary. Leonora talked to the dead as regularly as some mothers baked brownies. But tonight, something, some combination of the echoing emptiness of the room and her mother’s deepening voice and the knowledge of the atrocity that had been committed in this house, gave her the willies.

Thank God.
It had to be good TV if her mother was succeeding in unnerving
her.

“You can’t find them? You think they might be in the kitchen?” Leonora paused, seeming to listen intently. “Yes, I know it’s Lauren’s birthday . . . you think they’re having birthday cake without you?” Leonora frowned, then shook her head. “Tara, wait. Don’t go. Please, we want to talk to you. The other girls aren’t in the kitchen now, Tara, they’re . . .”

Leonora’s voice trailed off. She turned, as if watching someone go out of the room. Standing between her mother and the door, Nicky felt a rush of icy air go past her face. Her eyes widening, she took a reflexive step back. Her hand flew to her cheek.

Spooky.

Her skin felt normal—warm, dry.

Her heart, on the other hand, was suddenly racing.

“She’s gone,” Leonora said, sounding disappointed as she turned to look at Nicky. “Tara. She was here and now she’s gone. I think . . . I think what’s happening here is that she’s reenacting the events that occurred before she was attacked in the kitchen. I think on that night, she got separated from the other two girls, for whatever reason, then came up to this bedroom—Lauren’s bedroom—looking for them. When they weren’t here, she went down to the kitchen and . . .”

She never finished speaking. Instead, the air was split by a woman’s blood-curdling scream.

5

T
WO MORE SCREAMS followed in quick, terrifying procession, jagged twin shards of sound that sliced through the floorboards to hang in the air like an icy mist. The dreadful, haunting shrieks were faintly muted, as if they came from a little—but just a little—distance. They were unmistakably human, unmistakably female, juiced with the gut-wrenching terror of an animal unexpectedly falling victim to a predator. As caught by surprise as everyone else, Nicky sucked in her breath as goose bumps raced over her skin. Automatically, she looked down, because down was the general direction from which the sounds seemed to have sprung. Time seemed to stand still as the last shivering notes slowly faded away.

“What the hell?” Bob the cameraman muttered.

Nicky glanced at him in surprise. It was a measure of how unnerving the cries had been that he had forgotten himself enough to speak at all. Usually, he and Gordon were about as loquacious as their cameras. In fact, so much were they appendages of their equipment that everyone, herself included, tended to forget that they were there. But now he was staring down, just as she had been seconds before, his job momentarily forgotten.

Nicky caught a quick glimpse of herself reflected in his lens as the camera, temporarily without a guiding hand, lurched drunkenly. Her eyes were wide with surprise. Her mouth hung open.

“Unprofessional” didn’t do her demeanor justice. She looked shaken up, shocked. To make matters worse, she wasn’t talking. In fact, no one was talking. No one was filming. No one was doing anything. Everybody, followers hanging just outside the door included, was just standing there looking as if they’d been poleaxed. In the meantime,
Twenty-four Hours Investigates
was transmitting that bane of live TV:
dead air.

The horror of that, Nicky found, was as instantly restorative as a faceful of cold water. Whoever—whatever—had screamed, it was up to her to put the best possible spin on it for the audience watching at home, and worry about the details later. Hissing to get Bob’s attention—realizing his lapse, he looked as appalled as Nicky felt as he quickly grabbed and refocused his camera—she spoke in hushed, confidential tones to the audience at home.

“There you have it, people. You heard those screams right along with us. I have no idea who screamed, or why, but, given everything we’ve learned here tonight, everything we’ve experienced together, I’m willing to make a guess. I think what we just heard—those dreadful, soul-shattering screams—are the same screams that Elizabeth and Susan Cook reported hearing one terrifying night as they huddled together in this bedroom, the same screams that others have heard on dark nights when they ventured too near this house. I think they are the screams of a terrified girl being slashed to death in the living room directly below us. I think they are Tara Mitchell’s screams. . . .”

Sixty-eight seconds left. That left her with a little more time to fill than she would have liked, Nicky calculated even as she spoke, but not enough so that it would be obvious that she was trying to stretch her sign-off to fill it. After those screams, anything else would be an anticlimax. They were the perfect endnote to a program that had, in the teeth of her earlier fears, finally turned out to be, if not everything she’d been hoping for, close enough. And if she did say so herself, it was definitely damned good TV.

Nicky turned to her mother. Leonora was standing perfectly still, hands clasped, lowered lids veiling her eyes, lips compressed. Since glancing down as they all had in automatic response to the screams, she didn’t appear to have moved so much as a muscle. Leonora was undoubtedly still a little shaken, Nicky realized, just as she was herself. Whatever their origin—and now that the last chilling echo had died away and her brain was once again able to function properly, Nicky suspected that she might not want to inquire too closely into exactly where they’d come from—the screams had been as terrifying as they had been unexpected. Nevertheless, the oldest rule in the entertainment business still applied: The show must go on.

“Leonora, thank you for being our guide tonight as we crossed the threshold between life and death. You’ve taken us with you on a journey that few have made. It was fascinating. Enlightening. Chilling. I’m sure everyone watching with us at home was as absolutely blown away by the experience as I was.”

When Nicky had started talking, Leonora had looked up. Her expression had been cloudy, vague, her eyes unfocused. Nicky had gotten the definite impression that her mother was still off in ghostland somewhere. Now, though, as Nicky wrapped up, Leonora’s eyes sharpened, narrowed, and locked on her daughter.

Nicky knew that look, and felt her stomach tighten in response. Leonora was not pleased. It didn’t require genius to deduce that Leonora suspected, just as Nicky was beginning to, that the screams weren’t necessarily supernatural in origin. They had been so loud, so shattering, so
human.
So eerily appropriate. And the timing—the timing couldn’t have been better. Nicky couldn’t be sure, of course, but she suspected that astral beings had little interest in TV ratings, and thus couldn’t be expected to scream precisely on cue. Had someone—God forbid it was one of her crew—decided to give the program the finale it deserved? It was possible, she had to admit. Nicky only hoped that, discombobulated as her mother generally was after an encounter with the spirit world, she would remember that they were on live TV and behave accordingly.

She wasn’t prepared to count on it, however.

“One more time, thank you, Leonora James,” Nicky said quickly, taking her mother’s hand in both of hers. It was flaccid, icy. Leonora’s eyes, on the other hand, were anything but icy: They were beginning to burn.

No doubt about it: Her mother was in a snit.

“I’m glad I was able to help,” Leonora replied, her tone slightly stiff. Then her fist clenched in Nicky’s hands, and she pulled her hand away.

Uh-oh.

Still smiling, Nicky walked away from her mother, signaling for Bob to keep the camera on her. Whatever was riling Leonora—and Nicky was pretty sure she knew what it was—the time to find out about it was in exactly twenty-seven seconds—in other words,
after
they were off the air.

“As always, we go the extra mile to try to solve cases that have left other investigators baffled. We’ll take the information provided by Leonora tonight and see if it opens up any new leads, and we’ll keep you updated on our progress on subsequent shows. For now, I’m Nicole Sullivan. Thank you from all of us here for joining us tonight on this special live edition of
Twenty-four Hours Investigates
.”

A beat passed, during which Nicky determinedly smiled into the camera, and then the red light that warned them they were on the air blinked off. Bob pulled out his earpiece and grinned at her. The monitor showed the credits rolling. A quick glance at the sensors told Nicky that the readings were back to normal: Any and all ghosts had apparently vacated the premises. There was a smattering of applause from the onlookers crowding the door, and she glanced toward them with a smile that froze on her face as her gaze encountered her mother’s.

An explosion was clearly imminent. Thank God they were off the air.

“Nicky. That was awesome,” someone called. Nicky thought the voice might have been Mario’s. He had been looking on from the hallway and was probably now one of the group streaming into the room, but she was too busy bracing herself for what she knew was coming to definitively identify the speaker or do more than acknowledge the compliment with a wave.

Leonora’s eyes blazed into hers. Her lips parted. . . .

“I have to tell you, everything you said tonight was exactly on target.” Andrea Schultz saved her. Nicky had been so focused on her mother that she hadn’t even noticed that people were forming a knot around them. Slender in jeans and an embroidered vest over a pale green T-shirt, Mrs. Schultz looked far older than her fifty-five years. Her face was pale, and her eyes were bright with unshed tears. She took Leonora’s hand and clung to it. “Lauren’s room—the way it was—you described it perfectly. How did you
know
? And the blood in the kitchen. There
was
blood on the floor, just where you said.”

Leonora refocused on Mrs. Schultz. Faced with someone who had suffered a loss, someone who was turning to her for help, she was always
on,
always compassionate. As angry as Nicky could tell she was, this was no exception.

“I’m sorry for your pain.” Leonora gripped Mrs. Schultz’s hand. “I wish I could do more to help you.”

“Just . . . tell me one thing.” Mike Schultz, looking slightly out of place in a navy business suit, white dress shirt, and striped tie, stood behind his wife. Based on her previous dealings with the couple, Nicky would have described him as stolid: the rock supporting his wife through her grief. But his shoulders were slumped now, and his face seemed to have crumpled during the course of the broadcast. Where before he had appeared comfortably middle-aged, he now looked impossibly old. “Where is my daughter? You seemed to see Tara—what about Lauren? Where is
Lauren
?”

The pain in his voice was palpable. Nicky felt her throat constrict in the face of such obvious grief. That was the thing about the line of work she was in: It was easy—too easy sometimes—to forget that real people and real heartbreak lay behind these shows.

Leonora shook her head. “I can’t tell you that. I’m sorry. It wasn’t shown to me.”

“Oh, God . . .” His face turned red and tears formed in his eyes. He abruptly turned away, covering his face with his hands.

“Excuse us. Mike . . .” His wife went to him, sliding an arm around his waist and murmuring something to him. Together, they moved toward the door.

Marisa, who’d been hovering around the edges of the room, had joined them in time to hear that last exchange.