The Discovery (15 page)

Celia cocks her head. "I believe Mega-Mart gave a sizable donation to Farnsworth House."

"Yes, it did indeed. And that's the only reason I'm allowing you in here again," he notes.

Celia's ready to play hardball. "Mega-Mart is prepared to contribute more if you're willing to help us."

Wow ... a little extortion in small-town America. Okay, whatever works. I can see the dollar signs spinning in Mr. Pfeiffer's eyes.

"Look, Mr. Pfeiffer. I'm not going to candy-coat this," I say. "Four people—all our friends—have had heinous things happen to them since meeting Xander the Doll and taking pictures of him. One even died."

"Oh, that young cheerleader," he says, shaking his head. "Such a sad story. Driving too fast like that. A tragedy and a waste."

"Yes, it was," I say. "One that could have been prevented had we known more about this curse that surrounds Xander the Doll."

His eyes shift around as if he's covering something up.

He is covering something up,
Patrick says to me.

I've never seen a person sweat like this.

He needs to pop a salt tablet ... geesh!

I stand and advance on the curator. "Mr. Pfeiffer, you said this place needs to be fixed. What did you mean by that?"

He hesitates for a moment. "The board doesn't want me talking about it."

"Why isn't this place open to the public?" Patrick asks.

"Again, that's the board's decision, not mine," the older man says.

Patrick slices his eyes over to me.
This is personal for him. Push him, Kendall. He'll break.

"This doesn't make sense," I shout in frustration. "This has gone too far. I'm not trying to be disrespectful. There's something you're not telling us. A secret you're hiding that may cause more people to get hurt. Do you want that on your head, Mr. Pfeiffer? Do you want your children to know what you're doing?"

He lowers his eyes to the ground and begins pacing the room. "How do you know about my children?"

"I'm psychic, remember." Although I'm not picking up anything more specific, this may get him to talk. "Don't you want them to be proud of what you're doing here?"

His bottom lip quivers. "I don't know what to say. I'm just the caretaker. I have been for twelve years, since the board sought me out. I do what I'm told. I obey orders. I'm fifty-seven years old and I enjoy the steady paycheck from the board so my son can go to college at UGA and so I can have health insurance to cover my daughter's diabetes supplies."

"We're sorry about your daughter, Mr. Pfeiffer. Our friends the Lewises lost their daughter. Possibly because of Xander. Now, you know plenty about the history of this house and the family, and if you'll allow us to investigate and research, perhaps we can prevent another tragedy from occurring."

He drags his sleeve across his forehead to mop up the perspiration. "All right. I'll tell you what I know. The board is one person. It's the lone Farnsworth survivor. Her name is Abigail, and she's Robert Townsend Farnsworth's granddaughter. She lives in a nursing home in Macon and is very old and frail. Abigail made a deathbed promise to her father, Robert's son, that she'd always take care of Xander and he would always live in this house. However, when the economy crashed, a lot of the family's investments disappeared nearly overnight. The only way Abigail could keep the house was to donate it to the city as a tax shelter with the stipulations that the board control the day-to-day operations and that the city of Radisson wouldn't change anything about the building, disperse any of its contents, or open it to the public to judge. To get around the agreement and to raise some money, the historical society came up with the traveling exhibit, but Xander would return home to his room each and every night. That was, until weird things started happening, so we stopped the exhibit for a few years."

"Why bring him out now?"

"The county fair offered a nice donation for the exhibit and we couldn't turn it down."

Becca lowers the voice recorder that she's been using to capture the story. Celia cuts her eyes over to me; I sigh. "What do you think is going on here, Mr. Pfeiffer?"

"What do you believe is at play here?" Patrick asks.

The man holds up his hands. "I don't know. I don't want to know. I don't mess with anything and it doesn't mess with me." Fear resonates in his glassy eyes. More than fear. I sense a near panic from him. Dread is painted over his face from jowly cheek to jowly cheek, and for a moment, I believe he might cry. "Look, you're just kids. You don't have the responsibilities in life that I do. I do what I'm told; I collect my paycheck and go home every night. Xander, or
whatever,
leaves me be."

I swallow down my aggravation when I listen to the tremor in Mr. Pfeiffer's voice. Stepping forward, I put my hand gently on his arm. "We can help. If Xander is possessed by a spirit, we can help set it free and put it on its path to redemption and peace."

My fingers tingle with an unknown touch. My heart rate triples, and the psychic headache begins ticking away at me. Bits and pieces of time flash before me with vivid images that spark more curiosity than answers. A woman dancing around a fire. A boy crying in the blackness of his room. A whip striking skin, the color of it indiscernible. The fireworks of memories shift and I'm back in my dream ... dark ... dank ... the tang of wet earth fills my nostrils. The shadows of many lost souls dancing around in confusion.

I jerk out of the image, and Patrick holds me to him. He felt it too. My senses tell me there's something very dark here. Darker than we've ever dealt with. It may be voodoo or black magic or just a spirit that's confused, hurt, and angry. But it must be revealed and cleansed.

"Help us," I plead in a whisper.

Mr. Pfeiffer's lip quivers. His voice drops to a whisper. "I-I-I can't get involved."

Celia puts her hands on her hips and nods to me.

I hold my head high. "Well, Mr. Pfeiffer, we
are
getting involved. Tomorrow night, we're bringing our equipment and we're doing an investigation."

He sees that I'm not messing around.

"I'll leave the key under the mat," he says finally. "There's one stipulation."

"Name it," Celia says.

"You can't reveal your findings to the public."

"Agreed," Becca says on our behalf.

This doll has an attachment, and it's pissed. This has to be solved immediately.

"We have to do this for everyone who's ever been hurt by Xander. We have to do this for Farah."

A
ROUND NINE THIRTY
S
ATURDAY MORNING
, I stretch like one of my kitty cats and reach for my BlackBerry on the nightstand. The
bleep-bleep-bleep
of incoming text messages has woken me from a sound snooze. I smile when I read them:

> Morning baby
> Last nite wuz fun. Just the 2 of us. 2nite will b diff

Patrick and I had just curled up together on the couch at Father Mass's and watched
Casablanca,
which was exactly what we both needed to get our minds off the turmoil in town, to have some alone time, and to prepare for what we might face this evening. I run my thumbs over the small keypad to respond.

> Hi u! I no. Last nite wuz a blast.
> Worried @ 2nite
> Don't b. I've dealt w/worse
> u don't know that
> we never no what we're up against
> i'll b w/u the whole time
> going 2 ask Loreen and Mass 2 b there
> coming over?
> in a bit to Loreen's store
> i'll grab a shower & meet u there
> sounds good 2 me
> c u then

I let out a majorly contented sigh and then hop out of bed. After I take a quick shower, blow my hair into some semblance of a manageable style, and throw on jeans and a tank, I race through the kitchen—stopping long enough to fill the parentals in on where I'm off to—and then jump in the car and head over to Loreen's.

As I arrive, Loreen is standing outside the shop, locking the door.

"What's going on?" I ask.

"There you are, Kendall," she calls. "We're meeting Mass and Patrick down at the café for some breakfast."

The grumble at the bottom of my stomach tells me that it's most definitely interested in some food. "Sounds awesome."

We get to the Radisson Café, where I see Father Mass and Patrick already have a booth for us. Loreen slides in next to her boyfriend and I do the same with mine.

My eyes smile up at Patrick and he leans in for a kiss hello. In my peripherals, I see Loreen and Mass do the same thing. Momentarily, my psychic vision kicks in and I see Loreen and Mass together, kissing in a very public way, surrounded by people. I jump when the image leaves me as quickly as it came.

"Everything okay?" Patrick asks.

"Yeah, fine. Fine." I don't want to read anything into what I just saw, so I grab the small menu and drool over my meal of choice.

"I'd like the smoked Gouda, ham, and spinach omelet, please," I say to the waitress. Patrick orders the lox, onion, and cream cheese omelet, while Loreen and Mass agree to split the Healthy Platter, which is anything but—three scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, three pancakes, and hash browns. "Do you need a defibrillator with that?"

Loreen tosses a creamer at me and we laugh. Then, like that, we turn our attention to more serious matters.

Patrick sips his coffee and then begins. "Thanks for meeting us, you guys. We've got a hell of a case we're dealing with tonight and we're going to need all the help we can get."

Father Mass speaks to me. "Patrick's filled me in on what's been going on over at the historical society and how you think this Xander the Doll has been causing trouble for a lot of people." He scratches at his night's growth of beard and continues. "I must say that I'm not altogether convinced that a doll is the reason for car accidents, house fires, and motorcycle crashes, but then again, Kendall, I've experienced a lot with your group, so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt."

"Me too," Loreen says. "Besides, I've heard the tale of this doll and the sad ending of the slave nanny who made him. I believe she was lynched. My senses are telling me that you need to focus your energies on her history."

"I have," I say. "Well, a little bit. She was rumored to be heavily involved in voodoo, and I'm just so afraid of even Googling information on that." Or my mother finding out that I was looking it up.

"It's okay to research, Kendall," Patrick says firmly. "Knowledge is power."

"Here y'all go," the waitress sings out as she balances our breakfast dishes up her left arm. She doles out the meals, refreshes the coffee, and leaves us to our conversation.

I dig into my smoked Gouda omelet like I've never seen food before, letting the steaming egg and cheese warm my insides.

"Father Mass?" I ask with my mouth impolitely full. "What do you know about voodoo? Do they, like, make you study other religions and stuff in seminary?"

He nods as he's sipping his coffee and then sets the cup down. "I've studied practically every known religion in the world."

"Tell us what you know."

Father Mass puts his elbows on the table. "From what you've told me, the slave woman, Althea, was from the West Indies, or as you know it today, Haiti. So more than likely, she practiced Haitian vodoun, which is based on the merging of the practices and beliefs of West African people's Arawakan religion and the practices of Roman Catholic Christianity. See, all of these African slaves were brought to Haiti in the sixteenth century along with their traditional beliefs. However, they were forced to convert to the religion of their owners."

"No freedom of religion back then," I quip.

He continues. "Vodouisants believe in one Supreme Being, called Bon-Dye, but they also worship several lesser spirits that they call the loa." He gestures with his hands. "They're actually quite spiritual in their belief and had to work in a lot of the elements from Catholicism in order to hide their religion from their owners. The Bon-Dye is unreachable, so they use the
loa
as their way to speak to their Supreme Being. Now, the
loa
are related to the African gods they left behind and may be spirits of natural phenomena—wind, fire, water—or of their dead ancestors."

"Yikes, it seems like a complicated religion." Me, I prefer the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the Book of Common Prayer, a little hymn singing, and a whole lot of faith and prayer. But to each his own. Who am I to say who's right and who's wrong?

"Where do things like voodoo dolls come into play?" Patrick asks. "I mean, is it possible that Xander the Doll is a voodoo doll that was charmed in some way by Althea?"

"Loreen and I have talked about this," Father Mass says. "In my studies, I've read that the
loa
have the power to make their presence known and can temporarily displace the astral body of a living person and occupy his or her physical body; effectively, a possession by the
loa.
Priests and priestesses preside over ceremonies of this nature."

Loreen takes over. "My theory is that Althea, a
manbo,
or priestess, conducted a ceremony of some sort that possessed Xander the Doll. That's why your friends who disrespected him have had bad things happen to them."

"I don't know about that, Loreen," Father Mass says. "It's not in my nature to believe in gods other than my own, but I do believe in evil entities out there."

"As do I," she says. She adds, "Vodoun, as Mass has explained, is a very devout religion. It's not the Satan worshiping portrayed in movies. A lot of the ceremonies are about protection of their family and loved ones."

"Xander the Doll hasn't been protecting anyone," I say through gritted teeth.

"That's just it," Loreen says. "He
may
be protecting someone and we just don't know it. There may be more to it than you know. If there's a way to connect with the spirit of this slave woman..."

"Do we know where she's buried?" Patrick asks.

I shake my head.

"I guess we start with the house, then," he tells me. "I wonder if we can get an up-close-and-personal interview with Xander. Maybe do some EVP work with him or let you try out your psychometry?"