The Ghoul Next Door (7 page)

I shook my head vigorously.

Gilley nodded his head just as vigorously.

We did that back and forth with each other until we were both dizzy. “I’m
not
talking to her!” I whispered.

“She won’t quit calling!” he whispered back.

“Tell her I’ve left the country again.”

Gilley leveled his eyes at me. “I’m
sure
she’ll believe
that
.”

“I’m not talking to her, Gil.”

Gilley put the phone back to his ear. “Kendra? Sorry about that. Listen, M.J.’s feeling a little indisposed at the moment and she can’t come to the phone. I’ll have her call you back just as soon as she’s feeling better, okay?”

I breathed a huge sigh of relief as Gil hung up the phone. “Thanks, honey.”

Gil reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a nail file. As he inspected his nails, he said, “Spill it.”

I told him about what’d happened at the park and he stopped filing the second I said that I’d made contact with Bethany. His eyes got wider the closer I got to the end. “Did they record everything you said?” he asked me. I couldn’t tell whether he seemed panicked or excited.

“I think so.”

“This could either be really good for our business or really bad,” he told me.

I sat down in one of the wing chairs that made up our lobby’s seating area. “They might not even air it,” I said.

Gil cocked an eyebrow. “That reporter has called me three times in an hour, M.J. I doubt she’ll just let it go.”

I tapped my knee thoughtfully for a minute. “You know what bothers me?”

“That you picked that blouse to go with those jeans?” Gil said. “Or that you have no sense of style when it comes to handbags?”

I looked down at my perfectly functional brown pocketbook. “What’s wrong with my handbag?”

“You got it at a”—Gil paused while he made a choking sound—“discount retailer six years ago.”

I rolled my eyes. “Who died and made
you Tim Gunn?”

Gil snapped his fingers. “Make it work!”

“
Any
way, what bothers me is something Bethany said.”

“The dead girl?”

I nodded. “She said that on the night she died, she heard footsteps behind her, but when she turned to look, there was no one there.”

Gil’s brow shot up. “Another ghost?”

“Yeah. But, Gil, when I was connecting with her spirit, I didn’t sense anyone else in the ether.”

Gil shrugged. “Maybe he or she didn’t feel like showing themselves.”

I agreed but something else was actually bothering me. “You know what’s even weirder?”

“The fact that you won’t wear a belt even though
clearly
that’s the big thing missing from that outfit and the only way that blouse could possibly work with those jeans?”

“Will you leave off my wardrobe?” I snapped.

“Sugar, now that we’re back in the States, you need some help getting your closet in order. I mean, Molly Ringwald called. She’d like her wardrobe from the eighties back.”

“Gil,” I growled.

“Sorry. Continue. And then let’s go shopping.”

I inhaled deeply and let it out sloooow. “The weird thing is that Courtney said her brother heard disembodied footsteps following him everywhere he went. And I can’t afford a new wardrobe.”

“This is New England,” Gil replied with a wave of his hands. “The only place more haunted is Europe. There’re disembodied footsteps all over the place. And you can afford to go shopping because I’ve spent all the time I wasn’t talking to Kendra booking you appointments.”

My eyes bugged. “You’ve already booked me some appointments?”

Gil leaned over to look at his computer screen. “Thirty, to be exact. And there’re twenty more in my in-box that I haven’t had a chance to get to yet.”

My mouth fell open.
“Thirty?”

Gil rolled his eyes. “Chill out, M.J. They’re not all on the same day. In fact, I’ve scheduled you the next ten days off, giving you plenty of time to talk yourself into doing them again.”

“How did we already get thirty appointments on the books?”

“I sent out an e-mail to all of your old clients. They’re replying in droves.”

I blinked furiously for several seconds, crunching some numbers and trying to calculate how much extra cash that’d be.

“Seventy-five hundred bucks, honey,” Gil said, as if reading my mind. I squinted at him. I’d come up with a different, lower, figure. “I gave you a fifty-dollar raise,” Gilley added. “You’re a TV star now. And you can command it.”

I groaned. “What’s my schedule so far?” I worried that Gil would try to pack them in.

He clicked his mouse and pivoted the screen toward me. “You have twelve a week, honey. Four readings a day, three days a week. A bit like the old days.”

I used to read for clients Monday through Thursday, but my maximum then was six a day with a three-day weekend. It was crazy intense and it used to drain the life right out of me. I saw that Gil had set my new schedule up for Monday through Wednesday, with readings scheduled every fifty minutes from noon to four with ten-minute breaks in between. “You’ll have to eat lunch before you show up for work, but I thought this would work for you.”

I nodded. It’d work well, I thought. “Okay,” I said at last. “Just remember, no matter what the response is, don’t book me beyond the end of August and no more than twelve readings a week.”

Gil saluted. “Now, can we go shopping?”

I eyed my watch. It wasn’t even noon. “What about him?” I asked, nodding toward the door to my office, where we could hear laughter. Heath must be having a good time with his client.

“He’ll be fine,” Gil said, getting up to come around and grab my elbow. “He’s got two more clients after this, and lots of time in between. He can handle it.”

With that, we were out the door.

•   •   •

Three hours later I was crying uncle. Loaded down with far too many shopping bags and a credit card that was almost too hot to hold, I tried to get Gil to listen to reason. “My feet hurt, I’m hungry, tired, and I still have to go home and change before we meet Luke and Courtney!” (Okay, so maybe my argument wasn’t exactly laden with “reason.”)

“Just one more stop,” Gil called over his shoulder as I shuffled along behind him.

I glared hard at his back. He’d been saying that for the past three stores. “Gil,” I whined. “Come on!”

But he wasn’t listening. He was scooting into yet another store. I thought about leaving him, but he had the car keys. With a (huge) sigh I trudged into the store and almost came up short. All around me were racks and racks of gorgeous handbags. My eyes darted around until I spotted Gil, already talking the ear off one of the sales associates. As I headed toward him, two other associates saw my shopping bags, and when they blinked, I swear I saw dollar signs in their eyes.

I kept my head down and hurried over to Gil. “Try this on,” he said before I could even get a word out. In an instant the shopping bags were pulled out of my grip and a gorgeous black leather handbag with plenty of brass accents was draped over my shoulder. Gil stood back and tapped his finger to his lips. “Maybe,” he said.

“I like it,” said the salesgirl.

“It might be a little big,” Gil replied. “If it hits her too low or too wide, it makes her look hippy.”

“I like it,” Salesgirl said again.

“Try this one,” Gil suggested, plucking the handbag off my shoulder and replacing it with another equally beautiful bag.

“I like it,” Salesgirl repeated for the third time. Clearly she was a one-hit wonder.

“The first one was better,” Gil said. My opinion had stopped mattering four stores ago. So I just stood there stiffly as bag after bag was draped over my shoulder until finally Gil made the decision to go with the first one. I blinked wearily and lifted the price tag, nearly choking on the gasp that came with it. “Holy freakballs! Gilley! Four hundred and fifty dollars?!”

He stared at me like he couldn’t understand why I was so upset.

“Four
hundred
and fifty
dollars
!” I repeated . . . perhaps a little louder than I should’ve.

The confusion on Gil’s face lingered.

“Honey, the bag I came in with only cost me forty dollars!”

Gil pursed his lips and looked at me with disapproval. “Sugar,” he drawled. “This is Michael
Kors
, not Michael Kohl’s.”

“Should I ring that up?” Salesgirl asked Gil, even though
I
was the one holding the credit card.

“Yes, please,” Gil said, reaching for the card. I held on to it firmly and Gil and I had a tug-of-war in the shop for ten seconds before he poked me in the side and I let go.

Just when I was about to yell at him that I wasn’t buying a four-hundred-dollar anything, my cell rang. Looking down, I saw the call was from Heath. “Hey,” I said, still glaring furiously at Gil. “Did you get our note?”

“That you went shopping? Yeah, I got it. And Gil’s been texting me the whole time.”

“He’s been texting you?” I repeated. “What’s he been saying?”

Heath cleared his throat. “You wouldn’t like it.”

My narrowed eyes became slits, and I mouthed, “You’re dead!” to Gil. He shrugged nonchalantly and turned away.

“So, are you guys heading back soon?”

“Definitely. This is our last stop or I’m going to threaten to return everything we got. Did you want to try and grab dinner after we meet with Luke and Courtney?”

“Uh, sure, but that’s not why I’m calling.”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Gilley hand Salesgirl a belt before he twirled in a circle and began to head toward the clothing section. Trying to shift the phone to my shoulder while I picked up the bags, I asked, “Oh? What’s up?”

“You’re on TV.”

I dropped the phone. And the bags. Gil glanced over at me, smirked, then went back to sifting through the clothing. Grabbing the phone off the floor, I said, “Sorry—did you say we’re on TV?”

“No. I said
you’re
on TV. Did you do a reading for a reporter this afternoon about a girl who’d been murdered?”

I felt the blood drain from my face. “Son of a bitch!” I hissed.

“I take it that’s a no?”

I shook my head. “What
exactly
is happening on the broadcast?”

“Well, the reporter, Karen something—”

“Kendra,” I corrected, pinching the bridge of my nose with my fingers. “Kendra Knight.”

“Yeah, Kendra, she says that she had a, and I quote, ‘bizarre’ encounter with a woman named Mary Jane Holliday who claims to be a world-renowned psychic.”

“I never claimed any such thing!”

By now Gil had left the clothing rack and was making his way toward me—obviously sensing that something was wrong.

“Not my words, babe,” Heath said. “Hers.”

“Yeah, sorry. Okay, what else?”

“Well, she says that she thought at first that you were trying to pull some stunt on her to promote your show debuting on cable TV in a few weeks, but then she did some checking into your background and also what you said on camera. She replayed the tape a couple of times and says you seemed to have intimate knowledge of the murder of a woman named Bethany something that no one but the police or the girl’s family had knowledge of. And by that, she meant that there was a bottle of wine chilling in a bucket at the girl’s apartment, and that she had a cat named Sprinkles, but none of that was public knowledge.”

I didn’t say anything at first, wondering if there might be more, but Heath didn’t add anything, so I finally said, “Did it make me look really bad?”

Heath sort of chuckled. “Actually, I think you’ve converted a skeptical reporter into a believer. She said that at the moment where you started telling Bethany to look for the light, all of the charge was sucked right out of the battery of the camera and both she and her cameraman heard some sort of buzzing sound. She played that part of the audio back a couple of times and you can definitely hear something electric happening.”

“I crossed Bethany over,” I told Heath.

“I figured. Anyway, Kendra added that she’s reached out to you for further comment, but you haven’t returned her calls so far, and since this aired ten minutes ago, the office phone’s been ringing off the hook.”

“Well, that’s just great,” I grumbled.

“What’s happening?” Gilley asked.

I ignored him. “Don’t answer the phone,” I told Heath.

He chuckled. “Oh, I’m not touching it. But, Em, this could be good for you and the show. It’s great publicity at least.”

“Yeah, we’ll see. Listen, we’re heading back now, and all I need is a few minutes to change and we can head to the hospital.”

“Cool. I’ll be ready.”

I hung up with Heath and told Gil what’d happened. “The phone is ringing off the hook?” he asked, his eyes as shiny as Salesgirl’s.

“Don’t get too excited,” I told him. “Remember, you’re under strict orders not to overbook me.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Gil said. “Come on, let’s get you changed.”

“Thank God!” I said, picking up the bags and preparing to head out the door.

“Where’re you going?” Gil asked.

“Aren’t we leaving?”

He laughed and held up three blouses and two pairs of jeans. “Oh, honey, how you
do
entertain me! Now, go try these on. If I like any of them, you’ll wear them out of the store.”

We met up with Heath at my place a “mere” three hundred additional dollars later. The minute I walked into my condo, I headed to a drawer in my kitchen and pulled out a pair of scissors. Holding up my credit card so Gilley could see, I snipped it in half.

“You act like I don’t have the numbers, expiration date, and security code memorized,” he mocked.

I threw the two halves at him and stomped off to my room to change. I put on my favorite outfit from the ones Gil had selected for me, and inwardly I had to admit it was quite flattering—although I’d never let Gilley know it.

Heath whistled appreciatively when I came back out of the bedroom, and I couldn’t help smiling. Then he turned to Gil and said, “Nice.”

Gil rubbed his knuckles on his shirt. “What can I say? It’s a gift.”

I headed toward the door. “If you two are done bromancing each other, we need to get going.”

“Wait a sec,” Gil said, trotting over with two handfuls of thin magnets. “Let me put these in your new handbag just to be safe.”

As Gil was loading down my shiny new purse, I saw Heath stick a few magnets into his back pockets. And I noticed as Gil bent over that he’d packed a few in the pocket of the shirt he wore under his sweater.

“There,” Gilley said once he’d finished. “We can go now.”

We made it to the hospital in only twenty minutes, which was a miracle, given Boston’s notorious traffic jams. Gil parked the van in the parking structure and we headed down in the elevator and over to the main entrance. The hospital had several waiting rooms, and I realized I hadn’t asked Courtney which one to meet in. I texted Steven, and while we waited for him to respond, I grew impatient, and as I was about to call Courtney, I heard Steven’s voice call out to us. We turned and saw him wave us over. “We’re upstairs,” he said, and I couldn’t help noticing that he looked me up and down, and his eyes gave away his approval.

Heath took my hand, and I knew he’d seen it too.

Steven’s gaze shifted subtly to the move and he turned away and began to walk toward the elevator. We rode up in relative silence, but there was enough tension in the air to do most of the talking. Steven and Heath were silently bristling at each other, while I pretended we were all best buds and Gil seemed to be finding everyone’s reaction highly amusing.

Finally we reached the sixth floor and Steven led the way down the corridor to a door marked
PRIVATE
.

When we got through the door, I saw Courtney sitting with a young man in his early twenties with sandy blond hair and sharp-angled features that were quite handsome, but deep blue circles under his gray eyes.

I smiled to reassure him as Courtney stood and introduced us to her brother. “Hi, Luke,” I said, reaching out to shake his hand. “We’re here to help.”

His lips parted in a weary smile, but he seemed to be so exhausted that I doubted it was all sinking in. We took our seats at the small table set up in the room—which was obviously a lunch or conference room of some type—and I took control of the meeting. “Your sister has told us a little about what’s been happening, but we’d like to hear from you about this mysterious spirit that’s been giving you trouble,” I said to him.

Luke nodded. “Where do you want me to start?”

“At the beginning,” I said. “When did you first notice things weren’t quite right?”

Luke sighed wearily. His head hung low and his shoulders were slumped. I wondered when was the last time he’d gotten a decent night’s rest. “I think it started at the beginning of the semester,” he said. “I came home one day from class and the stuff in my house was all out of whack.”

“Out of whack?” Heath asked. He was taking notes, but he almost needn’t have bothered—Gil was recording the session on his phone.

“Yeah, it was crazy,” Luke told him. “I came home and it was like somebody had rearranged all the furniture. The couch was on the opposite wall, and my recliner was next to the kitchen facing away from the TV—totally not the way I’d left it. And the kitchen was off too. All my glasses and plates were in one cabinet together, instead of spread out in different cabinets like I’d had ’em before.”

“Anything else out of place?” Heath asked.

Luke was staring at the tabletop, his expression troubled. “Yeah,” he said softly, almost as if he didn’t want to tell us. “It was so crazy, though. . . .”

“Tell us,” I said gently. He pulled his gaze up to mine and I smiled at him encouragingly.

Luke licked his lips and said, “At first I thought somebody had broken in, you know? I mean what the freak, right? So I sort of went around the house real quick looking for all the expensive stuff like my Xbox and my TVs and stuff. They were all still there, but when I went into the bedroom . . . it . . . there . . .” Luke paused. He didn’t seem to know what words to use.

“What?” I prodded. “What did you see, Luke?”

He sighed again and rubbed his hand over his short hair. “My bed was on the opposite wall and so was the nightstand—right under the window. The light was off, but it was still pretty light out and the sun was hitting the bedspread, which was the first weird thing I noticed. I used to never make my bed. I mean, I figured that I’d just get right back in it every night, so why make it up, you know?”

I nodded, hoping to draw the rest out of him. I saw that his hands were trembling slightly. Whatever it was he’d seen that day in his bedroom had seriously shaken him.

“Anyway, so I get to the bedroom door and I’m just standing there, trying to figure all this out, and I see the bed is made up, like, the cover is even pulled up over the pillow, but on the bed there’s this . . .” Luke paused again to make a motion with his hands to convey that he’d seen something big there. “There’s this indentation,” he said at last. “Like, if a person were lying on the bed it would make an impression in the mattress, you know?”

Heath and I exchanged a look. That was a new one for us, but not completely unheard-of. “What did you do?” I asked when he didn’t go on.

He shook his head. “At first I just stood there. I mean, I couldn’t believe I was seeing what I was seeing, and then I sort of freaked out and got out of there. I mean, I swear I
heard
someone on the bed, like, sleeping—you know, how people breathe real deep when they’re asleep?”

Heath, Gilley, and I all nodded.

“It sounded like
that
.”

“What happened after that?” I asked.

Luke shrugged. “Eventually I went back home and whatever had been in my room was gone, but the furniture and the stuff was still out of whack. I put it back the way I had it, but then a couple of days later when I came home from my study group, it’d been all turned around again. I was starting to freak out, wondering if someone was punking me, you know?”

“You thought someone might be trying to play a trick on you?” I said. I always marveled at how hard people worked to deny what they saw with their own eyes.

“Yeah,” Luke said with another shrug. “I didn’t know if one of my buddies was playing me or something.”

“Did you confront your friends?” Heath asked.

“I did. They all denied it. Then I called the landlord and I asked if he’d had the locks changed before I leased the place. I mean, I couldn’t explain how anybody was getting in. All the windows and doors were locked up tight, and as far as I knew, I had the only key.”

“How long had you lived there?” I asked him.

Luke rubbed his eyes. “Just a few weeks,” he told me.

“Had the landlord changed the locks?” Gil asked.

Luke shrugged. “Dunno,” he said. “He wasn’t around when I called, so I left him a message and he never got back to me, which made me wonder if maybe he was playing with me or something.”

“Tell me when you decided it wasn’t anybody trying to trick on you,” I said.

Luke shifted in his chair. “I think it was maybe a week later. I came home from class and my furniture was all out of whack again, and it was really starting to freak me out. I didn’t go into the bedroom because I couldn’t take seeing that thing on the bed again, so I just grabbed a blanket and went to sleep on the couch. That night I had this really intense dream. More of a nightmare really. I mean, it was one of those dreams that feels so real and so crazy that you just want to wake up, but I couldn’t. I was having a hard time moving, too. Like my arms and legs were made of lead. And then there was all this blood. . . .” Luke’s voice drifted off.

“Blood?” I said.

“Yeah,” he whispered, extending his arms out to look at them like he could still see the blood on them. “I was covered in it.”

Heath stopped writing and he looked up at me. His expression seemed to say, “Whoa. That’s bad.”

“Was there anybody else with you in the dream?” I asked Luke.

At first the young man nodded, but then he shifted to shaking his head. “Yes?” he said. “No? I don’t know. It felt like someone else was there, but I couldn’t see them because there was just so much blood.”

“I’m assuming you eventually woke up and saw that it was just a dream,” I said.

Luke shuddered. “I woke up,” he said softly. “But what I woke up to totally freaked me out.”

“What’d you see?” Gil asked.

Luke opened his mouth to speak, but it was a long moment before he found his voice. “There was this shadow,” he said. “It was like . . . on the wall, but not. It was sort of closer to me than the wall. The room was dark, but it wasn’t pitch-black, but that shadow was pitch-black. It was like this black hole that light couldn’t penetrate.”

“Did the shadow have a form?” I asked. I was very familiar with the kinds of shadow ghosts Luke was describing.

He nodded. “It looked like a guy. Like the outline of a guy.”

“How tall?” Heath asked.

“I don’t know . . . maybe five ten, five eleven?”

“Did it move?” I asked.

Luke shook his head. “No. I mean, it just hung there for about thirty seconds and then it vanished. It freaked me out. I stayed up the whole rest of the night with all the lights on and the TV at full blast.”

“What happened after that?” I asked.

Luke closed his eyes and hung his head even lower. Courtney put a gentle hand on his back. She looked pained by her brother’s recounting. “It got worse,” Luke said. “I started staying later and later at school, but the library closes at midnight and my last semester was crazy hard. I avoided going home and I called the landlord again, telling him I wanted out of the lease.”

I wondered if this landlord had had any other tenants complaining about the shadow in the house. “What’d he say?” I asked.

“He wouldn’t return my calls, but he did send me a certified letter letting me know that if I broke the lease, he’d sue me for the remainder of the rent.”

“Nice,” I said.

“Yeah, he’s a real asshole. Anyway, that dream with me covered in blood kept coming back and it got to where I couldn’t sleep at night. And then I couldn’t sleep during the day. And then I couldn’t sleep at all. I was like a zombie. I felt like I was going nuts and I was so twisted up I didn’t know if I was awake or dreaming. I stopped going to class, I stopped hanging out with my friends, I dropped out of life.”

“Then what happened?” Gilley asked, his expression completely captivated.

Luke stared at the tabletop and shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s all pretty fuzzy. My dreams got weirder and then I woke up at my sister’s house.”

Luke paused to take a drink of water before continuing. “I think I slept for three straight days and I started to feel like my old self again.”

“But it didn’t last,” Heath said.

Luke shook his head. “Nope. My sister and I were out on a walk down by the water when all of the sudden I felt the shadowman right behind me again. I just wanted to get away from him, you know? I took off and it followed me until I ran into the Stop & Shop. And then, it was like a miracle—he backed off. I realized that as long as I keep myself near a group of people, the shadowman can’t get inside my head.”

“But that’s hardly a solution,” his sister said, reaching out to squeeze his hand. “He’s been unable to function normally from sleep deprivation. He comes here and sleeps either in the waiting room or, if I can get him a bed, in one of the doctors’ lounges, but the sleep he’s able to get is never long enough or deep enough for him to become fully rested. I’m worried about the lasting effects from his lack of restorative sleep.”

The room fell silent and I felt everyone’s gaze land on me. I was deeply troubled by what Luke was telling me. I knew by experience that he was in fact being haunted, and he looked so worn down and exhausted that I felt strongly that the spook in question might be angling for a full-on possession.

Possessions are particularly tricky, because once that door’s been opened—once a spook has gotten “in,” so to speak—even if it’s exorcised, it is most likely to come back again and again until it all but destroys its host’s life.

“I’d like to set up an observation,” I said to the group.

“An observation?” Steven repeated.

I nodded but focused on Luke. “I want to see what happens when you try to sleep, Luke. With your permission, I’d like to set up some cameras to watch you overnight. And I’d like you to be alone during the time we’re observing you.”

“If you think it’ll help, I’m willing to try anything. I just want this thing to go away and for my life to go back to normal,” Luke said.

I pressed my lips together. I thought I owed it to Steven, Courtney, and Luke to be honest with them. “The truth is that I’m not sure we can help. Whatever is haunting Luke is focusing very hard on wearing him down. I don’t know yet what the ulterior motive is, but it’s trying to take him over. And if it does, then we’re not the experts to help him with that.”

“You’re talking about possession?” Courtney asked, her face turning pale.

“Yes.” I let everyone in the room take that in for a good long moment before continuing. Then, I focused on Luke again, who looked scared to death. “The good news is that I don’t think we’re at the point where you’ve been taken over, Luke. But I suspect we might be close. I want to observe you, tomorrow night if possible, and hopefully Heath, Gilley, and I will be able to identify what’s truly going on. Then we’ll consider our options.”