The Supernaturals (27 page)

“Professor, we get the gist. You can set up the details with Mr. Dalton later.”

Kennedy stared at Peterson for the longest time. Then he turned and sat in his chair. He looked from Kelly Delaphoy to Julie Reilly and fixed them with his blue eyes.

“This man is going to get people hurt,” he said.

Peterson didn’t say anything; he only smiled and raised his brows at Kennedy’s statement.

“If we rush in there without a plan, that house will literally chew us to pieces. This asshole doesn’t even believe the damn place is haunted. He thinks it’s nothing more than a pretty summer retreat for rich idiots like himself.”

“Lionel, it seems you’re upsetting a man we have just paid an awful lot of money to. May I suggest a little leeway here?” Julie said. She tapped her cell phone, on the table in front of her. Peterson didn’t begin to fathom the power she herself wielded at the network.

“When you have concrete plans, I’ll go over them with Harris. Until then, I’ll be in my office.” Peterson stood, buttoned his suit jacket and strode from the conference room.

“Thank you,” Gabriel said as he stood. “He didn’t need to be here for this, anyway. George, could you close the blinds please? Ms. Reilly, will you do the same on your side?”

They drew the blinds and Kennedy turned off the overhead lights. He walked over to Jennifer, who still sat quietly at the window, even though her view of the outside world had been cut off by the closing of the blinds. Her eyes were still fixed on the same spot. “Let me say this to you, and you may research it if you wish, but Dr. Tilden is the most brilliant anthropologist in the United States, if not the entire world.”

All eyes sought out Jennifer in the semi-darkness. She lowered her head, turning her gaze to her hands where they rested in her lap. When Kennedy placed a gentle hand on her small shoulder, she looked up for the first time.

“Jennifer Tilden is why I sought out paranormal research. She came to me as a patient, and I’ll be betraying no confidential aspects of her case that she would not care to share. As a matter of fact, she really doesn’t care one way or another.”

“What is wrong with her, Professor Gabe?” Leonard asked.

Kennedy kneeled beside her and pried one of her hands free, holding it in his own. In the darkness, none of the others could see the gentleness that came to Gabriel’s face as he touched her.

“Jenny is quite insane.”

“Really?” Cordero said mockingly.

Kennedy glanced over. “And I would expect anyone but you to have something smart to say about her circumstance, George.”

Cordero tried to smile, shifting to cover his embarrassment.

“How are you doing in there, Jenny?” Kennedy asked.

Jennifer didn’t answer, but she did use her free hand to brush away some hair that had fallen into her face. She also squeezed Gabriel’s hand a little tighter.

“We need Jenny for what we have to do in Summer Place. She will be invaluable as we try and seek out what it is we’re dealing with.” He looked up at the men and women sitting around the table. “Jennifer and her special friend will be able to talk to that house and what inhabits it.”

“You’ll have to explain that, Gabe,” Lonetree said.

Kennedy turned back to the anthropologist. “Jenny, I want you to relax. You’re here with me, so
he
won’t be mean to you.”

Cordero, perhaps thinking Gabriel was referring to him, scrunched down in his seat just a little more.

“He’s not angry, he just wants to know why I’m not singing,” she said without looking up.

Jason and Harris stood so that they could hear better. Julie was watching Kennedy more than the small woman he knelt with, and Kelly Delaphoy was writing furiously on her notepad.

“If you sing, will he let you speak to us without interfering?”

Jennifer looked up at Kennedy and tilted her head to the left, as if she were listening to a far off voice. She almost smiled, and then she looked over at Leonard Sickles, who sat further back in his chair.

“Hey, boy, whiskey and water with lots of ice.”

Jason Sanborn’s pipe fell from his mouth. Kelly’s pencil snapped its point off against the paper. Julie Reilly stared in stunned silence, and the others—Harris Dalton included—stood suddenly.

The voice that had come out of Jennifer Tilden’s small mouth was male.

Leonard looked just as shocked, but infuriated even more.

“Who you callin’ boy, bitch?” The words didn’t come out with as much bravado as he would have liked.

“That’s not her, Leonard, and you will damn well apologize when she wakes up,” Kennedy said. He looked sternly at Sickles, who only stared wide-eyed at Jennifer.

“We don’t call a black man ‘boy.’ Not here, not anymore, Bobby Lee.”

“Ah, you know I didn’t mean nothin’ by it,” the male voice said. This time Jenny looked directly at Sickles. The male voice had a thick New York accent. “Hell, most of my friends are Negros, you know that.”

“Forget it. I can see you’ve backed out of our deal,” Kennedy said. He released Jenny’s hand and stood, then lifted her chin up toward him.

“Look man, you left this poor girl alone for years. What was I supposed to do, abandon her like you did?”

“We’ll get into that later, Bobby Lee. If Jenny sings for you, will you let her be for the next few hours, maybe even let her have a full night’s sleep?”

“She’s gonna sing, Kennedy, you can bet your ass on that. And as far as leaving her alone, well you can just kiss my—”

Gabriel reached into his coat pocket with his free hand and brought out a small syringe, holding it where she could see it. He still held Jenny’s chin.

“What the hell you gonna’ do with that?” Jenny’s male voice was starting to sound strained.

“I’m going to put her out for more days than you would care to know about. Now, if she sings, will you leave her be for the next twenty-four hours so she can rest?”

“She sings first—that’s the deal.”

“She sings first.”

Kennedy stood over Jenny and waited, keeping the syringe in the woman’s sight.

“Professor, is this dangerous to the girl?” Harris Dalton asked. He slowly lowered himself into his chair at the head of the conference table.

Kennedy shrugged. “Jennifer has nothing to lose here. She’s bordering on exhaustion and her system is close to shutting down. If she had stayed on the streets another month she would have died from malnutrition or sleep deprivation. As it stands, we may not be able to use her—and her friend—if she can’t rest. Without Jennifer, this project will be for nothing. I need her, and to put it frankly, she needs Summer Place.”

Before Harris could voice further concerns, the anthropology professor slowly stood. With her eyes closed, she walked over to where John Lonetree was sitting and eased onto his lap. If he was surprised by her actions, he didn’t show it. The temperature in the room felt like it dropped at least ten degrees. Julie folded her arms across her chest for warmth.

The rest of them stared, watching Jennifer as she looked deep into John Lonetree’s eyes. Jason glanced over at Kelly, and she exhaled a breath that produced vapor—the temperature in the conference room was dropping even more than they had realized.

Gabriel swallowed. He had seen all of this before. He had seen it just three weeks before the incident at Summer Place, and his guilt at not helping Jennifer was something that he regretted even more than the disaster of that night seven years before. He had left her after she had sought out his help, and he was miserable for it. Still, the fact of what he was about to witness never failed to scare the hell out of him. A case study would show that Jenny exhibited a classic case of split personality, but he knew that diagnosis to be the easy way out. She had a split personality, all right, but it was because she had someone else inside of her—not unlike a haunted house, Jenny herself was being haunted, by Bobby Lee McKinnon.

As they all watched with rapt fascination, Jenny slowly placed her arms around the big man’s neck and stared deeply into his eyes, as if she were begging John’s forgiveness for something she was about to do. John would never see it that way; when Jenny opened her mouth, John Lonetree’s world changed forever.

In 1958, the prodigious record producer Phil Spector, before his more powerful days behind the glass directing the talents of most of the early rock n’ roll stars of the fifties and early sixties, had been a part of a singing group The Teddy Bears. This small group had one song that went straight to the top of the Billboard Top 100:
To Know Him Is To Love Him.
It was this slow and melodic song that came out of Jenny’s mouth as she stared into Lonetree’s brown eyes. Phil Spector, Gabriel would later explain, had been a writing partner of one Bobby Lee McKinnon.

“To know, know, know him…is to love, love, love him—just…to see him smile…makes my life worthwhile.” Jenny took a breath and leaned closer, her eyes never leaving John’s. It was if everyone in the room was seeing Jennifer relax for the first time, as if she were safe for the first time in years. She took a small breath, her voice beautiful and haunted at the same time. Harris Dalton, who knew the song, swallowed and then slowly stood from his chair as he watched the scene play out before him. The room was becoming ever colder. “Yes, to know, know, know him—is to love, love, love him—yes, I do—yes, I do—yes I do—”

“My god,” Jason Sanborn said aloud.

Leonard Sickles was also wide-eyed. He slowly pushed his chair back and almost fell, trying to get as far away from John and Jennifer as he could while still looking macho. The voice coming from the small, woman was perfect, the highs and lows of the song drew in her listeners like a memory from youth.

Jason Sanborn was remembering being rejected by the girl of his dreams, and Harris Dalton was being transported to a triumph at the drive in movie theater thirty-five years before. But it was John Lonetree who was left in the moment, staring into Jennifer’s eyes and feeling like he was drowning, and not minding it one bit. His left hand slowly rose and slid up her back, caressing her as she sang.

For exactly two minutes and twenty-two seconds, she sang only to John Lonetree and no one moved. Then she smiled at him with eyes that finally had her own light shining through them, and she slowly lay her head upon John’s chest. She sobbed a moment, and then passed out.

Kennedy leaned over and smiled at his old friend, and then nodded and mouthed the word “thanks.” Then he straightened and stood over John, who still held Jennifer while she slept.

“Bobby Lee McKinnon, are you there?” Gabriel asked. Leonard Sickles edged further away from the haunted woman.

Suddenly the blinds shifted as an internal wind hit the room, raising the temperature as if someone had opened a door to a summer Arizona day. There was a loud moan that seemed to sound from every corner of the room. Then as suddenly as it started, the wind died and the room’s temperature returned to normal. A gunshot fired loudly and they all jumped as one. Then there was nothing.

“He’s gone,” George Cordero said from his seat directly across from Lonetree. He hadn’t moved since the show had started. Unlike the others, he hadn’t been transported down memory lane. He had been living the last minute of Bobby Lee McKinnon’s life as he was dragged from his bed and shot in the back of the head by the Mafioso he had been in financial debt to. It had been a horrible vision and George had even felt the bullet penetrate his head. He wasn’t frightened; it was something he lived with most every day of his life. But it was never easy living the final, terrifying moments leading up to someone’s death, and Bobby Lee’s had not been a good way to go.

“Jesus Christ, Man!” Leonard said from his standing position. “What the fuck!”

“Gabriel, you know for a fact this woman is insane, don’t you?” George said, ignoring Sickles’ protests. The others around the table slowly realized that perhaps they hadn’t witnessed the haunting of an individual, but the torn and fractured mind of a woman lost to the real world.

“Obviously, she has to be,” Harris Dalton added. He slowly sank back into his seat.

No one saw the angry look that came into John Lonetree’s face as he slowly stood, Jennifer’s limp, light body cradled in his massive arms. He walked over to a couch and gently laid her down. Her hand wouldn’t let him go until he eased it from his neck. He removed his jacket and laid it over her still form.

“I don’t mean she’s insane alone,” George said. “I mean whatever is inside her head, he’s also insane, and he made this woman that way. He’s angry he was murdered.” He looked at Gabriel. “How did Bobby Lee latch onto her, Gabe?”

“She went to study a small case of an apartment haunting in 1999. She went thinking it was routine, but when she left that small place in New York, she didn’t leave alone. This trip to Summer Place is not only for our benefit, but hers. Bobby Lee, whether he knows it or not, is going to be a link.”

“A link?” Jason asked.

Kennedy smiled and looked from face to face. “Yes, Mr. Sanborn, Jennifer and Bobby are our link to the other side.”

For the first time, Harris Dalton and the others realized this trip to Summer Place may not have been the joke everyone outside of this room was thinking it would be.

Professor Gabriel Kennedy looked at the team he had assembled and realized it was a small army indeed preparing for battle in a house he knew to be a gateway to something few people on earth understood. All he knew was that the force the house held inside of its rotten bowels was something from a place that scared the hell out of him. And, worse...