Cemetery Tours (34 page)

Kate shook her head.
  “My brother’s asleep on the couch and he’s had a... really stressful day.”  She didn’t feel like going into detail.  

“Okay, then let’s go down to the car.
  I don’t want to make a racket and disturb the neighbors.”

“Okay.
  Brink, follow us to Luke’s car,” Kate announced, feeling sort of silly.  She didn’t even know if Brink was around, though she was fairly certain that he hadn’t left her side all evening.       

Once they were inside the car, they shut the doors and turned on the Spirit Box.
  The roar of the static and sweeping radio stations seemed even louder inside the tightly enclosed space.  Kate fought the desire to cover her ears as she asked, “Brink?  Can you hear me?” 

“
Yes.
”

“What happened?”
 

“
Michael... gone
.”  Kate felt the already cold knot in the pit of her stomach tighten as a a whole new wave of fear and concern washed over her.

“Where did he go, Brink?”
 

“
Don’t know... taken
.”

“Taken?”
  Kate asked.  She was suddenly so terrified that she barely noticed Luke furrow his brow.  “Who would take him?  Did you recognize him?”  

“
No.
”
 

“I think I know,” Luke announced, switching off the SB7.
  “Buckle up.”  In the blink of an eye, his keys were in the ignition and the Ferrari revved to life.  Seconds later, they were tearing out of the parking lot and speeding toward the highway at almost ninety miles an hour.  Kate stared at him, waiting for some sort of explanation.  “After this morning, I did some research.  Turns out our friend Pastor Cannon was supposed to be the officiant at Grace Bledsoe’s wedding which, as we all know, didn’t exactly go down the way it was supposed to - ”

“Wait, I don’t understand.
  What does that have to do with Michael?”

“I’m not done.
  Before he became the Pastor at Calvary Hill, Cannon was a Reverend at a little church in Oklahoma.  During his five years there, two members of his congregation committed suicide and his son was killed in some sort of accident.  Then he gets to Calvary Hill and the bride of a wedding he’s supposed to perform ends up murdered.”

“So does Daniel Ford.”

“And so does Daniel Ford,” Luke repeated.  “That makes five unnatural deaths under this guy’s watch.  And these are tiny congregations.  It’s not like a mass random sampling where x number of people will be predicted to die prematurely.”

“You think he did it?” Luke didn’t answer right away.
 

“Michael was taken for a reason,” he finally said.
  “I mean, it is possible that this was just a random abduction, but think about it.  Michael isn’t a cute girl.  He’s not a kid.  He’s not just another faceless person on the street.  He’s a guy who can talk to dead people.  Now, I’m not saying that Cannon is responsible for all those deaths.  But if he was and Michael comes around telling him about his little talent - ”

“Then Michael becomes a liability,” Kate finished Luke’s train of thought.
 

“I was going to say a ‘threat,’ but yeah, pretty much.”

“Oh my God, we’ve got to hurry.”  Kate had long surpassed full out panic mode.  All that mattered now was getting to Michael.  “Where do you think Cannon would take him?”

“I have no idea.
  But I’m going to start at the church.  Maybe someone will be there.”

“At this time of night?”
 

“At the church I grew up in, there always seemed to be someone working late.
  I snuck in once, back when I first started investigating.  We have a columbarium in our courtyard where a lot of parishioners are buried and I was hoping I could capture some EVPs.  I wasn’t  there five minutes before one of our office ladies found me and kicked me out.” 

“Do you think whoever’s there will know where Cannon is?”

“No, but they might be able to give us some idea of where he’s gone.”  

As he spoke, Kate realized that their entire rescue mission was, to put it lightly, insane.
  If Luke was right and they were chasing down a
murderer
, just what in the world were they going to do about it?  Luke was a hot TV star and she was an interior decorator.  Neither of them was even remotely qualified to track down a killer.  Luke might have a slight advantage because he was really buff, but all of the criminals he’d encountered on his television show were, well, dead.  

“Maybe we should call the police,” she said.

“What are the police going to do?”

“I don’t know.
  If we tell them that we suspect foul play, they might be able to conduct a more thorough investigation of the scene, file a missing person’s report, get a more accurate search going...”

“Call them if it will make you feel better.
  Just make sure they don’t need you around for questioning.”  

He had a point.
  How were they supposed to explain to the police that their friend who could see ghosts had been taken by someone that they thought wanted him dead for that very reason?  They wouldn’t believe the first part, let alone the second.  And neither Kate nor Luke would ever convince them to engage in a wild goose chase all the way to Waxahachie.  Maybe they could somehow alert the police there.  Ask them to keep an eye out.  

By that point, they were flying down the highway.
  At the rate they were going, they’d make it to Waxahachie in a little under thirty minutes as long as they didn’t hit traffic.  Normally, Kate would have been petrified of going so fast, but at the moment, her concern for Michael outweighed her intense fear of crashing on the highway.  Fortunately, there weren’t too many cars out (it was
Sunday
night, after all).  That, and she couldn’t help but feel that this wasn’t Luke’s first time driving at the reckless speed of 94 MPH.  She just hoped they were going the right way.     

“If this is Cannon, how do you think he found out where Michael lived?” she asked.
 

“He probably followed us.”

“This morning?”  Of course.  When else would he have followed them?  

“Yeah.”

“But that’s impossible.  We would have noticed.” 

“Not necessarily.
  He probably stayed a few cars back, pulled over when we stopped for lunch, and started tracking us again when we left,” Luke replied grimly.  

“So you think Cannon’s been watching him all day?”

“Probably,” Luke answered.  Kate felt sick.  “You’d be amazed at what some people are capable of.  One of the reasons I stopped talking about our film locations on social media is because we’ve had some legitimately crazy fans track us down.  Turns out it is really easy to stalk in this day and age.”  

“Great,” Kate murmured.

“Hey, good news for us,” Luke told her.  “If some lunatic priest from Nowhere, Oklahoma can find Michael in one of the biggest cities in the nation, then you and I should have no problem tracking him down in the boonies.”  

~*~

Less than thirty minutes later, Luke and Kate pulled into the parking lot of Calvary Hill.  With no street lights overhead, Kate could barely see through the pitch darkness.  Only a single light from one of the windows inside the church’s main building provided any sort of illumination.  

“Come on.”
  Luke didn’t need to tell her twice.  Together, they ran up the steps to the chapel.  The door, as expected, was locked, so Luke reached into his wallet and pulled out a credit card.  

“You know that trick?” Kate asked.
 

“I told you, Babe, I’ve picked a lot of locks,” Luke reminded her as he knelt down and slid the credit card through the crack between the doors.
  Seconds later, the lock clicked and Luke gave the door a slight push.  It opened with a loud
creak
.  “Oops,” Luke whispered.  Kate grabbed his shoulder.

“Wait a minute, what’s our plan?”
 

“What do you mean?”

“Are we just going to barge in and demand to know where Michael is or are we trying to stay quiet and sneak up on him?” 

“Well, I think any and all chances of staying discreet sailed with this door, so I guess we’ll go with the first one.”
 

“But what if he has a gun?
  Or a knife?  We’re completely unarmed.”

“Oh no we’re not,” Luke flexed his muscles.
  “You asked me what I do in my spare time?  I work out.  And not just because it makes cute girls weak at the knees.  I’ve met a lot of shady characters over the years and I’ve learned you never know when you’re going to need to defend yourself.  But, if he does come after us with some kind of weapon, I’ve got this.”  He held up his keys to reveal a Swiss army knife keychain.  “But Kate, listen to me.  If anything happens, you get out of here.  You turn, you run, and you don’t look back, you understand?”  Kate wanted to argue that she would stay and help him, but given her limited experience in physical confrontations, she knew she’d be about as helpful as a caterpillar in an actual fight.  She might even make things worse if she tried to stay.  

“Yeah, I understand,” she consented.
 

“Good.
  Now, let’s go find Mikey.”

When Michael woke up for the second time, he was sitting upright in the dark.
  He blinked a few times, wondering briefly if he’d gone blind, before his eyes began to adjust.  Everything hurt just as badly as it had before, and on top of that, his back was pressed against something so hard it sent little sparks of pain shooting through his vertebrae.  Everything was blurry and distorted and he was so dizzy that he was sure the world had spun right off its axis and was freewheeling through space.  He closed his eyes, rested his head back against whatever was behind him, and took several deep breaths.    

Slowly, the misery began to subside and his senses began to pick up on little things that previously, had taken a backseat to the pain and nausea.
  Things like the slight breeze toying with his hair, the crickets chirping around him, and the tickling of grass against his ankles.  He was outside... but where?  

He opened his eyes again and tried with all his might to make them focus.
  It was difficult enough to see in the dark without the blurred vision and shaky disposition.  Instead of depending on what little he could see, he thought about what his senses weren’t picking up.  There was no sound of passing cars or horns blaring through the night.  That meant he wasn’t close to a highway, or any road for that matter.  The total absence of any source of artificial light was even more unnerving. 

The only good news was he could neither see nor hear whoever had dragged him out there.
  He hoped that their mission had been fulfilled by leaving him out in the middle of the field.  He didn’t want to think about what they had in store for him should they return.  Michael didn’t want to take any chances.  If they were coming back, he didn’t want to be there when they arrived.            

He needed to get out of there.
  His mind was clear enough so that he thought he’d be able to stand without falling over.  But try as he might, he couldn’t seem to figure out how to move his arms.  A few moments later, he registered that his hands were stuck, bound together, behind the wooden pillar.        

“Oh, this is not good,” he muttered, trying to wriggle his wrists free from whatever his captors had used to tie them together.
  It didn’t feel like rope or string.  It felt more like some sort of plastic, but for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out what that might be.  

He constricted his hand as tight as he could and tried to slip it through the plastic shackle.
  For a split second, he thought he might be making progress.  He could feel the plastic ring around the heel of his hand.  But that was as far as the binding would allow him to go.  He pulled harder, so hard that he felt the sharp edge of the band digging into his skin.  Moments later, his fingers were covered in a hot, sticky liquid.  The sting of the fresh cut made him flinch.