Dead Suite (5 page)

The door had been sealed off by Seattle PD. Sadie chewed her lip nervously. She didn’t
like to break in and she sure as hell didn’t want to end up in a jail cell. Somehow
she doubted she’d be released quickly once she revealed she was only obeying the wishes
of a ghost.

But a promise was a promise. Glancing around, she saw that the back of the house wasn’t
visible to the buildings on either side. May had mentioned a rock painted with yellow
daisies. It took Sadie a minute to find it in the overgrown garden. Whipping out a
pair of disposable gloves from her back pocket, Sadie retrieved the key, opened the
door, and then quickly closed the door behind her. The apartment was filthy and smelled
of rotten food and mildew. Sadie wasted no time going to the bedroom, which boasted
a saggy old mattress on the floor in the corner and a small lone window with tinfoil
pressed against it to keep light from entering. The closet held an impressive amount
of animal-print spandex and slinky dresses made from flammable-looking fluorescent
fabrics, but this wasn’t the time to pause and admire May’s choice in hooker attire.

Standing on tiptoe, Sadie retrieved the shoe box. She popped open the lid and searched
through a stack of photos and memorabilia to uncover a thick padded envelope that
contained a stack of cash and a couple pairs of small diamond-studded earrings. Sadie
pocketed the treasures before carefully placing the shoe box back in its location.

After locking up the suite, she returned the key to its hiding spot and hustled back
to her car. She had less than an hour to drop off the loot at WATS downtown and make
it to Maeva’s.

She was lucky enough to find parking right in front of the brown brick low-rise. The
only indication that she was at the right place was a small piece of paper taped to
the glass door with “WATS” handwritten on it. Sadie pushed the door open and looked
around. The space was cozy with a few round tables and folding chairs and a corner
station with tar-like coffee simmering on a burner. Sadie stood next to a credenza
littered with pamphlets that were free for the taking so that women coming in for
help could pick up brochures on various helpful courses offered around town, and there
were also pamphlets listing rehab centers as well as a sheet listing local shelters.
She randomly picked up a handful of brochures and shuffled them in her hands.

There were a couple older women who looked like they might be volunteers. One of them
got up from her chair and greeted Sadie.

“Can I help you?” asked the dark-skinned woman of about fifty.

“Do you work here?”

“I’m a volunteer. My name is Enid.” She looked Sadie up and down appraisingly, obviously
trying to decide if she was a working girl or just lost.

“I was a friend of May Lathrop’s,” Sadie said, mildly stretching the truth.

“Oh! That poor dear!” Enid’s hand flew to her mouth and her eyes welled up with tears.
“She was one of our favorites, and she was trying so hard to leave the streets behind.”

Sadie nodded. “She had a bit of savings and jewelry set aside for her future. She
wanted your organization to have it.” Sadie handed over May’s treasures.

“That’s just like her.” Enid clutched the envelope to her chest without looking inside.
“Thank you so much for bringing it by. We’re always looking for donations of any kind.
Did you know her long?”

“Just long enough to know she thought highly of the work you do here.”

“It’s just the few of us ladies and a couple of clergy who run this place, but we
like to feel that we’re making a small difference.”

Sadie assured her that May talked highly of all they did for her, and then she left
the building. When she climbed back inside her car Sadie felt good. She was glad she’d
taken the time to deal with May’s last request. She realized she still held a handful
of brochures that she’d picked up off the table inside WATS. Absently, she tossed
the papers into the side pocket of the car door as she pulled away from the curb and
headed to Maeva’s place.

***

When Sadie left the house that night, she was dressed in her black jeans, Nikes, and
a T-shirt. She didn’t know if there was a dress code for séances, but she was going
with comfort just in case. However, when she pulled up to Maeva’s house, her friend
darted out the front door, a flash of purple in a flowing peasant skirt with a dozen
gold chains around her neck. She looked like a wannabe-gypsy experiment gone wrong.

Maeva hopped into the passenger seat of Sadie’s Corolla and smiled.

“Is it over the top?” she asked, indicating her purpleness with a wave of her hand.

“Oh nooo,” Sadie said, backing out of the driveway. “You look . . . like you’re ready
to get out.”

“Got that right,” Maeva said, blowing out an excited breath and then a giggle. “The
minute Osbert was done feeding I passed him off to Terry and ran out the door.” She
glanced at her watch. “By midnight I gotta be back for the next round, but right now
I’m Cinderella off to the ball.”

“I don’t know if I’d compare a séance to a ball, but whatever,” Sadie remarked.

“Who said anything about a séance?”

“You did.” Sadie frowned. “Didn’t you?”

“I said Rick and Rosemary Thingvold were going to a home tonight. I never said they
were going there to do a séance.” She pointed up ahead. “You’ll want to take the next
right.”

“Okay, so why are we going to some house then?” Sadie asked warily.

“Oh you’ll see.”

“You’re lucky I was dying for an excuse to get out of the house tonight,” Sadie remarked.
She took the next right and accelerated. “This had better be good.”

After fifteen minutes mostly spent with the two of them singing along to raunchy seventies
rock, Maeva gave Sadie more driving instructions until they were turning from Twenty-Eighth
Avenue onto West Halladay Street in the hilly Magnolia neighborhood. Halfway up the
block Maeva announced they’d arrived, and Sadie steered to the curb and parked in
front of a turn-of-the century home that was eerily lit from the overhead streetlights.

“Wow, she’s a beaut.” Sadie whistled and nodded to indicate the house. “The place
has to be a hundred years old.”

“Give or take,” Maeva agreed, glancing out the passenger window. “Do you recognize
it?”

“The house?” Sadie asked. “Don’t think I’ve ever been here before.”

“It was in the news a few years ago, so I thought you might remember it.”

“In the news?”

“Yeah. A mother believed her fourteen-year-old daughter, Iris, was possessed by demons
and she tried to perform an exorcism.”

“Oh yeah,” Sadie said, nodding slowly as she remembered the wild story. “The papers
had a field day. They called it the Halladay Horror. The mother poisoned her, right?”

Maeva’s face grew dark as they both stared at the house. “Good ol’ mom tied her daughter
to her bed, then fed her poison to scare away the devil inside her. The next morning
when mom saw the poison had killed Iris, instead of just exorcising a demon, the she
ran around the neighborhood screaming the devil had killed her kid.”

Sadie remembered reading that the mother had killed herself while locked up awaiting
a psychological examination. It was just one of those sad tales of mental illness
that ended tragically. Sadie shivered in spite of herself.

Sadie and Maeva got out of the car and began walking up the staggered stone walkway
toward the front of the old-style, storybook Tudor home. The massive oak front door
showed the wear of battling the howling winds and Seattle rains.

“Has the house stood empty since then?” Sadie asked.

“The mom left it to a friend, and he sold it recently. The new owners hired Rosemary
because they weren’t having any luck getting renovations done. All the workers they
hired claim the house is haunted.” She turned to Sadie. “And that’s where Madam Maeva’s
Psychic Café comes in.”

“Why do I feel like I’ve been bamboozled?” Sadie asked dryly.

Maeva just smiled and pounded her fist a couple times on the solid front door before
opening it and stepping inside.

“We’re here!” she shouted.

Sadie followed her inside.

“Come to the kitchen!” The reply came from the back of the house.

Maeva kicked off her shoes and walked ahead up a long, narrow hall. Sadie held back.
The air in the house felt heavy and thick. Although old houses might be considered
beautiful because of their dark wood and quality craftsmanship, Sadie preferred new
construction—where there was a lesser chance of running into ghosts. Sure she enjoyed
helping recently departed spirits like May Lathrop, but those who’d hung around long
enough to claim a location like this house tended to be territorial and harder to
get rid of than cockroaches.

Finally Sadie slipped out of her shoes and followed Maeva down the long hardwood hallway.
Her footsteps echoed in the empty house and she found herself looking over her shoulder.
The hallway opened onto a large eat-in kitchen, where Rosemary and Rick Thingvold
were waiting, seated at a small card table and folding chairs. Their cue-ball shaven
heads and jewelry piercings glistened in the pale overhead light. They’d each added
a few new tattoos since Sadie had seen them last and, in some locations, it was hard
to tell where metal and ink stopped and their own skin began.

“Great to see you,” Rosemary exclaimed, offering Sadie enthusiastic waves and air
kisses as if they were old friends instead of occasional ghost busters together. If
Rosemary hadn’t been touch-sensitive and prone to feeling ill at Sadie’s touch, like
Maeva used to be, it probably would’ve been a bear hug.

Rick nodded hello.

“We put some water bottles in the fridge. Help yourself.” To Sadie he said, “I’m glad
Maeva convinced you to take the job.”

Sadie turned to Maeva, her eyebrows raising. “Job? What job?”

“I hadn’t gotten to that part yet,” Maeva said, scolding Rick. She turned to Sadie.
“The new owners have been trying to renovate the house. As I told you in the car,
they got it for a good price and would like to renovate it and then flip it for a
profit.”

“And what’s stopping them?” Sadie asked, already fearing the answer.

“The workers they hired all quit because they were tired of dealing with what they
call angry spirits.” Maeva drew air quotes around
angry spirits
and smiled as if this were the silliest thing she ever heard, even though spirits
were her bread and butter. “The drywaller got a concussion from a flying paint can.
Then they all walked off the job.”

“So they called the ghost busters at Madam Maeva’s? Why wouldn’t they just hire different
tradesmen?”

“One of the partners who bought the house attended that Wiccan conference where I
was a guest speaker. Apparently I made an impression. She’s convinced we can solve
the problem before the house gets a bad reputation among contractors and nobody is
willing to work here.”

“But what does all this have to do with me?” Sadie was getting an uneasy feeling.

“We came, we saw, and we smudged the hell out of the place,” Rosemary explained, then
broke out into a fit of giggles. “But, well . . .”

“What she means to say,” Rick said, “is that although we
tried
to contact the spirit who resides here and encourage her to move on, she wasn’t exactly
receptive to the idea. As a matter of fact, she tried to scare us off by throwing
things at us. Lucky for us there isn’t much inside the house.”

“We had flying paint brushes and a drop cloth tossed our way,” Rosemary added with
a laugh.

Maeva joined the Thingvolds and the three had a good laugh over a ghost tossing around
painting supplies, but the hairs on the back of Sadie’s neck stood up and she began
to feel distinctly unwell.

“You referred to the ghost as a she,” Sadie said. “How do you know the ghost is female?”

“We are assuming that the spiritual entity is Iris, the fourteen-year-old who was
killed here,” Rosemary said matter-of-factly. “Of course, it could also be Della,
her crazy mother, although she didn’t die inside the house.”

“Or someone else entirely. This house is a hundred years old. The spirit could be
that old too,” Sadie pointed out.

“True, but that would mean it’s been haunted all along,” Maeva put in.

“That’s my point,” Sadie said. “Maybe it was haunted. Maybe that’s why Della Prior
thought it had to do with her daughter, and maybe—”

“That’s a lot of maybes. You look beat.” Rosemary opened the fridge and tossed Sadie
a water bottle. “Whoever the spirit is, we’ve tried to have a sit-down chat with them
to find out what we could do to help them move on, but that only got us more angry
tossing of items around the house. We were at a loss, but then it hit us.” She smacked
the palm of her hand against her forehead. “Sadie Novak could do this because this
is
exactly
the kind of stuff she does every day!”

“Um. No, it’s not.” Sadie took a gulp of water and then looked pointedly at Rosemary.
“This is
nothing
like what I do every day. I clean up crime scenes, unattended deaths, meth labs,
and occasional hoarding or squalor residences. I am certified by the American BioRecovery
Association. I have blood-borne-pathogens training as well as certifications in meth
lab decon and environmental disinfection.”

“And then you talk to the dead,” Rosemary said.

“And help them move on from this dimension,” Rick added.

“Well, sure,
sometimes
I do that,” Sadie admitted. “But the ghost thing happens only when a spirit has been
left behind. It’s not an everyday experience and I certainly don’t go
looking
for ghosts. And I don’t think I can emphasize that enough.”

“Don’t be a stick-in-the-mud,” Maeva chided. “Besides, business for Scene-2-Clean
is slow. You’ve complained about that yourself, right? The Thingvolds are willing
to pay you a third of their take here, and—”

“So that’s what this is all about?” Sadie asked indignantly. “This is a mercy job?
I don’t need your pity. As a matter of fact, I was just telling Osbert this morning
how murders are picking up in Seattle. There was another prostitute killed in a hotel
downtown and I’ll probably get the call to clean it up. I told Ozzie, the way business
is booming I’d be getting him a Tickle Me Elmo.”