Fatal Storm (14 page)

Venus lifted the cooler and placed it on the
counter. She moved the cans of soda around so the ice could keep
them cold. “Did you know Dagger then?”

“That’s when I first met him. I asked for his
help on another case. It was a couple days before his wedding
rehearsal. The case made him so late he didn’t bother going.”

“The case.” Venus smiled. Iridescent glitter
flaked off of her eye shadow and landed on her cheeks. “You are
clueless about your appeal to men, especially Dagger. You should
have seen his reaction when Josh and Flea almost tripped over their
tongues looking at you. I can imagine Sheila saw the same effect
you had on Dagger.”

“Dagger has always had a big brother complex.
It’s been all business between us. If Sheila read more into it,
that was her problem.” Sara tried to steer the focus back to Venus.
“What about Josh and Flea? Are you dating either of them?”

“Oh, no. I have a girlfriend.”

“Oh.” That revelation surprised Sara but she
tried not to let it show. “Well, then, how did you feel about
Sheila?”

Venus laughed. “She’s definitely too rich and
elitist for my blood. Astrid and I have been together since high
school.”

“Is Astrid into astrology, too?”

“Believe it or not, she’s a molecular
physicist.”

“That should make for interesting dinner
conversation.”

“Thank you.”

“For what?”

“Most people just can’t see what a brain like
Astrid would see in someone like me. Truth is, I have a Mensa I.Q.
and a degree in botany. But it fed my interest in herbs and
Nature’s marvelous healing plants. Astrid was part of my Wiccan
group in high school so she understands my interest in astrology
and tarot cards and everything that is unexplainable.”

“Like ghosts and spirits.”

“Exactly.”

Padre stuck his head in the doorway. “Girls
need a hand? We’re about ready to chew on the woodwork out
here.”

After grabbing plates and cans of pop from
the kitchen, everyone gathered around the conference table.
Skizzy’s laptop was set up at one end of the table. Two file
folders on the table contained research notes which the IPI group
had left from their first night there. Venus brought the bags of
potato chips and cheese curls from the kitchen and placed them on
the table.

“Don’t you have any EMF meters or any other
equipment, dude?” Flea asked. “No cameras or recorders?”

“Got all kinds of special goodies.” Skizzy
held up what looked like a geiger counter. “This here reads natural
electro-magnetic impulses. Also have a scanner that sees through
walls. Whether the victim is dead or alive, I’ll know it.” His one
eyebrow jerked as if to add, “So beware.”

Josh glared across the table at Padre. “Now
that we are all gathered for our Thanksgiving dinner, tell us
exactly why we are here, and the truth this time. Not some bullshit
about needing to see for your own eyes exactly what happens in a
haunted house. Why the private investigator?” He glared at Dagger
with suspicion.

Skizzy pulled out a chair and sprawled into
it. “Why, don’t you see? We are here to investigate you three.”

Padre jumped in before Josh could voice his
objection. “Leyton Monroe hired Dagger and his team to figure out
what happened to his daughter. I’m here because I still haven’t
cleared the three of you. You were the last three to see her.
Something happened in this house and it’s up to me, with Dagger’s
help, to figure out what.”

“And what if we don’t want to stay?” Flea
asked.

“You either stay here with me or I put you in
a cell until I figure it out on my own. Your choice. Besides,” he
reached in his pocket and held up a set of keys, “I’m driving.”

Flea studied his sandwich, then reluctantly
took a bite.

Sara remained silent, preferring to listen to
what was not being said as much as what was being said. Josh was
combative while Flea was suspicious. Venus appeared calm as if she
had just finished a thirty minute yoga class. It probably wasn’t
the first time she had to be the only sane member of her group.

Josh waved his half-eaten sandwich at
the end of the table. “What else aren’t you telling us? What’s with
all this equipment and this lone gunman look-alike,” he added with
a poke toward Skizzy, whose ponytail and camouflage pants did make
him resemble a character from the TV show,
X-Files
. “A private eye is one thing, but why do
we need another computer geek? It’s just a duplicate of what Flea’s
doing.”

Padre stared across the table at Dagger. An
unspoken agreement appeared to pass between them. Padre patted his
mouth with a napkin and cleared his throat. “There is another
detail that we have kept out of the paper.”

Their three guests appeared to hold a
collective breath. Dagger watched them closely. Skizzy poured more
chips onto his paper plate while Padre explained about the two
bodies found in a dried well.

Venus gasped. “Two more?” She slapped a hand
against her throat, the circle of bracelets clanging on her wrist.
“Who? Where?”

A slow drizzle started pelting the wall of
windows. Outside thick clouds crawled, dragging a dark sky behind
like a cape, as though needing to hide any destruction it
planned.

“The well is about one hundred feet from the
house. Searchers were chopping their way through the underbrush but
it’s the cadaver dogs that found the well. It had a concrete cover
over the opening. They had to pry it up and it was evident it
hadn’t been accessed in decades.”

“So they may be the people haunting the
house. Have they identified them? Do you know when they died?”
Venus’ questions were coming fast and furious.

“No and maybe,” Padre replied. “But that’s
not the important thing. The bodies are one male and one female.
They were dressed in period clothes, possibly from the early 1900s.
But the puzzling, possibly shocking detail is that they were killed
the same way as the man we found in the ditch.”

“What do you mean the same way?” Josh
asked.

“Strangled, but this time with rope. The
ropes were tied in the identical way the scarf was tied around
Mister Jensen’s neck. And although it isn’t tough for anyone, even
me, to tie a bow, it is just too much of a coincidence to find
victims, at least eighty years apart, to have died the same way.
And I don’t like coincidences.”

“Wow, noxious.” Flea’s eyes widened making
them appear even larger behind his thick glasses. “We have a real
paranormal event happening here.”

“How can that be? I mean...” Josh leaned back
against his seat.

Dagger thought he looked like the boy who
cried wolf only to face a real wolf. He always thought there was
something deceptive about what Josh and his ilk do. He had yet to
see proof that ghosts were trying to communicate or that the dead
were in some limbo with unresolved issues. Then again, two years
ago he would have never admitted shapeshifters were real or there
was technology that could make people invisible. His cases lately
have been anything but logical.

“What does Sara bring to the table?” Josh
asked. “Or...” His index finger waved from Dagger to Sara. “Are you
two...?”

Dagger and Sara replied too quickly, “NO,”
while Skizzy, at the same time blurted, “Not yet.”

Dagger ignored the insinuation. “Sara has
talents that are important to my investigations.”

“I bet she does,” Josh said under his
breath.

“Tell us about the house,” Sara said in an
attempt to change the subject.

Outside the wind tore leaves from the weeping
willows, sending them skittering across the landscape. There was a
faint rumble in the distance, but if the wind kept up its strength,
it wouldn’t be long until the storm hit them full force.

Josh took the lead and appeared to have
researched the house thoroughly because he didn’t refer to any
notes. “It was built in the early 1940s by Charles Sebold. Chucky
was a shipping tycoon who developed the lake front harbor. He and
his wife, Marian, had one child, a daughter named Julia. This
little brick bungalow has twelve bedrooms, five bathrooms, a
ballroom, huge industrial-sized kitchen for entertaining the rich
and famous, a library, kids playroom, massive gardens, servants
quarters, you name it. The rich spared no expense.”

“So whose ghost were you hoping to rattle?”
Padre asked.

“Julia is the one whose presence is still in
this house,” Venus interjected. “She is the one I was trying to
contact.”

“She went missing when she was seven,” Josh
continued. “The staff lived on site and all were cleared of any
involvement. After a year without any clues, Marian was so
despondent she committed suicide.”

“In this house?” Padre asked.

“No. Witnesses say she walked off one of the
piers in the harbor. Chucky informed all of his business partners
that he was moving to Texas after her funeral. Instead, he took a
header off of the upstairs veranda.”

“Huh,” Skizzy blurted. “How do you know it
isn’t the wife who’s haunting the place?”

“Because there have only been reports of
sounds from Julia’s room,” Josh replied.

Dagger continued eating while Josh spoke. He
noticed Sara was staring at her hands as though not listening, but
Dagger knew there was more to it. He knew Sara was listening to the
beating of Josh’s heart. She may as well be a human lie detector
test. It surprised him that she was able to focus only on Josh and
block out everyone else’s breathing and heartbeats.

“Who bought the house after that?” Padre
asked.

“Sat empty for ten years, not that there
weren’t plenty of lookers. Few people could afford it. Then a
Chicago businessman bought it. Brent Boseman traveled a lot,
leaving his young bride alone with a staff of five. A staff member
was found dead one morning at the bottom of a staircase. It was
ruled an accident. Other staff members claimed they had heard him
cry out, heard him yell ‘no,’ but all the other staff were
accounted for. Then one by one the staff quit, claiming they were
hearing cries in the middle of the night, footsteps. The wife
refused to stay in the house one more night so the house was empty
again for another fifteen years.”

“But Mister Boseman did bring in a priest to
do an exorcism at the request of his wife,” Venus explained. “He
wasn’t too happy to move so he agreed to his wife’s request. When
that didn’t work, she wanted a medium to contact whoever was
haunting the place. The medium claimed there was a lot of evil in
the house. That did it for the wife.”

“Well, I hope my presence doesn’t piss off
the ghost,” Padre muttered under his breath while his fingers found
the gold cross he had pulled from under his shirt.

“After that a curator rented it to set up a
museum but too many weird sounds, footsteps, lights flickering.
Workers claimed they always felt as though someone were watching
them. Then the Historical Society gave it a go but the upkeep was
too expensive and there weren’t enough donations coming in. They
claimed the house was cursed.”

“Mass hysteria,” Dagger chimed in. “Not
unusual. They hear stories or read about the history of the place
and soon everyone is seeing ghosts.”

“Government research plan,” Skizzy quipped.
“I’ve seen it before. Government puts people in a situation to see
how they react, see what it takes to drive someone to suicide or
drive them to the looney bin.”

Josh sneered at him. “That what happened to
you?”

Skizzy’s eyebrow jutted sharply as he glared
at Josh. “I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss it, boy. I’ve seen more
in my lifetime than anything your fancy equipment would ever pick
up.”

“Let’s keep on subject,” Padre quickly
interjected.

Dagger asked, “How did you get the current
owner to agree to let you set up shop here?”

“We had to clear it with some lawyer first.
He thought the publicity would draw prospective buyers,” Venus
replied. “With the popularity of all the ghost hunting shows, they
thought it would draw people the way some of the allegedly haunted
restaurants and hotels draw record number patrons.”

“So you were going to film what happened here
and hope to sell it to a cable network to do what? Get your own
show?” Dagger didn’t care if his comment sounded cynical.

“Hell, yeah,” Flea said with a laugh. “Who
wouldn’t?”

Josh studied the equipment and computer
Skizzy had set up. “Wait a minute.” He narrowed his eyes at Skizzy.
“Are you here to make your own movie and compete with us? Because
if you are...”

“Do I look like a freakin’ movie producer?”
Actually, Skizzy looked more like a mad scientist, but then some
movie producers did display a bit of creative madness.

“Tell us about your most exciting trip,” Sara
said. “Did you ever catch one on film? Did one ever touch you?”

“Did anyone ever die before?” Dagger's gaze
settled on Josh.

“What is this? An inquisition? Are we being
set up?” Josh looked at Padre. “Well?”

“Do you feel like you are being set up?”

“You are asking a lot of questions, dude,”
Flea said.

“Got a problem with that?” Dagger drilled him
with his eyes. “I’m about to spend the night with three people I
don’t know a damn thing about.”

“Yeah, he does have a trigger finger,” Skizzy
added.

“Not very trusting, are you?” Josh sneered.
“We could say the same thing. We don’t know a damn thing about you
three.”

“There are few people I trust and for good
reason.”

“I want to hear more about the history.” Sara
started to gather up the empty plates while Venus retrieved a large
plastic garbage bag. “Were there any other theories about the
deaths?”

“The Rain Man,” Venus replied. “There was a
book written by Theodore Lautenburg. He documented a number of
murders from 1920 to 1950. They took place mainly in this area and
over the borders of Illinois and Michigan. That is where the
comparison to the Boston Strangler came in. The killer would
strangle his victims with a scarf.”