Grave Echoes: A Kate Waters Mystery (9 page)

Despite the lack of evidence, Wells believed whoever smoked the cigarettes took the girl’s pulse too. Perhaps in the shock of the moment, he or she smoked a few cigarettes, wondering what to do, and then maybe hearing a car, split before they could get involved. Experience had told him that the main reason people fled from a situation was because they were scared of getting caught. In this case, caught doing what, he wondered. The girl had clearly been driving the car when it went out of control, so if someone had been in the car with her, and considering all the damage involved, he doubted that someone could have walked away, at least not without substantial cuts, breaks, or bruising to the body somewhere. Wells recalled the conversation with the deceased’s sister Kate regarding the fight Waters had with her boyfriend, Sean Olson. He wondered if Sean happened to smoke Marlboros.

Downing the last of his black coffee and combing his hands over his trimmed mustache, Wells looked to the end of his desk where a large plastic bag held specific contents, that upon first glance, most people might have difficulty discerning. But Wells had worked a few occult cases in the past and he knew a bucket of dirt, black candles, a double-edged knife called an athame, and a poppet doll made from corn husks and cheesecloth were not just common household items. Most of his witchcraft cases involved domestic disputes where individuals resorted to curses and spells to solve their troubles. Still, every now and then, he came across some, immersed so deep in the idea of dark magic, they’d do just about anything to prove their power, most often by means of death.

Wells picked up the bag and took out the poppet doll. A thick hemp material fastened the limbs and torso together and red thread wrapped around the center. Someone had drawn rudimentary facial features of eyes, a nose, and mouth on the head with a black felt pen. There was something eerie about its simplicity. Jevanna Waters was definitely involved in witchcraft and Wells suspected the boyfriend knew something about it too.

***

Kate stood in the doorway to the spare room, terror choking the scream from her throat. Incredulity caused her to blink her eyes, but her vision worked just fine. The window David had nailed shut was wide open. The nails along the bottom of the window pushed out like a monster’s crooked teeth. Her breath suddenly came back sharp and Kate shrieked. She spun around, her back pressed against the wall in the hallway, gripping the poker with both hands, ready to strike—someone had broken into the house. The doors to the bathroom and the other bedroom were still shut. Afraid to move, she spoke instead.

“Who’s there?” Her voice sounded small. There was only silence and her heavy breathing.

She couldn’t stay in the hallway forever, but she was afraid to move. She shifted her feet, widening her stance into a defensive posture, the poker back behind her shoulder prepared to swing.

“If anybody is in here, you are trespassing.” She came across firmer, but there was silence again. “I’ve already called the cops,” she tried.

Releasing one hand from the poker, Kate nudged the bathroom door open. It creaked open like a coffin. Turning on the light switch, she found the room empty. There wasn’t a shower curtain, thus no place to hide. She glanced behind her, confirming no one was there, and then headed to the second spare room. Her heart pounded, and even though cold air blew from the open window into the hallway, sweat beaded around her hairline.

She turned the knob on the door and pushed it open using the poker. The room was empty and completely unfurnished, with a large closet. She didn’t want to check the closet, but she’d gone this far. Sliding the bi-fold to the side, she took a quick step back, poker poised. Her eyes dropped to the floor where a head lay face down. Kate screamed, stammering backwards and falling against the wall. She bounded up and reached for the door handle, when something made her stop—the skin on the head had a sheen to it. She turned and looked more closely. It was a mannequin, one of David’s first-aid dolls. A chuckle escaped her throat, and Kate laughed at her own foolishness, but stopped once she remembered the window, and that someone might still be in the house.

She slipped back into the hallway and set the poker down by the door to fix the window. The edges didn’t show any scratches or dents where a crowbar might have been used to pry it open. Kate reached for the top frame and pushed down, but the window was jammed. An old towel would have to do. She went to the desk to get scissors for cutting a small hole at the top to drape over the opening when her foot stepped on something crunchy. Shards of glass glinted on the wooden floorboards. Against the wall, she spotted a broken frame, the likely cause of the crash she heard. Kate didn’t need to look at the front of the picture to know who was in it—Sean and Jev, wrapped arm in arm, at the Oregon Rock Festival a few months ago in John Day Oregon, when they first met. She’d planned to give it to Jev for her birthday next month. She would have been thirty-three.

Kate looked back to the window, seeing how the breeze could have knocked over the frame…like it had the vase. But what about the second crash? Everything else in the room looked in order, except the window.

Cold raindrops splashed on her arm. Kate shivered, but more from the cold thoughts in her mind. What was happening? Was someone playing tricks on her, she wondered? Who and why? And why now, at one of the worst moments in her life?

Kate busied herself by fixing the towel on two nails above the window. Just before she let it fall, she peered outside, into the dark, rainy wind. Where the lawn looked like a black sea, an orange light flashed. It was just a flicker, but enough to tell that someone in the backyard had just struck a match, and where the flame disappeared, the dim red glow from a cigarette emerged. Shadows camouflaged the faint outline of a black slicker. Someone was watching her. By the size of the raincoat, Kate presumed it was a man.

She dropped to her knees, panic pinching her breath again. She crouched against the wall so she wouldn’t be seen, but whoever was out there, must have already seen her. She’d been standing in front of the window for a few minutes.

She calculated two things—whether or not she’d locked the back door, and where the nearest phone receiver was located. As swift as her muscles would move, she dashed to the door and smacked the light switch down. Darkness blanketed the room, both welcoming and frightening at the same time. Fear infiltrated her thoughts. Then, Kate moved back to the window and peeked through a silver curtain of rain. The only shadows she could see now belonged to the surrounding pines and oaks. Nobody was there. Her heart beat harder. If the person wasn’t in the back yard, where had he gone? A primal fear surfaced, so powerful, she suddenly had the urge to urinate.

The rain drummed on the roof, thundering through the silent, black house. Kate backed up against the wall in the upstairs room, deafened by the pounding of her frantic heart. The person she’d just seen in the lawn outside disappeared. Then, it occurred to her that it could be the same person who fled from Jev’s house?

Kate fumbled for the poker at the door and then crept downstairs, hugging the wall and holding the railing for support, freezing at each creak in the floorboards. Her legs felt like rubber. A faint, flickering light came from the television in the living room. She didn’t want to go down there where the man might be waiting for her, but she had to get to a phone.

The floorboard groaned under her foot. At the bottom of the stairway, she spotted one of the phones on top of the bureau. She leaned over the railing, hoping to reach it when footsteps sounded on the porch. Kate felt her stomach flip. A loud knock pounded at the door. Another rush of adrenaline overwhelmed her and she felt gooseflesh break across her skin. The knock sounded again, booming and demanding. Not like a knock that asked if someone was home, but more like a knock that commanded someone open the door. Reluctant to open the door with no peephole, Kate also wanted to keep her presence in the house secret, on a slim chance she hadn’t been seen by the stranger outside.

The person on the other side of the door coughed, triggering a cue in her memory. She’d heard Mr. Burton coughing in his garage the other day. A grumble sounded, as if someone tried to clear his throat, a gruff sound reminiscent of an older individual.

“Mr. Burton?” Kate called out.

“Hello? Kate?” a hoarse voice answered back.

Mr. Burton’s familiar scratchy tone welcomed breath back to her lungs. She set the poker down in the corner behind the door, unlocked the dead bolt and chain link, and opened the door. Someone in a black-hooded raincoat stepped into view. Kate stumbled backwards, her mouth opened with a silent scream. The dark-hooded figure reached one hand up and pulled the hood down, exposing shriveled skin around the familiar milky, blue eyes of Mr. Burton.

He grabbed Kate’s arm, tremor in his muscles from Parkinson’s disease. “I need to use your phone?”

Kate paused to catch her breath. “The phone…,” she trailed off for a moment to collect her thoughts back. “Yes, sure…is everything all right?”

His pasty eyes came closer. “There’s a limb down in my driveway blocking me in. I can’t get out.”

“Come on inside,” she said.

Kate stepped aside, letting him enter, and soon regretted it. In his other hand, he held a large, muddy axe.

“Mr. Burton?” Kate stared at the axe.

Mr. Burton looked down, seeming to have forgotten he held a large, shiny axe in his hands, and then set it down outside the doorway. “Guess I don’t need to bring that inside.” His smile softened his rumpled, blotchy features.

Kate gave a nervous laugh. “Right. I’m sorry. You just startled me. I wasn’t expecting any company tonight,” she said, retrieving the phone off the bureau.

“Or you didn’t want any,” he commented, looking around at the dimmed house.

“I was just going to lie down,” Kate said, believing now that Mr. Burton was the stranger outside her window. She imagined he was looking to see who was home before knocking. “Do you need a phone book?”

“Nope. I know the number by heart and so should you,” he said. “We’re always having power outages out here.” He steadied his hand on the bureau. “It takes them almost a week to come out and only twenty minutes to fix. I don’t get it.” When he creased his forehead, his gray eyebrows stuck out like tufts of feathers.

“Mr. Burton, you didn’t happen to be behind the house a few minutes ago, did you?”

He frowned at her. “In your backyard?”

She nodded. “Yes. I thought I saw someone in the backyard.”

He shook his head. “No. I’ve been trying to cut that damn limb from my driveway.”

She assumed he was afraid to admit having snooped through her yard. The figure she saw had to have been him…he wore a black raincoat with a hood.

Mr. Burton stepped back onto the porch. “Thank you Miss...” he began to say with his index finger trying to pinpoint her name in the space between them.

“Waters,” she replied. “Kate Waters.”

“Oh yes, that’s it. I knew it had something to do with water.” He scratched his balding head where darker patches of skin were taking on the shape of continents. “Sorry for startling you.”

“That’s okay.”

He bent down to pick up his muddy axe, and then turned toward her. “Oh, I almost forgot. You wouldn’t happen to have any matches handy? I can’t find mine to light my lantern with.”

Kate froze. The man she saw had matches. If the man in the backyard was Mr. Burton, he wouldn’t ask her for matches, unless they were wet. She located a lighter in the bureau and handed it to him.

“I’ll bring it back when I’m finished.”

“That’s okay. We have more.”

“Good, you’ll need them because it’s going to be a long night.”

He waved good-bye and she watched him amble away, cloaked in the night rain. Although he could deter an unwelcome visitor, Kate still felt uneasy, and quickly locked the deadbolt on the front door. She checked the backdoor in the kitchen, relieved to know she’d already locked it. Maybe the stranger took off when he saw Mr. Burton outside, she thought. Maybe Mr. Burton was the stranger. Either way, he was telling the truth about one thing—it was going to be a long night.

***

Kate filled the coffee carafe with water while David shuffled the morning newspaper at the kitchen table. Tall firs in the back yard split the sun’s rays, dispersing tangled light on the counter and walls.

“Are you sure the person you saw outside the window wasn’t Mr. Burton?” David asked, locating the comic’s section.

She turned the coffee pot on and looked over at him. “Well if it was him, why did he ask me for matches? The person I saw in the backyard lit a cigarette, so if it were him, he would’ve had them already.”

He nodded his head in agreement. “Mr. Burton doesn’t smoke anyway.”

“He coughs like it,” Kate replied, scooping hash browns and eggs onto two plates.

“He used to, until his wife died of lung cancer.”

“That’s too bad.” She set a plate down on the table in front of David and then sat next to him. He seemed reserved this morning, and she wondered if he was still upset about their argument. Maybe he wanted her to open up first. She didn’t want to keep things from him anymore, but his silence intimidated her.

“Do you think someone could be breaking in the window upstairs?” Kate asked, postponing a deeper talk with him about her feelings, mostly because she didn’t know them any better than he did.

“Maybe.” He shoveled a heap of eggs into his mouth and then shook his head. “But why not just break through the front door or at least a window on the bottom level? It doesn’t make sense.”

“Well, it can’t be opening by itself. I think someone is screwing with us,” she said.

He stopped eating and looked out the window. “You said you saw a broken picture frame upstairs? Who was in it?”

“Just a picture of Jev and Sean at the rock show. Why?”

“Maybe Jev is haunting us,” he said.

“What?” Stunned by his suggestion, she clanked her mug down on the table.

“I’m serious,” he replied, his green eyes darkened and the muscle in his lower jaw pulsed, like he chewed on his next sentence. “I saw a girl in the house yesterday, walking up the stairs. I didn’t see her face, only her legs. I thought it was you, coming home early. But when I went upstairs, nobody was there.”

“David…,” Kate started say, pausing when she suddenly remembered the little girl she thought she saw in the laundry room and reflected in the bedroom window last night. No. The thought was irrational. “You know, I thought I saw something the other day too, but it is only the result of exhaustion and stress. We are both under a lot of pressure right now. That’s all.”

David’s eyes widened and he leaned forward on the table. “What exactly did you see?”

“It was nothing.”

“Then just tell me,” he pushed her.

She sighed and took a drink of her coffee. “I thought I saw the reflection of a little girl in the mirror, behind me sitting on the washer in the laundry room. But when I turned around, she was gone.” Kate could almost see the fireworks behind his eyes. “It wasn’t a ghost, David. It’s more like a visual hiccup.” She took a bite of her potatoes, hoping he would drop the subject. Telling him about Jev’s witchcraft now seemed like a bad idea, knowing it would only reinforce his paranormal beliefs.

“So we’ve both seen a girl in the house, the upstairs window keeps opening on its own, even after it’s been nailed shut,” he said, with pronunciation, “and then a picture frame with Jev in it inexplicably falls over. I think Jev or someone else is trying to contact us.”

Fighting the roll her eyes wanted to take, Kate stood from the table. “So, do you think Jev’s house is haunted too? That a ghost broke the vase in the kitchen and opened the sliding glass door?”

“Don’t say it like I’m crazy. All I’m trying to point out is that something strange has been happening since Jev’s death.” He shifted his chair out from the table, crossed his arms behind his head, and leaned back.

Kate set her dish in the sink, not having much of an appetite anymore. She rinsed it off, thinking about David’s paranormal suggestion, when an idea sparked in her mind. It wasn’t ghosts that were connected to the strange occurrences as much as it might be witchcraft.

David hypothesized further. “I don’t doubt the possibility that someone was in Jev’s house or even outside our house last night, but I don’t see why someone would break into a window upstairs. Besides, neither one of us has any enemies.”

“But Jev might have had them.” Kate watched something like wonder lift his face. “I found out recently that she was involved in witchcraft.”

“How do you know?”

“She has a trunk of witchcraft supplies in her spare room.”

David stood from the table and walked to the sink. “Jev was a witch?”

“I don’t know if she was a witch, but it looks like she practiced magic on occasion.”

He moved closer to her and put his hand on her shoulder. “Is this why you’ve been so quiet?”

“Yeah, a little. It’s not everyday that you find out someone you loved and trusted was involved in the occult…someone you thought you knew, who told you everything.” Kate looked up at him. His eyes were gentle and his touch warm. “I was afraid to tell you.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t want you to think I was involved in that stuff—in any way.”

“Well, I’m not going to judge you for someone else’s actions or beliefs,” he said. “But it makes even more sense now that your sister could be trying to contact us. If Jev was a witch, she just might have the ability to do so.”

Kate couldn’t believe what she’d heard and wondered which was worse—a sister who practiced witchcraft or a boyfriend who believed her dead sister was haunting them? “Do you know how absurd that sounds? Didn’t you study biology in college?”

“You don’t think doctors believe in ghosts? They are surrounded by afterlife experiences.” He moved to the coffee pot and filled up his mug. “You’re the scientist. I would think that if anyone had an open mind about paranormal activity, it would be you.”

Kate laughed in defense. “Oh, I do, but I find it outrageous that you’re choosing to believe in ghosts over the threat of a real person.”

“Look, if someone had run out the back door at Jev’s, you or I would have seen them. That fence is too high to jump and there is no place to hide. And I’d be willing to bet Mr. Burton was the one in the backyard. He’s an old man. He probably forgot he was even outside last night.”

“He’s not that old,” Kate replied.

He went over to her and started rubbing her shoulders. “All right,” he said. “I’ll call Sonitrol today and get the alarm system reconnected.” He bent down and placed a soft kiss on her neck.

“Thank you.”

David’s eyes dropped to her chest. “What’s this?” He reached for a chain around her neck. Kate pulled the chain from her shirt to show him. “It’s just a key I found at Jev’s.”

“Why’d you put it around your neck?”

“I don’t know. I found it in her purse and wanted to have something on me that she’d had with her when she died.” Until Kate discovered what the key unlocked, she didn’t want to tell anyone, except Sarah, about her hallucinations—especially David.

“Katlyn Waters, full of deep secrets,” he said, admiring the key.

Not as many as my sister, she thought.

“It looks old.” David turned it around in his hands and then let it fall back into her shirt. “I’m sorry about the ghost thing. I’m not trying to scare you.”

“I know.”

For a moment, she considered another startling possibility: could David have been the one opening the window? But why would he do such a thing? How could he mess with her when she grieved? No, that was ludicrous. She believed whoever opened the window was someone without conscience, a need for vengeance, and even though she hadn’t known David very long, she knew he wasn’t the vengeful type—he saved people on a daily basis. He had a conscience, even if he believed it continued after death.