In the Dead of Night (41 page)

“What in the hell are you talking about, Jimmy?!”

Fiona was irritated with me. Not that she didn’t necessarily
not
believe that Dolores Cabrini had seemingly decided to tag along with our investigation. But, when she gets in her mode of making sure everything is going as it should—namely, wrapping up our quick investigation of the grounds so that we had a good hour and a half of exploring the inside of the exclusive mansion—she’s not usually paying any attention to her clairvoyant/clairaudient side. It’s all right side brain function at that point, and she’s a pistol in keeping everyone on the same page.

However, did I mention that I asked her this same frigging question three times while we circled the house? Or, that my pals all looked at me quizzically when I repeatedly sought confirmation from them??... Looking back at what I just penned in a rush, I guess not.

I could live with the fact that none of them heard what I did in the graveyard, since they had already made their exit. But how could none of them hear this spirit’s taunts? I mean, Angie’s ghost was going off on me and acting every bit as much of a psychotic bitch as she ever had in life. Only now she stalked me with her favorite insolent taunts from before she got ‘promoted to ghost’, as Justin likes to put it.

“I’m only going to say this one more time, Sweetie…Angie has been taunting my ass for the past twenty minutes,” I said, finding it hard to be as endearing to the love of my life as I normally am. “In fact, it would not surprise me in the least, if we don’t have something on tape from her vile mouth already.”

“Hmmmm.”

Ooh, I hated the coldness, and I braced myself for her rebuke, since obviously she truly hadn’t heard any of the specifics until that moment. But now she was angered by my delivery, and I regretted the fact that my formerly sharp negotiation skills had dulled in the three months since I quit my call center supervisor job.

Thank the Good Lord for an honest miracle to save my ass from Fiona’s wrath. No, it wasn’t any of my pals who came to my rescue, and it sure as hell wasn’t Dick Tracy or his Franklin pals, who stood around as if unsure what to do in the dimness. (I doubt any of them understood why Jackie insisted on them sharing one flashlight among them, with the beam turned to its lowest setting). My wife suddenly saw my pursuer.

“Oh my God, Jimmy!” she whispered, as if the wraith had stolen most of her voice. “She’s standing just outside the house and peering through the window at us…. Her face is so pale, and she look’s really pissed!”

“Well, I imagine she’s finding it hard to afford her Lancome and Chanel products on what they pay diva ghosts these days.”

My smart remark brought an immediate chuckle from Justin. I didn’t realize he had crept over to us in the main floor’s dimness, since I thought he wanted to keep a watchful eye on our two white supremacist guests. Maybe he was no longer seeing these kids as venomous.

“Damn it, Jimmy, I’m serious!” she hissed, loud enough for everyone in our immediate area to cease their low level conversations and turn their attention to her, as if she was E.F. Hutton. “You’re going to make her really mad…so
stop it!”

“Then can I assume you believe me now—”

“Yes!”

And so ended the cordial conversation between Mr. and Mrs. Alea. As is our habit when such misunderstandings arise, I sought out the company of the guys and Fiona moved over to where Jackie and Michelle waited. I glanced at our lesbian cohorts long enough to see their knowing looks in the soft glow from Michelle’s video camera display. Behind them stood the Thomas brothers, looking around like they were waiting for some warm-blooded prankster to jump out from a hiding place and say ‘Boo!’ Meanwhile, Fiona cast a few of her own wary glances toward the window where she claimed Dolores/Angie had peered at us. She grimaced worriedly.

Not a good sign, and I worried that maybe our uninvited former NVP member might insist on coming inside. That would be most unfortunate for me, since it was bad enough being followed by a feeling or voice outside. It would be so much worse inside a place that was giving me the creeps on its own. But, so far, I didn’t feel her or hear any more taunts.

“This is great,” said Tony, snapping a few pictures with the low-level light camera he had purchased the week before on Ricky’s recommendation. Only three of us remained unconverted to the newer, and more efficient, technology. Fiona, Jackie, and I weren’t ready to give up our analog beasts just yet. “I’ll bet we’ll get something tonight. Maybe we’ll see the kitchen ghost that Fiona mentioned earlier.... What was that about back there anyway?”

“It was nothing,” I lied. Yeah, I gave into a moment of superstition, thinking maybe that my tormentor would fly off to some other mischief and leave me the hell alone. “Did Fiona ever show you a picture of the kitchen ghost? She used to be the McGavock’s nanny, and is featured on the Carnton’s brochures.”

“The hell you say it was nothin’,” said Justin, joining us as we moved down the hallway to the back rooms on the main floor. “You damn well know I heard enough back there a moment ago. A ghost is following you, and I can only think of two that had a thing for you while they walked among the living.”

“Charlain? It isn’t that crazy witch…is it?”

Tony sounded mortified, and suddenly a small green light was pointed toward us that quickly became two. Sam and Brandon had their new commercial infrareds zeroed in on our conversation, ready to capture the gem morsels our producers craved. Great. Just frigging wonderful.

Ricky and Tom came over as well, and before it turned into a bigger powwow that included three lawmen, I set out to assure everyone it wasn’t Charlain, or anyone else of interest, for that matter.

“Really man…it ain’t anything to worry about. At least not for you guys,” I assured Tony and Justin, and proceeded to snap a few photographs indiscriminately around me. I thought appearing busy doing what we came here to do would work in my favor. “There’s a little girl that has been seen and photographed upstairs, and a Confederate officer whose been captured on both floors and while he takes a stroll from the back porch to the graveyard.”

“You are so full of shit, you know that, man?” said Justin, disgustedly.

“What, you don’t believe what I said about the girl and rebel officer?”

“I ain’t talkin’ about that…you know what I’m getting at, Jimmy,” he said, this time snickering. In the dimness, I could tell he had turned his chiseled good looks toward Sam’s camera. “You see what I have to put up with around here? An endless parade of half-truths, innuendos, and invitations to suspicious strangers without consulting the group first. You know…it’s in our little constitution that everything is supposed to be on the up an up about everything…. Let me know if I’m boring y’all with my grievance. Right, Tom?”

“Huh? Did I miss a joke or something?”

Tom sounded confused, and I could tell he was half-listening to us. He was doing his normal surveillance method of slowly scanning the room with his little baby, his cherished infrared device.

“See what I mean, man?” Justin sighed.

Sam’s main camera’s light came on, although at its lowest setting. Time to get a ‘reality aside’ in. But instead of hamming it up, Justin merely shook his head and shrugged his shoulders. Meanwhile, Tony and Ricky snickered nervously. Were they expecting a confrontation between Justin and me?

That question would go unanswered and become a moot point. Tom grabbed my arm, suddenly, drawing everyone’s attention to the viewing screen on his camera. At the moment, the lens faced the back porch where the famed blood stained floorboards had long since been painted over with industrial gray.

“No frigging way!” whispered Tony, while the rest of us guys murmured or merely stood speechless. “
Shit!
Fiona and Jackie?? Come take a look at this? Come
quick!!
You better hurry before it fades away!”

I thought for sure that it would fade…or that the twin images would fade. Maybe it was wishful thinking, at least for part of what the infrared caught that my naked gaze could not.

The window looked empty to all of us when we looked at it directly again. But not when using Tom’s camera. Definitely, there was someone standing outside, dressed in what looked like a Confederate cavalry officer’s uniform…the face unseen but the hat and coat clearly defined.

That part was cool. Very cool, in fact.

But the figure with him sent far more chills up and down my spine than the first image could have. The second figure was shorter, and might’ve been a male. However, it couldn’t be, despite the fact I couldn’t make out the face. The moonlight glistening on the leather contours of the feminine bodysuit and the red tint to the short hair that was visible around the shadowed face like a Christmas halo told me and everyone else that it could only be one person.

Angie. Angie with another ghost. Our biggest spirit skeptic in life had an apparent new sympathizer for her plight as a relative newcomer to the realm of the dead.

Chapter Five

I knew it was a bad idea scheduling an investigation without an extra day to review our findings from Sunday. Seriously, we’re not at our best in front of a live audience if we don’t have all of our ducks in a nice, neat paranormal row. And this isn’t like so many shows in Hollywood, where they’ll stop and fix any booboos. Once the cameras start rolling inside Studio 4F, it’s a one-hour run until they’ll stop. No ‘do overs’, no “hey, I gotta pee,” or anything else. Hell, if we get some crazy shit like a heckler in the audience, I bet we’d have to keep going while security took care of the dumb ass and booted him out of the building.

Needless to say, Monday was a day marked by anxiety for me…lots of standing on pins and needles while I waited for my shift to end. Both Sunday investigations ended up giving us a mother load of paranormal evidence to work with. We already knew that the Carnton would be chock full of stuff that could make us the best buzz in the paranormal investigative community—just on Angie and her Confederate friend’s appearance in the window alone. But, it turned out that our stationary mikes and cameras in the Carter House picked up some very interesting events, as well.

We really needed more time to regroup, discuss, and then decide on an effective game plan for presenting all of it on our local TV show. Fiona and Tom assured me that they could get it done well enough on their own, which is why my darling wife left me to run things in the bookstore she personally oversees (she runs three independent bookstores for a guy who has a helluva lot more money than business sense). The plan was for her to come back to the Franklin Tattered Pages store around 4:30 p.m. and pick me up, which should give us plenty of time to pick up a bite to eat and be ready for our 6:30 p.m. showtime.

But that won’t mean a hill of beans if we get on stage and things aren’t flowing cohesively as they have on our previous shows. I know Fiona and Jackie are pressing a bit, since Nick Rhodes and Lisa Stanfield, our producers, have worried them continually about the show being dropped at a moment’s notice due to ‘less than compelling content’. Honestly, I don’t know of anyone who can work effectively with that kind of pressure constantly coming at them.

Since the decision was out of my hands, I tried to stay as busy as possible. Traffic is high at the Franklin store on Mondays, and with the holiday season officially upon us after a robust Thanksgiving weekend, it ended up being quite busy in the store that Monday. Does this craziness make the job as stressful as being a call center supervisor? Nah…not even close. I should probably mention here that I didn’t just up and quit my other job…at least that’s not how I see it.

Fiona would disagree, and it was one of those times that I failed to listen to her personal admonishments on the subject. But, Max Racine and Ricky Chamberlain—my band mates—had quit their day gigs, too. We had finally secured the elusive big record deal, and it came with enough money for all of us to take a year off and record at least one album, with two more optioned with even more up-front money than came with the first one.

How could we lose—or, better yet, how could we screw it all up?

Well, the deal entailed traveling to New York to record in August, and once we traveled up there, we stayed at a fairly expensive hotel for nearly three weeks. However, we soon found ourselves over budget on what the rest of our collective advance amounted to—actually forty-five hundred dollars over, and we still hadn’t finished all the basic tracks yet. Our virtuoso violinist-front man, Chris Grimes, suddenly didn’t like the ‘feel’ of what got us the deal in the first place. Before long, he and Ricky began fighting over it all, since Ricky knew the primo expensive studio time was chewing away our advance like a rabid pack of beavers along the Harpeth River. Once the label’s accountants got wind of what was happening, they put a temporary hold on the project and we had no choice but to return to Nashville empty handed.

At that point we still had a contract, but without nearly enough money for all of us to remain employment-free for a year, as we had hoped. Everyone agreed to go back to work—wherever they could find a job—and work on trying to save enough money to finish the record. All of us, that is, except for Chris. Our prima donna front man decided we should pay him to remain in the band, as otherwise he would take a gig with a traveling circus act that had a year’s worth of shows lined up in Vegas, Reno, and Lake Tahoe. No joke.