The Lost: Book Two, The Eddie McCloskey Series (The Unearthed 2) (22 page)

An
a
woke him up.

“We’re snowed in. Can’t leave.”

Eddie experienced a moment’s disorientation and then remembered he was sitting in Kindler’s Control Room. Checked the time on the monitors in front of him.

4:07 AM.

After the wet footprints had appeared, they’d watched the footage. Nothing else had happened, and Eddie must have finally drifted off.

Ana’s eyes were red-rimmed. “I don’t want to stay here.”

He slowly got out of his chair. “Why not?”

“Look what happened at the last two houses we investigated. Something bad is going to happen here.”

Eddie stretched his arms over his head. “If it was going to happen, it would have already. Besides, you have nothing to fear.”

“Why not?”

“Only the people at the lake have been affected. You weren’t there. And if this is Tessa, she’s got nothing against you of all people.”

“Still …”

“Come on. Let’s pick out a couple guest rooms.”

“Can we stay in the same room? I’m seriously freaked out right now. I don’t know how you fell asleep. I’ve been up the whole time.”

That was a really bad idea.

“Eddie, this isn’t about you and me. I’m scared.”

Sharing a room would overcomplicate an already messy situation. But she had a point. Colin was dead and Bernie was missing. What if something happened here too? He wanted to be near her. Wanted to protect her.

“You take the bed. I’ll take the floor,” he said.

They grabbed their gear and took the first guest bedroom they found upstairs. Ana immediately locked the door.

He gave her a look.

Ana said, “This door is staying locked. I am freaked out, Eddie.”

“I was too the first time I spent the night on-site. You’ll get used to it.”

“Yeah, but I’ll bet you didn’t have a murder hanging over your head.”

Eddie smiled at the memory of his first job with Tim all those years ago. Neither one of them knew what the hell they were doing, but at least Tim had known how to act the part.

She must have mistook his smile as an invitation.

He watched her as she approached. Ten feet away, he still had his convictions. Five feet away, he wavered.

Six inches away, he was in trouble.

Ana looked up at him. Then she closed those cute eyes of hers and leaned in.

He fought every fiber of his being and didn’t kiss her. Wrapped her in a hug instead. “Get some sleep. Everything will be fine.”

Eddi
e
woke around nine. Ana was still asleep on the bed, her tiny body hidden under the covers. Eddie slipped out quietly and went downstairs.

Kindler was sitting in the kitchen, wearing his robe again. Ms. Anders was working over the hot stove on some eggs. She wore a tiny t-shirt and very loose pajama shorts that didn’t have the resources to cover her ass.

“Good morning, sunshine,” Kindler said.

“Everybody okay?”

“Right as rain, aren’t we, Ms. Anders?”

Ms. Anders purred and gave him the googly eyes. Eddie almost threw up in his mouth.

Eddie said, “Can you email Ana the old footage you showed us last night?”

Kindler didn’t miss a beat. “Sure, Eddie. And I’ve got some good news too. They found Bernie.”

“Is he okay?”

Kindler shrugged. “Hospital. Almost died from exposure. But he’s stable now.”

“Did he say anything?”

“He wasn’t in any condition to say anything from what Whitmore tells me. But they think he’ll be up and around later today.”

“Where’s the hospital?”

“Scranton.”

Eddie really wanted to talk to Bernie, but it didn’t make any sense going up there if the guy wasn’t talking yet. “Hey, you got a phone number for Mike Hollis?”

Kindler frowned. “No, but I can get it for you. This is America.”

Ana appeared in the doorway, her puffy eyes barely open.

“Did you get any sleep last night, my dear?” Kindler looked from her to Eddie.

“Not really.”

Eddie cringed. She didn’t realize how Kindler would take it. He grinned ear-to-ear at Eddie.

Jimb
o
immediately complained about having to share the living room with Eddie.

“I don’t like this dude always in my apartment,” he said.

Ana folded her arms. Eddie watched her and wondered how she’d respond. All they’d done last night was kiss. But he figured the guilt was gnawing on her now. He feared as a result she’d cave to Jimbo’s silly demands.

But Ana surprised him. “This isn’t your apartment, Jim. My name’s on the lease and I pay rent here. Not you.”

The look of hurt on Jimbo’s face was unmistakable and deep. Betrayed in front of another man. Jimbo shot a resentful look at Eddie.

“Whatever. I’m going out. Give me some cash.”

“Where are you going?”

“Just out. Why do I …”

Jimbo shook his head, didn’t bother to get his coat, and slammed the door on his way out.

For a moment, a heavy silence between Ana and Eddie.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Eddie said.

“Yeah I did.” Ana walked over to him and pointed at the computer on the coffee table in front of him. “The password to my laptop is Tessa18. My email should be open. I’m going to lay down for another hour.”

“Thanks.”

Ana started to leave but then hovered by the hallway. “How do I break up with him?”

“Just say, I’m breaking up with you.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“Didn’t say it was. But that’s all you have to say.”

“No.” She sighed. “That’s not all I have to say.”

* * * *

Her email account was open. Eddie wondered whether that was laziness or if Jimbo had her password and kept tabs on her account.

The most recent email was from Kindler. It contained three .wmv files. Kindler had written Mike Hollis’s number in the body of the email.

Eddie was tempted to call Mike Hollis right away, but that was just because he wanted to put off reviewing the tape. That was a boring-ass job he’d never enjoyed, and he still didn’t relish the thought of it even knowing there was something good to watch.

But he had a lot of tape, and the sooner it was done, the better. He opened the first two files. These contained the short footage of the footprints from the other two nights. Eddie watched both clips a few times, not noticing anything new or interesting about them.

The third file was compressed and contained many smaller files. With a groan, he started watching. There was almost four hours of tape to review.

* * * *

Around the two-hour mark, the footprints they’d encountered last night appeared. The timing jived with his notes. Unlike the other two sets of prints that had been left previously, these formed off-camera. That bothered him and reminded him of the lake, where Ana had walked away from the camera for five minutes only to miss the major paranormal activity of the night.

But aside from that gut feeling, there was nothing else about the footage he could find fault with. The prints from last night had appeared in two wholly different parts of the house, well away from the main, and only, stairway. It would have been next-to-impossible for someone upstairs—either Kindler, Ms. Anders, or Lori—to have snuck downstairs and leave them without being caught on film.

And the prints showing up in different places without a connecting trail between the two rooms was important also. The only way to fake that would be to have two people downstairs—and that would have increased the chances that a forger would have been seen either in person or on film.

But …

If two different people had left the footprints last night, then the size or shape of the prints would have been different. He homed in on the footage of both sets of prints from last night. They looked roughly the same but given the differing camera distances and angles, he couldn’t hang his hat on it.

Then he remembered that he’d measured last night’s prints.

He found the notebook in Ana’s backpack and flipped to the first page of the print measurements. It was marked: Laundry Room #1.

He eyeballed the lines demarking the toe and heel of the print, then flipped to the first page of measurements from the trophy room, which was marked: Man Cave #1.

He went back and forth between to the two pages but he knew right away they were the same size. That tended to rule out the two-person theory.

He checked the other prints. They all matched.

He dropped the notebook on the table and walked away from the couch. Ran a hand through his black hair and went to the window. Outside, the ground was white and the sky was blue. A few meager paths had been carved through the snow for vehicles and foot traffic.

His mind kept harping on the size and shape of the prints, but he didn’t know why. Maybe he just wanted all this paranormal activity to be bullshit. Maybe he couldn’t believe that a ghost or several ghosts were haunting three different houses and that they might have been responsible for killing Colin and driving Bernard into the dangerous elements last night.

Maybe he was just too rigid in his thinking. It was true that he’d never heard of a ghost killing anybody. But that didn’t necessarily negate the possibility. After all, he and Tim had never seen what was coming during their last ill-fated investigation. He’d never heard of a living boy subconsciously haunting the house he used to live in.

So maybe it was possible. Maybe he needed to take a step back and consider it.

The problem was the long odds.

The chances that a paranormal team would encounter activity in a supposedly haunted house during one short evening were slim. And even when allegedly paranormal activity was encountered, the evidence was usually ambiguous at best. Strange noises, unintelligible words captured through EVP, otherworldly orbs popping up in photographs. It was rare you got something at all, and even rarer that you got something good, and rarer still that you got something extraordinary.

And yet, he’d witnessed three pretty extraordinary events in three different houses. And only over the course of two nights.

It was like hitting the lottery two days in a row.

What were the chances?

Slim and none. He kept coming back to the near-statistical impossibility of the last forty-eight hours. What were the chances?

He paced the living room, not ready to go back to the mind-dulling routine of watching uninteresting footage. He’d already reviewed the tapes of the prints many times over. So now all that was left were the slow panning shots of empty, boring rooms.

He checked the time on the laptop: 1:59 PM. Ana still wasn’t up, but he didn’t want to wake her. Let her dickhead boyfriend do that, whenever he got back.

Eddie used Ana’s cell phone to call Mike Hollis. He had no idea where the conversation would go, but at least it would take him away from the footage for a few minutes.

“Hello?”

“Hi, is this Mike Hollis?”

Afte
r
a brief explanation, Mike Hollis warmed a little. He wasn’t about to buy Eddie a beer, but at least he was talking. Mike had a nasally voice that made him sound younger than he was.

“So what can I help you with?” Mike asked.

“There’s a lot of activity allegedly happening around here,” Eddie said. “Have you experienced any yourself?”

Another long shot. Ghosts were usually geographically limited. The chances of Tessa or whoever also materializing in Mike’s neck of the woods were slim. But so far, this case had beaten all the odds.

“No,” Mike said. “Nothing like that.”

“I’ve gotten the story from everybody else, but I was wondering if you could tell me what you remember about the day Tessa died.”

Mike exhaled sharply. “Oh, jeez. Long time ago.”

“That’s okay. I’m not looking for little details. More big-picture stuff.”

Mike was silent for ten seconds. “It wasn’t my finest hour, I can tell you that.”

“You were just a kid,” Eddie said.

“Yeah, guess that counts for something … We were playing that stupid game on the ice. I didn’t want to. They all made fun of me, everybody except Bernard, I think. He kind of hung back and didn’t say much.

“Anyway, Tessa kind of forced me partially onto the ice. Then she came out too. It was too much weight. I told her we should go back, but she didn’t listen.  I left her out there and the ice cracked … There wasn’t much we could do. She was in the middle of the lake.”

“Doesn’t sound like it to me. You ever think about coming back?”

Mike sighed. “No. Me and my old man don’t get along. No reason to.”

The scary image of Mitchell Hollis armed with a shotgun came to Eddie’s mind. He remembered the laptop on Mitchell Hollis’s bed. “That was nice of you to get him that computer, though.”

“Huh?”

“I was out at his place three days ago. I saw the laptop on his bed.”

“That thing?” Mike laughed ruefully. “You’d never think it, but that man’s got money squirreled away.  I still send him money whenever he asks though. Dutiful son and all that. But he paid for that laptop probably himself. He just doesn’t want anybody to know he has that kind of cash lying around.”

Eddie couldn’t blame the crazy old man for that. People bothered you less when they thought you had nothing.

“That’s funny … he acted like he couldn’t be bothered with the thing.”

Mike laughed. “He was blowing smoke. That’s what my old man does. He’s got money saved and he knows how to use that computer. Not as good as you or me but still.”

Eddie was running out of questions. He had the full picture of Tessa’s drowning now. The accounts only differed on how nasty the guys and Tessa had been to Mike.

After a pause, Mike said, “What do you think’s going on there?”

Eddie didn’t see an ulterior motive to his question. The guy lived hundreds of miles away and had an airtight alibi for the night of Colin’s murder according to Whitmore. Normally he wouldn’t talk about an open investigation, but he saw little harm in telling Mike. The guy’s only tie to the town was through a father he hardly spoke to.

“It’s either the find of the century or it’s all bullshit.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. It just doesn’t feel right.”

“Why would anybody go to the trouble?”

It was the million-dollar question.

“Anyway, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell anybody,” Eddie said.

“I won’t.”

“I don’t know if you heard about Bernard?”

“I haven’t.”

Eddie filled him in. “They say he’s going to be okay.”

“That’s too bad. I always liked him the most. He was a good guy. I wished we had kept in touch.”

Eddie remembered something Bernard had said. “You got his letter, right?”

“Letter?”

Eddie frowned. The last two days had been a blur and he’d gotten very little sleep. But he was sure Bernard had told him he’d given a letter to Mitchell for mailing to Mike.

Eddie decided to pursue it. “Bernie didn’t have your address, so he gave your dad a letter to forward to you.”

“When?”

“I don’t know exactly.”

“I never got it.”

“Really?” Eddie was certain Bernard hadn’t been lying about the letter.

“Yeah, I’d remember that.”

“Your old man has your address, right? Have you moved recently?”

“No, I’ve been in this house for the last seven years.”

Eddie wondered why Mitchell Hollis wouldn’t have forwarded a letter to his son. Maybe the old man just couldn’t be bothered. But then why would he lie? Mitchell wouldn’t worry about hurting Bernard’s feelings.

Eddie said, “Hey, if you think of anything else, could you give me a call on this number?”

“Sure. Before you go, I want to ask you something.”

“What is it?”

There were noises over the phone like Mike Hollis was switching ears. “What’s Ana like?”

“Great girl.” Eddie looked down the hallway at her bedroom door. “I think she’s going back to school soon.”

“I hear she’s nothing like her sister.”

“I couldn’t help you there, pal. I’m getting conflicting accounts of Tessa.”

Mike sighed. “She could be a bitch. A real mean bitch.”

“Ana’s not like that. She’s sweet, to a fault.”

“I shouldn’t talk like that about Tessa.” Mike’s voice grew nostalgic. “She was my first love. She was cool, and beautiful, and she was going places. And it didn’t hurt that she was drop dead sexy.”

“Anything else about her? Anything else about that day?”

“No, nothing. To think she’s a ghost now and …”

“What is it?”

“It’s probably nothing.”

“What, Mike?”

He sighed. “I can’t believe I forgot.”

Eddie gripped the phone tightly.

Mike said, “When she went in the water, before she went completely down, she said she’d fucking kill all of us.”

Eddie said nothing.

“She was about to die so—”

Eddie cut him off, because he sensed there was more behind the story. “It’s understandable given the situation.”

“Yeah … yeah.”

“Mike, you’re holding something back. It could help us solve this thing, maybe prevent another death.”

Mike sighed. “It’s going to sound crazy.”

“We’re way past crazy here.”

Mike paused a long time. “Okay. There’s something else I need to tell you.”