The Supernaturals (57 page)

“I see. So that means there is no activity on this floor.”

“Not as of yet, Ms. Reilly.”

The cameraman zoomed in on Kennedy as he answered. Damian Jackson watched as his eyes grew more and more accustomed to the darkness around them. He had also guessed the answer to Julie’s question. Any mysterious sounds or sights detected by this equipment would have been placed there by Kennedy, Kelly Delaphoy, or both. He saw Gabriel look up at him in the darkness and though he couldn’t see well, he knew the man was smiling at him. That made Jackson lose his own sense of humor.

Inside the production van, Lionel Peterson raised his eyebrow. Was Feuerstein’s own girl going to throw a monkey wrench into this whole thing and save him the trouble? He looked over at Kelly, who was seething. She gripped her clipboard tightly.

“Okay, we go to commercial in ten. Julie wrap up the second floor and try not to lose any more viewers than you already have,” Harris Dalton said. He, too, was seething at the way Julie Reilly was handling Professor Kennedy. “The second we go to black, I want the CEO on the line. If he sent Reilly here to sabotage his own special, we need to know right now.”

Kelly looked over at Peterson who returned her look with a shrug of his shoulders. Then he smiled and leaned toward her, ignoring the questioning look from Wallace Lindemann. The owner of the house tilted a stainless steel flask to his lips and drank deeply.

“She’s your girl in there. I suspect that her agenda is entirely from yours and old Abe’s.”

“I swear to God, Lionel, if you had anything to do with this turncoat bullshit, I’ll go straight to the board with it.”

“Honey, I’ve been threatened by far better people than you, and guess what? I’m still standing, and they’re back at their old cable channels with handheld cameras.”

New York

Abe Feuerstein accepted the phone from his assistant. His eyes lingered on several of the board as they stepped away from their seats at the commercial break. Their eyes wandered over to the old man sitting stoically in his large chair, but quickly moved away when they saw him looking at them. It seemed Lionel had far more supporters than even the CEO had realized.

“Harris, what is that woman doing to my special?”

Feuerstein listened as Harris Dalton asked him the same question from the Poconos. The CEO kept his smile on his face so the others would see him in control.

“I was just handed the ratings for the first hour. We started at sixty-two five—that’s over sixty million viewers—and in a single half an hour we lost ten million. There is a cutoff point, Dalton, when I have to pull the plug on this thing. We cannot sit through seven more hours of nothing; I want you to pass Ms. Reilly a little note from me. You tell her that if she thinks she’ll escape this thing unharmed, she’s sorely mistaken. Tell her she better appear to be giving Kennedy the benefit of the doubt, because he’s the star of the show, not her.”

The old man adjusted his bowtie and listened to Harris Dalton on the other end of the phone. Several members of the board started returning to their seats with fresh drinks in their hands.

“I never said that. Nothing gets faked, Harris. She can make it far tenser with her delivery. Explain to her that as of right now, the loss of viewers is on her head.” He smiled and handed the phone back to his assistant. “Get a message to the entertainment division, and for God’s sake bypass Lionel Peterson. Talk to LA directly. Have them get alternate programming ready in case this thing goes bad on us.”

“Yes, sir.”

Feuerstein smiled again, nodding as though he had been given good news. He nodded his head at the men and women of the board as they waited for the disaster from the Poconos to start once again.

The CEO knew he was facing another kind of horror if this special fell flat on its face. He would not only lose the confidence of the shareholders, he could possibly lose the backing of many for control of the manufacturing divisions. As this thought crossed his mind, he absentmindedly accepted a drink from his assistant. She nodded her head, letting him know that his message had been passed to the entertainment division. Abe sipped his drink and regained his confident air. The commercial—a small green lizard pushing car insurance—ended, and the show started again from Summer Place.

Abraham Feuerstein knew that if this failed, he could very well end up joining those ghosts out at that damnable house.

Nineteen

Bright River, Pennsylvania

With the second hour into the special having passed with no discernable recording or image having been relayed to the remaining thirty-eight million viewers, the mood in the production van was sticky at best. At the beginning of the last four-minute commercial break of the hour, Harris Dalton tossed his headphones down and stepped out of the van. He stood looking up at the darkened Summer Place. After the test broadcast, he had been sure that they would at least have something in the first two hours to hang their hat on, but thus far the show was sliding steadily downhill. He felt his reputation sliding with it.

“It’s playing with us.”

Kelly Delaphoy had come out just behind him, her clipboard still pressed to her chest as if she was preparing to ward off his ill humor with the thin piece of plastic. Harris shook his head and turned back to the darkened house, just as the first real drops of rain started to fall from the cloud-laden sky. He turned his face upward and took a deep breath as the rain cooled his face.

“Professor Kennedy doesn’t seem too worried about the non-happenings in the house,” Kelly said, flinching as a streak of lightning crashed over the property.

“What the hell does he have to lose?” Harris said. “His career was already in the shitter.” He brushed past Kelly and returned to the van.

The small producer watched the door to the van close, and then looked back at the house. With the darkened windows, it reminded her of a dangerous animal as it slept, its eyes closed and breathing lightly. Lightning illuminated the sky once more, reflecting off the glass on the second and third floor. She felt as if the house was mocking her and the entire effort to bring out what was hidden inside. The wind picked up and the rain start to come down in earnest, but instead of running for cover she stood her ground, looking up into the silent face of Summer Place.

“Show yourself, you bitch,” she said as the thunder caught up with the last bolt of lightning. The house remained as still as before. Silent and sleeping.

The real threat to Summer Place was coming, in the form of package carried by a messenger that had been dispatched from Philadelphia two hours before.

That package was a result of a theft from the Immigration and Naturalization Service Center mainframe computer. It was so hot that the man Leonard Sickles had hired to break into that system had decided to deliver the package himself. For the moment, Summer Place sat unaware of the threat coming its way.

Gabriel, Julie, Father
Dolan, and Damian Jackson—who still stood back from the camera’s lens—stood on the third floor landing and looked through the darkness toward the sewing room at the end of the long hallway. It was a corner room facing the back of the property, standing like a dark sentinel. They would have to pass it to turn the corner and get to the guest rooms on the far end of the floor. Jackson, the last person in line, took the opportunity to examine the device that Leonard Sickles, the little hood from LA, had engineered. It looked like a string of ordinary Christmas lights to him, and Jackson suspected that Sickles was running a game on Kennedy. Jackson had taken the opportunity to have all of Kennedy’s team checked out, especially the little gang member, so he knew the kid had recruited some friends from Los Angeles to do God-knew-what for him. As long as the gang members didn’t show up at Summer Place, Damian had more important fish to fry.

A flash of lightning produced a soft rumbling through the floorboards of the old house and brimmed brightly around the shuttered third-floor windows. Jackson heard Kennedy explain to the television audience that the intermittent light from the lightning outside could affect the ambient light photography they had planned. Damian smiled in the darkness as the team started moving down the hallway toward the sewing room and the suite where the opera star had supposedly disappeared.

The team, with Julie in the lead, stopped just outside one of the rooms and directed the camera toward the spot where Kennedy’s student had vanished into thin air—or, thick wall, if you believed the professor’s story. Lieutenant Jackson watched Kennedy’s expression as Julie once more explained the incident of seven years before. Gabriel looked away as the camera zoomed in on the spot where the kid had supposedly vanished and Jackson knew the professor was looking right at him. He couldn’t say for sure, but he suspected Gabriel was mocking him. Jackson placed his hands in his suit jacket and waited for Kennedy to look somewhere else, but he kept looking Jackson’s way. Jackson found it unnerving.

“Professor Kennedy will try to recreate the circumstances surrounding that night years ago. If he is successful, one of the greatest mysteries of Summer Place may be solved right here before the UBC cameras,” Julie said. The team moved away from the wall, the last place Kennedy’s student had ever been seen.

As the soundman slowly followed the others down the hallway, Damian intentionally rubbed his large hand across the spot on the wall. The velvety wallpaper was cool to the touch. Damian pressed hard onto the wall, making sure nothing creative was lined up for later discovery. It felt solid.

Julie and Kennedy stopped just beneath the ventilation grill where Damian had stood himself with the state police not two weeks before. The low-light camera adjusted and the world saw for the very first time the vent that had supposedly consumed the man Kelly Delaphoy had hired to trick out the house.

“And now, for the first time anywhere in the world, the UBC network will broadcast the actual incident that happened right here in Summer Place two weeks ago.”

Damian wanted to jump right out of his skin. He realized suddenly that he had been lied to, not only by Harris Dalton, Julie Reilly and Kelly Delaphoy, but by UBC as a whole. The footage had supposedly been lost forever, and they had sworn they had nothing to turn over to the police. Jackson clenched his teeth as Julie raised a concerned brow at the camera.

“A warning, the footage you are about to see is graphic and frightening. As most of our viewers are aware, this man, Kyle Pritchard, turned up yesterday. Mr. Pritchard committed suicide before he could give a full accounting of his experience. Once again, this footage is graphic, and has been proven to be real.”

They all heard the voice of Harris Dalton in their earpieces as the canned footage started playing. This allowed five minutes for the team to relax.

“You lying sons of bitches had that footage all along and didn’t tell me. That’s tampering with state evidence, and I told you I would hang you for it!” Jackson shouted, pushing past the sound- and cameramen.

“Lieutenant, I have been authorized to explain to you that our network technicians only a few hours ago came up with a workable copy of the video tape. As we speak, a copy of this tape has been forwarded to your office in Philadelphia—by US Mail.”

“If it takes me a year, I’m going to get someone at your network for withholding evidence.” Jackson looked from Julie to Kennedy’s smiling face. “And if I find you had something to do with the decision-making here Kennedy, that’s going to add to your problems.”

Gabriel took a step toward Jackson. The men were of equal height, and for the first time Jackson realized Kennedy wasn’t easily intimidated. Even in the dark he could see that the professor’s eyes were filled with a challenge the detective had never seen in them before.

“Hang around, Detective Lieutenant Jackson. You may get all the answers you ever wanted.”

Julie nodded toward the cameraman and he gave her a quick thumbs up. The scene had been filmed, and during the next commercial break he would feed it quietly to the control van for broadcast at the appropriate time.

Both men were being set up by Julie Reilly.

George Cordero followed
John Lonetree and Jennifer Tilden down the steep basement stairs with the use of low power penlights. The camera and soundmen were taking up the rear of the line and were still in the kitchen as the group slowly made their way down the steps. George hadn’t mentioned anything to either Jennifer or John, but since they had opened the door to the basement, he’d had a feeling that something was down there. He corrected himself—something
had
been down there. Deep down, he felt as if they had missed an opportunity by delaying their movement to the cellar and the subbasement. He stopped on the third step down, causing the camera man to almost bump into him. They were currently going out live, which was the only thing that stopped the cameraman from complaining that Cordero had almost killed them all with his sudden stop.