The Voodoo Killings (31 page)

Chloroform? Formaldehyde? I couldn’t imagine a situation where they’d be exposed to enough of that without suffering burns on their skin. Ether? More questions than answers.

There was no way I was going to contact Anna Bell, the whore Lee had worked with. Rumour was she’d become a poltergeist. Lou had noted a witness to two of the murders in his notes—luckily for me, someone who had died shortly afterwards of drowning. For whatever reason, drowning ups the chance you become a ghost—something about the act of dying in water. Anyway, that’s who I was hoping to contact: one Tom Jones.

Shit. Loose gravel slid out from under my feet and I started to slide down the beach….I grabbed for a low-growing shrub and only managed to uproot it. I hit the high-tide mark of shale, broken shells and barnacles ass first. I scrambled up and grabbed my backpack, which had rolled a few feet away, and started to walk towards the piers, where the old city dock used to be before the fire. I worked my way across a patch of beach that was more mud and seaweed than shale, and finally reached relative shelter under the pier.

I strained my ears, but the drizzle and wind drowned out any voices from above. Which meant no one was going to hear me either. The air temperature dropped and I froze.

The fog coalesced beside me and Nate appeared. I’d forgotten that this close to the ocean he could pop through the barrier easily,
especially in the rain. “Nate, what the hell? You’re supposed to be watching Cameron.”

“K, calling ghosts here is dangerous.”

“I call up ghosts all the time. Thieves, scam artists, murderers—
you
.”

He ignored the jibe. “This place is different.” He lowered his voice. “What if she hears you? It’s fucking poltergeist territory, for Christ’s sake.”

“I’m not calling
her
directly, I’m calling a witness.”

“To ask about someone who killed her.”

“Trust me, I’ll be fine.”

“K, she was a body dealer who killed people,
here
, and you’re calling up someone who could easily have been one of her victims to ask about the killer who got
her
. If this isn’t stupid, I don’t know what is.”

I frowned. “Nate! Stop it. That’s the part I’m trying very hard to forget right now.”

That Anna Bell became a poltergeist when she died shocked absolutely no one. Poltergeists by definition are malevolent spirits, but from there it’s a sliding scale. Doing something really horrible while you’re alive doesn’t guarantee you’ll end up a poltergeist; it’s the complete lack of empathy and conscience that nets you that kind of power in the afterlife. Anna Bell was a breed all on her own. She’d killed a lot of people in the body-dealing trade, and she’d liked it.

“Nate, if you have a problem with me being here, go back to watching Cameron, which is what you’re supposed to be doing.”

“He’s fine. No one’s getting in his building. Come on, K, let’s get out of here. This place gives me the creeps.”

I shook my head. “The docks give you the creeps—what kind of ghost are you?”

“A smart one who doesn’t fuck around with poltergeists!” He wrapped his arms around his body in a very alive gesture and glanced around. “Besides, it’s weird around here. If I lose my concentration for a sec, I start to slip back through.”

“Look, just stand over there and keep quiet.”

Nate muttered something less than complimentary but moved a few feet away.

I pulled out my waterproof china marker. I’d had too many errant waves wash away my painstakingly drawn symbols to mess around. Out here you didn’t need a mirror; drawing a symbol on wood or metal then placing it under water worked just as well, if not better.

I sketched the first symbol, an Egyptian one, on the sheet of metal I carried around in my backpack for just such occasions. The old Egyptian symbol for broadcasting someone’s name worked best in water and was easy to draw, too: a basket with an ibis on either side. Above the basket I wrote
Tom Jones
, hoping the ghost could read, and then walked to the water’s edge and held the sheet just under the surface.

I took a deep breath then tapped the Otherside and pushed it into the metal sheet. It charged fast, draining Otherside through me like a funnel. Hot damn, I’d forgotten just how effective salt water is as a catalyst. Yes it hurt, but there was a rush laced through it. It was as if a beacon shot out through the water and all of a sudden I became the centre of attention for a thousand and one eyes.

I cleared my throat. “Tom Jones, died 1888 by drowning. Are you out there?”

A minute passed….

“Tom? You out there?” I called again, and felt the submerged metal reverberate through the Otherside.

A few breaths later, a grey fog coalesced above the water in front of me into a figure….No, wait, make that three figures, in varying stages of undress.

The ghost on the left had managed to form a pair of suspenders and boots, and that was it. The middle ghost had done a better job, achieving a cowboy hat and flannel shirt. The last ghost wore a pair of red long johns. That could have been what he died in.

None of them had well-defined facial features; think of a blurred composite through a shaky camera. Ghosts from the turn of the century, unless they’d been very vain and/or upper-class, don’t have
a good grasp of their own facial features. It’s the ghost’s memory that has to do that work, after all, manifesting what they figured they looked like.

I felt the touch of cold again at my shoulder and ear. “
Nate
! I said back off.”

“Didn’t want to miss this. Jackpot, K. You got three.”

“Shut up,” I said out of the corner of my mouth. Then I addressed the ghosts. “You can’t all possibly be Tom Jones.”

They looked at each other, then back at me, and all three gave a slow nod.

“Who died in Seattle, 1888, by drowning?”

Again, the three ghosts nodded.

Nate snorted with laughter.

I shot him a dirty look. “Not helping.” I looked back up at my trio of ghosts. “Okay, which one of you was murdered, probably tied to the pier while you were unconscious? Raise your hand if that was you.”

Slowly but surely, all three raised a hand.

Nate howled with laughter.

“All right, so who died in June? Come on, guys, the beginning of summer?”

All three hands stayed up.

“Oh, for crying out loud…”

Nate couldn’t stop snickering.

“
Nate
, knock it off—”

“Oh, come on, Kincaid. You can’t tell me this isn’t funny. I mean, what are the odds?”

“What happened to being scared of poltergeists?”

He sighed. “Fine.” He vanished.

I turned back to my shambling lineup of Tom Joneses. “So, just so we’re all clear, all
three
of you are named Tom Jones and were drugged and tied to the pier and drowned in the month of June, 1888?”

Again, all three nodded, floating over the water with their feet trailing on the glass surface. I’d never run into this problem before: multiple ghosts who fit the same description—or claimed to.

“All right, boys. Since you all claim to be Tom Jones, I need to know which one of you witnessed a murder—”

The ghost in suspenders spoke. “This man, called himself Dr. Green, said he wanted to be my friend and bought me a drink.”

Why oh why hadn’t Lee’s brother written down a middle name?

“Not your
own
murder. I’m interested in information about the killing of two girls, prostitutes, who were found cut up on the beach.”

“That’s not very nice,” the ghost in long johns piped up.

“What? That they were prostitutes or were cut up?”

“My mother cared about my murder,” the ghost in suspenders continued.

This is why I hate working with ghosts who are over a hundred. At fifty, most of them start going a little screwy.

I sighed. “Look, I’m sorry, but
maybe
you shouldn’t have been taking drinks from strangers?”

Suspenders ghost said, “That’s not fair. I hadn’t had a drink in months, and I had no money, and here’s this nice doctor…”

“Look, you’re right. What happened to you was horrible, but so was what happened to these girls.”

“I thought you just said they were prostitutes?” the long john–wearing ghost said. “Sounds like they got what they deserved.”

I squelched my temper. I still needed to know who killed them.

I pulled a black-and-white photo of one of the girls out of my backpack. “All right, let’s try it this way. Raise your hand if you remember seeing two women murdered around the time you died, on this very beach.” I held up the old black-and-white photo.

All three ghosts raised their hands.

“Do any of you
actually
remember anything?”

Tom Jones with the hat lifted it and scratched what was left of his hair, or at least what he remembered had been left of his hair. “We’re pretty sure we remember Tom Jones.”

The other two nodded.

“We’re just not sure which one of us might be him.”

I closed my eyes. “And the women?”

“We’re pretty sure we’ve heard of them murders….”

“Let me guess—you can’t remember which one of you saw them?” I shook my head. “Why did you answer my summoning?”

The ghost with the suspenders said, “We don’t get to talk to people too much. No one ever calls us and it gets awful boring.”

“All right, think, guys, or try to think. These woman would have been badly cut up—face, body, fingers.”

Only one ghost spoke up this time, the one wearing the cowboy hat. “There were two girls killed like that, but I only really saw the one killed. I found the other one. Stumbled over her while I was alive, I think. Neither one of them were the one in your picture, though.” His face scrunched up. “That Chinaman, the one with the sister, he asked me all sorts of questions, made me look at the body. I never saw anything like it.” He shook his head. “He kept asking if the cuts had all been there when I’d stumbled across her. Made me sick to my stomach to look, but he paid me well. I took my money to the bar afterwards….” His voice trailed off as he looked towards the pier, not the one he’d died under but the modern one that had replaced it. “That’s how I ended up here, I think.” He dropped his chin. “No good deed, eh?”

Yeah, I’ll say. “Look, do you remember seeing anything else strange that night? Under or around the docks? Something or someone?”

He shook his head. “That Chinaman asked me the same thing. It was dark and, whatever it was, it kept its head covered.”

“It?”

The ghost nodded. “It ran out into the water, and I never saw it come back up—some kind of devil or sea monster.”

No such thing as devils and sea monsters. More likely a ghoul. Salt water doesn’t ruin their skin the way it does with zombies. He could just grab a rock and sink, no need to breathe.

I noticed the water was now lapping around the soles of my boots. I’d been so focused on keeping my ghosts wrangled, I’d missed the tide coming in. The drizzle had let up, too, and sun now peeked out from behind the grey clouds, lighting up spots on the beach. People would be venturing onto the dock and the beach soon: time to get out of here.

I pulled out my remaining bottle of laudanum and offered it to the three of them. “Look, guys, it’s been fun,” I said.

“Keep it. Next time, bring us some whisky,” Suspenders said, grumpily. And with that, all three ghosts vanished.

I extracted my boots from the mud and turned to head back up the shore.

All the warning I had was chilled air brushing the back of my neck.

I glanced behind me to catch sight of a dark, solid object sailing towards me. It clocked me on the side of the head.

“Damn it—” I slipped on the seaweed and wet rocks, and hit the shallows face first, getting a good mouthful of salt water. I pushed myself back up until I was standing again. My god, did my ears ring.

A raspy laugh pierced the ringing in my ears. I glanced around the shale and shadows under the pier.

“You know, I heard you weren’t the brightest knife in the drawer, but I never thought you’d come down here all by your lonesome.”

It was a woman’s voice, and raspy. Another flash of ice ran down the back of my neck as the sun ebbed in and out of the clouds. The ghost of Anna Bell floated above me. Large blond ringlets curled around her face and shoulders, and she was barefoot, her small feet pointed like a jewellery-box dancer’s and dangling under the hem of a cinched blue dress. Resting on her shoulder like a parasol was a piece of broken, waterlogged two-by-four.

What could I use to defend myself against a poltergeist except Otherside? But it was fifty-fifty that I’d pass out if I tapped the barrier again. I’d have to run for it. I gauged the distance to the pier’s ladder.

Anna Bell’s eyes flashed red and a smile spread across her face.

The two-by-four came down on my head again.

CHAPTER 19

DROWNING

I coughed up cold salt water. My throat burned from it. I was bone chilled, soaking wet, and my ears rang like after a seance, when I’d been standing too close to Nate’s speaker.

Anna. The last thing I remembered was the poltergeist….

My eyes fell on the rope wrapped around my waist and chest. Thick rope, the kind you find washed up onshore, pinned me to one of the pier’s pillars. I was sitting with my back against the pillar in a shallow pool of water, my hands bound behind my back. If my pounding headache was an indication, Anna must have knocked me out and tied me up. The sun had disappeared and the rain had picked up again. The lights on the pier had been switched on, bathing the shallow water around me in yellow light. If I had to guess, I’d say I’d been out for an hour or so. She must have hit me hard with the two-by-four.

I shook my head, trying to clear it, but all I managed was to get wet hair in my face and up the level of pounding in my head. I was so numb, I heard more than felt the water lapping against me. The tide was coming in. Not good. It was a wonder I didn’t already have hypothermia.

I needed to get a hold of Nate.

I tried to curl my legs underneath me and push up. It was no use. The ropes tying me to the pier might be wet, but they held tight.