Die Job (4 page)

Yeah, sure. I didn’t trust people who were Dr. Jekyll one moment and Mr. Hyde the next.

Flashing another killer smile, he sped up to reach the veranda ahead of the students. He held up a hand to halt their progress just as one of the wide double doors swung open, spilling light into the gathering dusk.

Lucy Mortimer stood in the doorway. Tonight’s dress was blue and topped with an apron. A velvet band with a cameo circled her freckled neck. “I guess you’d better come in,” she said. Clearly, the teenagers didn’t merit her “lady of the manor” routine.

We all fit easily into Rothmere’s foyer. My whole apartment would have fit. With original wood floors, deep baseboards and crown molding, a crystal and porcelain chandelier now wired for electricity, a sprinkling of oil-painted family portraits, and a grand staircase wide enough to let at least two Southern belles in hoop skirts descend side by side, the foyer made a strong first impression. “Wow,” and, “Dig that chandelier,” came from the students seeing the place for the first time.

“I understand from Mr. Spaatz that you’re hoping to encounter Cyril tonight,” Lucy said, motioning to us to gather under the chandelier, “so let me tell you his story.” She spoke in a low, husky voice, and everyone leaned forward to hear her. “Cyril Rothmere came to Georgia from Yorkshire,
England, in 1796 when he was twenty-five. Old letters suggest that he was banished by his family for ruinous gambling debts and he came to America to seek his fortune. He had a knack for farming, and once he acquired some land—winning it in a card game, ironically—he built a house and turned his plantation into the most successful one in southeastern Georgia. In 1801, he met a woman named Annabelle Latham and she broke her engagement to a neighboring landowner to marry Cyril.”

“The money-grubbing witch,” someone muttered under his voice.

Lucy backed up toward one of the portraits on the wall. “This is Cyril,” she said.

Everyone crowded around the portrait of a middle-aged man with a ruddy face, thick brown hair with wooly looking sideburns, and an air of consequence. He stood beside a horse with a hound fawning in the foreground. Rothmere graced the background.

“He’s nearly as ugly as you, Lonnie,” someone quipped.

Lonnie Farber gave the speaker the finger.

Lucy ignored the byplay; it was probably no more than she expected. “Cyril had this mansion built when the previous house burnt to the ground. Some say the blaze was arson, set by the neighbor who had also courted Annabelle. However it started, the fire consumed the entire house and everything in it, and Cyril started from scratch when he rebuilt. Follow me.”

Lucy, obviously in her element talking about “her” family, unhooked the velvet rope which kept the second story off-limits. Although the rooms on the ground floor had been refinished, funding had run out and the upstairs bedrooms remained pretty much as they’d been when Phineas Rothmere willed the place to the city in the 1950s and were off-limits
to the public. Explaining this, Lucy led us up two flights of stairs with a half landing where they turned. I was a step below Braden and another kid in a letter jacket and crew cut. Braden leaned toward the other guy and said in a low voice, “Don’t do it, man.”

Oh, great. What kind of prank was brewing? I hoped it didn’t involve alcohol, nudity, or combustibles of any kind.

“Mark—” Braden started.

The crew-cut kid shook his head and called, “Wait up, Lindsay.” Taking the stairs two at a time, he caught up with a tall brunette. He put his arm around her waist and she snuggled up against him. Braden’s shoulders slumped as he watched the pair.

Lucy paused in a gallery that overlooked the ballroom. A collection of portraits hung on the walls, barely visible in the dusky gloom. “Stay away from the railing,” Lucy cautioned. “It’s why we can’t allow visitors up here. We’re in the process of moving the family portraits to the museum.”

When she flicked a light switch, I could see lighter patches on the walls where paintings had hung.

“But Cyril’s family is still here,” Lucy said.

Cyril and an anemic-looking blonde I took to be Annabelle were seated in the middle of a large family that included four sons and three daughters. I edged closer to the painting she pointed at and tried to figure out which of the three young ladies posed in hoop skirts and ringlets was Clarissa. I decided she was the youngest, a sweet-faced girl of maybe sixteen, with chestnut curls, a pale complexion, and a shy smile. I could see her writing the letter I’d read last night.

“Rothmere was the largest plantation home for miles around when it was finished in 1831,” Lucy continued, “and Cyril
and Annabelle hosted a huge engagement party for their daughter Clarissa shortly after it was completed.”

“When do we get to the ghost?”

It was the tall girl Mark had his arm around, Lindsay. Spaatz frowned her down.

Lucy led us back the way we’d come, her skirt swaying as she descended the stairs, one slow step at a time. “There was a huge storm that night, and many of the guests who weren’t staying over left early. That may explain why nobody heard it.”

“Heard what?” a breathless voice asked.

“Cyril’s fall,” Lucy said. She stepped off the final stair and looked up at us. “In the morning, a maid found him, dead.” She paused to let us absorb the image. Then, with a
shush
of heavy skirts, she turned and gestured to the floor at the base of the stairs. “His neck was broken.”

Students jostled for position on the stairs and someone bumped me, hard. I teetered on the edge of the step, unable to grab the banister because of people on either side of me. As I toppled forward, Glen Spaatz hauled me back with an iron hand around my upper arm and turned to glare at the teens behind us. He gave my arm a reassuring squeeze before letting go.

“Was Cyril murdered?” This came from Tasha Solomon, her brow creased with concern.

We all made it down the stairs alive and circled Lucy. “No one knows,” she admitted. “What we do know is that Annabelle remarried as soon as her year of mourning was up. She married the neighbor she’d been engaged to when she met Cyril. And Cyril’s eldest son, Geoffrey, inherited the plantation just in time for his last son to be born here. Rumor has it the inheritance was timely because his business
in Savannah was failing and they were about to lose their house.

“Cyril’s buried in the cemetery out back, but many of the sightings of his ghost have been in the house, including on the landing, the spot from which he fell . . . or was pushed.”

Ari Solomon and I spoke up simultaneously. “What happened to Clarissa?” I asked.

“Have you ever seen him, Dr. Mortimer?” the redhead asked. “Cyril’s ghost, I mean?”

Lucy hesitated. Her fingers strayed to the cameo at her throat. “I’m not the fanciful type.” Clearing her throat, she said, “I’ll be in my office. Remember, I’m locking up at ten o’clock sharp.” She turned on her heel and bustled off down the left-leading hallway.

“Thank you, Dr. Mortimer,” Spaatz called after her. He took her place in front of the semicircle of engrossed high schoolers, some of whom carried weird electronic gadgets about the size and shape of a GPS.

“Okay,” Spaatz continued. “Find your partner and I’ll let you know where you’re stationed for the evening.” He waved a clipboard with a sheaf of papers on it. “Take baseline EMF and temperature readings as soon as you get to your observation point. Cell phones will screw up the readings, so everyone dump your phones in here.” He held up a plastic tub.

“The lights will be off to make it easier for Cyril to manifest, if he wants to,” Spaatz said. “Use your red light flashlights if necessary. Any questions?”

“Where do you want the chaperones?” I asked. “And what’s EMF?”

Spaatz smiled. “Good questions. EMF is electromagnetic field. Our Mel 8704s”—he held up the GPS-like gadget—“read
fluctuations in the EMF. Without getting too technical, certain readings that can’t be correlated to household electronics like microwave ovens or TVs suggest the presence of a spirit. Or, at least that’s what ghost believers maintain. Got it?”

Sure, I was ready to do a dissertation on the subject. I shrugged and he grinned.

“As to where the chaperones should hang out, you’re floaters—no pun intended. Just wander between the positions where our researchers”—he gestured to the kids—“are stationed. I’ve got flashlights and a diagram for each of you.”

Coach Peet stomped forward, taking the sheet that Spaatz handed him. The kids lined up to get their stations from Spaatz. I noticed Rachel was paired with Braden, and Mark and the tall brunette stuck together. I wondered uneasily if boy-girl pairings would lead to . . . indiscretions (as Mom would put it) in a darkened house.

“We’re on the landing,” Lonnie Farber’s buddy crowed. “We’re gonna be in on the action.” The two youths bumped fists.

“ ‘I ain’t afraid of no ghosts,’ ” Lonnie sang in a tuneful baritone.

Spaatz frowned. “Lonnie, Tyler, this isn’t a game. It’s a legitimate science experiment. Take it seriously, or take a hike.”

When Spaatz turned away, Lonnie cut a sly glance at his buddy. I knew they were planning something, probably some prank that would make me sorry I had agreed to chaperone. Lonnie caught me staring at him, and instead of looking away like I thought he would, he winked.

It was going to be a long night.

TRAIPSING AROUND THE OLD MANSION IN THE NEAR total dark was slightly unnerving, even though, like Lucy, I didn’t believe in ghosts. Frankly, the thought of what some of the high schoolers might get up to scared me a lot more than the prospect of an encounter with Cyril. In the hour I’d been “floating,” I’d caught one couple necking, found one pair snoozing, discovered one pair missing from their assigned spot, smelled beer on one boy’s breath, and hadn’t run into any of the other chaperones. Just outside the ballroom, I stopped to get my bearings. A film of moonlight made a path across the polished wood floor to the French doors that opened onto a raised stone terrazzo. A breath of a breeze stirred the hair at my temples and I frowned. One of the doors must be open. As I crossed the floor, faint giggles sounded from my left and someone hissed, “Sssh.”

I was halfway across the floor to investigate the giggles when
a hideous wailing moan stopped me. Ye gods! The giggles turned to shrieks.

“What was that?” a girl’s voice asked.

I didn’t answer because I was across the room, trotting toward the front hall where I thought the sound had come from. Another moan rose to a screech and died away, sending shivers down my spine. I skidded into the front hall to see fog spilling off the landing and wafting down the staircase. I gasped. Dimly aware of a couple of other people gathered in the darkness of the hall, I kept my gaze riveted to the landing.

Another eerie scream rent the air and I clapped my hands to my ears. Even before it died away, a white form rose from the mist and staggered along the landing. Hm, weren’t ghosts supposed to glide or flit? This one moved more like Frankenstein’s monster. My suspicions aroused—not that I’d ever thought there was really a ghost—I started for the stairs.

“Is someone recording this?” a voice whispered.

I had just reached the landing when Spaatz’s voice asked, “What the hell is going on here?”

Three or four voices answered him, saying “The ghost!” “Did you hear that scream?” and “Cyril’s up there.”

My eyes adjusting to the dimness, I took in Tyler crouched by a machine spilling fog into the hallway, a boom box that emitted another loud shriek as I moved toward it, and a tall figure in white ducking into the nearest bedroom.

I ran after the “ghost” as it made for the window, the floor boards shuddering with its heavy steps. Not very wraithlike. It slung a leg over the sill and I lunged. My fingers brushed what felt like cotton. Definitely not ectoplasm or slime or whatever spirits were supposed to be made of. I stuck my head out the window. At the back of the house, the room faced
the garden and cemetery. The roof sloped gradually beneath the window and a heavy drainpipe three feet to the left would provide a reasonably strong and agile teen with all the help he needed in shinnying to the ground. I looked out across the landscape. Heavy clouds blotted out the moon and stars, but I could vaguely make out a dark form sprinting toward the cemetery. He—I was darn sure it was Lonnie—must have shucked the sheet in order to run faster.

I had no chance of catching Lonnie, even if I’d been willing to risk climbing out on the roof, so I pulled my head in and returned to the landing. Spaatz had joined Tyler and one of them had shut off the boom box. Thank goodness. The eerie wailing was giving me a headache. I hoped the pranksters hadn’t tortured cats to record such hideous yowling.

“Did you catch Cyril?” Tyler asked when I reappeared. He was shorter than Lonnie but bulky through the shoulders, and had straight black hair and a few acne scars low on his cheeks. His look of affected innocence made me want to smack him.

“Hardly,” I said in as damping a tone as I could manage with my breaths coming a bit faster than usual and my heart pounding extra hard in my chest. From running up the stairs, of course. “And I didn’t catch Lonnie, either. He was headed for the cemetery last I saw him.”