No Ghouls Allowed (21 page)

“Holy shit,” Heath whispered from behind me. He’d seen it too.

“Come in, come in,” Porter told us, waving his hand enthusiastically as he took a
seat behind an enormous desk covered in folders and paper.

I eyed him more keenly now and dismissed the initial thought I’d had at such a handsome
man. “It’s okay, Beau,” I whispered. “Heath and I have enough magnets on us to stop
any spook in its tracks.”

This may or may not have been true, because all Heath and I had on us were our fishing
vests, and considering that we were up against a room where every single square inch
of wall space was occupied with a hanging planchette, I wasn’t especially confident
in anything except my ability to run . . . very, very fast if necessary.

“Do you like my collection?” Porter said, sitting down rather elaborately and waving
to the walls.

Breslow took three tentative steps forward into the room and Heath and I stuck close
on either side of him. “Is this some kind of a joke, Mr. Porter?” Beau managed in
a horse voice.

Porter adopted a confused look. “Joke? What joke would that be, Deputy . . . ah . . . ?”

“Breslow.”

“Deputy Breslow. What kind of joke do you believe I’m trying to make?”

He was toying with us, the son of a bitch. “Maybe you think you can outsmart the investigators
on a forty-five-year-old murder?” I suggested. “That’d be a great joke, wouldn’t it,
Mr. Porter?”

Porter turned his steely blue eyes on me. “Forty-five-year-old murder?” he said with
forced surprise. “What are you people going on about?”

“We found the remains of a young man in your home,” Breslow said bluntly.

Porter put a hand to his chest and widened his eyes. “In
my
home?” The deputy nodded. “Well, first, I will repeat that I have no idea what you’re
talking about, and second, I hope you obtained a warrant to search my residence?”

“We didn’t need one,” Heath said, but Porter talked over him.

“Well, I can’t possibly think that you would enter my home without my permission or
a warrant. Furthermore, as I’ve only owned my house for the past six months, I can’t
possibly imagine why you would think I had anything to do with anything suspicious
dating back to that property from forty-five years ago. If there was a murder committed
on my premises, it was well before my time there.”

I wanted to smack him. He knew damn well what we were talking about and he seemed
to be enjoying playing semantics with us and forcing us to explain ourselves.

“The skeletal remains were found in the hidden playroom inside Porter Manor,” Heath
growled. He didn’t much care for Glenn’s antics either.

“Inside Porter Manor?” Glenn repeated. “Well, I sold that home several months ago. . . .
Er . . . who did you say you were?”

“Deputy Whitefeather,” Heath said, and for emphasis, he coolly flashed the badge Beau
had given him.

Porter merely smirked at him. “I didn’t know the Valdosta sheriff’s department was
keeping its deputies in plain clothes these days.”

“We think the remains belong to Everett Sellers,” I said.

“You think?” Porter said, his cunning eyes shifting to me. “The coroner hasn’t confirmed
to whom they belong?”

“Not yet,” I said, without elaborating.

“So, how can you possibly know that these remains aren’t far older than forty-five
years?” Porter said, his amused and overly dramatic antics starting to really irritate
me. “I mean, that house was in our family for seven generations! Those remains could
have been anyone’s, including another one of my relatives who died of natural causes
and was, for whatever reason, stored in the house in this hidden room you claim to
have found.”

“We don’t think so,” Breslow said.

Porter picked up the receiver on his phone, dangling it in one hand. “Yes, well, assuming
I’m about to be accused of something, I’ll call my attorney and have him head down
to the morgue to see this body for himself and tell me what he thinks.”

“It ain’t at the morgue,” Breslow told him, a bit anxious to have Porter set down
his phone.

“Why not?”

“The remains were stolen,” Breslow admitted. I was a little irritated that he’d done
that, but then I realized that if Porter had killed Everett, then he most likely would’ve
snuck back into the house to remove the remains and he’d know already that they weren’t
at the morgue. “Do you know somethin’ about that, Mr. Porter?”

“Stolen?” Porter said, a wicked smile lifting the edges of his mouth. “From the morgue?”

Breslow was quiet, and that seemed to be all that Porter needed to set down the receiver
and settle smugly back into his chair. “I see,” he said, barely keeping back a snicker.
“Well, if you don’t have a body, Deputy, then you don’t have a murder.”

“So you’re claiming that you knew nothing of the fact that your cousin was murdered
in your home back in nineteen seventy-one and left in your sister’s playroom, which
was then covered over with drywall and hidden from the rest of the world?” I said.
I wanted to get Porter’s lie on the record.

“On the contrary. My cousin Everett walked off into the woods one afternoon and never
returned. My family and I searched tirelessly for him for weeks and months, but no
trace of him was ever found. Furthermore, I am not now, nor was I ever, aware of this
‘playroom’ you keep mentioning. My sisters didn’t have playrooms. They had closets.”

“Okay, so maybe one of the closets was converted over into a playroom and you just
didn’t realize it,” Heath said.

Porter rolled his eyes. “I wouldn’t know about that either. My mother was very strict
about our placement in that house. The boys were assigned bedrooms on the third floor
and my sisters were assigned rooms on the first. We were not allowed in each other’s
rooms. My mother thought that inappropriate.”

“And yet the room in question had a door that was covered over with drywall,” I said.
“Assuming Everett met an unfortunate demise in your sister’s converted closet—who
covered over the door with drywall?”

Porter eyed me dully. “I’ve no idea, Miss . . .”

“Holliday,” I said when he refused to go on without knowing my name.

But instead of elaborating on how he’d happened to miss the reconfiguration of his
sister’s room, Porter focused intently on me. “Did you say Holliday?”

“Yes.”

“As in Montgomery Holliday’s daughter?”

I nodded and was about to direct the conversation back to the topic at hand when Porter
said, “So you’re DeeDee’s daughter.” I felt a chill ignite my spine and the room suddenly
got very quiet. “I knew your mother quite well, you know,” he said, his eyes never
leaving mine. “She was such a beauty, even back then. Mother was always thrusting
the two of us together, you know, hoping that sparks would catch fire even at an early
age.”

I felt my skin crawl. The thought of this man having such inappropriate thoughts about
my mother, who was only eight at the time to his twelve, disgusted me. “What happened
in that playroom, Glenn?” I asked, refusing to look away.

Porter smiled. “Why don’t you ask your mother, Mary Jane?” he said. “Oh, but that’s
right. DeeDee passed away some time ago, didn’t she? But, from what I gather, you
two still chat from time to time, don’t you? And you don’t even seem to need a planchette.”

Heath took a threatening step toward Porter’s desk, his hands balled up into fists,
and I grabbed for his arm to stop him.

Porter laughed like he thought it was hilarious that we were so offended. Then he
set his hands on his desk and stood up. “Now, don’t let me keep the three of you.
I’m sure you have much to do to see about finding that lost body. Can’t very well
proceed without that, now, can you?”

I let go of Heath’s arm and took the short steps to his desk myself. Porter stood
and leaned forward over the desk to meet my unspoken challenge. Unperturbed, I stuck
my face right into his and said, “Somehow, someway, we’re going to prove that you
killed your cousin, Glenn.”

He narrowed his eyes at me. “Oh, but
I
didn’t, Mary Jane Holliday. And your mother knows it.”

A flood of angry heat seared my cheeks and for several seconds I had a hell of a time
holding back the punch to the face I desperately wanted to inflict on Glenn Porter.
I felt Heath’s hand on my shoulder just as I was really close to losing my cool, and
he said, “Come on, Em. He’s not worth it.”

I let myself be tugged backward, but I continued to snarl at Porter. Just before we
made it through the door, however, something in Glenn’s eyes sparked and in an instant
all the planchettes in the room began to vibrate and rattle. Alerted by the odd noise,
Heath and Breslow paused and turned back to look, while I stood rooted to the spot.
We watched as the wall behind Porter came alive with movement. The planchettes rattled
on their nails and began tapping out a rhythm against the wall.

With dread I noticed that they began keeping four-four time. Porter smiled his most
wicked smile, then sat back down, leaned back in his chair, and waved lazily at the
planchettes. And then he snapped his fingers and all the planchettes were once again
still and silent.

“Neat party trick,” he said to us, “isn’t it?”

That’s when I turned away from him and grabbed Heath and Beau by the arms, pulling
them out of the room. “See you around, Mary Jane,” Porter called after me.

It took everything I had not to run from the building.

We bypassed Chloe without even stopping to say good-bye. I made a beeline for the
car and took my frustration out on the door, which I slammed after I got in.

Heath got quietly into the backseat, and Breslow slid in as well. We sat there for
a few beats in silence, and I did my best to rein in my temper, but I still had the
urge to go back into Porter’s office and sock him in the nose.

Breslow started the car and pulled out from the curb and still no one spoke. At the
first red light we came to, however, he turned to me and said, “Wanna fill me in on
what Porter meant by your mama knowing what happened in that playroom?”

I froze. “I have no idea.”

“Well, you seemed to know,” he insisted.

“Beau, will you drop it, please?”

“No, I won’t drop it, Mary Jane!” he yelled, and behind us a car tapped its horn ever
so lightly. The light had turned green and we were holding up traffic.

Breslow punched the gas and I turned away from him, so angry and troubled, and confused.
“We need to go see Sarah,” I said after several more minutes of silence.

Nobody answered me, so I turned to Breslow. “Beau. We have to go interview Sarah.
She was there that day. I know she was.”

“That’s where I’m heading right now,” he said through clenched teeth.

I didn’t fault him for being angry with me. I would’ve been ticked off too, but I
couldn’t offer him anything other than the fact that my mother used to spend time
at the Porters’ and she had on her vanity a small porcelain sugar bowl that looked
very similar to the tea set in the playroom. That was it. That was really all I knew.

Except that wasn’t really
all
I knew.

Linda’s reaction to my question about the Sandman, the spook who’d been torturing
my mother as a child, witnessed by me in my out-of-body experience; the way DeeDee
had told me that Everett and Glenn had called up the Sandman; and the fact that Glenn
Porter had craftily implied that my mother was there, in that playroom, the day Everett
Sellers supposedly went missing. All of it suggested that Mama was involved, but to
what extent I couldn’t say.

And how involved could she have been anyway? She was only a child herself! Just eight
years old at the time.

True, she probably could’ve swung that mallet, but murder was an act that I found
my mother completely incapable of. There was no way, just
no way
, she could’ve been the one to kill Everett.

That’s what I told myself over and over at least all the way across town. “There,”
Breslow said. “She lives there.”

The house was hard to see, hidden behind so much overgrown foliage, but I caught sight
of a two-story redbrick colonial with black shutters.

We got out and approached the house, and as we headed up the walkway, Heath took up
my hand. “You okay?” he mouthed.

“Yeah. Thanks,” I whispered back. Heath gave another good squeeze to my hand. He knew
I was fibbing.

We got to the front steps and Breslow’s phone rang. He took it from his holster and
eyed the screen. It must’ve been important because he answered it. “Breslow. Yeah.
Yeah. When? Where? What hospital?”

Heath and I had paused beside Breslow to wait for him to finish the call, but alarm
bells were going off in my head and I had a terrible feeling about that call.

“What happened?” Heath and I both asked the second he hung up the phone.

“Linda Chadwick was attacked. She lost consciousness right after Matt arrived on scene,
but she managed to say your name and told him to warn you. Then she blacked out.”

My knees buckled. Heath caught me before I sank to the ground, and Beau reached down
to help steady me. “I know you two are tight, Mary Jane. She’s been taken to South
Georgia,” he said, referring to Valdosta’s main hospital. “I can take us there right
now if you want.”

“Yes, yes, please!”

Heath wrapped his arm around my waist and we hustled back to the squad car. Breslow
drove like a madman, zooming down side streets, switching on his siren and the lights.

We made it to the hospital in no time, but I still didn’t wait for the car to stop
before I was out of it and running for the emergency room. A panic so fierce it wrecked
my ability to think clearly took hold and refused to let go. Linda and Mrs. G. were
my surrogate mothers. If anything happened to either one of them, I’d be undone. I
just couldn’t imagine losing one of them, not now. Not yet.

“Linda Chadwick!” I shouted at the nurse behind the check-in desk.

She pulled her head back. I’d startled her. “Is that you or someone who’s come through
here?” she said calmly.

“Someone who came through here. Deputy Wells might’ve come with her.” I was fishing
for information to give the nurse so that she could cut through the identification
process and just tell me how Linda was.

“Are you a relative?”

Before I could answer, Heath and Breslow stepped up next to me. “She’s her niece,”
Heath said.

The nurse didn’t even question the statement. Instead she began to type on her keyboard
before pausing to tap the screen. “She’s in surgery.”

My eyes flooded with tears. “What happened to her?” I asked.

The nurse adopted a sympathetic expression. “I don’t know, ma’am. That’s all this
screen will tell me. If you’d like to take a seat in the lobby, though, I promise
to come out and update you just as soon as there’s more information.”

My breathing was coming in short, quick pants and I was having trouble keeping my
knees from buckling. Heath took hold of my waist again and guided me over to the waiting
area. “Ohmigod!” I cried. “Ohmigod!”

“Shhhh,” he said, cradling me close to him. “Em, she’ll pull through. She will. You
heard what Beau said. She was conscious right up until Wells got there. That’s a good
sign.”

I wept into Heath’s chest and prayed as hard as I’d ever prayed for Linda to be okay.
At some point I realized Beau wasn’t next to us, but I could hardly focus on that.
All I could think about was how much Linda meant to me, and how I didn’t know if I
could ever forgive myself for bolting out of her home the day before and not chasing
after her that morning.

Finally I had cried myself out and I sat up a little, wiping my eyes and sniffling
loudly. A tissue box was put in front of me, and I looked up to see Beau holding it.
“I talked to Matt,” he said.

“What happened?” I asked, taking the tissue box and blowing my nose loudly.

Beau sat down and leaned his elbows on his knees. “She was found on the lawn of an
elderly couple who claim that when they opened their front door to get the paper,
she was just lying there. At first they thought she might be drunk, but then they
noticed all the blood.”

“Thank God they were home to help her,” I said, so grateful to that couple.

“Yep,” Beau agreed. “Anyway, they said that when they went out to see if she was all
right, they could see that she was really hurt, and they coaxed her to lie down and
the husband went in to call nine-one-one while the wife stayed with Linda. During
the time it took the ambulance to arrive, Linda was talking but she wasn’t makin’
much sense. The one thing the wife said she managed to understand was that Linda was
anxious about someone named Mary Jane, and that she really wanted to have someone
warn her about something.”

“What?”

“Linda never said. The elderly woman tried to get Linda to give her more information,
because she was worried that maybe Linda wasn’t the only one who’d been attacked and
hit over the head. She was thinking maybe this Mary Jane might be off in the woods
somewhere, hurt too.”

“Why off in the woods?” I asked. That was a curious thing to say.

“Well, the old lady said Linda kept pointing to the woods behind her house.”

My brow furrowed. A small hint of recognition sprang to my mind. “Beau, where exactly
does this couple live?”

“Oh, this all happened on Loamloch. You know how there’s that stretch of road that
butts up right next to those woods?”

I sat forward. “Did you say Loamloch?”

“Yeah. Why, you recognize it?”

“My grandparents used to live on Loamloch,” I said. That couldn’t have been a coincidence.
“What was Linda doing over by my grandparents’ house? They haven’t been alive for
years.”

“I don’t know, Mary Jane,” Breslow said. “I guess we’ll just have to wait for Linda
to get out of surgery and tell us.”

We waited hours for news of Linda’s condition and at last, right around three o’clock
a doctor showed up to give us a report. “Mrs. Chadwick came through the surgery very
well,” he said. “She had a severe skull fracture and we’ve put a temporary stent in
to relieve the pressure, but she is doing very nicely, given her condition.”

“Can she talk?” Breslow asked.

The doctor shook his head. “No, I’m afraid not. We’ve induced a medical coma at this
point to give her brain a chance to heal. We’ll be concerned with swelling and any
sign of infection for the next several days, but I’m quite optimistic about her chances.”

I sagged against Heath, so relieved I started crying again. And then I launched myself
at the doctor who’d saved her and hugged him fiercely. “Thank you, thank you, thank
you,” I told him.

He chuckled good-naturedly and patted me on the back. “It’s okay, miss. Just doing
my job. By the way, do you know how we can get ahold of Mr. Chadwick? We don’t have
a record of insurance.”

“They’re divorced,” I told him. “But you can call her attorney, Montgomery Holliday.
He handled her divorce, and I’m positive he made sure Linda’s insurance was taken
care of.”

Linda’s husband had left her two years earlier for a younger, much dumber model. Grant
Chadwick had been a fairly wealthy man, and through e-mails and phone calls, Linda
had given me the blow-by-blow throughout their divorce. Daddy had made sure she had
received a very good settlement, which included a provision for her health insurance.
In fact, I could remember a chat with Linda about it and she let me know she was so
pleased that Daddy had even thought to include that, because she couldn’t have afforded
it on her own.

Since we weren’t allowed to see Linda, Breslow, Heath, and I headed out of the hospital
to grab a bite to eat. I wasn’t hungry, but Heath insisted that I get something, so
I humored him by ordering soup and a veggie sandwich. Over the meal we discussed what’d
happened to Linda, and I confessed to Beau that I thought she knew something about
the Sandman that she wasn’t telling us.

“How would she know anything about the Sandman?” he asked.

“She went to school with Sarah Porter,” I said, trying to hide the fact that Linda
was Mama’s best friend.

“So did your mama, right, Mary Jane?” Beau wasn’t stupid. He knew I was hiding something.

Heath had been oddly quiet from the time we’d left the hospital, but he chose then
to chime in. “You know what I think?”

“What’s that?” I asked, jumping on the chance to change the subject.

“I keep going back to Scoffland’s murder. And I can’t understand why he was killed.”

“Wrong place, wrong time?” I suggested.

But Heath frowned. “Which brings up another question. Why was he there alone in the
first place? The coroner said he’d been dead a few hours before the crew arrived,
right?”

Beau and I nodded.

“Okay, so why? What was he doing there?”

“Checking out the place before the crew showed up? You know, getting a scope for the
work involved,” I suggested.

Heath frowned. “Several hours before the crew arrives, though? I’ve worked construction,
and that’d be a weird thing to do.”

“So you think he might’ve been the target?” I asked. That hadn’t occurred to me, as
I’d just assumed that Scoffland had been in the house at the wrong time, and maybe
he’d seen something he shouldn’t have.

“Worth checking out, don’t you think?”

I pulled out my cell and called Gilley. “Yo! Yo! Yo!” he said. “Whaz up?”

“Can I speak to Gilley, please?” I said.

He laughed. “Sorry. What can I do for you, sugar?”

“You’re in a good mood.”

“Michel’s job ended early and he’s flying down here on Saturday for your daddy’s wedding.
He’s going to be my plus one.”

I rubbed my temple. My father’s wedding was in three days. How the hell was I supposed
to attend the wedding with a crazy spook and a killer on the loose? “Gil, that’s great,
but I need you to do some more research.”

“Okay, and speaking of that, I have stuff to report.”

“What?”

“No, no, you first.”

“Okay,” I said. “I want you to look into Mike Scoffland. See if you can find a connection
to him and the Porters.”

“The construction dude who was killed by one of his workers?” Gil said.

“Yes.”

“What kind of a connection might I find?”

“I don’t know.” And then a thought occurred to me. “See if there’s anything connecting
him specifically to Glenn Porter.”

Heath’s brow shot up. “That’s right! He’s a real estate developer, right?”

“Yeah,” Breslow said. “That could be the connection.”

“Glenn . . . Porter,” Gil repeated, and I suspected he was taking notes. “Anything
else?”

I set the phone on the table and hit the
SPEAKER
button so that Heath and Beau could hear. “I think that should do it. So tell us,
what did you find?”

“Well, for starters I think I’ve figured out who crafted that Ouija board.”

“You did?” I said.

“I did,” Gil confirmed. “I got ahold of an art historian in Louisiana who was an awesome
source of information. He’s an expert on the occult history in that region, and especially
knowledgeable about Ouija boards. I sent him the picture you took, and he was able
to tell me immediately who created it and gave me some history on it.”

“Do tell,” I said anxiously.

“To begin with, the board is actually an incredibly rare piece and insanely valuable.
In fact, he’d like me to put him in touch with the owner so that he can make an offer.”