Poltergeist (16 page)

Tuckman sighed as the others began to ring a cacophony of rejection. They would see it through and they would start right now—for Mark's sake. Cara was the only one who remained silent, keeping her eyes down and her face impassive.

Tuckman deserved an Oscar for his performance. He didn't look smug or pleased when he gave in to their demands to continue as planned. He looked resigned and tired. He excused himself and told them to begin as soon as they felt comfortable.

Patricia was availing herself of a tissue as Tuckman entered the observation room. I wondered what had taken him nearly a minute in the hall. He brushed his hands over his hair and sat down. Now he did look a bit pleased.

"Terry," he said, "make a note of the fact that the group chose to go ahead and there are no plans at this time to replace Mr. Lupoldi." He shot me a smug look, then returned his attention to Terry. "How's the monitoring looking?”

"Everything is pretty normal so far, though there was a small spike in EMR activity when you made the announcement. It's returning to normal now.”

Tuckman nodded to himself. "Good. Now let's see what they do.…”

For the first ten minutes or so they sat around the table and talked about Mark; then they started swapping stories about Mark and the séances and the whole thing took on the aspect of a wake.

Patricia suddenly giggled. "I'll bet Mark's with Celia," she said.

"Don't be stupid," muttered Cara.

The table gave a loud cracking noise and thumped up and down.

"Is that you, Celia?" Wayne Hopke asked, as usual assuming control of the questions.

The table thumped and skittered side to side, knocking Wayne and Cara out of their chairs. A hail of knocks roared on the tabletop. The rest of the group stood up to avoid the table's sudden agitation. A small bookshelf crashed over, spilling decks of cards and stacks of magazines onto the floor.

"Temperature's dropping. Electromagnetic activity is rising quickly." Terry glanced over his shoulder to catch Tuckman's eye. "I'm getting subaudibles.”

"What is it?" Tuckman demanded. "Is it from outside?”

"No, it's in the room. Can't tell what it is yet.”

"Mark it and analyze it later." Tuckman's gaze was intent on the scene in the other room.

The table was zooming back and forth with the séance group chasing after it and having difficulty keeping it under their fingers at all. The activity was nothing like the motion of the clamped tables that Ben had shown me. The table was almost writhing and making a horrible clatter as it warped the rug into folds and corrugations.

"Celia, are you there?" Wayne called again.

The table let out a bang.

"Is this Mark?" Patricia yelled.

Another sharp bang and then the table lurched against the fallen bookshelf. The stereo in the room blared a random segment of modern noise as the table stopped and trembled. Through the distorted music there came a loud pop.

Something hovered over the table in a flare of red light, spinning. Panting, the group drew around the table again. The light dimmed a bit and I could make out a flat, translucent shield shape about half the size of my palm, turning in empty air over the center of the table. Whatever was holding it there was strong enough for me to detect right through the double glass and I didn't like the feeling I got looking at that carmine glow, or the sudden sense of being tied to it.

Cara gasped and started to put out her hand. "That's mine!”

The thing flung itself into her face. She let out a short, sharp shriek and flinched, clapping her hand over her left cheek as she turned away from the impact of the thing. She crouched over and scuttled for the door. The table thumped one last time onto the floor, the eerie light dissipating.

"I think it's over," Terry had been saying as I bolted out of the observation room.

In the hall, I saw the door open and flaring red and yellow energy flooded across the floor as Cara stumbled out, clutching her bleeding cheek. I went toward her, tripping in the sudden flood tide of the paranormal pouring out after her. The worlds heaved and laid a shattering weight over me, pressing me down as I tumbled into the boiling Grey wave. I staggered, concentrating on getting to Cara Stahlqvist across the knife-edge of the Grey between us.

"Cara," I said, reaching to catch her arm. This storm of power didn't feel like the outraged ghost of Bertha Knight Landes lashing at Cara for impersonating her niece. It was sickening and brutal. My limbs weighed too much to move, and I felt I was mired in knee-deep muck and tendrils of avaricious horror as I shuddered and forced my arm to move.

Cara shoved me aside and hurried past. I stumbled back as if she'd swung on me with a two-by-four and gasped for breath I had not known I was missing. I choked on a taste of ice and scorched earth and put my shoulder against the wall, pushing myself away from the flashing, roiling edge of the Grey, at last. It had swamped me for mere seconds, yet it felt like I'd fought against a raging sea for fatal minutes. I felt dizzy.

The force that had flooded out the door drained away in eddies of color, drawing away like an outgoing tide. The remains of the poltergeist had a repulsive, sickly feeling, like a vine that had learned to thrive on poison and grown huge and virulent. It didn't have any distinctive shape this time, but I was sure that's what I'd felt brush past, dragging the edge of the Grey. It was much worse than it had been the day before at Patricia's. Something was wrong with Tuckman's ghost. It was far too strong. The cause might be the power line through the séance room—the power line that shouldn't have been where it was— but even that wouldn't account for the sensation of foulness. Even with it gone, I felt it.

As I leaned against the wall, head down, catching my breath, several other participants ran into the hall and milled about in confusion until Tuckman emerged from the booth with his assistant trailing behind.

I headed for Terry as Tuckman went to calm his flock.

"I need those recordings," I told Terry. He narrowed his eyes at me and looked truculent.

"What do you think I am? Your personal Mr. Step'n Fetchit?”

That took me aback. I'd seen two sides of the racism die in a single afternoon—it was no simple two-sided coin. What were the odds? "You think that my asking for the recordings is demeaning?”

"I notice you didn't ask Tuck," he hissed.

"Tuck's not the systems monitor. You are. But if you can't see past that chip on your shoulder to do your job, maybe I
should
get them from Tuckman.”

Terry glared at me. In the furious pause we heard the conversation behind us.

"We shouldn't have been thinking about Mark," Patricia cried. "We must have attracted his ghost and now he's upset with us.”

I glanced over my shoulder to see Tuckman's lips tighten in suppressed anger. "Don't jump to conclusions, Patricia. I assure you it was no such thing. Monitor readings were as they always are," he lied. "It was all your own doing. All of you. Not the spirit of our dead friend. It's just your own creation.”

Cara was walking back to the group with a moist paper towel pressed to her bloodied cheek. She stopped and listened, glowering at everyone.

"Maybe we shouldn't have been talking about Mark," Ana suggested. "Maybe we were too upset.”

"It must be Mark's ghost—it didn't act like Celia," Patricia insisted.

Cara barked a derisive laugh. "Bull! It acted just like Celia has been lately—mean. There's no damned ghost of Mark! There's no such thing!" She glared at them.

Tuckman shook his head. "I think you're a little upset.…”

Dale turned and tried to put his arms around Cara. "Cara…you're bleeding. Let me take you to the hospital.”

She shoved him back. "Leave me alone, Dale. I can take myself." She turned and stalked down the stairs. Her husband stared after her, a moment's bleak hurt on his face.

"She won't go very far," Ian said. "She left her purse.”

"Oh, God," Dale muttered, shivering back to himself. "I'd better take it to her." He darted into the séance room.

I turned to Terry. "I'll be back for the recordings in fifteen minutes. I am not above siccing your boss on you, but I'd rather you chose to do this yourself. Don't force me to knock that chip off your shoulder—you'll look pretty stupid if you get your butt handed to you by a skinny white chick.”

I brushed past the milling group of project members, past Tuckman—who glanced at me with curiosity—and down the stairs to find Cara.

She was standing in the building lobby, staring at something in her hand, when I caught up to her. I peered over her shoulder and caught a glimpse of a creamy stone streaked with amber and brown set in some kind of dark yellow metal. I'm no jewelry expert, so I couldn't tell if it was a real Edwardian brooch or a fake.

"What's that?”

She caught her breath and snapped a cold stare at me. "It's none of your business.”

"Maybe not. Unless it's a brooch you lost that might have been stolen by someone here.”

Her eyebrows knitted together. "All right. It's my brooch.”

"It doesn't seem like something to make much fuss over.”

"It was my great-aunt's! Bertha Knight—oh, damn it, have a little respect. I thought I'd—I thought I'd left it at Mark's.”

Her usual cool reserve had cracked for a moment, but it wouldn't last long. I'd have to pry into her before it froze back over. We locked eyes and I cocked my head a little, inquisitive. "How did you happen to leave it at Mark's?" She wavered.

I didn't. "I'll keep on asking until you tell me, but since your husband is on his way down here, you might want to talk fast.”

"Oh, God…All right. I left the brooch at Mark's place on Wednesday. We were having an affair and I didn't want anyone to know, so I said I'd lost it. Happy now?"

"No. Why didn't you go back for it?”

"I was
going
to go back for it, but I didn't have the chance and Mark didn't return my calls. One of
them
must have gotten it from Mark…or stolen it from him," she spat.

"Why do you think it's one of them?”

"It has to be one of them. Celia threw it, but it was one of them that made her do it. She's not like she used to be. She's not like the Philip poltergeist Tuck told us about. She's become cruel and spiteful. We used to have such fun…”

"Why couldn't it be Mark's ghost? Maybe you pissed him off."

"There's no such thing as ghosts," she spat. "We made Celia up. We control her. Or one of us does. You saw how the session went, didn't you? One of them threw it.”

We heard quick footsteps on the stairs behind us. Cara broke off and turned to look at her husband, trotting down to the lobby holding her purse and jacket over his right arm. He beamed at her, then looked crushed and angry when he saw the oozing red wound on her cheek.

"Come along, dear," Dale said, draping her jacket over her shoulders. "Don't want your lovely face to scar, Cara." He kissed her on the forehead and helped her out the door. Cara. It means "beloved." I stood and watched them until the door swung shut. I almost felt sorry for Dale Stahlqvist. He'd married a trophy—a goddess of quicksilver and steel—and now he had fallen in love with it. He’d forgotten that both quicksilver and goddesses can kill you.

Someone here was just as lethal. Someone had picked up the brooch from Mark's or caused Celia to pick it up, and it had to be one of those who'd been in the séance room. Now they had shown off their cleverness by throwing it back in Cara's face in front of everyone. It wasn't much of a stretch to imagine that someone who thought himself that clever also thought he could get away with murder, bringing the poltergeist along for the ride. It could have been any of them, including Dale or even Cara herself, lying through her perfect teeth about the brooch, though I doubted that. Her distress seemed too genuine to be an act—a much better act than her impersonation of Bertha Knight Landes's great-niece.

I trudged back up the stairs to get the recordings, bracing for battle with Terry and Tuckman.

Tuckman was still snake-oiling the rest of the séance sitters at the top of the stairs. Terry had disappeared. I walked back and spotted him in the observation room. The Nebraska-sized chip on his shoulder left me wondering what he had to be defensive about, since it now seemed unlikely that Tuckman had a saboteur.

I whispered to Tuckman's back, "Keep the remaining sitters here while I review the video with Terry. I want to get a better look at what happened. Cara thinks one of the others threw that thing at her and if so, we need to find out who, right away.”

He made a twitch of one shoulder and I hoped that was agreement, not dismissal.

I ducked into the observation room.

Terry was poking buttons on the video recording equipment. He didn't look up.

"Now what do you want?" he demanded.

I closed the door and pulled a chair around to sit in. Terry was a little in front of me and to the side, so I could see most of his profile as well as the tense set of his shoulders and back. "I want to know what your problem is.”

"You.”

"Don't think so," I said. "You don't even know me and I haven't done anything or said more than a dozen words to you since this ridiculous investigation began.”

"Ridiculous is right." He kept his head forward, but he pulled his hands away from the controls, balling them into fists and resting his wrists on the console.

"Ah. Now we're getting somewhere. This investigation bugs you?”

"Damn straight it does.”

"Why? It makes you angry. Do you think it's critical of you? Or are you afraid of it? You have something to hide?" I didn't think so; he didn't have any Grey connection to the poltergeist that I could see or to anything else. But he did have a big, angry red aura, shot through with white sparks.

He spun his chair to glare at me, thumping his fists onto his thighs. "No! If Tuck thinks I'm padding his results, he should come out and say so! I'm not a cheat! I earned everything I ever got—I worked my ass off for it! I got no reason to undermine this project. If this goes down in flames, I go, too. And there's Tuck saying the results are too good. Too good! He says he's going to bring in an independent investigator to check the group. And here comes you—you snooping, sneaky nobody, poking into our stuff, into our records and methods like you know any damn thing. Which you don't. You had to bring someone with you just to understand the machines.”

"I admit to being lost on certain subjects. I rely on experts to tell me what I don't know, like I'm relying on you to help me with that video.”

He stared at me, his fury slackening into surprise, the furious light around him dimming.

"Terry, it's true that you're in a good position to sweeten or skew the results. But so is Denise Francisco or almost any of the people sitting in that room every Sunday and Wednesday—even Tuckman himself. I have to know what can be done before I can tell if it has been done.”

"Are you saying you don't think it's me?”

"Yes and no. I'm saying I'm not sure that Tuckman's right about the problem. What happened today was so spectacular it should make or break Tuckman's belief in a saboteur. So what I want is to find out if what I saw through that benighted glass is the same thing the camera saw. I'm trusting that you haven't been up here doctoring that recording.”

He scoffed. "It would take a lot more than fifteen minutes and the equipment we have in here to do that.”

"Then show me the recording.”

Terry chewed on the idea for a while, then scooted his chair to the side and let me sit next to him while he cued the video. "I've got three angles, but this one's the best.”

"Three? The recordings you gave me before were only one angle.”

He shrugged and didn't look at me. "You didn't really need the other stuff, anyway, just general records—that's what Tuck said.”

I sighed. I didn't think Terry's spite was going to make any difference and I supposed I should be glad I hadn't waded through three times as much video to end up in the same place.

We watched the short session from every angle twice. By the end, we were both shaking our heads in amazement.

"That thing just popped in from nowhere and hung there in the air," Terry marveled, pointing at the close-up. "That… that's just…”

"That's an apport," I supplied.

"It's cool. The certifiable, real, live thing. The Philip group thought they could get one, but Tuck said he didn't think it was possible.”

"Tuck seems to be wrong." I stood up and looked at him. "Thanks, Terry.”

He gave me an embarrassed nod.

In the séance room, most of the remaining project members had re-gathered with Tuckman. Wayne Hopke, Ana, and Ian were lined up on the couch. Ian had his arm over Ana's shoulders, but she was looking away from him—at the floor or at Tuckman, who was sitting at the table with Ken and Patricia. Ken was frowning, his jaw tight, and listening intently to Tuckman while Patricia clutched his nearest hand and continued to sniffle. Wayne seemed oddly outside it all, just sitting beside Ana, nodding. Looking through the glass, I couldn't tell what might be happening in the Grey. There was no indication at all now—not even the wisps and lights I'd seen the last time.

Terry turned up the volume from the audio monitors.

"… sure it's not true. Cara was overwrought—momentary hysteria at having been hit. It's natural to feel stunned or shocked.”

"We'd better tell him they can go home," I said. "None of them threw that brooch.”

Terry stood up, stretching his back and legs with a series of small pops. "I'll do it.”

In a few moments, he walked into the séance room and whispered to Tuckman, who nodded and put his hands together in his sincere salesman pose and smiled. "They've finished looking at the tape and everything's fine. No one threw anything at anyone. I'll speak to Cara and for now we can assume that the project is going ahead. Thank you for being so patient. I know this has been a very difficult day.”

The sitters began stirring, sluggishly. Tuckman removed himself a little faster. A few seconds later, he strode into the booth.

"What's going on now?" he demanded.

"Nothing you shouldn't be spectacularly happy about," I replied. I nodded at the image on the monitor screen. "Looks like a legitimate apport.”

He narrowed his eyes and looked at the screen. He shook his head. "How are they doing that?”

I shrugged, though I still felt a little dizzy from my brush with Celia. "Power of the mind? Terry's been running it through everything he can think of and there's no sign of wires or strings or that it's just been tossed there. You can run it back and forth from every angle and it just appears there. It's the real thing.”

Tuckman stared at the image, his face blank.

"Tuckman?”

He scowled and flipped a dismissive hand at me. "Just finish it up." Then he turned and stalked out.

I put a hand through my hair, rubbing the impending headache developing in the top of my head. I was tired and feeling somewhat queasy and irritable. I hoped the hollow ache in my skull wasn't going to be a migraine, though Tuckman's attitude seemed good enough reason to feel irritated and worn-out all on its own.

"Do you want this one?" Terry asked.

"No. I think I can remember this. Besides, I'm almost done and that recording doesn't prove anything Tuckman wants to acknowledge.”

"You got that right.”

"Terry, why are you on this project? This seems like a waste of your time.”

"Abnormal psych doesn't get more juicy than the prisoner/guard experiment.”

”Excuse me?”

"There's this classic experiment in behavioral and abnormal psychology in which you give a group of people permission to do whatever they want to another group of people—even though you tell them they are supposed to take care of the other group. You let them know that their actions have no repercussions in the outside world. Pretty soon they're doing some horrible things to each other. This is an interesting variation, because this group has no prisoners, only guards, and they've been told that what they do has power in the world, but only if the group as a whole does it. I'm writing my thesis on permission, self-justification, and psychosis based on some of this.”

"I see." I didn't, but I didn't want a deeper explanation at that point. It was ugly enough without going off on research tangents. "I'll get the monitoring information from you on Monday.”

"All right. If you want any more of these recordings you let me know." He looked aside. "I'm—uh…I'm sorry I've been…”

I waved him off. "Don't worry about it. I'm used to it.”

I let myself out, lingering long enough to miss the séance group as they left.

I couldn't just write off the idea that Terry had tweaked the information, but the apport pretty well put a bullet in the idea of faked effects; there's very little in the realm of paranormal research more convincing than a documented apport under proper scientific conditions—because there'd never been one. Even a professional skeptic of the class of a Houdini or a Randi would have to pause over this. I needed to clear off the last interview with Wayne Hopke and catch up to "Frankie" before I'd feel I'd completed the job, but I was convinced that Tuckman's phenomena—however impossible they seemed—were the real thing. Why they were so strong I couldn't be sure. He hadn't asked me to find that out, but I wanted to know, even if he didn't.

I wondered about the phenomena as I headed home, feeling the throbbing in my head ebb and flow with every pulse. It seemed as if the apported brooch had picked out Cara before flying into her face. It would have taken a considerable amount of power to apport the brooch in the first place, then hold it in place long enough to change its direction. Most apports just drop straight down out of the air—and according to Randi and Houdini they're faked by sleight-of-hand artists tossing things over their own shoulder behind their backs. This one had appeared, hung in one place, then twitched aside with enough force to hit a woman more than a foot away and cut her deep enough to need stitches. It seemed not only a show of power, but also a little vicious.

Cara's remark about Celia becoming cruel ran through my head. Maybe the group had somehow made their very own duppy—not just a simple poltergeist, neutral and playful like Philip, but a malicious ghost. Terry had said they'd been given permission. They'd been told they had power and perhaps somehow every piece of pettiness and bad temper had become manifest in their ghost. I was half convinced by my own argument, since most people will do more out of anger or spite than they will out of compassion or good feeling—there are always more people willing to complain than to praise, after all—but I didn't let myself buy it just yet. I needed to finish up before I could draw a conclusion. I didn't want to be like Tuckman and predetermine the solution before I'd got all the evidence.

I had to pause my maundering while I negotiated the last of the drive home. I continued my train of thought after I'd closed and locked the condo door behind myself.

I didn't like the fact that I was running parallel to a murder investigation. I imagined Solis wasn't too thrilled about my presence nearby, either. Odd bits of conversation kept pulling me closer to Mark's murder without solving anything. It annoyed me to have those few broken threads of information I could do nothing about. I wished I could just pass them all to Solis and call this thing closed. I wondered if I ought to tell him about the brooch. It was Cara's, and by her admission she'd left it at Mark's the day he'd been killed. That pretty well made her the woman who'd been in his bed, even without her confession to me, and that would interest Solis. He'd get the basic information when he interviewed the séance group—someone would mention such a startling event—but I wondered if I should mention it sooner. It might lead him to an arrest all the faster and then I wouldn't have to keep on thinking about this case.

Except that I'd seen the brooch apport and that meant Celia had taken it into the Grey. Had she taken it from Mark's apartment or from somewhere else? The uncomfortable thought stirred in my mind that a ghost so mean-tempered it would cut someone and strong enough to make a table run around a room and menace people might be able to do much worse. I had to know what the ghost's involvement with Mark's death was.

I didn't think I could get the answers from Celia and I didn't like the alternative route. I hated to ask vampires for favors, even when I was owed a few. I had no desire to mix with that bunch if I could avoid it, but I might be forced to ask Carlos for help if I was to discover how Celia was involved in Mark's death.

I didn't feel up to negotiating with anything tougher than a tub of yogurt that evening. My headache was not improving and all I wanted was to lie down for a while. I fed the ferret and watched her destroy my bookshelf while I lay on the couch gulping down aspirin with pints of water until we were both ready to sleep.