Superstition (8 page)

“Testing, one, two, three . . .” Nicky was saying into a small black microphone that had just been attached to her lapel.

“Great. We’re good to go,” a man called from inside the house.

“Not quite,” Joe said in his best authoritative tone. Nicky looked around at him. Her hair shimmered with ruby highlights as she turned her head and her hair swung away from her face. Pretty. Too bad he was getting ready to sink right to the bottom of her favorite-people list. “Like the mayor said, no permit, no TV show. I’m going to have to escort you people off the property. If you refuse to go, you leave me no choice but to place you under arrest.”

Nicky’s lips parted as she sucked in air. Joe could almost hear the sizzle as her fuse ignited. Her big brown eyes shot sparks at him. Then,
boom,
she whipped around and took two long strides, which put her right in his face.

“That’s it,” she said, her eyes blazing. “I’ve had it with all the aggravation.
You
I don’t need. Take a hike.”

Joe blinked as he absorbed the full impact of her ire, but stood his ground. As Vince had reminded him, he was Chief of Police. Vince, as mayor, was his boss. If Vince wanted these people gone, then it was up to him to make them disappear. All things considered, though, it had been more fun being an innocent bystander.

“Ms. Sullivan . . .” he began. Too late. She’d already turned her back to him and was marching back toward the door.

So much for reason.
He sighed inwardly.

“You in there.” He raised his voice, talking over her to the cameraman, whom he could see just inside the house. “Shut off those cameras. We’re closing you down.”

She whirled and came back, heels clicking furiously. “I don’t
think
so.”

He crossed his arms over his chest, and looked her over. “You’re backing me into a corner here.”

“Is that so?”

“Do you
want
to get arrested?”

Her lips thinned. Her face tightened. Her eyes blazed. They were practically shooting out fire now, like twin flamethrowers.
Yikes,
she was mad. Holding that scorching gaze, Joe practically felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.

“Listen up, you,” she said. “We’re on TV, live, in about ninety seconds. Anybody who interferes with this broadcast, from this moment onwards”—her glance slid toward Vince, who, with Dave, was standing just behind him, then snapped back to skewer Joe like meat on a shish kebab—“will be looking at a lawsuit. A huge one, I promise. Do you understand me?”

“One minute,” the voice called warningly from inside the house.

“Okay,” she called back. Her eyes narrowed, then glittered. She was in Joe’s face again, glaring up at him, radiating menace despite the fact that the top of her head reached approximately to his mouth and he outweighed her by, he guessed, at least seventy pounds. “You hear that, Barney Fife? We’re on the air in one minute. That means you’ve got a choice. You can go ahead and arrest me on live TV with millions of people watching, or you can
back off
.”

She jabbed a slender forefinger toward his nose for emphasis. It stopped about six inches short of its goal and stayed there like a pale arrow frozen in the air.

After this, Joe reflected as his gaze lifted from that well-manicured finger to her eyes, he was going to have to lose the shirt. She was making the Mayberry connection, too.

“Nicky, we need you in position
now
.” The black-haired woman gestured frantically from the doorway.

“Coming,” Nicky answered, glancing around. Then she refocused on him.

“Your call,” she said through her teeth. Her fists were clenched. Her eyes dared him. This, Joe decided dispassionately, was a woman on the edge. All it would take was one tiny little push to shove her over.

And he wasn’t about to be the one doing the pushing—not without a much better reason than he’d been given so far. Not with a live TV audience getting ready to tune in at any second. No way. No how.

She must have read the answer in his eyes. With a final warning look at him, which she then widened to include Vince and Dave, she turned on her heel and hurried toward the door.

“You gonna let her buffalo you like that?” Vince demanded under his breath. “Quit pussyfooting around. Arrest her ass.”

“Ten, nine, eight . . .” The countdown, in a woman’s voice, was coming from somewhere behind the cameraman.

“Vince, we don’t want to do this. Trust me,” Joe said, grabbing Vince by the arm when the mayor, with a fulminating look that made clear his opinion of his police chief’s lack of resolve, started to go after her himself.

“Not on live TV.”

“. . . four, three, two, one . . .”

Vince hesitated. “Goddamn it,” he said bitterly.

“This is
Twenty-four Hours Investigates
,” Nicky said into the camera, and Joe realized that she was on the air. Her body language had changed completely in the last few seconds; she now looked comfortable, relaxed almost, and even managed to produce a smile for the audience at home. “Thank you for joining us for this special
live
broadcast. I’m Nicole Sullivan . . .”

4

“
T
HERE IS NOTHING IN the hall . . . nothing in the living room . . . nothing in the dining room,” Leonora intoned.

As Nicky had anticipated, once the camera was focused on her, Leonora had turned into the consummate professional. She was no newcomer to TV, after all, and she’d been a practicing professional psychic since the age of sixteen. Only someone as intimately acquainted with her as, say, her younger daughter, would have caught the nervous flicker in her eyes, the tension in her jaw, the jerkiness of her gestures. For whatever reason—psychic’s block or something else—Leonora was not
on
tonight. But she was trying, gamely walking through the house with increasingly rapid footsteps that Nicky knew signified her impatience with the lack of paranormal activity to pick up. The camera panned the magnetometer—standard ghost-hunting equipment that measured the magnetic field generally associated with the presence of spirits—that had been set up in each room: nothing. The temperature sensors likewise revealed a steady 72 degrees: no cold spots to be found. Since the house had no air-conditioning, they couldn’t even hope for a temperature drop due to a helpfully positioned vent, Nicky reflected gloomily. They were going au naturel, whether they liked it or not.

The plan was for Leonora to walk through the house, room by room, encountering and interacting with whatever ghosts were present, while the cameras rolled. So far, the plan had yielded approximately twenty-two minutes of the opposite of must-see TV: just nothing, nothing, nothing. And more nothing.

Call it Al Capone’s Vault Part II: the ghostless séance.

And Nicky’s worst nightmare.

“This is the library,” Nicky said quietly into the camera as her mother glided toward the small room next to the dining room. Despite the tall light set up in one corner specially for this broadcast, it was gloomy as all get out with its empty, dark shelving and shuttered windows. Dust lay over everything, and a cobweb adorned one corner of the coffered ceiling. Like the rest of the house, it smelled faintly musty, as if it had been shut off from light and air for a long time. If she’d been a ghost, Nicky thought,
she
would have wanted to hang out here.

Like the camera, her eyes followed as Leonora moved around the room, touching the fireplace mantel, a windowsill, the paneled wall itself. Behind her, out of range of the camera, Nicky was conscious of Karen and the rest of the crew watching with bated breath. If, through sheer willpower, they could have conjured a ghost out of thin air, it would have been materializing before them at that very moment. But they were as helpless to change what was happening—or, rather, what was not happening—as she was.

“Nothing. I’m getting nothing in this room,” Leonora said at last, her voice tight. Her eyes met Nicky’s for a long moment. Nicky knew that look. If the program bombed as badly as it seemed like it was going to, the bigwigs at the network weren’t the only ones who would be howling for her head: Her mother would be, too.

In the end, when the show was over and the backlash hit, this whole unbelievable debacle was going to turn out to be all her fault, Nicky realized bitterly. Why,
why,
hadn’t she seen this coming?

Because she’d been too eager to make tonight’s program happen, and the reason she’d been too eager was because she had known they were looking at her: CBS. They were searching for a new co-host for
Live in the Morning,
the long-running chatfest that most of America consumed along with their morning coffee. Quite apart from the fact that
Twenty-four Hours Investigates
was in crisis mode,
Live in the Morning
was a gig that every female television personality in the country would sell her laser-whitened teeth for. At their request, she’d sent in her audition tape, which had made enough of an impression that she’d been flown to New York for an interview. Things had gone well.

But she hadn’t been offered the job. They were keeping her in mind, they said, but they were continuing to look.

A friend in a position to know had told her that they liked her but had reservations: As a foil to Troy Hayden, the handsome, buttoned-down male host, they had envisioned a perky little suntanned blonde, not a tall, milky-skinned, sometimes too-composed redhead; the bulk of her reporting had been for news-oriented shows, from Channel 32 in Charleston where she’d gotten her start to
Twenty-four Hours Investigates
for A&E; and she had no experience with live TV.

Well, thanks to her own machinations, now she did. And it looked as though it was going to bite her in the butt.

After this, not only was she not going to get the job, she probably wasn’t going to be working for
Twenty-four Hours Investigates,
either. If she didn’t get fired, it would be because they would have no reason to fire her: The news magazine would be cancelled. She would go down in the annals of broadcast history as the reporter who killed the program.

If CBS ever talked about her again at all, it would be because she was to
Twenty-four Hours Investigates
what the iceberg was to the
Titanic
.

“Leonora James—who, as most of you know, also happens to be my mother—has an amazing record as a psychic medium. On her late, much-lamented-by-fans show
The Great Beyond,
she was able to put hundreds of families in touch with their deceased loved ones. She has talked to Marilyn Monroe, to Elvis, to John Ritter . . .”

With the camera now zooming in on Nicky, Leonora felt free to give her daughter a baleful look, which Nicky, still talking, did her best to ignore. Then, head high, posture regal, purple caftan swirling, Leonora glided past Nicky and back out into the hall while the camera, once again focused on her, rolled silently behind.

“. . . investigated literally hundreds of hauntings,” Nicky continued. “Including Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C., where the ghost of Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, is said to still walk the boards. . . .”

In a group just inside the front door, clustered well out of camera range, Nicky caught a glimpse of the onlookers craning their necks to follow the (non) action: several members of the technical support crew; a miniskirted woman she thought was with the local weekly newspaper; the scowling, bulldog-like mayor; and the mayor’s puglike pal, a short, chunky, balding guy she took for a cop. Barney Fife, tall, dark, and brooding, was standing at the rear, arms crossed over his chest, shoulders propped against the wall. He was watching her with a sardonic twist to his mouth: She hadn’t made a friend there. He was probably planning to pounce on her once the broadcast ended and haul her off to jail—which, at the moment, was the least of her worries, she decided as her gaze scanned the group. Their expressions ranged from worried to bored to skeptical. Unfortunately, there was not one enthralled face in the lot.

The flushing sound she heard in her mind was her career going down the toilet.

She had always felt uncomfortable in this house, Nicky reflected dismally as she trailed Leonora through the hall, doing her best not to trip over the myriad cables that snaked across the floor, courtesy of the
Twenty-four Hours Investigates
crew. As a young girl, she had been inside it on several occasions when her parents had socialized with the people who had owned it way before the Schultzes. At the time, she’d thought her discomfort had been due to the inferiority she had felt as a scrawny, freckle-faced nonentity who was simply awkward at the parties that were Livvy and Leonora’s lifeblood. Now she wondered if it had something to do with the house itself. There was still a vibe—a dissonance—in the atmosphere that made her skin feel almost clammy.

Or maybe it was because the crime hit too close to home. She hadn’t known any of the victims or their families—Leonora had remarried, and they’d moved away to Atlanta years before the Schultzes had come to live in the Old Taylor Place. But since Tara Mitchell and the other girls had been around Livvy’s age and the island was the place that Nicky and Livvy and their mother had always thought of as home, the crime had been a major topic of conversation within their family when it had happened. Though the details had faded over the years, the crime had resonated with Nicky, and it had remained part of her internal landscape ever since. When
Twenty-four Hours Investigates
had been looking for a blockbuster crime to feature, it had popped back into the forefront of her mind.

And the rest, as they said, was history.

So here she was, taking charge of her life, going after what she wanted, making a grab for the brass ring—and the sad fact was that she was falling flat on her face. She knew, from the expression on Karen’s face, from the sidelong glances being exchanged among the crew, from her own experience with what went on behind the scenes, that the feedback they were getting from the control-room producers, who were in Chicago watching right along with the audience at home, wasn’t good.