The Awakening (25 page)

I don't move. I just surreptitiously hold his hand beneath the table as Becca finishes up the story of Charles Stogdon.

She points at both of us. "I think you're right, Kendall. This Stogdon dude has something to do with all of this."

Jason turns his head and shoots a grin my way. "We headed to city hall after school?"

"You bet. We'll get the evidence and then go over to Celia's to review it."

We
. Yeah, I guess he's a part of this now.

"Anything?" I ask Celia impatiently.

She's seated at her desk, staring at the large computer monitor with four different camera angles displayed. Right after school she and Taylor retrieved the tapes from last night, and now we're all sitting around reviewing the evidence. Celia gnaws on a Twizzler and tugs the headphones off with one hand. "I told you, it takes time. Ghosts don't just perform on command."

"I know. Sorry," I say. "I'm just anxious."

Celia pats my leg. "'How poor are they that have not patience!'"

"Thanks, Iago," I say with a smirk. "Make a short shrift, would you?"

Celia threads her fingers through her hair. "Ah, but see, you've moved from
Othello
to
Richard III
and the transition isn't as you'd hoped.
Short shrift
is a confusing expression. Most people think it means 'quick work,' but in some reference sources, it means 'inadequate time.' Did you know that
shrift
really means 'confession'—like a priest shrives a person by tak ing confession and then giving them penance, like a Hail Mary or what have you? So, to literally 'make a short shrift,' you're making a confession."

Taylor, Becca, and I scream out in unison, "Celia!"

"Okay, okay. Geez. See if I try to educate you in the fine art of Shakespeare literature anymore." She takes another chaw off the Twizzler and then points at the screen in the upper left-hand corner. "I've seen a lot of orb activity and I'm noting the time on the footage. That tells me if there's something there, we're picking up its movement on the infrared cameras."

"Excellent!" I look over to where Taylor's slide-showing through the digital images she took. "Anything from you?"

"Some amazing digital photography, if I do say so myself," she says with complete confidence. She tosses her honey blond hair over her shoulder and purses her glossed lips. "Nothing substantial yet, but I still have a long way to go."

My eyes shift over to where Jason's listening in with Becca as she sorts through the sound recordings we made throughout the night. He winks privately at me, and my skin warms. I'm frustrated because all I can do is ... watch. There's nothing for me to do at this point because everything is about the evidence we gathered. There are no assumptions or psychic feelings for me to conjure up that could help at this moment. I just have to wait until we can interpret the information that will help us once we go in for the full investigation on Friday night.

Becca pulls her earbuds out. "I have an EVP for you to listen to."

I stand over her as she cues up the .wav file. "
Ooooooofffff muuuuuuuh lllllahhhnnn
."

Jason snickers. "You gotta be kidding me. That's nothing but a garbled mess."

"Shhhh!" Becca snaps.

"Play it again," Celia instructs.

"
Ooooooofffffff muuuuuuuh lllllahhhhhnnn
."

Celia concentrates hard. "Can you slow it down, Becca?"

"Sure." Becca types in some strokes, ups the amplification, and plays it again.

"
Ooooooofffffff muuuuuuuh lllllahhhhhnnn
."

I stare at Celia as she deliberates the syllables. "Well?"

She looks to Becca. "Are you hearing what I'm hearing? 'Off my land.'"

Becca claps her hands together. "Snap! Exactly what I thought."

"Off my land?" Jason asks. "What does it mean?"

Easy,
I think. "There's a disembodied voice in city hall that wants someone off its land."

"Whooo-hoooo!" Taylor shouts, raising her fist up to the ceiling. "Damn, I'm good. I mean, really. I. Am. Good. Wait till y'all see what I got."

We all gather around her, shouldering one another to get a look at the laptop screen.

"What are we seeing?" Celia asks.

Taylor shows us an image of the courtroom that's on the first floor in city hall. The yellowy paint of the room seems darker in the IR pictures. Two large tables with chairs are before the judge's bench. "I set the timer to record every ten seconds throughout the night. Mostly it's a bunch of nothing, until—"

She clicks on a frame that reads out "01:18:30 a.m." that shows the same empty courtroom.

"Now watch," she says. She taps the mouse on the arrow to go to the next photo, which reads "01:18:40 a.m." Ten seconds later. We all gasp in unison.

"Toldja. I'm good, aren't I?" she says with a bright smile.

Becca leans in more and bites her lip where her piercing is. "What the hell is that?"

"No way." Jason tilts his head. "It looks like a man."

"Phenomenal," Celia says and claps her hands.

"It can't be a man," Becca says. "What's that?" She points at what looks like a long suit coat.

"His clothes?" I ask.

"Wait," Taylor says. "It gets better." The next frame is "01:18:50 a.m." and what do you know: he's gone!

"It's trick photography," Jason says with a sneer.

Taylor reaches over and punches him hard on the top of his arm. "Right. Because I was sitting in city hall
by myself
at one-flippin'-o'clock in the morning dressed in a costume and messing with my own camera!"

Jason blocks her next blow. "I'm just saying—"

Taylor throws her hands up. "God, Jason!"

"You can't tell me that's not some sort of reflection or malfunction of the camera. That is the digital one Dad got you for Christmas two years ago, and it was cheap to begin with, so it probably has a scratch on the inside or something that caused that image."

"A scratch that looks like a man?" I interject.

"Ten seconds between frames is nothing. Anyone can run across the courtroom in under ten seconds," our skeptic continues.

Celia frowns. "You can be sure we'll test it to see if that's possible."

"It has to be," he says.

"Shuffle through those again," Celia instructs. When Taylor does, we all stare at the images. One minute the man's not there, the next he is, and then he's gone again.

"What are you thinking?" I ask Celia.

"That we need to try and debunk that tomorrow night when we're doing our investigation," I say. "We need to see if a person can cross the room in ten seconds, in order to determine whether someone was doing that to throw us off. If it can't be done, then we've definitely got proof of a full-body apparition."

"That's horseshit," Jason says with a snort.

Becca speaks up. "Could this be that Charles Stogdon guy we were reading about today?"

Celia squints. "Who?"

"Oh, right," I say, and then fill her in. Then I remember the image of the man I'd seen in my thoughts during study hall. That picture sort of, kind of looks the same.

Taylor enhances the picture to 200 percent to get a better look at our figure. "It looks like he's wearing a suit and has his fist raised."

"Nice 'stache," Jason says.

"Facial hair was very popular back then," Celia says in defense of our ghost.

"Back when?"

"He looks pissed," Becca notes, completely ignoring Jason's comment.

Right. I, too, bite my lip. "I wonder if this is who attacked my father."

Jason sits back and lets out a long sigh. "Okay, if you're gonna buy into this imaginary man, then I wonder if it's who attacked
you
."

Celia's eyes enlarge. "
What?
When? What happened?"

"Why didn't you tell us?" Taylor scowls.

Becca doesn't seem bothered that I covered this up.

I fill them in on how I almost took a header down the marble stairs but Jason had caught me.

"Thank God for that," Taylor says, her hand to her heart. "Oh! Celia, rewind all the way back to the beginning of camera three. That's the top of the stairs and it may have captured Kendall when this happened."

As I peer over Celia's shoulder, I realize that Taylor's video recording may have captured more than just my falling down. It may have documented the kiss. Cripes!

"There." Taylor points. "That's right after I set up the camera."

I watch as Jason and I climb the stairs together, stop, and then head off down the hallway. After a short while, we come back into view. "This was when Jason's temperature gauge registered a low reading and I was following this cool breeze down the hallway."

The video shows me padding along the hall and stopping at the top of the banister.

"Look!" Celia says. "On the back of your leg."

Sure enough, there's a large, dense orb trailing down my jeans. Then, without any warning, my feet are literally swept out from under me and I start to fall.

"Holy shit, Kendall!" Celia says. "There was something on you! Something did that to you."

"I
know!
" I say.

"Play it again," Taylor says. "See if you can zoom in on the orb."

Celia does, and the round white spherical figure seems to have a depth or bulkiness to it.

Jason leans his hand onto the desk and I see Celia taking note of his proximity. I hope she's not mad at me that I've let him join our group. I couldn't really stop him. And I didn't want to. She looks up at him as he asks, "Aren't orbs supposed to be dust or bugs?"

"Do you recall any giant moths or anything swooping around when we were walking down the hall?" I ask a bit snarkily.

"No. You're right. But still. That couldn't have just upended you like that. Maybe you tripped."

"The video doesn't show her tripping," Celia says.

I place my hands on my hips. "You were right there with me, Jason."

"I know. I can't believe that a globe of light did that. It makes no sense, and quite frankly, it seems asinine to even suggest it was responsible."

"So you're an expert now?" I ask.

"No, I'm just saying—"

Because we're arguing over what had or hadn't happened there at the top of the stairs, we fail to stop the videotape. I don't even think about it until I hear Celia nearly shriek.

I spin around. "What is it now?"

She points to the screen and her mouth falls open. Taylor's blue eyes dilate, and Becca just laughs. For on the screen is the very vivid image of Jason and me completely macking on each other.

I wince. "Oh, shit."

"T
HAT'S
HOT
," R
EBECCA SAYS
, gazing at the tape of the kiss.

Celia seems like she's going to cry. "How could you?" Utter disappointment is painted in hi-def colors across her face. Or maybe I've just learned to read auras all of a sudden. Suffice it to say, she's
not
happy with me. "I thought you were serious about this, Kendall."

"I am!"

She points at the screen where Jason and I are now kissing on a loop. "Yeah, right. You can't be serious about your gifts and using them to ghost hunt if you're making out with a member of the team."

Jason stands to defend me. At least, I hope that's what he's doing. "Look, it just sort of happened, okay? You know how it goes."

Fixing her glare on him, Celia says, "No,
I
don't!"

Taylor's usually sunny disposition morphs into downright disgust. "You're just a big fake, Kendall Moorehead. You drummed all of this up to be friends with me so you could get at my brother." She lasers her eyes at Jason. "Ever since you and Courtney Langdon broke up, girls at school want to be buddy-buddy with me to get an in with you. Well, I'm not going to be a part of this anymore."

I'm confused beyond reason. "What? Taylor, you're out of your mind."

She gathers up her laptop and camera bag, slamming and jerking things around. "No, honey.
You're
out of your mind if you think I'm going to spend one more minute of my time on this tomfoolery you've cooked up. Psychic? Yeah, right. I bet your dad didn't even get attacked. You probably destroyed that model yourself." She harrumphs and storms out of Celia's room.

"That's not how it is at all!" I say in her wake. Turning to Jason, I say, "Is she frickin' kidding me?"

He starts after her. "Taylor, wait!"

"Piss off, Jason!" she screams out, halting him midstride in the doorway.

I sit on Celia's bed with my head in my hands. How could this have gone so wrong so fast? Peeking through my fingers, I see that Celia won't even look at me. She thinks I only did this to get a guy. No! Not at all. I can read her thoughts easily.
You used me
and
You betrayed me
ring out so clearly that I'm surprised that Becca and Jason can't pick up on this too.

Speaking of Becca, she winks at me and then gathers her things. "Well, I guess that's that, huh? It was real. And it was fun. But it wasn't real fun." As she walks past me, she pats me on the shoulder and whispers, "Don't sweat it, K."

After she leaves the room, the silence is so palpable and electric, it would make our EMF meters blaze off the charts.

Celia stares ahead at her computer screen. "I'd really like it if you both left now."

"Celia..."

"Now, please." The emphasis in her tone leaves nothing to discuss.

Even Seamus growls at me—and drools a little—from his L. L. Bean monogrammed cushion next to Celia's desk. Okay, Nichols family. I get the message.

"Come on, Kendall." Jason grabs his jacket and then steers me by the elbow out of Celia's room and down the stairs. Outside, I stand stupefied over what just happened. Taylor's nowhere to be seen and Becca's on her way down the street. I wonder if Celia will ever speak to me again. And why was kissing Jason a betrayal of
her?
You'd think a psychic could read between the lines, but I'm at a loss.

"Can I drive you home?" Jason asks.

I point across the street. "I live right there."

"Hop in," he says. "We'll drive around and get some air, then I'll drop you off."