Ghost Town (10 page)

“You know that old sexist cliché about how it's a woman's prerogative to change her mind?” Connie said. “I hate to admit it, but there's more than a kernel of truth there.” She turned to Amber. “Isn't that right?”

Amber couldn't bring herself to respond, but Connie acted as if she didn't notice. She turned back to Drew.

“So this is the new world you're exploring.” She glanced at a passing couple who were dressed as a vampire bride and groom. “How amusing. You must give me an orientation.” She looked at Amber once again. “You don't mind me joining the fun, do you, dear?”

“Connie,” Drew said, “I don't think—”

“Of course not,” Amber said. “Drew, why don't you show her around? I'll take these to Trevor and Arthur.” She took the bag holding the bottled water out of Drew's hand and, without another word, started heading down the hall toward the ballroom. She managed not to cry, but it was a near thing.

“What are you
doing, Connie?”

She gave Drew what she hoped was an innocent look. “I told you. I became curious about this conference. If you're going to start changing your approach to therapy because of your newfound interest in”—she waved her hand as she searched for the right words—“alternative views of reality, then, as your supervisor, I need to be better informed about precisely what that means. For the sake of our patients, if nothing else.”

He looked at her for a moment with those puppy-dog brown eyes of his. There was no warmth in his gaze, though. Only cold assessment.

“What sort of game are you playing?” he asked. Before she could answer, he said, “Never mind. It doesn't matter. If you really are here to attend the conference, I hope you find the sessions interesting. But if you're here for some other reason, I don't care what it is. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to my friends.”

He headed down the hall after Amber. Connie watched him go, admiring the way his rear looked in those jeans.
That could've gone better,
she thought. Still, it hadn't been a total loss. Drew might be
angry with her for running off his girlfriend, but during their brief conversation, she'd had a chance to take the woman's measure, and if
that
was her competition, she felt confident that she would win Drew's affections eventually. Maybe a couple of days of seeing her at the same conference as Amber would make Drew realize just how unsuitable the woman was for him—and what a far better match she would be.

It was clear what Drew saw in Amber. It was typical, really. Highly empathetic people like him—especially if they had devoted their lives to healing the mind—were often attracted to the emotionally wounded. She had seen it numerous times in her career, although, of course, it had never happened to her personally. She had far too much control for that. Such relationships were based on an uneven balance of power, and because of that, they were destined to fail sooner or later. Drew was a highly intelligent, sensible man. He would realize this before long and break it off with Amber. And if by being there this weekend, she could hurry that process along, so much the better.

She should find the registration table for Esotericon and officially register for the conference, but first things first. It had been a long drive from Chicago, and she needed to pee and apply fresh lipstick. She had noted the restrooms near the lobby when she had walked in, and she headed for them.

“This is so
cool
!”

“If you say so.” Rach didn't look up from her phone. She was writing a status update for her Facebook page: “Bored beyond all human comprehension. All museums should be shut down and dynamited into rubble.”

Donner—who once again was wearing his silly Ghostbuster uniform—looked at her with a pouty little-boy expression that was really creepy on a man his age.

“C'mon, Rachel. This exhibit might be kind of dry, but it's the
most important one in here. I mean, it tells how everything began!” He broke off and then grinned. “Hey, I made a joke!
Dry.
Get it?”

“I told you, call me Rach.” She pronounced it “Rash,” as if she were a kind of skin disease. She continued gazing down at her phone. “And no, I don't get it.”

“This exhibit is about the flood back in the 1920s. Hundreds of people died, and the survivors almost abandoned the town. A flood is
wet,
right? But I said the exhibit was
dry
. It's funny.”

“Uh-huh.” In addition to Facebooking, she was also texting a former boyfriend who lived in Portland: “Snd ninjas to sve me! Cnt take much more!!!!!”

Rach had wanted to sleep in until at least noon, but Donner had pulled her out of bed at nine-thirty. If she'd had a straight razor, she would have gleefully slit his throat for forcing her to get up. She had asked him if the motel was on fire, because that was the only reason she could conceive of for waking up so goddamned early. But no, Donner had wanted to go to a museum—a
museum!
—which opened at ten. She had been royally pissed, but when he told her the place was called Beyond the Veil and it featured all kinds of spooky-ass exhibits, she had calmed down a bit. So far, the Dead Days celebration hadn't been as much fun as she had hoped, and she was beginning to regret letting Donner talk her into coming. But if the museum had some really gross exhibits—like wax figures of mutilated bodies with their guts hanging out—it might be worth killing an hour or so there.

But Beyond the Veil had turned out to be depressingly mundane so far. Worse than that, it was
educational
. There were exhibits on the Spiritualist movement of the mid-1800s, famous psychic mediums throughout history, and people such as Harry Houdini and James Randi who had made it their mission to expose paranormal hoaxes. Most numerous of all were exhibits about ghosts—and not scary-cool exhibits like the rooms in a Halloween haunted house, where people in hockey masks jumped out of the shadows shrieking
and waving rubber knives at you. These exhibits featured supposedly true accounts of hauntings dating back to ancient times, and while there were some wax figures to illustrate the stories behind the hauntings, they were strictly PG-rated.

And this exhibit—atrociously titled “Rain of Terror”—was the dullest of the lot. It was all about the flood that had devastated the town almost a century ago, and it was made up almost entirely of photographs and text, along with a few personal effects recovered after the flood—moldy-looking children's toys, rusted jewelry, mud-encrusted bottles—displayed in glass cases. She thought the exhibit was the pinnacle of eye-gouging boredom, but Donner was really grooving on it.

“C'mon, Rachel. I mean
Rach
. The rest of the museum is cool and all, but this—this stuff really
happened,
you know?”

Rach had met Donner at a comic shop in Indianapolis. She had been checking out the adults-only manga for sale, Japanese comics that were heavy on sex and violence, when Donner approached her, a stack of graphic novels in his hands. He began chatting her up, nothing too creepy, just asking her about what manga she liked and all that, and at first, her answers were curt and dismissive. But Donner didn't give up, and after a few minutes, she found herself warming to his sarcastic sense of humor. It wasn't as dark and cutting as hers, but they clicked, and when he asked her out, she said OK, despite the difference in their ages.

They had been together almost three months, which was longer than Rach's relationships usually lasted, and she was starting to get bored. The longer they dated, the more obvious it became that any similarities they shared were outweighed by their differences. Donner might be older than she was, but he acted like a little boy much of the time. Like now, for instance. He looked as if he might stamp his foot and hold his breath if she didn't start showing some interest in the display.

Rach let out a heavy sigh to let Donner know she was put out at
having to feign interest—not that he was perceptive enough to pick up on it—and she looked up from her phone and began reading the information placards accompanying the photos. And despite herself, the more she read, the more intrigued she became.

In the spring of 1923, a series of heavy rainstorms swept through Indiana. As bad as it was throughout the rest of the state, the deluge hit Exeter the hardest—and by the middle of May, the Mossapeak River—normally sedate and slow-running—had become a swollen, raging torrent. The townsfolk were nervous, and some were talking about evacuating, but the mayor called a town meeting and assured the good folk of Exeter that the worst of the rain was over and that the Mossapeak would soon begin to subside. Reassured, the townspeople returned to their homes.

That night, another storm hit, this one a veritable monster. It was as if the heavens cracked in two and released all the rain they had stored for the remainder of the year in a single awful night. The Mossapeak exploded over its banks, and water flooded the town. People tried to flee, and while some made it, most of them were pulled beneath the churning water and drowned. Those who survived did so by seeking higher ground, heading for second floors and attics, even climbing on top of their roofs if necessary. It took seventeen hours for the storm to blow itself out and the rain to dribble away to a gentle mist. It was another thirty-six hours before the floodwaters finally began to recede. When it was all over, two-thirds of Exeter's populace was dead, and most of the buildings had suffered such extreme damage that they were unsalvageable.

Black-and-white photos of the flood's aftermath covered the museum walls. Entire buildings had been swept away and reduced to kindling. Piles of lumber were scattered across a muddy landscape. Wagons and old-fashioned cars lay wherever they had come to rest after the water released them. Often, they were broken and incomplete, lying at odd angles and sometimes clustered together, as if they were surreal sculptures. The most disturbing pictures
were of bodies lying in rows on the muddy ground, arms folded over their chests and eyes closed. Arranged that way by the survivors, Rach guessed. She was surprised they hadn't covered the bodies with sheets, but maybe they hadn't been able to salvage any—or maybe there had been too many bodies to cover them all.

There were more pictures: the town in various states of reconstruction, mediums and psychics coming in to investigate reports of ghostly manifestations, to exorcise earthbound spirits and guide them to the afterlife. But Rach didn't pay attention to those. She was too caught up in the story of the flood itself. She tried to imagine what it had been like for the survivors, clinging to one another as they huddled on the roofs of their homes and businesses, sheets of driving rain pounding down on them from a bruise-colored sky. Wild, chaotic currents flowing past, carrying broken branches, splintered lengths of lumber, barrels and boxes, the corpses of animals—cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens, dogs, cats—and, worst of all, the bodies of their friends and neighbors. Men, women, and children, young and old—the flood wouldn't have been choosy about its victims. And how many had been alive as they were swept along in the raging floodwaters, crying out for help, stretching their arms toward those they passed, moving too swiftly to be saved?

Despite the hard shell of cynicism she presented to the world—which wasn't an act; she really
was
that cynical—Rach felt an almost overwhelming sorrow for those who had lost their lives in the flood. Hard on the heels of that emotion came anger toward whatever moron had thought so little of the tragedy as to dub the display “Rain of Terror.” Such a sensationalized name, not to mention that lame pun, dishonored the memory of all those who had died when the Mossapeak had overflowed its banks. She turned to Donner, intending to demand that they go find someone in charge—a manager or director or something—and complain about the display's name, but before she could speak, a blast of cold, wet wind struck
her in the face and sent her stumbling backward in surprise. Her right foot slipped out from under her, and she fell hard on her ass. She landed at an angle and began sliding downward—her mind trying to understand how there could
be
an angle when the floor she had been standing on was level—and she rolled onto her stomach, hands scrabbling frantically to grab hold of something and stop her descent. The surface was hard and grainy beneath her fingers, but it was so slick with water that she couldn't get a handhold, and she picked up speed as she slid. She felt a sudden stomach-dropping sensation of space opening up beneath her, and then she was falling. Falling
where,
falling
how
—she was in a
museum,
for godsakes! And then she hit the water.

Cold bit into her flesh, sank its teeth deep into her bones, and she opened her mouth to cry out, but water rushed down her throat, choking off her voice before she could make a sound. She slipped beneath the surface, her vision clouded by the murky water, pressure roaring in her ears. Lungs heavy and chest burning, she began thrashing about, her arms and legs flailing spastically, as if her body was seeking something solid to grab hold of so it could climb out of the water. A distant, detached part of her mind wondered if this was how humans had learned to swim in the first place, climbing instincts kicking in whenever they found themselves in water over their heads. Those who didn't manage to keep their heads above the surface drowned. Those who did survived to pass on their genes, and several million years later, voilà! Hairless apes put pools in their backyards and spent vacations at the beach.

You're losing it!
she warned herself.
Don't worry about how and why this is happening. Just get some air into your lungs, damn it!

She forced her body to relax and kicked toward the surface. She felt the current pulling her sideways, but she continued kicking, and after what seemed like a lifetime, her head broke the surface. She drew in a gasp of the sweetest air she had ever breathed and
did her best to tread water while she tried to figure out what was going on.