No Ghouls Allowed (19 page)

“Oh,” Linda said, taking a moment to think about it. “I believe we were eight going
on nine.”

“What happened between Mama and Sarah Porter?” I asked.

Linda waved her hand. “Oh, hell, honey, I don’t know. At that age you’re making friends
and unmaking them in the bat of an eye. From what I remember, though, Regina Porter
found some fault with your mother, and banned her from ever speaking to her daughter
again. It was probably that DeeDee had said something passed on from a dead relative
or something. Back in those days people were so spooked by those kinds of things.”

“Linda?” I asked next.

“Yes, buttercup?”

I had a hard time meeting Linda’s gaze for my next question. “Did Mama ever mention
someone called the Sandman?”

Linda’s sharp intake of breath told me I was right to be worried. “How did you find
out about him?” she asked carefully.

“It’s not important,” I said. “What did Mama say about him?”

Linda’s entire demeanor had changed dramatically, and for the first time ever in the
entire time I’d known her, she seemed to eye me angrily. “I made a promise to your
mother, Mary Jane, a promise that I swore I would take with me to my grave, and I
have no intention of discussing that with you, now or ever!”

I was so stunned by the forcefulness of her statement that for a moment all I could
do was sit there and stare at her.

To Linda’s credit, she appeared to be rather alarmed by her outburst too, and really
neither of us knew what to say next. The entire atmosphere had changed and what had
been a lovely reunion had suddenly turned into an awkward encounter.

Getting to my feet, I said, “Thank you for your time, Linda. It’s getting late and
I left Gilley and Heath waiting in the car.”

Linda got to her feet too. “Oh! Oh, my, Mary Jane, they’ve been waiting for you in
the car? Why didn’t you—”

“I’ve got to go,” I said. Now that the shock was over, I was beginning to feel the
full sting of Linda’s outburst and all I wanted to do was run out of there.

Linda’s hands attempted to reach out to me, but I turned away from her and headed
straight for the door. Pausing only for a moment, I said, “Thank you again, Linda.
It was great seeing you.” And then I was out the door and running down the block,
searching frantically for the rental car, which wasn’t in the spot where I’d left
Gilley and Heath, and they were nowhere else in sight.

Feeling even more desperate, I began to run down the street in the direction of Mrs.
G.’s. She lived only a mile and a half from Linda and I focused on getting there as
quickly as possible.

About a quarter mile into the mad dash away, a car pulled up alongside me. “M.J.!”
Gil shouted.

I took several more steps, on the fence about stopping to get in the car, or whether
to keep running and work off some of the hurt I felt at Linda’s rebuke. “M.J.!” Gil
shouted again.

I slowed down, then stopped, but I didn’t immediately move to the SUV. I heard a car
door open and in the next moment I was drawn up into a hug. “What happened?” Heath
asked me.

I shook my head. “It’s nothing. I’m sorry. I think I’m just tired.”

Heath lifted my chin and forced me to look at him. “You don’t want to tell me?”

“Not really.”

“Okay,” he said, stroking my hair. “I’d run with you, ya know, but I think you’re
worn-out and could use a lift home.”

“Yeah, okay,” I said, allowing him to lead me by the hand to the car. He opened the
passenger door for me and I scooted in next to Gil.

“What happened?” Gilley asked the second he saw my tearstained face.

It was odd, but there were things I could say to Gilley that I knew he’d understand
instantly because of our shared history, which made it much harder to explain to Heath.
“She yelled at me.”

Gilley was holding a large, double-scoop chocolate–peanut butter ice-cream cone. By
the amount of chocolate smeared around his mouth, it was an easy call to say that
it’d started out as a triple. “She did not!” he said.

“She did.”

“Why?”

“I asked her if Mama had ever mentioned the Sandman. She told me she’d sworn an oath
never to speak about it to anybody, including me. Actually, she yelled it at me.”

Gil adopted a sympathetic expression. He knew how much Linda meant to me, and how
kind she’d always been to me. Of course he’d also know how being unfairly yelled at
by someone I loved so much might feel. He looked down at his cone, seemed to think
about something, and then he offered it to me. “Here,” he said. “This’ll make you
feel better.”

That small gesture went a long way to doing just that. “I couldn’t take your cone,
honey,” I told him, although my mouth watered a little.

“We got a pint of pistachio,” Heath said from the backseat. I’d once told Heath that
my favorite flavor ice cream was pistachio, and I’d done that because his mother had
told me that it was his favorite flavor and I wanted him to think we shared something
sweet in common.

And while I do love pistachio, my favorite flavor was the one currently being offered
to me. Chocolate peanut butter. It was Gil’s favorite too. “Go on,” he said with a
wink, knowing I’d been a big fat fibber to Heath. Over his shoulder he said, “I think
she needs some of LuLu’s comfort now rather than waiting until we get back to Mama’s.”

I cleared my throat, and eyed Heath apologetically. “I am kinda hungry.”

“Then go for it,” he said easily and with a knowing grin. “I hear that’s your real
favorite anyway.”

“What? Who told you?”

Gil shoved the cone in my hand and put the car into drive. “That’s not important.
What
is
important is that we get you home and have Mama take care of you tonight. You look
like you’ve gone a few rounds with Mike Tyson’s polar bear.”

Mrs. G. took one look at me and ushered me into the house with a great deal of fuss.
“I saw it all on the news!” she said. “I hoped y’all weren’t involved, but then they
played some footage of you and Heath coming out of that building where those mental
patients went nuts and I knew you two were in the thick of things.”

“Wait,” Gil said, looking wide-eyed at us. “That really happened?”

I let Heath tell him the story while I polished off Gilley’s cone. Gil stared at his
disappearing dessert with more than a hint of regret in his hungry eyes, but then
Heath broke out the pistachio and added some hot fudge, and that set Gilley back to
rights again.

Meanwhile, Mrs. G. drew me a nice hot bath, which I soaked in for about an hour, letting
the healing fragrance of the bath salts work their magic.

Toward the middle of my soak Heath popped his head in and said, “Want some company?”

I smiled. “Come on in, baby, but I’m afraid we’re all out of bubbles.”

Heath stripped down quickly and I marveled at the exquisiteness of his physique. He
was so beautifully proportioned and wonderfully well toned that he constantly took
my breath away. He slid into the tub, careful not to jostle or splash me, and I sighed
when he settled in and picked up my foot to rub the sole. “How’s the tendinitis?”
he asked.

I’d developed a mild case of posterior tibial tendinitis on the inside of my right
foot, just below the anklebone, and while it wasn’t getting any worse, it wasn’t exactly
getting any better. “The same,” I said, laying my head back and relishing the feel
of Heath’s strong hands.

“You should ice it after each run,” he told me.

“I have been, except today there wasn’t time.”

“Crazy day, wasn’t it?”

“Insane. On so many levels,” I agreed.

Heath was silent for a moment before he said, “Em?”

“Yeah?”

“What aren’t you telling me about your mom and the Sandman?”

I tensed, but then I sighed and lifted my head up to look at Heath. “I’m not keeping
anything from you.”

Heath cocked a skeptical eyebrow and worked his thumbs into the center of my sole.
It was so pleasurable that I moaned. “You sure there isn’t something else bothering
you?”

“You mean besides the fact that we have an insanely powerful spook able to possess
the minds of a dozen people while slamming every door in a ten-thousand-square-foot
building, and we have no idea how to shut his ass down or where his portal might be
hiding? On top of which we somehow got roped into helping to solve a set of murders
forty-five years apart and we have very few leads and even fewer suspects?”

Heath chuckled as he set my right foot back down in the tub. He then lifted the other
foot and worked his magic on it. “Yeah, besides all that.”

I looked away from Heath and inhaled deeply. There was a terrible thought currently
running rampant in my mind that threatened to cause so much havoc that I didn’t know
if I could voice it out loud. But if I held it in, it might still destroy me. “I have
this fear . . . ,” I began.

“Of?”

Lifting my foot out of Heath’s hands, I set it down and sat up toward him, taking
up both of his hands in mine. I needed to whisper this and look into his eyes, because
I didn’t think I’d have the courage otherwise. “I think Mama may have played a part
in Everett’s death.”

Heath kept his expression neutral, but he squeezed my hands to reassure me. “The sugar
bowl?”

“Yes. Linda confirmed that it likely came from Sarah Porter’s tea set. She and Mama
were best friends right up until the third grade. There was some sort of falling-out
over that summer, and Mama became best friends with Linda.”

“Was it the same summer that Everett was murdered?”

I nodded. “The timing matches.”

Heath sat back but held on to my hands. “We need to know what happened in that playroom.”

I dropped my gaze. “But what if what happened in that playroom isn’t something I can
handle?”

“Hey,” Heath said, sitting forward again. When I kept my gaze averted, he lifted my
chin with his finger. “There isn’t anything you can’t handle, babe. Don’t you know
that by now? You’re the strongest person I ever met. The most courageous. The most
loyal. And . . . ,” he added, leaning in to hover his lips above mine, “the most beautiful.”

A moment later we were intertwined, and soon after that, we were making a wet mess
of the bathroom floor.

Later, as he and I were lying in bed, whispering to each other, he said, “Em?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you want me to try to reach out to your mom and ask her about Everett?”

Heath asked the question I’d been silently debating for much of that day. And, as
much as I thought I might want answers, I didn’t know if I could face what might come
directly from my mother. “I don’t know,” I said, because I really didn’t.

“If she was there that day, babe, she could tell us what happened, and assuming Everett
didn’t die because of anything she did, she might be able to point to the killer.”

I trailed my finger along Heath’s arm, starting at the top of his shoulder, moving
across the bulging muscle of his upper arm along the curl of his biceps and over to
the smooth part of his forearm. I loved every beautiful square inch of him and found
the tactile connection tonight so comforting. “What if she won’t tell us?” I asked,
snaking my finger back up the way it’d come.

“Then she won’t,” he said simply.

My finger stopped its languid stroll. “What if she does and I can’t handle it?”

“Like I said before, you’ll handle it.”

“What if handling it means seeing her differently?” I asked next, barely able to get
those words out.

“Would anything she told you affect how much you love her?”

I thought about that for a minute. “No,” I said at last. “Nothing could change how
much I love her.”

“Then it’s okay to ask.”

I sighed. “Have I told you how much I love
you
, Heath?”

A sly grin formed on his lips. “A couple of times, but for me, it never gets old.”
I moved in and kissed him, so deeply in love at that moment that I felt he was right.
I could handle anything. “Now, how ’bout it?” he asked me when I released him from
the kiss. “You wanna reach out to her now?”

I sat up and Heath did too. “Can we light a candle?” There was a white scented candle
in the room. I loved the symbolism of a white candle, how it promoted peace and harmony
especially during spiritual endeavors.

We found a box of matches next to the candle and lit it; then Heath and I sat cross-legged
on the bed, facing each other. I opened my senses wide and felt him do the same.

He quickly adopted a faraway stare and suddenly smiled. “What?” I asked.

“Grampa,” he said. Heath’s grandfather, Sam Whitefeather, was one of my spirit guides,
and the second Heath mentioned him, I felt a calm come over me. I adored that old
man something fierce. “He’s talking about how we got beat up today,” Heath said. “He
says this Sandman spirit is nothing to fuck with.”

I burst out laughing. “He did not say ‘fuck’!”

Heath tried to look serious, but the corners of his mouth were quirking. “Yeah, well,
you know a lot of this is left up to interpretation.”

I giggled. “Nice.”

“Anyway, he says the Sandman is really dangerous. He’s superpowerful and he has a
vendetta against . . .”

“Against?”

Heath’s faraway focus switched to looking directly at me. “Against you.”

“Well, that was sort of obvious from what happened today at the mental hospital.”

“Yep,” Heath said, his eyes becoming unfocused again. “Now I’m asking him if he would
bring your mom forward.”

I waited with my nerves fluttering in my chest, and I watched as Heath’s blank face
morphed into a lowered brow. “He says he won’t bring her forward.”

“Why not?”

“The Sandman has gained some power and right now he’s too fixated on her energy. If
Gramps brings her into this room, or anywhere around you, it’ll draw him like a magnet.
He says she’s doing her best on the other side to keep him guessing where she is,
distracted, and away from you, but to do that, she also has to keep her distance from
you until this is over.”