No Ghouls Allowed (7 page)

“Sure,” I told her, not wanting her to worry, even though Mama D. and her husband
were currently making their way down to North Carolina to visit with family, and I
only knew that because I’d had to board Doc, my beloved parrot, at the local aviary
when he would’ve much preferred Mama Dell’s company while we were away. “Now, you
have a fantastic time on your vacation with John!”

The second I hung up, I said, “We’re screwed.”

After I’d explained what’d happened, Gil said, “What’re we supposed to do without
any of our equipment or protection?”

“Maybe we can hit a hardware store and pick up some spikes?” Heath said. “And somewhere
around here we should be able to find some magnets.”

Mrs. G. set down her drink and said, “Oh, you three! I told you I had a solution for
you. Now, come inside so I can show you the surprise.”

We followed dutifully after Mrs. G. and she led us straight to the guest room, where
Heath and I were staying. Opening the closet, she pointed to the top shelf and said,
“Heath, would you please pull that big box down for me?”

He did and she directed him to set it on the bed. Then we gathered close as she lifted
off the lid and parted some tissue paper, and there she revealed a bright green, yellow,
and vivid orange plaid fishing vest. “Ta-da!” she said, pulling it out and holding
it up for us to see.

All three of us took a step back. “Um . . . wow,” I said.

“Whoa,” Heath said.

“Oh . . . my . . . God!” Gil said, and I braced for whatever insult was about to come
next. But he surprised me when he grabbed the vest out of his mother’s hands and exclaimed,
“It’s
gorgeous
!”

“Oh, you really like it?’

Gilley immediately put the vest on. It sagged a little on him and he reached into
the pockets to pull out several thin magnets. “Mama!” he said. “This is awesome!”

Heath and I stood side by side with wide eyes and I secretly hoped that in that big
box there was only one fishing vest.

It wasn’t our lucky day. Mrs. G. reached back inside the box and pulled out another
two brightly colored vests. “I was going to give these to y’all right before you started
filming the next season of your show. Gilley said that some of your locations were
too hot to walk around in those down vests, so I thought a fishing vest might be a
good alternative.”

Heath and I pushed giant smiles onto our faces and tried our best to look grateful
and thrilled. Truth be told, the fishing vest
was
a fantastic alternative to the sometimes sweltering heat of the down vests, and it
had ready-made built-in pockets to store plenty of magnets. The only problem was the
ungodly awful plaid.

“Can you believe these were on sale down at the sporting goods store? I mean, who
could pass up such a gorgeous pattern?”

“Mama, they’re perfect!” Gil sang, and he paraded around in his vest while he secretly
flashed me a mocking smile because he knew Heath and I were struggling to appear delighted
by Mrs. G.’s gift.

I was so tempted to tell him his butt looked fat in that vest, but managed to hold
my tongue and instead said, “Thank you so much, Mrs. G. These are great.”

“Yes,” Heath said, slipping his on with slightly wooden movements. “Oh, and they fit
too.”

Mrs. G. clapped her hands. “Well, I had to guess on the sizes, but I knew you were
a little taller than my Gilley.”

I held in a chuckle. Heath was nearly a half a foot taller than Gil. “Well, it was
so thoughtful of you,” I told her. “And they will definitely come in handy when we
go back to the Porter house.”

“But what about weapons?” Gil asked. “And meters and monitors. I mean, there’s no
way we can do a full-fledged ghostbust without the rest of our equipment.”

I sighed. “For now, we’ll have to plan a trip to the hardware store for magnets and
spikes, and make do with that.”

Gil nodded in agreement, and I wondered if he wasn’t a bit too enthused by the fact
that if he had no equipment with which to monitor Heath and me from the car, he’d
be kept well away from Porter Manor.

The rest of that evening we were busy wrapping things up from that afternoon. Gilley
made a call to the shop where our van had been dropped off to give them the insurance
claim number and coordinate with the insurance adjuster when our van would be looked
at. In the meantime he also rented us a four-door SUV. I was happy that he’d rented
us something roomy because Gilley could be stingy when it came to saving a few bucks.
A few years back when he and I had vacationed together in the Florida Keys, he’d rented
us a car so small and so slow that I thought it must’ve been purchased by the rental
company from a few clowns at the circus.

While Gilley was dealing with our transportation, I bit the bullet and called Christine.
My call went straight to voice mail, so I blurted out a short message for her to call
me and left it at that. I knew I could’ve called Daddy and asked him to pass the phone
to Christine, but I just didn’t have the energy to hear him ask me why and then grill
me for details once I told him about visiting Porter Manor. Where Daddy was concerned,
I was still a bit of a chickenshit.

At ten we all turned in for bed, and I hadn’t heard back from Christine, but decided
not to worry about it. I was almost too tired to think.

The next morning I woke up to the smell of fresh coffee and cinnamon buns. Heath was
still asleep and I didn’t want to wake him, so I slipped out of the bed and, after
donning a sweatshirt, hustled down to the kitchen for some gooey goodness. At the
kitchen door I inhaled deeply. “My God, Mrs. G., that smells like heaven!”

“Oh!” she replied. “M.J., you startled me half to death!”

“Sorry,” I said quickly, moving forward to give her a giant hug. I’d missed Mrs. G.
more than I’d realized.

She hugged me back, then shooed me into a chair before pouring me some coffee and
handing me a plate for the buns already on the table. “Best eat quick before Gilley
wakes up,” she said with a grin.

I reached for a bun, took a bite, and closed my eyes to savor the wave of buttery,
fluffy, sweet goodness that played like a beautiful symphony across my taste buds.
“These buns should be outlawed,” I told Mrs. G. “It’s gotta be a crime to make anything
this good.”

Mrs. G. laughed delightedly. “Oh, Mary Jane,” she said, reaching over to squeeze my
arm. “If you think that’s good, just wait until you try my peach cobbler tonight!”

I smiled, but there was a part of me that inwardly groaned. Heath and I were currently
training for a marathon in the fall and we’d both sworn to eat nothing but healthy
meals during our training. Then again, I’d been eating super healthy for a few weeks
now, so I figured a few days off the regimen wouldn’t hurt much. Especially if I kept
up the training. And then I realized that I should’ve gotten out of bed and gone for
a run, especially since I was having an eight-hundred-calorie breakfast. It’d take
me nine miles to burn that all off.

“Penny for your thoughts?” Mrs. G. said, and I realized I’d lapsed into silence while
I worked through the algorithm of miles/cinnamon buns.

“Your new kitchen is gorgeous,” I told her, admiring the open floor plan she’d chosen
when she redid her kitchen—a recent and much needed update, as the old one, dominated
by the avocado cabinets, appliances, and even the countertop, had dated back to the
early seventies.

By contrast the new kitchen was something straight out of
Elle Decor
, with gleaming white windowed cabinets, a gorgeous smoky gray granite countertop,
a large central island, Wolf appliances, and the addition of a huge bay window, which
had expanded the breakfast nook and gave tons of morning light to the room. Mrs. G.
beamed with pride. “It was expensive but worth it,” she said. “My next project is
to get rid of all the old carpet in the house and replace it with something more modern.
Did you know they make tile that actually looks like wood flooring?”

Before I could answer, we heard a voice say from the hallway, “Mama? Are those cinnamon
buns I smell?”

Mrs. G. winked at me. “No, Gilley. Just a new air freshener. Go back to bed, honey
love.”

A second later Gil’s head appeared in the doorway. “You know I can always tell a real
bun from a fake one, right?”

I hid a smile. Only I knew that Gil wasn’t referring just to baked goods.

Mrs. G. offered her son a skeptical frown. Huh. Maybe I wasn’t the only one who knew
Gilley’s penchant for the double entendre. “What’s on your agenda for today?” Mrs.
G. asked, setting a hot mug of joe down for Gilley, who was already four fingers deep
into the rolls.

Gilley looked at me as if I were the master of schedules. I wished there were nothing
more to do than hang out with Mrs. G. in her beautiful home and let myself relax.
But as with most of our vacations of late, there was no way that was happening with
some menacing ghost to deal with. “Well,” I said, “I’ll have to get ahold of Christine
and tell her about the accident, and warn her not to send any more workers over there
until we have a chance to fully investigate the source of the spook activity.”

“You know, Mary Jane, I’ve been thinking,” Mrs. G. said. “Maybe the source of the
activity has something to do with that young boy who went missing from the Porter
house all those years ago.”

Gil and I both turned curiously to her. “What boy?” Gil asked.

Mrs. G. tapped her lip thoughtfully. “Maybe y’all are too young to remember. I was
just about to enter my senior year, and at the end of that summer I’d landed my first
real job as a typist for the sheriff, which I was so happy about because it meant
that I got a chance to get out of workin’ at my mama’s boutique with all those gossipy
ladies goin’ on about how they couldn’t find good help, or their husbands spendin’
too much time on the golf course, or how the butcher was chargin’ too much for his
pork roast—”

“Ma!” Gil interrupted as Mrs. G. began to get wildly off tangent. “What boy?”

She chuckled. “Sorry,” she said. “I spend so much time alone these days, it’s hard
to remember how to tell a story! Anyhoo, it was on my second or third day at the sheriff’s
department when a call came in about a missing boy—a cousin of the Porters’, as I
recall, had come for a visit and turned up missing. No one knew what’d happened to
him and people searched for him that whole summer, but it was like he’d just vanished
into thin air.

“His parents lived in another state, Alabama, maybe. North Carolina? I can’t remember.
Maybe Tennessee?”

“So, they never found him?” Gil said to move things along.

Mrs. G. shook her head. “No. It was so sad and so scary. People didn’t know if he’d
been kidnapped or if he’d just wandered off into the woods somewhere and gotten lost.
The prevailing theory was that he’d died of exposure and his remains were simply never
found.”

“How old was he?” I asked, feeling a sense of familiarity. Had I heard this story
before?

“Oh, I think he was fourteen or fifteen at the time. A good-looking young man too,
from the photo that got printed in the paper.”

“Do you remember his name?” Gil asked.

“I do,” she said. “Everett Sellers. Such a good name, don’t you think? I remember
looking at his photo and thinking he could have easily been a movie star with those
good looks and that name. He was particularly close to Glenn Porter, who was just
a few years older than your mama, if I recall, Mary Jane.”

My breath caught.

“What?” Gil said.

“Nothing,” I said, not wanting to go into detail in front of Gil’s mom, but my heart
beat a bit faster as I remembered DeeDee telling me that the Sandman had been brought
forward by someone named Everett who was Glenn’s cousin. I hadn’t had any idea whom
she meant, but now there was an apparent connection, and what an odd connection it
was. It might even explain why I was pulled into that OBE with my mother as a child.
Maybe it was to give context to something having to do with Everett Sellers, or, taking
it one step further, maybe there was a connection to this Sandman and Everett’s disappearance.
It was something I knew I’d need to check out, sooner rather than later.

“M.J.?” Gil said as his hand landed on my arm.

I jumped. “Huh?”

“You were deep in thought there, sugar. Where’d you go?”

“Nowhere. Just thinking that maybe we should check out the story of Everett Sellers.”
No sooner did those words leave my lips than I had the most overwhelming foreboding
come over me. I’m not the best when it comes to predictions—my psychic sense is much
more firmly rooted in communicating with the dead—but sometimes I’ll get the most
intense image in my mind’s eye, and what came to me was the picture of the swirling
strobe lights of first responders playing against the front entrance of Porter Manor.
It was so clear, so vivid, and came with such intensity that I abruptly shot out of
my chair and began racing down the hallway. “M.J.!” I heard Gil call after me, but
I didn’t slow down or even pause in my flight to the guest room. I heard the pad of
Gilley’s bare feet behind me and was glad for it. I’d need him too.

Flinging open the door to the bedroom, I yelled, “Heath!”

“What?! What?!” he said, jerking upright before jumping out of bed and looking around
as if he expected to fend off an attack. I’d obviously woken him from a dead sleep.

“What’s happening?” Gilley asked me. “M.J., what’s going on?”

“Get dressed,” I said to both of them as I reached for my suitcase. “We’re about to
have a situation.”

As if on cue my phone rang. It was Christine. She was sobbing. “Mary Jane!” she wailed,
and then she couldn’t seem to form any coherent sentences.

So I did the talking. “Christine,” I said as calmly as I could while making a hand
motion for the boys to hurry up and get dressed. “We’re on our way. You stay put and
I’ll call Daddy. He’ll come to you, and I’ll head over to the manor and figure out
what’s going on.”

“N-n-noooo!” she cried. “D-d-don’t go over there! Everyone who goes there gets hurt
or . . . or . . .”

“Shhhhh, honey,” I coaxed, sitting on the bed to pull on my jeans. “Just try to tell
me who’s hurt. Can you do that?” My hand shook as I pulled up the zipper to my jeans.

“The . . . the . . . construction man! He’s dead! I only hired that crew last night
and this morning one of them is
dead
!”

Dammit,
I thought. If only I’d had a chance to speak with Christine and warn her about not
letting any work crews go over to the Porter house until we’d busted the violent ghost
there. I could only imagine that a new, unsuspecting work crew had shown up this morning
and perhaps was hit by a planter or another heavy object thrown from the third-floor
balcony. “Where’s Daddy?” I asked her.

“He . . . he . . .” Christine was starting to breathe too fast, and she didn’t seem
to be able to form words.

“Shhhh,” I tried again as I spun in a circle, looking for a shirt, and located one
on the top of my suitcase. “Don’t worry about it, Christine. I’ll find him. You stay
put until you hear from us, okay?”

“D-d-d-d-d-don’t go over there, Mary Jane!”

I paused with my shirt half on and said, “We won’t go inside. We’ll just figure out
what’s happening and call you. We’ll be okay. I promise. You just stay put. I’ll be
in touch as soon as I know something.”

I then hung up because I knew my insistence to head over there was only going to stress
her out more. The second I pocketed my phone, Heath said, “Tell me.”

“That was Christine. Before I had a chance to talk to her, she hired another crew
to go work on the house this morning.”

“Shit,” Heath swore, his forehead creased with worry.

“It gets worse.”

“How much worse?”

“I think someone might be dead.”

Gil stared at me as if he couldn’t believe what words had just come out of my mouth.
“Come again?” he said. “Someone
died
?”

“Maybe. Christine was pretty hysterical, and I can’t be sure of any details. That’s
why we need to go.”

I turned to head out of the room but was stopped in the doorway by Mrs. G. She was
toting our vests and she handed me mine, then Gilley his, and finally offered the
largest vest to Heath. “I don’t know what’s going on, but I’ll want a full report
the second you get back, and don’t even think about taking these off for the rest
of the day.”

I kissed Mrs. G. on the cheek and put my vest on in haste. We had to get going. “Thank
you so much! You’re a lifesaver!”

With that, we were finally out the door.

Gilley drove us over to Porter Manor and the moment we turned down the long drive,
he gave a whistle. “Lots of first responders,” he said.

I could feel myself tense when I saw the scene that had been almost exactly captured
by my mind’s eye just fifteen minutes earlier. Then I counted three sheriff’s patrol
cars, a fire truck, and a paramedic truck all on scene with their lights flashing.
As we passed the patrol cars, I was a little surprised there was no deputy standing
in the road, ready to turn us away. “Everybody must be inside,” Heath said from the
backseat.

“Look, M.J.!” Gil exclaimed suddenly. “Your daddy’s car.”

Sure enough, parked right in front of the steps was Daddy’s dark blue Lincoln. A jolt
of alarm added itself to the anxiety brewing in my stomach. “Why is he here?”

Gil parked and we all hopped out, but while Heath and I headed toward the front door,
Gil hung back by the rental car. “I’ll stay here, if y’all don’t mind,” he said, the
Southern creeping into his speech again.

“I’ll text you from inside,” I told him. Assuming my phone would work this time, of
course.

Heath and I hurried up the steps and through the front door, where I very nearly ran
right into Daddy. “Mary Jane,” he said, quickly taking hold of my shoulders and gracing
me with a disapproving frown. “Why are you here?”

I thought I could ask him the same thing. I craned my neck, trying to peek around
him, but Daddy’s a big man, and I get my petite stature from my mother. “Christine
called us,” I said, trying to shrug out of his grasp, but Daddy is also quite strong
for a man his age. “Daddy, please, let me go. I’m here to help.”

His disapproving frown intensified. “There’s nothing to be done, honey. You’d best
get back in your car and go on now before you get in somebody’s way.”

“Montgomery,” said a familiar voice behind Daddy. I leaned out to see Sheriff Kogan,
who’d been the Valdosta sheriff for as long as I could remember. “We’re ready to bring
out the stretcher. Mind stepping aside?”

I felt my breath catch even though Christine had warned me that a man had died.

“Come on, Em,” Heath whispered, and I felt his gentle hand on my back. “Let’s go back
outside so we’ll be out of the way.”

Daddy’s eyes flashed with a brief note of approval for Heath before returning to me.
“Wait for me in the drive,” he said, his tone brooking no argument.

With a heavy sigh I turned and headed back outside with Heath to wait next to our
rental car, which was parked well out of range of projectiles. Gilley came out from
the SUV to join us, but he kept glancing warily up toward the third-floor balcony.
It was now empty of flowerpots, but after our earlier experience, I could understand
how cautious he was being.

After a bit there seemed to be some movement visible in the front hallway and soon
enough two paramedics appeared with a stretcher between them. They carefully eased
it down the steps and it wasn’t until the stretcher was even with us that I could
see who was on it.

A man with salt-and-pepper hair and a thick mustache was totally strapped down, complete
with head and neck brace. His hands were struggling against the straps and his fingers
were extended and slightly curled, resembling claws. He was also growling and spitting
while trying to twist his head this way and that. Abruptly, he stopped growling and
emitted a laugh that could only be described as a cackle. It was a terribly creepy
sound, and as it faded, he returned to growling. I felt Gilley latch onto my arm with
both hands and step close enough to hug me.

“What the hell is that?” he whispered.

But I knew that he already had that answer. “Something’s got ahold of him,” I said
to Heath, who wore a grave look on his face.

We watched as the paramedics maneuvered the stretcher toward the ambulance, and all
the while the medic at the helm attempted to talk softly to the man and reassure him,
but it was as if his words were falling on deaf ears.

No one else spoke although a slew of other first responders was now coming out of
the house. I focused on them for a moment and I saw how strained their expressions
were. There was something about the way they were holding themselves so tensely, as
if they were quite disturbed by what they’d witnessed inside.

Daddy came out at that moment with the sheriff and a few men wearing hard hats who
were pale and visibly shaking. They scrambled down the steps and over to three pickup
trucks parked among the patrol cars and fire truck, and hustled inside.

“What do you think happened?” Gil asked, his grip on my arm becoming painful enough
that I pried some of his fingers loose.

“Somebody died,” Heath answered, his gaze far away as he stared in the direction of
the house.

“You’re trying to make contact?” I asked him.

He nodded. Then he frowned. “There is some
really
bad juju in there.”

“We already knew that,” I told him.

“Yeah, but, Em, I think it’s actually gotten worse from yesterday.”

“Maybe we should go?” Gil said, a hopeful note in his voice.

I pulled my arm out of his grip and walked with determination toward Daddy. He saw
me coming and excused himself from Kogan. “You can’t go in there,” Daddy said, obviously
mistaking my purposeful walk toward him at the top of the stairs.

“What happened?” I asked when I reached him.

Daddy shook his head and wiped a sheen of sweat from his brow. “Nothing you should
be concerned with, Mary Jane. It’s a terrible sight in there, and nothin’ I want my
baby girl to see. Now please, let me handle this, and you and Gilley and Heath go
on back to Minerva’s house.”

A knot of anger formed in the center of my chest. Daddy was forever treating me like
a child, as if he was oblivious to the fact that I’d seen far more terrible things
just in the past few years than he could even imagine. “Daddy,” I said sternly, refusing
to budge or go away. “That man who was just taken away, what happened to him?”

Daddy sighed. “We don’t really know, Mary Jane. He seems to be havin’ some kind of
psychotic break.”

I held his gaze stubbornly even as he laid a hand on my shoulder to gently remind
me he wanted me to leave. “That was no psychotic break,” I said, knowing a possession
when I saw one. “I’m assuming he was part of the construction crew that Christine
hired?”

“Yes,” Daddy said, but I thought his patience was beginning to wear thin. “He was
part of Mike Scoffland’s crew.”

“Did anyone else see what might have triggered the . . . uh . . . psychotic break?”

“No. Well, no, I expect, except Mr. Scoffland.”

“Can I talk to him?”

“No,” Daddy said firmly, applying more pressure to my shoulder and trying to turn
me away from the house.

I shrugged out of his grasp and crossed my arms to show him I wasn’t going anywhere.
“Daddy, I might be able to help that man, but I need to know specifically what happened
inside that house, and if Mr. Scoffland can tell me what he witnessed, I might be
able to help his crew member.”

“You can’t help him, Mary Jane, and you can’t talk to Mike. Now please, go on home,
all right?”

I shook my head and refused to turn away. “Daddy, you need to listen to me. There’s
something evil inside that house. Something spiritually evil. We had a bad encounter
out here yesterday, and I tried to call Christine to warn her, but I never got ahold
of her, and she hired another crew without knowing how dangerous it is.”

Daddy’s eyes widened at my admission. “What kind of bad encounter?” he demanded.

“It’s not important,” I told him, because it wasn’t right now. “I need to talk to
Scoffland—”

My argument with Daddy was cut off by the sound of his cell phone chirping. He pulled
it out of his pocket, glanced at the display, and promptly answered it. After a moment
his eyes got big and he gasped, “She’s what?!”

I held my breath again, focused on Daddy’s shocked expression, willing him to blurt
out a detail that might tell me what other bad thing had just happened.

“Which hospital are y’all at?” Daddy said, and my anxiety increased. I had a bad feeling
the call was about Christine. “Right, I’m on my way, June. You stay with her until
I get there, all right?”

Daddy hung up the phone and eyed me, then his car, as if he couldn’t decide whether
to bolt to his vehicle or explain to me what’d happened.

“Christine?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said, already turning away from me. I walked with him while he fished in
his pocket for his keys. “She’s had some sort of panic attack. Mrs. Lindstrom found
her on the lawn, struggling to breathe. Thank God June was out for her daily walk
around the block.”

As Daddy opened his car door, I gave his arm a squeeze. “She’ll be okay,” I assured
him.

For a brief moment he paused and there was something in his eyes, something I hadn’t
seen since a few days before Mama had died. There was a sweet tenderness in the look
he offered me, and he patted my hand gently and said, “Go back to Minerva’s, Mary
Jane. I’ll call you in a bit.”

I nodded, even though I had no intention of heading anywhere until I found out what’d
happened inside the mansion. Once Daddy’s car was comfortably rolling down the drive,
I turned on my heel and set my sights for Sheriff Kogan.

He was over with one of the firefighters, patting him on the back as the man turned
toward the truck, presumably to be on his way.

Before I could reach the sheriff, however, I was stopped in midtrack by the most horrible
bloodcurdling scream coming from deep within the house. Everyone turned to look through
the open door, but I was the first to fly into action. Tearing up the steps and into
the front hall, I headed for the back of the house, following much the same path that
Heath, Gilley, and I had used the day before.