The Hysteria: Book 4, The Eddie McCloskey Paranormal Mystery Series (The Unearthed) (9 page)

Nobody answered at Turner’s place so I went inside. It was after eight, the foyer was lit up but empty. I went down the hall to the study where I knew Turner liked to hang. I was making enough noise to wake the dead. I went in.

Morgan Turner shrieked a primal scream and next thing I knew he had a frigging machete in hand.

There’s a first time for everything. Unfortunately, this was a second time for me. And it was just as scary this go-around.

I froze, put my hands up.

He stopped short, blade held high over his head like a samurai sword. Turner studied me for a crazy minute, like we’d never met. His whole body was tensed like a long bow about to loose an arrow. The almost coppery blade had a weak glint in the light of the chandelier that cost more than I’d ever made in a year.

I really needed a gun or life was going to get very short.

“Morgan, it’s me. Eddie. Are you okay?”

At the sound of my voice his body relaxed and his eyes went less-insane.

“Where the hell have you been?” Turner asked.

“Private investigating.” I left the door to the study wide open in case I had to skedaddle. I tugged at my ear trying to make the move look completely natural. The deer tick-sized microchip glued to the back of my ear called Manetti’s cell phone and streamed audio to her. I didn’t relish the idea that the feminazi was my only safety net.

But it was better than having no safety net, especially since it was Jekyll and Hyde with this family.

Turner got a faraway look in his eye then seemed to remember he was holding a machete. How one forgets something like that, I don’t know. He put it back in its place, in a knife cabinet along with several antiquey-looking things that could have been described as sabers. I’m not a weapons nut. I’ve fired three guns in my entire life. The last was a shotgun I used to send a friend into the afterlife. The one before that a .45 I’d shot at the ground to scare somebody. And the one before that? My Nintendo Zapper for Duck Hunt. I was pretty good at that game.

Turner put a smile on his face. The weird part? He seemed genuinely happy to see me.

“I’m sorry, Eddie. We’re all on edge right now with Megan gone and Melanie…”

“Is Melanie around?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Any changes in behavior tonight, or outbursts?”

He frowned like he had no idea what I was talking about.

I moved between him and the machete. “Why don’t we sit down and I’ll give you a status update?”

“Detective Quick called…” His voice trailing off told me everything I needed to know.

“Come on, let’s talk.”             

***

I filled him in, leaving out the part about Pater and Megan’s colleagues. I could see him doing some mental math, measuring the hours I was gone against the time elapse of my account. I could tell it wasn’t computing.

“He’s dead.” Turner pondered the loss of his ex-son-in-law with a lot more sorrow than I expected. “And…explain how it happened?”

I’d already explained how it happened. It was bothering me I’d iced a man I didn’t know, even though it was in self-defense. I didn’t care to relive it. And it was starting to feel like Turner was fishing.

“He came after me, I had to defend myself. It was a hell of a thing.” I hoped that would be enough.

“Why did he come after you? I just don’t understand.”

I’d made this clear too. Turner was fishing.

“He was off.”

“Off?”

“Okay, Morgan. He was psychotic.” The more information Morgan wanted, the less I wanted to provide. “He hadn’t been to work in days, wasn’t answering his phone, and wasn’t making any sense when I talked to him. And then, he just flipped out.”

“Did you…shoot him?” he asked.

“I don’t carry a gun.”

He was visibly relieved. “That’s good. That’s very good. I don’t like guns.”

I didn’t know why that was good. I didn’t know why a frigging machete was better. With a gun killing somebody could be impersonal compared to the intimacy of cutting some poor shlub down with a blade.

A maid I’d never seen before popped her head into the study. She was Mexican and had a round face and could have been twenty-five or forty.

“Mr. Turner, I’m going home now. Can I come back for your room tomorrow?”

“Do not worry about my room, Juanita. I’ll take care of that for the next few days.”

She gracias-ed him and left as quietly as she’d come.

Turner didn’t look like the type to keep a messy room. Nothing was out of place in his house. And he had a lot of house and a lot of things.

“What set him off? Exactly.” Turner paced in front of one of the many fireplaces in the house.

One of my rules is never lie to the client. The exception to every one of my rules is unless you fear for your life.

“Morgan, he wasn’t making any sense, he just came after me.”

Turner folded his arms and looked into the dead fireplace. With his back to me, he said, “Did Jamie mention Megan?”

“No.”

“Did you?”

“That’s why I was there.”

A pause. “Did he mention anyone else?”

You mean like Ken Hernando? “No.”

Another stretch of silence. I could hear a grandfather clock at the other end of the study ticking. Outside the darkness deepened.

Daughter Number Three came in. Mia. She didn’t look like Turner and had short, stylish black hair. She was wearing khaki pants and a sleeveless top.

“Who are you?” she said. A little nervous.

“Mia, this is the man I told you about, Eddie McCloskey.”

“I’m going to find your sister.” I smiled.

She considered this and clearly wasn’t sure about me. “Dad, could I talk to you in private? I think someone was in my room again.”

Turner gave me a sharp look.

“Wasn’t me. I can’t even find the bathroom in this house.”

Turner nodded. “Would you excuse us?”

I excused myself, rather than them. I went around the first floor, still trying to familiarize myself with the layout. I was Theseus without his string. Eventually I came to the pool room. It looked out to the backyard. Strongbow was out there, captured in the flood lights.

Speaking of target practice. The guy had a long bow and was shooting at a target quite a distance away. I watched as the great mass of muscles in his back rippled from the pull and loosing of the next arrow.

I met him out there. “Nice night for a long bow.”

He didn’t know if I was kidding. He didn’t care either. “Find Megan yet?”

“Not quite. But I know how.”

He untensed the bow and held the arrow away and looked at me. “How?”

I didn’t trust anybody, not when there was a possibility of an MPI affecting anybody and everybody. “If I tell you, it won’t work.”

He grunted and went back to long bowing. “Mr. Turner is under a lot of stress. If I find out you’re taking advantage…”

Thwack
. The arrow missed the bull’s eye about six inches to the right.

“You getting ready, in case the French decide to wage war again?”

“No. Just getting ready.”

When no explanation came, I said, “For what?”

Thwack
. This arrow hit the bull’s eye. He leaned the bow against a metal stand next to him and turned dark eyes to me.

“For anything.”

“Define anything.”

“Anything is pretty self-explanatory.”

He went to retrieve his arrows and I left him alone.

***

At 9:30 I went to Melanie’s door and knocked. There was no noise coming from the room but I could tell she was in there. The room hummed with that sense of being occupied.

No answer.

“Melanie?” I knocked again.

A sound like somebody moving on a bed. “Come in.”

“It’s Eddie. Are you decent?”

“Decent enough.”

Uh-oh.

I went in. She was on the bed like I’d pictured. Wearing sorority shorts that probably had Greek letters across the ass and a diaphonous white t-shirt. In her lap was Megan’s empty roller skates box.

She held up Megan’s drawing of people dancing in the ballroom. “I found this.”

“What is it?”

She saw through my acting. “She drew this recently.”

“Oh yeah?”             

“I think it can help us find her.”

“I didn’t know you were actually looking.”

“Of course I am.” She put the drawing down and came off the bed. She was ninety-percent legs. “What a thing to say.”

“My mouth has a mind of its own.”

“I’ll bet.”

So we were back to this again.

She approached and I could feel the animal heat coming off her. She tipped her head back to look up at me. “What do you think it means?”

“It’s just a drawing.”

“You don’t believe that for a second. A picture is never just a picture. So why are you lying to me?”

My turn to be evasive. “You recognize the room? Looks like a dance hall or maybe somewhere you’d have a wedding. Any ideas?”

“I thought it was just a drawing.”

“In case it isn’t.”

She shook her head. “I’ve never seen this place before in my life.”

“Recognize any of the people in the scene?”

She frowned like she hadn’t thought of that already. She went back to the bed, made a big show of bending at the waist to reach for the picture. I saw every square inch of her legs and a little of something else.

She slinked back to standing position and surveyed the picture. “They look familiar. But I can’t place them.”

“You think Megan was trying to draw people she knew?”

“Maybe.”

“She always been an artist?”

Melanie put the drawing back on the bed and sat down. Her legs parted, just a little bit, not too much to be porn-worthy but just enough.

“Megan’s never drawn anything in her life.”

“Not even stick figures?”

“When she was about three.”

“Where do you think she is?”

“If I knew that, you wouldn’t be here.”

Up until this afternoon’s weirdness, I’d put Megan’s odds of being alive at fifty-fifty. Not too many people up and cut off ties with their family and friends with no explanation. But now with MPI as a possible, maybe likely, cause of everything, I’d increased her chances to seventy-five/twenty-five.

But that was cold comfort. Sure, it was more likely that Megan was alive but now I didn’t just have to worry about her and maybe the one or two people responsible for her disappearance.

Now I had to worry about the whole town.

Because MPI doesn’t just affect one person.

It affects a larger group. In the case of the laughing girls in Africa, the MPI plagued whole communities, both those afflicted with the illness and those having to deal with it. With the dancing manias of Europe, it traveled from one area to another, ultimately touching thousands of people.

More specifically, I had to worry about
this family
. They were acting batty but I didn’t have a baseline. Maybe they were always like this, hot and cold from one moment to the next.

But I doubted it.

“I never got to tell you, but I’m sorry about your mother,” I said.             

“Why are you talking about her?” Those legs opened another inch.

“I didn’t have the details until this afternoon. It must have been very difficult on the family.” I still didn’t have all the details and was hoping for more.

She said nothing. I kept my eyes well above her equator.

“They never found the guy that did it?” I said.

She shook her head no. I waited for her to volunteer more.

She didn’t.

“It happened in town, right?”             

She didn’t answer, just tilted her head to the side and looked me up and down.

“Do you think Megan’s trying to find the person that did it? Maybe that’s why she dropped off the grid?”

I didn’t think that but I was trying to get her to open up.

“She would have told me.”

“Why?”

“We’re close. We tell each other everything.”

“Everything?”

She nodded. “Until a couple weeks ago. We stopped talking. It was like she didn’t trust me.”

“You work at your father’s office?” I knew this from Strongbow.

“Intern. In the mailroom. That’s what a bachelor’s degree gets you these days.”

“He’s probably going out of his way not to show favoritism, you being his daughter and all.”

Her legs had an R-rating. Before she inched them to the X-rating level, I got out of there.