The Traveler: Book 5, The Eddie McCloskey Paranormal Mystery Series (The Unearthed) (17 page)

“Yes?”

“Be careful over there. Remember we’re investigating whether a ghost killed Stahl. Don’t be a hero. If you see anything, get a picture if you can and get the hell out of there. Okay?”

“Ghosts are almost always misunderstood and hardly ever dangerous. People don’t get that. I’m not afraid.”

“I know,” Eddie said. “But you’re not to risk your life.”

“Should we wrap?” Christie said.

Eddie didn’t want to, but he knew it was time to move on. Tomorrow was another day. They’d been in Fellov’s house for two hours and had exactly zero hits. He’d been methodical, going from room-to-room, asking yes or no questions. But the K2 meter had been silent. For old time’s sake, he’d busted out his old electromagnetic frequency (EMF) meter as well to build in some redundancy. But the EMF was quiet too.

A half hour ago, he’d gone out to the car to find the thermal imager. He hadn’t used it since his brother had died. Eddie didn’t think much of cold spots or warm spots and besides, you could feel them yourself without the need for an imager if you just paid attention.

But he was desperate. The house’s temperature was uniform, a little cooler downstairs than upstairs but nothing to write home about.

Now they were back in the living room.

Eddie addressed the room. “Were you murdered, Ms. Fellov?”

No response. The K2 had lit up once all night, a weak hit that Eddie hadn’t been able to reproduce.

“Let’s go.”

They walked out and Christie locked the front door. She stopped to talk to the patrolman. Eddie noticed it was a different guy. There must have been a shift change while they were inside.

Eddie was exhausted. He’d managed only a few hours last night. He was looking forward to laying down and shutting off his brain. Though today had been a struggle, he remained optimistic. Tomorrow they could attack this thing with fresh eyes.

As they were walking back to Christie’s car, the detective’s phone rang.

“Hey, Harney.”

She listened and suddenly stopped walking and looked at Eddie. Her mouth was open and her eyes were wide.

“We’ll be right there.” She hung up. “It happened again.”

***

Christie hit the siren and blew through every red light. She sped with almost reckless abandon and Eddie held on for dear life.

“No jokes about Asian drivers,” she said.

Another kind-of-joke. She was warming to him.

“I wouldn’t dare make a joke about Asian drivers,” Eddie said. “Not while you’re behind the wheel.”

Christie got them to the next house in one piece. It was a single home on the outskirts of town surrounded by a lot of farm land. It had probably been there for a hundred years.

An ambulance, four squad cars, and the crime tech van choked the driveway. Christie parked on the street, leaving one set of wheels on the property. Another cruiser arrived just after them and parked in the street, establishing the beginnings of a perimeter.

They jumped out of Christie’s car, as two EMTs maneuvered a stretcher off the house’s front porch and wheeled it toward the ambulance. A man with thinning grey hair was on the stretcher under a blanket. He had an oxygen mask up to his face.

“Crime scenes are always a madhouse,” Christie said. “You’ll have to wait outside.”

“You got it.”

The EMTs got the man into the ambulance and drove off. They weren’t in much of a hurry. Eddie didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing for the patient. He was either dead already or perhaps stable. He hoped the latter, for the guy’s sake and his own. It would be great if the man could share what had happened to give them some new evidence to consider. Following their brainstorming session at the police station, Eddie was beginning to fear there was no pattern to this madness, that the ghost was just randomly haunting people and that it could travel wherever it wanted without the need for a human. Maybe the ghost didn’t even mean to kill, maybe it did. But right now they had no firm idea.

If his nearly twenty years of ghost hunting had taught him anything, it was this: almost anything was possible. All you could do was follow general guidelines and hope to get at the truth. But more and more, Eddie was learning that the guidelines weren’t always helpful and sometimes got in the way. If he ever had the time and disciplined himself enough, he’d write a book about it.

Eddie parked himself on the front lawn and stayed well away. Several people were in and out, and he spotted Christie poke her head out a few times. The night grew colder and he began to shiver. He decided to go back to Christie’s car. He wanted to get off his feet, warm up, and while he was at it, he might as well catch some zees. He wasn’t helping anybody out here so it’d be better if he rested up for when he
could
be helpful.

“Eddie!” Christie waved at him from the front door.

He spotted Harney just behind her. The man was looking over her shoulder, which Eddie thought was fitting.

Eddie met her on the porch. Harney didn’t bother to join them.

“So what happened?” Eddie asked.

“When EMT arrived, O’Donnell was non-responsive. Cardiac arrest, just like Stahl and Fellov. They declared him DOA at the hospital.”

“Ghost?”

She nodded. “He called 9-1-1 to report the sighting. He was worked up on the call. He’d heard the news report about our investigating alleged paranormal activity in connection with Stahl’s and Fellov’s death. His wife told us about his bad heart.”

“His wife?”

“She’s here. She was asleep upstairs when she heard him yell out.”

“Is she okay?”

“Alive, yes. And she saw the ghost.”

“Can I talk to her?”

“Yes. We’ve gotten her to calm down, but soon the shock will wear off. It’s going to hit her.”

***

“Mrs. O’Donnell, I’m Eddie McCloskey. I’m here to help the police and would like to ask you some questions.”

She was sixty-five and petite, like each year she’d gotten a little smaller and if she lived long enough she’d shrink away to nothing. She’d wrapped herself in a blanket, but she was visibly shaking. The woman looked like she would break apart if the shaking worsened.

Eddie sat on a love seat next to her.

“Margaret,” Christie said. “Eddie is going to ask you some questions now, okay?”

The detective gently touched the woman’s shoulder. She started then realized he was sitting next to her.

“I’m sorry.” She had thick glasses hanging from a chain around her neck. She put them back on. “I’m sorry, what did you say your name was?”

“No,
I’m
sorry, Mrs. O’Donnell. My name is Eddie.”

“What would you like to know?”

She was on the verge of breaking down. He could see it in her eyes. She was trying to be strong because there were all these people in the house she didn’t know. Keeping up appearances for the strangers.

Eddie motioned to Christie, and the detective got the message. She cleared the living room. Eddie waited to begin until everybody else was gone and only Christie remained.

“Margaret,” he said. “If you want to cry you go right ahead.”

“Oh dear…” She broke down. Eddie let her. The ghost was gone and he thought unlikely to come back based on its pattern, for lack of a better term.

Except for Engel. It had been to Engel’s house several times.

Another discrepancy to add to the list. Eddie pushed it aside and focused on Margaret. She was beginning to get herself under control again. He didn’t want to miss this next window to ask her some questions.

He said, “Do you have somewhere you can go?”

She nodded. “I can’t drive at night. My son is coming.”

“Good, that’s good.” Eddie inched forward on the chair. “Now I’m real sorry, Margaret, but I have to ask you some questions.”

“What can you do?”

“I’m sorry?”

She was suddenly fierce. “About the ghost? What can you even do?”

“We will figure that out, believe me.” He tried to project a confidence he didn’t feel.

The anger eked out of her face and her eyes filled up again.

Eddie said, “Tell me what happened.”

“I was upstairs in bed. My husband was down here.”

“He couldn’t sleep?”

“He’d just gotten home. He was rounding at the hospital.”

“Your husband worked at Rariville Medical Center?”

“Yes, he practiced internal medicine.”

Eddie shot Christie a quick look. She’d made the connection too. Dr. O’Donnell had worked at the same place as Stahl. It was their first real connection between victims. And…now the name O’Donnell was sticking out in his mind for some other reason. Like he’d just read it somewhere. Hadn’t Stahl worked for a doctor named O’Donnell?

Mrs. O’Donnell was waiting for him to ask his next question.

He said, “I’m so sorry, Margaret. Please keep going.”

She grabbed another tissue out of the box on the coffee table in front of her and wiped under her eyes.

“I thought I was just hearing things. I’d never heard him scream before. I didn’t even know it was him. Can you believe that? We’d been married for forty years and I didn’t know what his scream sounded like.”

“You got up?”

“Yes. I have two bad hips, so it takes me ages to get up and down the stairs. But I went as fast as I could. He shouted for me to stay upstairs because there was a ghost in the house. I heard the words but they didn’t even register.”

“So you came downstairs.”

“Yes. I’d never heard him like that before. He was utterly terrified.”

“What happened when you got downstairs?”

“He was—oh God—” She almost broke down again, but then pointed toward the kitchen. “He was on the ground by the dinner table, grabbing at his chest. He had a bad heart. You know how doctors make the worst patients?”

Eddie nodded.

She put her tiny hand over her own heart, mimicking him. “I went over to him but by then he was unconscious. When I got close, I felt this
energy
.”

“What do you mean?”

“Almost like electricity. My skin tingled. It drew my attention. I looked up, and it was in the foyer.”

“What did it look like?”

“She was short and had long hair. She was watching me with this look of pure hatred. I’ve never seen anything like it. I could feel her anger, it was like a darkness in the house.”

“What did she do?”

“She floated toward me and held her arms out, like she was going to strangle me.”

“What did you do?”

“I laid down on top of my husband. I’d heard him call 9-1-1 already so I knew the paramedics were on their way. I…I knew he was dead and in that moment I didn’t care what happened to me. If the ghost wanted to kill me, I was going to let it.”

“You stayed where you were?”

She nodded. “All these terrible ideas came to mind, the worst things.”

“Like what?”

“That my grandchildren would die young or that I was going to be tortured…I don’t know…”

Eddie frowned. The cliché wasn’t true from what he’d read: people’s lives didn’t flash before their eyes when they were in a very dangerous situation and likely to die. But at the same time, Margaret was describing things she feared would happen. It had made him think of something else.

“What else did you see?”

“The police coming to take my husband away…and then him going to jail…”

“What made you think of these things?”

He sensed Christie edging her way closer to him. She probably didn’t know why he was asking these questions, but no doubt her cop-sense had picked up on the importance of the subject matter.

Margaret shook his head. “I was just scared, and that must have made me think of all the things I’ve ever feared.”

Bingo
. That confirmed it for him, though it wasn’t exactly welcome news.

He said, “You’ve thought of these things before?”

She nodded. “Oh, yes. My husband was in trouble some years ago…why does this matter?”

Before Eddie could smooth out an answer, her face turned stony.

“My husband was just murdered. Why do we have to talk about these things right now?”

He was going to lose her. Eddie decided to switch gears. He could come back to these other things later.

“I know this is hard, but trust me I’m asking you everything for a reason.”

She gave him a nasty schoolteacher stare for a moment, then her face softened.

Eddie saw his opening and went down a different path. “Did you recognize the ghost?”

Margaret thought about it. “She seemed familiar.”

“How?”

“I don’t know…my memory isn’t what it used to be.”

“Was she somebody famous?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“So perhaps someone you knew from around here?”

“I didn’t know her. It was like I’d seen her before a few times…but never met her.”

“What did she look like?”

“I already told you, she was short and had long hair.”

“Was she young or old?”

“I’d say she was in her forties.”