Ghouls Just Haunt to Have Fun

  Nothing happened.

  I opened my eyes again and stared at the mirror, willing the woman who’d shown up so frequently to appear.

  Nothing happened.

  “What’s happening?” MacDonald whispered.

  I sighed. “Not a damn thing.” I reached up then and touched the frame, running my fingers down the beautiful carvings. I remembered what Anton had said—that Mr. Beckworth hadn’t paid a lot of money for them—which surprised me, because the frame alone looked as if it were worth a fortune.

  I closed my eyes again and concentrated, all of my senses acutely open. I heard a sound from behind, like a door squeaking open, and MacDonald barked, “This restroom’s closed, lady; try another one.”

  My eyes snapped open and I stared into the mirror. In the reflection I could see MacDonald’s shadowy, irritated face, and over to the right of him a beautiful woman with long black hair half in the door and half out, but the light behind me in my peripheral vision was all wrong.

  The woman, however, appeared unsettled by MacDonald’s angry tone and was backing out when I called, “Wait! Don’t go!”

  MacDonald’s face registered surprise. “M.J., she can’t come in here,” he said, and I saw him turn toward the door. Then I saw his jaw drop when he realized the actual door was closed, but the one reflected in the mirror was partially open. “What the . . .” he said, his head swiveling back and forth between the door and the mirror.

  “I need to talk to you!” I said to her. “Please!”

  The woman shook her head, and in my mind I heard her say something that sounded like gibberish.

  “Damn it!” I swore under my breath. “You don’t speak English, do you?”

  The woman in the mirror scrunched up her face—she had no idea what I was saying.

  I closed my eyes and concentrated. I know you can understand my thoughts, however, right?

  I felt a mental nod.

  Please show me in pictures what happened to you.

  My mind immediately filled with the image of an enormous sailing vessel, and the smell of salt and sea wafted under my nose. The ground beneath my feet felt as if it were rocking rhythmically, and my stomach was seriously regretting my earlier meal.

  I also felt panicked. The view changed as the eyes I was looking out of turned in a one-eighty, and I saw a huge, sleek black ship right alongside the one I was on.

  There was shouting and the clanging of metal, and all around me utter chaos reigned as men with swords attacked the men from my ship. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, and I felt rough hands on my arms, and my terror increased.

  I was dragged roughly over to the black ship, and I faced a man who was formidable in height, with cruel black eyes. He seemed to look lustfully down at me, and the meaning of his words was impressed in my mind. This man knew me. This man had recognized my ship from my father’s fleet, and he’d hunted us down like prey.

  I knew then that I would never reach the shores of my destination—Spain, and my beloved fiancé, whom I’d been sailing to wed. I also knew that I would likely end up as this man’s enslaved concubine, and my skin crawled at the very thought.

  The pirate in front of me whispered my own name, “Odolina.” He stroked my cheek, and I spit in his face. He slapped me so hard that my vision clouded with stars; then he leaned in again to whisper in my ear. I could feel his hot, foul breath on my cheek and noted that his accent was thick but his Portuguese perfect, the meaning of his words filling my mind with understanding. He planned to rape me that very evening.

  I was hauled away to a dark, smelly cell belowdecks and thrown inside before the door slammed shut. Time passed, but I wasn’t sure how much; then the door to my cell opened and I was hauled out and up. The deck was covered in blood, and the bodies of my father’s crew were being tossed overboard.

  My heart ached for those men, as they had always been good to me and had fought the pirates bravely.

  I was brought to stand before the cruel pirate captain, and he lifted my chin, looked into my eyes, and licked his wicked lips. I recoiled and felt as though I wanted to vomit. He laughed and pointed behind me and shouted in a foreign tongue I did not recognize to the men holding me.

  I was dragged kicking and screaming to a door, which was opened, and I was tossed inside. It was his cabin. I turned to flee, but the door was slammed shut and promptly locked. I pounded on it, but to no avail. After a time I took stock of my surroundings. The room was littered with the treasure of my dowry, and already leaning against the walls were the special gift I’d commissioned for my betrothed. Four large mirrors with frames of solid gold reflected my terrified image back at me. But the face in the mirror wasn’t one I fully recognized. The woman standing there, pale and terrified, had long black hair, deep brown eyes, and alabaster white skin, and while I noted this in the back of my own mind, I was too distracted by the sounds from outside as the wicked man’s voice moved closer and closer.

  My eyes darted about the room for a possible escape. I ran to the porthole, but feet visible on the other side of the glass told me I’d surely be caught. Then I looked for a weapon and in desperation dug through the drawers of the bureau. There, just as the pirate captain’s footfalls sounded outside the door, I found a long silver dagger.

  Metal keys rattled outside the door, and I braced myself against the far wall, where the mirrors were propped. The door opened, and there stood my captor and soon-to-be rapist, and something in that moment moved me to do the unthinkable: I raised the dagger, intending to stab the pirate, but as if the knife had a mind of its own, it turned in my hand, and I plunged it with all of my might into my own chest.

  The pain was intense, and it caught me totally off guard. “Uh!” I moaned, reeling back to the present and fully into myself as I crashed into MacDonald.

  “Whoa!” he said as he caught me. “What’s going on?”

  “Out,” I said, clutching my chest. “I need to get out of here!”

  MacDonald half carried, half pulled me out of the ladies’ room. Gilley rushed over when he saw us emerge. “What happened to her?” he demanded.

  “I don’t know,” said MacDonald. “This woman appeared in the mirror, just like M.J. said she would, but it wasn’t Tracy; it was someone else. And then she disappeared, but M.J. had her eyes closed, like she was in some sort of trance or something, and she wouldn’t respond when I tried talking to her. Then she made this weird grunt like someone punched her, and next thing I know I’m carrying her out of there.”

  “Put her over on the couch,” Gil ordered, before running around to the other side of the bar.

  Heath helped MacDonald get me to the sofa, and I sat down and shook my head. It was still spinning a little from the intensity of that vision. Gil handed me a bottle of water from the bar, and I took a sip.

  “Take your time,” Heath said gently, and I knew he understood more than anyone else how discombobulated I was feeling.

  “I’m okay,” I said after another minute. “That was just a powerful experience.”

  “So what happened?” asked MacDonald. “What’d she tell you?”

  I told them all about what I’d experienced, and when I was finished Gilley said, “So she killed herself with the knife?”

  I nodded. “She did. But, Gil, I swear that wasn’t her intention. It just sort of happened at the last minute—and I don’t know if she saw the pirate in the doorway and decided it was futile to try to fight, or if the knife had a mind of its own.”

  “Mind of its own?” repeated Heath. “You don’t mean . . .”

  I nodded. “I do,” I said. “The dagger she used was the same one that we’ve been searching for. It’s the portal key, and the knife that killed Tracy.”

  “Whoa.” Gil gasped, then asked, “By any chance did you get a time period from her?”

  “I’d say it was the early sixteenth century,” I said.

  MacDonald looked curiously at me. “How could you possibly know that?”

&nb
sp; “It’s one of the things that gets imprinted on you when you do this work. Time translates with the imagery. I can’t pin it down to a specific year, but when I tell you this was the early fifteen hundreds, that just feels right.”

  “This stuff is so cool,” said MacDonald, the corners of his mouth lifting appreciatively.

  “So the mirrors and the knife go together,” said Heath. “Isn’t it freaky how they would both show up here together five hundred years later too?”

  “Too much of a coincidence, if you ask me,” I said. “And, Gil, there’s something else about the mirrors.”

  “What?”

  “They’re gold.”

  Gilley nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I remember the frame is painted gold.”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “They’re not just painted gold; underneath the antique-looking paint, they’re real gold.”

  “I don’t get it,” MacDonald said. “If that frame in there were real gold, do you know how much that’d be worth?”

  “No,” I said. “But whatever figure that is, multiply it times four.” When MacDonald looked at me blankly I told him how Mr. Beckworth had recently purchased four of those mirrors at auction, and when told that they might be haunted, he had suggested that he would have them removed and disposed of.

  “So where are the other mirrors?” the detective asked.

  “It looks like Beckworth has already started taking them down,” I said. “But what I want to know is, does he have any clue about how much they’re really worth, and does he know that there’s a connection between the mirrors and the knife?”

  At that moment the lights came on, and we all squinted in the now brightly lit room. Across the lobby we heard the assistant manager shout, “Finally!”

  “Well, one thing’s for sure,” said Heath ominously. “Whoever killed Tracy knows about the connection between the knife and the mirrors. It’s too much of a coincidence that Odolina and Tracy were killed by the same knife while in full view of the mirrors.”

  “M.J.,” said Gil, “did you get anything else on this sinister character Odolina was captured by?”

  Because the young Portuguese girl had impressed her energy on me, she had also shared a bit of her memories. “He wasn’t Portuguese,” I said. “I know he spoke the language, but I swear he was a Turk.”

  “Did you get a name?” Gil pressed.

  I closed my eyes and concentrated. “Or . . . ruck,” I said, trying to sound out the name I’d heard in the background on the ship when his men had addressed him. “But I think his first name was Bubba.”

  Gilley and the others laughed. “Did he shoot the jukebox?” kidded MacDonald.

  I smiled. “I know, I know. But I swear that’s what it sounded like when his men were addressing him by name.”

  “I’m on it,” said Gil as he hurried off to try to dig up anything he could find on this pirate.

  “What do we do until then?” asked Heath.

  As if in answer, MacDonald’s cell rang, and he looked at the display. “London calling,” he muttered, before putting the phone to his ear and walking off to talk privately.

  “Should we try to do some more ghost hunting?” Gopher suggested.

  I shook my head and sighed. “I say we stay put for now, because I’m not up for any more ghostbusting tonight.”

  We sat in weary silence for a while, listening to the rain. At some point Gopher got up and went behind the bar to see if he could get the espresso machine to work, and just as our nostrils filled with the delicious scent of coffee, MacDonald came back looking as though he’d hit the jackpot.

  Making a point of staring at me, he said, “You are not going to believe what I just found out.”

  “Do tell,” I said, sitting up from my slouched position.

  “That was Sophie’s supervisor at Lloyd’s. About two months ago Sophie reported to him that she had received a letter from Faline Schufthauser, the art thief. In the letter Faline said she wanted to strike a deal. Turns out she’d been working with a partner, a guy she was involved with who would arrange to fence the items they stole once the heat settled down.

  “But Faline was becoming increasingly afraid of her boyfriend. I guess the guy had a real dark side. She wanted to meet Sophie and turn over some stolen artifacts in exchange for a good word with the authorities. A few items on the list that needed to be returned were a set of four mirrors, and a knife that once belonged to a member of the Ottoman Empire, which were stolen out of the private collection of a wealthy Turk!”

  “Wow,” I said with a grin. “I’m good!”

  MacDonald laughed. “Yes,” he agreed, “you really are. But, as I was saying, on the day Sophie and Faline were supposed to meet, Faline was murdered.”

  “Whoa,” I said. Thinking about the freaky timing, I then asked, “If Faline was killed in Germany, what was Sophie doing here in San Francisco?”

  MacDonald ran a hand through his hair. “That’s what was so upsetting to her supervisor. He says that when he found out that Faline had been killed he took Sophie off the case, deciding it was too dangerous for her to continue with the investigation, and to pay the claim for the stolen property instead and let the authorities handle it. Sophie was understandably upset by the ordeal and asked for some time off to visit her sister in Sussex, which was where everyone thought she’d gone.”

  “But she continued to work the case and came here on the trail of the mirrors and the knife,” I surmised. “I mean, it can’t be a coincidence that she and the stolen artifacts were all in the same place at once.” I was going to tell MacDonald that he needed to talk with Beckworth—and soon—when I heard a shout from across the lobby.

  We all turned to see Gilley hurrying toward us. “Who’s your daddy?” he called as he approached, a smile as big as Texas plastered onto his face and some paper in his hand.

  “You found something?” I said, very surprised that he’d come up with anything in such a short period of time.

  “Wikipedia,” he said, taking a seat on a chair opposite me. “It never fails.”

  “So tell us what you’ve got!” I was anxious to put more of the puzzle together.

  “Oruç Reis was an Ottoman pirate and lived from 1474 to 1518. He was better known as Baba Oruç, or Father Oruç, which is why M.J. thinks he’s out of a country song.”

  I laughed and rolled my eyes.

  “Still, that’s a pretty amazing hit,” offered MacDonald, who I swear was quickly becoming my biggest fan.

  “Anyhoo,” said Gil, “this Oruç character was a nasty beast of a man. He pretty much terrorized the coast of Portugal for his entire adult life, but there is one thing that I noted of particular interest here, and that is that Oruç had a taste for the occult.”

  “He did?” Heath asked.

  “Yes,” said Gilley, his eyes flashing with enthusiasm. “It seems that Oruç had spent time along the Barbary Coast and in the company of a particularly powerful witch. Baba became well practiced in dark magic, and it was said that he carried a special dagger to help him conjure up evil spirits to use in battle against his enemies. This dagger was also supposed to give him immortality, and it had a taste for virgins.”

  “So the dagger kept its side of the deal,” I said. “The spirit of Oruç lives within the dagger.”

  MacDonald said, “And it did kill Odolina—I’m assuming she was a virgin?”

  “I’m sure of it,” I said, remembering the girl’s terror about being ravaged by the Turk, and the fact that she was on her way to her betrothed. No way would a young girl of noble birth have been anything less than virginal in those days.

  “Tracy clearly wasn’t a virgin,” Heath pointed out. “I wonder why she was killed with the knife.”

  “Yes, she was,” said Gopher, and we all turned to him in surprise. He blushed and shrugged his shoulders. “That’s why I moved on from hanging out with her. I could never get past third base.”

  I scowled hard at him. “You’re disgusting,?
?? I said.

  “I know, I know,” he replied. “I’m a real shit. And I’ve turned over a new leaf since she died, I swear.” We all looked at him skeptically. “Seriously!” he said, holding up his right palm. “I’ve sworn off women.”

  “Me too,” said Gilley, bouncing his eyebrows.

  I gave him a level look and got us back on track. “Gil, whatever happened to this Oruç character . . . I mean, he’s obviously grounded and very attached to this dagger, so I’m assuming that despite his belief in its protection, he still died violently?”

  Gilley’s eyes lit up. “Oh, man!” he said. “I forgot to tell you the best part! In one hell of an ironic twist it turns out that our guy Baba was murdered in his sleep by one of his concubines. He was stabbed in the heart with his own dagger by a woman believed to have the ability to communicate with the spirits of the dead virgins murdered with the knife!”

  “No freaking way!” I gasped.

  “Way,” he said. “Which is why Baba might have such a strong vendetta against the likes of you.”

  “So what about Sophie?” Heath asked. “What does she have to do with all of this?”

  I turned to MacDonald. “I think we need to have a lengthy conversation with Mr. Beckworth.”

  “We do?”

  “Yes,” I insisted.

  “Why?”

  “Follow my logic here,” I said, standing up to pace the floor again. “Sophie learns that Faline has been murdered and is formally taken off the case. But she doesn’t want to give up; she’s too close to catching up with the stolen artifacts. And say that she discovers that the mirrors and the knife have been fenced; someone with a lot of money has purchased them and taken them out of the country. She follows that trail and it leads her here, to this hotel where the mirrors are displayed in plain view. She also discovers that Beckworth—the owner of this establishment—has purchased them. She has the evidence and prepares to confront him. They meet in her room—which is why there was no sign of forced entry—and argue. He realizes she’s got the goods on him and a struggle takes place. He strangles her, and ransacks her room trying to find the evidence she’s got against him.