What a Ghoul Wants

  “Pull!” Heath shouted. “Pull!”

  While keeping my weight on the backs of Michel’s legs to hold him steady, I wriggled around and got my hands on Gopher’s jeans, then inched up until I had hold of his belt. I pulled as hard as I could and heard the groans of Heath, Michel, and John as they heaved up too, and suddenly, Gopher’s torso flew up out of the water as if the Widow had simply let go.

  We all fell back in a tangle of bodies and I had the unfortunate position of being close to the bottom, so I was mashed into the planks right before a fury of pounding began right under my own chest. Over my shoulder I could just make out Gopher’s frightened face, gasping for air. “Get up!” we heard Meg and Kim cry. “Get off the bridge!”

  I felt a heavy weight move off me, but I was still trapped in the tangle of limbs, and the pounding intensified, striking my sternum so hard I worried that one bad blow might stop my heart. I struggled to get up, but both of my arms were pinned, and then in a blink I was free and being lifted to my feet. Heath had hold of me and he was panting hard as he shoved me toward the center of the drawbridge. “Run!” he commanded. “Run for your life!”

  Chapter 13

  Kim and Meg helped me to the door of the castle. I took about five steps through it before I sank to the hard stone floor, where I lay down and rolled onto my back, shivering with exertion, cold, and fear. “Get her a blanket or something!” Meg yelled to Kim. Kim’s footsteps could be heard dashing up the steps.

  “Oh, my, God!” Gilley cried, and I realized he’d just come out of the dining room. “M. J.!”

  Gil rushed to me and squatted down and as he gazed at me, I saw him hiss in a breath. “What the hell happened to you?”

  I stared up at him. Was he kidding?

  “Didn’t you see the feed?” Meg asked, trying to get me to sit up against her. “We recorded the whole thing!”

  “My entire monitoring system shut down about five minutes ago,” Gilley said. “I was gonna wait for these guys to get back and check the cameras, but they were taking so long that I thought I’d try to see what was happening.” Gil then bent a little closer to me and put a hand on my collarbone. “You’re black and blue, honey,” he said.

  I didn’t really have time to take that in because in the next instant Michel burst in through the door, followed by Heath and John, who had a gasping Gopher slung between them.

  Gilley’s jaw dropped. “Somebody tell me what the hell happened!”

  Everyone ignored him in favor of tending to the wounded, which was pretty much everybody in attendance save Meg and Gil.

  Kim came back downstairs with an armload of blankets and quilts. She distributed these to the whole crew and we took them gladly. I was so miserably cold that I couldn’t really speak until Gil came to my rescue with a hot cup of tea. “Here,” he said gently. “I put some sugar in it, which I know you hate, but you need the calories right now, so don’t fight it. Drink it down, okay?”

  I nodded and sipped the brew. I wasn’t usually a fan of sugar in either my tea or my coffee, but this hit the spot. Once he’d made sure Gopher was okay, Heath came over to sit next to me. I offered him a sip of the tea and he took it gratefully. And then he must have had a good hard look at me, because his eyes squinched up and he fiddled with the opening of my hoodie. “What the hell. . . ?” he asked.

  “I was lying flat on the planks when the pounding started,” I explained.

  Heath laid his cool hand on my tender skin. “Jesus, Em!”

  “Is it bruised bad?”

  “It’s not good,” he replied. He then sighed and wrapped his arm around my shoulders to draw me in for a kiss on the forehead. “I’m sorry you were on the bottom of the tackle, babe.”

  “Me too. How’s Gopher?” I asked, nodding toward our producer, who was being wrapped in blankets, plied with tea, and treated like a wounded soldier back from the war. Meg and Kim were really sucking up to the boss after nearly getting fired for not having gone across the drawbridge.

  “He’ll be okay,” Heath said. His face clouded with worry, though, which troubled me.

  “You sure he’ll be okay?”

  “Hmm?” Heath said. He seemed a little distracted and then he must have realized what I’d just asked him, because he said, “Yeah. He’ll be fine. It’s us that I’m worried about. A million bucks is great when you live long enough to enjoy it, but I’m not sure even that’s worth all this.”

  “Maybe Gopher will call a halt to filming now that he’s had his own up-close and personal encounter with the Widow.”

  “Even if he hasn’t, we can still walk off the job, you know.”

  “Not without getting our butts sued right into the poorhouse.” Still, something was really troubling me about what’d happened tonight and I was having a hard time letting it go. “You know what’s weird?”

  Heath smirked. “Besides everything here at Kidwellah?”

  I gave him half a smile and a nudge with my shoulder. “I’m serious.”

  “Okay, so tell me.”

  “Clarence.”

  “The ghost out on the moors?”

  “Yes.”

  Heath scratched his chin. “He’s not the duke, is he?” he said, more statement than question.

  “No. He’s someone else.”

  “Another of the Widow’s victims?”

  I took another sip of tea before answering. “See, that’s what’s weird, Heath. He didn’t seem to have died at the Widow’s hands, and yet he makes a point to show me that he’s connected to the moat and the castle. And not just any part of the castle—he wanted to show me that he’s connected to the south wing.”

  “Okay, that is pretty weird, but I get the feeling you think it’s even more significant than that.”

  “I do,” I admitted. “When I first began communicating with him, I had the strangest feeling that we’d met before.”

  “You’ve met Clarence before?”

  “Well, maybe not met him formally, but he really felt familiar. It’s weird, but I swear I know him from somewhere. I also had the strangest sensation that he’d been waiting for me to come to him. And the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that the night I went looking for Gopher and the others, it was Clarence I saw out on the moors, not the duke.”

  Heath shrugged. “Well, sure, it could have been him, Em. But why is that sticking with you?”

  I frowned. “It’s less about seeing Clarence out on the moors and more about figuring out why he’s haunting that area. Obviously he died there or somewhere close by, and yet he’s not chained to the Widow. So how did he die, when did he die, and why did I feel so strongly that he had some message that he was trying to impart to me?”

  “Maybe he’s not connected to the Widow at all.”

  I shook my head. “No, there’s a connection. I can feel it. I’m just not sure what it is, and that’s the mystery I think we need to figure out.” The moment I said it out loud, I knew it to be true.

  Heath ducked his chin and rubbed the back of his head. I knew he was thinking hard about what I’d said, and wishing that I’d simply gone along with his idea to ditch this bust and head for home. “You want to stay, don’t you?”

  “I do. But only because I think we’re close to figuring all of this out, sweetie. And we have to figure out a way to help Merrick, Lefebvre, and the inspector’s brother. We can’t damn them to an eternity with the likes of the Widow.”

  Heath grinned sideways at me. “Life with you would be so much easier if you weren’t such a good person, you know.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, yeah, come on, let’s get a shower in and then let’s play back our footage.”

  Heath bounced his eyebrows. “Are we conserving water by doubling up in the shower?”
r />   “I’d love nothing more than to see you sudsy and naked, but I don’t know that I have the energy for any more of that tonight.”

  “How about if we just soap each other up, no hanky-panky.”

  I cocked a skeptical eyebrow. “You promise?”

  He held up three fingers. “Scout’s honor.”

  * * *

  I’m not quite sure which scout troop Heath belonged to, but it certainly wasn’t the “I will totally honor my previous promise of no hanky-panky in the shower” troop. Of course, I should’ve known better. I see that man naked and I lose any shred of willpower.

  Needless to say we were a little late getting back downstairs, and by that time it was almost four a.m. Surprisingly, we weren’t the only ones missing. John, Meg, Kim, and Gopher were nowhere in sight, but Gilley and Michel were in the war room huddled very close to the monitors. And to each other. “Hey, guys,” I said, and both of them jumped. Well, Gilley jumped and squealed, but what would you expect from him anyway?

  “You scared me half to death!” he cried.

  “And yet, you’re still able to draw breath.” I pulled up a chair behind him and Michel. Heath carried another over for himself and sat down next to me. “So, what’re we looking at?”

  Gil glared at me, but it didn’t last. Whatever he’d discovered on the footage was too exciting to keep under wraps. “Take a look at this!” he said, swiveling back around to tap at his computer screen.

  “All I see is snow,” I said.

  “Just wait a second!” Gil replied impatiently.

  I peered at the screen, but the snow was starting to make me a little dizzy. I was just about to complain again to Gil when something really weird happened—from the right side of the screen something like a dark shadow appeared, and if I had to describe it, I would say it looked like a man walking through the fuzz until he got to the center of the screen; then he stopped and seemed to turn toward the viewer. It was as remarkable as it was incredibly creepy.

  “Whose camera caught this?” Heath asked.

  Gilley paused the image and turned to us, excitement in his eyes. “That’s just the thing—none of the cameras were feeding anything at this moment. It was captured after we all came inside and had gathered in the main hall. At that time, no one’s camera was even on.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  Gilley pointed to every camera, including mine and Heath’s, laid out on the table next to us. “I’ve checked them all,” Gil said. “The last camera to film anything was Meg’s. She captured the footage of Gopher being pulled over the side and you guys wrestling to keep him from drowning, but she turned it off the minute you five were safe.”

  “That’s crazy,” I whispered, stunned by the image. And the even weirder thing was, I thought I knew who the image was.

  “You know,” Heath said, squinting hard at the screen, “that sort of looks like the shape Clarence took through my lens when you were talking to him, M. J.”

  I nodded. “I was thinking that it was Clarence too.”

  Michel said, “Whoever this Clarence guy is, he seriously wants to get our attention.”

  I sat back in my chair and thought about my encounter with the unusually lucid ghost. Most grounded spirits I meet tend to be somewhat confused about their world. Many of them don’t accept or even know that they’re dead, and the plane that exists between our physical world and their grounded reality seems to be an awfully confusing place.

  But Clarence had shown none of the confusion or distress or irritation that almost all the ghosts I’d met over the years had shared. . . and that in itself was quite remarkable. If I had to guess as to why, I would have to say that Clarence had not died suddenly. He’d known he was dying, accepted it, and after his body ceased to function, he’d denied himself the light that could have swept him home. But why he’d decided to stick around was a mystery. “I had the strongest feeling that Clarence had been waiting for me,” I said, almost more to myself than to the others.

  “What for?” Gil asked.

  I shrugged and added a sigh. “I really wish I knew, Gil. I think it was to tell me something important, but he’s limited in his ability to communicate. So he showed me instead.”

  “What did he show you?” Gil asked next.

  “Not much. Just him getting into a rowboat and rowing over to the side of the castle.” Something kept bugging me about the image I’d seen of Clarence rowing across the moat—it was as if I’d seen that exact same thing before and there was something significant about that sense of déjà vu, but what it could be I had no idea. “Did you analyze the recordings from our mics for any EVPs?” I asked.

  Gil nodded. “We’ve listened to them a couple of times, and there’s one part where I think I hear him, but it’s pretty garbled. I’ll have to work on it to try and enhance it.”

  I yawned and leaned back in my chair. “Sounds good.” Then I turned to Heath and said, “I’m bushed. You ready for bed?”

  “I am, but one thing you haven’t told me yet, did you get a visit from Gramps?”

  I sat up straight again. “Oh, yeah! Sorry, I forgot to tell you.” I then shared with them all that Sam had told me.

  “A prison break, huh?” Gil said thoughtfully, referring to Sam’s idea on freeing the Widow’s imprisoned souls.

  “We’ll need to make sure the Widow is weakened when we call out to the prisoners,” I said. “And that the demon is too.”

  “How’re you gonna manage that?” Michel asked.

  Heath shook his head. “I have no idea.”

  “The other night when the Widow had me cornered in the south wing, she used up a ton of energy trying to tackle me through the magnets. If we goad her long enough, Heath, she’ll weaken. And when she’s weak, the demon is also weakened and less likely to attack us.”

  “She could also kill us in the process,” he replied.

  “I think that you and me together could do it,” I insisted.

  Heath rubbed his face and blinked tiredly at me. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s get some shut-eye and work on this idea of yours after we’ve had some sleep.”

  I got up and took his hand before turning to Gil and Michel. “You guys should go to bed too. It’s been a long night.”

  Gil blushed, and to my surprise, so did Michel. “I’m not that tired,” Gil said, and very subtly he looked at Michel.

  “Me either,” Michel said, which made Gilley smile wide. “We should stay up a little longer and listen to that tape a few more times.”

  Gilley turned big gooey eyes to Michel. “We should.”

  I pulled on Heath’s hand. “Come on, honey, let’s leave them to their. . . uh. . . work.”

  Heath and I slept in until noon, and when I woke up, I had the rough outline of a plan forming in my head. We headed downstairs only to find Gilley and Michel still up and hovering over a table full of wires and electronic parts. “M. J.!” Gil said excitedly when he saw us. “Ohmigod! You totally have to come here and check this out!”

  Now, Gil does well on very little sleep. He’s one of those rare birds that can get by on four hours or less with very little effect, but as I looked at Michel, it was clear he was a lot more like the rest of us, and needed to nap. . . soon. “You look beat,” I said to him as Gilley pulled me over to the monitors.

  “I’m okay,” he said, barely stifling a yawn.

  I knew then that Michel had a thing for Gil. Only someone so romantically intrigued would stay up so long just to be near the object of his affection. And, by Gilley’s decidedly chipper mood, I could see the feeling was definitely mutual. “Have a seat,” Gil said.

  I sat in front of the largest monitor and Gil tapped at his keyboard. He then turned the volume up and we listened to the sound of snow again, but it wa
s somewhat muted; then a garbled voice said, “Tell the twins I love them.”

  I sat back and stared in stunned disbelief at Gilley. “Did he just say what I thought he said?”

  “Yeah, it’s weird, right? I mean, that’s the only EVP that came through, and I even ran it through the voice spectrum. It’s definitely Clarence’s voice.”

  I jumped to my feet. “Gil, I know you’ve been up since last night, but I need some additional research from you and it’s super important. Can you give me another couple of hours?”

  Gil nodded, for once not fighting me over the request.

  “I need you to find out if anyone named Clarence Lumley was ever connected to this castle.”

  Gil squinted at me. “Clarence Lumley? You mean, like, someone related to Inspector Lumley?”

  “Possibly. Just do some digging and see what you come up with, okay?”

  “Okay, but I’ll need to go into the city and search through the library.”

  “If that’s what it takes, please go do it. I need whatever information you can find, fast.”

  Michel stood and stretched. “Come on, Gilley, we’ll go together.”

  I wanted to hug the man! Instead, I turned to Heath and said, “We have a call to make.”

  An hour later Heath and I were helping Inspector Lumley push his rowboat into the moat. All three of us wore magnetic vests, and I’d taken the liberty of adding Meg’s and Kim’s vests to the bottom of the boat just to ensure we didn’t get tipped over from below.

  The inspector had fought me on the need to wear the garment, but I’d insisted that I had something very important to show him, and I wasn’t taking him along without it.

  Heath pushed us off from the shore and he took up the oars while I studied the water for any signs of the Widow.

  I was very nervous about embarking on this hunch, but my gut told me that I absolutely had to investigate my suspicions, and as Gilley wasn’t back yet from town, I had no choice but to act while the sun was high and the Widow would be at her weakest.

  Heath rowed steadily across the length of the moat, keeping to the middle, and no one spoke while we glided over the smooth waters. The inspector tapped his finger on the side of the boat, a sign that he was a bit impatient about this venture, and I could only hope that my hunch panned out. Otherwise, he’d be pretty ticked off.