“I thought we weren’t getting those?”
“Yeah, Kogan had a chance to rethink that, and as long as you’re gonna be on the payroll, we sort of have to give you a badge.”
“I’m in!” Gil practically shouted.
Uh-oh.
“Gil,” I said, ready to talk some sense into him. “Do you really think that’s a good idea?”
“Yes!” he said confidently. “I mean, who else is gonna do all your research for you, M.J.? You’ll need background checks, verification of alibis, etc., etc.”
I eyed him keenly. I was onto him. Gilley could do all of that from the safety of his mother’s house. There was no need to deputize him. “It’s up to Deputy Breslow,” I said with no small measure of confidence. No way was Beau gonna authorize yet another addition to the payroll. Not when he had deputies and staff that could also do everything Gilley had just mentioned.
“That’d be great, Gilley,” Beau said with enthusiasm. “Thanks for volunteering.”
I wanted to smack Breslow. Didn’t he know what a pain in the butt Gilley could be? Oh, wait. How could he know? Well, judging by the way they were both beaming at each other, he’d find out pretty quick.
“You’re welcome, but just to be clear, I get the same salary and a badge, right?”
“Uh, sure. Yeah. No problem,” Breslow said.
“Good. And of course I’ll need an hour lunch and maybe time off to get a coffee here and there. Oh, and I can’t possibly start work until ten a.m. I mean, I’m a wreck if I don’t get my beauty sleep. Plus I’ll need weekends and nights off.”
I smiled sweetly at Beau. “Welcome to my world, Deputy.”
His brow furrowed, but he didn’t comment further on Gilley’s demands. “So, you ready to go?” he asked me, probably just to change the subject.
I made a point of looking down at myself. “I still haven’t showered or changed yet, Deputy.”
“Uh, right,” Breslow said, a touch of color heating his cheeks. “Sorry. Take your time. Just not too much time. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”
Chapter 9
I left Gilley and Breslow to work out the details of Gil’s temporary employment with the sheriff’s department of Valdosta, and managed to take a quick shower (sans boyfriend), change, and be back on the front porch within twenty minutes.
Mrs. G. was in the front yard tending to her garden and looking worried. I wanted to reassure her that there was nothing to worry about, but like I said before, that woman could sniff out a lie like no one else I knew.
We drove behind Deputy Breslow to the station, where we all filled out some paperwork and were sworn in as deputies. That part was pretty cool, actually, and then Beau fished around in one of the desk drawers and came up with three badges for us. “Do we get guns?” Gilley asked.
Beau looked like he was beginning to regret his decision to put Gil on the payroll. I knew just how he felt. “No!” the deputy said. “No guns, Gilley.”
Gil pouted, but then he flashed his badge at me and said, “Deputy Gillespie, ma’am. Do you know how fast you were going?” Before I could say anything, he lit up and turned back to Breslow. “Ooooo, can we write tickets?”
I noticed a nice sheen forming on the deputy’s forehead. Served him right. He should’ve checked with me before agreeing to give Gilley a badge. Still, I felt a little sorry for him. “Gil,” I said, pulling him to the side and retrieving my cell from the pocket of my fishing vest. I’d managed to squirrel the vest away from Mrs. G. before she had a chance to bedazzle the back. “I have some research I need you to look into.”
“Oh?”
I opened up the photo tab on my cell and flipped through the photos I’d taken of the crime scene the day before to the Ouija board. “I need to know where this came from.”
Gil lifted the cell out of my hand and studied it. “That’s the coolest-looking Ouija board I’ve ever seen.”
“I thought so too until the planchette started moving on its own.”
“The Sandman?”
“Yeah. I was thinking about the board while I was out on my run, and it occurred to me that this thing had to have cost a pretty penny. I mean, look at the detail.”
Gil enlarged the image with his fingers. “It is super elaborate.”
“Exactly. So, I’m wondering if the board is responsible for the Sandman’s appearance. If I can find the origin of the board, I might be able to come up with some history about the Sandman and find a way to shut him down.”
Gil eyed me curiously. “Why don’t you just jam a spike through the board?”
I blinked. What he was saying was so obvious, and I hadn’t even thought of it. “The board is the portal,” I whispered. “Of course!”
Gil fiddled with my cell for a minute before handing it back. “I just texted the pic to my phone. I’ll see what I can find out about the board, but busting that spook’s ass might be a whole lot easier than we thought.”
“Do we have spikes in the car?”
“A whole duffel bag full,” Gil assured me.
“Awesome,” I said, beaming at him. Okay, so maybe I’d been a little quick to judge his joining us in the investigation. If we could shut down the Sandman, we could at least help Breslow with the investigation without the threat of a dangerous spook on our tails. “Heath,” I called. He and Beau were currently in a conversation over a file.
“What’s up?”
“We need to head over to Porter Manor.”
“Why?” the deputy chimed in.
“There’s something Heath and I need to do there. Actually, there’s something I need to take care of. There’s an item at the crime scene that I need to drive a spike through.”
Heath gave me a thumbs-up. He knew I was talking about the Ouija board.
Beau looked at me like I had to be making a joke. “You want to put a spike through a piece of evidence at my crime scene?”
“I’ll explain on the way,” I assured him, anxious to get to Porter Manor and put a spike into that board before the Sandman could inflict any more damage. “Would you mind driving us over there?”
Breslow agreed to drive us, but he told me there’d be no way he’d give me permission to put a spike into anything before he saw what I was talking about. I thought I could wait to show him how harmless it would be to his crime scene until we got to the playroom and I pointed out the board and its connection to the dangerous spook we were all so worried about.
We arrived at Porter Manor and Heath and I zipped up our fishing vests, loading a few extra magnets for good measure, and checked the duffel bag for spikes. Gil had prepared us well; the bag weighed a ton from the two dozen spikes rattling around on the bottom. I took a few out to hand-carry, just in case, and Heath tucked two into his waistband.
My sweetheart carried the duffel, and Beau—wearing Gilley’s plaid vest—led the way up the steps. He moved cautiously, with his right hand hovering over his sidearm while with his left hand he slid a knife through the crime scene seal over the door. Before he had a chance to open the door, I slipped one of the spikes I was carrying into his right hand. He looked down at it in surprise and I said, “Your gun isn’t going to help you here, Deputy. But that spike could save your life. Hold on to it, and if anything spectral jumps out at you, jab it with that and run like hell.”
Breslow paled a bit and swallowed loudly. “Maybe Heath should go first?”
I would’ve smiled if we’d been anywhere else, but I knew that as nervous as I was to be back at Porter Manor, Deputy Breslow had to be ten times more so, and still he’d driven us here and was willing to go inside.
Heath stepped forward and put a tentative hand on the handle. It turned without resistance and he opened the door wide.
Peering into the darkened hallway, he said to Breslow, “You
were here today?”
“This morning,” the deputy answered. “I came with Deputy Wells and Carter and made them carry a few magnets when we went inside to retrieve the remains from the playroom.”
“Anything weird happen to you this morning?”
Breslow shook his head. “No. It was quiet. We weren’t here long, though. Just a few minutes to go in, look for the body, find it was missing, and get the heck out.”
“Okay,” Heath said, and I saw him square his shoulders and step across the threshold. “Let’s do this thing fast. I don’t want to give the spook a chance to get creative.”
I followed Heath through the door and Breslow brought up the rear. We traveled down the corridor and made our way to the room at the end, which seemed to be the center of all the activity in the house. There was more tape across the doorway, and Beau indicated that we should simply duck under it. “When did you put that up?” I asked.
“This morning,” he replied. “I also resealed the front door.”
I paused before ducking under the tape. “You resealed the front door? When did you seal it the first time?”
“Last night,” he said. “I told Carter and Wells to do it before they left.”
“Did they come inside?” I asked.
He scoffed. “Nope. They gave me a bunch of flak about sticking around long enough to put that seal up too. Those doors were still slamming long after we left.”
“Ah,” I said, not surprised, but then something else occurred to me and again I paused before ducking under the tape. “Beau, you said that you resealed the door this morning. Was it broken when you came here to retrieve the body?”
He shook his head. “No, but sealing the door was probably a dumb idea anyway. I mean, the window leading into this room is broken, and anybody could’ve come in through the back door. I never thought to have the guys check it and seal it last night, but this morning when we looked, it was unlocked. I sealed it up, but anybody could get in here and take a skeleton out through that window. No way was I gonna get some boards and board it over this morning. Not without you two around.”
I noticed that the deputy was shaking slightly, but trying to hide it. I put a reassuring hand on his arm to let him know we’d be okay; then I moved under the tape and headed over to Heath, who was standing in front of the playroom door holding tightly to the duffel bag. He seemed to be waiting for something to alert us to the Sandman’s presence, but the house remained quiet.
Maybe a little too quiet.
I came up beside Heath and he pointed to the faint outline of darkened wood that perfectly matched the body of the young boy whose remains had lain there for over four decades. “Why would you steal a skeleton?” he asked.
“The only reason I can think of,” Beau said, “is because you’re trying to hide some key piece of evidence. And, as evidence goes, bodies, even old bodies, can reveal a whole lot about the murderer.”
I noticed that the deputy’s shoulders sagged a bit, and I thought he was probably upset with himself for not taking Everett’s remains at the same time we’d taken Scoffland’s. “It’s not your fault that it’s gone, Beau,” I said to him.
But he merely shook his head. “Try telling that to Kogan.”
“I’d be happy to.” The house had been going crazy at the time we’d made a run for it. No way could Kogan fault us for getting the hell out—especially not after what he’d been through in here himself.
“So where did you want to put that spike?” Beau asked, looking nervously around.
I pointed to the other side of the small table with the tea set. “On the other side of there.”
We walked around the table and the floor came into view and the second it did, my breath caught. “Where . . . ? Where is it?!”
The Ouija board was gone. All that was left behind was a dark-stained patch of wood similar to that where Everett’s body had lain, but this one was in the shape of a rectangle.
“The planchette is gone too,” Heath said, motioning with his chin to the wall, where we could all see a dark slash cut into the drywall.
“Maybe it got kicked aside or something,” I said, feeling my heart begin to race, because if someone had taken that Ouija board, and the planchette, and if the board was in fact the Sandman’s portal, then he could pop up anywhere in the county. Like at Mrs. G.’s, for instance.
“What’re we talking about?” Beau asked.
“There was a board here,” I said, distracted by the thought that the Ouija board was now gone. “We have to find it.”
“What kind of a board?”
“A Ouija board. But it wasn’t your typical Ouija board—this one was pretty elaborate and artistic.”
“A Ouija board?” he said. “My sister had one of those when she was little. It freaked her out one night at a sleepover and my parents got rid of it.”
I nodded because I heard that kind of story a lot from unwitting parents. “This board would’ve been about a thousand times more powerful than your sister’s board,” I said.
Beau gulped. “Then we’d best find it and put a stake through it,” he said simply.
We searched the room for several minutes, but there was no sign of the board or the planchette. “This is bad,” I whispered to Heath.
“Why didn’t we think to strap a magnet to it when we had the chance yesterday?” he replied, his face riddled with guilt.
“The house was going crazy and we weren’t at our best,” I said.
“If the board isn’t here,” Beau said, “what does that mean?”
I stopped fishing around on the floor to sit back on my haunches. “It means the spook who possessed Cisco and Cook, and manipulated Scoffland’s dead body, and slammed all the doors in this house at once, and threw a planchette across the room hard enough to embed it in a wall . . . is on the move.”
Beau’s face went the whitest I’d seen it. “What the heck was painted on that thing, anyway?”
“Access to our realm,” I said. Beau’s brow furrowed, but I didn’t explain more. I was too frantic to find any trace of the board and went back again to pull up the skirt of the table to look under it.
“Who would’ve taken it?” Beau asked.
“Everett’s killer,” said Heath, and I lifted my chin to stare at him. “It’s the only thing that makes sense,” he explained. “The killer took Everett’s body, and the board and the planchette. No body, no murder, and the killer gets to manipulate the Sandman any way he wants.”
I shuddered. “He could use it to murder someone else.”
Beau’s wide eyes got even wider. “We have to figure out who murdered that boy before that happens.”
“We do,” I agreed.
“Where do you want to start?” Heath asked.
Beau blinked and stared at the floor as if trying to decide on a direction. After several long moments where he didn’t offer anything, I said, “You know where I think we should start?”
“Where?” Heath and Beau said together.
“With Sheriff Kogan. I want to know exactly what happened to him in the moments after we left the room, before Deputy Cook attacked him.”
Beau nodded enthusiastically and was already moving toward the exit. “That’s just what I was gonna suggest. Come on, let’s go talk to the sheriff.”
A short time later we arrived at the hospital and Beau asked us to wait while he went in and made sure the sheriff was up for a short interview. A minute or two after he disappeared into Kogan’s room, he stuck his head out and motioned us over.
We found the sheriff alert but very pale with lots of tubes coming out of him. “Mary Jane,” he said hoarsely. “Mr. Whitefeather.”
“Sir,” Heath replied with a nod. “Please call me Heath.”
“You got it. And thanks for agreeing to wo
rk on this, Mary Jane. I hope your daddy isn’t too uptight about my recruitin’ you?”
“He’s not upset at all,” I assured him. He didn’t really need to know that Daddy knew nothing of my new title, or that I intended to keep him completely in the dark. I doubted that he’d allow me to continue if he knew what I was up to. I mean, it was fine if I wanted to go off and explore old abandoned castles and such, but he’d have a cow if he discovered I was working on an actual murder investigation. “How’re you doing, Sheriff?” I asked, hardly able to believe a man so gravely wounded could be up and talking so soon after nearly being stabbed to death.
“Aw, I’m okay,” the older man said with a dismissive wave. “He stuck me pretty good, but didn’t do any major damage other than nicking my lung. The docs patched that up and they say that as soon as my blood count is back up to normal, they’ll release me and send me home.”
I always knew that Kogan was a tough old guy, but he was certainly proving that now in spades.
“So,” Kogan continued. “Beau here says y’all wanted to ask me about yesterday; that right?”
“It is, Sheriff,” I said, taking a seat in the only chair in the room, which was to the side of the bed.
“Well, I don’t know that there’s much to tell. See, y’all left the room and it was just me and Levi, and we were gonna put Scoffland in that body bag when all of a sudden there was this weird noise—”
“What kind of noise?” I interrupted.
Kogan frowned. “I don’t know, some kind of compression sound. Like a pop but not a high-pitched pop like when a gun goes off. This was kinda deeper, and maybe even a little muffled.”
“We know exactly what you’re talking about,” Heath said. And we did.
Sometimes a spook will literally pop into our realm from one of the lower realms, and when that happens, it makes a sort of deep POW. It’s not crazy loud, and I’ve only heard the sound a few times, but it can be quite eerie to experience.