Demons Are a Ghoul's Best Friend

  “I’m sorry,” I said quickly. “You said ‘sons,’ as in plural?”

  Dory nodded. “Eric and Ethan. They both ended up in foster care and went missing.”

  Muckleroy and I exchanged a look that said, What? “Were they sent to the same foster home?” Gilley had the sense to ask.

  “Yes,” Dory said. “But I didn’t find that out until much later, after I got clean and off the streets. That horrible woman, the one who was fired because her records were so incomplete, told me that Eric had run away with his little brother. She said she heard they were in California. I knew she was lying, but I could never prove it because the police were all too familiar with my history and didn’t want anything to do with me.”

  “When was this?” I asked. “I mean, when did you talk with that social worker?”

  “It must have been right after I got out of rehab—nineteen eighty, I believe. Eric would have been in his late teens, and Ethan was a few years younger. Later, when the money came in, I hired a private detective, but he turned up nothing.”

  “When the money came in?” Bob repeated.

  Dory’s face turned profoundly sad as she turned again to look him straight in the eye and confess, “Yes, Detective, that is the supreme irony here. I won the lotto in 1985 by playing the numbers of my sons’ birthdays.”

  “Whoa,” Gilley said.

  “Whoa is right,” Dory said. “That’s why I live here,” she said, motioning to the room. “I had always hoped that Eric would come home.”

  “Eric but not Ethan?” I asked.

  There was another sad smile on Dory’s face. “Ethan was very young when he was taken away, and I was so into the drugs by then that he and I had barely bonded. I was in too much of a haze to pay much attention, but I doubt he’d remember much of me.”

  An awkward kind of silence enveloped us as each of us struggled for something to say. I looked down and noticed that I’d carried the folder of sketches with me into the house for the interview. Pulling the sketch out I took a shot and asked, “Dory, do you recognize this man?”

  She studied the sketch for a long time, but as I watched her I saw no hint of recognition cross her face. “No,” she said. “And if you’re showing that to me, I’m assuming this is the man you think is responsible for Eric’s death?”

  “We’re not sure,” Muckleroy said carefully. “But we have labeled him a person of interest.”

  Dory sighed. “I really wish I could identify him for you,” she said. “But I know I’ve never seen him before.”

  She handed it back to me, and I tucked it into my folder. “Thanks for looking,” I said. I really felt for this woman. The kind of guilt she carried must have been unbearable at times.

  Muckleroy was jotting a few notes into his notebook. After he’d finished he stood up and handed Dory a business card. “Thank you so much for your time, Mrs. Hinnely. Please call the number I circled on the card to schedule a time to go in for a DNA swab. I’ll do my best to put a rush on the lab, and then we’ll be able to release Eric’s remains back to you.”

  Dory stood up and took the card. “Thank you, Detective. At least I can give Eric a proper burial. And please don’t forget about my other little boy. If they’re both gone it would give me closure to know when and how.”

  “I won’t forget,” Muckleroy promised.

  As Gilley and Muckleroy headed out to the car, Dory reached out and touched my arm, stopping me from leaving with them. “M.J.?” she said. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Yes, of course,” I said.

  “The next time you speak with Eric—you know, before you help him to cross over into heaven—would you please tell him I’m so sorry and that I love him?” Dory’s voice cracked, ending on a whisper.

  Now I didn’t hesitate, and I reached out to squeeze her hand. “I absolutely will, Dory. I will tell him all that, and let him know that you still think of him and that you’re doing so much better.”

  Dory nodded, too overcome with her emotions to speak.

  We left her standing on the porch watching us pull out, and I wondered how a woman seemingly so strong now could ever have lost her way so profoundly.

  “What’s your feeling on her story?” Muckleroy asked me.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Ethan,” Muckleroy said. “Your psychic sense didn’t pick up on him, did it?”

  “No,” I said. “Which doesn’t mean he wasn’t also murdered. It may be that he just crossed over more easily than his brother.”

  “So what? This Hatchet Jack guy just swooped in and nabbed a whole horde of kids and killed them without anyone noticing?”

  “Maybe he didn’t take them all at the same time,” I said. “He could have snatched one at a time and come back for more.”

  “How does a woman who’s supposed to look after these kids just let three or four of them disappear like that?” Gilley asked from the backseat.

  “I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head. “It seems pretty extraordinary, doesn’t it?”

  “Like something out of The X Files,” said Muckleroy.

  “No offense, but I’ll be glad when we get to the bottom of this and I can go back to my nice, normal petty-theft detective beat.”

  “I’ll bet,” I said with a grin.

  We drove for a bit in silence, and then an idea occurred to me. “Detective?” I said.

  “Bob,” he corrected.

  “Oh, yeah, sorry—Bob. Listen, I was wondering if maybe it might be worth it to put a few of these sketches up near the foster home where we know Eric and Mark were taken.”

  “That’s a great idea,” he said, putting his blinker on.

  “And as it happens, we’re not far away from there.”

  We arrived at a large but neglected home a few minutes later. Everything about the house seemed to be rusting, from the siding to the chain-link fence around the property to the swing set in the backyard. The lawn was overgrown and filled with dandelions and crabgrass. The front steps were crumbling, and the front door to the porch hung slightly sideways.

  “Someone lives here?” Gilley asked, with a frown of disgust.

  “Looks like it,” Muckleroy said, indicating a curtain in one of the side windows that had pulled back to reveal an older woman. We headed up the walkway and the front door pulled open with a loud groan. “Yeah?” asked the elderly woman who mirrored the general feel of the house with her unkempt hair, raggedy clothing, and yellow teeth.

  “Good afternoon,” Muckleroy said, pulling his badge out of his suit pocket. He introduced himself and explained, “We’re here looking into a person of interest who might have been seen in this neighborhood about thirty years ago.”

  “You cops really are behind on your paperwork,” the older woman said with a snort.

  Muckleroy grinned at the woman’s pluck. She was sharper than she appeared. “It’s a cold case that we’ve been given new information on,” he said. “I know the former owner of this home has passed away, but are you in any way a relative of Mrs. Clayburn?”

  “If you’re talking about Maude, then yeah, I’m her sister.”

  The detective’s eyebrows rose. Maybe we’d get lucky after all. He motioned to me, and I quickly took out the poster of Hatchet Jack. “Do you by any chance recognize this man?” he asked, showing her the sketch.

  The woman squinted and came down the steps to take the paper out of my hand. “Yeah,” she said after a moment. “I knew him.”

  Gil and I both gasped, the break we’d apparently just gotten taking us both by surprise. “Do you remember his name?” Muckleroy asked, and I could hear the excitement in his voice.

  “That’s Jack,” she said, handing him back the sketch. My sister went with him for a while back in the late seventies.”

  “Jack who?” Muckleroy pressed.

  The woman shrugged. “I dunno,” she said. “I only remember his first name.”

  “Do you remember if he had any family in the area??
?? Muckleroy asked.

  This got us another shrug. “Not sure. He was a mean son of a bitch, from what I recall. He had a wicked temper. He liked to take the foster boys out on fishing trips.”

  “Fishing trips?”

  “That’s what I said,” Maude’s sister snapped impatiently.

  “So what happened between him and your sister?” Muckleroy asked.

  “They split up over it,” the woman said.

  “Over Jack taking the boys on fishing trips?”

  Maude’s sister rolled her tongue over her teeth. “Not so much taking them as not bringing ’em back. He claimed that he’d found a boarding school where the boys could learn better than the schools around here. Maude wanted ’em back ’cause she got her money by taking care of ’em.”

  “So what happened?” Gilley asked.

  The old woman scrunched her face up into a really good pout. “They split up!” she snapped. “Ain’t you been listening?”

  “And Jack never returned the boys?” Muckleroy asked, taking over for Gil.

  “Nope.”

  “Did your sister report this to her social worker?”

  Maude’s sister seemed to sense a trap. She folded her arms across her chest defensively and said, “Don’t know. You’d have to talk to her about that.”

  Muckleroy pressed his lips together. He couldn’t talk to Maude, and they both knew it. “How many of the boys did he take with him on these fishing trips, ma’am?”

  “I dunno. A few.”

  “Like, three?”

  “Two, three, four. Maude had so many little brats runnin’ around that I can’t remember.”

  “Do you remember the year?”

  The old woman shrugged. “Nope.”

  Muckleroy was beginning to get annoyed. We were so damn close to finding out who Jack was, and this woman was barely helping. “How about the time of year? Do you remember the time of year?”

  Maude’s sister rolled her eyes, clearly out of patience with the detective. “It was August, right after Maude’s birthday.” With that she turned around and climbed back up the steps.

  Meanwhile Muckleroy was scribbling in his notebook. Glancing up at her departing figure he said, “Uh, can I get your name?”

  “Sure,” she said, crossing her threshold. “I’m sure that’ll be the next thing you look up.” And with that she slammed the door and we were left stunned and a little bewildered, again on our own.

  “She’s lovely,” Gilley said sarcastically. “M.J., put her on our Christmas card list!”

  “Gil,” I said, giving him a warning glance to chill out.

  Muckleroy, however, laughed. “Yeah, she’s my pick for warm and fuzzy of the year.”

  We turned and headed back toward the unmarked car in the driveway. “Let’s put a few flyers up around here,” he said. “I’ll go this way,” he said, pointing right. “You two go the other way.”

  “How many should we put up?” I asked as I took half the stack I had left and gave those to him.

  “A couple blocks in each direction should do the trick,” he said. “Meet you back here in an hour or so.”

  Gil and I hurried around the neighborhood, posting the flyers on trees and lampposts. I was glad I had him with me, as the neighborhood didn’t look like it’d seen the welcome wagon in a long while.

  We met back at Muckleroy’s car and waited for him for another half an hour before we spotted him lumbering down the street. “About time,” Gilley muttered, glancing at his watch.

  I hid a smile, as I knew that Gil was impatient to get back to town so that he could have a nice hot meal followed by a long nap before we went back on duty at the school. “Sorry it took me so long,” Muckleroy said. “I was asking a couple folks if they recognized Jack.”

  “Any luck?” I asked as he unlocked the doors and let us into the car.

  “Yeah, actually,” Muckleroy said.

  “Do tell,” I said.

  “About two blocks down I found an old man on his porch who looked at Jack’s picture and thinks he remembers him from one of the teams in his bowling league.”

  “Really?” I said, looking down the street.

  Muckleroy nodded. “Yep. Said he didn’t remember the name, but thinks it’s the same guy who played on one of the opposing teams for a short time before dropping out. And the best part is that he also mentioned the teams got together on Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday evenings.”

  “Whoa,” said Gilley. “That explains why Jack is active only on Monday, Wednesday, Fridays, and Saturdays.”

  “Could he give you any more details? Like what team he might have played on?”

  Muckleroy scowled as deep lines of frustration formed along his brow. “No, he says he only saw him a few times, and the bowling alley closed down years ago. I asked if anyone from the neighborhood might have played on the team and he said most everyone’s died or moved away by now.”

  “So we’re back to square one,” said Gil.

  “Looks like it,” Muckleroy said. “But now that we know Jack was in this neighborhood and hung out with some of the locals, maybe someone with more information will come forward and give us an identification.”

  “The question is, Will they come forward in time? We have only one day left before we’ve got to exit the premises and the construction crews come in,” said Gilley.

  “Well, we’re going to go back to the school tonight,” I said. “I’ll do my best to make contact with Eric and see if he can give us more info. If Eric’s foster mother was going out with the man who abducted him, Eric might be able to give me a clue about a surname.”

  “Weird how his name is Jack, though, ain’t it?” Muckleroy said with a sideways glance at me. “I figured the name Hatchet Jack was just something the kids had coined when they first started seeing and hearing about his ghost.”

  “It’s not as weird as you might think,” I said. “You’d be surprised how many homes I visit where the residents don’t know anything about the ghost that’s haunting their house, but they feel a need to name it, and the name ends up being right on or real close to what the ghost’s name was in life.”

  “Well, the whole thing is creepy,” Muckleroy said. “And I don’t think you should go back to that school without a little backup. Maybe I should assign one of the officers to go with you.”

  “No way!” I said quickly. “It’s really better if I work alone. Besides, Jack’s not supposed to be on the school grounds tonight.”

  Muckleroy grunted. “I sure wish the son of a bitch were still alive. He’s one piece of scum I really would have liked to have put away.”

  I leaned back in my seat and closed my eyes, feeling the weariness of this job settle into my bones. “Trust me, Bob, he’s not going to get away with it. I’m not leaving this job until I know he’s been sent where he belongs.”

  Chapter 10

  That night around ten, Gilley and I drove back to the school. Gilley was wearing his protective sweatshirt and a nervous frown. I was in my usual black cargo pants with plenty of pockets, a black T-shirt, and a hooded sweatshirt.

  We had tested all of the equipment before loading up the van, and I was now fiddling with the electrostatic meter as the miles melted away under our tires. “What’s up?” Gil asked, sensing my jitters.

  “Not sure,” I lied.

  “Oh, really?” Gilley said, his voice dripping with skepticism. Damn. He was onto me.

  I sighed heavily, the weight of all this responsibility pulling me down. “What if Eric won’t go? What if I can’t convince him?” I said, and followed that quickly with, “And what if I can’t find Jack’s portal? We’ve only got tomorrow left, Gilley. What if all this effort—all this pain that we’ve unveiled for Eric’s mother and the other boys’ families—is all for nothing?”

  Gilley reached over and squeezed my shoulder. In a tone holding a tiny bit of mockery he said, “It’s tough being you, isn’t it?”

  That made me laugh. “I’m serious,” I
said. “What if we don’t get to finish this one?”

  “Then it’ll be demons one, M.J. and Gilley fifty-five.”

  I gave him an impatient look. “That’s unacceptable,” I said. “The bad guys don’t get one or two or any when we’re up against them.”

  “Yeah,” said Gilley. “That is exactly the spirit you’ll need tonight. Do not take no for an answer, M.J. But just so you know, no matter what happens you’re still a kick-ass ghostbuster, and giving only one up to the bad guys after so many successes is an amazing track record.”

  “I just want to give Mrs. Hinnely a sense of closure,” I said. “And I want to shut that demonic piece of slime down.”

  Gilley turned the van into the school parking lot and came to a stop near the elementary wing. “Then go to it,” he said gently.

  I unbuckled my seat belt and swung into the back of the van to grab my duffel. “I’ll set up in the same classroom we saw the boys in before,” I said. “If I get nothing then I’ll head over to Nicky’s window and see if Eric is there. I might be able to coax him into talking with me.”

  “Gotcha,” Gil said with a salute. “I’ll monitor from here.”

  I turned to walk to the building when I heard Gil call my name. I looked over my shoulder and asked, “Yeah? Did I forget something?”

  “No,” Gilley said, and his expression was slightly hesitant. “If you need me, M.J., just holler, okay?”

  I broke into a grin. “You gonna come to my rescue?”

  “I’m wearing the supersuit,” Gil said. “And I’ve got one of these,” he added, pulling out the magnetic grenade we’d made from the lead pipe and spike. “Jack won’t stand a chance.”

  I gave him a wave and jogged to the school. The grounds were quiet except for the sound of crickets and frogs from Hole Pond just across the field. The air was damp and chilly, perfect ghost-hunting weather, and there was something of an oppressive air in the night. I opened up my senses and couldn’t tell from where, but I knew I was being watched. I wondered if maybe Nicky was off, and if Jack came whenever he damn well felt like it and not only to keep the schedule Nicky had quoted.

  I opened the door to the elementary wing and stepped inside, my radar still dialed up to high alert. Pulling the night vision camera out of my duffel I turned it on and flipped it around to point down the hallway. In my ear Gilley said, “Confirmed visual from the camera.”