You don’t say? How many hopheads you got in this burg?
“It could have been used for insulin. One of our customers could have been a diabetic.”
And the reason he or she shoved it deep inside the towel dispenser instead of into the garbage can?
“I don’t know, but—”
No buts. Josh knew what he’d come for. When he’d spotted that syringe, he got the thrills, all right. You’d think he found Veronica Lake naked in his bedroom.
“Please stop with the sexual analogies.”
Why, baby? Too much to handle? Am I giving YOU the thrills? That’s a nice thought.
“What did you say?”
You know what I said. And you know how you feel, hearing my voice in your head.
“Let’s stay on the subject at hand. If you’re really some all-knowing ghost of a private eye, then what happened to Brennan exactly? Was that syringe involved? And what was it doing in my store’s women’s room? Who put it there? And what does Josh want with it?”
Whoa. Put the brakes on, baby, I didn’t witness who gave Brennan the big chill because I happened to be tailing you that night. And I didn’t witness who hid the syringe for the same reason. And as for what Joshy boy wants with it, I can’t tail him beyond your front door, so I don’t know. I can read your thoughts, but in almost all other ways, my powers of observation are about on your level—with the exception that I can remain invisible, of course, and take in a lot more than you, like that tail I ran on Josh when he was searching the little girls’ can. But I can only be one place at a time.
“Forgive me if I remain skeptical.”
I don’t blame you. But I do need you to pay attention to what I’m telling you now. I have a theory—and a lead for you to follow—
“Oh, no you don’t. I’m not doing anything you direct me to until I get a handle on exactly what you are.”
Suit yourself, baby. When I was alive, I was one skeptic Joe myself. “Concrete Jack”—that’s what they used to call me. So if you wanna run your own version of a background check, who am I to complain? Go to it, babe, you have my blessing.
With a dead author, a suspicious State Police investigator, and a hidden syringe in my store over the past twenty-four hours, I was now fairly sure I had a bona fide murder mystery on my hands. And the only one who seemed capable of helping me was a ghost.
Either that or a delusion.
Okay, so the whole “Jack Shepard” matter was a mystery in itself—one I knew I’d better resolve. And fast.
I myself knew next to nothing about ghosts, which meant I needed to consult with experts on the matter—and I needed to do it anonymously. That narrowed my investigative options down to one: the Internet.
CHAPTER 12
Dark and Stormy Night
One of the proofs of the immortality of the soul is that myriads have believed it—they also believed the world was flat.
—Mark Twain
Ghosts are not spirits of the dead. Ghosts don’t have innate intelligence. Ghosts are merely the hopes, fears, and emotions of the living, recorded on the psychic plane and replayed in an eternal, endless loop long after the person who inadvertently made that recording is dead.
Such was the hypothesis of Dr. Frederic Haxan, author and paranormal researcher, as typed in a message to me by a graduate student with the self-explanatory screen name SPOOKSCIENCEGUY.
For the past hour I had fruitlessly surfed the cyberwaves, using the keywords “ghosts” and “haunting.” After hopping from one search engine to another, and one crackpot Web site to another, I’d finally stumbled onto this site, sponsored by the Department of Parapsychology at Wendell University (wherever that was).
I entered their active chat room and met SPOOKSCIENCEGUY, KARDECIAN, DOYLEFAIRY, M. BLAVATSKY, and the rest of the “Ghostbusters.”
At last, I could talk freely about my problem. I mean, honestly, how could I tell anyone that I was having an ongoing conversation in my head with the voice of a dead private eye? They were sure to assume I was suffering some sort of post-traumatic stress from witnessing my late husband’s leap.
Going to a doctor was out for the same reason. Diagnosis of nut job might land me in a straitjacket. And forget my in-laws, that’s all the excuse they’d need to take Spencer away from me for good.
I took a long sip from my mug of lukewarm coffee and shifted my gaze from the flickering computer screen to the dark, rain-swept street. An SUV swished by, splashing water on the soggy curb, then the thunder rumbled in the distance, and I imagined storm clouds gathering miles off Narragansett Bay, brooding over the surface of the ocean.
Okay, so “dark and stormy night” is a total cliché, but it really was such a night. And there I sat alone, behind Buy the Book’s checkout counter, typing away on an Internet chat room, reading supernatural jargon from a gaggle of parapsychologists.
I was about to pose a question to SPOOKSCIENCEGUY—ONE of the thirteen people now chatting—when screen name DOYLEFAIRY crashed our conversation.
“SPOOKSCIEGUY, YOU ARE FULL OF POO-DOO,”
wrote DOYLEFAIRY in big, bold, irritated letters.
“The 1957 Pevensey Castle incident proved ghosts do not exist. The psychic phenomena attributed to specters are really the work of elves and fairies.”
Elves and fairies!?! I suddenly wondered what planet or dimensional plane DOYLEFAIRY hailed from.
“Way off base, FAIRY,”
screen name VENKMANN flashed a moment later.
“The Pevensey Castle photos are a hoax. That whole incident is about as real as the Cardiff Giant.”
GHOSTHUNTER jumped into the fray, followed quickly by COLDSPOT, WENDIGO, and GHOUL-LISHOUS.
I sat back and watched the argument scroll down my computer screen through bleary eyes, my too-fuzzy brain trying to make some sense of what these participants in the wendellunv.edu/psyphenom/talk chat room were saying.
Terms like “manifestations,” “elementals,” “poltergeist,” “exteriorization phenomena,” and “ur-spirits” were flying—most of them landing somewhere over my head. Meanwhile, the patter of rain against the arched front window was lulling me to sleep.
I blinked my eyes. My computer monitor began to flicker, and the sound of the rain receded. Against the scrolling banter of chat room text, I saw a man’s powerful profile. Jaw square. Fedora pulled low over the eyes.
I jumped, fully awake now. The vision vanished. Onscreen, the debate continued about my topic: sudden visitations from an outspoken ghost.
GHOSTHUNTER suggested an explanation for my “friend’s” problem. (Yes, I tried that transparent ploy, and no one who responded to my questions even pretended my “friend” was anyone but me—evidenced by the fact that they always put quote marks around the word “friend.”)
GHOSTHUNTER said my “friend” might be experiencing a form of demonic possession. This theory was predicated on the evidence that my “friend” was the only person to hear the entity, witness its physical manifestations, and its evil trickery (the upside-down chairs).
GHOSTHUNTER even had two suggestions: read Malachi Martin’s Hostage to the Devil, and see The Exorcist.
Gee, what a comfort.
DOYLEFAIRY conveyed that “exteriorization phenomena” like turning over chairs and turning them back again was more indicative of poltergeist activity—none too subtly adding that poltergeists, though known as “mischievous spirits,” could be far more dangerous than the definition suggested—the word “mischievous” connoting, to me anyway, the sorts of things one might see the Peanuts gang doing in a Sunday comic strip.