All eyes sought out Jennifer in the semi-darkness. She lowered her head, turning her gaze to her hands where they rested in her lap. When Kennedy placed a gentle hand on her small shoulder, she looked up for the first time.
“Jennifer Tilden is why I sought out paranormal research. She came to me as a patient, and I’ll be betraying no confidential aspects of her case that she would not care to share. As a matter of fact, she really doesn’t care one way or another.”
“What is wrong with her, Professor Gabe?” Leonard asked.
Kennedy kneeled beside her and pried one of her hands free, holding it in his own. In the darkness, none of the others could see the gentleness that came to Gabriel’s face as he touched her.
“Jenny is quite insane.”
“Really?” Cordero said mockingly.
Kennedy glanced over. “And I would expect anyone but you to have something smart to say about her circumstance, George.”
Cordero tried to smile, shifting to cover his embarrassment.
“How are you doing in there, Jenny?” Kennedy asked.
Jennifer didn’t answer, but she did use her free hand to brush away some hair that had fallen into her face. She also squeezed Gabriel’s hand a little tighter.
“We need Jenny for what we have to do in Summer Place. She will be invaluable as we try and seek out what it is we’re dealing with.” He looked up at the men and women sitting around the table. “Jennifer and her special friend will be able to talk to that house and what inhabits it.”
“You’ll have to explain that, Gabe,” Lonetree said.
Kennedy turned back to the anthropologist. “Jenny, I want you to relax. You’re here with me, so he won’t be mean to you.”
Cordero, perhaps thinking Gabriel was referring to him, scrunched down in his seat just a little more.
“He’s not angry, he just wants to know why I’m not singing,” she said without looking up.
Jason and Harris stood so that they could hear better. Julie was watching Kennedy more than the small woman he knelt with, and Kelly Delaphoy was writing furiously on her notepad.
“If you sing, will he let you speak to us without interfering?”
Jennifer looked up at Kennedy and tilted her head to the left, as if she were listening to a far off voice. She almost smiled, and then she looked over at Leonard Sickles, who sat further back in his chair.
“Hey, boy, whiskey and water with lots of ice.”
Jason Sanborn’s pipe fell from his mouth. Kelly’s pencil snapped its point off against the paper. Julie Reilly stared in stunned silence, and the others — Harris Dalton included — stood suddenly.
The voice that had come out of Jennifer Tilden’s small mouth was male.
Leonard looked just as shocked, but infuriated even more.
“Who you callin’ boy, bitch?” The words didn’t come out with as much bravado as he would have liked.
“That’s not her, Leonard, and you will damn well apologize when she wakes up,” Kennedy said. He looked sternly at Sickles, who only stared wide-eyed at Jennifer.
“We don’t call a black man ‘boy.’ Not here, not anymore, Bobby Lee.”
“Ah, you know I didn’t mean nothin’ by it,” the male voice said. This time Jenny looked directly at Sickles. The male voice had a thick New York accent. “Hell, most of my friends are Negros, you know that.”
“Forget it. I can see you’ve backed out of our deal,” Kennedy said. He released Jenny’s hand and stood, then lifted her chin up toward him.
“Look man, you left this poor girl alone for years. What was I supposed to do, abandon her like you did?”
“We’ll get into that later, Bobby Lee. If Jenny sings for you, will you let her be for the next few hours, maybe even let her have a full night’s sleep?”
“She’s gonna sing, Kennedy, you can bet your ass on that. And as far as leaving her alone, well you can just kiss my—”
Gabriel reached into his coat pocket with his free hand and brought out a small syringe, holding it where she could see it. He still held Jenny’s chin.
“What the hell you gonna’ do with that?” Jenny’s male voice was starting to sound strained.
“I’m going to put her out for more days than you would care to know about. Now, if she sings, will you leave her be for the next twenty-four hours so she can rest?”
“She sings first — that’s the deal.”
“She sings first.”
Kennedy stood over Jenny and waited, keeping the syringe in the woman’s sight.
“Professor, is this dangerous to the girl?” Harris Dalton asked. He slowly lowered himself into his chair at the head of the conference table.
Kennedy shrugged. “Jennifer has nothing to lose here. She’s bordering on exhaustion and her system is close to shutting down. If she had stayed on the streets another month she would have died from malnutrition or sleep deprivation. As it stands, we may not be able to use her — and her friend — if she can’t rest. Without Jennifer, this project will be for nothing. I need her, and to put it frankly, she needs Summer Place.”
Before Harris could voice further concerns, the anthropology professor slowly stood. With her eyes closed, she walked over to where John Lonetree was sitting and eased onto his lap. If he was surprised by her actions, he didn’t show it. The temperature in the room felt like it dropped at least ten degrees. Julie folded her arms across her chest for warmth.
The rest of them stared, watching Jennifer as she looked deep into John Lonetree’s eyes. Jason glanced over at Kelly, and she exhaled a breath that produced vapor — the temperature in the conference room was dropping even more than they had realized.
Gabriel swallowed. He had seen all of this before. He had seen it just three weeks before the incident at Summer Place, and his guilt at not helping Jennifer was something that he regretted even more than the disaster of that night seven years before. He had left her after she had sought out his help, and he was miserable for it. Still, the fact of what he was about to witness never failed to scare the hell out of him. A case study would show that Jenny exhibited a classic case of split personality, but he knew that diagnosis to be the easy way out. She had a split personality, all right, but it was because she had someone else inside of her — not unlike a haunted house, Jenny herself was being haunted, by Bobby Lee McKinnon.
As they all watched with rapt fascination, Jenny slowly placed her arms around the big man’s neck and stared deeply into his eyes, as if she were begging John’s forgiveness for something she was about to do. John would never see it that way; when Jenny opened her mouth, John Lonetree’s world changed forever.
In 1958, the prodigious record producer Phil Spector, before his more powerful days behind the glass directing the talents of most of the early rock n’ roll stars of the fifties and early sixties, had been a part of a singing group The Teddy Bears. This small group had one song that went straight to the top of the Billboard Top 100: To Know Him Is To Love Him. It was this slow and melodic song that came out of Jenny’s mouth as she stared into Lonetree’s brown eyes. Phil Spector, Gabriel would later explain, had been a writing partner of one Bobby Lee McKinnon.
“To know, know, know him…is to love, love, love him — just…to see him smile…makes my life worthwhile.” Jenny took a breath and leaned closer, her eyes never leaving John’s. It was if everyone in the room was seeing Jennifer relax for the first time, as if she were safe for the first time in years. She took a small breath, her voice beautiful and haunted at the same time. Harris Dalton, who knew the song, swallowed and then slowly stood from his chair as he watched the scene play out before him. The room was becoming ever colder. “Yes, to know, know, know him — is to love, love, love him — yes, I do — yes, I do — yes I do—”