A Dash of Murder (3 page)

We walked down the hallway, which was spray-painted with more graffiti and littered wit
h torn-off strips of wallpaper.

“What would it have been like to have to stay in this place for five years? No family, no home. It must
have been very lonely,” I said.

We walked to Room 227 at the end of the hall. There was an overwhelming stench that seemed to permeate the air both inside the room and out in the hallway. Upon entering 227, I saw it was a corner room with windows on both sides. I stuck my head out of one window and saw dried-out vines, all brown and crunchy, climbing up the side of the building. The windows had long since broken, and nature was taking over this little corner. I pulled my head back in to feel the odor c
reeping into my nostrils again.

“What stinks?” I said.

“I don’t know. Seems like something died,” Maggie an
swered.

“Lots of things died here, but this seems a little fresher.” The rotting smell mixed with
heat was becoming overpowering.

There was one piece of furniture in the room, an old dresser, that didn’t look like the fiberboard wonders we could find down at SuperWally. Always wanting to be on the Antiques Roadshow, I held my nose and went over and gave it my be
st unofficial expert look-over.

“Howard, help me turn this dresser around so I can see if there is a name anywhere on it. It looks like it’s from the ’20s. I think it used to be white. Look at the little legs and the woodwork on the bottom. Too bad a
drawer is missing at the top.”

Howard walked over and tried to wiggle one side of the dresser to pull it away from the wall. He couldn’t get it to bu
dge.

“Hmm.” My eyes scanned up and down the front for a manufacturer’s name or the date when it was mad
e. “Doesn’t have any markings.”

Just as Howard and I were about to get the dresser to move from the place it had probably sat for years, we heard a clatter from outside the walls on the g
ravel in front of the hospital.

Maggie looked out the window around one of the broken panes of glass. “That’s funny,” she said. “Howard, do we have a new member of the paranormal society? A woman? She’s nosin’ around out ther
e looking through the windows.”

“I wasn’t aware of another member. Perhaps the word of mouth got around about our trip into the unknown. You never know who will get the call to the world of sp
irits.”

A woman was pacing around in the weeds below wearing a dark blue gabardine suit and flat heels. All she needed was a string of pearls to complete her look. She seemed to be looking aro
und as if she had lost someone.

“Excuse me,” Aunt Maggie yelled out.
“Are you looking for someone?”

The woman, who had been unaware of our
presence upstairs, jumped back.

“Um … no,” she answered. She must have thought we were the lingering spirits. She patted her head to straighten the perma-tight hairdo that lay perfectly in set curls on the back of her
head. “May I ask who you are?”

“We are members of the Pecan Bayou Paranormal Society. We are doing extensive ghost huntin’ investigations throughout the entire hospital, and it will be televised on NUTV,” Maggie yelled out the wi
ndow to the woman in the weeds.

“Paranormal? And you are walking through the entire hospital? The hospital will be the su
bject of a television program?”

“Pretty near.”

Howard popped his head out of the next window. “Do you wish to join our group in a search for the paranormal?” The woman looked up, shading the sun from her eyes, not seeming to register Howard’s kind invitation to join us loonies. Not getting an immediate response from her, Howard continued. “Or were you here for some othe
r reason?”

“I’m … I’m …” She rubbed her brow and straightened the oversized glasses resting on her jutting cheekbones. She reminded me of a schoolmarm shutting the door of the classroom as she reined in her students after a long, carefree summer. She continued speaking, now finding a firmer voice. “I find the presence of a group who chooses to dabble in the occult, right
here in our town, outrageous!”

The woman seemed to be composing herself as she began shaking a long, thin finger upwards at us. “You are inciting the evi
l of this place. Come out now.”

“Oh dear,” said Maggie as she looked over the windowsill. “This can’t
be good for our investigation.”

“I don’t see how it could help,” I added. The woman standing below us started backing up a little and shaded her eyes to look up. I now noticed a neat, green Ford parked in the gravel lot in front of the hospital. I was surprised we hadn’t heard her pull up, but then we w
ere busy being swarmed by bats.

“You people are trespassing on this property.” She pulled a cell phone out of the front seat of her
car. “I am calling the police.”

“Whoa, ma’am. That’s a little
extreme isn’t it?” Howard said.

I watched her punch in the number as I wondered if she had the police on speed dial for incidents such as this one
.

“Good luck with gettin’ us arrested my dear. The officer who will probably respond to your call is rela
ted to two of us,” Maggie said.

We were all leaning out the windows now as we watched her report our trespassing to the Pecan Bayou Police Department. I guess when the paranormal is involved, the zealots come out of the woodwork. I just wouldn’t have expected anyone out there so quickly. If I remembered right, I believe my dad said he would be over at the new hospital this afternoon going through hurricane procedures with the chief of staff. He would be t
ickled pink to hear about this.

I turned back to see Howard pushing
buttons on his own cell phone.

“If we’re going to get into trouble, I better let Stan Gibson at NUTV know about it before he cancels the filming.” Howard stepped out into the hallway, narrowly missing the door hanging from one hinge.

In a few short minutes, my father scrunched up through the gravel in his squad car. Homeland Security might have given up on the color-coded alert system, but the many shades of red my father’s face could take on were a true barometer of any impending crisis. As he looked up and determined we were the cause of his disturbance, his skin tone was somewhere between watermelon pink and fire engine red. That would mean his reaction was somewhere between “Can I help you?” and “What the hell is going on here?” Why were people so concerned about an old, dilapidated building? Maggie couldn’t wait to get in here and find ghosts, and other people, like this woman, seemed to be terrified of it. The woman below stamped
over to my father’s police car.

“Officer, you have to get these people out of this building immediately. The citizens of this town do not want them meddling with witchcraft and then putting it on television. Who would want to invest in this property or even move to this town once they knew that it is full of people who worship the occult? Tell me that! It’s just disgustin
g what little minds resort to.”

Maggie bristled at the little part, pulling herself u
p to her full four-foot-eight.

“Excuse me ma’am,” my father said, pulling out a small notebook from the side of his patrol c
ar. “I didn’t catch your name.”

“My name,” she stood up straight as if to announce it to a large crowd, “is Maureen Boyle, and I d
idn’t tell you my name.”

“
Yes, Mrs. Boyle.”

“Miss Boyle!” She peered at the badge pinned to his shirt. “I will be recording your badge n
umber. What is your name, sir?”

“My name is Lieutenant Juddson Kelsey, ma’am,” he said in his most placating voice. Funny how I never heard much of that at home growing up, but he did seem
to use it well on crazy ladies.

“Miss Boyle,” he drawled, pure Texas, with a deliberate slowness over her last name. “Miss Boyle, what these people are doing here is with the permissi
on of the town.”

“Just who in the
town granted this permission?”

“Well … my boss, the Chief of Police. And I’m sure it’s fine with just abo
ut anyone on the town council.”

“So, Lieutenant Kelsey, there was a meeting of the town council granting this film crew permission to create a ghost hun
ting program in this building?”

“Not in so many words, but they
pretty well all know about it.”

Miss Boyle put her hand up to her throat, reminding me of a turkey neck at Thanksgiving. “Pretty well? Was there or was there not a meeting and a vote to allow thi
s investigation to take place?”

My father sighed. “Th
ere wasn’t one I was aware of.”

“Ah ha!” snapp
ed Miss Boyle. “I thought not.”

“But I think they all know about the program, and a couple of them are even exc
ited about seeing it.”

“Sir, this is a clear case of town officials acting in their own interest and not the interest of the people they are supposed to be
representing,” Miss Boyle said.

“Miss Boyle, most people in this town are too busy trying to figure out how to put food on the table, and they really don’t care all that much about anythi
ng going on in this old place.”

Miss Boyle raised her head and gazed into the broken windows of the hospital, and then she looked down her nose at my father. “You speak for the town now, do you? Well, I can assure you, you don’t speak for me, sir.” Miss Boyle looked up at Maggie, who was leaning against the peeling paint of the second-floor window. “The good people of this town might be a little concerned knowing about thi
s pack of charlatans out here.”

“That’s enough,” my father said, losing his gentle tone. “Miss Boyle, you’ve neglected to tell me jus
t what you are doing out here.”

“That,
sir, is none of your business.”

“Well, it seems to me that your being out here is not all that different from our friends upstairs being here,
so I think it is my business.”

Miss Boyle straightened her shoulders and tossed her cell phone back into her car. She jutted her chin out. “I am leaving, officer, as I can clearly see I am outnumbered here,
and you are siding with them.”

“I am not siding with them, ma’am. It is just that the paranormal group isn’t hurting anyone, and y
ou are disturbing their peace.”

“Disturbing their peace?” Her face went the color of a deep red communion wine. “Disturbing their peace? Well, I never! You will be hearing from me sir.” She scooted behind the wheel of her car. “This is far from over, Lieutenant.” She slammed the door shut. My dad watched her drive off, putting his notepad back into the front pocket of his n
avy blue cotton police uniform.

“
Thank you, Judd,” my aunt said.

“Hey Dad,” I said as Ms. Boyle’s car skittered gravel behind her. “Dad, maybe you ought to come up here. There is a pretty ba
d smell coming from somewhere.”

“Like what?” he s
houted back.

“Like
dead things,” Maggie answered.

“This old building is probably crawling with rats. I expect there’s a dead one in the wall, that’s all. On my way.” I turned back and remembered the dresser we had been about to move. Howard was back in f
rom his phone call.

“Let’s look at the
back of this dresser, Howard.”

“So we can find a dead
rat for your father to arrest?”

“Hopefully not. I just wanted to see if there was a date or a name on the back of this thing. It might be worth a lot of money,”
I answered.

Howard stuck his phone in his pocket and walked over. Putting our hands on the sides of the dresser, we both pushed. As the ancient legs screeched across the floor, the smell increased tenfold. Once the dresser was moved, I could see a large hole punched out of the drywall hidden by the dresser. Ragged edges of plaster an
d lumber stuck out of the hole.

“Good God,” said Maggie, “that’s awful.” The odor came at us full force. I expected Howard to be all over this, but the paranormal aficionado see
med to be backing away from it.

I held my nose again and leaned over to put my head into to the hole. It was dark, but from the sparse light that filtered in from the outer room, I could see a large closet-type space. “Aunt Maggie, hand me your flashli
ght.”

“Here ya go.” She stuck her arm out and extended it as far as it would go, giving me the red plastic utility flashlight. I was sure my father was wandering around downstairs. He was probably trying to remember where the stairway was from his last visit to this h
ospital for a disturbance call.

I clicked the flashlight on and focused the be
am around the dusty inner room.