Demon Hunting In a Dive Bar (7 page)

Beck opened her mouth to say something smart-aleck and shut it again. “No, I can’t, doggone it.”

“My instincts tell me he wants something. I would like to know what that something is. I am also curious to know how he found you after all these years.”

Her thoughts, exactly. Troubled, Beck gazed out the window. “Me, too.”

“And I would very much like to know why he smells of djegrali.”

“What?”
She snapped her head around to stare at him. “You’re wrong. The kith can’t be possessed.”

“I did not say he was possessed. I said he smelled of demon. A human that has been taken emits a foul odor, like rancid fat mixed with something rotten. Do you know this?”

“Yes,” Beck said, remembering the nauseating odor that had poured from Latrisse’s poor, ruined body when they’d found her. The putrid, oily smell had permeated Beck’s clothes and skin for days. “My best friend was possessed by a demon.” She curled her hands into fists in her lap. “By the time Toby and I found her, it was too late. So, yeah, I know what they smell like. It’s not something you forget.”

“You can say that again,” someone drawled from the rear of the vehicle. “My granddaddy had him a demon and hoo-doggie did he ever stink. I still remember that God-awful smell, and I been dead since Jesus was in short pants.”

The truck screeched to a halt in response to Conall’s unspoken command. Beck and Conall turned to look.

The ghostly figure of a man sat in the backseat of the pickup truck.

T
he ghost was slim and pale, with gleaming eyes the color of faded violets. A lock of blond hair fell over his white brow. He was handsome in formal attire—black jacket and slacks, white pleated shirt, and a black bow tie. Beck recognized him at once as the organist from Evie’s wedding.

“It seems we have a stowaway,” Conall said with a frown in his voice. “State your purpose, shade.”

“I’m William Blake Peterson,” the ghost said in his Bourbon and molasses accent. “But everybody calls me Junior.”

Beck had seen ghosts before, though not very often and never one this solid-looking. There was Lorraine, the wife of a steamboat captain, who haunted Jezebel Oaks plantation four miles up the Devil River. Float by the crumbling, abandoned mansion at twilight, and you might catch a glimpse of her watery figure keeping watch on the sagging balcony.

And a ghost named Hazel haunted Sardine Bridge, a creaky wooden structure located not far from Hannah in Robin-sonville. To summon Hazel, all you had to do was park on the bridge at midnight, call her name three times, and she’d appear. Or so the legend went.

As a teen, Beck had dismissed it as a silly story made up by silly norms to discourage their even sillier kids from hanging out at the river at night, where they might get snake-bit or drown.

Until the night she met Hazel face to face.

On a lark, Toby had driven her to Sardine Bridge late one evening when she was fifteen. They’d eased down the old logging road in Toby’s battered Ford Bronco. The gravel road was snaky and overgrown, seldom used anymore except by teenagers looking for a place to make out or party, or both.

Toby had parked and the engine grumbled to a halt. It was high summer, and the tree frogs and crickets played a raspy symphony in the thick, surrounding woods.
Dee-deep, dee-deep,
they called. The trees crowded along the riverbank and pressed against a night sky bright with stars, like shining bits of broken glass.

Somewhere in the ocean of green darkness an owl hooted a mournful song. Beck’s stomach jumped at the sound. There it was again, she remembered thinking, that feeling she sometimes got. Like something special, something wonderful and exciting, waited for her beyond the bar.

The humid air thickened with possibility. Seeing a ghost might not be wonderful, but at least it qualified as
something
. Sometimes, Beck got so
bored
at the bar she thought she’d lose her mind. And when she got bored, things had a way of happening, things that pissed off her daddy and made the norms edgy. Daddy didn’t like it when the customers got edgy.

Toby always seemed to sense when she was feeling restless and would step in with a suggested diversion, like a ghost hunting trip to Sardine Bridge.

Following Toby’s instructions, Beck had rolled down the passenger window and called Hazel’s name.

The bugs halted their music to listen. No answer but the watery chuckle of the river sliding beneath the bridge.

Ha-a-zel,
Beck called again. The excited feeling in her stomach faded, replaced by the niggling suspicion that she’d been had. This was beyond lame. But, at least they weren’t at the bar, so what the hell. She took a deep breath.

Ha-a-a-zel,
she’d hollered, one last time.

Nothing.

“Toby, you are such a jerk.” Flumping against the seat in a huff, Beck had glared at the gray-haired bouncer. “This is a crock of shit. I should’ve known you were jerking me around.”

Her heart jumped into her throat as a piercing scream shattered the night.

“Peacocks,” she’d said in a shaky voice, determined not to be taken in again. “Everybody knows they sound like a woman screaming.”

“That ain’t no peacock.” Toby pointed to a white, misty figure rising out of the river. “That’s Hazel.”

With a bloodcurdling screech, the ghost swooped over the bridge and through the windshield, her pale face stretched in a horrible death mask. She plunged through Beck and out the other side. It was like being doused with a bucket of water on the inside. Icy, cold water dipped from a never ending well of despair.

“No . . . cussing . . . on . . . my . . . bridge,” Hazel had said, punctuating each word with an icy pass through Beck’s body.

With a final shriek, Hazel flew out of the truck and dived back into the river. Beck doubled over, rubbing her aching midsection. She would have peed her pants, but her bladder was frozen.

“Oh, yeah. Probably should’ve warned you. Hazel can’t abide foul language,” Toby said in his lazy, country drawl. “She was a Sunday school teacher at the First Methodist Church until she died in a freak boating accident. I wouldn’t cuss no more on her bridge, if I was you.”

“Thanks,” Beck had muttered. “I’ll remember that.”

That had been her one and only attempt at ghost hunting. Sixteen years later, the memory of Hazel still made Beck’s insides quiver. Spectrophobia was an “abnormal and persistent fear of ghosts.” She’d looked it up. And, while her fear of ghosts wasn’t quite that manic, she had no desire for another Hazel-ectomy.

Bringing her thoughts back to the present, Beck eyed their ghostly hitchhiker with unease. One ice water enema in a lifetime was enough, thank you very much.

To her relief, Junior Peterson showed no inclination to swoop.

“You’re Rebekah Damian, the owner of Beck’s Bar, right?” he said, giving her a gentle smile.

His serene, slightly wan manner reminded Beck of Leslie Howard from
Gone With the Wind,
only younger and better looking.

“Uh, yeah.”

The ghost turned his eerie, shining gaze on Conall. “And you’re one of those demon hunters, aren’t you? I’ve met one of you a few weeks back. Big blond fellow.”

“My brother Ansgar,” Conall said with typical brevity. “What do you want?”

“A job.” Junior Peterson returned his attention to Beck. “You were at the wedding tonight. Did you enjoy the music?”

“Yes, it was real nice, but I’m not sure what—”

“I’ve heard that Beck’s is a place for our kind,” the ghost rushed on. “I was hoping maybe I could play piano there sometimes. In the afternoons, during the cocktail hour, maybe. You know, before the rowdies come in wanting something a little more lively.”

Beelzebubba’s raucous country rock sound was certainly more “lively” than the highfalutin music Peterson had played at the church. The kith would jump in the river if he started playing that classical stuff.

Not necessarily a bad thing, depending on the kith. Beck liked most of her customers, but there were a few she could do without, like the Skinners. Look up the word “trouble” in the dictionary and you’d find a picture of the Skinners; God’s truth.

“It’s a bar for supernaturals,” she said. “Not ghosts.”

Junior sat up straight. “So what am I, dog poop?”

“He has a point,” Conall said. “In my opinion, the disembodied spirit of a dead person certainly falls in the category of the supernatural.”

“Nobody asked you,” Beck said.

“You wouldn’t have to pay me.” Junior’s pale eyes glowed. “I’d work for free and a place to stay.”

What he meant was a place to
haunt
. Logically speaking, a ghost at the bar shouldn’t bother her, not when she had a dead guy working the door. But it did. The incident with Hazel had scarred her. I’m prejudiced against ghosts, she thought.
So, sue me.

“I thought you lived at the church,” she said aloud, hedging.

“Heavens, no.” Junior gave his cuffs an affronted twitch. “Evie invited me to play at her wedding, but I haven’t had a place to stay since my house burned.”

The lightbulb went off in Beck’s head. “Whoa, you’re one of
those
Petersons? The ones with all the money and the—”

She broke off with a little cough of embarrassment.

“—scandal,” Junior said, finishing her sentence for her. “Yes, I’m one of them.”

“Your granddaddy was the timber magnate,” Beck said, awed and a little star struck. The Petersons were
the
family in Hannah, the richest, most powerful, and most influential family in Behr County. Their social standing had waned a bit due to recent events, but they were still plenty loaded. “And you’re saying he had a demon?”

“Oh, my, yes,” Junior said. “He was in his thirties when he got possessed. I reckon that old demon was just looking for a good time, but Granddaddy had other ideas. Cole Peterson was much a man, and ambitious. He liked the power the demon gave him. He latched on to that old demon and wouldn’t let go. Together, they built the Peterson fortune.”

“Ansgar has told me of this,” Conall said. “ ’Tis most unusual. The demon and Cole Peterson merged, somehow, trapping the demon in Peterson’s body. The demon could not escape and Peterson could not die, though the fiend steadily consumed his body from within. When he could no longer conceal his obvious state of deterioration, Peterson faked his death and the family hid him beneath the house in a secret chamber. He resided there until—”

He paused, as though remembering their “guest.”

“Until the fire,” Junior said with a nod. “My parents and my grandfather died when the house burned. Truth is, wasn’t much left of Granddaddy Cole by that time. He’d had that demon so long he was a shriveled-up fig with legs.”

The Peterson mansion had been reduced to ashes. Mop Webb, a shifter and a volunteer fireman who worked for the beverage company that made deliveries at the bar, had told Beck that an old furnace beneath the house exploded.

“It was a terrible fire,” Beck said. “I saw the pictures in the paper.”

“Uh-huh.” Junior sat back and folded his hands in his lap. He had slender hands with long, artistic fingers; the hands of a concert pianist. Or, at least the kind of hands Beck imagined a concert pianist would have. Junior was her first. Like dragons, highbrow types were scarce at Beck’s. “If you read the paper, then I reckon you know about Mama’s letter, too,” Junior said.

Of course she knew about the letter. It was all anybody in the bar had talked about for
days.
Heck, folks were still buzzing about it. There hadn’t been this much excitement in Behr County since the boll weevil devastated the cotton crops back at the turn of the twentieth century.

Clarice Peterson had left a letter in her safe-deposit box confessing to the murder of Meredith Starr Peterson, her grandson’s socialite wife. Beck knew Meredith only by reputation but, according to all accounts, Meredith Peterson had been a bitch on wheels. Evie Douglass had been a suspect in the murder investigation until Trey—Meredith’s husband and the heir to the Peterson fortune—had made a dramatic announcement in court that
he’d
killed Meredith.

People had been buzzing about that, too. Real
Lifetime for Women
stuff. Scuttlebutt was Trey had a thing for Evie.

Must’ve been a big thing, if he was willing to cop to his wife’s murder and go to jail for her.

The police were still holding him for questioning when they found Clarice’s letter confessing to Meredith’s murder.

That was juicy, but there’d been more. Clarice had aired all the Peterson dirty laundry in that letter. By her account, Blake Peterson—Junior’s father and Clarice’s husband—was an abusive, philandering hound dog who’d beaten and bullied her for more than forty-five years. Clarice claimed she’d killed Meredith with one of Blake’s fancy collector knives to frame him for murder and even the score. Worse, to hear Clarice tell it, Blake was a sadistic son of a bitch who’d been murdering women for years to get his jollies.

Blake could hardly deny it. He’d died in the fire with Clarice. The paper said the matter was under investigation, and that’s as much as anybody knew about it.

Yes sir, that letter had caused quite a stir. But, this was the first Beck had heard about Old Man Peterson still being alive the night of the fire.

“I thought Cole Peterson was dead,” she said. “I thought he died years and years ago.”

“There’s dead and then there’s dead,” Junior said with a forlorn smile. “Granddaddy and that demon were well and truly caught. Like a fox in a snare, only there was no chewing off a leg to get out of the trap. See, if he died, the demon died, and the demon wasn’t having any part of that. So it held on, and they had to fake Cole’s death to avoid a lot of uncomfortable questions. In the end, Granddaddy was dried up and brittle as a dead cockroach.” The ghost’s body wavered briefly, and Beck realized he’d shuddered. “It was a mercy, if you ask me, when Mama burned the place down, even if it did leave me homeless.”

“Your mother must have been desperate to do those things,” Beck said, thinking of Meredith’s murder and the horrible fire.

“Yes, she was.” Junior’s voice was sad. “Quite desperate, for a long time.”

“What about you?” Beck asked without thinking. “How did you die?”

The temperature inside the cab of the truck abruptly plummeted. Oops, somebody had their ectoplasmic knickers in a twist.

“It’s impolite to ask a ghost about their demise.” Junior’s voice was stiff with displeasure. “You wouldn’t ask a demonoid about their possessed parent, would you?”

“Sorry,” Beck said. “I’m not up on my spook etiquette.”

“We don’t like the term ‘spook,’ either,” Junior said in the same frosty tone. “If you’re really sorry, give me a job.”

Beck swallowed a sigh. This day had started out like any other. Where had it gone wrong? Her gaze moved to Conall and stuck.

He raised a quizzical brow at her. “Why do you glare at me?”

“I was wondering exactly where my day went to shit,” she said, “and remembering that it started to go south right after
you
showed up.”

He chuckled. The sound was deep and rich, and it made her stomach do the squishy thing again. She didn’t know who she was madder at, him or herself.