No Ghouls Allowed (17 page)

“Yes. We think so,” I admitted. “And this particular evil spirit is one of the most
powerful I’ve ever encountered, and if you knew what Heath and I have been through
in the last few years, you’d know that is saying a lot.”

The room fell silent while Beau and Kogan pondered that with nervous expressions.
Finally, Kogan said, “How do we destroy it?”

My gaze fell to the floor. I couldn’t believe I’d had such a good opportunity to drive
a magnetic spike through the board the day before and missed it. Then again, when
Heath and I first encountered the board, we hadn’t had any stakes on us, and projectiles
were being lobbed at our heads, so perhaps I could give myself a break. Lifting my
gaze, I said, “First we have to find the Ouija board.”

Kogan’s mouth fell open. “It’s missing?”

I nodded. “Along with Everett’s body, the board and the planchette are both gone.”

“Sweet Jesus,” Kogan whispered. I noticed his arms were lined with goose pimples.
“Y’all have to hunt that thing down, Mary Jane.”

“We know, Sheriff.”

At that moment a nurse came into the room. “Are you all still in here?” she asked
a bit tersely. “Deputy, I told you not to stay too long. Sheriff Kogan needs his rest!”

Breslow, Heath, and I all adopted guilt-ridden faces. But Kogan said, “Now, now, Brenda,
don’t be too hard on them. I’m the one keepin’ them.”

Nurse Ratched crossed her arms and looked at us sternly.

“I think she means business,” Heath muttered. Turning to Kogan, he said, “You get
some rest, Sheriff, and we’ll keep at it.”

Kogan laid a hand on his arm and said, “Thank you, Heath. Take the Sellers file with
you, though. You’ll need to review who was there on the day that boy went missing.
And especially who was playing croquet.”

We waved our farewells to Kogan and headed quickly past the irritated nurse. Once
in the hallway, Beau said, “Levi is down this way.”

Heath and I walked solemnly behind the deputy to a room way on the other end of the
hospital. I don’t know what I expected, a guard at the door maybe? But the corridor
was empty, and when we stepped into Deputy Cook’s room, he lay there alone and pale
with an IV in his arm and his eyes closed.

I was about to ask Beau why there was no guard posted, because, to my mind, Cook could
wake up at any moment and start attacking people, but then I noticed that both his
wrists were strapped to the bed, and just under the covers, I saw another strap securing
his chest. He wasn’t going anywhere.

While Beau hung back with a pained look on his face, Heath and I stepped forward.
I opened up my senses and tried to feel if there was any evil spirit hovering close
to Cook, but I sensed nothing. With a nod to Heath I unzipped my fishing vest and
handed it to Beau. “Hold that, will you? And if he does anything freaky, throw that
to me.”

Heath did the same and then the two of us approached Levi, again very cautiously,
and again I opened up my senses. I felt that Heath was doing the same, because the
energy around us sort of expanded and became charged.

This is a technique that my sweetheart and I had all but perfected. When two psychics
work together, their joined forces can act as a booster to the kinetic energy that
surrounds them. It can make the act of reaching out to the other side, or even to
grounded spirits, that much easier. We’d been using it a lot together on our most
recent ghostbusts, but it also came in handy for the occasional joint readings we
gave to clients, and Heath and I had actually talked about doing some group readings
using this technique, just to give it some good exercise.

“You want to take the lead?” Heath asked me, and I smiled because I could sense the
energy of a woman who’d sort of been alerted to the shift in energy of the room, and
she’d stepped forward to look first at Heath, then me, as if deciding whom to communicate
with. I’d felt her make her decision and approach me. “Sure,” I said. Then I addressed
the spirit directly when I felt her introduce herself. Her name came to me in two
parts that sounded like “Sill” and “Vee” and I extrapolated to put the name together.
“Hello, Sylvia,” I said aloud. “I’m Mary Jane, and that’s Heath. Are you connected
to Levi?”

I felt rather than heard her affirmation that she was connected to the deputy, and
she showed me a tree with several branches, moving up to the second tier. “She’s his
grandmother,” I said. Sylvia then tapped me on the left shoulder, which is where I’ve
always put the male side of the family. “She’s his paternal grandmother,” I said.

“Oh my God,” Beau whispered. “Are you talking to his grandma Sylvie?”

I smiled at Beau. I’d missed on the name a little. “Yes, Beau. She’s indicating that
she knows you too.”

“That’s true!” he said.

“She’s showing me lemon cakes,” I told him.

“Whoa!” he said. “When Levi first joined the department, Sylvie used to bring by her
famous lemon cakes. They were so good,” he sighed. “Will you tell her I always thought
she baked the best lemon cake in Valdosta?”

I felt Sylvie laugh. “She says thank you,” I told him. Sylvie had heard him quite
clearly, but I understood how he assumed I’d need to relay the message.

Sylvie then pointed to her grandson, and I felt her leave my side and move over to
hug him. “She’s very worried about him,” I said, wincing a little because I could
see the bruise at his temple where I’d clocked him with Kogan’s gun.

“Does he still have that evil spirit inside of him?” Beau asked.

I focused intently on Sylvie. If anyone would be able to sense that, it would be her.
Her answer greatly troubled me. “She says not entirely, but there’s a remnant of it
that’s keeping him asleep.”

“It’s okay, Beau,” I heard Heath say, and I looked up at him only to find him staring
at Breslow. When I glanced at the deputy, I could see he’d gone pale and was holding
our vests close to his already fully protected chest.

“How do you know he’s not gonna wake up and start actin’ all possessed again?” Beau
said.

I focused again on Levi and Sylvie. “He’s in a dormant state,” I said. It was the
best translation I could find. His grandmother was indicating that Levi was still
in danger from being taken over by the Sandman, but at the moment he really was totally
unconscious. And then Sylvie helped me to understand the demon himself. “Oh, my God,”
I said. “That’s why he calls himself the Sandman.”

“Wait. What’d I miss?” Heath asked.

I pointed to Levi but looked to Beau. My next question would be aimed at him. “The
doctors can’t figure out why he won’t wake up, right?”

“That’s right. They say they can’t see any brain bleeding or damage from the knock
to his head you gave him.”

I grimaced at the reminder, but went on to explain. “The Sandman from childhood fables
goes around at night and puts sand in your eyes while you sleep, right? Supposedly
helping you get a better night’s sleep, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Yeah, somethin’ like that,” Beau agreed.

“Well, this Sandman will keep you asleep until he’s ready to take your body over again,”
I said, and I couldn’t suppress the shudder that snaked its way up my spine.

“Whoa,” Heath and Beau said together. “That’s bad, Em,” Heath added.

“Yep,” I agreed. Again I felt Sylvie come close to me and she all but implored me
to help her grandson. For several seconds I communicated with her silently, letting
her know I’d do my best, but I could still sense the worry she had for him as she
drifted back to Levi’s side, and it left me feeling unsettled. At last I felt her
energy begin to fade, and in a wink, she was gone again.

A moment later I heard Heath say, “Did she give you any ideas about how to fight the
Sandman before she left?”

I shook my head. “No. She was trying to pump a lot of energy into her grandson to
help him resist the next possession, assuming there is one, and she ran out of energy
before she could tell me more.”

Beau’s phone rang and the ringtone made us all jump. “Sorry,” he said, lifting it
from his belt to look at the display. “I’ll take this outside,” he added, setting
our vests on the floor and ducking out to the hallway.

Heath and I walked over to our vests and started to shrug into them. Mine felt very
heavy, but maybe that was because I was just so weary.

“You okay?” Heath asked.

I realized he’d been studying me as I got into my vest. “Yeah. I guess. I’m just tired.
It’s been a long three days.”

He nodded and reached over to pull me into his arms for a supportive hug. I loved
how well Heath seemed to read me. Sometimes I needed him to be close and sometimes
I needed my personal space, and he always seemed to intuitively know, at any given
moment, which way I was leaning. I sighed into his chest and he rocked me from side
to side. “We’ll be okay,” he said, giving the top of my head a kiss.

I so wanted to believe him, but I was facing Levi Cook, lying unconscious in that
bed, and I couldn’t help but worry. With another sigh I forced my gaze to move away
from the deputy. As Heath continued to rock me, my eyes drifted over to the bedside
table. There was a pitcher there with a cup next to it, and I thought it was so stupid
to put those next to an unconscious man who was currently strapped to the bed . . .
but then something about the pitcher caught my eye.

It was a simple plastic pitcher with a small red rose on the side, and it felt so
familiar in the way that reminded me of something. . . .

“Ohmigod!” I gasped.

Heath stood back but held my shoulders. “What’s the matter? Are you okay?”

My breath was coming in short bursts and I moved out of his arms and over to the side
table to pick up the pitcher and study the red flower. “The tea set in the playroom,”
I began, chills running up and down my spine. Quickly, I set down the pitcher and
pulled out my cell, flipping through the photos, hunting for a particular sequence
of images. I wanted to be wrong, but I knew that I wasn’t. “The second I first saw
that tea set,” I explained to Heath while I searched, “something about it seemed so
weirdly familiar, but I couldn’t figure out where I’d seen it before. I just realized
I haven’t seen it before. I’ve only seen a small piece of it.”

“I’m not sure I follow,” Heath said, coming over to me.

At last my finger landed on an image of the tea set and I bit my lip, because displayed
there was exactly the thing that had been troubling me. Or rather, the absence of
the thing that had been troubling me. “The tea set on this table is missing its sugar
bowl,” I told him, and turned the image around so that he could see the tea set, with
its three cups, saucers, teapot, and creamer. But no sugar bowl, which I knew would’ve
completed the set. And just to make sure I wasn’t wrong, I expanded the image a little
with my fingers to note the fourth cup and saucer on the bookshelf right behind the
table. All the pieces of the tea set were visible in the image except the sugar bowl.

“Why is a missing sugar bowl important, Em?”

“Because I know exactly where it is. Was. Or at least, I think I know.”

“Where?”

“On the vanity in my mother’s dressing room.”

Heath considered me for a long moment before he spoke. “What would the missing sugar
bowl be doing on your mother’s vanity?”

I bit my lip, feeling I’d just discovered something about my mother that I wished
I hadn’t. “She used to keep our ponytail holders in it. Mama had very long hair—well,
until the chemo made it all fall out—but she used to keep this little dish on her
vanity with our elastics in it and she’d braid my hair, then pull hers back into a
ponytail. I loved that little dish, because it was small and delicate, and while she
braided my hair, I used to hold it up and admire it. It had two little handles and
a pink rose on the side and gold around the rim and along the bottom.”

“Maybe it came from a similar set,” Heath said, but I could tell he thought it was
really odd that my mother had a little sugar bowl on her vanity and the tea set from
the playroom was missing only one thing—its sugar bowl.

I looked up at the ceiling, feeling like I wanted to cry. “I wish I thought it was
only a coincidence, Heath,” I whispered.

“Em,” he said, taking my hands and pulling my attention back to him. “It probably
is. I mean, there had to have been lots of those tea sets sold around the time your
mom was a little girl, right? Maybe she and someone at the Porters’ had the exact
same tea set. Maybe it’s just a crazy fluke that there’s no sugar bowl in this photo,
and one on your mom’s vanity.”

I nodded, but I was worried all the same. I didn’t want my mother to have a connection
to any of this mess, and the fact that I’d encountered her as a little girl being
haunted by the Sandman was still really bothering me.

“Hey,” Heath said when my gaze began to travel back up to the ceiling again. “Did
your mom even know the Porters? I mean, it sounds like they were pretty snobby, right?
Maybe they hung with their own crowd and she and they never even met.”

“It’s possible,” I said, but I still felt a terrible nagging in the pit of my stomach.
“We’ve got to find out for sure, though, Heath. We’ve got to make sure Mama was nowhere
near any of this.”

At that moment the door swung open and Beau came into the room. He saw us huddled
over in the corner and said, “You guys okay?”

I pocketed my cell. “Yeah. Fine. Everything okay on your end?”

Beau blushed slightly. “Yeah. My sister is eight months pregnant and her husband is
overseas on his second tour of duty, so my two brothers and I are filling in if Carrie
needs anything. This week it’s my turn and she wants me to bring her some onion rings
and a cupcake.”

Heath and I both smiled. “Cravings, huh?” I asked.

Beau nodded. “She can’t get enough of that combo. Anyway, speaking of cravings, y’all
hungry? I figure we can grab lunch and pick up my sister’s order in one shot. Two
birds and one stone, you know?”

“Sounds good to me,” I said, a little shocked by how hungry I suddenly was.

“Great,” he said. We can talk about strategy over lunch.”

•   •   •

Beau drove us to Patsy’s, a delicious Southern-home-cooking-style restaurant that
was an old favorite of mine. Heath and I ordered the battered tilapia with grits and
collard greens, and Beau ordered a slab of ribs. Over the meal we talked mostly about
the missing-persons file on Everett Sellers. “
This
is the list of guests at the Porter house on the day he went missing?” I asked. There
were at least twenty names on the list, with their corresponding ages. I breathed
a huge sigh of relief when I didn’t see the name of my mother there.

“Yep,” Beau said. “If you look at that first witness testimony, you’ll see that Regina
Porter was throwing a luncheon for the society ladies that afternoon. Many of them
had brought their children over to play, and it turned into a small party.”

I skimmed several statements only to realize that most of the ladies who’d attended
the luncheon had left about an hour before Everett was last seen. I pointed this out
to Heath and Beau. “And besides all of that, we now know that the room where Everett
was killed was intentionally boarded up, meaning someone in the Porter family had
to know that Everett was murdered inside the house and likely by whom.”

“The Porters had four kids,” Beau said, obviously more familiar with the Porters than
I was. “Jack, the oldest, died in a car accident when he was seventeen. He was Regina’s
favorite, and from what I hear, she never got over it. She spent most of her later
years locked up in that big ol’ house wearing black till the day she died.

“The next oldest was Molly. She went to work for her daddy, who was one of the meanest
sons of bitches you’d ever want to meet. My own mama worked for him as a secretary
for a few years, and he wore her down to a nub. She finally got the courage to quit
on him, and he made sure nobody in town would hire her. For a lot of years after that,
it was lean times at our house.”

I noted the hint of bitterness in Beau’s voice as he spoke about Winston Porter III,
who I’d also heard was as mean and vindictive an old coot as ever there was one. Daddy
had once had a run-in with him, and the two spat at each other for months afterward.

“Things got a little better when old man Porter died,” Beau continued. “I wasn’t on
the force back then, but Kogan was. Some sort of accident at the home, from what I
remember. Porter liked to drink and he ended up falling down that big ol’ staircase.
Made a hell of a mess from what Kogan told me.”

I scowled, wishing Beau hadn’t been quite so descriptive while we were eating lunch.

“Molly Porter was close in age to Everett—she was fifteen when he went missing—but
she was off at some friend’s house that day, and only heard about it when she got
home and saw all the police cars at her house.”

“Still, she’s someone we may want to interview,” I said.

Beau shook his head. “Well, you can interview her if you want, but I can’t.”

“Why not?” Heath asked.

“Because she’s dead. She killed herself a few years before her daddy died. It was
Kogan’s first case, actually. He’ll tell you about it if you ask him, but I got the
lowdown from another source.”

“Who?”

“Mama. Like I said, Porter was a mean son of a bitch and Mama said he was always hardest
on Molly. She was still working for him the day it happened. Mama told me that Molly
and old man Porter had a hell of a fight that day and then Molly locked herself in
her office. An hour or so later, there was this loud crash outside and everybody ran
out of the building to find the poor girl had thrown herself out the window and landed
on her daddy’s car.”

“That’s one way to make a statement,” Heath said with a wince.

“What was his reaction?” I asked.

Beau paused and looked down. Wearing a bitter scowl, he said, “He called her a dumb
bitch and yelled at her dead body until Kogan showed up and pulled him away from there.
Mama said he was more upset about the car than he was about his own daughter commitin’
suicide.”

The pit of my stomach was filled with fury for poor Molly. “What a horrible man.”

“He was,” Beau agreed. “Mama quit a week afterward. He just disgusted her.”

“Okay, so Molly and Jack aren’t around, and neither is old man Porter or his wife.
Who does that leave?”

“Well, Glenn Porter is still alive. He handled the sale of the house to Mrs. Bigelow,
but from what I hear, the house was in a trust left to him and his sister Sarah.”

I lit up when Beau mentioned her. “And how old was she at the time of Everett’s murder?”

“Should be in the file,” Beau said, wiping his sticky hands on his napkin and about
to reach for the thick folder.

I was afraid he’d get barbecue sauce all over it, so I grabbed it first and began
to look through the papers. “She was eight,” I said, and again that tickle of unsettling
energy pricked its way up my spine.

“Would an eight-year-old still be playing with a tea set?” Heath asked. I knew where
he was going. He thought the playroom might’ve belonged to Sarah.

“With a set as gorgeous as the one we found in the playroom?” I said. “Definitely.”

“Could she have killed Everett?” Heath asked no one in particular.

We all considered that. “It’s possible,” I said. “And it would explain why the family
covered up the playroom and directed the investigation away from the house.”

“Who was it that saw Everett walking away into the woods?” Heath asked next.

I flipped through more of the file. “It says here that it was Glenn Porter who was
the last person to see Everett alive.”

“So he’s lying,” Heath said.

“Could be,” said Beau. “And he’s still around to interview.”

“We should talk to the sister Sarah too,” I said. I felt an almost urgent need to
speak with her about a few things, like why my mother possibly had the sugar bowl
from her tea set. Try as I might, I simply couldn’t dismiss the coincidence.

Beau opened his mouth to say something, but at that moment his phone rang and he took
one look at the screen and answered it. “Breslow,” he said briskly. And then I saw
the shocked and alarmed expression on his face and a moment later he was on his feet,
yanking out bills from his pocket to throw onto the table. “We gotta go,” he said,
motioning for us to run with him to the car.

Heath and I didn’t hesitate, but on the way I said, “What’s happened?”

“There’s an incident at the state psychiatric hospital,“ he said, reaching his car
door and throwing it open. “One dead and several others injured.”

Heath and I both stopped short before getting into the car, stunned by the announcement.
“A shooting?” Heath asked.

Breslow waved at us impatiently. “No! Now would you get in?”

We obeyed, but before I closed the door, I said, “Beau, what kind of an incident is
happening over there?”

“That’s just it, Mary Jane. No one really knows. Cisco is dead, two nurses are being
rushed to the hospital, and three other patients have had serious injuries.”

“If it’s not a shooter, what is it?” I pressed, closing the door when Breslow threw
the car into reverse and shot us backward out of the parking space.

“Nobody knows,” he said. “Wells is over there right now, and he says it’s pandemonium.
He says patients all over the place are going berserk, attacking nurses, workers . . .
anybody who moves. He also said that when he got there, all the doors were slamming
all over the hospital, just like at Porter Manor yesterday.”

“The Sandman,” I said breathlessly.

“Shit,” Heath swore, leaning down to pick up his duffel bag of spikes. I took a few
from him when he handed them to me.

As we were getting prepared, Breslow’s radio crackled with sound. He picked up the
mic and spoke rapidly into it. I didn’t understand a word of it as it was mostly in
police code.

Very shortly thereafter we arrived at the hospital and came to an abrupt halt behind
several other cruisers. Wells popped up from behind one of the cars and hurried over
to us, huddling down next to Breslow’s window. “I don’t know what the hell is going
on in there, Beau, but it’s bad!”

Even from inside the cruiser we could hear the sound of doors slamming on all three
floors of the building. They were slamming in rhythm, a four-four beat, and it was
so creepy that I wanted to cover my ears and block out the sound.

“Who’s still in there?” Breslow said, pulling out his sidearm and checking the chamber.

“I’d say at least a half dozen patients. We got most of the staff out, but Debra said
that she’s still getting calls from folks stuck in the building. They’re hiding under
desks and in cabinets.”

“Do we know if anybody’s armed?”

“Not that we can tell. Mostly they’ve been picking up the furniture and throwing it
around.”

I looked toward the building and my gaze fell on something out of place on top of
an industrial-sized air-conditioning unit. “Ohmigod, is that . . . ?” I said, pointing.

“Don’t look,” Wells told me. “That’s Cisco. He threw himself out the third-floor window.
Crashed right through the glass.” The deputy paused to shake his head as if he couldn’t
believe it. “I mean, that glass is triple paned. You’re not supposed to be able to
go through it!”

“Why is he still on the unit?” Breslow snapped, pointing to the air conditioner. “You
guys just left him there?”

“Beau,” Wells said, “you gotta understand. This is like a scene out of a zombie movie
or something—I mean, wait until you see some of these guys in there! Their eyes are
all buggy and most of them are foaming at the mouth and growling like some kinda rabid
coyote!”

Wells looked totally freaked-out, and I knew he didn’t want to go anywhere near the
building with its mysterious slamming doors and possibly possessed patients.

And, judging by the way Breslow’s pistol-wielding hand was shaking, he didn’t want
to go in there either. That’s when Heath squeezed my hand, then motioned for Wells
to open the back door for us, and we got out. “Breslow,” he said to Beau. “You got
a Taser I can borrow?”

The deputy reached inside his glove box and pulled out a wicked-looking instrument.
He then pressed the yellow button on the side, which ignited a loud spark of electricity
between two metal points at the top, before handing it to Heath. “If one of them comes
within three feet of you, hold that up under their neck until they drop. You got it?”

“Got it,” Heath said, taking the Taser. Then he turned to me. “Let me take point,”
he said, shoving several spikes into his waistband with one hand while holding tight
to the Taser with the other. “You stick close behind and if anything happens to me,
you run like hell.”

“Right,” I agreed, but no way would I ever leave Heath behind. If we were going in
together, we were coming out together.

Breslow surprised us when he got out of the car with Gilley’s fishing vest, which
he put on before stepping forward to stand next to me. “You’re coming with us?” I
asked him, a bit surprised.