No Ghouls Allowed (23 page)

She was fully clothed, and I swore she was even wearing shoes, but her legs were mostly
covered with an afghan and there was a bandage on her head and a bruise under her
right eye. “We heard you had some trouble yesterday,” Beau said.

“Well, you heard right,” she told him, pulling at the afghan to better cover herself.
“I was just starting to feel better too when all that trouble started.” Then she seemed
to notice Heath and me and she added, “And who are these two, Beau? Did you bring
friends to see me?”

I stepped forward and offered her my hand. “Hi, Miss Porter. I’m Mary Jane Holliday,
and this is Heath Whitefeather. We’re assisting Deputy Breslow on an investigation
he’s working on.”

She took my hand, smiling and nodding, but then she stopped shaking my palm and looked
closely at me. “Did you say Holliday?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She put a hand to her lips. “You’re DeeDee’s daughter.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She stared at me and shook her head as if she couldn’t believe she was looking at
me. “You look so much like her,” she finally said. Her hands trembled a bit and she
attempted to cover it by pulling on her afghan again, then trying to smooth her hair.
“I . . . I wasn’t prepared to have guests,” she said, the lightest blush touching
her cheeks.

“We’re so sorry to intrude,” I told her.

“I loved your mother,” she said suddenly. “Dearly. We were once very, very close,
she and I.” She looked at me again and I saw her eyes water. “I miss her,” she said.
“Life just hasn’t been the same for me since she left, you know.”

I blinked hard myself. Her words moved me and I could only nod. She reached out a
tentative hand and put mine in hers. She closed her eyes and sighed, and it was such
a sad and strange moment. I’d never met Sarah Porter—of that I was certain—but she
had been so close to my mother and her love for her still clearly showed. After a
moment she opened her eyes again and attempted a smile. Then she let go of my hand
and fiddled with the buttons on her sweater.

Heath moved up next to me and extended his hand. “Nice to meet you, Miss Porter.”

She seemed a bit startled by his sudden appearance at her side, but she took his hand
and her smile broadened. “What a handsome man you are!” she exclaimed, then with a
wink added, “Are you single?”

He laughed and leaned a little against me. “Sorry, ma’am. I’m taken.”

She gave him a mock pout. “Just my luck.”

We all laughed. And then Breslow came forward a little more and I knew it was time
to get serious. “Miss Porter, we need to talk to you for a few minutes about something
that could be a little distressing. Is that okay?”

“Of course, Beau,” she said, and for emphasis she reached over to the bedside table
and lifted a bottle of pills. “They gave me happy pills today.”

I covered my mouth to hide a smile. What a sweet woman. “We need to ask you about
your cousin Everett Sellers,” Beau said.

A cloud came over Sarah’s face and her smile vanished. “Oh, that,” she said. “I take
it you found him.”

I was a little stunned by her statement. To me it meant she knew what’d happened to
him. “We did,” Beau said. “Can you tell us about that day, Sarah? The day he disappeared?”

She stared at her hands for a long time without answering and I wondered if she was
going to. At last she lifted her gaze to me, and there were tears in her eyes. “Do
you believe in signs?” she asked me.

“I do, Miss Porter,” I said, because that was the truth.

She nodded. “I thought you might. Before she died, your mother came to me, Mary Jane,
and she said that she would send me a sign someday. Something lovely. Something special.
Something I couldn’t miss. She told me that on the day that my sign came from her,
it would be time to tell the truth. And here you are, in the flesh. Something lovely.
Something special, and something I couldn’t miss. It’s time to tell the truth about
Everett, and I’m prepared to do that, but, Mary Jane, I have to ask you . . . are
you quite sure you want to hear it?”

I nearly faltered and my heart pounded in my chest. My mother was there that day.
I could see it in Sarah’s eyes. I swallowed hard, shored up my courage, and said,
“Yes.”

“Your mother figures into the story,” she added, as if that would make me change my
answer.

“I know she does,” I told her. That was the truth, too.

She nodded and went back to focusing on her hands, which continued to tug nervously
at the buttons on her sweater. “Everett was an evil, evil young man,” she began in
a voice barely above a whisper. “He liked to cause pain in others. Especially me.
The first summer he came to visit, I was seven and he was thirteen. He seemed to sense
that I was weak and he looked for many ways to taunt me. Torture me. Humiliate me
that summer, and as if that weren’t bad enough, he began to touch me in places and
force me to touch him in places that I knew were bad. Worst of all, he had my brother
watch.”

I balled my hands into fists. The thought of a seven-year-old as small and frail as
Sarah Porter must have been, being sexually abused like that while her brother stood
by and watched was so horrible, I could hardly stand it.

Sarah paused for a moment, as if the memory were still so close, it hurt her physically
to recall it. And then she continued. “It went on like that for weeks, but at last
he was sent home and I hoped it was for good, but the next summer he came back, only
this time he brought this terrible thing with him. It was a board game, he said, and
with it he could control the universe.”

Sarah lifted her chin to look at me. “By that time, Mary Jane, your mother had become
my dearest friend. I think she saw how fragile I’d become, and she was such a kind
girl, always nurturing sick and injured birds and bunnies back to good health. I think
she saw me as an injured little creature too, and certainly I was, because by that
time, my brother had taken to touching me in bad places too.”

I sucked in a breath and Heath wrapped an arm around my waist. Sarah must have been
so defenseless against the horrors inflicted upon her at such a young age.

“Anyway,” she went on, “DeeDee began spending more and more time at my house. I think
she sensed that I was in trouble and she did her best to protect me. And for a while,
she did. Although I never told her what was going on, she somehow sensed that my brother
was doing things to me, and she threatened him by saying that she’d tell my mother
if he didn’t leave me alone, and you knew your mother. Even at eight years old she
was a force to be reckoned with.

“Well, Glenn stopped preying on me, but then Everett came to visit again. He’d begged
his parents to come back and stay the summer with us, and as they had more money than
even we had, my mother obliged.

“At first I thought that maybe things would be okay between us, because he gave me
a present on the first day he was here. It was a beautifully painted board with a
silver disk that he said was magic. He said he’d show me how to play with it if I
was nice to him, and I was nice to him; I got him cookies and milk, and told him how
smart he looked in his new summer clothes.

“I was wary, of course, but I wanted so desperately for things to be normal that all
I could think to do was please him so that he wouldn’t hurt me again. And for several
days and nights things were normal. But then, one afternoon while your mother and
I were in my little playroom, having tea, the silver planchette that came with the
board began to move.

“Your mother and I sat there, scared to death and too frightened to even breathe!
The planchette swirled around, and around, and around on the board, always moving
in a particular pattern. First to the
S
, then to the
A
, then to the
N
, and on and on. I don’t know who said the word out loud first, if it was me or your
mother, but one of us eventually spoke its name. The second that happened, the room
erupted with an energy so intense, it knocked us both over. We were scrambling to
our feet when Everett suddenly burst into the room, laughing, and with him was my
brother, but it wasn’t my brother. It was something possessed. ‘Hello, kiddos,’ Glenn
said, but it wasn’t his voice—it was something else entirely. And then Everett grabbed
me, and my brother grabbed your mother, and they raped us both.”

I felt the blood drain from my face, and I tasted bile at the back of my throat while
my knees buckled. Heath held me up and attempted to move me over to a chair, but I
resisted and forced myself to stay put. If my mother could endure that unspeakable
violation, then I could damn well endure hearing about it.

If Sarah noticed my reaction, she gave no indication. She merely continued to stare
at her hands and recite what happened. “Afterward, your mother and I were left alone
to clean ourselves up. There was blood, you see, and tears. Everett took the board
and the planchette with him, and as he left the room, he let me know that he could
call up that evil spirit anytime he liked.

“DeeDee told him she was going to tell our parents what he and Glenn had done, but
Everett slapped her across the face and said that if either of us ever told anyone,
he’d have his evil spirit kill us, and we had no doubt that it would. He also told
her that he expected her to come back the next day, because, as he put it, ‘Why should
Glenn have all the fun?’”

I shuddered and felt sick to my stomach, and beyond that, an anger so intense it was
frightening churned in the middle of my chest, but I dared not move or speak and interrupt
the story. I had to know all of it. For myself and for Mama, I had to hear the full
story.

Sarah took a deep sad breath then, and continued. “DeeDee helped me clean myself up
even before she tended to herself, and then she ran home, and I knew by the way that
she hugged me at the door that she never planned on coming back. And for several days
she did stay away, but then one morning she came to the door, and I took one look
at her and I knew something terrible had been happening.

“She said that the evil spirit, the Sandman, that Everett had called forward had been
coming to her at night. He’d nearly killed her twice.”

Tears streamed down my face. I had never imagined my mother had been through something
so horrible, and it destroyed me that she’d endured all of that at such a young age.

“That day we hatched a plan,” Sarah said. For the first time since she’d started her
story, she looked up at Beau. “We never intended for anyone to get hurt. We simply
wanted to get the Ouija board away from Everett and destroy it. So, during my mother’s
party, while everyone out in the yard played croquet, DeeDee and I snuck up to Everett’s
room and gave it a thorough search. We found the board, but not the planchette, so
we brought it down to the playroom and were talking about how to destroy it, but DeeDee
said she was worried that destroying the board wouldn’t be enough. We needed the planchette,
she said, because she was convinced that it was the true source of Everett’s power
over his evil spirit.

“Somehow we needed to trick him into telling us where it was. I told her I knew just
how to do it, and I hurried up the stairs to my older brother Jack’s room.

“Jack was Mother’s favorite, but he was hardly a decent young man. He spent most of
his short youth addicted to drugs. They would make him loopy and you could ask him
anything when he was high and he’d tell you. I thought feeding some of my brother’s
drugs to Everett would make him confess where he’d hidden the planchette. I knew that
Jack hid his drugs in his room, which we were never allowed to go into, but I risked
it on that day because we were desperate, and found a stash of little white pills
hidden under his mattress. I brought these down and DeeDee and I then mashed them
into a powder and put them in the sugar bowl of my tea set, mixing it with a fair
amount of sugar to hide the powder. Then we went to the kitchen and made a batch of
very tart lemonade, telling our maid to pass a note to Everett when she saw him. We’d
asked Everett to meet us in the playroom, but he had to come alone.

“We then went back to the playroom and hoped that he obeyed the note. DeeDee and I
knew we were no match for my brother and Everett—drugs or no drugs, we’d be in real
trouble if they both showed up—but to our relief, Everett did arrive alone, wearing
a sick smile and toting a croquet mallet.

“We offered him some lemonade and he took a sip. When he made a face, and complained
about how sour it was, DeeDee calmly offered him some sugar, which she spooned into
his cup. She and I held our breath as Everett drank down the lemonade. It was a hot
day outside and he was sweaty from croquet.”

Sarah paused to take a sip of water from a glass at her bedside table. The irony of
the cup and its little red rose wasn’t lost on me. “Anyway,” she continued. “I’m sure
DeeDee and I expected the drugs to immediately take effect on Everett, but they didn’t,
well, at least not in the way we expected. Instead of getting sleepy and dopey, he
became agitated and angry. To this day I don’t know what drugs we gave him, but they
worked against us, not for us. I’ll never forget the way he turned to the door of
the playroom and shut it, locking us in. He then demanded that we take off all our
clothes.

“DeeDee refused and told him that she’d scream, and that’s when he reached into his
back pocket and pulled out the planchette. He waved it at us and laughed when we cried
out and scuttled back. He told us that all he had to do was say the Sandman’s name,
which he did three times, and in front of our eyes Everett turned into a demon.”

Sarah shuddered against the memory, and I recalled the face of the demon captured
very briefly by Beau’s camera. “He came at us,” Sarah continued, her voice barely
audible. “He attacked me first and bit my arm so cruelly, I thought I’d black out
from the pain. And then he was choking me . . . and then . . .”