No Ghouls Allowed (6 page)

Mrs. G.’s brow rose with interest. “And what did you find?”

I squirmed, picking my words carefully. “Nothing definitive. I’ll probably do a little
more background research before I go back for another look.”

“We’re going back?” Gilley squeaked, and when his mother raised her skeptical eyes
to the rearview mirror, Gilley blushed and flashed her a toothy, innocent smile.

“I think we might have to, Gil,” I said, turning slightly in my seat to look at him.
“Christine sank a lot of money into buying that old place, and I can’t very well let
her keep sending crews there who might get hurt. I think we’ll need to figure out
what’s causing the activity and do our best to clear it.”

Gilley frowned and settled down into the seat for a good pout. Heath’s expression
was unreadable, and I suspected that he felt a little conflicted about committing
ourselves to another encounter at Porter Manor. I knew he knew I was right, but still,
it’d be dangerous work; of that we could both be sure.

“We’ll have to gear up,” he said at last. “We’ll need some spikes and some vests.”

My sweetheart was referring to the magnetic spikes we used to close up the portals
the more evil spooks utilized to float between the lower planes and our plane of existence.
Not all ghosts are bad, of course. In fact most spooks are quite harmless albeit somewhat
annoying at times. Those spirits were often easy to deal with through conversation
and persistence and a reminder that their bodies had stopped living, and it was time
for their spirits to go on home.

The ones we had to be cautious of were the evil spooks who had no interest in crossing
to the other side, or what most people thought of as heaven. These more malevolent
souls enjoyed causing mayhem, and some even lusted for hurting the living. These spirits
were especially dangerous because most of them had figured out how to create a portal—a
hole between two planes of existence—that they could travel through, and they’d spend
much of their time on a lower plane, where most dark energies lurk. Here, they could
gain power and know-how, and plot against the living.

Often the only way to stop these spooks was to shut down their portals and lock them
into the lower realms, and to do this we used magnetic spikes, which, when driven
directly into the center of a spook’s portal, would cause total havoc with the electromagnetic
energy that held the portal open, and it would disintegrate and collapse, leaving
the spook safely locked on the other side.

Heath, Gilley, and I had encountered more than our fair share of these rather rare
entities, and all of them had been incredibly difficult to deal with, but somehow
we’d managed to shut them all down. Each really creepy spook taught us something about
dealing with the next, and I had to admit that we’d become very good at tackling even
the scariest of entities.

And even though we’d only encountered a bunch of slamming doors and a big creepy shadow,
something told me that whatever was haunting Porter Manor would require all of that
expertise and, of course, some ghostbusting equipment.

For added protection we usually wore our bubble vests, which were ordinary down vests
with much of the down in the front removed and replaced with magnets. “We’ll need
to get some bubble vests,” I said, thinking out loud.

“Where the hell are we going to find a bubble vest during the summer?” Gilley complained.
“It’s June, M.J. It’s not like they’re at the local department store.”

“I might have the perfect solution,” Mrs. G. said with a sneaky grin.

I eyed her curiously, but she didn’t give up any more details.

“We’ll need more than just the vests,” Heath said from the back. “Maybe we should
have someone in Boston send us some of our equipment.”

“Yeah!” Gil said. “M.J., call Teeko and see if she can send us our stuff.”

Teeko was my best girlfriend, Karen. She’d gotten the nickname Teeko from Gilley,
who’d elongated it slightly from TKO, total knockout, which appropriately described
my bestie.

“I’ll call her as soon as we get back,” I said.

“Have her send the Smasher!” Gil insisted, tapping my shoulder.

“The Smasher?” his mother repeated. “My goodness, Gilley, what’s that?”

“It’s an invention Michel came up with,” Gilley told her, realizing that if he explained
what the Super Spooker Smasher really was (an improvised tennis racket strung with
magnetized wires), she’d catch on that we were dealing with something pretty intense—aka
dangerous.

“What kind of invention?” Mrs. G. pressed.

“One that compresses the electromagnetic frequency of any ghost we come across,” Gil
replied easily. I had to hand it to him; the explanation was both accurate and a bit
misleading.

“Why would you need to do that?” she asked next.

“If they’re in a heightened state, Mama, it calms them down.”

I almost laughed. By “heightened state,” Gilley really meant “about to kill us,” and
“calms them down” was code for “squishes them like a bug.”

“Ah,” said his mother with a nod, and I swore everyone else in the car breathed a
sigh of relief.

Mrs. G. chatted with us amicably for the rest of the ride and at last we arrived at
her home, a lovely sprawling ranch with a stone facade, black-stained trim, and the
most gorgeous garden both in front and back. Mrs. G. loved to get her hands dirty,
and nothing gave her greater pleasure than playing in her massive gardens. That love
showed, because everywhere I looked, flowers were bursting with blooming joy.

The scent of gardenia, a favorite of mine, hung heavily in the air, as dozens of monarch
butterflies flittered drunkenly on the fumes while feasting on the coral blooms of
butterfly weed, purple coneflower, and blue salvia.

For a moment I stood at the entrance of the walk leading up to Mrs. G.’s and simply
allowed myself to drink in the scene with all its beauty and heavenly scent. In that
moment I felt the softest touch on the edge of my energy and I knew my mother was
close. She had loved to garden too, and it was one of the things that had made me
feel especially close to Mrs. Gillespie in the early days after I’d lost her, a time
when I was so broken and muted with sadness. Back then, Mrs. G. would pick me and
Gilley up from school and bring us here to help her weed or water or feed the gardens,
and held within such a gorgeous nurturing setting, I’d felt a semblance of security
and peace that no other place at that time could have possibly afforded me.

I’d also felt my mother’s presence almost constantly here. She seemed to know how
much I missed her and needed her close, because her spirit floated on the edge of
my energy for many months after she passed. I always felt it the most clearly right
in these gardens.

“Em,” Heath whispered, sidling up next to me on my left. “Your mom is like, right
behind you. I think she’s trying to hug you.”

I laughed and also felt my eyes mist. It was incredible to me that I should be so
lucky to have found someone like Heath, who understood more than anyone else ever
could what it was like being a medium, and also who freely gave his impressions to
me when I most needed a confirmation. “I can feel her,” I told him. “She used to be
a regular here.”

He grinned, but then his smile faltered. “Your mom has an urgent message for you.”

The second before Heath had spoken, I felt a shift in the ether around us, as if Mama
had gone from being playful to super serious in the span of an instant. “What is it?”
I asked, turning to face him.

Heath’s eyes shifted to the right, as if he were listening to someone next to him.
“She says that something’s going to happen soon that will change how you feel about
her, but she wants you to remember the love you feel for her right now, because she’s
giving it back to you tenfold. She’s afraid you’ll turn away from her—”

“What?” I interrupted. “That’s crazy. I’d never do that. She has to know that.”

Heath frowned, and I felt he was trying to communicate that to my mother, but for
some reason she was still pushing back. “She says the truth will come out, and it
could change everything.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know what she means.”

Heath focused on me again. “Neither do I. But she keeps insisting that this truth
has the potential to change the way you feel about her.”

I let out a small laugh. The idea was so absurd. “Nothing could ever make me change
the way I feel about Mama.” Heath shrugged. He had no answers. I tried a different
tack. “Does she say anything about what truth I’m supposed to be looking for? Is it
about Daddy?”

Heath’s gaze shifted to the right again. “No. It’s about . . .”

“What?”

“The sound man?” Heath had spoken slowly, as if he was trying to translate what he
was hearing inside his head.

My breath caught on his words and I felt all the hairs at the back of my neck stand
up on end. “You mean, the Sandman?”

He blinked. “Yeah! The Sandman. I think that’s what she’s trying to say. Do you know
what she means?”

“No. But in the OBE I had at the Porter house, my mother as a little girl had mentioned
that the spook terrorizing her was called the Sandman.”

“Whoa,” Heath said. “She won’t give me any other details. She just keeps telling me
that we need to be very careful of him. And also that she loves you very much.”

I felt my mother’s energy from behind again, and this time she enveloped me in a bubble
of love, which was her version of a hug. I drank in that feeling for the long moment
it lasted, and then it vanished.

“She’s gone,” Heath said.

We were left to simply look at each other, both of us wondering what the heck Mama
was talking about.

“Are you two still out here?” Mrs. G. said, peeking at us from the front door. “Come
on, y’all! I’ve made up some lemonade and a few snacks for us to eat on the back porch.
If you two want any, you’d best hurry. Gilley’s already through his first helping.”

Heath and I grinned and nudged each other before heading inside.

Before joining everyone out on the back porch, I claimed to need a visit to the powder
room and instead I called Boston. “How’s Georgia?” Teeko asked by way of hello.

“Beautiful. Sunny and eighty degrees today.”

“And?”

I grinned. We both knew her question hadn’t been about the weather. “And it’s nice.
Daddy seems really happy with Christine, who is a genuinely lovely person.”

“Oh, good!” Teeks said. She would never admit it to me, but I knew she wanted very
much for me to get close to Daddy. She’d been very close to her father until he’d
died of lung cancer quite suddenly the previous fall while we were off in Europe shooting
Ghoul Getters
.

Teeks and I caught up with each other for a bit before I casually said, “Hey, before
I forget, I need a favor. Can you please go to my place and dig out our bubble vests
from the front hall closet?”

There was a pause, then, “Your bubble vests? You mean the ones you wear on ghostbusts?”

“Those are the ones,” I said, trying to keep my voice nice and light. “Also, in that
same closet you’ll find a duffel bag with our
Ghoul Getters
logo on it. I need that and everything that’s in it.”

“Is that it?” Teeks answered, and I knew that although she was playing it cool, she
was dying to ask me why I wanted her to ship my ghostbusting equipment down South.

To her question I replied, “Almost. On the top shelf you’ll see about a dozen spikes.
If you could put those into the duffel, along with the weird-looking tennis racket
with the metal strings, I’d really appreciate it.”

There was another pause. This one nearly ten seconds long. “Sounds like you’ve got
one hell of a spook on your hands, M.J.”

“That we do.”

“How bad is it?”

I shuddered again. I’d been doing a lot of that lately. “Not as bad as that thing
that destroyed your patio furniture in New Mexico, but probably every bit as wicked
as Hatchet Jack.” I was referring to two of the spooks that Teeko was personally familiar
with.

“Yikes. You sure you don’t need a magnet grenade launcher or anything?” she said with
a chuckle.

I laughed too. That was funny to imagine. “Naw. What we have in that closet should
be good enough. I need it to get here as soon as possible though, Teeks. I mean, I
know it’s a lot to ask this late in the day, but can you find a way to overnight it
to us?”

“Well, if I head there right now, that should be doable,” she said. “John and I are
leaving at nine tonight for New Zealand.”

I slapped my forehead. “Ohmigod! I totally forgot about your big trip! Do you have
time to do this?”

“For you, girl, I’ll make time,” she said.

I wished I could reach through the phone to hug her, because I knew my favor would
most certainly be a hassle, but Teeks had always come through for me. It’s just how
she rolled. “Remind me to take you to the spa as soon as you get back,” I told her.
“My treat.”

“I’ll look forward to it. But I should probably go now if I’m going to make FedEx
with your stuff by five.”

“Wait! Let me give you my credit card number—”

“Pay me back when you get home,” she said easily. I wanted to hug her again because
I had a feeling it was going to be a few hundred bucks to ship all that heavy equipment
overnight to us. Still, I knew there’d be no way to argue with her, so I accepted
her offer, made her promise to keep the receipt, then gave her Mrs. G.’s address here
in Valdosta.

As I sat down to some lovely treats that Gilley’s mom had prepared for us, I winked
at Heath and gave him a thumbs-up to let him know I’d made the call and our stuff
was on the way. However, about a half hour later I got a call on my cell from Teeks.
“Hey, girl!” I answered cheerfully. “That was fast. Did everything get sent off okay?”

“No, M.J., there’s a problem. I can’t get the key to work.”

I gulped as the realization hit me that Teeko had the old key to the lock on my condo.
Heath and I had changed it—twice—to stop Gilley from just walking in on us, and I’d
never given Teeks the new key. I explained all that to her and begged her forgiveness
for wasting her time. “It’s fine,” she said easily. “Don’t worry about it, but, M.J.,
I’ve got to go meet John for dinner before we head to the airport. Can you call Mama
Dell?”