Spookygirl - Paranormal Investigator (16 page)

“Oh.”

“Did you take any temperature readings?”

“My thermometer went dead before I could.”

“That could’ve been the thing out there. Or it could’ve been dead batteries. Did you use fresh ones?”

“Um.” Now that I thought back, I couldn’t remember. “This equipment was Mom’s, so it’s pretty old. The batteries were probably old, too.”

“You always have to check that sort of thing before an investigation. Otherwise you leave yourself open to too many possible explanations.”

“Oh,” I said again.

She held out her hand for the camera and flipped through the photos, looking at each on the screen. “Did you use a film camera as well?”

“I don’t have one.”

“It’s good to use one, even if it’s just a disposable.
It gives you a negative to study. Digital photos can be unreliable; some investigators won’t use them at all. And it looks like you used a flash with all of these; it’s better to take some photos with a flash, and some without. Flashes can play tricks.”

“But I got orbs.” I grabbed the camera back and brought up a specific shot.

“Those look like specks of dust, unfortunately. Real paranormal orbs look more like little comets. They’re moving quickly, so in photos they look like they have tails.”

“What about the ectoplasmic mist in the shower alcove?”

Coach Frucile frowned at the shower photo. “It could be a mist. You’re right. Or it could be high levels of humidity reflecting your flash. Did you take this in the morning?”

“During first period,” I said.

“Did you know the cross-country team practices before school, then uses the showers?”

“No.” Like I had any reason to pay attention to the cross-country team’s schedule.

“That’s why the alcove is so humid in the morning. That’s the sort of thing you’d need to be aware of. A lot of your results do show possible activity, but they’re too easily discounted.”

“Oh,” I said once more. It was getting to be my
standard reaction to everything. Then I remembered one piece of evidence that wasn’t in the notebook. “I got EVP, too.”

“Really? You got a recording of that thing?”

I was kind of impressed Coach Frucile knew what EVP was.

“Yeah.”

I thought back to how the recording had scared me, and how I’d deleted it off my computer at first. If I was lucky, there’d still be a copy on the recorder. I took it out of my bag, switched it on, and pushed play. The sound was quieter and tinnier through the recorder than it had been on my laptop, but I could tell from Coach Frucile’s face that she could still make out some of the words.

“Now that,” she said, after letting it play on a loop a few times, “I can’t disprove. You’ve got something there.”

I wished I could’ve felt smug about showing her up on at least one detail from my investigation, but hearing the recording again had given me goose bumps.

“I don’t know what it means, though. It said I could do something, but then it said no, and then it trailed off. And that part about the street—did you hear that?”

Coach Frucile played the recording a few more times, listening very closely.

“First Street,” I said. “Is it telling me to go somewhere? I don’t think Palmetto even has a First Street.”

“It’s hard to hear, but I don’t think that’s First Street. It almost sounds like Birch Street. There’s a Birch Street downtown.”

“Birch Street.” Why did that sound familiar? It took a few seconds, but then I remembered the words inside the locker. “Birch Street Badasses.”

Coach Frucile gave me a weird look.

“Beth Chase,” I continued. “Brenda Thompson. Their names are scratched in a locker out there. Do you know them?”

“Never heard of them.”

“That thing out there wanted me to know their names. Could they be students? Former students, maybe?”

“The names aren’t familiar. They might’ve gone here before my time, though.”

I felt like I was definitely on to something.

“How can we find out? Can we look through some old yearbooks?”

Though I had no idea how we could get out of Frucile’s office let alone make our way to the school library with that thing out there keeping guard.

“The school’s in the process of digitizing the yearbooks for an online database,” Coach Frucile said, “but I don’t know if it’s live yet.”

“Then we rely on the magic of the Internet,” I said,
pointing at the computer on Coach Frucile’s desk. “Can I? Is that thing online?”

She nodded, so I jumped up and sat at her desk, and pulled up a search engine. Typing in
Beth Chase
gave me pages of useless results, but narrowing it down with
Beth Chase Palmetto Crossing
or
Beth Chase Palmetto High
gave me no matches at all. So I tried Brenda instead. The first hit for
Brenda Thompson Palmetto Crossing
was an obituary from earlier in the year.

“‘Brenda Ryans, formerly Brenda Thompson, 72, passed away on May 13. A lifelong resident of Palmetto Crossing, Brenda is survived by her daughter, April Ryans-Allen. Services will be held at Walker Brothers Mortuary.’ Pfft, Walker Brothers,” I muttered. “Those guys suck.”

Coach Frucile ignored my dig at Dad’s main competitor and leaned over the keyboard. “So, she’d have been in high school in the midfifties. Palmetto High was a tiny new school then. Assuming she went here.”

“That makes those lockers out there older than dirt,” I added. No wonder they were so crappy.

Coach Frucile just shook her head. Commandeering the computer, she brought up the school’s website and tried the new database. “Looks like it might be up and running
after all. Maybe we can find her if the system will let me do a search.”

It only took a few minutes to find her school photo. There she was—Brenda Thompson as a high school junior, wearing a leather jacket, her dark hair swept up and back in an exaggerated pinup style Isobel might have envied. Her makeup was heavy but expertly applied; her stare was defiant.

Well, we’d obviously found the first Birch Street Badass.

“Let’s see if Beth Chase is here, too.” I grabbed the mouse back from Coach Frucile and flipped through the database until I found her. Beth was pretty much the blond version of Brenda in terms of attitude, although her hair was shorter and shaggier. They both looked unpleasant in their photos. I imagined them beating up other kids for their lunch money, or sneaking cigarettes in the bathroom, or whatever dumb things bullies did in the 1950s.

We flipped through the rest of the database but didn’t find another mention of either of them. They hadn’t belonged to any clubs or organizations; they hadn’t played any sports. And they didn’t show up in any of the candid photos; those photos were full of giggling girls in ponytails and dainty sweaters—the fifties versions of Cherry and the rest of the void, I bet. It didn’t seem like Beth and Brenda had been too popular.

At least now we had an idea of what we might be dealing with. Finally.

“So you think it’s one of them out there?” Coach Frucile asked.

“It makes more sense than anything else does. My money’s on Brenda, since we don’t even know if Beth is dead. Whichever one it is, though, we need to know why she’s here.”

“Brenda’s obituary mentioned a daughter,” Coach Frucile said. “Maybe she could tell us something about her mother that might give us a clue.”

Normally I would’ve agreed, but the thing outside was still
fwumping
against the office door. Now wasn’t the time to track down relatives.

“Or I could just go out there and ask Brenda myself.” And then tell her to get the hell out.

Fwump. Fwump-fwump-FWUMP.
Coach Frucile and I both looked at the door. “Are you sure?” she asked.

“I don’t think I have a choice,” I said.

“What can I do to help?”

Coach Frucile was looking to me for answers? Wow. I wished I’d had time for more research and prep, but even without that, I felt weirdly confident.

“Well, it would help if we could get rid of those psychic echoes you mentioned before. It might be easier to deal with Brenda without so much negative energy around;
it’s probably getting her even more riled up.” I wasn’t sure how accurate that was, but it made sense. This wasn’t the time to question my instincts.

“We can use sage for purification. I have a few smudge sticks I was planning to try anyway. Salt might work as well, but sage is stronger.” From a storage cabinet, Coach Frucile pulled several small bundles of dried plant matter wound with red twine.

“Those are perfect.” Sage had always been Mom’s spiritual cleanser of choice. She’d called it the color-safe bleach of the paranormal universe, so this felt very appropriate. “I don’t know if we can clear the room completely, but if we can get most of it, that should do the trick. Let’s do this, you handle the sage, and I’ll have a chat with whoever’s out there.”

I found my black tourmaline in my bag and palmed it.

Producing a lighter from her desk drawer, Coach Frucile set the first sage stick smoking. Together, we returned to the locker room.

I felt so strong, so much more confident. I had a better idea of what I was dealing with, and a new ally.

While Coach Frucile made her rounds, walking the burning sage to every corner and between the rows of lockers, I headed straight to the shower alcove, where the presence had been strongest.

This wasn’t exactly like anything I’d done before, but I’d never hesitated when communicating with other kinds of spirits in the past, and I couldn’t afford to do so now.

“Hey!” I said, stepping into the alcove. When the shower curtains began to whip and the water turned on and off, I squeezed the black tourmaline more tightly in my fist and refused to be afraid. “Brenda. Beth. Whoever you are. You’re not welcome here anymore. It’s time to move on.”

Something hissed near my ear. I turned and didn’t see anything, but the sound came again. It sounded familiar, like the staticky whispers I’d heard on the EVP, but now I could hear it clearly.

“You know,” it purred at me. “You know we’re here.”

I’d been right.

“How could I not?” I said. “Look, you can cut out the theatrics. I know who you are, and I’m not scared of you.”

Anger and fear constricted around me, and the tone of the whisper changed. “Get out.”

“Still not doing it for me,” I said, although it was getting hard to breathe again.

“Want to know…” the hiss said, swirling hot around my head, “what it feels like to drown?”

The words made me shiver as I remembered how the presence had twisted around me earlier, squeezing the air
from my lungs, robbing me of the ability to breathe.

Then I smelled something odd and herbal, and I was aware of Coach Frucile in the alcove. She carried the sage to each individual shower stall, filling the place with wisps of pungent smoke before continuing on to the rest of the locker room. Somewhere beyond the direct rage of the presence, I felt something about the room lighten up. It was as if the lights had become just a little brighter.

The echoes were dispersing.

Brenda-or-Beth didn’t like that. She gave me a shove that was like being pummeled in the chest with a dumbbell. I fell back onto my butt. Tailbone, meet tile.
Ouch
. It didn’t scare me, but it did make me mad. Anger wasn’t going to help in this situation, so I forced myself to calm down again.

Before I could stand up, though, something invisible zipped painfully across my cheek. I yelped and touched my face. When I looked at my fingers, they were smeared with blood.

So
not cool.

“That’s it,” I said, getting back to my feet. “Get it through your incorporeal skull, you idiot. You were a bully back then, and you’re a bully now, and it’s time for this to stop.” I spoke calmly, clearly, not letting my emotions control me. “Are you going to show yourself so we can talk this
out like rational people, or would you rather be a coward?”

There was a flash of blue to my right. When I looked over, I saw the dark-haired girl from the yearbook photo. Brenda. Although she’d died in her seventies, her ghost still looked like her sixteen-year-old self, a mix between a greaser and a pinup girl. That was something I’d never witnessed before—a ghost appearing at an age different than the one she had been when she died. I figured it had something to do with her unfinished business, whatever that was. Yep, just another ghostly reminder that when it comes to the paranormal, there are no rules.

She glared at me. “We’re not cowards.”

Another girl, this one taller and blonder, dressed in a motorcycle jacket over a white shirt and jeans, appeared beside her.

“Brenda! Come on! We weren’t going to do this. We had a plan.”

“You must be Beth,” I said. “So, what’s this plan?” I looked from one Birch Street Badass to the other.

They both ignored me.

Brenda said, “She called us cowards!”

“So?” Beth said. “You see what she’s like. She can hear us. She’s going to make us leave. She’s going to be all, ‘Go into the light’ or whatever, and who knows where we’ll end up? We only just found each other again.”

Um, excuse me, I’m standing right here,
I thought. “So that makes it okay to scare me and scratch me and try to suffocate me?”

“We just want to be left alone. I thought it would make you stay away,” Beth said, sounding a little sheepish.

“Why?”

“Well, you’re a freak like us.”

“I am my own brand of freak, thank you very much.”

“You know what we mean,” Beth said. “The kids you deal with might not wear sweater sets and poodle skirts—”

“And bobby socks,” Brenda interrupted with a sneer at her contemporaries’ fashion sense.

“Those, too,” Beth said. “The kids look different now, but they’re still all alike. They still don’t like us outsiders. They’re always giving people like us a hard time.”

“People like us? You’re talking like you’re the ones who were bullied,” I said.

“Well, yeah,” Beth said, sounding a little impatient. “You think it’s easy going to school in your brothers’ greaser castoffs? My family couldn’t afford a lot of new clothes. Brenda started wearing that jacket to take some of the heat off of me. Then we
both
got picked on.”