The Unearthed: Book One, The Eddie McCloskey Series (15 page)

“You told me that mostly all hauntings were harmless,” Jackie said.

“Most are. But what if Billy dug up that grave? Isn’t that out of character?”

“Yes,” Talia cut in. “Billy would never—would have never done anything like this before.”

“We don’t know it was him,” Jackie said.

Charlie nodded. “You’re right. But Tim’s also right—we have to play this very safe.”

“So what are you saying?” Jackie started pacing. Which meant one thing. He was about to explode.

“We need to take a step back here,” Tim said.

Jackie stopped pacing. His face was bright red. “Nobody’s going to murder anybody in this house. And we know for sure the Moriartys offed each other. It wasn’t some fucking ghost.”

“John,” Talia said, hoping to calm him. Now wasn’t the time to lose it. Their son was missing.

Jackie ignored her. “We don’t have anything to worry about. We’re not the Moriartys, we’re not going to kill each other! And chances are this fucking ghost knows where Billy is, right?”

Tim said, “That’s true, but we have to be careful, Jackie.”

“Let’s get started, right now,” Jackie said.

“Mr. Rosselli—” Charlie stood up. “Try to calm down.”

“You don’t tell me to calm down in my own house. It’s not your son that’s missing.”

Charlie put his palms out. “I’m just saying, we’re here to help you. There’s no reason to get angry at us.”

“Then help me find my son. Do something!”

“John--”

The phone started ringing.

Talia jumped out of her seat.

Jackie grabbed it out of its cradle. “Who is this?”

His hand tightened around the phone, knuckles whitening.

“
WHO THE HELL IS THIS
?”

Everyone was quiet.

Then, a strange voice, not her son’s. “This is Billy.”

The line went dead.

Jackie ripped the phone out of the wall and threw it against the fridge. It broke and fell to the floor.

Nobody said anything for a moment.

Jackie eyeballed Tim. “I’m going out there to find my son. You need to talk to this ghost and get me some answers.”

He stormed off.

Ti
m
stepped outside to think. Things were moving too fast, and he had very little information to work with. What he needed was more.

He called Moira.

“Hey, Tim. How’s it going?”

“Billy’s still missing. Tell me you’ve got something.”

Tim heard papers rustling on the other end of the line.

Moira said, “Let me walk you through the history ... There were two owners prior to the Moriartys. There’s nothing in the local papers about hauntings before the Moriartys.”

“Very possible they went unreported.” Social stigma kept people from talking about these experiences often.

“Right.” Moira continued, “First owner was John Richards. He bought the house new in sixty-one. No one else on the deed. He was married to Genevieve Smith in sixty-three. It looks like they had one child, Gerald, in sixty-seven.”

“Do you have middle names for either John or Gerald?”

“Just initials—T and V.”

“Okay. How about the second owner?”

“The next owners were Harold and Sylvia Thompson. They bought the house in seventy-five. No children. Harold’s middle initial is W, but I don’t know what it stands for.”

Tim shook his head. Could have been William. Or any number of names. Walter,

Warren, Wayne, Wade ...

“Are the Thompsons still around?”

“I don’t know. If they bought another house, they didn’t stay in town.”

“How old were they when they sold the place?”

“In their sixties, might have gone on to a retirement community.”

“Did you find anything on them?”

“Not yet, but I’ll keep looking. All we’ve got is the middle initial.”

Tim thought about that. What more could they do with what they had before they went dark? Not much. He walked down the drive, taking his time, mulling things over.

Then he said, “If you don’t come up with anything on the Thompsons tonight, you could call Mrs. Dilworth tomorrow morning. She’s bound to have heard of these people, and maybe she knows where they are.”

“I was planning on it.” She paused. “Tim?”

“What’s up?”

“Do you need me there? I could use a change of pace for a few hours.”

Tim thought about it. “It would help. But …” He told her about William’s freshly dug grave. “Things could get hairy. Just wanted you to know.”

“I’ll be there in an hour.”

“Thanks, M. Great work.”

“Wish I had more for you.”

Tim put his phone away. Turning back to the house, he saw Eddie and Stan watching him from the porch. He signaled them to meet him on the lawn. He filled them in on everything.

“You guys okay? Tired?”

Stan said, “I’m good.”

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” Eddie smiled. “Or maybe just tomorrow night.”

It was funny but Tim was in no mood to laugh. “I think we should come back to this tomorrow when we have more data.”

“We should rock and roll,” Eddie said. “Most hauntings are harmless. Let’s play the odds and see if we can get anything out of the spirit to help us find Billy.”

“This spirit might have had a hand in the Massacre.”

“If it did, how will more data help us tomorrow?”

Tim shook his head. “We might find an angle, some way to communicate meaningfully.”

Normally Eddie didn’t push back too much. But he wasn’t biting his tongue tonight. “If that thing’s a killer, we need to find Billy even sooner. We don’t know what else it told him to do.”

They all digested that.

Eddie said, “Besides, we’re in a better position than the Rossellis to figure this out.”

Stan laughed sardonically. “Yeah, because we all have so much experience with killer ghosts. Come on, guys. The most we’ve experienced are some random thermals, questionable EVP, stray orbs on video, the shit that gets us laughed out of most scientific journals … if this is really happening, there’s not much we can do to stop it. Let’s call it what it is.”

Eddie said, “We can do something.”

“Sometimes doing nothing’s better. We need more intel.”

“We don’t have time.”

“We don’t have the experience.”

Eddie said, “The clock is ticking. We can’t wait for an expert. Giles Tyson is the closest thing and it’ll take him six hours to get onsite.”

Tim said, “I wouldn’t want him anyway.”

Eddie continued. “We can’t wait around for the exorcist. Billy is out there. We need to find him. Now. Before something really bad happens.”

Tim knew Eddie was right. And that Stan was too.

“We may not be the best for this, but we’re all the Rossellis have,” Eddie said.

Stan said, “If you want to go in, I’m with you the whole way. But for the record, I think we should wait.”

Tim felt their eyes on him. “I’m going to talk to Talia.”

Tim went inside. He hovered a moment, hoping against hope that Billy would just come home. Or at least call them. If they got confirmation Billy was okay, Tim could postpone the investigation till they had more information.

He mechanically checked his watch. He realized he was just stalling.

He had found that people, even the skeptics, always hoped you found something. Deep down, everybody wanted to be special, to experience something that no one else had.

But things were different with the Rossellis. They weren’t hoping for him to find something. They were demanding it. And that something was their thirteen-year-old son. Tim had never felt that kind of pressure before. And what the Rossellis didn’t understand, what no one ever understood, was that this business was anything but predictable. Maybe there was no spirit talking to Billy. Maybe Billy had just flipped his lid, the first symptoms of the onset of some debilitating mental illness that would plague his adult life. Maybe Eamon was lying to them, his way of getting back at all the people who’d tortured him over the years.

And he was just a guy who investigated hauntings in his spare time.

Talia was standing in the kitchen, absently holding a cup of tea.

Tim gave her the most confident smile he could muster. “How are we holding up?”

She shrugged.

“Any word from Jackie?”

She shook her head. “I think we should get started, Tim.”

His smile didn’t falter. “I do too.”

“What can I do?”

“We need to turn off the power first.”

“Why?”

“The only way we can detect a presence is through energy, through temperature changes, and other things like that. All this energy is interference.”

“I’ll take care of upstairs. Just give me a few minutes. Where do you want me throughout?”

“Your choice. Either outside, or by my side.”

Neither option looked very appealing to her. “I’ll stick with you.”

“Do not attempt to communicate with the spirit,” he ordered. “Let us handle that.”

“I’ll be right back.” Talia went upstairs.

Tim stood in the kitchen and listened to the house. He heard the hum of the fridge and Talia’s footsteps upstairs. He looked at the destroyed phone sitting on the counter. He closed his eyes and tried to feel something. Normally he only relied on verifiable objective data. But here he’d take anything he could get.

There was nothing.

Opening his eyes, he spotted a large kitchen knife sitting on the otherwise empty counter, next to the sink. He didn’t remember it being there. Maybe his mind was playing tricks on him. But it didn’t make sense for it to be there. The wooden block was on the other side of the sink, and Talia would not have left it lying around. She was a neat freak.

The hairs on the back of his neck came to attention.

He felt immobilized.

And as he watched, he swore he saw it move. A small twitch, barely perceptible. Or was it him? Was he losing it?

The feeling of paralysis began in his gut and started spreading.

Tim opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. The image of his Mom in that hospital bed kept coming to mind. She’d had cuts and deep scratches across her forehead, and her eyes had barely been open, but she was smiling at him. He knew it was a bogus memory—he’d never seen her like that. She’d died shortly after the car accident.

“Tim?”

The sound of Eddie’s voice pulled him out of whatever place he’d been sinking.

“You okay?” Eddie came over to him.

Tim nodded. “I’m fine. But that knife—” He pointed at the counter. But the counter was empty.

“What knife?”

“Forget it.” He looked at his brother. “We’re going dark on one condition.”

“That I follow your lead, got it.”

“That you promise not to get hurt. I couldn’t live with myself.”

Eddie put on a devil-may-care smile. “I’m indestructible, bro.”

“All done upstairs,” Talia announced, entering the kitchen. “Just give me a minute down here.”

“Great,” Tim said. A cold sweat broke out on his back. “Let’s saddle up.”

Tim and Eddie met Stan and Charlie on the porch.

“Stan, you work the K-2,” Tim said. “Eddie will work the other EMF and be ready with the digital camera. I’ll handle the digital recorder and the lead.”

Stan opened up a metallic, oversized carrying case and laid it on the porch. He pulled out the K-2 meter, which resembled a long remote control for the TV. At one end, there was a series of five lights, changing in color from green to red.

Stan handed the EMF detector to Eddie. The EMF detector looked more like a rectangular, palm-sized black box. It had a needle display over a spectrum of numbers. The needle was currently resting at the far left side, on zero. Eddie turned it on, and the needle twitched slightly, coming back to rest a notch above zero.

“Did we switch out the batteries?” Tim asked.

“Check and check,” Stan said.

“You do that every time?” Charlie asked.

Stan nodded. “To make sure we don’t get any bum readings. Low batteries can make that needle jump, and can cause these lights to flicker. Last thing you want when you’re trying to validate something.”

“And those things help you find ghosts?”

“Theoretically, yes,” Tim said. The existence of ghosts hadn’t been proved beyond a reasonable doubt; perhaps it never would be. Maybe they didn’t exist at all and everything they experienced would one day be explained rationally.

Tim pulled out the digital recorder and clipped the machine to his belt. He extended the wired microphone. Then he plugged the headphones into the machine, tapped the microphone twice and blew into it.

Stan explained, “Eddie’s detector measures electromagnetic fields. Mine measures magnetic fields. If a spirit is trying to manifest itself, it will do so by drawing on the energy around it. That causes changes in the magnetic fields.”

“There’s gotta be lots of other reasons why those things go off, though.”

“Exactly,” Stan said. “That’s why we had Talia shut down all the electrical equipment. All cell phones will be left out here on the porch too.” Stan took his out and placed it in the carrying case on the floor of the porch.

Tim pulled out his cell too, but paused when he saw a new text message. He had missed a text from Michelle.

Possible that Siobhan’s lover called house, using 1 or 2 ring code.

“More good news,” Tim said. They each read the message, handing the phone off to each other.

“It is good news,” Eddie said. “Points us in a direction at least.”

“Where do you want me?” Charlie asked Tim.

“For now, stay out front here. We’re going to lock the back door. Michelle and Moira are on their way, and Jackie could come back any time. We need you to keep them outside until we take a break. We don’t want anyone coming into the house in the middle of things. We need to control the environment.”

Eddie picked up the digital camera and flipped open the viewer. He turned it on and panned around.

Talia came out the front door.

The moon slipped behind some clouds.

Eddie switched on the light attached to the digital camera, throwing a beam out in front of him.

Talia said, “Everything’s off.”

“Okay. Last chance, Talia. You can come in with us or stay with Charlie. If you come in, you follow my lead.”

“I’m coming in. How can I help?”

“Stan, give her the thermometer.”

Stan handed her the item, a small box with a digital display. It was already on.

“What’s this for?”

“I need you to keep an eye on the temperature. If there are any changes, drastic or suddenly, or if there any changes in response to something that’s been said or happening, you just call it out. Okay?”

Talia nodded.

“Don’t be afraid to chime in about the temperature,” Stan told her. “There’s no hard and fast rules about how the thermometer is supposed to work.”