My partner and I went through our plan for that evening and placed all the meters in their strategic locations. Gil then wanted to go back down to his command center and make sure he was getting a reading off each meter. I joined him, as we were going to get something to eat afterward.
Sitting next to him and taking up the clipboard with the numbered meters and their corresponding locations, I went through them with him.
“Number one reads slightly above normal,” Gilley said, starting to go through the meters one by one.
I glanced at the sheet on the clipboard that documented each meter assignment and said, “Check-mark for fifth-floor meter. Next?”
“Meter two readings are normal.”
I scrolled down the sheet again and found meter two’s assignment. “Check for dining hall meter,” I called.
“Meter three readings are normal.”
“Check for lobby meter.”
“Meter four readings are slightly elevated,” Gil said.
“Check for ground-floor elevator.”
“Meter five readings are . . .” I looked up from my clipboard as Gilley paused, only to see his eyes widen with alarm before he shouted, “Off the freaking charts!”
I leaned in and glanced at his laptop and noticed that the electromagnetic meter on the third floor next to room 321 was in the red zone. “Jesus!” I gasped. “Have you ever seen them so high?”
Gilley shook his head. “Never! It’s got to be a faulty gadget,” he determined, but his face looked worried.
“Come on,” I said, setting the clipboard down. “Let’s go check it out.”
I hurried to the door and pushed it open, holding it for Gilley, whom I expected to be right behind me. When I glanced back, however, he was still in his seat, looking at me skeptically. “You coming?”
“I don’t wanna,” he said feebly. “What if that thing is up there, and it’s causing the meter to jump?”
I rolled my eyes. “Okay, grab some grenades and let’s go!”
“But . . .” Gil said, looking from his laptop screen to me and back again as if he were searching for another excuse.
“Oh, fine!” I snapped. “Stay here then!” And I let the door close. I walked down the hallway in an aggravated huff and nearly slammed right into Heath, who was likely coming to look for us.
“What’s up?” he asked me.
“We’ve got a meter spiking on the third floor, and Gilley the Girl has decided he’s too scared to come with me to check it out.”
“I’ll go with you,” Heath offered.
“Thanks,” I said, feeling better immediately. I hadn’t wanted to go up there alone, and I was glad that he was willing to tag along with me.
We hurried to the elevators and rode up to the third floor. I handed Heath one of the grenades from my tool belt, which I’d luckily strapped on before I left my room. “Just in case,” I told him.
“How high was the meter spiking?” he asked.
“High enough to proceed with caution,” I warned, gripping the cap on the grenade firmly as I watched the floor count on the control panel of the elevator. “But it might be a false alarm. I mean, the thing was spiking way beyond anything we’ve ever seen before, so it could just as easily be a faulty meter.”
“How often do you get a false reading?”
“Often enough,” I said as the boxcar stopped and the doors began to open.
We moved out of the elevator and proceeded down the hallway with caution. I was in the lead, and Heath had my back. We got to the first corner without incident, and I had my senses wide-open, but nothing much was hitting me.
“You feel cold?” I asked Heath, thinking that the telltale sign that indicated ghosties were about might give us an early warning.
“No. You?”
“No,” I said. I paused before turning the corner and reached into my tool belt for one of the last three electrostatic meters that we’d each be carrying that night. The readings were normal.
“What’s it say?” Heath asked.
“It’s normal. No unusual hits at all.”
My cell phone rang at that moment, and both Heath and I jumped. I took a breath and answered it. “What?” I barked, seeing that it was Gilley calling.
“The meter ’s gone back to normal,” he told me.
“Are you getting a bead on the one I’m holding or the one down the hall?” I asked.
“The one we planted outside room three-twenty-one,” he confirmed.
I began moving forward again. “Okay,” I said. “We’re almost to it, and we can check it out.”
“I have a good reading on your meter, by the way,” said Gilley. “I think we can cross it off the list too.”
We came to a stop outside room 321, and I looked down. The electrostatic meter was resting peacefully right up against the door. It hadn’t been moved or touched that I could tell. I bent down to pick it up and examined it. “It looks fine. Gil, what do you want me to do with it? Do you want to replace it with the one I brought along?”
“I don’t know, M.J. I mean, it seems to be working now.”
“It does,” I agreed.
“Is there a light socket nearby?” Gilley asked me. “You know how those things can spike when they get near a hot outlet.”
I looked up and down the hallway, and I finally spotted an outlet about ten yards away. “There’s no way it could have gotten a buzz off the plug in the hallway, Gil. It’s too far away.”
“Okay, well, let’s switch it out with the one you’ve got; that way we’ll know if we get big spikes again that it’s not that particular meter.”
I clicked off the phone and swapped the gadgets, then motioned for Heath to head back down to the main floor. But before we took even two steps we both froze. “You feel that?” I asked as a cool breeze seemed to blow across the back of my neck.”
“Cold air?” he said, pivoting on his heel to look back.
“Yep,” I whispered. I held my hands up and closed my eyes, concentrating. It was then that I heard the familiar clicks and blips coming from the electrostatic meters. My cell rang again and I flipped it open. “We’ve got action,” I said to Gil.
“On both meters,” he confirmed. “What’s your location, M.J.?”
“We’re standing in front of room three-nineteen.”
“So you’re next to three-twenty-one?” he asked.
“We are,” I said, holding my hand up and feeling the air in front of the door.
“I’ve got a female,” said Heath. “I think this might be Carol.”
“Gotta go, Gil. I’ll call you back in a few.” I clicked off the phone and focused all of my intuitive radar on picking up what was in the ether. Meanwhile, the cold around us intensified, and the electrostatic meters continued to blip noisily.
“It’s definitely Carol,” Heath said after a moment, and on the edge of my energy I was just starting to feel her too.
In my mind I saw a woman in her mid- to late forties, with frosted hair and nails perfectly manicured. Her clothing was preppy, a high collar and a blazer with shoulder pads. Her slacks were navy and finely creased, and her shoes were brown leather loafers, no socks. Her features appeared too sharp, her nose thin, her chin a bit long, and her lips pursed in a permanent pout.
Her eyes, however, appeared narrow and suspicious. “She wants to know who we are,” said Heath.
“Hi, Carol,” I said directly to her, and I felt her energy point toward me. “My name is M. J. Holliday, and this is Heath Whitefeather. We’d really like to talk to you, if you’re open to it. We think that something very bad happened in your room the other day. Something that turned your living area into a mess. A woman was attacked, and you might have seen what happened. We really need to ask you if you might be able to describe who the woman was fighting with.”
I could feel a sense of immediate dismissal. Carol didn’t seem to think much of me or my line of questions, and she turned her energy back toward room 319.
?
??Wait, don’t go!” Heath pleaded, and I was both surprised and relieved that he had such acute senses. “Carol, we know what happened to you. How your fiancé left you right before your wedding. He was a total jackass, and I’m really sorry about that.”
For a moment nothing happened, other than Carol’s energy seemed to hover in front of us while she considered what Heath had said. He turned to me and whispered, “We need to try a different angle here; she’s not interested in telling us about Sophie.”
I nodded. “I think your fiancé really regrets what he did to you,” I told her. “I mean, you’re obviously a beautiful woman, and I think he likely just had a really bad lapse in judgment.”
Heath smiled as Carol’s energy came toward us again. “I hear you got even by running up his credit cards,” he said. “The rat bastard. I’ll bet that bill hurt when it showed up in his mailbox, huh?”
In my mind’s eye I really felt as though Carol’s spirit were wickedly delighted by that. She was lapping up what we were putting down. “And I hear the woman he left you for later cheated on him,” I said, taking a huge chance.
In the hallway Heath and I actually heard a woman’s gasp. “It’s true,” said Heath, looking at me encouragingly. “I hear she slept with his best friend, in fact.”
Carol was now radiating satisfaction. “He’s devastated, you know,” I said. “He really wanted you to come back to him, but now it’s too late.”
And in that instant I felt Carol’s energy pull back—it felt like I’d just said something really upsetting to her.
“She wants to know why,” whispered Heath.
I realized then that Carol didn’t realize she was dead. “Remember?” I asked her. “You came back from your shopping, and then you took out your pistol . . . do you remember that, Carol?”
The ether seemed to vibrate as if a shiver ran through it, and the cold around us intensified and my teeth began to chatter. “She says she remembers,” whispered Heath. “But go easy, M.J.; I don’t think she’s going to like this next part.”
I nodded. “And you were so upset, Carol. Do you remember how upset you were?”
“She says yes,” Heath interpreted, and I was grateful she was communicating directly with him, because I was able only to sense her feelings and emotions.
“And when you looked at all those packages and those pretty new things, you realized that the spending on your fiancé’s dime was going to upset him, but it didn’t seem like enough to you. You wanted him to really regret his decision, right?”
“Yes again,” said Heath.
“And when you looked at the situation, you realized the only way to truly get even with him was to take your own life. That was the one way to send a powerful, lasting message to him, right?”
I looked at Heath to see what Carol would say, but he remained silent for so long that I finally asked, “What’s she saying?”
“Nothing,” he said. “She’s just sort of stunned, and she’s not saying any . . . Oh, wait a second; she just said, ‘Come back later; I need to think.’ ”
“She needs to think?” I repeated, looking at the spot in the hallway where I felt Carol was hovering. “Carol!” I said. “Wait; don’t go away. We really do want to help you.”
But even as I said those words I could feel the ghostly woman fading back through the door of 319. Out of the corner of my eye I caught Heath’s head snap in that direction, and he said, “She just asked if we could keep the staff out of her room unless someone is willing to clean up the mess. She doesn’t want to be disturbed.”
“Well, crap,” I said, frustrated that we’d been so close to getting through to her.
“We can come back tonight after we’ve given her some time,” Heath reasoned. “Maybe when we try to make contact again she’ll be more open to letting us help her, and maybe she’ll be willing to share some details about what she might have seen when Sophie was murdered.”
I nodded reluctantly and motioned to the hallway. “Feel like getting something to eat?”
“I do,” he said.
We started walking back down the hallway when my cell rang again. “Hey, Gil,” I said without even looking at the caller ID.
“What happened?” he demanded. “The meters went back to normal about a minute ago.”
“We made contact with Carol Mustgrove.”
“Did you get her across?”
“Nope,” I said with a sigh. “She seems to need some time to think things through, and she told us to come back later.”
“Well, that sucks,” Gil grumbled. “We’ve only got tonight and tomorrow. How much time did she want you to give her?”
“We’re going to try again later on tonight. Heath and I are on our way back downstairs. We’ll swing by to pick you up so that we can catch some dinner.”
“I’ll call Gopher and see if he wants to join us.”
I frowned. I didn’t really want him along, but then I figured that if he was going to continue with the shoot, it might be good to talk strategy with him over dinner. “See you in a minute,” I said as the elevator doors opened.
“Meet me at the front desk,” said Gil.
We rode the elevator down and went over to the check-in counter, where we saw Gilley chatting with Anton, the night manager who’d been attacked the night before. “Hi, Anton,” I said cordially. “How’s the head?”
Anton turned around so that I could see the small white bandage on the back of his head. “Eet still hurts,” he admitted.
“I’m surprised to see you behind the counter,” I said. “We thought you were quitting.”
“Oui,” he said, blushing. “But Monsieur Knollenberg and Monsieur Beckworth, zey can be very persuasive. Zey like my résumé, and zey promised no more night shifts.”
“That was nice of them,” I said, then caught something he’d said. “Did you meet with Mr. Beckworth personally?” I asked.
“Oui. He came here an hour ago, and he’s been talking with Monsieur Knollenberg in ze office.”
I looked at Gilley. “Is Gopher coming to dinner?”
“He’s on his way down. He said to give him ten minutes.”
“Perfect,” I said, then gave my attention back to Anton. “Would it be possible,” I asked him, “for you to ring into Mr. Beckworth’s office and see whether I could ask him a few questions?”
“Questions? May I tell heem to what zis is about?”
“I want to ask him about the mirrors he bought at auction.” Anton gave me a blank look, so I said quickly, “It’s my understanding that Mr. Beckworth bought four mirrors at an auction recently and that he’s placed them in several locations around the hotel. Heath and I have both seen a figure in the mirrors’ reflection, and I believe that they might be linked to a woman’s spirit. I believe she might have a close affiliation to the mirrors and may also need to be assisted in crossing over. I just want to ask him where he purchased them, and if he knows anything about their history.”
Anton blanched—I could tell he didn’t like the idea of haunted mirrors much. “One moment,” he said. “I will go ask him about ze mirrors.” He hurried away down the hall toward the offices.
“Where did you want to eat?” Gilley asked me.
“We could go next door,” I suggested. “Or there’s Biscuits and Blues just down the street.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard good things about that place. Let’s go there,” said Heath.
“Hello!” came a voice across the lobby. We all looked up and saw Gopher hurrying over to us. “Where’re we eating?”
I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned around. Anton was back at the counter, and he didn’t look like he had good news to share. “I’m very sorry, mademoiselle, but Monsieur Beckworth eez about to leave shortly, and he still has some things to go over with Monsieur Knollenberg. When I told him ze details and how urgent your mission was, he said he didn’t know zat ze mirrors were going to be a problem. He said not to bahzer with zem. He will have zem removed and disposed of. A
pparently zey are not valuable.”
“Er . . .” I said, surprised by Beckworth’s reaction.
“What’s up?” said Gilley, just tuning in to my conversation with Anton.
“Beckworth doesn’t want us to bust the woman in the mirrors.”
“Why not?” said Heath.
“He’s going to remove and dispose of them.”
“Less work for us to do, then!” Gilley said happily.
“Yeah,” said Heath, “good point, Gil.”
“So you’re okay with just leaving that poor woman grounded?” I asked the two of them.
“M.J., we can’t very well get rid of every ghost in San Francisco. Besides, we’ve got two more grounded spirits to work on and a demon to hunt down, all in the next day and a half. And we’ll still get paid the same, so let’s just put our energies where we need to, okay?”
“Fine,” I said, not really agreeing with them. “But when we get back from dinner I’m just going to poke my head into the Renaissance Room and see if I can’t make contact.” Gilley gave me look of exasperation. “I can’t just leave her stuck there without some kind of effort, Gil!” I said.
He shook his head ruefully. “Oh, M.J., such a softie for the ghosties. Come on, girl; let’s get some eats.”
Chapter 12
By the time we finished with our meal it had begun to rain, and darker clouds appeared on the horizon that looked like they had the potential to be really nasty. “Might get some lightning and thunder out of those,” said Gilley as we hovered under the restaurant’s awning, waiting for a cab to take us back to the hotel.
“Good ghost-hunting weather, though,” I said. The more damp and electrostatically charged the atmosphere, the easier it was for spirits to show up and work their mischief.
A cab finally stopped and we quickly piled in. We made it back inside the hotel in short order, and everyone shook off the rain. Gilley looked at his watch and asked me, “When do you want to start?”
I looked back out at the rain. “Anytime is good. Why don’t we meet in the command center in twenty minutes and get to it?”
“Sounds good,” agreed Heath.
“I’m in,” said Gopher.