“Then what happened?” I asked.
“Well, Levi and I stopped loadin’ Scoffland into the bag, and we were lookin’ around to see where the noise came from, and that’s when I looked over at him and he’d changed.”
“Changed how?” I said.
Kogan lifted his hand weakly and let it fall like he was frustrated by my questions. “I don’t know, Mary Jane. He just wasn’t himself, and I could tell right away I was about to have some trouble.”
“What happened next?”
“He pulled out a knife and he stuck me in the gut.”
“Did he say anything?” Heath asked him.
Kogan seemed to think on that for a moment. “No,” he said. “No, he mostly just started growling and waving the knife at me.”
“You mentioned a popping sound,” I said. “From which direction did you hear that noise?”
Kogan considered that for a second. “You know,” he said, “now that you’re asking, I remember that it was coming from behind that wall. The one where the hidden playroom was.”
“Do you think it could have come from the playroom itself?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Kogan said. “I think it might’ve.”
“And you’re sure Deputy Cook didn’t say anything before attacking you?”
Kogan started to shake his head, but then he stopped. “Wait a sec. You know what? I think he did say somethin’. It was right before I turned to see him pull his knife. We were both starin’ at the wall where the noise had come from and Levi says, ‘You know, Sheriff, I don’t feel so good.’ I forgot all about that once the knife showed up.”
I dug a little deeper with my next question. “And when you saw him with the knife, other than acting different, did he also look different?”
Kogan fiddled with the bedsheet. “Now that you mention it, Mary Jane, he did look different. He looked plumb crazy . . . like, psycho or somethin’.”
“Can you elaborate?” I pressed.
“Well, I guess he just looked unrecognizable. I mean, his face seemed like it belonged on someone else. It was Levi, but it wasn’t Levi. I ain’t never seen nothin’ like it. I asked the docs here to check him for drugs, and so far everything’s come back negative, but he hasn’t woken up and they also told me they’ve done a full MRI and PET scan and there doesn’t seem to be a reason for either the sudden mental break or for him to remain unconscious. You knocked him out, Mary Jane, but he’s really only got a slight concussion from that, and nobody here knows why he hasn’t come to yet.”
“Can we see him, Sheriff?” I still carried a bit of guilt for being the one to knock Cook into unconsciousness, and maybe I did want to see him to make sure he was okay.
“I don’t see why not,” Kogan said. “He’s out like a light and handcuffed to the bed. You should be safe enough.”
“I think I also want to see Cisco,” I said.
“Why you want to see him for?” the sheriff barked.
“Well, sir, because from what we’ve learned so far, there is a very powerful evil spirit who possessed Cisco and probably Cook too. If we can’t speak to Cook because he seems to be in some sort of coma, then we need to try to figure out what happened to Cisco.”
“He’s been sedated,” Beau reminded me.
“Well, maybe we can convince his doctors to wake him up so we can talk to him,” I said.
“What would that solve?” Kogan asked me. “I mean, great if you get him clearheaded enough to start talking to you, Mary Jane, but he still murdered a man and no judge in the world is going to accept the evil-spirit-made-me-do-it defense.”
“You’re probably right, Sheriff,” I said, simply to placate him. “And yet I still feel like trying to talk to him is a good idea.”
“You might get more answers from the coroner,” Kogan muttered.
“Why’s that?” Heath asked.
Kogan eyed Beau, who shook his head slightly. “I didn’t tell them yet, sir.”
“Tell us what?” I asked.
Kogan said, “The coroner finished the autopsy on Scoffland early this morning. He says that Scoffland was killed several hours before Cisco went crazy and nailed his hands to the wall.”
“He was killed sometime in the middle of the night?” I said. “How can that be?”
“Don’t know,” Beau admitted. “That’s why the sheriff thinks we should talk to the coroner.”
“But I thought there were witnesses?” I said, unable to let it go. “I thought the other construction workers saw Cisco kill Scoffland?”
“No,” Beau said. “Cisco and the other workers all got there around the same time that morning. Between eight and eight forty-five. They claim that Scoffland’s truck was already there and the boys split up to go look for him. When they heard the sound of a nail gun, they found Cisco with it in hand, and Scoffland nailed to the wall.”
“If Scoffland was killed sometime earlier, then how was he killed?”
“A nail through the heart,” Kogan said.
“So he was killed with the nail gun,” I said.
“Yep. Helluva way to go too. I mean, that had to hurt.” The sheriff gingerly touched his chest just above where he’d been stabbed. He knew better than most what a sharp object to the chest felt like.
“But now you’re thinking that Cisco didn’t do it?” Heath asked the sheriff.
Kogan sighed, and I could tell he was beginning to fatigue. We had to be wearing him out after what he’d been through. “I don’t know what to think,” he said. “Which is why I asked Beau to talk the two of you into helping us figure out what the hell is going on here. Is this some kind of demonic possession? Or just a big hoax? What I can’t get my head around is the fact that I’ve known Levi almost half his life. The boy’s like a son to me, and why he’d attack me like that I just can’t figure.”
“You know what this means, don’t you?” Heath said, and I realized his question was directed at me.
“What?”
“It means we now have two murders to solve. Scoffland’s and Sellers’s.”
The room went silent except for the sounds from the machines pumping strength and health back into Kogan. He was the first to break the silence. Turning to Beau, he said, “One of the things they teach you as a detective is that when you discover two separate crimes at one scene, there’s almost always a connection.”
“You think the murders were related?” I asked.
“I think it might be smart to approach it from that angle,” he replied.
“So we’ll need to keep our focus on Everett Sellers’s murder.”
“If it was Everett’s skeleton we found in the playroom,” Beau said. “With the body missing, I don’t know how we can be sure it was him.”
“There might be a way to narrow the likelihood down, though,” Kogan said, motioning for Beau to hand him a folder on the table to his right. “I had Wells bring over the missing-persons file on Sellers. He had to dig it out of storage, but there’s a photo in there I want you three to look at.”
We all came forward and gathered round Kogan’s bed. His hand shook as he opened the folder and began to sort through the contents. It was a thick file filled with witness statements, maps, and at least a dozen photos. “Ah, here we go,” Kogan said, lifting one out of the folder to show us. In the picture was a freckle-faced, redheaded youth of about fourteen, holding a croquet mallet and displaying a forced smile. He was also wearing the exact same clothing as the body we’d found in the playroom. “This was taken the morning Everett disappeared,” Kogan said. “In fact, not long after he and his cousins finished playing croquet, Everett was seen heading off into the woods, never to be heard from again.”
Heath nudged me and said, “Em, show the sheriff the photos you took on your phone. I think we’ll convince him it was Eve
rett’s body we found.”
I pulled out my cell and sorted through the images until I found the best picture of the remains of Everett Sellers. Seeing the photo, I was just as convinced as Heath that we were looking at the missing boy.
“Same outfit,” Kogan said, looking from my cell to the photo he was holding.
“Same hair too,” Beau said, noting the ginger hair on the skull.
“It’s him,” I told them, knowing it in my heart.
And then Beau focused on me intently. “Is he speaking to you?”
I blinked. “I’m sorry?”
“Everett. Is he talking to you? You know, from beyond the grave?”
“Oh,” I laughed. “No, Beau. I’m not sensing his spirit. I just feel it in my gut that it’s him.”
Kogan seemed to focus on me intently too. “No, no, Mary Jane, I think you’re missing Beau’s point. You talk to dead people. Can you . . . you know, talk to Everett and see if he can point the finger at his killer?”
I shook my head. “It doesn’t work that way, Beau, and besides, I haven’t felt a whisper of that boy’s spirit. Granted, I’ve been wearing a vest full of magnets, which alters the magnetic field around me and isolates me from any spectral energy, but even when Heath and I were first at the house, we didn’t pick up on the spirit of a young boy, and certainly not one who’d been murdered.”
“Do we know if it even was a murder?” Heath asked suddenly.
We all switched our focus to him, and it was Beau who answered him. “We do. I know we no longer have a body, but when I was studying the skeleton yesterday, I saw that the back of the boy’s skull had a big, round dent in it.” Beau then lifted the photo of Everett out of Kogan’s hands. “The dent was big enough to have been made by one of these,” he said, pointing to the mallet in Everett’s hands. Then he tapped at my phone a little and said, “And if you look carefully here at this photo that Mary Jane took of the body, you can see this oblong dark stain which moves outward from the boy’s skull. If I had to guess, I’d say that was the blood pool from the blow, which seeped into the wood.”
I made a face, glad I hadn’t noticed that. Then I had another thought and motioned for Beau to give me the phone. When he did, I began to tap through the images myself.
“What’re you looking for?” Heath asked.
“A croquet mallet.”
Beau moved to stand behind me and peer over my shoulder. “Wouldn’t that be some good luck if it were still in the playroom?”
I sighed as I reached the last picture, which was the one I’d given Gilley of the Ouija board. “No sign of the mallet,” I said, but Beau had put a hand on my arm.
“Hey, is that the board you were talking about?” he said, pointing to the image on my screen.
“Yes. That’s the Ouija board.”
He nodded and then the dawn of understanding lit up in his eyes. “You think that’s how that demon showed up in my picture of Scoffland? Like, maybe it was called there by that Ouija board?”
“I do, Beau. And I think it’s also how that same demon showed up forty-five years ago.”
“Forty-five years ago?” the deputy said. “You think there’s been some demon living in that house for forty-five years?”
I nodded, then shook my head. I wasn’t sure. I only had my out-of-body experience with my mother to go on, but I suspected the Sandman had made at least two appearances in the last half century. “All evil spirits need a portal to travel through,” I explained, and by the wide-eyed expressions of both Beau and Sheriff Kogan, I knew I had their full attention. “A portal is a small window made of electromagnetic energy which can thin the veil between our plane of existence—the physical world—and a realm that’s . . . well . . . lower than ours.”
Beau gulped audibly. “You mean like . . . hell?”
“Well, yes, maybe. The lower realms can house truly demonic energies, and they should never be trifled with. Ouija boards have the ability to create a sort of peephole by using the energy of the user, or users, to create a focused opening between the two realms. Energies that haunt the lower realms know this, and they often hunt for these peepholes to send scary messages, because fear can amplify the energy being pumped into the planchette, and that can then be used to create a bigger hole.
“If that focused energy becomes large enough, then the peephole can turn into a window big enough for the evil energy to climb through. It’s incredibly dangerous for children to play with Ouija boards for exactly that reason. They’re too easily scared and too naive to know when to let go of the planchette and step away from the board. Often, they don’t think to back away from the board until well after the portal has been formed and the evil spirit is let loose to wreak whatever havoc it wants to. And once it’s out, it’s very hard to put the genie back in the bottle.”
“So—so—so—,” Beau said, stuttering now because he seemed quite frightened by what I was telling him. “You mean to tell me that this board”—and he tapped my cell phone for good measure—“is the way that thing is coming and going?”
“Yes. We think so,” I admitted. “And this particular evil spirit is one of the most powerful I’ve ever encountered, and if you knew what Heath and I have been through in the last few years, you’d know that is saying a lot.”
The room fell silent while Beau and Kogan pondered that with nervous expressions. Finally, Kogan said, “How do we destroy it?”
My gaze fell to the floor. I couldn’t believe I’d had such a good opportunity to drive a magnetic spike through the board the day before and missed it. Then again, when Heath and I first encountered the board, we hadn’t had any stakes on us, and projectiles were being lobbed at our heads, so perhaps I could give myself a break. Lifting my gaze, I said, “First we have to find the Ouija board.”
Kogan’s mouth fell open. “It’s missing?”
I nodded. “Along with Everett’s body, the board and the planchette are both gone.”
“Sweet Jesus,” Kogan whispered. I noticed his arms were lined with goose pimples. “Y’all have to hunt that thing down, Mary Jane.”
“We know, Sheriff.”
At that moment a nurse came into the room. “Are you all still in here?” she asked a bit tersely. “Deputy, I told you not to stay too long. Sheriff Kogan needs his rest!”
Breslow, Heath, and I all adopted guilt-ridden faces. But Kogan said, “Now, now, Brenda, don’t be too hard on them. I’m the one keepin’ them.”
Nurse Ratched crossed her arms and looked at us sternly.
“I think she means business,” Heath muttered. Turning to Kogan, he said, “You get some rest, Sheriff, and we’ll keep at it.”
Kogan laid a hand on his arm and said, “Thank you, Heath. Take the Sellers file with you, though. You’ll need to review who was there on the day that boy went missing. And especially who was playing croquet.”
We waved our farewells to Kogan and headed quickly past the irritated nurse. Once in the hallway, Beau said, “Levi is down this way.”
Heath and I walked solemnly behind the deputy to a room way on the other end of the hospital. I don’t know what I expected, a guard at the door maybe? But the corridor was empty, and when we stepped into Deputy Cook’s room, he lay there alone and pale with an IV in his arm and his eyes closed.
I was about to ask Beau why there was no guard posted, because, to my mind, Cook could wake up at any moment and start attacking people, but then I noticed that both his wrists were strapped to the bed, and just under the covers, I saw another strap securing his chest. He wasn’t going anywhere.
While Beau hung back with a pained look on his face, Heath and I stepped forward. I opened up my senses and tried to feel if there was any evil spirit hovering close to Cook, but I sensed nothing. With a nod to Heath I unzipped my fishing vest and handed it to Beau. “Hold that, will
you? And if he does anything freaky, throw that to me.”
Heath did the same and then the two of us approached Levi, again very cautiously, and again I opened up my senses. I felt that Heath was doing the same, because the energy around us sort of expanded and became charged.
This is a technique that my sweetheart and I had all but perfected. When two psychics work together, their joined forces can act as a booster to the kinetic energy that surrounds them. It can make the act of reaching out to the other side, or even to grounded spirits, that much easier. We’d been using it a lot together on our most recent ghostbusts, but it also came in handy for the occasional joint readings we gave to clients, and Heath and I had actually talked about doing some group readings using this technique, just to give it some good exercise.
“You want to take the lead?” Heath asked me, and I smiled because I could sense the energy of a woman who’d sort of been alerted to the shift in energy of the room, and she’d stepped forward to look first at Heath, then me, as if deciding whom to communicate with. I’d felt her make her decision and approach me. “Sure,” I said. Then I addressed the spirit directly when I felt her introduce herself. Her name came to me in two parts that sounded like “Sill” and “Vee” and I extrapolated to put the name together. “Hello, Sylvia,” I said aloud. “I’m Mary Jane, and that’s Heath. Are you connected to Levi?”
I felt rather than heard her affirmation that she was connected to the deputy, and she showed me a tree with several branches, moving up to the second tier. “She’s his grandmother,” I said. Sylvia then tapped me on the left shoulder, which is where I’ve always put the male side of the family. “She’s his paternal grandmother,” I said.
“Oh my God,” Beau whispered. “Are you talking to his grandma Sylvie?”
I smiled at Beau. I’d missed on the name a little. “Yes, Beau. She’s indicating that she knows you too.”
“That’s true!” he said.
“She’s showing me lemon cakes,” I told him.
“Whoa!” he said. “When Levi first joined the department, Sylvie used to bring by her famous lemon cakes. They were so good,” he sighed. “Will you tell her I always thought she baked the best lemon cake in Valdosta?”