Before I could answer, we heard a voice say from the hallway, “Mama? Are those cinnamon buns I smell?”
Mrs. G. winked at me. “No, Gilley. Just a new air freshener. Go back to bed, honey love.”
A second later Gil’s head appeared in the doorway. “You know I can always tell a real bun from a fake one, right?”
I hid a smile. Only I knew that Gil wasn’t referring just to baked goods.
Mrs. G. offered her son a skeptical frown. Huh. Maybe I wasn’t the only one who knew Gilley’s penchant for the double entendre. “What’s on your agenda for today?” Mrs. G. asked, setting a hot mug of joe down for Gilley, who was already four fingers deep into the rolls.
Gilley looked at me as if I were the master of schedules. I wished there were nothing more to do than hang out with Mrs. G. in her beautiful home and let myself relax. But as with most of our vacations of late, there was no way that was happening with some menacing ghost to deal with. “Well,” I said, “I’ll have to get ahold of Christine and tell her about the accident, and warn her not to send any more workers over there until we have a chance to fully investigate the source of the spook activity.”
“You know, Mary Jane, I’ve been thinking,” Mrs. G. said. “Maybe the source of the activity has something to do with that young boy who went missing from the Porter house all those years ago.”
Gil and I both turned curiously to her. “What boy?” Gil asked.
Mrs. G. tapped her lip thoughtfully. “Maybe y’all are too young to remember. I was just about to enter my senior year, and at the end of that summer I’d landed my first real job as a typist for the sheriff, which I was so happy about because it meant that I got a chance to get out of workin’ at my mama’s boutique with all those gossipy ladies goin’ on about how they couldn’t find good help, or their husbands spendin’ too much time on the golf course, or how the butcher was chargin’ too much for his pork roast—”
“Ma!” Gil interrupted as Mrs. G. began to get wildly off tangent. “What boy?”
She chuckled. “Sorry,” she said. “I spend so much time alone these days, it’s hard to remember how to tell a story! Anyhoo, it was on my second or third day at the sheriff’s department when a call came in about a missing boy—a cousin of the Porters’, as I recall, had come for a visit and turned up missing. No one knew what’d happened to him and people searched for him that whole summer, but it was like he’d just vanished into thin air.
“His parents lived in another state, Alabama, maybe. North Carolina? I can’t remember. Maybe Tennessee?”
“So, they never found him?” Gil said to move things along.
Mrs. G. shook her head. “No. It was so sad and so scary. People didn’t know if he’d been kidnapped or if he’d just wandered off into the woods somewhere and gotten lost. The prevailing theory was that he’d died of exposure and his remains were simply never found.”
“How old was he?” I asked, feeling a sense of familiarity. Had I heard this story before?
“Oh, I think he was fourteen or fifteen at the time. A good-looking young man too, from the photo that got printed in the paper.”
“Do you remember his name?” Gil asked.
“I do,” she said. “Everett Sellers. Such a good name, don’t you think? I remember looking at his photo and thinking he could have easily been a movie star with those good looks and that name. He was particularly close to Glenn Porter, who was just a few years older than your mama, if I recall, Mary Jane.”
My breath caught.
“What?” Gil said.
“Nothing,” I said, not wanting to go into detail in front of Gil’s mom, but my heart beat a bit faster as I remembered DeeDee telling me that the Sandman had been brought forward by someone named Everett who was Glenn’s cousin. I hadn’t had any idea whom she meant, but now there was an apparent connection, and what an odd connection it was. It might even explain why I was pulled into that OBE with my mother as a child. Maybe it was to give context to something having to do with Everett Sellers, or, taking it one step further, maybe there was a connection to this Sandman and Everett’s disappearance. It was something I knew I’d need to check out, sooner rather than later.
Chapter 4
“M.J.?” Gil said as his hand landed on my arm.
I jumped. “Huh?”
“You were deep in thought there, sugar. Where’d you go?”
“Nowhere. Just thinking that maybe we should check out the story of Everett Sellers.” No sooner did those words leave my lips than I had the most overwhelming foreboding come over me. I’m not the best when it comes to predictions—my psychic sense is much more firmly rooted in communicating with the dead—but sometimes I’ll get the most intense image in my mind’s eye, and what came to me was the picture of the swirling strobe lights of first responders playing against the front entrance of Porter Manor. It was so clear, so vivid, and came with such intensity that I abruptly shot out of my chair and began racing down the hallway. “M.J.!” I heard Gil call after me, but I didn’t slow down or even pause in my flight to the guest room. I heard the pad of Gilley’s bare feet behind me and was glad for it. I’d need him too.
Flinging open the door to the bedroom, I yelled, “Heath!”
“What?! What?!” he said, jerking upright before jumping out of bed and looking around as if he expected to fend off an attack. I’d obviously woken him from a dead sleep.
“What’s happening?” Gilley asked me. “M.J., what’s going on?”
“Get dressed,” I said to both of them as I reached for my suitcase. “We’re about to have a situation.”
As if on cue my phone rang. It was Christine. She was sobbing. “Mary Jane!” she wailed, and then she couldn’t seem to form any coherent sentences.
So I did the talking. “Christine,” I said as calmly as I could while making a hand motion for the boys to hurry up and get dressed. “We’re on our way. You stay put and I’ll call Daddy. He’ll come to you, and I’ll head over to the manor and figure out what’s going on.”
“N-n-noooo!” she cried. “D-d-don’t go over there! Everyone who goes there gets hurt or . . . or . . .”
“Shhhhh, honey,” I coaxed, sitting on the bed to pull on my jeans. “Just try to tell me who’s hurt. Can you do that?” My hand shook as I pulled up the zipper to my jeans.
“The . . . the . . . construction man! He’s dead! I only hired that crew last night and this morning one of them is dead!”
Dammit, I thought. If only I’d had a chance to speak with Christine and warn her about not letting any work crews go over to the Porter house until we’d busted the violent ghost there. I could only imagine that a new, unsuspecting work crew had shown up this morning and perhaps was hit by a planter or another heavy object thrown from the third-floor balcony. “Where’s Daddy?” I asked her.
“He . . . he . . .” Christine was starting to breathe too fast, and she didn’t seem to be able to form words.
“Shhhh,” I tried again as I spun in a circle, looking for a shirt, and located one on the top of my suitcase. “Don’t worry about it, Christine. I’ll find him. You stay put until you hear from us, okay?”
“D-d-d-d-d-don’t go over there, Mary Jane!”
I paused with my shirt half on and said, “We won’t go inside. We’ll just figure out what’s happening and call you. We’ll be okay. I promise. You just stay put. I’ll be in touch as soon as I know something.”
I then hung up because I knew my insistence to head over there was only going to stress her out more. The second I pocketed my phone, Heath said, “Tell me.”
“That was Christine. Before I had a chance to talk to her, she hired another crew to go work on the house this morning.”
“Shit,” Heath swore, his forehead creased with worry.
“It gets worse.”
?
??How much worse?”
“I think someone might be dead.”
Gil stared at me as if he couldn’t believe what words had just come out of my mouth. “Come again?” he said. “Someone died?”
“Maybe. Christine was pretty hysterical, and I can’t be sure of any details. That’s why we need to go.”
I turned to head out of the room but was stopped in the doorway by Mrs. G. She was toting our vests and she handed me mine, then Gilley his, and finally offered the largest vest to Heath. “I don’t know what’s going on, but I’ll want a full report the second you get back, and don’t even think about taking these off for the rest of the day.”
I kissed Mrs. G. on the cheek and put my vest on in haste. We had to get going. “Thank you so much! You’re a lifesaver!”
With that, we were finally out the door.
Gilley drove us over to Porter Manor and the moment we turned down the long drive, he gave a whistle. “Lots of first responders,” he said.
I could feel myself tense when I saw the scene that had been almost exactly captured by my mind’s eye just fifteen minutes earlier. Then I counted three sheriff’s patrol cars, a fire truck, and a paramedic truck all on scene with their lights flashing. As we passed the patrol cars, I was a little surprised there was no deputy standing in the road, ready to turn us away. “Everybody must be inside,” Heath said from the backseat.
“Look, M.J.!” Gil exclaimed suddenly. “Your daddy’s car.”
Sure enough, parked right in front of the steps was Daddy’s dark blue Lincoln. A jolt of alarm added itself to the anxiety brewing in my stomach. “Why is he here?”
Gil parked and we all hopped out, but while Heath and I headed toward the front door, Gil hung back by the rental car. “I’ll stay here, if y’all don’t mind,” he said, the Southern creeping into his speech again.
“I’ll text you from inside,” I told him. Assuming my phone would work this time, of course.
Heath and I hurried up the steps and through the front door, where I very nearly ran right into Daddy. “Mary Jane,” he said, quickly taking hold of my shoulders and gracing me with a disapproving frown. “Why are you here?”
I thought I could ask him the same thing. I craned my neck, trying to peek around him, but Daddy’s a big man, and I get my petite stature from my mother. “Christine called us,” I said, trying to shrug out of his grasp, but Daddy is also quite strong for a man his age. “Daddy, please, let me go. I’m here to help.”
His disapproving frown intensified. “There’s nothing to be done, honey. You’d best get back in your car and go on now before you get in somebody’s way.”
“Montgomery,” said a familiar voice behind Daddy. I leaned out to see Sheriff Kogan, who’d been the Valdosta sheriff for as long as I could remember. “We’re ready to bring out the stretcher. Mind stepping aside?”
I felt my breath catch even though Christine had warned me that a man had died.
“Come on, Em,” Heath whispered, and I felt his gentle hand on my back. “Let’s go back outside so we’ll be out of the way.”
Daddy’s eyes flashed with a brief note of approval for Heath before returning to me. “Wait for me in the drive,” he said, his tone brooking no argument.
With a heavy sigh I turned and headed back outside with Heath to wait next to our rental car, which was parked well out of range of projectiles. Gilley came out from the SUV to join us, but he kept glancing warily up toward the third-floor balcony. It was now empty of flowerpots, but after our earlier experience, I could understand how cautious he was being.
After a bit there seemed to be some movement visible in the front hallway and soon enough two paramedics appeared with a stretcher between them. They carefully eased it down the steps and it wasn’t until the stretcher was even with us that I could see who was on it.
A man with salt-and-pepper hair and a thick mustache was totally strapped down, complete with head and neck brace. His hands were struggling against the straps and his fingers were extended and slightly curled, resembling claws. He was also growling and spitting while trying to twist his head this way and that. Abruptly, he stopped growling and emitted a laugh that could only be described as a cackle. It was a terribly creepy sound, and as it faded, he returned to growling. I felt Gilley latch onto my arm with both hands and step close enough to hug me.
“What the hell is that?” he whispered.
But I knew that he already had that answer. “Something’s got ahold of him,” I said to Heath, who wore a grave look on his face.
We watched as the paramedics maneuvered the stretcher toward the ambulance, and all the while the medic at the helm attempted to talk softly to the man and reassure him, but it was as if his words were falling on deaf ears.
No one else spoke although a slew of other first responders was now coming out of the house. I focused on them for a moment and I saw how strained their expressions were. There was something about the way they were holding themselves so tensely, as if they were quite disturbed by what they’d witnessed inside.
Daddy came out at that moment with the sheriff and a few men wearing hard hats who were pale and visibly shaking. They scrambled down the steps and over to three pickup trucks parked among the patrol cars and fire truck, and hustled inside.
“What do you think happened?” Gil asked, his grip on my arm becoming painful enough that I pried some of his fingers loose.
“Somebody died,” Heath answered, his gaze far away as he stared in the direction of the house.
“You’re trying to make contact?” I asked him.
He nodded. Then he frowned. “There is some really bad juju in there.”
“We already knew that,” I told him.
“Yeah, but, Em, I think it’s actually gotten worse from yesterday.”
“Maybe we should go?” Gil said, a hopeful note in his voice.
I pulled my arm out of his grip and walked with determination toward Daddy. He saw me coming and excused himself from Kogan. “You can’t go in there,” Daddy said, obviously mistaking my purposeful walk toward him at the top of the stairs.
“What happened?” I asked when I reached him.
Daddy shook his head and wiped a sheen of sweat from his brow. “Nothing you should be concerned with, Mary Jane. It’s a terrible sight in there, and nothin’ I want my baby girl to see. Now please, let me handle this, and you and Gilley and Heath go on back to Minerva’s house.”
A knot of anger formed in the center of my chest. Daddy was forever treating me like a child, as if he was oblivious to the fact that I’d seen far more terrible things just in the past few years than he could even imagine. “Daddy,” I said sternly, refusing to budge or go away. “That man who was just taken away, what happened to him?”
Daddy sighed. “We don’t really know, Mary Jane. He seems to be havin’ some kind of psychotic break.”
I held his gaze stubbornly even as he laid a hand on my shoulder to gently remind me he wanted me to leave. “That was no psychotic break,” I said, knowing a possession when I saw one. “I’m assuming he was part of the construction crew that Christine hired?”
“Yes,” Daddy said, but I thought his patience was beginning to wear thin. “He was part of Mike Scoffland’s crew.”
“Did anyone else see what might have triggered the . . . uh . . . psychotic break?”
“No. Well, no, I expect, except Mr. Scoffland.”
“Can I talk to him?”
“No,” Daddy said firmly, applying more pressure to my shoulder and trying to turn me away from the house.
I shrugged out of his grasp and crossed my arms to show him I wasn’t going anywhere. “Daddy, I might be able to help that man, but I need to know specifically what happened inside that house, and if Mr. Scoffland can tell me what he witnessed, I might be able to help his
crew member.”
“You can’t help him, Mary Jane, and you can’t talk to Mike. Now please, go on home, all right?”
I shook my head and refused to turn away. “Daddy, you need to listen to me. There’s something evil inside that house. Something spiritually evil. We had a bad encounter out here yesterday, and I tried to call Christine to warn her, but I never got ahold of her, and she hired another crew without knowing how dangerous it is.”
Daddy’s eyes widened at my admission. “What kind of bad encounter?” he demanded.
“It’s not important,” I told him, because it wasn’t right now. “I need to talk to Scoffland—”
My argument with Daddy was cut off by the sound of his cell phone chirping. He pulled it out of his pocket, glanced at the display, and promptly answered it. After a moment his eyes got big and he gasped, “She’s what?!”
I held my breath again, focused on Daddy’s shocked expression, willing him to blurt out a detail that might tell me what other bad thing had just happened.
“Which hospital are y’all at?” Daddy said, and my anxiety increased. I had a bad feeling the call was about Christine. “Right, I’m on my way, June. You stay with her until I get there, all right?”
Daddy hung up the phone and eyed me, then his car, as if he couldn’t decide whether to bolt to his vehicle or explain to me what’d happened.
“Christine?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he said, already turning away from me. I walked with him while he fished in his pocket for his keys. “She’s had some sort of panic attack. Mrs. Lindstrom found her on the lawn, struggling to breathe. Thank God June was out for her daily walk around the block.”
As Daddy opened his car door, I gave his arm a squeeze. “She’ll be okay,” I assured him.
For a brief moment he paused and there was something in his eyes, something I hadn’t seen since a few days before Mama had died. There was a sweet tenderness in the look he offered me, and he patted my hand gently and said, “Go back to Minerva’s, Mary Jane. I’ll call you in a bit.”