Restless Spirits: Chapters 1 & 2

Restless Spirits is a complete novel available to paid subscribers. Enjoy these first two chapters as a free preview. Click here to buy the book, and click here for the About and Navigation page.

You know, you just don’t expect to wake up one day and find that you’ve died.

Well, maybe the elderly do. And terminal patients, maybe. But when you’re healthy and in the prime of your life, it definitely comes as a shock. I know because it just happened to me, and I’m still trying to wrap my mind around it.

I’m not even sure when it happened, or how. All I know is that the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was myself, lying at the foot of the staircase in the old Baird house, face down in a pool of blood. The rest of me was lying on my back. That had to hurt, and it made me grateful that I didn’t remember. It took a while for my mind to catch up with what I saw. My first thought was that I’d never get all of that blood out of my clothes, and there goes my favorite pair of capris. My second thought was that my sister would be so full of herself at having been right that I’d never hear the end of it.

The third thought was where it caught up to me—it would be a neat trick to hear anything, from her or anyone else, ever again. I was dead.

What are the stages of grief again? There’s denial, anger, bargaining... I wasn’t sure about the last two, but I seemed to have the first three stuck on a loop. I mean, dead? Seriously? But I was only twenty-nine! Really twenty-nine, too, not thirty-something claiming to be twenty-nine, which was a privilege I was actually kind of looking forward to once I hit the big three-oh. I had a fully-loaded DVR at home and a novel to finish, and a business with my sister that was just getting into the black. How would this hurt the business? How would this hurt Chris?

From my vantage point on the second landing, I could see a plastic rock upended on the porch railing outside with its hidey-hole exposed, so it wasn’t that hard to piece together how I’d gotten in here. Apparently, I’d had time to set up my laptop before things went south, because I could see it sitting open on a dusty table in the parlor. At least it hadn’t gotten smashed when I fell.

I half-laughed, half-moaned at the absurdity of my relief. Fat lot of good it did me, not having my laptop damaged.

Or did it?

It had a built-in web cam. Did I turn it on before I went to explore? It would have been a dumb not to. At the angle I’d set it at, it might have recorded the whole sordid tragedy. Without thinking, I went to it. I mean, really without thinking. I didn’t even remember walking over there. I just suddenly stood in front of the computer, its black screen in power- save mode. I swallowed—or at least went through the motions of swallowing—and reached my hand out toward the infrared mouse.

And watched my hand pass right through it.

I stared for a long moment at my hand sticking through the mouse and the table beneath it. “Oh, come on!” I finally bellowed in frustrated disbelief. “Seriously?”

I was answered by oppressive, depressing, lonely silence. That felt pretty serious.

Then I heard someone laugh.

“Hello?” I called, praying I hadn’t imagined the laughter. At that moment, I felt so lonely I couldn’t feel anything but hope at the prospect of having some company. Maybe even a guide, some kind of guru who could help me navigate this here afterlife. Or, heck, even just a ghostly witness who could tell me what had happened.

“Hello!” I called again, moving in the direction I thought the laugh had come from. I heard it again, distinctly this time. It sounded like a small child, maybe a little girl. I racked my brain, remembering what I knew about the house, and couldn’t recall any child deaths occurring here. I moved into the dining room through a set of French doors with cracked panes. Nothing filled the shelves of the built-in China cabinet but dust and shadows. “I don’t want to hurt you,” I promised. “It’s okay. I just want to ask you some questions.”

More childish laughter came from the room I’d just left. I swore and turned around. As I approached the threshold separating the dining room from the parlor, the French doors slammed shut, hard enough for the cracks in the glass to grow.

With a startled scream, I reached for the handle, only to see my hand pass right through it. I bit back another scream, muttering instead, “Okay! Getting a little creeped out, here.” Then I remembered I could walk right through the doors. Rolling my eyes at myself, I stepped through them.

“Look,” I said, “little girl—kid—whatever, Aunt Ronnie needs some help here, okay? We can play hide and seek later.”

More laughter drifted down the stairs. “Kids,” I muttered, heading that way.

“Don’t go,” a voice whispered.

It might surprise you to learn that dead people can feel fear. I could, at least. Suddenly, I was petrified. “Ooookay…ghosts,” I said, realizing that not being the only ghost in the house might not be such a great thing after all. “I’m one of you guys. I mean, apparently. So can’t we all be pals?”

Behind me, the French doors swung open in a silent invitation. I stood there a moment, torn between following the laughter—which I had to admit was beginning to feel a little creepy—and taking up Whisper’s invitation. I didn’t feel that easy about either prospect, really, but either way, what did I have to lose? I was already dead. The only other alternative—doing nothing, and staying alone—was depressing enough to overpower my fear.

But not only was I not alone, I also had my choice of company. And like I said, the little kid was beginning to freak me out. If somebody was trying to warn me not to follow her, it was probably a good idea to listen. At least the other voice was trying to be helpful. I headed back into the dining room but paused at the threshold.

There was also a chance that this was a single entity, getting its afterlife jollies by screwing with me.

But even that seemed better than hanging out with my own corpse.

“Okay! I didn’t go!” I said, crossing the threshold. “So...what now?”

A light came on in the kitchen. That got my attention, especially seeing as how the house had no electricity. I moved toward it, then stopped. What was I doing? I mean, moving toward the light? Wasn’t that the way to move on? I wasn’t ready for that. Not yet. Not before talking to Chris. Not without knowing what had caused my head to do half a Linda Blair.

Then again...a kitchen light? Nah. The entrance to the Great Beyond had to be more dramatic than that. I edged closer to the kitchen. Without stepping in, just in case, I peeked inside. A man with sandy brown hair sat slumped in a chair in the middle of the kitchen. He was dressed in old fashioned trousers held up by suspenders, the sleeves of his blue work shirt rolled up to his elbows. He looked haggard, like he’d just been through some kind of ordeal.

“Hello?” I said. He didn’t turn around. “Was that you back there with the door? Were those theatrics really necessary?” No response. I tried one more time. “So, you want to tell me what’s up with that kid? Is it yours?” Nothing. Maybe he couldn’t hear me. Maybe he was only an apparition, an environmental memory of the living, unable to interact with me. He could only go through the motions.

Or maybe he wasn’t a ghost at all. A sinking feeling came over me as I realized I might be looking at my murderer. I started to back away.

“Best stay here,” he said, and I stopped. He didn’t look up, but he said, softly, “You’re safer in here.”

I opened my mouth to ask him why, but I was cut off by the sound of screaming.

Oh, no.

Chris.

***

Chris was my baby sister. She was also my business partner and best friend. More than that, I was the closest thing she had to a mother, having practically raised her after our mom passed away. This would devastate her. But it could be worse. At least I’d still be able to talk to her. Tell her goodbye, leave her with instructions on getting my house in order, and some hopefully stellar sisterly wisdom that she could think back on and smile about after she helped me cross over.

Chris could see dead people. See them, hear them, talk to them, help them with their unfinished business, that sort of thing. It gave us a pretty great edge in our business.

We’re professional ghost hunters. Well, I supposed now I could scratch “hunter” from the title on my business cards. Veronica Wilson, Professional Ghost, that’s me. I still couldn’t believe it. The job was what had brought me here to the old Baird house. The stupid, creepy, super-haunted Baird house, a.k.a. Chris’s obsession.

The house had a long, disturbing history.  Its reputation started back in the 1930s with Ruth Baird, a wealthy matron who killed her husband with an ax and then locked her daughter in the basement to starve before hanging herself from the banister. That had only been the first of a long series of grizzly murder-suicides and freak accidents that had happened in the house’s nearly eighty-year history. The handful of residents who had made it out alive told stories about voices coming from the drains, moving shadows, and feelings of being watched. Chris had been trying to gain access to investigate it for years, so of course, when we finally got it, we didn’t hesitate to haul ourselves over here.

I didn’t, anyway. Idiot.

But I mean, come on. How was I supposed to know I’d turn out to be the latest in a long string of tragic deaths to happen here?

I could remember arguing with Chris over the phone. She didn’t want me coming over here alone. But she was two hours away, working on one of her special missions. I was anxious to get a look inside the house and not about to be bossed around by my baby sister.

Well, Ron, here you are, inside the house. Like what you see?

For all of the paranormal activity rumored to happen here, the house sure felt awfully empty. I didn’t hear any voices or see any mysterious shadows, and I didn’t feel like I was being watched. I just felt alone. And scared. Would my memories ever come back? Or was my death just the beginning of what I would forget? If my memories were all that were left of me, what would happen if they all went away? Was this all there was? I never really had any solid beliefs about the afterlife when I was alive. But now that I was here, I couldn’t believe this was all there was to it.

Great. Now I wanted to cry, and I didn’t even know if that was physically possible.

I should have listened to Chris.

---

Chapter Two

Haunted houses have held a weird fascination for Chris and me ever since we were kids, when our dad sent us to stay with our aunt the summer after Mom died. Aunt Judy lived back east in a colonial farmhouse that predated the Revolutionary War. That was where Chris had her first encounter. It happened the first night we were there. She woke me up in the middle of the night, swearing she could feel someone sitting next to her in her bed. I yelled at her for making up stories, and she yelled at me for not believing her, and we both went on yelling until Aunt Judy came in and yelled at us both to go to sleep. We did, but only after I’d convinced Chris to sleep in my bed. So I could protect her, I said, but the truth was that I was scared out of my mind.

Chris wasn’t scared, though. She said the presence made her feel safe. She’s never admitted it, but I think she thought it was Mom.

I think all these years she’s been chasing Mom.

It was that same summer that she helped out her first ghost. Aunt Judy’s neighborhood offered up all kinds of haunted spots and mysteries, and we spent the entire summer exploring and daring each other into spooky places. We were playing hide and seek in a local graveyard when Chris told me a man in a red coat kept asking her if he could go home. When she begged me to help her help him, I went along, figuring it was all pretend. Either that, or she had lost her mind. I wanted to believe either of those things more than I wanted to think he was real.

But then she got our Uncle Bob involved, and he was more than happy to humor her. He took us to the library, where we learned that the part of the cemetery in which we’d been playing was full of the unmarked graves of British soldiers from the Revolutionary War. A visit to the historical society turned up a list of names of some of the men supposed to be buried there. One of the historians listened to Chris’s description of her new “friend” with complete credulity, and called in her friend from the Paranormal Society. Several days and phone calls later, Ensign William Creek was disinterred and shipped back to his native Wales. Chris never saw the man in the red coat again.

Even after that, I remained a skeptic, but I still helped out on all of her adventures. Her missions, she called them. Then Dad brought us back home, and it didn’t take me long to move on to other interests— namely, Joey Peters. Chris, though...she stuck with it, finding a whole new creepy world to explore close to home. By the time she was a teenager, she had already become an expert on ghosts. After I went away to college, she joined a local ghost hunting club and learned all the tools and tricks of the trade.

And I didn’t totally give it up. I enjoyed the thrill of the hunt whenever she managed to drag me along. I like a good scare as much as anybody. Ghost stories tended to depress me, though. They were always so tragic. I preferred stories with happy endings. Chris escaped her reality by delving into the past, doing what she could to help those who had no more future. I escaped mine by withdrawing into my own imagination. I made up stories for myself, ones with happy endings. I got good at it, too, and enjoyed modest success on the Romance charts. So I was more than a little surprised when Chris came to me a couple of years ago with a business proposal.

“Let me get this straight,” I said after she laid out her master plan. “You want to hunt ghosts— professionally—and you want me to finance it?”

“It’s a booming business,” she assured me, “and with your backing, we can afford some decent equipment that’ll help us knock out the competition.”

“This sort of thing has competition?”

“You’d be surprised.”

“Evidently.”

“But around here, it’s mostly non-profits on shoestring budgets. There are also a lot of con artists in the mix, doing a lot of damage to the industry. We could legitimize it, though. Take a scientific, skeptical approach—”

“Don’t you have to actually be a skeptic to do that? You’re about the biggest believer I know.”

“But you’re not. You’ll give us legitimacy.” She went into detail about how the business would work and how she would promote it, but I wasn’t really listening. My wheels were too busy spinning, imagining myself as a paranormal P.I. Truth was, I was  getting  bored  with  writing  romance.  The constant happily ever after didn’t hold the same appeal for me that it once had. I was ready to sink my teeth into something meatier, something with an edge.

Maybe ghost stories were just the thing for me, after all. And what better way to do research and jump-start my muse than to hunt down the real thing?

“I’m in,” I interrupted, “on one condition. I want to be your partner.”

“Right,” said Chris, “that’s kinda what I’m saying. You’d be my silent partner.”

“Not silent,” I corrected her. “I want to be your ghost-hunting partner. Full-time.”

Chris blinked at me. “You…I mean… Huh?”

“If I do this, I’m doing it all the way. I mean, why should you get to have all the fun?”

“But, Ron, this can get dangerous. It’s pretty scary sometimes.”

“Again I ask: why should you get all the fun?” “But you don’t have any training—”

“You can train me. I can’t imagine there’s anybody who knows more about this stuff than you do.”

“I guess…”

“Then it’s settled.” I stood up from my chair and held out my hand so we could shake on it. “So, do I need to, like, sign something?”

Thus, we became Wilson Investigations: Ghosts, Goblins, Imps & Nasty Spirits. That’s WIGGINS for short. Hey, she shouldn’t have made me senior partner if she didn’t want me to name it.

I suppose she could name it whatever she wanted now.

It wasn’t like Chris didn’t warn me. She and Gus, the techno-geek who made up the entirety of our “crew,” were more than two hours away, wrapping up one of her missions, when she called me with the news: after more than a year of untangling red tape, we finally got clearance to investigate the Baird place. You can’t just barge into an allegedly haunted house and start poking around for spooks. Well, you could, but that’d be one sure way to land yourself down in county lock-up for B and E. The Baird place might not have had any tenants—at least, not living ones—in over a decade, but it still had owners, and before we could go in, we needed their permission.

But first, we had to find the owners. Turns out they weren’t too proud of their connections to the place, nor of their inability to unload it. There was also something about suspicion of a thwarted attempt at arson a few years ago that led to the owners’ records getting buried pretty deep. Just tracking them down took the better part of six months. Once we found them, the actual ownership was tied up in arbitration between a pair of siblings. Turns out they weren’t fighting over who got to keep it, but over who had to take it.

Gee, Ron, what was your first clue that this house was bad news?

“Is it locked?” I asked when Chris gave me the news. “I can head on over there, get the lay of the land, figure out our equipment set-up, all that fun stuff.”

“There’s supposed to be a key in one of those fake roc—wait, forget I said that. You’re not going over there alone.”

“Why not?”

“Because that house is freaky, Ron. Even by my standards. I think it’s cursed.”

“Cursed? You don’t really believe that.”

“I do when it comes to the Baird place. Look, we do this as a group. It’s too dangerous to go alone. In fact, I was thinking about calling the Paranormal Society, see if they want to partner up—”

“Wait, what? The biggest paranormal challenge in the state, and you want to team up with the competition?”

She sighed. “They’re my old non-profit club. They’re hobbyists. They’re hardly competition.”

“Sounds pretty useless to me. Why do we want them?”

“Safety in numbers, you goofus. Plus, this house is their Holy Grail. It would just be mean not to include them.”

“Do we have to pay them?”

Another sigh. “No.”

“Fine. But that makes it even more important for me to get over there first.”

“How so?”

“Because...” I hesitated. I knew my reasons perfectly well, but I didn’t want to share them. Truth was, I’d been bitten by the Baird bug myself a while back. Something in its twisted history had sparked my imagination more than any other haunting, and I started my own research, the notes of which kind of turned into an outline, which kind of turned into the first draft of a novel that my agent was on pins and needles about.

I hadn’t told any of this to Chris—I didn’t like to talk about my novels with anyone not involved in the creation or eventual sale of them until they’d passed through at least three drafts. Call it superstition, but somehow, talking about them always made me lose interest in writing them.

I dug deep for an excuse. “Because we want to stake our claim,” I said. “You might trust these folks to respect our boundaries, but I have no reason to.”

“Don’t be a jerk,” said Chris. “I’ve been thinking about hiring so—”

“What? Hiring who? Hello?” “—ink I’m cutting ou—”

It was my turn to sigh as her cell lost reception. “Hello? Can you hear me? Who are you hiring? You can’t hire anyone without me!”

“—alk about this now. Prom—ang it. You— romise you won’t go—”

“What’s that? I can’t understand you,” I lied, but it was unnecessary. The line was dead.

So I grabbed my laptop, defied my sister’s wisdom, and hurried over here. That’s the last thing I remember.

---

Restless Spirits: Chapters 3 & 4

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