Ghost Trackers (15 page)

“So, you
are
admitting the possibility that there’s some paranormal aspect to Sean’s and Jerry’s deaths,” Trevor said.

“I’m not sure that I’m willing to go that far yet,” Drew said, “but there
are
some strange similarities. Both men died in proximity to us, both screamed before they died, and both bodies were found covered with fluid. Formaldehyde in Sean’s case, water in Jerry’s.”

“Both of them seemed to scream more in fear than in pain,” Trevor added. “And while they were covered with their respective fluids, there was, for the most part, none in their vicinity. Seems like there should’ve been some puddles or at least a few drops somewhere. But in both instances, the floor around them was dry as a bone.” Trevor paused, then frowned. “Sorry. Bad choice of phrase.”

“There was a sink near Jerry,” Amber pointed out. “That’s probably where the water came from.”

“Again, there was none on the floor,” Trevor insisted. “You can’t soak yourself from head to toe in a restaurant bathroom without splashing at least some water, and you’d probably end up splashing a lot of it, and it’d end up all over the place.”

As frustrating as it was, Drew couldn’t fault
Trevor’s logic on that point, but he also didn’t see how Jerry could have managed to avoid dousing himself without making a mess. He decided to table that problem for later. The paramedics hadn’t been able to give them a specific cause of death for Jerry, but there’d been no outward signs of violence—no bruising or bleeding—just as with Sean. Earlier, Drew had told Trevor that while it was uncommon for a man as young as Sean to drop dead unexpectedly, it wasn’t unheard of. But for
two
men in their early thirties to die suddenly within twelve hours of each other? That was definitely in the realm of the weird.

“Maybe their deaths weren’t natural,” he mused aloud, “but that doesn’t mean anything paranormal killed them. Maybe they were poisoned.” He hurried on before Trevor could interrupt. “Both of them cried out before they died, and both were covered with some sort of liquid. Maybe they cried out in pain and not fear. If that’s the case, then we’re dealing with a mundane murderer and not malevolent forces from beyond. I’m sure the police will have the chemical found on Sean tested, and they’ll do the same with the liquid on Jerry.”

“You better hope that it’s not poison,” Trevor said. “You gave CPR to both Sean and Jerry, which means if they
were
poisoned, you got plenty of the stuff on you.”

His thoughts had been running along similar lines. “I didn’t get much on me, and I washed my hands afterward both times. Still, if they
had
been poisoned,
you’d think I’d have suffered at least some ill effects from contact with the substance. But I feel fine.”

“And what sort of killer covers his victims’ bodies with poison?” Amber pointed out. “And who’d stand still long enough for him to do it? It seems like an impractical way to murder someone.”

Drew smiled at her. “Well, when you put it that way, my poison theory seems a little unlikely, doesn’t it?”

“More than a little,” Trevor said. “But maybe you should get checked out by a doctor, just in case.”

Drew and Amber looked at him.

“What? Just because I believe something paranormal is going on here doesn’t mean I think you should take a foolish risk.” He smiled. “The last thing I want is for you to drop dead, too, buddy. Better safe than sorry, right?”

“There’s an urgent care on the other side of town,” Drew said. “I’ll head on over and get looked at, but I’m not worried. Any poison strong enough to kill someone as fast as Sean and Jerry died would’ve had some effect on me by now.”

Amber put her hand on his arm. “Trevor’s right. You should go, just to be safe. I’ll come along and keep you company, OK?”

He wasn’t sure how he felt about her offer. On one level, he was happy to have her go with him, but on another, he was concerned that she’d attached to him too strongly, too quickly. They’d only started to get to know each other again after
years apart, but now it seemed that she didn’t want to leave his side. She’d spent so many years living alone, dealing with the depression that had resulted from the trauma they’d experienced in the Lowry House, and he feared that she was latching on to him emotionally, not only as someone who might help relieve her loneliness but also as someone who could be a stabilizing influence in her life.

One of the drawbacks to being a psychologist was that some people sought out his company because they hoped, consciously or subconsciously, to derive therapeutic benefit from it. He’d dated more than one woman over the years who’d secretly hoped that he could “fix” them. As much as he cared for Amber and as much as he wanted to rekindle their friendship, and perhaps take it further, as a psychologist it would be unethical of him to allow her to get too close to him while she was in such a fragile emotional state. Hell, given the fact that they’d witnessed two men die since returning to Ash Creek, he wasn’t sure he was in all that stable a frame of mind himself. Better to keep things more casual between then, for both their sakes.

“Thanks, but I’ll be all right on my own,” he said. “The last thing you need to do is sit around in a doctor’s office reading old magazines while I wait to be seen.”

She looked crestfallen. “But I . . . I don’t want to be alone right now, not after everything that’s happened.”

Trevor gave him a look that he couldn’t read before turning to Amber. “Tell you what. We’ll modify our plans a bit. We’ll drop Drew back off at the hotel so he can get his car and drive over to the urgent care, and you can hang out with me for a while. I was going to head over to the police station to ask them some more questions about Sean, but now that a second guy has died in our presence, that might seem a tad on the suspicious side. I think we’ll go straight to the Historical Society and see what else we can dig up on the Lowry House. Sound good?”

She looked disappointed and more than a little hurt by Drew’s rejection, but she nodded.

Trevor turned to Drew. “And assuming you get a clean bill of health from the doctor, you can head back to the hotel, track down Greg, and see if he remembers anything about what happened that night at the Lowry House.”

“Sounds like a plan,” he said.

They started walking toward Trevor’s Prius, Amber keeping Trevor between herself and Drew. He regretted hurting her feelings, but he told himself that it was for the best, and as a psychologist, he believed it. So, why did he feel so shitty?

“This may sound kind of morbid,” Amber said, “but if Sean and Jerry didn’t die of natural causes, then I hope they
were
murdered by some ordinary human killer. Because if there
was
some kind of paranormal cause to their deaths, something connected
to the Lowry House and to the three of us returning to Ash Creek after all these years, then that means they died because we stirred up something that we shouldn’t have.” And then, in a voice so soft Drew almost couldn’t hear it, she added, “It means
we
killed them.”

For the second
time that day, Greg watched his friends get into Trevor’s car and drive away. He’d been present the entire time they were at Flying Pizza, sitting alone and unseen at a nearby table. Having the power, as the cliché went, to cloud men’s minds not only came in handy but was also really amusing sometimes. He hadn’t expected Jerry Cottrill to be there, too, but his presence was serendipitous, and offing the son of a bitch and having Drew, Amber, and Trevor discover his body, especially after killing Sean in front of them the night before, well, life—and death, too, for that matter—didn’t get much better than that.

Things were moving along quite nicely, and everything was on track for the big event tonight. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t have a little more fun in the meantime.

He headed for his own car, humming along with the dark music playing in his head.

The Ash Creek
Historical Society was housed in an old building cattycorner from the downtown post office, only a few blocks from where Trevor’s
parents lived. The main room of the building wasn’t much to look at. The plaster on the walls was yellowed and cracked, and the warped wooden floor creaked so loudly he feared the boards would give way beneath their weight as they walked.

Framed black-and-white photos lined the walls, displaying images from the town’s past: the first firehouse, several covered bridges, farmers posing next to what at the time was brand-new state-of-the-art farm equipment, the first high school. There were no pictures of the Lowry House, though. It wasn’t the kind of place that the civic-minded citizens who served on the Historical Society wanted to commemorate. There were also framed front pages of the town newspaper, the
Hue and Cry
, mostly dealing with national events, such as the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Kennedy’s assassination, and the first moon landing. There
were
several local stories represented, but again, nothing about the Lowry House.

Most people who visited the Historical Society—and there were a handful here today, mostly people back in town for the reunion—didn’t go past the main room. But as far as Trevor was concerned, the best part of the Historical Society was the smaller room in the back, where the reference library was housed. He’d made a beeline for it the instant he entered the building, and Amber
had followed, a little reluctantly, he thought. Maybe she was tempted to linger and check out the pictures. Or maybe she was still bummed about Drew ditching her.

On the drive over, he’d tried to cheer Amber up by telling her about a recent interview he’d done for a paranormal magazine with a woman who claimed not only that she saw ghosts everywhere she went but also that they were always naked. Amber had smiled a couple of times, but he could tell she wasn’t paying attention, and he’d fallen quiet and stayed that way the rest of the drive.

Now the two of them sat at a small table in the reference room, Trevor on one side, Amber on the other, three huge bound collections of the
Hue and Cry
between them. The woman who’d retrieved the volumes for them looked as if she was 112 and wore a head bun so severe he wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that it had been coated in shellac. She’d wanted to hover while he read, especially once she’d learned that he was a writer there to do research, but he’d told her that he and his “assistant” worked better when they were undisturbed, and she’d gone out into the main room, a disappointed expression on her ancient face.

Amber eyed the large volumes of newsprint with an air of disbelief. “Haven’t these people heard of scanning and digitizing text?” she asked. “Or at least microfiche?”

Trevor, glad that she was talking again, smiled as he flipped back the stiff cover of one of the volumes and began turning pages. “They probably don’t have the budget for it. Besides, I like the smell of old newsprint. It smells like history, you know?”

“Smells more like mold to me.”

“That, too,” he admitted. He continued turning pages.

Amber watched him for several moments before selecting one of the volumes for herself. “What are we looking for?” she asked.

“I want to refresh my memory about the incidents with the Lowry House,” he said. “There are no detailed records of the Native American massacre you dreamed about, but the paper’s been around for more than a hundred years. It should’ve covered the bootlegger serial killer, the Lowry murder-suicide, and the fire. I’m looking through the volume of issues from the year the serial killings took place.” He glanced at the volume she’d selected. “You’ve got the year of the Lowry killings.”

For a moment, it looked as if she was going to put that volume aside rather than dig into it in search of the grisly specifics of how Lowry murdered his family. But then she asked, “Do you remember what month it was?”

“November.”

She nodded and began turning pages. Before
long, they’d both found the issues they were searching for and fell quiet as they read, Trevor occasionally writing a note in the small pad he always carried.

After a bit, he looked up from the page he’d been reading. “It’s weird. I don’t have any specific memories of this place, but it feels familiar, like I
almost
remember it.”

“Maybe you do,” Amber said, looking up from her volume. “I think the three of us coming home and being together has jolted our memories, kind of given them a jump start, you know?”

He smiled. “Sounds like one of Drew’s theories. Has he been giving you private headshrinking lessons?” As soon as he said it, Amber dropped her gaze to the table, and he regretted opening his damn mouth. It wasn’t that he was jealous of Drew. He cared about Amber, but as a friend. It was just that, no matter how hard he tried to watch what he said, his internal censor was too often asleep at the wheel.

He wanted to say something to make her feel better, but he had no idea what might work. It might have helped if he had a clear idea why Drew had not so subtly told her to accompany him to the Historical Society. Drew was usually so good with people—that was one of the main requirements of his job, after all—but from the way he’d dealt with Amber outside Flying Pizza, he’d seemed clueless. He probably hadn’t been thinking straight,
Trevor decided. Hell, he doubted any of them had. They had just discovered a dead body—the second in two days—and had been questioned by the police about it. Even someone with Drew’s training would be shaken up after that. Especially if he thought he might be falling for Amber too fast.
That
was it, he realized. Drew was a good man, and he wouldn’t want to take advantage of Amber or make any impulsive moves given their current situation.

Now Trevor knew why his friend had insisted that Amber accompany him to the Historical Society. He started to tell her, but for once he kept his mouth shut. It wasn’t as if either Drew or Amber had come out and admitted having feelings for each other. They might not have even admitted it to themselves. If he said anything about it now, he’d only end up embarrassing her. So he decided to broach a different subject.