Krewe of Hunters 8 The Uninvited (6 page)

“Things might be a bit messy,” she said, sweeping out an arm
that indicated the sections of newspaper strewn on the table and her shoes and
cape thrown on a chair. “Sorry. Long night.”

“Looks pretty good to me,” he commented.

“What do you like in your coffee? Oh, and what are you doing
here?”

“I told you. I need your help.”

“That doesn’t answer my question about the coffee. What do you
want in it?”

“Just black, thanks.”

“Of course. A fed from Texas. Black coffee.” She handed him the
cup, asking, “What do you need from me?”

“Information about the people you work with.”

“Everyone fills out an extensive form in order to work at the
house, and then has to pass an oral exam. Guides have to know what they’re
doing. Believe it or not, the place gets a lot of applications. When the board
hires, they want people who not only have a good grasp of history, but really
love it. So they ask personal questions, as well.”

“I’m aware of all that. What I want to hear is more about what
you’ve seen. What you, personally, have observed.”

She paused, eyes narrowing. “You think one of my coworkers had
something to do with this?”

“I don’t think Julian Mitchell went crazy, trashed his
workplace, then sat down and killed himself on a bayonet—no.”

Allison shook her head. “I’ve been through it and through it,
with you and with the cops. I don’t know what else I could possibly tell
you.”

“Start with your day,” he told her. “Tell me about it
again.”

She sighed. “It was pretty much like any other day,” she
said.

He took a sip of his coffee, smiling. “I was looking for a
little more detail than that. Were any of the tours unusual? Did anything stand
out to you?”

“Yes, I found the body of a friend in the study,” she said
curtly.

Before he could respond, his cell phone rang. He excused
himself and answered it, frowning as he listened.

Allison felt a chill; she knew it had something to do with
whatever was being said.

A moment later he hung up. “You took a family with two boys,
Todd and Jimmy, on your last tour.”

She nodded. “Yes, why?”

“Their father’s in the hospital. He woke up in the middle of
the night, screamed and fell into a coma. One of the kids was so hysterical when
they reached the hospital that someone on staff called the police.”

“
What?
Why? That’s terrible,
but—”

“The boy, Todd, wants to talk to you. He said that you’d
understand. According to Todd, a ghost did follow them home.”

3

T
he hospital was cold. Outside, the
late-summer heat was beginning to wane and the day was still beautiful, but
inside the hospital, Allison shivered against the chill that seeped into her
bones.

She didn’t want to be there; she wanted to run away. But Todd
wanted to see her because for some reason he believed she could help.

And she
wanted
to help.

The two boys were seated in an otherwise empty waiting area.
Todd’s mother was in with his father, and an attractive woman of about forty was
sitting with the boys. Seeing Allison, Todd leaped to his feet and came running
over to her. She was startled when he threw his arms around her but she
comforted the boy, embracing him and stroking his hair.

“He followed us home! He followed us home. That awful man
followed us home. The beast—Beast Bradley. He killed your friend and he made my
father sick!” Todd said, his words muffled.

Allison looked helplessly at the woman in the room and then at
Tyler Montague.

“Todd,” she said gently. “Ghosts can’t do that. Really. They’re
just…inventions, something we make up in our own minds. Your father—” She
paused, praying this wasn’t a lie. “Your father’s going to be fine. You’re in an
exceptionally good hospital and the doctors will find out what’s wrong with
him.”

The woman who was with the boys had risen and come toward her,
a hand extended. “You must be Allison Leigh. I’m Rose Litton, Todd and Jimmy’s
aunt. I’m sorry you’ve been asked down here. I know you’re dealing with your own
loss. But Todd was nearly hysterical and insisted that he see you.”

“It’s all right. It’s quite all right,” Allison assured her.
But it wasn’t. She didn’t know how to make this better for Todd.

She could only be glad that—as far as she knew—the ransacking
of the attic’s office space had not been divulged to the media.

“What do the doctors say?” Tyler was asking.

“So far they can’t identify the physiological cause,” Rose
Litton said. “Not yet, at any rate, but they’re doing a lot of tests. Early this
morning, while he was still in bed at the hotel, Artie jerked up, screamed—and
fell into a coma. It was as if he saw something in his sleep…or in his dreams.
They believe he might have ingested some kind of hallucinogenic, which made him
see something that terrified him, although they can’t tell what it is or how
this might have happened. They just don’t know.”

Allison touched Todd’s chin to get him to look up at her. “The
doctors here are the best. They’ll find out what’s wrong with your father,” she
promised again.

“Who are you?” Rose Litton asked, frowning at Tyler. “Forgive
me—that’s rude. I just knew the nurse had called the police station, asking
about a way for Todd to see Ms. Leigh.”

“Not rude at all,” Tyler said, reaching into his jacket and
producing his credentials.

“Special Agent?” Rose Litton read, her voice worried.

“I’m here to discover what went on at the house,” he told her.
“Please, don’t be alarmed. We don’t suspect any kind of true toxin. Allison
would be ill, too, if there had been, and so could a hundred-plus other people
who were in the house yesterday. I’m not a doctor, but I do know there are many
reasons for a coma, and the doctors here
will
get to
the root of it.” He hunkered down. “Did you see what happened? Perhaps, earlier,
your father knocked his head? Was he agitated, stressed out about anything?”

Todd shook his head. Jimmy stood and came over to join them.
“No, my dad doesn’t get stressed,” Jimmy said. “He’s a good guy. He yells
sometimes, but not much. We had fun after we left the house. We went to a tavern
for supper and Dad was okay when we went to bed.”

Todd nodded vigorously. “Yeah, he was fine. He let us watch TV
for a while in the hotel. Then we fell asleep and woke up because Dad screamed.
He just screamed in the middle of the night. We were scared ’cause Dad never
screams and suddenly he did.” He looked proud for a minute. “My dad is really
brave. It had to be something awful, a monster like Beast Bradley, to make my
dad scream like that.”

“Thank you,” Tyler said gravely. He stood again. “You know,
sometimes we have monsters in our minds, in our imaginations. I’ll go speak with
one of the docs,” he said. “In the meantime, you shouldn’t worry.” He smiled at
Rose and set his hand on Todd’s head. “Excuse me. I’ll be back.”

He left them, and Allison felt more awkward than ever.

She tried to smile at Rose. “It’s great that you could be
here.”

“I’m only over in Hershey,” Rose said. “Not far at all. And I’m
glad to be with the boys.” Her expression was pained, her eyes on Allison. Her
silence seemed to say a lot.

I don’t know what’s the matter with Todd.
He’s convinced it’s something from the Tarleton-Dandridge House. I hope you
can reassure him….

The realization that this might have been a bad time to bother
Allison seemed to come back to her.

“I really am so sorry!” Rose said. “You lost someone last
night. Tragically. It’s…it’s all over the news. And they’re making it sound—”
she glanced at the boys “—like a…well, paranormal event.”

Allison nodded. “Of course. People love ghost stories.”

“There
is
a ghost,” Todd
insisted.

Jimmy gasped. “We saw that a tour guide died at the house. It
was on the TV news when we got back. My parents were worried. They hoped it
wasn’t you!” he told Allison. “Dad turned the news off. He says we’ll get to
know enough about the real world when we’re older.” He frowned. “I’m sorry. I
mean, I’m glad it wasn’t you, but I’m sorry about your friend.”

Todd took her hand and squeezed it. They
were
sorry, but Julian was an abstraction to them, a news story,
while their father was lying here in a no-man’s-land. “Yeah, we’re really
sorry,” he said.

“Thank you. I’m the one who found him, and it was heartbreaking
for me. I’m going to miss him very much. But, Todd, like I was telling you, bad
things just happen sometimes, even to good people. Listen, you have to trust the
doctors here, and you can’t get upset about the house or believe you have a
ghost with you. Okay?”

He looked at her stubbornly. “The ghost likes you. You can talk
to him. You can get him to leave my dad alone.”

As Allison struggled for speech, Rose Litton shrugged
apologetically.

“All of us, every one of us, will do whatever we can for your
dad, okay, Todd?” Allison finally said.

Todd whispered a solemn “Thank you.”

A moment later, Tyler returned. He offered Todd an encouraging
smile. “They’ll keep at it, young man. Meanwhile, you stay calm and help your
mom and little brother.”

Todd nodded. He studied Tyler, and then apparently decided to
trust him.

“I will. I’m going to help my mom and my family,” Todd said.
“Please, help
her,
though,” he said, glancing over
at Allison. “The ghost likes her.”

Rose moved closer to Allison. “I am so sorry,” she said again.
“He was just crying and going crazy, and the idea that you might talk to him was
the only thing that worked.”

“We’ll do everything we can from our end, Todd,” Tyler
said.

Allison noticed that the boy seemed to respond to him. He
nodded. “I can reach you if I need to, right?”

“We’ll be here,” Tyler promised firmly. “I’ll even give you my
personal cell number. You can call me anytime.”

Todd gestured at Allison. “She doesn’t understand,” he said.
“But she can help us, and you can help her. Please?”

“I’ll do whatever I can, buddy.”

He wrote down his cell number and handed it to the boy, then
took Allison’s arm to lead her from the hospital. She steeled herself not to
wrench her arm out of his grasp.

When they exited, she moved away from him. “That was wrong,”
she told him.

“What was?”

“You made that poor boy think we could help him by convincing a
ghost to leave his dad alone!”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you believe they exist!”

They’d reached his car. He leaned against the roof, looking
over at her as she waited by the passenger door.

“I went in and spoke with Mr. Dixon’s doctors. There is
absolutely nothing physiological causing his problem—nothing they can discover.
Of course, they’re still testing. And he may come out of it himself. One of the
theories his primary physician has is that he put himself in the coma to avoid
some horrible fact or illusion he’d seen in his own mind. Whether you want to
believe I’m a quack or not, you have to admit that the power of the human mind
can be incredible. Maybe if we look into this and find something to say to the
kid, the family or even Mr. Dixon himself, we can reverse the situation.”

“If
we
can find something?”

“You know the history and the house better than anyone
else.”

Allison lowered her eyes, remembering the way she’d felt when
Todd was in the house yesterday, so convinced that something evil was still
alive there.

She looked back at Tyler. “I’m an academic. I believe in the
power of men and women to do good or evil. I don’t believe in spirits.”

“But you believe in history?”

“Of course. You can’t
not
believe
in history,” she said.

“Ah, but what about the famous saying: History is written by
the victors. And sometimes the victors might exaggerate or lie or leave things
out. Sometimes history has to be rewritten. It isn’t an unchanging, monolithic
entity. Attitudes change, and they change history. So do new facts as they
emerge.”

Allison sighed, wondering how the granite Texan could be so
ethereal in his statements.

“History didn’t kill Julian Mitchell,” she said. “Or put Mr.
Dixon in a coma.”

“Belief is everything,” he countered. “And, Allison, I do
believe it’s obvious that
something
is going on.
Even if by some remarkable chance Julian accidentally killed himself or just
decided, Hmm, let me think of a really gruesome way to kill myself, it still
wouldn’t explain what happened in the attic.”

“Maybe Julian trashed the attic.”

“Why would he have done that?”

“I don’t know! Why would he have sat down with his rifle—and
then leaned his head down on the blade?” she asked wearily.

“Those are things we have to know. Other people could die,”
Tyler said.

“You mean Mr. Dixon. He wasn’t at the house when he went into a
coma.”

“No. But he’d
been
at the house,
and you found a friend dead there a matter of hours earlier. Dixon saw the news
about Julian’s death before going to sleep.”

“So, he dreamed a ghost had followed him home and it was so
real and frightening to his sleeping mind that he slipped into another realm,”
Allison said. “I don’t know the answers to any of it. I just know that it’s real
and horrible and I’m so tired I can’t think. Will you take me home, please?” she
asked. “I’d just like to be alone.”

He looked over the top of the car at her and Allison saw that
his gaze was filled with disappointment. Of course. He wasn’t going to get what
he wanted. But it was more than that; it was disappointment in
her,
and somehow that was disturbing.

“Certainly. I’ll take you right home.”

Allison had no idea why his reaction bothered her. It just
did.

“I really need some time!” she said, almost pleading. “Julian
is dead. Not in a coma. There’s no coming back from that.”

“I completely understand. Really.”

She slid into the passenger seat. He was silent as they drove
and she watched him, feeling a clash of emotions. Life had become so painful and
intense overnight. It was still hard to fathom that Julian was dead. She was
still tired from last night. She’d discovered the body of her friend. Then she’d
dealt—for the first time in her life—with the police, and with crime scene techs
trying to find out what she’d touched and what she hadn’t. Later Adam Harrison
and this man had shown up… And today she’d spent time with a heartbroken child.
She was mentally and physically exhausted, and dismayed because she was
disappointing a
stranger.
And now, she was staring
at that stranger, wondering how someone with such a strong jawline and intense
eyes, such a tall, powerful build and compelling presence, could be part of a
team of
ghost busters
.

Yesterday she’d been herself—a teacher who loved history and
brought that love to costumed interpretation. She loved her life, and she had
good friends, a great family. And this morning…

She looked straight ahead. She wasn’t being selfish. She needed
to go home. To speak with her coworkers and friends from the board and— Good
Lord! She had to call her parents and let them know she was all right.

He drove to her house and stopped the car. Turning to her, he
said quietly, “I’m very sorry about your friend, and truly sorry that you were
the one to find him.”

She nodded. “I just need some time,” she said again.

“Call me when you feel you want to get back into it.”

“Of course.”

He was watching her so intently she wondered if she had food on
her face.

“You’ll need my number,” he reminded her.

“Oh. Yes.” She gave a deep sigh. “I do want to help the kids. I
do want to help you, even though it did look like a horrible accident.” Allison
took out her cell phone as she spoke.

“The trashing of the attic wasn’t an accident.” He removed his
phone from his pocket. “I’ll dial you,” he said.

He already had her number. Of course. He was an FBI agent.

She clicked on the call and added his number to her phone. Then
she realized she’d asked to be taken home and they’d arrived, but she was still
sitting in his car.

“I’m not sure what I can do for you,” she told him. “You’re
here, Mr. Harrison is here, the police have been through it all. I don’t know
what I could contribute.”