Pumpkin Roll (25 page)

Sadie and Pete shared a glance. “Did he?” Sadie asked, stalling for time.

Jane shrugged. “He was worried about you,” she said. “And he needed to talk to someone—you know how he is.”

Sadie did know how Shawn was; the boy had never been able to keep his thoughts and worries to himself. That detail of his personality made it strange that he was so good at the PI work he’d taken on these last few months. But that wasn’t what held Sadie’s attention. Instead she was trying to suppress the jealousy she felt at not being the one Shawn talked to. Jane was watching her intently so she simply nodded in response, hoping her face wasn’t too easy to read.

“Well, after he told me about it,” Jane continued, “I did a little research on Delores Wapple, just for the sake of curiosity, ya know, to see if she had any . . . connections to weird stuff.”

“What kind of weird stuff?” Pete asked, leaning forward slightly. Sadie watched the detective mask descend over his face, a combination of careful intent and open-minded interest.

“Wicca, gypsies, poltergeists.”

“You can research that kind of thing?” Sadie asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Jane said with a nod. “If you know where to look.”

Sadie didn’t glance at Pete this time. They had both assured one another that they didn’t believe in ghosts or witches, but Pete hadn’t heard his name whispered in dark corners of two different homes. He hadn’t had doors slammed in his face and wet gusts of wind come from empty hallways. Sadie didn’t believe—
she didn’t
—but she was curious and couldn’t pretend otherwise.

“Did you find anything?” Pete asked when Sadie didn’t.

“In fact, I did,” Jane said, smiling triumphantly. “Her father fancied himself a kind of medium and wrote articles on things like séances and crossing over earthbound spirits.”

Sadie and Pete both blinked at her, which apparently encouraged her to continue.

“He was one of the early experts in modern ghost hunting, and he was one of the first people to publicly introduce the idea that earthbound spirits were here by choice rather than some kind of damnation.”

“Earthbound what?” Sadie asked. Surely she was not having this discussion.

Jane turned her dark brown eyes to Sadie. “Earthbound spirits are souls who have died but haven’t gone into the light. Don’t you ever watch
Ghost Whisperer
reruns?”

Sadie shook her head. “Not my kind of show.” She looked up at Pete, who simply held her eyes before turning his attention back to Jane. Sadie was sure he wasn’t buying any of this either, but he was used to letting people say whatever they wanted to while appearing to reserve judgment. Sadie wished she were better at that.

“Well, anyway,” Jane said, “Daddy Wapple wrote about this stuff back in the late seventies. Most of what he wrote hasn’t been archived digitally, but I found references to at least a dozen articles in old collections around the country. I found one or two of his articles online, though I had to dig forever to unearth them. They were very Melinda Gordon.” She looked at Sadie. “That’s Jennifer Love Hewitt’s character in
Ghost Whisperer
—I can’t believe you’ve never watched that show! Her husband is totally hot.” She shook her head. “Anyway, if spirits don’t go into the light when they die, they become earthbound spirits and can wreak havoc among the living. They are basically what we think of as ghosts.”

“What kind of havoc?” Pete asked, still guiding the discussion.

“They thrive off energy, right? So, they get people all freaked out using air movement, temperature changes, and electrical surges. They can even move things sometimes, but they have to be totally ticked off to do stuff like that.”

“Electrical surges?” Sadie repeated, thinking of the exploding lightbulbs and power issues they’d had.

“Big time into electrical,” Jane said with a nod. “Energy is energy, so they mess with it.” She shrugged like that was a small detail. “Anyway, isn’t that kind of thing pretty similar to what you guys have been dealing with?”

Sadie and Pete remained silent, neither of them wanting to agree it was a possibility.

“So you believe that the experiences we have had are linked to ghosts?” Pete asked in a perfectly level voice.

Jane looked at him without apology. “Maybe.” She said it simply, but Sadie’s thoughts were going in a totally different direction while Jane continued speaking. “It’s pretty rare for earthbounds to hurt people, but it’s been known to happen. Daddy Wapple swore that they had a spirit in their home and that it liked to short out the toaster. That’s how he first got involved in all that ghost busting stuff.” She shrugged again.

“But why would spirits bug us?” Sadie said. “Heather said nothing like this has happened before. So why now?”

“Unfinished business is the number one reason earthbounds hang around,” Jane said with an air of authority. “Maybe Daddy Wapple isn’t done yet.”

Sadie almost chuckled, it was that preposterous, but quickly moved forward in her own growing theory. “If the dad was into this stuff and believed in it, then that kind of interest likely trickled down to his children. Now, assuming that’s what happened, and one of these children wanted to . . . bother someone, they would have a lot of information from which to draw to make things appear as though ghosts or spirits or something spectral was taking place, right?”

Sadie was thrilled to find a family history that supported the theory she’d already discussed with both Pete and Detective Lucille.

“Excellent point,” Pete said, nodding. “But it still goes back to motive. Why do this?”

“If it’s a spirit,” Jane said, not letting go of that possibility, “they just like to stir the pot. You can get rid of them, though, and then things go back to normal. Easy breezy.”

They all were quiet for a moment, until Pete pushed away from the table and stood, picking up his glass. “Well, regardless of who or . . . what is behind it, Mrs. Wapple isn’t there anymore, the police are investigating now, not us, and I’m hopeful we’ll get a full night’s sleep tonight.”

Sadie smiled, but she couldn’t smile away the heaviness in her heart. As much as she wanted this to be done, it wasn’t. The knowledge that Mrs. Wapple’s father was involved in spirits and such was very uncomfortable to her and opened even more questions. “I wonder how Mrs. Wapple is doing,” Sadie said as Pete took his glass to the sink.

Pete leaned against the counter. “I called the station for an update while you were gone. They didn’t give me much, but they said that her skull had been fractured. Luckily, the knife wound in her side wasn’t serious.”

Sadie pushed her empty bowl of beans away, suddenly feeling sick to her stomach. “Has she regained consciousness? Is she going to be okay?” All along Sadie had assured herself that Mrs. Wapple would be fine. It made her feel very foolish to have assumed she hadn’t been seriously injured.

“I don’t know,” Pete said, giving her a sympathetic look that helped her know he understood her concern for the Witch of Browden Street, weird or not. “They didn’t tell me that.”

Jane pulled out her phone again and started scrolling. “One of the articles talked about that.” She kept scrolling, then stopped. “‘The victim has regained consciousness and her condition has been upgraded to stable, though she will remain at the hospital for further evaluation,’” she read out loud.

“At least she’s getting the care she needs,” Sadie said, feeling a little better about the “further evaluation” part. “Hopefully social services will get involved and she’ll end up in a better situation in the long run.”

Sadie felt her desire to find answers drain out of her, replaced with fatigue and plain old sadness. She shook her head, more ready than ever to let this go. “Regardless of what might have been behind what’s happened here, it’s over now, right?”

“Let’s hope so,” Pete said, pushing away from the counter.

“In case it isn’t, keep in mind that I came to help,” Jane said. She put down a half-eaten piece of pizza and brushed her fingers off over the box, her bright purple nails flashing with the quick movement. “Any way I can.” She stood up from the table and shrugged again. “It won’t hurt my feelings if you want to leave it all at the feet of the police and let them figure it out, but I think we also need to face the facts.” She looked straight at Sadie. “You have a history, this story is already in the press, and it’s all just weird enough to get more and more attention from here on out. There’s always the chance that it will just go away—let’s hope it does—but if you decide to do a little homework on the sister, Mrs. Wapple, or even the possibility of ghosts, I’m happy to help.” She paused a moment. “I mean, maybe figuring out some explanations would be a kind of closure to everything. Totally up to you, though.”

Chapter 22

Sadie held Jane’s eyes and decided to look at this from a different perspective. Jane wasn’t trying to make her believe in phantoms—she wasn’t even trying to make Sadie feel obligated to launch an investigation—she was just offering her help, and much less forcefully than she had in previous situations.

Sadie smiled and put her hand on the younger woman’s arm as something much closer to gratitude and companionship pushed some of her doubt and hesitation out of the way. At Sadie’s touch, Jane tensed a little bit and for a moment her assured expression dropped enough to show a whisper of vulnerability, reminding Sadie that it was usually a lot of hurt that created the toughest exteriors.

“Thank you, Jane,” she said with sincerity. “For everything, really. I’ll call you in the morning, okay?”

Jane nodded and took a step back, causing Sadie to drop her hand. “Okay,” she said. “Do you need help with the dishes or anything?”

Jane was offering to do dishes? Sadie was seeing a whole new side of this girl tonight.

“Don’t tell Sadie, but we used paper,” Pete said, coming back to the table and sending a wink in Sadie’s direction. “Thanks for the offer, though.”

They walked Jane to the door and watched her climb into her car and drive away before Pete locked the front door and the new eyebolt—checking it twice. There was still one car parked at the curb, but Sadie was encouraged that the other reporters had left. Hopefully that meant that something far more exciting had happened and they had tossed her story aside like a stale crust of bread.

The curtains had been drawn when the police were there earlier, and Pete hadn’t bothered to open them up. For Sadie’s part, there was nothing outside that window she had any interest in seeing.

“It was nice of Jane to come,” Pete said, heading toward the back door, Sadie trailing behind him. “I was going nuts being here with the boys, knowing you were there alone. It was a huge relief when she called and said she was heading to the station.” He locked the back door and slid the new chain into place. Sadie was so glad he’d remembered to install the extra security, even though she hoped there would be no need for it.

“It
was
really nice of her,” Sadie agreed. She took a deep breath and let it out as Pete double-checked the window locks over the sink. She knew she should deal with the failed cinnamon twists and overcooked beans tonight—she hated leaving the mess for morning—but she couldn’t make herself do it. They weren’t going anywhere, and she was completely overwhelmed by far more important things.

While Pete finished securing the house, Sadie waited for him to ask her some questions about the police station, or about exactly what had happened at Mrs. Wapple’s house, but he seemed distracted somehow—not interested in talking things out. Strangely, that was okay with her. She was looking forward to the oblivion of sleep.

The two of them went through their nightly routines, and Sadie tried to ignore the intimacy of brushing their teeth next to one another in the bathroom. Pete finished first and gave Sadie a minty fresh kiss on the cheek before retiring to his room. Sadie closed the bathroom door and took a shower, scrubbing at the red paint still on her hands. When her skin was raw, but paint-free, she turned off the shower, dried off, and dressed in the pajamas she’d brought in earlier.

She opened the door a few inches to let the steam escape and began lathering on all the creams and serums that kept her looking a youthful fifty-two instead of her true age of fifty-seven. She was applying anti-crepe neck cream and thinking about how the paint can had been so perfectly rigged for her to kick over when the bathroom door suddenly opened. She jumped to the side and lifted both forearms in a block before seeing Pete standing there. She lowered her arms, both a little embarrassed by, and a little impressed with, her reflexive action.