Finding the Way Back (12 page)

“Does that mean you’re not going to clean up
after us?” Dean teased, winking at me.

“I think not,” I winked back.

“Tough crowd,” he sighed. “Just when I
thought I’d found the girls of my dreams.”

“We should go get the rest of our gear and
start setting up,” Emmett said, back to business. I followed him,
Dean and Glen outside and saw they had driven up in a big brown van
that was at least twenty years old. They brought in the rest of
their suitcases, cables, extension cords, tripods, and other
unidentifiable equipment into the house. I couldn’t imagine they
needed quite that much stuff, but whatever.

“Anything I can help carry?” I asked.

“That’s okay, we got it,” Dean answered as he
hefted two heavy-looking cases of mystery paraphernalia. Wanting to
help anyway, I took a duffel bag I saw in the back of the van and
carried it toward the house. Dean was coming back out as I was
walking up the front walk.

“Thanks, Laney, but unless you’re planning to
wash my dirty gym clothes, you can leave those in the van.” He
smiled as he took the duffel from me and headed back for more
equipment.

“Sorry!” I said, feeling foolish. Wanting to
avoid any other embarrassment, I went inside to see what Emmett was
doing. He had already begun unpacking several suitcases and Glen
was running extension cords and cables throughout the first floor
rooms. “I can help with setting up some of this,” I said. “I
actually do some photography as a hobby.” I picked up a tripod and
started opening it.

“Really, Laney, you don’t have to do that.
This is our job.”

“What, you don’t think I’m capable? I’m not
helpless, you know. And I’m definitely not paying you.”

“That’s not it. We bought a lot of this stuff
second-hand and some of it takes a little babying. I’d hate to see
you hurt yourself on some old piece of metal that sticks or slips
the way it’s not supposed to.”

“You men and your toys,” I started to say
then loosened a wing nut on the heavy tripod I was holding which
caused one of the leg extensions to fall out and land on my bare
foot. “Ouch! “Son of a—”

Emmett looked up quickly and saw me rubbing
my foot, my pride hurt, but the rest of me mostly uninjured. “Are
you okay? You really need to put some shoes on.”

“I’m fine,” I snapped at him. “Here, I’ll let
you do this part. When you’re ready to place the cameras I can tell
you exactly where I saw things.”

I went into the kitchen and fiddled around
meaninglessly while I recovered my dignity. After a few minutes I
had to return to the living room to see what everyone was
doing.

“So anything else happen recently that you
can tell us?” Emmett asked. “We want to get coverage of any place
where something strange happened.”

“Mostly it was upstairs. The footsteps we
heard when we were sitting in the living room, and the sound like
someone was leaning against the door when I was in the bathroom.
When I was upstairs I heard the music coming from downstairs. And
while nothing has happened in the basement yet, I do feel super
creeped out whenever I’m down there. But I really hate spiders so
that may be the reason for that.”

“Hey,” Connie interjected. “Don’t forget the
chair in the kitchen.”

Emmett looked at us questioningly.

I was uncomfortable telling him about it, and
I didn’t know why, but he had to know. He was, after all, a
professional.

“One of the chairs seemed to move by itself
in the kitchen, kind of like in that movie, Poltergeist.”

“Hmm, I see. We’ll make sure we get a good
camera angle of that area. Anything else?”

I looked at Connie and we both shrugged. “I
think that’s it.”

“We’ll check it all out.” Emmett and his team
finished placing cameras, microphones and various sensors around
the house until the place looked like some kind of movie set. When
they were done setting up, everyone sat down in the living
room.

“We’ll split up into two teams. Laney and
Connie can be with me while Dean and Glen work together. Is
everyone okay with that?” Emmett inquired.

“You know,” I said. “They always used to
split up on Scooby-Doo, and it was never a good thing.”

Emmett laughed. “Very funny. That’s not the
first Scooby-Doo comment we’ve gotten. We’ll come up with a
ridiculous plan for catching the ghost later.”

“And why did it usually involve Scooby
dressing up like a woman?” Glen asked.

“I don’t want to know,” Connie said,
laughing.

“Ok, I’m ready,” I proclaimed, sitting on the
edge of my seat. I suddenly visualized sitting close to Emmett in a
darkened room and my pulse went up a notch. “Let’s go,” I said
breathlessly.

“Dean and Glen, you start in the basement
where you can pull the master switch at the electrical box. We’ll
start on the second floor in the master bedroom.” Everyone nodded
in agreement. “Let’s roll then,” Emmett said, heading up the steps
two at a time.

Chapter
Thirteen

Connie followed Emmett up the steps and I
hung to the back. I stood in the hall outside the master, suddenly
feeling very silly. Maybe this whole thing was a ridiculous idea.
How was this really going to help us? Even if we found some kind of
evidence that a ghost was here, what would that change? What would
we do about it? Try to scare it off?

The entire house was dark and silent as a
tomb. So very silent. It made every move we made seem loud and
disturbing to the quietness around us. Emmett provided each of us
with a small flashlight so we could see our way around in the
blackness. They had red lens filters so our eyes would stay
adjusted to the dark. I moved just inside the bedroom door and
looked up to see the camera above me on a tripod trained at the
window where we’d seen the shadow.

“How does the camera pick up anything in the
dark?”

“It’s actually a full spectrum camcorder that
uses infrared sensors to pick up light not seen by the human eye,”
Emmett responded.

“Where do you get something like that?”

“The internet,” Emmett answered, looking
slightly alien in the light.

“Of course,” I said. These days you could get
just about anything online. I sat in the doorway and leaned against
the door jamb while Connie sat on the bed. Emmett walked to the
other side of the room and stood next to the bedside table, leaning
against the wall.

“You have a few boxes in here. Cozy. I heard
you were a talented decorator,” Emmett remarked, getting into the
act. Connie giggled, breaking the tension I was feeling as I was
nervous about sitting around all night in a dark room waiting for
ghosts.

“Maybe you should have made your bed, Laney,”
Connie razzed me.

“You know I’ve been a tad busy today,” I
whispered.

Emmett took a device out of his pocket,
getting back to business. “This is a digital EMF reader. You don’t
seem to have high EMF’s here,” he said as he squeezed past the
clutter around the bed. He walked up to where I was sitting and
leaned over, showing me the display. The numbers meant nothing to
me but they were low. He put it in his shirt pocket and took out
another electronic device, kneeling close to me. “This is the
recorder we use to pick up EVP.”

He smelled delicious.

“I know,” I said in all seriousness.

He looked at me, surprised. Then we both
laughed. “Okay, that time you got me,” he said as he stood up. “The
stuff we pick up on the recorder that we don’t always hear at the
time is interesting. It’s hard to say what it is exactly. Sometimes
you wonder if it’s just a defect in the recording, or if we’re just
hearing what we want to hear. But there have been times I’ve
experienced personally where the voice is crystal clear, and it
wasn’t audible in person.”

I shivered a little bit. The ghost thing was
getting a little too real for me. But something strange was going
on in the house. I did not imagine all these weird incidents.
Connie experienced some of them as well. Then we found out earlier
today from our mothers that they had grown up with ghostly
occurrences. Now that we were here in the dark with everything else
shut off, I started hearing the natural creaks and groans of the
house.

Connie lay down on my bed. “I could take a
nap I’m so tired,” she complained.

“It’s the beer. I’ll bet that’s why Emmett’s
standing, he doesn’t want to fall asleep on his watch,” I
teased.

I heard Emmett chuckle in the dark.

The darkness surrounded me and I felt my eyes
grow heavy. I struggled to keep them open and stay alert.

Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump.

Suddenly wide awake, I spun around and
flashed my light down the hall towards the stairway. “Did you hear
that?” I whispered, backing up in a crabwalk towards the bed.

Connie sat up and slid off the bed to sit
next to me on the floor. “Why are you whispering? If there’s a
ghost in the house, it already knows we’re here.” She reached out
and took my hand.

“I don’t know,” I replied trying to raise my
voice. “It just seemed wrong to talk aloud.”

Emmett moved next to the door, standing stock
still with the EVP recorder still in his hand. “Is there something
you’d like to tell us?” he asked. “We’re here to help you.”

Quiet. He stepped out into the hall. “Can you
tell us your name? We’re not here to hurt you.”

A shiver ran up my spine, I could hear a tiny
tinkling. Almost like ... music. It seemed to be coming from
everywhere, yet nowhere. Growing louder.

“Do you guys hear that?” I asked, unable to
hide the shaking of my voice. The fear was not from the music
exactly, more from the feeling of not being alone, of
otherworldliness.

“Yes,” they both answered as Connie gripped
my hand tighter. Abruptly, it was quiet again. No one moved. I felt
like my legs had put roots down deep into the floorboards.

Emmett took a step forward into the hall.
Nothing. Another step, still nothing. “How can we help you?”
Whatever it was, it was gone.

“What do we do now?” I asked.

Crash!

I nearly jumped out of my skin. Connie
screeched then asked, “What was that?”

“I think it came from your bedroom.” I took a
deep breath and stood up, pulling Connie with me as we moved down
the hall towards Emmett. He looked back at us in askance, and I
pointed to the room Connie was using.

Moving forward, Emmett shone his flashlight
into Connie’s room, flooding the corners with light. The shadows
shifted but nothing moved within. “I don’t see anything that could
have fallen. Come and take a look.”

Connie dropped my hand and tentatively
stepped into the room. She looked behind the beds to see if
anything could have slipped off, while Emmett and I lingered at the
doorway. “Okay, Velma, see anything?”

“Hey, if I’m anyone, it’s Daphne. I don’t see
anything obvious.” Connie turned, sweeping underneath the beds next
with her flashlight. “You know I opened that little door to the
closet under the eaves when we were first in here and it was packed
full of stuff. Maybe it came from there.” We turned to look at the
far end of Connie’s room. Both this room and the bathroom had
storage areas under the eaves that I hadn’t had the nerve to tackle
yet. The spider population would be out of control there.

Emmett walked over and pulled on the door. It
was stuck.

“I just opened that yesterday, right after we
moved all the boxes out of the way,” Connie said going to the door
also. “Let me try.” The door wouldn’t budge for her either. “Maybe
something jammed in the opening or something,” she said, as she
slid her hands around the edges of the door.

“Okay, my turn,” I challenged. Connie and
Emmett moved over and I grasped the handle and pulled. Holding
tight, I pulled with all my weight. The door gave way immediately,
sending me flying backwards. Emmett jumped forward to catch me and
we both crashed to the floor, our flashlights scattering. We lay in
a crumpled heap, too dazed to move.

“Are you guys okay?” Connie’s forehead
creased in concern as she leaned over us.

Slowly, I started to laugh. “I’m fine, except
for my dignity and a few scrapes. Good thing I landed on
Emmett.”

“I’m all right,” Emmett groaned from beneath
me. “Got the wind knocked out of me but it was worth it.” I looked
down at Emmett who was grinning at me from the floor. I blushed as
I realized what he was saying. I hoped he couldn’t tell in the
dark.

It was a new experience being around other
men after so many years with just Simon. I hadn’t felt like this
since I was in high school. Emmett’s breath was warm on my face and
I felt an irresistible urge to kiss him. Connie cleared her throat
behind me, breaking the spell. I rolled off Emmett and jumped to my
feet. He climbed to his feet slowly, a hand to his back. Connie was
looking at me with a smug smile on her face. I tapped her in the
shoulder with the back of my fist. “Don’t start with me,” I said,
looking down for my flashlight, looking everywhere but at
Emmett.

He picked his light up off the floor and
moved back towards the closet, examining the door. “There was no
reason for this door to be stuck like that and then just let go.
That was kind of strange, huh? Well, we’ll never be able to tell
what that noise was, unless we shift everything and look for
something that appears to have fallen or is out of place. Even
then, with all this dust it looks like this stuff has been here for
such a long time, why would it fall now?” He proceeded to close and
reopen the door again. “It doesn’t stick at all. I just can’t
figure out why it wouldn’t open.”

We moved back into the hallway and paused,
hesitant about what to do next. “I wonder if the guys had any luck
in the basement,” Connie said. “Probably I should have gone with
them.” She gave me a sly look. I thought about kicking her but
decided Emmett was too close.