Ghostbusters (7 page)

Erin was stung. “Oh. It was an understandable mistake.” She was fully aware that the reason for her visit was getting buried in this so-called “mission.”
Why
had she provided such a detailed explanation? All she'd needed to say was that someone had seen it on Amazon. That was it. It was the scientist in her, the
good
scientist, dealing in facts. Ed Mulgrave was a fact. But ghost hunting?

Fiction.

Dangerous fiction.

Trying to maintain her dignity, she walked past Abby toward the hallway.

“That's a beautiful suit, by the way,” Abby said.

“Oh. Thank you.” Erin was pleased. Inordinately so. Still, it was the first kind thing Abby had said to her after all these years apart.

My doing,
she thought.
My fault.

She trailed after Abby and Holtzmann as they staggered down the street with their stuff. They giggled and chattered. They were having fun.

If you want tenure at Columbia,
she reminded herself,
you cannot have fun.

Abby hailed a cab and looked back at Erin. With mock obsequiousness she said, “Oh, I'm sorry. Did you want to take this cab and leave us behind? You've always been so good at that.”

Erin rolled her eyes, but inside, her feelings were hurt. She'd thought the compliment on her suit had been an olive branch, not a wooden stake.

“That was very pointed,” Holtzmann declared, and Abby inclined her head.

“Thank you.”

Erin called after her, “Abby, please take down the book.”
Please, please, please don't ruin my career.

Abby looked at her and seemed to see her for the first time. Erin began to seriously lose it. Yes, what she had done to warrant Abby's present behavior—and she did warrant it—had been churlish, backstabbing, thoughtless. But she had been very young then. And maybe she had gotten some bad advice. She wasn't sure. After all, she was up for tenure at Columbia. And Abby was mired in the boondocks of weirdness at the Kenneth T. Higgins Institute.

My career is my life. The esteem of my colleagues is crucial to my future. Please, please, please, Abby, this punishment does not fit my crime.

Something in Erin's chest wrenched, and wrenched hard. And Abby's face softened, as if somehow through the white noise of bad history she could hear Erin's distress call.

“All right,” Abby said. “Introduce us to this guy at Aldridge Mansion, and if we don't pick up anything there, I'll consider taking the book down just until you get your tenure to Bullshit University.”

“Thank you,” Erin breathed, deflating like a popped balloon. She was saved. And maybe, just a little bit curious about Aldridge Mansion …

No. No, no, no, I. Am. Not.

But it did look like fun. Back in the day, it had been a lot of big, scary fun.

Erin got into the cab. Next stop, Aldridge Mansion—with a side trip down Memory Lane.

 

6

This is going to be fun. In an it-might-kill-us way.

Bundled up for the cold, college freshman Erin sat side by side with Abby on the bus from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor to the town of Ypsilanti. The side windows were fogged with condensation, but against the darkness on the street she could see dim white mounds of snow banked up in the gutters. There was hardly anyone on the bus so late on Thanksgiving Day. A drunken man was talking to himself in the backseat, but she couldn't make out what he was saying because the engine noise was so loud. There were a couple of teenage boys in hoodies jacked in with earbuds and a thin middle-aged woman in a knit beret with overstuffed shopping bags who was trying to read a yellowed paperback book while the bus lurched and swayed sickeningly.

The ride between campus and Ypsilanti took about fifty minutes, and though Erin wouldn't admit it to Abby, she was terrified out of her mind the whole way. Their ultimate destination was Depot Town, which lay north of the gentrified section of Ypsilanti, a place where two freshmen girls had no business after dark. Instead of being home for Thanksgiving dinner surrounded by family and love, they were risking robbery, rape, and worse.

On top of that, they both had lied to their parents about the reason for not coming home for the holidays: they said they had to hunker down and study—a lie of omission. What they were studying was not the science or math their parents would naturally assume, but the paranormal.

“This is it,” Abby said, pulling the stop cord for Depot Town.

They trundled off the bus, backpacks loaded with scientific equipment and recording gear. Abby took the lead, turning north on the empty sidewalk, leading them away from the lights and life of the restaurants in Depot Town's historical buildings, and toward the address on Norris Street.

They speed-walked through a mixed neighborhood of stark Victorians, bungalows from the 1930s, and small, bunkerlike brick homes from the 1950s. The lots were big, full of bare mature trees and drifts of snow that almost completely buried the underbrush. The sidewalk was cleared and salted, but icy in the shadiest spots. They both had their flashlights out because the streetlights were sparse. Erin could see into some of the houses that were close to the sidewalk. Some looked warm and comfy. Others were dark, dead, and forbidding.

Every time a car's headlights flared behind them, Erin cringed, waiting to hear the screech of brakes and the sound of car doors banging open. The route was dotted with empty lots and abandoned houses: convenient places to commit murders and hide bodies. How had she ended up here? The answer was simple: Abby had talked her into it. With the sheer force of her personality, her friend had convinced her they had no choice but to come here Thanksgiving night, which meant blowing off going home for the holiday and risking their own safety. Abby had the ability to pull Erin past the edge of what was comfortable and into the realm of what was decidedly not. Abby wasn't fearless or stupid; she was just willing to take a calculated risk.

“This could be the big time,” she said. “We've got to go for it.”

And so they had.

Cold seeped into Erin's feet and hands and her eyes watered. The lower part of her face was wrapped in a muffler. After walking for what seemed like miles, they finally saw the street number they were looking for. It belonged to a 1950s ranch house with narrow, high-set horizontal windows. Gang tags covered the redbrick veneer. The entrance was on the side, up the driveway, the entire property enclosed in a rusting, six-foot-tall hurricane fence decorated with No Trespassing signs. The snow-mounded yard was studded with unidentifiable junk that had been either dragged out of the house or thrown over the fence.

“With all that tagging, there's got to be a way in,” Abby said. “Maybe it's around the side.” She shined her light on the ground and it cast a bright ring in the snow. She set off across the empty space between the fence and the side of the darkened Victorian next door.

Erin followed her through the snow, turning her own light through the fence, onto the plywood nailed over the house's front door and picture window.
KEEP OUT
had been spray-painted on the plywood, but was barely visible beneath the graffiti.

They had embarked on the field trip because something horrible had happened at the Norris Street address on Thanksgiving Day 1966. According to news accounts, the man of the house went berserk after the Detroit Lions lost to the San Francisco 49ers, fourteen to forty-one, and chased his family out into the icy street with a baseball bat. After locking the door, he threw the cooked turkey out of the oven, blew out the pilot light, stuck his head in, and gassed himself. Ever since, and particularly on Thanksgiving, supernatural events had been reported at the house: an eerie green glow from inside, crashing noises, moans, curses, shrieks, and most disturbing of all, the unmistakable smell of roasted turkey. That's why the place stood abandoned—people were afraid to live in it.

“Over here,” Abby said. “I knew it. There's a break in the fence.”

They had to take off their backpacks to squeeze through the slit in the wire, then reach back to retrieve them.

Abby reshouldered her pack and hurried for the boarded-up back door. “It's loose,” she said as she pulled the edge of the plywood aside and reached into the gap. “The door isn't locked. Let's go in.”

Erin followed her through and into a little mudroom with a curling linoleum floor. Beyond it, their flashlights lit up the spot where the washer and dryer had been.

“Kitchen must be just ahead,” Abby said.

Their breath steamed in the light of the flashes.

“Stove is gone,” Erin said, noting the gap in the counter under the range hood and the capped-off gas pipe sticking out of the foot of the wall. “But that's where he died. Those Formica countertops are original.”

“Nice cigarette burns,” Abby said.

Erin swept her flashlight around the room. Some of the acoustic tile ceiling had fallen out and pink fiberglass insulation was strewn all over the floor. “Rats have been in here. Ugh.”

“Let's check out the rest of the place,” Abby said.

They moved through the dining room and into the living room. The walls had big holes kicked in them and they, too, were tagged. Glass from broken windows glittered on the floor. Plumbing fixtures had been ripped out of the bathroom, the mirror shattered into confetti, and all the bedroom doors were gone. Someone had dragged an old, stained twin mattress into one of the rooms. Their flashes lit up empty whiskey bottles and fast-food trash. Someone had been camping there. Not recently, though—the dates on the moldy newspapers on the floor were a year old.

“This is so cool,” Abby said, taking it all in. “Do you feel the vibe? Spooo-ky! We're going to catch us a ghost; I know it. We've got to spend the night!”

“It's freezing in here and the floor is disgusting,” Erin protested. “We didn't bring sleeping bags, or even blankets.”

“We can take turns on the mattress.”

“You've got to be—”

“Wait,” Abby said in a hushed voice. “Did you hear that?”

A faint creaking sound came from the other side of the house.

Erin's heart began to pound.

“Hurry, get out the gear,” Abby whispered.

Erin dug the video recorder out of her pack. Abby unwrapped the unwieldy, portable photoelectron spectrometer they had cobbled together from parts filched from U of M physics and chem labs.

When they tiptoed back to the living room, a greenish glow was moving around in the kitchen, very erratically. From the doorless doorway came a sharp clatter and disembodied curse.

Erin breathed in the aroma of roast turkey and a wave of dizziness swept over her. This was it. This was really it. She was about to see her second ghost, only this time with a witness. Her legs went weak. She suddenly realized she wasn't ready for prime time. She was all talk and none of the walk.

Abby grabbed her shoulder and shoved her forward. Erin instinctively aimed the video camera at the dancing light on the other side of the doorway as she was pushed bodily through it.

Intense light blasted into their faces as they burst into the ruined kitchen, and Erin was momentarily blinded.

“Who the heck are you?” said a shrill voice. “I'm armed!”

Erin's eyes quickly recovered and she saw a diminutive woman in an olive-brown down hat and matching parka holding a portable lantern in one hand and a dinner fork in the other.

“We're scientists from U of M,” Abby said, stretching the truth with what sounded like absolute conviction. “Who are you?”

“Martha Kinsler. I'm a writer, doing research for a book.”

“A book about ghosts?” Erin said.

“Well, it's sure as hell not interior decorating,” Kinsler retorted. “Why are you here?”

“Ghosts, same as you,” Abby answered. “Only we're using applied science to uncover the mechanisms of the spectral plane. We have some theories…”

“What's that smell?” Erin gasped. “Is that
him
?”

Kinsler showed them her open Tupperware container and the still-steaming turkey, gravy, stuffing, and mashed potatoes. An insulated bag sat on the floor. “My Thanksgiving dinner. Sorry, there's not enough to go around.”

“No problem.” Abby lowered the PKE spectrometer's nozzle. She carried the makeshift analyzer on a webbed strap over her shoulder.

“That thing's kind of intimidating.” Kinsler nodded at the ten-inch black probe. “What does it do?”

“Samples the air, and what's in this box measures the ionization energy,” Abby said. “We believe that could be a component or maybe the chemical signature of spectral appearances.”

Kinsler raised her brows. “Wow, you weren't kidding about being scientists. Have you taken any readings yet?”

“We just got here,” Abby said.

“What do you know about Charles Lemayne?”

“Got mad after the Lions lost and killed himself right there,” Abby said.

“There's a bit more to it than that,” Kinsler said. “I interviewed his widow a few years ago. He was about to lose this house to the bank—because of a serious gambling problem—when he had a vision about the outcome of the Thanksgiving Day game. Not a hunch, but a real vision, according to the widow. Came to him while he was brushing his teeth two days earlier. He saw something in the bathroom mirror—she wasn't clear about what it was—but it told him to bet his last nickel on the Lions. He was so scared by the experience and so financially desperate that he did what he was told.”

“His widow was convinced this was the truth?” Erin asked.

“I am certain she believed it,” Kinsler said. “Even talking about it forty years later shook her up so badly she could hardly speak.”

“Do you think he had been contacted by something from the other side, something malignant?” Abby said.