Cold Shadows (Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper Book 2)

  COLD SHADOWS

  Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper,

  Book Two

  by

  J.L. Bryan

  Copyright 2014 J.L. Bryan

  All rights reserved.

  Acknowledgments

  I appreciate everyone who has helped with this book. Several authors beta read it for me, including Daniel Arenson, Alexia Purdy, Robert Duperre, and Michelle Muto. The final proofing was done by Thelia Kelly. The cover is by PhatPuppy Art.

  Most of all, I appreciate the book bloggers and readers who keep coming back for more! The book bloggers who’ve supported me over the years include Danny, Heather, and Heather from Bewitched Bookworks; Mandy from I Read Indie; Michelle from Much Loved Books; Shirley from Creative Deeds; Katie and Krisha from Inkk Reviews; Lori from Contagious Reads; Heather from Buried in Books; Kristina from Ladybug Storytime; Chandra from Unabridged Bookshelf; Kelly from Reading the Paranormal; AimeeKay from Reviews from My First Reads Shelf and Melissa from Books and Things; Kristin from Blood, Sweat, and Books; Lauren from Lose Time Reading; Kat from Aussie Zombie; Andra from Unabridged Andralyn; Jennifer from A Tale of Many Reviews; Giselle from Xpresso Reads; Ashley from Bookish Brunette; Loretta from Between the Pages; Ashley from Bibliophile’s Corner; Lili from Lili Lost in a Book; Line from Moonstar’s Fantasy World; Lindsay from The Violet Hour; Rebecca from Bending the Spine; Holly from Geek Glitter; Louise from Nerdette Reviews; Isalys from Book Soulmates; Jennifer from The Feminist Fairy; Heidi from Rainy Day Ramblings; Kristilyn from Reading in Winter; Kelsey from Kelsey’s Cluttered Bookshelf; Lizzy from Lizzy’s Dark Fiction; Shanon from Escaping with Fiction; Savannah from Books with Bite; Tara from Basically Books; Toni from My Book Addiction; and anyone else I missed!

  Also by J.L. Bryan:

  The Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper series

  Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper

  Cold Shadows

  The Crawling Darkness (coming February 5, 2015)

  The Jenny Pox series (supernatural/horror)

  Jenny Pox

  Tommy Nightmare

  Alexander Death

  Jenny Plague-Bringer

  Urban Fantasy/Horror

  Inferno Park

  The Unseen

  Science Fiction

  Nomad

  Helix

  The Songs of Magic Series (YA/Fantasy)

  Fairy Metal Thunder

  Fairy Blues

  Fairystruck

  Fairyland

  Fairyvision

  Fairy Luck

  Chapter One

  “That’s where the bodies are buried,” Stacey said, pointing to the low, swampy depression in the center of the back yard. It looked like it was still flooded from yesterday’s rain.

  “What bodies?” I asked. I parked behind a tan Jeep Patriot, a surprisingly cheap car if it belonged to the owner of this big old Georgian mansion. The house had a symmetrical, well-kept face, but the sides and back were closer to ruin, with missing and broken shutters and mold growing between the bricks. It was as if the graceful front of the house were nothing more than a mask of rationality and order, disguising decay and incipient madness beneath.

  “The bodies of the restless ghosts, duh,” Stacey said.

  “We haven’t even determined whether this house is haunted, Stacey.” The driveway was uncomfortably narrow, barely wide enough for our cargo van.

  “I’m just taking early bets. Twenty bucks on us eventually finding dead bodies there. Who’ll take me on that?” Stacey glanced into the back of the van, as if somebody else were sitting there. She smiled, kind of suddenly. “So...when do you think we’ll call Jacob in on this one?”

  “I hope the case won’t be difficult enough to require psychic help,” I said, and her smile fell. “Psychics never come to the initial consultation, anyway.”

  “Never?” This seemed to disappoint her somehow. “Why not?”

  “Because they’re not supposed to have any details of the case. They go in with a blank slate, with as little information as possible.”

  “Don’t you think psychics are fascinating, though?” Stacey asked.

  “Not really. Their results are usually pretty mixed.”

  “So...when would we call Jacob, theoretically?”

  “You know, you can just call him if you want,” I said. “It doesn’t have to be about work.”

  “Then what would my excuse be?” Stacey asked. I think she’d developed a crush on Jacob Weiss right around the time he saved us from a horde of attacking ghosts. He was a reluctant psychic, his powers awoken after he’d nearly died in a plane crash. Jacob didn’t mainly think of himself as a psychic medium. He mainly thought of himself as an up-and-coming young accountant at a CPA firm downtown, who happened to speak with the dead in his spare time because they wouldn’t stop talking to him. It was just therapy for him, learning to cope with his unwanted new abilities.

  Jacob was reasonably cute, if you forced me to have an opinion, and he also dressed pretty well, which probably scored him a lot of points with Stacey.

  “We’d better introduce ourselves before our clients start wondering about the weird van in their driveway,” I said.

  A man sat painting at an easel on the brick patio behind the house, but he apparently hadn’t noticed us. A straw hat shaded his head, and he wore headphones. He was hefty, badly overweight, maybe in his thirties or forties.

  Stacey and I climbed out, me with my black toolbox of basic ghost-hunting gear, Stacey with her camera bag slung over her shoulder. I was the lead investigator and Stacey was the tech manager, my assistant. She’d only been with Eckhart Investigations for about eight weeks, since graduating from the College of Art and Design with her film degree. I’d been working with Calvin Eckhart for almost eight years, having foisted myself onto him as an unwanted apprentice during my freshman year of college.

  A ghost killed my parents when I was fifteen, a nasty pyrokinetic monster named Anton Clay. Calvin was still a homicide detective with the city police, and he’d unraveled the case for me—it wasn’t the first time he’d encountered dangerous ghosts around the ridiculously haunted city of Savannah. I’d stuck with him since he retired and opened the agency, because I’m determined to protect the living against the dead.

  Stacey and I strolled up the brick walkway past garden plots that alternated between thriving blossoms and dead yellow stalks, as if the irrigation and the automatic sprinklers weren’t functioning so well. Thin marble columns framed the front door, supporting a little half-circle balcony with a wrought-iron railing on the second floor.

  I climbed the brick steps under the shade of the balcony above. The tall door was painted a cheerful white, matching the window trim all over the house.

  I rang the doorbell.

  The woman who answered was short, round-faced and chubby, with an earnest look in her brown eyes. She wore a pastel purple blouse and pinstriped pantsuit bottoms.

  “Yes?” she asked, glancing between us.

  “Hi, I’m Ellie Jordan, from Eckhart Investigations,” I said. “Are you Mrs. Paulding?”

  “Thank the Lord.” She breathed out a slow sigh, as if our presence alone removed some kind of long-suffered weight off her back, and ushered us inside. “Y’all want some sweet tea? Chex mix?”

  “No, thank you, ma’am.” I followed her into the entrance hall, which was tall and ran all the way to the back of the house, but was also narrow and cluttered with furniture. A squarish staircase with three flights wrapped around the very back of the hall, above a pair of glass doors that led into the back yard.

  Polished antique sofas, chairs, and lamp tables lined the walls, un
der assorted landscape and seascape paintings in heavy, dark wooden frames that seemed more suited to portraits of notable dead ancestors.

  Despite the big twelve-pane windows at each end of the hall, it was gloomy, and the dark air felt heavy on my skin. The place already felt haunted to me, but I don’t go by my feelings. I’m an evidence-and-empiricism kind of girl. As far as this line of work allows, anyway.

  “This is such a beautiful house!” Stacey gushed. “How old is it?”

  “They say it was built in 1841,” Mrs. Paulding replied. “Some of the furniture’s even older, I guess.”

  “Mind if I take some video?” Stacey asked, unzipping her camera bag.

  “If you have to,” the woman said. “The place looks a sight. Well, it always does, to tell you the truth.”

  “Mrs. Paulding, this is our tech manager, Stacey Ray Tolbert,” I said.

  “Just call me Stacey!” Stacey gave her an enthusiastic handshake, which seemed to startle the woman.

  “And you can call me Toolie,” Mrs. Paulding said. “That’s short for Theodora, but nobody’s called me that since Momma died. Come on back, Gordon will want to see you. That’s my husband.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “He has some breathing problems, just so you know.”

  As we followed her down the hall, I glanced through an archway into a family sitting room, furnished with more antique sofas, plus one big La-Z-Boy recliner aimed at the big-screen TV. The walls here were decorated along a sort of pop-art theme, I guess you’d call it, bright paintings depicting candies with names I didn’t recognize—Munchmallows, Nickel Naks, Fizzy Lizzys. The only ones I did recognize were Pink Fairy cupcakes, which my mom had occasionally included in my school lunchbox as a cellophane-wrapped treat.

  I noted some family pictures on the wall. The Pauldings were a family of four, their daughter a few years older than their son. The husband looked like a virile man, bearded and tanned in the family beach pictures.

  We stepped out onto the rear patio, where the man we’d seen earlier was still painting. He still wore his headphones, and from this angle, I could see the portable oxygen tank by his feet, the tube running up toward his face.

  “Gord!” Toolie Paulding tapped her husband’s shoulder, startling him. He was painting an old-fashioned candy tin, similar to those in the living room. This one advertised COCO-MARSHIES! and the candy’s mascot, which dominated the lid of the tin, was a creepy-looking ventriloquist’s dummy in overalls and a straw hat, waving one arm and giving a gaping smile.

  A color picture of the original tin, printed on regular paper, was attached to the side of the easel with a clothespin. It looked like he was using it for reference.

  Gord, as she apparently called him, turned to look at us with an uncertain smile under the plastic tubing that fed oxygen into his nose. Never mind the living room photos of the virile man at the beach—he was pale, overweight, his beard scraggly and graying. He moved slowly.

  “These are the ghost detectives, Ellie and Stacey,” she told him, while helping him remove his headphones. “Ladies, this my husband Gord.”

  “Very nice to meet you, sir,” I said.

  “Nice...to meet you,” he replied, with a long gap to draw extra air. Stacey and I shook his hand gently.

  Toolie invited us to sit on the deck chairs.

  “So what can you tell us about your problems?” I asked. I took out a legal pad and a digital voice recorder.

  “Where to begin?” Toolie brushed her hand through her hair, shaking her head.

  “How long have you lived in this house?” I asked.

  “Oh...two years, a little more?” Toolie said. “It actually belongs to my cousin Mary, but she said we could live here rent-free as long as we maintained and repaired it.”

  “That sounds awfully nice of her,” I said. Unless she knew the place was haunted, I thought. “Does she live here in town?”

  “Oh, no, she’s lived over in Beaufort for several years,” Toolie said, referring to a pretty ritzy beachside town over in South Carolina. “She inherited this house from her family—the other side of her family, obviously. Nobody in my family ever had a spare mansion to worry about.” Toolie chuckled.

  “Can you give us your cousin’s contact information?” I asked. She was an obvious source for background information.

  “I’d rather not,” Toolie said, frowning suddenly. “When I’ve asked her, she says she doesn’t know anything funny about the house. If you go talking to her, it might upset her...and we can’t afford for her to get sore and throw us out...”

  “I understand, ma’am. Where did you live before this house?”

  “Just outside Raleigh, North Carolina,” Toolie said. “The move meant Gord would have to travel a little further for work, but he was always traveling anyway. He was a sales and relationship representative for Pink Fairy Bakery. You know, the cupcakes?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I saw the paintings inside. They’re really good.” It never hurts to compliment the client. Besides, I kind of liked the old-fashioned candy boxes he’d painted. Wouldn’t mind hanging one in my apartment, actually.

  “Thank you,” Gord said. “I started out painting...what I sold. Cupcakes. Chocolate Wands. Sparkle Wheels.” He paused to breathe some more. “Then I got interested in vintage candies. Brands nobody...remembers.” He gestured at his work in progress, the Coco-Marshies! tin with the creepy puppet.

  “That’s really neat,” Stacey said, smiling at him.

  “Gord has to paint outside now, because of the fumes,” Toolie said. “It’s a shame. We’d just set up a nice studio for him upstairs, and then he got sick.”

  “Do you mind if I ask...?” I asked.

  “Emphysema,” Toolie said. “Severe emphysema. He had to go on disability.”

  Gord scowled a little, as if he didn’t appreciate her sharing this information.

  “Did that begin before you moved here, or afterward?” I asked.

  “A few months after we moved,” Toolie said. “Gord used to smoke, but he quit ten years ago.”

  “Ten years?” Stacey asked. “That’s not fair! He quit for ten years and then he gets sick from it--”

  I gently motioned for Stacey to shut up, and she closed her mouth.

  “Sorry,” Stacey mumbled.

  “The doctors can’t figure out the cause,” Toolie said. “Breathing just started to get difficult for him one day, like his lungs were drowning.” Her mouth wavered, and for a second she looked like she would cry, but she forced herself to smile instead. She patted his arm.

  Gord looked at the patio’s brick floor tiles, as if ashamed of himself for getting sick. I felt sorry for him.

  “Do you work?” I asked Toolie.

  “Oh, yes. I used to be a sales associate at Napmaster Outlet back home. After we moved here, I got a job managing the Sir Sleepmore Mattresses by the mall. Everything was looking up at first, with the new job and this amazing old house, and I thought it would be nice for the kids to live here...” She frowned.

  “How many kids do you have?” I asked, though I was pretty sure I knew the answer.

  “Two. There’s Juniper—she’s thirteen now—and Crane, who’s about to have his eighth birthday. The time goes by so fast. One minute, they’re babies, and then they’re rushing toward adulthood.”

  “How did they adjust to living here?” I asked.

  “Well, it was good...at first. Then the strange things started happening.”

  Here we go. “Can you tell us what you and your family have experienced?”

  “It started with small things—so small I blamed them on the kids, to tell you the truth. My keys would be missing, and I’d find them somewhere strange, like on the stairs or at the bottom of the kitchen sink. Or a faucet would be left running. Don’t even get me started on those plumbing problems! We had moaning, banging pipes, and we’ve had three plumbers out here to fix them. One changed out the the master valve, another installed a water hammer arrestor, but the problem
kept coming back.

  “In fact, the more the plumbers worked, the more trouble we had. We’d wake up and find water damage in the walls or a leaking pipe in the basement. Then it got strange—ceilings would leak in spots where there weren’t any pipes. They couldn’t find where the water was coming from, and half the time the spot would be all dried up before the plumber even arrived.”

  “That sounds stressful,” I said.

  “And expensive!” Toolie said. “The yard started to go to all-heck around then, too. The sprinkler system’s always breaking down, and we can’t seem to drain the low spot there...” She pointed to the pool of swampy, greenish water that had collected in the depression in her back lawn. “The rainwater just sits and sits. We hired a landscaper to make a little drainage pipe for it, but mud clogs it up so fast, it’s just about useless.”

  Stacey snapped some pictures of the swampy yard. A small cottage sat in the rear corner of the lawn, built in imitation of the main house—brick with white trim, the two windows and the front door a perfect match with the features on the front of the mansion.

  “What’s that building?” I asked.

  “Just an old shed,” Toolie said. “We keep the lawn mower in there. It’s mainly the yard man who uses it. I don’t like going in there.”

  “Why not?”

  “Too many spiders.”

  “Have there been any other events, or is it all water-related?” I asked.

  “Oh, goodness, where to begin?” Toolie shook her head. “The first time I knew we had something strange in our house was when I was mixing up a pitcher of iced tea, right around Christmas. I was in the kitchen alone. I turned my back for one second, to fetch a lemon from the fridge, and something went whap! Well, I looked back to see my pitcher flying to the floor, spilling out the tea everywhere, just like someone had come along and knocked it off the counter. I was lucky it was the Tupperware and not my good glass pitcher.”