Southern Belle Page 8

  Moaning laughter twisted around the screeching sounds. Max heard a sharp crack, and Leed's head lolled to one side. The weight holding Max lifted, and as he discovered he could move freely, Leed's body dropped to the floor.

  Max rushed across the kitchen and checked Leed's body. No pulse. No breath.

  Clenched in the man's hand, Max noticed the photograph he had pulled from the drawer. With his sweat soaking his shirt and his mouth bone dry, Max reached for the photograph. Not one to enjoy touching a dead body, especially a freshly dead body, Max tried to pull the photo free without making contact. It slipped out with ease. Maybe fresh dead had its advantages — no rigor mortis, for one.

  The photo turned out to be a page torn from a book. The picture was black and white and depicted a large building ablaze, smoke pouring high into the air. A group of onlookers stood by and watched as if it were a grand show.

  Max stuffed the picture in his pocket and hurried out of the house. As he drove away, his heart hammering blood into his head, he thought of that picture. What could have been so important about it? He saw Leed's head crack to the side and remembered the feel of the ghostly weight against his chest.

  After a few minutes, Max pulled over. He rushed from his car and took a few steps towards the trees lining the road. He threw up.

  * * * *

  Max took Exit 103 off Route 85 and parked at Denny's. About thirty minutes later, Sandra arrived, and they shared a booth built for six. Despite the booth's size and the lack of a crowd, Max felt closed in.

  When he finished telling Sandra about what had happened, he whipped his head around the room. "She's not here is she?"

  Sandra took a quick look. "Not a single ghost here."

  "We've been through a lot, but this ... I've never been more scared in my life. I couldn't move. And even though I didn't see anything, I could feel it, smell it — her. Leed said it was one of the witches come to take revenge on him. He said we had to stop it. I think he's right."

  "Calm down, honey."

  "But she'll come after us. She can't go after Drummond, he's already dead. But if she wants to hurt him, she could come after us. He'd have to watch us die knowing it was his fault."

  "This is the reason I should've been there."

  Max pulled back. "You're going to give me an 'I told you so'? Really?"

  "What I'm saying is that had I been there, I would have seen this ghost. We would know exactly who we're dealing with. I know you want to protect me, but surely we're far beyond that now. You know you need me. So stop holding back and let me be of use."

  "Holding back?" Max tried to look surprised but she could always read him.

  "I don't know what the big secret is, but you've been as bad as Drummond."

  "It's not like that."

  "It's exactly like that." She smiled to show him she wasn't angry, that she worried about him and wanted to help. "You know better than this. If we don't trust each other, then the whole thing falls apart."

  Max sighed. He pulled out the photograph of the fire and slid it across the table. Sandra looked it over. "Well?" he said. "Leed died clutching that picture, it's got to mean something."

  "There aren't any ghosts around it, if that's what you're looking for. And sometimes an object that gets handled by ghosts a lot will have a glow to it. This has nothing like that. It's just a picture."

  Max looked over the picture again — massive mansion-sized house, smoke and fire obscuring most of the building, lots of people sitting far afield watching. They were dressed well. Very proper. Could be any time from the 1940s or before. Max never doubted that the picture held an important clue, but why did it have to be so difficult to find? If Joshua Leed wanted to show him something, why not draw a circle around it? Or write it down? Or for-crying-out-loud, just say it? Why wait until the evil spirit of a witch is killing you? Would it have been so difficult to trust a little before everything went to crap? And Drummond was no better. If he continued to hide the truth, the consequences might be as severe, if not worse, than what happened to Leed.

  Sandra reached across the table and rubbed the wrinkled lines on Max's forehead. "You've got a frowny-thing going on there. What are you thinking about?"

  "I'm sick of not having answers."

  "Then go get some. How many times will I have to remind you that you have a skill beyond seeing a detective's ghost? You're an excellent researcher. Go do some research. Find some answers."

  Chapter 11

  That evening while Sandra slept, Max sat at the kitchen table with a notebook, his laptop, and a lot of questions. He decided to focus on Dr. Ernest and Joshua Leed first. By following their path, he hoped to figure out where the other witches had been buried without resorting to a confrontation with Drummond — an unpleasant thing under normal conditions, but now one that might transform the ghost detective into an evil spirit.

  Within a short period of time, Max had begun to build a solid picture of this duo. They had done little to cover their tracks (hence the FBI's interest), and Max's research skills had improved over the last few years. One thing became abundantly clear — Leed had lied about a lot.

  For starters, Dr. Matthew Ernest never taught at any university. In fact, he never earned anything beyond a Bachelor's Degree. The "Doctor" in his name was a complete fabrication. That he and Joshua Leed became witch hunters appeared to be true. They spent a lot of time in online forums arguing the reality of witches and ghosts, trying to persuade any who would listen that a war existed just beneath the surface of our daily lives. If not for the fact that Max knew they were right — at least about the existence of these things — he would have dismissed their rantings as lunacy.

  Unfortunately, the rest of their world view was at best misinformed and at worst, downright deadly. They were convinced that a grand war continually took place between mankind and the supernatural. Max agreed that the two didn't necessarily mix all that well, but a war? No. They thought communing with benevolent ghosts through physical contact would be advantageous. Max had suffered through the intense pain of that experience — not something he would call advantageous. They suggested that all ghosts wanted to move on to a better afterlife, and that their job was to help facilitate the journey. Sounded nice, but Max knew of at least one dead detective that had no interest in moving on anywhere.

  By searching old newspaper articles, Max learned that Ernest and Leed spent as much time evading the police as they did hunting witches. Their names popped up in everything from big newspapers, like the Philadelphia Inquirer, to small county newspapers, like The Davidson Reporter. They were sought for questioning in at least a dozen missing person cases and several homicides. Max surmised that most of these interrogations went nowhere since the public police logs lacked arrests following the sessions.

  In the 1950s, however, on three occasions, both Ernest and Leed were charged — once with kidnapping, twice with murder. In the case of the murders, whatever evidence the police had went up in flames, destroyed in a bizarre fire. With the kidnapping, the police had the girl in protective custody. She claimed that they lifted her from a grocery store parking lot, told her they knew she was a witch and that they planned to kill her. At some point during her captivity, they decided they had made a mistake and let her go, making her swear to never tell a soul. She swore as instructed, and then headed straight for the police.

  "This is where you changed," Max said to the laptop screen.

  He could picture them having a difficult conversation. Ernest insisted they use their skills with the dark arts to silence this girl. Leed objected — after all, why did they let her go in the first place if they would only kill her in the end? But Ernest pressed on, pointing out that they had made a mistake, a tragic mistake, that he didn't want to hurt this girl, but that she jeopardized all they had worked for, that if she were allowed to testify, they would go to jail for a long time, and then who would be looking out for mankind? Who would fight the witches?

  Max could hear Leed's a
rguments weaken as well as his resolve. He may have despised the decision, but Leed eventually agreed. They put a curse on the girl, and within a day, she had died from unknown causes.

  While a lot of this story was supposition on Max's part, he had done this sort of thing enough to know when his imagination had struck close to the truth. This felt true. The newspaper articles, public police logs, and filed lawsuits that he could find supported his conclusion. And even if he missed the mark a little, it didn't change much.

  The facts remained that Ernest and Leed had deluded themselves into attacking women, some of whom were actually witches. No doubt, the ones they tracked down to North Carolina were real. Drummond might have been a bit gullible at the time, but he wouldn't kill random people just on the word of these guys. Since Drummond participated in the curse, Max had to assume the story of a North Carolina coven held merit.

  Unfortunately, while Max managed to put together a grim picture of Ernest and Leed — essentially two unintentional serial killers — he found little to link them up with the coven. Their history died when they reached Winston-Salem. Considering Leed's paranoia, Max guessed they purposely hid after dispatching the coven in order to protect themselves from retaliation.

  Max thought about different avenues to research — more basics on witch covens, searching for acknowledged witches in Winston-Salem, looking up some of the symbols Ernest and Leed had drawn on their walls. As his bouncing ball screen saver kicked in, he realized none of this would help him much. He already knew most of the witch basics from his previous research and his own unfortunate experiences with Dr. Connor, the Hull's witch on retainer. Finding current witches in Winston-Salem might be interesting, but the coven in question had been destroyed decades ago. The best he could find would be a relative of one of the witches, and he doubted any relative would be very forthcoming in the matter. As for the symbols, he needed to look them up but his mind didn't want to focus on that at the moment. In fact, there was only one thing he kept thinking about — Marshall Drummond.

  Max rested his fingers on the keyboard. "Okay, Drummond. You've got more answers than I do, and if you won't tell us, if all you're going to do is lie, then I'm not going to feel guilty about looking into you a little deeper."

  He typed Drummond's name into the search field but hesitated. He craned his neck to peek toward the stairs. Listening for any sound of Sandra, he held still.

  "Don't feel guilty," he finally said and tapped the Enter key.

  After a few hours, he had to admit that much of Drummond's life remained an undigitized mystery. He found several newspaper reports of cases Drummond had worked on as well as records of his private investigator's license and such. Nothing too telling, though. Until he found reference to a book called The Driving Darkness: One Psychiatrist's Look into the Roots of Mental Illness.

  The book made sure to change all the names of the patients as well as identifying features — sex, weight, hair color, eye color, etc. However, Max noticed that the author, Dr. Paul Clarkson, had worked at the West Carolina Insane Asylum at the time when he wrote the book. A while back, Drummond had confided that he once entered the care of that facility under his own volition.

  Drummond had been a beat cop when he encountered a ghost who needed his help getting hidden money to a niece. Talking of the supernatural experience led to his removal from the police force and the start of his career as a private investigator. It also led to a mental breakdown.

  An hour into reading the book, Max thought for sure he had found Drummond's case. The book had changed Drummond into a young, pretty girl named Daisy, but only that case matched the tone of Drummond's experience. Max, of course, knew he could be wrong, that he might be finding the outcome he wanted to find, but the other cases in the book either bore no sign of reality or bore signs of too much reality. They were people disturbed by abusive, tortuous childhoods or mystic delusions. Only the case of Daisy spoke of the reality Max had come to know. She had to be Drummond's case.

  According to the book, Drummond's therapy session uncovered that the ghost he had encountered was not, in fact, his first touch with the supernatural. His mother, Eunice Drummond, had suffered periodic seizures her entire life. Her parents had taken her to several doctors, but no cause could be determined. When she left home, she stopped seeking out doctors. As she once told her son, "I had no need for them. I've always known what causes my seizures."

  She then explained that she believed angels and demons would possess her body while she slept. Even if she nodded off for a quick nap, her soul opened to them. She had no way to prove it. Nothing beyond the seizures happened. But she promised her son that she knew this to be the case — because while in that state, she saw what they saw, she knew what they knew.

  She refused to tell little Marshall Drummond the specifics. "If I told you half of it, you'd never sleep again."

  Churches became prominent in their lives. She would take Marshall to a new church for weeks on end until she decided whether to move on to another church or to speak with the reverend or priest or whatever title that church used. When she spoke with the man, and it always was a man, he either thought she was evil or crazy. Then Marshall would be taken to a new church as Eunice kept searching for one that believed her.

  "But don't think ill of them or their church," she told him on numerous occasions. "A church, the actual building, is like a living being itself. So, you respect those who worship there and you respect the building itself. Otherwise, bad things'll happen."

  When Marshall was nine, they joined yet another church but something went wrong. Eunice thought they might have finally found people who understood her, and she excitedly went off late one night to meet the pastor at his home. She came back, bruised and disheveled, spewing hatred towards them and threatening to burn down their church. Marshall tried to remind her that churches were alive, and she struck him across the cheek.

  Two months later, at Marshall's tenth birthday party, she suffered a seizure that would not stop. His father and the other adults did all they could, but she died. An autopsy showed that she had a massive tumor in her brain, one that had been growing for years. Marshall then understood that his mother had been imagining the possessions, that she could have been saved if she had seen the right doctor, and that all the stories she had told him concerning the supernatural world were nothing more than the hallucinations of a damaged brain.

  But then he saw a ghost.

  He learned such things were real.

  Guilt plagued him.

  The book went on to discuss how these events shaped "Daisy's" life, and as far as Max could tell, Dr. Clarkson was criminally incompetent. After only two months with "Daisy", he concluded that the patient would be served best by a heavy drug regiment and surgery on the brain. Thankfully for Drummond, Dr. Clarkson's consistently draconian prescriptions led to his dismissal from the asylum. Not surprising since Drummond had picked this particular institution for its forward-thinking attitudes towards its patients, an attitude Dr. Clarkson clearly did not share.

  Max's cell phone vibrated on the table. He looked at the phone's face to see that somehow it had become seven in the morning and that his unwelcome friend, FBI Agent Stevenson, wanted to talk. "Hello?" he said, his voice scratchy and low.

  "Open your front door," Stevenson said.

  "Huh?"

  "And bring a cup of coffee with you."

  Max walked toward the front door. He saw the silhouette of a man standing outside. "For crying out loud," he muttered as he opened the door.

  "No coffee?" Stevenson said.

  Squinting at the morning light, Max leaned on the door frame. "What do you want?"

  "Somebody broke into Matthew Ernest's home."

  "Really?"

  "Yup. Broke in, walked around, and left. Doesn't look like the person took anything. Guess they only wanted to have a look."

  "You came here at seven in the morning to tell me this?"

  "Thought you might be interested
. Oh, and Joshua Leed was murdered last night." Stevenson paused, and Max could feel the man's eyes probing around, observing Max's reaction, comparing it to the reactions of guilty people. "You don't seem too surprised."

  "Leed hired me because Ernest had been killed. He was convinced somebody wanted him dead, too. I've barely started looking into any of this and now he's dead. Looks like he was right."

  "That's one possibility. But I don't find that possibility matches my facts too well. Of course, there's the other possibility."

  Though Max really didn't want to hear the answer, he had to ask. "What's the other?"

  "The other possibility is that you killed Joshua Leed, much like you killed Matthew Ernest."

  Max hung his head. "I told you I never met Ernest. And Leed only just hired me."

  "But you're the only one who can confirm that story. I'm telling you, Max, it's looking worse and worse. Especially because I don't like being lied to. People do it all the time to me. They lie about their alibis, lie about their involvement in crimes, lie about their guilt and their remorse. It's disheartening after a while. I'm going to tell you something that's not a lie, though. Federal prison — it ain't for you. I've seen plenty of guys go off to do time, and believe me, you won't be able to handle it."

  "I won't have to, since I didn't do anything."

  "Can I tell you a little secret? Some of us in the FBI, guys like me, we actually prefer the serial killers. Those guys, once their caught, they want to tell you everything. Much more pleasant way to do the job. Guys like you, with all the denials and the lies, it makes my day drag on and on."

  "I did not kill anybody."

  Stevenson clicked his tongue. "If you say so. I sure hope you're telling me the truth, though. Because when I find out I've been chasing my tail due to your lies, that will piss me off. That's when you'll find out how tough an FBI Agent can be." He lifted his head to see past Max's shoulder and smiled. "Good morning, Mrs. Porter. I hope I didn't wake you. Just having a friendly chat with your husband about federal prison. You have a nice day, now." With that, he walked back to his car and drove off.