Page 48 of Giving Up The Ghost
He nodded. “Come on.” He tugged me away from the door, examining the device from a distance. “It looks off the shelf, and I doubt she’s done any jiggery pokery to it, which means it’s got a fairly limited viewing field.”
The sound of a car door slamming drew us up short. “Shit. Tea or flee?” he muttered.
“Flee. I don’t want to try and keep a calm face around her right now.”
We hustled up the stairs, fear being a powerful motivator for my hip, before Oscar and Charlotte came in from their trip to see the old friend of Oscar’s grandfather. Ezra motioned for me to join him in his room as their voices drifted up the stairs, Charlotte excited about something and Oscar wary. “Here,” Ezra murmured, turning music on via his laptop and cranking up the volume. “If we’re going to get out of here we need to just commit, yeah?”
“Do you think Oscar will leave without those damnanswersof his?” I muttered, irritated because I knew, deep down, that Oscar was going to fuss about leaving. That he’d come up with some reason to stay, to come back. To try and work it out with Charlotte.
Maybe I was assuming too much. But I was tired. Tired on so many levels. And I wanted my boyfriend back, Goddamnit, not this caricature he’d become over the past few weeks. Not this nervous, uncertain man who’d slipped in one night and taken his place while I was asleep, led around by Charlotte who had apparently taken his sense along with his confidence.
Ezra pressed his lips into a thin line. “I’m not giving him a choice. No,” he stopped me when I started to say something, “don’t fight me on this, right? He’s… he’s my family, okay? He won’t break up with me in a fit of pique. He won’t be mad at me the same way he’d be mad at you. Let me handle Oscar. And Nadine,” he added, nodding at his laptop. “I’m wondering if she might be our missing puzzle piece.”
“Maybe,” I said slowly. “And if she’s not?”
“Then we won’t be worse off than we are now.”
Ezra called the state agent first, committing a few acts of fraud to convince them he was an agent in London and Charlotte Fellowes had come calling. She’d mentioned them, he said, and he wanted to know why things hadn’t worked out. Ezra made thoughtful noises, a few shockedoh, I says, and one hearty chuckle that sounded like it belonged to a fifty-year-old banker and not Ezra Baxter. Finally, he hung up and raised a brow at me. “Charlotte Fellowes is in hot water with a certain London estate agent. She wrote several checks to cover fees for the sale of her very tiny London townhouse, but the checks were made of rubber, and it turns out the house was not hers to sell, but rather property of a Cora Mitchell.”
“She’s one of the mediums from Violet’s circle,” I realized. “She had a… head injury, was it?”
“A fall of some sort, if the pattern holds.” We both had similar, grim expressions on our faces, the wheels turning faster. “Julian… Hear me out but…”
“Charlotte killed them, didn’t she?”
Ezra nodded slowly. “It’s looking like a definite possibility.”
“And Oscar…”
“She tried to sell someone else’s home once. Who’s to say she hasn’t before, or won’t again?” He gestured to the room around us. “This place is vaguely in her family, yeah? What sort of legalities are in place that might make it so she could take it over, or legally sell it if Oscar is gone?”
“Fuck.”
“In a word.”
“He’s downstairs with her right now.”
Ezra nodded. “She was trying to kill last night. Maybe it wasn’t me she was aiming for but Oscar.”
I shoved myself upright, gripping my cane till it hurt my fingers. “Come on. We can’t wait on this one.”
Ezra was impatient to get downstairs but waited as I made my slower way behind him. The lack of voices reaffirmed our suspicion they were in the cellar. The house was large, but not so big that it’d be impossible to hear them talking downstairs while we were in the entryway. “Cellar,” Ezra muttered. “It has to be.”
He pivoted to head for the cellar, then drew up short. “What?—”
I heard her before I saw her. A thin, high-pitched sob echoed off the walls before the crying woman manifested. She stood just a few feet from Ezra, her face sodden with tears. She was panicking, gesturing at us, in the hallway, her face red from shouting. Her anger was overlaid with the sound of crying, muffling anything she might have been trying to communicate. “Ezra.”
He nodded. “I don’t see them, but I feel… I feel so sad. Helpless.” His breath shook, and he slid to a crouch, clutching the back of his neck between his interlaced fingers. “It’s so much. She hurts so much.”
She tipped her head sideways, looking at me with frustration and confusion. Her mouth moved slowly and, when I shook my head in response, she threw up her hands. It was such anormalgesture, reminding me of CeCe with the way the crying woman rolled her eyes, giving me a look of sheer irritation, I burbled up a laugh. Ezra furrowed his brows at me and mouthedwhat, but I shook my head. “She’s just so… real. I don’t know how to explain it.” Almost noticing that I was doing it, I reached up to touch the spot on my head where my skull had been broken in my fall, the spot now marked by a patch of white hair. Before my accident, I never would have been able to see her.
Maybe.
She looked over her shoulder, whipping her head back to face us, opened her mouth, and screamed, silent under the looping sobbing noise that was both part of her and separate, a manifestation of her sorrow and anger perhaps rather than part of her corporeal manifestation. As her scream stretched, so did she, her mouth going horrifically wide and dark. Her body faded into the blackness of the gape, turning inside out almost, then vanishing. With her last flicker, the overhead lights burst, and the doors rattled in their frames.
Oscar came barreling out of the cellar before the glass had even settled to the floor.
CHAPTER 12
