Then there are the people who are, well, crazy. Or, more likely, had a breakdown at some point and saw ghosts. Non-supernaturals can detect spirits when the barrier between reality and fantasy is thin, like a mental break. In those cases, I think spiritualists honestly did see the dead once and have never stopped believing they have the power, lying dormant within them.
As for figuring out which type Gregor was, it wasn’t as hard to get him on that subject as I feared. He started it, asking me point-blank about my own powers, when they started and so on, as if it was a normal topic of conversation.
I gave him my usual story, about first spotting a ghost when I was twelve. It’s a funny little anecdote, one that suits my persona—more “stumbling over my powers” than having the finger of God show me the way. It’s mostly true, even. Embellished, of course, particularly the “stumbling” part. I come from a family where most inherit the power. My father killed himself when I was little, but I was close to my paternal grandmother, who’d prepared me for the day when I might start seeing people who weren’t there.
That doesn’t mean it was a breeze. There’s nothing that can truly prepare you for a lifetime of pleading and demanding ghosts. Most of my tales were nowhere near as funny as the ones I told. But the horror stories are mine; the world gets the slapstick versions.
Once I shared that backstory with Gregor, it left an obvious opening for me to ask his, which wasn’t nearly so cheery.
“My wife and I lost a child,” he said. “Our oldest daughter. She was three. She became very ill and did not recover.”
Jeremy and I offered sincere regrets for his loss, which he accepted with a nod before continuing.
“After Liliya passed, it was … not a good time for me. I was with her when she became ill. I worked from our apartment, as a tutor. My wife taught at a school. So I was with Liliya, and I was the one who did not think her illness was serious. I told my wife it was just a childhood ailment. When it became more …” He fingered the side of his glass. “The doctors said it would not have made a difference if she was brought to them sooner, but I did not believe that. I blamed myself. That is when I started to see ghosts.”
“Her ghost,” I murmured.
“No, that is what was odd. I did not see her. I saw others. Glimpses, mostly. Never her. I spoke of it to no one. I knew what they would say: ‘Gregor is mad with grief.’ I tried to make the ghosts go away. When they would not, I went to doctors. It did not help. They said I was punishing myself. I was imagining other ghosts to tell myself I was not worthy of seeing my Liliya.”
He drained his drink and then shook his head. “That is the start of a very long story. It was five years ago that my daughter died. It is only a year ago that I began to offer my help to others who are grieving. In the middle, I told my wife, and she was the one who said I was not going mad, not imagining it. She asked me to stop seeing the doctors and instead speak to others like me, like you. To help me understand. So I did, and now …” He spread his hands. “I am here.”
NINE
By the time we returned from drinks, I had e-mails from Elena with links and attachments, along with a note to call her to discuss it. The kids hadn’t gone to bed easily, so she and Clay were still up.
I checked a few of the links and then called before they headed off to bed. Elena ran me through the cases. In the background, I could hear the faint pop of the fire and the occasional clink of a glass or the murmur of Clay’s voice as he commented. I could picture them, on the sofa in the study, Clay sitting at one end, reading journals or research books, Elena stretched out, her back against him, fingers tapping on her laptop. It was a scene I’d witnessed many times on my visits to Stonehaven.
Elena hadn’t found much more to the cases than I’d heard. Three young women had vanished from Amityville over the years. They’d been going someplace and they never arrived and no one ever saw them again. No notes. No witnesses. Nothing.
She did find photos. Were they the girls I’d seen? That should have been easy to answer. But the pictures were old newspaper shots, whatever the family could grab at the time, rendered in black-and-white.
All three were over eighteen, with seemingly good family relationships and solid jobs. So they didn’t appear to be teen runaways. There were no angry ex-boyfriends or wannabe boyfriends. The second girl, Polly Watson, had been seen leaving her dance with a guy, but he was later found and exonerated. As for where Polly had gone … that’s where the connection between the girls and my ghosts fell into place.
Polly hadn’t left with a “boy.” She’d left with a man—a thirty-five-year-old chaperone at the dance. He said he was driving her home, but the investigation found they’d made a pit stop at the inn where I’d seen her ghost. He admitted they’d stopped there, but only because she needed to use “the facilities.” Which didn’t explain the witnesses who’d heard them arguing because Polly changed her mind about getting a room. They fought. She took off. She was never seen again. Her “date” was questioned, but it seems that after the fight he’d gone straight to the inn’s lounge, gotten plastered, and passed out. A half-dozen witnesses attested to it.
That was Polly’s connection to the inn. The other two girls had one, too. The first, Clara Davis, had been attending a wedding reception there. The third, Dawn Alvarez, had worked as a chambermaid in the inn, and had vanished on her way home.
Little had been made of the connection. Given the decades between the disappearances, that isn’t surprising. Two of the three had left the inn before they vanished. Maybe money changed hands to ensure the connection was left out of media accounts. People might like to stay in a haunted inn, but “resident serial killer” really doesn’t have the same marketing hook.
“Which is why the cases didn’t turn up the first time I searched,” Elena said. “When the place is mentioned in the accounts, it’s just called ‘a local inn.’”
“Plus, they aren’t crimes,” I said. “Just disappearances.”
She made a noise in her throat, as if this didn’t excuse her oversight. “Multiple missing young women is usually the first sign of a serial killer at work. Or a man-killing mutt.”
“Could that be what we have? That would explain the time frame. Werewolves live longer.”
I glanced at Jeremy for his input. He was on the bed but didn’t hear me. He was too busy sketching. Which meant he was worried. He doesn’t only sketch when he’s stressed—that would be a hard way for an artist to make a living—but if he is, it settles his mind. It also takes him someplace not quite reachable, which is why he’d missed the werewolf comment.
I turned my attention back to Elena as she said, “It’s possible. A werewolf killer would explain the lack of bodies—he took them away to eat. But I can’t recall ever seeing a mutt kill with a knife. It wouldn’t satisfy the hunting instinct. And a mutt sure as hell wouldn’t be sending notes to the papers. Again, that’s classic serial killer.”
“So what do you make of the notes?”
She paused. Clay rumbled something in the background.
“What’s his verdict?” I asked.
“He thinks they’re fakes. We only have one anonymous tipster claiming any knowledge of them, so that makes it suspicious.”
“You disagree?”
Another pause. “Those ghosts weren’t fake, which makes it hard to reconcile with phony notes.”