Abraham Feuerstein knew that if this failed, he could very well end up joining those ghosts out at that damnable house.
NINETEEN
With the second hour into the special having passed with no discernable recording or image having been relayed to the remaining thirty-eight million viewers, the mood in the production van was sticky at best. At the beginning of the last four-minute commercial break of the hour, Harris Dalton tossed his headphones down and stepped out of the van. He stood looking up at the darkened Summer Place. After the test broadcast, he had been sure that they would at least have something in the first two hours to hang their hat on, but thus far the show was sliding steadily downhill. He felt his reputation sliding with it.
“It’s playing with us.”
Kelly Delaphoy had come out just behind him, her clipboard still pressed to her chest as if she was preparing to ward off his ill humor with the thin piece of plastic. Harris shook his head and turned back to the darkened house, just as the first real drops of rain started to fall from the cloud-laden sky. He turned his face upward and took a deep breath as the rain cooled his face.
“Professor Kennedy doesn’t seem too worried about the non-happenings in the house,” Kelly said, flinching as a streak of lightning crashed over the property.
“What the hell does he have to lose?” Harris said. “His career was already in the shitter.” He brushed past Kelly and returned to the van.
The small producer watched the door to the van close, and then looked back at the house. With the darkened windows, it reminded her of a dangerous animal as it slept, its eyes closed and breathing lightly. Lightning illuminated the sky once more, reflecting off the glass on the second and third floor. She felt as if the house was mocking her and the entire effort to bring out what was hidden inside. The wind picked up and the rain start to come down in earnest, but instead of running for cover she stood her ground, looking up into the silent face of Summer Place.
“Show yourself, you bitch,” she said as the thunder caught up with the last bolt of lightning. The house remained as still as before. Silent and sleeping.
The real threat to Summer Place was coming, in the form of package carried by a messenger that had been dispatched from Philadelphia two hours before.
That package was a result of a theft from the Immigration and Naturalization Service Center mainframe computer. It was so hot that the man Leonard Sickles had hired to break into that system had decided to deliver the package himself. For the moment, Summer Place sat unaware of the threat coming its way.
Gabriel, Julie, Father Dolan, and Damian Jackson — who still stood back from the camera’s lens — stood on the third floor landing and looked through the darkness toward the sewing room at the end of the long hallway. It was a corner room facing the back of the property, standing like a dark sentinel. They would have to pass it to turn the corner and get to the guest rooms on the far end of the floor. Jackson, the last person in line, took the opportunity to examine the device that Leonard Sickles, the little hood from LA, had engineered. It looked like a string of ordinary Christmas lights to him, and Jackson suspected that Sickles was running a game on Kennedy. Jackson had taken the opportunity to have all of Kennedy’s team checked out, especially the little gang member, so he knew the kid had recruited some friends from Los Angeles to do God-knew-what for him. As long as the gang members didn’t show up at Summer Place, Damian had more important fish to fry.
A flash of lightning produced a soft rumbling through the floorboards of the old house and brimmed brightly around the shuttered third-floor windows. Jackson heard Kennedy explain to the television audience that the intermittent light from the lightning outside could affect the ambient light photography they had planned. Damian smiled in the darkness as the team started moving down the hallway toward the sewing room and the suite where the opera star had supposedly disappeared.
The team, with Julie in the lead, stopped just outside one of the rooms and directed the camera toward the spot where Kennedy’s student had vanished into thin air — or, thick wall, if you believed the professor’s story. Lieutenant Jackson watched Kennedy’s expression as Julie once more explained the incident of seven years before. Gabriel looked away as the camera zoomed in on the spot where the kid had supposedly vanished and Jackson knew the professor was looking right at him. He couldn’t say for sure, but he suspected Gabriel was mocking him. Jackson placed his hands in his suit jacket and waited for Kennedy to look somewhere else, but he kept looking Jackson’s way. Jackson found it unnerving.
“Professor Kennedy will try to recreate the circumstances surrounding that night years ago. If he is successful, one of the greatest mysteries of Summer Place may be solved right here before the UBC cameras,” Julie said. The team moved away from the wall, the last place Kennedy’s student had ever been seen.
As the soundman slowly followed the others down the hallway, Damian intentionally rubbed his large hand across the spot on the wall. The velvety wallpaper was cool to the touch. Damian pressed hard onto the wall, making sure nothing creative was lined up for later discovery. It felt solid.
Julie and Kennedy stopped just beneath the ventilation grill where Damian had stood himself with the state police not two weeks before. The low-light camera adjusted and the world saw for the very first time the vent that had supposedly consumed the man Kelly Delaphoy had hired to trick out the house.
“And now, for the first time anywhere in the world, the UBC network will broadcast the actual incident that happened right here in Summer Place two weeks ago.”
Damian wanted to jump right out of his skin. He realized suddenly that he had been lied to, not only by Harris Dalton, Julie Reilly and Kelly Delaphoy, but by UBC as a whole. The footage had supposedly been lost forever, and they had sworn they had nothing to turn over to the police. Jackson clenched his teeth as Julie raised a concerned brow at the camera.
“A warning, the footage you are about to see is graphic and frightening. As most of our viewers are aware, this man, Kyle Pritchard, turned up yesterday. Mr. Pritchard committed suicide before he could give a full accounting of his experience. Once again, this footage is graphic, and has been proven to be real.”
They all heard the voice of Harris Dalton in their earpieces as the canned footage started playing. This allowed five minutes for the team to relax.
“You lying sons of bitches had that footage all along and didn’t tell me. That’s tampering with state evidence, and I told you I would hang you for it!” Jackson shouted, pushing past the sound- and cameramen.
“Lieutenant, I have been authorized to explain to you that our network technicians only a few hours ago came up with a workable copy of the video tape. As we speak, a copy of this tape has been forwarded to your office in Philadelphia — by US Mail.”
“If it takes me a year, I’m going to get someone at your network for withholding evidence.” Jackson looked from Julie to Kennedy’s smiling face. “And if I find you had something to do with the decision-making here Kennedy, that’s going to add to your problems.”
Gabriel took a step toward Jackson. The men were of equal height, and for the first time Jackson realized Kennedy wasn’t easily intimidated. Even in the dark he could see that the professor’s eyes were filled with a challenge the detective had never seen in them before.