Ghouls, Ghouls, Ghouls Part 16

The next morning I woke with Heath's naked warmth curled around me. For a few heartbeats I felt content and happy. His body fit so nicely around mine. There was a synchronicity about us-even our breathing was in time together.

I opened my eyes, and a bit of the magic evaporated. He and I had made our way to the only unoccupied room-Gopher's.

Our producer's suitcase was still sitting on a nearby bench, opened and overflowing with his clothes. I sighed and closed my eyes again, pushing away the rush of reality.

"Hey," Heath said softly.

"Hey."

I felt gentle lips on my shoulder. "You okay?"

A smile crept at the corners of my mouth. He was so good at reading me. "Yeah. Just worried about Gopher."

Heath's arms wrapped tightly around me. "We'll find him."

I sighed again. "Finding him means going back to Dunlow."

"Yep."

"I hate that stupid rock."

That won me a small chuckle. And then, "Did you notice the clock is working?"

I opened my eyes and peered at the nightstand. The digital clock was flashing 12:00. "The electricity's back on!"

Heath sat up and looked around, squinting in the morning light. "About time," he muttered with a yawn.

There was a sudden eruption of noise out in the hallway, and Heath and I both jumped out of bed, naked and staring at the door. I knew that shrieking anywhere. "Gilley!"

I ran toward the door and Heath caught my arm. He shoved his flannel shirt at me and reached for his jeans. I threw the shirt over my head and dashed to the door. Pulling it open, I saw Gilley crying and waving his arms around, raising a ruckus, while John, Kim, and Meg all stood by trying to console him.

"They never came back!" he wailed. "The phantom's got them! It's got them! It's got them!"

I heard Heath clear his throat from over my shoulder and four heads swiveled abruptly in our direction.

Followed by four jaws dropping open.

Followed by four pairs of eyes opening wide.

Gilley was the first to recover himself. "Are you two serious serious?"

I winced. He can really reach those higher octaves when he's upset. "We're fine," I said calmly.

Gilley put both hands on his hips and snapped, "Oh, we can all see see that, M. J.!" that, M. J.!"

I smiled sheepishly and pushed Heath back inside the room, closing the door quickly behind me.

"We probably should have left them a note or something," Heath whispered.

I sighed yet again. "Yeah, well, hindsight's twenty-twenty."

Heath and I took our time going down to breakfast. I wasn't interested in facing the reproachful glare I knew Gilley would be issuing my way the moment he saw me. I hoped that if I took my time, he'd eat, grow tired of waiting for us, and move on to his computer now that the power was back on.

I hoped wrong.

Heath and I arrived in the dining room to find it still full. All conversation died away the moment we appeared. "Uh, boy," I mumbled.

Heath cleared his throat and laid a gentle hand on my back. "Morning," he said to our group.

"It is for some of us," Gilley snapped.

I felt my shoulders sag, but Heath ignored the sarcasm and took a seat near the end, patting the chair next to him. I took my seat and immediately got busy loading some eggs onto my plate.

I was acutely aware of the palpable silence all around me.

Heath also busied himself, pouring some tea into my cup, before adding some into his.

I thanked him but avoided all eye contact and dived into the eggs. They were stone cold, as was the tea, but I wasn't about to complain or even hint that the meal was anything less than scrump-dilly-icious.

"We're waiting ...," Meg said.

My fork stopped halfway to my mouth, and I set it down. Heath and I exchanged a look, and I was irked to see the corners of his mouth lifting. He thought this was funny.

Still, I was going to stick to my guns. "For what?" I asked innocently.

Meg started laughing. Kim and John joined in, as did Heath, but Gilley had folded his arms and was scowling at us. "Details," Heath said. "They want details."

"Uh ...," I said. Were they serious? "How about if I tell you that what happens between Heath and me is private?"

This made the group laugh even harder, and even Gilley's scowl turned less frowny. "We don't care about your extracurricular activities," Kim said delicately. "We're waiting to hear what happened at Dunlow."

"Ahhhhh ...," I said, relieved down to my toes.

Heath and I then filled them in on everything that had happened, including the detail about the ghosts of Kincaid and Bouvet falling to the rocks.

Gilley now appeared troubled. "Have you ever heard of a ghost reliving their actual moment of death?"

He had a point. Most spooks go right up to that moment where things start to go really bad, but almost never step into their actual death scene. "I've heard about it only rarely," I said. "I've never actually witnessed it."

"What could cause a ghost to want to go through that?" Meg asked. "I mean, forcing themselves to relive that horrible fall. Why?"

I pushed my plate away. My appet.i.te was gone. "There's only one reason," I said. "And that is that they're so desperate in those moments to get away from the thing chasing them that they see death as an actual escape route."

"So why don't they cross?" Gilley wondered. "I mean, at some point they've got to realize that they're really dead."

I felt goose b.u.mps rise on my arms. "It's the phantom," I said. "I think it might have some sort of captive power over their spirits."

Everyone at the table fell silent for a moment as we thought about those poor men and all the years their spirits were spending reliving their worst nightmares.

Gilley broke the somber silence when he asked, "What about that section in the middle?" I looked at him curiously and he added, "The part about Bouvet talking to someone else."

I rubbed my temples. "I'm not sure, Gil. I don't know who he was talking to or half of what he was saying."

"A lot of it was in French."

"But you had your camera on the whole time, right?"

My eyebrows rose. "Yeah."

"So it should be on the tape."

"As long as the microphone picked it up," I said.

"I'd be interested in looking at that footage," John said. "I mean, from everything you've told us, it seems like that's the exact moment when the phantom was released."

"Yeah, but from where?" I asked. "All we know is that Bouvet lifted a heavy lid, and out it came."

"From one of the crypts?" Meg suggested.

I nodded. That made the most sense. "Gil, can you do a little research on who's buried at Dunlow Castle? See if you can find anything on one of Dunnyvale's successors talking about coming back as a phantom or placing a curse on any trespa.s.sers."

"I still have to research this Alexandra chick," he reminded me moodily.

I smiled. "Then you'd better get crackin'."

In the end, Heath, John, and I decided to see if we could at least provide Gilley with the full name of Alex by heading to the newspaper. To our relief the building appeared to be open and functional.

The paper was a typical small-town affair; it was run by a father-and-son team with a circulation of slightly over a thousand people.

As it happened, Jordan Kincaid's appearance in Dunlee and his subsequent death were the biggest stories the paper had ever covered, so they had no trouble providing us with the articles from the days leading up to and including the tragedies. Of course, they also requested that we grant them an interview, which is why it took us two hours to get back to the inn with our intel.

We found Gilley upstairs in his room, tapping away on his laptop, a cord connecting the camera to his computer.

I laid the articles on his bed. "The best we can do is show you a picture of her," I said.

Gilley pulled his eyes reluctantly away from the screen. "Huh?"

"Alex's name was withheld from the article at the request of Kincaid, but the reporter did manage to snag a picture of her right before she, Kincaid, and some other unnamed dude set out for Dunlow."

Gilley squinted at the grainy black-and-white image. "Pretty, though, isn't she?"

"Yeah," said Heath. I cut him a look and he smiled sheepishly.

"Anyway," I said, "now I want more than ever to track her down. There's got to be a reason why Kincaid worked so hard to keep her a secret, and I want to know what that was."

"Can I finish this first?" Gil asked.

I sat down next to him on the bed. "Are you working on the camera feed?"

"Yeppers," he said, focusing back on the frozen green image. "I've been running the sound through a filter trying to pick up what he's saying, but a lot of it is so corrupted or muted that I can't really make a lot of sense out of it."

"Were you able to get anything at all?"

Gilley swiveled the screen toward me. "I can distinctly hear this word," he said before hitting the play b.u.t.ton. Through the computer I heard, "tresor ..." "tresor ..."

I closed my eyes and thought back to what I'd just heard. "Did he say 'treasure'?"

Gilley nodded. "I think he was talking about finding the treasure in one of the crypts."

But Heath still appeared skeptical. "But why would Dunnyvale tell you the phantom was brought to Dunlow by someone else?"

I turned to him. "Like I said before, he could have been lying."

"But why?" Heath pressed. "I mean, what good would it do to ask you to rid his castle of the very thing that's currently protecting his treasure? And what good does it do to tell you it was put there by someone with some sort of a connection to Alex? I mean, does this whole thing make sense as a wild-goose chase just for his amus.e.m.e.nt?"

Gilley sighed. "Nothing about this bust makes any sense, Heath."

I was silent for a moment, weighing the possibility that Dunnyvale was lying just to have some fun with us, and I finally had to admit that it didn't sit well with me at all. I finally admitted it to the guys. "My gut is telling me that he wasn't lying."

"Maybe it was one of the other descendants?" Heath suggested, as if he'd just thought of the idea. Gilley and I both turned to him. "What I mean is, maybe one of Dunnyvale's heirs brought the phantom to the castle to protect the family treasure."

"That's possible," Gil conceded.

"And in line with what Dunnyvale claims, that he didn't bring it to Dunlow."

"So where does this Alexandra person fit in?" Heath wondered.

My eye went to the paper on the bed. I picked it up and squinted at the tall lanky figure. "I've no idea," I admitted. "But she must be involved somehow. Maybe she's a descendant of Dunnyvale's line or something."

Gilley rubbed his eyes. "There's too much conjecture here," he said. "We know little to nothing about who brought the phantom or where it came from or where the treasure is or even where Gopher might be."

"We definitely need more to go on," I agreed when something else occurred to me. "You know who might be able to give us a few more clues?"

"Who?" Gil and Heath both said together.

"The man who was with Bouvet when he opened that crypt."

Heath's eyes widened. "That's right!" he said. "He was with his friend from France when they opened the lid!"

"Didn't you guys say that he went insane, though?" Gil asked.