Chapter 5

Bailey sat on the side of the bed in his room at the Red Oak Inn, the only motel in the town proper of New Mourne. He looked around in a daze. How did he get here? He had been kissing Fiona and enjoying her body’s quick response. He didn’t remember leaving her or coming here.

“What the hell’s going on?”

He closed his eyes to relax and concentrate. He remembered talking with Fiona at her office. He remembered telling her about Anna, something he never did, and something he had no idea why he did tonight. He found it all too easy to open up to Fiona Burns. What was that about?

He went to the window and looked down on the quiet street. Fiona’s office was too far away to view from here. They had stood on the sidewalk talking. They looked up at the stars. Then he kissed her. Like the conversation about Anna, that kiss was uncharacteristic for Bailey. He was starting a business relationship with her. He shouldn’t have kissed her.

Try as he might, he couldn’t remember what happened after that or how he came to be sitting here now. His cell phone indicated it was nearly eleven-thirty. He knew they had left Siren’s Call around ten. He and Fiona had not been together more than an hour. Where had he been?

The street below him was empty. No cars came through, and no people milled about. Even the pub was closed, and there was absolute silence outside. It was Wednesday night in July in the middle of nowhere.

“It’s too damn quiet to think,” he said aloud. “I need some traffic and sirens. How do people live like this?”

The words were no sooner out of his mouth than a coyote ambled down the street. The lean, tough-looking animal stopped on the sidewalk across from the inn and looked directly at Bailey with eyes that glowed silver-gray. Bailey resisted the urge to duck behind the curtains. Was he seeing things? He closed his eyes. When he opened them, the animal was gone.

Rubbing his face with both hands, Bailey mumbled, “You’re in the country. There are animals in the country. Don’t scream like a little girl.”

The ring of his cell phone jolted him again. He was relieved to see his father’s face onscreen.

“Hey, Dad.”

“Any ghosts make an appearance?” Dean Powers asked.

Bailey had texted his parents earlier today and told them about Fiona’s invitation for the ghost hunt at Siren’s Call.

“Fiona Burns is very good,” he summed it up to his father, omitting the details of his heart-to-heart about Anna and the kiss that had followed. “But she’s not as open to the idea as we’d hoped, and her family pretty much wants to get the pitchforks and torches and run me out of town.”

“I thought Southern people were known for their hospitality,” Dean said. “You’re usually able to work your charm. That’s why you’re the advance man. What’s going on?”

Bailey looked out the window again, half expecting the coyote to have returned with friends. “There’s a lot more to this town than Fiona being a medium.” Bailey blinked, trying to clear more of the fuzziness from his head. “This place…”

“What?”

He found himself reluctant to tell his father about the crows, his car and phone not working or even the coyote. An ache started in the center of his forehead and spread outward.

“Fiona’s family is very…unusual.” That wasn’t the word Bailey really wanted. He thought of the sheriff’s order for him to leave, the ire in Aiden Burns’ gaze, and the distrust of her cousin with the long red hair. “They’re intense to say the least.”

“Intense can make for great TV when it comes to families.”

“Usually.” Bailey had felt many undercurrents tonight at the shop. “There’s something strange in the air. Something not quite…right.”

Dean chuckled. “You’re not sounding like yourself, Bailey. You don’t believe in anything that’s not quite right.”

“You shouldn’t either,” Bailey muttered, thinking of the parade of psychics his parents had visited after Anna’s death. One kook after another had taken their money and broken their hearts.

“But I do,” his father replied in an even tone. He began a story familiar to Bailey. “It goes back to your grandmother and the séances she used to hold at the house with that friend of hers. Your mother was there the night Marilyn Monroe visited. Marilyn confirmed her death was murder, not suicide. I’ll never forget it.”

“I know, Dad. I know.”

Bailey’s paternal grandmother had been a secretary for a motion picture executive, and had an eclectic circle of friends. To this day, she participated in weekly séances. The only difference was she now held them at her retirement home instead of the stucco Southern California rancher where Dean was raised.

The girl next door, Bailey’s mother, was intrigued by the shenanigans in the Powers household. Thirty-six years later, Dean and Beth were still in love and still believed they once chatted with Marilyn Monroe through a medium at the family dining table.

“Your mother decided to marry me the night of that séance,” Dean continued, warming to his memories. “She said my family was so interesting that we’d surely have quite a life together.”

Bailey sighed. “I hate reminding you of this, but that medium friend of Gran’s turned out to be a fake like all the rest who promised to reach Anna.”

“She just failed to contact your sister. It was nothing personal, Bailey.”

He sounded a lot like Fiona, and Bailey didn’t want to hear it. “We will always differ on those details.”

Dean laughed. “Well, whatever’s not right in that Georgia town, you’re sure to figure it out. Finding logical answers is your specialty.”

“Yes, it is.” Bailey was beginning to feel more like himself. There was most likely a good reason why he had lost a half hour of time after kissing Fiona. He had probably come back to the room, fallen asleep, and awakened disoriented. The coyote was most likely a dog. He needed to get a grip.

“What if this Fiona Burns turns out to be a real medium?” his father asked.

“That’s not likely.”

“You might try opening your mind just a little bit.” His father’s tone was wry, as if he knew this was a lost cause.

“She’s talented, all right. Some great effects showed up tonight when she said she was talking with a ghost.”

“You could see she was using special effects?”

“I couldn’t find any wire or air vents, but I saw things move, and there were definitely orbs showing up on the computer screen.”

“Maybe they were real,” his father suggested.

“Yeah, right, Dad. I’m going to give Fiona another day or so to come around, then I’m coming home.” He looked around the comfortable but quaintly decorated room. Maybe it was the chintz bedspread and ruffled curtains that were playing with his head. “I’ve been on the road too long this time.”

They discussed a few additional points of business about other shows before Bailey ended the call with “Give my love to Mom.”

He set his phone down and returned to the window. The street was still empty, and though he watched for a few minutes, nothing else happened. He closed the blinds and grabbed his tablet to add to the notes he had made this afternoon.

He couldn’t find the file. That was strange. He had written about the gathering of crows, the intelligent gazes of the birds and their absence of sound. But his notes were gone. Once again, technology had malfunctioned. This town was driving him crazy.

He glanced nervously at the fireplace and the windows. “The Birds” was one of his favorite movies, but he wasn’t sure he’d want the crows hammering through the glass or down the chimney with their sharp beaks.

He shook his head and wrote up the details of Fiona’s interaction with the ghost she called Minnie. Bailey was sure Ryan had rigged something during his “walk through.” But the chill Bailey had felt when Fiona said a ghost was beside him had been instant and penetrating. This was in the middle of a store with other people standing around. No one else reacted. He felt out of sorts as he wrote the question: Was a real ghost standing beside me?

He deleted the question and saved his notes, to his tablet and to the cloud. They weren’t going anywhere this time.

Instead of thinking about cold drafts and ghosts, he remembered the flesh and blood woman he had kissed. Fiona Burns. He could still taste the sweetness of her lips. He could feel her smooth skin beneath his fingers. He could smell her sweet floral scent. But why couldn’t he remember anything about leaving her and coming to this room?

He met his own gaze in the dresser mirror across the room. He didn’t have time for this. Not only could Fiona potentially be working for his company, she was the most dangerous sort of woman, the kind who made you talk about yourself and examine your feelings. He had spent the past fifteen years avoiding that.

In the course of an hour, he told Fiona more about Anna than he had shared with the last woman he dated. Twenty-four hours ago, he had never spoken to Fiona, and tonight he had talked about his murdered sister with her.

“Goddamn it.” He stood and walked toward the bathroom, unbuttoning his shirt and tossing it aside. He needed a shower to clear his head.

In the glare of an overhead light, he faced himself in the bathroom mirror. He looked tired, his usual tan faded, and his hair in need of a trim. The jagged lightning tattoo on his left bicep seemed more sharply etched than usual.

He traced a finger over the black and blue lines. He was seventeen when he’d gotten the tattoo, on the second anniversary of Anna’s brutal murder. He had chosen the bolt of lightning because it had stormed the night she died, and he had wanted a reminder of the shock of losing her.

A lot of time had passed since then. He had accepted horrible events happen, and he would never have any answers about his sister’s death.

The tattoo prickled. Bailey touched the mark. Usually, this was when he allowed himself to think of Anna and to ask if there was something he could have done to protect her, to change how her life ended.

Tonight, however, he thought of Fiona. He heard her voice asking, “Do you want me to try to help?”

The voice poured through Bailey like a surge of hope. He started to answer, and then realized how off this was.

Because Fiona’s voice wasn’t just in his head. The question echoed again and again, off the tiled walls of the shower behind him.

“Do you want me to help?”

In a sudden cold sweat, Bailey fell back from the mirror. “Stop it!” he ordered, to make himself feel better, and to shut out the question. He pressed his hands to his head.

The voice stopped. Silence reigned even weirder, darker, and more complete, like a bottomless cavern.

“This town and that woman are fucking with my brain.”

Bailey staggered from the bathroom, wondering what Fiona had put in his coffee or what he had inhaled at her cousin’s shop.

As he fell deep into sleep, he heard the beating of wings, like the dozens of crows lifting to the sky.