From the Grave--A McKenzie Novel Read online

  The director of the film crew spun in a circle, looking above the heads of the festival-goers as if the answer could be found in the distance.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  My name echoed through the ballroom.

  “Who the hell is McKenzie?”

  I found Esti’s terror-stricken face. I don’t know why I laughed, yet I did.

  “This is nuts,” I said.

  “Who’s McKenzie?” the director asked again.

  I had no intention of answering. Unfortunately, Hannah, Kayla, and Esti were all focused on me, and the director took a chance.

  “Are you McKenzie?” he asked.

  “I’m going to take off,” I said.

  The director grabbed my arm. “No, you’re not,” he said.

  I looked down at his hands and then up at him. “Don’t do that,” I said.

  He must have heard something in my voice that resonated, because he released me and took a step backward. The cameramen weren’t as easily intimidated, however. They continued to point their cameras at me.

  “It’s possible that Leland has attached himself to you,” Hannah said. “I’ve seen it before.” Hannah glanced at Kayla.

  Kayla shook her head. “I don’t see him,” she said.

  The other psychic mediums continued to ask for me. The director sent a camera out onto the ballroom floor to record them asking for me. Another filmed a wide shot of all of us; the third camera stayed close on Hannah.

  “It’s possible Leland’s in hiding,” Hannah said.

  “Why would he be hiding?” I asked.

  “This place is crawling with ghostbusters. Someone might decide to take him on.”

  “Are you listening to yourself?”

  Once again I was challenging Hannah, and she wasn’t happy about it. Neither was her mother. I expected some sort of retaliation, yet none came.

  Esti continued to rub Hannah’s back.

  “Why is this ghost contacting all of the other mediums?” the director asked. “What does he want?”

  “Why don’t you go and ask them?” I said.

  I was hoping the director would leave. Instead, he sent his producer, the young woman with the clipboard.

  “I don’t think McKenzie is a negative person,” Kayla said. “He’s skeptical, that’s all.”

  “I’ve noticed,” Hannah said.

  “He wants to believe. He just can’t let himself do it.”

  Hannah waved more or less at the entire festival and the psychic mediums chanting my name.

  “Despite all the evidence right in front of him,” she said.

  “You’ll notice I’m standing right here,” I said.

  “I can’t help you if you don’t trust me.”

  “What are you, Tinker Bell? I have to clap my hands to prove that I believe?”

  Hannah glanced at the younger woman.

  “I don’t know how to help him either,” Kayla said.

  The producer returned and whispered into the director’s ear. The director repeated her words loudly enough for the festival-goers close to the booth to hear.

  “A ghost is offering a reward to anyone who shoots McKenzie?” he said.

  The crowd gasped.

  “This is great,” the director said.

  “I’m going home,” I said.

  “No, no, no, no, no…” the director chanted.

  “You know how to reach me if you need me,” Hannah said.

  “Wait.” The director was clearly annoyed. “Let’s just wait a minute.”

  Hannah turned toward Kayla. “Would you like to have lunch with my mother and me?”

  “I don’t want to intrude,” Kayla said.

  “We welcome your company. Don’t we, Mom?”

  Esti didn’t seem to care one way or the other.

  It was clear from Hannah’s tone that the invitation did not include the director and his crew.

  “Ms. Braaten,” the director said, “we need to talk.”

  I don’t know if he meant mother or daughter. It was mother who answered.

  “Hannah needs to take a break,” Esti said. “We will return by one.”

  “Wait a moment. We had an understanding.”

  “One P.M.”

  Hannah, Esti, and Kayla left the booth and moved toward the exit at the corner of the ballroom. I guessed that they would have lunch in the hotel’s restaurant.

  I went toward the exit in the opposite direction while trying to ignore the gawking expressions of the festival-goers as I moved past them. I had no doubt they thought the entire scene was well worth the twelve dollars they paid at the door, ten in advance.

  The director stood in the booth behind me, surrounded by his crew and their equipment.

  “This is so unprofessional,” he said.

  * * *

  I moved through the ballroom, across the crowded lobby, and into the parking lot that wasn’t crowded at all. I headed for my car. Two young men and a woman followed me. I was nearly halfway to my car when I turned to challenge them. Probably that was a foolish thing to do; if it had been just the two men, I wouldn’t have done it. The girl, though, made me think they were more curious than confrontational.

  “Can I help you?” I asked.

  They halted about ten yards short of me. The hands of the two men were empty. One was wearing gloves; the other was not. The woman was carrying a large bag over her shoulder. She was holding the strap with one hand, but her other hand was inside the bag.

  My inner voice said, When are you going to learn that women are just as dangerous as men?

  “Are you McKenzie?” the taller of the two men asked.

  “Yes.”

  The woman removed her hand from her bag. She was holding a cell phone.

  Lucky you.

  “May I take your photograph?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Please. I’m taking a sixteen-week class, Psychic Spiritual Development. Next week we’re doing a section on reading photographs.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Energy is captured in a photograph, and this energy can reveal secrets about you to those people who know how to read it, and I thought, given what just happened in there, I would really like to try to read yours.”

  “No,” I said.

  The woman seemed disappointed by my response. Her two friends seemed like they were willing to make an issue of it.

  “Are you sure that’s all you wanted?” I asked.

  The two young men glanced at each other.

  “I have a question for you,” I said. “Assuming you’re foolish enough to believe what those mediums were saying about me, how are you going to collect the money? Are you going to find a psychic to dial up the spirit of the dead man? And then what? Confess to committing murder and demand the dead man pay up? What if he doesn’t? What are you going to do? Threaten his life? Oh, wait.”

  “We didn’t mean nothing,” the taller man said.

  “The lady just wanted to take your pic,” the shorter man said.

  I was paying so much attention to the two men that I didn’t notice the woman bring her cell up and snap my photo until I heard the metallic sound that her phone made.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  I shook my head at her audacity. Normally I would have admired it. Instead, I spun around and stomped off toward the Mustang. A quick glance over my shoulder told me that the trio was no longer following me.

  When I reached the car, I popped the trunk, retrieved the SIG, and hung it on my belt behind my right hip even as my inner voice spoke to me.

  Who are you planning to shoot? The girl with the cell phone? Her two friends? Leland Fucking Hayes? What you need is a crucifix. Some garlic. A mallet and a wooden stake.

  I don’t know why I thought that was so funny, yet it made me laugh just the same—the idea that I would fight off Leland Hayes the way vampire hunters fought off Dracula, the way Peter Cushing went after Christopher Lee in all those g
reat old Hammer movies.

  “McKenzie,” I said aloud, “you need a plan.”

  THIRTEEN

  I didn’t have a plan. Certainly none came to mind as I drove back to the condominium.

  I stopped at the security desk, where I found out Smith and Jones were off for the next few days. I asked the woman working the desk if they had left a message for me. She said they hadn’t, so I didn’t know if they’d found the red Toyota Avalon or not. I might have called Bobby Dunston, except I didn’t want to talk to him, or anyone else, for that matter. I couldn’t think of a conversation that wouldn’t make me sound like a lunatic.

  I returned to the condo and started walking in a large circle again. By the third lap, it occurred to me that I had no basis on which to judge the reliability of any of the things that I’d seen or heard in the past few days.

  “What you need to do is some honest research,” I said aloud.

  Unfortunately, of the thousand or so books Nina and I had collected for our library, not one was devoted to the paranormal, except for some Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Neil Gaiman, and I didn’t think that they counted. There was the internet, of course, but after a half hour of surfing all I found was links to movies, books, psychic mediums, and TV shows. So what the hell, I decided, let’s watch some TV. Except, where to begin? I found the titles of 167 TV series devoted to ghosts, psychics, and the paranormal broadcast in the United States since the midseventies, and the only one I recognized was In Search of … with Leonard Nimoy.

  I browsed episodes of a handful of the more recent reality shows that I could watch on demand. There seemed to be a lot of contradictions. In one, an exorcist was brought in to cleanse a haunted house of a particularly pesky demon in an elaborate ceremony that included hand-holding, prayer, and burning sage. In another show, the owners were told that they should simply tell the ghosts they were not wanted and the ghosts would leave. In yet another, a psychic medium and an ex–New York homicide cop working together told the homeowners that nothing could be done and they should move. In the fourth show I watched, a group of ghost hunters confirmed that a bed-and-breakfast was indeed haunted, as the owners had surmised, but the spirits weren’t particularly malicious, and they, the B&B owners, and their guests could happily coexist if they simply treated one another with courtesy and respect.

  I suppose you could learn to live with a ghost, my inner voice told me.

  Stop it, I told myself. There are no such things as ghosts.

  Who told you that?

  My parents.

  So Hannah and Kayla and all those other psychic mediums chanting your name at the Twin Cities Psychic and Healing Festival were just making up all this crap?

  This time I spoke aloud. “There are no such things as ghosts.”

  It was at that precise moment that my baseball was swept off the shelf of a bookcase onto the hardwood floor.

  It occurred so quickly and so unexpectedly that it took a few beats before I was able to register what had happened.

  This wasn’t just any baseball, mind you. This particular baseball had been autographed by the seven Minnesota Twins that played on the teams that won both the 1987 and 1991 World Series. It was enclosed in a clear acrylic square box near my desk.

  I crossed the room, picked up the box, and held it up to the light. There was no damage.

  My first question: What the hell?

  My second: Really?

  I told myself that there had to be a logical explanation for what happened that had never happened before. I returned the ball to its place on the shelf even as I entertained a theory involving street vibration and the weight of my building.

  Didn’t Minnesota Public Radio get something like $3.5 million from the Metropolitan Council to deal with the vibration caused by Green Line trains rolling past its studios in downtown St. Paul?

  I took a few steps backward, all the time watching the box.

  After a few seconds, I announced again, “There are no such things as ghosts.”

  The box began to tremble.

  Then it stopped.

  Then it flew off of the shelf and landed at my feet. We’re talking at least a five-foot flight.

  Three-point-five million bucks, my inner voice repeated.

  Mind you, I had just spent a long Saturday afternoon fast-forwarding through over a dozen TV shows arguing that there really were ghosts and that most of them were assholes. Some of the shows even employed electronic devices to prove it, like EMF meters, EVP recorders, REM pods, IR lights, FLIR thermal imaging cameras, and a lot of other stuff with acronyms that I didn’t know. So while this might have freaked me out last Saturday, at the time it seemed perfectly reasonable.

  Although, I had to wonder, why was I being haunted now when I’d never been haunted before?

  What was it that Hannah Braaten said? It’s possible that Leland attached himself to you.

  Are you saying that Leland Hayes followed me home? I asked myself.

  Hannah said she’s seen it before.

  I flashed on the episode where the psychic medium said that you needed to be firm with the spirits that invaded your space, that you had to let them know who was in charge.

  “Hey, asshole.” I spoke loudly. “Yeah, I’m talking to you, Leland Hayes, you godless prick. You ruined your life, you ruined your son’s life, and now you want to fuck with me? Screw that. I want you out of here. This is my home, not yours. In the name of God, get out. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, take your worthless ass out of here and don’t ever come back. Go to the other side and take responsibility for your crimes, you chickenshit.”

  I stood quietly and waited.

  Nothing happened.

  I waited some more, thankful that there was no one around to see or hear me—at least no one that I could see or hear.

  Some people liked the sound of silence, whatever that was. It made me nervous, which probably said something disturbing about my personality. After a few more minutes of it, I said, “Got nothing to say for yourself? Fine.”

  I looked down at the acrylic box at my feet.

  There are plenty of things that can’t be explained, my inner voice reminded me. That’s why ancient cultures invented gods.

  I picked up the box and walked it back to the bookcase. I told the computer to play random songs from my playlist, and she settled on the Frank Sinatra–Aretha Franklin duet of “What Now My Love” to start. I arranged the box on the shelf so that Kirby Puckett’s autograph was facing outward.

  I was interrupted when the door to the condominium opened behind me.

  For some reason, the light metallic sound of lock and door handle sounded as loud as gunfire.

  I spun toward it and stared.

  Nina looked back at me.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “Hmm? Sure. Fine.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Looking for something to read. What brings you home so early?”

  “I don’t know.” Nina dropped her bag and coat on the chair where she usually dropped her bag and coat. “I just felt like I should be here.”

  I flashed on the story Kayla Janas told me about her roommate, about how Kayla sent her to the coffeehouse because Kayla felt that’s where she needed to be.

  C’mon, McKenzie. It doesn’t always need to be a thing.

  “How was your day?” I asked.

  “Not bad,” Nina said. “How ’bout yours? How was the Twin Cities Psychic and Healing Festival?”

  “It had its moments.”

  I walked toward Nina. She walked toward me. We kissed. Instead of I’m-happy-to-see-you, it felt more like I’m-happy-that-you’re-in-my-life-and-please-don’t-ever-leave-it.

  “And what can I do for you?” I asked.

  Nina smiled broadly, and I immediately thought of our master bedroom and the recent acceleration of our sex life.

  “Take me dancing,” she said.

  “Is that a metaphor?”

&nb
sp; She rapped my chest. “You always say you’re going to take me dancing and you never do,” Nina said. “We used to dance all the time when we first started dating.”

  I gripped my knee. “Did I ever tell you about my hockey injury?” I said.

  “The one that kept you from playing hockey last night? C’mon, McKenzie. Step up. You owe me.”

  “All right, all right, I’ll take you dancing.”

  “I expect you to do it with a smile.”

  I smiled.

  The phone rang. Nina read the caller ID before answering.

  “Hey, Shel,” she said. “Before you say anything, McKenzie has promised to take me dancing, so … You and Bobby are welcome to come with, but … No … No, Shelby. If you want to join us … Threaten his life. That always works for me … Okay, okay. I’ll see you then.”

  Nina hung up the phone.

  “Here’s the plan,” she said. “They’re hosting a Swing Night at the Wabasha Street Caves on the south shore of the Mississippi across from downtown St. Paul, the old speakeasy built into the sandstone bluff.”

  “I’ve been there.”

  “First, we’re stopping at Shelby’s, though. She and Bobby may or may not join us, she doesn’t know yet, but she wants to see us.”

  “Why?”

  “Who knows? Maybe she’s had a vision. I need to change. Are you going dressed like that?”

  FOURTEEN

  I’ve seen Nina take an hour or more to get dressed and I’ve seen her do it in less than three minutes, yet she always looked great. At least, that’s what I told her as we drove I-94 going east. We used the Cretin-Vandalia exit, which was starting to make me nervous, and a series of side streets to get to Bobby’s house across from Merriam Park in St. Paul, which made Nina nervous.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Nothing. Just being careful.”

  “Why? You know what? I don’t want to know.”

  “Okay.”

  I took a left and then a right. There was no one behind me.

  “All right, why?” Nina said.

  I told her.

  She closed her eyes and leaned back against the seat.

  “You don’t believe me,” I said.

  “I didn’t say that.”