Chapter 10
Hazel thought that she was coping pretty well, considering the situation, until the phone rang.
She’d successfully lined up a bunch of numbers for Tiffany and made them march in a decently coherent direction—her laptop hadn’t shown any signs of trouble yet—and had decided to give her eyes a break by stripping wallpaper for an hour.
The previous owner’s choice of a busy yellow-and-gray print kind of thwarted the benefit for her eyes, but she was enjoying the destruction anyhow, kneeling on the floor and ripping off huge swaths of abstract maybe-vases.
Any conscious thoughts she had centered mostly around the horror of nineties decorating and a little around lunch.
Then the phone went off, three high shrill tones, and she froze with her heart pounding in her throat and her hands icy by her sides.
Oh, for God’s sake, she scolded herself, her inner voice only a shade or two from her mother’s. You’ll never get through a week acting like this, let alone—
Hazel grabbed her phone as much to cut off that voice as to talk to the caller—or, really, to escape the moment when even her internal critic stumbled, because the heckler had no more idea than she did when the situation would change.
If.
The number was unknown, which probably meant a scammer, but Hazel stabbed at the green icon anyhow. “Hazel Lewis.”
She tried to sound normal, but probably failed, because the first thing the caller said was “I’m so sorry, I should’ve emailed or, or texted, I just didn’t—it seemed too immediate—this is Stephanie, by the way. Stephanie Chapman.”
“Oh,” said Hazel, blinking at the bare patch she’d created on the wall. She’d thought the voice sounded familiar. “That’s okay. Are you all right?”
It was only a polite, automatic question. The Chapmans had paid promptly and by electronic transfer, with no additional comment, and Hazel hadn’t expected to hear from them again. A call meant trouble; Hazel would have known that even if Stephanie had been less audibly flustered.
“Yes,” said Stephanie, to Hazel’s surprise. “Well, mostly. Physically fine, and no, um, hauntings. But people were clearing out Clarence’s house, and I thought you should know—”
Nothing good started that way. Hazel waited, listening to a bird of some description getting angry in the nearby trees.
“They found bodies. In the basement. Sort of.”
Hazel didn’t bother to find a chair before she sat down.
“Sort of in the basement,” she asked as Stephanie fell silent, “or sort of bodies?”
“Yes,” Stephanie said again, and her laugh sounded like a dropped glass. They sure did make a pair, Hazel thought, remembering her earlier reaction to the phone: the Roxy Hart and Velma Kelly of incipient nervous breakdowns.
She took in the bare living room, packed with boxes and strewn with salt.
Hazel’s strength had run out after protecting the bedroom and bathroom, and she’d decided it was better to rest than to risk making mistakes when she was tired, which still seemed like a good choice but definitely complicated matters now.
If the face at her window didn’t count, she hadn’t had any attacks from the ethereal in a few days.
“I’d offer to meet up,” she said, touching the charm around her neck, the rock soothingly smooth beneath her fingertips, “but that’s complicated right now. Why don’t you put me on speaker and get a drink, though? There’s no hurry.”
Hazel herself went to her bedroom before Stephanie continued the story, both because occult protections seemed important and because she wanted an actual chair and a Diet Coke from her minifridge. Bodies in the basement wasn’t the sort of topic that lent itself to short conversations.
The salvage crew, Stephanie explained, had been cleaning up the wreckage of Chapman’s house when one of them had noticed a hole in the guest room floor with more space under it than should have been there.
Everyone had noticed the odor, even through the masks they wore to keep from inhaling too much plaster dust. “They thought it was probably just a possum or a raccoon that had gotten, you know, stuck,” said Stephanie.
A few of them might really have believed that, Hazel thought. Most cleanup crews she’d met had been very familiar with the potential surprises in even an average house.
“The basement didn’t go that far west, not on the official floor plan,” Stephanie went on.
“So they went downstairs and yeah, there was a little padlocked door in the west wall. Clarence had put a ladder in front of it. I never would—well, I didn’t go there much, but most people wouldn’t have noticed. I’m pretty sure.”
“Probably not,” said Hazel. Most people didn’t notice much, herself included at times. She switched the phone from one side of her face to the other, giving the sweat on her cheek time to evaporate, and sipped her soda. “It sounds like he was quite the amateur handyman.”
“He was a lot of things.”
Clarence Chapman, once the deputy sheriff of Moon Mill, Pennsylvania, had apparently gone a good way past not a nice guy. The crew head had called the police as soon as he’d found the padlocked door. The police had broken the lock, opened the door, and removed all need for conjecture.
“I should’ve wondered why the cops hadn’t gotten around to bugging me,” Hazel said.
Stephanie went on to explain that three boxes and two large jars had sat on a set of small metal utility shelves, and while the dust had grown thick on them in the months of Clarence’s illness, it hadn’t gotten completely opaque.
When the first officer down had trained her flashlight on one of the jars, she’d clearly seen the human tongues floating there.
All of the boxes held hands. Most, but not all, were dry, skeletal, or both.
Clarence had preferred easily storable trophies.
“I only know what’s been on the news, really,” Stephanie said after a long pause to drink more of her beverage.
“The police haven’t told us much at all, except they’ve asked a bunch of questions, which does make sense.
For a day or two, they were treating Lee as a suspect, or an accomplice, but—I mean, maybe they do think that, still, but our lawyer says a bunch of the, um, Clarence—”
Hazel put the woman out of her misery. “Lee has an alibi for many of the murders, doesn’t he? Even though the police don’t know exactly when they took place. They must go back a while then.”
“He would have been just a kid. Maybe not even born yet, for some of them.”
“Jesus.” Forty, fifty years of killing. “Did anybody even suspect him before?”
Stephanie sighed, a gusty whoosh to express the overwhelming scale of the problem.
“Not that they’ve been willing to say, and he sure doesn’t have a record.
I don’t know. I bet some of his colleagues found him creepy, and more of them will say they always found him creepy if the story comes out, if you know what I mean. ”
“Sure. Memory works backward more than we’d like.
” Hazel toyed with the metal tab on her soda can, trying to recall what she knew about serial killers.
Forty or fifty years was a long time to go under the radar, even with the additional camouflage a cop would have.
Chapman must have practiced much more self-control than was normal—or he must have had unusual help.
Hazel remembered the heads above Clarence’s bed, creepy even before the room had changed, and then the hands that had tried to come out of the wallpaper. The ethereal reflected the physical, even when the inhabitants weren’t trying to control it.
“Are you worried about the victims’ ghosts?
” she asked, sitting up straighter as she took on her normal role.
Strangers or near-strangers usually only called her for one reason.
“I don’t think they’ll cause your family any trouble if they haven’t already.
Like I said, my situation’s a little complicated, but I’m glad to come out if I’m wrong, or I can advise you remotely. ”
“We’ve been okay so far. I did get concerned, so it’s good to hear that we shouldn’t have problems, but mostly I just figured you should know. I hope it’s not too much.”
Hazel blinked again, but this time the surprise was positive. “No—that’s really nice of you.”
“It seemed like the least we could do. Especially…” Hazel heard ice cubes rattle at the other end of the phone before Stephanie sipped her drink.
“We’ve had reporters already. None of us mentioned your name, but I know they’ve got ways of tracking down information.
At least a couple of them would probably love to know that Clarence hired a medium before he died. ”
“Ugh,” said Hazel. The paramedics had found her at Chapman’s house, her name and maybe photo would be in official records, and a quick Google search could probably reveal the rest. Steve at the impound lot had probably spread his story far and wide too.
“Well, I appreciate the advance warning. Maybe they won’t be able to find me. ”
“I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you.”
“Thanks. I think I’ll need all the luck I can get.”