6. STEVIE
STEVIE
I ’ve only met Andrew’s friend, Valerie, a handful of times because she’s hard to convince to leave the house. Or at least, that’s about as much as Andrew’s had to say about her.
After thanking Dr. Houston, Andrew gives Lo the directions to Valerie’s house, and we get back in our van.
“Do you think she’ll let us film?” I ask, glancing at the clock on the dashboard. It’s already almost eight—the day is disappearing very quickly. “I’ll let the idiots know we’re going to be late on getting them, too.”
“Yeah, she usually sleeps during the day, so I’m sure she just got up,” Andrew says, only adding to the mystery that is Valerie. “I wonder if anything weird has happened while they’ve been there alone.”
Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum are holding it down with the equipment back at the house, packing up for us, and then waiting until we can pick them up again.
They’re usually grateful for the break from us hovering over their shoulders, and I don’t mind paying them to basically babysit our equipment—shit is expensive.
“I doubt it. One of them would’ve called us by now if something was going on.”
“I don’t know. They’re so oblivious, I think a ghost could walk in front of them and they would have no idea.”
I snort as I start up the car. “Fair enough,” I say. “But I don’t know. I don’t think anything is really going on there.”
“You’re really giving up on Lo’s house? Already?”
“I don’t know, man. Gut feeling, I guess,” I say and glance into the mirrors to pull out from my spot. “I don’t think she’s yanking us exactly, but this is pretty standard haunted house stuff, you know? This is shaping up to be pretty boring TV. People have seen this all a million times.”
“The difference being that it’s actually real this time.
” Andrew reaches forward to fiddle with the radio.
We could afford a van, but not a very good one, so we still have a cassette player and FM radio, and that’s about it.
It makes our longer drives when we’re shooting in places like San Francisco and New Mexico absolutely horrendous.
“This is all going to be for nothing. I shouldn’t have let you talk me into this.”
“You’re such a drama queen. You’ll thank me for this later, I’m sure,” Andrew says. “And besides, it’d be nice to give actual ghost hunting a shot rather than just playing pretend.”
“Are we still planning on setting up some stuff around the house?”
Andrew shrugs. “I don’t think we need to, but we can.”
“I’m really starting to think we’ll need to. We’re going to have to make up for the shitty storyline with at least one or two genuinely creepy things. People are going to watch because of Lo, so we need to go big.”
“It’ll be fine, boss,” Andrew says, slapping down one of his massive hands onto my shoulders.
“Not one single thing to worry about.” When he sees the expression on my face, he puts his hands up defensively.
“Or we can just scrap the whole episode and write it off as a learning lesson to not go somewhere to investigate just because we’re asked. It’s whatever.”
“Thank you,” I say, even though I know he’s only saying it because I want to hear it, and flick on my turn signal to merge. It’s late enough that the traffic isn’t bad in Downtown proper. The Los Angeles freeways, however, are a different story.
But eventually, I pull in front of Valerie’s place, an apartment complex tucked into a quiet street, and drive until I can find parking.
We get out and walk up to the front gate, where Lo is standing.
She’s just on her phone, standing around, totally oblivious to my eyes on her.
But she still somehow looks perfect. Her jeans fit every curve just right and the way her long blonde hair catches in the soft breeze is literally like something out of a movie.
Seeing her like this—just out in the wild, separate from setting up to film—makes me realize she’s exactly the kind of girl I’d see once at a bar and never forget.
By the time we approach her, I’ve made myself nervous to speak. I’ve gotten smoother over the years, but Lo has made me revert back into my sixteen-year-old self who’s too scared to even look at her crush in the hall.
“Hey,” she greets us as we walk up.
“Hey,” Andrew says back. I can only nod coolly, my mouth dry.
Valerie comes down to meet us not much later and I’m relieved to have anything else to think about that isn’t how being around Lo is making my palms slick with sweat.
“I like the purple,” I say. Her hair had been dyed a vibrant green the last time I saw her, and then it was pumpkin-orange before that; I’m surprised by how healthy her hair looks despite the heavy dye.
“Oh, thanks. It felt right for October,” she says. “Come on in.”
The three of us follow Valerie through her open-air apartment complex. It’s bigger than it looks from the outside—hallways extend on forever, and what feels like a million different staircases overlap with each other across the three stories.
She walks us up a nearby flight of stairs and pops open her front door using the weight of her shoulder.
Her studio apartment is kept dim—not a single overhead light on.
Everything is done up in deep purples and blues and blacks, from her rug to her sofa to the tapestries on the wall.
It smells like weed and something else…like a musky perfume.
The three monitors set up on her desk are the only thing that stands out as not matching the vibe of the rest of the place.
From the floor, a tiny Yorkie yaps at us in greeting.
“Who’s this handsome fella?” Lo asks and drops into a squat so she can offer her hand to him. An image of Lo meeting my dog pops into my head and I brush it off, refusing to go there.
“Locard,” Valerie responds proudly. Her dog’s head whips in her direction, tail wagging at the mention of his name.
“Unique.”
“Named after the father of forensic science, Dr. Edmond Locard.”
“Oh, wow,” Lo says, and I can tell she’s trying her best to find an appropriate answer. I fight off a smile.
“So, Andrew mentioned you guys have a question for me?”
“We’re looking for something on a family who lived in the Eagle Rock area. There isn’t much in the library archives, so we don’t think anything went on, but we’re trying to find some answers.”
“Any particular reason?”
“There’s a ghost in my house,” Lo offers. “Allegedly.”
Valerie’s face lights up. “I love it—I grew up in a haunted house and I think it’s what made me into who I am today, ” Valerie says. Just like Dr. Houston, Valerie doesn’t know the full truth about our show. As far as she knows, Andrew and I are both actual paranormal investigators.
“It’s certainly building character,” Lo says, and I wonder if she ever gets tired of hearing other people’s opinions of her experience with her haunted house.
“I don’t know if these guys have told you anything about me, but I’m an independent crime solver.
On the side, at least. I work in freelance digital advertising as my actual job.
But my passion is crime. I’ve become somewhat of an encyclopedia on things that have gone down in LA County basically since its inception. ”
To her left, standing deeper in the house and clearly more comfortable than Lo or me, Andrew nods. “That sounds like an exaggeration, but it’s not.”
“You’re exactly who we might need,” I say. “I don’t know if we’ll find anything, but the little detour is worth it since the library didn’t give us much.”
“I mean, libraries try their best, but sometimes things go missing. A name might be misspelled, or something wasn’t able to be archived digitally.
Or, my personal favorite—people change their names and become much harder to create a timeline on.
” Valerie sits down in her office chair. “Who are you looking for?”
“I’m going to start setting up to shoot if that’s cool,” Andrew says, and Valerie nods.
“The Bevere family,” I say. “Irene Bevere owned the house at one point after inheriting it from her parents.”
“And what’s the timeline on this?”
“Irene inherited the house in the mid-1980s and then died in the 1990s.”
Valerie takes in the information, nodding to herself. “Okay. I don’t recognize the name, but that doesn’t mean anything.”
I sigh a little bit. If Valerie doesn’t know anything, it’s hopeless—there’s no spinning this one.
The best we can do is maybe get away with making up a story about the history of the house, but I don’t know if Lo would feel comfortable with that.
For being as entrenched in Hollywood as she is, she doesn’t seem like a bullshitter.
And that’s coming from a professional one.
As Andrew fiddles with the camera, doing the best he can to set up a remotely interesting-looking shot—we’ve historically been able to do a lot with very little; it’s part of the fun of learning the ropes with independent projects that have basically negative budget.
Valerie clicks around on her computer. She’s impressively fast despite having long, delicately decorated acrylic nails; I’ve never seen anyone type that quickly before, ever.
“Bevere…” Valerie mutters to herself. “Okay. I see what you mean about newspaper archives. There isn’t much going on here for Irene. Or any Beveres in Los Angeles in the mid-twentieth century, for that matter, in case something odd went down with one of her relatives.”
“Great,” I grumble, unable to hide my annoyance.
Andrew glances over my way, his way of telling me to stay cool.
I’m trying not to get agitated, but this is all feeling like a wild goose chase and a terrible waste of a day.
One weird thing happening at a house and a hot woman telling me it’s a ghost doesn’t actually mean anything.
The further I get from the lights flickering, the less I believe it’s anything more than just a random one-off issue with her electricity.