Skeleton Key Page 6

  “No. Nothing at all was familiar about it. But Dr. Frauss said there was a mystery there that he wanted you to check into. Maybe because I was there for the explanation and because I read the articles, I got connected somehow. You’re gonna check into it, right?”

  “Ya know, I think so, Tanner. Zander said he had some sort of intuition that there was a mystery to be solved, and I’m even more curious about that now than I was before. Plus, there’s a family that maybe could use my help. Our help. I don’t know how exactly, but your vision makes me think we should check things out. You wanna come with me?”

  “Sure. Is tomorrow too soon? A bunch of guys on the team have been sick, so Coach gave us a day off and tomorrow I only have a lab in the morning. I could be at the house by eleven.”

  “That sounds like a plan. I’ll make arrangements for our visit. See ya tomorrow.”

  ***

  Clay described his previous day’s activities to Tanner as they drove from Flint to Durand. He finally decided as they neared the Durand exit off from I-69 to tell him that Erika was the high school girlfriend that he’d told Tanner about nearly a year ago. “Remember? She was the one that I told to like me, and then told to break up with me.”

  Tanner laughed. “Does she still just wanna be friends?” He thought that was funny because that is what Clay had told her to say when she broke up with him.

  “Of course. She’s married, Tanner. But her husband is missing.” Then he decided to include with a slight smile, “And she still looks really good. She claims she liked me long before the eleventh grade. I guess my mind-control kinda screwed up a golden opportunity. I’d really like to help her if I can.”

  Erika had suggested that they meet at her house and go to the Depot together, so after stopping for three trains within about a tenth of a mile, they pulled into her driveway at about 11:30 in the morning. They stepped past neatly trimmed shrubbery to the porch of her cozy, cream-colored, ranch-styled home and rang the doorbell. Thinking again of her blue eyes, he noticed the house trim and front door were of the same color. Powder blue? Sky blue? The front door pulled open to the inside of the house, and Erika pushed open the front screen door. As she did so, a bird flew over Clay’s head and right into the house. Erika shrieked, ducked, turned, and tumbled over the side of a living room chair, falling to the floor. Clay stepped in to help her, but she was off the floor like she had bounced off a trampoline. She grabbed a couch cushion and started chasing the bird around the house, screaming and swinging at it every chance she got. Tanner and Clay both started laughing hysterically. Tanner held the screen door open and Clay opened the front window in hopes that the bird would find its way out before it got pummeled by a couch cushion. “Go out the window, you stupid bird! Go out the window!” Erika was yelling at it like she was Dr. Doolittle and the bird could somehow understand her ravings.

  As it flew down a hallway and banged into a wall, both men wiped tears from their eyes, but then Clay had an idea. The bird flew back into the living room with Erika running close behind. “Hold on, Erika! Wait just a minute!” Clay extended his hand and concentrated on the bird. The bird started fluttering in the corner of the room near the ceiling. It was like Clay had caught it in his hand. The bird continued to flutter, and then he swung his arm toward the window and the bird flew right outside. Erika and Tanner looked on in amazement, and Clay was kind of surprised himself. Then the men looked at Erika, still holding onto the couch cushion, and they began to laugh again.

  She was wearing an attractive sweater, a cute, navy-blue skirt, and matching knee-high leather boots. Hair, eye shadow, mascara, blush, and lipstick were all done to perfection. Her eye shadow was a bit darker today, making her eyes appear to be a deeper blue. She sat on the couch, but continued to cling to the cushion. She smiled and said to Tanner, “Hi, I’m Erika.” Then she began to laugh too. When her laughter died down a bit, she turned to Clay. “You can control the minds of birds? You could be an amazing hunter. You could join the circus.” She started to laugh again.

  “Telekinesis,” Clay smiled kind of awkwardly. “I didn’t get around to telling you about that talent. I never tried it on an animal before. I’m just as surprised as you. This is my son, Tanner, by the way.”

  “Nice to meet you,” she giggled. “I hope I didn’t make too bad of a first impression. I have to admit—if you hadn’t noticed—that bird kind of scared me for a minute. And, Clay, since you just made a confession, I have to admit there is something I’m afraid of…There’s a midget who terrifies me.”

  Everyone started laughing again. “What? A midget? Why is that?”

  “Well, there’s this midget in Durand—name starts with a J…Jester or something like that. Anyway, to this day, he rides around on a kid’s bicycle. When we moved here that first summer, I was walking downtown on East Main near the clock tower. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw somethin’ comin’ at me, so I threw up my arm to protect myself. That midget ran his bike right into me, and I hit him right in the throat with my forearm.” Tanner was already laughing. Erika looked at Tanner and said, “Just wait. He was cussin’ and yelling as he got up off the ground, and then he saw that his handlebars were crooked and started swearing at me even worse. I don’t know how he did it, but he was so mad that while he was swearing, he started kicking himself in the head.”

  “What? Say again?” Clay interrupted. “He was kicking his own head?”

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Tanner do a leg kick, which only came about waist high. He grabbed the back of his leg and said, “I think I just pulled a hammy.”

  “Yes! He was literally kicking himself in the forehead. Then he picked up a handful of stones and started throwing them at me. My friend, Dan—he’s a cop in town now—stepped in and saved me. He got the little guy to settle down and got him on his bike, and he started riding away.” Tanner and Clay were cracking up. “His forehead was swelled up, and his handlebars were turned at a crazy angle, so he kept veering to the right and jerking back to the left.” Now Erika was laughing. “He was steering all over the place, so when he turned back to me and threatened to ‘get me’ someday, he hit the curb and flipped off his bike again. That scary little man points at me and yells at me every time he’s seen me since. He terrifies me. So, yeah, I’m kinda afraid of midgets. Dan’s always been kinda my ‘protector’ ever since. He keeps an eye on the little monster for me, and he watches out for Logan too.”

  Everyone was still laughing as they finally left Erika’s house and headed for the Depot to take a look at the picture that had called out to Tanner. Tanner liked her and found himself hoping that Zander was right about her. Maybe she really could help his dad finally move on from the loss of his wife. He was also beginning to sense that there really was a mystery to be solved and maybe his dad was the one to figure it out.

  Chapter 8

  Roberto Gomez was heading to his truck so he could drive home for lunch when Erika, Clay, and Tanner arrived at the depot. Erika introduced the employee to everyone.

  “Nice to meet you, Roberto. What do you do here?”

  “Grease monkey, air monkey, snipe, diesel mechanic, gandy dancer, juggler…anything besides an engineman or a white shirt.”

  “That didn’t sound like Spanish, but I didn’t understand a thing you just said,” Tanner quipped.

  “Si, Señor Thomas. I was just messin’ with ya. I’m a train car and equipment oiler, brake repairman, track laborer, engine repairman, and unloader. Whatever they ask me to do besides drive the trains and supervise.”

  Tanner and Clay liked him right away. “Not to mention, he’s a really good friend,” Erika interjected. “Say hi to Stacy for me.”

  “Sure thing. Buenas tardes, amigos.”

  “Let’s head on in, Gentlemen,” Erika said.

  After Roberto drove away, Tanner said to his dad, “If we go in those front doors, we should walk in and turn to the right to go to a waiting area. If we go straight through the lobby and down a hallway,
there’ll be a stairway on the right, heading to the second floor.” He led his dad and Erika through the doors, and sure enough, it was just as he described it. They headed up the stairs. When they reached the second floor, Tanner turned to the right and walked down a hallway. When he reached the second office door, he turned right, then looked to the wall on the right and pointed at a family picture of Erika, Adrian, and Logan Payne. Logan looked to be about nine or ten years old. “There it is.”

  “That is what called you here? That picture in my office?”

  Tanner shrugged his shoulders and smiled. Clay marveled at his attitude. Clay had lost his wife, but Tanner had lost his mother. She loved Tanner with all her heart, and Tanner knew it. Yet, less than a year later, he could smile, laugh, and not take himself too seriously. They had found the picture, and now it was everyone else’s responsibility to figure things out. His cell phone buzzed; he took it out of his pocket, read the message, and laughed. “Big Jake came to our room to see if we had any flu medicine—he’s a player on our team who’s been sick,” he explained to Erika—“so my roommate, Mike, let him in and they headed for the bathroom. Mike says, ‘You don’t look so good, Jake,’ and Jake says, ‘How can you live in here? It smells so bad!’ and the next thing, he was puking his guts out in the toilet. Mike says he couldn’t leave fast enough.”

  Clay and Tanner started laughing again. “Tanner hypnotized Jake ’cause he was hangin’ out too much in their room. Every time he’s there in the room and hears his name, he believes the smell’s so bad that he leaves.”

  “Or he pukes and then leaves. That’s priceless!” Tanner was laughing again, and so was Erika.

  Clay was intrigued by the mystery, however, so he was right back to business while the other two were enjoying their laugh. He was studying the picture. It was simply a family picture of Erika, Adrian, and Logan Payne outside the Depot with an old orange-colored train caboose in the background. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. He removed it from the wall and looked at the back of the picture, feeling it to see if possibly there was something hidden on the back. There was nothing unusual that he could see. “Erika, do you mind if I take the picture out of the frame? Maybe there’s something inside.”

  She gave the okay, so he took a couple of minutes to remove the picture and check everything thoroughly, still discovering nothing unusual. He flipped the picture over again and studied the photo. He began to feel a coolness in the room, like the temperature had just rapidly dropped a few degrees. Clay looked up to see if someone had opened a window, but Erika and Tanner were standing and talking about some wooden carvings that were on Erika’s desk.

  “Yeah, Logan is really talented. I’m planning on getting him some real wood carving knives for Christmas. He did this with his jackknife.”

  “Wow,” Tanner said. “Look at this, Dad. He carved a train, some train tracks, and look at this horse. This one is really good.”

  As Clay started to look away from the picture, he heard, “I’m looking a dead horse in the mouth.” It was a kind of whispery male voice. He looked around, expecting to see someone else in the room.

  “Did you hear that?” he asked.

  Erika shot him a curious look, but Tanner quickly said, “I didn’t hear anything. What did you hear?”

  Clay clipped the picture back into the frame and leaned it against the desk before he said, “I heard a voice say, ‘I’m looking a dead horse in the mouth.’”

  Immediately, Clay heard, “I’m straight from the horses’ mouths.” He turned around again, assuming there was someone else in the room. “I’m straight from the horses’ mouths?” he said in wonderment. The room seemed to drop a few more degrees.

  “I could be beating a dead horse…”

  Clay repeated what he had just heard to the others.

  “Some sort of extra-sensory perception, Dad?”

  “I don’t know…It seems different. And who would be talking to me? And what do horses have to do with anything? And why is the room so cold?”

  It didn’t seem cold to Erika and Tanner. Erika didn’t understand Clay and Tanner’s gifts, but she was certainly curious about what was going on. Tanner set the horse carving back on Erika’s desk, so Erika reached to replace the train and tracks. As she did so, she noticed that the picture of her and Logan was lying face down on her desk. She gasped. Carefully, she set the frame back up correctly, then looked at Clay and walked straight to the wall where the family picture usually hung. There on the floor beside the wall was the picture that Clay had been studying. It was also lying face down.

  When Clay saw the picture, he said, “How did that get over there? I just leaned it against the desk.”

  “It just can’t be!” Erika said as she stared at the picture and the men stared at her. She looked back to her desk, and sure enough, the carvings were missing. She walked over to the wastebasket, reached in, and pulled them out. Erika said, “A ghost did it.”

  “A ghost?” Tanner repeated. “This is so cool! Dad, can you hear ghosts?”

  ***

  Dan Duncan pulled into his garage, unlocked the back door, and headed for the kitchen for a late lunch. He looked out his back kitchen window as he was pouring himself a glass of V8 juice. What he saw was a squirrel squatting on one of his birdfeeders, eating the birdseed. He slammed his drinking hand down on the counter in anger, chipping his glass and splattering the red juice all over his police uniform. He yelled a couple of choice swear words toward the squirrel. Dan was a firm believer that the smartest, most talented and athletic squirrel on earth occupied his backyard. No matter what he did to try to discourage the squirrel, it somehow managed to continue to antagonize the police officer.

  Since fall had made its way to Michigan and many species of birds had migrated South, Dan filled his feeders in hopes of attracting black-capped chickadees, blue jays, dark-eyed juncos, white-breasted nuthatches, and northern cardinals. He loved watching birds, especially in the winter mornings when Michigan’s depressing gray skies and frosty temperatures threatened depths of discouragement. He’d had some luck attracting his chosen species, but he’d also attracted a squirrel that was determined to drive the bird-watcher crazy. After the six weeks of late October and the month of November, Dan was considering using his police revolver to put the pest into eternal hibernation.

  Dan had mounted new feeders on six-foot poles. His super-squirrel made the leap with ease. He raised the height of the feeder. The squirrel climbed the pole just as easily. He spread the poles with black auto grease. The squirrel tracked it all over his deck as if to mock the foolish man. He tried plastic baffles, but the vermin would adjust the positioning and climb over them anyway. When he went to metal baffles, the squirrel began jumping from a nearby tree. He cut off branches and the squirrel began climbing his house, leaving scratch marks all over his woodwork prior to each flying leap. He moved the poles and the squirrel jumped from a nearby fence. He tried safflower seeds because squirrels weren’t supposed to like them, but his squirrel ate them like dessert.

  He had put up the feeders so he could bird watch and relieve stress. Instead he was feeling more stressed than ever. Before he went to change his uniform, he slid open the window and yelled, “Get out of my feeder, you stupid squirrel!”

  “Tchrring…tchrring,” it seemed to call back while flicking its tail as if to say, “Get away.”

  Dan Duncan unholstered his Glock 22 police issued handgun and leveled it at his intruder. With 15 rounds in the magazine, he was sure he could end its irritating life, but he’d also blow several holes in his neighbor’s vinyl siding. So he slid it back in the holster, put on a new uniform, and made himself a sandwich for lunch. He needed to pump some iron—maybe spend a little time at the soup kitchen. He found that it was getting harder and harder to live with himself.

  ***

  Each new power that Clay possessed seemed to surprise him less. He wondered, “Is hearing a ghost a parapsychological power?”

  “Maybe you�
�re a ghost whisperer, Dad. Jennifer Love Hewitt’s a ghost whisperer.” Tanner was smiling again.

  “She’s an actress and that’s a TV show. Get serious for a minute. Erika, you’re telling me that there’s a ghost in your office?”

  “People have believed for as long as I’ve been in Durand that the Depot is haunted. Roberto’s wife, Stacy, has claimed for years that she saw a ghost more than once while she was working here. It was a woman in a wedding dress. She saw her running from the women’s restroom on the first floor, and she saw her sprinting into the attic down the hall when she was pulling out Christmas decorations. There’re other stories of circus performers who roam the halls at night performing various circus activities, but no one around here has ever seen or heard anything to verify those stories.”

  “Are any of the circus performers supposed to be midgets?” Tanner quipped.

  “You’re not serious too often, are you?” Erika replied with a smile.

  “I am when I play sports, but other than that, usually only when my stuffy dad’s around.”

  Clay rolled his eyes and smiled. “So why would circus performers be roaming the halls?”

  “Well, in 1903, the Wallace Brothers Circus was traveling by two trains through Durand and while stopped at the Depot, the first train was rear-ended by the second train. More than twenty circus performers were killed and twice that many were injured. Ten of the bodies were laid to rest in Lovejoy Cemetery, just a couple of miles south of town. Two or three of the bodies were never even identified. Believe it or not, Comedian Red Skelton’s father was a clown in that circus and is buried in the cemetery. An elephant, some camels, and a dog were buried along the tracks…People in Durand occasionally claim to hear the trumpeting of that elephant.”

  “That would be a horse of a different color,” Clay heard in his head, but he ignored the voice temporarily.

  There was a pause as the two men took in Erika’s tale. “Clay, exactly one hundred years later—to the day—the train my husband was on crashed into a semi-trailer carrying horses. Only the conductor was killed, but Adrian has been missing ever since. The horses were also buried along the tracks as a kind of symbolic gesture in remembrance of the circus disaster.”