ENTANGLED Read online

  A ghost who had a better sense of design balance than Patti herself.

  Not that I’m a designer, mind you, or a ghost buster, either. And don’t ever call me a medium. That term makes me sound half cooked. Or sound like a kook.

  Or worse, a charlatan, which I’m not, no matter what a certain male ghost investigator of my acquaintance might think.

  An oh-so handsome specimen of a male who trips my feminine triggers way more than I want to admit, damn his vivid blue eyes. He was only on my mind because he’d left a cryptic voice mail this afternoon. A message I’d yet to decide if I’d answer.

  For the record, I am Colleen Cotton, a psychotherapist who studied my butt off to get my Ph.D. and license, then came home to St. Augustine, Florida to open a practice. Clients barely trickled into my office door until my friend Dove referred a woman who was being driven to distraction by a ghost. After one evaluation and one spirit intervention, word of mouth discretely spread, and voilà! I became a therapist to the haunted.

  Admittedly, I’m darn handy with the dead-but-not-departed, and I should be after years of up-close and personal experience. If it goes bump by day or night, I can often see it, usually hear it, and always feel it. Seeing as I grew up in a town where you can't, pardon the expression, swing a cat without hitting a ghost, dealing with hauntings keeps me busy and helps pay the student loans.

  Trouble is I’m good enough at my job that, once I’ve brokered accords between the living and their spirits, the no-longer-haunted patients no longer need a psychotherapist. Or if they do, they don’t come to me.

  Tonight’s intervention was a breeze compared to some. Patti called me about a ghost who kept rearranging the furniture in her enclosed sun porch. The ghost even moved a honkin’ heavy sofa bed Patti’s husband Jeff was tired of moving back into place.

  On my first visit to the house, I’d sat on the same sofa while I’d explained to resident ghost Angelica that home insurance didn’t cover things broken by spirits. Angelica cried, apologized, and negotiated a deal that would do Donald Trump proud. In the end, Patti agreed to a new furniture and accessory arrangement, and Angelica promised to stop shoving the sofa, moving knickknacks, and fritzing out the flat screen TV.

  Me? I promised never to move another sofa bed. Not even with the furniture sliders Patti had the foresight to buy.

  Why didn’t I get Angelica to ‘go to the Light?’ She, like many other ghosts, flat wasn’t interested in leaving her haunt. Since she wasn’t sucking energy from the occupants of the house—was, in fact, looking out for them as she’d watched after other owners for more than a century—I didn’t push her.

  I try not to tick off spirits if I can help it. The crankier ones will shove your head into a wall.

  Those with evil intent will do worse.

  Patti cleared her throat, and I jerked to face her.

  “Colleen, I hate to rush you, but Jeff will be home at six. Is the sofa in the right place?”

  I eyed Angelica who still stood across the room at the French doors staring through the glass panes into the shadowed tropical garden. The first time I’d met her, she’d worn what I took for a tea gown of the early 1900s. Today, in a dark blue narrow skirt and a poufy-in-the-chest white blouse with three-quarter sleeves, she looked ready to do housework, yet she hadn’t lifted an ethereal finger. In fact, she’d seemed as skittish today as Patti herself. Curious, because the emotion Angelica projected felt a lot like fear.

  “Well, Angelica?” I asked.

  The ghost gave an eeep and turned to me. “What? What?”

  “I said are the major pieces where you want them?”

  She tilted her head, then darted a lap around the space that left a contrail of energy that brushed near enough to both Patti and me to give us the shivers.

  “Yes, yes. It is fine now.”

  “All right, what about the lamps and accessories?”

  “Put the tall white lamp by the wall. The rest she can put where she likes.”

  I cocked a brow. “And you’ll abide by the agreement?”

  She peered into the deepening twilight and shuddered when she faced me again.

  “I will behave, Colleen, but please do not make me leave. Here I am safe.”

  I gaped a little because, really, what could harm a ghost? “Safe from what?”

  “I do not know, but it is not safe out there. I must rest.”

  With that, Angelica disappeared. She didn’t fade or waft through a wall or the ceiling as she had last time we met. She vanished faster than I could blink.

  “Safe?” Patti said, her voice squeaky. “Is Angelica threatening us?”

  “Heavens, no,” I said bracingly. “Angelia says the sofa is in the right place, and to put the tall white lamp on a table by the wall. The rest of the accessories you can arrange as you like, and your things will be safe from her.”

  “Really? The haunting is over?”

  I smiled, nodded, and made all the right noises as I helped Patti finish rearranging the sunroom, but I knew in my gut that somewhere else, a haunting was just beginning.

  o0o

  The late October wind blasted through my open windows and tousled my short black hair as I drove my Accord south on Avenida Menendez along the bay front. Not so much a cold wind as, well, wild. Unsettled. The town spooks I spotted as I cruised past appeared to be as restless as Angelica had been, flitting from their usual haunts to the sea wall and back again. Major weird.

  Then I got stuck on the restored Bridge of Lions that links historic downtown St. Augustine to Anastasia Island and saw a sailboat cut through what first looked like low lying fog. But no, fog and wind don’t mix. Those gray-white forms were ghosts hovering over the waters of the Matanzas Bay, shifting around the ship’s bow, and giving me a major case of the crawl-out-of-my-skin heebie-jeebies.

  I noted the activity in the spiral notebook I kept on the passenger seat. The same spiral in which I also wrote reminders such as the house insurance and taxes being due soon. Another hit to my pathetic bank account, and Patti Coleman’s check wouldn’t boost my bottom line that much. Taking on roommates last year hadn’t put me completely in the black either, though Pilar and Jaime had become good friends who put up with the quirks of my household.

  How did people get financially ahead and stay there? I shook my head as traffic began moving on the bridge. I inched my way along, seeing ghosts still churning over the white caps of the bay waters. When I reached the apex of the span, a mighty screech coming from the metal bridge deck made me slam on the brakes. A second later, three ghosts shot straight out of the Accord’s hood. What the hell?

  I don’t know how long I sat frozen, my clenched hands trembling on the steering wheel, but a horn honk made me hit the gas hard, and the car leaped forward. I eased into the right lane on Anastasia Boulevard as soon as I could, still shaken by the freaky ghost behavior that was sure new to me.

  Clearly the native spirits were restless, but why? Sure storms could stir paranormal activity, but this was a simple windy day in October. Wasn’t it? And, yes, we were a scant day away from Halloween when the veil between worlds thinned, but I’d still never seen spirits act like they were jumping out of their own ectoplasm.

  Luckily, I had a direct source of advanced ghost knowledge at home, and I’d question him pronto.

  And just maybe I should return the call to my least favorite ghost investigator. Give him a heads up on the bizarre ghost activity, and let him choose to believe me or not.

  Five minutes later I eased up the incline of my narrow street. Jaime’s jeep sat by the mailbox, but a huge black van almost blocked the turn in to my brick driveway. Damn renters across the street threw more parties than the Romans had orgies, and their guests were never considerate. I edged between the vehicles, and drove through the ten-foot stone pillars flanking the drive.

  Eight-foot high walls of stacked stone and coquina enclosed my acre tract of land. The property teemed with live oaks and magnolias, their limbs twis
ted into fantastical shapes by the sea winds and draped with Spanish moss. Yes, having an acre of property is super rare for this area, but then my house—a Victorian with hints of Arts & Crafts styling—was built in 1917, and the land had been in the family long before that. Of course, being located behind the famed Alligator Farm, the air can be ripe when the wind blows just so, but the house is mine free and clear.

  Except for those pesky taxes, insurance premiums and repairs.

  At the back of the house, I squeezed my Accord into the detached three-car garage crammed with junk. Maybe a giant yard sale was in order to de-clutter and improve my cash flow.

  I hopped out with my purse and briefcase, shut the garage door, and crossed the yard and the bricked patio to the back entrance. I had no more than touched the screen door handle when my great-grandfather flew to open it.

  And when I say flew, I mean flew.

  Da is a ghost.

  “Colleen! High time you came home.”

  I sighed at Da’s impatience. “I told you I’d be back about six,” I said, plopping my purse and briefcase on the catchall table in the mudroom.

  “Yes, well, but we have a situation. Come now, someone is waiting for you.”

  “Jaime?”

  “No, child. A friend picked her up for work.”

  “Then who exactly is waiting? You didn’t invite your ghost cronies for poker night, did you?”

  Da snorted. “Bigger doings than poker, me girl, but brace yourself.”

  Da pushed me through the kitchen I needed to clean and into the sprawling living room where I stopped short and blinked at the man in black who sat in my wing back chair by the fireplace.

  Black jeans, black T-shirt, black nylon windbreaker jacket. Only the sneakers had a lick of color—gray and blue. As icy as the look in those blue eyes.

  My heart pounded a painful few beats before I found my wits.

  “Brick Frasier? What on earth are you doing in my house?”

  Brickman A. Frasier, the hot ghost investigator of my dreams and nightmares, glowered at me. His tanned hands gripped the chair arms, and his ashen complexion slowly darkened to a brick red that almost matched his auburn hair. A muscle ticked in his square jaw before he took a breath that expanded his wide chest.

  “Let. Me. Up.”

  I shivered at the rawness in his sexy voice and took a step closer.

  “I’ve been held captive in this chair for half a freaking hour, Colleen. I want out.”

  I turned to my sneaky Black Irish great-grand ghost. “Da, what have you done?”

  Da’s chest puffed. “Now, now, me wee Colleen, I only made the man comfortable.”

  “He’s not comfortable. He’s terrified. Whatever you’re doing to keep him in that chair, stop it this instant.”

  With a mighty humph and muttering under his ghost breath, Da flew toward Brick, circled him three times counter clockwise, then settled behind the chair, arms crossed.

  An audible pop in the ethers made me jump. I don’t know if Brick heard the sound, too, but he shuddered and slowly levered himself out of the seat, as if bracing to be pushed back down.

  “It’s okay,” I told him. “Da won’t bother you again.”

  “And who,” Brick asked, “is Da?”

  “My great-grandfather, the ghost. What exactly happened?”

  “What happened?” Brick echoed with a snarl and paced closer to me. “I knocked on your door. It opened. I was jerked into your house by my shirtfront and shoved into that damned chair. I thought it was a stupid Halloween trick until I realized I was pinned there. Does your ghost do that to everyone?”

  “Why did you want to see me at all? As I recall from our last encounter, you said it would snow on the beach before you so much as spoke to me again.”

  “I—” He fell back a step, and then ran a hand over his near military-short hair cut, mumbled a curse, and sighed. “My ghost investigation team ran into a wall tonight.”

  “And that should mean squat to me?”

  “It means something to the client. Martha Harrison. She told us you’d done one of your interventions with her ghost last month, and she wants you on site for our investigation.”

  I frowned at Brick’s neutral expression. Clearly he didn’t want to lay all his cards on the table, but then he didn’t have to explain Martha Harrison to me. Elderly even by senior citizen standards and a legend in St. Augustine, she’d taught history to generations of students, fought for civil rights, and won her bout with breast cancer and lymphoma both. Far more steel than magnolia, her will was a force of nature. So much so, that I’d quaked in my sandals when Mrs. Harrison called me to do an intervention with her own home ghost, Zavier.

  In her accounting of the situation, Zavier had given her fits for decades and she’d steadfastly ignored him until after she took a tumble on the stairs. A screaming miracle she hadn’t broken a hip or worse, but that was her wake up call to do something about her spook.

  Zavier hadn’t caused Martha’s fall, so he refused to go to the Light, or to leave Martha’s house at all. Instead, we’d hammered out an agreement for him to stay quietly in the attic and leave her alone. Last I’d heard, Martha’s home was as close to spook-free as could be.

  Then again, if Zavier was acting as schitzy as the other ghosts in town, who knew what havoc he was wrecking?

  Unintentional or not.

  “Listen, Colleen,” Brick said, his voice placating, his energy set to soothe instead of confront. “I admit we got off to a bad start.”

  I snorted and crossed my arms. “Brick, you called me a scam artist.”

  “I conceded you might be a legitimate sensitive.”

  “Only after you told certain people I’d bilk them out of thousands.”

  “I apologized for that.”

  “Yeah, when one of my clients divulged to you what I actually charge.”

  “Okay, I had some bad information. I misjudged you, slandered you, and was an all-around ass, but that was months ago. Give me another chance. Come to Mrs. Harrison’s house with me. She won’t let us set up one piece of equipment until she talks with you.”

  I rubbed my forehead and thought about his request. Much as I was attracted to Brick, I didn’t want to make his life one whit easier. However, if I ignored a command appearance from Martha Harrison, I might as well take down my therapist shingle and go flip burgers. Plus I was itching to know what had the local ghosts acting so goosey, and curious as to whether I could help them regain peace.

  “Exactly what kind of problems is Mrs. Harrison reporting?”

  “Knocks all over the house, bangs and thuds in the attic, shadows moving. And she’s not the only one who’s called about paranormal disturbances. I’ve fielded more calls in the last two weeks than I have for two months.”

  I recalled my own uncharacteristically full calendar of clients. Ghostly activity on the rise. Angelica restless and in fear. No leap of logic to figure something out of the ordinary was afoot.

  Normally, ghosts aren’t destructive whether they’re seeking attention or simply going about their spirit lives. Panicked ghosts are another story. They could give off scattered, frenetic energy and not know or be able to control their own strength. Worse, a few spooks might get off on having more power to frighten home and business owners. Could I turn my back on a potential problem of that magnitude?

  “Please, Colleen,” Brick said. “I won’t ask anything of you again.”

  I gave Brick the evil eye. “If I go, I’ll do it for Martha, not for you and your team.”

  “Understood.”

  “One crack from any of you, and I’m outta there.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Fine. Do you have a digital recorder on you?”

  “Uh, yeah.” Brick blinked in puzzlement, but thrust a hand in his windbreaker pocket and pulled out a voice-activated recorder smaller than my dinky old cell phone.

  “I don’t suppose you had that running while you were, um—”

/>   “Forcibly restrained by your ghost? No.”

  “Too bad. I’ll bet Da had plenty to say.”

  “Anything I’d want to hear?” Brick teased.

  I waved away his attempt at levity. “Just turn the recorder on now, please.” He pushed a button and nodded. “Da, front and center. I need to ask you about the town ghosts.”

  “What about them?”

  Da answered even as he materialized between Brick and me. Brick put his hand out to feel the cold spot Da brought with him, and nearly stuck his hand through the middle of my great grand-ghost’s back. With a violent shiver, Brick wisely stepped back.