The Discovery (7 page)

"I'm here to help," she announces. "So what are you doing your Civil War paper on?"

"I haven't the foggiest clue. With so much going on, I haven't even thought of it yet."

She holds up her hands. "Maybe you should write about all of our paranormal adventures and how they relate to Radisson's part in the war."

"That's not exactly historic."

"Just a thought." Standing tall, she says, "We have an appointment with Mr. Louis Pfeiffer to talk to him more about Farnsworth House and Xander the Doll."

My mouth drops open. "How'd you pull that off?"

Celia whistles for a moment and then smiles. "Let's just say that Mega-Mart has recently made a substantial charitable contribution to the preservation of Radisson's precious history."

I smack her on the arm. "You didn't!"

"No,
I
didn't. But my dad did it for me," she says through a bright grin.

"Celia, you rawk!"

She shrugs. "Mega-Mart needed the tax write-off." She opens my car door for me. "Shall we?"

I grin like the Cheshire cat. "You're good."

Ten minutes later, we're parked in the driveway of the old Farnsworth mansion, better known now as the home of the Radisson Historical Society. A very sweaty, nervous-looking Mr. Pfeiffer opens the door and greets us begrudgingly.

"This is highly against our rules," he says flatly, not letting us through the large oak doorway that he's standing in.

Celia crosses her arms over her chest. "Mr. Pfeiffer, I'm sure if you talk to the board and advise them of the substantial amount of money donated by Mega-Mart, they will have no problem with two innocent high school girls coming into the house, taking a look around, and writing a school paper on it."

He steps aside.

Score one for Celia Nichols. Girl's got backbone.

"Is Xander the Doll here?" I ask with a bit of trepidation.

"He is," Mr. Pfeiffer says. "He is in his room upstairs and is strictly off-limits except for special displays."

"He's in his room?" Celia repeats.

"The room he shared with Robert Townsend."

"Is he still in the glass case?" I ask, just to make sure. I really don't need that doll coming to life and stalking me like he did in my dream.

"He is indeed."

Somewhat relieved, I let out a pent-up breath. "Thanks, Mr. Pfeiffer."

"No pictures," he says. "And don't touch anything."

"Yes, sir," I say politely.

"And no—"

"We've got it, we've got it," Celia says.

He scurries off to another part of the house, leaving us standing in the foyer. The place is in pristine condition, with well-polished hardwood floors, expensive Chinese rugs, and detailed oil portraits of the home's former inhabitants. To the left is a formal sitting room; to the right, what looks to be a music room. We walk down the long hallway, which opens up into a huge great room with settees, chairs, sofas, tables, and a lot of marble accents scattered about. A massive fireplace with dark wood trim on the mantel dominates the room.

"You could fit about ten people in that fireplace," Celia exclaims.

"Or at least cook for ten people," I add.

"Oh, they wouldn't have cooked in here. That is for warmth and entertainment. There's probably a hearth in the kitchen just as big."

We wander through the great room and into the back, where there's a bedroom that's been turned into an office. Boxes upon boxes of papers are stacked from floor to ceiling. I recognize many of the family names we've run across in our ghost hunting: Parry and Biddison, to mention a couple. Of course, most of the boxes are labeled
Farnsworth.

Celia moves to open one of the boxes, but I stop her. "He said no touchy."

"Yeah, but he's sweating like a prostitute in church. You think I'm going to do what he says?"

This time I laugh extra hard. "Okay,
that
was funny."

Before she opens the lid, though, I stretch my hands and wave them over the boxes, looking for something that speaks to me. A humming sound buzzes in the room like many voices whispering at once. Are ghosts of the Farnsworth family trying to tell me something?

I touch the arm of one of the chairs, and at once my ears are filled with shrieking cries of terror and torture. Could this be the resonance of injured or beaten slaves? The tears are more childlike, though, begging
Stop
and
Don't do it.
I remove my hand as if it's been burned and shake off the contact.

"Anything?"

I don't want to say for sure as I can't attribute the cries, so I just say, "The usual stuff."

Celia pulls her EMF detector out of her backpack and begins sweeping the room for readings.

"Don't let him see you using that," I say.

She nearly claps. "I've got a huge spike over in this corner."

"There's nothing here that should really set that off."

"I know. Are you feeling anything?"

I point to three boxes of Farnsworth material. "I'm getting the sense that we should look through those."

"Hmm ... how do we do that if we can't touch?" Celia asks.

I plop down on the floor and cross my legs. "Let me see what I can pick up."

I close my eyes and steady my breathing, letting the energy of the building flow around me. My hands hover above the boxes, palms itching as the information is nearly vacuumed into my skin.

"I'm getting the name Phillip Farnsworth," I say. I breathe deeper and let the house's memories speak to me. My bones rattle as I begin sensing times gone by. Images flash in color and in black-and-white, fluttering through the years so long ago and letting me peek at the Civil War world of the Farnsworths'.

With my eyes still closed, I describe what I see to Celia. "Phillip Farnsworth, the patriarch of the family, was allegedly from noble blood in Great Britain. However, he owed a ton of money to several people back in the early ... umm ... seventeen forties. Wow, that was a long time ago."

"This is all good, Kendall," Celia says. "Keep going."

I fill my lungs with air again and center my thoughts. The images come to me. "Farnsworth was shipped off to the penal colony of Georgia to live in debtors' prison."

Celia giggles like a schoolgirl and I let my hands drop to my lap. "What?"

She laughs again and says, "You said
penal.
"

"Oh, good God, Celia! Get serious."

She tries her best to stop laughing. "I don't know what's gotten into me. Must be the nitrous oxide remnants from the dentist filling my cavity after school."

"You're drugged up? Celia!"

"I'm okay, I'm okay ... go ahead."

I sigh hard and try to get back my connection with the old house. It takes a few minutes, but soon I'm seeing Phillip Farnsworth again, aboard the large vessel that brought him across the Atlantic Ocean to Georgia. "Okay ... here we go. Farnsworth moved from Augusta to Radisson when he won this property in a hand of poker. He had a full house. The other guy had two queens." Not that that's important, but it's what I'm picking up. "Farnsworth obtained much of the land on the east side of Radisson and made a buttload of money selling the Georgia pines for timber. From then on, the Farnsworth family had vast wealth that was passed on to Phillip's descendants. Not only that, they used the farmland nearby to grow cotton; to do that they needed to purchase many slaves from the ships that came into port from Africa and the West Indies."

"Thus Althea's arrival here."

I'm not seeing Althea. Maybe she's in these memories though. I don't know yet.

"Phillip's son John commanded the large property." Aching stabs pound over my left eye and I'm starting to pick up a musty stale odor. "Are you getting that?"

"What?" Celia asks.

"That fresh-from-the-boys'-locker-room smell?"

"Thank heavens, no!"

"There's more to this house, Celia, than just bricks and mortar. Something is rotting here. Something that needs to be cleansed—set free."

"As you see," she says. "The historical society only uses a few rooms here. Everything else is pretty much in the condition they got the house in."

"I'm sensing more secrets here than anyone could possibly understand." I drop my hands to my lap in frustration as my psychic headache intensifies. The images are becoming more transparent and it's harder to grasp them. "I wish Patrick were here. We could combine our energies and really see past the dirty panes of history."

Celia bounces in place. "Then y'all could do that mind-meld thing you were telling me about."

"Something like that," I say with a smile.

We walk back out to the great room, where I pick up the scent of roaring fires long gone. This room was once filled with partygoers, food, festivities, music, and many slaves to wait on the wealthy. It now houses books and periodicals from another time, paintings of former residents of the house, and antique furniture that would probably fetch a pretty penny at the Saturday flea market in downtown Radisson.

I glance up at the ceiling. "Celia, something deep inside tells me that the Farnsworths harbored a dark secret. Way darker than we could ever imagine. Darker than the people of Radisson at the time could realize. There's something that's blocking my ability to see any deeper though. I definitely need Patrick for this. Can you get the team in here for one of our in-depth, full-fledged wired-for-sound ghost hunts?"

Celia places her thumb and forefinger on her chin and rubs. "I'll have to talk to Pfeiffer again. Couch it in terms of investigating the building, you know, for school."

I wait patiently while she goes to find him. The whispers of voices from the past circle me but refuse to speak clearly. They know who and what I am. Something's keeping them at arm's length, though.

"It's okay ... I'm here to help," I say out loud.

Silence. Only the chirping of the robins outside in the trees.

Celia comes padding back into the room, out of breath. "Okay, he's not happy, but he said he'll talk to the board and get permission. He said he'll remind them of Mega-Mart's recent donation when they make their decision. I can confidentially say that we're in."

I glance about one more time. No more whispers. But the lost souls are there. And I'll help them.

I'll be back,
I say to the spirits.

"Yep ... something is
definitely
up here."

P
ATRICK FLINGS HIMSELF
back on the couch in my den Saturday morning and runs his hands through his thick hair. "Kendall, you can't suspect
everything
of being paranormal."

"But it surrounds me. Everywhere I go. Everything I do. I can't get away from it."

He pats the cushion. "Just relax and enjoy the rest of the weekend with me. Just ignore it the best you can."

I grab my phone from my purse and dial. "Oh, yeah? Well, listen to this."

"You have one new message. Message received at two forty-four
P.M.
'Umm, yes, Miss Ghost Huntress, this is James Pendergrass calling again. I'm the one with the haunted sandwich. I really need to know what to do. The sandwich walked out of the house yesterday and into the garage, where it stole my car. I reported it to the police, but they laughed at me. My number is—'" I stop the message.

"Are you kidding me?" I ask, the BlackBerry flat in my palm. "Of course the police laughed at him."

"The guy is obviously insane," Patrick says. "That's not paranormal; that's
ab
normal."

"Well, yeah ... but what if he's not abnormal? What if he's for real? What if his ham sandwich truly
is
haunted?"

"Did he say it was a ham sandwich?" he asks. "Not turkey or bologna?"

"I think so. I don't remember if he specified whether—"

He continues. "Because I would need to know if there was cheese involved and what condiments might have set off the spirit world. You know, are they against spicy mustard but not yellow mustard, or do they prefer Monterey jack to, say, Swiss?"

I smack him hard on his muscled biceps as he laughs like a hyena. "Who cares what kind of frickin' sandwich it was? This loony tune is calling me on a regular basis, I'm having nightmares about that megacreepy doll, and that
house
down the street was talking to me. A house, Patrick."

He tugs me over to the couch, where he cuddles me next to him. "It's in our makeup to question things we're sensing. I understand. I just don't want all of our weekends together to be spent doing nothing but paranormal things, you know?"

"We went out for pizza last night," I say.

He rolls his brown eyes. "With your ghost-huntress friends."

"And we went back to Father Mass's and watched a movie."

Patrick frowns at me. "Yeah, you Redboxed
Paranormal Activity.
"

I'm starting to see a pattern here, one I also fell into with Jason and that he didn't appreciate either. Maybe I should listen this time. Patrick is right. I rest my head on his shoulder, and his fingers find their way into my hair, stroking through the long strands. I love when he plays with my hair because it makes me feel treasured. My hand runs over his T-shirted chest; he's wearing a brown one with funky guitar designs all over it. I move my finger around the outline of the one closest to me. "I'm sorry. I don't mean to be a boring date."

He sits up. "You're not at all, Kendall. I love being with you. And I know we're both psychic, and dealing with spirits and other entities is just part of our lives. I don't have a problem with it. I just think we both need a break. Like, you know, our parents work during the week and relax on the weekends. Maybe we should look at our paranormal activity in the same way."

"The weekend is the only time I have to spend on my ghost hunting." He frowns a bit. So I add, "And with you."

His face twitches into a half smile. I can tell he's got an idea. "We need to do something unique, fun, and not at all related to ghosts, the paranormal, or anything like that."

"What do you have in mind, Mr. Lynn?"

Patrick leans into me, moves my hair off my neck, and gives me a little nibble behind my ear. Chill bumps break out on both of my arms and I feel like I'm going to burst into a thousand pieces and float up to join the stars in their twinkling activities.