Paradise Island Read online

  She lifted her chin, gathered herself together slowly and stood up. “Thank you for seeing me on such short notice, Dr. Darby-Deaver. Keep the check; it will compensate you for what you obviously feel was a waste of your valuable time.”

  Locking eyes with her, Ed picked up the check and tore it in half. He tried to talk to her, but she turned and walked out.

  He listened to the closing of his front door, then heard her start the engine of her little convertible and drive away.

  Guilt washed over him in a hot wave. Seated at his desk and staring blindly at the opposite wall, he replayed the interview in his mind and tried to think of ways he could have handled it better. After a thorough review, he decided he wouldn’t have changed anything. The woman’s case was iffy, her behavior suspicious. He put her check through the little shredder under his desk, then stood up to turn off the video camera, but he did not erase the recording. He was an excellent record-keeper and believed in keeping his files up-to-date, even though Mrs. Pissarro was apparently not going to be a client.

  Then he sat down and dutifully made notes of his impressions during the interview – the internal reactions that would not show up on the video – creating a word-processing document and storing it in a new virtual case file. Following routine, he then transferred a copy of the video from the camera into the same case file on the computer. The original recording in the digital camera was now redundant, but Ed believed in redundant systems, and he had a strict rule to preserve such things for a period of at least six months. The thought of erasing it never occurred to him.

  He tidied his desk and prepared to switch gears, but the interview had disturbed him. Oh, her story was routine – almost suspiciously so – but her reaction, walking out when he seemed to doubt her, instead of trying to be more convincing, was atypical. If she was only doing it for attention, she would have tried harder.

  He continued to brood about the beautiful lady throughout the following days, even as he tried to compose his closing monolog for the Haunt or Hoax? episode on Big Foot.

  Chapter 2

  The studio session on the Oregon investigation was typically frustrating. Worse, it was going to lack freshness, because right after the shoot was over his co-star, Teddy Force, went off with some girl to “decompress.” Ed had suggested to their new producer, Carly Nicholson, that they work around Teddy and go ahead with his own final analysis, but she refused.

  “We’re cadging more studio time than we can afford as it is, and we need to get in and get it done fast. That means all hands on deck, quick and dirty, everybody in and out together, know what I mean? Time is money, Ed. Besides, in a reality show, it’s the seat-of-the-pants, out-of-nowhere stuff that keeps the show dynamic. We don’t want anything too polished, not that there’s any danger of that,” she added with a heavenward glance.

  While fully competent, it was more important at that point in the show’s history that Carly was not romantically interested in men. Teddy had a tendency to get engaged to female co-workers, and Teddy’s love affairs always shook the earth. Carly not only wasn’t prey to Teddy’s charms, she never put up with his antics for long.

  Ed was terrified of Carly.

  Still, he had steeled himself to approach her about going ahead with his own wrap-up interview, with or without Teddy and especially without Porter, the show’s other paranormal investigator. Porter was a bulldog. An actual dog. He made studio work a nightmare.

  Ed believed in capturing reactions before time could cool them down, and it had been all of three weeks since they had returned from Oregon. Apparently, the first ten days of decompression with Sulky (Teddy insisted that was her real name) had been so physically demanding that he’d come back even more exhausted than before, and with a stubborn cold to boot. Announcing they had plenty of time because the network that carried their show had just signed a contract to live-broadcast some pointless sporting event (the Olympics) right smack in the middle of their season, Teddy had then taken to his bed (without Sulky) to recuperate. At least that’s what he said.

  When they finally got to work again, Teddy had been what Ed euphemistically called “unfocused.” Throughout Ed’s portion of the wrap-up, Teddy had heckled him off-camera, and they had had to start over a number times because of it. After so much time off, Carly found it hard to control him.

  Ed had recently begun to suspect Teddy’s dedication to the cause. He was by no means convinced that if there hadn’t been a reality show in it for him, Teddy would have been a paranormal investigator at all. If there had been an opportunity for, say, a reality-show handyman, Teddy might have suddenly figured out which was the business end of a hammer.

  By contrast, Edson Darby-Deaver had been a paranormal investigator literally since the playpen. He’d been logic-testing the unexplained since he’d had dealings with the wobbly clown his mother had placed in his playpen in September of 1962. Just short of age two, Ed had deduced that the thing swayed around in that slap-happy manner because it was bottom-heavy, and not because it was anthropomorphically delighted that you’d given it a smack.

  It was a big moment for tiny Ed. Up until then (a matter of six or seven minutes), he had enjoyed the thing’s company; it was a delightful companion, one who forgave every awkward move, especially the sharp kick that hurt Ed more than it did the clown. Ed’s father, for instance, resented sharp kicks, but this little fellow rocked around in delight and burbled a little tune as he did.

  But Ed quickly realized that the clown wasn’t real. It was made out of hard plastic. It wasn’t warm, it didn’t play back with him, it couldn’t talk, it couldn’t feel. It was just the first in a lifelong series of disappointments where he would realize that despite appearances, there really wasn’t anything there. And unlike other paranormal investigators, he was willing to admit it.

  His skeptical viewpoint added variety to Haunt or Hoax? and put a counterpoint to Teddy’s galloping imagination, but it also made Ed the bad guy. Teddy’s infatuated fans loved to heckle him. Teddy did too. Oh, Ed also had his fans, but they tended to be nice little old ladies who stayed home and knitted things for him, and adolescent males who stayed in their mothers’ basements and forwarded obscure articles to him. They didn’t follow him around making raw jokes, like Teddy and his fans did. That was bad enough, but the blowback from other (less successful) ghost hunters was downright mean.

  So the Haunt or Hoax? shoots were hard on Ed, and the studio work afterward was even harder. Ed drove home from the Jacksonville, Florida studio to his house in a gated enclave on Anastasia Island and waited in his driveway for the garage door to go up. He longed to go inside and find a little peace, but when he got out of his car what he found was Trixie Dare, walking right on into his garage, uninvited.

  A deceptively tough little blond, Trixie was slightly older than Ed but not enough to matter, in her own opinion. She was young for her age – again, in her own opinion – and she considered him fair game. In fact, no bachelor was safe when Trixie was around.

  Ed’s house and attached garage were his own personal territory. There were boundaries, after all, and he resented having to deal with her after the morning he’d had. Almost gratified, he realized that he also had a headache.

  He slammed the driver’s-side door of his little green Geo Metro expressively and then turned to face her with a certain attitude that he hoped would back her off, but of course it didn’t. Trixie went right up to the door into his house and opened it.

  “Are you coming?” she said, standing in the threshold. Then she went right on inside and left him before he could even say, “Really, Trixie!”

  He had equipment to gather from the back of his car, and when he didn’t come along fast enough, she popped back in and said, “Leave that stuff.”

  He stood erect, staring. In the face of such gaucherie, he was speechless.

  “Eddie, come on,” the woman said. “I’ve been waiting all morning for you to get back. We gotta talk about that customer of yours. Have yo
u been listening to the news? She’s dead.”

  “What customer? I don’t have customers. I have clients, and currently I don’t even have any of those.”

  “Your client, Jessamine Pissarro. That rich lady who killed her husband. She probably couldn’t stand the guilt, or she found out the police were about to arrest her. She drowned herself. I think that proves she was guilty, don’t you?”

  He froze, immobilized, blinded by memories. That beautiful face dissolving in tears came vividly before him again.

  Trixie hit the button lowering his garage door and the sudden noise jolted him. Shaking her head, she came forward to take his arm and guide him into his own house.

  “You didn’t know, did you? I’m so sorry. She was a beautiful lady, wasn’t she? You come on inside and I’ll get you a nice, tall glass of iced tea to settle you down. I knew you’d need somebody to talk to at a time like this. Don’t worry, honey, Trixie’s here.”

  * * * * *

  “Where do you want this” she said, moving a hand toward Ed’s large-capacity messenger bag.

  He was rather proud of that bag. It looked like the kind of rugged-yet-chic satchels that secret-agents-on-the-run in the movies managed to live out of for weeks at a time. World weary and careworn, the hero would take this type of bag along and in it, presumably, was clean underwear for the rest of the adventure, along with lots of weaponry and untraceable cellphones, which he would icily drop in garbage cans after every call. Ed felt very cool carrying that bag around, and he, like the spy, had emergency underwear tucked away in it. Among other things, of course.

  As Trixie’s hand reached for the bag, Ed cried, “Don’t touch that! Just leave it there.”

  “It’s on the floor.”

  “I like it on the floor.”

  “Isn’t that just like the one Matt Damon was running around with in that movie?”

  “Of course not,” he snapped. Somehow, having Trixie know that took some of the glamor away from it.

  “It doesn’t look like something you would use for ghost hunting.”

  “Trixie, I appreciate you coming over, but I’ve just been through a difficult recording session and this news about Ms. Pissarro is unsettling. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind giving me some time alone now.”

  She gave him a melting look with violet-blue eyes. “Oh, you poor thing, you come on into the kitchen and I’ll get you that iced tea.”

  “Trixie . . . .”

  “And then you can tell me all about your day.”

  He opened his mouth to say he-didn’t-know-what when the doorbell rang.

  “Oh, that’d be Taylor,” she said, brushing by him to answer the door.

  Standing in the hall like an intruder in his own house, Ed registered what she’d said. “Taylor? Taylor Verone? Why is she here?”

  “I called her,” Trixie said. “I knew you’d want to have your friends around you at a time like this, and Taylor’s always in on cases like this.”

  “Cases like what? Oh, hello, Taylor.”

  A tall blond 60-something woman came toward him and looked him over, examining him like a veterinarian worried about a sick puppy.

  Taylor, having decided that Ed did look frazzled but no more than usual, turned to Trixie and said, “Yeah, cases like what?”

  “You know,” Trixie said. “Dead people. That poor lady, Jessamine Pissarro, came to Ed for help about three weeks ago, did you know that? And now she’s dead. She’s bound to want her revenge against Ed for not helping her. Iced tea?”

  Trixie turned to play hostess, and Taylor turned to Ed. “She was your client? What for?”

  “She was not my client.”

  “If she was,” Trixie said, giving Ed a look, “she’d still be alive, wouldn’t she, Eddie. Instead, she went to that Dobbs guy, and now look what’s happened.”

  “She went to The Marvelous Dobbs?” Ed asked, blinky with surprise.

  “The Marvelous Dobbs?” Taylor repeated in a pained voice. She hiked herself up next to Ed.

  “That’s what he called himself back when he was putting on magic shows, which wasn’t that long ago,” Ed said. “His real name is Marvin Sterling Dobbs. Instead of going the Penn and Teller route and being an honest illusionist, he went to the dark side and began conducting amateur ghost hunts for paying customers. He started out on the Graveyard Shift, as we like to call it in the trade: bringing a group of excited amateurs to a cemetery, getting them worked up with wild allegations about the interred, and then waiting for activity – ball lights, drifting shapes, sub-aural voices – you know the drill. A lot of newbies get started that way. They go right for the graveyards, for some reason. I’ve heard Dobbs has branched out into haunted houses lately and is taking on private clients. He’s trying to develop a media presence, too, which is a bad sign. The only reason I’ve even heard of him is that he’s been pushing for a guest appearance on Haunt or Hoax? and Carly did some research on him.”

  “Oh, he’s bigger than you’re making out,” Trixie said. “I saw him in that TV special the Pendragons did on the Midtown Menace. You know, that thing in the sewers? That’s probably how Jessamine cottoned onto him. She could afford somebody with a high profile in your business. Personally, I think he’s hot.”

  “So does he,” Ed said.

  Ignoring him, Trixie chattered on. “I bet Teddy doesn’t want to give him a guest spot because he wants to be the only studly guy on the show. Not that you’re not a stud, Ed, but let’s face it, you’re not the sexy type. More of an absent-minded professor.” While she talked, she placed iced tea in front of them and raided the pantry for some gravelly-looking nutrition bars, which she attractively plated and set on the counter before coming around and sitting on Ed’s other side.

  Ed became hotly aware of being surrounded by blonds.

  “You think this guy’s bogus?” Taylor asked.

  “Unknown,” Ed said. “I’ve never met him, and I dislike collegial back-biting.”

  When she didn’t get a real answer, Taylor switched gears. “So Jessamine Pissarro came to you. About what?”

  “She claimed her husband was haunting her because he thought she had deliberately shot him.”

  “And you didn’t take her case? That must mean you didn’t believe her,” Taylor said. “Why not?”

  Ed grunted. “Gut instinct. You get a feel for these things. I’ve interviewed thousands of people about hauntings, and most people who have suffered through terrifying encounters relive them when they talk about them. They get a certain look in their eyes. They get an edge to their voices. Ms. Pissarro just sounded like she was reaching, as if she hadn’t properly thought it all through before she’d come to me.”

  “You got a bad vibe, is that it?” Trixie asked.

  Ed, a man who liked his privacy, was being slowly unnerved. Taylor, he knew, had a lover and a satisfying life, and wasn’t looking for anybody to spice things up. Trixie, on the other hand, would have come around the counter and sat in his lap if she thought she could get away with it. She was already playing hostess in his house. That had connotations Ed didn’t even want to think about. Taylor was quietly interested, prepared to be supportive, but Trixie was edging ever nearer; already he could feel her body heat against his right arm. Soon, she would be touching him. A hand on his arm. A comforting hug. Once, she had even put a hand on his thigh. His thigh! Arms were one thing; thighs quite another.

  He lost his composure with a bang. He jerked back from the counter, stood up, declared that he had work to do and left the ladies staring after him as he went down the hall. Along the way, he retrieved his spy satchel, which didn’t seem so sexy anymore, and went into his office, slamming the door behind him.

  Trixie turned to Taylor and said, “He got a bad vibe, all right. That woman killed her husband and he knew it.”

  Now that they were alone, Taylor bore in on Trixie. “Just what do you mean one of ‘my’ cases? I don’t get involved in Ed’s investigations, and any dead people in my life are
purely incidental.”

  Trixie lowered her very thick eyelashes and gave Taylor a pitying smile. “Still in denial, huh? Ed said you probably always would be, but heck, girl, if I had your talent, I’d be proud of it. I’d be telling everybody I meet about it. I’d read all their palms and warn them if their auras were off-color, just as a community service. It’s really true what they say, isn’t it? All the wrong people get the good stuff in this life.”

  Taylor liked Trixie, but sometimes she could be a bit much. Standing up, Taylor looked down at the other woman and said, “Is this what you meant when you said Ed was in trouble? You just wanted to come over here and pick up some juicy gossip, hoping Ed had inside information, and you didn’t want to look nosy so you wanted me to come too, was that it?”

  “Now, Taylor, you just settle down, girlfriend. I called you because I knew Ed would need your help with this thing. Ed doesn’t have many friends, but he’s a pretty nice guy and I know you two have a special connection. He keeps trying to find ghosts and not being able to, and you don’t go looking but you keep finding them anyway. You two are good together. You’re both weird, and I mean that in a good way. You may as well admit it. And don’t you think this situation could get a little sticky? I mean, the woman came to him for help and he turned her away. I was mad at him at the time, and I’m even madder now. He wouldn’t help her, and now look what’s happened. You might even say this is his fault. She’ll probably haunt him,” she added complacently.

  It suddenly hit Taylor how bored Trixie must be, and how excited she was to have even a slight connection to something that was all over the television and internet.

  “Trixie,” she said, “get a hobby. You need one.” She turned and stalked off.

  Behind her, Trixie huffed out a “Well!” and said something about gratitude, but Taylor ignored it. Down the hall, she stood by the front door and hesitated. She could either leave, which Ed would probably prefer, or she could turn left and knock softly on the office door and tell him she was going.