Kell led us down the long hallway. “What’s in the other direction?” Teag asked.
“Those stairs go to the attic,” Kell replied. “The house has a full attic and full basement, plus a detached garage. It’s cavernous.”
“And your group has been everywhere?” I asked.
Kell gave a bark of a laugh. “No. We never get that far.”
I looked down the dark hallway. “What’s down here?” I asked.
“Bedrooms,” Kell replied. “All but one of them are ‘hot’, supernaturally.” He stopped at the first room and opened the door. The furniture was gone, but draperies still hung forlornly from rods above the filthy windows. It was easy to tell where pictures once hung because of the rectangular spots on the wallpaper.
“We think this was the master bedroom,” Kell said.
An overwhelming sadness came over me, along with a seething rage that I knew was not my own. Instinctively, I backed up toward the doorway. “I can’t imagine trying to spend the night in there,” I murmured.
“We’ve spotted a woman’s ghost by the windows,” Kell reported. “This is also one of the rooms that the new owners had problems heating.”
It was cold as a freezer. “Let’s keep going,” I urged, running my hands up and down my arms. I clasped one hand around the agate necklace, and the coldness receded.
“This next room might have been a guest room,” Kell continued as we moved down the hallway. Faint moonlight straggled into the corridor from the windows. “We haven’t seen as much supernatural activity in it.”
“How soon did the house sell after the first owners lived here?” Teag asked. I noticed that he touched the agimat charm that hung around his neck.
“The house sat vacant but maintained for about ten years,” Kell replied. “A caretaker visited occasionally to check on things. Apparently, they needed a new caretaker just about every year. No one wanted to stick around.”
“I’m getting some weird jumps in the EMF readings,” Drew said, turning in a slow one-eighty from just inside the doorway. None of Kell’s team ventured far from the group upstairs.
“I’m getting some weird flashes in the photo stream,” Pete said. His wearable technology gave him a slightly unfocused expression as he looked at and not through his lenses. “The camera snaps shots every twenty seconds, and I see them on my glasses. It’s picking up sparkly things in the air that we’re not seeing live.”
“Picking up some activity downstairs,” Calista said, flicking through displays on her tablet. “Movement, sounds. Temperature fluctuation.”
“This is just the pre-game warm-up,” Kell said.
We left the door to the second room open as well. Room three was on the opposite side of the hall, and the faded pastel colors and stencils of toys and animals made it clear that the room was decorated for a child. I frowned. “I thought you said the Blakes didn’t have children.”
“They didn’t. Neither did the Tanners, the first new owners,” Kell replied. “But the Robertsons did. They bought the place from a real estate speculator who lost his shirt when a plan to build a mall fell through. The Robertsons bought the house about five years after the property went into foreclosure.”
I couldn’t imagine anyone thinking that Tarleton would be a healthy place to raise a family. “The Robertsons had two young daughters,” Kell said. Calista, Drew, and Pete moved into the room just far enough to monitor. “This was back in the mid-nineties. Things went okay for a while.”
“Maybe the house took a while to wake up,” Teag said.
I had the feeling that all around us, the house was indeed waking up. I didn’t need Calista’s recording equipment to hear faint scuffling sounds downstairs. Over our heads, boards creaked as if someone was walking in the attic.
“The girls started telling tales about invisible friends, a ‘bad lady’ in the dining room who chased them, and a man with no head in the garage.”
“Uh oh.”
“Mrs. Robertson began having migraine headaches. Mr. Robertson was traveling a lot. Both girls had night terrors,” Kell said. “The family dog wouldn’t enter certain rooms, and it would wake up and begin barking at nothing.”
Nothing you could see.
“There were a lot of weird goings-on,” Kell added. “It got so bad, Mrs. Robertson called in a medium and had a séance.”
“We’re having some weird goings-on ourselves,” Calista said. “The equipment is picking up vocalizations too low for us to hear. Listen.” She tapped her tablet, and we heard a deep voice that sounded distorted.