Aw, wasn’t that sweet? “No. Apparently, T.J. has a younger brother. That was him.”
“Oh. Oh, shit.” He sank into the chair opposite me.
“Yeah.” I smiled stiffly. Shaun had known T.J., too.
An unplanned moment of silence, of grief, followed.
Shaun said, “What did he want?”
I sighed. “To find his brother. I told him he couldn’t. The guy has a right to be upset.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Not a lot I can do. But if he stops by again, be nice to him.”
Chapter 5
I had a lot to put out of my mind before the show on Friday. T.J.’s brother haunted me—like T.J. I tried to imagine his story, to make up the background that built their lives. What made T.J. leave his family, disappearing so utterly that his brother had to turn detective to find him? What drove Peter to go through the trouble? The stories I came up with were all unhappy, and it made me unhappy to think of it. T.J. had always been so levelheaded. I couldn’t imagine him in that kind of life. I didn’t want to. I wanted to let him rest, to preserve the memories I did have.
The Band of Tiamat’s recent attack was at the front of my mind, aggravating because of how little I could do about it. All I knew: They had sent something against me, and it involved fire. And maybe a vampire conspiracy, if Rick was right. I had to hope Rick or Grant found something out. Or wait until it struck again and we learned more about it.
I thought about calling Gary and canceling the Friday gig with the Paradox PI team. Maybe the house was really haunted, maybe it wasn’t. I wasn’t sure I could deal with another confrontation with supernatural weirdness, in either case. But as cliché as it sounded, staying home and cowering would have felt like losing ground. Would have admitted that whatever attacked us had gotten to me. I didn’t want to do that.
If we ignored it, would it go away? Despite what my mother told me about my big sister’s teasing, that never worked. But I hadn’t yet let the scariness in my life interfere with the show. In fact, I sometimes thought having the show to focus on saved my sanity. I needed my sanity right now.
Ben insisted on coming with me to meet the Paradox crew. I didn’t even have to ask. Safety in numbers. We could watch each other’s backs.
I did a little research about Flint House on my own before heading out on Friday night. The death of the investigator hadn’t made it into major news outlets, so it took some digging into publicly released police reports to discover anything about it. A short investigation determined that the death was accidental—he’d fallen down the stairs. That sort of thing didn’t draw any attention or raise any eyebrows, but the paranormal community jumped on the story and ran with it.
The usual background applied: The house was a hundred twenty years old, a stately Victorian, built by a silver mogul with more money than sense, and bad luck followed him. Several of his children died of illness or injury. His wife committed suicide. He went mad and died young
. The house was sold, and the new owner immediately began reporting the usual haunting symptoms: strange noises, drops in temperature, voices in rooms where nobody was talking. That owner moved out and rented the house to a couple who within the year died in a messy murder– suicide situation. The house was sold again, and again, and now it had stood empty for almost ten years, because no one was willing to live there.
The body count piled up over the years. Every death could be attributed to normal, nonsupernatural causes, but this went beyond the law of averages or mere coincidence. Consensus among those who studied these things: The house was killing people.
It stood in an older part of Denver, west of the freeway, in one of those neighborhoods that started out as the wealthier side of town, lined with lots of Victorian houses; then went downhill, the houses falling into disrepair and the yards becoming choked with weeds; then became the really bad part of town; then slowly underwent a gentrification that was turning it into the artsy part of town.
The house wasn’t the nicest on the street, but it wasn’t the worst. The pale green exterior could have used a coat of paint, and rather than lawn the yard held a forest of shrubbery that hadn’t been pruned back in a decade. Two stories and an attic, with a round window, looked out on the street. The place was dark. I wished the Paradox crew hadn’t told me it was haunted. It would have looked perfectly normal, otherwise. Now it did look rather sinister.
The Paradox PI vans were already here, and a camera crew was already filming background footage, a few shots of the team poking around the yard and wrought-iron fence. A wrought-iron fence complete with spikes lining the top—of course the place was haunted.
The KNOB van, black, with the station logo painted on the side in big letters, was also here, with Matt and one of his minions waiting in the front seats. We had a few hours before we needed to set up, but I wanted to watch the team work and record a bunch of material to play back later.
We emerged from the car, and I got to work, gathering the gang over and making introductions. “This is my husband, Ben.” It still felt weird saying that, but people smiled, and no one else acted like it was unusual.
Gary said, “Ben, I know this is personal, but I have to ask, what’s it like being married to a werewolf?”
I was outed. Ben wasn’t. We looked at each other. With great interest, I waited for the answer. He pressed his lips in a wry smile, filled with everything he might say. What he did say when he looked back at Gary was, “It’s a howling good time, I suppose.”
Ben tried to wink at me. It looked kind of leering. I winced and shook my head. There were groans all the way around.
Tina gave Ben a narrow-eyed, suspicious look, like the one she wore at New Moon the other night, and like when she looked at me, as if she knew something, or at least suspected something. I really needed to talk to her privately.
The film crew asked Ben to wait in the van and had me get back in the car so they could film me stepping out and walking up to shake hands with Gary and company—twice. That was reality TV for you.
Gary filmed an opening narration while Matt and I taped my own introduction.
Gary spoke at his camera in the no-nonsense, explanatory tone his viewers had come to know and love. “The house was originally built by George Flint, a silver miner who struck it rich. He raised a family here, but they had a lot of tragedy in this house. One daughter died of pneumonia. A son was trampled by a horse right outside, about where the streetlight is now. The ghost stories started almost immediately.”