“Should I be scared?” Brenda asked him.
“Nope,” he told her. “Can’t help it. I’m an agent.”
“Well, good. And thank you. Again, I—”
“Get some sleep. We’ll talk later,” he told her.
Brenda smiled, nodded, and walked with them to the door, letting them hear her as she turned the bolt into place once it had closed again. After heading back to the car, Jon drove them back towards town.
Kylie looked at him. “Should she be scared?” she asked.
“I really don’t think so,” he said. “But it never hurts to take precautions.”
“Right,” she agreed. “We’re going to the cemetery, I take it?”
“We are going to the cemetery. I think Obadiah knows we’d look for him there.”
“He doesn’t hang out there often.”
“No, but he knows we’ll be looking for him. Trust me, Obadiah knows what happened here. And he is passionate about stopping people from being hurt.”
“All right,” Kylie murmured. She looked out the window as they drove. “A clown,” she murmured.
“A clown at Halloween. Who would notice?”
“You talked to all the neighbors?”
“No one saw anything. We just have video from Ginger Radisson’s phone. The police have it now. They’ll enhance it and study it as much as they can, but if you’re going to run around committing a crime, there’s really nothing like a clown suit to use as a disguise.”
“And there’s no time like Halloween to wear it,” Kylie murmured. “Anyway, Brenda was pretty depressed. She thinks the house and the grounds are cursed. She went back over all the suspected crimes. In one instance, supposedly proven since there was an execution in the case of Ezekiel Johnson, she determined the house was afflicted.”
“I was born in Salem,” Jon reminded Kylie. “Someone always owned the Brim House when I was a kid, but nobody ever lived there long. For years, a company that wanted to create a historic attraction owned it—another wax museum or something. They never got the funding for it, so the place stayed vacant. Then the man who sold it to Brenda bought it. He wanted to create a bed and breakfast at the house, but his wife got sick, and he lost all heart for the project.”
“I know all the stories. The ghost tour guides always pointed out Brim House as a haunted location. So, naturally—”
“You being you, you did all kinds of research.”
“I did. But that didn’t really help. Heck, it’s hard to prove recent cases. And going back hundreds of years, it’s almost impossible. Brenda just told me some of them, too, though.”
Jon nodded. “But then there is this,” Jon said. “We are in Salem, Massachusetts. And again, even back when I was a kid, museum researchers did all kinds of investigations on the house’s history. Salem has changed through the years, and people change. It is far more commercial today than even when I was a kid, but people need to work and make money. And I don’t think people should ever forget the trials. Some want to embrace the past. Others want to wash it away. And in my mind, it’s always best to admit and see the bad.”
He smiled and continued. “Some think it’s fine that we have commercialism as well as history. That it includes all our souvenirs, the witchcraft stores, the museums, and more. Growing up, I knew several practicing Wiccans. But they aren’t the dance-with-the-devil witches that were suspected of witchcraft in the 1600s. As it stands today, Brim House wasn’t there during the witchcraft trials in 1692.”
“Right, but the foundation existed for another place they razed. The builders used the foundation and a few walls to construct the new building, so I guess the basement was the basement during the trials. The house that stands there now was built by a man named Josiah Brim. Which, of course, is why it’s called Brim House. He had a family, and to the best of everyone’s knowledge, they lived there happily enough until they left the area. As I told Brenda, good people lived there, too. Not just the reportedly bad ones. But, Jon, at this point, there’s nothing, right? No suspect in the picture at all? It could have been anyone from anywhere, dressed up in a clown outfit.”
“No,” Jon said quietly.
“No? You do have something?” she asked, confused.
He took a breath, shook his head, and then glanced her way. “Nobody visiting the area did this, Kylie. Whoever it was probably heard the stories about the house all their life and researched it just as meticulously as anyone might. I’m going to assume it was a man—the size of the clown and the strength needed to manipulate a body behind a false wall and behind other skeletal remains lends better to a male. They had to know about the house. And everyone in the neighborhood. He knew when people were at work or occupied. And when he could slip into the home without being seen. He didn’t plan on Ginger Radisson’s front door camera, but he did plan for the costume just in case someone saw him. Someone local did this.”
“But what local?” Kylie asked.
He hesitated again. “Someone who grew up near the house with access to it would be my guess. Maybe even someone who, as a kid, snuck in all the time. And somewhere along the line, learned about the false wall.”
“Not a friend,” Kylie said quietly. “No friend would—”
“I didn’t say a friend. But we both know killers often wear costumes—not clown costumes, per se, but disguises that make them look like ordinary people.”
“So, what’s your plan?” Kylie asked.
“The neighbors,” he said flatly. “If I keep talking to all of them, someone may come up with something. Anyway, I’m going to park here. We can walk.”
“The place will be spilling over with tourists,” Kylie warned.
“Yes, but we’re together.” He winked. “We don’t even need to pretend that we’re talking on our cell phones.”
The cemetery was beautiful. The markers weren’t big or elaborate, but those of the long dead had been re-etched, and a plaque that described the opening of the cemetery and where to find important graves had been hung. Nature had taken over in places, and tree roots had broken through some stones.
As Kylie had thought, the place was crawling with tourists. Tour guides were out and about. Candy was being given out at several of the businesses near the cemetery. And children with bags that had ghosts, witches, or pumpkins on them—with a superhero here and there—collected their sweet treasures.
Kylie stopped, looking down sadly where a small child had been buried, and thought that some things never changed. Parents loved their children. Such a loss must have been devastating, no matter what century such a thing occurred.
She felt Obadiah before she saw him.
And knew he had set his hand on her shoulder.
“I’ve been waiting for you two,” Obadiah said.
She tried not to turn or be too obvious.
“Do you know something? Can you help?”
Obadiah was the first soul Jon had encountered as a child. A spirit who had been determined to talk to and through Jon, and halt something horrible from happening. Jon walked over and stood next to Kylie, looking down somberly at the grave, as well.