Dead Man Haunt (A Dead Man Mystery Book 2) Read online

  Dead Man Haunt

  A DEAD MAN MYSTERY

  BOOK TWO

  T. M. SIMMONS

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The reverse engineering, uploading, and/or distributing of this eBook via the internet or via any other means without the permission of the copyright owner is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated.

  T. M. Simmons, 2011, 2022. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  Cover and eBook design by eBook Prep

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  Published by ePublishing Works!

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  eBook ISBN: 978-1-64457-341-9

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  Before You Go…

  Dead Man Hand

  Also by T. M. Simmons

  About the Author

  When I first published Dead Man Haunt, Katrina had just devastated New Orleans and much more of the Gulf Coast. As I prepare this ebook version of my mystery, Irene has plowed up the Eastern Coast of the U.S. She left behind many deaths and is still wreaking havoc on the New England states, states which have never experienced hurricane damage such as this. I wish everyone touched by this disaster good lives and futures. To all the brave rescue personnel, thanks seems a rather simple word for a writer, but it’s heartfelt. Please don't forget all the pets who are wandering lost and alone and need reunited with their owners.

  As always, to Barney, my protector from the bumps in the night…sometimes.

  Ditto always, to Belle, my own Aunt Twila, and Terry. And to the new generation members added to Belle's extended family, and thus, mine: Savanna, Preston, Nevaeh and JoJo.

  Chapter 1

  “Dadblast that man!” Darn it, it’s just not satisfying to hang up on someone with today’s technology. I slammed the receiver down, then had to grab it up again to disconnect.

  “I take it Jack’s not happy with our new adventure,” Aunt Twila mused from the lounge chair in front of the fireplace. Miss Molly, the head cat in my menagerie, curled on Twila’s lap, enjoying negligent scratches under her chin.

  “He said we had no business interfering with a scheduled demolition of a dangerous building,” I fumed. “We’re not interfering! I just want you to see the place before it crumbles under the wrecking ball.”

  “Just who did you call to get permission for us to tour that hotel?” Twila asked.

  “One of Katy’s friends,” I replied with an it’s-of-no-consequence hand flutter. “I had no idea Katy would tell Jack about it.”

  Twila wasn’t about to let me get away with that evasion. “Cousin Katy has some pretty high-placed friends.”

  “Yup,” eighty-year-old Granny Chisholm, my next-door neighbor, agreed from her seat on the sofa across from Twila. Trucker, my hundred-and-fifty-pound Rottweiler, sprawled across the cushions beside Granny. Upside down, of course, his broad belly available for Granny’s age-hardened fingernails. “Betcha you called that there senator.”

  “I did not!” I denied.

  “Come clean, Alice,” Twila ordered.

  “Oh, for—Katy knows a reporter in Dallas who wants to do a feature story on the hotel before the town officials bring in a demolition team.”

  “And the reporter probably mentioned to the town officials that she didn’t have time herself to research the place?” Twila arched an eyebrow. “Insinuated to the powers that be in the small town that it would be a much more favorable story if they cooperated with us?”

  I ignored her, reached for my Crown and Seven on the desk, and gulped half of it. Soothing relaxation spread. It ticked me off that my ex-husband could still do this to me, over two years after our divorce. A divorce that was supposedly amicable, might I add. We grew apart, as the explanation goes to the courts. Nothing in common any longer. Too many differences, too many variances in our lives.

  “Sorry, Twila,” I said. “It’s not fair for you to be upset by a fight between Jack and me when you’ve barely arrived. You like Jack.”

  Granny snickered, which pulled the roadmap of lines on her face in new directions. I grabbed my drink again to prepare for what I knew, without doubt, Granny was about to say.

  “Wasn’t my fault Jack had to stay over,” I defended before Granny could utter a word through her cackles.

  “Oh?” Twila’s voice rose with interest. “Jack spent the night?”

  “Last week,” Granny revealed. “Seen his truck here that mornin’, so’s I brought over some of my cranberry muffins for their breakfast. Jack ’peared to be real glad to get ’em.”

  “He spent the night in the guest room!” I spat. “And the reason he had to stay over was because the water pump went out on his truck. I had to take him into Six Gun the next morning to get a new one.”

  Twila and Granny blatantly exchanged a high-five across the coffee table. Neither one hid the fact that nothing would make them happier than for Jack and me to give our marriage another go.

  “It’s not gonna happen, damn it,” I told them.

  “Uh oh.” Granny’s mouth stretched with a wide grin. “Ten bucks in the trip kitty!”

  I slammed my drink down on the desk and grabbed a pen. “IOU” on the scratchpad, I ripped off the top paper and jammed it into the mouth of Casper—a large-bellied jar with a caricature boasting Halloween-pumpkin teeth across the middle.

  Granny and I had made a stop-swearing pact a month ago, agreeing to use the money for a trip to New Orleans during Mardi Gras, since she’d never braved that raucous scene. Ninety percent of the bills and IOU’s in the kitty were mine, of course, probably plenty right now for a weeke
nd of decadent revelry. I’d already tried to give it up, but Granny refused to accept my offer to forget the no-swear pact and pay her share to N’awlins. Since Mardi Gras wouldn’t happen again for ten months, I figured we’d have enough by then to stay at the Royal Sonesta!

  Twila rose and took Granny’s empty glass before she headed for the bar across the study. There, she asked over her shoulder, “Anyone else ready for a refill?”

  “Yes,” I answered. “Just bring me another glass while I finish this one.”

  “Tsk, tsk,” Granny chided. “We might haveta start a cut-down-on-the-drinkin’ kitty next.”

  Defiantly, I gulped the remainder of my drink, then said, “Make mine a double this time, Twila.”

  “Jack still bothers you that bad, huh?” she asked. I didn’t miss her surreptitious wink at Granny.

  “I’m just pissed that he’s trying to stick his nose into another one of our ghosthunts!”

  “Ten bucks,” Granny said with a smirk as she accepted her fresh drink from Twila.

  At that moment, the Casper clock on the mantel, which Granny had gifted me with as a birthday/housewarming present, bonged a “Boo!” on the half-hour. I jammed another IOU into the Casper trip kitty and grabbed my own drink from Twila. The next boo/bongs would be ten in a row. I’d looked all over that clock for somewhere to turn down the volume, even called the manufacturer. No luck, and on sleepless nights, the boo/bongs echoed in the house, forcing me to close my bedroom door.

  There were other ghostly objects around my house. Since all my friends and relatives know about my favorite hobby, on every gift-giving holiday, people searched for more ghosts to add to my collection—a collection that mostly resides in cardboard boxes in my closet, the most garish ones at least.

  Twila and I see ghosts. We talk to ghosts. We actually hunt ghosts and enjoy the heck out of our quests. We love to prowl old buildings and graveyards, day and night, study the history of them, and occasionally chat with the long-passed occupants of both the buildings and graves. Yet out of the dozens of gone-by souls we chat with, very few ever keep our attention past that one and only conversation.

  Patrick, however, a ghost I met recently, had intrigued us into this upcoming adventure, the adventure Jack was so adamantly opposed to. I’d met Patrick when I joined a few local ghosthunters to investigate the historic, scheduled-for-demolition Springs Hotel in the tiny West Texas town of Mineral Springs. He stepped out of the shower in the men’s dressing room, six foot of blond nakedness, dribbles of water crawling down his tanned muscles, a white towel draped around his neck. No doubt in my mind he was a ghost, yet what a gorgeous ghost. Patrick winked at me—he could see me every bit as well as I could him. Then he disappointed me greatly when he faded back into his own dimension. I didn’t even get a chance to see if he’d show up in a photograph, because I was too rapt to remember the digital camera hanging around my neck.

  I’m a writer, an occupation that makes me one of the select few who actually enjoy the profession that puts food on the table, both for me and my animals. Twila lives in Yankee-land, where she still works part-time in a long-term care facility. (We called them nursing homes when we grew up.) She also cares for her mother and husband, a disabled vet. Still, we manage to get together a few times a year to prowl and hunt, and I’d picked up Twila at the airport early this afternoon. We’d driven the four-hour trip back to my lakeside cabin in Six Gun, Texas, excitedly discussing how we were loaded for bear...ghosts.

  We initially hadn’t planned on doing anything more this trip than revisit some old haunts, check out rumors of new ones, since Twila could only stay a few days. However, Patrick hitched a ride home with me from the hotel that night, and he passed muster with Howard, the Head Ghost in my spiritual boardinghouse, when he agreed to The Alice and Howard Ghost Agreement. All the paranormal residents that I allow to stay around have to read and abide by The Agreement, since otherwise, I’d never get any writing done. Nothing irks an editor more than a missed deadline, and besides, missed deadlines could shoot a hole in my royalty check schedule.

  Mischievous ghosts leave themselves wide open to the discipline Twila taught me to deal out when she dragged me on my first ghosthunting trip and drilled the rules of paranormal dealings into me. She was with me when I found this haunted log cabin deep in the East Texas Piney Woods while searching for a new home post-divorce, too. After a couple episodes of leeway-turned-bad news on my part, I learned to heed the rules and make sure my ghosts did so as well. Twila has no sympathy for a wishy-washy ghosthunter discipline-wise. For good reason, and it didn’t take me long to understand the method behind her madness.

  Patrick continued to hang around for a couple weeks, and he niggled me with the mystery of his life and the old hotel, dropped hints and innuendoes that I passed on to Twila in various conversations. Eventually, both Twila and I grew fascinated with possibly uncovering the truth of at least one of the tales circulating about the hotel in its prime. In return for his vast knowledge of the place, Patrick also insisted that he needed our help on a quest of his own, a quest he continued to be vague about.

  I’d known Twila would absolutely adore this hotel, since it was extremely active with ghosts and spirits besides Patrick. That, as much as our mutual fascination about historical buildings, pushed me through the maze of bracing the officialdom who had banned the public from the hotel until I found Katy’s reporter friend.

  Having an utterly handsome, naked ghost accompany us was a new twist, one Twila and I decided to enjoy to the fullest.

  Chapter 2

  Such a grand piece of decay. Brimming with ghosts!

  From across the street, Twila and I stared at the once-magnificent hotel and released twin sighs of yearning to explore the decrepit structure. It rose above us U-shaped, multistoried, and numerous broken windows shattered any sense that the façade sheltered anything other than wrack and ruin. Atop, a bell tower crowned the edifice, rising alone into the early morning, cloud-spotted April sky. A wide veranda graced the front, where in times gone by natty gentlemen and flapper ladies—or non-ladies—strolled when not partaking of the mineral baths or hidden-room gambling.

  Though I’d been here once before, experience taught me that in Twila’s company even more fantastic weird happenings would transpire. Her psychic powers far surpassed the fledgling abilities I possessed, since she’d been chasing ghosts years longer than me. The possibility of encountering past residents in her company, more than the building’s wonderful history, fired my anticipation for another one of our shared adventures.

  Oh, yeah, that and the fact that Patrick had already intrigued us with tales of his life in the hotel’s heyday. Former life, really, since he now abided in the afterlife.

  Twila raised her camera and snapped several pictures to begin the record of this adventure, and beside her, Patrick materialized briefly. Could a ghost cry, I’m sure tears would have rolled down Patrick’s cheeks at the sight before him, even though in his time men characteristically hid their emotions. Come to think of it, so did men today, like my ex-husband, Jack, except when he was pis...angry at me.

  Damn...darn! Now I even censored my thoughts so I wouldn’t have to pay into Granny’s trip kitty!

  Patrick stoically gazed at the building he had called home-away when he lived, then faded back into his own realm.

  “Gosh damn,” Twila mused, since she wasn’t part of the trip-kitty pact. “I wish that ghost would put some clothes on when he visualizes. He’s so hot, he even makes a long-married woman pant and remember those days when sex took precedence over sanity.”

  I giggled. “He forgets sometimes.”

  “Or maybe he knows how much you like to ogle that fantastic body.” She nudged me and winked.

  I grinned in remembrance. “That day in the men’s dressing room, over there in the hotel basement? The first time I met Patrick? Jeez Louise. He’d just stepped out of the shower. Had a white towel thrown around his neck. All that naked muscle and dribble
s of water crawling down that tanned skin...”

  “You’ve mentioned that several times. If I didn’t know better, Alice, I’d swear you were half in love with a ghost.”

  “Infatuated, maybe,” I admitted. “Not in love, but a definite possibility...infatuation. I’ve seen your eyes bug out when our friend appears, Twila. Ten seconds after you met Patrick at my house yesterday, you forgot he couldn’t consume and offered him a Jack and Coke.”

  “Well...” she mused. “Maybe fifteen seconds. After I got my breathing under control and could think.”

  Miss Molly and Trucker accompanied us today. Those two animals from my menagerie see ghosts as well as Granny, Twila, and I do, and are always part of any trip Twila and I undertake. Granny Chisholm pet-sat my other cats, an occupation that pads her small pension. Miss Molly hates her leash, so I held her in my arms even though she wore that irritating encumbrance. Trucker sat obediently at Twila’s feet, his leash loosely wrapped around her fingers.

  “This place does look a lot like that hotel where that thing crawled in bed with you,” Twila said. “Same architect, you said.”

  “Me? You were in that bed, too. But all you did was snore while that—that—that...whatever it was. Invisible entity, I guess. While it crawled straight up the bed between us. You didn’t even feel the mattress sinking under its weight. Or hear the claws dragging across the bedspread. You just snored!”