4

Cope

Cope was sitting in his reading room, trying to meditate. He had a busy day coming up with two of his regular clients and six out-of-towners who'd seen videos of Cope online and had booked him to speak with their lost loved ones.

From next door, in Ten's office, he could hear a ruckus. It almost sounded like Jude and Ronan when they were cheering for Tom Brady, but who the hell was Ten cheering?

Getting up from his table, Cope opened his office door and stepped out into the main office. He could hear hoots and gasps and knocked on Ten's door.

The commotion stopped all at once. "Come in, Cope."

He opened the door, not sure what to expect, but Carson and Cole sitting at the reading table with Ten wasn't remotely on the list of what he thought he'd see. "I could hear you guys in my office. Is something wrong?"

"Sorry about that," Cole said. "A customer tagged us on a Facebook post that included a snippet from a podcast called Ghost After Dark . I had never heard of it before, and neither had Carson. Apparently, the host of the show, Kit Savage, investigates one ghost story per season."

"He's a local guy," Carson added. "Was born and raised in Hull, on the south shore, and has over a half million subscribers."

"Right," Cole said, picking up the conversation again. "Fans had been writing to Savage and asking him to do a local story, not anything to do with the Salem Witch Trials or the Revolutionary War, a haunting that no one had ever heard of or investigated before."

"And that's exactly what he did. The first episode dropped last night, and it was a doozy. Cole called me at half past eleven and got me to listen to the clip, and it blew my mind." Carson's blue eyes, ringed in dark circles, glowed with excitement. "Have you ever heard of Domenica Fibonacci?"

Cope shook his head. The name wasn't ringing a bell, but then again, he'd been born and raised in New Orleans. "I've heard of the Fibonacci sequence. Is this any relation to that?"

"No," Carson said. "Domenica was born and raised in Italy. She met Vic Rothschild when he was doing his grand tour of Europe in 1977."

"Oh, that big house on the cliff?" Cope asked. "I've always wanted to tour it, but Jude isn't interested in that kind of thing."

"Right, Rothschild Manor," Cole said. "The gist of the story was that Domenica and Vic married after a whirlwind courtship and settled into the cliff house. According to everyone who knew them, the couple was very much in love, until an incident in 1983."

Cope felt himself being drawn into the story. He'd done a little research on the cliff house when he'd seen an ad on television announcing that it was open for the public to tour the luxurious home and the family's riches from Memorial Day through Labor Day. Nowhere in his readings did it mention the house being haunted or there being any kind of newsworthy event taking place in the 1980s. "Ohhh, what happened?"

"Domenica was committed to a mental institution for six months. Rumor had it that she came out a different person entirely. Some said she'd been given a lobotomy, but others thought something far more sinister had gone on at the old Danvers State Hospital." Cole bounced his eyebrows as if to say the plot had thickened.

Carson took over the story, "It wasn't an actual hospital. The place was known to locals as the Danvers Lunatic Asylum. A lot of shady things went on there from the time it was opened in 187 until it was closed in 1992. The building and what happened behind its walls was such a stain on the town that it was demolished in 2006."

Cope sat with that information for a second. While Ten had trouble visiting prisons, thanks to the decades of evil built up within its walls, Cope had trouble with psychiatric hospitals. They scared the life out of him. Just the idea of being trapped there and being unable to prove his own sanity sent a cold shiver down his spine. When he'd read former psychiatric patients, he hadn't been a casual observer; it was more like walking in the person's shoes. The experiences were chilling, to say the least, often ending with Cope being out of commission for weeks at a time. He didn't often agree to do readings for that reason alone.

"They used that building to film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest . You know, the old movie with Jack Nicholson?" Carson asked, sounding as if he'd been rambling on while Cope had been stuck in his own head, wallowing in his own personal horror story.

"I've heard of the movie, but I've never seen it," Cope managed to say. "What happened to Domenica?"

Cole grinned. "One dark and stormy night during a hurricane in 198, she plunged to her death from the top of the cliff."

Cope's eyes widened. "She jumped?"

"No one knows," Cole said. "Her husband said she jumped, but there was a lot of talk that her husband pushed her."

"The body was, of course, mangled by the fall, and with Hurricane Mitzi spinning up giant waves along the Massachusetts coast, it was days before the medical examiner was able to recover the remains. The autopsy was inconclusive, and the manner of death was listed as undetermined."

"That's one hell of a story." Cope shook his head. In his mind's eye, he could picture Domenica falling from that precipice. She would have known death was imminent, and by that point, it would have been too late to take back her rash decision to jump. On the other hand, if she'd been pushed, she went to her grave knowing her husband hated her enough to kill her. "I get that there's a sensational angle to this story with the whodunnit, but what had all of you hooting like the Celtics scored a touchdown?"

"I was wondering when you'd get around to asking." Carson tapped his phone, and a deep voice filled the room.

Welcome to Ghost After Dark . I'm your host, Kit Savage. This season, we'll be exploring the haunting of Rothschild Manor by the dead wife of the last member of the family to inhabit the stately manse. Domenica Fibonacci was a peasant girl from Italy who married well. When she came to live in the United States, she had the world on a string. A handsome and rich husband. A glorious house in which to live and start a family. Sounds like happily ever after, right? Wrong! There were rumors of infidelity. Domenica was involuntarily committed to an insane asylum, and one year later, she was dead at the bottom of a cliff. How did things go so wrong? Join me, won't you, in delving into the mystery of the Cliffside Horror.

Spooky, spine-tingling music began to play.

Cope opened his mouth to ask what the big deal was about this intro when a second voice came out of Carson's phone. "No! No ! No !" Each time the word repeated was louder and more forceful than the last.

"Hello?" Kit's voice sounded frightened.

"They're not very good actors," Cope muttered. Everly could have done a more convincing job.

"Listen," Cole urged.

"Lost. I'm lost. Aiuto! Aiuto!" the voice began to cry.

"What does Aiuto mean?" Cope asked, having a feeling he already knew.

"It means help," Carson supplied.

"The voice you are hearing is not mine," Kit Savage said. "It does not belong to any member of my staff. Domenica, is that you? Are you here with us tonight? What do you need my help with?" Kit's question went unanswered. "I'm going to take a short break and be right back."

Cole tapped the phone, stopping the podcast. "Nothing else happens after this. Kit Savage recaps what happened and reiterated that the voice was not something he or his producers added in. He closed the episode by asking if there were any psychic mediums listening that could help him out. He mentioned you and Tennyson by name."

Even with his gift working at full strength, Cope hadn't seen that coming. "I would need to do a lot more research on this guy before I committed to anything. Ten?"

"Same," Ten agreed. "The voice might not have even belonged to Domenica Fibonacci. It could have been some sort of internet glitch or background noise from someone else's phone."

"I would have agreed with you up to the point where the voice spoke in perfectly accented Italian." Cope sighed. He'd heard pain and desperation in the woman's voice. Under other circumstances, he wouldn't hesitate to get involved, but according to what Carson said, this podcast had over half a million subscribers. That was a huge amount of people who would be able to judge him, harangue him, blame him if things went wrong. Not to mention, potentially unstable people would easily be able to find out where he lived with his family. Cope turned to Ten and could tell by the look on his face that he was thinking the same thoughts.

Maybe Cope would get involved if he could arrange some private time in the clifftop house without cameras and microphones monitoring and recording his every word. His every step. Either way, he wasn't going to make a decision without talking it over with Jude.

It might be fun to get involved with an investigation like this, but there were so many unknowns. What if the voice was an actress or Kit Savage's sister, wife, or daughter? What if it was Kit's plan to lure in an unsuspecting psychic just to unmask them as a fraud? More than one famous psychic had been caught up in operations like that in the past. Cope wouldn't allow himself to be next in line.

But what if that wasn't the case?

What if the voice heard on the podcast was actually Domenica Fibonacci? The woman had been dead for forty years. If she had a message to pass on or had something to say, wasn't it Cope's responsibility to bring that truth into the open?