11. Chapter 11

Chapter 11

I finally read Connor’s fifteen-page email; he hadn’t been kidding about conflicting information. Huffing, I stuffed my phone back in the footlocker. Sidnee was watching me, amused. ‘Connor and Bunny, sitting in a tree…’ she started singing.

‘Yeah, yeah.’ I rolled my eyes at her before sobering. ‘Sidnee, hun, it’s time to spill.’

She looked confused. ‘What?’

‘What experience do you have with poltergeists?’

She froze. ‘How did you know I have any?’ she prevaricated.

I gave her a flat stare. ‘Well, mostly from the hints you keep dropping, stuff like “it’s burned himself out.” You’re in the know, Sidnee, and I need to know too.’

She looked away. ‘I don’t like to talk about it,’ she said finally. ‘It was a very scary time in my life and I try very hard to pretend none of it happened. It’s a dark chapter in my family’s history.’

I crossed the distance between us and settled on her bed. ‘Look, I’m sorry to make you talk about it but I really do need to know.’ I told her what Connor had said and pulled up his email of conflicting instructions. ‘All this is contradictory, and I have a source with real experience right next to me.’

‘What about Father Brennan?’ she tried.

‘I’ve already called him and left a message. He hasn’t picked it up yet – at least, he hasn’t replied. You’re all I’ve got, Sid.’

She sighed. ‘Fine. I was twelve, in the Philippines. This was before my parents died, and my grandmother and uncle were still alive. We had to leave our house for a few weeks because we were replacing the pipes or something like that. It doesn’t matter.’ She waved it away. ‘Anyway, we moved into my grandmother’s house. It wasn’t very large and my uncle was living there too, so the only place for me to sleep was in an alcove off the kitchen. They put up a little cot bed for me.’

I leaned forward, silently encouraging her to tell me more.

‘Nothing happened the first night – at least, I didn’t notice anything. Then there were a few weird things, but nothing you’d really consider off, you know?’

I didn’t so I shook my head. ‘No. Like what?’

She picked at her dark-blue bedspread. ‘Things like you’d set something down and it would disappear, only to show up in a strange place. Or the kitchen cabinets would be open in the morning but no one remembered leaving them that way. My uncle was drinking a lot so we put it down to him. He was stuck in a vicious cycle, often drunk or hungover.’

‘I’m sorry you had to see that so young,’ I murmured.

‘Yeah, it was an eye-opener.’ She sighed. ‘Then things got progressively worse. A pan would fly off the stove towards us all. Doors would slam. The atmosphere got tense and we started to think it really was a ghost. I tried to talk to it, to tell it to calm down, but that seemed to make it madder or give it power.’

She’d gone pale and her hands were shaking – I was forcing her to talk through some real shit here. I reached out to pull her into a hug and rubbed her back. I could feel the tension in her muscles. ‘I’m sorry, Sidnee. This is horrible. You don’t have to talk about it. I’ll figure it out. I shouldn’t have pressured you.’

She shook her head, pushed me away and took a deep breath. ‘No, I’m being dumb. You need to know what happened – what could happen. My uncle and I were going down the stairs and it shoved him. He knocked into me, and I fell down the stairs and sprained my ankle quite badly. At that point we were all freaking out. We were terrified to stay in the house.’

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Yeah. So my grandmother called in a priest.’

‘Was she Catholic?’ I asked, thinking of Father Brennan. The dominant religion in the Philippines was Roman Catholic. She nodded but, lost in her memories, she didn’t speak for a moment.

I prompted, ‘Did the priest get rid of it?’ If so, I was going to start hounding Father Brennan.

She shrugged. ‘He seemed to because all the activity stopped for a time. But then it came back even worse, like we’d made it even madder. By then we’d moved back to our own house, but my grandmother refused to be driven out of her home and she and my uncle stayed there.’ She licked her lips. ‘Until one day it pushed my uncle down the stairs again and this time it snapped his neck. After that, Grandma came to live with us, but I’m sure the stress and the death of one of her sons led to her early death.’

I squeezed her hand gently. ‘God, that’s awful. I’m so sorry, Sidnee.’

She gave a sad smile. ‘It was a long time ago. After my uncle died, the police found his partial fingerprints in the system. It turned out he was a serial rapist. His death led to a lot of cold cases being solved.’

I gasped, feeling at a total loss. I wanted to say something comforting but I had absolutely nothing. That was horrible.

Sidnee gave a bitter smile. ‘I told you it was a dark time. The police guessed that one of his attacks had gone further than usual and the poor girl had died. He’d buried her in the garden and she’d taken up residence in my grandmother’s house as a poltergeist. She’d grown in power until she’d killed my uncle – and after that she left. But the truth of my uncle’s darkness killed Grandma as much as his death. Poltergeists scare me, Bunny, with damned good reason.’ She looked me straight in the eye. ‘We have to get rid of this one. Before it kills someone.’

No shit. Her tale made my radar hum. She might not have noticed it but her story painted the poltergeist not only as the killer but also as a victim, and something about the apparition's desperation when it had appeared to me had suggested the same.

If that were true, who did it want to wreak vengeance on? Because my money was currently on Engell.