Whodunit

Chapter 16

Nubia shivered in her hoodie and bare feet. The end of the hall seemed a lot further away than it had when the crew picked out their rooms the day before. She and Ximena agreed to share a room. Now, Nubia shook at the image of sleeping in that room while Ximena's missing body withered away in the grimy waters of the amusement park.

She blinked at her room a couple doors down. The house seemed colder and the walls dewier than before. A windy drift carried the chill down the hall, and the rain and harsh breezes of the night fell on her ears in surround stereo sound. Almost like someone opened every window in the house.

She gripped the blow dryer in one hand and the extended cord in the other. She stood on her tiptoes and took small baby steps, trying her hardest not to make any sounds. The master bedroom door was cracked, but it hadn't been when she came upstairs to charge her phone and sit with Zaria.

"Anisa?" she whispered into the crack and pressed the door forward.

Darkness masked the shadows in the room. Thunder pounded the sky on the other side of the tall windows, making Nubia almost jump out her chilled skin.

"Anisa? It's me—Nunu," she said a bit louder.

Complete silence inside. Meanwhile, the storm played a marching band of instruments against the roof and windows. She stepped into the room and toyed with the light switch. She decided against flipping it on. The electricity of the jabbing lightning lit the room enough. When the lightning struck, she saw no Anisa crouching or hiding or anything that suggested her presence. So, she turned on her heels and scurried out the room, not liking the empty darkness behind her. She ran as quietly as she could manage on her tiptoes to her room and locked the door behind her. She cursed herself for not bringing her phone with her to watch over Zaria, but when she heard the girl startle awake with a cry for her brother, she forgot about fooling with the brand-new charger that somehow magically had a short in the wires. It had taken minutes to get it to work and once she did, she didn't want to chance moving it until the battery had charged enough.

She snatched the phone off the charger on the nightstand and plopped on the made-up mattress. She set the blow dryer next to her and tapped the phone screen. The screen remained dark, so she tapped it again and again. The screen wouldn't turn on.

"Man, I know you lying!" she grunted and threw the phone at the closet across from her. The phone hit the ground with an earsplitting crash. The screen expanded into tiny pieces of glass.

"No!" she cried into her palms, not caring who heard her until a creak in the room shut her up.

She gulped. Her neck stiffened. She observed the dim room through her peripheral vision. Light flowed in from the hall. The throbbing veins in her throat prevented her from moving her head. Sweat dripped down her face. The last time she'd experience a chill this paralyzing happened to be the day she saw her grandfather rocking in her grandmother's recliner humming an old Fats Domino tune. But she had never met her grandfather. He died of lung cancer a month before she was born. To the day. March 3, 2003 to be exact. A month later, her mother welcomed her into the world.

The time before that had been that night her and her mother encountered a man with a heavy, negative energy downtown near the river. He flagged them down to pitch a sell for one of his crosses. He portrayed himself as this devout Christian servant, but the demons possessing his spirit radiated off him like heat from an exhausted car. Her mother hadn't noticed, but to her being near him was unbearable. All her life she'd been sensitive to energies, especially the energy of other people. Or at least their souls. But she didn't want to believe it, so she tuned it out to the point that she almost forgot she had the gift. Or curse. Those experiences happened years ago. Even Desi's ramblings about slave ghosts hadn't conjured up the memories.