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“What are we doing?” Noah whispered, his lips brushing my ear. I shivered with delight and turned the handle. The door opened, and I pulled Noah inside.
“I’m giving you the tour,” I replied in the same soft whisper. “I thought you might like to see where I take English.”
“But I can’t see anything.” His backpack hit the floor with a soft thud. Then his hands were in my hair as he placed gentle kisses all over my face.
I pushed him against a wall. “Then I’ll describe it for you.” I nuzzled against his neck. “There’s a big desk at the front of the room, and a bunch of smaller desks in the back.” We kissed, and I melted into his warm embrace, overcome by the feeling of being so close to him. Then his lips moved to my neck and he began planting soft kisses there, a sensation I craved. He moved back, but as I leaned in to kiss him again, he pulled away.
“Something’s wrong.”
I thought he meant that someone was walking toward the classroom. I listened, expecting to hear approaching footsteps or voices in the hallway.
“We’re alone,” I assured him. “Everything’s fine.”
“No, we’re not. Someone’s here.”
Beyond the Grave
Mara Purnhagen
For spending over a decade putting up with thousands of bizarre, inane, and downright frustrating questions, this one is for Joe Purnhagen, who always has the answers I need.
one
I never should have sent my boyfriend to the electric chair. Watching Noah from a monitor in the next room, I felt awful for him. Frayed leather straps restrained his arms. Shackles held his legs in place and, even though his eyes were squeezed shut, I knew he was anxious and uncomfortable.
“Was it really necessary to restrain him?” I asked Shane.
“We’re keeping it authentic,” he replied.
Mr. Pate, the prison historian, scoffed. “Then you shoulda put the blindfold on him like I suggested.”
I ignored him. We’d been Pate’s guests at the Southern State Penitentiary for only three hours, but he’d already managed to completely offend me at least a hundred times. It wasn’t just that he insisted on referring to me as “little lady,” or that he was constantly snorting instead of blowing his nose into a tissue. What bugged me most was that he refused to leave us alone for even a second. He was openly suspicious of me and Shane and Noah, as if he thought we might try to steal something from the nearly barren building. As far as I could tell, the only things left in the abandoned prison were rusty metal bunk-bed frames and hungry rats.
And one antique electric chair.
“How much longer?” I asked Shane.
He glanced at his watch. “A few more minutes should do it.”
On the monitor, Noah swallowed hard. Guilt flared through me and I fidgeted with my bracelet, the one Noah had given me on my birthday. I was the one who had convinced him to come along on this last-minute trip, even though four months ago I’d sworn off ever participating in another investigation. I reasoned that this was not a true investigation, but simply an outing to piece together needed footage. And it was Shane who organized the whole thing.
My family was semifamous because of my parents’ work as paranormal investigators. Mom and Dad spent decades together debunking ghost stories and working under the theory that all hauntings were actually the effects of residual energy manifesting itself in different ways. Their career crossed over into book deals, DVDs and cable-TV specials and made all five of us—Mom, Dad, me, my older sister, Annalise, and our longtime cameraman, Shane—into dependable fixtures during Halloween TV marathons. I thought it would always be that way. It had never occurred to me that the Silver family would change the way we had—suddenly, and soaked in blood.
Four months earlier, Mom had been attacked in our home by a strange entity calling itself the Watcher. The head trauma she’d suffered had left her in a deep coma and doctors had warned us that even if she woke up, she might never be the same. I knew I had moved past the denial stage of grief, but there were still days when it didn’t feel real. It had only been a week earlier that I had spotted a pair of her worn blue slippers tucked under a computer desk in the living room. I had thought of her sliding them on while she worked, and the way they looked as if they were simply waiting for her to return. I had left them where they were.
My injuries from that night had faded, but my memories had not. I often awoke in the middle of the night, my hand throbbing with a phantom pain. I had wallowed in guilt for months, convinced that everything was my fault, including the death of Marcus, the young man the Watcher had possessed. Mine was the last hand to touch him. Now that hand was scarred and Marcus was dead and I felt like a dull photocopy of the person I’d been before it had all happened, someone who was trying to hold on to anything familiar before it shattered into unrecognizable pieces. Because the truth was, I may have stopped the Watcher, but I wasn’t sure if I had destroyed it. I doubted if such a thing could be destroyed, and that thought was enough to make me tremble.
Since the attack, Dad spent most of his time at the care center where Mom had been transferred a month before. He slept on a cot in her room during the week, and came home on weekends. At first, he had said it was a temporary arrangement. But days folded into weeks, and Dad’s computers remained turned off, his files untouched. We all noticed but no one knew what to say, not even Shane, who was like Dad’s brother. I didn’t know what would happen to the Silver Spirits franchise or the hours of video footage that sat, unedited, in our living room.
It was strange to wake up each morning to a quiet house, but even stranger was the absence of anyone sitting at a computer with earphones on, editing footage. There was something so unsettling and somber about those blank computer screens that I tried to avoid the living room completely. It was no longer the heart of our house; instead, it was more like a sort of graveyard, with the monitors serving as tombstones.
One evening, Shane pulled me aside. “I need to complete the DVD your parents were working on before everything happened,” he told me after dinner at Trisha’s apartment. Since their engagement, Shane and Trisha had insisted on hosting a Sunday-night supper every week. I liked it, not just because it gave me a chance to see Noah, but because it provided a rare opportunity to be with Dad, as well.
“Edit the footage,” I told Shane. “Dad won’t care if you come over and use the computers.”
“I need more than that.” Shane downed the last of his red wine—ever since he’d met Trisha, he had given up beer with dinner for a good Cabernet—and looked at me. “I need to go back to that old prison we visited last year. The video I took didn’t come out right. I have to redo it.”
“So redo it.”
“We were supposed to film a reenactment scene. I need Noah to fill in.” He glanced over at Trisha as she set a peach cobbler on the table, then turned back to me. “I need you to convince Noah to help me with this one. He said he’d go only if you were okay with it.”
I refused. There was no way I was dragging my wonderful new boyfriend, the guy who had stood with me during my darkest days and was still by my side, to an old prison where people reported hearing the wails of dying inmates. We’d been through too much, and I wasn’t eager to throw myself again into anything even resembling a paranormal investigation for a long, long time—if ever—and there was nothing Shane could say that would change my mind.
But Trisha could. “I know you’ve been through so much, Charlotte, and the last thing on your mind is stepping into a strange