It was exactly noon when Gabriella pulled into the driveway at work, squeezing her car in behind Amelia’s. She’d thought she left with plenty of time, but construction on the back roads coming back into Massachusetts had proved her wrong and she’d been worried about getting here on time. Not that she was going to get in trouble for being five minutes late, but she didn’t want to be late after having a full day and the morning off, something that didn’t happen often. So she pulled in, turned off the car, and rushed into the building.

“I’m here,” she said quickly as the front door closed behind her.

Gabriella kicked off her shoes, then hurried up the stairs. “Sorry, I left with plenty of time and-”

She paused at the entrance to the living room. James was sitting on the couch and Amelia was in the chair with her back to Gabriella. Another man she didn’t know was sitting on the couch beside James as the three of them talked in low tones. They all looked up as she walked in.

“Hey Gabs,” James said. “Come on in. Oh, you two haven’t met yet. This is my cousin, Gabriella. Gabriella, this is Father McEnerney.”

Gabriella blinked at the young man with short black hair who stood up to shake her hand. He wore all black and a Roman collar, but that still didn’t connect with the idea she’d had in her head of an ancient, wizened Catholic priest.

“H-hi,” she said, trying to get over her shock before anyone noticed. “Um, nice to finally meet you.”

“You too,” Father McEnerney said with a smile. “I’ve heard good things about you.”

He couldn’t have been older than thirty-five, forty at the most. And even that was pushing it with such a young-looking face. He gave her a firm handshake, then sat back down as Gabriella took one of the chairs from the computer bank and pulled it over to join them. She tried not to stare as Father McEnerney sat confidently with the others.

“Father, would you mind starting over so we can catch Gabriella up?” James asked. “I’m going to meet with the others later on, but no one else is on until noon.”

“Of course,” Father McEnerney said. “So as I was telling James, I have a bit of a situation and I’d really rather deal with it discreetly. But I don’t have the skills or resources to do it myself.”

Gabriella had been looking forward to her workout when she got to work, but this had her attention. Leaning forward to make sure she heard everything, she listened politely as the priest continued.

“So an old friend of mine lives out here with her teenage son. This son and his friends decided to play with a ouija board in a cemetery for some Halloween fun.”

James grimaced. Spirit boards came in useful for them sometimes, but as both he and their grandmother had told Gabriella far too many times, they were a menace. Clueless people used them without proper preparation and let in God only knew what.

“So, as you can guess, something went wrong,” Father McEnerney continued. “He says they thought they were talking to one of the boy’s grandfathers. But then the entity manifested around them. They ran off, leaving the board behind and not closing the doorway that they’d opened with the spirit board.”

“So the thing, whatever it is, is still in the cemetery,” James said.

“What did the Foundation have to say about it?” Gabriella asked.

“That’s the thing,” Father McEnerney said. “I’d really rather not bring this to the main branch’s attention. This is a good kid who made a stupid mistake. No one’s been hurt yet and we can prevent anyone from getting hurt at all, I hope.”

“So we’re going to work with the father on the side for a little bit,” James said. “If we can keep the rest of the Foundation from being involved, we will.”

“I really appreciate it,” Father McEnerney said. “And I’ll do everything I can to help. I’m trying to get him to tell me which cemetery it was, but his mother says he’s scared to mention anything else about it or it might come for him.”

Gabriella shivered. “Can it do that?” she asked.

“Well, we’re not sure what we’re dealing with,” Amelia said, and Gabriella immediately felt a little foolish. “But most things that can come through the ouija board are affected by iron. And all the cemeteries in Leominster have iron fences around them.”

“That’s convenient,” Gabriella said.

“Be thankful it was a popular building material,” James said with a laugh. “But most likely, this thing will physically be trapped within the cemetery gates. Which isn’t great, since there are people in and out of them all the time. But it’s better than nothing.”

“I know you have other things to work on,” Father McEnerney said. “And I don’t expect you to get it done right away. I’d much rather deal with it ourselves and have it take a little while, especially if the entity in question doesn’t have the power to hurt people.”

“We’ll figure that out as soon as we can,” James said. “And hopefully we can devote a good amount of time to it. But you know as well as I do how the Foundation is loading us all up with cases lately.”

Father McEnerney laughed, but there was a bit of an edge to it. “Do I ever,” he said. “I’m going straight from here out to Williamstown to bless a college building that was dealing with a particularly bad haunting. I’m not even sure what time I’ll get back to Boston tonight.”

He stood up, and the others followed. “I won’t take any more of your time,” he said, shaking hands with everyone. “I appreciate this a lot. Sadie’s a friend from high school and she’s got enough to deal with without the Foundation upsetting her family.”

“You do enough for us that I’m happy to return the favor,” James said.

A few minutes later, Father McEnerney left and James, Gabriella, and Amelia returned to the living room. “He is not at all what I expected,” Gabriella said.

Amelia laughed. “What do you mean?” she asked as she started reading through something on her phone.

“Maybe I was being stereotypical, but when I think of a Catholic priest, I think of a very old man.”

“Nope, not here,” James said. “Though he’s not affiliated with the Catholic church anymore.”

“Really?” Gabriella asked. “Why not?”

She flinched a little. That was probably a very nosy question. You couldn’t just ask why someone wasn’t a priest anymore. But he still dressed like one and apparently did the work of one, so there must have been a story there. But neither of the others seemed to disapprove of the question.

“I don’t know all the details,” James said. “I know he got hired by the Foundation as sort of a consulting priest. When he officially left the church, they kept him on. You’d have to ask him his reasoning, but I’ve never felt right doing that.”

“I think I can keep my curiosity to myself,” Gabriella said.

“I’ll talk to Bradley when he gets in and see how our schedule is looking for the week,” James said, half talking to them, half thinking out loud. “He’s been helping me set up a more coherent weekly plan since the Foundation seems to be sending cases in lumps. I bet we can find an hour somewhere to visit the city cemeteries and see if any of them fit the case.”

“There’s four of them,” Amelia said, looking up from her phone. “And the kids said they left the ouija board behind when they ran. Grounds crews might have thrown it out by now, but maybe we’ll get lucky and find it without wasting time on other cemeteries.”

Gabriella stayed quiet as the other two started discussing possibilities. A ghost in the graveyard as a Halloween case. She was somewhat familiar with the cemeteries in town, but except for the one Gran was buried in, she hadn’t really been to any of them. She couldn’t remember the name of that particular cemetery either, just that it was big and busy. Outside of the case, she should probably get more familiar with them for her local history research James had her doing on and off in her rapidly disappearing spare time.

She stood up, cringing just a little as the mild hangover from this morning made itself known again. “I’m going to go do my workout,” she said. “Let me know if you need me.”

The other two turned away from their own conversation just long enough to acknowledge she’d said anything as Gabriella picked up her bag and hurried downstairs.

---

She’d been neglecting strength training, so instead of hopping on the treadmill after her warm-up like she usually did, Gabriella headed over to the weight rack. She winced a little as she looked at her reflection. A little puffy from dehydration and bags under her eyes. Not terribly noticeable to anyone else, she was sure. But it definitely reminded her of the eye cream sitting forgotten on her bathroom sink.

There was a certain Foundation-approved weight training routine that she was trying to remember. There’d been cartoons of buff men in short shorts lifting weights and the diagrams were all slightly confusing because the arm movements all seemed a little off. But she couldn’t remember the details, so instead, she pulled up one of the saved routines on her workout app and started it up.

Ouija boards. It had only been a matter of time until she got a ouija board case, hadn’t it? Gabriella had grown up in an entirely ouija board-free environment. Her grandmother strictly forbade them in the house, so during the years Gabriella and her mother had lived in the rambling old home, she’d never touched one. This caution had spread to all of the relatives, so nobody else had them either. Maybe some of the cousins had played with them at some point, but she didn’t remember there ever being a thing or hearing any gossip about things going wrong, so they must have done it correctly or at least been far away from Gran.

Gabriella had been at a sleepover party once where they’d brought out a ouija board. She’d been thirteen years old and so excited that the girls in her English class had invited her to the birthday party. As the girl from the big, weird family in town, she had never really been close with anyone at school and was excited to finally start to fit in with the other girls. It had been fun up until midnight, when the hostess pulled out a Parker Brothers ouija board in a beat-up box. The other girls had giggled and hesitated, but ultimately joined her around the board with their fingers on the planchette.

Gabriella, on the other hand, had fled to the bathroom and stayed there far too long, debating what to do. She’d been so torn between joining in and feeling accepted by the group or avoiding the obvious dangers the innocent-looking ouija board had offered as she looked at it. Finally, on the cusp of a panic attack, she’d called her mom on her pre-programmed cell phone and asked her to come pick her up. Then she’d gone out and told the other girls she wasn’t feeling well and needed to leave.

The girls had been kind about it and her mom hadn’t been mad when she pulled up twenty minutes later. But leaving the party had definitely put a damper on Gabriella’s ability to be close friends with these girls, and she’d always kind of wondered if she’d overreacted. Maybe it had just been a silly kid’s game, and she’d ruined her chances at friendship with them by getting scared and going home.

Ten years later, it was nice to see she had been right not to do it. Now, hopefully, they could help this poor kid get rid of whatever he’d summoned.

---

CONTINUE TO CHAPTER 5