Lancaster Green Chapter 2
He’d been doing this work for over fourteen years now. A month away shouldn’t be throwing him off his game like this, especially if James was going to try to convince himself that it was just the month away that was the problem, not everything that had happened before then. Now he was in the hideous mustard-colored team van with Amelia, her driving as he stared out the window at the familiar streets. They remained just as familiar as they drove out of Leominster and into Lancaster, the slightly smaller and far more rural old town next door.
Lancaster was old, with towering trees and acres of conservation land dotted with marshes and pines. The houses were old, the farms were old. It was rustic and beautiful in a way he’d taken for granted as a kid. James had spent the first eighteen years of his life in Lancaster, surrounded by his family, before going to college down in Connecticut. After that, he’d only moved as far away as Leominster.
Connecticut wasn’t all that far, just a state away while some of his friends moved to entirely different countries for college. But it had still seemed too far sometimes when he was there. James would find reasons to come home on the weekends, often dragging his boyfriend, Owen, home with him, trying to play up the whole “autumn in New England” vibe as though they didn’t go to school in New England. When everyone else was talking about moving to New York City after college, including Owen, coming home had been a relief.
He’d been excited at the idea of possibly going to other Foundation branches in more exciting or far off parts of New England. But once the disappointment had worn off and he’d found a grungy little apartment in Leominster with a high school friend, James had realized this was where he was supposed to be.
And he’d been about to move to Ohio. Ohio. Were his parents even going to stay there now that they’d moved? They seemed to love it so far, so maybe they would. But he wouldn’t have. And if he had decided to move away and join them, he’d have to tell them why. He’d have to tell them what had happened to him and what he’d tried to do. And how would his mother possibly look at him the same way after he told her?
He had to tell them eventually. James and his parents were too close for him not to do so while still maintaining a relationship with them. He just had to figure out how.
He felt nauseous as they turned off Route 117 and onto a winding road flanked by fields of brown grass and well-kept farmhouses. There was a brewery down here that had always looked nice, and he’d kept meaning to go there. And maybe he would someday, though it’d be easy enough for them to put anything in the food and serve it to someone. Which was the point of a restaurant, yeah, but it also meant he could get controlled again. No one knew where Adele had gone. She could be anywhere.
“Nice area,” Amelia said. “I always forget how beautiful it is over here.”
James hummed in absent agreement. His elementary school was a few streets from here, North Lancaster Elementary. No one had sealed a ghost inside that one the way they had with Madelyn’s, but it was an old town, so the school was probably haunted anyway. It didn’t need additional help from the Foundation on that.
Everywhere here was haunted. Gran’s house was on the other side of Lancaster and Auntie Ruthie’s was just a mile down the road from her sister’s. And even though he’d never seen anything there, James’s childhood home was a renovated, freestanding condo in an old farmhouse with a few other buildings on the same lot. It was probably haunted by ghosts that were just begging James to shut off his terrible music as a seventeen-year-old.
Unless his music was drowned out by his mother’s. He could picture her perfectly from when he was a kid, blasting The Who in the kitchen as she cooked dinner, her large body moving gracefully to the music before she noticed teenage James watching and pulled him in for a dance. She was the musician in the family, more creative than James and his father by far and she always had music going. So she was probably the ghosts’ main problem.
Lancaster Green appeared over the crest of a small hill, modern and comfortable while still fitting into the landscape, where it was nestled beside a small lake and an open field. They pulled into the parking lot and Amelia checked her phone. “Usual deal,” she said. “Interviews and cameras. We’ll do them both together, alright?”
He’d have rather done the cameras and left all the talking to her. But even though he was in charge of the case, James knew that option wasn’t going to slide today. So he nodded and got out of the car.
The April air was warm, even if the wind was sharp. Across the street, the lake’s surface rippled with waves and the dock bobbed just slightly where it connected to the shore. There were a few boats docked there and a man was scrubbing the side of one of them as a couple seagulls targeted the Dunkin Donuts bag on the dock behind him. On their side of the street, the two-story facility’s grounds spread back further into rolling meadow that ended where the tree line began. There were other buildings back there, but they were small, clearly meant for maintenance and storage. And James knew that those trees connected with the nature conservation land that spread throughout the town.
He took a deep breath, looking up at the dizzying blue of the cloudless sky above them. “Alright,” he said to Amelia. “Let’s do interviews first, then we’ll figure out the best places for the cameras.”
They had one working comms unit on them for the moment. Apparently the Foundation had attempted and failed to repair one of them, but sent two over that had been due earlier in the year. So they were up a pair, but down overall. Which was the usual approach with everything that the Foundation tried to do, so James wasn’t surprised.
“Here, you take the comms,” Amelia said, handing it to him. “I’ll call and just stay on my phone with Bradley when it’s time to do the cameras.”
James strapped the comms unit to his chest and turned it on. It let out a sharp, ugly beep and vibrated against his chest in a slightly unpleasant way. “What the fuck?” he murmured, looking down at it.
“Isn’t it awful?” Amelia asked cheerfully. “It’s supposedly more sensitive and cuts the feedback. And can be used in the woods, but we’ve already proven that wrong. Graham had it in the state forest the other day and it cut out pretty much the second he stepped off the trail. I thought Bradley was going to drive out and find him himself. It took about ten minutes to get him back online, and he called during that time, so everything was fine, but…”
She shrugged with another slightly uneasy smile. James knew they’d done cases, they’d done a lot of cases while he was gone. And people had stepped in from other branches, but no one had really given him any details. He hadn’t asked much, but he could tell they were hesitant to tell him. And not because they worried he’d share their secrets, like he’d been afraid of before he left. No, this was clearly protective. And it chafed, but he got it.
He’d been gone a month. A blurry, horrible month after a far too clear week, even with the medication and missing memories. But he’d been away for a full month and so much had happened. Even since he’d been back, they’d been doing more than before. Were they still catching up on cases that had fallen to the side?
No, it didn’t matter. He wasn’t going above and beyond for this place anymore.
When they got inside, the interior seemed dated despite the modern exterior and the renovations that had driven his parents nuts. The reception desk was across from the front door and as the doors slid open, the receptionist lit up. “Thank you for coming!” she said, hurrying out from behind the desk and across the empty lobby. “Mrs. Rankin saw it again and she’s scared. She’s so sweet and she doesn’t have much time left, I don’t want her spending any of it scared.”
She was young, maybe twenty-three, with huge blue eyes and curly red hair tied back in a springy ponytail. “Are you Belinda O’Donnell?” Amelia asked, then glanced almost guiltily at James.
“No, sorry, she’s my manager,” the woman said. “I’m Jenny. Hang on, I’ll get her.”
She hurried back behind the desk and disappeared through a door. As they waited, James looked around the front lobby. Cozy chairs, a gas fireplace, and a bookshelf comfortably filled the space beyond the desk. He moved closer to the bookshelf, just out of curiosity. It held a combination of worn romance novels, horror novels, and some self-help books, all clearly donated.
“I’ve got a stack of books at home I need to get rid of,” Amelia said as she joined James. “Maybe I’ll see if they want them.”
They shared a love of gory, pulpy horror novels for reasons unknown, considering what they did for work. James nodded and kept going. Beyond the bookshelf, there was a water cooler and a small wicker basket full of snacks.
“We should test the water,” James said softly.
“Yeah, okay,” Amelia said, her voice a little more gentle than usual before she moved to the window.
The snacks too. They appeared to be wrapped, but that didn’t matter. If someone had drugged them, then the people might be seeing the same hallucination. Hadn’t…
James took a shuddering breath. Hadn’t Adele done that? A whole group seeing ghosts after going to the wellness fair?
He took another breath, staring at the apple cinnamon granola bar at the top of the basket. “We can test them, but it’s unlikely,” Bradley said through the comms, and James jumped.
“Yeah, of course,” he said, hoping he sounded more normal than he felt, and also pretty sure he hadn’t mentioned the snacks out loud. “Yeah, just a possibility.”
“Right.”
He forced himself away from the snack station and went back to the desk, where Jenny had brought her boss, a woman about sixty or so with short black hair, out to see them.
“Thank you for coming out,” she said, holding out a hand to shake. “I’m Belinda.”
“James McManus,” he said, forcing himself to shake her hand and hold on for more than a second as she glanced at his gloves, but said nothing. “And my captain, Amelia Cohen.”
It felt weird, but he’d chosen it this way. So he looked around while Amelia shook Belinda’s hand.
“Can you tell us your side of what’s going on?” James asked.
“Of course,” Belinda said. “Let’s find somewhere quiet to talk.”
She led them through a small door that led into a little rec room. It was empty, but there were a couple couches, two recliners, a small table stacked with board games, and a TV. The room was warmly decorated and the sun poured in through the windows lined with healthy looking plants.
“It’s only been the past five months,” Belinda said as they sat down at the table. “And at first we thought that maybe it was hallucinations. We have a lot of residents here who are in their last months, and as the body goes through the process of death, people often hallucinate. This is especially true when they are ill or on various medications.”
She neatened the figures on a chess set sitting between them. “The first one was Angela Joseph,” she said. “She was ninety-three, dying from stage four cancer. So when she said she was seeing shadowy figures floating around her room, we chalked it up to the morphine. And people say that a lot. They see loved ones, shadow figures, things like that before they pass on.”
What would the others have seen if James killed them? He looked at Amelia, who was nodding as she listened intently. What would she have seen in those last seconds before James took her life at twenty-six years old?
“And then Regina McBride started reporting something similar in the next room. But the thing was, she wasn’t dying. So when she said it, we thought it was disease or dementia. She was insistent that there was a dark cloud in her room at night. And then she had a stroke two days later and died.”
Was this thing causing the deaths? Or was it simply attracted to death? Would Bradley have seen something like that if James had shot him? Or would it have just been lights out? With either no idea what James had done, or one final view of him pulling the trigger.
Why did he think coming back here was a good idea?
“So then some of the staff started talking about the possibility that it was a ghost,” Belinda continued, oblivious to James’s internal torment, though Amelia clearly wasn’t as she glanced over at him. “And they talked to each other and it kind of spread. And so of course the residents knew as well. And some of them got really scared, to the point where one left. Her son came to pick her up and he wasn’t thrilled with us, but we didn’t hear anything from him after that. And my first thought was to have someone come in and pretend to cleanse it. I know-” Belinda held up her hands. “I know, it’s stupid and dismissive, but what else was I going to do? People die in these communities. We try to make it as pleasant as possible, but people are far more likely to die here than they are to leave and go home.”
Madelyn would never have made it home that day if James had his way. His heart was racing and he tried to remain focused. They all told him to move on and he was. But he needed a moment alone. “Excuse me, just a moment,” he said, knocking into the table and rattling the chess figures as he stood. “Where’s the restroom?”
“Out this door, to the right.”
“Thank you.”
He heard Belinda continuing to speak to Amelia as he hurried out of the room and into the silent lobby. Jenny glanced over at him from behind the desk, but he saw the little bathroom and went straight in before she said anything.
James splashed water on his face, the cold water not quite cold, but bracing enough to break the fog a little. He did it a second time, spitting out the water that got in his mouth, then dried off with a rough paper towel before checking his reflection in the mirror.
He didn’t look great. He’d lost weight over the past month and now his eyes seemed to have permanent dark circles around them and his lips were always chapped. And he looked tired, which made sense because he really only slept if he got himself high enough to actually fall asleep. Otherwise, he’d lay awake most of the night, thinking about everything that had happened, everything he’d done or almost done to the people he cared about. Then he’d get up, force himself through the day, and try not to wish he was dead.
He was wearing a turtleneck that pressed uncomfortably against his throat, but covered more than his usual flannel shirts. And his dirty-blond hair needed a cut badly. It had already been a little too long before everything happened. But then Adele had told him not to cut his hair so that she could hide an anchoring bead in it, locking him under her control.
Maybe he should just cut it himself. Even now, he tugged a lock of it back from his face and considered.
“Do you want to come back and do comms and I’ll take the interview?”
Bradley’s voice came out of the comms unit he’d completely forgotten about and James barely managed not to scream. “No,” he said, his heart racing. “No, I’m fine.”
“Yeah, you look fine.”
His sarcasm was pointed and James was tempted to take him up on what he knew was a legitimate offer underneath the scorn. “I can do it,” James said with a half-smile into the mirror. “I have to.”
“No you don’t, but fine,” Bradley said. “And don’t get the comms wet, they’ll never send us a new one.”
“Right, sorry.”
He took another look in the mirror and let out a deep breath. “Do I look okay?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
James would believe it for now.
