Ashes to Ashes (Experiment in Terror #8) by Karina Halle Page B

least the show will push the parents to make the move
happen.”
    “ You do
realize that we aren’t ghost whisperers,” Dex said sternly. “Perry
and I, we just see them. Our job isn’t to fix anything, it’s just
to record it, report it.”
    “ Like batshit
journalists,” I filled in. “Hacks. But we don’t banish anyone or
anything.”
    Except for
that one time , I thought back to The
Benson. I had to say that felt pretty good.
    “ I know that,”
she said, and for once her expression wasn’t so jovial. “I’m just
getting tired of this. And desperate. Please, you have to believe
me.”
    Rebecca walked over to a chair
and pulled it out. “Here, love. Why don’t you sit down and we’ll
start getting to the bottom of this.”
    Brenna smiled gratefully and
took a seat. “Okay. We have about an hour until my next class, but
I should be able to wrap it up by then. If I start wasting footage,
just let me know.”
    Dex quickly got the camera set
up and I pulled up a chair next to Brenna, feeling like a chump in
my hoodie. Rebecca put wireless mics on the two of us and we got
started.
    I asked Brenna to go back to
the beginning, from when she first started at the school. She’d
only been hired at the start of the semester. The last teacher quit
and no one really knows why. One day she had a nervous breakdown
and resigned. According to her student Jody, it was someone called
Shawna that made the teacher leave. Brenna said she eventually
found out who Shawna was, along with Elliot. Both of them Jody
described as her imaginary friends. When teaching first graders,
imaginary friends weren’t normal but they weren’t that uncommon,
either.
    “ At first,”
she said, “the only odd things that happened were just Jody talking
about Elliot and Shawna as if they were real people. Often children
with imaginary friends still know that they are imaginary. But Jody
acted like they were as real as her other classmates. Only…” she
trailed off, her brow furrowing. “Only Shawna wasn’t someone that
Jody liked…Jody feared her. That was another thing I found odd –
I’d never heard of an imaginary enemy before.”
    “ Not unless
the kid is batshit crazy,” Dex commented. I shot him a dirty look
to which he shrugged.
    She nodded. “I know. But Jody
seemed well-rounded. And then when her classmate Kyle started
talking about Elliot, I knew something was happening. They weren’t
messing with me, either. I’m pretty quick to see through children’s
games.” She paused to look us each in the eye, playing with the
timing of the story like a good teacher would do. “Then, I saw
Elliot for myself.”
    I sucked in my breath as she
continued.
    “ It was back
in February, a month after I started. A huge snowstorm had set in
on the coast, which was unusual. We get a lot of bad storms here
throughout the year, but snow was rare. And so the power went out
at the school and the kids were all sent home around noon before
the snow really got going. We have a generator here but Davenport
was worried about the roads becoming impassible.”
    I’d been given a ride in by my
boyfriend because his car was the only one with four-wheel drive
and so I was waiting for him to pick me up, just hanging out in the
teacher’s lounge with a few other staff and watching the storm blow
in. When the last staff member left, my boyfriend called to tell me
he was about fifteen minutes away. I went back to my classroom to
make sure everything was okay and that the lights wouldn’t come
blazing on when the power returned. At that time, my classroom felt
safe to me. The rest of the building, with the wind shutting open
doors and howling through the halls, made my hair stand right
up.”
    Finally, when I thought I
should be waiting outside, I left the classroom and walked back
down the hall. Suddenly the air turned as cold as ice, as if the
storm itself had reached inside, and I heard a kick and the sound
of a ball bouncing after me. I turned around