What Hides Inside: Bay City Paranormal Investigations, Book 2

bag on the floor, Sam crouched down and rifled through it. “Bo, what do you want me to do?”
“I’d like you to handle notes and the audio recorder, if you don’t mind.” Bo strolled over and stood close enough to make Sam’s pulse speed up. “That way you’ll be better able to concentrate on feeling the place out psychically speaking.”
Sam rose slowly to his feet, slinging his bag over his shoulder again. “You want me to see if I feel what I felt in Oleander House, don’t you?”
“Yes.” Bo held Sam’s gaze, his expression full of concern. “Can you?”
Savagely suppressing the part of him that wanted to scream no , Sam nodded. “Sure, no problem.”
“I’ll take the video,” Cecile said.
With one last half-worried, half-grateful glance at Sam, Bo turned to Cecile. “You don’t have to do video all the time, you know. You’ve become very proficient with the EMF detector.”
“I know. But I was thinking I could let my psychic senses guide how I take video. Like if I get a sudden sense of presence from a certain spot, I can quickly turn the camera to that area. Seconds count when we’re talking about paranormal phenomena, right?”
“Absolutely.” Grinning, Bo squeezed Cecile’s shoulder. “This is one reason I was so glad you decided to accept my offer to work with BCPI permanently. You come up with some fantastic ideas.”
Cecile’s cheeks went pink. “Thanks. I had lots of good reasons to accept.” She smiled fondly at David’s back, where he stood talking animatedly with Dean and Andre.
As if he felt her watching him, David turned around and winked at her. “So, do we have a time limit here or what?”
“No, take whatever time you feel is necessary.” Bo switched on the EMF detector and thermometer, holding one in each hand. “Cecile, go on and start the video.”
Sam heard the soft chime of the camera switching on. Glancing at his watch, he wrote the date and time at the top of a clean notebook page. He turned on the audio recorder and hung it on his belt.
“Saturday, November twentieth, two thousand and four, ten forty-five a.m.,” Cecile said, for the benefit of the recordings. “South Bay High School underground tunnel, South leg.”
“EMF’s steady at three. Temp, eighty-four degrees.” Bo glanced over at Andre, who was doing baseline measurements of his own. “What’ve you got?”
“Same,” Andre answered without looking away from his instruments.
“Are you feeling anything here?” Cecile asked.
“No.” Andre frowned and looked up. “Wait, yes. Kind of. I don’t know, it’s very strange. Just this vague sense of…wrongness, for lack of a better word.”
Cecile was silent, and Sam knew that she was stretching out her own psychic senses, seeing if she could pick up what Andre had. Closing his eyes, Sam did the same. And after a groping moment, he felt it. A jarring sense of something out of place. Similar to what he’d felt in Oleander House, but not exactly the same.
“It’s more focused, isn’t it?” Cecile whispered. “At Oleander House, you got that weird feeling everywhere. I didn’t sense this upstairs. Only here. And it’s very faint.”
“I agree.” Forcing his eyes open, Sam jotted down Cecile’s impressions and his own. A few feet away, Dean scribbled on the extra notepad Sam had given him, presumably writing down what Andre had said. “Let’s try to see if we can pinpoint where this unsettled energy is coming from, okay?”
“Yeah, good idea.” Andre gave him a worried look. “I didn’t feel that intelligence like we felt at Oleander House. Did you?”
“No, not really.” Sam figured it wasn’t really a lie. He didn’t feel that sinister presence here, though he sensed something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. An elusive and uncomfortably familiar vibration in the back of his skull, subsiding as soon as he tried to focus on it.
Don’t jump to conclusions, he reminded himself. Observe, record, and analyze later.
Easier said than done.
Bo started moving slowly down the hallway, sweeping the EMF detector back and forth in a smooth, steady motion as he went. Cecile followed with the camera. Pushing his uneasiness aside and concentrating on keeping his senses open, Sam trailed after them.
It took about forty minutes to cover every inch of the South tunnel between the stairs and the other end. The EMF reading remained steady at a mildly elevated level, but the temperature rose as they went. By the time they reached