Page 5

chapter three

They ordered breakfasts, though Meredith thought Bodie ordered enough for three with a Lumberjack Breakfast Combo as well as two breakfast sandwiches and a side of bacon. She picked more modestly—just eggs benedict—while the brothers each ordered egg-white omelets and gluten-free toast.

“Never too soon to worry about heart health,” Jimothy added with a sage nod.

“I remember reading about the son or grandson,” Jimothy said, smacking a hand down on the table with a grin.

“Vietnam, right? He shot his mother, which matched our little ghost last night. He didn’t mean to do it, they said.

Mental illness and drugs, or something like that.

She was trying to take care of him after the war, but he came home with a ton of trauma, and the government basically ignored vets while the community leered at them, so he went whackadoo. ”

“Basically,” Jeremiah agreed, with a vague tilt of his hand in a sort-of gesture. “Kind of a gross summary of events, but anyway, somewhere between when it got built for the good doctor and one of his kids shooting his mother, they nicknamed the house the home of a thousand souls.”

“Sounds dramatic,” Bodie pointed out, happy when his first plates began arriving at the table. Before he dug in, he added, “So far, we’ve seen what? Maybe two ghosts?”

“Yeah, but the story says the house is a ghost trap,” explained Jimothy. “It went from whackadoo doctor's family home to being used as body storage during the Civil War or something, where a bunch of the other ghosts came from.”

“Not body storage,” Jeremiah interrupted in between inhaling his own food.

“The ground was too frozen in winter to bury civil-war dead, so basically, instead of trying to break their shovels digging in frozen earth, they would just pile up the bodies in a house near the cemetery until the ground thawed up again.”

“Gross,” Meredith said, wrinkling her nose.

“One of the stories says there’s a ceiling in one of the rooms with a ghost blood stain, a mark on the ceiling where they stored the bodies above and their fluids soaked through from the attic to be seen from below,” Jimothy added, with a creepy grin.

“No matter how many times it’s been painted, the stain still bleeds through. ”

“Or…” said his brother with far less theatrics and a bored expression, “There’s a hole in the roof somewhere and we’ll find an ungodly large, molded watermark that might fall on us.”

“There’s that, too,” Jimothy agreed with a shrug.

“So, let me get this straight, Jimbobs,” Bodie began.

“Seriously,” Jimothy said with a snarl. “You’ve gotta stop with that. I’ll wear a fucking nametag, if you’re too stupid to tell us apart, but knock it off.”

“I’m honestly not even doing it on purpose at this point,” Bodie admitted blowing out a frustrated breath. “See, that’s what I meant when I said I lost my mojo. I spend so much time playing this character, I don’t even mean half of what comes out of my mouth.”

“So knock it off,” Meredith suggested helpfully.

“You make it sound so simple, like don’t look down,” Bodie said with a sigh. “But it made me so much money being him.”

“I’ll make it plenty simple for you, Bodie,” offered Jeremiah again. “Call us Jimbobs one more time, and they’ll have to cut the footage of one of us punching you in the face because it is well deserved at this point.”

Bodie sighed shaking his head. “Fair enough.”

“You were saying?” Jimothy asked with an elegant wave of his fork.

“We’ve got some lady who looks fairly new there, from what I saw by the fire,” Bodie began.

“I’m betting that was our last owner,” Meredith suggested, nibbling the end of a piece of toast Jimothy passed her with jam thoughtfully. “You know, the hoarder who filled the place up with stuff.”

“It probably isn’t all her stuff,” Jimothy said. “I mean, if we’re assuming someone agoraphobic owned it last, which would fit the state of disrepair of the estate, she likely started with a pretty good stash of the previous owners’ stuff and then added on to it.”

“From what I heard,” Jeremiah inserted, “And this was just some sloppy internet sleuthing rather than me doing a true deep dive, so take it as a grain of salt, but anyway, no one actually ever moved out. So theoretically, we have stuff all the way back to the 1800s or something, or at least the possibility of it, in this trash pile.”

Meredith considered it, taking a long sip of her coffee.

“We should hire an estate auctioneer, or someone to sell stuff on the internet auction sites for us while we’re doing this,” she suggested finally.

“That would mean sharing our cut,” Jimothy said. “If we work together, we split the cut at the end, possibly even the sale of the house, and go our separate ways with enough money to buy some other place.”

“We would have to agree to that in advance, though,” Jeremiah pointed out. “Preferably away from cameras.”

“I’m in,” said Bodie easily. “A ghost trap won’t scare me off, since it likely just means more promotional opportunities moving forward and increased viewership.

I can only see money there. I disagree with hiring someone, though.

I’m good at hands on, or I used to be, before they hired armies of guys to do my work.

I want to work on the actual house, when we get to that point, so I would rather not be our internet sales guy. ”

“I actually would love that position,” Jimothy said with a little finger wiggle.

“I’m great with inventories, know all the best auction sites for finding cheap bags this season…

I can handle auctioning or selling off anything we find as well as running some kind of local sale, I think.

We’ll have a walk-through sale, once we’ve got the place gutted.

There’s a chance ghosts will come out and interact with the people shopping, and we’re talking lots of hits online then. ”

“I would not want to be the one responsible for the home insurance on this place,” Bodie agreed.

Jeremiah held up a hand, ticking off points on his fingertips.

“So, we have Bodie on actual construction and ordering supplies—they go together, right? Okay, and we’ve got Jimothy on selling off the hoard of antiques I’m sure we’ll find among the odious stacks of garbage. Meredith, what’s your specialty?”

Magic, she thought, blowing out a breath, but instead she said, “For now, I can help man the fire pit and sort to dumpsters. Once we get to the remodel, I’m great with style and paint.”

She could do a whole lot better if they let her wiggle her wand and complete a room in a second, but she didn’t figure the cameras would let her get away with doing that…much.

“Fantastic,” Jeremiah said. “As you noticed, I’m good with organizing, so aside from being point person for everyone else to go to when things go wrong, I’m going to try to handle the ghost situation and keep us in constant dumpsters.”

“That is going to be a job unto itself,” warned his brother.

“I’m aware,” Jeremiah said with a sigh.

Just then, the bell above the door jangled as a harried looking Slater stumbled into the room, a camera flopping on his shoulder. “You guys are supposed to let us film you at all times,” he said in greeting, panting between words. “We’ve missed, like, an hour of footage.”

“Oops,” said Meredith, utterly unrepentant.

“Do you have a cat now?” Slater asked, tilting his head at her in confusion. “And why is it in the middle of the craft services table swatting anyone who tries to get cheese?”

“I’ll take care of the cat once we’re back at the house,” Meredith said, standing. The guys stood too, Bodie moving to the register to take care of their bill while the rest of them headed toward the cheerful mint green car. “Sorry we freaked you out, Slater. Any other good ghosties since we left?”

“Actually, yes, but I’m not supposed to tell you about it because it would probably freak you out,” Slater admitted, flipping his camera in his hands like a baton as he headed for his car, parked next to theirs. “Want to hear anyway, so you can be super scared?”

“Hit me,” offered Bodie, despite the shiver that tracked up Meredith’s spine.

“It was a weeping woman,” said Slater. “Carmen caught her at the end of her shift. And when she noticed Carmen filming her crying, she stood up and ran at the camera, screaming, her eyes black until she vanished through the wall behind Carmen. Ran right through her, and Carmen said her whole body went to ice like the air was sucked out of her for a second. Great stuff. We’re going to make so much money. ”

“We really are,” Bodie agreed, clapping a hand on his shoulder.

Meredith pulled her phone out of her pocket once she got her seatbelt on and opened her email, not surprised to find that although she missed out on the latest ghost footage, her email got hit again by another flood of offers.

Crossing one leg over the other, she tuned out her companions and decided to agree to a few of the sponsorships and set up a few brand deals while she had the time to herself.

Couldn’t hurt to make a few extra dollars from the publicity, right?

By the next morning, they managed to clear out most of the kitchen, their fire grew to be about ten feet tall, and they all looked more like NASCAR drivers than regular people.

“Did you really take the sponsorship from the weight loss gummies?” Meredith asked as she tended the fire in a branded hoodie when Jimothy brought her out another box.

“Did you look at how much they were offering?” he replied, scowling at her. “I wouldn’t make fun of me, not in those cute fuzzy earbuds, ya furry.”

“I actually like them,” she admitted. “So far, I’ve only accepted deals with brands I actually like or use in my real life. Can you say that?”

She tossed an old catalog into the fire, and it probably weighed nearly fifty pounds between moisture and sheer glossy pages. She followed it with a phone book, watching as both got gobbled up between mattress springs.