She was shaking so badly that I brushed my hand past hers in hopes that it would calm her down.
She drew in a deep breath, then let it out through her mouth.
“It’s in the basement,” she said. “Come on down, I’ll show you.”
I followed her down, and she led me directly to the “broken” electrical outlet.
Last night, Gentry and I had spoken at length about how today was going to go, and we both decided that from that point forward, he would know nothing about what happened.
I’d agreed with him and had then called Apollo to follow up with him.
His “how the fuck do y’all keep running into nut jobs? This place was supposed to be low key” had started off our conversation. Then we’d ended with “we need to get some eyes in there.”
Which led me to going to buy a new cell phone that I could leave plugged in to act as a hot spot, and a brand new outlet that would also be our source of eyes and ears if this didn’t end how we wanted it to end today.
“That’s it,” she said.
I nodded and got to work, heading to the electrical panel in the back corner of the basement before shutting off the power to everything besides the lights.
You can learn a lot from what an electrical panel looks like. Such as, when you have more breakers than are needed to run a room with only four can lights and eight electrical sockets. If I wasn’t convinced that there was more to the downstairs, seeing that there were four times the number of breakers needed for the space would’ve made me suspicious.
I got to work installing the new camera outlet—something that looked so eerily similar to a real one that it was concerning. When I was done, I “checked” the other outlets, moving a couch out of the way of one to ensure that it was working properly.
While I was down there, I plugged the cell phone into a charger and left it plugged in under the couch. Then moved on to the rest of the room.
I was almost done when my phone rang. “Grant.”
“It’s good,” he said. “And I now have access to their network. I don’t see anything else on the network besides a computer that they know about upstairs. Did you find anything else?”
“No,” I grumbled.
“I think that whatever they have going on is all closed circuit, like I suspected.” He cursed. “Hopefully you can get into that room today.”
But, as if the world had heard Apollo’s words and jinxed us, there was a pounding on the stairs.
“What’s going on here?” a man barked.
I cursed under my breath.
“Oh, Dad,” Eddy said, sounding surprised. “What are you doing home so early?”
“We decided to skip paying for a hotel room for a second night thanks to some teens using the one next to us as a party suite.” He looked suspiciously at me, then Eddy. “What’s going on here?”
His words this time were a whole lot less pissed off. He’d somehow flipped a switch, and now the nice pastor had come out to play.
“I broke off the vacuum plug in the socket.” Eddy pointed at the vacuum, an old, ancient thing. “I think it might’ve given up the ghost. Then it started to smoke, and I freaked out. Cara Humphreys recommended Mr. Grant here. And he came as soon as he could.”
“Got the socket changed over,” I said as I tucked my power tester into my belt. “Everything else in the rest of the sockets look really good. No smoke was visible when I arrived, but I imagine that’s because the vacuum wasn’t drawing any power. You don’t want to be plugging something that ancient in again. The rules and regulations have changed a lot over the years, and they have to pass a whole battery of safety tests before they can be sold. The same can’t be said for vacuums made in the nineties.”
“What’s going on?” a hesitant sounding female voice said from the top of the stairs.
“Your vacuum cleaner kicked the bucket, dear,” Barton Wheeler called out to his wife. “I think it’s time to finally admit you need a new one.”
I looked toward the woman who blushed on command. “Oh.”
“I got the prong stuck in the outlet,” Eddy pointed out as she walked toward them with the old outlet in her hand. “Look.”
“Whoops.” Minnie Wheeler covered her mouth with her hand.
