Free Spookygirl - Paranormal Investigator by Jill Baguchinsky Page A

shower drains, too?”
    “Okay, I was exaggerating. But something could be going on, and that’s why you were feeling all that weird stuff. You can’t still think the Frucile-Lucifer thing’s just a coincidence. The name’s obviously made up. Hey!” He stood up, excitedly. “Does your dad still have his old ghost hunting equipment?”
    “I don’t know. I assume he got rid of it. He’s so not into that anymore.”
    “You should find out. And if he still has it, maybe you can sneak some of it into the locker room and see if you find any magnetic fields, or those electric-phenom-thingies—”
    “Electronic voice phenomena,” I said.
    “Yeah, those.”
    “The Ramsay Court investigators didn’t find any EVP.”
    “Then if you get some, you’ll know you might be dealing with a haunting instead of a portal. Either way, holy crap. Palmetto just got a lot more interesting.”
    “No way.” I shook my head. “I’m not going back in that room. That thing didn’t want me there.”
    “Or maybe it did,” Tim said slowly. “You said it was pulling you toward the showers, right?”
    “Yeah.”
    “And Coach Frucile gave you a weird look after that.”
    “She’s given me several weird looks.”
    “So what if the thing in the locker room wants you? What if you’re the next sacrifice?”
    “Tim, that’s so not funny.” Problem was, I wasn’t entirely sure he was trying to be funny at all.
    The thought burrowed into the back of my mind and stayed there. What if he was on the right track, and the reason only I could feel the thing so strongly was because it was focusing on me? Staying out of the locker room seemed smarter than ever.
    But one other thing kept bugging me. Mom wouldn’t have been scared of this. She might have seen it as a challenge, but she wouldn’t have run away. She would have researched and investigated until she figured out what was going on and put a stop to it. Which meant I had to do the same.

CHAPTER SIX
guinea pig poltergeist
     
    Considering how Dad felt about anything ghost-related, I couldn’t very well just ask him about his old paranormal investigation equipment. Instead, I made a list of all the places in the apartment where he might’ve stashed it—and since the apartment was small, my list was short. I didn’t dare snoop through his stuff while he was around, but whenever he was out chauffeuring corpses in the funeral home’s hearse, I hit one of the spots on the list.
    I didn’t find anything in his closet or dresser, or in the storage bins under his bed. There was no equipment hidden in the hall closet or the television cabinet, either. I even searched my own room, hoping he might’ve stored the stuff in a forgotten corner of the closet back when he was using the room as his office. Nothing.
    After I’d exhausted all the possibilities in the apartment, I redirected my hunt and started poking arounddownstairs. Nothing turned up in Dad’s office. I couldn’t get into one of the cabinets in the embalming room, so guiltily, I filched the key from Dad’s briefcase. All I found were jugs of chemicals. There was still the spare room to check, but it was empty except for a couple of coffins—all discontinued floor models. Dad intended to sell them off at a discount, but he hadn’t gotten around to it yet.
    Coffins. Human-sized storage boxes, essentially. The very place to hide those mementos you’d rather forget about…
    I couldn’t have thought of this a little sooner?
    The coffins were dusty, and they showed assorted scratches and dents from the time they’d spent on display. Two were empty. But when I lifted the curved top half of the third coffin’s lid, I found some battered cardboard boxes taped shut and nestled on the faded satin.
Robin
had been scrawled on the top of each box, in thick black permanent ink, in Dad’s handwriting.
    Okay, score. Even though the equipment had been Dad’s specialty, it made sense that he might have packed it away with the rest