Page 15 of The Vampire and the Case of the Perilous Poltergeist

‘Thanks for coming, Aoife.’ I shot her a grateful smile. ‘I really need your help. We have a problem here, a poltergeist that’s started to become violent. I was hoping you could talk with it and see if there’s a way to get it to stop.’ Her stance relaxed and I wondered what she’d been expecting me to ask of her. ‘Can you help?’

She shrugged and I waited. When she opened her mouth I tensed, expecting her banshee wail to unnerve me as it had so many times before. Sure enough, the cold intensified and her screeched words made me want to clamp my hands over my ears. ‘I’ve never met a poltergeist. I cannot promise anything.’

Something about her voice pierced my very soul. ‘I don’t have any other options. Please can you try?’ She gave an abrupt nod and disappeared. I breathed a sigh of relief. Maybe this whole situation could be resolved quickly.

I waited for a few minutes for her to return but she didn’t. I didn’t want to waste the rest of my precious hour so I took my laptop to the library as I’d originally planned. Rather than looking for general information on poltergeists, I decided to see if I could find out anything about this specific one, Petty Peril. I assumed that was a corruption of his true name; Peril may well be his real surname, but I was guessing that Petty was probably Peter or something similar.

I really needed to access the records of staff and past recruits because it seemed likely that someone had died at the academy. Maybe their body was buried here, like Sidnee’s uncle’s victim.

There was no sign of any records in the library – they were probably confidential and locked away in a database – so I sat at my computer and signed into the slow library Wi-Fi. Once I wasconnected, I searched for deaths that had happened in or around the academy during the last few years. Nothing.

I extended the search parameters and finally I found something from thirty years ago.

After a three-day search, a recruit, Petrovich Peril, was found. It appears he had become lost and confused while hiking in the woods and had died of exposure. Our condolences are with the family over this tragic loss. The State Trooper Academy has closed for one day to allow his friends and acquaintances to attend the funeral. The family has requested that flowers and donations are sent to…

This was it, a short, emotionless obituary in the local paper, but at least I had his true name. I’d never have guessed Petrovich, but there was a lot of Russian influence in this part of Alaska so I guessed it made sense.

I filed the information into my memory and checked my watch: my time was almost up. I hurried back to my dorm and put away my computer. As I closed my footlocker, an icy breeze washed over my skin and I looked up. Aoife was hanging in the air next to me. ‘How did it go? Did you have any luck?’ I asked hopefully.

I braced myself for her banshee-wail reply.

‘He is angry. Someone is trying to harm the academy. He is trying to draw attention to it.’

I frowned. Harm the academy? I thought that Thorsen was at risk of harming the academy’sreputation, but although he’d been present at a few of the episodes he hadn’t been attacked – not like Engell. ‘Did he say who? Or what is being done?’ I pressed. Engell dealt with financials and I’d seen the pages of numbers floating around. Could he be embezzling from the academy?

Aoife shook her head. ‘It’s tough for us to communicate, like we are on different frequencies. What I managed to get wasgarbled. He isn’t trying to hurt anyone. He has the academy’s best interests at heart, but someone here doesn’t. That was all I got. You need to find a way to communicate with him because he was reluctant to speak to me.’

‘Thank you, Aoife. Your help has been invaluable.’ I frowned. ‘It’s weird that he’s trying to help when he’s done a lot of damage and someone could have been hurt.’

She shrugged then faded from view. I yelled, ‘Bye, Aoife!’ after her, but I wasn’t sure that she heard – or cared. Still, manners were important.

I thought about what I’d learned because it changed everything. If the poltergeist was trying tohelpthe academy, then who was trying to bring it down? And why?

Something fishy was going on, and I was determined to get to the bottom of it.

Chapter 13

I only had fifteen minutes left of my free hour. I pelted down the stairs at full vampire speed figuring that nobody would see me dipping into my supernat powers whilst they were at PT.

Recruits weren’t allowed in the administrative office but I was hoping that the staff would be busy elsewhere. I glanced in casually and grinned when I saw that the office was empty. So far, so good. I slipped through the casement of the receptionist’s window and went to the TAC officer’s bureau where we’d witnessed Petty’s temper tantrum.

The office was immaculate. We’d helped clean it up but had left most of the organisation to our visiting TAC officer, Captain Engell, who was apparently a neat freak. Everything was precisely so, with nothing extraneous on his desk: he’d gone full minimalist. I bet he only had one book by his bedside at a time and shuddered at the thought.

I checked the time on my phone then started searching. The desk was an old, wooden kneehole design with a long narrow drawer for pens and whatnot, and three sets of drawers down each side. The bottom left and right drawers were locked but I found a likely looking key in another drawer. Bingo!

Predictably, the left-hand file drawer was full of files and they were all financial. I wasn’t surprised since Captain Engell did the academy’s books as well as teaching several classes. Although I wasn’t sure what I was looking at, I took the time to scan-read several of the files, putting them into my memory so I could examine them properly later.

The right-hand drawer was completely empty and there was no sign of dust. That piqued my interest: where were the documents that had resided here? I closed and locked it, then turned my attention back to files in the left-hand drawer. Annoyingly I ran out of time before I ran out of files, so I hurriedly relocked the drawer and sneaked out of the office.

I made it back in time for flag formation. Afterwards I used a little more vamp speed to run upstairs to my room and slug back my blood before hurrying to the cafeteria where I was expected to be for breakfast.

Frustratingly, despite my extra-curricular activities I wasn’t that much further along. I now knew that the ghost was protecting the academy – but I had no idea from what.

I joined my squad with a full breakfast plate. They all looked well rested because they’d used their extra hour to sleep in, the jammy gits. Oh well: I was always tired during the day so the extra hour probably wouldn’t have helped much. I was looking forward to the week of night drills when the schedule flipped and I’d finally get decent day sleep like a good little vampire.

I looked around the room for Sidnee and she gave me a wave. I joined her for class as usual, and we settled down for an in-depth lecture on DV: domestic violence. Fischer himself was givingthe class, which only served to show how important the topic was to the academy. What was surprising – though perhaps it shouldn’t have been – was that DV wasn’t always a man hurting a woman but also vice versa. There was also a huge psychological component to it that I hadn’t really been aware of.

‘From the outside it’s easy to query why the victim didn’t leave their abuser,’ Fischer said. ‘Have you heard of Stockholm syndrome?’ We all nodded. ‘Good. Jones, what is it?’

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