A Deeper Darkness Read online

  A DEEPER DARKNESS

  By Jamel Cato

  A DEEPER DARKNESS

  Copyright © 2019 Jamel Cato

  All Rights Reserved

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  EPILOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  “Democracy is a sham,” Garrison Peakes said from the guest chair of my office.

  “How so?” I asked.

  “With a few million dollars and a connected publicist, I could make most of the voting public believe whatever I want them to believe. The rest don’t matter.”

  Peakes was white, in his late fifties and possessed of the kind of elitism you develop from spending your summers in the Hamptons. The expensive fresco wool suit he had on was so well tailored it could have been an extension of his skin. He was a Senior Policy Advisor to the President of the United States and a card-carrying member of a political party which had never gotten a vote from me. We hadn’t met before then, but I thought he looked just like he did on TV.

  He had spent the previous half hour pontificating on everything from geopolitics to the rise of Cancel Culture.

  “The Tyranny of the Majority,” I said.

  There are three kinds of smiles. Genuine smiles convey warmth and pleasure. There are also disingenuous smiles which communicate annoyance or impatience. Then there are predatory smiles like the one Peakes gave me after I unexpectedly quoted a famous socio-political epithet. It’s the smile of a hunter when a deer doesn’t flee or the boxer when a punch-drunk opponent gets up from the mat.

  “The will of the People can never be called Tyranny, Mr. Tiptree.”

  I could think of only one reason he would pay me a visit. “Are you looking for a ghost or hiding from one?”

  “I’m here seeking what everybody wants: the truth.”

  “The truth about what?”

  “Serenity Blakemore.”

  My poker face is usually pretty good, but it betrayed me just then.

  * * *

  A forty-three-year-old white woman from West Virginia was disrupting American politics the way the Internet had disrupted the newspaper business. She had never attended college, but she could speak with impressive authority on virtually any topic. She had founded a wildly successful nonprofit organization which improved the environment and created thousands of jobs throughout Middle America by transitioning former coal miners to the booming beekeeping industry which rose in the wake of the revolutionary breeding and pollination techniques she co-developed. She spoke four languages. She was beautiful and photogenic. Her rousing speeches brought crowds to their feet. And she was running for President as an independent.

  Her name was Serenity Blakemore.

  * * *

  I chose my next statement carefully. “I think you are talking to the wrong man.”

  “We both know that’s not the case,” Peakes said.

  “I have no interest in politics. Even if I did, I don’t think I could help you.”

  He retrieved two folders from his briefcase and placed them on my desk. “Take a couple of days and think it over. I’ll be in touch.”

  Eve, my friend and assistant who was literally a ghost, floated through the wall as soon as Peakes left my office. “I don’t like this.”

  “I thought you said you like old, rich guys.”

  She eyed me. “I said I thought a distinguished man can be just as attractive as a handsome man.”

  “I heard money was the difference between old and distinguished.”

  “No, it’s the difference between distinguished and you.”

  “That’s not what the strippers tell me.”

  “The only things a stripper can truly tell a man is that buying someone’s attention is not the same thing as genuine companionship and something sad happened when she was a little girl that made her put her companionship up for sale.”

  I knew when I was outclassed. “What do you think Peakes really wants with me?”

  “He wants you to reaffirm his worldview by proving Serenity is not what she seems to be.”

  “And the fact that he specifically asked me to do that doesn’t make you wonder?”

  “It makes me wonder just how desperate they are.”

  “Me too.”

  “What are you going to tell him? You can’t just say no.”

  I glanced down at the folders Peakes had left behind. I didn’t need to open them. One would be a threat to ruin me and the other would be a threat to ruin the people I cared about. “I’m going to ask him how high he wants me to jump.”

  “I figured. I’ll have our business records pulled out of storage and ask Mitchell to recommend an accountant experienced with IRS audits so we’ll be ready when you tell him you didn’t find anything.”

  “An IRS audit will be the least of my problems if I tell him that.”

  “Only for a year.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Serenity will be President by then.”

  “If she wins.”

  “Not if, when.”

  I’d rarely seen Eve express the kind of enthusiasm she had consistently shown for Serenity’s candidacy. The hope it engendered in her and millions of others was the main reason I’d never mentioned the unusual aural energy I saw whenever I looked at photos or videos of the candidate. Maybe it was just residual energy from a high concentration of ghosts congregating nearby. The political wunderkind charmed them as easily as she did everyone else.

  Maybe.

  CHAPTER 2

  I placed a call to Arthur Carini, the Executive Director of the National Association of Paranormal Researchers. Art was based in DC and always had his finger on the pulse of the political world, thanks to the storied lobbying practice he had before his house was haunted by the ghost of Thomas Jefferson.

  After pleasantries, I asked him what he could tell me about Garrison Peakes.

  “Not much,” Art said. “I’ve seen him at the Kennedy Center a few times, but we don’t move in the same circles. I heard he’s whip smart.”

  “Okay. Couldn’t hurt to ask.”

  “Sorry I couldn’t be more helpful. How’s Darlene?”

  “Still my better half.”

  “Give her my regards. Can we still count on V Shades to sponsor our convention this year?”

  “Send Eve the paperwork.”

  “Will do.”

  After I ended the call, I turned to Eve and said, “Clear my calendar the rest of
the day. Art is on his way here. He says Peakes is extremely dangerous and the Government is recording our calls.”

  “On it,” she said. “What about your appointment with Darlene? Do you really want to move that?”

  “No,” I said, rising to leave. “I’ll go see her now and try to make it back about the same time as Art.”

  If my ex-wife went through the trouble of having Eve put an appointment on my calendar, that meant it was important.

  “Preston,” Eve said before I stepped out the door.

  “Yes?”

  “I know you think I’m just drinking charisma flavored Kool-Aid when it comes to what Serenity represents for America. I’m sure that’s part of it, but I’m just as sure that’s not all there is to it. She evokes something in me that I’m convinced was a central part of my physical life. Something that had to do with giving everyone the chance to lead their best lives.”

  Eve was suffering from After Death Amnesia, a mental condition that prevented ghosts from remembering salient facts about their lives. I was helping her overcome it. So far, we had determined that she had been a wealthy Caucasian woman from the Middle Atlantic region of the United States with equestrian interests. Given her speech patterns and familiarity with certain historical events, we think she died sometime during the 1960s. Just about everything else was still a mystery.

  “I think you know yourself better than anyone else,” I said. “If Serenity Blakemore can help you deepen that knowledge, then she has my vote and my gratitude. Let’s follow that thread down the rabbit hole and see where it leads us.”

  “What if it leads me to the truth that I need to finally move on to the next Plane?”

  “I’ll be sad to see you go, but happy to see you fulfilled. I’ll escort you to the Border with bells on.”

  She smiled warmly. “Thank you.”

  CHAPTER 3

  I made the fifteen-minute drive from my office in West Philadelphia to the wealthiest zip code in Pennsylvania.

  Darlene Tiptree, my ex-wife, lived in Gladwyne, a leafy suburb that was renowned for old money and even older elitism. Just a few decades ago, an African American like her would have been unable to find a local homeowner willing to sell to her. But that was then. These days, thanks in no small part to our eight-figure divorce settlement and her stunning looks, she had regular brunches with her next-door neighbor, a sixty-four-year-old scion of the Sunoco oil empire.

  Manford Joseph Pew couldn’t get enough of Darlene’s Southern accent and sharp business mind. Darlene told me Manford claimed to have made a fortune after following her advice to short sell Comcast stock before cord cutting became a trend. This had made for a few awkward cocktail parties with Comcast’s CEO, who lived a few houses over.

  When Darlene opened her front door, I said, “I love what you did with the antennas. You can barely tell they’re there.”

  She stepped out and looked toward an exquisite topiary garden near the property line with the Pew estate.

  “The shrubs are growing in nicely,” she said. “I suppose I owe you for that.”

  I smiled. “You can pay me with sex.”

  “I’ll pay you by not having my divorce lawyers do an annual audit of your V Shades contract that would be guaranteed to increase your alimony payments.”

  “The word divorce is a turn off.”

  “Then I’ll never have to guess if you have a gun in your pocket.”

  “Trust me, you won’t have to guess.”

  The stinging reply I was certain I was about to receive was preempted by a bright smile and an animated wave.

  I turned in the direction she was looking and saw her neighbor grinning and waving back from his private tennis court.

  I smiled and waved too.

  Manford scowled at me and turned away. The philanthropist thought Darlene was the bee’s knees, but he did not care for me. I was pretty sure his dislike was due to whatever Darlene had told him about why she had divorced me. Sadly, this could have been any number of things. I had committed adultery, regularly stayed out all night and occasionally came home accompanied by captured supernatural creatures who got their revenge by telling my wife things that totally violated the Bro Code.

  Despite all that, Darlene and I were still friends. Manford and few others would ever know why that was so. “I know you didn’t call me out here to admire your shrubs.”

  “Let’s go inside.”

  “I need your help,” she said.

  We were seated together on a love seat in her living room.

  I moved closer to her. “What is it?”

  “Byron is missing.”

  I frowned and moved away. Byron Sturdivant was Darlene’s boyfriend. He was cultured, educated in the Ivy League and attentive in ways that I was not. Manford had introduced them. He knew Byron from being on some nonprofit board with Byron’s father, the wealthy black founder of the Philadelphia Coca Cola Bottling Company.

  “Call the cops,” I said coldly.

  “It’s complicated.”

  When the words complicated and cops are mentioned in the same conversation, you weren’t discussing a Boy Scout powwow. And when the people doing the mentioning were as rich as Byron and Darlene, there was a problem that could not be solved by hiring an expensive lawyer.

  Instead of empathizing, my jealousy made me stand and say, “Then call his people. Or call a pastor. Call anybody but me.”

  I stomped away.

  “Preston, wait” she meekly called at my back.

  When I got in my car, a ghost named Joya was hovering in my passenger seat. She always appeared as an elegantly dressed woman in her late fifties.

  “I’m not in the mood,” I snapped.

  “Okay,” she said simply.

  We sat in silence for a few minutes.

  “Darlene is disrespecting me,” I finally said.

  “Disrespecting you or hurting you?”

  “Disrespecting me.”

  “I remember this one year my in-laws didn’t want to invite somebody’s new girlfriend to Thanksgiving. They said she was too fat, too dark and too poor to set foot in their house. And she had extensions in her hair. They were convinced this woman was a social climber trying to weasel in on their money and class. I didn’t say anything at the time, but looking back on my life, I regret not calling them out on their ugliness. I wish I had told them that true class is the ability to respect the dignity in anyone, even people who you think are undeserving of it.”

  “Did the girlfriend come over for Thanksgiving?”

  “I came over and married Ben a year later.”

  After I went back inside and found Darlene, I asked, “What’s going on with Byron?”

  CHAPTER 4

  “Do you like smoothies?” I asked Art when I got back to my office.

  He patted his ample stomach. “What do you think?”

  On the walk to the juice bar, he gave me an insider’s crash course on current political power inside the Beltway.

  Garrison Peakes was the scheming architect of Roman Davidson’s meteoric rise from the mountains of Kentucky to the Oval Office. People in the know joked about tripping on one of Peakes’s puppet strings if you walked too close to the President.

  House Speaker Carol Schmidt received guidance from her Chief of Staff, a cunning strategist named Jasmine Perry. They said Perry had the best BBR Index in DC.

  “What’s a BBR?” I asked.

  “Brains, Beauty and a Rolodex,” Art explained.

  Both Peakes and Perry were gravely concerned about the threat posed by Ashley Gilbride, Serenity Blakemore’s shrewd and confident campaign manager.

  “What’s Gilbride’s BBR Index?” I sagely inquired like I hadn’t just learned the term minutes earlier.

  “Off the charts for someone under forty,” Art said. “What scares the establishment types is that it’s mostly brains with almost no Rolodex. It’s like she came out of nowhere. That doesn’t happen. There are dues and then there are Dues. Most of
the big donors, pollsters and State Committee chairs won’t return your calls unless they’ve known you for at least ten years.”

  One thing had me confused. Roman Davidson and Carol Schmidt were in opposing political parties. “I thought Davidson and Schmidt were enemies.”

  Art laughed. “When the microphones are off, there’s only one party. It’s called Power.”

  By the time we walked into Her Majesty’s Nectar, I was beginning to wonder if Democracy was indeed a sham.

  The Nectar was an upscale juice bar owned and operated by a forty something British ex-pat named Stanella Dane.

  “Fancy seeing you twice in one week,” she said to me when we approached the counter.

  “I can’t get enough of you,” I said.

  “That’s what all the blokes say until I come free of my knickers.”

  “When the Sun is up, I’m only interested in your blender.”

  “Are you having the usual?”

  “No, actually I’ll have A Hairy Mother with a side serving of Zeus Juice.”

  She raised a brow. “Are you about to run a marathon or something?”

  “You could say that.”

  She turned to Art. “What about you?”

  “I’ll take a hot blonde with a side of compassion,” he teased.

  She laughed. “If we served that, I would only need to open one day a year.”

  “Newcastle, right?” Art asked.

  “Pardon?”

  “That’s a Geordie accent if I’m not mistaken.”

  “Spent some time across the Pond have you?”

  “Before I got a mortgage and lost the wonderment of my youth, I explored what the world has to offer. Her Majesty’s subjects left me with the best memories of my life.”

  Stanella used her index finger to push an errant strand of hair back behind her ear. “What sort of memories?”

  “The kind the two of you can discuss later,” I said. “My friend will have a Kale smoothie with a quarter serving of Honey Have You Lost Weight?”