Just One More Question

We departed the Jewels exhibit and started assessing the overall situation. The individuals that had earlier been hostages of the gun men had gotten trapped on the ground floor. Somehow all the doors had become locked and they had spent the bulk of the past hour or so looking for a way out. We guessed that Set had done something to prevent their escape but we didn't really know that for sure.

Once Set was gone, the doors reopened and a brave couple ran down the street to the courthouse where there were some on-duty individuals able to help. Soon enough, law enforcement professionals were on the case, collecting stories and evidence while waiting for one of their 'weird happenings' contacts to arrive on the scene and determine if we were saying anything that made sense. The surviving gun men were arrested pending a further investigation.

We were split up in order to make our statements. I pitied the officer that had to talk to Larry. As for me, I and my interviewer found a spot in the corner of the cafe area on the ground floor where I told an earlier edit of this talk. Trust me dear reader, you received a much better performance. By this time it was early Sunday morning and the adrenaline that had kept me moving during our adventure faded, leaving me exhausted and yawning. I made it through the explanation but still could not leave.

Finally Kevin Taylor showed up to judge the supernaturalness of the situation. We've met before and he's well versed in this sort of thing. When he saw I was present he laughed. Had the officers informed him on the phone of my presence, he could have called it immediately and returned to bed. I think he was mostly kidding. He took some readings and gave us a thumbs up. There would be a detailed inquiry that we might need to attend but we were cleared of any suspicion for the moment. We would be able to go home tonight instead of a holding cell.

There was a question that all of us had been asked during our interviews that none of us could answer: Where was this Mr. Thorndyke now? He had disappeared. We had repeated what we'd been told about him by him but that's all we really knew.

Except for Larry.

“I know who he is,” he declared simply.

“Yes, he told all of us that he works here, that's not news,” Harry noted.

“No, I mean, I recognized him,” Larry clarified.

“Really?” Harry checked. Larry nodded. “Well why didn't you say so at the time?”

“It wasn't important then,” Larry declared. “We were already listening to what he had to say.” He started walking away from us. After a few steps he turned, saw that we weren't following him and gestured grandly for us to follow. So we did.

Larry led us all the way back to the third floor, up to the entrance to Central America. Once we'd all arrived, Larry shone his flashlight on the photograph that hangs there. The image there was a duplicate of Mr. Thorndyke. “Well that explains why he looked familiar,” I noted.

Ms. Chapman was very confused. “But... that man's been dead for forty years.”

Harry grew excited. “That was our ghost.” Larry smiled but shook his head. “That wasn't our ghost?”

“Just an entity using his form,” Larry explained. “If he had registered as a ghost, I would have said something much earlier.”

“If that's the case,” I pondered, “then who was our Mr. Thorndyke?”

We still don't know for sure.