Post #487742 by Cammo on Mon, Oct 12, 2009 10:07 AM

Angie's Ghost Story Part 5

The next day I showed up at five again, and said hi to Cindy as she was getting ready to leave. When I told Cindy about what had happened, it suddenly didn’t seem too strange at all.

“So, like what, the elevator didn’t work? Duh, you knew that. So what?”

“So nobody was on it!”

“Maybe they were, you didn’t look inside, did you?”

“Nope.” No way was I going to look inside that elevator. But she was right. Nothing had actually happened.

“Hey Angie, I’m looking for my bag. Can you help me, I thought it was on the table here.” She carried a canvas summer bag with her things in it. She stuffed it under the desk usually, which is where she was looking. I helped look around, and asked,
“You think somebody stole it?”

“Nah.” Then she thought. “There was nothing inside it anyway. I was talking to Bridgett, came back here and it was gone. I don’t know, maybe somebody lifted it.”

So we looked around and it was nowhere. I thought about asking Bridgett, she was one of the full time workers who seemed to be in charge of the big kitchen behind the offices. They had cheap breakfasts and sandwiches for sale, but they didn’t advertise so almost nobody seemed to buy them. Bridgett was back there, talking to a lady I hadn’t seen before. I waited for them to stop talking, and looked around at the clean walls and counters. And there was Cindy’s bag. It was on top of the refrigerator. I looked at Bridgett, back at the bag, and decided to go get it. I walked over, and could just barely reach up to get it. I snagged the handle and pulled it down. Bridgett just kept talking, she didn’t seem like anything was wrong. She sure didn’t seem to have put it there.

I walked out and gave the bag to Cindy, told her where I found it, and she looked through the inside. It was all messed up, she said, like somebody had shook it hard. Her compact mirror inside was actually cracked.

We didn’t know what to think. So she said goodbye and left.

I sat down at the desk. Mrs. Alton seemed to have left. All by myself again. And then I noticed that the radio was gone. That was really strange, because I remember listening to it when I came in, and it was plugged into the wall behind a big shelf behind me, so it would be hard to pull out. Almost impossible to pull out. Maybe it was back in the kitchen with Bridgett again. So I locked the front doors quick and ran back to the kitchen, and almost ran into Bridgett.

“Whoa! Where ya going?”

“I’m looking for the radio, it was behind the desk a minute ago, but it’s not ... you don’t know what happened to it, do you?”

She looked at me for a long time with a funny expression, then she asked -
“You here by yourself?”

“Yeah, I locked the front door when I left the desk, it’s OK. I should get back out there.”

“I’ll go with you.” she said in a flat voice.

We walked back out to the front and she stopped. Then she pointed down to the floor.

The radio was sitting on the floor, in the middle of the hallway, right in front of the desk. It’s cord was all tangled up.

“HEY!” I said, “Who’s been fooling around with it!”

Bridgett shrugged her shoulders.

“Jeez, if I find the creep who’s been screwing around with the radio, I’ll...”

“Are you always here by yourself?” Bridgett asked.

I explained while picking up the radio, that this was my first real week and that Cindy and I shared some hours, but yesterday was the first day I was by myself and...

“I’ll make sure you two are always on shift together,” she paused for a second, “...because the front door shouldn’t be locked during our open hours.”

I apologized, I really didn’t want to get fired for something like that, but she said it was alright, last summer they always had two girls on duty all night, she didn’t know why Mrs. Aldon didn’t do it that way again, and everything was just fine. Then I opened the front door for her and she left.

Other guests kept coming and going, but I worked on getting the radio turned on, cause no way was I going to be without a radio that night. It was hard, because I had to move the shelves out and stick the plug in , and then jostle the shelves back so the plug stuck out of this little slit that had been sawn out for it. Then I turned it on.

It didn’t work.

So I unplugged it again, this time I left the shelves out so I could plug it in easy, then looked around for a screwdriver. There was one in the junk drawer of the kitchen, and I unscrewed the back of the radio to see if there was something wrong with the plug inside, maybe it had been yanked loose. There were a lot of screws, big ones and little ones, some were set inside these narrow holes like they didn’t want you to get the back off, but I worked at it and finally pulled the back off.

And it was destroyed inside. Everything was broken and wrecked, like somebody had smashed it with a hammer, or ripped stuff out with pliers. But that was impossible. It had taken me more than a half hour just to get the back off, and the radio had only been missing for minutes. And it was the same radio, wasn’t it? That had me wondering if it really was the same radio at all, maybe there were two radios and somebody had wrecked one, and had switched it to fool me. Somebody was playing a joke on me. Maybe cause I was playing it too loud the night before. It was really strange, and I sat there wondering, then remembered Cindy’s bag getting wrecked too. It was like the same thing. So Cindy couldn’t have messed up the radio, it was somebody else.

Or was Cindy using the bag as a decoy, to make me think she wasn’t the one who did it cause it happened to her bag too?

Hey, I was only a kid and it was pretty confusing.