Vintage Pride Read Free Page A

what gave him the idea.”
    “What idea?”
    “ Spirit Seekers International . Think about it, Ethan. In the last four years, we’ve visited derelict mental asylums, old penitentiaries, lighthouses… Great locations for filming, I grant you, but none of those places is more than a couple hundred years old, and people are starting to say we’re running out of ideas. Europe, though… Man, that place is crawling with history. Just think of the places we could go, the things we’ll see.”
    Her eyes sparkled with enthusiasm. Ethan had seen Kim in this mood before. When she was on a roll, she could persuade anyone to do just about anything, but he still felt the need to exercise a note of caution.
    “Kim, this all sounds great. But you know we’re never really going to find any ghosts, don’t you? I mean, you said it yourself. We’ve been doing this for four years, and have we ever captured anything on camera that didn’t have a rational explanation?”
    “Just because we haven’t yet doesn’t mean we won’t. All the places we’ve been, you can’t tell me there’s never been a moment when you’ve heard or seen something and thought, ‘I don’t know what the fuck that was’.”
    Ethan shook his head, not wanting to admit to how scared he’d been in the operating theater at Silver Falls. To his mind, that wasn’t a bad place because of any lingering supernatural presences. All the evil there had been man-made, caused by the doctors who had carried out such ghoulish procedures on their unwitting patients. Kim had argued that all hauntings arose from the actions of the people who’d once inhabited a building, but he’d never been able to see eye to eye with her on that point.
    “Anyway, I think Dan’s already got one of the locations for the new season in mind,” Kim went on. “He told me on the way to Vegas he saw a story in the in-flight magazine about this wine producer in the Champagne region of France, a guy called Jean-Luc LeBlanc. He’s a real recluse, by all accounts, and he owns this magnificent château just outside the town of Épernay that the locals reckon is haunted. There’s talk of odd noises in the middle of the night, like wild beasts roaring, and the staff say they’ve seen this shadowy figure on the property…”
    “So far, so predictable,” Ethan murmured into his beer glass.
    “Oh, be quiet,” she retorted, not unkindly. “Yeah, I know you think you’ve heard it all before, but this is France. The château is like five hundred years old and according to Dan, it’s owned by an honest-to-God aristocrat. Aren’t you at least a little bit intrigued?”
    Ethan considered her words. Compared to their recent investigations, this sounded like a trip into the unknown. “Yeah, I think I am.”
    “Good boy.” Kim gestured to his glass. “Now drink up and I’ll get you another one of those. You are still far too sober for a man who’s just been dumped.”
    Obediently, he swallowed the rest of his beer.
    Maybe she’s right. Maybe that’s what I need. To get out of America for a while, expand my horizons, meet someone new…
    Like that was going to happen. After the disappointment of things fizzling out with Boyd, it might do him good to be on his own for a while. Throw himself into his work. Who knew, after four years of fruitless searching maybe they would finally find some evidence that ghosts existed—but he doubted it.
     

Chapter Three
     
     
     
    “You agreed to what?” Jean-Luc fought to keep the anger out of his voice. Over the seven years he and Marcus White had been business partners, Marcus had made some questionable decisions, but this had to rank among the worst.
    “Jean-Luc, what was I supposed to do? I’ve been trying to talk to you about this for over a week now but you just haven’t been interested in listening. Though it shouldn’t come as a surprise to me. After all, you’re clearly not interested with anything to do with the business