Random Road

by Thomas Kies

  Realizing that I wasn’t in a playful mood, the association president’s face became serious. “No, but I understand a lot of people have seen it, or claim to have seen it.”

  I nodded absently. “Why did you agree to this?”

  “Hosting this investigation?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Off the record?”

  “Okay.”

  He leaned forward and whispered, “Ferry ticket sales are off so far this summer. A little publicity about a ghost out on the harbor might be good for business, you know what I mean?”

  I looked straight at him. “On the record, do you believe we’re going to see a ghost out here tonight?”

  He swallowed and sat back, thinking. Finally, he answered, “I’m keeping an open mind. No, wait, what I meant to say was, if there’s a ghost out here, we’re going to find it.”

  I smiled. “You sure you want to go with that?”

  He frowned. “Can I get back to you?”

  We were both sitting on a padded bench and before I could say anything more to Daryl, Stella Barry slid in next to me. “So you want to get the lowdown on what we’re going to be doing tonight?”

  “You bet.” Now, admittedly, I was still a little buzzed from having cocktails with Mike Dillon and dinner with Kevin. But I’m a pro, I know when too much is too much. And right after I said “you bet” to the ghost hunter queen, I realized that I was going to have to rein in my sarcasm.

  Luckily, Stella Barry hadn’t picked up on my tone. She went ahead and got started. “Bartholomew Gault was the oldest of seven children, born into a wealthy family on Long Island. He attended Princeton University and got a job right out of school with a bank in New York. He worked hard, and by 1909, he was the bank’s general manager. That same year, he married a woman named Elizabeth who bore him two children. Elizabeth Gault insisted that they leave the grit and the grime of the city and that they move to the country, so Bartholomew bought the Hoyt mansion out on Connor’s Landing.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I wrote about that,” I said. “Jonathon Hoyt was the guy who built that house. He died in a shipwreck off the coast of Cuba.”

  Stella nodded somberly. “The house is plagued with bad luck,” she intoned mysteriously.

  Six people were recently hacked to death there. I’m not psychic, but hell yes, I’ll say that house was bad luck.

  Standing up, Stella shook out her hair and ran both hands through it. As we sliced through the black water, she gazed out at the darkness. “Soon after he bought it, Gault spent a small fortune upgrading and modernizing his new residence. He added electricity and indoor plumbing that was still very rare for that time. He moved his family into it in 1912. They were all very happy on Connor’s Landing.”

  As we got to the mouth of the harbor and entered Long Island Sound, I could feel air start to move around me. Gliding out over the open water, the tiny breeze quickly strengthened into a sustained wind.

  Stella brushed renegade strands of hair away from her eyes. She had to practically shout to be heard over the boat’s engines and the wind. “In 1917, Bartholomew Gault became president of Manufacturers’ Bank and Trust. He spent more and more time on the train to New York. As the economy grew, so did Gault’s tireless pursuit of wealth.

  Stella lifted her face, flaring her nostrils as she sniffed the air. “Life was good, until history and the Great Depression caught up with him. Like everyone else in America, he was heavily invested in the stock market. October of 1929 wiped out his fortune in an instant. By the following March, his bank had failed. By August, he was penniless. Bill collectors and solicitors started to knock on the front door of his grand house on Connor’s Landing. Suddenly, the man who had everything couldn’t buy food for his family.”

  I could feel Daryl Zelfin sitting by my side on the bench, waiting for the rest of the story. Except for the man’s breathing, he was absolutely motionless.

  I followed Stella’s line of sight. Only darkness lay ahead of us. The stars and the moon were obliterated by the storm clouds. The wind rose and fell like the breath of a mythical beast. The boat’s engines hummed like electricity through an exposed wire.

  “On August fifteenth, 1930, Bartholomew Gault inexplicably told his wife that he was going to go fishing. It was the last time anyone ever saw him. The next afternoon, an oyster trawler found his boat run aground on Fisher’s Island. There was no sign of Gault.

  “The police investigated and concluded that Gault had probably slipped off his boat by accident and drowned in the cold, unforgiving waters of the Sound. The locals say that the water was calm as glass that night, no wind, no chop.” She paused for a dramatic moment and took a breath.

  I glanced at Daryl. He was staring up at Stella’s face, waiting breathlessly.

  She looked down at him and smiled, pleased with the effect of her tale. “They say Gault couldn’t stand being poor. Better to be dead than a pauper standing in a breadline, so he tied something heavy around his waist and quietly slid over the side of his fishing boat.”

  Stella finished with the simple sentence, “They never found his body and coincidently, they never found the boat’s anchor.”

  She stopped talking and gazed pensively out over the water, hands clasped.

  This is all properly spooky.

  I stood up. “Nicely told. I think I’m going to go forward and get a better view. Let’s connect again when we get closer to the, um, point of contact.”

  What I really wanted to do was put some distance between me and the creepy lady. That and I was hoping to get some alone time with the Elroy brothers.

  The captain, a short, potbellied man in his early sixties, was dressed in a baseball cap and the requisite Harbor Association polo shirt and khaki pants. He stood at the wheel in the bow, steering the boat and peering seriously into the darkness ahead. We were moving toward the islands beyond Sheffield Harbor. It’s an area known for hidden rocks and shifting sandbars. He squinted into the darkness with steely concentration.

  I sincerely hoped he knew what he was doing.

  The Elroy boys were seated on a bench not far from the captain. “Hey.” I spoke with as much enthusiasm as I could muster. “Aren’t you Pete and Becky’s kids?”

  I was standing right behind them when they both turned toward me. From the blank looks on their faces, they had absolutely no clue who I was.

  “I was over at your house the other day for the party,” I explained, implying that I had been one of the invited guests. “You boys were by the pool with some very attractive young ladies.”

  That made them both smile. Lance stood up politely and Drew, seeing his brother on his feet, followed suit.

  “My name’s Geneva Chase. And if memory serves me right, you’re Lance and you’re Drew.” I poured warm honey into my voice.

  Before we could say another word, the captain shouted in a voice that sounded like a hundred miles of hard gravel road, “Lance, go aft and check the steering cable on the port engine.”

  The tall boy gave me an engaging grin and shrugged. “It’s nice to meet you, Miss Chase. I’ll tell my parents that I ran into you. I’ve got to go to work.” He walked quickly up the center aisle to the back of the boat.

  “So, Drew,” I said, “do you mind if I sit down here next to you?”

  “No, ma’am.” We both sat down on the padded bench.

  “You’re dad’s pretty proud of you guys,” I started.

  “He is?”

  “He thinks it’s great you both are working this summer.”

  Drew nodded slightly with a hesitant smile. “He says it builds character.”

  “Well, he’s right,” I responded. “You guys are doing a great job tonight. Hey, this is kind of spooky, isn’t it? Going out at night to try to find a ghost?”

  He offered a shy grin. “I don’t really believe in ghosts.”
/>   “Speaking of spooky, when I was out at your house, your dad was telling me about the night of the murders.”

  Drew’s eyebrows knitted together with puzzlement. “He did?”

  I pushed on. “That’s all pretty gruesome stuff. He tells me you and Lance were both at a party that night.”

  “Yeah, we were at a friend’s place in Greenwich.”

  “You weren’t at Greg and Missy Henderson’s house, were you? Their son’s about your age. I think it was his birthday last week.”

  Okay, it was a complete fabrication. I didn’t know any Greg and Missy Henderson.

  “No.” Drew shook his head. “What’s the son’s name?”

  I took a minute like I was trying to recall it, when in reality, I was making it up. Finally, I said, “Bobby,” snapping my fingers. “Yeah, Bobby. You know him?”

  It was Drew’s turn to see if he could place the name. “Nope, don’t know any Bobby Henderson. We were on Jimmy Fitzgerald’s boat. It’s tied off at Indian Cove Marina. Well, it’s his dad’s boat. You know the Fitzgeralds? His dad’s got more money than God.”

  Jimmy Fitzgerald? Oh man, yeah, Drew. I know the freaking Fitzgeralds.

  Obviously, this kid had no clue that his buddy had been busted that very afternoon for selling meth to an undercover cop.

  I suddenly noticed that we were cruising by Connor’s Landing. “Hey,” I stood up again and looked out over the railing. “Can you see your house from here?”

  Drew stood up beside me. “Yeah,” he pointed. “It’s over there, see those lights?”

  “A couple of houses over, isn’t that the Chadwick place where those people were killed?”

  He didn’t say anything at first. Then he bobbed his head and answered in a voice I could barely hear over the boat’s twin motors. “Yeah.”

  “So tragic. I heard there were a couple of teachers killed in there. I think they were from the Handley Academy.”

  Drew stared out over the water, transfixed by the sight of the Chadwick house as we steamed past it, dark and cemetery silent, a black monolith in the night. Once a home, now a massive tombstone.

  “So sad.”

  “One of them was my biology teacher. Mrs. Webster.” His voice was barely audible. “She didn’t deserve to die like that. She was a beautiful lady, beautiful in the way she looked. But beautiful in her soul, too. You know what I mean?”

  “Beautiful in her soul?”

  “She wouldn’t just teach us about science,” he explained. “She didn’t talk to us like a teacher talks to students. She talked to us like we were adults. She talked to us about real stuff. Life lessons, she called it.”

  I was about to ask another question, when the captain shouted. “Drew, see what the hell is holding up your brother, will ya’? I’ll bet he’s chattin’ up some good-lookin’ chippie back there.”

  Drew looked at me and blinked, like he was awakening from a dream. “I’ve got to go. Nice meeting you.”

  And then he was gone.

  By the time I wandered aft, Stella Barry was helping one of her team attach an odd-looking camera to a tripod.

  “You hoping to actually get a photo?”

  She stared at me. “You never know. Sometimes we get lucky.”

  “What’s a ghost look like on film?”

  The woman smiled. “Not always the same. Sometimes a spirit will look like a wisp of smoke. Sometimes, it will look like a person. Mostly we get orbs of light.”

  “Orbs of light.”

  “Well,” she finished with the camera,“that only makes sense now doesn’t it?”

  It does?

  Stella Barry watched her crew get their equipment ready. “I never studied physics. But I understand that energy is never lost. It changes form, but it’s never lost. I believe that when you die, your energy still exists. Your soul goes on.”

  “That’s what those orbs of light are? Souls? Energy?”

  The ghost hunter nodded. “Yeah, in a philosophical nutshell.”

  “Are you a religious person, Stella?”

  She smiled. “Of course I am.”

  “Aren’t souls supposed go somewhere? Like heaven?”

  “Most do. Some don’t. Some don’t know they’re dead. Others feel that they have unfinished business to take care of. But for most spirits who linger here, it wasn’t the right time for them to die.”

  Like Kevin.

  “So you think all us of have a specific time we’re supposed to die?”

  The paranormal investigator shrugged. “Everyone dies. And I think that God has a plan mapped out for us. Sometimes it doesn’t all go according to plan, or at least according to our plan.”

  At any other time, I would have avoided like the plague getting sucked into a religious discussion. But with Kevin being so sick, it was simply something I needed to talk about. “When we die, is it for a reason?”

  As she looked into my eyes, I saw sadness in her face. Like she understood where my question was coming from. Stella surprised me when she took my hand. He voice was soft. “I believe everything happens for a reason, honey. We don’t always know what it is. And sometimes, that’s why a spirit may linger. They’re simply trying to understand.”

  Almost at the same time that she said that, the wind picked up and in the distance I could hear the low reverberation of thunder.

  The captain hollered, “Daryl, can I see you please?”

  The Harbor Association president stood and walked briskly up the aisle. The captain and Daryl Zelfin put their heads close together to talk.

  As they did, an attractive young woman in her early twenties, with long hair tucked under a baseball cap, lifted up her arms to the night. Like some kind of signal, the other investigators stopped their conversations, remained absolutely motionless and watched her.

  Stella leaned in close and whispered in my ear, “That’s Marie. She’s an intuitive.”

  “You mean like a psychic?”

  “We have several. Marie is the most sensitive.”

  The young woman then held her palms out straight, as if warding off an unseen danger, before she announced, “I can feel movement. He’s here.”

  “This must be where Bartholomew Gault went overboard,” Stella said. Then she shouted, “Mr. Zelfin? Can we cut the engines?”

  Daryl looked at us with wide eyes and conferred with the captain again. Nodding, he walked toward us and the engines went silent. The association’s president came close. “We can’t stay long. The captain is concerned about the storm. He radioed the Coast Guard. They told him that the wind has shifted and it’s moving faster than we thought.”

  Not wasting another moment, Stella shouted, “Let’s get set up! We’ve got a storm moving in.”

  Suddenly the boat was a beehive of activity.

  Stella Barry had brought a dozen people along on this investigation. I’d expected a crew full of geeks and freaks. In actuality, they were painfully normal. After talking with some of them, I discovered they were plumbers, architects, waiters, insurance adjusters, landscapers, and housewives.

  Nothing marked them as being particularly different or special, except that right at that moment, they were all hustling to get cameras, audio recorders, electromagnetic sensors, motion detectors, and divining rods in place so they could find the ghost of Bartholomew Gault.

  In minutes, everything was in place and, except for the rising wind, the night was silent. The boat rocked with sea swells that were growing in size, but I could still feel, more than hear, the cameras shooting and the recorders humming.

  Someone behind me whispered, “Energy spike.”

  Another quietly added, “Ten degree temperature drop.”

  I peered out into the dark that surrounded us. Indeed, I could feel the change in temperature.

  Of course. A storm front’s
barreling down on us!

  We stayed as still as we could for another few minutes, holding tight to anything available to steady us on the rolling deck, straining to hear or to see something magical.

  “Another energy spike, ten points,” the voice whispered behind me.

  I thought I’d jump right out of my skin when a jagged spear of lightning split the sky and thunder clapped like God’s hammer of justice.

  “That’s it,” the captain shouted. “We’ve got to go.”

  “Five more minutes, please!” Stella pleaded.

  The wind swirled up around us like a hungry snake. The water suddenly started to roil.

  Without a word, the captain turned on the engines.

  Stella sighed. “Pack it up.”

  As quickly as they had broken it all out, they put it all away. No one said a word. It was easy to see how disappointed they were.

  Hell, I was disappointed.

  As we cruised away from the spot that the intuitive, Marie, announced was the place where Bartholomew Gault had drowned, I heard something that, to this day, gives me a chill when I recall it.

  “There he is!”

  I don’t know who said it. Suddenly, there was a rush to one side of the boat and I could feel the boat leaning dangerously to port.

  “Don’t crowd up like that,” yelled the captain.

  Okay, I couldn’t help myself. I was part of that crowd.

  We were all looking over the side.

  And deep under the water? Where it should have been totally black?

  We could see light.

  It was vague, faint, and a light shade of green.

  But it was light.

  About the size and shape of an antique lantern at a depth of about six feet, right under our boat. It was moving. It disappeared as it went under the boat.

  We rushed to the other side.

  “I said don’t crowd over like that,” the captain shouted.

  The boat listed to other side as we gazed into the water.

  The light appeared again, brighter now. Growing stronger as it rose closer to the surface.

  It didn’t look like an antique lantern at all.