“How curious,” I said.
I squinted against the inadequate lighting as I examined them. The stark turn-of-the-century ladies were a contrast to the hopeful eyes of the 1935 group. The 1975 women all wore long, loose hair, flared jeans, and relaxed expressions. There was an easiness to them the others hadn’t possessed - their bras had been burned, Vietnam was behind them, and the next war wasn’t even a rumor yet.
One particular face drew me in. Near the center of the photo dated 1975 stood a grinning woman with fake lashes framed by a wispy blond shag. “Mother?”
“Holy crap! That is Mom!” Alex said, readjusting the cat in his arms. “With the blond hair, you look just like her.”
I ignored him, but only because I recognized another woman in the photo. I tapped it excitedly.
“That’s Carrie’s mother!”
Unlike Vivi Bonds, her expression was one of irritation bordering on hostility. I knew that look - she had thrown it at me every time I went to Carrie’s house to play.
On the right side of the picture stood Ella, looking tired and agitated, and somehow even older than she looked today.
“This must be her coven,” I said, feeling strangely bonded to my mother through the photo.
I moved my flashlight from one photo to the next. Ella, and her ancestors, were in each of them, all the way back to 1895.
I snapped pictures with my camera phone to study later, then moved to the very last photo, a solitary frame following a large gap on the wall. There was no date, but the clothing and hairstyles were modern. I touched it, and determined it to be no more than four years old.
Once again, Ella stood at the side of the women, a tired smile cracking her thin lips.
And standing dead center, looking down at her feet, was Carrie Brighton - all grown up.
Her hands were crossed before her and her shoulders hung low. Unlike the other women in the photo, with their broad smiles and flashing eyes, Carrie appeared lost.
I peered closer. There was something on her hand.
A ring - a gray moonstone ring.
And she was the only one in the photo wearing one.
NINETEEN
“Baylee, come down here! Now!” Alex called to me from the bottom of the stairwell.
I had been so preoccupied with Ella’s photos, I hadn’t noticed that my brother had left me.
I tucked my phone into my purse and raced downstairs. Alex stood at the back window, the curtains drawn full open.
“Look at the sky over Ogie! Its orange!”
The moonstone ring squeezed hard on my finger as we ran outside. I locked the door behind me and shoved the key beneath the gnome.
We raced for the bikes, Alex with a black cat under each arm. He tucked them both into his bicycle basket, then we headed back down the dirt lane.
“You took Bart? Ella is going to put a curse on us, for sure,” I said, trying to keep up.
“You have your causes, I have mine.”
The road back was mostly uphill and I wheezed with each pedal stroke. Alex pointed to the sky, now a vivid atomic orange, glowing above the tree line. He sped up and I did too, the ring throbbing on my finger the entire ride.
We arrived at the shores of Lake Ogie to find the orange light beginning to fold in on itself. We watched it dissolve into a slow spinning orb that hung over the water, fed by several smaller lights encircling it.
The air was preternaturally cold as I dumped my bike. The atmosphere was electrically charged and the hairs on my arms stood on end. I raced towards the water, taking pictures as I ran. On the beach, I spotted Jax and Dave.
“This started about fifteen minutes ago,” Dave explained, taking pictures with his newspaper camera. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Alex arrived beside me, cradling both cats. “Baylee, your ring’s glowing!”
I slowly lifted my hand, revealing the amber light pulsing beneath my glove – the same color as the lights that drifted over the water. My arms shook and I heard my teeth chatter.
“I think I need something to drink.”
I felt dizzy again. My knees gave out and Dave caught me by the shoulders as I slumped against him.
“She’s clammy,” I heard Dave say. I knew he was still holding me, but I couldn’t feel him anymore. I could only feel the electricity surrounding me. It crackled, as enticing as a fireplace on a winter morning.
“There’s a cot inside,” Jax said.
“No.” I shook my head. “The lights are calling me.”
And they were. All around me, they whispered: Baylee…Baylee…Baylee…
I struggled, trying to free myself from Dave’s grip, but he held me tighter.
“What the hell?” Alex exclaimed, pointing.
The orbs now seemed to move around the lake, blinking in and out in sequence. In the center, the giant orb hummed. The others covered their ears, though to me the sound was like a lullaby.
Were we witnessing an actual mothership conveying messages to smaller crafts?
Across the lake, my eyes spotted a new shock of white. It appeared to float above the shore, then fluttered out over the water, like a sheet being carried by the wind.
Carrie?
I twisted out of Dave’s grip, kicked off my shoes, and sprinted towards the lake, dropping my phone just before I entered the water. “Carrie, that’s not the right light! Don’t go in!”
The wind whistled through the trees, and the humming sound deepened, seeming to emanate from within the woods. Except for the lights over Ogie, and the blazing barrel fire on the Jackson’s dock, it was completely dark. I called out a warning to Carrie’s spirit as I reached the water. “Please don’t!”
“Baylee!” Voices shouted close behind me.
I kept going, rushing into the water, my ankles submerging beneath the chilly waves.
I hadn’t been able to save Carrie in life, but I could help her spirit find peace.
I waded deeper, using my hands to propel me forward, ignoring the biting cold that gnawed at my limbs.
“Carrie! Stop!” I called.
Her eyes met mine before a firm hand grabbed hold of me.
“What the hell are you doing, young lady?” Jax’s rough voice demanded from behind me. His strong, leathery hands drug me back towards the shore.
“No! We have to save her!”
“Save who?” he demanded, pulling me back. Dave joined him, wrestling me back to the shore.
“Carrie!”
The light brightened above us. Jax shielded his eyes while I yelled and pointed to the small white form seeming to hover above the lake.
“She’s there! Can’t you see her? She’s there!”
“I can’t see anything with this light.”
The orb abruptly collapsed, folding in on itself like cosmic origami. The smaller lights quickly followed, and soon all was dark.
There was a howl in the distance, and whether it was animal born or supernatural, I couldn’t tell. I sat on the shoreline, my face in my hands. Carrie was gone.
Had she been taken by the light? Again?
Spirits often returned to the spot of their demise, if they had unfinished business.
“That’s twice,” Jax said, pointing a finger at me. “I don’t have it in me to fetch you out a third time.”
“What were you thinking?” Alex demanded, draping a towel over my bare shoulders as Dave escorted me up the dock steps to a chair. “Do you want to end up like Mom and Dad? I can’t lose you too, Baylee.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, my head starting to clear.
If I were the crying type, I would have been sobbing by now. I turned my head towards the water once more.
It was as if nothing had happened.
“Carrie’s ghost was out there,” I insisted. “Dave, you must have gotten pictures.”
Dave handed over his digital camera. I flipped through dozens of photos of lights, but there was not a single image of the ghost girl. I felt foolish.
I sneezed. And again.
Alex felt my head. “You’re sick, Bay Leaf. Let’s get you home.”
TWENTY
“I feel like I’ve been hit by a train,” I said to my steamed-up reflection in the bathroom mirror.
Even after a long shower, my head ached, in fact, most every part of me ached.
I’d fallen asleep almost as quickly as my head hit the bed, and I hadn’t yet had time to digest what had happened. But now, in the light of day, aided by cold pills and hot tea, I could sort it out rationally.
I sat down at the writing desk in my bedroom. “Just the facts, Baylee,” I reminded myself, a trick I’d learned in journalism school to stay focused.
The facts, as far as I knew them:
The lights appeared last night over Lake Ogie – a large pulsating orb surrounded by a ring of smaller orbs. We all saw them.
My ring reacted, almost seeming to communicate with the lights.
I saw Carrie, though no one else did.
It was the night before a full moon.
I added notes on the photos I’d seen at Ella’s, as well as the odd encounter with Laura at the diner. And, finally, I made notes on the additional moonstone ring that Jax found on the beach, as well as the fact that Carrie wore one in one of Ella’s photographs.
All this had to be linked. But how? I chewed on the end of my pen, a habit acquired in college. For some reason, it helped me think.
I left my desk and towel-dried my hair, trying to think it through. My theory that the lights only appeared on a full moon was shot.
I retrieved the strip of cloth I’d found wrapped around Dave’s hood ornament. “I’m sorry, Carrie,” I said. “I hope your spirit is at least at peace.”
But this time, when I rolled the fabric between my thumb and forefinger, I received a glimpse of an image - Carrie Brighton, standing before me in a sheer white nightgown, her hair and gown flapping in the wind. She looked so young.
“Bay-leeee…. It’s… not… overrrr.”
Alex buzzed about the cafe, wiping tables and polishing silver. I trailed him around the room, quizzing him about the night before. He didn’t respond until after dumping an armful of china cups into the deep sink, probably cracking a few in the process.
“Baylee, I’m sorry, I didn’t see Carrie or her ghost. I was too busy wrangling my cats.”
“Cat.” I corrected. “You have one cat. And it’s not your cat.”
I looked at Bart and Mr. B, curled up together near the stove. Neither had moved a paw in hours. At least Bart had a calming effect on his father.
“It was Carrie’s ghost out on the lake. I’m certain of it.”
“I’m not doubting that you see ghosts, Baylee,” Alex said, running a sudsy cloth across the rim of a cup. “I know you have gifts I can never understand, but you were also tired and there was a lot going on.”
“I know I’m not crazy. Why don’t you want to talk about this?”
“You’ve been through a lot.” He shook the water from his hands and dried them on his jeans. “Baylee, do you think you’re seeing ghosts from the pasts because of Ryan?”
“You mean he’s haunting me?”
“No, I mean you’re just haunted.”
His shoulders slumped.
“I’m worried about you, Sis. You never mourned for Ryan, as far as I can tell. It’s easier to chase phantom ghosts than to face your own. Now that those lights have come and gone, I hope you’ll drop all this and focus on The Aunt-Tea-Query. I promise you, the second I’m able to run this place on my own, I’ll release you back into the wild.”
I chewed on my lip, hurt by his accusation that I was chasing spirits to avoid my own problems.
“I’m sorry, I’ll focus more. I realize I’ve let you down, lately.”
“No, you’ve never let me down, not in all my life. But I do need your help. The holidays are right around the corner. If we don’t turn this place around before the new year…” his voice wandered off, his eyes drifting towards Bart and Mr. B.
“Noted. And appreciated.”
I picked up a cloth and helped straighten the cafe. Then I dug out some twinkle lights from a hall closet and draped them around the windows as I’d seen in The Little Tea Pot. I’d come to Reed Hollow to help my brother, after all - I might have failed others, but I wouldn’t let him down. Why was I out trying to solve someone else’s problems, when I had plenty of my own?
Baylee…It's not over.
The image of Carrie returned to me as I refilled the bagel basket. I blinked and shook her away. She had seemed so real.
Besides, if she really were a ghost, there wasn’t much I could do.
“That wasn’t a ghost,” Mother said, phasing in at the far end of counter, a cup of coffee pressed between her palms. She took a long slurp of coffee and when she lowered the cup, it was just as full as before.
“Were you eavesdropping on us?” I asked, joining her.
“No! I was with you when that nice Dave Cullins boy drove you home last night. Didn’t you see me in the back seat?”
“No!”
“Oh, good. I was trying to be quiet to give you kids some privacy.”
“I’ll save the hitchhiking lecture for another day, Mother. I need to know what you mean, about it not being a ghost.”
“I saw the girl on the lake. Living creatures have a wash of light around them. Sometimes it’s colorful, mostly it’s clear or white, like a full-body halo. That girl was lit up like a Christmas tree. Baylee, she was alive.”
My hand went to my chest. “She’s alive! How can that be? Didn’t she get sucked in to the lights?”
Mother shrugged. “I don’t know. The lights were trying to draw me in, too, like a vacuum cleaner. That’s when I jumped in the truck.”
I rubbed the corner of my eye. If the girl was alive, as Mother suggested, how could it be Carrie? She was much too young. “I need to find out what happened.”
“I wouldn’t rule out aliens,” Mother said. “Now that I think about it, wouldn’t it be fun to go to another planet?” She sighed, as if she’d missed out on her space boat.
“I just feel so helpless.” I slumped over the counter, my former enthusiasm for cleaning now gone. “I was supposed to stop these abductions. Instead, I did nothing as I witnessed one. Why did I get involved? I was much happier before I knew things.”
“We’re all happier before we know things,” Mother said. “That’s why ignorance is bliss.”
She took my hand in hers, and for once there was warmth radiating from them.
“Your brother was right - this isn’t your battle. If you really want to help, write Carrie’s story. Plundering other people’s memories isn’t your real gift. Writing is. There are strange things happening in this world, and the next. You can’t solve them all, but you can shine a light on them.”
I nodded, overcome by her surprising wisdom. Maybe death had given her a new perspective on life.
“I understand.”
Mother settled into her own thoughts, sipping on her bottomless coffee mug.
I turned towards the window and stared at the trees, struck by the realization that their colorful leaves would soon be stripped away.
Fall was too short… and winter too long.
Kela emerged, smiling and pretty in a long flowing skirt and tight sweater, despite having been out most of the night. She carried a smoldering smudge stick, wafting the scent of burning sage throughout the cafe.
“I banish all negative energy from this establishment,” she called out in a clear voice. “I invite in only positive energy.” As she passed us, Mother fell into a coughing spasm.
“Kela, Mom’s sitting right here,” I said.
“Oops! Sorry, Auntie Viv.” She waved a quick hello, then finished her work in the solarium.
“Nice to see her caring about this place,” Mother said. “Though sometimes I wonder if she’s trying to get rid of me.”
The remainder of my morning was s
pent at my desk, examining a set of silver collector spoons brought in by an older gentleman.
“They belonged to my wife,” he explained. “We drove our RV around the country every summer and collected these from most of the states. We wanted to get all fifty but…”
He sighed and spread out his knotted hands.
“We got thirty-five. Thirty-five of the best spoons of my life.”
“Don’t you want to keep them?” I asked.
“No. I don’t need the money, but I do need the freedom.”
He attempted to straighten his crooked back, and flashed me a toothy smile.
“You see, I got a new girlfriend and with those spoons hanging around, well, I feel like I’m being watched.”
He looked over his shoulder, as if his wife’s spirit might be stalking him, then rubbed his arms to ward off the chills.
My sympathy turned to amusement. I took the collection, giving him a fair price.
“Thank you. I’ll take my sweetheart somewhere nice, like Atlantic City.” He turned towards the window, waving at a pretty redhead half his age.
“She loves to gamble.”
“She must,” I said.
Once he was gone, I removed my gloves and held my right hand above the shiniest spoon. It was from California. From a distance, it felt warm. I picked it up and clutched it firmly.
An image of a young couple in Mickey Mouse ears appeared, strolling hand in hand along a crowded beach. They seemed so in love, and I was reluctant to let the spoon go.
Next, I chose the darkest spoon –the one vibrating at the lowest frequency. Florida. The same couple appeared, several decades older. Their Mickey Mouse ears had been exchanged for knitted hats, and their smiles replaced by masks of contempt. They wandered separately through an empty convenience store.
“Here’s your damned spoon,” the man said, nodding to a dusty display before walking away.
What happened between California and Florida, I wondered? Was it a natural separation that occurred after years of a marriage? Maybe it was better that Ryan left sooner, rather than later. At least all my memories of him were happy ones.
Touch of Light: A Baylee Scott Paranormal Mystery (The Reed Hollow Chronicles Book 1) Page 15