The Haunting at Grays Harbor (The River Book 8)

by Michael Richan

  I just attached it to her, when she came down here. People sneak into the house all the time. I see them, out on the street, talking to each other, scared of this place. They chant “Murder Marie!” and they dare each other to come inside. The house used to be locked up tight, and they’d sneak in through a bedroom window in the back, but after the power shifted, I could do more. I unlocked the front door, made it easier for them to get in. One day, Georgina made it all the way down here, to the basement. She lifted the board and saw my hand. She screamed like they all do, and ran out. But I hooked the rod to her, and she carted it off. I figured it would throw off the vortex. Was I right?

  Yes, you’re right, Maynard answered. The rod is in her attic, and it’s scaring their family. They’ve moved out.

  Oh, that’s too bad, I didn’t mean for them to move out, Christina said, looking dejected. I just wanted this vortex to come apart, so my mother would die.

  I think she is dying, Maynard said. She’s eating herself, upstairs. Slowly.

  Oh, she always does that, Christina said, rolling her eyes. She’s been doing that for years, whenever she gets depressed. She just grows back.

  You’d like the vortex to be gone? Maynard asked. If we were to dig up your body, and bury you somewhere else, the vortex would lose its power source. That would kill your mother.

  Alright, Christina said. Where would you bury me?

  Probably in the forest, Maynard answered. We wouldn’t want anyone to stumble across your grave, so it would have to be private, with no one around. That way you could be at peace.

  I like that idea, she replied. Would I still be a ghost?

  That would be up to you, Maynard said.

  Christina seemed to be pondering the idea. And my mother would be gone?

  If you’re the power source for this vortex, and I think you are, then yes, if you’re not here to be used by it, the vortex will collapse and eventually your mother will die.

  And will my father’s vortex die? She said her vortex was necessary to keep his going. Will it destroy his vortex, too? If it will, I’ll do it.

  Maynard? Roy said. I need to talk to you. Outside the trance, privately.

  Maynard paused for several moments, then he turned back to Christina. We’ll be back. We’ll talk more then, alright?

  And you’ll bury me somewhere else?

  We’ll discuss it, yes, Maynard said. I promise.

  Alright then, Christina said, absently flicking her ghostly fingers at her physical hand in the dirt.

  Maynard, Roy, and Steven all dropped out of the River, and slowly stood up.

  “What?” Maynard asked. “What is it?”

  “Not here,” Roy said.

  They walked out of the room and back through the basement, then up the wooden stairs and into the kitchen.

  “Well?” Maynard asked.

  “I want to be away from the house,” Roy said, walking out of the kitchen and down the hallway. “Steven and I need to check on a few things, and then I’ll tell you.”

  “So where are we going?” Steven asked.

  “Back to Aberdeen, to the motel,” Roy said.

  “Roy, we dig her up and bury her somewhere in the forest, and this’ll be over,” Maynard said, not leaving the kitchen. “Her mother is out of her mind and won’t notice if we act quickly.”

  “No, it’s not that simple,” Roy replied, walking back into the kitchen to face Maynard. “Please, you need to trust me on this. A couple of hours won’t make much difference.”

  “Other than I’m a thousand miles from my wife and home,” Maynard replied testily. “I’m not here to monkey around.”

  “Maynard, if I’m right, I promise you, you won’t consider the trip wasted,” Roy said, “but you’ve got to let me check into something first.”

  “What?” Maynard asked, his level of defiance increasing.

  “It’s something I can’t do here, and I must do privately,” Roy said, staring Maynard down. “So I need you to take us back to Aberdeen, and let me sort out a few things.”

  Maynard pressed his lips together and walked out of the kitchen, obviously angry. They listened to him stomp down the hallway and out the front door.

  “What’s going on?” Steven asked.

  “I’ll tell you when we have some privacy, back in the motel room,” Roy said. They walked out of the kitchen, following Maynard. When they exited the house, Maynard was replacing items in his trailer. He waited for them to arrive, and took the shovel and bucket from them, tossing them inside. He slammed the doors of the trailer closed and locked it up, then walked to the cab of the truck and got inside, clearly irritated.

  It was a mostly silent ride back to Aberdeen. Steven could see Maynard chewing at his gums. Finally he spoke.

  “I don’t like being shanghaied,” Maynard said.

  “How is this a shanghai?” Roy asked.

  “You lure me up here with pleas for help, then you keep me in the dark when it comes time to take some action,” Maynard said. “I don’t like it.”

  “We do need your help,” Steven said. “We don’t have the faintest clue what we’re dealing with here. We need your expertise.”

  “Then why aren’t we finishing things?” Maynard asked.

  “I already told you,” Roy said. “I gotta check on a few things. Then we can proceed.”

  “Things you can’t tell me,” Maynard said snidely. Steven felt himself begin to sweat, sitting between the two of them.

  “Yes, because I made a commitment to someone that I have to honor,” Roy said. “That’s the only reason. You should understand that.”

  “I might understand it,” Maynard said gruffly, “but it doesn’t mean I like it.”

  “Well, I don’t care if you like it,” Roy said. “Can’t be helped.”

  “And I can just sit on my hands while you two check into ‘something,’ is that it? Maybe I’ll crochet myself a doily?”

  “You got a nasty little streak in you, you know that?”

  “Better than reeking of coffee. You smell like you bathe in it.”

  “At least I can drink it without having to ask someone for permission.”

  “Guys,” Steven inserted. “Come on. Let’s stop the insults.”

  “You let your son push you around, too,” Maynard continued.

  “You’re asking for a bruising, my friend,” Roy replied. “You’ll leave my son out of this if you know what’s good for you.”

  “I’ll return to civility when we’re back to taking care of business, and not this f’ing around.”

  “Why can’t you just say ‘fuck’ like a normal person?” Roy said.

  “Stop!” Steven shouted. “Stop, both of you. Not another word. Maynard, I promise you we’ll be back on track, just give us a little bit of time to work out whatever my father is worried about. Dad, stop insulting Maynard. He just wants to get things done. You’d be pissed too if we were kept in the dark about something. You’d be cursing up and down about it. So let’s just ride back to Aberdeen in silence, do what we gotta do, and get back on track.”

  “Humprff!” Roy and Maynard said simultaneously.

  These two are exactly alike, Steven thought. Children.

  Chapter Twelve

  “Her father is James Unser,” Roy said.

  Steven paced in his motel room, listening to his father’s thoughts.

  “The vorghost was married to him,” Roy continued. “That’s what this is all about. Unser forced her to build the vortex under false pretenses, using his own child as the power source. We can confirm this with Maynard later, but I’ll bet the child of two gifteds is a lot more powerful than you or I, with just a single gifted parent. I’ll bet that’s why she was able to do so much from under all the goop. That, and she managed to get some fingers out.”

  “Why would Unser want her to make a vortex?” Steven asked.

  “I don’t know,” Roy answered, “but it’s connected to Eximere somehow, we already know that. Things wer
e going haywire there when the rod shifted locations, after those bozos from Seattle did their electromagnetic thing. Shutting down the vortex at the abandoned house might be a very bad move, it might impact Eximere. It could cause more damage. Unser wanted that vortex built for a reason. Enough that he tricked his ex-wife into murdering their daughter for it.”

  “What a prick,” Steven said. “I didn’t think I could dislike the man more than I did, but the more we learn about him, the more I hate him. How could he have his own daughter killed like that?”

  “For all we know, he married Marie with the intent of having a child for this purpose,” Roy replied. “She was apparently an unstable gifted who was clearly in love with him. Easy to manipulate.”

  “He hated gifteds so much,” Steven said. “Why marry one? Why have offspring that would be even more of what he hated?”

  “The vortex,” Roy said. “It’s all about that. He was up to something much bigger. And to sort that all out, we’re going to need Maynard. We’ll have to tell him about Unser and Eximere and all of it, or he won’t be able to help us. And we can’t do that unless we talk to Eliza. We made a pact that we wouldn’t divulge Eximere’s existence to anyone unless we all agreed. So there are two things that need to be done before we go back to Maynard, hopefully before he gets so pissed off he just ups and leaves. The first thing is to call Eliza, explain things to her and see what she thinks. See if she’s OK with bringing Maynard into the know. The other thing I think we need to do is find out who owns the land that abandoned house is sitting on. I can’t believe that house would sit undisturbed for so many years. Someone would have tried to buy it and tear the thing down. If we find out who owns it, that may connect the dots on this.”

  “I can check the state’s records with my phone,” Steven said, “but I can’t get a good data signal here at the motel.”

  “Let’s go somewhere in town where you can,” Roy said. “Any place you remember it being strong enough?”

  “Duffy’s,” Steven said. “I checked my email there, it worked fine.”

  “Let’s go,” Roy said. “I could use a cup of clam chowder about now.”

  ◊

  “Sure is taking a long time,” Roy said, slicing his fork into blackberry pie.

  “It’s a government website,” Steven said.

  “Ah, say no more,” Roy replied, lifting his coffee mug to his lips.

  “The abandoned house is owned by a trust that’s administered by a law firm out of Tacoma,” Steven said.

  “Just like the Unser estate!” Roy replied.

  “There was an option here to have it search all records on the same owner’s name, so I’ve launched that, and it’s taking a long time.”

  “Don’t need that, we already got what we need.”

  “Well, there’s no harm in seeing what else this law firm owns,” Steven replied, “or at least controls.”

  “Let’s call Eliza,” Roy said. “Explain it to her. Get her vote. If that property is controlled by a law firm from Tacoma, that’s evidence enough for me.”

  “You don’t know that it’s the same lawyers that control the Unser property,” Steven said. “Percival never told us the name of the firm.”

  “It’s close enough,” Roy said.

  “I need to wait until these results come back before I call her,” Steven said. “I can’t use the internet and make a call at the same time.”

  “Do it later,” Roy replied. “I want to get back to Maynard with a decision before he gets cold feet.”

  “It might help if you didn’t fight with him,” Steven said, looking down at his phone.

  “I can’t help it, he gets on my nerves.”

  “So you vote to take him into Eximere?” Steven said. “You realize that’ll put it out of our control?”

  “We don’t have a choice,” Roy said. “We can’t leave the vortex the way it is, it’s too unstable. And we can’t have Maynard destroy it, that’ll ruin Eximere too.”

  “We don’t know that,” Steven said.

  “I strongly suspect it,” Roy said. “They’re connected somehow, that’s obvious. It’s too big of a risk to take.”

  “So what, then?”

  “We take Maynard down to Eximere and lay our cards on the table,” Roy said. “Then see if his expertise can sort it out. Despite how ornery he is, I think he can help us. We need to use him.”

  “Trust me, he’s no more ornery than you,” Steven said. “You two are like a mirror image. Old, cranky, and stubborn.”

  “Call Eliza,” Roy said, taking the last bite of his pie.

  “Not here, not in the restaurant,” Steven said. “Out in the car.”

  “Come on, then,” Roy said, sliding out of the booth.

  “Wait!” Steven said, watching his phone. “Finally, the search finished! The page is updating.”

  “Never mind that. Come on,” Roy said, grabbing the tab.

  “Dad, stop,” Steven said, reading his phone.

  “What?” Roy asked impatiently.

  “Two more properties,” Steven said. “One in Matlock. The other is in Oakville. They’re all within thirty miles of Eximere.”

  Roy stared at him, unsure of what to make of the news. “Will you come on? We need to get Eliza on the horn.”

  Steven slid out of the booth and followed Roy out of the restaurant, staring at the pull tab dispensers as Roy paid the bill. Then they walked to the car and Steven started it up, turning on the heater. The dark clouds had intensified, and the late afternoon sky looked more like dusk.

  Steven dialed Eliza and put her on speakerphone, holding it between them.

  “Eliza, it’s Steven.”

  “Hello, handsome! I can tell I’m on speakerphone — Roy with you?”

  “Hello, Eliza,” Roy said.

  “Hello, Roy! What’s up?”

  “We’ve got a strange one here, Eliza,” Steven started. He retold the events since their last conversation, ending with what he’d found searching on the state website.

  “So I think we have to involve Maynard at Eximere,” Roy said. “And I vote to let him in, see if he’s got any ideas once he knows the whole story.”

  “You could just ask him to repair the vortex and leave,” Eliza said. “Or would he resist that?”

  “He might,” Roy said. “He’s a little feisty, he’d want an explanation. And he’d need a new rod to replace the broken one. We don’t know if he has one or not.”

  “I want to know what Unser was up to,” Steven said. “I want to know why he tricked Marie into setting up the vortex, at the expense of his child.”

  “We already know Unser was bad,” Eliza replied. “This just confirms it.”

  “But he was up to something,” Steven said. “Something more than just his estate, his house, and Eximere. If we repair the vortex, it’ll just be a band aid. Something else will pop up and put us at risk if we don’t find out the whole story and get to the bottom of it.”

  “He’s right about that,” Roy said. “We might be able to get Maynard to do a patch job and leave, but there’ll be a lot of unanswered questions.”

  “That poor girl!” Eliza said. “Buried by her parents, just because she was so gifted. What a shame.”

  “For what it’s worth, she hates Unser,” Steven said. “She sees him as the cause of all the trouble. She’s trying to wreck her mother’s vortex just to fuck with him, to get at him. If we repair the vortex, we’d still have to contend with her. She’d find a way to wreck it again, somehow. It’d only be a matter of time.”

  “So you bring Maynard in,” Eliza said, “then what?”

  “He’s an expert in his field,” Roy said, “and he’s not a newbie, he’s been around. He’s got experience. I’m hoping he’ll have some idea what to do. If not, we might be screwed, in which case Steven and I will be hauling a lot of books and objects out of Eximere as fast as we can carry them.”

  “And Thomas?” Eliza asked. “Jason? You can’t leave him there
.”

  “I guess that’s a last resort,” Steven said. “That’s why I’m voting with my dad on this. It’s two votes to let Maynard in.”

  “Well,” Eliza said, “I know I trust you two with my life. If you think it’s the right thing to do, I’m in too. Do you think he will keep his mouth shut about it?”

  “There’s a chance,” Roy said. “He doesn’t seem like a talker. But you never know when money comes into it. And I suspect the objects at Eximere would fetch plenty if put on the market.”

  “And arouse suspicion,” Eliza said. “I’ll vote yes, but look for a way to rope Maynard in more tightly, some way to ensure his silence. I don’t know him like you two, but I think we need some leverage.”

  “We’ll try,” Roy said. “He’s holding the cards at this point. We need him more than he needs us.”

  “You two take care,” Eliza said. “Please let me know how it goes, when you can.”

  “Will do,” Steven said. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

  “Bye.”

  Steven lowered his phone. “Well, I guess it’s settled. We tell him.”

  “Let’s get back to the motel,” Roy said. “I’m gonna be pissed if he got his panties in a bunch and left town.”

  Steven pulled his Acura out of the parking lot in Aberdeen and back onto the main road that stretched through town. As they reached the motel, they saw Maynard loading his bags into the back of his trailer. Steven pulled his car up next to the truck and they got out.

  “Going somewhere?” Roy asked.

  “I’m not paying for another night in this overpriced fleabag joint,” Maynard said. “Especially if there’s no reason to stay.”

  “We’ve found out what we needed to,” Roy said.

  “Well, that’s fine and dandy,” Maynard said, as though he could care less. “I hope you enjoy your knowledge. I have some knowledge too. I know I’ll be back in my easy chair in front of my wood burning stove right around noon tomorrow morning.”

  “Hold on, Maynard,” Steven said. “We need to show you something.”

  “Is that what your private confab was all about? Deciding to show me something?”