by JL Bryan
“Can you tell me anything else?” I asked Crane.
He shook his head.
“Would it be okay if Juniper took him into the library for a minute?” I asked Toolie.
“All right.” She sighed. “You keep an eye on him, Junie. Junie?”
Stacey reached over and shook the girl awake.
“Huh?” Juniper looked around, blinking. “What did I miss?”
“Take Crane into the library and watch him,” Toolie said.
“Oh.” Juniper rubbed her eyes. “Yep. Come on, Crane, let’s find a book to read.” Juniper took her brother’s hand, gently escorted him to the next room, and slid the door closed.
“What do we do?” Toolie asked.
“First, someone needs to be with Crane at all times,” I said.
“Obviously.” She nodded. “Do we take him to a...therapist or something?”
“Calvin knows somebody who’s sympathetic to ghost stories,” I said. I didn’t mention that I’d gone to the same person for therapy when I was younger, on Calvin’s advice. “Also, we have a friend who’s a psychic and consults on our cases. He might understand Crane’s situation better than any of us could. He might be able to speak with him.”
“Oh, yeah, Jacob would be great at that,” Stacey said, flashing a smile that was a little too wide for the situation.
“I was going to call him in for a look around, anyway,” I said. “We’re still trying to piece together the full situation here. I think we should definitely go ahead with our plans to trap Isaiah tomorrow night.”
“What about the two boys?” Toolie said. “They need to go. Right now.”
“They’re trapped in a drama with the ghost of their father,” I said. “It’s very likely that Isaiah’s presence is keeping them here. If we get rid of him, the boys might leave on their own.”
“What if they...don’t?” Gord asked.
“Then we’ll trap them, too,” I said. “I should mention that I also encountered another ghost.”
“Oh, goodness’ sake,” Toolie said.
“I believe it was Catherine, Isaiah’s wife, the mother of Noah and Luke,” I said. “I recommend we not take any action to remove her at this point.”
“Why not?” Gord asked.
“Because she’s the one who alerted us about Crane tonight,” I said. “I think she was banging on the window to tell us. Then I saw her outside by the pond...I mean, in your back yard...and she pointed him out to me. She saved his life.”
Gord and Toolie looked at each other.
“Well,” Toolie finally said. “It’s good to feel like one of them’s on our side in this thing, at least. Now if we could just get rid of the others.”
“We will,” I told her. “We won’t stop until this house is safe for your children again.”
Chapter Fourteen
Stacey and I left the house right at daybreak, exhausted. On my way home, I forced myself to take a detour by the Historical Association mansion. Grant had left me a package on the back porch, a manuscript box filled with photocopied letters and other documents surrounding the Ridley family. Fortunately, no document burglars had stolen it during the night.
I went home and crashed.
When my alarm woke me at one, I took my time making breakfast—a banana, a hard-boiled egg, some jelly I pretty much ate off a spoon. I was moving slowly and stiffly thanks to old Whippy throwing me down the attic stairs. Son of Whippy had done a number on me as well, slamming me hard against the roof. I was starting to hate that whole undead family.
I did a little bit of yoga stretching, keeping to the easy stuff like sun salutations, but I still winced each time I changed poses. Then I ran a bath and climbed in with a sheaf of the papers Grant had prepared for me.
Catherine’s letters were much harder to read without the big magnifying glass, but I managed to dig my way through them, taking in all the stuff I hadn’t read yet. Catherine tried to put up a good front, but there were multiple asides about Isaiah’s “rough discipline” approach to the boys.
I got the sense that Catherine might have been a little abused, too, from lines like: “Isaiah is strict enough with Eliza and me when we step out of line, but he reserves his worst for the boys.” Or a few comments like: “Some days I feel so dark, I wish the earth would open and swallow me whole.”
A couple of weeks after Isaiah’s death, when the family began to experience the haunting, there was a reference to “just when we’d thought the darkness had lifted,” a strange sentiment for a woman whose husband had just died.
And she felt a great deal of guilt about the ghost tormenting the family and wrecking the home.
I began to wonder. Isaiah wielded his horrible belt-whip with his right hand, but the bullet hole I’d seen was in the left side of his head. If he was right-handed, wouldn’t he have been more likely to shoot himself in the right temple?
It was hardly solid evidence, but it indicated another possibility. Maybe he hadn’t committed suicide. Maybe he’d been murdered, and the gun placed in his hand afterward. The state of forensics in the eighteen-fifties had been nonexistent, making suicide much easier to fake.
What if he’d been murdered? Catherine might have grown fed up with his abuse, with watching him lash his belt across her children, and decided to kill him. Or maybe there was some third party I didn’t know about, something to do with his business or political interests.
I flagged those ideas for later consideration and continued reading.
I sat up when I discovered the coroner’s reports, which Grant had tracked down and helpfully included.
Isaiah was declared a suicide, shot through the left temple, just as I’d observed when I saw his ghost.
Catherine, Noah, and Luke had drowned in the pond out back.
Eliza, however, had not drowned. She’d been found inside the house, in a cabinet in the upstairs office, with abrasions all over her throat. The death certificate had given the cause of death as “asphyxiation,” just like her mother and two brothers. It hadn’t specified that she’d been asphyxiated in an entirely different manner.
That new information hit me like a mini-bombshell, altering my already vague and confused picture of what had really happened to the family.
The coroner had concluded that Catherine had first strangled her daughter, then drowned herself and her sons in the pond. This struck me as a little doubtful—Noah had been twelve years old. Unless he’d been particularly sick or weak, it seemed like it would be difficult for an average woman to hold him underwater until he died. Maybe he had been sickly. I had no way of knowing.
It was beyond macabre to imagine Catherine doing all of that, including forcing herself to stay underwater until she drowned.
“Why would she have done it?” I whispered. My cat, lying on the fuzzy bathroom mat, turned his patchy black-and-white head to look at me. “That doesn’t make any sense, Bandit. If she killed her husband to protect the children, why would she kill the children?”
Bandit lost interest and looked away, deciding the tag at the edge of the mat was more interesting. He idly pawed at it.
“Maybe she didn’t kill her husband, then,” I said. “Maybe she thought it was suicide. Maybe it really was suicide. Still—why the daughter first, then everyone else dies in a different way?”
Bandit rolled to his feet, approached the tub, then rose up and put his front paws on the edge of the bath. For a second, it looked like he was actually going to say something. Then he lowered his head and began lapping up bath water.
“That’s the last time I call you in for a homicide consultation,” I told my cat. He didn’t even glance at me.
After my bath, as I was drying off, my Aunt Clarice called from Virginia. I’d lived with her from the time my parents died when I was fifteen until I moved back to Savannah for college.
She told me about some gossip from her bridge club, and some gossip from a ladies’ group at church, and I pretended to be really interested. She was just calling to tal
k. The more I encouraged her to talk, the fewer questions she would end up asking me.
The questions were usually the same: was I still doing that same sort of work (asked with distaste)? Had I met a nice young man yet, and when were the babies due? I wasn’t getting any younger and definitely didn’t want to end up a useless old maid at the age of thirty. Well, not in so many words, but that was what she meant.
She was mainly just checking to see if I was okay, living alone “in that big city.” Right. I assured her I was, and avoided mentioning how two different ghosts had nearly killed me in the past twenty-four hours. No reason to worry her.
With my family duties squared away for the week, I got ready for work and headed to the office.
While I loaded a few traps into the special rack built into the back corner of the van, Calvin dropped down in his elevator cage from his apartment on the upper floor. His bloodhound Hunter jogged out, wagged his tail at me, and stopped at my feet for some petting.
“Trap time?” Calvin asked.
“Yep.” I caught him up to date on the case. “It looks like you were right about our missing ghosts. Catherine definitely made an appearance.”
“And the little girl?” he asked.
“No sign of her yet,” I said. “Maybe that’s something Jacob can find out about.”
“You’re really softening on the issue of psychic consultants, aren’t you?” he asked.
“I’m softening on the subject of Jacob, at least. He was a big help last time.”
“But you’re not softening on that subject as much as Stacey,” he added, with a little smile. “Should I make us sandwiches?”
“No, thanks,” I said. Calvin usually buys those ultra-discount deli meats, the ones that stick out because of their unnatural color. “Can I have a dime?” I walked over to an old metal card catalog we’d salvaged from a local library. A ring thick with keys hung on a nail in the wall beside it.
“What decade?” Calvin asked.
“Eighteen-forties, eighteen-fifties.” I sifted through the keys until I found the one I needed, and then I unlocked one of the rows of miniature metal doors. I slid out the drawer. Instead of index cards, it had little Tupperware containers, labeled by decade. I picked up one holding coins from the eighteen-fifties.
Since money can be one of a person’s obsessions in life, a certain number of ghosts are still attracted to it after death. Unfortunately, we deal with a lot of ghosts from past centuries, and they don’t really respond to coins made of tin and zinc.
Calvin collects old silver coins, searching the internet for the most worn, chipped, and dented ones, those barely worth more than melt value. They can come in handy.
I lucked out and found one dated 1851. It was a Seated Liberty, a very common design, the goddess Liberty with stars and a shield. The goddess’s image had been worn down and tarnished until she was little more than a shadow.
The coin had been struck the same year Isaiah had died. Its deteriorated condition made it seem even more like suitable money for the dead.
“In mint condition, that would be worth eight hundred dollars today,” Calvin said.
“What’s this one worth?”
“About fifteen bucks.”
“We might have to bury this one,” I said. “Isaiah seems a little vicious. With, you know, the studded torture belt and trying to kill me and everything.” When we remove a not-particularly-dangerous ghost from a house, we do a catch-and-release. A walled cemetery in a ghost town makes an ideal wildlife refuge for ghosts, and we know where several of those are.
With the more dangerous ghosts, though, the violent and hostile ones, we never release them from the trap. We bury the trap with the ghost inside, which means we bury the bait inside the trap, too. That’s why we use cheap junk silver instead of shiny gold, even though gold might be more alluring and effective bait. You don’t want to bill the clients for a coin worth hundreds of dollars if you can avoid it.
“Do you have any thoughts about what might have happened in that house?” I asked Calvin. “To me, the only scenario that makes sense is the obvious. Isaiah lost his money and killed himself, and then his widow, crazy with grief, kills her three kids and herself.”
“But you don’t believe that one,” he said. “Or you wouldn’t have a problem with it.”
“Catherine saved our clients’ little boy, Crane,” I said. “He might have died without her.”
“Perhaps she’s trying to atone for her sins in life,” Calvin said.
“Maybe.”
“What’s a scenario that makes less sense?” Calvin asked me.
“One where Catherine kills her husband and her kids. The only motive for killing her husband was to save the kids from him. And why strangle the little girl upstairs, separate from the rest?” I asked.
“Perhaps Eliza’s death was more of an impulse, and the death of the boys required more planning,” Calvin said.
“And where does Eliza’s poltergeist fit into it?” I asked. “Between her father’s death and his ghost haunting the house, I could see how she might be stressed enough to create one, if she had the psychic ability to do it.”
“I suppose the poltergeist might have increased the stress on the mother,” he said. “She would have figured it was her dead husband harassing the household.”
“Which it might have been, but it was more consistent with poltergeist activity focused on Eliza,” I said. “It even happened during the day, all over the house, wherever Eliza was. That’s more like a poltergeist than a revenant like Isaiah. Ghosts are mostly nocturnal...”
Calvin nodded.
“But I still don’t think Catherine did it,” I said. “I saw her. She didn’t seem malevolent. I just didn’t get that feeling from her.”
“Aren’t you always telling Stacey that we should act on observable evidence and logic, and not our feelings?” Calvin asked me with a little smile.
“Yeah. True. Speaking of putting feelings ahead of logic, I could really go for a pizza right now.”
“You sure you don’t want a bologna sandwich instead?”
“Pretty sure, but thanks for asking.”
We ordered the pizza, and it arrived about the time Stacey did. She was finally, reluctantly, learning to dress in a way that was less likely to get her scratched or bitten by a hostile ghost. Tonight it was canvas pants and a long-sleeved, high-collared shirt.
Stacey and I loaded the big stamper, the device that slams the lid down onto the trap at high speed, into the van. With the heavy lifting done, we sat down and ate.
Mushrooms and garlic. Crunchy, buttery crust. Yum.
Then we were off to work.
On the way to the Paulding house, we caught a view of low black thunderheads spitting lightning into the ocean. According to the Weather Channel, we could expect another dark and stormy night in the ghost-infested old mansion. Hooray.
Chapter Fifteen
We arrived at our clients’ well before dark, because we wanted to set the trap before the sun went down.
Gord and Crane were in the kitchen, watching Pokemon on a digital tablet. Toolie was home from work, making some kind of chicken and broccoli casserole in the kitchen. Juniper came downstairs soon after we arrived to see what was happening. The family seemed like they were trying to act normally, maybe for Crane’s sake, but Juniper and her parents were clearly uneasy and nervous under their forced smiles.
I noticed they kept flashlights and electric lanterns near them now, to help defend against any ghost attacks. Assorted religious items had been set out in the family room—a cross, a print of Jesus standing in the dark with his hands glowing, an old Bible, and a Christmas Nativity scene on the coffee table—as if to ward off evil spirits.
If I did my job right, those spirits would soon be gone. The most dangerous one, anyway.
Clients usually have a few questions about the ghost traps, and I don’t generally like explaining them in the house where the ghost might hear, so after a fe
w minutes I led Toolie, Juniper, and Crane outside to the van.
“Here’s the basic trap,” I said, lifting a two-foot-high hard plastic cylinder from the back of the van. I explained it quickly: the innermost layer was a jar of thick, heavily leaded glass, very difficult for ghosts to penetrate, impossible for most. The second layer was copper mesh electrified by a battery pack concealed at the bottom—this created an electromagnetic cage for the ghost. The outer layer was just clear, hard plastic to insulate the wiring.
“What do you do with ghosts after you trap them?” Crane asked. It was the first thing he’d said since we’d arrived.
“It depends on the ghost,” I said. “If they’re not dangerous and don’t hurt people, we can release them into a special kind of sanctuary, an old graveyard where they can wander free within the walls. If they are dangerous, we bury the trap so they can’t bother anyone else.”
Crane seemed to think this over a minute, then he nodded.
“We bait the trap with candles to draw them inside, because ghosts can feed on the heat,” I said. I pulled the little Ziploc baggie of ghost-bait from my pocket. “We also have some special bait for Isaiah. Here’s a little train toy, a promotional item from his business that failed. And here’s a silver dime from the year he died, since he was so worried about money. These other two items are a couple of cufflinks Stacey found in the attic, which we think belonged to him.”
“So he’s not going to haunt our house anymore?” Crane asked. “You’ll make the bad one go away?”
“That’s right,” I told him.
Without another word, Crane turned and walked inside. Maybe it hadn’t been such a good idea to explain the trap to him. He was in direct contact with the ghosts, and I didn’t want him spilling the beans to Noah and Luke, in case the spilled beans would then somehow pass to Isaiah himself, warning him away from the trap.
“Don’t tell any of the ghosts what I just showed you,” I called after Crane while he approached the back door to his house. He glanced back over his shoulder, but didn’t say anything before walking inside.