by Lila Dubois
Table of Contents
Excerpt
Ghosts
Blurb
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Epilogue
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Note from Lila
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Excerpt
“What did you find?” he asked.
“There’s plenty of boys here in the school records that could be the bones in the castle. Did I tell you that the scientist said they’re boys, one age eight or nine, the other four months?”
Séan nodded and motioned for her to continue.
“Well, the baby wouldn’t be in the school books, but the older boy should be. There are plenty of nine-year-old boys in here.” She touched the school records. “But there aren’t any deaths for both an eight-or nine-year-old and a baby in here.” Now she touched the parish records. “Are you sure they’d be in these books?”
“No. These could be the wrong years, but it’s interesting that the records from the time of the Fenian Rising were left here.”
“The Fenian Rising, of course.” 1866 was just before the uprising, and the deaths that took place here might have been some of the impetus for the 1867 rising. “The time period is about right, based on the furniture, but we need to look for the records in the years before and after this.”
“Yes, we should, but we can’t.”
“Why?”
“These are the only records we have for those years.”
“Oh.” Sorcha looked at table and all the history that rested there. “The other records were destroyed?”
“Or the priest moved them to the new parochial house.”
“Leaving these behind.” Sorcha tapped her fingers on the table as she thought. “You think they were left behind because they contain information about what happened in the castle?”
“Glenncailty likes to keep her secrets, and that may have been a way to bury the tragedy. If they went to all the trouble of sealing the door, I’m sure they would have gotten rid of other records.”
“But why keep them at all? Why not burn them?”
“Maybe the priest said he did.”
“There’s something that’s been spinning around in my mind.” Sorcha pulled her phone from her pocket. “One time we had a visitor at our guesthouse who’d come looking for her roots. It was an Australian woman. Family history said that they’d come from Athlone, but she didn’t know much else. We helped her a bit, but I remember she had to go to Dublin, to the National Archives.” As she spoke, Sorcha typed information into her phone, checking what she was saying. “She mentioned the school records when she came back.” She got the information she wanted after a quick search. “Yes, it says here that the National School Records were established in 1831 and stopped in 1921, and that though it was a nationwide project, the records are still held by the parishes.”
“So these papers are actually an official government document and should be with the parish records.”
“Yes, and it also means there would have to be more of these books.” Sorcha’s voice rose with excitement. She had the feeling that if she could just get a few more pieces of information she could put it all together. It was as if the pieces were all there, but she didn’t know how they fit together.
“They were left here as a way of hiding them but not destroying them.” Séan’s voice reflected some of the same excitement she felt.
“But then why isn’t there a record of the death in the parish register? We know how old the boys were, and probably they died at the same time, so the parish register should show the death of two boys together, age nine and four months.”
There was silence before Séan looked up. “Because they never really died.”
“What?”
“The room was sealed, meaning the bodies were never seen, and they were never buried.”
“But surely someone had to know they were in there, that they were dead.”
“Maybe they did, but without the bodies, without a burial, would that be recorded?”
Sorcha licked her lips and looked back at the records. “So if not the parish records…”
“We need to look at the school records for a boy who disappeared from the records after age eight or nine.”
They looked at each other for a moment, then both sprang into action. Séan pulled his chair up beside hers. Sorcha grabbed a pen and pad from her purse and took a seat beside Séan.
“I’ll start at the beginning and read off all the eight-year-old boys, then we’ll do nine-year-olds.”
Page by page, Séan went through it. Every time they found a boy of appropriate age, Sorcha noted his name, only to cross it off if the boy was still listed at age ten. When they reached the end of the book, there was only one name on the list.
Henry.
“One of the boys with no last name,” she said, circling it on her list.
“He’s in the book until he’s nine. Then there’s nothing.”
“I wonder why he doesn’t have a last name. There are a few others like that.”
“It can’t have been that they didn’t know it—it’s clear the boy lived in Glenncailty his whole life.”
“Maybe the mother wouldn’t say.” Sorcha, already sad at the poor child’s fate, took a deep breath to hold back tears. “It must have been hard, to have no family.”
“But why wouldn’t he have his mother’s name? Surely even if the child were a bastard he would carry his mother’s family name.”
“It seems a strange coincidence that there are other children with no name too. I looked at them earlier, while you were sleeping, because I thought it was odd. There’s a year where all three are listed.”
“It’s this same year.” He turned forward a page and then back. “Charles is eleven, Henry is nine and George is five in this entry.” He went to the next year. “But now none of them are listed.”
“I know what happened to Charles.”
“You do?”
“Look in the parish record—he’s one of the people listed as having died in the uprising.”
Séan turned to the parish record and compared the entries. “Here it is, Charles with no last name, died age eleven, the same age he disappears from the school records. But the other two aren’t listed as having died in the uprising.”
“But the ages are right for them to be siblings. None of them are so close in age that they couldn’t be related.”
“And the lack of last names is too odd and specific to be coincidence.”
Sorcha’s heart sank. “Maybe they moved away after the oldest died. If they were bastards, life would have been hard in a little town like this. Even I was made uncomfortable by the way people acted when I was pregnant but not married. I can only imagine what it was like over 150 years ago.”
“If we’re right, and Henry is one of the bones in the castle…”
Sorcha and Séan looked at each other.
“Then Charles and George are his brothers, and according to the school records, they must have died the same year.”
“If that’s the case—” Séan closed the book. “Where is George’s body?”
Ghosts
The Irish Castle
The Glenncailty Ghosts, Book 3
Lila Dubois
> Published 2017 by Book Boutiques.
ISBN: 978-1-946363-51-0
Copyright © 2017, Lila Dubois.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Book Boutiques.
This book is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, locales, or events is wholly coincidental. The names, characters, dialogue, and events in this book are from the author’s imagination and should not to be construed as real.
Manufactured in the USA.
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Blurb
He can protect her from anything, living or dead. Except from himself.
Sean Donovan knows all too well the horrors of Glenncailty Castle. Ten years ago, after a young woman's death, he boarded the place up himself-and almost lost his own life doing it.
It would be easy to avoid Glenncailty, if it weren't for the woman who now runs it as a hotel. Something about the angel-faced redhead calls to him—and calls him to protect her from the darkness seething in the castle walls.
Sorcha has gotten used to calming rattled guests who claim to have met a spirit from the castle's tragic past. But two years after Sean's attempt to convince her to leave melted down into an unforgettable kiss, she realizes she needs his help.
The ghosts of the castle are restless, and growing more so. When one of the staff is attacked, Sorcha turns to Sean, not knowing the kind of danger she's put him in.
Working together blows the lid off desire long denied, but laying the ghosts of Glenncailty to rest means facing her own past. If she doesn't, the ghosts might tear Sean apart from the inside out, and that would mean never knowing what could have been…
Previously Published
(2012) Samhain Publishing, Original title: The Fire and the Earth
Dedication
For Amy, who will now be known as the prologue killer, ghost whisperer and echo ninja.
Acknowledgements
Cover Artist: Valerie Tibbs, Tibbs Design
Prologue
Ten Years Earlier
He was milking with his father when the call came. His mother rushed out to the milking parlor, phone in hand. Séan didn’t see her, but felt his father stiffen beside him. He looked up and knew by his mother’s expression that something was wrong.
He joined the search party, leaving his father to finish the dawn milking. A girl from the village had gone missing at Glenncailty Castle. She and some friends had decided to spend the night in Finn’s stable, one of the few relatively intact buildings on the deserted castle grounds, as a daring celebration of the end of their exams. When her friends woke the next morning, the girl was gone.
Twenty men made up the search party. At any other time they would have been a boisterous bunch, talking and telling tales, since everyone knew each other. Cailtytown village was small and close-knit. It was that closeness that kept faces somber and voices hushed as small groups were assigned search quadrants. The girl wasn’t from Cailtytown, but a larger town ten kilometers away, and yet everyone there feared for her as if she was their own. They scoured the grounds all day.
Séan tramped through waist-high weeds as they checked the outbuildings. The main building—the castle—was really three buildings, connected by covered hallways, and had seen many masters, and many uses. The grounds showed that with outbuildings, barns, mews and even a church in architectural styles spanning hundreds of years. By dusk there was nowhere else to look but the castle itself. The search party had dwindled to a few as men headed home to tend to their livelihoods, shaking their heads as they climbed into cars.
There was little hope of finding her alive.
Glenncailty Castle was in the process of falling to disrepair, with stones tumbled from their moorings at the corners of the buildings and upper windows broken or missing. All the past misfortunes associated with it seemed to hover around the massive gray structure like a dreary fog. Séan and a handful of others entered through a broken window on the first floor—the same broken window they assumed the girl had used. The foyer had a black and white stone floor set in a check pattern, though the colors were muted by dirt and dust. In front of him, a grand staircase led up to the second floor. The stairs weren’t original—they were wood with beautifully carved rails and intricate details on the posts. They must have been from one of the castle’s many renovations.
They found her on the first floor of the west wing, which was in the worst shape of the three. A hole in the floor above and the tumble of rotted wood that blanketed her broken body told the story of her death. They’d pulled the boards off her, hoping by some miracle she’d survived.
There was no miracle. The bright young woman was gone, now nothing more than a twisted mess of bone and skin, her eyes open, forever staring at the stone walls.
When the others had taken her body away, Séan stayed, using hammer and nails and scraps of wood to board up any entrance, hoping to stop anyone else from paying a dear price for their curiosity. When the first floor was secure, Séan tapped the hammer against his other hand and looked up at the stairs to the second floor. Though he doubted that anyone would climb the outside of the building to enter through one of the broken windows there, he mounted the steps, planning to close up what he could.
The air grew colder as he mounted the steps, and he could almost see his breath. The stairs under his feet were silent, without a squeak to betray their age.
He circled the second floor of the main building first, boarding up three of the windows. Most of the second floor was taken up with what he assumed was once a ballroom. There was a third floor, but the steps up to it were rotted away. He went back to the ground floor and the covered hall to the two-story east wing. The second floor there was in good shape, with all the windows already boarded up from the inside. Finally he crossed over into the west wing. They’d already done what they could with the first floor, though Séan had left one window uncovered to give himself a way out, since all the doors were chained closed or too old to open. He tried and failed not to look at the spot where the girl’s body had been.
That left only the second floor of this wing, which was a risk since he weighed more than the girl who had clearly fallen through. He climbed the circular stone stairs, feeling the worn places in the center of each tread. It was chillingly cold here, colder even than the second floor of the main wing. At the top of the staircase he found a hallway, the end of which was obscured by ivy, which had grown in through cracks and created a thick green curtain. Séan wondered if that was what the girl had gone to investigate—it was pretty, in a strange, sad way.
For a moment he thought he saw the curtain of ivy move and heard something almost like… He shook his head. There were probably rats in here.
The floor was wood, and he could see the gaping hole where the girl had fallen through. There was no way he could walk in the center, where the wood looked weakest, but he could see that at the edges wood floor was supported by stone. Careful to stay against the wall, where he was walking on wood-atop stone, he inched down the hall to the first door.
The room seemed frozen in in time—silk papered the walls, a small chandelier caught the last rays of sunlight and oilcloth-draped furniture seemed ready to have the covers drawn off. It was a room from a later period in the castle’s history, and one that had survived the neglect and failed renovations that left much of the rest of the castle a stony shell. The windows were intact and closed.
He’d started to pull the door closed when he saw her.
The shimmery gray figure stepped away from the wall. Her hair was long and as white as that of an old woman, though her face was young. She raised her hands toward him, eyes pleading. Séan froze, shocked and disbelieving.
Then the ghost’s face turned hard, her eyes di
sappearing until there were two gaping dark sockets in her face. Then she raised her hands and raked her nails down her cheeks, seeming to scrape strips of flesh from the bone. Her mouth opened, and kept opening, the gaping maw too large, the jaw dropped down like a snake’s.
He ran. He ran down the stairs and out of the castle, so desperate to escape that he broke a rib as he threw himself out of the one window he’d yet to board up. The sight of that woman in such pain haunted him. He’d run to the area where they’d parked the cars, only to find that everyone but him was gone, off to wake and bury the dead girl. Shaking from what he’d seen, he jumped into his father’s battered farm Jeep and raced home.
His mother was waiting for him with tea and freshly baked bread. She’d already heard they’d found the girl’s body. He’d opened his mouth to tell her what else had happened but stopped, not wanting to alarm her. Instead he’d gone out to the barn, silently rejoining his father as they went about the evening farming chores.
That night, sitting on the old stone fence outside the barn, he told his father what he’d seen. His father, a quiet, strong man, nodded as Séan spoke. He then helped him wrap up his ribs, as neither of them was a stranger to broken bones.
“Tomorrow, we will get help for her,” Séan’s father said.
“The girl who died?”
“The ghost.”
* * * *
The next day Séan and his father went to the parochial house. With his father sitting at his side, a mug of tea in hand, Séan explained what he’d seen. Their parish priest knew better than to tell anyone from around Glenncailty that ghosts weren’t real. When his tale was done, Séan, his father and the priest went out to the castle, taking care that no one else saw them. It was mid-day, and pale white sunlight made Glenncailty valley glow a lush green. The silvery stones of the castle and the abandoned outbuildings seemed out of place, as if the glen were meant to be nothing but trees and grass, the human presence foreign and wrong.
Séan hesitated as they approached, but a quick look at his father and the priest helped him find his courage. His father climbed in the window that Séan had thrown himself out of the day before. With his help, and that of the priest, Séan was able to climb in without hurting his ribs too much. The priest passed the small case he carried when making house calls to Séan and then scrambled through the window after them.