by JL Bryan
“That could be important,” I said.
“Maybe.” Stacey shrugged. “Her memories seemed pretty fuzzy to me.”
“She wasn’t too clear about the present, but her recall of the past seemed pretty crisp to me. I’m glad you mentioned that before we talked to these guys.”
“Hey, that’s what a good assistant ghost trapper is for, right?” Stacey forced a smile. She had a distracted look on her face, like something was bothering her. I wondered what was on her mind, but I didn’t feel like having a heart to heart in the parking lot at Roustie’s, where a biker might puke on our tires at any moment.
We stepped inside. Though it was late Sunday afternoon, there was already a scattered crowd. Acrid cigarette smoke hung in a permanent yellow fog over the room. There were a few glowing neon beer signs, a couple of pool tables, some tables and chairs you wouldn’t really want to touch. A bar took up one corner of the place, with a small empty stage beside it.
The clientele was what you’d expect from the cars outside, a mix of bikers and big old boys with meshback caps. There were a couple of women among the bikers, hard-looking types in their forties.
We drew a few glances, especially Stacey. I didn’t linger near the door but strode directly across the place toward the bar. I didn’t know what Buck or Dabney looked like, so I addressed myself to the bartender, a man in his fifties with a heavy salt and pepper mustache and a serious beer gut. His t-shirt featured a cartoony old man on a fishing boat. The rag tied onto his head featured flaming skulls firing missiles out of their mouths.
“What’ll it be, ladies?” the man asked. I assumed the question was directed at Stacey’s chest, because that was where he was looking. He leaned on the counter toward us.
“I kind of wouldn’t mind a mojito,” Stacey said, and I cut her a look. She pouted at me. “What? Okay, a sweet tea.”
“Only sweetie we got in here is you, darlin’.” The bartender punctuated this slice of wit with another big grin at her shirt.
“We need to speak with Buck Kilkenny or Dabney Newton,” I said. “Are either of them in today?”
“Whoa, girl got serious.” The man straightened up and backed away, eyeing us suspiciously. “You cops or what?”
“P.I.,” I told him. “It’s nothing serious. Just some background research for a client.”
“What kinda research?”
“I would have to speak to Buck or Dabney about that,” I said.
“I got to say, y’all ain’t too good at being P.I.‘s, cause one of them fellers is standing right in front of you, and you didn’t even know it. Buck Kilkenny.” He held out a fairly dirty hand with fingernails chewed into dangerous little points. I shook it with a polite smile.
“Nice to meet you, Mr. Kilkenny,” I said. I gave him my card. “I’m Ellie Jordan, and this is Stacey Ray Tolbert. Our agency actually specializes in the paranormal.”
“What’s that?”
“We trap and remove ghosts from haunted houses,” Stacey said.
“Oh! Heck, yeah, I’ve heard of y’all.” He glanced at the Eckhart Investigations card with renewed interest. “Yeah, must be a good trade, lots of dead folks in this city. What can I do for you pretty ladies? You sure you don’t want a drink? I can put it on the house, since I’m the house.” He winked at Stacey.
“I wouldn’t mind a bottled water, if you have one,” I said.
“Got a water glass.” He grabbed a tall, badly spotted glass from the overhead rack and filled it with water using a little hose.
“Thank you,” I said, though I had no intent of drinking it. The whole place was filthy, okay? I was pretty sure my jeans would make a peeling sound when I climbed off the sticky barstool. “We’re looking at a very haunted house right now—the Marsh house. Louisa Marsh told us you and Dabney used to work there.”
“Oh, yeah, back when we was pretty much dumb kids.” He lit a cigarette and poured himself a whiskey, asking with gestures whether we wanted one. Stacey and I shook our heads. “Hell, I guess I was twenty-five, twenty-six…Dabney and I knew each other since high school, he was a year ahead of me. We always ran around together. Yeah, Ms. Marsh paid us pretty good to try to keep that old heap from falling apart. I’m surprised they haven’t tore it down yet.”
“It’s still there,” I said. “How many years would you say you worked there, Buck?”
“Hell, how I would I know? It was a lot of partying in them days, a lot of Friday nights…I’d say four or five years, off and on.”
“What kind of work did you do for her?”
“Just about everything. Fixing windows, painting, patching the roof…you name it.”
“Ms. Marsh told me you also did some security work,” I said.
“Aw, yeah. When somebody got out of hand—starting fights, or trashing the house, wouldn’t pay, wouldn’t leave, whatever—we’d clear ‘em out for her. Why you asking about that?”
“Just getting a complete picture. Now, here’s the big question: did you ever experience anything unusual in the house?”
“You mean like a ghost?”
“Exactly.”
“Bet your ass! Especially early in the morning, or when night was coming on. Sometimes we’d come in and our tools would be moved around, or just plain missing. Sometimes you’d think you saw somebody walking into a room, but the room would be empty. Heck, sometimes the door was still closed, and you couldn’t figure out where they went.”
“Anything else?”
“The voices,” Buck said. “You might hear one talking at you, and there’d be nobody there. Sometimes it sounded like a big man. One time there was a woman, I never will forget. I was changing out the lights up there in the second-floor hall, and the voice says right in my ear, ‘Come on, sugar, let’s have a drink.’ Like she was hitting on me. Thing was, nobody was there in the hall, and plus I was way up on that ladder, so how’s anybody gonna talk right into my ear, anyway?”
“Did that scare you?” I asked.
“Well, yeah, but not enough to start turning down Ms. Marsh’s money. Heck, Dabney got it worse. He one time felt some guy’s hands grab him and shake him, like he was mad. That was late, late at night, later than I ever worked.” Buck sipped his whiskey, glanced around, and grinned. He lowered his voice and said, “Dabney spent a whole night or two there with Ms. Marsh, if you get my meaning. She was about twenty years older than us, and I don’t think she was that much of a looker, but she picked him, anyway.” He shrugged. “That’s how it goes. But I don’t think that ghost liked him spending the night with her. It’s the main reason Dabney stopped doing it, that ghost.”
“That’s really interesting,” I said, returning his conspiratorial grin. He knocked back the rest of the whiskey.
“What’s going on out here?” A tall, thin, acne-scarred man about Buck’s age walked out from the door behind the bar area, wearing a black wife beater shirt and an old cap with the logo of the Sand Gnats, our city’s minor league baseball team. He scowled at Buck. “You ain’t drinking at the bar again, are you?”
“Nope.” Buck moved to hide his whiskey glass with his body. “Just entertaining these pretty girls, Dabney.”
“And you ain’t run ‘em off yet?” Dabney looked us over, smiling though the toothpick grasped in his teeth. “Hoo-wee. Y’all from out of town?”
“No, sir,” I said.
“They’s private detectives,” Buck told him. This knocked the leering grin right off Dabney’s face.
“What do they want?” Dabney approached us, looking as suspicious as Buck had.
“We’re just doing some background on a house that may be haunted,” I said, passing him a business card. “The old Marsh place. We’ve already spoken with Louisa Marsh, and Buck was just telling us about some ghostly encounters you may have had while working there.”
“He was, was he?” Dabney asked. “Buck, go check the deep fryer in the kitchen. It’s busted again.”
“But I wanted to keep talkin’—” Bu
ck threw a desperate look at Stacey.
“I bet you did. Now go fix it up.”
Buck sighed and walked back through the door. Dabney watched him with his arms crossed, then turned back to us.
“Now what do the two of you want?” he asked.
“We were wondering if you’d ever experienced anything supernatural at the Marsh house,” I told him.
“Like what?”
“Anything. Tools moved out of place, voices, apparitions…maybe something grabbing you or scratching you,” I said.
“If I did, I don’t see how it would be any business of yours,” Dabney said.
“We’re trying to remove the ghosts for our clients,” I explained. “They’re the new owners of the house.”
“New owners, huh? Sounds like somebody had a big pile of money to burn. That place won’t stay put together no matter what you do to it.”
“Do you have any idea why?”
“Just an old place, that’s all. Falling to pieces.”
“Are you saying you never encountered a ghost while working there?” I asked.
“I ain’t gonna sit here and tell you gossip about Ms. Marsh or her family, or none of that,” Dabney said. “It’s disrespectful to her.”
“Ms. Marsh didn’t mind telling us about it earlier today,” I said.
“Then I guess you already heard what there is to say.”
“She said there were ghosts, including her uncle, Captain Marsh.”
“I won’t say there was nothing there.” Dabney found Buck’s whiskey glass and scowled. “You’d hear bumps in the night, stuff like that.”
“Did you ever spend the whole night there?” I asked.
“What are you saying?” Dabney narrowed his eyes at me.
“Just asking.”
“I don’t have anything to tell you,” Dabney said. “I see you’re not drinking, so you may as well clear out.”
“All right. Thanks for your time.” I slid off the stool—just as predicted, the seat of my jeans peeled away with a gross slurping sound. Stacey did the same. We started to leave, and then I turned back. “Just one more quick question, Mr. Newton. Did you ever meet Mercy Cutledge?”
“Why you asking about her?”
“She may be the one haunting the house.”
“Huh.” Dabney scratched his chin, as if putting together his answer very carefully. “Well, she killed that old man before I was even born. The only time I seen her, she was already a corpse. So I guess, no, I’d say I didn’t know her at all.”
“Did you and Buck find her body in the foyer of the house?”
“Me?” He looked taken aback. “Naw. Buck and I came in late that morning—long night before, probably. We did a lot of late nights in them days, drinking and carrying on. The police got there before we ever did.”
“Okay, that fits the police report,” I said. “Thanks for your time, sir.”
He rinsed out Buck’s whiskey glass and rubbed it with a yellowed, crusty towel while he watched us walk out the door.
“That was pleasant,” Stacey said, shuddering as we left the dim bar for the low orange sunshine outside. “So it sounds like Ms. Marsh remembered things wrong, huh?”
“It sounds like it.” I climbed into the driver’s side this time. “Let’s go get the house ready before sunset. I don’t want to be in there after dark.”
Stacey was very quiet as I started the engine. She had that same distant, distracted look on her face.
“Is something wrong?” I asked her.
Something was.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“I don’t know if I can do this anymore,” Stacey said, while I headed east. The Marsh house, on the west side of Savannah, was only a few miles from Roustie’s, so we had plenty of time before dark.
“Do what?”
“All of it. This work. I’ve been attacked by ghosts again and again just in the past few days. Twice in the Marsh house, not to mention that asylum basement…” She shivered at the memory. “I’m gonna lose my mind if this keeps up. I can’t handle it. I’m having nightmares, Ellie. Crazy, crazy nightmares.”
“It’s not always like this,” I said. “But occasionally it gets dangerous. The nightmares are normal, too. You get used to them.”
“Just thinking about going inside that house one more…” Stacey shook her head. “Maybe my mom’s right, and I need to move back to Alabama. Figure my life out. Things like that.”
“Must be nice,” I said.
“What?”
“To feel like you have that option.” I took a long look at her, then I stepped on the gas, charging down the interstate.
“Hey, our exit’s coming up,” Stacey said.
“We’re making a detour.”
“Uh, do we have time for that?” she asked, looking at the wide orange sun sinking behind us.
“Unless there’s an unexpected Sunday-night traffic jam, I think we’ll be okay.” I drove us south into the suburban sprawl, where Savannah’s historic squares, parks, mansions, and churches give way to a more typical land of strip malls and subdivisions.
Anticipation knotted up my stomach as we drove down a tree-lined side road and turned into a neighborhood. The sign read RIVERSIDE POINT, though the neighborhood was at least a mile from the nearest river. It was surreal—I hadn’t been back in at least a year, maybe more.
“Where are we going?” Stacey asked, checking the time on her phone. She looked antsy. I understood. We had a couple of chores to do inside the Marsh house before dark fell.
The neighborhood was an older one, the architecture ranging from 1950’s bungalows to those asymmetrical 1970’s houses with the high roofs and weird angles. The place mostly looked like I remembered, except for some taller trees, a few gardens that had been rearranged or removed, a couple of houses painted different colors. Several of the yards were overgrown and badly kept. They hadn’t been like that ten years earlier, or my dad would surely have griped about it.
I parked on the side of a road, in a gap between two houses. No house stood there, just a wooden fence with a couple of KEEP OUT signs.
“Where are we?” Stacey asked again.
“This is where I grew up.” I climbed out of the van and motioned for her to join me.
The fence was five feet high, so we could just look over it. I stood on my tiptoes for a better view.
Enclosed within the fence was a misshapen hump of red Georgia earth, with scattered weeds growing here and there. There weren’t nearly as many weeds or wildflowers as there should have been in an open, sunlit lot like this. There was too much death in the soil.
“Was something here?” Stacey asked.
“There have been six houses here over the years,” I said. “The first was a plantation house, when this was all farmland. It burned down. The last one was my house. It burned down, too, when I was fifteen. Every house built on this spot has been destroyed by fire.”
“Whoa, all six of them?” Stacey shook her head, looking at the empty lot. “Was it one of those pyromaniac ghosts you were talking about?”
“Pyrokinetic. Well, I guess pyromaniac isn’t wrong, either. In 1841, a family lived in the house here—wife, husband, three kids. The wife, a pretty woman named Elizabeth Sutton, grew kind of bored with her marriage, I guess. Her husband was much older than her. She had an affair with another man, an extremely handsome man named Anton Clay. He was a rich young merchant in the cotton trade. He had plenty of female admirers, but he wanted Elizabeth.
“Eventually, Anton pressured her to leave her husband and family to run away with him. Elizabeth refused and broke off the affair. Anton didn’t like that at all. In fact, he kind of snapped.”
“What happened?” Stacey asked.
“He came to the house very late one night, while everyone was asleep. He broke in and set the entire place on fire. Everybody died—Elizabeth, her husband, her small children, three slaves, and Anton himself.”
“How terrible,” Stacey whisper
ed. “Those poor kids!”
“Since then, every house built here has burned down, with no clear cause of the fire. I guess nobody has come along to risk building a seventh one yet. But eventually they will.”
“Were you hurt in the fire?” Stacey asked. “Or your family?”
“I would’ve died if my dog hadn’t woken me up.” I smiled a little, but there was no real joy in it. My heart was hurting. “Sweet little Frank. You know how golden retrievers always look like they’re smiling? Anyway, he jumped on my bed and woke me up, and my room was full of smoke.
“The dog led me out. I couldn’t even see him most of the time, there was so much smoke, and the upstairs hall was full of fire, just billowing up and out, a wall of flames. He managed to steer me downstairs and out of the house. Good dog. The best.” I was tearing up already, and I wiped my eyes on my sleeve. “On the way out, I saw him.”
“Who?”
I took a breath. “Anton Clay, I found out later. The guy was truly handsome, I mean he could be a movie star or something. You could see why a bored young wife would have an affair with this guy. His eyes were powerful, and sharp like they could cut you into pieces with a glance. In life, they were blue, but when I see them, they’re fire red. He was dressed in a cravat, vest, and an old, old-fashioned coat, like he belonged a hundred and fifty years in the past. Which he did.
“I didn’t know who he was back then, of course. He held out his hand, and he said something like ‘Come with me. We belong together.’ And I mean, in the middle of everything, I was so startled to see him there, surrounded by my burning living room. He should have been on fire, where he was standing, but his coat wasn’t even singed. And his eyes and voice kind of hypnotized me, making me stay where I was. I probably would have stood right there and let the fire take me if Frank hadn’t barked and nipped at my hand.
“I got going again, toward the door. When I looked back, the man was gone, but the fire was welling up toward me like it meant to get me before I could escape.
“Frank and I made it outside just before that wave of fire swept out the front door and spread out across my porch, which was all made of wood and went up fast.” I shook my head. I wasn’t even looking at Stacey, just staring at the desolate hump of land in front of me.