by JL Bryan
"It's not a ghost if I'm not dead."
"Is it a poltergeist? Or a doppelganger? That's what you usually call the ghost of someone who's still alive, but—no, wait, Ellie. We must be talking about your—"
"Don't say it."
"Your astral body?"
"Ugh. There's no need to delve into the crystals-and-UFOs terminology here."
"So we should get religious and say 'soul' instead? Your soul is loose?"
"Let's just get quiet and let Ellie sleep," I told her.
Sleep came, filled with unpleasant dreams—the fiery ghost of Anton in his nineteenth-century frock coat; the magician ghost in his top hat, his skeletal hands shuffling playing cards hand-painted with gruesome scenes, the jacks and queens murdered and bloody; the singing lullaby ghost with her half-formed face appearing from the darkness on the baby monitor, her dark sockets seeming to look right out at me from the little portable TV screen. Later, I dreamed of being trapped in a burning house with voices whispering at me, faces of ghosts I'd captured looking in at me through the windows as I burned.
Basically, it was a pretty typical night's sleep for me.
Stacey nudged me awake about mid-morning. My back was sore from the cot, and I stood and stretched. The day outside was drizzling and gray.
"We should've gotten up earlier," I said. "Before dawn. It's going to be hard to slip in and out of that old gas station without anybody seeing us."
"If I'd woken you before dawn, you wouldn't have slept at all. You really looked like you needed it. You still look like you need more, pretty badly."
"Thanks." I pushed hair back behind my ears.
"Not in a bad way."
"There's a good way to look like you need more sleep?"
"What you need is a hot stone massage and a pedicure."
"Very funny."
"Have you ever had a pedicure, Ellie?"
"Was there any more activity in the house?" I asked, while checking my phone.
"Pretty quiet. The nursery stayed cold, with high EMF readings, but the lullaby lady didn't do anything else. I'll look for anything that might have happened out of hearing range, of course...same for the crying lady in the shed, I didn't hear anything audible, but I'll run some more anomaly checks—"
"Oh, good. Grant's invited us to meet with him at the Historical Association. The tea room. Maybe he can help us identify the lullaby lady. With a little luck, we can wrap this up and make Mackenzie's house baby-safe again."
"Problem," Stacey said. "If we close this case, then we'll have to return the gear we checked out for it...and we're using half of that to monitor Anton's old haunts. So..."
"We can't deliberately delay this case, though. We can't make Mackenzie, our actual client, suffer any longer than necessary just because of internal politics at our agency—"
"Whoa, whoa. Hold your horses there, pilgrim. I was just saying that maybe we don't tell our evil new overlords if we happen to crack the case."
"And you might have a very good point there. We would just have to keep Mackenzie from talking to the home office if that happens. Now let's get some coffee."
We drove down to the Sentient Bean, our usual coffee spot, located at the south end of the long green sprawl of Forsyth Park, pretty much the biggest downtown park that doesn't involve thousands of headstones and weather-stained angel statues. We didn't order any food, because Grant had insisted that he would provide us lunch when we met with him.
I sat and recovered in the warm, familiar environment of the coffee shop, watching the rain pour down through the two-story bank of arched windows at the front. A group of art students in knit hats argued loudly about Andy Warhol at the next table. I tried to ignore them.
Stacey distracted me from thoughts of disturbing things like ghosts, death, and Studio 54 by telling me about a new baby sea turtle out at the marine science center on Tybee Island, of which she was a member. That was about the speed of conversation I was ready for at the moment—slow, cute, mildly amusing.
I fought to keep my mind from wandering back to the feeling of Kara clawing me out of my body and spinning my soul on her fingernails like a basketball. Ugh. Even Scary Houdini trying to choke me to death and make me disappear forever had been a minor kick in the shins compared to what the powerful Russian psychic had done to me. I felt like I would never rest comfortably in my own skin again.
Michael's sister Melissa, who hadn't answered my texts or calls, got back to me with a terse HE'S NOT ANY BETTER. STOP ASKING. At least it was a reply.
At last, it was time to meet Grant at the Historical Association, housed in a Federal-style mansion on an avenue of other old mansions, located just a short, tree-shrouded walk through Forsyth Park.
Stacey and I slipped around a group of Red Hat Society women taking a walking tour of the area, tourists from out of town, admiring the garden and architecture of the Association mansion itself.
"...Mariel Lancashire, a lover of historic preservation, willed that this house should be devoted to 'sober research and learning for the ennobling of the human spirit,'" said the tour guide, a fiftyish woman wearing an official Historical Association brooch. "Miss Lancashire meant the 'sober' part, too, forbidding the consumption of alcohol, tobacco, cake, or ice cream within the walls of her mansion. That rule has been broken a few times over the years...but I'm afraid those stories are better left for our ghost tour!"
"Hey, there's an idea," Stacey said, as we steered around the gaggle of chatting, picture-snapping tourists, through the front garden gate and up the front steps. "If we get sick of working for Kara and Nick, we can get jobs with one of the ghost-tour companies. Does anybody know the ghosts of this city better than us?"
"All we could really show them was the places that used to be haunted. If they're still haunted, it's because we failed."
"But we could turn those failures into cash!" Stacey said, while I rang the front doorbell. "And we could tell them about the ghosts we've confronted ourselves, all your adventures—"
"Adventures? I almost got murdered by the ghost of a dead magician in an old theater last night. You call that an adventure?"
"Well, technically—"
"It's my favorite girl in the world," Grant said, opening the front door with a flourish. He was dressed in a charcoal suit, his tie and matching lapel handkerchief in muted fall colors, his shirt a shade of orange so light it could have been mistaken for white at a distance. "And my other one as well. Come in. A feast awaits us...a feast brought to us by scandal."
"Good, because I skipped breakfast, lunch, and 3 AM snack, too," Stacey said. "I feel like I could eat two feasts."
I couldn't say I had the same appetite, but I was glad Grant had some information for us.
He led us into the mansion's dining room, where a dozen high-backed chairs were arranged along a dark mahogany table, all of it looking very stiff, Victorian, and expensive. The ceiling was high, letting light spill in on the stately brick fireplace and the portraits of assorted long-departed city notables and early settlers that looked down sternly at us, in the fashion of old portraiture, the dead seeming to judge the living and not really caring for what they found. Perhaps we were all too soft and modern for them.
Dining places were set for the three of us, and Grant removed round glass covers from dishes at the center of the table, uncovering an incredible number of small, colorful pastries and cakes. "Meringue and iced lavender cookies, petit fours, red velvet pudding, pralines, gourmet biscuits with hand-pressed sweet apple jam—"
"Whoa!" Stacey said. "It's like a...landfill of delicious poison."
"The landfill is precisely where all this excess is headed," Grant said. "There are also many, many sandwiches in the refrigerator. On croissants and crustless bread. All three major sandwich salad groups are represented—egg, tuna, and chicken."
"Why so much extra food?" I asked, pouring tea from the full pot that already awaited us. "You mentioned a scandal."
"Oh, yes." Grant's face we
nt from jovial to serious. He glanced around at the doors in and out of the room, and then he lowered his voice, or at least spoke in a whispery sound so we knew he was taking us into his confidence. "It revolves around Heloise Wellsley, current chair of the Hospitality Committee. You see, it was difficult to avoid noticing a sudden shift in the typical catering menu, somewhere around the time of that visiting delegation of historical preservationists from Cambridge. Too many sweets, you see. Less of an emphasis on freshly prepared vegetables and such. And, more often than not, a wasteful number of these desserts and breads left over. A clear pattern emerged."
"I see." Stacey nodded gravely, helping herself to a small white cake square with a pink rose drawn in icing on top. "So there was a mystery. The Case of Too Many Cakes."
"Indeed. As is turns out, Heloise was allowing her cousin too great an influence on the menu—her cousin, you must understand, who owns Old Towne Bakery and Catering out on River Street—an expensive location to maintain, to be sure..."
"So Heloise was spending too much of the Association's money buying cakes and sweets from her own cousin. I can imagine the uproar," Stacey said.
"Indeed. Quite a large faction is calling for Heloise to lose her chair, and perhaps be thrown off the Hospitality Committee altogether. This particular dethroning has been a long time coming, if you ask me." Grant sipped his tea. "At any rate, you've come to hear about dramas from long ago, not these new committee-related dramas currently unfolding around us like storm clouds rising from the sea."
"Were you able to discover anything about the Carlisle family?" I asked.
"As it happens, there are quite a number of records relating to Gibson and Company, if one knows where to look." Grant nodded at a cardboard Bankers Box currently sitting underneath the dining room's sideboard.
"Gibson and Company?" I asked.
"Named for Captain Alder Gibson of the United States Navy," Grant said. "Originally born in Massachusetts. Settled in Savannah after the Civil War, used his Navy connections to help him gain a significant share of the naval stores industry during Reconstruction—a bit of a carpetbagger, in fact, who made a tidy little fortune in the postwar chaos, exporting timber, turpentine, and such."
"And he...lived on the site of Mackenzie's house at some point?"
"He built the original house there, in the eighteen-seventies," Grant said. "Prior to that, the land was a sheep pen. The captain eventually married a local girl from an impoverished family. Hannah Root. As Hannah Gibson, she lived in his mansion and bore him two children before he died. And a third one, after."
"After?"
"She was early in her third pregnancy when Captain Gibson found his way into a shipyard accident. A bit of rope slipped loose at just the wrong moment, and a rather sizable load of timber found its way onto Captain Gibson's skull. This left a rather sizable inheritance for his young wife and children."
"So maybe it wasn't an accident," I said. "Maybe it was arranged."
"Perhaps," Grant said, "But no charges were raised at the time. You'll have to eat some of this food if I'm to continue."
Reluctantly, I took a single lemon cookie and placed it on a small plate. Stacey was munching her way through a brightly colored selection of confections.
"Where are the sandwiches again?" Stacey asked, then followed his directions through a swinging wood-paneled door into the adjacent kitchen. While she fetched cold sandwiches on croissants, I grabbed the cardboard box from the floor and began searching through it.
I found a photograph of Captain Gibson, who had a salt-and-pepper beard that grew mostly below his chin, a neck beard that lent his face a somewhat apelike appearance. His eyes were dark and stern. He stood at a wingback chair, looming over his smallish but attractive wife and two toddlers who both wore white dress-like garments, though one of them was a boy. I studied Hannah's face, the fuzzy gray blurs of her pert nose and sharp cheekbones, as if I could somehow magically discern whether the younger woman had killed her wealthy older husband.
"Hannah remarried just over a year later," Grant told us when Stacey had settled in with her fish sandwich. "The wedding was a few months after giving birth to her late husband's third child. The new husband was Daniel Carlisle."
"I read he was the owner of the naval stores company," I said.
"Well, at least he managed the share that his wife inherited from her late husband...which just happened to be a majority stake in the company," Grant said. "Mr. Carlisle had his own colorful background as well. He'd been a journeyman printer for a while, and was once arrested for forgery."
"So...maybe he helped murder the old captain. Right?" Stacey asked.
"You both enjoy leaping to such conclusions." Grant looked mildly horrified. "Murder, jealousy, betrayal..."
"There's usually some or all of that in the background of a haunting," I said. "If we find the story of happy people who lived happy lives in their happy, conflict-free homes, they probably aren't the ones haunting the house."
"Never fear, there was to be no excess of joy for Hannah Gibson Carlisle. The house burned in 1889, only months after the wedding, taking Hannah's three young children, even the baby. Also deceased was an African-American man in his mid-fifties, Julian Vasseur, who had been born in the French West Indies before moving to Savannah. Julian served as household cook, gardener, and general servant. Also deceased was the children's nurse, a Welsh girl listed as Mati Price. Hannah survived without injury, as did her husband Daniel. Daniel Carlisle happened to be away from home the night of the fire."
"Convenient," Stacey said, narrowing her eyes in exaggerated suspicion. "A little too convenient. Am I right?"
"But what did Daniel have to gain from killing those little kids and the servants? And burning his house to the ground?" I asked.
"It's a fair question," Grant said. "Having gone to all the trouble of marrying a woman with her own mansion, why burn it to the ground?"
"It was the servants." Stacey now spoke in a pretty cheesy black-and-white detective movie sort of voice. "They knew too much. Maybe the butler did it."
"Thanks, Stacey," I said. "That really gives us a lot to think about. What else, Grant? Did you find out anything else about the fire...like what caused it?"
"Or who?" Stacey asked, lowering her chin and shifting her eyes from side to side. "Who caused the fire? You see what we're saying here?"
"It was believed to be accidental," Grant said.
"Was there anyone who could have gained by Daniel and Hannah's death? Other heirs in line for the company? Did they have any other enemies?"
"That can be a rather difficult detail to suss out from obituaries and family records," Grant said. "You may take the box with you for further examination. Perhaps you'll find such answers within those printouts and photocopies."
"Thank you. Did you happen to run across—"
"You're going to ask whatever became of Daniel and his poor bride, who'd lost her first husband and three children by that point," Grant said. "You asked me about that specifically. They soon sold their share in the naval stores company and relocated to the British-controlled island of Barbados. They purchased the main house and other buildings belonging to an old sugar plantation. Apparently they intended to retire there, not far from the ocean."
"Sounds like a good plan," Stacey said.
"Sadly for them, it did not last. Daniel fell ill and died, as many of European descent did in the tropics, and Hannah was widowed a second time."
"Two dead husbands, three dead kids," Stacey murmured. "No wonder she's crying in the shed out back."
"We're not sure who's who just yet, Stacey," I said.
"Oh, so you think the multi-widowed lady is the one singing happy lullabies upstairs?"
"Whatever's upstairs in that nursery might be a lot of things, but it's definitely not happy," I said. Then I asked Grant, "Do we know what happened to the widow, Hannah, after that? Did she find a third husband?"
"And murder him?" Stacey asked.
"Where did she go next?"
"Next?" Grant raised his eyebrows as though I'd asked the most surprising, unexpected question ever spoken.
"After she sold the place in Barbados. Did she return to Savannah?"
"She did not. Sadly, the trail of the wandering widow ends there, with the sale of the old sugar estate, so far as the finest Barbadian librarians and myself can determine."
"We don't know anything else about her?" I asked. "She leaves a trail of dead bodies behind her and vanishes into thin air?"
"Vanishes with quite a lot of cash, too," Grant said, nodding. "I have open requests out at various institutions that might offer more, but as of now, that is the end of her tale. I can tell you that her two Barbadian servants did not go with her but remained on the island until dying in advanced age. The ultimate fate of Hannah Gibson Carlisle, however, remains a mystery lost to time."
"Well, eventually she came back to haunt the house where her children died," Stacey said. "That makes some sense, right? That would be the site of her biggest traumas and worst memories, the place where she lost her kids. Husband, too. I mean, unless she murdered that first one, because then she probably wasn't too upset about his death..."
"Maybe she killed both husbands," I said.
"You can't seem to decide whether to pity her or to suspect her of mass murder," Grant commented.
"Could be both at the same time," Stacey said. "Maybe she killed her husbands, but it turns out they were abusive evil guys who kind of needed it."