“I am tired. It’s true. Would you mind? Are you going to be safe here with a couple of strange guys?”
“I’m sure I will. I think I can handle myself.”
“All right. I swear I’ll have my head in the game tomorrow. I’ll be here early.”
I hugged her. “It’s no big deal, CJ. If for some reason the Taylors stop by, I’ll make your excuses.” I looked around at the peeling wallpaper, the dirty floors, the broken and missing crown molding. “From the way things are going here, it looks like you and I are both going to need some naps.”
She grabbed her keys, purse and briefcase and left without much more arguing. I sat down at the desk waiting for Angus to return. After about fifteen minutes, he hadn’t, so I walked outside to see what the holdup was.
There was no truck. There was no Angus. I couldn’t even see where there had been tire tracks in the driveway except for mine and Carrie Jo’s. What the heck? I walked around the property through the wild stickers I’d vowed to avoid earlier, ripping my skin a few times. I couldn’t make it all the way to the back of the house, so I circled back to the front and went the other way. There wasn’t much out there, just vine-covered buildings: what looked like it used to be a greenhouse, the corner of a brick platform and some other bumps in the landscape. It was a forbidding place. And suddenly I felt very alone. I called out to Angus a few times, but I spotted neither him nor his truck.
What if he wasn’t really an electrician but someone from the neighborhood looking to rob me or rip off some of the few valuable pieces left at Idlewood? That just didn’t make sense. Why would he show up wearing work overalls? And why would he introduce himself to us? I walked back inside and called out a few more times. I quietly grabbed my stuff, closed the door behind me, locked it up tight and left the house.
That was enough for one day. More than enough. I didn’t linger. I didn’t wait for anyone else to show up. I drove down the driveway and sat at the end of the street trying to decide where I should go next. Home to show the video to Mom and Gran, then call my aunts? They would all definitely be interested, but then Mom and Gran would want to come visit the house, and I didn’t think CJ would go for that. Not with the owners being so close-minded about spiritual activity and all. No, I needed to take it to Henri myself. CJ had left the video card here, and I wanted to hear firsthand what he had to say.
But what could he say? Yep, that’s a ghost you have there.
As I sat in my car I could almost hear the voice again. The small, young voice of someone who wanted my attention. Someone who wasn’t alive, most likely.
Rachel Kowalski…recording…
I headed down Dauphin to Cotton City Treasures, his antiques store. I hoped Henri was in Mobile and not taking one of his many trips to New Orleans.
I needed answers—and pretty darn quick!
Chapter Three – Henri
I’d barely gotten my first cup of coffee down when the first customer of the day walked into the shop. She was a window-shopper who didn’t make a purchase, but I helped her and she left with a few flyers for the upcoming Dauphin Street Fair that we would be participating in. I sat behind the counter again and worked on my new website design for Haunted Gulf Coast. It was more of a hobby, something to fuel my lifelong obsession with the supernatural. Thanks to some of Detra Ann’s string-pulling, I’d managed to get permission to spend one night at Lee House near the old courthouse. The owners were big believers in spiritual things, and they claimed this particular spot was full of negative energy. I told them I couldn’t help at all with “cleansing the place” but I would be more than happy to investigate. Maybe I could capture something. I was looking forward to the adventure. It had been a while since I’d done anything like it, although I had a sneaking suspicion that I’d be going solo. My better half was more practical than I was, although she had her own set of abilities that surprised even me sometimes.
Detra Ann and our one and only employee, Aimee, had gone to the Big Buy, as they liked to call it. It was a monthly regional auction for antiques dealers. The last time they made the trip across the bay, they came back with a truck full of real treasures. I hoped they were as lucky this time because business was booming. Really booming, thanks to the recent surge in old home restorations in the area. We had Seven Sisters to thank for that. Detra Ann knew the story behind each piece acquired, and Aimee was great at getting the prices we wanted.
When I wasn’t tracking down local ghosts, I was spending all my free time looking through old newspaper clippings about Aleezabeth. I’d been on the phone with Dumont’s new sheriff, Harry Joseph, but just like before, I wasn’t getting anywhere. Local law enforcement didn’t seem to care. Aleezabeth had disappeared so long ago that the case was technically “cold” and not given the priority it deserved. At least that was what I suspected. I didn’t want to believe it was because we had dark skin, or because we came from a poor family, but how else would you explain it? How could someone just disappear into thin air and nobody know anything or seem to care that a sweet young person who wouldn’t harm a fly had vanished?
To tell the truth, I felt a little let down. I’d hoped Carrie Jo and Ashland would help me find my cousin after everything settled down in their own lives, but that didn’t happen. To be fair, I’d kind of put it out of my mind too. Until Lenore began turning up in my bedroom, my car, the store. She never spoke and wouldn’t look at me. Her presence was enough. She was ashamed of my lack of purpose. My failure to get to the bottom of the mystery. I heard her whisper once: No more Peas, Carrots and Onions. Only I was left, and I wasn’t doing too well with my investigation into the disappearance of my own cousin. And I had two deaths to answer for now. I felt I didn’t deserve to be happy. I think Lenore agreed. Not when she and Aleezabeth were gone and apparently forgotten.
And here I was, about to marry the woman of my dreams like nothing had ever happened. My grandmother died shortly after Aleezabeth’s disappearance, but I was pretty sure she’d think it was shameful. I was the man in the family, after all, and now I was the only family left. Aleezabeth had been my responsibility. I’d let her down.
“Come on, Harry. It’s not your fault,” Detra Ann would tell me. Only she could call me Harry and get away with it. I’d pretend I agreed with her, but I didn’t. Not at all. Every detail of that day was ingrained in my head. I had been so anxious to do my own thing, to get into my own mischief, that I could not be bothered with my cousin. And I had left her alone. Alone to be grabbed by some evil man who stole her away from us all. No. I couldn’t tell Detra Ann all this. I internalized it and continued to search. Sometimes she’d help me sort through copies of stolen police reports. (Thankfully she didn’t ask questions about where I got them; she just raised her perfectly arched blond eyebrow and continued to read.) Yes, I loved this woman.
She’d taken a lot of heat after we announced our engagement, but she handled everything with grace. We were just talking about our engagement party this morning. It was a few months ago, but since her mother was such a socialite the Old Mobile crowd continued to whisper about us. Detra Ann laughed with me remembering Jessica Cumbest’s reaction to our big news. She’d swanned over for a personal chat at our engagement reception.
“Detra Ann, I don’t have a problem with you marrying someone like Henri. I just hope you understand some folks will—have a problem, I mean. There are some differences that are just too much for people to overlook.”
My fiancée sweetly replied in a whisper that matched Jessica’s, “Henri and I have talked about this quite a bit. We both feel like we can handle the age difference pretty well. I mean, he’s only ten years older than me. It’s not like he’s twenty years my senior.” Jessica’s face had turned red, and we sailed away to greet the rest of our “friends.” That was another reason to love Detra Ann, and as if she knew I was thinking about her she sent me a text.
I got the Steenburg! I got the Steenburg!
That had been her big goal today. Find a cast-i
ron Steenburg statue for Mrs. Devries, one of our most faithful customers. Mrs. Devries reminded me of someone I used to know, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. It would come to me eventually.
I continued clicking around on the page, rearranging components. I’d just about gotten the site like I wanted it when I felt a subtle moving of the air and caught a whiff of Lenore’s favorite perfume. It was the same kind our grandmother wore on special occasions, something called Vanderbilt. Then as if she were standing next to me I heard Lenore say, “Can’t you at least say her name, Henri?”
“It’s Aleezabeth! Aleezabeth! All right?” I said to the empty room. That was the moment Rachel came busting in the shop looking like she had run all the way here.
“Oh good. You’re here.” She looked around the shop and, seeing no one else, talked a mile a minute. “I’ve got something to show you—no. I’ve got something you should listen to. I captured it on my camera this morning. It’s from Idlewood.” She slid off her black jacket and tossed it across the glass counter, then tugged up the long sleeves of her gray t-shirt. Rachel knew all about my hobby documenting supernatural events, but I never expected her to share anything with me. She’d been courteous about the subject but not so much that I would have ever imagined she’d want me to collaborate with her. Not about Idlewood. Her Katie Holmes bob hairstyle bounced around her young face as she talked animatedly with her hands. Yep, she looked so much like the actress that sometimes I had to look twice. But she was just Rachel or Rachel K, as she called herself. Bubbly kid sister to our group of friends.
“Call me curious. What do you have?”
“It’s on my digital storage card. Actually, I have two. Can you take a look at them with me?”
“I’ve got the laptop right here. Hand me the card, and we’ll load it onto the big monitor over there.”
“For the record, this is all legit. CJ told me to bring this over to you. But the owner of the house, Desmond Taylor, well, he shouldn’t know about it. He’s kind of funny about these things.” She pulled one card out of the camera and one from her jeans pocket and handed them to me.
“Not a problem. Let’s see what you got.”
While we waited for the program to open, she shuffled through my stack of papers, as always without asking permission. “Still nothing, huh? I meant to ask you if you’d heard anything about your cousin. Maybe we should all load up and go over to Dumont. I bet with everyone’s help we could figure out what happened to her. Or at least help you find some clues as to where to look next.” She put the papers back and leaned forward with her hands on her knees. “This is it. Just forward about twenty seconds and then—yes! There! Turn up the volume!”
I did as she asked me and almost fell out of my chair when I heard the voice whispering Rachel’s name. “What the…” I slid the player tab back and listened again. “Okay, set it up for me. What was happening when you got this audio?”
She told me the whole story, and I felt the gooseflesh rise on my arms. “Let’s look at the whole thing this time. Let me start it over.” I listened to Rachel’s chatty voice on the recording and studied the room as she panned around and pointed at different focal points. “There!” I shouted. “Did you see it? It’s a shadow.”
“What?” she said, moving closer to the screen.
“Look just there, under the small window at the end of the building. There’s an empty space there, but in a second you’ll see a shadow fall across the wall and then disappear.” I pointed to the place where I wanted her to look, skipped the video back and played it again. There it was. A small shadow moving quickly across the faded white wall. “And you didn’t see anything while you were there?”
“Not a thing. I can’t believe I’m seeing it now!” she said, pushing her long bangs out of her eyes. She stared at the screen as if she still couldn’t believe what she was seeing. “It’s so small and the voice…so young…it must be a child. Do you think I caught something real?”
“Or it wants you to think it is a child. That would definitely make it more sympathetic. But it sounds real enough to me, and of course it is possible that it is the real deal.” She chewed on her lip and gave me a fearful look. When she was finished mulling it over we watched it again, this time with the sound muted.
“That’s so creepy. Every time I watch, it just gets creepier.”
I sensed there was something else about this experience that she hadn’t told me yet. “Anything else?”
“Well, I’m not sure if this is paranormal or not, but it sure was weird. There was this guy, a young guy with red hair and a beard. He showed up, said his name was Angus. He was supposed to be working on the electrical in the house, but he disappeared. I mean, not like vanished before my eyes, but he went out to his truck to get his tools and never came back.”
“Truck disappeared too?”
“No, I never actually saw the truck. He just said he had one. And he was Scottish. Did you know the first two families in that house were Scottish?”
“That’s pretty weak grounds for calling him a ghost, Rach. Aren’t there Scottish folks in Alabama?” I couldn’t help but laugh.
She punched my arm and said, “Come on, really? How many do you know? Name one and I’ll believe you. I think he was a ghost.”
“I’m not ready to make that call yet, but I wasn’t there. We’d have to see if he shows up again. He might just be a very alive, very human ne’er-do-well looking to get into mischief. And I know for a fact Mobile has plenty of those.”
“Yeah, true enough. I hope he wasn’t one. Before I thought he was a ghost or a ne’er-do-well, I thought he was cute. I’d hate to think he was dead.” A red flush spread across her cheeks and nose. “And he seemed so human, so alive. No. You’re right. There has to be another explanation.”
I shrugged. “Maybe there is. Maybe he was a guardian spirit coming to check on the house. That has happened before. He might have thought you were cute too.” I chuckled at her. “But let me see what we can find out.” I typed in Idlewood in my site’s search feature. There were no hits for that house on Haunted Gulf Coast, which only meant nobody had made a report about the place. I went wide and typed the name and the city into the Haunted Web’s search engine. It was basically a search engine that plundered all things paranormal. It was a huge net that caught much more than I could with my wimpy little website. “Hey, look at this.”
“I just spent three months researching the house’s history, and I didn’t see anything like this. How did I miss all these reports?” she asked incredulously.
“You historians. If you ever want to research hauntings, you have to skip the educational websites. Science doesn’t like this kind of stuff. This is the search engine to use when you’re ghost hunting. There are at least fifteen mentions of Idlewood, and that was with a general search.”
“Well, click on some,” she said impatiently.
With a shake of my head I clicked the first item. I knew immediately we had a winner. The headline read: IDLEWOOD’S FORGOTTEN CHILDREN.
“Shoot!” Rachel dug her phone out of her purse as it chimed away. “Oh no. This is Mr. Taylor. I’d better take it. He’s probably wondering where we are.” She answered the phone and stepped outside for some privacy. I nodded absently and quickly scanned through the article. After plowing through stacks of papers, emails and websites recently, I’d gotten good at scanning through documents and pulling out the important details. I read aloud the part that seemed most significant.
“Idlewood Plantation in Mobile, Alabama, has many secrets—including the location of two of the five Ferguson children who disappeared on or around the property in the 1870s following the death of their oldest sister, fifteen-year-old Tallulah Ferguson. The house has been closed to the public for many years, but older reports suggest the spirits of the ‘lost children’ manifest as shadowy figures in certain parts of the house…”
The bell on the door rang loudly as Rachel walked back inside. She held the phone to h
er chin and pressed her back against the door. “I have to go,” she said slowly. She seemed extremely distracted.
“You want me to email you this list?”
“Yeah, that would be great.” She pulled on her coat and grabbed her purse.
“Everything okay, Rachel?”
“That was indeed Mr. Taylor, wondering why we weren’t at the house. What a jerk! I told him we weren’t there because the power wasn’t on, and he didn’t believe me. He said he knew it was on because he just left there. He says it’s been on all week. Can you believe that? I checked it myself, Henri. Nothing was working. I’d better go back. I hate to call Carrie Jo—she’s not, um, feeling too well, and she’d flip out if she knew she missed Mr. Taylor. He didn’t sound too happy. I’d better get back there.”
“Hey! Don’t forget your cards.”
“No, you keep them for now. I’ve really got to go. Don’t forget to send me those links, please. Thanks for everything.”
“No problem. Thanks for sharing them. And hey, I might take you up on that Dumont trip. I might need some help.” She nodded with a sweet smile, and I watched her leave. Then I went back to the video and turned the volume back up.
I flicked the video back and watched the small shadow slide across the wall just as before. I saw Rachel’s finger pointing to different focal points in the room. Now came the part I wanted to analyze with my software. I grabbed a pen and a piece of paper and waited to write down the time marker on the video. I expected to hear a child’s voice speak again, but it wasn’t a child’s voice that I heard now.
It was a man—no doubt it was a man’s voice. The voice sounded darker and more menacing than any I could remember. And it didn’t say, “Rachel Kowalski…recording.”
It very clearly said, “Stay away!”
The Ghosts of Idlewood Page 4