by JL Bryan
"That's France, but yeah."
"Jacob's going to freak out," Stacey said. "I mean, if it's someone interesting. I have to call him!"
"Call him if you want, but there's nothing to report," I said. "Even if there were, you'd be breaking client confidentiality. And giving advance information to the psychic. Remember, we might have to pull him in for a look around the place."
"Oh, let's!"
"We don't even know if the place is really haunted, Stacey."
"It better be."
"Come on," I said. "Let's hit the road."
"Let me just try on six more outfits real quick."
"Very funny."
We zipped back across town to the office. The rain had stopped, at long last, but the clouds hung heavy, low, and gray, reserving the right to unleash another downpour on us whenever they felt like it.
Stacey fidgeted and chatted the whole way there, but her enthusiasm dampened once we reached the parking lot of the office.
She kept relatively quiet as we climbed into the enormous black cargo van owned by PSI. It was the size of a small RV, the interior lined with big color monitors. Like our old blue van, it was designed as a mobile nerve center. When a house was wired up with cameras and microphones to catch evidence of ghosts, an observer could sit outside, watching for anything strange, ready to warn whoever was inside.
In the old days—a few weeks earlier—it had usually been Stacey outside monitoring the gear, with me inside the house, searching for signs of a haunting. Now Hayden was our technical supervisor, technically, and Kara was the official lead on the investigation. She'd barely participated in the previous one, which was more than fine with me. I worried Kara would want to be deeply involved in this one.
Kara stood by the side door to the van and looked us over as we climbed inside.
“I thought I told you to fix her hair and face,” Kara said to Stacey, clearly referring to me.
“We went minimalist,” Stacey replied.
“It looks like you did nothing at all.” Kara slammed the door.
“That's how you know I did a good job!” Stacey said, talking louder since the door was closed.
Kara climbed into the shotgun seat ahead of us. Then the driver's-side door opened.
“All right, let's saddle up, ladies! Time to hit the old Ponderosa trail,” Hayden said as he took the driver's seat. He received zero response in return. Stacey shook her head.
Noticeably absent was Nicholas. I supposed he was staying at the office to run things there, but I didn't ask for fear of creating the impression that I actually cared or wanted him around me.
“You know what this reminds me of?” Hayden asked, while steering us out of the workshop via the garage door. “National Lampoon's Family Vacation. It's like, I'm the dad—”
“No,” Stacey said.
“Kara's the mom—”
“No,” Kara said.
“And you two are the kids!” Hayden twisted around in his seat. “You kids better settle down or I'll turn this—wait. The two of you pretend to fight first. Like a kid fight. Pinching, pulling each other's hair, whining...”
“That's not happening, Hayden,” I said.
“Come on. You haven't even seen my Chevy Chase impression.”
“Why do you bother having one?” Stacey asked.
Hayden opened his mouth to reply, then closed it and turned back toward the windshield so he could watch the road while he drove, which was a nice change.
We drove away from the ugly patch of worn-down industrial parks where our office was located, a few miles south of downtown, then skirted around Savannah's historic district on our way to the nearest bridge.
“Nice scenery out here!” Hayden announced. He drove us over salt marshes and dark water, where occasional old, barnacle-encrusted wooden docks jutted out into the creeks. Pelicans flapped lazily overhead. A black skimmer flew along the surface of the marsh, scooping up tiny fish in its oversized lower jaw. An oystercatcher nosed its distinctive bright red beak among mud and marsh grass, searching for oysters, presumably.
"It stinks," Kara said. "Like a sewer full of rotten fish."
"That's just the smell of nature," Hayden said.
"I hate nature," Kara said. I had jokingly used that line myself, usually while resisting Stacey's attempt to take me camping or rock climbing. I made a mental note to strike it from my repertoire. It bothered me that Kara and I would both joke in the same way. Then again, maybe Kara wasn't even joking.
We crossed the final bridge out to Tybee Island. The bulk of the island was protected wetlands, like many of the barrier islands that protect the city from tropical storms. Only the eastern edge, facing out onto the Atlantic Ocean, was developed, and there it was a typical stretch of beach town—loud, colorful, crowded with bars and restaurants and sun-fried tourists all summer. There were kitschy motels, condos, and cottages all along the beach and other houses tucked away in a few inland neighborhoods. Mostly, though, it was trees and marsh.
The inhabited portion was well ahead, though, so I was surprised when Hayden swerved off the main road and onto an unmarked stretch of pavement screened off by trees and undergrowth on both sides.
"Wait, you're heading into the middle of nowhere. There's nothing out here but..." I tried to visualize a map of the little island. The north shore had a pleasant beach but it was a hike to reach it.
I had some other memory, I knew, reaching back to my childhood, of taking this particular road...I'd been small, riding in the back of the car, my parents up front. Still alive. My mom's car had been a white Geo, not large, but it had seemed huge at the time. I might have been five or six years old.
We'd taken the bridge out to the island, as we sometimes did on warm afternoons. We'd swerved off the main road and followed this same overgrown, unpainted asphalt track through dense green woods, limbs brushing the car windows along the way.
A gap in the dense greenery revealed a patch of beach and ocean to my left. There was nothing man-made there, just the sand, water, and sky.
When I had come with my parents, it had been a brighter day than this one. Today, the sky was all gray, clouds close and heavy, blotting out the light from above.
“This is the wrong place,” I said.
"This is where the GPS is taking us," Hayden said.
"The client's house can't be back here," I told him. "It's nothing but preserved coastal wetlands, some rocks, and...a collapsing old house. Nobody's allowed back here."
In my mind, I could see my parents, and hear them. My dad was in the driver's seat, with his handlebar mustache grown in, his stomach already forming the pot belly that would grow more and more over the following decade, losing the physique of the high school football player in his photo albums. My mom, her long black hair gathered under a white beach hat, sunglasses hiding her eyes.
"Nobody's allowed back here," I heard my mother say. "David. It's not safe. We could get into trouble."
"A little trouble could be fun." He'd glanced at me in the rearview. I couldn't see his mouth, but a smile had sparkled in his eyes. "Right, Ellie?"
"Right!" I'd said, without hesitation, with all the enthusiasm a little kid could muster. We were going on an adventure, after all.
"That's two votes to one," my dad had said.
"If it looks dangerous, we leave."
"It'll be fine. I used to sneak out here with the guys back in high school."
"Somehow, that doesn't convince me it's a smart decision."
Well, that was the best I could remember the conversation.
"What's back here, Ellie?" Stacey asked.
"I think we're almost there."
The van rounded a bend and stopped. A metal gate was closed across the road, with a NO TRESPASSING sign on the front. Also DANGER. And CONDEMNED.
Those signs had been there when I'd visited with my parents, too.
"We have to go back," my mother had said when we reached the gate.
"I don't see why," my dad had re
plied. "There's plenty of parking. We've got the whole place to ourselves."
"It's illegal, David," my mom had said. "And it's condemned. It would be one thing if it were just us, but we have Eleanor with us."
"I want to explore the old road," I'd said.
"Trust me, I know my way around," my dad had told my mom. "I could do it blindfolded."
"You probably would, too, just to make things more dangerous," she had replied.
"Want to try it?" he offered. Then he'd opened the door and stepped out of the car. "We'll just snap a few quick pictures and then we'll be done. I promise."
I had giggled as my dad lifted me over the metal gate. For a moment, I stood alone on the other side, separated from my parents, an uncertain road twisting away into unseen mystery and danger ahead. It was a moment that, looking back on it, seemed to represent what my life would eventually become.
Then my dad clambered over the gate and dropped onto the worn pavement beside me. He took my hand, and that moment of being alone with my fear and the unknown evaporated. I was safe again. With his other hand, he helped my mom over the gate, though she didn't really need it. My mom had been an avid tennis player, and something of an accomplished athlete in track and field back in high school. I hadn't accomplished much of anything in high school, myself, but she wasn't around to be disappointed in me.
We walked up the road, my parents flanking me so I could hold both their hands. The sky was blue, the air was fresh and salty, and now that we were walking instead of driving, I could glimpse little slices of beach and sparkling ocean through the trees. It was a happy moment.
Then we rounded the bend.
"I was told to text them when we reach the gate," Kara told Hayden as we sat in the idling van at the closed gate. Her sharp little nails clacked the glass screen of her phone. "Security will let us in."
"Security?" I asked. "Are you really telling me that some movie star bought the old keeper's cottage? It was just a ruin."
"Is that what's here?" Hayden asked.
"What keeper?" Stacey asked. "Keeper of what? I'm confused."
"It was the home of the old lighthouse keeper," I said. "I came out here with my parents once. My dad just wanted to take some pictures."
"Of a collapsing old house?"
"And the lighthouse," I said. "It's an old ruin, really, out on a peninsula. It marks the entrance to the river's south channel."
"Oh!" Stacey said. "This is the way to the South Channel lighthouse? I've only seen it by boat."
"Exactly. But I don't understand why anyone would buy it. The house was a wreck, and really I thought this was all publicly owned wetland."
"Your assumptions were wrong," Kara said. "I feel no surprise at this."
Before I could think up a reply to that, a large black SUV rolled up on the opposite side of the gate, the grill stopping just short of the steel crossbars. All the glass in the SUV was tinted black, and even the windshield was darkened. It looked like the kind of armored security car appropriate for someone massively influential and famous, like the President of the United States, or Oprah.
The engine of the enormous beast of an automobile continued to rumble as the driver stepped out. It would be more accurate to say that he unfolded himself to the ground. The guy was huge, like The Rock, but with a mass of long braids. He unlocked the gate and walked out, approaching the driver's-side window.
Hayden lowered the window, and the huge man leaned inside, looking us all over, his dark eyes seeming to take snapshots of each of us. Or maybe I should say head shots, since he represented some as-yet-unnamed super-famous actress. Small gold hoops glinted in his ears, and his dark suit looked like it could have been purchased on Fifth Avenue. Stacey probably knew the brand and price range on sight.
"I need to see everyone's ID." The man held up a slender black phone, ready to take pictures.
Stacey gasped.
"D-Train!" she squealed. Actually squealed. "Holy smokes!”
The security man gave her a slight smile. "Football fan?"
"University of Alabama," she said. "Outside linebacker. You had more quarterback sacks than anybody else in the 2009 year. The championship year. Including taking down Garrett Gilbert three times in the championship game."
Now his smile was bigger. "No big deal. Gilbert was just a freshman. It could've been a whole different ballgame if Colt McCoy hadn't been injured."
"I remember that game so well," Stacey said. "My dad was up and yelling at the screen almost the whole time. When you guys crushed Texas, he took us all out for ice cream, and he was yelling and beeping his horn the whole way, his fist out the window, swerving all over the place and hollering..." She frowned. "Actually, Dad probably shouldn't have been driving that day."
"Your ID?" he asked her.
"Oh, yeah, sorry!" Stacey dug it from her purse. "Holy cripes, when I tell my dad I met Delavius Terry. Wow. So what have you done since then? Didn't you go pro?"
"The Patriots, one season. Knee injury."
"Yikes, I'm sorry. So what do you do now?"
"This," Delavius said, checking my ID. He handed it back and looked at Hayden in the driver's seat. "Okay. I'm going to back up, and you're going to drive on past. I'll lock the gate behind us. Meet me at the main house."
Hayden gave him a military-style salute. The huge security guard returned to the huge SUV, which he backed up and turned to one side, pulling through a gap in the underbrush and onto the beach beyond.
"I'm so excited!" Stacey said. "There's famous people everywhere."
"Hold yourself together," Kara told her. “We don't want to scare off a potential high-dollar client with your immature squealing and shrieking.”
“So why did you even bring me?” Stacey asked.
“You should practice keeping yourself silent,” Kara said. “I'm sure it will be difficult for you, but it is a useful skill.”
“I could totally be silent if I wanted! Ellie, tell her how quiet I can be. I could just sit here and not say anything if I wanted. I'm quiet a lot of the time. Like when I sleep, I don't talk then.”
“It's clearly an unfounded accusation,” I said, but I spoke softly. There wasn't a lot of sting in my snark these days, at least not when Kara was around.
Also, my mind was still focused more on the past than the present as Hayden drove us through the gate and eased down the narrow curve of a road. I probably hadn't thought about that day in twenty years, and now it flooded back in amazing detail, the way lost memories do.
The branches today were carved well back from the road on either side, some of them sawed off, many of them broken as though an eighteen-wheel truck had plowed through here in the recent past.
When I'd come up this road with my parents about two decades earlier, though, the woods had encroached heavily from both sides once we'd passed the gate. There hadn't been much more than a footpath's worth of pavement visible.
“It looks scary,” my mom had said as we approached the overgrown bend in the road. I was brimming with excitement at the time, but her words had a chilling effect. Scary?
“You mean haunted?” my dad had replied, chuckling.
“It's not ghosts I'm thinking about,” my mom told him, while helping me around thick, thorny vines that hung on one side of the road.
I'd stopped walking, planting my feet on the narrow, crumbling road.
“Are there ghosts up there?” I'd asked, squinting ahead at the shadowy woods and the road turning out of sight.
“There could be,” my dad had replied. “Ghosts who like to chase little girls.”
I had screamed, partly just playing, partly feeling real fear.
“David!” my mother had snapped. I'd gripped her hand extra tight, and she dropped to her knees and looked me in the eyes. “Eleanor, you don't have to worry about ghosts. No matter what silly stories you hear—even from Daddy—” She paused to cut him a warning look. “—just remember ghosts aren't real.”
“But I've seen them,
” I whispered. “In my closet.”
“That was your imagination,” she told me. “Ellie, if you ever see something scary like that, just repeat to yourself 'There's no such thing as ghosts.' Try saying it.”
“There's no such things as ghosts,” I said, but without really believing it.
“Ghosts are just pretend,” she'd said. “They can't hurt you.”
Looking back on it, that probably wasn't the most accurate piece of advice my mom ever gave me. Especially when you consider that she and my dad would both be killed by a ghost about ten years later.
“Okay,” I'd said.
“We believe in science, Eleanor,” my mom had said. “Not superstition.”
We walked on, down the road and around the bend.
The old house waited just around the curve. We all stopped and stared at it.
“Anybody believe in ghosts now?” my dad had asked, and my mom had elbowed him pretty hard.
The house was made mostly of stone. The foundation seemed to be composed of the sort of huge, heavy old ship ballast stones that can be found all around the city, including as the pavement of River Street, where all the tourists go. The rocks walling the second floor were much smaller and less evenly laid.
The windows were empty, the roof had caved in, and a deadfall of old timbers lay inside the gaping, empty front doorway. There may have once been a yard, but the house was now surrounded by high weeds, brambles, and a few rotten old fence posts.
It gave me an uneasy feeling right away. Twenty years later, riding slowly down the road, I could feel it again as the curve approached.
“Do ghosts live in that old house?” I'd asked, very timidly.
“Maybe we should go inside and look,” my dad had said.
“Not a chance,” my mom told him.
I had looked into the dark doorway, full of fallen and splintered wood, and shivered. Surely my dad wasn't going to force me to go in there.
“Okay, time for haunted-house family pictures,” my dad had said. “Everybody pretend to be a monster!”
While my mom and I made faces, my dad had taken a series of pictures. My mom and I competed to see who could make the scariest face, then the silliest.
“Wow,” Stacey said, snapping my attention back to the present. “Someone made a mess.”