The Keeper (Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper Book 8)

by JL Bryan

  Beyond the last curve, a huge area had been carved out of the woods. Stands of trees had been cleared out, leaving some mounds of churned-up earth here and there around the house.

  The house itself was not at all as I remember it. The old stone light-keeper's house still remained, and in fact looked as if it had not only been restored, but had grown to more than double its original size. More like quadruple. The original house was now only one corner of a much larger structure. The new additions to the house were also stone, or at least fronted with stone, in order to match the existing building.

  The new design was more embellished than the old, while trying to capture a touch of the old rustic feel. The windows and doors looked like antiques. Wrought-iron balconies had been added on the side of the house facing the ocean and the lighthouse. The lighthouse stood out on a rocky peninsula that jutted into the water, a long walk from the house along a jetty made of boulders.

  More of boulders surrounded the old lighthouse like the fingers of giant hands reaching up from the water. The lighthouse had been built to direct ships around those rocky shoals and safely up into the river.

  I looked back at the house.

  “Why would she buy this rundown old place?” I asked. “It must have cost a fortune to restore. Seems like it would be cheaper to just buy something new.”

  “Maybe she's into privacy,” Stacey said. “This must be the most isolated house on the island. You probably couldn't build anything else on this beach because it's a protected environment. But if you buy the one house that already exists...”

  “That actually makes a lot of sense,” I said.

  “Why do you say 'actually' like I'm normally some kind of babbling idiot who just talks on and on and on without making a point?”

  “Sorry. That's a great point, and you're an extremely bright young lady.”

  “Totally,” Hayden said, turning in his chair to look at us. “You're like the smartest person I've ever met, Stacey.”

  Kara snorted. She opened her door and hopped out. The rest of us joined her, heading for the massive, newly rebuilt stone porch with its protective roof blocking the drizzle. There certainly hadn't been a front porch the last time I'd seen it—maybe a heap of rotten boards below the front door. Now it was big enough to shelter a floating daybed and a couple of sky chairs, all suspended from overhead.

  I resisted the urge to peek inside the tall new windows, where soft lights glowed inside the house, while we waited for Delavius to catch up with us.

  Chapter Eight

  “Oh, hey, wow,” said a girl who opened the front door. She looked like a teenager in low-slung jeans, a diamond stud in her nose, glittering against her rich brown skin. She spoke with an accent that sounded vaguely French. Maybe French Canadian. “Are you the ghost exterminators?”

  “That's us,” I told her, reaching for a business card. “I'm Ellie Jordan—”

  “And I am the lead investigator,” Kara interrupted. “We were contacted by Miss Wagner's personal assistant, a Zoe Lafayette.”

  “That was me. I'm the one who phoned you,” the girl said. My eyebrows rose slightly—she didn't look a day over fifteen. I suppose they like a youthful look out in Hollywood, though. “Thank you for coming so quickly. This way.”

  “Wagner?” Stacey whispered, nudging me, in case I'd missed this clue to the famous actor's identity. “You don't think—”

  “Shh,” Kara hissed, almost too low to hear. Stacey let Kara pass in front of her, through the huge glass door into the house, then made a face when she couldn't see.

  I entered, noting that the glass door also had a layer of swirling black steel curlicues on the inside, so decorative and delicate-looking that you almost didn't notice it was actually a security measure.

  The front room was enormous, with arched windows admitting dreary, rainy-day sunlight. I imagined it was more cheerful on brighter days. The original stone floor and walls remained, and a new staircase made of dark timbers led upstairs.

  “You can wait here.” Zoe indicated sumptuous chairs by the stone fireplace, as well as a divan by one wall. Their frames looked antique, but the matching red upholstery that padded them looked new. “I'll let Miss Wagner know you have arrived.” She turned and left the room.

  “Wagner,” Stacey whispered again, elbowing me.

  “Sweet place,” Hayden said, turning slowly to take it all in. “You can almost smell the ghosts. Hey, you think they have big movie-star parties here? Parties I might get invited to?”

  “Too bad it's not the eighties,” Stacey said, “Then you could just tell them you're David Hassel—”

  “Yeah, the Hoff jokes never get old,” Hayden said. “Never. Ever. Ever.”

  “I expect more professionalism from all of you,” Kara hissed, her voice almost too low to hear.

  “Based on what?” I asked.

  The front door opened again, and Delavius entered the room, nodding politely as he passed through.

  “D-Train!” Stacey squealed at him, to the certain embarrassment of the rest of us in the room. She held out her hand, and he high-fived her, acting like a good sport in the face of her sheer obnoxiousness. “What was that little victory dance you used to do?” Stacey shuffled one way, then the other, pumping both fists. “Something like that?”

  “Victory dances aren't allowed,” he said.

  “Ooh. I must have been thinking of high school. There was a guy who used to do a dance after he tackled somebody, and the cheerleaders even started imitating it. I think it went like this...” She repeated the shuffling, fist-pumping dance, moving in a way that made me think of a hyperactive fiddler crab.

  Kara stared icily at Stacey, looking ready to grab the nearest blade and slice her to ribbons. This enabled me to enjoy Stacey's goofy giddiness much more than I would have otherwise.

  Kara looked livid, her face gradually turning crimson, as though her head were a clear pitcher that someone was filling with cherry Kool-Aid. I felt tempted to join in with the absurd dancing myself.

  “Miss Wagner is delayed on a call,” Zoe announced, returning to the room, which made Stacey stop dancing instantly. “Would anyone like a beverage while you wait? Waiakea? Apollinaris? Saint Géron?”

  “Just some water would be great,” Stacey said.

  “Those are all waters,” Zoe replied, her eyes narrowing just slightly in Stacey's direction, as though trying to puzzle her out.

  “Oh. Well, the last one, then,” Stacey said.

  Nobody else asked for any of the wide assortment of drinks on offer. Zoe and Delavius left the room. We sat for a minute, watching Stacey sip water from a gleaming glass bottle. She seemed increasingly self-conscious about it, the minor sounds of her drinking and swallowing seeming amplified in the quiet, rock-walled room.

  “So,” Stacey said. “I was going to say, do y'all think it's Alyssa—”

  “Miss Wagner is ready to see you,” Zoe finally announced. She gestured for us to stand.

  “It's Alyssa Wagner, isn't it?” Stacey blurted out as we took our feet. “Am I right?”

  “Did you not know who you were coming to see?” Zoe looked as puzzled as when Stacey couldn't identify the assorted brands of artisan waters.

  “Someone was keeping it all hush-hush,” Stacey said.

  “For security,” Kara said, glaring at Stacey.

  Zoe turned and led us through a hallway. The stone floor was subtly different here. It was new construction, but someone had gone to great pains to attempt to match with the old cottage section where we'd just been. If I hadn't known the house had been massively expanded, I probably wouldn't have noticed it at all.

  I heard water running ahead, and some kind of harp music. Potted plants hung overhead. Framed pictures decorated the hallway, featuring our new client alongside a number of famous actors, directors, musicians, and talk-show hosts.

  “It really is her,” Hayden breathed, suddenly awed. He stared at one picture while the rest of us passed him. “Look, t
here she is with the rest of the Superhero League. Tom Creswell as Hurricane Man. Delph Scronton as Mr. Mammoth. Lara Brightlee as the Crimson Wonder. There's even Bradford Decker as the evil Dr. Experiment. And of course...Alyssa Wagner as Zap Girl.” He touched the picture frame in awe. The actors weren't even in costume. It looked like a candid shot from a cast party, maybe, from one of the three smash-hit Superhero League movies. “I can't believe it,” Hayden said.

  “You look like you're about to cry,” Stacey said. She had to turn and speak to him, because we'd all passed him by this point.

  "Maybe I will," he said, his voice barely audible.

  Kara gave an annoyed sigh, and Hayden immediately snapped to attention and hurried to catch up.

  The hallway took us to a spacious sunken room lined with more rock, as well as dark marble that seemed far more expensive than anything that would have been original to the house. A colossal half-moon of a couch, large enough to sleep a family of grizzly bears, faced a glass wall that looked out over the beach, toward the lighthouse and the ocean beyond. A retractable projection screen was rolled up above it. It looked like it would cover the entire wall when it dropped into place.

  A couple of burly worker guys stood next to a stepladder, looking dubiously up at several clusters of what looked like bright pastel paper woven into beehive shapes, each of them dangling a clump of long, bright ribbons that swayed a little in the air conditioning.

  "They're supposed to be light and breezy," said the woman who stood beside them, gesturing up at the strange constellation of paper hives. "The big things are supposed to turn, and the long ribbons are supposed to swirl around the sides. Not dangle there like dead bug legs."

  "We hung them like you said," the first guy replied, scratching his beard.

  "They should look delicate and alive," she said. "They looked great at Selena Gomez's party. Did you even look at the Pinterest I linked you? Either of you?"

  The guys looked at each other, shared a shrug. The woman let out a long, slow, frustrated hiss, as if this were just the latest in a long train of unthinkable inconveniences.

  It was impossible not to recognize her. As Hayden had gushed, she'd played Zap Girl in three Superhero League movies, plus the separate actual Zap Girl movie, as well as a major appearance in Mr. Mammoth, in which she'd been captured by the invading Pod Lizards before helping Mr. Mammoth defeat them. Beyond that, she'd also starred in romantic comedies opposite some very attractive leading men.

  Alyssa Wagner was truly a major movie star, cute with her dimples and blond hair, but not runway-model gorgeous. She had an aw-shucks way about her, and you almost felt like you could trust her alone for hours with even the most unfaithful of boyfriends. Not an intimidating type, more like the girl next door. That was certainly how she'd been packaged and sold to the public, anyway, particularly in the hit movie The Girl Next Door. And the not-such-a-hit follow-up, The Girl Next Door 2: Back Door.

  At the moment, though, she just looked annoyed, her hair clamped back carelessly, a frown deep on her face. She fidgeted in bare feet, clingy designer jeans, and a sheer blouse, smaller and shorter in real life than I would have thought.

  "Maybe Mr. Gomez had a more powerful HVAC system," the other worker suggested.

  "Miss Gomez. Selena...it doesn't matter." Alyssa shook her head. Glancing away from him in frustration, she finally noticed the rest of us trooping into the room, or at least decided to acknowledge our presence at last. "Zoe?" she said, as if to prompt her assistant to speak.

  "Yes, ma'am," Zoe said. "These are the...investigators I contacted for you." She glanced at the workmen, clearly not wanting to identify us as professional ghost finders in front of the help.

  "Oh, finally, some good news." Alyssa walked toward us, looking over Kara, Hayden, Stacey, and me. "This is cool. Four girl ghostbusters. Just like in the movie, huh?”

  Hayden opened his mouth, then closed it again when Kara's gaze slashed toward him in a threatening manner. Don't correct the new multimillionaire client, her eyes seemed to say.

  "So you guys are for real?" Alyssa asked, giving us the skeptical look-over that new clients often did. Kara spoke before I could begin my usual reassurances.

  "We are all quite experienced in paranormal investigation and entity removal," Kara said. "Some of us have deep local experience, while others bring a broad international background." Her Russian accent lent some credibility there. I was surprised she hadn't brought Nicholas...but I was beginning to sense kind of a rift between Kara and Nicholas. For one thing, he was helping Stacey and me cover up our investigation of the Clay case, which Kara had forbidden. Hopefully, Kara didn't know about that part.

  "International?" Alyssa looked Kara over, seeming impressed. "Like where?"

  "I have faced entities thousands of years old," Kara said, which made my ears prick up. That was a rare thing to find in the United States. Most of the ghosts I encountered were only a few centuries old or less.

  "Whoa, cool," Alyssa said. "You're like, totally exotic, you know that? And your skin is like...I mean did you just step out of a pore-scrub spa session or what?"

  "I did not. Would you like to tell us about your trouble here?"

  "I didn't believe it myself until a couple of nights ago," Alyssa said. She glanced at the two workmen, gaping at all of us. "Keep trying to make those work." Then she looked back at Kara. "Let's go upstairs."

  Alyssa, with her assistant Zoe at her elbow, led us toward the helix of suspended wooden stairs at one side of the room. The stairs seemed to float free, as if by magic, connected by incredibly thin steel thread that was mostly concealed within the spiral of stairs. It didn't look like the most child-safe arrangement, but it was pretty neat.

  We ascended. The two-story glass wall at the back of the house provided a sweeping view of the beach, with its long line of boulders leading out to the old lighthouse. It was low tide, and water lapped at the high, sharp rocks all around it.

  Stone steps spiraled up along the outside of the lighthouse. The lower steps, I remembered, would be buried underwater at high tide, making the lighthouse difficult to access. The front door to the lighthouse was about a third of the way up, currently sealed by thick, rusty bars, just as it had been when I'd visited with my parents as a child.

  I could see it clearly again. We'd spread out a blanket on that beach and had a picnic—ham sandwiches, potato chips, sweet tea—my dad indifferent to the fact that we were trespassing. He said the old place should have been a public park, anyway, since the lighthouse was shut down and clearly nobody was going to live in the old keeper's cottage again.

  My dad took more pictures, with the lighthouse and the ocean in the background. I had climbed up on a boulder at one point, the sea splashing around me. The tide was coming in, swallowing up the peninsula on which the lighthouse sat. A little saltwater moat soon appeared among the rocks, carving the peninsula away from the land and turning it into a tiny island.

  The island had shrunk over the following hour, toward the lighthouse stairs, with only a few sharp boulders jutting up here and there to mark where it had been. I'd splashed around in the water, laughing. A slight rain had begun to fall, but it was warm and tropical, a welcome summer rain with the sunshine still glowing at full gold. Rainbow weather.

  My mom had started gathering our things, shaking the sand out of the picnic blanket, wanting very sensibly to get out of the rain before everything got soaked.

  Little five-year-old me had different plans, though.

  When my mom called for me to come in, I'd run the opposite way, giggling, out into the rising tide, my sundress floating around me like a lily pad. The rain had spattered my face and hair, soaking me like a hot shower.

  "Eleanor! Come back!" she yelled, which just spurred me to run farther out, deeper into the rising water, laughing.

  My dad yelled after me, too, and then I hit deep water, or maybe just a hole, and I went under.

  I'd had some swimming lessons, but my dress w
as suddenly tangled around me, making it hard to move my arms and legs. It was almost like something deliberately held me under the water.

  I couldn't breathe. I could see the sky, rippling above me through the salty water, rain dripping from gray clouds. My face was only an inch or two below the surface, but it might as well have been twenty feet. I was tangled, feeling a kind of shock, and unable to kick or struggle my way free.

  At one side of the wavering, drizzling sky, I could discern the old lighthouse, its granite-slab form jutting up toward the clouds. Someone stood at the railing up there, at the very top, in front of the long-dead lantern room. It was a white shape, its edges rippling like a sail in the breeze. A woman, I thought, looking down at me.

  My body had gone limp. Water had poured into my nose and mouth, as if I'd lost all strength to block it out.

  Then my dad had arrived and fished me out of the water. I remember turning quickly, the world spinning around me. I coughed up salty water, and suddenly I could breathe again.

  My parents were yelling, worried and angry. I looked up at the lighthouse again, but the figure was gone. The old tower had been sealed up and forbidden to the public for years, but I suppose someone could have simply broken the law and gone inside anyway. We had just done that ourselves, ignored the NO TRESPASSING signs.

  Maybe I was being punished for that, I'd thought at the time. For breaking the rules of the forbidden lighthouse, the land beyond the gate.

  I'd suffered nightmares for a week or so, but then I'd more or less forgotten, just another day in the distant past, buried under thousands of other days that had come since, each with their own problems and distractions. It had been years since I'd thought of that day.

  It was all coming back in clear detail now that I was again looking out at the secluded little beach and crumbling old lighthouse, as if it had only happened the day before.

  "Eh-hem," Stacey said, jostling my arm. "Nice view, huh?"

  "What?" I looked back and saw Kara, Alyssa, and Zoe waiting for us at the gallery at the top of the stairs. Hayden had wandered past them, gaping at the framed movie posters that lined the walls here. All of Alyssa's superhero and rom-com films were represented, as well as a stark image of a sad-looking couple on a snowy, wooded hillside. The Fallen Winter, a story about love and cancer, if I remembered correctly. Oscar nominated, probably. Oscar bait, definitely.