The Keeper (Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper Book 8)

by JL Bryan

  "I get the sense that you want to stay here," I said. "Maybe even taken up residence in one of the guest suites."

  "My apartment's small and smells like dumpsters. I'm not kidding. There's a row of restaurant dumpsters right under the window."

  "Works for me," I said. "You should probably take a room in the guest house. The caretaker's bungalow is kind of mine and Stacey's place."

  "Sweet! I'll just run back to my place, pack a suitcase, get my shampoo, my shaving kit, my toothpaste, my body spray, my foot powder, be back in no time." Hayden pulled out the van keys and jingled them.

  "Thanks for all the details," Stacey said. "So Ellie and I should be back..."

  "By nightfall," I said. "Hayden, maybe you could double-check all the gear by then, restock any worn-down batteries..."

  "Hey, I'm the tech manager, and I'll make those calls." He scratched his chin. "But yeah, I'll prolly do those exact things. Hey, did you like the handhelds?"

  "Yeah. I really did," I said. I tried for a soft, friendly punch to his shoulder, which I think just made everyone feel awkward. "So, we'll see you later. Thanks for all your help."

  "Whoa, whoa. I am not helping. I'm in charge."

  "Right. Have a good morning."

  I headed out the door, and Stacey was close behind. It was a nice morning now, plenty of sunshine. The kind of weather that sends ghosts into hiding.

  Before walking to my car, I glanced back at the dark granite lighthouse one more time. Flecks of white paint clung to the exterior, visible now in the bright daylight. In its heyday, the tower had been painted white, and from the pictures I'd seen, a cheerful sight for sailors arriving at the warm port of Savannah from cold northern seas or storm-filled tropical waters—but the years of wind and water had erased all of that cheerfulness, baring the hard gray stone underneath.

  Stacey and I had arrived separately in our own vehicles the evening before, which made our escape easy.

  I did go home, but only briefly, and then I headed to the library again, determined to collect whatever information I could.

  First, I looked deeper into the ship that had crashed on the rocky shoals around the lighthouse during the storm of 1837. It had been a smaller vessel, carrying molasses and other goods up from the West Indies. Twelve people had died, six of them slaves, the others an assortment of sailors and passengers, when the ship smashed into the rocks. High waves and a powerful undertow made escape difficult—particularly for the slaves, who apparently had been bound in chains and had little hope of escaping the deep, churning waters.

  Any one of those victims could have been the drowning voice we'd recorded. Or perhaps the voice belonged to none of them. I noted down all the names of those who'd died, determined to research each one as best I could.

  The crashing storm waters had buried the lighthouse base underwater for the first time, flooding the lower floors—the exterior staircase and the higher entrance would be added in the post-storm reconstruction.

  The blasting wind and rain of the storm had also managed to damage and extinguish the light. William Verish—decorated veteran of the War of 1812, in his youth—had gone out to fulfill his duties as light-keeper and get the enormous candles burning again.

  Verish had drowned in the volatile waters of the 1837 storm. In the darkness, an incoming storm-tossed ship had crashed on the shoals. William's wife Matty had managed to partially restore the light within a few hours, avoiding any further wrecks that might have happened. She'd later been awarded a commendation by the mayor of Savannah. The United States Lighthouse Establishment entrusted her with the job of light-keeper, since she'd already proven herself under the most dire of circumstances.

  The "Lady Light-Keeper" had grown into a bit of a legend among sailors who ported at Savannah. When they spotted her on their way into the river channel—standing at the railing, waving a cloth as she wiped down the huge lantern windows each day—they would cheer and whistle. Matty was often the first woman the men had seen after a long stretch at sea.

  Apparently, Matty welcomed the attention, at least enough to dress in bright white clothing, hats, and even ribbons on sunny days when sailors could have a look at her on their way into port. Many came searching for her after their ships docked.

  If the sailors wanted romance, they were disappointed—she instead gave them religious tracts, read to them from the Bible, lectured them on the evils of alcohol, invited them to church. Her hospitality might extend to bread, soup, or vegetables if the man appeared hungry, along with copious prayer before and after the meal. She believed in charity, thrift, and piety, and had adopted a strict Baptist view that looked with suspicion on amusements like cards, dancing, and the theater. Much of her small light-keeper's stipend went to her church.

  Matty had been a local character for decades until her death, when her eldest son took over the lighthouse. I'd even heard of her before. I vaguely remembered someone doing a presentation on her during local history week when I was in sixth grade.

  Care of the lighthouse generally passed to Matty's son Abner, then to his son Sean. Sean Verish died, along with his wife and three of his four children, when the massive hurricane of 1883 erased the original light-keeper's house from existence, leaving barely a foundation. Only Callie Verish had miraculously survived the flood waters. Care of the lighthouse had not passed to her, nor to her husband, Jessup Starch, that she'd married soon after her entire family had died. The lighthouse had been reassigned from her family to Captain Fredrick Gorman, a retired naval officer.

  There was plenty to consider there. If Callie had felt angry that the lighthouse had been turned over to someone else, then there was reason for her ghost to obsess over the property even after death.

  I followed up on the fate of Callie and her husband. After being hastily married in Savannah and getting the boot from the Lighthouse Board, Jessup and Callie eventually drifted westward.

  There wasn't much—they hadn't made the papers often—but I found their obituaries. It looked like they had five children of their own. Jessup Starch died in 1924, sixty-one years old, described as a farm worker and cattle hand. Callie Starch lived to be ninety-eight, dying in 1964 in Lumber City. Her obituary listed a number of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. I copied down this information. There could easily be someone alive today who knew and remembered her. If she was the ghost in the lighthouse, I needed to learn all I could about her.

  Perhaps her husband was the male ghost that had been spotted in the house and on the beach, but I had doubts. There hadn't been a lot of time for Jessup to build a personal connection to the place, as far as I could tell. Of course, it was possible I was still missing something critical in the story of Jessup and Callie Starch.

  I tracked down their descendants as best as I could, and found a few still living in the area. Lumber City was like a lot of rural towns, shrinking over the years rather than growing, its descendants scattering across the world in search of new opportunities.

  As noon approached, I decided it was much too late to start making any phone calls. My brain was too garbled for the careful, delicate kind of conversation that's required when you're trying to determine whether someone's long-dead grandma might be a troublesome ghost.

  Not that the lighthouse ghost had been troublesome, when I thought about it. She hadn't bothered anyone in the house, hadn't haunted the grounds around it, and really nobody would have noticed her if I hadn't gone poking around. Unless she was connected to the ghost who kept entering the house, maybe she could be safely left alone.

  I felt sorry for her, though, trapped in that cold tower alone for so many years. She was like Sleeping Beauty, waiting forever to be rescued by a kissing prince. Or Rapunzel, waiting for a chance to let down her hair so the handsome prince could come up and rescue her. The solution varies widely by princess, but the basic tale of being imprisoned in a tower is a common one.

  When I could barely hold my eyes open, I headed home for a quick sleep—very quick, beca
use I had some personal business to take care of that afternoon.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “Not the creepy writer guy!” Stacey said when I called her in the afternoon. “Szabo? The one who sells old toys out of his garage?”

  “He calls it collectible vintage children's memorabilia.”

  “Yeah...a guy with a stack of Barbie lunchboxes in his house is not completely right in the head. And why can't he put on a shirt in his pictures?”

  “He had a shirt on in his Amazon photo.”

  “A Donkey King t-shirt, with what looked like Spaghetti-o stains. And that's the picture he chose to present to the world. There must be so much worse.”

  “There are reasons I'm not going alone,” I said. “It's either this or looking for living descendants of the Verish family to see if they know anything about the lighthouse...and honestly, this is more urgent. The lighthouse ghosts haven't killed anybody as far as we know.”

  “Yeah...as far as we know,” Stacey said. “By the end we'll find out the lighthouse was full of Satan-worshipping psychos who all ritually murdered each other one Halloween night.”

  “For now, let's focus on the psychos we know about. We have to deal with the magician to get control of the theater. Hopefully we'll flush out Anton along the way.”

  “Assuming he's in the theater. I bet you wish that you'd bagged him up during those years when you knew where to find him.”

  “Calvin said Anton was trapped where he was, in the ground where he burned down my house, powerless as long as he was stuck there. As long as nobody came along and built another house for him to burn down with another family inside.”

  “It looks like someone is planning to build another house there. And now Anton's unstuck and roaming free.”

  “Yeah, I noticed. I think Calvin was saving Anton until he'd decided I was ready, as a kind of final test for me or something. I guess that plan went off the rails, though. Get dressed, Stacey. Tim Szabo will be so excited to meet you.”

  “Ugh.”

  After Stacey hung up, I called Calvin, hoping for an update. Hoping, in fact, that they'd agreed to sell the agency back to Calvin, life was going to go back to normal, and I would never see Kara and her ilk ever again. That would have been the most welcome news of all.

  Calvin sounded unhappy when he answered, though, and spoke as if heavy weights had been attached to all his words.

  “I spoke with Octavia Lancashire,” he said. That was the director of the company, the silver-haired woman who'd actually negotiated the purchase of the detective agency from Calvin. I'd never wanted him to sell in the first place, and now I just wished every day that it had never happened. “She was in London. I can say she sounded...frosty. Very frosty at the idea of reversing the sale.”

  “But she didn't say no?”

  “I did not get the impression that a 'yes' was on the way. She said she would discuss with 'the others,' whoever they may be, and come back with a detailed response. It sounded a lot like she wanted more time to build an appropriately insulting refusal. She was not a happy lady when she hung up.”

  My shoulders sagged. “I'll just have to quit, then.”

  “I told her what Kara had done to you,” Calvin said.

  “Really? I kind of hoped you wouldn't...”

  “It was my entire reason for trying to change things back. I told Octavia I could not leave you with such vicious, dangerous people. People who have strong psychic abilities need to be properly trained—not just in how to use their abilities, but how to use them ethically.”

  “Yeah, I'm pretty sure Kara skipped ethics day at Hogwarts,” I said. “What did Octavia say to that?”

  “She was very quiet and short with me after that. I can't really say whether she was mad at hearing what Kara had done, or just mad at me for raising hell about it. What did she expect us to do? Just accept that our lives would be ruled by monsters from now on?”

  “Well, technically you're retiring...”

  “Maybe not,” Calvin said. “Not if I can get the agency back.”

  “But it doesn't sound very possible.”

  “You're right about that.” He sounded weary as he said it. “We're going to fight this as best we can, Ellie. But you let me worry about it. You focus on your work.”

  “I'll be happy to,” I said. I bit my lip about all I wanted to say to Calvin at the moment—about how betrayed by him I felt, about how things would not be the same between us even if he did somehow manage to buy the agency back. There would be plenty of time for all of that. At least, I hoped there would.

  I hung up the phone and got ready to go. It was finally cool enough outdoors that I didn't look like a freak in a turtleneck and leather jacket, like I did during the summer. There was no reason to expect Szabo's house to be haunted—though, judging by his enormous wall-of-text internet rants about the superiority of parachute pants and the inferiority of digitally remastered episodes of Buck Rogers, it was quite possible that a number of disturbed spirits haunted his mind.

  I picked up Stacey and drove us out of the city. She wanted to play some new album by Nicki Minaj, but my Camaro—originally my dad's—is from the early 90s. Not only was there no USB port for Stacey to use, there wasn't even a CD player. Cassettes from the 80s worked just fine, though.

  “Just a...tape deck?” Stacey asked, poking at the slot in confusion.

  “I wouldn't be surprised if there's a phonograph player in there somewhere.” I slid a cassette of The Bangles into the tape deck—it was one of many tapes left over from my mom and dad. The fire had destroyed everything in the house. All the surviving artifacts of my childhood were right here in this car.

  Szabo's cinderblock house was in a low-rent neighborhood in Hinesville. A significant portion of an old Mustang sat unevenly on blocks and rocks in the weedy front yard. The house looked pretty poorly maintained. A rain gutter sagged, filled with tall weeds that had colonized upward from the yard. A cow could have grazed on his roof.

  We parked on the street, and Stacey and I made our way up the gravel drive, keeping an eye out for snakes in the badly overgrown yard on either side.

  Guitar music, played very slowly and hesitantly, echoed from the carport as we approached.

  The carport was furnished with a number of lawn chairs, a large cooler, and empty beer cans placed on every available nook and ledge, as well as heaped on the floor.

  At the moment, two people occupied the lawn chairs, both holding guitars. One was clearly Szabo, the not-so-successful pop history writer, his red hair and beard overgrown and uneven, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses. A burning cigarette dangled from one of his lips. Szabo was shirtless, his pale soft abdomen shaggy with red hair.

  Seated beside him was a boy who looked seven or eight years old, also shirtless, squinting as the cigarette smoke drifted into his eyes.

  “It's too hard,” the boy said.

  “Look, you gotta learn your suspended chords, little dude,” Szabo said. “You'll never shred like Eddie Van Halen just plucking around.”

  “I don't want to.” The kid stood up, pouting, and turned to walk out of the carport just as Stacey and I arrived. “I want to go play Pokemon.” Then he turned and walked away across the trash-littered yard.

  “Fine, go play 'Wish You Were Here' for the hundred millionth time!” Szabo yelled after the kid. “Dilettante!”

  “Maybe I will!” the kid shouted back over his shoulder.

  “And tell your mom she still owes me five bucks for last week's lesson,” Szabo said. “We'll forget today's since you reeked so bad.”

  “Lick my socks!” the kid shouted back. He dashed away into a house two doors down, then slammed the door.

  “Kid probably pocketed the five bucks,” Szabo muttered. Then he looked at Stacey and me like he'd just noticed us, though he must have seen us coming up the driveway. He sighed, which blew the smoldering cigarette out of the corner of his mouth. He picked it up from the concrete-slab floor and continued puffing
. “I'm guessing you're here from the Ladies' Auxiliary. Look, I had no idea I was going to win that cakewalk when I entered. I'm going to get you the other three bucks. Soon as that kid's mom pays me, probably. I still have half the lemon pound cake in the fridge. If you need to repossess, I understand.”

  “We're...not here about the cakewalk,” I said. I introduced myself and gave him a card from the detective agency, which raised his eyebrows a little. “We had a couple of questions about one of your books.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Szabo sat up, no longer slouching in his folding chair. “You guys are fans of my books?”

  “Well, not exactly—” I said.

  “But you did read one of them?”

  “Um...no.”

  “Oh.” He slouched in his chair again, and absently played a little riff on the guitar.

  “I've been trying to find a copy of one, though,” I said.

  “Yeah, why aren't they available as ebooks?” Stacey asked.

  “That's what I've been telling the publisher!” Szabo replied. “But they say it's not worth the cost of scanning my books, whatever that means. I mean, hey, how much does it cost to make a PDF? In the modern world of America?”

  “Probably not much,” Stacey said. “Right?”

  “Right! So, which one were you looking for? Lemme guess: Dead Roads and Medicine Shows. That's my opus magnipiece.”

  “I don't think magnipiece is a word...” Stacey said.

  “It is if you combine 'magnus' with 'masterpiece.'”

  “Actually it's Lost Magic. We're studying the history of an old theater over on Broughton Street—”

  “Not the Corinthian!” He was on his feet now, practically bobbing out of his flip-flops with excitement. An angry sort of excitement. “Tell me they're not tearing down the last great movie palace in the city. It's a travesty.” He shook his head and cracked another beer, as if only cheap brew could drown his sorrows.

  “It's condemned, but I don't know of any immediate plans to tear it down,” I said. “Maybe if we dug up some interesting history, that would help it get preserved as a landmark.”