by JL Bryan
The toddler boy was sniffing at a bowl of decorative soap in the bathroom, shaped like seashells. He tried to eat a small red one, until his mother slapped it out of his hand. He sank down to the floor and started crying.
“Don't eat soap, Kyle! What's wrong with you?” she snapped.
“I'll leave y'all alone to get adjusted,” I said. “I'll work on putting some kind of dinner together.” I was eager to hear more about her family history.
“I'll help with the cooking and cleaning,” Tammy said quickly. “I ain't lazy. Sometimes I'll have two, three jobs going. I just had a run of bad luck lately. And a run of bad men,” she added, after an extra moment of reflection. She was a walking country music song. “First order of business is bath for all these kids, though.”
The two bigger kids, Kyle and Steffy, both groaned at this news.
I closed the door as we left.
“Whoa, can you believe that?” Hayden asked me as we walked back down the stairs together. “This is getting crazy.”
“With all the kids? It's a big house, I'm sure it'll be okay. Just remind them to stay away from our gear, and away from the water outside—”
“No, I'm talking about how Alyssa Wagner has a sister who's just as hot as she is,” Hayden said.
“Oh.”
“I mean, Tammy is smoking, yo. She's like a fifteen out of ten. You think I'd have a chance with her?”
I shrugged. “I only just met her, Hayden. I wouldn't know.”
“Three kids. I'd need a bigger apartment. Or I'd have to move into her place.”
“I don't think she has a place.”
“She's got this one. Maybe we'll live here!”
“If you want to impress her, start by feeding her kids,” I said.
“I'm on it.”
Hayden headed for the kitchen. I went through the long, glass-walled hallway to the caretaker's bungalow and sprawled out on the couch for a minute, trying to de-stress before the next wave of stressful things started rolling in.
Rain drummed on the roof overhead and spattered the ocean-facing window nearby, the drops blown in slantwise by the wind. The constant percussion very nearly lulled me to sleep, and an afternoon nap would've been just the thing to improve my mood, but then of course my phone rang.
Calvin. I hurried to answer, eager for updates, whether on the investigation or larger issues.
“Looks like I found his police record,” Calvin said, at the point in the conversation when most people would say something like Hello, how are you?
“Who?”
“Your favorite magician,” he said. “Once you gave me the date of his performance at the Corinthian, that narrowed it right down. Aldous the Mysterious. According to the report my buddy sent over, his real name was Lucas Babbage.”
“Why was he arrested?” I asked.
“Drunk and disorderly, on a Saturday night after his show,” Calvin said. “He slipped his handcuffs—that must be an irritating thing about arresting a magician—anyway, he escaped, probably hopped a train out of town. The charges were so slight nobody bothered pursuing him. It was hardly worth a cross-country manhunt.”
“That must be why he left his magic cabinet in the theater, and never came back for it,” I said. “Do we know anything else about him?”
“Found an obituary that might be his,” Calvin said.
“Really? I searched for that...”
“Maybe not in the West Coast papers,” Calvin said. “A man named Lucas Babbage was found dead in a Hollywood apartment in 1928. According to the coroner's report, it looked like he was trying to develop a new escape trick but it went wrong and strangled him. He was all trussed up in ropes, hanging off the side of his bed. The obituary said he'd performed under a couple of names in his career, including Aldous the Mysterious.”
“So he died way out in Los Angeles,” I said. “Not at the Corinthian theater, not anywhere in Savannah. That means we should be able to get rid him of him just by getting rid of the magic cabinet. Right? That's his only lingering tie to the place.”
“We don't know whether he may have had other emotional ties,” Calvin said. “We may never. You're right. Removing the cabinet isn't a simple silver bullet, either.”
“Tell me about it. It's way up top, where it would usually be lowered by ropes down to the stage.”
“He was hostile when all you'd done was step into his territory. We should expect a more extreme response when we try to evict.”
“I think there was a little more than territoriality involved,” I said. “He hasn't had a chance to kill anyone in years. From what I've heard, he may have stalked girls, watching them from the mirrors, during the short time when the old Corinthian was used as a nightclub, but that club closed quickly. I can't find anything to indicate he claimed a victim. Of course, the nightclub didn't extend up to the attic, where we encountered him. Either Stacey or I would fit his general victim profile from when he was alive.”
“Then we'll all need to work together,” Calvin said.
We discussed how best to approach that for a minute.
“Any word from Octavia?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said. “I would advise you to keep silent on that subject.”
“I am, believe me. But I hope—”
“So do I,” he said.
Afterward, I double-checked our gear around the house, even though Hayden had done that. I needed the busy work.
I was waiting—waiting for Stacey to arrive, waiting for night to fall, but mostly waiting for our client's sister to emerge from her suite upstairs so I could hear more of her story.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“My great-great-great-grandfather...how many greats is that?” Tammy squinted, considering. “He was the first lightkeeper here, or one of the first. My Grandma could tell you for sure."
We'd gathered in the dining room of the main house, since we had Lisa's family members in town and there was nowhere else to seat all of us.
Hayden had cooked a meal of macaroni and hot dogs for the kids—which actually went down pretty well—and tenderloins and arugula salad for the rest of us. He'd dropped some cash on that, and he kept glancing at Tammy while he ate, clearly hoping he'd impressed her. Even Stacey expressed amazement at the meal.
Tammy sipped some pricey-looking French wine she'd found and opened, topping up her wine glass a couple of times while she related the story of her family. I listened intently to every word.
"When greaty-whatever-grandpa fought in the war...the 1812 one...he saved somebody important's life. A Captain Dearing, who later became an admiral and also part of the U.S. Lighthouse Establishment. Well, Admiral Dearing never forgot how a sailor named William Verish saved him during a storm at sea. Or maybe it was during a battle. Anyway, he appointed William Verish—that's my super-great-grandpa, now—to be keeper of the new lighthouse. It wasn't brand new, but the old one got destroyed in a hurricane. Admiral Dearing also insisted on a nice cottage and grounds for the light-keeper. He handed all that over to William Verish and said it was his family's, generation to generation. Every firstborn son would inherit the lighthouse duties and the house.
"Well, William died a few years after that. His wife, Matty, my great-whatever-grandma, she kept the lights going until her son took over. That went on for a hundred years! Well, maybe not that long. But generations of us lived here, until the big one in 1883, the storm that wrecked the whole island and Savannah itself. Took out the original cottage and the whole family—all except my great-great-grandma. She was only sixteen, lost everything, lost everyone."
"Callie Verish?" I asked.
"That's her!" Tammy slopped wine onto the dinner table in her eagerness to point at me. "How do you know?"
"I've been reading up on the history of the property. But I don't know nearly as much as you."
"Because you didn't have to listen to my grandma tell the story a bazillion times. First, they said Callie couldn't have the lighthouse because she was a fema
le—never mind how many years Matty Verish had run it just fine with no man around to do it for her, thank you...where was I?"
"Callie wasn't allowed to stay because she was a woman," I said.
"Right! Right. And that made her mad the rest of her life, and she lived a long time. I heard the story again and again from Grandma, who grew up hearing it again and again from Callie herself..." Tammy shook her head. "So Callie says, fine, and she goes to her boyfriend, a sailor, and tells him to marry her right then, at the courthouse. She turns around to the Lighthouse Authority, and says, hey now, I got a man, and he's over eighteen, so gimme that lighthouse now.
"And...they don't. By this time Admiral Dearing's long, long dead, you know, so our family don't have no clout anymore. The Civil War's come and gone, ain't nobody talking about 1812 anymore.
"The lighthouse gets reassigned to somebody new. Great-Great-Whatever Grandma Callie gets the boot. She and her husband eventually headed inland, did some farming...but she was always sore about it. Enough that I'm standing here generations later telling you about it. My own grandma told me and my sisters about it. She brought us out here one time when we were kids. The house was just a ruin then, but that lighthouse still stood there, just as mighty as always, though I guess the light's been out a hundred years or more by now. And Grandma says, 'That's ours by right.'" Tammy shook her head, looking at the high ceiling of the dining room above us. "So Lisa bought it back from the government. And she invited all of us for Thanksgiving. To show it all off. Grandma is gonna flip her wig."
"It sounded like you maybe didn't get along so well as kids," I said.
"Well, it was just normal sibling stuff, I think you'd say," Tammy answered. "Lisa was a little...different. She got picked on a lot. Acted weird. Always doing voices and faces, dressing up in every kind of way you can imagine. One day she dresses like a boy—I mean, goes out in public like that, goes to school like that. Next day, she wears clothes so cut up that she gets sent home. She always had to get attention in some weird way. And I guess people didn't know any better than to be hard on her for being different. We were a little hard on her, my big sister and me, but only because we wanted Lisa to fit in. We figured she'd be happy if she learned how to fit in already."
"I'm guessing that didn't work out," I said.
"She just got weirder as she got older. Stuck with the drama club, though, and you could say that really paid off for her. Soon as she graduated high school, she took a bus to Los Angeles and we didn't see her again for almost a year. Then almost two years after that. Then she turns up on TV, in the movies, everywhere. I guess she showed us, in the end." Tammy gestured around at the high windows, the antique furniture, the paintings. "That's what all this is for. She's just showing off. She'll let us see she bought the place, let us inside for a little bit so we can see what an impressive mansion she made out of it...then, once we've had our look, she'll shoo us out and fly back to Hollywood, forget all about us for a few more years. That's what she'll do." Tammy nodded, then bit into a thin, reddish sliver of steak. "This really is amazing, David."
"Thanks. But it's Hayden," he said.
"Oh, yeah. I want to call you David for some reason."
Stacey snickered. Hayden blushed and abruptly got to his feet, busying himself with some table-clearing.
"I'm with her," I said. "Great grub, Hoff."
Hayden shook his head, giving me a scowl. What did he expect me to do? Be his wingman as he tried to get romantic with Tammy?
I helped clean up, partly because I genuinely appreciated the Hoff cooking for us, partly because I wanted to make sure the place was spotless when Alyssa returned. Tammy kept her word and pitched in, so pretty quickly it hardly looked like anybody had ever been there. The smell of fried fish and onions had almost dissipated, too.
Afterward, Hayden dropped the huge movie screen out in the living room—his home-theater skills paying off at last—and he played Toy Story for the kids. All of them gaped at the enormous animated figures, even the baby. The toddler, Kyle, dozed off on the long, soft parabola-shaped couch.
While that happened, I managed to draw Tammy aside, to a bench inside the glass hallway. We faced the ocean through the falling afternoon rain, the sun starting to set through the woods behind us. She'd showered and helped herself to a cashmere shirt and designer jeans from her sister's room. Now she looked almost reborn, at least fashion-wise.
I tried to squeeze a little more information out of her as we sat on the bench, sipping pumpkin spice coffee—Stacey had made that, not me, but it was all right, and Tammy sure seemed to love it. Even with the whipped cream Stacey insisted on adding.
"I need to ask you something," I said.
"Me, too," Tammy said. "What's with the cameras everywhere?"
"Just...security." I hated to lie, but I had to remember who was paying my bill here. Besides, it was more of a fudge. We were trying to help secure the place against ghosts, after all.
"Sure, those little black ones you hardly see, up high. But I mean the ones on tripods. That's not normal. Rich folks don't like inconvenient things cluttering up their way."
"You'll have to ask your sister when she gets here," I said, ducking out of the situation. It's not as if the ghosts were dangerous. Except... "Your kids know to stay out of the water, right?"
"I told them. Is it really so dangerous? Seems like Grandma told me they used to swim out there all the time."
"Well, I can't speak for a hundred years ago, but the water's not safe now. It's a good place to get drowned."
"I'll remind 'em again," she said. She looked up and down the hall. "This is a funny way of building a place. Must be nice to have a whole extra house for guests. And nobody ever has to walk in the rain." She shook her head. "You wouldn't believe what this used to look like."
"I remember," I said. "I actually came here as a kid once. We had a picnic. I went for a swim, and actually I got...pulled under by the current. I almost drowned."
"What were you doing here? Nobody was allowed. We had to climb the gate to get in, and that was when the house was just an overgrown wreck. Grandma says it was our right to visit, because of our family."
"We climbed the gate, too. My dad was just reckless. He wanted to come see the old lighthouse and didn't see any reason we should be forbidden. It was a nice day. I mean, until the drowning part."
"There's something magical about a lighthouse," Tammy said, looking up the height of it. The top of the tower was virtually obscured by the rain clouds. Drops pounded on the roof of the hallway, just above us. "Grandma says you feel closer to heaven up there, and you can look down and see how small your own problems really are. How small you really are, and how small and helpless we must all look to God. She said light-keeping is the Lord's work. Saving lives, guiding those lost in the dark, warning them of danger."
I nodded. There was a romance to it, certainly.
"There's dark things out there, my Grandma says. Dangerous things. Spirits maybe. Things that come out at night, and only the light can chase them away." Tammy smiled at me. "Guess you think I sound crazy."
"Not at all. Do you mean ghosts? I always like to hear about people's ghost stories. If you don't mind."
"She didn't say more than that. Only that evil is real, and we got to pray, and we got to keep that light up. Course, nobody's kept that light up." She pointed to the lighthouse, barely visible now in the dimness under the thick clouds. "So I guess evil spirits can just stroll right in these days, if they want."
"Can I ask another question?" I said, then went ahead and asked it. "Do you know if anyone...maybe William Verish, or his son Abner, or his grandson Sean Verish...would any of them have, possibly, had a secret love affair with someone? A woman he would meet out at the lighthouse at night?"
"Oh, my." Tammy gaped at the tower as though seeing it in a new light. "How exciting, secret meetings at night...but I sure wouldn't know anything about that. You could ask my Grandma. She still has all kinds of old picture
s, letters, journals—"
"Really?" I sat upright, nearly shouting the words, and reminded myself to calm down.
"I mean to read it, but I haven't gotten to much of it yet," Tammy said. "It's just hard to read on that old paper."
"Do you think there's any way I could have a look at those?" I asked.
"Oh, I don't know. She's particular about keeping them in tip-top condition. A lot of it's fragile."
"I'd be careful," I said. "I have a lot of experience with fragile old documents. You see..." I hesitated, then plunged ahead. She'd been the first to mention ghosts, anyway. And Tammy was being much more straight with me than her sister had been. "I think there may be ghosts on this property."
"Oh, I'm sure!" Tammy said, without hesitation. "Lots of people died around here, with the hurricanes and all."
"Do you know of any other kinds of deaths?" I asked. "Like murders or suicides? These are more likely to cause hauntings."
"That would be something else to ask Grandma. What kind of ghosts have you seen?"
"Well...there was something in the lighthouse. I think it was a woman. She was all white, every detail of her."
"That could be Matty Verish," Tammy said. "She dressed in white so the sailors could see her. She liked them to wave at her as they sailed into port. Matty ran the lighthouse herself for almost twenty years, you know, until she handed it over to her son Aaron. I'm not sure what he wore," she snickered. "Not a white dress, I don't think. Probably the official keeper's uniform.”
We talked a while longer, but Tammy's hard facts about her distant ancestors grew increasingly limited. She'd given me some valuable insight, though. I just didn't know how the pieces fit together.
She did agree to make arrangements for me to visit her grandma and look through the family's historical documents. Those journals and letters promised to be a gold mine, giving a clear and detailed picture of the history of the lighthouse and those who had lived there. They could be key to cracking the case, and I wanted to get my mittens on them right away.
However...Alyssa had strictly prohibited me from investigating her family history. Here I was, doing exactly that, violating a direct, emotionally charged order from the only person who was paying us to deal with the ghosts.