“Bucky told Ty they had some time before he needed to identify the bo—confirm it was Rose. He drove us back to the town hall and I grabbed my car and followed them. My phone rang and I told my parents the news, that Ty probably would want to talk to them, would need to see them for comfort, but just not today. I watched Ty shake his head at Bucky and point to the side of the house. I got out and followed them, when I passed through the gate I saw them sitting on the patio steps. I sat next to Ty and wasn’t sure what to say, what could possible be said, so I just put my arm around his shoulders. From his other side Bucky did the same. Ty began to cry and softly whisper her name as the three of us stared at her garden.
“I’m not sure when my parents got there but they didn’t stay too long. My mother offered to help with the arrangements and asked him if there was anyone she could call for him. ‘I think she only has a cousin or two and an aunt in New Orleans,” he told her. “I have their numbers, but I’ll call them. I never heard her talk about any other family.’ Ty wouldn’t leave the house even though my parents and Bucky both urged him to stay somewhere else. ‘I want to be here, it’s the only way I can accept it.’
“My parents left in their car after I told them I was okay to drive. I felt like Ty, I needed to be alone to...accept things. I was standing on the front lawn when Bucky came out of the house and put a hand on my shoulder. I offered to go back in and stay with Ty, but Bucky just shook his head no and studied the front of the house. I thought about what happened in there the night before and asked Bucky if there was anything...unusual about the upstairs. He frowned and kept staring at the house. ‘I found the note on a vanity in their guest room. The only thing I saw upstairs that seemed odd, I guess, was there were all kinds of scratches, tears, in the carpet in front of the doors. Ty told me it was the dog.’ He turned to me and said, ‘I guess there was something else, Jason. The guest room smelled funny, it had kind of a funky animal smell. Maybe that’s why they locked the dog out, I dunno. And Rose must have tried to cover it up with some kind of flowery air freshener. I could smell sweet flowers, too.’ ”
Elizabeth and Rose
“The funeral was a few days later, in the little chapel on Main. So many people came that a lot of them had to stand in the back or wait outside until the ceremony moved to the graveside. It was warm that day, and the inside of the church was hot and musty. Rose’s Aunt had come for the service and she held Ty’s hand through the whole thing. Bucky sat on the other side of Ty and I sat with my parents on the pew behind them. I hadn’t slept much, and I had cried a whole lot. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and stare out the window, looking for owls or roses or Indians. I knew I’d never see Rose again. After she was buried we walked with Ty and the aunt back to the limo. Ty told us as we stood next to the car that the two of them had booked airline tickets to New Orleans, they would be leaving later that day. ‘New Orleans probably isn’t the smartest place to go to try and get sober, but I think it might be a good place to grieve. I want to walk in her footsteps, see where she was born.’
“I didn’t see him again until the summer after my freshmen year of college. I was working for Bucky, writin’ parking tickets, giving directions to tourists, living in my family’s summer place down on the lower end of the island. My bedroom window looked out over the creek and the swamp on the other side of it, but it never bothered me seein’ the black water and cypress trees hangin’ over the banks. Sometimes I would have fond memories of Rose, and I’d shed a few tears thinking about how crushed Ty looked at the funeral. I finally ran into him outside of the little pizza place on Main, and we shook hands and made small talk. He looked better, but not whole, and I could smell pot and bourbon on his breath. He told me he’d been looking into some rehab centers. ‘I want to find one in the Caribbean, you know—dry out, do some snorkeling, maybe take sailing lessons. I probably won’t ever really stop drinking, so I figured why not make a vacation out of it? And I’ve never been to Europe, either. Rose and I were going to go when I retired, we had a whole stack of brochures. But I hear some of the rehab places there are first class—snow skiing, mountain climbing, tours of London and the English country side. Once I’m done I’ll probably stick around and sightsee some more. Maybe go to France and go on a wine-tasting tour. I don’t think rehab is going to stick with me, I imagine I’ll see the world that way.’
“He asked me about school, and I told him that Jonas was transferring schools to be closer to me. He nodded, we shook hands, and that was that.”
Foster yawned and then apologized, “It’s not the story Jason, I’m never gonna forget that. It’s just the weed and the liquor. So, anyway, that’s it? You must have talked to him between then and when you saw him the other day. And now you remember everything about it?”
I told them, “I remember all of it now, it’s come back to me in little chunks small enough for me to swallow. The only thing left, the only thing that puzzled me back then, and still bothers me now, was why the white owl and Elizabeth had used Rose, and why had it taken over three hundred years for them to be reunited?”
Sam spoke slowly. “Who knows where the white owl was all that time, but Elizabeth and the brave were dead. So what’s the connection, Chief?”
“I found out a little more two years later. Bucky took me on a fishin’ trip in the boat he’d inherited from his father. It was a big ol’ thing, all teak and brass and it burned about as much gas as a rocket headed to the space station. It was an old Chris Craft, so old that it was cool again. I always pictured the stars of old black and white TV shows drinkin’ martinis on lounge chairs set up on the deck and smoking cigarettes, not weed. Bucky sold it at the end of the summer, but not before almost everyone on the island was invited to go on a short cruise.
“We headed out to the Gulf Stream and put out some lines in the water for awhile. After an hour without a single strike we quit and just let the boat drift while we drank beer. The sun was blindin’ and it was about a hundred degrees with a thousand percent humidity. I had a deep tan borderin’ on Hawaiian that summer, and—”
Sam cut in and asked, “How was it even remotely possible for you to tan when you were covered in about an inch of hobbit hair from head to toe?”
“Go to hell. I dove in the water and swam around for awhile. Bucky was sittin’ on the swim platform built into the stern of the boat and recalling the various sharks he had caught. I climbed out of the water fast and sat next to him in the little bit of shade the boat was providin’. He handed me my sunglasses and a beer and then out of the blue asked me, ‘Do you spend much time on the internet, Jason?’ My first thought was the incredible amount of porn I’d found—”
“That’s really what it was designed for, the whole business about it connecting universities and science labs to each other is a lot of bullshit if you ask me,” Billy declared.
“You’re probably right, but I doubt Bucky would have been interested in the porn—he had plenty of real time experience with sex. He asked me if I’d thought much about the time leading up to Rose’s death and I told him for a while it just felt like an odd dream, but that I’d been startin’ to remember more of it.
“Bucky nodded. ‘I’ve never been able to figure out why you were so interested in an ol’ island ghost story around the same time things went...bad, for Ty and Rose. I wouldn’t want you to break any promises you made to Ty or Rose, but I believe the more you learned about Elizabeth and the brave, the past, the more worried you were about what was happenin’ in the present. But the brave and Elizabeth were murdered centuries before Rose passed away. I’m a pretty good detective, but I couldn’t figure out how everything fit together.’
“He told me that it was the internet that stirred things back up for him. ‘I’m getting pretty good at finding things—crimes and criminals, mainly. But one day I started typing keywords into the search line—I typed in words that fit into the story—Jonas Parker. Elizabeth Parker. Parker’s Bluff. Murder. Finger. Drowning, owl, Rose, Engla
nd, some other words that I don’t remember now. I found out a few things that fill in the story a little, but don’t explain everything.’
“We were sitting there in the heat of late summer, listening to small swells bumpin’ along the hull every once in a while. ‘The first thing I found was an article about some local Halloween kind of stories by some reporter up in New England. One of the tales was about a mysterious lady who lived on a farm on the outskirts of town around the early 18th century. She was seldom seen, but was beautiful, with flowin’ black hair, a striking figure, and a refined way of speakin’, hinting at an upper-crust English background. She had been in the town itself only a few times, buyin’ fancy furniture and pieces of art, paying with loose gems and fine jewelry. Sometimes a man would be with her, and she’d introduce him as her husband. He was as handsome as she was beautiful, a tall man with dark features who rarely spoke. The couple had two children, a daughter who appeared to be four or five years old, and a newborn son. One day a servant from their farm ran into town screamin’ and pleadin’ for help. She said there had been a huge fight between the couple that raged until late in the night, and in the mornin’ the entire family had simply vanished.’
“He said that the local constables and some concerned men rode out to the farm and began a search. ‘The only thing unusual they found in the house was muddy footprints leadin’ down the staircase. They checked the stable and found a single horse was missin’ and a few fresh hoof prints circlin’ the house. It was near sunset when they found the bodies on the edge of the river, they were tangled in the branches of a toppled tree. She had bound her son to her with elaborate ribbons, and she herself was wearing a fine gown of the purest white. There were no signs of a struggle, the only wound they found on her was a missing finger that had healed long before that day. The searchers carried the mother and child back to the yard of the house and quickly buried them, without any formal service or prayers said over the grave.’
“The woman and her infant were said to haunt the house. Owners, and then caretakers reported hearing odd scratchin’ noises on the roof and doors, a small child laughing and movin’ unseen through rooms, and muffled footsteps on the stair steps to the second floor.
“The house burned in 1867, the foundation and some charred timbers are all that’s left. In that same year an unknown party paid to have the woman—Elizabeth, and her son, exhumed and the bodies were relocated to a small cemetery on the edge of the French quarter of New Orleans.”
Sam gave a low whistle and all he said was, “Holy shit. She was alive, she didn’t die in the swamp when Jonas stabbed her.”
“And she was pregnant,” Billy speculated.
“Elizabeth’s husband, or companion, he disappeared from the farm and reappeared in New Orleans. ‘I could only find a few other things related to the story.’ Bucky said, ‘A few men and women associated with the father and daughter, accordin’ to the newspapers, would go crazy and claim to be haunted by white owls and witches. But in New Orleans odd things happened so often that it wasn’t huge news.’
“Finally, according to Bucky’s research, in 1976 there’s a birth announcement in the New Orleans paper, the Picayune or something like that. Born to Jonas and Elizabeth Parker, a daughter, Elizabeth Rose. ‘The time between Rose’s birth and her arrival on Parker’s Bluff must have been pretty normal, I couldn’t find anything about her life in New Orleans. Every time I did one of those searches I felt like someone was behind me, whisperin’ for me to leave well enough alone. And I think I will. I’ve never told Ty or Betty the things I found, the bits and pieces of the puzzle. I know enough, and I’ve raised enough ghosts, I think.’ He stared out at the ocean and told me, ‘I imagine that more and more parts of the whole story will pop up on the internet occasionally, but I think you don’t want to go there, Jason. I think you’re the last man who should dig any further.’ I followed his gaze and looked out at the calm water and the crystal clear sky and just nodded. Bucky walked back to the helm and pushed the boat hard back to the marina. We never talked about any of it again. Even the storage closet at town hall seemed to just disappear, it’s still there but it just seems like nobody ever sees it—the maintenance guys don’t try to clean it, nobody’s ever asked about it. I saw Betty and a locksmith examining the door one time about a year after all the shit hit the fan. I have a feeling the key for the new lock will never be found, and nobody will have any interest in opening that door again.”
Billy said softly, “Hauntin’s, they come easy in the South. And almost everybody, at least everybody around here, has one of their own.”
“Sometimes they come around here way too easy,” I agreed.
“This swamp has a way of being in a lot of ghost tales. It’s easy to let your mind....slip sideways in a place like this. Jonas, Elizabeth, the brave, White Owl, poor Rose, Ty, even the chief here, they got twisted into a knot,” John said. “But it’s like when lightning starts a fire out here. It burns for a long time, but the swamp eventually swallows it.”
Sam said, “The other thing that seems to come up a lot around here is the treasure. What happened to us two months ago, and what went on with Jonas and Elizabeth, it almost makes you think the treasure itself is haunted.”
An owl broke the silence of the camp with a single loud hoot that seemed to roll our way from deep in the swamp. I felt it pass and move in the direction of the island.
The End
Other Novels by Jake Williams:
Foster’s Fall
Foster’s Choice
A Gator Tale
To find out more about the author and other books
please check out my website http://jakewilliamsfiction.com
The Tale of the Swamp and the Rose (Parker's Bluff) Page 9