The Haunting of Steely Woods
Bonnie Elizabeth
My Big Fat Orange Cat Publishing
Contents
1. Traci: September Now
2. Lucy: Summer Then
3. Traci: September Now
4. Traci: September Now
5. Lucy: Summer Then
6. Traci: September Now
7. Traci: September Now
8. Lucy: Summer Then
9. Traci: September Now
10. Traci: September Now
11. Traci: September Now
12. Lucy: Summer Then
13. Traci: September Now
14. Traci: September Now
15. Traci: September Now
16. Traci: September Now
17. Lucy: Summer Then
18. Traci September Now
19. Traci: September Now
20. Traci: September Now
21. Lucy: Early Fall Then
22. Traci: September Now
23. Traci: September Now
24. Traci September Now
25. Traci: September Now
26. Lucy: Early Fall Then
27. Traci: September Now
28. Traci: September Now
29. Traci: September Now
30. Lucy: Early Fall Then
31. Traci: September Now
32. Traci: Spring, When it Happened
33. Traci: September Now
34. Traci: September Now
35. Traci: September Now
36. Traci: September Now
37. Traci: September Now
38. Traci: November Now
Authors Note
About Bonnie Elizabeth
Also by Bonnie Elizabeth
The Haunting of Steely Woods
My Big Fat Orange Cat
Horror May 2021
Copyright 2021
Bonnie Elizabeth Koenig
Cover image Copyright © “lighthouse” | Deposit Photo
Cover Design Copyright © Bonnie Koenig
My Big Fat Orange Cat Publishing
MyBigFatOrangeCat.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN 978-1-953363-13-8 trade paperback
1
Traci: September Now
I nearly died on a toilet in a rest stop just off of I-5 in Washington on my twenty-fifth birthday. Though it’s been nearly twenty five years since, I remain haunted by that night.
My life is filled with things I don’t do and rituals I have created to keep me safe. My nightmares accompanied me on the long cruise my long-ago boyfriend, Jason, took me on to help me de-stress, and, he hoped, to help me get over it. He thought it was PTSD or perhaps just an overactive imagination. Ghosts aren’t real.
But they are.
They are all too real. Just like regrets.
At forty-nine I have remained unmarried and childless. Jason, of course, found someone else, someone sane who could raise the two children he always wanted and could go hiking and skiing and enjoy a wild and horrible action thriller.
This is also true of Matt, the boyfriend who tried to save me. He already had a child, a daughter, but that ended when she started having the same sorts of nightmares I did. He thought it was catching. I worried he was right.
When they left, she was fine, for which I am thankful.
After that, I gave up, mostly, and lived alone. Alone in Charlotte where the sun is warm and the city is large and noisy with energy and people, both of which I hope will drive away the ghosts. So far it has not worked completely.
But it did work well enough until Deborah Ransome came to work at the bank. Deborah was part of the media services department at the large bank where I worked. I was also in marketing, but an assistant to the producer of radio and television ads. Like me, Deborah was from the Pacific Northwest. She had lived in Portland, like I had, though she was from originally from Mercer Island up by Seattle. Clearly, her parents were old money.
My parents had no money, old or anything else. I’d made it on my own, putting myself through school. I had found a great job in Portland when it was just on the edge of fame and desirability. The Trailblazers were in the finals led by Clyde the Glide and Intel in Hillsboro was still a commute through open fields splattered with interesting and unusual places. The Pearl was an up and coming dream for the most part.
Still, Deborah and I had things in common, though she was younger and had come to Portland after I had left and stayed there much longer, knowing it as the sprawling busy city I often read about. I tended to think of the city as becoming too overdone, like a roast left too long in the oven, hardening and dry rather than moist with promise.
Deborah loved Portland. She remained attached to the Pacific Northwest with its evergreens and rain and gray skies that cover the land most of the year. There’s something hauntingly beautiful about it, almost magical. A place where anything could happen. It draws me, pulling my heart strings, though my parents are gone and my sister had always had one foot out of state, dreaming of living in a sunny climate.
Sometimes I envy Tessi her life in Las Vegas. How much less haunted could you get with the slot machines and noise and the tourists? The sun shines most of the time, except when you get windstorms blowing up dust or when you get a deluge that causes flash flooding outside of town. It’s a different place even than here, but Las Vegas had felt too close, as if ghosts could be deterred by mere geographic distance.
Which meant that the Duncan sisters were separated by most of the US. Traci and Tessi, no longer inseparable as we’d been as kids. Teresa had been Tessi for as long as I could remember. I’d started it, unable to fully say Teresa when I was three. Tess is three years younger than I am and so much prettier. Still, she’s practical and not given over to romantic fantasies. And I think that’s why when I nearly died and the ghost followed me that she wasn’t really able to understand what happened.
It makes me sad.
It also made me feel alone, despite being surrounded by Charlotte’s eight hundred thousand plus residents. They were all nice enough folks, sunny and bright like the weather. They can’t drive to save their lives, but I’d settled that by living in a condo near the Lynx so I didn’t have to brave the roads too often.
That morning, I was finishing my coffee, having gotten to the office early to put together some paperwork. The blinds on my eighth floor window—not nearly high enough to be important— were open and the sun angled politely so that it didn’t shine directly on my computer monitor but still kept my back plenty warm against the air conditioner. The feel of the cool breeze of the air conditioning and the sound of its hum remained a steady thing, something you could count on.
Papers lay scattered across my desk, a wooden thing practically large enough for a body. The desk had grown from an executive sized computer desk to this monstrosity as I had found I needed more and more space. No credenza for me. I wasn’t that important, though I had my own little office with a window, even if it wasn’t very big and around noon the sun hung at an angle in the sky that required I keep the blinds drawn.
Bookshelves and file cabinets lined the walls behind me. Two chairs sat scrunched in the corner lest I have guests. Other assistants had more space, but they didn’t have my desk which allowed me to work things through without having to sit on the floor.
I had been doing that, smoothing my skirt trying to sort some notecards around me on the industrial gray carpet when my boss had come in and seen what I was doing. Afraid of an OSHA violation for me having to use the floor, he’d found the largest desk he could and insisted I get it. To him I was valuable, ghosts or no ghos
ts.
Now it was mine and if it was idiosyncratic, it was no more so than Will’s high school band poster or Anson’s bowl of oranges that always made his end of the corridor smell like breakfast.
And the desk was a far better idiosyncrasy than being haunted, which was also mine, though I tried to down play that even more than the desk.
But that morning there were no ghosts, not then. My office was rarely haunted. The smell of coffee kept me awake and kept my stomach from rumbling too much. By now, there were probably donuts in the break room. I didn’t need one, but I wanted one.
Debating that, I closed my eyes for a second.
The room got chill and my eyelids snapped open. Above me the air conditioning vent sent out a heavier wave of cool air. Normal for our building.
Deborah walked in. She’s tall, taller than I am, with thick black hair that she probably spends half an hour ironing to flatness. It looks good on her though, trimmed to frame her face. She’s got a gorgeous smile and if her hazel eyes are a little too close set, no one notices because she laughs easily and everyone around her joins in.
That morning she wore a black skirt that fell just above the knee and black strappy sandals with low heels. In September in Charlotte, everyone is eager for what winter we have, and Deborah was clearly ready to dress for it. Her blouse was gray with dark black embroidery and probably cost her half a month’s salary.
“Did you hear?” she asked coming in. A black beaded earring poked through the curtain of dark hair.
“What?” I asked. There was such excitement in her voice that I thought perhaps we’d gotten some sort of award for the bank. It didn’t occur to me that I’d have known about that before she would have, unless it had circulated in the break room. Even then, someone would have come by and shared.
“Another woman was murdered at Steely Woods Rest stop,” Deborah breathed, her voice conveying both horror and fascination. It’s interesting how the two seem to go together as if the person who feels those things is both pleased to not be part of it and fascinated to be looking in on the horror.
A chill ran from the base of my skull to the base of my tailbone, spreading across my back with spider-like legs wrapping themselves around my spine. Goosebumps grew across my arms while my mouth dried and my tongue stuck to the bottom of my mouth like a dying fish.
Steely Woods.
Where I’d nearly died.
I was alive only by luck.
Sometimes I wondered if I was really alive or only existing. I spent most of my time terrified and there were odd rituals I had about certain things because of my experience. It wasn’t just losing lovers, it was losing a part of myself, perhaps the best part, the part that knew how to love life and have fun.
“Really?” I asked, hoping my voice was steady. Deborah didn’t know about my past. She knew I had lived in the area and probably knew Steely Woods. Who hadn’t stopped at that rest stop between Seattle and Portland when a pit stop at the gas station or the next McDonald’s was too far to go?
“Yeah,” Deborah said. “They’re talking about how it seems like someone gets attacked or dies about every nineteen or twenty years. It’s really wild. And the women who get killed all sort of look alike.”
As if I didn’t know. I’d seen the picture of the woman killed a few hours after I’d left that stop. I’d been visiting my friend Ronette and she’d called, frantic to make sure I was okay, immediately noticing the resemblance. The dead woman’s hair had been cut almost identical to mine, a short dark bob that curled away from my face. We were of a height and the shape of our faces could have made us sisters if not twins.
They’d compared her to a photo of a woman killed at the rest stop back in 1980. That woman’s hair was bigger, curled a bit more energetically, her jeans cut differently, but she could have been an aunt, or give her a makeover, another sister. Who knew there were so many of us?
“Like a serial killer?” Again, I hoped my voice didn’t shake, that Deborah didn’t suddenly recognize how much like the dead women I looked. Because what would I say then? It’s been hard enough to tell the men I had loved or to tell Tessie about what I’d gone through. I remembered their sadness that I’d had such an experience, their disbelief when I described exactly what I remembered happening, moment by moment.
“Have to be a pretty old serial killer don’t you think? I mean there was a girl in the early sixties and the one in 1980, the one in 1999 and one this year. If he started in his twenties, he’d be eighty or so now,” Deborah said. “Besides, what’s up with the time gap? There aren’t any other rest stops where women get killed on a regular basis, even if it’s years in between. In fact, if the reporter in Portland hadn’t been fascinated by the murders, no one would have put together the timing.”
“And it could be coincidence, couldn’t it?” I didn’t know why I felt such a need to poke holes in Deborah’s theory. Maybe because I still didn’t want to believe what had happened to me.
Deborah settled on the edge of my desk, which was, thankfully, far enough away that she wasn’t leaning over me. That kind of thing always creeps me out—not in the same way other things do but, in a personal space sort of way.
“Everyone always says that but I have a feeling…” Just like that she slipped off my desk and waltzed out of the office.
Having delivered her “news”, perhaps disappointed I didn’t share her obsession, she was off to something else.
I, on the other hand, wasn’t sure my legs had the strength to stand up and close the door.
2
Lucy: Summer Then
Summer in western Washington, pretty much in the middle of nowhere, meant the only interesting thing to do was watch the cars on Pacific Highway. Most folks worked for the logging companies in the area, and at one time, before he’d died, Lucy’s father had also worked there.
With him gone and her mother long dead, Alma and Lucy were on their own. Normally, Lucy loved summers, but this year she dreaded it. At school, she could usually get some lunch. At home, there wasn’t much hope of it. Alma worked part-time at the local café, where Clyde Marks, supposedly happily married, liked putting his hands all over her tits. It’s what kept Alma and Lucy in any money at all.
Still, it wasn’t enough. They’d lost the little house that they’d lived in with their daddy to another family, another logger who needed the space. Now they had a little trailer that Alma had managed to purchase, scraping together money from insurance and side jobs, which she didn’t say much about, but which seemed to come with copious amounts of alcohol.
The place smelled of cat urine, cigarettes, and cheap spilled wine, which Alma drank too much of. Clyde Marks would come by every Sunday morning when his wife was at church and Lucy would cover her ears listening to him with her sister in the big lower bunk where the springs squeaked and the trailer rocked as if a windstorm raged outside.
The last time he’d been there, he’d seen Lucy and smiled at her. “Maybe you’d like a ride too,” he’d said. His teeth had always been shiny white, but in that moment the sun seemed to glint at Lucy and she huddled back against the far wall, which made him laugh.
His boots pounded against the flimsy floors and out the door, which shut with a bang.
“Next week, ya’ll get out a here before he comes,” Alma said quietly, looking at Lucy.
Lucy nodded. She saw no fear in her sister’s eyes, instead something calculated glinted. Whatever it was, Lucy didn’t like it. In fact, at that moment she was almost as afraid of Alma as she was of Mr. Marks, though she couldn’t have said why. Alma was just trying to keep her safe after all.
The woods around the trailer were thick and dark, the evergreens cuddling each other and keeping the ground plants to a minimum. Lucy and Alma didn’t own that land. In fact, the place was where the previous owner had dumped the trailer. They both hoped no one would find it any time soon or they could be forced to leave their humble home.
The little town, which included the caf
é where Alma worked, a grocery store, and a gas station, and not much else was nearly an hour’s walk. You could usually hitch a ride to a bigger town and get the mail if you needed to, at least Lucy could. Alma usually sent her on those errands once a week. Lucy liked Wednesdays because Mrs. Pinterstock went into Kelso and got her mail and she’d always take Lucy along on her errands, talking to her like a real person with real interests and someone worthy of dreams, which was more than Lucy could say about anyone else.
Once she’d taken a ride with Jet Evens and he’d tried touching her breasts and when she’d said no, he’d driven in angry silence and left her in Kelso so that she’d had to walk home. Fortunately, Danny Rhoads had seen her and taken her into town. He probably would have demanded a touch or a feel, too, but he’d passed out with his foot halfway on the brake and sent the truck into a ditch. Lucy only had a few scratches and a lot of bruises from the incident and her left knee complained as she walked through the tall grass and into the woods along a path that only she knew and which eventually took her to the trailer.
Alma hadn’t been home because she was closing at the café and for that Lucy was thankful. She was in bed before her sister got there.
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