by Bryan, JL
“If we pool all that together, Farlee could probably make a great meal for all of us,” Wyatt said.
“Um—” Darika began.
“It depends on the ingredients,” Farlee said. “I can also gather wild herbs and mushrooms from the forest. It’s good to eat food that's still brimming with vital forces.”
“The wilderness isn’t safe,” I said. “There’s animals as well as supernatural danger.”
“My Earth energy is high and balanced, so I’m not afraid of nature,” she told me.
“Well, high and balanced or not, you really shouldn’t go out there, especially not alone.”
“I’ll call the ferryman and see if he can make an extra grocery trip before he brings your equipment this evening,” Darika said.
“That was fast,” I said.
“We had it overnighted, mostly from Atlanta,” she said. “It was not cheap, so I trust you’ll get use out of it.”
“You ordered more cameras?” Wyatt asked. “This is great. What if there was a phone app that could detect ghosts? People would go for that. What do you think?” He directed this last at Stacey.
“Me?” Stacey asked. “Uh…maybe? It really depends on what the phone can do physically. I’d have to think about that.”
“Let me know when you do.” Wyatt hopped to his feet, which made the rest of his entourage stir, ready to follow. “Is the guest cottage kitchen up and running, at least?”
“Yes, it’s fine, but I’ve been living there, maybe I should run ahead first and—” Darika said.
“Great! Farlee, you go with Darika. And someone should show me around this crazy house I’ve bought. Maybe…” He was turning very slowly but very obviously back toward Stacey.
“Gary’s your best bet there,” I said, inspiring the ex-wrestler to straighten up and check his comb-over. “Stacey and I are just getting our bearings ourselves.”
“But you can show me the equipment you’ve set up,” Wyatt said. “If this is the underlying problem that’s causing all the other problems, we need to crack it now. And we need more workers out here making the renovation happen.” He looked at Darika again.
“Nobody in the area will come—” she began.
“So bring them in from a hundred miles away, or a thousand miles away. Whatever it takes!”
Darika nodded and looked sullen as she turned away from him. She’d already been at the “whatever it takes!” phase for a while. I doubted she enjoyed him swooping in and implying otherwise.
Darika and Farlee left, and Gary took Wyatt around the house on a version of the tour he’d given us, with Stacey and me adding details about the cameras and such, because Wyatt still wanted us to come. Well, Stacey, at least. I probably could have dipped out unnoticed.
Brad trailed Wyatt by a few steps, expertly staying close yet out of the way.
Renoir followed us all at a distance, a shadow who made little sound.
“Big question,” Wyatt said after we’d looked at a few rooms. “Are there any areas without dead animals?”
“The, uh, herd of dead animals kinda thins out once you get upstairs,” Gary said. “But yeah, Old Man Grolman was indeed a big game collector.”
“But these are basically horrifying.” Wyatt peered into the India room with its giant dead elephant hung with costume jewelry, the once-fierce Bengal tiger whose fur had gone dull and dusty over the past century. “This place is ugly and depressing. That's kind of the elephant in the room, isn't it? Do you think Adrienne will want me to keep it like this?”
“I can’t say I really know your fiancée, sir,” Gary replied.
“Brad, what do you think?”
Brad made a sour face. “I can’t imagine she’d want this décor at her wedding. But if this is what her family was into…maybe?” He shrugged.
“Right. I can’t just throw out a bunch of their old heirlooms, even if they are, uh…” Wyatt grimaced at the big dead elephant. “Yeah. I’ll have to check with her when I fly her in for the big reveal. Which is supposed to be in twenty-five days. And this place is a wreck.”
“I’m sorry, what did you say about your fiancée’s family? Are they connected to this place?” I asked.
“Yeah, of course.” Wyatt furrowed his brow like we were supposed to know this confidential information already. “I mean, she is Adrienne Grolman. That’s kind of the whole point here.”
“Of the Grolman Animal Lard family?” Stacey asked.
“Right. This is her, like, ancestral home. That’s what will make it such a great surprise for her. It’s been sitting here empty all these years, and I’m bringing it back to life.”
“And you…bought it for your wedding?” I asked.
“Leased, technically. For the next century. We can hang out at her old, old family place. She’s going to flip hard when she sees it for the first time. Assuming it’s actually restored and not still a complete wreck.”
Stacey and I shared a shocked, silent gape at this information.
“You’ll want to be careful about the floor around the elephant,” I told Wyatt. “The trap door to the underground rooms used to be there. It was sealed up when the family left, but we don’t know how carefully.”
“Yeah, let’s go to this secret underground area they discovered,” Wyatt said. “I definitely want to check that out.”
We took the winding course through the butler’s pantry and wine cellar, past the meat cellar with its hooks and chains, and through the sizable hole in the cellar wall.
“They still haven’t managed to open it up?” Wyatt asked, pushing on the enormous vault door as if it had just been waiting on a critical nudge from him this whole time.
“Nope, and the old-timey bank locksmith guy got scared out of his wits and won’t come back,” Gary said. “It’s hard to find anybody worth a tick. I’m still trying.”
“Couldn’t we blast it open?” Wyatt asked.
Gary winced. “Probably not without taking half the house down with it. Probably nothing down there anyway. The old family would have taken it all with them.”
“But why bother sealing it off?” I asked. “Why not leave the key with the park service? Why hide it?”
“I can think of plenty of reasons,” Gary said. “Floods, mold, structural problems.”
“You certainly have a lot to say about this house,” Renoir said.
“Well, yeah,” Gary said, though his tone became deferential, like Renoir was his superior in the organizational pecking order. “You don’t have much else to think about, driving around here week after week. Not even many trespassers. I ran off some teenagers in a motorboat once.”
“Did you record anything interesting down here?” Wyatt asked Stacey, gesturing at our cameras.
“It’s very possible!” Stacey said. “We don’t know yet.”
“Send me anything you find.” Wyatt drew out his phone. “Are you on LookyLoon? I’ll send you a Look-At-Me.”
“Uh, yes!” Stacey fumbled her own phone in her excitement to slide it out of her pocket. “And I will totally Look Back at you, sir.”
“I’ll put you on my Look Closer list so I get Look Now notifications,” Wyatt added.
“And…you’re Looked Closer, too,” Stacey said, tapping her phone.
Gary rubbed his temples like he was having trouble understanding them, as their phones let out squawking loon-like cries. I could relate.
“We’ll call in a structural engineer about this vault, sometime after the wedding,” Wyatt said. “It’s one problem we can pretty much forget about for now. Honestly, I really didn’t understand what bad shape this place was in when we started.” His phone let out another loonie squawk, and he checked it. “Finally! Time for lunch. Which way is out, again?”
We made our way back up to the surface, leaving the chilly, dark underground rooms behind. Despite what Wyatt had said, I couldn’t help feeling the sealed vault below the house might well be the source of problems to come.
Chapter Fifteen<
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Six of us crowded around the dining table at the guest cottage while Farlee served us her creations, starting with a spicy curry. Darika’s frown indicated that perhaps a good bit of her own food supply was being consumed. Farlee followed it with a very cold ajoblanco soup, apparently a relative of gazpacho but with almonds and garlic instead of tomatoes, definitely welcome on the hot day.
Farlee pressed Brad into dishwashing service, since the cottage’s plate supply had to be washed between courses. He seemed miffed but cooperative, mentioning that more household staff would surely be needed in the future.
Wyatt peppered Stacey and me with questions about the investigation, and together with Darika we caught him up on the known history of the place.
“If your fiancée’s ancestors are haunting this island,” I told him, “then her return could further stir up the supernatural activities here.”
“Do you think they know she’s coming?” Wyatt asked.
“If they don’t, and this is just the normal baseline haunting for the estate…things could really blow up when she arrives. Are many of her relatives traveling here for the wedding?”
“A few dozen, according to our save-the-date spreadsheet. But how could that be a problem? Wouldn’t the old ghosts want to see their living descendants doing well?”
“There could also be spirits here who are hostile to Hank Grolman, and so may not feel at all friendly toward his heirs, either.”
“Like dead cattle rustlers and settlers he wronged out in Wyoming,” Stacey said. “If that’s who the ghost riders are.”
“When will we know?” Wyatt asked.
“We ordered some weatherproof outdoor equipment that should arrive this evening on the ferry.” I double-checked with a glance at Darika, who nodded. “We’ll monitor the area where the road workers saw the ghost riders.”
“That’s over by the cemetery,” Gary said.
I nodded, saying nothing, remembering how offended Gary had acted when I’d tried to study the graves and chapel up close.
“Where there’s a huge grave marker for Hank Grolman,” Stacey said. “Does anyone from Adrienne’s family know you’re here renovating the ancestral vacation house?”
“We’ve worked hard to keep it secret,” Wyatt said. “Shell corporations, all of it. That’s why I had to put Darika in charge. It was so complicated on so many levels, and I didn’t want to ruin the big surprise.”
“So, what’s Adrienne like? How did you meet?” Stacey glanced quickly from Wyatt to me, then back at him. “Uh, because it seems like anything about the Grolmans would help us understand the case a little better.”
“How did I meet Adrienne?” A truly dorky smile broke across his face, which was hard not to find a little endearing. “College. Stanford. Normally, we would never have met. She was an art student, and I was in computer science. It only happened because this guy in my dorm roped me into helping with his art installation where he was having sequencing issues with the moving parts and lights. It was some statement on consumerism using pieces of home appliances.”
“Sounds kinda neat,” Stacey said. “I always liked big wild installation pieces.”
“At Adrienne’s installation, she was the exhibit, in a cage wearing a white unitard like a B-movie space alien. Anybody who walked by could shoot her with this compressed-air paint gun mounted in front of her, like a carnival game. There were no instructions or signs, and she didn’t say anything. She was just there, and the gun was there.
“People started shooting her. You could adjust the gun to shoot harder or softer. The hardest setting fired big red paint blobs, the softest fired small green ones. She would let out a grunt each time one of the hard ones hit her, like it really hurt.”
“That takes commitment,” Stacey said, her interest in Adrienne apparently growing over their shared art-school background.
“I was watching her installation from across the aisle, and I felt like I got it. Like, given the chance, people would become more and more abusive. That was my take. It was an invitation for people’s inner demons to come out.
“Eventually, a couple of guys were just repeatedly pelting her on the hardest setting, not letting up. They started aiming for her face. She had goggles and a paper filter mask, but it was soaked with paint and probably wasn’t protecting her much.
“I yelled for them to stop and told them they were just showing everyone how terrible they were. I kind of went on a blind rant, really just a bunch of pent-up stuff I’d always wanted to yell at my brothers. I yelled at those guys until they stopped shooting her and left.”
“Aw, and Adrienne was impressed by your chivalry?” Stacey asked.
“No. She said she expected someone would use the situation for ‘performative morality’ when others could see them. What she liked was that I understood what her installation was trying to do. I suggested she build an enclosure around it that only one or two people could enter at a time. Remove any sense of being in public, subject to the judgment and approval of others, and then see what people do. And she actually invited me to coffee, and that was our first date. The end.”
“Aw, and now here you are,” Stacey said.
“Basically. It was off and on—we’re from really different backgrounds, you know. She grew up in New York, went to boarding school in Massachusetts, and races sailboats in regattas. Nobody sails in Chillicothe, Ohio. My older brother Skip works at a paper mill back home, thirty hours a week so they don’t have to give him benefits. He still sleeps in the upper bunk in our old room.”
“That sounds tough,” Stacey said.
“No, he’s a jerk, so it’s fine. This looks great, Farlee.”
The chef smiled as she set out thin yellow melon slices, juicy and sweet, refreshing in the summer heat.
Afterward, Stacey and I finally headed back to the chambermaids’ cottage, ready for a brief period of peace and quiet. We were exhausted, having slept little before the early start to our day.
“Wyatt seems to like you a lot,” I mentioned once we were alone. “He really opened up to you.”
“He’s just interested in the equipment,” Stacey said. “He’d be equally interested in me if I were a stack of technical manuals.”
“Yeah, right.” I yawned and headed for the shower.
We caught a few hours of sleep while it was still daylight. Darika was supposed to wake us with a phone call whenever the ferry arrived. Instead, she showed up knocking on our front door about an hour before sunset.
“The ferry’s here,” Darika said when I opened the door.
“Great, thanks.” I noticed the suitcase beside her. “Anything else?”
“Yes.” She took a deep breath and blew it out with a sigh, what they call a cleansing breath at yoga, which I haven’t attended in a long while but probably should get back to doing. “Wyatt, of course, needs his bodyguard, personal assistant, and chef available at all times, and the guest cottage only has four bedrooms.”
“So, you got crowded out?”
“Yes.” She looked away while she said that, as though embarrassed. “I could go back to the butler’s cottage, where I stayed before, but I moved out of there for good reason.”
“Can you tell us about it yet? It might help with our investigation.”
“I saw a…procession of things. The butler’s cottage is only one story, so I was on the ground level. I left the windows open at night back then, to let the breeze pass through. I could see trees out there in the moonlight. It was pleasant, until that night.
“I thought animals were walking by at first, maybe deer or wild pigs. Then I saw the shapes. They were like...shadowy people, covered in dark hoods. Some limped along. Some rode horses, but the horses were just bare bones. They were like those animals all over the lodge, badly preserved. Rotting. Horrible.”
“That must have been terrifying. Do you want to come in?” I asked, holding the door wide for her.
“They passed my window in a slow procession. So slow.
” Darika was staring off into space, remembering. “Just when I thought it was over, another one would come along. One of those rotted-out horses didn’t have a rider, just a white bag with a big dark stain tied to its back. Maybe there was a dead animal in there. Or maybe…” She shuddered. “I don’t know. But all of those things didn’t seem completely there, completely real.
“When they finally stopped, I told myself I might be dreaming. I made myself get out of bed and look out, but there was nothing, not even up the road where the procession should have been. They’d either put on a lot of speed or disappeared. And that, Ellie, is why I can’t go back and stay alone in the butler’s cottage. I've been staying at the guest cottage because it has upstairs bedrooms.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “You can certainly stay here if you want, but this cottage is haunted, too, by the masked chambermaid. And there’s no upstairs.”
“The whole estate is haunted. I’d just rather not stay alone.” She gave me a nervous smile. “Are you sure you don’t mind?”
“Of course not. Come on in.”
“What’s happening?” Stacey emerged from the hallway, rubbing her eyes.
“We’ve got a new roommate.” I closed the door after Darika rolled her suitcase inside.
“Oh. Cool.” Stacey smiled. “I don’t recommend the first room on the left. That’s Foxy Chambermaid’s room. And the one across from it’s ours.”
“Thanks. I'll avoid those.” Darika rolled onward to the second room on the right, moving in next door to Stacey and me.
Outside, we gathered at our respective vehicles. Darika frowned at the van.
“Technically, gas-powered vehicles aren’t allowed on the island,” she said. “It’s supposed to be electric vehicles only.”
“Are those electric?” I gestured at the yellow excavators and bulldozers standing like skeletal behemoths in the muddy chaos of the front yard.
“They aren’t, unfortunately.”
“Well, just count us as a construction vehicle for now,” Stacey said. “Helping you build a ghost-free island.”
We drove down the winding gray road to the steel gate overlooking the wharf. It groaned open at our approach. Either Gary was watching the gate through one of his concealed cameras, to which he’d yet to grant us access, or the inside of the gate had a motion detector.
