by Bryan, JL
The Charleston Crosser waited down at the dock. Captain Walker greeted Darika expansively and warmly, like a man who’d made a lot of money off of her, and his nephews hurried to provide her with cardboard boxes of supplies, including a cooler box with the Whole Foods logo. They loaded it all onto her golf cart, not letting her lift a finger.
“Thanks,” she told them. “I just ran out of everything today, very unexpectedly.”
“Was it the blimp?” Walker asked, scratching his white beard. It wasn’t raining tonight, and he’d traded his hooded rain slicker for an Atlanta Hawks cap and blue work shirt. “People say a blimp landed here.”
“Yeah, the LookyLoon blimp,” one of Walker’s muscular young nephews said. The guy was maybe a couple years older than me, in a clingy, damp t-shirt. His Geechee accent was a distant echo of Captain Walker’s, barely there at all when he spoke to me instead of his relatives. “Now we know who we’re really working for. Wyatt Lanigan. Always some super-rich guy from far away trying to make this island his playground. Things change, but they don’t.”
“In the meantime, we’re happy to help Ms. Mahajan with whatever she needs,” Captain Walker said, his tone and his expression admonishing toward his nephew. “Get the FedEx boxes. And be careful with them.”
The nephews loaded our boxes of freshly arrived gear into the back of our van, for which we gushed our gratitude. Darika drove away in her cart, eager to get the cooler box contents into her fridge. Our fridge, now.
“So?” Captain Walker said to me, his white eyebrows raised inquisitively, while his nephews chatted with Stacey about sea turtle nests on the beach, a well-chosen subject on their part that grabbed her attention.
“It’s like you said,” I told the ferryman. “Bad root. But we’re here to help, um, uproot it.”
He chuckled. “You’re root doctors?”
“I wish. All we have is technology and research.”
He looked at me like he was expecting a punchline to a joke, but I had none to offer. He shrugged and returned to his boat. “Keep yourselves safe, if you can.”
With that uplifting parting comment, he was off, detaching from the wharf and pulling away across the shark-infested waters.
“Root doctors?” Stacey said. “Was he joking?”
I shrugged. “I get the feeling he doesn’t approve of us being here.”
“Oh, yeah, I’m getting a great big helping of that feeling myself.”
We returned up the road, and the heavy gates closed behind us, locking us in with an audible thud.
Chapter Sixteen
The main lodge stood silent and empty again, everyone gone to their various cottages for the evening. Stacy and I unloaded some of our new gear into the card room, where the monitors and speakers fed us sights and sounds from around the lodge, mostly just dead animals doing nothing, and doing it silently.
“Should we set up the new stuff?” Stacey asked.
“Later. I want to catch up on the gigabytes of research Darika dumped on us this morning.”
“Suit yourself. I’ll search for anomalies in last night’s recordings. That’ll pass the time.” Stacey drew on a pair of headphones.
I sat down at my laptop, positioned on an antique games table with a painted-on chessboard, and carefully placed my hot coffee mug on a coaster, though it would hardly be the first drink ring on the board.
Without access to Gary’s network of tiny yet high-resolution cameras, we had blind spots all over the enormous house and grounds. Really, it was more like one big blind spot with scattered points of occasional visibility.
It also meant Gary could be watching us, because we didn’t know where all of his cameras were. And maybe he could hear us, and I definitely didn’t want him to know our plans for later.
Darika’s research assistants had been thorough at collecting information about Satilla Island, but it wasn’t well organized or indexed. I dove in, immediately swimming alone in the deep end of a mishmash of nineteenth century history.
I found many photographs of Heinrich “Hank” Grolman’s businesses, including sprawling Wyoming ranchlands teeming with cattle, a coal mine, a “Rancher’s Trust” bank that looked like an Old West saloon, and sepia photographs of a massive slaughterhouse in Chicago with thousands of cows packed nose to tail.
Few pictures seemed to exist of Grolman himself, and these appeared to be only when business required it. In one, he stood in the background of a crowded reception in a saloon celebrating Wyoming’s freshly granted statehood in 1890, when presumably the Greater Cattlemen’s Association gave up its vigilante and land-grabbing activities. He would have been thirty-eight in that picture. His bearded face was rugged and hard, and despite his attempts to soften his appearance with a bowler hat and tie, he looked like a hard-fighting, hard-carousing ranch hand, a rough cowboy hiding in a good suit.
The Ryland family of Pittsburgh seemed much more amenable to having their pictures taken and portraits painted. Senator James Ryland had been a man with a smile so wide it spanned all the way from one giant muttonchop sideburn to the other. He had nine children and a cheerful but tired-looking wife. Countless pictures showed the Ryland family’s lavish Christmas parties. A series of newspaper photos followed the senator on a visit to his family ironworks, shaking hands with sooty workers while dressed in a top hat and cravat. Another showed him delivering candy and presents to an orphanage. His campaign posters promised, rather vaguely, GOOD THINGS FOR ALL MEN, a slogan that clearly predated women’s suffrage by some years.
I focused on any images of Evangeline, the senator’s second-oldest daughter and third-oldest child. Fortunately, many of the Rylands’ family papers had been available at a public library in Pennsylvania they’d endowed, and which still bore their name.
Even given the relative restraint of nineteenth-century gossip columnists compared to modern paparazzi, it was easy to see that Evangeline’s wild behavior caused her family some embarrassment. She'd once zoomed on a bicycle down Negley Avenue, one of the city’s many long, steep hills, wearing only a petticoat and a giant flowered hat, apparently on a dare from friends, when she was nineteen. I read this in a letter written to Senator Ryland by his wife Josephine, complaining of the girl’s behavior. Another time, she engaged in an unauthorized horse race in a public park. Other pictures showed her daredeviling around Jekyll Island’s windblown beaches on an experimental sail-powered bicycle, or riding with her father and uncle in a small, boxy motorboat, a wild new invention at the time, powered by a plucky, ambitious little petroleum engine rather than a team of sweaty guys shoveling coal into a steaming fire box.
Pennsylvania’s newspapers had exploded in 1899 with news of Evangeline’s engagement to “Hank Grolman, of the Grolman meatpacking concern in Chicago.” A photograph showed Grolman at a banquet in the ballroom of the Ryland home in Pittsburgh. He’d upgraded from a bowler to a top hat and traded his beard for sideburns in blatant imitation of his soon-to-be father-in-law.
Beside Grolman was Evangeline, in a ball gown trimmed in gold leaf. She gave a little smile, a rarity for a nineteenth century photograph, and seemed to toast the photographer with her wine glass.
Senator and Josephine Ryland stood at the other side of the picture, well-dressed, starch-stiff, and plainly uncomfortable, not looking at their daughter, their future son-in-law, the camera, or each other.
I read Evangeline’s death notice in June of 1899, the month she was meant to have her wedding on Satilla, the same month and location for which Wyatt and Adrienne were now planning. Evangeline's wild streak and her desire to win regattas had sent her sailing in questionable weather with younger brother Averill and cousins Edna and Helena. Only Edna’s body had been recovered.
In photographs, Senator Ryland seemed visibly aged by the loss of two children. He sold Ryland Ironworks to J. P. Morgan in 1901 and did not seek re-election but lived as a quiet philanthropist. The Ryland family fortune vanished among hordes of great-grandchildren. Their Pittsburgh man
sion became home to classrooms for Oakland College.
I double-checked my notes. It was the same college where Wendy Haverford taught. I supposed it was natural for a history professor to research the Ryland family while having easy access to the old family home, which was beautiful and impressive in photographs, with balconies jutting from ivy-coated brick towers, the interior walls painted with cherubs, roses, or grapevines, decorated with classical busts and suits of armor. The mansion was carefully maintained by the college down to the present.
Another file included a Grolman family tree spanning several generations, from Hank’s grandfather Rudolf, stable keeper to the Hackelberend estate in Germany, down to the current generation of descendants. Few carried the Grolman name anymore; their numbers had dwindled with the shrinking family sizes of the twentieth century.
I found Adrienne at the bottom of one of the family tree’s many sheets, which were arranged in a somewhat confusing manner inside a PDF document, with no easy navigation. Adrienne was twenty-four, a couple years younger than me. It seemed like everyone involved this case was younger than me, except for those who’d been dead for more than a century, not exactly a table at which I was happy to be seated.
Eventually, I traced Adrienne’s ancestry back to Garit Grolman, one of Hank’s brothers who ran the business as Hank retreated into apparent despair and ultimate death on the island. Garit had served some years in the Imperial German Navy and was said to bring order and efficiency to the business, while the other brother, Otto, had clerked in Leipzig at a combination bookstore and coffee shop—sounded like a place I could hang out—and was apparently a more talented schmoozer than Garit.
As far as I could tell, the family had continued to prosper until the Great Depression struck it hard. This led to the eventual closure and abandonment of the massively expensive Satilla Island estate. The island was being evaluated for condemnation by the federal government, which was interested in claiming it as a National Seashore in the 1950s, but the family arranged for the state of Georgia to take over instead.
It wasn’t clear why the family preferred the state over the federal government. Maybe they thought local officials would take better care of the land, because they stipulated it had to be kept as an untouched wildlife preserve.
“Hey, Stacey,” I said at one point, “want to see the manor house in Germany where Hank Grolman grew up?”
“Sure.” She pulled off her headphones. “I’ve got something to show you, too.”
I showed her the ruins first, a color photo of bombed-out brick walls with gloomy forested hills rising behind it.
“Whoa, what happened to it?” Stacey asked.
“Destroyed in the Second World War. The Germans were using it for some kind of intelligence command. Look at the bricks.”
“Huh. They have that same color as the lodge, don’t they?”
“The architectural notes say it’s built of ‘Bentheim sandstone,’ a golden stone mined only in that particular part of Germany, in a city called Bad Bentheim. It’s not quarried anymore because the dust is deadly to workers.”
“So…Grolman spent a fortune bringing fancy rare stone over from Europe?”
“Right. And look.” I showed her a prewar black and white picture of the Hackelberend manor house—it was imposing, three stories high, the windows narrow, a covered porte-cochère at the front.
“It’s just like Grolman’s lodge,” she said. “Only…smaller?”
“It looks like Grolman built a version of the house where his family worked in the stables, but made it three times larger.”
“Well, that certainly makes a statement,” Stacey said.
“Even the gate is similar.” I showed her the old manor house’s iron gate topped with a brick arch. “He really took some design ideas from back home.”
“That must have been his idea of reaching the pinnacle of success. Who were these aristocrats his family served?”
“Heinrich—sorry, Hank—grew up serving the household of Count Frederik Hackelberend. Hank’s father and grandfather spent their lives cleaning the stables and grooming the horses. The Count was known for his lavish parties, particularly hunting parties, and kept private preserves for himself. The Count’s son, Frederik II, had to abdicate like the rest of German nobility after World War I.”
“Are you reading a Wikipedia article to me?” Stacey asked.
“You can read it to me if you prefer.”
“Sounds like Heinrich really wanted to be like the Count in every way he could,” Stacey said. “I guess we know who his favorite Sesame Street character would have been.”
“He ended up with an even bigger house and larger fortune, so it seems like he got everything he wanted,” I said.
“Except for the tragic lost bride,” Stacey said. “Which made all his success mean nothing to him, maybe. It sounds like he spent the rest of his life brooding and building walls. Literal and otherwise. They say no man is an island, but this guy really went for it anyway.”
“Well, he did become part of an island, since he’s buried here.”
“Yikes. Kinda grim, Ellie.”
“I blame a lifetime of working with the dead. So, what did you find?”
“I thought you’d never ask. Check this out.” Stacey unplugged her headphones from her tablet to bring its external speaker to life.
She played a clip recorded by the night vision camera in the dining room. Nothing stirred at first. The forty empty chairs seemed to stare at one another. The bear, wolf, and bison heads could be seen overlooking the room from above with their lifeless eyes. The glass bulbs on a bison-horn chandelier glinted greenly in the night vision, reflecting moonlight from one of the high, narrow windows.
I watched and listened carefully, waiting for any movement or sound.
When the voice began, it filled me with dread, as the voices of restless ghosts so often do.
Chapter Seventeen
It was thin and distant, and never grew too loud or clear, but it was definitely a man’s voice, singing.
“Is that German?” I asked.
“I think so.”
More voices joined in, straggling along as if they didn’t know the words as well, or were badly inebriated, or both. The sounds of clinking glasses, banging fists, and scraping chairs echoed in the room. It was eerie to hear such activity but see nothing at all, just the empty chairs facing each other across a blank, dusty table, and the decayed heads of the beasts staring into nothingness.
One of the dining room’s multiple doors opened, the one connecting to the Moroccan-style smoking room. It wasn’t a big movement, just an inch or two, so slight it could have been caused by a draft of air, or even the settling of the house as it exhaled some of the day’s humidity, nudging a misaligned door from its frame.
The voices and noises fell silent, as if something had distracted all the entities in the room at once.
Then a horn sounded, a single long blast.
“That’s like the one that called off the dogs,” I said.
A cavalcade of shouts, scraping chairs, breaking glass, and boots erupted, lasting a few seconds before falling silent, but toward the end I thought I heard something else.
“Sounds like they’re gearing up for the wedding celebration, doesn’t it?” Stacey said. “I hope they RSVP’d.”
“Can you replay those last few seconds?” I asked.
“I know what you mean. I heard it, too.” She played the last few seconds again, putting it on a loop.
Snarls. Growls. After the previous night, it was hard not to feel unnerved at the sound.
“That’s what we heard in the woods,” I said.
“Check the timestamp,” Stacey said. “This was recorded only a few minutes before we heard the scream and went to check it out.”
“These could be the entities that chased us through the forest. They left their indoor party to go hunting. Did we catch anything on thermal?”
“Yep. Good thing they told us t
he dining room is a major hauntspot so we set up multiple cameras.” Stacey brought up the thermal camera recording of the same time period and played the audio again to accompany it.
Cold spots formed slowly, small and scattered at first, but growing larger and colder as the voices and sounds grew louder. They deepened, darkened, going icy purple as they gathered at their table, the host of unseen spirits shouting or drunkenly singing.
Among all of those sounds, a dog howled. It wasn’t particularly loud, and it sounded more distant than the other noises. But the voices and clinking glassware stopped at the howl, falling into a silent pause for a few seconds.
Then a horn blew, and the overlapping cold spots surged as one toward the door. Dog howls and snarls joined the shouting voices. A tidal wave of cold psychokinetic energy crashed into the dining room door, a dramatic sight visible only to the thermal camera.
On the night vision at the same moment, nothing visibly happened at all until the door slipped slightly ajar. An observer in the room could easily have mistaken this massive paranormal event as simply a cold draft and a creaky door, though probably accompanied by a feeling of deep unease or of being watched, maybe even touched by cold invisible hands as the entities slipped past.
“It’s like the dog howl alerted them,” I said. “But to us? Or the woman we heard screaming in the woods?”
“They ended up hunting all of us, anyway,” Stacey said. “You, me, and Miss Invisible. You think she’s the Foxy Chambermaid?”
“I wouldn’t make any assumptions.”
“I’m just brainstorming. Too bad we don’t have a blimp to go brainstorm-cruising on like Wyatt.”
“Did you pick up anything else?”
“Nope. Once they left the room, they left the house, I think. I guess they were in a big rush to hunt us. Or Miss Invisible.”
“If they’re all ghosts, this must be a drama they play out again and again,” I said. “Maybe they’ve been doing it for a hundred years. Or maybe the recent renovations disturbed their slumber.”
