The Lodge (Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper Book 15)

by Bryan, JL

Gary’s golf cart tilted as he flew around the bend. He turned sideways as he braked. A floodlight on his cart flared to life.

  Its searing light revealed Stacey and me standing there, the cemetery gate open behind us, the door to the chapel standing open beyond that.

  I held up my hands. “Don’t shoot. We surrender.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  “What exactly are you up to out here?” Gary stepped out of his security cart, arms folded, dyed comb-over askew from his wild driving.

  “Believe it or not, ghost hunting sometimes leads you right to the one cemetery in the area,” I said. “We’re setting up gear to watch for the entities that ran off the road crew.”

  “Are you, now? Is that why you went breaking in during the middle of the night? Just tell me you didn’t…” He pointed his flashlight through the gate, checking Hank Grolman’s headstone, then the chapel door that stood open, revealing the mother and child statue within. “You did. That’s about as disrespectful a thing as I’ve ever seen.”

  “Again, it’s just a chapel,” I said. “We’re here to do a job. And I don’t think Darika or Wyatt intend for you to get in our way and slow us down. What we accomplished here tonight—”

  “I don’t care. It’s not right, and there ought to be a line. I told you, I grew up next to a graveyard, and they don’t like being bothered.”

  “We are going to do whatever we need to do around here, Gary.” I glared at him with the kind of unblinking fury my mother would throw at me for trying to avoid chores on Saturday morning. “And we’re still waiting on access to your camera network.”

  “And you’re gonna keep waiting.” Gary pulled out a ring of keys and started toward the cemetery gate.

  “We’ll see what your boss says,” I told him, and he grunted, not looking back as he passed through the gate and headed for the chapel.

  “Hey, at least we get to move all those tree limbs again,” Stacey said. “Good thing Gary didn’t see our van, or he might have caught us here.”

  “Very funny, Stacey.” I sighed and trudged up the broken road into the woods.

  Stacey and I returned to the lodge, to the card room where the jaguar watched us from atop its mock Mesoamerican-style stone pyramid with miniature steep stairs. An angry-looking harpy eagle the size of a dog perched above it, while a black caiman, a large Amazon River reptile in the mold of a crocodile or alligator, was mounted below, on a rock arrangement on the floor.

  “Let’s see the footage you recorded at the cemetery,” I said. “We need a greatest hits collection to show Wyatt and Darika tomorrow so they get the impression we’re accomplishing something here.”

  “Okay. I’ll include the audio from the dining hall party and whatever we’ve got of the Ghost Riders of Gravetown. I didn’t see a cowboy hat on that one guy, did you?”

  I shook my head. “He had more of a Grim Reaper fashion sense.”

  “Grim-looking horse, too. Poor thing looked like it hadn’t eaten in a hundred years. You really wanted to give it an apple or something.” Stacey connected her camera to her favorite laptop and downloaded the cemetery footage.

  The shadowy man appeared much as we’d seen him in the cemetery, but he never became as clear on camera as he had in person as he walked up the moonlit road. The shadowy person-shape was there, though, which was lucky. Often ghostly activity is more visible to the living eye than any camera.

  That was the case with the hooded rider. On the video, his face was just a pale oval, his form mostly shadows. We could barely see the outline of his horse.

  The sounds, too, were like something recorded down a deep well, mere echoes that didn’t reflect the thundering power of the hooves, the unnerving cry of the hunter’s horn, the snarl and snap of the unseen hellish hounds. But it was better than nothing.

  “Who do you think the guy in the cemetery was?” Stacey asked. “Grolman? Or one of his servants? And why the piggie mask?”

  “It’s probably safe to guess he wore it for the same reason the Foxy Chambermaid wore hers. Too bad we don’t know that, either. Now, as for the baby holding a cornucopia…” That took about half a second to look up. “The mother with the hat full of towers is the Greek goddess Tyche, or the Roman goddess Fortuna. The wheel she holds is the Wheel of Fortune.”

  “What was she goddess of? Prime-time game shows?”

  “Her domain is luck, both good and bad, but specifically the kind that afflicts entire cities rather than individuals. Floods, famine, prosperity, poverty.”

  “Sounds like someone you want to keep happy if you can. And who’s the baby?”

  “Plutus, the god of wealth. He lives in the underworld, part of the royal court of Hades, the Greek god of death—”

  “I knew that one,” Stacey said.

  “Plutus is the giver of gifts, particularly in the form of inheritance from the dead.”

  “That’s why you build an idol to him in your cemetery, huh?” Stacey said. “I mean, if you’re going to build one. He’d feel at home there. A cemetery is basically a playpen to a baby death god.”

  “He’s not always a baby.” I showed her a typical ancient depiction of adult Plutus, a winged young man in a fine robe, his childhood cornucopia of fruits and grains replaced by bags and chests of coins. “Some medieval writers identified him with Mammon, demon of greed, treasurer of Hell.”

  “Are we thinking Hank Grolman was a Plutus worshipper?” Stacey asked.

  “That’s the god he opted to honor with a chapel. Or a temple, I suppose we should call it.”

  “And what kind of offerings do you make to baby Plutus and the Wheel of Fortune lady?”

  “Animal sacrifices were the most common offerings in ancient times,” I said.

  “It kinda seemed to work, though, didn’t it? Grolman got super rich.”

  “Possibly. Or maybe he got into ancient deities after he was rich and began to fear losing his fortune. Maybe he didn’t want the wheel of Fortuna turning against him after it moved his way for so long.”

  “You don’t want it moving too fast, either, if you’re trying to hit that extra-narrow million-dollar wedge,” Stacey said. “Sorry, my grandma really likes Wheel of Fortune. So, what can we do with this information?”

  “I don’t know. It feels like a big piece of the puzzle, but I would personally like some of these puzzle pieces to start fitting together. Right now it’s like a bunch of mismatched pieces of a Picasso painting.”

  “With all the animal skulls around here, I'd say it's more of a Georgia O’Keefe.”

  We went back to work. Stacey slid on her earphones while I reviewed my notes on Heinrich “Hank” Grolman’s life, trying to figure out where worship of an ancient underworld god might have entered the picture. The Territory of Wyoming era seemed unlikely to me, but you never know. Maybe he’d gotten into ancient pagan rites after he’d become wealthy and tried to enroll himself in the elite Eastern establishment, or maybe it was something he brought with him from the Old World.

  I returned to the images of Count Hackelberend and his golden-stone manor house. Darika’s researchers hadn’t gone particularly in depth on Grolman’s ancestors, nor the aristocratic family they had served as stable keepers.

  Studying the history of the area, I came across a local legend that made me jump to my feet in excitement. “There’s a Wild Hunt entity cluster in the area.”

  “Is that like a wild goose chase?” Stacey asked, looking up from her screen.

  “The Wild Hunt is a pattern in folklore. The ghostly hunting party is led by someone—Odin, Satan, any number of local gods or legendary figures. In the area where Hank Grolman grew up, the lead hunter was a ghostly huntsman who rides at night with his dogs, hunting unwary peasants and travelers. It's an eternal curse, his punishment for hunting on Sunday instead of going to church.”

  “Do you think Hank Grolman brought the hunter ghost over from Germany? I didn’t really pick up a cowboy ghost rider vibe off those guys by the cemetery. Medieval hun
tsmen cursed by heaven, though? I can see that.”

  “I’m not sure what’s happened.” I considered the lead hunter, his cadaverous pale face under a dark hood. I compared it with my few pictures of Hank Grolman. “Imagine him without the mustache or muttonchops, and thinner. Could Hank have been the hunter with the horn? Like a dead, shriveled version of him?”

  “Dead, shriveled, shaved, and drained of color?” Stacey regarded the pictures of Grolman. “Sure, that could be the same guy. Why?”

  “It’s just a thought. Maybe Hank Grolman became the Wild Huntsman of his own island, somehow, with a hunting party of his wild young friends.”

  “But how does that happen?” Stacey asked. “If it’s just a curse for hunting on Sunday, half the men in my family would be Wild Hunters roaming around Alabama by now. Every duck blind and deer stand in the state would be haunted.”

  “I’ll keep looking at the lore and see if the International Journal of Psychical Studies has anything to say. The only clear pattern I’ve seen is that, whether the hunting party is led by a pagan god, a demon, or a ghost, it’s always bad luck to see it. Some say it’s an omen of death.”

  “Oh, I’m so glad we saw it, then.” Stacey shook her head and went back to work.

  The remaining hours of the night passed relatively quietly. Anything would have been quiet compared to our experience at the cemetery.

  Our equipment registered some creaking door sounds, footsteps, a couple of tiny orbs in the India room that vanished near the elephant and reappeared near the black vault door below the house. The master bedroom, where workers had been driven away by an imposing, unresponsive shadow figure, showed a cold spot on the thermal camera for a long while. Maybe it was Hank Grolman, wondering who’d been poking around his grave.

  We’d intended to set up cameras around the cemetery, but Gary’s attitude had cut that short. I actually sympathized with his take on respecting the dead, and it’s usually a good policy, but the dead need to respect the living, too.

  Stacey occasionally took a break from listening to audio files and played some music that was on theme with our case, like “Riders on the Storm” by The Doors and “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” performed by Johnny Cash, until I gently requested she cut it out so I could read.

  Information about Hank’s personal life remained elusive. I understood why Darika had connected me to a biographer of the closely associated Ryland family; it was because no biographers of the Grolmans appeared to exist. They had not sought the spotlight, had not been at the forefront of flashy new industries nor any public scandals. For my purposes, they were annoyingly boring and low-key. The Grolman Lard Company seemed to be their primary remaining asset, but I had the impression they owned bits and pieces of many things, investments accumulated over the generations. Their primary residences were in Manhattan and Greenwich, Connecticut.

  A 1977 notice in the Village Voice mentioned a forthcoming unauthorized Grolman family biography, Hunter of Men: How a Western Vigilante Became an Eastern Millionaire.

  There was no other reference to the book, though, and an online search yielded nothing about that title, nor its supposed publisher, Free Radical Press.

  “Can you track down the author?” Stacey asked me when I told her about it.

  “We’ll be lucky if he’s still alive. And something tells me ‘Publius D. Tribune’ could be a pen name.”

  “Yeah, and how credible is a guy who’s going to pick that as his pen name, really?”

  “Hmm.” Additional research didn’t provide much of a clue about the writer’s identity.

  I called it quits about an hour before sunrise. My brain felt like mush from trying to pull together a clear history of the island and the people who’d lived there.

  “I want to see their death certificates,” I told Stacey as we left the card room and headed for the front door.

  “Sounds like a coldblooded threat,” Stacey said. “I like it.”

  “Heinrich’s, Evangeline’s, every servant in that cemetery.” I stepped out into the blue-black of very early morning, the sunlight starting to seep over the horizon, reaching us before it reached the North American mainland. “I’ll text Darika. We need to catch a ferry into town.”

  A very loud, very male voice bellowed from the dark expanse of the plowed-up lawn ahead of us.

  Stacey and I reached for our flashlights.

  Chapter Nineteen

  It was a little too close to daylight for the average ghost to come out, but some of them mind the light less than others. Some even come out during the day.

  Following the voice as it periodically shouted, we reached the garden nook overseen by the Artemis statue with her arrow drawn.

  Wyatt was fighting with his bodyguard.

  They were sparring, shirtless and barefoot, wearing only some light pajama-type pants. Renoir threw a punch that Wyatt tried but failed to turn aside. The bodyguard pulled the punch at the last moment, then adjusted Wyatt’s stance and blocking form.

  They resumed fighting. Wyatt shouted each time he threw a punch or a kick, or avoided one, or failed to avoid one. Renoir made no sound, clearly not just the superior fighter but the trainer. He was tall, broad-shouldered and barrel-chested, built like a linebacker. Wyatt had a naturally very skinny, slender shape but was unexpectedly ropy with muscle with his shirt off, probably helped along by these kinds of early-morning workouts.

  “Are you boys not getting along?” Stacey asked, by way of announcing our presence.

  Wyatt looked over, startled. Renoir didn’t, like he’d already been aware of us before Stacey spoke. He did let Wyatt land a punch in his gut, then grunted and dropped to one knee. Given his previous performance, he was obviously taking a dive to make his boss look good in front of us.

  “Oh! Sorry, Renoir!” Wyatt said. Either he was a very convincing fake, or genuinely believed he’d just dropped his nimble Goliath of a trainer while distracted. He extended a hand to Renoir. “Are you okay?”

  “Lucky shot,” Renoir gasped. He accepted Wyatt’s help as he stood.

  “Let’s take a personal five, anyway, while they catch us up on the investigation.” Wyatt looked only at Stacey as he said this, perhaps because he’d missed that I was the lead investigator, but probably not.

  “I actually do have some stuff for you,” Stacey said. “As long as you’re done beating up your bodyguard.”

  “Oh, Renoir’s a seventh-dan black belt in ninjutsu. He can take it.” Wyatt elbowed the larger man playfully, in a boss-showing-his-dominance kind of way. “He’s training me, but I am a mere Padawan. It gets you booted up in the morning, though. What have you got for me?” He ambled our way, glancing at the computer bag strapped over Stacey’s shoulder.

  Renoir drew a shirt from a black duffle and receded into the shadows around the Artemis statue, keeping watch over us and the muddy, destroyed lawn behind us.

  “Do you want to put on, like, uh—” Stacey glanced over Wyatt’s torso and then quickly away. She shook her head as if canceling whatever she’d been planning to say, then brought out her tablet.

  They huddled fairly close together over the tablet. Wyatt’s eyebrows raised as Stacey showed him the highlights—the invisible party in the dining hall, voices and boots echoing among the empty chairs and staring dead beasts, and the shadow-man in the cemetery.

  His jaw dropped at the sight of the narrow stream of storm-force winds lashing through the forest, and the rider who’d emerged.

  “Can you Private Look those to me?” Wyatt asked.

  “Sure,” Stacey said. “But the recordings really don’t show the entities as clearly as they were in person.”

  “Why is that?” Wyatt asked.

  “Sometimes you just have to be there, I guess. It’s something you feel or experience in the moment that’s hard to capture.”

  “I can understand that,” Wyatt said, still gazing steadily at her, the early golden rays of sunlight landing favorably on his bare chest.

 
“Yep.” Stacey seemed to blank out for a moment. “Anyway, there’s your problem. Ghosts all over the estate. Wild hunters, masked servants, I don’t know.”

  “We think there might be a connection with the estate where Hank Grolman grew up in Lower Saxony.” I laid out what we knew, from the lodge being modeled after the Hackelberend manor and built of the same material, to the local legends of the ghostly hunting party that rode by night. “What we really need is more information about the Grolman family and their activities here. Do you think there’s any chance that your fiancée, or any of her family members, would be willing to—”

  “No,” Wyatt said. “This whole thing is a surprise. I don’t know how she’ll take it if she sees the old family home all ripped up like this. It has to wait until it’s ready.”

  “But there must be some way—”

  “We’re not involving Adrienne or her family right now.”

  “Okay.” I dropped that and caught him up on everything else, from the unauthorized biography that apparently never saw print to our plans to head to the nearest mainland port, Brunswick, to look at death certificates.

  “What’s that town like?” Wyatt asked.

  “Oh, it’s super-cute,” Stacey said. “They have an Old Town on a colonial square system, with gardens and parks. It’s like a mini-Savannah. Savannah Junior.”

  “Well, I definitely like what I’ve seen of Savannah,” Wyatt told her, and I could swear she blushed.

  Darika’s golf cart rolled up the road, headlights on against the lingering gloom beneath the thick, mossy live-oak canopy that sprawled like a shadowy spiderweb overhead. She spotted the four of us in the statue garden and parked close by rather than at the lodge.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked as she stepped out.

  “The investigators were just catching me up,” Wyatt said. “This place has some serious issues. How did nobody seem to know any of this before I bought it?”

  “The island’s been uninhabited and closed to the public for decades,” Darika said. “Nobody’s been here to see the problems.”