by Bryan, JL
“What used to go on?” I asked.
Chalmer looked from side to side, taking in the whole park, like he expected an elaborate counterintelligence operation against his low-budget country. “Not here,” he said. “We got to speak somewhere private.”
“That’s fine,” I told him. “Have you ever been inside an executive sprinter?”
“Wait.” Renoir held out a hand. “I’ll have to check the bag first.”
Chalmer clutched his old satchel closer, as if it were full of treasure. “Why?”
“Security,” Renoir said. “Can’t let you near the boss otherwise.”
“He’s really here?” Chalmer asked.
“You’ll never know until I check that bag. And the vest.”
Chalmer frowned and took a couple cigarette drags. Finally, he unzipped the bag partway and held it out.
Renoir rifled through and nodded. “Just papers.”
“That’s what you think!” Chalmer drew back and zipped it up again. “What’s in here would shock the world.”
“I can’t wait to see it, then,” I said.
We escorted him away from the park and into the alley where the van waited. Renoir stopped him and frisked him carefully, with a bit of a distasteful grimace. It had clearly been some time since Chalmer had taken a shower or even washed his hair.
Finally, we approached the van, and Renoir nodded to Lanita in the driver’s seat. The side door rolled open quietly.
“What in the sammy heck is going on here? I’m not getting in no van…” Chalmer’s protests died off quickly, though, as he saw the van’s unexpectedly luxurious interior. Wyatt removed his VR goggles, revealing his famous face as he took a look at Chalmer.
“Ooh, is this the guy?” Stacey asked. “Did he bring a copy of that unauthorized Grolman biography?”
“I don’t have a copy anymore,” Chalmer grumbled.
“Come tell us about it, then,” Stacey said. “The couch back there looks comfy. I’d take that if I were you. Want a drink? Or…” She looked at the glass minibar cabinet. “Cashews? Pralines?”
“A little whiskey would do me fine.”
“I guess that’s okay…” Stacey looked to Brad for guidance.
“Just help yourself.” Brad smiled with obvious effort, not responding well to Chalmer’s appearance, or maybe to his smell, which was getting more noticeable in the enclosed environment.
Chalmer took a small bottle of scotch and carried it to the back seat, not bothering with the cups offered by the minibar. He popped it open, took a drink, and sighed. Then drank again. And sighed again.
“What have you got for us?” Renoir stood in the middle of the parked van, bowing his head to keep it below the ceiling, because he was not a short man. He stood between Chalmer and Wyatt without blocking Wyatt’s line of sight.
“What do you know about the Grolman family?” Chalmer asked.
“Just what’s publicly known,” I said. “Heinrich—Hank—Grolman made his fortune out west before buying Satilla Island and building his estate there. He was obviously a big game hunter and traveled the world doing that.”
“Never met a wild animal he didn’t like to shoot,” Stacey said.
“And what if I told you…” Chalmer looked among us carefully. “Can everyone here be trusted?”
“Of course!” Brad said. “We’re a big gaggle of good friends. Now spill it. Please.”
Chalmer looked at Wyatt, making sure the young billionaire was listening, then sighed.
“The island was a hunting preserve for Grolman and his rich friends,” Chalmer began. “You know that? He bred big, mean hunting dogs and stocked the place with fancy foreign animals, all for the pleasure of hunting ’em down. And I got nothing against plain old hunting. Sometimes it’s the only way a man can eat.
“But they wasn’t hunting to survive on Satilla. They was hunting for the thrill of it, and to pile up the trophies. The problem with the real rich and powerful folks is they get bored with everyday pleasures. They start wanting fancy, special, elite type pleasures.” Chalmer raised his bushy gray eyebrows a couple of times, as if we were all supposed to get what this meant.
“Such as what?” I finally asked, since apparently he wasn’t going to continue if we didn’t demand it all with bated breath.
“Well, let me start over,” he said. “My great-grandpa came to America from a tiny little fishing village in Poland called Kuźnica. He was searching for his sister, Marzena, who’d gone off to America five years earlier. She’d been promised a good-paying housekeeping job for some rich American. Nobody had heard from her since, not a single letter sent back home. Turned out she’d worked as a maid in the big lodge there on Satilla, but she was gone by the time he tracked her there.”
“Aw, she died?” Stacey asked.
“She got locked up in Lassiter State Asylum over in Milledgeville.”
Stacey and I both drew back. It was the same old psychiatric hospital Stacey and I had entered on our first case together, just after Calvin hired her as my assistant. It was a harrowing place, a hive of unhappy ghosts, wisely left abandoned in the countryside, surrendered to the dead.
It stirred up frightful memories, but that experience had given me some real respect for Stacey, who’d only just started working with me then. I’d expected her to quit when she saw the real horrors of the job, like any sane person, but lucky for me, she hadn’t.
“We’re familiar with that place,” I said.
“By the time he tracked her there, she’d already died, after spending the last three years of her life as a patient,” he told us.
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” Stacey said. So was I. Lassiter had never been a happy or pleasant environment for its patients, even at the best of times.
“She was buried there on the grounds, with the other patients who died over the years, with nobody claiming their bodies. They wouldn’t tell him how she died or even why she was there. She spent the last three years of her life there, 1902 to 1905, and nobody would tell him why. He couldn’t get any answers.
“So he went back a few months later with a fake name and a beard and got a custodian job. That’s how he got Marzena’s file. Searched the whole place until he did.”
“What did it say?”
“Marzena had told the doctor about what really went on up there. Why they put the walls around the island. And what they really liked to hunt. It’s something they brought with them from the Old World, you see. Hunting peasants for sport.”
“But the Grolmans weren’t aristocrats in the Old World,” I said. “They were peasants.”
“And what did they become here in America?” he asked. “They wanted to be everything they weren’t back home. Only bigger. That’s what Marzena tried to explain to her doctor. The hunting club for American elites. They brought in poor people from Germany and Poland, people nobody in America would miss, and they chased ’em around the hunting grounds, all over the island, tormenting them with those dogs before they killed ’em.”
“Marzena saw all of this?” I looked at his leather satchel, eager to peruse the paperwork inside.
“The rich and powerful, hunting the poor for sport,” he repeated. “And Marzena thought there was more to it. Devil worship, maybe. Human sacrifice. She saw too much. That’s why they selected her. Made her a fox.”
I couldn’t help sitting up straighter in my chair when he said that. The chair was very soft and I’d sunken into it a little too much, anyway.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“Oh, they had a code. Hunting a ‘fox’ meant a woman. If it was a man, they’d say they were hunting ‘boar.’”
“Did she mention anything about masks?” I knew that was a pretty leading question, but I couldn’t help it.
His bushy eyebrows went up. “How do you know?”
“We…found some old masks at the lodge,” I said. “A fox and a boar.”
“They’d glue it onto the victim’s face before s
etting ’em loose,” he said. “Maybe it felt less like murdering a person. Eased their conscience somehow. Or maybe they were just sick, evil people who thought it was funny.”
“So how did Marzena escape the island?” Stacey asked.
“She didn’t truly escape, because it still came after her and got her, in the end,” he said. “But she swam to the mainland. And there’s sharks in that water, did you know that? Biggest ones in the ocean. But she made it, at least far enough for a fishing crew to pick her up. She didn’t speak a lick of English and only some German. Nobody involved knew Polish. They had to find someone who knew some German to take her statement.”
“So…is the file in German?” I asked.
“Her statement was, yeah. Problem was, the hospital was controlled by the Grolmans and their hunting-lodge buddies. Grolman had given the place a lot of cash. Edward Northbrook, another lodge member, was on the hospital board. And Dr. Timothy Haverford, he was the one who got involved and brought in the specialist from New York, who dabbled in a little thing called the Burckhardt method.”
“Which is what?” I asked.
“Do we really want to know?” Stacey cringed in anticipation.
“Burckhardt was a Swiss psychiatrist who experimented with trepanning. Cutting open the skull to access the brain. Think early lobotomy, but with cruder tools.”
“That’s the kind of thing I was afraid you’d say,” Stacey said.
“They did it to silence her, don’t you see?” Chalmer looked furious, his mood swinging to full boil. Renoir sidled closer to him, watching. “She’d seen the truth. So they called her crazy, and then they cut her up so she couldn’t think, and they locked her up. That’s what happens when you see it all, when you see what’s really going on in this world, and you try to spread the word, you try to tell everyone—they come after you, they get you fired, they drive away anybody close to you, they even get your wife to leave you. They tell everyone you’re crazy. They’ve done it all to me.”
“Do you have Marzena’s file there?” I asked.
“I had the file, and my great-grandfather’s journal. When he realized what he’d stumbled upon, well, he just hid it all away. What could he do against people like that? They’d kill him. They’d never leave him alone. I found it all after my grandfather passed back in ’75, in a box in his attic. He’d been too scared to do anything about it, too, maybe. I can’t blame him if he was. But I decided enough time had passed, I was going to do something about it.”
“Is that when you wrote the book?” Stacey asked.
“Exactly that, young lady. I wrote the book, based on Gramper’s journal, but it was hard to find a publisher. Only one would take it on. The Free Radical Press. They also did a vegetarian cookbook and some kind of meditation thing. But they were planning more serious stuff, political stuff. The owner had a vision of a company that would speak truth to power, but he also had a thing for substance abuse, and that’s how he ended up selling the whole company to some guys from New York for twenty thousand bucks, to people who said they’d keep it running but instead shut it down, fired everybody, no warning. So my book never came out, not one copy.”
“That must have been tough,” Stacey said.
“Worse part is, they had everything. The old hospital file, Gramper’s journal, everything. Even had some photographs of the lodge members together in the old days, in Grolman’s dining hall under the big bison head. In one they posed by a statue of a nekkid lady. The publisher said they needed it all to take good pictures and copy all the evidence for the book. They were supposed to give it all back to me, but then they got bought out.” He shook his head.
“You weren’t able to get any of it back?” I glanced at his satchel again, with more concern than anticipation now.
“I never could track down just who had bought the publisher and shut it down. I went to their old offices, but they were empty, company name gone from the building directory, everything vanished like smoke. I figure they bought it to bury it. Gramper had a list of people he thought took part in the secret activities of the lodge. There were some heavy, powerful names. Like the ones I mentioned. The Northbrooks made their fortune mining copper in Michigan. The Haverfords owned a book publishing company and newspapers all over the country.”
At this point I’d circled “Haverford” three times in my pocket notebook. Wendy Haverford had been the history professor who’d briefed us on the history of Satilla Island.
“If the publishing company kept everything, what do you have left?” I asked.
“Well…not a lot.” He finally opened the satchel and brought out his papers. “I photocopied some things, and I meant to do more, but I had to pay for it by the page at the library, and it wasn’t cheap back in the seventies…and I wasn’t so familiar with the machine, either…”
My heart sank as I looked at his paltry offering of supporting evidence. The copies had been blurry and slanted in the first place, now faded on paper gone yellow over the decades.
“There’s Marzena’s hospital file,” he told me. “What I have of it. You have to understand, it was already old when I found it, it’s from 1902, and I copied it on a 1970s machine.”
“Yeah, I see the problem.” The file wasn’t in German, thankfully; Marzena Ostrowski’s choppily translated account had been written in English. Unfortunately, it had also been written in compact doctor’s-handwriting cursive, rendered blotchy and blurry by the aging and the low-quality copies. The pages tended to cut off with missing text, too, and some were sideways, missing both upper and lower text. “Wow. There’s not much here, is there?”
“That’s just how they planned it,” Chalmer said. “They’ve been after me all my life. I can’t prove it, but I know it. I don’t carry a phone, because they listen. They got me fired from the gas station by messing with my card and making me look late. They got the bank to scramble my mortgage and foreclose on my house. And I’m just about certain they paid Garth Cayhill to sleep with my wife, because he could have had any girl at that bar. But that's what they do. They sweep away all the evidence and make you look crazy.”
“Let me see.” Wyatt held out a hand. I passed him the copies. He scanned through them quickly, then shook his head and passed them back. “Garbage.”
“Garbage,” Chalmer said, shaking his head. “Last little drab of my family’s legacy, and he calls it garbage. Well, thank you very much, sir. All I needed was to be kicked in the face by some snooty rich folks from California.”
“I’m from Ohio originally,” Wyatt said. “Chillicothe. I like California better.”
“What’s so great about it?”
“It doesn’t smell like a paper mill, and my brothers don’t live there.”
The old man in the ratty fishing hat chuckled. “You ought to learn to cherish your family, son. Family’s all a man’s got. If he’s got one.”
“My family, like your evidence, is trash,” Wyatt said. “And they like it that way. They work at it.”
“Where did Grolman bury his victims?” I asked Chalmer, before our client could run him off. Wyatt was not taking the accusations against his fiancée's family well.
“Right there on Satilla Island, I think,” Chalmer said. “There’s a cemetery there, though it might be too overgrown to see now.”
“What more do you know about the occult and ritual aspect of the lodge?”
He shook his head. “Only what my great-grandfather’s sister told the doctor. They forgot to destroy that part of her file before deep-sixing it in the hospital archives. One of their only loose ends. And now so much time has passed…well, I guess they’ll just get away with it. Unless somebody does something about it. Maybe somebody with real power.” He looked at Wyatt. “Somebody who’s now spending time on Satilla Island. And what’s your big plan, Mr. Tech Giant who spies on everyone? Are you going to tell the world about the Grolmans’ crimes? Or are you in on it? Are you here to restart the lodge?”
Wyatt's eyes swept up an
d down the man like he was a long column of figures to be added up.
“I’m not here for that, no,” Wyatt finally said. “I just wanted a nice beach house away from everyone.”
The old man gave Wyatt a similar appraising look, then nodded. “I could see that, yeah. Well, you’ve stepped into a real old hornet’s nest here. All I ask is you keep an eye out, as you go about making yourself an extra vacation home, and see if you run across any evidence at all. Anything that can prove what the Grolmans did to my family. To Marzena, most of all. And the other victims. You can keep my family’s garbage.” He nodded at the mostly illegible sheets in my hand. “They’ve got better copiers these days. Faster and cheaper, too. I’ve got what I remember jotted down in there, for what it’s worth, though you can call that garbage, too. Now let me out of this can. I’ve got to work a shift tonight, if they haven’t planted a bottle to get me fired yet, like before.”
“We really appreciate this,” I said. “Can I contact you with follow-up questions?”
“No, ma’am. They can listen in on all your calls and read all your messages. Satellites and microchips. Email me at the same place if you want to meet again. Maybe I’ll come. I recommend a proxy server, but I’m sure this guy knows all about that.” He pointed at Wyatt. He abandoned his empty whiskey and staggered to the side door, pawing around in search of a way to open it. “I need to get out of town. They can’t know I was here.”
“Who?” I asked.
“None of ’em.” He slapped the door in frustration. “Let me out! Or was this a trap all along?” He grabbed the largest fishhook on his hat and charged at Wyatt. “I knew it! You’re one of ’em! You’re bringing it all back, aren’t you?”
Renoir easily blocked the drunken old man’s attack, disarmed him, and twisted his arm behind his back. “Would you mind opening the door, Lanita?” he asked, his tone gentle and polite.
“Yes, sir, honey.” Lanita opened the door, and Renoir tossed Chalmer to the road outside.
Chalmer sprang to his feet, drew a second hook from his hat, and charged again, a hook in each hand. Renoir stood with his hands open, ready to grapple the man again.
