by Bryan, JL
The van’s side door closed in time to cut off Chalmer’s second attack, but he continued banging on the van and shouting until we drove away.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The local public health department had death certificates going back to 1911, but Heinrich Grolman had died in 1901, and Evangeline Ryland in 1899. So we headed for the city’s public library, which had a promising-sounding heritage room with genealogy resources and such.
Lanita parked us in the back corner of a parking lot behind the library, near another deserted alley. She seemed to know a hidden nook in every part of town for clients who wanted to stay out of sight.
The van's side door opened, and Stacey and I stepped out.
“Does nobody want to come hang at the library with us?” Stacey asked.
“Sorry, so busy. Text us when you’re done.” Brad got absorbed in his phone, which squawked out LookyLoon notifications. Wyatt didn’t respond at all, lost in the world of his VR goggles.
“We should keep moving instead of sitting still,” Renoir told Lanita. “Is there a scenic tour of the town available?”
“We can tour the whole coast if you like. Have a nice time at the library, ladies.” The side door rolled shut, and the big, dingy-looking van rolled away.
The library was a sunny, modern building, framed with just enough bricks to hold up its glass walls. A reference librarian guided us to their archive of records and paperwork from the city’s earlier days.
We couldn’t find any reference to the Polish girls or the other names from Satilla Island cemetery, though it didn’t help that we lacked burial dates for them.
Ultimately, the main item we were able to see before the library closed for the day was yellowed, faded, crumbling in a file folder in the back of a cabinet along with assorted other documents of its kind. The reference librarian let us see it, but didn’t let us touch it.
It was Heinrich Grolman’s death certificate from 1901.
“Well, that confirms he died in a hunting accident,” Stacey said. “Gored by a wild boar.”
“Look at the doctor who signed it.”
“Whoa.” Stacey took a snapshot. The librarian reminded us that it was time for the library to close, and we hurried outside.
“That doctor had to be a member of the secret human-hunting club, huh?” Stacey whispered. “Like Chalmer was talking about.”
“Some of what Chalmer described does seem to fit with the dreams the chambermaid ghost gave me, but maybe we should still take his words with at least a small grain of salt.”
“Speaking of salt, I’m hungry. And I wouldn't mind something salty.” Stacey drew out her phone. “Let’s see what’s nearby and grab a bite.”
“Maybe.” I walked around the side of the library. The van wasn’t there; we would have to call and let them know we were done.
“There’s a lot of little places…one a couple blocks from here is called Indigo Coastal Shanty. Let’s go there!”
“What kind of place is it?”
“Who cares? With a name that convoluted, it has to be good.” Stacey took my arm, semi-aggressively leading me in the direction of the mystery restaurant.
“If it’s bad, you’re buying,” I said.
“And if it’s good?”
“Just kidding. We’re obviously billing Wyatt for this either way.”
The Indigo place was easy to find. It was mostly outdoors, with cheerful turquoise tables shaded by umbrellas and trees, surrounded by a fence painted every color of the rainbow.
If we’d actually been betting, Stacey would have won. I had a rich, tasty tomato stew full of shrimp and fresh fish. I’d been tempted by the spicy Indian-seasoned Raj burger, but it was going to be a long, busy night, and I couldn’t just sit around with a heavy meal in my stomach, parked on the couch with my belt unbuckled like some sitcom dad. Stacey had chicken and sweet potatoes in coconut curry over jasmine rice. The menu was wild enough to suit the restaurant’s name, offering local seafood prepared with spices and recipes from the Caribbean and India.
“This was a great idea,” I said. “It’s nice to have a break from eating in the cottage.”
“Should we invite everyone else to join us?” Stacey asked, which was a very Stacey type of idea. In my mind, we were finally enjoying a break from everyone else.
“I don’t want to step on Wyatt’s chef’s toes,” I said.
“She’ll be fine. Her toe rings will protect her,” Stacey said, and I tried not to laugh with a mouthful of soup. “Okay, let’s get Darika something since she plainly wanted to go on this trip. What do you think she’d like? This curry? Or the Bombay chicken salad? Should I get her one of the Indian dishes, or is that presumptive? Cripes.”
“Text her the menu and ask if she wants anything.”
“Yeah, good point. I’ll LookyLoon her about it.” Stacey tapped at her phone. The screeching caw of a loon sounded about thirty seconds later. “She does want the Bombay chicken salad. I almost got that for myself. Want to share a dessert?”
“Are you just trying to put off going back to the island?” I asked.
“Yes. It’s awful there, isn’t it? Especially once you leave, and then have to think about going back. It’s just looming ahead of us like the entrance to a haunted-dungeon ride. Big wooden doors, skull decorations, and recorded screams. It’s not a ride you want to go on, but you already sat down and the lap bar’s locked into place.”
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s share a dessert. I’ll just run the calories off later when the dead horsemen are trying to kill us.”
“You think they will?” Stacey looked alarmed.
“Let’s not wear any fox masks, just to be safe. Are we doing the chocolate bread pudding or the Georgia peach pound cake?”
“The second one.”
“Because of the convoluted name?”
“Exactly.” Stacey smiled at our approaching waiter.
The dessert was as good as our entrees had been, the pound cake served with ice cream and drizzled with caramel. The indulgence fortified us for the inevitable return to the gloomy island.
The day had remained overcast, and it was starting to drizzle. Stacey and I huddled under an overhang in front of a nearby empty storefront as we waited for the low-key executive sprinter. We climbed inside as the rain picked up.
“Did you bring enough for the whole class?” Brad asked, eyeing the takeout bag in Stacey’s hand.
“Just enough for Darika, sorry. Good thing y’all travel with your own chef.” Stacey dropped into the chair across from him and folded out a table so she could set down the bag. I sat across from Wyatt, still lost in his VR goggles.
“Farlee has her moments,” Brad said as the van started to move. “But how was your leisurely dinner while we took the long way around the city?”
“You’d be jealous if we told you,” Stacey said.
“Did you find anything at the library?” Wyatt asked, raising his goggles to look at us. At Stacey, mainly. Brad raised the partition, cutting off our driver from the conversation.
“Just a little thing called Hank Grolman’s death certificate,” Stacey said. “Signed by that same Dr. Haverford who ordered Marzena’s brain-cutting surgery.”
“Assuming we believe Captain Hook,” Brad said. “Which I don’t, necessarily. He seemed like a big barrel of nuts to me.”
“I can’t argue with that,” I said. “But if you combine his account with the death certificate, there’s some room to doubt Wendy Haverford’s version of things, too. Especially if her ancestors were close with the Grolmans.”
“You think she’s whitewashing the past?” Stacey asked.
“Writing authoritative biographies and history books would be one way to do that,” I said.
“You believe the nut barrel over the professor?” Brad asked me incredulously.
“I’m not sure I believe either of them completely.” I raised the thick window blind and looked at the streamlets of rain coursing down the out
side of my window. “They might each have a limited viewpoint or knowledge.”
“But only one of them is a professional historian,” Brad said.
“Yeah, I'm going to need more before I believe such extreme claims about Adrienne and her family,” Wyatt said. “They're not evil people. She's a good person.”
“I’m sure she is,” I said. “We’re looking at things that happened a century before she was born. She can’t be blamed for anything her ancestors might have done.”
“What am I supposed to tell her?” Wyatt closed his computer as the van parked near the dock where the ferry waited. “We think one of her ancestors ran a Most Dangerous Game cult sacrificing humans to an ancient death god here on the island? I’m not sure I’m ready for that conversation.”
“And we can't prove if it’s true,” Brad said.
“I won’t say anything to Adrienne,” Wyatt said. “We’ve got enough problems with the renovations as it is. But we’re going to make it all work. Right?” He looked at Stacey and me.
“We are,” I said, then readied myself to step out into the rain.
We huddled under the ferry’s covered passenger area, avoiding the benches, which were damp from rain-filled gusts of wind.
“Well, I know one thing,” Stacey whispered to me. “Mr. Chonkers is still innocent in all of this.”
The ferry crew in their hooded rain slickers triggered some unnerving flashbacks of the unholy host of hunters prowling the cemetery. The hunters had seemed to be looking for the man in the boar mask, who’d hurried to hide from them. Maybe he was one of the servants imported from Germany, hunted for sport by the wealthy lodge members, now hounded forever in the afterlife by their spectral forms.
Rain and darkness fell on us as we crossed the intracoastal waterway. The sun slipped down deep in the west behind us and only grew more distant as we moved east toward the shadowy bluffs of Satilla Island. Night had already fallen on the ocean.
The lights of the Charleston Crosser revealed the island's marshy shore. The house-like wharf shelter where past generations had stood during inclement weather looked more sagging and deteriorated than ever as the rain pounded its crumbling roof and whimsical turret window.
A pale light glowed inside.
“Uh, who’s that?” Stacey pointed at the strange light. Renoir was already squinting at the window.
I could barely discern the outline of a woman in one of the broken window frames. She was tall and thin, dressed all in white. Her hair and face were as bone-white as her clothes. Her eyes, lips, and cheeks had a bluish hue, like she’d drowned recently. She watched us approach.
“You guys see her, right?” Stacey whispered.
“Of course we see her,” Brad said. “That’s Wyatt’s fiancée, Adrienne Grolman. And that is not her happy face.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
“I guess that’s one more for dinner.” Farlee sighed. She stood at the passenger-area railing, a giant rolling cooler beside her, as the crew tied us up to the dock.
Wyatt stared silently at his fiancée, who was unexpectedly here and waiting for him, having apparently arrived by some other boat. Finally, he whispered, “Dead. I’m so dead.”
“You’ll be fine!” Brad said. “So she found out a little early, and this place still needs a little work. It was meant as a hugely thoughtful gesture, right? It's the thought that counts. She should appreciate that.”
“She doesn’t look like she’s appreciating it very much.” Wyatt paced nervously on the boat deck, waiting for the crew to drop the plank so he could walk it. “Oh, no. I should never have done this. I could have just rented the Met in New York.”
“That does sound cheaper,” Stacey said. “Somehow.”
“Just relax and breathe. Have some of that lithium-infused mineral water.” Brad unzipped a pack and drew out a collapsible cup and a thermos.
“Yeah, good idea. Forget the cup.” Wyatt grabbed the thermos of lithium water and guzzled it.
I could see why he was nervous. Adrienne’s stare was ice-cold as she moved to the doorway of the wharf shelter to watch us disembark from the ferry. A matched black leather luggage set with polished brass latches and locks was stacked around her, including a couple of suitcases, a cosmetics case, and a hatbox. Gary was huffing and puffing as he carried a matching trunk, featuring lots of heavy brass fixtures but apparently no wheels, toward his golf cart, parked next to our blue van.
Darika arrived in her golf cart and jumped out, taking in the scene. “What’s going on?” she asked Gary.
“All I know is I’m the bellboy all of a sudden.” Gary heaved the trunk into the back cargo area of his cart, then stopped to take a breath, wipe his sweaty red face on his sleeve, and adjust his comb-over. Then he grunted and walked back to the dock to collect more luggage.
“Adrienne! You’re here. Wow.” Wyatt broke off from the rest of us to greet her at the doorway of the wharf shelter. When he moved to kiss her, she turned her head and caught it on the side of her chin, looking toward the group of us heading for the parking area on the shore.
Adrienne looked like she’d gone to some trouble to resemble a vampire recently risen from the permafrost, or maybe a marble statue. Her face was a bloodless powder-white, accented only with hints of frosty blue. Though she was in her early twenties, her face had the sculpted and smoothed look of someone who’d already spent a good amount of time on a plastic surgeon’s table. Her outfit looked like something ripped off an experimental fashion runway, the jacket with its superfluous buckles and buttons all the way down the arms to the wrist, her white slacks running the mile or so from her narrow, cinched waist to chunky-heeled white shoes that made her legs look even longer than they already were, which was really just unnecessary.
“This was supposed to be a surprise,” Wyatt said. “When it’s ready, it’ll be great.”
“You want to have our wedding here?” Adrienne asked, her nose nearly wrinkling, though I don’t think it was capable of fully doing so. “Why?”
“For you,” he said. “Your old family place, recovered from ruin, back to life again.”
“This is supposed to be a wildlife preserve,” she said. “No people.”
“It still is! Mostly. We did an ecological impact study. It’s going to be solar and wind. No fossil fuels allowed. Pollinator gardens and local plants only, rainwater cisterns, everything organic.”
“Show me. Show me what you’ve done.” Adrienne’s tone indicated she was seething inside but didn’t care to show it in front of strangers.
Gary eggshell-walked his way back toward the wharf shelter, moving slower with every step, clearly pained with indecision about whether to grab the next suitcase or keep his distance from the boss at this tense moment. He seemed to have settled on splitting the difference by continuing the last chore he’d been assigned, collecting Adrienne’s luggage, but doing it very, very slowly.
Meanwhile, Stacey sidled over to Darika and handed her the take-out bag of chicken salad almost surreptitiously, like it was a drug deal. Darika silently mouthed “thank you” before backing up to her cart and placing it inside, her eyes on Wyatt the whole time.
“Yeah, good idea, I’ll show you around,” Wyatt said to Adrienne. “This place is totally historic. It’ll be great. I promise. Everybody, let’s head to the main lodge—”
“No,” Adrienne said. “Just you and me. And the driver.” She snapped at Gary and pointed at her luggage. “Let’s hope he drives faster than he carries suitcases.”
“I can floor it if you like.” Gary hurried to grab the remaining luggage. “This baby does twenty-five on the paved road, a little less on the beach, even with the new sand tires. The beach is a nice drive at night. Nobody ever wants to see it, though.”
“Perhaps I will,” Adrienne said. “It sounds delightful.”
“Well, yeah. Yes, ma’am.” Gary sounded almost confused by her positive interest. “Right this way.”
Gary opened the rear door of his
elongated security cart for her, but Adrienne somewhat pointedly climbed into the front passenger seat to sit next to Gary, leaving Wyatt to sit alone in the back seat. Renoir tried to accompany them, but Adrienne said something and Wyatt waved him off. Gary drove the unhappy young couple away.
“How did it go on the mainland?” Darika asked me.
“Not bad,” I said. “It could have been better—”
“It could be better right now,” Brad interrupted. “If we returned to the guest house instead of standing in the rain like characters from a cliché-riddled love song.”
“I need to go to the guest house and make Wyatt’s dinner,” Farlee said. “And put these fish on fresh ice.”
“And I’m not going to ride in that scary-looking serial-killer van,” Brad declared. “Nor will I ride with the raw fish.”
“It's sealed in bags inside the cooler, Brad,” Farlee said. “You can’t smell them.”
“They’d better be reusable bags, Farlee. The ocean does not need more plastic.”
Eventually, Darika drove away with Brad beside her and Farlee in the rear-facing back seat with Renoir and the cooler.
Stacey and I drove our van back to the guest house. In the end, nobody had wanted to ride in it, saving us a stop.
“It’s like our own anonymous executive sprinter, with the outside designed to keep people away,” Stacey said. “Only we cleverly made the inside of the van unappealing, too. Going the extra mile pays off.”
The chambermaids' cottage was colder than the summer night outside, probably because it was haunted by at least one ghost. Maybe our gear would pick up some Foxy Chambermaid action tonight.
We opened the windows to let the balmy night air inside, chasing away a little of the supernatural chill. I was on edge, expecting to see the girl in the horrifying fox mask every time I turned a corner, opened a door, or glanced in a mirror. She'd fed on my energy before, and might come back for more, like a vampire waking up thirsty at night.
I found Stacey in our room, sitting cross-legged on her bed, wearing headphones and staring open-jawed at something on her tablet.
