The Tower

by J L Bryan

  “'Ernest Pennefort. Businessman, Developer, Public Citizen,'” Stacey read from the inscription.

  “Nothing about his years riding around selling patent medicines, then?” I asked.

  “They must have run out of room on the pedestal,” Stacey said. “Doesn't mention his kids, either, but I'm guessing he had some, since he has descendants.”

  “Maybe the other statue will give us a clue.” I led the way down a brick path along the center of the park to the other statue. It depicted a man who faced Ernest across the long walkway. The other man was taller and bit more rotund. Instead of a fountain, this statue was surrounded by a semi-circle of tall trees of varied species, many of them bare of leaves for the winter. The arboretum seemed ill-kept, with thorny vines and even poison ivy creeping up some of the trunks.

  “'Albert Pennefort. Patriot, Philanthropist, Father of the City,'” Stacey read. “Sounds like he wanted to outrank his dad. Made himself look taller, too.”

  “We don't know that Albert designed this himself,” I said.

  “Well, it sure sounds like he did. Or someone trying real hard to kiss up to him.” She made a loud smack with her lips.

  “This is the one who died in the bomb.”

  “So he was related to Thurmond, right?”

  “Right. He was our client's grandfather,” I said. “I don't know exactly how old Thurmond is, but he couldn't have been more than a baby when the bombing happened, and maybe he wasn't even born yet. We'll have to try to ask him about it, but he doesn't really seem thrilled to have us here at all.”

  We continued across the park to the coffee shop. It was called Ébrìk Coffee Room, a tiny elegant place full of dark and delicious smells. We shared a pot of very strong Turkish coffee, and I ate a sweet potato biscuit, which was rich and moist and generally way better than expected. Stacey had a huge toasted strawberry pastry. I'm not sure where she puts all the sugary stuff she eats. She must tuck it somewhere behind her ab muscles. Maybe I should take up rock climbing and kayaking, too.

  Nah.

  The Atlanta Central Library turned out to be less than half a mile from us, just back across the park and a few blocks up from the Pennefort Building. Basically the perfect distance for walking off a sweet potato biscuit (or a strawberry pastry, I suppose). We really were in the heart of the city. Just a few blocks south of us glinted the gold-leafed dome of the state capitol building.

  The library was a massive, boxy, four-story concrete building, each floor jutting out farther than the one below it, like a reverse staircase. It was built in a modernist “hey, let's just cut out three tiny windows in random places and leave the rest as a solid mass of blank concrete” kind of style. The place could have doubled as a prison in a pinch.

  The interior was made of giant square rooms, ready to serve as prison blocks, I suppose.

  We got to work digging into the history of the Pennefort Building and the area around it. We divided its history in half, so I took everything from 1899 to 1960, and Stacey looked from 1960 onward.

  Soon I was deep into microfilm, looking at images and words cranked out by long-defunct newspapers and magazines, piecing together what I could about the deeper history of the building. It seemed clear that the bombing in 1969 was a key event, but we didn't want to overlook older problems.

  In general, Stacey and I were searching for the usual: murder, violence, tragedy, suffering, betrayal, the kind of stuff that tends to leave unsettled spirits with unfinished business lingering around. Intense negative emotions that go unresolved are usually what binds a ghost to a certain location. If you can identify and break that bond, often the ghost will move on of its own accord.

  Failing that, you can always try to trap it.

  Some troubling details began to emerge as I pored through the glowing images of old periodicals.

  Ernest Pennefort's first son, Lawrence, had been born in 1901 and died in 1908, just a week before his seventh birthday. He'd wandered down from the family's penthouse apartment one night, into an area of the basement where reconstruction was under way. The little boy had apparently decided to play with the electrical wires being installed, which were unfortunately live, and he'd managed to shock himself to death. Workers found him down there early the next morning.

  Ernest's daughter, Catherine, had died in 1920, at age seventeen, shortly after a horseback riding accident. She'd actually survived the injury, though with several major broken bones. She'd been sent home to the tower, but died a few days later from an infection the doctors couldn't cure.

  Ernest's wife, an Irish immigrant named Siobhan, died a few months later, of an apparent aneurysm. She'd been forty years old, a ravishing beauty with intense eyes, so the reports went.

  Ernest himself died in 1921. Heart failure, after the deaths of his daughter and wife. He'd been sixty-two, a reedy man with a big smile and a ton of money.

  Albert Pennefort, their youngest, survived, expanded the family's investments, and had a few children of his own before dying at the age of sixty-four, when he'd been blown up by a hippie activist who had apparently skimmed the bomb-building manual's section on how to properly set a clock timer.

  In various society-page announcements, I saw references to Albert Pennefort's “elegant home on West Paces Ferry.” He seemed to have moved out of the tower, preferring a mansion several miles north of downtown. I supposed this was the same house that was currently unavailable to Amberly and family due to renovation work. I still wondered whether that renovation at the family's other home might be kicking up ghosts in the tower somehow. I made a note to swing by and check it out.

  “I'm booored,” Stacey said, sounding more than a little like a whiny kid as she sauntered over.

  “Found any deaths in the building since 1960?”

  “You mean other than that one time with the big bomb that killed everyone? Yeah, but mostly obituaries of people who lived in those apartments and died of old age, the occasional heart attack, one guy named Marcus Pennefort who fell down the stairs and died. I think he might be Thurmond's father. Maybe he just slipped and fell, or maybe a ghost killed him. That's sad for Thurmond. But I don't see any big murders or anything like that, stuff that could cause the haunting. That's why I'm boooor—”

  “If you want a break from that, then try to look up these people.” I ripped a page out of my notebook and handed it to her. “See if anyone still lives in Atlanta, or if there's anyone who can at least answer a few questions by phone or email.”

  “Who are they?” Stacey looked at the list.

  “People who contributed to The Great Horned Owl. They might know more about Elton the Hippie Bomber.”

  “He's our fire ghost, right? The one that chased Hyacinth?”

  “He's a possibility.”

  Stacey's brow furrowed as she read the names. “Are these for real? Pink Falcon? A. Truthteller?”

  “I'm going way out on a limb and guessing those are pen names,” I said. “Maybe try some of the more realistic-sounding names first.”

  “Okay...” Stacey wandered off, looking doubtful.

  I found another death that couldn't be ignored—in 1957, Albert Pennefort's ten-year-old daughter Miriam had fallen from the roof of the seventeen-story building. The newspapers reported it as an accident, but I wondered if it might have been something else, like suicide or murder.

  I was already overwhelmed with possible identities for the female ghost who'd grabbed me, the one haunting the client's apartment. Maybe it was ten-year-old Miriam, and she'd just been tall for her age, or presenting herself as taller in order to intimidate me. Or maybe it was seventeen-year-old Catherine with the infected bone injuries, or even Siobhan Pennefort, the original lady of the tower. It was hard to be sure when all I'd seen was a solid black silhouette.

  “Hey, I found one!” Stacey bounded over to me after a while. “I think.”

  “One what?” I'd already gotten absorbed in my own research.

  “A writer for The Great Horned O
wl.”

  “Pink Falcon?”

  “Ha, right. It was this guy. Jackie Duperre.” She held out her tablet, showing an arrest photo of a bearded man with long gray hair. The arrest photo was recent, and in color.

  My phone beeped, and I checked it. “Hang on, Stacey. It's Amberly.” I'd left Amberly a message that we'd caught some images of cold spots on camera—it's always good to show clients that they're getting something for their money, when you can, because often you get nothing solid at all, not for days, sometimes not ever. “She wants us to go back and show her what we found, while her kids are still away at school.”

  “So we're done with the library? We're going back to look at our videos?” Stacey sighed with relief, much more dramatically than was really necessary, and we gathered our stuff and left.

  I hoped this client meeting would give me a chance to slip in a question or two about the family's obviously troubled past in the building...if I could do that without upsetting the client too much.

  Chapter Ten

  “That's pretty interesting,” Thurmond said, in a flat tone that made it impossible to judge whether he was being sarcastic or serious.

  We all stood in the Art Deco apartment, looking at our largest laptop and tablet screens. I hung back, letting Stacey snag and present the video to them, letting Thurmond and Amberly have a clear view.

  Stacey was showing them the blue cold spot we'd caught on the thermal in their master bedroom, after the ghost had released my hand and fled. She replayed it again in the slowest possible motion—the dark blue shape emerging from off-camera, near the master bath area, and crossing right along the length of the bed before vanishing into the closet.

  “I knew it,” Amberly said. “I told her I'd seen her in the closet.”

  Thurmond scratched his chin, watching with bulging eyes. His long brown hair was untied and sprawled all over his shoulders and down to his shoulder-blade area in a way that reminded me of the trees overrun with ivy across the street, in his namesake park. He was balding and patchy on top.

  He wore a silky, blousy poet's shirt, another wardrobe item that looked like it had come from a costume shop or Renaissance Fair. Amberly, for her part, wore a matching blouse that probably belonged to a tavern-wench costume, over ripped jeans and high boots encrusted with costume jewelry.

  Given Thurmond's eccentric personality and family fortune, and Amberly's incredibly gorgeous face and small-town background, I had to wonder whether there might have been an undercurrent of gold-diggery in their relationship, at least at some point in the past. If so, Amberly hid it well and played along, dressing like a Dungeons and Dragons fantasy girl even casually around the home. Hey, maybe she was genuinely into it. Who knows? Maybe I just have a suspicious mind.

  “Now we have the dining room...first, the thermal...see how the cold spot rises? We have something on night vision, too...”

  Thurmond and Amberly let out perfectly matching little grunts and gasps as the shadow-figure flickered up to the ceiling and then vanished. Maybe they were soul mates, after all.

  “Whew, that sent spider-legs crawling all over me, as Great-Gran-Gran used to say,” Amberly said. “That's just where I see her—the dining room. And our room. I told you, Thurm.”

  “It could be some kind of...” He sighed. “This is just like Haunted Highways. Where they go looking around in old abandoned motels, amusement parks...you know, stuff by the side of the road. Old graveyards. They try to get pictures of ghosts, and voices...and they say stuff, and they show stuff, but I just figured it's all fake.”

  “It's not!” Amberly said. “I mean, I don't know about that show, but I told you there's something here. I'm not lying, and I'm not crazy.”

  “I never said you were.” He shook his head, still frowning, his eyes on the screens where Stacey had paused the videos, showing the thermal image on one and the shadowy night-vision image on the other. “I just thought...I just wanted everything to be okay.” He swallowed. “But I guess it's not.”

  “We actually had a couple of questions for you, Mr. Pennefort,” I said. “We researched the history of your family—”

  “You what?” His eyes darted over to me.

  “Just publicly available information,” I added quickly. I don't know what he was acting so shocked about. “There seemed to be a lot of tragedy in this building. A lot of your family members died here. Like in the 1969 bombing.”

  “Yeah. You think it's all tied together somehow?”

  “I'm not sure. Usually a haunting is caused by some kind of tragedy or violence, something that would leave a deep negative emotional mark. But once a place is haunted, there can be a downward spiral. Terrible things happen, people die, more ghosts are created...which leads to an even more intense haunting, more tragedies...until sometimes a place just becomes abandoned to the ghosts. There are places like that scattered all over the countryside. You pass them more often than you might think. You might wonder why that old house or empty store on the side of the road was left to the vines and weeds. Often there's something inside that's hostile to the living.” I told myself to stop rambling. “I can't pinpoint exactly where the problems began. Maybe it was the death of Ernest's son Lawrence, when he was six, but that sounds like a simple accident. I can't find anything particularly awful in the history of the building from the time it was built in 1899 to Lawrence's death in 1908. I feel like I'm missing something. Is there anything you know about from back then? Maybe something that wouldn't be in the papers?”

  Thurmond sighed. His head was tilted forward as if a great weight had come down on it, and he removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

  “I never liked this building,” he said. “I grew up here, mostly. I liked Grandma's house better—she had the Paces Ferry house, with the big yard and garden. After my dad died...and my mom left...I kind of got turned over to Aunt Millie and Uncle Vance, and they turned me over to nannies. Uncle Vance was busy running the businesses and Aunt Millie, she's...always been kind of space cadet-y.”

  “Just to be clear, Vance and Millie are your father's brother and sister?”

  “Right. Aunt Millie's been pretty much on life support up there for over a year, but her living will requires that she be kept alive. Uncle Vance...he just died six months ago. Turns out he maybe wasn't running the family businesses all that well. We're having to sell stuff off. Even our last strip mall, over in Druid Hills. The movie theater's been empty for years anyway...I remember seeing Empire Strikes Back there with my dad...” He shook his head. “I should have paid more attention to that stuff. Vance was getting a little loopy by the end. I guess it runs in the family a little.” He gave a sad smile.

  “What do you mean by that? He started acting differently before he died?” I asked.

  “Yeah...” Thurmond sighed and looked up at the ceiling, where his comatose aunt and dead uncle's apartments lay. “He started asking me if I remembered seeing people who didn't belong in our apartment. People who disappeared. He told me he'd seen his father walk into his bedroom one night. That would be Grandfather Albert, who died before I was born—in the bombing, as you said. So Uncle Vance said Grandfather Albert had walked into his room one night...and he was...I'll never forget this part. Uncle Vance said Grandfather was still on fire, still burning from the bomb. He said he could smell the burning hair and skin. Little bits of fire were eating up his face, right there where he stood in Uncle Vance's bedroom. With a sound like frying bacon, he said.”

  “You never told me this.” Amberly stared at him, horrified.

  “Why would I? You know how many meds Uncle Vance was on by the end. His medicine cabinet's still jammed full up there.”

  “Have you ever observed anything yourself?” I asked him. “Recently, or when you were a child?”

  “This place has always been full of my family's ghosts, one way or another,” Thurmond said. “There was a weird social pressure because of who we were. The public paid close attention to us. It's less so these days
, thank Gandalf. We're just about forgotten now. It's better that way.”

  “But did you ever see—”

  “Monsters in my closet? Creepy things in the hallway? What kid doesn't?” Thurmond asked. “My mom said there wasn't anything to fear. Then she ran off when I was eleven, so I guess she was lying. I've barely seen her since. Didn't even invite her to the wedding.”

  Amberly touched his arm and leaned her cheek against his shoulder.

  “I hate to bring this up, but I understand your father passed away in this building, too?” I said.

  “Yeah.” Thurmond stiffened up and took a step back from everyone. “That's enough for me. If you want to keep going with this...whatever.” He gestured at Amberly and left the room.

  “Sorry,” Amberly said, after he'd closed the door. “He was nine when his father died, but he still doesn't talk about it. The story is, his father had too much to drink and fell down the basement stairs.”

  “That's terrible. I couldn't imagine having to live in the same place where my parents...” I shook off the rising memories of the night my parents died. “What was his dad doing in the basement?”

  “Who knows? Just don't ever ask him about it again, okay?”

  “Okay. I'm sorry.”

  “Just keep at this,” Amberly said. “Get rid of whatever is in our apartment. I don't care if it's Thurmond's sweet dead grandmother. Okay?”

  “We're working on it,” I told her.

  After she left, Stacey shook her head. “Poor guy. Dad dies, mom runs off. Can you imagine?”

  “The building sounds like a serious hazard to the family it's named after,” I said. “They should probably just sell it. Or tear it down. They'd be better off.”

  “I doubt they'll take your advice on tearing it down.”