Haunted on the Gulf Coast (Gulf Coast Paranormal Trilogy Book 2)

by M. L. Bullock

Domino stared at me with sleepy eyes. “Well, what do you think?” I asked. With a bored yawn, he blinked. The doorbell rang, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

  If Uncle Derek had left the lighter here, I wasn’t comfortable with this level of helpfulness. He’d never been helpful before, except for the last time I saw him. And if it wasn’t my late uncle, I sure didn’t want to be indebted to anyone or anything else. Better to nip this in the bud now.

  I closed the door behind me and left the lighter on the table. Tonight, I’d let the light of friendship warm me. No candles needed.

  Chapter Eight—Midas

  Thankfully, Dr. Lundquist gave us permission to use the four-wheelers again, making access to the property we were investigating that much easier. The days were getting shorter now, and I felt the time crunch. The edges of the horizon had an inky blackness that warned us it would be dark sooner than we expected and time wasn’t on our side.

  We’d left later than expected; Aaron’s grandmother Nina showed up to bless us. It wasn’t a complicated ceremony, but she also did her best to talk us out of taking the trip to Wagarville. I politely explained to her that our client needed our help. She hugged Aaron as if she’d never see him again. I assured her that everything would be fine, that we had done this kind of thing before, but Nina didn’t have much more to say to me.

  The drive up had taken a bit longer than anticipated too. Bruce insisted on making a pit stop to change his clothing. He came strutting out of the Quik Stop bathroom wearing colonial garb and toting a non-working musket that he wanted to carry with him in the field. I could only shake my head. Cassidy reminded me that his methods worked had like a charm in the past, and with memories of her in her slinky red nightgown still fresh in my head, I wasn’t in the mood to argue. But then Helen’s vehicle had a flat tire, which put us behind even further.

  Suddenly, an unexplainable anxiousness hit me, and I wanted nothing more than to get into the field before full-on dark. It was almost as if something didn’t want us up here. Yeah, even I could feel that.

  “Grab that bag, Joshua. I think I see Jada. Is that all the gear?”

  “Yeah, that’s it.”

  “Hey, y’all. You ready? You know where you’re headed? You need anything?”

  “No, I think we’ve got it,” Joshua answered. “Aaron is with me in Pit One, Helen and Bruce are headed to the field, and you two are hanging back to monitor, right?”

  “Yeah, let’s get the cameras set up and do sweeps before we lose the light. Unfortunately, I don’t see us getting those cameras up on the rock wall before dark. We’ll have to do that tomorrow. And as you know, we won’t have a home base out here. The goal is to collect data, and we’ll review it all back at HQ.” The group offered a collective groan, but nobody argued with me. “Be careful out there.”

  With that, we rode down the narrow road and past the fields. Cassidy clung to me again, and I glanced over my shoulder to see Joshua, Aaron, Bruce and Helen behind us. The sun was going down and looked like a glowing pumpkin. If I remembered correctly, one of those weird harvest moons was coming up tonight.

  Pulling off the road, we grabbed our gear and hiked toward the pit. We were running on batteries tonight, except for the cameras on the pits. The archaeological team allowed us to use their generator for those, which was a huge help. “Let’s get the cameras up, Aaron and Josh. Helen and Bruce, can you guys make some sweeps with the EMF detectors? Let’s get our baselines. Why don’t you take the digital recorders and walk out toward the burn marks? See if you can catch anything.”

  “Roger that.” Helen and Bruce grabbed a digital recorder and an EMF detector and headed toward the field.

  “What about us?” Cassidy asked.

  “We’re going to do the same but at the wood line behind us. I don’t know why, but I get a distinct impression that we’re being watched.”

  “Interesting…I feel the same way. But as you always say, we can’t go on feelings.” She elbowed me playfully, and I grinned at her. I did always say that. Nothing like having your words tossed back at you by a pretty redhead with perfect lips.

  “Josh, we’ll be back in thirty minutes. You need anything?”

  “No, but don’t forget your walkie-talkie, Midas. Let’s stay in touch.” He popped the legs on the tripod and arranged it next to the open pit. Aaron rolled the cord behind him.

  “Yeah, right. Shoot, I bet Helen and Bruce forgot theirs.”

  Josh glanced toward them. “I can see them. I’ll keep an eye on them.”

  “Great. Be back soon,” Cassidy said as she slid the walkie-talkie on the belt of her low-rise jeans.

  We walked with flashlights in hand toward the wood line. “Any of this look familiar, Cassidy?”

  “Nothing specifically. I mean, these are the same types of trees I saw, the same landscape minus the fort.”

  “Let’s do some EVP work here. You first.”

  She pulled the recorder from her pocket and glanced at me as she spoke. “Cassidy and Midas, near the wood line, EVP session. Whoever is here, my name is Cassidy, and this is my friend Midas. Is there anyone here with us?” She paused a few seconds before asking the next question. “We’re not here to harm you or make you leave the area. We just want to talk to you. Do you want to talk to us?”

  Another few seconds went by and I added, “We heard you have been showing yourself to Jada. Do you know Jada and Zachary?” As we waited for any response, I heard a stick crack in the woods to my right. Without moving my body, I turned my head. Cassidy caught my attention. She heard it too! I put my finger to my lips. Another branch cracked, and I tiptoed toward the woods with Cassidy right behind me. We inched closer, but it sounded like whatever was ahead of us was moving away. I paused and whispered, “I think that’s a deer. Maybe a raccoon. Let’s go back.” Cassidy grabbed my wrist, and I felt her tense up beside me.

  Her eyes were focused on something that I didn’t see. I stared hard in the direction of the live oaks that currently held her attention. Then a flutter of movement startled me. Was that a shadow? “Did you see that?” she whispered.

  “I saw something. Looked like a shadow but with form. Interesting. I wish I’d thought to bring the thermal. Let’s head that way and see if we can get a closer look.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Hello? Is anyone there?”

  We didn’t hear anything else, and that brief glimpse of a shadowy creature was all we saw on our preliminary investigation. It was getting so dark now; it was time to get out of the woods. I wasn’t afraid of the dark, but the woods weren’t a safe place to explore after the sun went down. In this part of the country, there were black bears and bobcats, not to mention plenty of deep holes, according to Dr. Lundquist.

  Cassidy smiled at me as we stepped out of the woods. “That got my heart pumping.”

  “Mine too. Great feeling, isn’t it?”

  “Sure is, Midas. I never knew I was such an adrenaline junkie. Until I met you.”

  “Are you regretting our association?”

  “Is that what we’re calling this?” She laughed playfully. Before I could think of a witty comeback, Aaron was racing toward us.

  “Hey! You guys get over here. Joshua has a thermal hit on his camera. It’s from Pit Two.”

  “Seriously?” Cassidy and I raced toward the open pit and squatted down beside Josh, who was rewinding the footage.

  “Here it is. I caught an anomaly, like a figure. It peeks its head up and then dips back down. See? That looks like a head and shoulders to me.”

  Cassidy chewed on her lip. “Could it be heat from the ground?”

  “What heat? There’s no heat out here. My smartphone says it’s all of 45 degrees.”

  “Heat from the generator? Some other equipment?”

  Aaron shook his head. “Negative. There’s nothing at all out here. The generator is nowhere near that pit.”

  Cassidy gasped as we saw the head rising up from the pit on the screen. There were
plainly two eyes, and the head had a humanoid shape. Before I could stop her, she was headed toward the pit with her EMF detector. She waved it around evenly from left to right. “Huh, interesting. Point three, point four, point one. Might be some residue from something.”

  We did another EVP session but with no luck, at least as far as we could tell. We might be surprised once we ran the audio through the software. “There’s definitely something out here, but that didn’t look like an elemental to me. It looked like a person. What’s say we gather up and get in place? Where’s Helen and Bruce?”

  That’s when the fun really began.

  Chapter Nine—Cassidy

  “Midas, here they come! And they’re running.”

  A winded Helen handed me her digital recorder. “Check that out while I die for lack of oxygen. Bruce and I had quite a fright out there. I forgot to take our walkie-talkie.”

  I played back the recording from the beginning and waited to hear what had disturbed her so badly. I heard Bruce and Helen talking. They took turns asking questions, waiting the customary ten seconds in between, and I didn’t hear a thing. Until I did.

  “What’s your name?” Helen asked.

  Marguerite…

  “We didn’t hear that at the time. I mean we hadn’t scanned back or anything.”

  I listened carefully along with the group as Helen probed a bit further. “Why are you here?”

  Help…me…

  Bruce waved his musket around excitedly and said, “That’s when we heard something shoot past us. I could swear it sounded like an arrow. I’ve shot a few, so I should know what they sound like. It was weird. It was like someone was warning us away.”

  “But someone is asking for help,” I reminded them.

  “That sounds like a young woman, maybe even a girl. Could it be Marguerite?”

  “I can’t tell for sure,” I confessed, “but it could be.”

  Midas said, “Yeah, that’s definitely a female voice. Cassidy, we’ll go to the field where Bruce and Helen caught the voice and see what we can drum up. Maybe Marguerite will talk to you. Bruce and Helen, you take Pit Two. Aaron and Josh, you hang out in Pit One. It would be great if one of you would get in the pit and do some EVP work.”

  Aaron didn’t hesitate. “I’ll go in.”

  “Great. Josh, you keep an eye on things while we cross the field. Everyone has walkie-talkies, but let’s keep the chatter down. No talking unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

  Midas and I trudged through the field toward the spot where Helen and Bruce had their experience. It was on the far side, and we could barely see the rest of our group in the dark. The stars shined overhead, and I could smell decaying leaves and old hay. We walked through dried corn stalks, and a mouse ran across the toe of my boot. I did a stagger step in the dirt and then laughed at my own silliness. It was so chilly out now that I could see my breath; I was glad I wore my hair down tonight. I’d need all the heat I could get.

  “Let’s go right to the edge, by the fence line,” Midas whispered.

  “Okay.” I stared at the field through my thermal camera now. I’d borrowed it from Joshua. Midas waved his flashlight in front of us and then turned it off. We stood freezing in the dark, the only protection from the cold an overgrown cherry tree with dead limbs and a collapsing wood fence. I moved the thermal around slowly.

  “See anything?”

  “Nothing but the occasional mouse. And you. Geesh, you’re hot, Midas,” I commented as I moved the camera. His head and shoulders were shining bright orange and red in the thermal. Briefly, I caught a dash of blue color jetting behind him. “What was that? A bird?” I gently moved him out of the way. I stared at the screen and waited. “There!”

  Midas came to my side and look at the thermal. You couldn’t see anything with the natural eye but gray woods and blackness—except for the light we saw dart past us. “That’s no bird. It wouldn’t be completely blue.”

  He reached for his flashlight, but I touched his arm. “Wait, Midas. What if that’s the elemental? It might misinterpret a flash of light as something else. Let’s wait a minute.” We squatted low behind the cherry tree and waited.

  Then we heard the whizzing sound, but it was no arrow; this was the blue light. It wasn’t attached to a flashlight or any other kind of man-made beam that we could see. The ghost light moved past us as if it didn’t see us at all or care that we were there. Before I could put a coherent sentence together, it disappeared, only to reappear deeper in the field. The light was heading toward Pit One! Midas tapped on the walkie-talkie.

  “Midas to Josh. We’ve got a light headed your way.”

  “Roger that. I’m watching and waiting.”

  “Maybe we should head over there?” I suggested.

  “Like you said, we don’t want it misinterpreting what we’re doing. Let’s hang back a minute; I can see them. Keep that thermal recording.”

  We squatted down, and I kept filming as my cold hands began to sweat in my gloves. With my heart pounding, I watched as another blue light shot past us, whizzing louder than the last one. I thought I heard voices, two voices. I touched Midas’ arm, both to make him aware of what I heard and also for the comfort of knowing that someone was with me. He held my hand as we watched the light sail down the small hill into the field below.

  “Okay, now we’re going. Let’s stick to the fence line for cover. Look, it’s headed toward Pit Two. Midas to Bruce.”

  “Bruce here.”

  “Lights are headed your way. Be careful, and record everything.”

  “Got it.”

  “I can’t believe we’re seeing this,” I said as we walked quickly down the narrow lane toward Pit Two.

  “Yeah, this doesn’t happen often, to see—what the hell? Who is that?”

  A pair of truck lights shined on us and then onto the field. I heard Midas swearing as we ran toward the vehicle. The blue lights in the field had vanished completely now. Whatever had been here was gone, scared away by our unwanted visitor. By the time we made it to the truck, the whole team was circling it. Our unexpected guest was Zachary, the archaeologist.

  “Hey, you guys need any help?” he asked as he climbed out of the vehicle in his cowboy boots and hat.

  “You’re interrupting our investigation, Zachary. We had light anomalies on our thermal cameras, and now they are gone. Didn’t you know we were out here?” Joshua shouted.

  Zachary lifted his hat and plopped it back on his head. It was a southern-boy move that said either “I don’t like your tone” or “I’m thinking about what you’re saying.” Neither would be good. “Yeah, I knew you’d be out here, but I didn’t think you started this stuff until late into the night. Didn’t mean to get in the way, but I do have some concerns about y’all stomping all over our pits. We’ve done a lot of work out here. I’d hate to have to excavate all this stuff again just because y’all stomped it back in the ground.”

  Midas intervened as he waved a hand at Joshua, who clutched his flashlight like it was a weapon. “Dr. Lundquist gave us specific spots to work in, and that’s where we’re working. If you’ve got some issues with that or what we’re doing, you should probably talk to her.”

  Zachary didn’t budge, and I could tell he wasn’t going to be happy until we left. “This doesn’t seem right. Y’all don’t understand how bad this looks. We are archaeologists, not ghost hunters. And it isn’t good that you’re here. I mean, who’s going to take us seriously if they find out you’ve been out here?”

  Midas clamped his jaw, a sign that he wasn’t thrilled with this conversation. “Again, that’s an issue you’ll have to take up with your boss.”

  “You mean my professor. She’s not my boss.” Now it was Zachary’s turn to get all antsy; he took a step toward Midas just like a bully in a schoolyard. I don’t know if he understood this or not, but I was pretty sure Midas could take him.

  “Hey, hey,” I said, stepping between the two men to defuse the situation. “Obviousl
y, there is some miscommunication here. We’ll stay out of the pits until you talk to Dr. Lundquist. We’ll confine our investigation tonight to the field and the wood line. Fair enough?”

  “Great. Please do that.” He stomped through the hardened mud back to his truck and sped off without another word.

  “What now?” Bruce asked, unable to hide his irritation at Zachary’s interruption.

  Like the leader he was, Midas remained focused on the task at hand, despite the fact that he almost took Zachary’s head off just a few minutes ago. “We get back to work. Like Cassidy said, let’s work the field and the wood line. Stay out of the pits, but leave the cameras running. I can’t help but suspect we aren’t wanted in those pits, and that’s enough to make me curious.” We all agreed, and he added, “The lights were attracted to the pits, or to you all. I’m not sure which.”

  “Let’s give everyone time to get their heads back in the game. Maybe we should head to the van for a minute, grab some coffee, review what he has and go from there,” Helen suggested as she slid her arm through Bruce’s.

  “I could use some coffee. Has it gotten colder?” Aaron asked.

  “Feels like it has. All right, thirty-minute break. Hopefully, nobody else will disturb us.” We went back to the van and reviewed what we had. Besides Helen’s EVP and Josh’s anomaly, we didn’t have much except the amazing video of the two lights approaching the pits. I couldn’t wait to view those on the big screen. We warmed up and reworked our plan and then headed back into the field.

  We gave it the old college try but didn’t see anything else after Zachary’s interruption. No lights, no EVPs. No shadowy figures. Just a few bats and some small animals crunching in the leaves. We gave up around eleven and made the hour-and-a-half drive home. My eyes felt so tired, it was tempting to curl up in the seat and go to sleep, but I couldn’t leave Midas to do all the driving himself. Every guy needed a good side seat driver, I told him. I managed to stay awake through the drive and made it home to find Domino sleeping in my bed.

  I fell in beside him, and he hardly stirred except to purr at me for a few seconds.