Soul Search: A Zackie Story

by Reyna Favis

  When we arrived at the house, the production crew had already set up and was taking background footage for the episode. Lucas went to speak to them and Zackie walked about the grounds sniffing at things. There was a scattering of metal sculptures on the lawn. One made of copper particularly caught my eye as it reflected the morning light. It looked like an advancing ten foot sinuous dragon with red eyes and a flared, scaly mane that ruffled out around the head and then created a ridge down its back. It appeared to be barely held back by a chain that went around its neck that was staked to the ground.

  Tearing my eyes away from the dragon, I examined the house to understand its layout and to see if I could pick up on anything. The building was a large Queen Anne farmhouse that looked like it was built in the early nineteen hundreds. It was altogether ordinary. Worn, white clapboard siding covered the exterior of the home, but a graceful wrap-around front porch compensated for the shabbiness of the outer walls. Scattered along the three floors of the structure were tall, narrow windows that looked out at the surrounding forests in all directions. Peeking in one of the ground floor windows, I could see an artist’s easel with a blank canvas. Two chimneys were visible at the roofline, but only one of them appeared to be in service to fight the chill of the early morning. The farmhouse gave the impression of old-time coziness and would have been a welcome sight to trail-weary hikers. There was no atmosphere of foreboding, but I wasn’t about to let my guard down.

  Parmelia, Cam and Bodean were huddled in a group near the front porch, talking to a dark haired man and a blonde woman dressed in jeans and flannel shirts. Both wore their hair unfashionably long and pulled back in pony tails. The woman had a small child with a white arm cast on her hip, so I surmised these were the innkeepers. Walking closer to join the conversation, I got a definite crunchy granola vibe from them.

  The man folded his arms across his chest and shook his head. “Dude, y’all are here at exactly the wrong time. We won’t get any action until sundown.”

  “We tried to tell them that last night, but they were hell bent on coming this morning.” Bodean shot me a told-you-so look as he spoke. “They being Cam Ramsay over here and Fia Saunders over there.” He pointed his chin at each of us in turn. “Lucas Tremaine – you know Lucas? From the ghost show? - he’s come here to do some interviewing of y’all about your ghost.” Bodean puffed up a little when he referred to Lucas by his first name in front of the innkeepers.

  Not to be outdone, Parmelia chimed in, wringing her hands nervously as she spoke. “Lucas is staying with us in Lummie’s old cabin. His camera guys are down in Sylva. That was good for us. We couldn’t put up so many people.” That girl was on a constant state of high alert. Even in the midst of a humble brag, her eyes darted toward the house, towards me, into the woods, always scanning for danger. She was like the canary in the coal mine and I was starting to find this concept useful.

  The mother adjusted the little girl on hip and looked at the film crew. “The camera guys were real polite. They showed up early and knocked on our door to ask permission to start filming the house and yard.” As if this made her recall her own manners, she turned her gaze back to me and Cam. “It’s nice to meet you, Fia. You too, Cam. I’m Janie McLean and this is my husband, Neil. This little one is Gretchen.”

  The little girl started squirming at the mention of her name, so her mother put her down. As soon as she had her feet on the ground, she pulled down on her yellow sweater to show us the duckie on her chest. Like her mother, she was fair and the sun glinted off the golden locks almost making a halo around her head. She toddled over to Cam and pointed at his cast. Obviously, they had something in common and she wanted to discuss it.

  “Well, hello Gretchen.” Cam knelt down to get closer to eye level. “Yes, I have a cast too. Mine is blue. See?” Cam offered his blue wrapped cast for the little girl to examine and she touched it tentatively with her fingers. “Can you tell me how you hurt your arm?” Gretchen shook her head shyly and tried to hide her cast with her hand before ducking behind her mother’s legs. Cam looked to me for help, but I just shrugged. I had no idea how to make kids cooperate.

  I looked to the parents. “Was she able to tell you anything?” Janie looked a lot like her daughter as she shook her head. Neil mumbled a tight ‘no,’ his fists clenching at his sides. I called Lucas over to join us and he jogged over with Zackie at his heels. I waited until they joined us and then asked, “Can you tell us what happened the night she got hurt?”

  Janie looked at Neil and he nodded for her tell the story. “We had two guests that night, college boys taking a semester off to hike the A.T. They had been on the Trail for a few weeks and they looked like they had lost a lot of weight. I wanted to hand each of them a stick of butter to just snack on.” Janie reached down to smooth Gretchen’s hair as she spoke. “We fed them a big dinner and they were starting to fall into a food coma, so we urged them to get on upstairs to bed and get some rest.”

  “We were in the kitchen washing the dishes when the footsteps started up. We could hear someone walking with real heavy steps in the back rooms.” Neil jutted his chin toward the rear corner of the house. “We hadn’t had time to renovate this area yet, so we just kept it closed up. The guests were wandering around in stocking feet, happy to be free of their hiking boots, so we knew it couldn’t be them.”

  I stared at the rear corner of the house. “Was this something you heard before?”

  Janie nodded. “We first heard the footsteps during the renovation work on other parts of the house. We heard it a bunch more times when we started taking guests. It was always in those back rooms.”

  “We were set to ignore it as usual when we heard the door to the back rooms flung open hard and smashed against the wall.” Neil slapped his hands together imitating the suddenness and sharpness of the sound. Gretchen’s head snapped toward the unexpected sound and she stared with big eyes. Neil made soothing sounds to her in apology before picking her up. “That never happened before. We just stood at the sink staring at each other, wondering what now. We heard it stomping down the hall and then the pictures started crashing off the walls on the stairway.”

  Janie swallowed hard and took up the story. “At this point, we started fearing for Gretchen because it was heading upstairs. We feed her early and put her to bed before we feed the guests and she would have been sound asleep. We both started running up the stairs when we heard Gretchen wailing. Then she screamed and we heard a crash.”

  Neil hugged the little girl and buried her head in the crook of his neck. “When we got to the landing, we saw one of the boys sprawled on the floor out cold outside Gretchen’s room and we ran past him to get to her. She was on the floor crying hysterically and her arm was twisted under her. We heard another crash from the guest room and then a lot of swearing. The other boy said later that he was ripped out of bed and thrown to the floor. We figured that’s what happened to Gretchen to break her arm.” He rubbed her back and kissed the crown of her head.

  Janie reached out to put a hand on the little girl. “Everything quieted down after that. The boy in the hall had been thrown against the wall and hit his head. We wanted to get him to the hospital with Gretchen when the ambulance came, but he said he was okay and both boys were hell bent on just getting away from the house. They said they’d sleep in the woods, thanks all the same.”

  Neil shook his head in disbelief. “After that night, we got pretty much a repeat performance every time we took in guests. Folks would get regularly yanked from their beds and few of them wanted to stay after that.”

  Cam’s brow wrinkled with worry as he stared at the house and then at the family. “Did it ever come after Gretchen again? How did you protect her?”

  Neil and Janie exchanged another look and Janie shrugged. “We moved her bed to our room and we made sure one of us was with her at all times. But it was always the guests that were targeted after that first night. Gretchen would even sleep through all the noise.” Janie squinted he
r eyes as she thought. “Come to think of it, she stopped having bad dreams after that night.”

  Lucas was scribbling a mile a minute taking down the story. “Can you show us through the house, so we can see where things happened?”

  Janie and Neil led the way up the porch and through the door. Neil held the door open for us. “You won’t find anything this time of day. Everything’s always real peaceful during the day.” Both he and Janie were relaxed and decidedly not fearful or apprehensive as they brought us into the house. Cam asked permission for Zackie to come into the house and neither homeowner was averse to a dog in the house, in fact, they were planning to get a dog as soon as Gretchen was a little older.

  A front parlor was located to the right as we entered and I again saw the canvas propped on an easel. As we were led down the hall to the back of the house, I walked with Janie and asked her if she was an artist.

  “Both Neil and I are artists. You can see some of his work outside on the lawns. He works with metal. I like to paint with oils. Neither of us sells enough to support a family, so that’s why we ended up trying to convert this old house into an inn.”

  Lucas was walking on her other side and he tilted his head as he heard this. “I tend to think that artists are somewhere to the left in their political beliefs. This area seems pretty conservative, so how does that work for you?”

  Neil barked a short laugh, looked over his shoulder and winked. “The far right and the far left both hate the government. We all get along here.”

  As we came to the back of the house, there were a number of empty picture hooks on the wall. At the end of the hall at about the height of a doorknob, the plaster had been smashed in. The door in question appeared quiescent at the moment and I didn’t sense anything to worry about, but I shot a look at Parmelia to see how she was interpreting the threat level. Parmelia was about as far away from me as she could manage and still be part of the house tour. She had her arms crossed over her chest and appeared to be concentrating, but she wasn’t overtly nervous or panicked. As she caught me looking her way, I raised my eyebrows in silent question. She gave a curt shake of her head that there was nothing she was sensing.

  Lucas put his hand on the doorknob and looked to Neil and Janie. “Okay if we go in the room?” They shrugged and said it was all right, but advised us that we wouldn’t find anything right now that would be of any interest. The room was small and empty of everything except a few stacked cardboard boxes and built-in bookshelves that lined two of the walls. It had a single, bare window where the sun poured in to highlight peeling wallpaper that might have once been a textured cream design, but it was now yellowed with age. The wallpaper had long ago passed from being decorative to being functional and was now holding water damaged walls together. Janie mentioned that this was a common problem with old farmhouses. They had already spent a small fortune repairing the gutters, roof and downspouts. Zackie did a quick inspection of the room and then headed out the door towards the stairs and began climbing. Taking our cue from her, we also mounted the stairs and made our way to the second floor.

  The upstairs had a simple arrangement of two guest rooms facing each other across the hall. Gretchen’s room followed on the right side, while a bathroom lay on the left. At the end of the hallway was the master bedroom where, currently, the entire family slept. As we made our progress down the hall, Janie opened the doors to each room to give us a look. The guest rooms were small, but cozy with quilt-covered beds and cheerful yellow curtains. Entering Gretchen’s room, I expected more of the same, but Parmelia’s eyes went wide and she wrapped her arms tightly around her middle.

  “I need to get out!” Parmelia elbowed past the crowd to reach the hallway where she blew out a shaky breath and went to sit at the top of the stairs. I shot a look to Cam and shrugged my shoulders slightly. I felt nothing. Cam shook his head at me indicating that he too felt no presence. Zackie’s reaction was most telling of all. She did a lap through the room, exited and walked to the end of the hall, where she sniffed at the closed doors and then turned back to the stairs. Pushing Parmelia out of her way, Zackie walked down the stairs and then sat at the door looking distinctly bored as she waited to be let out.

  Bodean went to Parmelia and helped her to stand. “Let’s go outside and get you some air.” The rest of us followed the cousins as they slowly made their way down the stairs and out of the house.

  Standing on the porch, Neil looked at each of us, his brow knit with worry. “Did something just happen? I didn’t see or hear anything.” He put Gretchen down, but held her hand as Janie grasped his other hand.

  Parmelia put a shaky hand to her brow. “Nothing happened. What I was feeling was old, but it was pretty bad.”

  Lucas pulled out one of the patio chairs, helped Bodean to lower Parmelia into the seat and kneeled in front of her. “Are you okay? Can we get you anything? Water maybe?” Parmelia declined and said she was starting to feel better. Pulling up another chair, he sat next to her and gave her a few minutes to recover. Motioning to his camera crew, he let them set up before asking questions. “Can you tell us what you felt or any impressions you might have gotten?”

  Parmelia was starting to enjoy the attention and looked a little less like a frightened field mouse. “All I can tell you is that something bad happened in that room. I can’t tell you what. It doesn’t work that way for me.”

  Lucas nodded. “What did you feel?”

  “I felt terror most of all.” Parmelia swept her hair behind an ear as she thought. “But I felt rage and disgust.”

  Lucas gazed at Neil and Janie. “Do you know anything about the history of the house?”

  The McLeans looked at each other and Neil answered. “The house was owned by the Clark family for about a hundred years until the last descendent died in the 1990s. The property was put on the market and various people owned it for a while, but no one stayed for more than a few years. We didn’t think anything of it, since there was almost always some reasonable explanation for leaving.”

  Janie nodded. “People gossip, so I found out about the property from the neighbors. One family had a sick child and they needed to move closer to the specialist hospital in another state. There was also a veterinarian who was going to set up a practice in the house, but he had a gambling problem and couldn’t pay the mortgage anymore. There were maybe two or three other owners before them and I don’t know what their stories were. But you get the idea. We had no reason to think there was anything wrong with the house.”

  Lucas quirked an eyebrow. “So, no history of anything unfortunate happening in the house that you know of?” Janie and Neil shook their heads. Looking at the camera, Lucas summed up his interpretation of events. “Parmelia either got a false positive reading or some incident that didn’t make the newspapers happened in that room. If it were something well-known, the local rumor mill would have clued Janie in by now.”

  Parmelia looked slightly offended, but Cam nodded in agreement. Cam waited until Lucas cued the cameras to shut down and then said, “I don’t think there is anything else we can do here at the moment. As the McLeans have said, nothing will happen until the sun sets, so I make a motion that we reconvene here at dusk. Fia and I need to go to the county’s Register of Deeds office to get the details on the former occupants.”

  Lucas stood up. “Works for me. The crew and I will take some footage inside the house with the McLean’s permission.”

  CHAPTER 16

  The deed search pretty much reflected what Janie had told us. We were able to flesh it out a bit more with the names and dates of all the owners since the Clark family. Cam provided the names to Lucas and asked if he could put resources behind finding the former occupants in order to ask them if they had any untoward experiences in the house. Cam whipped out his laptop and went about determining if any of the occupants had criminal records, just in case that could provide evidence in favor of attributing the incident in Gretchen’s room to any particular family. No criminal r
ecords were uncovered, but we did discover that Daniel Clark, the last of the Clark family, had been a deputy sheriff for the county.

  The clerk was an elderly lady and she was every bit as forthcoming with information as Janie had indicated about the local populace. “I remember Daniel. He was a fine man, a truly fine man. It was such a pity how he got the Alzheimer’s and had to leave his home in the end. He loved that old house and I know he would never have left if he hadn’t lost his mind like that. Such a pity, such a terrible pity.” She would have gone on a good deal longer, but we asked her if Daniel ever said anything about his house being haunted. “No, never a word about that. His family had lived there forever and I guess they all just went peacefully. No one ever had any tales about ghosts or anything when Daniel lived there.”

  As we left the office, Cam murmured, “That narrows down the time in which this Anomaly arose. It must be Daniel or one of the other families that owned the property after him. It would be highly irregular for someone who passed at peace to return to complain about the current conditions.”

  I paused for a moment as we went down the steps of the building. “Do you think someone in one of the other families might have died in that house or while they were living there?”

  “Possibly. It’s worth looking into. Let’s go back to Lummie’s cabin and I’ll check the databases for any death certificates for these folk.”

  We got back into my car and found Zackie snoozing in the backseat. We had left the windows open and figured that it was cool enough that no one would accuse us of leaving a dog in a hot car. I snickered to myself and thought how silly all our pretenses were, since she could enter the wormhole and leave any time she wanted.

  Back at the cabin, Cam did his internet research while I hunted for food. I found the leftover bacon and toast and then located some tomatoes. We would have apple cider and BLTs minus the lettuce for lunch. I bit into my sandwich and mouthed my question over the wad of food. “Did you find anything?” Cam rolled his eyes and cupped his hand to one ear. I swallowed and tried again.