Ghost Trapper 13 The Trailwalker

by JL Bryan

  “That's so sad,” Stacey said. “Just because her boyfriend cheated on her. The snake.”

  “So it's believed that she committed suicide?” I asked.

  “Officially, it was an accident. Out of respect. But we all knew, once we heard about those rocks. That girl drowned herself.”

  “Whatever happened to the male counselor?” I asked.

  “Terrance? Who knows? I guess he left when everyone else did. The camp closed down because of Gwendolyn's death, you see. So everyone scattered back to their hometowns.”

  “Do you know where they were from? Gwendolyn or Terrance?”

  “I'm sorry, no. If I knew, I certainly don't remember now.”

  “What about Reverend and Mrs. Carmody? What became of them after the camp closed?'

  “Reverend Carmody died that winter. He was still living at the campground, you see. I suppose he had nowhere else to go.”

  “He died the winter after Gwendolyn?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did he die?”

  “I believe they said he slipped and fell in the bathtub. Broke his skull. So he died alone there.” Her voice dropped to a low, conspiratorial whisper. “They think he probably slipped in November, but they didn't find him until December. It's lucky it was so cold. Half the water in his tub was frozen. Preserved him pretty good for the funeral.”

  Stacey and I were silent for a moment, letting that sink in.

  “What about his wife, Laurie Ann?” I finally asked. “Where was she?”

  “She was already gone by then.”

  “Also deceased?

  “Oh, no. After the camp went bust, Laurie Ann up and left.”

  “She divorced him?”

  “Back then, around here, folks didn't get divorced. They had a notion if you swore something in a church before the Lord, that it meant something. It meant there'd be hell to pay if you broke that vow. Pardon my Hollywood language, but it's true. So folks didn't get divorced. But sometimes, if things got bad enough, they up and left. And that's just what Mrs. Laurie Ann did to Reverend Carmody. She up and left.”

  “Do you know where she might have gone after that?”

  “I wouldn't have the foggiest idea, darling.”

  “And Terrance, the boyfriend?”

  “I don't know. I'm sorry. I wasn't close to any of these people, you understand. I don't know where they went after camp closed.”

  “I understand. Thank you. You've really helped us.”

  “It's unfortunate to reopen the campground now,” she said. “I still say it's better off in the hands of the wild beasts.”

  After that, she quickly returned the conversation to the subject of the courthouse-turned-museum where she'd volunteered with the historical society, a topic that cheered her a bit after the gloomy talk of death and drowning.

  Stacey and I thanked her profusely before leaving.

  “Well, that told us a lot,” Stacey said.

  “But maybe raised more questions than answers.” I flipped through my little pocket notepad. I'd started a fresh one for this case, and it was half-full already. “We ought to find out whatever happened to the boyfriend, Terrance, and the preacher's wife, Laurie Ann, to start with.”

  “It sounds like everyone dies right there. The amateur archaeologist, Tennyford, ripped up by a mountain lion. Then this girl Gwendolyn drowns with her pockets full of rocks, an apparent suicide. But maybe that's just what they want us to think. Well, not us specifically, because we hadn't been born at the time, but you know what I mean.”

  “Right. If Gwendolyn was murdered, stuffing her pockets with rocks would be a way to try to cover it up. Whether she killed herself or was murdered, that kind of emotional trauma can lead right to a haunting.”

  “But we haven't seen a mysterious girl around the lake.”

  “Nathan has,” I said, and Stacey's eyes widened as I started the van.

  Chapter Twenty

  Our research continued with a stop by the North Georgia News's office and printing facility, but unfortunately they had little else to offer us about Stony Owl's history. The reporter who'd covered the three boys' deaths had unfortunately passed in the intervening decades. The current staff couldn't offer much beyond articles we'd already seen and the chipper press release Allison and Josh had sent to announce the camp's reopening.

  At the courthouse, we were able to verify that the deaths of Gwendolyn Malloy and Reverend Roger Carmody had occurred at the camp and were listed as accidents. No local records existed for Laurie Ann Carmody; she'd skipped town and never returned, as far as we could tell.

  Before we left town for the spotty cell reception of the campground, I sat in the van, still parked outside the courthouse, and called my old friend Grant Patterson of the Savannah Historical Association back home. A semi-retired lawyer and full-time gossip, Grant could be a great resource for hard to find information.

  “Ellie! Fantastic to hear from you,” he said. “It's been too long.”

  “It really has.”

  “I hope you're calling with a haunting adventure in which I might share. It's been a rather dull week. My most exciting moment was picking the spring plantings for the Tour of Gardens. I don't know why I let them keep the old family home in the event. It's dreadfully troubling opening one's home to the public. Which is why I'll be staying at Jack Taylor's house on Tybee for the duration.”

  “It sounds stressful.”

  “I only wish it were more so. I am so desperately in need of a challenge that I could almost go into the office and attend to my legal practice. Now, please, draw me into your latest bout of supernatural mischief.”

  I gave him a very quick overview, avoiding personal information about our clients and focusing on the history of Stony Owl.

  “Ah, yes, one of the forgotten birds, along with Rock Hawk,” he said. “I've read so little about them. There was the hypothesis that Rock Eagle and Rock Hawk were not eagles at all, but buzzards, a sort of bird that might carry the soul to the afterlife. Perhaps it represented an ancient god or spirit.”

  “There doesn't seem to be much known about any of them,” I said.

  “I will endeavor to find all I can, but I make no promises.”

  “Thank you. I was also wondering whether you might know anyone at the University of North Georgia.”

  “Oh, yes. There's Frances Bering, I believe she chairs the languages department now—”

  “We need some information on a student.”

  “That could be tricky, due to privacy policies—”

  “From a hundred years ago, when it was an agricultural school.”

  Grant chuckled. “It was never an agricultural school, regardless of its name. It was, in fact, a grand little academy, a jewel in the mountains, the first coeducational college in the state. Literature, philosophy, history, science, Greek, and Latin, yes. Agriculture? No, not particularly.”

  “The student was there in the late 1920s. Terrance Baker. We'd like to know his hometown and anything else you might dig up on him. He worked at Camp Stony Owl during the summer.”

  “I'll see what I can do.”

  “We'd also be interested in whatever can be learned about another student who worked there at the same time. Gwendolyn Malloy.”

  “And these former counselors haunt the camp to this very day?” Grant asked, in the sort of voice one might use when telling a campfire ghost story.

  “It's possible. We're still trying to identify the entities. And if you feel like getting some extra credit, we're also trying to trace the fate of one Laurie Ann Carmody, who founded Camp Stony Owl along with her husband Roger. They previously lived in Edenton, North Carolina. We don't know what happened to her after 1929. She may not have gone by the name Carmody after that, either, because she up and left her husband.”

  “Up and left, I see. Do you have a maiden name? A town of birth?”

  “Not so far, unless it's Edenton.”

  “I shall see what I can find. I look
forward to the sleuthing. Is there anything else?”

  “That seems like plenty,” I said. “Thanks so much.”

  “The pleasure is overwhelmingly mine,” he replied.

  After that, Stacey and I visited a local place called Cabin Coffee and took an outdoor table. Armed with hot beverages, we started cold calling our list of campers from the year the three boys had died. I wasn't surprised we didn't get many answers since we were unknown callers. Many numbers had been disconnected, and we scratched them off. Others went to voice mail, but with names that didn't match the family names from the files. We left messages all the same.

  Then we drove back up to the campground, under the heavy shadows of the trees, hoping for a nibble on some of the many lines we'd dropped into the water.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Back in our cabin, Stacey checked through some of the ocean of data we'd collected from around the campground, looking for moments when motion detectors had been activated or audio recordings had spiked.

  I worked on pulling my notes together in a more coherent way, creating a timeline of known events through the campground's history.

  We knew of six deaths on site. I listed them in order:

  Charles Tennyford – local farmer who excavated the owl, found mauled next to owl, apparent animal attack

  Gwendolyn Malloy – counselor who drowned with rocks in her pockets

  Rev. Roger Carmody – created the first version of the camp, died in the bathtub

  Paul, Thomas, Kyle – the boys who'd died after going out on a boat in a storm

  “Water,” I murmured. It was the common element among all the deaths, except for Tennyford.

  “What's that?” Stacey asked, crunching on some puffed-rice snack that did not interest me. “You thirsty?”

  “I think Josh knows more about why those boys went out on the water that night.”

  “Yeah, that was pretty obvious.”

  “But why didn't he want to tell us?” I rubbed my temples. “I hate when the clients don't cooperate. It's like trying to fight with a hand tied behind your back.”

  “Against an invisible opponent,” Stacey added. “Most of the time.”

  Later, as we hiked up to the lodge, our phones pinged out notification chimes as we entered signal range. I had a few voice mails.

  “I think these are people I called earlier,” Stacey said, looking at her screen. “Former campers.”

  “Start calling them back.” We entered the lodge and continued through the utility closet and up the stairs.

  While Stacey sat down at the ping-pong table, I rifled through the file cabinets, going back in time as fast as I could, back to the beginning of the campground.

  The oldest paperwork was packed into a thick, crumbling paper envelope in a bottom drawer. I opened it as carefully as I could manage, but the envelope was so old it fell apart in my hands.

  Inside, I found fragile yellow records of Carmody's purchase of the land from a local bank. A hand-drawn plat showed the hundreds of acres he'd bought. The stone owl effigy did not appear to be any kind of officially designated landmark, then or now.

  More paperwork detailed the sale of the preacher's old home in Edenton, North Carolina. Then, under that—

  “Jackpot!” I shouted at Stacey, wincing as I realized she was on the phone. I'd been screening out her phone conversations with former campers while I cabinet dived. She glanced at me, and I waved it off and shook my head.

  “I'm sorry, sir,” Stacey said, turning back toward the cleared spot on the ping-pong table. “Could you repeat that last part again?”

  I'd been searching for Laurie Ann's maiden name. If she'd up and left her husband, she might have reverted back to it.

  I'd found their marriage certificate from Edenton, North Carolina. Roger Carmody had married Laurie Ann Wilkerson in 1915. I had her surname and her place of birth, which was indeed Edenton. What I needed was a place of death, though. And she could have ended up anywhere.

  I copied the information off the marriage certificate and replaced the papers as carefully as I could. Stacey wrapped up her phone call.

  “Well, that was detailed,” she said. “That guy kept going on and on about his memories of the camp. He was kind of reluctant to talk about the three drowned boys and the camp closure. He said he didn't really know them, because he was Warthog Cabin and a little younger. He went on and on about how it was their own fault for going out on the water in the storm. He remembers being sad that the place never reopened.”

  “Wow. Good memories despite the trauma. And I found the full name of the preacher's wife: Laurie Ann Wilkerson.”

  A floorboard creaked, very distinctly, as if in response to the sound of that name.

  We looked at the cabin structure in the back corner of the attic. Did something shift behind the window? The interior was completely dark beyond the glass.

  I started toward the cabin's door, thinking again how odd it seemed to build a cabin inside the attic. Maybe it had been nice and cozy in its day. It certainly didn't look that way now.

  With Stacey at my back, I turned the knob and eased open the cabin door. Its creaky, scraping hinges were entirely non-soothing.

  The interior of the cabin was as we'd seen it before, dim and cluttered, jumbled and disorganized, bedroom furniture buried under boxes and paint cans and junk.

  “It's cold,” Stacey whispered, and I nodded, shivering.

  As we stood there adjusting to the deeper gloom, I became aware of a shadow in the bathroom doorway. It was so completely, perfectly still that I wondered if my eyes were playing tricks on me, drawing human forms where there were none, as our eyes can do in dim places, turning a coat on a hanger into Slenderman staring at us from the closet.

  Even when my eyes adjusted to the gloom, the shadow remained, darker than the space around it, untouched by the feeble yellow lamp light from our work space in the main attic area behind us.

  I nudged Stacey. She nodded; she saw it, too. I was glad I'd gone with the buddy system on this one. To heck with the Rule of One.

  The shadow was featureless, but I could discern the outline of a wide brim, exactly like the campaign hat the Reverend had worn. The preacher had died right there, in the small bathroom where the shadow stood.

  “Reverend Carmody?” I asked. My fingers rested on my flashlight, but I didn't dare draw it and shed light. “Roger Carmody? Is that you?”

  It didn't respond. The shadow was as unmoving as a mannequin.

  I stepped closer. Stacey followed a few paces behind, recording with a handheld camera, doing her part while I did mine.

  “I'm here to help,” I said in a soft voice, trying not to run him off. Carmody had died suddenly in his tub, decades earlier, and was possibly failing to process this reality. “I can help you move on. I've helped many do that.” And captured others and stuck them deep in the ground. I kept that thought to myself.

  The floorboard squeaked again and the shadow slipped out of sight, deeper into the bathroom.

  “Don't go disappearing on me again, Reverend.” I took a breath and stepped through the door. Stacey hung back, filming from the doorway, since there was barely enough room for one person to turn around.

  The room was cold, but the shadow figure was gone.

  “Reverend Carmody?” I looked around at the little sink with its rust-splotched pipe, the medicine cabinet open, his old straight razor on the steel shelf within.

  A metallic rattling sound made me jump, and I held up my hands, thinking the razor was being flung at me by an invisible entity.

  The sound had come from behind me, though.

  I turned to see the handles and faucets in the tub rattling as though someone had kicked them. Dark water gushed from the faucet, splattering the dusty old tub and soaking the cardboard boxes stored there.

  Stacey gasped. I turned in time to see the door slam shut, sealing her outside the bathroom and trapping me inside.

  I stood in pitch darkness, c
ut off from Stacey. She banged on the door, yelling, but couldn't force it open.

  The room grew colder. I drew my flashlight, and it took all my willpower to leave it off, to resist the urge to drive the entity away.

  “Carmody,” I said, trying to sound commanding. “I'm listening. Speak to me.”

  A smell like sour fish, like wet and rotten decay, filled the tiny room. The stench flooded my nostrils and lungs, gagging me.

  The entity was back; I couldn't see it, but I could certainly feel it, a solid, cold, reeking mass occupying the space in front of me, blocking my path to the door.

  “Carmody. Are you stuck here? Are you trapped in the place—”

  A cold hand struck me in the chest, right in the sternum. I toppled back into the tub, landing on the cardboard boxes stored there. They slipped aside with a sloshing sound.

  I dropped deeper, sitting in frigid, sour-smelling water that smelled like a lake instead of a bath.

  “Enough!” I shouted, firing up my light.

  The white glow revealed the figure leaning over me. The apparition was more solid now, more than a shadow, dressed in a pale uniform like the one in the pictures downstairs.

  The campaign hat shadowed most of its face, but this was probably for the best. The skin I could see was pale, bloated, and loose, badly decayed.

  The cold, dark water rose higher around me.

  “Don't you dare try to drown—” I began, but yeah, that's what happened next.

  Clammy fingers closed around my mouth; the wet skin was squishing, sliding around on the tips of its finger bones. The decayed fingers felt slender like bones, but sharp and strong.

  The entity shoved me under the surface, overflowing the tub and sloshing water over the side as I went under.

  I finally managed to activate the speaker on my belt, filling the room with The Old Kentucky Boys Bluegrass Gospel, belting out “Revive Us Again.” I could distantly hear the banjo and fiddle accompaniment through the thick, sour water filling my ears. And my nose. Ugh.