Castle Moon
Page 1
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Epilogue
* * * * *
In loving memory of my mother-in-law, Arleen. Gone too soon.
As always, special thanks to cousin Kiki.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, names, places and events are products of the author’s imagination. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Castle Moon
Copyright © 2016 by Moebooks
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any way without the express written permission of the author.
Cover designed by Revelle Design, Inc. www.RevelleDesign.com
* * * * *
Chapter 1
The mail arrives late in the day at our house, so I didn’t get the letter until after we’d already had dinner. E-mail would have been much more efficient, but the envelope was some kind of parchment or vellum or something, and the flap had a family crest, complete with Latin motto, so I figured my correspondent must be old-fashioned. And rich. Or crazy.
“Our house” is Cadbury House, a Gilded Age hunting lodge that sits at the end of a dirt road amid 1,500 acres of virgin coastal scrub on the northeast coast of Florida. In the early 20th Century it had been a tycoon’s plaything. In the early 21st Century, it was a white elephant hanging around the necks of his descendants. They didn’t want to live there, they didn’t want to let it go. The graves of three generations of Cadburys lay there; it would have been indecent to sell, especially to a developer.
So they rent it to me. I keep it just the way they want it, I can afford the peppercorn rent, someone is on the premises at all times for security purposes, and I need the space, air and large buildings for the animal shelter I’ve run for most of my life, Orphans of the Storm. The mansion is home and office, both. The barn is perfect for the dogs, the old cabins once used by servants are perfect for cats and any exotics that happen to turn up, and the area behind the cabins is great for the feral cats.
In fact, the whole setup is perfect, from our point of view, but the Tropical Breeze Branch of the U.S. Postal Service disagrees. Bumping down a dirt road at 10 mph for fifteen minutes in and fifteen minutes out is not efficient use of a postal employee’s time. So we have a P. O. Box in town, and at some point in the day somebody goes in and picks up the mail. That’s why it was fairly late in the day before I saw the letter.
When I got it out of the envelope, the matching paper inside was so fine and crisp it immediately gave me a paper cut. I whispered a ladylike curse, opened the letter, stuck my bleeding finger into my mouth and read. As I did, my eyebrows went up, one at a time, I smiled cynically, I muttered, “Oh, hell no,” and then I came to the last paragraph. That’s where I stopped, blinked, stared at the signature and read the letter over again, starting from the top with, “Dear Miss Verone,” noticing for the first time that he hadn’t called me “Ms.” Yep. Old-fashioned. Also rich (I had recognized his name by then), and also reputed to be crazy.
It was more in the nature of an announcement than a letter, informing me that I was going to participate in a “scientific investigation,” and I would be doing so the following week, so would I please clear my calendar, thank you. Then I sat there a while, mulling over the signature of the sender: Oliver Stratford Moon. The Moon family. Castle Moon. A kaleidoscope of images and memories bubbled around in my head, and I realized that the insane number quoted in the last paragraph of this astonishing letter was actually plausible.
I walked out of my office, eyes on the letter, and went blindly into the living room, where the man I love, Michael Utley, was watching the evening news. Still reading, I drifted down onto the couch beside him. Then I looked at him and opened my mouth, but nothing came out.
He was waiting with a smile on his face, looking at me with those frosty blue eyes of his, made even brighter by the contrast with his pure white head of hair and his suntanned skin.
“Letter from an old boyfriend, begging you to come back?” he asked.
“Michael, you’re a lawyer,” I began.
“Retired.”
I shoved the letter at him. “Here. Read this. Tell me what you make of it, especially the part about the $100,000.”
The figure made him sit up and look interested, and he was smart enough to look at the signature first.
“Oliver Stratford Moon,” he said slowly. Then he gently nodded, looking into space, speculating. “With him, anything is possible.”
He threw a quick glance in my direction, read the letter through carefully, then sat back, thinking.
We were silent for a few minutes. Then Michael said, “I guess you’d better do it.”
Chapter 2
Michael was born and raised in Tropical Breeze, and as an established lawyer, was one of the good old boys who came to know everything about everybody on their little patch of the earth. I only arrived in Tropical Breeze as a young woman about forty years ago; I’m still a Yankee. Still, I knew almost as much about the Moon family as Michael did. He’d never done any legal work for them, of course. A family like that has lawyers with offices in New York, London, Paris and Melbourne. Tropical Breeze doesn’t enter into it. But as a young man he’d attended a cotillion at Castle Moon, so at least he’d been inside the place, which I hadn’t.
I’d seen it, of course. The Moons can’t hide the monstrosity from public view, sitting as it does on a rock outcropping at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, just south of Tropical Breeze. It stands there like an architectural gargoyle staring angrily at the ocean and holding the world at bay with high, stone walls.
The Moon family resolutely keeps the riff-raff out. Unless you can cook or clean, or you have a portfolio similar to theirs, you’re not getting in. The Committee of the Historic Houses of Tropical Breeze has been trying to get the Moons to open the castle for house walks for decades. No dice. And my own request to use it for a fundraiser for Orphans of the Storm didn’t even get the courtesy of a reply. Now they wanted to pay me $100,000 just to go hang out with them for a week. It didn’t make sense.
“And this thing about Bastet,” I said, taking the letter back to reread that single, terse statement: “You will bring the cat, of course.” I looked back at Michael. “What do you make of that?
“That’s the only thing that actually does make sense to me,” he said slowly. “Ever since Edson Darby-Deaver wrote that book about you and your cat, you seem to be famous.” He quirked a smile. “In certain circles.”
“Does a family like the Moons belong to that kind of a circle?”
“Apparently at least one of them does. And if it’s Oliver, the others had better just put up with it. He controls the purse strings.”
My cell phone rang, and since I’d left it on my desk in the office, I sprinted off with the letter in my hand. I saw the contact photo of a cartoon ghost on the cell phone’s screen from across the room, and I grabbed it and started talking, not bothering to say hello. “You got one too, right? A letter from Oliver Moon?”
At that moment, my cat, Bastet, materialized and pounced onto my desk in front of me, holding a dramatic pose and staring. Cats always seem to either under- or over-react. I looked into her emerald gr
een eyes, (by coincidence, exactly the same color as mine), and listened as Ed went off on a stream of excited babble, full of half-sentences, unfinished thoughts and digressions.
Yes, he had gotten a letter too.
* * * * *
Ed is a professional paranormal investigator, and he thinks my cat is a goddess. That’s a good, quick sketch of Ed, but there’s so much more to him than that. Like most people, I thought he was a crackpot at first, but once I got to know him I realized that I’d been wrong, and as a person, I’ve come to like him very much. He’s that classic little brother figure, the one who keeps doing things, but he’s your little brother and you love him anyway.
Deep down inside, he’s just plain good, and terribly sincere. He looks like a trim little professor, with short, white hair and earnest brown eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses. He’s six years younger than me, but has none of the rigid ideas you’d expect a man to have by the time he’s in his mid-50s. He’s fun. He’s full of arcane information. He’s willing to admit he might be wrong, and he never gets a superior attitude. I’ve had him design a couple of Halloween Haunted Houses for fundraisers – that’s how I met him in the first place – and there’s nobody better at that kind of thing.
But he also tends to get me involved in his investigations, since, as I said, he thinks my cat is a goddess, and that I am the minion of the goddess, bound to do her bidding. I can’t seem to talk him out of it.
Normally that irks me, but this time I was grateful. One hundred thousand dollars worth of grateful. A week in a castle I’ve always been curious about, participating in an “investigation” and hobnobbing with the upper crust? Count me in – but I wanted the money up front. Not that I didn’t trust Oliver Moon, but I didn’t know the man personally, and he did have a reputation for bull-headed arrogance and unpredictability. Also, he wasn’t supposed to be very nice. I wasn’t spending a week in his blasted castle with him and his blasted family for nothing.
I didn’t know whether to be excited or disappointed when half the money arrived by electronic transfer, right on schedule. The other half was to be paid upon completion of the “investigation,” whether it produced results or not. The money was a godsend, of course – we needed to re-fence the area for the ferals, and now it would be possible, along with lots of other things. But right up until I looked at our bank balance and saw all those extra figures, I suspected the whole thing was a hoax. Now it was real, and I was committed.
After I logged off my bank’s website, I sat back in my desk chair and gazed out the windows at the river. The landscape is wide beyond our long, low house, and filled with coastal scrub, a river that rises and falls with the tide, and seabirds, large and small. It’s a classic lonely bayou setting, with the convenience of Palm Coast shopping just the other side of the bridge down the road. The view from my office is perfect for quiet contemplation. There’s an island about the size of a putting green some forty yards off our seawall, and I gazed at it, ruminating. An egret was stilt-walking around the island, poking at things.
Just what kind of results the experiment was supposed to produce hadn’t been spelled out in the Contract and Nondisclosure Agreement I had signed and sent back, (Michael read it and approved), but I didn’t care. I was getting paid either way. I’m not sure I was even curious at that point. But if Ed was involved, it was a good bet that the family believed that Castle Moon was haunted and wanted us to get rid of a ghost. That kind of thing always sounds like fun, but trust me, it never is. I’ve been dragooned into these things before; they tend to degenerate into chaos, and that’s if anything happens at all. And they tend to be planned for some ungodly hour of the night, and I’m a woman who needs her sleep.
I had never heard any rumors about Castle Moon being haunted, which was kind of surprising, considering how the place looked.
Castle Moon was built to look old. It rose up angrily in walls of hard, gray stone, looking cold even on a hot summer day. It was mossy on the north side and weathered all around and looked impregnable. Any Medieval knight would have ridden up to it and said to himself, “Nice place. I think I’ll kill whoever lives here and move in.”
But America hadn’t had Medieval times, at least not like the ones Europe had had, and there were no real castle ruins anywhere near the north coast of Florida, unless you counted the Spanish fort in St. Augustine. The Castillo de San Marcos was relatively new, compared to the castle in the Scottish Highlands that had caught the imagination of Horace Moon in 1911.
Horace Moon was one of those Gilded Age American millionaires who went around Europe raiding it of art, construction materials and even entire buildings. In 1911, he tried to buy an ancient castle in Scotland so he could have it dismantled and moved to Florida. His friend, Henry Flagler, was investing heavily in St. Augustine at the time, and Horace wanted to one-up him with a real castle.
The castle’s owners were impoverished descendants of an old, old family, and would have been happy to be rid of the moldering pile, but when they realized that he basically intended to steal it from Scotland and take it to America, they backed out of the deal. So he simply copied it.
Well, sort of. It ended up looking like ersatz Scottish-Americana, theme-park style. For the interior, he took a ceiling from this mansion and a stained glass window from that cathedral, and even a row of small shop fronts from a village in France, and put them all into Castle Moon. Then he went and spent the rest of his life in a townhouse in New York and never bothered with it again. His descendants had treated it as a weekend getaway cottage ever since. Someone in the current generation was living there, but you’d never have known it. The place looked frigid and lifeless.
The more time Michael had to brood over it, the less happy he was. Once we both got over all those zeroes, he started worrying about just what Oliver Moon had in mind. He never said exactly what was bothering him, he was just unsettled whenever we talked about it. In fact, he tried to get me to take his gun, but since I hadn’t had any gun safety courses and didn’t know anything about them, I refused.
“I don’t know, Taylor,” he said slowly. “This whole set-up has a smell to it.”
“’Set-up?’”
He was shaking his head. “You said Ed refused to participate unless he had more details?”
“He called Oliver Moon and did a phone interview with him about it. I’ll tell Ed to get here early on Saturday; then we’ll have a chance to talk it over with him before I go. I’m sure everything is going to be fine.”
* * * * *
So the morning we were due at the castle, Ed got to Cadbury House early and I gave him a cup of coffee. Michael sat in with us, partly to be sociable, partly because he was still uneasy about the whole project.
“So,” I said, hiking myself up onto a tall chair at the breakfast bar, “what are we going to be doing for the next week, Ed? Did Oliver Moon give you more specifics during your phone interview?”
Edson stacked up his posture and adjusted his glasses, preparing to deliver a lecture, and I quickly looked at my watch and said, “The Cliff Notes version, Ed. We have to leave in less than an hour if we’re going to get there by ten a.m. sharp, as required by the Contract.”
He shot me a look, but reorganized his thoughts before he began.
“As you know, Oliver’s sister Maxine has chosen to live there. Life in a foreboding castle has definitely flavored her literary work, and she has said in interviews that the castle, and the sound of the ocean pounding on the rocks below it, inspire her. But the other sister, Fawn, has reputedly always hated it, and her children usually try to get out of going there. It’s a tradition for the entire family to get together there twice a year, on Christmas and on Horace Moon’s birthday, and Oliver has assured me that all living members of the immediate family will be there. The birthday is tomorrow.
“For the amount of time members of the Moon family have spent there over the years, a disproportionate number of them have died there. That sounds suggestive, but being in a
warm climate, many of them moved into the castle in their old age to be nursed through their final days, so the number of deaths may simply be an artifact of a pattern common to all of our lives.”
“Ed,” I said, lowering my chin. “Cliff Notes?”
“You mentioned him before. Who is Cliff?”
I closed my eyes. “It’s a series of synopses for college students. It means, ‘Get to the point.’”
“Oh, yes, I remember them now. Never used them. Now where was I?”
I looked at my watch again, and he pulled himself together.
“Oliver Moon believes that some of his deceased relatives have never left the castle. During the last Christmas visit, he told me, he had some encounters, which was not unusual, but at the end of the visit something followed him home and has been with him ever since. He wants to be rid of it, whatever it is.”
“Don’t you mean whoever it is?”
Ed considered, with his head tilted to one side. “Not if it’s a demon, but he did, in fact, imply that it was the revenant of a dead relative. He won’t admit it, but I think he’s afraid.”
“So why’s he coming back?” I asked. “He might be running the risk of picking up another one. The place might be lousy with them.”
“I pointed that out to him, but he feels he needs to deal with this head-on, and he needs to do it at the castle, where presumably the troublesome relative died. He has candidates,” he said, pulling a notebook out of his canvas bag and flipping to the right page. “His Aunt Hilda, his cousin Clarice, his father Orion – wonderful name, isn’t it? Orion, the giant huntsman, elevated to the stars by Zeus.”
I opened my mouth to mention Cliff again, but he got it and moved on.
“There are others, but he believes those three are haunting the castle, and one of them, he’s not sure which, is clinging to him for reasons unknown. He told me he’s going to stand his ground, even if it costs him his own life.”
“He really said that?”
“And I believe he meant it. You looked him up on Wikipedia, of course?” I shook my head, and he gave me a disapproving look. “Research is essential to any project, Taylor, but of course, your approach is different from mine, so I won’t make a point of it. Oliver Moon is an impressive-looking man, well into his seventies, with jutting white eyebrows and dark, sharp eyes. Judging from my conversation with him, he’s not senile or insane. Not obviously so, at any rate. Just a touch of eccentricity; no confusion.” He shuffled through his notes, pulled out a page and adjusted his glasses. “Here’s exactly what he said: ‘I have to go for Grandfather’s birthday. It’s a tradition. Besides, I have to face this thing head-on, or it will destroy me. But I’m not a fool. That’s why you’re coming. You bring your research and your equipment, and have your friend Taylor bring that cat. That should just about cover it.’ I asked him who he was afraid for, and he said, ‘Myself! The others can take care of themselves. Especially my sisters. Fawn’s a drip, but she’s not the helpless little thing she likes people to think she is. And Maxine can take on the Olympic Wrestling Team with one hand tied behind her back. Don’t let her get you into the murder room, by the way. If you’re curious, I’ll show it to you myself.’”