by Mary Bowers
“I believe I have narrowed down your search since the last time I talked to you,” he said to Ed. “It is definitely my cousin, Clarice Ford. I had thought for a while it was her mother, Hilda, who died giving birth to her. I suppose that kind of thing would make you angry, or clingy, wanting to know how the child turned out. I’ve never had any children, so I can’t put myself in Hilda’s place. But however she felt about it all, she decided to go on into the light, or wherever it is they go.”
Ed quickened and looked like he was about to deliver the latest thinking on the subject, but Oliver stopped him with one sharp look.
“You want to know why Clarice would haunt me,” he told Ed. “I can only say that she has carried on being a nuisance to me just as she was during her lifetime. She wanted the castle, and she fully expected that because of her undue influence on my father in his final years, he would leave it to her.” He paused to chuckle. “My father was a dreamer, but he was no fool. He knew what Clarice was up to, and in the end, he followed family tradition and left everything to the eldest son, in this case the only son: me.
“My father’s name was Orion. Grandfather intended for him to use his full name: Orion Hanford Moon, but Father liked calling himself Orion Moon. He never bothered with his middle name. And Orion Moon was a very good name for him, as it turned out.”
“He was a hunter?” Ed interrupted.
“No. Quite the contrary. I was talking about the constellation. He was an amateur astronomer. His old telescopes are around here somewhere, probably in the dungeon, with all the other family junk. He was pleased with his name, because just about any time you look up at the night sky you can see Orion somewhere. Nothing to do with why his father gave him that name, of course. He’d hoped his son would be a hunter. Nouveau riche Americans of the Gilded Age were always trying to copy the habits of the British upper class. He probably envisioned my father riding to hounds in a pink jacket, but he couldn’t have been more wrong. My father hated riding horses, he hated killing things, and he loved the night sky. He wanted to name my sisters and me after constellations, too, but my mother wouldn’t let him. Father was an amiable, gentle sort of man, and Mother was . . . assertive.
“Father had very little interest in grandfather’s wealth, but he loved this castle. It’s away from any big city lights and there are no large buildings around for miles. The sky is wide open, and my father spent most nights during good weather up on the castle roof, looking at the stars. In the end, it probably killed him. He was spending night after night up there, watching the Ursid meteor showers. That was in 1993. They had an unexpected outburst that year, and he wouldn’t come down from the roof. The Ursids come around Christmas, and the best viewing is after midnight. The weather was cold. He got pneumonia. Still, he lived to be 83, and he died doing what he wanted to do.”
As he talked, his personality seemed to change, softened by good memories of a gentle father. These days he was surrounded by conflict and greed, and maybe it was bringing out the worst in him. I decided to reserve judgment until I knew him better. He might not be the old crank he appeared to be.
“Did you ever camp out on the roof with him to watch the stars?” I asked.
The question seemed to snap him out of it, and the wrinkles came back around his eyes.
“Of course not,” he snapped. “Mother was sensible. We would’ve all died of pneumonia if we’d followed Father around all day and night. I was a grown man by the time he died, and I wasn’t even living here anymore or I’d have made him come down from the roof myself. Now where was I?”
Ed flipped the little pages of his notebook back. “Cousin Clarice wanted the castle.”
“She did, you know,” Oliver said in a surprised voice. “Somehow she expected to inherit. Damn fool of a woman. Orion had two daughters and a son of his own. He wasn’t going to leave the castle to his niece, even though he did raise her here among his own children. She lived here long after I moved away, and she used that time to try to influence him, but whatever she expected, it didn’t pan out. She was furious when the will was read.”
“Clarice grew up here?” Ed asked, looking up.
“I told you, her mother died when she was born. And her father didn’t want to raise her on his own. She cramped his style. Fancied himself an international playboy. Fobbed Clarice off on my father, and as I said, I had a sensible mother. She treated Clarice like her own child, which is what it probably felt like, since she was brought to us when she was only a week old. Still, she was only a niece, not a daughter, and when it came to the will, my father simply allowed my grandfather’s trust to stay intact and copied the old man’s will. Not out of any kind of malice. He just wasn’t interested. My mother died well before him, so she didn’t have a say in it. I’m not sure he noticed much difference after she died. He still had his stars.”
He had started to mellow again, and this time I didn’t say anything. But he seemed to notice it himself, and looked up at me sharply.
“As for the others – Fawn was already dating the man she ended up marrying, and Maxine started writing pulpy trash, which my mother would never have allowed. When my father died, Maxine took the opportunity to move into the master suite and since then she’s been lurking up there, writing those sickening books of hers. Clarice stayed in the castle until she died four years ago, being a nuisance to everybody, and staying a nuisance even after she was dead.”
“Have your sisters reported seeing her?” Ed asked, excitedly scribbling in his notebook.
“They wouldn’t tell me if they had.”
“What about the staff?”
“Same answer.” He stood up abruptly. “Let’s get out of this room.”
Ed grabbed the recorder and shoved his open notebook into his back pocket. “Where are we going now?” he asked.
“To the dungeon,” Oliver said.
* * * * *
We walked out into the great hall again. I’d forgotten about the bust and it startled me all over again.
“Is that your grandfather?” I asked, pointing across the room.
“Yes.”
“Have you had any encounters with him since he has passed on?” Ed asked.
“No.”
“What about your father?”
Oliver stopped and Ed nearly ran into him. Neither man said anything for so long an interval I began to feel bewildered. Then, at last, Oliver said, “Leave him out of this.”
“Does he haunt?” Ed asked quickly (and, I thought, bravely).
“Leave him out of this,” Oliver repeated, already moving toward the spiral stairs we’d used to get to our rooms.
Ed paused for me to catch up, then whispered, “Are you getting any reactions from Bastet yet?”
“I wouldn’t know,” I told him. “She went off with her new bestie, Jeralyn.”
“Really?” he said, as if now we were onto something. “Well, keep a close watch on her when you do see her. She didn’t want to come here. That’s significant.”
We followed Oliver Moon to the staircase. There, Oliver flipped a light switch in the curving wall, and a faint glow bloomed in the stairwell below them. It still looked like a bottomless hole.
I turned away.
“What’s that?” I said, walking away.
There was a long hallway skirting the south side of the castle, just outside the great room. Along this passage were a few scattered chairs, a very few doorways, and no signs of recent human presence at all. Instead, there was a row of glorious windows letting in golden sunlight, and some kind of architectural detail against the inside wall. What a shame, I thought, to keep the light and the views walled off from all the interior rooms. Maybe this had been part of the defensive strategy of the original Scottish castle, but I thought Horace Moon should have left that wall out. In Twentieth Century Florida, nobody was going to be storming the castle.
Oliver came back to me.
“Oh, that? My grandfather took a liking to some shops that were about to be
demolished in a little French village. He bought them. He bought everything he took a liking to. He went through Europe like he was at an estate sale. He’d intended to line an indoor swimming pool with them, using them for dressing rooms and storage, but they turned out to be structurally unsound. They would’ve been dangerous. Also, he decided not to have a swimming pool after all. He was able to salvage the façades of the shops, though, with the display windows and entrances intact, and he had them set along the wall of this gallery. The long gallery on the other side of the castle has artwork. It’s more interesting.”
I wandered into the gallery a few steps and was fascinated by what I saw.
“It’s only the shop fronts,” he said behind me. “There’s nothing behind them.”
I went to the first door and opened it. Behind the façade there was a space about four feet deep with nothing in it. But the mullioned windows on either side of the door were clean, though not exactly clear, and they let in lots of cheery sunshine. The glass was obviously original, full of bubbles and waves. This was the most pleasant area I’d seen in the castle so far, and it was only an oblong of wasted space behind a false front in a hall nobody used.
“This would make a good hiding place,” I commented idly.
He became impatient.
“If you don’t mind, Ms. Verone, we are proceeding to the dungeon so I can explain the experiment you are here to conduct, and for which I am paying you extravagantly. If you’d like a tour of the castle, I refer you to my sister, Maxine, who will probably charge you admission. Are you coming?”
I took a deep breath. “I’m very sorry. It won’t happen again.”
“See that it doesn’t.”
He bumped past Ed, who’d waited in the entrance to the stairs. Ed gave me a withering look, and I whispered, “Okay, okay, I’ll be good.”
He surprised me and almost made me burst out laughing by leaning in and whispering, “One hundred thousand dollars.”
* * * * *
At the bottom of the stairs, Oliver snapped on an overhead light. We were in a hall running the width of the castle with a paved floor and barely adequate lighting. In front of us was a doorway with a locked grate, and as we walked past it, I looked in and saw that it was a wine cellar. At the far end of the hallway was another door, this one solid, and Oliver opened it and held it open for us.
“She’s in here,” he said.
We went in and stood still as Oliver turned on bleak overhead lights and closed the door behind us.
It was a cavernous room with rougher walls than the ones upstairs, and it was crammed with furniture, boxes, crated artwork and just plain junk. I had the feeling that anything could have been lurking there. As I went closer, I began to focus on individual objects: an armoire, a leather-strapped steamer trunk, a brittle-looking bookcase. A lot of the objects could have gone for good money at auction, but instead had been carted to the dungeon and left. It should have felt sterile and dead in there, but it didn’t.
Here were things that had once had value, even been loved, had been shown off with pride. Now they were in a dungeon, and I felt waves of . . . something all around me. Something old and angry. Ed edged around me, took out a pen-sized EMF meter and walked forward, scanning from side to side. The meter was used to monitor unexpected electrical forces, which to ghost hunters suggests a living presence without a body. Ed explained it to me one time, but it still doesn’t make sense to me. Why should ghosts give off electrical pulses?
“Nothing yet,” he said, staring at the meter. “Please proceed, Mr. Moon. I can pay attention to you while I do this.”
He seemed completely unaffected by the atmosphere, and I thought about how unfair it was that Ed, who wanted so badly to have a true paranormal experience of any kind at all, seemed completely immune to the undercurrents I was always picking up. And I, Taylor Verone, whose only interest in life was the welfare of animals, and who didn’t have the slightest interest in the paranormal, so often sensed things I didn’t want to know about. I have a lot of imagination and I know it. I try not to make a fool of myself because of it. But I was picking up something powerful then, and I didn’t want to go any deeper into that room.
“You said ‘she?’” Ed asked, when Oliver didn’t say anything. I looked at him and found he was watching me.
“Where’s your cat?” he asked.
“Bastet? I don’t know. She went off with your secretary.”
“Well, considering her reputation, I expect results from her. Make sure you get her back before tonight. I’ll have to speak to Jeralyn about this. She should have known better.” Before I could say anything, he turned to Ed. “’She’ is Clarice, of course. She’s over here.”
I shuddered back, and he gave me a mean grin. “Her portrait, of course.”
Ed came running. “No! I don’t want to see it, and neither should Taylor.”
But Oliver had already turned it around and set it on the floor, leaning it against the wall and stepping back.
Ed sagged, defeated. “I didn’t want Taylor to see it. You’re compromising her objectivity.”
“Let her look. She may feel something. That’s her ‘thing,’ right?”
I didn’t argue. What did it matter? I came forward and dutifully looked at the face in the portrait.
Her expression was unpleasant, somehow. Unsettling. It took me a few minutes to work out why. There was a little smile on her lips, but her eyes were calculating, and the artist had painted them as they were, even as he painted her smiling lips. The contrast in expressions gave her a mad look – mad the way the English use the word, not the American way.
“My cousin Clarice.”
Ed came up and ran his EMF meter all over the painting, stepped back, scribbled a few notes and said, “Nothing. What are you doing over there, Taylor?”
I turned, mildly surprised. I hadn’t realized I’d wandered away. I looked down again at the thing that had attracted me and regarded it as if it were something strange and wonderful. This face was the one I wanted to look at, not the one of the madwoman.
Oliver had come up beside me, and I was startled when he spoke. “That’s my father. Orion Hanford Moon.”
The look of the gentle stargazer was on the face. It was unmistakable. He looked back at me benignly, his pale blue eyes completely guileless. Oliver must have inherited his snapping black eyes from his sensible mother, because Orion’s eyes were a delicate, translucent turquoise, like his daughter Fawn’s. The resemblance ended there, because Fawn’s eyes were haggard, and Orion’s were cheerful. He’d been painted at about age thirty, and I could see that he’d never been handsome in the classical sense. His features were too soft, his face too round, his eyes too gentle to project masculinity. He had the hawkish nose of his father, and on his face, it just didn’t work.
I wished I could have known him. I knew I would have liked him. Have loved him. And what a lovely name he had.
“Why do you keep him down here?” I asked dreamily.
“There are better portraits of him,” Oliver said. “I think he got better looking as he grew older.”
“Does he interest you, Taylor?” Ed asked.
I was about to say no when Ed stepped forward with his stupid meter and started to have a go at the painting.
“Don’t do that!” I snapped.
He froze and turned his head to me. “Why not?”
“Leave him alone!”
“’Him?’” Ed said. “It’s a portrait, Taylor. Canvas and paint.”
I felt Oliver push up between us and turn to me, so close I could feel his body heat. I shied away from him and turned my head.
“Tell me what you feel,” he asked in a low voice. “Is my father with you now?”
“Don’t,” I said in a small voice. I stared at the portrait, wanting him to come out, to get between me and his living son.
“I’m getting something,” Ed said, moving his meter around.
“Oh, hell! This is stupid,” I said. I
turned and walked out. I was already up the spiral stairs and standing in front of the little French shop again before they caught up with me.
I couldn’t understand why I had gotten so upset. Sure, the whole thing was stupid, but that was no excuse for being rude, and I had definitely been rude to Oliver. I turned to him and apologized.
He actually smiled. “Not at all, Ms. Verone. I had planned on taking you to the other side of the dungeon to show you Maxine’s murder room, but I think you should rest now. I can see that you’re tired. The, um, psychic vibrations have obviously disturbed you. I consider that we have made progress.” He turned away and muttered, “I had no idea.”
Once Oliver was out of earshot, Ed got up in my face and said, “Are you out of your mind?”
“I think I am,” I said, almost in a whimper.
Chapter 6
I decided that if we were going to be up all night swinging EMF meters and running EVPs – they record electronic voice phenomena – I was going to need some rest. I told Ed I was going to my room, and trudged up to the third floor. As I walked away from him, he started following me up the stairs, raving about setting an agenda for the first night’s ghost watch, and wanting to know who was going to help him with his Sensitainer.
“Your what?” I asked, turning around in the stairwell.
“I’m calling it the Sensitainer. Don’t you like the name?”
I have these moments of helplessness with Ed. I didn’t even shake my head.
“Ah. I forgot. I haven’t had time to discuss it with you yet.” He chuckled. “Silly me. How can you know if you like the name if you don’t even know what it is?”
I popped my eyes at him and waited.
“Yes. Well, what it does is – would you like to discuss this in your room? Perhaps we could sit down.”
“No.”
“I see. Well, what it does is, it senses the disembodied presence, draws it within itself in a harmless, nonviolent way, and then contains it sensitively. Dual meaning. Just me being clever, ha ha. It has built-in EMF, GPS and EVP, with a thermal camera and night vision. All recorded digitally, of course. I’ve consulted with experts in the field, and have designed a positively-charged magnetic chambering device with an automatic spring door that immediately activates an electronic barrier upon closing.”
