Bait

by Karen Robards

  “The police investigated,” she said, “but the crime has never been solved. Over the years, evidence has been lost or has deteriorated, witnesses’ memories have blurred, and the detectives on the case have long since moved on to other, more urgent priorities. But the girls’ families haven’t forgotten. Their friends and neighbors haven’t forgotten. They continue to wait for justice to be done. And some say that the girls are waiting for justice, too. They say that their spirits still linger here in the place where they were last seen alive—this once majestic Southern mansion at the heart of Pawleys Island.”

  A panoramic shot of the island taken from the air filled the screen. It was all there, the ingredients that made Pawleys Island a picture-perfect mini-paradise: the sapphire ocean, the sugar-white beaches, the swooping gulls and egrets wheeling through a cloudless azure sky, the deep green of near-tropical vegetation, the small, pastel bungalows clustered near the center of the island like sprinkles on a cupcake, the more imposing, multistoried summer “cottages” that predated air-conditioning—and, in many cases, the Civil War—hugging the outer edges along the waterfront. The best way to describe it, Joe had decided not long after taking up residence here, was as the place that time forgot.

  As proof of what the island lifestyle did to a person, he had to remind himself less and less often lately that there wasn’t anything wrong with that.

  The redhead was still talking. “The Schultz family sold the property two years after Tara’s murder and Lauren and Becky’s disappearance. Since then, four other families have moved in—and moved out. None has stayed longer than six months. For the last three years, the house has been on the market. So far, no takers. Why? Because local folks say the house is haunted by the ghost of Tara Mitchell and, though their bodies have never been found and their families still cling to a last faint hope that they are alive and maybe one day they will come home, by the ghosts of Lauren Schultz and Rebecca Iverson, too.”

  The shot cut to a gleaming white kitchen. A fortyish man and woman and a pair of teenagers were sitting around a table in the middle of the room, looking earnestly out at the TV audience.

  The redhead was standing beside the table, talking into the camera. “I’m here with Paul and Susan Cook and their children Ben, twelve, and Elizabeth, fourteen. The Cooks bought the house four years ago, and were the last family to live in it.” She turned to the Cooks. “You only stayed in the house for six weeks, isn’t that right? Can you tell us why you moved out?”

  “It was Elizabeth,” Paul Cook said. The camera zoomed in on the girl. She was petite, cute rather than pretty, with dark hair, a freckled nose, and braces. Her hair was pulled back off her face in a low ponytail, and she wore a white button-down blouse.

  “They came into my bedroom at night,” Elizabeth said in a small voice. “I know it was them now—those three girls. Back then, when it was happening, I didn’t have a clue what was going on. See, I would be asleep, and then I would wake up and the room would be cold as ice and I knew I wasn’t alone. At first I just kind of heard them, like their footsteps, like they were walking across the floor. And ... and sometimes the closet door would open and close again, even though I always checked to make sure it was shut when I went to bed. A couple of times I heard them giggling. Once, once it felt like one of them sat down on the edge of the bed. I felt the mattress sink and kind of jiggle like a weight was on it, and this ... presence.” Elizabeth shuddered. “I kept telling my mom, but she said it was bad dreams and I should just close my eyes and go back to sleep. Then ... then I saw them. All three of them. It was the middle of the night, and I heard them and opened my eyes, and they were standing around my bed, looking at me. Just these three kind of shapes, you know, like girls only—not solid. They were real pale, with like these black holes where their faces should have been.”

  She stopped and took a deep breath, and as the camera pulled back, her mother could be seen reaching for her hand across the table.

  “Elizabeth was afraid from our first night in that house,” her mother said. Susan Cook was petite like her daughter, attractive, with dark-brown hair cut short and shaggy, and light-blue eyes. She was wearing a blue button-down shirt. “It got so bad that I had to lie down with her before she would go to sleep. We moved to Pawleys Island from Ohio, and when we bought the house, we didn’t know anything about what had happened there. Later, we found out that Elizabeth’s bedroom had once been Lauren Schultz’s. But I didn’t know that then, and when Elizabeth started telling me all that stuff about there being ghosts in her bedroom, I just thought she was being overimaginative. The last night we spent in the house, it was about two o’clock in the morning and Elizabeth just started screaming. Paul and Ben were gone on a Boy Scout camping trip, so it was just Elizabeth and me. I jumped up and ran into her room to see what on earth was going on. She was still lying in her bed, just hysterical. I thought she’d had a bad dream, and I got in bed with her to calm her down—and then it started.”

  “What started?” the redhead asked.

  “The bed started shaking,” Mrs. Cook said. Her hand was still entwined with her daughter’s. It was obvious from the whiteness of both their knuckles that they were gripping each other hard. “Elizabeth and I were both lying on her bed, and it just started shaking like there was an earthquake. It shook so hard that the mirror over the dresser rattled against the wall. And then the bed rose a couple of inches off the floor. It just levitated.”

  “And then we heard her scream,” Elizabeth added.

  “Heard who scream?” the redhead asked.

  “Tara Mitchell,” Elizabeth said with a shudder. “I know that’s who it was. At least, I know now. She sounded like she was being stabbed to death right there and then.”

  Her mother shook her head. “We don’t know it was Tara Mitchell. We don’t know who screamed. Not really. All we know for sure is that it sounded like a young girl, and it was blood-curdling. And ... and it seemed to come from the first floor of the house, right beneath Elizabeth’s bedroom.”

  “Where Tara Mitchell was killed,” Elizabeth said. She was wide-eyed and pale as she glanced at her mother, who squeezed her hand.

  “We called the police,” Mrs. Cook said. “They came. They searched the house. They didn’t find anything. They were the first ones to tell us about what had happened there. They said we weren’t the only ones to experience what we did. Apparently, everybody who’d lived in the house since the Schultzes had seen things. And heard the screams.”

  She broke off and took a deep breath.

  “Anyway, that was it,” Mr. Cook said. “They wouldn’t stay in the house another night, either of them. We had to move out. They wouldn’t even stay on the island, so we ended up in Charleston. We finally managed to sell the house, but we took a bath on it.”

  “I don’t care,” Mrs. Cook said. “There’s no way we were spending another night in that house. I’ve never been so scared in my life. The place is haunted. There is just no other explanation I can come up with.”

  The redhead was back alone on the screen. “As you heard, the Cooks aren’t the only people who have witnessed something unusual at the house.”

  The camera angle widened to show that she was once again outdoors, in front of a backdrop of what looked like old white clapboard siding. A pimply teenager in a baseball cap and a green T-shirt that read “Pro-Lawn” stood beside her.

  “I have with me now Thomas Bell, who works for the lawn-care service responsible for keeping the grass cut.” She moved the microphone she was holding in front of the kid’s face. “Tom, would you tell us what you experienced here?”

  The boy swallowed as the camera zeroed in for a close-up of his face. “Well, see, it was last August, a Thursday, and I was working later than usual so I could get all my lawns done because I wanted to take off early Friday. I got to the house, oh, about nine P.M. It was just starting to get dark out. This here’s a good-sized property, about two acres with lots of trees, but I was working fast, so
it only took me about forty-five minutes to get done. There wasn’t a lot of light left by the time I was finishing up, but I could still see some, and I was just getting around the front of the garage with my Weed Eater when I saw somebody walking up the driveway toward me.”

  The camera pulled back so that the audience could see that the white clapboard wall was actually the front of the detached three-car garage. It looked old and rickety, and its closed gray auto doors seemed to sag.

  “At first I couldn’t see anything except, you know, that there was just somebody coming. The house was empty—it’s been empty since I started cutting the grass—so I thought it was kind of funny that somebody would be walking up the driveway.” The camera moved, panning down a narrow blacktop driveway that curled through a stand of shaggy pines toward the street in front of the house. “Then I saw that it was a girl, a teenager, with long, blond hair, wearing blue jeans and some kind of light shirt. She was walking toward me, just normal, you know, and I shut off the Weed Eater in case she wanted to say something to me and I wouldn’t be able to hear her. She was real close when I did that, like right there beside that big pine.”

  He pointed to a towering evergreen about thirty feet from the garage.

  “I swear, she seemed to look right at me. Then, while I was still looking at her, she just kind of ... vanished. Like she dissolved into thin air or something.” He swallowed. “It was weird.”

  The redhead asked, “Then what did you do, Tom?”

  The kid gave a sheepish half-smile and dug his hands into his pockets. “I let out this big ole yell and threw my Weed Eater down and ran like my pants was on fire. I never did go back here, either. Not before today. Harvey—that’s my boss—he had to send somebody to pick up my stuff.”

  “What do you think you saw, Tom?”

  “There’s no ‘think’ about it,” the kid said. “People can laugh all they want—some of my friends think it’s the funniest thing ever—but what I saw was a ghost. And I saw it as plain as I’m seeing you right now.”

  The redhead was suddenly in close-up again. She spoke directly into the camera.

  “We asked Tom to look at six dozen photographs we put together of young, long-haired blonde girls, some of whom live in the vicinity of the Old Taylor Place now, to see if he could find the girl he saw, and he was indeed able to pick one out.” The camera pulled back so that Tom Bell was once again sharing the screen with the redhead. They were still standing in front of the garage, and the kid was holding what looked like a 5 x 7 photo. “Is that picture you’re holding of the girl you saw, Tom?”

  “Yes, ma’am, it is,” he said.

  “You sure?” she asked.

  “Sure as I am that I’m standing here talking to you.”

  “That’s pretty sure,” she said with a slight smile. The camera zoomed in on the photograph. The image of a pretty, smiling blonde teenager filled the screen. Joe remembered that picture from the case file, too. He felt a twinge of something—pity? Sorrow, maybe?—for the girl, who had no idea when that picture was taken that her life was getting ready to end shortly thereafter in a burst of horrifying violence.

  “This is a picture of Tara Mitchell,” the redhead said, as the camera continued to focus on the photograph. “It was taken just a week before she died.”

  Also by Karen Robards

  BEACHCOMBER

  WHISPERS AT MIDNIGHT

  IRRESISTIBLE

  TO TRUST A STRANGER

  PARADISE COUNTY

  SCANDALOUS

  GHOST MOON

  THE MIDNIGHT HOUR

  THE SENATOR’S WIFE

  HEARTBREAKER

  HUNTER’S MOON

  WALKING AFTER MIDNIGHT

  MAGGY’S CHILD

  ONE SUMMER

  THIS SIDE OF HEAVEN

  DARK OF THE MOON