A Ghostly Light

by Juliet Blackwell

  “Does this tell you anything important?”

  “I’m not sure. I mean, nothing obvious, but it’s certainly . . . interesting.”

  I imagined contacting Detective Santos with this latest news. It was hard to believe he would find it relevant, though it would almost be worth telling the detective, just to see the look on his face.

  • • •

  I put Stephen and Caleb in charge of the salvage pile, and showed them how to extract nails from wood without hurting themselves or ruining the wood. I ignored the grumbling.

  “Mel, may I ask a favor?” Olivier said, when it was apparent I would not have time to meet with him for another hour or so. Duty called. “May I climb the tower, look for readings?”

  “Of course. But don’t go on the outside balcony. The warning sign is no joke. Everything inside the tower is solid, but that catwalk could come down at any time.”

  “I will be careful.” Olivier headed off, weighed down by his ghost-busting equipment: the electromagnetic field detector, the ultraviolet camera, the ultrasensitive recorder and motion detector. Olivier seemed uncharacteristically hesitant, not at all his usual upbeat self. I felt bad for him. This ghost business could be tough.

  The crew had almost finished with the demolition of the interior of the Keeper’s House, and the electrician and plumber would be out later today to go over the plan on-site. They had been surprised that the project was back on track so quickly; crime scenes usually took much longer to be released. I was fortunate I hadn’t lost either of them to another project. Getting subcontractors to show up when they said they would was a constant headache, and since construction required steps be done in a particular order—one did not, for example, paint the walls before the plumbers and electricians had finished their work—a delay at one point in the schedule created a domino-like disaster further down the line.

  “Feel anything?” I asked Olivier when we met up an hour later. He came from the direction of the foghorn building.

  “Nothing. If I can’t even find ghosts in a haunted lighthouse . . .” He shook his head. “I don’t even know what I believe anymore, Mel, this is the truth.”

  I started to ask him about his experiences in Hungary, which had obviously affected him, but stopped myself. Olivier would tell me if—and when—he was ready.

  “Here’s something you might find interesting,” I said as we headed to the Keeper’s House. “Landon says some physicists are researching concepts of multiple universes, and quarks and whatnot. I’m a little fuzzy on the details, but the basic idea is that the universe is composed of different planes, with infinite versions of us. If so, those planes might overlap from time to time, resulting in what we call supernatural phenomena.”

  “Hmm,” Olivier said, looking thoughtful. “Wouldn’t that cause doppelgängers rather than ghosts?”

  “Yeah, okay, there might be a few problems applying that theory to ghost hunting.”

  Olivier smiled. “But it has possibilities, does it not?”

  “Definite possibilities. Anyway, back to this plane and this universe: Let’s take a look in the attic. There’s been a fair amount of ghostly activity up there.”

  “After you, madame.”

  I led the way across the nearly gutted front room to the stairwell, whose walls had been taken back to the studs on one side. We went up to the second floor, down the hall, and climbed the steps to the attic.

  We paused to ground ourselves before opening the attic door. I went first, glancing around to see if I noticed anything—I didn’t—before flicking on the light.

  She stood right in front of me: pale face, high cheekbones, hair piled on top of her head.

  And then there was the sound of shattering glass.

  The ghost rushed at Olivier, shoving him down the steep stairwell.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  “Olivier!” I clambered down the stairs after him.

  He lay on the landing, on his back. I knelt beside him and put my hands on his neck, feeling for a pulse.

  He opened his eyes. “Are you an angel, Mel?”

  “Almost no one thinks so.” I straightened and breathed a sigh of relief. “Are you all right?”

  “I’ll have a bruise or two, and I need to catch my breath,” Olivier said, grunting as he sat up with a big smile on his face. “But I am just fine.”

  “You seem remarkably good-natured,” I said. “Why are you smiling like that? You do realize you were just pushed down a flight of stairs, right?”

  “Yes. But I was pushed down the stairs by a ghost. That was her?”

  I nodded.

  “This is incredible, Mel. Think about it—a ghost reached out from another dimension to have an effect in the here and now. This I witnessed with my own eyes.”

  “No, you witnessed it with your own body. Sure you didn’t bonk your head or something?”

  “I did not say I enjoyed falling. That hurt. But to have this experience is a privilege.”

  “I’m very glad this floats your boat, Olivier. But personally, it pisses me off. Stay down here this time, will you?”

  I raced back up the stairs and burst into the attic.

  “Ida, that’s enough! Stop it!” I shouted. “I understand you’re beside yourself—literally—but that does not give you the right to hurt my friends, do you understand me?”

  She didn’t answer, but manifested in front of me, staring with that awful, empty expression.

  “Ida—Mrs. Vigilance—please listen to me,” I said. Trish had said the boy’s body was never found. Could this be what Ida was searching for, why she could not move on even after her own death? “I want to help you. Is it . . . have you been looking for your boy, Franklin?”

  Now I had her attention.

  She mouthed something, but it took a moment to put together what she was saying. Her lips moved, but the words were delayed. It was like watching a movie with an out-of-sync soundtrack.

  “Franklin.” She seemed to fold in on herself, wrapping her arms around her, crouching and sobbing. “Oh, Franklin, my baby! Where are youuuuuuu?”

  This last word went on and on, a great anguished howl that grew in intensity and reverberated off the walls until I had to hold my hands over my ears, as I had with the foghorn. Another pane of glass cracked.

  “Stop! Ida, stop! I’ll help you find him!”

  The horrible sound waned and finally petered out altogether. I look around the attic and realized Ida was gone, too. But now at least I knew—or thought I knew—that she could hear me.

  As hard as it was to know a loved one had died, the rituals of laying the earthly remains to rest offered some solace and a sense of finality. Not having the lost one’s remains to bury and to mourn could be a source of great anguish; Annette had once told me this is why murderers sometimes are granted leniency if they tell where the bodies are buried, so the families can rest.

  The island wasn’t that big. If Franklin was here, there should be a way to find him.

  Unless, of course, he had been washed out to sea by a rogue wave or a high tide. In which case, like the fabled Spanish bullion in Davy Jones’s locker, it was doubtful he would ever be found.

  But I felt compelled to try to help this tormented spirit.

  “Mrs. Vigilance . . . may I call you Ida? Please listen to me: I will do my best to help you find Franklin.” Before leaving the attic I turned and added, “And just so you know, Thorn Walker is not a friend of mine, so do with him what you will.”

  • • •

  “How do you suppose you find a body after all this time?” I asked Olivier as we walked downstairs. “Cadaver dogs can’t find old remains, can they?”

  “I don’t think so,” Olivier said. “Dogs find cadavers by detecting the gas emitted by a decaying body, and there would be nothing but bones left after all this time. But I’m no e
xpert. I do know a couple of psychics who have had success with this sort of thing.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind. But this island isn’t that big, maybe we could unearth something the old-fashioned way.”

  “Which is what, exactly?”

  “Um . . . looking around?”

  “You told me Ida searched for her child for ten years. Do you really think she would have missed him if he was someplace obvious?’

  “Probably not. But maybe the island has changed over the years. I don’t know, maybe the sands have shifted in storms, or an earthquake revealed something.”

  “You are right,” Olivier said as we carefully picked our way across the front room, littered with lath and plaster and old crooked nails. “Maybe an earthquake triggered a landslide in a mountain and revealed a hidden cave. Oh no, wait—there are no mountains on the island.”

  The French were masters of sarcasm.

  “Okay, fine, I know it sounds crazy, but I don’t know . . . the work here’s ahead of schedule, and it wouldn’t hurt to take an hour or so to look around. Worst-case scenario, we find nothing but we’ve had a nice stroll around the island. What do you say?”

  “In that case, I will say what you Americans always do, ‘it’s worth a try.’ Allons-y!”

  I walked out the front door to find Buzz shuffling awkwardly on the front porch.

  “I hate to be the one to break it to you, Mel,” Buzz said. “But I just got a text: Alicia was taken into custody and is being charged with murder.”

  • • •

  It’s not like this news came as a surprise. But since I didn’t feel any closer to finding Thorn’s killer, or even a reasonable alternative suspect, it felt like a punch in the gut. I texted Ellis to let me know if there was anything at all I could do, though I already knew what he would say: Help us figure this out. STAT.

  Alicia had an excellent lawyer, handpicked by Ellis Elrich and answering to him, and if she was eligible for bail, Ellis would pay it, no questions asked. So at least in this, Alicia was luckier than most.

  Also, this must mean Detective Santos had been satisfied with Waquisha’s explanation of her whereabouts during the murder, and that she was off the hook. I wondered if she would show up to work again. It was going to be a little awkward: “Sorry I thought you might be a murderer and too bad about your father’s boat, now cut this baseboard at a forty-five-degree angle, will you?”

  For now, though, I pulled my crew together in the courtyard, told them we were looking for the century-old remains of a little boy, and asked for volunteers. Just about everyone offered to go; in my experience, construction workers had big hearts and were quick to lend a hand to someone in need. Besides, I imagined the idea of hiking around the island was appealing, even with such a sad task at hand.

  Still, Franklin’s death occurred over one hundred years ago, so this was archaeology more than a search for a body.

  “His name was Franklin Prescott Vigilance, and he might have been wearing a little pirate outfit when he disappeared,” I said. “With a red-and-white-striped shirt and a black hat. He often carried a little metal pail and scoop. After one hundred years in the elements, it’s hard to imagine what could have endured, but one never knows.”

  We used the buddy system, just in case. I encouraged everyone to take shovels or rods so they could poke around under the sandy bases of rocks.

  “He was probably playing around the rocks, most likely by the shore.” I was basing that on where I had seen him, though as I said it I realized Thorn and Ida both appeared in different places on the island, so perhaps he could, too. “He might have crawled into a crevice and gotten stuck, that sort of thing. Try to put yourself in the head of a five-year-old.”

  As I was talking, I noticed something out of the corner of my eye. But this time it was no ghost, it was Terry Re talking to Caleb, by the storage shed. They seemed absorbed in their conversation.

  “Okay, thanks, everybody. Don’t do anything stupid—as always, stay safe above all. Shout if you find anything—or text me if you’re out of earshot. And we’ll meet back here in an hour or so and get back to work. In the meantime, enjoy the island.”

  I started toward where Caleb and Terry were speaking, but was approached by Paul Halstrom.

  “What can I do for you, Paul?” I asked.

  “We’d like to help.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “We heard your speech. We’d like to help. We know this island better than all of you combined.”

  That was probably true. Paul, Terry, and Major seemed to have an inordinate interest in this island. And what could I say? That I had a vague theory—completely unsupported by evidence—that one of them might have killed Thorn Walker and thus they couldn’t help us search for a little boy’s century-old remains?

  “Um . . . sure,” I said, keeping an eye on Caleb. He and Terry were laughing now. “The more the merrier. Thanks.”

  “Have you looked inside the house?” Paul suggested.

  “What?”

  Olivier came to join us. “You leave us alone now, Paul.”

  “Hey, I’m just trying to help out.”

  “You have no business here on Lighthouse Island at all,” said Olivier. “I have revealed your true identity to Mel, so now she knows what you are up for.”

  “I think you mean ‘up to,’” I said as a quiet aside to Olivier, but my attention was still on Caleb. I breathed a sigh of relief when Terry walked away. Caleb slid down to sit with his back against the storage shed, and opened his book.

  “My ‘true identity’?” said Paul with a sneer. “What am I, some kind of masked superhero? So what if we’re here trying to document some ghosts? It’s not against the law. And isn’t that what you’re doing here?”

  “But then why is it you were not honest with Mel in the first place?” Olivier demanded.

  Paul hesitated, shuffling his weight from one large boot to the other. “You know how it is with this sort of thing. I wasn’t sure . . . to tell you the truth, I’m not really sure what we’re dealing with. That . . . thing, whatever it is, barely lets me in the house, much less the attic. All we managed to get was the maps.”

  “Maps?” I asked. “What maps?”

  “The treasure maps. There was a stack of them in a box. Terry grabbed it from the attic doorway, but then that thing chased us out of there . . .” He shook his head. Halstrom was a large man, well muscled, but the stark fear on his face made him look like a scared little boy. He had gone up against something that had shaken him, badly. “Anyway, it was like a horror show in there. We got chased down the stairs, and my bad, I dropped the box.”

  “The box of maps?”

  He nodded. “Just as we were running outside. They blew everywhere. We’re still picking them up. I hear you found one, too, right?”

  I nodded. “What do you think they were for?”

  “No idea. We’ve tried digging up a bunch of the marked spots, but I don’t know what it’s about. We never find anything but, like, a couple of old coins or a little bottle or one time a little toy soldier.”

  I realized I had forgotten to ask Ida Vigilance about the maps. It was hard to remember everything in the moment, when I was in the presence of a being from beyond the veil. I should make myself a list of ghost questions.

  Then I remembered what Trish had said.

  “There’s a treasure map in the front of the book Treasure Island. Robert Louis Stevenson drew it for his stepson one rainy day, to keep him entertained,” I said. “Maybe Ida drew the maps for her son Franklin, as a game. Maybe that’s all there is to that.”

  “Could be,” said Paul with a nod. “There’s no treasure we could find, that’s for sure. Terry really thought there might be something, but nothing turned up.”

  “How long have you three been doing this?” I asked.

  “Not lo
ng. We only just met here, at the harbor last week. Funny we had so much in common. Terry’s real interested in spirits, and so’s Major.”

  “That’s nice,” I said. “Always good to make new friends. What do you know about Major stealing a file from the California Historical Society?”

  He frowned. “When was this?”

  “A couple of weeks ago, so maybe it was before you met. Okay, thanks for helping to look. But why did you suggest we look in the house?”

  “Because, like I said,” said Paul. “The ghost doesn’t want to let us in that attic. Seems strange to me. Maybe she’s eaten up with guilt or something, and that’s why she’s so mean.”

  “You’re suggesting she killed her own son?”

  He shrugged. “All sorts of crazy things happen in this life—and in lives past. Am I right, Olivier?”

  Olivier just nodded, looking pale once again. I guessed the happy effect of Ida pushing him down the stairs wasn’t enough to sustain his good mood.

  Paul said he and Major and Terry would help search the island for little Franklin’s remains, and I went over to talk to Caleb.

  “Hey, Goose,” I said, cringing when I realized I used his little-boy nickname.

  “Hey.” He didn’t look up.

  “Good book?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. Great. Of course, I like what the Muppets did with it.”

  No response.

  “So, what was Terry talking to you about? That woman who was here?”

  “The book.”

  “What did she want to know about it?”

  “You guys seem to have a thing about Treasure Island,” he said in an exasperated tone, finally looking up.

  “It’s a classic. And there’s something about the morally ambiguous character of Long John Silver . . .”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Caleb said with a slight smile.

  “So, seriously, what did Terry ask you about the book?”