Spooked on the Gulf Coast (Gulf Coast Paranormal Trilogy Book 3)

by M. L. Bullock

  I tucked the paper into my pocket and got on with the business of burying Wilmer McCoy. I had no tears for the boy I didn’t know, but my heart was heavy just the same. I said a prayer to myself. I wasn’t one to pray out loud like Aunt Ruby. I felt like Wilmer would understand. As I slung mud over him, I heard Humphries’ boots sloshing through the mud behind me. With the last shovelful of mud, I turned to face my enemy.

  Fury rose within me. “You shouldn’t have killed that boy, lieutenant. He didn’t deserve that.”

  Bart got right up in my face, that wild look in his eye and his pipe in his hand. He bucked up against me with his chest like a buck might another buck when he wanted to challenge him to a fight. “It would be a mistake to cross me again, Darcy. It would be a real mistake.” He pointed his dirty finger in my face. “Everyone has their day, private. That’s a fact. Men die all the time. This is war, in case you hadn’t noticed. Everyone has their day. Even that boy.” He thumped my chest with his bony finger. “Even you.”

  I don’t know why I said it, but I did. I had to. “You too, lieutenant. You will have your day too.”

  “Is that a threat, Private Plum Darcy?” He said my name with slow enunciation, a clear threat that he meant business.

  I backed up and stabbed the shovel into the mud marking the headstone of the late Wilmer McCoy. I grabbed my coat and walked back to him. “No, lieutenant. That’s not a threat. Just a fact. Everyone has their day. Come on, dog.”

  Without looking back, I walked to the shack.

  Chapter Seven—Cassidy

  The activities around Harrington Farm were in full swing now. A group of women in period clothing chatted around a quilt under the canopy of two oak trees. They greeted me as I walked by, so I paused a moment to stop and appreciate their handiwork. It wasn’t a fast work, sewing a quilt took patience, but I could tell it was going to be a beautiful project and the group appeared to enjoy the process. I kept walking and found Jason giving a lesson about the role of drummers during the war. He invited a young man from the audience to come help him demonstrate the equipment, and I listened intently.

  Jason helped the volunteer adjust the drum for his height. “Before the Civil War, drums such as this type were around eighteen inches long, but for convenience’s sake, drums were much shorter, usually between twelve and fourteen inches deep. A genuine Civil War drum is a rare find, and most, like this one, have unique artwork like an eagle or a flag emblazoned on the side.”

  I could have stayed and listened longer, but the urge to connect, to sketch the mental images in my mind, became too strong to resist. If only I could find a quiet place. With drums tapping, guns going off and dogs barking, that was going to be difficult to do. I randomly wondered how my kitten, Domino, was handling all his alone time. Did he miss me? Probably not now that he had his bubbling water fountain and an automatic feeder. But I missed him, and I’d only been gone a day.

  A pathway at the edge of the nearby woods beckoned to me, and I toyed with the idea of going for a walk. Probably not a good idea since I didn’t know this area too well. And then I saw the dog again, the blue tick hound. “Hey, boy,” I called to him. Yes, that was the same dog. He had jet black ears, a gray spotted body, and a pointy tail. He wasn’t very big but big enough to be used as a hunting dog. I’d seen quite a few dogs here, but as of yet, I couldn’t identify his owner. At least I didn’t see the rope around his neck today. That’s a good thing. Someone was going to get a piece of my mind for leaving that dog tied up with that horrible rope. The hound watched me for a few seconds and then trotted into the woods. As he disappeared, I followed behind him.

  “Boy? Where did you go?”

  A straw-covered pathway stretched out before me. Overhead, young trees, smaller pines than the ones that towered above, bent to create a green ceiling that allowed only a sliver of golden sunshine to permeate. As I stepped on to the path, I noticed that it bent to the immediate left, and I hurried to catch up to the dog. Instinctively, my hand went to my waist to call Midas, but I hadn’t thought to bring a walkie-talkie with me.

  Oh well, I won’t go too far in. Just a few feet.

  The dog began to bark as if he’d spotted a squirrel or some other quarry. “Hey, boy! Wait for me.” I walked a bit further and with every twist and turn of the pathway promised myself that I wouldn’t go deeper. I made every turn believing that I would see the dog, but he was always just out of my view. He barked, and I heard the leaves stirring beneath his paws. Just like a hunting dog to follow everything that moved. As I walked, I noticed the cool morning air quickly burning away and could feel the temperature rising. Whenever I stopped, I’d have to tie my sticky bundle of red hair up to get it off my neck.

  “Okay, puppy. I’m not chasing you all day,” I complained as I walked another few feet only to discover that the path opened into a clearing. And the clearing was full of deep green palmettos. The air felt different here. Not just cooler. It was quieter, almost stagnant. The hound was nowhere to be seen. Now what? I hovered at the edge of the field and searched for a path through them but quickly ixnayed that idea. Wow. I haven’t used that word in so long. My sister Kylie used to love it. No. I’d sit here on this rock. This would be the perfect place to sketch a few minutes. I eased down, keeping my eye out for the dog as I tugged my hair on top of my head with a ponytail holder I pulled from my pocket.

  Man, it was quiet here.

  I didn’t hear a single bird or squirrel or anything. What could that dog have been chasing? I closed my eyes and focused on summoning up the mental image that insisted on coming to life. With my pencil in my hand, I began to sketch. First an eye and then a beak. A tiny beak with a hook at the end. Strange. I’ve never seen a bird like that. It only took a few minutes to finish him, and then I waited. There had to be more. I’d seen more. Still, I waited. I flipped back to the picture I started in the bathroom last night, the one with the young man with the hazel eyes.

  Plum…his name was Plum.

  I didn’t have colored pencils with me, this was strictly black lead, but I knew he had hazel eyes, light brown hair and soft pink lips. And there were dark circles under his eyes…he was so hungry and so tired.

  And yes! I could see the other man too. He lingered behind Plum. Taller by a few inches with a longer face, his pointed beard gave him a malevolent expression. His eyebrows had a naturally excessive arch at the center point. As I finished the sharp angles of his face and began to pencil in the collar of his uniform, a strange sound drew me away from my work. It was a shaking sound. Like leaves shaking. I glanced above me to watch for the furry culprit, but there was no animal up there. In fact, that sound wasn’t emanating from the branches above me but from the forest floor.

  Yes! Just there! I could see the palmetto fronds swaying slightly. Was the ground moving? I clutched my sketch pad and pulled my legs up on the rock. Man, what a goofball, leaving the farm without a walkie-talkie. The green carpet continued to stir, and I slowly began to realize that this was nothing paranormal. I could see a fat black snake making his way over the mossy ground and off to the path behind me.

  Great. Looks like I’ll be taking an alternate path home. I breathed a sigh of relief, but that didn’t last long. I heard footsteps creeping up behind me. I tilted my head to take a peek, but there was no one there. Hmm…could be an echo. I’d learned from experience that sometimes the woods can create strange reverberations. You couldn’t always predict where the noise was coming from either.

  “Hello?” And of course, no one answered. In the distance, I could hear cheerful music and cannon fire. Both were sounds that brought me comfort. Having determined that I was quite by myself, I kept at my sketch, honing the subjects with details that I missed on my first pass through. After a while, I put the pencil down on the rock beside me and studied the picture. Clearly, the second man was the threat; the man in the foreground had no idea what was about to happen. Just like Anita Anderson had no idea she was about to die.

  Those
eyes pierced mine as he watched me from the paper. Frozen in time. Frozen at that moment.

  I touched the sketch with my fingers, rubbing his coat and his hair, smudging it as precisely as I could. When I painted with oils, making contact like this, touching a finished work often propelled me back to that moment in time. But I quickly discovered this wasn’t the case today. Not with pencils and paper.

  And then a hand touched my shoulder. “Oh, God!” I jumped up from the rock and spun around to see Midas standing there. “What the heck, Midas? Are you trying to give me a heart attack?”

  He put his hands up as if to say, I’m sorry. With a sexy smile, he said, “Cassidy, I called your name. You didn’t hear me?”

  “Obviously not. Phew. Thank God you’re not this guy.” I showed him my sketch, and he looked it over.

  “That is impressive work. Do you know anything about him?”

  “This man,” I said as I tapped the younger man at the forefront of my sketch. He was the subject of this snapshot. “This is Private Darcy. And this…” I suddenly knew the answer. “This is Bart.”

  “Wow, Cassidy. That’s amazing. You picked the right place to summon up old spirits. They might actually be buried here.” He cast a wary eye at the palmetto-covered ground in front of us.

  “What do you mean? I don’t see any headstones, but I imagined there could be some hidden under all those palmettos.”

  He handed me the sketch pad back and said sadly, “These palmettos are the headstones. That’s how poor folks marked graves during that time period, especially during the Civil War, at least that’s how they did it around here. If you were lucky. Palmettos are a poor man’s grave marker.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Seriously?”

  He studied the area more closely, his hands on his hips. “Yep. Could be one person, could be a dozen. Who knows? But this clearing, the way the trees have been kept away, this is most certainly a graveyard.”

  A great sadness washed over me. All this time I’d been sitting in a graveyard and never knew it. I knew it now, and I was ready to go.

  “You hungry? We’re going to have some dinner and then get the equipment set up.”

  “Starving. How did you find me out here? I didn’t even know this place was out here,” I said as we walked away from the palmetto field. I looked back once, but it was quiet. Nothing moved at all.

  “Bruce pointed me in the right direction. He said you walked back here with one of the historians.”

  I shook my head. “No, I didn’t. I followed that dog in here. The blue tick from yesterday. I haven’t seen anyone but you. And a black snake.”

  Midas paused and frowned. It wasn’t an I-don’t-believe-you kind of frown. It was the kind of frown that said something is going on here. “Huh. Let’s get back to the farm. I’d like the team to see your sketch.”

  “Sounds good,” I said, and we quickly left the palmetto graveyard behind.

  I knew I would be back.

  Chapter Eight—Sierra McBride

  “You do realize for an investigation it is going to be hard to get clear audio with all this noise going on. I mean, the chances of contamination are pretty high.” I was sure everyone had considered this already, but I felt like it was important to point it out. We would have to take every precaution possible to get the clearest audio. The spirits here at Harrington Farm wanted to talk; that much I knew for sure. I rubbed my wrist remembering the invisible hand that clutched me.

  “Since the cannon fire ends at sunset, we should be okay if we investigate later rather than earlier. It looks like we are in for a late night, guys. It might be a good idea for us to get a little rest before then.” Pete snorted as he shoved the batteries in the back of his swanky new Tri-Field. “I still can’t shake the feeling that I’ve been here before. Talk about déjà vu.”

  Pete always had the best toys. I hoped he brought his 3D mapping device, or the “cartoon machine,” as I liked to call it. Visual tools like that one came in handy on investigations. The 3D mapping device detected anomalies and showed them as stick figures on whatever monitor we used. That was a cool piece of technology. It was good seeing Pete looking so happy—and sober. It almost felt like we were back in full swing, except we’d exchanged lead redheads.

  I wasn’t jealous of Cassidy; in fact, I liked her and considered her one of my friends, but I sometimes missed the dynamics of the original team. Joshua always said I was too sentimental about those kinds of things, but he didn’t get what I meant. My husband wasn’t one for nostalgia, but he felt things deeply and I loved him for it and appreciated our differences. What I’d tried to explain to him on more than one occasion was that with Cassidy’s talent for painting ghosts, it’s like we weren’t needed anymore. There were no more mysteries to solve, not as a team. Gulf Coast Paranormal wasn’t the same.

  Why this level of distraction, Sierra? Get your head in the game.

  “Hey. Earth to Sierra. Where are you?” my husband teased as he elbowed me.

  “I’m here, Joshua. Just thinking. So I believe the hot spots for activity are obvious. We’ve got the bottom-floor guest room where my wrist was grabbed. And then we have the upstairs room where Mrs. Anderson died. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t cover the entire house, but I’m thinking that we definitely need to put cameras in these areas for sure. Let’s line the stairs with REM pods to see if we can track anything traveling up and down.”

  Midas agreed and began drawing a rough sketch of what he had in mind. It would be an easy setup; the only problem would be tripping over one another in the dark. The farmhouse wasn’t particularly small, but with eight or nine people inside, it could get crowded fast.

  “I’ll check with Jason and find out what’s a good time to lock the place down. We’ll definitely have to do that if we want to control the environment and keep the contamination to a minimum. And I should warn you, not everyone here is happy about us being here. Just be mindful when interacting with folks. We don’t want to do or say anything that’s going to offend the locals or visitors to Harrington Farm.” Everyone agreed, and Midas continued, “Cassidy, why don’t you show them what you’ve come up with?”

  I smothered a sigh and felt Joshua nudge me beneath the table. He got a dirty look in return. Cassidy flipped open her sketchbook and laid it in front of us. “He’s right about keeping a low profile. We met a guy earlier, Matthew King. He called us revisionists, whatever that is.” She tapped her finger on her open sketch pad. “Now this…this is Private Plum Darcy and this other man…this is Bart.”

  Aaron’s eyes widened dramatically. “He doesn’t look too friendly. What’s up with that beard?”

  Cassidy described the men in great detail, and Midas told us about the palmetto field. Naturally, we all agreed we needed to check it out. After a supper of sandwiches and chips, Pete pulled the van up to the back door and we quietly began to unload equipment. A few people stopped by to ask questions, but nobody gave us a hard time. About halfway through the setup, Cassidy disappeared—I presumed to go sketch—and Midas went in search of Jason to make lockdown arrangements with him.

  We snaked cables through the house, taped them down and finally checked the monitor for camera angles and connections. I tapped my watch wondering what time we’d get started. Nine? Ten? I yawned and rubbed my growing tummy. Yep. I’d need a nap soon. I walked upstairs with two power bars that I’d retrieved from my backpack. Maybe Cassidy was up here. I didn’t see her downstairs, and I couldn’t deny the fact that I was worried about her. She was nowhere to be found.

  That’s weird. I swear I saw her walk this way.

  I paused in the hallway but didn’t hear a thing. No humming, nothing at all. Joshua was at the bottom of the staircase taping down a cable connection. “Hey, did you see Cassidy go by here?”

  “I think she’s in the back guest room.”

  “Huh,” I said as I handed him a power bar. “I must have missed her.” I glanced down the hallway. The door was clo
sed now. I tapped on it and waited for her to answer me. “Cassidy? You in there?”

  I waited a minute, but when she didn’t answer, my heart began to skip. “Cassidy?” When she still didn’t answer, I turned the doorknob and eased the door open. It was a heavy door with an old-fashioned enamel doorknob. She wasn’t in the bedroom, but I heard a noise from just beyond, in the bathroom.

  “Cassidy? Everything okay?” My boots made a lot of noise as I walked across the hardwood floor. I was a bit cautious crossing the room. I mean, it’s not every day you get grabbed by an invisible hand coming up from the floor. I didn’t like the idea of anything grabbing my ankle. I shuddered just thinking about it. Needless to say, I did some fancy stepping across the room. The bathroom door wasn’t closed all the way, and I didn’t want to disturb her if she was trying to have a private moment; I had a lot of those nowadays.

  I heard a scratching sound. I knew that sound; it was the sound of a pencil on paper. Cassidy was drawing up a storm.

  I knocked on the bathroom door politely. “Cassidy? You okay?” The door swung open at my touch. For some reason, I held my breath. I don’t know why.

  Cassidy was on the floor drawing like a madwoman on her sketch pad. A dog I’d never seen before was beside her. His head rested on his front paws as he watched her work, but he looked up at me, his black ears perking up.

  He was only there for a second. And then he wasn’t there at all.

  Chapter Nine—Private Darcy

  No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop thinking about Wilmer McCoy. It didn’t help that I had to face his father every minute of the day. I prayed that this rain would end and that the lieutenant would want to leave this place for good. It didn’t look like that was going to happen anytime soon because Bart had found a jug of whiskey in one of the knapsacks. He didn’t waste any time uncorking the black glass bottle and tilting it up to his lips. Of course, he had to make a few comments about the taste of the whiskey and how inferior it was to anything we had in Kentucky. I didn’t disagree with him; although I wasn’t much of a whiskey drinker, his comments just didn’t seem appropriate. But then again, the lieutenant wasn’t much for manners and such.