River of Ghosts (Haunted Florida Book 2)

by Gaby Triana

  One way or another, I had to figure this shit out.

  For generations, we’d lived in the Everglades and survived. But we had the tools, we had implements, we had each other to solve problems. Here, we had an evil house, rainwater, a shotgun, a bowie knife, and a backpack containing random things.

  I wanted to sit up and think my way out of this, but my head continued to pound.

  I dozed in and out without meaning or wanting to. I hadn’t slept the night before, so sleep came intermittently. After a while, I lost sense of time and had the distinct impression that either Eve or Sharon were dozing off as well, since the steady sound of rainfall and thunderstorms were lulling us all into a stupor.

  The dark cloud in the corner of the room was no longer there. I exhaled a sigh. Lying on my side, my right hand splayed out against the wood of the floor. It was a deep dark wood, so vastly different from other areas of the house that were lighter. Whoever had built the house had used whatever timber they could find, a mixture of different trees, but this wood had a different energy to it.

  Yes, energy.

  When we first arrived, Linda had pointed it out and even placed a piece in my hand to feel. I’d felt a jolt of power flow through me, which was how she learned I possessed psychic gifts. I’d heard of the ability before, being able to gather information from somewhere else or the past just by touching an object. It was called psychometry.

  Between the steady rhythm of the rain, the soft snoring in the room, and the rolling thunder getting farther and farther away, my hand vibrated gently. Before I knew it, my whole arm vibrated, as though it were alive with its own beating heart. This vibration wasn’t visible to anyone else, only to me. It reminded me of times when I was young, right before dawn when the energy of the sun would immerse my bedroom and I’d feel like I was floating out of my body.

  Something about those still, early morning hours.

  Don’t move…

  The voice was my own subconscious talking. I couldn’t move if I wanted to. I was in a trance-like state, my hand pulsating with crackling sensation. After a few minutes, the floor came alive. Moved right underneath my hand, swayed, rocked gently back and forth, the feeling of being on a boat. I was dizzy from exhaustion.

  I saw my grandfather’s shoes walking along the dirty floor, heard his conversation with Rutherford’s wife, as she fought tears while describing what had happened to their assistant. Brigitte had gone out to bring in the traps they’d set up for studying the snail kite, when the Nesbitt brothers appeared, like they often did, only this time they were determined to make them leave.

  Depositing dead animals around the property hadn’t worked, running their airboat back and forth late at night hadn’t worked. Finally, it seemed they’d gotten fed up with their being at the house and shot the first person they saw.

  Brigitte had been a warning.

  It could’ve been any of them, Elena said.

  Grandfather gave her the bad news that she’d died at the hospital. How did he know, Elena asked. He just knew.

  My grandfather had the gift before me, the gift of knowing. Did that mean he’d been susceptible to the energies here, like I’d been? We were more alike than I’d ever imagined. It saddened me that I hadn’t gotten to know him in person.

  The conversation lingered in my mind. Evil acts had taken place here, sure. These were no-man’s lands. Most people knew terrible things occurred in the Everglades and nobody would know any better. It was a well-known fact that bodies were dumped here for good reason, because the earth and water had a habit of swallowing people up, and if the glades didn’t get them, the reptiles would.

  Murder was an unfortunate byproduct of these lands.

  No, what stood out in my mind was the wood my hand still touched, the rocking motion that persisted, and the notion of water and boats and humans who mastered both.

  Open yourself, Avila, I heard Linda telling me in a washed-out dream.

  The visions served as clues. I’d been here once, long ago, and I’d be here again and again. Our souls recycled. The water, the boats, were a part of my higher self. My grandfather had arrived here that day to help, not on an airboat, but the way all my people had traveled these waterways in the old days—by dugout canoe.

  And if we wanted to get off this island…

  …all we had to do was make one.

  NINETEEN

  “What happened?” Kane mumbled himself awake.

  “We build a boat. A dugout canoe. That’s how my ancestors got around. I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before.”

  “And how are we supposed to do that?” Sharon asked, disdain in her tone like she’d already decided it wouldn’t work.

  I actually understood the process from hearing it explained in the village so many times to tourists. “We need a dried cypress log. There’s tons of fallen ones outside. Add fire to burn the cutout, rope…granted, we need a hatchet or machete to carve the shape, so it won’t be exactly like a real one, but—”

  The words flew out of me. I visualized it in my mind like I did everything else. It’d be something like a dugout, not perfect maybe, but it’d work.

  “Where are we going to get a hatchet?” Sharon smirked.

  Kane brushed Eve’s hair out of her face as she slept. “True, we’re fresh out of hatchets and ropes.”

  “We need to explore the house. We haven’t since all this began and maybe we’ll find items. At the very least, we can build something to float out of here—a raft or whatever. All we need is to get far enough ‘til someone sees us. We have the wood to start. Look at this place—it’s falling apart.”

  “It’s true, babe.” Eve stretched. “We can pull the rotting wood coming off anyway and maybe float the hell out of here.”

  “Or the doors. Pull them off, tie dry brush to the undersides, use palm fronds to affix them to the wood,” I said, feeling hope for the first time in a while. “We won’t know until we take a good look at all we have. What about our backpack?”

  I already knew it contained a box of rounds.

  Kane got up and headed to the one backpack still sitting by the front door. He opened it and dumped the contents on the floor. The box of shells tumbled out. “There’s that. BBQ lighter. One…two…three ponchos. Mosquito repellant. Aaannddd….a bunch of cables.”

  Orange, rubbery coils spilled out.

  I grabbed a cable, pulling it taut. “That’s our rope. We can always split it open and use the individual threads if we need it to be lighter. Kane, you have your bowie knife for that. The ponchos can line the bottom of the rafts, help keep water from seeping through.” The idea illuminated my brain, the positive thought counteracting the negative vibes prevailing in the house.

  “But can a raft hold five people?” Eve looked at Linda’s dead body. “One of them lying down?”

  I hated to tell her that I didn’t think Linda’s body would be making it off this island. “Depends on how we make it. Maybe we build individual ones, depending on what we find, and we each float on our own. Our biggest problem right now is the amount of rain and finding dry wood.”

  “This is crazy, you know that?” Of course, Sharon had to have an opinion, even though I was willing to bet she’d never contributed a single useful idea in her life. “This isn’t freakin’ Gilligan’s Island.”

  “You have a better idea?” My heartbeat kicked up a notch. If Sharon could just not speak the rest of our time here, that’d be great. “How about from now on, unless you have a solution to the problem, you don’t knock anyone else’s idea? Good? Great.”

  Yes, I was being sassy with the Sharon Roswell from Haunted Southland, but who cared at this point? She’d shown her true colors, and I was done. My whole life I’d learned that if something weighed you down, you cut it from your life. I was not beyond putting her in her place if I had to.

  “I never knocked the idea, Cypress. I only said it was crazy.”

  My hands shook with anger. Something primal inside of me wan
ted to rush at her and grab her by the neck. “It’s the crazy ideas that end up working and making news, aren’t they? It’s not like we’re trapped somewhere we can’t get out. The only thing separating us from home…”

  “Is the water. She’s right. An airboat’s basically a raft with a motor on it.” Kane sounded enthused. I couldn’t wait to start working with him on getting this done. Finally, a ray of hope in this dismal situation. “How long will it take?”

  I shrugged. That was another problem. “Could take days, weeks.”

  “Weeks? Without food, only water?” Sharon scoffed.

  “We can survive without food, Sharon,” I blurted. “And we have tons of water, because…” I gestured to the outside world. “I present to you…Florida’s rainy season. The problem is finding dry wood, we need fire, which we can start but it might get put out thanks to the storms.”

  “And there’s no way in hell we’re building one inside this bundle of sticks,” Kane said about the house.

  I stood by the front door and watched the torrential rain come down in sheets. Whatever we built, it’d need to withstand the elements, and it’d need to keep us away from gators. I couldn’t imagine a raft that fell apart as we rode along, leaving us impervious to the gnashing of teeth.

  A dugout canoe took months to make. The wood had to be carved then dried and baked out in the sun over several weeks. It was simple in design but we were lacking supplies and time. A makeshift raft, however, would work better but could get it get us down the River of Grass thirty or so miles?

  “Whatever.” Sharon got up and moved throughout the house in her restlessness. “You guys do whatever you want. I think we should hang tight. Someone will find us, just like they found those kids in the Thai mountains.”

  “They found those kids in the Thai mountains because they spotted their bicycles outside the cave system,” I said. “We don’t have anything to show that we’re here. Did any of you tell your friends and family where you’d be this weekend?”

  “I did, but nobody knows where Villegas House is. That’s why we hired you.” Sharon kicked an empty can of beans the wind had rolled into the room and sent it flying.

  And when my family realized I was missing, they would ask Kellie for my whereabouts, and Kellie did not know where I was this weekend, because I only told her about the production team hiring me for a tour around the Everglades. I didn’t mention Villegas House.

  “By the way.” Kane held up my phone. “Your battery just died.”

  “Of course it did,” I sighed.

  All the more reason to get started.

  It was late evening when the rains finally slowed, and Kane wasn’t about to go walking in pure darkness.

  We’d spent the time scouring the house looking for items we could use to build our raft. In the upstairs rooms, we’d found a dresser full of clothes, old hairbrushes, and hangers. I took the wire hangers, figuring we could bend them into shapes to help tie the wood planks together, but without any tools to chop the planks or wire cutters, the idea would prove difficult.

  Another room contained an old wooden table with drawers filled with papers mottled with heavy mold. Sharon spent most of her time here, reading through them, blowing mold around. She discovered them to be Rutherford’s research papers on birds, flora, and fauna. She was obsessed with finding a journal, or something that would clue her in as to what happened her, but I was done caring about the past.

  All the past had ever done for me was make me fearful.

  We’d begun building a foundation inside the house using planks, palmetto fronds, and cables. The house reeked something awful, but we did our best to stay away from Linda’s corpse. At random moments, I kept expecting her to sit up and speak to me, so I’d go around exploring cabinets and closets, anything to keep away from Linda.

  Sharon would read out loud from Rutherford’s observations, as if we cared. I swear, if I heard one more entry about birds and animal eating habits, I was going to roll the papers into a tube and shove them down her throat.

  The body’s stench got worse throughout the heat of the day and filtered into the upstairs rooms. If nobody brought it up first, I was going to be the one to suggest we move it outside. Whatever happened to it happened to it. In my culture, we didn’t make a big deal about memorializing people. We moved on and eventually, people were forgotten. We didn’t construct monuments or statues. She’d return to the land, same way she’d come in, though I knew these people’s ways were different.

  They hung onto everything. Put their people in ornate boxes in the ground. Didn’t they realize, as investigators of the paranormal, that Linda’s true essence was no longer physical? Her soul had moved on. Left was an empty vessel. I would never say it to their faces, but the body rotting downstairs was garbage and not serving us one bit.

  We explored every inch of the house as much as we could until the sun began sinking and the absence of light put an end to our work. I wasn’t sure how long we’d been at Villegas House, but I believed we were going on Day 3.

  The darker the sky got, the more I feared what would come. Would I see visions again? Would the gloomy cloud permeating the home hover over us again? I felt like it was studying us, watching our every movement, trying to figure out how to make us leave.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I kept seeing shifts of light moving in the darkness, orbs flitting back and forth. Some felt harmless, while others felt cold and oppressive. The moment I’d address them with straight eye contact was the moment they’d disappear. Ghosts. They may not have been haunting us every moment of the day, but they were definitely making life harder for us, telling us what to do, as in the case of my grandfather reminding me we came from river-navigating people.

  I was using the remaining ambient light from sundown to hunt for tools when a foul smell overrode Linda’s and a little boy stood in the doorway to the upstairs hall, blocking my path.

  “He’s here,” Billie said, his dark hair covering eyes that stared out of the two dark shadows of his eye sockets. He stood perfectly still, not looking at me, but past me.

  “Who is?” I asked the moment I could breathe again after he scared the shit out of me. He wouldn’t respond. “Billie?” My little brother’s presence continued to baffle me, since he had nothing to do with this house.

  “I don’t want to stay. I’m scared, Avila.”

  “Why are you here?” I asked him. “You never lived here. Why don’t you go home?” I felt silly for suggesting he find his usual place to live.

  “I follow you,” he said then looked over his shoulder and sank into the shadows.

  “What do you mean you follow me?”

  “I’m always with you, Avila. I love you.”

  “And I love you.” My chest filled with a pain I couldn’t process. My little brother had left this life for a better one and the best he could do was hang around the sister that had betrayed him? I wished I could go back in time and treat him better, do it all over again, be the big sister I should’ve been. Instead I’d treated him like an annoying pest. “Are you my spirit guide?”

  He nodded but wasn’t paying attention.

  I took the chance and asked him more questions. It wasn’t every day my little brother materialized in full body right in front of me. As used to his visits as I was becoming, what if I never saw him again after tonight? What if, once I got off this stupid island, the house’s effect would wear off?

  “Why were you in my vision today?” I asked. “With Grandfather. You were here at the house. I saw you.”

  “I am not with Grandfather.”

  “Then, who was it?” I asked, my own answer coming to me in another moment of clarity.

  “Uncle Bob,” he said.

  Uncle Bob.

  My grandfather had brought his son with him to Villegas House, to show him how to make peace with others. A lesson in diplomacy. Uncle Bob had somehow survived the murders and came home to tell what happened. My uncle had seen it all. It would explain
why he wanted me—all of us—to have nothing to do with this place, why he wanted nothing to do with spirits and ghostly tales at all.

  “Your gator tooth is Grandfather’s.” Billie pointed at the charm around my neck hanging from a leather string. I’d always known it belonged to my grandfather, but I never knew how I’d come into possession of it. “Uncle Bob brought it home.”

  I touched the charm around my neck.

  It was imbued with energy.

  My grandfather’s energy.

  This house’s energy.

  Which meant the darkness had always been with me.

  I’d always worn it, assuming it was a token of the grandfather I never knew, but it was more than that. It connected me to this place. No wonder I often felt immense sadness when my fingers grazed it. Today, I felt the sorrow again, but also resentment that I’d been carrying around pain all my life in one form or another.

  Would I ever be free of it?

  “Avila?”

  “Yes, Billie.” I couldn’t see my brother anymore. His spirit form had receded into the background, though I could still hear his disembodied voice, I couldn’t see his ethereal shape. But I knew he was there, crouching.

  “I’m scared.”

  “Don’t be,” I told him, though I empathized. I was scared too, but even now, I had to be his big sister. “Scared of what?”

  “The angry man,” Billie said. “He’s right behind you.”

  TWENTY

  I turned slowly.

  The “angry man” was the shadow energy shape I’d seen moving throughout the house, only now his form was human. Without a face or discernible features, I couldn’t see what he looked like clearly and got the sense that I never would. The spirit felt older, more ancient, like he’d lost his identity over the years.