Haunted

by Randy Wayne White

  No . . . Birdy had something else in mind but took her time getting to it. “I didn’t plan on checking out of the motel until Monday morning.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Well, what I’m thinking is, the cops said that Saturday and Sunday before Halloween are the two busiest nights of the year at the Cadence house. Teenagers go there to park and dare each other to jump the fence.”

  I had my carry-on bag open on the bed but stopped what I was doing. “You’re saying I should be there with my camera tonight because it’s Saturday?”

  “No, I’m saying we could hide inside and get video—or scare the hell out of them. Live video would make Bunny’s attorney very happy.” She laughed, picturing how much fun it would be.

  I didn’t mind altering my plans with Belton, but there was an obvious problem. “You have to be at work at six in the morning and I planned on going to church. We wouldn’t get back here until late tonight.”

  “I’m talking about tomorrow after I get off. Sunday will be just as busy and I work four to midnight on Mondays. We can stay as late as we need to and sleep in.”

  Her eagerness was the tip-off. Suddenly, I knew what this was about. I said, “Brit’s attending brushfire school in Port Charlotte. That’s where you’re going tonight, isn’t it? It’s more than an hour away and you’re not coming back. Tomorrow night is a trade-off so I won’t be mad.”

  The expression on Birdy’s face was partly genuine, partly mock surprise. “Psychic, that’s what you are. You and Lucia should compare notes.”

  I said, “No, I had coffee with Joey before you got up this morning. By sunrise, I’d learned more than I wanted about how to set a woods on fire—controlled burns, state regulations—all sorts of things. That man’s as talkative as you when he’s full of caffeine. Well . . . actually, he’s shy and that’s how he covers it. Talking. Some people do.”

  Birdy went to the window, a wicked smirk on her face. “Before sunrise, huh? So tell me, Hannah, how’d you sleep last night?”

  15 October, 1864 (aboard Sodbuster) [LOCATION AND FIRST FOUR LINES BLOTTED]: . . . the Spaniard is a member of the Craft & what them 3 gerillas did to his wife and t’other woman now bind us by Sacred Obligation. The use of a cable & a tongue cutting might be due we will see. Glass rising and damn cold. Good NE wind for long reaches, a Lords blessing . . .

  17 October, 1864 [no location]: Unknown raiders has sent them three Yankees to hell & now has the 4” guns from Labelle altho it aint much of a fort being only tents & a sutlers shed. But no help to a woman who kant talk for screaming prayers to a God who aint traveled this far inland. Sheepherders madness, the Spaniard calls it. This being a sickness that afflicts women in lonely country. But the Spaniard knows good as us that a bullet is his woman’s only cure. They was 5 Yankees she says now. Not 3.

  On this windy Saturday before Halloween, the Cadence house looked forlorn and restless when I arrived at a little after six. It was not as busy as predicted, but I’d seen two big-tired trucks, one loaded with teenagers, on the access road when I turned in.

  I was glad they were gone. The sky had descended on gray streaming clouds, but there was still plenty of light for photos. That gave me time, so I allowed myself to reread my recent discoveries in the journal.

  I don’t know why I felt compelled to do so. My great-uncle’s callousness was as upsetting as the tragedy that had befallen a woman who was nameless and faceless to me. She hadn’t lived here in the old house, but I had walked the ruins of her property and life earlier that morning. I felt sure it was the homestead a mile downriver.

  The “Spaniard”—a Brazilian timber grower—had been a master brick mason, as the cistern proved.

  Sheepherder’s madness, he had said of his wife. The man sounded slightly mad himself, although I could force myself to understand. My well-educated friend Birdy had remarked on the difficulties that women faced when isolated by wilderness. But neither of us had projected the danger of living in a spot that might attract roaming bands of soldiers who were far removed from home and their own conscience. Little food, no salt, but time enough to get drunk—someone had stood by that cistern and emptied bottles of strong ale from Massachusetts.

  A woman who could only scream prayers, not speak, had endured more than I wanted to think about but couldn’t help imagining.

  Five men. Not three, she had said.

  Brutes. The word was not strong enough.

  Predators—it ignored the pile-on savagery of pack behavior.

  Inhuman . . .

  The word worked, but wasn’t quite right. Sadly, it described the behavior of more than the woman’s attackers. Captain Summerlin could be included after the threats he had penned. Hang the men with a cable, cut out their tongues. I could only project from his cryptic wording. To then reference a Sacred Obligation had the taint of blasphemy. But who was I to say what was conscionable and what was not during such a war? A man of my own blood had lived it. He had seen and done things his own way.

  20th October, 1864 (Ft. Thompson, Labelle): The Federals sent Gen. Woodbury from Key West with a fresh troop in new uniform & kit to Ft. Myers & shoot our cattle where they stand. Goddamnt let them come. No one expected these sorts & it has turnt the stomach of even them that backs the North. For the price of a bushel of salt we expect the pleasure of settling this matter. Says Bro. Gatrell: lure the enemy so close it’s up to God to decide who lives or dies. I says Amen. 4” canon loaded with nails & pig shit will make quite a party for them who wants to dance. For them who runs, the fat pine is strung at every fence row. The Gerillas has been loosed & hells flames is ready . . .

  Gerillas. Captain Summerlin had meant guerrillas, of course, a man who had seen much of the world but seldom the inside of a schoolhouse. There was no confusion, however, regarding his remarks about fat pine and hells flames.

  I knew exactly what he meant. My mother’s old house is built of heart-of-pine—fat pine, or lighter wood, as it is known. Lumber so crystalized with turpentine, you can’t drive a nail through it even after a hundred years of curing. But a single match can cause a wall—or a fencerow—to explode into flames.

  The knowledge produced in me an irrational shame for events that had occurred generations ago. Why hadn’t Capt. Summerlin blotted out his threats? Even with his coded mix of apostrophes and numbers, they were readable to someone willing to invest the effort. I had proven that. The man had protected himself in earlier entries but now laid the truth bare.

  Why?

  The question led to a truth I felt, not thought: this entry was Capt. Summerlin’s declaration of war. He had finally chosen a side, yet his convictions were neither blue nor gray. Revenge was the motivator but his true allegiance was to Florida. Vanquishing invaders was his goal. He and friends had baited a trap with salt—bushels of salt, of all things!—and those who entered were to be fired upon by cannon. For those who escaped, there was no escape. I had helped Belton Matás pace the distance from the cistern to a fencerow. Fifty long strides, for a man sprinting for his life. No evidence of fire remained, but I suspected it had once been a barrier of flames.

  The scorched bricks we’d found came into my mind. The scorched bones I had seen behind the Cadence house materialized behind my eyes.

  The leather-bound journal was on my lap. Once again, I attempted to open the next few pages. Used my fingernails, then a fingernail file from my purse. As I knew from experience, this had to be done gently, couldn’t be forced, so I had to govern my eagerness to confirm what I knew in my heart: Ben Summerlin and friends were the unknown raiders who had killed three Union soldiers near Labelle. Weeks later, they had laid a trap of cannon and flames on an unnamed river—this river. Lift my eyes, I could see the tree canopy that shaded water flowing a quarter mile away. My great-uncle had been among the gerillas set loose, a band of cow hunters turned man hunters. They had orchestrated the killings of an e
nemy who had perished under fire and in flames. Then he and his friends had allowed the dead to burn while digging shallow graves. What else explained scorched bones?

  It was a time of war. Loathsome crimes had been committed. But I also had to wonder if greed had played a role. Belton had told me of the Union paymaster who, in 1864, had been sent to purchase cattle and pay troops at Fort Myers, but his boat had been ambushed by four-inch cannon. Rather than let the Confederates take the gold, he had jettisoned the money. No . . . Belton had clarified that point—the Cow Cavalry had ambushed the paymaster, not Confederate soldiers.

  It was impossible to believe all these elements were coincidental.

  Greed—it sullied whatever justice had been done. But who was I to say? I hadn’t suffered that poor woman’s pain and I was looking back from the distant, distant land of almost two centuries. Any attempt at moral judgment only proved my own callowness. My family disloyalty, too. Yet the shallow graves I had viewed that morning still nagged at my conscience. The graves were haphazard . . . indifferent . . . chaotic—but there was something else that troubled me. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. The answer, I hoped, was hidden between these damn stubborn pages that I continued to pry into and cajole.

  Finally . . . finally the paper began to separate from the glob to which it had been adjoined for decades. I put an eye to the open space and was disappointed to see the first lines of the next page had been scribbled black. When I attempted to see more, the snap of flaking paper forced me to stop.

  I took a break to calm my fingers. It was six-fifteen. The sun would set in an hour. Still time for photos, but the harsh late-afternoon light was draining westward. I checked phone messages, took another look at the house. Windows above the balcony had dimmed to black domino eyes; the music room and cupola were isolated chambers joined by a pitched roof. The house bore the weight of wood and years in silence, indifferent as a rock, but the structure was animated by wind-churning trees and cawing crows and . . . something else.

  I used a tissue on the windshield to confirm what might have been imagined. Smoke . . . Smoke leaked from the chimney as indiscernible as mist. Last night’s fire would have gone cold by dawn. Why was there smoke?

  I lowered the windows and sniffed—woodsmoke. But that proved nothing. Ranchers in central Florida do controlled burns off and on all winter long. Somewhere someone—Joey Egret, possibly—had set a fire to clear brush that might fuel a major forest fire come spring. No doubt, however, the fire inside the house still smoldered. The chimney proved it.

  I had the keys to the padlock, planned to enter the house anyway. I wanted wood samples from the floors and walls—especially wood from near the fireplace. Eighty years earlier, a teacher had written of blistered skin and the aberrant behavior of good children. Last night, in a flashlight’s beam, the joists had glittered with sap. Pine sap, I had assumed. Now, however, after researching manchineel and mimosa trees, I suspected it wasn’t true.

  My reasons for seeking a rational solution were selfish, but in a yearning, hopeful sense. I am a believer in good and evil. I choose to believe that a divine purpose cushions whatever tragedy befalls us and that order is of the highest design. There is no room in my faith for haunted houses or supernatural devilry. If there was a solid explanation, I wanted to know it. My faith is shaken often enough by reality.

  That’s why I wanted those wood samples. First, though, I went back to work on the journal, hoping to read at least one more page. The result was disappointing: days or weeks after fighting had occurred here in 1864, Ben Summerlin had used ink to obliterate what he had written—two full pages. Then he had sealed those pages with daubs of tar.

  His last entry about the incident was penned two months later and among the first I had read as a teenager, sitting in the attic of my mother’s house. Frustrated, I now skipped ahead and read the passage one more time:

  December, 1864 (Punta Rassa Cattle Dock): Gossip tween Tampa & Key West says I kilt Sodbuster & God knows who else in the switchbacks of some damnt river when drunk. This aint true. It werent cause I was drunk I left behind a box of silver Liberties & the purtiest little dory this coast ever seen. What happened is Union Blues took me by ambuscade at night & I out run them. Figured they was bandits. A cable length from the Crossing I opened the seacocks & did not wait to watch Sodbuster sink. 100 silver dollars gawn & the purtiest little dory. I have never been so drunk as to abuse a vessel purty as Sodbuster. Better she is on the bottom than with bandits is what I thot. Same with them silver Liberties. So to hell with them that gossips of murder & drunkenness & thievery. I got a ranch in Cuba what needs tending. Florida is a might warm for me now . . .

  When I was a girl, Capt. Summerlin’s language and allusions to danger and treasure had struck me as romantic in a Pirates of the Caribbean way. But they also left unanswered questions that were never addressed in later entries—an oversight, I had believed.

  Not now. The man had been in fear for his freedom. Trivializing the matter, then dismissing the subject, had been his way of closing a door. By referencing Havana, he was also addressing the subject of murder. A hard-nosed sea captain cared nothing about rumors. But he knew the law. That’s why he had blotted out the facts and sealed them with tar before sailing south.

  Tar . . . I closed the journal, pleased I had guessed right about exposing it to the heat of a fireplace—until I remembered that Theo had seen some of these entries. But after reflecting for a moment, I felt better about that, too. Captain Summerlin had been so vague about his dory’s location—a cable length from the Crossing—that Theo’s chances of finding it were less than my own. Besides, he was after the paymaster’s gold or John Ashley’s fortune, not a measly one hundred silver dollars.

  I did feel a frustrating sense of loss, however, about the blotted passages. An expert might know how to retrieve my great-uncle’s lost history, but it would have to wait. Daylight and the photographs I wanted could not.

  I stepped out of my SUV, opened the trunk, and got the camera ready.

  • • •

  WHY WAS a woman dressed like me, with hair as black as mine, inside the music room off the balcony?

  I wasn’t imagining the ghost of Mrs. Irene Cadence—because I didn’t see the woman. Not at first.

  The camera did.

  The biologist had loaned me an expensive 35mm with a tripod and a wireless shutter attachment after I’d mentioned how much I admire the Everglades work of Clyde Butcher: black-and-white landscapes of cypress and saw grass that captured subtleties of color better than any color shots I have ever seen.

  “In the hands of the right photographer,” the biologist had explained, “a fine lens reveals details the human eye can’t see.”

  What a lovely notion, I had thought at the time.

  The observation didn’t seem so fanciful now.

  The biologist had loaned me a fine lens, too—a Canon 24mm with incredible light-gathering capabilities. It also had an incredible price tag—I’d checked—so I was extra careful as I set everything up and took a few practice shots outside the gate.

  The house became my subject. Harsh sunlight flared off the windows. It put an icy edge on falling leaves. I snapped a few images on full auto, then experimented with slower shutter speeds. To avoid camera shake, I used the Remote button and kept my distance. After a half dozen or so, I checked my work on the LCD view screen.

  Nice shots. The wide lens allowed the house to be itself, old and rambling, aloof to trees that had shaded it for a hundred years. Brash sunlight was transformed into saffron and bronze. The porch off the sitting room was a cavern of shadows. Above it, the balcony was bright as a New Orleans stage but solemn for its emptiness.

  Or so I thought until I saw what the lens had seen.

  Three frames in, there she was: a blurred image through the upstairs window. A blouse of lipstick red, a face as translucent as moonlight. But tiny
because of the wide-angle lens. My head swiveled between the LCD screen and the house while I checked two more frames. In the next shot, only a smear of her shoulder appeared . . . then the women’s face in profile, but no more detailed than an antique cameo. She wasn’t overweight like the witches, nor was she silver-haired like Lucia. This woman was young, lithe, full-breasted.

  The woman on the balcony . . .

  The ghost story about Irene Cadence came into my mind, a lady of great beauty with raven-black hair. It couldn’t be her, though. Ridiculous, even to linger on the possibility. But, if not . . . who had the lens discovered?

  I looked up from the gate, studied the window, then yelled, “Hello? Are you there?”

  Not now, she wasn’t. I opened the gate, took a few steps but lost my courage. So I returned to the camera—which is when I realized that I was wearing a blouse of copper red. Not as bright but similar. And I, too, had black hair, although it was pulled back in a ponytail. The explanation was obvious: I had photographed my own reflection.

  Of course!

  I was convinced. But the feeling didn’t last. The woman in the photo couldn’t be me. I was at ground level. She was upstairs behind the French doors that connected the balcony to the music room. It was an impossible angle. Or was it? I turned and looked. My SUV, with its big mirrors, was behind me. If the sun had hit a mirror just right, and if I was standing just so, and if the light had ricocheted upward . . .

  The solution was too complicated. What I needed was a closer look at the photos.

  The camera’s electronics were high-tech. It took a while to figure out how to zoom in on the LCD screen. A toggle switch, click by click, magnified the image, but was no help. The woman’s image was soon so pixelated, she vanished in a shattering of red and moonglow skin. That caused me to wonder if my imagination had reconfigured oak leaves and light into a female form. Another look at the images proved it had not.