by Ann Cook
Mrs. Waters snorted. “Poppycock, of course. Something in the local paper about it yesterday. Fact is, the round light’s probably illegal hunters, knocking around the woods at night.”
Beside the door the artist picked up three framed watercolors, all storm scenes that had been turned to the wall, and led Brandy through a pair of French doors into a simply furnished living room with a fireplace in one corner and watercolors on every wall—Gulf scenes, crimson sumac, white ibis with curved beaks.
Brandy paused before the mantel. On it two small, oval portraits, one faded with age, faced each other in connecting silver frames, photographs of dark-haired little girls. Across the room on a small table a studio portrait of a young woman in a graduation gown gazed back with brown, liquid eyes, hands on a camera in her lap.
The stiffness in the artist’s face softened as she followed Brandy’s gaze. “My daughter, Cara. She plans to carry on my work with the bird sanctuary. I’m an old woman, and it’s a big job. She’s also a help with nature photos. Familiar with the whole area. She’d know more about the Shell Mound tale.”
Brandy turned to see a slim young woman emerge from the hall in jeans and a canvas apron. Along her high cheekbones and slender neck, dark hair fell like a curtain. Large eyes and a height on no more than five feet gave her an elfin look.
“I managed to cut all the monofilament line off the pelican you brought in yesterday,” she said to her mother, and then gave Brandy a shy glance.
The artist nodded, pleased. “We left Brandy O’Bannon’s dog Meg in the yard.” She turned to Brandy. “My daughter, Cara. You’ll see her again in the hotel dining room tonight.”
Cara spoke up. “I love dogs. I’ll take good care of her.” She held out a hand to Brandy, her expression a little anxious. “You’re the newspaper woman from Gainesville? I asked Mr. MacGill to recommend me for dog sitting. I wanted to talk to you.”
Brandy smiled as they shook hands. “I’m on my way back to the hotel. I’d be glad to give you a lift.”
Cara whirled toward the hall, calling over her shoulder to Marcia, “Truck will bring me home. I’ll put out some dog food and be changed in a minute.”
Mrs. Waters set a watercolor of a hurricane scene she had carried from the studio beside the front door. Brandy was startled at the ferocity of the image. A mammoth black wave rose from seething waters, its crest deathly white. Below it crouched the frail buildings of a town.
“The storm surge of 1896,” the artist said.
Brandy sensed an opening for her other story. “This reminds be of another question. A private investigator in town is looking for a woman and child who dropped out of sight here in June of 1972, just before a hurricane. He says it’s important to find them, but the woman must be using another name. Any idea who that might be?”
For a fraction of a second Mrs. Waters hesitated, then looked down and shook her head. “There were no strangers who stayed in Cedar Key after Hurricane Agnes, and no fatalities. The man’s mistaken.”
Brandy had heard about the protectiveness of small town natives, and this woman would be stubborn. As they stepped outside and stood on the cleanly swept porch, Brandy smiled. “I hope nature doesn’t take another swipe at Cedar Key while we’re here. October’s still the hurricane season.”
The other woman did not smile back. Instead her tall, spare figure turned to face the island’s jagged western shore. “Nature has reason to punish this town,” she said. “The cedars, gone. The oyster beds pillaged. Still, sometimes nature rewards those who pay her back.”
“The environmentalists?”
“And perhaps the painters.” Mrs. Waters looked at Brandy, her gray eyes troubled. “Fact is, if the tropical storm near Cuba heads this way, we’ll evacuate. You’d need to find another place for your dog.”
Behind them the door opened. Cara appeared in a white uniform and burgundy apron and glided after Brandy down the front steps.
“I’d like to ask some questions about the Shell Mound ghost,” Brandy said when they reached her car. Cara tucked her skirt beneath her and slid into the passenger seat. “Your mother told me about your nature photographs there, and your work in the bird sanctuary.”
As Brandy pulled into the street, Cara turned toward her, a pained glint in her eyes. Brandy was conscious of the fragile bones in her face, the sensitive mouth. “Mother told you I plan to carry on her work. The truth is, I don’t want to spend my life in Cedar Key. I want to be a professional photographer. I’ve learned all I can from books and magazines. I need college courses. Mother doesn’t understand that.”
The yearning in Cara’s voice sent Brandy’s memories reeling into the past. She was seventeen again and with her own mother at the dining room table, surrounded by her mother’s literature and grammar texts, her tidy stack of term papers, her red pen, her precise lesson plans. She listened to her mother repeat in a voice that could slice meat, “Get your degree in English, get certified to teach. You’ll have security.”
And her own argument. “I don’t want to teach about language. I want to use it.” Brandy gave Cara a quick, sympathetic look.
“Maybe I could be a newspaper photographer,” Cara was saying. “I’m pretty good and I learn fast.”
Brandy swung the car past the concrete block high school. Beyond it, she could see mud flats barbed with oyster beds. “Start with a job that’s less ambitious. Maybe an apprenticeship at a photography studio in Gainesville. Then you could take some university courses, work your way up. Have you told your mother how you feel?”
Cara’s young face clouded. “I don’t want to hurt her feelings, but the truth is, Marcia’s not my real mother. She just likes me to call her that. She’s my foster mother. My foster dad might’ve listened, but he died five years ago. Without me, Marcia would be alone. She won’t hear of my leaving. I’ve had to respect that.”
For a moment Brandy again was a high school senior, sitting in her father’s littered study among his history and social studies books, his current events clippings and maps. “You’d be a great reporter,” he was saying, his round face aglow. “You care about words and about people. Go for it. Do your own thing, Bran.”
She had tried to please them both, taken an English degree along with communications courses with an emphasis on print journalism, and then found a job at a small newspaper. Although her father died the year she graduated, she was still trying to prove he’d been right.
“I think people should do work they enjoy,” Brandy said.
Cara stared into the growing dusk. “My foster mother doesn’t listen, and I can’t disappoint her. I owe her too much.” She lifted slender shoulders in a helpless gesture. “Truck keeps begging me to stay, too. I’m twenty-two. If I don’t get away soon, I never will.”
“Is Truck someone special? You said he was bringing you home tonight.”
Cara shrugged. “A guy I’ve known all my life.” With a slight frown, she looked away. “A friend who’d like to be a lot more. Has an oyster fishing business here. Marcia thinks he’s wonderful, mainly because he wants to keep me here, too.”
Brandy raised her eyebrows. John said she got too involved in people’s problems. He was probably right. “Maybe you should take charge of your own destiny,” she said anyway.
Cara was quiet for a few seconds. Then she straightened her shoulders and her voice dropped. “I’m not even the real Cara Waters, you know. Cara Waters is dead.”
Startled, Brandy slowed the car.
“The real Cara Waters drowned in a freak hurricane. Marcia found me like a stray kitten years later during another storm.” A sudden sharpness spiked her words. “No one knows who I am, least of all me.”
Brandy gaped at her, astonished. Had she found the lost child, if not the missing mother? Cara would be about the right age. She floundered for a response. “But you have a fine
home here. Is it important to know?”
Cara’s voice sunk almost to a whisper. “Of course it is. Somewhere I might have a father, brothers or sisters.”
Brandy noticed she did not mention a mother.
“Marcia doesn’t understand. All that matters to her is her precious pictures and her bird sanctuary. She has some kookie idea that we owe Cedar Key and nature something.”
“For what?”
“For delivering me from the hurricane. So I’ve been enlisted in her fight.”
Warnings signals were going off in Brandy’s head. Don’t jump into this problem. It’s too personal. Think of John’s advice. Marcia didn’t want to talk about the missing woman. She would certainly resent Brandy’s questions if she probed further. Better marshal a few facts first. She drove on for a few minutes in silence, casting about for another subject. Ahead she could see the dark waters of the Gulf and a tiny beach.
“I do need to ask you about a story I’m researching. Your mother said you’re familiar with Shell Mound. Tell me about the recent reports of the unexplained light. If there’s anything new, I could use it for a Halloween feature.”
Cara looked away again, perhaps let down by the shift in topics. “I guess you know Shell Mound’s a place the original Indians piled oyster and clam shells. The mounds are common along the coast. A friend told me about a story in yesterday’s Beacon. I don’t know what people see, but it must be something.” A sudden smile flitted across her heart-shaped face. “The paper said a fisherman’s wife took some kids out to Shell Mound for a picnic and stayed late. They all say they saw the round light. They piled into the car and drove home, totally psyched out.”
“You didn’t see the story yourself?”
“Marcia took the paper to the gallery. It was gone when I got there.” Brandy tried to recall the clippings in her notebook. “I believe there’s an eighteenth century woman and a dog.”
“It gets written up a lot. People claim they’ve seen a girl in a long white dress. But the main thing is the light, a bright light in place of the woman’s head.” Cara made a spreading gesture with one hand. “She’s supposed to appear for miles around the island and the Suwan-nee River, but they say she always comes back to Shell Mound.”
“There’s a wolfhound, I believe.”
Cara shrugged her narrow shoulders. “The story is, more than a hundred years ago the girl saw pirates hiding a treasure. She was caught and murdered and buried with the treasure, along with her dog. Now they’re supposed to guard the site.”
“The map shows a swamp near there,” Brandy said. “Probably the light is swamp gas, or hunters with head lamps.” She considered the subject. How could she give an old story a new slant? She shot Cara a quick, inspired glance. “Has anybody ever tried to photograph this figure or this light?”
Cara shook her head. “Not that I know of.” Her voice took on a sudden eagerness. “Maybe I could help with your story, prove what I can do. I have the equipment for night photography.” The words tumbled out. “Let’s try. The sightings usually come in a series. We’d have to stake out the place pretty late at night. I’ll take pictures and you write the story.”
“How safe would we be?”
“Safer than on the street or in a mall parking lot. Marcia sometimes carries her gun in case of rattlers. She can shoot, but I can’t. Anyway, we’ve never needed one.”
Cara’s daring surprised Brandy. Maybe the daughter had grown accustomed to tramping through the woods at night with Marcia. Brandy bit her lip. “It would be a good angle for a Halloween story, all right.”
“Tonight’s the best chance. A storm may come up later this week. I wouldn’t go then.”
Brandy sighed. “My husband’s the practical type, and cautious, but maybe I can persuade him to go with us.”
Cara looked at her watch. “Coming to dinner at the hotel? I’ll be serving in the dining room. You could let me know then.”
Her slim jaw tightened. “I won’t tell Mother. She’s never ready for me to do anything on my own. But if I could take a picture good enough for the Gainesville paper, somebody might offer me a job.” Her brown eyes shone again. “Maybe I could even do some research, begin to find out who I am.”
Brandy swung the car away from the Gulf onto Second Avenue, past white frame houses with fretwork balconies, some with side halls and open porches, all nineteenth century, all now dark.
“The St. Petersburg Times ran a story about the Shell Mound ghost about ten years ago,” she said. “A reporter found some wooden slats and old coins at the burial site and, oddly enough, the bones of a large dog.”
As they pulled up to the curb, Cara nodded and gave Brandy a searching look. She hesitated a few seconds, and then said in her soft voice, “That’s not the only unidentified skeleton around here.” She slipped out of the car, then turned back. “I’ve got to get to work now. I’ll tell you later about a really mysterious skeleton. It’s in the Cedar Key cemetery now. No one knows whose it is, but I have a theory.”
While Brandy stared after her, Cara sailed through the double doors, long hair floating behind her.
CHAPTER 3
In the lobby Brandy glanced at her watch. Five o’clock. She didn’t see Rossi or his car. She would wait until she had more facts before talking to him about Cara. Besides, the investigator hadn’t been willing to help her. From the counter she scooped up a copy of the local newspaper, scanned the Shell Mound story about the previous night’s ghostly sighting, and jotted down a staff phone number from the masthead. Because she knew the hotel did not furnish telephones in guest rooms, she stepped into a booth in the corner near the dining room and emerged a few minutes later disappointed on two counts.
The managing editor knew nothing about a missing woman and child, although he admitted the paper dated back only nine years. Also the latest witnesses to the apparition come from nearby Chiefland and rejected any further interviews. For that story, Cara’s idea for stalking the specter held the most promise.
Brandy advanced on the counter. MacGill should know if John had gone out. The hotel owner stood beside the clerk, talking to a lanky customer in a navy blazer, a blond ducktail curling over his collar. “My boat’s tied up at the Dock Street marina,” the young man was saying. “Plan to get an early start on the flats in the morning.”
The sports fisherman turned a slickly handsome face toward the clerk and grinned as she handed him a key. Behind her plastic rimmed glasses her eyes were alight. He shifted his appraising glance to Brandy, smiled, tossed the key up, caught it, and crossed to the rear of the lobby. The proprietor watched him run lightly up the stairs. “He’s from Miami Beach, he says. Came into the lounge a year ago.” MacGill thrust out his lower lip. “Lad surprised me. It’s the first time he’s stayed at the hotel.”
Brandy opened her battered notebook. “I told you I sometimes write about historic preservation. At a another time, I’d like to talk to you about the hotel.” She laid a clipping with her photograph on the counter. “My husband still around?”
He nodded toward the staircase. “Have a look on the second floor balcony. It runs along the front of the building.”
Upstairs the door to their room stood open and the soothing strains of Chopin wafted through the hall. She found John, stretched out on a bamboo sofa overlooking the inlet, absorbed in Peterson’s The Role of the Architect in Historical Restorations. A gulf breeze brushed through the cabbage palms across Second Avenue and ruffled his hair.
“About time you got back.” He looked up and caught her wrist, pulling her toward him. Maybe with Tiffany Moore out of the picture, she thought, her stock was going up. Perhaps John would even take an interest in her Cedar Key assignments.
Bending down, she kissed his forehead. “I missed you.” Gently she detached herself and looked over the railing. From the balcony she could see fishing
boats moored in the inlet, and beyond, a fringe of wooden restaurants along Dock Street. In the Gulf above Atsena Otie Key, the sky was tinged blood red.
“Rossi’s not cooperating,” she said, “and I haven’t talked to anyone who says they know about the missing woman. But lots of odd things go on in this little town. The young woman taking care of Meg says no one knows who she really is. She just turned up here during a storm when she was little. Doesn’t seem likely that two women her age—both unidentified as children—would live in a town this size. Cara wants to talk to me about an unidentified skeleton buried here, too. Maybe she thinks there’s a connection.”
John sat up, lines forking between his eyes. “Look, Bran. You get too involved in people’s lives. In the past your snooping almost got you killed.”
“But I helped solve a murder.”
He rubbed his forehead, a signal of frustration. “Promise you’ll stick to writing your assigned stories. Don’t go poking into this girl’s business.”
Brandy plumped down beside him, “Maybe you’d prefer the mystery of Shell Mound. According to the local paper, the ghost walked last night.” She tilted her face up to his. “We could explore that mystery together tonight.”
“I don’t think so.” He gave her a sly smile. “That’s not the kind of exploring I had in mind.”
Her plan for John was working fine, she thought, but at the expense of her stories. She never quite achieved a balance.
By the time Brandy had changed into her snug black and white crepe, and they had taken their seats in the dining room, darkness had descended on Cedar Key. The dry seed pods of a mimosa tree rattled against the empty verandah screen, and along the floor a clump of palmettos cast a long shadow. Because she found the town charming, she was puzzled by a sudden twinge of dread. Maybe it was the ghost talk.
Against a cypress panel wall, under one of Marcia Waters’ scenes of a prowling Florida panther, the fisherman from Miami Beach toyed with his cocktail glass. While John studied the menu, the other man raised one eyebrow and grinned at her. She looked away. Maybe tonight her dress was hooking the wrong fish.
