by JL Bryan
Stacey showed the scene on her laptop. First, she ran the night vision clip, where all we could really see was the game objects moving by themselves. I pointed out the little orbs that winked in and out around the moving objects.
When the tall shadow-man arrived, it barely registered on camera. Toolie and Gord watched me stand, frozen in fear, while a vague outline of a man faded in and out of view. At one point, a greenish thread blinked over to the Candy Land game board to flip it off the coffee table, and that was the only hint of his bizarre weapon on the night vision.
Then Stacey played the same clip in thermal, so they could see the bluish boy-shapes and hear the snatch of laughter she’d caught on the microphone.
“My word,” Toolie whispered. “Those are the boys Crane’s been talking about this whole time?”
“We believe so, but we can’t be one hundred percent certain yet,” I said. “We’re going to visit the Historical Association in a little while for some more research on the Ridley family.” I checked the time. We needed to meet Grant in about an hour and a half.
On the screen, the two light blue shapes flew up into the ceiling. The shadow-man we believed to be Isaiah Ridley entered, a tall purple-black shape that filled the living room with deep blue cold.
“That’s him,” Toolie whispered. “Isn’t it? The one I saw upstairs?”
Gord gave her a questioning look, but didn’t say anything. I guessed a private conversation about Toolie’s encounter would happen a bit later, when Stacey and I weren’t around.
“He came from the crafts room, Mrs. Paulding,” Stacey said. “I don’t have that clip separated out for you yet, but I watched him open the door and walk toward the stairs. Well, he kind of drifted...”
“There was a hole in his head.” I pointed to my left temple. “And the right side of his face was shattered. He was all covered in dirt, so it was hard to see very much, but that seems consistent with a man who shot himself. So I really think this is Isaiah.”
“Four ghosts,” Toolie said, shaking her head.
“You mean three and a...half,” Gord said. “The poltergeist isn’t really a...ghost.”
Stacey and I smiled at his little joke, which seemed to cheer him up for the moment.
“That’s right, Mr. Paulding,” I said. “I have to say that I’m most concerned about Isaiah himself. Clearly, he can interact with physical objects in a forcible way. The other two ghosts, possibly his own sons, seem afraid of him. He has that odd weapon, which to me indicates he may have beaten his children with a belt. I’d like to go ahead and construct a trap for him, try to get him out of your house and on his way.”
“Oh, yes, please.” Toolie all but sighed the words, and she looked relieved. “Can you do that tonight?’
“Stacey and I will need to poke around in your attic,” I said. “If we can find any objects of personal significance to Isaiah, it would help us bait the trap.”
“Oh, yes, do what you need to do,” Toolie said. “Let me know if I can help.”
“Do you know if there might be anything left from the Ridley family?”
“If there is, it must be in some of those old trunks at the very back,” Toolie said. “It’s a mess up there. I usually only go far enough to grab the Christmas stockings or Easter baskets.”
“We’ll have a look,” I said.
On the screen, we watched Juniper take her tests. After the Zener cards, there was a test where Calvin spun a color wheel with a pointer on one side, Wheel-of-Fortune-style, and she had to guess which color the pointer indicated when the wheel stopped. After a number of repetitions, they switched to a test involving a series of little boxes, each with an animal figurine inside, and she had to guess which animal was in which box.
Finally, there was a telekinesis test. After sliding the screen out of the way, Calvin placed one tiny object after another on the table—a shirt button, a thimble, and so on—and encouraged her to focus on them and try to move them with her mind.
None of them budged.
The testing lasted for more than an hour, after which Calvin and Juniper joined us in the kitchen. Juniper looked exhausted, like she’d just completed a thousand-page math test filled with convoluted word problems.
“How did it go?” Toolie asked. Juniper shrugged and grabbed a Sprite from the refrigerator.
“I haven’t compiled all the numbers yet,” Calvin said. “I’ll need to add up—”
“I sucked at it,” Juniper said. “I totally failed.”
“There’s no reason to get upset,” Toolie said.
“This won’t take long.” Calvin added up the scores from the Zener-card test. “Since there are five cards, a score of twenty percent is considered the same as random chance. Yours was...” He tapped the numbers into his calculator. “Twenty-four point three seven...just a bit above average.”
“Yay,” Juniper said sarcastically, leaning against the counter. “Watch out, everybody, I’m slightly above average.”
“So what does that mean?” I asked. “You don’t think she’s creating the poltergeist?”
“It seems less likely than before,” Calvin said. “What about your other child? I understand he may have interacted with two of the ghosts.”
“You mean Crane?” Toolie asked. “You think he’s making the poltergeist?”
“I’m just gathering information,” Calvin told her. “As long as I’m here, it might be a good thing for me to test him, if y’all don’t mind.”
“We have to meet Grant soon...” I checked the time on my phone. “Should I tell him we’ll be late?”
“Let’s see if I can even get Crane to work with us,” Toolie said while pushing herself to her feet. “He’s been in a mood lately.”
“He’s a little pest,” Juniper said.
“Juniper, do you fight with your brother very often?” Calvin asked.
“Like feral cats and rabid dogs,” Toolie muttered as she left the room.
“Well, it’s his fault! He’s always bugging me and trying to take my stuff,” Juniper said. “I just want him to leave me alone.”
“If he has some unresolved anger toward you, that could explain why the poltergeist seems to be focused on you,” Calvin said.
“Whoa, wait.” Juniper scowled. “You mean my little brother is attacking me with a poltergeist? I swear, I’m going to give him the worst Indian burn ever.”
“It’s not intentional,” I said.
“If the poltergeist is drawing energy from Crane, and Crane is angry at you, it could simply be absorbing that anger. And harassing you as a result,” Calvin said.
“I knew it wasn’t my fault!” Juniper looked triumphant as Toolie returned with a very reluctant Crane. The seven-year-old frowned at all of us, his dark eyes odd and solemn.
“Crane, this is Mr. Eckhart, a detective,” Toolie said. “He’s going to play some games with you.”
“Why does he want to play games with a little kid?” Crane asked. I admit, I had to bite my lip to avoid laughing.
“It’s a kind of test, like in school,” Toolie said. “Only you don’t get a grade. Just try for me, sweetie.”
Crane gave a big sigh, but he accompanied his mom and Calvin into the dining room.
Stacey and I had to leave in a few minutes, but we watched the beginning of the session along with Toolie, Gord, and Juniper, who leaned over my chair to watch over my shoulder.
“Star,” Crane said on the screen, correctly identifying the card my boss had just drawn. “Waves. Square. Square. Circle.”
The five of us grew silent and still. We could see the cards on the video.
“Cross. Waves.” Crane said. We could hear some rustling on his side of the balsa-wood screen, but we couldn’t see him. His voice grew more and more agitated. “Star! Cross! Waves!”
“Is he...?” Toolie asked, clearly unsure how to finish her sentence.
Crane had correctly identified eight of the ten cards. He kept going for three or four more, then an
nounced “I’m done!”
“We still have a few more--” Calvin began.
“I don’t want to play anymore!” We heard his footsteps thumping rapidly toward us, and then the dining-room door opened and Crane ran to his mom. “I’m all done!”
“Crane, maybe you should go back and finish,” Toolie said.
“No. Luke and Noah want me to come play with them. They’re in my closet.” Crane dashed away. His footsteps echoed through the hall as he ran upstairs.
“That’s a shame.” Calvin rolled through the open door to join us.
“I’m so sorry,” Toolie said. “I think he got uncomfortable.”
“He said Noah and Luke called him away,” I told Calvin.
“Eleven out of fourteen.” Calvin shook his head. “That’s about seventy-nine percent. Of course, the test is inconclusive, the sample size too small--”
“But you’re thinking yes,” I interrupted.
“I’m thinking yes,” Calvin agreed, looking at the parents. “Added together with his apparent ability to see and hear at least two of the ghosts, I’d say your son is psychically gifted.”
“Oh, come on!” Juniper snapped. “What does he have to beat me at this?”
“It’s not about beating you, Junie--” Toolie began.
“It shouldn’t even count! He didn’t even finish the stupid test, and I sat in there forever!” Juniper gave the fed-up ugh grunt of a deeply annoyed teenage girl as she left the room, shaking her head.
“So...” Gord said. “Time to sign Crane up...for tai’ chi?”
“It wouldn’t be a bad idea at all,” Calvin said. “This may get complicated, though.”
“Get complicated?” Toolie asked. “When was it simple?”
“Poltergeists are most commonly associated with adolescent girls,” Calvin said. “We can speculate about why, but that’s what the data shows. Those associated with teenage boys tend be less pronounced, less high-energy, as if there’s less emotional power behind them. Now, it’s very rare for a child of Crane’s age, seven or eight, to produce a poltergeist—but when they do...it can be unusually powerful.”
“What does...that mean for us?” Gord asked.
“It still means we need Crane to stop feeding the poltergeist, through the methods we mentioned earlier, but it could take longer to accomplish,” Calvin said. “If you stop feeding it, the poltergeist will go dormant or dissipate in time. Your boy will have to cooperate, though.”
“We’ll do what we can,” Toolie said.
“Holy cow, we’re running late, Ellie!” Stacey announced, pointing to the time on her laptop screen. “We have to meet Grant in five seconds...and....now we’re late.”
“Sorry, we need to run,” I told them. “We’ll be back tonight to observe, and to rummage around your attic.” I turned to Calvin. “Are you ready to go, too?” I was really asking whether he wanted me to help him load the wheelchair into the truck again.
“As long as I’m here, I’d like to ask a few more questions,” Calvin said. “And maybe we can convince the boy to come back down.”
“I’ll do my best.” Toolie wished us well before leaving the room to go after him.
Calvin nodded at me. He could fold up his wheelchair and pull it up into the truck with him, but it was a little extra trouble.
“Okay, good luck,” I said.
Stacey said cheerful good-byes to both of them. We’d had a small break in the case, at least. Maybe Grant would have something more for us.
We took Stacey’s car, and she drove to the old mansion housing the Savannah Historical Association as fast as she could.
Chapter Ten
The Association occupies a three-story Federal-style mansion on Drayton Street, its front door looking out onto the sprawling lawn of Forsyth Park, the largest of the many parks downtown. It’s a beautiful structure, gray brick with white and black trim, a little reminiscent of the Paulding family house but much larger, without the ornate touches of pilasters and columns. A practical place for serious scholarship. A widow’s walk on the roof, surrounded by black iron railings, offers a fourth-floor view of the park and the city around it.
The house was donated to the Association by one of its founders, a woman named Mariel Lancashire, who never married or had children and spent her days fighting against demolition of the city’s more historic buildings. She left the mansion in her will with the stipulation that it be devoted to “sober research and learning for the ennobling of the human spirit.”
We parked on the shady side street behind the old mansion, walked through a garden planted with roses and hydrangeas in full bloom, and climbed the steps to the back porch, where we rang the rear doorbell. The Association was closed on the weekends—and wasn’t open very long on weekdays, either, unless there was an event or you had an appointment. Grant, fortunately, had his own key and could come and go as he pleased.
Grant opened the door with a smile, dressed in a white summer suit with a baby-blue silk tie and matching handkerchief. In his late fifties, Grant was always spotlessly dressed and impeccably groomed, his shoes polished into black mirrors, each graying hair on his head in place as if an invisible hairdresser ghost followed him around at all times.
“Good evening, ladies,” he said, stepping aside for us to enter. “Fashionably late. I approve.”
“Sorry, Grant,” I told him. “We were tied up with a client.”
“Sounds like quite an adventure.” Grant locked the back door behind us. “Worthy of Indiana Jones himself.”
“Very funny. It’s always so nice in here.” We’d stepped into a rear gallery hung with portraits of city notables, like town founder James Oglethorpe, Girl Scout founder Juliet Gordon Lowe, writer Flannery O’ Connor, and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
The air was cool from the air conditioning, but also unusually crisp and light because of the mansion’s dehumidifiers, which help preserve the vast collection of old books, maps, and papers against the heavy, damp Georgia air.
“Let’s hear your story,” Grant said. He led us up the back stairs, made of wide hardwood steps polished to a high gleam, much like his shoes. “I want all the spine-tingling details.”
While he led us into an archive room, with shelves and shelves of paperwork stored in plastic bins surrounding a few round cherry work tables that were probably worth thousands of dollars each, I gave him some details of our current case and the ghosts we were facing.
“A poltergeist?” he asked, raising an eyebrow. “How dark and Germanic.” Grant gestured to one of the tables and lifted the lid off a clear plastic tub. “I know, these plastic containers aren’t as romantic as the old chests and crumbling leather valises in which the old documents tend to arrive...they’re a bit Hobby Lobby, in fact...but they’re much more useful for preservation.”
Grant eased out a few yellowed documents, while Stacey and I sat in the high-backed chairs at the table.
“Your friend Isaiah had a busy life before it was cut short,” he said, easing into the chair across from us. “Here we have a variety of legal documents...there’s an investor’s prospectus for the Georgia Canal and Railroad Company, for instance...Isaiah was described as a tall man with a severe look. Fond of horse racing, apparently. Merciless in his business dealings.”
“What about the letters?” I asked. “You mentioned his wife’s letters.”
Grant sighed. “Always trying to skip to the juicy parts. Can’t I present this in my own melodramatic, drawn-out fashion?”
“Normally that would be great, but we have to get back to our clients’ house and dig around in their haunted attic,” I said. “I’d like to do that before sunset if we can.”
“You don’t have much time,” Grant said, checking his watch. It was an antique wind-up, no doubt some expensive heirloom one of his ancestors had probably purchased in Switzerland. “How unfortunate for me. I wish I had clients with such interesting problems, instead of dowagers endlessly revising their wills to puni
sh this or that grandchild.” Grant is a semi-practicing attorney, trading on his old family name to do business with other old-money types in town.
“Come with us on a ghost hunt sometime,” I offered.
“I’ll consider it.” He brought out an old folder tied with string and carefully opened it, revealing a stack of yellowed, hand-written pages. “Catherine Ridley’s letters to her sister,” he said. “As promised, I’ve made an attempt to arrange them in order. The papers were scrambled, and of course only the first page of each letter actually has the date inscribed upon it...”
“I really appreciate it, Grant,” I said. “You mentioned the last letter in particular?”
“I believe it’s the last letter. Towards the end, she takes less care about little niceties like dating the letters, and her handwriting grows more frantic and difficult to read.” Grant pulled on latex gloves and used rubber-tipped tweezers to gently draw the last few pages out of the folder.
“What are the gloves for?” Stacey asked.
“To avoid damaging the paper with my wonderful natural oils,” he said.
“Does that mean we have to wear them, too?” she asked.
“Only if you intend to touch anything in this room.” Grant turned the pages to face me, then passed me the tweezers. I opened and closed them nervously while I read.
Or struggled to read, I should say, because Catherine’s handwriting really was difficult. The faded cursive letters, leaning sharply forward as though she’d scrawled out the letter in a blind panic, weren’t easy to decipher, especially on yellowing old paper. Grant clicked on the high-powered desk lamp built into the table, which was mounted on a movable mechanical support arm alongside a big magnifying glass. For just such occasions, I assumed.
“Thank you,” I said, leaning forward to adjust the glass and peer through it.
“What does it say?” Stacey asked.
“You might begin with the second paragraph,” Grant suggested.
