by JL Bryan
“Ellie?” Stacey asked. “What’s up?”
“What are you seeing over the monitors?” I asked her.
“Baby banshee is screaming, and the client’s on the way down to the basement. Where are you?”
“The next street over.”
“Town Terrace Way? Or Terrace Town Court?”
“Whatever, the one right behind the house.” I reached the empty street and stood where the apparition had been. There wasn’t even a trace of the cold spot left, just a warm early-September breeze on a summery night.
I pointed my flashlight toward the empty cul-de-sac at one end. Then I looked the other way, where the street terminated at the big roundabout at the center of the community. All the central neighborhood streets connected there. It seemed like the community was originally designed to include a few hundred homes, but only about forty houses had been completed, most of them on the streets near the impressive, columned front entrance.
“You said the clients are up?” I asked.
“If I had to guess, I’d say it’s related to the screaming in the basement,” Stacey said.
“She’s still screaming?”
“She’s gone quiet. Client is in the basement, looking at your gear, probably wondering where you are...he’s walking out the door now...”
“All right. There’s no telling where the Big Bad Wolf went. He could be anywhere.” The planned community sat on hundreds of acres, much of it still scrub and piney woods on the undeveloped northern half, which was adjacent to a federally protected wilderness area.
“Did you get a look at it?” Stacey asked.
“Just a shadow guy so far. He wants to look big and impressive. He was almost as tall as the basement ceiling the first time I saw him.” I jogged back across the red dirt of the vacant lot. Our client stood at the fence in his yard, wearing striped pajamas and thick glasses. “Hi, Tom.”
“What happened?” Tom Kozlow asked. He was lanky, twenty-seven years old, junior partner in a suburban dental practice. “It was screaming bloody murder down there. Woke up both of us.”
“Tom, what’s happening?” a woman’s voice asked, startling me.
Tom raised a cell phone. It was his wife, Ember.
“I’m trying to find out.” Tom looked at me expectantly.
“I encountered a second entity.” I spoke loud enough that Ember could hopefully hear me over the phone. I imagined her up in her bed, heavy with advanced pregnancy, listening to unexplained screams in her basement. “I pursued it back to the next street.”
“You mean there’s another ghost in our house?” Tom asked.
“I mean there was another ghost, but I don’t think it’s necessarily rooted to your house,” I said. “We need to figure out the history of this place and what was here before this development. Then we might be able to put together who these people are.”
“Did you see the one in the basement?” Ember asked over the phone.
“We picked up some thermal impressions of her.” I looked at Tom. “Would you mind opening the gate for me? I don’t know if your fence will survive me trying to climb over again.”
We returned to the basement, where the small girl ghost had vanished from her dark nook under the stairs. While Tom returned to his wife, I searched the basement again, finding a few electromagnetic residual traces, but nothing more. If the ghost was still there, she’d hidden herself extremely well.
I stayed in the basement for the rest of the night, but I didn’t hear her again.
Chapter Two
Sometimes, you get lucky and clients want to provide breakfast after you’ve been up all night watching for ghosts in their house.
Ember Kozlow didn’t move like a woman who expected to launch out a baby only days from now. She bounced on her feet as she moved around the kitchen, letting Stacey and me help only with those things she couldn’t do, like reach the griddle in a low cabinet. Ember whisked together eggs and flour, mumbling Cyndi Lauper’s “She Bop” half under her breath, as though not entirely aware she was singing out loud at all.
“I hope you kids like crepes,” she said, while rinsing blueberries. “Tom tries to keep me off my feet these days, but I’m going crazy. I miss working. I’m going back as soon as the boy’s born.” Ember was part owner, along with a couple of her college friends, of Seaside Treats, a small bakery and candy shop on River Street. She was pudgy and glowing with her advanced pregnancy.
“These look awesome,” Stacey said, accepting the first plate of blueberry crepes. “So you make candy and your husband’s a dentist. It’s like you’re in cahoots.”
“It’s a cavity conspiracy,” Ember said, with a smile and a tone that told me this was a well-worn joke in their marriage.
“Thank you,” I told Ember as she slid me some of the ultra-thin pancakes. They were delicious, doughy and sweet.
“I’m just glad to be doing something,” Ember said.
“So how did you get into the candy-slinging business, anyway?” Stacey asked.
“My mother,” Ember said. “She’s kind of a...hippie poet type. She teaches community college theater in North Carolina. How do you think I got stuck with a name like ‘Ember’?”
“I think it’s pretty,” Stacey said.
“My older brother Wolf got the worst of it,” Ember said, and I accidentally, very impolitely snorted a laugh, almost dropping a bit of partially chewed crepe out of my mouth. I covered my lips.
“Sorry,” I said.
“I know. He goes by Wally,” Ember said. “Anyway, my mom was always making little candies and brownies. I learned from her. Later, some of my college friends wanted to start a shop where we’d make chocolate and sweets from scratch right on-site, with me in charge of the kitchen.”
“Sounds like a dream job,” Stacey said. “Chocolate everywhere.”
“Packed with millions of calories.” Ember smiled. “More crepes?”
“I’m trying to keep it under a million calories today,” I said. “Thanks, though. They were really good.”
“I know, I’m scared to try your actual desserts,” Stacey said.
“What are you doing?” Tom entered the room dressed in a crisp white shirt and a muted tie. He approached Ember, who’d moved on to preparing a smoothie in the blender. “Dr. Patel said you need to rest this week.”
“We tried to help,” Stacey told him.
“I can’t just lie around all day,” Ember said. “Haven’t you ever read ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’?”
“I’ll take care of this. Go and eat.” Tom nudged her out of the way, taking control of the banana and grapes she was feeding into the blender.
Ember sighed and sat down with us, bringing her own plate of crepes with her.
“How soon can you get rid of the thing in our basement?” Tom asked me.
“We’re going to research the history of the land,” I said. “If we can identify these ghosts, then we’ll know how to bait the traps and catch them. I’m guessing there must have been a farm on the land before, although this far north of the city, it might have been just raw woods before the developers built your neighborhood. Do you have any idea why the developer stopped building?”
“They ran out of money.” Tom ran the blender briefly, then poured a tall smoothie and served it to his wife, kissing her on the cheek. “They had all these plans at the beginning, you know, an old-fashioned front-porch community, sidewalks, common areas. Neighborhood softball team on the baseball field they never built, over by the picnic pavilion that doesn’t exist. Did you see the retail strip near the entrance?”
“It looks like a ghost town,” I said.
“It was supposed to be like our little downtown, with restaurants and shopping in walking distance of your home. It never opened. Now they’ve got it blocked off with traffic cones. You should see the old brochures.” Tom laughed and shook his head.
“I’d really like that,” I said.
“They’re upstairs in the office--” Ember began
to stand, but Tom stopped her.
“Stay. I’ll get them.” Tom hurried past her toward the front stairs.
“Did you just tell me to ‘stay’ like a dog?” she called after him.
“That’s a good girl!” he called back, and she scowled, tightening her grip on her fork.
Tom returned with three full-color brochures, which I unfolded and spread out on the kitchen table. The spacious room had big windows admitting more and more sunlight as the day broke around us. Outside, I could see a pleasant suburban street, the ornate lamps spaced along the sidewalks fading as the neighbors climbed into their trucks and SUVs for their morning commute. The lawns were bright green and landscaped with young trees and flowering shrubs, the two-story houses essentially carbon copies of each other, with just the gables and porches rearranged for a little variety.
This was the kind of street advertised in the brochure, which consisted of more artists’ renditions than photographs. The developers seemed to imagine a small-town atmosphere, populated by blond Abercrombie & Fitch models who liked to wave at each other while walking dogs and blond children past each other’s front porches.
Step into an earlier, simpler time, one brochure said. An old-fashioned community, built on traditional values. The neighborhood barbecue. Christmas carols. Fireworks on the Fourth of July. Softball and swim teams for the kids. Shopping and dining. Town Village: Convenience. Comfort. Community.
Another brochure showed the “retail village” area, designed to look like the brick storefronts of any small American town circa 1951. The fictional businesses catering to the Ambercrombie models included a beauty salon, barbershop (with spiral pole, naturally), and a corner drugstore where cheerful kids drank malts at the counter, dressed in their Norman Rockwell Sunday best.
Town Village Park, the big circle of piney woods at the center of the community, was illustrated with a nature trail running through a botanical garden, as well as a bandstand, a duck pond, a large playground and baseball diamond complete with dugouts and a concession stand, and other features that clearly did not exist.
“So you don’t think any of this will ever be built?” I asked Tom.
“If it ever happened, I’d go into severe shock.” He buttoned his shirt cuff.
“But you bought the house anyway.”
“Oh, yeah. For a hundred and twenty-five thousand less than the original asking price.” He winked at Ember. “Now I have to go stare into some dirty yellow mouths all day to pay for it. Do you need anything before I go?”
“Just one thing,” she said with a smile, and he bent down to kiss her.
Stacey gave me an aww look, and I rolled my eyes a little.
“Good luck with the ghosts,” Tom said, glancing at Stacey and me on his way out.
“We’d better get going, too,” I said. “We’ll figure out our plan of attack and return this evening. By then, we should have a better idea of who these ghosts are. Ember, do you know whether any of your neighbors have experienced unusual activity in their homes?”
“I guess I could ask a couple of people.” Ember didn’t seem thrilled with the idea.
“These ghosts might be wandering freely across the neighborhood,” I said.
“Well, they need to wander a little farther from my house. There are plenty of empty houses around here. Why do they need mine?”
“One possibility is that the little girl ghost might be drawn to you,” I said. “If she feels lost and scared, she might see you as a mother figure.”
“Oh.” Ember glanced down at her swollen belly. “That kind of makes me sad.”
“We’ll find out more as soon as we can.” I stood up. Stacey and I rinsed our plates in her sink before she could stop us and insist on doing it herself. “It’s best if you avoid the ghost. It might feed on your energy. If you hear it crying, stay away from it. Don’t try to interact with it.”
“Hurry back,” Ember said. “I’m not thrilled about sitting around this house alone, even in the daytime. I just keep expecting to hear her scream.”
Stacey and I left our gear set up in the house. We pulled out of the driveway, both of us ready to head home and nap for the morning.
“So what do you think we’re dealing with here?” Stacey asked, looking out the window as we drove southward down Town Village Boulevard, flanked by cheerful white houses and green lawns. It was the central road of the community, taking us past the ghost town of the two-story, never-opened retail village, identified by a hand-carved wooden sign as “Town Village Main Street.”
We reached the front of the development, embellished with three-story brick towers featuring fluted columns and inaccessible decorative balconies. It was a pretty fancy facade for a community that largely consisted of dirt, weeds, and broken promises.
“I’m guessing an old farm,” I said. “A large male who used to abuse and terrify a little girl. That’s the general pattern we’re looking for.”
“Should we call in Jacob?”
“Not until we know where to look. Town Village covers hundreds of acres. That could take him days of wandering around, unless we can figure out where any old houses used to stand.”
“To the library!” Stacey said, doing her best to sound enthusiastic. She hated digging into old tax records, land titles and all the exciting lost paperwork of history.
“I’d rather you spend some time going through our recordings. See if Moaning Myrtle answered any of my questions.”
“That could take hours...”
“I’ll go to the library while you do that.”
“Woo-hoo!” Stacey said. “I mean, uh, shucks. No library dust for me today.” She gave a mock frown.
We drove south—our clients lived in the Port Wentworth area, about fifteen miles north of downtown.
I dropped Stacey off, then headed home, which for me is a narrow brick loft in an old glass factory. There are some very fancy converted-loft communities for wealthy young professionals around the city. Mine isn’t one of them.
I fed my cat, Bandit, and took a few hours to rest. Then I hopped into my old black Camaro, which I’d inherited from my dad after my parents died, and drove to the city archives. I spent a few hours there, and then a few more at the Bull Street library.
When the library closed for the afternoon, I went to meet Stacey at the Eckhart Investigations office, located in an ugly cinderblock building next to a car wrecker place. But, hey, the rent’s cheap.
In the big workshop in the back, Stacey’s face glowed in the blue light of three monitors arrayed around her at the video editing station. Calvin, our semiretired boss, sat behind her, his loyal bloodhound Hunter puddled on the floor beside him, lazily flicking his tail and looking bored.
“Ellie, you have to hear this,” Stacey said.
“Did we pick up some anomalies?” I climbed onto the very uncomfortable wooden stool beside her.
“Maybe it’s just static, but I want to hear your opinion.” On the screen, a greenish video version of me walked through our clients’ basement, looking like a weird apparition myself on the night vision while I questioned the crying ghost.
“Here.” Stacey gestured to another screen, full of squiggly digital graphs of sound waves recorded by the high-powered microphone. She indicated a big spike near the middle. “Listen close and tell me if you hear anything.”
The video skipped ahead, showing me from a fairly unflattering angle while I talked to a corner of the basement.
“Why are you here?” the video-recorded me asked.
The voice that answered was like a cold hiss of air, raising bumps all along my back: “They died.”
I almost fell off the stool.
“That was not static, Stacey,” I said.
“I didn’t want to raise your expectations too high,” she said. “I thought it would be a nice surprise.”
Yeah, like finding your cat left a dead chipmunk on your doorstep. “I’m glad you found something. Is there more?”
“Just on
e more thing.” Stacey selected another audio clip, and the video jumped to a moment when I was passing by the stairs.
“What do you want?” I asked. “What are you doing in this house?”
“Hiding.” A single word, clear as a rattlesnake on a quiet night.
“Wish I could’ve asked follow-up questions,” I said. “What else?”
“Some visuals.” Stacey showed me the thermal video of the huge, dark mass filling the basement from floor to ceiling around the door. A night vision frame showed a suggestive outline of someone standing there—just a shoulder and arm shape, and a line where the brim of a hat would have been.
“That’s the guy I followed outside,” I said.
“Any leads on his identity?” Calvin asked.
“Just a heap of information,” I said. “The land was originally part of a grant to a man named Joseph Thorburn. Scottish guy. He focused on the area along the river, though, growing mulberries and trying to cultivate silkworms—it was called Silkgrove Plantation.”
“The ruins are still there,” Calvin said, nodding. “Just north of the lumber-processing plant.”
“The Town Village development is a little back from the river. It was pretty much wilderness until the...” I opened a thick folder of photocopies and print-outs from the library. “Until 1809, when it was sold to the Whalen family, who had a farm on the place where Town Village is now.”
“So who got murdered?” Stacey said. I gave her a puzzled look, and she shrugged. “That’s how these things usually go, right?”
“The Whalens lived there for a few generations,” I said. “A number of children died young, which was normal for the nineteenth century. I did find a woman who died at the age of twenty-two, after having three children—Rose Whalen—and her husband re-married.”
“But we’re looking for a little girl, right?” Stacey asked.
“It could be an adult woman who was small. I do have the names of several girls who died of illness or accidents,” I said. “There’s something else interesting. The old maps show a rail line running through that property, on the wooded north side. I dug into that and found it was built by the Georgia Canal and Railroad Company in 1851, the first line to connect Savannah with Charleston.”
