by JL Bryan
We stood quietly in the darkness, watching, hearing only the slow lapping sound of the river.
“Maggie?” I called out, the name of the female train robber. “Maggie Fannon?”
“There,” Stacey whispered, pointing.
It took me a moment to notice the tiny light, moving among the collapsed buildings like a glowing red firefly. It wasn’t alongside the tracks anymore.
I started after it, trudging through the waist-high weeds. The others began to follow me, but I motioned for them to stop. I wanted to check out the ghost without spooking it away.
The tiny light led me to one of the many small, mostly collapsed buildings. This one was made of rocks, maybe some kind of old smokehouse. A live oak had grown up behind it, its heavy limbs wrapped around the sides and top of the little building like the fingers of a giant’s clutching hand. The growing tree had applied enough pressure over the years to tilt the building forward, so that the empty front doorway and what remained of the front wall actually leaned toward the ground.
Overall, it looked like the sort of building that would immediately collapse on your head and crush your skull if you poked around inside it.
The red light slipped inside through the tilted cavity of the door. Of course. I sighed as I approached the building.
The front wall was tilted so far over that I had to drop to my hands and knees to look inside. A curtain of vines and moss blocked my view. I used my unlit flashlight to rip and pull them out of the way, worried I would rip some critical vine or root that was quietly holding the old rock building together, and the entire precariously balanced front wall would crash down around me.
“Ellie?” Stacey whispered, approaching me. “Be careful. You’re not going in there, are you?”
I shushed her and looked into the darkness inside the building. I couldn’t see anything in there—no moonlight was leaking in from above.
I was just about to click my flashlight to life when the red glow returned. It was just a burning pinpoint at first, but this time it quickly flared and spread to form an irregular shape about the size of a burning human head, floating in the darkness just a few feet from me, while I crouched under a ton of unreliable rocks.
My mouth opened, and it was equally likely that I was about to ask a question or scream.
Then it flared a little brighter, and I saw that it wasn’t a head or a face—our brains just tend to interpret shapes that way. It’s one reason people sometimes think they have ghosts when all they have is an active imagination.
The shape was a rock, and in its faint glow I could see the edges of other rocks around it. It looked like a giant red-hot coal, though it didn’t give off any heat.
Then it went dark, and I could see nothing at all.
“Maggie?” I whispered.
Maggie, or whoever the spirit was, didn’t respond, not even a tiny dot of red in the darkness.
I clicked on my flashlight, revealing a slag-heap of rocks that had once formed the back wall, before weather and the pressure of the growing tree had conspired to shatter it. I could see the dark bulge of the tree trunk behind the pile, near the top. The limbs and remnants of the roof created a solid canopy overhead, sealing out any light from above.
Slowly, I reached toward the rock that had glowed. It had been a searing red a moment earlier, but my fingers found it just as cold as any of the stones around it. My fingertips left deep trails in the dust on its surface.
“Ellie?” Stacey whispered from outside.
“One sec.” I pushed and pulled on the rock. The thing was heavy, but I managed to partially dislodge it, drawing it forward a few inches.
Small rocks and broken pebbles of old cement rolled down from the slag-heap behind it, immediately filling in the small gap I’d just opened. I saw how this was going to go.
“Michael, want to come in and give me a hand?”
“I’d rather you came out,” he replied, but he dropped to his hands and knees and crawled in with me. Jacob and Stacey hung back, away from the crash zone of the front wall if it decided to flop over. They shone their lights in at us.
“Is there any chance we can move this without creating a rock slide?” I indicated the stone that had glowed.
Michael looked it over, then studied the heap built up behind it.
“It’s going to take a minute,” he said, lifting smaller rocks from high on the pile. “You should step outside.”
“Or stay and help,” I said, taking a few stones from the heap and laying them near the wall.
“You should let me do that,” Jacob said, but there was no room for an extra person inside the tiny half-collapsed building.
“Maybe in a minute. I’ve been...” I grunted, moving another rock aside. “I’ve been meaning to do some...weight training. Just let us know if anything looks like might it come crashing down.”
Michael and I continued to work at it, clearing away the rocks higher on the heap so they wouldn’t slide down. Finally, Michael rolled aside the head-sized rock. I picked up my flashlight and pointed it at the area beneath it.
More rocks.
“Looks like a bust,” Michael said.
“Let’s keep digging.” I took hold of another hefty rock, and he had to help me move it aside.
“What are we looking for, anyway?” Michael asked.
“In my experience, probably human remains,” I said. “We might find a crushed skull or some vertebrae.”
“Oh, good, I was worried it might be something scary,” he said, lifting more rocks and stacking them near the wall on his side.
“But you called Maggie’s name,” Stacey said from outside. “Didn’t she die in New Orleans? Like a thousand miles away? Why would she be buried here?”
“Maybe Jill-o’-lantern isn’t Maggie,” I said, panting heavily now. I wiped my sweaty face on my denim jacket sleeve.
Michael moved another sizable rock, revealing something dark and solid underneath.
“Doesn’t look like a skull to me,” he said. I pointed my flashlight. It was filthy, dusty dark brown material.
Michael had to move a few more rocks to reveal the entire object. It looked like a very old canvas satchel, tied tight.
“Maybe the bones are inside,” I said.
“What’s going on, you guys?” Stacey asked. “We can’t see anything.”
“Hold your horses.” I held my light steady while Michael carefully unwound the two tight knots holding the satchel closed. Then he lifted the flap and looked inside.
His eyes widened.
“Well?” I asked. “Is it a leprechaun? What’s in there?”
“It’s...money. Kind of.” Michael reached inside and drew out a small stack of green bills bundled together. “I’m not sure if it’s real.”
He passed me the faded, stiff green certificates. The one on top had the number 20 in each corner, but it was issued by “The Merchants National Bank of Savannah.” In 1902. With a picture of a guy I didn’t recognize at all, a graying man with enormous sideburns.
“Who the heck is Hugh McCulloch?” I asked.
“Maybe he’s the inventor of the muttonchop,” Michael guessed.
“Abraham’s Lincoln’s treasury secretary,” Jacob said from outside the building.
“So is it real money or not?” Michael asked.
“I’ll have to ask my accountant.” I replaced the stiff, brittle money and lifted the satchel away, revealing nothing but more rocks and dust.
We crawled out and away from the slanted building, and I felt the relief of open sky above my head. I stood and handed Jacob a stack of bundled bills. “What do you think?”
“I want to see the funny money, too,” Stacey said, leaning close to him.
“Be gentle with it,” I said, passing her another stack. “It feels like it’ll crumble if you squeeze it too hard.”
“Third National Bank of Atlanta,” Stacey read from a fifty-dollar bill at the top of her stack.
“Second National Bank
of Nashville,” Jacob said, studying his stack of hundreds.
“Could we actually cash these in?” Stacey asked.
“I’m not sure,” Jacob said. “They’re older than the Federal Reserve system, so they might just be worthless paper. Maybe the Treasury would still accept them. I’ll have to look it up.”
“Still, pretty neat,” Stacey said. “Buried treasure.”
“I don’t think the ghost showed it to us so we could go on a shopping spree at the mall,” I said.
“No kidding,” Stacey said. “Who goes to the mall anymore?”
Michael, who’d been rummaging inside the satchel, came up with a small leather pouch tied with a string. Its sides bulged out, and it jingled as he moved it.
“Sounds promising,” he said. He drew the string and shook out a few coins into his palm.
They were five-dollar coins, with an eagle on one side and a picture of Lady Liberty on the other. Their dates were mostly in the 1890’s. They were solid gold.
“Five bucks,” Michael said. “We could get a Value Meal at Wendy’s.”
“How many are in there?” I asked.
He shook the bag. “Twenty or thirty, I think. So, what do we do? Count it up and divide four ways?”
“Keep it all together,” I said, taking the bag of coins back from him. I gestured for Jacob and Stacey to replace their cash, too. “It might be worthless paper now, but the ghosts don’t know that. This money is part of the case. It’s the reason the case exists at all. It’s what the robbery was about.”
“I don’t get it,” Stacey said. “How is all the money still here? It’s hard to believe.”
“The only member of the gang who lived was Maggie Fannon, and I think she’s the one who led us here. She must have hidden the money.”
“She must have been pretty strong to move all those rocks.”
“Or she caused a little avalanche while burying the satchel.” I looked back at the old building. “I guess the ruins kept the weather off. And this canvas must be pretty tough.”
“And nobody ever poked around back here? Anytime in the last hundred years?” Michael asked.
“It’s been part of the national wildlife refuge since the nineteen-twenties,” Stacey said.
“We wouldn’t have found it without the ghost,” I said. “Now we have to figure out what she wants us to do with it. Maggie, are you still there?”
I looked around the ruins, but saw no hint of the little red light. I handed Michael the satchel and drew out my thermal goggles. No sign of the ghost.
“Okay.” I replaced my goggles and nodded at Michael. “Now you have something to carry. You are hereby made the treasurer of this expedition.”
“Does that mean I have to grow sideburns?”
“Are you besmirching the hallowed memory of Hugh McCulloch?”
“Only the memory of his facial hair.” Michael began to pull the old satchel’s strap over his head.
“Support it with your arms, too,” I said. “It could rupture.”
“Either trust me as your treasurer or nominate someone else,” Michael said, but he did as I said, supporting the bottom of the bag with his arm rather than trusting the old strap.
We began our return hike, back out the gate—I was even feeling public-spirited enough to replace the padlock—and then along the tracks through the woods. After we’d passed the industrial area, we slipped through the trees and emerged behind the shady strip mall where Stacey had parked her car.
She looked relieved when we found it waiting in the parking lot, perfectly intact. We quickly loaded our stuff and climbed inside.
“So, great hike, everybody,” Stacey said as she pulled out onto the road. “Saw some ghosts. Found some cash. We made some real progress on the case. Uh, didn’t we?”
“Possibly,” I said. “Now I know what our banshee looks like, if we run into her again.” I described what I’d seen after touching the rails.
As I spoke, I kept glancing at the road behind us, feeling like someone was watching me. I wondered if we’d brought a presence along with the old money, maybe the ghost of Maggie.
A car was behind us, though the road was otherwise deserted. It felt like they were watching us, but that could have been my paranoid imagination. After we made a turn, I watched behind us again. A pair of headlights rounded the turn after us, just before our road curved us out of sight, keeping their distance but moving in the same direction.
“What are you looking at?” asked Michael, sitting in the back seat behind me.
“Can you tell what kind of car is behind us?”
“I don’t see one.”
“Just wait.”
I caught more glimpses of the headlights, but the car stayed back, mostly keeping itself out of sight behind the last curve or turn.
I had Stacey pull into the first well-lit parking lot we saw—a Waffle House—and wait there a moment. The car eventually showed up, slowed briefly, then picked up speed. A black Acura sedan.
“Follow that car,” I said. “It’s our turn to spy on them.”
“Are you sure they were following us?” Stacey pulled into a parking spot, then reversed, but cut it too widely and had to pull up again.
“You could tail them a little closer,” I said.
“Sorry, I missed car-chase day in detective school.” Stacey finally managed to turn her hybrid SUV around and nosed back out onto the road, where a red light promptly stopped us.
“Do I run it?” Stacey said.
“If you get a ticket, we can cover it out of that bag of cash.”
Stacey hesitated, then stomped the gas and ran through the red light, since no cars were approaching. The Acura was out of sight, though, gone like another ghost into the night.
Chapter Sixteen
When I returned to the Kozlows’ basement, the motion detector noticed my presence and the array of lights sprang to life. I turned them off. There were still no messages from Tom or Ember, so either the ghosts had left them alone or our defenses had warded them off.
Jacob and Michael had gone home. Michael had offered to stay, but I knew his younger sister was at home by herself, and I still had reservations about the supernatural darkness that lay beneath his apartment house, sealed for now under lead and steel and a demonologist’s rite. For whatever that was worth. I’d encouraged Michael to move away, just to be safe, but he hadn’t done it yet.
Stacey sat out in the van, reviewing footage and audio captured by our gear while we were away at the tracks. I sat on my air mattress in the clients’ basement, finally getting some time to catch up on the folders of information Grant had collected for us. My top priority was to learn about the victims of the train robbery so I could identify the ghosts.
I read about:
Dr. George Canton, 64, and his wife Ethel, 61, had died from burns and shrapnel. Both were on their way home to Charleston from Savannah. This sounded like the well-dressed older couple Jacob had mentioned.
Ronald Abbot, 26, sales agent for the Albany Pecan Company, made me think of the cocky young man in the suit Jacob had described. A pair of sisters—Margaret Knowles Davenport, 31, and Minnie Knowles, 35, also fit his description. Both were originally from Savannah, but the younger, married sister had lived in Charlotte, North Carolina with her husband and six children, according to the newspaper death notice Grant had copied for me.
Finally, I reached Sophia Preston, age eight, traveling alone. Like the others, she’d died of severe burns and shrapnel from the dynamite explosion in the passenger car. The newspaper reports gave few details, but between my experiences and Jacob’s, it seemed she had been recently orphaned and was being sent away, perhaps to live with family in another city. She would have died feeling sad and alone, and had been trapped in those feelings ever sense—even learning to use them as a weapon to feed on the living.
I felt sorry for the little girl who’d grown into a banshee after death. Like me, she’d lost her parents at a young age—even younger
than I had—and become a burden to be dropped on distant relatives. I wanted to help her.
I had to remind myself that the living came first, that it was unacceptable for the banshee to still be hanging around to feed on the newborn baby. Time was running out. I needed to devise a trap for Sophia. Surely the little girl’s ghost would be happier in the cemetery at Goodwell, full of flowers and trees, than obsessively haunting the site of her traumatic death. Maybe the geographic separation and the new environment could help her move on from this world.
“Ellie, I’ve got something,” Stacey said over my headset. I let out a sigh. We’d only walked a mile across mostly flat land, but my body was tired and full of aches, as if we’d climbed a mountain. The haunted woods and tracks had drained us.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I’ve been monitoring Captain Neighborhood Watch’s hidden cameras around the community,” Stacey said.
“You can do that? Hack into his cameras?”
“Apparently he bought one of the cheaper spy camera sets on the market,” she said. “Not much trouble to snag the signal. Anyway, I just saw a shadow-man go into a house on another street. It looks unoccupied, maybe not even completely finished.”
I weighed how much I wanted to go into an empty house looking for undead hobos and criminals.
“Keep watch on it,” I said. “I’d check it out, but I don’t want to leave Ember unguarded again.” That sounded much better than I’m just too exhausted, okay?
“Aye aye,” Stacey said. “He just kind of disappeared at the front door, as far as I could see. This camera’s pretty shoddy. Everything’s gray and fuzzy.”
“Grant got us some good information,” I said. “I think our banshee’s name is Sophia. She was eight when she died.”
“Aw.”
“Don’t forget she’s a dangerous ghost now, though. Let me know if you see any more activity.”
After jotting down what details I could gather about the dead passengers, I turned my attention to the railroad crew. Benny Wheelwright, conductor, 54—Jacob had seen his ghost tied up near the robbery site. Jacob had said nothing about Lars Olsen, the 28-year-old brakeman from Michigan, or Malcolm Dumont, 46, the engineer. I supposed the brakeman and conductor’s ghosts might still be inside the train as it drove back and forth on its isolated track like one of the old locomotives at the museum. I had seen the train moving in both directions now—a wind blowing from the east, an apparition riding the rails from the west.
