by JL Bryan
Each one of them had been tied up with rope and killed with a single shot to the head.
The newspapers, court records, and other accounts offered much less information about those passengers who’d been wounded instead of killed. Angus Kroeller, a railroad cop, had suffered some burns in the explosion, then a bullet in the leg in a shoot-out with the remaining gang members, James McCoyle and Maggie Fannon. McCoyle had died, but Maggie Fannon escaped with the stolen money, probably because of the railroad cop’s injury.
As Grant had told us, James McCoyle had been suspected in multiple train robberies out west during his younger years, arrested once but escaped custody. Maggie Fannon was a Savannah native who’d been arrested for crimes like forgery. The other two gang members were also fairly local, Liam and Sean O’Reilly, each with arrest records for assault and robbery, in towns scattered around the Southeast. McCoyle had recruited them locally, not bringing in any of his Old West gang. Maybe he’d ditched them, or they’d died or retired from the increasingly dangerous world of old-fashioned stick-’em-up train robbery.
I tried to piece together what must have happened that night.
Maggie Fannon had waited at the intersection with the old tracks and hailed down the train as it rolled north from Savannah. When the train stopped, the gang had taken the crew at gunpoint and tied them up.
They’d dynamited the safe in the cargo car, helping themselves to a heap of money amounting to about fifty thousand dollars, on its way to the Bank of Charleston in South Carolina.
After that, something went wrong.
The O’Reilly brothers had gone into one of the passenger cars for a little bonus robbery, taking the travelers’ cash and jewelry. An additional dynamite charge had gone off while they were in there, killing the brothers and several passengers.
That was where the story ceased to make sense. As Michael had already pointed out, an experienced train robber like McCoyle would know better than to upgrade a simple cash robbery into multiple counts of murder. The heat from the authorities would be intense.
The only scenario I could devise was that the O’Reilly brothers had brought dynamite into the passenger cars to intimidate the passengers, and then accidentally detonated it. Or maybe the kerchiefs covering their faces had slipped, and they’d decided to kill witnesses—they were rough and violent types, after all. And maybe stupid enough to blow themselves up, too.
Another obvious possibility was that McCoyle or Fannon had deliberately dynamited the car with the O’Reilly brothers inside in order to keep more of the loot for themselves. Still, why not double-cross the other gang members later, after the robbery, rather than create a pile of innocent victims? McCoyle’s other robberies had been conducted rationally, with no deaths involved.
The dynamite in the passenger car remained a huge question mark.
At some point, the railroad cop Kroeller had exchanged fire with James McCoyle, and ultimately Maggie Fannon had escaped with the money, which would never be seen again.
Until now. I glanced at the worn satchel sitting by my toolbox and backpack a few feet away. Why in the world would Maggie have left all the money behind? Fifty thousand dollars was a huge amount in 1902, easily the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars today. Why suffer all that and then drop the cash?
Maybe she’d been in love with McCoyle or one of the other gang members, overcome with grief at his death. Or maybe she’d been running for her life, afraid, and the bag of money was slowing her down. It certainly wasn’t a light piece of luggage. Maybe she’d hidden it at the ruins, intending to return later, but fled to New Orleans and died before she had a chance to return.
I flicked on the overhead lights, opened up the satchel, and began counting the bundled stacks of money, jotting in my notebook the totals given on their rubber bands and also how much money came from each bank, in case that mattered. The money looked so unfamiliar, with the names of individual cities displayed prominently next to faces I didn’t recognize at all, that it was as if the currency had come from some alternate reality.
The work absorbed my attention so much that the sound of a creaking door barely registered in the back of my mind. Then a cold breeze blew into the room, and I looked up.
The door to the outside had opened, but there was nobody there who could have opened it.
“Ellie!” Stacey said. “I’m seeing something on thermal in there. Cold.”
“Great.” I stood up on wobbly legs—they’d fallen asleep while I sat cross-legged on my mattress counting money. Pins and prickles erupted everywhere.
I drew my flashlight from its holster and approached the open door. It was possible I’d failed to close it securely and the wind had blown it open, which would also create a cooling effect on the thermal imaging camera.
“What do you see?” I whispered. I closed the door.
“It went out of range. Northwest corner.”
Turning the thermal camera on its tripod, I found the small, pale blue shape drifting along the wall, in the general direction of the stairs.
“Sophia,” I said. “Sophia Preston.”
The blue form halted, as if pinned in place by my words.
“My name is Ellie Jordan,” I said. “I’m here to help you.”
It remained frozen in place. Then the overhead lights went out and the basement door blew open with much more force, slamming hard against the wall.
I turned, rotating the thermal camera around with me. The display screen showed a cold haze drifting into the room. I felt it on my skin, too, a cold, clammy presence. The temperature in the room began to drop, as registered by the thermal display. From a balmy September seventy-one degrees to fifty, then forty, then thirty-eight, turning the basement into one big walk-in freezer.
“Ellie?” Stacey whispered.
“Shhh.” I needed to assess the situation. Blowing out a frosty breath of air, I rotated the camera, panning slowly around the basement. I was looking for any sign of the tall, dark shape that had dragged the banshee away before.
I found signs of multiple spirits, cold and thin, like spindly pillars of ice floating in a scattered formation around the basement. Around me.
The smallest, darkest one, the one I’d addressed as Sophia, remained where it was, shaped a little more clearly than the others, suggesting the profile of a young girl.
I felt a sinking feeling in my gut. I was surrounded. I glanced at the little cluster of floodlights that I’d pointed at the door while I was away. I’d disconnected its sensors, but I could manually activate the lights and blast them into all the dark corners and nooks where the ghosts lurked. That might send them scurrying. On the other hand, with the kind of focused group intention they were clearly showing here, it might just make them angry.
With my thumb on the button of my flashlight, I took a deep breath of the frozen air and addressed them.
“Okay,” I said. “You’ve got my attention. What do you want?”
The deep cold spots remained where they were. If anybody answered, I didn’t hear it. Stacey would have to review the audio later in case there was a reply out of the range of human hearing.
The money for which they’d died sat out in stacks around my mattress. I had to wonder how they felt about that. It certainly made the situation awkward for me.
Since the ghosts weren’t responding or moving, I took the opportunity to sweep the camera around and count the large cold spots. Six. Among the deceased were six passengers. Sophia, our banshee, was one of the six.
“Sophia Preston,” I said again, then I read the other names from my notebook. “George Canton. Ethel Canton. Ronald Abbot. Margaret Knowles Davenport. Minnie Knowles. I understand you had a difficult death and, so far, a pretty troubled afterlife. You’re trapped here and you want to move on. All we want is to help you do that.”
The six cold shapes remained where they were, making no sound. I could feel them watching me from every side. My back was always to one or two of them, and I didn�
�t like that at all. My heart was thudding, my instincts screaming at me to fight or flee. Preferably flee. The basement door still stood wide open, but I resisted the urge.
“Any ideas how I can help?” I asked. I was feeling a little desperate for a response here. If they had a message, they needed to tell me already. If they were going to attack, let them go ahead and do it.
Cold silence was their only answer.
“Stacey,” I whispered. “Get into position.”
“Okay! Uh, what position is that?”
“Come around back,” I said, through gritted teeth. “Stay outside by the door until I call for you. Watch for nasties along the way.”
The six figures still hadn’t moved. I wrapped my arms around myself, the intense cold eating through my denim jacket. I really needed to replace my leather one. It had been a much better insulator against the cold, plus those pesky psychokinetic ghost attacks.
When trapped in a basement surrounded by several ghosts who are acting way too interested in you, the smart thing is to get out of that basement, and preferably out of that house altogether. Get thee to a Motel 6 if necessary. Unfortunately, my job is to protect my clients from ghosts, and my activities that night might just have drawn them all to my clients’ house instead. I’d turned one or two ghosts into six. Huge failure on my part, the exact opposite of the job I was supposed to do.
So I had to stay there and face them, even if it meant getting slammed all over the concrete floor by irate ghosts.
“What’s the plan, Jan?” Stacey arrived in the back yard at top speed, with both her flashlights drawn.
“The ghosts are stonewalling me,” I said. “I want to test something out. Stay in the doorway and make sure it doesn’t close.”
I walked several steps deeper into the cold, lightless basement, feeling eyes all over me, observing me from the darkest parts of the room. I moved as quickly as I could, returning all the cash to the satchel, then bringing it to the open doorway.
“Take this,” I told Stacey. “Carry it away.”
“So they’ll come after me?” She frowned, understandably.
“I hope they do,” I said, which only deepened her frown. “Then we’ll know why they’re here.”
“Okay.” Stacey sighed, then carried the satchel to the far side of the lawn and set it down by the fence. She stood next to it, a flashlight ready to fire in each hand.
I didn’t feel any change in the basement. The thermal camera showed the ghosts staying put, not reacting at all to the money.
After a few minutes, it seemed apparent that they weren’t planning to react at all. That was bad news. Either Sophia had bragged about feasting on Ember’s rich pregnant-young-woman energy, and brought her friends along for a taste...or the ghosts were here to watch me. I wasn’t fond of those options.
“What do you want?” I asked the unseen spirits. “Why are you here?”
I had the cold sweats now, standing in the freezing air and waiting for a response. I’ve faced some dangerous and violent entities before, but I almost would have preferred a clear attack to this complete uncertainty, this indifferent and endless staring at me like a gang of obsessed stalkers.
I fought the urge to scream at them. My clients, after all, were sleeping upstairs, and I didn’t want to have to explain why they had more ghosts than ever in their house tonight. I wasn’t even sure of the reason myself.
“Okay, Stacey,” I finally whispered. “Come on back.”
Stacey dashed across the yard and into the basement. She eased the satchel to the floor and drew her second unlit flashlight, then stood with her back to mine, helping me watch for any attack.
“What are we doing?” she whispered after a minute.
“Waiting,” I said. The ghosts hadn’t moved so far, and I was desperate to learn anything I could from them, as long as my education didn’t take the form of scratching and biting. I hate the scratchers and biters.
The ghosts remained implacable, and I tried to pretend the cold and fear weren’t wearing me down.
Finally, after twenty or thirty more minutes of their silent staring, they began to withdraw. I felt it in the temperature first, as the warm outdoor air tumbled in through the open basement door. On the thermal camera, the cold spots were fading away.
“Okay.” I let myself breathe for a change. “I guess they’re gone. You should get back to the monitoring station.”
“You mean the van? I’m not leaving you here tonight. They could come back.”
“We have to watch everything, Stacey.”
“The server’s recording everything.” Stacey dropped onto my air mattress, stretching her legs across the floor. “I’m staying.”
“Suit yourself.” I sat down with her, feeling a lot more grateful than I was acting. I didn’t especially want to spend the rest of the night sitting alone, waiting for the dead to emerge from the shadows. Sure, that may be a typical Tuesday for me, but I’d had more than enough for one night.
“You know, I think we only found about half the money,” I said, to change the conversation away from dead spirits who watch you in the night. “I was almost done before the ghosts came, but the total was only up to about twenty-four thousand dollars.”
“So where’s the rest of it?”
“That’s the question.” I sighed and leaned back against the wall. “We need to trap Sophia the Banshee Girl. I don’t think she’s the worst ghost in the area, but she’s the only one anybody’s paying us to stop.”
“Really? And we just leave all these other ghosts running wild?” Stacey asked. “What about Maggie?”
“What about her?”
“I mean...she hired us, didn’t she?”
“You think the ghost was trying to hire us?” I laughed a little. “That would be a first.”
“Seriously, though. She led us to all that money. She’s stuck haunting the tracks. Maybe she didn’t intend to do it, but she hired us.”
“You’re crazy, Stacey.”
“Sure, but that’s irrelevant right now. I know you, Ellie. You aren’t going to be content to just capture one ghost and leave all these others running wild. Are you?”
“We need to talk to the other witnesses around the neighborhood,” I said. “Captain Neighborhood Watch said some of them had seen intruders. I think they might have seen ghosts.”
“So we won’t give up even after we get Sophia tomorrow night?” Stacey asked.
“We’ll be lucky if we can catch her,” I said. “But you’re right. We can’t leave all these ghosts here, terrorizing the neighborhood, feeding on these people. We have to find a way to stop them all.”
Chapter Seventeen
The next morning, I stopped off at the office on the way home. After the way the ghosts had swarmed around me the previous night, I didn’t want to leave the satchel of possibly-cursed money in our clients’ home. I didn’t particularly want to leave it in the van, either, in case ghosts tried to bother Stacey the next night, and of course there was the threat of regular, everyday thieves who still had a pulse.
The only place to leave it was in the giant steel safe in the basement below our office. The safe was designed to hold large firearms, but Calvin and I had stocked it with more dangerous items than that over the years, supernatural bric-a-brac—a voodoo doll, a few old murder weapons, a possibly-possessed skull of an ancient tribal shaman—that might still carry a spectral charge and wasn’t safe to leave out in the wild.
I parked inside the workshop and walked down the stairs to the basement. By the time I’d opened the safe, the cage elevator was rattling its way down.
“Sorry, I didn’t want to wake you,” I told Calvin as he rolled out of the elevator. Hunter jogged over to me, jowls bouncing and tail wagging. “There’s no silencer on the garage door, though.”
“It’s seven o’ clock,” Calvin said. “I’ve been up for two hours. What’s happening here?” He glanced at the satchel I was placing inside the safe.
�
�Want to see?” I put it on a built-in counter and untied the straps.
Calvin whistled at the sight of all the money inside.
“Jacob’s researching whether the cash is worth anything. I’m pretty sure these have some value.” I opened the pouch of five-dollar gold coins. “There’s twenty-four of them.”
“Oh, yes. Where did you find this?”
I gave him a quick rundown. “It’s amazing it survived all this time. I guess it’s been in a wildlife preserve for about a hundred years, and it’s been fenced in for part of that time.”
“Oiled cotton,” Calvin said, touching the lining of the canvas. “Linseed oil. Nineteenth-century waterproofing. The pressure of the rocks heaped on top would have kept most of the air out, slowing the process of decay.”
“Okey-dokey. What do you think about what Stacey said? Was the ghost hiring us?”
“More likely, the hidden money was one of the strands binding Maggie’s ghost to this world. A part of her guilt.”
“So we freed her?” I asked.
“It’s possible, but the only way to be sure is if you see her again, haunting the tracks,” Calvin said. “Then you’ll know you didn’t.”
“A few other things don’t make sense to me. Why did they murder the railroad crew? Why dynamite the passengers? And why did Maggie hide half the money instead of taking it all with her?”
“It could have been a form of insurance,” Calvin said. “If she were caught, she could go back and collect the rest of the money at some later time.”
“Seems like a desperate move,” I said.
“The circumstances might have been desperate. She was on the run, weighed down by two satchels stuffed with money. Another possibility is that she may have been leaving the money for someone else. An accomplice.”
