The Haunting of Steely Woods

by Bonnie Elizabeth

  Except now, I didn’t really need that. I was going to confront my fears. After, it wouldn’t matter if I lived in Alaska where I had to spend half the year with only a few hours of sunlight in a day.

  I almost smiled at myself as I opened the door to my condominium. It was a rare thing for me and I was pleased about that. Who would know that having to plan how to take care of a ghost would bring me such joy?

  I heated some soup on the stove and then settled in on the dining room table with my laptop. Although I often liked the ability to look out the window, I closed the blinds so the sun didn’t hit the screen, and I sat facing the hallway. Just in case.

  I had all the lights on even that early. I didn’t care about using too much energy.

  Friday night with my computer was probably not what I had dreamed for myself at nearly forty-five. I think I had dreamed of having children and a husband and perhaps having an early evening in or waiting up for the kids, depending upon when they’d been born. Instead I had hardly any friends simply because I rarely went out. Even on Facebook, I was only connected to those who had known me when I went to school and people from work, leaving me with few contacts by the standards of most social media users.

  I sipped soup from a large mug. I could have made a sandwich but I wasn’t particularly hungry. Even the nice aroma of the tomato basil didn’t make me long for my usual grilled cheese. When it was gone, I rinsed the cup and set it aside.

  I went back to the computer, reading carefully, following the threads that I managed to unravel about hunting down what ghosts wanted, as well as piecing together the history of Steely Woods Rest stop.

  It was easy enough to find information about rest stops in general. There were a number of websites that detailed the history of them. Finding out about the building of one was harder. Finally, I found something from a page on the history of the county where Steely Woods was located.

  There was a small population center about two miles from the freeway. It had once been a growing community, but with the influx of the interstate highway, people bypassed that little place because of the ease of travel north and south. The town didn’t die, really. It sort of faded away until it was more of a rural location for those who didn’t want to be too close to any town at all.

  Once upon a time there had been a newspaper, and someone had helpfully scanned two decades worth of papers. While that seemed like a lot of work, the paper was only weekly, just two single legal sized sheets of a paper with a full third of it devoted to advertising.

  From the newspaper, I found out that a young girl named Lucy Martin disappeared in the early autumn about eighty years ago. It appeared as if no one missed her for some time, so it was certainly possible she’d disappeared in September.

  The school librarian had suggested that something happened to her and asked the police to investigate the sister. Nothing was proven. I searched for more information about Lucy but nothing came up. I did see her sister, Alma mentioned a few times in the paper. She was charged with solicitation once and another time she was charged with solicitation and fraud. Because of the fraud charge, she served time in jail.

  I wondered what had happened to her after that but though I scanned the papers for some time after that, I didn’t find another mention of her. Given that the papers were just scanned pages, I could find no way to do a better search.

  I had a feeling I had a name.

  “Isn’t that right Lucy?” I whispered to myself. The apartment felt too quiet. I didn’t even hear the woman upstairs moving around.

  I glanced towards the window, the sheer blinds letting in light from the parking lot but not allowing me to make out any cars in the lot. While it was dark, it wasn’t late enough for the complex to be that quiet.

  I felt cold all of a sudden.

  Then the faucet in the bathroom dripped. Once.

  Chills ran up my arms.

  While I still felt terrified, I gloried in the fact that I was certain I was onto something. Maybe Lucy even wanted me to continue.

  “Did you know,” I whispered, because speaking out loud seemed to echo in the apartment as if it were empty of everything, not just other humans, “that your sister Alma was arrested and went to jail for fraud and solicitation a few years after you disappeared?”

  I waited. No faucet dripped. No chill came around.

  Maybe I was just insane and reading things into random events. Maybe Anson was right and the whole concept of ghosts was just my brain’s way of trying to make sense of a particularly unusual experience.

  I drew in a breath, trying to figure out what I thought about that. Tears welled at the corners of my eyes. What if I really was just crazy? Maybe I hadn’t seen anything in the rest stop and I was a crazy woman who had been living in fear that I shouldn’t have had all these years. Maybe I should have said more to more of the therapists I’d visited. Maybe I’d have medications that would keep me from seeing those things.

  I closed my eyes for a second, trying to hold back more tears and perhaps sobs. The fear, the knowledge that I knew deep down that I wasn’t insane, that I had seen a ghost or some sort of supernatural creature and it had been trying to kill me had made up the warp and weft of my life all these years. To think that it was all a dark fantasy was too much.

  I turned off the computer and decided it was close enough to bed time to retire. I’d change clothes and then sleep. I wondered if I’d sleep easier if I could convince myself I was just insane.

  I walked down the hallway. I passed the bathroom, its door wide open and all the lights on. I even had an extra electric lantern there to drive out any unwanted shadows. I turned forward to look into my bedroom.

  The lights flickered and died.

  Even the electric lights.

  I felt a cool brush against the back of my neck.

  And then it was gone.

  The electric lanterns came on again. The lights stayed off.

  I turned around, hurrying back past the bathroom. I didn’t want to be trapped in my bedroom if something happened. A lantern sat on the dining room table leaving a small circle of yellow light.

  I got to my tiny dining area and breathed a sigh of relief. I peered out of the blinds but it was dark. Completely dark. No streetlights leaving puddles of yellow light around the cars in the narrow visitor’s lot, no lights in the buildings across the way. The power was out. The actual power.

  “If that was you and you’re sending me a message,” I said out loud, no longer whispering. My voice wasn’t echoey any longer. “Then could you turn the lights back on? This freaks me out.”

  I waited.

  Nothing.

  Everything stayed dark.

  I sighed, allowing thoughts of just being crazy, of manipulating facts to come to the fore once again. Before I could sink into the despair of one learning of one’s inability to tell fantasy from fact, the lights flickered back on again.

  I shuddered. Relieved to know I wasn’t crazy. Terrified that I hadn’t left behind the murderous ghost in Steely Woods nineteen years ago.

  19

  Traci: September Now

  I had all day Saturday to research. I decided to go out for coffee at the Starbucks just a short walk from my complex. It was early, not even nine, when I went, but cars were out, gliding along the roads just a little faster than they should have. A white Nissan Altima turned right from the left turn lane, not wanting to bother with going around the block.

  I crossed at the light. Other people might risk running across several lanes of traffic, but I wasn’t planning on taking chances. While the sun shone in the morning, I noted clouds in the distance which might mean a storm later in the day. I didn’t worry about it. Even if I wanted to leave about the time it started raining, I’d learned that in Charlotte rain showers rarely lasted very long.

  As I walked, I picked out the smells of coffee and car exhaust swirling around me. I hurried onward, listening to the low purr of cars. Passing a small deli, I heard music, somethin
g fast paced with drums. It didn’t feel like morning music unless you’d been up all night and needed the kick. I wondered if the person playing it had already gotten his hit of caffeine from the Starbucks two doors down.

  Opening the door, I noted two people in line, and a few others sitting around with drinks. One person waited on a drink near the counter, looking at a cell phone. A man in jeans and a plain gray t-shirt sat at a table in the corner with a computer and his fingers were flying over the keyboard. I wondered what he was writing.

  The short line moved quickly. My coffee was a bit hotter than I liked but I had things to research and time to let it cool down. While the Starbucks lighting wasn’t my ideal, there were plenty of people around. If I needed a bathroom break, their bathrooms were singles, which meant no stalls.

  I wrapped my hands around my warm drink for a moment. I wasn’t cold, exactly, but inside I felt chilled. Going out, even surrounded by people, and staying some place if I didn’t have to was not normal for me.

  I sometimes walked into the Starbucks and left again, on particularly sunny days, but I didn’t know that I’d ever pulled up a chair and sat down to work. I chose the spot closest to the window which faced southeast so I had maximum sun. While it might be dim around me, I was in a puddle of sunlight.

  While I knew the coffee hadn’t had time to cool, it tempted me. I’d slept poorly after my encounter with Lucy and my body craved the caffeine. I moved the cup aside and started searching the internet for Lucy Martin, who disappeared eighty years ago in Southwest Washington. I doubted I’d find much. The name was common enough and I knew little other information.

  I did search on Alma Martin, hoping the name was a little less common. Even then, I found far too many recent results, particularly links to social media. I tried to limit the searches to certain years but that didn’t help. I limited it to Washington and while I got a lot of hits that weren’t her, I did get a one that was clearly about her. An obituary. From Olympia.

  It had to be her. I read carefully, hoping for any clue about her sister Lucy but found nothing.

  Reading between the lines, it appeared that Alma wasn’t particularly well liked. Her time in prison wasn’t mentioned, merely hardships that had come her way until she met Lee Tucker who married her after a long courtship. She’d been a step-mother to his youngest son and she had no family of her own, having once had a sister who had run off and disappeared years before. Alma died at seventy-eight years old.

  Old enough that the internet was around and her obituary was there, which was good for me. Old enough that I didn’t think Lucy would appreciate how long her sister got to live. I did some calculations based on her age. Lucy had disappeared in 1942. Alma would have been nineteen. I wondered if Alma had murdered her sister and that’s why Lucy’s ghost killed someone every nineteen years. Even after death, she was trying to get payback for what her sister had done.

  It made sense. A pattern for something that might have been random. I frowned. I hated the thoughts Anson had put there, however well-meaning. I was doubting myself too much.

  I went back to my internet search on how to get rid of ghosts. Given that Lucy had disappeared, I wondered if I’d need to find her body and give her a real burial. Maybe I needed to write up the truth about her life. I certainly couldn’t kill her sister for her.

  I found little practical help in my search. Nothing even touched on the possibility of a ghost trying to kill a living person. In my reading, it seemed like most ghost experts didn’t believe such a thing was possible. Clearly, none of them had visited Steely Woods rest stop.

  A few sites suggested returning to the place of the original crime. I had the vacation time and Nils wasn’t likely to balk at letting me take it now.

  I looked up and stared around the Starbucks. The tables had filled while I researched ghosts and more people were waiting to order. Others stood together, waiting for their drinks to be finished. There was plenty of life.

  My phone chimed letting me know I had a text.

  Anson. Which surprised me.

  “Will and I want to chat.”

  “When and where,” I typed.

  “When you free?”

  “I’m at Starbucks.” I added the street in case they didn’t know which one. There aren’t as many here as there were in the Northwest but there were still plenty of them.

  “Fifteen minutes.”

  Which gave me fifteen minutes to worry about what they might have to say and why they both wanted to see me. Anson and I had seen something horrible but Will hadn’t. Will had been intrigued by Deborah’s story about the murder in Steely Woods, though, and I wondered how much Anson had taken him into his confidence.

  The man in the corner got up and left, taking his computer with him. Whatever work had brought him out on a Saturday morning was finished.

  I watched as an older woman placed her order. She clearly wasn’t used to all the choices and the barista had to explain several of them. I admired the patience with which the woman behind the counter spoke. The line got longer while the girl talked. I felt my shoulders tensing just thinking about how the barista must feel knowing she was falling further and further behind.

  A second helper came to the other cash register, probably noticing that the line was starting to push against the door. Maybe I should have asked Anson and Will if they wanted anything.

  I watched people, letting my mind wander until the two men came in. Both were already carrying Starbucks cups. Anson had a venti something in a clear plastic glass and Will had a smaller cup of something hot, probably black coffee, which was what he usually got when he was working.

  “You already stopped here?” I asked.

  “We met up at the Harris Teeter in my neighborhood,” Will said, looking mostly at the floor. “Once we started talking, Anson said you ought to be involved.”

  Will wore loose fitting jeans and a Panther’s shirt. Anson also wore jeans and his shirt was a plain red t-shirt. Both men looked casual. Will looked more rested than Anson but not by much, which surprised me.

  “So what’s up?” I asked, leaning forward.

  There was only one other chair. Will looked around uncomfortably until Anson asked the woman next to us if we could borrow the chair from her table. She nodded it was fine so he settled in. Music swirled around us. Three coworkers just discussing life. Normal.

  Except it wasn’t.

  “I didn’t sleep well,” Will said, starting. “I emailed Anson really early this morning about the nightmares I kept having and the things they brought up. I keep seeing Deborah going to that rest stop in Washington and the thing following her, like it noticed her there. I was terrified, but I was just watching so I couldn’t do anything.”

  I wanted to be sympathetic and it’s not that I wasn’t, but my dreams were so much worse, I didn’t really know what to say.

  “I got his email and said that you had been attacked at that rest stop and maybe it was following you,” Anson jumped in.

  “That made sense to me,” Will said. “I’ve spent the morning researching stuff. You wouldn’t believe what I found out.”

  I waited.

  Anson was practically ready to jump out of his seat. I wondered what could be so interesting.

  “When they were building the rest stop, they found a body, well, skeleton. No one knows who it was or why she was there. There were some rumors that it could be a girl who went missing over a decade before, Lucy Martin, but no one knows for certain. Lucy had a sister but the sister died before they thought to take DNA or anything.” Will talked quickly, almost excitedly, but he kept his eyes on his coffee, as if it were more interested in his story than Anson and me.

  I was stunned. “I’ve been working on researching this for I don’t know how long. I’ve been over the history of that rest stop and I never found anything about the bones.” I was mad. I’d worked so hard. How had Will found something like that?

  “I started looking for bones found when things wer
e being built anywhere in the area. There’s no way to know whether this has anything to do with the girl who went missing because the area was an old field then and it’s not like they had DNA when the rest stop was built,” Will said.

  I nodded. I hadn’t considered that angle of research. I’d been focused on the place.

  “What made you decide to search those key terms?” I took a sip of coffee. Maybe Will and Anson would see things I didn’t. I’d avoided horror movies and scary novels. The two men, by contrast, seemed fascinated by death, though both were clearly rethinking their interest.

  “I guess it was the dream and believing Deborah’s killer was a ghost. The most common reason for a ghost to haunt a place would be because they’d been murdered there,” Will said. His face pinked ever so slightly.

  “But ghosts that kill people?” I asked.

  Will shrugged, head down.

  “There are poltergeists,” Anson said. “I read up on hauntings that seemed more forceful and some experts think those aren’t really ghosts but demons. I guess they have more abilities in our world.”

  “I can give you ghosts, maybe,” I said, “I saw something terrifying at Steely Woods and I don’t think it was natural. I think it was something supernatural. But this thing looked like a rotting body. Then it was gone. I don’t think that’s what a demon looks like. Is it?”

  I hadn’t read up on demons. Maybe they weren’t the cloven hoofed things I had in my imagination.

  Will nodded. “I don’t believe it’s a demon either. That’s so Hollywood. Maybe it is possible for someone who died to influence and take from the living if there was enough negative emotion attached to their death…at least that’s how I interpret some of what I’ve read.”

  Anson looked skeptical.

  “You don’t think so?” I asked Anson.