Author: J.L. Bryan
Date: 2021-08-12 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Paranormal; Horror; Ghosts
Description: More than a century ago, the Sea Islands of Georgia's coastline were the playground of the ultra-wealthy. Carnegies, Morgans, Rockefellers and other aristocrats of the Industrial Age built luxurious southern beach retreats on islands like Cumberland and Jekyll to escape the icy winters of New York. In time, though, the grand mansions were abandoned and fell into disrepair, abandoned to the weather and the wilderness. A secretive client hires Ellie Jordan to investigate one such island, home to a sprawling estate modeled after a royal hunting lodge. Weapons and artifacts from around the world a
Publisher: jlbryanbooks.com

Contents
The Lodge
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Also by J. L. Bryan
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six

The Lodge
Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper,
Book Fifteen
by
J. L. Bryan

Copyright 2021 J. L. Bryan

All rights reserved

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to my wife Christina and my father-in-law John, without whom I would be a full-time parent struggling to write at odd hours.

I appreciate everyone who helped with this book, including beta reader Robert Duperre (check out his books!). Thanks also to copy editor Lori Whitwam and proofreaders Thelia Kelly, Andrea van der Westhuizen, and Barb Ferrante. Thanks to my cover artist Claudia from PhatPuppy Art, and her daughter Catie, who does the lettering on the covers.

Thanks also to the book bloggers who have supported the series, including Heather from Bewitched Bookworms; Mandy from I Read Indie; Michelle from Much Loved Books; Shirley from Creative Deeds; Lori from Contagious Reads; Kelly from Reading the Paranormal; Lili from Lili Lost in a Book; Heidi from Rainy Day Ramblings; Kelsey from Kelsey’s Cluttered Bookshelf; and Ali from My Guilty Obsession.

Most of all, thanks to the readers who have supported this series! There are more paranormal mysteries to come.

Also by J.L. Bryan:
The Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper series
Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper
Cold Shadows
The Crawling Darkness
Terminal
House of Whispers
Maze of Souls
Lullaby
The Keeper
The Tower
The Monster Museum
Fire Devil
The Necromancer’s Library
The Trailwalker
Midnight Movie
The Lodge
Cabinet Jack
Urban Fantasy/Horror
The Unseen
Inferno Park
Time Travel/Dystopian
Nomad
The Jenny Pox series (supernatural/horror)
Jenny Pox
Tommy Nightmare
Alexander Death
Jenny Plague-Bringer

Chapter One

“This is all so sketchy,” Stacey whispered. There was no reason to keep quiet, but in the darkness and near silence, broken only by the lapping of the Savannah River and the night choir of insects, a normal voice sounded loud as a gunshot. “Are we sure this is the right place?”

“It must be,” I replied, pointlessly whispering also. “The security guy opened the gate for us.”

It was a couple of hours before dawn, and we stood at a small, deserted dock deep inside Savannah’s industrial district, surrounded by long metal buildings webbed together with chain link. Construction machinery loomed in the shadowy fenced-off areas.

“It’s definitely very…gray,” I said. “But it looks like a spot where we can load the van onto the ferry.”

“There are nicer spots for that,” Michael said. He’d come to wait with us in this extremely dark hour of the night because of the unusual place and time arranged by the client. I generally had a rule against involving Michael in my work, especially after his sister had paid the price for it by being possessed, but that rule was for the supernatural side of things. In this particular instance, I was worried about the living client, not any spirits of the dead. Not yet. And I was more than fine with Michael helping to protect us against the living. “She’s late,” Michael added. “We should go. This is crazy.”

“The law firm already wired the retainer to our bank account,” I said. “And it’s…a lot. More than our last several cases combined. Some of our clients are slow to pay us anything. We need this case.”

“And Jacob said the lawyers who contacted us are from a top-notch, blue-chip firm out in Silicon Valley,” Stacey said. “Personally, I think we should be doing more cloak and dagger stuff like this. We’re private detectives, right? We should sometimes have mysterious, anonymous clients. We should meet in exotic cities passing off briefcases full of secret codes, written on flash paper in invisible ink.”

“Is that the ferry?” I squinted at the thick, white, moonlit fog obscuring the river. We could hear the slow-rolling water and smell its living broth of fishy odors, but could see only fog beyond the end of the dock. It was like standing at the edge of the world rather than the edge of the river.

“I hope the ferry captain can see better than I can,” Stacey said.

Lights approached, cutting through the fog, accompanied by the low chug of an engine.

A weather-stained craft emerged from the sea. The ferry, designed for transporting vehicles, resembled a length of blacktop road with rusty junk heaped on either side, a mobile parking lot.

When it reached our dock, its wide front end lowered into a ramp.

“Looks like our ride,” Stacey said.

“It looks like a scrap heap,” Michael said. “How far are you traveling on this thing?”

“Our client is meeting us on the island,” I said. “That’s all we know.”

“Is ‘the island’ a local river or sea island?” Michael eyed the craft. “That thing could be taking you to Bermuda. Or the Bahamas.”

“Oh, please, please, let it be the Bahamas.” Stacey held up her hands, fingers crossed. “I knew I packed my swimsuit for a reason. Maybe we’ll investigate a haunted seaside resort with windsurfing and sea kayaking.”

“I’d just be happy with room service,” I said, but I wasn’t getting my hopes up. I had also packed a swimsuit, though. It was summertime, and our first week of investigation was already paid, with on-site lodging included. On an island. Somewhere. “I expect it will turn out to be a hotel or resort, though I doubt we’re lucky enough to have a job in the Caribbean.”

While the identity of our client remained unknown, they’d apparently already determined to retain us through an intermediary. Research must have shown that we were the paranormal investigators to hire in the area, if you absolutely had to hire some.

The idea of leaving town for parts unknown concerned me, but there were more than a hundred barrier islands along the Atlantic coast, from the Carolinas to Florida, along with countless smaller islands in the labyrinth of rivers, creeks, and tidal marshes all along the shore. Perhaps we wouldn’t travel too far.

The ferry crew moved like shadows in the fog. A figure in a hooded black raincoat emerged onto the ferry’s lowered metal ramp and descended quietly to the dock.

I tensed, glancing at Michael. He took my hand discreetly, as if he understood I wanted to be reassured but didn't want to look weak in front of the new client. I squeezed him back in silent thanks, then let go and stepped forward to meet the person in the water-resistant Grim Reaper getup.

The figure drew back the hood, revealing a dark-skinned man in his late sixties or early seventies, balding with a fringe of pale white hair and a matching beard of considerable length. His eyes sought me out, and he smiled, teeth flashing in the moonlight.

“Eleanor Jordan?” he asked, voice lilting in the traditional Geechee-Gullah accent of the sea islands, which sounds quite a bit like a Caribbean or West African accent.

“Ellie,” I replied, cringing inwardly at the sound of my rarely used full name. “I thought I was meeting a woman named Darika.”

“You’ll meet her on the island. I am Emmanuel Walker, owner and skipper of the Charleston Crosser. I’m here to get you across. That’s the vehicle?” He nodded at our aged blue van full of ghost-hunting equipment, parked next to Michael's cheerful red 1949 Chevrolet pickup that Michael had restored himself.

“The van's ours,” I said. “About how long do you think this trip will take?”

He shrugged. “Two-three hours.”

“Guess we’re not going to the Bahamas.” Stacey sagged.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

Captain Walker scratched his head. “You signed on without knowing your destination?”

“Our client is being sort of cagey with us. But the check cleared, so…” I shrugged. “Still, it would be nice, prior to boarding a boat, to know about a few minor details like where it’s actually going. We don’t know the who, what, or why of the situation. Just the when.” I pointed to the dark predawn sky above. “Knowing where would be nice. A real luxury, even.”

“I see what you mean.” He glanced at Stacey, then his eyes landed on Michael. “I was told two passengers only. Did your friend here sign the nondisclosure agreement? Darika loves her NDAs.”

“Well, no,” I said.

“I won’t mention it to anyone,” Michael said.

“It would be nice for somebody to know where we are,” I said.

“Just in case we get ax-murdered, you know?” Stacey added. “So my mom will know where to pick up the body.”

The captain looked genuinely distressed. “You should have asked Darika the destination. I cannot violate the NDA, or I could lose the transport contract.”

“What contract?” I glanced at the machinery around us and considered how easily he’d glided into the dock despite the darkness and fog. “What do you normally transport? Construction equipment like this? Cars?”

“I transport anybody who wants to pay, wherever they got to go,” he said. “But stepping aboard is your choice.”

“Are you suggesting we shouldn’t go to the island?” I asked.

“Some do call it an unlucky place.” Captain Walker seemed to pick his words carefully. “Most of us avoid it. We don’t fish there, we don’t take tourists there. We leave it be.”

“Is there an actual ax murderer?” Stacey asked.

The captain shook his head, but he seemed indecisive. He looked at me while pointing at Michael. “Can he be trusted?”

“Not with picking a restaurant, unless you’re really into hot dogs,” I said.

“Come on, you love Sly’s Slider Dogs,” Michael said.

“Oh, my gosh, Sly’s Sliders?” Stacey gushed. “Have you had the Pain Don’t Hurt sandwich?”

“Brisket with jalapeno sauce.” Michael nodded. “It lives up to its name.”

“See what I mean?” I asked the ferry captain.

“Prove his number, I’ll call him if there’s an emergency.” The ferryman held out his hand to me. “Now give me your keys. I’ll secure your vehicle.”

“Okay.” I was reluctant to hand over our van full of expensive gear, but I’d also never driven onto a ferry before, so it made sense to let the ferryman do it.

“Are you sure about this?” Michael asked, brow furrowed. I felt like furrowing my brow a bit at the situation, too, but kept mine distinctly flat and unfurrowed instead, acting relaxed to reassure him.

“Oh, yep,” I said. “Nobody’s throwing around this kind of cash just to lure us out into the ocean and ax-murder us.”

“Probably,” Stacey added.

“Most likely, we’re dealing with a client who has an investment to protect, and who does not want anyone to know they’ve hired paranormal investigators.”

“Because they don’t want word getting out that their place is haunted,” Michael said.

“Or they don’t want to look crazy. I wouldn’t be surprised if we find some developer creating a new golf resort out on one of the islands. He probably built it over some old plantation house or native burial ground and, boom, instant ghost problem.” I watched Walker drive our van up the ramp onto the ferry. The blacktop strip of the onboard parking area looked like it could hold a dozen cars or vans like ours, or a few large construction vehicles instead.

“I hope they aren’t wrecking any wildlife preserves out there,” Stacey said.

“We’ll find out soon.” I gestured to the boat. “All aboard.”

“Isn’t that for trains?” Stacey asked.

Michael held me tight, his green eyes staring at me grimly. His dislike of the situation was clear. “I should come with you,” he said.

“You have to be at work in, like, an hour, so I doubt you can fit in a week on some island.”

“I could arrange it.”

“It’s fine.” I drew back from him. “It’s just a ghost. Whatever it is, I’m sure I’ve seen worse. And I’ve definitely seen worse paychecks.”

“But it’s like they’ve set you up to disappear. How can that be good?”

“I’ll be fine. Thanks for understanding.”

“I didn’t say I understood—” he began, but I quieted him with a kiss, because it was time to go.

Stacey and I headed up the ramp.

“Ever see cattle boarding the truck for the slaughterhouse?” Stacey whispered, and I elbowed her, hoping her voice hadn’t carried on the breeze.

The crew, just two young men assisting the captain, hurried about raising the ramp, speaking to each other in a rapid island creole, of which I could catch maybe one out of three words, despite having grown up in coastal Georgia myself.

“Make yourselves at home,” Captain Walker told us, then pointed past heaps of equipment and crates toward a covered seating area with three benches. “But stay over there for your safety. Help yourself to water from the cooler.”

“Thanks,” I said, and he headed to the wheelhouse.

As the ferry pulled away into the foggy river, Michael stood on the shore, watching us go. Watching me.

I waved. He waved back.

Then the night fog fell between us like a curtain between worlds, and I didn't see him again after that.

Chapter Two

Stacey and I stood at the railing as we headed downriver. The ferry moved slowly through the predawn fog. It was like navigating through some dark, primordial world more simple and wild than our own.

It may have been a long way until sunrise, but that didn't stop colossal cargo ships from cruising up and down the river. Cranes lined the riverbank like the hundred-handed giants of Greek myth, lifting and swinging steel containers on and off the ships.

This was the commercial heart of the city, ultimately the reason it existed at all, a safe harbor providing ready access to the Atlantic and the rest of the world, yet protected from the ravages of tropical storms and hurricanes by the barrier of islands along the coast.

After crossing under the dark shadow of the Talmadge Bridge, we crawled alongside River Street, the cobbled heart of our city’s tourism biz, still dark at this hour, though people in the critical coffee, baking, and newspaper delivery industries were no doubt already at work.

River Street, to me, would always mean memories of my parents taking me to the candy shops, where I would watch in wide-eyed fascination as the workers spun up fudge and caramel in plain sight, as if by magic. I hardly ever went there as an adult, though. Maybe because of those memories.

As the black sky lightened to deep blue, we nosed past one river island after another, then the rocky spire of the South Channel lighthouse, whose ghosts Stacey and I had removed. It stood dark now, no supernatural glow in its lantern room.

“Maybe we are going to the Bahamas,” Stacey said, watching as the North American continent drew farther and farther away from us, separated by a growing gulf of grass-filled marshes and deepening water as we left the river for the ocean.

“It would be nice.” I eyed the ever more crowded waters, with fishing boats joining the international cargo shippers. Colorful sailboats and yachts would appear later. Those earning their living from the sea had to rise much earlier than those spending their leisure on it.

“We’re turning south,” Stacey observed as we passed tourist haven Tybee Island at a distance. The beaches were sparsely populated, but would be thronged after sunrise if it didn't rain. The heavy clouds above held that question in limbo for the moment.

“Surely he’ll tell us where we’re going now,” I said.

“Yeah, I’m kind of desperate to find out,” Stacey agreed.

We picked our way around the cluttered deck of the ship and headed up a narrow aisle between assorted crates and barrels toward the wheelhouse.

“He doesn’t like to be disturbed when the door’s closed.” One of the crew members, who looked about twenty, emerged to block our path. He spoke apologetically, with the same accent as the captain, smiling but clearly serious about the ferryman’s protocol.

“Oh, I just had a quick little old question for the captain.” Stacey threw a dazzling smile that shifted the crewman’s stance noticeably. “How much longer until we reach, uh, you know, how do you say it right, cause I ain't from around here—”

“Satilla Island?” He slowly returned her smile. “It’s a long haul. You want some Pringles?”

“I…maybe?” Stacey seemed thrown off balance by the offer.

“Isn't Satilla the island with the high walls?” I asked. “Who lived there, again? The Rockefellers?”

The crewman shook his head. “No, some other old dead rich people from up north. How about some RC Cola?” he asked Stacey.

“No. Yes, actually, on the RC. Then we’ll head back to the passenger area.”

He raised his eyebrows at me. “You? Pringles, RC? Try ’em together, you’d think they were made for each other.”

“No, thanks. I’ll probably grab a water from the cooler, if that’s okay.”

“You got it.” He gave Stacey another smile before departing.

“Well, now we have to wait here for your drink order,” I said.

The door to the wheelhouse opened, and Captain Walker acknowledged us with a gentlemanly tip of his Atlanta Hawks cap. “You want to know our destination, and you’ve been more patient than I would have. Satilla Island. Do you still choose to go? Or no?”

“That’s the walled-up island, right?” I asked. “Who lived there? The Carnegies?”

“The Carnegies had Cumberland Island,” Walker said. “The estate on Satilla was built by the Grolman family.”

Stacey and I shared a blank look.

“Sorry, I don’t recognize that one,” I said.

“Yeah, unless you mean Grolman Animal Lard.” Stacey chuckled. “We use that at The Country Barn restaurants. Which is why the food tastes better than everywhere else.” Her family owned a small chain of Deep South themed restaurants serving deep-fried everything.

“I believe it’s the same,” the ferryman said, drawing a surprised look from Stacey.

“They made their fortune in lard?” I asked.

“Grolman was a cattle baron out west,” he replied.

“Did that make him an outsider here, among New York society?” I asked. “Is that why he built the wall around his island?”

The ferryman shrugged. “Who knows why they did as they did? They were all crazy. They stopped coming down here ’round the Depression and the war and never came back. But they left pieces of themselves, like snakeskin. The snake crawls on, looking shiny and dazzling new outside, but he’s still that same mean old snake inside.” He chuckled to himself, looking out at the horizon.

“Can you tell us who we’re working for?” I asked him. “Other than the law firm?”

“The lady in charge is Darika Mahajan,” he said. “She’s very…focused. Knows what she wants. She’s unhappy all the time now, because the work is so far behind.”

“What work?” I asked.

“Bringing back the old Grolman place. Remaking the island.” He looked at the wild forest along the beach. Having passed the tourist hub of Tybee Island, we now skirted green nature preserves and wetlands.

“Who is she working for?” I asked.

“Yeah, I thought Satilla Island was a state park, or a national one,” Stacey said. “Are we secretly working for the Fish and Wildlife Department? Is the island haunted by ghost crabs?”

He grinned. “The ghost crabs belong there. Why do you ask if it’s haunted?”

“Just, uh, a lucky guess, I guess?” Stacey suggested.

Something in his amused look told me he didn't believe her. “You aren’t worried about the island’s spirits?”

“Does it have spirits?” she asked.

“Older folks say it has bad root.” He said ‘older folks’ like he wasn’t wrinkled and white-haired himself. Maybe he’d been much younger when he’d heard older folks talk about it. Or maybe an older generation still lived on the islands, people in their nineties and hundreds.

“Bad magic?” I asked, and he nodded.

“Root lives all over the world, good and bad. In some places, the good grows extra thick. Some other places, things go the other way.” He shook his head. “But never mind, here’s the second thing. I’ve seen the faces of the workers coming back from Satilla Island. I bring them over—carpenters, landscapers, all kinds. And I bring them back. They all quit, after a few days or weeks. I can see in their faces when they’ve made up their minds to quit, to stay off the island for good.”

“Why do they quit?” I asked.

“They don’t say it to me or my nephews, but we hear them whispering. Sometimes they’re injured. Usually, they see things. You can tell the ones who’ve seen things by the look in their eyes.” Walker nodded at the deep water ahead. “Maybe you shouldn’t go. As I said, I only take you where you want to go. And soon enough, you’ll be coming back. Could be hurt. Could have that fear in your eyes, or a bad spirit riding you home.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” I said.

He laughed. Maybe he thought I was kidding. Or maybe he could tell I wasn’t.

“Well, thanks for the warning, but we’ll go ahead to the island and give it our best shot despite the ghosts,” I said. “Like you said, they’re everywhere, anyway.”

He nodded, looking me over carefully, like he was seeing something he hadn’t before. “As you like. I’m only the captain of the boat, not of you. Excuse me.” He tipped his hat before closing the wheelhouse door, apparently satisfied he’d done his part to give us a warning and an informed choice, regardless of whether he agreed with our decision or not.

Chapter Three

The handsome crew guy finally returned with Stacey’s ice-cold blue can of RC and an unopened Pringles snack pack.

Stacey and I returned to the benches in the covered passenger area and watched the sunrise like tourists on a day trip. It was nice. She even shared her Pringles.

The ferry took us south past wild and largely uninhabited islands, like forested Sapelo Island, once ruled by the RJ Reynolds tobacco guy, and also once home to a number of independent Geechee towns, now reduced to just one. Stacey knew about it and filled me in. I wondered if our ferryman had relatives there.

At Jekyll Island, a dead oak forest lined the beach. Giant old trees lay toppled across the sand, their roots killed by saltwater, the dried carcasses of their trunks bleached bone-white by the sun. The Jekyll Island Club had been the summer home of Gilded Age barons like the Rockefellers and Morgans. They’d followed the Carnegies, who’d made a private domain of Cumberland Island—not Satilla Island, as the captain had reminded me.

Satilla Island, our destination, lay south of Jekyll and north of Cumberland, but farther east in the Atlantic, and much smaller than either one.

Satilla was imposing in its own way, though, as it came into view, with a high forested bluff near the center, made higher by a three-story mansion at the island’s peak, made of unusual bricks with a dark golden hue. Portions of a perimeter wall of those same bricks could be glimpsed through the foliage of the forested area, high above the rocky, marshy shore.

As our ferry slowed, Stacey said in a low voice, “You know we’re crossing right past The Hole, right?”

“The Hole?” I asked.

“The Hole,” she repeated, getting overly dramatic about it. “A deep underwater depression, home to a large population of the Atlantic Ocean's biggest sharks. The diving is supposed to be breathtaking, if you know what you’re doing down there. And potentially deadly otherwise.”

“That better not be an invitation.”

“It’s fine! The sharks don’t really attack that much. But if you don’t know what you’re doing, it could be very bad to try swimming from the island to the mainland at the wrong time. I actually did go hiking on Cumberland Island once, years ago, and we didn’t swim because of all the sharks nearby.”

“So, this island is like Alcatraz,” I said. “But with sharks as the prison guards.”

“I think Alcatraz has shark-infested waters, too. But no alligators, which this area has a ton of. So maybe it’s worse than Alcatraz.”

We approached Satilla Island’s swampy western shore, the mainland-facing side, sheltered from the ocean by the island’s rocky bulk and its dense forest of live oaks. The live oaks grew wide with long limbs, but low and serpentine, constantly pruned by salt and strong ocean wind, their odd curves and angles once prized for shipbuilding, back when ships were made of wood.

The wharf featured a shelter resembling a small Victorian house with tall gabled windows. The shelter had once protected guests from inclement weather, but now its windows were broken, leaving only jagged remnants of glass, and its door was completely missing. The whole structure leaned to one side. I supposed it would still provide better protection against the rain than nothing, though. Any roof in a storm.

As his two-man crew tied up the boat, Captain Walker frowned at the imposing dark mansion that overlooked the island.

“Maybe you should change your mind,” he murmured, barely loud enough for us to hear, as if concerned someone on the island would hear him. I didn’t see anyone, just a gray road paved with crushed oyster shells curving steeply up and away from the landing into the thick wilderness. “Part of me does think I shouldn’t bring anyone else here. But what can I do? It’s my work, and their check cleared the bank.”

“Don’t worry, this is my work, and I need the paycheck, too,” I said. “We’re in the same boat.”

“Hey, literally!” Stacey swept her arm at the ferry around us. “We are literally all in the same boat.”

“Not for long.” The ferryman went to drive our van down the ramp.

“Ellie, do we have a good feeling about this, or a bad feeling about this?” Stacey asked. The island’s bulk blocked the sunrise, keeping us in a realm of deep shadows. Walker turned on the van’s headlights before driving down the ramp.

“You’re the parks and outdoorsing expert, Stacey. What do you know about this island?”

“All I know is people can't visit Satilla because it’s a wildlife sanctuary. There's not even a ranger station. Nobody comes here.”

“Does that mean the state of Georgia is hiring us? That would be…different.” I headed down the ramp and along the concrete dock. “I never really saw myself as a government contractor. Do we have to hire a lobbyist now?”

“If it’s the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, you’ll know them by their khaki shirts and green pants,” Stacey said.

Walker had parked our van on the oyster-gray road and left it idling as he stepped out. He cast another wary look up at the big, dark house above, as though expecting it to creep down toward him if he turned his back on it too long.

Ahead, up the steep road and surrounded by the gnarled limbs of the live oak forest, stood a black steel gate twenty feet high and topped with barbed spires. Whoever built it had been very serious about keeping out the riffraff.

An arch made of dark golden brick spanned over the gate. From either side of it extended the brick wall that encircled the forested bluff of the island’s interior.

“You both be careful.” The ferryman spoke quietly on his way back to his boat, swerving to avoid us as if he thought we might be a little bit cursed and didn’t want to be touched by our evil fate. “Watch for the wildlife. I’ll see you when you’re ready to cross back.”

“What wildlife?” Stacey asked, but he was already busy directing his little crew to depart before the heavy clouds above could begin their threatened downpour.

I looked both ways along the shore for any sign of animals big enough to maul us.

“We’ll be fine,” Stacey said as the ferry pulled away, leaving us alone together on the island. “Right, Ellie? We’ll be fine?”

“Of course,” I replied, more to assure her than to voice my own feelings, which were definitely mixed.

Up the steep road, the gate rumbled and creaked, then gradually began to open, driven by unseen heavy machinery. The greasy smell of petroleum lubricating oil, maybe for the massive hinges, mingled with the muddy, fishy smell of the marsh.

The gate’s sound and vibration disturbed a group of blue egrets who’d been nosing in the shallows for food. They took flight, squawking complaints like they planned to give the marsh a bad Yelp review later.

Beyond the gate, the long, tentacle-like live oak limbs coiled into a low canopy. Resurrection fern grew thick atop the oak limbs, while thick gray swathes of Spanish moss hung below them like the beards of ancient prophets. Poison ivy and thorny vines claimed any remaining open space. Below the canopy, multi-bladed saw palmetto leaves walled in the oyster-shell road, wide and dense enough to conceal any wildlife.

“So…” Stacey said after a few minutes. “I guess the welcome wagon's in the shop.”

“We’ll take the open gate as an invitation.” I started toward the van.

We pulled forward through the gate, which was so large I felt like I was driving into the mouth of some strange, giant monster. That feeling was only amplified as we drove through the tunnel of shadowy green surrounding the road, down the monster’s throat into a twilit underworld, cut off from the summertime heavens above.

The gate closed behind us, the heavy machinery locking us inside.

“Watch out for the little helpless wild animals,” Stacey said as I drove cautiously along the dim, unfamiliar road. The forest had grown in so close that I had to stay more to the middle than the side, watching for oncoming vehicles as well as animals. In much of Georgia, the humid subtropical wilderness was constantly trying to reclaim the land, and Satilla Island was no exception. We were just as far south as the steamy Okefenokee Swamp, almost to Florida. Left to its own devices, the island would become a jungle.

The road snaked through the woods, rising up a steep grade all the while. Little spur roads of dirt and gravel branched off toward small brick outbuildings, or the ruins of them. We only caught glimpses of these through the undergrowth. I stuck to the larger paved road, which I assumed to be the main one. I didn’t really appreciate being left to guess so much, though.

I slammed the brakes when a large gray canine appeared around a bend in the road, very close to us, crouched and taut like it had been preparing to leap across the road as we appeared.

“That looks like a wolf,” Stacey said.

“A very stoic wolf,” I added, because it wasn’t moving at all. “I bet he’s been reading Marcus Aurelius.”

“Or she,” Stacey said. “Okay, it’s a statue. Really lifelike, though. It got me for a second.”

We drove on past the wolf statue, which turned out to be mounted on a stone pedestal concealed by vine-choked hedges. Maybe the statue was a practical joke, meant to scare visitors as they arrived from the wharf. The effect while riding in a more vulnerable horse-drawn wagon or buggy would probably have been more startling.

Next we passed a grove of trees centered around a silvery marble archer woman, her tunic and hair rippling as if blown by a breeze as she threatened to shoot an arrow our way. A trio of marble hunting dogs surged around her in apparent excitement, eager to be unleashed toward us.

“Do you think that’s Artemis?” I asked Stacey. “The Greek goddess?”

“Could be. I love her shoes.” The tall huntress wore sandals laced all the way up to her knees.

We passed another grove, this one choked by a sprawling infestation of thorny vines. If it housed another statue, the overgrowth blocked us from seeing it.

Then, abruptly, the wilderness ended. We’d reached the crest of the bluff.

Ahead, the earth was churned up everywhere, raw and red. Trees had been ripped up by the roots and placed in a big deadfall off to one side. Mud-spattered yellow bulldozers and excavators sat abandoned like cars dropped off at the junkyard, forlornly waiting for their drivers to return.

The oyster-shell road curved wide to provide new arrivals a long look at the immense house, which resembled a medieval manor made of strange dark golden bricks.

The great mass of the mansion blocked the sunrise behind it, leaving its face shadowy and hooded under the eaves. The high, narrow arched windows sat high above ground level, reinforcing the apparently extreme desire for privacy that seemed to have shaped this walled island. The steep black roof was, surprisingly, made of modern solar shingles. Sitting on the crest of the bluff gave the house access to sunlight all day, or at least during breaks in the frequent coastal rain.

The road took us under the squarish covered porte-cochère at the front of the house, supported by thick columns, where coaches and buggies of yesteryear would have discharged guests. It seemed like the place to park, so I did.

“Well, this house could hold a whole pack of ghosts,” Stacey said as we stepped out. “It’s huge. Is this the biggest house we’ve ever investigated?”

“If you don’t count skyscrapers or hotels.” I looked it over. Rows of the high, narrow windows were spaced along the front of the house, yet the overwhelming impression was still one of a mostly blank solid brick facade. Blackened brick chimneys resembling nineteenth-century factory smokestacks made it clear this place had been built during the age of coal. “Maybe even if you do.”

We approached the double front doors. Like the gate, the doors opened as we approached.

“What if nobody lives here, and the house hired us itself?” Stacey whispered as we looked warily into the gloomy, marble-floored interior. “Like maybe it’s been upgraded to a smart house, and it’s smart enough to realize it has a ghost problem?”

“We are working toward that, but we have a long way to go,” said a woman’s voice from somewhere inside, which was a little jarring. She stepped into view, a small woman with large, dark eyes that took us in carefully. She wore a perfectly tailored black suit and golden earrings and bracelets. Her outfit probably cost more than a year of my rent. “I’m Darika Mahajan. Welcome to the lodge.”

I introduced myself and Stacey. “You’re the one who’s hired us?”

“Yes. I’m sorry for the over-the-top secrecy. I’m sure it may seem paranoid to you, but we have our reasons for avoiding publicity until we’re ready.”

“We take confidentiality very seriously for all of our clients,” I said.

“Good. Come inside, please.”

We followed her into a front hall with a high, recessed ceiling that was like a black sky overhead, its massive columns and distant ceiling beams hewn from California redwood—entire tree trunks, judging by the size of them, sanded and polished to a high gleam. A second-floor gallery looked down on the room, not accessible by any stairs I could see, hung with frames that were large and ornate but empty, their paintings removed.

Full-sized animals loomed around us—an African lion, a giraffe, a black rhino, and the largest buffalo I’d ever seen. The creatures were mounted on wooden platforms, preserved through taxidermy, but even taxidermy could only do so much and last so long. They’d deteriorated over the years. The lion had lost much of his mane, and many patches of the buffalo’s hair had fallen off. Dirty cotton stuffing leaked from cracks in their hides.

“This was, as you may know, originally built as a hunting lodge for Heinrich Grolman, who often went by ‘Hank’ after emigrating from Germany to Wyoming,” Darika said. “The main house has sixty-three rooms.”

“Grolman was a big cattleman, right?” I asked, looking at the chandelier of bison horns overhead.

“His land investments eventually led him into coal mining out west, and from there to railroads and banking. This house was not only a vacation retreat, but a showcase for his hunting trophies from around the world.”

“And he just left it all here?”

“He was no longer alive when his family turned the island over to the state park service in 1955. Like most of the Gilded Age estates on these coastal islands, it grew too expensive for later generations to maintain and modernize. The family closed up the buildings and abandoned them, asking the state to turn Satilla Island into a protected wildlife preserve.”

“Why are they restoring the estate now?” I asked. “I noticed the solar roof. That doesn’t come cheap.”

“We are looking to modernize in certain areas, while also restore what’s worth keeping.” Darika looked at the lion, with its half-shed mane, bleeding stuffing from cracks along its hide, as though she doubted it fell into that category.

“Are you turning it into a hotel?” I asked.

“No. A private residence.” She smiled as my jaw dropped.

“But who…?” I let the question trail off, then closed my mouth and shook my head. “Well, if it’s somebody who likes their privacy, they certainly came to the right place.”

“Wait a sec, though.” Stacey looked from the giraffe to Darika. “How can it be a private residence if it’s a state park?”

“The island has been leased from the state for limited private development for a period of ninety-nine years,” Darika said. “It has been done very discreetly.”

“Yeah, because some people would protest against that,” Stacey said. “If it’s supposed to be a protected ecosystem.”

“I assure you the new owner is committed to supporting and enhancing the long-term health of the island’s unique ecosystem.” The line sounded well-rehearsed, like Darika had said it many times before. “We intend to renovate the existing buildings with an eye to historical preservation while looking to the future in a fully responsible manner with consideration for all relevant stakeholders.”

“Oh,” Stacey said. “Okay, then, I guess. Could be worse.”

“However, the flora and fauna on this island are not necessarily native,” Darika said. “Grolman imported a variety of species of animals, plants, and trees to stock his game preserve. Many were hunted to death or failed to adapt. Others are still out there. People have reported wild dogs and pigs, and there’s also a small herd of wild horses.”

“Oh, horses?” Stacey perked up.

“They aren’t friendly. I’d keep my distance.” Darika brought us into a room with a desk the size of a Buick. The taxidermy displays here included a fox and a boar. Many panels of the thick cedar wainscoting had been removed, leaving wall studs and wiring exposed. “This was the owner’s study. I use it as my office. Please sit. Help yourself to coffee or tea if you like.” A Keurig was set up on a rolling plastic cart in one corner, plugged into an orange extension cord that snaked across the room to a distant plug.

“Thank you.” I took one of three hard wooden chairs facing Darika across her desk.

“We are behind schedule on the renovations, and my employer is not happy with that.” She sat stiff and upright in her own padded leather chair, as though it, too, were hard and wooden. “We’ve had an awful parade of problems. We’ve brought out specialists of all kinds, masons, landscape crews, and all have quit. We can’t keep anyone working here.”

“Why not?” I asked, though I had a pretty good idea where this was going. They’d hired us for a reason, after all.

“They experience strange things,” she said. “Voices. Or something touching them, sometimes scratching. Or they see things. They get scared, and they leave the island for the day or the weekend, and never come back.”

“Where do these strange experiences happen, primarily?”

“All over. Inside, outside. Upstairs, downstairs, and down in the basement, where there's a vault that might go even lower. The vault door was concealed behind a wall. We discovered it entirely by accident while updating the plumbing.”

“What’s in the vault?” I asked.

“We don’t know. We called a specialist in rare antique locks. But he was frightened while attempting to open it and demanded immediate transport to the mainland. He does not return our calls anymore. We are attempting to find someone else, but apparently it’s no simple lock and requires some expertise. It’s likely that Grolman kept valuables like art and jewels down there when he was away from the island. That was common on other islands like Jekyll.”

“Are you saying there could be a secret treasure trove down there?” Stacey's eyes danced at the idea of unearthing secrets.

“I doubt the family left anything of value when they abandoned it,” Darika said. “There could be items of historical interest, though. We need to check the area for structural integrity, regardless.”

“Did the locksmith say what he encountered down there?” I asked.

“He heard an angry voice yelling at him, but he was alone in the basement. He said it started snarling at him. Like a demon. His words.”

“Has anyone else heard a voice like that?”

“Yes. As well as the inhuman sounds. Growls. Some stonemasons reported howls in the dining room, along with strange voices, when working late at night.”

“Did they see anything?” I asked.

“No, but the room turned freezing cold. That experience was enough to make them quit.” She shook her head. “We were already behind schedule. When the masons quit, it was like a floodgate. The rest went with them. We’ve hardly begun to restore the windows. The lawn is a mudhole. It’s supposed to be brimming with pollinator-friendly local wildflowers and ornamental shrubs by now. Even if you made our problems go away today, I don’t see how it’ll be ready in twenty-five days.”

“What happens in twenty-five days?” I asked.

She waved the question away. “Nothing.”

“Can you tell us more about what people have seen here?”

“That would take a while.” She sighed. “One carpenter said he came in from a dinner break to find a girl looking at his tools. Running her fingers over them, like she was thinking about stealing one. When he yelled at her, she looked up at him. Then, he says, she was just gone, like a whiff of smoke, like he was crazy for ever thinking she was there at all.

“Then he saw her handprint on the head of his hammer, in red, like her fingers had been bloody. He tried to show it to Gary, but wouldn’t you know, the blood magically disappeared by then. He quit, of course. They all quit eventually.”

I nodded, thinking how her words echoed the ferryman’s. “Who’s Gary?”

“Security. The only other person, besides me, currently staying on the island full time.”

“Have you ever seen or heard any of these things like the workers report?”

“I try not to think of it,” she said quickly, then gave an apologetic smile. “I did not really believe in such things. My mother is a chemist and a skeptic. But my grandmother believed in the older ways. She said spirits were everywhere, set to wander by bad karma from their evil deeds, or by the failure of their survivors to observe proper funeral rites. So that’s what keeps me from going crazy out here, knowledge from my grandmother. Because I cannot abandon my work. I do not fail. That’s why he wanted me here in person, overseeing everything.”

I resisted the temptation to pry into her elusive boss’s identity again. “We typically start by examining locations where incidents have occurred. We try to eliminate possible non-paranormal causes. We can then set up observations—”

“Good,” she said. “I can’t afford to wait another minute. I need to be able to assure the workers that this…whatever it is…has been removed and they can safely resume their efforts.”

“Has Gary seen anything?”

“I’ll have him talk to you when he returns from patrol.”

“I’m here.” A beefy man with a sandy comb-over that didn’t match his graying goatee entered. He wore a cotton shirt printed with palm fronds, the top buttons open so we wouldn’t miss his gold-chain necklace. “I observed their arrival and followed at a distance.”

“What did that accomplish?” Darika asked.

“Uh…” Gary seemed befuddled by the question. He looked over Stacey and me as if sizing us up for a fight, then stuck out his hand toward Stacey. “Gary Tatum, head of security.”

“He’s the only security officer we have,” Darika added.

“Because the others bailed,” Gary said. “Not me. I grew up in a little old house next to a graveyard. I could see dead people outside sometimes, when the moonlight was bright.”

“Wow, you weren’t scared?” Stacey asked, shaking his hand.

“Little bit, you know, when I was a kid. But it’s just one more thing to get used to. Like the sound of coyotes. Or police sirens, once you move to the city.”

“Did you grow up out west?” I asked.

“Wyoming. I’ve even been to the original Grolman ranch out that way, too, when I was a teenager, but it’s just a ghost town. Nothing to see. It never was as big as this place, anyway. Ol’ Man Grolman may have called this a hunting lodge, but you could fit my whole hometown on this estate. Guess it’s just what they call kismet, a Wyoming boy ending up here at the Grolman place.”

“By way of World Domination Wrestling,” Darika added. “Where he was known as Lance Leopard.”

“I had a good run before Lionel Slayworld stole my act,” Gary grumbled.

“Tell them what you’ve seen and heard here,” Darika instructed him. “The strangest events.”

He scratched his goatee, regarding us more carefully, like he wasn’t ready to go there with us yet.

“Or anything the workers might have told you,” I said.

“They all see something.” Gary sighed. “Then they leave. The landscapers heard growling and thought things were watching them from the woods. Not human things. They said they could smell the animals out there, and they smelled like…what did he say? Garbage and rotten meat.”

“Aren’t there wild dogs on the island?”

“Sure. But some of them who heard the growling also found claw marks across their arms or back. Like an invisible animal had scratched them deep. Everybody who had those claw marks, or even saw somebody with ’em, quit. The workers started talking about diablo dogs, devil dogs, stalking the island, hunting the workers, dogs you can hear but never see.”

“They would find these marks without actually being attacked?” I asked.

“Exactly. The worst was what happened to the landscape crew foreman, Ernesto. They found him out in the woods, bitten and clawed—”

“We can't discuss Ernesto,” Darika interrupted. “There’s active litigation from his family.”

“That definitely sounds like something we need to know about,” I said. “What did Ernesto report?”

“He couldn’t remember what happened to him,” Gary said. “He had that soap opera thing when something falls on your head and you forget.”

“Amnesia?”

“Yeah, that.”

“What else do people experience?” I asked.

“All kinds of things. In the main dining room, real late at night when nobody’s there, you might hear voices. Sometimes it’s one voice. Sometimes it’s like a party, with loud drunken voices, music. Until you open the door and it’s dead silent all over, like it never happened. Not a chair out of place.”

“Has this happened to you?”

“Me, other people. One time we had this furniture lady upstairs—”

“She was a professor of antiquities,” Darika said, “evaluating the items left by the original occupants to help us determine what other pieces would be appropriate.”

“Anyway, she comes screaming down, white as a sheet, saying she saw a girl in a dress, covered in blood, staring at her from the doorway of the room. The furniture lady wouldn’t go back upstairs and wanted us to call the ferry for her right away.”

“That sounds similar to what the other person reported,” I said. “What general age was this apparition? Elementary? Teenage? Adult?”

“She only described the girl as bloody,” Darika replied. “She didn’t want to delve into additional details. She wasn’t in the mood.”

“Did anyone else report this female apparition?”

“Possibly. Didn’t someone see her outside?” Darika asked Gary.

“Yeah, and they hear screaming from the woods,” Gary said. “Could be the same girl. We used to go looking when workers reported the screams, but we never found anybody out there.”

“The mysterious screams in the woods did not help with worker retention,” Darika added.

“Did the antiquities professor and the carpenter see the apparition in the same area of the house?” I asked.

“The carpenter was in the billiards room,” Gary said.

“No, the bowling alley, but it does share a common wet bar with the billiards room,” Darika said.

“This is one heck of a hunting lodge,” Stacey commented.

“No doubt Grolman wished to impress his peers who had vacation homes on nearby islands,” Darika said.

“Did he host many social events here?” I asked.

“It’s difficult to find specific details, but we know he invited guests here to hunt, sometimes from among those elite families vacationing on Jekyll. He imported game animals from around the world, and he bred hunting dogs. Given the number of servants’ cottages, he must have had quite a staff and a great capacity for entertaining.”

“You mentioned hearing voices in the dining room—” I began.

“It wasn’t just me,” Gary interrupted. “Lots of people have.”

“Then we should monitor that area. Which way is it?”

“The shortest path is through the billiards room.” Darika pushed open the double doors. “There’s no direct path from the entrance hall to the dining room.”

“Old Man Grolman probably wanted to make sure everybody saw his hunting trophies on the way in,” Gary said, following close behind us as if he didn’t want us wandering around the place unsupervised even for a moment, a sheepdog enforcing the rules on us potentially wayward sheep.

Chapter Four

The billiards room had an Egyptian theme, with a hieroglyph-style mural depicting a pharaoh hunting a hippopotamus. More preserved animals stood there: a crocodile, an ibex with huge horns curving back toward its spine, a gazelle with its head cocked toward us, furry ears perked up as if it had just heard a suspicious sound right before it died.

The two pool tables were topped with worn red felt imprinted with years of circular drinking-glass stains. Apparently, the lodge boys hadn't believed in using coasters.

As with other rooms, sections of walls and ceiling had been removed, exposing the inner guts of the house. The marble top of the wet bar at the end of the room had been lifted away and set aside, revealing blotchy copper plumbing underneath. Beyond the bar lay the two-lane bowling alley, where the Egyptian theme continued, but the lights were out, leaving it in shadow.

Darika pushed open a thick oak door into a vaulted stone space two stories high. Plastic sheets hung over portions of the walls, swaying in a draft of salty ocean breeze that leaked in from somewhere. One visible section of wall displayed archaic weapons of stone, bone, and wood, like a spear and a longbow next to a fanned-out batch of arrows. The massive table seated forty.

“The dining room,” Darika said. “Despite the apparent rugged and rustic environment, there are statements of wealth and power here as well. The floor is Italian marble, though local Georgia marble is used everywhere else. The table is cut from a centuries-old California redwood, like many of the house’s columns and trusses. The weapons on the wall are probably mock-ups of antiques, since they were abandoned here, but I will get them appraised just in case. The family took the china, art collection, and other valuables with them.”

“But not the animal heads,” Stacey said. The room had multiple fireplaces, and over each hung the head of some beast—a black bear, a leopard, a stag, a bison. The chandeliers were clusters of bison horns or deer antlers suspended on chains. “It’s like my grandpa’s dream house.”

“No, the family did not seem eager to take their old patriarch’s taxidermy collection with them,” Darika agreed. “They left it included with the estate.”

“We’ll definitely set up equipment in here,” I said. “We’ll also need a room to use as our center of operations.”

“Take any room you like, except for the study, since I'm using that, or the second-floor guest bedrooms and bathrooms that have been renovated,” Darika said. “We have a cottage for your personal accommodations. Since we have no workers staying on-site anymore, you won’t find yourselves crowded.”

“A cottage, sweet!” Stacey said.

“It’s the old chambermaids’ cottage,” Darika said, and Stacey’s smile faltered. “But it’s been restored. Servants lived in crowded, uncomfortable dormitory conditions a hundred years ago. Now we have an espresso machine in the community kitchen, a bidet in the community bathroom, and an individual bed tent for each employee.”

“Great,” Stacey said, all trace of enthusiasm gone.

“I appreciate you staying on-site. It’s expensive to pay the ferryman every day.”

“Where do you and Gary stay?” I asked.

“Gary has the old gamekeeper’s cottage, and I have the guest house. I used to stay in the butler’s cottage, but…” Darika shook her head slightly, cutting herself off.

“But what?” I asked, with probably more curiosity and less tact than I should have.

“We can discuss it later. Please feel free to begin your work. I hope we can resolve all of this quickly.” She was visibly tense, like a wire stretched to its greatest length, just before it snapped.

“We’ll be happy to get started,” I said, ready to start earning that big retainer she’d paid.

“You cannot fail at this,” she said. “So much has been invested already. Can you guarantee you will remove the problem?”

“We have a pretty good success rate, but we’re not perfect. And some places are so haunted it’s best to just abandon them to the ghosts.”

“That is not an option here.” Darika’s eyes smoldered like they would burn holes in my head if I suggested abandoning the place again.

“Okay,” I said. Then added, “Sorry,” because the comment seemed to anger her so much, like she was offended by any possibility of failure.

“I’ll show you the way,” Gary said, stepping in to defuse the tension, or perhaps lumbering in entirely unaware of it. “The road’s pretty rough. You can follow my patrol vehicle.”

“It’s a golf cart,” Darika muttered. To us, she said, “Gary will be your primary interface around the island.”

“I’ll issue walkie-talkies,” Gary said. “We have more security equipment than personnel. You’ll need code names. Mine’s ‘Beach Hawk’—”

“That’s not really necessary,” Darika interrupted.

Gary shook his head as we returned to the entrance hall, weaving through the crumbling, cracking specimens of African wildlife.

Outside, Gary’s patrol vehicle—an extended golf cart painted black, framed in mesh to keep out mosquitoes—waited ahead of our van, ready to escort us. Gary passed us the promised walkie-talkies before we climbed into our vehicles.

The road was bumpy, littered with heaps of dirt and scattered with gravel from all the construction activity. Behind the house was even more chaotic construction, with lots of open, ripped-up soil and idle earth-moving equipment amid the remnants of a lawn and gardens. A statue of a muscular man armed with a spear was lying on the ground next to a wide, muddy trench where an underground pipe had been exposed.

A pleasant-looking two-story brick house with wraparound porches on both floors appeared beside us, nestled among the old-growth oak trees.

“Is that our cottage?” Stacey asked hopefully into the walkie-talkie, holding down the big button on the side.

“Guest cottage. Darika’s place,” Gary’s crackling voice replied.

We rounded a bend, away from the house and the ruins of its imported gardens, into the native live oak forest, the wind ruffling the gray beards of Spanish moss and the resurrection ferns that grew thick on the winding oak limbs like miniature forests within the trees. The ferns must have enjoyed a good rain recently, judging by their refreshed bright green color. Resurrection fern looks dead when dry, but restored to life as if by a miracle when it rains.

Finally, we saw a small, one-story building, much more modest than the first, with a screened corner porch positioned to catch the ocean breezes.

“Is it that one?” Stacey asked into the walkie-talkie.

“That’s the butler’s cottage,” Gary replied. “Darika saw something there. Don’t ask me what, because she don’t tell me much.”

We followed the black golf cart down a bumpy dirt side road that took us to a kind of village in the woods. The buildings were large and low, the siding freshly restored yet still flimsy-looking, definitely not brick. I didn’t see how it could survive a major tropical storm.

“Looks like the servants’ village,” Stacey said as we got out.

“You’ve got the old chambermaids’ cottage.” Gary stepped up onto a tiny front stoop and inserted a key into the rusty lock.

“Darika mentioned that, yes,” Stacey said.

“Of course, now it’s a workers’ temporary boarding house,” Gary said. “When the restoration work was still going, the workers took the ferry to the mainland every Friday and came back on Monday. We had fewer and fewer coming back each Monday, though, until it got to where there weren’t any at all. You know it’s bad when folks will turn down a good paycheck to stay off the island.”

“Do you know who the real boss is?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah, I do, but I’m not at liberty to say.” Gary grinned and shoved the reluctant front door open.

A pungent, rotten smell greeted us just inside.

“Ugh!” Stacey covered her nose. “What died in here? And what did it eat before dying?”

“The housekeeping staff quit, too,” Gary said.

“I can see that. And smell it.” I took in the mess. The front room was furnished with futons and futon-like chairs, their cushions mostly knocked to the floor, facing a television on the wall. In the kitchenette, cabinets had been left open, crackers and other dry foods spilled everywhere. A box of Stoneground BerryStix cereal lay overturned on the table, the purple compressed-fiber twigs spilled out onto the knotty pine floor below.

“What is that stink, really?” Stacey asked.

“Could be an animal got into the walls and died,” Gary said. “But I’d check the trash and sinks first. I suppose I could stick around, help you straighten up and unpack your things. I’m supposed to be interfacing with you two, whatever that means. Sounds kinda weird to me.”

“We’ll be fine,” I said while Stacey and I hurried to open windows and let fresh, salty air inside. “I appreciate it, but feel free to de-interface. What I’d really like is a map of the island.”

“I’ll see what I can rummage up. But only this main road from the wharf is in good repair, and only as far as the cemetery. The beach road’s a nightmare, pond road’s not even accessible. Here, let me at least help with the luggage.”

With Gary’s help, we grabbed our things and carried them through the TV-futon-kitchen area to the back hallway with the bedrooms and bathroom.

Each room had a row of four single beds, and the housekeepers hadn’t passed through these rooms on their way to tender their resignations, either. Linens and towels lay strewn on the floor or bunched up on partially bare mattresses.

“Ew,” Stacey said, appropriately.

We dropped our luggage in the two least wrecked bedrooms and assured Gary he could go on his way. He seemed reluctant to leave. Maybe he’d grown bored on his lone patrols, and he was definitely a talker. He didn’t seem to want to open up about any paranormal experiences he'd had on the island, and I got the sense there was more he wasn’t saying on that subject. He had plenty to say on any other subject, unfortunately.

“Yep, just buzz me if you need anything,” he reminded us, yet again, tapping the walkie-talkie on his belt. “If I’m not answering and if it’s an emergency, but only then, you can come wake me. I’m in the gamekeeper’s cottage past the stables, by the kennel. They had dozens of horses here in the old days. Big old hunting dogs too. I’ve heard the feral ones in the woods, descended from those hunting dogs. I'd hate to see one up close.”

“Should we be carrying a pistol or something?” I asked.

“Or just a tranquilizer gun, maybe?” Stacey asked, giving me a side-eye.

“Hey, I was going to fire a warning shot in the air,” I assured her.

“I don’t have a spare tranq rifle lying around to loan you, sorry. Usually the animals don’t come close and bother people. But if they do…” Gary reached into his cart and handed me a battery-powered airhorn with a Florida Gators logo, the kind one might honk obnoxiously at a football game. “Just give ’er a toot. Dogs, they got sensitive hearing. Pigs and horses don’t like loud noises, either. Can’t think of an animal that does.”

“Are you sure that’s enough?” Stacey frowned. I wasn’t feeling too confident, either.

“If you stay out of the woods, the animals’ll stay out of you,” Gary said with a chuckle that failed to set me at ease. “Stay close to the buildings, out of the forest and marsh. The beach is usually okay during the daytime, unless the horses are out. They mostly graze up at the grassy north end—avoid that, too, on account of the horses—but they also come down and run around in the ocean water. It gets the bugs off ’em.”

“Aw, I want to see the beach horses playing in the water,” Stacey said.

“They’re real territorial about the beach, like a surfer gang in a Frankie Avalon movie,” Gary said. “But don’t hesitate to call me if you need help. I don’t fear pigs nor dogs of any size. Horses, I’d stay back from.”

“Great,” I said, while not feeling great. “I’ll get in touch if we have any questions. Thanks again for all your help.”

“Yep, there’s a lot of history on this island,” Gary said, leaning against the wall of our living room instead of leaving. “I'm not saying I know much of it, but there must be a heck of a lot. Just look at the big old house, for instance. That’s all kinds of historical, I’d say.”

“We plan to do that later,” I said. “Like you said, we’ll get in touch if needed. Feel free to drop by with that map of the island, though.”

“Yep, must be an amazing past, but nobody knows much about it.” Gary yawned and gazed out the window. “Could be rain this afternoon.”

“We’ll catch up with you later.” I stepped past to open the door for him, then plucked the key out of the front door lock and pocketed it. “Thanks again, Gary.”

“You got it.” He gradually ambled outside. “Stay safe, and remember what I said.” He climbed into his elongated golf cart and, at long last, drove away.

“To honk at wild dogs?” Stacey asked after he was gone. “Wow, thanks for the sage advice, oh wise one.”

I would have sighed at the state of the cabin, but that would have required breathing in too much of the foul air.

Pulling our shirts up over our noses, we got to work.

Chapter Five

Well, that wasn’t fun. We’d been promised private accommodations on the island, but given the great expense of restoring the old estate, I had also assumed we’d be dealing with a hotel company, and staying in some appropriately decent rooms. Not the presidential suite, obviously, but at least something around Motel 6 quality.

While it wasn’t clear who’d hired us or what kind of paranormal issues they faced, it was clear that the last people who’d stayed in the chambermaids’ cottage had fled in a hurry, leaving behind socks, work gloves, and phone chargers. From the laundry remnants and overall smell, we guessed it had been previously occupied by male workers, ones who did sweaty jobs around the humid island.

Fortunately, the cabin did have a broom closet full of cleaning supplies, which looked very lightly used so far. There was a small washing machine where someone had abandoned wet jeans and shirts some time ago. The rotten laundry only added to the cottage’s not-so-welcoming aroma.

After we tossed the rotten laundry and the toxic bag of kitchen waste into the community dumpster outside, the smell finally began to clear out, though not as quickly as we might have liked.

Reluctantly, we cleaned up the place and made it habitable, an exhausting but sadly necessary waste of time.

“Why did we turn down Gary’s help, again?” Stacey asked.

“I didn’t want him standing around watching us. And I was annoyed they didn’t get this place ready for us. I prefer privacy when I’m annoyed.”

“Yeah, it’s kinda rude to give your guests a filthy cottage. I thought accommodations on the island would be luxurious, but I wasn’t thinking about servant-level accommodations.” Stacey drew a giant blue circle of bunched-up cloth from the closet. “Look, it’s one of those bed tents.”

“For only the most spoiled of servants,” I said.

“Huh.” Stacey set it up, a big blue cylinder like a hamster tunnel that completely enclosed her narrow single bed, except for an open zippered flap like the entrance to a tent. I hated to admit that it looked kind of cozy in there. “It’s totally private once you zip it up. I would have loved this back in the college dorm.”

“If you’re going to use it, make sure you Lysol it,” I told her, and she recoiled slightly from the tent.

“Yeah. I mean, I think this one’s brand new, but…” She went for the Lysol can in the kitchen.

In the end, it wasn’t so bad. The workers had left in a careless hurry, but they hadn’t damaged the house or made it truly filthy. Or left any dead animals in the walls, as far as we could tell.

Outside, the low, gray cloud cover had begun to rain. We sprinted to the van through what felt like cold, wet needles hurled from above by vicious sky spirits, targeting us in particular for some reason.

The return drive was no picnic, with the rain washing holes and gullies into the dirt road. The van bounced and shuddered until we finally reached the paved oyster-shell road.

Gary met us at the main house and helped carry our first load of gear through the front doors. “Darika’s busy,” he told us. “She’s in her office—I mean, the study—and her mood's close to boiling. I’d avoid that area. You might not see her again today, if you’re lucky.”

“Works for me,” I said.

We set up audio and visual gear in places where paranormal disturbances had been reported, like the dining hall, where so many auditory apparitions had been heard, and the bowling alley, where the carpenter had seen the ghostly girl. A sphinx sat at the end of the two bowling lanes, the two sets of wooden pins set up between its paws. There was no automatic ball return or pin reset. Like everything in the house, it was built to be serviced by humans rather than machines.

Gary lent a hand with the heavy lifting, which we did appreciate, though it felt like he was there to keep an eye on us and make sure we didn’t damage his unnamed employer’s property.

Activity had been reported in a few rooms upstairs, but that wasn’t what interested me most.

“Let’s see this mysterious door down in the basement,” I said, and Gary frowned.

“I don’t like going down there,” he told me. “Usually, I avoid it. I recommend you do the same.”

“Why do you avoid it?”

“Just a bad feeling. And what the locksmith said. I don’t want to sound yellow, but maybe whatever’s down there, we ought to just leave it be.”

“You might be right,” I said. “But Darika made it clear that abandoning the island isn’t an option, so we have to look into the problem spots. That sounds like a big one.”

Gary fell quiet for several seconds, as if chewing over what I’d said, then nodded. “You’re going to check it out sooner or later. I can’t help that. I’ll do what I can to keep you safe, but we better make it quick.”

We passed through a room of glass-fronted display cases, most of them empty. A few contained blunt, ornate rifles and curved pistols of another era, all of them scratched, missing parts, or disassembled. “This is the gun room. I imagine it used to be more impressive.”

Old West animals were mounted and preserved here: a wolf with its canine teeth bared, a grizzly bear rampant with its claws raised high, a mountain lion with its ears back, crouched as if ready to spring.

“Next up is the smoking room. How’s that for an outdated term? No fancy rich folks’d let you smoke in their house these days. I quit the coffin nails ten years ago myself, chew JuicyFruit instead.” Gary opened double doors into a Moroccan-style room with hanging lamps of curled wrought iron and amber glass, though the glass was all broken. Silk curtains were tied back in the corners for that royal-tent-in-the-desert look. A raised dais with an overturned piano bench occupied one corner; the reddish-brown stuffed corpse of a Barbary sheep occupied another.

Finally, we reached the dining room, with its many heads and fireplaces, and Gary pushed open a jib door at the back that I hadn’t even noticed. It had no handle or knob, designed to blend invisibly with the oaken woodwork wall panels.

“This is the butler’s pantry. Watch your step here. The crew gutted it but never rebuilt it before quitting.” He led us into a long, narrow room littered with tarps and lumber and tools. Beyond a plastic sheet at the end were stairs down to the basement level.

“After Grolman and his pals returned from hunting, the kitchen staff would butcher their kills and store the meat down in the meat cellar. Hides and heads went to the taxidermy shop, if they were worth keeping as trophies.”

“Taxidermy shop?” Stacey grimaced. “I’m not sure I want to see that.”

“Ladies first.” I gestured for Stacey to follow him down.

“Gosh, thanks.” Stacey rolled her eyes and descended the stairs.

The basement stairs and walls were of gray rock, carved out of the bluff itself, unlike the dark golden brick of the house’s facade. We crossed through a wine cellar full of empty racks and into a dim central corridor.

Gary pointed out the open door to the meat cellar, hung with chains and hooks like the guys from Hellraiser had swung by to redecorate. We passed the taxidermy room, where skulls lined the walls, mostly deer with towering antler spreads, but also a few wild pig skulls with impressive tusks.

“Here’s where it gets interesting.” Gary led us farther down the basement corridor to a crude hole in the wall the size of a small door, possibly busted open with a sledgehammer. Quite recently, too, given the amount of fresh dust and broken bricks lying around.

“What’s through there?” I asked.

“Good question. They discovered this area by accident. It was all sealed up, meant to keep everyone out forever, it looks like. Wanna go in?” He ducked and stepped through the wall.

We followed him into an odd, downward-sloped corridor painted all black—floors, ceiling, walls. The unlit, widely spaced wall sconces were made of the horned skulls of goats and sheep.

“Where did those lead?” I pointed at a brick staircase that spanned most of the way up to a large square trap door on the ceiling. The top rows of stairs had been demolished, leaving a gap of empty space.

“That was the entrance to this area, many long years ago,” Gary said. “Used to lead up to the India room. When they moved out, they busted out the upper stairs and nailed a new floor over the old trap door, then parked the dang elephant on top of it, too. Like I said, it’s like they meant to hide it forever, and it was just bad luck that led workers to discover it.”

“Why bad luck?” Stacey asked.

“Well, dumb luck, at least. Could be bad luck, too, we’ll see.” He glanced around nervously.

The hidden underground hallway ended at a round black steel door like the entrance to a bank vault. The keyhole, taller than my hand and narrower than my little finger, was not quite like any I’d seen before. I didn’t think my pack of lock picks and my basic skills with them would be any match for this door. I’d never even attempted to pick a bank vault lock. If I could do that, maybe I’d have a bigger apartment.

“What exactly did the locksmith experience?” I asked Gary.

“He said he kept hearing someone speaking to him, but he didn’t understand the words, like it was just too far to hear. At first, he figured it was voices echoing down from the workers upstairs. Then after another little while, the voice came again, only real close to him, and this time he heard it. And it just said one word, ‘Go.’ And at the same time, something snarled at him like a demon, he said, and that sound chased him all the way to the stairs. He never came back.”

“Who would?” Stacey stared at the massive black steel door. “Any guesses what’s back there?”

Gary shrugged. “I’d guess nothing much. Maybe spiders, maybe a nice view of the house’s foundation.”

“Any plans to bring out another locksmith?”

“Believe me, the boss lady’s breathing fire down my neck about that,” Gary said. “The locksmith said the problem is it’s some kind of rare custom lock, and you’d have to know all about antique vault locks to even get started on it, and there’s just not a lot of specialists available. I’m doing my best.”

“Think you can pick it, Ellie?” Stacey asked.

“Not a chance. Let’s monitor this area, though, obviously.” I plonked down the tripod I was carrying. Stacey topped it with a night vision camera, then dug an audio recorder out of her backpack and set it up nearby.

“Let’s keep moving,” I said. “We’ve got a long night ahead.”

“You don’t have to tell me twice.” Gary wasted no time getting through the broken hole in the wall, then ran through the basement corridor and the wine cellar. He took the stairs up to the main floor two at a time.

Chapter Six

We picked the card room as our nerve center, using the worn green felt tables as display stands for our monitors and speakers. It was conveniently located on the first floor, just off the front hall, and wasn’t a reported center of supernatural activity.

As Gary predicted, we couldn’t hope to cover all the indoor and outdoor areas where people had experienced strange encounters, so we did our best to focus on major paranormal hotspots, which Stacey still liked to call “hauntspots.”

In the master bedroom upstairs, workers had reported a large, shadowy mass shaped like a giant man silently watching them. The room had turned cold, and the electricity in the room had gone out, leaving them in darkness. Their phones were drained of power, too, and they’d fallen over each other in their scramble to escape.

The Moroccan-style smoking room had been another busy place, where the sound of piano music and voices had been reported, along with the smell of tobacco.

“I’m exhausted.” Stacey slouched in one of the card room’s high-back chairs, looking over the array of monitors and the wires snaking among them. “Good thing we’re just getting started.”

“We’ll make it an early night,” I assured her. “Maybe wrap it up around midnight or one.”

“Oh, early, good.” Stacey yawned and stretched then peeked over at my computer. “Whatcha doing?”

“Cyberstalking Darika,” I said.

“With data fusion?”

“So far, just LinkedIn. That’s too public to feel truly stalkerish. Assuming this is the right person—there’s no picture—she’s got an MBA from Brown and is currently the managing director of something called Why Enterprises.”

“Which is…?”

“The thing I’m now trying to figure out.”

“Why Enterprises is a personal investment arm of my employer.” Darika entered the room, looking sharp and still ready for business in her suit, though it was hours past sunset. “Whose name, as you would have inevitably discovered, is Wyatt Lanigan.”

“Oh,” I said, torn between my shock at recognizing that name and the awkwardness of her walking in on me stalking her, even if just mildly through publicly available information. “I’m sorry, Darika, I was just trying to, uh, get an overall picture of anything that might affect the case.”

“That’s fine,” she said. “It’s only LinkedIn.”

“Right, exactly.” I tried to relax, but it didn’t go well. “Are we talking about the Wyatt Lanigan? Creator of—”

“LookyLoon!” Stacey piped up. She tapped her phone and turned the screen to face me. A logo filled it for a moment—the profile of a black bird with a huge red eye that stared relentlessly like some kind of zombie, its pupil a stylized black “L.”

The logo vanished, replaced by a selfie of Stacey and Jacob hiking in the woods, with Bigfoot stalking behind them, hairy hands raised as if preparing to grab them both. I assumed Bigfoot had been added later using the app. “I use it all the time lately. I actually meant to Look Back at Jacob earlier. I’ve sent you a couple of Look-At-Me requests, Ellie, but you never Look Back.”

“I’m not on LookyLoon,” I said. “I thought that was for high schoolers.”

“Whatever. You can fool around with your pictures and your friends’ pictures too. And put each other into popular memes. And add word and thought balloons like a comic book. Here, I’ll send you another Look-At-Me.”

“That’s okay, I’m not really interested in LookyLoon…” I glanced at Darika and realized my comment might annoy her. “Uh, right this second.”

“I’ll send Look-At-Me requests to both of you,” Darika said, plainly trying to drag me onto the social media platform. She tapped at her phone. Stacey’s phone let out a shrieking, haunting cry like a loon, and she tapped at it.

“Looked Back at you!” Stacey told Darika cheerfully. “Ellie, check your email or your phone messages. I just sent a Look-At-Me cluster invite to all the contact information I have for you. The LookyLoon app lets me do it with one button.”

“Well, that explains who can afford to spruce up an nineteenth-century mansion that’s been sitting abandoned all these years,” I said, ignoring the pinging notifications from my phone as they both spammed me with Look-At-Me requests. “A tech billionaire. But why’s he doing it?”

“Wyatt has a number of homes around the world,” Darika said. “Collecting and managing unique houses is one of his interests.”

“And you manage that for him?” I asked.

“His real estate portfolio falls under my purview, but rarely do things go so poorly that I must be this hands-on with a single property. Unfortunately, I fired the former project manager after failing to take him seriously about the estate being haunted. So here I am, with the last dreg of our security team, trying to secure the island against things I never believed existed.”

“We’ll have to dig into the history of the place,” I said. “Are there any old records in the study?”

“You’re welcome to see whatever is there so long as you leave my things alone. I didn’t notice many files of interest, just land surveys. If there was more, the Grolman family must have taken it when they moved out.”

“Maybe we could find the living descendants and ask if they have any archives about the house—”

“Out of the question.” Darika spoke so quickly and sharply that I couldn’t help but draw back from her, startled. Noticing my expression, she softened. A little. “From what we understand, the family prefers the island to remain in its wild, uninhabited condition. However, their focus and influence in the state of Georgia has waned over the generations. They haven’t lived here since the Great Depression. So, when Wyatt decided he wanted this island, we had to keep it quiet, negotiate carefully with the current lever-pullers of the state, and provide the necessary generous political donations, as you would expect. Keeping it quiet up until now has been a tremendous effort.”

“But people will know sooner or later,” Stacey said. “I mean, they won’t hear it from Ellie and me, because of the nondisclosure and all, but…won’t the public hear about it?”

“Of course,” Darika said. “When Wyatt does go public, the house will be restored to its historical condition, but updated to minimize impact on the island’s ecosystem. Only electric vehicles will be allowed on the island once the heavy construction phase is complete. Rainwater will be cached to irrigate the landscaping…assuming that system ever gets installed. Wyatt’s goals are fully aligned with the preservation and protection of the island in its natural state.”

After the bulldozers and excavators are done, I thought, but didn’t say aloud. “I’m glad to hear that,” I said. “Anyway, his goals aren’t really our business, except to say that renovation and construction at a haunted site are good ways to stir up any local spirits. The spirits may be territorial, they may resent change, they may hate the presence of the living. Or, in the worst scenarios, they may have been lying in wait, hungry ghosts ready to prey on the energy of the living, and the arrival of living souls enables them to feed.”

Darika shuddered. I felt for her, but I wasn’t pulling any punches, because it sounded like this estate was a hive of paranormal activity. “Pretas,” she said. “That’s what they call them in India.”

“Do you know of any possible reason for the haunting?” I asked. “Tragic deaths? Murders?”

“Hank Grolman died in a hunting accident,” she said. “Killed by one of the island’s wild pigs. He had imported some Carpathian boar to breed with the local swine to make them larger and stronger, more dangerous game. Just as he bred larger, stronger boarhounds to hunt them with. All for the entertainment of his guests, I suppose.”

“People had weird entertainment in the 1800s.” Stacey was distracted, thumbing at her phone, which kept screeching out notifications. “Oh, my roommate just Looked At some new plants for our apartment. Let me Look Back at her real quick.”

Darika grew absorbed in the LookyLoon app on her own phone, which kept emitting its own screeching-loon notifications, leaving me standing there waiting for them, my phone still in my pocket. My eyes wandered over to the South American hunting trophies, like the dead jaguar with its glassy, staring eyes, as though it too had been sucked into the stupefying glare of some social media app.

“Wyatt just Private-Looked me, asking for an update on this house,” Darika said. Her eyes moved up from her phone to look at me. I saw again incredible tension there, the gaze of someone who’d been carrying a lot of stress for quite a while and might be considering snapping fairly soon. “What is our timeline?”

“Timeline?” I asked. “We’re just starting. I really don’t know. We’ll try to identify the entities who are causing trouble, but this will take a combination of observation and historical research.”

“I’ll tell him three days.”

I gaped. “I don’t think so!” I finally managed to say. “We can’t even begin—”

“Four?”

“I can’t guarantee anything like that,” I said. “What is the hurry?”

Instead of answering, Darika typed something back on her phone, hopefully not giving us a four-day deadline.

Wyatt Lanigan was a person I knew from the media, a young Silicon Valley hotshot typically seen in vintage video game shirts and cargo pants, too cool for suits or even business casual.

“How old is Wyatt?” I asked Darika, but she was too engrossed in her phone to respond.

“Twenty-three,” Stacey said.

“He’s younger than me?”

“Not younger than me,” Stacey pointed out, somewhat unnecessarily. “But hey, most people don’t even make their first billion until they’re past thirty. You’ve still got time, Ellie.”

“He wants it done in three.” Darika put her phone away.

“I told you I can’t guarantee three days,” I said. “You already hired us for a week. Maybe—”

“When Wyatt declares something, he expects people to make it happen. He calls it ‘programming our own reality.’ So now I must aggressively, relentlessly, and annoyingly push you to make it happen. Which I am sorry about, because you do seem like nice ladies, and you don’t deserve the kind of pressure and scrutiny I’m going to apply to you.”

“We can only do so much.”

“What resources would enable you to do more?” she asked. “What are your constraints?”

“Resources? Constraints?” I repeated, which did not make me sound particularly bright, but I was accustomed to operating on a shoestring. Sometimes just the little plastic tip of the shoestring. And constraints? We’ve got nothing but constraints.

“Yes.” Darika spoke slowly, as if her estimate of my intelligence had adjusted downward. “If we determine the constraints in your process, we may find that certain aspects can be offloaded and outsourced to be performed in parallel with those core competencies that cannot be offloaded. What do you typically spend most of your time doing? What usually slows you down that could be performed by others with appropriate skills?”

“Uh,” I said, which I was sure lowered her estimation of me a little more. I got what she meant, but I simply wasn’t used to the idea of bringing in other people just to help me out. Occasionally, we needed a specialist, like an exorcist, but I hadn’t yet determined what we might need here. “We usually bring a psychic eventually, after we make some initial—”

“Bring her in now.”

“It’s a him, actually,” Stacey said. “He can come this weekend. Right now, he’s out of town for work—”

“Who cares? What else?” Darika had her phone out, taking notes.

“Historical research,” I said. “A list of everyone who ever died on the island would be great. And everyone who ever lived here, while we’re at it.”

“It will be a short list,” Darika said. “Unless you count Native Americans from the precolonial period, of whom we know nothing beyond a few artifacts. Satilla Island was considered too steep and rocky for cotton or rice plantations, and so mostly ignored by settlers. What else do you need?”

“That should do it for now. Unless you want to buy us some extra cameras and microphones and motion detectors—”

“Write up a list with prices and send it to me.”

“Okay.” I felt weirdly stunned by her request. It was far from my usual experience, which often involved trying to collect partial payments from clients months after removing their ghosts.

“Today,” Darika added, though it was already very late. “What else?”

“I’ll let you know as we determine the, uh, particular constraints of the case,” I said.

“Good.” Darika looked between us as if evaluating us yet again. She frowned. “You really are going to be able to take care of this, correct?”

“Yes,” I said, not because I was sure we could, but because I didn’t think I would enjoy the consequences of saying anything else. I’d already tried to explain that I wasn’t sure, but she wasn’t willing to take it partly depends on circumstances outside my control for an answer. She expected me to program reality.

With a final sharp nod, Darika left the card room, but her presence seemed to echo loudly as Stacey and I got back to work.

On the monitors, the shadowy house lay silent, the slowly rotting predators from around the world standing guard over the emptiness, as they had for so many decades.

Though, as we would shortly observe, the house was not nearly as empty as it seemed.

Chapter Seven

It didn’t take long for me to draw up a wish list of equipment and email it to Darika, who had gone home to the guest cottage for the night. Then Stacey and I settled into our observation, stakeout style, waiting for the hour to grow late. We kept the lights off to avoid scaring away any ghosts, so the card room was lit only by the glow of our monitors.

Our sensors began picking up whispers of activity well before midnight—an electrical spike in the billiards room, a temperature drop in the upstairs bedroom where the large shadow had scared off the workers. Something unseen set off a motion detector in the smoking room. A sound like breaking glass in the dining room lasted less than half a second, but certainly got us excited. Stacey replayed it a few times.

These traces of paranormal activity came and went, and in any normal investigation, this would have been a tremendous haul of data for a single night. More often we sit night after night, waiting for any hint of ghostly action at all.

The lodge appeared to be a profoundly haunted place, long ruled by the spirits and untouched by the living, the kind of location I would usually write off as a ghost hive—better abandoned to the dead than reclaimed by the living. One of the worst such places we’d visited was Lassiter State Asylum, an old psychiatric hospital near Milledgeville where Stacey and I had searched for forgotten records. It had left me with recurring nightmares.

Clearing the ghosts from the lodge, if it was even possible, seemed like far too much to handle on Darika’s unreasonable timeline. Three or four days could potentially happen in other cases, if the haunting was relatively simple, the ghost’s identity and motives known, and all the stars aligned and the ducks lined up in rows, but none of that was happening here.

“We’re in trouble, aren’t we?” Stacey asked, reviewing her notes. “Can we ever clear a place like this? And what would cause a place to become so haunted?”

“All good questions.” I pulled on my leather jacket and reached for my utility belt. “Let’s take a walk.”

“Ooh, yeah, ghost tour, I’m definitely up for that.” Stacey grabbed a portable night vision camera as we left the card room.

She took some video of the Indian-style lounge, adorned with colorful tapestries on the walls and a stuffed Bengal tiger crouched in one corner, teeth bared, ready to spring. Cobras and vipers in a glass display case had gone dry and flaky with age, gradually shedding their skins for the last time.

An elephant occupied the center of the room, its trunk raised as if trumpeting. It was a pretty sad sight. Time had worn holes into the trunk and ears, which were pinned open to make the largest possible display. The tip of one tusk was missing, possibly cut away for the ivory, possibly just broken through carelessness.

There was certainly no hint of a hidden trap door visible beneath the elephant, and Gary had assured us that a new floor had been built over the trap door before the island was donated to the state. Sliding the elephant away to check the floor beneath it wasn’t exactly practical. Even dead, the elephant remained a formidable guard.

We eventually reached the lodge's second floor by way of a narrow, dim back staircase with a low ceiling, clearly meant for servants.

“Where are the main stairs?” I whispered to Stacey. “There’s nothing in the entrance hall except a gallery where people upstairs can look down on new arrivals.”

“Maybe the upstairs was VIP only,” Stacey said. “Unless you worked here. VIPs and employees.”

We emerged into the wide upstairs hall, where rotten fragments of a red carpet runner clung to the floorboards.

Gary had brought us to the area earlier, but we’d focused on the master bedroom where the shadow figure had frightened the workers. Now we took our time nosing around.

Every other door seemed to open on a servants’ nook of some kind—a linen closet, a sewing room, a narrow hall shortcutting to some other area of the second floor.

In between were spacious bedrooms, some with a significant amount of antique furniture remaining or perhaps recently replaced, fancy beds with bedcurtains, armchairs by the fireplace. Each bedroom featured a large, preserved bird mounted on branches in an upper corner as if preparing to swoop down on guests—a falcon, a kite, an osprey.

The master bedroom, where we had already set up the camera, featured a California condor suspended from the ceiling, its fleshy vulture head glaring down with unnatural red-glass eyes.

More California redwood accented the walls there, as if to remind everyone that elements of the house had traveled thousands of miles across the country on Hank Grolman’s whim.

The master bedroom was noticeably cooler, and my EMF meter detected higher electromagnetic activity along with the colder temperature. Stacey panned the room with her camera. I watched the shadows to make sure none of them stepped forward and attacked us. It can happen.

We waited quietly in the master bedroom and continued to pick up readings of possible activity. Nothing manifested, so eventually I tried for a voice session, recorded with a very sensitive microphone.

“Hello?” I said, my voice wavering as I looked at the weird, red-eyed condor above. I decided to stop looking at it. Instead, I focused on the bed and wardrobe shoved together in the corner, creating a large, dark, shadowy area that I didn’t especially trust. Someone, dead or otherwise, could easily hide behind the wardrobe and tall headboard. I pointed my microphone that way. “Is anyone here? Can you tell us your name? Do you have a message? We are here to listen.”

No obvious response came, but the readings on my EMF meter flickered upward. I continued to have the impression of someone in that dark corner.

“We can help you.” I tiptoed that way, since I didn’t want to startle the entity into fleeing before I got close.

The headboard’s corner posts were pillars of polished wood that could have held up a cathedral roof or two. The headboard itself was a thick, heavy slab of wood between them. I tensed as I stepped around the headboard to look into the cold, dark corner behind it, where I thought I sensed a presence, though I’m not exactly psychic.

Something moved in that narrow, dim space, pale filaments in the air, gossamer thin.

Cobwebs, stirred up by my approach and my breath. Nothing more.

I sighed. “Looks like a dead end.”

“This room still weirds me out. Do we really have to be here? We already have the camera recording.” Stacey nodded at the tripod just inside the doorway.

“I was thinking you could spend the rest of the night in here alone. An entity’s more likely to approach a lone person, you know?”

“Seriously?” She frowned at the large, dusty bed.

“No, of course not. But you’re probably feeling better about staying in the chambermaids’ cottage now, aren’t you?”

“Ugh. You’re mean, Ellie.” Stacey didn’t wait for me as she headed to the hall.

On the third floor, servants had been housed in small cells with sloping ceilings that left little standing room. The tiny windows were nailed shut, the nail heads gone to rust.

“It’s stuffy up here,” Stacey said. The air was thick and stale, difficult to breathe, the ventilation poor. Maybe nailing the windows shut hadn’t been such a great idea. “Let’s leave,” Stacey added, and I agreed.

Escaping the vast lodge was not easy. A narrow staircase from the third floor led down to a laundry closet on the second but ended there. We had to search around for stairs to the main level.

Finally reaching the first floor, we found the doors to the rear veranda and stepped outside, overlooking muddy chaos where the construction equipment rested like sleeping dinosaurs. The salty breeze off the ocean was refreshing after the confined rooms upstairs.

We picked our way around the exterior of the house, over uneven ground, past the occasional recessed doorway, along paths through overgrown copses of trees adorned with marble statues. A quite muscular, quite naked, definitely male statue with a very long sword overlooked a crater of churned-up earth. Stacey and I couldn’t determine which specific character from myth or history this might be, even after spending some time carefully looking it over and discussing it.

Eventually, we reached the porte-cochère out front, where our van slumbered under cover of the roof. We grabbed snacks—bottled water, Stacey’s tooth-chipping Stoneground granola bars. Having learned my lesson about those, I’d brought myself trail mix.

“This place could be nice,” Stacey said, leaning back against the van’s front grill. “If you got rid of all the big dead animals and the antler chandeliers. I mean, one or two of those is really enough. And you could turn the basement taxidermy shop into a…well, pretty much anything would be an improvement.”

“I see the appeal of having a whole island to yourself,” I said, “but if I had a billion dollars, I’d probably want a house that was a little less like a medieval dungeon. I'd want big windows and balconies. Why have a house on the crest of an island and no balconies? I’ll never understand some people.” I tossed trail mix in my mouth and crunched down on the sweet and salty combo. It was just nuts and raisins, nothing too crazy and fun like M&Ms.

“Yeah, they didn’t take advantage of the great balcony potential at all.” Stacey bit into her walnut-pistachio Stoneground bar with an audible crack that made me wince but didn’t seem to bother her at all. “Mmmm,” she hummed, somehow enjoying it.

“I guess we should head back inside,” I said, but I felt reluctant about it.

“Yeah, probably.” Stacey didn’t sound too thrilled to go back into the lodge, either. As colossal as the building was, it had a stuffy, cloistered feeling on the inside. The slow decay of the countless dead creatures, preserved but not perfectly, and certainly not forever, only made the stagnant air more foul and unpleasant.

We started toward the front door, snacks in hand, ready to finally return to our monitors and relax.

A scream tore through the night, shattering the peaceful soundscape of marsh frogs and chirping insects. Unseen movement rustled through the woods by the driveway.

Stacey and I shared a wide-eyed look. That scream hadn’t sounded like an auditory apparition at all. Those were usually faint, or distant, or oddly flat, as the voices of the dead tended to be.

This sounded so clear and loud that it was very possibly a living person. If so, it had to be Darika, the only other woman on the island.

We dropped our snacks, grabbed our flashlights, and chased the scream.

Chapter Eight

The scream had come from the forest, so we searched along the edge of the road for a break in the vegetation. It wasn’t easy getting past the dense undergrowth.

We found a narrow, winding path through the live oaks, whose heavy limbs sometimes snaked like malevolent tentacles across the ground, threatening to trip us up. Overhead, the limbs curled around and through each other like the spiraling bars of an ornate birdcage, letting little moonlight pass through their leaves.

Stacey and I plunged ahead, not shy about using our blazing white flashlights now, listening for another scream among the trees.

We eventually slowed, having no idea whether the twisting path was taking us closer to the person who’d screamed or not.

“Darika!” I shouted. “Are you out there?”

“Darika!” Stacey swept her light among the thick, mossy trunks of the ancient oaks.

We reached something of a clearing, a weedy pit near the exposed roots of a fallen oak. The oak roots were as thick and serpentine as the branches, creating an impenetrable wall.

“Darika!” I shouted again, pivoting slowly, my flashlight iris opened to full floodlight mode, turning the tree bark in front of us bone-white like the bleached dead oaks of Jekyll Island.

“Did you hear that?” Stacey asked.

I shook my head and fell silent, listening.

A twig snapped, leaves crunched, undergrowth rustled.

Something was out there.

More than one something, because they walked on both sides of the clearing, quietly encircling us.

“Ellie?” Stacey’s whispering voice trembled. Our lights weren’t showing us anything, our view blocked by the thick subtropical foliage. “Do you...smell that?”

I nodded. It was like rotten meat, the stench of death radiating from the woods, conjuring memories of a bloated, flyblown possum carcass I'd once walked past on the road.

The sounds came gradually, almost too low to hear at first, like whispers in the woods.

These weren’t whispers, though.

They were growls and snarls, slowly getting louder and clearer and closer, from the forest all around us. We were surrounded. It sounded like the island’s wild dogs, often heard but rarely seen, had tracked us down.

I grabbed Gary’s airhorn from where I’d stuck it in my utility belt and pulled the trigger, turning in a quick circle as I unleashed the loud, irritating blast. The cheerful cartoon gator on the side gave me a thumbs up.

Stacey drew out pepper spray and watched the underbrush, waiting for the unseen beasts to emerge.

A hush fell when I finally released the airhorn trigger. The underbrush had ceased its shaking, and the unseen creatures had fallen silent. Perhaps they’d left.

“Guess the horn worked,” Stacey whispered. “Probably really hurt those dogs’ little ears.”

“As long as it teaches them to stay away from us,” I said. “They sounded vicious.”

“Probably just hungry, the poor pups.”

The snarls and growls rose in the woods not far away, and we went tense and silent again, readying ourselves for a fight, but the sounds receded into the distance.

“Good thing that’s over.” Stacey sighed and sagged, touching her chest as if to still her racing heart. “Whew.”

Another high-pitched scream shattered the silence, off in the direction where the beasts had gone.

“It’s not over,” I said, and we ran as fast as we could, through vines and low limbs that seemed determined to hold us back, lashing our faces, arms, and legs, as if the island itself were our enemy. We called for Darika, but the scream didn’t return. The silence worried me even more than another scream would have.

Breaking through from the underbrush, I saw the starry night sky spread open before me as we reached a wide-open space.

Too wide-open. My foot landed on nothing at all, and I toppled forward until I sprawled face-first across a steep, weedy slope overlooking empty darkness that smelled like the ocean.

The edge of the cliff had eroded away, leaving treacherous open space. The wall above the eroded point had a vertical crack almost all the way up; the strain of losing its footing was breaking it, slowly, year by year.

“Ellie!” Stacey called out somewhere above as I slid down the slope, grabbing wildly at passing weeds that tore out by their roots, not nearly strong enough to hold me. The slope only grew steeper and muddier. I was heading toward a straight drop to the moonlit rocks on the beach far below.

I finally caught a thicker branch and ended my rolling crash before it could become a bone-breaking plummet to the rocks. The isolated island would be a terrible spot to suffer a serious injury. A boat or medivac helicopter would take a long time to arrange, and the bill would surely be as catastrophic as the injury.

“Are you okay?” Stacey scooted carefully down the slope in a seated position, inching toward me.

“Stay back,” I warned her. “The view of the beach gets a little too good down here.”

“Take this.” She extended a long branch in my direction. I grabbed it and hauled myself up from the edge until I felt secure enough to crawl on my hands and knees.

We climbed back up the slope to flat, stable ground away from the erosion and the cracked wall.

“I haven’t heard the scream again,” Stacey said. “Should we head back to the house?”

A low growl rose in the undergrowth nearby, along with that awful rotten-meat smell. I’d dropped the air horn in my scramble to not topple off the bluff, so I drew my flashlight instead.

More growls joined in, as if we’d been corralled to the edge of the bluff, tricked into a trap where we couldn’t move forward and couldn’t retreat.

I stabbed my flashlight at the undergrowth like a weapon, hoping it would bother the creatures into leaving. A thicket of long, sharp saw-palm fronds twitched at my blast of light. Something crouched behind it.

Then a horn trumpeted somewhere in the woods, blasting out a bold, powerful tone like the opening note of an imperial march. It blew three times, then stopped.

The woods fell silent. No growls, nothing threatening us from the underbrush. After a minute, the smaller, softer night noises resumed, the chirping of insects and the scratching of critters in search of snacks.

“They’re gone,” Stacey whispered. “Aren’t they?”

I picked up the long branch Stacey had used to help me up the slope. With the far end, I pushed aside the undergrowth where the unseen beast had been growling at me.

Behind it was nothing, just muddy earth and vegetation.

“They didn’t run away,” I murmured. “They’re just gone. Do you see any dog prints in that mud?”

“Not one,” she said.

We didn’t need to say much more out loud. A pack of large dogs didn’t just disappear without a trace. Not even Houdini’s dog could have pulled off that trick.

Once we were sure the beasts were gone, we backtracked through the woods as quickly as we could toward the lodge, hoping our new employer hadn’t just been mauled by the local diablo dogs.

Chapter Nine

“Gary?” I shouted into the walkie-talkie as we raced back through the wilderness. “Gary, check on Darika! Gary, do you read? Copy? Hear? Hello? Gary!”

He didn’t respond by the time we emerged onto the oyster-shell road. Stacey and I ran at top speed—which was maybe a little faster for her than me, but okay, that’s fine—directly toward the guest house where Darika stayed.

All her lights were out. As we sprinted toward the house, I looked over the front door and the windows for any sign of forced entry. Nothing seemed out of place, but there was a back door and other windows I couldn’t see. We clambered up onto the front porch and rang the doorbell. No response. I couldn’t hear any ringing inside the house; maybe the doorbell didn't even work. I pounded the door with my fist instead.

“Let’s check around back,” I told Stacey. We ran along the wraparound porch to the back door and knocked there instead.

The barn-style door to a shed beside the house stood open, and Darika’s personal golf cart sat inside, quietly charging for the night. If Darika had gone anywhere, she had traveled on foot.

“What now?” Stacey asked. “Break down the door? Or can you pick the lock?”

“I’d rather not do either.” I raised the walkie-talkie. “Gary! Wake up!”

“Huh?” he replied, drowsily. “Whatcher doin’?”

“We heard a woman screaming in the woods,” I said. “Now we’re at Darika’s, and she’s not answering the door.”

“I’m on my way.” His voice wasn’t exactly brimming with urgency as he said it.

“Please hurry.”

“Yeah, yep. Hurrying.”

I knocked on the back door again while we waited. I called Darika’s phone, using the island’s spotty satellite WiFi since I had no cell service, but it went to voicemail.

“Are you thinking about that landscaper, Ernesto, who got dragged into the woods and mauled?” Stacey asked. “Because I am.”

“Darika’s not answering.” I traded my phone for my lock picks and knelt in front of the door. Stacey lit the keyhole for me with her flashlight. The lock was nothing special and popped open with a little effort.

The door opened onto a dark, silent front hall.

Then a high-pitched wail shrieked from somewhere inside the house.

“Burglar alarm!” Stacey clapped her hands over her ears. “Ouch.”

A light switched on somewhere inside. Darika descended the stairs, wrapped in a silk robe, her long black hair loose and flowing to her shoulders. When she saw us at the door, she scowled and raised a tiny remote control in her hand. The alarm ended with a bloop.

“What is happening?” Darika hissed, her face a mask of fury.

“We heard a woman screaming in the woods,” I said. “We wanted to make sure you weren’t in danger.”

“Why would I be out in the woods in the middle of the night?” Darika asked. “Unless it was one of Wyatt’s mandatory team-bonding exercises out in Big Sur. How did you get into my house?”

“I, uh, picked the lock.” I held up my picks sheepishly, and she scowled. I became acutely aware of how dirty and scraped-up we appeared.

“If I’m locked inside my house, shouldn’t that tell you I’m probably safe?” she asked.

“We didn’t want to make assumptions, given the reports of injured workers—”

A deafening siren made it pointless for me to speak any further.

Gary’s long black golf cart came flying up the road flashing rows of blinding blue police lights.

“You called Gary?” Darika asked, grimacing at the searing lights and shading her eyes with her hand.

“Just in case,” I said.

“It was a seriously freaky scream, and we heard it a few times,” Stacey said.

“We were concerned about another Ernesto situation,” I said.

“What’s the trouble?” Gary hopped out, one hand on a bright yellow TASER holstered on a camouflage tactical vest, which he wore over a bright yellow shirt polka-dotted with parrots like he'd been on his way to a Jimmy Buffett show. He tossed his head to fling away some long strands of hair that had drooped off his bald spot and into his eyes.

“Right now, it’s those lights!” Darika shouted before he got too close. “Why are you even using those?”

“It creates a feeling of security. Lets everyone know the authorities are here and in charge.”

“There are only four people on the entire island, Gary. Who are you trying to impress?”

Gary scowled, but he reached in and killed the flashing blue lights.

Darika turned her attention to Stacey and me, looking over the damage we’d taken in the woods. I was in especially bad shape, covered in dirt. “What happened to you two?”

“I hit a steep spot where the ground’s crumbled away and the wall’s broken, and I nearly fell off the bluff. You might want to fix that.”

“Finally, something to place on my to-do list for this wretched island,” Darika said. “So, you chased a ghost into the woods. I don’t suppose you caught it?”

“Not this time.”

“When you do, let me know. Until then, stay away from my house at night. And as a general rule.” Darika stepped back into the house and closed the door. I heard her lock it with a chain on the inside.

Chapter Ten

“I’ve seen that look on her face before.” Gary approached us as we left Darika’s porch. “You do not want to be on the business end of that lady’s wrath, I can tell you.”

“Sorry for the false alarm, Gary,” I said. “Thanks for coming.”

“Hey, just doin’ my duty. Looks like you two got banged up pretty bad. Darika didn’t do that, did she?”

“We got drawn into a wild dog chase in the woods,” I told him. “It wasn’t great.”

“You need my first aid kit?”

“We have our own, thanks. We could use a ride back to the main house, if you don’t mind me getting dirt all in your cart.”

“Heck, no, I end up hosing that thing out every week for one reason or another. Hop in.” He opened the rear door for us like a limo driver. I decided not to ask about the frequent hose-outs.

Stacey and I climbed into the extended golf cart, glad for the mesh that blocked the insects. The electric cart barely made a sound as it glided up the oyster-shell road.

“While we’re all stirred up out here, how about a night drive on the beach?” Gary suggested. “You can see the stars real well right now. And this cart’s got new sand tires I want to test out. Tread’s so deep you could shove your whole fist up inside.”

“Is the beach haunted?” Stacey asked.

“Could be. It’s a nice spot, anyway. The horses like it.”

“I wouldn’t mind seeing the wild horses.” Stacey looked interested now. “And they run around on the beach in the moonlight? Did I fall into an episode of Black Beauty?”

“I think our hands are full enough as it is,” I said. “Did you see anything unusual tonight, Gary?”

“Me? Nope, I just watched a DVD and hit the sack. Top Gun. Always puts me right to sleep.”

“Someone called the dogs off with a horn. Any guesses who that might be, Gary?”

“Wasn’t me. Pretty sure it wasn’t Darika.”

“Guesses can include dead people,” Stacey told him.

“Dead people, huh?” He rubbed his chin. “I suppose the old game warden whose house I took over. Or maybe it’s Old Man Grolman himself, out hunting boar and deer from beyond the grave. But a dead man’s got no use for meat.”

“Maybe he enjoys the chase,” I said.

“It has to beat lying around in your grave all night,” Stacey said.

“Is Grolman buried here on the island?” I asked Gary. “In that cemetery, maybe?”

“Oh, I could take you on a night tour of the island. The cemetery’s all right, but I don't recommend it. I’d say the beach is the way to go.”

“I’d like to see the cemetery in the morning,” I told him. “Late morning. I think we’re just about done for tonight.”

“Suit yourself.” Gary parked by the front door, near our van. He hopped out to get the door for us again. “If you see anything else crazy, just holler. I’ll keep my radio on. But do not—and I can’t say this enough—go and bother the boss lady at her residence again. She only likes to meet with people in her office at the lodge. Never has anyone to her house. That guest cottage is like her personal bubble, you know what I mean?”

“Okay,” I said as we stepped out. “Thanks for the lift.”

“Be careful out there.” His gaze shifted from us to the heavy front doors of the lodge. “And in there, too. I couldn’t tell you which place is more dangerous, to be honest.”

Then he drove off, his black security cart as silent as the deathly carriage of a Dullahan from Irish lore.

“Well, that was all terrible,” Stacey said as we climbed into the van. “You’re bleeding. Let’s go patch up your scratches.”

At the chambermaids’ cottage, the communal bathroom's floors and pipes looked new, but the walls were aged concrete, even in the shower stalls, creating a dismal prison feeling. The lodge had originally been built as a show of wealth and power by Grolman, but little thought had been given to the comfort of the numerous people meant to staff the place. So far, it didn’t look like social-media tycoon Wyatt Lanigan had any serious plans for labor reform, either.

After showering in one of the concrete nooks, I changed into some night clothes—not pajamas, not in a place where things might creep in to attack us at night. Instead, it was yoga pants and a loose long-sleeve shirt, suitable for sleeping in a strange bed or running for your life from some demonic horror.

Stacey and I retired to our rooms.

In mine, I made sure the windows were shuttered, because sunrise was only a few hours away, but also to prevent things from looking at me while I slept. Paranormal entities can easily walk through walls, but also can be somewhat in denial about being dead, so they obey certain physical boundaries out of psychological habit. Habit is a powerful force in a ghost’s existence.

I pulled together the four narrow beds in my room into one giant superbed, then spread out my sleeping bag atop it. The mattresses were new but cheap and uncomfortable. The bedframes were more than a century old and creaked at the slightest movement. With my phone alarm set to wake me at the crack of ten, I looked forward to a few peaceful hours before sunrise.

Despite the poor accommodations, I was tired enough to fall asleep quickly.

My sleep was unpleasant and uncomfortable, though, filled with dreams of unseen beasts pursuing me through the woods.

I awoke disoriented in total darkness, the air around me painfully cold, like I was sleeping in a refrigerated locker down at the morgue. My fingers and toes were numb, and I felt drained, like some paranormal parasite had been feeding on my energy.

Footsteps sounded, small and soft. I wanted to believe it was just Stacey passing my door on a late-night visit to the bathroom or kitchen, but I doubted it. Stacey doesn’t generally suck all the warmth out of a room or all the energy out of people’s souls. If either of us has that effect, it’s probably me.

I eased out of bed, pawed around on the flimsy nightstand until I found my flashlight, then padded to the door in my socks, trying to keep my steps soft to avoid alerting the entity to my presence.

My flashlight stayed off and pointed at the floor, but if I heard a growl from the darkness ahead, it was going full white-light flood mode.

I’d left my bedroom door ajar in case Stacey needed me, but not enough that I could step through without pushing it open and advertising my presence.

Refraining from that, I looked out through the small gap of my slightly open door, into the hallway outside. Stacey’s room was just across the hall, her door wide open.

Someone stood in the hall, barely visible in the moonlight from the front room windows, staring into Stacey’s room with her back to me. She wore a white apron over an ankle-length black dress. The apron straps crossed her back, tied in a large bow at her waist. A white cap concealed most of her head, but a few long strands of pale hair had escaped from beneath it.

The woman looked completely solid. My main indicator that she wasn’t of the living was the cold front she’d brought with her, though her Victorian-era maidservant costume was another hint.

I eased open my door, trying to make no noise, but the hinge gave a rusty squeak.

The woman turned to look at me. I jumped, and I screamed.

Her appearance horrified me. Her face was bizarrely canine, the ears wide and triangular, the nose sharp, the eyes black and empty.

Being in the ghost business, I’m never proud to admit when I’ve been startled into screaming, but we’d only just been menaced by disappearing diablo dogs in the woods earlier that night.

As I screamed, I reflexively turned on my flashlight to strike her with thousands of lumens of white light.

Her canine face was a mask, a sculpted red work of monstrous, brutal artistry that concealed her whole face in the guise of a demonic-looking fox.

I tensed, ready for an attack.

The ice-cold woman vanished instead, possibly chased away by my light. I carry that thing for a reason.

A bright blue glow erupted from Stacey’s room, as if Gary had driven in there with patrol lights blazing. Stacey’s cylindrical blue bed tent glowed from within. The tent unzipped, and Stacey jumped out swinging her flashlight. “Ellie? What happened?”

“I saw a horrible apparition.”

“Oh, good! Where?” She swept the hall with her flashlight. “In your room? No wonder you freaked out.”

“Actually, she was in the hallway, staring into your room,” I said.

Stacey shivered at that, and shivered more as I described the woman I’d seen.

“Do you think they had fancy dress balls at the lodge?” Stacey asked. “Costume parties?”

“Maybe. She wore more of a maid’s outfit, though. Black dress, white collar. Either she was one of the household maids, or she decided to dress like one and spend her afterlife in the maids’ cottage. That second option’s possible, but would require some pretty specific motivation.”

“Yeah, a ritzier guest would probably haunt the main lodge,” Stacey said. “I wonder why she’s here. And why she keeps wearing the mask in her ghost form.”

“It must have been significant to her. If she hadn’t been wearing it, or we hadn’t been stalked earlier, I could have kept myself under control and observed her longer.” I shook my head, disappointed in my reaction.

“While she observed me,” Stacey reiterated. “In my sleep.”

“Maybe you’re sleeping in her old room. Maybe even her old bed.”

“Ellie, stop!” Stacey sighed. “I’m moving into your room.”

Stacey actually managed to fall asleep again within a few minutes of moving over to a new bed. It wasn’t so easy for me. My mind kept rerunning my spill down the bluff, the threatening growls in the woods, and the haunting image of the girl in the hallway with her hideous mask, definitely not the kind of thing one wore to a children’s party. The fox mask seemed designed to be unpleasant and disturbing.

It appeared the Grolman estate was indeed home to a host of spirits, as reported by the many workers who’d quit, and even hinted at by Captain Walker, who certainly seemed to know his way around the islands.

After the difficult night, it was almost a relief when my cell phone woke me, even though it was Darika calling to demand an update.

“Good morning,” she said, in the most perfunctory of ways. “I’d like a rundown of your work so far.”

“We’ve only just started—”

“Yet we need swift progress. In addition, I’ve arranged for you to speak with Dr. Wendy Haverford.”

“Oh. Good? I’m sorry, who is—”

“Oakland College History Department. Pittsburgh. She wrote a biography of Senator James Ryland.”

“And who is James—”

“Again, I’ve retained her to explain that to you, at some expense, so I suggest you listen to her and make good use of that time and our money.”

“Okay, but if I knew—”

“Can you help us or not?” Darika asked.

“We did have another development.” I told her about the apparition we’d seen in our cottage. “Do you have any idea who that could be?”

“I certainly do not. My task was the legal and political work involved in gaining the island lease, as well as renovating and modernizing the estate when that proved too difficult a task to delegate. The history of the people who once lived here was irrelevant.”

“We see that in a lot of cases.”

“Come to my office at nine-thirty for the meeting with Dr. Haverford.”

“Is she here on the island?” I asked, surprised, but Darika had hung up.

“What’s up?” Stacey asked.

“Darika's not feeling patient with us at all. And I still don’t get the rush. How can you buy a nineteenth-century mansion that’s been neglected for decades and expect to flip it into something modern and habitable overnight? These people watch too much Home and Garden TV.”

“Because Wyatt Lanigan is famously impulsive,” Stacey said. “That’s how he ended up living on a blimp. The company that owned it was going to decommission it, and he felt bad for it.”

“He lives on a blimp?” I asked. “That he felt bad for?”

“You know, the LookyLoon blimp? I read he’s got it all decked out inside like a luxury apartment, and he prefers it to any of his houses. Or his yacht. Or his submarine.”

“A wacky, extravagant kind of billionaire, then,” I said. “Did he just buy Satilla Island as another hobby? Because he felt bad for it? Or as a status symbol? ‘Look at me, I’m as rich as an old-time Rockefeller.’”

“And now we’re risking our lives to make it a safe playground for him,” Stacey said. “Maybe he should abandon the island instead. Find another hobby.”

I thought it over, then sighed and shook my head. “If there are dangerous entities, we want to remove them from the world—not just for the benefit of some tech billionaire’s twentieth vacation home that he’ll maybe never visit, but to protect all the people those entities might endanger in the future.”

“Like the people who work on the island,” Stacey said. “Or unsuspecting campers and explorers, if it becomes a public park again.”

“When the dead don’t stay buried, we have to bury them better and deeper,” I said. “That’s just what we do. Let’s be glad we have a client who can pay his bills for a change.”

With no time to spare, we hurried to get ready, then drove up toward the main lodge, which looked like an immense, shadowy tomb even in the morning light.

Chapter Eleven

“I’ve had a team up all night researching the island,” Darika said by way of greeting us when we stepped into the office. She’d set up two large, curved, gaming-style monitors atop the giant redwood slab of the antique desk. The ragged stuffed boar stared at us with glass eyes over its long, curved tusks. The fox was perched on a log, its paws nailed into place.

One of Darika’s monitors, turned partly toward us, displayed grainy newsprint and black and white pictures, with the headline EVANGELINE RYLAND RAISES EYEBROWS AT DEBUTANTE BALL. A portion of a photo showed a cluster of grim, unsmiling young women in stiff, high-collared, tightly cinched dresses. One stood apart from the others, keeping her distance and smirking, in a much looser dancing dress. “Reading anything good lately?” I asked.

“I’ve forwarded everything to you. Please have a seat. Dr. Haverford will be joining us in a few minutes.” Darika rotated the screen to fully face us, then tapped at her keyboard, which was silvery and ergonomic, sleek and wireless, as was her mouse. Her monitors and speakers were also wireless. I wasn’t even sure where their electricity was coming from.

“I did look up Senator Ryland, but I didn’t have time to read in depth,” I said. “They were a Pittsburgh family who did well in the iron industry.”

“Very well, yes,” Darika said. “They were members of the Jekyll Island Club and had a winter cottage there like other prominent families.”

“And the Rylands were somehow involved with the Grolmans?”

“They are the reason this estate exists,” Darika said. “As you should hear shortly.”

A window popped up on the monitor facing Stacey and me, and it showed the two of us in real time, inside a video conferencing app. Stacey waved at her grainy digital self.

“Do we have to be on video?” I asked, not particularly thrilled with the idea of watching myself throughout the conversation.

“Not appearing would be rather rude on a video call,” Darika said.

“Are you going to be on the video?”

“Of course not, I’m just facilitating.” A plaintive, high-pitched bird call shrieked from Darika’s phone, and she checked it and sighed. “Wyatt just sent me a Look Now.” She went silent, fingers clacking at her phone.

“Oh! That reminds me, I need to Look Back at Jacob from earlier.” Stacey brought out her phone and launched the LookyLoon app, the black bird with the big red eye. She typed. Her phone let out a bird wail, too. Both of their phones continued to wail intermittently as they conversed over the app.

I was once again abandoned, with only my unflattering digital reflection for company. It stared back at me relentlessly from the large screen, which magnified my face much larger than nature intended, giving me an uncomfortably close look at my own pores while I waited.

Having kept my phone in my pocket, I was the only one paying attention when the new window popped up on the desktop monitor. A chunky, kindly-looking woman appeared, wearing a canary yellow blazer and sipping from a mug that was also canary yellow. Shelves of books filled the walls behind her.

“Hello? Can anyone hear me?” Dr. Haverford asked, as if starting a Ouija board session. A cat somewhere near her meowed in response.

“Hi, Dr. Haverford,” I said, jumping into it while Darika’s and Stacey’s attention gradually stumbled away from their phones and toward the new face and voice that had joined us. “I’m Ellie Jordan.”

Darika recovered and got involved—though remaining off-screen—and she introduced Dr. Haverford as “the foremost authority on the history of the Ryland family.”

“I’m afraid I’m all thumbs with computers,” the woman said apologetically. “But I understand meeting in person is cost-prohibitive. You can also read my book. I’m happy to send you one.”

I looked at Darika, who swung her index finger in a circle. I supposed that meant keep going or perhaps just roll with it.

“Yes, sorry, we don’t have a travel budget, I guess,” I said. “But I’d love a copy of your book.”

“It’s nothing special, really. If your focus is Satilla Island and the Grolmans, then it’s James and his daughter Evangeline you’ll want to know about.”

“I…suppose so,” I said.

“They were an unlikely pair, many said, but both had their peculiarities.”

“I'm sorry, who were the unlikely pair?”

“Hank Grolman and Evangeline Ryland, of course. Well, the Ryland family was opposed, obviously, with Mister Grolman’s background. The Rylands were a well-established, highly respected family. And Grolman was a rough one.” The cat on her end yowled again. “It's okay, Mr. Chonkers!” she said, in a babyish voice.

“What was Grolman's background?” I asked. “All I know is he was involved in the cattle industry.”

“He was born in Lower Saxony, near the Teutoburg Forest. His family were peasants employed in the stables of local aristocrats, as they had been for generations. Heinrich sought a better fate for himself than serving the beasts of wealthy men. He came to America as a young man in 1873 and found his horsemanship served him well out west. Are you familiar with his Wyoming days?”

“No, but I’m happy to learn,” I said.

“Wyoming was still just a territory with no official government. Some of the largest landowners formed vigilante associations to protect their property. Heinrich was an effective enforcer for a group called the Greater Cattlemen’s Association, hunting down cattle rustlers. He took his pay in land and cattle and amassed his first fortune. His second arrived when a coal patch was discovered on his land, just as the railroad companies were arriving in Wyoming hungry for it. That turn of fortune made Grolman a truly rich man. Soon he invested in banking and railroads.

“Later reports, and more than one lawsuit, claimed Grolman may have used aggressive strong-arm tactics in his Wyoming days, and he was even accused of running small but legitimate settlers out of their homes. But by then, Heinrich Grolman—or ‘Hank’ as he came to be known—could afford an iron shield of legal defenses against his past actions.

“The rumors, as well as his general roughness, blocked his attempts to rise to the highest levels of Eastern society. He purchased a Manhattan townhome and threw extravagant parties. It was during this era that he met Evangeline Ryland and determined to marry her, against her family’s wishes.”

“What were Evangeline’s wishes?” Stacey asked.

“Evangeline had always been the family wild card, mostly a disappointment, active in nightlife, even drinking and smoking in public. She was in her mid-thirties when they met, most likely at one of his Manhattan parties, nine years Heinrich’s junior, but she was rather old to be unmarried. Her younger sisters had long since married proper gentlemen of proper families, but Evangeline resisted and remained single.”

A fuzzy orange cat the size of a beach ball leaped onto the professor's desk, blocking our view as it sniffed the camera.

“It’s Mr. Chonkers!” Stacey gasped, as if meeting a major celebrity.

“That’s a naughty Mr. Chonkers!” Dr. Haverford gently removed him and set him down on the floor.

Stacey jotted a note and held it where only I could see.

Mr. Chonkers is so cute, she’d written.

“I’m sorry,” Dr. Haverford said, back to a professional, adult tone again. “Where were we?”

“Evangeline was cruising toward spinsterdom,” Stacey said. “Old Maid City. Population one, obviously.”

“Yes. So, despite Evangeline being on the road to becoming a, well, a hopeless reclusive cat lady…” Haverford paused and cleared her throat. “Well, despite that and Mr. Grolman’s great wealth, the Rylands opposed the idea of their daughter marrying a man of such low and crude reputation. This led to Grolman’s attempt to polish himself up and join the Jekyll Island Club, where the Rylands were members along with the Morgans and Rockefellers and the other powerful families of the age. Grolman hoped to raise his social standing through membership and to spend time in Evangeline’s company on Jekyll each winter, when her family came down, until they could be married. His attempt to join the club was rejected. Senator Ryland almost certainly blocked it himself.

“In response—and this brings us to your restoration work—Mister Grolman purchased Satilla Island, considered too small and rough for development by most, and placed his enormous hunting lodge at its peak. On a clear day, you can see that lodge all the way from the southeastern beaches of Jekyll, with the sun rising behind it, lighting up that golden Bentheim stone imported all the way from Germany.”

“You mean this entire estate was built to impress his girlfriend’s family?” Stacey asked.

“Precisely. Mr. Chonkers!” Dr. Haverford gasped as the chubby kitty again leaped on the desk, strolling across the keyboard. “That’s a big no-no!”

“It’s Mr. Chonkers again!” Stacey whispered, smiling, until the lady put her cat away again.

“Now, where were we?” Dr. Haverford asked, looking flushed. “Again, I am sorry, I am not good with computers.”

“Well, Mr. Chonkers sure seems to love them!” Stacey beamed.

Dr. Haverford’s expression went hard and cold, like she did not appreciate others commenting on her cat. “Where were we?”

“He built the mansion to impress Evangeline’s family,” I said. “Did it work?”

“Not immediately, but it began to have its intended effect, gradually wearing down the social resistance to their marriage. It helped that Hank Grolman held lavish parties on Satilla, inviting the sons of other northern families over from Jekyll and Cumberland. These were hunting parties, young men only. The only women allowed on the island were Grolman’s servants and Evangeline herself, who visited in defiance of her family’s wishes. Grolman’s hunting preserve was meant to imitate that of the aristocrats his family once served. His pack of boarhounds was specially bred for him. Hank and the boys hunted the island’s wild boar and white-tailed deer, as well as bears that swam over from the mainland, alligators, wild turkey and ducks, and imported game like quail and pheasant. I could name a number of prominent families whose sons attended Grolman’s parties, names that still stand for wealth and power today.”

“But what happened with Hank and Evangeline?” Stacey asked, on the edge of her seat like she was watching a romantic comedy, or perhaps a Shakespearean tragedy. “Did they end up together? Did her family keep them apart?”

“After three winters, the Ryland family relented. Evangeline was thirty-six and refused to show interest in other marriage prospects. Hank had indeed raised his profile sufficiently, or perhaps her family finally gave in. Hank and Evangeline were to be married on Satilla Island in a ceremony of lavish proportions with a thousand guests. The lodge was decorated with new gardens and statues for the occasion. It was to be the wedding of the century, held appropriately enough in June of 1899.”

The professor fell silent. Stacey looked from her, to me, to her again. “And? What happened?”

“Unfortunately, Evangeline’s daredevil streak extended to such activities as sailing in rough weather. She was a member of the New York Yacht Club and was training her younger brother Averill and two cousins to be her crew for the summer regattas, which she intended to win. Though devoted to leisure, she could be something of a taskmaster in her leisure activities, and insisted they train no matter the weather. It was also said she liked to watch the lightning strike the water. They were lost in a storm only a few weeks before her wedding. Everyone aboard drowned.”

“I knew there wouldn’t be a happy ending!” Stacey said. “There’s never a happy ending.”

I nodded quietly. Stories with happy endings don’t usually lead to haunted houses.

“After Evangeline’s death, Hank became a rather broken man, a hermit,” Haverford continued. “The parties died down and the walls went up, enclosing the island, blocking out the world from the estate he’d originally built as a shining showpiece to impress all who saw it. He became more reclusive until he died. He brought his brothers Garit and Otto over from Germany and put them in charge of his business affairs—centered in Chicago rather than Wyoming by this point—so he could spend his time brooding, walking the halls where his wedding was meant to be.”

I was jotting on my notepad. These were certainly the ingredients for a haunting. I hadn’t observed a brooding old man roaming the hallways, but a shadow figure had been observed in Hank’s old bedroom, frightening enough to run off the workers.

“Did Grolman hold costume parties at the lodge?” I asked.

“I’m sorry?” Haverford’s big smile faltered a little. She sipped her cheerful yellow mug. “My, this tea is growing cold already.”

“Masquerade parties,” I said. “Did they dress up in masks?”

“Not that I’m aware, no.”

“Are you sure? Not the guests? Or maybe the serving staff? I saw an…image of a woman in a maid’s dress and a fox mask. It was an interesting mask, too. It looked hand-crafted. I’d like to find out more about it.”

Haverford’s forehead wrinkled and her frown deepened, as though trying to recall something but coming up empty. “I’m sorry, I’m just not familiar with anything odd like that. His guests, as I said, were entirely male, particularly young men and bachelors of the finer families, largely to avoid any whiff of scandal that might interfere with his process of engagement to Evangeline, one assumes. He would have avoided the outlandish and the bizarre if he was trying to win favor with the Rylands.”

“Then Grolman never married anyone?” Stacey asked. “He just moped around here listening to The Cure? Or whatever they had in the early 1900s instead of The Cure?”

“Bartók, perhaps.” Haverford chuckled. “Yes, according to all reports, the heartbreak was permanent.”

“Did he die here?” I asked.

“Yes, on one of the hunting trails, in 1901. He’d roused himself for a rare hunt with some of the old boys’ club, but he was then fifty and had perhaps not kept himself in top form during the years of mourning. It’s said they were chasing the island’s largest beast at the time, a boar with tusks like swords. It had been slaughtering smaller animals and was believed maddened by disease. Grolman shot it, but when he went in to finish it with the blade, the boar had a moment of renewed vigor and defended itself. By the time the doctor arrived, Grolman had died of his injuries.”

“Did anyone else live here on Satilla after Heinrich died?”

“He preferred ‘Hank’ in his later years. And while his nieces and nephews did continue to visit to escape the New York winters, later generations lost interest in Satilla Island. The Great Depression shut down most of the estate, and it never truly opened again. They gradually laid off staff and closed down entire buildings, even shutting down hallways of the main lodge. The stables were emptied out. Finally, in 1955 the estate was given in trust to the state of Georgia, with the strict caveat that it be left as an undeveloped nature preserve, the buildings left to the wilderness. It was described as prone to flooding and storm damage, with rocky terrain unfit for commercial or residential purposes.”

“That’s quite a thing to say after you’ve built a giant mansion on the island,” I said.

“They were in the best position to know. They saw firsthand the expense and futility of fighting the constant damage of wind, water, and salt.”

“Well, I think it was nice of them to make it a nature preserve,” Stacey said. “I wonder what the family would think of the restoration happening now.”

Darika’s eyes widened and she leaned forward in her seat, shaking her head, doing a “cut” move across her throat while staring at Stacey.

“I doubt the Grolmans have even thought about that house in generations,” Haverford said with a wave of her hand as she sipped tea. “They gave it away so long ago.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” I said. “Do you know of any particular problem with the dogs?”

“Which dogs?” the professor asked.

“His hunting dogs. Grolman bred powerful hunting dogs, didn’t he?”

“He certainly had quality hunting dogs and fast horses for his hunting parties. As I said, Grolman was interested in imitating some of the aristocratic traditions he’d observed as a stable boy in Germany—and in surpassing them as well. The lodge is an example of that, clearly.”

“Did the dogs ever kill anyone?” I asked.

“Where would you get that notion?”

“Nowhere in particular,” I replied, thinking of the snarls and growls that had pursued and surrounded us. I shivered at the memory. The girl in the freaky fox mask had caught me at a bad time, too, and was haunting the back of my mind.

“I’m not aware of any such event,” Dr. Haverford said. “Bear in mind, however, that my primary interest is in the Ryland family, and my knowledge of the Grolmans beyond Evangeline’s death is less complete.”

“Could later generations of Grolmans have held those masquerade parties I was asking about?” I asked.

“I suppose. And I can’t vouch for all the dogs being well-behaved, either. I can only say that the house was, in essence, built as a monument to Hank Grolman’s affection for Evangeline Ryland, only to become a monument to his grief.”

“Wow,” Stacey said, taking in the room around us as if viewing the dead fox and boar with new eyes. “This estate was like the Taj Mahal, kinda. A monument to love.”

“If you don’t have any additional questions, I do have a class to teach,” she said. “Which I will be teaching in person, thank goodness. But I’ll have to drive there first. And Mr. Chonkers needs his pills before that.”

“I appreciate your time,” I said. “You’ve been a huge—”

“We’ll be in touch if we have additional questions,” Darika said.

“Is that you, Ms. Mahajan?” the professor asked. “It’s so good to hear your voice.”

“We greatly appreciate your help on such short notice,” Darika told her.

“And I appreciate your overly generous fee. Call back if you have any more questions. I’m at home reading most evenings.”

“Great,” I said. “Thank you again.”

The call ended. Unfortunately, this meant the window centered on my face expanded, once again swelling to fill far more space on the screen than my actual head took up in real life.

“Well?” Darika asked. “Does that speed anything along?”

“Yes, and no,” I said. “It’s hard to connect anything she said to the scale of the haunting here.”

“Yeah, this is easily like an eight or nine on the boo scale,” Stacey said. “Which goes up to, like, ten, I suppose. Or should we call it the boo-ometer? Like barometer?”

“Maybe some of the people Heinrich Grolman wronged during his career as a strong-arm vigilante for Big Cattle came back to haunt him,” I said.

“Like a Winchester House situation.” Stacey nodded sagely. “Haunted by the ghosts of people killed by the Winchester rifle.”

“Some of the road crew saw shadowy figures on horseback that appeared to stalk them before melting away into the woods around the cemetery,” Darika said. “And they quit after they saw it. That’s why the road hasn’t been repaired past the cemetery.”

“I don’t remember you mentioning those before,” I said.

“Honestly, I’ve heard so much that it all just runs together. We’re supposed to have multiple crews working in parallel on different aspects of the renovation. Instead, we’ve got ghost stories and contractors ghosting us.”

“Okay, sorry,” I said. “We’ll just heap ghost riders onto the ever-growing lore of the island. Did they get a good look at them? Any clue what era they were from? Swords? Guns? Hats?”

Darika shook her head. “They just said shadows. And hoofbeats.”

“Maybe we can get more out of them if you send us their contact information. The ghost riders could be Old West people wronged or even killed by Grolman, or they could be connected to his hunting parties here on the island. Do you know if the information your researchers collected included that list of people who’ve died on the island?”

“I don’t know. That’s the sort of thing you can check for yourself by looking through what I sent you.” Darika was not in a patient mood today.

“Sure. What about burial records for the island cemetery?”

“Honestly, there wasn’t much in this office that predated the state-park era beginning in the 1950s,” Darika said. “Any files before that, the Grolman family took with them or destroyed before handing the keys over to the Satilla Island Park Authority.” Darika raised her voice and looked past me. “Can I help you?”

I turned to see Gary edging into view, wearing a fresh Hawaiian shirt and a seashell necklace, carefully pushing the strands of his comb-over into place with his fingers as he smiled at Stacey. “Morning. I had an appointment to take these ladies on a tour of the island.”

“And you thought you’d just slink around the doorway eavesdropping until then?” Darika asked.

“I wasn’t…” Gary blushed. “I didn’t know it was a private meeting. The door’s open wide.”

“It isn’t private.” Darika looked to me. “I believe we are done for now. Unless there’s anything else?”

“Eh, nope. We’ll be in touch as soon as…well, as soon as we figure out anything,” I said, finishing my sentence rather lamely.

“Enjoy your tour.” She cut a look in Gary’s direction, and he stepped out of sight as if afraid that her look would indeed cut him.

Chapter Twelve

We stopped in the card room to make sure our little network server had indeed downloaded the heap of files sent by Darika and her nameless team of off-site researchers. Digital scans of newspaper articles, obituaries, and fine-print legal documents provided what looked like hours of mildly blurry reading.

“Anything interesting?” Gary asked, leaning over my shoulder as I glanced through the data.

“Let’s hope so. How about that graveyard tour?”

“I'd still say the beach is much nicer. Graveyard's not much.”

“We're not looking for nice. We're looking for unhappy dead people.”

Gary fell silent, gaping and stepping back from me.

Outside, Stacey and I again piled into the back of his security cart. If there were dangerous animals roaming the island, better to view them from inside the mesh, with Gary up front wielding the TASER.

Gary took us down the main road farther than we’d traveled before, past the muddy turn-off to our cottage.

“They’ve already removed about half the stables, believe it or not,” Gary told us as we rounded a bend and saw crumbling stables and the remnants of corral fences. An open space scattered with remnants of rotten wood indicated where even more structures had been. “Everything used to be powered by steam or horse. Mostly horse. Wagons for the workers, carriages for the rich folks.”

“Aren’t they going to restore any stables?” Stacey asked. “What fun is an island retreat with no horses?”

“Oh, I’m with you on that. Used to ride all the time, before I moved to California and became Lance Leopard. But no, Wyatt Lanigan’s not a horse man. His fiancée likes ’em, so I hear, so they’ll probably fix some up for her.”

“Yeah, because I’d definitely want horses—wait, who’s he marrying?” Stacey asked.

“That’s, uh…” Gary cleared his throat. “All this falls under my NDA. I only know ’cause I overheard from Darika when she was on the phone, and I wasn’t supposed to. Nobody’s supposed to, ’cause there’d be so much attention from the media and tabloids and all.”

“Then maybe we overheard from Darika while she was on the phone.” Stacey waggled her eyebrows at Gary, but he was too busy driving to notice. “Right, Gary? What do you say?”

“If you ask me,” he said, “they ought to just leave this island alone, keep it a nice park. Well, nice to look at. Between the wild boars and feral dogs and the…well, you know, the things that come out at night…this whole situation’s nothing but a big Grandma-sized quilt of red flags. Some places ought to be left alone. Like the house where I grew up, next to the boneyard. Nobody lives there now. Last I heard, it was all boarded up. Probably for the best.”

I nodded. He wasn’t necessarily wrong. The scale of paranormal activity here was daunting, and Stacey and I weren’t miracle workers. Not every haunted location could be cleared. Sometimes the dead win.

“That trail leads to the pheasant house, about half a mile down. They’d stand on the roof to shoot.” Gary indicated a barely visible break in the woods. “There’s deer stands and shooting platforms scattered all through the woods. There’s a duck house over by the marsh, but the road’s still busted up and overgrown.”

“It must be hard to find a road crew that doesn’t mind creepy figures watching from the woods,” Stacey said.

“Exactly right. There’s my place, the old gamekeeper’s cabin.” Gary pointed to a long, narrow, ramshackle building where a few windows were boarded up. It had a large porch and a crumbling brick chimney. “I know it looks bad on the outside, but the inside...” He shrugged. “Anyhow, there’s the old kennel.”

The area where he pointed was mostly obscured by a tall, badly rotten fence overgrown with vines. Chunks of the fence near the ground were missing, as if very large animals had chewed and clawed their way out.

“Up here’s the old coal-fired power plant,” Gary said as a soot-stained brick wall with multiple chimneys appeared on our left. The wilderness had reclaimed most of this building, too, with spindly trees sprouting through the remnants of the floor. “Of course, the Boy Wonder is trying to make it all renewable. Solar, then later some wind turbines, if they can ever get anybody to work on the island long enough to finish anything.” He chuckled. “Good luck on that.”

Gary grew quiet as we parked at the cemetery. The main road grew visibly rougher ahead, broken and cracked, mostly swallowed by the humid, fast-growing wilderness, littered with fallen limbs that made it impassable.

A brick wall with a black steel gate surrounded the island cemetery. A brick arch spanned over the gate, imitating the style of the big gate above the wharf. Here, too, the wilderness had grown up around and through the fence, on its way to consuming the cemetery, as if trying to break down and devour any sign of civilization.

Gary unlocked the gate, and we passed under the archway into the cemetery. I felt chills and crossed my arms. Stacey did the same.

“I guess the landscapers quit, too,” Stacey said. The cemetery looked like it had been recently cleared, the wild growth hacked back from the graves and the central path, leaving only the big old oak trees to shade the graves. The debris had simply been piled in a towering heap of brush trees and chainsawed limbs and left to rot in a back corner, though, as if the landscapers had quit before finishing the clean-up.

“You can probably guess which one belongs to the original Mr. Grolman,” Gary said.

I could. On the right-hand side of the path lay a scattering of small headstones, perhaps two dozen of them, no bigger than shoeboxes.

On the left-hand side, though, rose a single black marble obelisk, easily nine feet tall, with Heinrich Grolman’s name inscribed on the base. Behind it was a matching marble chapel about the size of a one-room cabin, its stained-glass windows depicting figures holding fruit, grain, and olives.

The chapel’s low, narrow door was made of dark cedar, set deep in a recessed archway, out of the reach of all but the most extreme weather. A wagon-wheel design was engraved in the door, maybe a nod to Grolman’s history out west, though it seemed like an odd place for it.

I stepped into the recessed alcove and explored the door’s ornate lock with my fingertips. It had once been embossed and gilded, but most of the gold had flaked off over time, exposing sharply edged steel beneath. There was no handle or doorknob, just the keyhole.

“What in the devil’s dealings are you up to, lady?” Gary snapped, and it took a moment for me to realize he was snapping at me. “That’s kinda private, don’t you think?”

“Is it?” I stepped back. “It’s a chapel, not a crypt. Aren’t people supposed to go inside a chapel?”

“Family members, maybe, if they’re paying respects,” Gary said. “It just doesn’t seem right for us to go poking in there. Sorry if I jumped at you about it. I didn’t mean to do that. I guess I’m touchy because, well, I told you I grew up next to a graveyard. And sometimes people would mess around in there, teenagers usually. And that’d stir up the dead, and I’d have an extra week of hearing them moaning or creeping around more than usual. Have to make sure my curtains were tight so their dead faces didn’t look in at me.”

“That’s okay, I get that completely.” I pushed against the chapel door, gently at first, then with a little more force, but it was locked.

“Come on, now,” Gary said, looking uncomfortable.

“Do you know if Darika has the key?” I asked.

“I can ask her, but I wouldn’t bank on it. Why would you want to go in there, anyway?” Gary shuffled back from the chapel, glancing around like he expected the dead to come crawling out all around us, zombie-horde style. “Let’s leave him in peace.”

“Okay.” I stepped away from the chapel, with its tantalizing ornate lock, and crossed the main path to look at the array of small headstones, wanting to see more before Gary ushered us out the gate.

The smaller headstones offered little more than names. Some were German, like Klaus and Gunter. Others near the back looked a bit different: Walentyna, Nadzieja, Katarzyna.

Puzzled, I raised my phone to take pictures of them. “Stacey, what do these names sound like to you?”

“Umm…Russian?” she guessed.

“Please, do we really have to bother the dead like this?” Gary asked.

“If the dead would stop bothering the living, we wouldn’t have a problem. Stacey and I wouldn’t even be here.” I didn’t stop snapping pictures. “We need to find out who these people are and how they died.”

“How can you do that after all this time?” Gary was edging toward the gate now. “It sounds hopeless to me. Are we done here?”

“Almost.” I stepped around one of the old, moss-draped oaks and froze at what I saw. “Stacey, look.”

Stacey drew up beside me. “Oh. Yeah. That’s something.”

Hidden among the thick, gnarled oak roots of the old tree, positioned where someone could pass right by a hundred times and never notice, was a statue so small I could have fit it in my laptop bag.

It was a fox, made of stone, seeming to peer at the little graves with the Eastern European names, its big triangular eyes raised and alert.

“What does this mean?” Stacey asked. “It must have something to do with the chambermaid in the fox mask. Doesn’t it?”

“I would think so.” I knelt in the dirt and searched the fox for any inscription or symbol, anything that might tell me something about why it was there, but it was unadorned, just a fairly realistic-looking stone animal. I hooked my fingers under it and pulled, trying to pry its sunken feet from the dirt.

“What are you desecrating now?” Gary circled around the tree to watch me as I knelt and pried. I wasn’t entirely sure where his eyes were going as he looked me over, but I wasn’t really comfortable with his gaze, or his attitude.

“We’re just trying to figure out what’s going on,” I said, forcing some patience into my tone. “Have you heard anything about foxes on this island? Or masquerade parties?”

Gary’s forehead wrinkled. “Not that I know of. Sounds kind of weird to me. And no foxes live on this island as far as I’ve heard or seen. Now, let’s leave these dead folks in peace, and we can, uh…”

He fell quiet, staring at the sky.

The world around us grew dark fast. It had been an average early summer day, a little overcast, but the sudden darkness fell on us like a freak thunderstorm had arrived, or maybe the moon had swallowed the sun in an unexpected eclipse.

We gaped wordlessly as the shadow fell over the cemetery, turning day to night, like the gates of the underworld had opened to flood the upper world with darkness.

Chapter Thirteen

It was late morning, approaching noon, when the deep darkness fell on us.

“I think that’s a…?” Stacey looked up at the shadowy underbelly of the body above us, which my brain first tried to process as some sort of low, huge, metallic storm cloud.

Then my brain straightened up and told me I was looking at something that, while large and metallic and cloud-shaped, was actually quite solid, like a giant aluminum balloon with a shiny red trolley bus attached underneath. Helicopter-sized rotary blades jutted out all over the metallic cloud’s surface, pointing at every angle.

“It’s a blimp,” I said aloud, stumbling my way into finishing Stacey’s thought. “Isn’t it?”

It wasn’t quite what I’d envisioned, which was the Goodyear blimp, a titanic flying machine shaped like a big, round fish. I’d seen that at some sporting event or other with my dad. This one was smaller and had a more compact design.

As it drifted over us, I saw the big cartoon loon on the side, made entirely of black solar panels, except for the red part of its huge eye. It seemed to watch us all like the Eye of Sauron, or the Eye of Providence on the dollar bill.

Static blasted over Gary’s walkie-talkie, followed by Darika’s panicked voice. “Gary!”

“Yes, ma’am, I see it,” Gary said. “Looks like the big boss man just rolled into town.”

“He’s not going to land, is he?” Stacey asked. “Where will he park that thing?”

“Drop whatever you’re doing and come to the lodge,” Darika instructed.

“You got it, ma’am,” Gary said. “Did you have any idea he was coming?”

“I did not.”

He put away the walkie and nodded at us. “We’d better move.”

“What’s happening? What does Wyatt showing up like that mean?” I asked, while we all ran to the security cart, stopping only to close the cemetery gate.

“I doubt he’s come to celebrate the lack of progress on the restoration,” Gary said. “I’d say there’s a good chance we all end up on the chopping block today. But if so, good luck finding anyone else willing to stick it out around here. That’s what I’ll tell ’em, too, if anybody asks my opinion. Which they won’t.”

Gary drove back the way we’d come. The plump, curvy blimp floated ahead of us, turning slightly, revealing another giant black LookyLoon bird on another round aluminum flank.

“Uh, that thing’s dropping lower,” Stacey said. “Again…he does know the lawn’s a wreck full of debris, right? That he can’t possibly land a blimp here?”

“If not, let’s hope his pilot can see that,” I said.

Gary floored his golf cart, zipping us along as fast as its quiet tires could carry us. The drive to the lodge only took a few minutes, but seemed to stretch out longer and longer, as if the oyster-shell road were somehow lengthening, adding coils like a growing snake, even as the airship loomed ever lower and closer.

Finally we reached the lodge, and Gary charged toward the front door. He barely had time to stop before his walkie crackled again.

“Wyatt's landing on the beach,” Darika’s staticky voice said. “Meet me there.”

“Gotcha.” Gary stomped the accelerator.

“He can’t land on the beach, though,” Stacey said. “Can he?”

“I hate the beach road,” Gary grumbled.

We soon saw why. We drove out a side gate, beyond which a bumpy, unassuming-looking spur road took us through a patch of forest and out to the bluff over the beach. The road down was steep and crude, barely wide enough for the golf cart’s wheels to fit, with nothing remotely resembling a guardrail on the crumbling edge. It felt like we were perpetually on the cusp of tumbling off the side and crashing the rest of our way down. I was already dreading the ride back up even as we descended. I gripped the door handle, white-knuckling it.

“This is actually kind of fun,” Stacey said. I kept my disagreement to myself.

We finally reached the blissfully flat hard-packed sand of the beach.

Darika had already parked her cart and stepped out. She scowled as we joined her.

“Why did you bring them?” she asked Gary, like Stacey and I weren’t standing right there.

“You said to drop what we were doing—” Gary began.

“You. I meant for you to drop what you were doing, including the two of them, and come meet me. Why can you not follow a simple instruction? Wyatt doesn’t know I’ve hired paranormal investigators. Now I have to explain why they're here.”

“Do you want me to drive them back real quick?” Gary asked, and my stomach dropped nervously at the thought of riding back up the narrow, steep road, especially in a hurry.

“It’s too late for that now!” Darika gestured at the cloud-shaped blimp as it drifted over us, ever lower as it cleared the edge of the bluff.

The blimp descended slowly to the wet sand ahead, landing on multiple giant circular pads that seemed to grip the beach, actively sucking themselves into place with giant fans.

The gondola on the bottom of the blimp was all sleek curves, cheerful red metal, brass fixtures, and enormous windows, a touring trolley for the sky.

A long staircase dropped slowly from the gondola to the ground. The staircase structure was mostly clear, with curved red steps that seemed to float.

The first person to emerge from the gondola was a tall, broad-shouldered, dark-skinned man in a black suit and tie, the tie nearly invisible against his black shirt. Round sunglasses hid his eyes, and the rest of his face was locked into a mildly stern expression. He looked like a textbook security guy, other than the fairly stylish shades.

“Renoir, so good to see you.” Darika stepped forward and shook the enormous man’s hand, smiling broadly in a way she’d certainly never smiled at Stacey and me. She was about half Renoir’s size, and he seemed to take care to go gentle on the handshake. He nodded at Gary, acknowledging him quickly before looking at us.

“Who are they?” he asked, his voice a deep baritone.

“Consultants,” Darika said. “Local private investigators.”

Renoir removed his glasses and looked us over, his deep brown eyes piercing, making me feel almost guilty, like a cop doing an interrogation. “And what exactly are they investigating?” I thought I caught a trace of Cajun accent in his voice.

“They’re fine,” Darika said. “Fully licensed. They signed NDAs like everyone. I didn’t know Wyatt was coming here today—”

“Neither did we,” Renoir said. “It started as just another working cruise. But you know him. He decided to swing on down and have a look at what y’all are up to around here, do a little surprise inspection.” He smiled. “So, surprise! Inspection.”

“How’s his mood?” Darika asked, her voice dropping low.

Renoir smiled more widely and turned away like he wasn’t going to address that.

Next to emerge was a petite, heavily tattooed woman in jeans ripped to threads, probably to help show off her blazing-neon tattoos, mostly lizards crawling up and around her legs. Open-toed sandals served as a display case for her many and assorted shiny toe rings.

A young man in a light blue suit followed, weighed down with several black electronics bags, which gave me the idea he was some sort of personal assistant. His red hair, short but carefully carved and styled with a razor-sharp part that took no prisoners, didn’t move in the stiff, warm ocean breeze.

Finally, Wyatt Lanigan emerged, and I recognized him instantly in his trademark outfit: retro video game t-shirt—Galaga, at the moment—thousand-dollar Kiton cargo shorts, tree-fabric sneakers from hyper-sustainable company Allbirds. He was short and slender, his brown hair dyed blond at its spiky tips, his eyes darting around wildly, like he was trying to see everything at once. He was twenty-three, but I might have guessed a little younger.

He hurried down the stairs like he was running from a burning house full of monsters.

“Wyatt, it is so good to see you!” Darika stepped forward, beaming at her boss.

“Why would you be happy about this complete nuclear meltdown? Have you seen this place? We don’t even have a month, Darika! Gang way!” Wyatt leaped over the last four steps and landed in the sand on one knee and one fist like Iron Man, but with more of a wince on impact. When he stood, the redhaired assistant guy bustled over with wet wipes to remove the sand from Wyatt’s fingers and knee, an action Wyatt seemed to barely notice. The guy straightened a couple of the tiny spikes on Wyatt’s head before retreating.

“I’m sorry. I know what you’re saying, but—” Darika said.

“That makes one of us, because your reports make less and less sense,” Wyatt said. “We just overflew the whole site from above. I wasn’t even planning on stopping here. It was intended to be a relaxed brainstorming cruise over the East Coast. But now I see nothing is ready. Nothing!” Wyatt paused as the redhaired assistant guy whispered in his ear. Wyatt’s gaze shifted to Stacey and me. “Who are those two?”

“We’ve had unique difficulties,” Darika said. “For which they are specialists. Perhaps we could discuss this more privately—”

“How could it be more private?” Wyatt asked. “We’re on an island. There’s literally nobody here.”

Darika’s eyes flickered among Wyatt's three-person entourage. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. Please tell me what mysterious job I’m paying these two to do. Based on what I saw on my flyover, it better be landscape design or roadwork. And they’d better be geniuses at it.”

“They’re…” Darika sighed like she was already mentally updating her resume and starting up a job hunt. “They’re paranormal investigators. The contractors and work crews quit because they’re scared. They all believe this house is haunted.”

Everyone fell silent and nearly as motionless as statues, watching Wyatt for his reaction.

He covered his eyes and moaned.

“Great,” he finally said. “First the congressional hearings, now this. It’s all piling up like when you're about to lose at Tetris. What am I supposed to do, Darika? Just tell Adrienne, ‘Sorry, that dream wedding I promised will be a disaster because the place is haunted. How about a mud-themed wedding? It’s ecological.’”

“I don’t think Adrienne would like that,” the redhaired assistant guy leaned over and said, in a voice that sounded like a whisper but wasn’t.

“We already have the final invites with the location reveal back from the printer, ready to mail,” Wyatt said. “We sent save-a-date notifications two months ago. I’m flying in cruelty-free foie gras from Spain. We’re bringing the entire wedding party down from New York on the Benetti. Everyone we know will be on the island, hundreds of people. If this is a disaster, Adrienne will kill me. Murder me, Darika. Probably with one of her dad’s hunting rifles. And then, as I’m bleeding out and dying, she’ll dump me, too. I can’t screw this up.” Wyatt looked at Stacey and me as if just remembering we were there. “And now we’re talking about ghosts? Is this real?”

“Sometimes people see abnormal things because of toxins in their systems,” said the densely tattooed girl with the sizable toe-ring collection, whose name and role I still hadn’t sorted out. “A three-day juice cleanse will flush that out.”

“This isn’t a dietary issue, Farlee,” Darika said, with a quick glance and tight smile before returning her attention to Wyatt. “I know it sounds crazy, but it’s the truth. I was hoping to have it resolved before I had to explain this to, well, anyone. Other than Gary, who’s seen it all.”

“Yeah, this place is haunted as all get out,” Gary added. “If you ask me, I’d move the whole wedding someplace else. Because mixing all those people with all the trouble on this island—”

“That’s probably enough unsolicited input, Gary,” Renoir said, and Gary closed his mouth and lowered his head.

“No, I want to hear him out.” Wyatt looked at Gary. “You’ve seen things, too? What’s your name, again?”

“Gary. It’s like Darika says. Everyone hates it here. Bad enough to quit.”

“Well, great. Maybe I'll stick around for a night or two. It’ll be nice to finally get a look at the place in person. Brad, the luggage.”

“Of course,” replied the redhaired assistant, apparently named Brad, after a twinge of displeasure crossed his face and vanished quickly. “I’ll just shed what I have first. May I disgorge here?” He stepped to the nearest golf cart, Darika’s, and she nodded. He stripped off his various computer and tablet bags, including the one from which he’d drawn the wet wipes. “Anyone else want to help?” he asked before heading back up the clear staircase. Nobody followed.

“Could you grab my backpack, Brad?” the heavily toe-ringed woman, Farlee, called up after him. “And the cooler bag? And my carving and plating kits? Thanks, Brad, you’re a beautiful and kind soul.”

“Oh, my pleasure, Farlee,” Brad replied, not bothering to submerge his sarcasm.

“So, these two girls are, what, again?” Wyatt asked Darika, pointing at Stacey and me. “Ghost exterminators?”

“They’re with Eckhart Investigations, a firm in Savannah that specializes in paranormal investigation,” Darika said. “They have quite the reputation if you dig into it online. Mixed reviews, but some clients are happy afterward.”

“You can’t win ’em all,” I said, drawing Wyatt’s gaze very quickly before he looked back at Darika.

“Tell me this isn’t one of the hidden-camera shows,” Wyatt said. “You know I hate those. I’m sure it would help with the blown budget, but no.”

“It isn’t,” Darika replied. “This is a real problem. I didn’t want to believe it at first, and then I didn’t know how to tell you. It’s been nothing but stress day and night, coming to grips with this and researching how to address it.”

“You should try chamomile and lemon balm teas for stress,” said Farlee, who’d been gazing off at the ocean.

“I drink gallons of both, thanks,” Darika said. “Wyatt, I know it sounds insane, but this is the root of our problem here, and we are addressing it.”

“How long will it take?” Wyatt asked.

“I’ve given them a very short deadline.”

“We need replacement crews out here today. This place is a wreck. Keep going with…” Wyatt gestured toward us. “Whatever this is. Is the master suite ready, at least?”

“No, only some of the guest suites on the second floor,” Darika said. “I wouldn’t recommend trying to stay in the main lodge.”

“That’s what I’ll tell our wedding guests. ‘Just avoid the main building where all the event space and lodging is.’ What about the smaller cottages?”

“The guest house, butler’s cottage, and some of the servants’ cottages have been restored—”

“We’ll take the guest house, then. Come on, everyone.” Wyatt started toward Darika’s cart, and Renoir and Farlee followed.

“But I’ve been staying at the…” Darika’s protest died on her lips as she watched them clamber into her golf cart, the security guy and the toe-ring queen in back. Up front, Wyatt took the wheel.

Wyatt stomped the golf cart’s accelerator and tore off down the beach with a loud whooping sound, pumping a fist in the air, and plainly no idea where he was going, since the only road was the opposite way. His current trajectory would eventually land him in the salt marsh.

“Where are they going?” Stacey asked.

“Wherever Wyatt's whims take them,” Darika said. “Just like the rest of us.”

After a minute, perhaps realizing his own lack of a clue about where to go, Wyatt circled back and pulled up alongside us. “Which way?”

“I’ll show you.” Darika hopped into the empty shotgun seat and pointed, and off they zipped.

“Wait! Seriously?” Brad called from the stairway, where he was only halfway down, bent over as he hauled suitcases in each hand, an overnight bag around his neck and a large denim backpack covered in bright patches and flags strapped to his back. He watched like an abandoned child as Wyatt and the rest of the entourage drove away without him.

“I guess we better help that fellow,” Gary muttered. He drove the security cart over to the staircase, where we all helped Brad load the luggage into Gary’s cart.

“Well, thanks for your help,” Brad told us, cutting a sharp look in the direction the other cart had gone. “I suppose it’s true what they say about Southern hospitality.”

“I’m from California,” Gary said. “Well, Wyoming.”

“Wyoming’s close enough.” Brad turned to Stacey and me. “I’m Brad Matthews, Wyatt’s personal assistant. Very pleased to meet you all.” It sounded like a rote, shallow pleasantry, but I was happy to take any pleasantry at this point.

After Stacey and I introduced ourselves, I said, “I’m guessing Renoir is security—”

“He's Wyatt’s personal bodyguard and ninjutsu instructor,” Brad cut in, seemingly eager to dish. “Renoir has a few black belts and was a martial arts champion in Los Angeles a few years back. He’s originally from Louisiana. You could probably hear the touch of remoulade in his voice. He’s mostly flattened it down, sadly, for his various attempts at acting, which rarely proceeded beyond stuntman work.”

“What about Farlee?” I asked.

“She is Wyatt’s personal chef. He goes nowhere without her.”

“And his fiancée’s totally okay with that?” Stacey asked.

“Why not? Adrienne is the one who recommended her.” Brad gave Stacey an amused smile.

Gary drove us back up the steep and narrow beach road, the bumpy and cracked surface bouncing us the whole way. I gripped the door, knuckles white again, and tried not to look at the ever-growing drop outside my window. I wasn’t always such a chicken about heights. My acrophobia began relatively recently when a poltergeist nearly threw me off a high balcony, and it wasn’t helped very much when a third-floor catwalk in a necromancer’s library abruptly collapsed beneath me.

In addition, I had a sinking feeling that we’d only made this terribly unpleasant drive down and back up the beach road in order to get fired…leaving everyone on the island exposed to the dangers of a severe haunting we’d barely begun to understand.

Chapter Fourteen

Darika’s golf cart was parked at the lodge, so apparently Wyatt had decided to look around the main building before heading to the guest cottage. We parked there, too, and went inside.

I’d expected to find everyone gathered in Darika’s office, or maybe touring through the various macabre exhibits of decaying old beasts.

Instead, they were in the card room, where Wyatt was checking out our array of little monitors and speakers and computers. I felt like he was intruding pretty deeply on our space there, but I couldn’t really complain, because technically it was his space, and he was now the client as much as Darika. More than her, I supposed.

“They say all this equipment helps them find ghosts?” Wyatt asked Darika. “And they've set it up all over the house?”

“We don’t have nearly enough to cover this entire house,” I said as we entered. “There’s more coming on the ferry.”

“What is all this?” Wyatt looked at me. “What kind of equipment? Have you collected anything?”

“Only some sounds in the dining room,” I said. “That’s a place where many workers reported activity before they quit. But we haven’t had any time to review what we’ve collected—”

“Does it really work, though? Have you ever caught an image of anything before?” Wyatt gave me the impression of a kid who’d just heard about a promising new video game.

“Oh, yes, on past cases. Images, audio—”

“Audio?”

“Sometimes you can hear them talk.”

“Whoa. Wow.” He looked over the array. “Do you have your own router for all this input? It doesn’t look like you’re using the one in the house.”

“Our tech manager Stacey will be happy to explain all of that,” I said.

“Oh, yes!” Stacey beamed at Wyatt, and his jaw dropped open just a little, but he closed it quickly.

I was glad to pass that job to Stacey. While I could have explained our use of the equipment in the same detail, I wouldn’t have done it with Stacey’s peppy personality, and our continued employment on this case seemed doubtful. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted the future of the case to hinge on my ability to charm Wyatt into keeping us around.

Stacey explained in slow, honeyed Alabama tones how we used the camera, microphones, and other monitoring gear. Wyatt shied back from her at first but grew more engaged as he asked fine-grained details about the specifications of each piece of equipment. The more technical the conversation grew, the more comfortable and animated he became.

His entourage and employees—Darika, Gary, Renoir, Farlee, and Brad—watched Wyatt and his interactions with Stacey like a kettle of hawks eyeing potential prey, or perhaps a herd of sheep eyeing a potential threat. I sensed how their day-to-day lives rose and fell with Wyatt’s moods and impulses.

“All of this is aimed at giving you superhuman senses, isn’t it?” Wyatt said to Stacey after he’d looked at literally every monitor. “To see in many places at once, to see in the dark, to hear beyond the range of ears. Even touch, with the thermal devices and motion detectors.”

“Yeah,” Stacey said, beaming at him. “I never thought of it exactly that way, but yeah.”

Were they having a moment? If so, did I need to feel so alarmed about it? They were standing close together, eyes lingering on each other. They were the same age, and I had to admit that Wyatt Lanigan looked more attractive in person that he did on TV. He’d always seemed pale and stringy, but in person was more compact and wiry. Maybe the martial arts training was paying off, and maybe he’d been lifting a few weights lately. And spending a few minutes out in the sun, too.

A digitized loon cry shrieked out, then another, and everyone in the room but me checked their pockets. Apparently, I was the only one without a LookyLoon app nesting in my phone.

“Wyatt—” Darika began.

“I see it,” Wyatt said. “A local news site’s showing footage of the airship parked on Satilla Island. Oops.”

“Oh, Adrienne’s going to hear about it,” Brad said, sounding very grave.

“You could tell the pilot to get it back in the air,” Darika said. “Say it was a minor maintenance issue.”

“Good idea,” Wyatt said. “Brad, text PR and make that happen. I’ll tell Captain Estevez to go home. We’ll bring my plane to the local airport instead. I assume there’s a local airport, right?”

“There’s several,” I said.

“Good! Problem eradicated.” Wyatt sent a text, then pocketed his phone and looked at Stacey again. “I want to see some of these ghost pictures you’ve taken.”

“Oh. Well, sure, once I go through the data—”

“I get it. Hey, everyone, let’s have an individual break and reflection moment, all right? Enjoy a little you-time. Farlee, why don’t you whip up some lunch for everyone?”

“For everyone?” Her eyebrows shot up. “We only brought enough in the cooler bag for a light lunch.”

“The kitchen here is massive, though,” Wyatt said.

“It’s not entirely functional,” Darika said. “Or stocked.”

“Then how are you guys eating while you live here?” Wyatt asked.

“I have my groceries delivered weekly by the ferry,” Darika said.

“We brought a week’s worth of supplies,” I said. “But only enough for two people—”

“If we pool all that together, Farlee could probably make a great meal for all of us,” Wyatt said.

“Um—” Darika began.

“It depends on the ingredients,” Farlee said. “I can also gather wild herbs and mushrooms from the forest. It’s good to eat food that's still brimming with vital forces.”

“The wilderness isn’t safe,” I said. “There’s animals as well as supernatural danger.”

“My Earth energy is high and balanced, so I’m not afraid of nature,” she told me.

“Well, high and balanced or not, you really shouldn’t go out there, especially not alone.”

“I’ll call the ferryman and see if he can make an extra grocery trip before he brings your equipment this evening,” Darika said.

“That was fast,” I said.

“We had it overnighted, mostly from Atlanta,” she said. “It was not cheap, so I trust you’ll get use out of it.”

“You ordered more cameras?” Wyatt asked. “This is great. What if there was a phone app that could detect ghosts? People would go for that. What do you think?” He directed this last at Stacey.

“Me?” Stacey asked. “Uh…maybe? It really depends on what the phone can do physically. I’d have to think about that.”

“Let me know when you do.” Wyatt hopped to his feet, which made the rest of his entourage stir, ready to follow. “Is the guest cottage kitchen up and running, at least?”

“Yes, it’s fine, but I’ve been living there, maybe I should run ahead first and—” Darika said.

“Great! Farlee, you go with Darika. And someone should show me around this crazy house I’ve bought. Maybe…” He was turning very slowly but very obviously back toward Stacey.

“Gary’s your best bet there,” I said, inspiring the ex-wrestler to straighten up and check his comb-over. “Stacey and I are just getting our bearings ourselves.”

“But you can show me the equipment you’ve set up,” Wyatt said. “If this is the underlying problem that’s causing all the other problems, we need to crack it now. And we need more workers out here making the renovation happen.” He looked at Darika again.

“Nobody in the area will come—” she began.

“So bring them in from a hundred miles away, or a thousand miles away. Whatever it takes!”

Darika nodded and looked sullen as she turned away from him. She’d already been at the “whatever it takes!” phase for a while. I doubted she enjoyed him swooping in and implying otherwise.

Darika and Farlee left, and Gary took Wyatt around the house on a version of the tour he’d given us, with Stacey and me adding details about the cameras and such, because Wyatt still wanted us to come. Well, Stacey, at least. I probably could have dipped out unnoticed.

Brad trailed Wyatt by a few steps, expertly staying close yet out of the way.

Renoir followed us all at a distance, a shadow who made little sound.

“Big question,” Wyatt said after we’d looked at a few rooms. “Are there any areas without dead animals?”

“The, uh, herd of dead animals kinda thins out once you get upstairs,” Gary said. “But yeah, Old Man Grolman was indeed a big game collector.”

“But these are basically horrifying.” Wyatt peered into the India room with its giant dead elephant hung with costume jewelry, the once-fierce Bengal tiger whose fur had gone dull and dusty over the past century. “This place is ugly and depressing. That's kind of the elephant in the room, isn't it? Do you think Adrienne will want me to keep it like this?”

“I can’t say I really know your fiancée, sir,” Gary replied.

“Brad, what do you think?”

Brad made a sour face. “I can’t imagine she’d want this décor at her wedding. But if this is what her family was into…maybe?” He shrugged.

“Right. I can’t just throw out a bunch of their old heirlooms, even if they are, uh…” Wyatt grimaced at the big dead elephant. “Yeah. I’ll have to check with her when I fly her in for the big reveal. Which is supposed to be in twenty-five days. And this place is a wreck.”

“I’m sorry, what did you say about your fiancée’s family? Are they connected to this place?” I asked.

“Yeah, of course.” Wyatt furrowed his brow like we were supposed to know this confidential information already. “I mean, she is Adrienne Grolman. That’s kind of the whole point here.”

“Of the Grolman Animal Lard family?” Stacey asked.

“Right. This is her, like, ancestral home. That’s what will make it such a great surprise for her. It’s been sitting here empty all these years, and I’m bringing it back to life.”

“And you…bought it for your wedding?” I asked.

“Leased, technically. For the next century. We can hang out at her old, old family place. She’s going to flip hard when she sees it for the first time. Assuming it’s actually restored and not still a complete wreck.”

Stacey and I shared a shocked, silent gape at this information.

“You’ll want to be careful about the floor around the elephant,” I told Wyatt. “The trap door to the underground rooms used to be there. It was sealed up when the family left, but we don’t know how carefully.”

“Yeah, let’s go to this secret underground area they discovered,” Wyatt said. “I definitely want to check that out.”

We took the winding course through the butler’s pantry and wine cellar, past the meat cellar with its hooks and chains, and through the sizable hole in the cellar wall.

“They still haven’t managed to open it up?” Wyatt asked, pushing on the enormous vault door as if it had just been waiting on a critical nudge from him this whole time.

“Nope, and the old-timey bank locksmith guy got scared out of his wits and won’t come back,” Gary said. “It’s hard to find anybody worth a tick. I’m still trying.”

“Couldn’t we blast it open?” Wyatt asked.

Gary winced. “Probably not without taking half the house down with it. Probably nothing down there anyway. The old family would have taken it all with them.”

“But why bother sealing it off?” I asked. “Why not leave the key with the park service? Why hide it?”

“I can think of plenty of reasons,” Gary said. “Floods, mold, structural problems.”

“You certainly have a lot to say about this house,” Renoir said.

“Well, yeah,” Gary said, though his tone became deferential, like Renoir was his superior in the organizational pecking order. “You don’t have much else to think about, driving around here week after week. Not even many trespassers. I ran off some teenagers in a motorboat once.”

“Did you record anything interesting down here?” Wyatt asked Stacey, gesturing at our cameras.

“It’s very possible!” Stacey said. “We don’t know yet.”

“Send me anything you find.” Wyatt drew out his phone. “Are you on LookyLoon? I’ll send you a Look-At-Me.”

“Uh, yes!” Stacey fumbled her own phone in her excitement to slide it out of her pocket. “And I will totally Look Back at you, sir.”

“I’ll put you on my Look Closer list so I get Look Now notifications,” Wyatt added.

“And…you’re Looked Closer, too,” Stacey said, tapping her phone.

Gary rubbed his temples like he was having trouble understanding them, as their phones let out squawking loon-like cries. I could relate.

“We’ll call in a structural engineer about this vault, sometime after the wedding,” Wyatt said. “It’s one problem we can pretty much forget about for now. Honestly, I really didn’t understand what bad shape this place was in when we started.” His phone let out another loonie squawk, and he checked it. “Finally! Time for lunch. Which way is out, again?”

We made our way back up to the surface, leaving the chilly, dark underground rooms behind. Despite what Wyatt had said, I couldn’t help feeling the sealed vault below the house might well be the source of problems to come.

Chapter Fifteen

Six of us crowded around the dining table at the guest cottage while Farlee served us her creations, starting with a spicy curry. Darika’s frown indicated that perhaps a good bit of her own food supply was being consumed. Farlee followed it with a very cold ajoblanco soup, apparently a relative of gazpacho but with almonds and garlic instead of tomatoes, definitely welcome on the hot day.

Farlee pressed Brad into dishwashing service, since the cottage’s plate supply had to be washed between courses. He seemed miffed but cooperative, mentioning that more household staff would surely be needed in the future.

Wyatt peppered Stacey and me with questions about the investigation, and together with Darika we caught him up on the known history of the place.

“If your fiancée’s ancestors are haunting this island,” I told him, “then her return could further stir up the supernatural activities here.”

“Do you think they know she’s coming?” Wyatt asked.

“If they don’t, and this is just the normal baseline haunting for the estate…things could really blow up when she arrives. Are many of her relatives traveling here for the wedding?”

“A few dozen, according to our save-the-date spreadsheet. But how could that be a problem? Wouldn’t the old ghosts want to see their living descendants doing well?”

“There could also be spirits here who are hostile to Hank Grolman, and so may not feel at all friendly toward his heirs, either.”

“Like dead cattle rustlers and settlers he wronged out in Wyoming,” Stacey said. “If that’s who the ghost riders are.”

“When will we know?” Wyatt asked.

“We ordered some weatherproof outdoor equipment that should arrive this evening on the ferry.” I double-checked with a glance at Darika, who nodded. “We’ll monitor the area where the road workers saw the ghost riders.”

“That’s over by the cemetery,” Gary said.

I nodded, saying nothing, remembering how offended Gary had acted when I’d tried to study the graves and chapel up close.

“Where there’s a huge grave marker for Hank Grolman,” Stacey said. “Does anyone from Adrienne’s family know you’re here renovating the ancestral vacation house?”

“We’ve worked hard to keep it secret,” Wyatt said. “Shell corporations, all of it. That’s why I had to put Darika in charge. It was so complicated on so many levels, and I didn’t want to ruin the big surprise.”

“So, what’s Adrienne like? How did you meet?” Stacey glanced quickly from Wyatt to me, then back at him. “Uh, because it seems like anything about the Grolmans would help us understand the case a little better.”

“How did I meet Adrienne?” A truly dorky smile broke across his face, which was hard not to find a little endearing. “College. Stanford. Normally, we would never have met. She was an art student, and I was in computer science. It only happened because this guy in my dorm roped me into helping with his art installation where he was having sequencing issues with the moving parts and lights. It was some statement on consumerism using pieces of home appliances.”

“Sounds kinda neat,” Stacey said. “I always liked big wild installation pieces.”

“At Adrienne’s installation, she was the exhibit, in a cage wearing a white unitard like a B-movie space alien. Anybody who walked by could shoot her with this compressed-air paint gun mounted in front of her, like a carnival game. There were no instructions or signs, and she didn’t say anything. She was just there, and the gun was there.

“People started shooting her. You could adjust the gun to shoot harder or softer. The hardest setting fired big red paint blobs, the softest fired small green ones. She would let out a grunt each time one of the hard ones hit her, like it really hurt.”

“That takes commitment,” Stacey said, her interest in Adrienne apparently growing over their shared art-school background.

“I was watching her installation from across the aisle, and I felt like I got it. Like, given the chance, people would become more and more abusive. That was my take. It was an invitation for people’s inner demons to come out.

“Eventually, a couple of guys were just repeatedly pelting her on the hardest setting, not letting up. They started aiming for her face. She had goggles and a paper filter mask, but it was soaked with paint and probably wasn’t protecting her much.

“I yelled for them to stop and told them they were just showing everyone how terrible they were. I kind of went on a blind rant, really just a bunch of pent-up stuff I’d always wanted to yell at my brothers. I yelled at those guys until they stopped shooting her and left.”

“Aw, and Adrienne was impressed by your chivalry?” Stacey asked.

“No. She said she expected someone would use the situation for ‘performative morality’ when others could see them. What she liked was that I understood what her installation was trying to do. I suggested she build an enclosure around it that only one or two people could enter at a time. Remove any sense of being in public, subject to the judgment and approval of others, and then see what people do. And she actually invited me to coffee, and that was our first date. The end.”

“Aw, and now here you are,” Stacey said.

“Basically. It was off and on—we’re from really different backgrounds, you know. She grew up in New York, went to boarding school in Massachusetts, and races sailboats in regattas. Nobody sails in Chillicothe, Ohio. My older brother Skip works at a paper mill back home, thirty hours a week so they don’t have to give him benefits. He still sleeps in the upper bunk in our old room.”

“That sounds tough,” Stacey said.

“No, he’s a jerk, so it’s fine. This looks great, Farlee.”

The chef smiled as she set out thin yellow melon slices, juicy and sweet, refreshing in the summer heat.

Afterward, Stacey and I finally headed back to the chambermaids’ cottage, ready for a brief period of peace and quiet. We were exhausted, having slept little before the early start to our day.

“Wyatt seems to like you a lot,” I mentioned once we were alone. “He really opened up to you.”

“He’s just interested in the equipment,” Stacey said. “He’d be equally interested in me if I were a stack of technical manuals.”

“Yeah, right.” I yawned and headed for the shower.

We caught a few hours of sleep while it was still daylight. Darika was supposed to wake us with a phone call whenever the ferry arrived. Instead, she showed up knocking on our front door about an hour before sunset.

“The ferry’s here,” Darika said when I opened the door.

“Great, thanks.” I noticed the suitcase beside her. “Anything else?”

“Yes.” She took a deep breath and blew it out with a sigh, what they call a cleansing breath at yoga, which I haven’t attended in a long while but probably should get back to doing. “Wyatt, of course, needs his bodyguard, personal assistant, and chef available at all times, and the guest cottage only has four bedrooms.”

“So, you got crowded out?”

“Yes.” She looked away while she said that, as though embarrassed. “I could go back to the butler’s cottage, where I stayed before, but I moved out of there for good reason.”

“Can you tell us about it yet? It might help with our investigation.”

“I saw a…procession of things. The butler’s cottage is only one story, so I was on the ground level. I left the windows open at night back then, to let the breeze pass through. I could see trees out there in the moonlight. It was pleasant, until that night.

“I thought animals were walking by at first, maybe deer or wild pigs. Then I saw the shapes. They were like...shadowy people, covered in dark hoods. Some limped along. Some rode horses, but the horses were just bare bones. They were like those animals all over the lodge, badly preserved. Rotting. Horrible.”

“That must have been terrifying. Do you want to come in?” I asked, holding the door wide for her.

“They passed my window in a slow procession. So slow.” Darika was staring off into space, remembering. “Just when I thought it was over, another one would come along. One of those rotted-out horses didn’t have a rider, just a white bag with a big dark stain tied to its back. Maybe there was a dead animal in there. Or maybe…” She shuddered. “I don’t know. But all of those things didn’t seem completely there, completely real.

“When they finally stopped, I told myself I might be dreaming. I made myself get out of bed and look out, but there was nothing, not even up the road where the procession should have been. They’d either put on a lot of speed or disappeared. And that, Ellie, is why I can’t go back and stay alone in the butler’s cottage. I've been staying at the guest cottage because it has upstairs bedrooms.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “You can certainly stay here if you want, but this cottage is haunted, too, by the masked chambermaid. And there’s no upstairs.”

“The whole estate is haunted. I’d just rather not stay alone.” She gave me a nervous smile. “Are you sure you don’t mind?”

“Of course not. Come on in.”

“What’s happening?” Stacey emerged from the hallway, rubbing her eyes.

“We’ve got a new roommate.” I closed the door after Darika rolled her suitcase inside.

“Oh. Cool.” Stacey smiled. “I don’t recommend the first room on the left. That’s Foxy Chambermaid’s room. And the one across from it’s ours.”

“Thanks. I'll avoid those.” Darika rolled onward to the second room on the right, moving in next door to Stacey and me.

Outside, we gathered at our respective vehicles. Darika frowned at the van.

“Technically, gas-powered vehicles aren’t allowed on the island,” she said. “It’s supposed to be electric vehicles only.”

“Are those electric?” I gestured at the yellow excavators and bulldozers standing like skeletal behemoths in the muddy chaos of the front yard.

“They aren’t, unfortunately.”

“Well, just count us as a construction vehicle for now,” Stacey said. “Helping you build a ghost-free island.”

We drove down the winding gray road to the steel gate overlooking the wharf. It groaned open at our approach. Either Gary was watching the gate through one of his concealed cameras, to which he’d yet to grant us access, or the inside of the gate had a motion detector.

The Charleston Crosser waited down at the dock. Captain Walker greeted Darika expansively and warmly, like a man who’d made a lot of money off of her, and his nephews hurried to provide her with cardboard boxes of supplies, including a cooler box with the Whole Foods logo. They loaded it all onto her golf cart, not letting her lift a finger.

“Thanks,” she told them. “I just ran out of everything today, very unexpectedly.”

“Was it the blimp?” Walker asked, scratching his white beard. It wasn’t raining tonight, and he’d traded his hooded rain slicker for an Atlanta Hawks cap and blue work shirt. “People say a blimp landed here.”

“Yeah, the LookyLoon blimp,” one of Walker’s muscular young nephews said. The guy was maybe a couple years older than me, in a clingy, damp t-shirt. His Geechee accent was a distant echo of Captain Walker’s, barely there at all when he spoke to me instead of his relatives. “Now we know who we’re really working for. Wyatt Lanigan. Always some super-rich guy from far away trying to make this island his playground. Things change, but they don’t.”

“In the meantime, we’re happy to help Ms. Mahajan with whatever she needs,” Captain Walker said, his tone and his expression admonishing toward his nephew. “Get the FedEx boxes. And be careful with them.”

The nephews loaded our boxes of freshly arrived gear into the back of our van, for which we gushed our gratitude. Darika drove away in her cart, eager to get the cooler box contents into her fridge. Our fridge, now.

“So?” Captain Walker said to me, his white eyebrows raised inquisitively, while his nephews chatted with Stacey about sea turtle nests on the beach, a well-chosen subject on their part that grabbed her attention.

“It’s like you said,” I told the ferryman. “Bad root. But we’re here to help, um, uproot it.”

He chuckled. “You’re root doctors?”

“I wish. All we have is technology and research.”

He looked at me like he was expecting a punchline to a joke, but I had none to offer. He shrugged and returned to his boat. “Keep yourselves safe, if you can.”

With that uplifting parting comment, he was off, detaching from the wharf and pulling away across the shark-infested waters.

“Root doctors?” Stacey said. “Was he joking?”

I shrugged. “I get the feeling he doesn’t approve of us being here.”

“Oh, yeah, I’m getting a great big helping of that feeling myself.”

We returned up the road, and the heavy gates closed behind us, locking us in with an audible thud.

Chapter Sixteen

The main lodge stood silent and empty again, everyone gone to their various cottages for the evening. Stacy and I unloaded some of our new gear into the card room, where the monitors and speakers fed us sights and sounds from around the lodge, mostly just dead animals doing nothing, and doing it silently.

“Should we set up the new stuff?” Stacey asked.

“Later. I want to catch up on the gigabytes of research Darika dumped on us this morning.”

“Suit yourself. I’ll search for anomalies in last night’s recordings. That’ll pass the time.” Stacey drew on a pair of headphones.

I sat down at my laptop, positioned on an antique games table with a painted-on chessboard, and carefully placed my hot coffee mug on a coaster, though it would hardly be the first drink ring on the board.

Without access to Gary’s network of tiny yet high-resolution cameras, we had blind spots all over the enormous house and grounds. Really, it was more like one big blind spot with scattered points of occasional visibility.

It also meant Gary could be watching us, because we didn’t know where all of his cameras were. And maybe he could hear us, and I definitely didn’t want him to know our plans for later.

Darika’s research assistants had been thorough at collecting information about Satilla Island, but it wasn’t well organized or indexed. I dove in, immediately swimming alone in the deep end of a mishmash of nineteenth century history.

I found many photographs of Heinrich “Hank” Grolman’s businesses, including sprawling Wyoming ranchlands teeming with cattle, a coal mine, a “Rancher’s Trust” bank that looked like an Old West saloon, and sepia photographs of a massive slaughterhouse in Chicago with thousands of cows packed nose to tail.

Few pictures seemed to exist of Grolman himself, and these appeared to be only when business required it. In one, he stood in the background of a crowded reception in a saloon celebrating Wyoming’s freshly granted statehood in 1890, when presumably the Greater Cattlemen’s Association gave up its vigilante and land-grabbing activities. He would have been thirty-eight in that picture. His bearded face was rugged and hard, and despite his attempts to soften his appearance with a bowler hat and tie, he looked like a hard-fighting, hard-carousing ranch hand, a rough cowboy hiding in a good suit.

The Ryland family of Pittsburgh seemed much more amenable to having their pictures taken and portraits painted. Senator James Ryland had been a man with a smile so wide it spanned all the way from one giant muttonchop sideburn to the other. He had nine children and a cheerful but tired-looking wife. Countless pictures showed the Ryland family’s lavish Christmas parties. A series of newspaper photos followed the senator on a visit to his family ironworks, shaking hands with sooty workers while dressed in a top hat and cravat. Another showed him delivering candy and presents to an orphanage. His campaign posters promised, rather vaguely, GOOD THINGS FOR ALL MEN, a slogan that clearly predated women’s suffrage by some years.

I focused on any images of Evangeline, the senator’s second-oldest daughter and third-oldest child. Fortunately, many of the Rylands’ family papers had been available at a public library in Pennsylvania they’d endowed, and which still bore their name.

Even given the relative restraint of nineteenth-century gossip columnists compared to modern paparazzi, it was easy to see that Evangeline’s wild behavior caused her family some embarrassment. She'd once zoomed on a bicycle down Negley Avenue, one of the city’s many long, steep hills, wearing only a petticoat and a giant flowered hat, apparently on a dare from friends, when she was nineteen. I read this in a letter written to Senator Ryland by his wife Josephine, complaining of the girl’s behavior. Another time, she engaged in an unauthorized horse race in a public park. Other pictures showed her daredeviling around Jekyll Island’s windblown beaches on an experimental sail-powered bicycle, or riding with her father and uncle in a small, boxy motorboat, a wild new invention at the time, powered by a plucky, ambitious little petroleum engine rather than a team of sweaty guys shoveling coal into a steaming fire box.

Pennsylvania’s newspapers had exploded in 1899 with news of Evangeline’s engagement to “Hank Grolman, of the Grolman meatpacking concern in Chicago.” A photograph showed Grolman at a banquet in the ballroom of the Ryland home in Pittsburgh. He’d upgraded from a bowler to a top hat and traded his beard for sideburns in blatant imitation of his soon-to-be father-in-law.

Beside Grolman was Evangeline, in a ball gown trimmed in gold leaf. She gave a little smile, a rarity for a nineteenth century photograph, and seemed to toast the photographer with her wine glass.

Senator and Josephine Ryland stood at the other side of the picture, well-dressed, starch-stiff, and plainly uncomfortable, not looking at their daughter, their future son-in-law, the camera, or each other.

I read Evangeline’s death notice in June of 1899, the month she was meant to have her wedding on Satilla, the same month and location for which Wyatt and Adrienne were now planning. Evangeline's wild streak and her desire to win regattas had sent her sailing in questionable weather with younger brother Averill and cousins Edna and Helena. Only Edna’s body had been recovered.

In photographs, Senator Ryland seemed visibly aged by the loss of two children. He sold Ryland Ironworks to J. P. Morgan in 1901 and did not seek re-election but lived as a quiet philanthropist. The Ryland family fortune vanished among hordes of great-grandchildren. Their Pittsburgh mansion became home to classrooms for Oakland College.

I double-checked my notes. It was the same college where Wendy Haverford taught. I supposed it was natural for a history professor to research the Ryland family while having easy access to the old family home, which was beautiful and impressive in photographs, with balconies jutting from ivy-coated brick towers, the interior walls painted with cherubs, roses, or grapevines, decorated with classical busts and suits of armor. The mansion was carefully maintained by the college down to the present.

Another file included a Grolman family tree spanning several generations, from Hank’s grandfather Rudolf, stable keeper to the Hackelberend estate in Germany, down to the current generation of descendants. Few carried the Grolman name anymore; their numbers had dwindled with the shrinking family sizes of the twentieth century.

I found Adrienne at the bottom of one of the family tree’s many sheets, which were arranged in a somewhat confusing manner inside a PDF document, with no easy navigation. Adrienne was twenty-four, a couple years younger than me. It seemed like everyone involved this case was younger than me, except for those who’d been dead for more than a century, not exactly a table at which I was happy to be seated.

Eventually, I traced Adrienne’s ancestry back to Garit Grolman, one of Hank’s brothers who ran the business as Hank retreated into apparent despair and ultimate death on the island. Garit had served some years in the Imperial German Navy and was said to bring order and efficiency to the business, while the other brother, Otto, had clerked in Leipzig at a combination bookstore and coffee shop—sounded like a place I could hang out—and was apparently a more talented schmoozer than Garit.

As far as I could tell, the family had continued to prosper until the Great Depression struck it hard. This led to the eventual closure and abandonment of the massively expensive Satilla Island estate. The island was being evaluated for condemnation by the federal government, which was interested in claiming it as a National Seashore in the 1950s, but the family arranged for the state of Georgia to take over instead.

It wasn’t clear why the family preferred the state over the federal government. Maybe they thought local officials would take better care of the land, because they stipulated it had to be kept as an untouched wildlife preserve.

“Hey, Stacey,” I said at one point, “want to see the manor house in Germany where Hank Grolman grew up?”

“Sure.” She pulled off her headphones. “I’ve got something to show you, too.”

I showed her the ruins first, a color photo of bombed-out brick walls with gloomy forested hills rising behind it.

“Whoa, what happened to it?” Stacey asked.

“Destroyed in the Second World War. The Germans were using it for some kind of intelligence command. Look at the bricks.”

“Huh. They have that same color as the lodge, don’t they?”

“The architectural notes say it’s built of ‘Bentheim sandstone,’ a golden stone mined only in that particular part of Germany, in a city called Bad Bentheim. It’s not quarried anymore because the dust is deadly to workers.”

“So…Grolman spent a fortune bringing fancy rare stone over from Europe?”

“Right. And look.” I showed her a prewar black and white picture of the Hackelberend manor house—it was imposing, three stories high, the windows narrow, a covered porte-cochère at the front.

“It’s just like Grolman’s lodge,” she said. “Only…smaller?”

“It looks like Grolman built a version of the house where his family worked in the stables, but made it three times larger.”

“Well, that certainly makes a statement,” Stacey said.

“Even the gate is similar.” I showed her the old manor house’s iron gate topped with a brick arch. “He really took some design ideas from back home.”

“That must have been his idea of reaching the pinnacle of success. Who were these aristocrats his family served?”

“Heinrich—sorry, Hank—grew up serving the household of Count Frederik Hackelberend. Hank’s father and grandfather spent their lives cleaning the stables and grooming the horses. The Count was known for his lavish parties, particularly hunting parties, and kept private preserves for himself. The Count’s son, Frederik II, had to abdicate like the rest of German nobility after World War I.”

“Are you reading a Wikipedia article to me?” Stacey asked.

“You can read it to me if you prefer.”

“Sounds like Heinrich really wanted to be like the Count in every way he could,” Stacey said. “I guess we know who his favorite Sesame Street character would have been.”

“He ended up with an even bigger house and larger fortune, so it seems like he got everything he wanted,” I said.

“Except for the tragic lost bride,” Stacey said. “Which made all his success mean nothing to him, maybe. It sounds like he spent the rest of his life brooding and building walls. Literal and otherwise. They say no man is an island, but this guy really went for it anyway.”

“Well, he did become part of an island, since he’s buried here.”

“Yikes. Kinda grim, Ellie.”

“I blame a lifetime of working with the dead. So, what did you find?”

“I thought you’d never ask. Check this out.” Stacey unplugged her headphones from her tablet to bring its external speaker to life.

She played a clip recorded by the night vision camera in the dining room. Nothing stirred at first. The forty empty chairs seemed to stare at one another. The bear, wolf, and bison heads could be seen overlooking the room from above with their lifeless eyes. The glass bulbs on a bison-horn chandelier glinted greenly in the night vision, reflecting moonlight from one of the high, narrow windows.

I watched and listened carefully, waiting for any movement or sound.

When the voice began, it filled me with dread, as the voices of restless ghosts so often do.

Chapter Seventeen

It was thin and distant, and never grew too loud or clear, but it was definitely a man’s voice, singing.

“Is that German?” I asked.

“I think so.”

More voices joined in, straggling along as if they didn’t know the words as well, or were badly inebriated, or both. The sounds of clinking glasses, banging fists, and scraping chairs echoed in the room. It was eerie to hear such activity but see nothing at all, just the empty chairs facing each other across a blank, dusty table, and the decayed heads of the beasts staring into nothingness.

One of the dining room’s multiple doors opened, the one connecting to the Moroccan-style smoking room. It wasn’t a big movement, just an inch or two, so slight it could have been caused by a draft of air, or even the settling of the house as it exhaled some of the day’s humidity, nudging a misaligned door from its frame.

The voices and noises fell silent, as if something had distracted all the entities in the room at once.

Then a horn sounded, a single long blast.

“That’s like the one that called off the dogs,” I said.

A cavalcade of shouts, scraping chairs, breaking glass, and boots erupted, lasting a few seconds before falling silent, but toward the end I thought I heard something else.

“Sounds like they’re gearing up for the wedding celebration, doesn’t it?” Stacey said. “I hope they RSVP’d.”

“Can you replay those last few seconds?” I asked.

“I know what you mean. I heard it, too.” She played the last few seconds again, putting it on a loop.

Snarls. Growls. After the previous night, it was hard not to feel unnerved at the sound.

“That’s what we heard in the woods,” I said.

“Check the timestamp,” Stacey said. “This was recorded only a few minutes before we heard the scream and went to check it out.”

“These could be the entities that chased us through the forest. They left their indoor party to go hunting. Did we catch anything on thermal?”

“Yep. Good thing they told us the dining room is a major hauntspot so we set up multiple cameras.” Stacey brought up the thermal camera recording of the same time period and played the audio again to accompany it.

Cold spots formed slowly, small and scattered at first, but growing larger and colder as the voices and sounds grew louder. They deepened, darkened, going icy purple as they gathered at their table, the host of unseen spirits shouting or drunkenly singing.

Among all of those sounds, a dog howled. It wasn’t particularly loud, and it sounded more distant than the other noises. But the voices and clinking glassware stopped at the howl, falling into a silent pause for a few seconds.

Then a horn blew, and the overlapping cold spots surged as one toward the door. Dog howls and snarls joined the shouting voices. A tidal wave of cold psychokinetic energy crashed into the dining room door, a dramatic sight visible only to the thermal camera.

On the night vision at the same moment, nothing visibly happened at all until the door slipped slightly ajar. An observer in the room could easily have mistaken this massive paranormal event as simply a cold draft and a creaky door, though probably accompanied by a feeling of deep unease or of being watched, maybe even touched by cold invisible hands as the entities slipped past.

“It’s like the dog howl alerted them,” I said. “But to us? Or the woman we heard screaming in the woods?”

“They ended up hunting all of us, anyway,” Stacey said. “You, me, and Miss Invisible. You think she’s the Foxy Chambermaid?”

“I wouldn’t make any assumptions.”

“I’m just brainstorming. Too bad we don’t have a blimp to go brainstorm-cruising on like Wyatt.”

“Did you pick up anything else?”

“Nope. Once they left the room, they left the house, I think. I guess they were in a big rush to hunt us. Or Miss Invisible.”

“If they’re all ghosts, this must be a drama they play out again and again,” I said. “Maybe they’ve been doing it for a hundred years. Or maybe the recent renovations disturbed their slumber.”

“Poor Miss Invisible,” Stacey said. “I wonder why they were chasing her.”

“The lodge being a male-only club should help us narrow that down.” I pulled up one of the few surviving pictures of the lodge’s interior in its heyday. They were scanned from the Ryland family collection in their library archive and focused on the preparations for the 1899 wedding that never occurred. “Look at the maids in the deep background here. They’re dressed like the one I saw in our cottage.”

Stacey squinted at three servant women being directed by a butler as they hung what looked like miles of white bunting and ribbons. “Could any of them be Foxy Chambermaid?” she asked.

“Yes, literally any of them. They’re all blonde and dressed the same.”

“They look pretty young, too.”

“Right. Remember those names in the cemetery?” I pulled up the cemetery pictures on my phone and looked up the names, glad that Silicon Valley denizens Darika and Wyatt had prioritized internet access with a powerful satellite dish atop the main house. “Walentyna, Nadzieja, Katarzyna. Polish names, all female.”

“So…why? And what did they all die of? Isn’t that suspicious when they were all so young?”

“We don’t know when they died. This picture was taken in 1899, and the Grolman family maintained some level of staff here until they donated the island to the state in 1955. Some of them might have grown old here, keeping up the place.”

“Ugh, this is exactly why people should not cheap out on headstones,” Stacey said. “You never know when some historian or paranormal investigator might really need that information. So why so many Polish girls?”

It didn’t take me long to find a possible explanation. “The Ostflucht. They could have been Ruhrpolen.”

“Oh, sure,” Stacey said. “That’s just what I was thinking. Come on, Ellie, translate that to informal English.”

“Poland was part of the German Empire, but the rural western part. Lots of Polish people migrated eastward in the late 1800s for factory jobs in the cities.”

“Basically, you’re saying these ladies were hired as cheap immigrant labor,” Stacey said.

“From the cemetery, it looked like he may have brought all his servants over from one part of the German Empire or another.”

“Not a fan of hiring local workers from Georgia, I guess.”

I sank back into research, and Stacey resumed checking over the previous night’s data, looking for anomalies, anything from audio spikes to motion detector activation.

With headphones, I listened to my attempted EVP session from the master bedroom, when I’d tried to get in touch with the big, shadowy presence there, but there was nothing. The entity hadn’t returned my calls.

When it was almost an hour past midnight, I nudged Stacey, and we got moving without a word. If Gary was listening in on us, I didn’t want to alert him that we were about to do anything of any particular importance.

We headed outside and set out some of our new, more rugged gear, pointed it toward the woods where we’d entered in pursuit of the voices. This was partly an exercise in seeing whether Gary might pop out of the woodwork for a closer look at our nighttime activities.

Though we took our time setting up outdoor gear around the estate, Gary never turned up, so we felt a little more comfortable climbing into the van and driving down the road. I turned out the headlights as we passed the gamekeeper’s cottage and the boarded-up dog kennel, hoping to avoid alerting him that we were on the move. We also remained silent as we drove past, not that he would have been able to hear us talking inside the van. Too bad we didn't have a quiet golf cart of our own.

The moonlight was barely enough to light the way. I was happy to flip my lights back on as we eased on down the road out of sight from Gary’s cottage.

The headlights did little to illuminate the wilderness alongside the road, though, with its canopy of gnarled oak limbs and the gloomy undergrowth, like the dark forest in the bad part of a fairy tale, with wolves watching through the trees.

I slowed to a crawl as we approached the brick and steel fence of the cemetery, but I didn’t park by the gate like Gary had. I continued onward as the road became broken and uneven, jarring us brutally despite my low speed. We stopped when I reached heavy limbs blocking our way.

“Looks like the end of the road,” Stacey said.

“I want to park around the bend, where Gary can’t see the van if he comes by. Come on, let’s do some yard work.”

Stacey groaned as we got out. We spent a few minutes moving fallen limbs out of the path, then replaced them after I drove the van out of sight and parked it.

We hiked the short distance back to the cemetery. Even if Gary drove to the very end of the restored part of the road, he wouldn’t see our van.

At the cemetery gate, Stacey held her flashlight while I picked the lock. The gate’s hinges shrieked like startled loons when we opened it. I couldn’t remember if they’d made that sound when we’d visited earlier, but perhaps it just hadn’t seemed so loud or important at the time.

We stepped inside the starkly class-divided cemetery, with the servants on the right and the lone towering Grolman marker on the left, the chapel behind it to really adorn his afterlife.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Stacey whispered as we passed the black marble obelisk and approached the chapel.

“No, but we need to understand more about Hank Grolman and his family. And there’s something off about this, isn’t there?” I circled the chapel, shining my flashlight onto the narrow stained-glass windows. “Look at the images. Olives, grapes, wheat, apples. Sheep, goats, cattle.”

“Mmm. A farm theme. I like the animals.”

“But not a religious theme,” I said. “As one generally finds with a chapel.”

“Oh, yeah, good point. I mean, there’s sheep, but…if it’s not a chapel, what is it?” Stacey shined her light at the deeply sunken front door. “Now I kinda want to look inside, too.”

“Then let’s go.” I knelt at the chapel door, looking over the braided metal design around the lock, still ornate even though the golden top layer had flaked away.

The lock was surprisingly difficult. Soon my face was sweaty, from the effort of concentration as much as the humid Georgia summer air. The buzzing insects attracted by face sweat were an unwelcome addition, too.

“I think someone’s coming.” Stacey swung her flashlight away from me and looked among the servants’ gravestones. “Huh. Never mind.”

“Keep an eye out. I don’t want any graveyard ghouls sliding up on us.”

“Yeah, okay,” Stacey said, her voice just a little higher than a moment earlier. “I’ll do that.”

Finally, I set the last pin and felt the lock loosen.

I pressed my hand against the wagon-wheel design in the door. The door budged, but it was so heavy that it seemed determined to push itself shut again. I was determined not to allow that, though, because I was not going to get stuck re-picking the lock.

“Stacey, help me push!” I said.

“Aw, it’s like you’re giving birth. And I’m here at your side.”

“It kind of feels that way, yes,” I grunted, using all my strength just keeping the thing propped open.

Stacey leaned against the door, putting her back into it, and together we swung it open.

The air inside was…stale. Very stale. It was more like opening a crypt than a chapel.

“Ugh! I can’t.” Stacey backed off and turned away, taking gulps of air from the opposite direction.

I kept the door propped open with my boot and pulled my jacket over my nose while I waited for the initial reek to pass. Stacey returned with the stone fox statue and used it to prop the door open.

We pointed our lights inside, revealing a life-size statue of a woman holding an infant.

“That’s…interesting.” Stacey snapped pictures. “At first it looks like a classic Madonna and child, but it’s not, is it? The baby has a cornucopia. And the mother’s holding a wheel like the one on the chapel door.”

“And her crown looks like a city full of towers. This looks pagan to me.” I stepped through the narrow arch into the small chapel, holding my breath against the stink.

There were a few benches facing the statue, too low for sitting, probably for kneeling, lined with stiff, crumbling material that had once been soft velvet.

In front of the statue was a deep depression like a baptismal pool, but unlike most baptismal pools, it was lined with thick, dark gunk.

I stepped forward for a closer look into the gunk pit.

“Oh, no,” Stacey whispered. “Tell me it’s not full of people’s bodies or dead animals or something.”

“It doesn’t smell great.” I pinched my nose as I looked into the filth. “Whatever it was rotted away a long time ago. But I think…do you have a stick or something I can stir this with?”

Stacey blanched. “Of course not. But I will be happy to step outside and find you one. And maybe pass it to you without stepping in here again.” She wasted no time leaving, but quickly returned and extended a long, thin oak branch to me through the doorway.

I took it, then held my breath as I gave the filth pit a good stir with the branch. The awful smell erupted anew. Small objects clinked down in there. Bones, I thought, and readied myself as I looked more closely.

“They aren’t bones.” I sighed with a little relief at the small round objects glinting in my flashlight’s focused high beam. “They’re just coins. Stacey?”

I looked over to where she stood just outside the doorway. She held a finger over her lips and pointed. She’d turned off her light.

Taking my cue from her, I clicked off my light before I stepped closer to her and looked out.

On the other side of the cemetery’s single central path, a shadowy figure of a man hobbled among the small servant headstones, heading for the cemetery’s open front gate. For a second, I worried it was Gary, busting our illicit late-night chapel invasion.

It wasn’t Gary, though, unless he’d died and become a ghost in the past few hours. The man was just a shadow, no features, not even really fully formed, and was much quieter than Gary could ever have been.

The shadow-man’s movements seemed hesitant to me, slowing as he lurched closer to the cemetery gate that we’d left open, like he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to go there or not.

Stacey looked at me and widened her eyes emphatically, twice. I knew she was wondering whether we should react, maybe hurry to close the gate before we inadvertently unleashed yet another restless spirit onto our client’s estate.

I responded with a double-palms-up shrug worthy of Larry David. What was one more ghost around here? Then I walked my fingers across my palm and pointed after the entity. Let’s follow, I was trying to say, with an unknown degree of success. Then I pointed to my eye, and she understood that one and drew out her camera.

She fell into step behind me as I tiptoed across the grass of the posh side of the cemetery, with its one VIP resident, wincing each time the weedy grass rasped against my boots and jeans.

These little sounds didn’t seem to draw the shadow-man’s attention, fortunately, as far as I could tell. He stopped right at the threshold of the open gate, as if pondering whether crossing over was a good idea or not.

Then he stepped through.

Once outside, he became sharper and clearer. Not fully solid, but from a sufficient distance, he might have been mistaken for a living person. His shadowy, indistinct body had sharpened into a black suit, tattered and dirty like it hadn’t fared well through the process of him digging his way up and out of his grave.

We trailed him at a distance, moving as quietly as we could.

By the time we reached the cemetery gate, he was several paces up the road, shuffling in the direction of the main lodge, though not very quickly.

He may not have been moving fast, but he was focused, walking in a straight line along the center of the road. With each shambling step away from the cemetery, his back straightened a little, and his limp grew slightly less pronounced. He had pulled himself out of his grave, crossed back to the land of the living, and now seemed to have places to be and things to do.

Stacey and I continued following at a distance, watching him become more solid and clearer with each step.

When the eerie horn sounded from the woods, I first thought it was a powerful wind blowing in from the ocean, the harbinger of a storm.

I wasn’t entirely wrong.

They came crashing through the forest with hurricane force. We saw them only through their effects, tree branches and undergrowth thrashing as a maelstrom ripped through the forest, moving in our direction.

As the storm-like forces approached, I could hear more individual sounds within the roaring cacophony. Howling and snarling, the same entities that had dogged us the night before. Thunderous clomping sounds, horse hooves striking the earth. The shouts of men, exuberant and barbaric.

The chaos ripped through the woods alongside the road, a mass of sound and motion like a freight train, and still we couldn’t see the cause of it, only the lashing treetops.

I tore my gaze away to see how our wandering spirit was reacting to the approaching sound and fury, if at all.

That was the only reason I saw him rushing toward us.

He moved in a blur directly toward Stacey. She was oblivious to his approach, absorbed in taking video of the paranormal storm, with its occasional flashes of unnatural light, lashing its way through the dark woods.

“Look out!” I shouted, pushing Stacey out of the dead guy’s path.

Unfortunately, this planted me squarely into his path.

When he arrived a second later, it was like getting smacked with a wall of solid ice. The impact launched me off my feet and sent me sprawling across the ground. I managed to avoid landing on my neck, but slammed painfully down on my shoulder instead.

The wandering ghost wasn’t done with me yet.

He stepped on my chest, crushing my heart and lung region under a patent leather shoe that buttoned up the side. I got a close look at that shoe as it crushed my cardiovascular system. His black suit and tie were tattered, full of holes, his face hideously misshapen.

No, not misshapen. He wore a mask with dark eye holes, and tusks like a boar.

His other foot came down on my face. The sole of his shoe smelled like mud and rotten leather.

“Ellie!” Stacey, my hero, flooded him with white light as she recovered from my pushing her aside.

He was gone in an instant—ghosts really hate that flood of full-spectrum light. He seemed to be done toying with us for the moment.

“Are you okay?” Stacey dropped to her knees beside me. I covered her flashlight with one gloved hand and looked around to make sure the apparition was gone.

“I’m great, thanks,” I said. “Switch it off.”

“You sure?”

“Yep.”

Stacey snuffed out her flashlight.

We walked slowly down the road toward the cemetery gate again, watching the hurricane of movement in the forest. It encircled the cemetery, where the wilderness grew right up to the old fence on three sides.

The whirling disturbance grew quieter, the shouting and howling reduced to the grunts and grumbles of horses, dogs, and men.

Our friend the face stomper stood inside the gate, once again reverted to a slumped, featureless shadow. He faded away as unseen beasts snorted and sniffed around the cemetery, drawing closer to him.

A couple of times, I thought I glimpsed a shadowy rider moving along the outside of the cemetery fence, but it would always melt back into the darkness of the woods when I looked right at it.

Then I finally got a look at one of them, and I couldn’t help wishing I hadn’t.

The rider emerged from beneath the sprawling shadow of an ancient oak. I saw the horse first, a skeletal creature with few remnants of skin or muscle, its head a long, smooth skull sheathed in a polished leather bridle.

The horse was bad, the rider worse. The hands gripping the reins were withered and pale. The rider’s form was mostly hidden by a hooded coat or cloak that mingled with the darkness of the forest. I could see his face, though, pale and stern, unblinking.

I was glad his dead-white eyes weren’t looking my way. They were fixed instead on the gate to the cemetery, left open by us. No trace remained of the shadow man now. It looked like he’d gone to ground. I guess, on some nights, it’s best to just give up and head back to your grave early.

Looking back at the pale rider, I realized his head was rotating, slowly but surely, from the open gate toward Stacey and me, the only people around.

His eyes, chalk-white except for the black pupils, found my face. His gaze was cold and unflinching.

He raised something long and curved from the inner folds of his loose black garment. I thought it was a blade at first, but it was an ivory hunting horn, decorated with little spirals of gold, and it very much resembled the tip of an elephant’s tusk.

He raised it to his lips and blew a long, deep note. Then another, and a third.

Stacey and I tensed, reaching for our flashlights again. The horde of entities was positioned to charge out from both sides of the cemetery, swarming around us. From the way they had ripped through the forest, there wasn’t much chance of us outrunning them.

The sounds rose again in a horrible wave from the shadows of the woods. Hoofbeats. Shouts. Snarls. All converging on the spot where Stacey and I stood on the road in front of the cemetery.

Then it stopped.

The night was unnaturally quiet and still. Many seconds passed before the katydids resumed their chirping, many more before the frogs returned to croaking and the night birds called again.

“Are they gone?” Stacey whispered.

Lights erupted from around the next curve in the road, coming from the direction of the lodge.

Flashing blue lights.

Gary’s golf cart tilted as he flew around the bend. He turned sideways as he braked. A floodlight on his cart flared to life.

Its searing light revealed Stacey and me standing there, the cemetery gate open behind us, the door to the chapel standing open beyond that.

I held up my hands. “Don’t shoot. We surrender.”

Chapter Eighteen

“What exactly are you up to out here?” Gary stepped out of his security cart, arms folded, dyed comb-over askew from his wild driving.

“Believe it or not, ghost hunting sometimes leads you right to the one cemetery in the area,” I said. “We’re setting up gear to watch for the entities that ran off the road crew.”

“Are you, now? Is that why you went breaking in during the middle of the night? Just tell me you didn’t…” He pointed his flashlight through the gate, checking Hank Grolman’s headstone, then the chapel door that stood open, revealing the mother and child statue within. “You did. That’s about as disrespectful a thing as I’ve ever seen.”

“Again, it’s just a chapel,” I said. “We’re here to do a job. And I don’t think Darika or Wyatt intend for you to get in our way and slow us down. What we accomplished here tonight—”

“I don’t care. It’s not right, and there ought to be a line. I told you, I grew up next to a graveyard, and they don’t like being bothered.”

“We are going to do whatever we need to do around here, Gary.” I glared at him with the kind of unblinking fury my mother would throw at me for trying to avoid chores on Saturday morning. “And we’re still waiting on access to your camera network.”

“And you’re gonna keep waiting.” Gary pulled out a ring of keys and started toward the cemetery gate.

“We’ll see what your boss says,” I told him, and he grunted, not looking back as he passed through the gate and headed for the chapel.

“Hey, at least we get to move all those tree limbs again,” Stacey said. “Good thing Gary didn’t see our van, or he might have caught us here.”

“Very funny, Stacey.” I sighed and trudged up the broken road into the woods.

Stacey and I returned to the lodge, to the card room where the jaguar watched us from atop its mock Mesoamerican-style stone pyramid with miniature steep stairs. An angry-looking harpy eagle the size of a dog perched above it, while a black caiman, a large Amazon River reptile in the mold of a crocodile or alligator, was mounted below, on a rock arrangement on the floor.

“Let’s see the footage you recorded at the cemetery,” I said. “We need a greatest hits collection to show Wyatt and Darika tomorrow so they get the impression we’re accomplishing something here.”

“Okay. I’ll include the audio from the dining hall party and whatever we’ve got of the Ghost Riders of Gravetown. I didn’t see a cowboy hat on that one guy, did you?”

I shook my head. “He had more of a Grim Reaper fashion sense.”

“Grim-looking horse, too. Poor thing looked like it hadn’t eaten in a hundred years. You really wanted to give it an apple or something.” Stacey connected her camera to her favorite laptop and downloaded the cemetery footage.

The shadowy man appeared much as we’d seen him in the cemetery, but he never became as clear on camera as he had in person as he walked up the moonlit road. The shadowy person-shape was there, though, which was lucky. Often ghostly activity is more visible to the living eye than any camera.

That was the case with the hooded rider. On the video, his face was just a pale oval, his form mostly shadows. We could barely see the outline of his horse.

The sounds, too, were like something recorded down a deep well, mere echoes that didn’t reflect the thundering power of the hooves, the unnerving cry of the hunter’s horn, the snarl and snap of the unseen hellish hounds. But it was better than nothing.

“Who do you think the guy in the cemetery was?” Stacey asked. “Grolman? Or one of his servants? And why the piggie mask?”

“It’s probably safe to guess he wore it for the same reason the Foxy Chambermaid wore hers. Too bad we don’t know that, either. Now, as for the baby holding a cornucopia…” That took about half a second to look up. “The mother with the hat full of towers is the Greek goddess Tyche, or the Roman goddess Fortuna. The wheel she holds is the Wheel of Fortune.”

“What was she goddess of? Prime-time game shows?”

“Her domain is luck, both good and bad, but specifically the kind that afflicts entire cities rather than individuals. Floods, famine, prosperity, poverty.”

“Sounds like someone you want to keep happy if you can. And who’s the baby?”

“Plutus, the god of wealth. He lives in the underworld, part of the royal court of Hades, the Greek god of death—”

“I knew that one,” Stacey said.

“Plutus is the giver of gifts, particularly in the form of inheritance from the dead.”

“That’s why you build an idol to him in your cemetery, huh?” Stacey said. “I mean, if you’re going to build one. He’d feel at home there. A cemetery is basically a playpen to a baby death god.”

“He’s not always a baby.” I showed her a typical ancient depiction of adult Plutus, a winged young man in a fine robe, his childhood cornucopia of fruits and grains replaced by bags and chests of coins. “Some medieval writers identified him with Mammon, demon of greed, treasurer of Hell.”

“Are we thinking Hank Grolman was a Plutus worshipper?” Stacey asked.

“That’s the god he opted to honor with a chapel. Or a temple, I suppose we should call it.”

“And what kind of offerings do you make to baby Plutus and the Wheel of Fortune lady?”

“Animal sacrifices were the most common offerings in ancient times,” I said.

“It kinda seemed to work, though, didn’t it? Grolman got super rich.”

“Possibly. Or maybe he got into ancient deities after he was rich and began to fear losing his fortune. Maybe he didn’t want the wheel of Fortuna turning against him after it moved his way for so long.”

“You don’t want it moving too fast, either, if you’re trying to hit that extra-narrow million-dollar wedge,” Stacey said. “Sorry, my grandma really likes Wheel of Fortune. So, what can we do with this information?”

“I don’t know. It feels like a big piece of the puzzle, but I would personally like some of these puzzle pieces to start fitting together. Right now it’s like a bunch of mismatched pieces of a Picasso painting.”

“With all the animal skulls around here, I'd say it's more of a Georgia O’Keefe.”

We went back to work. Stacey slid on her earphones while I reviewed my notes on Heinrich “Hank” Grolman’s life, trying to figure out where worship of an ancient underworld god might have entered the picture. The Territory of Wyoming era seemed unlikely to me, but you never know. Maybe he’d gotten into ancient pagan rites after he’d become wealthy and tried to enroll himself in the elite Eastern establishment, or maybe it was something he brought with him from the Old World.

I returned to the images of Count Hackelberend and his golden-stone manor house. Darika’s researchers hadn’t gone particularly in depth on Grolman’s ancestors, nor the aristocratic family they had served as stable keepers.

Studying the history of the area, I came across a local legend that made me jump to my feet in excitement. “There’s a Wild Hunt entity cluster in the area.”

“Is that like a wild goose chase?” Stacey asked, looking up from her screen.

“The Wild Hunt is a pattern in folklore. The ghostly hunting party is led by someone—Odin, Satan, any number of local gods or legendary figures. In the area where Hank Grolman grew up, the lead hunter was a ghostly huntsman who rides at night with his dogs, hunting unwary peasants and travelers. It's an eternal curse, his punishment for hunting on Sunday instead of going to church.”

“Do you think Hank Grolman brought the hunter ghost over from Germany? I didn’t really pick up a cowboy ghost rider vibe off those guys by the cemetery. Medieval huntsmen cursed by heaven, though? I can see that.”

“I’m not sure what’s happened.” I considered the lead hunter, his cadaverous pale face under a dark hood. I compared it with my few pictures of Hank Grolman. “Imagine him without the mustache or muttonchops, and thinner. Could Hank have been the hunter with the horn? Like a dead, shriveled version of him?”

“Dead, shriveled, shaved, and drained of color?” Stacey regarded the pictures of Grolman. “Sure, that could be the same guy. Why?”

“It’s just a thought. Maybe Hank Grolman became the Wild Huntsman of his own island, somehow, with a hunting party of his wild young friends.”

“But how does that happen?” Stacey asked. “If it’s just a curse for hunting on Sunday, half the men in my family would be Wild Hunters roaming around Alabama by now. Every duck blind and deer stand in the state would be haunted.”

“I’ll keep looking at the lore and see if the International Journal of Psychical Studies has anything to say. The only clear pattern I’ve seen is that, whether the hunting party is led by a pagan god, a demon, or a ghost, it’s always bad luck to see it. Some say it’s an omen of death.”

“Oh, I’m so glad we saw it, then.” Stacey shook her head and went back to work.

The remaining hours of the night passed relatively quietly. Anything would have been quiet compared to our experience at the cemetery.

Our equipment registered some creaking door sounds, footsteps, a couple of tiny orbs in the India room that vanished near the elephant and reappeared near the black vault door below the house. The master bedroom, where workers had been driven away by an imposing, unresponsive shadow figure, showed a cold spot on the thermal camera for a long while. Maybe it was Hank Grolman, wondering who’d been poking around his grave.

We’d intended to set up cameras around the cemetery, but Gary’s attitude had cut that short. I actually sympathized with his take on respecting the dead, and it’s usually a good policy, but the dead need to respect the living, too.

Stacey occasionally took a break from listening to audio files and played some music that was on theme with our case, like “Riders on the Storm” by The Doors and “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” performed by Johnny Cash, until I gently requested she cut it out so I could read.

Information about Hank’s personal life remained elusive. I understood why Darika had connected me to a biographer of the closely associated Ryland family; it was because no biographers of the Grolmans appeared to exist. They had not sought the spotlight, had not been at the forefront of flashy new industries nor any public scandals. For my purposes, they were annoyingly boring and low-key. The Grolman Lard Company seemed to be their primary remaining asset, but I had the impression they owned bits and pieces of many things, investments accumulated over the generations. Their primary residences were in Manhattan and Greenwich, Connecticut.

A 1977 notice in the Village Voice mentioned a forthcoming unauthorized Grolman family biography, Hunter of Men: How a Western Vigilante Became an Eastern Millionaire.

There was no other reference to the book, though, and an online search yielded nothing about that title, nor its supposed publisher, Free Radical Press.

“Can you track down the author?” Stacey asked me when I told her about it.

“We’ll be lucky if he’s still alive. And something tells me ‘Publius D. Tribune’ could be a pen name.”

“Yeah, and how credible is a guy who’s going to pick that as his pen name, really?”

“Hmm.” Additional research didn’t provide much of a clue about the writer’s identity.

I called it quits about an hour before sunrise. My brain felt like mush from trying to pull together a clear history of the island and the people who’d lived there.

“I want to see their death certificates,” I told Stacey as we left the card room and headed for the front door.

“Sounds like a coldblooded threat,” Stacey said. “I like it.”

“Heinrich’s, Evangeline’s, every servant in that cemetery.” I stepped out into the blue-black of very early morning, the sunlight starting to seep over the horizon, reaching us before it reached the North American mainland. “I’ll text Darika. We need to catch a ferry into town.”

A very loud, very male voice bellowed from the dark expanse of the plowed-up lawn ahead of us.

Stacey and I reached for our flashlights.

Chapter Nineteen

It was a little too close to daylight for the average ghost to come out, but some of them mind the light less than others. Some even come out during the day.

Following the voice as it periodically shouted, we reached the garden nook overseen by the Artemis statue with her arrow drawn.

Wyatt was fighting with his bodyguard.

They were sparring, shirtless and barefoot, wearing only some light pajama-type pants. Renoir threw a punch that Wyatt tried but failed to turn aside. The bodyguard pulled the punch at the last moment, then adjusted Wyatt’s stance and blocking form.

They resumed fighting. Wyatt shouted each time he threw a punch or a kick, or avoided one, or failed to avoid one. Renoir made no sound, clearly not just the superior fighter but the trainer. He was tall, broad-shouldered and barrel-chested, built like a linebacker. Wyatt had a naturally very skinny, slender shape but was unexpectedly ropy with muscle with his shirt off, probably helped along by these kinds of early-morning workouts.

“Are you boys not getting along?” Stacey asked, by way of announcing our presence.

Wyatt looked over, startled. Renoir didn’t, like he’d already been aware of us before Stacey spoke. He did let Wyatt land a punch in his gut, then grunted and dropped to one knee. Given his previous performance, he was obviously taking a dive to make his boss look good in front of us.

“Oh! Sorry, Renoir!” Wyatt said. Either he was a very convincing fake, or genuinely believed he’d just dropped his nimble Goliath of a trainer while distracted. He extended a hand to Renoir. “Are you okay?”

“Lucky shot,” Renoir gasped. He accepted Wyatt’s help as he stood.

“Let’s take a personal five, anyway, while they catch us up on the investigation.” Wyatt looked only at Stacey as he said this, perhaps because he’d missed that I was the lead investigator, but probably not.

“I actually do have some stuff for you,” Stacey said. “As long as you’re done beating up your bodyguard.”

“Oh, Renoir’s a seventh-dan black belt in ninjutsu. He can take it.” Wyatt elbowed the larger man playfully, in a boss-showing-his-dominance kind of way. “He’s training me, but I am a mere Padawan. It gets you booted up in the morning, though. What have you got for me?” He ambled our way, glancing at the computer bag strapped over Stacey’s shoulder.

Renoir drew a shirt from a black duffle and receded into the shadows around the Artemis statue, keeping watch over us and the muddy, destroyed lawn behind us.

“Do you want to put on, like, uh—” Stacey glanced over Wyatt’s torso and then quickly away. She shook her head as if canceling whatever she’d been planning to say, then brought out her tablet.

They huddled fairly close together over the tablet. Wyatt’s eyebrows raised as Stacey showed him the highlights—the invisible party in the dining hall, voices and boots echoing among the empty chairs and staring dead beasts, and the shadow-man in the cemetery.

His jaw dropped at the sight of the narrow stream of storm-force winds lashing through the forest, and the rider who’d emerged.

“Can you Private Look those to me?” Wyatt asked.

“Sure,” Stacey said. “But the recordings really don’t show the entities as clearly as they were in person.”

“Why is that?” Wyatt asked.

“Sometimes you just have to be there, I guess. It’s something you feel or experience in the moment that’s hard to capture.”

“I can understand that,” Wyatt said, still gazing steadily at her, the early golden rays of sunlight landing favorably on his bare chest.

“Yep.” Stacey seemed to blank out for a moment. “Anyway, there’s your problem. Ghosts all over the estate. Wild hunters, masked servants, I don’t know.”

“We think there might be a connection with the estate where Hank Grolman grew up in Lower Saxony.” I laid out what we knew, from the lodge being modeled after the Hackelberend manor and built of the same material, to the local legends of the ghostly hunting party that rode by night. “What we really need is more information about the Grolman family and their activities here. Do you think there’s any chance that your fiancée, or any of her family members, would be willing to—”

“No,” Wyatt said. “This whole thing is a surprise. I don’t know how she’ll take it if she sees the old family home all ripped up like this. It has to wait until it’s ready.”

“But there must be some way—”

“We’re not involving Adrienne or her family right now.”

“Okay.” I dropped that and caught him up on everything else, from the unauthorized biography that apparently never saw print to our plans to head to the nearest mainland port, Brunswick, to look at death certificates.

“What’s that town like?” Wyatt asked.

“Oh, it’s super-cute,” Stacey said. “They have an Old Town on a colonial square system, with gardens and parks. It’s like a mini-Savannah. Savannah Junior.”

“Well, I definitely like what I’ve seen of Savannah,” Wyatt told her, and I could swear she blushed.

Darika’s golf cart rolled up the road, headlights on against the lingering gloom beneath the thick, mossy live-oak canopy that sprawled like a shadowy spiderweb overhead. She spotted the four of us in the statue garden and parked close by rather than at the lodge.

“Is something wrong?” she asked as she stepped out.

“The investigators were just catching me up,” Wyatt said. “This place has some serious issues. How did nobody seem to know any of this before I bought it?”

“The island’s been uninhabited and closed to the public for decades,” Darika said. “Nobody’s been here to see the problems.”

“It's even possible the Grolmans knew this place was unsafe, and that's why they wanted to make sure no people were allowed on the island,” I said. “Which might be something one of the living family members would know about.”

“How could anyone know?” Wyatt looked from Stacey to me. “Like Darika said, it’s been generations since they lived here. And if they had to abandon it because it was haunted, won’t they be happy to have it back in the family, fully restored, with all the ghosts cleared out? Don’t you agree, Renoir?” He looked back toward the statue, but the security guy wasn’t there anymore. He’d walked over to the front of the garden nook, looking out at the ripped-up chaos of the lawn where the construction vehicles slumbered. “Renoir?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Renoir said. He was watching Gary park his black security cart under the porte-cochère. “You’d have to ask somebody who knows the family.”

“Well, you’ve met them,” Wyatt said. “You know Adrienne.”

“I try to stay out of clients’ personal affairs,” Renoir said.

“Okay, thanks for that fantastically useful insight,” Wyatt said. “What do you two think? Stacey?” He hesitated, looking at me.

“Ellie,” I reminded him.

“Right, sorry.”

“You’re probably right, Wyatt,” Darika said before I could speak, smiling at me as she told her boss what he obviously wanted to hear. “Adrienne and her family will surely appreciate it.”

“Great, it’s all settled, then. We sally forth and continue on,” Wyatt said.

“I can handle the investigators if you want to go on your jog,” Darika said.

“I’ve got them pretty well handled. Oh, they need to catch a ferry to the mainland today. Right?” Wyatt looked at Stacey.

“Right,” Stacey said. “Thanks.”

“Of course,” Darika said, glancing suspiciously at Stacey. “We have a ferry on call. What’s on the mainland?”

“Death certificates,” I said, which pretty much killed the conversation.

“Better call that boat,” Wyatt reminded Darika, as if more than seconds had passed since we’d mentioned the idea.

“Right. Happy to. We can catch up later.” Darika walked a little stiffly toward her golf cart.

“We’d better get going, too,” I said.

“Yep, Renoir and I were going for a sunrise run on the beach,” Wyatt said. “You’re both welcome to come.”

“Maybe you could invite Darika,” I suggested.

“Yeah, she’s probably already done her morning workout, though,” Wyatt said. “She’s very into her own routine.”

“I could go for a run,” Stacey said. I threw her the most exasperated look I wanted to show in front of the client, which was pretty low-key, and it was pointless because all her attention was on Wyatt. “But first I’ll have to run to the cottage and then change before I run. I mean, we’ll probably drive to the cottage, not run, but then, I’ll run at the, you know, run…”

“Great. We’ll pick you up there.” Wyatt finally replaced his shirt as he walked off with Renoir toward the guest cottage.

Over at the main lodge, Gary stood by his security cart, watching us with a look that didn’t seem too friendly at all. No doubt he was still mad about the cemetery. He walked past Darika’s cart and through the front door to join her inside.

“Is it just me, or is everybody casting seriously hostile feels in our direction?” Stacey whispered. “Except maybe Wyatt.”

“I think Darika’s unhappy with us for going over her head to Wyatt.”

“That wasn’t intentional!” Stacey said. “We heard some guys grunting in the garden in the dark. How are we not going to go have a look? In case it was paranormal or something.”

“Let’s keep it on eggshells around her anyway,” I said. “Send her all the clips to review, too. Keep her in the loop, because I don’t think she likes to feel left out of it.”

We headed to the chambermaids’ cottage, where Stacey changed out of her boots and jeans and denim jacket, chosen despite the summer heat to provide some protection against invisible claws and bites and other ghostly attacks, and into some more jogging-appropriate attire.

“You should come, too,” Stacey said.

“Or you could not go,” I said. “Still an option.”

“You’re missing a golden opportunity to run alone on the beach at sunrise.”

“No, I’m not, because Wyatt and his security guy will be there, so we won’t be alone. I don’t jog in front of clients. Run for my life, sometimes, but never jog. But you have fun while I sleep.” I flopped down on the bed, hoping Foxy Chambermaid didn’t show up to haunt me while Stacey was gone.

Chapter Twenty

Gary's elongated security cart arrived to pick up Stacey, with Gary driving and Renoir riding up front beside him. Wyatt was in the back rows with Brad and Farlee. The rear of the security cart could technically fit four people, but it would be cramped. They were all dressed for jogging, Brad in a well-ventilated crop top with mesh sides, Farlee in a smock-style tank top that showed off the rainforest tattoos on her back, including a neon-purple poison dart frog and a scarlet macaw. Renoir was the only one in a complete shirt, a simple navy blue moisture-wicking one.

“I guess jogging’s a full-entourage activity,” Stacey said, looking through the window along with me.

“Now I feel almost rude for not joining,” I told her, then closed my eyes and returned to bed. “Well, have fun. Toodles.”

Stacey sighed and went to join them, leaving me to unwind and relax alone at the cottage, as long as the local ghosts left me alone during the daylight hours. I’d downloaded some Polish hymns in case one or more chambermaid ghosts decided to bother me.

I tried to imagine what it must have been like for them, leaving their farms and families in search of better pay, ending up serving at this huge, strange, isolated estate, some for the remainder of their lives.

I closed the curtains and lay in the shadowy gloom, exhausted, wondering how Stacey could feel like jogging.

My dreams were uneasy.

Barking, snarling hounds pursued me through the live oak forest on a dark night, followed by hooded figures on horseback.

My legs were tired and throbbing, like I’d been running for hours. I was near collapse.

I reached the spot where, in the real world, the crumbling bluff had undermined the high brick wall, leaving a wide break over a steep fall.

In my dream, the wall was intact, more than twice my height and topped with iron spikes. I had nowhere to run.

I turned, my back against the wall, as three boarhounds stalked toward me, their teeth bared, drooling. They looked ready to tear me apart and eat me.

A horn sounded, and the dogs ceased their advance, though they kept their aggressive stance toward me, daring me to run again.

The horse riders regarded me from their hooded dark robes. I struggled to catch my breath and realized something was partly blocking my mouth and nose. I touched that area and found sharp teeth that weren’t mine, sculpted out of some hard, smooth material, maybe clay. I wore a mask, one with a pointy nose and large triangular ears.

I tried to remove it, but I couldn’t. It was glued to my face somehow.

A rider dropped from his horse and approached me. He wore a dark hooded robe or cloak, like all of them, hiding their identities.

His face wasn’t withered, colorless, or pale, though. It was ruddy, like he’d been eating well and drinking copiously, and the ends of long muttonchop sideburns were visible on the lower half of his face.

He smiled, his lips wide and beefy, his teeth sharp and crooked.

I stood rooted to the spot as he approached, shaking with fear, unable to move, trapped by conditions beyond my control.

“Pretty,” he said, taking up a length of hair from my shoulder. The hair was long and golden and curly, in a way mine isn’t. “A perfect offering.”

He drew a long, narrow, gold-plated knife. The hilt was braided from platinum, gold, and silver and embedded with precious stones. It looked more like a ceremonial object than a tool or a weapon.

It cut just fine, though, when he rammed the blade through my throat.

He did it with such force that I slammed back against the brick wall. I felt myself struggling for air, drowning in my own blood.

The rider muttered something—a prayer, I thought, or a curse. The other riders joined in. Their chanting voices were the last sounds I heard before I died.

I awoke with a start, with that feeling like I’d just caught myself from falling. I was back in my bed in the chambermaids’ cottage, in the gloom created by drawn curtains that kept out the light.

Despite the hot summer day outside, I was freezing, droplets of sweat all over my body like thousands of cold pinpricks. And the window-unit air conditioning was, sadly, not good enough to make that happen.

She was in the room with me, in her black maid’s dress, her long blonde hair running in wild curls all over her shoulders, her face hidden behind her hideous fox mask.

I was tired. The ghost had been feeding on me, drinking my energy while I slept, a rather malevolent thing for them to do, especially when I was so exhausted already. But in exchange for terrible, energy-draining sleep, I’d gotten a glimpse of her memory, whether she’d intended to share it or not.

I glanced at Stacey’s bed. Empty. She still hadn’t returned from her beach exercise excursion, and our new roommate Darika was in her office at the lodge. That left me alone in the cottage to spend some quality time with its resident ghost, the Foxy Chambermaid.

“They murdered you,” I whispered, looking at the girl’s mask, the black holes of the eyes giving me no read on her emotion. “Heinrich Grolman and his hunting friends. Is that right?”

She made no sound as she turned and walked away.

I tried out some of the names from the tombstones, but I wasn’t sure I could pronounce them correctly. “Walentyna?”

She kept walking, her back to me.

“Nadzieja? Katarzyna?”

Remaining eerily, unnaturally silent, she passed out the door and turned down the hall.

“Wait! I want to help you.” I ran into the hall after her.

She was already gone, though, in that sudden and complete way that ghosts often have, which can make you question whether you’d just been dreaming, or perhaps whether your mind was slowly breaking down, making you see and hear things when you were actually all alone, haunted only by your own thoughts and feelings and memories.

Chapter Twenty-One

Stacey’s LookyLoon app wailed out its notification, loudly and repeatedly. I’d managed to drift off to sleep, apparently, and Stacey had returned from her jog at some point.

“Want to do something about that?” I grumbled.

“I don’t want to go fishing, Dad,” Stacey muttered, her eyes shut. “It’s too early.”

I rolled out of bed and picked up her phone, where the red-eyed loon logo took up the whole screen, wailing until I tapped it.

An image of Wyatt appeared, rendered as a watercolor portrait against a background of bright mutant flowers. A comic-book dialogue balloon floated above him: “How’s that ferry ride to the shore? Scenic? Should I try it out?”

I replaced Stacey’s phone on the spare bed where I’d found it. I wasn’t trying to catfish Wyatt by pretending to be Stacey. I’d just wanted the shrieking Look Now notifications to stop.

On my own phone, there was a text from Darika. FERRY ARRIVING 11 A.M. BE AT THE WHARF.

I checked the time: 10:30 a.m. “Stacey, wake up!”

“What?” She opened her eyes. “What’s wrong?”

“We’re going into town to dig through old courthouse paperwork.”

“Ugh. Can't we just get attacked by devil dogs and death riders again?”

“Sorry, you’re not getting off that easy. We’re late already, so get up and move.”

“Okay, Mom.”

We rushed to get ready and reach the dock in the meager allotted time. It turned out not to be necessary, because the ferry hadn’t arrived yet. Stacey and I spent a few minutes looking out over the water. The mainland was too far to see. The cloudy, gray weather obscured the shoreline of Jekyll Island, which was sometimes visible as a distant thin line on the horizon.

The marshy area around the wharf teemed with every kingdom of life, insects feeding fish who fed birds. A group of black skimmers, seabirds with orange and black beaks like long pieces of candy corn, loafed on a sandy patch, watching the thick brown water. Frogs warbled nonstop.

Darika's golf cart crawled down the road to join us. Wyatt rode up front while Darika drove, and his three entourage members were crammed into the rear seat. They parked alongside us.

“Whoa, party at the wharf,” Stacey said. “Are we doing an oyster roast or a shrimp boil?”

“Those both sound very cultural,” Wyatt said. “But we’re going for a ferry ride. Even if you ignored my Look Now about it.”

“What? Did I?” Stacey drew her phone, flustered. “I missed the notification somehow. Which is…not easy to do. Not for someone on your Look Closer list.”

“That’s probably my fault,” I said. “It was squawking earlier so I clicked it. Did you say you’re coming on the ferry, Wyatt?”

“We’re all coming. Farlee wants to local-source some provisions. And the rest of us…you want to tell them, Renoir?”

Renoir nodded. “All right. I was forwarded an email to Wyatt from a potential crackpot security risk—”

“The missing writer!” Wyatt interrupted. “Publius D. Tribune, who wrote that unauthorized biography of the Grolmans we needed.”

“It’s a person claiming to be that writer,” Renoir said. “He saw the LookyLoon airship on the news and started writing Wyatt emails, saying Satilla Island is more dangerous than most people know. That everyone should stay away. This person has emailed every hour since we arrived here.”

“I need to get in touch with him,” I said.

“He wants to meet with me,” Wyatt said. “He wouldn’t even talk on the phone. But he was already on his way here to Brunswick.”

“On his way to stalk you,” Renoir said.

“We’ll have him outnumbered,” Wyatt told him. “He wants to meet in public, anyway.”

“I don’t recommend it,” Renoir said.

“We’ll go in your place,” I said. “Stacey and I meet with witnesses all the time.”

“And then I just sit around doing nothing and miss out on the interesting stuff?” Wyatt looked incredulous.

“You could come to the fish market with me.” Farlee cast a warm smile at the side of his face.

“Yeah, exactly, am I going to hang out at the fish market with my chef?” Wyatt scoffed, never seeing Farlee’s smile or how his words obliterated it. “I already told the Publius guy I’ll be there. I want to see this weird little town, anyway, since I just bought an island close by. There might even be florists or whatever for the wedding.”

“There are,” Darika said. “I’ve already identified the top vendors who might be useful, as well as ones to avoid, to save you and Adrienne time after you reveal the wedding location to her—which you may want to consider doing soon, before she reads about it on the internet.”

“She’s right,” Brad said. “If NutjobStalker2000-at-AOL can find you here, Adrienne absolutely can.”

“Let me worry about Adrienne, guys,” Wyatt said. “It’s under control. Is that our boat?”

It was indeed. The Charleston Crosser made its way toward us, looking more cluttered than ever, though its parking strip was empty of any vehicles or construction equipment.

“That’s it,” Darika confirmed. “Captain Walker is the owner and operator.”

Brad and Farlee stared at the small, no-frills craft with undisguised revulsion on their faces, his arms crossed, her finger repeatedly tapping her lip in a kind of nervous tic as she stared with wide eyes. I hoped they weren’t prone to seasickness.

“Looks awesome!” Wyatt said. “I’ve been so focused on the wedding and the renovation that I haven’t stopped to think how fun it is to have an actual island, especially out here in the middle of nowhere.”

I wasn’t sure I agreed with Wyatt’s assessment of the area—those sea islands that hadn’t been declared protected wildlife sanctuaries had plenty of resorts and exclusive neighborhoods. And Brunswick might not have been New York City, but it was still one of the country’s oldest ports. Still, while we stood there on the edge of an uninhabited island, cut off by clouds and fog, it did feel like the middle of nowhere. The shark-infested waters added to that.

“Captain Walker will drive our van aboard himself.” I took out my keys.

“Please…do not put that beast on the boat with us,” Brad said, looking with some horror at our weathered old van. “Our ride across the water already looks unpleasant enough.”

“It’s not that bad!” Stacey said. “And you get Pringles and RC if you’re nice.”

“Wyatt, it’s not too late to charter a helicopter,” Brad said, plainly not tempted even by those finer grades of potato chip and soda. “I could have one here in less than an hour.”

“Helicopters are for hopping traffic,” Wyatt said. “There’s no traffic here. Where’s your sense of adventure? Don’t you want to see how the simple fisher folk live? Think of the local color.”

“Yes, local color, of course.” Brad shook his head and straightened his tie. He carried multiple overlapping bags again, stocked with Wyatt’s laptop and hand sanitizer and water flask and such. He wore a muted gray-plaid suit, and every red hair on his head was combed precisely into place, like he wanted to be ready for any impromptu executive board meetings that might spontaneously break out, while his billionaire boss wore cargo shorts and a rumpled Donkey Kong t-shirt.

Renoir wore a navy polo shirt and darker-hued khakis, like he wanted to be the most average-looking and least noticeable American on the street. Farlee took the opposite approach, in a screamingly bright sundress short enough to show off the colorful reptilian tattoos coiled around her legs.

Captain Walker’s crew lashed the ferry to the dock.

“If we’re not taking the van, how are we getting around in Brunswick?” I asked. “Are we just hiring a Lyft or something? I’m not sure I’ve updated my credit card information on the app.” I pulled out my phone.

“We are not doing that.” Brad looked like he’d smelled a dead fish. Which he likely had, because there were plenty of fishy odors rising from the marsh. “It wouldn’t be secure enough for Wyatt…among so many other factors. I’ve chartered an executive sprinter.”

“What’s an executive sprinter?” I asked.

“Better than a Lyft,” Brad said. “Though feel free to order your own ride if you prefer.”

“No need, there should be plenty of room if Brad got us a decent one.” Wyatt started toward the ferry, and everyone else followed, like he was a powerful magnet and the rest of us were just iron filings trailing after.

“I did better than decent.” Brad sounded a little insulted. “There's a company that specializes in secure quality transport, thank goodness, on Saint Simons Island.”

Darika greeted Captain Walker in her usual crisp, cool way and introduced him to Wyatt and his entourage. The ferryman was cordial. In the background, his younger crew members couldn’t stop glancing over at Wyatt, definitely recognizing their famous passenger. If Captain Walker had any idea of Wyatt’s special status in the rest of the world, he gave no sign. All fares were equal to the old ferryman.

“Okay, hold down the fort,” Wyatt said to Darika as he stepped onto the ferry.

“Me? Hold the fort?” Darika looked perplexed. “I haven’t left this island in weeks. And I’m familiar with Brunswick. I was staying in a hotel there originally, before things here went…sour.”

“You mean before your budget blew up like Mount Vesuvius?” Brad imitated an explosion with both hands.

“Why don’t you go grab someone a tissue, Brad?” Darika snapped. “Or go polish a shoe.”

“Aw, are you about to cry, Darika? I know it's all been so overwhelming for you.”

“Our driver will know the way around,” Renoir said to Wyatt. “We’ll be fine without Darika.”

“Yes, thank you for that, Renoir.” Darika watched us climb aboard, leaving her alone on the dock.

She kept watching, seemingly at a loss for words, as the ferry pulled away from the island, leaving her there.

I felt bad for her, but I wasn’t sure whether to say anything, and actually would have preferred fewer people on this trip, ideally just Stacey and me. Wyatt seemed intent on getting involved, though, despite the advice of the people around him, and he wasn’t going anywhere without his bodyguard and assistant. And his chef, obviously, because he could hardly be expected to travel without one.

We gathered along the railing by the shaded passenger area, though we didn’t need the roof shade on this overcast day. The view of the water quieted us for a while. I watched for sharks as we crossed The Hole, the dark underwater pit brimming with the ocean's largest predators.

Chapter Twenty-Two

We passed Jekyll Island again, with its haunted-looking forest of dead and fallen oaks killed by salt, the old sun-bleached trunks like the bones of giants. Colorful pleasure boats and Jet Skis zipped through the waters around the island, riders whooping and cheering as though determined to ignore the vast and spreading specter of death along the shore, like the masked attendees at Prospero’s ball.

Beyond Jekyll, we quickly approached civilization, signified by the lighthouse of Saint Simons Island. Where Cumberland, Satilla, and to a large extent even Jekyll were now dominated by nature preserves, Saint Simons was enthusiastically and unapologetically commercial, brimming with tourist shops and rental cottages right up to the edge of the water.

“I guess we’re out of the middle of nowhere,” I said to Wyatt.

“That didn't take long,” he replied, grinning.

We docked at a secure terminal that was out of the public eye, though still not in the middle of nowhere.

Stacey and I were the last to leave the ferry. We glanced over at Captain Walker in his wheelhouse before we did. He didn’t come out, just raised his Hawks cap briefly and looked away.

Once off the boat, Brad strode confidently toward one of the few vehicles in the parking lot, a dust-gray cargo-sized van. Its windows looked cloudy and dull, giving no hint of what lay inside. Faded wheelchair symbols were stenciled on the back and doors; overall it looked like some kind of medical or charity transport for the elderly or disabled.

I cast a puzzled look in Stacey’s direction. This wasn't the kind of vehicle I’d expected.

As the six of us approached, the driver hopped out to meet us. She was smiling, heavyset and in her fifties, wearing a black suit with a starched white shirt. “You must be Brad. The office forwarded your picture.”

“I am he,” Brad said. “And you must be Lanita, our driver. I am so very, very pleased to meet you.”

“Thank you, sir. And while I will take you to any destination in the Golden Islands area, I can also serve as your local guide and mobile concierge. I am here to maximize your comfort and enjoyment in every possible way.” She pressed a button on her key fob.

A side panel of the van silently slid aside. A step folded down, inviting us in.

Brad leaned forward with a slight frown and a critical eye.

I wasn’t sure how critical he could be, because the interior space looked like the first-class cabin of an airplane, with four large leather chairs with armrests, plus a leather sofa built into the back. Thick, dark privacy curtains blocked all the windows, including the rear windshield; the driver must have had a rear-video feed to watch instead. The driver and front passenger seat were partially blocked from view by a large television screen.

The floors and paneling looked like hardwood, and a glass-fronted minibar glowed blue along the side opposite the open door. So that was an executive sprinter, I learned—limousine-quality accommodations hidden inside a large, plain-looking van. More spacious than a limo, too.

A bright blue swath of sky glowed down from the roof, which was odd because the day was overcast and threatening rain, like a teenage sky goddess slowly realizing she’d been stood up on prom night and preparing to unleash torrents.

“Video ceiling! I love these.” Wyatt bounded up into the van and found the controls for the ceiling screen and the interior lighting, which shifted from its original soft white to a bright red, then a deep blue, then a funky green, then a disturbing Pepto pink. The ceiling screen shifted to a thunderstorm, then stars and planets as if flying through outer space.

“This looks great,” Brad told Lanita, all hint of critical inspection gone, either satisfied with the interior or reflecting Wyatt’s positive response. “And I can’t say enough how glad I am that you’re here, and that your company is here and exists. Please continue to be here and exist for as long as I must work in the area.”

“I’m glad you’re happy, Mr. Brad,” Lanita said.

“I call the couch.” Farlee stepped up inside, but Brad shook his head.

“Not you, Farlee,” Brad told her. “You’re not riding with us.”

“What?” She looked offended. “I have at least three stops to make, depending on the selection at Jackie’s Seafood Market. There’s a local produce source on Saint Simons I want to consider—”

“Exactly,” Brad said. “And that’s why you have your own vehicle.”

“My own?” Farlee stepped out, looking excited.

“When I told them you’d be shopping for raw fish, they said they had just the thing.” Brad pointed to a rattling brown clunker as it pulled up behind the luxury-filled van. “There’s even a cooler for you in back. They were happy to tack it onto our not inconsiderable bill.”

Farlee watched as her own driver stepped out. He looked like Kid Rock in granny glasses, with a long mop of graying hair and a significant amount of facial stubble missed by his last attempt at shaving. “Hey, is one of you, uh…” He rummaged through the pockets of his suit, which was similar to the other driver’s but ill-fitting, too tight in the stomach and baggy in the pants, and finally located an index card. “Farrell? Farma?”

“Enjoy your shopping,” Brad told Farlee. “This way you can take all the time you need.”

Farlee’s face went crimson, and it looked like a storm was brewing just behind it. “Thanks so much, Brad.” She stalked off to the junky, wheezing car.

“You’re a beautiful and kind old soul, Farlee,” Brad called as the slobby driver dropped his keys and recovered them on his way to opening the back door for her.

“Do you mind if I ride up front?” Renoir asked our driver, Lanita. “I like to keep an eye out.”

Her eyes swept Renoir up and down—tall, dark, handsome, his muscles obvious through his polo shirt. “You can ride with me all you like, sir.” She opened the passenger-side front door for him. “My magic carpet awaits.”

Brad glanced at us as he stepped inside. Wyatt had taken a front-row passenger chair and swiveled it backward so he could more easily monkey with the touchscreen controls for the cabin. Brad took the chair beside Wyatt and swiveled it backward, too.

Stacey and I followed, taking the opposite chairs. The four of us could have been meeting for lunch, especially if we pulled out the foldaway tables on the walls. The chairs were unbelievably soft; I felt my spine settle gently into a padded, supported spot. Controls along the arm invited me to lay the seat flat like a bed and look up at the planets and comets, or perhaps enjoy a nice automated massage, but I resisted those invitations.

“This is pretty sweet.” Stacey reclined a little and made the headset tilt forward.

“Where are we meeting Mr. P. D. Tribune, if that is his real name, which it obviously isn’t?” I asked. The side door closed quietly. When the van started to move, the ride was a smooth, pleasant glide.

“Hanover Square. He wanted to meet in public.” Brad unfolded the table in front of Wyatt and poured him a cup of water, using a collapsible cup and steel thermos from one of the bags he carried.

“That’s a park downtown,” Lanita said. There was currently no partition to the driver’s area, though one could be lowered. “I can have you there in fifteen minutes.”

“Let’s do it!” Wyatt said. He gestured at Brad, who slipped virtual reality goggles over Wyatt's head, then strapped wired gloves onto Wyatt's hands. “Let me know when we’re there.”

I could barely tell the van was moving. It was so well insulated against the outside environment that we could have been traveling anywhere in the world, focused inward on our screens and luxuriously comfortable chairs.

“I’ll have to meet this person first,” Renoir said, looking back at us from the driver area. “Make sure he’s not armed.”

“We can handle that if you want to stick with Wyatt,” I said. “And three would be kind of a crowd. We don’t want to scare off a witness who’s already being cagey.”

“I need to be there,” Renoir insisted. “One of you can come with me.”

“Okay. You okay with waiting here, Stacey?”

“Uh, in the VIP van? I’m good, yeah.” Stacey turned her chair back and forth, testing it out. “But hey, Lanita, can I ask? Why the wheelchair logos on the outside? This doesn’t look equipped for them.”

“It makes people look away faster,” Lanita said. “Some people want to ride in a showy stretch limousine or Humvee, and we offer those. But others prefer to travel anonymously, without turning heads. Sometimes you just want peace and quiet. Everything about the outside of the van is meant to make people look away. Pumpkin on the outside, coach on the inside.”

“An S.E.P. field,” Wyatt said, though still absorbed in the world of his virtual goggles, his fingers tapping in the air as if playing an invisible piano.

“A what?” Stacey asked.

“A Somebody Else’s Problem field,” Wyatt replied. “From The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series? It’s a technology that renders you nearly invisible by making you look like somebody else’s problem, one other people try not to notice so they don’t have to get involved. So you're not truly invisible, but instead people avoid looking at you and then forget about you quickly.”

“Sheesh, that’s bleak,” Stacey said.

I raised the window shade next to my seat. The glass of the side windows had looked cloudy and dark from the outside, but that was something of a trick. From the inside, the view was crystal clear.

Colorful beach-town bungalows rolled past, then quickly gave way to an old-timey brick downtown with Victorian houses and buildings. One impressive brick and stone building bristled with spires and pediments and a soaring clock tower. Gargoyle faces bared their teeth from each of its corners, warding off evil spirits. Maybe the old Grolman place needed a few of those.

“What’s the gargoyle building?” I asked the driver.

“Old City Hall. It’s mostly used for weddings now.”

“Oh, yeah, it’s pretty,” Stacey said, leaning over me to look out. “Hey, maybe y'all should just get married there, Wyatt.”

“I hardly think it would be suitable—” Brad began, though he hadn’t looked at the building at all.

“Do you think so?” Wyatt raised the blind beside him. “Hey, that’s cool. Like an Italian palazzo spliced with a nineteenth-century bank.”

“I could make inquiries,” Brad said.

“Forget it. Satilla Island will happen. Adrienne will be floored.” Wyatt nodded as if to convince himself of this. Trying to program his own reality, like Darika had said.

I had my doubts about whether Wyatt’s fiancée would really be happy about the wedding location at all, especially given how little time they had to finish and prepare the massive old house. Wyatt seemed ready and willing to throw heaps of money at that problem, but his ability to do that was stuck on hold until we removed the ghosts.

I could see why he was here, giving it his close personal attention, monitoring us himself.

We arrived at Hanover Square in no time. It was a sizable lawn of grass paved with straight and narrow brick paths, a park that encouraged no funny business. A canopy of towering trees kept the paths and benches shaded and cooled, inviting visitors to enjoy a break from the hot, sticky Georgia summer. The park was surrounded by residential lanes with modest brick houses and a few tall, colorful ones with gingerbread trim on their porches and balconies.

Lanita parked in a quiet, out-of-the-way alley across from the park.

“Here we are,” she said. “First stop, the park. Second stop, just let me know.” She looked at Renoir as she said this.

“We’ll need to visit the courthouse and maybe the library, wherever the town’s oldest records are stored,” I said.

“Perhaps you should have your own fish car like Farlee,” Brad said.

“Our company only has the one,” Lanita told him. “For special occasions. Practical jokes, usually.”

“Aw, we’ll settle for an executive sprinter if we have to,” Stacey said.

“I guess we’re up.” I glanced at Renoir and moved toward the side door. It opened and rolled aside for me before I could find the handle.

As we stepped out, Renoir drew on a black baseball cap featuring the LookyLoon logo, the bird with its big red eye and L-shaped pupil.

“This is how the contact will recognize us,” Renoir said. “I think it’ll look better on you than me.”

“But you’re taller,” I said. “Like a billboard. He’ll be more likely to see you.”

Renoir gave me a half-smile and reluctantly put it on. “You got me there.”

“Why don’t you both wear one?” Brad suggested. “We have plenty.”

“It would be weird if we both did,” I said, then rolled the door shut before he could make any more suggestions.

Renoir and I started across the street toward the park.

Chapter Twenty-Three

It was sparsely populated in the middle of the weekday. The brick paths converged from every side of the grassy square onto a three-tiered fountain at the center. A few benches along the heavily shaded paths were occupied, but most were not.

“Do we just wait here?” I asked as we approached the fountain.

“And stay on guard. This guy could be an all-out loon,” Renoir reminded me.

“Is that the best word choice when you work for the LookyLoon guy?”

“Probably not.”

We ambled around the fountain, orbiting it slowly like courting couples might have done a century earlier, keeping an eye out for any approaching strangers. Or gossipy matrons, it felt like.

“Six o’ clock,” Renoir finally said, and I looked back.

The guy approaching us wore a ratty tan bucket hat decorated with lures and buttons, as well as a khaki fishing vest with zippered pockets that could have held an alarming number of small knives or other weapons. He also carried an old leather satchel that could have held a gun.

“Let’s see if he follows.” Renoir verged off onto the next path, and I stuck close by him.

“’Scuse me,” the guy said, trying to hide it as a loud cough, like he was a spy for a really low-budget country.

We stopped and looked back at him. The man had long, unkempt gray hair, and he drew out a pack of Camels as he approached us. He lit one as he studied Renoir’s cap like he was looking for a secret code.

“Are you Publius D. Tribune?” I asked, feeling ridiculous as I heard the words come out of my mouth.

“I may have gone by that appellation a time or two, long ago,” he said.

“I’m Ellie, and this is Renoir. Is there another name we can call you?”

“You work for the LookyLoon guy?”

“We do,” I said.

“All right. I guess you can call me Chalmer. Tell me, does ol’ Fancypants Wyatt have any idea what he’s gotten into over on Satilla Island? Any idea at all?”

“Like what, specifically?” I asked.

“Y’all mean to say you haven’t found anything strange? Nothing to indicate all that used to go on?” Chalmer asked.

“What used to go on?” I asked.

Chalmer looked from side to side, taking in the whole park, like he expected an elaborate counterintelligence operation against his low-budget country. “Not here,” he said. “We got to speak somewhere private.”

“That’s fine,” I told him. “Have you ever been inside an executive sprinter?”

“Wait.” Renoir held out a hand. “I’ll have to check the bag first.”

Chalmer clutched his old satchel closer, as if it were full of treasure. “Why?”

“Security,” Renoir said. “Can’t let you near the boss otherwise.”

“He’s really here?” Chalmer asked.

“You’ll never know until I check that bag. And the vest.”

Chalmer frowned and took a couple cigarette drags. Finally, he unzipped the bag partway and held it out.

Renoir rifled through and nodded. “Just papers.”

“That’s what you think!” Chalmer drew back and zipped it up again. “What’s in here would shock the world.”

“I can’t wait to see it, then,” I said.

We escorted him away from the park and into the alley where the van waited. Renoir stopped him and frisked him carefully, with a bit of a distasteful grimace. It had clearly been some time since Chalmer had taken a shower or even washed his hair.

Finally, we approached the van, and Renoir nodded to Lanita in the driver’s seat. The side door rolled open quietly.

“What in the sammy heck is going on here? I’m not getting in no van…” Chalmer’s protests died off quickly, though, as he saw the van’s unexpectedly luxurious interior. Wyatt removed his VR goggles, revealing his famous face as he took a look at Chalmer.

“Ooh, is this the guy?” Stacey asked. “Did he bring a copy of that unauthorized Grolman biography?”

“I don’t have a copy anymore,” Chalmer grumbled.

“Come tell us about it, then,” Stacey said. “The couch back there looks comfy. I’d take that if I were you. Want a drink? Or…” She looked at the glass minibar cabinet. “Cashews? Pralines?”

“A little whiskey would do me fine.”

“I guess that’s okay…” Stacey looked to Brad for guidance.

“Just help yourself.” Brad smiled with obvious effort, not responding well to Chalmer’s appearance, or maybe to his smell, which was getting more noticeable in the enclosed environment.

Chalmer took a small bottle of scotch and carried it to the back seat, not bothering with the cups offered by the minibar. He popped it open, took a drink, and sighed. Then drank again. And sighed again.

“What have you got for us?” Renoir stood in the middle of the parked van, bowing his head to keep it below the ceiling, because he was not a short man. He stood between Chalmer and Wyatt without blocking Wyatt’s line of sight.

“What do you know about the Grolman family?” Chalmer asked.

“Just what’s publicly known,” I said. “Heinrich—Hank—Grolman made his fortune out west before buying Satilla Island and building his estate there. He was obviously a big game hunter and traveled the world doing that.”

“Never met a wild animal he didn’t like to shoot,” Stacey said.

“And what if I told you…” Chalmer looked among us carefully. “Can everyone here be trusted?”

“Of course!” Brad said. “We’re a big gaggle of good friends. Now spill it. Please.”

Chalmer looked at Wyatt, making sure the young billionaire was listening, then sighed.

“The island was a hunting preserve for Grolman and his rich friends,” Chalmer began. “You know that? He bred big, mean hunting dogs and stocked the place with fancy foreign animals, all for the pleasure of hunting ’em down. And I got nothing against plain old hunting. Sometimes it’s the only way a man can eat.

“But they wasn’t hunting to survive on Satilla. They was hunting for the thrill of it, and to pile up the trophies. The problem with the real rich and powerful folks is they get bored with everyday pleasures. They start wanting fancy, special, elite type pleasures.” Chalmer raised his bushy gray eyebrows a couple of times, as if we were all supposed to get what this meant.

“Such as what?” I finally asked, since apparently he wasn’t going to continue if we didn’t demand it all with bated breath.

“Well, let me start over,” he said. “My great-grandpa came to America from a tiny little fishing village in Poland called Kuźnica. He was searching for his sister, Marzena, who’d gone off to America five years earlier. She’d been promised a good-paying housekeeping job for some rich American. Nobody had heard from her since, not a single letter sent back home. Turned out she’d worked as a maid in the big lodge there on Satilla, but she was gone by the time he tracked her there.”

“Aw, she died?” Stacey asked.

“She got locked up in Lassiter State Asylum over in Milledgeville.”

Stacey and I both drew back. It was the same old psychiatric hospital Stacey and I had entered on our first case together, just after Calvin hired her as my assistant. It was a harrowing place, a hive of unhappy ghosts, wisely left abandoned in the countryside, surrendered to the dead.

It stirred up frightful memories, but that experience had given me some real respect for Stacey, who’d only just started working with me then. I’d expected her to quit when she saw the real horrors of the job, like any sane person, but lucky for me, she hadn’t.

“We’re familiar with that place,” I said.

“By the time he tracked her there, she’d already died, after spending the last three years of her life as a patient,” he told us.

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” Stacey said. So was I. Lassiter had never been a happy or pleasant environment for its patients, even at the best of times.

“She was buried there on the grounds, with the other patients who died over the years, with nobody claiming their bodies. They wouldn’t tell him how she died or even why she was there. She spent the last three years of her life there, 1902 to 1905, and nobody would tell him why. He couldn’t get any answers.

“So he went back a few months later with a fake name and a beard and got a custodian job. That’s how he got Marzena’s file. Searched the whole place until he did.”

“What did it say?”

“Marzena had told the doctor about what really went on up there. Why they put the walls around the island. And what they really liked to hunt. It’s something they brought with them from the Old World, you see. Hunting peasants for sport.”

“But the Grolmans weren’t aristocrats in the Old World,” I said. “They were peasants.”

“And what did they become here in America?” he asked. “They wanted to be everything they weren’t back home. Only bigger. That’s what Marzena tried to explain to her doctor. The hunting club for American elites. They brought in poor people from Germany and Poland, people nobody in America would miss, and they chased ’em around the hunting grounds, all over the island, tormenting them with those dogs before they killed ’em.”

“Marzena saw all of this?” I looked at his leather satchel, eager to peruse the paperwork inside.

“The rich and powerful, hunting the poor for sport,” he repeated. “And Marzena thought there was more to it. Devil worship, maybe. Human sacrifice. She saw too much. That’s why they selected her. Made her a fox.”

I couldn’t help sitting up straighter in my chair when he said that. The chair was very soft and I’d sunken into it a little too much, anyway.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Oh, they had a code. Hunting a ‘fox’ meant a woman. If it was a man, they’d say they were hunting ‘boar.’”

“Did she mention anything about masks?” I knew that was a pretty leading question, but I couldn’t help it.

His bushy eyebrows went up. “How do you know?”

“We…found some old masks at the lodge,” I said. “A fox and a boar.”

“They’d glue it onto the victim’s face before setting ’em loose,” he said. “Maybe it felt less like murdering a person. Eased their conscience somehow. Or maybe they were just sick, evil people who thought it was funny.”

“So how did Marzena escape the island?” Stacey asked.

“She didn’t truly escape, because it still came after her and got her, in the end,” he said. “But she swam to the mainland. And there’s sharks in that water, did you know that? Biggest ones in the ocean. But she made it, at least far enough for a fishing crew to pick her up. She didn’t speak a lick of English and only some German. Nobody involved knew Polish. They had to find someone who knew some German to take her statement.”

“So…is the file in German?” I asked.

“Her statement was, yeah. Problem was, the hospital was controlled by the Grolmans and their hunting-lodge buddies. Grolman had given the place a lot of cash. Edward Northbrook, another lodge member, was on the hospital board. And Dr. Timothy Haverford, he was the one who got involved and brought in the specialist from New York, who dabbled in a little thing called the Burckhardt method.”

“Which is what?” I asked.

“Do we really want to know?” Stacey cringed in anticipation.

“Burckhardt was a Swiss psychiatrist who experimented with trepanning. Cutting open the skull to access the brain. Think early lobotomy, but with cruder tools.”

“That’s the kind of thing I was afraid you’d say,” Stacey said.

“They did it to silence her, don’t you see?” Chalmer looked furious, his mood swinging to full boil. Renoir sidled closer to him, watching. “She’d seen the truth. So they called her crazy, and then they cut her up so she couldn’t think, and they locked her up. That’s what happens when you see it all, when you see what’s really going on in this world, and you try to spread the word, you try to tell everyone—they come after you, they get you fired, they drive away anybody close to you, they even get your wife to leave you. They tell everyone you’re crazy. They’ve done it all to me.”

“Do you have Marzena’s file there?” I asked.

“I had the file, and my great-grandfather’s journal. When he realized what he’d stumbled upon, well, he just hid it all away. What could he do against people like that? They’d kill him. They’d never leave him alone. I found it all after my grandfather passed back in ’75, in a box in his attic. He’d been too scared to do anything about it, too, maybe. I can’t blame him if he was. But I decided enough time had passed, I was going to do something about it.”

“Is that when you wrote the book?” Stacey asked.

“Exactly that, young lady. I wrote the book, based on Gramper’s journal, but it was hard to find a publisher. Only one would take it on. The Free Radical Press. They also did a vegetarian cookbook and some kind of meditation thing. But they were planning more serious stuff, political stuff. The owner had a vision of a company that would speak truth to power, but he also had a thing for substance abuse, and that’s how he ended up selling the whole company to some guys from New York for twenty thousand bucks, to people who said they’d keep it running but instead shut it down, fired everybody, no warning. So my book never came out, not one copy.”

“That must have been tough,” Stacey said.

“Worse part is, they had everything. The old hospital file, Gramper’s journal, everything. Even had some photographs of the lodge members together in the old days, in Grolman’s dining hall under the big bison head. In one they posed by a statue of a nekkid lady. The publisher said they needed it all to take good pictures and copy all the evidence for the book. They were supposed to give it all back to me, but then they got bought out.” He shook his head.

“You weren’t able to get any of it back?” I glanced at his satchel again, with more concern than anticipation now.

“I never could track down just who had bought the publisher and shut it down. I went to their old offices, but they were empty, company name gone from the building directory, everything vanished like smoke. I figure they bought it to bury it. Gramper had a list of people he thought took part in the secret activities of the lodge. There were some heavy, powerful names. Like the ones I mentioned. The Northbrooks made their fortune mining copper in Michigan. The Haverfords owned a book publishing company and newspapers all over the country.”

At this point I’d circled “Haverford” three times in my pocket notebook. Wendy Haverford had been the history professor who’d briefed us on the history of Satilla Island.

“If the publishing company kept everything, what do you have left?” I asked.

“Well…not a lot.” He finally opened the satchel and brought out his papers. “I photocopied some things, and I meant to do more, but I had to pay for it by the page at the library, and it wasn’t cheap back in the seventies…and I wasn’t so familiar with the machine, either…”

My heart sank as I looked at his paltry offering of supporting evidence. The copies had been blurry and slanted in the first place, now faded on paper gone yellow over the decades.

“There’s Marzena’s hospital file,” he told me. “What I have of it. You have to understand, it was already old when I found it, it’s from 1902, and I copied it on a 1970s machine.”

“Yeah, I see the problem.” The file wasn’t in German, thankfully; Marzena Ostrowski’s choppily translated account had been written in English. Unfortunately, it had also been written in compact doctor’s-handwriting cursive, rendered blotchy and blurry by the aging and the low-quality copies. The pages tended to cut off with missing text, too, and some were sideways, missing both upper and lower text. “Wow. There’s not much here, is there?”

“That’s just how they planned it,” Chalmer said. “They’ve been after me all my life. I can’t prove it, but I know it. I don’t carry a phone, because they listen. They got me fired from the gas station by messing with my card and making me look late. They got the bank to scramble my mortgage and foreclose on my house. And I’m just about certain they paid Garth Cayhill to sleep with my wife, because he could have had any girl at that bar. But that's what they do. They sweep away all the evidence and make you look crazy.”

“Let me see.” Wyatt held out a hand. I passed him the copies. He scanned through them quickly, then shook his head and passed them back. “Garbage.”

“Garbage,” Chalmer said, shaking his head. “Last little drab of my family’s legacy, and he calls it garbage. Well, thank you very much, sir. All I needed was to be kicked in the face by some snooty rich folks from California.”

“I’m from Ohio originally,” Wyatt said. “Chillicothe. I like California better.”

“What’s so great about it?”

“It doesn’t smell like a paper mill, and my brothers don’t live there.”

The old man in the ratty fishing hat chuckled. “You ought to learn to cherish your family, son. Family’s all a man’s got. If he’s got one.”

“My family, like your evidence, is trash,” Wyatt said. “And they like it that way. They work at it.”

“Where did Grolman bury his victims?” I asked Chalmer, before our client could run him off. Wyatt was not taking the accusations against his fiancée's family well.

“Right there on Satilla Island, I think,” Chalmer said. “There’s a cemetery there, though it might be too overgrown to see now.”

“What more do you know about the occult and ritual aspect of the lodge?”

He shook his head. “Only what my great-grandfather’s sister told the doctor. They forgot to destroy that part of her file before deep-sixing it in the hospital archives. One of their only loose ends. And now so much time has passed…well, I guess they’ll just get away with it. Unless somebody does something about it. Maybe somebody with real power.” He looked at Wyatt. “Somebody who’s now spending time on Satilla Island. And what’s your big plan, Mr. Tech Giant who spies on everyone? Are you going to tell the world about the Grolmans’ crimes? Or are you in on it? Are you here to restart the lodge?”

Wyatt's eyes swept up and down the man like he was a long column of figures to be added up.

“I’m not here for that, no,” Wyatt finally said. “I just wanted a nice beach house away from everyone.”

The old man gave Wyatt a similar appraising look, then nodded. “I could see that, yeah. Well, you’ve stepped into a real old hornet’s nest here. All I ask is you keep an eye out, as you go about making yourself an extra vacation home, and see if you run across any evidence at all. Anything that can prove what the Grolmans did to my family. To Marzena, most of all. And the other victims. You can keep my family’s garbage.” He nodded at the mostly illegible sheets in my hand. “They’ve got better copiers these days. Faster and cheaper, too. I’ve got what I remember jotted down in there, for what it’s worth, though you can call that garbage, too. Now let me out of this can. I’ve got to work a shift tonight, if they haven’t planted a bottle to get me fired yet, like before.”

“We really appreciate this,” I said. “Can I contact you with follow-up questions?”

“No, ma’am. They can listen in on all your calls and read all your messages. Satellites and microchips. Email me at the same place if you want to meet again. Maybe I’ll come. I recommend a proxy server, but I’m sure this guy knows all about that.” He pointed at Wyatt. He abandoned his empty whiskey and staggered to the side door, pawing around in search of a way to open it. “I need to get out of town. They can’t know I was here.”

“Who?” I asked.

“None of ’em.” He slapped the door in frustration. “Let me out! Or was this a trap all along?” He grabbed the largest fishhook on his hat and charged at Wyatt. “I knew it! You’re one of ’em! You’re bringing it all back, aren’t you?”

Renoir easily blocked the drunken old man’s attack, disarmed him, and twisted his arm behind his back. “Would you mind opening the door, Lanita?” he asked, his tone gentle and polite.

“Yes, sir, honey.” Lanita opened the door, and Renoir tossed Chalmer to the road outside.

Chalmer sprang to his feet, drew a second hook from his hat, and charged again, a hook in each hand. Renoir stood with his hands open, ready to grapple the man again.

The van’s side door closed in time to cut off Chalmer’s second attack, but he continued banging on the van and shouting until we drove away.

Chapter Twenty-Four

The local public health department had death certificates going back to 1911, but Heinrich Grolman had died in 1901, and Evangeline Ryland in 1899. So we headed for the city’s public library, which had a promising-sounding heritage room with genealogy resources and such.

Lanita parked us in the back corner of a parking lot behind the library, near another deserted alley. She seemed to know a hidden nook in every part of town for clients who wanted to stay out of sight.

The van's side door opened, and Stacey and I stepped out.

“Does nobody want to come hang at the library with us?” Stacey asked.

“Sorry, so busy. Text us when you’re done.” Brad got absorbed in his phone, which squawked out LookyLoon notifications. Wyatt didn’t respond at all, lost in the world of his VR goggles.

“We should keep moving instead of sitting still,” Renoir told Lanita. “Is there a scenic tour of the town available?”

“We can tour the whole coast if you like. Have a nice time at the library, ladies.” The side door rolled shut, and the big, dingy-looking van rolled away.

The library was a sunny, modern building, framed with just enough bricks to hold up its glass walls. A reference librarian guided us to their archive of records and paperwork from the city’s earlier days.

We couldn’t find any reference to the Polish girls or the other names from Satilla Island cemetery, though it didn’t help that we lacked burial dates for them.

Ultimately, the main item we were able to see before the library closed for the day was yellowed, faded, crumbling in a file folder in the back of a cabinet along with assorted other documents of its kind. The reference librarian let us see it, but didn’t let us touch it.

It was Heinrich Grolman’s death certificate from 1901.

“Well, that confirms he died in a hunting accident,” Stacey said. “Gored by a wild boar.”

“Look at the doctor who signed it.”

“Whoa.” Stacey took a snapshot. The librarian reminded us that it was time for the library to close, and we hurried outside.

“That doctor had to be a member of the secret human-hunting club, huh?” Stacey whispered. “Like Chalmer was talking about.”

“Some of what Chalmer described does seem to fit with the dreams the chambermaid ghost gave me, but maybe we should still take his words with at least a small grain of salt.”

“Speaking of salt, I’m hungry. And I wouldn't mind something salty.” Stacey drew out her phone. “Let’s see what’s nearby and grab a bite.”

“Maybe.” I walked around the side of the library. The van wasn’t there; we would have to call and let them know we were done.

“There’s a lot of little places…one a couple blocks from here is called Indigo Coastal Shanty. Let’s go there!”

“What kind of place is it?”

“Who cares? With a name that convoluted, it has to be good.” Stacey took my arm, semi-aggressively leading me in the direction of the mystery restaurant.

“If it’s bad, you’re buying,” I said.

“And if it’s good?”

“Just kidding. We’re obviously billing Wyatt for this either way.”

The Indigo place was easy to find. It was mostly outdoors, with cheerful turquoise tables shaded by umbrellas and trees, surrounded by a fence painted every color of the rainbow.

If we’d actually been betting, Stacey would have won. I had a rich, tasty tomato stew full of shrimp and fresh fish. I’d been tempted by the spicy Indian-seasoned Raj burger, but it was going to be a long, busy night, and I couldn’t just sit around with a heavy meal in my stomach, parked on the couch with my belt unbuckled like some sitcom dad. Stacey had chicken and sweet potatoes in coconut curry over jasmine rice. The menu was wild enough to suit the restaurant’s name, offering local seafood prepared with spices and recipes from the Caribbean and India.

“This was a great idea,” I said. “It’s nice to have a break from eating in the cottage.”

“Should we invite everyone else to join us?” Stacey asked, which was a very Stacey type of idea. In my mind, we were finally enjoying a break from everyone else.

“I don’t want to step on Wyatt’s chef’s toes,” I said.

“She’ll be fine. Her toe rings will protect her,” Stacey said, and I tried not to laugh with a mouthful of soup. “Okay, let’s get Darika something since she plainly wanted to go on this trip. What do you think she’d like? This curry? Or the Bombay chicken salad? Should I get her one of the Indian dishes, or is that presumptive? Cripes.”

“Text her the menu and ask if she wants anything.”

“Yeah, good point. I’ll LookyLoon her about it.” Stacey tapped at her phone. The screeching caw of a loon sounded about thirty seconds later. “She does want the Bombay chicken salad. I almost got that for myself. Want to share a dessert?”

“Are you just trying to put off going back to the island?” I asked.

“Yes. It’s awful there, isn’t it? Especially once you leave, and then have to think about going back. It’s just looming ahead of us like the entrance to a haunted-dungeon ride. Big wooden doors, skull decorations, and recorded screams. It’s not a ride you want to go on, but you already sat down and the lap bar’s locked into place.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s share a dessert. I’ll just run the calories off later when the dead horsemen are trying to kill us.”

“You think they will?” Stacey looked alarmed.

“Let’s not wear any fox masks, just to be safe. Are we doing the chocolate bread pudding or the Georgia peach pound cake?”

“The second one.”

“Because of the convoluted name?”

“Exactly.” Stacey smiled at our approaching waiter.

The dessert was as good as our entrees had been, the pound cake served with ice cream and drizzled with caramel. The indulgence fortified us for the inevitable return to the gloomy island.

The day had remained overcast, and it was starting to drizzle. Stacey and I huddled under an overhang in front of a nearby empty storefront as we waited for the low-key executive sprinter. We climbed inside as the rain picked up.

“Did you bring enough for the whole class?” Brad asked, eyeing the takeout bag in Stacey’s hand.

“Just enough for Darika, sorry. Good thing y’all travel with your own chef.” Stacey dropped into the chair across from him and folded out a table so she could set down the bag. I sat across from Wyatt, still lost in his VR goggles.

“Farlee has her moments,” Brad said as the van started to move. “But how was your leisurely dinner while we took the long way around the city?”

“You’d be jealous if we told you,” Stacey said.

“Did you find anything at the library?” Wyatt asked, raising his goggles to look at us. At Stacey, mainly. Brad raised the partition, cutting off our driver from the conversation.

“Just a little thing called Hank Grolman’s death certificate,” Stacey said. “Signed by that same Dr. Haverford who ordered Marzena’s brain-cutting surgery.”

“Assuming we believe Captain Hook,” Brad said. “Which I don’t, necessarily. He seemed like a big barrel of nuts to me.”

“I can’t argue with that,” I said. “But if you combine his account with the death certificate, there’s some room to doubt Wendy Haverford’s version of things, too. Especially if her ancestors were close with the Grolmans.”

“You think she’s whitewashing the past?” Stacey asked.

“Writing authoritative biographies and history books would be one way to do that,” I said.

“You believe the nut barrel over the professor?” Brad asked me incredulously.

“I’m not sure I believe either of them completely.” I raised the thick window blind and looked at the streamlets of rain coursing down the outside of my window. “They might each have a limited viewpoint or knowledge.”

“But only one of them is a professional historian,” Brad said.

“Yeah, I'm going to need more before I believe such extreme claims about Adrienne and her family,” Wyatt said. “They're not evil people. She's a good person.”

“I’m sure she is,” I said. “We’re looking at things that happened a century before she was born. She can’t be blamed for anything her ancestors might have done.”

“What am I supposed to tell her?” Wyatt closed his computer as the van parked near the dock where the ferry waited. “We think one of her ancestors ran a Most Dangerous Game cult sacrificing humans to an ancient death god here on the island? I’m not sure I’m ready for that conversation.”

“And we can't prove if it’s true,” Brad said.

“I won’t say anything to Adrienne,” Wyatt said. “We’ve got enough problems with the renovations as it is. But we’re going to make it all work. Right?” He looked at Stacey and me.

“We are,” I said, then readied myself to step out into the rain.

We huddled under the ferry’s covered passenger area, avoiding the benches, which were damp from rain-filled gusts of wind.

“Well, I know one thing,” Stacey whispered to me. “Mr. Chonkers is still innocent in all of this.”

The ferry crew in their hooded rain slickers triggered some unnerving flashbacks of the unholy host of hunters prowling the cemetery. The hunters had seemed to be looking for the man in the boar mask, who’d hurried to hide from them. Maybe he was one of the servants imported from Germany, hunted for sport by the wealthy lodge members, now hounded forever in the afterlife by their spectral forms.

Rain and darkness fell on us as we crossed the intracoastal waterway. The sun slipped down deep in the west behind us and only grew more distant as we moved east toward the shadowy bluffs of Satilla Island. Night had already fallen on the ocean.

The lights of the Charleston Crosser revealed the island's marshy shore. The house-like wharf shelter where past generations had stood during inclement weather looked more sagging and deteriorated than ever as the rain pounded its crumbling roof and whimsical turret window.

A pale light glowed inside.

“Uh, who’s that?” Stacey pointed at the strange light. Renoir was already squinting at the window.

I could barely discern the outline of a woman in one of the broken window frames. She was tall and thin, dressed all in white. Her hair and face were as bone-white as her clothes. Her eyes, lips, and cheeks had a bluish hue, like she’d drowned recently. She watched us approach.

“You guys see her, right?” Stacey whispered.

“Of course we see her,” Brad said. “That’s Wyatt’s fiancée, Adrienne Grolman. And that is not her happy face.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

“I guess that’s one more for dinner.” Farlee sighed. She stood at the passenger-area railing, a giant rolling cooler beside her, as the crew tied us up to the dock.

Wyatt stared silently at his fiancée, who was unexpectedly here and waiting for him, having apparently arrived by some other boat. Finally, he whispered, “Dead. I’m so dead.”

“You’ll be fine!” Brad said. “So she found out a little early, and this place still needs a little work. It was meant as a hugely thoughtful gesture, right? It's the thought that counts. She should appreciate that.”

“She doesn’t look like she’s appreciating it very much.” Wyatt paced nervously on the boat deck, waiting for the crew to drop the plank so he could walk it. “Oh, no. I should never have done this. I could have just rented the Met in New York.”

“That does sound cheaper,” Stacey said. “Somehow.”

“Just relax and breathe. Have some of that lithium-infused mineral water.” Brad unzipped a pack and drew out a collapsible cup and a thermos.

“Yeah, good idea. Forget the cup.” Wyatt grabbed the thermos of lithium water and guzzled it.

I could see why he was nervous. Adrienne’s stare was ice-cold as she moved to the doorway of the wharf shelter to watch us disembark from the ferry. A matched black leather luggage set with polished brass latches and locks was stacked around her, including a couple of suitcases, a cosmetics case, and a hatbox. Gary was huffing and puffing as he carried a matching trunk, featuring lots of heavy brass fixtures but apparently no wheels, toward his golf cart, parked next to our blue van.

Darika arrived in her golf cart and jumped out, taking in the scene. “What’s going on?” she asked Gary.

“All I know is I’m the bellboy all of a sudden.” Gary heaved the trunk into the back cargo area of his cart, then stopped to take a breath, wipe his sweaty red face on his sleeve, and adjust his comb-over. Then he grunted and walked back to the dock to collect more luggage.

“Adrienne! You’re here. Wow.” Wyatt broke off from the rest of us to greet her at the doorway of the wharf shelter. When he moved to kiss her, she turned her head and caught it on the side of her chin, looking toward the group of us heading for the parking area on the shore.

Adrienne looked like she’d gone to some trouble to resemble a vampire recently risen from the permafrost, or maybe a marble statue. Her face was a bloodless powder-white, accented only with hints of frosty blue. Though she was in her early twenties, her face had the sculpted and smoothed look of someone who’d already spent a good amount of time on a plastic surgeon’s table. Her outfit looked like something ripped off an experimental fashion runway, the jacket with its superfluous buckles and buttons all the way down the arms to the wrist, her white slacks running the mile or so from her narrow, cinched waist to chunky-heeled white shoes that made her legs look even longer than they already were, which was really just unnecessary.

“This was supposed to be a surprise,” Wyatt said. “When it’s ready, it’ll be great.”

“You want to have our wedding here?” Adrienne asked, her nose nearly wrinkling, though I don’t think it was capable of fully doing so. “Why?”

“For you,” he said. “Your old family place, recovered from ruin, back to life again.”

“This is supposed to be a wildlife preserve,” she said. “No people.”

“It still is! Mostly. We did an ecological impact study. It’s going to be solar and wind. No fossil fuels allowed. Pollinator gardens and local plants only, rainwater cisterns, everything organic.”

“Show me. Show me what you’ve done.” Adrienne’s tone indicated she was seething inside but didn’t care to show it in front of strangers.

Gary eggshell-walked his way back toward the wharf shelter, moving slower with every step, clearly pained with indecision about whether to grab the next suitcase or keep his distance from the boss at this tense moment. He seemed to have settled on splitting the difference by continuing the last chore he’d been assigned, collecting Adrienne’s luggage, but doing it very, very slowly.

Meanwhile, Stacey sidled over to Darika and handed her the take-out bag of chicken salad almost surreptitiously, like it was a drug deal. Darika silently mouthed “thank you” before backing up to her cart and placing it inside, her eyes on Wyatt the whole time.

“Yeah, good idea, I’ll show you around,” Wyatt said to Adrienne. “This place is totally historic. It’ll be great. I promise. Everybody, let’s head to the main lodge—”

“No,” Adrienne said. “Just you and me. And the driver.” She snapped at Gary and pointed at her luggage. “Let’s hope he drives faster than he carries suitcases.”

“I can floor it if you like.” Gary hurried to grab the remaining luggage. “This baby does twenty-five on the paved road, a little less on the beach, even with the new sand tires. The beach is a nice drive at night. Nobody ever wants to see it, though.”

“Perhaps I will,” Adrienne said. “It sounds delightful.”

“Well, yeah. Yes, ma’am.” Gary sounded almost confused by her positive interest. “Right this way.”

Gary opened the rear door of his elongated security cart for her, but Adrienne somewhat pointedly climbed into the front passenger seat to sit next to Gary, leaving Wyatt to sit alone in the back seat. Renoir tried to accompany them, but Adrienne said something and Wyatt waved him off. Gary drove the unhappy young couple away.

“How did it go on the mainland?” Darika asked me.

“Not bad,” I said. “It could have been better—”

“It could be better right now,” Brad interrupted. “If we returned to the guest house instead of standing in the rain like characters from a cliché-riddled love song.”

“I need to go to the guest house and make Wyatt’s dinner,” Farlee said. “And put these fish on fresh ice.”

“And I’m not going to ride in that scary-looking serial-killer van,” Brad declared. “Nor will I ride with the raw fish.”

“It's sealed in bags inside the cooler, Brad,” Farlee said. “You can’t smell them.”

“They’d better be reusable bags, Farlee. The ocean does not need more plastic.”

Eventually, Darika drove away with Brad beside her and Farlee in the rear-facing back seat with Renoir and the cooler.

Stacey and I drove our van back to the guest house. In the end, nobody had wanted to ride in it, saving us a stop.

“It’s like our own anonymous executive sprinter, with the outside designed to keep people away,” Stacey said. “Only we cleverly made the inside of the van unappealing, too. Going the extra mile pays off.”

The chambermaids' cottage was colder than the summer night outside, probably because it was haunted by at least one ghost. Maybe our gear would pick up some Foxy Chambermaid action tonight.

We opened the windows to let the balmy night air inside, chasing away a little of the supernatural chill. I was on edge, expecting to see the girl in the horrifying fox mask every time I turned a corner, opened a door, or glanced in a mirror. She'd fed on my energy before, and might come back for more, like a vampire waking up thirsty at night.

I found Stacey in our room, sitting cross-legged on her bed, wearing headphones and staring open-jawed at something on her tablet.

“What’s up? Are you finally watching Kim’s Convenience? I told you it was hilarious.” I looked over her shoulder. When I saw what she watching, I sank down beside her. “Are you...really doing this?”

“I didn’t mean to!” Stacey looked guilty. “I was just doing a status check, making sure all the gear was up and recording. And then…this.” She pointed at the screen.

On the screen, Wyatt and Adrienne were arguing in the gun room, decorated with a few broken-down rifles and some larger fauna of the American west, like the mountain lion and grizzly bear.

“Let me hear.” I unplugged her headphones so the audio would play over the tablet’s external speaker.

“—and why would you think I’d want our wedding here?” Adrienne demanded. “Are we going with a depressing dead animal theme? Should we rent sad-looking ponies for the kids to ride? Is the Tiger King guy going to officiate?”

“It's for your family,” Wyatt said. “Won’t they be blown away? And then we can enjoy it ourselves, fix it up our way. There’s already a new roof with solar—”

“This is a lot, Wyatt. It's too expensive. That's one reason we ditched the whole place.”

“I’ve got like three billion dollars left, so I think I'll be fine. And that will probably double after we get through these congressional hearings. We are definitely not spying on people through their phones all that much. I mean we are, but everyone knows it. That’s how we serve you relevant ad content, which, you know, makes for a more customized and enjoyable user experience—”

“This isn’t a rehearsal session with your lawyers, Wyatt.”

“Right, sorry.”

“Escaping my family’s shadow is thematic in my life and art, Wyatt,” Adrienne said. “I thought you understood that. This house is nothing but a palace of those very shadows. What are you saying to me with this? That you only see me as everyone else sees me, after all? As just a subordinate piece of my family? A trophy with a famous name? That this—everything between us—was a mirage? Is this all about your ego? Showing off how far you’ve climbed?”

“Ironically, that’s kind of why the lodge was built in the first place,” Stacey muttered.

“Of course not,” Wyatt replied on the screen. “This represents taking command of that past and ruling over it. Changing it. Making something good out of it. Seizing the biggest symbol of your family’s heritage and doing what you want with it. We could cover it in graffiti. We could burn it down.” Wyatt grew excited. “Wouldn’t that be the perfect climax to the wedding? You want a statement of rebellion? Have history’s most extravagant and decadent party here with everyone, I mean everyone—then at the end, demolish the whole place while everyone watches.”

“We’re not destroying it, either, Wyatt.” Adrienne rolled her eyes and popped a couple of pills from a brown medicine bottle.

“It could be an amazing site for a wedding, though,” Wyatt said. “And a new, meaningful experiment in eco-friendly living. Eventually. Once we get the roads and landscaping done.”

“This isn’t some theme park. This is deeply personal to me.” Adrienne frowned as she looked over a display case of hunting knives gone to rust. “But everything’s a joke to you. You come here on your blimp—”

“It’s a hybrid airship. And this inspection was a last-minute choice. I was originally just doing a brainstorming sky cruise over the East Coast—”

“My family history is not a tourist attraction. How is inviting ghost hunters supposed to help with our wedding?”

“I’ve never really believed in ghosts, but there are strange things happening here. That’s why the work crews quit and the renovations are behind schedule. Those paranormal investigators are here so the work crews will eventually come back. To create a placebo effect if nothing else. And they do have some weird images and video from around the island.”

“Like what?”

“Like, some hooded guy on horseback. And it’s not fully there, not like a real person. It’s, well—”

“A ghost? They took a picture of a ghost on a horse, that’s what you’re telling me.”

“Stacey can show it to you.”

“She’s the cute blonde one?” Adrienne asked.

“How did you know?”

“You knew her name off the top of your head. You just met that girl and already remember her name, even though you’re terrible with names.”

“What do you want me to do? Abandon this island? Find a new place to get married?”

“I’ll take care of the wedding from now on,” Adrienne said. “You just sign the checks. My friends were right. I was stupid to let you surprise me like this, no matter how insistent you were.”

“I’m shocked. That’s a stark contrast to the many positive and supportive comments your friends have previously made about me,” Wyatt said.

“Sure, more sarcasm. That’s your answer to everything.”

“Sometimes it’s the only answer,” Wyatt said. “Adrienne, just let me finish what we’re doing here. I can make this place good again.”

“Who says it was ever good?” Adrienne wandered into the dining hall, decorated with crumbling animal heads and bison-horn chandeliers. “The taste level here is just…subterranean.”

“We can’t abandon the island now after everything I’ve sunk into it,” Wyatt said.

“Why not? My family did.”

“It’s not just the wedding anymore,” he said. “These paranormal investigators—”

“Yes, thanks for inviting them without talking to me first. Tell me this house won’t end up on some cheesy reality TV show. Look at all these cameras. How do we know they aren’t watching us now?”

Stacey shared an awkward look with me.

“They signed nondisclosure agreements. They can’t say a thing. Nobody even knows they’re here,” Wyatt said.

“Okay. Well, maybe there’s some hope of containing things. But don’t bring anybody else here. And I want your little hangers-on gone. I don’t want to listen to Brad clapping for everything you say, or see your creepy bodyguard who’s always slithering around, or watch how high your chef’s dress rides up every time she fetches you a kale smoothie.”

“You told me to hire Farlee.”

“Yes, to help you get in shape for the wedding. Not for you to drool over her dragon tattoos.”

“They’re actually tropical climbing salamanders.”

“Really, Wyatt?”

“What are you watching?” Darika stood in the doorway, holding her takeout box of chicken salad.

“We were just doing an equipment check,” I said. “But Wyatt and Adrienne are in the main house, and they started arguing—”

“And you’re listening in on them?” Darika asked, jaw dropping.

“Um, sort of accidentally.” I felt my cheeks burn in shame, or at least embarrassment. “I know it’s inappropriate, but we desperately need to hear the Grolman family’s perspective, and now she’s conveniently shouting hers—”

“Have they said anything about me?” Darika dropped onto the bed on Stacey’s other side, and we scooted over to make room for her. She continued eating while she spied on her boss with us. That Bombay chicken salad smelled spicy and delicious.

“You might be the only person Adrienne hasn’t complained about,” Stacey told Darika.

“But the night is young,” I added.

“I’m not sleeping under the same roof as your entourage,” Adrienne told Wyatt onscreen. It really was like watching a soap opera, one we'd never intended to turn on, but now couldn't look away from. “Not tonight. Send them to the guest cottage.”

“That’s where we’re already staying,” Wyatt replied. “The main house isn’t ready.”

“It has power, doesn’t it? And water from the well?”

“Sure, but there’s more to be done.”

“What about bedrooms?”

“A few guest rooms have been fixed up, but not the master bedroom, and it’s also one of the main hauntspots Stacey recorded—”

Stacey raised her eyebrows at me, looking quite chuffed to hear Wyatt using her word.

“If we’re staying here, then we’re staying in the main lodge, as the masters of the place. Anything else would be inappropriate,” Adrienne said.

“Adrienne, there really are problems here. I don’t know if you’d call it supernatural, or what it is, but you can see the evidence collected by the investigators.”

“Wyatt, maybe you don’t understand. I am here for the sole purpose of closing down this project of yours before it can embarrass me or my family any further.”

“Embarrass you?” Wyatt asked. “I told you, we did an ecological impact study—”

“Do you think I wish to be associated with a lowly crook like Heinrich Grolman? Do you know what kind of person he was? He was a ruthless businessman who only cared about profits. A crude, unrefined monster without a shred of virtue or nobility in his body. You know my art is a path for individuating myself from my family and all they project onto me. Now you want to shove me back into everything I went to California to escape. Was it always about my family, my name, to you? Am I just a prize in a narcissistic game you’re playing in your own mind? Maybe something to show off to your brothers, to show how you've become their superior in every way?”

“Of course not. I thought we were both playing the game together,” he said “Player one and player two, together against the system. Which is everyone else.”

“And I’m always player two in your analogy,” Adrienne said.

“I don’t specify. But I am better at video games.”

“Except Mario Kart.”

“That’s because you’re ruthless.”

“Haven’t you done your research?” Adrienne asked. “You’re marrying into a family of ruthless capitalists. We'll throw bananas all over the path behind us.”

“That's why you always play as Donkey Kong.”

“I'm no Princess Peach. But Heinrich Grolman was a complete Bowser. He didn't have a drop of culture in his blood. Because who needs fine art or fashion or poetry when you can decorate your foyer with a dead giraffe?”

Wyatt laughed, explosively, grabbing his stomach and doubling a little. After a couple of seconds, Adrienne’s cold facade melted, and she broke down into laughter, too, smiling for the first time since we’d arrived, and they both looked like the young adults they were underneath the heavy public identities they carried.

“I hate this place,” she said, shaking her head and smiling.

“It’s terrible, isn’t it?” Wyatt said. “It seemed like a good idea when I was just reading about the island from thousands of miles away, before I got up close and personal with it.”

“It’s sweet, Wyatt. Really. But this will never work. We have to shut it down. Return the island to nature.”

“I still don’t think we should stay here tonight.”

“Are you afraid of ghosts, Wyatt?” She sauntered close and slid her arms around his waist. “Can’t you keep me safe, now that you’re all buffed up from your tae kwon do?”

“Ninjutsu. If only I’d known it growing up with my brothers in Ohio.”

“Whatever it is, it’s working.” She traced a finger over his bicep.

“We’re focusing mostly on tiajutsu right now. Though we’ve also gotten into some swordcraft, and Renoir says next month we might try nunchaku. And personally, I think I’m ready for shuriken, often called throwing stars—”

“Shh.” Adrienne touched a finger to his lips, then kissed him, long and slow.

“Maybe we should stop watching,” Stacey said.

“Shh,” Darika whispered. Then she stood up, taking her empty takeout container with her. “I mean yes, of course we should. We never saw this.”

Stacey minimized that particular window on her screen so we wouldn’t see or hear whatever transpired next between Adrienne and Wyatt. “It sounds like we should start packing, Ellie.”

“I’ve been kinda living out of my suitcase anyway, but yeah, maybe. What do you think, Darika?”

Darika shook her head. “We’ll see what they decide. He is impulsive, but she is like gravity. Everything bends her way eventually. I’ll see you in the morning.” She walked to the door.

“Good night, don’t let the chambermaids bite,” Stacey said, then immediately winced. “Sorry. Probably shouldn’t have said that.”

“It would have been better if you hadn’t.” Darika departed for her own room.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Since we hadn’t technically been fired yet, Stacey and I resumed our work, which meant heading to the lodge for the night to observe. The rain had tamped down to a slow drizzle, but the night sky was cloudy and dark, and no light reached us from the distant heavens.

We parked next to Gary’s security cart under the porte-cochère. Gary himself stood at the front door like a bouncer at a bar, tasked with keeping out undesirables.

“How’s it going, Gary?” I asked as we approached.

“Not bad, could be better. Seems like the big surprise of restoring the old family place didn’t make that girl happy like Wyatt hoped. A real fizzle of a firework, only this had to cost millions of dollars, all down the drain.”

“Yeah, well, elephant carcasses are not popular wedding decorations this season,” Stacey said. “I kind of see where she’s coming from. It was a definite misfire on his part.”

“Anyway, until we hear otherwise, we have to keep working.” I stepped closer to the door, but Gary folded his arms and blocked me.

“Sorry. Nobody in or out right now,” he said, trying to look menacing.

“In or out?” I asked. “So, if Wyatt and Adrienne try to leave, you’ll stop them?”

“Huh? Uh, no, I mean, nobody in. Sorry, nothing I can do about it.”

“I’m sure Wyatt will let us come. I’ll send him a Look Now about it.” Stacey tapped at her phone.

“What? Don’t do that.” Gary was so offended by Stacey's end run around his doorkeeping authority that he reached for her phone. She backed away, glaring at him.

“Keep your hands off, Gary,” I said, stepping up and drawing my tactical flashlight, which is heavy and beveled for breaking glass. Or flesh and bone, if needed.

Gary backpedaled, looking surprised. “I’m just doing my job.”

The LookyLoon notification squawked from Stacey’s phone. “I bet that’s Wyatt, telling us we can go inside.” She checked her phone, then turned it to show Gary. “See? Told ya.”

“Oh, pardon me, madam.” Gary bowed low and opened the door very slowly. “I didn’t realize you were such intimate friends with the master of the house.”

Stacey narrowed her eyes as we stepped past him into the front hall, greeted mutely by the giant deteriorated corpse of the Cape buffalo and the lion with its dusty, half-shed mane.

In the card room, Wyatt was explaining our array of monitors and observation gear to Adrienne, who plainly could not have been less interested.

“Here they are.” Wyatt looked slightly relieved. “They can explain it better. Or just show you the stuff.”

“Just show me the stuff,” Adrienne echoed back, her voice soft, not looking at either of us.

“Okay, sure.” Stacey pulled up the same material we’d showed Wyatt earlier, including the distant singing voices in the dining hall, followed by the dining hall door opening. She ended with the shadowy figure in the cemetery and the glimpse our camera had caught of the dim hooded rider. “That’s our best look at these entities so far.”

“Who else has seen this?” Adrienne asked Wyatt.

“Just me and Darika,” Wyatt said. “And Ellie and Stacey, obviously.”

“Brad and the others?”

“Some of it, yeah. Why?”

“My family will kill me if this goes public,” Adrienne said. “Erase it.”

“Erase the whole video?” Stacey asked.

“Erase everything you have collected here. It can’t end up on TV or online. It’ll be my fault for letting my fiancé bring you here.”

“We keep all client information confidential—” I began.

“It cannot be truly, permanently confidential until it’s erased,” Adrienne said.

I couldn’t actually argue against that, but I was still alarmed by her demand. “Wouldn’t your family, at least, want to know about this?”

“They already know.” She sighed and covered her eyes.

The room was so silent that we could almost hear the fur rotting off the jaguar.

“What do they know?” Wyatt asked her, finally.

“The estate is haunted. We’ve known it for generations. Why do you think we abandoned it?”

“Well…the Great Depression, right? And these days, people don’t really use lard that much anymore…” Wyatt trailed off as she scowled at him.

“My ancestors left Satilla Island because it’s completely scary, if you haven’t noticed,” Adrienne said.

“But you never told anyone?” Wyatt asked.

“People think you’re crazy when you make such claims,” Adrienne said. “When my family gave the island to the state of Georgia, we specifically required that people should never be allowed. Wildlife only. We literally made it illegal for people to visit. What more do you want from us? If I’d known what you were up to, Wyatt, I would have warned you. Now I have to fix this mess. Did you at least have everyone sign nondisclosures?”

“Definitely,” Wyatt said. “But we thought it was mostly short term, until our wedding. Obviously, the wedding location wasn’t going to be secret after that.”

“It’s not short term. It’s permanent.” Adrienne looked us over coolly. Coolly seemed to be her default mode of looking people over. “We do not want this kind of publicity. We put this place behind us nearly a century ago. It was a forgotten ruin when I was born, and it must stay that way.”

“What did your family experience here before closing it down?” I asked, treading out onto very thin and unwelcoming ice, but I had to know.

“Just the sort of things you’ve described,” Adrienne said.

“But where did it all come from? How did it happen?”

She took a deep breath. “First, I am not descended from Hank Grolman, the man who built this place. He’s just a great-great-et cetera uncle of mine. So don’t blame me for this. I’m descended from his brother Garit, one of the brothers he brought in to help run his businesses. But nobody spent the kind of time here on the island that Hank did. They’d come for a few weeks in the winter, instead of a few months. It became…unpleasant. People encountered shadowy figures and strange voices all over the island, but especially in the main lodge. The cost of upkeep was painfully high for a place nobody wanted to visit anymore.

“So we offloaded it onto the state of Georgia and did everything we could to keep people away. The ghosts here are not benign. They are dangerous. That’s why we need to end this restoration project. Otherwise, you’re just endangering people,” Adrienne said.

“But you want to spend the night in the lodge?” I asked her.

“I’d like to spend just one night here, yes. It’s somewhat legendary within my family, as you can no doubt imagine. I was fascinated by it as a child but forbidden to come. Until just now, of course, when I’ve been sent to remove Wyatt.” She gave him a sly look. “You must have been very sneaky with the lawmakers and regulators. Unfortunately, we may have failed to remember to continue purchasing local influence over the years. We believed the matter of the island had been settled permanently, and we had no other interests in the state of Georgia.”

“The political side was pretty cheap,” Wyatt said. “Darika arranged it all. She’s very detail oriented. And discreet.”

“Darika’s very smart. Should I be worried?” She gave him a teasing smile, though her eyes didn’t seem to be teasing at all.

“She’s an effective employee. She’s no artistic genius, though.”

“Neither am I.” Adrienne relaxed and smiled faintly at the compliment. “Tell Farlee I would like to have dinner, after all.”

“Great.” Wyatt tapped at his phone. A loon call shrieked back in response several seconds later. “Hey, ghost detectives, join us for dinner? You can fill us in on some more background.”

“That sounds a little crowded,” Adrienne said.

“And we already grabbed a bite in town,” I added.

“Yep, totally stuffed.” Stacey patted her stomach. “It was amazing.”

“Besides, the two of you will be busy,” Adrienne said to Stacey and me. “Removing all of these cameras from my family’s home.”

I felt a rising panic. While abandoning the island to the dead wasn’t the worst plan—arguably, it was the safest possible plan—something felt off to me. I needed to understand this place. Sooner or later, people would return, even if it was years in the future. My chance to do anything to decrease the danger by removing even one of the many negative entities was vanishing fast.

“If you’re interested, our investigation has uncovered some possible information about Hank’s activities here,” I said. “I’m not sure how reliable it is, and it’s not backed by much evidence, but maybe there’s some kernel of truth, because parts of it corroborate other things we’ve seen.”

“What information?” Adrienne glowered behind her thickly painted makeup. Not a crease appeared anywhere on her face, though. “From where?”

“There was a guy who tried to publish an unauthorized biography of Hank Grolman back in the seventies, but—”

“Oh, not this again. Chalmer Ostrowski?”

“You’ve heard of him?” Wyatt asked.

“Yeah, he’s a stalker. First he tried blackmailing our family. Our attorney still has the letters. But not even the lowliest tabloids would listen to him. He was arrested for breaking into our fishing cottage on Wintertide Island, off Newfoundland. Fortunately, none of us were there at the time. The guy’s just a loon—no offense to your app, Wyatt. He’s spent time in jail, in mental hospitals, often homeless. Just ask my family’s attorney. He’s got it all on file.”

“He also tried to stab me with a fishhook,” Wyatt said. “So, there’s that.”

I nodded. If she was already familiar with whatever Chalmer had to say, then I had nothing to add about it.

“Maybe we could do just one more night’s observation—” I began, in a bit of last-ditch desperation, though I kept it calm and professional on the outside. I hope.

“Absolutely not,” Adrienne said. “Wyatt says you work all night, so spend tonight erasing everything you’ve recorded and packing up all this junk. Then you’ll be ready to leave on the ferry in the morning.”

I felt like all the air had been knocked out of me. I looked over at Wyatt, but he nodded along, not wanting to argue with his fiancée.

“Sounds like that’s for the best,” Wyatt said. “We’ll find another place for the wedding. There’s still time, right?”

Adrienne hesitated, looking around the room full of dead South American animals, like a long-neglected natural history museum.

“I don’t know about the wedding, Wyatt,” she finally said, then walked stiffly out of the room.

Wyatt stared after her, looking shocked and pained, like he’d been stung by a scorpion. I wondered if Adrienne was a Scorpio.

Before leaving, he looked back at us.

“Wyatt, I’m sorry—” Stacey began.

“You’ll take the ferry in the morning. This is over.” He looked around the card room, a place of leisure for the dead, full of their sort of pleasures—cards, ashtrays, wild animals hunted for sport rather than food. “Maybe it’s all over.”

He trudged out of the room, going after Adrienne, perhaps hoping to salvage some of what he’d lost.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Stacey and I spent hours breaking down our nerve center and collecting all the gear around the house that we’d set up only a few days earlier.

The case felt like a wasted effort, a total defeat. The dead had won. They would continue to dominate the island, endangering anyone who came ashore, perhaps collecting new souls over the years, becoming ever more haunted, an ever-deepening whirlpool of spiritual darkness.

While Stacey and I worked, carrying out Wyatt's orders to surrender and retreat, we felt like the house was watching us all night. This was especially true in the enormous dining hall, between the heads on the wall, the dozens of empty chairs at the long table, the fireplaces and nooks where shadows gathered.

I could smell the echoes of old smoke in the room, though as far as I knew it had been decades since any fire had been built here. Maybe I heard the distant voices singing their drinking song for a moment, or maybe I just remembered it particularly clearly.

The heavy, cold feeling of an unseen presence pervaded the master bedroom where the towering shadow had run off some workers. A glance through our thermal camera, before we turned it off and packed it up, revealed a sizable cold spot in the room’s corner. Maybe that was Hank Grolman himself, watching in amusement as one of his living heirs threw us out.

“If Chalmer’s right, then some awful crimes would be going unpunished and kept secret here,” Stacey said as we descended the stairs from the butler’s pantry to the wine cellar.

“I know.” I widened my flashlight’s iris, chasing away shadows as we navigated the cold catacombs below, past the meat cellar.

Something inside me recoiled as we crossed through the broken hole in the wall into the long-hidden passageway beyond. We passed the partly demolished staircase to the nailed-shut trap door above. Perhaps the royally decorated bull elephant had once rolled back on its platform to reveal the steps below, the titan of the land giving way to the wealthy and powerful members of the secretive hunting lodge.

The air grew thicker and colder as we followed the horned-skull sconces along the wall to the black steel vault door.

While Stacey hurried to break down our recording gear, I took a final look over the strange antique bank-vault lock, something that would take tools and skills I didn’t have to crack.

We holstered our flashlights and switched to small belt-mounted lights, leaving our hands free to carry the gear we’d collected, ceding the basement to its ghosts.

“They sealed up this place, then made it illegal for anyone to come to the island,” I whispered. “Whatever happened down here, Adrienne’s family wanted to make sure nobody ever found out about it.”

“Every family has its secrets, I suppose,” Stacey said. “Though they usually aren’t this well-hidden.”

A male voice whispered, somewhere close by. I couldn’t tell where it emerged, only that it echoed down the corridor to where we stood, like a message to us.

Male voices answered, also quiet as whispers. They moved in a kind of rough melodic unison, though without much sense of rhythm. Chanting.

The air grew thicker and colder, like we were in the dark water at the bottom of a deep lake—a place I’d been fairly recently, at a haunted campground—and every nerve ending in my body was screaming at me to run. I felt the entities’ presence like electricity in the room, boiling over, a storm waiting to erupt. I expected apparitions to appear around us, or worse, a violent psychokinetic attack.

“Listen, uh, guys,” I said shakily to the invisible but very real presences crowding the underground corridor. It was hard not to consider how isolated we were down there, and how far we had to run to reach the floor above, and then to reach the outside. “We were just leaving.”

Stacey gaped, trembling visibly. The shadows grew thicker, into a black fog, swallowing our flashlight beams, absorbing all light and warmth and air.

“Run!” I shouted.

Animal snarls arose. Claws scraped the floor and jaws snapped. Men’s voices shouted behind them, seeming to urge on the animals’ pursuit of us.

Stacey and I raced up the hall.

Ahead of us, dark hooded shapes descended the old stairs as if the trap door above were wide open instead of nailed shut. The hems of their dark robes flowed like black oil over the rough brick stairs as they moved soundlessly down to join us, perhaps meaning to cut off our retreat.

We swerved wide around the foot of the stairs. Stacey slowed as she ducked through the brick hole in the wall, and the weight of our retrieved gear kept us from moving at top speed.

The entity slammed into me from behind, and I smelled it before it struck me, a heavy, rotten carcass of wet meat and sharp claws, jaws snapping at my ear.

I shouted a warning half a second before crashing into Stacey, and we both sprawled across the floor of the main cellar corridor, landing hard and in a confused tangle that made it hard to reach my flashlights. Our tripods and camera cases clattered to the floor, adding to the confusion.

My hand was conveniently close to one of Stacey’s flashlight holsters, though, so I drew one and clicked it on, washing the attacker in a full-spectrum white blast.

Nothing was there, as far as I could see. I swung the flashlight beam up and down the hall.

“Ellie, you’re bleeding!” Stacey said. “On me, a little. But that’s okay.”

“Sorry.” I sat up, taking a deep breath. “Are you hurt?”

“Just mildly banged up, mostly by your tackle.” She stood up, brushing herself off, as I did the same. “What was that all about?”

I looked back the way we’d come.

In the distance, a hooded figure stood at the vault door as if guarding it. He held a small lamp made from a goat’s skull, perhaps taken from one of the wall sconces, swaying on the chain that served as its handle. The skull's eyes glowed dull and red from the coals inside. The lantern light painted the hooded man's shriveled, dead face in a shifting red glow; his eyes, nose, and mouth were deep, dark holes.

The red light of the lamp died, and he vanished.

“I think he’s gone,” I whispered.

“You’re looking bad back here, girl.” Stacey gingerly touched my jacket.

I became aware of a huge patch of pain across my lower back, like I’d just gotten a cheap tattoo on spring break. “How bad?”

“Like a three-clawed tiger got you.”

“Ugh. Always three scratches, every time.”

“I thought we were about to get ripped apart.”

“Maybe they know we’re leaving, and just moving us along.”

“Then maybe we should hurry in case they change their minds,” Stacey said.

We dashed through the wine cellar, up through the butler’s pantry, and around the annoyingly labyrinthine course to the front door. Stacey insisted on walking behind me to cover my injured rear, and I wasn’t going to waste time arguing about it. The claw marks stung with every step I took.

Outside, Gary leaned against his security cart, idly looking into our van’s open back door as if admiring how messy it was in there, wires and cables hanging everywhere. He’d watched us carry out and stow away loads of gear while holding his post.

“Done yet?” Gary asked, watching Stacey strap some cameras down into place inside the van. I kept facing him so he wouldn’t see my injury, which involved a rip in my jeans that ran from the waist down through a back pocket.

“It would have gone faster with some help,” Stacey said. “You must have been tired from carrying Adrienne’s entire Princess-Vespa-sized luggage collection.”

“Hey, Spaceballs, good flick.” Gary popped a stick of JuicyFruit in his mouth. “Yeah, I felt like Barf the Mawg for a minute, carrying all those bags upstairs. And she keeps calling me ‘the driver’ like I’m not head of security for the whole island. But the boss man says to do whatever makes Adrienne happy, though that’s probably a lost cause, if you ask me. Off the record. Don’t go repeating that comment to anybody, that’s not an official notarized Gary comment. It’s just, well, some people aren’t prone to happiness. I’d probably feel sorry for her if I thought about it long enough.”

“Everybody has their problems,” Stacey said. “Even if they’re rich and have amazingly long legs and look like one of these goddess statues.” She nodded across to the garden nook where Artemis stood, her short marble tunic revealing the tension in her lifelike sculpted leg and hip muscles, the smooth planes of her face reminding me of Adrienne’s touches of plastic surgery and her stark white makeup and hair coloring, as though Adrienne aspired to look like a marble goddess instead of a real human being.

“It’s been a long night,” I said. “See you around, Gary. Or not, most likely, since we’re leaving in the morning.”

“I’ll hold the fort,” he said, saluting lazily with just his forefinger. “Sleep tight.”

“It could happen.” I yawned, not for the first time, exhausted from gathering all our gear. I circled to the van’s side door, putting me out of Gary’s line of sight, and strapped down the tripods I’d been carrying.

We pulled away from the lodge. It stood dark against the night sky like the empty castle of some forgotten king, a grand mansion for the dead.

At the corner of my eye, a hellish red light glowed dimly in one of the master bedroom windows, outlining a tall, shadowy figure there, perhaps the long-deceased master of the estate watching us depart.

When I turned to look, the window was dark, as if it had only been a mirage conjured by my own mind.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

“Where’s Darika’s golf cart?” Stacey asked as we parked at the chambermaids’ cottage and hopped out. Darika’s cart was indeed nowhere in sight.

“Good question. It’s late for her to be out running around.” At three in the morning, a few hours still remained until dawn. “There’s something on the front door.” A folded piece of paper jutted out above the doorknob. I opened the door and caught the paper as it fluttered free.

Stacey pointed her flashlight at it. “The Rogue and the Prince? What does that mean? Sounds like historical romance. Especially printed in that curly-swirly font.”

“I think she ripped out the title page of a paperback novel. Here’s the actual note.” I turned it so Stacey could see the handwritten cursive on the back. Even dashing off a note on unlined paper, Darika had some flawless penmanship.

“What’s it say?” Stacey took it from me and read aloud. “‘I can’t take it here any longer.’ Wow, were we bad roommates? Did you leave your dirty dishes in the sink again, Ellie?”

“Very funny. Keep reading, you note-snatcher.”

“Fine. ‘It’s so cold in my room, and they won’t stop whispering. I’ll be sleeping on the couch in the guest house if you need me.’ Who wouldn’t stop whispering? The chambermaids, you think?”

“Maybe Adrienne’s return has stirred up the ghosts even more,” I said.

“I wouldn’t want to spend the night alone here with Foxy Chambermaid prowling around. She may seem harmless, but you know how that goes. She’ll probably turn out to be obsessed with revenge, and murdering the living will be one of her top three favorite hobbies.”

“That would be our typical luck.” I headed inside. I had to pump the light switch a couple of times before the lights sputtered to life. It was cold in the living room, colder in the bedroom. Reaching for my sleeping bag, I said, “I’m just going to collapse.”

“You are not!” Stacey drew our first aid kit from her suitcase. “Get those clothes off so I can take care of you.”

Reluctantly, I lay on my stomach and let her pull off my damaged jacket, shirt, and jeans.

“Ew,” she said. “Not only do you have claw marks on the lower back, there’s teeth marks up near your shoulder.”

“Great. Now I’ll have to get a paranormal rabies shot.”

“Ha! Just keep up that sense of humor while I do this.” She slathered antibacterial ointment across my back, and I hissed even though her touch was gentle.

She bandaged me up and wrapped my sleeping bag over me as a barrier against the unnatural cold. “Now just take two aspirin and avoid being attacked by any more evil spirits until morning.”

“I’ll do my best, doc,” I mumbled. My eyes were already closed. Worn out, and with only a few hours to rest before it would be time to get moving again, I quickly fell into an uncomfortable sleep. The chill in the air was aggressive, forcing its way under my sleeping bag so I only seemed to grow colder as I fell asleep, as if I were being lowered into a deep well, or maybe my own grave.

I found myself drifting in a fog through the second-floor corridor of the main lodge. At first I thought I was formless, a transparent eyeball like Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote about, a pure observer.

Then I entered one of the bedrooms and found I had a form after all. I carried a cloth in one hand and found myself wiping the furniture and fixtures, the bed posters and the lamps, surfaces that already gleamed from recent cleaning. The only dust I could see was the particles dancing in the sunbeams from the narrow windows framed by heavy curtains.

I wiped down the dressing mirror, seeing myself there—braided blonde hair tucked under my cap, white apron over my black working dress—and that was when I saw him.

He’d slipped in through the open door behind me. His long white shirt was rumpled and untucked, spilling out around his suspenders. His graying blond hair was unkempt, his sideburns overgrown. He smiled, and it was all cruelty.

His smile frightened me, and I shuddered with revulsion as his arm slipped around my waist.

His other hand, springing out from the other side like a magician’s trick, covered my face with a cloth that smelled oddly sweet. The world went blurry.

I found myself lying in dirt, the sweet scent in my nostrils replaced by a stinging ammonia smell. My breath sounded too loud in my ears. Something was over my face, making it a little harder to breathe, a little harder to see. A mask.

I sat up, coughing at the burning stench in my nostrils.

A man in a hooded robe stood over me, illuminated by moonlight. The bad ammonia smell emanated from him; he must have roused me with smelling salt.

We were in a clearing in the woods. Nobody else was there, just me, the hooded man, and his horse.

I asked him what was going on, though my words were definitely not in English.

He replied in English, though, in a voice hard and with no hint of sympathy.

“Tonight we hunt and sacrifice in honor of our god,” he said. “You have the honor of serving as our sacrifice, little fox. Your death will be worth more than your life ever was. Now, amuse the gods with a spirited chase.”

A distant note blew, a hunter’s horn, low and long. Somewhere far away, voices shouted and dogs barked.

“The hunt begins,” he said, then mounted his horse and rode away, leaving me alone.

Soon I was running, my heart pounding like a drum in my ears, my breath hot inside the mask. Soft moccasins—not a sort of footwear I’d ever worn before—padded my feet, silencing my running. I crashed through low-lying branches, battering aside long, thin saw palmetto leaves the size of butcher knives. I tripped over live oak roots that arched above the ground, cracking my knees and shins with bruising force as I tried to run.

Each time I fell, I got up again and kept running.

The men on horseback were closing in on me. The dogs were closer. I could hear them crashing through the limbs, huffing fast and loud, hot on my scent.

Farther back was the steady clomping of horses and the voices of men. They made no effort to stay quiet and had little reason to try. They were masters of this island, and no matter how fast or far I might run, there was nowhere to escape. A high, spiked wall encircled most of the island. I knew where the gates were, but surely those were being watched.

I went another way.

I’d seen the tree before, on occasional afternoons and early mornings when I’d been able to walk in the wild parts of the island. I remembered how a thin upper branch grew out over a wall.

The dogs found me before I reached the tree. The giant snarling monsters burst out from the woods all around me.

I jumped as high as I could and caught a limb of the live oak. I scrabbled my feet up along the mossy trunk to avoid getting my legs torn off.

They barked and clawed at the tree, shredding the bark, announcing their find to their masters.

I climbed up, limb by limb, as the men arrived on their horses. The dogs kept snapping and clawing at the trunk below, just in case they hadn’t made their point clear enough.

Seeing me up in the tree, in danger of making an actual escape over the wall, the men tossed aside any sense of leisurely sport hunting and drew their rifles. Bullets bit and tore into the tree around me. The gnarled, winding, curved live oak limbs created a cage-like environment that provided some protection against their shots, but I couldn’t remain there, clinging to the shadows of the trunk. Sooner or later a bullet would find me, or the hunters would get me some other way.

I had no choice but to run far out on the limb, which looked thinner and more slender up close than it had from the ground, not much wider than a rope.

The slender tree limb creaked and sagged under my weight. It only grew thinner as I approached the point where it reached out over the high wall. The iron spikes topping the wall glittered darkly in the moonlight, waiting to rip into my flesh and impale me if I slipped and fell, or if the creaking limb snapped.

A bullet crossed the air in front of my masked face, hot and screaming like a winged demon. If I’d been just a little faster, it would have killed me.

Another struck behind my feet, hitting the limb that supported me. I caught splinters in my calf muscle and staggered. The limb let out a sickening crack and swung downward. I plummeted toward the wall and closed my eyes as the row of spikes rushed up toward me.

I kept falling.

When I opened my eyes, I was dropping through darkness. I thought I’d fallen on the inside of the wall, that I was rushing toward the ground and the waiting hunting party, who would finish me off if I survived the fall.

The fall ended at last in a sudden, painful impact, but not on the brick wall or the hard ground.

Instead, I smacked into water with such force that I plunged all the way to the muddy bottom. The soft, silty mud was far from the worst thing to break my fall, but it was also like quicksand, not just catching me but embracing me, sucking me down, inviting me to join it permanently.

I kicked and thrashed, pushing free and trying to find my way to the surface, to desperately needed air. Marsh grass tangled around me like fishing nets, blocking me.

Finally, I broke up out of the brackish water and took a deep breath of briny air.

I’d survived, but I was far from safe. The men and dogs were in an uproar, their shouts and howls blending together like a chorus of devils in the night.

Closer by, snakes and alligators inhabited the marsh waters on the island’s western side. Beyond that lay a particularly deep patch of ocean brimming with sharks.

Beyond that, though, lay the mainland, and survival, perhaps even freedom, if I could only make it there.

They’d done this to others before me, hunting us for sport, importing peasants who had no family for thousands of miles and no knowledge of the strange new country where they’d arrived. They terrorized us with stories of alligators and sharks in the waters. Few of us could swim, anyway, and that skill certainly wasn’t encouraged.

But I could. To our masters, we were all the same, just rural villagers from nowhere, disposable, servile beasts of no individual importance.

I wasn’t like the other girls, though. I’d grown up in a fishing village on the Baltic Sea, and my grandfather had taught me to swim. And if the sharks ate me, it would be a more honorable death than what the rich men on the island had planned for me.

I whispered a prayer to Jadwiga, the deceased child queen of Poland, believed to hold a special place in heaven, begging for intercession to keep me safe from the beasts of the water.

The mask fell from my face, perhaps loosened by the impact after the long fall, or perhaps removed by the saint's intercession.

I began swimming through the dense marsh grass, doing my best to watch for alligators, though it was impossible to tell them apart from all the floating sticks and logs that had tumbled from the bluff above.

For now, at least, the high wall that had imprisoned me was my protector. The hunting party could not climb it, could not even see me because of it. They would have to circle around to the gate, then all the way back to the marsh.

By then, I wouldn’t be in the marsh at all.

I swam, thinking only of speed and nothing else. There was no need to stay quiet.

At last, I broke free of the grasses and the salt marsh and reached open water.

I swam through water so dark and deep it looked black even on the sunniest days, water where enormous sharks were known to gather, perhaps to breed. I would be a small, crunchy morsel for them, a single bite of meat.

The smell of salt filled my nose, and seemingly all the space behind us, reaching my eyes, almost burning—

I awoke to the smell of salt in the air. Lying there in the chambermaids’ cottage, I first felt a pang of regret. I’d nearly escaped the island, yet here I was, somehow back here in this cottage, trapped, expected to serve once again.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

When I saw Stacey on the next bed over, snoring softly with a blonde lock of hair curled around her nose, my sense of identity began to return. So did the pain from the scratches and bite on my back.

Someone was behind me in the bedroom, standing over me, their presence ice cold and radiating a thin, pale glow. I knew that when I turned, I would see a dead person who’d been standing over me while I slept, perhaps feeding on my energy—I certainly felt exhausted—and infecting me with her own, mingling our memories, as can happen when entities want to communicate, often as a precursor to oppressing and then possessing you.

While not exactly eager to turn and face the dead, I was even less eager to leave my injured back exposed, so I reluctantly and gingerly rolled over.

She was pale, not fully formed, her dress and body fading to nothing somewhere around her hips. She held a candle that gave off a thin glow. Her face and hair were like transparent sketches at the outer edge of that glow, no clear features at all.

“Marzena?” I whispered, my breath frosty and white because the ghost was sucking every drop of heat out of the room to create this apparition.

Perhaps in response to her name, her candle grew a bit brighter, her face clearer. I’d seen her face in the mirror in my dream, just before she’d been grabbed by the man with the sweet-smelling handkerchief. That sweet smell was likely chloroform, my now-awake brain understood, to knock out the victims before they were masked and placed in the woods for the hunt.

The face in the mirror had been young and rosy, though, while the girl before me looked like she’d been through some awful years. Her hair was tangled and dirty and shaved well back from her forehead to reveal her scalp. Stitches ran from her temples to the crown of her head, like zippers built into her skin and skull.

“Look what they did to you,” I whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

Marzena's candlelight dimmed to a bare pale spot, which floated over toward the door. I could barely see the translucent outline of her torso.

I grabbed Stacey’s shoulder and shook it hard, but she didn’t respond.

The weak, ghostly light drifted over the threshold and out into the hall. Marzena was leaving.

“Stacey!” I hissed, but she didn’t respond. Finally, I grabbed a pillow and smacked it across Stacey’s snoring face.

“Huh!” Stacey started awake, looking around. I touched a finger over her lips to silence her, then pointed.

With bleary, unfocused eyes, Stacey turned her head toward the pale orb of Marzena’s light. Stacey blinked several times, getting the importance even as she struggled to awaken and sit up.

The orb drifted out of sight, up the hall, leaving barely a glow behind it.

“Keep an eye on that,” I whispered, removing my finger from her lips.

Stacey nodded and grabbed her boots. She’d otherwise slept in full gear, just as I would have done when sleeping in a haunted cottage near a haunted mansion on a haunted island, had it not been for my injuries.

As it was, I needed Stacey to go chase the orb while I dressed and strapped on my belt.

By the time I caught up with her, she was following the pale glow out the back door, which I’d actually never used before. It opened onto a weedy yard area with the remnants of a fence and the rotten, tilted posts of a laundry-drying line.

Like a phantasmic firefly, the chambermaid’s feeble light wound its way into the woods behind the house, following the slightest of trails through the thick growth.

I took a breath and followed the light into there, letting Stacey cover me from behind. We had to keep our flashlights sheathed to avoid drowning the pale light of Marzena’s candle or chasing the fragile ghost away.

It was hard enough to follow her through the forest, but occasionally her light would swell, and I’d see her face looking back at us like a mask floating in the shadows, impatiently waiting for us.

At other times, I’d think I’d lost her altogether.

It was like following a will o’ the wisp, more commonly called a jack o’ lantern on the sea islands, the glowing light that would lead you astray into wild places, only to leave you stranded and exhausted, alone and confused.

Maybe we were following a jack o’ lantern here, a harmful spirit leading us into danger, while I naively believed it was trying to help. I was tired already and had the distinct feeling she had been feeding on me while I slept. Maybe it wasn’t even Marzena at all, but something evil wearing her form, as powerful ghosts sometimes do, wearing a previous victim’s appearance and identity like a mask.

It was not easy to trudge through the muddy soil while avoiding the low, twisting live oak limbs that arched up from the ground. I repeatedly whacked my shins and knees along the way, since I couldn’t use my flashlight. Of course, these things did not slow the ghost at all.

Whispers arose in the darkness around me, so low I could barely hear them. If I’d been a different person in a different line of work, I would have told myself that it was probably in my mind. But being myself in my particular situation, I doubted it was imaginary.

This wasn’t the rough shouting of the huntsmen, thankfully. The voices were soft, shaking, whispering to each other. These were female voices, maybe servant girls. Maybe Marzena had brought some friends along.

I was glad she did, because with each whispering voice came a weak, flickering, glowing orb, winking in and out of sight as we meandered through the thick island wilderness. While none of them provided much light individually, together they lifted the woods from nearly pitch black to a deep gloom, enough to help Stacey and me see our way a little better.

We emerged among the statue groves, passing a muscular Apollo whose tunic didn’t leave much to the imagination.

Then we had to cross the exposed open space of the lawn, darting from one piece of construction equipment to the next, trying to use machines’ shadows for cover. I didn’t want Gary, Renoir, or anyone else to see us out here. I wasn’t going to let a little thing like getting fired stop me from doing the job.

Normally, we help the living against the dead, but now I had no living client—in fact, I was directly cutting against my client’s stated wishes by continuing the investigation. So, who was I serving?

Marzena, maybe, and these other frail ghosts with their weak candlelight, the innocent victims of the lodge’s original owner. They were the ones I served now.

I supposed I was serving the dead against the living. But surely even the modern-day Grolman family descendants would eventually be happy to have their old ghosts exorcised, if possible. They just didn’t want any publicity about it, and to their credit, they’d taken steps to protect the living against the dangers of the island, after finding themselves helpless against the ghosts.

The flickering white spots of candlelight did not lead us to the tall rear veranda doors, facing the churned-up earth of the staging area where hunting parties had once mustered before hunting deer or boar or servants, now bare earth waiting for something new to be planted.

Nor, happily, did the maids' ghosts lead us around to the front door, where we’d last seen Gary standing guard, though it was possible he’d gone out on patrol or back home since then.

Instead, the little lights brought Stacey and me to a recessed servant’s door on the side of the kitchen, near the overgrown remnants of an herb garden. Hopefully, the maids’ ghosts knew the best route to wherever we were going.

Marzena vanished in front of the door, her light snuffed out.

I took the knob and turned it.

Locked. I sighed and reached for my lock picks.

A dusty windowpane nearby glowed with thin, spectral light. Marzena stared out at me, watching expectantly, waiting for me to join her inside, like I was taking too long to pass through the doorway.

“Yeah, easy for you to say,” I muttered, dropping to my knees. I signaled Stacey to keep her flashlight off this time.

I popped the lock and eased the door open. The door wasn’t particularly creaky or loud, but it certainly sounded that way as we stepped into the silent, dark house where we were not supposed to be.

Marzena’s apparition was stronger inside the lodge, but she was still transparent. As we followed her, I could see right through her ribs to the candle she carried. Her dress was ripped and torn from her ordeals in life, spattered with blood.

She led us up narrow servants’ steps to the main second-floor hallway. I thought I could hear other footsteps padding softly around us, other voices whispering just below my range of hearing. Maybe the other maids had continued with us to the house.

The door to the master bedroom, where the tall shadow figure had been seen, and where we’d removed our cameras hours earlier, creaked open as if pushed by a breeze.

I looked inside.

A man stood there, not Wyatt, but taller and larger. I knew him from the few pictures I’d seen of him; here he wore bristly sideburns and a suit and tie. Large holes in his neck, arms, chest, stomach, and legs oozed thick, congealed black blood. He stared at us with flat, hard eyes.

I took Stacey’s arm and drew her back and away from the apparition. We grabbed our flashlights but held back on actually blasting him.

It was Heinrich “Hank” Grolman, I was pretty sure, original builder and owner of the house. He was watching us, perhaps curious for now, but I had no doubt he was dangerous. It was possible he could summon all the ghostly lodge members, bring the hunting party up to capture us here in the house, perhaps with a blast on an ivory hunting horn.

He didn’t make any moves right away, though, just watched us pass, his eyes burning darkly in their sockets.

Marzena continued walking, illuminating our way with her feeble light, so Stacey and I kept following, though we took turns keeping an eye on the master bedroom door for Grolman’s possible coming attack.

Our spirit guide finally stopped outside a guest room door. As we caught up to her, she vanished.

Stacey mouthed something to me. Adrienne. This was the room where she was sleeping.

I shrugged, then motioned for Stacey to stay put.

Carefully, gently, I placed my fingers on the doorknob and turned it. Every noise sounded unnaturally amplified, the metallic rasp of the latch bolt across the strike plate, the tiny squeak of the spring inside the knob.

Finally, I nudged open the door. At least I hadn’t needed to pick the lock.

Adrienne’s many pieces of black leather luggage made it perfectly clear that this was indeed her room.

I looked first to the bed, to see whether Adrienne was awake and preparing to yell at me for this deep intrusion into her personal space late at night. There was no response. She’d closed the bedcurtains, though, so I had no idea whether Adrienne was awake or asleep in there, or whether Wyatt was with her.

Marzena’s flickering spot of candlelight floated above a particular suitcase, which was closed tight, so I’d have to open it without drawing attention. Great. Sneaking into Adrienne’s room while she slept and then rummaging through her luggage could only end well.

I knelt in front of the chosen suitcase. Adrienne had already inserted the brass key into the lock, fortunately, in between the engraved words Louis Vuitton and Made in France. It had to be fairly vintage, too, since it lacked the built-in wheels of modern luggage. This was luggage designed to be carried by servants and staff, a perfect match for the Grolman estate.

Slowly, I turned the suitcase key, wincing at the slight scraping sound.

I hesitated and held my breath, watching the bedcurtains for any hint of a response from Adrienne to my late-night burglary. Nothing so far.

Next came the suitcase’s two heavy brass latches, one on either side. I carefully pulled them open, doing my best to soften the movements, but their metallic rasps boomed in my ears.

I went still and silent, holding my breath again, eyes on the bedcurtain.

Maybe they moved, or maybe it was my imagination playing tricks as I stared obsessively at the thick, shadowy folds of cloth.

Finally, I searched Adrienne's suitcase, pawing through silk and cashmere, and some really incredibly nice-feeling cotton socks that must have had a thread count of about a million, but found nothing that seemed worth all this trouble.

A rasp of cloth sounded from the bed.

I looked over, my heart on the verge of exploding, and held my breath again.

One of the bedcurtains shifted, like it had moved and was falling back into place.

I froze, wondering whether I had any chance of staying hidden by the darkness of the room. Had Adrienne looked out and seen me? Or had she just brushed against the curtain from the inside? The movement was so slight, I told myself, it could even have been the air vent in the room giving the curtain a little push. I didn’t really believe that, but I wanted to believe it.

Nobody came charging out of the bed screaming at me, so I continued my fruitless search. It was difficult to hurry and stay quiet at the same time. I dug deeper, looking for inner zippers and hidden pockets.

Marzena’s features grew clearer in her candlelight. She leaned closer to me and began decaying before my eyes. This seemed like an overly dramatic way of telling me I was making her wait too long, literally withering away in front of me like that. Okay, Marzena, I get it, I mouthed.

My prying fingers found their way under the corner of the suitcase’s interior. I pried up a hard flap at the bottom—unfolding many of Adrienne's clothes in the process—and revealed a shallow compartment below.

My breath caught as I saw it. It was steel, the ring so big I could have gripped it in both hands with room to spare, the teeth long, oddly shaped and jutting out in every direction like a medieval spiked weapon.

I knew what it had to be.

Adrienne had brought the vault key with her.

I rubbed my chin like Indiana Jones weighing the size of the little statue in at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Cold sweat erupted all over me. This was it, the lodge’s greatest mystery, and I was about to open it. I was thrilled and terrified all at once.

My hands shook as I took the key. Little cloth hooks held it in place in the suitcase, which slowed me down and aggravated me greatly until I figured out how to unfasten them. Marzena was probably making her face rot to dust in fast-forward to complain about the time again, but I didn’t give her the satisfaction of looking up to see it.

At last, I stood, gripping the key in my hands. It was about as heavy as a crowbar, though much thinner and longer.

Hardly daring to breathe, I eased over to the door.

Stacey, just outside in the hallway, gaped at the key when I emerged, her eyes nearly popping from her head. I handed it to her and made sure her grip was solid before I let go. Dropping it on the floor would no doubt wake everyone.

With sweat-drenched palms, I slowly pulled the door shut in order to leave it exactly the way we’d found it, like Smokey Bear says to do in the woods. I winced as the latch bolt clacked into place. Then the door was solidly closed.

Stacey pointed at the giant key repeatedly, and pretty much unnecessarily, her jaw wide open. I could tell she wanted to yell in excitement and was just barely holding it in.

I took the key back from her, hoping that would calm her a little. She was bobbing on her toes, resisting the urge to actually jump up and down.

Now that we had the key, we didn’t exactly need a spirit guide to tell us where to go next.

We headed back to the stairs, the host of dead girls lighting our way with flickering ethereal candlelight.

Chapter Thirty

We traversed the basement and reluctantly crossed through the broken hole in the basement wall, back to the area where we’d been assaulted. I was still in great pain from my last visit to the underworld of the house, and despite my desire to open the vault at last, I was not eager to return to the scene of the attack.

In the maids’ thin candlelight, I worked the vault key into the hole on the huge black door. I had to turn it this way and that; just trying to use the key was a bit like picking a lock. This lock and key had indeed been a special custom job.

The dead maids gathered close, their faces pale.

I recognized one of them from the 1890s-era photographs I’d seen. There had been many of her, thanks to her famous and politically involved father. Not like her more reclusive fiancé, Heinrich “Hank” Grolman, of whom pictures had been rare.

“Evangeline?” I whispered, then made myself speak up. “Evangeline Ryland? Why are you here? Are you lost from the shipwreck?” She was dressed as a maid, so that didn’t really add up.

The ghost who looked like Evangeline gaped at me. A moment later, a fox mask covered her face. Then she vanished, leaving only the orb of her candle to aid my vault-opening efforts.

I focused on my work, taking furtive glances up the hall, watching for the return of the supernatural hunting party, or at least for Heinrich Grolman to follow us down from his room.

I was sort of hoping for that, really, because if Grolman’s ghost made no move to stop us, it would imply that perhaps he actually wanted the vault open, in which case we were playing right into his hands. Even down here in the basement, there were no snarls or menacing voices this time, now that we had the key. And that troubled me.

At long last, a metallic thunk thundered from the depths of the door as the bolt slid aside.

At that moment, all the girls’ candle lights vanished like a birthday cake had been blown out, leaving Stacey and me in absolute darkness.

“Hey, Ellie?” Stacey whispered.

“Yeah?”

“Did the maid brigade just ditch us?”

“I think so.” I clicked on my belt light, and Stacey did the same.

Together, we hauled open the steel vault door.

Beyond, lined with more unlit horned-skull sconces, lay wide, shallow stairs carved from rock, twisting slowly down and out of sight.

The sour air rising from below threatened frostbite. It made me think of Dante’s Inferno. Not the fiery upper levels, but the very bottom circle, the lowest pit, where Satan lives and all is frozen.

“Okay,” I whispered. “Let’s go.”

We descended the stairs.

They brought us to a sizable room hacked out of the hard rock of the island bluff. Maybe it had begun as a natural cavern, but the chisel marks on the wall indicated it had been widened.

In some ways, it was a larger version of the chapel-sized temple of the goddess Fortuna and infant god Plutus up in the cemetery. It had rows of padded planks for kneeling, the padding consumed by mold and water damage. Nobody had tended this temple in many years.

Dampness trickled in from the walls, too. The floor was sloped, sending the moisture creeping down the sunken aisle between the rows of kneeling benches. The aisle served as a handy drainage gutter for all the dampness creeping in.

The sunken gutter-aisle ended at the floor’s low point near the far end of the room, where a circle of rotten wood about the size of a tractor tire was set into the sunken floor. Nearby, a long lever was built into the wall.

On a pedestal overlooking the rotten wood circle stood a statue of a winged man, handsome as an angel and larger than life. He smiled and pointed out at the audience like a late-night infomercial host who wanted to emphasize how much everybody could benefit from his amazing product, but only if you act now, because supplies won’t last at these prices. He was the focal point for all the benches in the room.

“That’s Plutus,” I whispered to Stacey. “See how his eyes are blank? That’s because he’s blind. He can’t see who deserves wealth and who doesn’t. See how his foot is curved and sideways? He walks with a limp, because wealth comes slowly.”

“And what’s with the wings?”

“Wealth is also quick to flee.”

“So why doesn’t he arrive quickly on wings, and leave slowly on foot?” Stacey asked.

“Maybe he does, sometimes.” I eased closer, wary of the big rotten circle on the floor in front of the idol. The wealth god held a heaping bag of coins, and more bags and chests were piled around his feet, all part of the statue. Plutus carried as much luggage as Adrienne, it seemed. “I read that he’s tied closely to death by way of inheritance. Which is certainly one way to confer wealth without regard to who deserves it.”

“These walls are creeping me out.” Stacey’s flashlight passed over one deeply set alcove after another, which I might have taken as storage nooks for specialty items, if this were actually a bank vault. She moved closer to one alcove, studying it. In a low, almost strangled voice, she said, “Uh, Ellie? You should probably…yeah.”

I stepped over to join her, looking along the beam of her flashlight, and drew a sharp breath when I saw what she meant.

The alcove was roughly the size of a coffin or sarcophagus, but vertical. It was mostly empty, but there was a small rock shelf near the top, high and out of sight, above the level of the alcove’s front opening.

On that shelf rested a human skull, its dark eye holes staring back at me indifferently.

I snapped a picture with my phone before stepping back.

“Do you think they’re all like that?” Stacey asked.

“There’s only one way to find out. You check the alcoves down that way, and I’ll go this way.”

Stacey blanched, but she nodded and got to work. Slowly.

I was sympathetic. Bracing myself, I looked into the next alcove. Another skull awaited me there, again tucked high and out of sight.

In all, we found that seventeen of the nineteen alcoves contained skulls. Two had empty shelves.

“I know I’m not the more experienced investigator here,” Stacey said, “but I’m going to go way out on a limb and say the haunting of this estate could be related to this underground death-god temple full of human skulls.”

“Sometimes you have to go way out on a limb. Marzena showed me some of her memories. They would drug their victims. One lodge member would hide the victim deep in the woods for the rest of the hunting party to find.”

“This is the place, huh? I almost can’t believe it’s real,” a woman’s voice said, startling us both.

Adrienne emerged from the stairwell, wearing a long, casual shirt dress over worn-down jeans and caramel leather Gucci riding boots that had probably softened her footsteps. She’d removed her funereal marble makeup, revealing a softer, pinker, more vulnerable face beneath.

“Oh, uh, hi,” Stacey said, giving it her best nervous smile.

“You know, it is true what I always say to Wyatt,” Adrienne said. “I do hate my family. It’s one of the top things he and I have in common, hating our families. I hate being expected to carry it and protect it, as though anybody in the twenty-first century cares about our reputation. We sell lard. I’m the lard princess. That’s what they called me at boarding school, did you know that? Plus, I was overweight. Are you there, anorexia? It’s me, Adrienne. Now cut to a montage of me growing up into a freaky, rebellious art student with minor substance abuse issues. But only able to live that lifestyle, doing molly at runway shows in London, because of the very privilege that I resent. I’m a whole clutch of clichés, in short.”

“What would you need to protect your family from?” I asked.

Adrienne gave a horse-like derisive snort. “Look at this place. Dead people from long ago are so weird.”

“Do you know what went on down here?”

“Nothing good, as you can see. How could it be anything good? It’s nothing we’d ever want to be associated with. It’s a stain on all of us in my family, a burden, a curse, choose your nomenclature.”

“Whose skulls are these?” I asked.

“Skulls?” Adrienne looked around. Her gaze lingered on the tall, winged god. “What skulls?”

We showed her one, and she recoiled just as we had.

“Oh, no,” she whispered. “That’s awful.”

“I believe we have a real opportunity to remove the entities from this island,” I said. “If we can give these remains a proper burial—”

“But what happens if word leaks out about all this?” Adrienne asked. “My family will kill me. And stick my skull down here in this basement, apparently. This has to remain secret.”

“Sometimes truth and sunlight are the only cure.”

Adrienne shook her head. “They should have filled this place with dirt instead of just sealing it off.”

I nodded. “That would have made it more grave-like. Sometimes the dead are restless if their bodies haven’t been properly honored. For example, considering this place is dedicated to a Greek underworld god, members of the cult might have wanted coins placed under their tongues. That would pay the ferryman so you could cross the River Styx to the underworld. We could check these skulls for coins. Maybe try adding some if there aren’t any. That will send them on their merry way to the other side.”

“I think I have some change.” Stacey reached into her pocket.

Adrienne was aghast. “That’s gruesome.”

“Yeah, but that’s the job.” I drew out the pen that I had for my notepad and approached the skull in what seemed like the most prominent alcove, closest to the god Plutus. “I’ll just peek in here, see if there’s a coin.”

“Don’t,” Adrienne said.

“There’s no telling whether adding coins would really help, anyway, partly because we don’t know whether these are the skulls of cult believers or their victims. But the coins would be easy to try as a first measure,” I explained.

“I’ve got a quarter, couple nickels, about six pennies.” Stacey jingled the coins in her palm. “I hope the ferry to the underworld’s cheap.”

“I’ll just pry this guy’s jaw open and have a peek…” I reached my pen toward the skull’s nose hole.

“Stop!” Adrienne screamed. “Get away! Don’t you have any respect?”

“Sorry.” I backed away from the skull and the alcove. “I know our humor can get a little dark sometimes, but that’s just our way of coping with the things we see. We’ll rein it in.”

“That,” Adrienne hissed, “is my great, great, great-grandfather. We will not disturb his remains or anyone’s. That is the first rule.”

“What’s the second rule?” I asked, automatically. I definitely wanted to know what more she had to say. She was changing her tune fast, suddenly revealing more knowledge.

“Shut up! We do not desecrate the dead. You have to leave. We should all leave, right now.”

“Why?” I asked. “Is this a family crypt? Is that what you’re here to protect?”

“Go! It’s not safe for us here. Not even me.” She pointed to the stairs. “We have to seal this vault. I’ll tell Wyatt to fill it with rubble and dirt, make it part of the earth. I promise. But we have to go.”

“What are you afraid of?” I tried to act calm and detached, but I was getting worn down by the burning cold of the room, my energy sapping quickly.

Adrienne glanced at the alcove where her ancestor’s skull sat. “It’s not just Garit here. It’s also Garit’s son William, another direct ancestor of mine. And Garit’s brother Otto, and other members of the lodge.”

“So, it’s a crypt for the lodge members?” I asked.

“Yes, but only the highest-level members. Through a bargain with the gods below, their souls are preserved here on the island, kept safe from the ravages of the underworld, from all the penalties for their sins that await them. So long as this temple remains undisturbed, they will spend eternity at leisure on this island, reliving their fondest memories of singing and drinking and hunting, chasing the animals.”

“And the people?” I asked. “The peasants in fox and boar masks?”

“The Great Hunt is an ancient tradition,” Adrienne said. “And it pleases the old gods, or at least that’s what my ancestors believed.”

Her words surprised me so much that I struggled to act calm and keep the conversation going. “What about Evangeline? Why was she among the hunted? I read she drowned while sailing.”

Adrienne looked puzzled for a moment, not that it creased her forehead at all. Then she smiled. “Evangeline Ryland? My, you have been dipping deep into the past.”

“I just saw her ghost,” I said. “She was with the maids. Even dressed like them.”

“And what do you suppose that means?” Adrienne cocked her head, seeming amused more than anything.

“She didn’t die in a shipwreck, but here on the island, hunted by the lodge members. Sacrificed to their god. But how? She went sailing…was it Garit?” I thought of the pictures I’d seen of the boxy early motorboats that had been eagerly adopted by wealthy sea island vacationers, including Evangeline’s uncles. “He’d been in the Imperial Navy. He must have ridden out in a motorboat and attacked Evangeline while she was sailing. Maybe he had help from other lodge members. So they dumped Evangeline’s brother and cousins, but kept her alive…hit her with the old chloroform, maybe…”

“And why would he do such a thing?” Adrienne crossed her arms, looking amused now.

“Garit?” I said. “Maybe he wanted his brother’s fortune for himself. Heinrich died only two years later. I think I saw his ghost earlier, too, covered in bloody holes from being gored to death during that wild boar hunt. Did Garit stage that, too?”

Adrienne took her time, seeming to weigh whether to answer this or not. Finally, she said, “My ancestor, Garit, was in truth only a half-brother to Heinrich, or ‘Hank.’ Hank’s father was no more than a low and crude peasant, a servant in Count Hackelberend’s stables. But Garit’s true father was Count Hackelberend himself. Heinrich and Garit shared only a common mother…the stableman’s wife.”

“Ooh, scandalous,” Stacey said.

“Garit had noble blood. My family is an aristocratic bloodline. That’s why Garit became an imperial naval officer and Hank was meant to remain a servant mucking out horse dung.”

“But German nobility abdicated after the first World War, so it’s kind of a moot point, right?” I thought something moved behind me, in the alcove holding Garit’s skull, but saw nothing when I turned. I took a couple steps away from it.

“Not our bloodline,” Adrienne smirked. “Only the weaker European line. They are nothing now. We are the American branch, the stronger arm of the family. My ancestors made tremendous sacrifices to come to America and to get us where we are today.”

“Yeah, but those sacrifices are supposed to be, like, hard work, thrift, and perseverance,” Stacey said. “You’re not supposed to make literal human sacrifices.”

“The Hackelberend family has honored the old gods for centuries, and the gods below have provided for us in return,” Adrienne said. “It is far too late to break our bond now. Generations too late.”

“So, Evangeline and Heinrich were both murdered by Garit,” I said. “Sacrificed to their god. Enabling him to take control of Heinrich’s cattle-and-coal fortune. And the secret lodge, too?”

“Garit was always Heinrich’s superior in the lodge hierarchy,” Adrienne said, looking amused, like I was a clueless child who’d just wandered into a molecular biology lab and started poking at microscopes. “Garit was the noble child, after all. He was the one who initiated his half-brother Heinrich and had this lodge designed to accommodate the old ways.”

“Like this temple. And…whatever this is.” I approached the circular hole in the floor, sealed with wood that was mostly rotten and black. “What’s under there?”

“Nothing for your eyes to see,” Adrienne said.

“You know that's only going to make me more curious.” I approached the lever built into the wall, most of its wooden handle now rotted down to reveal a flat length of sharp steel. I’d have to touch it carefully.

“Leave the dead for the dead,” Adrienne said.

I pulled the lever. It required a lot of force to move; I was glad for my gloves protecting my fingers against the splinters and steel.

Counterweights groaned and rumbled somewhere behind the wall.

The slab of rotten wood inside the circular opening slid aside, very slowly. It was so warped and decayed that it shredded and broke into pieces as it opened, the cracked chunks of woods tumbling away into the space below.

There was a lot of space below, too. A rock tunnel dropped straight down like a well, reaching far into the depths beneath the lodge.

Stacey joined me at the edge of the circular opening, and together we shined our flashlights down into it. Even with our powerful tactical flashlights, we were barely able to see the bottom. I had to tighten my flashlight iris to create a narrow, penetrating beam, and I still had to squint.

“Are those…?” Stacey whispered.

“Bones,” I whispered.

It was like peering into the skeleton-filled catacombs below Paris, only these bodies had been strewn haphazardly, dropped from above and left abandoned.

Among the cracked ribs and broken skulls and rotten rags of clothes lay another kind of artifact: fox and boar masks, shattered into fragments.

“This is where your ancestors put the peasants' bodies.” I turned back to Adrienne.

She wasn’t there.

“Where’d she go?” Stacey asked. While we’d been looking at the bones below, Adrienne had slipped out of the room.

Well, not all the way out, because she stood at the curve of the stairs at the far end of the room from us. She was almost out of there, though, poised to fire a last verbal parting shot.

“Since you’re so interested in my ancestors, maybe you should meet them,” Adrienne said. “I would stay and visit myself, but frankly, they’re a little scary.”

She turned and left.

Something moved in the alcove where Garit’s skull was mounted.

In fact, something moved in nearly all the alcoves.

The dark, hooded figures emerged, led by the same specter who had blown the horn, the leader of the hunting party, who looked like Hank but thinner and with no facial hair. That had actually been Garit, then. His brother Hank’s ghost haunted the bedroom upstairs, and perhaps lingered around his own grave, but Hank did not lead the hunting party nor rule the island, though he was apparently not innocent and had dabbled in his brother’s occult evil himself before getting murdered.

A tremendous wealth transfer had occurred with Hank’s death. The blessings of Plutus had indeed passed to Hank’s brother Garit, first great wealth, and now a favored status after death, an eternal vacation.

The hooded lodge members closed in on either side of us as they emerged from their alcoves. The pit of sacrifices lay wide open behind us, not really a great escape route.

Ahead, Adrienne’s footsteps echoed from the stone stairs as she ran the rest of the way up to the vault door.

Chapter Thirty-One

A gauntlet of shadowy figures gathered ahead of us—the long-dead lodge members, the hunters, roused from their slumber by our intrusion. Garit, apparently the leader of the pack, wore his gilded elephant-ivory hunting horn, which I'd since learned was called an oliphant, on a leather strap over his robe.

I understood now why the temple’s center aisle was built like a wide gutter. Bloodied corpses, the bodies of the hunters’ victims, had once been dragged down to the sacrifice pit at the death god’s feet. The aisle could later be rinsed with water, and, if nothing else, the creeping dampness would gradually erode the blood with black, soil-thickened water weeping down from above, year after year.

It looked like Stacey and I might become the latest sacrifices, perhaps the first on this island in many years. Adrienne was leaving us here as an offering, one that could strengthen her dead ancestors. If we died here, Stacey and I could end up trapped on the island even after death, as ghosts to be hunted across the centuries.

That sounded unpleasant, so I screamed, “Run!” as Stacey and I charged in the only direction we could—straight ahead, into the converging mob of ghosts, toward the stairs beyond.

The ghosts looked like risen corpses. One had a face like badly rotten fruit, but thankfully most of this was concealed by its hood.

Garit, their bloodless-white leader, drew a gold-plated dagger from his robes.

Other lodge members drew their own knives. Some had boar tusks mounted in place of blades. Anyone stabbed by those might appear to have been gored to death rather than murdered, especially if one of the murderers was also the doctor who signed the death certificate.

Stacey and I turned what defensive weapons we had on them as we charged, widening our flashlight irises into floods of white light that we hoped might shield us, but the entities didn’t slow. This was their sanctum sanctorum, the seat of their power and their ghostly immortality, and we had violated it.

We bolted through the center of them, swerving to avoid their slashing blades.

The hooded hunters pursued us up the stairs as we took them two and three at a time.

Up ahead, the vault door was swinging closed. Adrienne was sealing us inside. If the ghosts didn’t kill us, we could starve to death, or die of thirst if the creeping black water proved undrinkable, which seemed very possible.

Stacey let out a bellow and threw herself against the vault door with a painful-sounding smack, grunting on impact.

I sucked in my stomach and squeezed through the remaining space, out into the hallway. Adrienne gaped at me.

“Get back in there!” Adrienne snapped.

“You’re crazy!” I replied. It wasn’t the greatest conversation, but I was focused on applying some kickboxing knowledge. I launched a foot into Adrienne’s narrow gut. She staggered back a few steps, my muddy boot print visible on her shirt, and fell to a sitting position on the floor.

I turned my attention to getting Stacey out, then shoving the vault door closed.

“Where did she go?” Stacey asked.

Adrienne had already fled.

“I’m not sure, but I’m keeping this key.” I struggled to remove the vault key from the door, which proved almost as difficult a process as inserting it.

“She’s getting away!” Stacey said.

“We’re on an island,” I said.

“But we have to warn the others that she’s a murderous nutjob.”

“That would be the right thing to do. Let’s head for the guest house.”

“What about Wyatt? He’s staying here in the lodge, isn’t he? We have to warn him,” Stacey said.

“What if he’s in on it?” I asked.

Stacey’s mouth dropped. “No! Do you think? He doesn’t seem like the type.”

“I’m not sure what type you’re looking for, but he’s rich and powerful, which seemed to be the top qualifications for getting invited to join the lodge.”

“Yikes. But if Wyatt’s in on it, then maybe all his people are in on it, too.”

“I’m guessing some of them are innocent. Maybe Darika. Probably Wyatt’s chef. Maybe all of them. We probably won’t know until we get there. Or until it’s too late.”

The sound of male voices and the growling of dogs rose around us, the supernatural hunters leaving their vault to join us in the corridor. We wasted no more time getting out of there and through the catacombs of the basement.

The nearest way out was the front door, which risked an encounter with Gary, and at the moment I didn’t really trust anyone on the island. At this point, though, if I absolutely had to trust anyone, it was probably Gary, because Wyatt and Adrienne seemed to have no idea who he was and didn't bother remembering his name.

We emerged into the front hall and ran toward the front door, past the big, shadowy animals of the African savanna.

“Excuse me, ladies?” a woman’s voice shouted. “It’s so rude of you to run out like this. We haven’t even had coffee.”

We turned to see Adrienne on the second-floor gallery overlooking the front hall.

“Tonight we hunt and sacrifice in honor of our god,” Adrienne said. “You will have the honor of serving as our sacrifice, little foxes. Your deaths will be worth more than your lives ever were. Now let's amuse the gods with a spirited chase.”

Adrienne raised a long semi-automatic rifle, the kind that gives hunters an absurdly unfair advantage over their prey, and fired at us. The crack of the rifle in the enclosed room was loud as thunder.

Stacey and I screamed and ran. The bullet struck the Cape buffalo near us. Its side exploded in a dirty cloud of cotton stuffing, decayed wooden support structure, and rotten, dried-out skin.

Adrienne kept shooting, and I’m pretty sure she was laughing, letting loose like a crazed hyena—or maybe a loon—as she fired again and again.

Stacey and I twisted and turned among the sizable hunting trophies in the room. Adrienne blasted out a huge chunk of the dead giraffe’s neck, hacking through it like a giant ax. The head and upper neck broke off and crashed to the floor, leaving only half a giraffe.

We ducked behind the black rhino. A couple of shots punched out its innards in a cloud of filthy stuffing and continued onward, undeterred, screeching over our heads like angry wasps.

Another bullet struck the front door just before I pushed it open.

Stacey and I bolted outside. A window by the door shattered as Adrienne shot it out.

Unfortunately for us, Gary was no longer posted at the front door, and his security cart was missing. We would have to escape on foot.

We ran down the road in the direction of the guest cottage where Darika and Wyatt’s entourage had gathered for the night.

“What,” Stacey gasped, “the heck is going on?”

“Worst…client…ever…” I panted.

“Shouldn’t we take the woods?”

“She’ll…need at least thirty seconds to get downstairs…and out the door…so…let’s put as much distance—”

The rifle cracked again. Adrienne was shooting at us from a second-story window instead of pursuing us on foot. Until we reached the next bend in the road, she’d have a pretty clear shot at us.

“Woods!” I said, and we ran for cover.

Without the maids guiding us—I guess they’d only been good for a one-way trip—it was much harder to find our way in the dark. Going through the woods slowed us considerably, especially since we didn’t want to use any flashlights that might make it easy for Adrienne to target us. At least the guest cottage was closer to the main lodge than the chambermaids’ cottage, indicating the higher status of its intended residents. Everyone else was there now, Darika as well as Wyatt's three other employees.

We finally stumbled out of the wilderness behind the guest cottage. We kept to the shadows and away from the moonlight as best we could, though it was possible Adrienne had her own night vision or thermal gear, enabling her to see us in the dark.

The lights in the guest cottage were all out, not surprising at four in the morning.

Something stung me, right in the chest. I thought it was a hornet at first, until I touched it and found a dart.

“Stacey, look out!” I turned back to stop her, and also to try to block her against any additional darts. I stumbled right into her, nearly losing my balance.

“Oh, hi,” she said, catching me in her arms and standing me back up.

“Someone shot me. We have to go back. We can’t…go this way.” My thoughts were going cloudy already from the tranquilizer, or maybe I was just panicking.

I tried to turn her back to the woods, but it was too late. She cried out as a dart stabbed into her shoulder.

“Let’s go!” I shouted, or maybe I slurred “Leggo!” but I definitely managed to do it loudly.

Stacey and I ran back the way we’d come, but again we couldn’t go very fast in the dark and root-cluttered woods.

A dark figure followed us.

“He’s behind us,” I told Stacey.

“What, who’s what?” Stacey asked, her voice and her legs going sluggish. “He’s who where?”

“It’s the guy. Who shot us.”

“Yeah, about that.” Stacey sat down on a log and cradled her head in her hands like we weren’t even being chased. “Who did shoot us? That’s what I don’t get. And why, Ellie? Why do people shoot us? We’re good people. I’m good persons, usually, sometimes.”

“It’s that guy.” I clicked on my flashlight and blazed its beam down the trail behind us.

He stood several yards away, completely still, watching us. He wore camouflage coveralls and a black balaclava, and of course carried a tranquilizer rifle.

He kept his distance. Time was on his side. Stacey and I would be helpless and entirely at his mercy soon.

I decided not to fold that easily. With my last bit of strength, I charged toward him, drawing my second tactical flashlight with my other hand, ready to bash him on both sides of the head, or ram the beveled front edges into his stupid balaclava-covered face. And then take a nice nap, because I was just so sleepy.

“Stop.” He pointed the rifle at me.

“No.” I swung both flashlights in pincer move, but not fast enough.

He backed away, shooting me in the ribs as he did, the dart stabbing in somewhere near my vital organs.

“You got me there,” I told the camouflaged gunman drowsily. I turned away from him and started up the trail again, thinking distantly that if I ran fast enough, maybe I could still escape. “You really…got me there.”

Then I collapsed to the forest floor, my landing not exactly softened by the wide, hard root that cracked into my ribs.

Chapter Thirty-Two

I woke slowly in a clearing, with a smell like rotten eggs stinging my nose. My entire torso ached, bruised and cut.

A mask covered my face, narrowing my vision like horse blinders, making my breath echo back into my ears.

My utility belt with all my gear was gone, along with my phone and my boots. Soft moccasins enclosed my feet instead, to make me a quieter and more challenging quarry.

I lay still, playing possum as a precaution. I moved only my eyes as I strained to see and hear whatever might be happening around me.

Something tall and dark moved at the edge of my vision, and I gradually inclined my head slightly that way, hoping the mask hid my open eyes.

The dark figure hunched over an unconscious girl who lay not far away, blonde hair spread across the dirt, a now-familiar style of fox mask concealing her face.

She also wore jeans, a green work shirt, and a denim jacket, so I realized it was Stacey and not a chambermaid. This wasn’t another ghost’s memory, infecting me like a mosquito’s saliva as it fed on me. This was happening right now.

The figure bending over her wore camouflage coveralls and a black balaclava. The guy who’d tranquilized us. It wasn’t really a surprise seeing him here.

I probed my fingers through the dirt until I found a sizable sharp rock. Before I could plan the best way to sneak up on the guy without him hearing, Stacey snapped to life with a gasp behind her fox mask, one leg kicking like a tickled puppy.

The guy took off into the woods. I breathed a sigh of relief but held on to my sharp rock in case he returned.

“Stacey!” I scrambled to her side. “Wake up!”

“I am extremely awake right now. I think. Did a cat pee on my clothes? Or yours, maybe? Or both of us?”

“Those are smelling salts. The secret lodge society special.”

“I just had the weirdest dream.” Stacey yawned and reached up, then jumped as she found the mask affixed to her face. “Okay, no, this is weirder. How do you get this thing off?”

“You don’t. They glue it to your face and then kill you and throw you in the underground sacrifice pit.”

“Right.”

“Except for Marzena. Maybe a long fall off a cliff will shake it loose.”

“Good to know.”

We got to our feet, listening for any hint that our kidnapper was returning.

In the distance, a long, low horn note sounded.

Dogs and men howled. Hooves pounded the earth.

“Now the hunters are coming for us,” I said. “This is the real sacrifice. I bet Adrienne wasn’t even trying to hit us when she shot at us. She was just getting us running.”

“Flushing us out like rabbits,” Stacey whispered. “Speaking of rabbits, is there a place we can hop to for safety? Or a hole where we can hide? We’re kind of helpless without our gear.”

“Against a girl with an automatic rifle and her most ruthless dead ancestors.” I studied the clearing where we’d been deposited, the trees growing around it. “It’s a little different, but I think I saw this area of the woods before, in Marzena’s memory. She escaped through here. There’s a path that way. Or there was a hundred years ago.”

“It’s probably heavily overgrown since then, though.”

“Hopefully it's been long enough for a tree limb to grow back. Let’s go.”

We hurried through the woods as best we could, but the sounds of the ghostly hunting party approached faster than we could run. It was hard finding our way with just the meager moonlight that dribbled through the thick, low forest canopy.

“It’s not fair,” Stacey panted at one point. “Ghosts don’t trip over rocks and roots.”

The deafening maelstrom of the hunting party grew ever closer, crashing through the woods. Unholy light flashed like lightning, giving us glimpses of hooded figures atop skeletal horses. The hooves filled the night with a sound like iron hammers striking anvils.

At one point, Stacey and I slid down a steep, rocky slope that I didn’t remember from the dream, though it seemed like a major feature. We regained our feet and kept running in the same direction, but I’d lost a lot of my confidence about being on the right path.

The hunting party approached, breaking through branches and slender tree trunks, a storm that would soon pour down on us from all sides, so changing course wasn’t a very realistic option.

We hit an impassible thicket of vines and thorns.

“Which way?” Stacey whispered as the supernatural hunting party thundered toward us. I could hear the voices of the dead men louder and clearer than ever, as if they were thrilled with the prospect of live souls and fresh meat after so long.

I stared blankly at the wall of vegetation, trying to remember scraps of a dream now mostly forgotten, like a story printed on flash paper, burned away when touched by daylight.

“Ellie!” Stacey hissed.

“This way,” I said. I wasn’t sure at all, but we had to keep moving. Staying still was certain death.

We fought around the dense thicket…and there it was, the sprawling live oak from which Marzena had made her daring escape to the sea. While the portion of the limb extending over the wall had been broken back then, many years had passed, plenty of time for the tree to regrow so it could once again offer passage over the wall.

Unfortunately, the tree hadn’t done that, but instead lay on its side on the ground, smaller trees crushed beneath it, its fallen trunk covered in years of ferns and fungus.

“Why are we stopping this time?” Stacey whispered, as the cacophony of the hunting party approached.

“That tree was supposed to be our way out.”

“Oops.” Stacey looked at the stump, as large as a kitchen table. “Looks like they chopped it down.”

“Maybe because Marzena escaped that way.”

“They didn’t have to blame the whole tree. What do we do now, Ellie?”

I took a breath, trying to draw together a new plan. “The wall’s right over there. If we can follow it to that crack over the crumbling side of the bluff, we can get out.”

“The place where you almost fell to your death?” Stacey asked as we approached the wall.

“Right. We can get outside the wall that way.”

“Then what?”

“I guess we swim across to Jekyll Island and try to get help.”

“Through the sharks?”

“How many people actually die in shark attacks each year, Stacey?”

“I don’t know, but swimming through a major shark hangout spot like The Hole is a great way to join that group, Ellie.”

“Who do you trust more, the sharks or the people on this island?” I asked.

“Gotcha. The sharks it is.”

We scrambled as fast as we could alongside the wall, thick with layers of vines, some thorny, others poisonous. Climbing up and over it was plainly a hopeless idea, even without the spikes at the wall’s top.

“I think we’re almost there,” Stacey said.

Ahead, moonlight leaked through the wall. Not much, but enough to mark the place where I'd fallen. We slowed, watching for the treacherous ground where the bluff’s edge had crumbled away beneath the wall.

The hunting party burst out of the wilderness, as if realizing we were on the verge of escaping.

A trio of oversized boarhounds stalked out and blocked the way to our planned escape. Their empty sockets and open jaws glowed with an infernal, fiery light, as if brimstone burned deep inside their guts.

They advanced on us, flames licking out of their eye holes, jaws wide to display their teeth, their drool boiling and steaming in the heat of their demonic inner glow.

Hooded riders on rotten horses surrounded us, gripping their reins with skeletal hands.

We were trapped against the wall, with no way out.

One rider came forward, a particularly strong apparition on a horse that didn’t look skeletal at all.

I expected Garit Grolman, the bleach-white ghoul who carried the oliphant horn to announce the hunt, leader of the lodge, son of Count Hackelberend and murderer of his own half-brother.

Instead, the rider’s black hood fell back to reveal Adrienne Grolman. She smiled a little at our obvious shock.

“Wait,” Stacey said. “Are you…dead? You’re with the ghosts?”

“No, I’m not dead, you fluffy-brained child,” Adrienne replied.

“Then where did you get a horse?” Stacey looked outraged. “Shouldn’t we all get horses?”

“This big fellow leads the island’s wild herd.” Adrienne smacked the stallion hard, maliciously. The horse rolled its head and twisted from side to side, as if warring with itself. “But at the moment, he is possessed by the hunting party.”

“You mean that live wild horse is possessed by one of these weird dead horses?” Stacey asked. “Is that a thing now? Do we have to watch out for that in the future?”

“You will indeed be watching out for these horses,” Adrienne said. “As you spend eternity here, hunted for sport by my ancestors. They grow weary of the same hunts, and they will be so pleased with me for replenishing their afterlife with fresh blood.”

“There must be easier ways to make your family proud,” I said.

“Yeah, like arts and crafts,” Stacey said. “There's a whole world of glitter glue out there.”

“You’re insipid.” Adrienne slipped off the horse she was riding bareback and dropped to her feet. She still wore the riding boots under her hooded black robe.

“Nice robe,” I said.

“Nice mask,” Adrienne countered.

“It wasn’t my choice. Unlike your robe.”

“All that we do tonight follows ancient tradition,” she said. “We should all be honored.”

“I wouldn’t say that’s how I feel. What’s next? You draw a gold-plated dagger and stab us through the throat? Sacrifice us to your god?”

“Don’t give her ideas, Ellie!” Stacey hissed. “At least, not ideas like that. Encourage her to go in a different direction.”

“We don’t have much choice but to sacrifice you, do we?” Adrienne asked. “It’s not as though we could allow the two of you off the island after all you’ve seen. Fortunately, tonight calls for a double sacrifice.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, but my answer arrived before she had to say a word.

Gary emerged from a narrow path in the woods, dressed in camouflage coveralls.

Wyatt followed, and Adrienne beamed at her fiancé’s arrival.

“That’s it,” Stacey whispered. “We are dead.”

Chapter Thirty-Three

“You’re all in it together,” I said. “But why bring us here at all, then? You just needed victims?”

“Darika hired you,” Gary said. “By the time I knew about it, I couldn’t do much to stop it.”

“But Darika hired you, too, right?” I asked Gary.

“You might say she was steered into hiring me,” Gary said. “I told you, I’m from Wyoming. My family’s worked for the Grolmans one way or another for generations, going back to the Old West days. I even mentioned a little of that to Darika when she interviewed me, or at least that my grandfather worked on a Grolman ranch. She probably figured it helped qualify me for the job, since the island was going back to the Grolman family, once these two got married.”

“Wait, what are you talking about?” Wyatt asked Gary.

“Gary is a Knight of the Lodge,” Adrienne said.

“What’s that?” I asked. “A title you give to lowly servants who do your dirty work?”

Adrienne glared at me. “Brother Gary has been keeping an eye on this little restoration project for my family, making sure nothing happened that could embarrass us. Unfortunately, you two happened. But now I’ll make it all work out for the best.”

“By killing us,” I said. “And dumping our bodies with all the others.”

“It’s actually true?” Wyatt asked Adrienne. “All of it? Your family used to do those things?”

“We still do, just not in this old wreck of a place.” She moved close to him and caressed his chest and stomach, making little claws with her fingernails. Then she drew a long, gold-plated dagger from her robe. “And you’ll join us, Wyatt. Like you always wanted.”

“Why…do you think I would want to do this?” He looked somewhere between surprised and mystified.

“You don’t fool me, Wyatt,” Adrienne said. “You want to belong to the very elite of society. That’s why I’m such a trophy to you.”

“You’re not—”

“You gave it away when you bought this place for our wedding, Wyatt. You didn’t do that for me. You did it for yourself. Wyatt Lanigan, strolling halls once inhabited by American aristocracy. That would certainly show the people back home, like your stupid, oafish brothers, forced to watch you rise into the most rarefied air, transmuted into royalty like lead into gold. You have the money, but you wanted the status symbols to really let everyone know you’re at the very top. Like this island. And me.”

He gaped at her for a long moment before saying, “Adrienne, you’re not just some status symbol to me—”

“Yes, I am. Don’t give me that garbage about respecting my art. My art is stupid. You look at me and see a chance to wear a crown. And you know what? I can live with that, Wyatt. I know what I am, and what I have to offer.” She pushed the hilt of the dagger into his fingers. “You can join us. You will be my king, and we will build an empire together. But you must make the sacrifice. Usually, there is more ritual than this, but it doesn’t matter. You must bind yourself to us in blood before we can be bound in marriage. But our god will provide all you need. Not just wealth, but protection against the turning wheel of fortune. And a favored place after death, so you won’t have to suffer like all the common souls.”

Wyatt looked from the dagger, which Adrienne was still trying to make him accept, to Stacey and me. “Really? Your god can provide all of that?”

“We’ll make the double sacrifice together, Wyatt,” Adrienne said. “You can even kill the pretty one if you like. I’ll do the other one. This will be our true wedding, Wyatt, in the eyes of my ancestors.”

Wyatt looked from her to us. After a moment, he nodded slightly, like he’d reached a decision.

“Okay,” he said, voice trembling.

“Wyatt, don’t,” Stacey said.

“Shh.” Adrienne scowled at Stacey, then extended the dagger to Wyatt.

Wyatt’s fingers closed around the jeweled golden hilt of the dagger as he accepted it from Adrienne.

The shadowy hooded riders moved in closer, seemingly eager to watch us become their latest quarry as we lost our lives and our afterlives for their benefit.

I tensed, preparing to fight back, to attack Wyatt once I saw which way he was going to move, and who he planned to sacrifice.

Wyatt looked from me to Stacey, as if trying to pick.

“Don’t do this,” I told him. “Haven’t you heard the one about gaining the whole world but losing your soul?”

“But that’s not what’s happening here,” Adrienne said. “In this deal, you get to keep your soul. That's the beauty of it.”

“I’m ready,” Wyatt declared, his voice strangely flat, as if he’d repressed his emotions in advance of the violence he was about to perform.

He looked right at me.

“I’ll say the prayer.” Adrienne closed her eyes.

Wyatt took a deep breath, then took a step forward and stabbed the gold-plated blade through Gary’s throat.

Gary’s eyes widened, and he staggered back, lips moving silently as blood leaked down the front of his neck. He tripped over a live oak root as thick as a steel beam and collapsed to the ground, hitting his head on another root of the same tree.

Angry whispering rose among the hooded riders. Their skeletal horses stamped and shook, reflecting their discontent. The demonic dogs snarled, their faces glowing with infernal inner fire.

“What?” Adrienne’s eyes snapped open. She drank in the scene, then bared her teeth at Wyatt. She backed away from him, toward her possessed horse and the dead hunters. “You betrayed me, Wyatt. After everything we’ve done together. After all our plans for the future. How dare you?”

“You never mentioned any of this,” he said.

“I was going to, before the wedding. And this is what you wanted. You wanted to be the elite…but you’re not. You’re garbage. A peasant. A nobody from nowhere, sad because your poor mommy died early and left you to be bullied by your father and your brothers. So pathetic to hear. Especially the second and third and fourth time. I could have made you strong, Wyatt.” She climbed onto the possessed stallion. “But you made your choice. And now all three of you will be fresh quarry for the ancestors.”

The dogs and mounted men closed in around us, each rider armed with a blade.

The riders flowed down from their skeletal mounts to the ground like liquid shadows, advancing on foot, preparing to stab us as they’d once stabbed Heinrich Grolman to death on Garit’s command.

“Wyatt, give me your phone!” Stacey said, grabbing his arm.

Wyatt passed the phone over automatically, as though barely aware of what he was doing. He stared at Gary, the man he’d stabbed, like he couldn’t believe he’d done such a thing. Maybe that ninjutsu training had been worth something, after all.

“Don’t be stupid,” Adrienne said. “Gary and I disconnected the satellite, obviously.”

“That’s okay.” Stacey accepted Wyatt’s phone and swiped the LookyLoon app.

“You’re…taking a Looky right now? Seriously?” Adrienne asked, back up on her high horse again.

“I’m hoping Wyatt saved it locally after I sent it…Okay, everybody, listen up!” Stacey turned the phone outward.

On the screen played the video Stacey had taken of the ghostly hunting party at the cemetery, one of the clips and images she’d sliced out and sent to Wyatt and Darika.

The cloaked form of Garit, leader of the hunt, rode forward, his white blur of a face featureless on the video.

I looked from the phone to the version of him that was on skeletal horseback in front of us.

“The sun rises early in the summer,” I told Adrienne. “I bet the hunting party goes to ground at first light, don’t they?”

“It’s not that close to sunrise.” Adrienne didn’t look back at me; her eyes were fixed on the phone. “What are you doing there, Ghostbuster Barbie?”

On the screen of Wyatt’s phone, Garit blew the oliphant horn three times, just as he had while Stacey and I stood there cowering that night.

Three blows had signaled the end of the hunt.

“So what?” Adrienne asked, while her stallion stamped impatiently like a swarm of bloodthirsty bugs had descended on it. She smacked it again, hard.

The ghostly hunting party, men and beasts alike, drew back from us, melting away into the forest’s shadows and gloom.

“Wait,” Adrienne said. “Wait, come back!”

“Sorry, Adrienne,” I said. “Ghosts are creatures of habit, and that horn ends the hunt for the night. And I’ll bet it’s too close to morning to get them all up and running again. Ghosts usually hate the light. I bet that goes triple for your ancestors, as evil as they were.”

“Wait!” Adrienne screamed, turning her horse this way and that, reaching out with her bare hands as if she could stop the riders from vanishing. “Please. Don’t abandon me.”

The man with the bloodless white skin and eyes, her ancestor Garit, looked at her from under his hood—but distantly, as if she were a stranger, or perhaps as if he didn’t even really see her there at all.

“Great-grandfather Garit, please,” Adrienne pleaded.

Her dead ancestor turned away and disappeared into the woods, the highest-ranking member of the lodge going to join all the others, doing nothing to aid his living heir.

The hunting party had vanished.

Adrienne lost control of her horse; free of its possessing spirit, it was a wild beast again. It had never before been ridden by a human, yet suddenly faced the indignity of finding one upon its back.

The horse thrashed in a violent rage, then reared up and pitched Adrienne off. It was a long drop to the ground from the tall stallion, and Adrienne landed hard, crying out at the impact and then lying still.

The angry stallion stomped all around the clearing, not sure which way it wanted to go or who it wanted to punish for its confusion and all it had just suffered.

“Whoa, boy,” Stacey said in a soothing tone that might have worked if the horse had been remotely tame. We did our best to stay back, away from its kicking hooves.

Finally, the horse found the same path from which Wyatt and Gary had emerged and galloped away instead of sticking around to trample us all, which was definitely for the best.

“Adrienne! Are you okay?” Wyatt ran to where Adrienne lay in the dirt, her black hood thrown back to reveal her face.

Adrienne opened her eyes and moaned. “Stupid horse.”

“Listen,” he said. “I still believe in you. Part of you. I believe there’s a part that does want to break away and be free of all this. Don’t let go of that, whatever happens. You don’t have to be…this.”

Adrienne seemed to think over his words for a long moment, then smiled slowly. “You still want to marry me?”

“Oh, no, the wedding’s totally off.” Wyatt drew back and stood up. “Just, you know, get yourself some really good, really expensive, really long-term therapy, okay? Your family ought to pay for it. It’s the least they can do.”

“You will not tell me what I need,” Adrienne said, and the air around us turned cold as winter. And I meant winter up north, with heaps of ice and snow burying people’s houses, not the kind we get way down here in south Georgia, where you can still sit on the porch in your tank top sipping iced tea.

Thick fog formed quickly from the island’s humidity, turning the woods into an almost otherworldly environment, as if the line had blurred between dream and reality, life and death.

“What’s happening?” Wyatt asked, shivering at the cold snap. He looked again at Gary, the man he’d stabbed, lying motionless and bloody on the ground, and looked away quickly. I felt bad for Wyatt's obvious mixed feelings, but I focused on the thick, icy fog rolling in from the woods.

Small, fairy-like lights glowed within the fog—candles, each held by a translucent wisp of a maid, their forms and faces barely distinguishable from the fog itself.

One leaned over Adrienne, and I saw the stitching across her head, and remembered awakening with the feeling that she’d been feeding on me.

Now she touched Adrienne, and her apparition grew sharper and clearer. Her face was almost exultant as she fed on the Grolman heir’s energy.

The other maids surged forward, a crowd of hungry ghosts who’d stumbled on a feast. They tore into Adrienne like jackals, licking their lips and snapping their jaws, animated by a century of simmering hatred and suffering.

Adrienne screamed and levitated off the ground, as if drawn upward by the force of the ghosts’ hunger, their eagerness to feed on her without mercy.

“Wyatt, help!” she shrieked.

Wyatt held back, though, staring, clearly not wanting to get in the middle of all that, as though Adrienne were now surrounded by a Somebody Else’s Problem field herself.

Then Adrienne was ripped away across the ground, dragged by angry spirits into the forest undergrowth like a bleating rabbit captured by dogs. Her screams shrank away into the distance, the fog going with her.

“What…was that?” Wyatt whispered.

“Unsettled family business, I think,” I whispered back.

We looked at the place where Adrienne had lain, and then at where Gary still lay.

“We’d better get some medics out here,” I said, speaking a little louder now. “And the police. I think Darika has a radio in her office, if we can’t get the satellite back up.”

“I'm sure I can handle the satellite,” Wyatt said, mechanically and distantly.

“And we need to check on Darika and everyone at the guest cottage,” Stacey added.

We took Gary’s keys, and Wyatt led us back the way he and Gary had come. The black security cart waited at the edge of the road.

As we drove to the guest cottage, the sky overhead was unusually bright, as if a storm had passed, taking every cloud with it, leaving nothing but emptiness and moonlight behind.

Chapter Thirty-Four

At the guest cottage, we found Darika sleeping soundly on the sitting room couch, and Farlee and Brad asleep in their beds. Everyone was accounted for except Renoir, who was nowhere in the house.

We eventually found him lying at the edge of the woods, a tranquilizer dart jutting from his arm, another from his leg. It looked like he’d been dragged out of sight once he was unconscious. He was breathing fine, but he was in for a long nap.

“Gary must have waited for Renoir to do a perimeter check, then dropped him from a distance,” I said to Stacey after we checked him over. “Makes sense. I don’t think Gary could have gotten close enough to chloroform him.”

“Should we try to carry Renoir inside?” Stacey looked at the tall, muscular man dubiously.

“We’ll check Gary’s cart for smelling salts first.”

At the main lodge, while Wyatt worked on fixing the satellite connection for our phones. I made a radio call for medical help in case Gary and Adrienne were still alive.

Once the satellite was up, Wyatt focused on getting in touch with his lawyers, which seemed a good move since he’d just stabbed a guy, potentially fatally, and Adrienne was still missing. I wondered if his lawyers would arrive by blimp.

Stacey and I finally removed our masks after dissolving the adhesive with turpentine. It was not a pleasant process.

Against my advice, Wyatt accompanied us down into the deep underground temple. I suppose he was desperate to understand what he’d nearly gotten himself into with the Grolmans and their old family cult.

Stacey and I brought electric lanterns and multiple flashlights. Though the sun was up, none of that light reached down into the temple of the death god.

Wyatt looked ill as he watched Stacey and me using pens to open the jaws of the lodge members’ skulls, mounted on their shelves like hunters’ trophies. We put a coin in the mouth of each one—a penny here, a nickel there. As Stacey had said, hopefully the ferry to the underworld was cheap.

“Will that really make a difference?” Wyatt asked.

“It may not,” I said. “But according to their own rules, it may force them to move on to the other side, to leave this island behind and face whatever fate awaits them next. We still need to bury the lodge members’ skulls somewhere appropriate. The victims’ bodies need to be removed from that shaft and given a proper burial, ideally at a Polish or Polish-language church.”

“Should we move their little headstones, too?” Stacey frowned. “Why did they even have headstones, if their bodies were down in that pit?”

“Because those weren’t normal headstones,” I said. “They were records of the lodge’s offerings to their god. We don’t even know if Heinrich is really buried under his big tombstone or if he’s down in the pit. Maybe they glued a boar mask on him before stabbing him to death, because he was ultimately a peasant in Garit's view. Anyway, the island’s cemetery isn’t a cemetery. It’s a temple complex in disguise. That’s probably why Gary was so defensive about it, because he’s a servant of that cult.”

Wyatt grimaced as he looked down at the distant broken bodies at the bottom of the rocky shaft. “I can’t believe any of this. Obviously, I’ll pay whatever it costs to get the victims where they need to be.”

Stacey put an arm around him, comforting him, a task to which she was generally better suited than me.

We placed a coin inside the jaw of each skull, like small deposits into gruesome piggy banks, then hurried to leave that underground temple forever.

Outside, I passed the huge vault key to Wyatt, the new master of the lodge. “I’m sorry for how everything turned out. Sometimes the truth is painful, and nothing works out right.” That’s me, soft and gentle, bubbling with empathy.

“I guess I really dodged a bullet with Adrienne,” Wyatt said.

“So did Stacey and I,” I said. “Nine or ten of them, at least, from her rifle.”

“She knows her way around a rifle. She says her father and grandfather sometimes take her hunting at their place on Wintertide Island.” Wyatt shuddered, as if that information had recently taken on new and unpleasant possible implications.

“Yeah, they should probably get some Canadian Mounties or whatever to check that island, too,” Stacey said. “Tell them to look in the sacrifice pit at the hidden temple.”

“And stick a toonie in each skull, right?” Wyatt said.

“A two-dollar coin?” Stacey asked. “Wow, those Canadian ferrymen of death are getting paid much better than American ones. Should we have tipped the ferryman better, Ellie? Those are some pretty nasty souls he has to transport, and we barely paid enough to operate a gumball machine.”

“I’m sure he’s seen worse,” I said. “And speaking of ferries, ours could arrive any minute.” A sound like thunder approached, and I tensed, thinking the hunting party had returned despite the daylight, perhaps to spit our coins back in our faces.

Helicopters appeared above—police and medivac. Then the local news channel. Then a charter helicopter brimming with local Georgia attorneys retained by Wyatt’s California law firm to hold the fort until they arrived. Some had helped grease the wheels of Wyatt’s lease on the island in the first place.

“We may not be leaving anytime soon, though.” I sighed. “Who wants coffee?”

Chapter Thirty-Five

Gary, surprisingly, was still alive, though in extremely critical condition.

Adrienne Grolman was found later in the day wandering the western marshes of Satilla Island, bruised, scratched, dehydrated, disoriented, incoherent, and exhausted. She was flown to the local hospital that had a wing named after her family, the same one where Marzena had stayed after narrowly escaping through the marsh. Her family or their representatives would surely arrive to scoop her up before long.

When the Charleston Crosser arrived at the wharf, Captain Walker and crew were detained by police who were still trying to piece the situation together. Nobody was allowed on or off the boat or island for hours.

It was nearly dusk when Stacey and I finally approached the ferry and saw the two extra passengers who’d come to join us.

“You’re a day early!” Stacey said, flinging herself at Jacob, pushing him back onto the ferry rather than letting him step off. “This case is closed, as far as paranormal investigation. We’re leaving as soon as everyone lets us.”

“Sounds like I was late, then,” Jacob said.

“How did you get here?” I asked Michael.

“Your guardian angel thought it was time for me to come.” Michael nodded at Captain Walker back in the wheelhouse. “He said there was a bad storm here last night, but only on this island. And people get hurt in storms.”

“Captain Walker’s traveled these islands and waterways for decades,” I said. “It’s probably best to listen to his advice.”

“Especially when his advice means I should see you now instead of later. That's advice I'll always like. So, what happened here?” Michael looked up at the manor house perched on the peak.

“We’re…definitely bound by a non-disclosure agreement,” I told him.

“Sounds serious.”

“Our clients’ attorneys will be making formal statements.”

“Wow, very serious.” He drew me closer, as if a boat crew and assorted uniformed officials weren’t all around us. “I’d like to make a statement of my own.”

“What’s that?”

“I’d better make it in private. I wouldn’t want you to blush in front of all these nice, innocent people.” He raised his eyebrows as I felt my cheeks burn. “Look at that, I already failed. So, are you going to give me the tour of the forbidden island?”

“No, never. We’re never coming back here. Let me see if the police will let us load the van onto the ferry yet.”

We could see the stars and the moon by the time the Crosser was underway. Captain Walker was taking us all the way to Savannah, saving us a couple hours of driving.

In the passenger area, one of the younger crewmates happily entertained Stacey’s questions about wildlife he’d seen from the boat, particularly manatees and dolphins, while we all shared RC Cola and Pringles.

I managed to slip away for a minute and catch Captain Walker alone.

“How did you know it was time?” I asked.

“I expected things to go bad on that island, so I’ve been keeping an eye. Once you know to watch, then you see things change. The birds feel it first, then the fish. The sharks feel it last, or they just don’t care.”

I laughed, and felt some genuine relief.

“These things that you do, regarding the spirits, will change you,” Captain Walker said, joke time over now. His eyes remained on the water, watching. “Do you understand it can leave scars on your soul?”

“Yeah, well, what’s one more for the pile, right?” I forced a laugh, trying to brush off as minor and unimportant any potential damage that constantly walking in the world of death might have done to my psyche, let alone my soul.

He didn’t buy my fake carefree attitude, though. He didn’t even try it on. “Life is for the living. Don’t bury yourself with the dead. The time for that will come on its own. You can’t stop the tide from changing.”

“Or the wheel of fortune from turning.”

“Hey, Vanna White.” He winked. “Lady Luck herself. And what happens at the end of Wheel of Fortune?”

“The bonus round?”

“At the end of every show, no matter how much you win or lose, the wheel stops turning and the lights go out. You get three rounds, maybe a bonus round, and that’s it.” Captain Walker thumped the wheel of his boat for emphasis.

“What if you become a returning champion?”

“That’s Jeopardy. Nobody gets a second turn at the Wheel. Now, let me have quiet. There’s shoals ahead.”

Later, Michael and I sat inside the cab of his truck, parked on the ferry, watching the moonlight reflecting on the surface of the water.

“Some people would say a night cruise is the most romantic kind of date,” he said.

“You’re just happy for a cheap date where we hang out in your truck.”

“Always.” He leaned over and kissed me, and it lasted a while, and I was glad we had some privacy inside his truck, shielded by the old blue van, for the rest of the trip. He was strong and warm and mentally stabilizing, and I did my best, for at least a little while, to focus on the living and forget about the dead.

Chapter Thirty-Six

In that spirit, I agreed to a thing I would normally have declined out of hand, and it terrified me, and ultimately I did it for one reason only: because I knew Michael would love it.

Okay, I also didn’t want to look chicken in front of Stacey, who was obviously going to be enthusiastic about it.

It was a few weeks later, close enough to Michael’s birthday that I could pass the experience off as a birthday present, though it was coincidental. I think Wyatt just wanted some closure with Stacey and me to help sever our trauma bonds, or at least that’s what his chef told me.

At Wyatt’s invitation, we took an afternoon sky cruise aboard his blimp—sorry, his hybrid airship, he does not like it when people call it a blimp, though everyone does anyway. Because that’s what it is, Wyatt, a blimp.

The interior of the gondola was indeed luxurious, though.

Farlee worked in the kitchen nook behind a chrome serving counter, blending smoothies and cutting some unfamiliar-to-me vegetables drizzled with vinegar and served with a tiny scoop of red bean paste. I wasn’t sure whether it was any good, because I couldn’t eat a bite. The view was filling my stomach with a big pile of nerves, leaving no room for food or beverages. Hopefully, the chef didn’t take it personally.

The walls were floor-to-ceiling clear window panels looking out on the sea islands and the ocean thousands of feet below. To make it worse, many areas of the floor were also completely transparent, like those underneath the built-in chairs and sofas clustered around a glass tabletop in the sunken central seating area. The floor beneath the glass table was clear, too, of course. It was like constantly walking on a web of narrow footbridges over a fatally high drop.

Wyatt had a private stateroom at the rear, which we weren’t invited to see. Renoir occupied a drop-down chair beside it, reading a gardening magazine, having traded his slate-black sunglasses for rimless reading glasses.

Wyatt himself stood by one of the curved window walls, giving Michael and Stacey a long-winded description of very specific technical details about the airship and how he’d improved it and had a team designing a more advanced version. Michael and Stacey soaked up the view, and Michael was probably genuinely interested in Wyatt’s chatter about the minutiae of the machinery.

Stacey sipped a green smoothie and snapped pictures of the view, taking selfies with Jacob and me and anyone else who would cooperate. Wyatt stole extra glances at Stacey, and occasionally scrutinizing ones at Jacob, like he was considering making some kind of mergers and acquisitions play.

“Holding up okay?” I asked Jacob at one point, away from the others. He’d once been in a plane crash.

“Well, I thought it would be like baby steps back toward getting on a plane someday,” Jacob said. He sat on one of the deeply piled sofas, doing his best not to look out through the windows or down through the floor. “And it sort of is. Because I’m realizing now that one nice thing about airplanes is that they hurry up and get you there as fast as possible. They don’t drag it out in a slow-motion torture session like this blimp does.”

“You mean hybrid airship,” I said.

“Whatever.”

“Here we are,” Wyatt announced, and I went to join them on the other side of the gondola. “Time to get some perspective on all of this.”

We hovered low over Satilla Island, where multiple crews were busy at work on the old buildings.

“We can’t do much about the main lodge until all those remains are settled and the government investigations are complete,” Wyatt said. “But my lawyers found a loophole that enables us to tear down some of the old, unrelated buildings as environmental hazards. We’re removing it all as fast as we can, giving the island back to nature.”

“What about the basement?” I asked.

“We will fill it in completely.” Darika stepped up on my other side, drinking cucumber juice in a martini glass.

“Including the weird old temple?” Stacey asked.

“We’re calling that the ‘sub-basement,’ but yes,” Darika replied. “It will be completely packed with rocks and dirt.”

“Sounds great,” I said. “You’ve taken all the other measures we’ve recommended?”

“That building’s been blessed and re-blessed by multiple overlapping denominations,” Wyatt said. “The old cemetery, too, where we’re plugging the door and windows to that little temple with concrete.”

“Any word on Gary?” I asked.

“He’s recovering,” Darika said. “The legal situation is fluid.”

“And Adrienne?” Stacey asked, looking at Wyatt.

He shook his head. “Her family walled me off after I refused to join their freaky murder cult. So I don’t know much.”

“Having different family religions can sometimes cause strain on a relationship,” Stacey said with a nod.

“From what I’ve heard, she’s spending time in a private psychiatric institute,” Wyatt said.

“Just like Marzena,” I said. “But she’ll probably get treated better.”

“The Canadian authorities are investigating the Grolman property on Wintertide Island,” Darika said. “But that’s sealed tight, no information available yet.”

“Where are we on Publius D. Tribune?” Wyatt asked her.

“The Wyatt Foundation has purchased his old house, the one he lost in foreclosure, and given him clear title to it,” Darika said. “That's the Wyatt Foundation, helping the homeless one step at a time. Though usually not this far east.”

“Aw, that’s generous,” Stacey said.

“A little too generous for someone who attacked us with fish hooks.” Brad sniffed.

“He deserved something for helping us,” Wyatt said. “He didn’t need to stick his neck out and reach out to me, but he did.”

“It’s ultimately just a tax deduction, regardless, and even more so after we added the solar shingles,” Darika said.

Wyatt turned to Stacey and me. “It looks like Darika made a smart move hiring the two of you. I’m scared to think how things might have gone if you hadn't been here to figure it all out.”

“I’m still not sure I'll ever have that place figured out.” I looked down at the huge bulk of the Gilded Age mansion at Satilla Island’s crest, surrounded by a high wall that was slowly cracking and crumbling into the ocean below. Someday the wall would be gone and all would be revealed. Nothing resists the wind, water, and salt forever. The tide always changes and the wheel always turns, just as Vanna White taught us. “Hey, Michael, how are you enjoying the ride?”

“Great present, Ellie. I’ve always wanted to ride in a bluh, I mean, an airship.” He clapped Wyatt on the shoulder, causing Brad to grimace slightly like he wanted to spritz Wyatt’s shoulder with sanitizer. “Thanks, man. This is really the best way to travel.”

“That’s what I’ve been telling people!” Wyatt said. “And with this model, it’s the landing system that makes the difference, because you can land anywhere in the world.”

“Why’s that?” Michael asked, and Wyatt told him. He told him a lot, for a while.

Stacey and I sat and watched the clouds drift by below our feet, and the meandering coastline far below that.

“It’s not so bad once you get used to it,” I said. “Being up here, I mean. It’s kind of surreal.”

“Just like our work,” Stacey said.

I thought about the ferryman’s warning, that our work could be damaging to the soul. He was probably right, but somebody had to stand in the breach between worlds when one opened. I wondered if it really was eating away at me on the inside somehow. I wondered if it was doing that to Stacey, too.

But on that afternoon, on a sky cruise through the heavens, through clouds that had once been considered the dwelling places of gods and angels, I put those thoughts aside.

Satilla Island was already behind us, growing smaller and less distinct, the host of evil spirits and their victims hopefully exorcised from the lodge, making way for a new generation of living things to move in and take over.

From the author

I hope you enjoyed this latest from Ellie and Stacey!

A few notes if you're interested:

Satilla Island is fictional, named after the Satilla River that empties near Jekyll and Cumberland Island, but its geography and history are inspired by those and other sea islands. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the plantation owners were replaced by the Gilded Age inhabitants—the famous Jekyll Island Club on Jekyll, the RJ Reynolds estate on Sapelo, the Carnegie estates on Cumberland Island, most notably the palatial Dungeness, whose burned-out ruins still stand, with wild horses grazing on its former lawns. Dungeness replaced a plantation house that had burned down, then itself burned down in the 1950, in a pattern similar to the story of Ellie's childhood home, though I didn't know about that when I first wrote about Ellie's childhood years ago. The Hole is a real place off Cumberland Island, filled with the Atlantic's largest sharks.

Hackelberend and Count von Ebernburg are each the mythical lead hunters in different local Wild Hunt stories in Germany. While I'd had “eccentric big-game hunter” in my Ellie story ideas file for a while, it was the combination of that with the old estates I've visited on Jekyll and the old, widespread Wild Hunt myths of Europe that made the idea click for me. My cover artist and I picked the house on the cover from stock images of various old country manor houses, and only by studying that building later out of curiosity did I learn about Bentheim stone, sourced from Lower Saxony, a place with very local Wild Hunt myths about the ghostly hunter Hackelberend.

The interesting connection there isn't just the Wild Hunt myth—there are different versions all over Europe, led by old gods or ghosts or the devil himself—but also that the Germany city of Braunschweig, or Brunswick, is also located in lower Saxony. The port town of Brunswick, Georgia, the closest town to Jekyll and Cumberland, which Ellie and Stacey visit in this book, is named for that city. To me, this was an amazing coincidence that would have increased the area's appeal to the Grolman family (as well as those members who were secretly Hackelberends and not Grolmans at all, like Garit and Adrienne). It never fit into the story in any specific way, though, so I'm mentioning it here instead, as a sort of curiosity item.

So those are my last notes on The Lodge. I'm currently at work on Ellie's next case, which involves a ghost who, according to childhood lore in one small town, emerges from doors and cabinets left carelessly open at night. You can pre-order Cabinet Jack on Amazon.

Thanks for reading these books! Subscribe to my newsletter to hear about new releases. And follow on Facebook for more frequent updates, ghost memes, etc.:

Next Ellie book: Cabinet Jack
Newsletter (recommended!)
Website (www.jlbryanbooks.com)
Facebook (www.facebook.com/jlbryansbooks)