Haunted Page 4

  I discovered two interesting journal entries from a lady who might have taught at the school. If true, it was my introduction to a ghost or apparition that was associated with the Cadence house in later years—the woman on the balcony, I came to think of her. Or young Mrs. Irene Cadence.

  In January 1939, the teacher wrote: “I am much vexed by the tantrums in recent days of otherwise good children who are from good homes. Today, Mary, a subdued girl who earns fine marks, excited the class when she ran outside, pulling at her hair and screaming. She did so without cause and despite the frigid weather. This incited other children to follow, some who claimed to hear a woman crying on the balcony. I blame this on deer fever, not the tragedy said to have occurred in this house. Girls at a certain age are sensitive and such stories impress deeply. Mary’s temperature, however, was normal when we finally calmed her and warmed her near the fire . . .”

  Another entry, dated February 1939: “Five children have now been sent [home] by a blistering of the skin, mostly of the hands and wrists but thrice in the appearance of blisters or carbuncles on their faces. A painful tenderness near my cheek warns that I, too, have been infected, as do recent nightmares. How wretched the screams of that poor woman on the balcony! We expect a visit from Dr. Hansen of Ft. Myers most any day now . . .”

  The producers of Vortex Hunters had found these same lurid tidbits. I confirmed it by downloading an episode entitled “The Malediction of Cadence Place.” Most of it was sensational nonsense but did include some history that was useful—especially a few facts about Charles Cadence’s wife, Irene. That’s how I knew she’d been considered a woman of great beauty with skin the color of “parchment” and raven-black hair.

  The house had remained empty until the 1960s, when it was remodeled by an artist—a member of New York’s avant-garde and a friend of LSD proponent Dr. Timothy Leary. One December night, he fell from the balcony and died. The coroner’s report listed alcohol and “other drugs” as contributing factors.

  I had shared this information with Birdy. She had delighted in the stories because they were fun to hear, the two of us alone in the empty house, but she wasn’t frightened—until now. I lifted her chin and asked, “Does it still throb?”

  “Like I got jabbed by a hot needle. The thing crawled from my cheek into my hair—I can still feel it. What I need is a mojito and a bath. How far’s the nearest hotel? I bet they have a bar.” She finished buttoning her blouse, the starched collar unusual for camping, but it looked good, the way it framed the angles of her face.

  I said, “On the bright side, we don’t have to worry about palmetto bugs.”

  “Enough with the palmetto bugs. They’re cockroaches, only bigger and they can fly,” she said. “Just a nicer name. I hate roaches, too. In college, there was a garbage strike and roaches took over our dorm. Middle of the night, a girl would scream, I didn’t even wake up, it got to be so common. That was before I switched to law and moved out of the liberal arts wing, which had a lot of flaky people to begin with.” Birdy paused. “Cockroaches, scorpions—I’m not sleeping in that room anymore, so forget it. Just wait until one bites you.”

  I knew we needed another hammock and a box of bug bombs if we were going to spend a night or two in this place. Bunny Tupplemeyer’s attorney had said overnighting wasn’t a must but could be useful. He had decided that evidence the house was not haunted would help prove his claims were based on law, not superstition.

  From the SUV, I’d brought canvas chairs and she sat—but not without first flipping the thing to check for visitors.

  “They sting, not bite,” I said, while I filled a Ziploc with ice from a cooler that contained tea, bottled water, and a few yogurts. “When I was ten, maybe twelve, one nailed me on the thumb while I was stacking firewood. Then, a few years ago, I picked up a tarp and got it in the palm of my hand. Ice helps. Try this.” I handed her the bag.

  “Did you cry?”

  “I wanted to.”

  She said, “Hardass. I should’ve known.”

  “No, it’s the way things are on the islands.” I was referring to the house where I had grown up and where my mother, Loretta, still lives, in a little fishing village, Sulfur Wells, across the bay from Sanibel and Captiva Islands on Florida’s Gulf Coast. Birdy had been there often enough that I didn’t have to say the house was older than the house we were in. Or that it sat on an Indian pyramid built of shell. “Outside, mostly, we find little reddish scorpions, but no worse than ant bites. The big black scorpions, like those in there”—I tilted my head toward the hall—“they’re common on the shell mounds. Burns like fire, I know, but the pain goes away if you don’t have a reaction. I’ve heard they came from Cuba or Mexico on the Spaniards’ boats, but I don’t know that’s true. Loretta doesn’t like them, but she hates cockroaches worse, so you learn to get along. You never find cockroaches in a house that has a scorpion.”

  “You’re telling me you grew up living with scorpions?”

  “It’s not like I kept them as pets.”

  “But they’re there. In your house, I mean. Right now, not just years ago.”

  “Loretta’s house, yes.”

  “Incredible. My mother, the queen of nonviolent hippiedom, would freak out. Call in the napalm or set the house on fire. That woman won’t even eat eggplant because it’s sliced like steak. Did she ever get bit?”

  “Loretta? Once that I know of. It was hiding under the toilet seat. She came running out with her skirt around her ankles, mad as a hornet. First time I ever heard her use the F-word. Plus some other words I was too young to recognize. That woman has a mouth on her.”

  Birdy laughed, her spirits improving.

  I borrowed my Uncle Jake’s philosophy to counsel her. “Don’t bother them, they won’t bother you. Cockroaches are a different story.”

  She nodded at that and stared into the fire. Finally said, “It snowed in Boston today, but here I am sitting with little Miss Hannah Sunshine and nursing a scorpion bite. I could sure use a mojito. If you ever talk me into camping again, I’ll bring a couple of pitchers.”

  It wasn’t true that I’d had to convince her, but I conceded, “A mojito sounds pretty good right now.”

  Birdy reached for her flashlight, which I’d found in a pile of glass. She used it to check the ceiling for the umpteenth time, the crystal chandelier frosted with cobwebs and dust, moonglow through the main window. Next, the walls, as if searching for enemy snipers. Then she switched the light off and placed it on the floor near her pistol—the pistol holstered, no belt—and refocused on the fire, finally relaxing a little as the Benadryl kicked in.

  “How long you think before we can go through my suitcase?”

  We? I almost asked, but guessed that half an hour was a reasonable period. I had dragged her bag into the hall and sprayed it with mosquito spray. Deep Woods Off! was the only thing I had to convince scorpions there were better places to hide.

  Birdy muttered something while craning her neck, then said, “This must have been a beautiful house back in the day. Weird. Build a place like this out here in the middle of nowhere. Lonely as hell, too, especially for the guy’s wife. What was her name?”

  “Irene. Irene Cadence. She was seventeen and he was forty when they married. Irene wasn’t quite thirty when he died. I couldn’t find what happened to her after that—nothing factual anyway. According to the TV show, she went insane, haunted by guilt or loneliness—that sort of stuff. But they made that up, had to. It was their way of explaining why a teacher and her students claimed they heard a woman crying up there.” I pointed up to what had once been a music room. It opened through French doors onto a balcony that faced east and a line of trees along the river’s bank.

  Birdy said, “She probably went stark raving mad out of boredom. Wouldn’t you have hated to be a woman back then?”

  I replied, “My aunts and grandmothers were—sons
were a rarity among the Smiths. My two great-aunts, Sarah and Hannah, they had it rough, the way they lived—this was the early 1900s. About the same time this house was built. They raised their own food, chopped firewood and sold it. Not together. I don’t know why, but they went their separate ways.” After a moment, I smiled. “Sarah and Hannah didn’t have much luck when it came to finding men either.” I hadn’t mentioned the Peeping Tom. Talking about men was a way of working into the subject without causing a panic.

  Birdy asked, “That old book you brought, it belonged to one of your aunts?”

  I don’t know why I was surprised she had paid attention to what I was reading earlier. She was a trained sheriff’s deputy after all. “It’s a journal I found in Loretta’s attic,” I said. “Remember me mentioning my great-uncle to the attorney? I went through his papers.”

  “Her attorney’s gay,” Birdy said, “but he still had the hots for you. You didn’t notice?”

  I was flattered but stayed on topic. “The journal belonged to my Great-great-uncle Ben Summerlin. Maybe three greats back—from the late 1800s. It was in a box I found when I was about thirteen or fourteen, but I still haven’t managed to read it all. A lot of pages are stuck together like they got soaked. Or maybe just age. And he used abbreviations—old-timey sort of language. Code sometimes, too. He was a man who didn’t enjoy writing, you can tell. If one word would do, that’s what he wrote. ‘Captain Summerlin,’ people called him. He was a cattleman and a blockade-runner. He owned a forty-foot sharpie, Widow’s Son. And a dory named Sodbuster.”

  “A what?”

  “Sailboats. They weren’t big, but not so small either. They didn’t draw much water.”

  “Why’d he name them that?”

  “He didn’t say . . . or I haven’t gotten the right pages unstuck. There’s no telling how people name boats.”

  Birdy said, “In cowboy movies, sodbuster is what the bad guys call farmers, isn’t it? Interesting name, I guess.”

  I had found a journal entry a lot more interesting than that, which I had already shared with Birdy without naming the source. It mentioned a box of coins my long-dead uncle had lost after being chased by Union soldiers. He had run his dory aground and scuttled it.

  100 silver dollars gawn, he’d written with an ink quill pen some months later. The date: December 1864. Jettisoned, hidden, or stolen, the journal had yet to reveal.

  Birdy, remembering, asked, “What would a hundred silver dollars be worth now? Captain Summerlin, I like his name.”

  “Two or three thousand dollars,” I said, “depending on their condition. I looked it up on the Internet. Silver dollars is how they paid cattlemen in those days, Union and Confederates both.”

  “He sold to both sides?”

  “Some did,” I said, and let my eyes move around the room. “This had to be a good area for cattle. That’s not much of a river out there, but I bet it was like a highway in those days. Captain Summerlin might have mentioned it in one of his later entries. Not by name, but the location seems about right.” Then I tried to get back to the subject of men by asking, “That archaeologist we met, Theo Ivanhoff, did he seem a little strange to you? In an odd, sneaky sort of way?”

  Even when she is yawning from Benadryl, Birdy’s brain works faster than most. “I knew you didn’t like him. That’s why you bit his head off when he went on a talking jag—all because of your uncle the blockade-runner. There had to be a reason. You’re usually so polite.”

  She was right about the professor. I didn’t like him.

  “I wasn’t mean about it, I just corrected him,” I replied. “I’m glad to hear you say talking jag. I thought you were hanging on every word. That man doesn’t know when to shut up.”

  “No,” Birdy said, giving her hair a flip. “I was picturing him in the shower. I bet you were, too.” Said it in a fun, devilish sort of way, her mood back to where it had been before a scorpion landed on her face. “I’ve got forty credit hours in archaeology. Might have majored if the guys were better-looking. Theo’s a five, ordinarily, but he is a solid twelve on the King Tut scale.”

  The timing was right to discuss the man I had seen peeping. I started to say, “Oh, I forgot to tell you. When I went outside to get the first-aid kit—”

  Three soft raps on the door interrupted me.

  “Who the hell could that be?” Birdy said. “Probably teenagers getting a jump on Halloween.” She reached for her pistol. “Stay here. I’ll go.”

  Dr. Theo Ivanhoff was trouble. I sensed it, and, before the night was done, he would prove it by trying to sneak a wedge between Birdy and me. Instigate an argument, play one off the other—I had seen this method before.

  Even with her sheriff’s deputy instincts, Birdy seemed oblivious. The two of them had archaeology, an empty Friday night and loneliness in common. She liked the shape and size of the man, I suppose.

  Softened by firelight, Theo was decent-looking, I had to admit, but in a way I consider feminine, like a sheik in a silent movie. Smooth skin, gaunt, his hair combed back just right, and dark eyes that were more alive for the angles of his face. But the angles were slightly off, pinched like a ferret, a man who sniffed his opponents before deciding how to behave. His clothing was a warning, too, the way it demanded attention: black jeans, a black collarless shirt buttoned tight, no belt, no socks, his billfold on a chain like he’d just climbed off a Harley or out of bed. Add a white collar, he could have passed for a priest vacationing in Hawaii.

  When Theo noticed me staring, he said, “You’re still not convinced it wasn’t me. Are you?”

  I had told Birdy about the peeping man while I observed Theo, but there had been no reaction, just amused patience. Like I was a child. I said, “The nearest house is two miles on the road to Arcadia. The main road is half a mile—more, I’d say—but your trailer’s close, right there by the river. Don’t sound so offended. You’d think the same if you saw what I saw.”

  He had the irritating habit of hooting “Well, now!” a cartoonish signal of victory or discovery. He used the device before saying, “You don’t know anything about this area, do you? If you don’t mind walking, I can take you to where forty people are camped not more than a mile from here. Or get in my canoe, there are houseboats hidden in some of those bends, the trees so thick you couldn’t spot them from the air. I said it wasn’t me. Now, in essence, you’re calling me a liar.”

  In essence—an educated man who draped words like fashion scarves.

  Birdy said, “She’s not accusing you,” then swiveled in her chair to me. “Anyway, he wasn’t breaking any laws.”

  “This land is posted,” I said. “Why didn’t he stop when I asked who he was?” I turned to Ivanhoff. “You had to get written permission to stay here, didn’t you?”

  Theo, settling back now that I was on the defensive, said, “The investment group invited me. I didn’t have to ask.”

  I should have expected that. Earlier, he’d spent twenty minutes telling us how important he was, saying, “Federal law requires they bring in an expert before they cut down every damn tree for miles and build houses. Or whatever cardboard community they’re planning. But they can’t touch the place until I say it’s okay. I’ve been here a month and I’m in no hurry. The so-called lead archaeologist only stops by on weekends—and only if his arthritis isn’t acting up, the old prick. Recceology’s not his strong suit, so I’m the person actually in charge.”

  Recceology was the study of battlefields, he’d explained. Civil War battle sites had to be mapped before they could be bulldozed. Even minor skirmishes, like the one that had taken place here, between the house and the river, in 1864 or ’65. Theo hadn’t said what his actual work was, though, nor had he invited us into the areas he had cordoned with rope. Three areas, about a quarter acre each. There were dirt mounds and sifting screens, signs posted by the government that read Federal Antiquities
Site. Access Prohibited.

  Theo had done some probing, too, by asking Birdy, “What kind of development does your aunt have in mind? Condos or a planned community? They’re keeping it all hush-hush, which is just stupid. They’re better off if I know.”

  I didn’t trust the man but found some of what he had to say interesting. The same with his references to the nearby RV campground and houseboats, because those were the people I needed to speak with. Then I made a mistake by asking, “You’re what’s called a ricky-ologist? Are there other Florida sites you’ve excavated?”

  An expression of contempt flared while he corrected my pronunciation, then he had expounded on his expertise. Twenty minutes, we’d stood there listening.

  I didn’t want to risk another lecture now, so I cut the man off before he could start, saying to Birdy, “I bet your aunt’s insurance company considers trespassing a crime.”

  “The grande dame of Palm Beach,” she said to Theo. “My aunt’s just an investor, not the owner. Well . . . this part of the acreage is assigned to her, I guess. But we don’t arrest people for trespassing unless there’s a complaint.” Taking the middle ground before taking sides. Then she tried to dismiss it, saying, “A week before Halloween, a place like this is bound to attract some weirdo visitors. Drunken kids, the UFO types.” Birdy caught herself before adding That’s why we’re here.

  Theo eyed her for a moment. “You’re right. That’s why the RV park’s full.” Then turned his sights on me. “Why do you call her Birdy when her name’s Bertie?”

  Birdy warned, “Because she wants to,” and continued with what she was saying. “The house has a reputation—all that paranormal baloney, so who cares? I say we find a hotel and get a drink. It’s still early and, let’s face it, we can’t sleep in a house full of scorpions.”