Randy White - Haunted

I had the keys to the padlock, planned to enter the house anyway. I wanted wood samples from the floors and walls-especially wood from near the fireplace. Eighty years earlier, a teacher had written of blistered skin and the aberrant behavior of good children. Last night, in a flashlight’s beam, the joists had glittered with sap. Pine sap, I had assumed. Now, however, after researching manchineel and mimosa trees, I suspected it wasn’t true.

My reasons for seeking a rational solution were selfish, but in a yearning, hopeful sense. I am a believer in good and evil. I choose to believe that a divine purpose cushions whatever tragedy befalls us and that order is of the highest design. There is no room in my faith for haunted houses or supernatural devilry. If there was a solid explanation, I wanted to know it. My faith is shaken often enough by reality.

That’s why I wanted those wood samples. First, though, I went back to work on the journal, hoping to read at least one more page. The result was disappointing: days or weeks after fighting had occurred here in 1864, Ben Summerlin had used ink to obliterate what he had written-two full pages. Then he had sealed those pages with daubs of tar.

His last entry about the incident was penned two months later and among the first I had read as a teenager, sitting in the attic of my mother’s house. Frustrated, I now skipped ahead and read the passage one more time:

December, 1864 (Punta Rassa Cattle Dock): Gossip tween Tampa & Key West says I kilt Sodbuster & God knows who else in the switchbacks of some damnt river when drunk. This aint true. It werent cause I was drunk I left behind a box of silver Liberties & the purtiest little dory this coast ever seen. What happened is Union Blues took me by ambuscade at night & I out run them. Figured they was bandits. A cable length from the Crossing I opened the seacocks & did not wait to watch Sodbuster sink. 100 silver dollars gawn & the purtiest little dory. I have never been so drunk as to abuse a vessel purty as Sodbuster. Better she is on the bottom than with bandits is what I thot. Same with them silver Liberties. So to hell with them that gossips of murder & drunkenness & thievery. I got a ranch in Cuba what needs tending. Florida is a might warm for me now…

When I was a girl, Capt. Summerlin’s language and allusions to danger and treasure had struck me as romantic in a Pirates of the Caribbean way. But they also left unanswered questions that were never addressed in later entries-an oversight, I had believed.

Not now. The man had been in fear for his freedom. Trivializing the matter, then dismissing the subject, had been his way of closing a door. By referencing Havana, he was also addressing the subject of murder. A hard-nosed sea captain cared nothing about rumors. But he knew the law. That’s why he had blotted out the facts and sealed them with tar before sailing south.

Tar… I closed the journal, pleased I had guessed right about exposing it to the heat of a fireplace-until I remembered that Theo had seen some of these entries. But after reflecting for a moment, I felt better about that, too. Captain Summerlin had been so vague about his dory’s location-a cable length from the Crossing -that Theo’s chances of finding it were less than my own. Besides, he was after the paymaster’s gold or John Ashley’s fortune, not a measly one hundred silver dollars.

I did feel a frustrating sense of loss, however, about the blotted passages. An expert might know how to retrieve my great-uncle’s lost history, but it would have to wait. Daylight and the photographs I wanted could not.

I stepped out of my SUV, opened the trunk, and got the camera ready.

WHY WAS a woman dressed like me, with hair as black as mine, inside the music room off the balcony?

I wasn’t imagining the ghost of Mrs. Irene Cadence-because I didn’t see the woman. Not at first.

The camera did.

The biologist had loaned me an expensive 35mm with a tripod and a wireless shutter attachment after I’d mentioned how much I admire the Everglades work of Clyde Butcher: black-and-white landscapes of cypress and saw grass that captured subtleties of color better than any color shots I have ever seen.

“In the hands of the right photographer,” the biologist had explained, “a fine lens reveals details the human eye can’t see.”

What a lovely notion, I had thought at the time.

The observation didn’t seem so fanciful now.

The biologist had loaned me a fine lens, too-a Canon 24mm with incredible light-gathering capabilities. It also had an incredible price tag-I’d checked-so I was extra careful as I set everything up and took a few practice shots outside the gate.

The house became my subject. Harsh sunlight flared off the windows. It put an icy edge on falling leaves. I snapped a few images on full auto, then experimented with slower shutter speeds. To avoid camera shake, I used the Remote button and kept my distance. After a half dozen or so, I checked my work on the LCD view screen.

Nice shots. The wide lens allowed the house to be itself, old and rambling, aloof to trees that had shaded it for a hundred years. Brash sunlight was transformed into saffron and bronze. The porch off the sitting room was a cavern of shadows. Above it, the balcony was bright as a New Orleans stage but solemn for its emptiness.

Or so I thought until I saw what the lens had seen.

Three frames in, there she was: a blurred image through the upstairs window. A blouse of lipstick red, a face as translucent as moonlight. But tiny because of the wide-angle lens. My head swiveled between the LCD screen and the house while I checked two more frames. In the next shot, only a smear of her shoulder appeared… then the women’s face in profile, but no more detailed than an antique cameo. She wasn’t overweight like the witches, nor was she silver-haired like Lucia. This woman was young, lithe, full-breasted.

The woman on the balcony…

The ghost story about Irene Cadence came into my mind, a lady of great beauty with raven-black hair. It couldn’t be her, though. Ridiculous, even to linger on the possibility. But, if not… who had the lens discovered?

I looked up from the gate, studied the window, then yelled, “Hello? Are you there?”

Not now, she wasn’t. I opened the gate, took a few steps but lost my courage. So I returned to the camera-which is when I realized that I was wearing a blouse of copper red. Not as bright but similar. And I, too, had black hair, although it was pulled back in a ponytail. The explanation was obvious: I had photographed my own reflection.

Of course!

I was convinced. But the feeling didn’t last. The woman in the photo couldn’t be me. I was at ground level. She was upstairs behind the French doors that connected the balcony to the music room. It was an impossible angle. Or was it? I turned and looked. My SUV, with its big mirrors, was behind me. If the sun had hit a mirror just right, and if I was standing just so, and if the light had ricocheted upward…

The solution was too complicated. What I needed was a closer look at the photos.

The camera’s electronics were high-tech. It took a while to figure out how to zoom in on the LCD screen. A toggle switch, click by click, magnified the image, but was no help. The woman’s image was soon so pixelated, she vanished in a shattering of red and moonglow skin. That caused me to wonder if my imagination had reconfigured oak leaves and light into a female form. Another look at the images proved it had not.

Well… there was an easy way to settle the matter. I would go inside the house. First, though, rather than leave the camera unattended I returned to my SUV and opened the back. When I did, a startling option presented itself. Piled against the seat were a blanket and a few towels. Beneath them, I had hidden the pistol that Birdy had wanted to see. There was a loaded magazine, too.