Randy White - Haunted

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 great s 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.