Sarah Gilman - Ghosts of the Falls

“Aha.” He pursed his lips in exaggerated consideration. “Yes, I can picture you as feisty as Tink. It suits you well.”

“Thank you.” Her smile widened, an unstoppable force pulling the corners of her mouth up, even though she tried to keep her happiness at his comment contained. “So, Dutch, how did you come to be the one to call in an exorcist?”

He rolled down the window and stuck his arm out. “Unlike the owners of the motel, I believe in spirits, and we’ve had a well-known ghost in the area for a long time. The people who were in the motel when the fire started say they saw furniture levitate and windows shatter, so I couldn’t believe the report that the fire was electrical in origin.”

She nodded. “It’s fortunate for the motel guests that the spirit decided to go for theatrics.”

“Why’s that?”

“Judging from the article I read, they fled because of the haunting, which likely saved their lives from the fire that consumed the motel moments later.” She ground her teeth. “A few weeks ago, I would have asked myself if the spirit did that on purpose and I would have bet he didn’t want to hurt anyone.”

A minute of silence passed, and he tilted his head. “What happened a few weeks ago?”

“Well…” This was not a conversation to have with a stranger, especially a client.

“Sorry. You don’t have to answer that.”

She cleared her throat and steered around a series of potholes and a suicidal chipmunk. “Tell me about the ghost. Why is someone buried out here in the first place?”

Dutch frowned and the wind from the open window teased his brown hair. “The Hutchinson ghost is quite the legend around here. Over a hundred years ago, a logger got knocked into the river by a falling tree and fell into the gorge. Park visitors have reported numerous sightings, usually along the river below the falls, where the body is said to have been recovered.”

“Sightings? Ghosts can’t be seen, except for the most powerful individuals, who are few and far between. Ghost sightings are most often pranks.” She swallowed. They did have a strong spirit on their hands. But that strong?

He shrugged. “Local fishermen report having spoken with a young man, and out-of-state tourists have said the same thing. None of them thought they were talking to a ghost at the time.”

“If they were able to see him at all, he’d be transparent.”

“Not according to the stories. Solid as you or me. Some report shaking hands with the guy. But later, he’d disappear.”

“Hmm.” She ran her fingers over her braided hair, trying to disguise massaging a tensing muscle in her neck. “Spirits powerful enough to assume corporeal form are the rarest kind. There have only been a couple observed by exorcists in recorded history. I would say someone was playing a prank on the park visitors, but there is a spirit here, no doubt about it. That issue aside, what else happened the day the logger died?”

“What do you mean?”

“It takes a significant event or events to bind a spirit to earth. His death must’ve been horrifying to experience, yes, but neither that nor the unusual burial can be responsible for his continued presence here.”

“Nothing else happened that I know of.” Dutch glanced down and to the left, a sure sign of another lie. Or, perhaps, he was looking at her legs?

She wiped her clammy hands on her jeans. Here she was discussing her job and he hadn’t mocked her once. Could the man get any sexier? “It’s nice to be able to talk openly about my profession. Even polite people have trouble hiding their skepticism most of the time.”

He grinned, and she couldn’t avert her gaze. Good thing she was driving slowly. She forced her attention to the road and yanked her thoughts away from Dutch. She had a problem. If the Hutchinson ghost was powerful enough to assume corporeal form, he was in a good position to try to stop them from reaching the grave and binding him.

Stay on your toes, Jade .

…

They crossed a covered bridge, and Dutch directed Jade to pull over to the side of the dirt road. He climbed out of the car, pleased that his first trip in a motor vehicle would also be his last. Nauseated, he swallowed and took a deep gulp of forest air. The familiar scents of pine and rotting leaves eased him, as did the illusion of life the act of breathing in and out offered.

“Hard to believe this area was logged.” Jade walked around the car, a canvas satchel hanging from her shoulder, her face upturned to the trees.

“The Vernon Logging Company completely cleared this area of mature trees in the eighteen hundreds, but nature has a way of reclaiming the land.” He tapped his knuckles against the thick bark of a maple so large and gnarled it must have been a small sapling left by the loggers. This tree has been alive as long as I’ve been dead .

“Any relation?”

“Pardon?”

“Vernon Logging Company. Relations of yours?”

Shit . He’d given his old boss’s last name when he’d spoken on the phone with her brother. “Oh, yes. I’m a descendant.”

Not entirely a lie. In the end, the company had been more like family than his blood kin.

“This way.” He pointed out a smear of orange paint on the trunk of a pine tree. “The park maintains a rough trail. It’s not heavily traveled, but the area where the grave is located is the best place to view the falls, so a few people make the trek now and then. May I carry your bag for you?”

She adjusted the strap. “Thank you, but I’m fine, both with the bag and on the trail.”

He grinned, pleased. His experience with women wasn’t what many people would think—prim and pretty ladies in their Victorian dresses, expecting men to carry everything for them and lay coats over puddles while they sat around drinking tea. Those images were far from the whole truth, at least for Vermont women. He didn’t find anything wrong with chivalry, but life in New England was a tough one for most, and the reality had been that women worked just as hard as men to survive.

These days, many of the women who visited the park lacked the grit he found attractive in women. They complained about imperfect cell service, about bugs, about building a fire, about boredom, and everyone seemed to have allergies. What they needed was a Vermont winter without electricity or vehicles, living on the food they grew and slaughtered during the summer.

Many of the women he’d observed would complain about the difficulty of this trail. Not Jade. She stepped past him and called over her shoulder, “Are you coming?”

“Of course.” He followed her off the packed dirt of the logging road and onto the layers of rotting leaves and pine needles of the forest floor. The rough path meandered around trees and granite outcrops as it guided them downhill, the terrain steep and muddy. The river rushed over a shallow, rocky bed to their right, and the ground leveled as they got closer to the gorge.

As they progressed, Jade picked wildflowers—they were abundant in the area above the falls, far more so than the rest of the park.

“What are you doing that for?”

“They have a purpose, trust me.” A feminine gasp escaped her lips when she spotted a wild rose bush, a massive beast of a plant that grew over a rocky outcrop and up a white birch tree. Palm-sized red blooms sagged a bit under the weight of morning dew. Jade stared with a hand over her mouth.

Were roses in the woods not common? He knew of several in the vicinity. So caught up in watching her, he walked into a tree, almost losing his physical form in surprise.

“Are you all right?” She rushed toward him, stumbling a bit on loose stones.

He brushed a leaf from his hair and straightened his shoulders. “You didn’t see that.”