Haunted

13

15 October, 1864 (aboard Sodbuster) [LOCATION AND FIRST FOUR LINES BLOTTED]:… the Spaniard is a member of the Craft & what them 3 gerillas did to his wife and t’other woman now bind us by Sacred Obligation. The use of a cable & a tongue cutting might be due we will see. Glass rising and damn cold. Good NE wind for long reaches, a Lords blessing…

17 October, 1864 [no location]: Unknown raiders has sent them three Yankees to hell & now has the 4” guns from Labelle altho it aint much of a fort being only tents & a sutlers shed. But no help to a woman who kant talk for screaming prayers to a God who aint traveled this far inland. Sheepherders madness, the Spaniard calls it. This being a sickness that afflicts women in lonely country. But the Spaniard knows good as us that a bullet is his woman’s only cure. They was 5 Yankees she says now. Not 3.

On this windy Saturday before Halloween, the Cadence house looked forlorn and restless when I arrived at a little after six. It was not as busy as predicted, but I’d seen two big-tired trucks, one loaded with teenagers, on the access road when I turned in.

I was glad they were gone. The sky had descended on gray streaming clouds, but there was still plenty of light for photos. That gave me time, so I allowed myself to reread my recent discoveries in the journal.

I don’t know why I felt compelled to do so. My great-uncle’s callousness was as upsetting as the tragedy that had befallen a woman who was nameless and faceless to me. She hadn’t lived here in the old house, but I had walked the ruins of her property and life earlier that morning. I felt sure it was the homestead a mile downriver.

The “Spaniard”-a Brazilian timber grower-had been a master brick mason, as the cistern proved.

Sheepherder’s madness, he had said of his wife. The man sounded slightly mad himself, although I could force myself to understand. My well-educated friend Birdy had remarked on the difficulties that women faced when isolated by wilderness. But neither of us had projected the danger of living in a spot that might attract roaming bands of soldiers who were far removed from home and their own conscience. Little food, no salt, but time enough to get drunk-someone had stood by that cistern and emptied bottles of strong ale from Massachusetts.

A woman who could only scream prayers, not speak, had endured more than I wanted to think about but couldn’t help imagining.

Five men. Not three, she had said.

Brutes. The word was not strong enough.

Predators-it ignored the pile-on savagery of pack behavior.

Inhuman…

The word worked, but wasn’t quite right. Sadly, it described the behavior of more than the woman’s attackers. Captain Summerlin could be included after the threats he had penned. Hang the men with a cable, cut out their tongues. I could only project from his cryptic wording. To then reference a Sacred Obligation had the taint of blasphemy. But who was I to say what was conscionable and what was not during such a war? A man of my own blood had lived it. He had seen and done things his own way.

20th October, 1864 (Ft. Thompson, Labelle): The Federals sent Gen. Woodbury from Key West with a fresh troop in new uniform & kit to Ft. Myers & shoot our cattle where they stand. Goddamnt let them come. No one expected these sorts & it has turnt the stomach of even them that backs the North. For the price of a bushel of salt we expect the pleasure of settling this matter. Says Bro. Gatrell: lure the enemy so close it’s up to God to decide who lives or dies. I says Amen. 4” canon loaded with nails & pig shit will make quite a party for them who wants to dance. For them who runs, the fat pine is strung at every fence row. The Gerillas has been loosed & hells flames is ready…

Gerillas. Captain Summerlin had meant guerrillas, of course, a man who had seen much of the world but seldom the inside of a schoolhouse. There was no confusion, however, regarding his remarks about fat pine and hells flames.

I knew exactly what he meant. My mother’s old house is built of heart-of-pine-fat pine, or lighter wood, as it is known. Lumber so crystalized with turpentine, you can’t drive a nail through it even after a hundred years of curing. But a single match can cause a wall-or a fencerow-to explode into flames.

The knowledge produced in me an irrational shame for events that had occurred generations ago. Why hadn’t Capt. Summerlin blotted out his threats? Even with his coded mix of apostrophes and numbers, they were readable to someone willing to invest the effort. I had proven that. The man had protected himself in earlier entries but now laid the truth bare.

Why?

The question led to a truth I felt, not thought: this entry was Capt. Summerlin’s declaration of war. He had finally chosen a side, yet his convictions were neither blue nor gray. Revenge was the motivator but his true allegiance was to Florida. Vanquishing invaders was his goal. He and friends had baited a trap with salt-bushels of salt, of all things!-and those who entered were to be fired upon by cannon. For those who escaped, there was no escape. I had helped Belton Matás pace the distance from the cistern to a fencerow. Fifty long strides, for a man sprinting for his life. No evidence of fire remained, but I suspected it had once been a barrier of flames.

The scorched bricks we’d found came into my mind. The scorched bones I had seen behind the Cadence house materialized behind my eyes.

The leather-bound journal was on my lap. Once again, I attempted to open the next few pages. Used my fingernails, then a fingernail file from my purse. As I knew from experience, this had to be done gently, couldn’t be forced, so I had to govern my eagerness to confirm what I knew in my heart: Ben Summerlin and friends were the unknown raiders who had killed three Union soldiers near Labelle. Weeks later, they had laid a trap of cannon and flames on an unnamed river-this river. Lift my eyes, I could see the tree canopy that shaded water flowing a quarter mile away. My great-uncle had been among the gerillas set loose, a band of cow hunters turned man hunters. They had orchestrated the killings of an enemy who had perished under fire and in flames. Then he and his friends had allowed the dead to burn while digging shallow graves. What else explained scorched bones?

It was a time of war. Loathsome crimes had been committed. But I also had to wonder if greed had played a role. Belton had told me of the Union paymaster who, in 1864, had been sent to purchase cattle and pay troops at Fort Myers, but his boat had been ambushed by four-inch cannon. Rather than let the Confederates take the gold, he had jettisoned the money. No… Belton had clarified that point-the Cow Cavalry had ambushed the paymaster, not Confederate soldiers.

It was impossible to believe all these elements were coincidental.

Greed-it sullied whatever justice had been done. But who was I to say? I hadn’t suffered that poor woman’s pain and I was looking back from the distant, distant land of almost two centuries. Any attempt at moral judgment only proved my own callowness. My family disloyalty, too. Yet the shallow graves I had viewed that morning still nagged at my conscience. The graves were haphazard… indifferent… chaotic-but there was something else that troubled me. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. The answer, I hoped, was hidden between these damn stubborn pages that I continued to pry into and cajole.

Finally… finally the paper began to separate from the glob to which it had been adjoined for decades. I put an eye to the open space and was disappointed to see the first lines of the next page had been scribbled black. When I attempted to see more, the snap of flaking paper forced me to stop.

I took a break to calm my fingers. It was six-fifteen. The sun would set in an hour. Still time for photos, but the harsh late-afternoon light was draining westward. I checked phone messages, took another look at the house. Windows above the balcony had dimmed to black domino eyes; the music room and cupola were isolated chambers joined by a pitched roof. The house bore the weight of wood and years in silence, indifferent as a rock, but the structure was animated by wind-churning trees and cawing crows and… something else.

I used a tissue on the windshield to confirm what might have been imagined. Smoke… Smoke leaked from the chimney as indiscernible as mist. Last night’s fire would have gone cold by dawn. Why was there smoke?

I lowered the windows and sniffed-woodsmoke. But that proved nothing. Ranchers in central Florida do controlled burns off and on all winter long. Somewhere someone-Joey Egret, possibly-had set a fire to clear brush that might fuel a major forest fire come spring. No doubt, however, the fire inside the house still smoldered. The chimney proved it.

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.

Put the gun in the camera bag? I thought about it for a moment, but only a moment.

No… I didn’t need a gun to confront a woman even if she was a ghost. I had my cell phone. If the woman didn’t make her presence known when I entered, I would press the issue-but only after getting the pictures I needed.

I was losing my light. It is a phrase that photographers use.

THEO HAD BEEN inside the house… and maybe still was. The lingering odor of marijuana and freshly burned resin hung at nose level when I entered. A broken cookie on the floor told me Lucia and the witches had been here, too.

I stopped in my tracks and listened. Theo, the nonstop talker, couldn’t bear silence. But that’s what I heard, silence: the slap of wind against roof, the creak of old wood. A full minute I stood there.

The fire, although smoldering, was nearly out, but that was no guarantee the house was empty. The realization spooked me. If there was a woman upstairs, ghost or not, she was welcome to leave or stay. That was up to her. I wasn’t going to risk confronting a man who had dodged a rape charge. Another concern was that, after only a few minutes inside, smoke that hazed the windows had already moved into my bloodstream. I could feel it. The chemical it contained sparked a glowing clarity that soon teetered between giddiness and despondence.

Maybe I spoke my thoughts aloud. I’ve got to get out of here.

I did. I retraced my steps, padlocked the door, and was dialing 911 when I remembered why I’d come. Pictures… I needed pictures. Photographing the archaeological dig site required me to break federal law. I couldn’t call the police. Not yet.

Damn it.

It made me angry to be in such a position-caught between the law and my fear of a man I had disliked at first sniff. Which is why, when I opened the back of my SUV, I made a decision that was unlike me. I pulled the blanket back and removed the pistol from its clever carrying case. And it was clever: a leather box the size of Webster’s Third. It looked like a book, too, NEGOTIATORS embossed in gold on the cover. I had no idea what the title meant-another ruse, I assumed.

My Uncle Jake, in life, had been wise and sweet and bighearted as a retriever. But, in death, by leaving me this gun, he’d become a man of mystery. The gun was silver steel, smooth as glass in my hand, and a mystery in itself. Even finding it on the Internet had been a chore. Thirty-some years ago, a master gunsmith had produced a concealment weapon for a government agency. The name of the agency was still classified, although it was known that fewer than two hundred of the special weapons had been produced. The pistol was a shortened Smith & Wesson with a hooked trigger guard, a sleek fluted barrel, plus other tweaks for fast and lethal shooting. My gun expert friend, Birdy, had pronounced it “Beautiful; perfectly balanced.”

Odd… Until this instant, I had thought the pistol ugly, even brutal, in appearance. There was a reason. I had used it to shoot a killer. The thump of bullet taking flesh, the man’s screams, still troubled me during moments when I lacked confidence or doubted my own virtue. Even touching the barrel could spark a response similar to what I’d felt that day: body shakes, labored breathing. It was humiliating what fear had done to me. And that was the problem. I felt no guilt about shooting the man. Quite the opposite. Bunny Tupplemeyer had guessed correctly about me first aiming at his genitals but losing my nerve. What haunted me was the memory of how helpless I had felt… and the knowledge that the frightened girl inside me could not be trusted to overcome life’s inevitable dark surprises.

The gun reminded me of the truth. That’s why I avoided the very sight of it. Perhaps I was feeling the effects of the smoke and whatever drug it contained because the truth was vividly clear now. And the truth was this: fear was my enemy, not the gun. Fear-and weakness-both separated me from the woman I pretend to be. Why hadn’t I realized this before?

Suddenly, the decision was easy. I was alone in a lonely place. Theo Ivanhoff was somewhere nearby. I had a right to defend myself… And yes, by god, I would.

A magazine loaded with seven bullets was also in the box. Federal Power-Shoks. Birdy had said they were best man-stoppers made and had given me a box. I inserted the magazine with care, then held the pistol away to catch the sunlight. On the handgrips, in red, an archaic Scottish word was stamped: DEVEL. That had taken some time to research, too. The word meant to smite or knock asunder. It could be pronounced DEAH-vil, but I preferred dah-VEL, which was acceptable according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

As I studied the pistol, I realized I should have also taken it to the gun range and practiced. Birdy had invited me often enough. Three times I’d joined her, wearing safety glasses and earplugs. We had taken turns firing her Glock, which was lighter and, in appearance, as utilitarian as a cookie punch. There’s nothing elegant about plastic. But the Glock held eighteen bullets, not seven like mine. And it was foolproof enough that I had outscored Birdy on our first trip to the range-a mistake on my part because it put her in such a foul mood. After that, missing the center ring had taken more effort than hitting it. But I’d managed.

The fact was, my Uncle Jake hadn’t just taught me to shoot, he had made me practice until my hands and eyes automatically knew what to do. Hundreds of rounds through a little.22 caliber revolver, then hundreds more with a variety of guns. Same with using a fly rod and an axe-an approach that worked equally well with the clarinet. Jake had been very proud when I was named first chair as a junior.

“Women learn faster than men because they have to,” he had said. Which, to a girl of twelve, had seemed a frivolous compliment, but now, standing outside the gate to the Cadence mansion, assumed an unsettling new meaning.

I did a quick review of the pistol’s mechanics: on the left, beneath my thumb, was a de-cocking lever. The weapon had no safety or other frills. The front sight was iridescent red. Shuck the slide, point, and pull. Simple enough. Unless that red sight was centered on an attacker’s chest-or his genitals, as I knew too well.

Enough! Let it go.

I did.

I stowed the pistol in my camera bag and said aloud, “You’re a fool if you try.” A warning that was also a plea, both of them directed at Theo as if he were listening.

Had Birdy’s words about fortune-tellers and electronics come to mind, I might have realized Maybe he is.