Forest Ghost (6 page)

He nodded. ‘Yes, we did, Sparks. A man and a woman. We found them in a pool of water. The cops don’t know what happened to them yet.’

‘Oh, God,’ said Corinne. ‘Are you OK?’

‘Little bit shaky, to tell you the truth. It wasn’t very pretty.’

‘A man and a woman? Had they committed suicide, too?’

‘The woman certainly hadn’t. But, like I say, the cops don’t know what happened to them yet, and I’m not too sure I want to talk about it just yet.’

‘You’re
soaking
,’ she told him. ‘You need to get out of those wet clothes before you catch pneumonia or something.’

Jack looked around for any members of the scouting staff. Sparky tugged at his sleeve and said, ‘We
did
see something, didn’t we, Dad? We weren’t just making it up?’

‘No, Sparks, we weren’t just making it up. But we still don’t know what it was, and we don’t know for sure that it had anything to do with what happened here.’

‘Did she have a head injury? The woman?’

‘You could say that.’

‘I thought so. That’s Castor again. Castor is the evil star.’

An office door opened on the opposite side of the hallway and a khaki-uniformed scout leader came out, with a sheaf of papers under his arm. Jack manoeuvered his way through the crowd of relatives toward him and called out to him, ‘pardon me!’ as the scout leader started to walk away.

‘Talking to
me,
sir?’ blinked the scout leader. ‘Something I can help you with?’

‘I sure hope so. I was wondering if there were any dry clothes anywhere around that you could lend me?’

The scout leader was plump and bespectacled with a dented bald head that had been burnished by outdoor activity to the color of a shiny brass doorknob. He stared at Jack as if he had asked him a question in Swahili.

‘I was outside, in the rain,’ Jack explained. ‘I was helping the sheriff’s deputies to search the woods.’

The scout leader shook his head and tutted. ‘I
warned
them something like this would happen! I warned them so many times!’ He dropped his papers on the floor and bent down to pick them up.

‘Anything would do,’ Jack told him. ‘Maybe a tracksuit, or a sweater and a pair of jogging pants.’

‘Don’t sell off any more acreage, I said!’ the scout leader went on, gathering up his papers. ‘You’ll regret it if you do! In its heyday, this camp covered more than eleven thousand acres, did you know that? Eleven thousand! Now it’s down to less than five, and the Chicago Scout Council wants to sell the rest of it off, for development! You’re playing with fire, that’s what I told them! Playing with fire! It won’t be just the local community you’re up against, or the scouts, or the staff alumni! No, sir! There are things in these woods that will fight you back, too!’

‘Some – ah – dry clothes?’ Jack prompted him.

‘Oh. Yes. For sure. By cracky, you
are
wet, aren’t you? You see that door at the end of the corridor, on the right? That’s the storeroom, for the shop. You should find some Owasippe sweatshirts in there, and some sweatpants. Leave them a note to say you’ve taken them, and your address, so they can bill you.’

‘Thanks,’ said Jack. But before he turned away, he said, ‘What “things in the woods”, exactly?’

‘What?’ The scout leader blinked at him. Tucking his papers back under his arm, he took off his spectacles and used one of the pointed ends of his boy-scout scarf to wipe the fingerprints off them.

‘You said that “things in the woods” would fight back, too.’

‘Well …’ said the scout leader. ‘Anybody who knows anything about woods will tell you the same.’

Jack was just about to ask him what ‘the same’ actually meant when Sally appeared. She looked tired and harassed and her hair was all messed up.

‘My God, Jack, have you been swimming?’

‘Oh, very funny. I got caught in the rain. Did they tell you what we found?’

‘Yes,’ she said, with a grimace. ‘I’ve just been talking to the undersheriff. He wants me to keep these poor people in Muskegon overnight so he can ask them some more questions tomorrow morning about their children. Most of them just want to go back home.’

‘Why does he need to talk to them again? The bodies we found in that pool must have been there for
days
, long before any of us got here.’

‘He’s just being an overzealous a-hole, I’m afraid. What exactly was their condition, these bodies, if you don’t mind my asking you? All the undersheriff told me was that they were a male and a female and it appeared to be a murder-suicide.’

‘Well, he’s probably right. The woman’s head had been cut clean off, and the guy was curled up under the water clutching it, like a goddamned football.
He
may have committed suicide but
she
sure didn’t.’

Then he said, ‘Just a second, Sal,’ and turned around to apologize to the scout leader for interrupting their conversation, but the scout leader had gone. Jack could just see his coppery doorknob head bobbing away through the crowd. ‘Shit,’ he said.

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Sally.

‘I’m not sure. I was talking to that scout leader and he said something about “things in the woods”. He said that the scout council wanted to sell off all of this land for redevelopment, but that there were “things in the woods” which would fight back, if they tried. He shot off before I could ask him what he meant.’

Sally patted the front of Jack’s soaking-wet shirt. ‘I expect he meant the wildlife. Nothing more aggressive than a pissed-off raccoon, and I can tell you
that
from experience. Right now, though, I have to persuade fifty-one tired, grieving and impatient people that they would be better off staying the night at the Holiday Inn in Muskegon rather than their own much more comfortable beds. And
you
need to get yourself out of these clothes.’

‘OK. You’re right. Maybe I can catch up with that scout leader again before we leave.’

‘What time are you going?’

Jack checked his watch. ‘We have a flight at seven-twelve. Which means we have to be out of here in less than forty-five minutes.’

‘Jack,’ said Sally, as he turned to go. ‘I just want to thank you for coming today, and for everything you’ve done. You and Sparky, both of you. It was over and above the call of duty, and I really appreciate it.’

Jack said, ‘Thanks, Sal.’ He felt again that there could be something between them, but that was probably because she reminded him so much of Agnieszka, and because he was feeling tired, and it would have been so comforting just to have somebody hold him close. Apart from that, he knew that if they became lovers, their relationship couldn’t possibly last, and then he would lose her as a friend.

He went along to the storeroom, which was a small, stifling room stacked with Owasippe T-shirts and Owasippe sweatpants and other souvenirs, like Owasippe mugs and Owasippe tote bags, all of them marked with the head of Chief Owasippe, in his full-feathered war bonnet.

He quickly changed into a baggy green-and-white tracksuit, bundled his wet shirt and pants into a plastic Owasippe shopping sack, and went back outside. As he came out, he almost collided with Undersheriff Porter.

‘Oh – I was looking for you, sir,’ said Undersheriff Porter. ‘I wanted to tell you how much we appreciate your help in locating those cadavers. Also to ask you for your contact details. The medical examiner in Lansing will be carrying out autopsies on both of them and she may need to ask you a few additional questions.’

‘Jack Wallace,’ said Jack, shaking the undersheriff’s hand. It was dry and horny, as if he spent as much time chopping up firewood as he did undersheriffing.

‘Interested to know exactly what it was you saw in those woods,’ he remarked.

‘Like I said before, something white, running behind the trees. It could have been anything.’

‘Maybe it was a cougar. We do have cougars in the woods around here, but you hardly ever see them. You can go your whole life and never catch sight of one. Ghost cats, they call them. On the other hand, maybe it was the ghosts of Chief Owasippe and his two sons. There’s plenty of people who swear they’ve heard
them
, on a really quiet night.’

‘You’re not serious.’

‘It’s a local legend. Back in the eighteen-somethings, Chief Owasippe gave his sons a canoe and sent them off into the unknown to prove their manhood. They made it all the way to Chicago, and they made friends with the settlers at Fort Dearborn. But they were away for so long that Chief Owasippe went and sat under a pine and waited for them to come back, and he wouldn’t touch food or drink until they did.’

‘And
did
they come back?’

‘Nope. They were only two nights short of home when they sheltered their canoe under a riverside bluff, and while they were sleeping the bluff collapsed on them and buried them. And that’s a true story, because years later some trappers found their canoe, and their cooking-pots, and their two skeletons.’

‘So what happened to Chief Owasippe?’

‘He fasted himself to death. And that’s why you can hear him and his sons walking through the woods here at night, and some say that if you call out to them, they’ll answer you.’

Jack looked at Undersheriff Porter narrow-eyed. Maybe the undersheriff was shooting him a line, but he didn’t detect the slightest flicker on his face that might have given that away.

‘Well, it’s a good story,’ he said. ‘But I don’t believe that what we saw was a ghost – or
ghosts
, plural.’

‘Neither do I,’ said Undersheriff Porter, still expressionless. ‘Personally, I don’t believe in ghosts. But some pretty unaccountable things happen in these woods from time to time. One of my deputies took his boys camping out here once and he says that in the middle of the night they all got the willies so bad that they packed up their tent without even waiting until first light, and hightailed it home. He said he couldn’t understand what made them feel that way, but whatever it was it frightened two shades of shit out of all of them.’

He sniffed, and then he said, ‘What I’m trying to tell you, Mr Wallace, is that I’m a skeptic. I don’t think there’s any such thing as the supernatural, or ghosts, or even life after death. But I do believe that there are things on this earth that we don’t yet know about, or understand, and that they deserve to be thoroughly investigated to find out what they really are. Either we’ll laugh at ourselves for having been so scared of them, or else we’ll run for the hills, screaming.’

T
hey arrived back at the restaurant at a quarter of ten, in the middle of the evening sitting. Every table was taken, and there were several customers sitting at the bar waiting. A five-piece Polish band was playing a noisy folk song, ‘Ja Tu I Ty Tu’, accompanied by a drum and two fiddles, and the conversation was so loud that Jack had to shout when his manager Tomasz came up to greet them.

‘Glad you are back!’ bellowed Tomasz, in his ear. ‘Very, very busy tonight!’

‘I’m not complaining!’ Jack told him. ‘Can you take care of things for the rest of the night? I’m bushed!’

‘No problem!’ Tomasz replied. He was a big man, with prickly gray hair and a big bovine face. He wore a scarlet coat with the restaurant’s signature letter
N
embroidered on the pocket, a black shirt and a red bow tie. He had worked for the Wallaces ever since the restaurant opened seven years ago, and he was unceasingly cheery, always telling jokes and slapping his customers on the back as if he had known them all his life.

Two months ago, however, Jack had come out of the restaurant into the yard at the back to get some fresh air and found Tomasz standing by the wall, silently crying. Tomasz had wiped his eyes and gone back inside without saying a word, and Jack had never asked him what had upset him so much, but ever since then he had suspected that there was much more to Tomasz than back-slapping and humorous banter.

‘Sparks – you go up to bed now,’ said Jack. ‘I’ll be up in a couple of minutes. Don’t forget to brush your teeth!’

Sparky plodded tiredly up the stairs while Jack went behind the bar and opened a cold bottle of
Ź
ywiec beer.

‘Long day, huh?’ asked Tomasz.

‘Long, and horrendous, believe me.’ Jack didn’t really want to talk about it, or even think about it. He looked around the restaurant and said, ‘How’s the new
gol
ą
bki
recipe going down?’

‘From Mikhail, nothing but complaint. From diners, nothing but compliment. We sold maybe eight or nine, and every time people say how much they like it. More tasty than before, they say.’

‘OK. I’ll just have a word with Mikhail and then I think I’ll call it a day.’

‘By the way,’ said Tomasz, ‘you have visitor.’

Jack looked around. ‘What – here, now?’

‘No, no. She come here maybe eight o’clock, eight-thirty. When I tell her that you will not be back until much later, she leave. But she leave address and contact number. Here.’

Tomasz took a dog-eared visiting card out of his breast pocket and handed it to Jack. It was printed in italics, and the address had been corrected in purple ink. The name on it was
Maria Wiktoria Koczerska
and the amended address was in
Belmont Gardens
, which was a little over five miles away, to the south-west, a quiet residential area on the outer limits of the Polish district of Avondale.

‘Did she say what she wanted?’

Tomasz shook his head. ‘No. But she did say that it was important. She said to call her as soon as you can.’

‘What was she like? Young? Pretty?’

Again Tomasz shook his head. ‘Once, maybe. But not now.’

‘OK, Tomek, thank you. I’ll give her a call in the morning. You’re sure you can manage down here tonight?’

‘Don’t you worry, Boss. Everything is under control.’

Jack went through to the kitchen to see how Mikhail was coping with tonight’s crowds. He was shouting and swearing at Piotr and Duane, as usual, but the food was coming out fast and it was looking good.

‘One borsch with meat roll! Two Polish plates with
pierogi
! One Silesian dumplings!
Where is fucking Silesian dumplings
? One
bigos
!’