Return of the Wolf Man (7 page)

Despite everything that had happened, Joan smiled. That seemed like a very good idea indeed.

V

With the advent of the automobile, the tiny fishing village of LaMirada, Florida, had become the sandbox of the well-to-do. Mansions rose and tennis courts sprouted beside the Gulf beaches, and recreational tans joined the leathery bronze of longtime locals. The sheriff acquired a deputy. The main street got a traffic island. The mayor was given an office, a secretary, and a raise when he was forced to spend less and less time managing his general store.

When the train station opened in LaMirada in 1922, the village became a weekend haunt of the middle class. By the 1940s, a tiny airfield had been built just north of the marshes and travel agents in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington made LaMirada one of the hottest resorts on Florida’s west coast. Republican presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey stopped in the town during the 1944 campaign.

By 1950, LaMirada was nearly a ghost town.

To hear some people tell it, LaMirada was literally a ghost town. Spirits were said to roam the grounds of an abandoned military research facility. Disembodied laughter was heard in the streets and in movie theaters, lighted cigarettes floated along beaches and roads, and food rose from tables in homes and restaurants and disappeared, bite by bite. Some crackpots said the specters belonged to ancient Spanish settlers who had colonized the region. Among those local eccentrics, the lunatic fringe said they were the result of “invisible soldier” experiments conducted at the local military facility during the war.

But the ghosts were not entirely responsible for the near death of LaMirada. They were merely a curiosity and a nuisance. The real town-killer was a shadowy figure known as the Beast of LaMirada.

The Beast first appeared almost a month to the day after the strange events reported on La Viuda, a rock of an island located just off the Florida coast. Two shipping clerks, Chick Young and Wilbur Grey, returned from Mornay Castle on La Viuda with tales of having encountered a vampire they called Count Dracula, a werewolf called Talbot, the legendary Frankenstein Monster, and even the Invisible Man. No trace of these creatures was ever found, though authorities were never able to question Young and Grey. The men left their LaMirada hotel room the day they returned. Some people said they assumed aliases and went to Mexico; others claimed they went to Africa; some maintained they’d joined the Foreign Legion. Whatever the truth, they never returned to LaMirada.

Authorities also weren’t able to question Dr. Sandra Mornay, owner of the castle. Her smashed body was found beside a curtain wall, in the shadows. She was dressed in a lab coat and surgical cap. Apparently, she’d been thrown from the window of the castle laboratory. Given the reputation of her ancestors, villagers could only speculate as to what godless work she’d been up to. Mornay’s assistant, Professor Charles Stevens, was also dead. His jugular vein had been severed and half the blood in his body had been drained. The only eyewitness to his murder, insurance investigator Joan Raymond, said that the young scientist had been slain by the mysterious Count Dracula. Though she insisted that Dracula was a madman and not a vampire, she could not explain the missing quantities of blood. Miss Raymond also said that she thought she heard Dracula and Dr. Mornay struggling in the laboratory. They had also argued at the castle before the masquerade party. Perhaps they were lovers, she suggested. Perhaps they were expatriate Nazi spies. Whatever the truth was, it vanished with Count Dracula and died with Dr. Mornay. The scientist was buried in the neglected garden behind the home of her ancestors.

It wasn’t Miss Raymond’s calm truths but the wild claims of Young and Grey that marked the beginning of the end of LaMirada. Newspapers from Naples to Miami carried the story that a vampire was prowling the coast. Reporters, curiosity seekers, and even hunters descended on the region, overtaxing its resources for nearly a month during the summer peak and chasing away regulars. When no vampire was found and the fad ended, many of those regulars did not return.

Miss Raymond did return, however. Following a brief vacation she resigned from her job with Shippers Insurance. Because Dr. Mornay had died intestate, Mornay Castle was auctioned by the state. Using her savings and a small inheritance she shared with her sister, Joan Raymond bought the castle and moved in alone. She donated the laboratory equipment to New York University, hired workers to seal off the basement, and renamed the castle the Tombs. Except for brief weekly visits to the mainland, she kept entirely to herself.

The Beast made his first appearance a few days after Miss Raymond took title of the castle. A couple of never-say-die occult researchers from North Carolina’s Duke University still hunting for Count Dracula were brutally murdered during a storm in a little-traveled region of Big Cypress Swamp. Their jugular veins had been attacked and their blood half-drained, just like Professor Stevens—though there was a difference. Whereas the wounds on Professor Stevens’s throat had been what the Collier County coroner described as “neat slashes,” the wounds on the two new bodies were “savage lacerations.”

There was another brutal murder the next night. A young waitress was attacked while she was walking to her apartment after ten p.m., when her shift had ended. This time, however, there was a witness: a police officer, who wrote in his report that he’d heard a cry like a dog baying and saw “a shaggy man-like beast rushing away from the scene.” The veteran officer said that he fired two shots at the retreating figure and was sure that he’d hit him at least once. But there was no blood at the scene save for that of the poor girl, and the search for the “beast” turned up nothing. The only pedestrian in the vicinity, James Karl McDougal, owner of McDougal’s House of Horrors, gruffly claimed to have seen and heard nothing. When the police officer asked the normally resplendent entrepreneur what he was doing out with his shirt unbuttoned to the navel and his feet bare, he snapped, “Coming back from the beach, you moron!” Since the night of the masquerade, when he was attacked by a wolf, less-than-discreet associates reported that Mr. McDougal had been even surlier than usual.

Because the murders began when Miss Raymond returned, county Police Inspector Wellman went to query her about them. Where was she on the night of the first attacks? Island-bound because of heavy rains, she said. Where was she the night of the second murder? Repairing the storm-damage to her tiny launch. Did Inspector Wellman wish to see the boat? He did, and was satisfied that she was telling the truth. However, Miss Raymond did speculate that the killings sounded very much like the work of a werewolf. Why did she say that? asked Wellman. Miss Raymond only smiled and suggested that he arm himself with silver bullets. The inspector did not visit La Viuda again.

Despite the best efforts of local and state police to catch the Beast, the killings continued for years. The few loyalists who returned to LaMirada the following summer did not come back the summer after. By 1951 the permanent population had dwindled from 3,500 to 500. By the following year it had dropped to 375. The tenacious McDougal closed his once-popular House of Horrors and moved to Tibet. Though the murders stopped then, it was too late to save LaMirada. For a while, the town council toyed with the idea of turning the House of Horrors into a maritime museum. The murderous Vesta Cove was located off a precipice near the McDougal property; the wreckage of many a ship was still strewn across the rocky, difficult-to-negotiate shoals below. But the families of sailors who had died there did not want the site disturbed, so the museum building sat and LaMirada inched a little closer to death. Even the curiosity-seekers stopped coming in 1955 when the famed Gill-Man, who had been captured in the Amazon, escaped from Ocean Harbor Park. For a year after that, everyone who wanted to hunt for a monster went to the Everglades, where the creature had been spotted.

Decades passed. And then, on one moonless night, the population of LaMirada decreased by one more.

ONE

The Present

“M
s. Raymond was a very private woman,” attorney Henry Pratt said as he guided the compact express cruiser through mirror-smooth gulf waters. He had to speak loudly to be heard over the slap of the waves and the rush of the wind. “Your great-aunt was a wonderful writer and a grand old woman. But she was very, very difficult to get to know.”

The late afternoon sky was rich blue and remarkably clear, the warm air invigorating. And the young blond woman sitting beside him in the open cockpit was an exhilarating change from the crusty fishermen and fourth-generation old money families with whom the attorney usually dealt. He prayed that Caroline Cooke would decide to move here from Atlanta.

“You say that as if privacy were a bad thing,” the woman said. “Given my great-aunt’s profession, I’d think that a little aloofness would add to her mystique, to the appeal of her stories.”

“Oh, it did,” Pratt said. “But she had a sharp mind and a great imagination, not to mention an extraordinary talent. I’d have liked to have gotten to know the woman behind that a little better.”

“I understand,” his passenger replied in a flute-clear voice. The young woman was subdued but not morose. Even during the funeral on the island she’d been quiet but not gloomy. And she’d been very, very gracious with those who’d come to pay their respects to LaMirada’s most famous citizen.

“Not that your great-aunt was impolite or unthoughtful,” Pratt went on. God, he didn’t want to create the impression that he was critical. “To the contrary. Joan Raymond was the first person in town to hire me when I graduated from law school. She never had a literary agent—”

“Yes, I know.”

“—and she trusted me to renegotiate her old contracts as well as negotiate the new ones. She never failed to enquire about my father and mother, or about the health of whoever was ailing in town. But she very rarely talked about her own life.”

Caroline said nothing. Worried that he might be talking too much, trying too hard to make the young woman feel at ease, Pratt shut up. He stole another look at the slender beauty as she pushed windblown locks of blond hair from her face and hooked them behind her ear. Her hazel eyes were clear and her white skin seemed even paler because of the black suit she was wearing. Even in mourning she looked lovely. Winsome and lovely.

They rounded the headland and the island of La Viuda loomed suddenly. The castle seemed to grow from the low, craggy peak in the center. As always, it presented a forbidding silhouette against the sky. It was as if the dark stones of the Tombs were unable to reflect sunlight. Pratt reduced their speed. This time out, Pratt wanted Caroline to be able to enjoy the view. Earlier in the day he’d had to run the young woman and her parents out here, then take Caroline back to his office to review her great-aunt’s will. Joan Raymond had left her great-niece everything, and he wanted to make sure she had an overview of what that entailed—property, copyrights, bank accounts. There were royalty statements and investments they would have to deal with before the week was out. There were also unpublished manuscripts at the Tombs. Caroline had listened politely and attentively. She seemed like a woman who took responsibility seriously.

“I don’t think my great-aunt felt that she knew herself very well,” Caroline said at last. “She once wrote to me saying there were a great many things she needed to understand about her own life and the world in general. She said that writing was her way of exploring them.”

“When you put it that way, I guess one can’t blame Ms. Raymond for keeping to herself,” Pratt said. “Some of what happened to her on that island was pretty weird. I assume you know about its history.”

“Not much,” Caroline said. “My mother told me a little about it when I was a child. Something about a murder?”

“That’s putting it delicately,” Pratt said.

Caroline looked at him. “What do you mean?”

“You know,” Pratt said, “now that I think about it, I’m not sure we should be discussing this right now.”

“Why?” she asked. “Because of the funeral?”

“I suppose so,” he said. “I don’t know. I just think death isn’t an appropriate subject right now.”

“When is it, Mr. Pratt?” Caroline said. “Besides, what better way is there to honor my great-aunt than by telling me about her past? Talk to me.”

Pratt looked at her. “You really want to know, don’t you?”

“I asked, didn’t I?”

Pratt nodded. In that respect at least, the young woman was just like her aunt. She spoke her mind.

“To put it bluntly,” Pratt said, “a scientist, Professor Stevens, had his throat torn out. Though Ms. Raymond denied it, others who were there that night insisted the killer was a real, honest-to-God vampire or a werewolf.”

“You’re kidding,” Caroline said.

Pratt shook his head. “Today most of the people in town laugh at the stories. State Trooper Willis—you met him at the funeral—actually gets angry when he hears them. Says they turned the town into a joke and killed its future as the coast’s biggest resort. But a few people, like Stephen Banning, Jr., whom you’ll meet in a few minutes, believe the stories religiously. Or irreligiously, as the case may be.”