Trace Their Shadows (2 page)

Her voice hardened. “But as for those other stories …Some silly people started tales after the war. World War II, of course. A girl drowned in the lake here. She was foolish and went in alone.” Sylvania looked down at her fingers, now locked in her lap. “We’ve never done much swimming here. There are ‘gators, of course, and heavy weeds. But the young people would go in sometimes. We had a house party here that weekend. We were all celebrating the end of the war and Brookfield’s homecoming. It happened at the end of the second day, when everyone was leaving.” She shifted in the chair. “A hired girl saw the young woman wade into the lake. She drowned before anyone could reach her.”

Brandy scribbled a few lines in the tattered notebook. “How sad! Is she buried in a local cemetery?”

Sylvania arched her long neck. “That’s probably what caused the stories. Everyone searched for days but they didn’t recover the body. The sheriff’s office didn’t have the expert divers they have now.” She rose suddenly and crossed to a window, her voice lower. “The water is very dark around the cypress, you know. It was late in the day when she went in, rather like it is now. And of course, ‘gators very rarely kill people, but, I’m sorry to say, they are scavengers.”

John moved toward his great–aunt. “You don’t have to answer any questions you don’t want to. I didn’t mean the subject to come up.”

“When the party was over,” Brandy interrupted, why would this woman go into the lake by herself?”

Lines around the older woman’s mouth tightened. “No one knows. She simply disappeared into the water.” Downstairs the door bell jangled. Her face brightened. “Lands, that must be Axel now.”

As Sylvania hurried into the hall, John turned on Brandy, furious. “Now she’s in a hostile mood. She’ll think I put you up to this.”

Brandy bit her lower lip. Her ploy had been a tad questionable but productive, and she had never really promised not to ask about the missing woman. “Sorry, but I am a reporter.”

A shaft of light slid across his face. The muscles in his jaw tightened. “You’re quite the little manipulator, aren’t you?” He sat down on the couch again, arms folded. “So you just wanted to see the house. Maybe put a nice story in the paper, maybe interest a buyer?”

Brandy shrugged. Reporters had to be callous. “Also I need a human interest angle. The Beacon comes out four times a month. Who’s to care about a little ghost story?”

“Two families,” he said between his teeth.

Brandy ignored his remark and scribbled a few more notes. “Are Sylvania and her husband separated?”

John rubbed his forehead and looked away. “Sounds like it,” he said. “Uncle Ace always spent a lot of time in town. Now he’s finally pulled up stakes. I can’t blame Aunt Sylvania for wanting to move. It’s lonely out here.”

Below, the door opened and Brandy heard a heavy tread in the hall. In a few minutes Sylvania swept back into the room with the developer, a stocky figure in an open–necked sport shirt, a briefcase in one large hand.

“My old friend, Axel Blackthorne,” Sylvania said, seating herself beside the fireplace. “He bought the land to the west. He wants this lot, too.”

Blackthorne extended a hand to John, a sapphire and gold ring glinting on one chubby finger. Across his bald head several strands of grey hair lay in moist arcs.

“I’m a grand–nephew,” John said. “I came to talk to Aunt Sylvania about a national register plaque for the house. It’d be a shame to see it torn down.”

Blackthorne sat with a thump in the remaining easy chair and mopped his ample forehead. He spoke softly through widely spaced front teeth. “Sorry, young man. But Mrs. Langdon agreed to a deal last week. The lake front development is well started. After all, the house is falling apart, and we’ve offered your aunt a very fair price.” He smiled.

His great–aunt turned from Blackthorne to Brandy. “This is a friend of John’s. A Miss O’Bannon.” Her voice took on an edge. “A reporter for the Tavares weekly.”

The developer bobbed his head in Brandy’s direction, then leaned purposefully toward Sylvania. “I came by, Syl, to drop off some papers.” He took a folder from his brief case and laid it on the nearest end table. “I’ll see you again next Saturday, and we’ll get the contract for the house out of the way.”

He heaved himself out of the chair and hesitated in front of Sylvania. “Before I forget, we’ve had some pilfering on the building site next to your lot. At night mostly. We’ve put up a chain link fence, but I’ve got guard dogs to patrol after working hours. We’ll keep the gate between your place and our property locked and give you an extra key.” He set a padlock key down with the papers.

Sylvania stood to see him out, her tone firm. “I don’t go out at night, Axel.”

Before the builder followed her, Brandy saw him take a furtive glance up the darkened stairway. Brandy and John sat in frigid silence, listening to the older couple’s voices recede.

When Sylvania strode back into the room, John rose. “There’s not much time, but maybe by next weekend I can find someone who’ll make a better offer. Someone who’ll restore the house. I know a couple of architects who care about the county’s historic buildings.”

Sylvania remained standing, her back rigid. “I greatly doubt you can. I’ve told Axel I’d sign the contract when it’s ready next Saturday. And that’ll be the end of it.”

Brandy followed John and his great–aunt into the hall. “I’ll be in touch again, too,” she said, dropping her card on a side table. “I’ll probably have some more questions after I check out the historical museum. And I’m still interested in the woman who disappeared.”

Outside a light wind rustled the cypress and cabbage palms. On the porch Brandy turned again to Sylvania. “Do you ever see or hear anything unusual yourself? The sightings are supposed to appear in the top floor window and then down by the boat house.”

“I don’t use the top floor,” Sylvania said sharply. “And you heard me tell Mr. Blackthorne I don’t go outside at night. I especially don’t go near that old boat house. I don’t allow anyone else near it, either. And not just because it’s about to fall down. I worry more about cottonmouth moccasins than I do about spirits.”

She stared down at Brandy. “I should add, young lady, that I don’t want to see any publicity about what I’ve told you today. Dredging that story up again would be unpleasant for the drowned girl’s family and for ours. Stick to the building of the house and its early history. The death of that poor girl is something everyone has tried to forget.”

That’s just the trouble, Brandy thought. Sylvania stood for a few seconds, her angular figure silhouetted in the doorway, and then closed the door. Without looking at Brandy, John thrust his hands in his pockets and started toward the pier.

Brandy followed across the sandy grass. “I pity the dead girl. No one cares what happened to her.”

“For God’s sake, it was a long time ago.”

Blackthorne’s two black Dobermans trotted beside the chain link fence, watching them. Beyond the dock the lake stretched for a mile and a half until it vanished into shadowy trees on the opposite shore.

John stamped across the broken planks. “My objective isn’t to irritate Sylvania. Don’t expect me to bring you out here again.”

Unfortunately, Brandy thought, she probably would need to come. “As soon as Mrs. Langdon sells the house, some reporter is going to ask about the ghost. It might as well be me.”

Grudgingly, John offered his hand when she stepped onto the boat. “It’s already Monday. Damn!”

Brandy moved past the polished console before the captain’s chair and slumped down on the rear seat. All the usual gear on the eighteen foot Lowe had been neatly stowed away. This guy was orderly and rational, probably why they had started out, ghost–wise, on opposite sides.

John settled behind the wheel, turned the key, and runnning lights winked on at the bow and stern. “Whenever I can, I come out and just drift,” he said, backing the hull away from the old boat house and the smell of rotting water lilies in the next lot. “Watch the cormorants and herons and egrets. Maybe do a little fishing.”

Brandy stared into the tannic stained water around the knotted cypress roots. Her lit degree often surfaced at odd moments. “That missing girl, pulled down to muddy death, like Hamlet’s Ophelia.” John nodded from the captain’s chair. At least he understood the reference, even if he had the curiosity of a department store mannequin. Her current boyfriend would have thought Ophelia was a yellow–flowering ground cover.

Briefly Brandy wondered if Mack would help investigate the ghost story. She had known him since high school, an iron–pumping jock with an Atlas build and a daddy who owned a Buick agency near Leesburg. Mack got his thrills from his two hundred horse outboard, not from fishing and bird–watching. He’d rather crouch on water skis behind his Bowrider with Brandy at the wheel and a wide open throttle. Not exactly the skills he would need to stake–out a ghost. Still, she couldn’t expect any more help from Sylvania’s grand–nephew. She would have to ask Mack.

Sighing, she tucked her bulging bag, the only untidy object on the deck, under the table. “Was your great–uncle very rich?”

John glanced back and lifted one eyebrow. “Very. Citrus. Brookfield and his wife. Both families had miles of groves south of here. He was the big success of his generation.”

“It’s strange about the house. Not keeping it up, I mean. I still want to see if anything funny goes on around there at night.”

A blue heron flapped down and roosted on the sagging boat house roof. From one side came the hoarse grunt of an alligator. The animals were settling down for the night. Brandy looked back at the tall, silent house. A solitary light burned on in the crescent window. “I wonder who the missing girl was,” she said, “and what happened to her body? The ‘gator theory sounds pretty thin to me. Surely someone would find something eventually.”

As they drew away from the fringe of cypress knees, a bone–white sliver of moon rose in the east. Brandy leaned back against the vinyl seat for the dark, two mile ride to the dock in Tavares. At least, she had made a beginning. Showed some initiative. Maybe been a bit aggressive. The first thing a real reporter would do, she said to herself, is look up the old newspaper reports.

THREE
 

At eight the next morning Brandy nodded to the advertising clerk at a cluttered desk in the Tavares Beacon’s reception area and paused before the secretary’s desk. “Did you find the clipping I wanted?”

The fifty–year–old woman bobbed a wavering pile of lacquered hair. Customers and staff often judged her by her coiffure and one inch fingernails, a mistake. She knew more about the paper than anyone except the editor himself. “Got it right here, sugar.” She opened a drawer, laid a column of newsprint on the desk top, and tapped it with a crimson nail. “Leesburg Commercial. Ran about a year ago.”

Brandy put the story from the larger county town in her notebook, crossed to the editorial room, and set her bag next to a laptop computer, gathering her courage. Six weeks ago she had graduated from the University of Florida, ambition at full tilt. The let–down came when she had to launch her career at a weekly that shared a building with a strip shopping center, a shoe repair shop, a recycled clothing store, and a unisex hair salon. In mostly rural Lake County, journalism jobs were scarce.

Would her critical new boss buy the Able mansion story? Brandy’s main task was to help cover courthouse and city hall. But the fight between developer and preservationists and its background ghost story should jog Mr. Tyler’s interest, even catapult her into one of the full time reporter positions, the county news beat.

When the article actually appeared the house would surely be sold. Then John Able shouldn’t care. Brandy stiffened her back and rapped on the editor’s door.

Irritable Mr. Tyler, who had retired from a respectable northern newspaper, barely tolerated his job on a throw–away weekly. At least once a month he threatened to resign, but the extra income had become addictive, and he didn’t want another stressful job on a big daily.

As soon as Brandy stepped into the room, he sat forward, clasped his forehead with one thin hand as though exasperated beyond endurance, and with the other stabbed out the butt of a cigarette. “Have you forgotten to cover the Chamber of Commerce referendum meeting? It starts in thirty minutes. I suppose you want to ask a favor.”

He cocked his narrow head to one side. “The new city council candidate interview is at 1:00 P.M. And you haven’t forgotten the cookie fund–raiser at the library, I hope? You ought to be able to handle that one.”

Brandy ignored his tirade. “Not to worry, Mr. Tyler. Every story is on my calendar. I’m out of here in five minutes.” She gave him her most beguiling smile. “But you are perceptive. I do need a favor. I’ve stumbled onto a great human interest feature.” Show initiative, she thought. He ought to like that.

He straightened up, eyes wide in mock astonishment. “Miss O’Bannon, you were hired to help out with county stories. We’re not the Leesburg Commercial. Readers pick up our rag to clip coupons and see what’s listed in the yard sales. And maybe to read about local events the Commercial skips.

Like a partner in a conspiracy, she lowered her voice. “But it’s a ghost story, Mr. Tyler. A story about a grand old Lake Dora home, the old Able mansion. It’s about to be demolished in the interest of progress. Or maybe in the interest of profits. A ghost of almost fifty years is about to be evicted. Now isn’t that a story?”

Behind his glum expression Brandy caught a flicker. She handed him the column. “I remembered reading this when I was home last summer. High school kids out in a boat spotted the ghost on the Able property. According to this, there have been rumors for years. The Commercial column gives a name. A witness.”

He wagged his head. “Some columnist hard up for an idea used a bunch of impressionable youngsters.”

“But wouldn’t it be fun to scoop the Commercial? Everybody loves a ghost story, and everybody will hate to see the old home go. People would pick up more papers. Surely that would make our advertisers happy.”

He raised his eyebrows and drummed the desk with one finger. “I’ll make a deal,” he said at last. “I don’t want to throw cold water on your first story idea. But your other assignments have to be nailed down and copy–ready before you tackle anything else.” He shoved a manila folder of notes toward her. “And you have, let’s see…” He consulted his desk calendar. “This is Tuesday. You only have until next Monday. Sorry. Then someone’s got to take over the county news beat.” He leaned back. “Let’s see what you can do.” She had won, but she felt a tightness in her chest. He would consider her——if she didn’t fail.