“Definitely not,” I said. “It moved more like a panther, but I doubt it ever walked this plane alive. I think it’s a demon from the lower realms, and I think that it’s made a deal with the Widow—swapping her the access of her portal for some of its power.”
“Do you think you can get it on film?”
I laughed but not with mirth. “Dude, if you get close enough to this thing to get it on film, you probably won’t survive the encounter.”
Gopher frowned like he didn’t believe me. “Okay, so back to this vest thing, what do we do?”
“Someone’s got to stay behind with Gilley while the rest of us go out on the hunt.”
“Well, it can’t be you or Heath. We need both of you guys in the field.”
“True.”
“And it can’t be John—he’s our sound tech and if we don’t catch anything on film, we might still get something on his microphone. And Michel should definitely go on the hunt. I had a chance to look at his photos—the guy is really good with a handheld.”
“Also true.”
“What about Meg or Kim?”
“They’ve already made the two smallest vests. The one missing the magnets would be a size large.”
Gopher blinked at me and then it registered. “You did that on purpose.”
“I had nothing to do with the order the girls made the vests in, buddy. It just happened that the last vest they were going to work on was a size large, and since you, John, and Heath all share that size, one of you has to stay behind.”
“But I can’t stay behind, M. J.!”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m your director, or have you already taken over this whole operation?”
I bit back the retort on the tip of my tongue, and instead I laid the size-large vest on the table in front of Gopher. “You want the vest? It’s yours. But you’ll have to decide between Heath and John, which one of them stays behind. Oh, and if you choose Heath, I won’t be going on the hunt, and if you choose John, you’re going to have to hold the microphone, and we all know you’ve got a bad shoulder.”
“Dammit!” Gopher swore. “What am I supposed to do while you guys are out on the hunt?”
“We’ll all be connected by the headphones; there’s no reason you can’t watch the footage in real time from Gilley’s monitors and call the shots from here. In fact, I think doing it that way should make you happy.”
Gopher glared at me. “How could I possibly be happy?”
“It’s warm and dry in here, and the forecast calls for rain tonight. You’ll be downright cozy with access to food and drink all night long. And with the live stream you won’t miss a minute of the hunt.”
I could see Gopher’s mental wheels turning while he considered that, and at last he let go of his moody glare. Handing me the vest, he said, “Fine. I’ll stay here. But tomorrow, there had better be a vest for me to wear.”
I saluted him smartly and headed off in search of Heath.
* * *
We all met for dinner at six o’clock. Mary served us a lovely meal of lamb stew with fresh biscuits and plenty of hot tea to wash it down with. I ate heartily and felt like I was relaxing for the first time in days. “So you’ll be ghost hunting tonight, then?” she asked.
I nodded. “Yes, ma’am. We’ll be heading out just after one a.m.”
Mary shivered. “Lady Mortimer’s ghost is a frightful thing, she is. I don’t envy you.”
“Have you ever seen her?” Heath asked.
“Aye. Only once, and it was enough to scare me socks off. It’s a terrible thing, working here and fearing that she’ll break out of her end of the castle or grab one of us from the drawbridge and pull us under.”
I noticed that her complexion had paled a bit since she’d brought up the topic of the Grim Widow. “If she frightens you so much, why work here?” I asked her.
A blush replaced the paleness of Mary’s cheeks. “Oh, I couldn’t leave Arthur to face her alone,” she said. “Me brother’s not quite so fearful of her as I am.” I thought Mr. Crunn was plenty frightened of the Widow, but I didn’t say that to Mary. “He says as long as we stick to our end of the castle and the middle of the drawbridge, there’s nothing to fret about.” She then topped all our cups off with more tea and coffee before hurrying away to fetch our desserts.
I looked around the table and saw the trepidation in the eyes of my crew—especially John. Which reminded me about the assignment I’d given him. “Did you have a chance to talk to Crunn and draw us a map of the castle?”
John nodded and reached under his seat for his backpack. Pulling out his iPad, he tapped at it for a minute before handing it over to me.
“Wow,” I said, gazing at the screen. “I’m impressed. This is really good.”
John’s blueprint had the whole castle neatly mapped out for both the first and second stories, and it even included the secret passageway we’d stumbled upon. I focused on that detail and asked, “Does this lead anywhere?”
John got up and came around to look over my shoulder. “Arthur didn’t know,” he said. “I put that in because we found it, but Crunn said he had no idea there was a secret passage there.”
I compared John’s first-story drawing with his second-story blueprint. I remembered the spiral stairs when the trapdoor had opened, and how he’d nearly fallen down them. I shuddered a bit at the memory of trying to pull him out of there and get away from the Widow and whatever that black demon thing had been. But I felt I was remembering only things that were superficial. There had been more to that moment that I felt I needed to recall. I closed my eyes and thought back. John had fallen into the opening and onto the first few steps of the staircase, I had looked at him sprawled out on the stone steps, it’d been cold. . . really cold, and there had been a sound that had come up from the depths below. A chorus of wails, but there had been something more. What was it?
“Em?” I heard Heath say, jolting me out of the memory. My eyes snapped open and I found him looking at me with concern.
“Water,” I said. Heath moved his water glass over to me. “No,” I said with a shake of my head. “I heard water.”
“You heard water?” John asked over my right shoulder.
I turned in my chair to look at him. “You might have heard it too. When you fell through the passageway and onto the steps, do you remember what you heard?”
He frowned. “It was pretty dark, M. J.”
I shook my head. “Not what you saw, buddy, what you heard.”
His frown deepened and I happened to catch the rise of goose bumps along his arms. “I don’t know. I heard moaning, and. . .”
“And what?” I pressed.
“Like. . . the sound of waves. It was pretty damp and smelly in there too.”
I sat back in my chair and turned my eyes to Heath. “I think I know where the Widow’s portal is and how she gets out of the south wing.”
Heath tipped the iPad toward him to look at the blueprint and I tapped at the secret passageway. “I think that’s how she gets into the moat.”
Heath’s lips compressed. “Her portal can’t be the whole stairwell, Em. It’d have to be someplace along the wall.”
“I know.”
Heath and I were both silent for a minute while we considered how impossible it was going to be to make it to the stairwell again and find the Widow’s portal while holding off both her and that big-ass demon long enough to drive a few magnetic stakes into solid stone. Oh, yeah, and free the Widow’s prisoners to boot.
“There’s no way you’ll be able to get to it,” Gilley said, leaning way over in his seat to look at the iPad. “If her portal’s in that passageway, you’ll never live long enough to make it there and shut it down.”
?
??Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I told him.
He made a face and went back to his dinner.
“Maybe Gramps will have an idea,” Heath said, squeezing my hand under the table.
I nodded, but I wasn’t feeling so confident now that I thought I knew where the Widow was hiding her portal. I knew it also had to be the place she was hiding her prisoners. It made sense as the only places we’d seen the souls that she’d captured had been around the moat. She could’ve dragged them out of the stairwell, through the water, then put them on or near the drawbridge just to taunt us.
The thought of those prisoners made me remember that I needed their names handy to call out to them when the moment of truth arrived. Turning back to Gil, I asked, “How’s that research coming?”
Gil bent low and picked up his own iPad. I waited while he powered it up and scrolled through his notes. “I only had two hours to do the research,” he said, “and already I can tell you there’s not much online. I’ll have to go to the library tomorrow and leaf through the newspapers and public records.”
“Did you find out anything useful?” I pressed.
“Not so much useful as weirdly coincidental,” he replied.
“How do you mean?”
“I was able to find a few articles on some of the more recent victims, and I now know why Lumley thinks they were the work of a serial killer.”
I leaned in closer to Gil. “I’m listening.”
“The six cases of documented drownings at Kidwellah since nineteen eighty-five were all white males and all but one were between the ages of forty and sixty-seven wealthy, married, and visiting here on holiday with their wives.”
“None of the victims were women?” I asked.
“Nope.”
“But you said all but one—what was the one?”
“Lumley’s brother, Oliver Lumley,” Gil explained. “He was only thirty-two and unmarried at the time of his death, and he wasn’t so much here on holiday as he was investigating the suspiciousness of the deaths.”
I nodded. I knew that, but something else struck me as odd about Gil’s description of the men. “What about kids?” I asked. “Did any of the victims have children?”
“Four of the five married men had kids, ranging in age from six to forty, but I think you hit on the other really odd coincidence—none of the kiddos were here at the time of their father’s deaths.”
“That is weird,” I said. “It’s as if the killer was just waiting for a specific type of man to show up. Married, with no children on vacation with him.”
“Lefebvre and his wife had a daughter,” Gil said, glancing at Michel, who was listening in.
He nodded. “Zeta. She’s a model in Paris. Hates both her parents. I’ve photographed her on a number of occasions, and she’s not exactly the most congenial personality.”
But I wasn’t concerned with Zeta; I was concerned about the fact that I’d doubted the theory of a serial killer since Lumley had first proposed it, but now I was faced with a number of victims who seemed to fit a very specific type of profile—save Merrick Brown, Oliver Lumley, and Fiona Hollingsworth. How did they fit into this crazy puzzle?
“Thanks for looking into it,” I told Gil. “Anything more you can get for us tomorrow would be great. Oh, and I’ll need a list of the names of the victims.”
Gil reached again into his backpack and retrieved a pad of paper. Tearing off the top page, he slid it to me. “That’s who I have so far. I’ll get the full list tomorrow.”
I tucked the list away and asked, “Did you get me anything on the duke?”
Gil nodded and tapped at his iPad. “That’s an interesting character, M. J. But let me just say this, I really want you to rethink going out on the moors tonight to look for him.”
“He can’t be as dangerous as the Widow,” I countered.
“He may be worse,” Gil told me. “The duke has a reputation for marking people for death. Everyone he’s supposedly appeared to has died. If you find him, you’re a goner.”
“Like I said, I’m already in trouble, then.”
Gil shook his head. “Yeah, but you didn’t have the crew with you. If you expose them, then they’re all marked for death too.”
I laughed but looking around the table, I could see Gilley had struck a nerve. Kim, Meg, and even John had gone pale. “You’ll be fine,” I told them, but they hardly looked reassured. Turning back to Gilley, I said, “Tell me about the duke so I have some background to work with.”
Gil eyed me doubtfully, but he did consult his notes once more. “It’s pretty much the way you’ve already heard from Crunn. The duke was married to and supposedly murdered the Grim Widow’s sister, Catherine. Then he married Lady Jane, she goes nuts, and he locks her up in the south wing. She then figures out how to get out of that section, probably through the secret passage John found, and just for kicks, she kills off a few of his friends. He beats her, puts her back in the south wing, cutting her off from all human contact, and somehow she’s able to still get out and continue to kill even more people. Finally, when his illegitimate son from another woman comes to stay at the castle, Lady Mortimer drowns him too, which sends the duke into a deep depression and he heads off onto the moors one night never to be seen again.”
“She killed his son?” I gasped. God, this woman was nasty!
“Yep. It’s never been proven, of course, but the story goes that one night after the young man got a little rough with one of the lady servants who’d been nice to Lady Mortimer, he was found facedown in the moat the next morning.”
“Got a little rough with the servant? How old was this kid?” Heath asked.
“Nineteen. He was born in between the time the duke was married to the sisters, and I think I read that the duke really wanted to marry the woman he had the kid with, but Lady Mortimer’s father insisted that the duke marry Jane.”
My mind was skipping over certain details of Gil’s research and focusing on other clues too consistent to be mere coincidence. A theory began to form in my mind. It was sketchy at best, but I wondered. . .
“What?” Gil asked, and I realized he’d stopped talking and was waiting for me to say something.
“Nothing,” I said. I didn’t want to share my theory yet. I wanted to think on it and maybe find something else to help connect the dots, but what I was thinking wasn’t good, because it meant we’d all been looking in the wrong direction.
Shortly after dinner, Heath and I went up to bed. I was dopey eyed by the time my head hit the pillow, and just before giving in to sleep, I remembered to call out to Sam Whitefeather, asking him to come visit me in my dreams.
“Hello, M. J.,” I heard from somewhere close.
I opened my eyes. “Sam?” I was standing on a dock at the edge of a beautiful moonlit lake and there was someone just to my side. Turning, I saw him—my spirit guide and Heath’s grandfather—looking effervescent in a white cotton shirt and linen pants, and with a beautiful glow about him.
“You rang?” he said, bending over to pull at something behind us. I noticed it was a stool, and he placed it just behind me. I sat down and he snapped his fingers and another stool appeared. He took his seat by my side, crossing his legs leisurely.
“Thanks for coming,” I said.
He winked at me. “Least I could do. You had some questions for me?”
“Almost too many to count, my friend. But let me first ask you what you might know about the Grim Widow.”
Sam shook his head distastefully. “She’s an evil, evil spirit, M. J. One of the worst you’ve ever taken on, I’m afraid. She’s completely given herself over to forces of evil and she’s hungry to add more victims to her collection.”
“She’s added at least one more since the other day, Sam,” I said.
“André Lefebvre. I saw him chained to her, just like Merrick. The one small bit of grace we’ve had lately is that it doesn’t look like Fiona Hollingsworth was killed by the Widow, and she managed to get across to your side without trouble.”
Sam nodded. “Yes, Fiona is here, but she’s not in very good shape. She’s having trouble with the adjustment and several angels are working with her as we speak.”
I cocked my head. “Angels? As in pretty people with white wings?”
Sam laughed. “Not exactly. Although I’ve never seen an ugly angel, most take on a human-looking form minus the wings.”
“How can you tell them apart from regular people?”
Sam grinned. “Trust me, the minute you see one, you know.”
“Huh,” I said, then got back to the point of the conversation. “I’m glad Fiona’s all right, but I’m still concerned over Merrick and André.”
“For good reason,” Sam said in agreement. “I’ve managed to connect with Merrick’s grandmother. She’s beside herself because she can’t locate him anywhere in the ether. And André’s father is also quite upset that his son may be lost to him forever.”
“See, now, that’s what I really don’t understand, Sam. How is it possible for one spirit to keep another spirit prisoner? If Merrick knows he’s dead, why can’t he just cross?”
Sam sighed heavily. “You, more than most, should know the answer to that, M. J. Merrick can’t cross because he believes he’s a prisoner of the Widow. He’s blind to the possibility that he can escape from her clutches by merely believing that he can. For him, the prison is real, and while it remains so in his mind, he won’t be able to cross. His mother can’t reach out to him because he spends most of his time stuck behind the barrier of the Widow’s portal. No spirit from the higher realms can cross into the lower, but we can sometimes meet in the middle in your realm.”