Ghost Night

“No, no, I’ve been working, Marty. I’m doing all right. You know the commercial for the new underwater camera that any two-year old can use? I wrote it.”

Marty shuddered. “All those two-year-olds!”

“It was fun, actually. We shot in a lovely private pool, and the kids were really adorable,” Vanessa assured him.

Marty still looked at her worriedly. “You okay down here? Where are you staying?”

“She’s got a perfectly good room at my house or with David and me—she won’t take either,” Katie said.

“I’m just down Duval, perfect location, a little room for rent above one of the shops,” Vanessa told him. “And I’m quite happy.”

“But what if you’re not safe?” Marty asked.

“I’m right on Duval, in the midst of the tourist horde. There’s someone up just about all hours of the night, and the cops are out in droves. I’m safe. Look, I’ve been bugging police and anyone else you can think of for two years—whatever happened, happened. It’s sliding by, and that’s why I’m so concerned. This killer might lie dormant for a long time, then swoop down on another group of unsuspecting boaters.”

Marty stood. “Well. Just in case you didn’t come across this in your research, I have something to show you.”

He walked over to the large buffet where a ship’s dining bell held the central position. Reaching behind it, he pulled out a framed picture. He turned to her with pleasure in his eyes. “Dona Isabella!” he told her.

Vanessa walked over to study the picture. It was a pen-and-ink drawing of a woman in an elegant gown circa the early eighteen hundreds. Her hair was loose, curling around her shoulders. The artist had captured the beauty of the woman, and something more—something that was partly flirtatious and might also be cunning. She could see that the sketch had been titled “The Mystery of a Woman.”

“How do you know that this is Dona Isabella?” Vanessa asked.

Marty smiled, proud of his acquisition. He opened the frame, showing the old parchment on which the portrait had been sketched, and the signature of the artist. Len Adams had sketched the picture, and he had written, “Dona Isabella at Tea with a Friend, 1834.”

“I’ve had it authenticated, of course,” Marty said. “Len Adams is known down here—his pieces are coveted. He died very young of tuberculosis, so he doesn’t have an extensive body of work. He came here because he was dying in the north. He died anyway. But he sketched many wonderful portraits.”

Vanessa was fascinated by the picture, and suddenly felt guilty about her slasher-film script. Of course, in the movie, Dona Isabella had been the victim of Kitty Cutlass, quickly in the film, and quickly out. It had been Kitty Cutlass who’d returned from her watery grave to join with the ghost of Mad Miller to wreak murder, mayhem and havoc upon the unsuspecting teens sailing to Bimini and on Haunt Island.

“Oh, girl, you’re one after my own heart!” Marty said, appreciating the way she looked at the picture. “I’ll copy it for you—won’t be the original, but you’ll have the beauty anytime you choose. Poor thing! So lovely, such a coquette and so tragically young to be a victim.” He looked at Vanessa. “Boy, that would be something, wouldn’t it? What if your people were killed because the ghosts of Mad Miller and Kitty Cutlass are out there, cruising between Key West and Bimini, right into the Triangle, alive through some wild magnetic source?”

Vanessa stared at him.

He gave her a tap on the shoulder. “Joshing with you, girl. But if you want more pirate history, you come on back here anytime, all right? And if you need anything at all, you come to see me. I’m like a Key West structure, an institution, always here, and I wouldn’t be anywhere else in the world.”

She thanked him, and she and Katie said goodbye.

“Do you think that the murders might have had something to do with the story you were filming?” Katie asked as they walked. “No, wait. We’ll wait until we all get together, and then we’ll talk about it. I don’t want to make you repeat it all over and over.”

They stopped in front of the Beckett house and Vanessa looked up at the grand facade. “So you’re living in the Beckett house!” Vanessa teased.

Katie shrugged. “Life is pretty bizarre, just like death.”

“So it seems,” Vanessa agreed.

Katie opened the front door with a key and they stepped into the hallway. She paused. “I guess they’re already here,” she said. They walked through the large parlor, through the kitchen and to the back porch, handsomely furnished with white wicker and plush jungle-colored cushions. There were three men there already—not just the two tall, dark-haired men Vanessa assumed to be Liam and David Beckett, but Sean O’Hara, as well.

They all stood as Vanessa and Katie came into the room.

She envied Katie, who walked comfortably up to David Beckett and slipped an arm around him. There was something nicely sure and confident in the motion, and more so in David’s smile of response. They were happy.

David and Liam shook hands with Vanessa and were pleasant and cordial. Sean, of course, she had already met.

He waited quietly.

Then the awkward silence fell at last.

“Why doesn’t everyone sit, and I’ll get some drinks and snacks,” Katie suggested.

Great! Vanessa glared at her, feeling as if she had suddenly been thrown to the wolves.

But she was the one who wanted help!

She sat stiffly, folding her hands around her knees as she looked at the three. “Perhaps this is way out of bounds. But I don’t know where else to go from here.”

“Start at the beginning,” David suggested. “Sean has told us what you want us to do—but start back at the beginning, the film shoot you did, everything that happened that night and everything that happened after.”

Vanessa decided to start out looking straight ahead, and then she decided to speak as naturally as possible and not avoid anyone’s eyes. “I’ve loved Key West since I was a child, since my father first brought me down here. When my friend Jay Allen came to me saying that he wanted to make a film, the first thing that came to my mind was the story of Mad Miller, his mistress, Kitty Cutlass, and the murder of poor Dona Isabella. Everything went fine, and we were down to a skeleton crew—Georgia and Travis, the last characters who remained alive, Jay and myself, of course, two young production assistants, Bill Hinton and Jake Magnoli, and Barry Melkie, our soundman. Zoe was everything as far as props, costume and makeup, with the help of Bill and Jake. Oh, and of course, Carlos Roca. Lew, our Bahamian guide, was there, too. That night, we had just about wrapped, and I was by the fire…Jay was there, I’m not sure who else at first, but everyone was just winding down. Suddenly, Georgia came screaming down the beach—she’d seen heads sticking out of the sand, arms. She described a scene that was the exact one in which we found her and Travis the following morning.”

“You found Georgia and Travis?” David asked.

She nodded gravely.

“You found the bodies?” Sean asked.

“I did,” Vanessa said. “Lew and Jay came quickly down to the beach, then the others…and then the Bahamian authorities.”

“Let me see if I’ve got this straight, though,” Sean said. “Georgia and Travis were found dead. Georgia had been running down the beach. Where was Travis?”

“No one knew,” Vanessa said.

“Then why didn’t you look for him?” Sean asked.

“Frankly, we thought he was part of a huge prank being pulled on Georgia. Jay was aggravated with him. We did go down the beach—Lew, Jay and I—and there was nothing there. Except—”

“Except?” Liam asked.

“The sand where we later found the two had been churned up. It looked as if maybe there had been something stuck in the sand.”

“And that didn’t bother you?” Sean asked.

“We were filming a horror movie. We thought that someone was playing an elaborate prank, and, as I said, that Travis was involved in the prank. I’m afraid that a lot of pranks are carried out on film sets,” Vanessa said evenly. She took a deep breath. “Anyway, Georgia was in terror—she wasn’t going to stay on the island. She was having an absolute fit, so Carlos said that he could take her into Miami and head back first thing in the morning. We all thought it was best. But Georgia and Travis were found on the beach, and Carlos and the boat disappeared.”

“I’m not sure there’s much of a mystery there,” Sean said. “Apparently, Carlos stole the boat after he killed the two.”

“I don’t believe it, not for a minute,” Vanessa said. “The police, the Coast Guard, the FBI—every known agency looked for the boat and Carlos, but it was as if they had vanished. What you don’t understand is that Carlos Roca wasn’t capable of doing something so horrible. He was one of the most gentle people I’ve ever met.”

“I wasn’t in on the investigation, but I do remember it,” Liam said. “And I’m sorry to tell you this, but most of those law-enforcement agencies believe that Carlos Roca did murder the two young people and steal the boat.”

“I don’t care what they believe!” Vanessa said.

She was surprised when Sean said, “Of course, there’s another scenario. Someone else hijacked the boat, someone who might have already taken Travis. That person either killed Carlos first to take control of Georgia or had Carlos knocked out somewhere. Then did the grisly deed on the island and dumped Carlos in the Atlantic.”

David leaned forward. “Okay, here’s the curious part—where was Travis? Had he been killed and his body hidden? And was it possible for someone to have killed him, hidden his body and managed to go after Carlos and Georgia in the boat, get back to the island without being seen, find the one body, stage the gruesome death scene, and then get rid of Carlos? And how, with the alarm that must have gone out, could they have gotten away with the boat? Everyone in the Bahamas, South Florida and all of the Caribbean would have been on the alert.”

“Well, stealing the boat, gassing it up, changing it—that seems the easiest part of it,” Sean said.

“I agree with you—where Travis was when the whole thing started would be a nice piece of the riddle.”

“Dead,” Vanessa said softly.

“Probably dead, but where? And how was he killed, and then not found until later?” Sean mused.

“These are the questions everyone has asked time and time again, and they haven’t found the answers. But they aren’t people who know the legends, know the area—”

“Snacks and beer!” Katie announced cheerfully from the hallway.

She set nachos with steaming cheese and other ingredients on the coffee table and passed around the tray she carried with ice-cold beer bottles.

Vanessa accepted a beer with a gaze that said both “Thanks” and “How could you have left me alone in here?”

Katie smiled. “I know you all,” Katie said, sitting, “and there isn’t a better mystery out there!”

“I have a lot of work to do now,” Liam said. “And it’s a bad time, a very bad time, at the station.”

“Nothing has been decided,” Sean said.

“We’ve all agreed to talk about it. We’ve talked about focusing on a number of mysteries and legends, but we haven’t decided what our focus is going to be,” David said. “It’s Sean’s decision. I am gung-ho on the idea of pooling our resources and working locally, but Sean’s been doing the budget, mapping and research, so it’s his decision.”

“Yes, but if you’re thinking about the story, I ought to be on the trip,” Liam said. He looked at Vanessa. “It hasn’t occurred to you to be afraid? The killer or killers were never caught. They might still be out there,” he said.

“Afraid?” she asked softly. “I still have nightmares. I see Georgia alive and screaming, and I see the heads and the arms sticking out of the sand. I remember being terrified of the dark for nearly a year. And then I got very angry, and I finally figured out that I’d probably have nightmares for the rest of my life if I didn’t do something to discover the truth. I think the killer is a coward—he worked in the dark, at night. I think there has to be a way to stand against him. That starts with finding him—and when he’s found, I don’t care if they give him life or the death penalty, just so long as he can never do anything so horrible to anyone else, ever again.”

She stood up. They were going to agree, or they weren’t.

“I’ll let you all talk,” she said. “Katie knows where to find me. Thank you for your time.”

Afraid? Yes, she’d been so afraid.…

Her only fear now was that they would say no.

The Happy-Me sat off the coast of Bimini in shallow water. Jenny and Mark Houghton and their friends Gabby and Dale Johnson had planned on camping on the beach, but they had gotten lazy. They hadn’t tied up at the dock because they’d kept the boat in the shallow water, and talked so late that the sun had gone down.

Both retired, the couples motored the short distance to Haunt Island several times a year.

Gabby and Dale had gone to bed, Mark was still topside and Jenny was humming as she put away the last of the dishes. They’d dined on spaghetti and meatballs, heated up in the microwave.

She was startled to hear her husband call her name. “Jenny!”

She nearly dropped the dish in her hand, it had been so quiet. She set it on the counter and hurried up the ladder to the deck. For a moment, it struck her that they might as well be alone in the world. Entirely alone. There were a few stars in a black-velvet sky, and it seemed that there was no horizon, the sea melded with the sky. The lights of the Happy-Me were colorful and brave against the night—and pitiful, as well.

“Hand me the grapple pole there, quickly, Jenny,” Mark said, leaning over the hull and staring into the water.

“What?”

She was concerned. Mark had been given a clean bill of health after having suffered a heart attack on his seventieth birthday, but he thought himself a young man still, at times. And he was acting like a crazy one now.

“That one,” he said, spinning around. There was a grappling hook on a long pole set in its place in metal brackets against the wall of the cabin.

“But, Mark—”

“Please, Jenny, please—there’s someone in the water!”

She heard it then: a gasped and garbled plea for help.

While Mark continued to stare into the water, Jenny reached for the hook, almost ripping it from the wall to bring to Mark.

He stuck it out into the water, calling out, “Here, here, take this, we’ll get you aboard!

“Ah!” he murmured. Jenny saw that someone had the pole and that Mark was managing to pull the person closer to the boat.

“The flashlight, get a flashlight!” Mark said.

Jenny turned to do so. As she did, she heard another gasping sound, and within it a little cry of terror.

She spun around.

The sound was coming from Mark.

Because someone…something…was rising from the sea.

It couldn’t be. It was a bony pirate, half-eaten, so it appeared, in rags. Bones and rags, and it was laughing.…

“No!” Jenny gasped herself.

The thing reached out and grabbed Mark around the neck. It lifted him and tossed him overboard. Jenny started to scream in protest, horrified for Mark, her companion, friend, lover, husband for all of her life.

And then…

In terror herself. For her own life.

Because now the thing pulled a sword. A fat sword. Maybe it wasn’t a sword. Maybe it was a machete. Maybe it was…

Her last conscious thought was, What the hell does it matter what it is?

It swung in the night.

She never managed to scream. Her windpipe was severed before she could do so. She dropped to the deck, her head dangling from the remnants of her neck.

“Quickly,” said the one to the other, joining him on board. “Quickly. The other two, before they wake up!”

The deck was drenched as they walked across it and down the ladder to the cabin below.

Gabby and Dale never woke up.

For a while, the Happy-Me rolled in the gentle waves of the night, beneath the velvet darkness of the sky.

Then it sank to a shallow grave.

Chapter Three

Vanessa had the dreams again that night.

They had started the night on the island when Georgia had talked about the monsters, left the island with Carlos—and wound up murdered with her head on the sand.

For the first weeks after the incident, they’d come frequently. They would start with her being Isabella, rising from the sea in her period gown, covered with seaweed.

Vanessa had agreed to play the small role of Isabella, and the day when they had filmed her in the costume had turned out to be fun—after she’d calmed down from being aggravated. There she had been in that gown, floating—a corpse that had come to the surface, about to open its long-dead eyes—and they were supposed to have been filming from beneath her. But in the middle of the shoot, they’d gotten distracted by a school of barracuda, and she’d looked up at last to see that the boat was far away and there was no sign of the others. She was a good swimmer, but the seas were beginning to rise and the gown was heavy. She lay there cursing them, then called out, hoping someone on the boat would hear her.

The boat had come around at last with Jay and the others on board. They’d been thrilled with their footage of the barracuda—which usually left people alone, unless they had something on them that sparkled and attracted the attention of the predators. Incredulous, she’d asked if they’d gotten the shots of her, floating in the water. Oh, yes, they’d done so. Then, seeing her face, Jay had been entirely contrite, and everyone had tripped over themselves trying to appease her for the afternoon.

But in her dreams, she didn’t see Isabella as herself. She saw her dead, murdered, empty sockets where her eyes should be, yet seeming to see, face skeletal and pocked with the ravages of the sea, bits of bone and skull peeking through decomposing flesh. The woman stared at her as if she were the enemy, and all around her, huge black shadows seemed to form, and they were made of seaweed and evil.

Then she was alone on the beach at Haunt Island, and they were coming after her, and she didn’t run because there was nowhere to go to escape the darkness and evil, she simply stood there, staring at them, as they seemed to grow larger and larger and come closer and closer, and she could smell the rot of flesh and a stagnant sea and she could almost feel the salt spray of the ocean.

Right before they embraced her, she awoke with a start.

For a moment she was disoriented in the darkness of her room. Then she heard a whistle from below her window, the wheels of a late-night taxi going somewhere and the laughter of the few drunken revelers still on the street, and her eyes adjusted to the darkness. She was in her little studio room atop the bathing suit and T-shirt shop on Duval Street. A glance at the faceplate of her phone told her that it was just about 2:00 a.m.

She stared at the ceiling for a while, angry with herself. She wasn’t afraid of ghosts or sea monsters. Someone real and alive had happened upon the island. A real person had killed her friends—and she just couldn’t believe it was Carlos. Carlos was probably dead. She hated the fact that everyone assumed that he’d been the killer, when he probably died trying to protect Georgia from whatever sick maniac had come upon them. It was chilling to think that the killer had to have been on the island with them when Georgia had first screamed, when they had all thought that Travis was fine somewhere, laughing at the cruel joke he had played on Georgia. They should have looked harder for Travis that night.

And yet, who would have really suspected anything? They were a large enough group. They’d been enjoying the shoot, and even the pristine isolation of Haunt Island.

She probably lay there for hours, and then drifted off.

Vanessa’s phone rang at 8:00 a.m. She knew, because the jarring sound caused her to bolt up, and she saw the time immediately. She fumbled to retrieve it from the stand next to the bed and answered breathlessly.

“Yes?”

“Vanessa?”

She felt as if her heart stood still for a moment. The voice sounded like that of Sean O’Hara.

“Yes?”

“Are you awake? Sorry if I woke you.”

He wasn’t one bit sorry, she thought.

“I was awake,” she said. So she was lying. She wasn’t sure what she had said or done exactly that had seemed to raise a barrier of hostility within him—other than that she did want him to take his project and turn it to her purpose.

“Ready to let me see your stuff?” he asked.

“Pardon?”

“Diving, filming,” he said. Was there a touch of mockery in his tone? Was he amused that she might have thought that he meant something else?

“Of course. Anytime. Does this mean that—”

“It means I want to see if you’re as good as your credentials,” he said flatly.

“Of course. Where do you want me, when, and with what equipment?”

“I have equipment. You probably want your own regulator and mask.”

“Of course. What about cameras?”

“Mine are excellent quality.”

“So are mine.”

“Let’s see if you know my equipment, and my methods,” he said. “And if I hire you, it’s going to be as my assistant, remember? Hauling, toting. But…it won’t hurt to see what you can do with a camera. You never know when you may need some backup.”

“All right.”

“Meet me at the dock in half an hour. My dive boat is the Conch Fritter. I’ll be setting her up.”

“I’ll be there,” she promised.

For a moment she couldn’t afford to waste, she just sat there, staring at her phone. He hadn’t agreed.

But he hadn’t said no.

And in the water, she could prove herself.

She blinked, then shot out of bed. She had thirty minutes to shower, find a suit and run down the seven or so blocks to the boat docks.

And there had to be a cup of coffee somewhere along the way.

Vanessa Loren was all business when she arrived at the dock precisely on time. She was wearing a huge tank-type T-shirt over a bathing suit and carried a dive bag in one hand, a large paper cup of coffee in the other. Her hair was swept back in a band at her nape and she was wearing large dark sunglasses.

“Hand over the bag,” he said politely.

“I can manage,” she told him.

She could. Without needing a handhold of any kind for balance, she made the short leap from the dock to the deck with amazing dexterity, never in danger of losing so much as a drop of coffee—not that the company didn’t serve its coffee with A-one lids.

He shrugged as she landed. “Suit yourself. Want to grab that line aft?”

“Sure.”

Bartholomew leaned casually against the rail, arms crossed over his chest. “She’s got quite the physical prowess, and yet she’s light and sleek as a cat. I say, hire her on! Trust me, the women of my day were seldom adept at working on any ship. Ah, this is but a boat. There you go.”

Sean wanted to tell Bartholomew that there had been a number of famous and infamous women working upon pirate ships, but since Bartholomew was indignant at the term pirate, he’d deny it. And he knew that Bartholomew was going to goad him all afternoon.

He refrained from replying.

He went to the fore to release the front line and she scurried to release the one aft. He didn’t speak to her as he guided the Conch Fritter out of the harbor.

Bartholomew, however, kept up a running conversation.

“Ah, what a lovely day. Truly lovely day! Calm seas, a beautiful sky and just the tiniest kiss of autumn in the air. I do remember this reef—we forced a few Spaniards into her sharp tentacles, we did. Glorious sailing! Oh, and by the way—you do know that this is the area where Mad Miller supposedly attacked the Santa Geneva and kidnapped Dona Isabella. Alas, the ship upon which she sailed sank to the bottom of the sea with the nasty, evil creatures upon the pirate ship, Mad Miller’s flagship, slicing up many a man as he begged for mercy, cast into the water, drowning!”