“Oh, snap! That's from before.”

  “Sorry, what does that mean?” I asked.

  He leaned against the edge of his desk and popped open a can of Mountain Dew Code Red, then slurped it contemplatively. I glanced around the cramped, dingy office. He'd hung his framed degree on the wall, a bachelor's in management from the University of South Carolina business school, next to a pennant featuring their mascot, a gamecock, which I think refers to cockfights. A matching rooster paperweight perched on his desk. This guy would have loved the Chicken Salad Shack. I might have even seen a Gamecocks flag among the chicken memorabilia there.

  “Okay,” he said, after killing half his Dew and letting out a sigh. “So, the town government of Timbermill was what they call 'dormant' for a long time. Since, like, eighty-eight, eighty-nine. I mean, we are talking the disco era here.”

  “I think that was the seventies,” Stacey said.

  “Who knows? Anyway, yeah, the population crashed hard and fast once the mill closed back in the day. I guess you could say Miller time was over, huh? It shrank so much they stopped bothering to elect anybody.”

  “There's been no municipal government for decades?” I asked.

  “Yeah, but now this new town council came along—they're pretty much all real estate developer types—and they were like, ‘Hey, yo, this town needs a police force and stuff.’ And it turns out one of those guys was a USC Delta Sig Ep like me—he was class of '79. Crazy good luck, right? I actually knew his nephew, Wilmont. Wet Willie, we used to call him. Boom, now I'm running this town. But the bosses keep saying they want me to act like the sheriff from Mayberry, which is this old TV show, so I'm still hitting the books on that.” He tapped his tablet, and the Andy Griffith theme whistled out of it.

  “I can see you're studying hard,” I said. “We don't mean to slow you down. Do you know where we could find any files from 1938?”

  “Yeah, that's gonna be a deep basement-er, with all the old files and junk. TBH, I have not spent much time down in that basement. We're going to need, like, a professional organizing company or something. Do they have those?”

  “Do you mind if we have a look?” I asked.

  “Uh.” He scratched his chin. “Am I allowed to let you do that?”

  “For sure. You're the chief.”

  “Right. I mean, hey, what are they going to do, arrest me?” He grinned and started toward a door near the back of the room.

  The chief led us downstairs to a bleak basement, lit by only a few bulbs, with rusty, dripping pipes snaking overhead.

  “There are…definitely files here,” Stacey said, looking at the heaps of mildewed folders, very possibly the source of the smell from upstairs. Some files lay in drawers that had been pulled out from file cabinets and stacked haphazardly. More were crammed into the built-in shelves and cabinets along the walls, while others lay strewn across tables or piled on the floor, soaking up the dripping water.

  “Like I said, I'm not proud of this basement, so let's keep the judgment minimal,” the chief said. “I keep putting off dealing with it, with so much else going on. I guess you could say I keep gettin' my britches caught on my own pitchfork.”

  “Huh?” Stacey asked.

  “It's a line from that Andy Griffith guy. Did it sound natural, like I dropped it in right?”

  “Not really,” Stacey said. “But close. You'll get there.”

  “Cool. So, like you can see, the basement's a wreck. Maybe give me six, seven, ten, twelve months to get it straightened out, you can come back and have a look.”

  “We're kind of in a hurry,” I said. “We don't mind digging through it by ourselves, at all.”

  “You don't?” He gave me a suspicious look, as if my apparent enthusiasm for heaps of old paperwork was a sure sign of a criminal mind. “Do y'all live in town or what?”

  “We're working for an investor who purchased one of Timbermill's historic homes and wants to learn about its past.” I gave him one of our business cards, which do not actually mention ghosts or any other things that go bump in the night. “The investor is considering future real estate purchases around town.”

  “Private investigators? Wow. I did not expect that.” He gaped at us like creatures in an alien zoo. “Okay. Well, I'll have to go upstairs and check your license, for, like, due diligence, I think? But as long as that checks out, you can have at it, if you really want to.” He cast a dubious look at all the files. “Feel free to organize them a little as you go.”

  “Thanks, bro! Up top!” Stacey raised a hand to him, speaking his language like a native, and he grinned and slapped her a high five.

  “You got it, detective,” he said. “Hey, let me know if y'all want coffee or anything. My mom sent me a French press. I'm still trying to figure it out, but it might turn out okay.”

  “I may take you take up on that,” I said.

  “Sweet. I'll break out the bean grinder for sure.” He headed upstairs.

  I began rummaging through the nearest loose drawer of files. The drawers had been pulled from dusty wooden filing cabinets built into the wall, leaving a honeycomb of open, dark cavities there. A few drawers remained where they were supposed to be, but not many.

  “Where do we even start?” Stacey grimaced as she opened the water-damaged top folder on a nearby stack, using her fingertips like tweezers in order to touch it as little as possible. “I wish I had my gloves.”

  “I wish I had my flashlight,” I said.

  “Should I run up to the van?”

  “Grab some of Chief Tyler's coffee while you're up there.”

  “Do you want fries with that, ma'am?”

  “If at all possible, yes.”

  While she climbed away up the sagging, creaky steps, I looked from one file to the next, trying to be methodical, but it was all madness down there. To begin with, I needed to find papers from the right decade.

  It was a mess, though. I picked up one folder to see yellowed typewritten reports from the 1970s. Much too recent. I checked another folder, and then another. There wasn't much in the way of chronological order.

  A rusty creak sounded behind me.

  I turned, looking toward the back of the dim basement.

  A narrow closet door was open. I hadn't noticed it before, tucked beyond the built-in shelves and hidden behind bulky items like sawhorses and a stack of traffic cones. The closet was in a side wall, not the back wall, so I couldn't see into it without getting closer.

  I stepped toward it, reaching instinctively for the flashlight at my utility belt, but it wasn't there because I wasn't wearing my gear. I hadn't wanted to look too loony when asking the local police for help, and I hadn't expected to encounter anything paranormal while digging through the town's old records during daylight hours. Maybe it was the ghost of someone who'd died of boredom among all this paperwork.

  The temperature grew noticeably colder as I approached the open closet, weaving my way among the junk of decades past. I kept my distance from the closet itself, approaching along the wall opposite it.

  The ceiling bulb nearest the back of the basement didn't do much to cut the gloom. It sputtered, close to death.

  It was a narrow closet, but almost eight feet tall, and deep enough that I couldn't see much as I tried to peer into it.

  Something moved in there. I couldn't see it, but I heard it, a metallic clank like a hammer striking metal.

  Then it dropped onto the floor and came my way.

  A tin can rolled across the concrete, spilling out a trail of rusty nails as it spun toward me. I stopped it with the toe of my boot.

  The ceiling light bulb finally went out with a crackle, leaving the back area of the basement in shadow, like darkness had flooded out of the closet. I couldn't distinguish the darkness within the closet from the darkness around me, but I kept staring in the same direction, waiting for my eyes to adjust, waiting for whatever lurked in the closet to make its move.

  As my vision finally adjusted, I discerned two circular shapes with dark spots in the center, faintly visible near the top of the closet.

  Eyes. A pair of eyes stared at me from the closet, but they were too high up for any normal person, as if the entity within were giant-sized. Ghosts can take any form, really. Most tend to wear a version of their appearance in life, but others take different forms, often horrifying ones, whether by choice or because their self-image is monstrous rather than human. Truly old spirits may have shed their humanity altogether, twisting over the centuries into demonic shapes.

  I stared back, torn between my desire to learn more about the case and the reality that I had no defenses on hand.

  Avoiding any sudden moves, I backed away from the closet and toward the rickety stairs, which seemed impossibly distant.

  The eyes in the closet didn't blink.

  Footsteps approached.

  “Hey, it took him forever to work the French press, but it's not bad.” Stacey clomped down the stairs, a mug of coffee in each hand, utility belt strapped on, tactical flashlights holstered at her hips. “No French fries, but he has beaucoup de Hot Pockets if you're really…” She seemed to notice that I wasn't there, at least not in the lighted portion of the basement. “Ellie?”

  I worried that speaking, like moving too fast, could potentially trigger the entity into moving, but I didn't have much choice. “Stacey, lights! Now!”

  Then I bolted toward her, to the extent that I could bolt without tripping and falling on the clutter. I figured if I was going to yell, I might as well put some distance between myself and the ghostly eyes.

  “Oh, cripes, hang on.” Stacey set the coffee mugs down on the basement stairs and drew her flashlights. The process seemed to stretch out forever, though it was probably just a few seconds.

  I tripped over a stack of files on the floor, knocking them over like a snow heap. I lost my balance and landed on one knee.

  Stacey's double-barrel flashlight blast filled the basement with white light, revealing the scattered files and piles of debris. The tin can marked where I'd stood, the long trail of nails behind it too rusty to glint even in the bright light. It had seemed like a pretty clear threat to me, rolling the can full of tetanus-riddled sharp points in my direction.

  Nothing stood in the basement behind me. If the entity had pursued me, then the intense lights had driven it back.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “You got it.” Stacey passed me a flashlight. “What happened?”

  “The closet opened. Watch out for nails.” I approached the closet again, armed with the power of light this time, and told her what had happened.

  Finally, I reached the closet and pointed the light inside.

  The eyes shone back at me, reddish.

  Stacey gasped. “Is that what I think it is?”

  “Yeah,” I replied, seeing it clearly at last.

  “It's even more awful in person.”

  Feeling a mix of relief and embarrassment, I stared at the red glass eyes and filthy, dusty pink hide of the Easter bunny costume from the old pictures, the one that had probably given kids more nightmares than happy memories. It had been stuffed onto the top shelf of the closet, facing outward. The mask's actual eyeholes appeared to be the wide nostrils of the bunny's nose, below the glass eyes, which were just for show. I wondered whether the costume maker was malevolent, wanting to scare kids, or just had poor costuming skills.

  “Is everything okay now?” Stacey asked.

  “I'm not sure.” I moved closer to the closet, watching my step so nothing stabbed me through the foot. I peered into the second shelf, the one below the costume, which held a rust-splotched hammer and a few loose nails. “The can must have come from here. The shelf runs all the way to the brick wall of the foundation, but there's nothing but cobwebs back there. I suppose a rat could have knocked the can over—”

  “Oh, please, let it be a ghost and not a rat,” Stacey whispered, looking at the heaps of files we needed to search. Many were large enough to conceal a rat's nest.

  “—but there would be little rat-prints in the dust.”

  “So a ghost threw the nails at you?” she asked in a hopeful tone.

  “Maybe.” With the flashlight beam, I traced the course of the spilled nails, then shook my head. “We should clean these up so nobody steps on them. Let's watch our backs down here.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  “I'm still not finding anything about Solange,” Stacey complained an hour later. We'd swept up the nails with a dusty broom we'd found, and then kept digging through files. We'd located police paperwork dated with the correct year, but nothing mentioning our missing girl.

  “We have to wrap it up soon. Dave and Nicole are expecting us.” I glanced toward the closet door, making sure the rabbit costume wasn't getting possessed and starting to move, like I'd kept imagining since discovering it.

  We were just about to call it quits when Stacey shouted.

  I turned, worried something had crept out and grabbed her, but she was waving a stained manila folder in my direction.

  “Got it!” she announced.

  “Are you serious? I'd given up on finding anything today.” I took the folder, laid it on an old desk we'd partially uncovered, and carefully opened it.

  The file contained a few faded photographs, including the one of Solange that had run in the local paper. Others showed the girl at a younger age. She was usually with her mother, Aurelie, whose haughty beauty and French name would surely have made her an exotic presence in the rural mill town, even in her threadbare Depression-era day dress.

  “So that's the lady who ran the boardinghouse,” Stacey said. “I wonder what happened to her.”

  “Take pictures of every page.” I pulled out my phone, while Stacey drew out a pocket camera with a much higher resolution.

  The police notes stated that Aurelie was a young widow originally from Tours, France. Aurelie had moved to America with her young daughter Solange, arriving at the port of Savannah. She eventually found steady work in Timbermill, cooking and cleaning at the boardinghouse for its elderly owner, a much older widow named Ida Collins, who perhaps took sympathy on Aurelie.

  The last page in the file was folded in half. I opened it gently, trying not to tear the fragile yellow paper. A photograph slid out and landed face down on the floor.

  We looked at the paper first. It was full of scrawled, jotted notes, like a small addendum to the main file about the missing girl:

  Also missing – Raynard, 7 – second child of Aurelie, disappeared one week later

  “Wait, a whole other kid went missing?” Stacey asked. “How is that a footnote?”

  I picked up the photograph from the floor and turned it over.

  The boy in the picture stood alone, dressed in a bowtie, suspenders, and flat wool cap, his eyes huge and frightened, like he was scared of the camera or the photographer. He might have been six or seven in the picture. While Solange and her mother were fair-skinned and light-haired, the little boy in the picture had dark skin and curly black hair.

  “Different fathers, you think?” Stacey asked.

  “And the local police and newspapers clearly thought one child was more important than the other.” I took a snapshot of the photograph and the accompanying paperwork with my phone. “Raynard. That sounds a lot like 'Rainy,' doesn't it?”

  “The invisible friend from the spooky sheet trick?” Stacey asked.

  “And if Andra finds it hard to say French names like 'Solange' and 'Raynard'—”

  “Then maybe she simplifies them to Sunny and Rainy.”

  “But that still leaves open the question of why they went missing, and why Solange died, and whether this has anything to do with the 'Jack' character that the kids seem afraid of—”

  The closet door slammed wide open against the basement wall, like a hurricane was blowing through.

  I turned in time to see the can of nails, which we'd gone to all the trouble to gather up, hurtling through the air toward my head.

  “Look out!” I moved to protect Stacey while also turning my back toward the closet to protect myself. I really should have ducked instead, because the can cracked into the back of my head. Starbursts exploded behind my eyes as I staggered.

  The nails exploded from the can, showering us with sharp points.

  “Ellie! Get down!” Stacey shouted, though I was already off balance and drifting down to my knees anyway.

  I heard the whooshing sound of something approaching from the darkness. The entity was making its move.

  Stacey gripped her tactical light with both hands like a baseball bat. She swung it at a small, dark object that came flying toward us. My blurred vision finally registered that the old hammer had been flung through the air, in the general direction of Stacey's ribcage, which it could definitely damage at that speed.

  I held my breath as her flashlight swept toward the hammer, momentarily blinding me with light, so that I heard the crunching impact rather than saw it.

  Stacey let out a pained grunt and stumbled into me, dropping to join me on the floor.

  At the same time, something crashed into the desk where we'd been working, scattering the files on the missing children.

  “Did it get you?” I started checking her for injuries.

  “I got it.” She held up her flashlight to show me the deep dent in its side and gave me a pained half-grin. “Whacked it with everything I had. I think I pulled something in my side though, yikes. How's your head?”

  “Fine,” I said, though it ached. I pushed my way up, trying to ignore my throbbing head, and shone my light toward the closet door.

  “Let's get out of here, Ellie,” Stacey said.

  “In a second. I want to see it if I can.” I looked on the desk, where the hammer had landed after Stacey struck it out of the air. “Nice batting skills, by the way.”

  “Thanks! I was a Wildcat back in Montgomery. Fifth-grade softball champs? Surely you've heard of us.”

  “I may have seen something about that on ESPN.” I advanced toward the closet door instead of taking the stairs out of the basement. Stacey sighed and followed me.

 

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