An Interesting History

  Founded in 1911 by a group of investors, Timbermill was built among Georgia's ancient, untouched forests. Soon, fine lumber flowed out from the steam-powered sawmill and down the rail line to the port of Savannah. A woodworking factory and other industry sprang up around the mill.

  Timbermill grew into a classic American family town, a happy and productive place full of fine homes and shops. Neighbors sang Christmas carols and hunted Easter eggs in the town park.

  Sadly, the mill's closing in 1961 sent the lovely town into decline. The factories closed and the trains stopped coming. The population shrank as young people moved away.

  A Bright Future

  Now this historic jewel of a community has been polished up for the new century! Timbermill is growing like never before, with luxurious neighborhoods and a beautifully refurbished downtown. Will you join the Timbermill craze and become a part of this amazing town's bright future?

  “Well, that was a little low on hard facts,” I muttered.

  “Don't worry, the house is a little low on paranormal activity,” Stacey said. “Maybe the spooky sheet trick really was just a trick.”

  “Then that eight-year-old's an amazing magician.”

  “Maybe a stage-magic prodigy.”

  I returned to my tablet, looking up local newspaper archives. Timbermill, I discovered, once had its own paper, The Timbermill Ledger, but it had been defunct since 1970, and nobody had been helpful enough to digitize and upload the print run. Hopefully I could find it on microfilm at the library.

  We had paid subscriptions to access the digital archives of larger area papers, so I searched the Savannah Morning News archives for mentions of the little town. I mostly found reports on timber and lumber production and advertisements for the town's housewares, tools, and furniture. Lathe-turned house trim like decorative spandrels, corbels, and gingerbreading were “guaranteed to lend your home an air of noble aristocracy.”

  One headline stood out: Local Girl Missing in Timbermill. The story had been far from front-page news in Savannah, buried in a back corner of the paper, an almost reluctant public service of relaying a story from the hinterlands. The story was from 1938, in the depths of the Great Depression.

  A 12-year-old girl, Solange Tondreau, resident of Timbermill's boardinghouse district, has been missing for nine days. Her mother, the widow Aurelie Tondreau, operates the boardinghouse at 73 Park Circle for its owner, the widow Ida Collins. The lost child is described as flaxen-haired like her mother, last seen wearing a cotton sleeping gown. Any sightings should be reported to police.

  I recognized 73 Park Circle right away as our clients’ address.

  The article didn't include a photograph, so it seemed pretty unlikely to have provided much help in locating the missing kid.

  I plugged Solange's name back into the search, but no additional articles showed up. Searching her mother's name didn't return any new information, either. Whatever the outcome had been in the case, the Savannah paper hadn't covered it. Hopefully I could exhume that information from the Ledger microfilm, if the library had it.

  “Ellie!” Stacey whispered, pointing frantically at one of the monitors. “Look!”

  On the monitor showing Dave and Nicole's room, one thing had clearly changed—the mirrored armoire door was now wide open. We could see assorted blouses and blazers hanging inside. Shoes lined the armoire's inner floor.

  “Did that just open?” I asked. “Can you replay it?”

  “On it.”

  We watched the recorded video.

  A minute earlier, all had been calm in the bedroom. The green tones of our night vision camera showed the armoire, with the curtains of the upper-porch doors reflected in its mirrored door.

  I watched closely, holding my breath.

  “Did that curtain move?” I whispered.

  “I don't think so. Just watch,” she whispered back.

  The view didn't seem to change, until—

  A pale shape appeared inside the glass, the palm of a hand pressing against the inside of the mirror.

  I jumped back in my seat. “That's in the mirror, but not a reflection.”

  “Nope.” Stacey's eyes were glued to the screen.

  The armoire door swung open—silently, since we didn't have a microphone in that room—and the mirror on its front moved out of sight, replaced by the smooth, blank back side of the armoire door. The clothes hanging inside swayed and then settled down, like they'd been given a small push, or someone had just walked through them.

  “Then what happened?” I turned to the live feed on the monitor, where the clothes had stopped swaying and the door remained halfway open.

  “That's all we can see. Do you think Nicole and Dave are okay in there?”

  “I…hope so.” We couldn't see anything much beyond the armoire area, by design to protect their privacy, but it would have helped at the moment if we could see whether an entity might be moving into their room, menacing them as they slept.

  I looked out the van window and up at the second-floor porch. The doors remained dark and still, curtains drawn, giving no hint of what might be happening inside. I lowered the driver-side window and listened carefully but didn't hear any sort of yelling or screaming to indicate immediate danger.

  “Let's wait and see,” I decided. “Barging into their room this late could make us very unpopular. They've survived plenty of nights here already. But we'll stay in high alert mode.”

  “I guess that means putting my shoes back on.” Stacey sighed and reached for her sneakers.

  “Which microphone is closest to their room?” I asked.

  “Um…probably the one near the inner wall of the attic. It's not super close, though. We just didn't put much on the second floor.”

  “Turn up the volume on that one.”

  She did, until the speaker let out a low electronic hum. We still didn't hear any shouts or screams.

  We did pick up one voice, though, soft and low. It was one of the kids, but definitely not Lonnie.

  “I won't tell,” the voice whispered, hard to hear through crackling static. “I promise.”

  “Who was that?” Stacey asked.

  “I'm not sure.” I motioned for her to stay quiet, waiting to see if more words arose from below. I noted the time: one-thirty in the morning.

  We waited a few minutes, but we didn't hear the voice again.

  “Did it record anything leading up to that?” I asked.

  “I'll start a few minutes back.” Stacey pulled up the audio recording.

  We listened carefully.

  The first thing the voice had said was simply “Hi.” Then there was a long pause, then, “Yes.” The voice murmured a few things we couldn't make out, between long pauses, as if we were hearing one side of a conversation. The next thing we heard clearly was, “I think they're looking for you.” Finally, it repeated what we'd heard before. “I won't tell, I promise.”

  Chapter Twelve

  “Okay, that gave me chills,” Stacey said.

  “I think it's definitely a kid. Jason, Andra, maybe Penny?”

  Stacey shrugged. “Hard to tell. It's probably not Andra talking to her invisible friends from the magic show, since we already know about them.”

  “Let's set up more microphones tomorrow, in the main attic and in some of the little unused rooms on the second floor. We need to figure out who this is and what they're doing.”

  “Feels kinda like we're spying on these kids, though.”

  “Yep, that's basically the plan.”

  After a few more hours, it became apparent that the house had gone silent for the night, and soon the night sky lightened to purple. Stacey prepared clips of what we'd seen—the cold spot in the closet, the armoire opening, the shape of a hand inside the glass—to show the clients the next day.

  I yawned as I climbed up front and started the van's engine.

  We drove past the crumbling, empty mill and long-forgotten factories, over the weedy railroad tracks and through the trendy part of town, then on past the newly built subdivisions along the highway.

  Back in Savannah, the town was just waking up, the gray morning light beginning to seep through the canopy of trees that would soon help defend pedestrians on the streets and sidewalks against the blistering summer sun.

  Like a vampire, though, I would be holed up in my lair, blackout curtains drawn tight against the day.

  My cat greeted me with a slow blink when I arrived. He lay like an indolent prince atop the carpet-covered cat condo I'd recently bought him. The green flakes all over his furry black face told me he'd found the catnip sprinkled inside. Like a mom juggling a demanding career and a small child, I'd resorted to buying gifts to try to make up for leaving him all the time.

  I stretched out on my sagging couch and tried to relax with a book someone at kickboxing had recommended—The Silver Pigs, a murder mystery set in ancient Rome—but the case wouldn't leave my mind.

  Eventually, I grabbed my tablet and pulled up the footage Stacey had marked to carve out for the clients. I again watched the cold spots arise in the downstairs closet, only to retreat from the closed door and withdraw.

  Later, the armoire, already left open, had opened wider.

  I paused it at the moment when the mirrored door began to move, then I played it at ultra-low speed, studying the brief glimpse of the entity in the mirror.

  The pale hand shape pressed against the inside of the glass. The hand was gauzy and pale, not a fully formed apparition. I could see through it to a blurred reflection of the porch-door curtains.

  Something else appeared above the hand, just briefly, before the door's mirrored front swung out of sight to show the clothes swaying inside the closet. I backed up the video in slow motion.

  A thin, white oval shape, almost like a white thumbprint, floated above the hand, superimposed over the porch curtain behind it. I paused the image. As I stared at it, I began to make out the suggestion of eyes, clear holes where the view of the curtain behind it was sharp instead of hazy. There were hints of a nose and mouth.

  I thought of the scribbled faces of Jack in Jason's drawings.

  So I put that aside and tried to think of less creepy things as I turned out my lamp, leaving my apartment pitch black.

  I pulled the sheet up to my neck and closed my eyes.

  In the darkness of my mind, I saw again the human shape in the sheet that had swelled toward me during Andra's magic show, reaching out to me, enshrouding me. I could almost feel how cold it had been.

  My cat chose that moment to pounce on my feet in the dark, and I may have cried out a little.

  It took a while to get to sleep.

  I got up around noon, downed a couple shots of coffee, and walked about two miles through downtown Savannah to the city's main public library on Bull Street. I called Stacey as I walked through the park.

  The library was a comforting sight, one of my favorite spots in the city. Its white marble facade resembled an austere Greek temple, but its doors opened onto a warm, welcoming interior full of sunlight and curved walls upheld by funky purple columns.

  I soon occupied a seat in the microfilm room, searching through copies of the Timbermill Ledger from 1938, starting a couple of weeks before the missing-girl had run in the Savannah paper. Fortunately, issues of the Ledger did not run nearly as long as issues of the Savannah Morning News, so I could skim quickly.

  Soon I found what I was looking for. The headline read GIRL MISSING FOR THREE DAYS. A black and white photo showed Solange, her long hair tied back with a ribbon. She looked cheerful, with sparkling eyes and a wide smile.

  I read the article below the picture, skimming over the information I already knew.

  …a happy presence in the boisterous atmosphere of the boardinghouse, young Solange is sorely missed by her mother Aurelie, who has no idea where her daughter might have gone.

  “Lots of men come through that boardinghouse,” reports police chief Kilborne. “Plenty of good working folks, but of late there's been drifters and degenerates coming in by rail. We'll keep searching the woods around town and see what turns up.”

  The paper didn't mention any suspects. I also noticed that the paper didn't quote the mother directly, but reserved quotes for the police chief, as well as a random millworker who lived in the boardinghouse and called the missing girl “real pretty and friendly.”

  I flipped ahead, issue by issue, skimming for news of the case.

  There was nothing else—until I found Solange's obituary, published about three weeks after she'd gone missing.

  Unfortunately, even this left me with more questions than answers. The cause of death was not given, nor was there any mention of how she'd gone missing or where she'd been found.

  I printed paper copies of what little I'd discovered, then took a break and went outside to call Stacey.

  “She died,” I said when Stacey answered.

  “Oh, no! Wait, who?”

  “Solange. In 1938.”

  “The missing girl? What happened?”

  “I'm still piecing that together. The local newspaper was weirdly silent about it, considering they reported her missing. I don't see how there's no follow-up piece, especially if the girl was found dead. How'd you like to visit the Timbermill police department with me?”

  “The town's big enough for a police department?”

  “Let's hope the police were more interested in her case than the newspaper.”

  “I'm ready. Also, I've got those clips all shortened up, ready for the clients. Should I just send them?”

  “Sure.”

  “What about the audio of the talking kid?”

  I hesitated. “Let's keep that to ourselves until we have a better picture of what's going on.” This felt like an ethical gray area, but those could happen.

  I went back inside, hoping to dig up something more than what I'd found so far about the missing girl.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “So, did you dig up anything more?” Stacey asked as she climbed into the van.

  “Nothing about the girl,” I said.

  “Weird that the papers would care more about her going missing than turning up dead.”

  “Very weird. I did find another obituary from several months earlier that could shed some light, or maybe make things more confusing.”

  “Was it Solange's father? Is that why the papers didn't mention him?”

  “No, it was Ida Collins.”

  Stacey frowned. “Who?”

  “She owned the boardinghouse, and her obit was much less skimpy. Apparently, her husband was one of the original managers at the old mill, and the house was built for them. When he passed away, she began taking on boarders. When she died, ownership of the house passed to her nephew, Charles Collins of Watkinsville, Georgia.”

  “What did he do with the house?”

  “The obituary didn't say. Maybe we can dig up the property title history while we're at town hall.”

  “Sounds super-fun,” Stacey muttered.

  We drove out along the rural highway to Timbermill, making good time since there wasn't much traffic to slow us down.

  The town hall, containing its entire government, was a two-story brick building near the railroad tracks, on the still-inhabited side of things. The front door opened onto a narrow, musty lobby area without a human in sight.

  Framed black and white pictures on the wall showed scenes from the town's glory days. Some showed the mill and factory under construction. One showed a big Christmas tree in the park, surrounded by people holding open hymnals and singing. Another showed kids in their Sunday best scrambling all over, while someone in a creepy bucktoothed Easter bunny costume with beady eyes presided over them from the bandstand.

  “Looks like whoever wrote the town history for the website just cribbed their notes from these pictures,” I said.

  We followed the sign to the police department, which consisted of a few desks. The only officer there looked maybe three years older than me. He occupied a desk in the corner, watching a black and white video on a tablet, oblivious to our presence.

  “Uh, hello?” I knocked on the open door.

  The young cop looked up at us, startled, and jumped to his feet.

  “Hey there.” He looked between us briefly, like he was trying to figure out if he knew us. “What can I do for you?”

  “We're in the middle of some historical research around town,” I said, keeping it deliberately vague. “And we were hoping to look at an old missing-person case.”

  “Okay.” He scratched his head. “Sorry, are y'all locals?” His accent was deep and slow; maybe he was from the South Carolina Lowcountry. “I'm just getting my bearings around here.”

  “Are you not local?”

  “I just moved here from Cola City about six months ago,” he said.

  “Where's that?”

  “It's a nickname for Columbia, South Carolina. Also called Soda City.”

  “What soda is made there?” Stacey asked.

  “I don't think there is one.” He scratched his head again.

  “So how did you end up here?” I asked him.

  “It seemed like a good opportunity. I mean, police chief, whoa! Am I right? Do you know how many twenty-eight-year-old dudes have that kind of job title? Chief Tyler Masterton. It's a pretty sweet set-up.”

  “What happened to the previous chief?”

  He shrugged and made an “I don't know” kind of humming sound. “Mm-mmm. What are y'all researching, again?”

  “A girl who went missing in 1938.”

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26