Not surprisingly, Specter Ten had left the vicinity of camera two by now. They were either back at their van or investigating elsewhere in the woods. His best chance to catch them was to try base camp. Assuming they hadn’t been eaten by monsters since he last saw them.
He looked out at the lake once more, making sure that nothing was sneaking up on him again, and then began to trudge back through the woods, his eyes wide open for any sign of more paranormal activity. But as he made his way deeper into the forest, nothing more happened. The bloody woman seemed to have made her point for the time being. The hellhound was otherwise occupied. The silver spacecraft had perhaps found a cornfield to doodle in. Even the ghostly boy and shadow man didn’t reveal themselves.
Perhaps they were all steering clear of the poorly-concealed cameras.
He passed one that looked like they’d attempted to camouflage it by taping a small pile of leaves to the top. It now looked exactly like a camera on a shiny, metal tripod with a pile of leaves and duct tape stuck to it. He couldn’t decide which was more ridiculous, the fact that they’d done such a terrible job at it or that they’d even bothered.
Personally, if he were a Hedge Lake monster, he’d wait for a more respectable investigation team, too. This was probably downright insulting.
He located the fire trail and followed it to the clearing where Specter Ten’s ugly-mobile was parked. It was quiet. He didn’t think anyone was around, but when he walked behind the vehicle and peered inside, he found Mandy right where he’d last seen her, still playing with her cell phone. Pete was with her, sprawled on the floor of the van behind her, a tablet in his lap, a set of headphones on his head, intently studying the screen.
And Jordan was here, too, he saw. She was sitting cross-legged between them, playing with one of the team’s meters. Apparently this was where she ran off to when he became too boring for her.
Mandy glanced up at him, acknowledging that she saw him with only that one look, and then silently returned to her cell phone.
“You guys find any monsters yet?” he asked.
Pete looked up from his screen, surprised, and pulled off his headphones. “What?”
“I asked if you found anything yet.”
He glanced down at the tablet and gave a bored sigh. “Nope.”
Eric wanted to ask how the hell they could possibly miss them. They were everywhere. He felt like he hadn’t been able to take two steps without tripping over something monstrous. These guys had to be the worst paranormal investigation team on the planet. But he bit his tongue and simply asked, “Are you busy?”
“Owen decided I should start going through our footage, since Fettarsetter’s getting impatient,” he replied. “Said I was better at seeing things. But he just hates doing it himself.”
Eric wasn’t surprised. Owen didn’t strike him as someone with a lot of patience. “Didn’t find anything interesting?”
He shook his head. “A lot of what you’d expect to be out in the woods.”
Eric guessed that didn’t include hellhounds and lightning-spewing spaceships. “You don’t sound very optimistic.”
He shrugged his broad shoulders. “It’s not whether a place is haunted or if something exists, it’s all about capturing evidence. And solid evidence is hard to come by. Most days there just isn’t any.”
“Maybe ghosts don’t like getting their picture taken,” suggested Jordan as she scanned herself with the EMF detector. She scrunched her face up as she tried to make sense of the reading it gave her. She even tried turning it over and looking at it upside-down.
Pete shrugged. “Maybe they don’t,” he agreed.
“Well, if it was easy,” reasoned Eric, “anyone could do it and it’d already be done.”
Pete grinned. “That’s true.”
“So where is Owen?”
“Investigating.”
“On his own?”
“Says one person makes a lot less noise than two.”
“Is he right?”
“Probably. But I’m sure he’s just screwing around. Like I said, he hates reviewing tapes.”
Eric didn’t think he’d like it, either, to be honest. It looked excruciatingly boring.
“I don’t think he takes this as seriously as he should,” agreed Jordan.
“He’s probably not far away if you want to talk to him,” said Pete. “I could radio him.”
“Actually, I was hoping to talk to you.”
Pete’s eyebrows floated upward on his pudgy face. “Me?”
“You’re the researcher, right? You know all the stories about the triangle?”
He managed to look genuinely modest. “I’ve dug up a few things. Probably not everything.”
“Like all of the disappearances?”
“All ten of them, starting with Robert Kapper in ‘thirty-seven.”
“Right. In the summer.”
“Tenth of July,” he specified.
“You’re good.”
“It helps to have facts. Gives you names and dates to use when looking for EVPs.”
Eric nodded. That did seem like a good strategy. Make it personal to the ghost. Engage them with familiar talk.
Pete opened the side door of the van and stepped out.
Jordan remained where she was. She put the EMF detector down and started digging through the nearest duffel bag for something else to play with.
Mandy seemed to have completely tuned the three of them out. It was difficult to tell if she even knew that they were there. Typical cell phone addict. People like her always drove Eric nuts. Especially when they were his students. If he had it his way, he’d happily take a hammer to any device that turned up in his classroom.
Stupid things.
And yes, he grasped the irony of the fact that he kept finding himself in situations where he relied on his own cell phone to keep in touch with Isabelle, Karen and Holly. He didn’t care. He still hated cell phones.
(Karen wasn’t the only one who could be impossibly stubborn about things.)
“Robbert Kapper was only nine, you said?”
Pete nodded. “Real sad story.”
“It was. You didn’t happen to find any pictures of him, did you?”
He shook his head. “That would’ve been cool. But I couldn’t even find any original news articles. He might not have been real, honestly. It’s possible someone made it up. Sometimes that happens.”
“I’ll bet it does.” But he had a sneaking suspicion that Robert Kapper and his tragic fate were perfectly real. He couldn’t quite get the blond-headed boy’s frightened face out of his mind. “Who was next?”
“Grover Storning. Local hunter. ‘Forty-nine. I was able to confirm that one. In fact, I’ve been able to confirm all of them except Robert Kapper.” He swiped at his tablet and brought up a series of photographs, most of which had been taken directly from old news clippings. Literally. Many of them were pictures of the actual newspapers taken with the tablet. He talked Eric through each of the remaining eight victims supposedly claimed by the triangle, showing him pictures of each as he went.
Agnes Rickel, age fifty-seven, mysteriously disappeared in 1956. She was last seen in her own garden. She left behind her trowel and two very baffled, grown sons. Her picture revealed her to be a husky woman with a stern face and a prim bun in her hair.
In 1961, sisters Irene and Cora Quetter, ages sixteen and eighteen, went out for a swim and never returned. They were both tall and skinny, with larger-than-average noses and wispy-looking blonde hair.
Then three different men, William Tinet, Marshal Candol and Chester Swaine, all went missing on separate occasions in 1967, 1974 and 1981, respectively. In each case, their empty fishing boats were found abandoned and adrift along the shore. Their pictures revealed little in common. They were of different ages, builds and backgrounds. They weren’t even all of the same race. The only thing they seemed to have in common was that they enjoyed fishing alone, something Eric found without surprise that he had no pressing desire to do while he was here.
In 1992, John and Ruth Badrey decided to hike around the lake. But after exploring only a third of the shore, Ruth began feeling ill, so John left her at one of the docks and promised to bring the car around for her. But when he returned, she’d vanished. She was a very pretty woman in her early thirties, with long, brown hair, a brilliant smile and dimpled cheeks.
“The last was in 2009,” Pete explained. “Eleanor Loday was waiting in her car while her husband snapped some pictures of the lake. He was some kind of photographer. He claimed he was only out of sight for a few minutes, but when he came back, she was gone.” There was a picture of a middle-aged woman with dark, curly hair, pronounced cheekbones and an endearing smile. “This one made headlines for a while, I guess.”
“And they never found any sign of any of these people?”
“Not a trace.”
Eric had seated himself in the same uncomfortable chair where he sat the last time he was here and listened with growing unease. Each eerie detail made him a little more anxious. So much tragedy in this one little area. It was a lot to process.
“Creepy stuff, huh?”
“Very. Where did all these people live? There aren’t many houses around here.”
“There’re a lot more houses over on the other side of Fettarsetter’s place,” replied Pete. “It’s a long walk between houses on this side, but there are places all around here. Most of these people, though, weren’t local. Some were from the surrounding towns. A few were from pretty far away.”
Eric recalled the ghostly figures he’d encountered. Even without a picture, he was fairly sure that the boy he’d seen was Robert Kapper. But what about the others? None of these pictures looked anything like the bloodied woman. Nor did any of them resemble the residual woman or children. He supposed the shadow man might be one of the fishermen, but he couldn’t be sure. He hadn’t actually seen the figure’s face. “Were there any other reports for the area? Accidents? Deaths? Non-mysterious tragedies? Anything that might spawn a restless spirit?”
Pete nodded. “There were, as a matter of fact. A couple of drownings. One in ’sixty-eight and another in ’eighty-six.” He grinned. “Ironic, right? But other than that, I didn’t see anything. Oh, except for there was a family back in the early eighties that died in a fire.”
Eric felt his stomach churn a little at this news. A fire? He recalled the residual house in the woods, the way it had transformed itself into a burned husk. And those people he saw… That woman… Those girls…
Jesus…
“And there was a serial killer, too.”
Eric raised an eyebrow. “Serial killer? Seriously?” Was there anything creepy that hadn’t happened on this lake?
“It was over a hundred years ago. Right around nineteen hundred, I guess. Guy named Jeremiah Bog supposedly killed a bunch of women and then disappeared just when the police started to suspect him. But I can’t find any solid articles on it. It could be all made up.”
“That’s possible,” agreed Eric. He hoped it was made up. He had enough to think about without adding a sociopath to the mix. Especially when said sociopath would probably now be among the ghosts lurking in the forest. As if the bloody woman wasn’t enough spectral psychopath for one day. “You’ve really done your homework on this place.”
Pete grinned. “Unlike Owen, I do take this stuff seriously.”
“I can tell.”
“Careful with that, please,” said Pete to Jordan, who had emerged from the van with a camera of some sort and was filming the nearby woods with it.
“I will be,” she promised, barely looking up at him.
This was apparently good enough for Pete, who promptly seemed to forget about the little girl playing with the probably very expensive camera and asked, “Want to see something really cool?” He swiped at the screen a few times and then showed Eric another picture. It was a little blurry, but it seemed to be a picture of the lake. “I took this yesterday. See the shadow under the water?”
Eric took the tablet and looked closely. There did seem to be a shape under the water, now that he was looking. “A rock?” he suggested.
“Can’t be.” He reached over and swiped at the tablet. Another picture slid across the screen, replacing the last. “I took this picture right after it. No shadow. Whatever was there disappeared between the first and second shot.”
Eric nodded. But he wasn’t impressed. It could have been a large fish or a turtle. It could have been a cloud of silt drifting through. Or it could have been a shadow. It could even have just been an odd glitch in the camera. Of all the things it could have been, sea monster was pretty low on his list of possibilities.
“It’s hardly solid evidence, I know,” he said, sounding a little disappointed. “But it’s curious. The blog fans will like it.”
“I’ll bet they will,” agreed Eric. He stared at the photo, thinking. “Have you taken very many pictures like this?”
“Hundreds. We’ve been all around this end of the lake.”
“Can I see them?”
Pete took the tablet and leafed through his files for a moment, then he handed it back to him. Picture after picture of the lake and surrounding area passed before his eyes. After a few dozen, he stopped. “There…” he said, staring down at the image of a narrow cove. He turned it so Pete could see. “Where is this?”
Pete considered the picture. “That’s over by Fettarsetter’s place,” he realized.
That figured. It was the last place he wanted to go.
“What’s so special about it?”
Eric looked at it again. “That’s where my dream took place.”
Pete stared at the screen, his eyes growing larger as he digested this bit of information. “Whoa…”
A loud commotion rose from the nearby forest and Eric and Pete both looked up to see Owen rushing through the forest toward them. “Check it out!” he shouted as he approached them, lifting his handheld camera for them to see. “I got something!”
As Eric, Pete and Jordan all crowded around him—Mandy wasn’t interested, of course—he flipped up the view screen and pressed the play button. A shaky video of the forest began to play.
They waited…
“Look close. It’s easy to miss.”
Obviously it was, because none of them saw anything more than trees and brush bouncing around as Owen stumbled through the forest. Eric kept expecting to see the shadow man flash across the screen, or maybe even a glimpse of the blond-headed boy as he vanished into thin air. But nothing like that happened. As far as he could tell, nothing at all happened. And as soon as nothing had finished happening, it was over.
“Did you see it?” asked Owen, his voice almost shrill with excitement.
“See what?” asked Pete.
Owen gave a frustrated grunt and replayed the clip. “Right there. On the left side, when I stop moving for a second.”
Eric and Pete leaned closer and watched the indicated area more closely. The sickly motion paused as Owen stopped walking and held the camera still for a moment. Something moved from top to bottom, a small, blurry thing.
“Some dust?” asked Pete.
“Jeez, Pete! Am I the only one here with a trained eye for these things?”
“Bug, then?”
“Ladybug?” guessed Jordan.
“It’s not a ladybug,” insisted Owen. “Is that my thermal camera?”
“I’m being careful!” she snapped, and promptly turned and walked away with it before he could take it from her.
“Don’t you break that!”
“I won’t!”
“So what is it, then?” asked Eric, impatient.
Returning his attention to the footage, he proudly declared, “It’s an orb!”
Pete sighed. “It’s not an orb. It’s dust. Or a bug.”
“Or a ladybug,” added Jordan from the far side of camp.
Owen ignored her and fixed his gaze on Pete. He managed to look terribly disappointed in his partner. “That’s what it wants you to think, dude.”
Eric wondered if he might actually have been better off in the company of the bloody woman.