Ghouls, Ghouls, Ghouls (20 page)

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Authors: Victoria Laurie

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BOOK: Ghouls, Ghouls, Ghouls
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Still, I was going to stick to my guns. “For what?” I asked innocently.
Meg started laughing. Kim and John joined in, as did Heath, but Gilley had folded his arms and was scowling at us. “Details,” Heath said. “They want details.”
“Uh ...,” I said. Were they serious? “How about if I tell you that what happens between Heath and me is private?”
This made the group laugh even harder, and even Gilley’s scowl turned less frowny. “We don’t care about your extracurricular activities,” Kim said delicately. “We’re waiting to hear what happened at Dunlow.”
“Ahhhhh ...,” I said, relieved down to my toes.
Heath and I then filled them in on everything that had happened, including the detail about the ghosts of Kincaid and Bouvet falling to the rocks.
Gilley now appeared troubled. “Have you ever heard of a ghost reliving their actual moment of death?”
He had a point. Most spooks go right up to that moment where things start to go really bad, but almost never step into their actual death scene. “I’ve heard about it only rarely,” I said. “I’ve never actually witnessed it.”
“What could cause a ghost to want to go through that?” Meg asked. “I mean, forcing themselves to relive that horrible fall. Why?”
I pushed my plate away. My appetite was gone. “There’s only one reason,” I said. “And that is that they’re so desperate in those moments to get away from the thing chasing them that they see death as an actual escape route.”
“So why don’t they cross?” Gilley wondered. “I mean, at some point they’ve got to realize that they’re really dead.”
I felt goose bumps rise on my arms. “It’s the phantom,” I said. “I think it might have some sort of captive power over their spirits.”
Everyone at the table fell silent for a moment as we thought about those poor men and all the years their spirits were spending reliving their worst nightmares.
Gilley broke the somber silence when he asked, “What about that section in the middle?” I looked at him curiously and he added, “The part about Bouvet talking to someone else.”
I rubbed my temples. “I’m not sure, Gil. I don’t know who he was talking to or half of what he was saying.”
“A lot of it was in French.”
“But you had your camera on the whole time, right?”
My eyebrows rose. “Yeah.”
“So it should be on the tape.”
“As long as the microphone picked it up,” I said.
“I’d be interested in looking at that footage,” John said. “I mean, from everything you’ve told us, it seems like that’s the exact moment when the phantom was released.”
“Yeah, but from where?” I asked. “All we know is that Bouvet lifted a heavy lid, and out it came.”
“From one of the crypts?” Meg suggested.
I nodded. That made the most sense. “Gil, can you do a little research on who’s buried at Dunlow Castle? See if you can find anything on one of Dunnyvale’s successors talking about coming back as a phantom or placing a curse on any trespassers.”
“I still have to research this Alexandra chick,” he reminded me moodily.
I smiled. “Then you’d better get crackin’.”
 
In the end, Heath, John, and I decided to see if we could at least provide Gilley with the full name of Alex by heading to the newspaper. To our relief the building appeared to be open and functional.
The paper was a typical small-town affair; it was run by a father-and-son team with a circulation of slightly over a thousand people.
As it happened, Jordan Kincaid’s appearance in Dunlee and his subsequent death were the biggest stories the paper had ever covered, so they had no trouble providing us with the articles from the days leading up to and including the tragedies. Of course, they also requested that we grant them an interview, which is why it took us two hours to get back to the inn with our intel.
We found Gilley upstairs in his room, tapping away on his laptop, a cord connecting the camera to his computer.
I laid the articles on his bed. “The best we can do is show you a picture of her,” I said.
Gilley pulled his eyes reluctantly away from the screen. “Huh?”
“Alex’s name was withheld from the article at the request of Kincaid, but the reporter did manage to snag a picture of her right before she, Kincaid, and some other unnamed dude set out for Dunlow.”
Gilley squinted at the grainy black-and-white image. “Pretty, though, isn’t she?”
“Yeah,” said Heath. I cut him a look and he smiled sheepishly.
“Anyway,” I said, “now I want more than ever to track her down. There’s got to be a reason why Kincaid worked so hard to keep her a secret, and I want to know what that was.”
“Can I finish this first?” Gil asked.
I sat down next to him on the bed. “Are you working on the camera feed?”
“Yeppers,” he said, focusing back on the frozen green image. “I’ve been running the sound through a filter trying to pick up what he’s saying, but a lot of it is so corrupted or muted that I can’t really make a lot of sense out of it.”
“Were you able to get anything at all?”
Gilley swiveled the screen toward me. “I can distinctly hear this word,” he said before hitting the play button. Through the computer I heard,
“trésor ...”
I closed my eyes and thought back to what I’d just heard. “Did he say ‘treasure’?”
Gilley nodded. “I think he was talking about finding the treasure in one of the crypts.”
But Heath still appeared skeptical. “But why would Dunnyvale tell you the phantom was brought to Dunlow by someone else?”
I turned to him. “Like I said before, he could have been lying.”
“But why?” Heath pressed. “I mean, what good would it do to ask you to rid his castle of the very thing that’s currently protecting his treasure? And what good does it do to tell you it was put there by someone with some sort of a connection to Alex? I mean, does this whole thing make sense as a wild-goose chase just for his amusement?”
Gilley sighed. “Nothing about this bust makes any sense, Heath.”
I was silent for a moment, weighing the possibility that Dunnyvale was lying just to have some fun with us, and I finally had to admit that it didn’t sit well with me at all. I finally admitted it to the guys. “My gut is telling me that he wasn’t lying.”
“Maybe it was one of the other descendants?” Heath suggested, as if he’d just thought of the idea. Gilley and I both turned to him. “What I mean is, maybe one of Dunnyvale’s heirs brought the phantom to the castle to protect the family treasure.”
“That’s possible,” Gil conceded.
“And in line with what Dunnyvale claims, that he didn’t bring it to Dunlow.”
“So where does this Alexandra person fit in?” Heath wondered.
My eye went to the paper on the bed. I picked it up and squinted at the tall lanky figure. “I’ve no idea,” I admitted. “But she must be involved somehow. Maybe she’s a descendant of Dunnyvale’s line or something.”
Gilley rubbed his eyes. “There’s too much conjecture here,” he said. “We know little to nothing about who brought the phantom or where it came from or where the treasure is or even where Gopher might be.”
“We definitely need more to go on,” I agreed when something else occurred to me. “You know who might be able to give us a few more clues?”
“Who?” Gil and Heath both said together.
“The man who was with Bouvet when he opened that crypt.”
Heath’s eyes widened. “That’s right!” he said. “He was with his friend from France when they opened the lid!”
“Didn’t you guys say that he went insane, though?” Gil asked.
“Maybe he’s better now,” I said. “What we really need is a name, which might lead us to a phone number.”
“I know where you could kill two birds with one stone,” Gil suggested. “The library. I bet someone there can tell you who Bouvet’s friend was, and they might also give you all the names of Dunnyvale’s descendants.”
I got up from the bed and gave him a peck on the cheek. “Thanks, Gil. We’ll check it out first thing in the morning, but in the meantime, could you please keep working on that tape?”
“Only if you go out and bring me back some food. I’m in the mood for a nice burger and fries.”
“You’ve been pretty hungry lately,” I said. Gilley had been carbo-loading like he was preparing for a marathon.
“You know I eat when I’m stressed!”
“Fine,” I agreed. “We’ll bring you some dinner. But I’m having them put extra lettuce on your burger.”
“Go right ahead,” Gilley said sweetly. “I can pick it off later when you’re not looking.”
Chapter 9
The next morning, Heath and I headed to the village library, which was larger than I expected. There we met with the librarian, a lovely elderly woman named Mary, who was something of an expert on Dunlow Castle, and she graciously agreed to sit with us and answer our questions.
“We know that Dunlow was built by Ranald Dunnyvale in the late sixteenth century,” I said after we’d found a nice quiet corner. “But what I’m more interested in is anything you can tell me about his descendants, and this rumor of the Spanish gold hidden somewhere in the castle.”
Mary tilted back in her chair and lifted both hands. “Oh, is that
all
you’ll be needing to know, then?” she said with a laugh.
I grinned. “I realize it might be a lot to tackle.”
“Oh, aye,” she said. “Seven generations of Dunnyvales lived in that old keep after Ranald. In fact, there were Dunnyvales living there right up until the turn of the twentieth century, when no more male heirs survived to pass it on.”
“What happened to it then?”
“It went to the oldest daughter, Cleona Dunnyvale Mulholland, and then in the late 1930s to her son, Carney Mulholland, who lost it about ten years after the war.”
The name Mulholland was swirling around in my head. I knew I’d heard it before, but where? “How did he lose it?” Heath asked.
“Carney Mulholland was as nice an Irish gentleman as you’d ever want to meet,” Mary said. “But the poor man had a terrible gambling problem, and lost the entire family fortune. He then sold off his properties one by one to pay his creditors, but he tried to hold on to Dunlow, you know, because he believed the legend of the hidden gold, and just needed time to do a proper search for it—or so he tried to tell the tax man when he came round to collect. The collector gave him a month, but Carney died in a terrible motorcar accident just a few days shy of the deadline. He never did find the treasure—and truthfully I don’t believe it ever really existed. The castle fell to the government after that. It was made into a historic landmark shortly thereafter, but a few years ago when the whole world began struggling financially, it came up for sale and has been on the market since two thousand eight. There’ve been no offers made, though, as no one wants a haunted castle so far away from shore.”
“You said there were seven generations of Dunnyvales that lived at the castle,” I said. “Do any of them stand out in your mind—either for good or bad?”
Mary tapped a finger to her lower lip as she considered my question. “A few,” she said. “There were Ranald’s twin sons, born to his second wife not long after his first wife passed. His first son, Malachi, died some years before too. It’s said that Ranald was truly a broken man after his first wife died. He’d adored their son, and when Malachi died at the tender age of twelve, and then his beloved wife just a few years later, Ranald had no heart left to share with the next two boys born to him, nor was he much of a husband to his second wife, Josephine, even though by all accounts she loved him dearly. He all but ignored his family, and with no guidance or interest from their father, the twin lads grew up to be quite dreadful. They were said to be simply wretched young men, always drinking and fighting and carrying on.
“In later years, as Ranald’s health began to decline, he grew so tired of their behavior that he bequeathed his castle to the winner of a joust between the pair to be held the day of his funeral, which took place in fifteen ninety-nine.”
“Who won the joust?”
Mary chuckled. “Neither really. The brothers killed each other on the battlefield, and both had sons, but Carrack died before Keevan, so, technically, Keevan was declared the winner and heir, and the castle fell to his son Aidan.”
I remembered then the angry male ghost I’d met in the kitchen on our first day in the castle and how his name had sounded like Caron to my intuitive ear. I’d have bet dollars to doughnuts that Caron had actually been Carrack.
“When did rumors of the treasure start circulating?” I asked next.
“Oh, those rumors were quietly whispered about well before Ranald died, but no one had the nerve to voice them while the great lord of Dunlow lived. At the joust, however, Carrack publicly announced that he’d learned his father had whispered the location of the gold to Josephine while on his deathbed, and that right after Carrack won the joust, he would make haste to force his mother to reveal it. As you can see from that story,” Mary chuckled, “Keevan was obviously his mother’s favorite.

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