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  "Who knows?" Craig asked, then grinned. "Of course, I've got theories on that, too. Minnie was a member of the Beings of Light Church some years back but they excommunicated her--or whatever it is the High Hooey Center does when it kicks you out. Well, that was right around the time that Spiros appeared--"

  "Spiros is the 'high being' they claim to channel?"

  "She's told you about him, then?"

  "Briefly." David nodded. "Very briefly."

  "I figure they were afraid she was going to tell who the channeler was, so they dumped her. And that pissed her off."

  "Is she mad at all of them, then?"

  "Sure she is, but Theo is a particular target. Seems she gets to all the eligible men before Calla can and 'spoils' them for Minnie's darling daughter."

  "Minnie has implied, particularly to Amber, that Theo sleeps around, that she's a gold-digger." David shook his head. "But Minnie or no Minnie, Amber hates Theo."

  "Most women do. Holly, my sister-in-law, says Theo's predatory. Women sense those things. We don't."

  "You've got that right. So, is Theo a maneater, like Minnie--and Amber--say?"

  "Let's put it this way. If you get invited into her bed, make sure you've got rubbers. She's been around. I wouldn't take any chances."

  "Rubbers." David chuckled. "Haven't heard that word for a while. All us aging big city baby boomers say condoms, so no one'll know how old we are. I say condom, but in my head, it's still rubber."

  "Guess I'll have to say that too," Craig said. "You ever see the old-fashioned kind?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "My granddad had this rubber. This one rubber. He kept it in a wooden box by his bed and when I was ten, he decided to explain the facts of life to me. He took that thing out of the box and kinda waggled it in my face, you know? And then he explains to me how you had to be careful to wash it out every time you used it, and how you needed to dry it and talc it. I was horrified--my grandfather was having sex with my grandmother."

  Masters guffawed. "What an awful thought!"

  "It still is," Craig chuckled. "When he picked the thing up, talc flew out of it, and there were water stains--fresh ones--in the wooden box. A kid doesn't need to know his grandma and grandpa are still doing the wild thing. And you should've seen this thing. It was as thick as a plumber's glove. You wouldn't even know you were having sex." He laughed. "It warped me, Masters, it truly did."

  "Can I ask you something?" David's tone was serious.

  "Shoot."

  "Why did Minnie try to break up your marriage?"

  "Try? My friend, she did it up brown. My own theory is that Minnie wanted to get rid of Linda She never liked her--" He grinned. "Like you, she was from the big city, which is a pretty exotic thing to Minnie, who claims never to go anywhere. Anyway, as far as she was concerned, Linda waltzed in here and stopped her plans to fix me up with her daughter. After Linda left, she went back to trying to matchmake me and Calla."

  "I'm sorry."

  "No. It was a lousy marriage anyway. If it hadn't been, Linda would have trusted me, at least enough to hear my side. So, in a way, the old bat did me a favor." He finished off his beer. "Has Minnie tried to fix you up with Calla yet?"

  "I've been given the sales pitch a dozen times." David groaned. "And Calla keeps leaving phone messages about interviewing me for the paper. She's left notes on the door and she's come over when her mother's there. I guess I can't avoid her forever, but..."

  "How the hell do you avoid her now?"

  "I screen all my calls, and I lock myself in my office all day." He grinned sheepishly. "I got nasty with Minnie early on after she came into my office without knocking, then I followed up by making sure she knew about the lock I installed. Amber then explained to her that I'm a monster if anyone disturbs me during working hours. A regular Jack Torrance."

  "Jack who?"

  "Jack Nicholson’s character in The Shining."

  "The maniac writer." Craig nodded appreciatively. "That's nothing I'd want to mess with."

  "Let's hope Minnie continues to feel the same way. But I think I'll just let her go. I knew I should--I just didn't want to do any housework."

  "You might ask Eric about working more hours for you. He's got a part-time job at the bait shop that he would love to give up."

  "I'll ask him. Thanks. So, tell me about Calla. You were going to marry her?"

  "Lord, no. Minnie thought I should. I'd about rather turn gay."

  "Bad news, huh?"

  "She's not exactly ugly or anything, just homely. Real skinny, with a long horsy face. Wears granny glasses."

  "How unfortunate," David said.

  "And she fucks with her hair. It's always different and always looks like a cat threw up on her head. It's always short, but sometimes it's brown, and sometimes red. Once she frosted it so she looked a lot like the Bride of Frankenstein. She cuts it herself, too, and sometimes little chunks are gone out of it. Then, when that happens, she perms it so it looks like an Afro from the seventies. The boys at the station have a pool every week on Calla's hair." He grinned. "I won last week."

  "She sounds horrible."

  "Yep. She's sort of got this rebellious save-the-world attitude that you'd expect from a college kid. She handcuffed herself to a trash can once to protest rising refuse bills. Had a photog from the paper take pictures and wrote up a story trying to accuse my men of brutality. Since half the town witnessed the event, she just did herself a big disservice. She's the bee in your bonnet type, always looking for causes no one else cares about. Calls herself a liberal or a socialist or a humanitarian, depending on her mood. Always shows up in old jeans and Hawaiian shirts. Wrinkled ones. I mean, this is California, we don't much care, but she wears this stuff to weddings because it's 'her right,' as she says."

  "Old hippie," David observed solemnly.

  "You've got it. The worst thing about Calla, though, is her earrings. Now, understand, I've been here most of my life. Went to college in San Luis Obispo and I get out to LA or Frisco once in a while, but basically I'm a socially ignorant country boy. But even I know those earrings of hers must come from inside cereal boxes. They're big and they're cheap and she has a million of them. That's Calla."

  "You haven't mentioned her qualities as a writer," David said dryly. "Her mother told me she's written fifteen books and volunteered me to read them so she can get published."

  "Lord have mercy on our souls," Craig said with false fervency.

  "She once had an offer to sell one of those books. It was a long, long time ago. You know what she did? She wouldn't sell it because they said there'd be some editing."

  "There's always some editing."

  "She said it was perfect the way it was and if they were too stupid to see that not one word should be changed, then they couldn't have it. She wrote a scathing editorial about the publishing industry and selling out in the next issue of the Guardian."

  "She sounds utterly charming."

  "To the core. And her mother never gives up trying to get her married off. Christ, Masters, I guess I'm just as bad a gossip as Minnie."

  "It will go no further, I promise." David hesitated. "Can we change the subject?"

  "Please."

  "Okay. Do you know if there are any police records still around for the Body House Massacre of 1915?"

  "You've been wanting to ask that all evening, haven't you?"

  "Yeah, I have."

  "There's nothing. Not a scrap. After I became chief, I had a really good look around, but it's all been destroyed. If it ever existed."

  "What about doctor's records? Any idea where Louis Shayrock's rues got to?"

  "No, and not for lack of looking. I thought I'd find out plenty, since the same family's been doctoring around here since God knows when. Keith Shayrock, his grandson, is our doc these days, but all he told me was that his granddaddy died in a fire in 1918. The family feeling is that he was murdered."

  "Don't tell me. The fire was in his office and all
his records were destroyed."

  "Exactly right. You ought to give Keith a call and talk him up a little--you seem to be pretty good at that. Because of my job, sometimes people clam up around me even when there's no reason to." Craig cracked his knuckles with great enjoyment. "Old Red Cay wasn't exactly the most upstanding place in the world, you know, and now and then, you hear talk about how many of Lizzie's customers were Red Cay's most upstanding citizens."

  "The mayor and a senator were mentioned as victims," David told him.

  "Mentioned where?"

  "In the Guardian."

  "From 1915?"

  "Yes. There are several articles. I haven't even finished going through them yet, but--"

  "The Guardian office burned down three weeks after the massacre, so all the morgue copies were destroyed." Craig lifted his eyebrows. "And all the copies of the papers mentioning the Body House massacre disappeared. Where the hell did you find the papers?"

  "There were some boxes in the attic that Eric and I found. They were built to be invisible. The contents date back to 1911, the year Lizzie moved here, and they appear to go on for some time after her death. I'm guessing the retired navy man she left the place to packed the items away."

  "Can I give you some advice?"

  "Sure."

  "Don't tell anyone else about the papers. Sure enough, they'll disappear on you. Copy them and send the originals somewhere safe out of town. Memories are long around here."

  "I'll do that. You've done a lot of researching yourself."

  "I have. I got interested in the original massacre in 1968, after the hippie slayings."

  "Eric mentioned you were there. Was it bad?"

  "It was very bad. Not as bad as that fetus stuck in the engine, I guess, nothing could be as bad as that. What got me curious about the old murders was that I'd heard stories about the methods of the murderer and they seemed very similar to the hippies. Jack the Ripper type stuff. But I couldn't find anything factual to verify it. All we have are word-of-mouth stories and some write-ups in books and magazines to go on, but those mean nothing since they were based on hearsay. No witnesses survived." He looked up hopefully. "You probably know more about the massacre than anyone else. I'd be real interested in taking a look at those articles."

  "I'll be happy to make you copies." David grinned. "You can expose the ancestors of half the people in town as part of the scandal. There were a whole bushel of Coxes dipping their surnames that night."

  "Really!" Craig laughed, delighted. "Any Swensons?"

  "There might have been one, I can't recall offhand, but I'll look."

  "Exactly what have you got? I'd sure like to find out about the condition of the bodies."

  "I have lists of the victims and the missing persons. I also have a schematic of the locations of the victims, but so far I haven't found any detailing on the murder methods, except for one mention of a Ripper-style disembowelment I don't really expect to find anything else, either, not in newspaper clippings."

  "Probably not." Craig lapsed into silence. The murders weren't important anymore, but the fascination held.

  "Amber has found several of the missing dolls," David suddenly announced.

  Craig looked up in amazement.

  "They're in hidden compartments in furniture and walls. You know..."

  "What?"

  "It's probably a coincidence, but..."

  "Spit it out, man!"

  "Yesterday, Amber found an effigy of a sea captain. He didn't have a head."

  "Oh?"

  "She dropped it and was upset because it broke. She saw a pool of something that looked like blood underneath it and figured it had been filled with a red-colored oil or something. Then she picked it up and it spurted the stuff in her face. She says it was warm and that it tasted like blood." David paused. "It wasn't, of course, it couldn't be, but phenomena can suggest such things. It dried to a powder very quickly. I think these dolls were Christabel's creations--they have very obscene genitals--and I think she used them in her voodoo rites."

  "Um hmm," Craig said doubtfully. "So Amber's okay?"

  "She was shaken and I offered to move her out of the house, but she refused. She's no newcomer to weird phenomena. It's just a little too personal when it gets in your mouth."

  "That's an understatement."

  "I wonder..." David said slowly.

  "What?"

  "It sounds far-fetched, but I wonder if finding, or even breaking the doll could have some correlation to the appearance of the lighthouse ghost."

  That did sound far-fetched, but Craig didn't say so. "Maybe I'm being overly cautious," he began, "but I wouldn't tell anyone about those dolls, either. Things disappear around here--hi, guys!"

  "You two looked like you were having so much fun, we decided to leave you alone," Amber said as she and Eric stared down at them.

  "Thanks," Craig said. "We grunted and burped and told stories."

  "Guy stuff," David added.

  "Well, it's almost eleven."

  "Holy sh--cow!" Craig said, in deference to the girl. "Last time I looked at my watch, it was eight-thirty."

  "Time flies," David said. "Amber, you look frozen to the bone."

  "I am. Can we go home now?"

  "You've got it." David rose and started gathering their trash while Eric doused the fire.

  "Did you have a good time, kiddo?" David asked his daughter as the four walked back to the car.

  "Yeah, Dad, great." She grinned. "But you two look like you had a better time."

  Masters shrugged, a mildly embarrassed expression on his face.

  "You're right, Amber," Craig said, as they reached the car.

  "We had a good time." He tossed her the keys. "In fact, we had such a good time that you get to drive us home."

  She stared at him a long moment, then bubbled, "Sure!" and Craig, bemused, thought she looked like she'd swallowed the proverbial canary.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  August 13

  The Lighthouse: 2:31 P.M.

  Eric Swenson wanted to visit the lighthouse by himself, so he waited until Amber had left for cheerleading practice to go out and repair the lock; Minnie was polishing floors, and David was shut away in his office. He'd meant to do it earlier in the week, but there had been no time until now.

  Now, as he reinstalled the hardware with thicker, heavier bolts, he felt uncharacteristically nervous and half-wished he'd called David to help him, as the writer had requested.

  He finished screwing in the top bolt and started on the bottom. The eerie feel of the lighthouse--of Body House and the entire finger, for that matter--had changed, had grown somehow stronger, so that now there was so much electricity in the air that it practically thrummed around him, filling his ears with thickness, making the golden hairs on his arms stand at attention. Creepy! Quickly, he finished attaching the bolt, then hesitated, his hand resting on the latch, and wondered whether to go in or not. After all, he'd come out here by himself for that express purpose. He'd wanted to find out just what had changed. Now, his guts were insisting that he didn't want to know.

  Abruptly, the latch turned ice cold under his fingers and with a cry of surprise he let go. "What the heck?" he whispered, staring at the heavy wood-plank door.

  It began to shake, almost imperceptibly at first, then harder and harder. Eric stepped back as the new metal fittings began to rattle and the four-inch-thick wood started to creak and groan.

  Then as suddenly as it began, the shaking stopped. The silence was huge as Eric stepped forward and laid his hand on the latch. The freezing cold metal now felt nearly normal. Suddenly, something crashed against the door from inside, a huge, heavy weight. Despite the shock, Eric held his ground. Two seconds passed. Again the door was struck and, as he heard the sound of cracking timber, he leaped backward.

  Again and again the force hit the door, until the new bolts were giving way and a crack appeared in one of the planks. One or two more strikes would open it.
/>   “Captain?" Eric called tentatively.

  Silence, then a sound like nails scrabbling against the door. “Captain Wilder?"

  More scrabbling, like rat's claws moving over slick pavement, a pause, then thunder as the door was struck again.

  Eric sensed frustration. "You want me to open the door, Captain?"

  A single rap was the reply.

  "Okay, I'm going to open it now." Swallowing hard, Eric stepped forward and depressed the latch, then moved back as the door swung slowly open.

  The captain nearly filled the doorway, even without his head Eric stared, amazed at the changes in the apparition he'd seen so many times before.

  Previously, Captain Wilder had appeared to be not quite solid, not quite opaque, allowing Eric to make out whatever was behind the figure. But now, as he stepped onto the threshold, he appeared as solid as any human. And he didn't feel like a leftover anymore.

  "You--you're real, aren't you?" Eric whispered.

  Slowly, one pale hand rose and rapped once on the door frame. The blood on the front of the uniform appeared fresh and sticky and a vertebra glinted whitely where the sun hit the neck.

  "Are you Captain Wilder?"

  Another rap. Then the hand moved toward Eric and gestured for him to come closer. When he didn't move, the apparition repeated the gesture, more impatiently.

  "Okay," Eric whispered. Despite the horrifying appearance of the ghost, he didn't feel it meant him any harm. He inched toward the ghost, trying not to flinch as its cold hands took his upper arms and drew him to itself. The roaring in his ears increased and his mind was lost in the dark lake of a strange consciousness as he felt the tall, bloody body, cool and solid, against his own.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Body House: 2:33 P.M.

  When the Masters and the Swensons had returned to Body House a few nights ago, David had shown them the dolls and let Craig scan through the articles. Eric hadn't been interested in touching the dolls--in fact, he'd refused, apprehension plain in his eyes, even though he'd expressed interest before he actually saw them. David had intended to ask him about it, but the next morning, prompted by a phone call from his editor Joanna, David had left Eric, the dolls, and the crate full of papers alone in favor of getting a chunk of book done.