Freelance and Fishmaids is a supernatural novella, serialized in twelve episodes. This is Episode Seven. Start Here.
Previously, Reyville and Caroline were drawn into a most unusual hostage situation…and deeper into their partnership than ever before.
In this episode, Reyville learns of a deeper threat building on the island, and Caroline begins to face her own ghosts.
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For more tales set on Ferris Island, check out the Ferris Island Index.
A dream—a regular dream, one she was getting all-too used to—picked Caroline up in pinched fingers and dropped her lightly into her parents’ driveway in Denver, walking up to the amber-yellow front door because her mother was dead.
In the dream, just like every other time before, she stood on the doorstep, feeling the heartbeats inside the house like a fearful throbbing: her brothers were inside, sitting pensively around the big dining room table, waiting for her. Waiting to ask one hundred and one questions about what arrangements to make. Her brothers were older, but she was the daughter. She should know everything. She should know what her mother wanted.
But the truth was a shameful secret that she slipped under the doormat in front of the yellow door and left there for the next owners of her parents’ house to find and discard:
I didn’t know my mother.
The memorial service, a blur. That’s where she learned most of what she knew about Mama June, the neighborhood’s mother first and hers second. From the pastor, telling a romantic synopsis of June Phelan’s memoir, and the open-mic where her community shared memories of her as a neighbor, a friend, a church member. Bits and pieces of her childhood, but not enough to hold onto as Caroline slid down the ladder of grief into the darkness of sentiment.
Aunt Ida sitting in the goldenrod-upholstered pew in her black dress and her vintage pillbox hat, hands in her lap, humming her grief into a hymn. The two sisters were as different as two sisters could be; Ida was sassy and quick-tempered. She was a charismatic Christian who lived Pentecost every day of her life, singed by the fire of the Holy Ghost, a leaping lady, never married, who raised Hell just so she could shower it with the shouted grace of Jesus.
Caroline searched for her mother in Aunt Ida, but never found her.
The dream felt ten years long, always, as Caroline wandered in the dark, hands outstretched and sightless, looking for June Phelan. The woman who never raised her voice, who served her husband and children gracefully and dutifully until the day she died. Mama June, who adopted the neighborhood children and gave them attention they were missing at home. The congregant who brought food to shut-ins and was present for more than a few births in the church community, a steadfast support in a time before doulas were trendy.
Caroline could not remember a time when her mother had shared an opinion of her own, and she had certainly never told any stories about herself as a child, though she would sometimes talk about her own mother and father, the grandparents that Caroline had never met. She often imagined her mother’s mind and heart as a bottle, tightly capped and highly pressurized. And while she could spare a shiver of sympathy, in the house-shaped prison of the dream and its neverending hallways she felt an overwhelming rage that June Phelan could not have been more like her sister—open wide and testifying—for the sake of her only daughter who never knew her.
I just want to know…everything.
And the dream would end, as always, in front of an old night-draped farmhouse on an unfamiliar hill, midwest humid, a river at her back, and rabbits running wild in the moonlit hydrangeas. A place where everything began, she knew, and yet closed and locked to her. There was a light on in the window, flickering, but Caroline could not move her legs to climb the porch steps.
Frozen in place in the strange heat under strange, feverish stars.
Alone in the night with only the moon-eyed rabbits for company.
********
Caroline woke, startled, sweating from the humidity of the faraway place she had seen only in her dream, finding the reality of the tiny cottage Northwest-cold and damp. She shivered as she gathered the blankets around herself, blinking in the dark.
The dream still clung to the room like a fragrance, like the acrid bite of a blown-out match, and Caroline stared up at the ceiling, breathing deeply, trying to rid herself of the fear that the unfamiliar farmhouse on the hill always brought her.
It was then, as she was listening to the whistle of her own breath in the dark, that she felt the gaze of unseen eyes on her and she let herself glance down, to the dark corner opposite her bed under the window where the ambient light did not reach.
There was something there that had not been there, before.
A face, unclear, hovering in the gloom over broad shoulders.
The erratic shadows made the mouth look wide and gaping, the eyes hollow and staring, and Caroline felt the temperature in the room drop seafloor-cold within seconds, shocked to see her own breath turn to vapor.
“Who are you?” she whispered, her voice deadened in the chill.
But the figure did not respond, only swayed on invisible feet, unblinking.
The need to know was stronger than the fear, the echoes of the farmhouse on the hill still rippling through the air, and Caroline reached out with her left hand toward the bedside table.
Toward Scully.
She took up the camera in her trembling grip, slowly lifting it, pressing the button to turn it on, aiming the lens at the figure. Not daring to breathe, not wanting to blink away the vision.
Snap!
She had left the flash on and forgotten, and the bright light shocked the room awake, the apparition vanishing and the temperature rising back to normal all at once.
The corner was empty.
Caroline sat up and pressed the button to look at the photo, her shoulders slumping.
The photo was blank. It was just a dark corner.
*******
Work the next day passed slowly, like moving through water, and when she glanced out the window near the end of her shift to see the Princess of the Weathers sliding easily into its usual slip, she couldn’t name the feeling in the pit of her stomach. She had not seen Reyville since the night of the squidding-boat-rescue, their awkward farewell at her car, and the passage of a few days had left her feeling foolish and unsteady.
She still hadn’t searched for “Liam Lucas” online.
Somehow, she couldn’t bring herself to do it.
The clock hit 11:30am and Caroline slipped into the kitchen to remove her apron. She heard the General Store door open, and she could feel Reyville enter the building even without seeing him, the sea’s breath off of his wool coat and his easy walk to the corner booth.
She tousled her curls back into place, brushed any lingering flour off of her pants, and took a quick peek in the small mirror over the handwashing sink. She looked tired after the dream and the apparition the night before, and she knew it. But nothing she could do about that.
When she clocked out, said goodbye to Noah, and left the kitchen with two cups of coffee and two slices of pie, there he was. Sitting at the corner booth, as she imagined he would be, removing his coat and rolling the sleeves of his old sweater up past his wrists.
Caroline squared her shoulders and walked over as casually as she could, setting down the coffee and the pie, trying to keep the questions out of her expression as she sat down across from him in the booth.
“Morning,” she said.
“Miss Phelan,” he said, smiling genially as he took up his coffee mug. “How have you been holding up?”
She couldn’t read him. How have I been holding up today?
Or since…since…you know, the other night?
“Oh, you know,” she said, sliding one pie plate over to herself. “Well enough.”
“Good.” When he looked up and met her eyes, something had changed. Shifted, as if in the time since they had last spoken he had shoved something back into place that had been off-kilter. What she had seen the other night—the hope, the question, the desire—was gone.
Or hidden.
“How…are you?” she asked.
He winked, a hollow gesture. “Busy. The poacher from the other night wasn’t working alone, it turns out. We’ve uncovered a bit of a ring, smuggling various things through the island to various points on the mainland. It goes a bit deeper than we thought.”
Caroline was genuinely surprised. “Seems like a bad place to run any kind of organized crime, since everyone knows everyone here. Like you said: all of the fishermen and waterworkers knows that poacher’s face, now. It spreads.”
Reyville nodded. “Problem is, most of their operations are happening through the Brack. And the laws of private property being what they are…we can only interact with the liaison, and he’s no help. He claims that the Brackers have no knowledge of anything illegal happening on or around their island, but there’s no way to confirm that.”
Caroline remembered the liaison, from after their retrieval of the little Bracker girl from the Shag. The Bracker liaison was a smooth-talker, island-born but well trained in the art of turning you ass-backwards and making you think it was your idea. An ideal first line of defense to protect the interests of a shadowy group of people who want to be left alone.
“What are you going to do?” Caroline asked, fork poised with a bite of pie.
Reyville shrugged. “Leads are thin on the ground, but I’ve got one name to go on. Seth O’Connor, former Port Salish Harbormaster. He’s at a hospice over in Damascus, and Dan thinks he may have some ideas for how to…well, how to conduct our own investigation. On the Brack. Without permission..”
The penny dropped a few seconds later than usual, and Caroline stared at him. “You mean…trespassing?”
Reyville sipped his coffee, nonchalant. “An ugly word. But there aren’t many other options left open to us. O’Connor was around during a time before liaisons and red-tape, and I’m sure he spent time on the Brack. If he can give me a lead, a contact, anything…”
Caroline chewed her pie, disquieted.
“Anyway,” Reyville said, “I came in to ask if you wanted to come along. To Damascus. I know it’s just a conversation with an old man, and could end up meaning nothing, but uh…I would hate to do it without my partner in crime.”
The warmth in his tone felt familiar.
Caroline pretended to think it over. “Well, seeing as how you may need the help…I could reorganize my sock drawer another day.”
A shared smile. At least it was something.
*******
Tree of Life Hospice was in the center of town in Damascus, overlooking the local park and surrounded by a lovely garden, well-manicured even in the gray of winter. Upon pulling into the parking lot, Caroline hadn’t given much thought to the emotions she would feel about visiting such a place.
Nursing homes, hospice centers, hospitals…she had spent her fair share of time in each, and had hoped never to do so again.
Nevertheless, she and Reyville got out of the car and entered the building, comfortable but sterile in the way of most facilities of its type. Nurses passing to and fro in their scrubs, residents seated in the hallways in their wheelchairs, doors ajar, and windowed common rooms full of potted plants, the sound of classic jazz filtering down from somewhere.
But as soon as they entered, Caroline noticed something unusual about the mood in the place. Where most nursing homes she had ever visited were quiet and respectful, even somber, there was a low buzz of conversation in Tree of Life. Something manic, even. Residents speaking to one another in animated tones as they passed down the halls, the nurses gossiping in corners, the receptionist looking more than a little frazzled as they checked in as visitors to Mr. Seth O’Connor.
They learned the old man’s room number and started down the hall, and the strange fizz in the air felt no different the further they traveled into the building.
“Caroline?”
Caroline turned to the voice, the friendly face peering out at her from one of the resident’s rooms. It was Agnes Candle, her blonde hair pulled up away from her face, holding her leather-bound Bible under her arm.
The two women embraced tightly in a shower of surprised laughter, and Caroline gestured for Reyville to continue on to Mr. O’Connor’s room without her.
“What are you doing here?” Caroline said, once they pulled away.
“I’m visiting a friend,” Agnes said. “Mrs. Esther Benoit. She’s been a longtime congregant at our church, and the sweetest lady. The women at church are taking turns sitting vigil. It won’t be long now, they tell us.”
Caroline nodded, brows pinched sympathetically, though her own memories of sitting and waiting by the bedside of a loved one still burned ember-hot. “It’s good of you to do that.”
“She did the same for many others,” Agnes said, then dropped her voice conspiratorially. “And besides, it’s an exciting day to be here. Did you hear about the UFO?”
Caroline laughed, surprised. “The what?”
“Oh! I assumed that’s why you of all people would be here.” Agnes smiled. “Last night, the night nurses and a few residents saw something bright fall out of the sky into the backyard of the hospice.”
Caroline arched an eyebrow. “Are you serious?”
“That’s what everyone is saying,” Agnes said. “It’s all anyone can talk about. Esther claims she saw it, too. I should head back in there, do you want to come in for a minute? UFOs are right up your alley, I imagine. Strange phenomena, and all that.”
Caroline wanted to say no, glancing down the hall to where Reyville had disappeared into the room of Mr. O’Connor, but Agnes had such warmth and expectation in her eyes that Caroline felt she couldn’t refuse. “Sure. For a minute, I guess.”
They entered Mrs. Benoit’s floral-patterned room, and for a moment, Caroline thought the floor would drop out from beneath them all.
The woman in the chair beside the window was Aunt Ida. Same soft brown skin, same short tight silver curls, same blue housedress and slippers, same eyes…same eyes…
But no, but no…it was only for a moment, a ghost of guilt or worry or shame passing through, changing the features of old Mrs. Benoit enough that Caroline’s legs began to shake.
No, Mrs. Benoit was Mrs. Esther Benoit, and no one else.
Agnes made the introductions. “Esther, this is my friend, Caroline. She’s here visiting someone else and I asked her to come and say hello.”
Knowing that the old woman was supposed to be days away from passing, Caroline worried for a moment that Mrs. Benoit would be too lethargic to give a greeting, to register her arrival, but her gaze was sharp and swift and her bony hand reached out for Caroline’s, a stronger grip than she expected.
“Pleasure to meet you, Caroline,” said Mrs. Benoit, and she had the gentle lilt of an accent that Caroline couldn’t place. “Marie Esther Benoit. Call me Esther, as all do.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Esther,” Caroline said, taking Agnes’s cue and sitting in one of the visitor chairs, while Agnes took the other.
“Caroline investigates unusual supernatural phenomena,” Agnes explained, matter-of-factly, as if it wasn’t the strangest job Caroline could have picked. “Ghosts and aliens and miracles and mysteries, all sorts of things. She writes a blog about it, on the Internet. And a book, too, I hope.”
Caroline had never heard someone else explain it in such a kind way. She gave Agnes a grateful smile, and said to Mrs. Benoit, “I hear it’s been an exciting day, here, Esther.”
Mrs. Benoit nodded. “Oh, yes. I was awake last night, you know, when the light landed. Outside in the backyard, around midnight. So bright, so bright! Thought it was a bolt of lightning, but there was no storm.”
The old woman made a humming noise in her throat, then said, “He came to visit, you know. Sat right where you’re sitting now.”
This was clearly news to Agnes. “What do you mean, Esther?”
“The man of light,” Mrs. Benoit said. “From up in the sky. You know, I wonder…sat right where you are sitting now, and we talked. He was very polite. Sounded a bit like my George.”
“George, your late husband?” Agnes said, for Caroline’s benefit.
Mrs. Benoit nodded. “My George. Yes. My good-hearted man.”
Caroline didn’t know the woman, but she had seen the signs of cognitive decline before, and this…was not that. Mrs. Benoit’s gaze was still as sharp and unflinching as it had been when Caroline came in, the old woman’s voice was rich and full of conviction. She was recounting what she had seen before her very eyes. Not a memory, not a vision.
“What did you talk about?” Caroline asked.
“All sorts of things. He knew a lot,” Mrs. Benoit said. “Some things that only George could know. About our house in Port-au-Prince, about moving here so many years ago looking for work. George was a lumber man, you know.”
“Did he look like George?” Agnes asked. But Mrs. Benoit shook her head.
“No, not really like George at all. His face kept changing, first like one thing, then like another. But it wasn’t frightening, as you might think. I got used to it.”
Caroline asked, “Where did…the man of light go, Esther? After he left you?”
“He visited others,” Mrs. Benoit said. “I heard him speaking to others, down the hall. To everyone, maybe, one at a time. The ones who were awake. To the staff, even. I don’t know. And then, shortly before the morning, he was gone.”
Agnes was sitting with her brows furrowed. Caroline was thinking of Reyville, sitting with Mr. O’Connor somewhere down the hall. Thinking of all the people lying in their hospice beds. Thinking of Aunt Ida. And the thought of Aunt Ida was like a pain, somewhere under her ribs.
“What do you think…he wanted?” Caroline asked, her voice sounding far away, even to herself.
Mrs. Benoit patted Caroline’s hand. “I don’t know what he wanted, sweet girl, but I know what he gave. One last conversation. Nothing replaces one last conversation.”
*******
Reyville had a piece of paper in his hand when they finally reunited.
Caroline had said thank you to Mrs. Benoit and goodbye to Agnes, promised to meet up for coffee sometime soon, and found Reyville leaving Mr. O’Connor’s room. They walked back to her car in silence, and when they climbed in and closed the car doors, Reyville finally spoke.
“He gave me a name,” he said, handing Caroline the piece of paper. “A contact on the Brack that we can talk to. But it’s…it’s not going to be easy. It’s not above-board, I mean.”
Caroline’s mind was still swirling with Mrs. Benoit, the man of light—angel? ghost? spirit? delusion?—the way the old woman’s voice still echoed in her brain, but she took the piece of paper and looked at it. A name, written in pencil. Reyville’s handwriting. Caroline’s eyes couldn’t focus, the name swimming in her vision.
“Are you going to check it out?” she asked, hollow.
Reyville sighed. “Yes,” he said.
“When?”
“As soon as possible.”
“I’m coming, too.”
It wasn’t a question. But he shook his head, a motion she caught out of the corner of her eye. “No, Caroline, not this time. You can’t.”
“Of course I’m coming. What’s the point of showing me this, if I wasn’t?”
“This isn’t an investigation into a ghost or a fishmaid or anything for your blog,” Reyville said. “This is…this is something else. These are criminals. And the Brack is…the Brack is wild country. I have no idea what I’ll be walking into.”
“You can’t go alone,” Caroline said. “It would be stupid to go alone.”
“I’ve survived worse.” Reyville smiled, but there was an edge to it. “I always survive worse. It’s what I do.”
“Reyville, I can’t let you do this by yourself. What kind of friend would I be…”
She let that statement slip into a silent question.
What kind of friend, indeed?
They sat in the question for a long moment.
“Promise me this,” she said, finally. “Promise me you won’t do anything until we come up with a plan, together. Please? Even if you won’t let me go with you, at least let me help you.”
For one terrifying moment she thought he might refuse. He set his jaw, but nodded.
Caroline started the car, and they headed back to Seavend.
*******
That night, Caroline stood at her window in the cottage, looking out at the Princess of the Weathers where it sat in its slip.
He had not left. He usually did, heading back to Port Salish to be ready for any calls to action. But not tonight.
Something about the way the boat stayed there, bobbing in the harbor, made Caroline feel safer than she had in a long, long time.
One last conversation. The voice of Mrs. Esther Benoit was still strong in Caroline’s ear, a benediction. There’s nothing like it. One last conversation.
A man of light from up in the sky, landing on earth to give the residents of a hospice one last conversation. Why? What did it possibly mean? Did it even matter?
Caroline felt the hollow eyes of her own resident spirit, the haunting in the cottage, and she shivered. One last conversation. Isn’t that all anyone ever wanted? Is that all grief amounted to, in the end? The fervent wish for one last chance to speak?
The farmhouse on the hill. Locked.
Her mother’s heart. Sealed.
And yet…
Caroline reached for her phone, fingers trembling. She knew it was only an hour ahead, there. Not too late.
Not too late.
She opened her contacts. She didn’t have to scroll far.
Tap. Dial. Ring.
“Hello?” came a shaky voice on the other end, familiar and warm even across the distance.
“Hi, Auntie,” Caroline said.
Thank you for reading! 📸
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That ending, indeed the whole story, got me in all the feels, as they say. There's times I wish with all my heart I could talk just one more time with my dad.... oh man. This was good.
One last conversation. T’is a mighty powerful notion indeed... <3
The end of this episode came far too quickly. I’m left greedily wanting to turn the page for the rest of the story - right now! Tsk... ;)