dark night closed in around her, and she glanced at her nearest neighbor’s house, satisfied that all the lights were off and her neighbor, Jeffrey Allen, was surely in bed. She used the penlight in her hand to guide her toward a large bush at the back of the yard.
Shoving several of the leafy branches aside, she revealed a hole big enough for a person to drop into. She knew there were earthen steps to aid in the three-foot drop, and she easily accomplished it, finding herself at the beginning of a narrow earthen tunnel.
She’d discovered the tunnel last summer when she’d been working in the yard. Initially she had to crouch for several feet before the tunnel descended deep enough that she could stand in an upright position and walk.
Half the town already thought she was crazy, gone around the bend because of her parents’ abandonment, her brother’s rages and the murder of her sister.
If they only knew what she did on moonless nights when she wasn’t working the night shift at the Pirate’s Inn, they’d probably have her locked up in an insane asylum for the rest of her life. But there was a rhyme and reason to her madness.
The tunnel system was like a spider web running under the town, although Savannah had only explored one corridor, the one that would take her directly to the place where her sister had been murdered.
She moved confidently with the aid of the bright but tiny beam of her penlight leading the way. It had been rumored that Lost Lagoon had once been home to a band of pirates, and she suspected these tunnels had been made by them years and years ago.
She occasionally moved by dark passageways she had never explored and wondered if anyone had been in them in the last hundred years or so.
She hadn’t told anyone of her discovery of the tunnels. They were her secret, her voyage to the last link to her sister. It took her a little over fifteen minutes to reach her destination, a set of six old wooden planks embedded into the ground that led up to another hole beneath a bush at the base of a cypress tree.
She shut off her penlight, climbed up the planks and crouched behind the tree trunk. At this time on a Friday night, most of the town would be at Jimmy’s Place, a popular bar and grill on Main Street.
But moonless Friday nights when the fog rolled in—the teenagers in town knew those were the nights that Shelly’s ghost walked the night.
Savannah could hear them, a small group of teenage girls giggling behind a row of bushes that separated the swampy lagoon from the edge of town. Set in the center of the row of bushes was a stone bench where her sister and her boyfriend, Bo McBride, used to sit at night and talk about their future, but Shelly had never gotten a future.
Between the bushes and the swamp was just enough solid ground for a “ghost” to walk in front of the bushes and the bench and disappear into the wooded, swampy area on the other side.
She remained hidden for several minutes until she thought it was just about midnight, and then she turned on the flashlight strapped around her waist beneath the gauzy white gown. The double-sided beam produced an otherworldly glow from her head to her toes.
Performance time, she thought. Her role as Shelly’s ghost required very little of her, an appropriate costume but no script to memorize. She started to walk across the “stage.” She walked slowly, her head half-turned away and her long dark hair hiding her features from her audience.
“There she is!” A young female voice squealed.
“It’s Shelly. It’s really Shelly,” another voice cried out.
Savannah embraced the sound of her sister’s name into her heart as she continued her walk. Tears burned in her eyes, but she swallowed against them. Shelly’s ghost didn’t cry. She just walked across the place where she’d been murdered and then disappeared almost as quickly as she’d appeared.
To the continuing squeals of her sister’s name, Savannah reached the woods on the other side of the “stage.” She shut off the flashlight at her waist and headed for a tangled growth of vines behind which was the small entrance of a cave. The opening of the cave was hidden and couldn’t be seen unless you knew what you were looking for.
She quickly moved the concealing vines aside and clicked on her little penlight, using it after she’d entered the fairly large cave that led downhill. The cave narrowed somewhat as it continued but remained wide enough that a pirate could push trunks of treasure or buckets of jewels through it.
This passageway eventually intersected with the one that would take her to her backyard, a perfect escape route for the ghost of the dead.
She moved quickly, eager now to get back to the house where she lived. It was the house she’d grown up in, but it hadn’t felt like home since two months after Shelly’s murder, when her parents had left town and moved to a small retirement community in Florida.
They’d left the house for Savannah and her older brother, Mac, to live in. Mac had married and moved out months before, leaving Savannah in the house that contained far too many haunting memories.
She felt a cathartic relief and a little bit of guilt as she reached the earthen steps that would bring her up into her backyard.
Everyone in Lost Lagoon loved a good ghost story, she told herself. The town was steeped in stories of the walking dead. The ghosts of dead pirates were rumored to walk the hallways of Pirate’s Inn.
Savannah had been working there as night manager for a little over a year, and while she occasionally heard odd bumps and thumps in the night, she’d never seen a ghost.
But the rumors of sightings of apparitions were repeated again and again by thrilled townspeople and occasional tourists. The ghost of an old, toothless hag supposedly appeared in the alley beside the Lost Lagoon Cafe, and several people had sworn they’d seen the faint wisp of ghostly figures around Mama Baptiste’s Apothecary Shop.
She turned off her penlight, stepped up out of the tunnel and squeaked in surprise as she saw a tall, dark figure standing before her. She fumbled to turn on her penlight once again and found herself face-to-face with Deputy Josh Griffin.
“Hi, Savannah. Busy night?” he asked.
Her heart sank as she realized she’d been busted.
* * *
JOSH SHONE HIS own flashlight on the slender, dark-haired woman. Her doe-like brown eyes were huge in a face that was unnaturally pale. Her lower lip trembled even as she raised her chin and glared at him defiantly.
“If you’re going to arrest me, then just get on with it,” she exclaimed.
“How about we get out of the dark and go inside and talk about my options,” he replied.
Savannah Sinclair and the murder of her sister, Shelly, had haunted Josh for a long time. Before the murder Savannah had been a lively, charming twenty-seven-year-old who was often seen out and about town.
“Okay,” she replied. Despite her initial upthrust of her chin, as he walked just behind her he saw her shoulders slump forward and felt the energy that had momentarily radiated from her disappear.
Despite the ridiculous outfit she wore, he noticed the slight sway of her slender hips beneath the gauzy material, could smell the faint scent of a fresh floral perfume that emanated
