A Ghost of Brother Johnathan's (6 page)

We had finished our dinner and Luke paid the tab. As we left Hurricane Kate’s to walk back to the hotel I commented to Luke, “At the end you meet God… that’s what he meant? Weird. Why would I need to, want to, or would go meet Rupp’s donkey, Geoffrey Ozwald Dresden? And, to what end?”

“Why would anyone? And remember that in all likelihood, the story of the donkey’s name is nonsense,” Luke replied.

I was about to say more when my cell phone rang, we stopped in our tracks and stood with our backs against the wall of a shop, out of the way of pedestrian traffic. Luke obliging turned his back to give me privacy while I took the call. I hung up and tapped Luke on the shoulder.

“That was Marta. I need to go to her home right now, this moment.” I heard the panic in my voice and Luke did too.

I was power walking and Luke had no problem keeping up with my stride and our conversation. In stunted phrases I explained, “Need to do an investigation and an EVP session, right now. Activity has heightened. Marta is worried.”

I didn’t glance at Luke for his reaction. I didn’t want to see the look in his eye when he realized what I was talking about. Turns out, I need not have worried.

“We can take my car. I keep two extra digital sound recorders in the trunk for cases I work on and I’ve got two extra digital cameras and extra batteries for all the devices.”

Now I turned to him, to see his expression. He was all business. It made me wonder if he had conducted paranormal investigations before. His car was in sight, we both broke into an easy jog, reaching his car at the same time. Within ten minutes we pulled up to the curb in front of Marta’s house. Just as before, her entire house was lit.

Luke noticed the bright lighting inside Marta’s home and said, “Is she expecting others?”
“No. She keeps the lights on for the
others
.” I emphasized that description and added, “And I do not mean people, at least not living ones. Come on.” I dashed out of the car and Luke was right there beside me. Marta had seen us park, she had her door open and ushered us in.
“Please, come in.” She looked at Luke and said, “Detective Landry, Shannon said you might come. I do hope that this, uh, this situation is not too eccentric for a police detective. You do realize this is not an official call?”
In a compassionate gesture, Luke gently placed his right palm on Marta’s shoulder. “Call me Luke. I understand the gist of tonight’s visit and I’m here as a private citizen, and a friend of Shannon’s.” I know that his calm, truthful words and physical expression gave Marta peace of mind.
Marta nodded, turned to me and said, “It’s in the basement. We should have flashlights on. I have the basement lights on, but at their best, it’s dim down there. Watch your step on the stairs.” Marta turned and we followed her through the kitchen to a back pantry room and from its back wall, the basement door was wide open. We descended into the basement.
I followed Marta and Luke followed me. The flight of stairs was typical of every basement I had ever been in, they were wood with a single handrail on the right side. I counted seventeen steps to the bottom. The stairs ended at the center of the basement. We stood on concrete floor that wasn’t painted or varnished, nor did it have telltale signs of water damage, it was clean and a little dusty.
Directly in front of us stood a washer and dryer combo, next to it was an ironing board with an unplugged iron, and to the left of that were ceiling-high windows that faced the backyard. Underneath the windows, a set of cupboard shelves held the usual laundry necessities, including various kinds of detergent, fabric softeners, and clothes hangers.
To our right, and continuing around behind us, was an open storage area stacked with boxes, crates and packed with miscellaneous pieces of furniture. From the corner of my eye I spied an old oak rocking chair, and turned to admire it. It was that kind of rocker that Rosario referred to as a papa-bear chair. I could not help but to think that if Rosario were here, we’d all be ambushed by her love for antique furniture and furnishings and we would be hustled into exploring every nook and cranny for fear that a treasure would slip by her. Obviously, having hidden treasures from the past under her feet did not faze Marta, in the least.
“Look over here,” I heard Luke say.
I turned directly behind me and walked about twelve feet to the very back of the basement. There, propped up against a tall mahogany bed headboard was an ornate gold-framed mirror. Luke stood off to its side.
Luke said, “By my calculation, this is at least four feet wide and six feet tall. Maybe it was used for a dressing room wall?”
“Uh-uh.” Marta came forward. “That’s the mirror that hung on the wall, over the bar at Jonathan’s Rupp’s Edgewild Tavern. The mirror was placed on the wall the way we see it now, horizontally. Not vertical-wise the way one uses a dressing mirror.” Marta pointed to a folded sheet of canvas, left on the floor off to the side of the mirror. “It had been covered for decades. I just uncovered it last month. An antique dealer in Crescent City had called me about it, he wanted to know if I would be willing to part with it, for a pretty price, of course.”
“And you decided not to sell it?” Luke asked.
“That antiques dealer never showed up. I waited all that day for him and he never called and never showed up. Therefore, I’ve not given it much more consideration. I suppose I could donate it to the new tavern. It seems a bit too fancy for a pizza parlor.”
“Or not,” I piped in. “Marta, I have an idea. Do you have some candles, small ones, such as a votive or tealight, that cold be placed in glass jars or short beverage glasses?”
“I have several votive candles, most are scented, if that’s okay. And most are in little glass containers. How many do you need?”
I looked around where we stood and guestimated the space. “Five or six should be just about right. I’ll help you bring them down.”
“No, you just stay put and do whatever arranging you need. I’ll be right back.” Marta turned and went up stairs; we could hear her footsteps above us.
Luke turned to me and asked, “What are you planning to do?”
“I’m going to make the best use possible of this mirror. The advantage we have in having an authentic possession of Jonathan Rupp’s is not to be wasted. Tonight, along with an EVP session, I will use this mirror to scry. Now, please help me move a few things.”
If my idea caught Luke by surprise, he did not say so. With his help we had the perfect floor arrangement when Marta returned with the candles.
The mirror was now in a vertical position, leaning against the headboard, but as upright as we could manage and still have it securely propped up without danger of it falling over. I stood front and center to it, six feet away. The effect reminded me of standing in front of a carnival funhouse mirror when I was little. However, this time I didn’t move, jump up and down or wave my hands to view and be entertained by the distortion. In fact, this mirror displayed no distortion whatsoever. Luke stood to my left, out of direct sight of the mirror and Marta did likewise, to my right. The six candles Marta provided were placed on the floor, at even intervals on all sides in front of the mirror, creating an arc of flickering light, encircling us and reflecting into the looking glass world of Jonathan Rupp’s mirror.
Marta was calm. Luke was wide-eyed.
“What’s next?” Luke asked.
I explained, “Because the electrical lights are already dim, we can leave them on. You two will remain where you are. Do not make a move, regardless of what you see, hear or what may appear to happen to me. And Luke, make no mistake, I do mean regardless of what appears to happen to me. I will begin by saying a blessing.” I looked at Marta. “I don’t think Jonathan Rupp will mind that my blessing is of Celtic origin. I don’t know any German ones. The Celtic sentiment applies to all cultures.”
Marta smiled and said, “Go right ahead, dear.”
“Okay, Luke, turn on the digital recorders, place them around this arc, but on the outside, about a foot away.”
He did so and then asked, “How about the digital cameras?”
“Because they are quiet, they can be used, but no flash. So use them as you see fit.” Luke nodded agreement.
Standing still, I breathed deeply and slowly for a few moments. I swallowed hard and cleared my throat the best I could without coughing. Then, focusing my attention on the mirror, I gazed into its gleaming surface and said:

As I uttered the last sound, a blinding spark of light burst across the surface of the mirror. All the electrical lights went dark. The flickering flames of the candles cast shadows on the walls and on our faces. Nevertheless, the mirror stayed true and unflawed in its brilliance.

I looked at Luke to get confirmation that a camera’s flash had not caused the light flare. He shook his head no and held his hands open to show he did not have a camera. I turned my attention back to the mirror.

Gazing directly into the mirror’s glimmering light, I said, “We are not here to harm you.”
“We know,” a company of voices replied.
“Do you prefer darkness?” I asked.
“We like the light,” the voices answered.
So far, very good. I decided to take a stronger, more direct approach and asked, “May we communicate with Jonathan Rupp?”
Intense silence filled the room. My heart pounded as I strained to hear a reply. Instead, I heard the screech of a car braking from a few streets away and a dog’s mournful howl in the dark distance. Above my head, I heard the steady ticking of Marta’s grandfather clock in the hallway. From its rhythm I counted the seconds in deafening stillness. Three minutes crept by. I was about to call it quits, then the voices called out.
“Something here. Something here,” the voices said.
“Where?” I asked in a strong and clear voice.”
“Here,” a soft female voice said.
“In the mirror?” I queried
“No. No, no,” a single voice whispered. Then “Here. Here, here,” the familiar soft female voice answered.
“May I communicate with Jonathan Rupp?” I asked again.
“Nooo,” a single voice answered.
Frustrated and drained of energy, I was about to ask one more time to speak with Rupp. I inched two steps closer to the mirror. Then, without indication, from behind me, an orb of fiery light shot across the room, swooping in close to my face and then it stopped, a few inches from the mirror’s surface. The orb hung in the air, pulsating bright to dim and then with no warning or obvious cause, it burst into millions of points of glittering light. The mirror shattered and falling like pieces of the sky, the sparkling mirrored glass fragments spilled out onto the concrete floor.
All the electrical lights came back on.
The session was over.

It had been a long day that had morphed into a long day’s night. The grandfather clock struck eleven. The three of us sat in the living room. Marta served up steaming mugs of hot cocoa. I looked over at the piano, where both cats were curled up underneath it, cozy and snug on a small braided rug. They were oblivious to what had taken place.

Fatigued and emotionally spent, I envied the cats’ serenity. I took out my sound recorder and gave it a cursory listen. It was clean of any electronic voice recordings, exactly as I expected, because my recorder was not used in the session. I wanted to record all discussion about this evening so I set my unused recorder on the coffee table in front of where Luke and I sat on the sofa. Both of Luke’s recorders were on the table. I flipped the switch on my recorder.

“Marta Kellerman’s home. Eleven at night. Myself, Marta and Luke Landry are sitting in the front living room, the room Marta’s calls the piano room. Marta’s two cats are in this room with us, they are peacefully asleep on a rug underneath the piano. It is just we three people. We will now discuss what took place this evening in the basement of this home.”

I gave a brief but full description of the occurrences, including the voices that had replied to my questions and the bright orb activity, and the shattering of the mirror. Next, I asked Luke, and then Marta, to state what they had experienced. Not surprisingly, their observations matched mine. I then asked Luke to play his recorders. First up was the recorder that had been placed in the space between Luke and myself, behind us on what I identified as the laundry window side of the basement.

“Okay, I’ll reverse it to two minutes before you told me back it up. Here we go.”
Silence and then, “Shaaannon… Shaaannon.”
Luke said, “Clearly, that is your name, or someone with the same name. Marta, did you hear it?”
“Loud and clear. But who would call out to you?” Marta asked of me.
“I haven’t the vaguest idea. Luke, continue playing that recorder.”
A few more minutes of silence, then Luke stopped the recorder and interrupted. “Okay, this next part is toward the end, immediately before the orb appeared and the mirror cracked.” He resumed playing the recorder.
“Keep walking!”
More silence and then the recorder stopped, it had reached the end. Luke turned off the recorder.
“That last EVP, that was a man’s voice. And it sounded like a command,” I said.
“Oh, I agree, that was a man all right. He sounded angry, or impatient,” Marta offered.
“What about the other EVPs on the recorder and when we heard them live, could either of you discern if the voices were male or female?” asked Luke.
I answered, “Hmm, seemed to me that when several voices answered in unison, it was a mix of male and female. But when it was a single voice, saying ‘Here,’ I believe that was a soft female voice, but the male voice we just heard say ‘Keep walking,’ that was different from the other male voices. What about you, and Marta?”
Marta said, “Yes, I agree. I think in the unison of voices, there was one female voice, and the rest were males.”
“Intriguing, my opinion is just the opposite. I heard more female voices and maybe only one or two male voices,” Luke countered.
I considered these differences for a moment and suggested, “Perhaps the spirits are playing to our individual genders? Just a guess. Anyway, Luke, play the other recorder now.”
Luke picked up the recorder we had just listened to and set it aside on the lamp table that was at his end of the sofa. He switched on the second recorder. We listened through thirty-five minutes of static silence, not so much as a whisper.
“Odd, indeed,” Marta said.
“In my experience it is often this way. For whatever reason, one recorder will pick up an EVP and another, of the same age, make and model, and placed nearby, does not catch a single sound,” I explained.
Luke packed up both recorders and set them beside my purse on the coffee table. “I’ll go over these again tomorrow, when I can plug them into the sound analyzing application on my computer.”
I drummed my fingers lightly on the side of my cocoa mug. I had a plan of query and I hoped it wasn’t too late to ask Marta. I cleared my throat and spoke up.
“Marta, not to be too nosy,” I smiled, hoping to diffuse my need to interrogate, “I would like to know why you were willing to part with that beautiful mirror?”
Marta sighed and placed her mug on the table beside her chair. She looked up at me and said, “It’s huge. It was far too large for the walls here in my home. I suppose I could have offered it to the pizza restaurant, it would be an authentic addition to it. I was leaning toward doing just that, when out of the blue this antique shop owner calls me and wants to know if I have any pieces from the original tavern that I’d like to sell. He made a pleasant argument in favor of selling, said he offered to purchase it or he’d put it up for auction, taking a percentage off the top for his seller’s fee. All that I agreed to was to allow him to see the mirror, no strings attached. We made an appointment, but he never showed and never called to cancel. So, I just left the mirror where it was. Good grief, it took Ozzy and his two nephews the better part of an afternoon to get the darn thing out from behind the bed down there, the same bed we had the mirror propped up against.”
Marta’s explanation spurred Luke’s interest. He attempted to ask her questions in a casual tone, but I could tell it was the detective in him that was doing the questioning.
“Marta, did the antiques dealer ever mention how he knew to contact you? They usually work off of a lead.”
“Oh, it was the antique shop in town, at least that is what he said. I never checked on it.”
“And, did he give you a referral telephone number for you to call him?” Luke asked.
“Not exactly. Because the date for his visit was sometime away, he mailed his business card to me. I still have it. Just a minute.” Marta left the room, and disappeared down the hall.
I nudged Luke. “Excellent follow-up,” I whispered.
Marta returned and gave Luke the card. “Might as well keep it,” she said.
Then Luke did the most peculiar thing. He didn’t so much as glance at the card and instead he took out his wallet and slipped the card inside. “Thanks.”
I turned to Marta and asked, “Down in your basement, are there more items, furnishings and such that were original to Jonathan Rupp or his tavern?”
“Oh, I’m pretty sure there are, that bed for one, it was Jonathan’s. It needs a lot of restoration work done to it. The wood is good and sound, no termite issues, probably because it was made from the redwood taken out of the local forest. Other aspects, such as the metal fixings have rusted away, and then there’s the problem with getting a mattress to fit. I’d have to have one custom made, because the bed was custom-sized to Jonathan.”
“Any other items of Jonathan’s down there?” I asked.
“There’s an old trunk behind the bed, it has a collection of some of his personal belongings. No clothing or anything intimately personal. Jonathan made a living in other ways than being a clown and tavern keeper. After he survived the shipwreck, he was still young, a teenager, remember. A married couple in Crescent City took him in. He took up the trade of the husband, who was well known and very successful as a poster artist. Though Jonathan’s work wasn’t so much with the large advertising posters, he specialized in their miniature versions, the trade cards and circus cards that were in use in that era.”
Small cards? Now, this was interesting
. “Just how small are those cards?” I asked.
“They vary in sizes, but are much the same size as playing cards and contemporary business cards. I have some, just a minute.” Marta got up, and again she disappeared down the hall.
I nudged Luke, and asked “Have you ever heard of these type of cards?”
“Yeah. There’s a collection on display in Crescent City, at the museum, the cards are in their exhibit of the
Brother Jonathan
shipwreck.”
Marta returned and handed to me a professionally framed shadowbox collection of the cards. They were circus cards that advertised when the circus was coming to town. Of the six cards in the framed shadowbox, I noted that they were four-color, elaborately hand-drawn designs and each card depicted a different circus act.
Immediately, I imagined that working on these cards was the logical reason for Jonathan Rupp to wear a pair of blue lens spectacles, and that it must have to do with the different colors and hues. Each card was an individual work of art. I suspected that he would initially draw the picture in light pencil and then color it in. And for that reason he wore the blue lenses to see the delicate penciled outlines. I was in awe and relieved, that I now had a good reason for Rupp to have those blue glasses and it had nothing to do, whatsoever, with gambling scams.
“May I see that?” Luke interrupted my private musings. I handed the collection to him. He scrutinized the cards for several minutes and then handed the shadowbox back to Marta.
Marta set it on the coffee table and then asked, “What now?”
I explained, “Luke will analyze the recorders, and I’ll get back to you. I have a few ideas about where and what to research next, then I need to think about the next steps.”
I could sense Marta’s apprehension and I didn’t want to leave her wondering and fretting. “Marta, I need some rest. I’m sure that by morning I’ll have a clear path mapped out for us to pursue. Please, do not worry, these things have an uncanny way of working out. Also, I wholeheartedly believe that you are not in harm’s way.”
I stood up and gave her a hug. Luke took my cue and we made our way to the front door. Just as Marta opened the door and was about to see us out, Luke turned to her and asked, “Marta, in your knowledge of your family history, do the initials KGC mean anything?”
Marta blinked, obviously perplexed by Luke’s query. “No, I haven’t a clue as to what that is or what those initials stand for.”
Luke smiled. “That’s good to know and also not important, in the least. Just an obscure idea, so don’t give it another thought. Goodnight.”
I was back at my hotel room and asleep within the hour.
I woke the next morning feeling well rested and… I had a plan tickling my brain. I made one phone call and then I called Marta to let her know I had recruited Ozzy to accompany me to Crescent City. Marta was excited. She said she felt from the very beginning that a trip there would help brush away the cobwebs. She only wished her day wasn’t filled with work, because she would like to go along.