Spirits in Savannah E-Book

Heather Silvio

• Herausgeber: Panther Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: A Doctor Danger Mystery
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 205

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Yo-ho-ho, it’s a pirate’s life for one haunted family… if they live that long.

When a family shares repeating nightmares of a vengeful pirate after vacationing in Savannah, Georgia, they hire supernatural specialist Doctor Sarah Danger and her team to stop the destructive haunting.

Doctor Danger is an expert in freeing people tormented by the supernatural. Traveling to the oldest city in Georgia, she and her team expect to quickly identify and disarm the pirate apparition terrorizing their clients.

But in one of the most haunted cities in America, where ghosts cross between realms, Sarah uncovers a series of riddles needed to break the ghost’s curse. As the haunting escalates, she must rely on her empath abilities to crack the case. Can she solve the riddles in time, or will she fall victim to the curse herself?

Don’t miss out on the supernatural mystery of the Spirits in Savannah from the author of the Paranormal Talent Agency.

Leseprobe

Spirits in Savannah

A Doctor Danger Mystery

Book 2

Heather Silvio

Panther Books

Contents

Blurb

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Author’s Note

Thank You

About the Author

Books by Heather Silvio

Blurb

Yo-ho-ho, it’s a pirate’s life for one haunted family. If they live that long.

When a family shares repetitive nightmares of a vengeful pirate after vacationing in Savannah, Georgia, they hire supernatural specialist Doctor Sarah Danger and her team to stop the destructive haunting.

Doctor Danger has established herself as an expert in freeing people tormented by the supernatural. Traveling to the oldest city in Georgia, she and her team expect to quickly identify and disarm the pirate apparition terrorizing their clients.

But in one of the most haunted cities in America, where ghosts cross between realms, Sarah uncovers a series of riddles needed to break the ghost’s curse. As the haunting escalates, she must rely on her empath abilities to crack the case. Can she solve the riddles in time, or will she fall victim to the pirate ghost’s curse herself?

Enjoy the supernatural thriller of the Spirits in Savannah from the author of the Paranormal Talent Agency.

ChapterOne

That I wanted to rip someone’s head off within five minutes of meeting the family confirmed they needed supernatural help.

“Sarah, are you okay?” Daniel Trawl, my part-time assistant, asked, worry clouding his hazel eyes.

Christine Mackey, our client, looked from Dan to me. “Dr. Danger?”

“Give me a second, please,” I managed to answer. As a clairempath, I experienced others’ emotions as if they were my own. The seething anger coursing through me wasn’t mine.

I identified and isolated the anger, breathing slowly to calm the accompanying nervous system overreaction, and surrounded the emotion with a bubble. As I exhaled, I imagined the bubble floating away, taking the anger with it. My breathing slowed and my heart rate stopped jumping around. The urge to beat someone to a bloody pulp passed with the anger. Eyes closed, I imagined my medieval stone wall, the image that provided protection from others’ invading emotions. The wall grew higher as I placed gray stones upon moss-covered stones, piling them toward the sky in my mind. When I felt better fortified, I opened my eyes and offered a wide smile to the Mackey family, staring at me askance.

“Are you okay?” Christine echoed Dan’s question.

“I am now, yes,” I assured them, not elaborating. “How are you all doing?” The Mackeys had hired me to investigate what they believed was a supernatural issue. It was a specialty that I’d fallen into as a private investigator’s assistant while earning my master’s degree in counseling. My boss, Jeffrey McCarthy, shocked me by gifting me the business when his retirement coincided with my second graduation a few years later, when I received my doctorate in comparative mythology.

Although the blog Dan wrote about our supernatural exploits blew the whole thing up. A Doctor Danger Mystery had become a mini-phenomenon. Now I ran my firm as a Supernatural Specialist, while teaching occasional classes at a Tampa community college. Dan accompanied me on our out-of-town cases. The final member of our ragtag team, Amanda Jenkins, stayed in Tampa to do research as needed.

Right now, Dan and I sat on a cloth-covered couch at the crack of dawn in a Savannah, Georgia vacation rental. The family sitting across from us looked like they hadn’t slept in weeks. Which it turned out they hadn’t.

“As we explained when we hired you, we’re desperate,” Christine began, her hands fidgeting in her lap. She glanced at her husband and their two teenagers. All four had huge bags under their brown, blood-shot eyes.

Christine’s long, curly brown hair was pulled back in a messy ponytail. Her husband, James, had what appeared to be at least a week’s worth of uneven facial hair growth. He kept running his hand over it, which made me think the beard wasn’t usual for him. He slumped forward on the couch, his elbows on his knees.

Fifteen-year-old Kelsey let her long, curly brown hair fall so that it obscured part of her face. She had wrapped her arms so tightly around her thin middle that I worried she’d asphyxiate herself. And, 18-year-old Jimmy stared at the ground, a frown slashing his pimply face, long arms and legs suggesting a gangly teen undergoing perhaps his final growth spurt.

“Of course,” I said, recognizing that calling a supernatural investigative consultant was not a typical call for most people.

“We wanted to meet with you here because this is where we think everything began,” she said in a soft voice.

My angry reaction upon entering the vacation rental suggested something was going on in this house, but I wasn’t sure yet what that was. “Here specifically, or Savannah more generally?”

James jumped in to answer before his wife. “We’ve thought about that a lot in the past two weeks. It started with the ghost tour we took during our vacation.”

The Mackeys had told me earlier that they’d traveled from their home in Tennessee to Savannah for a final ten-day vacation before their son left for college in California. They’d filled their days with a variety of tours; everything from a self-guided walking tour of the town’s famous squares to a group foodie tour to the nighttime ghost tour that seemed to start the trouble.

“We didn’t realize it at first,” Christine picked up the narrative. “But, all four of us realized over the next two days that we’d had dreams of pirates.”

At the word pirates, a frisson of anger rolled through me. Interesting, and not good. I rolled my shoulders and added a stone to my medieval wall of protection. Something or someone was triggered by the word.

She tittered. “We assumed it was because of the pirate history of Savannah that we’d learned about.”

“What kind of pirate dreams were these?” Perhaps I could narrow in on why the word created that reaction. The teenagers stared at me. Both looked scared, with a touch of insolence. I barely managed not to laugh out loud. Teenagers. That likely had nothing to do with the case and everything to do with hormones and lack of sleep.

Christine and James exchanged an unhappy glance and James answered. “Weird, to be honest. We talked about it once we realized we were all having similar dreams. The dreams jumped around, like dreams do. Some scenes took place on what looked like pirate ships.”

“The images were like what we’d seen in the pirate museum,” Christine added.

“Other scenes took place on a beach, like at a camp out.” James shrugged, appearing unsure how to better describe the dreams.

“The last scenes took place at a bar or restaurant filled with drunks and pirates, all dressed in old-timey clothing.” Christine bounced her leg until her husband laid a hand on her knee. She covered his hand with her own and sighed. “That would have been fine, but then the hallucinations…” Her words trailed off.

“When did the hallucinations begin?” I asked, noting that Dan was using a stylus to scribble everything they said into our growing case document opened on his tablet.

“Almost immediately after arriving home,” Christine answered, her face paling even more if that was possible.

“We started seeing pirates walking around our house,” James said. “I know that sounds ridiculous.”

“It doesn’t,” I said gently. “Tell me more about what you saw.” Another ripple of anger wormed through me and my jaw clenched. The protective wall normally worked better than this. A lot of angry energy existed in this room. Except none of the family looked that angry. The son still scowled, but I couldn’t tell if the emotion was originating from him.

“Jimmy, Kelsey,” I said, surprising the teens by addressing them. “Why don’t you tell me what you’ve seen at your home?”

The teenagers exchanged a look, much as their parents had, and Kelsey swallowed audibly. “Just what Dad said,” she answered with a one-shoulder shrug.

“Yeah,” Jimmy agreed, staring over my shoulder at something apparently very fascinating.

“What are you looking at that has you so mesmerized?” I asked, and Jimmy’s hard gaze swung to mine. Was that normal teenage defiance, or something more?

“Nothing,” he murmured, dropping his gaze and slouching against the arm of the couch.

I redirected my questions to his parents; I’d have to circle back around to the teenagers less directly. “It worsened when you were home, but you wanted to meet here because the dreams started here,” I summarized and gestured at the room around us. It was a lovely vacation rental. I could see why it would be popular. Gleaming hardwood floors, and a soaring ceiling above large windows that flooded the room with sunlight. The furniture was serviceable; maybe a little older, but comfortable enough, with a pleasant country-chic style that would stand up to consistent use.

Christine nodded. “Yes, precisely. We thought maybe it would be helpful to walk the tour and see if something jumped out at us.”

“But it didn’t?” I asked.

The corners of her mouth drooped. “No.”

James stared at me in defeat. “We didn’t know what else to do. Then we saw Dan’s blog when we were searching for answers online. So we called you.”

“Thank you so much for meeting us on such short notice, and so early.” Christine wrapped an arm around her daughter’s frame. “We haven’t gotten a good night’s sleep in weeks. And we’re jumping out of our skin, waiting for the next hallucination. Nothing like this has ever happened before.”

“No history of supernatural issues?” I asked.

“Nothing,” Christine answered.

“Even something simple, like knowing who’s calling without checking caller ID? Or seeing, hearing, even smelling something that doesn’t seem to have a source? Anything that, looking back, you can’t fully explain?”

“Nothing like that,” Christine said. The other family members shook their heads as well.

“Do you think you can help us?” Jimmy blurted out.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But I’m going to try.”

“Do you think we’ve been supernaturally infected or something?” Kelsey asked, her brother’s question emboldening her.

I shook my head. “Any number of things could be going on. Savannah has an incredibly rich and diverse history, not all of it pleasant. It’s certainly possible that there’s a supernatural component to what’s happening. Or it could be a shared psychosis,” I said, trying and failing to lighten the mood with a joke. Dan made a choking sound, and I resisted the urge to look at him. He got the joke, but if I saw him laughing, I’d compound the damage.

“You think we’re psychotic?” Christine asked, her expression aghast.

Ugh. Macabre humor had been a mistake. I hurried to explain. “Sorry, bad psychology joke. No, I don’t believe you have psychosis.”

“Then what?” Jimmy demanded, tension radiating off of him.

“I don’t know, but I’ll do my best to find out.” A wave of malevolent glee swept through me. “If I care to,” slipped out before I caught myself. Five pairs of eyes widened, though Dan immediately understood something emotional had happened to me.

“Sarah, do you need another minute?” he asked, his hand at my elbow.

The physical touch electrified me instead of grounding me. I leaped to my feet, then strode to the doorway arch to the bedroom, behind the couch where the family sat.

Dan stood but did not follow, while the family twisted in their seats to watch me.

I added yet another stone to my not-so-effective medieval wall. At this rate, it would reach the heavens. “Apologies,” I said, voice shaky to my ears. But before I could lay out my plan, my vision wavered as I fought off another wave of that weird, happy anger. “Oh my goodness.”

Next to the window closest to the couch on which the family perched now stood a young man. Scraggly long black hair surrounded a youthful face. He wore a white shirt with puffy sleeves, open at the throat, over black pants and black scuffed boots. He had a pistol strapped to one hip and a knife in a sheath on the other.

A pirate! And he stared at me with insane blue eyes.

“Oh good,” he said jauntily. “Ye can see me. That will make this much more fun.”

ChapterTwo

“Who are you?” I asked the pirate, eliciting gasps and a flurry of questions from the family watching me from the couch. If Dan responded to my question, I didn’t hear him.

“Who do you see?”

“Is it a pirate?”

“Does this mean we’re not hallucinating?”

“Are our visions real?”

The questions overlapped so much that I failed to discern who asked each one. Not that it mattered. I only had eyes for the man who had blinked into visual existence.

The pirate by the window sneered. “Why should I tell ye?”

“Who are you?” My repeated question now dripped with restrained anger.

The pirate’s sneer became a smile, revealing rotting, snaggled teeth. “’Tis different.” He stepped toward me, his ghost boots silent on the hardwood floors.

“What?” I asked, even though I knew the answer, as his wonder at my matching anger mingled with that anger in my mind.

“Ho, ho, ho.” The pirate slapped his thigh.

“Heh, heh, heh,” I echoed his laughter. He was right. The whole situation was highly entertaining. A ghost? Of a pirate? In Savannah? I mean, what could be more perfect?

“Sarah.”

Dan’s tone caught my attention more than my name. The mischievous glee stampeding through me belonged to the ghost. Ugh. Normally I caught on faster to the invading emotions of others.

The ghost seemed off, to be sure, but I tried for civil and approachable, anyway. “My name is Sarah Danger. I’m a specialist who⁠—”

“I care why?” The ghost leaned against the back of the couch I’d been sitting on before his appearance. I always wondered how an intangible ghost could lean against a physical object on another plane; somehow they chose to lean against things as if they had corporeal form. That allowed them to ‘walk’ on the ground, too.

The fact that all four family members and Dan also now stood from the couches watching me talk to the air registered in my peripheral vision.

“If you don’t want to give me your name, can you tell me why you’re here?” I asked instead of answering, hoping I’d get lucky.

No such luck. The unnamed pirate ghost laughed again. “Why are ye here?” he asked the question of me, oblivious to the fact he had just cut me off when I’d tried to provide that information moments before.

“The Mackeys hired me to free them of the pirate ghost who has been haunting them.” I said the sentence as neutrally as possible, my goal to perhaps elicit a real response but without another angry flare.

“’Tis funny coming from them,” the pirate retorted, his face scrunched and his hands fisted.

“What do you⁠—”

The pirate ghost vanished.

“Wait!” I cried out, but the ghost was indeed gone.

My cry alerted the Mackeys to the probable departure of whatever being I’d been conversing with. Questions inundated me from the haunted family.

“You saw him?” Christine asked.

“Was it a pirate?” Kelsey asked.

“Can you describe who or what you saw?” James asked.

“Oh, goody, you’ve got our psychosis,” Jimmy quipped, throwing my words back in my face.

“Sarah, are you okay?” Dan’s question enabled me to focus on him as the last of the ghost’s malevolent glee drained away.

I held up a hand to stop the barrage of questions and comments. “I can confirm that there is a pirate ghost present in this home.”

The family clutched at each other, jaws dropped open and eyes wide at me confirming their fears.

“I suspect he is indeed haunting you,” I continued.

“Just suspect?” James frowned.

“That isn’t something I can say with complete certainty. Given his comments,” I added, then faltered with how much to disclose. The ghost had indicated the family knew something I didn’t. Without understanding the scope of the haunting, the ghost’s exact verbiage could hold importance I didn’t yet comprehend. And I didn’t want to enlighten the family until I understood that connection. I started my sentence over. “I believe the pirate ghost is haunting your family, yes.”

Christine’s eyes closed, and she pulled her daughter closer.

“Now what?” James asked.

“The next steps are to confirm the ghost is haunting the family, and how. The ghost can be attached to one of you, all of you, or even an object in your possession.” I met Dan’s eyes, and he nodded. “One or more of you may have seen, heard, or otherwise experienced something related to your initial visit that resulted in the haunting.”

“But we already retraced our steps,” Christine said.

“Yes, and you did so together, correct?” Dan jumped in to ask.

“Of course. We wanted to help each other remember what had happened,” James answered for the family.

“Dr. Danger is going to interview each of you separately,” Dan explained. “She’ll ask you to bring her through the timeline to the best of your recollection.” Now he held up his hand to stop Christine from interrupting. “She doesn’t expect it to be perfect. But, as she noted, one of you may have seen or heard or experienced something different from the others.”

“Of course,” James said, nodding in understanding. “Not having others there to fill in the blanks of their own experiences could allow one of us to remember something we didn’t remember before.”

“Exactly,” I said, retaking the narrative. “Dan and I are going to head into the bedroom now—” My cheeks heated at the unintended double entendre and I avoided looking in Dan’s direction. “—to discuss our planned questions, and then bring each of you in individually.” I made eye contact with each of the four family members. “Do any of you have questions before we get started?” A series of head shakes met my question.

What I withheld from the family, and what Dan knew from our history together, was that if the ghost was haunting the family and not the vacation rental, which seemed likely, the ghost almost certainly wasn’t haunting the family as a whole, but one of its members. The true next step was determining which family member was the target. And why.

ChapterThree

Dan followed me through the arched doorway from the living room to the primary bedroom of the vacation rental. It was a gorgeous space, similar to the living room, with its vaulted ceiling and large windows along one wall, letting in a ton of light. A massive king-sized bed sat against the wall perpendicular. A loveseat and two high-backed plush chairs pushed against the wall opposite the windows completed the space. I strode toward the loveseat and chairs.

“Perfect. Help me move them?” I asked Dan as I grabbed one chair and turned it to face the loveseat. He repeated the process with the other chair, resulting in an intimate interview setup.

“How do you propose we figure out which family member the ghost is haunting?” Dan asked the question I’d been thinking.

“I’ll take them through their timelines, as we stated, but, of course, I’m hoping their emotional energy lets me know which one it is.”

“That would make it easier.”

He and I shared an easy smile. Ever since our first out-of-town case together to Hawaii, we’d developed an amiable, but platonic, friendship and working relationship. He was my junior by several years, and pursuing his own doctorate to match mine. He enjoyed flirting with me and I enjoyed reminding him that we were colleagues.

“Let’s start with the mother.”

“You got it, boss.”

I took a seat in one of the plush chairs, admiring the scrolling loops on the high-back. Either hand-carved or a well-made replica of an antique. Footsteps on the wood flooring alerted me that Dan and Christine had entered the room. I heard a thud as Dan closed the door behind them.

Christine perched uneasily on the edge of the loveseat, facing me. Dan took the chair next to mine and opened his tablet to take notes.

“What can I answer?” Christine’s worry was still etched on her face, but her squared shoulders and strong vocal tone told me she planned to cooperate.

None of her emotions breached my stone wall of protection, suggesting she was not the direct target of the haunting. But I’d push her some to see if anything triggered. After easing into it, of course. No reason to alienate a cooperating client!

I offered a gentle smile. “Let’s start easy. Talk me through your vacation timeline. Start with your original arrival in Savannah. I’ll ask clarifying questions as you speak, but otherwise, I’ll let you tell the story in your own words.”

Christine nodded. “We arrived four weeks ago, on a Sunday. We had a mix of activities planned, including a number of tours, like we mentioned.”

“Did you also have free time in the schedule?”

“We did. We used that to go deeper into things that interested us from the planned tours.”

“Take me through each of those tours.”

“All of them?”

“Yes, please. I know you believe that the trouble started with the nighttime ghost tour. And you’re probably right,” I allowed with a slight nod. “Just in case, however, we need to be thorough.”

“Oh, okay.” Christine closed her eyes a moment, gathering her thoughts, maybe determining what to include. “The first full day we followed a self-guided walking tour of the town’s squares.”

“The famous squares designed by James Oglethorpe?” I asked for confirmation on the off chance she was referring to something obscure, but my research during the drive here suggested these were the squares.

“Yes.” She launched into a square-by-square description of their walk, with nothing unusual popping out at me. Specifically, my clairempathic abilities registered no emotional change during the recitation. The squares were unlikely to be part of our problem or solution.

“The next tour was a Southern food tour; they even gave us a map of where we visited so we could go back to places we liked.”

“Dan, if you’ll get a copy of the map later,” I said.

“Sure thing, Doc.”

“Please take us through that tour,” I directed Christine, who described each of the restaurants and even several of the dishes they had. My stomach growled during the scrumptious-sounding bananas foster French toast. “Apologies for that.”

Christine laughed, cutting the lingering tension in the room. “Not at all. I highly recommend trying it.”

“I’ve made a note of that,” Dan said, merriment evident in his tone.

“Please continue,” I said, and she did, wrapping up the story. Once again, nothing stood out as relevant to our case, nor did her emotions change much beyond minor fluctuations. Certainly nothing like what had happened when I first entered the home and when we discussed the pirate ghost.

Christine paled. “The last tour was the nighttime ghost tour.”

“The one that seemed to start the trouble,” I reiterated.

She nodded and a single tear slipped out.

I leaned forward to pat her knee. “Take your time. We’ll get this.”

“Thank you,” she whispered. With a shuddering breath, she began the tale.

And once again, despite the heightened emotions she experienced in the retelling, I felt nothing unusual. I risked a glance at Dan, who quirked an eyebrow in question. I shook my head in the negative. The ghost didn’t appear to be haunting Christine Mackey.

“Did that help?” she asked, interrupting my internal musings.

“Of course,” I assured her. It did, by eliminating her as the ghost’s target. “Thank you so much for talking us through your experiences.”

“Anything I can do to help our family,” she said resolutely.

“If you could send James in,” I said.

Christine rose from the chair and headed back to the living room. I heard the murmurs as she answered her family’s questions. The closed door between the rooms would have prevented our low voices from penetrating. Soon, footsteps entered the space and James Mackey took the seat across from me.