The Curse of the Old Woods Read online

  The Curse of the Old Woods

  Paranormal Grievance Committee Chronicles, Book 1

  By

  Elizabeth Andre

  Published by Tulabella Ruby Press

  Copyright 2018 Elizabeth Andre/All Rights Reserved

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

  Thank you for downloading this ebook. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy from their favorite authorized retailer. Thank you for your support.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is strictly coincidental.

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  Other titles by Elizabeth Andre:

  Tested: Sex, love, and friendship in the shadow of HIV

  The Time Slip Girl

  Learning to Kiss Girls

  Taijiku

  Love’s Perfect Vintage

  Lesbian With Dog Seeks Same

  Bodies in Motion

  Right Time For Love

  Landing Love

  Lesbian Light Reads Volumes 1-6 Boxed Set

  The Beauty Queen Called Twice

  Skating on Air

  Someone Like Her

  Roll With Me

  Stop and Go

  Nice Jewish Girls

  Lesbian Light Reads Volumes 7-12

  Love Most Likely

  Editor: Cassandra Pierce

  Cover design: May Dawney

  Thanks to our beta readers: Melissa, Denice, Carlos, and Julie

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  About Elizabeth Andre

  Connect with Elizabeth Andre

  Other Titles by Elizabeth Andre

  Chapter One

  Seeing Katie

  Today was a good day. For one thing, Evelyn had more energy. The treatments for breast cancer often left her physically drained, but over the last few days she’d felt invigorated in a way she hadn’t felt since the treatments began a few weeks ago. She felt so good that she hadn’t asked Gwen, a dear friend of hers, to take her shopping. More often than not, it was Gwen who drove Evelyn to and from the hospital for her treatments, and it was Gwen who helped her run errands.

  But when Evelyn woke up this morning, she felt a lightness and delight that she hadn’t felt in a long time. She managed to eat more for breakfast than she ordinarily did. Her appetite hadn’t been robust lately. She ate a couple of slices of toast with butter and plum jam and a nectarine. She drank her coffee with a little bit of cream.

  Evelyn was in such a good mood that she didn’t mind the humidity of this sunny June day or the fender bender that backed up traffic for several minutes on her way to the store or the little boy who had a screaming meltdown in the middle of the frozen food aisle or the cashier who liked oversharing about her personal life. Evelyn just nodded as she paid, and the cashier talked. She only bought a few things because Gwen had been so good about keeping her pantry well stocked. She just had the one bag with a dozen eggs, a loaf of bread, and a cup of hot soup from the salad bar in it.

  Leaving the store, Evelyn shielded her eyes from the sun with her free hand. She looked this way and that before stepping into the parking lot. She took one step and froze. For a second, maybe just a fraction of a second, she saw something extraordinary. She saw a young woman’s face, a face so like her older sister Katie’s that her breath caught at the back of her throat. It was just the head and shoulders like a high school yearbook senior portrait. It was there for only a moment.

  “Katie?” she whispered.

  It floated in the air near a black SUV that was parked in one of the disability spaces. Evelyn took a step. A car honked and swerved, narrowly missing her. The driver of the car yelled some choice words before heading to a parking space. Evelyn took a good look around, still shocked by what she’d seen. The face was gone. She was sure she’d seen it, but now saw no evidence that it had ever been there. A trick of the light perhaps? Evelyn stood, indecisive, in the middle of the parking lot. She switched the grocery bag from one hand to the other. It suddenly felt heavier that it should.

  “Madam? Are you all right? Madam?”

  The soft, kind voice jolted Evelyn out of her thoughts. The woman who spoke was medium height, slim, dark skinned. She wore a dress and head wrap that were colorful and bold. Evelyn guessed they were made from an African print. She had three children with her, two girls and a boy, wearing Western-style clothing. Their features and slender build indicated they were the woman’s children. The children, who Evelyn smiled at, regarded her with solemn curiosity.

  “I’m fine. Really,” Evelyn said. “Just a bit tired.”

  “You are sure, madam?” asked the woman.

  “I’m sure. Thank you for your concern, but I’m fine.”

  To emphasize how fine she was, she tried to smile as she said goodbye to the woman and her children and began to walk to her car, taking care to be more aware of her surroundings. Once she got into her car, she sat for a bit before switching on the ignition. She glanced toward the supermarket entrance and saw the woman herding her children into the store. Now that Evelyn was sitting down, she realized how heavily she was breathing. She knew what she’d seen, yet she couldn’t quite convince herself that she’d seen the face of her older sister floating in the air like that. For many years after Katie had disappeared, she’d held on to the hope that she would see her again someday, but not as some disembodied head and shoulders in a supermarket parking lot. The day she buried her mother was the day she finally accepted that she’d never see Katie alive again. That thing that had distracted her in the parking lot seemed a cruel prank. Perhaps it was the cancer treatment. Maybe hallucination was a side effect.

  She drove home slowly, feeling exhausted. Grateful to be home again, she parked her car in the garage and walked into the storage room that separated the kitchen from the garage. There was a small bench pushed up against one of the room’s walls. Katie was sitting, or appeared to be sitting, on the bench. As before, Evelyn could see only her head and shoulders. She dropped the bag of groceries. Katie opened her mouth, but no sound came out. Then she was gone again. Evelyn, trying to keep her composure, stepped over the grocery bag to stand in front of the bench. She put out her right hand at the spot where Katie had been. She could feel cold air. She drew her hand back. She let out a breath and sunk to the ground, insensible.

  Chapter Two

  Getting the lowdown

  “Ms. Nicholas, I am not normally someone who believes in things like this,” said the woman who introduced herself as Mrs. Evelyn Forcier. She pulled a flyer from her purse and unfolded it.


  “It’s all right,” Maya Nicholas said soothingly. She could see that the woman was under stress.

  Although Maya was relatively new to paranormal investigating, nearly every meeting with a potential client began with them saying that they normally didn’t believe in “things like this.” She actually preferred working with skeptics, even if they never could quite bring themselves to believe. They kept her on her toes. The gung-ho believers, on the other hand, could be tiresome.

  Maya didn’t have a real office for her agency, currently called Nicholas & Associates, although she wasn’t wedded to the name. More often than not, she met clients, such as Mrs. Forcier, in the Corner Grind, her favorite neighborhood coffee shop. The low-key coffee shop, decorated with World’s Fair posters and dark wood molding, had become Maya’s de facto office since she launched her business a year ago. Staff and patrons alike mostly minded their own business, even when Maya spent all day there and had multiple meetings. Also, the anise tea was excellent.

  The woman pushed the flyer in front of Maya. She must have handed it to Mrs. Forcier at the street fair she’d gone to in an attempt to drum up business. Maya had split the cost of a booth with a friend of a friend who was a psychic.

  “I couldn’t believe it when I bumped into you. When was it? Last Saturday? The Saturday before? Well, whenever it was, meeting you was providential,” said Mrs. Forcier.

  “I’m glad you called me. You mentioned that you wanted to talk to me about seeing your sister?” Maya tried to remember to modulate the speed at which she talked. Her mother had said since Maya was a child that she’d give a hummingbird’s wings a run for the money.

  Mrs. Forcier nodded. “Yes. My older sister Katie. She’s dead, but you must have guessed that already.”

  “Well, that’s the main reason people contact me these days. Deal with dead people in some way,” said Maya, realizing how awkward that sounded. She needed to develop a smoother spiel. “Mrs. Forcier, when did your sister die?”

  A server set their drinks down on the table. Mrs. Forcier pulled the mug with her coffee in front of her.

  It hit Maya that Mrs. Forcier was probably Mrs. Forcier to nearly everyone she had ever met. There were probably very few who qualified to know her first name and even fewer who got to call her by it.

  “I don’t know exactly.” Mrs. Forcier smiled a sad sort of smile. “One day, she went for a walk in the Promontory Woods, and we never saw her again.”

  Maya had heard a lot of stories about the specters, ghosts, and ghouls that were supposed to roam the Promontory Woods, a large forested area on the edge of Springfield Heights that had long resisted efforts of real estate developers and politicians to build anything on it. The local newspapers every year around Halloween in their roundups of spooky things in the region always mentioned Promontory Woods.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever heard a story about someone named Katie who disappeared in the woods.” Maya felt the excitement inside her build. She leaned closer to Mrs. Forcier.

  Mrs. Forcier raised her mug to her lips and blew on it. She returned her mug to the table and leaned toward Maya.

  “As I said, Miss Nicholas, Katie, is older than I am, and she’s my half-sister, actually. I mention that only so you have all the information you’ll need. Her name was Katherine Rose Morey. We had different fathers. She was older than me by six years. Despite the age difference, we were very close. She babysat me when our mother went to work. Mother always worked, so she needed a babysitter. Katie was the obvious choice.”

  Mrs. Forcier stopped speaking as if the words were caught at the top of her throat and again attempted to cool her coffee to a drinkable temperature. This time she was successful and took a sip. Satisfied, she set the mug down and opened her purse again, pulling out her wallet. She flipped through the plastic pages where people kept photos and then paused. Again, Maya noticed the slight smile that seemed to be Mrs. Forcier’s trademark.

  Still gazing at the photo, she said, “I was ten when Katie disappeared. She was 16 and had begun to grow into her looks, if you know what I mean. She was what some would call striking, even as a little girl. She was all sharp angles. As she grew into her teens, the angles softened. Her body filled out a little. She developed curves. She had started a growth spurt when she was thirteen. By the time she was sixteen, she was just shy of six feet tall.” She handed Maya the photo she had been looking at.

  Maya saw in the black and white portrait a very pretty young woman, one who met the camera’s gaze straight on. Katie seemed to be someone who would not back down from any challenge.

  “She’s certainly a lovely young woman. What do you need me for?” Maya held out the picture to Mrs. Forcier.

  The older woman shook her head. “You keep that for the time being. You’ll need it. She never came home one day. No trace of her was ever found. I want you to find her.”

  “You know I’m a paranormal investigator? Not a cop,” said Maya.

  “Oh, I know. You are exactly what I need,” said Mrs. Forcier.

  Maya took out the small notebook she used to jot notes in. Steve, the guy who had gotten her into paranormal investigation and was still her mentor always said, a case was a case. All cases could be linked to paranormal phenomenon somehow if you looked hard enough, he said more often than she could count.

  Mrs. Forcier continued talking but got a faraway look, like she was still looking at Maya but not really seeing her. Maya scribbled down as much of the story as she could.

  “It was 1957, in the summer. Like it is now. She liked to take walks by and through the woods. In those days, the Promontory Woods were much more remote. Not as many people lived out that way as they do now. Anyway, Katie loved to walk to the woods and discover new paths. She’d go at any time of day or night, especially during the summer. I remember waking up at night sometimes, realizing she wasn’t there. I never worried because she always came back. I didn’t like to go to the woods. I’d heard the stories, and I found the woods foreboding. She found them an endless delight. She took me with her once at dusk. Scared me half to death. I saw shadows everywhere. She saw only light. I never went with her again. One day she went there and never came back.”

  “What do you think happened to her?” Maya asked.

  Mrs. Forcier looked straight at Maya then with the same unyielding gaze her sister had turned on the camera in that picture all those years ago. “I think someone or something got at her and killed her. The police tried to convince us that she ran away with a boyfriend. She didn’t have a boyfriend. If she was still alive, she would have contacted me. I think she’s still in the woods.”

  Maya had heard stories about young women who had disappeared into Promontory Woods and supposedly still haunted them, and she told Mrs. Forcier so.

  “I’ve heard all those stories, too, Miss Nicholas, believe you me, and none of them have anything to do with Katie. None of them are about a teenage girl who disappears in the woods in the summer of 1957. Will you help me find out what happened to her? The woods hold the key to her fate.”

  Maya sighed. “I really think that the police might be your best bet, Mrs. Forcier.”

  “The police?” she snapped. “They proved themselves to be useless long ago because it wasn’t an easy case to solve. They gave up a long time ago, and it’s a cold case now. Cold cases aren’t given any attention.”

  “So, why are you contacting me now? You could hire any ordinary private detective. Why me? Why now?”

  Maya knew these were the questions that would elicit the answers that could make the case even more interesting, and Mrs. Forcier did not disappoint.

  “I’ve been looking for her for years, waiting for her to come home. My time is running out.”

  She rolled up her sleeve, revealing an I.V. port. The veins were blue and thin, stark against white skin that hadn’t seen the sun this summer.

  “I have cancer. I don’t know how much time I have, but I saw her. A few weeks ago. I’d gone shopping and was le
aving the store and there she was. Her face, just her head and shoulders floating there for a moment. I saw her again in my house. I still live in the family home. I inherited it from our parents. That second time when I saw her, I fainted. My friend, Gwen, who’s helped me out since I started treatment, found me as I was coming to. She had come over to check on me.”

  “You hadn’t seen your sister at all before then?”

  Evelyn shook her head. “Not once until a few weeks ago. She must be trying to tell me something.”

  “For someone who claimed she wasn’t inclined to believe in things like this, you’ve taken to the idea that idea that she might be trying to communicate with you awfully quickly.” Maya felt an enormous amount of sympathy for this woman. Her sister had disappeared apparently without a trace decades ago. She had a disease, cancer Maya assumed, that would take her sooner than she might have wished. Now, after years of not seeing her sister, she thought she’d seen her twice in a very short space of time.

  “What choice do I have? Before I die, I will have the truth of what happened to Katie. I want you to help me discover it.”

  She opened her purse again. This time she took out her phone. Her index finger danced across the phone’s surface before she handed it to Maya. She a saw a drawing, maybe a map, a little out of focus, on the screen.

  “What am I looking at?”

  “I kept all the maps that Katie had drawn of the woods. In those maps, she drew several of the paths she had taken. That’s the last map Katie drew that I know of. She most likely followed that path on the day she disappeared. Notice the date?” Mrs. Forcier said.

  Maya did, with some squinting. It was dated June 28, 1957.

  “The last time we saw her was the morning of June 30th. She said she was going for a walk in the woods and would stop by the five and dime on the way home to pick up some bobbins and thread for my mother. She never made it to the store.”

  Maya asked, “Have you ever gone back to the woods?”