Within fifteen minutes, they are rolling down the long, diagonal hill into Stokely, gently curving at the bottom where it runs into the state route. Just past the intersection, in the row of buildings on the left, Fairlawn Diner sits at the end, H.L. Mortensen Hardware a few doors nearer. Its front, typical for buildings of this advanced age, features bay display windows on both sides of a double wooden door. Clay coasts his faded red pickup into a curbside slot across the street and Jeremy, though in the lead, without another vehicle behind them, is able to hit his brakes and back up to draw even. After a quick discussion, Kay climbs out, to join the other two, as Jeremy and Emily reiterate their plans to hit the nearby library.
“They’ve got a liquor store in this town?” Clay notes, obviously impressed to spot one. Peering back the way they’ve came, albeit where the state route continues winding out of town in a vague south-southwest direction.
“Man, I almost wish I was going with you guys,” Denise laments. Though a couple of cars have passed, heading the opposite direction through town, none have yet come up behind them, and she continues to lean in Emily’s window.
“Well, you could, I mean,” Emily tells her, “how much time can you possibly spend in this hardware store? Not to mention the library’s, what, a whopping three blocks away.”
Eventually, another vehicle materializes in their mirrors, and with an agreement to meet up at the diner in an hour, Jeremy and Emily continue up the road. There’s some kind of closeout specialty store nearby, and a low budget pawn shop, a quaint, family owned, small town pharmacy, all of which Kay and Denise plan to hit after Clay helps them out and leaves.
The library is tucked away on a parallel street, one block way from the main drag. If not already researching the existence of said library, they never would have known it existed. Just past a pair of nearly identical, towering brick churches, albeit of opposite denomination – one Lutheran, one a Church of Christ – they turn right on a side street, followed by another quick left. Here, in the shadow of a tin can colored water tower, with the name STOKELY across it in big black block letters, they encounter a much more nondescript brick building, single storied, one whose only remarkable feature is a series of almost Spanish looking arches along the front walk, leading to the library’s entrance. The building is situated perpendicular to the lot, at the edge of a wide green lawn fanning out for an acre or so behind and beside it.
They park and approach the building, finding about as many patrons inside as the half dozen cars in the lot would have suggested. Though exhausting in fairly short order what this charming, cozy operation contains – a space small enough to glimpse all four walls at once, with thin, garish carpet that would make even Las Vegas blush. Still, there is a tiny, glass walled room eating up the northwest corner of this main space.
Emily is the first to spot it, tucked behind a tall yet single aisle reference section. She and Jeremy have temporarily, wordlessly split, as the magazine racks were calling his name. She resists an urge to gallop over to the glass, arriving to discover, with a giddy shudder that brings a smile to her lips, that this might indeed prove a fruitful little find. A sign, taped beside the thick wooden door, on one of the glass panes, bears an amusingly outdated dot matrix style print job which announces LOCAL HISTORY AND GENEALOGY.
This smile almost immediately leaves her face, however, to read further, in slightly smaller type below, that entry is granted by appointment only, that no pictures are permitted and furthermore no cell phone is permitted inside the room. Which leads her to spin around and look for an employee, and it’s only at this point that she realizes someone’s been watching her with visible entertainment this entire time. Standing at the checkout desk, across the room and just to the left of the entrance, there’s a middle-aged man with a thick grey moustache, a matching, neatly groomed head of curly hair, beaming – in friendly enough seeming fashion, Emily thinks, it’s true – in her direction. Then they make eye contact, as she closes the gap between them, and his smile widens. He’s wearing a crisp, long sleeved white dress shirt, a tasteful red tie with some sort of repeating abstract pattern in yellow, and a thin, gold name badge with the name Paul Hilldreth engraved, below that the title of Head Librarian.
“It says we need an appointment for that room?” she blurts, in something of a near panic for reasons even she can’t quite explain. Only the urgency of getting this close to a targeted destination, and finding it painful to think about turning around now, empty handed.
But the librarian waves this notion off before she’s even fully finished it. “Nah, it ain’t locked. We put that sign up to give it a little intrigue, but…turns out nobody cares anyhow.”
“Do I need to leave my phone here?” she offers, even going as far as to extend a hand clutching the object.
He merely glances up at her, as they make eye contact once more, and with an even warmer smile, somehow, assures her, “that really won’t be necessary.”
Once she and Jeremy are ensconced within that glass walled room – well, the two internal walls are glass, anyway – they are nearly elbow to elbow at the lone available table, which only seats four. A couple stray chairs are tucked into tight corners of this cramped space, and there’s a desk in case anyone ever cares to monitor activity here. If standing just so, in the walkway bordering the west external wall, Emily is able to glimpse the cute little workstation someone has crafted, in the underbelly of that hotel-style desk, and she suddenly wishes that this were her job. It could be the most charming work station she’s ever seen. An old school computer, with one of those giant, blocky white monitors, like a deformed marshmallow. Then a pair of those plain metal L shaped bracket type bookends, to the left of that computer in the corner, jammed with various tomes and papers which are sticking out all over and slightly leaning anyway. Plus another whole row of random manuals on a shelf above it, just beneath the tall ledge where this employee is meant to stand and deal with people.
Looking about the space, she considers that this is the coziest room she’s ever visited, period. For a moment an image fills her head, of her and Jeremy owning some big old farmhouse in the countryside, maybe not too far from here – for she really has fallen in love with this region – and some tidy little office, in a back nook of the ground floor, where she spends her every free hour. With just enough room to do some painting, yes, and clearly no need for these towering bookshelves, but this same basic warm aura for sure.
Now they are seated at this table, with every inch taken up by the books that each has found fascinating. For some weird reason, God bless him, Jeremy is obsessed with maps and charts, which might help explain why he’s so good with logistics at his department store. So he’s studying that angle here. Whereas she, and again this is more of an artist’s sensibility, is reading up now on local history, sure, but also its folklore, its ghost stories and other murkier details.
“Finding anything interesting?” she asks him, after a long, silent stretch, following an expectant glance that surely he picked up peripherally, therefore requires some sort of explanation or comment.
“Ehahhhhhh…,” he sighs, flipping back and forth between these two pages, comparing some decade-by-decade maps, “none of this is making sense, really. Granted, the most recent view I have here is fifteen…no, wait, seventeen years old, but still. There’s nothing whatsoever where that gigantic ass lake should be. Just this huge forest. But then on the other hand, that overgrown road we passed coming and going, which even Owen and Maggie…”
“Owen and Maggie?”
“Yeah, you know – that old couple I told you about?” Jeremy questions. Only when Emily solemnly nods does he continue. “Anyway, even Owen and Maggie said it was the old route for Stokely Farm Road. I mean, we saw it ourselves, we heard them say it. But according to this that is still Stokely Farm Road.”
“But wait a minute, we saw that road too. If it’s the same one, anyway. It dead ended into…well, okay, so does it show that graveyard I was talking about?” Emily asks, and then, genuinely interested in what he’s looking at now, leans over to peer at the map herself.
“Mmmmmm…no. So see? I just wanna drive the fuckin route myself and see what’s what. I think this must just clearly be outdated, or wrong to begin with.”
“We could maybe ask that librarian guy up front,” Emily suggests, glancing back in that direction, where she can see him joking with and laughing over whatever he’s saying to some elderly couple checking out right now. “He seemed pretty knowledgeable about stuff…”
“Eh, well, whatever. What about you? Coming up with anything?” Jeremy inquires.
“Oh!” she says, jarred back from this reverie, into the heart of her research. “Well, I mean, this is all pretty scattershot, but…I did find some reference to an Edwina Rochefort Kidwell who…”
“Wow. That is an awesome name.”
“…yeah so anyway,” Emily chuckles, “an Edwina Rochefort Kidwell who apparently owned this Otherwise property – under its former name, of course – for damn near fifty years. Only when she died about a year and a half ago did a Harry Kidwell inherit the property, of course…”
“Of course,” Jeremy replies, after Emily has gestured in his direction for exactly this response.
“Yeah, so anyway, this fire everyone keeps referencing, apparently this is how she ended up with the property. Everything…except for what we’re calling the quote unquote gift shop up front…”
“Yeah?”
“…the main house, the school building, the barn, and those two old cabins, everything else went up in flames.”
Jeremy nods but is thinking that they’ve already kind of heard all this. “Okay yeah but what are the details? We still don’t actually know what happened.”
“Well…I don’t know,” Emily replies, and flips back to the glance at the cover, Ghosts of the Carolina Piedmont, and then returns to her current page.“They don’t really get into that. This is just a book about local hauntings, you know, they’re just setting the scene of…oh…my…god…”
“What?” Jeremy asks. But when Emily turns the book in his direction, it’s immediately obvious what has freaked her out so. She has turned to the next page, at the top of which is a black and white sketch which clearly resembles the tall man she saw two nights ago, including the trench coat and top hat. “Whoa…,” he says, and admittedly feels all at once as though he’s going to fall out of his chair.
“Yeah,” she nods in rapid fire fashion, although distracted to some extent by what she’s reading. “Apparently he is spotted around that property all the time, in particular the pond.”
“The weird pond you guys found, or the…”
“No, the normal one right behind the barn. They say he likes to walk around it. Everyone thinks this must be the ghost of William Allensworth.”
Jeremy chuckles and says, “who the fuck is William Allensworth?”
“Well, once again, I don’t know, they don’t get into any…”
Just then, the door flies open with a bang, causing them to halfway jump, until they hear some giggling, and Kay croaking, “okay, bitches, you ready to go?” before they’ve even had a chance to turn around.
“Go? Already?” Emily questions.
With just one glance, Denise becomes completely enthralled by this cozy nook, though, as Emily knew she would be. “Oh wow! This is so cool!” her little sister says, begins drifting around the handful of short aisles, the random paper stacks. Inspecting that desk in busybody fashion, with a boldness Emily hadn’t dared, but then also some references set up on slanted tables, books written about this region in the 1800s, with what looks like a fountain pen. Not to mention the copious clippings and dated photographs pinned all over the two external walls, taped to the glass ones in spots, framed atop the bookshelves and table space.
“You’ve been here for two hours!” Kay protests.
“We have?” Jeremy and Emily reply as one.
“Yeah,” Kay nods, “and let me tell you, that was a nice little hike up here!”
“Really? But it’s only, like, four blocks,” Jeremy says, “it couldn’t have been any worse than your walk in the woods yesterday.”
“I don’t know, it seemed longer somehow. But yeah, so anyway, we put that stuff in your car. Checked out some shops, even ate lunch at that little diner. That cute old lady, Doris, was our waitress again, you remember her?”
“Yeah, we told her you two were doing some research,” Denise interjects, as she continues to stroll around the room, “she said she could tell us some stories about this area, but not on the clock. She looked kind of horrified when we told her about your tall man encounter, though. Actually just from us mentioning you were coming here to look some things up.”
“We need to go talk to that lady!” Jeremy declares, “maybe not while she’s working, but figure out a day when she’s off.”
“Yeah…,” Emily murmurs, but is playing with her necklace and glancing back at that librarian, who’s just standing at the counter now and admiring his kingdom, so to speak, watching everyone in action around the library. “Although something tells me he would know quite a bit about this area, too…”
They leave the room in twos, as Jeremy and Emily first reshelve everything they’ve been reading, despite posted advisories against doing so. Emily suggests this, explaining that she can’t really say why, but that it feels like they want to keep this stuff under wraps until they solve the mysteries themselves. This just seems right. Not to make a big deal about it, and cause everyone to know about their little secret here – or maybe not learn, much to their disappointment, that these aren’t secrets, but rather boring old common knowledge to the locals.
By the time Jeremy and Emily catch up, the other two have already stopped to ask this Paul Hilldreth some questions. Denise is mid-sentence, or rather run-on paragraph, explaining that they’re all staying up at that artist’s retreat, but Jeremy jumps in and cuts to the chase. He says that they read about some fire but can’t seem to figure out what happened.
“Yeah, you know, this book mentioned something about a William Allensworth,” Jeremy adds, figuring it best not to come off as a crackpot, or at the very least to present some pure facts, “and then also, yeah, we’ve heard from numerous people about this fire…”
“Yeah, do you know anything about this mysterious fire?” Emily asks him.
“Yep, I sure do,” Hilldreth nods slowly, studying each of their faces. “I know pretty much everything there is to know about this region. I could tell you every road, every wildflower, probably damn near every address if I really had to,” he adds with a chuckle.
“Okay, so what happened?” Jeremy asks again.
“About this fire or…?”
“Yeah, about this fire, about this fire.”
“Well, then,” he says, and leans in, a move which reflexively inspires all of them to do the same, “that fire, it was intentional. Fifty, sixty years ago, that was a boarding school for boys. Troubled ones, or ones who were just, you know, maybe what you might call orphans. Anyway, evidently a bunch of them had it out for this one kid in particular, and just kinda relentlessly tormented him for whatever reason – nowadays what we would refer to as bullying. The headmaster and the other adults all knew what was happening, but apparently they did absolutely nothing to stop it.”
“Oh my god…,” Kay says.
“Yeah,” Hilldreth glances over at her, making eye contact, before returning his gaze to Emily and Jeremy, “so one night this boy, who was I believe about nine, ten years old, doused all their cabins with gasoline and torched the place. A bunch of them burned alive up there, or at any rate died from inhalation. The body count ended up being something like twenty-three.”
“Twenty-three!?” Jeremy exclaims, a bit louder than intended. He looks back and observes a couple of people looking their way, though only mildly curious.
“Yeah, they had ‘em crammed like sardines into those cabins. It coulda been higher. Also by some kinda miracle the firefighters got there before it spread to the woods. Everybody was runnin around in a panic, but they just found Charles calmly walkin around the place. That’s what made the sheriff and his deputies immediately suspicious about the kid, in fact.”
“Charles?” Emily questions.
“Yeah, you know, he was the one who did it, the one they were bullyin. Charles Howard.”
At the mention of this name, Denise feels her eyelids begin to flutter in frantic fashion, a tic she can’t control. Mostly because her knees also go weak at this time, and it’s all she can do not to faint. She steadies herself by clamping onto the counter with all her might, as the other three glance over at her, mouths open and nearly as shocked as she.
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