Deader Than Ever

FIVE WEEKS LATER

The imprint could have been a Sasquatch print. Could have been a puddle. It was kind of hard to tell.

I knelt in the mud, looking down at the ground in the Wayne Township forest. Upon completion of the new nature trail in the township, they'd suddenly gotten Bigfoot sightings. The township supervisors had capitalized on it by putting a wood carving of a nine-foot Sasquatch along the trail. I was doing some investigation.

"Daddy? Come look over here."

I stood up and pushed my way through the brush. I was wearing my new professional paranormal outfit---Black Bigfoot shirt with day-glow yellow stripes, yellow bandanna around my right ankle, and a black jacket with all sorts of zippers and buckles on it. I walked over to my son along the trail.

Paul is six. He was wearing his gray shirt with "Queen of Everything" written on it, and blue terrycloth shorts. I looked at what he was pointing at, in the mud.

"A Bigfoot print!" he announced.

"Hunh," I said. "You might be right, little man." The print was indistinct, but visibly a footprint. I could clearly see toes. It appeared to be about fifteen inches long---Not impossible for a person, but unusual. 

"Here's what we do," I said. "If you don't have a ruler, you lay something down beside it before taking a photo. That way, you can show how big it is." I set down my Swiss Army knife beside the footprint and fished out my camera. "Just call me Jack Link, because I am messing with Sasquatch."

"Also, I think Bigfoot went to the bathroom over there," said Paul.

"Get a sample," I said.

My name is Lou, and I live in Lock Haven.
Don't ask me what I do for a living. That's hard to describe.
I'm sort of the history expert at the public library, but I also do a lot of paranormal investigation. I write about it all for the local newspapers, a website, and the occasional magazine.
There was no box for this on the college applications. I kind of fell into it over the years, as I discovered I was really good at it.
If you got it, haunt it.

It was a cool, pleasant morning. The colored leaves were falling as I rode my bike down West Bald Eagle Street. I turned and headed toward Bellefonte Avenue, where an exercise class was doing stretches outside the local coffee shop. The instructor saw me riding by, and waved. He called out,"It's Lou! Hi, Lou!"

I waved back as the whole class turned and called out greetings. I rode into work---The Ross Library.

I put on my mask, walked in and took my temperature, and then headed up to the third floor. I walked into the monthly staff meeting. 

"You're late," said the New Boss.

I frowned. "We're supposed to be here at a time?"

"Hey, Lou," said Holly. "We took a vote while we were waiting, and we decided that the last person in should take the minutes."

I sat down. "Well, you'll definitely regret that."

"Let's talk about the annual book sale," said Mel. "It's coming up next week."

After the meeting, I walked down the back way. It's my favorite route to my desk. As you leave the third floor, you can enter the oldest part of the building, an old mansion built in 1887. I can disappear in the twisty hallways upstairs. I passed the attic door and cut past the Sloan Museum Wing, going down the back stairs to my desk.

Our founder, the woman who gave us the library, was Annie Halenbake Ross. Her funeral was about where my desk now sits, which I've always found cool. I sat down at my desk in the old, haunted building, and to type up my half-assed meeting notes.

"Let's find the brick sidewalk, Daddy!" Paul said happily as we walked down the street in the dark. It was our usual Alien Patrol---Since sometime last summer, we'd been going out at night and checking for possible UFOs. Protecting Lock Haven from aliens since 2019.

"I think it's right up here," I said. "One of my friends on city council asked me to look into it. He wants to know if the brick is original to the city, or placed later." I shined my flashlight down on the corner. "I think this is it, right here."

We knelt down, looking at the sidewalk. Down below, near the corner, it was ragged, almost randomly placed bricks. But as it went uphill, it was better preserved, and formed an actual walkway, all dark brown brick.

"Daddy! Look! This one has words on it!"

I shined my light on the brick. Stamped on it, it had the words PENN BLOCK CALDER PA. "That's a pretty good clue," I said. "We gotta look that up."

Back at the house, I pulled out my Pennsylvania map. There was no Calder on it, which was interesting. I got online, and searched the term. I found it on a page run by the Cameron County Historical Society.

I found Paul back downstairs. watching TV. I said,"Guess what, little man?"

He looked up at me. "What?"

"Those bricks came from Cameron County, way up past Kettle Creek," I said. "The town on them, Calder? It doesn't exist. A guy named Calder built the Penn Block Brick Works, and wanted to found a town with his company homes. He started making bricks with the name Calder on them, but then couldn't get the license to start the Calder Post Office, so his plan failed. So he wound up with a bunch of bricks with the name of a nonexistent town on them. When the place went out of business in 1920, a local bank bought them and sold them at a deep discount. Those bricks have probably been there a hundred years."

"Cool," said Paul.

"I'm gonna do some more digging," I said. "I can probably get an article out of this."

I used to hate meetings. Then COVID-19 hit, some asshole invented Zoom meetings, and now I hate those even more. Whose idea was it to take terrible meetings and mix them with technology so you can now do them from home?

I sat down in my office, turned on my computer, and brought up the link. The camera came on, and I saw SaraLee sitting there, wearing her gray ghost-hunting shirt.

At least this one was with someone I like.

"Hey!" she said with a smile. "How are you doing?"

"As well as anyone," I said. "How about you?"

She shrugged. "So, you said you had some ideas about the team?"

"Kind of, yeah," I said. "I think we're gonna have to start getting back out there. Things are opening up, and we have clients who've been waiting like forever. I think we're gonna need to start investigating again, but with some precautions."

"Agreed," she said. "What did you have in mind?"

"Small and limited," I said. "Maybe two of us at a time, for shorter investigations, on a volunteer basis. Masks and gloves. It's not ideal, but it's way better than nothing."

"I think you're right," she said. "Let's pitch it to the others."

"I feel bad for you, actually," I said. "You just got on the team, and then this shit happens, and we have to go on hiatus."

SaraLee laughed. "I know, right?"

"I'll contact a few clients on the waiting list," I said. "See if they're still interested. If we can't manage that, we'll go do some exploring on our own."

"Good."

"Hey," I said. "I misjudged you. I really did."

"How's that?"

"You know I had reservations about you joining the team," I said. "You know how I am about the psychics. But I was wrong. You're smart and you're active. You're exactly what we need right now. I misjudged you, and I'm sorry."

SaraLee smiled. "You mentioned that back when we met in February. You were forgiven then, and you're forgiven now. Let's do this thing."

"Hey, Ari," I said, leaning over the table. "You know those posters you made to advertise my haunted tours in October?"

Ari, our new tech person, looked up at me. "Yeah?" she said.

"Can you make a smaller version?" I asked. "Four to a page, so we can cut them and hand them out at the book sale?"

"Let me check," she said. "I think I can. I'll definitely try, and see what I can come up with."

I smiled. "I have every faith in you, Ari."

I walked through the lobby and out the library's back door, into the book sale on the patio. It was insane---People were in the aisles, staying six feet apart, and still managing to form a crowd. We had mask rules in place, arrows showing people which way to go.

I walked through the sale. I was wearing my new black sweatshirt with the little alien on it. It was easy to forget, for a little while, that we still were in a pandemic. But everyone was wearing masks, and the library staff had been ordered to be cautious.

Ari came out, holding out a stack of little flyers for the tours. I took them.

"You're a genius, Ari."

I think she smiled behind her mask. "Let me know if you need more."

I put them on the table, and went inside. I walked into the Pennsylvania Room and sat down---I had the whole place to myself. I pulled History of Cameron County and looked through it. 

Nothing on Calder or the brick works. But I found a huge entry on the Dent's Run gold.

Dent's Run was the supposed place that some gold had been lost during the Civil War. I'd dealt with this before---It was the first article I'd ever done for the Pennsylvania Wilds. I'd become a little dubious of the existence of the actual gold, in fact; a lot of the details didn't make a ton of sense. I read through the story.

It contained more detail than any account I'd yet seen, which was interesting. I had to wonder where some of this had come from. Dates, names, and a detailed description of the route, which I hadn't thought existed.

Zach looked in. "Lou, can you cover the desk a little early? I gotta get out to the sale and run the register."

"Oh, sure," I said, and stood up.

"Sorry to interrupt you---"

"I can do this at the desk as well as here," I said. "It's cool."

"So I was looking for information on bricks, but I found a long entry on the Dent's Run gold," I said. Then I mixed the chicken into the casserole.

"There's gold?" Tif asked, sitting at the table. Paul was outside, running around with his little friend from next door. I think both of them were wearing black dresses. Meanwhile, our senior Schnauzer, Kasper, was wandering around the kitchen.

"Well, maybe, but I'm a little dubious," I said. "The story is that during the Civil War, a shipment of gold was taken through Pennsylvania, but the crew largely died. The one remaining guy, Connors, made it as far as Lock Haven, and the gold never turned up. I worked on this one a few years ago."

"Has anyone found it?"

"Nah, not yet. I'm not convinced there's anything to find. Efforts have been clownish and badly researched. The earliest mention of this was in a magazine from like the fifties. A lot of details don't match up. I've begun to think it's most likely a myth."

"Be cool if you could find the gold, though," said Tif.

"I think it's more likely I'm gonna find proof it never happened," I said. "Which would also be cool. With the details I have from the Cameron County book, I should be able to track some things down. It would have made the news at the time. If there's a total absence of news, that'll tell me something."

"I mean, how can you tell?"

"With this new information, I have the date Connors supposedly came to Lock Haven. That'll be big news if it really happened. If I go through the newspapers and don't find a mention of it, that tells me a lot. If I do find something, even better. Either way, I can get an article out of it."

"And your title?"

"Baby, It's Gold Outside."

"Jesus christ. That's the worst one since the one about the guy who tried to blow up his girlfriend in Renovo you called An Explosive Romance. It would be cool to go to Cameron County and look for treasure, though."

 I put the casserole in the oven. "Well, keep next Friday open. Not Cameron, but we're going up to Potter County."

"What's in Potter County?"

"After dinner, we're gonna take a drive up to Cherry Springs State Park. It's the furthest place away from any streetlights in Pennsylvania. Darkest place in the state. We're gonna sit and look at the stars."

"Sounds good," said Tif.

 In the morning, I walked into work, hung my backpack on the hook, draped my jacket over the chair, and immediately was hit with a question.

"Lou, do you know where we can find the book Doctor Nina and The Panther?" Barb asked me.

I rolled my eyes. "Are you serious? This again?"

"A book club wants to read it."

"It should be in Pennsylvania Biographies, but I wish they'd knock it off with that stupid book. It's supposed to be about a woman doctor who lived in this area, but historically, none of the details check out. It's likely a fraud, and people come to me all the time asking when I'm going to write about it. At this point, I'm sick to death of hearing about Doctor Nina and the Goddamn Half-Wit Panther."

Barb went to check biographies. I went to the card file. 

Speaking of things that probably weren't true. Nothing under Connors or Castleton. I checked the biggest books---Linn, Meginness, Furey. No mention. I went to the newspaper archive.

We have a little card file that nobody knows about but me. I keep telling people how to use it, and everyone keeps forgetting that it's there. It shows what newspapers we have from which years, and where to find them. It saves me tons of time.

I flipped through it, checking to see what newspapers we have from 1863. I know newspapers got a little sketchy during the Civil War, and it could be chancy finding them. To my delight, there was one entry for the Clinton Democrat, with spotty issues throughout the year. It had a notation.

ASK STAFF FOR ASSISTANCE.

That meant the attic. I was the staff they'd ask for assistance, so I knew roughly where to look. I walked up the stairs and into the attic, in the newspaper room. The shelf was all pulled out and rearranged from my attempt to get into a secret door back in May. Sometime I'd have to come and straighten that up.

I dug around---The newspapers in the attic aren't in much of a discernable order---Until I found the ones from 1863. I unwrapped the brown paper around them, and started paging through.

When I got back downstairs, Barb was back at the desk. "Someone filed it under fiction," she said.

"Probably a good idea," I said. "It wasn't in the attic. I checked."

"Is there someone on that roof?" I suddenly asked, looking at the Larsen Building across the street.

Tif, Michelle, and Paul all turned and looked up. We were sitting in one of the city lots, eating subs for dinner. Michelle said,"I don't see anyone."

"There was someone there," I insisted. "They ducked down. Can't see them now."

"What would someone be doing on the roof?" she asked.

"Personally I'm hoping sniper. It would liven things up around here."

"They'd definitely be after you," said Tif.

"Fair," I said. "Been doing a lot of work on the Dent's Run gold."

"Does it exist now?"

"Likely not," I said. "I pulled the old---There he is!"

We all looked up. Looked like a couple of young people were doing something on the roof. Michelle said,"Huh. There is someone."

"I told you."

Paul stood up and shouted,"THANK YOU FOR ENTERTAINING US!"

We all laughed. I said,"So, no mention of the lone survivor of the Dent's Run incident in any of the best books, for one thing. No mention of a guy staggering into town and then later being claimed by the Army."

"Which would have been big news," said Tif.

"Right. With the new date I found, I checked through the newspapers at that time. We have them for June and July 1863, which is allegedly when it was happening. No mention of any of it, which is telling as they reported all sorts of other Civil War stuff going on at the time."

"They would have said something," noted Tif.

I nodded. "With all the Civil War news, they'd have said something. I noticed something else, too---There was a lot of recruiting being done, but they all were catching a train to Harrisburg. If there had been an actual Army outpost in Lock Haven at the time, the way the legend says, they'd have signed up right here. There's nothing supporting this legend."

"So there's no treasure to find," said Tif.

"No digging required," I said.

Paul was waiting on the sidewalk with me when SaraLee's car pulled up. Rolling down the window, she said,"Hi, Paul! How are you?"

Paul, who to the best of my recollection had never met SaraLee before, cheerfully said,"Good!"

"Are you doing school online?"

"Yeah," said Paul. "It's fun."

I hugged him. "Back soon, buddy."

"Will you be back before bedtime? You promise?"

"I promise."

I got in SaraLee's car. I had a black mask with a single ghost on it. Hers had ghosts and bats and stuff all over it. We were both wearing our gray ghost sweatshirts, and I had the jacket with all the buckles and zippers on it.

"Right around the corner," I said.

"On Highland," SaraLee said. "I remember."

"Right, I keep forgetting you grew up in this neighborhood," I said.

"Paul's cute," she said.

"He's a great kid. We're having some clinginess problems lately....Since the lockdown, he doesn't want me out of his sight. He gets scared when I have to go to the grocery store."

She nodded. "I've been feeling like a terrible parent, when I need five minutes alone. I get it."

"Right up here," I said.

By 7:30, we were set up and investigating the house. The clients had left us alone---Occasionally clients do, though it's uncommon. I looked at SaraLee and said,"Bring any of your equipment?"

"I have a recorder, but I forgot it," she said. "With my kids home, I wasn't as organized."

"Understandable," I said. "Here, you can use my spare laser thermometer and EMF detector. Let's get started in the living room."

We sat down on the floor. I turned on the recorder. "Is there anyone here?"

"Can you say your name?" asked SaraLee. "Do you have a message to pass on?"

There was a sound, a little tap, near the stairs. SaraLee looked at me and pointed, and I nodded. I leaped up with my camera.

7:53 PM. We were upstairs in the hallway. Recorder running. "I mean, I just wanted to get out and do my thing again, you know?" I was saying. "It's been so long since we got to do anything."

"Sixty-nine degrees," said SaraLee, aiming the thermometer. "I know. Believe me, I'm so over this."

8:16 PM. Down in the kitchen. 

"You know what really drives me nuts? The bags at the grocery store---You can't get them open anymore! You can't lick your fingers with a mask on...."

"Oh, I know," said SaraLee.

I said,"I mean, during the lockdown, I felt so useless, you know? All I could do was sit at home and teach Paul survival skills. And I love the little guy, but I wanted to get back to work. And that made me feel guilty, too."

"I know. I felt bad going back to work....Instead of being home, spending time with my kids. My son asked me when he got to spend a day with me."

"And doesn't that just stab you through your heart?" I said.

"Having a night out is good," said SaraLee. "I needed this."

I nodded. "Me, too. We should get back to doing this more, even if it's just me and you."

"Agreed."

I looked at the recorder. "Might as well wrap this up. I did promise Paul I'd be home before bedtime."

She slid the laser thermometer across the counter at me. "Here you go."

I slid it back at her.

"Keep it," I said. "You've earned it."

It was dark in Potter County. I mean really, truly dark. You may think you know what dark is. I assure you that you do not. Not the kind of dark that comes with being miles and miles from any available streetlights.

We sat in the dark, looking up at the stars. The Prius was parked in the middle of the field at Cherry Springs, and we had lawn chairs set up. Tif and Michelle sat in two of them. Paul was running around in the field, and I sat on the ground. I was wearing my dark blue sweatshirt with the rainbow alien on it, and my backup paranormal jacket, black denim with white spots.

"Daddy, I'm scared," said Paul.

"What are you scared of?"

"There might be ghosts."

"I've never heard any stories of ghosts at Cherry Springs," I said. "Besides, what are you worried about? We look for ghosts all the time."

"Yeah, but it's really dark here."

"It's too bad Biz couldn't make it," said Tif. "She's not feeling well. At least we're still doing this tonight."

"No way I was missing out on this," I said.

"I can see the Big Dipper," said Paul. "And I see Cassiopeia!"

"Very good, little man," I said. "Hey---What's that?"

There was a bright white light above, moving through Cassiopeia toward the horizon. It began to stop, hover, and then continue, growing brighter and dimmer as we watched it.

"What the hell?" said Michelle.

"It's a UFO," said Tif.

"It is a UFO," I said. "It's not identified. I don't know anything that behaves that way. Heading north-northeast. Eight-thirty five PM. I can't think of what that might be."

It hovered, dimmed again, and then disappeared.

"Wow," I said.

"We just saw a genuine UFO," Tif commented.

I crossed my arms. "This turned out to be a pretty good night."

Half an hour later, we were riding home along Route 44. It was dark, Michelle driving, Tif in the seat beside her. I was in the back with Paul, who had fallen asleep with his head on my shoulder.

Yeah. This is why I adopted a kid.

As we rounded a bend, he stirred, opened his eyes briefly. "I lv you, Dy," he murmured.

"Love you, too, little guy. You have fun tonight?"

"Mhm."

"Last few days, we've looked into Bigfoot, ghosts, a buried treasure, and a UFO. Been a pretty busy time, huh?"

I looked down. His eyes were closed.

He was asleep again.