Sunset House (Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper Book 18), page 1
Contents
Sunset House
Copyright
Also by J. L. Bryan
Acknowledgments
Dedication
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
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
From the author
Sunset House
Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper,
Book Eighteen
by
J. L. Bryan
Copyright
Copyright 2023 J.L. Bryan
All rights reserved.
This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Also by J. L. Bryan
The Night Folk series (NEW!)
Sable
The Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper series
Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper
Cold Shadows
The Crawling Darkness
Terminal
House of Whispers
Maze of Souls
Lullaby
The Keeper
The Tower
The Monster Museum
Fire Devil
The Necromancer’s Library
The Trailwalker
Midnight Movie
The Lodge
Cabinet Jack
Fallen Wishes
Sunset House
The Funtime Show
Urban Fantasy/Horror
The Unseen
Inferno Park
Time Travel/Dystopian
Nomad
The Jenny Pox series (supernatural/horror)
Jenny Pox
Tommy Nightmare
Alexander Death
Jenny Plague-Bringer
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my wife Christina for her support. Thanks to my son Johnny for always doing his homework and his chores.
I appreciate everyone who helped with this book, including beta reader Robert Duperre (check out his books!). Thanks also to copy editor Lori Whitwam and proofreaders Thelia Kelly, Andrea van der Westhuizen, and Barb Ferrante. Thanks to my cover artist Claudia from PhatPuppy Art, and her daughter Catie, who does the lettering on the covers.
Thanks also to the book bloggers who have supported the series, including Heather from Bewitched Bookworms; Michelle from Much Loved Books; Shirley from Creative Deeds; Kelly from Reading the Paranormal; Lili from Lili Lost in a Book; Kelsey from Kelsey’s Cluttered Bookshelf; and Ali from My Guilty Obsession.
Most of all, thanks to the readers who have supported this series!
Dedication
For my parents
Chapter One
The morning started off more than promising.
At sunrise, I hopped into the ancient black Camaro I'd inherited from my father. I seemed to catch every green light in Savannah between my apartment and Duck Donuts, arriving just as the shop opened for the day. I picked up three wickedly appealing doughnuts and three iced coffees—plain with a little cream for me, mocha for my boyfriend Michael, and salted caramel latte for his younger sister Melissa.
An upbeat song thumped on the radio, and I turned up the volume. It was “Slow Down” by Selena Gomez. Ironically, the fast beat encouraged me to press the accelerator a little harder.
Another point in the “promising morning” column was the cooling clouds blanketing the sky, breaking up the summer's long, blistering heatwave. It had even rained a couple of times in the past week. It was August, following a painfully hot, dry July, but Labor Day and autumn were finally in sight.
“Good luck, Melissa,” I said to my reflection in the rearview mirror. “I know you'll do great. It'll be so…great.” I sighed, feeling stupid for rehearsing what I'd say to her. Melissa's attitude toward me was by turns hot and cold, reflecting her mixed feelings about my relationship with her brother. My work meant constant danger for those around me, and she and Michael had both suffered for it, had taken turns being possessed by an entity intent on tormenting me. We'd won that battle, but the war for my place in their tiny, two-person family continued.
“I know you'll do great, Melissa,” I repeated. “Or 'well'? I know you'll do well.” Too bland? “You'll kill it up there, Melissa!” Too violent?
I parked at their building, a nineteenth-century Queen Anne house divided into apartments long ago. As I left my car, I looked up at the turret window where Michael's bed was located behind a drawn curtain.
Melissa was crossing the front porch toward the small parking area, the hard plastic wheels of her rolling suitcase clanking over the floorboards. She grunted as she lifted the suitcase to carry it down the front steps.
“Hey, Melissa!” I greeted her as brightly as I could manage, which was apparently a notch too loud, because she looked up at me, startled, and nearly tripped over the last step, almost suffering a nasty fall because of me. I ran to help her, though I couldn't do much with a three-coffee to-go caddy in one hand and a box of ultra-premium doughnuts in the other. “Sorry!”
She recovered nimbly, not surprising for someone with years of soccer games and dance lessons behind her.
“I got you an iced salted caramel.” I held out the coffee caddy. “And a blueberry lemonade doughnut, to celebrate your first day as a Blue Devil. I always see the blueberry lemonade on the menu, and it always sounds good, but I never actually get it—”
“My hands are full.” She rolled on past me, her voice unusually thick, her green eyes a little damp and swollen. She'd pulled her blonde hair back in a loose, careless ponytail, and her shoulders slumped morosely under her soccer jersey.
“Oh, right, sorry. I'll set these on the porch.”
Michael emerged from the door to the first-floor hallway where the big house's various staircases and apartment entrances converged. He was hung like a summer clearance rack, sporting a selection of small luggage, handbags, and a mesh laundry bag full of towels and sheets. He wore a pensive frown, an unusual look for him, until he saw me and smiled, putting up a positive front.
“Good morning,” I said, then kissed him. “I brought you coffee for the big road trip. And a maple bacon doughnut. You can thank me when you come back from North Carolina.”
“Thanks,” he said, trying but failing to put more cheer into it. “I'll grab it in a second.”
“Can I help carry anything?” I set the coffee and doughnuts on the railing and took the laundry bag from him. Dropping my voice, I asked, “Is Melissa okay?”
“She's been eager to leave all summer, but now she's suddenly afraid to go.” Michael started down the stairs.
“You mean she's feeling several months' worth of delayed and deferred fear and anxiety, all at once.”
“Way to totally just psychoanalyze me,” Melissa grumbled, returning empty-handed from the parking area.
“Sorry,” I told her yet again. My social skills were really in peak form today. “But fear is totally normal when you're facing a major life change. You're going to do so well at Duke.”
“Yeah, you'll totally kill it!” Michael said, and she smiled. Drat, missed opportunity.
“I know you'll be fine,” I said. “Everyone who's ever met you knows it, probably.”
“It's just so far away.” Melissa looked up at the third-floor windows to the apartment where she and her brother had lived since their mother's death. “I'm leaving everything behind.”
“Doesn't feel that way to me.” Michael trudged past her, loaded down with her belongings.
“You went to college here in town, Ellie,” she said. “Why didn't I do that? It would be cheaper.”
“Because you were lucky enough to get a scholarship,” I said. “It's smart to take advantage of that.”
“It doesn't cover everything, though. I'll still graduate with debt—”
“Which you'll pay off with help from your degree,” Michael said, before turning the corner to the house's driveway. “Because you'll pick something smart that earns you a good living.”
“No pressure, though,” Melissa grumbled. “I'll just start by digging a big, dark hole of debt and jumping in. That's what I feel like I'm doing right now, actually, jumping into a dark hole.” She looked up at her own bedroom window again.
“That's not what you're doing at all,” I said. “Listen, after my parents died, I had to go
“But you finally did?” Melissa asked, with a sort of fragile hope in her voice.
“Well…” I looked back on my later high school years, living in the shadow of my ebullient cousin Alison, who moved like a glowing lamp of bottomless glee through what felt to me like a bleak adolescent nightmare of an existence. I'd kept away from other kids, a weird loner reading arcane books and hanging around cemeteries in the dark hours of the morning, trying to understand how the dead behaved and why they haunted the living. “Not really, but I'm a bad example.”
“Great.” Melissa sighed and shook her head.
“That's because I chose to keep to myself,” I said. “I didn't want to put down any roots because I wanted to move back here to Savannah. You'll make different choices, because you're going somewhere you chose. It's the power of making your own choice that matters. You'll belong there, you'll put down all kinds of new roots, and branch out into an exciting new life, and…sprout new twigs and leaves, I guess…”
“And acorns,” Michael added, rejoining us. “Or cashews, because you're totally nuts.”
“Shut up!” Melissa scowled.
“With that attitude, you can drive yourself to North Carolina,” Michael said.
“I am driving. The whole way.” She drew car keys from her pocket and jingled them like Christmas bells.
“That was not part of the deal.”
“You said I needed to practice, Mikey.”
“I didn't say I wanted to be in the car when it happened.” He shook his head and returned inside.
They loaded Melissa's possessions into her car, a 1980s Pontiac with a sharply sloping hatchback. Michael had rescued it from a junkyard and repaired it by hand, as he often did with antiquated bits of machinery. He'd done the same with his own blazing-red 1949 Chevy truck.
“I'm jealous of this car,” I told Melissa as she climbed into the driver's seat. The sunroof was open, letting the breeze of the relatively cool summer day pass through.
“Don't worry, I've drilled her in every aspect of maintaining this beast.” Michael slid into the shotgun seat and patted the dashboard affectionately.
“Drilled and drilled.” Melissa rolled her eyes. “I got it all the first time.”
“There's nothing to worry about,” I said. “You're starting a great adventure, Melissa. And you are going to kill it.”
“That's what I keep hearing,” she said.
I walked around behind the car, aiming for the passenger side so I could say goodbye to Michael, but maybe Melissa didn't realize that, or she was just anxious to get going on her life-changing road trip.
Either way, I tried not to take it personally as she drove away, hoping it wasn't me that she was so eager to flee from.
“Oh, wait!” I yelled after them. “Your doughnuts!”
I sprinted to the porch and back, sloshing cold coffee and whipped cream everywhere as I waved my caffeinated, sugary offerings at them.
They turned out of sight a few blocks away and apparently hadn't noticed me trying to stop them, because they didn't circle back. They headed out of town, stranding me at their empty home with too much coffee and too many doughnuts for one person.
Chapter Two
After they left, I needed to go meet Stacey at our office. A potential client was expecting us to visit that morning, and the location was a bit of a drive from Savannah, out in a remote, rural part of south Georgia.
My encounter with Michael and Melissa, and the sight of them driving off without a backward glance at me—even when I had free doughnuts—had left me feeling extra alone. I really could identify with Melissa's fear of the huge change in her young life, though surely her situation would turn out far more positive than mine had.
Maybe that was why I drove out of the way to visit the suburban neighborhood where I'd grown up. I had memories of it being a reasonably happy place, with kids occasionally bicycling or skateboarding in the street, a place were people hung bright, blinking, fabulously tacky decorations during the holidays.
In more recent years, it had taken a turn for the worse, the decay seeming to spread from the empty lot where my house burned down to the houses beside it, which had fallen into disrepair and neglect, turning the whole neighborhood gloomy.
The last time I'd visited, months earlier, some construction company had cleared out my family's old lot, preparing to build something new there. I hadn't checked on it recently, but now I found myself in the mood to have a look, to go kicking at the loose stones of my past.
What I found was not at all what I expected.
For as long as I could remember, the front of the neighborhood had been marked with a tall, gradually decaying wooden sign installed when the neighborhood was built back in the 1970s. A jaunty sailboat design had adorned the words Riverside Point, an utter scam of a neighborhood name since the river was nowhere nearby.
Now that sign was gone, along with the entire neighborhood.
The earth was churned up everywhere, construction equipment rolling behind temporary orange-mesh fencing. The original streets remained, so far, but that was about it.
I pulled into the neighborhood and immediately had to stop at a row of traffic cones blocking the street. A muscular, dark-skinned man with a gray beard and yellow hard hat approached, so I lowered my car window.
“Can I help you?” he asked.
“I, uh…” I really didn't have an answer. I doubted he could help me. “I used to live here.”
“Oh, yeah?” He was being polite, but I could sense the impatience behind it. He kept watching me, waiting for me to say more, to get to whatever annoying point I'd come to make while interrupting his work.
Alongside the main road, where Mrs. Hernandez's house and giant azaleas had once stood, a huge sign presented an artist's conception of a three-level community loaded with cutesy wooden benches and stacked-stone walls. Shoppers browsed at boutiques and dined at cafes on the bottom level, while happy-looking couples stood on plant-filled apartment balconies above, beaming in awe at the incredibly convenient stores below.
Coming soon, the sign read, Ocean Bluff Terrace, an exciting new mixed-use village! The finest in retail living!
“Ocean Bluff?” I said. “That's even more of a lie than Riverside Point. We are miles from the ocean.”
“True,” the construction guy said, still acting polite, “but I can't let you park here, ma'am.”
“Sure. Of course. It's just a shock. I came here expecting a glimpse at the old neighborhood, and I know it was in bad shape, but I had no idea all this was happening.” I shook my head, trying to reconcile a hundred competing childhood memories of walking my dog, trick-or-treating, and playing hide-and-seek with the neighbor kids against the empty wasteland laid bare in front of me.
His expression softened. “I see how it would be a surprise. But I saw it before the tear-down, and honestly, I think this is going to be a step up. It'll be a good place.”
I nodded. “I hope so.”
“Sorry about your old house, though,” he said.
“Well, the house was already gone.”
He nodded. “I felt the same when I visited my grandparents' old place, found it blown over by a storm. Guess it's why they say you can't go home again.”
“That's true.” I watched bulldozers clear away the stand of trees where a few middle-schoolers had once built a treehouse. I'd been nine at the time, too young to qualify for entry to their club.
“I'm going to need you to leave the area,” the construction guy added. “For everyone's safety.”
“Right. Sorry.” I smiled up at him and noticed him eyeballing my surplus of coffee and doughnuts. “Would you, uh, like an iced mocha or salted caramel?”
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