It was rare that Dean Winchester found himself at a loss for words.
“Um—okay,” was all he was able to manage at the revelation that the spirit of Captain Terrence Naylor was standing in front of him and trying to hold a conversation with him. “This is weird.”
“You have not answered my question yet!” Finally, Dean leaned back, angling his body toward the door but not willing to take his eyes off Naylor. “Sam!”
A minute later, he heard Sam’s size twelves clomping down the wooden stairs, and his brother came in. “What is it, Dean, I— Oh. It’s a spirit.”
“Thank you, Captain Obvious,” Dean muttered.
Naylor was now folding his ectoplasmic arms over his insubstantial chest. “If one of you would kindly explain yourselves.”
Sam slowly tore his eyes away from Naylor to look at Dean. “It’s a spirit that talks.”
“Apparently.”
Naylor bellowed, “Stop speaking of me as if I wasn’t right here in front of you!”
“Well,” Sam said slowly, “you aren’t—exactly. You see—you’re dead.”
“Yes, I’m aware of that, if you please,” Naylor said testily. “I quite distinctly recall the feeling of the sea overtaking me, the salt water filling my mouth and nose. It was rather unpleasant, and I’m not like to forget it.”
Dean frowned. “So you know you’re a spirit—a ghost.”
“Of course I do! And you still have not an- swered—”
“This is a hotel,” Sam said. “An inn.”
Recalling the history of the place that Bodge had given him when he was here last, Dean added, “Your descendants lived here for a while, then about thirty years ago, some guy tried to turn it into a museum. That tanked pretty bad, and an old woman bought it and turned it into an inn. When she retired, she sold it to a nice young couple, who still run it.” Dean figured mentioning that both members of the couple were female wouldn’t be such a hot idea.
Scowling, Naylor said, “That’s absurd. Why would anyone lodge in my house?"
“It’s been renovated a bit,” Sam said lamely. “Well, at least you’re not screaming,” Naylor
said, shaking his head.
“What do you mean?” Sam asked. “You’ve manifested before?”
“I beg your pardon?”
Dean quickly said, “You’ve talked to other people before us?”
“Of course! Well, not precisely talked. I at- tempted to do so, but they never displayed any form of comprehension. It was most irritating, especially the ear-piercing wails of the girls.”
“And you’ve always been here?” Sam asked. “Following my death, my soul came to this
place. I used to mock those absurd spiritualists that my Agnes would go to. I didn’t believe that one could speak to the souls in heaven or in hell. It never occurred to me that they might not actually arrive at either destination. Instead, after death, I found myself here.”
“That’s not uncommon,” Sam said. “Spirits often are drawn after death to places that were important to them in life.”
“There has never been anything more important to me than this house, young man, not even the boats I served upon. I was a wrecker for my entire adult life, and I built this house myself. The mate- rial was paid for with the wages I earned on the wreckers, and I constructed it with these two good hands.” He held out hands that had probably been meaty and callused when they had had substance.
Dean was about to say something, but the captain kept talking. The poor bastard hadn’t had a proper conversation in a hundred fifty years or so, so Dean let him ramble on.
“Eventually, I owned my own vessel and took a wife. Agnes bore me sons and daughters, and I retired so I could watch my children grow. Then she—she passed on from the consumption, and I purchased another boat.” He shook his head. “The business had changed, sadly, especially after the War of Northern Aggression ended so poorly.”
Somehow, Dean managed not to snort. He knew plenty of modern Southerners who still referred to the American Civil War that way.
“Young wreckers who didn’t know the reefs and had to be salvaged themselves when they went out. Much more corruption, honorable judges retiring and being replaced by foolish young men who understood nothing of tradition. And then that blessed storm . . .”
Sam looked as though he hadn’t followed any of that. Dean only knew what Naylor was talk- ing about by virtue of having visited Key West before. He held up a finger. “Uh, Captain? Look, my brother and I need to, ah, have a conversation in private, okay? We’ll be right outside.”
“Truly this is a lodging house?”
Nodding, Sam said, “Truly. Um—what year do you think it is, Captain?”
“Well, I perished in the year of our Lord eigh- teen hundred and seventy-one. I suppose we’re approaching the turn of the century now?”
“Actually, we’ve passed it,” Sam said.
“Twice,” Dean added helpfully. “It’s now twenty hundred and eight.”
Naylor’s face fell. “It’s been that long?”
“’Fraid so.” Dean grabbed Sam’s shoulder and hustled him out through the porch door. “Now then, if you’ll excuse us.”
They went out, Dean slid the door shut, and they walked out into the garden. “It’s that Molly chick and Farmer Greeley all over again,” he said.
Sam shook his head. “Yeah, but this is a lot different. Molly and Greeley only manifested once a year. That’s why they were solid and speaking, it was a whole year’s worth of spiritual energy con- centrated into a single day. Plus, they were tied to a particular time and place. But going from a typical haunting to something like this—that’s new.” Sam scratched the back of his head. “What was all that about wrecking things?”
Dean was unable to help smiling at the oppor- tunity to lecture Sam for a change. “He was a wrecker—it was the big business around here in the nineteenth century.”
“They’d deliberately wreck ships? That’s awful.”
“No, dumb-ass, the ships’d get wrecked all by themselves. There’s reefs out there up the ass, and ships would get nailed all the time. Remember, most boats were wood back then. The wreckers were salvage ships that would rescue the boats.”
Looking back at the bungalow, Sam said, “So he was a pirate.”
“That’s what I thought, too, at first,” Dean said with a chuckle. “But no, it was all legit. Was pretty heavily regulated, too, but people who were good at it made a bundle. Half the nice houses on the island were built by wreckers and their families.”
“Huh.” Sam put his hands on his hips. “So now what?”
Dean shrugged. “Now nothin’. Yaphet said the spirits on the island were more active. This proves it wasn’t just him bein’ stoned.”
“This is more than just active, Dean, this is—I don’t now, supercharged.”
“Yeah,” Dean said, “that’d take some serious mojo.”
Sighing, Sam said, “Which makes it even more likely that it’s one of our Wyoming refugees.” He pulled his Treo out of his pants pocket. “I’m gonna give Bobby a call.”
“Okay. I’m gonna see what I can do about my roommate situation.”
As Sam put the phone to his ear, Dean stepped back up onto the porch and slid the door open. “Captain?”
“Have you and your sibling conferred?” he asked snidely.
“Look—can you haunt one of the other bun- galows? I mean, Sammy and I—we’d like our pri- vacy, y’know?”
“I might be willing to accede to your request, young man, assuming you can explain to me why you have responded to me so differently from ev- eryone else.”
“Couple reasons,” Dean said. “One, my brother Sam and I, we’re hunters. We fight demons and vampires and the like.”
“This is a common practice in this century, is it?”
“Uh, no, actually—we’re kind of under the radar.”
“Under the what?”
Recalling that radar wasn’t developed until the twentieth century, Dean amended his statement. “We’re a secret society.”
Naylor rolled his eyes. “Like the thrice-damned Freemasons, I suppose.”
“Uh, sort of.” Dean figured that was as good an analogy as any, though he would’ve killed for the Freemasons’ resources.
“You said a ‘couple’ of reasons. What is the other?”
“Normally, spirits like you aren’t able to contact living people so—so precisely. I’ve been doing this most of my life, and I usually can’t have a conver- sation with a spirit like this. Which means there’s someone or something on this island that’s mess- ing around with the dead.”
“And you intend to take arms against this some- one or something?”
“That’s the plan, yeah.”
Again, Naylor folded his arms. “And what becomes of me should you be successful?”
Dean let out a breath. “You go back to what you were before. Or—” He hesitated. “Or we salt and burn your remains, and you move on to whatever afterlife you’re supposed to go to.”
“Then I will enter into this agreement with you, young man.”
Fed up with feeling like he was in the princi- pal’s office, he said, “My name’s Dean. Dean Win- chester. Not ‘young man.’”
For the first time, Naylor smiled. “Very well, Mr. Winchester—the terms of the agreement are thus: I will not disturb your privacy for the dura- tion of your stay in my house. In return, I request that, should you and your brother be successful in your endeavors, that you retrieve my remains from under the walnut tree in the garden, salt and burn them as you say, and free my soul from this wretched place.”
Unable to help himself, Dean said cheekily, “I thought this was the most important place in your life.”
“It was. But my life is over, and this is no longer my home. It is past time I moved on, don’t you think, Mr. Winchester?”
Since that plan had been in the back of Dean’s mind in any case—leaving aside any other con- siderations, the spirit would be bad for Nicki and Bodge’s business—it was easy enough for him to say, “Sure, no problem.”
“Normally at this juncture, I would spit on my hand and offer it to you.”
“Let’s not and say we did,” Dean said, as Sam slid the door open with one hand while placing his phone back in his pocket with the other. “What’d Bobby say?”
Sam cut his eyes toward Naylor, but Dean waved him off. “He’s cool.”
After giving Dean a we’ll-talk-about-this-later look, Sam said, “Bobby hasn’t heard of anything like this, either, but he said he’d dig through his library and see what turns up.”
Dean liked it better when Bobby knew every- thing off the top of his head, which meant Dean could cut right to the part where they kicked ass.
Sam continued: “He also said that this is the first time Yaphet’s been right about anything since he said the Beatles would break up.”
That got a laugh from Dean. “C’mon, let’s check across the street, then track down Yaphet.”
“Best of luck, gentlemen,” Naylor said. “May God be with you—for all our sakes.”
Then the spirit disappeared. No fading, no movement—one second he was there, the next he wasn’t.
Dean looked at Sam and grinned. “Spooky.”
To his credit, Sam didn’t dignify that awful joke with a reply. “Why’s he wishing us luck?”
As they left, Dean explained his conversation with the captain. He finished with: “It’s weird.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, we salt and burn these people ’cause they’re causing a fuss. Never really thought about it from the spirit’s side. Remember that job in New York we did about a year or so back?”
Sam smiled as they went into the main house through the back door. “I remember you geeking out over the guy’s vinyl collection.”
Ignoring the dig—although Manfred Afiri did have an amazing record collection that Dean seriously envied—he said, “We didn’t salt and burn the bones because we needed the body to prove that she’d been killed.”
“I remember, yeah. You think we should’ve?” After giving a quick wave to Bodge, sitting at the
front desk, they went out the front door. “I dunno. I mean, Manfred has both our numbers, and he woulda called if the spirit acted up again, but—” He shook his head as he swung the wrought-iron gate open with a low squeak. “Did we do her spirit any favors by not letting her move on?”
Sam peered down at his brother. “Since when are you the whiny emo bitch of this partnership?” Rolling his eyes, Dean said, “Kiss my ass,
Sammy, you know what I mean.”
“I do, I’m just stunned to hear you say it.” “What, I can’t be philosophical once in a while?”
Sam smiled. “As long as it’s only once in a while, I guess.”
“Gee thanks.”
They crossed Eaton and approached the house with the turret.
Unfortunately, the door was locked, crime-scene tape flapped in one of the bushes in front of the house, and the sign in the window read closed until further notice.
“Guess a double homicide really is bad for busi- ness,” Sam muttered.
“Yeah. I’d rather wait until there’s a few fewer folks on the street before we try going at it with our mad lockpicking skillz.”
Sam gave Dean a withering look. “Right. So what, we talk to this Yaphet guy?”
“May as well.” Dean chuckled. “Remember how
Manfred was a trip back to the sixties?”
“Yeah.”
“Yaphet’s worse.”
Shuddering, Sam said, “Okay, now I’m scared.” At that, Dean just grinned as he led Sam toward Duval Street.
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