fireplace and stuck it through the garment. She walked over to the basement, threw the poker into the water, and shut the door. Then she sat at the wooden writing desk, picked up the telephone, and asked the operator to connect her with the LaMirada sheriff’s office.
She told him who she was. She told him where she was and what had just happened—more or less. The sheriff asked Joan if she were in any immediate danger. She said no, she didn’t believe so. He told her that a patrol boat would be over within a half hour and she should stay where she was.
Joan hung up and looked around the sunlit foyer. The light dispelled the horrors without destroying the history and character of the room.
Stay where you are.
Despite everything that had happened, Joan smiled. That seemed like a very good idea indeed.
V
With the advent of the automobile, the tiny fishing village of LaMirada, Florida, had become the sandbox of the well-to-do. Mansions rose and tennis courts sprouted beside the Gulf beaches, and recreational tans joined the leathery bronze of longtime locals. The sheriff acquired a deputy. The main street got a traffic island. The mayor was given an office, a secretary, and a raise when he was forced to spend less and less time managing his general store.
When the train station opened in LaMirada in 1922, the village became a weekend haunt of the middle class. By the 1940s, a tiny airfield had been built just north of the marshes and travel agents in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington made LaMirada one of the hottest resorts on Florida’s west coast. Republican presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey stopped in the town during the 1944 campaign.
By 1950, LaMirada was nearly a ghost town.
To hear some people tell it, LaMirada was literally a ghost town. Spirits were said to roam the grounds of an abandoned military research facility. Disembodied laughter was heard in the streets and in movie theaters, lighted cigarettes floated along beaches and roads, and food rose from tables in homes and restaurants and disappeared, bite by bite. Some crackpots said the specters belonged to ancient Spanish settlers who had colonized the region. Among those local eccentrics, the lunatic fringe said they were the result of “invisible soldier” experiments conducted at the local military facility during the war.
But the ghosts were not entirely responsible for the near death of LaMirada. They were merely a curiosity and a nuisance. The real town-killer was a shadowy figure known as the Beast of LaMirada.
The Beast first appeared almost a month to the day after the strange events reported on La Viuda, a rock of an island located just off the Florida coast. Two shipping clerks, Chick Young and Wilbur Grey, returned from Mornay Castle on La Viuda with tales of having encountered a vampire they called Count Dracula, a werewolf called Talbot, the legendary Frankenstein Monster, and even the Invisible Man. No trace of these creatures was ever found, though authorities were never able to question Young and Grey. The men left their LaMirada hotel room the day they returned. Some people said they assumed aliases and went to Mexico; others claimed they went to Africa; some maintained they’d joined the Foreign Legion. Whatever the truth, they never returned to LaMirada.
Authorities also weren’t able to question Dr. Sandra Mornay, owner of the castle. Her smashed body was found beside a curtain wall, in the shadows. She was dressed in a lab coat and surgical cap. Apparently, she’d been thrown from the window of the castle laboratory. Given the reputation of her ancestors, villagers could only speculate as to what godless work she’d been up to. Mornay’s assistant, Professor Charles Stevens, was also dead. His jugular vein had been severed and half the blood in his body had been drained. The only eyewitness to his murder, insurance investigator Joan Raymond, said that the young scientist had been slain by the mysterious
Francine Pascal
Fleur Adcock
Elena Aitken
Dwight V. Swain
K.D. Rose
Marc Eden
Mikayla Lane
Lorelei James
Richard Brockwell
George Ivanoff