Latham's Landing Read Free Page A

over an hour to get back. It took only a half-hour to get
there this morning.”
    “ The tides are like that,” Fred said,
nodding as he stowed the raft. “You can’t trust ‘em.”
    “ Thanks for waiting for us,” I said
with relief.
    “ All I could do,” Fred said, with a
shrug. “I don’t go on that island except in the daytime. So if you
hadn’t come back, I‘d have waited as long as I could and then left
a light on here for you.”
    Sandy and I walked wearily up to the bed and
breakfast. Of course, the kitchen was closed for the night.
    So we drove into the nearest town, about
fifteen minutes away. The diner there was closed, too. But there
was a bar there that was alive, if not hopping.
    “ God, it’s good to eat!” I said,
stuffing my mouth with French fries. “I’m starving!”
    “ I don’t get how we lost track of time
so badly,” Sandy said musingly, sipping her beer. “Sure, we mixed
up the doors. But that took us what, a half-hour at most to find
the right one? We lost three hours somehow, Tina!”
    I knew one thing. “It’s a sign,” I said with
surety. “We’ve seen enough, Sandy. Let’s cut this trip short and
head back upstate. We can find a place with a pool near a mall and
shop, watch movies, and lay in the sun for the rest of the week.
Let’s have a real holiday vacation. Enough ghost hunting.”
    “ I’m not hunting ghosts,” She said
irritably. “I wanted to see with my own eyes what was out here. And
I’m not going until we’ve seen that other island, the sea
room.”
    “ Fine, but that’s it, one more day,” I
said vehemently. “I’ll go out with you tomorrow morning, and we’ll
check it out. But I want to be on the road before dinner, okay? We
can stop somewhere on the way.”
    Sandy looked at me for a moment and then
nodded. “Sounds good to me.”
     
    About ten am, we again got in the raft. Fred
left us a note to be careful, that he’d be gone for the day, but
just to leave the raft when we got back, and he’d stow it that
night.
    Soon, we were back near Latham’s Landing.
This time we continued around the house, not stopping at the
harbor. As we motored past, it was easy to see that part of the
house was actually submerged. The lower floor had a row of windows
that were right above the water, and the bottom part of the house
was under lapping waves.
    “ Did the water rise overnight?” I said
in wonder to Sandy. “What the hell?”
    “ Latham did it,” Sandy replied. “His
wife died somehow, but I gathered it was some kind of tragic
accident.”
    “ Did he kill her?” If she said yes, I
wouldn’t be surprised.
    “ No, because he went crazy afterward
with grief. Then he raised the water in his lake and flooded the
house’s first floor, most of it just guest bedrooms and sitting
rooms. Yet he continued to live here. Some said that he would go
out to his little island place and meet with her ghost at night.
Lights were seen sometimes through the years at night at his main
house by locals. And the Sea Room sometimes was said to be so
bright it looked like it was burning—”
    I turned to her, suddenly angry. “Sandra, out
with it. You seem to know a hell of a lot more about this house
than I saw in the short blurb in the picture book we both looked at
yesterday morning. And that museum that was supposed to give us
info closed down more than a year ago. So how do you know all
this?”
    “ My aunt told me a lot. She said she
hired a private investigator, after my cousin disappeared. He
talked to a lot of the locals, and after more than a little money
he came back to her with no explanation, just a lot of these old
stories.”
    Great . “Have other people disappeared
here?”
    “ Henry’s the only one that’s
documented. But a lot of people died here, Tina.”
    I gaped at her. “Who? Fred said no one has
died out here—”
    “ Latham killed himself here. His wife
died somewhere in or on her way to the sea room—”
    “ What