The Legend of Fuller’s Island

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  The Legend of Fuller’s Island

  Copyright © 2012 Annie’s.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews. For information address Annie’s, 306 East Parr Road, Berne, Indiana 46711-1138.

  The characters and events in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual persons or events is coincidental.

  _______________________________________

  Library of Congress-in-Publication Data

  The Legend of Fuller’s Island / by Jan Fields

  p. cm.

  I. Title

  2012912100

  ________________________________________

  AnniesMysteries.com

  800-282-6643

  Annie’s Attic Mysteries

  Series Editors: Ken and Janice Tate

  1

  Matthew Steven Fuller was hardly a man given to superstition or gossip. Even into his eighties, he stood ramrod straight with eyes as bright and piercing as a hawk. He wore a beard, well tended, but concealing. I never remember seeing him smile, though I never saw him lose his temper either. He was like a firm pillar that you knew would stand forever. I could think of no man less likely to die from a curse or the bite of a demon hound, and yet, no other answer has appeared, even these many years after the event.

  The Fuller Family History

  By Steven Fuller

  Private printing, 1925

  As Annie Dawson turned the yellowed page, she caught the sharp scent of old book, a smell mixing leather, old ink, and probably more than a little mildew. She brought the book closer to her nose to squint at the notes written in the margins. Each one reflected the unique wit of her grandfather. For Charles Holden, reading always had been an interactive experience. He read the author’s words, and then added his own in little notes and drawings along the margins. When Annie found a stash of her grandfather’s books in the attic, she’d brought them down and began reading them, mostly for the pleasure of hearing her grandfather’s voice in the penciled words.

  Sitting in Grey Gables, the house Gram and Grandpa had shared, Annie had often felt her grandmoter’s love as she had restored the house and unearthed her grandmother’s treasures from the attic. Now, through the books, she was having the same sense of her grandfather’s love and delightful perspective on life.

  Luckily, she’d begun her reading with one of Grandpa’s more unusual books, a rather fanciful family history he’d collected somewhere. At least, it was titled as a family history, though it read more like a cross between a memoir and a ghost story. From his comments, clearly her grandfather had found parts of the book as outrageous as Annie did. Still, it was fun to read the juxtaposition of the author’s long-winded and slightly pompous prose and her grandfather’s quick-witted responses.

  As she laughed aloud at some of her grandfather’s humorous notes, a project idea began forming in her mind. She would collect some of the cleverest of her grandfather’s sayings from margin notes in his books. Then she could sprinkle them among anecdotes about his work and family from his journals. She had piles and piles of his books and journals as source material. She would have a few copies bound as presents for the family—Quotes From Grandpa Charles. It would offer a sense of his wonderful personality to generations who never had the blessing of knowing him.

  Annie sat back, thinking. Her grandchildren, Joanna and John, never met their great-grandfather. They had no real memories of their great-grandmother either, though at least Betsy Holden had gotten to see them when they were babies. It was still hard to believe that Gram had been gone for several years now— some days, the loss of her grandmother still felt sharp in Annie’s heart.

  She sighed and turned her attention back to the book.

  A chubby gray cat lay at the end of the sofa, curled up in a mildly disgruntled pile. Boots, like Grey Gables, was Betsy’s before she was Annie’s, and Boots never liked it when Annie sat on the sofa with her legs tucked under her, since it left no room for a cat to pile up in her lap. Suddenly, Boots sat up straight, her nose pointed toward the front door.

  “Did you hear something?” Annie asked.

  Boots never moved a muscle. She just continued with the fierce frozen stare that cats are so good at, as if she could see into another dimension where things were far more exciting.

  Annie shifted on the sofa, putting her feet on the floor and feeling for her shoes. She slipped into them just as she heard footsteps on the porch. She was halfway across the room by the first knock. When Annie opened the door, she found her best friend, Alice MacFarlane, picking a piece of autumn leaf from her thick auburn hair. The spots of gold and red on the blown leaf were an almost perfect match to the gold and red of Alice’s twill jacket.

  Grinning at Annie, Alice took a step away from the door and gestured with a flourish toward the silver-haired man leaning heavily on a wooden cane behind her.

  “Jim Parker!” Annie said, stepping forward to give the smiling man a hug. “I didn’t know you were coming for a visit!”

  “It was a bit impromptu,” Jim said, his voice warm and gravelly. He hugged Annie with one arm, while keeping a firm grip on the sturdy cane in the other. “I’ve hit a snag with my latest book and thought I would come and visit my gorgeous muse.” He cast a mischievous look toward Alice.

  “He knows I’m very susceptible to flattery,” Alice said.

  “Well, come in and tell me about your snag,” Annie said. “I’m not a muse, but I’d still like to hear what you’ve been up to.”

  Jim laughed and shook his head. “Miss Annie, I would never consider calling you my muse,” he said. “I expect that after Alice finished roughing me up, your mayor friend would have a go. I know from experience that he can be a bit hot-tempered.”

  Jim walked through the door with a slightly uneven gait from his prosthetic legs. A photographer, he had lost both of them when he was a war correspondent and an explosion had brought down the hotel where journalists were staying in Kosovo.

  Annie felt her cheeks warm at Jim’s mention of Ian Butler. Her relationship with the handsome mayor was complicated. They were good friends, but they both were beginning to suspect it might be growing into more.

  Alice gave Jim a playful poke. “Just so you know who you’d have to face first.”

  Jim caught her hand in his and gave it a squeeze. “You’re always first with me.” Then he turned back to Annie. “So, how’s your gallant mayor doing?”

  “You didn’t stop by his office to visit?” Annie asked, her voice teasing, as she led them into the foyer.

  Jim burst into laughter. “You know, I do believe I was growing on him a little the last time I was in town, but that still doesn’t mean I want to push my luck. There’s been a time or two when I half-expected him to take a swing at me.”

  “I’m sure Ian wouldn’t go around brawling,” Annie said, though she had to admit inside that she suspected he’d come close. “Please, come and sit. Tell me what’s going on with you.”<
br />
  “Frustration,” Jim said as he followed Annie to the living room. “I need one more location to finish my book on abandoned places, and I’m not having much luck finding it.” Jim and Alice took seats on the sofa. Boots immediately padded onto Alice’s lap and curled up, giving Annie a smug look.

  “Is her highness annoyed with you?” Alice asked as she rubbed the cat between the ears and was rewarded by a rumbling purr.

  “I wouldn’t let her sit in my lap earlier,” Annie said. “She’ll carry a grudge until dinnertime, and then all will be forgiven.”

  Jim leaned slightly away from Boots and shook his head. “Women and cats,” he said. “I’ll never really understand either.”

  Alice leaned over to give him a peck on the cheek. “It’s the mystery that makes us interesting.”

  “And I do like a good mystery,” Jim said.

  Annie settled into the cozy chair across from the sofa, smiling at her friends. Sometimes she worried about Alice’s relationship with Jim. Annie knew Alice loved Stony Point and loved having roots here and a sense of community. She also knew Jim loved his nomadic life, moving from one job to the next with no roots anywhere. They seemed to have totally opposite goals, even though they both loved adventure. But Annie had to admit, Alice never looked happier than when Jim was around.

  Jim ran a hand over his short silver beard. “I don’t know where to look now,” he said. “One place I had set up to shoot turned out to be a bust. It had a great story, but all the buildings were down to foundations. No visual interest. Another would have been a great shoot, but I couldn’t get permission to get inside because the buildings were so decayed that the owner was scared I’d fall through a floor and sue him. Now my deadline is bearing down on me, and I need one last abandoned place with a juicy backstory.”

  “I wish I could help,” Annie said. “The only abandoned place I know of around here is the Old Seaman’s Rest, and it’s not exactly photogenic.”

  “And I’ve seen more than enough of that place!” Alice said.

  Annie knew that was true. Alice had spent the greater part of a day tied up in the Old Seaman’s Rest building when she was kidnapped during a crazy mystery involving movie stars and swapped luggage.

  “What kinds of spots do you have so far?” Annie asked.

  “There’s a ghost town out West,” Jim said. “And an abandoned hospital, an abandoned prison, an abandoned amusement park, and a little village on an island in the middle of a river right here in Maine.”

  “I’ve seen some of the photos,” Alice said. “They’re enough to give you nightmares. You could set a really creepy movie in any of them.”

  “Then don’t show them to me. Sometimes my imagination can be a little too vivid. I hope you find someplace,” Annie said. “You don’t have any leads at all?”

  Jim shook his head. “I’ve chased a few, but they haven’t turned into anything. I really need both a good story and good visuals. A ghost story would be best of all.”

  At that Annie laughed and picked up the book she’d left on the table. “You should read this then. It’s one of my grandfather’s books, and it has a witch, a curse, ghost dogs, and a family that abandoned their home.”

  “Really?” Jim’s eyebrows rose in interest as he reached for the book.

  “But I doubt the old family home is still there,” Annie said. “Or if it is, it’s probably not abandoned anymore. This is an old book.”

  Jim leafed through the book. “So, tell me the ghost story.”

  “Well, keep in mind that I haven’t completely finished the book,” Annie said. “It’s the history of the Fuller family. Apparently it was written by a man my grandfather knew, or so it seems from the notes Grandpa scrawled in the page borders. The family owned an island off the coast of South Carolina.”

  “Oh!” Jim said. “Readers love Southern Gothic.”

  “Apparently the family was wealthy, fairly eccentric, and not well-liked by the mainlanders,” Annie said. “Lots of stories went around about happenings on the island.”

  “What kind of happenings?”

  Annie shrugged. “Apparently it depended on who you asked—everything from feuds to smuggling to practicing the dark arts.”

  “And which happening is the ghost story connected to?” Alice asked, her eyes shining.

  “A little of all of them,” Annie said. “From what I’ve read, the author’s great-grandfather got into a feud with one of the mainland families over fishing near the island. Apparently the Fullers were very focused on privacy. Locals complained that they brought vicious guard dogs to the island for security to protect some sort of smuggling operation. Steven Fuller, the man who wrote this book, swore his family had not brought the dogs, and he hints that they actually were ghost dogs. At any rate, big black dogs were blamed for the attacks on several trespassers, and eventually, the author’s great-grandfather was found mauled to death.”

  “By dogs?” Jim said.

  “So the locals claim,” Annie said. “The only other dangerous animals on the island were wild pigs.”

  “Pigs?” Alice said with a laugh.

  Jim nodded. “Wild boar can be dangerous. I’ve run into a few in my time. One big fella got a little rowdy once … so I ate him.”

  “You’re such a tough guy,” Alice told him.

  “You know it,” Jim said, his blue eyes sparkling. He turned back to Annie. “You said the family abandoned the island?”

  “Apparently so,” Annie said. “I don’t yet know if they ever went back, but the great-grandfather’s death was actually the last death blamed on the dogs. Apparently having a family member fall victim to the animals was too much, and the family abandoned the island. The author said the family believed the island was cursed, and that the empty land would always be guarded by these ghost dogs.”

  “Cursed?” Jim grinned. “It just gets better and better.”

  “That part is a little confusing,” Annie said. “Actually, a lot of this book is a little confusing. But apparently an old woman from the family they feuded with placed a curse on them. The author’s flowery style can make it a bit difficult to sort out all the particulars. Anyway, that’s about as far as I got in the book, so I don’t know what happens after that. I’ve been reading my grandfather’s comments along with the text, and it makes it slow going.”

  “Charlie didn’t take that sort of thing seriously, did he?” Alice said.

  “Not the curses and such, of course,” Annie answered. “But he did wonder about the dogs. He thought they might be a new breed. Apparently the scant description meant more to him than to me. Plus, if he knew the author, he might have heard about the dogs in more detail from him.”

  “Your grandfather was interested in dogs?” Jim asked.

  Annie nodded. “He was a veterinarian.”

  Jim turned the book over in his hands. “Could I borrow this? I’d like to read it. It sounds like an intriguing possibility—if the island is still abandoned, and if there are any interesting ruins there.”

  “Feel free,” Annie said, “as long as I get it back. I’m not done with it, but I have plenty of other books to fill my time while you use it.”

  “Don’t worry,” Jim said. “I wouldn’t dare do anything to make Annie Dawson unhappy. You have a lot of fans in this town.”

  They chatted a bit longer after that, and Annie brought out iced tea and cookies, but she could tell by the way Jim kept sneaking peeks at the book that his mind was already off on his next assignment. She hoped she’d given him a good lead, though the more she thought of it, the less likely it seemed. Annie had lived in the Deep South, and the humidity was hard on buildings. An island abandoned since the turn of the century wasn’t likely to be in good enough shape to offer many photographs for Jim’s book.

  She saw Jim settle back into the corner of the sofa and open the book again. At least she had cheered him up.

  “Don’t mind him,” Alice said, giving Jim a look that he didn’t even noti
ce. “He’s as bad as a treasure hunter sometimes.”

  “I just hope it turns out to be a treasure for his work,” Annie said, “and not another disappointment.”

  “Well, if there’s any photo treasures to be had,” her friend said, “Jim will find them. You can count on it.”

  2

  I wasn’t permitted to be in the room with the adults, of course, and thus I sneaked in early to slip behind the old camel-hair sofa. The dust and stiff hair made me want to sneeze. I was a child, barely six years old. I remember the air in the room was thick, almost stifling, with smoke from cigars and pipes. The men in the room were all my family and my heroes. I knew in my young heart that these men could face down lions, but their voices quaked as they whispered about the dogs. I heard about the red eyes, the jaws dripping with blood, and the horrible sound of their howls that cut the night air with dire prediction like the scream of a banshee.

  —Steven Fuller, 1925

  Since she’d sent the book with Jim, Annie spent the rest of the weekend on normal autumn chores. She raked up the rest of her leaves and dumped them into her leaf compost bins. Since not all the leaves were off the trees, she knew that no matter how clear she managed to get the lawn, the next good wind would mean more raking.

  On Monday, she headed into town and bought two big maroon mums for her front porch. As she set them out, she smiled, remembering the year she’d bought so many mums from a local school fundraiser that she couldn’t even get on the porch. Thankfully Ian had saved her from herself and found someone to come and take most of the flowers off her hands.

  Annie was a little surprised not to see Alice or Jim again. She wondered if Jim had made any headway on finding the location he needed for his book. Annie was fairly sure that not even a visit from the handsome photographer would keep Alice from a Hook and Needle Club meeting, so she was glad when Tuesday arrived, and she could head into town to catch up with everyone.

  When the bell tinkled to signal her arrival at A Stitch in Time, Annie felt a warm rush as Mary Beth Brock looked up from her spot at the register and smiled. “You’re early today!”