©1 July 2025 Levite
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1.
We're two officers down. But it's OK.
Mister Walt retired last month. And Ms Betty, the senior female officer is out on a medical, but, at least according to those that say they know this sort of thing, she may take an early retirement as well.
So the rest of us had already been doing the work that Mister Walt had been doing, but then when we split up what Ms Betty's assignments I got to do her upcoming appointments doing safety inspections.
Which means I had to go through the various things that were looked for during the safety inspections of county facilities from a employee and client safety perspective. Things like undo trip hazards, overloaded outlets, stuff stored in front of fire exits, and so on.
I reviewed the checklist, and looked up a few items that I was unfamiliar with, and then went out on the handful of inspections that were scheduled but she had been unable to complete.
I had expected that I would feel somewhat ill at ease, or even awkward walking into the county health department doing to them what they do to everybody else. But it was remarkably straightforward, and when I made a couple of suggestions to the facility manager, she told me that one of the items was on her list to have done, but it just hadn't been accomplished yet.
"I've got a work order in to maintenance to have it moved, but you know how that is."
I nodded, "all too well."
And so it went.
There was only one facility that had anything that failed them, and I was within my authority as inspector if I had closed the place and ordered them to stay closed until the problem was corrected. But instead, their Admin started moving stuff right then, and called their custodian to help her, and by the time I was done with the rest of the inspection, all the Christmas decorations that had been piled three feet thick and six feet high in front of the fire exit was back in the storeroom, where it was supposed to have gone in January, over three months ago.
With the tree and wreaths sorted, they passed with only a few minor issues. One of those being an amazing daisy chain of power strips that went on and on around a room.
"There isn't an outlet on that wall," the Admin told me. "We've got the printer and computers on their own extension cords, but things like desk lights and the fax machine, there's no other way to do it."
I looked down the wall, she was right, there was no outlet anywhere to be seen. "What was this place when it was built?"
"I've heard it was a feed store. They didn't need a lot of power."
"I guess not."
After a couple of days of that it was almost a relief to get a call from one of the few county offices way out on Montauk Point.
So I informed those I needed inform that I would be out of the office, got my stuff together, and drove for an hour and a half out to the Point.
2.
The office wasn't all the way out at the very end of the island, but it was close enough. Surrounded by nature preserves and state parks, the office and small shop building was shared by the large County Park to the north, the Ranch, and a smattering of smaller sites around the area.
"Most days I work at Third House, but I try to spend a day down here just to clear the paperwork for the others, and some days I go up to the park up north to cover as well."
"That's a long way around."
She smiled, "one of our rangers says it's faster to ride a horse cross country from here to there in the summer than it is to drive."
"I've seen the traffic around here, so some days I'd believe him."
"Traffic? You mean our two lane parking lot with a water view?" She laughed.
"Where's the water view from the road? All I've seen is bushes and weeds."
"You have to know where to look."
Her report that was of interest to me was mainly here, but sometimes up in the Third House. And when she described them, they were totally different and unrelated phenomena.
In this small house, which reminded me a lot of the Parsonage from another investigation, where I could stand in the kitchen, and almost see the entire rest of the house. Which meant that the reported sounds of footsteps on the old floorboards and doors rattling probably weren't from somebody else, alive, in the house.
The best information I'd found about the place was from when the original owner's family had transferred it to the county after World War Two, according to the note on the transfer, "for the 1852 Cottage to facilitate the public use and county management of parklands on the Montauk Peninsula in perpetuity."
Since then the house had been a caretaker's residence, a storage unit, the park's main office while the other office was being renovated, then it was a seasonal residence for park staff, and lately, a office away from the office.
"We're talking about putting some summer staff, conservation interns and the like, back in here this year. We quit doing it during COVID, but now we think we need to again."
I nodded as we looked at the still furnished 'bedroom and a half'. "Did any of the previous summer interns report these sorts of incidents?" I asked.
"I remember one from not long after I started saying she would hear a bang in the house, and look out, and there'd be nobody here."
I looked around the room, "And you've heard these bangs?"
"Yes. Usually late in the afternoon, but once in awhile early in the morning when I first get here."
I did some testing with everything that could bang in the small kitchen, then in what would be better called a 'water closet' with a RV sized shower and toilet, and a corner sink that were clearly added seventy years after the place was built and explained why the 'half bedroom' was half of a bedroom.
She kept shaking her head, saying some were close, but nothing was what she had heard. She said the sound was deeper, more resonate, and sometimes it made the house shake a little.
And she said the feeling of being watched was when she was in what passed for a living area, now small office, "I'd be on the phone or computer and I just knew somebody was standing right here in this door looking at me."
I agreed to spend some time in the place and see what I could come up with.
She left and I carried in my bag and thought about how best to cover the house.
One of my 'new toys' was an outdoor full spectrum camera with a motion sensor function. It was similar to the one I've been using since the case on the golf course, but this one had better resolution and depth of field in low light. During my testing, not only did it photograph the local opossums, and cats, lurking around our apartment dumpster, you could identify individuals. Something the apartment complex manager seemed to take in stride, but he promised he'd see if something could be done to at least thin their numbers out a little.
"Hello," I said to the empty house, "I'm going to be staying here for awhile and working up at the Third House. Is that OK?"
The house was quiet and still.
I sat at the desk in the living area and just looked at the place. Then I noticed something about the ... it was way too small to call a hallway... the opening to the bedrooms and the tiny bathroom.
"I wonder," I said to myself and got the full spectrum camera out. Then after adjusting the blinds in the bedrooms, I took some pictures. Then I played with the blinds again, and then the front door, and the lights, and ended up with some interesting images of the old wooden bathroom door that, at some point in its life, had been painted.
Pareidolia is a real thing. That is the word for when you see an image in something natural that was never intended to have an image in it. My favorite example was a large piece of very old wooden paneling that on was the wall in our grade school library. Everybody, including the librarian and my own teachers, saw an old time open cab fire truck in the grain. And if you squinted just so, you could see a fireman driving the truck. It was just the way the wood had been split and the way the grain came together, but there it was. Did the lumber mill intentionally put that sheet together like that when the school was built? Probably not. And there were some people that said they never saw it. But, like the tiger in the pattern, once you saw it, you had a hard time un-seeing it.
Here, in the 1852 cottage in the park, there was an odd pattern in the grain of the bathroom door, that, with the right light, looked like somebody standing there. And it was just hard enough to see that if you were busy and your peripheral vision caught it just right..... Then it wouldn't be there when you looked up.
I was pretty sure I had solved that part of it, but now I had to concentrate on the bangs.
So I sat and looked at the local options to have lunch delivered, and waited.
One hour and fifteen minutes later I was marveling at another stuffed crust pizza masterpeice. The delivery fee was almost equal to the price of the pie, but if it was as good as it smelled, it was worth every penny.
I had eaten my fill of the pizza, and went through my work emails with my laptop connected to the park's internet. And then I started researching another location from the historic list that was out this way.
" ! WHACK ! "
The sound startled me out of the middle of an article about the retirement of one of the area's legendary fishing captains after working for sixty years on the same boat.
The first thing I did was look outside. The sound had been loud enough that I could feel the desk vibrate under my hand, so I thought maybe somebody had shut the back door.
There was nobody around, so I checked my digital recorders.
According to the directional unit that had been on the kitchen table, the sound originated behind, and below, the unit. By several meters.
I looked around the small kitchen and figured out that that would be outside, probably under the window in the back bedroom. So I went out and looked around.
I didn't see anything that would make that sound out there, but, as it so happened, I had a motion activated camera sitting on an old wooden crate in front of the shed. So I took it in and checked the pictures.
And I solved that part of the case.
But then as I was sitting there chuckling at the large raccoon that had figured out how to use the crawlspace under the cottage as their own bunkhouse, every motion sensor I had put out went off, and I could feel a slight vibration in the desk. It lasted for a few seconds.
"Wait a minute, what was that?" I asked the room as the last of the sensor's lights went out and stayed out.
Then my phone buzzed.
"Magnitude 2.5 to 2.7 Earthquake. Block Island Fault, 35 kilometers east, south east of Montauk Point, NY. Initial depth, 14 kilometers. No Tsunami Warning Issued."
I wasn't all that far from the epicenter, and had video of my sensors on the floor going off in sequence from east to west as the vibrations traveled along.
I saved that data, as well as the raccoon video, in the file with the photos of the door. Then I went out and figured out how Ol' Miss Coon was getting under the cottage.
Just from standing and looking, you couldn't tell anything was special about any particular section of galvanized metal that was nailed up along the bottom of the siding. But then when I went over and tugged on the one I'd seen the animal use, it came away just a little, and when I let loose, it sprung back and made a slightly less dramatic version of the noise I'd heard.
"Well, I think I've solved this one," I said to the hole under the house.
My problem was that I either drive over an hour home, and then back out here in the morning to talk to the park admin, or spend the night in the cottage, and then head home.
Given the options, and that I still had over half a pizza, I elected to spend the night.
"Besides," I told myself, "that'll give me a chance to verify that nothing else is going on."
In the morning I ate cold pizza, and went through the recordings and photos from the night, and found that there were no more earthquakes, that the raccoon doesn't make the noise when it crawled back in under the house. And that the face and figure on the bathroom door disappears in pitch black.
I took a VERY quick VERY cold shower, put on my clean outfit, and drove up to the Third House and waited for the admin to come in.
3.
"Oh, wow. I didn't expect you to spend the night there," she said.
"I just wanted to be thorough."
"How'd it go?"
"Well, you have a raccoon, and an earthquake. And I've got evidence of both." I paused for a second, "and an interesting bathroom door. Wanna see?"
"Sure, but can you wait a minute, I just saw my boss pull in. And I think Mister Clements is here, he's the maintenance supervisor. You can show us all at once," she pointed down the hall and around the corner, "The conference room is just down there, there's more room for all of us, and a big screen TV."
"And coffee?"
"Oh yes. It'll be ready in a minute, I'll call you."
"Thank you, I'll go get set up."
Of everything I had, they found the photos of the bathroom door the most interesting. Mister Clements said he'd been trying to "catch that coon for years", but now he knew where they were hiding. And they loved the idea that my sensors showed the earthquake waves complete with time stamp.
"So, unless you want me to hang around here and see if there's anything unusual happening, I'm done." I said as we watched the real time video of the motion sensors lighting up.
They looked at each other for a moment, then the Admin shrugged, "As long as there's nothing at the cottage that's going to harm anybody in the summer, I think we're good."
"I'll flush the raccoons out and then seal that up, that'll take care of that."
"And paint the door," the park manager added.
"And paint the door."
The drive back to the office didn't seem as long as the drive out.
I copied my video and the data from the sensors to a contact at the college who then sent it on to the USGS, then I went back and checked the inspection schedule and found out what I'd be doing for the next few days.
But, I had closed a case.
-end wait-
[NOTE: The above story were written as adventure fiction, and is to be taken as such. While most of the features of Long Island exist, including the Block Island Fault, which did produce measurable earthquakes in 2021 and 2022, the rest of the setting is fictional.
Thank you, Dr. Leftover, TheMediaDesk.com]
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