S S Engle

The Many Ghosts of Thomasina Grey S S Engle

West Virginia, 1871. Thomasina Grey is a young woman with a fragile mental capacity when her influential father is abducted from their home in the middle of the night by a supporter of the radical new Ku Klux Klan following in the north. Eager to get him back, Thomasina runs out to get help from the new detectives in town, Lockhart & Dickerson. However, when Thomasina has a mental relapse and forgets everything, she is again taken to the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum for proper care under the careful watch of Dr. Breckenridge. It is up to Thomasina's younger brother Theodore to get the detectives help, but the men are not so willing until the Ku Klux Klan is mentioned. Lockhart has some unfinished business with the Klan's West Virginian leader, Friederich Kretschmann, which goes all the way back to the Battle of Moorfield in 1864. Needing eyewitness testimony from the kidnapping though means traveling into the asylum to speak with Thomasina, who is more than an unreliable source at this point. She thinks she's someone else, specifically a woman named Sara Pearce who died at the asylum when it opened in October of 1864. Mysteriously, Lockhart himself has been plagued by nightmares of his time in the Civil War, as well as Sara Pearce, a woman he never knew. An old friend in town, Valentine Underhill suspects the two cases may be related in a pseudoscientific phenomenon known as metempsychosis, or a form of semi-controlled reincarnation. But before a proper investigation can get under way the detectives are derailed by Klan activities swelling in the quiet northern state. Thomasina seems to be a target, and only she could know why, but with her memory coming and going, it's hard to say what she does and does not know anymore. One thing's for sure though, she knows more than anyone is giving her credit for. Problem is, is anyone going to believe the word of an asylum patient when there's lives on the line?