Wm. F. (Bill) Sattelmeyer

Writer

Interactive Designer

Synopsis
Once Dead

Ph.D. candidate Maggie McAuley has been dead for two months, and she still hasn’t gotten over losing everything she ever loved, from her family and fiancé to her days on a surfboard. She can’t remember what happened to her, but she is quite clearly no longer alive. You might call her a ghost, yet it isn’t any kind of ghostly world Steven King would have written about.

Not that she wants to scare anyone. She’d settle for a last goodbye. It’s just that she’s a scientist, for Pete’s sake; she’s used to knowing how things work. She’s used to doing, and here she seems limited to watching, and that sucks. She isn’t even able to help when Charley, a former employee at her father, Noah’s, independent bookshop dies during a confrontation with a bearded stranger… and reappears as a spirit equally as lost as Maggie.

Charley’s death is a mystery to two other ghosts in the northern California coastal town of Santa Pasa. The spirits of Ulysses S. Grant and Samuel Langhorne Clemens, dealing with their own issues of loss, have also settled here. Though Grant’s belief that he was a failure in life – good for nothing but killing – has kept him from finding peace in death, he explains that most spirits, like Maggie, are a result of violent and unexpected deaths. It’s a death that haunts Maggie, because she can’t remember it. Charley only remembers the pain… and being told by a dark and evil man that he must “pay.”

When Doug Emery –  regional manager of a bookstore chain and determined to put Noah’s bookshop out of business –  is discovered stoned to death in his storeroom, Maggie’s father becomes a primary suspect. Examining the evidence, Sam and Grant believe both Charley’s and Emery’s death was more likely caused by an insane, rogue spirit. That would be troublesome in its own right, but at the site of an upcoming Civil War re-enactment being staged for the city’s anniversary, Grant becomes the next target of the ghostly assailant who turns out to be a bitter former Union soldier.

Despite what ghost stories suggest, spirits aren’t capable of walking through walls, rarely rattle chains, and aren’t even very interested in the living. Sam shows her that there are, though, rules in this life after life – something, finally, that Maggie can understand, particularly when she learns that death also exists in the afterlife… of a much more permanent kind.

During the weekend re-enactment, the ghost-soldier next attempts to kill AlanWhittier, one of her father’s current employees, and, later, while visiting him in the hospital, Maggie prevents the vengeful ghost from finishing him off. Maggie believes all of the murders and attempted murders are connected, but can’t figure out how. Then Maggie’s father, snooping around Emery’s now-closed book store, is also attacked by the ghost. Maggie tries to prevent his stoning and is almost killed herself. Grant arrives, but is only able to fight the spirit to a draw, and Noah dies despite Maggie’s desperate attempt to bring rescue.

Emery’s book store, built on a former historic site, turns out to be the key to the deaths. Sam and Maggie discover that the spirit is former ordnance sergeant Daniel Tucker who had been left to die by greedy townsfolk a hundred and fifty years earlier – trapped in a cave below the old mission with a fortune in gold dust from the California gold fields. Maggie realizes Tucker’s final revenge is to kill as many of the people watching the re-enactment as possible in order to punish the entire town for his slow and wrongful death.

   As the final re-enactment battle begins, Tucker confronts Maggie. When Grant intervenes, Tucker, assured they can’t stop his revenge, vanishes. Maggie realizes Tucker has used re-enactment weaponry to create a Civil War-era booby trap that will kill hundreds of spectators… and permanently end the souls of Sam and Grant and Maggie if they are caught in the explosion themselves.

Grant sends Maggie to safety, hoping he can somehow stop Tucker this time and have his own chance for redemption – saving lives instead of taking them. Maggie decides to fight another way, and, with other ghostly and human help, is able to force the spectators to start leaving the park, then returns to confront Tucker herself, hoping to delay him long enough for the living to escape.

Tucker, insanely powerful, toys with Grant, until he realizes his victims are escaping. As he begins to spontaneously combust as a prelude to setting off the explosives, Maggie is able to grab Tucker’s own ghostly revolver and, for Charley and Whittier and her own father, ends Tucker’s misery permanently. Maggie realizes that who you are isn’t always about genetics; sometimes it’s about how you deal with what life throws at you… including death.