She paused, listening, and realized that she heard only the rustling of the trees, the grand old oaks that stood sentinel along the walls, shrouded in moss. And yet, there seemed to be soft voices in the night. The sound possibly created by movement of the air, the natural settling of the earth and manmade structures as well. Still, it was almost as if she could hear her name spoken softly, urging her on, calling to her.
But then she heard something that wasn’t the whisper of branches moving or the moan of the soft breeze. It was like a thump or a rhythmic tapping sound, and it was coming from just down the path and to the right, from the large and beautiful vault where her ancestors had been laid to rest. She hurried silently along, wanting to catch the prankster red-handed.
“Charles? Charles Osgood? Is that you? Show yourself. The reenactments are not a joke! Don’t ruin it all by being a jerk!” Ashley called out.
She turned the corner and stopped dead, a scream rising in her throat. As if on cue, a drifting cloud un-curtained the moon, and the Donegal family vault glowed in opalescent majesty. Mist swirled at the base. An angel rose high atop the chapel-like roof, hands folded, eyes lifted to heaven.
The body of a man dangled from the base of the angel, the straps of his backpack caught upon the marble structure, his feet just brushing the ground. His cavalry hat covered his face, and blood, from a series of wounds to his abdomen and chest, streaked down his torso and limbs and pooled at his feet.
Terror filled her; she stared, blinking. Too afraid to run, too afraid to allow her trapped scream to escape, a confusion of thoughts tearing through her mind.
For a moment, it was as if her mind hit Pause on the horrible image before her.
Her home was haunted. This was the ghost of Marshall Donegal, the valiant man who had died there defending his property in 1861.
If she stepped forward, his head might rise with the hollow, skeletal grin of a man dead more than a century and a half….
She heard the rapping sound again. It was the dead man’s sword, rapping, tapping, against the tomb.
And it snapped her out of her paralysis.
At last, she screamed.
This man wasn’t a ghost.
He was never going to grin at her, or anyone else.
He was real, and he was certainly dead, murdered and in the cemetery, where she now stood alone with nothing at all to defend herself. She closed her mouth quickly, cutting off the sound of her scream.
She had been right to worry, and to search. She had felt even last night that they had to find Charles Osgood. And now, she had found him.
But the prank had been pulled not by him, but on him.
And it was fresh blood that dripped beneath his dangling feet.
A killer might still be here, watching from the shadows that melded with the mist in the darkness of the graveyard.
* * *
Donegal Plantation. Few plantations rivaled it. A haunting opaque white shimmer in the moonlight, the building rose up on the bank in all its majesty. It sat before Jake Mallory as it had all his life; a stunning representation of a bygone era.
Nowadays, the very circumstances that had defeated those who had lived here long ago were the ones that made the area a place of such amazing history and beauty. The war had scarcely begun when the Union might had throttled the city and parish of New Orleans, and, for miles around the city center, the surrender that had seemed like such a tragic disaster had kept enemy forces from laying waste to the magnificent houses that had been built when cotton had been king.
He remembered the first time he had come here; his parents were friends with Ashley’s parents. He remembered the first time he saw her, hiding behind her mother’s skirts. She had been five; he had been eight.
Compare that to the last time he had seen her. The way the light had gone out in her eyes. She had built a wall around her heart and soul that was as impregnable as brick.
He was still damaged goods himself. He had learned to cope with what he was because of Adam Harrison and the team he had put together in a way he had never managed on his own. Maybe because he had discovered that he wasn’t so strange. Still, the images that lived in his mind would always create a divide with Ashley.
There had been good times, though. Their parents had played as a team in pool tournaments. Jake and Ashley had come along, played in the various game rooms offered by different venues, shared sodas and snacks. But more than pool had kept them together as friends when they’d been really young. Once, they’d been part of a garage band together; they’d been pretty good at that, too. And when the three years between them had seemed unbridgeable and they spent most of their time within a year of their own age group, Ashley had come to him upon occasion with her dating dilemmas, or to comment on his dating choices. He smiled as he thought about Ashley and remembered the way her lips would purse when she was trying to tell him something. Somehow, someway, Ashley had retained something of the Southern belle in her behavior; the word bimbo would not cross her lips, nor would she tell him that his latest crush was a slut, a tramp or trailer trash, nor would she use any other such derogatory term. The question was always, “Seriously, Jake, is she what you’re really looking for? I’m not certain that her behavior is really…nice. But, hey, you want what you want, right?”
Nighttime here really seemed to be a time warp back to the past. Tonight, the house, seen through the veil of oaks that led to the sweeping entrance, seemed to stand guard upon a hill. A soft breeze caused the branches to sway in the ethereal light, and the path to the house might have led right into a different time and dimension. There was nothing to mar the perfection of the picture; whatever cars might have been there were hidden away in the car park, and the view he saw was one of sheer magnificence.
He drove up the vast and sweeping, oak-lined drive from the road. Once upon a time, the road had been a carriageway, and the rear entrance from the road had not been considered a grand entry at all. The grand entry had faced the river. Some things had changed. The mighty barges bringing cotton downriver were outdated. Still, with the working sugar mill and Beaumont plantations as the nearest neighbors to Donegal, and both a mile away, the view of Donegal, even by night, was spectacular.
It was quiet when he parked; yet just yesterday there had been hundreds—possibly thousands—of people crawling all over the place, from the reenactors to the visitors who flocked here on the day of the actual reenactment. That thought made him smile as well—in comparison to the real battles that had taken place during the war, the skirmish here had been nothing. But Donegal Plantation had always been home to those who knew how to survive. When Marshall Donegal had been killed, Emma Donegal had raised her son and daughters on her own, and she had kept the plantation thriving, even under Union rule. It was sad—and probably not at all fair—that legend had her as the one to slip out into the skirmish and kill her husband. Her motive was supposedly the fact that she didn’t agree with his management of the plantation, or with the management of their slaves, several of whom he was supposed to have slept with, along with quadroons at the quadroon balls in New Orleans, and the wives of a few of his best friends. Their daughters, too. But those rumors weren’t anything new. People loved to speculate. He knew that neither Ashley nor Frazier believed in the rumors regarding Emma, and he didn’t take them very seriously, either.
He parked the car directly before the house and got out. He knew that he wouldn’t be out here at all, and the team wouldn’t be on call, if Adam Harrison hadn’t been old friends with Frazier Donegal.
An inexplicable discomfort settled over him. It was late, of course, and he was miles and miles away from Bourbon Street, where the parties were just hitting their stride. Out here, the world was sleeping.
Still, he hesitated.
Lights in the large old stable building showed him that tourists were still quartered there, and he even saw some light emitting from the smaller stables, still in use, behind the large barn structure.
The ho
use looked ominously quiet.
He walked around the side of the house, not certain why he was experiencing such a distinct impression that something was wrong. And then he knew. As he stood there, he saw a figure in white come tearing out of the graveyard.
For a split second, he was paralyzed. She looked like a phantom, a stunning vision from the past, a gorgeous ghost in a long, flowing white gown, her golden hair caught in the wind.
It wasn’t a ghost; it was Ashley.
She looked just as she had looked in his dream: a shimmering figure standing upon a roof with the floodwaters rising. She looked as she had looked, reaching out for him and yet trying to warn him of something horrible and dark that loomed behind him. Her fingers had slipped through his…
He couldn’t let that happen now.
He raced across the grounds, hearing earth and gravel crunch beneath his feet. “Ashley!” he called her name.
She stopped; she stared at him with huge blue eyes the size of saucers, like a doe caught in the headlights of a car.
She still saw him as a pariah.
“Ashley,” he called again. She screamed and started to run away.
They hadn’t parted that badly. She wasn’t seeing him, she realized. She was still imagining whatever nightmare had caused her to run.
She turned just as he reached her, and they collided and fell to the ground. She struck out at him from below, and he caught her arms, perplexed and yet aware that she could deliver a solid blow if she chose. She seemed to be fighting for her life.
“Ashley! It’s me. Jake. Jake Mallory!”
She went dead still. He realized that she was trembling violently.
“Ashley, it’s Jake. Come on, Ashley, whatever else, you’ve known me all your life! It’s Jake. What is it, what are you running from?”
Her trembling subsided.
“I found him,” she said. “I found him.”
“Found who, Ashley?”
“Charles. Charles Osgood.”
Dead. She’d found him dead, of course. No one acted like this unless they had seen something really terrible. Certainly not Ashley Donegal.
“Where?” he asked, easing back.
He wanted to fix things for her. This was Ashley. Certainly, one of the most beautiful women he had ever known and once loved. He wanted to hold her and tell her everything would be all right….
But it wasn’t, of course. She had found a dead man.
He rose quickly, taking her hand to bring her to her feet. “Where, Ashley?” he asked again, his tone quiet but authoritative.
She blinked and seemed to gain possession of herself again. “The graveyard. The family vault,” she said.
“And he is dead? You’re certain?”
“Oh, yes.”
He pulled out his cell phone and dialed 911, and carefully gave the address and the situation. Ashley stared at him while he did so. If Jackson Crow was already on the case, then they had federal jurisdiction. But they needed a medical pathologist out here now, and, naturally, they’d have to work closely with the local police.
“Go on inside,” he told her. “The police are coming.”
She shook her head. “I’m with you. I’m not moving. I mean, I’m not moving if you’re not moving.”
“Someone needs to tell your grandfather.”
“He’s smart—he’ll figure it out when he hears the sirens.”
“When he hears the sirens, he’ll be worried about you.”
“I’m staying with you!”
He wondered if she was actually so shaken that she was afraid to head for the house herself—afraid, perhaps, of everyone on her property now.
“All right, but we need to keep a distance from the actual…scene,” he said.
“Corpse,” she said dully.
He walked back to the cemetery. She hadn’t released his hand. She wasn’t going to.
They had to part momentarily to slip through the gate without opening it further, and Jake was loath to make any changes to the scene. A stone cherub seemed to follow their passage through the rows of vaults, shimmering beneath the moonlight.
He didn’t have to ask her to lead him; he knew exactly where to find the Donegal vault.
It was the largest, the most ornate and the most beautiful in the graveyard. When they turned the corner in the center to reach it, he stopped, trying to take in everything that he saw before the local authorities came to assess the situation.
There was the vault. Cherubs and gargoyles guarded the iron-gate doors and the four corners of the tomb. High at the front was a life-size angel, and, caught upon its foundation by the heavy canvas straps of a period backpack, was the body of a man. He hadn’t known Charles Osgood, and if he hadn’t seen many a portrait of Marshall Donegal, he wouldn’t have known that this wasn’t a trick of time, that they hadn’t gone back approximately one hundred and fifty years to discover a dead cavalry man in the cemetery.
Convenient place to die. Or be murdered.
But despite the blood that dripped from the body and pooled at the feet, he didn’t believe that the man had been killed here. He had been brought here soon after death, but he hadn’t died here. The body had been put on display. It was evident that whoever had killed the man had done so to be historically accurate—and to make sure that the world knew that a man had been killed just as Marshall Donegal had been killed long ago. Was it an assault on the Donegal family? Or had someone wanted this particular man dead and used the Donegal family history as a means of throwing off suspicion?
“He was so proud to be playing Marshall Donegal!” Ashley whispered.
“Stay here—exactly here,” he told her.
He was afraid that she was going to cling to him, but she didn’t. With him there, she seemed to be finding her own strength.
“I know. It’s a crime scene,” she said woodenly.
Jake, watching where he walked, searched the area surrounding the tomb. There was nothing there. The graveled paths around the tombs certainly didn’t allow much room for footprints, and he didn’t expect to find any. They would have to hope that the forensic team summoned could find fingerprints, hair, fibers, DNA—anything that might tell them who had brought the man to his death, and then here.
They could hear the sirens then, shrieking through the night. And then voices as guests staying in the various rental rooms began to rouse.
“Get to the cemetery gates,” Jake told her. “Make sure no one but the police comes through.”
She nodded jerkily yet didn’t move.
“Ashley!” he said, taking her shoulders. “You don’t want guests wandering in here, and your grandfather will be coming out any minute, worried to death, and he is in his eighties!”
She snapped to finally and nodded, spinning about in a whirl of shimmering white. He watched her go, his insides twisting in a knot of pain. She didn’t need this; she didn’t deserve this. Of course, the dead man hadn’t deserved it, either. As he heard the sirens come closer and closer, he pulled out his cell phone and dialed Jackson Crow. It hadn’t been so important before that the team arrive quickly; now, it was.
He looked back at the corpse, and time melted away again.
Someone had reenacted murder.
5
Ashley stood shivering at the gates of the cemetery, trying to compose herself. She had certainly been in something like shock, but Jake was here, and now she was okay. It was bizarre that she was okay because Jake was here, but that was the way that it was; he was in control, and it brought her back to herself.
She had felt that she’d been losing her mind; the dreams had plagued her mercilessly, and Charles had been gone, and she had longed to see Jake.
And Charles was dead—and Jake was here. Really here.
And she had to quit behaving like a “dumb blonde” screamer out of an old movie. She started to move again, thinking that she had to get to her grandfather.
But she didn’t get that far.
The first p
erson to rise and rush out, hearing the wail of the sirens, was Cliff Boudreaux, and he didn’t have far to come, racing out of his quarters in a flannel robe. His graying brown hair was mussed and he was barefoot, as if he had been sleeping. She saw that he first looked back to the house, but then saw her and ran to her instead, gripping her shoulders, his eyes filled with worry.
“Ashley? Ashley, why are you standing here like this? What the hell has happened?”
She stared back at him, suddenly more assured, and she was even angry again, furious. Someone had killed Charles Osgood. He could be petulant; he could be whiney; but he was a good man who, to the best of her knowledge, had never hurt anyone.
She felt all sense of trembling and shaking fade away completely. Yes, Jake had done that for her.
“Charles Osgood is dead. I just found him in the cemetery,” Ashley said. “The police are on their way.”
As she spoke, she saw that people were beginning to emerge from the far stables, where the rental rooms were.
“Cliff, I’m going to get my grandfather. Please make sure no one wanders into the cemetery,” she said.
She turned toward the house, noticing Beth and her grandfather had come out to the riverside porch together and looked as confused as anyone else. She broke into a run, crossing the distance from the graveyard to the steps.
“Ashley!”
Frazier reached out, and she ran straight into his arms. “I’m all right, Grampa, I’m all right. But I found Charles Osgood. He’s…dead.”
Frazier drew away from her, staring into her eyes. Beth let out a soft gasp but said nothing.
Ashley continued, “I thought I heard something in the cemetery.”
“You heard something in a cemetery—and you hurried into it to find out what was going on? Lord, girl!” Beth said.
“I’ve lived my whole life with the family cemetery in full view from my window, Beth,” Ashley reminded her. “And Jake’s here,” she added quickly.
“Jake’s here?” Frazier said, and it seemed to make everything better.
Krewe of Hunters, Volume 1: Phantom Evil ; Heart of Evil ; Sacred Evil ; The Evil Inside Page 38