“Come!” she said urgently. “Please, come.”
He forgot about Detective Mack Colby and the call he had intended to make to get Cliff’s apartment searched. He followed the ghost out of the office and through the house.
And on out to the stables.
Cliff was there, sweeping hay from the slab of concrete in front of his door. He looked up at Jake with guarded eyes.
“Are you doing the search?” Cliff asked him.
Jake felt about two feet tall. He had known Cliff for years; he could remember many more occasions with the man than what he had mentioned to Ashley. Cliff had patiently corrected him and taught him about riding, horses, shooting and the plantation itself dozens of times throughout the years. They’d gone out in alligator season together, and Cliff had taught him that even if the creatures were predators, they had their place in life. They had to be hunted to control the population, but they didn’t deserve to be tortured because man had unbalanced nature. A clean kill: a good shot between the eyes. That was the way to kill a gator.
He had taught him other things. Things like balancing his weight with that of the horse he was riding, how to sit a jumper and how to calm a horse when they ran into a bear in the woods. He’d taught him how to hunt fowl, and, in return, Jake had taught Cliff how to hold a cue and shoot a break that could nearly clear the table.
“No, Cliff, honestly, it’s because I want you cleared. I don’t want anyone who doesn’t know you the way I do not knowing that they can trust you,” Jake said.
Cliff studied him and then nodded. He leaned on the broom. “You come out to go after Ashley?” he asked. “You ask me, she shouldn’t be out alone right now.”
The ghost of Emma Donegal had disappeared when he’d reached the stables.
But now he knew why he was here.
“Where is Ashley?” he asked.
“Just ten minutes ago, she came running down and asking me if there was any problem with taking her mare out for a ride. Said she needed to clear her head, and a ride around the property always did that for her. I was going to let her have a few minutes and then take a ride myself. I just don’t feel right about her being alone.”
“Hell, no!” Jake said. “What horse can I take?”
* * *
“If you head to the bayou, you’ll find a concrete marker. That’s where Emma had Harold Boudreaux buried,” Marshall had told Ashley. “But don’t go now, young woman. Show some sense of self-preservation. There’s someone out there bent on hurting Donegal Plantation, and you are the last of the Donegal family.”
“Cliff is a Donegal!” she told him.
“No, my dear, not really. Emma wasn’t born a Donegal.”
“Yes, and I’m not sure exactly what the relationship is, but Cliff’s great-grandfather and a young woman born a Donegal got together in the 1920s, so, yes, he is a Donegal!” she said.
“Well, yes, I suppose you’re right on that.”
Marshall Donegal had followed her when she went out to the stables, determined on riding. He kept trying to dissuade her while Cliff kept trying to dissuade her.
Before she’d mounted up on Varina, she’d given Cliff a huge hug. “I love you, cousin!” she told him.
Cliff had looked at her strangely and then shook his head. “Look, Ashley, you don’t have to defend me. I didn’t murder anyone.”
She’d grinned at him. “I never thought you did. I just wanted to say that I love you!”
She hadn’t bothered with a saddle; she had to find out if there was really a stone near the bayou. If so, she wasn’t imagining the ghost. He was really there, telling her things.
Or she was imagining the ghost, and he was really suppressed memories in the back of her mind. Whichever. She wasn’t doing well fighting the concept of imagining Marshall Donegal, so she might as well try to use what was happening. And it didn’t look as if she’d be running to Jake for comfort. She’d be business, strictly business, from now on out.
She thought that she had ridden out alone; she should have known better. Marshall Donegal was riding behind her—on a ghost horse, of course. His mount was a beautiful roan, complete with all his Confederate trappings.
“Dammit, woman! Let me lead!” he called to her.
She felt something as he and the roan seemed to pass through her. Then she took off through the woods, following him.
They rode for twenty minutes. Then the ghost horse let out a whinny and stopped, and her haunting ancestor slipped from his mount and walked down the trail to a large pine. He tried to rip away the vines and grass and weeds that grew around the base; Ashley saw that the grass moved, but little else happened.
She began the task herself.
She gasped out loud. It was there, a large, flat, stone marker. One word had been crudely etched into it.
FRIEND.
Ashley sat back on her haunches and looked up. Marshall Donegal leaned against the tree, watching her.
“Why? Why did Emma bury him out here? There’s a tomb for the slaves—and then the servants—who stayed on to work the plantation,” Ashley said.
“Emma was truly a wonder,” he said sadly. “Any rumors you heard about fights between us—or my indiscretions—were stories created because people need stories. We fell in love, and when that first blush of love was gone, we still loved one another deeply. She was a strong woman. She held the place together after I died—with the help of Harold Boudreaux. In 1864, they became lovers. The world would never have accepted it. Even after the war ended, they would have been in grave danger. There was a pecking order for those of mixed blood in New Orleans, you know that. Quadroons were all the rage to become a man’s mistress, and the Quadroon balls were infamous. But after the war, the KKK was started up, and if they had been discovered, Harold most probably would have been burned on a cross, and Emma would have been subject to rape and ridicule. They had to keep their affair entirely secret. So he raised their child as one of his own. Another of the former slaves—a young woman of mixed blood herself—was accepted as the child’s mother.”
“Did you mind? Did you hate what happened?” Ashley asked him. “I mean, as a ghost, were you bitter or…can you still hurt?”
“My soul can know agony,” he said quietly. “But did I mind this? No. I loved Emma with my whole heart. And a dead man knows that the color of his skin doesn’t mean a damned thing. I admired Harold. I loved what he did for my family, and how he taught and defended my children. No, I didn’t mind. Not this. I just thought you should know. Maybe it can help you in some way.”
They both started at a sound that seemed to come from the woods that led straight to the bayou. Ashley quickly stood up. “Probably a raccoon or even a squirrel,” she said and grimaced. “Maybe even a gator.” She walked toward her mare.
It wasn’t a raccoon, squirrel or gator. As she mounted, she heard the noise from the woods by the bayou again.
“Quickly,” Marshall said. “I’ll hold the path!”
“But it may be nothing.”
“You’re alone out here. Get back to the house! Please!”
She almost laughed and reminded her ghost protector that he was dead.
But she didn’t. She turned to ride, finding the quickest path back to the house and kneeing her mare to a gait that would lead it at all speed through the trails without killing them both.
But as she made her way homeward, something darted into the path in front of her.
Varina reared, and she wasn’t as prepared as she should have been. She cursed herself for her carelessness as she felt herself fly into the air.
And land hard on her rump in the middle of the dirt path.
As she quickly stood, rubbing her injured section, she realized that it had grown late.
Darkness was falling, and she was alone in the woods.
Even her ghost was far behind her now.
Interlude
People were easy.
Pathetically easy.
Once you knew
what they wanted and you dangled it before them as you might dangle a carrot before a horse, they came. They came—just as the stupid animals they were in truth.
She barely saw him coming.
She got just a glimpse of him.
During the phone call he’d made to her, she’d guessed that he was Jake. She’d giggled.
He’d almost giggled, too, it was so damned perfect.
And what an idiot woman. You’d think they’d have to get through some kind of school to broadcast the news. But a pretty blonde was all you had to be, it seemed. Maybe not. Maybe others were smarter.
He watched her when she came staggering along the overgrown and marshy trail near the bayou, swearing as she did so. Actually, he watched her for a while. He didn’t know what it was about her that had made him want to do this. He’d plotted and planned his first kill forever; he’d thought that it would be his only kill. But he started hearing the voice again. She was nosy. She was going to start dredging things up and just might have some journalistic abilities. The voice said that she needed to go. And looking at her, he had begun to anticipate the kill.
He glanced toward Beaumont; he could see the plantation through the trees. But there was nothing going on there—the plantation offered its last tour at four, and people were usually off the property by five. Even the actors and historians would all be by the road now, ready to head out.
She stumbled her way to the small clearing. Her little red spiked heels were completely ruined, and her jacket was torn. But though she was irritated, she wanted the story more. In fact, when he came upon her, she was looking down at her shoes and cursing about how much they had cost her.
“Damn it, what the hell are you doing here?” she demanded, tossing back her head of bleached blond curls. “I was expecting—”
She never voiced what she was expecting. He was quick. The needle got her with such speed that she barely gasped, much less managed to get out a scream.
As she fell, he heard the horses. He heard the rummaging over on the next trail.
He had to move with speed.
He rolled her down to the true swampy area just before the bayou.
He held her head under in just a half foot of water.
She didn’t struggle. She was out, and she was easy to kill.
When she was dead, he couldn’t help but roll her over. He smiled, looking at her face. That pretty, bitchy face, all clotted with mud now. Her lashes were slipping. False lashes; she’d been all makeup and hype and selfishness. Actually, he’d done the damned world a favor.
She wouldn’t look so good on the eleven o’clock news now. Of course, they wouldn’t find her right away, and they wouldn’t expect to find her out here.
But somebody was out here now. He had to move.
And move quickly.
9
She stood in gathering twilight, cursing her mare for throwing her.
Poor mare; it wasn’t her fault—she had been startled. Scared.
“Damn you, foul rodent!” she cried into the bushes. She swore softly; it was time to walk, and walk quickly. “Last time I follow a ghost into the woods!” she muttered.
Was it a ghost? Was there really a ghost? Or did she have deep-seated memories that she needed to address, and seeing the ghost of Marshall Donegal was a way of doing it? Hmm. That would be a good one for a shrink.
Maybe, just maybe, people did see ghosts. And maybe it was some kind of a gift, and she’d been far too terrified to ever recognize the possibility before.
Jake had that gift—that sixth sense or intuition. And when he’d come to her with it, she had simply panicked.
Well, too late on that one!
She paused; she heard something coming from the pines and brush closer to the bayou. Gator? It was unlikely that one of the giant crocodilians she’d known all her life was going to come this far in off the bayou and stalk her.
She quickened her pace.
Of course, she knew that even on land an alligator could move damned fast as well.
But, no. The woods here were filled with birds, the bayou was brimming with fish and there were plenty of small mammals. A gator had not had a whiff of her and decided that it was time for his evening meal.
She heard it again. Definitely not a gator, because she kept hearing the rustling, would stop—and then the rustling would stop as well. A beast of prey would come straight for her.
She started to run. As she did so, she heard a thrashing in the woods ahead of her and then from one of the other trails.
She swore and looked around her. There was a fallen slender pine near her, leaning against an oak. She tested the trunk carefully, found that it would bear her weight and crawled up to the branches of the hardier oak. She kept crawling, hoping that whatever was out there didn’t climb trees.
The thrashing around her grew louder, as if amplified in the thickening darkness of the night. She finally realized that she could hear hoofbeats, and a rider was coming for her. She waited, barely daring to breathe.
Of course, Cliff knew that she was out here. When her mare came back without her, he’d be on the trail, coming to find her.
But even as she heard the sound of a horse, she saw something dark below her. Not a creature—a man. A man who looked like a shadow because he was dressed in black: black boots, jeans, sweatshirt and hoodie. He moved with his face lowered, and in the darkness he might have been a black shadow.
Was she seeing shadows now instead of ghosts?
No, he was real.
He was approaching the tree; he paused as if listening.
She heard her name called through the trees. And she no longer heard the sound of hoofbeats.
For a moment, the entire world seemed silent. She waited, not daring to breathe.
Darkness fell in earnest, but the moon prevailed.
And then, naturally, the moon was covered by clouds.
Ashley cursed herself for starting out alone tonight. She had to breathe; she tried to do it silently.
And then, though she couldn’t see him, she was certain that the man below her in the dark hoodie was looking up.
Did he see her frozen there?
She held her position. She couldn’t tell if he was there or not anymore; his form seemed to have been swallowed up by the blackness of the ground below.
There was rustling.
There was someone below her, someone who seemed to be stalking the area.
Something banged against the tree. A man’s hand?
She started to slip; she felt a splinter of bark shoot into her hand and barely kept from crying out. She tried to shift her position and fell, a scream escaping her lips at last.
She landed hard on human flesh, toppling the standing man to the ground. Panic seized her and she shot out a fist, striking anywhere she could as she tried to rise. She made it halfway to her feet when she heard him shout out.
“Bloody hell, Ashley! Why are you hitting me, damn it?”
Jake.
She went still and started trembling. For a minute, she still had to wonder if he’d been in the pines before the bayou, stalking her.
But then both heard it; more noise coming from the trail.
“Ashley! Jake! Where the hell are you two?”
That was Cliff’s voice.
And from the bayou, another voice.
“Hey! What’s going on in there? I have a gun, and I know how to use it!”
Jake scrambled up, half knocking Ashley over but then drawing her to her feet.
A light suddenly glared into the darkness, and they both raised their hands to protect their eyes. Cliff came trotting up on his favorite mount, Jeff. He dismounted in the little clearing where he found them.
“Cliff!” Jake said.
“Where’s your horse?” Cliff asked.
“Where is your horse?” Ashley asked Jake.
“Mine is tethered down the road—he meant you!” Jake told her, irritated. “What the hell are you doing, skulking aroun
d in the woods by yourself? Jesus, Ashley, how much of an idiot are you?”
He was clearly upset, but he took a step back.
“Damn it, I would have thought that you had some sense.”
She heard the safety slide on Cliff’s shotgun, and she felt a millisecond of fear again.
She was wrong; Cliff was bitter, and he was going to shoot her in the woods.
“Someone is coming,” he said.
A minute later, his shotgun aimed at the clearing, Toby Keaton came into view. Seeing them, he lowered his weapon.
“What is this? A family meeting? You guys scared the hell out of me! What’s going on over here?” he demanded.
“I was out riding. Some fairly big mammal scared Varina, my mare,” said Ashley. Ruefully, she added, “She threw me.”
Toby looked at Jake, standing beside her, and Cliff, seated again up on Jeff.
“With what went on—you all damn near scared the death out of me. I mean, this side is your property, but I’m just a spit across that bayou. You’ve got to warn me when you’re going to be rustling around by the water at night. I can tell the difference between the sound of a gator and the sound of folks stomping around in the woods, you know!” Toby said.
He was clearly shaken.
“Toby, I’m so sorry,” Ashley said. She looked at him. His black jacket didn’t have a hood.
But he might have a hoodie stuck down beneath his coat; his shirt was black as well.
“How did you get over here, Toby?” Jake asked him, as if reading Ashley’s mind.
“I live next door, remember?” Toby said, exasperated. “One of my hounds was going crazy, but he lost the scent at the water. I don’t come out at night without a shotgun. God knows when you’re going to come upon a doped-up schoolkid, a gator or, hell, a damned poacher! Or just a nutcase now, like whoever did in old Charles.”
“I’m sorry. Toby, how did you get here?” Ashley repeated. “Have you been over in the woods right by the bayou?”
“I came over in my little aluminum canoe,” Toby said. “I heard all manner of rustling—and it’s turned out to be you!”
Krewe of Hunters, Volume 1: Phantom Evil ; Heart of Evil ; Sacred Evil ; The Evil Inside Page 46