by Jane Godman
“He’s here,” Reece said, coming to stand beside him. He nodded to the space where Stonecliff’s door had once been, then hunched his shoulders against the wind.
As the energy generated from The Devil’s Eye neutralized, its grip on the remaining spirits continued to loosen and one by one they started to cross over—sometimes of their own volition and other times with a little urging from Reece. One ghost remained and held on to Stonecliff with a furious grip. Even Declan could feel the hate and malevolence exuding from his presence, and Declan didn’t have a sensitive bone in his body. But no doubt Hugh Warlow felt as proprietary about Stonecliff in death as he had in life.
Fortunately for Declan, whatever held Warlow—and the spirits who had yet to move on—didn’t allow them to venture farther than Stonecliff’s ruins or The Devil’s Eye. He and Carly weren’t troubled by them in the home they made at Morehead.
“Is he saying anything?” Declan asked.
Reece shook his head. “Just glaring. Come on.”
They started across the courtyard and down the path through the woods. Bare trees rose up on either side of them, pointed branches snagging on his coat like bony fingers trying to hold him back. The soles of his boots slipped a little on the dead leaves covering the ground, slick and wet from this morning’s flurries. Damp earth mingled with the salty tang of the sea in the chilly air. At least the trees helped cut the wind blowing in off the water a little.
“He’s following us,” Reece said.
Declan knew who Reece meant when he said “he.” Warlow always trailed after them when they made their rounds, sometimes shouting furiously, sometimes mocking and sometimes merely glaring with all his frustration and rage. Unfortunately for Reece, he was the only one who could hear the man.
“Is he saying anything?”
Reece shook his head. “Not yet.”
They continued on in silence to The Devil’s Eye, stopping once they reached the ten-foot chain-link fence Declan had installed around the bog’s perimeter. Coils of barbed wire edged the top of the barrier and thick chain and a padlock kept the only gate locked tight to trespassers. He still couldn’t be sure all of the villagers who’d followed Warlow had been arrested, and Declan wasn’t taking any chances.
After Sean Leonard’s arrest, the police had arrested two others—the pharmacist and a charter fisherman. Leonard had named both men in an attempt to lessen his sentence. Leonard had even tried to claim he had never killed anyone, that he’d only been brought in to help Warlow at The Devil’s Eye after Dr. Howard had died.
Whether he had actually been a part of the murders or not, he’d been prosecuted for them. He was the only one left alive, after all, and someone had to be brought to justice for all the carnage. The fisherman and pharmacist had not been prosecuted yet. The police had hadn’t found any physical evidence linking the men to the crimes.
This meant Declan had to be extra diligent about keeping away anyone who might want to start up Hugh Warlow’s madness again at The Devil’s Eye.
“There’re only two,” Reece said, moving away from Declan and closer to the fence.
Declan stayed where he was, while Reece tried to convince what remained of the murdered men to move on.
Carly continued her study of the property, keeping track of GMFs and recording the haunt activity on the grounds. The GMFs never dropped, the levels remained as high as ever, but the haunt activity had decreased to almost nothing. He and his sisters hadn’t seen a shadow person since just before the house burned down.
This seemed to suggest her theory that the energy had absorbed the evil from the murders committed here, and that the energy could be neutralized by stopping the killings’ credence. In its way, Stonecliff would have been the greatest investigation of her career, but she could never publish her findings. They could never risk anyone starting up what Warlow had done.
He and Carly had built a good life together; they were happy in their little cottage at the edge of the world. A part of him still could hardly wrap his head around the fact that, through all the terrible things that had happened here, he’d found her. He hadn’t known he could love anyone the way he did Carly. Who knew, maybe those rare good moments helped to dissipate the negative energy here, too.
Carly still taught at the university; her career had kept them afloat for the first six months that he had been cleaning up from the fire and doing what he had to protect themselves and the village from the bog. He and Jayne had ended their partnership on good terms, helping each other out when they needed it, and he’d started his business from scratch. Though, he’d really only had time to focus on it over the past few months, so he was still in the early stages, struggling to build a client list. But it would come.
Allen, Katie and Josh hadn’t been thrilled by the news that he had decided to stay on, and a part of him dreaded what would happen to Josh and Allen without him to intervene. But they seemed to be doing fine. Josh had even started to get his act together. He was working and had found his own place. Carly wondered if half of Josh’s issues stemmed from constantly being compared to Declan, and maybe she was right.
He and Carly had traveled to Seattle so she could meet his family last spring. They’d loved her, and Allen had taken him aside, telling him he understood now why Declan had stayed, assuring him that his mother would have been happy for him.
Declan wasn’t so sure about that. His mother had never wanted him to come back here, and would no doubt be saddened to know he was living on the estate. But hopefully she would understand why.
Reece and Brynn had stayed at Morehead while he and Carly had been in Seattle, to keep an eye on Stonecliff and The Devil’s Eye. When he had announced his plan to stay on after the fire, Eleri had been the first to speak. She didn’t feel it was fair for him to assume the burden and that it should be divided among the three of them—each living at Morehead for four months out of the year. But that wouldn’t have been feasible for his sisters and their husbands. They’d all built their lives away from Cragera Bay and couldn’t just drop out for a third of the year. No, he and Carly would stay, but asked that they house-sit for them once in a while if they went on vacation—which they had no problem with. Reece and Brynn had stayed last summer, and Kyle and Eleri would stay when he and Carly went on their honeymoon to Greece after they were married this April.
“I did what I could,” Reece said, with a shrug. “Hopefully, they’ll go.”
“I don’t know why they’d want to stay.”
“They’re some of the first ones to die and they’ve been here a long time. Sometimes better the devil you know.” Reece cast him a sidelong glance, and then rolled his eyes.
“Warlow? What’s he saying?”
Reece nodded. “His usual goodbye spiel. ‘The Devil’s Eye will be strong again.’ ‘You can’t stop the faithful.’”
Slick knots twisted his insides. Declan would never admit it, but sometimes he feared that Warlow was right, that one day it would start all over again. He gave himself a mental shake. Right now, he and Carly and his family had stopped the evil Warlow had created in its tracks and would keep fighting to see it never came back.
He looked out into the cold, silent woods and smiled hard. “I won.”
And for now, that was true.
By the time he and Reece returned to Morehead it had started snowing again. Big fluffy flakes swirling in the wind. Warm light spilled from the windows and the chill that had gripped him at The Devil’s Eye lessened.
Inside, the small cottage looked a like a Christmas decoration factory had exploded. Every bare surface in the house had been filled with lights, garlands and ornaments, or in some cases all three. Carly had been excited about his sisters and their husbands coming to spend the holiday with them. The warm air was filled with the savory smells of good food cooking, the sound of laughter drifting out from the kitchen.
Whatever anxiety his visit to The Devil’s Eye had inspired waned now that he was home.
�
�Her hair’s already starting to lighten. I think it will be your color, Brynn,” Eleri was saying, as he and Reece walked into the kitchen. She sat at the table, her six-week-old niece cradled in her arms. “God, could you imagine if she inherits her father’s eyes, too?”
“Let’s hope that’s all she inherits from me,” Reece said, and dropped a kiss on his daughter’s forehead, before strolling to his wife at the kitchen counter and slipping an arm around her waist.
Brynn’s cheek was smudged with flour, evidence she was responsible for the wonderful scent filling the house.
“It won’t matter what traits she inherits,” Eleri said, tickling little Anna’s chin. “Because she’ll be surrounded by people who love her.”
Kyle stood from his chair next to his wife’s and shook Declan’s hand. A part of Declan still marveled that these men had become his friends as well as his family given the strange history that linked them all together.
“How was the drive?” Declan asked.
“Not bad. We made good time,” Kyle said.
Declan looked over at Carly, standing next to the counter a few feet from Brynn and Reece. She was smiling at him and holding out a glass of red wine. Her hair was loose, falling past her shoulders in golden-brown waves. Her snug red sweater hugged her slender frame, black trousers clinging to her long legs. She could still take his breath away.
He accepted the wine and brushed his mouth against hers.
“How’d it go?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Good. No changes.”
He slid his arm around her waist and she leaned against him, resting her head on his shoulder while pleasant conversation flowed around them.
A happiness he couldn’t have imagined when he first arrived warmed his chest. He could never have found this life, this sense of peace without Carly. He’d found his place here, with the family he hadn’t known and the woman he loved. He’d come home.
About the Author
Dawn Brown’s first sojourn into storytelling began when she was nine. She would gather neighborhood kids into her garage and regale them with ghost stories, believing even then that atmosphere played an important role in a good story.
Dawn has a diploma in journalism but found herself pursuing a career in computer leasing. After the birth of her son, she gave up the corporate world to be a mom and write full-time, trading in her dreary cubicle for a dreary room in the attic.
Now Dawn spends her days creating dark, romantic mysteries with edgy heroes, clever heroines and villains she hopes will keep her readers sleeping with the light on.
Dawn lives in Ontario, Canada, with her husband and son.
To learn more about Dawn and her books, visit her website at www.dawnbrown.ca.
Also by Dawn Brown
The Devil’s Eye
The Witch of Stonecliff
FORGET ME NOT is the next book in Barbara J. Hancock’s series SCARLET FALLS. Keep reading for an excerpt from this book.
Chapter One
She concentrated on placing one foot in front of the other. Again and again. Scarlet Falls was a small town. When she stepped out of her house—a rented craftsman on Fairlane—there had been only two miles between her and her stepsister.
Now there was less.
One step and then another.
The late afternoon sounds around her were muffled and distorted. Her ears had begun ringing before she’d hung up the phone. Or maybe she’d dropped it without pressing a button because her fingers had gone numb.
Her whole body seemed to be partially shut down.
Breath came shallow to her lungs. Her vision was black at its edges. Each hard slap of her boots on pavement jarred feet and legs gone tingling—half asleep, nerves pinched off by disbelief.
She had never stopped hoping.
Not when Gracie stopped calling. Not when her online presence went dormant. Not when she had followed her to Scarlet Falls only to find a room at the bed and breakfast full of all of Gracie’s abandoned things.
Her camera.
Her precious camera.
That’s when she should have known and begun to accept.
Maddy stopped, though in losing her momentum she might never move again.
A large black crow watched her from a canted fence post, its claws dug into the pitted decayed wood. The field behind it had been planted in corn, but all the stalks had been shorn by a harvester so that nothing but grubby stubs and the detritus of dust and leaves remained.
A scarecrow leaned worse than the fence post, nearly fallen over and forgotten. The late October wind caused one of its gloves to flutter again and again. Something about the inanimate gesture made caustic acid burn the back of Maddy’s throat.
Goodbye.
Goodbye.
Goodbye.
But the crow ignored the fallen scarecrow. The bird’s head tilted ever so slowly to zero one dark, beady eye on her.
Maddy couldn’t move.
The crow had interrupted her dogged march and now it held her paralyzed with the gleam of its gaze.
It didn’t move as a bird should move. No fluttering. No preening. No flexing of its wings. After the slow tilt of its head, it was as still as she.
But its sharp and shiny beak hinted at the horrible potential for movement. As did the talons which held it so grippingly in place on the fence post.
The bird was only a couple of feet away from her. And it seemed aware of her when everyone and everything else in town had allowed her to pass unnoticed. She’d lived most of her life outdoors with her booted feet in the dirt and her hands in the shrubbery and flowers and plantings that made up her paints on the palate of yard and lawn and garden.
But she rarely worked in edibles and had never seen a crow closer than circling high in the sky, a distant black spot winging over her head.
This one was large.
Much larger than she thought normal.
Even so, the fear that tightened her chest and brought her numb body back to pulse-pounding life was also out of proportion.
Maddy took a step.
She was not going to allow a bird to become more than a bird because of the fear, doubt and horror-movie terror currently filling her mind. Not even in this dark town where a murderer lurked.
Several more determined steps took her past the talons, the beak and the terrible focused eye. Once the crow was behind her, she walked faster. Her legs stronger although her heart still faltered.
She had been afraid to drive.
It had been a logical decision to avoid her van in the midst of shock. Asking for a ride from the deputy who had called her would have been smarter. Some faulty instinct had said, “No. Don’t ask him. Don’t.” And she had obeyed.
She had begun the assent up the last hill to High Lake when the rusty throated caw sounded harsh and loud and horrible behind her. The gravely cry scraped away the nerve she’d gathered in one sudden screech leaving her raw and trembling.
But she didn’t stop.
She turned—enough to see the bird. It still clung to the leaning fence post. It had turned its head to watch her walk away.
Maddy kept walking. To the lake. To her stepsister’s shallow, unmarked grave.
* * *
It wasn’t hard to find her way. By the time she came to the gravel road the deputy had bluntly described, she could hear the beehive of activity around the bend. Across the glassy black surface of High Lake, she could see an A-frame perched on a rise. She had helped landscape its hill the previous spring for an eccentric author who wrote about Scarlet Falls’ history. Witch trials and the occult. The very things that had drawn her stepsister here in the first place.
Gracie had laid less than a half a mile away. Sweet Gracie. Less than a half a mile away.
Maddy clenched her fists, shaking her head at the trooper’s car as it slowed to offer her a ride. She’d come this far entirely on her own and there were only a few steps more.
A different deputy than the one who had spoken to h
er on the phone noted her approach and stepped forward to meet her.
“I’ll have to ask you… Oh, Ms. Clark. I didn’t realize it was you. Please…I don’t think you should be here. I’m sorry, but the sheriff has cordoned off the…area,” the deputy said. His awkwardness and the sadness on his face saved him. He had laugh lines around the edges of his eyes, but they were dormant now as if he might never laugh again.
“I’ve walked all the way from town. I’m not turning back now,” Maddy said. He looked over his shoulder and then down at her clenched hands and up again at her tight face.
As they stood at an impasse, another deputy paused in what he was doing to look at her. His face was blank. No doubt he’d been trained to hide his emotions. Maybe he had been the one who had called. Blunt. Matter-of-fact. Cruel in his coldness.
“I’m not turning back,” Maddy repeated.
She stepped around the deputy with the sad eyes while he warred with impossible decisions and continued toward the center of the hive. There was yellow tape strung out in a wide circle, beyond that was a ring of official vehicles and then even more tape. Near the heart of the activity, a large scarlet maple stood, raining colorful leaves down like brilliant snow on the hidden scene below its branches.
But it was the presence of Sheriff Constantine’s SUV that caused her throat to tighten.
Back at her house, she had all of her stepsister’s things, including the last roll of film Gracie had shot from over a year ago. William Constantine had been in those shots. Frame after frame. His angular face in sunshine and in shadow. Many of the shots obviously taken at a distance without his consent, but one, heartbreakingly close, with his blue eyes cut to the side and aware.
Gracie had come to Scarlet Falls on what she considered serious business. Maddy was left to wonder if Constantine had been her assignment or if his striking appearance had appealed to her stepsister in other—more artistic and possibly feminine—ways.
“No,” a deep voice said above the drone of everything else—the forensic team and deputies, the crickets in the distance and her own buzzing thoughts.