Victoria House (Haunted Hearts Series Book 2)

by Denise Moncrief

He shook a little as if he was amused, but she couldn’t understand how his wife turning to Josh McCord would amuse him.

  “There were rumors that she was having an affair with him, but she wasn’t. There were even rumors that he had killed her or that I had killed her in some sort of jealous rage. Some people claim they’ve seen her ghost walking along the lake like she’s the new version of The Lady Of the Lake.” He propped his chin on the top of her head. “A lot of people think Josh killed Jeremy Haskins, so it didn’t take much effort for them to think Josh killed Caroline too.”

  “You said you didn’t think Josh could kill anyone.”

  “I don’t.”

  Gray seemed so sure of his assessment of Josh’s true character, the one Josh hid behind a cocky attitude and a seemingly constant inebriated state of being.

  She tensed. They were so close to a crucial part of his story. She could feel it. “So then, this Jeremy Haskins guy is probably not dead either.

  “Oh no, Jeremy is dead.”

  A chill raced up her spine. “How do you know?”

  He laughed, a dry brittle sound that wasn’t mirth or amusement. Just wasn’t funny at all. “I’m the one who buried him.”

  The room seemed to shrink around her. Everything suddenly seemed like too much and not enough all at the same time. Knowing that he was involved in something like that threw her mind into overdrive. The questions that should be bubbling from her stuck in her throat.

  He eased her off his lap and picked up the towel that had fallen to the floor. “We’d better get going.”

  He rose from the chair, pushed around her, and headed down the hallway to the back of the house. She followed him into the bedroom.

  “Wait a minute. You can’t just drop that on me and not finish the story.”

  She wanted to believe in him, to believe he was one of the good guys. The possibility that he had been involved in a murder, that he might have killed someone, caused all sorts of doubts and fears to surface.

  He rubbed the back of his head before yanking a blue button down shirt off the bed and shoving first one arm and then the other into the sleeves.

  “I can’t tell you the whole story. Not without talking to someone first. Not that I need permission, just that it’s the right thing to do.” He smiled as he buttoned his shirt, but his smile seemed weary. “It was an accident, Tori. A horrible awful accident that happened to a horrible awful person.”

  He breathed in deeply and reached for a pair of khakis hanging in his closet.

  “The problem is that his father would never see it that way. He would want to punish someone for Jeremy’s death, someone that doesn’t deserve to be punished. If anyone deserved punishment, it was Jeremy.”

  He rummaged in a dresser drawer and pulled out a pair socks.

  “So I’ve kept this huge secret all these years. Not to protect me, but to protect someone else.” He moved toward her and raised his hand, hesitated, and then stroked her cheek. “It’s not that I don’t want to tell you, or that I want this secret to come between us. It’s just that it’s not my story to tell.”

  “Is that what broke you and Caroline up?”

  His tired smile tugged at her sympathy. “You are so perceptive, Tori. I don’t think I’m going to be able to hide anything from you.”

  “Then don’t.”

  “Give me some time. I need to get to a place where I know it’s safe for you to know.”

  She nodded. She could understand that. Hiding the truth of his son’s death from Fred Haskins was a death wish. She’d learned enough about Hill County to know that.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Gray expected to find Lucy Kimbrough’s prints all over Jared Crenshaw’s truck. When the AFIS system spit out a match to Josh McCord, Gray was even more confused than ever. He’d marked Josh of his list of suspects. With this latest piece of evidence, he would have to put him back at the top. Josh had more motive than Lucy Kimbrough did. As far as Gray knew, Lucy had no reason to kill Jared.

  His eyes traveled across the room to where Tori paced along the far wall. Her restless energy made his nerves ping. The urge to grab her by the arms and shove her into a chair almost overcame his good judgment. Tori would rip him up one side and down the other if he manhandled her.

  She tapped her finger on a printout. “Nothing about this makes sense.”

  An understatement.

  Ever since he’d told her about his part in Jeremy Haskins’s death, there had been a strange new tension surrounding them. Not between them, but all around them like some sort of negative energy force field was blocking them from moving forward.

  Something was coming at him, something that was going to disrupt his life. Was he pulling Tori into the mess? Was it fair when she didn’t know what she was getting herself into? They really hadn’t known each other that long. A few months. Not long enough to form a lasting bond strong enough to weather the kind of storm that revealing the secret would generate.

  The truth was coming out. He sensed its emergence from the watery grave in which he’d buried Jeremy just a surely as if Jeremy’s ghost was gathering energy to haunt him.

  Gray pushed the fear of things to come aside and concentrated on Tori’s evaluation of the evidence. Since the day they had investigated the Crenshaws’ trailer, they had collected enough evidence to fill six large storage boxes. Most of it was useless. The few pieces he deemed evidentiary were spread across the metal table in the center of the room.

  At six in the morning, there was hardly anyone in the office but them, a good time to bat ideas around without others overhearing them brainstorm. Still, he had wanted to take no chances on being overheard and suggested they carry their butts and their accumulated evidence to Interview #5. The room was misnamed because the Hill County Sheriff’s Department only had two interview rooms. It was the one with the broken intercom, so no one could listen to their conversation without barging into the room with them.

  Tori stopped in front of Gray as she completed her bajillionth lap. “Let’s just for the sake of argument assume our prime suspect is Lucy Kimbrough. Not that we have sufficient grounds to make her our prime suspect, just that I like her so much for the crime just because I don’t like her.”

  He smirked. “That’s never a good reason to suspect someone, Tori.”

  Her eyes sparkled with mischief. “No?”

  “Never.” He grinned. “But you know that. Continue.”

  He was bone tired and it was okay with him if she worked through some of the inconsistencies. In the end, he would have to pull all the loose threads together and make a scenario work for the prosecution. At the moment, he had no viable theory. Everything he had assumed about the case had been shot to hell and back.

  Tori scratched her head below her left ear. “If Lucy used Jared’s truck to take him out to the ridge and dump him, then her fingerprints should have been all over the interior, but I couldn’t find a single print that was hers. Yet Josh left a lot of prints.”

  He nodded his weary agreement. “Just not in any of the right places.”

  “Josh has been in Jared’s truck, but I don’t think he drove it off the road. Any trace of whoever ditched it is gone. Any place a driver would have touched it had been wiped clean. If Josh had done that, he would have wiped everything down. He knows evidence collection.”

  His concentration level was at an all-time low, and he completely understood the conventional wisdom about not getting involved with a co-worker. It amazed him how a kiss or two or ten changed his attitude toward the woman. Suddenly everything she did, everything she said, every conclusion she drew impressed him.

  It was time he dove into the discussion and quit daydreaming about kissing her. “I think the most important piece of evidence in the truck was the rock on the floorboard near the accelerator.”

  He paused, remembering the way he had drove Jeremy Haskins’s ’74 Gran Torino into Lake Jefferson years before the developers had built up the shore with condos and rest
aurants. It had been a shame to destroy such a fine car.

  He lived in fear that someone would one day dredge it up and find a large rock attached to the accelerator. Would there be anything of Gray left in the car? At the time, he’d known nothing about criminal investigations, and forensics had come a long way since he had placed the rock on the accelerator and put the car in drive, barely falling backward out of the open driver’s side door before watching the car roll into the lake.

  Tori waltzed past him on another trip around the room. Watching her pace was making him a little light headed.

  “Wonder what was in the black bag.” Her mind had obviously shifted away from Jared’s truck to Lucy’s.

  “I’ve wondered that too. Judge Carlisle might think it’s enough to give us a warrant to do a search if I word the request right.”

  Tori’s eyes brightened. He’d never met anyone so enthusiastic about evidence collection, except for maybe Josh McCord. Then her attitude seemed to deflate. “We don’t have enough to get a warrant for her house, and we need that. If she thinks we’re on to her, she’ll destroy evidence, if she hasn’t already. She knows how things work. We need to search both her house and truck or neither one of them.”

  She ran her fingers through her hair. He was glad she’d left it loose instead of tying it up in her usual ponytail. His mind drifted toward running his fingers through it and causing that same primal moan she’d emitted out on the ridge in the rain.

  Her eyes riveted on his. “What are you thinking about Gray?”

  “How sweet it would be to run my fingers through your hair.”

  She picked up a file and whapped him on the shoulder. “Would you stay on topic?

  He smiled. “I’m the lead investigator on this case. Shouldn’t we be doing this at my pace?”

  “Your pace has slowed to nothing. An old lady on a walker could outrun you right now. The sooner we can nail this down, the sooner we can go out to the house.” She moved in close. “You do want to go out to Victoria House, don’t you?”

  He wouldn’t have thought she’d ever want to go there again. “You really want to go back?”

  “Yes, and I want to listen to that EVP. I want to know what we’re dealing with.”

  “We can do that.” He studied her intense expression and hadn’t missed that she’d made it something they were dealing with together.

  “I’ve decided I’m moving in.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure? After what happened?”

  “The more I’ve thought about it, the more I think someone’s been in the house messing with things, trying to mess with me. Maybe even trying to scare me away. The message on the floor was plain. Tori must die. The phone call about losing the evidence...same thing. If they tried once to rattle me, they will try again. The only way to catch them is to be ready for it when it happens. Do you want to help me figure out what’s really going on out there? Are you game?”

  He grinned. “Of course, I’m game. But what if it’s all paranormal?”

  She snorted. “You mean like the missing parquet tiles that were replaced when I went back? You said yourself that wasn’t paranormal.”

  “No, I mean like the way you keep feeling like someone is slicing your throat. I was there, remember? That is paranormal. That kind of thing can mess with your mind and make you do things you wouldn’t do if you were...” He was about to say something that might be a sensitive subject for her.

  “In my right mind.”

  “Dealing with that kind of thing can make a person weird in the head. If you’re going back out there, I’m going with you. I don’t want you to be out there alone.”

  She laughed, and her mirth echoed around the room. “Are you suggesting that you move in with me? Because I plan to stay there. That’s my family’s property...my property now, and I’m not going to let anyone run me away from what’s mine. Whether it’s a ghost or a living human being. So I’m letting my room at the Ozarkan go and moving in whether the house is ready for me or not.”

  She kept hinting that the house was doing strange things to her, and she’d claimed the house in Little Rock had told her where to find Lipton’s body. Did Tori have some sort of weird connectivity with the residual energy that sometimes attached to inanimate objects? He’d heard of such a thing, but never met anyone who claimed to have that particular gift. Tori might not call it a gift.

  “I don’t want you to stay by yourself. My gut says something dangerous is going on out there.”

  Oh God, did he sound too much like he wanted to be her protector?

  She stood tall, her shoulders squared. “I can handle myself.”

  “I know you can, but you shouldn’t do it alone. Not when you don’t have to.”

  “Okay.”

  His heart fluttered at the thought of living in the same house with her. “Okay? Okay, then, I’ll stay in the house with you. At least until we figure out who or what is trying to mess with you.”

  She lifted a folder from the table, her mind obviously moving on to something else once they’d settled their plans for staying together at Victoria House. She handed him the file and he glanced at the label.

  “When I showed you this file, there was an odd expression on your face. What did you see in here that made you look like that? Maybe you subconsciously noticed something important.”

  He opened the file and scanned the few pages in the folder. A single report stood out to him. The result of testing a sample that Tori had at first assumed was Courtney Crenshaw’s blood since it was the only female blood sample taken from the trailer. Finding Kimbrough’s fingerprint in the trailer changed that assumption.

  “If this is Courtney’s blood, she has the same blood anomaly that I do. But… It could be Lucy’s blood.”

  “That anomaly is rare, Gray.”

  He glanced at her over the edge of the file. “I know that. How much of a coincidence do you think it is?”

  “That would be a really big coincidence. It would make me think there was a genetic connection between you and the person that belongs to.”

  He swallowed hard. “That would mean we have the same father.”

  She nodded. Her eyes revealed that she understood the significance and the emotional impact of his discovery.

  “I never knew who my father was.”

  She took the file from him and placed it back into the box from which she’d pulled it. “You don’t have to follow up on that if you don’t want to. It won’t add any evidentiary value to the case.”

  “What if I want to know if Courtney’s old man is my father?”

  “Do you?”

  “Not really. I didn’t care much for the old bastard, and I look nothing like him. You know what I think?” He tried to shake off the horrible feeling forming in the pit of his stomach but couldn’t. “I think Courtney and I might be related, but there’s no way we have the same father.”

  She reached for his hand and sighed. “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t want pity.”

  “This isn’t pity. It’s empathy. I never knew my father either.”

  He snorted. “There are a lot of us around. Fatherless children. They used to call us bastards, you know.”

  “I know. Sometimes they still do.”

  He stood and shook off the heavy mood threatening to overtake him. “Let’s pack this stuff up. I need to go ask Josh why his fingerprints were all over Jared Crenshaw’s truck in all the wrong places.”

  ****

  A woman stepped out of the shadows just as Gray and Tori exited the rear door of the office. Her unexpected appearance made Tori jerk and step back. Gray’s hand went for his weapon, maybe because he was still on edge from too much caffeine and not enough sleep.

  Gray lowered his hand and clenched a fist at his side. “Doris, what are you doing here? You nearly scared the...me.”

  “Mitchell, I need you to tell me the truth.” Her eyes darted toward Tori.

  Whatever Doris had to say she cou
ld say in front of Tori.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Is my baby dead?” The pain in the woman’s eyes ripped at his heart.

  “No, Doris. She’s not dead. At least, not as far as I know.”

  “I’ve heard stories.”

  “You mean about her being the new Lady Of the Lake? Just stories.” He took her by the elbow. “Let’s go inside where we can sit down to discuss this.”

  And where eavesdroppers couldn’t pick up a juicy new piece of gossip. He glanced at Tori, trying to communicate how badly he wanted her to stick by his side through the uncomfortable conversation he was about to have with Caroline’s mother.

  He led Doris into the building with Tori following close behind them and sighed with relief that Tori had gotten his unspoken message.

  They settled into chairs around the table in the coffee break room. He took Doris’s hand in his.

  “I asked a friend of mine with the FBI to find her. He located her in Tucumcari, New Mexico. Waiting tables at a truck stop. That was about three or four months ago. I have no reason to believe she’s still not in...” He had been about to say something that was untrue. “Actually, I’ve heard recently that someone has seen her here in Fairview, but I don’t know that it’s true. If she’s here, she hasn’t tried to see me.”

  “Someone said they thought Josh McCord had killed her just like he killed that Haskins boy. Just like he killed Jared Crenshaw. I don’t know why a man like that is still running around loose, Mitchell. I know the two of you were best friends, but things have changed. I know it. Everybody knows it. Why can’t you see what’s going on with him? He should be in jail.”

  He closed his eyes. How did these rumors get started? “Josh didn’t kill Caroline. I don’t know where people get these ideas from.”

  “They never found that boy’s body, Mitchell.”

  “I know. But I also know that Josh didn’t kill Jeremy.”

  Doris’s eyes sparkled with unshed tears. “How can you know that?”

  He hesitated. Maybe it was time the truth was revealed. If just to a few people, folks who needed to put their fears to rest. “Because I know where he was when Jeremy disappeared, and he couldn’t have done it.”