Shaw's Landing (Haunted Hearts Series Book 4)

by Denise Moncrief

  A streak of lightning illuminated the landscape around Shaw. The jagged bolts of electricity were getting closer together, striking the ground across the lake. The storm was upon them and would be dumping rain on them any moment. He needed to move this investigation along and get away from Victoria House before the storm broke.

  Dickerson pushed a sample into a tube and sealed it. “Whoever chucked this up hadn’t eaten much.” Dickerson pushed the tube into a box specially designed to hold it. “I’ll get the lab to run a few tests. Maybe we can isolate something that will help identify who threw up.”

  “I’m not holding my breath.” Actually, he was. The smell of vomit was putrid. How could the man work with the stuff without gagging?

  Dickerson rolled his eyes and moved down a path. He pointed toward a group of bedraggled bushes. “You see what I see?”

  Shaw nodded and walked the few paces to check it out. A few more yards down the trail, and it appeared they’d found where someone had stashed something large in the woods. “What do you make of that?” Another streak of lightning gave him a clearer view.

  When the night went dark again, Dickerson passed the flashlight over the ground near the mangled shrubbery. “Tire tracks. Probably a motorcycle. Whoever was living in the basement rode a bike.”

  So they were looking for a man. Until they had found the tracks, he had speculated that Courtney Crenshaw might have been hiding out at Victoria House. She was the only person of interest that was still missing. Everyone else was either dead or could account for their whereabouts. It was possible that Lucy Kimbrough had enlisted Courtney’s help to get Caroline Grayson into Victoria Hamilton’s bedroom.

  Dickerson turned his gaze toward the entrance to the tunnel that led to the basement. “Maybe Lucy Kimbrough rode the bike.”

  “How could she carry a dead woman on the back of a bike?”

  Dickerson grunted. He hated having the obvious thrown at him. “It looks to me like this is the way Kimbrough got Caroline Grayson into the house. Through the tunnel. Up the stairs.” He turned and stared through the thick brush toward the lake. “Maybe she got here by boat.”

  Shaw rubbed the back of his neck. The previous evening, a mosquito had popped him right below the hairline. He scratched and then forced himself to leave the itch alone. “She would’ve had to have known exactly how to get into Victoria Hamilton’s bedroom.”

  Dickerson nodded. “Finding that door into the upstairs hallway was an accident. It was so well hidden.”

  “It was dark in that passage.”

  Dickerson shivered. “Someone was watching.”

  Shaw laughed. “Are you getting a little spooked, Dickerson?”

  “Don’t be an ass. I don’t mean something was watching us. Someone was watching them. You have another witness.” He nodded toward the tunnel door. “Probably the person who’s been living here.”

  A creepy feeling crawled all over Shaw. “Are you sure it was someone…alive.”

  “Yes, Bennett. I saw her footprints in the dust.”

  That stopped him in his thought tracks. “Her?”

  “Yeah, shoe size was too small for a man, and the shape looked like a woman’s. She probably watched them through that peephole door in the wall. It was open.”

  So Shaw was back to suspecting Courtney Crenshaw. For some reason, he had hoped she wasn’t involved in the murder of Caroline Grayson. He turned his gaze toward the trampled bushes. “I assumed we were looking for a man.”

  Dickerson smirked. “Lots of women ride bikes, Bennett.”

  Shaw blinked at him. He’d never considered himself a sexist. Not much of one anyway. But the odds were more likely the rider was a man.

  “Bet she has a tat, too.” Dickerson slapped his thigh at his thin play on words.

  Shaw pretended to ignore his lame pun. So the witness was a woman, a woman who was probably acquainted with Lucy Kimbrough, Jared Crenshaw, and Omar Cooley. Someone who had probably worked for them, someone who would know how to get into the basement through the tunnel. A woman who felt she needed to hide.

  Courtney Crenshaw. He had to find her.

  “I think we’ve seen enough. Let’s get out of here before something else happens that we can’t explain.”

  Dickerson let loose a belly laugh. “Are you getting a little creeped out, Bennett?”

  “This place is creepy.” What was he saying? He’d sworn he wouldn’t let on to Dickerson how the whole incident had shaken him, and here he was, admitting it.

  “Ever been anywhere creepier?”

  Shaw didn’t want to discuss past experiences. “Yeah, your office.”

  He hurried back through the tunnel and entered the basement. The place did give him the creeps. “Stop. Do you hear that?”

  Dickerson paused, his nasally breathing almost in Shaw’s ear. Shaw moved a step to put some distance between them.

  “I don’t hear anything. You’re imagining things now.”

  “No, I heard glass clinking.”

  Dickerson hooted. “Really? Just because you think this used to be a speakeasy, you’re gonna conjure up some ghostly noises to prove it. Get over yourself, Bennett.”

  A cold wave passed over him. From the corner of his eye, he could have sworn he glimpsed movement. When he turned that direction, the room was still.

  “I thought I saw movement over there just now.”

  Dickerson wasn’t done with his derision. “Maybe it was a rat or a feral cat.”

  Shaw shrugged off the feeling of being watched. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Whatever you say, ghost hunter.”

  Shaw made himself look straight ahead, his focus on the stairs that would take them up to the kitchen. If he’d turned to Dickerson at that moment, the man might have discovered just how spooked Shaw really was.

  ****

  When Shaw had finally locked the front door behind him, he watched as Dickerson unlocked his car, pushed his kit onto the back seat, and then settled into the driver’s seat.

  The first fat drops of rain smacked the top of Shaw’s head. He beeped the remote on his keychain and the lights of his SUV flashed. Going home to Little Rock would probably be a wasted trip. No doubt, he’d have to turn around and come back to Hill County. For such a small county, there seemed to be a lot of activity, both paranormal and criminal. His gut told him something more would happen before everything settled down. He’d best find a motel in town.

  He couldn’t stay at Shaw’s Landing with Tori Downing and Mitchell Grayson camping out there. He’d offered them his place on Ashley Creek as a temporary hideout until they’d recuperated and the attention from the discovery of Caroline Grayson’s body had died down. He usually stayed in the apartment above the abandoned restaurant when he was working a case in Hill County, but he’d decided to stay away from Shaw’s Landing while they were there. The last thing Shaw wanted to witness was their mushy romance.

  His gaze shifted to the second floor of Victoria House just as Dickerson turned around in the drive and headed toward the road. A light glowed in the furthest window. It shifted and shimmered and finally coalesced into the shape of a woman. He blinked his eyes and rubbed them, but when he opened them again, the apparition was gone.

  ****

  The bed shifted, and Courtney stiffened the way she always did when Jared lay down beside her. Her eyes popped open. Not Jared. He was dead, yet the weight of someone’s body pressed against her, and she experienced the same fear and disgust as she had when Jared would come home angry and horny. Immobilized, her heart raced to keep up with the frenetic rush of her rising panic.

  For a long moment, she couldn’t remember where she was. She slowly turned her head and found she was alone. The boom of thunder startled her and she tried to sit up, but her muscles wouldn’t cooperate. A steady pressure on her chest kept her pressed against the mattress.

  Somewhere in the neighborhood, a dog’s baying ruptured the quiet following the thunder, sounding a little too
much like the eerie cry of a coyote howling at the moon. Courtney closed her eyes, hoping she was dreaming, hoping she’d open her eyelids again and find it was all just her imagination. But the attempt to hit reset didn’t work. She was still pressed against the bed as if someone’s heavy weight covered her.

  “Help.” Her strangled call barely passed her lips.

  Her suddenly dry mouth begged for a drop of water. Living with Jared, she’d had a few moments where she had been afraid for her life, but she’d never experienced such raw fear.

  Then, a sharp pain started below her right ear and sliced across her throat to her left ear. Her breath escaped her in one giant huff. The pressure on her chest increased, crushing her ribs. Her eyes began to flutter shut. Pounding rattled the house and shook the bed. Another boom from the approaching storm jolted her nervous system, and whatever held her captive released her.

  She jumped from the bed, pressed her fingers to the throbbing pain in her neck, and stood trembling in the middle of the room. The desire to flee was so strong that she had to force herself to remain still and assess the situation.

  Footsteps shuffled on the hardwood floor outside her room, followed by the heavy tread of someone descending the stairs. A door creaked open, and then voices drifted up the stairs. She moved to open the bedroom door a little wider so she could hear the conversation below. Her leg muscles tensed, prepared to run.

  “Mitchell, what are you doing here? It’s late.” Sally’s greeting drifted up the stairs.

  “We need to talk.” Gray clipped his words as if he were biting each one of them in two.

  “What’s the matter?” Sally’s voice wobbled a bit.

  “I think it’s time you told me the truth.”

  Courtney moved into the hall and stood in the shadows at the top of the stairs just as Gray followed his mother into the living room out of sight.

  “What are you talking about?” Sally stammered.

  “Who is my father?”

  A chair screeched as if someone had sat down hard.

  The wind rose in pitch and volume, rushing around the outside of the house, muffling the conversation inside. Courtney descended the stairs, pressing her back against the wall so Gray and his mother wouldn’t notice her.

  “I don’t see what good it will do to go over this again.”

  “You should have told me the truth years ago.” There was a long silence before Gray spoke again. “Don’t you think you might have warned me that my father was Fred Haskins?”

  Sally gasped. “Who told you that?”

  “Who do you think? Haskins enjoyed telling me that I was his son.”

  Another clap of thunder. Then a few seconds later, lightning streaked the sky outside the front window, illuminating the living room in a strange yellow-orange glow for a split second.

  “He’s lying.”

  Sally’s response was so low Courtney almost didn’t hear it.

  “Really? I don’t think so. It’s always a good thing to know what kind of bastard I’m up against when I start to go after someone like him. You know, he thinks I won’t try to nail his ass for what he’s done just because I’m his flesh and blood.”

  Courtney turned the corner and slipped into the hall that led to the kitchen and the back door. She leaned on the drywall just at the edge of the entrance into the living room, straining to hear, prepared to run.

  “You took money from him.”

  “What if I did? I needed the money. He offered to support us, and I accepted his offer…gratefully.”

  Sally’s defensive tone grabbed Courtney’s sympathy. Haskins had put the woman in a difficult situation, but then he was good at that.

  “He barely gave you enough to live on. He could have taken better care of you. Of me.”

  “He would have, but I didn’t ask for more. I didn’t want more.”

  Another gust of wind pushed at the clapboard sides of the house, rattling the windows.

  “Oh my God, Momma. Don’t you get the difficult place you’ve put me in? What were you thinking getting involved with that man? A married man.”

  Sally sniffed. “My relationship with Fred is none of your business. What we had was—”

  “Oh, please. Don’t tell me his wife misunderstood him. Don’t tell me you had something special with him.”

  “Mitchell, you are being offensive. You should stop before you say too much.”

  Gray’s voice rose to a roar. “How am I supposed to live with Fred Haskins’s blood running through my veins?”

  Sally’s tone matched his, anger rattling in her voice. “You’ll be all right. You should be better than all right. He has power in this county. As long as he lives, he’ll never let anything happen to you. He promised me.”

  “What makes you think I want his protection? Or yours.”

  That had to have been a hard blow for Sally Grayson. She gasped but didn’t respond. Maybe she was in so much shock she was speechless.

  “He must have made Trudy Jepson feel just as special as he made you feel.”

  A sharp pop rang out. Courtney winced. Had the woman just slapped her son?

  “Trudy Jepson was just his housekeeper. Don’t make what we had seem so cheap. Like he would be with just anybody.”

  “Momma, Courtney Crenshaw is my half-sister, and our birthdays are only months apart.”

  Courtney pushed her fist against her mouth, stifling a strangled noise of surprise.

  “That’s not so.” Sally’s voice had risen to a high-pitched squeak.

  “DNA doesn’t lie.”

  Courtney backed away, moving quietly down the hall toward the back door. Her breath burst from her in ragged gasps. What if Sally told Gray that Courtney was in the house? She couldn’t deal with facing Gray. Not after what he’d just told his mother. Before she had another solid thought, she had slipped into the back yard. Gray might hear the rumble of the bike as she started it, but by the time he rushed out the back door to investigate, she’d be down the street.

  What Gray had just told his mother changed everything. For the first time in a long time, she wasn’t afraid of Fred Haskins. Well, not as afraid.

  Chapter Six

  Jordan Clark had sensed something was just a bit off about the case from the moment he had stepped through the front door of Laurel Heights. The way Dickerson and Bennett had sniped at each other made him believe there were things the two of them weren’t telling him. The one thing he hated more than anything else was being left in the dark.

  Shaw Bennett had told him to wrap it up, and then he and Dickerson had left in a hurry without much of an explanation. Once Jordan had put up the crime scene tape and sealed off the residence, he’d waited until later that evening before going back to Laurel Heights just to make sure neither one of them came back and caught him in the act of returning to the scene. In the light of day, the house didn’t seem quite so spooky. After dark with a storm approaching, the façade appeared downright ominous.

  While he was inside the house earlier that day, he had been acutely aware that the place was alive, as if it had a heartbeat pulsing through it, but he had been reluctant to express his intuitive impressions to anyone, especially Shaw Bennett. The man had a reputation for being a paranormal freak, and he might have taken Jordan’s feelings seriously, but the last thing Jordan wanted to do was encourage Bennett’s obsession. Law enforcement and the supernatural were not a good mix. Jordan had no desire to set himself up for public ridicule the way Bennett had.

  Jordan had kept his secret for so many years that sometimes he could forget he had such a strange inexplicable ability. He’d had this sixth sense sort of thing going on since he was a kid. For most of his life, he’d done his best to pretend it didn’t exist, but a strong vibe had raced up and down his spine the moment he had crossed the threshold of Laurel Heights, so strong he couldn’t ignore it.

  While Bennett and Dickerson were on the scene, Jordan hadn’t been able to explore the old place as much as he had wanted. H
e was anxious to get back inside and take his time absorbing the energy emitted by the house. Jordan crossed the front porch, pulled on a pair of gloves, and carefully detached the seal. He’d made sure he left both the front and back doors unlocked. When he was finished, he’d redo the seal and make it appear as if it had never been disturbed. He pushed open the front door and stalled in the doorway. A hazy sort of darkness shrouded the front room in shaky shadows, but he didn’t dare turn on a light.

  The essence of the house rushed over him, and the pulse of the place seemed to throb through his veins. He’d never had such an immediate reaction. Closing his eyes, he allowed the intense sensations to flow through him, forcing his mind to focus on how the room made him feel. He sensed a dark entity struggling with a lighter one. He sensed heartache and despair, bitterness and resentment, and the unmistakable pain of abandonment. Anger and fear overshadowed every other vibe the house gave off.

  Jordan opened his eyes and scanned the room. To his left was the spot where Antonio Constantine, aka Tino, had landed after his flight over the balcony rail. Jordan might be a bit green as a field investigator, but he’d done pretty well in senior physics in high school. Tino’s flight trajectory was impossible. In Jordan’s estimation he should have landed a good ten to twelve feet closer to the staircase, and some of the debris from the broken balcony railing should have been beneath the body rather than remaining on the balcony.

  The place appeared as if a class five hurricane had surged through it. He didn’t know much about the power of a meth lab explosion, but he was certain no explosion would have caused the mess inside the house without damaging the structure more than it had. He’d found items in strange locations, strewn around as if the wind had picked them up and tossed them about. An odd circumstance, since none of the windows had busted out.

  His opinion was based on part gut instinct and part common sense. Of course, Tino could have caused the mess when he searched the place, but in Jordan’s limited experience, he’d observed that a typical search had a certain feel, and this scene didn’t have the feeling. Whoever had staged the scene, had done an excellent job, but the effort wasn’t quite good enough.