Shaw's Landing (Haunted Hearts Series Book 4)

by Denise Moncrief

  “When Courtney makes a commitment, she sticks to it, even when it doesn’t make sense. I guess that’s part of the reason she kept going back to Jared. That, and she didn’t think she could go back home to her mother. Not that Trudy wouldn’t have taken her back. Courtney thought she had nowhere else to go but back to Jared. She had no usable job skills because Jared never wanted her to work. She had no identity outside of being his woman. I mean… Really, I don’t understand why abused women go back to their abusers. Maybe it’s because I’m a man. I don’t understand a woman’s psychology.”

  Bennett nodded. Neither did he. “You would think once she’d gotten free of him she would have stayed away.”

  Josh closed his eyes and leaned his head on the backrest. “So many times I helped her leave only to hear days later that she’d gone right back. There were a few times he found her and made her come back home, but most of the time she went back to him on her own. I would like to think there was something about him that was worth going back, for her sake, something that would explain her compulsion to return to him, but there just wasn’t anything about him that would make anyone want to stay with him. So no, I don’t understand why she kept going back for more abuse.”

  There had to be more. Her reasons had to go deeper than that. Why would a woman go back to her abuser unless she felt she had no other choice? Courtney was mixed up in something she couldn’t easily get out of. He sensed the level of her entanglement and the depth of her despair. The woman was on the brink of doing something desperate. “If Jared owed a lot of money, that could be why he was cooking meth for Cooley. Was he a user?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  Shaw turned into the driveway of Laurel Heights. “Doesn’t matter if the debt was hers or Jared’s. The boss, whoever he is, will want his money, and he’s going to want Courtney to pay off Jared’s debt.”

  “If that’s the case…and I think it is…then Courtney is in real trouble. She doesn’t have the money, and she’ll be desperate to get it.”

  Shaw had come to the same conclusion. “Is she dangerous?”

  “Courtney?” McCord chuckled as if the assertion was ludicrous. “No.”

  He’d said she was tough like her mother. She lived in a hard world filled with ruthless men and cruel realities.

  “Even though she was married to a meth cooker? That’s a hard life.”

  “I guarantee she had no part of that…unless he made her do things she didn’t want to do. She’s probably relieved to be away from it…and scared someone is going to drag her back.”

  Or maybe someone else made her do things she didn’t want to do. Maybe it wasn’t Jared that held her in virtual if not literal captivity.

  ****

  Jordan had lost quite a bit of time while he was unconscious on the kitchen floor of Laurel Heights. Flat of his back, he stared at his watch as if gazing at it would turn time backward or something. Was it past twelve midnight or past twelve noon? The cobwebs seemed to have invaded his mind. He shook his head, but the feeling of being enveloped in cotton candy wouldn’t go away. His dry mouth begged for a smidgen of liquid refreshment, but he couldn’t appease his thirst. Nothing could be disturbed. He had to leave the place just as he had found it, so no borrowing a glass to gulp down an ounce or two of water.

  His hands seemed unnaturally hot in the gloves he wore, so he peeled them off and shoved them into his pants pocket. Sweat dripped from his hands. He winced at the thought it was dripping onto the floor. He managed to turn his heavy head toward the kitchen window. A big bright moon hung in an inky sky. Pushing up on one elbow, he paused while he waited for his head to clear. Whatever had happened to him had stolen his breath. His chest felt like a bag of cement sat on top of him. He finally managed to sit up.

  With his head between his knees, he drew in a few deep gasps of air. The pressure eased a bit. Just as he was considering the necessity of eventually attempting to stand, muffled voices came from the other side of the back door. He strained to listen and panicked when he recognized Shaw Bennett’s voice.

  Maybe Jordan could avoid them and they’d never know he’d been there. His car. What if they saw his car? He’d hidden it down the road a ways, and walked the short distance to the house, hoping no one would see him enter through the front door. Bennett was coming in through the back door. Why was he sneaking around?

  “I told my guys to lock up when they were done. I didn’t think the owner would want people snooping around her place after word got out that someone died here. You know how it is when a house with a history is abandoned.”

  Another man responded. “Something must have made you try to open the door first…without the key.”

  A pause. “Just an odd feeling.”

  “Like someone has been here ahead of us.” There was the tiniest lilt of sarcasm in the other man’s tone.

  Bennett answered evenly, though his answer could be interpreted as defensive. “Of course someone has been here ahead of us. The crime scene people didn’t leave here until late today. So there would have been people around the house all day long.”

  Jordan was on his feet in another heartbeat, just in time to slip through the kitchen door into the living room before the two men entered the house. He propped his hand on the swinging door to steady it, hoping Shaw wouldn’t notice it had recently been in motion. Hovering on the other side, he waited to see what the men would do.

  Footsteps neared his position, so he dove further into the shadows behind the floor-to-ceiling drapes that covered the dining room windows.

  The other man shoved the swinging door open. “There’s no one here. What you’re feeling is probably electromagnetic energy.”

  “I don’t get the heebie jeebies like some people do.” Bennett’s quick comeback held a bit of derisive amusement.

  Sometimes Bennett was like a shark gnawing on a swimmer’s leg. Jordan kind of felt sorry for Bennett’s victim.

  Bennett finally followed the other man into the room. “Let’s get started.”

  Jordan was quite certain he should sneak out the back door and get far away from Laurel Heights, but curiosity was killing him. Instead of doing the smart thing, he used the loud tromping of Bennett and his companion climbing the stairs to cover his footsteps as he ascended to the second floor.

  He stood outside the door while Bennett and the man discussed their plan of action inside the master bedroom. Apparently, Bennett believed there was some sort of supernatural energy emanating from the bedroom closet.

  Jordan peeked around the doorjamb while the two men worked at getting up enough nerve to open the closet door. His breath hung in his throat as he passed the open doorway and glanced across the hall toward the back staircase that descended to the lower floor. When he peeked into the bedroom, he was relieved that neither man had noticed him dash across the doorway. He released his held breath slowly.

  The other man stood in the middle of the room with his hands on his hips as if bracing for whatever might come their way. “So how do you want to do this? You wanna provoke?”

  “Sure. I brought a digital recorder.” Bennett paused a second. “Do you feel that? The temperature dropped.”

  A loud screech interrupted their conversation, and then a crash rattled the wood floor beneath their feet.

  Bennett reached for his service weapon. “What was that?”

  Jordan slid along the wall away from the open door and froze.

  “Sounded like it came from down the hallway.”

  He had to move before they caught him, but once again, his feet and legs were like two dead weights attached to two strands of overcooked spaghetti.

  Just as he glanced toward the stairs calculating his diminishing chances of escaping detection, a woman seemed to appear out of nowhere. For a moment, he thought an apparition had formed right in front of him. She placed a finger over her lips. In another heartbeat, he realized she was alive, real flesh and blood. His heart skipped its usual sinus rhythm and then stuttered back to
normal.

  She grabbed him by the elbow and nodded toward the stairs. The tread of feet on hardwood rattled the floor of the bedroom behind them. Jordan and the woman were suddenly in forward motion and had already descended most of the way down the back stairs when the second man’s voice rumbled from above. “There’s no one here.”

  The woman stopped mid-step, causing Jordan to nearly stumble into her. Another crash and bang shook the house. Both of them turned toward the top of the stairs and listened. The pounding of footsteps headed down the hall toward the front staircase, and the woman tugged on his arm again. The two of them restarted their flight downstairs. Once they reached the kitchen, she pulled him toward the basement door.

  No way was he going down there. “Stop,” he whispered toward the back of her head.

  She kept moving. He pulled back.

  Her eyes drilled into his. “Trust me.” Her hand slid down his arm. Her fingers entwined with his.

  His heart leapt at everything those two little words meant. Jordan didn’t trust easily. Most of the people in his life had let him down. There was no explanation for the sudden desire to trust this woman. Like he’d known her all his life and wanted to trust her more than anyone else he’d ever met.

  “You’re a cop, right?”

  He nodded, a huge lump in his throat clogging his ability to communicate.

  She pointed toward the back of the house. “You could leave, and they’d never know you’d been here, but there’s something I think you should see.”

  “Why me? They’re cops too.” He hooked a thumb toward the noise emanating from up the stairs.

  She smiled. “I trust the look in your eyes.”

  Strange.

  Before he had time to object again, she was tugging him through the basement access door. His already taut nerves twanged. His mind steeled his psyche for the onslaught of the emotions that had nearly shattered him when he’d tried to enter the basement earlier.

  She didn’t reach for the switch on the wall, but rather pulled an electric lantern from a cubbyhole that he had overlooked earlier. The glow of the lantern’s light cast out the darkness at the bottom of the stairs. The lower they descended, the more the light revealed a large, underground space. A huge basement for a house that size. Shadows darkened the corners, but nothing sinister seemed to lurk there. Across the room, a shelf had been shoved aside, exposing the entrance to what appeared to be a tunnel. When he had investigated the basement earlier that day, he hadn’t found the rolling shelves or the hidden entrance. This was apparently the way she had gotten into the house.

  When they reached the basement floor, she paused and turned toward him. “The explosion made the left tunnel collapse, so we’re taking the right one.”

  She spoke to him of tunnels as if he should know what she was talking about. Of course, he was aware that an explosion had occurred and that it was probably caused by one of Omar Cooley’s cookers blowing up, but he had assumed Cooley had found a cave in the rocks behind the house to brew his meth. This was the first he’d heard about any tunnels.

  He pulled back on her hand when she began to move again. She stopped and seemed to assess him with glowing eyes. He couldn’t quite make out their color in the glare of artificial light emitted by the lantern.

  “What’s your name?”

  She sighed as if he’d asked an irrelevant question. For a moment, he thought she wouldn’t answer, but then she offered him an obvious lie. “You can call me Chelsea.”

  “Okay, Chelsea. Where are we going?”

  She blinked at him as if he were being obtuse. “You want to stop Cooley, don’t you?”

  He nodded, not wanting to squelch any revelations she might have for him.

  She pointed the lantern toward a tunnel branching toward the right, obscured from view until she shone her light on the entrance. “That leads to Cooley’s place.”

  Jordan studied the implications of accessing Cooley’s house from Laurel Heights. Would anything he found there be admissible as evidence without a search warrant? Bennett claimed he was in the process of acquiring one, but then Bennett had said a lot of things Jordan was starting to question.

  “What am I going to find there?”

  A hint of fear clouded her eyes. Until that moment, she’d been unstoppable in her quest to lead him toward discovery.

  “Other women just like me.”

  Her simple sentence implied so much. Women who were just like her, who hesitated to use their real names. Women associated with Omar Cooley.

  Once again, his pulse quickened. She was leading him toward something significant. His mind raced with all the possibilities. He nodded. “Lead the way.”

  Chapter Eight

  It had been a long night, filled with forward motion and little rest. After Courtney had left Haskins’s house, she’d circled the lake for what seemed like a few hundred times. She hadn’t noticed anyone watching her trailer, so she finally stopped and dismounted the bike.

  Drawing in several deep breaths, she approached the place she’d called home for three, almost four years. Before Jared bought the land with the mobile home at a Sheriff’s auction, they had lived in a very small apartment above an antique store in downtown Fairview. They’d had to move out of the apartment when the landlord had discovered Jared was a meth head and that she and Jared weren’t really married.

  Condominiums, marinas, and restaurants circled Lake Jefferson on every usable patch of land. Everywhere except for Jared’s little bit of earth. Courtney could never understand why Jared didn’t sell to the dozens of developers who had knocked on their door offering to buy his property for a huge amount of money. He refused every one of them, rather angrily. What was it about this piece of property that was worth hanging onto?

  Then, her eyes traveled to Victoria House on the peninsula just across the inlet. The proximity to the Hamilton estate had to be the reason, but she couldn’t sort it all out. His reasons were still a mystery to her and probably always would be. The dissatisfaction of the developers who’d put up those condominium projects, whose residents had to look out their balconies and view Jared’s mobile home while they drank their morning coffee or their evening wine, had resulted in a constant barrage of harassment from all sorts of government officials. Jared had backed them all down. To the day he died, he’d managed to keep his property.

  Who did it belong to now? Maybe she had some rights where the property was concerned. She’d lived there long enough and everyone thought they were married.

  She gritted her teeth and pushed aside the yellow crime scene tape that barely clung to one side of the open door just as the sun started its daily journey up over the eastern horizon. Maybe she was just trailer trash, but no one had the right to invade her home and leave it wide open for anyone to take whatever he wanted. Like the place was abandoned or something.

  She stopped herself mid-rant. Wasn’t abandoning everything and everyone connected with her former life exactly what she’d planned to do? She’d demanded that Haskins get Halsey to leave her alone so that she could go back to the trailer, get a job, and live her life. But was that what she really wanted? She didn’t even know if the place belonged to her.

  One glance inside the door reminded her that she hadn’t cleaned since the last time Jared went on a rampage, since the day she’d plunged a screwdriver into his gut. The memory of her impulsive action should have given her some intense satisfaction, but it didn’t. In fact, wounding him had only left him vulnerable to attack by Lucy. If Courtney hadn’t driven the tool into his stomach, maybe he could have fought Lucy off and he’d still be alive. Maybe Courtney wouldn’t be in such a huge mess.

  More than anything else, she hated change.

  But then if Jared were still alive, he would still be taking his anger out on her.

  Maybe change wasn’t so bad after all.

  She stepped across the threshold and stood in the middle of the trailer. Fingerprint dust darkened the surfaces of just about e
verything, and it seemed at least half of the junk that had been lying around the house was missing. She glanced toward the bedroom. A dried pool of blood stained the carpet where Jared had bled. Someone had cut a piece out of the center, probably as evidence for testing. It was strange to think of her home as a crime scene.

  Wrapping her arms around her middle, she stayed in one spot a long time, trying to shake off the feeling of being violated.

  A tear dripped down her cheek. She swiped it away. She’d never cried so much in her life as she had since she had found out Jared was dead and Fred Haskins was her father. Not that she was going to miss Jared or her lousy life. No, she hated the thought of starting over somewhere else. The road ahead would be filled with twists, turns, and potholes. She was already tired of the journey, and she hadn’t even gotten started yet.

  Standing frozen, deep in thought in the middle of her catastrophe wasn’t solving her problem. She’d told Fred Haskins she had evidence of his crimes. If she was going to threaten him with proof, she needed to be able to produce it. Once Haskins figured out she was bluffing, it wouldn’t matter that she was blood kin or not. Courtney truly believed the man had no loyalty to anyone but himself.

  And his blood ran through her. Was she like him? Did evil pass from one generation to another? Popular culture painted the Devil as a little man in a red suit with a forked tail and a pitchfork or as a dark, ugly, ambiguously terrifying form that stalked a person in the night. Courtney knew better. Evil didn’t just inhabit the night. Sometimes it taunted a person in the middle of the day. She’d seen the Devil. He drove a Lexus and lived in a three-thousand-square-foot house with a four-car garage and an Olympic-sized swimming pool, and his security guard Jake scared the crap out of her.

  Courtney studied the mess in her trailer. Of course, the Hill County Sheriff’s Department had already searched the place, but it appeared that someone else had gone right behind them. Maybe what she was looking for was already gone.