Why was he telling Clark his personal business?
“Anyway, she appeared several times after that. Soaking wet and reaching her hand out to me. I thought I was going nuts. I thought I was on some sort of psychological guilt trip. As soon as I turned eighteen, I enlisted in the Army. My father had wanted me to go to Vanderbilt just like he and my mother had. I just wanted to get away from them and away from the ghost. Dad was a little disappointed when I enlisted. He didn’t speak to me for years, not until I finished my last tour.”
Clark dropped the remaining unshredded portion of the card on the table. “Seeing her…that could have been psychological you know. Might have been your imagination.”
“Maybe.”
Clark finally turned his eyes toward Shaw. “Have you seen anything else?”
No, he hadn’t.
His cell vibrated on his hip. He glanced at the display, thankful that someone had interrupted his gut-wrenching trip down memory lane.
“Yeah, McCord?”
“I just got an interesting call from Courtney Crenshaw.”
Jepson. She wants to go by Jepson.
“Good. I was worried about her.”
McCord was silent a moment. “More than you have been?”
Did McCord know that he’d found her twice and lost her or let her go both times? “I found her outside Grayson’s house. I actually talked her into going to the diner. You wouldn’t believe how much the woman can eat.” Shaw was still amazed that she had downed the whole burger and then finished up the fries.
“She ordered the cheeseburger with large fries, didn’t she? Her favorite.”
Why had he started this? Shaw didn’t want to discuss Courtney’s eating habits. Why had he stalled? Finding her again was much more important than her meal choices.
“What did she say?”
McCord cleared his throat. “There are two things she wanted me to tell you.”
A billion questions raced through Shaw’s mind. Like where was she and how had she gotten to where she was going without her bike and whose phone had she called McCord from? He sensed the importance of what McCord was about to say, so he held onto his questions hoping maybe McCord would voluntarily give him some answers.
“I gave her your cell phone number. She’s going to call you sometime tomorrow because she wants you to come get her. Not tonight. Tomorrow. She says she needs rest tonight, and apparently, you don’t let her get much rest.”
Shaw laughed, a nervous little chuckle. “What? We were together hardly more than a few hours.”
He hadn’t quite worded that right. Shaw could almost hear McCord smirk.
“Hey, I’m just relaying what the woman said. I was supposed to give her some money today so she could get out of town, but you know why I wasn’t able to.”
So McCord had kept something from him, just as he had suspected. “You could have told me that.”
“No, I couldn’t. I didn’t exactly promise her I wouldn’t tell, but it was sort of understood. Then, there’s this other thing…” Another long pause. “She left what she thinks is Cooley’s handwritten notes in a knothole in a tree at her grandmother’s old place.”
So Courtney had also kept something from him.
“I don’t think we should leave it there, and I can’t go get it tonight. Ashley’s had a rough day, and I should stay with her. I’m at Gray’s place because she’s too scared to stay at her own house tonight.”
That sounded like a long story, and unless McCord wanted to fill him in on the details without expecting him to do anything about it, Shaw had enough on his plate at the moment without adding Ashley Rivers’s problems to the stack.
He diverted the conversation in a different direction. “Why aren’t you at your house, then?”
Josh snorted, and the sound was self-deprecating. “My house smells like stale Jack Daniels.”
Oh yeah, the man had earlier admitted throwing a nearly full bottle against his bedroom wall.
“I’ll go get the papers. Just tell me how to find the tree.”
Shaw’s end of the conversation had captured Clark’s attention. The man kept a steady gaze on him. After his experience, maybe Clark wanted to indulge in something closer to normal police investigation activities.
He stared back at Clark. The other man’s eyebrows lifted.
Shaw knew what Clark wanted. He wanted to go along for the ride. Might be a good idea to let him. He’d get his mind off what had happened, and besides, Shaw still felt a bit guilty for excluding the man from his meeting with Laurel Standridge and Chase Peterson. Normally, that would have been proper protocol. It was never wise to interview potential suspects without another person in the room. If he had known about Clark’s sixth sense, he might have invited him to join them at Laurel Heights when Laurel went to pick up Celeste’s diary.
That was an experience Shaw would never forget. His whole body tried to shake off the aftereffects, but the electrical leftovers still zipped through his nervous system whenever he thought about it.
McCord gave him directions to the Jepson farm and told him how to find the right tree. Seemed easy enough. He’d already been down that road several times in the last few days. He’d probably passed the dirt drive out to the old Jepson farm every time he’d gone down the road to Laurel Heights or Cooley’s place.
“Courtney says it’s written in some sort of code.”
Shaw rubbed the knotted muscles in his neck. He wasn’t very good with breaking codes, having little patience for anything so tedious. “Hmm…we have a guy in Little Rock that’s good with codes, but…”
“No. Let’s keep it here. Now that I know she’s Haskins’s daughter, I’m more worried about her than ever. I think we should keep this close.”
So Courtney had told McCord about her blood relationship to Fred Haskins.
Shaw could have reminded McCord that this was his case to handle any way he saw fit, but he had to agree. The fewer people that knew about Cooley’s notes, the better.
“You’re right. I’ll look at the papers once I have them, but maybe we should try to figure out what they mean before we give them to an expert.”
“I’m good with codes.” McCord didn’t sound like he was bragging. Just stating a fact.
“Okay, then. I’ll go get them, and we’ll meet up tomorrow.”
McCord disconnected then.
Shaw eyed Clark. He looked like hell.
“You wanna take a road trip.”
Clark nodded. “Yeah. I’m not ready to rest.”
He did indeed fidget and twitch as if he was still wired, despite the exhaustion that had settled into the creases around his mouth and eyes. Dark smudges colored his lower eyelids. His nose appeared to be three times its normal size. A cauliflower shaped, purplish-red bruise glowed bright on his cheek.
“You know, you’re gonna crash when the shock wears off.”
“Yeah, I know.”
They were out the door and settled into Shaw’s SUV when Clark hit him with another hard question. “So tell me what happened with the Lipton case. I’ve heard a lot of rumors, but I would like to hear your side of the story.”
Shaw tossed him a sharp stare. What was this about? If the man was going to pull out of his post-shock stupor, he wished the guy would choose other topics of discussion than things that embarrassed Shaw.
Clark shrugged. “If we’re going to be partners and we’re going to have to work together, I would like to know the truth about what happened. After all, I may have to defend you to other cops.”
He wanted to grumble something mean and ugly. Shaw didn’t need Clark’s help defending himself against rumors.
He pulled the SUV up to the exit of the parking lot. Looked both ways before moving onto the street. Finally, he was headed toward the city limits on the road going south.
Okay, he’d tell the story…again. He had kind of hoped the furor over the Lipton case and his failed attempt to prove Lipton’s house was haunted would pass into
oblivion. So, he would tell Clark the story. The long, hideously awful story. It would pass the time, and maybe, just maybe, the jerk wouldn’t ask any other personal questions. He took his time telling it, because it was more than a few miles down the road to the Jepson place.
“So…you and Tori Downing…what happened with the two of you? Sounds like there was a little something there…”
The man was so perceptive. He’d have to remember that. “She works for the Hill County Sheriff’s Department now as a criminalist.” He paused. “She’s Grayson’s girlfriend.” He thought he’d done an adequate job keeping any hint of jealousy out of his tone.
“Oh, wow! So why are you helping him?”
Shaw gripped the steering wheel tighter. “Because I’ve known him a long time, and there was never anything between Tori and me like you’re imagining. Tori left Little Rock hating my guts. I don’t think she’s changed her mind.”
It hadn’t been easy for her to call him and ask him to come out to Victoria House. Neither had it been easy for him to agree to her plea for assistance. Yet Shaw had never been able to turn down a cry for help.
“Hey, she might dump Grayson.”
Shaw glanced at Clark, tossed him an ugly scowl. “I think she’s happy with him. And even if she was free again, I don’t think she’s ever thought of me that way. There’s nothing there. I’ve moved on from any chance of that and so has she.”
“Uh-huh.”
He hated the sound of raw skepticism vibrating in Clark’s sarcastic reply. The man was pestering Shaw about his feelings like Clark was a middle school girl looking for a rumor to start. His implications weren’t even worthy of a response.
“Oh, I get it. You’re hung up on someone else.”
Clark wasn’t going to move on and let it go.
“No. Nothing like that.” He realized too late he shouldn’t have spluttered his response. Made it look like that’s exactly how it was.
He glanced toward Clark again, and the man stared back at him with a smug smile on his bruised lips. “I think there is something like that. Your jaw just tightened up a bit.”
Maybe he’d spent too much time teaching the man how to detect a person’s tells. He’d just recently told the man how to tell when a question had gotten to an interviewee.
His mind focused on Courtney, and the words he hadn’t wanted to voice seemed to float out of his mouth without his permission. “This woman…there’s no chance. Too many complications. It won’t work.”
“But still you think about her?”
“Tell me about your love life, Clark. You seeing someone?”
Clark’s smirk transformed into a scowl. “No, not anymore.”
The conversation carried them down the road, and before too long, they had taken the dirt track up to the Jepson farm and found the tree. The engine was still hot on the SUV when he stuck his hand into a squirrel nest and pulled a wad of papers out of the knothole. He handed Clark the bundle while he made sure he’d gotten everything.
Clark unfolded the packet and scanned the first sheet. “This isn’t a hard code to break. It reads like basic substitution. I bet it can be broken without much difficulty.”
The man surprised him. “Your familiar with code breaking?”
“Yeah. I worked with a guy in New Orleans who had done some of that kind of thing in the military. He’s with the DEA now.” He handed the wad of papers to Shaw. “Drug distributors thought they were smart keeping records in code, but Jean could break them. Every time. He’s good.”
“Do you think you could get this guy to take a look at them? I would like to keep them out of the hands of the locals as much as possible.” Despite what he’d told McCord, he felt better getting an outside opinion.
Clark brushed his hands on his pants. The papers had been inside a squirrel’s nest, after all. “If he’s still in New Orleans and if I can find him, maybe I can set up a conference call or something.”
Shaw nodded. “That would be great.”
He wanted Courtney in on that conversation. Perhaps, she could interpret what the data meant once it had been decoded. “Tomorrow, Courtney Crenshaw is going to call me, and I’m going to pick her up again.”
Clark lifted his eyebrows. “You know where she is? Why don’t you go get her now?”
“No, she didn’t tell McCord where she was.”
“Then have him find out where the call came from.”
Clark was pushing hard.
“I’m doing this on her terms.”
“Her terms? She’s a known associate of meth distributors. She’s been a suspect in a murder investigation. I don’t think we should allow a person of interest to define the terms.”
Clark had a valid point. But Courtney was no ordinary person of interest.
“She won’t tell me what I need to know if I push her.”
Clark smirked. “You know her that well?”
Shaw refrained from answering. He could feel his jaw muscles tightening, so he turned his head away.
Clark hooted. “Oh, I see. She’s the woman that’s gotten to you, isn’t she?”
“Don’t be…That’s not…”
Clark headed toward the SUV. “Tomorrow should be interesting.”
“There can be no personal involvement with a person of interest in a criminal investigation. You know that, right?”
“Why are you telling me? I’m not the one hung up on a suspect.”
“Witness,” Shaw replied.
“Uh-huh. My point. No wonder you’ve forgotten about Tori Downing.”
He wanted to shout that the man was out of line, but maybe he wasn’t.
Chapter Fourteen
Courtney pulled the old double wedding ring quilt her mother’s grandmother had made for Trudy up around her chin and snuggled into the bed that had been hers while she was growing up. She stared at the ceiling of her old room, noting the same crack in the textured plaster as had been there since as long as she could remember.
It felt good and right to be back in her mother’s house. She could almost pretend that she’d never left and she hadn’t been stupid enough to run away with Jared Crenshaw.
As the night dragged on, her mind wandered from this to that. She thought about every moment that had led up to her big decision to leave home. She’d grown up some while she had been gone, but that evening, her mother had treated her as if she’d never left. Like she was the same old Courtney. She wasn’t. She’d changed. The old Courtney didn’t exist any longer.
She laid the back of her wrist across her forehead. The migraine had finally settled down to a dull roar, especially after she’d located some of her pain meds in the medicine cabinet above the bathroom sink. Her mother hadn’t gotten rid of any of her stuff while she was gone. It was almost as if she always believed Courtney would come back.
The return visit was bittersweet, but Courtney knew she could never truly go home again. Somehow she’d have to make a new life for herself. She had no idea where to start. Shaw Bennett had offered her a place to stay at his defunct catfish restaurant on Ashley Creek until she could get started over again. Interesting that the place had been called Shaw’s Landing. Was it named for him? She thought she’d heard rumors about the abandoned building. Was every freaking old building in Hill County haunted?
Before Brett had dropped her off at her mother’s, he’d stopped in town where she’d left Stan Kershaw’s motorcycle, the one she’d been riding, the one that Jared had practically stolen. To her surprise, the bike had been right where she’d left it. She’d retrieved the diary she’d found in Victoria House from the seat compartment. Then, she had asked Brett if he would make sure that Stan got his bike back. She wouldn’t need it any longer. Not if Shaw Bennett found her a new name and a new place to live.
If she went into witness protection would she ever see Shaw again? He had admitted his attraction to her. She groaned. What good was it to think about that? There could never be anything between them. He’d said as much. I
t was impossible. Why did she have to meet him when her life was so complicated? He intrigued her like no one else ever had, and she couldn’t understand that. He wasn’t her type. But maybe he should be. If they’d been able to meet under somewhat normal circumstances, would they have even been interested? There was no way to know for sure.
She reached over and picked up the diary she’d found in Victoria House where she’d left it on the nightstand. Of all the things she could have latched onto, she had kept the ragged book. She’d been so busy or so exhausted that she hadn’t had a chance to open it yet, but the ragged old book seemed to call to her.
Her eyes were a bit scratchy from lack of sleep, but she was still having a hard time drifting off, so she flipped the book open, hoping a little reading would help her get drowsy. The handwriting was feminine, embellished with dashes and curls. The ink had faded with time, but was still readable. Dates headed the entries. The book was decades old, and there was no name inscribed at the front to identify the chronicler.
The entries dated back to 1923. Courtney became absorbed in the woman’s story. The longer she read, the more convinced she became that she was reading Victoria Hamilton’s words. Whoever the woman was, she’d married for money and wasn’t happy with her husband, a man much older than she was, a man who tolerated little and expected much.
The writer’s pen poured out her regrets. Her heart ached for the child she’d left behind in New Orleans, a child she could never tell her husband about. She’d finally gotten enough of her depressing situation and written to an old friend in New Orleans, begging her to locate a man and tell him where she was living. Night after night, she waited for the man to find her and take her away, but he had never come for her.
Courtney’s heart ached for the woman in her unhappiness. So much of the story sounded like the legend of the Lady of the Lake. Didn’t Victoria Hamilton’s ghost wander the shore of Lake Jefferson searching for a lover that never appeared?
Shaw's Landing (Haunted Hearts Series Book 4) Page 15