According to the legend, no one ever knew his name, but if this was Victoria’s diary, then her words had revealed his identity. The man’s name was John, which was kind of ironic since Victoria gave little hints here and there that she had been a prostitute.
Victoria Hamilton had wanted to get out of the life she was living. She had begged John to marry her and give their child a home, but the man wouldn’t or couldn’t, so she had manipulated Alfred Hamilton into leaving his wife and marrying her. His only demand had been that she leave her child behind. Such a bad mistake. She had regretted her choice the rest of her life.
Victoria had loved John more than anything, and she was distraught that he didn’t come for her when she had asked. So much so that she considered killing Alfred and ending her life if she could never be with the man she loved.
If that’s the way she felt about her life, why didn’t she leave? She didn’t have to kill herself.
Was that really what happened to Victoria Hamilton? Had she murdered her husband and then killed herself? No one really knew what had happened to the Hamiltons. Their deaths were one of the greatest unsolved mysteries ever.
Courtney closed the book and laid it on the quilt next to her. Her eyes drooped. So sleepy. Warmth enveloped her as she sank further into the bed covers. Comfort surrounded her. She sighed with contentment.
Just as she was drifting off to sleep, a searing sensation heated her thigh. She reached down to touch her leg. The place where her fingers dragged across her skin burned like fire. Her eyes popped open.
Iridescent rays of light streaked toward the ceiling from around the book, growing brighter and brighter with each passing second. Her heart rate accelerated to a frightening pace. She pressed her hand against her chest and gulped a deep intake of air. Her lungs burned as if she’d swallowed a hot coal straight from a barbecue pit.
She shifted her leg. Keeping her eyes on the diary, she inched away from it toward the opposite side of the bed. Before she could slide out from under the quilt, tendrils of light shot out from the book and wrapped around her, drawing her toward the glowing ball of light on the bed. No longer could she detect the outline of the book, not the binding or the cover. The edges blurred into an orange-white blob.
Against her will, she reached toward the center of the light. As soon as her fingers touched something solid, her mind filled with a billion bytes of information, just as if she were a computer storing data.
Her psyche filled with visions and dreams, things that she didn’t want to know and didn’t want to see. As if her memory was filling up with all of Victoria Hamilton’s history. Just when she didn’t think she could stand one more second of Victoria’s overwhelming emotions, her bedroom door swung open.
“Courtney, are you okay? What’s the matter?” Her mother’s voice boomed around the room. She stood frozen in the bedroom doorway, her eyes riveted on the glowing mass next to Courtney in the bed.
That’s when Courtney realized she’d been screaming.
To her amazement, the book seemed to suck all the light back into its pages, leaving the room cold and lifeless. She sat up on her bed and swung her legs over the side, all the while gasping for breath.
“What was that?” When Trudy finally found her voice, her mother seemed just as breathless as she was.
“I was reading this diary, and then I fell asleep. I woke up when my leg started to feel like it was on fire. I reached out to touch it...” Courtney shuddered once.
Trudy opened her mouth and then closed it. Her brow crinkled in confusion. Fear glowed in her eyes. She shook her head and seemed to pull her thoughts together before speaking again. “Whose diary is it?”
Courtney hesitated before she answered. Her fear was ridiculous. How dangerous could it possibly be to hold this particular diary and to know the secrets within its pages? “I think it belonged to Victoria Hamilton.”
Trudy’s eyes widened. “How did you get it?”
“I found it in the basement of her house.”
“What were you doing there?”
Courtney ran her trembling fingers through her hair. Until that moment, she’d been able to keep the details of the past few years of her life from her mother, but she couldn’t keep everything she’d been through inside her any longer. She needed her mother.
“I was hiding there.”
“Who were you hiding from, Courtney?”
She wished she’d had more time to prepare for this moment. “My father.”
Trudy smiled, an indulgent expression. “Courtney, your father is in prison. Why would you need to hide from him?”
“I’m hiding from Fred Haskins, Momma.”
Trudy gasped and backed up a step. “Who told you Fred was your father?”
She hadn’t tried to deny it like Sally Grayson had tried to deny it to Gray.
“It’s not important how I found out. You need to know he’s the reason I’m going into witness protection, so I want you to be careful with him.”
Trudy moved the few paces to the nearest chair and dropped into it. Her gaze seemed to focus on the worn wood flooring for a long moment. Finally, she lifted her eyes to gaze at Courtney. “Does Fred know that you’re his daughter?”
She expected anger or bitterness to rise up from her core, but it didn’t. The only emotion she could manage was a dull empty ache for what should have been and never was. She should have had a father in her life that loved her and raised her as his child.
“Yeah, he knows.”
“What have you gotten yourself into that you need to hide from Fred Haskins?”
Courtney sighed. “Oh Momma, you really don’t want to know.”
Trudy nodded. “Fred Haskins was the worst mistake I ever made in my life.”
Sally Grayson didn’t feel the same way about the man. Sally and Trudy were nothing alike.
Surely, her mother had some weird feelings about having Fred Haskins’s baby. “You must resent me—”
“Oh, no, honey. I could never resent you. Haven’t I ever told you? I’m so glad you were born. You’re the best thing that ever happened to me.”
Courtney smiled. “If I’m the best thing that ever happened to you, that’s pretty pathetic.” She’d spent her teen and adult years doing things that had hurt her mother.
Trudy rose from the chair, moved across the short space, and sank onto the bed next to her. Trudy lifted her hand and it hung mid-air, as if she was afraid to touch her. Courtney tilted her head, and Trudy tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, just like she had when Courtney was little.
“Are you leaving in the morning?” There was a catch in Trudy’s voice.
Courtney nodded. The tears were welling in the corners of her eyes once again. It seemed she’d cried a river the last couple of days.
“Will I ever see you again?”
“I don’t know.” That was the truth.
Trudy Jepson wrapped her arms around Courtney, and the two women cried together until they both fell asleep from exhaustion.
****
Shaw glanced across the motel room at Clark. He’d never heard someone snore so loudly. While Shaw was on active duty, he’d heard so many raucous melodies coming out of soldier’s mouths after a long, hard day, but never had any of them generated quite the volume that Clark did. Maybe he shouldn’t have let Clark fall asleep because of the possible concussion, but at some point, there was nothing he could do to stop him. Every once in a while, he’d peek at the other man to make sure he was still breathing normally.
He’d spread the documents Courtney had left in the tree across the cheap, veneer-topped table. None of the scribbling made much sense except what was written in plain text, the notes with James Standridge’s name at the top.
All of the names on the list were women. By each name several locations were listed as well as dates in chronological order. The woman who called herself Chelsea had told Clark there were other women like her. Shaw believed the women on the list had been recruited
to work in Cooley’s labs, whether they’d wanted the job or not. At the top of the list was Cherish Duncan.
The rest of the papers were indecipherable to him. He’d let Josh McCord take a look at them, but he wouldn’t let him keep them. For some reason, he didn’t want the documents out of his hands. Maybe he could get Josh to dust for prints on the paper, just to find out for sure who had been handling them.
Courtney’s prints should be all over them.
He settled back into his chair and crossed his arms over his chest. Her memory zoomed into his mind. He’d spent very little time with her, yet she’d made a deep impression on him. She’d told Josh McCord that she’d call Shaw the next day. He glanced at his watch. Yesterday had turned into today. She would call him in a few hours. Maybe when the sun came up.
Shaw wouldn’t relax where she was concerned until she was in his sight again. Courtney was at the vortex of something that went beyond dangerous. Something that had the potential to be deadly.
She had such beautiful eyes. They sparkled when she was filled with hope and dimmed when a new twist on her tough situation added another layer of stress to her already stressful life. He wanted to be the one to put the sparkle back into her eyes. He wanted to save the rest of her life for her. His thoughts startled him. The way he was feeling, surely it was just some sort of hero complex.
When this was over, she’d be long gone. Moved on. And he would be tackling another case. The never-ending cycle of crime and punishment never ceased to turn in a complete circle. It was crazy to get hung up on a… What was she now? A victim. A suspect. A witness. Certainly, a person of interest. Oh yeah, he was interested.
Clark snorted and grumbled gibberish in his sleep. If Clark remained in Fairview to work the Haskins case with Shaw, then tomorrow…no tonight…the man was getting his own room.
There were so many dangling threads in the conglomeration of cases he’d taken over from Hill County, that he didn’t know which one to unravel first. He needed a plan, but his mind wouldn’t focus long enough to head one direction or another. His captain would want answers soon, or he would push Shaw to move on to fresher cases.
Shaw had been accused often enough of being a lone wolf. That’s why his captain had insisted that Clark work the Constantine case at Laurel Heights. As if Dickerson wasn’t enough of a watch dog for the captain. Until his recent experience working the Grayson case at Victoria House, the man had reported everything to Captain Hendricks. Maybe Dickerson would keep a few things to himself now.
It was never Shaw’s intent to work autonomously, but it happened that way a lot with the cases he investigated. Very often he was pulled into circumstances that couldn’t be officially recorded in a case file. He had an unofficial reputation in the law enforcement community, and he was thinking maybe it was time to put aside that role. He’d seen and heard so much abnormal stuff that his mind was filled with the unseen. So much so that he hardly had time to deal with what could be seen, felt, or heard in the natural realm.
Maybe he needed some rest, but if he stretched out on the other double bed, he wouldn’t sleep, what with Clark snoring and his mind churning. And every time his thoughts took a new path, his mind would eventually return to Courtney.
Where was she? What was she doing? Was she safe where she was?
Focus, Bennett. You need a plan. To save Courtney and to stop Haskins.
He’d found from past experience that the best way to approach this kind of situation was to do the unexpected, but Haskins was smart. He’d be expecting the unexpected. Perhaps the best thing to do was to give him what he wanted. What did Haskins want more than anything? A legacy. Then, that’s what Shaw would give him. He’d provide the man with a legacy. It just might not be the one he wanted.
When the sun came up, he would head back out to Shaw’s Landing. Tori Downing wouldn’t like his plan, but he’d bet that Grayson would cooperate with him. It was a start. Something to do to move forward and to keep his boss convinced that Shaw was actively working the case. The sooner he brought Haskins down, the sooner Courtney, and the rest of Hill County, could live and work and love in peace. Maybe, just maybe, if his plans fell into place quickly enough, Courtney wouldn’t have to go into witness protection.
All Shaw had to do was make sure that when Haskins went to jail he left no one on the outside that could run his business for him. Everyone associated with the man should be dead by now, but a man had come out of the woods and pressed a gun to Courtney’s head. Someone was still doing Haskins’s dirty work for him, and Shaw needed to work that lead. That meant finding out how Jake Richards fit into Haskins’s operation. The man had lawyered up, but Shaw could still dig into his life.
There was one more thing he could do. He’d go into the Sheriff’s Department office as soon as the sun came up and use all the authority he could manage to demand to see the case files on Cherish Duncan’s disappearance and the identification of the body found on the Ashley Ridge Trail.
He didn’t believe the dead woman was Cherish. Had the coroner made a positive identification yet? If he had and the woman really wasn’t Cherish, then someone, possibly in the Sheriff’s office, was tampering with evidence. He chuckled to himself. That was the least of the crimes committed by members of law enforcement in Hill County.
****
It was well past noon when Courtney sat up in bed and rubbed the sleep from her eyes. She glanced around the room and recognized her stuff, the things she’d left behind when she ran away from her momma. The clatter coming from outside her bedroom door sounded so familiar. Her mother wanted her to get up, and Trudy wasn’t going to move quietly around her house any longer.
Courtney stretched and slid her legs off the side of the bed. Victoria Hamilton’s diary lay on the side table. Her mother had wanted her to throw the thing away, but Courtney couldn’t quite make herself do it. What she’d read was important. She could sense it, feel it all the way down to her toes. She just hadn’t been able to understand why it was significant yet. When she met with Shaw Bennett later, she would show him the diary if she could handle the book without it trying to suck her into its pages again.
That sounded like a good premise for a book. She imagined what it would be like. What would happen if a book sucked someone into its story? Victoria’s story was full of deceit and violence. The woman had done some very wrong things to survive.
Just like Courtney had.
She nudged the diary with her finger, but nothing happened. She sighed. If her mother hadn’t heard her screaming, would she have become a permanent part of Victoria Hamilton’s story?
She rearranged her clothes where sleeping in them had caused them to twist around her body, and then she trudged through her slightly open bedroom door and wandered down the short hall to the kitchen where her mother was putting away dishes and talking to herself.
“Who are you talking to, Momma?” Her tone was teasing, and she waited for the typical Trudy reaction to getting caught talking to herself.
Trudy spun around with her hand on her chest. “Don’t sneak up on me like that. And you know I wasn’t talking to anyone.”
Courtney smiled. “Are you hearing voices again?”
“Don’t be a wise ass.” She nodded toward the kitchen table. “You want some lunch, because breakfast was over hours ago.”
Her mother hadn’t changed a bit. That was an unbelievable comfort. At least one thing in her life was stable.
“I’m sorry, Momma. I wanted to spend some time with you before I left today, but I guess was exhausted. I didn’t mean to sleep all morning.”
Trudy’s stern countenance softened. “You probably needed it.”
Courtney cleared her throat before asking her mother what she wanted to know. “Umm…what happened last night? I know you must have heard me screaming. Did you see anything…weird?”
Trudy tilted her head. “No, what do you mean?”
Courtney smiled to reassure her mother she wasn’t going nuts. “It
just seemed so…real.”
“You must have been dreaming.” Trudy put a couple of glasses away in the shelf before turning toward Courtney. “You said something about the diary burning your leg and then glowing like it was on fire. You probably went to sleep reading. I told you last night you should get rid of that thing if it gives you nightmares like that.”
Ah, the conversation was coming back to her now. The sleep was finally leaving her fuzzy mind.
“I can’t stay here much longer, Momma. Haskins sent Jake Richards to find me last night, and he almost caught me. If I hadn’t been with…” No, she didn’t want her mother to know who was helping her.
What Trudy didn’t know, Trudy couldn’t tell. And Trudy loved to talk. It didn’t take much to get her to spill everything she’d thought she’d seen or heard.
“Jake is in jail. But I’m sure Haskins isn’t going to give up.”
“Why does he want you so much? Courtney, what did you do to him?”
That last question stung. “I haven’t done anything to Fred Haskins. He wants…”
She shivered and crossed her arms over her chest, likely a subconscious effort to protect her heart. Even as she wrapped her arms around herself, she realized what a defensive posture she was taking with her mother. Trudy might not be well-educated, but she was sharp.
“He wants me to take over Cooley’s operation.”
“Why? That’ll just set you up against old man Cooley.”
Weird. She acted like she already knew what Courtney was talking about.
“Momma, how do you know about Cooley?”
“Oh, hon. Everyone knows Omar Cooley cooks meth. It’s not that hard to believe Haskins owns him. He owns everything else in this God-forsaken hell hole.”
Courtney snorted. That wasn’t the first time her mother had voiced her not-so-kind opinion of the place she’d lived all her life.
Trudy stepped closer to her daughter. Concern covered her middle-aged features. Life had etched fresh creases in her face, wrinkles that hadn’t been there before Courtney left.
Shaw's Landing (Haunted Hearts Series Book 4) Page 16