Shaw's Landing (Haunted Hearts Series Book 4)

by Denise Moncrief

  When they finally came back up for air, he pulled her toward the door to the outside. She waited while he locked up behind them.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I have Laurel’s permission for us to stay at Laurel Heights awhile.”

  Well, he had just dropped a big, ole bomb on her. “What? Why?”

  “Well, she was getting a bit worried about how long the house had been vacant. She’s afraid someone’s going to break in and vandalize the place or start squatting there.”

  Courtney got it. “That’s a possibility. It’s got the reputation already for being haunted.”

  “I filled her in on everything that had been happening…including the visit from Haskins’s skeleton this afternoon. She asked me if we would mind housesitting for her. I’m not sure if she really wants us to or if she’s just being gracious.”

  “Us?”

  “Yeah, us.” He answered with a distinct twinkle in his eye.

  “I’m not sure I need to stay in protective custody any more. I mean, I think the biggest threat came from Halsey.” She’d just offered him a challenge that she was pretty certain he was going to meet.

  “Maybe.”

  She deflated. Did he mean maybe Halsey was the biggest threat or did he mean maybe she didn’t need to be in his protective custody any longer? She tried a different approach to getting the answer she needed. “We don’t know each other very well.” Not enough for them to live together. She was never rushing into something like that again. She’d learned a hard lesson with Jared.

  “No, we don’t, but you have to admit, living under the same roof certainly speeds up the getting to know you process.” Yes, a definite sparkle glittered in his brown eyes.

  Was the man playing with her? Did men play hard to get?

  “So?”

  She tilted her head back and forth. “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “So we agree. We’ll stick together.”

  “Why do we have to stick together at Laurel Heights? Can’t we stay here?”

  He stepped back and tossed her a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding frown. “With the ghost of Jeremy Haskins’s doing the skeleton dance every night? Are you gonna be able to sleep?”

  She sighed. “Well, I didn’t think we were planning on getting much sleep.”

  His lips passed over hers again. “When you’re right, you’re right. But we can’t stay here. I want you with me, and I don’t like leaving you alone on the creek any longer.”

  “Okay, but the first time I’m burned, cut, strangled, or shot at by an angry ghost, or even if I’m dreaming about any of those things, I’m out of there.”

  He grinned. “Yeah. I’d be right behind you. Actually, I was kind of hoping we could help James Standridge.”

  “Oh, please. Is that what this is about? Do you really want me there, or are you just hoping I can help James go to the light?”

  “You know what? If you don’t want to help James rest in peace, then it’s okay with me if he haunts us every night while we’re…you know.”

  She crossed her arms. “You know, sometimes you are an ass.”

  “Most of the time. You think you can handle it?”

  She was gonna give it her best try. She kind of liked the guy. Might even fall in love with him if things settled down, and they could concentrate on each other. Actually, she felt the first flutters of something deep and powerful in the pit of her stomach. She could see herself permanently attached to this guy. If she gave it a chance.

  He smiled as if reading her mind, something he was prone to do. Then, he turned and headed across the deck. She followed him two paces behind, climbing the stairs with a lighter bounce in her step than she’d had in a long, long time.

  “Will we ever come back here?” She liked the place in spite of the supernatural activity that seemed to rattle around it.

  “Maybe one day, if I can ever get rid of the ghosts.” There was the slightest hint of expectation in his voice.

  This time she thought she could read his mind. Was she going to have to help every ghost in north Arkansas go to the light? “Do you think it’ll ever be open as a restaurant again?”

  He stopped and looked down at her. “That’s my dream.”

  Her heart made a huge lump in her throat. “I wouldn’t mind helping you make that dream come true.”

  What was she saying? Was she making long-term plans? She’d never had any goals further than getting through the next day without dying.

  His grin lit up his face. “I wouldn’t mind that either.”

  He opened the door and entered, heading straight toward the kitchen. “I’ll dump everything in a garbage bag so we can pack it out of here. I don’t want to leave anything that will possibly spoil and stink up the place.”

  She headed toward the bathroom, hoping to take care of business while he was busy packing and yakking. The door was already ajar. A flush of unease swept over her. She pushed it open with her fingerprints.

  Shaw was still talking in the kitchen. Every word echoed around the apartment as if it had been magnified a hundred times.

  “One time I left some milk in the fridge and…”

  She let loose a blood-curdling scream.

  Within microseconds, he was at her side. “What’s wrong?”

  She pointed toward the pendant and gold chain on the counter next to the sink. The tremors began in her hands and quickly vibrated through her whole body.

  “I thought Butch melted it down. We watched him. How could this happen?”

  He pushed her behind him. She watched over his shoulder as he flipped the pendant over. He shook his head. “It’s not the same. There’s a different imprint on it.”

  She stared hard at it, her breath hiccupping in her throat. Her lungs screaming for more oxygen. “He resents me.”

  Shaw turned toward her, confusion on his face. “Who resents you?”

  “Jeremy. That’s why he’s harassing me.”

  “What does he have to do with this?”

  She pressed her lips together, afraid to utter the truth. Afraid to put the words into the atmosphere, for once she had spoken them, she could never get them back.

  “Courtney, talk to me.”

  How many times had she seen that very pendant dangling from a thick chain around Jeremy Haskins’s neck?

  She backed away from it. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Shaw grabbed her upper arms. “Did that belong to Jeremy?”

  She nodded. She just couldn’t push the answer past her numb lips.

  He roared in apparent frustration. “What is it with ghosts and pendants?”

  As soon as the words crossed his lips, the unmistakable rattle of bones banging against one another clattered outside the bathroom window, twenty feet above the ground.

  Shaw grabbed her hand and dragged her out the door, pulled her down the stairs and rushed them down the path to the dock, leaving his collected garbage behind. He gave Courtney his hand as he helped her into the boat. He untied the line from the piling and jumped in before pushing off the wooden deck. In another second, he had pulled the cord on the outboard and the engine roared.

  The boat didn’t move but a few inches, churning the water near the propeller.

  “Here’s the problem,” he muttered and yanked on the anchor line. When he couldn’t lift the anchor, he pulled harder, putting his back into it. “Must be snagged on something.” Suddenly, the line gave and Shaw fell back on a seat. He groaned with the impact.

  Courtney watched in horror as a body rose to the surface of the creek. A woman, no doubt, her long hair splaying around. Courtney screamed. It seemed she was always screaming. Shaw rushed to put his arm around her as he lifted his cellphone to his mouth.

  “Dickerson, I’m at Shaw’s Landing. You’d better get out here. We have another body.”

  The End

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Denise is a Southern girl. She has lived in Louisiana all her life, and yes, she has a drawl. She has a
wonderful husband and two incredible children, who not only endure her writing moods, but also encourage her to indulge her writing passion. Besides writing romantic suspense, she enjoys traveling, reading, and scrapbooking.

  Accounting is a skill she learned to earn a little money to support her writing habit. She wrote he first story when she was a teen, seventeen handwritten pages on school-ruled paper and an obvious rip-off of the last romance novel she had read. She’s been writing off and on ever since, and with more than a few full-length manuscripts already completed, she has no desire to slow down.

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  OTHER TITLES BY DENISE MONCRIEF

  Deceptions Of The Heart

  The End

  Cross Examination

  The Memory Catcher

  Laurel Heights (Haunted Hearts #1)

  Victoria House (Haunted Hearts #2)

  Ashley Ridge (Haunted Hearts #3)

  An Impostor in Town (Colorado #1)

  Purgatory (Colorado #2)

  Twin Rivers (Colorado #3)

  Crisis of Identity (Crisis #1)

  Crisis of Serenity (Crisis #2)

  COMING SOON

  Crisis of Security (Crisis #3)

  Chelsea Lane (Haunted Hearts #5)

  The Unmistakable Scent of Gardenias (Haunted Hearts #6)

  Second Sight (Prescience #1)

  BONUS MATERIAL

  CHELSEA LANE

  Haunted Hearts Series: Book Five

  Chapter One

  Fairview, Arkansas

  May 2011

  Kristie curled into a tight ball in the corner of the room and sucked back a sob. Only moments before, her only friend in the world had taken her last breath. Freaked out, that’s what she was. She’d never before been in the same room with a dead body. At least, not one that had died the way Sharona had.

  She wanted to go home so badly. Had her family finally stopped looking for her? Had they ever searched for her? Filed a missing person’s report? Did they presume she’d run away and left her fiancée at the altar? Maybe they thought she didn’t want to be found, so they figured there was no use looking for her.

  Her eyes shifted toward the slight lump in the middle of the cot. Sharona had lost so much weight before the end. When Kristie recognized the signs of toxic poisoning, she’d begged both James and Zeke to find Sharona a doctor, but they had refused. The panic on their faces when she told them just how sick Sharona was should have been her first clue that they would do nothing to save her life. After all, how would they have explained to the doctor why the woman was dying from ingesting a toxic chemical used in cooking methamphetamine?

  In the three months Kristie had been their prisoner, she’d noticed two other women come and go with no explanation as to why they had disappeared in the middle of the night. Within days, there was always a replacement. Kristie was sure James acquired the new workers the same way he’d recruited her. By kidnapping.

  Her degree in biochemistry had prepared her to take a position in her father’s medical research company, not to diagnosis how a woman was going to die. Knowing how the chemicals would eat Sharona’s body from the inside out had caused Kristie all sorts of nightmares. At least, having the knowledge had kept her out of the labs and in the house for the few days it had taken Sharona to die. They had threatened Kristie. Told her that if she didn’t make Sharona well they’d force her to eat the same toxins that had killed Sharona.

  She wiped her sleeve across her nose. Over time, the cooking process had produced various symptoms in her. Headaches. Nausea. Dizziness. Fatigue. Not to mention the diminishing will to live. She sometimes thought her brain was going to mush. Her usually sharp intellect was being replaced with fuzzy reasoning. It was moments of clarity such as this one that caused her the most anguish. She blocked out thoughts about how long it would take the chemicals to break down her body.

  Now that Sharona was dead, Kristie would be heading back to one of the labs as soon as the sun came up. Would James or Zeke follow through on their threat? Would she be eating something that would quickly destroy her before the day was over?

  Finally, she allowed the tears to spill over her cheeks without trying to wipe them away.

  When she had left New Orleans, she’d taken the nearest on-ramp onto I-10 and headed west, intending to go all the way to California. After graduating from Tulane, her boyfriend had started making plans for forever. He wanted to settle down, get married, and have a few children. The night before her wedding, she’d come to the conclusion that she wanted something else. Yeah, she had wanted to start a new life, just not with Brandon.

  She’d wanted adventure. She’d wanted a life that wasn’t mainstream. She loved Brandon, but she didn’t love him enough to give up the freedom to go wherever she wanted and live however she pleased. Marriage had seemed too much like a trap. Too much like the same trap her mother had fallen into. By the time her father had moved on to wife number two, all of her mother’s dreams had died. Vivienne had believed she was too old to pursue what had been lost to her by marrying Charles Godchaux.

  Maybe she was running from her mother’s past as much as she was escaping from her future. Kristie never made it out of Louisiana. To the best of her recollection, she’d been abducted at a truck stop outside Lafayette. When she’d finally come out of a drug-induced sleep in the house on Chelsea Lane, she didn’t even know how she’d been transported there. It was a month before she became aware that the house was somewhere in Arkansas.

  She flinched when someone put a hand on her shoulder and looked up into the glowing eyes of an apparition. A wavy, shimmery bright white image of Sharona hovered beside her. She glanced toward the bed where the lump hadn’t moved even an inch. Kristie scrambled into a seated position and tried to shove her body further into the corner, but there was no room left to maneuver.

  “Sharona?”

  Gratitude and compassion radiated toward her from the light being. “He is coming.”

  She shifted her gaze toward the door, but no sound came down the hallway. Both James and Zeke usually made a lot of noise, their heavy books pounding the wood floorboards of the old house.

  “Who?”

  The ghost of Sharona Adams began to fade.

  Pain ripped through Kristie’s heart. She wasn’t ready to say goodbye. Not yet. “Wait. Don’t go.”

  “I will not forget.”

  The light disappeared and the room darkened. Darker than it had ever been. It mirrored the darkness that had descended on her life. Hope leeched out of her soul as the spirit of her only friend in the world faded. For the first time in her life, Kristie felt utterly alone.

  The door of the bedroom swung open, and Chelsea’s face appeared. Hatred for the woman surged inside her. Her fingers clenched into two tight fists. Did her disgust for James’s girlfriend register on her face? No matter.

  Chelsea’s eyes riveted on Sharona. “She’s gone?”

  She glared at Chelsea in angry silence. She’d give her nothing.

  Chelsea glanced toward the open door. “James will be here any second.” She moved to within inches of Kristie. “Hit me. Hit me hard.”

  She blinked at the woman.

  “He’s in the bathroom, and the back door is unlocked. Run. Get out of here. If you hit me, he’ll believe I fought and you won.”

  She spat her disgust at Chelsea. “I can’t run. I won’t get far before he’s caught up to me.” She pushed up the wall to stare Chelsea in the eye. “I’m dying, Chelsea. I don’t have any strength left to run.”

  “You have to try.”

  Kristie shook her head and a stab of pain pierced her temple. She pressed her hand against the hurt. “You could have helped us before we were too
weak to run.”

  The door banged the rest of the way open. Zeke’s tall figure filled the frame. “What’s going on in here?” He glanced toward Sharona and shifted his eyes away quickly. His steely gaze settled on Chelsea. “You know what to do.”

  A single sob escaped Chelsea.

  “Don’t tune up, woman.” He grunted his contempt for her. “I don’t know why James keeps you around. You’re worthless.”

  Chelsea wasn’t afraid of much, but Zeke could back her down. But this time, maybe she’d had enough. “If my brother ever finds out what you’ve done to me, you’re a dead man.”

  Zeke laughed and the sound of his derision swept over Kristie and rolled in her already nauseous stomach.

  “Your brother don’t care what happens to you. He knows where you are. Who do you think gives him drinking money?”

  Chelsea’s face colored pinkish red. “That’s not true. Brett would never give up on me.”

  Zeke grabbed her by the shirtfront, and Chelsea wilted, all of her former defiance seemingly seeping out of her.

  “Do what I tell you to do. If you don’t, I’ll kill James.”

  Kristie had heard that before. It was enough to keep Chelsea in line, and Kristie didn’t understand why that particular threat seemed to have such a strong hold on the other woman. As far as Kristie could tell, James wasn’t worth the oxygen he breathed.

  Zeke left the room without a single backward glance, apparently confident in his ability to control Chelsea. She stumbled over to the bed and yanked the sheet off Sharona.

  Kristie watched her movements. “What are you doing?”

  Chelsea turned her teary gaze toward Kristie. “I’m going to roll her in the sheets, and then we’re going to bury her under the basement.”

  “Under the basement?”

  Chelsea’s posture straightened. Determination edged her haggard features. “Shut up and do what I tell you to. We don’t have all day.”

  Once Sharona was wrapped in the bedding, the two women struggled to carry her down the main stairs and then through the kitchen to the basement stairs. Under the house, Chelsea dropped her end of the dead woman and pointed toward a chest of drawers. “Help me move it.”