Resurrection in Mudbug

by Jana DeLeon

  “Lordy! Lordy!” Helena, who’d dashed inside the crypt with Jadyn, started running around in circles, waving her hands in the air. “He’s locking us in with the dead people.”

  Jadyn gestured to the frantic ghost to get her attention then pointed to the outside, hoping Helena got the hint. The ghost stopped running and wrinkled her brow.

  “You want me to go outside with the killer? Are you insane?”

  Jadyn glared at Helena and pointed outside again, desperately wishing she could talk to the ghost. “We need a diversion so that we can make a run for it,” she told Colt, hoping Helena would take the hint. “Otherwise, we’re stuck in here until daylight.”

  Helena sucked in a breath. “Oh no! I’m not staying in here all night. I’ll go goose him with a twig or something.”

  The ghost walked through the crypt door and a second later, Jadyn heard the sound of glass breaking.

  “Damn it!” Helena ranted. “Who left a lantern right outside of the door? I’ve stubbed my toe and set the cemetery on fire.”

  The image of her and Colt trapped in what could essentially become a smoker flashed across her mind, and she struggled to force herself to stay put. Give Helena time to do something. What, she had no idea. If the ghost had gone solid and kicked the lamp, they were already operating at a deficit.

  “I can hear him. He’s right outside,” Colt said as he stood in front of Jadyn and pointed his pistol directly at the door.

  Jadyn said a silent prayer as smoke began to filter through the crack Colt had left in the crypt door. Oh, someone was right outside, all right, but it wasn’t the killer.

  Helena stuck her head through the door. “Someone’s moving around about twenty feet up in the trees. I’m going total ghost on this one.” A second later, her head was covered with a white sheet, only two openings for her eyes showing through. She disappeared on the other side of the crypt and Jadyn wondered if Helena could make the white sheet visible to the shooter. If a ghost in a cemetery didn’t scare him away, she wasn’t sure what would.

  “This piece of wood will do for a weapon.” Jadyn could hear Helena talking to herself outside the crypt. “If I can just get it out of the ground. It’s stuck. Help! I’m falling!”

  As the sound of the dull thud echoed back at them, Jadyn cringed.

  “The stick’s on fire!” Helena yelled and a second later, Jadyn could hear the ghost running away from the crypt.

  Colt peeked out a crack in the door. “There’s some dead brush on fire just outside the crypt. The smoke may be enough to provide cover. I want you to crawl out of the crypt and go to your left. I’ll cover you from the doorway, then head right as soon as you’re clear and try to draw him off that way.”

  “No, it’s too risky.”

  “So is sitting here and dying of smoke inhalation or worse.”

  Because he was right, Jadyn dropped to her hands and knees and crawled to the door. Colt killed the lantern and eased the crypt door open enough for her to exit. A stack of dead brush three feet in front of the crypt was the source of the fire, which leaped up about two feet in height. Fortunately, the surrounding foliage was green so unless the wind picked up, there was little chance of the fire spreading.

  She paused a couple of seconds, then the brush popped and sent off a pillar of black smoke. Jadyn took advantage of the additional camouflage and scampered out of the crypt and into the nearby tree line. Pausing only a second to catch her breath, she peered around the tree trunk, then rose from the ground and started darting from tree to tree, working her way away from the crypt.

  Every second that passed without the sound of gunfire, her hope grew stronger, and she hoped Colt was out of the crypt and on his way out of the cemetery as well. Just as she was going to traverse a small clearing, she heard the sound of running feet. She barely had time to duck behind a tree when a man came running past her, holding a pistol.

  He wore a dark hooded sweatshirt with the hood pulled up, so Jadyn couldn’t make out any discerning detail except that he was average height and weight. And he was definitely in a hurry. A couple of seconds later, she knew why.

  Helena Henry burst out from the tree line, running after the man and still wearing the white sheet, except she’d added an accessory. Clutched in her hands was an old wooden cross, flames shooting off of it.

  “My hands are on fire!” Helena yelled as she ran past.

  Jadyn stared, drop-jawed. It was a page out of a Southern nightmare. Being chased by a burning cross was definitely enough to make someone flee, even someone packing a gun, but Jadyn had the added benefit of seeing the whole package, which was far more disturbing.

  She could have stopped Helena and told her to drop the cross. It seemed an obvious solution, but in her panicked state, it apparently hadn’t crossed Helena’s mind. Jadyn was beginning to understand just how detrimental Helena’s propensity for panicking could be. She didn’t think for a moment that the cross could actually burn her hands, but she did wonder about the mental strain that it might place on an already frantic mind.

  Figuring the shooter was long gone, she picked up her pace, heading for Earl’s cabin. With any luck, Helena would be long gone, the cross extinguished, and Colt wouldn’t catch a glimpse of any of it.

  With any luck.

  ###

  Colt opened Earl’s truck door and stepped out, then waited for Jadyn to exit. “Thanks for the ride,” he said to the surly caretaker, who waved a hand in dismissal and barely waited for Colt to shut the passenger door before throwing the truck into reverse and screeching back down Main Street.

  The caretaker was probably still pissed that not only hadn’t they come back with the lanterns, but one was broken. The whole shooting and fire incident hadn’t seemed to concern him at all. But the lanterns were a big deal. Colt didn’t even attempt to understand the man’s rationale.

  Before they even reached the hotel door, Mildred threw it open and gave them an anxious look. “Was that Earl? Is everything all right? Did something happen?”

  “We’re fine,” Jadyn reassured her.

  “I’m going to head home,” Colt said. “We can talk about all this tomorrow, when I’ve had some time to mull it over.”

  Mildred disappeared back inside the hotel. “That’s fine,” Jadyn said, her exhaustion apparent in her voice.

  As she started to turn toward the door, he placed his hand on her shoulder. “Hey, I just want to say I’m sorry. I should never have put you in that position. If something had happened to you…”

  “But it didn’t, and please don’t apologize. You were just doing your job. So was I.”

  She gave him a small smile before slipping inside the hotel. He heard the deadbolt slide into place a second later. He stared at the door for several seconds as guilt, fear, and responsibility warred inside of him. Finally, he blew out a breath and hurried across the street to his truck.

  He didn’t want to think about how his heart had clenched when he’d realized how much danger they were in. Didn’t want to dwell on the fact that the thing that had scared him most was something bad happening to Jadyn. And even worse, didn’t want to consider how much it would hurt him if something did.

  As he drove down Main Street, he knuckles whitened on the steering wheel and cursed. They were on the right track with the key…he was certain. But had the shooter been in the cemetery retrieving his goods and simply taken the opportunity to kill them because it happened to present itself, or had he followed them to the cemetery, hoping to eliminate them before they got too close to his secret?

  Surely if he risked stealing the key from the sheriff’s department in broad daylight, it meant he needed to move the product soon. Was one of the other crypts the hiding place for whatever Duke had died for? He banged one hand on the steering wheel, so angry over the theft of the key that he could barely see straight. That key could have broken this case wide open, and it had been stolen from right under his nose.

  Tomorrow, he’d pay another visit to
Earl. Even though none of the other crypt keys looked like the one from Duke’s, he still wanted to take a look inside all of the crypts in Mudbug cemetery. Then he’d call around and see if any other towns had recent issues in their cemeteries. Maybe he’d get lucky.

  He sure hoped so. In his opinion, he was long overdue.

  ###

  The shooter watched from the alley as the sheriff pulled away from downtown Mudbug and headed down the highway into the swamp. His problem had just multiplied, and his failed attempt to eliminate the woman on the bayou that afternoon had been a pointless risk, although a well-calculated one. He’d seen the woman’s posture at Duke’s cabin when talking to the sheriff and had hoped that her obvious animosity would cause her to keep the key to herself. But clearly, she’d weakened as women usually did and turned the evidence over.

  When he’d caught sight of them entering the cemetery, he figured they’d guessed the identity of the key, but he’d been watching closely when the sheriff opened the crypt, and the merchandise he desperately needed to find was nowhere to be seen.

  Could the key open more than one crypt? Had his supplier given him the wrong key? Or was something more insidious going on and his supplier was playing him?

  Regardless, he needed to find the merchandise and fast. His life depended on it, and quite possibly his sanity. He still wasn’t sure what he’d seen that night in the cemetery, but he was determined to convince himself it was all due to the stress he was under. He didn’t even want to think about the alternative.

  He pulled the hood back on his sweatshirt and sighed. It had been a simple plan. Deliver the money and the supplier would tell him what the key unlocked. Then his transport guy could do his part and get the product to the buyer. But that idiot Duke had totally screwed them when he lost control of the shrimp boat in the storm.

  Fortunately, the shooter been smart about the way he’d structured his business. No one—not his suppliers or his customers—had ever met him face-to-face. Because he’d always used expendable middlemen and made all arrangements by untraceable cell phone and money drops, no one was aware of his identity.

  The men who’d supplied the merchandise were low-life thugs and didn’t have the means to determine who he was, much less find him once he left Louisiana, but the buyer was the type of man who would track someone who crossed him to the ends of the earth. And then he’d make him pay. Look what he’d done to Duke, and that poor bastard hadn’t even known what the money was for, much less where the merchandise was hidden. The only way out of this mess was to find the merchandise and get it to the buyer before the buyer figured out who he was. Then he’d take the considerable amount of money he’d amassed and leave Mudbug forever.

  Narrowing his eyes at the fading taillights, he cursed himself once more for his greed. Between his meager legitimate earnings and the deals he’d made the last six months, he’d already saved enough money to leave the country and never lift another finger again, but when he’d been offered this job, he hadn’t been able to say no. The payout would have been the icing on the cake.

  Now, unless he found the merchandise, he was totally screwed.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  An hour before dawn, Jadyn handed Helena the iron key and watched as she tucked it into her jeans pocket. Yesterday had been a brutal day followed by an exhausting night. It had taken Jadyn and Mildred a good hour and half a bottle of scotch to calm Helena down. Jadyn wasn’t convinced that the ghost could actually feel the alcohol, but when the first shot seemed to bring her down off the rafters, Mildred kept pouring.

  By the time Helena’s hysterics were under control, it was well after midnight and Jadyn knew she was already facing a night of tossing and turning before she ever went up to her room. Her mind was too overloaded to stop whirling. Even her body, which was exhausted beyond belief, refused to relax. She’d spent four hours catching ten to twenty minutes of sleep before her alarm went off, and she popped out of bed, anxious to get the first order of business behind her.

  “The night dispatcher will be there,” Jadyn reminded Helena. “If she sees the filing cabinet open, we’ll have a whole new set of problems.”

  “I know. I know,” Helena said. “I wait until you call, then I swipe the filing cabinet key and put the crypt key back in the cabinet.”

  “But not where you found it, otherwise Colt will know something’s up. Slip it inside one of the folders at the back of the drawer. Then maybe he’ll think he accidentally dropped it inside.”

  Helena shook her head. “Do you know how stupid that sounds?”

  “It sounds more intelligent than telling him I helped a ghost steal the key and it almost got us killed last night.”

  “There is that,” Helena agreed. “Make sure you keep her on the phone long enough. And this is sketchy at best. If she looks that direction when I have the cabinet open…”

  “Don’t worry. I have an idea about that.”

  Helena didn’t look convinced but she set off down the street to the sheriff’s department. As soon as she slipped through the wall, Jadyn picked up her cell phone and dialed the dispatcher.

  “This is Jadyn St. James,” she said when the dispatcher answered. “I don’t suppose Sheriff Bertrand is there, is he?”

  “No. I expect I won’t see him for a couple of hours, but if there’s an emergency, I can get him for you.”

  “You heard about that trouble with Shirley’s car yesterday, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, I was having a cup of coffee on the roof of the hotel and I saw a man I didn’t recognize enter the parking lot from the alley. I lost sight of him behind the oak tree. Can you look and see if he’s still there?”

  “Oh my! Give me a second.”

  Jadyn heard some rustling and then the dispatcher came back on the line. “The parking lot looks clear from here. Where did you see him?”

  “I saw him entering from the back, just past the general store’s Dumpster. Do you have a clear view?”

  “Pretty clear, except I can’t see behind the plumber’s van.”

  “I have a decent view of the van. I don’t see anyone behind it. But I can’t figure out where he’s gone to.”

  “Should I go outside and look?”

  Jadyn deliberated sending the woman outside for a moment, but then Helena popped out of the building and started down the street back to the hotel. “No. That might not be safe. If neither of us can see him, he was probably just walking by. I apologize for bothering you, but given everything that’s happened and not knowing all the locals by sight, everything is starting to look suspicious to me.”

  “I understand, and it’s no bother. I’m always telling Colt to err on the side of safety. He doesn’t listen, of course, but it’s nice to know that at least one law enforcement officer in this town sees how reasonable that is.”

  “Absolutely. Well, I’ll let you get back to work. Thank you for humoring me.”

  “Anytime, Ms. St. James.”

  Jadyn slipped her cell phone back in her jeans pocket as Helena walked into the hotel wearing a broad smile.

  “I don’t know what you told her,” Helena said, “but it worked like a charm. She stood right at that front window, staring across the street.”

  “So the key is back in place?”

  Helena nodded. “I dropped it into the second-to-last folder of the second drawer. That should be good, right?”

  Jadyn nodded, a wave of relief washing over her. As long as Colt believed he was distracted enough to drop the key into a folder instead of the bottom of the cabinet, as he actually had, they’d be in the clear.

  “If you’re all done with me for now,” Helena said, “I’m going to the bakery to smell the cinnamon rolls.”

  Jadyn froze. “You’re not planning on stealing one, are you?”

  “No, I’m not going to steal anything, Goody Two-shoes. I just like the smell of them baking. Maybe I’ll get Mildred to buy me one later.”

  “Why do
n’t you just conjure one up? Wouldn’t that be easier?”

  “Oh sure, like it’s that easy. If I could conjure stuff up, why would I be hanging around you guys?”

  “But you conjure up different outfits all the time.”

  “But that’s all I can do.” Helena shrugged. “I don’t know why.”

  Jadyn suddenly realized that Helena was dressed in normal jeans and T-shirt. “Hey, what happened to the grocery store dress? Did you eat it all?”

  “I got fruit flies in it running through the cemetery. I need to rethink the concept.”

  Before Jadyn could formulate a response, Helena left through the wall. Jadyn looked out the window and watched as she crossed the street to the bakery. At least things were starting off good this morning. The key was back in place, and Colt had no reason to suspect it had ever been in her possession.

  Now, she just had to figure out a way to get him to find the key, and she could put the crypt key nightmare behind her. In addition, she made a mental note that if Helena thought something was a good idea, it was likely to be far more trouble than it was worth. From now on, she listened to her own instincts and stopped letting emotion enter into her decision-making.

  That’s a first.

  She frowned as the thought entered her mind. Searching her memory, she tried to think of a time when emotion had overridden good common sense during a job decision and she couldn’t think of a single time. So why now?

  Granted, there were any number of good reasons—a boatload of cash, the circumstances of Duke’s death, getting shot at, Helena’s appearance, her attraction to Colt.

  Hold up!

  Where had that last one come from? She wasn’t attracted to Colt.

  Liar.

  She slumped down in a chair in the lobby, a feeling of dismay coursing through her. Colt? She was attracted to white-knight-syndrome, I’m-the-boss Colt? She groaned, trying to understand how this could have happened.

  Maybe it’s because he saved her life last night…or at least, tried to.