by Brant, Kylie
“After the night I’m plannin’, I’ll be draggin’ at that hour, but we all make our sacrifices. And I’ll expect a full accountin’ with all the juicy details just as soon as you can talk ’bout this case.”
Ramsey was half surprised to hear herself say, “You’ve got it.” She followed the woman out the back door to the porch. “Did that dress do the job the other night?” Remembering the woman’s words, she asked, “Did your ex bleed when he saw you in it?”
“Sliced and diced.” Leanne’s smile was feline. “I’d be lyin’ if I said that didn’t make my night.”
When Dev closed the door behind the woman, Ramsey walked over to him and slid her arms around his waist. Tipping her head back, she murmured, “You have a devious mind, Stryker.” She gave him a quick kiss. Settled in for a more lingering one. “I’m finding it’s one of my favorite things about you.”
He wasn’t a man to waste an opportunity. His lips warmed on hers and hazed her mind pleasantly. “Nice to know that my penchant for crime meets your approval.”
When his hands grew more inquisitive, she wedged her palms between them and gave his chest a light push. “You ever pull anything like that, and it jams up one of my investigations, I’ll slap the cuffs on you myself.”
His smile was wicked. “I think I just might enjoy that.”
Ramsey blew out a sigh. “Yeah, you probably would.”
It was a good thing, she concluded three hours later, that Dev had insisted they finish their meal before tackling the records. Ramsey rubbed the heels of her palms against her burning eyes. They were only halfway through the pile, and they hadn’t come up with anything really valuable yet.
They’d run across several references to turmeric, buried amidst a mind-numbing host of other herbs, plants, and crops in the endless cycle of planting and harvesting detailed in the records. There were the minutiae of preparing everything for use, whether it was cutting off and cleaning roots, pulverizing them to powder, or grinding grain and corn for food. None of it was remotely helpful, and she lowered her hands to gaze at the heavy leather-bound records balefully.
“So these almost have to have all been written by his wives, huh?” She glanced at the running list she was keeping of author names and dates. “Given the timeline we have placing Ashton in this area, it’s doubtful they’re relatives. Or children.”
“I’m guessin’ so. Look at this one.” Dev shoved a record over to her from his seat beside her. “It details more of what their property looked like. That clearin’ of Rose Thornton’s didn’t hold just the main cabin, but several structures.”
“With fourteen wives, the man would need several structures,” she muttered, scanning the page he indicated. “A curing barn. For the meat, I guess. Oh, a planting shed.” She read silently for a moment, the close, cramped writing hurting her eyes. “Clever, even back then. They were growing plants out of season, out of climate even, in a crude temperature-controlled building.” And turmeric, she noted, was on the list of plants grown there. “A celestial chapel for their devotions. Spent a ton of time in it, from the looks in those records.” Every meticulously recorded day mentioned devotions before dawn and again after nightfall. “Doesn’t look like all the time Ashton spent in church did him any good.”
“God can be a dangerous weapon in the hands of the wrong person.” At her surprised look, Dev shrugged. “The things some people have done in the name of religion over the history of mankind are pretty horrifying.”
She couldn’t disagree. Not when it was appearing more and more possible that someone had raped and killed Cassie Frost with some sort of god complex in his mind. Ramsey wondered where someone like Quinn Sanders would have met up with a man like that.
Handing the book back to him, she resumed studying the list she’d made. “We’re missing a record.”
“No, this is it,” he said, without lifting his head from the record he was studying. He was wearing those glasses he’d had on in the book photo, she noted, which he’d sheepishly admitted to need for reading. She’d snuck more than one look at him in them throughout the night. She thought she just might strip him naked when they were done, all but those rimless glasses. On him, they looked sexy.
Jerking her attention back to the list she made, she cleared her throat. “Yeah, but each record book was written by a different woman, recording the daily activities of the Ashton clan for a calendar year. And one year’s missing.”
Finally, he lifted his head. “I asked Leanne specially. She says these are all of them. And she’s had the run of that museum since she was in grade school, what with Donnelle’s devotion to the place. She’d know.”
Once she’d discovered how they were arranged, she’d flipped the front of each open and noted the name and year covered. Silently, she began jotting the years down in chronological order.
Once done, Ramsey looked up, satisfied. “Like I said. We’re missing one. 1892. The records run from 1882 to 1898, so it didn’t start right away when Ashton went down there. That’s seventeen years. We’ve got sixteen books. And if our assumption is true and these are written by Ashton’s wives, he must have acquired a few wives after his marriage to Ruth.”
“Goes to figure, given his history,” Dev agreed. “Probably had even more than that. Could be he just gave his favorites the honor of writin’ the annual records.”
“So where’s the missing book?”
They looked at each other for a moment. “Could have been lost through the years, I s’pose. Or ruined.” He gave a quick grin. “Maybe someone spilled a beer on it or somethin’.”
“Or maybe it was destroyed.” Her mind was working rapidly. “Maybe someone wrote something in it that Ashton didn’t like.”
Dev looked dubious. “What would that be, that they didn’t write borin’ enough? Because I gotta tell ya, readin’ this stuff the first time had my eyeballs bleedin’. It’s not any better tonight. I can’t for the life of me figure how people got the strength to face ’nother day if this”—he thumped the book in front of him for emphasis—“is all they had to look forward to.”
“When did Ruth Ashton disappear?”
He paused. Then, without a word he got up from the table and went to his computer desk in the next room, began rummaging through the notes stacked there. When he went still, she knew she had her answer.
“Eighteen ninety-two.”
Her mind was a jumble with pieces of the puzzle, and she gave them time to click into place before speaking. “So what if she displeased Ashton somehow? Maybe he found out about the letters she’d written home.” And how, she wondered for the first time, had Ruth managed to smuggle them out for mailing in the tight-knit community in the first place?
“That may have given him reason to kill her, but not to destroy the record she created.”
“Unless he got his hands on a letter, discovered she was selling him out to her parents, and then took a closer look at the records she was writing.” Driven to move, she shoved her chair back and paced the length of the room. “There had to be constant supervision in their life. These people lived in each other’s pockets. Ruth would have had to be smart to conceal something in the records that was escaping everyone else’s attention.” But the fact she’d somehow managed to write and mail those letters home proved she’d been plenty smart.
“Eighteen ninety-two.” Dev looked pensive, staring into space.
When he didn’t go on, she said, “What?”
“Thinkin’ back to what Donnelle told us ’bout the legend. The red mist is sighted every generation or so. The first time was in 1922.” He paused a beat. “The way I count it, that’s exactly thirty years later. Maybe the legend of the red mist originated from acts a generation earlier than we’ve been thinkin’.”
Everything inside her reared away from his conjecture. Facts. He’d gotten her facts about the existence of the religion. Facts suggesting that Rufus Ashton had been one very sick fuck. But she was nowhere close to embracing the local su
perstition or using the information they’d uncovered to support it.
She was here to solve a murder. One in this century. Her only interest in Sancrosanctity, Ashton’s church, was that it gave her background for the profile she’d be developing.
A man acting on the beliefs taught by a cult—damned if she’d call it a religion—originating in the 1870s. A man who used its beliefs to condone his own twisted pleasures.
Ramsey was on shaky ground, and she was glad she didn’t have Raiker here, challenging her at every turn, forcing her to defend her conclusions. His tactics kept his consultants sharp, made them exacting in their deductions. But there was nothing exact about what she was considering now. They were light on evidence, heavy on speculation. And as a professional, that made her more than a little uneasy.
“Okay.” She shot him a look that was half apologetic, half defiant. “I’m not ready to go there. But the rest of it . . . yeah, it could fit. Where’s that last record book? Have we looked in it?”
Dev reached for it, and she rounded the table to peer over his shoulder as he flipped through it. The careful writing halted midway through the book. Both of them read silently.
“So Ashton died in March, 1898.”
“Again, here’s hoping there’s a hell,” she muttered. “Sounds like they built a special crypt for him.”
“I know that mausoleum,” he said pensively. “The cemetery butts up against Rose’s land. It’s in the oldest corner of the area. Used to play around there when I was a kid.”
The entries grew more random after that. Instead of daily, one day might be recorded, and then the next entry would be weeks later. Until August of that year, where a full month’s worth of entries were entered.
“They left the area under the direction of the new leader,” she murmured, peering harder at the writing. “Pages and pages indicating the area was getting increasingly intolerant—said the pot to the kettle—and they were going west to find a more moral place to settle.”
“And then nothin’ after that.” Dev closed the book slowly. “Apparently the new leader wasn’t interested in keepin’ records.”
“Or if he was, those new records stayed with them. Rufus Ashton’s history remained here in the town he started.”
She insisted on finishing the other books since they hadn’t looked at them chronologically, but very little new information came to light. Ramsey was on the last of them when a word seemed to jump off the page at her. Turmeric.
Slowing, she began to read more carefully. Finally she said, “The author of this record seems like one of those unbearably smug people, you know? The kind that thinks she works harder than anyone else. Does more than her share.”
“A martyr,” Dev offered. He had his glasses off and was rubbing his eyes.
Checking the clock, Ramsey saw it was near midnight. “Yeah, I guess. But she also goes into even greater detail about her days, to prove just how busy she kept. Listen.” Ramsey began to read from the journal. “ ‘My service today was to prepare the basket for the casting out ceremony. I carefully cut away the root of the turmeric and laid it among the most perfect pinecones I could gather.’ ” She looked up at Dev. “Casting out ceremony. She’s mentioned it several times in here but doesn’t define it.”
“Maybe when they threw the undesirable males out of their place,” suggested Dev. “Cast them out because they were too much competition for female attention, or they didn’t make the religious cut in some way.”
Funny how her impression was always several shades darker than his. Or, perhaps, not so odd, given her occupation. “What else do you cast out in religion? Demons, sin.”
“Evil.”
“And if you’re casting out evil, what do you hope to replace it with? Purity, right?”
There was a slight smile on his face as he watched her work through it, but his nod was immediate. “Goes to figure.”
“Turmeric to symbolize purification. Pinecones to symbolize immortality.” And the only people in need of immortality, she thought, were the dead or the dying. “This is it,” Ramsey said surely. “Or at least as close as we’re going to get to verification about the plant on the church window.”
“Is it enough?”
“It’s enough for me.”
“Good.” He shoved the books in front of him away to stretch. “ ’Cuz I have to have these records back in a little over four hours, and there’s the little matter of some sleep ’tween now and then.”
She considered him. He didn’t look all that tired to her. Her lips curved slowly. “I can see you’re exhausted. So I’ll just stick around long enough to get you tucked in bed before I go back to the motel.”
There was a gleam in his eye that no woman in her right mind would trust. “Would you?” His chair scraped the floor as he pushed back from the table and rose. “I am feelin’ a bit weak in the legs. Probably goin’ to need some help just gettin’ back to my bedroom.”
“You are in sorry shape.” She rose, slid an arm around his waist, and was rewarded with a quick squeeze as he hugged her to his side. “I wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t offer every bit of assistance I could.”
“You’re a givin’ sort of woman, Ramsey.” The words were rife with amusement. Slowly, arms wrapped around each other, they moved down the hallway. “I’ve always recognized it.”
It would serve him right, she thought with a flash of humor, to do exactly as she’d stated. Get him all primed and ready in bed and then kiss him on the forehead and go for the door. Just to hear what he’d come up with next.
He nudged her to the left, and they entered a shadowy bedroom. He bent to turn on a lamp on the bedside table. Its soft glow pushed gently at the darkness, relegating it to the corners of the bed where they hovered like inky curtains.
There’d been no lamp on the last time they’d ended up in Dev’s bed, she recalled. She had a fleeting impression of a high school boy’s room, with posters on the wall of muscle cars and pinup girls. Trophies lining the shelves. Knew the room had been kept as it had been when Dev had occupied it full time.
There was a temptation to explore that further. To take a look at the boy he’d been in order to get a better handle on the man he’d become.
But the strength of that temptation couldn’t begin to compete with the urge she felt when she looked in Dev’s eyes. When he lowered his head and brushed his lips down the curve of her jaw. Whisper soft. Too light a gesture to be responsible for her pulse revving to instant life.
Her immediate response was troubling on one level. Because no man had been allowed that power over her. Sex was a mutual give and take, but she was always careful about what she gave. She didn’t look back. Not ever. But she knew he wouldn’t be so easily forgotten. He was dangerous for that fact alone.
His mouth cruised along her chin, down her throat to linger at the hollow at the base of her neck. And she knew, even as her head lolled back to provide him greater access, that if she didn’t take control of this interlude, his tenderness would be her undoing.
She placed her hands on his chest and exerted enough pressure to have them both tumbling on the bed. The springs of the mattress creaked as they landed on the bed, then rolled, limbs entwined.
“Pushy.” Dev’s lips curved. “I kinda like it.”
“You’ve incredibly high standards.” With swift movements, she divested him of his shirt and went to work on his belt. “I’ll try to live up to them.”
Her sudden urgency fed his, and he tugged at her clothing until their hands were engaged in a battle as they fought to divest each other of their garments. And that first sweet feel of flesh against flesh had Ramsey sighing in satisfaction.
Her hands streaked over him, testing, exploring. Rediscovering the surprisingly solid muscle roped along his arms. Layered beneath his chest and stomach. And recalled again the pleasure to be had from his body.
They rolled until she was above him and he used the position to nuzzle her breast, taking the nipple into h
is mouth and sucking, scraping it lightly with his teeth.
Colors kaleidoscoped behind her closed eyelids. This was what she wanted. Sensation rearing up, rollicking through her system, making it easy only to feel. Battening back all thought, all logic, until it was only the act itself that mattered.
He switched his attention to her other breast, and she went on her knees above him, pressing closer. His hand wandered over the curve of her hip and slipped between her legs, rubbing softly at the dampness there, his touch eliciting even more heat.
Last time he’d reduced her to a shuddering mass. This time she was determined to return the favor. But first she had to evade those clever stroking hands. That knowing, seeking mouth.