“Was anything touched in the house?” Fin asked.
“No, sir, and I would have known. I know this place like the back of my hand. I know every little relic in it. Whoever did this never entered the house—they just brought her through the woods and set her on the porch. I swear. Now, they had to have come through the woods because there is—and always has been—rough foliage by the gates. And I like to think I would have woken up with someone coming that close.”
“There was no rain,” Tom Drayton said. “But our forensic people couldn’t find prints of any kind. Whoever did this was wearing gloves. They knew how to make sure they didn’t leave anything behind.”
“Tom, Mr. Fryer, would you mind if Avalon and I take a walk around here?” Fin asked.
“No, sir, I don’t mind a thing that you do. I’d be happy to give you a tour of the house, if you’d like, too.”
“Thank you,” Fin said. “Right now, we’re going to walk, if you don’t mind.”
“Be my guest.”
Fin headed around the men and up to the porch, pausing to look at the steps, and at the wicker chair that sat near the door.
“This is where it was?”
“Yes, sir, just about,” Fryer said.
Fin nodded his thanks and then looked at Avalon. “Shall we take a walk around?”
She nodded.
He caught her hand; she was glad of it. They started around the porch to the back of the house.
The size of the place was in its two stories, she thought. It might have been about five thousand square feet altogether, a perfect square. It didn’t take any time to walk around to the back.
There was a bit of lawn, but not much. Forest stretched out behind it in all directions.
“Trees and trees and...a few gaps,” Fin said, and pointed.
He started walking toward a narrow opening, drawing her along with him.
“Fin?”
He stood still for a minute once he had started through.
“It is a trail,” he said. “Come on, let’s see where it takes us.”
They walked through brush and foliage.
The trail twisted and turned and finally broke out to a patch of earth with another trail behind it. He hurried toward it.
Since he still had her hand, Avalon had little choice but to follow.
He stopped again and pointed, and she could see through to the trail’s end, where a narrow opening led to a paved road.
“He didn’t come alone,” he said.
“I can see what you mean or what you were looking for, but why do you think that?”
“I don’t think one man could have come here and gotten through the trees and brush carrying her weight and keeping her so...pristine. I think he had help. The same on Christy Island. It’s one thing to drag a body around. Another to create such a display. There isn’t one killer. Or, at least, he has someone abetting him when it comes to disposing of—displaying—the body.”
Avalon stared at him, and she felt a strange sensation of cold, thinking at first it was because of his words.
But then she heard a voice behind her.
“Miss?”
Avalon swung around, feeling the brush of a chill on her shoulder as the voice continued.
“There were two of them. Two of the monsters, all in black, carrying the poor wee lass through all this, so careful, and laughing and commending one another and warning each other they must take care. And then she was there, so young, so lovely...so dead!”
She and Fin had been joined by the dead.
Behind Avalon stood a girl of about eighteen wearing a blue dress that might have been a day gown worn by a woman of substance a century and a half ago. Her eyes appeared huge and blue, her hair was a soft brown, and she had a mournful look as she shook her head sadly.
“Forgive me... I felt something about you, miss. You see me...you hear me. You...” She paused, looking at Fin. “You both see and hear me!”
Fin bowed his head in recognition.
“We do,” he said softly. “And anything you can tell us will help. Anything at all.”
Seven
“Alana Grimsby Howard,” the young woman told them with a curtsy. Fin introduced the two of them, grateful Avalon had come with him.
The young spirit had seen something in Avalon. Something special, or “sensed” it rather, as she had said.
After the introduction, he explained he was with the FBI, and then thought he might have to explain the FBI to her.
But Alana waved a hand in the air. “I have been around a very, very long time!” she said. “Love my home,” she explained to them. She let out a breath. “My father, wounded, came home to die. My husband, wounded, came home to die. Then there was fever... I know they whispered I didn’t have the will to fight it, but they were so wrong—I was a mother, and I would have done anything to stay with my child.”
“I’m so sorry!” Avalon said.
“It’s all right, and we’re here together now.”
“General Grimsby and your husband have remained, too?”
The spirit nodded. “My poor father! Such a good man. He hated the war. He had always been a military man and my mother came from money. She passed years before the war, peacefully, in my father’s arms. Despite his position, he was against what happened. He always hated the very concept of slavery—he said a human soul could not be owned. But he also loved his home, Mississippi... Anyway, the war took a toll, but I think maybe he stayed because he became such an ardent believer in a cause that wasn’t his when it began, but became his. He believes we will all move on when all men and women cease to be cruel and hateful to one another and learn that God created all human beings.”
“That may be a long, long time...” Avalon said dryly. Then she looked at Fin with dismay, clearly wishing she had bit her tongue.
“I think that we just have to pray that we keep moving forward on that score,” Fin said, not wanting to crush her hope, yet wondering if such a day could ever come.
“The law must help us all move forward!”
“The law does help,” Fin said. “But, as I’m sure your father knows, the law may be one thing—changing the hearts and minds of some people is a monumental task. But it goes on. Some human beings are born...twisted. Some are taught a cruel way, but some are monsters, such as the ones who did this thing to the young woman who was left on your porch.”
Alana nodded. “I was so—so horrified when they came that night. I didn’t understand at first what they’d done, what they were doing...”
“When they came, was she...” Avalon faltered.
She looked to him for help. He nodded gravely to the ghost of Alana Grimsby Howard. “When they brought her, she was dead and dressed as she was found?”
Alana nodded.
“Might your father or husband know more?”
“I woke them when I saw what was being done. There were, sir, as you surmised, two of them. They were all in black. I don’t know what they had on their faces, but they wore masks of some kind, made of material, and they formed to their faces. They wore black trousers and long-sleeved black shirts. They meant to blend in with the darkness.”
Fin walked out to the road.
Ellen Frampton had been murdered two years ago. Two years of rain and storms had come and gone.
He studied the poor dirt road where they stood, anyway, mentally tracing back the way that it might lead out of the forested area.
Easy enough. The killers had taken I-10, just as they had, to reach the mansion. But had they come from the east or the west?
There had to be a base of operations somewhere; a place where they took their victims, where the women were killed and drained of blood and dressed like dolls for display.
But where?
He had to wonder where else these kil
lers might have struck; with signatures so similar, they had to be the same. Or could it be worse, could there be more murders that they hadn’t discovered yet?
Might there be even more than two people involved?
Aware that he was being watched by Avalon and Alana—the living and the dead, he thought dryly—he searched the road. He wondered how silly he must look as he thrashed through the bushes, long grasses and trees that grew close to the road.
The forestry service or road-maintenance crews must have kept the road open, and so they would have been over it several times in the last years.
But they would have kept the road cleared—they wouldn’t have dealt with the heavy growth that encroached beside it.
“Fin?” Avalon asked softly.
He stopped and shook his head. He needed a team out there. And it might bring them nothing. He knew that Tom Drayton had ordered a forensic team out, but Fin didn’t think they had searched the road here. They had never known how the killers had arrived to set up their victim.
“Fin?” Avalon said again.
“What are you looking for?” the ghost of Alana asked.
“I have no idea. Something. Anything. They can’t be perfect. I don’t care what they know about forensics and law enforcement. They can’t be perfect.”
He was muttering; sounding a little crazed, he thought. Maybe he was.
These killers couldn’t get away with it.
His mind was racing, as well. One man had lured Cindy West away when she had left the pizza parlor. One man was in the video surveillance from the casino.
Were they a team?
Were there more of them? He thought about the murder fantasy website.
What else went on in the true dark web?
“Okay,” Avalon said. She started fighting through the bushes with him. He was happy to have her join, even though finding anything was a long shot. It was a thankless task and she finally stopped.
“We need to go back,” she said.
“There has to be something—”
“We need to go back and get flashlights—that would help tremendously. The undergrowth causes too much darkness.”
He had been bending low over a thorny bush, and now straightened.
She was right. And nothing was going to change in the time it would take them to do this right, to do a thorough search.
“We’ll head back.”
He led the way, aware that Avalon followed close with the ghost of Alana Grimsby Howard just behind her.
They wove through the path and back to the house. Tom Drayton and Robert Fryer were on the porch. Tom was sitting on the steps; Robert was sitting in the chair—the wicker chair where Ellen Frampton had been left. Maybe it wasn’t the same chair. But Fin wondered.
Tom stood, looking at Fin anxiously.
Fin told him, “I think I know how the killer brought her here and I think he had help. We found a trail that leads to a dirt road—”
“There are a lot of dirt roads around here,” Tom said, frowning.
“But not that many that lead to gaps in the forest,” Robert Fryer said. He looked at Fin hopefully.
Fin nodded. He thought about where they were and remembered that with all his friends at the force, Tom was still retired.
“I’m going to get a team out there,” he said.
Tom nodded. “Might be better you try to do it. They might just think that I’m...obsessed. Unable to let it go. And I think that... I don’t know. I am obsessed. Best if you bring in agents. Fresh eyes.”
Fin nodded and pulled out his phone. He called headquarters and spoke with both Jackson Crow and Angela Hawkins. Jackson would get him a team out there as fast as possible.
Angela was cross-referencing murder scenes from across the country, to search for anything that echoed this case. And she was getting someone in their office on the dark web, searching for sites like the one Avalon had so briefly discovered.
“What do we do now?” she asked.
He smiled. “Wait.”
Robert Fryer stood up. He shivered slightly though the day wasn’t cold, and Fin thought that he was feeling that Alana was near.
He opened the door to the house, indicating that they should come in.
“I’ll tell you about the place, if that’s okay. I don’t think I can just sit, and it would be really rude of me to go watch a game show or read a book,” Robert said.
“He gives a great tour,” Alana whispered to them.
The house might not be important as having belonged to a president or a famous statesman, but it was a beautiful display of the Victorian era. Portraits of the general and his wife took precedence over the mantel in the large entry. The floor was hardwood, covered with handsomely knit rugs.
“The land came to the Grimsby family early in the 1800s,” Robert Fryer said, compelled to give his speech. “Verne Grimsby, father of General Amos Grimsby, started the house in the 1830s—it was completed, as it stands now, by 1855. Amos Grimsby went to West Point and fought in the Mexican War alongside Grant, Sherman, Lee and Longstreet—all men on the same side at the time. Amos gave speeches against secession. He might have owned a lot of property, but he was never a planter. In his memoirs, he admitted that he should have upped and left because he didn’t believe in the institution of slavery, but he was a Mississippi man born and bred. He was injured at Shiloh, and came home to die, just weeks before his son-in-law, Arthur Howard, was also injured—to make it home to die in the bedroom upstairs. Alana Grimsby Howard nursed both her father and her husband until both took their last breaths. She succumbed to a fever soon after herself, leaving her child, Ezekiel, to the care of a cousin who raised the boy. The current owner of the house is a direct descendant of General Grimsby who maintains the house as a historic venue, believing that the home showcases the Victorian era in the United States. If you’ll follow me, you’ll see the grand dining room, and the kitchen—a small area added in the late 1800s when the original kitchen, outside, burned down after an electrical storm. Please...”
Robert Fryer walked ahead of them, pointing out the woodwork on the dining table in the grand dining room that could sit up to twenty guests. There was a music room that offered a grand piano, a violin on a stand and a harpsichord.
“Grimsby was a great believer in education...for everyone,” Fryer told him. “And his daughter, Alana, was a talented musician. She was adept with all the instruments here and was said to have the voice of an angel.”
“I imagine that she did,” Avalon said. “It’s a beautiful home.” He noted that she glanced toward Alana as she spoke.
Alana smiled.
“Well,” Alana whispered to them, “the place is haunted. But not by that poor young woman. I believe...well, I’m not that experienced, but I believe she went on. I had to stay... I couldn’t leave Ezekiel. He did grow to be a fine young man. I think he sensed me near sometimes, and his father and grandfather, as well.”
“Her son, Ezekiel, had children?” Fin said.
“Ezekiel had four sons. He became a college professor and two of his sons went the same route—one became a state senator, and one went on to open a vocational school.”
“That’s wonderful. I know that Ezekiel’s parents would have been extremely proud,” Fin said, glancing at Alana, too.
Robert paused, shivering a little again, as if something inside him sensed Alana there, even if he couldn’t pinpoint the cause of his chill.
“Impressive—and amazing that the house and so many articles from the family and the period remain here,” Tom commented.
Robert Fryer nodded and added dryly, “You know, we had the occasional visitor—the true historian who was interested in people and lifestyles...and, sometimes, just the person heading from Biloxi to Vicksburg, still a buff, not just so rabid. But in the last two years, more people come. Now that we�
��re haunted. I mean, we must be—by that young lady left to be discovered on our porch. I suppose it’s good for the house. Great for the upkeep. But it doesn’t do much for my faith in humanity.” His shoulders sagged.
But then he beckoned them on. “Come on, you should see all the rooms. As I said, we keep care here. The house itself is such a fine example of the period and the rooms have changed so little. Even through the many decades, and family members moving off, of course. There was always someone, however, who saw to it.”
He was still showing them the upstairs bedrooms when they heard the quick toot of a horn.
“That will be a team from the local office,” Fin said.
“I’ll get the gate,” Robert said. “Unless you want to go with them and drive out to the road behind, where you think the killer got in from.”
“We’ll bring the team in, and I’ll lead them through the back first,” Fin said.
He headed down ahead of Robert Fryer, who passed him at the doorway to hurry to the old guardhouse to open the gate.
There were four in the forensic team—a man named Bert Nelson introduced himself as the head of the team.
He was familiar with the case, and he and his team members had done a quick study of the state police report from the time of murder.
“I’m not sure what we can do for you at this point, Special Agent Stirling,” Bert said. He was a serious man in his late forties or early fifties with close-cropped graying hair and an athletic build. “They combed the porch and the grounds. The medical examiner tried to pull prints off the body. All was to no avail.”
‘I don’t want you to try to find something here,” Fin explained. “But I’d like you to follow me through a trail to a seldom-traveled dirt road that eventually leads out to a paved road and then I-10. There may be nothing, but—”
“There may be a serial killer at work,” Bert said, nodding his head. “We heard about Christy Island. But, I’m curious—what makes you think you’ve found the right trail and the right road?”
“Process of elimination,” Fin said. “There may be nothing—two years have passed. But I don’t think they would have taken the same care where they parked to come through that they did on the porch. They wouldn’t suspect that anyone would be able to discern just what they had done.”
The Forbidden Page 12