by Kay Hooper
“You’re probably underestimating yourself, but when it comes to guests, I’d say that’s the way to go.”
Penny laughed. “True enough. Okay, I’m going to go and get our honeymooners moved.”
“See you later.” Emma made a mental note to ask Jessie if she’d noticed any spirits in the vicinity of the Topaz Room. She caught herself chewing on a thumbnail, and forced herself to stop. But the anxiety she felt was still very much with her.
Whatever Jessie said—or didn’t say—Emma was convinced that her sister’s urge to reopen the old wounds of her past was something that could very well have consequences Jessie hadn’t considered.
Assuming Victor had, in fact, been involved, Emma was certain he would go a long way to protect his reputation. If Jessie confronted him, if she asked the wrong question—or the right one—if whatever had happened even all those years ago reflected badly on him…
For the first time, that struck Emma as odd, the fact that whatever had happened to Jessie had not gotten around town all those years ago, had not become the subject of gossip. That was just the sort of gossip the town thrived on, and Emma most certainly would have heard about it, especially once Jessie had left—or run away from—Baron Hollow.
What that told her was that Jessie had not awakened in somebody else’s house after a party, disoriented and disheveled after whatever had happened to her, forced into a dazed walk of shame past others to get herself out of there and home.
She had somehow gotten home, on her own or with help, and no one had seen her—or noticed anything unusual if they had.
Had someone snuck her into the house? Because it would surely have been very late, and for all his preaching of individual responsibility and self-reliance, their father had kept his teenage daughters under a strict curfew: Jessie might well have been able to sneak in past curfew if she hadn’t been drunk or hurt, but if either had been true, could she really have gotten into the house without waking anyone?
Unless…it had been during one of their father’s regular and sometimes lengthy business trips out of town. By then, he had been accustomed to leaving the girls on their own, with only the middle-aged housekeeper/cook, a live-in widow who had taken no more than a cursory interest in either of the girls and was there more for form’s sake than to exert any authority over Jessie and Emma.
It occurred to Emma, not for the first time, that there were a lot of questions she should have asked herself when Jessie had left—and since then. And even more since Jessie had come home.
For the past, she had no excuse for not asking if something had been wrong, if something had happened to hurt or frighten her sister; all Emma remembered was that after weeks of behaving oddly, practically hiding in the house and keeping to her room, Jessie had abruptly run away, that time for good, and though upset and even angry, there had been little Emma could do about the situation.
Angry? Why had she been angry? Because Jessie had left without even saying good-bye? Because she had escaped and left Emma to endure a small-town life with little change and even less excitement? Maybe. Maybe that had been it. Emma wasn’t sure.
But she was sure that, for the present, she hadn’t asked Jessie more than a few questions because Jessie had made certain she wouldn’t. It wasn’t only her psychic walls that were up; Jessie had put even more distance between herself and her sister, and it was all too clear she didn’t want that gulf crossed.
For whatever reason.
Emma realized that she had exchanged one anxious habit for another; she was absently fingering the small scar in the hairline over her right temple. It told her that her anxiety level was intensifying.
What it didn’t tell her was why.
HE WAS ABLE to get ahead of his prey easily and with enough time to get himself set and ready for her. After so many years as a hunter, he knew what he was doing. And he was very, very careful to make no mistakes.
He settled in and waited, and within fifteen minutes or so, he saw her coming toward him. One look told him she had relaxed her guard somewhat; it was virtually impossible to be guarded for an extended length of time, and that was something he often took advantage of.
She was already questioning herself, doubting what she had felt or sensed earlier. Convincing herself there was no good reason for her to be jumpy.
Good.
He was so perfectly camouflaged in the brush beside the trail that she came within two feet of him without seeing him. In the last instant, as he leaped, he thought she sensed danger, but by then it was too late for her to react effectively.
He had the gun holster unclipped from her belt and tossed out of reach before she could even make a move for it, and was so adept with his razor-sharp knife that the loop holding the pepper spray around her wrist was severed before the gun hit the ground. He cut through the nearest strap of her backpack, and as that weight fell away from her, he had her in his arms, trapped.
She struggled for only a moment, instinctively, before the knife pressed to her throat drew blood. Then she went still.
“Make a sound,” he breathed, “and it’ll be your last. Got it?”
Her chin barely moved in a nod. She was breathing in terrified little gasps, and, held tightly against him, her body shook.
He had her bound and gagged with duct tape and with the hood over her head in a matter of seconds, so practiced in his art that she never even got the chance to plead for her life.
That would come later.
He gathered up the gun and pepper spray, zipping both into her backpack, then hoisted her over one shoulder, picked up the backpack, and set out through the forest, away from the trail.
She smelled like fear.
He liked that.
JUNE 30
Nathan Navarro had settled in nicely over the past couple of days. Baron Hollow had at first seemed no odder to him than most small towns and rather more welcoming than he had expected—though that could have been due to his ostensible reason for being here. He’d been warned; people were intensely curious about writers.
The locals hadn’t wasted much time. He had patiently answered the usual questions about his surname—yes, Spanish in origin but generations back, and really quite a common name in the US and, yes, he was aware that he looked more black Irish than Spanish, a trait for which he credited or blamed his mother—and quite a few about his supposed job.
“Where do you get your ideas?” seemed to be the most popular.
He’d been warned about that too.
But all in all there had been only polite, casual interest in him and only a cursory interest in his movements.
Which was just as well.
It had given him at least some time and opportunity to get the lay of the land, both literally and figuratively. He was more resigned than surprised to find both cell service and high-speed Internet spotty at best, and the terrain surrounding Baron Hollow was difficult, remote, and had a well-deserved reputation for having sheltered for generations more than one fugitive from the determined searches of cops and feds.
There was more than a little bit of bad history here, rather famously so, back during Prohibition and even further back to the Civil War, and bad feelings about various wrongs lingered even today, which was one reason he was undercover.
One reason.
The dense mountain forests surrounding Baron Hollow had, in fact, swallowed up a few fugitives and never bothered to spit them out, somewhat ironically since most of it was federal land. In any case, it was always possible that some of those people were still hiding up in the mountains somewhere, or maybe they had walked out at some point and just stayed off the grid.
Or maybe they had put a hurrying foot wrong and tumbled off a cliff’s edge on a narrow mountain trail to their deaths; bodies left exposed to the sometimes harsh elements, predators, and scavengers were likely never to be found. And if they were found, there generally wasn’t a whole lot left to identify.
Like this one.
Navarro s
tood in a small ravine, looking down at human remains spread out across a relatively level area beneath a granite outcropping that formed a cliff high above, frowning as he studied the scattered bones, a few with tendons and shreds of muscle still attached.
And there was the smell he recognized. Blood soaked into the earth, and decomposing flesh.
Death.
Not much was left of her. Not much at all. He didn’t even see a skull, just a few strands of blond hair clinging to a shriveled bit of scalp at one end and tangled among sticky briars at the other. He imagined some animal grabbing the skull and tugging, making off with all but the few pitiful hairs anchored to the briars and the patch of scalp that wouldn’t let go.
With an effort, he shook off the image, hoping it was just his imagination and not a flash of what had actually happened. As a matter of fact, something about that image bugged him, and when he knelt to look closer, he realized what it was.
Her spine around the base of her neck had been severed, and the cut was too clean to have happened naturally. Nothing had wrenched her head free of her body.
Someone had cut off her head. And though there was no way for him to know for certain if she had in fact been running and had fallen to her death, every instinct he had told him that was what had happened. Which meant that someone—either an unspeakable ghoul or an unspeakable murderer—had found the remains later and had removed her head and taken it away.
His money was on the killer. The question was, had the killer left the rest of her because this was the way he always disposed of his victims, letting the weather, scavengers, and nature clean up after him? Or had he left her here as some kind of punishment for escaping him?
Or for some other reason entirely?
Navarro rose to his feet and continued to frown down at what was left of the victim. He never got used to this. No matter how many times he found himself looking down at some variation of this too-familiar scene, he never got used to it. Which was probably just as well.
Getting used to unnatural death was probably a pretty good indication that it’d be time to hang up his spurs.
For now, however, this was still his job, or part of it. So he looked, making various mental notes. One such note was that it didn’t take a forensics expert to know that these remains had been out here at least a week, and possibly a couple of months.
No, not that long. Between the heat, summer rains in the last week or two, and wildlife hungry after a rough winter, human remains would be consumed and/or decompose and be scattered in a fairly short amount of time.
If he was looking at a victim of a possible killer in the area—and one glaring omission from what he was looking at told him it was more than possible—then she had died recently.
Navarro pulled out his cell phone, figuring it was worth a shot since he was so high up and possibly near one of the cell towers he had spotted earlier in these mountains, but was still mildly surprised to find he had a signal. He hit a speed-dial number.
“Didn’t you just check in?” Maggie asked by way of a greeting.
“This morning. Right now I’m hiking in the mountains west of town. And I’ve found something. Someone.”
“Send me a picture,” she said immediately.
Navarro got the best angle he could and snapped a shot with his cell, sending it back to Haven.
“There isn’t a lot to see,” he told Maggie once he’d done that. “I’d say the animals got to her quickly. Probably drawn here fast because of the blood from the impact. The drop from the cliff above me is at least seventy-five feet, and underneath the fallen leaves and shit here is mostly granite. She hit hard.”
“You think the fall killed her?”
“I think somebody could have dumped a body off the cliff, but this is a pretty damned inaccessible place, and why bother? If he planned to leave her out in the open for the animals to clean up, I’ve passed dozens of ravines off the main trails that would have done the trick. One good shove and she would have rolled down a rocky slope, into some fairly nasty underbrush and, for all intents and purposes, vanished. The animals would have gotten to her before the smell of decomp attracted any attention. No, I think she was running, trying to escape, maybe at night, and fell.”
“No chance it was an accident, a hiker who put a foot wrong?”
“Take a closer look at the picture.”
There was a moment of silence, and then Maggie said, “Ah. No sign of equipment. Or clothing.”
“Yeah. I doubt a naked woman was running through these woods by choice. Even a teenager wouldn’t be that stupid.”
“I don’t see a skull.”
“Neither do I. And there’s a clean cut through the spine I’m guessing means he found her here and removed it. Maybe to delay identification through dental records; unless her DNA is registered in one of the national databases, identifying her is going to be a bitch.”
“Meaning military, medical, law enforcement, government service, criminal—or missing persons.”
“Those are the choices. And your average tourist or hiker doesn’t fit into any of them.”
“There was no news locally of anyone missing?”
“No. I have to say, though, the place is crawling with tourists, which is one reason I’m guessing she was a hiker or somebody else just passing through. Down in town, up on the trails hiking and on horseback, pretty much everywhere you look are people who don’t live here. I talked to a couple of hikers not an hour ago who didn’t even go near town, nor planned to. They were just hiking up along the Blue Ridge.” He paused, then added, “It’d be easy as hell for somebody to go missing up here without any media or law enforcement in the area knowing about it.”
“That,” Maggie said, “is not going to make your job easier. Any other feelings I should know about?”
“Yeah,” Navarro said. “I could feel it down in town some, but up here…There are some very bad vibes in these mountains. The whole place stinks of death.”
Something Navarro, of all people, would know. Because when he came hunting, he was hunting the dead.
SHE HAD TRIED to get his attention, without success. At first it had baffled her, because she recognized what he was and knew he could sense what others could not. He had, after all, left the trail and gone almost directly to all that remained of—
Of her.
She kept her gaze averted from all that remained of herself, of her mortal body, because she wasn’t ready to face that. Maybe she never would be.
Then again, maybe “never” was a useless concept wherever she drifted in between these attempts to break through to the world she had so recently inhabited.
Why can’t you see me? Feel me?
He appeared oblivious to everything except what his normal five senses observed. So maybe he couldn’t see or sense her. Maybe this was a wasted effort. Or perhaps it was simpler than that. Perhaps her fight to stay alive had exhausted her spirit to the point that she couldn’t yet gather enough energy to make him see her.
Somehow, without really understanding, she knew that energy was a factor. That she needed it, needed to focus it in order to break through to…the living.
Frustrated, she watched as he studied the remains, his face showing little emotion. Not unexpected, that; something else she knew without wondering how she knew that he was here searching for a killer, her own killer, and those who hunted monsters tended to be made of very tough stuff indeed.
But would that make it harder, despite his abilities, for her to reach him? Her energy was all emotion; she knew that. For now, at least. All wild emotion, regret and anger and bitterness for a life cut short, all of it without focus. And worry for those left to face what she had. And if he couldn’t feel that, how could he feel her? How could she warn him of the danger?
How could she warn any of them?
She hesitated, then concentrated, staring at his face, willing him to look up, look at her. Willing him to see her. But instead of that, she realized he was growing fai
nter and fainter, and she recognized the pulling sensation that told her she had been here too long.
She resisted instinctively, because there was still so much to do before she could go, before she could rest.
But she’d pushed herself too much already, and as he and the forest around him grew more and more distant and blurry until they finally disappeared into a cold, gray twilight, she wondered in despair if she would be able to do anything at all to stop the monster when those all around him were oblivious to just how close he really was.
SEVEN
Jessie didn’t know quite what she felt when she eventually discovered that the old road that filled her with such cold dread led to a shallow creek, on the other side of which was a neat-looking little cabin.
It had red-and-white-checked curtains hanging in the two front windows. It had a wooden rocking chair on the front porch. It had flowerpots on either side of the front steps. With flowers in them.
Surely somebody wasn’t living way out here, with no sign of electricity run to the place. No…because the “driveway,” such as it was, would surely show more signs of regular usage. Wouldn’t it?
She stayed well back, taking what cover she could behind a cluster of slender pines. She still felt cold and deeply uneasy, constantly fighting the urge to get away from this place as fast as she could.
Weird. Because it looked so damned normal.
It looked like some old lady lived there, she thought.
But it didn’t feel that way. It felt cold and dark and not a place anybody would want to visit. It made her skin crawl unpleasantly.
Jessie could feel that with her walls up; even the thought of lowering them to sense more was so stomach-churning she knew it would be impossible. So she tried instead to use her normal senses.
She watched. She listened.
For a long, long time.
The yard that sloped down to the creek wasn’t exactly neatly manicured, but nor was it choked by weeds; there were patches of red dirt and more than one half-buried granite boulder, but the grass, such as it was, had been cut recently.