by H. P. Bayne
“Doesn’t necessarily eliminate the possibility, but it’s probably good news,” Lachlan said. “When did your neighbour see him? Before or after the shooting?”
“I don’t know.”
Lachlan made a rotating gesture with his hand. “Well, can we find out? It might help us figure out whether he had a hitman on his tail when he left Montague’s.”
Dez got on the phone in a hurry, hoping both Emily and Forbes could provide answers to soothe his new fear.
“Shooting happened around ten,” Dez said. “Emily saw him between midnight and one in the morning.”
“That’s a good sign,” Lachlan said to Dez’s great relief. “If he made it there without being taken out, he probably slipped any tail he might have had. Of course, it also leaves us back at square one. Any idea where to start looking? You know him best. Where would he go?”
“If he’s worried about putting people at risk, he’s proven he can drop right off the radar. If he doesn’t want to be found, he won’t be.”
“That’s a cop-out. Everyone can be found if you’ve got the right people looking. If you and I aren’t the right people, they don’t exist. Let’s break it down. He doesn’t have a lot of options. I’ve been paying him under the table for his work, but it won’t be enough for a long-term hotel or major transportation. Did he ever get set up with fake ID?”
“No, we never approached anyone about that sort of thing.”
“So that limits where he can go and how far. We’re sure he’s got his dog with him?”
“He wouldn’t go anywhere without Pax.”
“So more limits. Plus, he’ll be eager to keep his mug from being seen in public too much. How did he avoid it the two years he was away? Where did he go? What did he do?”
The answer hit Dez like a brick. He could have kicked himself for not thinking of it sooner.
“The Forks,” he said. “He told me he stayed there during those couple of years.”
“Did he say where, specifically?”
Dez’s stomach rolled as he said the words out loud. “Ravenwood Hall.”
“The mansion on the east side of the island? The one everyone talks about being haunted?”
“Yeah, that one.”
“Well, if there’s one place to find a guy who sees ghosts, why not try the most haunted place in town?”
Dez scrubbed a hand down his face. “Crap. Guess I’m going to have to go there.”
“That gives us another problem. Driving through The Forks is not what I’d call an option. We’d only be setting ourselves up for carjacking and murder.”
“You’ve got a better idea?”
Lachlan grinned. “Damn straight I do.”
4
There was a chill in the air when Sully poked his head out from under three layers of blankets.
Winter was coming, and while the snow had yet to fall, the cold suggested it wasn’t far off.
Sully had spent two miserable winters here, nearly dying during one particularly bad cold snap.
A champ at fires, he’d found a parlour toward the back of the house small enough to heat easily. Now, once again, he made the room his home. After lighting the fire last night, he’d curled up on the fainting couch, Pax curled on the floor next to him.
Previously, his routine had been to awaken every hour or two to stoke the fire. But he’d gotten comfortable during his return to his old life. His body clock had forgotten its preset survival alarms, and when he awoke inside the parlour, the fire was completely out.
He stayed where he was a moment, shivering beneath the blankets as he mentally prepared for the extra dose of cold he’d feel once he fully emerged from his cocoon.
Pax next to him exhaled noisily in his slumber. The cold rarely bothered him, thick coat of black fur protecting him from the worst of the elements. But every animal had its limits, and Sully felt guilty for the dog’s sake at having neglected his duties with the fireplace.
He was still thinking about getting up when the distant creak of footsteps somewhere on the other side of the closed door made the decision for him.
Of course, the sound might not be human-caused. He’d heard footsteps before, usually overhead and often in the dead of night. But in a house like this, with its history and inhabitants, you learned quickly to tell the difference between physical and ghostly.
The footsteps he heard now were not made by invisible feet.
Someone was here.
Someone living.
Visitors to an abandoned building in The Forks took on a far different meaning from those anywhere else. Here, the person was likely to be an escaped convict or a messed-up meth user rather than a college kid with a video camera.
Sully jumped up, leaving the blankets where they fell as he lunged for the fireplace poker next to the fainting couch. Pax rose and stood to attention next to him, ears perked and a low growl sounding in his throat. Sully angled his body as he faced the door, heavy, wrought-iron poker drawn back in a batter’s stance.
A crash sounded within the house, then a series of increasingly loud bangs. Noisy Ned had taken longer than usual to realize a newcomer was within his territory and to begin showing his displeasure. The poltergeist tolerated Sully, but he was as good as an alarm system for anyone else.
Noisy Ned was losing his touch, but he’d still prove a helpful ally.
Sully. Pax. Ned. If this intruder was up to no good, they were in for an unpleasant surprise.
A second crash sounded, vibrated the walls as Ned closed in.
This one was followed by a human exclamation. “Bloody hell! Sully! Sully!”
The wrought iron poker dropped to the ground with a dull clatter the same moment as Pax’s growls gave way to a gentle woof.
“Dez?” Sully said, voice not loud enough to carry beyond the room.
He left the parlour, Pax on his heels. A short hall led past a kitchen on one side and a large dining room on the other. From there, it emptied into what would have been a grand entry hall in the house’s pre-flood days. Dez had backed himself up against one of the wood-panelled walls, palms flat against it as his head swivelled to allow saucer-like eyes to scan for hidden dangers in every shadowed corner.
A solid object cutting through the air whistled past Sully as Ned threw his latest improvised missile. Dez ducked just as a rusted brass serving tray clanged against the panel where his head had just been.
“Sully!”
Sully closed the distance to his brother. “I’m here.” Then louder, for the poltergeist’s benefit: “Cut it out! He’s not a threat!” Waiting a moment, he listened for further movement from Ned, but all had fallen silent. The ghost had either decided to grant Sully the benefit of the doubt, or he’d exhausted himself with that last throw. It didn’t really matter which, as long as Dez was able to go home with no cuts, bruises or broken bones.
Dez had gone from ducking heavy objects to wrestling with Pax’s enthusiastic welcome. “What the hell was that, Sully?”
“I call him Noisy Ned for lack of an actual name. No idea who he really is, but he comes in pretty handy when someone shows up unexpectedly.”
“Is there somewhere we can talk where Ned isn’t?”
“I generally have no idea where he is, but we can try.”
Dez fell into step beside Sully as he led them back down the hall and into the parlour he’d just left.
“So it’s true,” Dez said. “This place being haunted, I mean. It wasn’t just some stupid story kids told each other in school.”
“Nope, it’s all true. Near as I can tell, there are at least six separate entities here, and most of them are in a bad mood daily. They all tolerate me, probably because they like Pax and they know I’m looking after him. I think he was Linton Blackmoor’s dog.”
“The most recent owner? The guy who died here in the flood?”
“Yeah. He’s still here, too, I think. I don’t know how to help him or anyone else since I can’t see them or communicate with them,
so we just put up with each other. Kind of like a really bad roommate situation.”
Dez looked around the room, eyes settling on the rumpled pile of blankets on the fainting couch and what was left of last night’s now-extinguished fire. “And you’ve been living here? I mean, you spent two years in this place by yourself?”
“I had Pax.”
“I know. I just meant…. Bloody hell, Sully.”
“It’s not so bad. I’ve got a roof over my head, a way to more or less keep warm, and a stockroom with canned stuff and seeds for the garden out back. And I’ve got Pax and the best security setup a guy could ask for with Noisy Ned.”
“Yeah, but…. Bloody hell.”
It seemed like the right time to try again to fix things. “Dez, I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“I know, okay? I get it.”
“I didn’t keep it from you because I—”
“I heard you the first time. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You haven’t… done anything about it, have you?”
“Killed Lowell, you mean? I thought about it. Hell, I think about it at least once every five minutes. But I haven’t confronted him. Eva’s been keeping an eye on me, making sure I’m not about to fly off in a murderous rage. Listen, I don’t want to stay long, and I can’t. Lachlan’s waiting on the riverbank, guarding a boat we borrowed from some ex-cop buddy of his. Raynor called me, looking for you. He said Montague was shot to death, apparently by a sniper. And he thinks you were involved. Surveillance video shows a guy running out of the house. Someone who looks a lot like you. And… you don’t look surprised by any of this.”
Sully shrugged. “There’s nothing to be surprised about. It was me. I was there.”
Dez’s mouth drew together in a tight line, the calm before the storm. Sully waited, watching as the blood filled the vessels in his brother’s face, then decided he’d better step in to head off the worst of the explosion.
“He said he had answers, and I needed to get him to talk. If there’s a way to take Lowell down for what he did to our family, I had to try.”
“So you broke into his house and confronted him?” Dez was angry, no question, but Sully counted himself a win that the question was growled rather than shouted.
“Sort of. I snuck in while he wasn’t looking and I talked to his back, pretending I was armed.”
Sully filled Dez in on the conversation with Montague that had followed, right up to the point where the bullets started flying. When he’d finished, Dez’s fury had reduced to a more comfortable level of angry.
“You’re an idiot, you know that? Damn it, Sully. You could have been killed. Do you get that?”
“I know. I didn’t count on a sniper in the backyard.”
“The police aren’t sure if you were in on it or if you’re just a witness they need to talk to. Either way, they want you in there for a statement.”
“I can’t do that.”
“I know. And Raynor knows, I think. But he’s talking about outing you if you don’t come forward soon on your own.”
“So what am I supposed to do?”
“No clue. Maybe if you considered the consequences before going off and doing stupid crap, you wouldn’t end up in these situations.”
“I couldn’t have predicted an assassination.”
“But you had to have known the chances of things going bad were pretty damn good. You went anyway.”
“If he could help us take down Lowell, I wasn’t about to leave that stone unturned. I’d have thought you’d be onside with that.”
“I would have been onside with a sit-down conversation that didn’t involve a break and enter and threats.”
“He wasn’t going to say anything without serious incentive,” Sully said. “You have to see that.”
Dez’s sigh and subsequent subject change suggested he did see that. “Still leaves us with what we’re going to do about you.”
“I’m already doing the only thing I can think of. I’ve removed myself from the situation, and I’m somewhere no one will look.”
“I know this doesn’t solve the Raynor problem, but no one ever looked for you at my apartment, did they? You could stay there.”
“Dez—”
“Listen, Sully, I drove into The Forks just one time, when Raynor and I came to look for you at the Dules’ old house. We almost didn’t get out alive.”
“I lived here for two years on my own. I’m not saying it was without problems, but I managed it. I can do it again.”
There’d been a time, not so long ago, when this conversation might have gone very differently. Dez would have laid down an argument as to why Sully needed to be somewhere safe and, failing that, would have resorted to force to get his younger brother to such a place.
Things had changed. Sully could see it in the conflicting emotions passing across his brother’s face. Sully had spent much of his life struggling to exert his independence with Dez, his ability to make his own decisions and mistakes. Now that he was here, it wasn’t without some regret.
“I think you’re making another stupid mistake, but I’m done arguing,” Dez said. “You’ll do what you want. You always do. But I came here for something else. I’m pissed at you with good reason, but I had no call to say what I did to you. I’m sorry I just blurted it out like that. The Gerhardt thing, I mean.”
Sully dropped his head at the reminder, scanning the tops of his and Dez’s boots. The name reopened the door, one Sully had spent the last two days trying to hold shut.
“Sully?”
“It’s okay, Dez. After everything I told you—everything I hadn’t told you—I get it.”
“It didn’t give me the right to nail you with that. Not the way I did. It was wrong. I was wrong. It was a dick thing to do, and I’m sorry.”
Sully forced his head up, his gaze making it as far as Dez’s chin. He couldn’t quite meet his eyes. “It’s okay. Like I said, I understand.”
Dez nodded, muscles in his face relaxing a little. But not entirely. They’d each made their apologies, but words hadn’t fixed what their secrets had broken. Sully wasn’t angry at Dez for what he’d said—what he hadn’t said until two days ago. He was too busy being angry with himself. He’d held out on Dez, had kept from him a truth he had every right to know. Intentions didn’t matter, not to Dez. He was an action guy, and it was actions that counted. Sully’s had been dishonest, and with someone who deserved nothing less than complete honesty.
And there was the other thing, the reality he’d been trying hard to avoid. But it was there, not just around him but inside him. He was Gerhardt’s son. The son of a rapist, a sociopath who took advantage of patients he believed could benefit him. That man was half of Sully’s genetic makeup. His skin, blood, bones, hair, all of it was at least partly made up of Gerhardt’s genes. Emily might have been right: Inside, he was his mother’s son. But the physical parts of him, those were at least partially Gerhardt.
He didn’t want to be inside his body anymore, and it terrified him.
“You okay?”
Sully’s gaze had drifted back down, and he lifted his head to look back up at Dez. This time, he only made it as far as the logo on Dez’s T-shirt.
“Yeah. I’m fine.”
He wasn’t. His brother would see that as surely as he was standing here.
Dez didn’t pursue it.
“Listen, there’s another reason we came,” he said instead. “Lachlan wants your help with his other ghost.”
“Right. I’ll do what I can. I’ll come down and talk to him.”
“We were thinking more along the lines of you coming with.”
“Okay. But after that, I’ll have to come back here.”
For the first time in his life, he hoped for an argument from Dez. He realized as he stood here, drowning in self-loathing, he needed some sort of validation that he was more than a liar, more than a rapist’s son, more than a man with the soul of a killer. Dez had always seen
the best in Sully, and had been quick to remind him when he needed it. Dez had never let him down.
Until, with one word, he did.
“Fine.”
5
Conversation with Lachlan was put on hold until they reached the mainland, boat nosed into a quiet spot on the shores of Riverview Park. Sully didn’t breathe any easier when they hit land.
“I need to get the boat back to my friend,” he said. “Find somewhere to hang out where no one will notice you, then send me the location. Not your apartment, Braddock. It’s the first place Raynor will look. Now, give me a push back out.”
Lachlan didn’t wait for agreement, simply waited like a ship’s captain for his impromptu crew to shove the boat from the shore back onto the water.
Sully watched him go before turning to scan the park. A few people were around, enough to convince him to draw his hood over his head. Dez followed Sully and Pax a few steps before spinning back to the river.
“What?” Sully asked.
“My SUV. The jerk’s planning on driving my SUV.”
“So?”
“So he’s got a concussion. He’s not cleared to drive yet.”
“Well, you’ve got the keys, right?”
“Nope. I left all my valuables at his buddy’s place. My keys, my wallet, even my wedding ring. Lachlan convinced me if we were going into The Forks, we should be going empty-handed, just in case someone tried to rob us.”
Sully grinned. “I think you’ve been taken.”
“Damn it.”
“He’ll be fine. How far is it to this buddy’s place?”
“He’s out of town. I’m thinking it’ll be close to an hour before Lachlan gets back here.”
“There are too many people around,” Sully said. “And I guess we can’t go back to the apartment. Any other ideas about where to hole up?”
Dez quieted in thought. When his expression registered he’d arrived at a possible solution, it also contained an element of reluctance. “Do you still remember the back door key-code at the Black Fox?”