Erin Solomon Mysteries, Books 1 - 5

by Jen Blood

  “I had it under control,” I said when he sat down. Einstein greeted me with wagging tail and an anxious whimper. I crouched to reassure the dog, too pissed to even look at the Fed.

  “Not for long, you wouldn’t have. And I told you that I’d talk to him tomorrow,” Juarez said evenly.

  I looked at Diggs, who was very determinedly not looking back. “It’s a room full of people. What’s he gonna do, attack me here?” I demanded. “The worst that happens in that situation is that he maybe gets one pop in before somebody takes him down and he goes straight to jail for a few days. You think I can’t take a punch here and there?”

  Juarez just shook his head, like I was too crazy to even argue with.

  “I bet you could take a punch,” Rosie volunteered. Juarez might have thought my most recent stunt made me certifiable, but I’d clearly gained some street cred in the eyes of our chesty young barkeep.

  “Damn straight I can. And I can throw a punch, too, so it’s not like I can’t defend myself in a pinch.”

  “She does have a mean right hook,” Diggs said. He touched his jaw. “Trust a man who’s been on the receiving end before.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “I can handle myself just fine.”

  “I’m not going to fight with you,” Juarez said. “I’m in the middle of an investigation—I can’t just have you interrogating my suspects. It doesn’t work that way. Particularly if I believe it’s putting you in danger.”

  “I’m in the middle of an investigation too, you know,” I said. I wasn’t doing the whole unflappable thing nearly as well as he was. “You act like I called you out here and now I’m working for you or something.”

  “I apologize if it upset you,” Juarez said. “But it doesn’t mean I won’t do exactly the same thing again if I have to.”

  “It’s not that big a deal,” Rosie assured us both, trying to smooth things over. “Will goes off the reservation about once a month, anyway. Trust me, this isn’t the first time a little blood was spilled sous le rouge blanc et bleu.”

  Rosie continued chattering, primarily about the number of brawls the Black Falls VFW saw on your typical Saturday night. Juarez was notably quiet, and Diggs was still not-so-subtly watching me to see what I might do next. Red Grivois had taken Will home, just as Juarez had advised, but otherwise the bar showed no signs of slowing down. In all the chaos, it took a good five minutes before the comment Rosie had made finally sank in.

  “The French you used a few minutes ago—sue la rouge. What does that mean?”

  She gestured toward the American flag hanging above the front door. “Sous le rouge blanc et bleu—Under the red, white, and blue. The flag over there, you know? Why?”

  Suddenly, I was back in Max Richards’ filthy kitchen. What had Bonnie said? When he smells blood sous le rouge blanc et bleu—il est fait.

  “It was just something Bonnie Saucier said to me the other day,” I explained. All eyes were on me. I expected Diggs to make fun of me, but he remained quiet. “You get that she’s crazy though, right?” I insisted. “I mean, I didn’t really take her seriously.”

  Rosie didn’t look convinced. “She’s un taweille. She sees things.”

  “Sarah used that word the other day,” Diggs said. “It’s a witch?”

  “Oui. Her mémère—her grandma, oui?—was from the tribe in Madawaska. Very powerful. She’s predicted all sorts of things over the years. What did she say to you?”

  “Forget it, it’s nothing. And most of it was in French, so even if it was something, it was lost on me.”

  On the other side of the booth, our nubile friend had migrated closer to Diggs. Much closer. She wasn’t actually in his lap, but I had a feeling it wouldn’t take much to get her there—maybe another whiskey shooter. Or a stiff breeze. It was nearly midnight, and I was starting to feel the effects of a series of emotionally draining days and not enough sleep.

  “We should probably get going,” I said. “We’ve got an early morning tomorrow.”

  Rosie made a face. “Do you have to?” She tucked her hand through Diggs’ arm, her big, wet brown eyes on his. “You promised me a dance.”

  Diggs got up eagerly, trying in vain to disentangle himself. “She’s right, actually. We do have an early morning. Raincheck?”

  She wasn’t happy about it, but short of tying him to the booth it wasn’t like she had much choice. “D’accord.” She didn’t actually loosen her grip on him, though. “Maybe I could take you to see the old Lincoln place before you go. You can’t leave Black Falls without seeing it, oui?”

  That was all it took for me to get my second wind. Diggs had finally extricated himself and was putting on his jacket, but I held up my hand for him to wait.

  “You know where the old Lincoln place is?”

  “Oui. Everybody who grew up here does.” A flash of inspiration crossed her face. “We could go now, non? This is the best time to see them.”

  “The best time to see who, exactly?” Juarez asked for me. He didn’t look that sure he wanted the answer.

  “Erin Lincoln,” she said seriously. “And her maman. They walk at night, in the field by their house. Out near where Mrs. Lincoln died.”

  Chapter Ten

  “Erin Lincoln and her mother still walk the fields outside their old house,” Diggs said when no one else spoke. “And you’ve seen them, I suppose?”

  “Make fun if you want—anyone around here will tell you,” Rosie said. She looked at me knowingly. “You want to see, oui?”

  I really, really did. I looked at the guys. Diggs had been around me long enough to know what was coming next, but Juarez was still in the dark.

  “Is it far from here?” I asked.

  “Non. Just a few miles. I’ll get my coat.”

  “What happened to having an early morning tomorrow?” Juarez asked.

  “You heard her,” I said. “It won’t take long. Anyway, you can go back to the motel if you want—we’ll just meet up in the morning.”

  He looked like he was seriously considering it until Diggs gave him the eye. “Come on, Jacky Boy. They must cover this at Quantico.”

  “Almost none of what I learned at Quantico seems to apply when Erin’s in the picture,” he said. He seemed a little depressed by that fact.

  We decided to take Juarez’s rental, since there was more room for the five of us—Jack and Rosie in the front so she could navigate, much to Rosie’s chagrin, and Diggs, Einstein, and me in the back. Einstein required a window seat, which meant Diggs and I were forced to vie for space beside him.

  “You take up a lot more room than someone your size technically should,” Diggs complained after I’d elbowed him in the side for the third time since we’d set out.

  “I could go up front and let Rosie sit with you,” I whispered. “I’m sure she’d be more than happy to cuddle up back here.”

  He stopped complaining after that.

  What started as a lark got progressively more serious the farther we got from town, passing trailers and abandoned houses and an old, ruined mill along the way. Rosie gave us a surprisingly in-depth history of the town, but I was barely listening—too busy trying to imagine my father as a kid in this desolate little backwoods world. When I was growing up on Payson Isle, he never talked about his past. I could remember him reading to me, teaching me, praying with me (a lot)… But somehow in all that, the subject of his childhood never really came up. If it had been as bleak as I was starting to suspect, I could understand why he hadn’t been eager to amble down memory lane with me.

  About twenty minutes after we’d piled into the car back at the VFW, Rosie directed Juarez down a dirt drive almost completely obscured by overgrown brush.

  Not far in, our headlights hit on a sprawling colonial with the windows broken out and the front portico caving in. The shutters were half off and a picket fence around the perimeter had been torn to shreds by weather and unruly teens.

  Einstein and I were the first ones out after Juarez stopped the
car. “It doesn’t look so bad,” I said, studying the place with a critical eye.

  A car door shut behind me, then another. “Says the woman who spent a solid week wandering the paths of Payson Isle alone,” Diggs said.

  “If I didn’t see any goblins there…” I began.

  “Maybe you just weren’t paying attention,” Juarez said. He shined his flashlight across the property, landing the beam on a No Trespassing sign riddled with bullet holes. “You know, legally that sign is all that’s needed to make going in there a prosecutable offense.”

  “Pfft,” I said. “It’s fine.”

  “Pfft?” Juarez asked. “What does that even mean?”

  “Get used to it,” Diggs said. “That’s Solomon’s number-one comeback when she knows you’re right but she’s gonna do it anyway.”

  “Shouldn’t we at least wait until daylight for this?” Juarez pressed.

  “Our plane leaves for Quebec at dawn—we won’t have time before we go. I just want to check it out. It’ll be fine.”

  “Where have I heard those words before?” Diggs said.

  “I’m with you,” Rosie said. She abandoned Diggs and took my arm. “You boys can hang out back here like a couple of little girls, but we’re going in. Right?”

  I wasn’t used to having an ally in my madness, but I wasn’t about to question it. Still arm in arm, Rosie and I waded through thigh-high grass with a bravado borne of too much alcohol and not a lot of common sense. We were halfway there before I heard Diggs and Juarez start out behind us.

  The front door of casa Lincoln was falling off its hinges—admittedly a little more so after I was done trying to pry it open, but I comforted myself with the knowledge that a wrecking ball would be a kindness there.

  It had been a gorgeous house once upon a time, opening into a grand hall with high ceilings, a butterfly staircase, and a chandelier that I suspected would have fetched a pretty penny if it didn’t appear that hooligans had spent the past thirty years swinging from it.

  The entire house had been graffiti’d from floorboards to rafters, and the floors were littered with old beer cans and cigarette butts. Whatever ghosts may have been in residence, they apparently weren’t enough to dissuade the locals looking for a den of iniquity in their own backyard. Juarez hung back with Einstein, while Diggs, Rosie, and I forged ahead to the second floor. Our flashlight beams bounced in tandem through each of the rooms, over broken glass and spent condoms and the occasional stray pair of underpants.

  “Do you have any idea what you’re looking for?” Diggs asked when we’d hit nearly every room on the second floor, and I still hadn’t ventured farther than the threshold in a single one.

  I didn’t have a clue what I was looking for. It wasn’t like I was expecting Erin Lincoln and my grandmother to spontaneously appear before us. I was just looking for a connection, I think. To feel as though, somehow, I belonged to this place. Or my father had, anyway.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted to Diggs. “I just want to look around a little.”

  Downstairs, I heard something skitter across the floorboards. Einstein whined, but he made no move to leave us. We walked down another short corridor tagged with clever slogans from the locals, none of them all terribly original. They kept up like that all the way to the end of the hall, with one notable exception: The last door on the left was closed. There were no beer bottles or cigarette butts in front of it. No sign that someone had used the door for target practice; no food or condom wrappers. The only graffiti was three words written across the center in large letters:

  HERE BE DRAGONS

  I looked over my shoulder at Rosie. Her bravado was wearing thin.

  “Nobody goes in there,” she said. “Jamais. That’s the rule. Do whatever you like to the rest of the place. Just don’t touch that room.”

  I don’t really believe in portents from beyond the grave or ghosts or ghouls, and the only creatures of the night I’m especially fond of can be found on primetime. But for the first nine years of my life, I was raised by a man who believed in all of them—his conviction in the afterlife and the spirits who roamed the shadow world was nothing short of fanatical. Regardless of how pragmatic Kat may have raised me to be after the fact, it was hard to simply dismiss those early years when Dad was running from every bump in the night.

  Rosie took a few steps back to join Juarez and Einstein. Diggs, the perennial skeptic, took his rightful place by my side.

  “There’s no such thing as spooks, kids,” he said calmly. He pushed at the door, but it didn’t budge. He tried pulling; still nothing.

  “Is it locked?” I asked.

  “Must be,” he said. “I don’t think it’s moving.”

  I shouldered him aside to give it a go myself. I’d barely touched the knob before it opened.

  “Very funny,” I said.

  He frowned. I can usually tell when he’s kidding, but when my flashlight beam caught him this time there was no telltale spark to his baby blues.

  “I must have loosened it for you,” he said.

  That ghostly chill I’d been feeling ever since I’d started chasing the Gendreau/Lincoln story took up permanent residence at the base of my spine and the back of my neck as the old door creaked open. I shined the flashlight across the walls and the floorboards. Unlike the rest of the house, this room was untouched: no graffiti, no bottles, no condoms. There was no furniture. The only things that remained in the room were an old rocking horse and a baby doll that would have given me the willies on my best day.

  “This must have been her room, don’t you think?” I asked. I didn’t go in.

  Diggs passed the threshold and shined his flashlight along the walls, treading carefully to avoid rotted floorboards. He stopped at the other side of the room and focused his light on a section of the wall where the wainscoting had broken away.

  “Come take a look,” he said to me.

  I crept across the floor, just waiting for the ground to fall away beneath my feet. When I reached Diggs, I crouched beside him. My flashlight beam joined his. There on the wall, hidden behind the wainscoting, the letter J had been carved into the wood. Beneath it, smaller but no less distinct, was the letter E. Jeff and Erin. Under the initials, someone had carved an arrow pointing all the way down to the floor.

  I tried to imagine the two of them—these siblings Sarah Saucier said were too close, one light and one dark—making their mark on this home they barely knew, then covering it back up so only they would know their secret.

  I knelt in the filth and checked out the floorboards directly below the arrow. What I suspected had once been the best hardwood flooring money could buy was now so rotted that it took no time at all to find the board Jeff and Erin had been pointing to. Einstein came over and tried to help, but he just ended up giving himself a sneezing fit by snuffling too much dust. He was relegated to the sidelines with Juarez and Rosie; Diggs took his place. He knelt beside me while Juarez manned the flashlight. Darkness shrouded the scene. We worked on the loose board for less than a minute before we were able to pry it up with Diggs’ utility knife.

  Juarez shined his light inside the compartment we’d found in the floor. There, hidden beneath more dust and dirt, was a filthy old t-shirt. I took it out gingerly, disappointed until I felt the weight of something wrapped inside.

  I peeled the shirt away. Inside was an old diary, worn and faded. The inscription on the inside cover was written in a child’s sloping handwriting:

  The Journal of Erin Rae Lincoln

  PRIVATE!!!

  ◊◊◊◊◊

  We managed to get out of the old Lincoln place unscathed, with an almost-disappointing lack of hauntings or ghostly appearances to report. We dropped Rosie at her grandmother’s place—a double-wide trailer on a dead-end street not far from the VFW—and then waited until the light came on inside before we pulled away. We left Diggs at his Jeep at the VFW, and by the time Juarez and I got back to the hotel, it was almost one a.m. Juarez had been
quiet all night—or at least since my little rebellion back at the bar. He and I walked Einstein together, on the same abandoned stretch of Route 1 I’d nearly been run down on twenty-four hours before. We were almost back at the motel before I finally broke the silence.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “Maybe I should be asking you that,” he said. “It’s been a long day.”

  That it had. “I feel like we’re getting closer, though,” I said. “The thing with Will Rainier is big; you might not see that yet, but you will. The fact that those three names—Jeff Lincoln, Will Rainier, Hank Gendreau—keep coming up can’t be a coincidence.”

  “Will and Hank’s names only come up in connection with Erin Lincoln and Ashley Gendreau,” he pointed out. “There’s nothing to indicate they had any involvement with any of the victims found in Canada.”

  “You’ve looked into it?”

  He stopped walking and turned to face me, an amused glint in his eye. “I get the feeling you must not think I’m very good at this job.”

  “That’s not true. I think you’re probably very good at your job, but things get missed—I just want to make sure that doesn’t happen with my father. I mean, look at Hank Gendreau.”

  “There’s every indication that Hank Gendreau did, in fact, murder his daughter. So far I haven’t seen a thing in the file to convince me otherwise.”

  “Have you talked to him? If you do, you might change your mind.”

  He shook his head. Einstein sighed beside me, no doubt wondering when—if ever—we were going to bed. I reached down and scratched behind his ears while I waited for Juarez’s response. His amusement had given way to annoyance, or at least a hybrid of the two.

  “You really are just…”

  I quirked an eyebrow and waited for him to continue. “Just…?” I finally prompted.