by Joyce Lavene
Berkley Prime Crime titles by J. J. Cook
THAT OLD FLAME OF MINE
PLAYING WITH FIRE
Specials
HERO’S JOURNEY
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
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HERO’S JOURNEY
A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author
Copyright © 2013 by Jim and Joyce Lavene.
Excerpt from Playing with Fire by J. J. Cook copyright © 2013 by Jim and Joyce Lavene.
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eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-60017-7
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Berkley Prime Crime Special edition / December 2013
Cover photos: Truck © by Margo Harrison; Dog © by Eric Isselee; and Background © by Mayovskyy Andrew.
Cover design by George Long.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Contents
Also by J. J. Cook
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Special excerpt from Playing with Fire
Chapter One
Sweet Pepper fire chief Stella Griffin stood on the back deck of her rented cabin in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. She was looking down at the Little Pigeon River as she drank the last can of Coke from her refrigerator. She preferred Coke to coffee in the morning, though more often than not since she’d come to Sweet Pepper, she had coffee.
It was hard to remember to keep the remote cabin well stocked. Stores were harder to get to than in her hometown of Chicago. Now when people offered coffee, or any other beverage or food, she was likely to take them up on it.
Hero, the young Dalmatian that had been adopted by the members of the Sweet Pepper Fire Brigade, was jumping at red and gold leaves that fell from the oak tree that gracefully arched over the deck. It was late November. Most of the leaves were gone. It had been a good game while it lasted.
“So you’re determined to do this?”
Stella turned, the strong wind whipping her shoulder-length red hair around her face. “Yes, I am.”
The angry, questioning voice belonged to her roommate at the old cabin, former Sweet Pepper fire chief Eric Gamlyn. He stood well over six feet with a broad chest and wide shoulders. He wore blue jeans and a red Sweet Pepper T-shirt, his blond hair tied back from his face with a leather strap.
Eric had been dead for forty years. Since his death, he’d haunted the cabin that he built. He was usually a good roommate, but there were some difficult aspects of living with a ghost.
“You know how I feel about this, Stella. It’s a mistake,” he said in a loud voice that shook the cabin around them.
Hero barked at the sound. Stella believed he could hear and see Eric. The two seemed to have a special bond. Eric frequently called the puppy to the cabin from the firehouse and Hero had begun spending the night with them.
Stella was unimpressed with Eric’s bellowing. She was used to it. He liked to throw his spectral weight around when he wasn’t happy about something. She finished her Coke and went inside.
The cabin interior looked like an old hunting lodge, made of large, smooth logs that were stained a light brown color. There were three big rooms—living room, kitchen, and bedroom—with a small area off the kitchen that had a rough-hewn table and a few chairs.
There were deer antlers everywhere, used as a cup holder in the kitchen and as light fixtures throughout the cabin. The living room had a stone fireplace, a large brown leather sofa, and a matching chair. There were colorful Native American rugs on the rough, wood floors. The single bedroom contained an oversized log-framed bed, two dressers, and a side table.
Tall windows overlooked the deck and the Little Pigeon River. The Smoky Mountains rose up beyond the river, their majestic face changing with each passing hour. Stella loved the deck. She thought she could sit outside on one of the old rocking chairs and be happy there forever.
“I know you think you can handle everything, but you can’t clean out the chimney. You’ve already tried and it didn’t work. I’m going to need the extra warmth this winter, even if you won’t. I think it’s best to hire someone else to do it.”
“You know I don’t like strangers in my cabin,” he growled, following her through the glass door that led to the deck.
Stella sat in the brown leather chair with the puppy at her feet. “He’s got good references,” she assured him. “People hire others to do these things, Eric. Not everyone is an expert at everything.”
“I’m the expert on this cabin.” His blue-eyed gaze was able to see the entire structure, inside and out. He could control most things that happened there, even out to fifty feet from the cabin. He could stop bats, southern scorpions, and other pests from invading his space.
It was humans—living humans—he had a problem with. Especially Stella.
Most of them he could scare away easily. Stella was a different matter. He’d given her some leeway since she’d come to save his beloved volunteer fire department.
Now she was taking advantage of his weakness. “He’s not even from Sweet Pepper. The least you could do is hire a local person.”
“I’m not local either, remember?” She put two slices of bread in the toaster, frowning because they were the last two slices of bread. She was running out of everything. She hated driving into Sevierville or Pigeon Forge for supplies. “He’s been here as long as I have. People speak highly of him. I think he’ll be okay.”
Stella had been acting fire chief in the small Tennessee mountain town since August when she’d come from Chicago to train the new volunteers. She was supposed to have finished with the job and been back home within three months.
Three months had stretched into four after the grizzly discovery of Eric’s remains, which had been entombed in the old firehouse. He’d been murdered, not killed in a grain silo fire as people had thought. She wanted to help look for whoever had done that to him.
She still planned to go home as soon as all the questions were answered. Eric had saved her life and had been a fellow firefighter, even though it was before she was born. He couldn’t remember how he’d
died. He deserved to know what had actually happened to him.
Hero whined a little in his sleep and kicked his long legs. Stella rubbed his neck. He was probably dreaming. The puppy had been abandoned, along with his mother, and rescued by a couple in town. The fire brigade had taken Hero in after a call when they’d saved his rescuers’ home. He had been a gift to the fire department.
“You’re a different story.” Eric paced through the living area of the cabin, walking right through furniture and tables.. “We agreed that this is still my cabin.”
“It is still your cabin. You can have it back all to yourself as soon as I leave. Since it doesn’t look like that’s going to be anytime soon, we need to have the chimney cleaned. The last time you started a fire, there was smoke everywhere.”
“I can try again. Soot and creosote have built up. It’s not something lodged in it.”
“My point exactly. I don’t know how to clean a chimney, and I don’t want to learn. For whatever reason, your ‘ghostly powers’ keep you from cleaning it. Patrick will do a good job, and the fireplace will be ready for colder weather. It would look bad for the fire chief’s cabin to burn down because of carelessness.”
Eric ignored her. He pushed himself up inside the chimney again. If blasting his ghostly form through the chimney opening would have helped, the problem would be solved.
The problem was he could only accomplish one or two physical tasks at the same time. It wasn’t easy being a ghost, and holding on to a corporeal form. He couldn’t grasp the chimney broom and force it up and down within the space with enough strength. It was ridiculous!
He didn’t want to admit he couldn’t clean the chimney. It seemed like such a simple task.
He came back, defeated again. Hero jumped up and started barking at him as he emerged from the fireplace.
“If it was actually clogged with something, I could get it,” he told Stella. “The problem is the soot on the walls needs to be scrubbed out.”
“Stop whining about it,” she said. “I have to run down to the fire station for drills and drive to the grocery store for supplies. I’m putting Hero out for a while. Let him run down to the station if he wants to. I’ll bring him back with me.”
“And the chimney sweep?” Eric’s not-quite-solid muscular legs were spread apart like a defiant sea captain, his arms folded resolutely across his chest.
“I told him the door would be open when he got here. Please don’t scare him off like you did the line repairman from the electric company. We didn’t have power for days until they found someone else to come back after the storm.”
He looked into her pretty brown eyes and freckled face. His heart softened, as it always did. “I know. I’ll be careful. I wasn’t expecting the lineman. I don’t like surprises. I’m ready for this.”
Stella smiled at him as she pulled her hair back into a ponytail to keep it out of her face while she went through drills with her recruits. Her mother’s strong features gave character to her face. Her father’s Irish heritage gave her hundreds of freckles.
She’d been a firefighter for ten years, following in the footsteps of her father, grandfather, and great-grandfather—another legacy of Irish blood. That blood made her stubborn too.
Coming to Sweet Pepper to train raw recruits wouldn’t have been on her radar if she hadn’t been injured in a fire, and had a bad break up with her boyfriend. She’d gotten so much more than she’d ever imagined by coming to this small town—including new friends and the intimidating ghost who stood before her.
It wasn’t easy living with a ghost, especially one who could be contentious at times. She’d heard ghost stories from her father’s Irish family her whole life. She’d never expected to live with a specter. There was so much the old stories left out, like ghosts popping in and out of the bedroom and the bathroom. Even though she’d tried to set limits on walking through walls, Eric wasn’t good with limits.
She’d cut him some slack. He’d lived alone for forty years before she arrived. She seemed to be the only one, besides Hero, who could see and hear him. Other people reacted with panicked screams to his tricks as he floated items around the room or shook the cabin. No one had wanted to live there for a long time.
She supposed Eric also made allowances for her. After all, he liked to talk. It had to be hard for him, all those years not being heard. He also liked to cook—another story entirely.
“Do you need anything from the grocery store?” She tucked her red Sweet Pepper Fire Brigade T-shirt into her jeans.
“Maybe some cocoa powder,” he said. “I was thinking about making a chocolate-pepper soufflé.”
“Are you already working on recipes for next year’s pepper festival?”
“You can’t start too early.”
The Sweet Pepper Festival was a yearly, three-day celebration in October. It involved everything pepper, from people dressed like peppers to pepper-recipe contests, pepper-eating contests, and pepper music.
Hot peppers had put the little town on the map. Sweet Pepper worked it for all it was worth. Stella had enjoyed the festivities. She hadn’t thought she would, but she loved the town spirit during the event. People went a little overboard with costumes for her taste, otherwise it was delightful. She’d even put together a recipe for the pepper recipe contest. Stella wasn’t much of a cook— she didn’t win anything. It had still been fun.
She’d quickly found out that Eric loved to cook and had won prizes almost every year during the festival when he’d been alive. Now she was encouraging him to participate. She wondered what everyone would say if she put his name on a recipe.
Of course, the next festival was almost a year away. She didn’t know where she’d be by then.
“You’ll need eggs too,” she finally said. “Anything else?”
“I think that’s it for now. Don’t forget you need sugar and coffee. Walt drank up the last of the coffee when he was here yesterday.”
Walt Fenway was the former police chief in Sweet Pepper. He’d been a good friend of Eric’s. He couldn’t see or hear his friend now but Stella was always willing to translate. He’d become a good friend of hers as well in the time she’d been there. He was helping her work on finding answers surrounding Eric’s death.
“Okay. I hope that’s it.” Stella picked up her purse, keys, and sunglasses. “I can only bring so much up here on the Harley. If Hero comes down for practice, I won’t be able to bring him up too.”
“Use the Cherokee,” Eric said. “The town gave it to you so you’d have something to drive besides that death trap you call a motorcycle.”
“You know I don’t like to use that unless it’s for fire brigade business. I don’t want to take advantage of everyone. They’ve all been very good to me.”
From the time she’d arrived in Sweet Pepper, the thankful residents had insisted on leaving food and other supplies at the cabin, and giving her free meals at local restaurants. She didn’t feel right accepting their generosity all the time. The town paid her a handsome salary—more than she made on her captain’s salary at home.
Sweet Pepper had been the victim of budget cuts by the county. They’d had to re-form their old volunteer firefighter’s group. That’s where she came in. They’d needed someone who could get it started for them.
Eric shrugged as he hovered above the sofa. “You’ve helped them too. I’m sure they have lower house insurance premiums now and they don’t have to worry about losing everything in a fire. Relax and let them help you.”
She didn’t agree with him but she didn’t have time to argue. “I’ll be back later. Don’t forget about Hero.”
Hero ran out the door with her. He was training with the volunteers to become a rescue dog. He was young, but showed great promise. His mother, Sylvia, and her owners, Kimmie and David Spratt, were volunteers too. Sylvia and Hero were always glad to see each other, their re
unions punctuated with ecstatic barking and jumping.
Both dogs loved ladder practice. They bounded up and down from the second floor of the firehouse with careless abandon that their human counterparts wished they could emulate.
The plan for Hero had originally been for him to live at the firehouse, which was located at the end of the long, twisting road the cabin was on. Someone was always on duty there to handle the communication dispatch.
That all changed the first time Eric met him. The ghost and the dog became friends. People frequently commented on seeing the long-legged, spotted puppy running up Firehouse Road to the cabin.
“Be careful,” Eric warned Stella as he always did before she left the cabin. He wasn’t able to accompany her.
At one time he’d been able to go from the cabin to the firehouse he’d built, but since they’d discovered and removed his remains he’d been stuck at the cabin. He didn’t understand why, but there were many aspects of being a ghost he didn’t understand.
Hero started out sniffing the ground around the cabin in what Eric called his perimeter—the area Eric could maintain around the cabin. It seemed to act like an invisible fence for the puppy. Hero never wandered from that fifty-foot space unless Eric released him.
“I’m always careful,” Stella replied as she always did.
She waved to him where he stood on the covered porch in front of the door. She put on her helmet, climbed on the vintage 1979 Harley that had belonged to her father, and kick-started it. The engine chugged to life.
The eighty-inch black motorcycle had seen better days but she and her father had freshly rebuilt the motor before she’d left home. The transmission was getting a little tired but it still raced down the road like a champ.
The bike clunked into gear as she went into the first turn of the sharply twisting mountain road. The wind rustled past her and through the almost leafless trees on either side of the narrow road.
She loved the feeling of freedom the motorcycle gave her. People, especially her mother and Eric, didn’t like that she wanted to ride it. That was too bad. At least she had her father’s blessing. He’d ridden it across the country when he’d been in college. He appreciated her love of the Harley, so much that he’d only say she could borrow it.