The Haunting of Rachel Harroway- Book 1

by J. S. Donovan

  “What the hell was that?” he asked, panting.

  “The girl,” Rachel gulped air.

  “What now?”

  Rachel brushed herself off, catching her breath. “We go deeper. See where she is leading us.”

  “Leading you,” Peak made very clear who he believed to be at fault. “This is absurd, Harroway. We are probably lost. Going deeper would be completely irrational.”

  “I saw her come this way.”

  “I didn’t. I don’t. Let’s head back before the other officers start to suspect that we’re partners partners.”

  Rachel felt sweaty and probably had messy hair from the run. Peak looked the same. I could see it. She turned back to the trees where she last saw the girl. “Have a little faith. This could be big.”

  “Faith?” Peak chuckled at the absurdity. “You know who you’re talking to?”

  “You never stop reminding me.” Rachel started towards the trees.

  “Let’s walk blindly into the woods. Brilliant.”

  “I can go alone,” Rachel suggested, not facetiously.

  “I don’t think so. Your mental health is already in question. Being alone in the woods could be fatal.”

  Rachel wasn’t sure if he was joking or serious. Either way, he followed her deeper into the mountains. They spotted a straggly game trail and walked it for a solid thirty minutes, passing by oaks, burrows, a few more streams, twigs, crying birds, and a deer carcass blanketed in maggots.

  The girl hadn’t made herself known. Rachel chewed her lip nervously. What if it was a trap? She would have no way of knowing. A feeling of isolation and fear bubbled up. Peak didn’t say a word and Rachel didn’t talk to him, knowing that his response would be a series of unpleasant words she wouldn’t want to repeat.

  They hiked to a point where the mountain plateaued. A massive oak tree cast a shadow over Rachel’s glistening, smudged face. A wasp's nest the size of a basketball hung below its lowest branch. Hundreds of wasps littered the ground below, some dead, the rest twitching. Peak paused at the sight, eyeing the dead bees cautiously. Rachel’s attention was on the girl standing on top of the dead wasps. Her face was emotionless. Her blood-red eyes looked on while her left arm lazily rose like that of a string puppet. The girl’s pale index finger extended, pointing to a clearing up ahead.

  Rachel started toward that direction, passing by trees and feeling her heart beat faster. Even Peak saw the dead wasps. She hadn’t seen Orphans effect the world like this since when she first moved into the Hadley House.

  As she got closer, Rachel noticed low lumps of dry brown dirt scattered about the clearing. When she stepped her foot out of the tree line, her breath left her lungs as if someone had poked a hole in her throat. She lurched over. Peak caught her before she could fall.

  “What’s happening?” he asked.

  She felt like a million hands were tugging on her at the same time, about to tear her skin from her body and her limbs from their sockets.

  “This is a bad place, Peak,” she said, catching her breath and wiping away a tear. “A very bad place.”

  The Sense, as she called the odd tuggings and cold shivers, always meant one or two things: the remains of the restless dead or imminent danger.

  After helping Rachel steady herself, Peak drew his pistol: a Glock 19, not as high caliber as Rachel’s handgun, but one with sentimental value. He stepped out into the clearing, keeping his breath calm and his coal-colored eyes alert. Rachel moved in behind him. Goose bumps covered her skin. The area was drab compared to the rest of the lively forest. It was a circle of light brown dirt and a few patches of grass.

  Rachel stepped on something that felt like a stick. She looked down at the arm bone and a hand of skeletal fingers. She looked a little farther. Near a patch of grass, the right half of a skull jutted from the dirt. A centipede crawled out of its upper jaw and into the eye hole.

  “I just found another skeleton,” Peak said as he walked into the middle of the clearing. He brushed his foot over the dirt. “And another one.”

  Rachel moved forward. The mounds were starting to make sense now. Leaves rustled in the nearby foliage. In sync with one another, six teenage girls with milky white skin and dead black faces shambled toward Rachel from behind different trees, all their bloody eyes glaring at her. From behind, the first teenage girl moved in. She released a rattle and so did the other girls, filling the clearing with the sound of a thousand cicadas.

  They approached, surrounding Rachel and freezing exactly three meters away to form a perfect circle. They suddenly went silent.

  Gun up, Peak moved through the center of the clearing. “See anything?” he asked, passing through one of the girls who had rich black hair, a busted lip, and a nasty, pus-filled rope scar around her slender neck.

  “Yes,” Rachel mumbled in reply. She didn’t take her eyes off the girls--seven in total--and withdrew her notebook and pencil. She flipped to a blank page, studying the first girl. A gorgeous redhead with freckles and light brown eyes. Rachel let her hand work as she took note of the girl’s upturned eyes, sloped nose, thin lips, the curvature of her jaw, flannel shirt, jeans, and bare feet.

  “Get Forensics up here,” she ordered as she sketched.

  He checked his smartphone. “No service.”

  “Then run!”

  Tucking away his pistol, Jenson Peak vanished into the tree line, leaving Rachel standing in a secret graveyard.

  When Rachel finished up one sketch, she moved to the next girl-- a black-haired beauty. When she got her likeness down, Rachel, without thinking, sketched the twins with glasses and short statures. The next girl was dark blonde with a busted forehead and widow’s peak. The final girl had nearly black hair cut in a bob and a cross necklace. By the time the sketches had been completed and refined, Peak returned with the forensics unit.

  Peak lied to the other investigators. “We followed a path here. One that we knew the victim ran. Even found some shreds of clothing along the way.”

  As they moved in and began to uncover the bodies, the girls watched. Chewing on her nail, Rachel stepped aside, knowing that this would be her biggest case. A forty-year-old serial murder.

  4

  Fogged Mirror

  The heat from the black tea bit Rachel’s tongue, numbing her mouth as she looked over the evidence board. A photo hung for each of the seven dusty skeletons. Their yellow frames sprawled out, seemingly haphazardly dumped and poorly buried under a few inches of dry dirt. All but the blonde girl whose remains were fished out of a spring runoff on the side of the mountain. Was she the first victim or the last? Rachel wondered, taking another sip. What could the outlier tell me about the killer? Rachel racked her brain. If only the Orphan could talk to her. But the dead remained in their final state of living, meaning that a crushed windpipe equaled no verbal communication. Just another quirk of her Gift, Rachel supposed. Perhaps she could use another aspect of her power to get an edge.

  Over the years of practice and via her mother’s journal, Rachel had learned that the Gift had three tiers: The Sense, The Sight, and The Reality. The Sense allowed her to feel the presence of the restless dead or to be alert for immediate dangers. It was often more trouble than it was worth. Nearing a knife rack or crossing a busy street, Rachel got goose bumps or a cold chill. When she passed by the place of an unresolved death, she developed a nagging feeling in her gut, pulling her to the source like dust to a vacuum.

  The Sight allowed Rachel to see the spirits of the dead, or Orphans as she liked to call them. However, the power also allowed them to see her. Once they did, the Orphans would Mark her, meaning they wouldn’t leave until she gave them closure or until she injected her blended concoction of poisonous herbs and native American spices that sometimes left her steering the toilet seat for days.

  The final power of the Gift was The Reality. She didn’t know much about it, only that it allowed her to see the final moments of the Orphan’s death through the Orphan’s point of view.
Everything they felt or thought, Rachel felt and knew and when they died… Rachel didn’t want to find out.

  Rachel took another sip of her steaming tea and put her mug on the plastic table before her. The Highlands Police Department briefing room had the charm of a high school science classroom. Multiple rows of white plastic tables stuffed with plastic chairs ran in two columns down the length of the room. The audience faced a whiteboard, projector, and laptop podium at the front. Rachel sat in the back, close to the door. She reviewed the artwork in her sketch pad. Her attention drifted to the bruised gash on the girls’ necks, the shading on their faces, and their dark penciled eyes that were red and bulging. From the seat next to her, Detective Jenson Peak eyed the drawings. His black tie was loosened, and his hair was slightly ruffled. Rachel flipped to the fifth page, showing him the first of the short-statured twins, the one with a wider body, and then brought his attention to the front of the room.

  Extremely tall with the same thin sideburns he’d had since the 1970s, Lieutenant James McConnell stood at the front of the room and tapped his extendable pointer on the photo of a short, slack-jawed skeleton curled up in the fetal position. One of the twins, Rachel knew.

  “We’re dealing with seven forty-plus-year-old skeletons, folks,” McConnell said. “We don’t know who they are, their gender, or their cause of death. Who can talk to me?”

  A forensic analysis in front cleared his throat. “Their small jaw size, wide pelvic shape, and bone thinness indicate that most, if not all, are female.”

  “Good,” McConnell jotted down the word Female on the board with his nearly illegible handwriting. “Next?”

  Another analyst raised his hand. “Evidence of underdeveloped wisdom teeth suggest that they are under the age of eighteen.”

  “Nicely done,” the lieutenant wrote down <18. “Detectives. What can you tell us about our Jane Does?”

  Rachel and Peak traded looks. Peak took the initiative. “Their tattered clothes revealed nothing about who these girls were. No identification or licenses was discovered on or within a half mile of the burial site. We believe our killer stripped them of their belongings pre-mortem. There are a few wide-ish trails through the woods that with the proper trailblazing would allow access to a small vehicle, such as a sedan.”

  Rachel flipped through her notebook, noticing a similarity. “None of the victims had their shoes, either.”

  Lieutenant McConnell wrote down the word Shoes with a question mark. “Anything else?”

  They were strangled by a hemp rope. They’re all attractive in their own way. They want me to find their killer, which means he’s not dead. “No, sir,” Rachel replied.

  “Okay,” McConnell put aside his pointer and grabbed the sides of the podium, looking out at his team with tired eyes and a wrinkled forehead. “I want this case prioritized. The media is going to be all over this, folks, and I want to show them that Highlands PD aren’t amateurs. Porter and Hines, get some DNA samples out to the lab. Jones...”

  As the lieutenant delegated tasks, Rachel got the feeling that someone was watching her. Watching her from every direction but just out of sight, like how she felt as a child when the night light burned out and she was alone in her dark room. Careful not to draw attention to herself, Rachel scanned the room until she noticed the girl standing in the corner. Her blonde hair tumbled over her face like dirty golden seaweed. Her blood-red eyes watched Rachel with unblinking resolve. She opened her mouth, releasing a rattle. It grew louder and louder, until Rachel could hear nothing but the crackling noise of a broken throat. The detective kept a straight face, knowing she was the only one who could hear it, but after a minute, she could take no more. She got up and left the room, passing by the small bullpen and into the bathroom.

  Another female officer, Lindsey, washed her hands in the sink. She said something to Rachel, but the harsh noise blocked it out. Rachel smiled at her and nodded to what was hopefully a simple statement. After a moment, Lindsey exited the bathroom. Rachel waited until she was gone before turning on the faucet. The girl’s noise muted the sound of running water. Rachel cupped in her hands under the running water and splashed over her face. The ice-cold liquid slid down her face and jaw like tears. Clenching her eyes shut, Rachel splashed herself again, suddenly feeling the water’s temperature rising. She did it a second time and the noise came to a sudden halt.

  Opening her eyes, Rachel wrapped her fingers around the ceramic sink. The faucets in the nearby sinks turned on and poured hot steaming water that fogged the room. Rachel took a deep breath and looked at the clouded mirror before her. Her heart pounded. The dead were never this restless.

  “Show yourself,” she commanded.

  In the misted reflection, the silhouette of a figure stepped forward.

  Trembling, Rachel turned around, resting against the sink’s edge. It wasn’t just one Orphan who stood before her but all seven, forming a crowd around her. The strangled girls closed in, only a few feet from her. They stank of dirt, sweat, and decay. They watched her with expectation, confusion, and building frustration.

  “You need to be patient. I don’t know enough to help you yet,” Rachel said, keeping an eye on the bathroom door. If someone walked in… She turned her attention to all the running sinks.

  Wham!

  A stall door flung open and smashed shut. The blonde girl frowned heavily.

  “You're frustrated, but that doesn’t change where we’re at,” Rachel said, forcing herself to be calm.

  Wham! Wham! Wham! Every stall door slung open and slammed shut violently and randomly. Rachel adjusted her posture, pressing back against the sink and watching the chaos unfold. Like the flicking of a light switch, the swinging stall doors subsided instantly.

  The dead girls stared at her.

  Rachel crossed her arms. “Finished?”

  They didn’t reply.

  “What’s your name?”

  Rachel heard a squeaking sound behind her. She twisted back to the mirror. Dakota, written on the fogged surface via an invisible finger.

  “That you?” Rachel asked the blonde.

  The blonde nodded.

  “Thank you, Dakota,” Rachel said with soft smile, but not forgetting about the violent fit the Orphans had seconds ago. “How about the rest of you?”

  Slowly, but simultaneously, six names were written in the fog. Amber, Cara, Louise, Kensie, Tiffany, and Heather. Rachel withdrew her phone and took a picture of the mirror. “Last names?”

  The girls exchanged a look and shook their heads.

  “Alright. We’ll work with what we remember. Do you know the date?”

  Days, months, times, and years overtook the mirror, writing over the names and each other. Rachel took a picture of the mirror. It was messy but would be a good launch point.

  Now for the hard question. “Who killed you?”

  The girl’s expressions filled with dread. Dakota stepped forward. She put her hand on Rachel's shoulder. Her touch was stern and icy. She pointed to another fogged mirror nearby. An invisible fingertip traced across the surface, drawing an outline of a man. He held a coil of rope that ended at a noose. A potato sack covered his head with two black eye holes.

  The bathroom door opened. Rachel nearly jumped as a patrol woman entered and slipped into a stall, giving Rachel an odd look. The Orphans had vanished. Without a word, Rachel turned off the faucets and walked out, massaging her shoulder as she went. They rarely touch me...

  She bustled to her desk in the bullpen. It was a small metal thing with a rolling chair, computer, and a stack of files from the last case. In the briefing room nearby, Lieutenant McConnell continued his talk. Rachel booted up her computer and opened up the Missing Persons’ database. Using the pictures from her phone, she input the names and the dates between 1974-1977.

  The briefing room door opened and closed quietly. Peak joined Rachel at her desk, slipping into the guest chair that faced her.

  “You’re missing out,” Peak said sarcas
tically.

  “Look,” Rachel handed him the cellphone. Her foot tapped anxiously as the database loaded up.

  Peak scrunched his brow at the picture. “What am I looking at?”

  “The names, dates, and portrait of the girls’ killer,” Rachel said with an involuntary smile.

  Peak put down the cellphone. “All I see is a mirror.”

  Rachel studied the cellphone screen, seeing the fogged mirror with the girl’s names. Peak probably already thought she was insane, anyhow.

  Missing Persons’ pictures popped up on the desktop monitor.

  Dakota Mulberry. Born: September 23, 1960. Reported Missing: March 18, 1977. The seventeen-year-old had long blonde hair, a skinny frame, big eyes, and a sweet, genuine smile.

  Cara Dummer. Born: July 9, 1961. Reported Missing: December 29, 1976. Four inches over five feet with oval-shaped glasses, chestnut brown hair, and a studious innocence.

  Tiffany Dummer, Born: July 9, 1961. Reported Missing: December 29, 1976. Same as Cara, but with a handful more freckles and about ten pounds heavier.

  Heather Lee. Born: November 4, 1960. Reported Missing: September 23, 1976. She was tall, with long black hair and thick glasses.

  Kensie Herd. Born: August 30, 1960. Reported Missing: July 9, 1976. Short, with jet-black hair cut into a bob and last seen wearing a cross necklace.

  Amber Catiline. Born: November 6, 1960. Reported Missing: February 15, 1977. Red hair, freckles, and seemingly orange eyes.

  Louise Richardson. Born: December 1, 1959. Reported Missing: January 19, 1976. Dark blonde with athlete’s shoulders and a strong jaw.

  Peak studied the pictures without emotion. “It’s always the beautiful.”