The Sense of Death: An Ann Kinnear Suspense Novel (The Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels Book 1)
Page 27
“No, really, I’m fine,” said Ann, herding Walt toward the door.
“Call if you need anything?”
“I promise. Thanks, Walt, I mean it.”
Walt bent over and, for the first time since she had known him, gave her a peck on the cheek. “You take care.” And then he was up the log stairs, starting up the pickup, turning it carefully around, and heading down the drive.
Ann walked through the dining and sitting rooms, opening windows as she went, then climbed to the second floor and did the same. She even went into the basement, turned on the light, then turned it off and went back upstairs. She felt in some way as if she were reclaiming the cabin as her own.
With the fresh air wafting through the cabin, and the sun, filtered by tree limbs, brightening the Indian rugs scattered on the floor, she returned to the kitchen. She stood in the center of the small room and tried to slow her breathing, opening her senses to anything that might be present. Garrick’s report that Biden Firth was not at the cabin had been encouraging to her but she had known she would not be fully convinced until she had had a chance to experience it—or not experience it, as the case may be—for herself.
She could sense nothing in the kitchen, nothing in the cabin. It would be only her own all too normal nightmares she would need to deal with in the coming months and years.
But the cabin itself was not where she especially wanted to be at the moment. Going out the front door, she turned right and descended the small hill to the fire pit. Everything was as she had left it except for an area of recently dug dirt off to one side of the clearing showing the place where, at Ann’s request, Mike and Walt had buried Beau.
Ann lowered herself gingerly into one of the Adirondack chairs by the fire pit. She sat back, resting her head on the back of the chair and closing her eyes, listening for a sound different from the regular sounds of the woods—the scuffle of squirrels in the undergrowth and the slap of water on the dock—and breathing in the clear air, searching for something different from the piney scent she was used to. In a minute her breathing slowed and one might have thought she was asleep but in another minute she opened her eyes, looked around, and gave a long ascending whistle.
At first nothing happened but then, at the edge of the clearing, Beau appeared. He was not some wraith, he was the Beau she knew, large and shaggy and solid—only a slight translucence that she had never seen in his life marked him now. Her heart thudded in her chest.
“Here, Beau,” she said, and he trotted over to her, stopping a few feet away and sitting, looking intently at her face. She started to reach her hand out for him but she realized that this was not something to be touched and she let her hand fall back on the arm of the chair.
The beating of her heart eventually slowed as she gazed at Beau and a tear slipped down her face.
“Good boy,” she whispered, and Beau thumped his tail.
She leaned her head back against the chair again and closed her eyes and then she heard, faint but clear, a whistled bar of The Cranberries’ “Kiss Me.” She stiffened and her breath caught in her throat but she kept her eyes closed and in a moment she felt a breeze, or breath, at her ear. She opened her eyes and Beau was turning to trot away and, in the shadows where the clearing gave way to the woods, Ann saw a person, immensely old, gray hair pulled back from a nut brown face, the features so creased by time that only her tiny stature suggested her gender. Ann got the general impression of primitive clothing, soft folds of some kind of animal skin, but she could scarcely draw her gaze away from the woman’s eyes which shone with a kind of inner luminescence even in the shadows.
Beau trotted to the figure and disappeared into the woods behind her and as the woman turned to follow, she nodded almost imperceptibly to Ann and then disappeared behind Beau.
Chapter 54
A few months later, Mark Pironi sold the Rittenhouse Square house (he no longer referred to it as the Firth house) to two doctors—Amy and Zach DeCoeur—who were relocating from Charlotte. On an overcast Sunday afternoon, Amy was in the library unpacking boxes of books when Zach came in carrying a can of paint with bluish drips down the side.
“Does this color look familiar to you?” he asked, holding up the can.
Amy contemplated it. “I don’t think so,” she said.
“All the other cans match something but I can’t find anything to match this one.”
They carried the can from room to room, comparing the paint drips to wall color, trim color. When they got to the top floor, which they were outfitting as a movie room (Zach was a huge movie fan and wanted to furnish it with old movie palace seats but Amy was unconvinced), Amy shook her head.
“I don’t think it matches anything.”
“Do you want to keep it?” asked Zach.
Amy took the can from him and jiggled it back and forth. “It is almost full. But I don’t really like the color.”
“Me either,” said Zach.
They returned to their tasks—Amy unpacking books and Zach cleaning out the garage. Zach gave the can one last shake—it did seem a shame to throw away an almost full can of paint—then shrugged, opened the door to the alley and dropped the paint can into the trash bin outside the door. He closed and locked the door, setting the burglar alarm then climbing the stairs to the kitchen for a beer.
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Ann Kinnear Book 2
The Sense of Reckoning
October 2015
After solving the Philadelphia Socialite murder, Ann Kinnear should be riding high. Instead, she's depressed and considering abandoning her spirit sensing business. To add to her problems, Ann has suffered a series of injuries to her hands—could these be the ghostly repercussions of the violence that ended her last case?
Ann goes to Maine to solicit help from fellow spirit senser Garrick Masser. Ann and Garrick find more trouble than they bargained for in a tale of obsession and misplaced loyalty that has its roots in a crumbling summer hotel, international art theft, and the historic wildfire that destroyed large swaths of Mount Desert Island in 1947.
Unless Ann can fit together the pieces of the past while staying ahead of whatever—or whomever—is causing her harm, her future, and that of her friend Garrick, may be very brief indeed.