“The town is haunted, though, isn’t it? It wasn’t only Clara Chadwick you saw all those years and it wasn’t her causing all the accidents,” Creed said quietly. He looked out over the water, too. Did he taste it when he swallowed? Was that why he had needed the whiskey’s burn? Did he remember dying when the water filled his lungs?
“Accidents happen,” Trinity said. She’d had a phone call from friends still in Boston. The police had determined the fire had been caused by a faulty hot plate in one of the dorm rooms. She wasn’t sure if she believed in their findings, but it did give her some measure of comfort whenever she thought of Jen Po.
“They happen too often to children of Chadwick descent,” Creed said.
“What?” Trinity asked.
She turned to him. The setting sun reflected off the lake and glinted in his black eyes, but he didn’t shield them. He turned toward her instead.
“I’ve spent years studying the history of this place. High Lake was used as a dunking spot in a series of witch trials presided over by a Judge Avery Chadwick in 1692,” Creed said.
Trinity suddenly knew why the rise they stood on was familiar. She’d seen it in Creed’s book lined by townspeople while a woman was lowered into water to see if she would drown and prove her innocence or live to be confirmed a witch and burned at the stake.
Bound.
Trinity could feel her arms tied to her sides again and the cold lake waters closing in.
“Half a dozen women were put to the test here. They all drowned. One of them was Lisbeth Wildes. Before she died, she swore Chadwicks would suffer for untold generations,” Creed said.
“But there’s no such thing as witchcraft. Not like they believed it to be in those days. Curses and deals with the devil,” Trinity argued.
“Several historians have argued that Wildes was a ‘wise woman.’ What we would call a ‘psychic’ today. She could find lost objects. She knew secret things about people. When they were lying. When they were hiding something. That probably didn’t help her popularity with the townspeople. I’m not proposing that Wildes was a witch. I’m suggesting dark deeds—like drowning innocent women to hide your secrets—attract darkness. Lingering darkness. And most people don’t believe in ghosts either,” he said.
“Was it that evening when you died that you became interested in Scarlet Falls’ history?” Trinity asked. Her fears about Creed’s motivations seemed to be solidifying around her like a vice.
Suddenly, he reached a hand up to brush warm fingers across her cheek. It was a butterfly touch so soft and light that it could have been a breeze, except a breeze wouldn’t have caused a sensual curl of heat in her stomach and lower.
“No. It wasn’t dying. It was you. The ferocity in your eyes, the strength you expended to beat the water from my lungs and force them to work again. I had two cracked ribs and bruises for a month,” he said. But he said it with a twist of his lips as if being injured by her while she saved his life was a fond memory. “You saved me that day, but you also damned me because once I saw you fighting, I couldn’t look away.”
He stepped closer and brought his other hand up, this time more firmly to cup her cheek.
“I’ve known something was wrong in Scarlet Falls for as long as I can remember. I was a curious kid. I always wanted to know why. Why couldn’t we go out at night? And why did people who did get hurt…or worse. I’ve always known something was wrong, but when you saved me I finally saw…something, someonewho was right.”
“Glorified first aid,” Trinity said, clenching her fists that were too often too late.
“You saw. You saw what was wrong and you tried to fix it. That night in the hospital with my ribs taped and the taste of your kiss on my lips, I vowed that I would help you. I vowed that I wouldn’t rest until I helped you.”
Trinity easily found the melted chocolate in his eyes now. She didn’t know how she’d missed it before.
“I’ve been researching the town’s history ever since,” Creed continued.
“And watching me,” Trinity said.
“You’re a beautiful woman. The way you move…You should see yourself. Carefully placing each step, each touch. I don’t think you ever relax,” Creed said. He leaned in to brush her lips with his once, twice.
She did relax. But only in times like these in his arms when another kind of tension claimed her undivided attention.
He rarely tasted like Scotch anymore. She’d noticed a full bottle gathering dust on his desk in the loft. Kind of like the dark memorabilia he collected from the town. History. A relic from before when he’d been dealing with Scarlet Falls’ secrets all alone.
“So you don’t have a grim fascination with death and the occult,” Trinity said against his seductive mouth.
“My books pay the bills and give me the perfect excuse to devote all my time to historical research,” Creed said. “And I believe the history of Scarlet Falls holds the key to unlocking its mysteries.”
“And your collection?” Trinity said, thinking of the notebook, and the trunk of dust and bones she’d yet to tell him about.
“I wasn’t exaggerating when I told you about the whispers. The things I find and keep all have stories of historical significance to the town and my research. So many stories running through my mind.”
Trinity thought about the hundreds of items she’d seen in his rooms. She thought about the shadows she’d seen with Clara in the cemetery.
“Why didn’t you tell me years ago?” she asked.
“By the time you left for nursing school, I was sucked into the history of the town. I’d become a part of Scarlet Falls and I could see that you wanted to leave it all behind,” Creed said.
“I always meant to come back,” Trinity said. Although she wasn’t sure she would have if the fire hadn’t forced her.
“By that time, I wanted you to get away,” Creed said.
“I don’t think it’s possible to get away from Scarlet Falls. I think it’s in my blood,” Trinity said.
“If it is tied to Chadwick lineage that might be truer than you think. A surprising number of townspeople have ties even if they’re generations removed,” Creed said.
“How about us? Are we kissing cousins?” Trinity asked.
“No. I don’t think so. My lineage traces in another direction,” Creed pulled back from her arms and walked down toward the water. Trinity felt tension rise in her muscles as he came close to its black edge.
“Another direction?” she asked.
She followed him down the rise to stand at his back.
“My family tree branches from the Wildes,” Creed explained.
Trinity breathed in a deep breath of blood-scented air and held it. A chill claimed her. She didn’t believe in witchcraft. A poor group of helpless women had been drowned in this lake. That was all. Still, she remembered the arms reaching for Samuel Creed as if they wanted him to join them.
“My father left town when I was five. He died in Montana, about as far away as he could get from Massachusetts. My mother moved in with my aunt and they raised me in a creaky old Victorian below Main Street,” Creed said.
Trinity remembered The Wilde Sisters. They’d been eccentric to say the least. She hadn’t thought about them in years, but at one time they’d ran a quirky little New Age shop beside the post office—crystals, dulcimer music, tie dye.
“They moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, right after I graduated from high school. My mother disapproves of my books. She disapproves of my interest in the town’s history and with my donations to the Historical Society. After that day by the lake, she refused to stay in Scarlet Falls. She doesn’t believe in witchcraft, but she does believe in evil,” Creed continued. He looked at Trinity, a slight smile on his lips. “And she might have a touch of the same gifts Lisbeth Wildes was purported to have.”
“But you stayed,” Trinity said, stepping closer to him.
“Yes,” he replied. One simple word that said so much. He had stayed because of h
er. He was trying to solve the puzzle of Scarlet Falls…for her.
Creed might have a lifetime of research in front of him, and even if he mapped out every inch of the town’s history they would probably still be in the dark.
Luckily, she was no longer afraid of the dark.
“Clara Chadwick is at peace now,” Trinity said. She leaned against Creed’s strong back and looked out over the lake where one of his ancestors had cursed her family’s blood and then drowned by her family’s hands.
“Yes. Your Girl in Blue is finally sleeping,” Creed said.
Then he kissed her by the side of High Lake where once only death had reigned.
Epilogue
A young yellow tabby cat made its way across town. It crossed the street to avoid a large house with peeling paint and crooked shutters. Three stories up in a tall tower room topped by scalloped slate shingles, the curtains fluttered. The cat sat across the street cleaning its paws until a tall man came out of the house, climbed into a large SUV with a gold star painted on its side and drove away with a roar of engines and a burst of exhaust. When the curtains fluttered again, the cat stood up and walked slowly on.
Several blocks of travel brought it to an old Victorian with new paint that made its nose twitch. Still, a vaguely familiar sunny spot on the porch beckoned and the cat stole a nap until pansy-filled hanging baskets blocked the sunbeams it craved.
It padded onward to an alley behind a coffee shop where its stomach expected a bowl of cream. It waited to no avail. With a disgruntled twitch of its tail, it continued to a window of a hair salon where several surprised women made a fuss with tummy rubs and bits of sugared donuts it haughtily refused to touch.
“If I didn’t know better, I would swear that’s Violet Jesham’s old cat,” one of the women said. Her head was covered in a pungent paste that made the cat’s eyes water and burn. “It even has the same crooked stripes at the corner of its eyes.”
“Well, Gibbons did get around,” another woman replied and they all laughed.
The cat left the beauty parlor and headed to a quieter part of town. It trod a familiar path, but one it had never walked before until a niggling sense of urgency caused it to veer off course.
Padding down a side street lined with smaller homes than the ones it had passed earlier in the day, the cat found another sunny spot on another porch. This one had window boxes instead of hanging baskets so the sun could pour through and warm the pale blue boards beneath the cat’s paws. It flopped down, surrounded by a floral profusion it tolerated because it didn’t block its sunlight. Bright and colorful petals and greenery waved in the breeze. A few cool and lazy bees buzzed, but not actively enough to warrant the cat’s attention.
Here purred in its throat as it settled in to wait.
Inside the house, a phone’s musical ringtone chimed and footsteps sounded down a long hall. After several muffled sentences, an auburn-haired beauty hung up the phone and cried.
* * *
At the topmost branches of a blazing maple set back from High Lake by brambles and brush and a long gravel drive that ended in an abandoned foundation where a house had once burned to the ground, a shabby black crow stretched its wings. Its neck reached forward and its beak opened, and a rusty shriek of a caw sounded grittily to echo in the surrounding copse of woods.
Below its perch, more and more rescue vehicles arrived, silently, with no flashing lights or shrieking sirens.
The shallow grave that had finally been found warranted no rush.
With one more caw, this one stronger than the last, the crow leapt into the air to circle higher and higher on the autumn air currents, searching for an updraft that would take it home.
About the Author
Barbara Hancock lives in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains where her daily walk takes her to the edge of the wilderness and back again. When Barbara isn't writing modern gothic romance that embraces the shadows with a unique blend of heat and heart, she can be found wrangling twin boys and spoiling her pets.
Also by Barbara J. Hancock
Darkening Around Me
Silent Is the House
eISBN: 9781460336359
THE GIRL IN BLUE
Copyright © 2014 by Barbara J. Hancock
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