Ashley Ridge (Haunted Hearts Series Book 3)

by Denise Moncrief

  ****

  Josh pushed through the swinging front door of the Hot Spot, allowed his vision to adjust for a moment, and then scanned the faces hovering around the carousel-shaped bar. When he located Zach Halsey, he didn’t stop to think. Josh did what came natural. He headed straight for little Halsey.

  As soon as Zach caught sight of Josh, his face paled. Even in the darkened bar, Josh could see the panic flare in his eyes. Josh grabbed the younger man by his ear and started dragging him toward the door, a favorite move of Trudy Jepson’s.

  How many times had Trudy dragged Josh out of a bar, kicking and screaming, when he was still underage? Zach was old enough to drink by Arkansas law, but Josh had his doubts about the boy’s maturity level.

  “Hey, hey, stop it.” Zach twisted and spun, trying to loosen Josh’s hold on his earlobe. Josh let go, pushed Zach up against the nearest four-door truck, and got in his face.

  “I want to know what happened the night Cherish Duncan went missing?”

  Zach quit squirming. “How the hell would I know?”

  The younger man’s beer breath attacked Josh’s nostrils. He crinkled his nose. Was that what he smelled like when he’d been drinking?

  “Don’t mess with me, Zach. I know you were there. It’s all gonna come out soon, and it’ll go much better for you if you tell me now. If you had something to do with that girl’s disappearance, then you’re grandpa isn’t going to be able to shelter you from facing the consequences forever. Someone will accuse you of killing her.”

  Zach shook his head. “You got it all wrong, McCord. I didn’t do anything to her. I sure didn’t kill her.”

  Josh stepped back and Zach took a swing at him that missed by a mile. Zach came at him, but Josh placed his hand flat in Zach’s shirtfront. “Hitting me is a bad idea. There are at least six witnesses here tonight who would love nothing better than to see the sheriff’s grandson arrested.”

  He lowered his hand when Zach calmed down a bit. “Now, let’s start over. I never said I thought you killed her. In fact, I’m pretty sure you didn’t. You were on duty last night, weren’t you?”

  He nodded. “I worked that wreck up near the state line from about one until nearly four in the morning.”

  “That’s a pretty firm alibi.”

  Zach wiggled out from between Josh and the truck. “Yeah, it is.”

  Josh crossed his arms, but no way in hell was he letting Zach leave without giving up what he knew. “So talk. What happened the night Cherish disappeared?”

  “What makes you think I know?”

  Josh took a step toward Zach, and the younger man pushed his hands out in front of him.

  “Okay, okay.” Zach scanned the parking lot as if noting every face that was staring at them while they argued. “Let’s get out of here. I’d rather not talk about it with so many people around.”

  “Hey, Zach,” called one of the men Josh had seen with Zach inside the bar. “You want us to get rid of this guy for you.”

  No doubt, the bunch of men huddled just outside the barroom door was Zach’s high school jock buddies.

  Josh nodded toward his vehicle. “Let’s go.”

  Once they were settled in the truck, he started the engine and pulled onto the highway. The only noise in the cab was the sound of Zach’s heavy breathing.

  Finally, he spoke. “Where are you taking me?”

  “Where do we need to go?”

  Zach pinched the bridge of his nose. “You wanna go to the place I last saw her?”

  Josh nodded.

  “Drive out to the trailhead. We’re gonna hike out to the Love Shack.”

  Another freaking hike.

  ****

  The closer Josh and Zach got to the Love Shack, the slower Zach walked. Josh bit back his amusement. He loved seeing Zach stall for time.

  “Must be a good story you have to tell if you’re dragging your feet.”

  Zach grunted.

  Josh kept two paces behind him. No way Zach was getting out of his sight.

  “You don’t seem anxious to tell it.”

  Zach kicked a rock out of their path. “I’m not.”

  Sometimes Zach sounded more like a grumpy little boy than a grown man. He suspected Zach’s place on the Department payroll was more nepotism than anything.

  Once they arrived at the Shack, Zach halted right in front of the steps to the front porch.

  “I’m not going back in there.”

  Josh rubbed his chin and studied Zach’s back. As soon as they had come around a bend in the trail and saw the Shack, Zach’s shoulders had tensed.

  “Must have been a bad experience.”

  Zach pushed his hands up the sides of his face, and then wrapped his arms around his middle. “I still dream about it.”

  Josh waited for Zach to continue, no need to push. After all this time, Zach probably wanted to tell someone the story. It’d been locked inside him for four years. The truth needed to come out even if Zach was still living in denial about it.

  “I’ve wanted to tell someone the truth for a long time, but Grandpa wouldn’t listen. He said it was best to keep it to myself. He didn’t want to know.”

  Just as Josh had speculated. Halsey ignored a lot of things.

  “It was Halloween, and I wanted to bring a girl up here. None of the girls I usually hung around with wanted to hike all the way out here, but I could tell that Cherish had a huge crush on me and she’d be willing to do anything I wanted her to do just so she could go on a date with me. So I asked her to come out here.”

  He lowered his arms and his shoulders sagged. “Do I really have to tell this story?”

  “Confession is good for the soul.”

  He used to hate it when Trudy would throw that one at him.

  “Right.” Zach stared at the Shack for a good minute or more before he continued. “Some of my friends bet me that I couldn’t get her to do it with me. I knew when she got into my car that I was gonna lose the bet.” He shook his head as if the memory made his head hurt. “Yeah, I know. I was an asshole. When she said no, and I knew she would, I was going to harass her a little and then take her back home, but something just got hold of me… I didn’t act like myself. Even while I was pushing her to do what she didn’t want to do, I knew something wasn’t right. Then she clawed my face and I just went nuts, but I didn’t hurt her.”

  “So you’re telling me that you didn’t rape the girl?”

  Zach jerked as if he’d been punched. “Rape? Who said anything about rape? I’ve never had to force a woman.”

  Josh snorted with contempt. “A real player, aren’t you?”

  Zach finally showed some backbone. “Do you want me to tell this story or not?”

  Josh motioned for him to continue. “So tell it.”

  “I told her she was going to pay for clawing me. I’ll never forget the look on her face. She was scared of me, but I really didn’t intend to hurt her. I couldn’t seem to stop myself, as if someone else had control of me.”

  “Really? Come on, that’s a load of crap, and you know it.”

  “I’m serious. It was freaky.”

  Josh grabbed a tall weed up from the roots and pulled the leaves off. The abandoned farm was overgrown. Surely no one had been inside the place in years. A tree sapling poked its top branches through a hole in the roof. One end of the rusted tin roof sagged.

  “You couldn’t think of a better place to get yourself some?”

  “It was Halloween. I wanted to do something scary, and I’d always heard ghosts haunted the Shack.”

  Josh laughed. “When I was in high school, there was a rumor about a ghost yanking on a guy out here.”

  Zach smiled. “Really? I’ve heard the same rumor about a guy I went to school with.”

  Josh pointed at the front door of the Shack. “Ain’t nobody doing nothing in that dump. I bet you couldn’t even get very far inside the front door anymore.”

  They’d stalled long enough.

&nbs
p; “Finish your story, Zach.”

  The temperature had dropped ten degrees while they stood there talking. Zach shuddered either from the cold or from the memory; Josh couldn’t be sure which.

  “Cherish’s face…it was like she didn’t have any blood anymore. She was staring over my shoulder. I’ve never seen anyone so scared. I thought she was gonna pee her pants. I turned and I saw it. This big black…thing. Like a spot in the dark that was darker than normal darkness. I was so…shocked, I guess, that I loosened my hold on Cherish. Next thing I remember, I woke up on the floor of the Shack with a bloody nose and a broken rib. I never saw Cherish again.”

  “You’re gonna have a hard time selling that story.”

  Zach laughed, hard and bitter. “Why do you think I’ve kept it to myself all these years. Nobody would believe the truth. It just sounds like a really bad lie.”

  Josh smiled and shook his head. “Yeah, it does, but I’m gonna tell you…I’ve seen stuff you wouldn’t believe.” He allowed the grin to drop from his face. “But you have a bigger problem than telling the truth. Brett Duncan is convinced you killed his sister.”

  Zach nodded. “Yeah, I know.”

  “So it would be a good thing if you cooperated and helped me find her killer before Brett decides to take the law into his own hands. If he gets a notion to exact his own personal version of justice, your grandpa isn’t going to be able to help you if he doesn’t take your story seriously.”

  “How can I get him to listen to me? I can’t explain what happened without explaining the weird stuff too.”

  Josh headed toward his vehicle. He’d heard enough, but he had one more thing to say before he eased off the pressure he’d put on Zach. He turned and stared Zach straight in the eye.

  “You should go talk to your grandpa. I think the sheriff might listen to you now.”

  Chapter Ten

  Josh wasn’t yet ready to face the mess he’d made on his bedroom wall, but the stench of stale bourbon had permeated the entire house and was nauseating his already shaky stomach. He needed some rest and there was no way he was sleeping in his bedroom for a while. A deep sleep would go a long way to begin the healing process, but with so many tangled thoughts swirling around his head, he wasn’t going to get any. Not with the strong odor of his discontent wafting off his bedroom wall. He might have to find somewhere else to stay for a while.

  He tossed his phone onto the coffee table, leaned his head back on the sofa cushion, and glared at the cell as if he could intimidate it into ringing. He didn’t expect to hear from Gray for a few hours or days or weeks, but he was kind of hoping Ashley would call him. The phone lay on the table mute, mocking him. She wouldn’t call.

  Gray had obviously turned off his phone. He had left the man two urgent messages, but there was no telling when Gray would finally get around to listening to them. He couldn’t blame his old friend for isolating himself from the rest of the world. In his shoes, Josh would have left town as well.

  In fact, Josh should be decompressing from his own experiences over the last few days. After all, it wasn’t going to be easy to process being kidnapped and held at gunpoint while a psycho offered up a dead woman to him as a gift. The previous night’s adventure had kept him from wallowing in his leftover emotions from the drama, and the day’s events had kept him moving in so many directions he had no time to analyze how he felt. That was probably a good thing. Or maybe not. Was it ever good to delay the inevitable emotional letdown from living through something like that?

  He’d been told often enough that he overanalyzed everything. Maybe that’s why everything seemed so much bigger to him than to anyone else. Had he been pushed to define what everything was, he probably couldn’t.

  He needed Gray’s advice. The Cherish Duncan case was not setting well on his stomach. Jackson was taking the investigation in the wrong direction, and Sheriff Halsey had taken a hand’s off attitude. Now that Josh had squeezed part of the truth out of the sheriff’s grandson Zach, he understood why. The sheriff was going to be a hindrance rather than a help to the case.

  That left Josh to pick up the loose threads and follow the real leads. He’d never carried that load before now and he wasn’t sure he liked it. No, actually he didn’t like it. Not what he was trained to do. Gray had always taken the lead and left Josh to do his forensics stuff. He preferred the precise science of the lab to the abstract art of the investigation. Not that he was a science geek. No one had better call him a nerd.

  He glanced at the clock on the wall. He’d waited all day for a final autopsy report from Epps, but as usual, the old man was dragging his feet. The county needed to elect a new medical examiner, but when it was election time no one ever challenged Epps.

  Josh stretched his arms out in front of him to relieve the kink between his shoulders. Maybe I should lie down, just until I decide what to do for the night. He stayed upright, too tired to slide down onto the sofa cushions.

  His body wouldn’t move but his mind wouldn’t stop. Surely, Zach had already spoken to his grandfather about what happened the night Cherish disappeared. Josh had been expecting Halsey to storm into the lab and cuss Josh out for pressing the younger Halsey to admit he had been the last to see the girl before she disappeared. If Zach didn’t fess up to his grandfather…

  Why did he care if Cherish Duncan received any justice for what happened to her? She was nothing to him. But he did care, and his sympathy for other people was what always got him into so much trouble.

  Josh was on the edge of a slippery slope, getting ready to slide into some deep introspection when his cellphone vibrated on the table. He barely had enough energy to focus on the display. But he did, and when he did, he groaned. Not Bennett again. What does the jerk want now?

  He grabbed the phone from off the table. “Whatever it is you want… No.”

  A long pause. He’d obviously taken Bennett by surprise.

  When he finally spoke his voice held a slightly wheedling tone. “Laurel Standridge agreed to go out to the house and get the book.”

  Josh’s heart raced. The previous evening’s paranormal experience had been intensely exhausting. Was he up for another round? That was surely where this conversation was headed.

  “I’m listening.”

  “She won’t go out there without Grayson.”

  Relief and disappointment hit Josh simultaneously. “That’s not gonna happen.”

  “Can’t you call him and get him to meet us there.”

  “Why don’t you call him?”

  Shaw made a disgruntled noise. “He didn’t give me his number. He told me I could go through you if I needed anything from him.”

  Josh cackled. “Really? Is that gonna keep you from contacting the man? You’re in law enforcement, Shaw. Use your cop powers to get his cellphone number.”

  “His phone must be off.” Shaw sounded grumpy. “Or he’s ignoring my calls.”

  So Shaw had already tried to get Gray on the phone and failed. Just like Josh had.

  “I’ve been trying to reach him all afternoon. Left him two messages. He’ll get back to me when he gets good and ready, and not a minute sooner.”

  Road noise hummed in the background of the call. Shaw was obviously traveling and using his Bluetooth to do the hands free thing. Josh recognized the hollow, echo-like sound of being on a speakerphone.

  “She’s ready tonight. Wants to get this over with. If we can’t get Grayson on board, we’re gonna loose this opportunity.”

  “Okay, first thing, that ghost isn’t going to stay energized forever. One day, you might be able to retrieve the book without Laurel’s help. Second thing, why don’t you call Tori Downing? I’ll bet she’d answer her phone.”

  And why hadn’t Josh already thought of that?

  All quiet for a moment.

  “If I do get her and she does get Grayson to meet with us at Laurel Heights, you want to be there when Laurel puts her hands on the book?”

  Josh didn’t hesitate. Not
even a fraction of a second. “Yeah. I do. But you know what I think would be even more interesting?”

  A quick intake of breath. “What would happen if Tori Downing put her hands on it?”

  Josh smiled. “Yeah, exactly.”

  “Meet you there around nine tonight.”

  “Okay.”

  Josh disconnected the call, set his alarm for eight-thirty, and slid down onto the sofa cushions.

  ****

  Josh drove out of town to meet Shaw Bennett at Laurel Heights. The full moon of the night before was hiding behind a bank of dark threatening clouds. A fine night for ghost hunting. He’d always heard a storm stirred things up. Or maybe that was just how things were portrayed in the movies.

  When it came to paranormal investigation, it was difficult to separate fact from fiction. Even the reality television shows didn’t always get it right. A little too much drama. Not enough real evidence. He often wondered why no one had ever captured a quality image of an apparition on camera or film.

  Truth was, both of his genuine experiences had taken him by surprise. He and Gray had only thought they were prepared for what happened in Laurel Standridge’s garage. In the middle of that gut-wrenching encounter, the last thing he’d had on his mind was taking a picture. An experience he’d never forget, but couldn’t prove.

  What had happened at Victoria House had been equally unexpected.

  Shaw’s black SUV was already in front of Laurel Heights when Josh arrived. As he exited his truck, the first big dollop of rain splatted and flattened on his arm. He gazed into the night sky and pressed his lips together. A chill ran up and down his spine, and he shook his arms and legs to get rid of the weird tingling in his limbs, a sensation that felt like ants were crawling all over him.

  Why in the hell did I agree to this?

  Just as he approached the front porch steps, Gray drove up the steep drive in his dark blue sedan and parked behind him. Josh waited until Gray and Tori got out of the car and caught up with him before climbing the steps onto the porch.