Ashley Ridge (Haunted Hearts Series Book 3)

by Denise Moncrief

  Josh spluttered his rebuttal. “Whoever knocked me out at the Jepson place was not a ghost. That was a real, living, breathing human being with bad breath. Really obnoxious bad breath.”

  “Maybe, but I think we should go out to Ashley Ridge and do an investigation. There seems to be a lot of activity out there.”

  Josh’s heart raced at the thought of doing an investigation with Gray and Ashley again. Just like old times…if they could get Ashley to agree to go with them. The only difference? This time he believed that spirits could manifest themselves in strange and mysterious ways that couldn’t be understood by mortal man.

  “I have one question before I agree to do this.”

  Gray held his gaze, but didn’t even blink, as if he knew what question was about to hit him.

  “Where is Jeremy buried?”

  Gray waited a moment as if assessing the importance of keeping the secret any longer. “In a deep pool at the bottom of a waterfall.”

  Ashley’s chair legs scraped on the vinyl flooring as she scooted closer to the table. “Does the waterfall drop into Ashley Creek?”

  “Yes.”

  Josh knew where the fall was even though he’d never seen it. “How’d you get him out there? There’s no access, except maybe the long way up Baxter Road and over the top of the mountain.”

  Gray slid back his chair. His eyebrows pulled together. Deep ridges of concern appeared across his forehead. “I borrowed an ATV and went through the backcountry.” He paused a moment. “Why did you ask that, Ashley?”

  Tori sucked in a shaky breath. She’d been so quiet, but even the newest person in the group sensed the potential impact of what Ashley was about to say.

  “The waterfall covers the opening to the underground room I was telling you about, and Ashley Creek runs right behind the Love Shack. I remember hearing it the night…”

  Josh wrapped her trembling hand in his, well aware of the unspoken end to her sentence. She’d never told him, but he was certain that was the place where Jeremy had raped her. None of her memories of the place would be pleasant.

  Gray’s subdued excitement enveloped them. “So are you saying you think the Ridge Trail ghost is Jeremy Haskins?”

  She bit her lower lip before speaking. “He spoke to me, Gray. He used the same words he used that night…you know, the night he died.”

  Tori’s strained voice entered the mix of voices, low and soft, so low it wouldn’t be overheard by the other diners. “What did he say?”

  Ashley’s eyes welled with tears. “Run, little girl.”

  Tori rose from her side of the table and went to kneel beside her. Ashley’s lower lip quivered as Tori gazed up at her. “That must have been a horrible experience for you…down in the cave. To be reminded of such an awful thing in such a creepy way. I’m sure the shock of that hasn’t worn off yet. There’s got to be a letdown from it.”

  Ashley wiped a tear away and nodded. “I haven’t had time to fall apart.”

  “Have you ever gotten counseling for what he did to you?”

  Ashley shook her head. “I never wanted anyone to know.”

  The catch in Gray’s voice betrayed his strong emotion. “Why didn’t you tell us, Ashley? We had it all wrong. Knowing the truth might have changed everything.”

  She sniffed. “I know.”

  He released her hand and rose to his feet. “You have to confront him.”

  The trembling spread throughout her body. Josh shot Gray a withering death glare. “Are you nuts? She can’t expose herself to that. I won’t allow it.”

  “You won’t allow it? Since when do you have the right to speak for her? She has a mind of her own.”

  “Stop it, you idiots. Quit fighting about her in front of her.”

  Ashley stood, forcing Tori to stand with her. “Gray’s right. This is about Jeremy and me. After all the hell he’s put me through the last few years, I want him to know that if he weren’t already dead, I’d kill him. I need him to know that he’s better off dead so he can go away and leave the rest of us alone. He’s never going to stop terrorizing people out there until I show him I’m not frightened of him.”

  “But you should be frightened. You’re messing with something you don’t understand, and you have no idea how powerful it is.” Josh didn’t want her risking her sanity to put the ghost of Jeremy Haskins in his place. Some things buried should never rise again.

  Tori jerked one of those hard shakes when a jolt of nervous energy hits quick and hard. “That’s what makes what happened even more creepy.”

  Ashley wiped the back of her hand across her wet eyes. “What do you mean? What happened?”

  “I touched something that belonged to Celeste Standridge.”

  “You mean that crazy old lady who used to live out at Laurel Heights?”

  Tori nodded. “You see, I have this weird sort of psychic ability. The spirits of dead people speak to me when I touch their things. Not just anything, but something that had special meaning to them. When I picked up Celeste’s diary, she told me things, and she told me to tell Josh that you were in trouble and you needed his help. She was frantic. Even more frantic than when she told me the other things she had to say.”

  “What else did she say?”

  Tori eyes cut over to Gray.

  He tensed a little and then spoke. “Celeste was trying to communicate with Laurel Standridge.”

  Their conversation ceased when Brett Duncan rushed into the Diner and made a straight line toward Josh. Brett had come within inches of Josh when he came to an abrupt stop. His anger throbbed in the rapid pulse pumping the vein in his neck. “You told me you wanted to know who killed her just as much as I do.”

  Josh held his ground, refusing to flinch in the face of Brett’s anger. “I do.”

  “Why won’t that idiot Epps let me see her body?”

  Josh caught Brett by his upper arm and guided him toward the door. “Come with me. We’ll go find out.”

  ****

  Josh flashed his ID at the security checkpoint when he entered the County Building where the morgue was housed. He dragged Brett Duncan behind him, muttering, “Guest of Josh McCord,” as they rushed by the guard.

  As Josh suspected, Russ the night guard would give him no trouble. It was after five in the afternoon, so the building was practically deserted. The guardians of the Hill County Government Building were not accustomed to intrigue and clandestine missions carried out by Hill County employees. But perhaps they should have been.

  Josh punched the down arrow on the elevator pad and shifted from one foot to the other, waiting for a car to arrive on the first floor.

  Brett cleared his throat, clearly uncomfortable with what Josh planned to do. “I don’t know anything about this kind of stuff, but I just thought it only right for them to show me her body. That’s only right.”

  “I agree with you, Brett.” Josh hadn’t yet shared his ulterior motive for making a viewing happen whether Epps liked it or not. He had a lot of suspicions that he wanted to put to rest.

  When the elevator dinged open, Josh held the door for Brett and stepped in last, glancing up and down the first floor hallway to make sure no one had witnessed their arrival other than ineffective Russ the Night Guard.

  “Basement.”

  Brett snorted and jabbed the appropriate button. “Right. Aren’t all morgues in basements?”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  Josh’s anxiety level was so great that he was afraid he’d start hiccoughing. Sometimes he did when his nerves got the better of him. Maybe that’s why a lot of people thought he was perpetually drunk. He hiccoughed a lot when other people were pestering him.

  Once the elevator stopped on the basement floor, Josh led Brett down the hallway to the unmarked double swinging doors on the far end. He pushed them open and barged into the small reception area. As he had anticipated, Sherry, the day clerk, had already gone home. There would be a person on night shift, but the poor guy usually snoozed becau
se there was rarely any night action.

  He punched in Epps’s code to open the security door—he’d watched the old man fumble through the digits often enough—and then passed through with Brett right behind him. Inside the autopsy room, he switched on a light. Not the bright overhead lights Epps’s used when doing his morbid work, but the softer light that usually remained on when Epps was filling out his paperwork at a nearby desk.

  As with most morgues, the drawers holding the remains of the recently deceased lined the wall in four columns of three drawers deep. Hill County never utilized all of its capacity. No names were scribbled on the slips stuck into the ID slots. How did Epps remember whom he’d shoved into what drawer? Josh started pulling slabs out in a methodical manner. One of the bodies had to be the woman found on Ashley Ridge Trail.

  The photos he’d shown Brett had not elicited the usual wail of grief from a bereaved loved one. He’d been repulsed and sickened but not grieved. Like everyone else that had seen the victim, Brett thought she looked like Cherish, but then his sister would have been four years older. He couldn’t be sure if the woman in the crime scene photos was his sister or not.

  “I just don’t understand what’s going on,” Brett muttered once again.

  Neither did Josh, but he was starting to get a bad feeling in the pit of stomach. Finally, he yanked open the right drawer. The toe tag read Cherish Duncan. He slowed his pace and glanced up at Brett Duncan.

  “Are you ready for this? It’s never easy for anyone.”

  “Just do it.”

  Josh pulled the tray out and folded the sheet back from the victim.

  Brett studied the dead woman long and hard. “She looks familiar, but that ain’t Cherish.” He pointed at the woman’s shoulder, bare and peeking out the top of the sheet. “Cherish had a tattoo right there.” He shook his head and stepped back from the corpse. “That isn’t Cherish.”

  The door to the autopsy room swung open and the night clerk rumbled into the room. “McCord, what are you doing in here? You know you’re supposed to sign in with me first. This is highly irregular.”

  Josh covered Jane Doe’s face again and nodded toward Brett. “We were just leaving.” He shoved the slab back in its proper place and pushed the drawer closed.

  “Epps is gonna hear about this, McCord.”

  “Fine. Tell him. In fact, tell him Josh McCord was doing his job for him tonight.”

  He and Brett rushed from the room, the basement, and finally the building before the night guy had time to call Epps.

  ****

  The five of them, Josh, Ashley, Tori, Gray, and Brett had hiked the half-mile up the Ashley Ridge Trail to the Love Shack.

  They were a little too quiet for Ashley’s nerves. She needed discussion. Noise. A distraction from the inner turmoil raging inside her. “It’s really grown over since…in the last eight years. Like the forest wants to obliterate it and all its bad memories.”

  Ashley bumped into Gray when he stopped suddenly. He turned and blinked at her. None of them acted as if they wanted to get much closer.

  Gray made a noise of limited amusement, half huff and half grunt. “Lots of high school kids come out here and get the mess scared out of them on Halloween.”

  Ashley mumbled her opinion. “People should stay home on Halloween.”

  Gray darted a glance at her. “Most people are smart enough to stay out of Victoria House that night.”

  “That was your idea, Mitchell Grayson. Not mine.”

  Gray laughed. “No. Actually, I think it was Josh’s.”

  “Hey, I don’t think so,” Josh argued from right behind her.

  The warmth of his presence comforted her. He had assured her on the drive up that she wouldn’t have to face whatever paranormal being was in the Shack alone.

  Tori snickered. “I hear Earl doesn’t have a bit of trouble aiming his shotgun and pulling the trigger on trespassers.”

  “No, he does not.”

  Gray stared at the dilapidated structure with his hands on his hips. “Every other year or so, some fool ends up with a backside full of buckshot. It makes a messy wound.”

  Ashley studied Tori Downing, intensely curious about the woman who had inherited Victoria House and all its ghostly secrets, including the mysterious security guard Earl. “Does he still work for you?”

  Tori sighed. “No. He was my aunt’s employee. When I found out about his twitchy trigger finger, I let him go. I couldn’t afford the liability if someone ended up dead.”

  Ashley let the conversation thread die. She could have kept it going, but she wasn’t in the mood for small talk.

  Once or twice Tori and Gray would glance at each other and silent communication would pass between them. Ashley envied how close the two of them had become in such a short period of time. Maybe she and Josh could get back to that place. They had it once, that closeness where they could read each other’s minds with one glance. Actually, he’d read her mind earlier. That was one step closer to being close again.

  Her heart dropped into her stomach. There was a lot for them to overcome if they were ever going to find the mushy zone again. One more glance at the happy couple, and she wanted to toss a shoe at them. Thinking about Josh and how much hurt they’d caused each other made her ache all over, so she made herself think about other things…like the prospect of ghost hunting with them again.

  Gray had brought some electronic gizmos with him. Things he assured her were top-of-the-line gadgets for detecting paranormal activity. She had no doubt the spirits on Ashley Ridge would not be so subtle as necessitated the use of electronic devices for detection. The ghost that she presumed was Jeremy Haskins had been more than willing to make himself known to her.

  She shivered at the recollection of how many times the dark shadowy figure had brushed past her in the tunnel below Terrance’s little house of horrors. Each time the thing had touched her, she had felt a cold wave pass through her, chilling her right down to the bone.

  She turned her attention toward the object of the evening’s investigation. The Shack was not more than a couple of yards away. The four of them—Gray, Josh, Ashley, and Tori—had agreed to meet at the trailhead for Ashley Ridge just before sundown. Brett had been a last minute addition.

  The tin roof of the Shack appeared even more rusted than when Ashley had last seen it. The ramshackle front porch was missing a few extra pieces of wood flooring. A tree sapling poked through a gap in the roof. On the far left of the building, a lettuce dared to thrive in the disused vegetable garden, the only edible plant in the midst of an infestation of her favorite weed, the goldenrod.

  Ashley sneezed and rubbed her itchy nose.

  Gravel crunched and she turned find Josh moving past her toward the house.

  “It’s party time.” He grabbed her hand and pulled her forward with him.

  Gray moved almost as soon as they did, but Tori remained immobile. Gray nudged her. “Are you coming?”

  “I’d rather not.” Tori’s stiff reply revealed her heightened level of nervousness. The tip ends of her hair bounced a little with her trembling.

  She couldn’t blame Tori. Her account of what happened at Laurel Heights the day before had thoroughly creeped Ashley out. She did her best to steady her nerves and dragged in a deep breath.

  Josh stopped and placed a hand on her cheek, stared into her eyes. She saw only sympathy and understanding in their depths. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  She wasn’t sure at all, but she nodded anyway and drew in a deep breath. “I need to do this.”

  She glanced over her shoulder and caught Brett Duncan’s eyes. She supposed he had every right to be there if they were trying to contact Cherish, but his presence made Ashley more than a little uncomfortable. She’d just gotten used to Josh, Gray, and Tori knowing everything. What if they slipped and mentioned Jeremy in front of Brett? How many uncomfortable questions would she have to evade?

  They’d all been through so much lately, Ashley wor
ried that none of them would have enough energy to draw a ghost out of the nether. “Don’t spirits feed on energy?” Her question popped out of her inner thoughts as if it had a mind of its own.

  Gray gazed at the cloudless sky. “There might not be enough energy tonight for anything to materialize. No storm to stir things up.”

  The western horizon that peeked through the trough of Duncan’s Pass glowed with reds and pinks and yellows and oranges. A gorgeous sunset. A romantic sunset. Ashley glanced back toward Josh and caught him studying her.

  He moved forward to whisper in her ear. “You look gorgeous with that beautiful sunset behind you.”

  An odd thing for him to say at such an odd time. She hadn’t felt gorgeous in forever. She smiled her appreciation of his compliment, however blind he might be. She caught up each of his words and buried them deep in her heart to retrieve at a later time so that she could savor each sweet morsel at her leisure.

  The scene seemed kind of surreal. Fractured as if they’d stepped through a split into another dimension. As if she was experiencing life outside herself. As if she’d become someone else for a moment in time. Like she was living inside a Dr. Who episode. The house beckoned her, yet repelled her at the same time, a push and pull on her psyche that sent a rush of adrenaline coursing through her veins.

  “So how are we going to do this? I’m not even sure what you want me to do.” Brett’s voice broke into the moment and the scene tilted into reality again. “I brought the teddy bear that Mom gave Cherish on her third birthday.”

  Gray reached for the bear and Brett gave it up with a hesitant frown.

  “If my theory is correct, the bear will absorb some of Cherish’s residual energy from when she was here, and we’ll be able to find out what happened to her.”

  Brett pressed his lips together as if he were smothering strong emotion. Ashley thought she detected a single tear in his eye. The guy wasn’t as big a brute as everyone in town made out like he was. If the man loved his little sister that much, he couldn’t be all raw meat and no sweetness.

  Gray cradled the bear as if it were something precious. “Brett, you should stay here. I’ll take care of it and make sure you get it back.”