Ashley Ridge (Haunted Hearts Series Book 3)

by Denise Moncrief

  Ashley knew how hard it was to live with killing someone. She didn’t want that for Josh. Surely there was another way to end Terrance’s life, take away his freedom, without being responsible for killing his body. As far as his soul was concerned, she believed it was already destroyed by the evil he had internalized.

  “Let him go, Josh.” She shoved his shoulder. “You’re killing him.”

  Let him die. The voice screamed around the room, bounced off every surface, rang in her ear. Not Josh’s voice. Jeremy had taken control of Josh.

  Her touch must have broken the hold Jeremy had on Josh, because Josh released his grip on Terrance’s neck and the two men disengaged, Terrance falling backward and Josh trying hard to steady himself. It seemed the blackness separated from Josh in that instant and hovered in the air over him.

  She shielded her head from the dark oppression that seemed to be growing and expanding inside the room. The hollow didn’t seem so large any longer. Claustrophobia clawed at her psyche.

  Terrance jumped to his feet and shot forward while Josh tried to readjust to his surroundings. His eyes appeared glassy. He stumbled and nearly fell. Before Terrance could put his hands on Josh, Ashley swung the chain and the lock hit Terrance in the forehead. He staggered but didn’t fall. The roar of anger, or pain, she wasn’t sure which, coming out of his mouth seemed to shake the very foundations of the mountain.

  She cringed in the face of his rage, a fury so intense she thought it would destroy them without a single physical blow.

  Josh’s head jerked up and his eyes cleared, just as Terrance rushed him once more.

  ****

  Shaw turned off his flasher as the road up the mountain became narrower and more twisted. He didn’t want to alert Phelps to his approach. When he was almost to the top, he parked next to a run-down cabin, right behind a Mazda Miata. He started to run the plate, but was frustrated by the lack of radio signal. His gut instinct told him the little red sports car belonged to Terrance Phelps. He exited his vehicle and made his way toward the front.

  When he was almost to the door, he discovered that the doorknob had been blow off, probably by a handgun. He pushed the door open with his free hand and stepped aside, halfway expecting someone to fire at him or try to clock him the moment he entered the room. After he detected no movement inside the house, he entered the premises, cleared the few rooms, and turned his attention to an interior door that stood wide open. The lock had been busted off this door as well. He had brought a flashlight just in case he needed one. When he turned the light on and flashed the beam inside the space behind the door, he discovered a staircase.

  He crossed his gun hand over the wrist of the hand that held his flashlight and began a slow and careful descent down the stairs, leaning his back against the cold stone wall. Something slimy permeated the thin material of his shirt. He gritted his teeth. He didn’t like slime.

  Once he had gone down the entire flight of stairs, he found the entrance to a tunnel. He traveled the passage with cautious steps, keeping a steady pace. Time was of the essence, but nothing would be accomplished by being impetuous and barging into a bad situation.

  From out of the darkened passage floated several voices. There was a female amongst them. Probably Ashley Rivers.

  At the end of the tunnel, he eased through an opening into a large dome-shaped room. Across the stone floor, Josh McCord had his hands around Phelps’s neck, his thumb pressed into Phelps’s throat. Ashley Rivers circled them with something held high above her head. She swung the object and it landed square in the center of Phelps’s head. Incredibly, Phelps kept his feet. The doctor roared with obvious fury, loud enough to be heard over the constant roar of the waterfall that fell over the open end of the cave-like room. Considering its location, Shaw speculated the room had been carved out of the cliffs that overlooked Ashley Creek.

  Josh McCord wobbled on his feet. The man looked like he’d been through hell and back. The fight Shaw had stumbled upon must have been going on for some time, because both men sported purplish-red bruises, split lips, and bloodied noses.

  Phelps rushed McCord, but he moved aside at the last minute. A black mass that had been hovering over them descended into the space between them. Phelps turned and headed for Josh again but instead if ramming into him, Phelps ran headlong into the shadowy black shape.

  Phelps and the black mass seemed to merge into one entity. The man’s face distorted and twisted. Pure evil poured from him. “Mine,” he roared, yet the voice wasn’t his. A different timbre altogether.

  Shaw couldn’t make his legs move, no energy, like wading through thick syrup, stuck in the entrance to the room. It was as if an unseen band had wrapped around him, immobilizing him with fear. He watched the scene unfold, hopeless to affect its outcome. Both Ashley and Josh seemed to be stuck in place as well. Ashley’s face worked with strong emotions—a potent mix of fear and anger. Josh reached a hand back as if to block her from what was going on in front of them.

  Whatever had overtaken Phelps was battling with him from the inside out. Phelps convulsed and staggered, tripping over his own feet, slamming into the rock wall next to the outside entrance of the room, stumbling toward the watery barrier that separated the room from the outside world.

  The force that had kept Shaw captive released him with a jerk as soon as Phelps stepped across the lip of the opening. Shaw reached Ashley just as Phelps twisted and fell into the rushing stream of water. His scream echoed around them, enveloping Shaw, pressing on his eardrums until he didn’t think he could stand the stabbing pain.

  Suddenly, every bit of negative energy left the room. Shaw could almost see it trail Phelps out the opening of the room.

  As if in unison, the three of them rushed to the edge of the cliff, skirting the pounding currents of the waterfall, and gazed down at the creek below.

  Ashley pressed a shaking hand over her mouth, her gaze locked on Terrance Phelps as he rolled and bounced and bumped all the way down the side of the cliff. The black form seemed to weigh him down when he sank into the pool at the base of the waterfall. A splash of water shot up out of the pool. The creek roiled and swirled as if what it had just swallowed tasted nasty.

  Shaw estimated it was a good one hundred feet or more to the bottom of the waterfall. Phelps had hit the water with a resounding splat. There was no way the man could survive such a hard fall.

  The three of them watched and waited until it became apparent that Phelps had gone under and wasn’t going to pop back up anytime soon. Perhaps the rush of descending water kept him pushed under.

  Josh suddenly seemed to notice Shaw’s presence. “What are you doing here?”

  “Tori Downing was worried about the two of you. She did some snooping around Ashley’s office and figured out that Phelps had taken Ashley. She was right, wasn’t she? I mean, that looked like a pretty nasty fight. I get the feeling neither of you were here willingly.”

  Josh seemed to snap out of some sort of trance. “How did you know to come out here?”

  “Tori told me that Ashley had found this place.”

  Josh’s arm tightened around Ashley. “It’s a long story and one that I’m sure you’re gonna want to hear, but I’m wondering if we shouldn’t do something about Phelps first.”

  Shaw shook his head. There was no easy way down to the base of the waterfall. By the time one of them climbed down to the creek, Phelps would be long dead if he wasn’t already.

  Ashley gasped, turned her face into Josh’s shirt, and then peeked at the scene below.

  Josh pulled her even closer if that was possible and pointed at the pool. “What’s that?”

  Shaw watched in horror as Phelps popped up out of the water with a skeleton hanging around his neck. He thrashed and fought with dead bones until the skeleton’s bony fleshless fingers seemed to press on the top of the doctor’s head, forcing him back underwater. He held his breath, waiting for Phelps and the skeleton to emerge from the pool again. When he finally rose to
the surface again, the doctor rolled onto his back and began to float. Even from a distance, Phelps’s eyes appeared glassy. The man was no doubt dead and the skeleton was hitching a ride on his corpse, floating on the waters of Ashley Creek headed for Lake Jefferson.

  Shaw couldn’t look away. The image of the skeleton riding the psychopath down the rushing springtime gorged waters of Ashley Creek would undoubtedly stick with him for a long, long time.

  He shook the shock off, and resorted to what he knew best. The job. “I guess we’re going to have to eventually recover his body and try to determine whose bones those were.”

  Ashley finally spoke. Her first words were shaky and totally unexpected. “I’m pretty sure those bones are what’s left of Jeremy Haskins.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Two Weeks Later

  Once again, Shaw was meeting Laurel Standridge and Chase Peterson halfway between Fairview and Little Rock. It had been a couple of weeks since Laurel had taken the diary from the house Celeste Standridge had left her. She’d promised to read it and let Shaw know if there was anything in its contents that might be significant to his investigation of the deaths at Laurel Heights. Her silence had almost gone unnoticed.

  He’d been busy with the investigation of Caroline Grayson’s death and the aftermath of his intentional leak to the Little Rock news reporter. Lucy Kimbrough had been named as Caroline’s killer, but the vultures wanted the blood of someone living, and either Grayson or Halsey had become the target, depending on which side of the rapidly escalating war a person landed on.

  Grayson’s undercover operation was going better than expected. Halsey had renounced him publicly and privately a spat had erupted between Haskins and the sheriff that had gone beyond ugly. Grayson was making a public show of criticizing the Sheriff and his Department, flatly denying any accusations that he murdered his wife and grumbling that Halsey was targeting him for some nefarious reason. Rumors about how Grayson was connected to Haskins were as prolific as flies at a summer picnic. It had only been a matter of time before Haskins approached his seemingly disaffected son.

  Shaw rubbed his eyes. For the last few weeks, he’d gotten very little sleep, traveling between Little Rock and Fairview on a regular basis. Sometimes he wondered if he needed to move his residency to Hill County.

  The kidnapping of Ashley Rivers and the multiple murders attributed to Terrance Phelps had sidetracked him from following up on the case at Laurel Heights. Closing seven cases without a living suspect had taken much of his attention. After several days of intensive plodding through the backcountry, searchers had finally located Phelps’s body downstream from the waterfall on Ashley Creek, almost to the spot near Shaw’s Landing where the creek spilled into Lake Jefferson.

  Shaw had been on the scene, holding his breath, when they pulled Phelps out of the muddy bank of the Creek eight or nine miles from where he’d fallen. Jeremy’s bones had not been with Phelps’s body.

  Josh McCord and Ashley Rivers had agreed with him. If search and rescue found Haskins’s remains, so be it. The truth would come out. They prepared themselves for the possibility, but as the days went by, Ashley’s past remained in the past.

  There had not been a good reason to bring a missing skeleton into the Phelps investigation. Every day that passed put more and more distance between what happened at the cabin and what had happened to Ashley Rivers eight years before. She’d told Shaw the whole story. He didn’t feel justice would be served by dragging all the horrible things that had happened to her out into the open.

  Shaw now had a name for the woman discovered on the trail three weeks ago. Brandy Patton, a runaway for whom no on had bothered to file a missing person’s report. Since the news broke of the woman’s death and the local doctor’s involvement in a series of murders, rumors had intensified about the hauntings on the Ashley Ridge Trail.

  He’d closed the investigation into the death of Antonio Constantine, a.k.a. Tino, and he’d received funding to hire an earthmover. Yeah, he’d made a big deal out of retrieving the bodies of the men who had died in the explosion. He’d needed to close that case as well, and he hadn’t been able to do so without a body and still go home at night with a clear conscience. He had wanted to make sure Arkansas’s most notorious meth cooker was really dead and buried in the tunnel system beneath Laurel Heights. The work crew had dug Omar Cooley and Zeke Richards out of the rubble.

  This time he made it to the diner ahead of Laurel and Chase. He had nothing new to report to them. Rather he was hoping Laurel wanted to meet because she’d finished reading Celeste’s diary.

  When the couple entered the restaurant, he caught their attention with a wave of his hand. Laurel and Chase slipped between tables loaded with other diners. The place was packed. Really hopping for three in the afternoon. It was officially spring and he assumed there were tons of people out joy riding on a bright beautiful day.

  He stood and shook Chase’s hand. He glanced at Laurel and something sparkly caught his attention.

  She noticed him notice. “We got married.”

  Chase nodded. “Last week.” He pulled out a chair for Laurel and then one for himself. “I know you’re curious about why we wanted to meet, so I’ll get right down to it.” He pulled something from his pocket and slid it across the table to Shaw.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s a travel drive. You’ll find bank account and routing numbers on it for a couple of banks in the Cayman Islands.”

  Shaw raised his eyebrows. He studied the drive that still lay on the table between them. “Let me guess. That’s what Tino was searching for.”

  “Yes.”

  “Now, why couldn’t you tell me that weeks ago?”

  Chase pulled his chair closer to the table. “I needed to get the passwords from my brother, Rand, so that I could pay off the men he owed. They were going to kill him if he didn’t give them their cut soon. I’ve added the passwords to the document. You should have no trouble accessing his accounts.”

  Shaw leaned back and crossed his arms. “Why are you giving this to me now? I would have never known about it. You could have kept whatever money there was in those accounts to yourself.”

  Laurel reached over and slipped her hand in Chase’s.

  Strong emotion flared in the man’s eyes. “I couldn’t do that. As much as I hate him for his part in murdering my wife, and as much as I despise him for what he’s done to Laurel, and as much of a lowlife as I think he is, he’s still my flesh and blood. His partners were threatening to kill him if he didn’t send them their cut. I couldn’t let him die. I couldn’t have his blood on my hands. I can’t be responsible for that. All that would do… Letting him die would have been the easiest thing to do, but I don’t want to sink to his level.”

  Shaw finally picked the device off the table. “That was probably wise. Limits the number of nightmares a man has to live with.”

  “It won’t be easy tracking the funds, but if you follow the money, I’ll bet you’ll be able to get a lead on a pretty big operation. Those guys are serious if they could get to Rand in prison.” He stopped and coughed. Then looked Shaw straight in the eye. “They’d already gotten to him once. He nearly died.”

  “I’m sorry to hear—”

  “Don’t be. Whatever he gets, he deserves. But like I said, I don’t want that coming from me and I don’t want anything bad to happen to him because of something I did or didn’t do.” Chase waited a moment and then inhaled deeply before he continued. “His cut is still in the bank, less a few hundred grand.”

  “Oh, really? You kept a little something for yourself?”

  “Call it a finder’s fee.” Chase’s face set into a stern, don’t-even-argue-about-this look.

  Laurel finally spoke. “I was going to open Laurel Heights as a bed and breakfast, but I ran out of money. Spent the last of it on the road the last few weeks.”

  Shaw understood. He unfolded his arms and leaned on the table. The waitress approached them and
he waved her away. She gave him a nasty scowl and swiveled on her foot. He’d really done it. From then on, the service would be lousy, but that was all right. He didn’t want any interruptions. This conversation was proving to be very significant.

  “So now you can pursue your dream.”

  She shook her head. “No, I’m not going to do that anymore. What I want to do…” She licked her lips. “I want to use the money to finish the remodel and then I want to house women who are running away from abusive situations. And I thought…”

  Shaw smiled. “Go on.”

  “I thought you might be able to steer women my direction on occasion. Maybe you could put the word out among law enforcement officers that there was a safe haven for battered women or even just women who were running away from a bad home life and need shelter for a few days or weeks or months.”

  He got it, and he approved. “I have run across a few women who needed help, but yes, I’m always hearing about someone who needs a place to stay like that. I will definitely put that on my list of resources. And I will…discreetly…tell other officer’s who I think would appreciate knowing about a place like that.”

  Her grin spread across her face, the worry lines disappearing.

  She swept her hair over her shoulder. He sensed she wasn’t done with her revelations. After another long moment of silence, in which she seemed to study him intensely, she pulled Celeste’s diary out of her purse.

  “Here, I want you to take this. I’ve read it. All of it. There are some interesting passages in there that I think you will want to read. I’ve paper clipped them.”

  His heart pounded with sympathy. From the expression on her face, it appeared whatever she had discovered had been hard to take.

  He took the book from her outstretched hand. “So I guess you found out what you wanted to know?”

  “I did.”

  Silence grew into an enormous thing between them.

  “Are you going to tell me what she said?”

  Laurel sighed. “Remember when Tori told me that Celeste said she’d saved my life twice?”