The screen door of the costume house was flung open by an exuberant Patty Luchent. It banged against the side of the house as Patty pulled Pippa out from behind her. With a hand on both of Pippa’s upper arms and her body directly behind Pippa, Patty responded to Jake.
“We all bring something to make this world beautiful, right?”
A nudge made Pippa stumble forward. Hotness crept up her throat. If Jake Chapman even said a word, one word, Pippa might faint dead away. As it was, he had gone remarkably still. Like in a dime novel romance. Only there was nothing romantic about this moment. It was sheer and unadulterated awkwardness.
Jake cleared his throat. Agnes chomped on leaves while her trunk reached for another branch. Penn sat on her haunches and let her mouth drop open, tongue out, panting with a droopy smile on her furry face.
“Sure,” Jake coughed out.
Patty’s laughter sounded like tiny bells. She stepped out from behind Pippa and extended an arm toward her like the ringmaster announcing his next act. “Isn’t she beautiful? She finally got herself all dolled up and out from under her fiancé’s thumb and her father’s finger!”
Not really.
Pippa opened her mouth to protest.
She really hadn’t.
Pippa closed her mouth.
“Looks fine to me.” Jake gave a swift nod. Polite. Distant. The fun drained from his gray eyes like the sunlight hidden behind a cloud.
“I’ve got an appointment!” Patty announced with a sudden flourish. She skipped down the porch steps and waggled her fingers at Pippa, then at Jake. “Ta-ta and toodle-doo, my lovelies!” A sparkling smile.
A train whistle could be heard in the distance, and Patty’s eyes darted toward the depot. “Right on time,” she said, then took off at a brisk pace toward the station. Whom she was meeting and why, Pippa had no idea. All she knew was that once more, it was just her and Jake. Staring at each other. Unsure of what to say or if anything should be said at all.
“Lily took another bottle.”
“Have you found anything out about your sister?”
They spoke simultaneously, and Pippa winced. Jake’s news was wonderful and platonic, but no, she had to dive right into his sister’s assault and murder and claw at an already-open wound with the finesse of an angry caged tiger.
“No.”
“Oh, good.”
They tried again.
Jake’s mouth tightened. Pippa noticed him biting down on his ever-present cigar, his jaw flexing against some unspoken emotion or word.
“I need to keep going.”
Of course he did. Pippa nodded. Jake had an elephant to tend to. Down the street, Ernie was already leading the other two elephants back into the indoor octagonal ring for practice. Even though the season was officially over and the circus was settling down in Bluff River to prepare for winter, that didn’t mean the animals were left unworked and unrehearsed.
“It’s nice to see you.” Pippa offered the proper statement.
Jake’s eyes darkened as he palmed his bearded cheek. “Sure.” He gave one of his customary short nods. “And you do look pretty.”
Pippa stood there staring after him, even after he’d disappeared into the elephant house and, as if in closure, Agnes’s tail gave a resounding thwack to the doorframe.
Chapter Twenty
CHANDLER
Where did you find this?” Chandler all but shook the necklace in Hank’s face. He was walking her home, the ghost tour ended, the police having taken statements from the onlookers, after which they interviewed her.
How had the doors been opened? Who else had keys? Had she heard the screaming too? Did anything look disturbed or missing?
She’d been every cop’s worst witness. She didn’t know. Only herself and the contractor. No, never. And finally, it’s an abandoned train depot—everything looked disturbed, and there wasn’t anything to miss.
“You want to explain this?” Chandler asked again in the darkness, their footsteps scraping on the sidewalk.
“Sure. I think it’s the necklace that they say was on Patty Luchent.” Hank’s voice was deep and sliced through the night.
“You don’t say?” Chandler tried not to allow so much sarcasm to infuse her words, but she couldn’t help it. “And where did you find it?”
“The depot.”
“And how did you get into my depot?”
Hank stopped and stared down at her, although he was probably lucky to make out any of her features under the moonless sky. “You gave me a key.”
“No, I didn’t.” She hadn’t, had she?
“Yes. You did.”
“When?”
“When you were in the ER. Before we left. It’s why I’d come to your place to begin with, remember? I wanted access to the train depot.”
It bugged Chandler that she didn’t remember. It was a ramification of her disease, specifically during her episodes. Lost memories. Lost conversations. Short-term amnesia almost.
“So, you have a key? That I gave you? Did you leave the doors open tonight?” Chandler crossed her arms.
A breeze picked up and brushed between them, like a ghost playing around two stubborn lovers refusing to move.
“No, I did not leave the doors open.”
“Then how—?”
“Chandler.” Because his voice was so baritone, it sounded sharp when Hank said her name. She pressed her lips together, irritated that he’d shut her up.
“I entered the depot with your permission—or so I thought. I found the necklace upstairs. It was wedged beneath an antique desk in one of the rooms. I wanted to show you tonight, but you were on that tour with Cru and his—”
“With Cru. Ah-hah! You’re jealous.” Chandler couldn’t help but goad him, even though it was probably far from the truth and took a lot of guts to say to his face. But her annoyance had inspired her.
“Sure. I am.” Hank didn’t deny it, and Chandler couldn’t tell if he was being patronizing or not. He tapped her arm to get her to follow him, and they started down the sidewalk again. “The fact is, that’s twice now someone has tampered with the train depot. I figure the first time they got in through the window.”
“They’re all cemented in.”
“Not the one at ground level. I couldn’t fit through it, but someone your size could.”
Chandler didn’t respond. She hadn’t noticed it. She didn’t like that she hadn’t noticed it. Those details were rather important to be aware of in her field of expertise.
“I’ve no theory for the doors being open tonight, though.”
“Why? Why would anyone care to be inside the depot, and why now after my uncle bought the property? Lottie never mentioned anyone trespassing on the property before.”
Hank didn’t answer right away. Finally he broke the silence. “I think it has to do with Linda. Uncle Denny’s sister. It’s why I’m here. We’re disrupting a story no one has cared about for years. That could be threatening someone.”
Chandler sniffed and couldn’t help but peer into a lighted window of a small house they walked past. The TV was flickering inside. It looked warm. A haven. Not at all a house that belonged in a town with a haunted circus.
“I’m not disrupting anything,” she argued. “I’m not here to mess with ghosts or to find missing children from 1978.”
“1983.”
“Whatever. My point is, I just want to do my job. It’s what I’m good at.” Chandler fished in her pocket and pulled out Patty’s necklace. She reached for Hank’s hand, which, she noted, was very large, and she pressed the necklace into it. “Here. Take this—thing. You can have your fun investigating serial killers, and while I have the utmost sympathy for your uncle and your family never finding reconciliation with Linda’s disappearance, it has nothing to do with me. Or with Patty Luchent, for that matter.”
“Chandler.” Hank’s tone held an edge of caution.
“No.” Chandler stepped away from him. They had arrived at her rental.
The cottage lights were on, evidence that Margie had stayed true to her post watching Peter. Chandler held her palms toward Hank. The screams from the depot still echoed inside of her, restless and unexplained. The mess in the upstairs of the costume house also flashed across her memory—also unexplained unless she chose to believe Lottie. It was unsettling at best, and terrifying at worst.
“Please. Do whatever you need to find out about Denny’s sister. I’ll support that, but I-I can’t be a part of it. This place is . . .” Truth be told, Chandler had considered leaving. Yet that would leave her a wide-open target for Jackson to prove his point that she was slipping at her job. Not to mention it would be difficult to explain she had skipped town because of a ghost story. “Just leave me out of it,” she concluded.
Hank tipped his head, searching her face in the darkness. “I’m not sure you can be left out of it. Especially if you keep inserting yourself into it.”
Chandler wanted to tell him it was inadvertent insertion. Unwilling. Accidental. Unintended. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t explain any of it. The only thing she could shed light on was why she’d transplanted herself and her son to a different state, to a small town, to a jobsite—even going so far as to pull Peter from school and attempt online homeschooling.
She was running. Plain and simple. From the truth that dogged her feet. One day soon, she would simply not be enough for Peter. Maybe even for herself. And the idea of asking for—let alone accepting—help was akin to giving up her rights. It was independence suicide, and she wasn’t ready for that to die.
Her call with Uncle Neal this morning had been brief and concise. Her follow-up call with Jackson had been the damaging weed to her struggling patch of flowers. The flowers of hope that she could turn in a proposal to restore this place—this behemoth of a building.
Chandler sucked in deep lungsful of fresh air, allowing its crispness to infiltrate her system and jump-start it with oxygen. The roof alone would cost over a million in repairs. It wasn’t the estimate she’d been hoping for. She wasn’t ignorant, though, as Chandler had expected the amount to be rather exorbitant. But that positioning of the decimal point would make convincing Uncle Neal difficult—that it was a good idea to restore rather than demolish and rebuild. Uncle Neal hadn’t gone apoplectic on her when she’d briefed him on the estimate, but neither had he responded with a rose-colored outlook.
“And we’re still waiting for the quotes on the foundation?” His tone was thoughtful. He was calculating in his head.
“Yes. But I have a good feeling about that from what I can see. As we know from the initial pre-purchase assessment, it is sound. It just needs some bolstering. And all the window framing will need restoring, and the windows custom-ordered,” she added. Might as well be up front with the truth.
“We knew that. What about the flooring?” Uncle Neal asked.
“It seems all right in most places. Rotted away in a couple of rooms, mostly in the corners where moisture’s gotten in.”
She wasn’t going to say a peep about the place being haunted or mention its history.
“Well, keep at it. I trust you’ll put as much thought and time into the alternative too. I know where your passions lie, but I’d appreciate an unbiased proposal.”
Chandler assured him she would. She was already in communication with an architect, who was busy drafting plans in the event they demoed the depot and started from scratch.
Jackson had been another beast altogether. He was her dandelion.
“You’re wasting time and funds on something that is obviously not worth repairing. If it were, someone would have snatched it up long ago and done just that.”
“That takes capital, though,” she’d argued.
“Far more capital than a smart man would front,” Jackson countered back. “A restored historic building to house custom hobby shops? You’ll never have any ROI.”
Right. Return on investment. And it had all gone downhill after that. Jackson’s urging to simply work with the architect and forgo collecting all the quotes rang heavy in her mind as she unlocked the main door of the train depot. She liked the building better in the daylight.
But once the tall windows were unblocked and restored, the sunlight streaming in, she could imagine the beauty of the interior. Once the carved woodwork was refinished, the floors polished—floors scuffed from shoes and trunks and luggage carts—and the benches facing the ticket gate brought back to their original state, she could imagine people being drawn once again to this place.
Now, however, it was nothing but a hollowed-out relic of lost memories.
“Hey.”
“Gahhhhhhh!” Chandler screamed and whirled around, her moccasins scattering gravel at her feet as she slapped out instinctively, her hand connecting with a solid chest.
Hank’s left eyebrow rose, and he looked down at Chandler’s hand that she snatched back as fast as she’d hit him. She hadn’t fazed him in the slightest.
“A bit jumpy?” He winked. There was something about a brawny man with shaggy hair pulled back by a leather strap that had never attracted Chandler before. She wasn’t sure why suddenly she was all twitterpated like a middle-school girl.
“No. Not jumpy.” Liar. Chandler looked over his shoulder as though she would find some sort of explanation for his presence. “Why are you here?”
Hank crossed his thick arms over his equally thick chest. Chandler noted the rosary that wound up his forearm, encircling a cross. What should be comforting, a symbol of closeness with God, just left her with more questions.
“You told me it was cool if I came by. Remember? Just to leave you out of it.”
“Fine. Just—tell me where you need to go inside and I’ll give you a bit.” Chandler cut to the chase, hanging on to the olive-green strap of her messenger bag hung across her chest as if it were a lifeline to an instant 911. She’d wait outside. Let Hank do whatever digging around for ghosts and cold-case clues he wanted, and then when he left she’d go about her business.
“I’ll show you.” He bypassed her and stepped into the depot.
“No. You’ll tell me.” Chandler heard the wobble in her voice, even though she was trying to sound severe. Determined and confident.
“You don’t trust me.” Hank stated the obvious, his green eyes sparking.
“I . . .” She stopped. She really had no answer. It wasn’t that she couldn’t trust him—she just didn’t know him. Didn’t really know anyone here, for that matter.
Hank was deep inside the depot already, his head tipped back to eye the vaulted ceiling as though Leonardo da Vinci had painted on it. Chandler followed with caution, clinging to her bag like it was a weapon.
“Have you been upstairs yet?” he asked and shot her a look over his shoulder. “It’s all part of the explanation. The upstairs.”
“I don’t need an explanation,” Chandler lied. Actually she would rest easier knowing Hank was nosing around the depot, and yet she felt she needed more reasons as to why.
Linda Pike had last been seen at the depot in 1983. If she had vanished then, and the police hadn’t found her, what made Hank believe that, decades later, he would have better luck?
“What’s so important about upstairs?” she asked.
Hank gave her a knowing smile. She’d caved. Her curiosity was going to kill her—like the proverbial cat—and Hank Titus would probably stand there and watch, laughing the entire time at what a walking contradiction she was.
“What’s so important about upstairs?” she repeated.
“So, you haven’t been upstairs yet,” he concluded.
“Can we not dance in circles?” Chandler’s annoyance was getting the best of her. “I just spent last night half convinced this place is haunted! My co-worker is pressuring me to bulldoze the building, and if any more weird stuff takes place here, I just may do that. I didn’t come to Bluff River to play games, and I’ve enough on my plate to balance—as you well know. So tell me what you think you can accomplish
with a cold case that’s older than we are. Not to mention that stupid necklace and that crazy ghost story!”
“Feel better?” Hank cocked his habitual eyebrow.
“Yes!” Chandler exclaimed. Took a breath. Squeezed her arms against her chest. “No.” She managed a slight smile. Her attempt to appear more civil and less like a raging Cruella de Vil.
“Do you know what they used the second level of the depot for?” Hank inquired, choosing to let her outburst slide, apparently also deciding to ignore answering her very valid, very pointed questions.
“Yes. Offices and telegraph communications.” Chandler tried to squelch her frustration, to calm herself, to enter back into the realm of the sane and reasonable.
“That’s all you know?”
“Yes.”
“I’d wager a bet there’s a direct line of sight to the circus grounds from the windows upstairs.”
Chandler gave Hank a no-duh look and impatiently tapped her shoe on the floor. “And that’s important why?”
Hank motioned her with a wave. “Maybe if we ever left the main room, we could find out.”
“Fine.” Chandler rolled her wrist in a fancy wave in return. “Lead the way.”
His boots clomped up the stairs, and Hank waved an arm in front of him, clearing the path of spider webs. Mouse droppings collected in piles in the corners of the steps. The walls were gray with dust and years of grime. Chandler hunched her shoulders to avoid touching anything. It was gross and filthy. The smell of must and dankness grew thicker as they climbed. Footprints on the steps reminded Chandler that the contractor had already been up here to inspect the roof. Good. At least she knew they wouldn’t fall through rotten floorboards.
Hank reached the landing and waited for Chandler. She stopped beside him and looked right and left, momentarily in awe of the complexity of the building’s architecture. Large rooms branched off on both sides of the hall, and to her right, a tall oval window—now filled with cinder blocks—had at one point allowed in natural light from floor to ceiling. To her left, the hallway ended abruptly to wrap around an open floor in a catwalk of sorts. A person could look all the way down to the ticket area.
The Haunting at Bonaventure Circus Page 17