Harley jumped to her feet. “Matilda. Matilda, you stop that!”
The man’s white tennis shoes dug into the tree’s base, dancing about the exposed roots for traction. “What does it want from me?”
“Um …” Harley floundered for words. “Well, I think she smells food. Do you have something in your fanny pack there—I mean, your bag?”
“No.” He gave her a defensive look. “Of course I don’t having anything to eat in my bag. Just my map and wallet and keys.”
An unconvinced Matilda rooted at the fanny pack, impatient to unwrap whatever treasure lay inside.
“And you’re sure there’s not something to eat in there?” Harley asked. “A food item of some sort?”
The man looked at his wife, this time with a guilty expression. “No.”
When Matilda rooted once more at the fanny pack, nibbling at the zipper, he at last conceded. “All right, all right, I do have something.”
He unzipped the fanny pack and removed a chicken leg wrapped in plastic wrap, holding it up for the group to see.
“Ooh,” they said in uniform awe.
“Donald!” His wife approached and pointed a finger at the chicken leg. “Where’d that come from?”
“Nowhere.”
“You’re supposed to be on a diet, remember? Doctor’s orders. You promised me.”
“Well, I’m hungry! And you never feed me before you—you take me on these stupid death marches of yours.”
“You said you wanted to come!”
“I was being nice! Anything to keep from goin’ back to all those stupid New Age counseling sessions … all that incense and those love beads.”
“Rumi stones.”
“Whatever.”
A hand cut the air between them, and Justin Wheeler appeared. “Oh, would you please just give the pig the chicken leg so we can get on with the tour?”
Returning to the real cause of his predicament, a flustered and forlorn Donald removed the chicken leg from the plastic bag and tossed it across the woods. An ecstatic Matilda rushed forward in pursuit, dragging her leash behind her. She rooted at the ground, gathering snow on her snout, as she collected the chicken leg in her mouth.
Then she paused and raised her head to Harley in warning.
Harley rushed over and peered down at the ground.
Crusts of snow and clumps of pine needles were gathered around something, something unsettling.
A hand, frozen in a final, terrifying grip before dying, reached up from the damp earth, the icy fingers gnarled and grasping.
Harley jumped back, nearly hitting the ground before she caught her balance on Matilda. The pig squealed, and Harley choked on the cold air, her eyes adjusting to what she had just seen. She wondered if her mind was playing tricks on her. Maybe it was just a branch or a bit of leaves jutting from the snow.
But no.
Beneath the hand lay a mound of body, like a snowman fallen on its side, and Harley brushed the snow from the torso, revealing a woman’s black dress. She worked her way up to the head region, where threads of dark hair swirled in a frozen pattern on the snow, the ends jutting from the ice and trembling in the breeze.
She lowered her gaze from the lifeless eyes, past a series of bruises on her neck, and to a hangman’s noose draped down her chest.
Her gaze darted about the woods, in search of Justin Wheeler’s ghost tour. But there was no sign of them, nor of Justin’s bellowing voice, echoing through the pines.
She and Matilda were entirely alone.
Her hands shaking, Harley removed her cell phone from her pocket, preparing to dial Sheriff Jed Turner’s number.
11
A Ghost of Christmas Present
The woman was not from Notchey Creek, of this Harley was certain.
In her black wool dress and heels, she appeared quite out of place. The dress was unsuitable attire for a mountain town, where people wore their hiking clothes, even out to dinner.
And as for her looks, she appeared almost unreal.
Harley ascertained she was probably somewhere in her late thirties, although she could have been much older. Her dark hair was freshly dyed, her cheeks plump, and her forehead smooth from injections, shaving years from her face. Her makeup, too, was perfectly applied, creating a natural, put-together look. The only things detracting from her youthful appearance were a few age spots on her hands, and crepey skin about her neck, things she hadn’t corrected—at least not yet.
Even with the pallor of death on her face and her slender figure frozen by cold, she was still incredibly beautiful.
Harley buttoned her coat to her chest, blocking a chilly gust of wind. Why had the woman been in the park, presumably in the middle of the night? A blanket of snow had covered her body, and since it had not snowed since the very early hours of the morning, she must have been there several hours.
But why? It was not likely she was a transient, a prostitute, or a homeless drug addict. Besides, Notchey Creek was not home to many, if any, of those types, anyway. And the woman had taken really good care of herself. She was sophisticated, and seemingly had money.
And her eyes, in their final seconds before dying, had peered up at the night sky, shining in a terrifying brilliance. Like a cat’s eyes, they were a light green.
Stunning.
One thing was for certain—if someone had seen the woman in Notchey Creek, they would have remembered her. She was that striking.
Harley knelt beside the woman and pressed two fingers to her wrist. The flesh was stiff and cold.
Nothing.
Harley rose to a stand, and when she dialed Jed’s number, she found her phone had no reception. While she hated to leave the body, if only just for a moment, she had to phone Jed.
“Come, Matilda.”
The two edged their way along the trail, Matilda walking alongside Harley as she held her phone out and above her head, waiting for reception.
At last she heard a dial tone, and seconds later, Jed answered.
“What?” he said with his usual charm.
She told him of the woman she had found only moments earlier, and their exact location in the park. After some reluctance, he promised he would be there soon. The two said goodbye, and she and Matilda hurried back to the body.
Except the body was gone.
The patch of snow where the woman had been was empty, and in addition, there was no sign of the woman or anyone else for that matter, ever having been there.
She had simply vanished.
12
Grave Experiences
“But I’m not crazy, Jed. She was right here.”
Sheriff Jed Turner towered above Harley, peering down at the now-empty patch of snow. A heavy brown leather jacket covered his beige sheriff’s uniform and a matching toque concealed what little the barber left of his brown hair.
Prior to becoming county sheriff, Jed had been a professional football player for the Indianapolis Colts, but a torn ligament forced him into early retirement, and a return to his hometown.
Jed had been in Harley’s graduating class, and the two had known one another since childhood. At one time they had been unlikely friends, only for their friendship to be severed by Jed’s abusive and overbearing father. In recent months, however, they had rekindled their relationship through the shared experience of tragic events. Nothing like solving a murder case to bring two very different people together.
“Well, there ain’t anybody here now,” he said.
“Well, she was. A woman. Long dark hair. Beautiful face. Light green eyes. Very distinctive.”
He gave her an incredulous look. “Maybe you woke her up from a bender, you ever think that? Maybe she heard you—saw that pig standin’ over her, and took off.” Under his breath, he added, “Heck, I’d take off too if I woke up and found that pig hoverin’ over me.”
“It wasn’t that.” Harley found her tone involuntarily transitioning from pleading to exasperated. “She was dead, Jed. I’m sur
e of it. And she’d been strangled. She had bruises around her neck—a noose hanging down her chest.”
“You check her pulse?”
“Of course, I did.”
Yet he was still unconvinced, and moved his gaze from the patch of snow-covered earth, to the canopy of trees still heavy with snow. He shook his head. “Maybe you’re the one comin’ off a binge. Maybe all those whiskey fumes finally went to your head.”
“Has anyone been reported missing?”
“Nope. And especially not anybody matchin’ that description.”
“Well, could you check some of the other precincts? See if they’ve had any missing persons reported?”
Jed examined her for a moment, his brows coming together. “What is it with you findin’ drunks in the wee hours of the mornin’—and them always runnin’ off?”
He was referring to the homeless man she and Tina had found in the ditch that fall. The man, delirious and speaking gibberish, had staggered into the woods and disappeared afterward, only for his body to be found a few days later. Harley had been right in that particular case, and she feared this woman had met a similar fate.
“Except this woman didn’t run away,” she said. “She couldn’t have. She was dead.”
What more did she have to say to convince him?
“Then where’d she go?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Somebody must’ve moved her body.”
“Ain’t no footprints anywhere.”
Harley peered down at the ground. There were plenty of pine needles and sticks and debris, but no footprints other than their own.
How could this be? How could someone move a body without leaving footprints?
“Margaret Reed,” a male voice said.
13
“Whose Woods These Are I Think I Know”
Justin Wheeler and Heather Knowlton approached from behind. Beside Harley, Jed’s body tensed up and his jaw stiffened.
Justin extended his hand to Jed, and he shook it with some reluctance. “I’m Justin Wheeler,” he said. “Historian and paranormal expert. And this,” he said, gesturing to Heather, “is my assistant, Heather Knowlton.”
“Yeah, I know who y’all are. You got those silly ghost fliers all over town. Now tell me who Margaret Reed is.”
“Was. And you’d know who she was if you’d ever attended one of my ghost walks. In fact, we were about to make contact with her too until Revenge of the Nerds here,” he said, pointing to Harley and Matilda, “crashed our tour.” He turned back to Jed. “Margaret Reed, you see, is the final act of our show, the magnum opus.”
Jed seemed to search for the name Margaret Reed in his mental rolodex. “You mean the one who killed herself over the Sutcliffes way back when? But I thought that was just some made-up legend.”
“It’s every bit true.” The color returned to Justin’s cheeks, as if the publicity to be gained from the crisis had overcome his initial anxiety. He motioned to the surrounding forest, and as if being cued by a film crew, he commenced with his monologue. “You see, Margaret’s family once owned this land. All of it. All of Briarwood. Received it as a land grant from the government after the Revolutionary War. They were homesteaders, a good family, self-sufficient for the most part, responsible citizens, kept to themselves.”
“And then what happened?” Justin continued with great theatrical flourish. “The logging industry in the late 1800s—that’s what happened—and with it the Sutcliffes. Carpetbaggers from up north. Robber barons taking advantage of the New South. They saw the millions they could make from the timber in these mountains, and unfortunately for Margaret and her family, saw the Reeds’ land as the perfect place to build their glorious mansion. And so what’d they do? What did the Sutcliffes always do when they saw something they wanted and the Reeds wouldn’t sell it to them? They took it.
“No papers existed for the land grant, and with no physical proof the land rightfully belonged to them, the Reeds were treated as squatters. The Sutcliffes bought the land right out from under them, simple as that, and the Reeds fell into despair. You see, land was capital back then, Sheriff, and without it, the Reeds had nothing left. And so they passed away, one-by-one, until only poor, penniless, and destitute Margaret was left. And she, too, gave in not long after that. Killed herself on Christmas morning—hung herself not far from here where the land borders the Sutcliffes’ at Briarcliffe.”
“And what’s this got to do with anything?” Jed asked.
Justin gave a knowing smile. “Well, I think she’s come back, Margaret has, and she’s making a point with these sightings.”
Jed rolled his eyes. “Have you and your group seen anything out of the ordinary here recently—I mean, besides your silly ghosts?”
Justin considered. “Well, a woman in our group said she thought she saw something last night—during the midnight tour.”
“What?”
“Well, you know what I think it was, but since you’re a non-believer, I’ll just report she said it was like a flash of something—in the trees.”
“What kind of flash?”
“Um … like a movement. A light.”
“And who was this woman?”
“Don’t know. We don’t take names when we sign people up for the tours.”
“Whatever,” Jed said with a sigh. “I need you to clear these woods right now, you got it?”
“But I can’t go, don’t you see that? I’ve been called here. I’m needed. My gifts are needed.”
Jed gave another look of warning, and Heather stepped forward. “We apologize, sir. It’s just that Justin gets so excited—has such a passion for the paranormal. He thinks there’s something truly astounding to be studied here.”
An unconvinced Jed motioned for them to leave, and Justin said, “And don’t you find it odd, too, Sheriff, that the recent activity in these woods, the reported sightings of Margaret in the last few days, coincide with Beau Arson’s arrival in town? Don’t you think it’s strange that the lost son of the family who ruined the Reeds all those years ago is back—and so is she?”
Jed dismissed him with a wave of his hand. “Beat it.”
“But I don’t think you get it, Sheriff. Beau Arson’s presence here has stirred up a very troubled spirit.”
“And you’re stirrin’ up mine.”
Perhaps sensing Jed would never be persuaded, and feeling his talents might be appreciated more elsewhere, Justin Wheeler and Heather Knowlton departed.
When they were out of seeing and hearing distance, Jed grunted a laugh, and in a tone laced with sarcasm, said, “I don’t know. Maybe she was one of Justin Wheeler’s silly ghosts. Maybe this really is the Haunted Woods of Briarwood Park.”
“She was real, Jed.” Harley sighed with resignation. “Besides, you know I don’t believe in ghosts, anyway.”
But it was no use to continue this back-and-forth with him. He simply did not believe her. Would not believe her. And why should he? A woman’s body disappears without any physical evidence indicating said body had ever been there, not even any footsteps in the immediate vicinity to indicate anyone had been there at all.
“Please,” she said. “Just make a few calls, okay? Ask around. See if anybody’s been reported missing. Whoever she was, she took good care of herself. Somebody somewhere’s going to notice she’s gone. They’ll be looking for her.”
He gave a nod, but she could tell he was noncommittal. He examined her. “Are you sure you’re doin’ all right?”
“I’m fine. Why?”
“Alveda called earlier. Said you’ve been mouthin’ off. Didn’t sound like you, so …”
“That’s what she said? Mouthing off?”
“No, she said you were bein’ insolent.”
Harley considered. “Well, I might’ve been a little insolent, I guess … but you know what she’s like.”
“I do.”
And the issue was dropped.
He motioned for her and Matilda to follow him back along the tra
il, and they did so, Harley walking with her head down, lost in thought, and Matilda intermittently sniffing at the ground.
They were only a few yards along their journey when Jed came to an abrupt halt in front of them.
14
Footprints in the Snow
“What?” Harley asked.
“Wait a minute.” Jed was looking off to their left. “Maybe we do have us some footprints after all.”
He trod about five feet from the path and stopped before a set of large footprints in the snow, forming a trail that disappeared among the trees. Even stranger, the prints appeared to be from bare feet.
“Wait right here,” he said. “Don’t move.”
And she and Matilda did not move, except for when the pig explored the ground at her feet, or when Harley drew in and released breaths of fog in the cold air. Focusing on the spaces between the trees, gray and dappled with snowflakes fluttering in the air, she anticipated Jed’s reappearance.
And there he was.
“Interestin’,” he said. And in typical Jed fashion, he did not expand further. Instead, he hiked his way back along the path toward them, kicking tufts of snow from his shoes as he did so.
Harley could not be certain, but he looked as if he had a bit of a smile on his face. Yes, he was acting purposely coy. She pushed her glasses up her nose and gave him a disapproving look. “Well, where’d they go?”
“You’re not gonna like it.”
“Jed.”
“Briarcliffe.” The coy smile blended with a smug expression. “Went straight up to Briarcliffe.”
So that was why he was smiling, Harley thought.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said, “and I don’t agree.”
He shook his head, and his smile fell into a disgruntled grimace. “What is it with that man and women anyway? Well, I’ll tell you one thing. There’s only one other person I know of around here besides me that’s got feet that big.”
The Ghosts of Notchey Creek Page 4