Chapter Three

Dangerous ghosts? How the hell was he supposed to keep her safe from dangerous ghosts? Up until a few weeks ago he didn’t even believe in ghosts. Silently he cursed. Everything had seemed so straight forward, and then she’d arrived. Thrown it all into a tail spin.

Emma was small, and fit perfectly in his arms. Holding her close brought out fierce protective urges that made him want to rip the house apart beam by beam until he found the thing that had tried to harm her, and beat it into submission. Except he wasn’t sure how you did that to a ghost. And he didn’t want to let her go. Not now. Maybe not ever.

“Do we need to fight this thing?”

“We can’t. Jen’s made her presence known. We’ll want to follow her lead. See what she has to show us. Try not to tweak her. Spirits don’t have the normal social and psychological boundaries, or capacity for rational thought. That much I know, which is why one with power and rage can be dangerous to the living.”

“We don’t do this if following her lead means more of the same for you. It’s too big a risk. I’ll call this whole thing off and level the property before I put you in harm’s way.” The raw emotion behind his words surprised him.

“You gave your oath to Keith. If he’s here too, and you decide to back out, you’re going to have serious trouble on your hands. Maybe even blood.”

Great. This couldn’t be easy, could it? No one else had made these kinds of warnings and predictions. Then again, no one but Emma had managed to pierce the barrier and brush up against the dead. He hated not knowing what to do. Hated feeling powerless. He closed his eyes, counted to ten. Took a deep breath. “What’s our next step?”

“Whatever we planned next. Now that we know she’s here, we know what to watch for. I know to be more careful.”

Cool air rushed between them as Emma eased back. He adjusted, following her lead. He did not, however, remove his arm from her shoulders. Touching her kept them connected. He reasoned that if he stayed connected, he’d keep her safe. “Eric didn’t warn me things would go down this way.”

“You never know how the game will play out. Mostly contact is light and ephemeral. Sometimes you get a lingering headache. Off and on, you connect with the victim and get a shadow experience, a second hand walk through of what happened to them. That’s bad. Real bad.”

She sighed, rubbed the bridge of her nose. “It’s not the worst part of working a cold murder case, though. The worst part is handling the disappointment and anger of the families when you don’t connect. On average you don’t connect way more times than you do. To see the last shreds of hope torn away, there’s nothing like it on earth. Those faces stay with you and haunt your dreams.”

“It was like that when we told the victim’s families for the first time, and then, twice as bad when they’d go to the morgue. Make the final identification. I know where you’re coming from.” Never, in a million years, had he thought someone like her, a psychic, went through the same hell as a cop. The revelation was humbling. “Eric said you hate these cases. Mostly he blamed the police.”

“The one-two punch. You go in wanting to help. Maybe family called you in. Maybe a lone cop, desperate enough to grasp at straws. You’re treated like a two bit hustler. And when you can’t produce, the smug superiority of the cops, and the desolation of the family make you want to dig a deep hole, crawl in and pull it shut around you.”

He’d faced down the derision of fellow officers. He knew how tight that thin blue line held together, and how brutal they were to outcasts. “When word first hit my precinct I’d outed fellow officers, even though these guys were a black stain on the badge and had killed more than a few good cops along the way, they turned a unified back. I was nothing. Worse than nothing. A rat.”

“You did the right thing.”

“I know. But I gave up everything that mattered to do it, and I didn’t realize what kind of price I’d pay afterwards. Most places, you bring in the bad guys you’re a hero. But your buddies, they wonder, why didn’t you keep this in the family? Give us a chance to fix it ourselves? You broke ranks so you’re damaged goods. Internal Affairs tries their hand at recruiting you, but even a rat doesn’t like to work with one.”

Where had those words come from? Deep, he guessed. He’d thought them a million times, but never spoken them to a soul. He remembered how often these thoughts plagued him afterwards, when he went through his ‘I hate people’ phase and buried himself into working out his issues through his computer and programming. It had made him a rich man a second time in his life, like the game company he’d formed with Keith back in college. It had liberated and healed him as well. But he never managed to completely erase the stain of personal failure he’d felt, even though he knew what he did was right.

“Would you do it again?”

“In a heartbeat,” he said without hesitation. “You pegged me earlier. Once a cop, always a cop. I couldn’t join a police force anywhere, since reputation travels, so I made my own. This way I can still keep outing the bad guys.”

“You have an over developed hero complex, Sam,” she said, a little mischief in her eyes.

“What’d you call me—white knight? Maybe I am some days.” If she knew the whole truth, including what he’d done to Angela, she might think otherwise. For once, he decided to forget the details, forget the plan for the future, and live in the moment. “Does it matter to you?”

“What girl doesn’t like a hero?”

As answers went, it was evasive. She did that, shift and slide like sand, easing out of corners. He didn’t want to push his luck. The horror and fear were gone. He had her beside him, thought he could keep her safe. It was enough for now. “I’ll remember that. Might come in handy.”

“You’d use my words against me?” she teased. “Not very heroic.”

“I promise you’d enjoy it.”

Emma’s breath caught. Proof she was thinking of the possibilities, same as him. “I believe you.”

“I’m not into lying.”

When she turned, the curve of her breast feathered against him and he all but lost it right there. “It’s been a long night.”

The longest in his recollection. Judging by the tight hitch in his pants, it was only going to get longer. Probably involve a cold shower. Maybe two.

“It’s almost midnight. We should call it here, pick back up in the morning.” He wanted anything but, however, her eyes were tired, it really had been a long day, and they’d both benefit from a strategic retreat. “You think you’ll be safe? I’m next door. All you need to do is yell. I’ll be there in a second. If you want, I can crash on the couch in the suite.”

“I’ll be fine. I promise.”

Accepting promises from former con artists was never a sound idea. He’d left sound ideas at the door step the minute he set eyes on her.

“Good enough,” he said, rising from the couch. He offered her his hand and she accepted, but once she stood, she put distance between them.

She lingered by the board, staring at Jen’s photo. “She was surprised by her death, Sam. Genuinely shocked. As if dying wasn’t supposed to happen to her.”

“Jen lived a fairy tale life.”

“And look where it got her,” Emma said. “I think it’s important, this surprised energy.”

That aroused his curiosity, which was way better than the other kinds of things she’d aroused. “If she was surprised, and had time to be shocked, maybe she had time to think.”

“And time to think might mean time to do something else.” Emma’s eyes sharpened, and she touched the picture again. Rubbed her index finger in a circular motion, ringing the head shot again and again. “She had time to think, time to process emotion, and time to do something, but what? What else did you do, Jen? What else do you want us to know?”

Sam held his breath, waiting for another catastrophic event. He was beginning to think that’s how the paranormal circus worked: three rings, all crazy, no waiting. But the theater for the night was done and gone. The walls didn’t leak blood, the windows didn’t rattle, and nothing went bump in the night.

“She did something, Sam, between the time she knew she was going to die, and the time she died. There was a substantial gap of time.” Emma stopped touching the picture. “We need to figure out what happened in that gap. We do that, we’ll know who killed Jen. And, we’ll know why.”

~ * * * ~

Holloway Lodge glowed weakly in the night. The kitchen. The library. The front porch. From the vantage point in the tree line, he observed in silence. Thinking. Wondering. The torrential rain beat down around him, falling from a merciless sky. Had he been a more superstitious man, he would draw the parallels between this season and the season he’d killed Jennifer Vaughn and think perhaps it was an omen of reckoning. There were similarities, yes, but his concern was not so much for what he’d done, as it was for the people inside the lodge. What they would do. What they might undo, or uncover.

He’d viewed the last five years as a paced marathon. Endurance, patience, they’d all been key. Why this time was different, he couldn’t say. But it was different. The woman’s arrival left him concerned. And Sam Tyler, living here, made it worse. This was not crazy Keith and his parade of freaks. Now there was a force at the lodge, with a defined mission, and the ability to see it through to the end.

A battle line had been drawn, one that would need crossing. Not now, but soon. To make a wrong move at this critical juncture was far more dangerous than making no move at all. Haste had once been his undoing, put so very much at risk, and destroyed something of great importance to him. He knew better this time. Still, he would take any steps necessary to stay safe. Hidden. Anonymous.

A brutal strike of lightning forked out across the surrounding mountain tops. For a moment he thought he saw someone standing at the bottom of the lodge stairs. A man. Looking directly at him.

He ducked back into the trees, but on a following flash of lightning, found the spot to be bare. A trick of the night, or imagination. The only living occupants of Holloway Lodge were tucked away in the library. He decided after a few more minutes of observation, he’d gain little more than catching a chill standing in the rain. It was time to leave. He had to plan, to make ready. And, perhaps, to kill.