Bone Island 03 - Ghost Moon (27 page)

There was a pounding on the front door. She walked to it and looked through the peephole.

Jonas was out there. Liam had told her not to let anyone in. And she was starting to feel like hell, so weak and disoriented.

He was waving at her wildly, saying something, but she couldn’t hear him.

She shouted at him. “I’m sick, Jonas! Go away.”

“Watch yourself, Kelsey,” Bartholomew said. “What’s wrong with you?”

“I don’t know. I’m fine. I must have eaten something…bad.”

She stumbled back to the voodoo altar.

Her eyes returned to the large princess doll. A great sacrifice for a small child who had surely loved the doll.

She stared at the smiling princess doll, and at its crown. The crown was large and covered in cheap gold paint. Perhaps the doll was supposed to depict Mardi Gras royalty.

The altar seemed to spin before her. She blinked, positive she was seeing something.

Her phone started ringing. It was difficult to reach for it. She managed to get her hands around it. She flipped it open.

“Hello?”

She sensed movement and heard the fall of a
surreptitious footstep. She looked up. The sound was coming from Cutter Merlin’s office.

She saw him.

Just as she heard Liam’s voice.

“Kelsey, get out of the house. Get out of the house quickly. I’m on my way,” Liam said.

She wanted to answer him.

Then the phone was slapped from her hand.

She didn’t have the power to resist.

He shouted his orders as he left the station. “No sirens. And no cars on the peninsula. No one into the house but me, and start surrounding it. He has Kelsey. If he sees us, if he has any idea that we’re on to him, she’s dead. I repeat, no sirens, and stay back! Move it, move it!”

He rushed out of the station house and to the car. He tried not to shake, knowing that if he did so, he’d wreck the car. He thanked God that it was a small island.

He parked at the wharf, got out of the car and started running.

He passed Jonas’s bed-and-breakfast and burst out onto the road that led to the Merlin estate. As he came to the end, he saw Bartholomew standing there, his hands in the air.

“Not the door—he’ll see you. Don’t use the door,” Bartholomew said.

“Then what? He’s got her—get the hell out of my way!” Liam cried.

“No! Follow me. Get down, follow me.”

He began a quiet, quick jog behind Bartholomew.

On the front lawn, he nearly tripped over the body of Jonas.

He kneeled down. Jonas groaned. He was alive.

“I…saw someone. In the attic. It wasn’t Kelsey,” he said. “I thought it was you, but I wanted to be sure. I was on the porch…and then…”

“Help is coming,” Liam told him. “Hang on.”

Jonas nodded.

“And stay down. Stay down, please.”

Liam moved on, following Bartholomew.

To his amazement, the ghost ducked into the crawl space beneath the house. He followed the ghost.

He didn’t see it at first. And then he did.

It was a trapdoor. It had been used frequently, and gave without a single squeak.

It led to Cutter Merlin’s office.

“Give it to me, Kelsey,” he said.

She blinked, trying to focus. She wanted to lash out, strike him. She couldn’t. He had his hands on her shoulders, and she couldn’t move.

“I know you.”

“You know me well. I was your handyman around here when you were a kid. I took all kinds of bull from your sainted family. Now, I want the reliquary. Where is it?”

He shook her. She felt her head rattle.

“I haven’t found it.”

“You’re a liar.”

“You killed your friend,” she said. “Why? You’re Chris Vargas. You killed Gary White, and you had him
doing all kinds of dirty work for you. Why did you kill him?”

“I had to kill him. He wouldn’t give me the book. I knew that I couldn’t beat Cutter without Abel Crowley’s original book of spells. Cutter’s book
In Defense from Dark Magick
was too powerful for the spells that I knew. I finally learned that Abel’s spell book was talked about in
Key West, Satanism, Peter Edwards, and the Abel and Aleister Crowley Connection,
but Gary lied and said he couldn’t find the book. When I found out he lied and that he was keeping the book for himself—I had to kill him. I wasn’t ready for Cutter to die on the night he did. I was just continuing to scare him—leaving him clues about what I wanted—and hoping that he would finally just give up the reliquary. Things went too far that night, and he died of a heart attack. I knew, though, that he would leave you a clue.”

She was scared, definitely scared. Terrified. But it didn’t really seem to register. She was going to fall down, and there would be nothing he could do.

She started to slip. He dragged her up, shaking her again. “How much coffee did you drink?”

Her heart sank. Whatever he had drugged her with had been in her coffee. And it had been so good. She’d had several cups.

She smiled at him. “A lot.”

Suddenly she saw that he had a huge blade out, next to her face. He forced her down to the floor, the point of his knife near her eye. “Kelsey, I’ll cut you to ribbons before I do worse things to you and then kill you,” he said. “Or, I’ll tell you what. Your friend Jonas is lying
on the ground outside. I haven’t killed him. Yet. I’ll drag him in here and cut out his eyes and tongue in front of you. How’s that?”

“You want the reliquary?” she asked him. “Take it.”

He slapped her. Hard. For a moment, her teeth rattled and the room spun.

“Where is it?” His voice was shrill.

“Tell me how you killed my mother, and I’ll give you the reliquary,” she said.

He started to laugh. “Your whole family loves coffee, Kelsey. That, combined with her painkillers and a phone call I made to her. She was rushing—rushing down the stairs because she believed a madman was killing you in the living room. That’s how she fell. That was my first. I didn’t know that it had worked. Stupid, huh? But I slaughtered a bunch of beautiful Key West roosters for that one. And it worked. So, you know how your mother died. Now give me the reliquary. Her death was supposed to force Cutter to give up the reliquary—I would have killed you, and your father next, if you hadn’t left so quickly.”

He pressed the blade of the knife close to her right eye.

“The crown,” she said. “Take it. You won’t get far with it. Liam will come after you.”

“Liam is passed out cold somewhere. Maybe he had a traffic accident. Maybe he’s dead. The world will know that the house is cursed. What do you mean, the crown?”

“The doll’s crown,” she managed.

She didn’t see him reach for it. He’d had to drop her to do so. She heard his exclamation of pleasure.

And she knew then that he would kill her.

Liam took great care, crawling through the trapdoor as carefully and silently as he could. It took some effort; the Persian rug covered the trapdoor.

He made it into Cutter Merlin’s study and carefully stood, drawing his gun.

The door was ajar. He could hear Vargas talking to Kelsey. She was still talking.

He started out. “Vargas!”

Vargas spun and dropped, dragging Kelsey up in front of him. Liam saw that he was holding a large bowie knife, and that the blade was now against Kelsey’s throat.

“You’ve got the reliquary. Leave her,” Liam said.

Vargas shook his head. “I need her. She has to come with me.”

“Come with you where? There’s no way out.”

“There is,” Vargas assured him. “Stay back.”

With his eyes on Liam and his arm tightly around Kelsey, Vargas started to back up. Liam followed him.

He looked into Kelsey’s eyes. They were glazed. She was trying to move, trying not to be dragged like such a limp rag doll.

“Shoot him,” she mouthed.

“Stay back!” Vargas demanded.

He was going all the way through the house. Liam knew that his men were out back, but they’d also been
told to stand down until given an order. They wouldn’t risk Kelsey’s life.

Where the hell did he think he was going?

Vargas must have read his mind. He started laughing. “I have a boat back there, Beckett, under the dock. When I’m some distance away, I’ll let Kelsey go. You rush me now, and I’ll slit her throat,” he said. “I’ve been the smart one, you stupid cop. All these years.”

“So smart I caught you killing a goat,” Liam said.

That gave him pause. He hesitated. But then he started moving again, backing slowly away. The knife was chafing at Kelsey’s throat. Liam saw a thin trickle of blood.

He lifted his hands. “I just want Kelsey.”

“Drop the gun, then.”

Liam dropped the gun. He lifted his hands again. “I just want Kelsey.”

Vargas kept going backward.

Step by step.

They came to the back door. He keyed in the alarm and opened the door; the reliquary tucked under his one arm, his grip around Kelsey treacherous as he held her and the knife, and worked the alarm and the door.

A trapdoor. How often had the man been in there with him? He’d done work for the Merlin house. He’d found the door. And that had begun it all.

“Stay back!”

“I’m keeping my distance,” Liam said.

He silently cursed himself, wondering when the man had gotten the boat to the docks.

He kept his eyes on Kelsey for a moment, willing her to live.

She stared back at him gravely.

The door was open; Vargas dragged her down the steps and slowly, slowly backward toward the dock and the beach. Liam followed at a distance, now keeping eye contact with Vargas. At the foot of the docks, Vargas tightened the knife. “Stay there, stay there…. No, come out. Do what I say or she dies, do you understand?”

“What do you want?”

“The boat. Get into the water. Drag it out.”

Liam jumped down into the chest-deep water. His heart sank. The boat was a Donzi, a speedboat.

But as Vargas asked, he drew it from beneath the dock and loosened the ties.

“Now get back!” Vargas shouted. He was getting nervous, it seemed. Liam realized that he should have been drugged like Kelsey, and Vargas had imagined that he’d take the reliquary and dump her in the water before anyone was any the wiser.

He backed up slowly. Vargas had a bad time getting into the boat, trying to get his balance, drag Kelsey in and keep the knife at her throat all the while. It took him some time. Bartholomew was on the dock, trying to steady Kelsey, trying to trip up Vargas.

Liam prayed for the moment when he could move, take his chance to rush the man.

Vargas would never let her live. He’d throw her over in deep water. And she was drugged; she wouldn’t be able to stay afloat.

Vargas was almost in the boat. Liam was ready to leap when the boat suddenly tilted out of the water.

Kelsey crashed overboard. Vargas tried to hold on to her, and he went in, too.

Liam made a dive into the water, desperate to find Kelsey. Something swirled around his feet.

It was the dolphin. A good twelve feet long, powerful. The animal had caused the boat to tilt. And, though he couldn’t really believe it, the dolphin was leading him to Kelsey.

He dived, and dived again, following the large, sleek sea creature.

And his arms came around Kelsey. He pulled her from the water, screaming her name as they surfaced. She gasped, choked, coughed, and opened her eyes and stared into his.

“Liam,” she said.

He half swam and half dragged her to the shore. As he did so, something like an iron fist landed on his back.

Vargas. Vargas, rolling him over, straddling him, lifting the knife high over him in a frenzy. He bucked with all his strength and threw the man from him. Vargas lifted his arm to throw the knife.

His aim went askew as Kelsey staggered to her feet and threw herself against him. The knife went flying to the ground, and Vargas shoved Kelsey aside, desperate now. He turned and ran for the house.

Liam jumped to his feet, racing after him. Kelsey came behind him. As they tore into the living room, Vargas suddenly stopped.

Just stopped, dead still.

“No.” Vargas was staring at nothing. Staring toward the fireplace.

“No!” he repeated.

Liam started forward. Vargas rushed to the fireplace and reached into it, drawing out the shotgun that Cutter had held on his lap, the shotgun that had disappeared on cleaning day.

“Kelsey, down!” Liam said and made a dive himself for the police-issue Smith & Wesson he had dropped earlier.

Vargas shot wildly, at nothing.

But it wasn’t nothing.

There was a woman in the room, slowly materializing. She was wearing a blue dress, and she had long dark hair and had beautiful blue eyes. Kelsey’s mother.

The shots went straight through her.

She walked to Vargas and said softly, “There is a hell, and you will rot in it. You will never touch my child!”

“Witch! You’re not real. I’ll show you your precious daughter!”

Vargas let out a long gale of hysterical laughter and spun around, aiming the gun at Kelsey. She rolled swiftly to the side, and Vargas tried to follow her. His finger twitched on the trigger.

Liam took fleeting aim with the Smith & Wesson.

And he shot the man.

Vargas fell.

Liam could hear his men out in the yard, running now toward the house. He hurried to Kelsey, trying to help
her up. She was still staggering, but when she’d gotten to her feet, she whispered, “Liam, I’m…I’m fine.”

He eased his hold on her. He watched as she walked to the apparition of her mother.

“I loved you so,” Kelsey whispered.

A spectral hand touched her cheek with infinite tenderness, and then disappeared in a soft glow of light.

“Love is forever, my darling child,” Chelsea Merlin Donovan said. “I will always love you.”

“I
must admit, I was afraid that you’d want to do one of those
Titanic
deals. You know, how the woman threw the gem back into the sea!” Jaden said.

Kelsey laughed. “Hell, no! That’s too much money. I’ve divided it between a lot of Cutter’s favorite charities. AIDS, cancer, heart, diabetes and the animal shelter! The reliquary itself is being returned to the Church and France, and I’m actually well on my way to getting a great deal of Cutter’s collectibles to the museums where he wanted them to be. Oh—the fake reliquary? We’re giving that to you and Ted, Jaden,” Kelsey added.

Jaden gasped. “Oh, you can’t. It’s far too valuable.”

“But you don’t intend to sell it. And anything is only as valuable as what one pays for it. You two should have it. You will appreciate it, as Cutter did.”

Jaden looked at Ted.

“We couldn’t!” Ted said.

Jaden pinched him. “Maybe we could!”

Liam laughed softly. “Kelsey wants you to have it. Take it.”

“Can you imagine, that monster lurking in that house,
on and off, all those years? I guess he found the way in when he worked for the Merlins all those years ago,” Katie said. “Ugh! Too creepy.”

“I think,” Kelsey said, “that he got himself attached to Cutter, and he saw the book, and he found out more about the things that had gone on in Key West and decided bit by bit to put together everything that had been used over the years. He
was
invisible, because he could come and go so easily. He was a thief—and he was a psychopath! At least, that’s how I see it.”

“You don’t hate the house now, do you, Kelsey?” David asked her, frowning.

They were all at O’Hara’s. In the weeks since Vargas had attacked Kelsey, they had made a point of meeting each other every Sunday at four, if not during the week. They were at the back-patio table: Ted and Jaden, Clarinda and Jonas, Katie and David, Sean and Vanessa, and Kelsey and himself.

Good friends were hard to come by.

And all of his friends—including Jonas—had forgiven him for being a cop.

They still tried to figure out what could have caused such a madness, one that allowed a man to function in the world by day—and live in his own world of black rites and pure greed and obsession.

“No. I love the house,” Kelsey said.

Vanessa asked her softly, “When are you going back to California?”

Liam couldn’t help but answer for her. He leaned closer to the table, pulling Kelsey to him.

“She’s not,” he said, and he produced her hand,
displaying the ring they had chosen. It wasn’t a diamond.

Kelsey had opted for an emerald.

“An engagement ring?” Clarinda asked, grinning.

“Absolutely, short engagement,” Kelsey said. She turned and smiled at Liam, that dazzling smile that made his heart melt. “We lost a lot of years somewhere. We’re hoping to make them up.”

“Oh, oh! Oh, how sweet!” Jaden said.

“Saccharine, actually!” Ted said with a laugh. She elbowed him, and he grunted.

“But what about your partner and best friend, Avery?” Jonas asked.

“Oh, I can answer that!” Vanessa said, actually waving a hand in the air. “If I may! Well, Avery Slater met a nurse in the hospital. They hit it off right away. Avery is looking at property down here. There’s a little Victorian on Whitehead, near the Hemingway House, that he wants to buy.”

“Really!” Clarinda said, laughing. “Well, soon he’ll be a freshwater conch.”

“True.”

Sean O’Hara lifted his beer bottle. “To engagements!”

They all toasted.

Jaden and Ted had to get back to work on a cache of silverware that had just been brought up by salvage divers, and Clarinda was about to go to work. They all hugged and parted, with Liam setting his bottle down and saying, “Well. It’s time.”

David nodded at him. “It’s time.”

Liam took Kelsey’s hand, and they started off walking.

The cemetery wasn’t far.

Naturally, on the way, Katie started crying softly. It was contagious. Liam squeezed Kelsey’s hand, looking at her with tender assurance.

There, by the large sculpted angel, were Bartholomew and Lucinda, his beautiful lady in white. She was shy, but she smiled, and when Bartholomew came to them all, one by one, giving them his spectral handshake first, and then just hugging everyone with a breeze of tenderness, she did the same.

They each had a private word for him.

“Thank you for being here, my dear, dear friends,” Bartholomew said.

“Thank you,” Liam said huskily. “Thank you for our lives, and what’s most precious. Those we love within our lives.”

Trying to be jaunty, Bartholomew doffed his hat and bowed deeply.

Then he took Lucinda’s hands. “We’re ready, my love,” he said. “Let it come.”

And it came. A golden swatch of light. It settled over the pair, and it glimmered, and then they were gone.

It was a glorious moment. That shimmering light. The sun just beginning to fall. The palette of colors that was so beautiful on a winter’s day that was gentle and balmy.

Then Katie let out a loud sniffle, and they all laughed and comforted one another, and it was time for them to leave.

But Kelsey hovered just a moment, and Liam waited patiently, watching her.

There were tears shimmering in her eyes, but she didn’t shed them.

She walked over to him and placed her hands on his chest. She stood on her toes and tenderly pressed her lips to his.

“Love is forever,” she told him.

When he kissed her far more firmly in return, she knew that he agreed.