Ghost Layer (The Ghost Seer Series Book 2) (12 page)

“You can trust me, Clare.”

“That’s not the point. I’m used to making my own decisions, but you muddy my mind, Zach.”

He came to her and put his arms around her, held her in the sun, and the whole moment condensed to one she’d recall forever. Murmuring in her ear, he said, “I’m glad I muddy your mind, because you do the same.”

“You’re trying to get around me.”

“Maybe, but it’s the truth. And I believe you’re in danger
and
hurting and should stay in. Just for the morning, lover.”

She sighed. “I happen to agree.”

“Good, and we’re going to get you a little insurance.”

That piqued her interest and she let him draw her back through the sliding glass door. He sat in the large chair facing the view of the mountains in back and drew her into his lap, so gently she didn’t bend wrong and hurt her ribs. Then he settled her as he wanted, wrapping his arms around her. She ignored that her bottom rubbed across his groin and he hardened, since he seemed to do the same.

“What insurance?” she asked.

Zach raised his voice. “Enzo.”

THE GHOST LABRADOR
leapt onto the balcony, solidifying atop the rail, then hopped down and ran through the glass doors.

Hello, Zach! You called me, Zach! I am happy to SEE you. You’re holding Clare so you can see me easier, too!

Zach’s arms had tightened around her when the dog had materialized. Now he cleared his throat and said, “Yes, I can see you, Enzo.”

Clare wondered just how much he could see the ghost. Enzo was pretty gray-and-shadows solid to her. His tongue draped outside his muzzle as he gave them a doggie grin. He tilted his head.
What do you want, my friend Zach?

After a little cough, Zach said, “Twice in the last few weeks Clare has been hurt and you haven’t been . . . ah . . . available.”

Enzo’s good cheer evaporated. He lowered himself to his belly and his ears lost their perkiness, his tail drooped. The darkness that was his eyes seemed to dull. He whined.
I am sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sor–

“I understand,” Zach said calmly. “You were with the ghost Clare was helping a week and a half ago, and last night Clare said you were guarding her from a bad spirit?”

Yes. Sometimes it is only one bad spirit, a bad man or woman who stays, sometimes it is the evil a person leaves behind and it becomes sticky and other bad stuff and spirits paste to it and—

“We don’t need to know that now,” Zach said. “Was it that ghost that hurt Clare on the stairs?”

No, it was a human!
Enzo rolled eyes that now had their regular little spark in them as Zach asked questions and didn’t accuse him of anything. He still stayed low.
My nose for real smells is not as good now.

“All right.” Zach flicked his fingers. “What about this evil spirit outside?”

Enzo sat up and raised his muzzle.
I watched and then I made it go away!
His eyes slid aside.
Maybe the Other made it go away. For now. Clare is too new to handle it, and it is out of her time.

“Okay, then back to the human who hurt Clare. Is there any way you can help her?”

I would not have smelled the stuff on the stairs.
His ears raised slightly.
If I saw someone put stuff on the stairs, I could tell her.

“Uh-huh. Could you attack a person if you saw them hurting Clare?”

Drooping again, Enzo said,
No. I am a spirit companion and guide for Clare. I can’t hurt a human.
Even a bad human. Then I would turn into a bad ghost, too, and mean and evil and Clare would have to kill me.

“I couldn’t!” Clare cried.

He inched closer to them and put his chin on her knee.
I know, Clare. But it would not be me.
The chill of him soaked through the thin layer of her sundress. He turned and licked her hand and she felt cold ghost drool.

“I’ve seen you lift and move objects. Could you throw something at them?” Zach asked.

But Enzo was shaking his head, a cold caress across her leg.

“Hmm,” Zach said, still sounding contemplative. He rubbed his head on her hair and she sighed.

“Could you scare people? That sounds easy for a ghost,” Zach offered.

Maybe. But they would have to really believe I could hurt them. Most bad people don’t.

“I see.” Zach’s thighs tensed under her. His chest rose with a quiet, deep breath, “Could you come and tell me if something has happened?”

Enzo barked.
I could! I could! I can run fast!
He zoomed around the room until he blurred, then disappeared. An instant later he sat in front of them again, looking more chipper.

“All right,” Zach said. His chest stilled a second as if he suppressed a sigh.

Later!
said Enzo and vanished.

“He didn’t give a reason for leaving,” Clare muttered. “He usually does.” She shifted on Zach’s lap.

Zach stroked her hair. “I asked him to go.”

Her brows went up as she leaned back to look at him. “Oh, did you?”

“Yes.” Zach’s gaze shifted. “Telepathically.”

“And I didn’t hear that.”

“Guess not. Said I wanted private time with my lady.”

She lifted her arms and set her hands behind his neck and stroked him there . . . and noticed his erection growing, and that had her body reacting. Her breasts felt heavier and more sensitive, and her nipples peaked. Her lips plumped and her mouth needed the taste of him. She wanted to kiss him with closed eyes so she could savor his flavor . . . right there on the side of his jaw.

“Clare,” he said, low and grumbly, and his voice ruffled her nerves in the very best way. “We’re getting really close.”

She chuckled in her throat. “Not close enough.”

But he didn’t laugh with her, so she met his gaze again. His eyes were all too serious. She stiffened. “I was speaking physically, but you were talking about . . . emotionally. You don’t want to be close?”

“I don’t know what I want. I don’t want to feel the fear for you that I did for three damn hours last night.”

She frowned. “I told you I was okay.”

“Yeah, but that didn’t help much. I wanted to be here, to protect you.” He paused. “And I don’t
ever
want to arrive too late.”

That had her gulping, but she said one of the truths she’d come to learn and live. She put her hands on either side of his face. “I know you have this protector gene, Zach, but this is my new life. There will be dangers in it that I can’t anticipate, that you can’t anticipate. Enzo can warn me about a bad ghost. The best we—I—can do is, um, do my job, cope with my gift, and do my best. It’s like regular life, Zach; there’s unexpected danger around every corner. Car accidents, muggers, avalanches, snake bites. I’m not a fatalist, but there’s stuff I—and you—can never foresee.”

His mouth flattened, then he put his hands over hers and said, “There’s something about this whole setup that bugs me.”

Her brows rose. “About J. Dawson?”

“No, not the woo-woo stuff. Your assault, the people you’re involved with here.”

“I barely know anyone. I just arrived yesterday!”

“Doesn’t mean they don’t know more about you than they let on, especially Laurentine.”

“You didn’t like him from the get-go.”

“That’s true.”

His phone beeped an alarm. “I gotta go, but first—” He took her chin and she stared into his dilating pupils, which edged out his beautiful blue-green eyes. Then his mouth was on hers and his tongue was tasting hers and dueling with hers in her mouth and his taste exploded into her, coffee, Zach, mint, Zach . . . clear through her. She could’ve melted . . . or caught fire.

But the nasty alarm was insistent and wouldn’t let her relax, so she pulled away, let her head sag against his shoulder. “I guess I can stay in and do a little more research.”

Zach grunted and lifted her off his lap and onto her feet with ease. Her knees wobbled, then locked. He stood and he was too close or not close enough. This time he kissed her nose. “Later.”

“Yeah,” she managed.

“One last thing.” He got the notepad from the desk and handed it to her. “Authorize me to pick up your phone from the sheriff’s department, if they’re done with it.”

“Oh, yes!” She wrote a short note, signed it, and gave it to Zach.

“You know, you could catch up on your sleep.”

That had her eyes opening wide. “Nap! In the middle of the morning?”

“You’re injured, and didn’t get enough sleep. Leave the damn computer off and crawl back into bed.”

The bed they had already made. “I don’t think—”

“Nope, don’t think. Do it.” He grinned. “I want you frisky in the afternoon.”

She laughed and her ribs told her that a nap might be good. “Maybe.”

He strode out of the room, whirling his cane more than using it.

As pure tiredness fell on her like a smothering blanket, she understood she didn’t know her own limitations in this new life. Or what demands—mental, physical, emotional—her changed circumstances might put on her.

She glanced around the pretty room, out toward the balcony, and the view beyond. The bed was ready for her to collapse in, or if she wanted, her computer was ready and waiting.

She looked at the alarm clock and wondered whether to set it for lunch . . . and when Zach might be back since she was supposed to wait for him. He hadn’t given her even an estimate of how long he might be, and she wanted to know. She headed down the hall to see if she could catch him. When she reached the open rail above the great room, she saw him already heading out, moving faster than she’d anticipated. Yes, he managed the physical part of his life very well.

A hint of chill, a whiff of dying flowers, drifted over her and had her spinning, putting her hand to her ribs. The air in the hallway morphed and wavered.

CLARE CAUGHT HER
breath, set her shoulders, and strode back. The corridor was cooler than just a few seconds ago, and in front of her door, she saw a small pile of bones and flinched. They might be toes.

Enzo hopped around tumbled bones like he was a real dog scenting roadkill, sniffing lustily.
Oooh, oooh, oooh. It IS J. Dawson. Two toes.
Sniff. Snort. Enzo sat and looked up at her.
J. Dawson left you a present.

“He doesn’t have to leave his bones around to get my attention,” Clare grumbled. She stared at the toes. She’d have to take care of them herself, and the idea had her stomach pitching. So much for a good breakfast; she’d be lucky if she didn’t upchuck.

She pulled a tissue from her sundress pocket and dropped it over the old and twiggy-looking metatarsals.

Bending, she quickly grasped the small bundle and glanced down. She’d gotten everything . . . but the thin tissue sure let her know what she was holding. She should have continued to carry her bandanna, a thicker piece of cloth.

She unlocked the door, kicked it open, and hurried to the upper shelf in the closet, where she stored the box with the dancing skeletons. She flicked that clasp up—thankfully it didn’t stick—and dropped the bundle, tissue and all, into the box. It fell and hit the other bones with a nasty clatter.

A long black envelope with a piece of tape on the back fell from the inner top of the box onto the bones. Snatching it up, Clare let the box shut and retreated from the closet and closed the door.

You got it! The thing you didn’t find before and we wanted you to see. Yiiipppyyy!
Enzo raced around the room. He sounded as happy as if she’d won the lottery . . . which she’d rarely played, the odds of winning were so poor.

When she turned the envelope over, she saw carefully pretty cursive writing in silver, surrounded by silver stars and a scattering of glitter, and read, “Auntie Clare!”

Only one child would address her that way, her brother’s daughter, Dora. Dora, who was slated to become the next ghost seer in the family if anything happened to Clare. Dora, whom Clare was determined to protect . . . from the “gift” and . . . the Other.

Dora and her father had packed up Great-Aunt Sandra’s house, and now Clare knew who’d included the box in her portion of the furniture.

With a smile, Clare went to the small desk and took the letter opener from a pottery mug of utensils and sliced open the top of the dramatic envelope. Inside she found a tri-folded piece of pastel paper, and she flicked it open to see: “Great-Aunt Sandra left a note about this box! She said to send it to you and that you’d find it within a couple of weeks when the ‘time was right.’ I thought it’d be cool to include my own note! Use SeeAndTalk to call ME!
XXXXXX00000000, DORA!
”

Rolling her eyes, Clare stared at the computer, where she could do some work on Curly Wolf . . . then at the bed . . . then at Enzo. “You think I should call Dora?” she asked.

Yes, yes, yes!
he yipped.

Clare wasn’t so sure. She could use her tablet—since she didn’t have her top-of-the-line new phone—and leave a message on Dora’s cell in good conscience that she’d tried to reach her niece . . . Clare had a niggling suspicion that she might not want to hear what Dora had to say.

Still, she sat down and logged into SeeAndTalk and pinged Dora’s number but her niece didn’t answer. It was two hours later in Williamsburg, Virginia, and a school day. Enzo appeared disappointed.

Clare sent a brief report to Rickman Security and Investigations regarding her conversations with J. Dawson Hidgepath and Dennis Laurentine.

When she continued to check her uninspiring e-mail, the phantom Lab bounded through the sliding glass door, off the balcony, and into the air, where his grays faded and he matched the blue of the sky and disappeared.

He was gone, and she was finally alone. Her shoulders relaxed from a high line of tension, and she closed her e-mail and left the desk.

Stiffly removing her clothes, she slipped into a nightshirt, and left the drapes open so she could see the sun and the sky and the wisping clouds. She snuggled into bed and plunged into sleep.

•   •   •

The first thing Zach did was check out the ground around the door that had been left unlocked.

The terrace showed the marks of a lot of traffic. Where the terrace ended, there were signs of trampling around, but he noted a rough path to the edge of the hillside then around to the left of the house—east. He followed it to the woods, eyes sharp for disturbed pine needles, until he found the break in the barbed wire fence where a thin person could squeeze through.

Checking, he saw that it wasn’t electrified, and muscled through the opening. Parallel to the fence were ruts in the grass and dirt. It had rained yesterday, and he squatted and stared at the wide tire tracks that belonged to a big and heavy truck. One of the tires had picked up a nail or a screw, something that had damaged the tread. Plenty of trucks in ranch and farm country. A tingle at the top of his spine told him he should pay attention to this.

As he stood, he saw that the truck tracks overlaid a line of narrower ones both before and beyond the wide tires. These came from a smaller car, and left less of an impression.

He took pictures of both sets with his phone, though he was sure the sheriff’s department had already done that. Didn’t look like they’d taken any casts.

With a shake of his head, he went back through the fence, called Rossi to tell the ranch manager it needed to be fixed, and headed out.

Zach drove to the Park County Sheriff’s Department in Fairplay, where he met with the man himself, a white-haired, lean, and tough guy who appeared to be near the end of his career. Zach introduced himself, gave the man his card from Rickman Security and Investigations—suppressing his wince as he did so—and took the chair the sheriff indicated.

Zach talked the talk and limped the walk, dropped names of people he knew: his old boss in Montana, Wyoming peace officers, and Denver policemen. None of these seemed to overly impress the guy and Zach liked him for that . . . though the sheriff had one of his deputies take note of the names to check them out.

Even with his most persuasive manner, Zach didn’t get all the notes regarding the case. He did get the opinion that the sheriff thought the best thing for Clare and him to do would be to leave the DL Ranch and return to Denver—advice he’d have given if he’d been in the sheriff’s seat. The general idea was that the “trap” set for Clare was to scare her away.

Zach couldn’t shake the feeling that it was more . . . or that Clare might be a threat because someone believed she could contact J. Dawson, and something from the past was carrying over to the present.

The sheriff himself had advised Laurentine to up his security, probably in a smoother manner than Zach or Rossi, because the man lived near the multimillionaire and was a public servant.

It occurred to Zach that he’d been more abrasive now that he wasn’t a deputy, and that was a change he liked—to be able to speak and act more the way he wanted than was politic. Even now the sheriff was speaking to
him
because it was polite to do so, not that he wanted to.

Definitely a check in the plus column of going private.

When the deputy walked back in after having made the calls to his references, she appeared impressed in spite of herself and told the sheriff, “He’s good.”

That opened the man up enough to have him reveal the list of the witnesses they’d talked to—everyone Zach had, though a deputy had awakened and gotten a foggy nothing of interest from Tyler Jorgen, whom Zach hadn’t spoken with yet.

He offered Clare’s authorization to retrieve her phone and her signature was compared to the one when they’d confiscated it. They were through with any investigation regarding her telephone.

They’d found that the calls had been placed from the DL Ranch landline and the one Clare had answered had lasted under a minute. They’d gotten the exact time of the call, short minutes from when Rossi reported they’d heard Clare scream and discovered her.

Zach put the phone in the satchel he carried his tablet computer in, stood, and made a comment that he was headed to the Park County Archives to read a former sheriff’s diary. That sparked a good discussion, and Zach casually mentioned J. Dawson and the probability he might have been murdered, which had everyone talking and throwing out opinions.

When he left, he thought he’d made himself welcome and was happy he’d formed some new connections.

The trip to the archives in Bailey and the reading of the sheriff’s journal, which the volunteer archivist had marked for Zach, went smoothly.

The fact that the sheriff put down that he had a gut feeling about J. Dawson’s death hadn’t surprised Zach. But the lawman had nothing to go on, even after he sniffed around. J. Dawson had fallen and been found quickly, dead, and some flowers drifted down with him. The pair of prospector brothers who’d heard his last cry figured he’d been picking flowers for one of the recently arrived women in town.

There were only a couple of notes. After his death, no one filed a claim on J. Dawson’s mine. The sheriff had visited the mine and it hadn’t looked like much. Nothing had shown on the narrow, rocky trail that might have indicated foul play.

Skimming the rest of the entries, Zach got the impression that there was so much going on in Curly Wolf that even a conscientious sheriff would have to move on pretty damn fast to other, more significant, matters.

The guy couldn’t take time from his job just because of a gut feeling that something was wrong with the accidental death of a lightweight, and J. Dawson had been considered a lightweight. A dreamer.

A romantic.

Zach understood constraints of time and money and manpower and the press of other cases for damn sure, but it always hurt to let a case go when you
knew
there was something hinky about it.

He didn’t have to do that anymore. He could almost taste the sweetness of that thought on his tongue. He had enough money from his disability pension and his savings, from the consulting job, that if something crossed his path that felt just plain
wrong
, he didn’t have to walk away from the case because of practical realities.

His mind spun with that knowledge. He wouldn’t ever have to walk away from a case.

True, he didn’t have the badge to force people to talk to him . . . and he might have to smooth out his manner now and again . . . and he didn’t have authority to go where he might need to be, but a cop needed a search warrant.

Still, there could be a workaround to that, too. If there was enough reason for it. He’d have to make sure he wouldn’t turn righteous vigilante, which was a damn slippery slope.

Clare would help keep him honest, and honorable.

He looked at the general information on Curly Wolf that the archivist had printed out, studied it for a few minutes, absorbing the facts.

“Are you done?” the archivist asked.

Zach blinked. He probably hadn’t moved in the last few minutes. “Yeah. Can I take pictures of Sheriff Benson’s journal entries with my phone?”

She frowned. “No flash.”

He nodded. “All right.” He tried a smile. “I’ll be out of your hair in a minute. Thanks for setting aside this time for me. You’ve been a great help.”

“You’re welcome.”

•   •   •

The insistent chirping of a baby bird, along with the cold sweep of a ghostly tongue across her face, woke Clare.

It’s Dora!
Enzo’s drool might vanish before it hit any floor or rug, but it dripped on Clare’s face like thawing ice just fine.

She jerked up.

Dora wants to talk to you!
Enzo said.

Yes, the chirping bird was Dora’s call signal on SeeAndTalk. Clare lunged from the bed for her tablet on the desk, accepted the call. “Just a minute, Dora.”

“Okay, Auntie Clare. I’m walking out of school to the commons courtyard, so I’ll get you better. You sound a little fuzzy.”

Not just because service was iffy in the mountains, even with the big satellite dish that Dennis Laurentine surely had. Clare had been
gone
in sleep. And—three hours!—had passed.

She hurriedly dressed again, put on her light sundress in yellow and peach hues—the house was warm and the outside temp was mid-seventies
.

To clear her head a bit, Clare took her tablet to the balcony and looked around. With a deep breath, and standing outside in the mountains on a weekday morning, she knew she was blessed that she never had to work again. Even the thought that she had a gift that wouldn’t let her rest seemed tolerable . . . Perhaps, just perhaps, in this moment, she could identify a little with her parents. They’d spent their whole lives doing nothing but living on a trust fund and enjoying moving from pleasurable moment to pleasurable moment.

“Hello, Auntie Clare!” Dora said.

Clare jerked, tore her gaze from the thin white clouds ribboning the blue sky, and said, “Dora? Aren’t classes going on?” But Clare smiled at Dora’s round and cheerful face, surrounded by the straight and dense dark brown hair that Clare envied her. Their complexions were the same, a natural tan due to their heritage.