Haven (10 page)

“Yeah, I keep hoping, but so far no luck. I mean, I’ve had no luck seeing or hearing anything paranormal.”

“
Well, I didn’t think you wanted to be listed among the family legends as a ghostly presence,” Emma said dryly.

“Hardly. I plan to die peacefully in my sleep at a hundred and one, after having completed every single thing on my bucket list.”

“A hundred and one?”

Penny grinned. “More than a century.”

“Ah. Well, I’m not going to ask what’s on your bucket list.” Without giving Penny a chance to respond to that, Emma said, “As for our guests, maybe they were just imagining things. They came here expecting a haunted inn, and what the mind expects, the imagination tends to create.”

“More than likely,” Penny agreed. “I thought I’d suggest they can move to the other side of the house if they want; the Topaz Room is vacant now.”

Emma nodded, but said, “Better warn them any sounds they hear in there are likely to be from a wandering writer in the room below theirs. Didn’t you put him in the Garnet Room on the ground floor?”

“Yeah, because he’s going to be coming and going, and didn’t want to disturb the other guests. He did promise to be quiet about it, and judging by the way he moved, I’d say he’s not likely to bump into the furniture or anything like that. He’s more catlike than Jax is.”

Eyeing her innkeeper, Emma said mildly, “I see he made an impression.”

“Well, yeah. I mean, come on, Emma—we don’t exactly have an excess of unattached men around here. At least none that you or I haven’t known forever—warts and all. Navarro is an
unknown element. You have to admit, even his name sounds…exotic.”

“He’s a writer. We’ve had them stay here before.”

“Not like him, we haven’t.” Penny grinned. “Wait’ll you meet him.”

“Uh-huh. Well, just remember that he’s only visiting. Men like that don’t put down roots in places like Baron Hollow.”

“And innkeepers don’t dally with the guests. Yeah, I know. Don’t worry—I doubt I’ll get the chance to dally. Between my schedule and his apparent determination to explore the town
and
the wilderness all around us, I’ll be lucky to catch just enough glimpses to fuel my fantasies. Which is probably all I can handle anyway.”

“You’re probably underestimating yourself, but when it comes to guests, I’d say that’s the way to go.”

Penny laughed. “True enough. Okay, I’m going to go and get our honeymooners moved.”

“See you later.” Emma made a mental note to ask Jessie if she’d noticed any spirits in the vicinity of the Topaz Room. She caught herself chewing on a thumbnail, and forced herself to stop. But the anxiety she felt was still very much with her.

Whatever Jessie said—or didn’t say—Emma was convinced that her sister’s urge to reopen the old wounds of her past was something that could very well have consequences Jessie hadn’t considered.

Assuming Victor had, in fact, been involved, Emma was certain he would go a long way to protect his reputation. If Jessie confronted him, if she asked the wrong question—or the right one—if whatever had happened even all those years ago reflected badly on him…

For the first time, that struck Emma as odd, the fact that whatever had happened to Jessie had
not
gotten around town all those years ago, had not become the subject of gossip. That was just the sort of gossip the town thrived on, and Emma most certainly would have heard about it, especially once Jessie had left—or run away from—Baron Hollow.

What that told her was that Jessie had not awakened in somebody else’s house after a party, disoriented and disheveled after whatever had happened to her, forced into a dazed walk of shame past others to get herself out of there and home.

She had somehow gotten home, on her own or with help, and no one had seen her—or noticed anything unusual if they had.

Had someone snuck her into the house? Because it would surely have been very late, and for all his preaching of individual responsibility and self-reliance, their father had kept his teenage daughters under a strict curfew: Jessie might well have been able to sneak in past curfew if she hadn’t been drunk or hurt, but if either had been true, could she really have gotten into the house without waking anyone?

Unless…it had been during one of their father’s regular and sometimes lengthy business trips out of town. By then, he had been accustomed to leaving the girls on their own, with only the middle-aged housekeeper/cook, a live-in widow who had taken no more than a cursory interest in either of the girls and was there more for form’s sake than to exert any authority over Jessie and Emma.

It occurred to Emma, not for the first time, that there were a lot of questions she should have asked herself when Jessie had left—and since then. And even more since Jessie had come home.

For the past, she had no excuse for not asking if something had been wrong, if something had happened to hurt or frighten her sister; all Emma remembered was that after weeks of behaving oddly, practically hiding in the house and keeping to her room, Jessie had abruptly run away, that time for good, and though upset and even angry, there had been little Emma could do about the situation.

Angry? Why had she been angry? Because Jessie had left without even saying good-bye? Because she had escaped and left Emma to endure a small-town life with little change and even less excitement? Maybe. Maybe that had been it. Emma wasn’t sure.

But she was sure that, for the present, she hadn’t asked Jessie more than a few questions because Jessie had made certain she wouldn’t. It wasn’t only her psychic walls that were up; Jessie had put even more distance between herself and her sister, and it was all too clear she didn’t want that gulf crossed.

For whatever reason.

Emma realized that she had exchanged one anxious habit for another; she was absently fingering the small scar in the hairline over her right temple. It told her that her anxiety level was intensifying.

What it didn’t tell her was why.

HE WAS ABLE
to get ahead of his prey easily and with enough time to get himself set and ready for her. After so many years as a hunter, he knew what he was doing. And he was very, very careful to make no mistakes.

He settled in and waited, and within fifteen minutes or so, he saw her
coming toward him. One look told him she had relaxed her guard somewhat; it was virtually impossible to be guarded for an extended length of time, and that was something he often took advantage of.

She was already questioning herself, doubting what she had felt or sensed earlier. Convincing herself there was no good reason for her to be jumpy.

Good.

He was so perfectly camouflaged in the brush beside the trail that she came within two feet of him without seeing him. In the last instant, as he leaped, he thought she sensed danger, but by then it was too late for her to react effectively.

He had the gun holster unclipped from her belt and tossed out of reach before she could even make a move for it, and was so adept with his razor-sharp knife that the loop holding the pepper spray around her wrist was severed before the gun hit the ground. He cut through the nearest strap of her
backpack, and as that weight fell away from her, he had her in his arms, trapped.

She struggled for only a moment, instinctively, before the knife pressed to her throat drew blood. Then she went still.

“Make a sound,” he breathed, “and it’ll be your last. Got it?”

Her chin barely moved in a nod. She was breathing in terrified little gasps, and, held tightly against him, her body shook.

He had her bound and gagged with duct tape and with the hood over her head in a matter of seconds, so practiced in his art that she never even got the chance to plead for her life.

That would come later.

He gathered up the gun and pepper spray, zipping both into her backpack, then hoisted her over one shoulder, picked up the backpack, and set out through the forest, away from the trail.

She smelled like fear.

He liked that.

JUNE 30

Nathan Navarro had settled in nicely over the past couple of days. Baron Hollow had at first seemed no odder to him than most small towns and rather more welcoming than he had expected—though that could have been due to his ostensible reason for being here. He’d been warned; people were intensely curious about writers.

The locals hadn’t wasted much time. He had patiently answered the usual questions about his surname—yes, Spanish in origin but generations back, and really quite a common name in the US and, yes, he was aware that he looked more black Irish than Spanish, a trait for which he credited or blamed his mother—and quite a few about his supposed job.

“Where do you get your ideas?” seemed to be the most popular.

He’d been warned about that too.

But all in all there had been only polite, casual interest in him and only a cursory interest in his movements.

Which was just as well.

It had given him at least some time and opportunity to get the lay of the land, both literally and figuratively. He was more resigned than surprised to find both cell service and high-speed Internet spotty at best, and the terrain surrounding Baron Hollow was
difficult, remote, and had a well-deserved reputation for having sheltered for generations more than one fugitive from the determined searches of cops and feds.

There was more than a little bit of bad history here, rather famously so, back during Prohibition and even further back to the Civil War, and bad feelings about various wrongs lingered even today, which was one reason he was undercover.

One reason.

The dense mountain forests surrounding Baron Hollow had, in fact, swallowed up a few fugitives and never bothered to spit them out, somewhat ironically since most of it was federal land. In any case, it was always possible that some of those people were still hiding up in the mountains somewhere, or maybe they had walked out at some point and just stayed off the grid.

Or maybe they had put a hurrying foot wrong and tumbled off a cliff’s edge on a narrow mountain trail to their deaths; bodies left exposed to the sometimes harsh elements, predators, and scavengers were likely never to be found. And if they were found, there generally wasn’t a whole lot left to identify.

Like this one.

Navarro stood in a small ravine, looking down at human remains spread out across a relatively level area beneath a granite outcropping that formed a cliff high above, frowning as he studied the scattered bones, a few with tendons and shreds of muscle still attached.

And there was the smell he recognized. Blood soaked into the earth, and decomposing flesh.

Death.

Not much was left of her. Not much at all. He didn’t even see a
skull, just a few strands of blond hair clinging to a shriveled bit of scalp at one end and tangled among sticky briars at the other. He imagined some animal grabbing the skull and tugging, making off with all but the few pitiful hairs anchored to the briars and the patch of scalp that wouldn’t let go.

With an effort, he shook off the image, hoping it
was
just his imagination and not a flash of what had actually happened. As a matter of fact, something about that image bugged him, and when he knelt to look closer, he realized what it was.

Her spine around the base of her neck had been severed, and the cut was too clean to have happened naturally. Nothing had wrenched her head free of her body.

Someone had cut off her head. And though there was no way for him to know for certain if she had in fact been running and had fallen to her death, every instinct he had told him that was what had happened. Which meant that someone—either an unspeakable ghoul or an unspeakable murderer—had found the remains later and had removed her head and taken it away.

His money was on the killer. The question was, had the killer left the rest of her because this was the way he always disposed of his victims, letting the weather, scavengers, and nature clean up after him? Or had he left her here as some kind of punishment for escaping him?

Or for some other reason entirely?

Navarro rose to his feet and continued to frown down at what was left of the victim. He never got used to this. No matter how many times he found himself looking down at some variation of this too-familiar scene, he never got used to it. Which was probably just as well.

Getting used to unnatural death was probably a pretty good indication that it’d be time to hang up his spurs.

For now, however, this was still his job, or part of it. So he looked, making various mental notes. One such note was that it didn’t take a forensics expert to know that these remains had been out here at least a week, and possibly a couple of months.

No, not that long. Between the heat, summer rains in the last week or two, and wildlife hungry after a rough winter, human remains would be consumed and/or decompose and be scattered in a fairly short amount of time.

If he was looking at a victim of a possible killer in the area—and one glaring omission from what he was looking at told him it was more than possible—then she had died recently.

Navarro pulled out his cell phone, figuring it was worth a shot since he was so high up and possibly near one of the cell towers he had spotted earlier in these mountains, but was still mildly surprised to find he had a signal. He hit a speed-dial number.

“Didn’t you just check in?” Maggie asked by way of a greeting.

“This morning. Right now I’m hiking in the mountains west of town. And I’ve found something. Someone.”

“Send me a picture,” she said immediately.

Navarro got the best angle he could and snapped a shot with his cell, sending it back to Haven.

“There isn’t a lot to see,” he told Maggie once he’d done that. “I’d say the animals got to her quickly. Probably drawn here fast because of the blood from the impact. The drop from the cliff above me is at least seventy-five feet, and underneath the fallen leaves and shit here is mostly granite. She hit hard.”

“
You think the fall killed her?”

“I think somebody could have dumped a body off the cliff, but this is a pretty damned inaccessible place, and why bother? If he planned to leave her out in the open for the animals to clean up, I’ve passed dozens of ravines off the main trails that would have done the trick. One good shove and she would have rolled down a rocky slope, into some fairly nasty underbrush and, for all intents and purposes, vanished. The animals would have gotten to her before the smell of decomp attracted any attention. No, I think she was running, trying to escape, maybe at night, and fell.”