Stay Dead
Authors: Anne Frasier
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #General, #Women Sleuths, #Thrillers, #Suspense
ALSO BY ANNE FRASIER
Writing as Anne Frasier
Hush
,
USA Today
bestseller, RITA finalist, Daphne du Maurier finalist (2002)
Sleep Tight,
USA Today
Bestseller (2003)
Before I Wake
(2005)
Pale Immortal
(2006)
Garden of Darkness
, RITA finalist (2007)
Play Dead
(2013)
Writing as Theresa Weir
The Forever Man
(1988)
Amazon Lily
, RITA finalist, Best New Adventure Writer award,
Romantic Times
(1988)
Loving Jenny
(1989)
Pictures of Emily
(1990)
Iguana Bay
(1990)
Forever
(1991)
Last Summer
(1992)
One Fine Day
(1994)
Long Night Moon
, Reviewer’s Choice Award,
Romantic Times
(1995)
American Dreamer
(1997)
Some Kind of Magic
(1998)
Cool Shade
, RITA winner, romantic suspense (1998)
Bad Karma
, Daphne du Maurier award, paranormal (1999)
The Orchard
, a memoir (September 2011)
The Man Who Left
,
New York Times
bestseller (2012)
The Girl with the Cat Tattoo
(2012
)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2014 Anne Frasier
All rights reserved.
No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of
Amazon.com
, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-10: 1477820132
ISBN-13: 9781477820131
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013920783
Cover design by Cyanotype Book Architects
CONTENTS
Follow-Me-Girl Mojo
Queen Elizabeth root
Rosebuds
Lavender
Spikenard
Name paper: Write the subject’s name seven times in black ink. Rotate one-quarter turn, write seven times in red.
One hair from the subject’s head
Put all the above in a red flannel bag. Dress the bag in follow-me-girl oil and carry it close to your heart.
CHAPTER 1
T
he voice on the phone was hesitant. When Homicide Detective Elise Sandburg heard it her heart began to pound, and all of her war wounds throbbed. She reached for the pain meds beside her hospital bed, popped a pill, and downed it with a swallow of water.
Elise, the detective who’d stared down many a gun barrel, who’d trailed madmen through the underground tunnels of Savannah, who’d been captured, caught, and tortured, was now quivering in fear, brought down by the sound of her own mother’s voice.
“I need to talk to you about Anastasia,” Grace said.
Anastasia. The other family outcast.
“Your aunt
. . .
” Grace’s voice trembled. “She called me last night.”
Which was a very strange thing to say, considering Anastasia was dead.
In that moment Elise thought,
Oh, how the tables have turned.
She was no longer the crazy one in the family.
“I wondered if you had something to do with it.” Grace plunged on. “That’s what you people do, isn’t it? Conjure up the dead?”
It was hard to shake the rumors when Elise’s own mother believed she had some sort of power. Grace’s question shouldn’t have been a surprise. The woman’s conviction would always be the source of their estrangement no matter how many years passed. Elise was the dark mystery her mother brought into her home, someone without her DNA, and the older woman had quickly come to regret taking in an abandoned baby. A baby everybody else had been terrified of helping. Elise had to give her credit for at least stepping up and saying she’d do it. She’d take in this child people thought should have been left on the grave where she’d been found. But a little love would have been nice.
“You’re contacting me after five years to ask if I brought your sister back to life?” Elise asked.
Silence. Then, “Yes.” The admission came as a quiet whisper.
“You know I’m in the hospital with stab wounds, don’t you?” Not to mention dehydration, bruised ribs, and a severely sprained ankle.
“I saw something about that on the news.”
Right.
“So, you haven’t brought your aunt back from the dead?”
“No.”
“Oh.” She sounded disappointed.
“What did Anastasia say when she called?”
“I was so shocked to hear her voice
. . .
You know how that is. When your heart starts pounding and you can’t think.”
“Are you sure it was her?”
“Yes. She told me not to tell anybody, but she wanted me to know she was alive and that I shouldn’t worry about her and that she loved me. Oh, and that she adored you. You were always her favorite, you know.”
Elise did know. “Why are you sharing information told to you in confidence?” And with her, of all people.
“Because of her daughter. Melinda. The plantation has been left to Melinda.”
“That doesn’t seem so unusual,” Elise said.
“I think it’s strange that she left nothing to me. Nothing. Not even the cuckoo clock. And now here she is, calling in the middle of the night to tell me she’s not dead.”
“You went to her funeral, right?”
“Yes.”
“You saw her dead body, right?”
“The service was closed casket because she’d been in the water so long. The funeral director said she looked awful. He couldn’t really do anything with her, and he didn’t want her family and friends to remember her that way.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“You didn’t cast some spell on her?” Grace asked with a combination of hope and disappointment.
“No spell.” Elise thought about telling her that’s not what root work was about. Not her daddy’s root work, anyway, but she didn’t see the point. She’d tried a million times before.
“Could you go to the plantation and check it out? See if anything seems odd?”
The only thing that seemed odd was Elise’s mother. But some of Elise’s best childhood memories were of the weeks spent on her aunt’s property. It was a healing place. And who knew what Melinda would decide to do with the property. Probably sell it. Elise wouldn’t mind visiting one last time. And she could do with some healing.
“I’ll look into it.”
Elise’s looking into it had something to do with the fact that she and her mother hadn’t spoken in so long. It wasn’t that she wanted to spend time with Grace. She knew better than that. Even an occasional conversation over coffee came with the promise of fresh emotional trauma, but Elise wanted to reestablish a distant contact. Like this. A phone call once or twice a year. And if a Band-Aid on the relationship meant poking her nose into Aunt Anastasia’s affairs, she’d do it, plus it would give her a place to recover while her house was in shambles.
CHAPTER 2
C
risis belief. It was a powerful thing, Elise thought, as she lay in the reclined passenger seat of Detective David Gould’s car, her broken body supported by the pillows he’d stuffed around her earlier, her crutches wedged between them.
“This is insane,” David said, revisiting his earlier attempt to talk her out of recovering from her injuries in a house she hadn’t seen since she was a kid. “You’re on some heavy-duty drugs and shouldn’t be by yourself.”
Funny that David of all people would make an issue of drugs, but he
was
the expert when it came to pharmaceuticals.
“Come stay at my place,” he told her. “I’ll take care of you.” Then his shoulders stiffened as he most likely realized his poor choice of words. Nobody took care of Elise.
Elise
took care of Elise. And really, his gloomy apartment with vines that blocked the sun and a Siamese cat that peed whenever it got upset? How could that possibly be any better than the plantation house where she was going? How could it possibly be any better than
. . .
than
. . .
well, than almost anything.
They hit a bump, and the dashboard hula girl did a shimmy. Elise groaned, and David let out a muffled sound that was part apology, part annoyance at being put in a situation where he was causing her more pain.
“You brought your gun, right?” David asked. They were both thinking about the remoteness of the plantation. It was near Savannah, but hidden the way so many things in the area were hidden. Isolated, secret, on a twisted, tangled dirt road.
“Yes.” She would have said more, but pain was making a harsh revisit, and she didn’t want David to know. She dug her fingernails into her palm to keep from making more noise.
“Why the hell go to your aunt’s?” David had argued back at Elise’s Victorian home in the Garden District of Savannah where they’d stopped to pick up some things after her four-day hospital stint.
“My house is full of men with power tools and hammers, not to mention an asbestos abatement team.” She’d had to shout over the sound of those very power tools and hammers. Elise was just happy the construction crew had finally shown up even though they were three months late. Did anything ever happen at a convenient time? But recovering in her own bed would have been nice. “I’d say it’s serendipitously fortunate,” Elise had told him. “Not that my aunt’s dead, but that her house is empty.”
She hadn’t told him about her aunt’s supposed return. She’d considered at least sharing her mother’s request that she check out the plantation, but it had been hard enough to talk David into driving her here today. Let him think she was coming to the plantation in order to put the past week behind her, and because her home was a hard-hat and toxic-waste zone. That’s all he needed to know right now.
From her low perspective, Elise could see blue sky and rapidly moving clouds. Live oaks and Spanish moss created a strobe of light and shadow that was hypnotic. She wanted to roll down a window and smell the world beyond the car, but the afternoon was unusually cool for early November in the South. And even though she knew it was the medication, she suddenly felt close to tears. The kind of feeling you get when your senses are flooded with the overwhelming beauty of the moment. It’s a feeling that comes out of nowhere, probably the same kind of euphoria a dog feels before it begins tearing madly around the yard, just high on life. Or the drunken woman at the end of the bar who suddenly loves everyone. That’s the wave that came over her. She loved David. She loved her teenage daughter, who was at that moment on a short-term foreign exchange in Sweden even though Audrey had begged to stay in Savannah after her mother’s ordeal.
Elise would heal, but the near-death experience made her question all of the turns in her life, and the choices, good or bad.
Should she have become a detective? Should she have exposed her daughter to the seedier side of Savannah? To the criminals and the murderers? Maybe she should have become
. . .
what? A doctor? A
real
doctor. Or a veterinarian. Or a florist. Or a farmer. Or an artist. Or a writer. Or a bookstore owner. Or a café owner. Audrey could work at the café too, and they would both wear white aprons, and if a customer stepped in and said, “Hey, did you hear about the murder last night in Forsyth Park?” Elise would just shrug.
Too bad, but she had beans to grind. Too bad, but she had a latte with a whipped-cream heart to make. She would be all about bringing a bit of comfort into her customers’ dark lives. She wouldn’t be stepping into those dark lives. She wouldn’t see what those lives looked like from the inside, from the hearts of murderers and victims. She would return home smelling like fair-trade coffee, not a body that had been lying on a living room floor for three days in the heat of a Georgia summer.
Elise never thought she’d become one of those women on a quest for the meaning of life, the meaning of
her
life, but she suddenly found herself looking inward. Who was she? Elise Sandburg, detective? Elise Sandburg, daughter of a root doctor? Elise Sandburg, the woman abandoned in a cemetery as an infant?
The cemetery incident alone could do a number on a person, and she’d spent the bulk of her life trying to prove she wasn’t a weirdo and a misfit. And in so doing, she’d denied her heritage. Shame? Had it been shame? Maybe. But also fear. Being the daughter of a root doctor carried with it a responsibility she hadn’t wanted. Years ago, with her father’s death, the mantle had been passed to Elise and she’d done nothing with it. Just watched it drop at her feet.
How could a detective believe in mojos, in root magic, in hoodoo? And she didn’t
want
to
believe. But as much as she denied belief, a part of her wondered
. . .
was it real? Or did the simple act of believing make it real? So much of magic and superstition was belief-based, and yet root doctoring was supposed to be in a person’s blood, passed down from generation to generation.
Elise should have died. She’d been beaten and tortured and stabbed, but as she lay there bleeding out, thinking of Audrey, thinking of David, she’d called upon a chant that had been taught to her years ago by an old woman who’d lived down the road. Knowledge she’d put aside. Swept aside. Kicked aside. In that moment, when she should have been embracing death, saying good-bye to life, she’d turned to the old chant. If it really meant so little to her, why had she reached for it in what she thought to be her final moments of life?
Crisis belief. Yes, it was a powerful thing.
She didn’t die. A chant—root magic saved her.
Nonsense. She’d lived because her blood had excellent clotting properties. She’d lived because she’d outsmarted her captor. She’d lived because she was relatively healthy and she’d been able to endure the abuse her body had taken.
Root magic hadn’t saved her. Elise had saved herself. And the man she’d outwitted, Atticus Tremain, aka the Organ Thief, was now in a coma that he would most likely never awaken from. A depraved sicko who’d been obsessed with her. A man who’d left a string of bizarre murders in his wake, removing body parts ranging from hearts to genitalia.
That
was the truth.
That
was real.
Elise wished she’d killed him, especially since they hadn’t been able to directly tie him to the murders, but he was as good as dead, she tried to tell herself. He would never hurt anyone again, she tried to tell herself.
They hit another bump, and Elise stifled another moan. “What do you see?” she finally managed.
Would David understand if she told him she was trying to find herself? Find Elise? Yes, he would get it.
“What do I see?” he asked, throwing her question back to her, turning his head slightly, but not enough to make eye contact. “Crazy. I see crazy.”
She laughed, because he’d always been the impractical one.
“And total isolation,” he said.
“That’s what I want.”
He stopped the car in the middle of the road and lifted his cell phone. “No bars.”
“There’s a landline phone. I gave it a test call yesterday.”
“Did anybody answer?”
“Just the ghost.”
“Ha-ha.”
“The place
is
supposed to be haunted, you know.”
“Did you ever see anything?”
“No, but people have reported hearing voices and music. Personally I think those people were high.”
“What isn’t supposed to be haunted around here?”
The car dipped down a steep grade, then turned through a pair of stone pillars and rusted iron gates that probably hadn’t been opened or closed in years. Elise’s breath caught on the pain as the car stopped and David shut off the engine.
He sat behind the wheel, looking through the windshield. “Holy crap,” he finally said in a voice that held both horror and amazement.