The Ghosts of Cragera Bay (7 page)

He led her into a study. A large, ornately carved desk stood in the center of the room. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves jammed tight with leather-bound volumes ran the length of the far wall, opposite French doors that led out to a small patio and offered a view of the sea.

“How much do you know about EVP?” she asked, unzipping her computer bag and pulling out the laptop.

“Nothing.” Declan sank into the large chair behind the desk.

“Electronic voice phenomena. It’s sounds or voices picked up in recordings that weren’t there at the time the recording was made. Some people believe it’s the dead attempting to communicate,” Andy explained, standing beside her.

Declan’s brow cocked. “Some people, but not you?”

“EVP is difficult to prove.” Carly set the laptop on the desk and opened the screen. “There are so many things that the recorders might have picked up—radio waves, a CB transmission or just background noise. It’s unreliable.”

“But you obviously recorded something or we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Why use a method you don’t trust?”

“Curiosity, I suppose. There were witnesses who’d claimed to have heard voices at The Devil’s Eye. I wanted to see if we would pick anything up.”

“And you did.”

She nodded. “This was recorded yesterday while we were taking measurements at The Devil’s Eye.”

She opened the audio file and pressed play.

Weeping sounded from the tinny computer speakers.

He stiffened and met her gaze. “Is that—”

She held up her index finger and his mouth snapped shut. The crying continued, deep and distinctly male, then the woman’s voice, the same one who had iced her blood the night before.

“Devour him.”

Declan’s face drained of color, leaving his skin pasty. His eyes rounded, darkened, but remained fixed on the now silent laptop. The sound bite had reached the end. There’d been more weeping, but the only clearly spoken words had played out, and left Declan looking stunned and empty.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

He looked up and met her gaze, his wild and unfocussed. “How did you…you couldn’t… I never should have agreed to any of this.”

He stood and walked out of the room, leaving Carly staring after him dumbstruck.

“What just happened?” Andy asked. She’d almost forgotten he was there.

“I don’t have a clue. Wait here.” Carly hurried out to the foyer. A cool, damp draft whispered against her skin. The front door was open, and Declan leaned against the stone wall beneath the overhang. Even hunched with his back to her, she could see the rise and fall of his every deep breath.

Concern built inside her, tangling with an inborn curiosity. Those words had meant something to him.

“Declan,” she said, softly.

He whipped around, those black eyes pinning her where she stood. Some of the color had returned to his face, but his rough-hewn features were hard, shuttered.

A nervous thrill shot through her, the sensation not wholly unpleasant.

He shook his head. “I never should have started all this.”

She blinked. “What happened just now?”

“I made a mistake.” He rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand. “You have to go.”

“All right,” she said, approaching him slowly, the way she would an animal she didn’t quite trust. “But those words meant something to you.”

He shook his head even before she finished her sentence. “You have to go.”

“I will. Andy and I will leave and we won’t bother you again. But let me help you first.”

He eyed her skeptically, maybe not believing she meant what she’d said, then leaned back against the wall. The rain had tapered off. The air, thick with the scents of wet earth and sea brine, blew soft and cool over her skin from where she stood in the open doorway. “You can’t.”

“You don’t know that. Tell me why those words scared you.”

He shot her a scowl, clearly unimpressed that she’d implied he was frightened, but he looked better, that terrible shell-shocked expression leaving his eyes.

“It didn’t scare me.” He dropped his gaze to his trainer-clad feet pressed against the crumbling flagstone and slid his hand into his jeans’ front pockets.

Silence stretched between them, interrupted only by the patter of rain gently hitting the ground and the faint, relentless hush of waves hitting the shore.

“My mother died back in April,” he finally said, voice so low she wasn’t sure she’d heard him at all. “Cancer. She’d been sick a long time, but by April she’d been at the end. Allen, my stepfather, and I had been relieving each other at the hospital so she wouldn’t be alone when it happened.”

His throat jumped, and Carly’s chest tightened. “You don’t have to tell me if it’s too difficult.”

He looked up and fixed his dark eyes on her face. “By then, between the morphine and the disease she wasn’t really there. Do you know what I mean?”

She nodded. There were stages of death and in those final stages a person’s consciousness ebbed in and out, the gaps between growing larger and larger until there was only the mechanical body functions—heart beating, lungs drawing breath—until the body shut down, too.

“Anyway, it was late and I had dosed off, but I woke up because she was touching my arm and she was trying to talk, asking me not to go. I thought she was trying to tell me she didn’t want to be alone, that she was afraid, but then she said,
‘They’ll devour you.’”

A shiver scurried up Carly’s spine. “Was it her voice on the EVP?”

He shook his head. “It threw me because it’s a woman, and those words were so close to what she’d said, but it wasn’t her. It was the last thing she ever said to me. She slipped back out and she was gone before morning. Do you think it’s a coincidence?”

“If it is, it’s pretty bloody spectacular.” But what did it mean? She didn’t have a clue. “Do you still want us to go?”

“Can you tell me what the hell is in this house?”

“Not until I’ve investigated.”

“I’ve seen things here, heard things.”

She smiled. “I know. Will you tell me?”

“Yeah,” he nodded, and pushed away from the wall. “I’ll tell you.”

Chapter Six

What in the hell was he doing? He followed Carly back to the study. If he could have made a bigger ass of himself, he didn’t know how. He’d heard that voice, those words, and the air sucked from his lungs. He couldn’t breathe. Slick cold still crept over his skin every time he played the words in his head.

They walked back into the study and Andy looked up from the computer. His gaze bounced between him and Carly, while he waited for an explanation.

“The rain’s let up,” Carly said. “You might as well start setting up at The Devil’s Eye, while I ask Declan the preliminary questions.”

“Might as well,” Andy agreed, getting up from his chair.

“We’ll meet you there in about a half hour, I’d say.”

Once Andy had gone, he sat in the chair behind the desk. “What did you want to ask me? Let’s get this over with.”

She sat opposite him, gently arched brows lifting, that teasing smile pulling at her full lips. “This isn’t a trip to the dentist, you know? It’s not going to be half as terrible as you think.”

He’d rather be getting a root canal, actually. “What do you want to know?”

She dug a pen and notepad from her bag. “I need to ask you some questions about what you know of Stonecliff’s history. Don’t look so horrified. I promise I won’t shove sharp things under your fingernails to make you talk. This will all be virtually painless.”

“If you say so,” he muttered. A part of him still couldn’t believe he’d agreed to do this.

Carly flashed her mono-dimpled smile and tapped the tip of her pen on the paper. “How long have you been here at Stonecliff?”

“A little more than a week.”

She nodded and made a note on the paper. “Did you know about the house’s history before you arrived?”

“The murders, you mean?” he asked, with a frown. When would she ask about the ghosts?

She looked up from the paper and shrugged. “Among other things.”

“I didn’t know anything about the house, except that it belonged to my father and he was dead.”

She frowned, a faint line forming between her delicately arched brows. “What was your relationship with your father before his death?”

“Why do you need to know that?”

A pink flush crept into her cheeks and she pushed her hair back from her face. “I guess I don’t, really. I’m trying to establish how much you knew about the estate before you experienced phenomena, and the scenario you’re describing sounds very similar to what your sister, Brynn, went through.”

The sister who’d turned up to milk a dying man out of whatever she could get her hands on. “I doubt it.”

“Really, Brynn was sent away when she was a toddler, guardianship granted to her maternal grandparents in the States. They let her believe both her parents had died when in reality her mother hadn’t died until she was eleven, and you know when your father died. She only found out the truth this past spring when Eleri contacted her.”

He frowned. Not quite the way Warlow had described it. “I knew about my father.”

“You never wanted to meet him?”

He shook his head. “Nope.”

“Why not?”

No way he’d admit to Carly he and his mother had hidden from the man for the bulk of his childhood. That he’d grown up with an underlying fear of what would happen if the man ever found them.

“My mother left him before I was born. He relinquished his rights when she remarried. I have a good relationship with my stepfather. I didn’t feel I was missing out. What does any of this have to do with your investigation?”

She shrugged. “I’m just being nosy now.”

He snorted in spite of himself. “At least you admit it.”

“You never saw the estate, then, before you arrived?”

He shook. “The lawyer told me I had inherited a house on the coast, but didn’t tell me anything else. Like I might have trouble selling it because of the people murdered here for twenty years.”

She scribbled something on the paper. “When did you find out?”

“The first time I spoke to the real estate agent. She told me we could have trouble selling because of the house’s history. When I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about, she filled me in.”

“Did you have that conversation before or after your first strange experience at Stonecliff?” she asked, without looking up from her notepad.

“After.”

She lifted her steely gaze to his, her expression intent. “When did you first experience something unusual?”

“My first night here.” His heart rate kicked up. “I woke and there was a man—or I thought he was a man at first—standing at the end of my bed. I couldn’t see anything except his outline, but he looked like he was wearing a long coat and an old fedora. He was like a shadow in the dark, which doesn’t make sense. You need light to cast a shadow. Then I saw two red eyes, and I knew it wasn’t a man at all.”

Carly’s pen flew over the notepad, her gaze flickering to his face as she wrote. “Did you notice any sounds or smells?”

“There was a weird gurgling like it was struggling to breathe, and it stunk, like the bog, but stronger.”

Her head snapped up. “Do you mean The Devil’s Eye?”

“Yeah.” The glint in her silver eyes left him uneasy.

“Did you make that connection just now?”

“I noticed it the first time I saw The Devil’s Eye.”

“Before or after you spoke to the estate agent?”

“Before.”

“Huh.” She dropped her gaze to the pad and wrote quickly. “Interesting.”

“Why’s that?”

“Other witnesses have described a smell similar to what you described, but none drew a comparison to The Devil’s Eye—where the murders took place. It’s an interesting connection, that’s all. What happened next?”

“Nothing. I turned on the light and it disappeared. I thought I had dreamed the whole thing.”

“When did you begin to suspect it wasn’t a dream?”

“I had nearly the exact same experience the following night.”

Her brows lifted. “And the night after that?”

Heat stole into his face. “I’ve been sleeping with the lights on ever since.”

Her mouth twitched. “I don’t blame you. Have you seen it again since then?”

“I’m not sure,” he admitted, frowning. “Two nights ago, I was in the kitchen and heard scratching at the back door. Mrs. Voyle had just left and I worried she’d fallen or something, but she’d already gone.”

“You opened the door to investigate?” Carly’s attention remained on her notes.

“Sort of.” Declan reached back and scratched the top of his head. This all sounded crazy. “I guess Mrs. Voyle hadn’t closed the door properly when she left, because when I was about to grab the doorknob, the wind must have kicked up and blown the door open. There was no one outside. I don’t know what the scratching had been, but I could see those glowing eyes watching from the trees. And it smelled like campfire this time, faint but there.”

“Could someone nearby have been burning leaves or something?”

“Maybe, but I smelled it again in my bathroom yesterday morning.”

Carly’s head jerked up, gaze narrowing. “The smell of fire in your bathroom?”

He nodded, a chill dancing up his spine just remembering the experience. A part of him didn’t want to tell her the rest. He wanted to forget the whole thing, pretend it never happened. Yet this was the experience he wanted clarified. As disturbing as the shadow man and his glowing eyes had been, the burned woman had turned his soul cold with terror.

He launched into the story before he could change his mind. When he finished, Carly stared at him with wide eyes, her hand on the page still. He shifted in his seat, rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand. Shit, he must sound like an absolute lunatic.

He stood and shoved both hands through his hair. “Isn’t this where you tell me about everyone else who’s seen this woman?”

Carly blinked as if he’d snapped her out of a trance. “Um…right…it’s just…” She cleared her throat. Hell, had his story shaken her? That didn’t bode well. “No one I interviewed mentioned fire smells or a burned woman.”

“Great. What does that mean?”