The Murder in Skoghall (Illustrated) (The Skoghall Mystery Series Book 1) (39 page)

“Can we get this over with, or do we need to wait until midnight or something?”

Jess watched as one bat and then another emerged from under the eaves of the barn. They circled the birch trees and then swooped over the driveway, past the garage, and into the back yard. “What’s a haunting without bats?” she said, sounding overly cheerful.

“Jess.”

“I’m sorry, Beckett. I wish I could ask someone else to do this, but you’re the only friend I’ve got here.”

Beckett took a breath and blew it out through his mouth in an exasperated sigh. “I’m sorry, too. I don’t mean to make this harder on you, I just don’t like it.” He pointed at the sky behind the house. “Those clouds are really dark. We might finally get some rain.”

“Thank goodness.” The small talk wasn’t easing her nerves any, so Jess turned and went inside.

She found Shakti shoved behind the couch, already sensing that this was an unusual night. “Come on, girl.” Shakti thumped her tail against the wall, but made no move to come out. Jess tried again, this time with a cookie. Shakti scooted toward the treat, but changed her mind and stayed out of reach. Beckett chuckled when he saw Jess on all fours, her rump in the air, sweet-talking a puppy. He disappeared and returned with a spoonful of peanut butter.

With Shakti finally crated, Jess led the way to the bedroom. She took out her leather belt and a scarf and laid them across the end of the bed. Beckett eyed them suspiciously. “I trust you,” she said. “You won’t hurt me.”

“But, Tyler…”

“Tyler bound my hands and yelled at me. He didn’t actually hurt me.”

“Okay.” Beckett forced a small chuckle. “I’m a lot more stable than that guy, right?”

That’s what I’m counting on,
she thought. “I might need you to scare me, to heighten the tension. I think the more juice we’re putting out, the easier it will be for Bonnie to come through.”

“Juice?”

“Emotional power or energy or something like that. I’m figuring this out as I go. Just use the belt to bind my hands, and we’ll see what happens.”

Beckett nodded his head slowly. “So that’s it? I belt your hands together and we sit around and wait?”

“Pretty much.”

He laughed, not the dry chuckle of a minute ago, but a mocking sort of guffaw. “Jess! Seriously? That’s the big plan? Do you really think it will work?”

The sky rumbled to the west of the house, the early growl of an approaching summer storm. Jess and Beckett both lifted their heads to listen. Half a minute passed before they heard another growl. “Yes,” she said. “It’s the anniversary of Bonnie’s death. We got bats. We’ve got a storm coming. What else do we need?”

“Okay. Sure.” He threw his hands up and brought them down to clap together. “Why not?”

Jess sat on the bed, scooting back so she was propped against the headboard. Beckett joined her and they sat, staring past their feet at the belt and scarf laid casually nearby. They looked harmless, like Jess had laid them out to decide which one she should wear, and she supposed Bonnie’s accessories had appeared just as benign this night forty years ago. Thunder clapped outside, still at a good distance, but closer than before. She and Beckett listened, their bodies tensed with expectation.

“I could go make some popcorn,” Beckett said.

Jess smiled and was about to say something in response when the air in the room changed. Jess looked at the hair on her arms and saw that it was standing up. “Do you feel that?” she whispered.

“What?”

“The air. It’s like it’s…electric.”

“Like when a storm is coming?”

“No. Yes.” Jess ran her hands over her arms and smoothed down the hair. The back of her neck tingled now, too. She looked toward the front corner of the room, nearest her office. Her eyes told her nothing was there, but her heart began pounding and her chest felt suddenly tight, like a balloon was inflating inside her ribcage. The room took on a muted mustard color.

“Are you all right?”

“Huh?” Jess looked at Beckett, surprised to find him beside her on the bed.

“You’ve been staring at that corner for two minutes. What’s going on?”

“She’s nearby.”

“Can you see her?” Beckett looked around the room.

“Not yet, but the feel of the room changed, and the light. She’s with us. Can’t you feel her?”

Beckett hesitated to answer. He looked at the ceiling and rubbed his goatee. “I’m not sure, Jess. Maybe. Or maybe I think I can because you say she’s here.”

Jess nodded. She closed her eyes and breathed in and out slowly, moving her diaphragm the way she’d been taught to breathe in yoga classes. Focusing on the breath allowed her to clear her mind of fear and doubt and simply receive without pressure or second-guessing herself. Jess felt a melancholy sense of loss. It was not unlike when she realized she had to leave her husband. As difficult as the marriage had been, to finally acknowledge it was time to give up on them and face the unknown had caused her a period of grief before she was able to act definitively.
Yes
, she thought,
this is the loss of everything that could have or should have been
.

Beckett touched her hand and Jess startled. She looked into his blue eyes, dim in the now dark room, and was warmed to see his concern so plainly. Jess reached out to turn on a bedside lamp. She also hit record on her phone to capture audio, then turned on her video recorder.

“What’s going on?” Beckett kept his voice low.

“Grief. The feeling is sadness for what she lost, but…”

“But what?”

Jess put her hand on Beckett’s arm to quiet him, to signal him to wait. “But it’s changing,” she said.

The mustard hue was turning orange, gradually deepening to a fiery intensity. Jess tried to keep breathing calmly, but her chest felt like someone was sitting on it and her hair again stood on end. A flash of lightning illuminated the windows that flanked the bed, separated from the crash of thunder that followed by only half a second—the storm was as close as the river. Bonnie stood in the corner of the room as though she’d needed the jolt of lightning to power her appearance. Jess jumped back, rattling the headboard, surprised by the confluence of lightning, thunder, and ghost.

“She’s here,” Beckett said.

“Can you see her?”

He shook his head. “I have a definite feeling we’re not alone.”

Jess was gripping Beckett’s hand tightly, though she had no idea when she’d taken hold of it. She loosened her fingers. “She looks…nice, like when I first saw her, but the atmosphere, the feeling, is that she’s pissed off.”

“Yeah. I’m getting that much,” Beckett said. “Jess? What’s our plan if things get too intense?”

Jess looked away from Bonnie, turning her head to meet Beckett’s eyes. She wanted to tell him if things get crazy he should get them the hell out of there, but she froze, the words that were so insistent in her head somehow unable to come out as speech. She had to see this through. “As long as I’m okay, just watch the show.”

“What if you’re not okay?”

Before Jess could respond, a flash of lightning and the accompanying boom of thunder filled the room. Jess found herself looking right into Bonnie’s face. Bonnie spoke, but was again voiceless. Jess watched Bonnie’s ashen lips shape the same desperate plea,
find him
.

“Help me,” Jess said.

The belt flew off the end of the bed and wrapped around Jess’s wrists, propelled by some unseen force. Beckett now stood several feet away, though whether he’d leapt back or been propelled by the same force that moved the belt, Jess did not know. She felt something yank on both of her ankles, dragging her down the bed so she lay on her back in the middle of her mattress. She yelped with fright. To her right stood Bonnie, her skin now sickly in color, her eyes bloodshot, the mark of the scarf that choked her appearing, its shade turning from pink to red to purple while Jess stared at it.

The rain at the edge of the storm arrived, pattering against the roof, heavy droplets, a tremendous relief to everyone in the area. Jess loved a good summer storm at night. She would have been sitting on the porch with a glass of port right about now, counting the seconds between flash and boom, waiting for the spectacular show to arrive, but instead she was jerked hard against the bed, her body pinned by a forceful weight that pressed into her abdomen, making her struggle for breath. She gasped, squeezing her eyes shut against the pain. When she opened her eyes, the room was smaller and painted a soft mauve. The furniture had changed. A man’s chest of drawers stood against the wall to the left. Across from the bed sat a lady’s dresser with an oval mirror above it. To the right of that was a chair and a closet door. Strewn over the chair were a number of women’s clothes, tried on and discarded. An orange sash lay on the floor beside the chair. The window at the front of the house was open. A cool breeze drifted in, stirring the floor-length ivory sheers. Jess heard crickets chirping outside.

“Fucking gook bitch! Where are the guns?” someone shouted at Jess and a blow to her face slammed her cheek against the bed, moving her jaw with such force she wasn’t sure it would ever realign properly. The man’s knee dug into her abdomen just below the sternum, making it impossible to breathe. She tried to squirm, but her hands were now not only belted, but strapped to the bars of the old iron headboard. Panic flooded Jess’s body while one thought repeated in her mind:
Don’t wake Johnny!

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Don’t wake Johnny! Don’t wake Johnny! Don’t wake Johnny!
That one thought, one goal, prevented Bonnie from screaming her terror into the night. It would not have brought her a rescuer. No one lived close enough to hear a woman’s screams, not across the field of corn that separated her and her closest neighbor. While her screams might have served to release some of her fright and pain, they would have woken Johnny. And then what? Her only hope was that Carl had forgotten about Johnny.

“You gook bitch! Answer me! Where. Are. The. Guns.”

“Carl. Carl. You’re hurting me.” Bonnie’s wrists stung where the leather cut into her skin. Still she tugged against the bonds, trying to make her hands as small as her wrists, but she was small boned and every bracelet she’d ever owned had been taken to a jeweler to remove links, every watch had needed extra holes cut into the bands. And Carl had cinched the belt so tight.

“Shut the fuck up!”

She didn’t understand how it was Johnny remained quiet in his room, but he had once slept through a cocktail party that got rowdy late in the evening. As long as it wasn’t her panicked voice he heard, he might sleep the night through, perfectly unaware. When it was all over, she would crawl into his bed with him. She would surround him with her arms and as she protected him, he would comfort her, until John came home to take care of them both.

“Please, Carl,” she begged him, keeping her voice soft, “it’s Bonnie. Remember me? Your high school sweetheart. Bonnie.”

“You think that’s funny? You think you can just tear apart my friends?” His voice rose with agitation. “Gut them like one of those stinking pigs you got outside and leave them to rot?”

Bonnie shook her head. “No. No. Carl, it’s not funny. It’s not.”

He punched her in the jaw, whipping her head to the right, loosening a couple of her teeth. As her face pushed downward into the soft, smothering bedding, Bonnie bit her tongue and tasted iron. She sobbed into the bedspread, letting it muffle her sounds, keeping them, she hoped, from Johnny’s ears. 

Carl moved away, his combat boots heavy on the wooden floor. Bonnie opened her eyes to find him picking up the small hammer and nails she had left sitting out. One of her frames in which she had arranged pressed violets was on the floor, propped against the wall. As Carl turned away from the nightstand, hammer and nails in hand, the toe of his boot bumped the frame and it tipped forward, its glass breaking. He positioned himself at the foot of the bed and held up a nail. “Where are the guns, mama-san?”