Liam spoke again.
“I didn’t scream!” Avery protested. He waited, listening. “I’m telling you, I didn’t scream. I would remember screaming. In surprise, in pain, in…whatever! I didn’t scream. There was no time. It was bang, and then the rush of the water and the pain in my head.”
Avery listened again to Liam, closing his eyes for a minute. “Of course. Of course, I will do my best to remember more, but…it was sudden. So sudden. Seriously, I went into the water. How the hell do you scream in the water? I mean, I suppose you could try, but…no one would hear it, certainly. Oh, my God. I was attacked on that property by some bastard!”
Kelsey, watching him, shook her head. “You don’t ever have to go back there!” she whispered.
“Like hell! I want to know who did this!” Avery told her.
He spoke to Kelsey’s cell phone again. “Sorry, Liam. Kelsey was telling me that I didn’t have to go back there. I told her no slinking ass was driving me away from staying with her. Whoever this is wants to separate her from the rest of us. I’m not letting that happen! What? Oh, I haven’t seen the doctor yet. I woke up with Kelsey reading to me, and then she called you right away. All right, yes, of course.” He closed the phone and handed it back to her.
“You hung up on him?” she asked.
“He wants a doctor to come in and see me, and see how I’m doing, and decide how long I have to stay here,” Avery explained. “He was in the middle of something. Blood and guts on the beach.”
“What?” Kelsey demanded.
Bartholomew was back on his feet, anxiously frowning.
“There was a dead animal on the beach, that’s what it sounded like. Not a human being,” Avery explained. “Are you going to go and get the doctor for me?”
“Yes, of course!”
Kelsey ran out to the nurses’ station, excitedly told the woman on duty that Avery had come to and ran back to the room. There was a different physician on that morning, but he came in just seconds after Kelsey had returned to the room.
He spoke to Avery, listened to his words, asked him to point his fingers in different positions, alike and opposing, and stared into his eyes carefully with a light.
Afterward, he supported Avery as he stood for the first time, and they took a few steps together.
Finally, the doctor said, “You’re looking very well, Mr. Slater. Very well indeed. That was a nasty bump you got on your head. We’d like you to stay one more night for observation, then take it easy for a week or so.”
“Oh, I can’t stay,” Avery said.
“Avery, they said that you needed to stay in the hospital another night,” Kelsey said.
“Well, I can’t. I need to be with you. And you know that you can’t stay here. You need to be working on your grandfather’s estate,” Avery said firmly.
“I don’t want you here alone,” Kelsey said.
“Here’s the deal, Kelsey, and that’s that. I’ll stay, if you’ll go home. And if you’ll have another friend come over during the day while Liam is working. That’s it, that’s my final offer!”
The doctor looked from one of them to the other. “This is a hospital, miss. Your friend will be safe here.”
“I take it he never saw Friday the 13th,” Avery said, grinning. “Parts one or two!”
“I beg your pardon?” the doctor said.
“I’m sorry, nothing,” Avery said. He looked at Kelsey. “I will catch up on People and US. I will be fine. You’ll call someone to come and get you—someone who will stay with you. And I’ll think about what happened, and try to remember.”
Kelsey felt as if she were being ripped in two. She knew now that her grandfather had counted on her finding the reliquary, on doing the right thing with it.
She needed to go through his ledgers, to find out how he had labeled the various pieces and where he wanted them to go.
But she didn’t want Avery to be alone.
“Avery, you’re staying. I’ll get on the phone with Liam and work things out.”
She looked across the room. Bartholomew had proven he was a willing if spectral guardian.
Bartholomew was staring back at her.
“Oh, no!” he said firmly. “Where you are going, I’m going. I am not staying here and leaving you and Liam alone down there. No. No, absolutely not! No—and I mean it!”
No goat had ever deserved to end its days so heinously.
Franklin Valaski stared at Liam, shaking his head. “Liam, not to judge, but why me? Shouldn’t animal control have been called on this one?”
“We have laws against animal abuse, and this is abuse if I’ve ever seen it,” Liam said. “Hell, I don’t even know where anyone got a goat on this island!”“Up on Stock Island, sir!” Ricky Long told him. Along with members of the crime-scene unit, he and Art Saunders were working the bizarre crime.
Liam looked over at him and shrugged. “There’s a fellow up there with goats. I mean, there may be some down here, but…roosters. We have roosters and chickens everywhere. You’d have thought this nut might have gone for a rooster. It wouldn’t be all that easy getting a goat!” Ricky Long continued.
Liam hoped that was true. That would help him a great deal.
He looked around. The men and women of the unit were all working diligently, searching the beach for any evidence—gum wrappers, cigarette butts, footprints, trash in containers, anything and everything—but he was afraid they were also thinking that he was losing his mind. They were all still working a murder; there were drug busts daily, prostitution rings, grand larceny, gang violence, smuggling and any number of other serious events happening, and they were looking for clues to a goat-murderer.
“Hey!” he snapped loudly, drawing everyone’s attention. “I have good reason to believe that whoever butchered this goat killed Gary White. We’re looking for an organized man who functions well day by day but has a seriously delusional personality. He’s taking after Peter Edwards, an historical character who supposedly sacrificed goats on the beach in a like manner to curse Southern blockade runners. And if I hear one more snicker, someone is going to be on trash duty for the next month!”
Everyone went back to work.
Liam turned to Franklin Valaski. “Cause of death?” he asked flatly.
Valaski stared at him. “Liam—”
“Cause of death!”
“All right, thankfully, I think the throat was slit first. This is an isolated area, near the fort, busy by day, dark by night. Perfect for someone to get a goat out here, and even if anyone had been around to hear, the animal would have died so quickly it wouldn’t have had much time to let out a noise. Get the windpipe, and, well….”
“What kind of a weapon?” Liam asked.
Valaski sighed, his gloved hands on the wound.
“Something incredibly sharp. Like a sacrificial knife.”
“It’s not a problem at all, really, I don’t mind!” Vanessa assured Kelsey. “I have work with me. Copies of a lot of the film we took, my computer…right now, I’m weeding through, looking for the best footage and clearest explanations of different events we chronicled, along with the main event, the massacre on Haunt Island…so I’ll be fine. And Sean will be fine without me for a night,” she said, grinning. “It’s good to miss each other now and then—it makes you know how wonderful it is when you’re together!”
Kelsey smiled. “Thank you.”
“And I will be with you. I don’t work at all today. I can help you at the house,” Katie assured her.
They were in Avery’s hospital room, and Avery wasn’t pleased.
“I’d be fine alone,” he insisted.
“You’ll be fine giving me your opinions of what we’ve got,” Vanessa said firmly.
He threw up his hands. “I feel useless. I feel worse. I’m taking up time that people need.”
“Avery, please, deal with it!” Kelsey said firmly.
Avery looked at Katie. “You won’t leave her for a minute? I can’t believe that Liam approved this, but…” He lifted his hands in aggravation once again. “I am overrun by women!” he moaned.
“But we all have cute friends,” Katie teased.
“Don’t add insult to injury,” he moaned. “I do not need to be fixed up!”
Kelsey laughed and kissed him on the cheek. “Behave. Promise?”
“I’ll keep him in line,” Vanessa said.
Katie and Kelsey waved, leaving the hospital room at last. Katie O’Hara had driven up, and she and Kelsey would drive back. In the morning, when Avery was released, someone would make the trip back up to bring him down to Key West and the Merlin house. He was stubborn; he was not going to stay anywhere else as long as Kelsey was staying there.
As she drove, Katie said, “So we’ve determined that Avery was attacked. It’s a pity that he didn’t see anything. Or hear anything. Whoever is doing all this is incredibly good, I’ll give him that much.”
“He did see something. He saw a dolphin. Well, we both saw the dolphin. It is a fascinating creature—it observes people as we observe it,” Kelsey said.
“I should have been outside, watching over him,” Bartholomew said from the backseat.
Kelsey saw Katie frown at the ghost in the rearview mirror.
“It’s all right—I see him,” Kelsey said wearily, closing her eyes as she leaned back in the passenger’s seat.
“What?” Katie asked. The car swerved slightly.
“Sorry, sorry!” Kelsey said, opening her eyes and sitting up straight. “I shouldn’t have spoken while you were driving. I can see and hear Bartholomew just fine, thank you very much.”
Katie’s jaw dropped.
“Katie, it’s fine. I’m glad that Bartholomew is such a wonderful ghost, that he’s so watchful. I’m thrilled to know that ghosts exist. I have to believe in a concept of heaven—it’s the only way I can live with everything that has happened in my life. I’m sure many people feel that way, and some scholars say that’s why we invented religions. But Bartholomew is great, he gives me faith and hope and all kinds of good thoughts,” Kelsey said.