“Oh?” Darcy said. She hadn’t heard a word about Marcia Cuomo.
Mrs. O’Hara was smiling wryly. “At the time, I’m afraid, she had a reputation for having a nip or two while working. She didn’t want Matt Stone thinking that she was drinking on the job, so she just told Penny she’d had a fall. Apparently, when she tried to explain to a few people that there was a very physical ghost in the house, they didn’t think her a credible witness in the least.”
“I see. I’d love to talk to her.” At the counter, Darcy wrote down her cell phone number and gave it to Mrs. O’Hara. “Could you ask Marcia to call me at her convenience?”
Darcy left the library and searched for the little Volvo she had borrowed from Penny. Twenty minutes later, she was out at the stables. Sam, the old caretaker, was working there, and she assured him that she could manage saddling and bridling the horse herself.
Daylight still dappled through the trees, but with such a canopy of green, the forest trails and copses were dark and shadowy as early evening came to pass. Darcy rode to the point where she had dismounted on her last ride out, left Nellie having a lazy sip of water at the brook, and returned to her perch upon the log.
She hugged her knees to her chest, always a little afraid. She closed her eyes, concentrating on the sense of the past that had nearly come clear to her before.
First, the cold. It settled over the forest like a blanket. An inward voice, her own, called out in silent fear as the feeling wrapped around her. “Josh!”
“I’m here.”
It was the softest voice, or it was insanity. It was her own mind, working on different circuits, a mechanism to keep her from going mad.
She opened her eyes. The forest had darkened even further. She heard voices. One light, a girl’s voice. She was laughing. Talking about the wedding, then apologizing. “Ophelia, you’ve been so wonderful. He was to have been yours, but then, really, you’d never met, and then we met, and Ophelia, I really do love him so very much! We’ll find the right man for you, I know it. Maybe not in this little town, but you’ll travel with Barry and me, and it will be wonderful.”
She could see the sisters. They had come into view. Two ghost horses had now joined Nellie at the brook. Nellie lifted her head, snorted, shied away uneasily, seemed to get ready to run.
Both girls had a wealth of brown hair, and were clad in simple cotton dresses, petticoats beneath, heavy boots on their feet.
Amy dismounted first.
“It will be wonderful,” Ophelia agreed softly from her saddle. Then she, too, dismounted.
“Why did we stop here?” Amy asked, cupping her hands to create a dipper so that she could draw a cool drink from the brook.
“Oh, I just wanted to show you something. It’s in the water. You’ll have to kneel down.”
“I’ll get soaked.”
“It’s summer, little goose. You’ll dry.”
Amy hesitated.
And watching the past replay itself in her mind’s eyes in the haunted glen, Darcy wanted to cry out, to warn Amy, to help her. And instead, she sat frozen, in something of a trance, seeing the time repeat itself in the images of what had been, aware that she could only see, that there was nothing she could do.
“Something in the water?” Amy repeated.
“Yes, get down, you’ll see!”
It was a classic execution, carried out badly, brutally foiled. Once Amy was down, Ophelia drew the heavy ax from the pouch at the back of her saddle. Her first blow merely dazed Amy, who screamed and fell sideways into the water. Ophelia instantly saw that she had botched a clean kill. She began to work arduously, swinging the hatchet again and again while Amy screamed. The thudding of the blade against flesh, bone, muscle, and sinew seemed as loud in the forest as a drumbeat.
The vision came to life far too vividly. And, watching from the log, Darcy could bear it no longer. She began to scream as well. She forgot herself, running forward to the spot, thinking that something had to stop the terror.
Neither the dying Amy nor the determined Ophelia noticed her in the least. Time had come, and time had gone, and all that vision could give was an echo of the past.
As Darcy burst upon the sisters, the images faded. Shaking, Darcy fell upon her knees in the water. Yet, as she knelt there, shaking, horrified at Ophelia’s vicious cruelty to her own sister, she saw the ghost.
Amy, headless, thrashing through the brush by an old oak, not twenty feet away.
Slowly, Darcy rose.
When Matt reached the house, he saw that Clint and Carter were out by the stables, arguing over Riley, a big buckskin quarter horse. He strode over to the two of them.
“We have more horses,” he reminded his cousin and their friend.
“Ah, but only one glorious redheaded guest,” Clint said. He carried his usual joking tone, but there was a slight edge of steel to it.
“She’s out riding again?” Matt asked.
“And I say I should be the one riding out just to make sure she’s doing all right,” Carter said. He rubbed his beard and grinned. “You know, give her a real feel for the charm of the Old South.”
“Hell—a beard gives you Southern charm?” Clint scoffed.
“Hey, I’m a land baron, and you’re…a relation,” Carter reminded him.
“Right. I belong at Melody House. You’ve got your own property. You just like to hang out here,” Clint returned.
Matt ignored the two of them and took Riley’s reins, then quickly swung into the saddle. He looked down at the two of them. “I’ll go.”
They frowned at each other. “That’s just not fair,” Carter said.
“And why not?”
“You’re rude to her,” Clint answered.
“And she doesn’t really look a damned thing like Lavinia,” Carter said.“Yeah, Lavinia is beautiful, but she’s also got that pinched terrier look, you know? Like a woman who always wants more,” Clint agreed.
“While this one just seems to rise above it all,” Carter said.
“Look damned good in a nightgown,” Clint said.
“Too bad she doesn’t sleep in the buff,” Carter said, shaking his head.
“Hey, the woman is working for me,” Matt said irritably. “Lay off—she’s not a one-night conquest here for anyone’s amusement.”
“Who said anything about one night?” Clint demanded.
“Working for you?” Carter said, one eye half closed as he squinted up at Matt in the dying summer sun. “Bull. You don’t believe in anything she’s doing.”
“Neither do you.”
“No, but I sure am attracted to our guest. And I’m fascinated by her work, not at all ready to mock her—the way that you are,” Carter said.
“See you at dinner,” Matt said, starting to turn Sam around.
“Hey!” Clint called to him.
He looked back at his cousin. For a minute, Clint looked as he sometimes had when they were kids. Stubborn, and somewhat sullen.
Matt reined in, staring at him.
“She’s no one-night stand for you either, Matt.”
“She’s working for me,” he repeated.
“Yeah. Like the air doesn’t crackle when the two of you get close.”
True enough. But he’d be damned if he’d have these two knowing anything and taunting him about his attraction to the ghost buster he didn’t believe in.
“She’s only here until she finds something…or until Adam arrives,” he said curtly. Then he nudged Riley with his thighs and headed out for the forest. He hadn’t asked any questions about which way she’d ridden, nor did he look for any signs.
He was certain that he’d find her right where she’d been before, near the water, probably seated right on the same log.
“Communing” with the forest.
A surge of irritation filled him, and yet he was anxious to reach her, and suddenly, deeply glad as well that he’d reached the house when he had. There wasn’t a damned thing wrong with Clint—except that he was a spendthrift and a womanizer. He did have a way with the opposite sex, though. He was all smiles and courtesy, and made many an easy conquest. Carter, too, seemed to manage his share of affairs. And he hadn’t seen either of them so determined in a long time. Hell, never determined enough to argue over one woman.
So?
If she was interested in one of them…?
She was working for him. Or rather, come to think of it, Harrison Investigations had paid for their exploration and examination of Melody House. It was his damned house. That gave him the right to have a proprietary feeling.
Maybe it didn’t.
Hell, he had one anyway.
He reached the copse, the brook, and the place where the fallen log lay in the forest. Nellie, wide-eyed, stood in the brook. The horse wasn’t drinking, just standing. She seemed to be in a strange trance, swaying oddly in the water.
Matt looked hurriedly to the log. Darcy was not there.
Then he heard a sound. A grunting. His eyes were diverted close to one of the old oaks. He stared incredulously, dismounting from his horse by rote, staring at Darcy.
She was on her hands and knees, digging furiously. Covered in mud. His austere, regal-looking guest was smudged with raw earth from head to toe, and she was totally oblivious to the fact that he was there.
She’d dug a really big hole with only the help of a club-shaped log and a sharp stone.
“Darcy?”
As he said her name softly, she gave out a cry of triumph.
And in the eerie light of the dying day, she raised a human skull high into the air.
Chapter 6
6
S he had found it!
Elation roared through Darcy.
“Darcy!”
Her name was called out so roughly that she nearly dropped the skull. She looked to see that Matt had come upon her in the woods.
“Matt! I’ve found it!”
But one look at his face assured her that he didn’t share her pleasure in the discovery.