Читать книгу The Ghosts Of Cragera Bay - Dawn Brown - Страница 7

Chapter One

Wind swept cold off the sea and icy spray stung Carly’s face and hands like tiny needles. Despite the brilliant October sun glittering off deep blue waves, the dark water looked fathomless, empty. She drew her jacket tighter around her middle and stifled the shiver creeping up her back, focusing her attention on the man standing at the end of the rock jetty.

She smirked. Bathed in late afternoon sun, his shoulders hunched against the wet wind and his gaze fixed on the distant horizon, he could have stepped off the pages of some Victorian romance novel. The tortured hero, brooding and lost, returning to his cursed past.

He must have known something of the terrible legacy he’d stumbled into by now—if he didn’t before coming to Cragera Bay. Maybe he’d seen the shadows, heard the voices, smelled the dead. Maybe that’s why he’d changed his mind and agreed to speak to her.

She pushed back hair that had come loose from her ponytail and whipped wildly in the relentless wind, then started down the jetty. Waves slapped at the sides of the pier, spray soaking the hem of her trousers. Her heeled boots on the uneven stone turned her gait clumsy. Twice she nearly went over on her ankle and toppled forward.

Maybe the man hadn’t changed his mind at all. Maybe his plan was to let her fall over the side and be washed out to sea.

He couldn’t have guessed she’d wear such inappropriate footwear, but when she’d chosen her clothes this morning, she hadn’t considered traipsing across a deserted beach or over a stone jetty. She’d dressed to appear professional, capable and serious. Someone Declan Meyers could trust.

“Mr. Meyers,” she called over the surf splashing against the rocks. He stiffened and glanced over his shoulder. Dark eyes narrowed and glinted like black glass. Again the image of the brooding hero—Heathcliff and Mr. Rochester rolled into one. Windswept black hair framed the sharp angles and smooth planes of his face. High, carved cheekbones, pointed chin and lips pressed into a flat line.

“I’m Dr. Carly Evans. We spoke on the phone,” she said, coming to stand beside him.

She held out her hand, which he glanced at briefly before meeting her gaze—keeping his own hands jammed in his coat pockets. “Let’s go in.”

He shifted around her and started down the jetty, leaving Carly gaping at his back. Bloody prat.

She drew in a deep breath, swallowed down a few choice epitaphs and followed the man. He wasn’t going to give her what she wanted. Certainty trickled over her like a soft spring rain.

The hell he wasn’t. She hadn’t come all this way for nothing, hadn’t come this close to seeing The Devil’s Eye only to be turned away now.

Meyers reached the end of the jetty, descended the short set of stone steps and would have continued across the beach without bothering to look back.

“Mr. Meyers,” she called out, determined that he stop and wait for her.

He faced her, a single black brow arching.

“I appreciate you agreeing to see me. I understand your hesitance given recent events. You’re no doubt suspicious, but I can assure you, I’ve known your sister Brynn’s fiancé for years.”

He snorted. “I’ve never met my sister Brynn, so an association with her fiancé means about as much to me as if you told me you’ve known that guy for years.” He nodded to an old man trudging through the sand in heavy rubber boots, fishing rod slung over his shoulder.

“I understand, but—” Her heel caught between the uneven stones, ankle turning out. She tumbled forward, arms pinwheeling as the jagged steps rose up to meet her.

Big hands clasped her shoulders, stopping her from hitting the ground face-first. She lifted her gaze and met Meyers’s nearly black eyes. His mouth twisted in a smirk, and heat crept into her face. This wasn’t how she’d wanted their first meeting to go, her falling into his arms like some klutzy damsel in distress.

She drew a deep breath, and eased back from his grasp. Sharp pain zinged up her leg from her throbbing ankle, but she bit her lip to hold back the whimper and forced a smile.

“Thank you, Mr. Meyers. I wasn’t looking where I was walking.”

“Are you all right?” he asked, frowning.

She wasn’t. Her ankle ached miserably. Already her boot felt too tight—a sure indication of swelling. She fought the urge to kick his ankle then ask if he was okay. Instead, she held her forced smile in place. “I’m fine. Perhaps we could find somewhere to speak. There’s a café just up the road.”

He shrugged and grasped her elbow, helping her down the stairs to the sand. Shrill pain licked into her calf with every step, but she held her face stiff against the urge to wince and tried not to limp—the latter less successfully.

His frown deepened. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

She nodded. “Of course.”

And if I’m not, it’s your bloody fault. She bit back on the words, fighting to play nice. She needed his permission to access his property, after all.

Though, maybe she should use this little mishap to her advantage and guilt him into giving her what she wanted. If he hadn’t dragged her out here in the first place, she wouldn’t be hobbling across the beach now.

Once on the boardwalk, they followed a short alley to Cragera Bay’s main street. Most of the shops and restaurants that had lined the narrow cobblestone road were closed and boarded up. The village felt empty, abandoned. With hers and Meyers’s footfalls the only sound besides the wind and distant rush of the surf, she could almost imagine they were the last two people on Earth.

He pulled open the door to the café, letting her enter first. An older woman behind the counter set down her paperback novel and pushed her pink-framed reading glasses atop her head so the lenses sank into short, silver curls. Big eyes barely glanced at Carly before they fell on Meyers and widened.

Carly could guess what was going through the older woman’s mind. She’d no doubt recognized him, heir to Stonecliff. Arthur James’s long lost son.

“What can I get you both?” the woman asked.

Meyers ordered a coffee and Carly a cup of tea. They took their drinks to the table near the window overlooking the street and farthest from the counter. For all the good it did, the woman sat back on her stool and picked up her novel, but continued to watch them over the top of the pages, forgetting her glasses still atop her head altogether.

To be fair, she and Meyers were the woman’s only customers. There wasn’t much else for her to focus on.

How long until this café went the way of so many of the other businesses in the village? Months? Weeks? Days? Cragera Bay was diminishing as if it were slowly folding into itself until it disappeared completely. The discovery of a trio of murderers hunting in the area for more than two decades, killing countless men and women, seemed to have chased away tourists and locals alike.

“I appreciate you agreeing to meet me, Mr. Meyers,” Carly said, shifting in her seat to keep from putting any weight on her bad ankle. You jerk!

He flashed an insincere smile. “It’s my pleasure.”

“Why don’t I begin by telling you a little about my research and how The Devil’s Eye factors in?”

Meyers held up his hand, silencing her. “I’m not interested. I didn’t agree to meet you to hear about your research, and you’re not getting anywhere near my property.”

She stiffened. “Why did you invite me here?”

“Because I want you to stop.”

He’d dragged her out here and nearly broken her ankle for this? “I beg your pardon.”

“Stop asking people about Stonecliff and ghosts and murders and evil entities and God knows what else.”

“You know about the murders?” she asked.

“Of course, I do,” he said, as if she’d asked the stupidest question he’d ever heard.

“Just about the men found in The Devil’s Eye, or the other murders, too?”

He frowned, his expression turning shuttered. He didn’t know what she was talking about. “Ruth Bigsby, your father’s nurse, murdered two people, tried to kill one of your sisters and frame the other.” He opened his mouth to respond, but she pushed on before he could. “That means Stonecliff had four people killing on the property, one acting completely independent of the others. Don’t you find that odd?”

“Of course, but I doubt very much it’s the result of ghosts.”

The cynical derision in his tone fed her gathering temper. She clenched her jaw and mentally counted to one thousand. “I don’t think ghosts did it, either. I do believe there is a possibility that a high level geomagnetic energy may be a large factor in the phenomena reported on your property.”

Meyers rolled his eyes and took a swig from his coffee. “See that right there, that’s what you need to stop.”

“Mr. Meyers, if you would just let me bring in a team to investigate—”

He snorted. “That’s never going to happen. Not alone. Not with a team. Not in a box. Not with a fox.”

“I see you’re a fan of the classics.”

“I need to sell that house. What I don’t need is some new-age flake asking questions about ghosts and murder cults and magic energy.”

She wrapped her hands tightly around her teacup, half-surprised the thin china didn’t shatter in her grip. Narrow-minded ignoramuses really shouldn’t be able to get under her skin after so many years working in a field few people took seriously, but they did. He did.

“Mr. Meyers, several reliable witnesses experienced phenomena inside your home, at the bog, your own sisters among them.”

He drew in a deep breath and released it slowly as if struggling with his own battle for control. “These women, my sisters, are strangers. I don’t care what they experienced, and if they think sending you to slow down my chances of unloading the estate will get them anything—”

Laughter bubbled up her throat before she could stop it. “Believe me, your sisters want no part of Stonecliff.”

“Lucky for them, no part is what they got.”

She blinked at his animosity. He hadn’t even met these women.

“It’s not my intention to hinder the sale of Stonecliff,” she told him.

“Maybe not, but that’s the result.”

“You don’t think the dead men they hauled out of the bog might be the reason that you’re not having to beat off a long line of potential buyers? How many bodies have they found now? At least twelve, but I thought there’d been three more since the arrests.” She squinted as if struggling to remember.

“Pieces of three,” he admitted, grudgingly. “Look, the murders are hard enough to get past, but you running around claiming the place is haunted makes everything harder.”

“I’m not claiming anything. Are you telling me you haven’t experienced anything unusual at Stonecliff? No voices? No strange smells? No shadows with red eyes?”

“No such thing.” His gaze held hers. His expression remained inscrutable, but the muscle at his jaw flicked.

He’d seen something at Stonecliff, even if he didn’t want to believe it himself.

“You can’t stop me from asking questions.”

“No, I can’t, but I’m asking you to. Think about it this way—the sooner I sell the place, the sooner you can hassle some other poor sucker into letting you onto the property to hunt for ghosts.”

She really was beginning to dislike the man. The throb in her ankle flared as if to drive home that point. “That’s not what I’m doing. I can help you.”

“I doubt it,” he said, shaking his head. He pushed back his chair, legs scraping the tile floor and stood.

“Wait,” she called when he started to turn away. He faced her, his expression impatient. “Your sister, Eleri, asked me to tell you to be careful of Hugh Warlow and not to trust him.”

Meyers chuckled humorlessly. “He said the same thing about her.”

* * *

Declan left the café shaking his head. He’d given it his best shot, but he didn’t believe for a second he’d seen the last of Carly Evans. Gauging the glint in the woman’s stormy gray eyes, she’d be back.

So not what he needed.

He sighed, shoved his windblown hair back from his face and started for his car. Despite all attempts to appear nonchalant, meeting with the woman had unnerved him. He’d expected Carly Evans, parapsychologist, to be different—pale skin and dressed in black, rings glittering on every finger or maybe some time-displaced hippie—rather than the very attractive woman in tweed pants and a white blouse beneath her blazer. His imagined version would have been much easier to dismiss.

Tall, slender, caramel-colored hair pulled back from the soft lines of her face, she’d been more attractive than he’d expected, too. Not that it mattered. She could have been a Victoria’s Secret model and he still wouldn’t let her hunt for ghosts on his land.

His land. The idea that Stonecliff was his still caught him like a kick to the gut. That he was here, in this place he’d sworn he’d never come to, was surreal. It was amazing what greed could make him do. Not greed. Desperation.

Once he reached the battered Land Rover he’d left parked in the lot near the water, he climbed in behind the wheel. There was only one other car, a silver Ford Focus. Probably Carly’s.

“Shit,” he whispered, through his teeth. She’d twisted her ankle pretty good on the jetty, even if she hadn’t wanted to admit it. He should drive back to the café and offer her a ride to her car.

He was in no hurry to spend more time with the woman. Her questions had left him cold—especially the ones about shadows and red eyes—and he didn’t want her to confuse an act of common decency as a chance to change his mind. But he wasn’t enough of a prick to leave her to limp all the way to her car.

He drove back to the café, following the route he’d walked. There was no sign of Carly on the empty sidewalks. When he reached the restaurant, he pulled up to the curb, hopped out and stuck his head in the door.

The woman behind the counter set down her book and looked at him above her pink-framed glasses, eyebrows lifting. “Is there something I can help you with, love?”

He glanced at the table where he and Carly had been sitting. Empty now, their cups cleared away, there was no evidence they’d been there at all.

Unease settled over him. “The woman I was with, did she say where she was going?”

“Not to me. If I see her again, should I tell her you were looking for her?”

He shook his head. “It’s fine. Was she limping when she left?”

The woman’s thin brows knitted together. “I didn’t notice.”

Maybe Carly’s ankle was better. If she’d hobbled out of the café, surely the woman would have noticed. Though, maybe not, depending on how engrossed she was in her book.

“Thanks, anyway,” he muttered, and stepped back outside. The sun had dipped behind the buildings, casting long shadows over the narrow road. He glanced up and down the empty sidewalk. No sign of Carly.

Again that tickle of apprehension.

For God’s sake, she was a grown woman. She’d survived so far without any help from him. No doubt she would continue to—twisted ankle or not. Still, that she’d just vanished in the past fifteen minutes gnawed at him.

He might not have given it another thought anywhere else, but here, in Cragera Bay, someone disappearing was reason to worry.