The Cursed. Heather Graham
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kid, Dallas. Lay off. She was dealing with screaming tourists who told her they saw a ghost, not a man.”
Dallas nodded. “Yeah, all right.”
“Come in and talk to her. Talk. Don’t yell.”
“I was never yelling.”
“You basically accused her of causing his death.”
“The hell I did. I merely suggested that an intelligent and rational human being might have thought from the get-go that there was something more than a ghost in her yard.”
Liam lowered his head, a slight grin on his face. “I’m going in for coffee. If you can be nice for a few minutes, you’re invited, too.” He looked up at Dallas, and his smile faded. “You heard the doc. He couldn’t have been saved unless he’d been in an emergency room when it happened. It’s not Hannah’s fault your man is dead.”
“I know. I just...I just feel like something is escaping me and that I should be able to grasp it, and I can’t. I’ll be pleasant. I promise.”
“No sarcasm?”
“No sarcasm.”
They took the path from the gate past the pool, where the techs were busy stringing tape to try to salvage what they could of the victim’s route from the yard to his death.
There were no blood trails to the yard, which seemed impossible, but unless the techs could find something with their equipment that neither Liam nor Dallas had seen, Jose Rodriguez might as well have appeared in the yard like the ghost those kids had thought he was, because there was no sign of where he had been before he showed up by the pool.
How could that be? He must have been bleeding steadily by that point.
There was a crime scene marker at every spot where Hannah O’Brien had seen blood as she’d followed the trail through her yard to the alley.
Dallas couldn’t help himself. He paused, looking at the lawn chairs beside the pool. He imagined the couple lying there....
Opening their eyes.
Seeing Rodriguez bleeding, holding a knife, then screaming in terror at what they thought was a ghost.
They had still been out there freaking out when Hannah came out to see what was going on, so why hadn’t Rodriguez stayed there with them and asked for help?
The pool was surrounded by attractive tile work, which gave way to lawn. It appeared that Rodriguez had stumbled past the chairs, then across the grass, past the bushes edging the yard and through the gate into the alley. It hadn’t rained recently, so the foliage was dry and brittle. He had to assume there would be evidence if Rodriguez had gone through it. Since there wasn’t, he had to assume Rodriguez had taken almost a straight line out to the alley.
Had the gate already been open?
He closed his eyes and tried to picture what had happened.
Sliced, bleeding, dying...but he hadn’t headed to the house?
Why?
There could be only one reason.
Rodriguez had come from the alley, trying to escape through the yard, and the killer had been behind him. But he’d seen the kids by the pool and hadn’t wanted anyone else to die, so he’d sacrificed his own life and turned around, back toward danger.
So where was the killer now?
And where was the knife the couple had seen Rodriguez waving?
The answer was obvious.
The killer had followed him until he had fallen, then wrested the knife—which might well have been dripping with the killer’s blood—from Rodriguez’s dying grasp.
2
Hannah had hurried past the pool area and inside without looking back. Once there, she leaned against the door, just breathing.
She still felt as though, even if she were pinched, she wouldn’t feel anything.
He’d been real. The “ghost” in her yard had not been a ghost at all. At least, he hadn’t been a ghost when her guests had seen him. He had been real—he’d been flesh and blood and...
Alive.
But according to the medical examiner, nothing could have saved him at that point.
And still, in her mind, she kept replaying everything about finding his corpse as clearly as if it were happening all over again. First the blood...
And then the body.
She’d rushed to his side, fallen to her knees while fumbling to get her phone from her pocket. She’d touched him, ready to do whatever necessary to help him.
And then she’d seen his eyes.
Dead eyes.
Every corpse she’d ever seen had been laid out tenderly in a casket at a wake or a viewing.
The dead never look right, never, no matter how good the mortician is, Melody had told her once.
But they didn’t look like the dead man in the alley. Lying there as if he’d known death was coming, as if...
As if he had tried to speak, tried to say something before succumbing to the darkness.
If only she’d gotten there sooner.
No. She couldn’t have gotten there sooner; she hadn’t had any idea of what was going on when Shelly and Stuart had started screaming, and it had seemed so cut-and-dried. Shelly, already on edge after the ghost tour, had thought she’d seen a ghost and Stuart had gotten carried away on the wave of her hysteria. And then she’d had to deal with all the other guests shrieking and shouting and just generally going nuts.
There was nothing she could have done. Even if she’d run right out to look for a bleeding man with a huge knife in his hand, it would have been too late. He’d already been dying.
“Keep telling yourself that,” she muttered drily to herself. She realized she felt incredibly guilty, which was ridiculous, because she hadn’t done anything wrong.
But the man had been alive....
And now he was dead.
She pushed away from the door. She didn’t just feel guilty about the dead man, she realized. She felt guilty for suspecting her resident ghosts of being up to no good, which had been entirely stupid of her. They always looked exactly the same. Melody was always beautiful in her Victorian gown, and Hagen always looked like a handsome swashbuckler in his fawn breeches, boots and muslin poet’s shirt. They didn’t change clothing—and they didn’t run around with weapons, much less bleeding.
She needed to do something, get busy. She couldn’t just stand there all day feeling guilty. But she’d already stripped all the beds in a fury and cleaned the house, powered by the adrenalin that had raced through her after the scare and the effort of getting all her guests settled elsewhere. By the time the sun came up, the Siren was ready for business. Too bad she didn’t have that much energy every day.
In the kitchen she poured herself another cup of coffee and took out her scheduling book. Stuart and Shelly and their friends had been due to stay another three days. There were prospective guests who had wanted to come, but she’d had to turn them away. Several had left their numbers, though. Maybe she could call them and...
And tell them that a dying man had walked through her yard before his death and scared everyone else away?
The pages seemed to swim before her eyes.
She thought she heard someone knocking at the back door. She rose and went to check.
No one.
She moved back through the house, looking out the windows as she went. There were people walking along the sidewalk out front, but no one was at her door or trying