Scene of the Crime: The Deputy's Proof
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Carla Cassidy
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Chapter One
It was a perfect night for a ghost walk. The Mississippi moon was nearly hidden from view by the low-lying fog that seeped across the land and invaded the streets of the small town of Lost Lagoon.
Savannah Sinclair retied the double-beamed flashlight that hung at her waist beneath a white, gauzy, floor-length gown. She used talcum powder to lighten her face and knew that most people would think her actions were more than a little crazy.
Maybe she’d been a little crazy for the past two years, since the night her older sister, her best friend, Shelly, had been murdered and found floating in the lagoon.
From that night forward, Savannah’s life had been forever changed. She had been forever changed, and what she planned to do at midnight tonight just proved that Shelly’s death still haunted her in a profound way she couldn’t get past.
She stared at her ghostly countenance in the bathroom mirror and wondered, if Shelly’s murder had been solved and her killer arrested, would things be different?
She whirled away from the mirror and left the bathroom. The clock on the nightstand in the bedroom indicated that it was eleven thirty. Time to move.
She turned off all the lights in the four-bedroom house that had once been home to her family, grabbed a palm-sized penlight and then slipped out the back door.
The dark night closed in around her, and she glanced at her nearest neighbor’s house, satisfied that all the lights were off and her neighbor, Jeffrey Allen, was surely in bed. She used the penlight in her hand to guide her toward a large bush at the back of the yard.
Shoving several of the leafy branches aside, she revealed a hole big enough for a person to drop into. She knew there were earthen steps to aid in the three-foot drop, and she easily accomplished it, finding herself at the beginning of a narrow earthen tunnel.
She’d discovered the tunnel last summer when she’d been working in the yard. Initially she had to crouch for several feet before the tunnel descended deep enough that she could stand in an upright position and walk.
Half the town already thought she was crazy, gone around the bend because of her parents’ abandonment, her brother’s rages and the murder of her sister.
If they only knew what she did on moonless nights when she wasn’t working the night shift at the Pirate’s Inn, they’d probably have her locked up in an insane asylum for the rest of her life. But there was a rhyme and reason to her madness.
The tunnel system was like a spider web running under the town, although Savannah had only explored one corridor, the one that would take her directly to the place where her sister had been murdered.
She moved confidently with the aid of the bright but tiny beam of her penlight leading the way. It had been rumored that Lost Lagoon had once been home to a band of pirates, and she suspected these tunnels had been made by them years and years ago.
She occasionally moved by dark passageways she had never explored and wondered if anyone had been in them in the last hundred years or so.
She hadn’t told anyone of her discovery of the tunnels. They were her secret, her voyage to the last link to her sister. It took her a little over fifteen minutes to reach her destination, a set of six old wooden planks embedded into the ground that led up to another hole beneath a bush at the base of a cypress tree.
She shut off her penlight, climbed up the planks and crouched behind the tree trunk. At this time on a Friday night, most of the town would be at Jimmy’s Place, a popular bar and grill on Main Street.
But moonless Friday nights when the fog rolled in—the teenagers in town knew those were the nights that Shelly’s ghost walked the night.
Savannah could hear them, a small group of teenage girls giggling behind a row of bushes that separated the swampy lagoon from the edge of town. Set in the center of the row of bushes was a stone bench where her sister and her boyfriend, Bo McBride, used to sit at night and talk about their future, but Shelly had never gotten a future.
Between the bushes and the swamp was just enough solid ground for a “ghost” to walk in front of the bushes and the bench and disappear into the wooded, swampy area on the other side.
She remained hidden for several minutes until she thought it was just about midnight, and then she turned on the flashlight strapped around her waist beneath the gauzy white gown. The double-sided beam produced an otherworldly glow from her head to her toes.
Performance time, she thought. Her role as Shelly’s ghost required very little of her, an appropriate costume but no script to memorize. She started to walk across the “stage.” She walked slowly, her head half-turned away and her long dark hair hiding her features from her audience.
“There she is!” A young female voice squealed.
“It’s Shelly. It’s really Shelly,” another voice cried out.
Savannah embraced the sound of her sister’s name into her heart as she continued her walk. Tears burned in her eyes, but she swallowed against them. Shelly’s ghost didn’t cry. She just walked across the place where she’d been murdered and then disappeared almost as quickly as she’d appeared.
To the continuing squeals of her sister’s name, Savannah reached the woods on the other side of the “stage.” She shut off the flashlight at her waist and headed for a tangled growth of vines behind which was the small entrance of a cave. The opening of the cave was hidden and couldn’t be seen unless you knew what you were looking for.
She quickly moved the concealing vines aside and clicked on her little penlight, using it after she’d entered the fairly large cave that led downhill. The cave narrowed somewhat as it continued but remained wide enough that a pirate could push trunks of treasure or buckets of jewels through it.
This passageway eventually intersected with the one that would take her to her backyard, a perfect escape route for the ghost of the dead.
She moved quickly, eager now to get back to the house where she lived. It was the house she’d grown up in, but it hadn’t felt like home since two months after Shelly’s murder, when her parents had left town and moved to a small retirement community in Florida.
They’d left the house for Savannah and her older brother, Mac, to live in. Mac had married and moved out months before, leaving Savannah in the house that contained far too many haunting memories.
She felt a cathartic relief and a little bit of guilt as she reached the earthen steps that would bring her up into her backyard.
Everyone in Lost Lagoon loved a good ghost story, she told herself. The town was steeped in stories of the walking dead. The ghosts of dead pirates were rumored to walk the hallways of Pirate’s Inn.
Savannah had been working there as night manager for a little over a year, and while she occasionally heard odd bumps and thumps in the night, she’d never seen a ghost.
But the rumors of sightings of apparitions were repeated again and again by thrilled townspeople and occasional tourists. The ghost of an old, toothless hag supposedly appeared in the alley beside the Lost Lagoon Cafe, and several people had sworn they’d seen the faint wisp of ghostly figures around Mama Baptiste’s Apothecary Shop.
She turned off her penlight, stepped up out of the tunnel and squeaked in surprise as she saw a tall, dark figure standing before her. She fumbled to turn on her penlight once again and found herself face-to-face with Deputy Josh Griffin.
“Hi, Savannah. Busy night?” he asked.
Her heart sank as she realized she’d been busted.
* * *
JOSH SHONE HIS own flashlight on the slender, dark-haired woman. Her doe-like brown eyes were huge in a face that was unnaturally pale. Her lower lip trembled even as she raised her chin and glared at him defiantly.
“If you’re going to arrest me, then just get on with it,” she exclaimed.
“How about we get out of the dark and go inside and talk about my options,” he replied.
Savannah Sinclair and the murder of her sister, Shelly, had haunted Josh for a long time. Before the murder Savannah had been a lively, charming twenty-seven-year-old who was often seen out and about town.
“Okay,” she replied. Despite her initial upthrust of her chin, as he walked just behind her he saw her shoulders slump forward and felt the energy that had momentarily radiated from her disappear.
Despite the ridiculous outfit she wore, he noticed the slight sway of her slender hips beneath the gauzy material, could smell the faint scent of a fresh floral perfume that emanated from her.
The few times he’d seen her since her sister’s murder, he’d been filled with guilt. The consensus at the time had been that Shelly had been murdered by her then-boyfriend, Bo McBride, and that law enforcement simply hadn’t found the evidence to make an arrest. Josh knew how little had actually been done in the investigation.
But that was then and this was now, and it had taken him weeks to figure out the mystery of “Shelly’s ghost.” He now had questions for Savannah that he wanted answered.
She opened the back door that led into the kitchen. She turned on the overhead light and gestured him toward a chair at the round wooden table.
“If you don’t mind, I’d like to change clothes before you decide to take me in,” she said. She didn’t give him a chance to reply but instead left the room.
Josh sat in a chair at the table and looked around. Red roosters danced across the bottoms of beige curtains at the window, and a hen and rooster salt and pepper shaker set perched on the pristine stove top. Other than a coffeemaker, the countertops were bare.
There was an emptiness, a void of life in the room, as if it were a designer home where nobody really lived. He heard water running in another room, and a few minutes later, Savannah returned.
She’d changed out of the gauzy gown and into a pair of jeans that hugged her long slender legs and a blue-and-gold T-shirt advertising the Pirate’s Inn. She sat across from him at the table. She’d obviously washed her face, for her color was more natural. Her cheeks were faintly pink.
“So, are you going to arrest me?” she asked. Gone was the defiance, leaving behind only a weary resignation in her voice.
“What would I arrest you for? Impersonating a ghost?” he asked with a touch of amusement. “I don’t want to arrest you, Savannah. I want to talk to you. What are you doing? Why are you pretending to be Shelly’s ghost?”
Her long-lashed brown eyes gazed at him, and she tucked a strand of the long, silky-looking dark hair behind one ear. “How did you know that I’d appear out of the bush in my backyard?”
“I’ve been tracking the sightings of Shelly’s ghost for about a month,” he replied. “I saw your performance a couple of weeks ago and instantly realized it was you, but I couldn’t figure out how you appeared and disappeared and got back here without anyone seeing you. So, I’ve been staking out your house and watching your movements.”
Her face paled slightly. “You’ve been stalking me?”
“Basically, yeah,” he admitted. “But I have to say, you aren’t an exciting person to stalk.”
Her cheeks grew pink again. “Sorry if I bored you with my life. Aren’t there other people you should be stalking? Don’t you have any real crime fighting to do?”
“Things have been pretty quiet since we managed to get Roger Cantor arrested,” he replied. The affable coach of the high school had been exposed as a deadly stalker and was now behind bars. “And you didn’t answer my question. What are you doing pretending to be Shelly’s ghost?”
“Entertaining the locals,” she replied airily, but her dark eyes simmered with a depth of emotion that belied her words. “And you didn’t answer mine. How exactly did you figure out that I’d appear by the bush in the backyard after one of my ghostly walks?”
“The last time you pulled your stunt, I was here, watching the backyard to see if you’d sneak across the lawn. To my surprise, you came up from under the ground.”
Josh had always been attracted to Savannah’s high spirits, her beauty and more than a touch of sexy flirtation that had always lit her eyes when they happened to encounter each other. But that had been before her sister’s murder, and the woman who sat across from him now appeared achingly fragile, a mere shell of what she’d once been.
A touch of guilt swept through him again. As a lawman, his job was to solve crimes and get the guilty behind bars. But officially Shelly’s case remained an open one, without resolution.
“There’s a tunnel,” she finally said. Her finger traced an indecipherable pattern on the top of the wooden table, and her gaze followed her finger’s movements.
“A tunnel?” Josh felt like he was attempting to pull a confession from a hardened criminal.
She stopped the movement of her hand and looked at him once again. “There’s a tunnel that runs from the backyard to a tree near the lagoon where Shelly was murdered. I discovered it about a year ago.”
“What would a tunnel be doing in your backyard?” he asked.
Her slender shoulders moved up and down in a shrug. “I guess you’d have to ask the person who dug it, but it looks like it was made a long, long time ago. Maybe it was used to transport goods from the lagoon to here by the pirates who once lived around here.”
Josh frowned thoughtfully. Lost Lagoon had a history rich in pirate lore. He supposed it was possible that pirates could have unloaded their treasures onto little boats to navigate the small lagoon and then bring them here, where they might have had an inland camp.
He focused his attention back on her. “You haven’t answered my question. Why, Savannah? Why are you doing this?”
He studied her intently, wanting her to explain, to tell him what the payoff was for pretending to be her sister’s ghost. She frowned and looked out the darkened window.
Josh was a patient man. It was one of his strengths as a deputy. He leaned back in his chair, not willing to go anywhere until he had the answer he needed from her.
Was she crazy, as many people thought? Had the murder of her sister, the destruction of her family and her own isolation from everything and everyone caused mental illness of some sort?
She finally looked back at him and leaned forward. Her hair came untucked from the back of her ear, the long dark strands shining beneath the hanging light over the table.
“A month after Shelly’s murder, my parents forbade us ever to speak her name again,” she began. Her dark gaze went over his shoulder to the bare wall behind him. “They packed all of her things away in the storage shed out back and pretended she had never existed.”
She looked back at him, her eyes filled with a depth of simmering emotion. “I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to my sister, my best friend and the person I’d shared a bedroom with since I was born. As time passed and Bo left town, everyone stopped talking about Shelly. It was as if she had never existed anywhere at any time. Even after my parents left town and I tried to talk to Mac about Shelly, he shut me down. He was so angry, still is so angry. He definitely didn’t want to hear Shelly’s name or anything I had to say about her.”
Josh understood her pain. He’d lost a twin brother when he’d been fifteen years old, and he knew for the rest of his life he’d feel as if an integral piece of himself was missing.
“I found the tunnel a year ago,” Savannah continued. “It took me weeks to get up the nerve to go down inside and explore where it went. When I finally did and realized it came up next to the place where Shelly had been murdered, I came up with the ghost plan.”
“But why? What do you get out of pretending to be her ghost?”
“I get to hear squealing teenagers say her name. I make sure nobody forgets about her. I keep her alive by pretending to be her apparition in death.” She shook her head. “I know it sounds crazy and you probably can’t understand it, but for those few moments when people are crying out Shelly’s name, I feel better. I feel as if she’s still with me.”
“It’s dangerous,” Josh replied. “You’re sneaking out of your house alone in the middle of the night to go down into a tunnel that you don’t even know is safe. There could be a cave-in, or somebody could come after you while you’re doing your little show.”
A whisper of a smile curved her lips, and for a moment Josh saw the semblance of the young woman she’d once been. “Actually, a couple of weeks ago Bo McBride did come after me. Apparently his new girlfriend, Claire Silver, told him about Shelly’s ghost and encouraged him to see the spectacle. I’d just finished my walk when he jumped over the bushes and chased me into the woods. I jumped into my rabbit hole and disappeared.”
“But that’s my point,” Josh protested. “You disappear down that tunnel, and if anything happened to you, nobody would know you were in trouble.” He leaned forward. “I want to check out this tunnel.”
Her eyes widened, and her gaze slid away from his. “I don’t think that’s necessary. I’ve been using it for almost a year, and it’s perfectly safe.”
“I’d still like to check it out for myself,” he countered. She looked at him again, and he knew in his gut that she was hiding something. “I figure you’ve got two choices.”
“And I figure I’m not going to like either one of them,” she retorted.
“You can take me down through that tunnel and I can see for myself that it’s safe and secure, or I can get a backhoe in here to fill in the entrance in your backyard.”
She sat up straighter in her chair, a flash of anger in her eyes. “You can’t do that. My backyard is private property.”
“I can do it,” he replied calmly. “That hole is a danger. A small child could fall down it. I can make a case to have it filled in without your permission for the safety of the community.”
She glared at him. It was the most emotion he’d seen from her since her sister’s death. “Fine, I’ll take you down into the tunnel.”
Josh nodded and stood. “Why don’t we plan on around noon tomorrow? I’ll come here and we can check it out.”
She stood as well, her body vibrating with tension. “Don’t take this away from me, Josh. It’s all I have in my life.”
He had a ridiculous impulse to step forward and pull her into his arms. Instead he stepped toward the back door. “I’m just trying to keep you safe, Savannah. That’s my job.”
“If I felt unsafe, I would have called Sheriff Walker,” she replied.
“Maybe you aren’t in a mental state to know what’s safe and what isn’t.”
He knew he’d spoken the wrong words by the flash of unbridled annoyance that filled her eyes and stiffened her stance.
“Contrary to popular belief, I’m perfectly sane. I know people think I’ve become a weird recluse who only comes out at night to work at the local haunted hotel, but that’s my choice. The way I live my life is nobody’s business but my own.”
“Point taken,” Josh replied. He opened the back door. “I’ll see you at noon tomorrow. Good night, Savannah.”
She shut the door behind him with more force than was necessary, and he headed for his patrol car parked at the curb in front of her house.
He got into the car and started the engine but didn’t immediately drive away. Instead he sat and stared at her house. No lights shone from the front windows just as very little light had shone from her eyes on the occasional times he’d seen her in the last two years.
Despite his intense attraction to her two years ago, since that time he’d tried not to think about her. It was only curiosity about Shelly’s “ghost” that had brought him here tonight.
Guilt was a terrible thing, he thought as he finally pulled away from the curb. Savannah was broken. She’d been broken since Shelly’s murder...a murder that had never been investigated as vigorously as it should have been.
As a deputy, Josh had followed orders, but as a decent man, he had known nobody was doing enough to close the case. Closure might have made a difference to Savannah.
Yes, she was broken, but he had no hero complex. He wasn’t the man to fix her, but what he could do was make sure she was safe if she insisted on doing her ghostly walks.
He couldn’t go back in time and do things differently in the case of her sister, but he could see to it that if Savannah insisted on continuing her haunting ghostly walks, at least the tunnel she used was safe.
