Baby and the Billionaire

by Beverly Evans

  "He really is. I didn't get a completely clear look of our frosty friend's head, but from what I did see, he didn't have anything on this guy." I pull out another piece of paper. "Now, look at this. It's from the next year.”

  She takes the scan of a newspaper article out of my hand and reads over it.

  "He disappeared?" she asks.

  “The year before the last time the carnival was held in the summer.” I nod, taking the paper back and reading it. "The summer season won't be the same around Shadow Creek this year as the carnival returns without beloved member Matthew Branson. Branson has not been seen or heard from after leaving a note for his roommate and walking out of their hotel room last year. Specifics of the note have not been shared, but his roommate, Gregory Pitz, has gone on record stating he believes Branson was going to meet someone, possibly at the carnival grounds."

  “I’m surprised I’ve never heard my parents talking about this. Someone disappearing in Shadow Creek seems noteworthy. Especially when they had two little children.”

  “Right. Little children. The person who disappeared was a grown man. And not a local. Besides, it was traumatizing enough for the town for them to stop having the summer carnival. Remember, the Halloween stuff didn’t start happening until later. I know I was in middle school before I have any real memories of there being anything out on the carnival grounds. And the haunted houses are even more recent than that. It’s like we’re still recovering.”

  "So, he wasn't from Shadow Creek. He was a traveler," Sylvia muses. “That explains why he didn’t show up in any of the regular records.”

  "Exactly. He came through during the summer each year. It was an even more popular tourist time then than it is now, and I'm sure the carnival made really good money. That's why they kept coming back. But this particular year, Branson disappeared. And his roommate thinks the carnival grounds are the last place he came," I say.

  "Are you telling me your theory is now that you time traveled and witnessed a murder from twenty-five years ago?" she asks. “When you were barely a toddler?”

  "No," I roll my eyes.

  "Then why are we here?" she asks.

  "I don't know. But it has to mean something. Now we know who Matthew Branson was. All that's left is figuring out what happened to him," I say.

  "And who wound up frozen to his ID card almost three decades later," she points out.

  I let out a breath and nod. "That, too."

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Gavin

  "What are we doing back here?" I ask, glancing around the empty house. "I thought that article would have made you feel better."

  Scarlett runs her hand along the wall of the den and glances back over her shoulder at me.

  "Why would that make me feel better? All it did was bring up more questions. Now we know Matthew Branson disappeared, which explains why his identification was with that body. But we still don't know who that body is, or why the card was with it. Or what happened to Matthew Branson," she tells me.

  "And you still think it has something to do with what you saw last year?" I ask.

  "Of course I do. It has to. One person disappearing from a small town is upsetting. One person disappearing and their ID showing up frozen to a different dead person twenty-five years later is disturbing. All that happening, then a person getting murdered and their body disappearing from the same place where all that seemed to focus is a fucking Bex Taylor-Klaus show. As much as I'd like to think this is all just Scream getting the third season it actually deserved and I just happened to fall into it, it doesn't seem like the most plausible explanation," she says.

  "I don't know what half of that means, but it sounds serious, so I'm going to go with it," I tell her. "Just explain to me what those people disappearing from the carnival grounds has to do with this house. I understand the body was found here, but what connection does that have to the corn maze or the hotel where Matthew Branson was staying when he disappeared?"

  "Exactly that," Scarlett nods. "Connection. Matthew Branson didn't actually disappear from the hotel. He walked out of the hotel, but his roommate said he believed he was going down to the carnival grounds to meet somebody. Why would he say that if it wasn't something Matthew did frequently?"

  "Alright. So, he actually disappeared from the carnival. I still don't understand what that has to do with this house or what happened last year."

  "The summer carnival was held on the same grounds as the corn maze and haunted houses are now. It was the exact same area. Now, I know you're not one hundred percent convinced I saw what I did last year. But go with me on this. Imagine we are back at the corn maze. We're standing there, and suddenly there's a stabbing in front of us. We're scared and run, ending up heading toward the Ferris land rather than back toward town. How long do you think it would take to get to where you found me?" she asks.

  "A few minutes," I tell her.

  "Okay. So, then we stood there and talked for just a short time. Not more than a few seconds. Then we headed back to the corn maze. I wasn't running, so it took a little bit longer. But it couldn't have taken all that long."

  "I suppose not," I nod.

  "Good. Now we get back there, and what do we find?"

  "Nothing."

  "Exactly. We didn't find anything. I had just witnessed a man gets stabbed to death, and in the time it took me to run out there and get back, it was gone. Nobody. No knife. No pool of blood. All we found was a pile of hay. That's not much time to fix something like that, especially if you don't want people noticing. That got me thinking. Whoever did the stabbing couldn't have just discovered a place to stash the body on a whim. They went into it knowing how to cover it up. So, I had to think. How do people do things without getting noticed? What other times have we known when people have made it so they can do illegal things without other people noticing?"

  "Prohibition," I say, her meaning dawning on me. "The tunnels."

  "The tunnels," she confirms. "Now, this house isn't old enough to have rum-running tunnels or underground gambling dens or anything. It's too recent for that. But it's not that simple. The original house burned about fifty years ago. The new one was built right on the same foundation by a contracting company brought in from another town. I remember reading about it when researching this house. Everybody thought it was very strange, but the owners wouldn't want to use local people, especially because it had been here for so long all the professionals already knew what it looked like. It would have been an easy job to recreate the house. But that's not what they did. The other crew came in, a different house appeared, and it sat here."

  "You think whoever owns the house hired that company because they didn't want anybody to know about the hidden tunnel," I say.

  "Yes."

  "But if the house burned 50 years ago, that's 25 years before the body ended up here."

  "That doesn't mean somebody wasn't trying to keep the tunnels a secret. Remember I told you the mansion on the hill is rumored to have whole levels of subterranean floors and networks of tunnels. Those tunnels have to connect to something. What if one of them connects here?"

  "Didn't the police investigate the tunnel where you found the body?" I ask.

  "Yes," Scarlett says, moving on to another wall and feeling along it carefully. "They didn't find anything. It didn't go but a few feet further than the door to where the freezer was, but that doesn't make any sense. Why would somebody build a partially hidden tunnel that didn't go anywhere? The police department is essentially Jimmy and two other officers. They don't have the manpower or, frankly, the ambition to do any further investigating than that. But I know there has to be another tunnel around here. If I can find it, maybe it'll prove something."

  "Prove what?"

  She shakes her head. "I don't know. But I'll know when I find it."

  I watch her continue to move around the room for a few more moments. The police just turned the house back over to her, and as soon as they did, Scarlett insisted on coming her
e and starting this search. So far, she hasn't come up with anything.

  "How did you find the first tunnel? I know you said something about the fireplace."

  She nods. "The first few times I came in here, I noticed something strange about the andirons, but that happens with old houses. The next time someone broke in and the andirons had been dragged across the floor, that was fun to fix. That day I got here, and someone had started a fire in the fireplace and hastily put it out. It was a mess. While I was looking in the fireplace, I felt air coming between a couple of the bricks. When I touched it, it moved out of the way, and that activated the hidden passage behind the bookshelf. It was all very H.H. Holmes. So, I'm wondering if there's another hidden access point. Maybe that was never actually part of the network of tunnels, but a storage area. A place where people kept bootleg liquor or hid when gangsters came, I don't actually know. I might be mixing up a couple of eras here. The point is, if that section was only designed to have the room that was later outfitted as a walk-in freezer, the tunnels connect somewhere else."

  "You really shouldn't be stressing yourself out like this," I tell her. "It's not good for you or the baby."

  "This is not stressful," she tells me. "What's stressful is not knowing what's going on and wondering why no one else seems to care that there's apparently a murderer in Shadow Creek. I need to figure this out."

  Three hours later, we've still had no luck finding any sort of passage or door to another tunnel. That hasn't dissuaded Scarlett, but she did finally agree to come home and eat something. While we wait for the delivery of the Chinese food she says Cupcake is craving, I pull out the books and papers I brought back with me.

  "I spent a lot of time looking over these since February. After you showed me the mansion on the hill, I wanted to know more about it and its place in Shadow Creek. There's so much mystery surrounding it, but I figured there has to be a real story in there somewhere," I tell her.

  "Because there can't possibly be unexplained things in this world?" she raises an eyebrow.

  I smirk at her. "Says the woman who just tried to take a screwdriver to a bathroom wall because you were convinced there was a soft spot, and it turned out to be where someone plastered over a hole from an old towel rod?"

  "Proceed," she relents.

  "Most of what I read didn't sound significant at the time. But now some of it is piecing together. Look." I show her the book I'd read several times since February. She runs her fingers over the pictures, just like I expected her to. "This is what the house looked like originally. A lot of the decoration and things were maintained. There aren't any pictures, of course, but there are a few references in here to the idea of tunnels. It tries to link them to the servants' passageways throughout the house," I tell her.

  "That's definitely not what they were used for," she says. "I mean, I'm sure there were some servants down there, but they weren't to make sure the lady got her evening bath."

  I laugh. "Alright, well, this part gets into the family more. It mentions the carnival. Apparently, a version of that carnival was held here for more than a century."

  "I didn't know that," Scarlett says.

  "It was really popular among the summer tourists. Of course, that long ago, it wouldn't have been anything like a carnival now. Mostly food vendors and freak shows. The occasional miraculous medicine man."

  Scarlett laughs.

  "It kept evolving. They started offering rides. Sewing competitions. Food contests. And here's an interesting little tidbit that might interest you…"

  She nods. "Interesting tidbits do tend to interest me."

  I nudge her playfully, and she presses a kiss to my lips.

  "I'm going to remind you of that sassy little mouth of yours when Cupcake gets to be about twelve," I tell her. "But as I was saying, something that might interest you... this section talks about how the McVey family contributed a tremendous amount of money to the carnival for years. But it was always as a sponsor. They participated by supporting the event and sometimes walking around it, but that was about it. Then about thirty years ago, a standout in the jams and jellies competition surprised everyone. Thirteen-year-old Priscilla McVey, with her green pepper jelly."

  "Priscilla McVey?" she asks.

  I nod. "The daughter of Harlan McVey, the current generation of owners of the mansion. She became a frequent participant in the carnival after that. Especially the food contests."

  The doorbell rings, and Scarlett perks up.

  "Speaking of food," she says, making her way to the door.

  She opens it but doesn't come back into the room. I wait for a few seconds, but she stays at the door.

  "Scarlett?"

  She doesn't respond. I walk over to the door and find her standing at it, staring down at the porch. "What's wrong?"

  When I step up beside her, my eyes fall on what she's looking at. My entire body tenses, and my hand wraps around her wrist to pull her into the house behind me.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Gavin

  "That's my phone," Scarlett says. "The phone I lost in February when we went sledding on the hill."

  I stare down at the porch and the phone sitting on top of a black envelope. Cracks and scratches mar the screen like someone purposely stomped on it. The sight sends a chill down my spine and makes my hands clench into tight fists by my side.

  "Call the police," I tell her. "Get in the house and shut the door. Stay there."

  "I don't usually do well with commands," Scarlett tells me.

  "Trust me; I'm aware of that. But you need to be tonight. Get inside and call the police. Tell Jimmy he needs to come over and talk about this right now," I insist.

  "Where are you going?" she asks.

  "To find the fucker who thinks they're so funny," I mutter, barely keeping my temper in check. This asshole has been harassing the mother of my child. It stops now.

  I close the door behind me and rush out into the night. Summer heat and humidity closes in around me as I storm through the yard, looking around for whoever left the phone. Everything is still. Cicadas and grasshoppers are all I hear. But there has to be someone. Scarlett didn't take long enough to get to the door for whoever it was to get far away.

  I don't see headlights on the road or notice any movement through the shadows. I move around the house, searching the yard, moving both ways down the road, and coming back again to search through the shadows again until the police car pulls up in front of the house, and Officer Boones steps out.

  His eyes immediately narrow when he sees me.

  "You have got to be kidding me," he starts, but I hold up my hand to stop him.

  "I have been here with her all evening. I was sitting in the living room with her when the doorbell rang. Don't even try to go down that path, Jimmy," I warn.

  He doesn't look pleased, but it sufficiently silences him, and we make our way into the house, being careful to step around the phone and envelope. Scarlett has her arms wrapped around her belly in the corner of the couch, and I sit down beside her when we get inside, taking her hand in mine. We explain to Jimmy what happened, and he instructs us to show him the phone and envelope. He already saw them, but we don't argue.

  Scarlett leads him to the door and opens it just like she did when she thought it was the Chinese food. Jimmy takes several pictures of the phone before reaching down to pick it up.

  "You haven't looked in the envelope?" he asks.

  "No," Scarlett tells him. "We didn't touch it before calling you."

  "I'm shocked. You... actually made a good decision."

  Her face curls up, and she takes a step closer to him, but I step in between them.

  "You're pushing your luck, Milkshake," she mutters.

  "Who did you call for help?" he snaps.

  "Only because you're the only one at the station tonight, and the petition six years ago to have a bovine police unit didn't go through."

  "Bovine police unit?" I murmur to her.

  She clo
ses her eyes and shakes her head. "It was a whole thing. I think it started as a protest against... something. But it lost its way." She reaches down and scoops up the envelope. "Happy haunting."

  Her eyes snap to me.

  "It's different," I observe. "All the other notes have said Trick or Treat."

  "So, the prankster got more creative," Jimmy says.

  "Seriously? You're just going to dismiss it like it's nothing? I've been getting these notes for months, and you haven't given it a second thought," she points out.

  "Because there's no reason to. It doesn't mean anything. It's silly notes. You have no proof it is anything more than a bizarre joke. You have to know how ridiculous people think your raving about this imaginary murder from last year is. Someone is having fun at your expense."

  "I found a body, Jimmy," she points out.

  "Months after you started getting the notes. And a body that's been dead for decades. It has nothing to do with you getting the shit scared out of you by Halloween decorations," he says.

  "The point is, this is your job, and you need to be taking it seriously," I say to Jimmy. "She lost this phone months ago, and suddenly it shows back up with a note about haunting. This is a threat against Scarlett. Can't you see that?"

  "What I see is two people letting their imaginations get the most of them. I will admit it is a messed-up twist of fate that you stumbled on a body after you haven't been able to let go of the idea of that murder. But whoever killed that man is long gone. The house hasn't even been touched in three years. You know that because you're in control of selling it now. It's time to let go of all this. Let us do our job. The medical examiner submitted DNA from the body, but it's going to take a while to process it through the databases and see if there's anything to find out. Once we know that, we can move forward, finding out who he is and what might have happened to him. Other than that, there's nothing left to do."

  "What about Matthew Branson?" Scarlett asks.

  "What do you mean?"