“Smells like gas,” Dominic said as he inspected the oven.
Sure enough, the smell of gasoline was too strong to ignore. I was correct in assuming that someone had doused the house with an accelerant. There was no way one forgotten oven had the power to burn down the entire structure, rather than just the kitchen. It meant that Teagan was right about one thing. Someone was definitely trying to kill her, or at the very least, drive her out of Yew Hollow.
“There’s nothing here for me,” I said, kicking aside a pile of debris. “See anything?”
Dominic shook his head.
“Let’s head out to the woods where we found the body,” I suggested. “Maybe we missed something the first time.”
As I stepped over the outer wall of the foundation, my foot got tangled up in the mangled remains of red brick. I tripped, reaching my arms out to catch my fall, but Dominic appeared out of nowhere. He caught my forearms, and I bounced gently off his chest rather than hitting the ground and eating a lot of dirt. Blushing furiously, I righted myself and pushed him off. Maybe chivalry wasn’t dead after all, but I didn’t need Dominic to think that I was incapable of taking care of myself.
“Thanks. Damn house.”
“Maybe it was a ghost,” he said, a smile playing at the corners of his lips.
“Not funny.”
Together, we abandoned the house, heading out to the trees in the backyard. I led Dominic toward the spot where we’d found the body. It wasn’t far from the house, just a quarter mile or so, where the foliage thickened and the sky was barely visible through the impenetrable leaves of the trees. There was nothing left of the incident other than a forgotten string of crime-scene tape. I tore it down from the trees, balling it up in my hand.
“We found him here,” I said, pointing to the space beneath a large oak tree, “with a handmade noose around his neck. We think he hung himself from that branch.”
I pointed upward, to a thick, sturdy branch protruding from the oak tree. Dominic stared up at it then did a circuit around the tree. He studied the tree and the ground around it, his eyebrows drawn together in concentration. I, on the other hand, focused on what wasn’t visible.
Witchcraft was fickle. It presented itself in ways that mortals weren’t familiar with, a strange metallic scent on your tongue or just a feeling, like the tickle of a spider’s web across the hair on your arms. I shivered. Only the leftover musk of death found its way to my senses. There was no indication that Ronan’s spirit had lingered, or if he was still around, he certainly wasn’t making his presence known to me.
“It’s no use,” Dominic said, kneeling down to get a closer look at the space beneath the oak tree. “There’s nothing left here. Footsteps would’ve been washed away, and I assume your officers picked apart the rest of the crime scene already. This was a waste of time.”
I nodded in agreement. It was frustrating but true. We needed to work with what we had, and the crime scene wasn’t giving up any new secrets.
Then, from deeper in the woods, a branch snapped. Dominic and I both whipped around to face the noise. My heart pounded in my throat. These woods were unsettling enough without the addition of bodiless sounds.
“Probably just an animal,” Dominic said in a whisper.
“Then why are you whispering?” I whispered back.
He shrugged then stepped forward toward the source of the noise. I grabbed his arm, halting him in his tracks. I felt the pulse at his wrist beat steadily beneath my fingers. Unlike my own nervous heartbeat, his was strong and slow.
“What are you doing?” I hissed.
“I’m going to go see what it was.”
I shook my head, my grip tightening on his arm. “Don’t. If Teagan’s right and her husband is terrorizing the town, I won’t be responsible for the new guy getting offed. Chief Torres already thinks he’s taking a risk on me. We should just go.”
“Morgan, do you want to solve this case or not?”
He had a point. Besides, with his impressive physique and resounding voice, he could scare off a number of creatures that made their home in the woods. Ghosts, however, were a different story. You couldn’t scare what was already dead.
Despite my protests, he gently removed my hand from his arm and trekked deeper into the forest. Reluctantly, I followed along behind him. The rational part of me knew that whatever had made the noise probably wasn’t a huge threat to us—it could’ve been a particularly fat raccoon—but the whole Riley property gave me the chills. If something sinister lingered in the woods, I really didn’t want to know what it was.
Suddenly, Dominic kneeled in the dirt.
“Check this out.”
I hesitantly leaned over his shoulder, trying to see what he was looking at. Something shiny glinted in the dirt, and as Dominic prodded a few leaves aside, I saw what it was.
A wedding ring.
“It has to be Teagan’s,” I said as Dominic parked the car in front of the station. Once again, he insisted on opening and closing my door for me. I’d given up trying to stop him, wondering how he’d grown up in Brooklyn with such good manners. I had also spent time in New York, and the city had relieved me of all faith in humanity, as nearly everyone there had been the epitome of rude. But Yew Hollow was all small-town charm, and Detective Dominic Dobbes fit right in.
We’d captured the ring in a clear evidence bag. It was too small to be a man’s ring, and now that I thought about it, I didn’t remember seeing a wedding band on Teagan’s left hand. The real question was how it had ended up in the woods behind Teagan’s house. As soon as we entered the station, I corralled Chief Torres in his office.
“Chief!”
He nearly jumped out of his office chair. The wireless mouse of his desktop computer crashed to the floor, splintering into several pieces. “Jesus, Summers. Give me a heart attack, why don’t you?”
“Is Teagan here?” I asked.
“Interrogation room. Did you find anything?”
I held up the evidence bag. The wedding band, despite its layer of dirt, shimmered beneath the fluorescent lights.
“Is that hers?”
“I don’t know, but I’m going to find out,” I said, pocketing the bag.
“We’ll try to lift some prints off of it after we speak to Teagan,” Dominic added, nodding respectfully to Chief Torres. “Maybe it’ll give us some insight as to who else was in those woods on the night of Ronan’s death.”
Chief Torres’s desk phone rang, so he gave us the thumbs up as he picked up the receiver. I tapped Dominic on the back, indicating that we should leave Torres to his business. Together, Dominic and I pushed open the door to the interrogation room.
Teagan looked no better than she had the day before. The nasty cut on her forehead was starting to scab beneath its stitches, and the accompanying bruise had darkened to a deep purple, trailing down along her temple. She looked dead tired, as though she’d been up all night worrying about Ronan’s next attempt on her life instead of sleeping.
“How are you, Teagan?” I asked, sitting down across from her. Dominic leaned against the wall.
“I’m exceptional,” she deadpanned. She jerked her head in Dominic’s direction and asked, “Who’s he?”
“This is my, uh, partner, I guess,” I said. “Detective Dobbes, meet Teagan Riley. Detective Dobbes is helping me out with your case, Teagan.”
Dobbes inclined his head politely. “It’s nice to meet you, Teagan. Hopefully Detective Summers and I can shed some light on your situation.”
“I hope so too,” Teagan said, looking Dominic up and down. It took me a few seconds to realize that she was admiring Dominic’s stylish stature. I twitched, suddenly aware of my strange desire to kick Teagan under the table. Instead, I clicked my fingers at her, recapturing her wandering attention. Her eyes snapped back to me.
“We took a ride out to your house earlier today to see if we could pick up any other details at the scene,” I said to her. Without ceremony, I extracted the evide
nce bag from my pocket and tossed it onto the table in front of Teagan. “Does that look familiar?”
Her eyes widened as she leaned forward to grab the bag, inspecting the ring through the clear plastic. “My wedding ring! Where was it?”
“In the woods behind your house. Any reason you can think of as to how it ended up there?”
Teagan shook her head vigorously. “I took it off the night of his funeral. When I went to bed, I took it off and put it in the drawer of the bedside table. I figured it got lost in the fire.”
“Hard to believe it somehow walked out to the woods, then,” I said, unable to keep the sharp edge out of my voice.
Teagan’s eyes narrowed. “I told you. I told you it was him. How else would it have ended up back there?”
Dominic stepped away from the wall and approached Teagan. Despite his intimidating height, he seemed to radiate a sense of calm, a useful talent that I had never fully grasped the concept of.
“Ms. Riley,” he began, the Brooklyn accent intensifying as he put on his good-cop persona. “Is there any reason why you might’ve gone into the woods behind the house following your husband’s death?”
“No,” she said shortly. “The nightmares are enough. I don’t ever need to go back to that place again.”
“Nightmares?”
“Yes, I have dreams about Ronan. I had one the night he attacked me.”
“Allegedly attacked you,” Dominic corrected. He rested one hand on the table, leaning next to Teagan. “We don’t know that the culprit is your husband’s ghost. Did you know that someone covered your house in gasoline before they burned it down?”
“No.”
“Did you hear anything outside? Or notice anything odd, such as a strange smell or anything like that?”
“Everything was odd,” Teagan responded. She fiddled with a bandage wrapped around the palm of her hand, and I caught a glimpse of the long, jagged gash beneath it. “He wrote on the mirror in my own blood. Things moved on their own. The door wouldn’t open when I tried to leave the house. It locks from the inside, Detective Dobbes. How would you explain that?”
“What did he write on the mirror?”
“Until death do us part. Ironic, isn’t it?”
Dominic made eye contact with me, as if asking what I thought about this information. I’d already known about the message on the mirror. It was in Teagan’s report from the night she had been attacked. The problem was that there was no proof of paranormal activity in Teagan’s house. We had Teagan’s word and no witnesses, and it was this fact that raised eyebrows at the force. Dominic had caught on. I could tell that he was asking himself the same question that I had. Was Teagan telling the truth?
“Detective Summers, can I speak with you outside?” Dominic asked. I nodded, the legs of my chair scraping against the floor as I pushed myself away from the table and stood. Dominic held the door open for me and said to Teagan, “We’ll be right back.”
Outside the interrogation room, I squinted through the blinds to keep an eye on Teagan. She didn’t shy away from staring right back at me.
“It’s weird, right?” I said to Dominic.
He nodded, running a hand through his hair. He did that often, as if it cleared his mind. “It sure is. She’s either delusional, hallucinating, or a really good liar.”
“Or all three,” I said. “I suggested PTSD the first time I spoke to her.”
“What’d she say?”
“Not much of anything. It’s a possibility, right?”
Dominic peered through the blinds. Teagan had folded forward, resting her head on her hands, looking very much as if she’d fallen asleep. “Has she seen a psychiatrist? Is she taking any medications?” he asked.
“She sought therapy after Ronan died,” I said. After my meeting with Teagan yesterday, I’d spent the evening studying her case file, trying to glean whatever information I could from its contents. “No medication that I know of, though.”
“She seems lucid enough,” Dominic said, still observing Teagan through the window.
“Fool me once,” I muttered. Teagan could appear to be lucid all she wanted, but there was still no proof to her story.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something move in the interrogation room. I peeked through the blinds, at first only aware of Teagan dozing on the table. Then, when I realized what the true trouble was, I panicked.
Ronan Riley had finally appeared—I recognized his hulking figure from the photos in Teagan’s file—and he was in the process of trying to tip over the large filing cabinet in the interrogation room onto Teagan’s head.
I ripped open the door to the room, shouting, “Teagan, move!”
As the filing cabinet swayed, Dominic sprinted past me and threw himself at Teagan. In one swift movement, he swept Teagan up in his arms and darted to the opposite side of the room. The filing cabinet ricocheted off the desk and onto the floor with an earsplitting bang. The drawers of the cabinet fell open, strewing papers and folders throughout the interrogation room.
“Get her out of here,” I ordered Dominic. Ronan looked pissed, and I didn’t want him to get any other ideas. I spread my arms wide, forming a barrier between Ronan and Teagan. Dominic shouldered the door open, carrying Teagan from the room.
The ruckus had drawn attention. Chief Torres and several other officers gathered at the door to the room, fighting to peek inside. It wasn’t much of a show for them; all they were able to see was Yew Hollow’s paranormal detective talking to what appeared to be thin air.
“What do you want, Ronan?” I asked, trying to keep the ghost’s attention so that he wouldn’t go after Teagan a second time. He glanced over my head as if trying to gauge where Dominic was taking his wife.
Ronan had been a beefy guy with short, dark hair cropped close to his head. He was stocky, built well from head to toe, and hardly taller than me, but his width made up for it. I knew that he was an elementary school gym teacher, but I wasn’t expecting the bulk of the man in front of me. He looked more like a prizefighter than a gym teacher. His square jaw and deep-set eyes were far too intimidating, and it didn’t seem likely that he was capable of interacting with any child who still thought monsters lived under beds. In any case, Ronan seemed surprised that I was staring right at him, so I assumed he wasn’t aware of my particular gift.
“You can see me?” he thundered, confirming my hunch.
“Yes.”
“How?”
“I’m a witch. A psychic medium.”
“You’re one of those Summers girls.”
“Yes, I am,” I said, relieved that Ronan seemed more interested in my ability to communicate with him than his mission to kill his wife. My gut twisted with a sad realization. Teagan had been telling the truth, and all I had done was attempt to explain away Teagan’s strange story. How could I have been so closed-minded? This was Yew Hollow, after all, where the paranormal conducted every concert. I just wasn’t used to giving up my director’s baton and podium to a ghost.
“Summers?” Torres said from the doorway. “What’s going on?”
“Teagan wasn’t lying,” I said, keeping a sharp eye on Ronan. He paced from one end of the interrogation room to the other. “He’s here.”
“Ronan Riley?” Torres asked. At the mention of his name, Ronan’s beady eyes homed in on Chief Torres. “He really burned down the house?”
“Did you burn down your house?” I asked Ronan. “Did you try to kill your wife?”
Ronan stopped pacing and faced me. His whole body seemed to bunch up, the muscles in his shoulders evident beneath his Yew Hollow Elementary School T-shirt.
“Yeah, I lit the whole damn place up.”
My stomach clenched. With Ronan’s confession came the confirmation of what I had hoped wasn’t true. Ronan, for whatever reason, could hurt Teagan. He had all the qualities of a normal ghost—he had materialized in the interrogation room out of nowhere, his body was slightly translucent, he walked through the filing cabine
t with every pass across the room—but somehow, he had managed to hone his strength and focus it on manipulating the physical world. He wanted to kill his wife, for whatever reason, and I had absolutely no idea how to stop him.
“It was him,” I told Torres.
In an incredulous voice, Torres only responded with an emphatic, “Shit.”
“Ronan,” I said in a soft voice, trying not to rile him up any further. “Why are you trying to kill your wife?”
He planted one foot on the filing cabinet and looked me straight in the eye.
“Because that bitch murdered me.”
5
In Which I’m Reluctantly Wooed
“Excuse me?”
I stood in shock for a moment, waiting for some kind of further explanation from Ronan. I’d considered the possibility of Teagan’s involvement with Ronan’s death but dismissed it on the account of Teagan’s instability. It seemed more likely that she was simply suffering from the aftermath of a tragedy. If it was all an act, it sure was a good one.
“She. Murdered. Me.” Ronan enunciated each word as if to drill them into my brain. “She waited until I fell asleep and then dragged me out to the woods and strangled me.”
I rolled my eyes. Already, Ronan’s story sounded fabricated. “How on earth would she be able to do that?” I asked Ronan. “Teagan’s a toothpick, and you must weigh at least two hundred pounds. Besides, don’t you think you probably would’ve woken up during the whole dragging process?”
He kicked the filing cabinet so hard that it rotated and fell to its other side. “I don’t know! She must have drugged me first! You’re the cop. You figure it out.”
“It’d be a whole lot easier if you weren’t continuously trying to kill your wife!” I argued, wondering how I had ended up in a conversation about ethics with a dead guy. “What was your plan there, Ronan? To terrify her to death?”
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