by Lila Dubois
“No.”
“Seriously?” she said, face scrunched up with indignation.
He smiled. “Fine. You have already ruined this morning’s work. But you only have thirty minutes.”
“I can have it done in thirty minutes if you help me.”
Tristan looked into the pot—the water was murky, with bits of stuff floating in it. “You have an hour.” He turned the burner on.
“Thank you, Tristan.”
“You are welcome, Dr. Heavey.”
Chapter Four
Rory Mac Gabhann burst into the shared office Tristan used to plan and place orders. “There’s a blonde woman cooking human bones in the kitchen.”
“Oui.” Tristan examined next week’s menu of modern takes on classic English and Irish dishes. Good, but boring. He needed to try something new.
“No, not ‘oui’. You’ve to say something more than that when I say someone is cooking human bones in your kitchen.”
“It’s the scientist Seamus hired to deal with the dead bodies from the secret room.” Maybe something classically French—duck à l’orange, perhaps.
Rory, the acting special events manager as long as Caera Cassidy was on leave, ran his hand through his hair. “But we have an event.”
“And the food will be ready.”
“You’re not going to cook the food while she’s doing that?”
“No. She has—” he looked at the clock, “—ten more minutes.”
“Are you going to ask her about her arm?” Jacques said. He was hovering half-in and half-out of the wall.
Rory frowned, looking around. “Did you…never mind. So you’re sure we’ll be okay for the event? We already had to move everyone out of their rooms in the west wing. I don’t want anything else to go wrong.” With Caera gone touring with her American boyfriend, Rory bore a heavy workload, but he was determined to do it alone and hadn’t let Elizabeth, the general manager, hire anyone else.
“Nothing else will go wrong. The food will be glorious.”
“I don’t think she believes in ghosts.” Jacques was clearly bored—he hated it when Tristan did paperwork, and didn’t care if Tristan was having a conversation with another live person.
Tristan bit down on the urge to tell Jacques to shut up.
Rory sat forward. “Do you hear something?”
Tristan’s head snapped up, his heart hammering in his chest. He examined the other man’s face. “Do you?” Could Rory hear Jacques?
Rory shook his head. “I’m imagining things. The mood around here is strange ever since Séan went nuts and took down the wall.”
Tristan still had trouble believing that the mild-mannered and quiet Séan, who seemed happier with his animals than with people and who rarely entered Glenncailty, had ripped down the wall hiding the bricked-over nursery door with his bare hands. From what Elizabeth had said, it seemed Séan had been possessed. Tristan knew ghosts were real, but possession?
“I’d better get back to work,” Rory said, rising.
“I will see you later,” Tristan said. After Rory left, Tristan turned to Jacques. “Could he hear you?”
Jacques was looking at the door. “I don’t know.”
“Um, Chef Fontaine? She’s back.” The sous chef’s voice was tinged with alarm.
Tristan looked up from the tray of desserts he was putting the finishing touches on. They were nearly done with the prep of the event food. Everything else was being cooked at food stations in front of the guests or started once the guests began arriving. The pub’s lunch service was underway, and they’d changed up the dinner menu to reflect the morning’s loss of both food and time. All in his world was back under his control.
“Who is back?” he asked without looking up.
“The scientist—she’s cooking something again.”
Tristan’s head jerked up—he handed off the bag of white chocolate mousse. “I’ll deal with her.”
Pushing through the wall of plastic that they’d left up, he saw Melissa dripping something onto a scrap of fabric she held with tweezers. She touched the fabric to the flame of a lit burner. The fabric burned purple, letting off a truly horrifying smell. Tristan grabbed a towel and held it over his face before reaching up and turning the extractor fan on to max.
“What is that? It’s terrible.”
“Just needed to confirm something.” She smiled widely.
“It smells like rotten meat and old milk.”
“Oh yeah, sorry about that.”
The rest of the kitchen staff were coughing and turning on fans.
“Out, out!” Tristan shouted.
Melissa threw her supplies into a plastic box—was that a silverware caddy?—and hurried away.
“I’m not done with you,” he said, following her. “You cannot invade my kitchen.”
“I was only in there for two minutes.”
“And you stank up the place.”
“You could light a candle.”
Tristan felt ridiculous arguing with her as he followed her across the dining room, but the infuriating, pretty woman was not going to get away from him until she got a piece of his mind.
They stalked across the lobby, still arguing. Tristan followed her to the west wing.
“Dr. Heavey.”
“You called me Melissa before.”
“Melissa, stop and face me.”
She was halfway up the stairs when she turned. He was one step below her, bringing their faces even.
“You have classically Caucasian features.”
“What?”
“Your face.” She touched his forehead, then his cheeks. “Caucasian.”
Tristan sucked in a breath—he wanted her. As soon as she touched him, the attraction he had for her, which he’d tried to mask under his irritation, roared to life.
She pulled her fingers back, looking uncertain, then turned and bolted up the stairs.
“I don’t think so,” he muttered.
Melissa tried to ignore the butterflies in her belly. She shouldn’t have touched Tristan. The man was devastatingly handsome. It was ridiculous. No one should have such a well-balanced face, good body and sexy accent. She knew that her attraction to him was genetic—his features were nearly perfectly symmetrical, and he had the air of command and dominance that made him a desirable mating partner. Still, knowing why she found him so attractive didn’t lessen the feeling or account for her enjoyment in their verbal sparring matches. If she were being completely honest, she’d admit that she liked him being irritated at her—he was even sexier when he was annoyed.
As she stared down the hall, she saw two people at the entrance to the nursery room. She flipped from flustered to concerned—she didn’t want morbid tourists messing up the scene.
“Excuse me, what are you doing?”
“We are not done talking!” Tristan said as he followed her.
“Dr. Heavey.” As she got closer, Melissa realized that the female was Sorcha. “This is Séan Donnovan. We were able to go through some old records, and we think we know who the children are.”
“You do?” Melissa brushed by them, checking to be sure they hadn’t moved anything and deposited her box of samples on top of a tarp. “That may help answer some questions about who murdered them.”
“Murder?” Sorcha said in a thin voice.
“All of them were murdered? Even the children?” Séan asked. He had a thick Irish accent.
“Yes.” Melissa pulled out her laptop, which she’d brought up to the nursery so she wouldn’t have to keep running downstairs. “The adult female’s leg was broken shortly before death. Ribs and most of her phalanges were also broken, indicating some sort of aggressive physical altercation. The children both had fractures to the upper vertebrae. If they were older their hyoid bones would be broken.” Melissa paused, reluctant to say the words. It was so much easier to discuss bone trauma than it was to explain what that trauma meant in terms of human suffering. “They were strangled. Strangled wit
h enough force that their necks broke.”
Sorcha whispered, “But, but he was only a baby.”
Melissa didn’t want to tell them how severe the marks were—it was enough they knew it was murder. The fact that the strangulation had been brutal wasn’t necessary for them to know. “Yes, it is a rather grim—”
“Stop,” Tristan said.
Tristan couldn’t bring himself to enter the room. His heart was pounding in his chest, his blood full of fire. Even in the hall he could feel the cold that emanated from the room. The sun had disappeared and raindrops splattered against the windows of the nursery. It was the first time he’d seen this hidden room, and it was worse than he could have imagined. Not just the real physical space, with its sad, broken pieces, but the cold, hate and sadness that saturated the air.
“Don’t. Move,” he told Séan, Sorcha and Melissa.
Séan grabbed Sorcha, holding her still. He didn’t question Tristan’s order.
“I told you already.” Melissa got to her feet. “I’m sorry about your kitchen.”
“Melissa, stop.”
She stopped talking, both eyebrows going up. She looked around, then focused on Tristan.
“She can’t see them,” Jacques said.
“What is it?” Séan asked quietly.
“There are ghosts all around you,” Tristan answered.
“This is preposterous.” Melissa bent to her boxes. “You all need to leave, not because there are ghosts but because you’re destroying my context clues.”
“You don’t believe, but that doesn’t make the ghosts any less real,” Tristan told her. He was focusing on the people who were alive, trying not to see the ghosts that filled the room like dancers on a stage.
“Can’t you feel it?” Sorcha asked Melissa. “Look how dark it is, how cold.”
“That’s a good point.” Melissa looked around, then grabbed two work lights from the corner of the room. She fiddled with them, but they wouldn’t turn on. “The battery must have run down.”
“Tristan, what do you see?” Séan asked.
Now that he’d been asked directly, he had no choice but to look, to interpret. These weren’t just still, transparent figures. It was as if he were watching video clips on endless repeat. The room was full of moving figures, but they weren’t distinct people, rather the same few in different places, doing different things. The most common one was a redheaded woman in a green dress.
“There’s a man and a woman. They’re fighting,” he told the others. He watched as the male figure slapped the woman to the ground, then kicked her viciously.
“This is ridiculous,” Melissa said.
The beating continued, and though Tristan knew the events had happened long ago he winced. “He’s killing her. She cannot survive.”
“I…I saw it too,” Sorcha said, voice shaking. “When I touched the blood on the floor.”
Tristan looked at her. “You see it now?”
“You mean to tell me that you both think that you’re seeing into the past, to the moment when this woman was killed by whoever assaulted her?” Melissa’s voice was calm, curious.
She watched with interest as the rest of them succumbed to a shared delusion.
“Séan,” Sorcha asked the bearded man who was holding her, “do you see anything, over there behind Melissa?”
Melissa looked over her shoulder. There was absolutely nothing there.
It was dark in the room now that it was seriously raining. The lights from the hall provided some illumination, but the shadows were long and eerie, so she could excuse the rest of them for imagining things. She did find it interesting that they were all “seeing” the same thing. It wasn’t far different from people who went to psychics and then convinced themselves of psychic power by reading in to every strange word the “psychic” said.
Séan and Sorcha ran for the door, knocking over a broken chair. Melissa gritted her teeth—there was no reason for them to be in here, making a mess.
Tristan stopped them at the door. “You cannot come out here,” he said to Séan. “He’s waiting.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know, but he’s waiting for you, reaching for you. He’s tried to enter the room, but he can’t. He’s waiting for you to come out.”
“It must be the man who possessed you before,” Sorcha said. “The brother.”
Melissa made her way over, not wanting to miss a word of this strange drama. “Whose brother?” she asked.
“There are old parish records at Séan’s house, because it used to be the parochial house.” Sorcha’s face, already pale, seemed nearly translucent. She was genuinely scared.
“We went through them,” Séan said, his voice low and lilting. “We found three boys who had no last names. In the parish records their births were there, but not their baptisms, and there was no father listed.”
Melissa frowned. “That’s unusual. I presume that the parish isn’t large, so it would be odd that the priest didn’t know the children’s origins.”
“They were the bastard children of the Lord of Glenncailty,” Séan said.
Melissa looked over her shoulder, then nodded. “That would make sense if they went to the local school, though usually the children of a landed and titled man, even if they were bastards, would have been taught by a private tutor. In this case, a tutor from England, since no Englishman would allow his children to be taught by an Irish person.”
“Glenncailty isn’t easy to get to, even today,” Sorcha said.
Melissa considered what they said, ignoring the way they were all twitching and staring suspiciously at the shadows. “So the records indicate that there were children who may have been the children of the English landlord. They were enrolled in the parochial school, though they were not baptized in that church. That supports the theory since the Lord of Glenncailty would have wanted them baptized in the Anglican church.”
“We found three names. There are only two children’s bodies,” Séan said.
“The infant is too young to be in the parochial record.”
“But that means there are two children unaccounted for,” Sorcha whispered.
“We’re missing bodies.” Melissa looked around, tensed. There was nothing worse than missing bodies. Though she didn’t put any sentimental value on them, she did believe that death deserved notice. Most of the time death could only be confirmed with a body. “We’ll need to do a full excavation of this room and—”
A strong gust knocked a branch into one of the windows. It shattered, and wet wind whipped around the room. The plastic box containing the infant fell to the floor, the little bones rolling out.
Sorcha, who until then had seemed relatively sane, ran toward the remains, knocking Melissa out of her way.
“I’m here, my sweet baby,” she said.
“Oh dear,” Melissa sighed. Some people were overcome when faced with death and sadness—it seemed that Sorcha was one of them.
“Your bastard father killed your brothers,” Sorcha mumbled. “I thought that I could protect my family—after all, he wouldn’t dare hurt them, not when I’d been so good to him, not when he loved me.” Sorcha’s accent had gotten so thick Melissa could barely understand her.
“Sorcha!” Séan picked her up, and she struggled, laughing maniacally. Melissa had some chloroform in her kit—if Sorcha didn’t calm down soon, she would use it.
Séan carried Sorcha toward the door. At the threshold, Tristan stopped him.
“No, don’t come out here. He’s waiting for you. Give her to me.”
Melissa was more than a little alarmed—it seemed Tristan was as wrapped up in the delusion as poor Sorcha was. There was no one in the hall, no reason Séan couldn’t leave.
Sorcha screamed, thrashing so much that she fell from Séan’s arms. She was ranting in Irish, the words coming so fast that though Melissa spoke a few words of the language, she couldn’t make out anything. Melissa ran to her, putting one hand on her head. “Hold s
till.” It was chloroform time.
“He can see them,” Sorcha said dreamily.
For a minute Melissa shivered—the atmosphere was getting to her. The wind howled through the broken window, the shadows wavered as the lights in the hall flickered. Sorcha, with her pale skin, waves of red hair and eerily distant stare, looked like the kind of woman you would expect to see whispering about ghosts while standing in the rain. The only thing she was missing was a billowing white dress.
“Tristan can see the ghosts.” Sorcha blinked and seemed to come back into herself. “God protect us.”
Tristan’s face was grim, deep furrows bracketing his mouth. “You see them?” he asked Sorcha.
“I did. I think I was inside her, the mother, or she was inside me.”
“We know.” Séan touched her arm. “You were...talking.”
“Did you understand her?” Melissa asked Séan. “I didn’t get it all.” Though she didn’t believe the other woman had been possessed, which is what Sorcha was implying, it was interesting.
“What did I say?” Sorcha asked.
It was Séan who answered. “You said...that you had to kill them, your children, to hurt him.”
Tears filled Sorcha’s eyes, and she nodded. “The father, the Lord of Glenncailty, killed the oldest boy because he looked and acted Irish. She was angry, so angry.” Sorcha rubbed her arms.
“He kills one child, she kills two, and then he kills her.” Tristan shook his head. “That pain, that rage... They are not ghosts.”
“I saw them, I felt them. What can they be if not ghosts?” Sorcha asked desperately.
The mother of all collective hallucinations. Melissa kept that theory to herself.
“Memories.” Tristan’s gaze scanned the room, and for a moment Melissa believed that he could see something. “They are memories so strong that they left a mark. Ghosts are souls, left wandering because they cannot leave. These are not true ghosts, they are moments of history that even time cannot erase.”
“We can’t...we can’t make them go away?” Sorcha asked.
“No.”
“We need to leave, run.”
