Moriah's Landing Bundle

by Amanda Stevens

  The current Mr. Krauter had never married and thus had no heir. Elizabeth couldn’t decide whether she considered his childless state a pity or a blessing.

  The room she stood in had once been the kitchen of the original residence. The sinks and cupboards had been upgraded to stainless steel, but most everything else had been stripped away. It was now used as a receiving room—the entry point for bodies to the funeral home. There were signs posted in prominent areas which proclaimed that the room met all state and federal requirements for blood-borne pathogens. Although it wasn’t a formaldehyde area, Elizabeth could smell a strong disinfectant that made her slightly queasy.

  Several doors radiated from the receiving room, most of them clearly marked. The embalming room, straight ahead. To the right, near where she stood, the crematory. To her left, the coolers. To her far right, an unmarked door that led presumably into the other areas of the funeral home.

  It would take only a few moments for the attendants and the officer to transfer the body to one of the coolers, and then they’d come back in here. The officer would probably remain on guard all night, in his squad car she hoped. If he stayed near the coolers or in the receiving area, Elizabeth would have a big problem. But she didn’t think that too likely. People in Moriah’s Landing were nothing if not superstitious, and that included most of the police force.

  All she needed to do was find a place to hide until the coast was clear. She surveyed her options once again. The embalming room. The crematory. The unmarked door.

  Duh, as her students would say.

  Elizabeth opened door number three and cautiously stepped through.

  A narrow, dark hallway stretched before her, and she hesitated just inside the door, trying to get her bearings. But it was no use. The corridor was windowless, making navigation highly precarious. Elizabeth hated to use her flashlight, but unless she wanted to stumble around and risk detection, she had no other choice. Pressing the switch, she angled the beam down the hallway.

  If she could locate the lobby or the chapel, that wouldn’t be so bad. She could find a pew and sit quietly. Meditate on how much trouble she would be in if Cullen were to find her there.

  Maybe he would even threaten her with…dire repercussions. For a moment Elizabeth let herself fantasize about the possibilities.

  Then she snapped out of it. Kinky wishful thinking, coming from a girl—a woman—who’d barely even been kissed.

  She suppressed a sigh just as a light came on at the end of the hallway and she heard footsteps. Someone was coming down the stairs.

  Elizabeth’s heart started to pump in overdrive. There was a door just ahead, and she rushed toward it, the skirts of her costume rustling noisily. She doused her flashlight and melted inside the room just as the footsteps sounded down the hallway.

  They came closer. Closer. And then they slowed.

  Elizabeth held her breath. She glanced around frantically for a place to hide, but she could see nothing in the darkened room, and she didn’t dare turn her flashlight back on.

  The door opened, and she pressed herself against the wall behind it, praying that the abundant folds of her dress would not spill out and reveal her hiding place.

  For a moment, her luck seemed to hold. Nothing happened. Nothing moved. Elizabeth didn’t even dare breathe. She stood there, pulse hammering in her throat as she tried to will away whoever stood on the other side of the door.

  And then the light came on, and she blinked, certain that she’d been caught. When her eyes became accustomed to the blinding glare, she glanced around.

  Whoever stood in the doorway did not come into the room, but Elizabeth wasn’t alone.

  Not five feet from where she stood squeezed against the wall, a woman she didn’t recognize rested peacefully in a satin-lined coffin.

  “Good night, Mrs. Presco,” a voice whispered from the doorway.

  THIRTY MINUTES LATER, Elizabeth crept from the funeral home lobby where she’d been hiding and glanced down the hallway. The light at the end of the corridor had been extinguished once again when Mr. Krauter had gone back upstairs, and as far as Elizabeth could tell, the coast was clear.

  Earlier, she’d waited in the viewing room with Mrs. Presco just long enough for the door to close and for Mr. Krauter—presumably the visitor—to disappear down the hallway toward the receiving area where he’d undoubtedly gone to oversee the arrival of Bethany’s remains.

  While Elizabeth had been scrunched behind the door in the viewing room, she’d tried to tell herself there was nothing wrong with Mr. Krauter conversing with the dead. It was rather…sweet.

  But images had started to form in her head, visions that had made her break out in a cold sweat. She’d barely allowed Mr. Krauter time to get to the receiving area before she’d opened the door of the viewing room and all but tumbled into the hallway. Then she’d found herself a new place to hide until she’d heard him return to his living quarters upstairs.

  Satisfied that he wasn’t coming back downstairs, that the two attendants had gone home and the police officer was standing guard somewhere outside, Elizabeth decided it was time to make her move.

  She paused in the corridor now, listening to the quiet of the funeral home. Like any old structure, the house had its fair share of creaks and rattles. Cold drafts. Nothing that was overly alarming.

  But she was still uneasy, and she pulled her cloak tightly around her as she tiptoed toward the receiving area. A light over the sink had been left on, and she could see at once the room was empty. She was tempted to draw open the back door and try to determine where the police officer might be. But if he was just outside, he would see her. Best to proceed on the assumption that he was safely ensconced in his squad car. Maybe even snoozing by this time.

  Before she had a chance to lose her nerve—or regain her sensibilities—Elizabeth hurried over to the cooler-room door, pulled it open, and stepped inside. The door closed behind her with a swish, and she resisted the urge to try the knob to make sure she wasn’t locked inside. If she was trapped, it might be better to prolong her ignorance.

  The room was completely dark. Elizabeth groped along the wall for the light switch, but when she couldn’t find it, she realized the control was probably on the other side of the wall, in the receiving area. The funeral-home personnel would know to turn on the lights before entering the vault-like cooler room.

  She flicked on her flashlight. The room came slowly into focus as the beam played off stainless-steel fixtures and a torturous-looking device suspended from the ceiling that she presumed was used for lifting and lowering bodies. She remembered reading once that back injuries were prevalent in the mortuary business.

  Spotting the metal cooler, she moved toward it, gooseflesh prickling at the back of her neck.

  Being alone in a mortuary cooler room was not for the faint of heart. Elizabeth wasn’t usually squeamish, but she had a healthy respect for the unknown. The metaphysical. The dark forces at work in the world which couldn’t be explained by any amount of scientific research and experimentation.

  Early on in her studies, she’d become interested in more than just means, motive and opportunity in murder. Criminal personality profilers had long since determined that most serial killers shared certain characteristics from their childhood. The big three warning signs, as they were known, were: chronic bedwetting, the torture of small animals and an obsession with pyrotechnics. In addition, most had suffered child abuse. But Elizabeth had wanted to know if there were other forces at play. She’d wanted to delve even more deeply into the killer’s mind to determine if there was a kind of base instinct that drove men to kill, not just once but over and over.

  In graduate school, her fascination had taken a new twist. Could there be something more than instinct or abuse that drove a mind to the dark side? What about where the killer grew up, where he lived, where he worked?

  In other words, could a place be evil?

  Elizabeth didn’t know why, but ever since child
hood, she’d been very attuned to the strange vibrations in Moriah’s Landing. Sometimes when she lay awake at night, she could sense the supernatural undercurrents that rippled through the town. She could feel the evil that lingered from the witch executions of the 1600s and from the murders of twenty years ago. She could almost taste the bloodlust.

  And when she felt those dark stirrings, she came back to the same question. Could a place drive a man to kill? Was that why the women twenty years ago had been murdered in Moriah’s Landing? Was that why poor Claire had been tortured?

  Was that why Bethany Peters lay stone-cold in a mortuary cooler?

  A frigid blast of air encompassed Elizabeth as she opened the cooler door. The unit was equipped with two removable trays, one on top of the other, so that bodies, or even gurneys and caskets, could be slid in and out without much effort. Bethany had been placed on the top tray, her features frozen in death, her face bluish in the gleam of the flashlight. She looked pale and perfect, almost ethereally beautiful.

  As Elizabeth placed her hand on the tray and slid it out, something moved in the darkness behind her. A rustle. A tiny whisper of noise that could have been nothing more than imagination.

  But a finger of dread slipped up her backbone.

  She turned, playing the flashlight over the room once again. In a far corner, almost concealed by shadow, a gurney covered with a sheet had been shoved against the wall. The white cloth molded itself to the body that lay beneath it.

  The sheet moved.

  A pale hand lifted.

  And Elizabeth felt her entire body go rigid with fear.

  Chapter Five

  Elizabeth gasped and jumped back, smashing into the cooler with a hard thud. The flashlight slipped from her fingers and crashed to the floor. The bulb flickered, then went out, plunging the room into total darkness.

  Heart knocking, Elizabeth kept her gaze fixed on the spot where she’d last seen the gurney. She could see nothing. Could hear nothing but the sound of her own pulse roaring in her ears.

  But she knew she wasn’t alone.

  The air around her seemed to shift and quiver with an unknown presence, a malevolent entity that watched and waited. Elizabeth could feel those invisible eyes on her in the darkness.

  Cold air from the open cooler whispered along her backbone as she pressed herself against the metal. For a moment, nothing happened. All was silent. And then in a flurry of movement, someone—something— rushed toward her in the blackness.

  Elizabeth screamed and tried to move out of the way, but the gurney caught her in the midsection, knocking the breath from her lungs as she slammed backward into the cooler.

  She dropped to the floor, banging her head on the metal tray as she fell. In a daze, she heard footsteps scurry across the tile. The door opened into the receiving area and light seeped in for just a split second before the door closed behind an escaping form. Then all was quiet again. All was pitch-black.

  Elizabeth shoved the gurney out of her way. Groaning, she tried to get up, but something rested on her shoulder, holding her down. She lifted her hand, felt cold flesh. Dead flesh. Bethany’s arm had dropped over the side of the tray and her hand had come to rest on Elizabeth’s shoulder.

  Scrambling away, Elizabeth managed to rise on shaky legs just as the light came on in the cooler room. The sudden brilliance blinded her, disoriented her, and for one terror-stricken moment, she thought the intruder was coming back to finish her off. Her mouth went dry with fear as she watched the door slowly open, and then a dark figure stepped into the room.

  Elizabeth collapsed against the wall, her breath almost a sob. “Cullen!”

  His gaze widened when he saw her. He glanced at her, the open cooler, then back at her. “What the hell are you doing here?” he demanded.

  He must have seen then that something was very wrong because he strode across the room and took her arm. In spite of the lingering shock and the protection of her velvet cloak, Elizabeth’s skin tingled all the way up to her shoulder.

  “What happened? Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.” But her voice sounded as unsteady as her legs felt. “Someone was in here, Cullen. He shoved the gurney against me and—”

  “Wait a minute,” Cullen said grimly. “What are you doing in here?”

  She gave him a weak shrug. “Never mind that now. I’ll explain everything later, but we have to see if we can find who was in here. It might have been the killer—” She broke off when she spotted something lying on the floor. “What’s that?”

  Cullen glanced in the direction she indicated. He walked over and bent down. “Looks like a test tube.”

  Elizabeth came to stand above him. The empty glass vial was about four inches long and three-quarters of an inch in diameter, capped with a rubber stopper.

  “Cullen!” In her excitement, Elizabeth placed her hand on his shoulder, then immediately removed it. “Whoever was in here must have dropped it.”

  “You don’t know that. Someone on the mortuary staff could have left it.”

  “But you are going to send it to the lab, right?”

  No sooner had the words left her mouth than she saw what Cullen was doing. He’d withdrawn an evidence bag from his coat pocket, and using his pen, expertly flipped the vial into the bag without touching the glass.

  “If it doesn’t belong to the mortuary staff, then why would someone bring a test tube into the cooler room?” Elizabeth mused.

  Cullen stood. “I don’t know,” he said in a strange voice. “Why don’t you tell me?”

  His words took a moment to sink in. Then Elizabeth put a hand to her chest in outrage. “You think I brought it? That’s ridiculous!”

  He gave her a shrewd appraisal. “Is it? Why are you here?”

  She glared up at him. “I can’t believe you’re standing here interrogating me when whoever was in this room might still be in the funeral home. He’s the one who can give you answers.”

  “Come on.” Cullen took her arm.

  “What? Wait a minute.” Elizabeth tried to pull back. “Did you hear what I said? The killer could be in the funeral home at this very moment. We have to search it—”

  “We don’t have to do a damn thing,” Cullen said through gritted teeth. “I can’t believe you, Elizabeth. What the hell were you thinking? Don’t you realize you may have just tainted evidence?”

  By this time they were at the door. He opened it and pulled her through, then drew her across the receiving area to the back door. Freezing air cut through Elizabeth’s wrap as they hurried outside. A squad car was parked in the drive near the back door, and she could see an officer sitting behind the wheel. When he spotted Cullen, he opened the door and got out.

  “Detective Ryan? Everything okay?”

  Cullen gripped Elizabeth’s elbow. “There may be an intruder in the funeral home, Dewey. Go around and cover the front while I have a look around here.”

  Officer Dewey glanced briefly at Elizabeth, nodded, and then took off.

  Cullen opened the back door of the squad car and all but shoved her inside. For a moment, she tried to struggle away from him. Then she had to wrestle with her skirts, and by that time, Cullen had the situation well under control.

  He leaned down, peering at her inside the car. “I’ll deal with you later. Right now, I’m locking you inside.”

  Elizabeth tried to muster a little dignity. “You can’t do tha—”

  The door slammed closed and Cullen disappeared back into the funeral home.

  Elizabeth reached for the door handle, but, of course, there wasn’t one. A wire mesh screen separated the back seat from the rest of the car, and she suddenly realized how helpless prisoners must feel, trapped inside with no way out. But there was one big difference in their plight and hers. She was innocent. She’d done nothing but try to help, and this was the thanks she got?

  On the second story, lights came on in Ned Krauter’s residence. Then one by one, lights came on in the ground-floor wind
ows as Cullen and Officer Dewey searched the premises. The third floor remained dark, which somehow seemed ominous to Elizabeth.

  Several minutes passed before Cullen finally came back outside. Elizabeth was freezing by this time. She huddled inside her cloak, teeth chattering, as she watched Cullen and Officer Dewey speak in low tones just outside the squad car. She pressed her ear to the glass, but she couldn’t hear a word they were saying. For a moment, she thought Cullen might have forgotten about her, and she considered rapping on the window to draw his attention. As if sensing her intention, he deliberately turned his back on her.

  Elizabeth sat back against the seat, fuming. Smarting.

  Finally, the door opened and he leaned down. “You okay in there?”

  As if he cared. “I’m fine.” Elizabeth slanted him a sullen glance. “Did you find anything?”

  “No.”

  “What about the third floor?”

  “Krauter said it’s rented to a fisherman, named Cross. Krauter says his boat went out a few days ago. Without a warrant we can’t search his place, and without probable cause, which we don’t have, we’re not likely to get a judge this time of night to sign one. But the door was locked. No way the intruder could have gotten in.”

  “What about the first floor? The chapel—”

  “We searched the damn place from top to bottom, okay? If someone was in there, he managed to get away—”

  “Wait a minute,” Elizabeth said sharply. “If? If? There was someone in the cooler room. I saw him.”

  “Did you recognize him? Can you give me a description?”

  “No…”

  “Why not?”

  “I didn’t actually see him,” Elizabeth admitted. “He was hiding underneath a sheet on the gurney. When I saw the sheet move, it—it startled me, and I dropped my flashlight. The light went out so I didn’t see who it was. But there might be fingerprints on the test tube. Or on the gurney. He shoved it into me.”