The Southern Comfort Prequel Trilogy Box Set

by Lisa Clark O'Neill

  “I’m not suggesting hypnosis,” Ben said. “More a way of helping you to remember what you saw.” He nodded toward her lap. “The fact that you’re wringing your hands right now suggests that you still have a stress response to the memory, even after all this time. Sometimes acute stress imprints neutral stimuli – what we might think of as mundane details – more strongly than we realize. If there’s a chance that you might remember something… anything.”

  Ainsley stared at her cousin, his clear blue eyes so shadowed by exhaustion and worry. “You think that everything that’s happening now is connected to Carly’s murder.”

  “I think we’d be fools not to explore that option.”

  She dragged a hand through her tangled hair. “Okay. What do you need me to do?”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  BEN shoved his hands in his pockets as he looked around the bedroom. Callum obviously hadn’t gotten around to updating things in here yet, as it still had the same cabbage rose wallpaper and lacy curtains that he remembered from when he was a kid. The wood floor – badly in need of refinishing – still bore marks from the iron twin beds which had occupied most of the space. He’d slept in one or the other of them any number of times, as had his sisters and Ainsley. A few times, much to his dismay, he’d been stuck in a sleeping bag on the floor while the girls pushed the beds together and had themselves a little slumber party. That had ended once he was old enough to demand his own space on the sofa – or in a tent outside – rather than be relegated to the bedroom with what he saw as the babies. And girl babies at that.

  Now the room stood empty, except for some painting supplies and a few boxes belonging to Elias.

  It was weird. Weird being in a room that held so many childhood memories for him, knowing that it belonged to someone else.

  Particularly when that someone else was a man he’d long considered not an enemy, precisely, but certainly not a friend.

  Ben hoped that this room held memories for Ainsley, too. Especially memories of that night. She could very well be correct in that she’d already relayed everything she’d seen to the best of her ability. But – even though he was usually as skeptical as she was about repressed memories and other psychobabble – he’d taken a course recently regarding cognitive interviewing techniques, and the few times he’d tried it out, he’d been pleased with the outcome. It wasn’t hypnosis, which he didn’t trust. Like Ainsley said, that too often produced unreliable results, as it more often put stuff in people’s heads rather than pulling it out.

  But cognitive interviewing simply helped people recall certain events by forcing their mind to work in a different way from normal.

  He never would have thought of applying it to Ainsley and what she might have seen if Cal hadn’t made the point. And he’d had to ask the man about bringing Ainsley here, back in the actual surroundings from the night of the murder, which led to them discussing her just staying on here. Part of Ben still felt wary about that – they might have reached an understanding of sorts, but he still didn’t particularly like the other man. But he couldn’t deny that Callum was qualified to protect his cousin.

  Not that he’d ever term it that way around Ainsley. Ainsley might be as smart as they came, and he knew she was fiercely independent. But a gun in the hands of a person who knew how to use it trumped independence when it came to defending yourself against somebody who appeared to want you dead.

  One of the floorboards in the hallway behind him squeaked, and he turned just as Ainsley and Cal came into the room. The other man had been showing her to the guestroom.

  Ben frowned when he considered that it happened to be the room right next to Cal’s.

  “You look like someone kicked your dog,” Ainsley said.

  “It’s nothing.” But Ben shot a glare at Cal for good measure. He might agree that this was probably the safest place for Ainsley at the moment, but he didn’t have to like the fact that the hormones were so thick surrounding the two of them that they practically formed a cloud.

  Cal leaned a shoulder against the doorframe, offered a lazy smile designed to irritate.

  Deciding that the best course of action was to continue to ignore him, Ben turned his attention to his cousin. He gathered from her expression that she was having much the same reaction he did. Aside from the missing furniture, the room looked like a snapshot of the past.

  The room hadn’t changed, but they had. Their family most certainly had. Seeing this sort of time capsule of their childhoods was melancholy, to say the least.

  But it might also help Ainsley recall details she otherwise wouldn’t have.

  “Is this the window you were looking out?” Ben asked, walking toward the one closest to him and pulling aside the curtain.

  Ainsley nodded. “Sabrina was asleep, and you know how once she’s out, you could march a Mardi Gras parade past her bed and she wouldn’t so much as flutter an eyelid. But I couldn’t sleep. Too much excitement, I guess. It was my first night here, and the whole summer stretched before us.” Her hands flexed on the handles of the crutches. “Anyway, I heard something. A –”

  She stopped when Ben held up a hand.

  “There are a couple things I want you to do before you tell me what you saw. First, I want you to come over here, stand as close as you can remember to where you were that night.”

  “Okay.”

  Ben moved back after she made her way across the mostly empty room and joined him at the window.

  “Was the curtain open? Or closed?”

  “Ah… closed,” Ainsley said. “I think.”

  “Close your eyes.”

  “What?”

  “Close your eyes and try to picture the room the way it was that night. And relax,” he told her, reaching out to give her shoulders a quick squeeze. “This isn’t a test.”

  “That’s too bad, since I am the queen of test-taking.”

  “Why am I not surprised?” Cal muttered from the doorway.

  “I’ll make-up a scantron for you if this doesn’t work,” Ben assured her. “Now, close your eyes. It’s June,” he said when she complied. “You’re twelve years old and it’s the first night of your summer vacation. Your cousin is snoring in the bed beside you and you’re awake, staring at the ceiling –”

  “The floor,” Ainsley corrected, frowning just a little. “That much I remember. I was staring at the floor, because I was lying on my stomach, with my head at the foot of the bed. I thought that maybe changing positions would help me fall asleep. My head was closer to the window, which is why I heard the noise outside, I think.”

  “What was on the floor?”

  She raised her shoulders in a shrug. “I don’t know. It was almost twenty years ago, Ben. I can’t –”

  “Ainsley,” he interrupted. “You’re getting tense. I can feel it in your shoulders. You may be a champion test-taker, but this is one instance where pressuring yourself isn’t going to help. Remember, you’re twelve years old. You have the whole summer before you. You’re excited but relaxed. Comfortable. You’re lying on the bed. What’s on the floor?”

  “Moonlight,” she finally said. “The moonlight coming through the lace made an interesting pattern.”

  “So the curtain was closed.”

  Ainsley opened her eyes, looked into his. “Yes.”

  Ben smiled and squeezed her shoulders again. “Good. Now I want you to tell me the last thing you saw before you turned away from the window.”

  “The last thing?”

  “Yes. I want you to tell me what happened in reverse order. From right before you left the window to the point when you first heard the noise.”

  “This is like trying to recite the ABCs backwards.”

  “Exactly,” Ben agreed. “It engages parts of your brain that are otherwise neglected, as people are mostly linear thinkers and recall events from beginning to end. But it’s the most recent memory in the chain that is the clearest, so we start with that and work our way back. It helps people recall de
tails that they otherwise overlook.”

  “Okay.” She drew a deep breath. “Okay.” And closed her eyes.

  Ainsley walked him backward through the events she’d witnessed on the night his sister was murdered.

  Hearing it from her perspective, knowing that she’d seen – almost certainly seen – the man who raped and murdered his sister, brought back the frustration, the horror and the fury erupting as fresh as if it’d just happened.

  But Ben tamped down hard on his emotions, kept his tone as even as possible while he asked Ainsley to elaborate on certain points.

  “The noise you heard,” Ben said. “The one that caused you to get out of the bed and venture toward the window. What was it?”

  “I thought it was a bird,” Ainsley said. “A nightingale. I had one once outside my bedroom window in Savannah, and it like to drove me crazy. But it sounded different.”

  “Different how?”

  “More like… a whistle.”

  “Like the kind you blow in?”

  “No, like when someone uses their fingers?”

  Ainsley jumped as a sharp noise filled the room. Both of them turned toward Callum.

  “Like that?” he said after pulling his hand away from his mouth.

  “Yes,” Ainsley nodded.

  “Don’t look at me,” Cal said, and Ben realized he must have been scowling. “I was in Atlanta at the time. Crap,” he said as the sound of muffled barking drifted up the stairs. “Now I got the dog all excited. I better go let him out.”

  When he disappeared down the hallway, Ben turned back to his cousin.

  “So you heard a whistle. As if someone were signaling Carly that he was here?”

  “Possibly.”

  That made sense. “And after that you saw Carly climb out the downstairs window.”

  “The one in Granny’s sewing room. Although I didn’t actually see her climb out, because the roof of the porch blocked the view of that window. But it’s the one that was left open. The doors were still bolted from the inside, so she couldn’t have gone out them.” Ainsley stared out the window, her expression pensive.

  “I don’t know how much this helped,” she told him, glancing back over her shoulder. “I don’t think I told you anything new, or useful.”

  Ben had to admit that he’d been half hoping that Ainsley would suddenly remember that she had seen the man’s face after all, and he could set her up with a sketch artist. But he was realistic enough to admit that after all these years, that was a long shot. And she couldn’t recall what she hadn’t seen.

  “You said you saw the man’s arm.”

  “Yes,” Ainsley agreed. “He was standing in the shadows, but he reached out when he saw Carly hurrying toward him. His clothes were dark, he blended in, except that his arm was bare. He must have been wearing a T-shirt. The light from the back porch hit his arm, and I could tell that he was Caucasian.”

  “Did he reach out to touch her?”

  “He… no. I don’t think he touched her. Which seems odd, now that I think about it. A sixteen year old girl sneaking out of her grandmother’s house to meet a man, you would think that she would embrace him, wouldn’t you?”

  “Depends on the purpose of the meeting, but yeah. Especially given Carly’s… history with men.”

  “I didn’t mean to imply anything.”

  He waved that away. “I didn’t think you did. And anyway, no matter how she acted, she didn’t deserve what happened. He could have just been reaching out to beckon her over, so that she knew where he was.”

  “Except… his palm was facing up.” She demonstrated. “Like you would do if you were reaching for someone’s hand. But they weren’t holding hands when they walked away. Carly walked off first, in front of him.”

  Ben stretched out his hand, palm up. “What comes to mind when you see me making this gesture? Assuming I’m not offering to hold your hand.”

  “That… you want me to hand you something.” She looked up. “But what?”

  Ben considered. It was a longshot, but as far as the puzzle went, it might fit. “Do you remember if Carly was carrying her camera? Could you tell?”

  “You never found her camera,” Ainsley said. “Did you? I remember now that Sabrina told me about how Aunt Denise turned the house upside down, looking.”

  “No,” Ben said. “We didn’t find it.”

  “So maybe she handed it to him. But why? Why take her camera with her outside at midnight? That’s not exactly the best time to take pictures.”

  “Unless the thing you want to take pictures of is only visible at night. Or you’re planning on relocating to an indoor location.”

  “Is it possible it was someone she knew from the photography club, then? Or one of the competitions she participated in?”

  “I don’t know,” Ben said. “But it’s worth looking into. Luckily there’s no statute of limitations on murder.”

  “I’m sorry I can’t give you a definitive answer,” she said, her voice cracking with the effort it took to speak the words. “And I’m so sorry that I didn’t say anything that night. I could have yelled out the window, or woken up Bree…”

  “Do not,” Ben’s own voice shook with vehemence “beat yourself up. We already discussed this. If you’d yelled out the window, Carly most likely would have laughed, or flipped you the bird.” His jaw tightened. “And I say that from experience, because like I said, it wasn’t the first time she’d snuck out. I could have said something to my parents, too, when I realized what she was doing. But I didn’t because Carly had equally incriminating information against me. So I protected my own ass. And I’ve lived with the fact that I never spoke up, too.”

  His phone signaled an incoming text message, and Ben snatched it off his belt.

  “What happened?” Ainsley said, obviously reading from his expression that the information was significant. “Sabrina?”

  “No.” There was still no sign of his sister, despite the fact that experienced search and rescue teams had been scouring the woods surrounding the area where her car was found for days. Ben would be out there himself if he didn’t think that he could do more good investigating rather than hiking through the hills. The bloodhounds and their handlers stood a better chance of following her trail than he did, much as it pained him to admit.

  And if he were being fully honest with himself, he didn’t believe that his sister was simply lost in the woods.

  He swallowed, pushing that thought aside.

  “Ben?”

  “Sorry,” he said, glancing back up at Ainsley. “I have to go. You stick by Elias. The man’s got his issues, but he’s a damn good shot.”

  “Ben. What happened?”

  He sighed. He guessed it wouldn’t hurt to tell her. “They found the truck that they’re pretty sure ran you off the road last night.”

  “And the driver?”

  “Well, the owner is a ninety-two year old man who claims that his antique pickup was stolen from his barn last night.”

  “But you don’t think he was the driver.”

  “Considering the fact that he’s in a wheelchair, no I don’t. It would have been awfully tricky for him to walk back home after leaving the truck at the bottom of a ravine.”

  AINSLEY followed the mechanical whirr to the door of Callum’s shop. He stood with his back to her, bent slightly over a piece of wood as he ran it through the table saw.

  And though she felt disgusted with herself, she couldn’t deny that the smell of sawdust coupled with the sight of a man working with his hands caused a very feminine sort of reaction.

  Not to mention the fact that this particular man’s ass looked fabulous in jeans.

  Sensing her presence, he glanced over his shoulder, the protective goggles making him resemble a ridiculously attractive bug.

  He shut off the saw, pulling the goggles down to hang around his neck as he turned toward her. “I thought you were resting.”

  “I napped.”

  “For tw
enty minutes?”

  “Hey, I’m used to my days being balls to the wall from the time my alarm clock goes off until bedtime. Lying around doing nothing is not exactly my forte.”

  “Are you hungry?”

  It had been hours since the breakfast sandwich Ben brought her, and she’d only eaten half of that. Glancing at her watch, she realized that she’d missed lunchtime. But the scene at the hotel that morning – including Ms. Becker’s horror at the idea that someone had broken into Ainsley’s room – coupled with reliving the night of Carly’s murder had left her stomach unsettled.

  “Maybe in a little while,” she said.

  Cal frowned, but he didn’t push it. Instead, he pulled over a chair.

  Ainsley studied the raw, unfinished wood, the arms of which had been carved to resemble forest animals. “You made this?”

  “Do you see any elves?”

  “No, just one jackass. It’s beautiful.”

  “Thanks,” he said gruffly. “Sit down. And don’t tell me you’re tired of sitting. Until the swelling in your ankle has a chance to go down, you’re gonna have to suck it up.”

  “It’s a shame you didn’t pursue a career in medicine,” Ainsley said as she sat “considering your excellent bedside manner.”

  When he didn’t respond, Ainsley glanced over her shoulder. And realized she’d made a terrible blunder.

  “I’ve said something to upset you.”

  Cal’s movements were jerky as he waved that away. “It’s nothing.”

  “It’s obviously not nothing,” she said. Belatedly, she recalled his reaction when Ben had called him Doc. “But you don’t have to talk about it. I’m sorry for bringing it up.”

  He turned away, picked up the piece of wood he’d been working on, running his hand along it.

  “My dad was a carpenter,” he said. “A good one.”

  “So you come by your talent naturally.”

  “I had no intentions of following in his footsteps. I was going to be a doctor,” he said. “Orthopedic surgeon.”

  She remembered the experienced feel of his fingers as they examined her ankle. “I see.”

  He glanced over at her, smiling just a little, but she wouldn’t call it an expression of amusement. “You’re not going to ask what happened to make me change my mind?”