The Witch of Stonecliff

by Dawn Brown

  Kyle wanted them to stop, and knew they would if he could just go back to behaving the way he used to. And he tried, he really did, but he couldn’t quite play the role of himself anymore. He was like some awkward B actor in a movie of the week.

  He pulled out the scissors, slit the plastic packaging and dumped a small square box on the desk.

  “Were you expecting anything?”

  Kyle shook his head, pulse flicking fast at his throat. A part of him wished Tom would go away and stop asking questions, but another part of him was relieved to have his brother with him in case it was from them. The conflicting emotions weren’t new. Most times he wished his family would leave him alone, but when they did, panic gripped his chest and squeezed.

  Gingerly, Kyle lifted the lid from the box. A ring, white gold with a square cut diamond, lay in a bed of folded white tissue.

  He released the breath he’d been holding, relief turning his muscles soft. He sank into the chair and picked up the box.

  “Who’s that from? Is there a note?”

  He didn’t need one. “It’s from Leigh.”

  “Is that the ring you gave her?” Tom asked.

  Kyle nodded.

  Tom whistled softly. “That must have set you back a few quid. Sorry, though. When did you two call it off?”

  “We didn’t.”

  Tom’s eyes widened and darkened all at once, a glower settling over his granite features. “She’s ending things, and this is how she tells you? No phone call? No note?”

  Kyle almost laughed at the furious incredulity in his brother’s voice. In truth, Tom was far more bothered than Kyle, but then Kyle couldn’t remember the last time he felt anything besides frustration…and fear.

  He shrugged and covered the box with the lid once more. “She wants me to call her, beg her not to go. She’s always had a flair for the dramatic. I could fix this if I wanted to.”

  Tom’s face softened, brows pulling together. “And you don’t want to?”

  Kyle shrugged again. Leigh might believe she was calling his bluff, forcing him to return to London and pick up life where he’d left off, but she didn’t understand the man who’d given her that ring, who’d lived that life, was no more. He was dead, and Kyle was all that was left.

  Exhaustion swept over him. His legs ached from standing for so long. Tom blocked his path to the desk chair, so Kyle shuffled to the worn settee before the dark telly. He flopped onto the sagging cushions, glanced at the antique cuckoo clock on the far wall. Nearly two-thirty. He could sleep a few hours before dinner. Make up for the hours he lost when he’d woken up at three, drenched in sweat, nightmare images swirling inside his brain.

  “When’s the last time you spoke to her?” Tom asked, dropping onto the chair opposite him.

  Why couldn’t Tom just leave him alone? What the hell did his brother care about Leigh calling off their engagement, anyway? He hadn’t liked her. No one in his family had. She hadn’t liked them either.

  “Last week, I think.” Had he spoken to her then? He might have, or maybe the week before. He couldn’t say for sure. He might have spoken to her last week, two weeks ago or six. Every day ran into another the same as the one before.

  “And you haven’t seen her again since the hospital?”

  “No.” And that had been nine months ago. Ten? What difference did it make? She wanted it over, and Kyle didn’t care. Everyone was happy. He stretched out across the settee, propping his head on a lumpy throw pillow. Maybe if he closed his eyes, Tom would take the hint and leave.

  Instead, his brother stretched out his leg and gave Kyle’s couch a shove with his foot, forcing Kyle to open his eyes.

  “What in the hell is going on with you?” Tom snapped.

  For the first time in months, anger flared inside Kyle. He sat up and glared at his brother. “What do you think?”

  “I wish I knew.” Tom threw up his hand, his voice rising in frustration. “I wish I had a clue what was going on inside your head. Make no mistake, I’m no fan of Leigh’s, but you were going to marry that girl. You loved her that much, and now you can’t even be bothered to ring her?”

  Tom didn’t understand, he was happily married to the same girl he’d fallen for in school. He assumed everyone lived that way. He didn’t get that for Jack—and Leigh, too—it was all about how it looked and what they brought to each other. Their relationship had been more arrangement than romance.

  “The night this happened—” he pointed to his neck “—I was drunk and trying to get another woman to come back to my hotel room, that’s how much I loved Leigh.”

  “So you’re a prat, we’ve all known that for years. But whatever you did or didn’t do, you should have some reaction to this woman dumping you. Anger. Relief. Disappointment. Something.”

  Kyle’s anger amped up another notch. Typical Tom, telling everyone what they should be doing, how they should be acting. Kyle’d been listening to it since he was a lad.

  He jumped to his feet. “Fuck off. When someone tries to kill you, then you can tell me how I should be.”

  Tom stood, square face ruddy with his own pent up anger. “I wish I could tell you how to act. I’d start by telling you that you need to do more than spend every waking hour staring at a computer screen or sleeping.”

  Kyle opened his mouth to argue, but Tom lifted his hand and silenced him. “Don’t try to tell me you’re working. Unless you’ve managed to come up with a way of telecommunicating your thoughts to the computer without the use of a keyboard, you’re not fooling anyone.”

  “Piss off, Tom,” Kyle ground out, the same way he had as a boy when he was losing an argument to his brother.

  “I wish I could, but I can’t. I don’t give a shit what Mum says or your doctors, I can’t stand around and watch you move about this house like a ghost.”

  “So leave, then.” Kyle stiffened, doing his best to ignore the panic bursting inside him at his own words.

  “Oh, no, little brother, I’m not going anywhere.” Tom’s voice dropped low and menacing. A slow smile stretched across his face and a flicker of unease lit inside Kyle. Tom’s expression was the same one he wore when they were boys and their arguments turned physical. Kyle had never been able to win, even when they were older. He was nearly as tall as Tom’s six feet two inches, but where Kyle was lean, lanky muscle, Tom was built like a tank. With all the weight Kyle had lost since the attack, he doubted he’d fare any better now.

  “Fine, I’ll go.” Kyle turned and started for the door, but Tom grabbed his arm and forced him to stop and face him.

  “No, you won’t. You’re going to listen to me. I’ve had enough of you walking around like a zombie.”

  That was Tom’s second reference to a living corpse, he just had no idea how close to the mark he’d hit.

  “You have to stop this.” Tom’s voice gentled, but retained its urgency. “If you need to, speak to a therapist, something, but you need to snap out of this fog. Christ, they might as well have killed you for all the living you do these days.”

  Tom’s words struck him like a jab to the chin. He blinked and stepped back, while his brother’s glower turned pained in one fluid sweep.

  “I’m sorry. My God, I didn’t mean it. I’m so sorry, Kyle.”

  Before Kyle could react, Tom yanked him forward and hugged him.

  Kyle could count on one hand the number of times he and his brother had embraced—mostly under the watchful eye of their mother insisting they remember they were brothers after another knockdown battle—but for just an instant all he could do was marvel at the strange sense of comfort that came from the strength of his big brother.

  “I’m sorry,” Tom whispered.

  Kyle eased back from his brother’s hold, shaking his head. A faint smile pulled at his mouth. “Don’t be. You’re right.”

  “I’m not,” Tom said quickly, shoving his hand through his thick, sand-colored hair. “Hell, I still can’t believe I said that. You know I didn’t mean it.
I was—”

  “Frustrated? Angry?” Kyle finished for him.

  “It’s no excuse.”

  Kyle grinned, for the first time in months. Something had shifted. Whether it was from the truth in everything Tom had said, or simply feeling something beyond scared for once, he didn’t know. But something had lit inside him and was slowly burning away the fog he’d been wandering in since leaving the hospital.

  His brother shook his head. “It would have killed me to lose you. It would have killed all of us.”

  Guilt squeezed Kyle’s insides, Tom’s words shaming and humbling him all at once. The past ten years he’d done everything he could to distance himself from his family. Hell, he’d even changed his name.

  Since he was a boy, he’d believed he was better, smarter, destined to be more successful.Yet despite the fact that he’d been an utter prick, they’d taken care of him, worried about him, feared the possibility of losing him. He didn’t deserve any of it. Their care had never been returned. But by God, he would earn it going forward. He would make up for every shitty thing he’d ever said, every sneer, every eye roll. He would be the son, the brother they should have had all along.

  “I’m sorry.” His throat ached, but it had nothing to do with his injury.

  Tom frowned. “For what?”

  Christ, where to start? “For everything. You’re right, I have to start back to a normal life. And I will. I’m just… I don’t want to write for the paper anymore, and I don’t want to marry Leigh, and I don’t want to go back to London.”

  Tom clasped his shoulder. “No one’s expecting you to get over what happened overnight, we just want to see you living again. Whatever you need, we’ll get for you.”

  Kyle ran a hand through his lank hair and shot Tom a self-deprecating grin. “I don’t know what I need yet.”

  “That’s all right. You don’t have to figure it out now.”

  Kyle sank down onto the settee, the exhaustion that had threatened to engulf him earlier now gone. Faint energy hummed beneath his skin. “I guess the first thing I should do is phone Leigh, tell her I got the ring, that I’m sorry about how things worked out.” He looked up at the clock. “But in a few hours, when she’s home from work.”

  Tom nodded. “I need to go, or I’ll be late picking up the little ones from school. I’m sorry for what I said.”

  “Don’t be. What I’ve been doing these last months, it hasn’t been living.”

  “One more thing, though,” Tom said. “I think your first step, before you do anything else, should be taking a shower. You stink, mate.”

  Kyle smirked and flipped his brother off as Tom left chuckling. Once alone, Kyle stood and retrieved his laptop from where he’d set it on the floor. He glanced at his wet hoodie heaped in the middle of the desk.

  His first step should be cleaning that mess, then a shower, then call Leigh. Instead he set his laptop on the coffee table, dropped onto the settee and opened the screen. He closed the spider solitaire game he’d been in the middle of and opened Google.

  He hadn’t been entirely honest with Tom, just now. While he didn’t have a clue what he would do once he managed to get his life back, he did have some idea about how to rebuild. He needed to overcome the fear that threatened to swallow him every day. He needed answers. He needed justice.

  In the search window he typed Stonecliff Manor and Cragera Bay.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Given your history, I can’t understand why in the hell you’d come back to Cragera Bay, let alone keep company with Eleri James.”

  Kyle stared blandly at Detective Harding, pressed the palms of both his hands to the cold, steel tabletop and drew a deep breath. “What history would that be?”

  “Didn’t you claim that The Witch of Stonecliff herself was responsible for your injury?” Harding drew an invisible line over his own throat with his thumb.

  Eleri had begged Kyle to let her leave Barber’s farm before he called the police, and not mention she’d been there at all. He’d convinced her to stay. He was an airtight alibi, after all. They’d been at each other’s side for nearly two days.

  Now, seated across from the detective grinning like a shark who’d caught his first scent of blood in the water—Eleri was in a separate interrogation room—a sense of disquiet twisted low in Kyle’s gut. He’d clearly underestimated the man’s pathological hatred of Eleri.

  “Not the witch, at least not alone,” Kyle said. “Besides, weren’t you convinced I was robbed and left for dead on the highway?”

  Harding’s shit-eating grin dimmed, eyes narrowing. “As the evidence proved.”

  “I’ve read the reports. Besides my car dumped at the side of the road, there was no other evidence. Especially blood evidence. Given my injury, shouldn’t you have found at least some spatter?”

  Direct hit.

  The man leaned forward, his face stony. “We’ve moved off topic.”

  “Too bloody bad.” Since gaining access to his police file, and speaking to Grady, Kyle saw just how shoddy the investigation had been. He’d nearly died, and no one had even bothered to interview all the witnesses at the last place he’d been seen. “Did you even look into my claims? Go to The Devil’s Eye? You would have found blood evidence there, I can promise you that.”

  “You were drugged out of your mind,” Harding growled. “You bloody hallucinated—”

  “Bullshit!” Fury pounded behind his eyes. He gripped the edge of the table. “I know where I was, what happened, what I saw. You don’t want to believe me. It would mean you were wrong about Eleri.”

  “Mel Barber found you staggering down the highway, the same highway where we found your car. You can believe what you want—”

  Kyle slapped the flats of both hands onto table and jumped to his feet. “Bloody hell. The men you found in The Devil’s Eye had their throats cut, too. Just like me.”

  Harding shifted in his chair, casually propping an elbow on the back. “Now where did you hear that? Eleri?”

  Angry as he was, Kyle wasn’t so far gone that he didn’t see the trap the detective was setting. “Eleri told me her sister saw the gash on the body she found.”

  Harding quirked an eyebrow. “Why would Mel Barber lie?”

  Kyle sank onto the hard seat. “Because he was afraid, and now he’s dead.”

  “I was wondering when you’d finally remember. Mel Barber is dead, and Eleri James is right in the thick of things again.”

  Panic fluttered in his chest. “She had nothing to do with it. We haven’t left each other’s side in days.”

  “Of course.” Harding nodded and rubbed his chin with the back of his hand as if deep in thought. “Since someone attacked her in her room, right?”

  Kyle nodded. “That’s right.”

  “And what a mystery that is.”

  “Well, if you investigated Eleri’s attack the same way you did mine, it’s no wonder you’re so baffled.”

  Rather than pissing the man off, Harding’s smug smirk returned. “Perhaps the bruises on Ms. James’s neck aren’t the result of someone attacking her, but defending themselves. A faceless attacker would be an excellent explanation for strange marks left by someone trying to fight her off.”

  Cold crept over Kyle’s skin. “That was days ago.”

  “And how long do you suppose Barber’s dinner has been molding on the kitchen table?”

  Kyle leaned forward. “Let’s say you’re right, and Barber left those bruises on Eleri while he unsuccessfully fought off a woman less than half his weight. How did she manage to string him up from the rafters?”

  Harding opened his mouth to argue, but Kyle cut him off. “Don’t bother. I’m tired of listening. You and I both know she didn’t kill the men you pulled out of The Devil’s Eye. The bodies go back too far, don’t they? She’d have been too young to have killed them all.”

  The detective’s face darkened. “I didn’t bring you in here to discuss an ongoing investigation. When was the last ti
me you spoke to Mel Barber?”

  “That’s why you haven’t arrested her. Even the greenest attorney could prove Eleri innocent with the evidence you’ve gathered. You’re desperate now. You don’t want to admit you’ve wasted the past fifteen years trying to arrest the wrong person.”

  * * *

  Eleri sat on one side of the steel table staring at the empty chair in front of her, pulse fluttering in her throat. She’d been in this room before with its pale green walls, chipped paint over concrete, closing in on her.

  The last time Harding had brought her in for questioning, he’d kept her waiting just as he was doing now. When he finally had come in, he’d fired off accusation after accusation, certain she’d attacked her own sister with a knife.

  He would have undoubtedly charged her formally had Ruth, who hadn’t been aware she’d been taken in, not killed again while Eleri had been in this very room.

  Was it a coincidence that Miller had brought her to the same room Harding had questioned her in last time? Not likely. No doubt when they finished here, she’d be taken to the same holding cell she’d spent that night, too.

  Tapping her finger on the steel table, she glanced at her watch. She’d been there for nearly forty-five minutes already. How long would they leave her here to sweat?

  The door opened with a loud clunk and Detective Miller strolled in, a thousand watt smiled stretched wide over his chiselled features. “Sorry to have kept you waiting so long. Do you need anything? Coffee? Water? The toilet?”

  She shook her head. “I’m fine, thank you.

  “Good.” He dropped into the chair opposite her, set his notepad on the table. “I’ve only a few questions for you.”

  Sure he did. Perhaps he’d forgotten, but she’d done this before. She knew how long these interviews took.

  Miller lifted his pen. “How did you know Melvin Barber?”

  He wasn’t waiting for Harding? She frowned and glanced at the one-sided glass on the far wall. “I didn’t.”

  Miller’s warm, hazel eyes crinkled. “Then why were you at his farm?”