Forbidden Highway (Peri Jean Mace Ghost Thrillers Book 5)

by Catie Rhodes

I forgot about the fatigue weighing me down, and the intensity of nightmare I’d just lived through dulled. My body got ready to do battle.

  13

  We stared at the box, all three of us frozen in place. Fear iced me from head to toe. My imagination cavorted like a drunk at Mardi Gras. I let it convince me a piece of Hannah Kessler was in the box. Tension worked its way down my neck and into my shoulders. I pushed down the image of a stray body part in the box. I had to keep myself in check, or I’d never get Hannah back in one piece.

  “I’ll open it.” Wade closed the distance between himself and the box.

  “Wade, no.” I reached for him. “What if it’s booby trapped?”

  “Then I’m the one who needs to pick it up anyway.” He pulled the lid off the box before I could argue more. “It’s a cellphone.” He held up the device.

  “Can’t they make bombs out of those?” Rainey backed away.

  Wade shrugged and pushed the button to wake it up. He stared at the screen, still except for the rise and fall of his chest.

  “What is it?” I moved toward him.

  “A message. Let me go look at it, see if it’s anything you need to see.” He tried to walk away, but I grabbed his arm and hung on for dear life.

  “Let me see. Now.” I held out my hand. My anticipation swelled. What would I see? How bad would it be? Would I ever be able to forget it?

  The pressure in my chest bore down and the curse’s poison sizzled in my veins. My body went stiff, and I slapped my hand against my chest. The sound of two hearts beating pounded in my head. Pain stabbed at my ribs, and each breath hurt. Below that, a rotten burn lingered. The poison from the curse? The bird inside my chest? Both. Priscilla Herrera may have given me a temporary reprieve back in the crypt, but the effects of the curse would eventually come back to roost. It was going to kill me when it did. Hurry, a familiar voice whispered inside my head. The pain let go. I sagged against Wade with a groan. He closed his eyes and pressed the cellphone into my hand. Rainey crowded close, the sharp odor of her fear rising between us.

  I punched the button to light up the cellphone’s screen. There was nothing but a video. Sweat erupted on my head and slithered down my back. Whatever evil I was about to see was my fault. Poor Hannah. I’m so sorry, so very sorry. I tapped play.

  A dark, blurry image filled the screen. Hannah’s sobs were the only sound. We had plenty of time to analyze the desperation in them and hear the deep, racking sorrow of someone who had lost all hope of rescue or relief. A light clicked on, and Hannah’s face jerked into focus. One eye was swollen shut, and her lip had a split spreading up to her nostril.

  Grief welled in me, almost as bad as the physical pain a few seconds earlier. I swayed on my feet. Wade’s arm slipped around my waist. He pushed his legs against mine to keep me upright. His hand squeezed hard in mine, I blinked against tears and stared at the screen.

  “No,” Hannah grated out. “No. Please not again. I’m begging you.”

  Her eyes squeezed shut, and her lips clamped together. The camera stayed on her face. It turned pink and then red. Sweat sprouted in fat beads on her brow. Her eyebrows pushed together until they formed an ugly v. She strained against whatever was being done to her. Finally her mouth flew open, and she sucked in a breath.

  “Noooooo!” Her scream went on and on.

  I had time to imagine all the horrible things being done to her, each picture in my mind more horrible than the last. Moaning, I leaned into Wade, grateful for his comfort and sick Hannah had no one to comfort her.

  “Please, please, please.” Her breath came in pants. “Just stop. Please.” A steady stream of tears ran down the side of her face. “I have money. I can give you money.”

  “Me-he-he-he,” came Gage’s awful laugh from somewhere offscreen. “Don’t want your money. This is about a beef I got with Peri Jean.”

  Hannah’s body relaxed, and she let her head fall to one side. Her breathing became less frantic. Her face crumpled. Sobs shook her body. The camera moved to show Michael Gage’s grinning face. He had a white bandage over his nose where I bit him.

  “Peri Jean, I’m waiting on you. We’re gonna have some fun.” He giggled again. The smile fell off his face. “You doing so good on finding the treasure, I changed the time I’m giving to find it to forty-eight hours. When I call your cellphone in two days, you best have that treasure for me. Unless you want the next box to have pieces of your friend in it.”

  The video went to black. Rainey spun away with her hands over her face. Wade took the phone out of my hand and dropped it back in the gift box. He turned me to face him and put both arms around me. One huge hand stroked my back.

  “We’re gonna find her,” he whispered. “I promise you.”

  I bawled against his chest, tears scalding my cheeks. Wade did nothing more than hold me upright. He knew to let me get it out. My sobs scraped my throat raw and made my chest hurt even worse, but I let them run their course.

  “I’m calling Tubby.” My voice had a honking, foggy ring. I took my cellphone out of my back pocket.

  “You will not.” Rainey rushed over to me and tried to snatch my cellphone.

  I held it out of Rainey’s reach, really too sad and tired to stop her if she had her heart set on taking it from me.

  “Tubby’s the only way we’ll find Luther Palmore’s books, and you know it.” I found Tubby’s contact information, and my finger hovered over the call button.

  “I can’t be involved in something illegal.” Rainey stepped away from me.

  “Pretend you don’t know,” Wade said. Brow wrinkled with a frown, he put his hand on my back and rubbed. He leaned so close his whiskers tickled my face. “Are you ready for me to do the healing Priscilla Herrera suggested?”

  “Let me get this in motion first.” I called the special number Tubby had given me. Rainey clamped her hands over her ears and marched away from us.

  “You change your mind about a job at my cathouse?” Tubby drawled.

  “Shut up and listen.” I told him about the video and about my urgent need for Luther Palmore’s books and who I thought had them.

  “So our fine, upstanding ex-sheriff has the books somewhere.” He laughed.

  “Unless he sold them.”

  “Well, if he did, they’re gone forever.” Tubby put his hand over the phone and told somebody to stop fucking crying and do their damn job. He came back with an angry huff. “But I got an idea where they might be.”

  “You go check it out. If they’re where you think they are, get them. I’ve got to make a run to Nacogdoches, but I’ll be back—”

  “Hold on, hold on. I ain’t never said I’d steal them damn books for you.” His voice got high and whiney. “I sorta thought we’d do it together. Be like old times. Bonnie and Clyde ride again.”

  “Tubby, if I didn’t have this other stuff hanging over my head, I’d do it.” But it won’t ever be like old times again. I kept the last part to my own self.

  “What you gotta go do? Might be, I’ll help.”

  “This done got out of hand, Tub. The treasure done made me sick.” I caught myself lapsing into Tubby’s speech pattern and cut it off with a cruel mental swipe. “I’m running out of time, and I need to go to Nacogdoches to get what I need.”

  “Something magic?” Tubby knew enough about magic to hire a witch if he thought it would get the job done.

  “Yeah. It’s magic.” The pain in my chest came back in a bright flash. I rubbed at it and hoped magic could fix it. Something in there felt very broken.

  “All right. I’ll do this for you, but you gonna owe me.” He waited for me to concede.

  I thought I was the one helping him. Silly me.

  “Yeah. I’ll owe you.” The prospect sent ice scrabbling up my spine. No telling what he’d want or when he’d want it. “Oh, and Tub?”

  “Mmm?”

  “You got any idea where they’ve got Hannah, you could end this a lot quicker.”

  He hung
up on me.

  A sheriff’s cruiser passed by the cemetery, slowing at seeing our little group standing around Rainey’s car. She took a few steps out and waved. The lights flashed, and the cruiser went on its way.

  “Get in the damn car.” She jerked open the door and climbed in on the driver’s side.

  Wade and I obeyed. He had to help me into the backseat. Rainey drove off into the darkness.

  ANOTHER HOUR AND A HEALING LATER, I lay curled in the backseat of the Nova while Wade drove us to Nacogdoches. The rumble of the road echoed up through the old car seat and vibrated against my head. Sleep, which Wade insisted I needed, was out of my reach. Instead, I lay with my eyes open, staring at the back of the driver’s seat and hoping I was traveling the right road, that I wasn’t making another stupid mistake.

  A radio preacher crackled over the car’s original stereo, voice fading in and out, the same way the moonlight chased us through the pines. “Jesus-uh is watching you at all times, waiting for you to acknowledge his presence-uh. Waiting for you-uh to realize your true destiny-uh. Why won’t you submit?” His voice rose. “Submit, submit, submit.” With each ‘submit’ his voice raised an octave until he screamed like a madman.

  Wade clicked off the radio. “I feel you not sleeping, Peri Jean.”

  “I’d rather worry.” I pulled out my cigarettes, lit one, and tapped the pack on Wade’s shoulder. He grunted, took it, and blazed up his own dose of carcinogens.

  “I’m worried too. More about you than this silly little errand.” He let off the gas and slowed for a deer to dart across the road in front of us. “You’re making a mistake taking on Priscilla Herrera’s mantle. She’s evil, and you’ll always have a part of that in you.”

  “She’s not evil. Not in life, not now.” I hoisted myself to a sitting position. “She’s just…ruthless. She does whatever it takes to get the job done.”

  “And you want that in you?” Wade slowed again, this time to stop. Five deer ran across the road. He turned to face me. “Because it will be.”

  “How do you know it isn’t already?”

  “Because I know you, probably better than anybody else. You’ve got this rocket launcher inside your head.” He tapped his own head to make sure I understood. “But you don’t know how to run it. Do you think this is going to help?”

  “I don’t see how I have a choice. If I can’t get the curse off the Mace Treasure, I don’t find it.”

  “That’s not the end of the world.” Wade put the car in gear and started driving again.

  “What about Michael Gage? What about Hannah?”

  “That’s going to go however it goes with or without you finding the treasure.” The silhouette of Wade’s head wagged back and forth. “Gage is going to do whatever he’s going to do to Hannah, and we’re going to kill him if we can get to him before the cops find him.” He stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray. “No. You’re letting yourself get bullied into this. Why?”

  Anger zigzagged through my head. “What about the next Michael Gage?” I wiggled around until I could lean over the front seat to glare at Wade. “He’s not the only person who’s hurt people I love over the Mace Treasure.”

  Wade shook his head again. “You’re still not thinking straight. What about the next time you get frustrated with your gift? You can’t get this out of you. No telling how it’s going to affect you on a day-to-day basis.”

  I swallowed. Was I doing the right thing? I couldn’t know until I tried. But, as Wade so generously pointed out, there was no way to undo it if it turned bad. I slid down on the seat and leaned back. Something moved in my chest, and it let out a throb. My mind called up an image of that raven sinking into my chest. I shuddered and told Wade something I hated admitting out loud. “I think it’s too late.”

  “I know,” he said softly. “It was probably already too late when you went under the water at that damn quarry.”

  “Then why are you arguing with me about it?” I popped the back of the driver’s seat with the flat of my hand.

  “Because I’m scared of losing you.” His voice broke on the last couple of words. “You’re my only real friend.”

  A lump worked its way up my throat. I tightened my jaw against it and watched the back of Wade’s head. He sat perfectly still, only moving his hands on the steering wheel as we rounded curves on the endless ribbon of farm road. We said no more until we hit the Nacogdoches city limits. The first rays of daylight were just starting to light the pillow of clouds on the horizon.

  “Pull over at a restaurant or something.” I scooted forward on the seat. “Somewhere you don’t mind staying while I go take care of this.”

  “I’m not letting you go by yourself.” Wade passed a convenience store the size of a small village.

  “You’ve got to. Reba Skanes doesn’t like men. I think she’s afraid of them.” I pointed at an all-night waffle house coming up to our right. “It’s why I moved out as quickly as I did.”

  Wade chuckled. “The world would end if you didn’t have the company of a man.”

  I popped him on the arm, and some of the tension that had lingered between us since the night I stripped naked in front of him went away. “Pot. Kettle. Black. All I’m saying, dude.”

  Wade pulled into the waffle house’s parking lot and turned to regard me, eyes squinting in mirth. He took my hand and ran it over his beard and then kissed it. “Please don’t do something where I lose you. I can’t take it.”

  “I’m doing the best I can.”

  Wade got out of the Nova and helped me out of the backseat. He stared into the windows of the waffle house for several seconds and took off walking without saying goodbye. I opened my mouth to yell after him and closed it. Maybe his way was better.

  I got in the car and drove the streets of the oldest city in Texas. Memories of my time with my ex-husband veiled the newer businesses with old wounds, the fire that cobbled me together.

  Wade’s words came back to me. His concerns scared me just as much as they did when he voiced them. Taking on Priscilla Herrera’s mantle could bring way more bad than good. It might even kill me.

  I stopped in front of the lot where the old house my ex-husband and I shared with a bunch of other losers once stood. The nightmare of that time rang in my mind’s eye. The house of a thousand bad times was gone. Maybe burned to the ground. Maybe razed by a city-owned bulldozer. Just gone, a patch of manicured grass next to a well-kept Victorian in its place.

  I stopped growing in this place, stopped trying to learn who I was. Figured maybe it wasn’t worth finding out. Just as the house was gone, maybe the old me was going, too, slowly, but going all the same. I started driving again and was at Reba’s in too few minutes.

  REBA’S NEIGHBORHOOD, an older one full of turn-of-the-century frame houses, was declining when I lived in it but still mostly working class. On the day I returned, the neighborhood carried an air of surrender.

  Garbage and outright junk littered the yards. Many of the formerly graceful homes had plywood nailed over doors and windows, their porches collapsed, railings hanging like broken dentures. Those were the abandoned ones.

  Most of the occupied houses could have had a sign in front saying, “This is where you buy drugs.” Shadowy figures stood on those porches, watching me, waiting to see if I was a customer.

  I got out of the car and stood in front of Reba’s house. It hadn’t changed much since the summer I helped her paint it when I was barely eighteen. The paint, which must have been redone since then, was perfect snowy white without chips. How did she stay in this awful neighborhood? I’d have made Memaw move, even if she kicked and screamed.

  I walked up the concrete steps to the porch, took the first creaky step onto the wood floorboards, and tilted my head up. The porch’s ceiling was still the odd shade of blue Reba insisted on.

  When I helped Reba paint this porch, I couldn’t understand why she insisted on this particular shade of blue-green for the porch ceiling. She never would say
. Over the years, I’d learned it was supposed to keep ghosts away. She’d known what I was even then but never mentioned it or treated me any different. She’d been good to me. I should have visited before now.

  The front door opened with a soft click. Reba stood behind the screen door, smiling. “As I live and breathe, I never thought I’d see you again.”

  “I’m sorry I stayed away.” I pulled on the screen door, and its hinges screamed.

  “Come on in. I got iced tea.” Reba stepped away from the door, holding one hand to her stooped back.

  I followed her inside, taking in the sheet-covered furniture and the scatter of magazines and books. The house even smelled the same, dried roses and pine scented cleaner. Reba already had the tea poured and set out on the kitchen table. I sat in the chair she indicated.

  “You really knew I was coming?” I took a sip of my iced tea. Just like I remembered. Too sweet and too strong.

  “She came into my dreams last night.” Reba ran her finger down the condensation on her iced tea glass, but didn’t drink. “All that time you lived with me, I kept wondering if I wasn’t supposed to give it to you then. But Leticia insisted you weren’t the one. Begged me not to mention any of it to you.”

  All the air went out of my lungs, and the ache rose up in my chest again. Memaw had known all this? Why did she never tell me? Again, something fluttered in my chest, pushing for more room. I rubbed at my breastbone. The discomfort eased, but only a little.

  “You’ve still got time.” Reba jerked her chin at my chest. “And I’ve got a story to tell you. Priscilla insisted.”

  I nodded. “You don’t refuse her.”

  She gave me a rueful smile. “The Robert Skanes who knew Priscilla Herrera was my grandfather. He passed this story down to my father, Bobby, who passed it to me. When I started to get too old, I tried to pass it to my daughter, but…” Reba shrugged and folded her hands in front of her. I couldn’t help but notice the humped up joints and knuckles, the rash of sunspots. “Priscilla had other plans. Neither the story nor this duty was for my daughter.”