Just for a Heartbeat
Danielle Stewart
Contents
Just for a Heartbeat
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Epilogue
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Copyright © 2016 by Danielle Stewart
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Just for a Heartbeat
Every photograph was at one point a moment intended to be remembered. Ruby Constantine works tirelessly to give old film new life, salvaging forgotten and discarded rolls. There is a gamble to the process; she may end up with a priceless treasure or a stack of meaningless photographs. The job provides a level of excitement the rest of Ruby's life lacks. That is, until a particularly unique set turns out to have captured a grisly crime that Ruby knows the local police on Bolton Bluff Island off the coast of Maine are not equipped to solve.
Patrick Sullivan has given up his job as an investigative reporter in Boston in order to write articles about bumble bees and pizza crusts for a tiny newspaper in Maine. Why? Because no one dies as a result of something he’s written anymore. Though his goal is to keep his head down and mind his own business, a call from Ruby changes everything. She holds a special place in his heart and helping is a pull he can’t resist.
Success seems impossible when their hunt for a killer becomes more dangerous than anything they could have imagined. Ruby and Patrick must decide if their lives are worth more than the truth.
Prologue
Every photograph, developed or not, was at one point a moment intended to be remembered. That idea was the basis for the Film and Photograph Salvage Coalition (FPSC) when Ruby Constantine created it seven years ago. With a network of photographers and film developers all across the country they’d managed to develop over three thousand rolls of film that would have otherwise been lost or destroyed. Some of the rolls were bought at auctions, others found in estate sales or Goodwill donation drop-offs. As the group gained notoriety through viral social media posts about unique photography finds, packages began to show up from all over the world. Most days there was more film than time to develop it. That suited Ruby just fine. Being busy was her sanity. She’d stuffed her days full of work, learning languages and skills most people never took the time to hone.
No matter what other hobby she picked up, film was always her first priority. Every single roll held equal parts of opportunity and disappointment, and it was not known until the final moments of the process which one would win out. Some film, being of organic substance, would be too degraded by heat, water, or age to produce anything. But occasionally there would be a find, exceptional enough to land the prints in a museum or even sold to a collector. That was the main source of revenue for FPSC and what allowed Ruby to live a comfortable, but not flashy, lifestyle. Becoming self-sufficient was a necessity. Owning two cats and being intentionally single at the age of twenty-five meant she needed to be completely fulfilled in her job to keep the nosey interjections from other people to a minimum. But no prospect of a relationship had the promise of a new project.
Ruby had high hopes for the package she expected to receive in the mail any day now. The film was from Alaska and rumored to have belonged to an artist who took candid photographs of the indigenous people and wildlife in the 1940s. Shortly after winning the auction for the thirty-two rolls of film, Ruby was contacted by two anthropologists and a historian interested in purchasing any prints of good quality.
Ruby was the type of woman who paced while waiting for the mailman in the morning, wearing a path in her old shag carpet. She could feel the ticking of the clock the way some people felt their pulse throbbing. Today, she was feeling especially impatient. She pulled back the lace curtains of her living room window and peered expectantly toward the quiet road where her mailbox perched among the daylilies she had planted last summer. The approaching fall season was bringing with it cooler air, but there was still plenty of warm sunshine to hang on to.
Noticing the red plastic flag on the mailbox was still up, which meant the box still housed her paid utilities bill, she deflated. Despite the proof this offered, that the mailman had yet to arrive, Ruby opened her front door to check her porch for any boxes. There were none. Silently chastising herself, she turned toward a large box which had been sitting in the corner of her one-bedroom cottage for over a year. Busy was always better than waiting impatiently.
Normally the focus of the Film and Photograph Salvage Coalition was any rolls of film dated prior to 1990. The ones she’d just grabbed were hand spun onto a spool and kept in a small black tube. No date could be determined, though if she had to judge by the brand of film, it would have been somewhere between the late eighties and early nineties. Not a high likelihood of being a museum jackpot, but the homemade setup gave it at least an air of suspense. Experience told her this low quality storage system more likely meant there would be a chance she’d put in all the work and still end up with nothing to salvage.
Flipping on some music free of any distracting lyrics, Ruby stepped into the dark, windowless room under the stairs. This process would take hours. She relished the tedious and muscle-cramping work most people found claustrophobic. Any work she could do alone in her home was appreciated. Tying back her dark poufy hair, she tried to wrangle the wispy strands that clung to her forehead and always got in the way of her work. Her trendy bulky framed glasses were a tool she couldn’t live without while in the developing room. Contacts always failed her, and she often reminded herself that no one would see her anyway.
The hours of preparation were always worth it. As she neared the end of her work on the rolls, the familiar tightness in her chest and the excited buzzing in her ears took over as she lifted the prints and checked their exposure. She knew instantly it was a success, images covering each square. But it wasn’t until she flipped on the light and began to examine them that she realized the magnitude of what had developed.
Blinking hard as her eyes adjusted, she tried to convince herself the images in front of her were not what they appeared to be. They couldn’t be. Because in all the years of doing this work, she’d never seen anything as horrifying. As long as she’d been alive there had only been one moment, one memory more frightening than this.
Her knees knocked together as she edged backward toward the only chair in the small cubby of the darkroom beneath the stairs. Slumping down onto it she snapped her eyes
shut. Every photograph was, at one point, a moment intended to be remembered. What kind of monster wanted to remember this?
Chapter 1
Nineteen days pass very slowly when haunting photographs are tucked into the top drawer of your living room desk. Ruby tried everything. She’d spent a full day staring at them. A full week pretending they didn’t exist. Neither solved the problem. If she lived somewhere else, if she was someone else, she’d have immediately turned her findings over to the police. The logical solution.
She rolled over in bed, kicking the blankets off while getting to her feet with force and intention. The pictures were loud as only taboo things could be, calling out from inside the drawer and insisting she evaluate them again. Looking at them in the dead of the night probably wasn’t advisable, but Ruby couldn’t resist. It didn’t really matter if she pulled them out and spread them across her table anyway. Every time she closed her eyes she could see every inch of every photo on the two horrific rolls.
Stepping over a few delivery boxes and sliding her hand against the wall until she hit the switch, Ruby flipped the light on. Her cottage was small by most people’s standards. One bedroom, a galley kitchen, one cramped bathroom, and a living room she used more as a dining room. Her prized feature was the converted coat closet that now acted as her dark room. But it was home. It had been for the last ten years which was, by far, the longest she’d ever lived in one place.
There was a before and after in Ruby’s life. The before was wide open exploration and discovery. The after could best be described as shrinking. A slow dwindling down of her world around her until the only thing she considered her space was the cottage.
The sun was beginning to rise as Ruby filled the coffee pot with water and clicked it on. She’d be tired today, but at least the nightmares had been kept at bay. Gathering up the photos, she averted her eyes, not wanting another second spent on them as the new day dawned. She’d considered burning or destroying them but always talked herself out of it. She couldn’t help feeling the film that held these photos had come to her for a reason.
A quiet knock on her front door, had Ruby’s heart racing and she haphazardly shoved the photos back into the drawer as if she’d been the one to create the monstrous scene displayed in them. As if she were guilty. In a way she knew she was. Not turning them over to the police had made her feel like an accomplice. But that couldn’t be what brought a knock to her door. Not at this hour of the morning.
She wrestled her hair into a ponytail and swept her fingers over her tired eyes, brushing away any tears or tiredness the best she could. Makeup-free these days, she’d found peace with the way her eyes looked naturally. At least she was blessed with good thick, well-shaped brows and lashes that curled enough on their own without sticky, smudgy mascara.
Ruby moved tentatively toward the door and tried to make out the two figures on the other side of the lace curtains. A man and a woman, loudly bickering, though she couldn’t decipher their words.
“Hello,” she said through a cracking voice as she pulled the door open and looked at them curiously. “Can I help you with something?”
“Oh, Piper, we woke her up. I told you it was too early to come over here.” The man was tall, dark-haired and wide-shouldered, but his face seemed kind even as he rolled his eyes in protest.
“Well, it’s not like we had much choice. We can’t just sit around in the dark in that house of horrors.” The woman turned her frustrated eyes from the man and fixed her attention on Ruby with a smile that appeared as if it took some effort to muster. “I’m so sorry to wake you. We are staying in the cabin over the hill there. The power went out and we can’t find the fuse box. There’s no cell service and without power the land line isn’t working. It’s basically a slasher movie waiting to happen.”
“You didn’t wake me,” Ruby said, oddly apologetic, a knee jerk reaction to conflict. “I was just making coffee.”
“Oh yes, thank you that would be great,” the woman with the saucer-sized dark brown eyes said as she stepped inside Ruby’s tiny house. “I can’t function without coffee, and you need electricity to make coffee. I’m Piper, this is my husband Bobby,” she rambled out in one breath. “He thought it would be a great idea to spend our one week of vacation away from the kids up here in an uninhabitable cabin just because his boss’s cousin gave us a great deal.”
“She didn’t invite you in,” Bobby scoffed, still waiting at the doorway for Ruby to either kick them out or let them in. She did the latter, not wanting to seem rude.
“It’s all right. I don’t mind. If your cabin is anything like this one, the fuse box will be out back in a small shed. But you can’t go out and flip it back on. It needs time to rest.”
“Is that how electricity works?” Bobby asked, twisting his face up doubtfully.
“Everything is different on Bolton Bluff,” Ruby said with a shrug as she pulled a few mugs down from a small cabinet and filled them. “I’m sorry, I don’t take cream or sugar in mine so I don’t have any. Would milk be okay?”
“I take mine black too,” Piper said, taking the mug to her lips like she’d been rescued from the desert and given a full canteen. Bobby waved off the offer of coffee and looked around the house uneasily.
“Are you on vacation too?” he asked, seeming to know the answer. She felt like she was under some kind of inspection and was failing. Maybe it was the lack of sleep or the intrusive thoughts pounding at the edges of her mind, but something kept telling her these people’s arrival was a sign.
Never one to believe in fate, Ruby tried to brush off the idea. They were just a couple tourists who’d rented a broken-down cabin and had some well-earned renter’s remorse.
“No, I live here. I have for about ten years.” Ruby invited them a few steps farther into her living room and offered a seat on the couch. She sat on the wobbly wooden desk chair she used to review photographs and film.
“I hope I didn’t insult you when I was talking about the island,” Piper said earnestly. “It is gorgeous here; it just hasn’t worked out the way we had planned. We’re grumpy and tired, that’s all.”
“That makes three of us,” Ruby joked, and they seemed to relax some. “Once you get power back on the key will be to not run any three things at the same time. Toaster and fridge, fine. Toaster, fridge, and coffee pot? No go.”
“Lucky for us,” Piper said, glaring playfully at Bobby again, “our cabin doesn’t have a toaster or a coffee pot. It had a fridge loaded with food though. It just happened to be food from the last renter who probably checked out in 1999.”
“I think I spent the entire walk over here saying sorry,” Bobby grumbled. “We were way overdue for a vacation.”
“Well, there’s a walk back we have to think about too,” Piper said, but Ruby could read her features softening into a smile. “I am truly sorry to intrude on you like this. We didn’t even catch your name.”
“Ruby Constantine. I really don’t mind the intrusion. It’s quiet up here; the company is a nice change.” She fidgeted with her own mug of coffee and glanced around nervously. Again, the photographs in the drawer called to her hauntingly. They were heavy, weighing on her day and night, and she was ready to be rid of them. At any moment she felt like her veins might burst open and she’d bleed into the carpet, disappearing right in front of them. Surely they could see the stress building inside her. She needed a release, some kind of help to free her from the horror she’d seen.
“What do you do for a living, Ruby?” Piper asked politely.
“I develop photographs for a group I started. We salvage film and try to preserve and develop it. We’ve had some impressive finds over the years.” Her mind didn’t move to the discoveries her team had made of the South American photographer who’d captured the only known pictures of a bird who’d long since been thought extinct. All she could think of were the gruesome shots she’d uncovered a couple weeks ago.
“What a neat job. I bet you have great stories.”
Piper smiled behind her coffee cup and her face lit with a friendly joyfulness Ruby didn’t often see in people.
“How about you guys? You’re on vacation from what?”
“From our twins,” Bobby said straight-faced, then faltered into a laugh. “Actually I’m a police officer in North Carolina, and Piper is a social worker. Rewarding work but you definitely need a break now and then.”
“I bet you two are the ones with the good stories.”
Both their faces fell a bit in a somber, knowing way. “I wish more of the stories were good,” Piper admitted. “But we do get a happy ending every now and then.” She tried to plaster on a bright smile that went flat too soon.
“Do you find it hard to determine what’s right and what’s wrong?” Ruby asked, knowing her line of questioning would be bizarre and probably met with concern. She tried to clarify. “You both must make a lot of quick decisions in your jobs. How do you know when it’s right?”
“Your gut,” Piper chimed in when Bobby seemed confused, his mouth popping open but shutting just as quick. “Your instincts are usually right if you quiet yourself long enough to listen to them.”
“I like to use logic and reason,” Ruby began. “I like clarity and rules, but sometimes following them doesn’t always take you to the right place. You know what I mean?”
“Yes,” Piper said quickly, her eyes locked on Ruby. “You can’t always follow the rules.” She leaned in, begging with her body language for Ruby to keep going. “Is everything all right, Ruby?”
Everything was not all right. The back of her eyelids were etched with the horrors of the photographs. Her breath caught as she imagined them again. “Why do you ask?” she replied, feeling and likely looking defensive suddenly. There was no logical reason that these two strangers should be let in on the world she’d just fallen into. But at the same time the weight of what she’d seen was heavy, and carrying it alone felt impossible. She needed to get help soon.
Just For A Heartbeat (Piper Anderson Legacy Mystery Book 2) Page 1
