She’d also learned when they’d played several games of chess that he was as competitive as she was, that his laughter was often contagious and that he had the ability to make her feel like she was the most special woman on the face of the planet.
If she’d been on the verge of being in love with Bo before, the two days had only intensified her love for him. She had no idea what he felt toward her. It was obvious he was physically attracted to her and that he cared about her well-being.
In any case, it didn’t matter what he felt for her, as their time together would eventually end and she’d return to her life with only heart scars to show that he’d once been here.
That was if the person tormenting her was caught, when that person was no longer a danger. She couldn’t stay with Bo forever and could only hope that Trey and his men found the guilty party so that she could gain some needed distance from Bo.
Each night when she got into bed, she thought about calling to him to join her again, to make love to her once more, but in the end she denied herself the pleasure, knowing that it would only make things harder on her when it came time for him to say goodbye.
She didn’t want to leave the safety of his house and yet felt a restless need to escape the confines. She was accustomed to being out and about town during the days, enjoying the leisure of summer before school began again in the fall.
She was particularly restless when she went to bed on the third night of being cooped up. She’d never considered herself a coward before, but her desire to stay inside was definitely built on the roots of fear and the perverse desire for her admirer not to be able to see her, to get close to her in any way.
Although the mattress was comfortable and the last couple of nights’ sleep had found her easily, tonight she stared up at the ceiling as slumber refused to come.
There was little moonlight tonight and finally at eleven thirty, still unable to sleep, she got out of bed and moved the curtains aside to peer into the dark night.
Adrenaline filled her and she suddenly knew exactly what she wanted to do.
Chapter Ten
“Bo?”
He sat straight up at the sound of Claire calling his name. Immediately his thoughts went to holding her in his arms, making love to her again. That was almost all he’d been able to think about over the past three days.
“Yeah?” His voice was deeper than usual, husky even to his own ears.
“Get dressed.”
He frowned at her unexpected words. “Get dressed? Why?”
“It’s a perfect night for ghost hunting,” she replied. “I’ll be back in just a few minutes.” He heard her soft footfalls returning to his bedroom.
He raked a hand through his hair and then reached in the darkness for the jeans at the foot of the sofa. He’d hoped she’d call to him again, wanting...needing him, but certainly not for a night of ghost hunting.
Once he had his jeans pulled up, he turned on the living room light. He pulled on the white T-shirt he’d had on before going to bed and then sat on the sofa to wait for Claire.
This wasn’t exactly what he’d had in mind for a Friday night. If he was going to be awakened by her, he’d hoped for something far different.
She appeared in the living room dressed in a pair of denim jean shorts and a peach-colored sleeveless blouse that buttoned up the front. Her blue eyes simmered with an excitement he hadn’t seen over the past couple of days.
“Are you dragging me out of the house in the middle of the night on a wild-goose chase?” he asked.
“Probably,” she replied with a cheeky grin. “But from the rumors I’ve heard, tonight seems like the perfect night to catch a sight of Shelly’s ghost walking around the edge of the lagoon.”
Bo couldn’t help a snort of disbelief. “I don’t believe in ghosts,” he replied.
“Then you don’t want to go?” she asked, obviously crestfallen.
“Nah, I’ll go. I’ll indulge you in your craziness. If nothing else we’ll get out of the house for a little while.” He was rewarded with one of her beatific smiles that made him feel bigger, stronger and better than he was. Those smiles of hers could become addictive to him if he allowed it.
“We need to walk,” she said. “The sound of any vehicle might scare the ghost off.”
“I’ll grab a flashlight.” He left the living room and went into the kitchen, where he not only grabbed a flashlight from the cabinet beneath the sink but also opened one of the desk drawers and pulled out a pocketknife with a wicked blade.
He’d bought the knife off another kid at school when he was fifteen, then had made the mistake of showing it off to his mother. She’d immediately taken the knife from him and had grounded him for a week.
He’d forgotten about the weapon until the day before, when he’d been digging in the drawer to find a paper clip that Claire had wanted for her notebook.
He slipped the knife into his back pocket. There was no way he wanted to be out in the dark with Claire and not have some form of protection. He’d certainly prefer a gun, but the knife would have to do. Besides, he didn’t really expect any trouble.
“We have about fifteen minutes to get to the bushes in front of the edge of the lagoon,” she said when he returned to the living room. “Supposedly the ghost always walks around midnight.”
“Of course she does,” he said drily. “At what other time would a ghost walk the night?” He locked the door and they were on their way, the humid night air wrapping around them. “Does she also rattle chains as she walks?”
His sarcastic comment was met with an elbow to his rib. “Laugh now, Mr. Nonbeliever, at least I have an open mind.”
The street was dark between the lamps that marked each block and Bo grabbed Claire’s hand, not quite trusting what might be lurking in that darkness. They’d already been ambushed twice; he didn’t want to be caught unaware again.
They left Bo’s street and crossed to another, moving in the direction of the tip of the lagoon and the swampy area that surrounded it.
The night felt ominous, with wisps of lowlying fog appearing as they got closer to the swamp. The houses they passed were dark, the residents asleep in their beds as most sane people should be. A dog barked, breaking the silence.
Claire moved closer to him and he squeezed her hand, wondering what in the hell they’d been thinking of when they’d decided to leave the house in the middle of the night.
“You know I’m probably the only man on the face of the earth who would indulge you in this craziness,” he murmured softly.
“I know,” she replied and this time she squeezed his hand tight.
When they drew closer to the swamp, the air smelled of fish and rotten vegetation, a scent that Bo knew was familiar to them both. On stagnant, hot summer days the smell of the swamp permeated the whole town.
The silence of the night also filled with noise as they got nearer to the swamp. Bullfrogs croaked, and splashes created by fish jumping or gators slapping their tails could be heard.
A knot of tension balled up in Bo’s stomach. He knew just ahead of them was the stone bench where he and Shelly had met on so many nights. Just behind the bench a long row of bushes created a barrier between safe land and the lagoon ten feet beyond. It was in those bushes that Shelly had struggled with somebody to her death.
While he would always grieve the loss of her as a beautiful woman he’d once loved, he’d also come to the realization that they would have never married.
At the time of her death Shelly had one foot with him in Lost Lagoon and her other foot pointed in the direction of a bigger, more exciting future someplace else.
Had there been another man involved? Had that been the sticky situation that had troubled her before her death? And had she fought with that man that fatal night?
If she’d lived, Bo knew that the vision she had of a life outside of Lost Lagoon would have won in the end. Still, knowing that didn’t make being at the place of her murder any easier.
<
br /> He would have rather lost her to another man than to death. Yes, she’d been his first love, and he’d made the decision when she was gone that she would be his last love.
They approached the bushes on the left side of the bench and heard some giggling coming from the bushes to the right side. Bo shone his flashlight in the faces of three teenage girls who were crouched down.
“Shut off that light,” one of them said. “You’ll scare away the ghost.” Her admonishment was followed by a new round of excited giggling.
Bo turned off the flashlight and crouched down beside Claire. “We’ve got to be out of our minds,” he whispered. She grabbed his hand once again.
“At least we’re a little bit crazy together,” she whispered back.
The moonlight spilled but a mere sliver of illumination and the lowlying fog was thicker here, making it impossible for him to see Claire’s features. She was only a dark form next to him, a woman he would know in any depth of darkness by her heady scent and by the familiar heat of her body so close to his.
Part of him wanted to leave town now, to climb on his bike and finally put Lost Lagoon behind him forever. Claire was getting too deep inside his heart, and he wouldn’t allow love into his heart again.
He no longer cared about clearing his name. The odds of them finding out the real killer after two years and without law enforcement’s help were minimal at best.
However, the danger to Claire was real and present, and he couldn’t leave town until he knew she was no longer at risk. Shelly and her murder would always be a piece of his past that would haunt him, but as soon as this issue with Claire was resolved it was time for him to leave and get on with his life in Jackson.
It was ironic that Shelly had wanted to leave Lost Lagoon and Bo had wanted to stay in the small town where his mother lived and his business thrived. With Claire it was the opposite: she loved her life here in Lost Lagoon and had probably never considered moving away from the job she loved and the people she’d always known all of her life.
It was a lose-lose situation for them that only confirmed to him that he was a man meant to live his life alone. Besides, he wasn’t in love with Claire, he told himself firmly. He just cared about her and her safety and suffered a healthy dose of lust where she was concerned.
She was the first person in town who had been kind to him. She was one of the few people who believed in his innocence. She was bright and funny and sexy as hell. It was no great mystery that he was drawn to her.
He heard the teenagers begin to squeal. He and Claire raised their heads above the brush and Bo gasped as he saw a figure appear at the right of the grassy area between the bench, the bushes and the swamp.
It was a human figure, clad all in white from shoulders to toes and with long dark hair just like Shelly’s. She appeared to be lit from within as she glided gracefully across the area and toward the opposite side of the space.
“Shelly! It’s Shelly!” The teenagers squealed in a combination of excitement and terror. “It’s her ghost.”
It certainly looked like the ghost of Shelly, but Bo noticed that the woman never turned her face toward them and he caught a glimpse of black sneakers on her feet.
Since when did ghosts wear sneakers? He grabbed his flashlight and leaped over the brush at the same time the “ghost” reached the other side of the open area and disappeared into the overgrown brush near the swamp’s edge.
There was no place for her to go without walking back out. He assumed that whenever she made her walks she waited until anyone who had watched the spectacle went home and then left the cover of the wooded area.
She wouldn’t have that same luxury tonight. He took the same route she took and crashed through the woods, his flashlight scanning the area for any sign of her.
She’d be trapped between the swamp and a high rise of land that was impossible to climb. It was a relatively small area to search and Bo wanted to know who was playing such a sick game for the entertainment of giggling school girls.
He shone his flashlight from side to side, expecting to see a white-clad teenager who was pretending to play the role of the ghost of a dead young woman. Instead he found nothing. Nobody crouched beneath thick brush, nobody hidden behind a tree...nothing.
There was no way out and yet she was gone...seemingly vanished into thin air just like a ghost.
“I’m telling you that was no ghost,” Bo said to Claire as they began the walk home. “That was a real person pretending to be a ghost.”
“Then how do you explain the fact that you didn’t catch her? That she totally disappeared?” Claire asked.
“I can’t,” he said, his frustration obvious in his voice. “But somebody is playing a sick game and I don’t like it. I’d love to find out who it is and why she’s doing it.”
“Yet another mystery to add to the growing list,” Claire replied. She hadn’t been fooled into believing the “apparition” had been the ghost of Shelly. What she couldn’t imagine was why somebody would do such a thing. What was there to gain by pretending to be Shelly, dead and walking at the place of her murder?
She and Bo strolled at a leisurely pace as they started the trip back to his house. “There is a person who got away with murder, a crazy stalker after me and now somebody impersonating a dead woman. The whole world seems to have gone crazy,” she said.
“Number one on my priority list is making sure you stay safe and sound,” he replied, his voice deep with determination.
Her heart warmed and she reached out to grab his hand. She could walk through life’s ups and downs with his big, warm hand wrapped around hers.
Still, she couldn’t help but wonder how long this cozy safe haven Bo had provided her would last. Trey and his men had come up with nothing. She couldn’t imagine who might be after her.
How long was she willing to put her life on hold, hiding away in Bo’s house with fear as a constant, simmering companion? How long would Bo continue to live his life this way?
“You know I can’t just stay at your house forever,” she said.
“So far I’m not complaining,” he replied easily. “I wonder if the ghost walker has anything to do with the new amusement park?” he asked, obviously changing the subject.
“No way. The ghost walker started making her appearance long before the amusement park bought the land to build. Besides, if it was somehow tied to the amusement park then it would be a ghost of a pirate in keeping with the theme,” she replied.
“I thought all the ghosts of pirates past appeared at the Pirate’s Inn,” he said with a touch of amusement.
“That’s the rumor. Supposedly old Peg Leg walks down the hallway on the second floor and you can hear his wooden leg as he walks. Then there’s Pirate Joey, who is drunk on rum and stumbles around trying to find his ship.”
Bo laughed. “Shelly worked as night manager there for years and never saw a ghost, although she used to tell me it was kind of creepy to work the night shift.”
“Creepy how?”
“She occasionally heard noises like creaking and thumping. I told her it was probably nothing more than the building settling, but she still got freaked out occasionally.”
They headed down the street that was one block over from Bo’s house when she noticed the odd illumination that filled the night sky. “What’s that?” she asked.
“Looks like something is on fire,” Bo replied and squeezed her hand tighter as he pulled her into a fast jog. They reached Bo’s street, where his house was in the middle of the block, and Claire gasped in horror.
The street was alive with activity. The town’s two fire trucks were parked along the curb in front of Bo’s house. A large group of nightwear-clad neighbors had clustered on the sidewalk across the street as flames shot out of Bo’s house.
Two patrol cars were also parked on the street as she and Bo began to run toward the scene.
What had happened? Claire’s mind raced. Had they left the stove on after dinner and had i
t somehow caught fire? Had there been an electrical weakness somewhere in the walls that had sparked into flames?
The volunteer firefighters, clad in their yellow jackets, trained hoses on the flames but they appeared to be making little progress at containment. Thankfully Bo’s motorcycle was far enough down the driveway to not be in any immediate danger of catching fire or blowing up.
As they got close enough to feel the heat, Trey stopped them. “Thank God you two weren’t in there,” he said. “I was afraid we’d be looking for charred bodies in the morning.”
“How did this happen?” Bo asked, his features grim in the unnatural dancing light of the fire and the cherry swirl of lights from on top of the various emergency vehicles and patrol cars.
“I can’t answer that yet. Bob has been too busy working to talk to me,” Trey replied.
Bob McDonnel was the fire chief and at the moment one of the men manning the hoses. “He’ll be able to tell us more once they get a handle on the fire and he gets a spare minute. Right now they’re trying to save your bike and make sure the flames don’t jump to the houses on either side.”
Claire felt Bo’s frustration wafting from him as she stared at the burning house. As vicious and hungry as the flames appeared, she feared there would be nothing left when the fire went out. She was watching him lose his last tie to Lost Lagoon, the house where he’d grown up.
“By the way, where have you two been in the middle of the night?” Trey asked.
“We couldn’t sleep so we decided to take a walk,” Claire said. There was no reason for Trey to know they’d ventured out to see a ghost walk.
“Convenient that both of you just happened to be gone when the house went up in flames,” Trey replied.
Bo stiffened. “Are you implying something?”
Trey hesitated a moment. “Not particularly, just looking at all the options. You have to admit that where you go, trouble seems to follow.”
“Have you talked to Jimmy?” Bo asked.
“I haven’t had time. I figured he was still at work at Jimmy’s Place and not inside.”
Carla Cassidy Page 12
