Harlequin E Shivers Box Set Volume 4: The HeadmasterDarkness UnchainedForget Me NotQueen of Stone

by Tiffany Reisz

  And now Gracie was the one beyond the grave.

  Chapter Two

  She found herself in the passenger seat of the large SUV that had a gold star on its door. The interior of the vehicle was uncomfortably warm in the late-afternoon sun, but Maddy didn’t open the window.

  She was cocooned and she knew it. Shut away from the bustle outside and every unimaginable thing the bustle entailed.

  Maddy breathed deeply of the stuffy air because it was pleasant even if it was hot. Robust coffee—an espresso blend—sat forgotten in the cup holder of the center console. Its scent blended with the pleasant fragrance of worn leather seats, the well-oiled shotgun on the rack above her head and the slightest hint of woodsy cologne. The last rose from a discarded jacket in the otherwise empty backseat.

  So she breathed.

  And she waited.

  But not for long.

  Soon, the sheriff detached himself from a group of people wearing disposable white coveralls that proclaimed Forensics down each sleeve. He strode toward her and his SUV with purpose. He didn’t hurry, but his steps were energetic. Her intrusion on the crime scene must be an extra task that had been added to his list.

  The door opened, allowing a waft of chilled air scented by autumn leaves and dirt to enter the cabin of the SUV. She was glad when he climbed in and shut the door. That particular forest scent might haunt her forevermore.

  Constantine’s presence charged the atmosphere, making the large vehicle feel not quite so big after all.

  “One of the deputies could drive me back to town,” Maddy said.

  “I’ll see you settled,” he said.

  Maddy didn’t argue.

  He turned the key and the diesel engine rumbled to life beneath them. She reached to fasten her seatbelt as he maneuvered the vehicle in a wide circle away from the crime scene. She closed her eyes anyway and swallowed. She thought about Gracie seeing everything in terms of the next perfect shot. Her stepsister had been intense, energetic and seemingly unstoppable.

  Seemingly.

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Clark,” Constantine said.

  She opened her eyes and looked sideways at the tense set of his jaw. His teeth were clenched.

  “So am I,” Maddy replied. She thought about those last pictures Gracie had taken of the man who now sat close by her side.

  She was sorry about so many things.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  He didn’t ask for directions to her house. Scarlet Falls was small and she’d been the stepsister of a missing person. A year ago she’d given a brief statement at the sheriff’s office. He’d never been to her house, but he must have kept tabs on her. That probably explained why he was able to drive her straight to her door. Still, she felt oddly exposed and vulnerable as she followed him up the walk to her porch with its planters full of purple and yellow pansies shifting in the evening breeze.

  When a large yellow tabby cat rose, stretched and yawned at their approach, Maddy stopped and stared. The cat came to her and twined around her ankles, but all she could do was teeter on the edge of disbelief.

  “Where is your key?” Constantine asked, unaware of her surprise at the cat’s appearance.

  “It isn’t locked,” she told him. The cat had distinctive stripes that tilted up from the corners of its eyes. She’d seen another cat with those markings in this town, but it had died years ago.

  “It. Isn’t. Locked,” the sheriff repeated, deadpan. He stood with one hand on his hip and the other on the back of his neck as if his muscles were stiff, but he didn’t stretch. He only stood, his blue eyes trained on her face.

  “I didn’t think I should drive so I left my keys…” Maddy said. She would never have left her door unlocked in Boston. Her cheeks warmed under his calm but fierce appraisal.

  Constantine turned and approached the door with caution. It was closed as she’d left it, but he still opened it carefully and slipped inside before shutting it behind him, leaving her outside.

  Maddy leaned over and picked up the cat at her feet. It meowed a greeting as if they were old friends. Easy. Normal. No reason for the look in its amber eyes to make nerves skitter down her spine.

  Across town in the cozy parlor of Scarlet Falls’s Historical Society, a cat named Gibbons slept forever on an embroidered cushion. She’d made the mistake of talking to the taxidermied mascot when she’d been called to handle a renovation of the Society’s landscaping, only to be told the poor cat had died twenty years ago.

  As a man she didn’t fully trust checked her home room by room, Maddy held the cat that had begun to purr in her arms. He was very warm and very alive. There were hundreds of thousands of yellow tabby cats in the world. Probably hundreds in Scarlet Falls alone. The resemblance meant nothing. Nothing at all. Today was a grim day. It was setting her on edge, making her see strangeness in the most innocent of circumstances.

  Only when Constantine came back to the porch did Maddy wonder if he’d seen the photographs she’d left on her bedside table and what he would make of them if he had. He was the only person her stepsister had photographed in town before she was killed. The only one.

  As he stepped down the porch steps, she stepped up. When she reached the top, she allowed the cat to drop down to the porch and pad back over to its spot in the waning sunlight. Then she turned to look down at the man several steps below her.

  “Someone killed your sister,” Constantine began.

  “I know,” she said. Her shock had faded, but it still pulsed at the edges of her perception. The revelation was that her shock wasn’t entirely new. She’d known. Some part of her had known all along. She hadn’t come to Scarlet Falls to find Gracie. She’d come here for the same reason she’d walked to High Lake. To grieve.

  “Until we know more, you need to be more cautious. Lock your doors. Hell, always lock your doors,” Constantine continued.

  He’d moved closer to the foot of the stairs. He was a tall man with a powerful build and broad shoulders even though he was lean. She wished it was caution that made her note the muscular movement of his arms and chest beneath the khaki of his uniform shirt. Her stomach tightened because it wasn’t about caution at all—it was an instinctive woman-to-man observation.

  “Be careful,” Constantine said, but before she could assure him that she would be he stepped closer still and she didn’t back away. She didn’t turn away and go inside and lock her door. For some reason, standing and not running away from him felt completely decadent and dangerous, as if she were asking for trouble.

  She was higher than he was. He looked up at her. The change was dizzying—partly because he was too physically powerful to seem vulnerable, and yet the position and the look in his eyes made him deceptively so.

  His thick, dark blond hair fell long on his forehead several weeks past the point of needing a trim. The waves shadowed his eyes, as did the sinking sun. More shadows played in the hollows of his cheeks and on the set of his jaw, still tense, still tight.

  Deception.

  Maddy stiffened and backed toward the door.

  “We’ll find the killer,” Constantine said.

  Her hand groped for the doorknob behind her back until she found it with a sense of relief. But she still didn’t turn it and make her way inside. She didn’t know whether to thank him or fear him or both.

  Because maybe the killer had already been found.

  She desperately wanted to brush the hair back from William Constantine’s face and find the light in his eyes, but she was also afraid. Her stepsister had been fascinated by him, and now she was dead.

  Maddy kept her hands to herself and only watched as Constantine walked away.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  He was still in the house.

  Or so it seemed.

  The faint hint of his woodsy scent lingered in the foyer, around the tight corner of the back hall and into her bedroom.

  She checked the stack of photographs first while the stray cat wound around her ankles as if he belonged her
e. The stack had definitely been disturbed—it looked as though it had been riffled through and shuffled like a deck of cards.

  She looked at the one that now rested on top. It was of William Constantine on the back stoop of a large shabby Victorian in a black T-shirt and low-slung jeans. Off duty, but still tense, his stance the same as earlier today with one hand on his hip and the other on the back of his neck.

  There was something about the picture that had caught her attention before, but she still couldn’t say what it was beyond the rugged perfection of his face and form. Beneath that photo was the one snapshot she’d found of something other than Scarlet Falls’s sheriff. It was a small waterfall, rough and rocky and craggily picturesque. The photograph was taken from its base with the camera pointing up the watery cascade.

  With a sigh, she placed the stack back on her nightstand. She cringed as she imagined what he must have thought of her stepsister’s photographs and her keeping the photos so close to her pillow.

  But maybe it didn’t matter.

  Maybe a suggestion of the inappropriate on her part paled in comparison to what he might have done. She didn’t for one second believe in the things her stepsister believed in—spirits coexisting with the living and seeking ways to communicate—but what if Gracie had photographed the sheriff for her usual outlandish reasons only to stumble upon something real? Someone had killed her. Maybe someone with something to hide. What if that someone was Sheriff Constantine?

  And what if the photographs had alerted a murderer to her suspicions?

  For long seconds after that thought Maddy stood in the darkening room. She had locked the doors. Would that stop a killer from getting inside?

  The cat, much too fluffy and fat to be an actual stray, had already hopped up on her bed to claim a soft plush throw draped over the foot of her mattress. But after only a few seconds of cleaning his front paws, he jumped down, padded across the floor and jumped up onto the top of a vanity with a wavy mirror that proclaimed its antique age. The vanity had been in the fully furnished house when she’d rented it last fall.

  The cat pawed at something as it sat among brushes, moisturizer and makeup. She stepped forward, the click of bottles making her nervous that something would break and possibly harm the curious animal.

  Her reflection, like the cat’s, was distorted in the mirror, both of them shadowy and vague, but the cat’s paw nudged at something much more distinct. Stuck in the elaborate frame of the vanity’s mirror between one bunch of carved grapes and another was a dried posy of pale blue forget-me-not flowers tied with a small faded bow.

  It hadn’t been there before.

  Not when she’d applied lotion to her legs last night.

  Not when she’d brushed her hair that morning.

  Maddy reached for the tiny dry bundle and pulled it loose. The cat leaped down then back up on the foot of her bed as if it had completed a task.

  She couldn’t imagine Sheriff Constantine wedging the posy into the frame of the vanity’s mirror, but it was almost worse imagining some faceless stranger in her home while she walked across town.

  Forget-me-not.

  Maddy squeezed the brittle flowers too tightly and they became pale blue dust in her hand. She used her other hand to open one of the drawers in the dressing table’s base. Then she opened her fisted fingers to allow the petal dust and faded ribbon to fall. It was easy to close the drawer and pretend the tiny bouquet had been something she hadn’t noticed, there on the mirror, all along.

  Chapter Three

  Maddy woke the next day with a cat she had no intention of adopting meowing at her kitchen door. She sleepily let him outside and watched him bound off her back stoop and onto the silent street.

  It was early.

  The town was still asleep.

  Curtains were drawn. Garage doors were closed. There was no movement and no noise.

  High above the houses—so far above that it was nothing more than a black dot—a bird circled overhead.

  Maddy closed the door.

  Distrust was an itch beneath her skin that she couldn’t scratch. She’d always worked long hours, but she’d managed to make friends in Scarlet Falls and had many friendly acquaintances beyond that.

  They couldn’t all be suspect.

  Not the eccentric matron of the Scarlet Falls Historical Society with her constant knitting and her long-dead stuffed cat.

  Not the infamous occult author with his predilection for expensive Scotch and hoarding historical objects both creepy and bizarre.

  Not his new wife, the nurse, with her constant walking and her sweet but sad smile.

  No.

  She couldn’t live afraid of everyone and everything because of Gracie’s violent end.

  Maddy moved toward the coffeemaker. She flicked its switch and waited as the aromatic scent of her morning blend rose up around her. Sleepiness fled and was replaced by trepidation.

  She remembered the strong pleasant espresso scent of yesterday.

  Gracie had focused on Sheriff Constantine. Maddy had to acknowledge that unspoken warning even if she was secretly drawn to the man with his shadowed eyes and determined jaw. What if that pull of magnetism was actually her instincts trying to point her toward her stepsister’s killer?

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  She raked leaves that morning with two photographs in her pocket even though she could have made her excuses and Mrs. Jesham would have understood. The yellow leaves from the elms that lined the street on which the Historical Society stood had blown and drifted onto the lawn of the recently renovated Victorian.

  So she had dressed for work and locked all her windows and doors before taking the van across town. Making small things right like cleaning up the messy leaves soothed her.

  Physical exertion gave Maddy something to focus on besides fear and frustration. The curtains twitched several times as Mrs. Jesham checked on her progress, but the senior woman didn’t venture outside. She rarely did in spite of her involvement in Scarlet Falls’ Garden Club. She seemed to prefer to man the reception desk while she plied her knitting needles surrounded by thousands of old photographs and dusty memorabilia.

  Claustrophobia tightened Maddy’s chest as she thought about Violet Jesham’s preferred environment. Maddy had always needed to be outside. Even today, when the scent of earth and leaves reminded her of dark deeds, she was still glad to be beneath the October sky.

  As she thought it, she looked up. Her chest tightened more. Another bird circled and circled, this time lower in elevation so she could see its beating wings. Lazily, it caught one current and then another, cycling ever downward, closer and closer still.

  Maddy pulled her eyes away from the bird’s movements. She ignored the irrational sensation of being watched and followed by the same bird she’d seen on the fence post the day before.

  Of course the same bird wasn’t stalking her.

  Maddy worked until the leaves were bagged and left on the curb for recycling collection later in the day. All morning she’d been aware of the photographs in her pocket and the silent intention they represented.

  She was going to The Falls.

  She had the two photographs that seemed different from the others. She had finally realized what had caught her attention about the first—the one of Sheriff Constantine on his back stoop. Constantine’s eyes had been cut toward the camera. He’d been all too aware of being photographed. She’d also brought the picture of the small waterfalls that connected High Lake to the river that ran through the town.

  Her stepsister had been there just before she died. The photograph she’d taken was from a year ago, when autumn leaves had been on the ground like the ones that must have covered her grave.

  Maddy waved to Violet Jesham when the lace curtain fluttered again, and then she climbed into her van to drive to The Falls.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  The woods around High Lake were dark and damp. There were still enough leaves on the deciduous trees to block the meager autum
n sun. Paired with the conifers—spruce, pine and cedar—the trees shadowed the trail that meandered to The Falls even at midday.

  Maddy hunched her shoulders against the chill and made her way along the path her stepsister must have taken. The Falls weren’t impressive enough to draw tourists and the metallic bite in the air from the iron-heavy water was unpleasant enough to discourage locals. In fact, High Lake itself was mostly barren—glassy and dead.

  But there was music ahead nonetheless—the sound of water rushing over mossy stones as gravity sucked it down toward the town. The hissing symphony grew louder and louder.

  The trail opened up only slightly at a small clearing where The Falls sang. For some reason the sound caused goose bumps to rise on Maddy’s skin. Maybe it was the drop in temperature near the cool water and the misty air. Or maybe it was the vulnerable feeling of being watched that wouldn’t leave her. The jagged and jumbled stones at the base of The Falls mirrored the tumultuous landscape of her emotions.

  She’d heard the gurgle of waterfalls likened to the sound of laughter, but in the shadowed glade she thought the water over the rocks sounded like incessant whispers whose meaning she couldn’t fathom.

  She took the picture of The Falls from her pocket and looked at it. She wanted to position herself where her stepsister had been when the photograph was taken. A large stone at the midway point of The Falls’s drop was too rounded and covered by slimy moss to be a safe perch, but Maddy determined it had to have been where Gracie had stood to capture the shot.

  Thankful for her lug-soled boots, Maddy stepped her way from one slick stone to another, surrounded by sibilant whispers of water that splashed against the rocks and further slicked her shoes. The water shooshed, shivered and shied along its path only to disperse in a misty explosion of chaos on the rocks below.

  Finally, she held herself and her breath on the large stone where Gracie must have stood a year ago. Metallic mist coated her skin and her hair, causing tendrils to curl damply around her face. She looked up at the top of The Falls to try to see beyond the landscape, knowing her stepsister wouldn’t have been here for the view.