The Unmistakable Scent of Gardenias (Haunted Hearts Series Book 6)

by Denise Moncrief

  Jordan picked a lemon wedge from the bowl on the table, squeezed the juice on his palms, and rubbed his hands together. He lifted his hands to his nose and sniffed. “Yum. Crawfish mixed with lemon.” He wiped a fresh paper towel across his face and then propped his elbows on the table. “So tell me what’s been going on. You said there had been some interesting things happen since you’ve been staying here.”

  Sophia glanced toward Dylan. The question on her face asked whether he was going to tell Jordan everything. No, he wouldn’t, but he would tell him as much as he could without telling things that weren’t any of Jordan’s business.

  Dylan stood next to Sophia and reached for her hand to reassure her that he remembered how to be discreet. “Sophia’s done some research.” For the next few minutes, the two men compared what they had each learned about the history of Wakefield Plantation and about the numerous attempts to claim the Wakefield inheritance. The history between the Wakefields and the Soileaus seemed to surprise Jordan.

  He summed up his opinion of her possible connection to the family that used to own The Grove. “I don’t know if Charlotte is related to those Soileaus or not. If she is, she’s never said so. There’s a bunch of them around St. Denis Parish. She used to say she was probably related to all of them but only half of them she’d claim.”

  Dylan nodded. “Just like most families.”

  “So tell me about the paranormal activity.”

  “Has the sheriff told you about her experiences?”

  Jordan shook his head. “No, she just hinted that she’d had some.”

  “She’s seen a woman in town who claimed to be Celia Wakefield, and she’s seen the same woman inside the manor house. The thing is… There’s no one living in the house right now. Especially not a woman named Celia Wakefield.”

  Sophia added her thought. “That might be what paranormal investigators call a residual haunting.”

  “I’ve heard of that before. Why do you think what Charlotte saw is residual?”

  “Celia would speak but not respond in a logical way. Not what ghost hunters call an intelligent haunting.”

  Dylan slipped his arm around Sophia’s waist. “The other night, it looked like the house had caught on fire underneath one corner of the front porch. You can go see for yourself. There’s no fire damage. After I put out what I thought was a fire, a big, white glowing thing appeared out of the dark. Just kind of formed right in front of me. Creepiest thing I ever saw. The sheriff said she’d seen the same thing pacing up and down the path next to the house.”

  He glanced at Sophia before he continued, and she nodded as if to reassure him she could handle him talking about her experience. “When most of the upstairs floor had been laid, we decided to explore the house. Sophia looked into a mirror in one of the bedrooms, and she saw the reflection of someone’s face covered in blood.”

  Chelsea tilted her head. “You sure you aren’t imagining stuff? That house looks creepy even from a distance. The dark could make you think you see things.”

  Sophia shook her head. “I was pretty freaked out, but I’m sure of what I saw.”

  Dylan pulled her closer to him. “Tell them about the cemetery.”

  “Collin and I… He’s Dylan’s foreman on the work crew… We went down the path on the side of the house and found a cemetery. As soon as we got close to the gate, I started feeling funny. We were about to leave when this old woman just seemed to come out of the fog. She told me Celia knew I was looking for her, and that I’d find her. That it was in my blood.”

  Jordan leaned forward. “What happened then?” Somehow he had sensed there was more to her story.

  “A ghost appeared to me in the cemetery. She asked me to help her get free. But that’s not what freaked me out… She told me to tell Dylan to beware the curse.”

  This was news to Dylan, but then they’d had no time to discuss her experience since he had returned that afternoon. “What curse?”

  “I don’t know. That’s when Collin picked me up and carried me out of there. By that time, I was freaking out.” She shivered once and clung to Dylan’s side. “Still kind of freaks me out.”

  “Collin said his men have had strange things happen in the house. A couple of his men got into a fight over nothing, and he said that’s not normal for those guys. Things go missing and they blame each other.”

  Jordan nodded. “I’ve heard rumors all my life about Wakefield Manor. A couple of the guys I grew up with said they’d been inside the house. They said some weird stuff happened, but they’d never talk about it. Though, you know, it seems like their friendship was never the same after that.”

  Dylan tried to catch Sophia’s eye before he offered his final observation. “Then there’s this other thing…”

  The room grew quiet, almost unnaturally so. Sophia cleared her throat.

  “What? What is it?” Jordan’s voice rasped with impatience.

  “Brandon Wakefield has been out here. He’s probably still hanging around. He shows up and then he disappears, just kind slips away from us before we can stop him. Punched the sheriff in the face. You know, it’s almost like the guy doesn’t even recognize us. Like he’s in a trance or something. The way the sheriff describes her encounter with him… She says she didn’t act like herself when she was around him. Like he affected her in a way she’s not sure how to describe.”

  Jordan rose from his chair. “I want to go inside the house…alone.” His sudden announcement startled Dylan.

  Chelsea jumped to her feet and grabbed his arm. “No, Jordan. You remember what happened the last time you did that.”

  Jordan smiled at her, a definite light of affection in his eyes. “If I don’t come out in fifteen minutes, send Dylan in to get me.”

  Chelsea narrowed her eyes. “This isn’t funny, Jordan.”

  “I’m not being funny. I came here to help out a friend. Sensing the mood in a house that appears to be haunted is something I can do.”

  The surprises kept coming. “What are you talking about?”

  Jordan laughed, but Dylan doubted the man was amused.

  “I seem to have a gift for feeling the emotions of the disturbed spirits in a place.” He slipped an arm around Chelsea and hugged her. “I was getting the feel of a house back in Arkansas when I met Chelsea. I guess you could say she rescued me that night.”

  She huffed her opinion of his light-hearted comments. “I might have to rescue you again. Please, let me come with you. I want to be there. You know I can hear their voices.”

  He bit his lower lip and wagged his head. “And every time you do, it drains the energy out of you.” He pulled a stray strand of hair from Chelsea’s lip. “You’re just now getting healthy. I don’t want you to get weak again.” He smiled at her. “You always do what you want to do. But please stay outside this time. I’m asking nicely.” His grin widened. “Okay?”

  She nodded her agreement, and Jordan brushed his lips against hers.

  Dylan busted into their tender moment. “I should go with you.”

  Jordan slapped him on the shoulder in a brotherly sort of way. “My gift works best if I’m alone. It always has.” He glanced up at the darkening night sky. “Now’s the best time of day to do this. Just when the sun goes down. You got a flashlight I can use?”

  Dylan pulled the light out of a nearby drawer and handed it to Jordan. “You never told me you had a gift.” Did he allow enough doubt to edge into his voice?

  “It wasn’t until I met Chelsea that I dared to admit I had one.”

  He had pushed past Dylan, rushed across the yard, and disappeared inside the manor house before Dylan could reorganize his objections.

  Fourteen and a half minutes later, Dylan was having difficulty in restraining Chelsea from following Jordan. By the time he returned, the sun had sunk below the horizon and a half moon had popped into the sky overhead casting dim light over the yard.

  Dylan, Sophia, and Chelsea stood at the bottom of the front steps. The three
of them stalled their actions when Jordan emerged. His face had drained of color, his lips pressed firmly together, and his eyes seemed half-glazed and half-crazed. He dropped onto the top step and sat with his head between his knees, moaning and muttering to himself. The flashlight dangled from his hand.

  Sophia broke through the weird moment. “So, what happened? You look like you’ve…”

  “Seen a ghost?” Jordan lifted his head and stared up at her. “No, I didn’t. But I felt their presence… There are a lot of them, and they are all very disturbed. I get the feeling one of them is holding the rest of them back from being violent. Otherwise…” He paused as if he’d started to say one thing and then decided to say another, perhaps shielding them from the depths of what he’d sensed inside the house.

  “Was one of them Les Wakefield?” In the quiet night, Sophia’s soft question sounded more like a boom than a whisper.

  “No, I didn’t feel his presence. I got the feeling… I’m not sure this makes sense.”

  Dylan urged him to go on. “What?”

  “It was like he’d gone out for a walk, and his absence gave the rest of them a chance to come out of hiding.”

  Dylan glanced at Sophia. Her mouth twitched with suppressed emotion. No doubt she was holding back a slew of questions just like Dylan was. Fifteen million questions bounced on the backside of his tongue. Jordan’s eyes locked with Dylan’s and stalled his outburst. He’d never seen his friend so afraid.

  “Les is the dangerous one. The whole bunch of them … They hate him. They’re all stirred up because he’s out in the world and they aren’t. Jealousy is a very ugly thing to feel.” He licked his lips. “They blame the women in their lives for their misfortunes. I hate to think what might have happened to Charlotte or Sophia had she not been there to protect them.”

  Nothing Jordan could have said could have startled Dylan more. “Who?”

  Jordan stared over Dylan’s shoulder as if he were gazing into another world. “The woman… For some reason, they respect her.”

  “You got all that from just going inside the house?” Unbelievable.

  “It’s the strongest feeling I’ve ever gotten from a place. I’ve never sensed that much before. It was kind of…” Jordan’s face flushed. “It was a rush of emotions. Really strong and fast and… It nearly choked me. If I had stayed any longer…”

  Chelsea rushed forward and dropped next to him on the top step, wrapping her thin arms around his waist and pressing her cheek against his shoulder. “Please don’t go in there again without me.”

  Oh yeah, Chelsea and Jordan had obviously been through much more than they had shared with Dylan. Jordan brushed her hair and whispered in her ear. Her eyes glistened with tears. She nodded and wiped her nose on Jordan’s shirtsleeve.

  Jordan finally turned his blue eyes back toward Dylan. “We shouldn’t investigate this on our own. I don’t have the equipment, and I’m not sure how often I can go in there without doing myself damage. I want to ask some friends of mine from Arkansas to come down here to help us do this right.”

  Dylan rubbed the back of his neck where a mosquito had sucked a pint of blood from his veins. “I’m not sure I want to involve anyone else.”

  “These guys have done this sort of thing a lot. I trust them. They know what they’re doing.”

  Chelsea snorted. “You mean Gray and Josh? If the spirits aren’t stirred up enough yet, Gray and Josh will disturb them even more.”

  Jordan laughed and brushed his knuckles across the tears on her cheeks. “They’re cops, and Chelsea doesn’t like cops.”

  Sophia finally wedged another word into their fast-paced conversation. “She seems to like you all right.”

  Jordan grinned. “I’m not a cop anymore. I think that’s the only reason she stays with me.”

  Chelsea sniffed. “You know it’s more than that.” Her quiet reassurance spoke volumes.

  Dylan took control of the conversation back from them before they made plans he couldn’t keep. “Call your friends. We need all the help we can get.”

  He glanced toward the house. Was it his imagination? Did a dark shadow pass across the bedroom window?

  “Sophia, maybe we should head back to New Orleans tonight.”

  She seemed to study his suggestion a long time before she spoke. “Yeah. I could use a break from this place.”

  “Are you coming back in the morning?” Jordan’s eyes glowed with anticipation.

  Dylan sighed and nodded.

  Jordan pulled his keys from his pocket. “I want to come back here tomorrow too. Why don’t we all ride together?”

  No one objected to the four of them sticking together. The adage that there were safety in numbers rolled around in the back of Dylan’s mind.

  Within minutes, Dylan and Sophia were packed and headed away from Wakefield Manor.

  Chapter Fifteen

  It was late by the time the four of them headed east on the River Road toward New Orleans. Usually Sophia was okay with lapses of conversation, but the lack of it pushed her to the limits of her patience. She wanted someone to talk about what happened, but she didn’t want to start the discussion.

  Ideas had begun rolling around in her head as they neared Vacherie. Snatches of the letters she’d read in the old desk in the bedroom at Wakefield Manor kept popping into her memory. When she was reading them, she’d had the eerie feeling that she’d read them before. The way the writer had strung her words together seemed very familiar, yet the writer was a mystery. All of them had been signed with one character, a large H presented with a distinct flourish, an old-fashioned form of penmanship.

  Dylan had been staring out the window next to him for miles. He glanced her way and wrapped his hand around hers. “What are you thinking about?”

  “Those letters I found in the bedroom of the house.” She waited for a response, but when he remained silent, she continued expressing her disjointed thoughts. “The writing seemed familiar to me, like I’d seen it before… And I keep thinking about what the old woman said to me at the cemetery.”

  “Why would you think about those two things together?” His laughter sounded like he was trying to hide his discomfort with a light-hearted attitude. The stilted quality grated on her already jumpy nerves.

  Chelsea’s quiet comment floated toward them from the front seat. “It’s obvious. Something in her subconscious is connecting them.”

  Really? It didn’t seem so obvious to Sophia. “She said that finding Celia was in my blood. What does that mean? It sounds like I have a blood connection to her, but that can’t be true.” She twisted in her seat to better stare at Dylan. “I want you to take me to my mother’s house.” He had to agree. She didn’t want to argue.

  Dylan let go of her hand and pressed his back against the door. He spluttered his objection, his face flushed with anxiety. “Your mother probably hates my guts.”

  Sophia chuckled at his fear of her mother. “Yes, she probably does, but not nearly as much as I did, and I’ve gotten over it. You have to come with me. I don’t want to go by myself.”

  “Come on, Sophia. You’re not scared of her, are you?” Was he really trying to deflect his own fear back at her?

  “Afraid of my mother? You just have to know how to work her. No, I’m more afraid of what I might find in her house.”

  Dylan frowned, and his expression was comical, enough so that Sophia had to suppress her amusement at his expense. Laughing at him would not go over well. Like most men, Dylan was a sensitive sort when it came to his male ego.

  “What could you possibly find at your mother’s house that has anything to do with the Wakefields? Are you related? Have you been holding back information?”

  “Whatever I’m remembering is in my grandmother’s things, and those are stored in my mother’s garage. So I need to go to Lafayette to look through my Maw Maw’s stuff, and if I find something, I want you to be there with me.” She allowed a bit of wobble into her voice, enough to let him think s
he was going to get emotional if he didn’t comply.

  They’d decided to take Jordan’s car instead of Dylan’s truck because they could all fit. Instead of leaving his truck at the plantation, Dylan had asked Bobby McIntosh if he could leave it at his place. Bobby was more than happy to babysit Dylan’s truck. You’d think he’d been asked to watch over royalty. What was it about guys and their trucks?

  Jordan braked hard as he came to an intersection. The sudden stop made them bounce forward and then backward. Jordan pointed toward a highway sign. “Then I should cut over to I-10. If we head that way now, we ought to get there around nine-thirty or ten. Maybe you should call your mother and warn her we’re coming.”

  “Hold up a minute. I’m not sure—”

  “Shut up, Dylan. If Sophia wants to go to Lafayette to see her mother, then I’m taking her to see her mother.”

  Dylan grunted. His expression reminded her of a puppy that had been tapped on the nose with a newspaper for puddling on the floor.

  “If you don’t want to face her mother, I’ll go with her.”

  Chelsea grinned at Jordan like he was her hero. Sophia dared to smirk at Dylan.

  “Fine. I guess I have some sucking up to do to your mother anyway.”

  Sophia leaned back in her seat. “You’d have to eventually.”

  It wasn’t easy getting her way with Dylan when his mind was made up. Life with him would never be easy, but she’d rather argue with him over everything than lose him again over anything. Such a trade off. The old woman in the cemetery was right. They were made for each other. She hoped that he had finally come to see it that way. He said he had.

  For the moment, she chose to believe him. Trust was easier to lose than to build up again after it had been torn down. At this point in their newly remade relationship, she had to make that choice or live without him.

  ****

  “Sophia, you’re home!” Her mother spread her arms and pulled Sophia into a tight hug. Then, Maggie Cannon pushed her back enough to look her up and down. “Are you getting enough to eat?”