by Ghost Night
They drank their tea then, cold, and though she kept drifting to sleep at his side, she would awake again and again with a start.
He found the remote and at long last turned on a late-night talk show. The noise seemed to soothe her.
She slept next to him as if he were a bastion against the edge of eternal darkness.
Waking with Sean was amazing; she had felt his body and warmth throughout the night, and she had slept deeply. She opened her eyes and felt wonderful. He had been on his stomach at an angle, and she had been sleeping against his back. Great back, broad shoulders, long clean lines, bronze flesh. She drew her finger down the length of his spine delicately, waking him immediately.
He woke well, too. It was all so new and amazing, of course. He turned and took her into his arms, a wicked look in his eyes, and they made love to start the day.
Afterward, Vanessa headed to Katie’s room to shower and leave Sean in his own space, and once she was dressed, she came downstairs and to the back of the house where he’d set up his office. He was there already, telling her that coffee was poured and that when she was ready, they’d go over the shooting schedule and she could tell him anything that she thought he might have missed.
Walking into the kitchen while reading the schedule that Sean had printed for her, she stopped, stunned—as if she’d been hit by a brick.
For a moment—just for a moment—she thought that she saw the pirate again. Tall, lean, dashing, rich black hair, plumed hat, standing thoughtfully by the dining-room window, staring out at the day.
She saw him in such detail!
And then he was gone.
She blinked. There was nothing there. Sun streaming in played on the dust motes in the air.
She hurried over to the coffeepot and poured a large cup. She nearly scalded her throat in her hurry to drink it down.
Now she was seeing things nearly on an hourly basis. And after such a miraculous night of deep and undisturbed sleep.
Sean walked into the kitchen to pour himself more coffee. He frowned, looking at her. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
“Really? You look—scared.”
She smiled. “With you in the room? Never,” she said with a laugh. She walked over and hugged him and drew away quickly. “I had another thought that we might add in on your schedule.”
“Right,” Sean said, smiling. “What scene would you add?”
“Jay and me at night, walking down to where we saw nothing. Where I found the bodies the next morning. Very descriptive without being gruesome.”
“I like it. Write it in. Obviously, we’ll film hours that we’ll wind up editing out, but any scene that you think might enhance the project, just tell me.”
Vanessa lowered her head and smiled. It was amazing that he might have hurt her so much and made her so angry—and that, as far as a working relationship went, he was completely confident and comfortable. He knew what he wanted; he knew where he was going. It occurred to her then that they both wanted the same thing. She hoped they made an excellent documentary that was engrossing and made others think, as well.
Until that moment, she realized, she’d been thinking of her own agenda.
The phone rang, causing her to nearly jump out of her skin.
Sean arched a brow to her. “Hey, telephone. It’s a landline—remember those? Granted, we don’t use them much anymore.” He walked over to answer it.
She couldn’t be so jumpy. They would lock her up—before they could even get to the project.
Sean answered the phone. He frowned and reached into his pocket. “Sorry, forgot to plug it in last night.” He glanced at Vanessa and smiled. “I got distracted,” he said.
Then his smile faded. “You’re kidding!” he said.
He listened again.
“I’ll be right there,” he said.
He hung up and stared thoughtfully at Vanessa.
“What?” she demanded.
“The body was stolen.”
“What?” she repeated.
“I’m heading out to meet Liam. I won’t be long. The body was stolen out of the university van. The problem is, no one knows when. They’d packed it up this morning, and Doctors Aislinn and Latham were at a Cracker Barrel in the middle of the state when they decided to check to make sure that the chest wasn’t moving around too much. Well, it wasn’t moving. It was gone.”
“Someone stole the body out of the van?” she repeated incredulously.
He nodded.
“Who in the hell would want to steal a mummified body?” she demanded.
“Here’s my question,” he said. “Who in hell would even know that it was there to be stolen?”
Liam was in his office, filling out paperwork. He looked up the minute Sean came in and glumly waved toward a chair on the other side of his desk.
“Anything?” Sean asked him.
“Nothing—this may be worse than the damned Bermuda Triangle. Most of the time, we can’t even find a stolen car, and then we find them half the time because they have LoJack, but they’re stripped. But this isn’t a car we’re looking for, it’s a chest with a body in it! This is going to be impossible. They don’t know when it happened. They had just left a Cracker Barrel in the center of the state when Dr. Latham decided to check on their cargo. So—they’d stopped for breakfast in Florida City. The van might have been broken into then. It could have happened when they pulled off a few times along the way. So, it might have been stolen anywhere from Key West to Orlando. They believed that their cargo was safe—who tries to steal a corpse?”
“Is there anything we can do?” Sean asked.
“We have reports filled out and sent around the state,” Liam said. “They’ve dusted for fingerprints. The lock was sprung with a pick, but that doesn’t really help any. The door could still be secured, so it doesn’t mean that the chest was stolen later than earlier.” He shook his head. “Someone must have thought it was a treasure chest.”
“There was an article that ran in the paper this morning—David talked to a reporter last night, and I believe it went around on the wire and on the Internet. The article announced that it was a body that had been found.”
“Maybe the thieves weren’t on the Internet, and God knows, they probably didn’t read the newspaper, either,” Liam said. “The officers here are livid, of course. Keys police tend to be very territorial—they take the theft personally. She was our creepy old body, the way they look at it. They’ll be doing everything they can, searching for anything suspicious. Obviously, you need a reason to stop people and search their trucks or vans, but we’re good and subtle around here—learned a lot from the drug traffic. Someone may just find the chest somewhere—I mean, once they’ve discovered they haven’t any gold, silver or precious gems, they may just abandon the chest.”
Sean shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I think that the body was stolen on purpose.”
“What? By gang members? Like some kind of initiation? If we have a large clan of devil worshipers down here, I don’t know anything about it,” Liam said.
“I don’t think it was gang members or devil worshipers. I think it was someone…I don’t know. Someone involved, somehow,” Sean said.
“And recently, two unexplained disappearances,” Liam said.
“We may be getting into something very bad.”
“Well, I am a cop. It’s the kind of thing I’m supposed to be doing,” Liam said dryly.
“Are you set for tomorrow?” Sean asked.
“I am—shifts covered for two weeks,” Liam told him. “Why?”
“I’d like to go for some target practice sometime before tomorrow.”
“Target practice?”
“It’s been a while for me,” Sean said.
“You are really expecting trouble,” Liam said.
“Hey—now a nearly two-hundred-year-old body has been stolen. Yes, I g
uess I am expecting trouble.”
“And you still want to proceed?”
Sean hesitated. “I think I feel now more than ever that we have to,” he said. “Maybe stealing the body was someone’s idea of a prank. And maybe there is something here that we’re not seeing—but maybe we’re close, and there was something we weren’t meant to discover. I don’t know. Not much makes sense yet. But yes. With what and who we have—hell, yes, we have to move forward now.”
While Sean was gone, Vanessa continued to study the schedule, adding in notes and suggestions. She liked reviewing his work, and going over all the notes he had made about supplies, lighting and editing in the scenes that would go with the narrative.
She rose at one point, realizing that they’d had coffee but not breakfast. Now it was nearly lunchtime, and she was hungry.
She heard the sound of the air-conditioner kicking on as she walked to the kitchen. It might be late fall, but the day was growing warm. The sun was bright outside, casting the dancing rays of rebounding sunlight into the room to play with dust motes in the air again.
She froze again.
He was there again.
Someone by the window. Someone in pirate attire.
She nearly screamed. She felt again the weakness of her legs buckling.
At first, her mind raced in a somewhat rational direction.
Carlos. It was Carlos Roca. She had seen him, and he was real, and she was wrong, and Sean was right, and he was guilty of murder, and now he had come for her.
But it wasn’t Carlos.
It was the pirate—the dandy pirate.
The tall, striking fellow with the sweeping hat and brocade coat. The one she had seen yesterday, and then briefly again just this morning.
She would blink, and he would go away. He wasn’t real. He was her mind playing tricks.
Really no. She was seeing things.
But she blinked, and this time he remained. She realized that he was staring at her with equal consternation. He jumped up, his eyes locked with hers, and gasped.
“Oh my God!” he cried.
She was hearing things, as well as seeing them. Not just a figurehead through a camera lens. Oh, no, this was much worse. This was a walking, talking pirate ghost.
In her room.
She let out a weak scream.
He let out a weak scream.
Her mouth worked hard.
“Mad Miller!” she gasped.
“Good God, no!” the apparition replied in horror.
Replied. It was talking to her, the images talked to her now, even when she was awake.
She fell back against the door, her hand flying to her throat.
“You’re not there,” she gasped out.
“My God! You can see me!” he cried. “You can really see me!”
Her knees were really buckling now. And he seemed to be fading in and out, and she wasn’t sure what she saw, or what she heard.
“Who are you?” she demanded.
“A friend, I swear. All right, I’m dead, I’m a ghost—but I’m a friend, honest to God, please don’t scream again!”
She didn’t.
So much for being strong. So much for being the kind of woman who just didn’t pass out.
She slumped against the wall and sank to the floor, entering a sweet world of darkness and silence.
12
As he headed back to his house, Sean tried not to dwell on the stolen corpse. He called different suppliers, making sure that everything was set for them to leave in the morning. He had a few calls to make, since they needed everything from diving supplies to film, memory cards, backup equipment and groceries.
David called to let him know that he and Jamie were at the dock and that things were coming as promised.
He tried calling Vanessa, but she didn’t pick up.
She was at his house—locked in.
But he found himself hurrying. He didn’t know why the theft of the body disturbed him so much. Liam had been right—it had probably been some kind of a prank. Or, God knew, maybe an eccentric collector had decided that he just had to have a mummified murder victim from the early eighteen hundreds.
Still, as he neared his house, he was almost running. It occurred to him that he’d been gone a long time. Liam had not been able to leave the station then—he’d been tying up his paperwork and transferring his workload to other detectives throughout the day in preparation for taking his vacation time with Sean and David and the crew.
An hour at the range had been good. He’d always had a clear eye and a steady aim, but since guns weren’t in his workaday world, he hadn’t carried one in a long time.
The day’s events at the fort and beach would be drawing to a close, but there would be parties, lectures and “pirate” entertainment as the night arrived. Once again, pirates and their consorts would be roaming the streets. At the moment, it was one of the most beautiful times of the day; there was nothing like a Key West sunset. The bright sunlight gave way to a gentle, pale yellow, and the brilliant blue of the sky overhead became a silver-gray. Then the sun started down, and it seemed that the horizon and everything around was shot full with a palette of unbelievable colors, from deep magenta to the most delicate pink, shimmering gold to gentle rose. It was most amazing to watch the sun set over the water, but to Sean, the colors were still visible, and the colors were what created the beauty.
The brighter shades were just giving way to violet, silver and gray when he reached his house. Once there, he bounded up the walk and fitted his key into the lock, calling Vanessa’s name.
In the foyer, he paused, calling her name again.
Vanessa was there. She walked to the foyer from the center of the house and the kitchen and dining-room area.
She stared at him with immense eyes that seemed to accuse him of the foulest of heinous deeds.
“Sean,” she said.
He noticed that she had shampooed her hair and that she was wearing a white halter dress that showed off the tan of her skin.
“Are we going somewhere?” he asked.
“Oh, yes. Bon voyage party at O’Hara’s. All of our friends will be joining us,” she told him. “It will be Katie’s last night for now, so she’s going to be there in case Clarinda needs her. David said as long as we’re all ready and aboard by ten we’ll be fine…oh, and Marty has turned his booth over to his friend for pirate fest—you have been gone awhile. Did you learn anything?”
“No. The police barely know where to start searching for the chest. I went—I went to target practice with Liam.”
“We’re having guns aboard?” she asked, frowning.
“Think about it. Yes,” he said.
“Well, we don’t have to leave right away. Come in and sit down and let’s talk for a minute, shall we? Sit, please. Can I get you something? It is your house, of course. Thank goodness, the choices here are much broader than what I have up in my room. Beer? Wine? Soda, soda and whiskey, or whiskey. Rum! That’s right. It’s a pirate drink. Strange, I’ve had this growing affection for a good stiff drink from just about the time I arrived here.”
She was definitely behaving strangely, and yet she certainly seemed stone-cold sober.
He followed her to the dining room. He noticed that Bartholomew was there. He was seated at the dining-room table. He looked at Sean with a guilty expression.
Sean frowned, feeling a sensation of dread.
“I’ll take a beer,” Sean said. “But I can get it myself.”
“No, no, let me. Sit,” she said.
He took a chair at the end of the table. Bartholomew—for once—was silent.
Vanessa set a beer in front of him. She had taken one for herself, and walked around to take a seat at the other end of the dining-room table.
“Sean, I mentioned to you that I see a figurehead—with Dona Isabella’s face on it—in the water, and it leads me to things beneath.”
“Yes,” he said slowly. Carefully.
She lea
rned toward him, eyes snapping with light and anger. “You hypocrite!”
“What?”
“You tell me everything is a trick of the mind—when you live with a ghost!”
He was certain that his jaw fell. Then, of course, he gave himself away by staring at Bartholomew. She saw him! She saw Bartholomew.
“What a jerk!” she told him. “You might have mentioned your pirate friend to me!”
“Privateer,” Bartholomew said, but weakly.
“You see him,” he said, his voice just as pale.
“Yes, and he nearly gave me a heart attack. You should have told me. When I saw him, I thought that he might have been Mad Miller—”
“That was terribly insulting,” Bartholomew interjected.
“How was I supposed to know?” Vanessa snapped to him. She wagged a finger at Sean. “You should have told me!”
He opened his mouth but no sound came. He cleared his throat and tried again. “You would have thought that I was crazy.”
“Really? That’s great. Instead, I’ve been thinking that I’m crazy.”
“You can see him—clearly?” Sean asked.
“She’s far more perceptive than you’ll ever be,” Bartholomew said.
“Thank you so much,” Sean said dryly.
“You want everything to be black and white,” Bartholomew said. “You want science and explanations.”
“There is probably a science to everything,” Sean said. He looked at Bartholomew. “We just haven’t figured it all out yet.”
“I hope not—I hope something is left to a—a dimension of faith, or the next world, be it Heaven or Hell,” Bartholomew said earnestly. “God forbid someone discovers how to force a soul to stay on this earthly plain.”
Sean looked from Bartholomew to Vanessa. “You hear him clearly, too?”
“Perfectly. Actually, we had a lovely discussion this afternoon. He’s been around watching out for me a great deal of the time. I kept feeling as if there were…something. Of course, I didn’t believe in ghosts,” she said. “But now…”
