Harrison Investigations 1 Haunted (13 page)

"She's working for me," he repeated.

"Yeah. Like the air doesn't crackle when the two of you get
close."

True enough. But he'd be damned if he'd have these two knowing
anything and taunting him about his attraction to the ghost
buster he didn't believe in.

"She's only here until she finds something...or until Adam
arrives," he said curtly. Then he nudged Riley with his thighs and
headed out for the forest. He hadn't asked any questions about
which way she'd ridden, nor did he look for any signs.

He was certain that he'd find her right where she'd been before,
near the water, probably seated right on the same log.

"Communing" with the forest.

A surge of irritation filled him, and yet he was anxious to
reach her, and suddenly, deeply glad as well that he'd reached the
house when he had. There wasn't a damned thing wrong with
Clint-except that he was a spendthrift and a womanizer. He did have
a way with the opposite sex, though. He was all smiles and
courtesy, and made many an easy conquest. Carter, too, seemed to
manage his share of affairs. And he hadn't seen either of them so
determined in a long time. Hell, never determined enough to
argue over one woman.

So?

If she was interested in one of them...?

She was working for him. Or rather, come to think of it,
Harrison Investigations had paid for their exploration and
examination of Melody House. It was his damned house. That gave him
the right to have a proprietary feeling.

Maybe it didn't.

Hell, he had one anyway.

He reached the copse, the brook, and the place where the fallen
log lay in the forest. Nellie, wide-eyed, stood in the brook. The
horse wasn't drinking, just standing. She seemed to be in a strange
trance, swaying oddly in the water.

Matt looked hurriedly to the log. Darcy was not there.

Then he heard a sound. A grunting. His eyes were diverted
close to one of the old oaks. He stared incredulously,
dismounting from his horse by rote, staring at Darcy.

She was on her hands and knees, digging furiously. Covered in
mud. His austere, regal-looking guest was smudged with raw earth
from head to toe, and she was totally oblivious to the fact that he
was there.

She'd dug a really big hole with only the help of a club-shaped
log and a sharp stone.

"Darcy?"

As he said her name softly, she gave out a cry of
triumph.

And in the eerie light of the dying day, she raised a human
skull high into the air.

______ 6____

She had found it!

Elation roared through Darcy.

"Darcy!"

Her name was called out so roughly that she nearly dropped the
skull. She looked to see that Matt had come upon her in the
woods.

"Matt! I've found it!"

But one look at his face assured her that he didn't share her
pleasure in the discovery.

"What the hell are you doing?" he demanded.

"Matt, it's her skull-the younger sister's skull. The story was
true. History. We all knew that she had been murdered by her older
sister."

"Put it down immediately," he admonished harshly.

She stared at him, confused, frowning.

"Down, put it down!"

Slowly, she did so. "What on earth is the matter with you?" she
demanded. "Look, whether you believe in any of this or not, you
don't have to be such a jerk. I've found her skull. We can bury it
with her body. That would just be human decency."

He hunkered down by her, looking at the skull that now lay on
the freshly dug earth. He didn't touch it, but stared at her again.
"Keep your hands off it."

"But-"

"You've got a human skull there. And I'm the sheriff."

She looked at him then in total disbelief. "But. . .this murder
took place well over a hundred years ago! What are you going to try
to do-arrest someone?''

"How do you know that?"

"What do you mean, how do I know that? We both know the
story."

He waved a hand in the air, dismissing her outrage. "Are you a
bone expert as well, Miss Tremayne?"

Anger took slow root in her, and, along with it, a sinking feel
of desolation. Dammit, he knew it. He knew as well as she did that
the skull had been in the earth for eons. And there was something
about the way he was hunkered down, near her, yet a million miles
away. He wasn't going to admit that she had found the skull, that
she was right, and that she had somehow come upon it through
extrasensory perception. At the same time, he knew in his gut
that was just what she had done. He drew away. He didn't believe in
her power, but he was still repulsed by it, maybe at some
instinctive level of his own.

"All right. There's your skull. What are you going to do about
it?"

"I'm going to see that it's properly handled."

"It belongs to a poor, young, innocent girl who was brutally
murdered by someone she loved and trusted. To handle it properly,
you merely need to get the records out and see that her head is
buried with her body," Darcy said angrily.

"You can guarantee me, beyond a doubt, that this is her skull?"
he said scornfully.

"Yes."

"Well, that's not the way the law works."

"You're being ridiculous."

"I'm doing my job."

Darcy stood up and dusted her hands on the sides of her jeans.
"Fine. You do what you have to do," she said, and started walking
away from him.

She felt his hand fall upon her upper arm. Hard. When he swung
her back, there was too much force to his touch. She stared at his
hand, stared at his eyes. He released her instantly.

"Do you go around finding body parts all the time and just
burying them because you're convinced they have to be ancient?"

"No."

"No to which?"

"We both know whose head this is!"

"Whether we do or not, human remains have to be handled
properly. Legally."

Her eyes fell. Maybe he was right on that. And maybe she was
just dismayed by the horror she had seen in his eyes when he had
watched her with the skull.

"All right, Sheriff. I bow to your very logical and legal
reasoning. If you'll excuse me, though, I think I'll head back for
a shower."

He nodded, those gray eyes still on her. She felt a strange hurt
inside, and she was furious with herself. Matt Stone had been a
hostile force from the very beginning. She'd been an idiot to let
any measure of attraction form between mem. And yet... attraction
didn't
form.
It existed. It existed right then as they
stood in the woods, as they stared at one another. Something in the
air, alive, electric, static. She'd never felt such an urge to come
close to another person, press against him, feel his arms
wrap around her. She was certain that the sheer heat dancing in the
air emitted from him. And she was equally certain that no matter
what his raw desire, the static erupted from his mind, like a wild
wind that pushed away, even as it pulled.

She suddenly wanted to shout that she wasn't a leper.

But in his mind, maybe she was.

She turned and walked away, striding to Nellie without looking
back. She mounted, turned the horse toward home, and never turned
her head.

Anger filled her. To anyone else, she might have just proven
that she did have certain psychic abilities. Not Matt. He wouldn't
begin to understand her job. That yes, Harrison Investigations
could come in and prove if something wasn't right-if there was
indeed a fake, a trickster, creating ghosts or hauntings for their
own purposes-be it simple amusement or something illegal. But when
phenomena were real, they tried to find out
why,
what had happened, why ghosts couldn't move on. And then they tried
to help them.

She'd helped Amy. And the idiot, Matt Stone, should realize that
it meant she could discover the truth about his house. And that it
should
be discovered, because it was something even
stranger than she'd ever encountered before.

Something far more sinister.

And it didn't seem that even Josh could help her here, as he so
often could.

When she could solve a mystery and help heal a lost soul, she
loved what she did. Which was wonderful, because far too
often her work was frightening, and she felt such deep sympathy so
many times that it was painful. And yet, a day like today was so
incredibly rewarding!

Except that it had to come with a man like Matt Stone!

The great unbeliever.

She knew that he hadn't moved.

And he wouldn't move, not for a while.

He would watch after her long after Nellie took to the
trail.

It was late, but it didn't matter. Matt sat at his desk back at
the station, doing nothing.

He'd called out a few of his men, and the skull, and the
surrounding dirt, though disturbed, had been properly boxed for
forensic study.

Because he'd known that Darcy was right about the identity of
the skull, he'd had it taken straight to friends at the Smithsonian
who specialized in the field, and he knew that he'd get a report
back in the morning that the skull was well over a hundred years
old.

So he found himself sitting in his office, doing nothing. His
door was closed. At first, he'd pretended to be busy with
paperwork. Then, he'd given up all pretense, sat back in his chair,
laced his fingers behind his head, and stared into space.

The image returned to him again and again.

Darcy, digging.

Darcy with the skull.

Her cry of triumph.

It gave him the creeps.

But not really, and it should have. She was fucking weird. No.
Yes.

She was, and it didn't matter. She was still inordinately
attractive to him, arresting. More.
Seductive.
He should
want nothing to do with her. He wanted to be closer to her,
instead. He wanted to talk to her, know what made her tick,
understand her background. He loved the sound of her voice, the
inflections in it. He was equally fascinated by every flick of her
eyes, her slightest movement. She could have so much energy, move
so quickly and fluidly, and then show such cool poise and reserve
that she was maddening.

If he stayed at work, he could keep some distance. He needed
distance. If anything was really
hauntingly
mysterious, it was the allure she seemed to hold for him. So
she was good-looking-many women were. All right, so she was
sinuous, sensual, and fluid as a cat. Other nearly-perfect people
also had such seductive quality.

Not like this woman.

Maybe it was the secrets, or the knowledge in her eyes.

Why the hell couldn't he be repulsed. Christ, she'd been digging
in the dirt like a gopher!

There was a rap on his door.

"Yeah?"

He pulled his feet off his desk top as he called out.

Deputy Harding, charged with the graveyard shift, opened his
door and peeked in. "Everything all right?"

Alan Harding was young. A good age to keep peace between
midnight and eight. Sandy-haired, blue eyed, nearly six-four, and
capable of controlling the occasional rowdy drunks who called for
law enforcement at that hour.

"Yeah, everything is fine. Why?"

"Just...er, checking. You don't usually sit around in here this
late, that's all."

Matt arched a brow. "How late?"

"It's nearly two."

"A.M.?"

Harding grinned. "That is my shift."

"Yeah, sure." Matt scratched his cheek. "Yeah, I was just
leaving."

He rose, taking his hat from the peg on the wall. ' 'Call me
if-"

"If I need you, yessir," Alan said, a cleft in his chin
deepening along with his smile. "Heard you found an old skull out
in the woods today."

"I didn't find it."

"The psychic found it, huh?"

He stiffened. Why the hell did he hate it when people referred
to Darcy as a psychic? That's what she claimed to be.

He didn't believe in psychics. Refused to believe in
psychics.

"Miss Tremayne, from Harrison Investigations, found the skull,
if that's what you mean."

"She must be for real, huh?"

Matt settled his hat on his head. "She can read, and she
apparently likes libraries. That's why the name of the
company has the word
investigations
in it,
Alan."

"Sure-sir!" Alan said.

Matt shook his head and walked out, throwing over his shoulder,
"Call me if-"

"If we need you," Harding finished for him again.

Matt muttered beneath his breath. When he exited the station, a
low-lying fog sat on the ground. And despite himself, he suddenly
felt an intuition of unease. What the hell had he been doing at the
station so late?

Deepest night.

He should have been at Melody House for hours now.

His strides were long as he headed for his car. And he was
damned glad that he was the sheriff right then because he far
exceeded the speed limit as he headed home.

It should have been an entirely triumphant and peaceful night
for Darcy. She knew that she had done well. And usually, to go with
some of the torture that her existence afforded her, she was able
to feel something like serenity and satisfied pleasure at a job
well done.

But that night...

Dinner should have been fun. Penny, Clint, and Carter had all
been excited about her find. Clint and Carter had vied for her
attention, Penny had studied her like a wise old sage who had known
her stuff and was proud as a peacock herself for being the one to
insist that Harrison Investigations be called into the house. Even
old Sam Arden, caretaker, had seemed to eye her with a new
respect. It was almost as if she had become the accepted matriarch
of a village, having proven her mettle. None of them seemed ill at
ease with her, though both Clint and Carter kept asking, in
different ways, just how she had managed to do it. She refused to
explain exactly how, just saying that she had researched the story
at the library, and put two and two together. Clint, however, shook
his head.