“I’m always happy to see you both,” Kendall said, squeezing Rebecca’s hand.
When she and her mother reached the door, Rebecca hesitated and looked back. “Mr. Flynn, if you repeat me on this, I’ll call you a liar, but I have a suggestion for you. Find yourself a polite way of getting those bones back. You got to understand. The people where I work, they mean well, but this city’s still got troubles, and they’re busy dealing with that. I hear you got friends in high places. Use them.”
She nodded firmly. Clearly she, too, had had her say.
Kendall cleared her throat as soon as the door shut behind the two women and looked at Aidan. “What was that all about?”
He was still staring thoughtfully after Rebecca as he answered her. “Vinnie asked me if I was getting anywhere searching for Jenny Trent. I mentioned that I thought the bones I’d left at the M.E.’s office might be connected. I guess she thought it over and decided to tell me what she thought before she left.”
“What about the voodoo dolls?” Mason asked. “Do you think they’re related to Jenny Trent? Or is someone just trying to drive you off the plantation so they can snap it up themselves?”
“Why leave a doll for Kendall, then?” Aidan asked him, watching carefully to see his response to the question. “She has nothing to do with the plantation anymore.”
“Someone left you a voodoo doll?” Mason asked, turning to Kendall. “And you didn’t tell me?”
“It just happened last night,” she said. “And in case you didn’t notice, we were busy all day, so I didn’t get a chance to tell you. Anyway, it was no big deal.”
“No big deal?” Mason repeated disbelievingly. “I can’t believe—”
“Hey, I didn’t know about it, either,” Vinnie put in. “But if Kendall says it’s no big deal, I believe her. Anyway, the way I see it, you’re looking at two different things. One, some idiot thinks it will be all spooky or something to leave voodoo dolls lying around. Two, maybe the bones Aidan found came from some old grave or maybe they’re recent, but either way, they still got him started looking for Jenny Trent, and that’s a good thing, whether it has anything to do with the plantation where he found the one bone or not.” He stood. “As for me, I’ve got to go to work.”
“Vinnie, thanks so much for helping out today,” Kendall told him.
“My pleasure. Mason, see you later?” Vinnie asked.
Mason shrugged. “I’ll check my calendar. Hmm. Nope, no pressing engagements. Yeah, I’ll see you in a bit. I’m going home for a shower first, though. I smell like a giant cinnamon scone.”
Vinnie looked at Aidan. “Hey, man, if you ever think I can help you…”
“Thanks,” Aidan told him.
Vinnie left, and Kendall turned to Mason. “You can go on home. Aidan can wait while I just give the place a once-over and lock up.”
“All right.” Mason started for the door, then turned back, “Aidan, by the way, I remembered something else kind of weird about that woman who bought the dolls.”
“What?” Aidan asked.
“Those gloves she was wearing?” He grimaced. “I think maybe they were made of latex.”
“Odd,” Aidan said. “Thanks. That info might come in handy.”
“Sure.”
When Mason was gone, Aidan surprised Kendall by walking quickly over to the counter and asking, “Do you keep your sales slips organized by the week?”
“Yes. I do my banking Mondays. Usually. Right now I’ve got two weeks’ worth of sales slips. I didn’t make it in on Monday. Why?”
“I want to find the receipt for those voodoo dolls.”
“Why? If the woman was wearing gloves, you won’t get any fingerprints, and she paid cash, so there won’t be anything to identify her. Or him.”
“I just want to make sure there is a sales slip,” he said.
She stared at him blankly for a minute, then realized that now he was suspecting Mason of being in on something.
“Come on, Aidan,” she groaned. “There are tons of people in this city, and dozens of them are probably guilty of something. Why are you picking on my friends?”
He looked up at her. “Because Jenny Trent’s trail put her here and then at the Hideaway. Two people—besides you, I might add—are generally both here and at the bar. Vinnie and Mason. Simple enough? Now, are you going to get me those sales records?”
“Yes,” she snapped. Jerk! She’d been glad to see him—anxious to see him, even—and now he was turning into the high inquisitor again. “But you know, maybe you should be listening to what Vinnie said. Maybe those voodoo dolls don’t have anything to do with Jenny Trent being missing. And while you’re at it, maybe you should be listening to Rebecca, too. If you’re so interested in finding out about those bones, you should just get them back and send them somewhere else.”
He ignored everything she’d said and asked again, “Can I see those sales slips?”
She let out a snort of aggravation and went back to her reading room, which doubled as her office, annoyed to find herself trying to avoid looking at her tarot deck while she unlocked the bottom drawer of her desk to pull out the daily receipts.
She turned to bring them back out front, then saw that Aidan had followed her. He took the stack of receipts from her hands and sat down at her reading table. She stood in front of him, and her eyes fell on the deck of cards. They did nothing.
What the hell had she been expecting?
“Have you seen the sales slip?” he asked her, going through the receipts.
“No,” she admitted. “I trust Mason.”
He paused suddenly.
“That’s it, right?” she demanded.
He placed the receipt in front of her. The computer had written, “Collectible voodoo doll, quantity, three.” The price and the amount, a cash sale, were filled in after.
“See?” she asked quietly.
“Of course, Mason isn’t stupid,” he mused.
“Oh, will you stop!”
He looked up at her. She didn’t know what he was thinking, because that crystal curtain had come down over his eyes.
“Yes, of course. Sorry.”
He wasn’t sorry at all. He simply knew nothing he could say to her would change her mind.
He rose. “Thanks. Anything I can do to help lock up?”
“No,” she said stiffly. “Thank you.” She locked the receipts back in her desk, then went to make sure the rear door was locked.
The thing to do, the right thing to do, was tell him that she had changed her mind about going to the plantation, that she was just going to go home and stay there for the night. She owed her friends a certain loyalty, after all.
But she didn’t want to go home. And didn’t she owe something to herself, as well? Admittedly, she didn’t know Aidan Flynn well, but she wanted to know him better. Even if they constantly clashed.
They weren’t in a relationship, of course. But they could be. And wasn’t that part of a relationship? Making things work even when you disagreed or got angry?
Hold on, you are nowhere near to that point, she warned herself.
But no warning was going to help her now. Not even Miss Ady’s insistence that there was evil at the plantation. Evil that was after her.
Now that voodoo doll…It had been left at her home. While she was sleeping. That was far creepier, when you thought about it. Of course, voodoo dolls had been left at the plantation, as well. But not when any of the brothers were staying there, which told her that whoever had done it was a coward, only willing to go after women and empty houses.
Aidan was waiting for her in the front of the shop, staring thoughtfully at a life-size skeleton dressed in a tux and hanging near the door.
He turned to her. “Ready?”
“Yes, thanks. I need to run by my place,” she reminded him. “I have to grab some clothes and feed Jezebel.”
“Of course.”
He went in with her, and while she gathered a few things from
her room, he offered to feed the cat. Jezebel, the little hussy, had liked him from the beginning. Kendall could hear the Persian purring from the bedroom.
When she came out to the kitchen, she saw that he had unlocked the rear door and stepped out back.
He saw her, waved, then walked over to the gate. It was big and heavy, and wide enough to allow a carriage to pass through. He scaled it without visible effort, putting himself on the outside, in the alley, then climbed back into the courtyard.
“Kendall,” he called.
She walked out to the back, curious.
“It wasn’t much of an effort to scale this,” he told her. “The hinges make great footholds.”
She saw exactly what he was saying. She doubted it was a feat an octogenarian could accomplish, but it wouldn’t take a gymnast, either.
“This has to be how he, or she, got in,” Aidan said.
“I imagine.” She was silent a moment. “Should I ask the police to come back? See if they can get any prints or anything?”
“The cops around here don’t get excited about bones,” he said. “I don’t think—no matter how much they like you—they’re going to pull out all the stops to find some prankster.” He looked at her and shrugged. “Besides, I doubt there’ll be any fingerprints other than mine.”
“Why not?”
“Because whoever bought those dolls was wearing gloves.”
“But my voodoo doll was a cheapie. Your voodoo dolls were the expensive ones.”
“You really think there are two people out there planting slashed-up voodoo dolls?”
“No,” she admitted, then crossed her arms over her chest, feeling a little shiver. Night was just starting to fall. Suddenly she was glad she had decided to go with him.
She didn’t want to be here alone when the darkness came.
The nighttime DJ at the radio station was a heavyset giant of a man named Al Fisher. He was a decent sort who loved music, loved people and had been the first one to contact Jeremy about doing PR. Tonight’s call-in segment was going great, Jeremy thought, as he reminded listeners that they had an hour left to call in for a chance at winning the last available tickets.
Then he got a call from some guy with a voice like a Halloween bogeyman.
“Your first event is this thing at the aquarium, right?” the caller said.
“Yes,” Jeremy said.
“They say you’re planning a second event out at that plantation you inherited,” the caller said in his raspy voice.
Jeremy hesitated. The idea of doing a gala out at the plantation hadn’t been a secret, but neither was it common knowledge. He wondered how this guy had heard about it.
“Well?” the caller said.
“The idea has come up, yes.”
“Well, get that idea right out of your head,” the caller said, his raspy whisper taking on a menacing quality. “What you’re doing is wrong. You may be a Flynn, but if you start bringing people out to that place, bad things are going to happen. Really bad things. The dead need to rest in peace. You need to get out of there or you’re going to die.”
“All right, great Halloween prank,” Al put in, hitting the cut-off switch and disconnecting the caller.
The rest of the hour passed pleasantly, but in light of the voodoo dolls that had shown up on the lawn, Jeremy couldn’t get the caller out of his mind. When they were finished, he took off the headphones and looked at Al. “You’ve got caller ID at the switchboard, don’t you?”
“Sure.”
“Find out who that was for me, will you?”
“Just some idiot,” Al said dismissively.
“I’d still like to know.”
“Gotcha.”
Jeremy followed Al into the hallway, then waited while Al headed out to check the switchboard log. He came back frowning.
“Sorry, Jeremy. The call was made from one of those prepaid cell phones. No way of tracing it. None at all.”
“Thanks,” Jeremy told him. Aggravated, he left the station. He thought about calling his brothers, then decided it could wait. Maybe, come Monday, Aidan could ask his FBI buddy if there was any way to trace the signal. But he doubted it. As far as he knew, not even the FBI could trace a prepaid cell phone, especially if the caller had been smart enough to buy the thing with cash.
It was dark when they left the hubbub of the city. The highway offered lights and plenty of cars, but the river road was dark.
As they drove, Kendall asked Aidan about his day, determined not to let herself be bothered by his suspicions of her friends.
“It was good. I went back to the B and B where Jenny Trent stayed and got a list of the other guests that night. Three other rooms rented, two singles and a couple. The couple was from South Dakota—the guy asked his wife for his hearing aid while we were on the phone, so I didn’t think he’d be helpful, but he was. The kid staying in the attic came back and passed out at one, didn’t hear a thing and never saw Jenny Trent. There was a teacher from Detroit in the other room who had met Jenny and wanted to be helpful, but she didn’t know anything and hadn’t heard anything. The old guy, though. He got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, which was off the hall, and saw Jenny. Said she was dressed up in black jeans and an inside-out T-shirt, and told him she was going out to meet some genius and get in on a great discovery.”
“See!” Kendall said triumphantly. “Vinnie was telling the truth. He’s as innocent as a snow-white lamb.”
Aidan glanced her way. “‘Innocent as a snow-white lamb’ and ‘Vinnie’ don’t really sound like they go together to me, but yeah, he’s probably telling the truth.”
“Probably?”
He grimaced. “How do we know Vinnie wasn’t the genius who was going to let her in on a great discovery?”
“‘Genius’ and ‘Vinnie’ don’t exactly go together, either.”
“Come on, you’ve got to admit he’s a genius with a guitar.”
She was quiet for a minute. “Aidan, even if Jenny Trent was in my shop and at the bar, it doesn’t mean that she didn’t meet someone during the day, somewhere else, and make arrangements to meet him late that night.”
“You’re right.”
He was staring straight ahead.
“Where do you go from here?” she asked. “It sounds as if you’re at a dead end.”
“When you hit a dead end, you just go back out to the street and find a new route,” he told her, flashing a smile. “Thanks to your friend Rebecca, I’ll go back and start over with Jonas, get him to put in a Federal request to have the bones and the blood and the dress analyzed, and get them up to either Quantico or D.C. I’ll call on some old friends up there for help.”
“But you still won’t know what happened once Jenny left the B and B.”
“I know.”
“So?”
“We’ll start researching the other victims.”
“Other victims?”
He glanced her way. “There have been at least ten disappearances just like Jenny’s over the past decade, most of them in the last few years. We’ll look into them all, one by one. I’m convinced that most of them, at least, are connected, so eventually we’ll catch her killer.”
“You act as if you know for certain that she’s dead.”
He didn’t answer, but then, she thought, he didn’t have to. She felt as if she knew Jenny was dead, too.
They stopped at a restaurant for dinner on the way out to the plantation, and to Kendall’s surprise, Aidan seemed ready—even eager—to talk about other things. Music, books, even the weather. After they left the restaurant, Aidan pulled into a gas station.
A small, skinny man came out to serve them.
“Hey, Jimmy,” Flynn said.
“Mr. Flynn, miss,” the man returned, tapping his baseball cap.
“Jimmy has been staying out back at the plantation,” Aidan explained pleasantly.
“Oh,” Kendall said, for lack of another response.
“Don??
?t worry, I won’t be bothering you none,” Jimmy said hurriedly. “I can leave if you need me to.”
“You can stay out there, Jimmy. I talked to my brothers, and they don’t mind.”
The man frowned uncertainly. “You’re not…you’re not pulling my leg or nothing, are you, Mr. Flynn?”
“No. Maybe we can work out some kind of a deal. We’ll get you set up back there a little better, and you can keep an eye on the place if we’re not around.”
The man’s hands were shaking, and he looked too overcome to speak, so he only nodded.
Jimmy filled up the tank, which hadn’t been anywhere near empty, Kendall noticed. Then Aidan paid him, and they drove off.
“Very generous,” Kendall said.
“No. Selfish,” he told her.
“How?”
“I like him being out there.”
“Why? He’ll never see anything going on. You said he just closes the door and hides in there all night. Frankly, it’s a little creepy to know he was out there all that time, scaring Amelia with his light.”
“He has to come and go, doesn’t he?” Aidan said.
“So you think he’s the one creating all the mystery at night?” Kendall said.
“He didn’t plant the voodoo dolls,” Aidan told her.
“Honestly, Aidan, I know this is what you do for a living, but don’t you think people who do things like that—try that kind of scare tactic—are usually kind of frightened themselves? That they do things like that because they’re too scared to face the person they’re attacking.”
“Usually,” he agreed, his eyes on the road.
Usually.
She read the unspoken corollary. Usually—but not this time
She had been feeling more relaxed than she had all day; dinner had been easy, pleasant, natural.
But his comment had spooked her, and then, as they crested a slight rise, she saw the plantation.
It rose high and white in the moonlight, and there were lights on inside, so many that it should have looked warm and welcoming. But somehow, tonight, the place she had once loved looked like a cruel jack-o’-lantern.