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She started toward it.
A jerk on her ankle made her panic for a moment; alligators didn’t usually travel out into the depths of the river—they preferred the bayou and the shallows. But it would be quite ridiculous if she were to be consumed by a natural predator she knew and respected in the hunt for a human monster.
It wasn’t an alligator; it was Jake. He frowned at her, indicating that she wasn’t to take off without him.
She nodded and pointed. Then, of course, her beam picked up nothing, but he nodded and followed her downward.
They were in an area of soft packed mud and underwater growth. At first Ashley thought she had imagined the glitter in the water. It was dark, and with the current, once the muck was disturbed, it spread out, creating an even darker brown haze.
Then she felt Jake squeeze her hand, and he indicated the metal detector.
There was definitely something there.
They had to move quickly, because the water around them was becoming browner by the second. There was nothing easy about maintaining their position in the water; they fought the current hard. But Jake was digging in the mud, and she did the same.
There, beneath one of the plumes Jake had just started.
She saw it.
It was still in excellent shape; it looked as if it had just been set down on the river bottom. The 1853 Enfield rifle that shot a Burton-Minie ball still had its bayonet, which had surely glittered in the glow of her flashlight, soundly attached.
It was the weapon that had been carried not just by the defenders, but by all of the federals on the day of the skirmish that had taken place in 1861. It would have a thirty-nine-inch barrel with three grooves, and the stock had three metal bands, so that it was sometimes called the popular “three-banded” rifle. Reproductions of the rifle were carried by all the reenactors. At the beginning of the war, it had been quite typical, appreciated on both sides of the great conflict.
She pointed; Jake reached down a hand and collected the weapon by the stock. He nodded to Ashley and indicated that they head toward the riverbank.
They emerged about a hundred feet shy of the boat ramp. Sludging up the muddy bank, Ashley saw that Angela had been true to her word and was there leaning against Jake’s car down by the public ramp.
She saw them right away and came hurrying toward them, heedless of the marshy terrain. She had something in her hand, which turned out to be a large plastic bag of some kind—an evidence bag for the weapon retrieved. Angela, apparently, had had faith in their findings, while Ashley had to admit she hadn’t expected that the four of them would find anything in the Mississippi. Of course, this team had probably been trained, but then again…
She had been the one to spot the weapon.
“You found it!” Angela cried, wrinkling her nose as she stepped into a deep pit and struggled to free her foot.
“Ashley actually made the discovery—without a metal detector,” Jake said. He held the weapon out while Angela opened the bag.
“Wait!” Ashley said.
They both paused, staring at her.
She studied the weapon.
The manufacturers of historical weaponry were good—really good. They could replicate weapons to a T.
But there was something about this one.
She didn’t touch it, but she moved closer. Mud encrusted the weapon, and there was no choice. She delicately took a finger protected by her diver glove and dusted aside a speck of the mud.
And it was there. Deeply, roughly gouged into the stock near the barrel, there were initials.
She looked up at Jake and Angela, chilled to the bone.
“This weapon is real. I mean, authentic to the period—and our house. It belonged to Marshall Donegal. You can see his initials right there, MPD. He carved them by hand himself with his knife. Marshall Patrick Donegal. ”
Interlude
He watched it again. There she was, that blasted reporter, talking to Jake Mallory.
Mallory, so cool and solemn and yet easy with the reporter, revealing nothing at all.
They didn’t have good new footage to show; so far, none of the reporters or their crews had been allowed on the property, and thus they had nothing new to say. Of course, the world now knew that Charles Osgood was dead, and everyone everywhere was deliberating. It was absolutely amusing to discover just how many people were certain that a bitter Confederate ghost had committed the crime.
Or even a Yankee. Hell, four Yankees had “died” on the property that day.
Ridiculous. No one was putting blame where it belonged. Or maybe they were.
The canned video was replaced by the reporter again, the pretty woman who seemed to have a hard edge. It was the hardness of a woman who wanted to rise in her field and was willing to do just about anything to do so. She’d sleep with the boss while making her cameraman traipse through dangerous territory before setting her pretty face in front of the camera. She’d sleep with the producer. He knew that look. He’d seen it often enough in the business world. With men, it just meant that they’d stab you in the back; with a woman, it meant that she’d do just about anything.
The reporter’s face was replaced again by the image of a sea of pictures; they were artistically angled in the shot, from, clockwise, left to right, Frazier Donegal, Emma Donegal, Marshall Donegal and Ashley Donegal.
Ah, and it seemed that the generations had taken DNA from all—Ashley looked like her great-great-however-many-grandfather, and like Emma Donegal. All these decades later.
The newscast ended.
He should have felt satisfied. He’d caused the havoc he wanted. They were never going to catch him; there was just no way to prove that he had done any of this.
But then the newscast changed; there was a “this just in!” alert.
The reporter came back on. Anchorwoman Marty Dean identified herself again and announced that police believed that they had the murder weapon, an historic Enfield rifle once owned by the Civil War master of Donegal Plantation, Marshall Donegal. Tests were being done by forensic experts, seeking proof that the weapon, pulled from the Mississippi, had indeed been used in the murder.
Naturally, Marty’s station would be right on the investigation, bringing news about the heinous events at the plantation the second they became available.
He clicked off the television, startled.
The weapon shouldn’t have been found so quickly. He had left no traces; he had ditched the damn thing in the Mississippi River, and he had been careful in every possible forensic way.
He paced, trying to calm down, and he did.
They had the weapon. Even if they found old Charles’s blood, they could never trace it to him. Even if they knew how he had gotten there and killed the man, they couldn’t trace it to him.
Pity, though. The image must have been so brilliant, the dead man—dead. Blood dripping. He’d been in Marshall Donegal’s uniform. The possibilities for amazing ghost stories were endless….
He sat down again. It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t going to really choke the life out of the place.
So…
They’d be watching the cemetery. And they’d be watching the river.
There was always the bayou, and before you reached the bayou from the house, there were endless trails with pines, giving way to marshland….
“‘It is well that war is so terrible—lest we should grow too fond of it,’” he whispered aloud, quoting Robert E. Lee, the South’s—no, the country’s—greatest general.
He smiled, his faith in himself restored.
“It is well that bloodletting is so complicated—because it is so actually sweet and entertaining!” he said.
The killing was the best.
8
The Enfield and bayonet had been turned over to the forensics lab, and there was nothing to do on that angle but wait—and, de
termine, of course, how the priceless family heirloom had gone from its glass-encased place of honor in a small attic museum that guarded such precious pieces into the hands of a murderer, and then into the river.
Frazier was horrified. Of course, it had never been locked up. They didn’t lock up their artifacts at Donegal Plantation. Marshall Donegal had been buried with his dress sword, but not the Enfield rifle he would have carried into the war. At his death, Emma had kept the weapon above the fireplace in the rear parlor, should they come under attack again at any time. It was most likely that she kept it there until her death in 1890. One of her children had probably moved the rifle and other artifacts from the mid-1860s to the attic. Frazier knew that his father had been the one to purchase the box it had been displayed in now. No one had even known it was missing; when they all returned to the house, he asked Ashley a dozen times at least if she was sure that the weapon they had found had been Marshall Donegal’s, and he had gone upstairs himself to assure himself that the box was empty.
It was.
The reality of the Mississippi River was that it was not the nicest place in the world to dive; returning to the house—once the initial questions were asked and answered—Jake hurried up to his room and straight into the shower. He was sure the others were doing the same. But he had barely stripped out of his swim trunks when there was a knock at the door. He frowned, wrapped a towel around his waist and went to it. He opened it a crack.
Ashley was out there. She had stripped off her dive suit and wore a terry robe over her bathing suit. Her hair was still damp and tangled from the water, but she looked restless and uneasy.
He opened the door fully without moving aside.
“What? Is anything wrong?” he asked.
She looked at him with her huge sapphire eyes. It was suddenly impossible—despite the five years that had passed since they’d been together—not to feel an uncomfortable rise of his libido.
God, he’d loved her, always. Not true, he tried to correct himself. Once, she had been a bright, entertaining, but annoying little precocious kid. But not long; she’d caught up so quickly. And when he had realized that he’d teased her the same way boys had teased girls they had secretly coveted since the be ginning of time, he had just fallen head over heels. It was the sapphire of her eyes, maybe. The perfection of her skin, the softness and the glitter in the color of her hair. Ah, but that was just lust. He’d loved her tomboy antics, the way she could ride, race, challenge, laugh, and argue her side of any matter. It was the sound of her voice….