A crimson stain crept down her leg to soak the scraps where we knelt, oozing around a steak knife that quivered where it protruded from dense muscle. The subtle flex of the handle called to mind someone sawing back and forth to slice a difficult cut of meat.
A whistling noise had me reaching up to touch my stinging earlobe. “What in the…?” Blood smeared my fingertips, perilously close to my carotid, but I had gotten lucky. A new piercing wouldn’t kill me. “I’ve got you.” I leapt to my feet and plunged through a cold spot. Hello, Timmy. I swiped my sticky hand through the air, hoping the disturbance would sent him skittering, but his icy presence twined higher up my leg the longer I stood there. “Give me your arm. I’m going to help you stand, and we’re getting out of here.”
Eyes wide, she clasped forearms with me, and I hauled her to her feet. A sharp gasp told me she had put weight on her wounded leg, but she didn’t complain. I hooked an arm around her waist while she clutched at my shoulders, and together we hobbled toward the exit.
This time the tinkle of metal brought sweat beading on my forehead. This was a dining room. A defunct one, but a dining room all the same. There was no telling where the ghost had hidden his stash of cutlery, but I had to assume he was well-armed.
Halfway to the exit, Marit tensed in my hold and cried out, tears clinging to her lashes. I didn’t slow down to find out what had happened but kept her shuffling toward the open door. Once across the threshold, I called for help.
Mr. Voorhees barreled up the stairs, followed by the captain whose name I no longer remembered. His gaze touched on Marit leaning all her weight against me, slid to the blood covering our hands, and then dipped to her thigh.
“What happened?” He bellowed inches from my face. “What’s wrong with my daughter?”
“The ghost,” I panted. “We were scraping up foam when the lights dimmed. We could see okay, so we kept working. The next thing I knew, a knife was sticking out of her thigh.”
Unwilling to let his daughter brave the steps, Mr. Voorhees swept her up in his arms, hollering orders down the stairwell to the others. The captain had his phone out, and he was talking to someone in a commanding voice. He grabbed my elbow, hauling me down after him, and asked, “Are you injured?”
“No,” I lied, unwilling to be examined. “The blood is Marit’s.”
The urge to backtrack and confront the ghost thrummed in my veins, but I had no kit with me. I would be as defenseless against it as Marit had been, and I had no reason to believe my luck would hold if I presented him with a singular target for his wrath.
The crew gathered around Marit as her father lowered her onto a makeshift pallet, taking care to arrange her on her left side, facing away from me. The fluffy pink cushion beneath her resembled insulation, and I was glad someone had the forethought to cover it with one of the thick vinyl signs advertising New Cruises Coming Soon!
One of the crew members who looked an awful lot like the captain stripped a hoodie over his head and passed it to Mr. Voorhees to use as a pillow. While he held Marit’s hand and murmured reassurances to her, he glared at me, like this was somehow my fault.
Apparently he had been counting on the fact the ghost never bothered Marit when he assigned her the dining room as her pet project. Just as obvious was his fury over his foiled plan. No doubt he’d hoped a night of hard labor in spook central would send me scurrying to Cricket to beg for my toilet wand back, but his daughter had been the one who limped from the room and not me.
“Grier,” Marit panted over her shoulder. “Thanks for getting me out of there.” Her fingers tightened around her father’s much larger hand. “I wouldn’t have made it without her.”
I started to brush off her comment, but then I noticed the wound that had caused her to cry out as we made our escape. Four steak knives protruded from the back of her left thigh, each one a fraction closer to the inside of her leg, as though each toss had been aimed mid-stride, and the topmost blade had come within inches of piercing her femoral artery.
“Thank you,” Mr. Voorhees rasped to me, his attention finally locking on his daughter’s face.
“I’m glad I could help,” I mumbled, wondering how I was going to get back upstairs to confront the ghost. Tonight it would be impossible. Tomorrow would have to be soon enough.
With all eyes on Marit, I decided to make myself scarce before the cops arrived. I crossed the gangplank at a lope to beat the EMTs then power walked for Jolene. I straddled her then pulled on my leather jacket, muttering a curse at the sticky zipper.
“Ms. Woolworth,” Detective Russo called. “A moment of your time.”
This night just kept getting better and better.
I kept my seat and let her see me get comfortable. “How can I help you?”
Much to my annoyance, her notepad made another appearance. “You witnessed the attack on Ms. Voorhees?”
A sliver of paranoia wedged beneath my skin. Russo must have been stalking her radio for action. The alternative, that she had been stalking me, had me searching the black sky for signs of Cletus.
“Yes.” I ran down a highly edited version of events leading up to Marit’s injury. “And that’s it.”
“What’s wrong with your ear?” She peered at me over her notepad. “Were you hurt too?”
“No,” I repeated my lie. “It’s Marit’s blood.”
“You were sitting right beside her.” Russo stared at my ear like she was waiting on fresh crimson drips to prove me a liar. “You didn’t see who attacked her?”
“It was dark.” How dark, by human standards, I wasn’t sure.
“There must have been some light.” She checked her notes. “You told Mr. Voorhees you two kept working. It was only after the attack that you left the dining room.”
Fiddlesticks.
“I told you what happened.” I unhooked my helmet from its lock and held it in my lap. “I can’t help what you believe.”
“There’s a lot more to this, and to you, than the eyes can see.”
“Why are you here?” Now that I was paying attention, she wasn’t standing with the other cops, and she wasn’t consulting with them either. Maybe I hadn’t been too far off the mark with my stalker comment. “Why the interest in me?”
“Ms. Meacham filed a missing person report two days after you disappeared five years ago.”
Shock rearranged my features before I could smooth them. “I didn’t know.”
“You were a nice kid from a good family, never missed work, never gave her any trouble, and your best friend was employed by her too. You were solid and dependable, not the type to blow off work or quit and not bother to tell anyone.” She kept glancing between the page and me like her notes stretched back that far. For all I knew, maybe they did. “She drove out to your house the second night you were a no-show. A crew wearing white biohazard suits was working in the living room. They were cleaning what looked like blood out of the carpets, the curtains, everything.”
The muscles in my abdomen clenched tighter and tighter until I imagined my navel touching my spine. Details. She had details. Details I needed if I ever wanted to piece together what really happened to Maud. But the cost was too high. Paying her would emotionally bankrupt me. I had to cut my losses and figure out a way to get my hands on her case notes. “She must have misunderstood what she saw.”
Russo wasn’t buying what I was selling. “Your guardian was Maud Woolworth, correct?”
“Yes,” I whispered, tasting bile.
Woolworth House was iconic. She might not be part of any walking tours, but I couldn’t stop buses from passing the house or guides from sharing her history. She was a landmark in Savannah, both mundane and extraordinary, the bronze plaque rooted in the front lawn said so. Factor in my last name, and there was zero hope of a mistaken address pulling my buns out of the fire.
“She passed away around the same time you stopped coming to work.” Russo tried on a smile, but its edges were sharp. “What happened to her?”