Her old eyes were kind and filled with empathy. “That pretty little friend of yours, that girl Sheila. They say she’s missing now. And that someone might have been in that house when you were there. Oh, Kendall, I told you to be careful.”
“Miss Ady, I was careful,” she assured the older woman. “How did you know Sheila’s missing? There wasn’t anything in the paper.”
Miss Ady sniffed. “Rebecca heard about it at work, and she told me. The cops asked them to be on the lookout for a Jane Doe that might be your friend.”
Cold chills ran through Kendall’s veins, but she already knew the truth. Whether they found her or not, Sheila was dead.
She knew because she had been walking in her friend’s footsteps in a dream.
“Amelia came to me again, last night,” Miss Ady said gravely.
“Oh?”
“She said she’s very worried about you.”
“Please, if you’re ever able to answer her, tell her that I’m fine.”
“Pull out a card,” Miss Ady said, indicating the tarot deck on the table.
“What?” Kendall asked her.
“Shuffle your cards. Pull one out.”
“Oh, Miss Ady, that’s just silly.”
“Please. Humor an old lady.”
Kendall sighed. She didn’t want to do it, but she didn’t see any way out of it. She shuffled the cards, then shuffled them again. And then again. Finally she knew she couldn’t procrastinate anymore and she pulled out a card.
Death. But at least it wasn’t laughing. It was just there.
“It just means a new beginning, Miss Ady,” she said, though she wasn’t sure who she was really trying to reassure.
“And if we’re believers in a higher spirit, isn’t that what death is?” Ady asked her.
Kendall forced herself to smile. “Maybe it just means I’ve closed the door on being such a loner, and now I’m going to continue on a new path with Aidan Flynn. Maybe Amelia left me something far better than a plantation, maybe she knew somehow that Aidan and I would hit it off.”
She had expected Miss Ady to smile, but the older woman didn’t, only continued to study Kendall with grave eyes.
“Don’t you go anywhere alone, you hear me? And don’t you go off in the dark, neither. You make sure you stay around that Flynn boy of yours all the time, you understand?”
“Okay, Miss Ady, I will,” Kendall promised her.
Aidan’s first stop was the police department.
Hal was in and saw him right away.
“Did you ever get anything more on the break-in at the morgue?” Aidan asked.
“Yeah, we got a delivery man. He left a box of chemicals.”
“That’s it?”
“And we got a shadow. I can show it to you, if you like.”
“There’s a movie I’d love to see,” Aidan told him.
Hal made a call, and they walked down to the computer lab, where the tech played the security tape, which he’d refined as much as was technically possible. Just as Hal had said, they saw a delivery man at the back. He rang the bell, and then, when no one answered, looked around, set down the box, hunched his shoulders and hurried back to his vehicle.
The tech fast-forwarded through what seemed like hours of nothing. Then, as Hal had said, they saw a shadow walking up to the back door. It was human, but there was no way to tell if it was a man or a woman. The face was completely obscured, and the person seemed to be wearing a hooded black cloak.
“As you can see, it looks as if the grim reaper paid a visit to the morgue,” Hal said dryly.
Aidan thanked him for showing him the tape, then asked if there was anything new on Sheila Anderson.
“She never got on her plane,” he told Aidan. “We’re running a trace on her cards, but I’m not counting on anything to turn up. Meanwhile, we’ve got crews going over her car, her house, her yard. All we have so far is that the electric cable was cut by a sharp instrument. Oh, and Jonas was in here this morning. He delivered the girl’s wallet. Told me they’d been having an affair, and that she’d left it in his car.”
“And what’s your gut feeling about that?”
“My feeling? Well, you’re friends with the guy, so I’ll be polite. I think he’s a cocky SOB with a wife who’s sweet as molasses, and he’s been a real jackass, playing around on her. But do I think he’s a murderer? That he did the girl in? No.”
“Thanks,” Aidan told him. “If I hear anything, I’ll get with you. So you got nothing off the car?”
“Can’t say nothing. She was driving on some rough terrain, not her usual ride into work and back. But I can’t say exactly what it means. We’ve got gravel roads over half the state.”
“Thanks,” Aidan said again.
He knew one place where they had a gravel road. The driveway to his house.
After saying goodbye to Hal, Aidan planned to drive straight out to the plantation, but a call from Matty as he was walking out to his car detoured him.
He agreed to meet her at a café right across from the station, since they were both already in the area. When she saw him, she walked up to him and gave him a hug and a kiss on the cheek. There were tears in her eyes.