“A storm, a change, a shake-up. The ground is always quiet before the earth erupts. First, men feel a rumble, and if they don’t heed the warning, they fall through the cracks.”
Great. Really great. All he needed was a cryptic ancestor. Longman was on his mother’s side. His dad’s people had been a no-nonsense mix of English and Norwegian. But, of course, this land had been in his mother’s family for generations. Longman was his mother’s great-grandfather, and it was her father who’d raised him. This house was on old Apache land, it was natural, he supposed, that his last full-blooded Apache ancestor should come to his parlor to watch invisible flames.
Then, of course, his dad’s family had its share of the unusual, as well. The bad, the good—and those who’d just disappeared into thin air.
As if reading his mind, the specter of his dead great-great grandfather looked at him thoughtfully. “You think you’ve seen the woman in the picture because you have. You’ve seen pictures of her many times—even old photographs. In fact, those pictures have been seen by everyone in Lily. You believe they found the skull of Sage McCormick, your father’s great-grandmother.”
Yes, it had been in his mind. Of course!
“You knew her?”
“I often saw her perform from the back of the theater. I was allowed in. We were tolerated in Lily—my people, I mean. When the wars still raged and Native peoples were rounded up, many of us were part of the community here. I remember when Sage McCormick came to Lily. I remember her presence onstage. I remember her laughter, and that she was kind. I remember when she fell in love with your father’s great-grandfather, and I remember her daughter, your father’s grandmother, as she grew up.”
“So that’s it,” Sloan said. “I knew the picture because I’d seen the woman Jane depicted dozens of times. She’s my great-great grandmother. And I’ve avoided acknowledging this—because I never wanted to know how she died. It’s the distant past now, but I guess the stories always made me want to believe she went to Mexico and lived happily ever after in a world where she could be herself.” He sighed. “And if there is a ghost in her room at the Gilded Lily, I wanted to believe that it wasn’t her—or that she returned there after her death. Does that make sense?”
There was no answer. Sloan looked over at the chair. Longman was gone.
Maybe he had never been there. Sloan didn’t know. He had never known if he created spirits with whom he could earnestly debate the dilemmas in his own mind or if they actually existed.
But now...
Cougar, still in the kitchen, suddenly let out a screech. The cat was almost as good as a watchdog. Sloan jumped to his feet. He headed straight to the kitchen and saw that the cat was standing by the door to the screened-in porch, his back arched.
Sloan strode across to the door, set his hand at his waist over his gun, and yanked the door open.
No one there.
He looked out at the far stretches of his property. Sparse trees grew here and there, low and scraggly. His land stretched out in back until it came to a row of foothills that skirted the mesa where Lily was situated. To the left, he saw the stables and the paddocks, and all seemed quiet. A light burned upstairs in Johnny Bearclaw’s apartment. He heard one of the horses whinny.
He had ten acres—a big enough spread if someone wanted to hide there.
He walked out to the stables, turning on lights as he entered. Kanga and Roo whinnied again as he approached their stalls, stepping up to the gates to receive attention. Sloan patted the horses, speaking to them softly. Kanga was almost twenty, and she was as friendly as a dog and loved human interaction. Roo was “the young un,” at twelve. He was Kanga’s only offspring, bred from Fierce Fire, an award-winning running quarter. Sloan wasn’t much on rodeos, but occasionally he brought Roo out to show. He didn’t enter competitions, but Roo could turn on a dime, and Sloan liked to let him strut his stuff now and then.
The horses didn’t seem skittish. Then again, they did like human contact and Sloan had enough visitors out here that they wouldn’t be skittish if they’d heard someone walking around the yard.
Maybe the cat had seen demons that haunted his feline mind.
As he stood by the stalls, his cell phone rang. He answered it quickly.
“Hey, you down there?” Johnny Bearclaw asked.
“Yeah, it’s me, Johnny.”
“You been there awhile?”
“No, I just came out. The cat was freaking out over some noise or other,” Sloan said.
“I was about to come down,” Johnny announced.
“You heard something?”