A playhouse?
“Megan is twenty-two, but she has Down syndrome. Sometimes my friend Grant watches her when I’m at work, but God love him, he gets sidetracked and . . . well, Megan loves to wander for flowers and hiding places. Foster Hill House is that to her. Yesterday Grant found her there and she’d picked all the daffodils in a patch at the corner of the house. I’m so sorry.”
Daffodils?
Daffodils! Thank God Almighty! And then her inward praise turned outward, and Kaine’s breath released in a whoosh of anxious relief.
“Oh, thank God!” Kaine’s exclamation turned Joy’s expression quizzical.
It wasn’t him. He hadn’t followed her here. It was a horrible, awful mistake caused by an innocent special-needs young woman who lived in a fantasy world of flowers.
“You’re not upset?” Joy charged on. “The flowers are the only nice thing about that place. I wasn’t concerned when Megan picked them, but I hadn’t a clue the house had been bought. I mean, that place should’ve been bulldozed years ago. No one wants to touch it.”
“I’m not upset. I’m just surprised your daughter even wants to go there.” Kaine set the coffee on the counter and ripped open her candy bar. Her first bite was celebratory.
“Megan has an imagination, and Foster Hill House inspires that.” Joy shrugged, her beaded earrings hanging low enough to brush her shoulders. “But it creeps everyone else out. Superstition, y’know?”
“I suppose they say it’s haunted.” Kaine spoke around a heavenly mouthful of peanuts, caramel, and chocolate. Blessed relief.
“Some do.” Joy squeezed a plastic lid onto her coffee cup, her eyes widening as if she knew far more than she was willing to spill over gas-station brew. “But, it’s more what happened there.”
“What happened there?” What could be worse than a haunted house?
“Of course, the realtor didn’t tell you.” Joy sniffed. “Foster Hill House has a litany of oddities. All the way back to the 1860s. Legend says people saw strange lights there in the middle of the night, lanterns glowing, and they heard piano music. Little things would be moved in the house. A candlestick or an old umbrella stand. Rumors that people were coming and going, but in the daytime no one could ever find anything to explain it.”
Kaine swallowed the candy, the mouthful suddenly as big as a softball in her throat. The relief from knowing Megan had left the daffodil oozed away, forced out by the house’s legend. It was eerily familiar. The coffee cup she’d left at her bedside table moved to her dresser with a daffodil propped in it. Her red cardigan flung over the back of the chair when she was sure she’d hung it in her closet. Her kitchen light on when she was positive she’d turned it off before leaving for work in the morning.
The police blamed it on post-traumatic stress disorder. Any wife whose husband was killed in an accident, but insisted it was murder, could be shaken enough to see things, even hear things. It didn’t mean it was real. But she’d never prop a daffodil in a coffee mug. It deserved a vase. Her favorite flower.
“And then the murder.”
“The murder?” Kaine choked, and it wasn’t because the coffee was awful. The knot in her stomach grew larger than when she’d first laid eyes on Foster Hill House.
Joy nodded, her yellow cheesehead not shifting at the movement. “She’s become something of a renowned mystery.”
“Who? What happened to her?” Kaine didn’t want to know, but reflex forced her to ask. It was dumb luck she’d flee the memories of death only to buy a house shrouded in shadows of the grave.
Joy sucked in a breath. “That’s the mystery of it. It’s been over a century and now it’s more folklore than fact. No one really knows any more. I’m not certain if anyone back in 1906 really understood it all. Just a young woman. Her body was stuffed into a massive, hollowed oak tree at the bottom of the hill. Some like to say she’s the one who lit the lanterns at night. They stopped shining after she died. At least”—Joy flicked the air with a green fingernail—“that’s what legend says.”
Chapter 3
Jvy
Stillness shrouded the examination room, but peaceful was not a word Ivy would use to describe its crypt-like atmosphere. The body on the table revealed all of the young woman’s secret wounds with stabbing reality. There would be justice for her, if Ivy could commandeer the future. But paramount to justice was a mission to search and save, and one that Ivy would not be left out of. She’d had that same desperation when Andrew died, watching him as he disappeared beneath the ice on the lake. But this time, death would not—could not—become the final signature penned to the end of this woman’s tale.
Gabriella had borne an infant. Within the last two or three weeks. Alone with the body, Ivy held the dead girl’s hand in the bowl of warm water and ran the washcloth over her pale skin. The mud caked under Gabriella’s fingernails dirtied the water.
“Where is your baby?” Ivy whispered. But, did it matter? Yes, Gabriella had been murdered, but perhaps her child was safe. Or was the babe out there, alone for the last thirty-six-odd hours? Would it even be able to survive such a stretch on its own?
Ivy scowled in concentration as she passed the wet cloth over Gabriella’s bruised wrist. Her father had exited the room to soothe his own unsettled nerves in a cup of coffee. She heard the front door shut with a thud. As promised, Joel had returned from the sheriff’s office to hear the analysis of the cause of death.
She wrung water from the cloth and laid Gabriella’s hand over her sheet-covered chest. Drying her own hands on a towel, Ivy tucked a loose strand of her hair into the pinned mass on the top of her head. Her own dark hair and olive skin were a severe contrast to the ethereal paleness of Gabriella. Eyes that were as blue as the sky were now covered with closed eyelids. Ivy knew her own eyes, hazel and catlike, sparked with spirit that Gabriella could no longer claim. Life.
The door pushed open, and Joel entered, Dr. Thorpe on his heels with a pointed look at Ivy. Her father was beseeching her to cooperate. Now would not be the appropriate time to challenge Joel Cunningham’s reappearance in Oakwood, in their lives. Not with a murdered woman and the reality of a missing child.
“Thank you,” Joel’s cool politeness rankled Ivy’s nerves, and he was clearly already well engaged in conversation with her father. “I do take my role here very seriously. I have an obligation to find the truth.”
“I believe the truth may be hard to reconcile,” Ivy inserted before she could bite her tongue.
Their eyes locked. His narrowed, but Ivy preferred to foster an unaffected expression, even though her stomach churned with the intensity of his stare. Their foundation was already well on its way to being irreparable, yet in this moment they were forced to get along.