Haunted, page 12
Again he ignored her proclamation. “So is that why you’re here?”
She nodded. “I’m hoping to find something to lead me to my sisters.” Her fingers tightened on the polished brass frame of her mother and aunts. “We’re the only Coopers left now. Three sisters, like these three.”
“David said you haven’t seen them in twenty years.”
Tears burned her eyes, but she blinked them away. “I need to find them, Ty.”
Strong fingers closed over her shoulder, offering a reassuring squeeze. “We will.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“David’s working on it. He always gets what he wants.”
She shivered, the comment sounding less like a compliment and more like a warning. “Ty…”
He didn’t lift his gaze to hers. Instead he stared at her hand where the diamond glinted in the afternoon sunshine. “He didn’t tell me about your engagement.”
She glanced down at the ring, guilt tugging at her that she had yet to give David an answer. “It’s not official.”
He reached out, pressing his finger against the diamond. “You’re wearing his ring.”
“Yes, but I haven’t said yes.”
“Yet.” His gaze finally met hers, his blue eyes deepening to navy. “You will.”
She shook her head. “It’s not my decision anymore.”
“What do you mean?”
“David knows the truth about me now.” She blinked hard, fighting against the threat of tears. “He might change his mind.”
A corner of Ty’s mouth tipped up into a crooked grin. “If only…”
She’d often thought Ty didn’t consider her good enough for his best friend. Did his comment mean that or something more personal?
Then he chuckled. “Not a chance, not with what he’s willing to do for you.”
She wouldn’t admit to knowing about the gun. “He’s helping me find my sisters.”
Ty nodded. “So tell me about them.”
“My sisters? I don’t know anything about them now. We were so young.”
“Do they have any—” his throat moved as he swallowed, then whispered “—gifts?”
“I don’t know. When we were little, they never really said.” As a child, when she’d seen the ghost of her grandma, she’d never mentioned it to her sisters. Or her mother. She hadn’t been sure what was real and what wasn’t, not with the con games her mother had played.
Her fingers stroked over the face of the little girl in the middle frame. Mama had been the middle sister, like Ariel. “My mother was the only one of her sisters to have gifts. What if I’m the only one? My sisters will have no warning that someone’s after them until I find them.”
Or the killer does.
Ty arched his scarred brow.
“You don’t believe me,” she accused him, fighting the frustration gripping her. Television personalities, both real and fiction, purported to have her gift. So why could no one accept that she had it? Was she not special enough to have an unusual ability?
Ty shook his head. “It’s not that, Ariel.”
“Then what?”
He shrugged. “From a police standpoint, I’d be more interested in finding the threat than your sisters. It’s easier to find one person than two.”
“You’re saying I shouldn’t be looking for Elena and Irina?”
He shook his head. “It might not be necessary—”
“Because you don’t believe any of us are in danger?”
“I’d be a fool not to believe that.” And Ty was no fool. “I’m saying you’re looking for the wrong people. A cop doesn’t go looking for more victims. He looks for suspects in the crimes that have already occurred.”
She shuddered, hating to think of herself or her sisters as victims.
Ty continued his explanation. “You need to find the killer.”
Ariel’s pulse quickened at the jangle as keys turned in the lock of the front door. She wasn’t worried that the killer had found her. She was worried about David.
Heavy footsteps trod through the archway, into the living room where Ariel sat in her favorite extra-wide easy chair, her laptop open across her knees. Warm breath blew across the nape of her neck, exposed by the high ponytail she wore. She closed her eyes as he brushed a soft kiss against her jaw. A shiver rippled through her at the delicious sensation of his lips against her skin.
He made it impossible for her to stay away from him, as she’d intended. She wanted to uncomplicate his life. “David…”
“You’re mad at me,” he said.
She tried to summon anger or, at the very least, righteous indignation. “I should be mad at you.”
He sighed. “With everything going on, I wanted to make sure you were safe. But I know how independent you are.”
Because she’d had to be. She’d never had anyone she could count on. She glanced down at her hand, at the glittering diamond. Dare she believe she had someone now? She closed her eyes, shutting out the ring and David. She couldn’t involve him any deeper.
“I asked Ty to follow you because I didn’t want to take any chances,” he explained.
She used old hurts and bitterness to harden her voice. “In case someone really was after me?”
He shook his head, his soft hair brushing her cheek. “I’m not going to fight with you. You’re not going to push me away again.”
“I’d be doing you a favor,” she told him.
His hands closed over her shoulders as he pressed his cheek against hers. “You’re not getting rid of me that easily.”
She might not, but what about the killer? Would he get rid of David if he continued to get in his way? It was a risk she didn’t want to take. Not with David.
“What kind of future can we have when you don’t believe me?” she reasoned.
“It’s not that I don’t believe you, but you don’t know for sure what really happened. Someone could have killed your aunts for another motive. For land. For money. Who knows?”
“That’s why I have to find him.”
“Him?”
“Her. I suppose the McGregor descendant could be female.” She hadn’t considered that possibility because of the strength it would have taken someone to lift the first aunt up to that beam and put all those rocks onto the second.
“That’s what you’re doing,” he said, scanning her computer screen. “Looking up McGregors?”
“Trying to.” She’d found so many she didn’t know how to begin to narrow down her search.
“Why didn’t you ask me to help you?”
She didn’t want David getting hurt by anyone, least of all herself if she kept pushing him away, so she withheld the truth. Again. “You’re already working on finding my sisters.”
His breath sighed out in a ragged groan of frustration with which she could so identify. “I can’t find any way to unseal their adoption records. I’m sorry.”
“Me, too.” She wanted to see her sisters again and not just to warn them. After how David had responded to her past, she was brave enough to risk their rejection now. She was stronger than she’d been at eighteen, when she’d first considered finding them.
“I’m not giving up, Ariel.”
On finding her sisters or on them? She should give him an answer to his proposal. The one burning in her throat was yes, but she couldn’t utter it, not just out of fairness to him but out of fear for herself. Maybe he’d changed his mind. Maybe she wasn’t as brave as she thought.
He slid his arm around her as he moved to sit beside her on the oversize chair, but a file protruded from between the cushion and the side. “What’s this?”
“You’ve seen it,” she reminded him. “It’s my record.”
He fingered the worn manila folder. “You’ve had this for a while.”
“A long time.”
“You looked for your sisters before.”
She nodded.
“Why did you give up?”
She took the folder from his hands and flipped through it, thumbing the pages like a fan. “There’s nothing here to use to find them.” The contents showed only how lost she’d been growing up. How alone.
“I’ll admit I’m not sure about this whole witch hunt thing,” David said. “All those McGregors could have died out long ago.”
As the Coopers would if someone didn’t stop killing them. “Then who murdered those women?”
David shrugged. “Another enemy, maybe someone using the vendetta to disguise their real motive.”
Ariel sighed. “David, I haven’t seen my mother in a long time and I don’t remember my aunts. I don’t know who their enemies might be.”
“We’ll look for them.”
Ariel handed the laptop over to him. “You look.” She stood up, stretching the kinks from her back and clutching her file. She hadn’t looked at it in so long. But she was stronger now, she reminded herself. She thumbed through all the documents until she found the one she sought—the formal complaint that her mother was an unfit parent. Only an enemy would swear out such a complaint.
“Thora Jones.”
“What?” David asked, glancing up from the computer.
“She was an enemy of my mother’s.”
“Who is she?”
Ariel shrugged. “Maybe a wife of one of the men my mother seduced. Or someone my mother swindled during a séance.”
His forehead furrowed. “How’s that?”
“Not only can I see ghosts, I used to play one for my mother occasionally. Although she had real gifts, she used to con people.” She laughed bitterly. “Claimed she was doing them a favor, that it was nicer to lie to them than tell them the truth. An old Gypsy proverb.”
“Do you remember Thora Jones?”
“No.” She shook her head. “But I was nine. I don’t remember all that much.”
“You remembered the legend.”
She sighed. “It was the kind of thing that would make an impression on a child, give her nightmares for years afterward.” Where she lay awake, crying and trembling with fear and no one to comfort her.
“Ariel…”
She jerked her chin. “No. No pity. Not from you.”
His lips slowly pulled up into a grin.
“Thora Jones…” he said, changing the subject. As he repeated the name, his brow furrowed.
She nodded, hope flaring. “Do you know her?”
“Does it give her address?”
Ariel turned her attention back to the complaint, a sense of foreboding racing across her skin as she read the address. “Right here in Barrett.”
“I thought I recognized the name.”
“What if she’s a McGregor, David?”
“Ariel, she swore out that complaint twenty years ago. Like you said, she could have had any number of reasons for reporting your mother as unfit.”
He didn’t say it, but she called him on it. “Because she was unfit?”
His dark eyes softened with sympathy. “What you said about the séances and the men—it doesn’t sound like the ideal environment for a child.”
“It wasn’t,” she admitted, regret heavy on her heart. “But it was a lot better than what followed.”
Even if Thora Jones wasn’t a McGregor, Ariel wanted to give her a piece of her mind for stealing the only family Ariel had known. She reached down for her purse, which sat beside the couch, and rummaged inside for her keys. “I hope she still lives at the same address—”
“You’re not going alone to see her,” he said, his fingers closing over hers. “You’re not pushing me away or shutting me out again, Ariel.”
His fingers warmed her hand, his words her heart. She gazed up into his eyes at the twin reflections of herself in the dark orbs. He leaned over, brushing his mouth against hers once, twice, with just enough passion that she lost her breath.
“David, she’s probably an old lady now. I’ll be okay,” she insisted.
He shook his head, unswayed by her argument. “I’m coming with you.”
When they buzzed the intercom at the tall wrought-iron gates, gratefulness that she wasn’t alone calmed some of the nerves jittering in Ariel’s stomach. She might be braver now but not this brave.
Peering through the windshield of David’s Escalade, she concluded that the sprawling four-story brick house didn’t look like a private residence at all. Instead the imposing structure, the grounds entirely fenced, reminded her of the sanitariums where she’d been locked away from time to time growing up.
“Are you sure this is the right place?” she asked.
He nodded. “Yeah, the Jones estate. And you think my penthouse is cold.”
She’d never told him that. How did he know her so well? “This really is a house?”
He laughed. “Everyone in Barrett but you knows the Jones estate. You don’t care how much money people have.”
And maybe he thought her crazier about that than about seeing ghosts.
“Have you changed your mind?” he asked, glancing over at her.
She shook her head, determined to face the person who had begun her nightmare.
“Do you have an appointment?” a voice squawked through the intercom.
“David Koster,” he said, neither confirming nor denying if he had one.
With his position in Barrett, he didn’t need reservations or appointments. Predictably the wrought-iron gates opened. Ariel realized again that it was a good thing David had come with her. Without him, she doubted she would have gotten inside.
Once he drove up to the imposing front door of aged oak and antique brass, she reached for his arm, closing her fingers around the green silk of his sleeve. “David, I want you to stay here. I need to do this by myself.”
He turned toward her, his brown eyes dark with hurt. “Are you ever going to let me in, Ariel?”
She knew what he really meant—would she ever trust him? That was an answer she couldn’t give either of them. But she could give him a bit more honesty. “David, you’re further into my life than anyone’s ever been.”
His mouth kicked up into his little wicked grin, and his hand cupped her cheek, his fingers stroking over her skin. “I like to go further than anyone else.”
“David…”
He put his hands back on the wheel, gripping it. “I’ll stay here. But you stay outside where I can see you and make sure you’re safe.”
She might be safe physically, but she didn’t think she’d be very emotionally safe facing down the woman who’d destroyed her family, such as it’d been. Palm damp, she fumbled with the door handle before stepping out of the vehicle. Her boots tapped an uneven rhythm against the cobblestone driveway as she walked hesitantly to the front door. She found no doorbell, just a knocker in the shape of ram’s head, but there must have been a hidden camera somewhere, because she’d barely lifted the heavy brass knocker when the door opened.
A blond woman stood before Ariel, her eerie light blue eyes dazed before she blinked and focused. “You’re not David Koster.”
“You’re not Thora Jones.” She was too young to have been the woman who’d accused Myra of being an unfit mother twenty years ago. She probably wouldn’t have even been a teenager yet. Hair rose on the nape of Ariel’s neck and her skin prickled. Could it be? Blond. With those unforgettable, eerie blue eyes. She looked like an aged-progression photograph of the image of the child in Ariel’s mind.
Was this the woman her older sister had grown into? Except for the physical similarities, she had none of Elena’s fire and charm Ariel remembered. This woman was a stranger. She matched the house, cold and unapproachable, in a gray blouse and flannel trousers. Ariel couldn’t mistake her for a housekeeper, not with the diamonds at her ears and neck and the imperious tilt of her nose and chin.
“Thora is my grandmother. She’s not available right now.” She stepped back as if to close the door again, dismissing Ariel.
“You’re Elena Cooper.” The words spilled from Ariel’s lips like an accusation.
The chin tilted again, and despite being shorter than Ariel, she managed to look down her thin nose at her. “I’m Elena Jones-Phillips.”
Her surname was inconsequential. What mattered was that Ariel had found her older sister.
Chapter 9
Ariel’s heart clenched as she realized that, while she had grown up with strangers, Elena had been living with family, the woman responsible for their mother’s losing custody of them. Instead of fighting Thora Jones’s charge, Myra had just given up. She’d given up them.
Ariel’s knees weakened. She couldn’t believe that after all these years and all her fears she’d found her sister like this, almost by accident.
“Who are you?” Elena asked with a faint quaver in her voice, as if afraid of the answer.
“You know who I am,” Ariel said, realizing the dazed look in Elena’s pale blue eyes when she’d opened the door had been recognition. And shock. As Ariel had anticipated when she was eighteen, her sisters—at least this one—wanted nothing to do with her. Pain squeezed her heart, and she fought a silent battle for her breath…and her pride. Finding both, she straightened and remarked, “Good thing I’m not here for a tearful reunion.”
“Then why are you here?”
“To warn you.”
Thick black lashes blinked over those blue eyes once, then again. “About?”
“The curse.”
Blond hair brushed the woman’s shoulders as she shook her head. “You’re talking about the ramblings of an unstable woman. None of that was true,” she insisted, her voice vibrating with intensity. “It was all in her alcohol- and drug-induced imagination. Curses, vendettas, special abilities—none of that was real.”
“I’ve thought that sometimes.” When she’d awakened from a nightmare, soaked with sweat. “Then I would look at this.” Ariel lifted her wrist, dangling the sun charm near Elena’s face.
Elena lifted her wrists, both bare but for the slim gold watch on her right one. “It’s been twenty years. I’ve forgotten everything about that life.” Her mouth twisted into a hard line as she added, “And everyone.”
