Fatal, But Festive, page 8
Kiley poured, but her eyes kept darting to the folder. “Thanks for coming.”
“Yeah, I don’t have long.”
“I know. I already ordered food.”
Her brows went up. “You think you know what I want?”
“I got the sampler platter.”
Mendosa blinked, sipped her coffee, closed her eyes blissfully. Yeah, it was good coffee. And then she said, “You’re kind of smart, aren’t you?”
“Kind of.”
“Well, this is everything I have on York.” She nodded at the bundle.
“I don’t want you to get into any trouble—”
“I won’t. I checked with the chief. He approved it.”
Kiley frowned. “He approved it?”
The waitress arrived with their platter. Kiley moved the bundle off the table to make room for it. She’d expected to have to convince Mendosa to help her.
“Why was this so easy?” she asked.
“It’s a cold case. No leads in years. If someone wants to help out, why the hell not?”
“So any aspiring Dick Tracy off the street who walked in could’ve had all this for the asking?”
Mendosa was spearing appetizers and loading them onto her plate. She demolished a jalapeño popper and a third of a dishful of queso dip, then said, “Tell you the truth, he’s still pretty weirded out from the Miller case. He thinks you and that McCain character actually have something, you know?”
“Yeah?”
She nodded.
Kiley said, “It’s all Jack. I don’t… have anything. Except a house with an invisible ‘Spooks Welcome’ sign on its etheric lawn.”
Mendosa shrugged. “You two think you’ve got something on this kid?”
“He’s haunting us a little. Jack and me. Or maybe he’s haunting an old lady’s coat, and the old lady is haunting us. We don’t know yet.”
“Huh.” She ate some more. Kiley did, too. As the selection on the platter dwindled, Mendosa wiped her mouth with a napkin, took a drink of coffee, which she had refilled, and leaned back in her chair. “He had no family, nobody to push for him. The case went cold. It shouldn’t have. There was a pregnant girlfriend…I meant to look up her name—”
“Rosalie Cantrell.”
“Yes. Yes. So you’ve found her?”
“Yeah.”
“You talk to her yet? How’d she make out?”
“Had twins. She was sure Gabriel was dead, because she claimed his ghost was with her day and night. She wound up attempting suicide five years ago and has been in a persistent vegetative state ever since.”
“Jesus.” Mendosa looked horrified.
“Yeah.”
“What happened to the kids?”
“Well, they were grown by then, but Rosalie was never stable. She never moved out of her mother’s house. Is still there. The kids are okay, more or less. Inherited their grandmother’s house and comatose mother.”
“Wow. But they’re okay?”
Kiley shrugged. “The brother’s a nervous thing, keeps his head down, always looking at the floor. Sister’s an overbearing, demanding jerk, but probably has good reason to be. To be honest, they’ve been less than helpful. But you know, they blame believing in ghosts for what happened to their mother, and so me, being kind of in the ghost biz…”
“I can see where that would be a problem.”
“Besides, they weren’t even born when Gabriel went missing. I don’t think there’s much they could tell us that might help.”
“Well, I can only tell you what I remember. It was heartbreaking enough that it stuck with me. Gabriel York was only nineteen..”
“I’m surprised you remember anything.”
“Hard case to forget. Nineteen-year-old kid disappears without a trace on Christmas Eve? Hell, you don’t forget that. He was supposed to pick up his pregnant girlfriend. They were going to elope. But the girlfriend said he never arrived. She waited all night by her bedroom window, but he never came.”
“They ever find his car?”
“Yeah. At the bus station. But since he hasn’t been heard from in a couple’a decades, I don’t really think he went traveling.”
“Since he’s been haunting his girlfriend for just as long, I don’t think so, either.”
“Never liked the girl’s parents.” Mendosa grabbed the final breadstick as she slid out of her chair.
“Why not?”
She shrugged. “Couldn’t tell you. Maybe something in that file can.”
“Thanks for this.”
“Keep me posted,” she said, pointing with the breadstick for emphasis, then she dipped it into a dish of salsa, bit off the end, and hurried away.
Kiley stacked their dishes atop the platter and moved it all aside so she could open the folder. And the first thing she saw was a photo of Gabriel York. He had wild dark curls, brown eyes, thick lashes that made him look innocent and kind, not angry and dead.
CHAPTER NINE
Kiley sat on the floor, the file open in front of her, a glass of wine in her left hand. Jack had a roaring fire going. The tree was lit and the entire place smelled like Christmas. Maya sat on the sofa beside Johnny, reading over his shoulder from a book with old cloth binding in faded red. Chris was in one of the soft chairs, tapping non-stop on his iPad.“So the family lore is that the twins’ father—”
“Gabriel York,” Kiley said, holding up a five by seven headshot. “This is him without his face paint.”
“Johnny?” Jack prompted. And Kiley knew why. She’d seen the look that had crossed Johnny’s face.
“What?”
“You looked like you recognized the guy,” Jack said.
A little frown knit Johnny’s brow. “Yeah, for a second, I thought I did. But no. Please, continue. Family lore…”
“Family lore is that Gabriel York wanted to marry Rosalie, but that her father didn’t approve. So they were going to elope on Christmas Eve. She waited for him, but he never came. And no one ever heard from him again.”
“Rosalie’s father,” Maya said slowly. “We haven’t talked about him much, have we?”
“Because he’s been dead for a while,” Kiley said.
“Yeah, but how long a while?” Chris tapped the screen as he spoke the name. “Edward O’Reilly Cantrell.”.
Kiley flipped pages in the police file. “It’s right here, I just saw it. Yes, right here. A statement from Grandma Nisha herself. “Edward and I had a falling out we just couldn’t get past. He took his car and left us on December twenty-first. I remember because it was the winter solstice. The darkest night. My darkest, for sure.’” Kiley sighed heavily. “So first her husband vanishes without a trace…”
“And then her daughter’s fiancé does the same a few days later?” Jack said, completing her thought.
Maya rose from the sofa and moved to stare into the fire. “I wonder where they were going to go? Gabriel and Rosalie? They must’ve planned to go somewhere.”
“Well, there’s really only one place to go,” Johnny said. But he said it in an odd accent. He walked around the sofa to put a hand on Maya’s shoulder. “I’ll make it nice. And we’ll be safe. No one knows but Uncle Sammy and me.”
Maya stared at his face and her eyes went really wide.
“G-Gabriel?”
He lifted his brows. “You’re not Rosalie!” The words exploded from him with some sort of percussive force that sent Maya reeling backward. Kiley surged to her feet and broke her progress, taking a full body hit, then grabbing hold to steady her. Johnny collapsed in on himself like a deflated balloon.
Jack dove, shoving a sofa pillow under his head before it hit the corner of the hearthstone. Chris was on his feet, gaze jumping from one of them to the next. “What the hell, what the hell?”
“That wasn’t Johnny,” Maya said. She got her footing, eased out of Kiley’s grasp, and moved toward where he lay on the floor. “His eyes changed. They were darker. And his voice…”
Kiley returned to the file, its pages scattered. She found what she was looking for, all the same. “Gabriel York was raised in England, by his mother. She died when he was sixteen, and he came here to live with his Uncle Samuel York, his only living relative,” Kiley said, nutshelling what she found on the pages describing the young man.
“So…he probably spoke with a British accent,” Maya whispered. She was sitting on the hearthstone, her hand on Johnny’s shoulder as he gradually came around.
Chris tapped his screen. “Gabriel was his only living relative and heir.”
“Heir to what?” Jack asked.
Johnny was sitting up, looking around, asking what had happened quietly, beneath the ongoing conversation.
“Cross referencing public records with both their names and the dates—”
“There was a cabin,” Johnny said.
“There was a cabin,” Chris said, overlapping him. And then he added, “Holy shit, how did you know that, Johnny?”
Johnny looked at Maya. “How did I know that?”
“I think Gabriel York might’ve … possessed you for a few seconds. Your eyes were different, and you spoke with a British accent. It’s not the first time, either.” She looked at the others. “We need to address this, find a way to protect him—”
“What we need to do is find the cabin,” Johnny said. He looked at Maya and then the others. “I feel it to my bones. It’s important we go there.”
“Then we’ll go there.”
Chris said, “It’s way the hell north, up in the Adirondacks. I have an address.”
“I have a metric shit ton of camping gear,” Jack said.
Kiley raised her eyebrows at him. “How did I not know this?”
“Because I figured you’d peg me as some kind of survivalist instead of just a camping enthusiast.”
“Well, duh. Oh course not. So where is all this gear? You have a bunker somewhere?”
“See?”
“What?”
“I have camping gear, too,” Johnny said. “Should we gather it up and meet back here?”
“Let’s gather it up on the way, Maya said. “And let’s take multiple vehicles. I want my All Wheel Drive. Chris and Johnny can ride with me.”
“We’ll take the van,” Jack said. “There’s room for a lot of gear in the back, and it’s full of gas.”
“I’m texting you the GPS coordinates,” Chris told Jack, whose phone bleeped before the kid had finished speaking.
They drove. They stopped for fast food — Burger King, so Maya could have a vegan option. Then they drove some more. It got dark, and road signs were few and far between. It was at that point of darkness where the mountains were purple silhouettes against the distant sky, visible only between gaps in the treeline.
“It’s creepy way the fuck up here in the dark,” Kiley said.
Jack tapped the phone to call Maya, who picked up right away. “We were just going to call you. What’s our plan of action?”
“I don’t know,” Kiley said. “Get there and look for clues?” Then she added, “Johnny, what did you get out of Rosalie’s soul or whatever? You never said.”
Johnny’s voice came quieter than Maya’s had. “She’s holding on by sheer will. Says she will not die and leave her beloved Gabe behind—it’s Gabe, by the way. No one called him Gabriel.”
“What makes her think he won’t just go with her?” Kiley asked. “I mean, couldn’t that be why he’s hanging around, waiting for her so they can go together?”
“No, no. He isn’t choosing to stay. Rosalie thinks he’s trapped,” Johnny said.
“That tracks,” Jack said. “Everything about him feels…just claustrophobically trapped, bound, like he’s stuck in a straitjacket. It’s a sense of panicked suffocation, all the time.”
“Jeeziz,” Maya whispered.
“Okay, okay. Gabe is trapped, and it’s damned unpleasant and that’s why he’s so freaking dickish all the time,” Kiley said. “Got it.”
“So we need to free Gabe,” Jack said.
Nodding, Kiley went on. “Rosalie is lingering in a vegetative coma because she won’t die without taking Gabe with her.”
“And Grandma Nisha can’t be at peace until her daughter finally is?” Chris asked. “I don’t know. It seems to me that if something that simple could keep you from crossing over, all the dead would be hanging around waiting for loved ones.”
“So again, we need to free Gabe to free Rosalie and we need to free Rosalie before Grandma Nisha will move on,” Kiley said, because saying it out loud, it almost made sense.
“And we need to do it all by Christmas Eve,” Johnny said.
“Um… how do you know that, Johnny?” Kiley asked, her eyes on Jack’s profile while she awaited a reply from the other car.
“I don’t know,” Johnny said at length. “But I’m sure of it.”
Mm-hmm. And do you know what happens if we miss that deadline?”
“One of us will die.”
“Tell me this isn’t the place,” Kiley said, hours later.
Jack was still driving because it was his van. Kiley was still in the passenger side. But now Chris, who’d joined them after the last rest stop, was crouching between them, watching the in-dash screen and the view through the windshield. The rest of the space in back was crammed full of gear, “just in case.”
That’s what Jack said when she asked him about all the crap he was loading. That it was “just in case.”
“This is the place,” Chris said, nodding at the bramble-and-vine-smothered cabin.
“It looks like it’s been sitting untouched for a hundred years,” Kiley said kind of softly, because the place seemed to warrant it. But maybe that was just because it was so very dark outside. Inky dark. It had density, this darkness. They’d driven deep into the Adirondacks, and were miles from the nearest…anything. They’d lost cell service a few miles back.
“If this is the last place Gabriel York was before he died, then it can’t have been sitting here like this for more than twenty-five,” Chris pointed out.
“Ah, hell.” Jack pulled the van slowly into the only spot that looked roughly like a driveway, a barely discernible pattern where the tall weeds and grasses were thinner and formed a distinct rectangle.
Johnny and Maya crept along right behind them in Maya’s hybrid Land Rover.
“I don’t see any electric lines,” Jack said. He stopped the van, shut it off, but left the headlights on. It wasn’t even fully nighttime, dusk, maybe. But this place was dark all the same. There were gigantic, bare-limbed trees looming over it like angry old men trying to frighten it, and behind them, evergreens made a solid backdrop that admitted no light. The cabin wore a coat of briars and brambles and a skirt of thick weeds and saplings.
Jack reached into his door’s side pocket and pulled out a heavy-looking metal flashlight as long as his forearm. Then he nodded at Kiley and said, “There’s one on your side, too.”
She reached down and found a flashlight. Hers was blue. His was red. She wanted to trade.
Chris flicked one on from behind, right into her eyes, then quickly away when she closed them and put up her hand.
Johnny and Maya were already out of their car, armed with flashlights of their own. Kiley inhaled and wrinkled her nose at the hint of decay that tinged the scent of the pines and the forest itself. The ground was squishy, so wet that it came up into her shoes. It had been a rainy summer in most of the state, though, and that was probably why it was so overgrown, anyway. Kiley reminded herself that a vine-covered cabin in the summer would be whimsical, not terrifying. It was just that it was winter and the brambles were leafless and brown, decked only by their thorns and withered, dried bits here and there, rasping loud in the cold breeze.
“It sounds like it’s warning us away,” she said. So much for trying to find a positive thought about the place.
They walked closer, Jack led the way, which was really impressive, Kiley thought, since she knew he was as scared as she was. He just hid it better.
She stuck close, holding her flashlight for dear life. They sort of crouched while they walked, almost in expectation of attack. Jack aimed his beam straight ahead, so she swung hers, making wide arcs, scanning the weeds and undergrowth around them, the forest beyond that. No glowing eyes. Something skittered away, shaking the grasses as her light moved over them. She thought her heart was going to pound through her chest and pressed a hand there to keep it contained.
Jack reached back, took her hand from her chest and held it in his. “Woodchuck. Rabbit. Raccoon. Something small and furry that would make you go ‘aww’ in the daytime.”
“I do not go ‘aww’.”
Maya snort laughed behind her.
A little more relaxed, they started moving forward again. Jack aimed his light at the ground, found two front steps and swept them clear of litter with his foot. And then he tore vines away from the door, took hold of the knob and twisted it. “It’s not locked. Swollen, though.” He put his shoulder against it and pushed the door open.
Its hinges creaked like damned souls being dragged to hell. The sound only stopped when the door stood wide, and Jack was inside, shining his light around. He said, “Huh.”
Which made Kiley look, too. She aimed the beam around. The place was dusty and there were cobwebs, but it was in good repair.
“I’ll get some lights,” Johnny said from the rear of the group. The rest of them fanned out, exploring the place by flashlight. Large front room. The few pieces of furniture—a sofa and a couple of chairs—were all sheet-draped. There was a nice cobblestone fireplace that took up a whole wall. It had shelves built into it and a big slab of wood for a mantle. There were rooms off it, two on each side, and three of them had flashlight beams moving around inside.
Johnny came through the front door with two of those white-gas lanterns in each hand. He lined them up on the floor inside, and kneeling, began the process of lighting them, which seemed unnecessarily complicated. There was pumping involved. Kiley had no idea. But when the first one took, the light was tremendous and bright white. It glowed like a miniature sun.
