Priscilla was a handful, Reed thought. Morrisette’s son, Toby, was a few years younger than his sister and to hear Morrisette tell it, already thinking he was an adult and “the man of the family.” His mother disagreed. “In his dreams,” she’d confided not long ago.
“Come on, let’s get to it,” she added. “You go south, I’ll head north. Let’s just get a feel for this place and hope we don’t find any more bodies.” Reed eyed the woods, tall and gloomy, and wondered if the whole damned estate was a dumping ground for corpses and if there was a serial killer on the loose. The victims discovered in the basement had been there for years, possibly decades, but what if there were more? Fresh ones?
Reed didn’t like the turn of his thoughts. And there was Bronco. Why was he on the property? What was the connection?
As to the victims—yes, girls, he decided, his stomach churning at the thought. They’d been hidden in that hole in the wall a long time.
Who the hell were they?
CHAPTER 4
Nikki eased off the gas as she reached the gates of the Beaumont estate, then sped past. Before she was spotted. Of course the entrance was closed off, police vehicles blocking access except for the authorized vehicles from the department or the medical examiner or forensic team. And, she noted, Reed’s Jeep was wedged between two sheriff’s department SUVs. Deputies had been posted to prevent the public and the press from getting too close to the crime scene and keeping neighbors, the general public and lookie-loos from catching a glimpse of what was going on. Well, too bad. Fortunately, she knew this area like the back of her hand and so she rolled on past the main entrance. Around two curves she found a turnout where the road was wider, a spot that fishermen used to park their cars before they hiked to the river.
She pulled in and parked, locked the car and started jogging along a familiar path through the forest. She came to a fork near a blackened stump and turned without hesitation to the right, doubling back toward the Beaumont estate. She’d come here as a kid along with her brothers and sister. Andrew, the oldest, leading the way, Kyle dogging at his heels, Lily and Nikki lagging behind as they’d followed the old deer trails through the sun-dappled forest. It had been long ago—so long—and now . . . she closed her mind to the past, didn’t want to think of her shattered family. Andrew had died so long ago and his death had sent the family into a tailspin, Kyle rebelling and becoming distant, Lily set upon her own introspective path of bad decisions, and Nikki’s own innocence destroyed. Her parents, never loving to begin with, had never been the same.
But she wouldn’t go there. Not now. Not when she had to concentrate.
She kept running.
Twilight was fast approaching, the gloom settling under the canopy of branches overhead, the smell of the river thick in her nostrils. Roots and rocks made the ground uneven, and spider webs and limbs brushed her bare arms as she caught glimpses of the river through the trees. She was breathing hard as she spied the wire fence, the mesh disintegrating, a faded NO TRESPASSING sign hanging by a single strand as it warned that violators would be prosecuted.
“Too bad,” she muttered, and slipped through a large gap in the mesh.
Speaking of prosecution and the law—what happens when Reed finds out you’ve been here? Not just trespassing, but nosing around his crime scene? Huh? What then?
Ignoring that nasty little voice in her head, she hesitated at the edge of the woods leading to the clearing beyond, where the tall grass met the river’s edge and nestled in a copse of live oaks. The proud old house stood, crumbling now, on a small rise. As a child, Nikki and her family had attended parties here. Even then the old house had been starting to show its age, but now, nearly thirty years later, it had fallen into near ruin. As she peeked between the leaves of an overgrown crepe myrtle, she eyed the house and grounds now crawling with cops. So different from how it had been. In her mind’s eye she remembered the parties Beulah Beaumont had hosted, here on these very grounds. Nikki had been little more than a toddler who, like the other children of guests, had been allowed to play and run down the terraced lawn and in the surrounding trees while the acrid smell of smoke from the barbecue mixed with sweet aromas of hummingbird cake and pecan pies wafting from the kitchen.
She remembered Beulah Beaumont, the matriarch, as a proud woman with flaming red hair piled high, blue eyes that narrowed suspiciously and thin lips that were forever drawn into a saccharine smile. Miss Beulah had smelled of some odious perfume meant to cover the scents of alcohol and cigarettes, though those acrid scents had always lingered. As Nikki’s mother, Charlene, had once said, “Who does she think she’s fooling? And that wig! Dear Lord!”
At the events, Beulah had never left the shade of the veranda but had sat in her wheelchair as if it were a throne, sipping from her tall glass of her own special Chatham Artillery punch. The boozy recipe included more than a little sugar and lemons, along with a concoction of whiskeys, rum and champagne “kissed with lemons and oranges,” as Beulah herself had often drawled.
Even as a five-year-old, Nikki had made it a point of avoiding Beulah’s watchful eyes; there was just something fraudulent in her seemingly gracious smile when she greeted the Gillette family and offered sweet tea or “something a little stronger.”
But that was long ago. Before Beulah had passed and her stepson, Baxter, had inherited the house and surrounding acres.
Now, still hidden in the foliage surrounding the overgrown lawn, Nikki watched as a couple of deputies talked by the ME’s van parked near the rear of the old house. Other cops came and went through a back side door, but she didn’t spy Reed.
Good.
But was he still inside, or had he left in the time it had taken her to park her SUV and jog back through the forest? She slid her cell phone from her pocket, hit the camera app and zoomed in on the porch. Reed would really have a fit if he found out she was taking photos, but he was going to have one anyway.
She wanted to talk to some of the officers involved but couldn’t chance it just yet. Not when Reed was probably still nearby. A mosquito buzzed near her ear and she slapped at it as she eyed the area and thought that if she skirted the house along the river, then cut into the old rose garden, she might be able to overhear a conversation or even get a peek inside the house.
The house sat on a point where the river turned nearly back on itself, the grassy bank overhanging a narrow rocky beach. Not great cover, but it would have to do.
She slid her phone back into her rear pocket, then eased from the cover of the undergrowth to crouch beneath the rim of grassland. Noiselessly she started circumventing the grounds and past the point and the remains of what had once been a dock and was now reduced to a few weathered boards and dark pilings nearly obscured in the swollen river. Debris moved swiftly downstream—branches, limbs, a bucket and a volleyball swirling by.
Nikki edged carefully beneath the overhang, her boots slipping on wet rocks. She had to slip through the reeds, but all the while she watched the house and wondered what had happened.
She couldn’t fight the rush of adrenaline as she imagined finding out the facts to whatever story was evolving on this old plantation. Who had been killed? When? Why? She just didn’t have enough information. Who had phoned in the crime to the police—who was that anonymous caller? She needed to get to the bottom of this story, or at least be the first to report it. Carefully she eased along the bank and hoped she didn’t step into an alligator nest or come across any snakes or . . . Stop it. A tomboy in her youth and a daredevil in her teens, she didn’t let too many things frighten her, so she wouldn’t worry too much about the creatures she’d grown up with, and she moved as quickly as possible as darkness was encroaching, shadows fingering through the marshy bank.