Page 25 of The Grave Robber

“Sorry for the late-night visit.”

“Please, don’t apologize.” He shook his head and rubbed hisred-rimmed eyes with a thumb and index finger. He’d been crying. Jason must’vetold him about the fate I’d seen for his daughter. “Anything I can do,” hesaid, his voice cracking. “Any time, day or night.”

“Thank you.”

He sat me behind a massive oak desk and woke up hiscomputer. A video was already cued up. “Just press play.”

I viewed the grainy video from a surveillance camera set upin Halle’s kitchen on the houseboat. The angle captured a tiny bit of herbedroom as she slept in the background. I could only see her blond head giventhe covers she had pulled up to her chin.

After a moment, a dining room chair slid slowly across thekitchen floor, scraping the tile and not stopping until it butted up against acabinet. Creepy? Yes. Legitimate? That remained to be seen.

The video flickered as the timestamp jumped forward, theclips pieced together rather shoddily. The next clip showed a cup launchingitself off the countertop and crashing against the fridge. The clip had sound,and the crash was loud enough to wake the dead. Metaphorically. But Halledidn’t move. Didn’t even flinch. That fact was even more suspicious than thecup.

“There’s one more event,” Donald said.

I waited until the next flicker. This clip was from the samecamera, only this time, I saw Halle’s face in the background, blurry andmonochromatic but clearly her. She breathed softly with her hands under herchin, which didn’t change, even when the blanket covering her slid down to revealher complete state of undress.

Though I should have looked away, I didn’t blink until thedoor to her bedroom slammed shut with a violent boom that would’ve shaken thewhole boat. It was almost a warning to anyone watching—a very possessive one.

“That’s it,” Donald said. He’d walked away to gaze out ahuge plate glass window, unable to watch what his daughter had been goingthrough.

The timestamp between the three clips showed they’d happenedonly a few minutes apart, and if not for a few minor points, I might’ve boughtthe whole thing. But probably not. I’d been at this for a long time.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“How old is this?”

“About a year. It was captured right before Halle’s motherdied.”

“Jason said you had it checked out?”

“Yes. Our head of security says it’s legit. He alsoinvestigated her houseboat. There was no evidence of tampering. Nothing tied tothe chair or the cup.”

“And Halle didn’t see anyone when she woke up?”

“That’s just it. She didn’t. She slept through the wholething. It was actually our head of security who noticed it a few days later andbrought it to our attention.” He pointed at the computer screen as thoughaccusing it of wrongdoing. “We had her committed because of all this, Eric.”His voice broke, and he had to step away to gather himself. He gazed out of thewindow again, the darkness beyond impossible to penetrate save for a fewflickers of moonlight glistening on the waves across the lake. “Years ago, wehad her institutionalized because we thought she was delusional. And then wesaw this video.”

The guilt was clearly eating him alive.

“And now you think she’s going to be murdered?” A husky sobrushed out of him, and he fought to keep his emotions under control.

I gave him a moment before asking, “Can you email this tome?”

“Of course. But you haven’t told me what you think.”

“I don’t have an opinion just yet,” I lied. “But let me askyou, in all of the years you’ve had security cameras on Halle, is this the onlyvideo showing any supernatural events?” And three in one night, too. Howconvenient.

“My wife and I tried for years to figure this out. To comeup with a reason for what we thought were Halle’s delusions. To figure outexactly when it all started.”

“And?”

He shook his head. “We never came up with a specific time,place, or incident. One day, we just noticed that she was, I don’t know how tosay it…”

“As honestly as you can.”

“That she was going downhill.” He raked a hand through histhinning hair. “Or maybe she’d already hit rock bottom by the time we caught on.She’s a very good actress.”

“I noticed.”

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