Page 15 of The Night Before (Savannah 1)

Caitlyn gritted her teeth against the pain. The last thing she wanted was to deal with anyone. Except Kelly. “I can call one of my sisters or my brother.”

“Promise?”

“Yes. Please. I’ll be fine.” Liar! You’ll never be fine!

Reed looked skeptical, but the woman cop bristled, sending him a silent message that warned him to hold back whatever protest he was about to voice.

Frowning hard, Reed snapped his notebook closed. “We could phone someone for you. One of the siblings you mentioned.” He scratched his chin, seemed lost in thought as he glanced out the window to a spot where a bird feeder turned slowly as it hung from a limb of her magnolia tree. A cardinal balanced on a small perch and was busily pecking at the tiny seeds. “You’ll need someone with you. Some reporters were already showing up at your husband’s house as we left.”

Her heart nearly stopped beating. “Reporters?”

“It won’t be long before they put two and two together and show up here,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Wonderful.” Dealing with the police was tough enough; she couldn’t imagine taking on the press. Not now.

“I wouldn’t talk to them if I were you.”

Don’t worry.

Detective Morrisette nodded her agreement as she slid her dark glasses onto the bridge of her nose. “They can be nasty. Please let us call someone. A friend or a family member. You shouldn’t be alone right now.”

“No—I’ll be all right . . .” A ridiculous statement. She would never be all right. Maybe never had been. Now Josh was dead and there was so much blood in her own bedroom and her dream . . . was it a dream? If only she could get through to Kelly and find out what the hell had happened last night. She forced a calm, humorless smile. “I’ll call my brother, Troy. He works downtown at the bank.” Both officers appeared skeptical as she walked them to the back door.

“It’s Saturday,” Reed pointed out. “Aren’t the banks closed?”

“Not Montgomery Bank and Trust,” she said, glancing at the clock. The bank was open a few hours in the middle of the day, an innovation her grandfather had incorporated years before. “I don’t need anyone to call my brother. I’ll be fine,” she insisted, knowing that she was lying. “Just give me some time alone to pull myself together.”

Reed looked as though he was about to say more but caught a quick shake of his partner’s head and held his tongue. Caitlyn watched as they walked through her front yard. The old gate creaked as they passed through and Oscar, spying a neighbor’s cat lurking in the branches of the sassafras tree, started barking insanely.

Before he could race outside, Caitlyn closed the door, and as it latched she leaned against the cool panels. Somehow, some way, she had to figure out what had happened last night.

Josh was dead. Dead.

Probably murdered.

And she couldn’t even swear that she hadn’t killed him.

Four

This morning the spirits were still restless.

Angry.

Hissing as they darted through the shadows.

Mocking.

As they had been all night long.

Their movements had kept Lucille from sleep, haunting her, touching her mind if she dared drop off even for a second. They’d started around midnight, sighing through the branches of the live oaks, causing the Spanish moss to sway. The wraiths grumbled by the old waterwheel that creaked as it turned in the stream flowing past the orchard, and they hid in the rafters of the third story of this grand old decaying manor where Lucille had tried and failed to sleep. She’d thought they would disappear into the shadows with the morning light. But she’d been wrong. They were still annoying her as she swept the wide porch of Oak Hill, the Montgomery plantation, poking her broom at a cottonlike nest of spiders in the corner.

“You all, jest git. Go away, l

eave me be,” she muttered, her lips flattening over her teeth as she spied the gardener’s boy clipping dying blooms off the roses. He didn’t look up from beneath the bill of his cap, but she knew he’d heard her. She’d have to be careful.

Though some people thought she was a little touched in the head, that some of the Montgomery lunacy had somehow invaded her, Lucille was as sane as anyone she knew. Saner. She was just cursed with the ability to hear those who should have passed on, and she was certain the old three-storied home with its beveled windows, crystal chandeliers and pillared brick porch was haunted. She knew some of the ghosts’ names, had read them time and time again on the crumbling gravestones. Some of the angry, bodyless beings had been slaves over a century before, some had been children, poor little souls who’d never had a chance to grow up, but what they had in common was that every last one of the angry souls had been born with at least one drop of Montgomery blood running through their veins.

She just wished they’d be silent. Slide back into their tombs where they belonged. But that was not to be because something vile and dark had happened last night; she just didn’t know what. Yet.

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