Katie O’Hara, was the one who had been born with the sixth sense, gift, curse or whatever one wanted to call it that allowed people to see what others did not. Liam didn’t think that the rest of them had anything that remotely resembled Katie’s gifts. But they had all survived events in which what wasn’t at all ordinary had played a major part.
And they all knew there were forces in the world that weren’t visible to the naked eye.
And he should have been accustomed to Bartholomew by now.
In life, Bartholomew had surely been a dashing and charming individual. Even in death, he was quite a character: intelligent and with a keen sense of justice.
“What?” Liam said, spinning around.
Bartholomew stopped short. “What do you mean, what? Cutter Merlin was found dead in a most unusual way, and, God knows, the place had its reputation. You just may need me.”
“It’s going to turn out to be kids, I’m willing to bet,” Liam said. “Teenagers who know the man died and want to break into a haunted house.”
Bartholomew shrugged. “I’m just along for the ride,” he said. “I haven’t seen it yet. The place sounds extremely unusual, and I’m fascinated.”
Liam groaned. “All right, let’s go.”
Liam supposed it was natural that people—young and old—would find the Merlin house fascinating, and that it did make a great haunted house. Once, of course, it had been a beautiful grand dame, but time had done its work, and with Cutter Merlin being old and alone, it had taken on that aura of decay long before the gentleman had passed. Then, of course, there was the truth—he had been a collector of oddities, including human remains such as mummies and shrunken heads.
It was a little more than a mile down Duval and around Front Street and then down around the little peninsula to reach the Merlin house. Liam parked in the overgrown yard. He exited the car and stared at the place, but not even the porch light he had left on after Merlin’s body had been removed was still shining. A burned-out bulb? Or was a prankster inside?
“That’s one eerie residence,” Bartholomew commented.
Liam shrugged and walked up the path to the porch. He tried the front door and found it unlocked. He knew that it had been locked and they had sealed up the entrance over the washer and dryer. Merlin’s attorney, Joe Richter, had the only other set of keys.
He stepped in. Somehow, the house still seemed to have an aura of death about it.
He tried the light switch by the front door, but nothing happened. He turned on his flashlight, and the parlor was illuminated.
An odd whisper emanated through the house. In his mind’s eye, Liam thought about the layout of the house. The front door faced south and Old Town, Key West. Cutter’s library or office was to the left, and behind it was a workroom. The living room stretched the rest of the way in the front, with a doorway leading into the dining room. The kitchen stretched across the back of the house and could be entered through the dining room or the living room. In the center of the living room there was a grand stairway.
The staircase where Kelsey’s mother had died.
He hadn’t been there when it had happened; he had seen Kelsey after, at the funeral. Throughout the service, attended by most of the city, Kelsey had stood, pale and stoic, trying to be a rock for her father, and for Cutter.
Later, when the formal services had ended, they had come here.
Friends and neighbors had helped; food had been set on the buffets, and on the dining-room table, and people had talked. And one by one, their other friends had gone, and finally he had been alone with Kelsey, and they hadn’t said much; he had just held her while she sobbed, until she was so tired that she needed to be brought up to bed.
He had carried her. With her father’s permission. Cutter had suggested that they just wake her; he had been loath to do so. “She’s not heavy, sir,” he had assured Cutter. But when he had brought her up the stairs and laid her down, she had clung to him, and he had stayed beside her in the darkness and the shadows until the exhaustion of her grief had brought sleep mercifully to her once again, and only then had he tiptoed away.
It had been the last time he had seen her.
He couldn’t think about Kelsey or the past now. He wasn’t the same; he was sure Kelsey wasn’t the same. And the house certainly wasn’t the same. It seemed like a shell, the bones of a family and happiness that had once existed.
He owed it to Kelsey, though, to keep the miscreants and thieves away until she decided what she wanted.
Two archways sat on either side of the stairway, one leading to the dining room, the other leading to an area that was a family room—in Victorian days, the family had seldom used the proper living room or parlor. The fireplace was dual; a mantel sat on the other side in Cutter’s office. Though it was seldom that the temperature went below forty even in the dead of winter, it could be cold in the dampness of the semitropics. He had found Cutter in the rocker by the fireplace.
He cast the light over the parlor. It sat in still and brooding silence, boxes everywhere, the heads of long-dead animals staring down at him, spiderwebs reigning supreme along with the dust.
“Oh, God! Oh, God!”
The sound was coming from the kitchen. Frowning, Liam walked through the parlor and quietly continued, skirting boxes and crates and statues, until he reached the kitchen.
He cast the flare of his flashlight toward the far wall even as a bloodcurdling scream ripped through the air.
It startled and unnerved him; even Bartholomew gasped.
“What the hell…?”
“Oh, my God! You’re alive, you’re real!”
The light illuminated three people—three young people.
Teenagers, as he had suspected.
They looked like little Key deer caught in the head-lights, staring back at him with white faces and terrified stares.
“Yes, I’m alive,” Liam said irritably. “Who are you, and what are you doing here? You’re trespassing.”
There were two boys and one girl. It was the girl who worked her jaw and gasped out, “There are things in here! Things! Horrible things, shadow ghosts, they touch you…they try to kill you!”
She had been hunched in terror against the wall. She had a frying pan clutched in her hands. She was dressed in capri pants and a tank top that left her stomach, and her cute little belly-button ring, visible. She was as skinny as a twig, maybe fourteen.
The boys seemed to gain courage from her. They both stood as well, and were each about an inch shorter than she was. One of them held a copper dough roller. The other was clutching a deep dish pan. Strange weapons—gained from the racks that stretched out over the brick island in the center of the room. Liam was surprised that none of them had grabbed the fire poker.
“Sir! There’s something awful in here!” one of the boys said.
“Awful!” the other repeated.
“How did you get in here?” Liam asked.
“The door was open,” the girl said. She was shaking. “Please…please get us out of here. We’ll never come back, never!”
“You can take us to jail—it will be okay!” the boy with the roller clutched in his hands told him, his eyes still huge and panicked.
“Look, just stay here, and I’ll check out the place and—”
“No!” The wail came out of the three of