Ravenswood (Ravenswood Series Book 1) Read online

  Any one of those strangers could be her killer.

  The detectives watched all of them and listened to everything they said. They even stood next to me at the cemetery and watched as her friends each threw dirt over her coffin. They came to the book bar afterward to help celebrate her life with drinks and food everybody brought. They watched it all, and I watched them.

  At first I thought I wanted answers, but what would answers do for me? Why would a person slaughter a defenseless senior citizen? There was no reason someone could give to make what happened okay. Even if I had answers, nothing would make this hurt less. Nothing is ever going to make this better.

  I sat at my favorite table in the corner of the bar and waited, not for answers or reasons, but for some sort of end to my pain. No, I’d never see my grandmother again. But I would have given almost anything to see one of those detectives grab her killers and bring them to justice right in front of me. Anything. There was so much hatred and vengeance boiling in my veins, I could hardly breathe.

  Someone had to pay for this. Someone had to tell me to my face why, why they took my last living relative away with such inhuman violence. Then they should be shot.

  “How are you holding up?” a deep voice asked, pulling me back to reality.

  My vision was blurred with furious tears, and my fists were clenched tightly in front of me. A few shredded napkins were utterly destroyed, ripped into tiny pieces clamped inside my palms. I hadn’t even realized I was doing it. I blinked back my surprise and looked up in search of the person speaking to me. My eyes couldn’t focus on anything. They were too raw and swollen.

  I needed to pull myself together. I needed to…I didn’t know. I didn’t know what I needed to do because there was no one to ask, because I was completely and utterly alone in this world now.

  What was I going to do?

  “May I sit with you?” the voice asked as my vision slowly started to clear.

  I swallowed hard and rubbed at the tiny shreds of napkins that stuck to the sweat of my hands. “Sure,” I rasped, clearing the knot of sadness in my throat and wiping my clammy palms down my pants.

  The man pulled back the chair across the table from me. His hands were tanned and impeccably manicured.

  Were those the hands of a killer?

  He wore all black. No other color adorned his body, except for the bronze shade of his skin and golden ochre of his eyes. He balanced a plate of food over a glass of deep red wine in one hand and carefully placed both on the table. He moved gracefully and sat down, bringing his eyes level with mine.

  “So. How are you holding up?” he asked again, this time his voice was quieter, oozing with concern. Unfamiliar features accented with woeful eyes did nothing to relax my shoulders or loosen the heaviness in my chest.

  “I’m fine,” I lied, leaning against the back of my chair. I studied his face; it was the sort you’d remember if you’d seen it before, flawless skin, long nose, and an elegant mouth. Someone you’d definitely look twice at. “I’m sorry, but how did you know my grandmother?”

  “Addy and I knew each other through—” His lips twisted into a smile, and I knew the next words out of his mouth would be lies. “Business associations,” he said, bringing a spoonful of fruit salad up to his lips. I watched him chew slowly, then sip deeply at his wine. He smiled behind the rim of the glass.

  “You just called her Addy,” I said.

  “Yes, I did.” He smiled wider as he spoke the words, but his tone was laced with a dangerous air. His eyes held mine for a long measure, then he picked up a slice of apple and held it out on the tip of his fork to me. “Would you like some?” For some reason, his question hung thickly in the air between us.

  “No,” I said stiffly. I wasn’t going to eat off a stranger’s fork. Was he crazy?

  He breathed in an audible breath, popped the apple slice into his mouth, and leaned back on his chair. “Do you have any idea why this happened?”

  My head began to swim, images of my grandmother dead, her blood flowing below her in the shape of giant red wings. I closed my eyes and hung my head into my hands, trying to stop the morbid thoughts from pouring in.

  “The police say they have no clue. They wouldn’t tell me anything anyway,” I said, heat rising in my cheeks, fire blistering at my skin.

  “I didn’t ask what the authorities knew. I asked if you had any idea. You.”

  His words rippled around me like a cold wind. “What do you mean?”

  “Addy never told you anything? Where you came from? Who she really was? Who you are?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  This was one of those scam artists, preying on a grieving relative. I sat up straighter, willing myself not to cry. How dare he? How dare he come in here and try to mess with my head?

  “I’m sure you have an inkling, no? You couldn’t have lived your entire life not knowing—I mean, my dear, your whole family misses you.”

  Total scam artist. My mother was dead. My father was dead. I had no siblings. I had no family.

  I tried keeping my face blank as I rose up from my chair. I hadn’t pulled my chair back, and the weight of my body shifted the table, knocking over the man in black’s wine. It splattered across a shelf of books, their spines bleeding dark crimson. The glass smashed on the floor and shattered loudly.

  “How did you know my grandmother’s real name was Adelaide?” I whispered, my heart pounding painfully in my chest.

  “You do want to find the truth, don’t you?” he said, standing and dabbing himself with a small white napkin. He crumpled it up into his fist and tossed it on the plate. Someone rushed over to the table, mumbling and sweeping up the glass, but I paid no mind to them. “I didn’t mean to upset you, um…” he gave a straight, tight-lipped smile, “I don’t even know your name, now. I’ve known Addy for years. I haven’t seen her since you were younger, though. I was very close to her daughter once.”

  “My mother?” It wasn’t heat this time, but ice that surged across my skin, seizing my chest. “You knew my mother?” Liar. Sick, twisted liar.

  “A long time ago,” he said, pushing his chair in and turning toward the front door. He took a few steps and stopped, looking back at me over his shoulder. He shoved his hand deeply into his pocket, pulled out a small photo, and tossed it onto the table in front of me. “You look a little like her.”

  My gaze fell to my feet, willing them to move. I wanted to lunge for the photo but didn’t want him to feel like he had some hold over me. I couldn’t even look him in the face.

  He had known my mother, and I looked like her. What was in the picture?

  The ice thawed, my body felt weighted and thick with sadness. Could he be for real? What if he was? I mean, what if I had some long lost relative somewhere? I wanted to ask him all about my mother. All about who this Addy person was. Who I was. But when I lifted my head to speak, he was gone.

  The photograph—grainy and blackened around the edges—was of my mother and I holding hands. I must have been three or four. Next to us stood a man and two young boys a few years older than me. The boys' attention was on me, a smile captured on their faces. I stood in the middle, eyes wide, as if haunted by the people around me. Atop my head lay a crooked crown of roses. We must have been playing dress up.

  I had no memory of taking the picture, but even sadder was not remembering my mother at all. She looked so sad in the photo. I traced my fingers over her face. She had an ethereal glow about her. Even the small, silvery charm that hung in the scoop of her collarbone gleamed incandescently, the same one my grandmother wore. We all sort of gave off that ghostly, old-world picture filter.

  My grandmother never kept any pictures of my parents; she had only one of my mother. And the man in the photo could have very well been my father. I didn’t know what he looked like. I didn’t know anything at all.

  The two boys? I wasn’t sure. One looked so familiar. It was something about his eyes. In the monochrome imag
e, they looked almost white, so in real life they must have been a brilliant blue. Something deep in my subconscious, some memory from long ago, pulsed through my mind in muted gray tones, but I couldn’t make out the thought clearly.

  There was just something about that boy—something I was supposed to know—maybe I was just making myself reach for something because I wanted answers so desperately. Yet, studying his stare shook something loose in my mind, like memories floating to the surface in cloudy gray water. The most transparent images, maybe they were just dreams once, I wasn’t sure—pale blue eyes, tiny fingers on keys, laughter, strange flames flickering in jars. Each thought disappeared quickly until I was left with nothing at all.

  I turned the picture over in my trembling fingers. In a scratchy hand was written Halerow: 32856.

  Chapter 4

  I mean, my dear, your whole family misses you.

  I heard the deep voice in my dreams, waking me each night, a few minutes after I fell asleep. My brain wouldn’t turn off, nagging thoughts of the man and the boys in the picture. Who were they? What were they to me? Were they cousins? Did I have distant relatives somewhere I could call family?

  There was a constant unsettled sensation that fluttered in my stomach. My temples throbbed with pressure, and I could swear I started seeing shapes moving across my vision, ghost-like apparitions, smoky and billowy. I knew it was from sheer exhaustion and grief, but it never seemed to end. I kept thinking I needed to do something, find something, go somewhere; I just didn’t know what or where.

  A week passed in blurry slow motion.

  One week since my grandmother’s body was found, almost five days since meeting the man in black and seeing the photograph, I woke each night covered in sweat, grasping onto the blankets with the images of blood over skin and a stranger’s words in my head, I mean, my dear, your whole family misses you. But there was no one. I knew in my bones my grandmother didn’t have any living relatives. I remembered her telling me.

  She wouldn’t have lied.

  Your whole family misses you. The voice echoed in my head, just as much as the horrible images of my grandmother. All I could see and hear were the images and the man’s words. I couldn’t sleep and barely ate. It was as if whatever unsettled business lingering around me was slowly eating away at my emotions, my body. I couldn’t think about anything else. What if the killer returned? What if he was on the other side of the wall from me again? What if something was left behind? What else was in that envelope? What was the book about? How much was it worth? Who was my grandmother, really?

  Amy and Megan tried to get me to talk to someone, but I refused. What good would it do me? I wasn’t making sense, even to myself. Eric agreed with the girls, but his words seemed millions of miles away from me when he called. I didn’t bother closing the distance between us. I kept telling him I needed time. I’d be fine. He accepted every lie—maybe he agreed so easily because he just didn’t want to have to deal with me anymore.

  Your whole family misses you.

  And what did he mean by saying, “You do want to find the truth, don’t you?” Of course I wanted to find the truth about what happened. There was a killer on the loose. Maybe they were coming after me next.

  I tried not to think about it. Every time the thoughts bubbled to the surface of my brain, I’d shove them back down. There were professionals who were worrying over all the details; I had no idea how to go about solving a murder and catch a killer.

  But the numbers I saw on that old photo, the same ones the detective showed me scribbled on the back of a book, flashed in front of my eyes, relentlessly. Halerow: 32856. The same number on the back of that picture the man in black showed me and the book my grandmother was holding when she was murdered.

  Halerow: 32856.

  Faces and numbers, incessantly looped in crazy images through my mind. I saw them even with my eyes open. Numbers and faces forming in the grains of wood on the table or the webbed cracks on the wall. They were everywhere. I was so tired, I saw them everywhere. Awake in my own nightmares.

  You do want to find the truth, don’t you?

  Halerow: 32856.

  I pulled out my cell phone and held it in my hands. The light illuminated the small room I was sleeping in, making shadows darker than they ought to be. I swiped it open and keyed in my password numbers.

  Maybe I should just Google it?

  That probably should have been the first thing I did. I thumbed in the numbers and searched.

  No results containing all your search terms were found. Your search Halerow: 32856 did not match any documents.

  I tried the numbers by themselves—my last name by itself—again, no results. Giving up, I padded out into the small kitchenette. I’d been staying in the small apartment above Spirits and Words, spending all my time clutching onto the only thing the detectives let me kept from that night of my grandmother’s—her necklace—and sat alone with my grief. I couldn’t find the strength to go back and live inside the house where my grandmother was so savagely taken from me. When I tried, it felt different somehow, strange. The air felt charged, like just before a thunderstorm, and the wind and waves outside at the shore were churning, warning me away. I wondered if someone could be inside waiting for me in one of the deep, dark corners of the house. Deep in my bones was an unsettling feeling of unfinished business.

  In the rooms above the bar, the security system kept me safe. I sat in the dark at the small table and poured myself a glass of wine. My grandmother always told me: Anything could be fixed over a glass of wine. I guess she couldn’t have fully thought that through, because my grief and her death were absolutely unfixable, no matter how much I drowned myself at the bottom of a bottle. There was no voice to talk to on the other side of the wall; there were no sounds here at all. No more laughter or late night talks, no more clinking of glasses or early morning shopping sprees. I didn’t know death would be so quiet. It was as if the world was muted and some weird hush blanketed right above me, barring me from the life that was continuing to go on around me.

  I peered out through the small kitchen window and sipped slowly. This part of the building faced the bay, and I watched as the moon threw streaks of ghostly fingers across the lapping water. The wine curled in my stomach like lead. Nothing would be fixed; nothing would ever be the same. I had no family left. I was completely and utterly alone. To give myself strength, I fastened her necklace around my throat, swearing an oath never to take it off.

  There had to be something—some clue—some hint of something.

  I swiped my phone open again and feverishly typed in the numbers, changing the order, mixing everything up. I looked up my grandmother’s name, the one I’d known and the one I’d just learned. Nothing. I searched and searched until I felt the walls of the apartment cave in and my eyes start to blur. I scoured through names and numbers until finally I hit a match. A Google map for the address 32856 Halerow Road, Louisiana. In the bottom left hand corner was the street view of a storefront with a sign that read The Hollow. The strange, aged-stricken building sat nestled on an old street. It’s bijou styled façade held a sweeping front porch with second and third cast iron balconies. Behind the great edifice slept a marshy wasteland that blurred around the edges.

  That old place couldn’t have anything to do with my grandmother.

  Could it?

  I sealed my own fate when I typed The Hollow directly into the search bar. A small website popped up. It was a small tourist shop down south owned by someone named Rose Delacroix.

  Jackpot.

  That name was written on the envelope that old book was in.

  The feel of an icy touch swept along my shoulders, and my grandmother’s small bell jar locket that now dangled over my collarbone warmed against my skin. Maybe the silly trinket would give me strength to crawl out of this hole, because I was suddenly focused on taking a spontaneous trip down south.

  I leaned back and felt a wave of relief wash over me. Closing my eyes, I fe
ll asleep instantly.

  “Are you sure about this?”

  Eric sat in the front seat of his car, eyes locked on a group of young girls in short skirts pulling luggage from the trunk of the car in front of us. It was hard not to look at them, long, tanned legs, loud, laughing lips, and then there was me sitting next to him. I made a face at the reflection in his visor mirror, then flipped it back up with a loud thud. The noise it made caused him finally to look my way.

  “I mean, can’t you try calling the place again?”

  “And leave another unanswered message? No.” I sighed, touching a hand to the locket that felt heavy under my neckline. I wasn’t used to wearing jewelry, and the metal felt heavy and irritating against my skin. More irritating than Eric, which was a great feat for such a tiny, insignificant object.

  We’d been arguing for the entire ride to JFK Airport. He thought I should leave everything alone, and I honestly thought he should go screw himself.

  He stared blankly at me, and as always, I wondered what went on in his mind as he did. Once I thought he found me pretty, but now I think he didn’t see me any longer. That’s all I’ve known of relationships; I seemed to ghost through them, pale and invisible, with a heartload of romanticized anticipation and a gut full of rejection. I could literally turn a man off with just one kiss.

  He yanked open his door and walked around to the back of his car, popping open the trunk with his key fob. I climbed out of the passenger side and followed. As I reached for my small rolling travel bag, Eric dropped his hand over mine before I could pull it up. His fingers softly squeezed, but his eyes traveled just over my head to trim legs and high heels. I let him leave his hand there for a moment before shrugging it off and hauling my bag up and out of the back of his car by myself.