Ghost Moon

There wasn’t a terrible rush; Cutter Merlin was dead. The spider that had spun the web about him emerged from the old man’s mouth, causing Liam to start and shudder—and be glad that no one had been there to see his horrified reaction.

Liam frowned, noting the book on the old man’s lap. It was large, with gold trim on the pages, and Liam judged it to be a hundred or more years old. He carefully lifted the cover, but the bloodred twilight was turning to darker and darker shadow, so he took his flashlight from his pocket, carefully lifting the book with the tip of the light.

In Defense from Dark Magick.

There was something in the old man’s hand, as well. Liam knew not to touch him until the M.E. came, but he was curious, and it hardly appeared that this could be a case of murder. An old man had scared himself, and died from a heart attack.

His gloves were in the car, so he used the tip of the small laser light to shift the hand and see what was clutched in the fingers. The old man had long since gone in and out of rigor, so he wasn’t stiff, and Liam was easily able to see what he clutched.

It was a casket, a little gold casket, like a jewelry box with its lid open for a special piece. Liam hadn’t been an altar boy, but he had been brought to church every Sunday when he’d been growing up. It seemed to him that the box was some kind of reliquary. It appeared to contain a small gold ball, filigreed, with the ball designed to fit into the casket, and the casket designed just to fit the ball.

Beneath the book on his lap, Cutter held an old sawed-off shotgun.

“What were you doing, old man?” Liam asked softly aloud. He shook his head and stood, looking around the room again. Boxes and crates and pieces—some priceless, some surely pure junk—seemed piled en masse. Now, the shadows stretched out like bone-fingered tentacles. Liam walked across the room to the main entrance, and, once again with his flashlight, studied the door. Odd. Cutter Merlin had prepared his dinner, simple soup and a sandwich. But he had never eaten it. He had taken a book and an old relic and gone to sit in his rocking chair by the fire, staring at the front door.

Staring as if he were waiting for someone, but with a book and gold casket as his weapons, along with a sawed-off shotgun. He hadn’t pulled out the shotgun to aim at anyone; it remained on his lap, beneath the book.

Cutter Merlin had been called eccentric as long as Liam could remember.

In the last years, he had been referred to as a crazy hermit. To keep their children from playing near the shoreline where the boats came and the water could suddenly become deep, local parents had warned that the man was loony, that he might have been the devil.

The front door was locked. In fact, there were three bolts on the door now, and they were all secured.

It was as if Cutter Merlin had become quite frightened of some visitor in his dotage. Who?

He’d probably begun to suffer dementia. Alzheimer’s. And none of them had really known. Or cared. Liam felt horrible again; how had they all forgotten this man?

He walked back to the corpse. Cutter still stared at the door in fear—and determination. He had been clutching the little casket as if his life had depended upon it.

“Poor old fellow,” Liam said. “You were always good to me. I’m sorry that I forgot you.”

Hearing the approach of the M.E.’s car, he returned to the door. He was about to unlatch the locks when he decided that he just might want to investigate the death further. He headed into the kitchen for a towel and covered his fingers to unlatch the bolts.

The M.E. was Franklin Valaski, a veteran of many a death, natural and unnatural. He was nearly Cutter Merlin’s own age, or at least he looked nearly as old. Maybe his years observing death had made him old early and given him that look of an old bulldog. He was short, stout, wrinkled and excellent at his job. He was followed by an assistant, one of the dieners at the morgue, who bore a stretcher.

“So, old Merlin finally bit the dust, eh?” Valaski said, shaking his head. “Tell you the truth, I had all but forgotten the old bastard was out here.”

“Sad, huh?” Liam murmured. “Looks like a heart attack.”

“Lead the way,” Valaski said.

Liam pointed to the rocking chair, and Valaski went on over to the corpse. The young diener nodded an appropriately grim greeting to Liam, which Liam returned, and then stared around the house.

The diener was gaping at what he saw.

You didn’t know Merlin! Liam thought.

Then, naturally, he found himself thinking about Kelsey. Her mother had died here. He didn’t know much about it—he had been fifteen at the time. It had been a tragic accident, he knew, and Kelsey’s father hadn’t wanted to do anything except escape Key West—and the place where his beloved wife had perished.

He had been brokenhearted to see Kelsey go. But then, half his class had been in love with or in awe of Kelsey—all of them budding into adolescence, a bit slowly, being boys. She had been a whirlwind of smiles and energy. In grade school, she had been a freckled little thing with thick pigtails. But in middle school she had shot up, and she had acquired an amazing shape. Unruly dark hair had become a beautiful and sleek deep brown, so shiny it seemed black, like a raven’s wing. Her freckles had faded, and her eyes had become the deepest shade of blue that he had ever seen. She had been friendly to everyone, kind to the kids other kids picked on, and she had eschewed as sophomoric the idea of being a cheerleader or belonging to any club.

Sometimes, when people had teased her about her grandfather, she had let her eyes grow big and assured them that he was the devil. Then she’d laughed and told them that he was an adventurer, and, until he had turned sixty, he had traveled the globe, battling primitive tribes on the islands of the Pacific and riding camels in the Sahara. She had defended him as the most magnificent explorer in the world. He’d even been to the North Pole!

Liam realized he hadn’t thought about Kelsey in years, either. He’d heard about her father’s death; he had succumbed to a virulent flu a few years ago.

He’d sent her an e-mail knowing that he had learned about it long after the funeral. No flowers to send—even if he had known where to send them.

Now, of course, he’d have to find Kelsey, wherever she was. Probably still in California—she had become a cartoonist, he’d heard. Naturally—she’d always been a good artist. He’d find a phone number; it was one thing to send sympathy in a note after the fact; it was quite a different matter to tell her about a death that way. He didn’t know what she would feel; Liam was pretty sure that she hadn’t seen Cutter Merlin since she’d left Key West.

“Odd,” Valaski announced.

“What’s odd?” Liam asked, walking toward the M.E.

“Looks like a coronary, but…”

“Yeah?”

“It looks as if he were…scared to death,” Valaski said.

“He was an old man, and he probably wasn’t under any medical care,” Liam said. “He might have been suffering from delusions.”

“Hmm,” Valaski said, agreeing. “Odd, though—a man who lived with a mummy, shrunken skulls, coffins and voodoo offerings. Stuffed animals. Bones. Petrified flesh. You wouldn’t think he’d scare easy.”

“He was old,” Liam said softly. Old and forgotten.

“Yes, of course. But what’s really odd…”

His voice trailed off, as if he were deep in thought. Or memory.

“Valaski?” Liam prompted.

Valaski looked up at him. He seemed to give himself a shake, physically and mentally.

“Nothing. Nothing, really. It’s just that…Well, he seems to be wearing the same expression I saw on his daughter’s face. You remember her. Chelsea Merlin Donovan. I’ll never forget. She was such a beautiful woman. She fell down the stairs—down that beautiful curving stairway right there. She died of a broken neck, and yet…Well, she had this exact same expression on her face. I remember it as if it were yesterday. Her husband was holding her, tears streaming down his face. She had fallen…and yet her eyes were open, her lips just ajar…and she seemed to be staring at the most terrifying thing in the universe. Just like Cutter here. Good God, I wonder what it was that they saw?”

Chapter One

Kelsey Donovan was at home, working beneath the bright light above her drafting desk, when her phone rang. She answered it distractedly.

“Yes?”

“Kelsey? Is this Kelsey Donovan?”

It was odd, Kelsey thought later, that she didn’t recognize Liam Beckett’s voice the minute he called, but, then again, it had been a long, long time since she had heard it, and they’d both been basically children at the time.

His voice was low, deep, confident and well-cultured, with the tiniest hint of the South. Naturally—they were from the southernmost city in the United States, even if that city had never been completely typically Southern or typically anything at all. Key West was an olio of countries, times, and people, and accents came from across the globe.

And still…