Shelly had been murdered by her then-boyfriend, Bo McBride, and that law enforcement simply hadn’t found the evidence to make an arrest. Josh knew how little had actually been done in the investigation.
But that was then and this was now, and it had taken him weeks to figure out the mystery of “Shelly’s ghost.” He now had questions for Savannah that he wanted answered.
She opened the back door that led into the kitchen. She turned on the overhead light and gestured him toward a chair at the round wooden table.
“If you don’t mind, I’d like to change clothes before you decide to take me in,” she said. She didn’t give him a chance to reply but instead left the room.
Josh sat in a chair at the table and looked around. Red roosters danced across the bottoms of beige curtains at the window, and a hen and rooster salt and pepper shaker set perched on the pristine stove top. Other than a coffeemaker, the countertops were bare.
There was an emptiness, a void of life in the room, as if it were a designer home where nobody really lived. He heard water running in another room, and a few minutes later, Savannah returned.
She’d changed out of the gauzy gown and into a pair of jeans that hugged her long slender legs and a blue-and-gold T-shirt advertising the Pirate’s Inn. She sat across from him at the table. She’d obviously washed her face, for her color was more natural. Her cheeks were faintly pink.
“So, are you going to arrest me?” she asked. Gone was the defiance, leaving behind only a weary resignation in her voice.
“What would I arrest you for? Impersonating a ghost?” he asked with a touch of amusement. “I don’t want to arrest you, Savannah. I want to talk to you. What are you doing? Why are you pretending to be Shelly’s ghost?”
Her long-lashed brown eyes gazed at him, and she tucked a strand of the long, silky-looking dark hair behind one ear. “How did you know that I’d appear out of the bush in my backyard?”
“I’ve been tracking the sightings of Shelly’s ghost for about a month,” he replied. “I saw your performance a couple of weeks ago and instantly realized it was you, but I couldn’t figure out how you appeared and disappeared and got back here without anyone seeing you. So, I’ve been staking out your house and watching your movements.”
Her face paled slightly. “You’ve been stalking me?”
“Basically, yeah,” he admitted. “But I have to say, you aren’t an exciting person to stalk.”
Her cheeks grew pink again. “Sorry if I bored you with my life. Aren’t there other people you should be stalking? Don’t you have any real crime fighting to do?”
“Things have been pretty quiet since we managed to get Roger Cantor arrested,” he replied. The affable coach of the high school had been exposed as a deadly stalker and was now behind bars. “And you didn’t answer my question. What are you doing pretending to be Shelly’s ghost?”
“Entertaining the locals,” she replied airily, but her dark eyes simmered with a depth of emotion that belied her words. “And you didn’t answer mine. How exactly did you figure out that I’d appear by the bush in the backyard after one of my ghostly walks?”
“The last time you pulled your stunt, I was here, watching the backyard to see if you’d sneak across the lawn. To my surprise, you came up from under the ground.”
Josh had always been attracted to Savannah’s high spirits, her beauty and more than a touch of sexy flirtation that had always lit her eyes when they happened to encounter each other. But that had been before her sister’s murder, and the woman who sat across from him now appeared achingly fragile, a mere shell of what she’d once been.
A touch of guilt swept through him again. As a lawman, his job was to solve crimes and get the guilty behind bars. But officially Shelly’s case remained an open one, without resolution.
“There’s a tunnel,” she finally said. Her finger traced an indecipherable pattern on the top of the wooden table, and her gaze followed her finger’s movements.
“A tunnel?” Josh felt like he was attempting to pull a confession from a hardened criminal.
She stopped the movement of her hand and looked at him once again. “There’s a tunnel that runs from the backyard to a tree near the lagoon where Shelly was murdered. I discovered it about a year ago.”
“What would a tunnel be doing in your backyard?” he asked.
Her slender shoulders moved up and down in a shrug. “I guess you’d have to ask the person who dug it, but it looks like it was made a long, long time ago. Maybe it was used to transport goods from the lagoon to here by the pirates who once lived around here.”
Josh frowned thoughtfully. Lost Lagoon had a history rich in pirate lore. He supposed it was possible that pirates could have unloaded their treasures onto little boats to navigate the small lagoon and then bring them here, where they might have had an inland camp.
He focused his attention back on her. “You haven’t answered my question. Why, Savannah? Why are you doing this?”
He studied her intently, wanting her to explain, to tell him what the payoff was for pretending to be her sister’s ghost. She frowned and looked out the darkened window.
Josh was a patient man. It was one of his strengths as a deputy. He leaned back in his chair, not willing to go anywhere until he had the answer he needed from her.
Was she crazy, as many people thought? Had the murder of her sister, the destruction of her family and her own isolation from everything and everyone caused mental illness of some sort?
She finally looked back at him and leaned forward. Her hair came untucked from the back of her ear, the long dark strands shining beneath the hanging light over the table.
“A month after Shelly’s murder, my parents forbade us ever to speak her name again,” she began. Her dark gaze went over his shoulder to the bare wall behind him. “They packed all of her things away in the storage shed out back and pretended she had never existed.”
She looked back at him, her eyes filled with a depth of simmering emotion. “I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to my sister, my best friend and the person I’d shared a bedroom with since I was born. As time passed and Bo left town, everyone stopped talking about Shelly. It was as if she had never existed anywhere at any time. Even after my parents left town and I tried to talk to Mac about Shelly, he shut me down. He was so angry, still is so angry. He definitely didn’t want to hear Shelly’s name or anything I had to say about her.”
Josh understood her pain. He’d lost a twin brother when he’d been fifteen years old, and he knew for the rest of his life he’d feel as if an integral piece of himself was missing.
“I found the tunnel a year ago,” Savannah continued. “It took me weeks to get up the nerve to go down inside and explore where it went. When I finally did and realized it came up next to the place where Shelly had been murdered, I came up with the ghost plan.”
“But why? What do you get out of pretending to be her ghost?”
“I get to hear squealing teenagers say her name. I make sure nobody forgets about her. I keep her alive by pretending to be her apparition in death.”
