old. He was a good officer. Strong, usually sane and courteous. He could break up a barroom brawl like no other.
He protested weakly. “No…no, I would have seen a person.” He cleared his throat. “Oh, Lord, Lieutenant Beckett, please…maybe we could not mention this?” he asked hopefully.
Liam was irritated; he might have just lost his chance of finding whoever had broken in. But he said, “I’m not going to say anything—hell, I don’t want half the idiots in this city starting all kinds of rumors about haunted houses and animated suits of armor. Let the paramedics check you out. Just say you crashed into the display shelf, and that’s what I’ll say, too. It’s the truth.”
He walked out. The paramedics were exiting their ambulance with their cases in their hands.
“It’s a knock on the head, self-inflicted,” Liam said. “I think he’s fine, but check him out, please.”
The paramedics nodded and headed for the house. A patrol car came sliding up to park beside the rescue vehicle. He sent the two officers inside, telling them to secure the residence before they left.
He stepped down to the lawn and looked back at the house. He felt the presence behind him and didn’t turn.
“Did you see anything?” he asked softly.
“No, I was with you,” Bartholomew said.
“Well, what do you think?”
“I don’t like the place, if that’s what you mean.”
“Is there anything in it? Anyone?”
“I sense—something,” Bartholomew said.
“I’m telling you, this has to do with something human,” Liam said flatly.
“Maybe. I’m human,” Bartholomew protested.
“You’re a ghost.”
“But I was human. Evil isn’t…it isn’t necessarily human.”
Liam groaned softly. “We both know that human beings are the ones who carry out physical cruelty and injury to one another.”
“Well, we don’t actually know everything,” Bartholomew said.
“If I were going to be hounded by a ghost,” Liam said, “you’d think it would be one who knew a little more about eternity.”
“There’s no one in the house now,” Bartholomew told him indignantly. “No one who isn’t supposed to be there. No one human.”
“Someone else was in that house tonight,” Liam said with certainty.
“I think so, too,” Bartholomew said.
“And now?”
“Whatever is in there isn’t human,” Bartholomew said quietly. “So, what now?”
There was nothing else to be done for the night.
“Now? Hell, I’m heading back for a new batch of fish and chips,” Liam said. But as he walked toward his car, he hesitated. It was dark now on the little peninsula. But there were three acres surrounding the house. There was a strip of beach on the property, and near that there were mangrove swamps and bits of pine and brush on higher ground. The house itself was built up on a large slab of coral and limestone, but surrounding it were dozens of places where someone could conceivably hide, or places where one might stash a small vessel like a canoe, or…
Hell. A decent swimmer could make it across to the mainland easily.
In the darkness, someone could hide with little chance of actually being discovered. He would need a helicopter and megalights to find someone in the night.
He made a mental note to get an electrician out there in the morning.
When he reached O’Hara’s, he found Katie, David and Jamie at a table, all dining on fish and chips themselves.
“Well?” David asked curiously.
“Teenagers,” he said.
“They mess anything up?” David asked.
“They were huddled together in the kitchen, terrified,” Liam said. “They thought the shadows were coming after them.”
Katie laughed. “I can well imagine that place at night. They must have been scared out of their wits.”
“Hey, that place is frightening to an adult,” Jamie O’Hara said.
Liam was surprised that Jamie might have ever found anything frightening. He was a solid man with gray hair, bright eyes, and the calm confidence that made him a good man in any situation and—in Key West—a good barkeep. He could stare down any man about to get in a brawl, and if a punch was thrown, he had the brawn to walk an unruly guest right out to the street.
He’d been both a friend—and something of a parental figure to all of them.
“Cutter Merlin was born and bred right here, and he was popular with folks when he was a young man. He was our version of Indiana Jones, I suppose,” Jamie said. “When he got older, that’s when folks started talking about him. They said that he got himself into too many places that maybe he shouldn’t have gone. It wasn’t until his daughter died, though, that folks started saying that he might have been a Satanist, or a witch. Trying to explain that wiccans, or witches, practiced an ancient form of religion that had to do with nature and that Satanism meant worship of the Devil didn’t seem to go over. After his daughter died, people said everything in the world about him. He’d signed the Devil’s book. He held Black Masses. You name it, people said it.”
“He was a nice old man, and a great storyteller,” Katie said. “I was out there a few times. Kelsey is a few years older than me, but we were in a sailing class together, and we all went to her place for a picnic after the final day. Cutter was great. He dressed up in a suit of armor, then showed us how heavy it was and why a knight needed a squire. He was wonderful.”
Jamie shrugged. “Well, you know how people gossip, and you know how rumors start. People said that his daughter died because he’d signed a pact with the Devil—and that was why Kelsey’s father got her the hell out the minute he could after his wife passed away.”
“I wonder if it occurred to people that he might have been in tremendous pain—and that he wanted to raise his daughter without her having to remember how her mother had died on the stairs. A tragic accident,” David said.
Liam hesitated, thinking about the things the M.E., Franklin Valaski, had said the day before when he had studied Cutter Merlin’s mortal remains and mentioned the man’s dying expression, comparing it to that of his daughter.
She had fallen, but her eyes were open, her lips ajar…
And Cutter had been found with a relic in his hands and the book in his lap.
In Defense from Dark Magick.
Just what the hell had the old
