Heather Graham - Ghost Shadow

The electricity was out.

Her heard movement in the bushes and swung around. Liam.

“What’s going on?” Liam asked.

“Electric.”

Liam swore. He reached for his phone. David stopped him. “If he has them, they might still be alive. No alarms.”

Liam nodded. He drew his service revolver and they went into the house. “Fuse box?” Liam asked.

David nodded. “I can see-I can see enough.”

He went up the stairs and made a hurried sweep of the house. He came back down the stairs and went into the dining room.

The books lay on the table, undisturbed.

He turned to go back and look for his cousin.

But he was shoved. Shoved, back toward the table.

He swung around, ready to fight, ready to survive. There was no one there.

He was shoved toward the table again.

The top book flew open.

He drew out a penlight and threw the glow onto the page. He looked at it, puzzled. It was a family tree. He turned the page.

The paper nearly ripped as the page turned back.

“What? What?” he demanded aloud. The book offered a host of pages of old names, the kind of names the streets had taken on in honor of early residents, and names of those who had gone before and not been honored.

He studied the page again that the unseen entity wanted him to read. The headline read, Smith.

He ran his fingers down the page, following the descendants through the ages, births, marriages and deaths.

He swore aloud as Liam came back into the house. “Search this place, top to bottom!” he told him. “Get someone here, Liam, quickly, for the love of God!”

David burst out into the night and started running.

Katie was stunned as she heard movement-real movement-behind her. She blinked, trying to adjust to the slim filter of outside light that made its way in.

She longed to cry out; she was terrified for Sean. Tears stung her eyes.

She couldn’t cry out. She had to find Sean in silence.

A noise startled her.

She swung around. It was as if the museum had been activated. Next to the hanging tree, military ruler Porter waved a broadside that promised death to all pirates. His arms were jerking spasmodically. His jaw jerked and there was an awful moment when he talked without sound.

Then a bad recording came on. Rasping and hollow. “Death…death…death…to…to…all…all…all…pirates!”

She moved quickly by Porter, only to crash into a tall robotic of a wrecker.

“Storm! Storrrrm…warning. First ta’ reach her, salvage is mine…mine…mine…mine.”

She had to stay calm. She couldn’t heed the jerky movements or the eerie voices of the robotics. When she moved again, a sailor with the insignia for the Maine seemed to leap ahead of her in her path. He hadn’t moved. She was terrified, and she knew that someone had hit the mechanization that Craig Beckett made.

They were just robotics. Just robotics coming to mechanical life. She had to ignore them.

She had to get downstairs to Sean.

She started to walk again, and then she heard stealthy movement. Not a robotic.

Someone was stalking her in the darkness. She made her way carefully then, letting the robotics talk and move, and using them for cover.

She came to the robotic of Ernest Hemingway. He jerked and spoke, complaining about his wife, Pauline. He said, in grating and broken words, that he’d set a penny into his patio-because his wife had certainly taken his very last penny. Katie slipped by him, glad of the noise he was making, and headed down the servants’ stairs to the exhibits below.

She paused, having reached the first floor. She was going to have to sneak across the open entryway to get to the left bank of rooms if she didn’t go through the pantry corridor in the back.

She didn’t want to go through the pantry corridor; it was too narrow. If there was someone there, that someone could too easily nail her.

As she hesitated, she heard a strange whooshing noise, and, at first, she thought one of the robotics was speaking in a rusty voice once again.

“You…you…you…you…you. You are going to die. Come out, come out, wherever you are! We’re locked in, and your poor brother! Paying for the fact that you had to sleep with a Beckett!”

She froze. The voice was near. But from which direction?

She streaked out from the passage beneath the stairway and raced over to the left hall of exhibits where she had left her brother. She burst in on Robert the Doll. In silence, he was jerking back and forth on his stand.

She nearly tripped over a body. She hunched down. It was Sam Barnard. He was wearing handcuffs, and when she gingerly touched him, she discovered a plastic bag wound tightly around his head. With trembling fingers, she ripped it away from him.

“Katie!”

The whisper was Bartholomew’s. His hands were on her shoulders. He motioned her to silence, but beckoned her to follow him.

Her brother was stretched out in the facsimile of the cemetery, where the servicemen from the Maine were buried and honored. A bag was on his head; it wasn’t tightened. She ripped it away from him, and lay against him, desperate to hear his breathing.

He had a pulse. There was a gash on his head; she knew from the stickiness beneath her fingers when she touched him.

“Oh, God!” she prayed in a breath.

“Katie!” Bartholomew warned her again.

“You…you…you…you…you…are dead!” The words were followed by laughter. She tried to rise carefully, to start to move.

“Katie, the other way!” Bartholomew urged her.

Too late. She ducked to avoid a nineteen-twenties flapper, and crashed right into the wall of a big man’s chest.

He reached for her. He was wearing gloves. The gloves he had always known to wear. Diver’s gloves, so plentiful in the Keys!

His hands wound around her neck. She struggled.

He winced and jerked suddenly, as if he’d been hit from behind.

Katie took the moment. She pushed against him and bit his arm, bit as hard as she could. She clawed at his flesh.

If she died, which well she might, the bastard wasn’t getting away with it again.

Nor would he blame David Beckett.

“Bitch!” he roared.

His huge hand came flying across her cheek. The blow was stunning; she felt it with her jaw and head, stars sprung up before her eyes.

And then a darkness deeper than any she had ever imagined.

David slowed when he reached the lawn of the museum. Any alarm now would cost Katie her life, and he knew it. He had to believe that he had a chance. That the killer was determined to tease and taunt her before ending it. He wondered if she was meant to be his finest work. Katie O’Hara, so well-known and beloved in Key West. Beautiful, and a songstress. With a family as old and renowned as his own.

And Sean was in there, somewhere.

The door hadn’t been locked. It remained open. He couldn’t be sure how the killer would act and react, and he was certain that Liam would turn the house upside down. But he had to hurry-if sirens suddenly riddled the streets, if he knew that time was nearly up, the killer would work faster.

The killer had made a mistake. He wouldn’t be able to cast suspicion on David or anyone else. But David thought that he was so overconfident now in his quest for some kind of belated family vengeance that he wouldn’t believe that. He would still believe himself invincible.

And he would have taken care.

David didn’t enter right away. He stared at the floor behind the doorway. It took him a moment, and then he saw it. A trip wire. Somehow it would alert the killer that he was here.

His eyes had attuned well to darkness. He paused for just a moment at the entry, then leapt the turnstile as silently as he could. He hurried toward the left hall.