Carla Cassidy - Scene Of The Crime - The Deputy's Proof

He turned on his flashlight and shone it down, seeing nothing but earth.

Had he heard her crying? Weeping because she knew this was the end of her walks? Should he go down and console her? Or let her cry in private? He had a feeling that if she was crying, she wouldn’t welcome his presence.

He heard her again, only this time instead of weeping, it sounded like a scream of terror. With his gun in one hand, his flashlight in the other and adrenaline pumping through his body, he dropped down into the hole.

The first thing he saw was the penlight beam, shining at him from the floor in the distance. What he didn’t see was any sign of Savannah.

“Savannah!” He yelled her name, and it echoed in the air.

He quickly walked forward, his gun leading the way and his heart pounding a million beats a minute. Where was Savannah? Why was her flashlight on the ground? What in the hell was happening?

He didn’t know, but he wouldn’t give up until he found her.

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CARLA CASSIDYis a New York Times bestselling author who has written more than one hundred books for Mills & Boon. Carla believes the only thing better than curling up with a good book to read is sitting down at the computer with a good story to write. She’s looking forward to writing many more books and bringing hours of pleasure to readers.

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Contents

Cover

Introduction Every muscle in his body stiffened as he thought he heard a faint cry coming from the hole in the ground. He turned on his flashlight and shone it down, seeing nothing but earth. Had he heard her crying? Weeping because she knew this was the end of her walks? Should he go down and console her? Or let her cry in private? He had a feeling that if she was crying, she wouldn’t welcome his presence. He heard her again, only this time instead of weeping, it sounded like a scream of terror. With his gun in one hand, his flashlight in the other and adrenaline pumping through his body, he dropped down into the hole. The first thing he saw was the penlight beam, shining at him from the floor in the distance. What he didn’t see was any sign of Savannah. “Savannah!” He yelled her name, and it echoed in the air. He quickly walked forward, his gun leading the way and his heart pounding a million beats a minute. Where was Savannah? Why was her flashlight on the ground? What in the hell was happening? He didn’t know, but he wouldn’t give up until he found her.

Title Page Scene of the Crime: The Deputy’s Proof Carla Cassidy www.millsandboon.co.uk

About the Author CARLA CASSIDY is a New York Times bestselling author who has written more than one hundred books for Mills & Boon. Carla believes the only thing better than curling up with a good book to read is sitting down at the computer with a good story to write. She’s looking forward to writing many more books and bringing hours of pleasure to readers.

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Epilogue

Extract

Copyright

Chapter One

It was a perfect night for a ghost walk. The Mississippi moon was nearly hidden from view by the low-lying fog that seeped across the land and invaded the streets of the small town of Lost Lagoon.

Savannah Sinclair retied the double-beamed flashlight that hung at her waist beneath a white, gauzy, floor-length gown. She used talcum powder to lighten her face and knew that most people would think her actions were more than a little crazy.

Maybe she’d been a little crazy for the past two years, since the night her older sister, her best friend, Shelly, had been murdered and found floating in the lagoon.

From that night forward, Savannah’s life had been forever changed. She had been forever changed, and what she planned to do at midnight tonight just proved that Shelly’s death still haunted her in a profound way she couldn’t get past.

She stared at her ghostly countenance in the bathroom mirror and wondered, if Shelly’s murder had been solved and her killer arrested, would things be different?

She whirled away from the mirror and left the bathroom. The clock on the nightstand in the bedroom indicated that it was eleven thirty. Time to move.

She turned off all the lights in the four-bedroom house that had once been home to her family, grabbed a palm-sized penlight and then slipped out the back door.

The dark night closed in around her, and she glanced at her nearest neighbor’s house, satisfied that all the lights were off and her neighbor, Jeffrey Allen, was surely in bed. She used the penlight in her hand to guide her toward a large bush at the back of the yard.

Shoving several of the leafy branches aside, she revealed a hole big enough for a person to drop into. She knew there were earthen steps to aid in the three-foot drop, and she easily accomplished it, finding herself at the beginning of a narrow earthen tunnel.

She’d discovered the tunnel last summer when she’d been working in the yard. Initially she had to crouch for several feet before the tunnel descended deep enough that she could stand in an upright position and walk.

Half the town already thought she was crazy, gone around the bend because of her parents’ abandonment, her brother’s rages and the murder of her sister.

If they only knew what she did on moonless nights when she wasn’t working the night shift at the Pirate’s Inn, they’d probably have her locked up in an insane asylum for the rest of her life. But there was a rhyme and reason to her madness.

The tunnel system was like a spider web running under the town, although Savannah had only explored one corridor, the one that would take her directly to the place where her sister had been murdered.

She moved confidently with the aid of the bright but tiny beam of her penlight leading the way. It had been rumored that Lost Lagoon had once been home to a band of pirates, and she suspected these tunnels had been made by them years and years ago.

She occasionally moved by dark passageways she had never explored and wondered if anyone had been in them in the last hundred years or so.

She hadn’t told anyone of her discovery of the tunnels. They were her secret, her voyage to the last link to her sister. It took her a little over fifteen minutes to reach her destination, a set of six old wooden planks embedded into the ground that led up to another hole beneath a bush at the base of a cypress tree.

She shut off her penlight, climbed up the planks and crouched behind the tree trunk. At this time on a Friday night, most of the town would be at Jimmy’s Place, a popular bar and grill on Main Street.

But moonless Friday nights when the fog rolled in—the teenagers in town knew those were the nights that Shelly’s ghost walked the night.