Barbara Hancock - The Girl in Blue

Strange accidents and unexplained deaths are commonplace. And everyone fears the dark in Barbara J. Hancock’s Scarlet Falls.

A secluded hamlet ablaze in autumn splendor, Scarlet Falls is a seemingly idyllic New England town…. But Trinity Chadwick knows better. The place is haunted to its very core. For Trinity there has been no escape from the specter of the girl in the blue dress. The child's laughter still rides on the tainted mist of the town’s frigid lake. And tragedy always follows in its wake.

Constant vigilance against malevolent forces has worn Trinity down, driving her back to the last place on earth she ever expected to step foot: Hillhaven—her childhood home. Only to encounter Samuel Creed. The last man she ever expected to confront. A long-ago kiss of life kindled an obsession in both that is at once sensual and macabre. Creed is tortured by that memory. He is as tempting as ever, a man Trinity can neither forget nor entirely trust.

The Girl in Blue

Barbara J. Hancock

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Epilogue

For Todd

One, two…she’s coming for you.

Three, four…who’s at the door?

Five, six…full of tricks.

Seven, eight…too late, too late.

Nine, ten…it’s happening again.

Chapter One

Trinity Chadwick was coming home. It was October and the maples would be ablaze, scorching hill and dale and turning every crag and cranny burnished and bright.

Scarlet Falls, Massachusetts, had mapleleaves in autumn and crimsonwildflowers called crested celosia in spring.

The red leaves and flowers hadn’t given the town its name, though.

Blood was red, too.

Trinity took a deep breath. She’d opened the vent in the bus window as far as it would slide. The fortifying air of the New England countryside was bracing, but oxygen had little to do with the process of shoring up each and every fiber of her being. Awareness was everything.

Scarlet Falls was beautiful, but it was also haunted.

She’d lived with the idyllic and the horrifying her whole life. Nursing school in Boston hadn’t been all that different. Simple on the surface, butscrabble and scrap underneath.

Trinity slowly reached down to finger the bandages on her left arm beneath her black wool pea coat. She’d been lucky. The flames that had engulfed her apartment had killed one friend and badly injured another. The crisp air she’d drawn in now threatened to release in a whimper of remembered fear and pain, but Trinity instead forced it through tight lips in a controlled sigh.

Her arm had been burned when she’d dragged her roommate to safety after the girl had collapsed from smoke inhalation. Other friends—fellow nursing students—had held her back when she would have returned to the burning building. Though she’d been singed and burned, and even now spoke with a smoky rasp to her voice, the press had zeroed in on her “heroics,” ambushing her for interviews.

She wasn’t a hero.

She’d left most of her salvaged belongings, her car and the fall semester of her third year behind in order to escape. As the bus wheezed up the final crimson-decked hillside before it crested the rise by the light of the setting sun and began its decent into Scarlet Falls, Trinity couldn’t help thinking about frying pans and fires.

* * *

The town had a main street that had been constructed more or less during themid–eighteen hundreds. The neighborhood sprawled outward with clapboard and picket fencing. Several churches sat on picturesque high ground with spiky steeples piercing the sky. At least one of them was much older and plainer than its fellows, more Puritan than Victorian, its leeside hunched over and seeming to protect a cemetery of very old graves.

Trinity looked away from worn tombstones and lopsided crypts as the bus labored by. She turned her face toward the distant black gleam of glassy water on the horizon. A mere glimpse of High Lake was enough to send chilly fingers of dread down her spine. So she faced forward, lifting her chin rather than cowering in the corner of her seat. Her stop was near the river. As the bus approached, the gloaming light softly illuminated the covered bridge that spanned the flowing water. She would have to cross it on foot and climb the last rise to Hillhaven.

Then she would be home.

No one would be there to greet her. Her parents were finally retired from their respective jobs as teacher and postal worker. They had saved for years for their current extended trip to Europe. Trinity hadn’t called to tell them about the fire or her burns. Just as she’d never told them about The Girl in Blue.

She would be alone at Hillhaven, which would be both a boon and a curse.

The bus pulled away in a fog of diesel exhaust and a cacophony of grinding gears. Trinity was left with a stuffed backpack and a constricted chest in the deepening twilight of evening.

A dog barked in the distance. The river was low and gently lapping over rock and driftwood after a long, dry summer. High Lake was all the way across town and out of sight now, even if she should look in its direction.

She didn’t.

Trinity shouldered her bag over her uninjured right arm and turned to face the dark maw of the bridge. How long did she stand there, rooted in place and not looking toward the lake, while the bus drove out of sight? Night had descended in a cool wash of sensory deprivation and inky blackness. She was an adult now. Well past the age where darkness should have been a threat to her. Nevertheless, her heart rate increased. In a place where having your senses peeled might mean the difference between life and death, limited visibility should be frightening.

Nothing to see here, move along. One foot in front of the other.

Her footsteps echoed on the old oak boards beneath her feet. The noise was creaky and low. Scree. Scree. Scree. It was a long way across the river in the echoing belly of the bridge. Too long.

A child’s laughter rang out softly behind her.

Trinity paused to look back. Useless, but instinctive. She couldn’t stop herself.

There was no one there.

She blinked, straining her eyes against the deepening pitch. The moon had yet to rise. The air was cool and still. There wasn’t even a hint of a breeze. She couldn’t see back the way she’d come. The interior of the covered bridge was pitch-black.

But she heard no steps or any other sound. Only the memory of that familiar laugh echoing in her ears.

Trinity forced herself to turn and continue toward the house. She did pause one more time with a start. A light had come on in one of the upper front rooms. A large shadow passed in front of the light behind a pulled shade, and Trinity knew that someone—or something—was home.

* * *

Hillhaven had been built before Scarlet Falls was more than a muddy little settlement beside a useful river in the 1600s. The original structure had been a mill, but that had long since given over to a great rectangle of a home with a gabled roof and spidery gingerbread trim. The roof was steep and flat across its peak, complete with a widow’s walk where a brass telescope had been used to peer down at the town.

Trinity had done her share of peering.

Always watching. Always trying to help.

In the dark, with a crescent moon too slim to light her way, Trinity could only imagine the gray paint and even grayer shutters. Her parents hadn’t been able to fight time or tradition, and though she was sure her mother had chosen red curtains to offset the colonial drab, the effect was jarring.