Chasing Shadows Read online

  And, damn, what an ass it was.

  Avery suddenly stiffened and glanced back at Cam over her shoulder. “Excuse me?”

  Fire rose to her cheeks. Please, God, tell me I didn’t actually say that out loud. “Tequila?” she answered in a small voice, hoping Avery hadn’t actually heard what she’d said.

  Avery stared at Cam with an expression that was hard to read before shaking her head and resuming her search.

  Cam took the opportunity to resume her appreciation of Avery’s backside. It was, Cam decided, perfectly proportioned for her body. And toned. It was a description she always hated reading in romance novels—so overdone—but now found that she had a special appreciation for the word.

  Avery made a small “aha” sound and reached farther into the drawer, causing the hem of her light blue panties to peek out from under the khakis. Cam licked her lips and, suddenly feeling a splash of tequila-fueled boldness, hopped off the bed. “Avery,” she said in a low voice as she closed the distance between them.

  Avery rose and turned to face Cam, a confused look crossing her face.

  “I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time now,” Cam breathed, moving forward to press Avery back against the dresser. In one fluid movement, she wrapped both arms around Avery’s neck and drew her in for a kiss. As kisses go, it was wet, sloppy, and completely one-sided, but Cam didn’t care. The feel of Avery’s lips, the scent of Avery’s shampoo now tickling at her nostrils was more intoxicating than Jane’s hot chocolate and she couldn’t get enough.

  Avery pushed against her shoulder, ending the kiss. Cam ran her tongue over her lower lip, savoring the taste that lingered there.

  “What the hell, Cam?” Avery scowled, walking Cam away from the dresser and back toward the bed. The expression on Avery’s face fell somewhere between confused and pissed off. Even tipsy, Cam knew that she’d made a mistake, one that she wasn’t sure how to correct.

  “Um…tequila?”

  Shaking her head, Avery said, “Cam…” and, locking eyes with Cam, trailed off. She breathed out a long sigh. Taking Cam by surprise, she wrapped her bandaged hand around Cam’s waist, gliding the other from Cam’s shoulder to the nape of her neck. Avery pressed their lips together and, with a moan, Cam allowed herself to melt into the kiss, running her hands along Avery’s back before moving lower to cup her ass. Cam parted her lips, and Avery swept her tongue inside in a slow exploration that set Cam’s body on fire. She wanted more, craved to feel Avery’s skin against her own. Cam slipped her hands beneath Avery’s shirt and pushed upwards, intent on removing any barrier between them.

  Avery took an abrupt step back, her hands moving to block Cam’s. Breathless, she shook her head. “As much as I’d like to explore this a little more,” she said, her voice husky, her eyes dark with passion, “I’d rather know that it’s Cam I’m kissing. Not Jennifer and not Mildred’s tequila.”

  Cam opened her mouth to protest, but Avery put a finger to her lips. Reaching behind her, she grabbed a set of lavender pajamas from the dresser drawer and deposited them into Cam’s arms.

  Avery reached out to trace a finger along Cam’s forehead, pushing a lock of tousled hair back into place. “Goodnight, Cam,” she said quietly before dropping a kiss on Cam’s nose, striding out of the room, and closing the door firmly behind her.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Avery crunched down on a piece of maple bacon, chasing it with a sip of Jane’s hot chocolate—this one without the liquor—before returning to the case file she had splayed out on the kitchen table. There had to be something there that would offer her a clue she could sink her teeth into, something that would tie Bishop to Jennifer Morris and the diary. She’d been at it all morning and nothing.

  She leaned back in the chair, groaning as the movement strained at her sore back. She’d spent the night on the torture device that passed for Mildred’s couch, reading through the diary they’d retrieved from Jennifer Morris’s house after giving up any hope of sleep. It was just as Jennifer’s ghost had described. Even if Avery hadn’t known the author of the diary, it wouldn’t have taken much of a detective to figure it out.

  The flowery writing in the diary smacked as belonging to a teenage girl from the late 1970s. Roxanne Johnston—her name carefully printed on the book’s inside cover—wanted Farrah Faucet hair, had a crush on Shaun Cassidy, and hid copies of Tiger Beat under a loose board in her closet. Her ultra-conservative mother had declared the magazine to be filth and forbade her daughter from reading it. Undeterred, Roxanne had saved her weekend babysitting money and, once a month, would sneak downtown with her best friend Suzanne to the K-Mart and buy the latest copy.

  It was on one of those clandestine trips that Roxanne met Buddy. He was older, had hair like Vinnie from Welcome Back, Kotter, and drove a Pontiac Firebird. Buddy was exactly the kind of bad boy that Roxanne’s mother had always warned her about. To Roxanne, it was love at first sight. The relationship progressed on the pages just as Jennifer had described, ending with the last, fateful entry that saw Roxanne sneaking out of the house after her mother had gone to bed in order to meet Buddy.

  Avery sighed. Why couldn’t it be like those TV shows where the detective looks through a file and something so significant jumps out at him that he has that “Eureka!” moment and runs off to go triumphantly solve the case? All the distractions she’d had lately—Cameron Reinhart chief among them—weren’t helping things.

  Avery took a moment to brood as she looked out the kitchen window and into the backyard. Jane was outside refilling the bird feeders, while her grandmother sat in a chair on the deck to supervise. She couldn’t actually see her grandmother, but she could hear her hectoring voice as she instructed Jane on the proper amount to use. Mildred did that a lot to Jane, and yet she never seemed to mind. Either that or she tuned her out. Avery’s money was on the second possibility.

  “Avery? Mildred? Is anybody home?” Cam called from down the hallway.

  Avery frowned as she felt her heart pick up its pace at the sound of the other woman’s voice. What’s that about? She levered herself out of the chair, forgetting her hurt palm and wincing a little when she pressed down on the table. “In here,” she called out. “The kitchen.”

  Cam’s bright head popped around the corner. She looked decidedly more well-rested than Avery felt. She was wearing the faded gray Tragic City Rollers t-shirt that Avery had thrown on that night—God, was that only a few days ago?—at the funeral home. It fit her a little tight, but in all the right places, or so Avery found herself thinking.

  “Hi,” Cam said in a tentative voice, coming over to stand in front of Avery. She tilted her head as she tracked Avery’s stare, crossing her arms when the realization seemed to hit her. “I hope you don’t mind me borrowing another one of your shirts to wear.”

  Embarrassed that she’d been caught staring, Avery’s cheeks began to burn. She cleared her throat and quickly looked away. She stood from the table and crossed to the stove. “Would you like a cup of coffee?” she asked. “Or I can heat you up some hot chocolate. There’s still a little left over from this morning.”

  “That’s a hard no on the hot chocolate,” Cam said, shaking her head. “And normally I’d say yes to coffee, but the diesel fuel you guys call coffee down here is too strong for me to drink.”

  Avery grinned. “Add a little cream, a little sugar…”

  “And the next thing you know I can’t get through the door. Nope, I’ll drink mine black and save those extra calories for lunch. I will take a glass of ice water, though.”

  “Sure.” Avery turned to go to the cabinet for the glass, but Cam put her hand on her arm and pulled her around to face her and promptly dropped a kiss on her cheek. Avery leaned back to look at her. “What was that for?”

  “For being so chivalrous last night.” It was Cam’s turn to blush. “Tequila or no, it was wrong of me to put you in that position, and I’m sorry.”

  Avery opened her mouth to speak, but before s
he could, she heard Mildred coming in through the sun porch, calling back over her shoulder to Jane. “Hold your horses, why don’t you? I’m getting some more. If you’d listened to me in the first place and not filled those feeders so full, why then…” She turned and saw Avery and Cam standing in the kitchen, a full five feet between them. She looked back and forth at them before narrowing her eyes. “So, what’s going on in here?”

  “Nothing’s going on, Grandma.” Avery took a guilty step away from Cam. “We’re just talking.”

  “Uh huh. Well, don’t mind me. Go ahead and ‘talk.’ I have to get more bird seed, because Jane keeps overfilling the feeders,” she said, yelling out the last few words so that, Avery was sure, Jane would be able to hear her from the backyard. Mildred glanced over at the case file lying open on the table. “Did you find anything that helps?”

  Avery shook her head. “No, nothing that jumps out at me yet.”

  “Where did all that come from?” Cam asked, seeming to notice the stacks of file folders and photographs for the first time. “I thought the Sheriff’s Department took you off the case.”

  “I may have accidentally on purpose dropped a copy of the case files in the box that I used to bring home some items from my desk when I was there yesterday,” Avery grinned, still pleased with having pulled it off. At the time, taking the files had been an impulse move, but now, considering what they’d learned last night, she was glad to have risked it.

  Cam’s phone rang, and she pulled it out to look at the screen. “Oh shoot, this is Shaye, my show producer, calling again.” She made a face, but then swiped her finger across the front of the phone. “Hi Shaye, what’s up?” She listened for a moment, holding up a finger to Avery and mouthing “one minute.” She began to pace up and down by the door, looking agitated.

  “Well, what do they expect me to do? They know my aunt passed away, and I’ve had a ton of things to do to settle her estate. I can’t just snap my fingers.” She listened again and grew a little pale, shaking her head. “No. Absolutely not!”

  Avery stepped closer to her and put a hand on her shoulder. “What is it?”

  Pulling the phone away, she murmured her answer distractedly. “They want to go ahead with the show at that haunted house that Chuck Jackson and I went to look at. You know, the one where the diary came from, and where Chuck and I saw…” Cam gave a little shiver before continuing, “Whatever it was we saw there. Shaye has a team already assembled and ready to go, and they want to get started right away.” She jammed the phone back to her ear and nodded. “Yes, yes, I know all that, Shaye. But I just can’t…”

  Hmmm. “Why not?”

  “What?” Cam asked, sounding surprised at Avery’s words.

  “What?” The echo came from Mildred, sounding just as shocked.

  “Maybe that’s what we need to shake this thing up,” Avery said nodding. “Maybe we can use this to our advantage to help draw out the killer.”

  Cam stared at Avery while speaking into the phone, “Let me call you right back.” She hung up over the squawking protests on the other end.

  “Look,” Avery said, her tone serious, “we know Bishop had something do with Jennifer’s death, right?” Cam nodded. “Well, I don’t know how it works in California, but here in Bethel Springs we’re going to be hard pressed to find a judge that’s going to allow a ghost to testify.”

  “She’s got a point,” Mildred said, inserting herself into the conversation. “We need a way to prove it was Bishop. What better way to do that than have a ghost appear right on camera and tell the whole world it was him that did it.”

  Avery shook her head. “Grandma, I don’t think that’s going to happen, but maybe we can make him nervous enough to get him to confess. Or to incriminate himself.” She shrugged one shoulder. “Either one. He’s not the brightest bulb in the box, you know.”

  Cam’s expression was dubious. “I don’t know…”

  “C’mon, I think it’s worth a shot. Go ahead and tell her you’ll do it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Seeing that she’d swayed Cam to her side, Avery smiled. “Yes, call her back.” She paused as a thought suddenly occurred to her. “Hey, do you guys ever do one of those séance things? You know, where you sit around in a circle and contact the spirits?”

  “No,” Cam shook her head, “but I’m sure Shaye would eat that up. Do you want me to see if she’ll go for it?”

  “Yeah, why not? The spookier the better. I think, if we play our cards right, we might just get Bishop to spill his guts. Hell, it’s worth a shot anyway.”

  “Well, I usually go around an old house by myself, with just a cameraman.” Cam looked skeptically at Avery. “Where am I going to find people for a séance?”

  “In this town?” Mildred asked. “They’ll be lined up. But count me in. And Jane of course. Avery makes four. How many more would you need?”

  “I have no idea,” Cam said, shaking her head, “but I can read up on it. What do you say, Avery?”

  “I say, let’s have ourselves a séance and call up some ghosts.” Avery grinned. Damn, this could actually work. “We’ll just need to find a way to get Bishop there. You can do your thing, and then we sit back and wait. And what if we do it live—we’ll have forty million witnesses to Bishop incriminating himself. Not to mention your production crew. Seriously, what could possibly go wrong?”

  ****

  Word gets around fast in a small town. Cam wasn’t sure who spread the word about the proposed filming of one of Cam’s shows at the Johnston House, but somebody sure had. Cars lined the gravel road in front of the house in both directions for fifty yards or so on either side of the house, with some people standing outside their cars, taking selfies.

  This was a vast difference from the last time she’d been there. Then the tall grass and overgrown bushes had almost covered the driveway, the house just barely visible through the overgrowth. Since then, some yard crew had been busy. The shrubs had been cut back and the lawn mowed. The old house, though, still looked abandoned, although it had lost its air of total neglect. The shutters had even been removed from the windows and while the white paint was still peeling, most of the kudzu still covered the walls. Cam had to admit, it certainly looked like a haunted house.

  “Why on earth would people drive all the way out here?” Avery grumbled from the seat beside her. “It’s not like we’re letting anyone come inside. And the filming isn’t until tomorrow.”

  Cam grinned. She’s cute when she’s pouting. “I know, but people are curious. There’ll no doubt be even more tomorrow when we actually start rolling.” Regardless of what Avery thought, it wasn’t an uncommon occurrence to have a large crowd show up to observe the production. The show producers usually had to hire local security to keep the crowds in check and from entering into the production area in some hair-brained attempt to go viral on YouTube.

  “Hell,” Avery scowled, “the last thing we need is to turn this into some kind of circus. I don’t want Bishop to be so distracted by what’s going on out here that he misses what we’re doing inside.” She reached toward the dash to retrieve her cell phone. “I’m calling Hobbs to get out here and move these people on. Jeez, you’d think they’d never seen a film crew before.”

  “Well,” Cam said, smiling as she returned the wave of a pair of teenagers standing in the back of a Ford pickup truck, “they probably haven’t.”

  “You know what I mean,” she muttered. Avery had already pulled out her cell phone and was dialing what was presumably Hobbs’s number. Seconds later, as the rental car slowed to pull into the driveway, Cam listened as Avery gave him some terse orders about the cars. She frowned as she realized an older, raggedy looking Buick was partially blocking the drive. A little woman with a sparse, white fringe of hair sticking out from a bright red hat was standing behind the car, gazing up avidly at the house. Avery rolled down her window and leaned out.

  “Mrs. Moody, what in the world are you doing? These peopl
e are trying to conduct their business here, and your car is blocking the way. You need to move it—in fact, you need to go on home! There’s not a thing in the world to see here except for a few folks from California moving equipment in and out of a house. I’ve got a deputy on the way now to run all y’all off as soon as he gets here, so you’d best be moving on.” Avery rolled the window back up as the elderly woman scrambled to her car, and then turned to face Cam, who was trying valiantly to suppress her grin. “What? My God, these people.”

  Cam maneuvered the car through the space left when Mrs. Moody backed up, swerved around the car in front of her, and took off at high speed. “I think you scared that poor old woman half to death.”

  “Poor old woman, my ass. Pearl Moody has all kinds of money, but she just won’t spend it. Mildred says she puts her whole retirement check directly in the bank and then sits in her house, refusing to put the air conditioner any lower than eighty-five. Hell, she probably doesn’t even watch TV because that might cost something. I’m sure Mildred and Jane told her about the film crew, so she’s out nosing around.”

  So says the woman who only watches the occasional basketball game and the news every now and then…

  “Well, bless her heart,” Cam said and laughed at the expression on Avery’s face. She pulled up behind one of the three white vans that Shaye must have rented at the airport. As she parked the car and looked up, the woman herself emerged from the house, clipboard in hand, looking like she was ready to go into war.

  “Is that Shaye?” Avery asked, peering hesitantly out the car window. “She looks kind of intense.”

  Shaye Lawson stood just a hair over five feet and was a force of nature unto herself. She kept her dark hair short and in a style that required minimal effort to upkeep. Cam had never seen her without something in her hands—clipboard, cellphone, notepad, a battleax that one time in Scotland—which she always used to wave and point the production crew around the set.