The Skeleton King (Dartmoor Book 3) Read online

  “Unfortunately, yeah. I just took them up to see Davis.”

  “Assholes.”

  “Ditto that.”

  “Though, actually,” Becca dropped her voice, “this is really all Amy’s fault. Her dad builds her this barn, and she up and runs off to Kentucky. Ungrateful–”

  “I’m still not one-hundred-percent sure there aren’t cameras in here,” Emmie reminded, smiling despite herself.

  Becca clamped her lips shut, eyes bugging. “Oops.”

  Emmie laughed, hollowly. “It’s okay. I ditto that too,” she whispered, “but let’s try not to get fired before our jobs are eliminated.”

  “Right.” Becca nodded and walked off. “I’ll start with the left side of the driveway,” she called over her shoulder. “I’ll let you get the Beast’s pasture.”

  That would be Emmie’s horse, Apollo. Who Becca and Fred referred to as either the Beast, Widowmaker, or El Diablo. He was the first one at the gate every night, no exceptions, and none of the other horses challenged him.

  Emmie grabbed a carrot from the tack room fridge and took her first deep, relaxing breath of the afternoon, heading out the front doors. It had been one shock after the next lately – Amy announcing she was marrying and moving all her horses to Kentucky; Davis deciding to sell the farm; developer after developer making their way up the drive in low-slung black cars. In the midst of the whirlwind, she was losing touch with the part of her that thrived on the even keel of farm life, forgetting to enjoy the quiet moments. She hadn’t ridden in days.

  She took a deep breath of summer-scented air as she headed down the driveway, resolving to shove all thoughts of leaving Briar Hall out of her head.

  In the dressage arena, Tonya warmed Chaucer up at a swinging trot, horse and rider in perfect sync. Emmie watched them a moment as she walked, mentally approving of the way Tonya’s hands rested light on the reins, letting the horse stretch.

  “Em!” Becca shouted, startling her. “He’s doing it again! Tally!”

  Emmie glanced toward the pasture she was headed for…and sure enough, there went Tally, leaping neatly over the five-foot fence and taking off at a mad gallop toward the trees.

  “Shit.”

  Two

  It was early when church let out, and after a brief discussion in the common room, Walsh and Michael decided to head up to the cattle property now, avoiding the heat of the day tomorrow and getting a jump on whatever was to be done there. They shared an intolerance for waiting, in that regard.

  The sun was at its sharp evening slant when they parked their bikes in front of the falling-down farmhouse and dismounted.

  Walsh was slow about tugging off his gloves, straightening his rings. He took a moment to let the country air fill his lungs; he traced the rolling pastureland with his eyes. The grass rippled in gleaming waves as the wind caught it. Clusters of doves lifted from their hiding places and took awkward flight.

  He loved it here. Nothing but the animals and the faded whispers of the dead to disturb the quiet. One of the few places in his brother-crowded world where he could feel his insides unclench.

  “You good?” Michael asked. There was the faintest edge of impatience in his normally flat voice; he wanted to go home to Holly, and Lucy, and whatever hot dinner awaited him in the oven.

  “Yeah.” Walsh laid his gloves on the seat of his bike and pulled a notepad and pen from his inside cut pocket. “You were the last one to have a burial up here. Lead the way.”

  ~*~

  Tally was short for Tally-Ho, a name that had left the entire barn staff in stitches…until they’d realized how appropriate the name was for the Thoroughbred. On an almost weekly basis, Tally went over a fence. For a while, they’d turned him out in the round pen, because its eight-foot solid board walls couldn’t be leapt. But it had been a cruelty, keeping such a large, energetic horse in such a small enclosure. They’d swapped pastures, putting him in with Apollo’s herd, and for a few weeks, the change seemed to please him, and he’d stayed put. But tonight showed him back to his old ways.

  “I’m sorry, Fred, you’re sure you don’t need our help?”

  “Sí. You better catch Loco, before his madre shows up and yells at us.”

  “No kidding.” Emmie dropped the saddle flap and ran down the stirrup. “Don’t worry about Apollo’s fly sheet; I’ll take it off when I get back.”

  “Si.”

  She buckled on her helmet and glanced toward the neighboring wash rack, where Becca saddled her gelding, Mocha. “Ready?”

  Quick click of Becca’s helmet strap. “Yep.”

  Emmie draped Tally’s halter and lead-rope over one arm and gathered the loose reins of her mount. She adored Apollo, but search-and-rescue wasn’t his strong suit. She’d saddled her favorite lesson horse, Sherman, almost seventeen hands of solid, level-headed Quarter Horse with a knack for just about everything.

  Sherman turned to regard her through sleepy brown eyes, the lopsided blaze on his face giving the impression that he was lifting one nostril in question.

  “Let’s go find your dumb friend, okay?” she told the horse, patting his shoulder and leading him from the barn.

  Tonya was on her way back into the barn as Emmie and Becca left. “Tally got out again?” she guessed.

  “He wanted to make sure I got a ride in today,” Emmie said with a fast, false smile. The prospect of wrangling the wild Thoroughbred left her exhausted. “Good ride?” she asked Tonya.

  “Better than the one you’re about to have.”

  “Too true.”

  She and Becca mounted and steered their horses down the driveway, toward the run between two pastures where Tally had disappeared. The grass needed cutting and it swished around the horses’ fetlocks as they walked. Mocha and Sherman stepped with coiled energy, necks stretching forward as an evening breeze ruffled their short manes.

  It wasn’t the ride Emmie would have chosen, but there was no fighting the magic of being in the saddle. Sherman had an easy, swinging walk and the motion of his shoulders rolling soothed her nerves. She pulled in a deep breath and let it out slowly, felt the tension bleed from the backs of her legs as his ribcage pushed at them.

  “It’s really happening, isn’t it?” Becca said quietly beside her. “They’re really selling this place. And those dickheads are going to turn it into a freaking shuffleboard court.”

  Emmie heaved a deep sigh that caught in her throat; her eyes burned and she blinked hard as she stared between Sherman’s ears at the grass ahead. “I’ve gone through so many scenarios in my mind: What if we bought it ourselves?”

  Becca made a gasping sound of shock beside her that quickly turned into an excited squeal.

  “What if we started raising money? Hosted a tack sale. A 4-H show, and put all the proceeds toward a collective purchase of Briar Hall? What if we all chipped in – you, me, Fred – and we went to the bank to take out a loan? What if we tried to get Tonya’s family to buy it?”

  “Tonya!” Becca exclaimed. “That’s it! Her dad’s loaded. We’ll get him to buy it, and she wouldn’t have any reason to fire us, and we could….You’re shaking your head.”

  “Because I already asked Tonya, and her family already has a farm; they don’t want this one. And because no tack sale, or benefit show, or loan in the world will get our three broke asses enough money to buy this place.” Emmie cleared her throat and hoped it didn’t sound like she was on the verge of sniffling. “This is the problem with falling in love with someplace that isn’t yours – it won’t ever be yours.”

  “It’s not fair,” Becca said fiercely.

  “Davis is old, and this is a lot for him to handle,” Emmie said, knowing it was the truth.

  “What does he handle? You run everything, and he just signs the checks.”

  Emmie snorted.

  “You know what I think it is? I think he just doesn’t want all his kids fighting about it when he finally kicks off.”

  She started to protest…but nodde
d instead. “I’d say that’s a big possibility.”

  “I just don’t want to leeeeaaavvve,” Becca groaned, bending at the waist and draping her torso across Mocha’s neck. The gelding snorted in annoyance but otherwise tolerated her theatrics.

  Emmie smiled faintly at the display, feeling chilled and depressed inside. She knew, when the inevitable departure came, Becca would land on her feet. Eighteen, fresh out of high school and taking a semester or two to work, she was personable, responsible, bubbly, and could meld easily into a new barn and a new situation. She and Mocha would find another boarding or training facility to take them, and she’d swap chores for her board, and she’d start college, and in less than a year’s time, the heartbreak of Briar Hall would have faded.

  Emmie, on the other hand, was going to be scraped off the side of this place like bubbled-up lead paint, and wherever she went, she’d be starting all over, back to square one; no longer a trusted decision-maker, but the new-girl. The new, almost-thirty, boring, dry, workaholic girl with the difficult horse no one wanted to bring in from the pasture. Not to mention she couldn’t afford to board Apollo; she needed to work off his rent. And, now that she thought of it, she’d need a place to live, because going home to the folks just wasn’t an option.

  Dwelling on it was getting her nowhere fast.

  With a firm mental shake, she cleared her head. “Which way did he go, you think?” she asked as they reached the end of the run and had to choose to follow the property line to the left or right.

  “Well, all those briars Brett was supposed to trim back are to the left,” Becca said. “So…”

  “He went left,” they said in unison.

  ~*~

  “These’ll be the two kids who were bothering Ava,” Michael said, gesturing to the innocuous patch of grass between two sapling pines. A good spot; the trees were small, still, so the roots hadn’t provided much obstruction, but as they grew, the roots would further till the bones.

  “Ronnie and Mason,” Walsh said, writing down the location on his pad and putting two tally marks beside it.

  “That should be it.” Michael folded his arms and didn’t seem to know what to do with himself, then, mouth curled sharply with distaste for this whole business. At least, that was how Walsh read his expression. What seemed a deep frown for Michael was just a facial twitch on someone else. “How many you got total?”

  Walsh ticked through the list and whistled. “Thirty-seven.”

  “Christ.”

  “The Carpathians were a…large deposit.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But”- Walsh stowed his pen and pad away, straightened his cut and dug out a smoke – “the graves look good. Not too much erosion, no odor. All of it was done by the book. Digging ‘em up would be a bloody nightmare.”

  “It’s not possible,” Michael agreed. “Some have been here for fifteen years. Nothing left but bone and dust. And you get that stuff up in the air, on the ground – dogs can sniff that out.”

  “Hmm,” Walsh agreed, taking his first drag. “Better to leave ‘em.”

  By unspoken agreement they headed back for their bikes, the walking slow in the rough grass. Twilight was hitting hard, and the farm around them was pulling on its blanket of shadows as the first stars flared to life overhead. It would be full dark soon, and then the property would become a whole other world, one that belonged to the quiet things that watched them now from the trees; things that slunk along on silent bellies, with yellow eyes and strange calls that echoed across the empty pastures.

  It was a good dump ground, and Ghost had used it wisely. Not one body had been buried before the farm had been “sold” to the dummy corporation that now owned it. As far as the city knew, Ghost Teague didn’t own shit aside from his home and business. The club was careful with its comings and goings, and up till now, their activity on the old cattle farm had been invisible.

  But if a whole village of retirees moved in next door…

  If there was shopping and entertainment and all sorts of staff…

  It was something that bothered Walsh more than he’d said aloud.

  All his Tennessee chapter brothers had grown up in the States; several had visited London, but they hadn’t been raised there. They knew nothing of the din and stench and jostle of a city that size. Day in, day out, London had eaten at him, like acid rain crumbling away his hard edges over time, until he’d become this smooth, emotionless shell.

  Until Gramps died, summers in East Sussex with his grandfather had been the highlight of his childhood life. His mother had fretted over him, worried that he had no father. “A boy should spend some time with men, learning how to be one,” she’d told him, and when he was four, she’d begun packing him off to her father’s house for two months out of the year.

  It was in Rottingdean, East Sussex that he’d realized he was a boy misplaced in the world. He could close his eyes now and return there, to the bedroom that overlooked the back garden, the nubby clean-smelling blanket beneath his cheek, weak sunshine warming his bare arms, the scent of Gram’s roses beyond the open window being swept up in the salt tang coming in from the beach. He could hear the ham frying and hear Gramps singing and he could hear birds. Real, actual songbirds, on the window ledge and in the garden, calling to one another.

  Summers became his life, and all the months in between merely his existence. Rottingdean was roses and cottage gardens; it was fumbling, pleasant-faced tourists and friendly locals. Cozy pubs, fingers sticky with candy, a belly full of Gram’s fatty cooking. It was games of chase through walled back gardens with boys who didn’t tease him for being so small. It was his bare sun-browned toes digging into the cool sand on the beach, and the sun striking off the white cliff face high above. Day trips to Brighton. Endless walks outside the town, into fields that fostered his wildest boyhood imaginings.

  He didn’t belong in the cheek-by-jowl world of cities. He belonged somewhere drowsy and soft. It was why he loved Tennessee. It was why something as sad as an abandoned cattle farm meant something to him outside its body-hiding attributes.

  “Did you hear that?” Michael asked, startling him, slamming him back to the present.

  He halted, going still all over. The wind touched his face. “What?”

  “I heard–”

  And there it was: a scream.

  It wasn’t a human one, though.

  “What the hell?” Michael asked under his breath. His hand went to his waistband, the gun stashed there.

  Walsh put his thumb and forefinger in his mouth and whistled, one sharp blast that made Michael wince and flushed doves from the grass.

  A moment later, a figure emerged from behind a stand of trees partway up the driveway. A snorting, head-tossing, four-legged figure, who stepped to the center of the path and stared at them, nostrils flared. The horse was a dark, gleaming bay, rangy and long-necked, black tail cocked like he was prepared to bolt.

  “Ghost got horses up there in the barn we don’t know about?” Michael asked dryly.

  Walsh whistled again, and the horse took a few steps toward them, threw his head up, and snorted explosively.

  Walsh started up the driveway, toward the horse and the old vacant barn beyond it, pace steady so he wouldn’t spook the animal.

  “What are you gonna do?” Michael asked behind him, and he sounded annoyed.

  He didn’t know. But his feet were taking him up the hill.

  ~*~

  “It’s locked,” Emmie said grimly, surveying the gate in front of her. They’d found hoofprints in the deep mud right at the property’s edge, and they’d fought their way through honeysuckle and low-hanging tree limbs up to the fence. They’d found this gate that separated Briar Hall from its neighbor. And they’d found it locked, with a padlock that only bolt cutters could overcome.

  “Is there a key at the barn?” Becca asked behind her, where she held both horses out from under the dense cover of branches.

  “Not that I know about.” Emmie gav
e the lock a tug, and the rusty chain scratched at the tubular gate. She had a sinking suspicion the neighbors had been the ones to put the lock in place.

  She tilted her head back and looked up at the sky through the latticework of leaves above. It was almost dark, the landscape a miasma of purple shadows and indistinct outlines. She had a small flashlight and her cellphone in her breeches pockets, Tally’s halter still slung over one shoulder.

  Doubtless, all the horses were in by now. Tally’s owner had probably arrived, and was wondering where her baby was.

  “Stay with the horses,” she said, stepping onto the lowest rung of the gate. “I’m going to go have a look around and see if I can find him.”

  “No!” Becca protested.

  Emmie glanced over her shoulder and found the girl staring at her with horror.

  “You can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Who even owns that place over there? What if, like, some crazy old farmer dude with a shotgun and a pitchfork is just waiting to…fork somebody to death,” she finished, face going red with distress. “You can’t go alone, Em.”

  “Someone has to stay with the horses.” And, she added to herself, if one of us has to get arrested for trespassing, better me than the kid with the bright future. “I won’t be gone long, and I’ll call you if I need help.” She touched her phone where its outline showed through her pocket. She grinned. “You know, if I almost get forked to death.”

  “You are not funny.”

  “And it’s not getting any lighter. I’ll be back.” Without leaving room for argument, Emmie climbed up and over the gate, landing in a soft crush of ferns, and started off at a brisk walk before Becca could talk any sense into her.

  There was evidence of Tally’s passage: trampled undergrowth, more moon-shaped tracks in the soft soil, visible as Emmie passed the flashlight across the ground.

  The sky retained color, but down low along the grass, it was already nighttime.