Scene Of The Crime: The Deputy's Proof

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.

Savannah could hear them, a small group of teenage girls giggling behind a row of bushes that separated the swampy lagoon from the edge of town. Set in the center of the row of bushes was a stone bench where her sister and her boyfriend, Bo McBride, used to sit at night and talk about their future, but Shelly had never gotten a future.

Between the bushes and the swamp was just enough solid ground for a “ghost” to walk in front of the bushes and the bench and disappear into the wooded, swampy area on the other side.

She remained hidden for several minutes until she thought it was just about midnight, and then she turned on the flashlight strapped around her waist beneath the gauzy white gown. The double-sided beam produced an otherworldly glow from her head to her toes.

Performance time, she thought. Her role as Shelly’s ghost required very little of her, an appropriate costume but no script to memorize. She started to walk across the “stage.” She walked slowly, her head half-turned away and her long dark hair hiding her features from her audience.

“There she is!” A young female voice squealed.

“It’s Shelly. It’s really Shelly,” another voice cried out.

Savannah embraced the sound of her sister’s name into her heart as she continued her walk. Tears burned in her eyes, but she swallowed against them. Shelly’s ghost didn’t cry. She just walked across the place where she’d been murdered and then disappeared almost as quickly as she’d appeared.

To the continuing squeals of her sister’s name, Savannah reached the woods on the other side of the “stage.” She shut off the flashlight at her waist and headed for a tangled growth of vines behind which was the small entrance of a cave. The opening of the cave was hidden and couldn’t be seen unless you knew what you were looking for.

She quickly moved the concealing vines aside and clicked on her little penlight, using it after she’d entered the fairly large cave that led downhill. The cave narrowed somewhat as it continued but remained wide enough that a pirate could push trunks of treasure or buckets of jewels through it.

This passageway eventually intersected with the one that would take her to her backyard, a perfect escape route for the ghost of the dead.

She moved quickly, eager now to get back to the house where she lived. It was the house she’d grown up in, but it hadn’t felt like home since two months after Shelly’s murder, when her parents had left town and moved to a small retirement community in Florida.

They’d left the house for Savannah and her older brother, Mac, to live in. Mac had married and moved out months before, leaving Savannah in the house that contained far too many haunting memories.

She felt a cathartic relief and a little bit of guilt as she reached the earthen steps that would bring her up into her backyard.

Everyone in Lost Lagoon loved a good ghost story, she told herself. The town was steeped in stories of the walking dead. The ghosts of dead pirates were rumored to walk the hallways of Pirate’s Inn.

Savannah had been working there as night manager for a little over a year, and while she occasionally heard odd bumps and thumps in the night, she’d never seen a ghost.

But the rumors of sightings of apparitions were repeated again and again by thrilled townspeople and occasional tourists. The ghost of an old, toothless hag supposedly appeared in the alley beside the Lost Lagoon Cafe, and several people had sworn they’d seen the faint wisp of ghostly figures around Mama Baptiste’s Apothecary Shop.

She turned off her penlight, stepped up out of the tunnel and squeaked in surprise as she saw a tall, dark figure standing before her. She fumbled to turn on her penlight once again and found herself face-to-face with Deputy Josh Griffin.

“Hi, Savannah. Busy night?” he asked.

Her heart sank as she realized she’d been busted.

* * *

JOSH SHONE HIS own flashlight on the slender, dark-haired woman. Her doe-like brown eyes were huge in a face that was unnaturally pale. Her lower lip trembled even as she raised her chin and glared at him defiantly.

“If you’re going to arrest me, then just get on with it,” she exclaimed.

“How about we get out of the dark and go inside and talk about my options,” he replied.

Savannah Sinclair and the murder of her sister, Shelly, had haunted Josh for a long time. Before the murder Savannah had been a lively, charming twenty-seven-year-old who was often seen out and about town.

“Okay,” she replied. Despite her initial upthrust of her chin, as he walked just behind her he saw her shoulders slump forward and felt the energy that had momentarily radiated from her disappear.

Despite the ridiculous outfit she wore, he noticed the slight sway of her slender hips beneath the gauzy material, could smell the faint scent of a fresh floral perfume that emanated from her.

The few times he’d seen her since her sister’s murder, he’d been filled with guilt. The consensus at the time had been that Shelly had been murdered by her then-boyfriend, Bo McBride, and that law enforcement simply hadn’t found the evidence to make an arrest. Josh knew how little had actually been done in the investigation.

But that was then and this was now, and it had taken him weeks to figure out the mystery of “Shelly’s ghost.” He now had questions for Savannah that he wanted answered.

She opened the back door that led into the kitchen. She turned on the overhead light and gestured him toward a chair at the round wooden table.

“If you don’t mind, I’d like to change clothes before you decide to take me in,” she said. She didn’t give him a chance to reply but instead left the room.

Josh sat in a chair at the table and looked around. Red roosters danced across the bottoms of beige curtains at the window, and a hen and rooster salt and pepper shaker set perched on the pristine stove top. Other than a coffeemaker, the countertops were bare.

There was an emptiness, a void of life in the room, as if it were a designer home where nobody really lived. He heard water running in another room, and a few minutes later, Savannah returned.

She’d changed out of the gauzy gown and into a pair of jeans that hugged her long slender legs and a blue-and-gold T-shirt advertising the Pirate’s Inn. She sat across from him at the table. She’d obviously washed her face, for her color was more natural. Her cheeks were faintly pink.

“So, are you going to arrest me?” she asked. Gone was the defiance, leaving behind only a weary resignation in her voice.

“What would I arrest you for? Impersonating a ghost?” he asked with a touch of amusement. “I don’t want to arrest you, Savannah. I want to talk to you. What are you doing? Why are you pretending to be Shelly’s ghost?”

Her long-lashed brown eyes gazed at him, and she tucked a strand of the long, silky-looking dark hair behind one ear. “How did you know that I’d appear out of the bush in my backyard?”

“I’ve been tracking the sightings of Shelly’s ghost for about a month,” he replied. “I saw your performance a couple of weeks ago and instantly realized it was you, but I couldn’t figure out how you appeared and disappeared and got back here without anyone seeing you. So, I’ve been staking out your house and watching your movements.”

Her face paled slightly. “You’ve been stalking me?”

“Basically, yeah,” he admitted. “But I have to say, you aren’t an exciting person to stalk.”

Her cheeks grew pink again. “Sorry if I bored you with my life. Aren’t there other people you should be stalking? Don’t you have any real crime fighting to do?”

“Things have been pretty quiet since we managed to get Roger Cantor arrested,” he replied. The affable coach of the high school had been exposed as a deadly stalker and was now behind bars. “And you didn’t answer my question. What are you doing pretending to be Shelly’s ghost?”

“Entertaining the locals,” she replied airily, but her dark eyes simmered with a depth of emotion that belied her words. “And you didn’t answer mine. How exactly did you figure out that I’d appear by the bush in the backyard after one of my ghostly walks?”

“The last time you pulled your stunt, I was here, watching the backyard to see if you’d sneak across the lawn. To my surprise, you came up from under the ground.”

Josh had always been attracted to Savannah’s high spirits, her beauty and more than a touch of sexy flirtation that had always lit her eyes when they happened to encounter each other. But that had been before her sister’s murder, and the woman who sat across from him now appeared achingly fragile, a mere shell of what she’d once been.

A touch of guilt swept through him again. As a lawman, his job was to solve crimes and get the guilty behind bars. But officially Shelly’s case remained an open one, without resolution.