Raven's Cove - Jenna Ryan (8 page)

“He’s like a bad penny that way,” Jasmine remarked.

His brows lifting in speculation, the chief moved a finger between them. “You’re with him?” Then to Rogan. “She’s with you?”

“For a few more revolutions,” Jasmine said.

The man’s eyes narrowed. “Should I know what you’re talking about?”

“Only if you live on a carousel.”

“In other words, no.” Rogan flicked a look at the deputy, who seemed to want the shadows to swallow him up.

The tension returned. The chief’s lips thinned. “Right. Back to business. Except…” With a subtle head motion at Jasmine, he aimed a questioning look at Rogan.

Intercepting it, Jasmine held out her hand. “Elizabeth McCabe. My friends call me Jasmine Ellis. Michael here still prefers the name Rogan.”

“Cover story?” the chief assumed.

Rogan moved a shoulder. “That was the plan.”

“Life’s all about plans. Ian Cutless,” he said to Jasmine. Then he made a showcase gesture. “And this, my friends, is the nephew of the woman I’m currently seeing. His name’s Wesley Hamilton-Blume. His favorite pastimes are eating, sleeping and blowing up bad guys on his iPhone. Sound impressive? Well, let’s see. He can outgun any gaming adversary online, and eat more blueberry pies than the three of us combined.” His expression hardened. “He can also lose prisoners like nobody’s business.”

“I didn’t lose him,” the deputy defended. His gaze dropped back to the floor. “He escaped.”

“Escaped,” the chief repeated. “While you slept off a massive dinner in your—no,
my
—chair.” He held up a finger to count. “I leave town at 3:00 p.m. Deputy collects the prisoner’s meal tray at five-thirty. Then deputy lumbers off and doesn’t check the cells again until I get back at—” he regarded his watch “—ten forty-five the following day. I go in, and what do I find? Fresh scratch marks around the lock, a lump of nothing under the blanket and two black feathers lying on the pillow.”

“Feathers?” Slithery knots formed in Jasmine’s stomach. “Why feathers?”

“Because my now-gone prisoner likes to thumb his nose at the law. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a nice enough fellow most days. Eccentric, but that’s normal in this town. Teaches at the local school.”

Oh, damn, Jasmine thought. “What did your prisoner do to get arrested?”

“He broke in here and started diddling with my office computer. I caught him doing the same thing earlier and warned him, but did he listen? No. Yesterday afternoon he was back doing it again. So I invited him to spend the night in one of our cells. Evidently—” he shot the deputy a virulent look “—he chose not to accept.”

“What’s his name?” Jasmine hated to ask.

“Mud when I get hold of him. But in the day to day, he goes by Grant, Lenny Grant.”

Chapter Seven

“I knew this would happen.” Jasmine stormed into Daniel’s cottage, mindless of the magazines that swayed in her wake. “Daniel’s gone, we’re here, and so is the legend that got him two death feathers and me one. I can’t believe I was worried about him. He’s a cat with nine hundred lives. Okay, maybe you didn’t know your friend Ian Cutless was the police chief here when we were in Salem, but all you had to do was call. We could have saved ourselves a long trip and the thrill of spending the night in a paper jungle.”

Rogan leaned a shoulder on the door frame. “You’re forgetting, Cutless was in Portland last night. And Daniel escaped from his cell sometime between when the chief left and when he returned.”

“Are you telling me that Wesley is the only deputy this town has?”

“Hard to believe, isn’t it?”

Her lips tipped into a false smile. “In that case, your old friend’s an idiot.”

“Wesley’s father is the mayor.”

“And his aunt’s dating the chief. Still an idiot.”

“Doesn’t alter the fact that we had to come.”

“No? Huh.” When Boris poked his nose into her leg, she bent to pet him. “So tell me again, Rogan—or maybe it’s for the first time—how do you expect to catch a murderer into whose hands we appear to be playing?”

Although he found this side of her strangely arousing, Rogan knew better than to mention it. Or get too close to her right now. Pushing off, he headed for the nearest window. “We let the killer think we’re playing by his rules. Then we slip our own cards into the mix and hopefully control the outcome.”

She swiped a line with her hand. “Forget cards and who’s playing by whose rules. Do you think we’re dealing—don’t say it—with Malcolm Wainwright or not?”

“I think Wainwright’s dead.” Unable to fully shake the sensation of being watched that had been plaguing him for most of the day, Rogan eased the blind aside. “I also don’t believe his death’s being avenged. That could be wishful thinking on my part, but I still wouldn’t put it at the top of the list.”

She watched him as he moved from window to window. “What would you put there? A big question mark?”

“For the moment, yes.”

“But there is a connection to Daniel.”

“And the trial and the safe house. I just haven’t figured out where the lines intersect.” His eyes traveled over mist-covered bushes to the dense stand of trees behind them. “Tell me, Jasmine, how did Daniel take your divorce?”

“Excuse me?”

Rogan’s lips curved. “Was he okay with it, or, like most red-blooded males would have done, did he try to win you back?”

She knocked one of the stacks with her hip and had to make a quick grab to save it. “I’m not a poker chip. Our marriage didn’t work out. We grew apart rather than together. And if you’re suggesting that Daniel might be behind these murders or my feather, you’re wrong.”

“Only a question.”

“There you go. Question answered. Next suspect.”

“I’ll let you know when I have one.” His gaze cruised over a fog-shrouded rowboat trapped in the underbrush. “Did you still feel like we were being watched after we left Cutless’s office?”

“Are you kidding?” She headed for the kitchen with Boris trotting along behind her. “I’m feeling it now, and we’re inside. Uh…”

He knew what the look she shot him meant and grinned as he surveyed a clump of wild berry bushes. “There’s no one inside with us. Ask Boris.”

The growl he heard in response didn’t come from the dog.

When the bushes revealed nothing, he followed her to the kitchen. And almost bowled her over in the doorway.

“What?” he said, then lowered his gaze to the table, where Boxman sat crunching cornflakes, drinking beer and wearing nothing but his underwear.

At their combined stare, the big man glanced down at his striped boxers. “I got wet tromping through the woods looking for Daniel’s bod— Looking for Daniel.”

“We, uh, hmm…” Jasmine drummed up a smile. “No idea what to say.”

Rogan had a few ideas, but none worth uttering.

A thought had been nagging him since last night, and it had nothing to do with being watched. Or maybe it did, but only in a roundabout way.

Drawing Jasmine back to the main room, he said, “The guy on the phone yesterday—you heard him more clearly than I did. Can you remember his exact words?”

She glanced away. “He said he was my nemesis, my fate, and I should look for the feathery token he’d left on my front door. He mentioned a bird and death. Then he told me I was going to suffer the way he’d suffered before he died.”

The words came back, and with them the altered voice. The tone.

“He’s angry.” Rogan ran it again to be sure. “He was trying to taunt you while he frightened you.”

“News flash. He succeeded.”

“Only on your end. On his, the intonation changed. He tightened up when he said you were going to suffer.”

“That makes two of us.

A smile touched Rogan’s mouth, but there was no humor in it. “When he told you he’d suffered, he got even tighter. By the time he reached the last three words, his teeth were clenched.”

“And that means?”

Rogan let grim purpose blend with the darkness that had lived inside him for more than half his life. “It’s personal, Jasmine. He sees you as having killed him in some way. And whatever the cost, he’s determined to make you pay.”

* * *

RATHER THAN LIFT, THE FOG
actually sank by midafternoon. Jasmine knew Rogan hadn’t meant to make things worse for her by saying what he had. She also understood he wanted to ease her mind when, during lunch, he suggested a change of sleeping accommodations. What he came up with was an enormous cliffside mansion called Blume House. She suspected it was the place Boxman had mentioned last night. The Blumes being the source of the local legend, Jasmine wasn’t entirely convinced that the mansion-turned-inn could do much to settle her nerves, but as she climbed from Rogan’s truck late that afternoon, she had to admit the place impressed.

Like everything else in and around Raven’s Cove, Blume House might have been plucked from another era. Another world, actually, the kind where darkness was both a state of mind and a state of existence.

The faded gray structure wrapped around a massive courtyard like a gothic fortress. Within the courtyard stood a fountain, twenty-five feet across and shaped like a bird’s nest. Two enormous stone ravens spouted water from their beaks. Gnarled branches with pointed tips stretched to the top of the second-floor windows and cradled both the birds and their nest.

The house itself had an air of despair. Like the man who’d been transformed into a raven, it seemed to be waiting for some kind of elusive miracle to occur.

Given the nature of the tale, Jasmine thought it might have a very long wait.

On the porch, she and Rogan opened the creaking entry doors.

“Better than a bell,” she remarked and let the combined smells of fall flowers, must and furniture polish wash over her.

The bloodred carpet was ancient, the ebony banister scarred, and somewhere, someone was playing Hayden on a raspy organ.

She tested the newel post for strength. “For what it’s worth, this would make a fantastic museum.”

“Try mausoleum or funeral parlor.” Rogan looked around. “As hotels go, it lacks a certain ambience.”

“It wouldn’t if we were in the Black Forest.” She walked ahead of him. “The cashier at the general store told me the place was shipped across the Atlantic piece by piece from Germany in the late 1600s and jigsawed back together over the next decade.”

Rogan raised his eyes to rafters so heavily shadowed they quite literally disappeared. “I believe it.”

Jasmine peered into the first of many rooms that branched off from the great hall.

“Guess we should have phoned.”

“I did. I spoke to—”

“A moron with mushed peas for brains.”

The female voice came from Jasmine’s left shoulder, so close to her that when she spun, she fell into Rogan’s chest.

“Sorry. Did I startle you?”

Whoever the woman was, she looked like a warrior bird. Her midlength hair was black with scarlet tips. She had two visible raven tattoos, black fingernails and God knew what kind of costume on her body. Her coat was a hodgepodge of leather, feathers and rough red lace. So were the boots that skimmed the tops of her thighs.

To Jasmine’s amusement, after a quick once-over, she smiled and shot out a firm hand.

“Riese Blume. If you’ve heard of old Rooney Blume, he’s my grandfather and the patriarch of the Cove. Most everyone here has Blume blood to some extent, with the obvious exception of the guests who pay to stay in my home. As luck would have it, mine is the only hotel in town, but I’m a fair innkeeper. More than fair if you can cook. Dog’s cool as per your question to my pea-brained assistant, who went and beaned himself jumping off a rock at a wedding we hosted today out on the cliff, which is why I’m dressed up like a partly transformed raven in skintight hip waders and a feather coat. But that’s not important. Do you want one room or two?”

“Uh…” was all Jasmine could manage.

Rogan did better, working up a slow smile. “One’s good for me.”

The spell shattered. “Two’s better.”

Dollar signs came and went from Riese’s black eyes. “Adjoining?”

“Please.” Rogan dropped an arm onto Jasmine’s shoulders. “Away from the other guests if possible.”

“In a house the size of the
Titanic,
I can swing just about any request.” Pausing, Riese shook a curious finger at Jasmine. “I don’t mean to be rude, but are you any relation to Lacey Blume? She ran off thirty years ago with a psychologist from Boston. Fat toad insisted we were loony for thinking any part of our legend was true. Then he got himself tangled up with the biggest loon of all. Er, no offense if you are related.”

Jasmine turned a burgeoning laugh into a smile. “Not that I know of.”

“What about you?” She zeroed in on Rogan. “Your lady friend’s got Lacey’s eyes, but you’ve got the look of a Blume altogether. Dark, dangerous and brooding, with a healthy dose of just plain bad. Not that my great- great- blah, blah, blah ancestor, the one who was poofed into a raven, was truly bad, but…”

The door opened and closed behind them. Riese continued to talk while she mounted the stairs to the entrance, where Boxman stood with a backpack on his shoulder and a butterfly bandage stretched across his nose.

“My multiple great’s name was Hezekiah Blume,” Riese went on. “There aren’t any portraits, but most agree he was a strapping man with a very large chip.”

Despite the fact that she appeared to be in storytelling mode, Jasmine saw her hand ball into a fist. Boxman had mentioned meeting a birdwoman in a local bar. Given the fact that Riese looked like a woman with a fistful of mad, two and two probably made four.

A glance at Rogan yielded nothing except a placid “Cause and consequence, love.”

Because she felt she and Boris owed him for the bandage, Jasmine got to Boxman first and gave him a peck on the cheek. “Nice to see you again, Sergeant.”

He kept his uneasy gaze on their hostess. “What? Oh, yeah, thanks. Uh, hi there, Rita.”

“It’s Riese.” But she stopped on the third step and scowled at Jasmine. “Is he really your friend?”

“Mmm. He’s also a police officer,” she said when the woman’s hand twitched back into a ball.