Chapter One

She concentrated on placing one foot in front of the other. Again and again. Scarlet Falls was a small town. When she had stepped out of her house—a rented craftsman on Fairlane—there had been only two miles between her and her stepsister.

Now there was less.

One step and then another.

The late-afternoon sounds around her were muffled and distorted. Her ears had begun ringing before she’d hung up the phone. Or maybe she’d dropped it without disconnecting because her fingers had gone numb.

Her whole body seemed to be partially shutdown.

Breath came shallow to her lungs. Her vision was black at its edges. Her legs had gone half-asleep, tingling from nerves pinched off by disbelief. The slap of her boots on pavement was barely an echo to her ears.

She had never stopped hoping.

Not when Gracie stopped calling. Not when her online presence went dormant. Not when Maddy had followed her to Scarlet Falls almost a year ago only to find a room at the bed-and-breakfast full of all Gracie’s abandoned things.

Her camera.

Her precious camera.

That’s when she should have known and begun to accept.

Maddy stopped, though in losing her momentum she thought she might never move again.

A large black crow perched on a canted fence post, its claws dug into the pitted, decayed wood. The field behind it had been planted with corn but all the stalks had been shorn by a harvester so that nothing but brittle straw stubs and the detritus of dust and leaves remained.

A grubby scarecrow leaned worse than the fence post, nearly fallen over and forgotten. The late October wind caused one of its gloves to flutter again and again. Something about the inanimate gesture made caustic acid burn the back of Maddy’s throat.

Goodbye.

Goodbye.

Goodbye.

But the crow ignored the fallen scarecrow. Instead it zeroed one dark, beady eye on her.

Maddy couldn’t move.

The crow had interrupted her dogged march and now it held her paralyzed with the gleam of its black gaze.

It didn’t move as a bird should. No fluttering. No preening. No flexing of its wings. It was as still as she.

But its sharp and shiny beak hinted at the horrible potential for movement. As did the talons that held it so grippingly in place on the fence post.

The bird was only a few feet away from her. Even though she’d passed through town unnoticed by anyone or anything, it seemed unnaturally aware of her.

She’d lived most of her life outdoors with her booted feet in the dirt and her hands in the shrubbery, flowers and plantings that made up her paints on the palates of yard, lawn and garden. She rarely worked in edibles and had never seen a crow closer than circling high in the sky, a distant black spot winging over her head.

This one was large.

Much larger than she thought normal.

Even so, the fear that tightened her chest and brought her numb body back to pulse-pounding life was also out of proportion.

Maddy took a step.

She was not going to allow a bird to become more than a bird because of the fear, doubt and horror-movie terror currently filling her mind. Not even in this dark town where a murderer lurked.

Several more determined steps took her past the talons, the beak and the terrible focused eye. Once the crow was behind her, she walked faster. Her legs felt stronger, although her heart still faltered.

She had been afraid to drive.

It had been a logical decision to avoid her van in the midst of shock. Asking for a ride from the deputy who had called her would have been smarter. Some faulty instinct had said, No. Don’t ask him for a ride. Don’t.

She had begun the ascent up the last hill to High Lake when she heard the rusty-throated caw—harsh, loud and horrible—behind her. The gravelly cry scraped away the nerve she’d gathered in one sudden screech, leaving her raw and trembling.

But she didn’t stop moving.

She turned—enough to see the bird. It still clung to the leaning fence post. It had turned its head to watch her walk away.

Maddy kept walking toward the lake…to her stepsister’s shallow, unmarked grave.

∗ ∗ ∗

It wasn’t hard to find her way. By the time she came to the gravel road the deputy had bluntly described, she could hear the beehive of activity around the bend. Across the glassy black surface of High Lake, she could see an A-frame perched on a rise. She had helped landscape its hill the previous spring for an eccentric author, Samuel Creed, who wrote about Scarlet Falls’s history, witch trials and the occult—the very things that had drawn her stepsister here in the first place.

Gracie had been less than half a mile away. Sweet Gracie. Less than half a mile away.

Maddy clenched her fists, shaking her head at the trooper’s car as it slowed to offer her a ride. She’d come this far entirely on her own and there were only a few steps more.

A different deputy than the one who had spoken to her on the phone noted her approach and stepped forward to meet her.

“I’ll have to ask you… Oh, Ms. Clark. I didn’t realize it was you. Please…I don’t think you should be here. I’m sorry, but the sheriff has cordoned off the…area,” the deputy said. His awkwardness and the sadness on his face saved him. Laugh lines rimmed the edges of his eyes, but they were dormant now.

“I’ve walked all the way from town. I’m not turning back now,” Maddy said. He looked over his shoulder and then down at her clenched hands and up again at her tight face.

As they stood at an impasse, another deputy paused in what he was doing to look at her. His face was blank. No doubt he’d been trained to hide his emotions. Maybe he had been the one who had called. The deputy she’d spoken to on the phone had been blunt and cold to the point of being cruel.

“I’m not turning back,” Maddy repeated.

She stepped around the deputy with the sad eyes while he warred with impossible decisions, and continued toward the center of the hive. There was yellow tape strung out in a wide circle. Beyond that was a ring of official vehicles and then even more tape. Near the heart of the activity a large scarlet maple stood, raining colorful leaves down like brilliant confetti on the hidden scene below its branches.

But it was the presence of Sheriff Constantine’s SUV that caused her throat to tighten.

Back at her house she had all of her stepsister’s things, including the last roll of film Gracie had shot from over a year ago. William Constantine had been in those shots. Frame after frame. His angular face in sunshine and in shadow. Many of the shots had obviously been taken at a distance without his consent, but one had been heartbreakingly close, with his blue eyes cut to the side and aware.

Gracie had come to Scarlet Falls on what she considered serious business. Maddy was left to wonder if Constantine had been her assignment or if his striking appearance had appealed to her stepsister in other—more artistic and possibly feminine—ways.

“No,” a deep voice said above the drone of everything else—the forensic team and deputies, the crickets in the distance and her own buzzing thoughts.

She didn’t stop until his hand closed around her upper arm, and even then she considered it a pause. She had no intention of allowing him to stand in her way for long.

“You can’t be here,” Sheriff Constantine continued.

Maddy turned to confront him, but she was completely shocked by the transformation in his appearance. His face was leaner. His eyes were still vivid blue but tinged with red from lack of sleep. He had a five-o’clock shadow of golden stubble on his angular jaw and chin.

The tall muscular man had dropped at least fifteen pounds since Gracie had snapped his pictures a year ago. Maddy hadn’t seen him up close for months. There had been no reason for her to speak to him in person. Gracie’s father was her next of kin. Maddy had no legal claim to information about the investigation. She was far more familiar with his photograph than with the man himself.

He wasn’t wearing his hat, and his thick hair was rumpled and darker than she’d expected, a blond that hadn’t been touched by the sun. In fact, his skin had faded from the summer bronze of the photographs, as well.

He wasn’t any less attractive.

He was just…changed. More intense, his eyes harder and more harried by some demons she couldn’t place.

“I’m here,” Maddy said.

She looked down at his hand on her arm. She’d left the house in a silk T-shirt and black leggings. She always appreciated switching from her gardening coveralls to something soft and pretty. Now she wished for more of a barrier between the sheriff’s warm, calloused hand and her sensitive skin.

His fingers loosened. Maybe he’d seen her concern and felt her stiffness and assumed it was because his authoritative hold dimpled her skin, when that hadn’t been the problem at all.

It was his touch and her body’s unexpected reaction to it when everything else in her was devastated and dark.

“There’s nothing you can do here, Ms. Clark,” Constantine said. His voice had gone low, persuasive and, damn it, empathetic. As if he understood and cared about her pain.

“I can grieve,” Maddy said.

She pulled her arm from his hand and he let it go, but he stepped in front of her at the same time. His broad uniformed chest blocked her from seeing what she would never see again and from what she couldn’t have unseen if she was allowed to go to the base of the scarlet maple where a body bag waited for Gracie’s remains.

“You’re going to go over to my truck and climb inside and you’re going to wait there for me,” Constantine said. There was flint in his words, hard but brittle. She could shatter his calm control, maybe, if she fought, if she screamed and accused and shattered completely herself.

She tilted her chin. She met his eyes. They had looked so much lighter in her stepsister’s photographs, untouched by forest shadow and murder. Much lighter than Gracie’s other subjects of tombstones, abandoned houses and empty churches.

Her stepsister had been gifted, but when Maddy’s mom had died Gracie had turned her gift to such impossible things—spirit photography, for God’s sake.

And now Gracie was the one beyond the grave.