one

“He was dead, but that wasn’t the creepy part.”

Ahead of them, an early morning mist blanketed dense woods. It was barely dawn and sunlight slanted through the trees at an acute angle. Golden rays of light fell across late-summer foliage like a glittering illustration in an old children’s book, or a photo on a motivational poster.

“I don’t want to know the creepy part!”

“I want to know the creepy part,” Randy Bogart said.

His brother, Death, paused to help Wren Morgan navigate a slippery patch of fallen leaves. The path they were on led to the haunted Hadleigh House, a nineteenth-century plantation and local legend. Wren had been dying to get inside since she learned that Keystone and Sons, the family-owned auction company she worked for, had contracted to sell the contents. As an auctioneer, part of Wren’s job included appraising and cataloguing the items to be sold. They hadn’t been able to start work on the Hadleigh House, though, because the place was being treated as a crime scene after hikers found a dead body. An elderly man, who had yet to be identified, had gotten drunk and ridden a stolen horse down this path. In the dark, he’d ridden full tilt into an overhanging branch and been killed.

Earlier that morning, Death had run into Duncan Reynolds, the chief of police in their tiny town of East Bledsoe Ferry, during his coffee-and-donut run. Ever since Death had begun his new career as a private investigator and part-time bounty hunter, the chief had become a close friend and mentor. At Randy’s urging, Death shared the latest gossip now.

Apparently, the old man’s death was causing even more of a sensation than one would expect because of the legends already surrounding the path. It was known as the Vengeance Trail, and the story was that during the Civil War a soldier (Confederate or Union, the accounts varied) had killed an old man and stolen his horse. That night, as he was riding on the Vengeance Trail, the horse had bolted, taking revenge for his master’s death by dashing the murderer against an overhanging limb and killing him.

“Okay, so, you know the dead man was wearing a Civil War cavalry uniform, right?” Death began.

“Like the ghost story.”

“Like the ghost story. Right. Well, the state crime lab came back with a report on the uniform. You ready for this?”

His companions stopped and watched him expectantly.

“The uniform was saturated with formaldehyde and traces of … how do I put this delicately? A substance known as ‘body liquor.’ It’s the result of human decomposition. They think the dead guy got the uniform he was wearing off a recently embalmed corpse.”

“Oh! Gross!” Wren moaned. “That is so gross!”

“Wow!” Randy said. “That’s cool! Where exactly did he get killed, do you know?”

“Somewhere right along here, I think, where the climb gets steep.”

Wren covered her face. “I don’t want to see the dead guy!”

Death laughed. “There is no dead guy!”

“But there was one.” She hung back, hiding behind the muscular bulk of her ex-Marine boyfriend and trying to peek around him without actually seeing anything.

“There was, yes,” he told her patiently. “But that was, like, three days ago. The police have been here and they took him away.”

“But what if they missed bits?”

He half turned to peer down at her, his right eyebrow cocked up in amusement. “Missed bits? Really?”

“It could happen.”

“No, sweetheart. I promise. It couldn’t. The police are very thorough when it comes to dead guys. They always make sure to get all the bits.”

“What if they were invisible bits?”

“Like dead guy cooties?”

She glowered at him. “You say that like it isn’t a thing.”

“They even took the branch he brained himself on,” Randy said.

He’d ranged a little ahead of them and shinnied up a tree. He sat, now, astride a branch, and indicated the fresh-cut marks where another branch had been removed.

“Get down from there before you fall and break your neck,” Death scolded. He glanced at Wren. “You know, when we were little and we went to the zoo, my brother always used to get switched with a baby monkey. To this day I’m not sure which one we ended up with.”

“Ha, ha.” Randy dangled full-length from the branch and dropped the few inches to the ground. Both brothers were tall and muscular, but where Death was burly and built like a tank, Randy was long and lean. He turned his attention to Wren and spoke kindly. “There really isn’t anything to be afraid of. I’ve been around lots of dead people and they almost never do anything creepy.” Randy was a firefighter and a nationally accredited paramedic. “Except for that one guy whose head fell off, but that’s another story. My point is, there’s nothing to be scared of here and now. It was just some old man who got drunk and had a stupid accident. Tragic, but not dangerous at all.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” Wren replied sourly. “The last time some guy did something stupid and got himself killed I wound up getting kidnapped, your brother got beat up, and the guys who did it cut off my hair!” She ran a hand over her still-short cap of red hair, lamenting the braid that had taken her years to grow out.

“She does have a point,” Death agreed reluctantly. “But”—he turned his attention back to her—“you wanted to get started on the Hadleigh House. Unless you’ve got a helicopter in your pocket, we’re going to have to suck it up and go up the path to get there. Here. Close your eyes and take my hand.”

She did, taking his hand in both of hers and allowing him to lead her past the deadly spot on the trail. His heartbeat under her fingers was strong and not racing, and his breathing had evened out. Before they’d stopped to talk he had been gasping, with an alarming wheeze deep in his chest.

Death Bogart didn’t look it and didn’t like to admit it, but he had returned from the war a damaged man. A combat injury had left him with a severely compromised lung capacity and symptoms of PTSD that he denied suffering from.

“Look,” Randy said from slightly ahead of them. “There are stone steps set right into the hillside. The dead guy had to jump his horse down them. You can still see where they landed because the horse’s hooves gouged out divots in the path.”

“Randy,” Death growled. “Ix-nay on the ead-day uy-gay!”

“Right. Because I totally don’t speak pig Latin,” Wren said drily.

Death ignored her, stooping to examine the steps. “This is worked stone. This path must have been heavily used at one point.” Now it was overgrown with moss.

“It probably was. You’d never know it now, but from the mid-1800s to the Second World War there was a whole little community out here. There was a one-room schoolhouse, a flour mill, a smithy, and a general store back that way”—Wren pointed back the way they’d come—“and a church and a bunch of houses up beyond the old boundaries of the plantation, that way.” She gestured ahead. “The church cemetery is still in use, in fact, though the church was abandoned decades ago. A lot of people who’ve never even lived around here get brought back and buried in old family plots.”

“You know, I’m kind of surprised to see a plantation this far north,” Death said.

“There aren’t many,” Wren agreed, “but some of the earliest settlers came to Missouri from Virginia and Georgia and they built the same kinds of houses and outbuildings they were used to down there. The land is good here, but the climate isn’t right for cotton or tobacco. There was never a land rush, but a few of the big old houses remain. Where there were settlers, especially wealthy settlers, little towns grew up.”

“Is there anything out here now?” Randy asked. “The whole area looks pretty desolate to me.”

“Well, it’s not a city,” Wren said with a wry smile. “There are still a fair number of houses, scattered well apart, back in among the trees. The cemetery, as I said, is still in use. And there’s a camp for wounded veterans, Warriors’ Rest, in the northeast corner of the old plantation.” She and Randy exchanged a meaningful look behind Death’s back. “They keep horses, and it’s centered around the old stables.”

“That must be where the … ” Randy paused and cleared his throat. “The ead-day uy-gay stole his orse-hay.”

“You think?”

Death just shook his head and went before them, up the steps and between two enormous lilac bushes at the head of the trail. Wren followed. As she came up behind him, he stepped aside so that she could appreciate the view.

They were standing at the front gate, the Hadleigh House rising from the overgrown garden like it was, itself, a specter from the past.

_____

The wrought-iron fence that enclosed the front yard had been white once. Now the paint was yellowed and speckled with rust. The gate hung crooked from a single hinge. A bolt hole remained where the latch had been, but it was long gone now. A loop of wire held the gate fast to the gate post.

Off to the left, deep-worn ruts marked the upper end of the long driveway, untraveled for so long that saplings grew between the tracks. The ruts led through another, wider metal gate and made a circle through the side yard, passing under a carport. That entrance to the house was blocked now; the roof of the carport had fallen and a small tree grew beside the doorstop.

They had left Wren’s pickup at the bottom of the drive, but had had to take the old path through the woods. An ancient bridge had once carried the driveway across a deep gully with a creek running through it, but it had long since tumbled into the water.

In late summer, almost fall now, the long grass in the front yard of the Hadleigh House was dark green tinged with brown and gold. It was a big, rectangular block of a building with a dozen windows on the front side alone and a front door covered in flaking black paint. Low steps led up to a broad verandah. Six massive columns topped with carved Corinthian capitols supported the porch roof two stories above. A pair of tall, straight oak trees flanked the entry­way.

The hill fell away behind the house, so that the house and its attendant trees stood framed against a clear blue sky. It looked, Wren thought, like a ship sailing on the crest of the world.

Death unhooked the small gate, lifted the trailing corner, and pushed. It opened with a dismal creak and they went into the yard. An uneven path, paved with red bricks, led to the steps. Wren could see the green blades of irises, their flowers long gone, massing along the fence line. There was a concrete goldfish pond, filled now with dirt and debris, a broken birdbath, and a trellis covered in sweet-pea vines. Once this had been a well-manicured garden, but now the black-eyed Susans scattered among the weeds and the roses growing in such proliferation along the iron fence were wild.

“So how does this happen?” Randy asked. “A place like this go up for auction, I mean.”

“Usually,” Wren said, “somebody dies.”

At the foot of the steps Death put out a hand to stop her and went ahead, testing the boards to make sure they were sturdy enough to hold his weight.

“That makes a lot of sense,” Wren said, frowning at him. “Using the heaviest of us to see if the porch will collapse.”

“I’m a Marine,” he said, bouncing a little to see if it would hold. “Marines always go first.”

“You know what ‘Marine’ stands for?” Randy asked conversationally. “Muscles Are Required, Intelligence Not Essential.”

“I’ll kick your ass for that later,” Death told his brother, almost absent-mindedly.

“Whatever, Jarhead.”

Wren followed Death up onto the porch, Randy trailing behind her. The door sat in the center of the facade, with everything else balanced around it. It had a single light. A rural scene was etched into the glass.

“So somebody died,” Randy persisted. “I’m assuming you mean someone other than the dead guy on the path?”

“Key?” Death asked.

Wren handed over the key ring Sam Keystone had given her and continued her conversation with Randy. “Some man out in California, a descendant of the family that built it. He’s owned it all his life, from what I hear, and never even set foot in the state. When he passed away, this was only a small part of his estate. I guess his heirs weren’t interested in it either. We’re supposed to clear out the contents and then they’re going to sell the house and land separately. It’s just the house and a few fields and the woods out front now. A lot of the old plantation was sold off years ago.”

Death was wrestling with the key in the rusted old lock. “Yeah, Randy. You need a house, right?”

Due to a strange set of circumstances, the two brothers had spent the past year each thinking the other was dead. Now that they were reunited, Randy had moved to East Bledsoe Ferry to be close to Death. Right now he was camping on the sofa in Death’s tiny combination office/studio apartment.

“I think this is just a bit more house than I’m looking for. You gonna get that, Scooter? If you need someone more talented to take over, you can just give those keys to me.”

“These old locks can be temperamental.” Wren reached past Death to grip the key. She adjusted it slightly and the knob turned easily under her hand.

“Smartass,” Death muttered.

The door swung open and the three of them stood on the threshold, peering into the dark interior.

“So,” Randy said, “where does somebody find a corpse in a Civil War uniform?”

“You had to ask that now,” Wren sighed.

_____

“So, we know he got the horse from the veterans’ camp,” Death reasoned. “The chief said they found it spooked outside the fence the next morning.” He pointed to the left. “That’s off that way. He must have ridden between the fence and the tree line. I can’t see a drunk on a strange horse managing to jump that gate.”

“How does a drunk even stay on a horse?”

“Beats me. How does anybody stay on a horse?”

They had made a quick search of the mansion without finding any corpses, embalmed or otherwise. Thick dust lay everywhere, undisturbed for decades, and Wren had decided that, while the old house did feel haunted, it didn’t feel sinister. Leaving her happily ensconced among the antiques, the Bogart brothers had returned to the head of the trail to explore the mystery of the dead stranger more thoroughly.

“You realize the police must have been over this ground already?” Randy asked.

“You’d rather go help my girlfriend catalogue knickknacks and dishware?”

“I was just making conversation.”

They pushed along between the fence and the foliage, noting broken branches and finding the occasional hoof mark in the softer earth along the tree line. There was a path, overgrown but hard-beaten, along the outside of the fence. The brothers circled the house, waded through hip-deep weeds on the long slope behind it, and found themselves in an overgrown apple orchard. Many of the trees were dead—tall, black skeletons dropping branches into the mould to decay. A scattering of young trees grew among them, volunteers sprung up from windfall apples. Several were large enough to have produced fruit of their own and Death and Randy went from tree to tree, tasting what they found.

“What the hell kind of apples were they growing in this orchard anyway?” Randy demanded after half a dozen trees yielded nothing but small, hard, bitter fruit.

“Doesn’t matter,” Death said. “Apples don’t grow true from seed. Don’t even ask me how I know that. But these are kind of the apple equivalent of mutts. You plant an apple and it’s anybody’s guess what kind of tree it’s going to produce. Here, try this one. It’s not too bad.” He tossed his little brother a small, dusky-pink apple and pocketed a couple more for later, and they wandered on through the orchard and out the other side.

Through a stand of pines and over a ridge they came to another fence. This one was chest-high, shiny, and new. A small herd of horses grazed on the other side. A big, light gray stallion watched them warily.

“Oh, look! A pale horse! We found your ride.”

“Funny,” Death said. “Hey, you remember that time we saw the Clydesdales?”

City boys, the Bogart brothers had little experience with horses. About the only time they’d ever been in the presence of the big animals had been at a parade once, when they’d been close enough to touch the famous team as it pulled the beer wagon past.

“See if he’ll let you pet him,” Randy urged.

“Why don’t you see if he’ll let you pet him?”

“You’re the one with a pocket full of apples.”

“Oh, right.”

Death took one of the apples from his pocket and held it out, trying to look friendly and non-threatening.

Watching him, eyes wide and nostrils flared, the horse edged closer. He got within reach and stretched his neck out, obviously trying to reach the fruit without getting too close. He took the apple from Death’s palm, but shied away when Death tried to rub a hand down his nose.

“I was just trying to pet you,” Death said.

“Something I can help you fellas with?”

At the sound of a new voice, the brothers turned. A strange man had come out of the trees to their right and he stood now, watching them suspiciously. His feet were firmly planted and his muscular arms crossed over his chest. He wore jeans and a tank top and his exposed arms and upper chest were covered with tattoos.

“We were just trying to pet your horse,” Randy said.

The man scowled at them. “That horse has been messed with enough by strangers.”

“Is he the one that was stolen by the dead guy?”

The stranger’s eyes narrowed. “That’s a matter for the police. This is no place to come snooping around trying to satisfy your curiosity.”

Death stepped between the two men, holding up his hands placatingly. As he did so, his T-shirt sleeve slipped up, revealing his own tattoo. The other man’s eyes fell on it and his face and body language softened.

“Jarhead?”

“Big dumb Jarhead,” Randy clarified helpfully.

“Ex-Marine, yeah,” Death said. “Don’t mind my brother.”

“Kurt Robinson. Army artillery, retired. This, well, the pasture and what’s beyond is a camp for wounded vets. Warriors’ Rest. I’m the caretaker.”

“I’ve heard of it,” Death acknowledged, moving forward to shake Robinson’s hand. “I’m Death Bogart and this is my little brother, Randy.”

“The private eye. I’ve heard of you. Were you looking for us?”

“No, we weren’t looking,” Death said.

“But since you found us,” Randy cut in, ignoring the dirty look his brother was giving him, “I’d just like to say that I’m a paramedic. I’ll give you my cell phone number. If you guys ever need my kind of help, just let me know. No charge.”

Robinson’s demeanor warmed even more. “Thank you. I appreciate it. Any kind of help we can get, we’re glad to have. Listen, I’m sorry if I snarled at you about the horse. It’s just that the big guy’s been pretty freaked ever since that jerk stole him and got himself killed. He won’t even go back in his stall. We’ve had to fix him a makeshift stable in an old tool shed.”

“Yeah, I’m not surprised,” Death said. “I don’t know a lot about horses, but isn’t it kind of surprising that the dead guy was even able to get on him? From what I’ve heard, horses have a pretty keen sense of smell, and that guy must have stunk to high heaven.”

The formaldehyde and body liquor were not common knowledge, so Death didn’t elaborate. Even without them, the dead guy had to have smelled like a distillery.

“Well, Sugar was confined in a narrow stall, so he didn’t have anywhere to get away. The guy just had to open the gate, then climb the rails and jump on his back before he could get out.”

“His name’s Sugar?”

The big horse had edged back over, reassured by Robinson’s familiar presence, and was gazing pointedly at the pocket Death still had a couple of apples in.

“Because he’s such a sweetheart,” Robinson said.

“Can I give him another apple?”

“Let me see it.”

Death showed him the apple and Robinson nodded. “Go ahead. I just wanted to make sure it wasn’t green. Green apples will give a horse terrible stomach pains.”

Death held it out to the horse.

“Not like that,” Robinson said. “Hold it flat on your palm. Otherwise he might bite you accidentally.”

Death did as he was told and, almost delicately, the big stallion took the apple from his palm.

“So, what kind of things do you do around here?” Randy asked, again ignoring Death’s glare.

“Whatever we can to help whoever needs it.”

Sugar moved close, stretched his long neck over the fence, and rubbed his cheek against Death’s.

“He wants you to pet him.”

Death obliged, and Robinson nodded at the horse as he continued his conversation with Randy.

“Sometimes it helps someone who’s traumatized just to be around someone who understands.” He sighed. “Sometimes, nothing at all is enough.” He looked hard at Death. “I appreciate your brother offering his help, but it seems to me that you’re the one whose help we really need right now. I don’t know how much we’d be able to pay you … ”

Death waved away the concern. “Don’t worry about that,” he said. “Brothers-in-arms. If you really need help, I’ll be glad to do what I can. What is it that you need my help for?”

“I need for you to prove that my best friend is insane.”