Deadly Harvest Read online

  The act of giving statements at the police station—which should have been fairly simple, since Rowenna had almost literally stumbled upon the body, and the others had found it only in the course of looking for her—took the majority of the afternoon. While he was still at the station, both of Jeremy’s brothers called, offering advice and whatever assistance he needed, and both of them asking with concern if he was sure that the corpse wasn’t Mary Johnstone.

  He was certain the dead woman wasn’t Mary, but at the moment the police had no idea who she was. He hoped, since there was now a national database that listed missing persons, that she would not remain a Jane Doe for long. Whoever she was, someone must have loved her and someone must be missing her, and they deserved to know what had happened to her, as awful as it was.

  At five o’clock, they left the station. They hadn’t eaten. None of them had been hungry.

  It was actually Brad who said that his stomach was growling. But despite his hunger, he wanted a drink first.

  Jeremy understood. Rowenna didn’t say anything—she had been quiet and thoughtful all afternoon—but she seemed content to go along wherever he led.

  They went to a restaurant near the water’s edge, where their view was one of pleasure craft gently rocking at the dock and a peak of the House of the Seven Gables rising just over the tree line.

  Brad swallowed down two whiskeys, neat, before they ordered. Rowenna joined him for the first, and Jeremy found that the beer he’d ordered was gone in a matter of seconds, as well.

  Now, far away from the cornfield, with a few hours between them and the awful discovery, the world was just beginning to seem normal once again.

  Jeremy had seen a lot. Hell, he’d once thought that nothing would ever dislodge the image of drowned children as the most awful thing he’d ever seen, but this had done it.

  Or at least now there were two images to fill the horror chambers of his mind.

  Rowenna set a hand gently on Brad’s arm when the waitress brought his third whiskey in less than ten minutes. “Let’s thank God it wasn’t Mary,” she said softly.

  He drank, and his own hand trembled as he set his glass down. “The thing is…” he said, his voice husky with emotion. “The thing is…there’s a psychotic killer out there. And now Mary’s out there, too.”

  “You can’t let yourself think that way, Brad,” Rowenna said, and glanced at Jeremy.

  He wondered how he had ever managed to keep his distance from her. The empathy in her amber eyes when she looked at Brad was remarkable.

  But the way she was looking at him…

  She looked as if she wanted to say something but was holding back, as if certain that he wouldn’t approve.

  He tilted his head at an angle, questioning her silently.

  She looked back at Brad. “I have…I have a feeling that Mary is alive,” she told him.

  Brad tried to smile, but no one could have called it a complete success. “Yeah? Well, I hope you’re right. I thought so, too, but now…” He shook his head as if he didn’t know what to think anymore.

  It was clear from her expression that she was still struggling with what and how much to say. “I know it sounds ridiculous, but you can actually ask Joe Brentwood about it. I get…feelings about things sometimes. And I feel that Mary is alive.”

  Jeremy couldn’t believe what he was hearing. She really did believe in all that stupid paranormal crap. He almost said something, but he stopped himself in time.

  Brad managed a real smile that time, and he lifted his glass to her. “From your lips to God’s ears,” he said, reaching over to squeeze her hand. He sat up straighter and offered her his hand. “You know, we were never formally introduced. I’m Brad Johnstone.”

  “Rowenna Cavanaugh,” she returned, shaking his hand.

  “And you’re from…?” he asked.

  “Right here in Salem. I’m a native,” she said.

  Brad actually managed a slight but genuine laugh as he told her that she didn’t have an accent. She responded in turn that he didn’t sound like a Southerner. Brad told her then that he was a Jacksonville native, and that she should never believe people who said that Florida was only a state of transients and newcomers, because his family had been in the area since the early 1800s.

  It was good to hear Brad carry on a normal conversation, Jeremy thought, but at the same time, he couldn’t help feeling oddly anxious, as if he were waiting for a bomb to drop.

  Except that a bomb had dropped, in the form of a corpse in a cornfield.

  He leaned back in his chair, sipping his second beer. Soup came—they’d all ordered the New England clam chowder the area was famous for—and was followed by fish.

  Without discussing it, they had all decided on fish. White flaky meat that didn’t resemble anything that had ever been a mammal.

  They had almost finished their meal—with Brad and Rowenna carrying on most of the conversation, discussing anything and everything except local history, Halloween, Mary or the body in the cornfield—when Jeremy looked up to see Joe Brentwood standing in the doorway.

  He looked old, Jeremy thought, as if he’d aged ten years in the course of one day. Old, tired and worn.

  Jeremy straightened, wishing he could keep Joe from seeing them, and Rowenna and Brad from seeing Joe.

  But that was impossible.

  Even as the thought flashed through his mind, Joe turned toward them. He caught Jeremy looking at him, and he offered a weak smile and walked over to their table.

  “Mind if I join you?” he asked.

  There was nothing he should want more than a meal with the detective on Mary’s case, Jeremy thought, but logic didn’t matter, because in fact there was nothing he wanted less, right at the moment.

  “Joe,” Rowenna said welcomingly. “Of course we don’t mind.” She started to rise, but Joe stopped her with a hand on her shoulder.

  “Sit, sit, thanks,” he said, and pulled out the fourth chair and sat down himself. He ran his fingers through his white hair. “Long day. Really long, really bad day.”

  “Have you come up with anything you can tell us? Anything at all?” Jeremy asked him.

  “Besides the press breathing down my neck? And me praying that the CS Unit doesn’t give away details that may foul up the investigation? No.” He glanced quickly at Rowenna, who was studying him with concern. “Ro?” he said softly. “How about you?”

  She shrugged.

  What the hell did this guy want from her? Jeremy wondered.

  “Any ideas at all?” Joe asked her, then frowned as he glanced at Jeremy. “She’s come up with some real leads for us in the past,” he said flatly.

  She thinks she’s a psychic! Jeremy wanted to shout. A psychic. And he was a believer in good old-fashioned investigations, the kind that took time and turned up real evidence. Then he forced himself to stop and think about his reaction, and he was puzzled suddenly by his own attitude. If intuition could solve crimes and save lives, it would be great. He started examining his own feelings, thinking about the way he almost resented the easy flow of words between Rowenna and Joe, and the way his hackles had gone up so quickly on Joe’s arrival. He would be really disappointed in himself if the reason was something as petty as professional jealousy.

  But it wasn’t, and he knew that now.

  His mind flashed back to the unease he’d felt when Joe had called him about Rowenna and her empty gas tank earlier that day. Was that the kind of intuition she was talking about? No, his had made sense. He hadn’t known then that there was a killer on the loose, but he had known that Mary was missing. It made sense to worry about another young, attractive woman who was alone and in a vulnerable position. On the other hand, he hadn’t batted an eye when Brad had said he felt sure Mary was still alive, that he would sense it if she were dead. But Mary was Brad’s wife. It made a certain kind of sense to think they might have some kind of deep and inexplicable connection. But Rowenna didn’t know Mary, so making the leap to belie
ving her intuition was something else again.

  He glanced at Brad. Joe Brentwood had told his officers to make sure that every farmer in the vicinity checked his scarecrows.

  Because there could be more dead women.

  Because one woman was definitely missing.

  Mary.

  He could only hope that Brad hadn’t thought of the same thing.

  But Rowenna obviously had, because she looked at him then, as if reading his thoughts. Talk about intuition…

  “I believe that Mary is still alive,” she said softly, fervently.

  “She has to be,” Brad said passionately. “We need to be doing something. Going through the cornfields with a fine-tooth comb. Looking for that man—looking for Damien.”

  “Son, we have every law enforcement officer in the area looking for both your wife and that guy Damien, or whatever his real name turns out to be. There’s nothing you can do right now.”

  “There has to be,” Brad said. He stood up suddenly.

  “Brad,” Rowenna said worriedly.

  “I’m just going for a walk. I’m going to walk these streets until he shows up. Because he is going to show up.”

  Jeremy stood up, too. “Brad, if you find him…”

  Brad let out a long sigh. “I’m not an idiot. I’m not going to beat him up or anything. I’m a cop, remember?”

  “Not here, you’re not,” Jeremy reminded him.

  “But I know how to hold someone until he can be taken in for questioning by someone who is a cop here. Look, I’m not going to go nuts on the guy, I swear it. I’m just going to find my wife,” Brad said.

  “We’ll walk with you,” Rowenna said, standing.

  “I’ll get the check,” Jeremy said.

  “All of you, take care,” Joe said warningly, and looked at Rowenna. She nodded slightly, and Jeremy knew some kind of a communication had just passed between the two of them. He felt his irritation rising again, and he knew he had to let it go.

  If the two of them thought they had some sort of shared-intuition thing going, he wasn’t going to change it.

  And he wasn’t going to allow himself to go off like a madman, either.

  Not when he needed to stay in Joe Brentwood’s good graces.

  He paid the check, and found Brad and Rowenna out by the dock, looking out at the night and at the boats listing gently in the water. It was a peaceful scene.

  They started walking, passing the House of the Seven Gables, quiet now by night, only a few lights on. They moved on past closed shops, then reached the pedestrian mall and veered off to walk down toward the cemetery, locked behind its gates now for the night.

  The wall around it wasn’t high, though. A determined three-year-old could scramble over it.

  They looked in, and the graves were silent and eerie by night, the moonlight falling over them, shadows sweeping like living things around the centuries-old markers.

  Jeremy paused, even as Rowenna and Brad moved on, their arms linked, their heads bent toward one another in conversation.

  Jeremy knew that what puzzled him was the proximity of the cemetery to so many businesses where, on Halloween, even at the end of the day, there must have been hundreds—if not thousands—of people around at any given moment.

  Even as dusk had fallen.

  Especially as dusk had fallen and Halloween night had arrived.

  How had someone spirited Mary out of the cemetery? How was it that no one had seen her being taken? Had she left willingly?

  What was he missing?

  “Jeremy?”

  Rowenna was looking back at him, and even in the dark, he could see the question in her eyes.

  “I’m coming,” he said, and caught up with them. Together, they walked the rest of the way around the cemetery and back to the street, where he noted again that the cemetery sat on a rise above the traffic, both vehicular and pedestrian.

  Back at the Flynn plantation, they had discovered that the graves of the family burial ground sat above a maze of dank tunnels that led to the river. Waterlogged at times, they were navigable tunnels for all that. Here, the cemetery lay higher above the water, not below sea level, as the graves at the plantation did.

  Was there a similar secret passage below the earth here, its entrance hidden beneath a grave marker?

  But nothing had been disturbed in the graveyard. The place had been thoroughly searched, and there had been no sign of digging, no indication that the ground had been disturbed in any way.

  There were several aboveground tombs and burial vaults here. Maybe one of them opened and offered a gateway to some realm beneath the earth. Tomorrow, he would talk to Brentwood, and no matter what it took, he would find a way to legally tear apart the cemetery, and never mind that it was on the National Register of Historic Places.

  Tomorrow.

  How many tomorrows did they have before Mary was discovered dead, a macabre scarecrow in a field, half-consumed by crows, a smile slashed in blood across her face?

  Rowenna was looking back at him again, and he realized that he was standing still, thinking. He smiled. “I’m coming,” he said again.

  Now, however, Brad stopped. He was staring over the wall, and then he turned to Jeremy. “He took her. Somehow, he took her.”

  “Who took her, Brad?” Jeremy asked, afraid of the answer. Brad had a look in his eyes that said he was slipping away again.

  “The devil,” Brad said firmly.

  “Brad, the devil doesn’t slip into cemeteries and kidnap living women.”

  “That devil of a man. Damien. He’s the one who took her,” Brad insisted.

  “Brad, we’re looking for him. But even if we find him, he may not be guilty of anything other than overacting and telling fortunes without a permit,” Jeremy said patiently.

  But Brad shook his head, deadly serious. “He’s the devil in human form, Jeremy, I’m telling you. You don’t understand. I saw it in his crystal ball.”

  “Brad,” Jeremy said, “the man, whoever he is, knows some good magic tricks, that’s all. He showed you a picture of a turkey dinner, and your imagination did the rest.”

  Brad shook his head in emphatic disagreement.

  It disturbed Jeremy to see the way Rowenna was looking at Brad, a worried frown furrowing her brow.

  “The picture in the crystal ball changed,” she said softly.

  “Rowenna,” he said warningly, and stared at her, adding silently, Please, for the love of God, don’t encourage him. Don’t get sucked into his delusion, don’t encourage him to think the devil has come to earth and stolen his wife.

  “The picture changed. I saw cornfields. Rows and rows of corn, and…he was threatening me. I know that the man was threatening me. I saw the cornfields, and I saw something else.”

  The street seemed to fall dead silent then. It was as if even the breeze had hushed itself to better hear Brad’s words.

  “What did you see?” Jeremy asked flatly at last.

  “Evil. I saw pure evil,” Brad said.

  Suddenly the air was split by an eerie, keening cry, as if a wolf had let out a loud and plaintive howl.

  Except there were no wolves around here. Not anymore. Not for more than a hundred years.

  It was a husky, Jeremy told himself. Someone in the area had a dog, and that dog was baying to the moon that even now was rising higher in the night sky.

  “You can’t see evil, Brad, it’s a concept,” Jeremy said.

  “No. I saw evil,” Brad insisted. “The man was evil, and I saw evil in the shadows, in the darkness, in the corn. It’s a deadly harvest of evil, that’s what it is,” Brad said.

  Again, the dog howled.

  “Time to get you back to your room, Brad,” Jeremy told him.

  “I have to keep looking. I have to find Mary,” Brad said.

  “It’s all right,” Rowenna told him. She took his face between her hands and stared into his eyes. “It’s all right, Brad, really. We all know about the danger in the cornfiel
ds now. And everyone is looking for Mary. She’s going to be all right.”

  “How can you know?” Brad demanded, anguished.

  “Because I’ve seen the cornfields in my dreams. I’ve seen the scarecrows. And Mary isn’t one of them,” she said very softly.

  She turned away from Brad, lowering her head, but Jeremy saw the movement of her lips.

  And he imagined that he heard her one whispered word escape them.

  “Yet.”

  8

  It bothered Rowenna more than she wanted to admit that Brad Johnstone had seen the cornfields in the crystal ball, the crystal ball owned by the man no one knew and no one could find.

  “Does that sound good to you?” Jeremy asked.

  “Sorry, what?” Rowenna asked, brought back to the present by the sound of his voice.

  Brad had just gone in, and he had sworn that he would lock up and stay inside until the morning came. Now she and Jeremy were alone on the sidewalk, surrounded by the quiet darkness.

  “I said we can just stay at my place here in town.”

  “Oh. I…I can’t. I need to go home.”

  “Why?” Jeremy asked, almost combatively.

  She stared at him, her brows arching slightly. He was in a hardheaded mood, that was for sure. He seemed ridiculously tall, all of a sudden, even fierce, and she wasn’t sure why. Nothing about him had changed. He was just looking at her, dressed in the same jacket and jeans he’d been wearing all day. But his tone was hard, and she suddenly found herself remembering that he’d been a cop, so arguing with him wasn’t going to be easy.

  She could just tell him to go to hell.

  Sure she could—if she were eager to end a relationship she’d been aching to have….

  “Jeremy, I don’t even have a toothbrush or anything.”

  “We can find a convenience store, or an all-night pharmacy, if that’s your big objection.”

  “I just got home,” she told him.

  “And your home is way out in the country, and it’s late. And more important, I think we’ve both had enough of cornfields for the day.”