Forbidden Ground (Cold Creek #2)(64)

Something scraped or scratched against her bedroom window. A branch? It was almost like fingernails on a blackboard. Chills shot through her. Had the wind picked up? Squirrels sometimes got on the roof. That could be what she’d heard, but they usually stayed away after dark. The bushes outside were cut low, which pleased her, since it made it easier to see the mound.

The sound came again, more like a growl or snort this time—just like before in Tess’s garage. Her heart pounding, she got up, went to the window, parted the drapes a few inches and peered out.

Nothing. Nothing but the night, the lawn, the woodlot beyond and the mound, which always beckoned to her. Again she recalled the stag outside the garage window, the sounds it had made, but maybe she’d been half-asleep and had hallucinated this. There was absolutely nothing out there to make sounds on the window, no animal in the yard.

Yet the face of the Beastmaster mask under the bed flashed through her mind. Suddenly, she didn’t want it under her bed. Grant didn’t want it in the house, as if it were evil. She had to get it out of this room or she’d never sleep tonight.

She dragged the box out again, took it down the hall, into the kitchen and clicked on the basement light so she could take it downstairs. Hurrying now, feeling cold to the core, she put it on the Ping-Pong table and scurried back upstairs. In the morning she’d suggest to Grant that he get safety lights that clicked on where there was movement outside, like Mom had put in years ago at their old house after Tess had been taken.

Trembling, Kate got back into bed and pulled the covers up as if she were a kid afraid of the dark. She left her bedside light on, turned her back to the window and curled up in a fetal position. Yet, despite the fact the curtains were closed, she felt exposed as if the eyeless mask was outside, staring in at her, able to see right through walls, right through the centuries.

She got up, dragged her bedding to the floor and, with the bed as a buffer between her and the window, made a messy little nest on the carpet to comfort herself. As she lay down again, she pictured the darkness outside.

As she tried to doze, her thoughts flitted past like bats in the night, sharp ideas like deer antlers, faces wearing masks—Brad and Lacey, Kaitlyn, Carson. Could she really trust anyone?

Then a vision that shot her straight up, wide awake, in her ravaged covers. Could she trust Grant, smiling and seductive, staring at her from behind his mask?





20

As soon as daylight seeped into her room, Kate got off the floor, stretched her sore back and whipped open her curtains. The forest and mound were still in shadow, but looked so normal. Just another June day—Monday. Gabe and Tess would be home in five days. She pictured them sipping wine, sitting on the deck of the riverboat, gazing out at old chateaus and castles along the Loire...man and wife.

She yanked the curtains closed and hurried to take a shower and get dressed. The house was quiet, so she’d fix breakfast for Grant. And Brad, if he’d come in last night. Today she and Grant were going to Keith Simons’s house for lunch so she could talk to Lee. But before any of that, she was going outside.

She went out the kitchen door and checked outside her bedroom window where she thought—no, she was sure—she’d heard sounds, scratches, even snorts or grunts last night. Could Brad have come home drunk with Lacey and they were goofing around in the backyard? She doubted it, but that thought made more sense than what was really tormenting her, that the stag she’d seen outside Tess’s garage window had been here, too. Just a deer, she told herself, not someone in a Beastmaster mask—or worse. No, the only ghosts she believed in were ones from a person’s past, like her dad, not the dead-come-to-haunt-you kind.

Under her bedroom window, she was certain the hosta plants had been trampled like someone had stood close to the house and her window. There was definitely disturbed foliage, and, since it had rained yesterday, she wondered if she’d find footprints in the soil under the bent leaves.

She pushed the green-and-white-striped leaves of the plants to the side so she could see the ground. Damp soil, vague shapes, but nothing distinct, as if a person’s standing on the large leaves had blurred any prints. But something on the ground glittered. She saw small flakes that looked like pieces of the broken record her mother had kept because it was from Dad’s old Johnny Cash collection, and she was sorry she’d smashed it against the wall when he’d walked out.

Kate reached down for a handful of soil and looked closer. Mica chips! Thin mica chips just like the ones from the Beastmaster masks! She’d go around to her rental car and get some of her smallest handpick tools and a sieve.

“Kate!”

She gasped and jumped to her feet. “Oh, Grant. I just... I heard noises out here last night and wanted to look for prints. But look, look!” she cried as she showed him three small chips of the black mica on her dirty palm. “Proof someone was out here with a Beastmaster mask, since it has a mica covering! I heard scratching and snorting and—”

He held up his hands as if trying to stop traffic. “Kate, sweetheart, this whole area has mica chips in the soil, and there’s a vein of it a little ways back in the woods. Besides, they put mica in potting soil and a bunch of other things. A garden store from Chillicothe once asked if they could dig out the mica back there, and I said no.”

“Of course you said no digging,” she retorted, instantly angry with him again—and at herself for being so foolish.