Deadly Night by Heather Graham Page A

then added, “If anyone else wants their tea leaves read today, you do it, okay?”
    Mason looked at her quizzically, then shrugged. “Sure. If that’s what you want.”
    “Thanks. It is.”
     
    When he arrived at the plantation, Aidan found that the structural engineer they’d booked had arrived early. Luckily Jeremy had been early, too. They were already walking through the house. Aidan met the man and shook hands with him, saw that Jeremy had the inspection under control and left them to their own devices.
    Aidan walked back out front and stared up at the house, though he didn’t know what he was looking for. Yesterday he had been certain he had seen a woman in white on the balcony. Had it been Kendall? It must have been. What other possibility could there be?
    But when he had met Kendall at the door, she hadn’t looked like the woman he’d seen. That woman had been paler, and dressed in white. The woman in white. Clearly he’d read too many old ghost stories in his day. There had been no woman in white. It had been a trick of the light, of the strange weather, with its wind and roiling dark clouds, followed by sun and clear skies.
    He closed one eye, staring at the house almost defiantly. What bothered him most, he knew, wasn’t the woman he’d seen, who really might have been a trick of the eye. What bothered him was his gut feeling about the house. There was something disturbing about the place, something dark and forbidding.
    He gave himself a mental shake. Houses didn’t have personalities. They were wood and brick and stone, nails and plaster.
    He walked back toward the house, but didn’t go inside. Instead, he found himself tracing his steps past the house and back to the last slave cabin, where he had found the soup cans and the bone. The place looked as if it had been invaded by moles, the police had dug so many holes, looking for other bones or anything else suspicious. He hunched down, looking at what the search had turned up. There had been other bones at the site: chicken bones. They went nicely with the discarded container from a fast-food restaurant.
    Nothing very intriguing in that. Some homeless person had been using the area as a base. With the number of people still displaced by the storm, that shouldn’t be surprising.
    It would be good to find out who, though.
    Lights. Amelia had seen lights. She’d been convinced her ancestors were haunting the house, that they were coming for her. Those lights could be explained now, as could the noises. Someone sneaking around back here would undoubtedly have made noise.
    But then there was the bone.
    This was actually pretty high ground—on the river, yes, but above sea level. How high had the water come? High enough to shift bones from old coffins?
    He rose and surveyed the domain that was now the Flynn brothers’ legacy. It was in sad shape, at least cosmetically, but comparatively speaking, it had survived the centuries well. The house and stables were intact; the slave quarters decaying and in need of repair, but they were still standing.
    Just as they had stood for nearly two hundred years.
    Maybe his brothers were right; maybe this place really was important and represented their chance to do something good, to make a difference.
    He looked across the overgrown lawn and untended brush to the family burial ground, its white mausoleums and stone monuments just visible through the trees. There was a line of bent and twisted old oaks, dripping with moss, that more or less defined the edge of the cemetery.
    He walked toward it.
    A low wall of stone, covered with lichen and crumbling with age, ran alongside the trees, a truer demarcation of where the cemetery began and ended.
    An angel sat atop a sarcophagus that stood at least five feet high. Only one name was listed on it: Fiona MacFarlane. Below her name, the etching grown faint with time: Beloved in this house.
    Nice sentiment. He wondered what her connection to the family had been. He really