Grave Matters: A Night Owls Novel

Grave Matters: A Night Owls Novel by Lauren M. Roy Page B

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or hand out flyers or something?”
    “Nope. We’re the weird people living in the creepy house on the hill. It just made the most sense. I mean, if you believe there’s a dead guy hanging out in your basement, you’ve already gotten past the hard part, logicwise.”
    “Fair enough.”
    “So she went, and took care of it, and brought me back what was left to examine.” He sucked in a breath, half expecting to taste that stale dirt again. “Someone raised it, Val. On purpose. And when I tried tracing the source, it . . . reacted. I don’t know if it was an attack, or if I tripped their defenses. Probably the latter.”
    “Bloody hell. Are you okay?”
    “Yeah. I’ve seen spookier. But like I said, weird night. Anyway. Want to fill me in on what the guys saw?”
    She’d given him the brief rundown on the phone. Now she went into a slightly longer version, adding in details as best she could from Justin and Chaz’ account. Partway through reading the titles off the crumpled list the thing had dropped, she paused. “Do you think they could be related? This and the ghost Elly dealt with?”
    It had been at the back of his mind since her initial phone call. He nodded. “If the exorcism had been routine, I’d say it was just a coincidence. But with what I felt earlier, and how Elly described it to me, I’d say it’s a safe bet.”
    The Clearwater house looked undisturbed as they pulled into the driveway. Like most of the other houses on the street, the windows were still dark. Only a few residents were up and about at this hour, probably people who worked in Providence or Boston, or teachers getting ready for a day of classes. In Crow’s Neck, plenty more lights would be on, cars already sliding out onto the early-morning streets, or more likely, people setting out on bikes or on foot to the bus station a mile away. They might as well have been different planets, let alone different neighborhoods.
    They got out of the car and took a quick trip around the outside, Val sniffing the air the whole time. No matter how many times Cavale’d come here in the last month, he couldn’t help but marvel at the size of the house. He’d been in a few that rivaled it over the last couple years—old rambling Colonials collected their fair share of ghosts, after all—but the idea of
living
in a place this grand was beyond him. He still sometimes felt overwhelmed by all the space in his house, and that place could fit inside the Clearwaters’ two or three times over.
    “Do you want to do a walk-through?” he asked, as they completed their circuit.
    “I don’t think we need to.” Val gestured down the street. “He went thataway. I don’t smell anything newer, so I don’t think it came back after Chaz and Justin left.”
    “Are we following it on foot, or driving?”
    She checked her watch—one of the few things that (if you were stretching for it) might give away her age. So many people relied entirely on their phones to tell the time these days; not a lot of them bothered with watches anymore. Val always had hers on. It was a practical measure as much as an indicator of her era, though—if your phone died and you weren’t sure how close it was to sunrise, you were pretty well fucked, she’d explained once. “We have another hour and a half until dawn. Let’s walk. I can’t imagine it stuck to the streets for long.”
    In fact, it hadn’t. Cavale followed Val through backyards and over fences, grateful that the cold weather had hardened the ground and meant they weren’t tramping through mud. Though that meant their prey hadn’t left much in the way of footprints, but Val said the scent was pretty strong. They trespassed over the greens at Edgewood’s golf course—were it summertime, there’d be die-hard players teeing off already, getting in a round as day broke. The golf course gave way to untended, overgrown fields, and Cavale had a vague sense of where they were. When they came upon the cast-iron

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