shrugged and grasped her elbow, helping her down the stairs to the sand. Shrill pain licked into her calf with every step, but she held her face stiff against the urge to wince and tried not to limp—the latter less successfully.
His frown deepened. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
She nodded. “Of course.”
And if I’m not, it’s your bloody fault. She bit back on the words, fighting to play nice. She needed his permission to access his property, after all.
Though, maybe she should use this little mishap to her advantage and guilt him into giving her what she wanted. If he hadn’t dragged her out here in the first place, she wouldn’t be hobbling across the beach now.
Once on the boardwalk, they followed a short alley to Cragera Bay’s main street. Most of the shops and restaurants that had lined the narrow cobblestone road were closed and boarded up. The village felt empty, abandoned. With hers and Meyers’s footfalls the only sound besides the wind and distant rush of the surf, she could almost imagine they were the last two people on Earth.
He pulled open the door to the café, letting her enter first. An older woman behind the counter set down her paperback novel and pushed her pink-framed reading glasses atop her head so the lenses sank into short, silver curls. Big eyes barely glanced at Carly before they fell on Meyers and widened.
Carly could guess what was going through the older woman’s mind. She’d no doubt recognized him, heir to Stonecliff. Arthur James’s long lost son.
“What can I get you both?” the woman asked.
Meyers ordered a coffee and Carly a cup of tea. They took their drinks to the table near the window overlooking the street and farthest from the counter. For all the good it did, the woman sat back on her stool and picked up her novel, but continued to watch them over the top of the pages, forgetting her glasses still atop her head altogether.
To be fair, she and Meyers were the woman’s only customers. There wasn’t much else for her to focus on.
How long until this café went the way of so many of the other businesses in the village? Months? Weeks? Days? Cragera Bay was diminishing as if it were slowly folding into itself until it disappeared completely. The discovery of a trio of murderers hunting in the area for more than two decades, killing countless men and women, seemed to have chased away tourists and locals alike.
“I appreciate you agreeing to meet me, Mr. Meyers,” Carly said, shifting in her seat to keep from putting any weight on her bad ankle. You jerk!
He flashed an insincere smile. “It’s my pleasure.”
“Why don’t I begin by telling you a little about my research and how The Devil’s Eye factors in?”
Meyers held up his hand, silencing her. “I’m not interested. I didn’t agree to meet you to hear about your research, and you’re not getting anywhere near my property.”
She stiffened. “Why did you invite me here?”
“Because I want you to stop.”
He’d dragged her out here and nearly broken her ankle for this? “I beg your pardon.”
“Stop asking people about Stonecliff and ghosts and murders and evil entities and God knows what else.”
“You know about the murders?” she asked.
“Of course, I do,” he said, as if she’d asked the stupidest question he’d ever heard.
“Just about the men found in The Devil’s Eye, or the other murders, too?”
He frowned, his expression turning shuttered. He didn’t know what she was talking about. “Ruth Bigsby, your father’s nurse, murdered two people, tried to kill one of your sisters and frame the other.” He opened his mouth to respond, but she pushed on before he could. “That means Stonecliff had four people killing on the property, one acting completely independent of the others. Don’t you find that odd?”
“Of course, but I doubt very much it’s the result of ghosts.”
The cynical derision in his tone fed her gathering temper. She clenched her jaw and mentally counted to one thousand. “I don’t think ghosts did it, either. I do believe there is a possibility that a high level geomagnetic energy may be a large factor in the phenomena reported on your property.”
Meyers rolled his eyes and took a swig from his coffee. “See that right there, that’s what you need to stop.”
“Mr. Meyers, if you would just let me bring in a team to investigate—”
He snorted. “That’s never going to happen. Not alone. Not with a team. Not in a box. Not with a fox.”
“I see you’re a fan of the classics.”
“I need to sell that house. What I don’t need is some new-age flake asking questions about ghosts and murder cults and magic energy.”
She wrapped her hands tightly around her teacup, half-surprised the thin china didn’t shatter in her grip. Narrow-minded ignoramuses really shouldn’t be able to get under her skin after so many years working in a field few people took seriously, but they did. He did.
“Mr. Meyers, several reliable witnesses experienced phenomena inside your home, at the bog, your own sisters among them.”
He drew in a deep breath and released it slowly as if struggling with his own battle for control. “These women, my sisters, are strangers. I don’t care what they experienced, and if they think sending you to slow down my chances of unloading the estate will get them anything—”
Laughter bubbled up her throat before she could stop it. “Believe me, your sisters want no part of Stonecliff.”
“Lucky for them, no part is what they got.”
She blinked at his animosity. He hadn’t even met these women.
“It’s not my intention to hinder the sale of Stonecliff,” she told him.
“Maybe not, but that’s the result.”
“You don’t think the dead men they hauled out of the bog might be the reason that you’re not having to beat off a long line of potential buyers? How many bodies have they found now? At least twelve, but I thought there’d been three more since the arrests.” She squinted as if struggling to remember.
“Pieces of three,” he admitted, grudgingly. “Look, the murders are hard enough to get past, but you running around claiming the place is haunted makes everything harder.”
“I’m not claiming anything. Are you telling me you haven’t experienced anything unusual at Stonecliff? No voices? No strange smells? No shadows with red eyes?”
“No such thing.” His gaze held hers. His expression remained inscrutable, but the muscle at his jaw flicked.
He’d seen something at Stonecliff, even if he didn’t want to believe it himself.
“You can’t stop me from asking questions.”
“No, I can’t, but I’m asking you to. Think about it this way—the sooner I sell the place, the sooner you can hassle some other poor sucker into letting you onto the property to hunt for ghosts.”
She really was beginning to dislike the man. The throb in her ankle flared as if to drive home that point. “That’s not what I’m doing. I can help you.”
“I doubt it,” he said, shaking his head. He pushed back his chair, legs scraping the tile floor and stood.
“Wait,” she called when he started to turn away. He faced her, his expression impatient. “Your sister, Eleri, asked me to tell you to be careful of Hugh Warlow and not to trust him.”
Meyers chuckled humorlessly. “He said the same thing about her.”
*