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The trip to Rincon took about thirty minutes. Cassie navigated them right up to a gated entrance made of more rust than metal. The orchard had sat for who knows how long as a useless piece of land. It would’ve cost more than the Partridges could afford to get it back in working condition. Robert Shapiro had had a plan, but all that went down the drain when his wife died.
“I guess this is the right place.” David leaned into the steering wheel to get a better look out the window. “Hard to tell out here what’s what. Don’t want to be walking on someone else’s land, making a fool of ourselves.”
“It’s the right place.” Cassie had hardly noticed the trees beyond the fence. She only had eyes for the figure in front of her. Her chest tight, she continued, “I see him.”
“Who?”
“The man from the other day. The one we thought might’ve been Robert Shapiro but turned out to be one of his victims.”
“Think that means his bones are here?”
Cassie shrugged. “There could be a million reasons he’s right here, right now. But yeah, I’d put money on this being his final resting place.”
“Shall we see if he leads us to the jackpot?”
Cassie shot David a look but followed him out of the car anyway. “Can we not call the pile of dead bodies we’re looking for the jackpot?”
“I suppose I shouldn’t say that in front of your friend.”
If the gate had been closed with a padlock at some point, it was long gone now. David pushed it open and waited until Cassie passed through before closing it behind them. There were a few paths forward, but they looked more like deer trails than anything else. A few beer cans and a pack of empty cigarettes told them local kids had also found the abandoned piece of land and used it as a party spot.
“Which way?” David held his hands out to either side.
Both paths looked identical to Cassie. Grass and weeds had long taken over. It was past the time for harvesting apples, but since there had been no one to pick them, they’d fallen to the ground and rotted. A sickening, sweet scent filled the air and threatened to upset Cassie’s still-queasy stomach.
But more than that, she felt the touch of that red-hot anger she’d been desperate to avoid.
“Shapiro’s spirit is here, too.” She swallowed the lump in her throat. “It’s faint. Distant. But he’s pissed.”
“Well, is he pissed to the left, or the right?”
Cassie closed her eyes. In the inky blackness behind her eyelids, she could see the faintest hint of scarlet. It was pulsing, but not in rhythm with her own heartbeat. No, it lived and breathed because of another. Shapiro was more than a ghost now. He was made of emotion. And that made him so much stronger.
Cassie squared up the blotch of red in her vision and then opened her eyes. “He’s pissed to the left, apparently.”
David gestured for Cassie to lead the way, and after a moment’s hesitation to consider what bugs they were about to collect on their person, she pushed aside the weeds and started walking.
“I’m not sure what we’re getting into.” Cassie threw a look over her shoulder. “This is something different.”
“I don’t like different.” David grunted as he pushed past a low-hanging tree branch. “What you’ve already got going on is different enough. We don’t need to add more different to it.”
“That was an appalling use of the English language.”
“But you still knew what I meant.”
“Barely,” Cassie said under her breath. “I know. And I’m worried about it. Shapiro is stronger than most ghosts I’ve encountered. He found a way inside me. He manipulated my feelings. Amplified them.”
“Why?”
Cassie shrugged. “To feed off them? Might give him power. When he was in my house, it was uncomfortable, but tolerable. When I was in his house—whole different story.”
“Yes, I remember the part where you passed out.”
“His house is one of his seats of power. He has more control over that domain than other places.”
“And what about this domain?” David asked. “Out here in the middle of God knows where.”
“He buried his victims here.” Cassie was just spit-balling. There were no hard and fast rules for these things, but she had built up an arsenal of likely truths over the years. “I’d say he’s got a reason to be attached to this place.”
