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CHAPTER 26
The sky was gray and ominous, promising rain.
Not a perfect day to go snooping at the old Beaumont house, but Nikki was running out of time. With one eye on the darkening sky, she drove past the main gates to the spot where she’d parked on the day the Duval girls’ bodies had been found. From her conversation with Tyson Beaumont the other day, she knew that security cameras and alarms would be placed around the old mansion and estate in the coming week, and she didn’t want anyone to see what she was doing. So, she figured, it was basically now or never.
A beat-up old pickup with a camper was already parked near the trailhead, no one around, and she
assumed the driver was a fisherman who’d made his way to the river. She pulled her Honda to a spot nearby, got out and hurried to the path leading through the woods.
The air was thick and muggy enough that she began to sweat as she jogged along the deer trail and through the thickets, the gloom of the day permeating the woods. This time she avoided the river and took a fork in the path that would lead directly to the clearing and the outbuildings near the old house.
Rain began to fall, droplets falling through the trees to the forest floor, the wind causing leaves to shiver. She threw up the hood of her light jacket and kept walking. The questions that had been swirling in her mind propelled her onward. Why were the Duval girls taken from the theater? To kill them? Why bury them here at the Beaumont estate? What’s the connection? Or was this place chosen randomly? Who would know about the secret hiding spot? Margaret Duval? Nurse to Beulah? Mother of the sisters who were killed? And why or how did Rose escape? Was that all part of the plan? Whose plan?
Who the hell had access to the house? The Beaumonts? Baxter or Connie-Sue, his wife, or his son, Tyson? Margaret Duval, who had once been the nurse here—mother of the victims? Or any of the Cravenses? Wynn or Jasper or Bronco? They had access and their cabin had once belonged to the Beaumonts.
Or someone connected to the Marianne Inn? That old lodge kept coming up, and the boat that she thought she’d seen beneath the drooping branches of the willow tree. Who was in that boat?
The rain kept falling ever faster, the path growing muddy, leaves dripping. Nikki felt that she was getting closer to finding out the truth but was missing something vital, the damned link that brought it all together.
She kept moving, pushing wet branches aside, her thoughts a jumble. As she reached the edge of the thicket, she stopped and surveyed the place. Even though Tyson had indicated there weren’t any cameras inside the fence line yet, she couldn’t be certain. The house stood as she remembered from her last visit, but instead of the beehive of activity of a newly discovered crime scene with police officers and EMTs on the scene, the area was empty, devoid of life. Not even a bird in the dismal sky. The huge house was dingy and sad, the roof collapsed in one section, bricks crumbling in the chimneys as it loomed on the hill. Traces of crime scene tape flapped in the wind, while draping Spanish moss danced eerily, turning and floating, like wispy ghosts. The sky was somber and dark, the grass tall and shimmering in the breeze. All of the outbuildings were dark and empty.
The whole area seeming abandoned and sinister.
She turned her attention to the river, past the spot where the pier had been to the willow tree with its drooping branches, leaves turning with the breeze, the end of the limbs floating on the dark ominous water.
Shake it off, Nikki told herself and squinted, searching for any shadow of a boat hidden within the willow’s shroud. Don’t freak yourself out. It’s just a gloomy, depressing day. Get a move on.
Cautiously she picked her way around the edges of the sheds and barn, then stayed near the surrounding trees, all the while snapping pictures. She eyed the contents of the machine shed, and pump house, barn and stable, all rotting, all empty aside from whatever equipment had been left to rust in the weather.
She passed by the old garden, now overgrown with tangled, out-of-control rose bushes and tall weeds, then walked beneath the drape of branches and leaves that turned in the wind. There was no boat tied to the gnarled trunk, but she saw a deep indent in the muddy bank where the prow of a boat could have rested if the craft had been tied to a thick branch or the trunk.
Who was here that day?
Someone who was curious?
Or someone nefarious?
Why hide in these protective limbs?
She thought about the accident that took Morrisette’s life, the other boat with the red and white prow that had scraped against Nikki but dealt Sylvie Morrisette a deathly blow.
Could someone have been steering the craft? It was so crazy that day, so confusing, but surely someone would have seen someone in the boat.
But as far as she knew, it had never been retrieved.
“Odd,” she said aloud, and peered from the shelter of the willow to the house, so dark and imposing. She took another couple of pictures with her iPhone, then stuffed it into the back of her jeans and walked through the rain to the back porch.
The rain had picked up.
A skitter of fear slid down her spine, but she ignored it and stopped long enough to take some pictures of the back of the estate, gloomy and dark and unkempt, the siding gray and rotting, the chimneys crumbling at complete odds with the way she remembered the house as a child. How grand it had been, how polished and proud with its gleaming windows reflecting the setting sun, the clapboard painted white, the tall shutters black and gleaming on that hillock with its groomed and terraced lawns.
No longer.
And never again, she thought, pocketing her phone.
She kept on, close to the woods, and once she was close to the house, crossed the knee-high grass, bent now with the wind and rain. She, too, was wet, her hair dripping, her shoulders damp. Quickly she hurried across the dirty floorboards of the porch. The doors to the back living area, French doors now boarded over, were locked and she wasn’t surprised. She suspected that Tyson had secured the building the day she’d seen him at the front gate, but she also figured that old locks and windows would probably give way with a little pressure.
Walking along the wide wraparound porch, she eyed every possible way in. She checked a second door, a side entrance that she knew from her own exploration of the house as a child had been the servants’ entrance and led to the basement. It, along with the front door with its arched transom, was locked tight.
