Page 29 of Ghost Walk
“Alright, alright.” He obediently left her alone, watching her work. “What in Christ’s name are you doing?” He asked after about thirty seconds. That was the longest he’d stayed silent since they’d met, so it must have taken some real effort for him.
“This is the same floor Lucinda died on. The surface has been cleaned a thousand times since then, but not the sides. Wood is porous.” She finally wrenched a board looseand set it sideways, so she could look at the unfinished edge. “You see?” She pointed at the telltale black stains. “Blood seeps through the cracks and gets absorbed. Two hundred years and it’s there.” She began yanking up more boards, trying to see how big the pool had been.
Jamie’s teasing smile faded. He stared at the growing size of the hole, looking grim. “It might not be blood.” He decided a little desperately. “It might be old varnish. Aye, it looks like varnish. There’s too much for it to be blood.”
Grace didn’t take offence. Victim’s families and friends often went into denial, at first. Somehow it was easier for Jamie to imagine that Lucinda was alive when she left the bedroom. Maybe because of their time together. His mind kept trying to find a way to escape the truth.
She knew the feeling.
“The human body has more blood in it than you think.” Grace kept her voice calm. “Trust me. She bled to death right here.”
Jamie squeezed his eyes shut. “Fucking hell.”
“I’m sorry.” And she was. Lucinda might have been a mean girl, but Jamie had cared for her and she died far too young.
Grace reached over to touch his hand in comfort. Her palm passed through his and she left it there, linking them as best she could. The sizzle of energy sparked, again. She couldn’t feel his skin, but she could feelJamie. The little jolts of power ran up and down her arm, growing stronger the longer they stayed linked.
His gaze slashed up to hers. “How do you do that?” He whispered in awe.
“Don’t ask me. You’re the ghost here.”
Jamie shook his head. “I’ve tried to touch more people than you can imagine over the years and you’re the only one I’ve ever been able to feel. It’syou, Grace.” He curved his long, elegant fingers around hers, like he wanted to hold on. “I was meant to findyou.”
She stared back at him, dazed and a little scared. Holycowbut the man was trouble. He could make her forget that he was actually dead. Forget that they were at a crime scene. Forget that she wasnormal. Forget everything except the blue of his eyes and the musical sound of his voice.
She swallowed hard. “Do you want me to be sure about the blood?” She blurted out, desperate to get them back on track.
“I do, but…”
“Good.” She pulled her hand back from him, refusing to notice the way his fingers made an instinctive move to cling to hers. “I might be able to tell for sure if it’s blood or varnish. I don’t think it’s ever been tested on anythingthisold, but theoretically it should work.”
He sighed and gave a jerky nod. “Do whatever you can.”
“Alright.” Grace got to her feet and pulled down the window shade, so the room got darker. She grabbed her squirt bottle full of luminal and sprayed an even coat across the wood. The chemical reacted with biological materials, making them glow. If someone had bled onto this floor, they were going to be able to tell pretty quickly.
Grace clicked on her UV flashlight and wasn’t surprised at all when the wood lit up like Harrisonburg’s annual fireworks display. “Blood.” She said simply.
Jamie cursed in Gaelic.
The evidence was unmistakable to anyone who’d ever watchedDateline. Lucinda had died right there, bleeding onto the floor. The pool of blood had been several feet across, running under the bed and straight back to the wall. The wound that killed her must have been deep and massive. Either that or she’d suffered dozens of smaller wounds, before she’d finally succumbed. Someone had then used the bedclothes to clean up the mess and dumped her body out the window. It was all tragically, terribly, irrefutably clear even to an ex-forensic investigator.
Apparently, Grace been wrong earlier. Even two hundred years later, therewasstill evidence of murder left in this house. She snapped some pictures of the scene, falling intothe familiar rhythm of the job.
“It’s like magic.” Jamie glanced at her. “You can do something likethisand you choose to give dull tours of this dull town? Why?”
Grace focused on the camera controls. “I told you, I burned out.”
That answer didn’t satisfy him. Huge surprise. “And I toldyou, I have no idea what that means. Were you injured?”
“No.”She hesitated.“Not physically.”
Jamie’s head tilted, seeing far too much. “So much brutality must have been hard to witness.” He finally said. “Hard to forget.”
Her lips compressed, refusing to be lulled in by his gentle tone. “The job was important and I was good at it. The stress just got to be too much for me. I started… seeing things.”
“Seeing things?” He tried an encouraging smile. “Like ghosts?”
“Kind of.” For no reason except she had a hard time guarding what she said around this man, Grace found herself telling him the truth. “I saw a victim before she died. I relived the whole crime scene, just as it was the night of the murder.” Her eyes flicked up to his. “I wasthere, Jamie.”
