Haunt Me Still by Jennifer Lee Carrell Read Free Book Online Page B

me down on a spooked horse….” I waved wildly in the direction of the hilltop. “And now I can’t find the knife.” The last sentence was nearly a wail.
    Dropping to his hands and knees, Ben began combing the heather for it.
    “Did you hear me? She’s fifteen. She’s dead .”
    “I heard you.” Two minutes later he plucked the knife from a clump of heather. It gleamed darkly, a pattern of whorls in the steel catching the strange gray light, so that the blade seemed to ripple and undulate almost as if it were alive. “Jesus, Kate,” he said, staring down at it with a low whistle. “Where did you say you found the girl?”
    “On the hilltop.”
    He was suddenly terse. “Show me.”
    “We need to call the police.”
    He was gazing upward through the mist. Slowly, he shook his head. “Are you sure she’s dead?”
    “ I saw her. ”
    “Did you check her pulse?”
    “She’s dead.”
    “You said her throat was cut. But there’s no blood on this knife.”
    “So maybe the killer used another….” My voice trailed off. There hadn’t been enough blood around the body, either.
    I began running back up the hill. Ben followed.
    It didn’t take long to reach the summit. For a moment we crouched just below the rim, listening, but all we heard was wind in the grass. Silently, Ben eased out the sharp-edged black pistol I had never seen him without and cautiously peered up over the edge. After a moment, he jumped up and strode over. I followed.
    The cairn was there, and beside it the fire ring. But where the body had lain, nothing was visible but grass.
    Other than Ben and me, there was no one, living or dead, atop the hill.

5
    “ BUT SHE WAS HERE ,” I said. “I found her. Over there. By one of the pits. It was only a few minutes ago.” I pointed toward where I had seen her.
    His gun drawn and ready, we slowly circled the hill just below the rim, Ben bending to look at the grass as we went. When we’d come full circle, he peered over the edge once again. “Stay here.”
    Bent low to the ground, he slid silently across the grass, glancing into each of the pits in turn. At the last one, he straightened, motioning me over. They, too, were empty of everything but grass and wind.
    “ She was here, ” I insisted.
    Ben crouched down to the ground, scanning the grass with a tracker’s fine eye. “I see no sign of it,” he said after a while, sitting back on his heels. “A few footsteps—but nothing like the weight of a body.”
    “She was here,” I said again. “It was Lily. She was dead.” I glared at him for a moment in silence, and then, feeling the hot swell of tears, I turned on my heel, speeding back down the hill.
    “Where are you going?” he asked as he caught up with me. “Back to the house,” I said shortly. Lily would be there, or she would not. “And you?”
    “I was looking for you. Now that I’ve found you, I don’t exactly know.”
    I stopped. “You knew I was up here?”
    “Lady Nairn told me that she’d told you not to come up the hill. So it was the first place I looked.”
    “Not funny.”
    “But accurate.”
    Trained in some branch of the British special forces that he’d never identified to me in all our time together, he’d left it to found a high-tech security company. “As in guns,” he’d told me when we first met. “Not stocks and bonds.” That Lady Nairn would need someone like Ben made sense. The moment the merest hint of her show got out, she’d be hounded by paparazzi. No doubt she’d worried about Sir Angus’s collection as well, at least the part that she meant to move down to Hampton Court and back.
    But it was Lily who had needed protection, I thought. And had not had it. Ben hadn’t even known who she was.
    By the time we got down to the lay-by, dusk was quickly fading to dark. Ben drove me back to the house in silence.
     
    I leapt out of the car as soon as it came to a stop and raced inside, taking the stairs two at a time, up one flight and