Rocks & Gravel (Peri Jean Mace Ghost Thrillers Book 3) by Catie Rhodes Read Free Book Online

there’s no way I can convince you to contact the ghost? I’ll provide whatever you need.”
    I dropped my gaze. Embarrassing Hannah made me feel like a second-rate person. I knew from experience the receiving end of embarrassment hurt and demeaned like nothing else. I pressed my lips together, trying to reconcile myself to dropping the subject, offering an olive branch, when I felt her hand on my arm.
    “Forget what I said. I know this is hard for you, too, and I know my family’s behavior has made your life harder than it has to be. I can take one for the team.” She flashed me a weak smile, and I nodded in thanks.
    “You know I bought the Mace House from the bank, right?”
    “Yes. Still planning to turn it into a bed and breakfast and event venue?”
    She nodded. “And I plan to generate a little income giving tours of the place. But this is more about what you found in there the night you solved your cousin Rae’s murder. Remember?”
    “Those books. Luther Palmore’s books.” An icy shudder climbed up my spine as I remembered the night I found those books.
    “Gone.”
    “Maybe the bank auctioned them off to recoup some of their expenses.”
    “No. They sold the house and contents as a single package. I saw the box of books when I toured the house with the bank’s realtor. They were in there as late as three weeks before we closed. Someone came, literally like a thief in the night, and took them.” She pulled up her knees almost to her chest and draped her arms over them. “I was disappointed but accepted it, until I was at Uncle Joey’s house last Memorial Day.”
    The direction this was going sounded really, monumentally bad. My shoulders tensed in sympathy for Hannah.
    “You ever been in Uncle Joey and Aunt Carly’s house?”
    “You kidding? They’d probably have to burn the place to purify it after I left.” I nudged her with my elbow, and some of the tension broke. We shared a brittle laugh. “I do know they had a new house built on Piney Lake last year.”
    “The house has all these nooks and crannies and closets for storage. One of them is a little room off the laundry. One of Felicia’s kids helped me spill wine all over myself, and I went in there to look for some stain remover. I opened the door thinking it was the logical place for Aunt Carly to have laundry supplies, but what I found sure wasn’t stain remover.”
    My imagination supplied several different things she could have found in the room. Drugs. Sex toys. An electric chair wired for home use.
    “This closet was full of old stuff. Most of it didn’t mean anything to me, but Luther Palmore’s trunk of books was sitting right in the middle of it.”
    “What? Did you look through any of it? Was it all Mace Treasure stuff?” My pulse kickstarted and sped up. I never knew Joey Holze had an interest in the Mace Treasure.
    “Regretfully, no. Aunt Carly came up behind me and berated me for snooping in her home.”
    “What’d you say?”
    “I let my temper get the best of me. Told Aunt Carly I knew exactly what I’d seen in there and went outside, interrupted the barbecue, and accused Uncle Joey of stealing from a former crime scene.”
    I kept my mouth shut, already seeing the writing on the wall.
    “Uncle Joey went bananas. I mean, I really thought he was going to hit me, and Scott was right there behind him, waiting for his turn. In one instant, the whole family turned on me, calling me a traitor, telling me to get off their property.”
    “And you left.” Though I loathed Hannah’s family with the intensity of a flaming case of herpes, her falling out with them made me feel bad for her. Finding out people aren’t who they pretend to be is never fun. Especially when they’re loved ones.
    “Nothing else to do but leave. Thing is, I’m wondering now if the Bruce journals and Priscilla Herrera’s book of folk medicine are sitting in the storage closet at Uncle Joey’s and Aunt Carly’s.”
    “One way to find