The Haunting of Rachel Harroway- Book 2 Read online

  THE HAUNTING OF RACHEL HARROWAY BOOK 2

  J.S DONOVAN

  Copyright 2017 All rights reserved worldwide. No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means without prior written permission, except for brief excerpts in reviews or analysis.

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  CONTENTS

  The Haunting Of Rachel Harroway- Book 2

  Prequel- The Haunting of Rachel Harroway - The Beginning

  1. Collapse

  2. Breaking Point

  3. Dreamcatcher

  4. The Yellow Moon Motel

  5. Tasting Death

  6. The Chosen One

  7. Proof

  8. The Girl

  9. Trouble

  10. Faded Photographs

  11. Mercy

  About the Author

  THE HAUNTING OF RACHEL HARROWAY- BOOK 2

  PREQUEL- THE HAUNTING OF RACHEL HARROWAY - THE BEGINNING

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  In 1983, a family of four was murdered in their nineteenth century Queen Anne manse. There were no witnesses, no real investigation, and no survivors.

  Over thirty years later, the house is suddenly back on the market. Ready to settle down, a young married couple moves from New York City to their dream home in the quiet town of Highlands, North Carolina. However, as past secrets come to light and unpredictable strangers violate their privacy, the couple’s hope for a fresh start twists into the fuel for their darkest nightmares.

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  1

  COLLAPSE

  Collapse

  Something was burning, and Albert felt busted. The fall ruined his arms, legs, and body. He forced his one good eye open. Spires of fire reached for the moon. He didn’t believe in hell, but the evidence overwhelmed him. Refrigerators, cabinets, and appliances littered the earth around him. The items were familiar. They were from inside his home. Why were they here?

  Wood snapped, and a burning tree fell away. It opened a gap between the other trees that were decorated with a blender, clothing, and more of his items. Beyond stood the empty cliff where Albert’s beautiful estate once stood. Now the broken building was a burning heap of rubble before him

  Albert knew he wasn’t in hell. He was very much alive, and Detective Rachel Harroway had destroyed him.

  Albert rolled to his belly. A moan of pain escaped his lips. Grabbing fistfuls of felled leaves and dirt, he dragged himself away from the house. Every inch across the earth was torture, but Albert endured. He survived the fall. He would survive this.

  Pushing his palms against the earth, Albert lifted himself high enough to grasp a low-hanging branch. In a feat of strength, he pulled himself off the ground and allowed his body to slump against the bark. Painful jets of wind pelted his bloodied face and charred head. Detective Rachel Harroway had burned away what little hair he had when she set his mask on fire. She had plunged a knife in his calf, and pushed him off the balcony as well. Albert would never forget that.

  He shoved his hand into his pocket and pulled out a small toothpaste-like tube with a metal needle on its nozzle. Ordered special from his favorite veterinarian, the tranquilizer incapacitated his victims within seconds. Albert rolled up his sleeve and stuck it into his arm. He squeezed in just enough for the pain to stop and stowed it away for later use.

  Albert sighed. The flaming world shifted and spun around him as the drug took effect. He pressed on, staggering through the woods. Reality faded in and out. He lost minutes at a time. The fire was behind him now. Helicopters carrying massive orange water containers zipped overhead. As treasurer, Albert knew the town had just lost a fortune in damages. Not many people lived out here, so the only home he expected to be destroyed was his own, but the wildlife preserve wouldn’t be happy. Albert had to remind himself that the issues no longer mattered to him. Even if the detectives died in the fire, the police would recover their bodies and start asking how two detectives ended up dead inside one of the suspects’ home.

  Things did not go as planned obviously. Albert meant to kill the detectives after one last hunt and dump their bodies miles outside of town. He was going to pay his escort Lexi Heavens to be his alibi for the night and make sure that his lawyer Lennard Splints was rewarded for his services. After a few months, he’d find another victim, and the hunt would continue.

  The Roper, as the media called Albert, never killed for fame. He killed for the rush. There was nothing like chasing a girl down and listening to her last breath. As he staggered through the woods now, he remembered each of the girls fondly. It was the ultimate form of dominance. The rope was just a personal touch, one he learned from his uncle when the old drunk beat Albert bloody, put a noose around his scrawny neck, and pulled as tight as he could. Albert remembered the struggle, the hopelessness, and the moment when he thought he would die. His uncle released Albert before that final breath and reminded him not to cry when butchering a steer. His innocence died that day in Texas, and the only consolation six-year-old Albert got from the horror was through the continuance of the cycle. He quenched the thirst after high school with countless self-help seminars. When Detective Harroway discovered his old burial ground, he felt his lust reignite.

  There was a cabin in the distance. A hunter’s private lodge. Albert reached out for the cabin door. His legs gave way, smashing him into the doorway. Pressed up against the door’s face, his body felt like a sack of meat and broken bones. The wooden knob jiggled in his hand but didn’t twist. He shambled to the window and peered into the darkness beyond. He punched the glass and heard a knuckle pop. Unblemished, the pane wobbled.

  Groaning, he forced himself down the stairs, found a fungi-covered log, and rammed it into the window. When the glass pane was sufficiently destroyed, he slugged through it. His rotund belly rolled over jagged shards, and he landed arm-first on the other side. Tears washed down his cheek. He felt the pain and hated it. Hated Rachel, but not as much as he hated his uncle and his affair with murderous addiction. He crawled across the floor, feeling like a worm.

  The world faded into darkness.

  Albert awoke with his burnt face stuck to the hardwood floor. The morning sun bled through the broken window. Birds chirped outside. Wind whistled. Albert’s body was tenderized like meat. He moaned in agony and forced his hand into his pocket. He pulled out the tranquilizer and jabbed it into the vein of his arm. Not too much, he reminded himself as he squeezed, and then let the needle fall out of his grasp. He rolled to his back, allowing the “medicine” to do its work. The cops would be looking for him, he knew. He needed to get out of Highlands. Get out of the state.

  He reached for his cellphone. It wasn’t in his pocket. Dread overtook him. He turned his head to the left. His cellphone lay beside him.

  Trembling, he picked it up. He studied the cracked screen, perplexed by the recent call he didn’t remember making.

  Someone walked by the window. Albert’s heart skipped a beat. Was he imagining things? The front doorknob jiggled. The scratching of a lock pick followed. Albert scooted back. He looked around the single room cabin. There was a bed, a small empty kitchen, and a table. Even if there was a weapon within reach, he had no way of defending himself. His upper back pressed against the bed’s metal frame. With anticipation, he watched the front door open, and he saw the biggest knife he’d ever seen.

  “It’s you,” Albert’s voice croaked.

  2

  BREAKING POINT

  One week later...

  Gasping and coughing, Rachel held her neck with her shaking hands. She could still feel scratchy hemp rope digging into the flesh of her throat
, tightening and stealing her breath. She lurched over, ready to vomit out her insides.

  It all happened in a blink. The Roper was in her home, strangling her with a noose and about to throw her over the loft’s railing when suddenly he vanished, and Rachel was alone in her big, hollow house. Confusion and terror flooded her. She had drunk her smoothie today, a concoction of deadly herbs and spices that numbed her Gift and shielded her from the Orphans. Yet, Albert Jacobson, or the ghostly version of himself, had attacked her.

  Rachel felt the hairs on her arms and neck stand up on end. She braced herself for another assault, but if it came, she knew she was defenseless.

  The living can’t hurt the dead, and what’s dead cannot be killed.

  “Rachel,” Albert’s voice teased.

  Rachel twisted around the dark second-story hall. The man’s voice had no origin. It was like he was part of her in a way that violated all her thoughts.

  “Get out of here!” she commanded.

  Al’s cocky chuckle echoed through the house before fading away.

  Rachel caught her breath. Her heartbeat only quickened.

  Her new phone jiggled in her bedroom. Rachel stared at the open door at the end of the hall. Slowly, she approached the noise, questioning if this was reality or another mind game. She stepped into the room, facing her disheveled bed and messy clothes on the floor. The digital clock on the nightstand displayed the number 3:12 a.m.

  Rachel answered the call.

  “This is Dispatch. We have a 10-37,” the operator said.

  Drenched with sweat and wearing her night clothes, the emptiness of her home pushed down on Rachel. “Tell me where.”

  Rachel quickly changed into a grey t-shirt and dark skinny jeans. She slung on her saddle-colored leather jacket and put her black hair into a ponytail before jogging down the stairs. In the living room, she put on her hiking boots and tied them tightly, periodically glancing over her shoulder.

  It was a cold spring night in the Appalachian Mountains. Rachel’s home, a 1892 Queen Anne manse, stood sentry in the woods. An old coat of green paint peeled off its wooden walls. It was incomplete, damaged, and old. Nonetheless, it had weathered every storm.

  Rachel slammed on the gas pedal and skidded out of her driveway. Her vision tunneled and blurred with lack of sleep as she raced through winding roads flanked by dense bushes and untrimmed trees. The headlights of her police-issued 2005 Impala sliced through the blackness and took her to the rendezvous point.

  Other squad cars marked her destination. She rolled to a stop on the gravel patch off the beaten path and glanced at her red-rimmed eyes in the rearview mirror. Taking a breath to compose herself, she stepped out of her car. Though her leather jacket warmed her, Rachel’s teeth still chattered. She crossed her arms over her chest.

  In the far distance, she could barely make out the cliff where Albert’s house had stood.

  “It’s always cold on nights like these,” Detective Jenson Peak said. His navy-blue windbreaker and copper hair rippled in the breeze.

  Rachel didn’t see him approach. With his coal-black eyes and silent steps, Peak always had a ghostly quality about him, but he was Rachel’s friend, one of the only people that knew about her Gift.

  “Who reports a body in the middle of the boonies at three in the morning?” Rachel asked.

  “An anonymous tipper,” Peak replied. “Officer Jones said he was very curt. We suspect a looter.”

  Rachel nodded. The assumption made sense. With Albert’s estate being so deep into the woods, it had taken days to clear up the debris from his collapsed house, and the job was still only partly finished. The charred trees below the cliff had a treasure trove of serial killer memorabilia just asking to be sold on the Internet.

  ATV four-wheelers with police decals rolled off a metal trailer and onto the gravel with a satisfying crunch. Rachel nibbled on her thumbnail. Images of running through the woods with the Roper hot on her heels plagued her, and then the attack tonight… Rachel felt Peak’s eyes on her.

  “I’m fine,” she answered his unspoken question with a lie. “I don’t imagine we’ll get any sleep tonight, but I’d rather spend it inside the precinct than in these mosquito-infested woods.”

  “We can agree on that,” Peak replied. “Still, there is something gratifying about seeing a killer’s cadaver.”

  “Yeah, but there’s nothing satisfying about smelling it.”

  An officer offered them ATVs. They each mounted their own and pulled back the throttle. Another officer led the caravan as they zipped through the woods. At their speed, the dark world mudded into a gray smear, and the sounds of the woods were muted by the engine’s roar. The trail took them through the scorched lands spreading nearly a mile from Albert’s cliff. Like a flag, one of Albert’s buttoned shirts clung to a crisped tree. More items were scattered on the ground, still waiting to be disposed of by volunteers.

  They ended their journey at a cabin.

  Electric lanterns spotted the front porch railing. More beams of artificial light shined through the broken front window. A forensic photographer snapped a picture of it and the fat log nearby.

  Rachel and Peak shut down their rumbling transports and dismounted by the front porch. The officer that led the way drifted on the dirt and slingshot back the way he came.

  “The cabin is what? A mile from the cliffside? And somehow no one found the body until now,” Rachel asked no one in particular.

  Peak shrugged. “Blame it on the incompetence of man or the big woods. Either way, the search chopper can’t see through canopies this thick.”

  It was as good of an explanation as any. Rachel had to remind herself that the Highlands Police Department wasn’t equipped for massive forest fires, serial killers, and whatever other horrid things that seem to be attracted to the serene paradise of a town. There was no doubt that her fellow officers worked hard, but there was only so much one can do with limited resources.

  Rachel and Peak hiked up the two steps onto the porch. The forensic photographer, Palmer, lowered his camera and smiled at them. “Brace yourself in there. It’s a messy bessy.”

  They stopped at the door’s threshold, their boots landing on a trail of dried blood snaking up the planked floor and ending at the dark red bloom beneath the Roper’s corpse. His body was slouched against the metal bedframe. Flies crawled across Albert’s green flesh and double chin. One of his eyes was shut and swollen. The other bulged in its socket. Burnt smears replaced the thin crown of grey hair on his bald head. His slack jaw, swollen tongue, and the horrid stench made Rachel almost believe that dead meant dead.

  Woodrow Gates, the sixty-one year-old grey-eyed, grey-haired coroner, who still did Pilates, knelt down before the rank cadaver and brushed aside the tatters on Albert’s plaid shirt with his gloved hands. Deep lacerations painted dead Albert’s rotund but surprising muscular torso.

  “I count four stab wounds, six or seven days old.” Gates said, pointing out the gashes. He turned back to the detectives, almost shocked to see Rachel. “Feeling better?”

  “Much,” Rachel replied, feeling the awkwardness of her last encounter in the medical examiner’s office. Rachel was drunk than, thrashing on the floor and grasping at her throat. Using the Gift to experience Maxine Gunther’s murder through the victim’s eyes was far more violent and dangerous than Rachel had anticipated. Maybe it was her good looks or reputation as a great detective that convinced the coroner to keep the encounter a secret. Either way, Rachel focused on the conundrum pressing at the front of her mind.

  “The fall didn’t kill Albert.” So I didn’t kill Albert. “Who did?” Rachel thought aloud.

  “Someone with a big knife,” Peak answered.

  Rachel stared at the body. How can he haunt me if I’m not responsible? She felt a strong tugging at the bottom corner of her shirt.

  “Ugly cuss.”

  The voice startled Rachel. She turned to see Albert standing between herself and Peak. He observed the b
ody through the crude eye holes cut out of the burlap sack that covered his head. “Don’t hold it against me. I was dashing when I was alive. Not so much in the latter years, but women, especially the ones I paid, found me to be very appealing.”

  Rachel felt faint. She looked away from the Orphan and back to the crime scene, forcing herself to act normal but unable to control the perspiration dampening her body.

  “He appears to have been murdered not long after the house escape,” Rachel said.

  “Maybe someone he knew was with us that night,” Peak said. Neither one of them liked the idea of that.

  “Oooh,” Albert said with sarcastic excitement. “Perhaps it was a secret admirer or a vengeful family member of one of my victims? The possibilities are endless. You’ve got your work cut out for you, Detective.”

  Rachel gnashed her teeth. She felt her blood pressure rise.

  “Don’t get mad at me. I’m the victim here.” Albert smiled under his mask.

  “Maybe he was in contact with someone. Does he have a cellphone on him?” Rachel asked her living companions.

  The coroner shook his head. “None that we know of.”

  Peak strolled about the single-room cabin. “I’ll make a note to check the local cell tower records for that night. He could’ve called someone from my place.”

  Rachel slid on plastic gloves. The coroner stepped aside, allowing Rachel to fish around the cadaver's pockets. He had no ID or wallet on him, just pocket lint and a receipt from a local barbeque joint with a saucy fingerprint on its lower corner. Rachel bagged it. “We know who owns the cabin?”