Once Upon A Ghost: Murder By Design (Book 3) Read online

  Once Upon A Ghost

  Murder By Design (Book 3)

  Erin McCarthy

  Copyright © 2017 by Erin McCarthy

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  To my husband, John, for always supporting and encouraging me, and for reminding me that I'm still just a girl from the 216.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Also by Erin McCarthy

  Chapter One

  As I stepped into Cezar Wozniak’s lake house, I decided I had ninety-nine problems—but at least a ghost wasn’t one. I wasn’t sure if my brief tenure as a spiritual medium (against my will, I might add) was over, since I hadn’t seen a ghost in weeks, but I was hoping it was because real life was presenting some problems. Most notably, my latest client, the aforementioned Mr. Wozniak, who wanted his home staged by my booming business, Put It Where?

  Unfortunately Cezar clearly had a fondness for Vegas. And it had thrown up in his living room. As I wandered through the explosion of color and mirrors, it seemed more casino than lake house. There was no way the diamond-patterned red and black carpet needed to be anywhere but in a medieval-themed restaurant. I glanced over my shoulder, half expecting a jester to leap out and shake jingle bells on a stick at me.

  Buyers would want the views of the lake, but they were being obscured by fabric and gilded mirrors. Yet Mr. Wozniak had a ton of money, I was being paid very well to make this all go away, and I wasn’t going to walk away from the chance to pad my bank account while the getting was still good. It turned out that being kidnapped by a serial killer was good for business. After my name and face had been splashed all over the paper and online news sites as the woman rescued by the cops from the copycat Torso Murderer six weeks ago, everyone in Cleveland wanted me to stage their home. They also wanted to grill me about how it felt to be drugged and wake up in a boat slip chained to rattan furniture.

  I could tell you how it felt. Sucky. Not good. Freaky. There is nothing like visualizing yourself as a future headless corpse lying in a field sans cute clothing to make you panic.

  But Nick Pitrello was sitting in prison awaiting his trial, and I was attempting to go about my usual Bailey Burke business. Making homes prettier one less leg lamp and sports blanket at a time. I love our Cleveland teams as much as the next person, but I morally object to the presence of orange and brown in a dining room. As I measured and made notations on my iPad, I hummed to myself because it was so still and quiet. Almost an hour out of the city, the house was enormous, and perched far away from the neighbors. It was peaceful but a little creepy, actually. I’m used to my small Victorian in Ohio City.

  Plus I tended to look over my shoulder now that I had been roofied by a serial killer and had an insurance salesman threaten me with a gun.

  My friend Ryan, who had first appeared to me as a ghost two months ago, usually took opportunities like this to scare the crap out of me, but Ryan had been MIA for weeks. Ever since I had ruined my budding relationship with Detective Jake Marner by confessing to him I see dead people. It turns out some guys are turned off by the idea of dating a chick who has spirits crashing the party constantly. The irony being, of course, that no spirits were anywhere to be found currently. I couldn’t figure out why Ryan would just disappear, and my attempts to contact him had failed.

  When I made my way through the family room, I was drawn to the back sliders to check out the view. I decided to go out on the deck because we needed to make sure it was cleaned up, since the lake was such a selling point. Other than needing a fresh coat of stain, the deck was in decent shape and the crisp October breeze felt amazing after the stale air of the house. I was wearing designer pumps I had indulged in after business really took off, which wasn’t ideal for wandering down onto the grass. There were several Adirondack chairs facing the water and if I wasn’t mistaken, I saw a man sitting in one of them.

  If that was Cezar Wozniak, I needed to introduce myself. We had only spoken on the phone. “Mr. Wozniak? Hi, it’s Bailey Burke. I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you were home.” I picked my way carefully across the grass as I called out in a loud enough voice for him to hear me.

  There was no response. Starting to wonder if my eyes were betraying me and I was trying to talk to an inflatable water toy, I came around the side of the chair.

  And screamed.

  Holy Moses, that was no Shamu floatie. It was a dead man. Eyes wide open, looking waxy and stiff. He was shirtless, wearing colorful shoes, a beer on the armrest next to him with his hand wrapped around it, like he had been enjoying the recent spate of warm autumn weather. Until someone shot him.

  His entire chest was covered in dried blood. I’m not a fan of blood. I mean, probably most people aren’t, but it makes me feel lightheaded and hot. I stumbled backward, twisting my ankle when my heel sank into the grass. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” I chanted.

  Then, because I was raised Catholic and could virtually feel my Irish grandmother cracking me on the back of the head, I did the sign of the cross in front of Murder Man and hightailed it out of there. I tried to search for any natural reason for someone to have a hole in their chest that resembled fresh ground beef, but I couldn’t. I was pretty sure the likelihood of an alien creature bursting from his chest wasn’t as high as him having been pumped full of bullets.

  Fingers trembling, I dialed 9-1-1 and powerwalked my ass through that house and straight to my compact SUV. I was explaining what I had seen to the dispatcher as I climbed in and locked all the doors. The blood looked like it had been dry for at least a few hours, if not overnight, but I wasn’t taking any chances. I slumped down in my seat and murmured replies softly to the person on the phone.

  “Ma’am, I cannot hear you,” the man said. “I need you to speak louder and explain to me what happened.”

  “I found some guy dead in an Adirondack chair.” I wasn’t sure why the type of chair mattered, but I tend to speak in design terms even when it’s irrelevant, a habit my mother finds intensely irritating.

  “He’s dead? How do you know? You need to check to see if he’s breathing.”

  “He’s not breathing!” I whispered urgently. “He has a lot of blood on his chest and his eyes are open and he’s not moving.”

  “What is the address?”

  I fumbled to access my notes on my iPad, still hunched down. If death was coming at me, I didn’t want to see it. I read the dispatcher the house address off of my tablet.

  “Help will be there shortly, ma’am, but I need you to stay on the phone.”

  I kind of wanted to just throw my car in reverse and get the heck out of there, but I knew that the cops would not be cool with that behavior. It might actually make them suspicious of me, and while anyone who knew me would know how ludicrous the idea was that I would shoot someone, the cops in this country setting didn’t know squat about me, and wouldn’t care that I hated the sight of blood, and was slightly (okay, maybe more like above average) obsessed with cleanliness. “Okay.”

  “How do you know the victim? Do you know his name?”


  “I’m not sure. This house belongs to Cezar Wozniak and he hired me to stage it, but I’ve never met him.” I heard sirens in the distance and I breathed a sigh of relief. “The police sound like they’re on their way.”

  “That’s an ambulance, not the police.”

  Was he for real? “I told you the guy is dead! I need the cops here with a crime scene crew.” I’d had a brief stint as an evidence tech when I was younger and unwilling to admit that I was squeamish. My initial career choice had been inspired by both wanting to please my mother and Ryan Conroy, my cop friend I had been crushing on at the time. Now I’m smart enough to understand there is no shame in preferring quartz countertops to crime scenes.

  The dispatcher sounded put out with me. “Did you shoot this man?” he asked.

  Crap. Now he thought I was the crazy with a gun. “No, of course not!”

  I decided to just hang up on him, knowing that it would force him to dispatch police as well as the ambulance. In minutes the property was overrun by emergency responders, and I was describing what I had seen. I stood in the driveway hugging myself, expecting to see the yellow tape being unrolled any second. Instead a figure wearing sunglasses who had the walk of a man in charge came up to me and asked me to describe again what I had seen.

  I did. He rubbed his jaw. “Miss Burke, there is no dead body on that back deck.”

  Something about his tone confused me. “It’s not on the deck. It’s in the chair.” Like, it wasn’t hard to find. I didn’t need to draw him a map to the body. It was six feet off the deck.

  “There is no person, living or dead, in any chair back there.”

  That stunned me. I felt my jaw drop. “He was just there!” There was no way I had hallucinated a corpse. But then I had a sudden horrible thought. Maybe I hadn’t seen a dead body. Maybe I had seen a ghost. I started rushing forward, heels be damned. I needed to see with my own two eyes what was back there.

  “Ma’am!” He grabbed me by the arm and stepped in front of me. “You can’t go back there.”

  “If there’s no body, there is no reason I can’t,” I argued.

  He still held me back. “Miss Burke—"

  “Call me Bailey.” Miss Burke made me feel like I was a kindergarten teacher. “Who are you, by the way? You never bothered to introduce yourself.” I realized I sounded a lot like my mother when I said that, but hey, I was agitated.

  His eyebrows shot up. “I’m Sheriff Hill, but you can call me Lawson.”

  Lawson Hill was an unusual name. He sounded like a mapped location more than a person. “Great. Lawson, I am telling you I saw something.”

  “Something or a dead body? Those are two very different things.”

  Semantics. Whatever. I couldn’t tell him that there was a distinct possibility I had seen a ghost. “Can I just go look?”

  “I’ll take you around the side of the house, but we’re not getting close.”

  That had to mean he somewhat believed me. Or he was just thorough. “Thank you.”

  But when we were about fifteen feet from the chairs, I had a direct view and there was no one in either of them. Certainly not a dead man. There were two guys picking through the area, one squatting down and studying something in the brush. “Umm.” My cheeks burned. “Let me explain.”

  “Please do.”

  Since I didn’t think it was possible the killer had waited until I went back to my car and then whisked the corpse away without a vehicle anywhere in sight, I was forced to conclude that it was a spirit. Or maybe not an actual ghost but an imprint, the energy frozen in the place of a violent crime. I had read about it, but so far had never experienced it.

  “See, here’s the thing…” I turned and crossed my arms over my chest. I was wearing a really cute dress in plum. Contrary to popular opinion, redheads can wear purples and reds. Or at least this redhead was going to. Sheriff Hill was studying me.

  He was older than me by a decade or so, putting him closer to forty, but he had the muscle definition of a runner, visible beneath his nylon jacket. He wasn’t wearing a uniform of any kind, and that was reassuring for whatever reason.

  “I see ghosts. I’m a medium. So what I’m wondering is if I saw a ghost of a man who was murdered, not the actual body of that man.” It sounded insane. I knew that. But I had no other explanation.

  “A ghost?” he repeated slowly. “Like Casper?”

  “Who is Casper? Is that the name of the guy I saw?” I asked, confused. “I thought his name was Cezar.”

  “No, Casper the Friendly Ghost.” Then he shook his head. “Never mind. It’s not important. Have you tried to contact the homeowner?”

  That was it? He wasn’t going to grill me about being a nutbag who saw dead people? That was oddly reassuring. “No. Because I thought he was dead. Someone is dead,” I insisted. “I just don’t know who or how long ago they died.”

  Lawson Hill’s mouth curved up into a smile, which took me by surprise. “Well, that clears everything right up then.” But then he added, “You do understand it’s a crime to summon emergency services when there is no emergency, right?”

  That gave me pause. “I thought it was an emergency. I thought a man had been shot and I was in danger.”

  He seemed slightly stymied as to what to do with me. “Okay, here’s the thing. You are going to give me the homeowner’s name and I’m going to call him and verify one, he is alive. Two, you were actually hired by him to whatever it is you’re supposed to be doing. Watering his plants, or whatever.”

  Wow. Lawson Hill was a little patronizing. So maybe staging wasn’t brain surgery, but no need to put it down. My purse was in my car, but I was going to give him one of my business cards at the first opportunity and try not to cram it down his mansplaining throat. “I’m a home stager. Mr. Wozniak hired me to get his home ready to sell. I’m not a house sitter.”

  His eyebrows went up like he still didn’t see the difference. “Give me the number.”

  Since my phone was in my hand, I was able to read him off the client’s phone number. He called and left Cezar Wozniak a voicemail when he didn’t answer. “He didn’t pick up.”

  Thanks for cluing me in on that. I mentally eye-rolled. I respect law enforcement tremendously, but I also had been subjected to far too many Captain Obvious moments with them lately. This was what happened when you saw dead people. You were slammed with skepticism repeatedly. I understand their perspective, because I realized I sounded like a loon, but honestly, I didn’t ask for any of this. I was the world’s most reluctant medium.

  “I have email communications with him and a contract that he signed I can forward to you,” I said.

  “I will definitely need that.”

  Fortunately, I was able to wrap the whole thing up in just a few minutes using my phone, though I was standing there at a loss as to what to do. Finish my staging plan and assume the ghost was unrelated to my client?

  “You need to leave the property,” Lawson Hill told me when I asked him if there was an issue with me staying.

  Damn it. I should have just kept my mouth shut, gone for a coffee, then doubled-back. “I have the house security code to enter, and I was hired,” I insisted. “You saw all that.”

  To my astonishment, he completely caved. “Fine, you can stay.”

  I wasn’t sure if it was a trick or not, but I wasn’t going to argue. “Thanks.” I saw the other two men coming around from the back of the house, one carrying an evidence bag. “What did they find?” I asked, curious.

  He gave me a look that suggested I was stupid to think he was going to tell me. “We’ll call you if we have any further questions.”

  Or he could lose my number, which would be fine with me too.

  “Sure. Thanks for your help. Sorry to bother you.” I tried to play it casual, but I was stuck between a rock and a hard place here. If I had touched the body and it was a corpse, I would have compromised the crime scene and possibly implicated myself. If I didn’t touch the
corpse, how was I supposed to know it was a ghost? So far, any ghosts I had encountered had been walking and talking. This one hadn’t been moving, which probably made it just an imprint of the crime scene.

  It was creepy to be in the house, and I realized I was going to have to wing it. There was no time for measuring the rooms, because I couldn’t be in the still, silent space for another minute. It felt like the house was suspended in time and I was an intruder. I ran through the upstairs, then came back down, determined to get out of there and go home and have a calming glass of wine. But when I hit the landing at the bottom of the stairs, a man was standing there. He had salt and pepper hair, a round gut, and he was wearing nothing but a look of total annoyance and swim trunks. Just like the body on the deck. I gave a startled yelp and came to a dead stop on the bottom step.

  “Lady, you need to zip it,” he said. “And no calling the cops this time.”

  I took a deep breath and tried to calm my racing heart. “That was you outside?”

  “Well, it wasn’t Mickey Mouse, you know what I’m saying?” He made a face. “Yes, that was me. I may have miscalculated though, by not talking to you. But I just died, I don’t know how this gig works. I was testing you to see if you would see me or not. Plus it was kind of funny.”

  “Oh, I saw you.” I gestured to his chest and shuddered. “Who are you, by the way?” I was curious how long ago he had died, but I thought that might be a rude question.

  “Cezar Wozniak. Who the hell are you?”

  That explained why he hadn’t answered his phone. “I’m Bailey Burke, you hired me to stage your house before you put it up for sale?” I wasn’t sure why I posed it as a question. I just felt unsure of what the heck the protocol was for talking to a deceased client.