From the Shadows (Buckhorn, Montana #2) - B.J. Daniels Page 0,82
saw her reaction and drew her to him. “I thought it’s what you wanted.”
“I thought it was, too. It still is. I’m just feeling... sentimental.”
Finn held her closer, kissing the top of her head. “If you want the hotel—”
“No.” She drew back and met his gaze. “I don’t. It’s time to move on. Even my grandmother understood that. She just hoped...” She didn’t have to finish.
He knew. “She hoped that Megan’s murder would be solved first. I still think it will happen. I plan to talk to the marshal with the new evidence I’ve collected. I’m hoping he will be able to track down Devlin and Claude to make sure they aren’t...in some kind of trouble.”
* * *
CASEY FROWNED AS she saw the concern in his expression.
“It’s just a feeling,” he said quickly. “I’m more worried about what will happen before this reunion is officially over.”
“More ghost tricks?” she joked and saw that his concern ran deeper and darker than that. She shivered. He rubbed his hands along her arms. “What aren’t you telling me? From the day I arrived here, I’ve had the feeling you really believe the Crenshaw is haunted.”
He sighed. “There’s something I need to show you.”
Once dressed, they went down to his room, closing the door firmly behind them. Casey had picked up on his tension. She stood in the middle of the room as Finn went to his duffel.
“I found this when I was searching the hotel for Megan’s diary.”
She couldn’t imagine what he’d found. But just the mention of the diary made her stomach roil. If he’d found something, why hadn’t he mentioned it before now?
He pulled out a small notebook in a plastic bag. He turned toward her, and she had a moment of panic. What if there had been two diaries? What if she’d taken the wrong diary? Megan and her head games. It would have been so like her to keep two.
He unzipped the bag and took out the notebook. “It’s pretty dusty. I have no idea how long it’s been hidden under the stairs.” He opened it, found the page he was looking for and handed it to her.
She stared down at what was written there, instantly relieved to see that the handwriting definitely wasn’t Megan’s. Megan had always been doodling on any and everything she could find when she was supposed to be working. Whoever had written this, it hadn’t been her.
With each word she read, her heart began to pound harder. The text sent chills through her. “Who wrote this?” He shook his head. “This can’t be real.” But she knew better. There was an authenticity to it. She could almost feel the writer’s pain as well as the darkness that surrounded the killer in him.
She quickly handed back the notebook, feeling as if just holding it connected her with the writer in some awful way.
“It just confirms what’s been bothering me since I began digging into the hotel’s history.” He put the book back into the plastic bag as if he thought it might be some sort of evidence. Then he returned it to the duffel bag and came back with a sheet of paper. He motioned for her to join him on the edge of the bed.
Sitting down beside him, she hugged herself against what else he’d discovered.
“I made a list of young women who went missing over the years after either working at the hotel or staying here,” he said.
Did she remember people going missing?
“Even before I found the notebook, I’d seen entries in your grandmother’s journal about female staff going missing. Often it would appear they had left, but they never returned home. The law assumed they had run away, I would imagine because the cases were never solved.”
Casey couldn’t believe this. “I never knew any of this.” She realized that she would have been back in California before it became evident that one of the female staff hadn’t returned home. Her grandmother had never mentioned any of this.
“I got to thinking,” Finn was saying, “Anna had a lot of return guests each summer. What if one of them was a serial killer?”
She shot to her feet. This wasn’t possible. She didn’t want to believe it, and she could see it was one reason he hadn’t mentioned it before now. “It sounds like you had too much time on your hands.”
“I tried to match up the years that young women went missing with return guests.”