The Third Grave (Savannah #4) - Lisa Jackson Page 0,1

within the river’s banks. From the corner of his eye, he caught a flash. Movement. His heart nearly stopped. But it was just his stupid dog taking off through the tall grass, startling two ducks. Wings flapping noisily, quacking loudly, they took flight.

Shit!

His heart leapt to his throat, but he heard no footsteps, or shouts, or sirens, or baying of hounds.

Good. Just keep moving.

Get in.

Find what you’re looking for.

Get out.

No more than fifteen minutes.

Twenty, tops.

He saw the sagging fence with its rusted NO TRESPASSING sign dangling from the locked gate and vaulted over what was left of the mesh, then spied the house, built on a rise, surrounded by live oaks, the once-manicured lawn surrendering to brush. The whitewashed siding was now gray and dimpled, paint peeling, roof sagging and completely collapsed around one of four crumbling chimneys.

For half a beat, Bronco stared up at the house, its windows shuttered and boarded over, graffiti scrawled across the buckling sheets of plywood, the wide wraparound porch listing on rotted footings.

His grandfather’s voice whispered to him: Don’t do it, son. Don’t. This—what y’er contemplating—is a mistake, y’hear me? It’ll only bring you trouble, the kind of trouble no man wants. He set his jaw and ignored the warning. He’d waited long enough. Now, finally, the old man was dead. As if Wynn Cravens had heard his thoughts, his raspy voice came again: Boy, you listen to me, now.

Bronco didn’t.

Y’er gonna get caught, Wynn Cravens cautioned from beyond the grave. Sure as shootin’. And then what? Eh? Another five years in prison? Hell, maybe ten! Could be more. Don’t do it, son.

“Oh, shut up,” Bronco growled under his breath. Something he would have never said to his big, strapping grandfather if the man were still alive. Of course he wasn’t. Wynn Cravens had given up the ghost just two weeks earlier, his big heart stopping while the old guy was splitting wood.

With Wynn’s passing, Bronco’s fortune had changed.

This was his big chance, maybe his last chance, and Bronco was going to make the best of it. After all of the bad breaks in his life, finally something good was coming his way. He took the hurricane as an omen. A sign from God Himself.

Right now all of the cops and emergency workers were busy being heroes.

Which gave Bronco some time.

From the corner of his eye he caught a glimmer of movement, a blur through the trees. Not the dog this time. Fender was right on his heels.

He felt his skin crawl. There had always been rumors of ghosts haunting the grounds, lost souls who’d found no escape from the tarnished history of the Beaumont family. Bronco, though he hated admitting it, couldn’t help believing some of the old stories that had been whispered from one generation to the next. Even his grandfather, a brawny no-nonsense Welshman, had believed that tortured spirits moved through the stands of live oak and pine and had sworn on the family Bible that he’d seen the ghost of Nellie Beaumont, a seven-year-old girl who drowned in the river in the late 1990s. Bronco knew nothing more than that her death had devastated the family. Glimpses of the girl had always been reported the same: a waif in a dripping nightgown, dark ringlets surrounding a pale face, a doll clutched to her chest as she forever wandered along the edge of the water.

And the sightings hadn’t stopped with Gramps. Bronco’s father, too, a man of the cloth, had sworn he’d seen the ghost, though Bronco thought Jasper Cravens’s glimpse of the apparition had been the result of his affection for rye whiskey rather than an actual viewing of a bedraggled spirit. And hadn’t he once, while sneaking through these very woods, thought he’d caught sight of a pale, ghost-like figure darting through the underbrush?

He’d told himself the apparition had been a figment of his imagination, but now, the thought of any kind of wraith caused the hairs on the back of his arms to ripple to attention.

“A crock,” Bronco reminded himself just as he spied a deer, a damned white-tailed doe, bounding through a copse of spindly pine.

He made his way toward the back of the house, through weeds and tall grass to the listing veranda that stretched across the rear of the house and offered a view of the terraced lawn and bend in the river. Quickly across the rotting floorboards, he walked to the side door, the one his grandfather and the rest of the staff had