He seems stunned by my retort, which is just what I want him to be. I want him to know that I won’t be a victim like Charlotte or Jessie or any other woman he’s threatened.

“I’ve already called the police, Ben. I told them you’ve been watching my house. I told them they should take a good look at you, because I’m not the first woman you’ve stalked.” Can he tell I’m bluffing? I don’t know. I only know that now is the time to leave, while he’s off-balance. I turn and head down the stairs, not at a rush, because I don’t want to act like prey. I descend with the calm and measured pace of a woman in charge. A woman who’s not afraid. I make it down to the second-floor hallway.

    Still safe. Still no pursuit.

My heart is thudding so hard it feels ready to punch its way out of my chest. I walk down the hall toward the next staircase. I just have to get down those steps, out the front door, and climb into my car. Forget Hannibal; he’ll have to fend for himself tonight. I’m getting the hell out of here and driving straight to the police.

Footsteps. Behind me.

I glance back and there he is. His face is twisted in rage. This is no longer the Ben I know; this is someone else, something else.

I bolt toward the last set of stairs. Just as I reach the top of the staircase he tackles me and the impact hurls me forward. I am falling, falling, a terrifying swan dive down the stairs that seems to happen in excruciatingly slow motion.

I don’t remember the landing.

Twenty-Nine

Heavy breathing. Warm air huffing on my hair. And pain, great pounding waves of it, crashing in my head. I am being dragged up the stairs, my feet thumping over each step as I’m pulled higher and higher. I can make out only shadows and the faint glint of a wall sconce. It’s the staircase to the turret. He is taking me to the turret.

He pulls me over the top step and drags me into the room. Leaves me sprawled on the floor as he pauses to catch his breath. Hauling a body up two flights of stairs is exhausting; why has he gone to the effort? Why bring me to this room?

Then I hear him open the door to the widow’s walk. I feel the rush of cool air and the scent of the sea sweeps in. I try to rise but pain, sharp as the slice of a knife, shoots from my neck and down my left arm. I can’t sit up. Just moving my arm is unbearable. Footsteps creak closer and he stares down at me.

“They’ll know it was you,” I tell him. “They’ll find out.”

    “They never found out before. And that was twenty-two years ago.”

Twenty-two years? He’s talking about Jessie. The girl who fell from the widow’s walk.

“She tried to leave me, too. Just like you are now.” He glances toward the widow’s walk, and I picture that cold and rainy Halloween night. A teenage boy and girl arguing while their friends are downstairs getting drunk and making out. He’s trapped her here, where she cannot escape. Where murder requires only a shove over the widow’s walk. Even twenty-two years later, the terror that girl felt still lingers in this room, powerful enough to be felt by those who are sensitive to echoes from the past.

It wasn’t Aurora Sherbrooke’s death that had shaken Kim so deeply on the day she visited this room with her ghost-hunting team. It was Jessie Inman’s.

“That’s life in a small town,” says Ben. “Once they decide you’re respectable, a pillar of the community, you can get away with everything. But you, Ava?” He shakes his head. “They’ll see all the empty booze bottles in your trash bin. They’ll hear about your hallucinations. Your so-called ghost. And worst of all, they know you’re not from here. You’re not one of us.”

Just like Charlotte, whose disappearance raised no questions. One day she was here, and the next she was gone, and no one cared enough to investigate because she was an outsider. Not one of them. Not like the well-respected Dr. Ben Gordon whose roots run generations-deep in Tucker Cove. Whose father, also a doctor, had the power to keep his son’s name out of the newspaper after the Halloween night tragedy. Jessie’s fate was forgotten, and soon, so would Charlotte’s.

Just as mine will be.

He bends down and grasps my ankles. Begins to drag me toward the open door.

I flail, try to break free, but the pain shooting down my arm is so agonizing that I’m reduced to kicking. Despite it he holds on, hauling me toward the widow’s walk. This is how Jessie died. Now I know the terror Jessie felt as she struggled against him. As he lifted her up and over the railing. Did she hang on for a moment, her legs dangling over the abyss? Did she plead for her life?

    I keep kicking, screaming.

He pulls my legs through the doorway and I reach out with my good arm to grab the doorframe. He yanks harder on my ankles but I hang on for dear life. I won’t surrender. I will fight him till the end.

In fury he drops my ankles and brutally stamps his heel on my wrist. I feel bones snap and I shriek. My broken hand is useless and I cannot hold on.

He drags me out onto the widow’s walk.

Night has fallen. All I see of Ben is his shadowy outline, wreathed in mist. Here is how it ends, tossed from the rooftop. A fatal plummet to the ground.

He grabs me under my arms and wrenches me toward the railing. The mist is as wet as tears on my face. I taste salt, inhale a final breath that smells like…

The sea.

Through the swirling fog, I see the figure looming in the darkness. Not mere mist but something real and solid, advancing toward us.

Ben sees it too and he freezes, staring. “What the fuck?”

Abruptly he releases me and I slam down onto the deck. A jolt of pain shoots from my neck, and it’s so excruciating that for an instant everything goes dark. I don’t see the blow, but I hear the fist thudding into flesh and Ben’s grunt of pain. Then I make out the two shadows grappling in the fog, twisting and turning in a macabre dance of death. Suddenly they both lurch sideways, and I hear the crack of splintering wood.

And a shriek. Ben’s shriek. For the rest of my life, that sound will echo through my nightmares.

    A figure looms over me, broad-shouldered and cloaked in mist. “Thank you,” I whisper.

Just before everything fades to black.

* * *

—

I cannot move my head. A cervical brace encases my neck and shoulders as I lie flat on my back in the ambulance, and I can only stare straight up, where I see the reflection of flashing blue lights on my IV pole. Police radios chatter outside and I hear yet another vehicle arrive, tires crackling over gravel.

A light shines in my left eye, then my right.

“Pupils are still equal and reactive,” the paramedic says. “Ma’am, do you know what month it is?”

“September,” I murmur.

“What day?”

“Monday. I think.”

“Okay. Good.” He reaches up to adjust the bag of saline that’s hanging over my head. “You’re doing great. Let me just tape down that IV line more securely.”

“Did you see him?” I ask.

“See who?”

“Captain Brodie.”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“When you came up to get me, he was there, on the widow’s walk. He saved my life.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am. The only person I saw up there with you was Mr. Haskell. He’s the one who called the ambulance.”

“Ned was there?”

“He’s still right outside.” The paramedic sticks his head out the back of the ambulance and calls out: “Hey, Ned, she’s asking about you!”

A moment later, I see Ned’s face looking down at me. “How’re you feeling, Ava?”

    “You saw him, didn’t you?” I ask.

“She’s asking about someone named Brodie,” the paramedic explains. “Says he was up there on the widow’s walk.”

Ned shakes his head. “The only people I saw up there were you and Ben.”

“He tried to kill me,” I say softly.

“I wasn’t sure about him, Ava. All these years, I wondered how Jessie really died. And when Charlotte…”

“The police thought you killed her.”

“So did everyone else. When you got involved with Ben, I worried it was happening all over again.”

“That’s why you followed him here?”

“I heard you screaming up on the roof, and I knew. I think I always knew it was him. But no one listened to me, and why would they? He was the doctor and I’m just…”

“The man who tells the truth.” If my wrist wasn’t encased in bandages, if it didn’t hurt just to move, I would have grasped his hand. There’s so much I want to say to him, but the paramedics have already started the engine and now it’s time to leave.

Ned climbs out and swings the door shut.

I’m trapped, stiff as a mummy in my neck brace, so I can’t look out the rear window at the morgue van that’s waiting to transport the body of Ben Gordon. Nor can I catch a final glimpse of the house where I would have met my death, were it not for Ned Haskell.

Or was it the ghost who saved me?

As the ambulance bounces down the driveway, I close my eyes and once again I see Jeremiah Brodie standing on the widow’s walk, keeping watch as he always has.

As he always will.

Thirty