Page 22 of Spooked (31 Days of Trick or Treat: Biker & Mobster #13)

While Mouse is a serious man sitting around the table in church, his face rarely giving away his thoughts, regarding him now, I notice he’s far more open.

The slight upward curve to his lips and the arching of a brow suggest he might have found something interesting.

But it doesn’t stop him from clicking the keys and moving on.

Anxious to hear the results of his searching, even though I don’t know precisely what he’s looking for, I resist the temptation to prompt him for updates, knowing I wouldn’t be here if he didn’t expect to give me answers.

It seems hours, but it's probably only about ten minutes, before he lifts his fingers from his keyboard, and leans back, linking his hands behind his neck. A shake of his head makes his long hair fly, and he huffs out air to blow a strand off his face.

It’s only then that he raises his eyes to me. “Well, I’ll be fucked.” He turns a screen, angling it so we can both see.

“I started at the source. Emerald and Albert Sullivan.” He points to the picture on the screen, and I suck in air as the two people who’d I’d seen getting it on in the bedroom are pictured before me.

What the fuck? It was possible I’d heard Bullet mention Siobhan without taking it in, but there’s no way that I’d ever seen the two people in the grainy picture in front of me.

Yet, every detail of their faces is just as I remember, complete with the softness in their eyes that shows how much they were in love.

While working, he’d placed the blunt in the ashtray. With a new tremble in my hands, I reach for it and his lighter, picking them both up. I light one end, put my lips to the other, and breathe deeply in.

As Mouse starts summarising their story, I’m grateful. Though it’s the same words that are right in front of me, I’ve lost the ability to focus properly or read. My heart is pounding, and I feel dizzy. Hallucinations are one thing, but how could my brain materialise people who are real?

“They were quite the story back in their day. Albert Sullivan was wealthy, his grandfather having made his fortune in gold here in Arizona and having invested it wisely. Albert’s father died during World War I, so he, as the only grandson, inherited everything.

He was highly respected and well-known in society.

He remained single despite being faced with numerous rich debutantes whose families were courting him.

He was in his fifties when he finally fixed his sights on a dancer who definitely came from the wrong side of the tracks. Emerald Dias.”

He pauses to shake his head and smirk. “There was obviously something about her that caught his attention when he saw her on the stage.” He stops again to glance at me.

“I doubt Emerald was her real Christian name, but I can find no birth certificate. But that was what she used to sign the marriage certificate.” He swipes his hair behind his ears again and raises a corner of his mouth.

“It was the golden years of the fifties. No one would have blinked an eye if he’d kept her as his mistress.

But in nineteen sixty-three, something made him decide to marry her.

By then she’d spent ten years performing her arts and had become sought after and popular—among the male crowd.

” He rolls his eyes. “Her change of status did her no favours in New York. As his wife, it seems she was tolerated, but not welcome in the drawing rooms of the city. He brought her back to his roots, here in Arizona, where his family had generated wealth. He’d renovated the Sullivan House for her, and they took up residence.

” Mouse clicks a few keys, and a new screen appears.

“Seems they had the final joke. They used to throw lavish parties, and people wanting Albert to invest in their businesses either lost the chance or had to come to bumfuck nowhere to tap into his fortune. He used to flaunt Emerald in front of the men who used to leer at her when she was dancing, forcing them to show her respect. I suspect he also enjoyed having captured a woman whom they’d all thirsted over, but who was only his to touch now. ”

“They really loved each other,” I tell him, forgetting that I’m trying hard not to remember how I know, let alone admit it.

Mouse misses nothing. “You saw them?” he asks sharply.

I give a sheepish nod and then shrug. In for a penny… “I saw them at their most intimate.”

He chuckles, but softly. “Love can sometimes find itself in the strangest of ways.” His eyes glaze slightly, and the upturn to his lips makes me wonder if he’s remembering how he met Mariana. He’d saved her from a bear if I correctly recall the story.

There’s a sharp pain in my temple. I place my fingers there, then, in a stupidly plaintive voice, ask him, “But what does this mean? Do the people I saw in my head really exist? What the fuck’s going on, Mouse?” My eyes plead with him to help me.

“Vision, not dream or hallucination,” he states firmly.

“We know you went to the house, you took pictures and showed them to Bullet. But while you were there, the spirits revealed something to you.” He rubs at his chin, and his brow furrows.

He sweeps his long hair over his shoulder as he asks metaphorically, “But for what purpose? That’s what I want to know. ”

My own brow creases. Could he be right? I’m a twenty-first-century man.

It’s easier to believe I’m going crazy and that everything I saw had been a figment of my imagination, or nightmares conjured up by the damage from that knock to my skull, than to believe I experienced a prescience of things that were real.

My headache seems to worsen with all the conflicting thoughts in my brain.

I return to his question. “You think they were maybe trying to tell me something?” Frowning, I reinforce my question. “Do you really believe that’s possible, Mouse?”

Fixing his dark eyes on me, he projects sincerity over the desk that separates us.

“If you’re asking me whether I believe there’s a spirit world that lives alongside us, then my answer has got to be yes.

Do I believe in ghosts? Probably, though not the same way as you think, but there are things that we can’t explain.

” He chuckles. “Maybe one day we will. Imagine someone from the nineteenth century being faced with a cell phone, having the ability to contact anyone, anywhere. They’d think that was magic and dismiss it out of hand. ”

But cell phones are science. I start to argue against him, then close my mouth. Maybe he’s right. In the past, people put volcanic eruptions and earthquakes down to acts of their gods.

Mouse is staring at his screens once again. “Emerald gave birth to two girls.”

“Siobhan and Sian.” I give him the names immediately.

Raising his chin, he confirms that the facts back up what I was told in my… vision, I suppose, if that’s how he wants to describe it. I’m not sure whether to be relieved or dismayed that my imagination hadn’t been lying.

“Siobhan was born first, which would make her seventy,” he continues.

“Sian was born four years later.” He keeps clicking, looking from one monitor to the next.

“Looks like Siobhan married, but her husband died a while back.” Creases appear on his brow.

“Albert died in the nineteen-eighties, but Emerald lived on. She passed away in 2010, at the age of seventy. Found a copy of her will. She left everything to Siobhan and nothing to Sian.” Again, his fingers fly over the keyboard, then he sighs.

“Perhaps this is why. There’s a birth registered to Sian in nineteen ninety.

She was unmarried.” He shakes his head. “Girl gone bad? Mother didn’t approve of the relationship?

Whatever, that’s when Maeve entered the picture. ”

“She’d almost married,” I tell him. “But her fiancé died before they could tie the knot. He was from good folks, but not the stock her grandmother was looking for. Siobhan spun a story that turned Emerald on her younger daughter, though they reconciled before her death. Maeve thought the will had been changed to favour her, but obviously,” for some reason I point at his monitor, “it had not.”

His sharp eyes narrow. “Maeve told you that?”

Swallowing hard as it seems unbelievable, I simply nod.

He chuckles softly, as if my non-response had been the answer he needed. “As I see it, there’s only one thing you can do now. Hound, if I were you, I’d go visit Maeve. I think her grandmother might have been trying to tell you something.”

He what? Visit the ghost/spirit, whoever she is, in the hospital? Fuck no. I don’t need to struggle to come up with the excuse as to why that’s a bad idea. In fact, it’s preposterous the more I think about it. “You’re suggesting I go visit a woman I’ve never met before…”

His snort interrupts me. “From the sound of it, you got quite cosy with her.”

How he picked up I was attracted to Maeve, I don’t know, but it only serves to add yet another complication.

I’d feel awkward meeting her. I can’t explain that to Mouse without betraying more of myself, so I rely on the most important thing.

“What’s the fuckin’ point if she’s unconscious?

” Feeling a shiver down my back, I don’t voice my next fear.

What if the Maeve in the hospital isn’t the one I met?

He shrugs. “I don’t rightly know, but something tells me this is your path.

The coincidence of you both being admitted at the same time can’t be dismissed lightly.

” His shoulders rise up and down. “Maybe she’s waiting for you to wake up.

Perhaps your presence will bring her around.

Or maybe there’ll be links to the fucked-up family you found out about.

” He stands. “Come on. I’ll come with you.

” My expression must speak volumes. Rolling his eyes, he passes my crutches to me.

“We’ve got to go now, or else we’ll miss evening visiting time. ”