Read Bone Island 01 - Ghost Shadow for Free Online

place.”
    Again, he was startled.
    “You’re wrong,” he said harshly, “and I’m tired of the joke. This place is owned by the Beckett family, and it’s not for sale-yet.”
    “Beckett!” she gasped.
    “Beckett, yes. The name that you see on the marquis outside. B-E-C-K-E-T-T. This museum has been the property of my family for decades. I’m David Beckett. It is four in the morning and I’m wondering what you are doing here at this time. I actually belong here-at any hour. Now, if you please, get out.” He spoke evenly, almost pleasantly. But he meant the get out.
    It seemed now, after hearing his name, as if the young woman facing him had changed her attitude suddenly. She seemed to back away. I’m a Beckett. Oh, yeah, David Beckett. Person of interest! he almost shouted.
    It had been ten years since he had left, determined that he wouldn’t let the past follow him, not when he was innocent, not when someone else had taken his fiancée’s life, long after she had taken leave of him.
    “I’m so sorry; I should have known,” she said. “Actually, we’ve met. It was years ago, but I should have known, you do look a lot like Liam. I’m Katie-”
    “I don’t care who you are,” he said, startled by his abrupt rudeness. He shook his head. “Just get out. It’s private property.”
    “You don’t understand. I believe that I do own this place. I just have a few last papers to sign on Saturday. Tomorrow. Liam is, after all, Craig’s executor-okay, you both are, if I understand it right, and you’d told him to go ahead and act in his absence. Liam was ready to sell.”
    David frowned.
    Sell? Never. Not the museum. The museum needed to be dismantled, taken apart. He wasn’t superstitious, he didn’t believe in curses. But this place held a miasma. There was something that appeared to be evil in the robotics. The faces were too lifelike. The ones that moved didn’t jerk about-they looked like the real thing from a distance.
    They invited idiots and drunks and psychotics to behave insanely. Commit murder, and leave the corpses behind, far more fragile than the imitations that might survive many decades.
    David shook his head, feeling a twinge less hostile. He still couldn’t really figure out who in hell the girl was, but, at least she wasn’t a drunken tourist who had stumbled in. A Northerner, probably. Someone who had come to Key West convinced it was not only a sunny Eden, but a place to make a good few bucks off the spending habits of vacationers. But she’d said that they’d met?
    “Whatever you might have thought, whatever you might have come to believe, the museum is not and will never be for sale. If it’s the house you’re interested in, it may come up on the market in a year or so,” David said flatly.
    She stared at him steadily. Now it seemed that she was the hostile one. “So, you’re David Beckett, suddenly home and taking interest in the family-and the family property. How nice. Perhaps you should speak with the lawyers. I believe that the sale has gone through.”
    “Look, Miss-”
    “Katherine O’Hara, and don’t be superior with me, because my family has been down here as long as yours-or longer. I hope that you’re wrong, and that this sale can go through. I love what your family created. This is a beautiful place, and your grandfather and great-grandfather did such a fabulous job showing history, the simple, true and the bizarre. I don’t understand…”
    Her voice had trailed as she stared at him. She looked nervous suddenly.
    Was she thinking that no matter what the newspapers or police had said, he might be a murderer? A very sick one at that, setting a corpse into an historical tableau?
    After all, she had said that her family had been here forever, and yes, he did know of O’Haras who were longtime residents, but…
    “Katie O’Hara?” he said sharply.
    “Yes, I just introduced myself,” she said with aggravation.
    “Sean’s little sister?”
    “Sean’s