A Valentine Wish (Gates-Cameron 1)

Anna flinched.

Dean resisted an impulse to reach out to her. “Are you saying that if you had the evidence to clear the Cameron twins’ names, you wouldn’t release it because it might offend the Peavy family?” he asked Mark, instead.

Mark hesitated, then shrugged. “I guess I’ve gotten soft. I know what it’s like to destroy a family’s reputation, Dean. Especially when there’s a politician in the family. I destroyed a few during my stint as an investigative reporter for a statewide newspaper. There was one man in particular—the state’s attorney general. I found out about the mistress he was keeping, despite his image as a devoted husband and family man. He was supporting her, of course, with taxpayers’ money. I broke the story. His family disintegrated, and his Bible-belt political career crashed and burned.”

Mark rubbed a hand over his face in a weary gesture. “The hell of it was, he was basically a decent man. Dedicated public servant. Performed his job competently, efficiently, honestly, except for that one failing. I’d always admired him. Still do. And I still wonder if it was really anyone’s business that he fell in love with the wrong woman at the wrong time.”

“For seventy-five years,” Dean said gently, “Ian and Mary Anna Cameron have been branded as criminals. Murderers. They’ve become the local ghost story to be bandied about around campfires. If there’s even a chance that they were innocent, that someone murdered them and got away with it, don’t you think someone should try to clear their names?”

“That someone being you?”

Dean cleared his throat, aware of Anna’s gaze on his face. “Well, yeah, I guess so.”

“So you’re—what? Trying to lay troubled souls to nest?”

Dean tried to return Mark’s wry smile. “Something like that, I suppose.”

“You’re sure you haven’t seen the ghosts, yourself?”

Dean hoped his smile didn’t look as sickly as it felt. “Haven’t heard nary a rattling chain,” he drawled in an affected Southern accent that made Mark grimace.

Mark’s smile faded then and he sighed. “Tell you what, Dean. You find evidence of any sort that the Cameron twins were falsely accused, and I’ll run the story. It’s certainly a story of local interest, whether the Peavy family was involved or not. But I’m going to need more than your hunches—or the ghostly whisperings of a tormented spirit.”

Anna glared at Mark. “That wasn’t funny.”

“I’ll try to find you something more concrete,” Dean agreed. “And, Mark, I’m not taking this lightly. I have no interest in stirring up trouble just for the fun of it, or hurting innocent people. I just want to know the truth about the history of my new home.”

“Fair enough, I suppose.”

Mae joined them then, and the men let the subject drop. The next time Dean looked toward Anna’s corner, she was gone.

He wondered whether she approved of what he’d done thus far to help her.

7

All that we see or seem

Is but a dream within a dream.

—Edgar Allan Poe

ANNA DIDN’T REAPPEAR during the next week. Dean wondered if she’d stayed too long Monday evening. Maybe she was off in that gray waiting area with her brother, gaining strength to return.

Or maybe he would never see her again. That possibility was a constant, nagging worry at the back of his mind.

It wasn’t so bad during the daytime, when he could stay busy with the renovations and his attempts at researching the inn’s history. He had put together a chronology of the inn’s ownership since the twins’ deaths. Their stepfather, Gaylon, had managed it until his death in 1939, at which time his son, Charles, had taken over. Eleven years later, Charles sold the inn to a man named Jonas Harvey, who’d kept it four years before running into financial difficulties.

In 1954, the inn was purchased by a bohemian art group, who used it for a creative retreat funded by wealthy patrons. The group disbanded five years later and the inn was closed. It reopened in 1961, purchased by a nostalgic former member of the art group, and had limped along until 1974 when it had closed again.

Taking advantage of the bicentennial historical fervor, the inn reopened in 1976, owned and managed by a devoted member of the Daughters of the American Revolution. It thrived for a few years, particularly during the early-winter horse-racing season at nearby Hot Springs, but then had been forced to close due to tax problems.

Two more owners had briefly tried and failed to recapture the inn’s former financial success. It had been closed for almost six years when some odd twist of fate had brought it to Dean’s attention.

He read every archival article he could get his hands on, but they were few and unsatisfactory. Even the state newspapers had had little to say about the incident of February 14, 1921 ; so much had been going on in the world at that time that little attention was given to the deaths of a suspected small-town bootlegger, his sister and his alleged partner.

He talked to the locals. In the diner, the market, the barbershop, the gas station—anyone who was willing to discuss the old scandal became a potential source of information. Dean found more than a few townspeople willing to speculate about Gaylon Peavy’s role in the tragedy, but that was all he got from them. Speculation. What ifs. Maybes. Nothing that even began to prove Ian Cameron’s innocence.

If there ever had been a serious investigation into any scenario other than the one Tagert had given after the shootings, Dean found no evidence of it. Some of the old-timers recalled that Tagert hadn’t been particularly popular, but none of them had ever heard talk that he’d been crooked.