Creeeaaak!
The unworldly sound again. Like a ghost moaning.
Trent felt a whisper of dread crawl up his spine.
“What’s that?” Lynch stepped back, squinting up toward the opening to the hayloft.
A knot in his gut, Trent was already on the first rung of the ladder.
Was someone else in the loft?
Injured?
Oh, hell.
He climbed, his boots ringing through the stable, one of the horses letting out a worried neigh. The minute he hoisted himself into the upper story, he knew something was wrong. He looked down. Yeah, obviously Drew had fallen through the opening around the ladder; blood showed on the rough edge of the board where the kid had hit his head when falling through. And there was more—evidence of someone being dragged through the scattered straw.
What the hell had gone on here?
Who had Drew met? Or had the kid walked in on something he wasn’t supposed to see?
He stepped closer to the stacked bales, noticing a dark stain in the thinly strewn hay at his feet, hearing someone following him up the ladder.
A trail of blood.
Drew’s?
Creeeaaaaak!
The sound was louder, gave him the willies. He looked up to the darkened rafters, then jumped backward, nearly falling through the hole in the floor himself.
“Jesus!” he whispered as his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness.
He thought he might be sick.
A young woman’s naked body swung gently from a rope tied to a crossbeam. White and ashen, her eyes bulging, she twisted slightly as a breeze blew through the open window.
“Goddamn it!” He couldn’t believe what his eyes were telling him as he stared at the details of her face, puffy and pale.
Nona Vickers was hanging from the rafters, her bare skin blue in the half-light.
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered under his breath, questions cutting through his brain.
“For the love of the father.” McAllister was standing next to Trent, staring up at the dangling corpse, his hand to his mouth as if he might be sick. “Saints be with us.”
Who had done this? Trent wondered.
Why?
Drew?
Had he, after stringing Nona up, fallen through the opening by mistake?
No, no. It didn’t make any sense.
Two pinpoints of light in the dark rafters startled him … the eyes of an owl, roosting above the girl’s body.
“What is it? Did you find something?” Reverend Lynch’s voice boomed upward, through the opening to the floor below.