Not Quite Right (A Lowcountry Mystery) (Lowcountry Mysteries Book 6) Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Information

  Also By Lyla Payne

  Title Page

  Dediction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Epilogue

  Thank You!

  Not Quite Mine

  Also By Lyla Payne

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright 2016 by Lyla Payne

  Cover by Eisley Jacobs at Complete Pixels

  Developmental and Line Editing: Danielle Poiesz at Double Vision Editorial

  Copyediting: Shannon Page

  Proofreading: Mary Ziegenhorn, Diane Thede, Cheryl Heinrich

  All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations or locations are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used factiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  Also by LYLA PAYNE

  WHITMAN UNIVERSITY

  Broken at Love

  By Referral Only

  Be My Downfall

  Staying On Top

  Living the Dream

  Going for Broke (published in Fifty First Times: A New Adult Anthology)

  LOWCOUNTRY MYSTERIES

  Not Quite Dead

  Not Quite Cold

  Not Quite True

  Quite Curious

  Not Quite Gone

  Quite Precarious

  Not Quite Right

  Not Quite Mine (May 31, 2016)

  Mistletoe & Mr. Right

  Sleigh Bells & Second Chances

  SECRETS DON’T MAKE FRIENDS

  Secrets Don’t Make Friends

  Secrets Don’t Make Survivors

  Secrets Don’t Make Lovers (September, 2016)

  Young Adult Novels Written as TRISHA LEIGH

  THE LAST YEAR

  Whispers in Autumn

  Winter Omens

  Betrayals in Spring

  Summer Ruins

  THE CAVY FILES

  Gypsy

  Alliance

  Buried

  THE HISTORIANS

  Return Once More

  Exist Once More (November, 2016)

  To the readers who love Gracie as much as I do - thank you for continuing to read her story.

  Chapter One

  The skies open up, not bothering with any preamble before pounding Heron Creek with a driving rain. The sheets of water hide the world outside my car behind a hazy curtain. I’m not prepared to operate a vehicle anyway, not with a similar storm raging inside me.

  Dylan Travis is my brother? How is that possible?

  Obviously your mother is a lying bitch, the devil on my left shoulder whispers. You knew that already.

  “I would never call my mother a bitch,” I protest, not caring that I’m literally talking to voices in my head now.

  You spent half your life criticizing her. Why would she tell you anything? his partner hisses.

  My head pounds. It takes a minute, but my thoughts start to arrange themselves in some semblance of order—mostly in the form of questions. I want to be able to say that Travis’s mother has wrong information, that it’s not possible my mother has another child.

  I know from growing up with Felicia that anything is possible where she’s concerned, of course, but with the curse on our family…how could he have lived? No males on my mother’s side have survived past the age of thirteen, not since Anne Bonny’s husband used his mistress’s knowledge of voodoo to curse us until all eternity.

  Or something.

  If the curse is real—and Amelia and I both know it is, based on the statistically impossible number of times she’s almost lost her boy baby since she got pregnant—then Travis can’t be my brother. If he is, I don’t know what that would mean for the curse. Despite my recent experiences, I still have little to no idea how the world of ghosts and curses and voodoo actually works.

  Could it have somehow missed him if no one but my mother was aware of his existence? Was my mother the only one aware of his existence?

  Travis is younger than me by a year or two, so my mother would have been long gone from Heron Creek by the time he was born. I would have been too young to remember her being pregnant, or if there had been a guy around other than my father.

  My father…

  My fingers fumble over my phone, closing the offending email and pulling up my contacts. My father hadn’t left a way to get in touch, but he had called from an anonymous number a few weeks ago. I click it, saying a silent prayer that he’d bought one of those untraceable burner phones as opposed to calling from a pay phone or some other random place. The chances are probably decent, seeing as I can’t recall the last time I saw a pay phone, and a hotel would have a listed number.

  The phone beeps, and when I pull it from my ear, I see that there’s no service.

  “Shit.” The storm must have knocked out some towers. Worry churns in my stomach at the sight of the time—I’m late for my meeting with Mama Lottie. “Double shit.”

  You might think that people don’t mind waiting once they’re dead, since they literally have all the time in the world. Hell, I would have thought that a year ago. Maybe it’s true for some ghosts, but not for the ones who have decided to haunt me.

  The phone rings, startling me so much it flies from my hand and drops onto the carpet. I locate it after some unladylike scrambling and press “Accept” the moment the Unknown Caller registers on the ID. The devil himself couldn’t have offered me anything to put Frank in my contact list as “Dad,” even though that’s who he claims to be.

  “Hello?” I say.

  “Gracie? What’s the matter?”

  “How do you know anything’s the matter?” Everything about Frank rubs me the wrong way, but it’s impossible to tell whether it’s him personally or the simple fact that neither he nor my mother thought I needed to know he existed before a month ago.

  “Because we both know you wouldn’t be calling me otherwise.”

  “How did you know I tried to call you?” Confusion tumbles through me. My call hadn’t gone through? Had it?

  He pauses, and in the empty space I hear the whisper of words left unsaid. Too far away to decipher but close enough to prickle my suspicions. Does he have more abilities as far as the supernatural than I know about?

  “Well, you did try to call. How about you tell me why?”

  No way he’s going to tell me how he knew. In order to let it go, at least for now, I chalk it up to fatherly intuition and change focus. “Is Dylan Travis my brother?”

  “Who now?”

  I roll my eyes. “Don’t play dumb, Frank. He’s the detective in Heron Creek, you know that.�
�

  “Why would you think he’s your brother?”

  “Because his adoptive parents got him from Felicia. Under the assumption that he was hers.”

  The silence on the other end of the line goes on so long that I pull the phone away from my ear twice to make sure we’re still connected.

  Finally, he clears his throat. “I can’t say.”

  “Can’t or won’t?” I snap. “Because you said there are things I need to know about my family. Does this count? Is Travis family?”

  Thinking about him in those terms douses me with sticky dread. It isn’t as though I dislike the guy, but he’s had a knack for getting under my skin—and in my way—ever since he arrived in town. He would probably say the same thing about me.

  Even more confusion muddles my thoughts at the deluge of questions his presence here brings up. Had he come to Heron Creek by accident? What are the chances of that even happening in a town as small as this?

  No. He knows who I am, or at least who he thinks I am, and that’s why he came. But why keep it a secret?

  “Now’s not the time, Graciela. Don’t you have somewhere you’re supposed to be?”

  He as good as answered the question. If now isn’t the time, it means there will be a time.

  And there wouldn’t need to be a time to talk about Travis if there’s nothing to say.

  Lightning flashes, and this time the connection goes dead. It won’t revive, no matter how creative my curses, so calling Travis is out of the question. It’s just as well, even if being out of reach from Amelia worries me, because I am really late now. Mama Lottie seems pretty set on her deadlines, and not at all the type to take even a squalling storm as a valid excuse for not meeting them.

  “I wonder what happens if I die on the way there,” I mutter under my breath, turning the car back on and flipping the windshield wipers on high.

  Contemplating the possibility of confronting Mama Lottie on level playing ground occupies my thoughts for a few minutes, but it can’t hold. For one thing, she still knows voodoo. For another, she’d have been dead longer than me, and I’m guessing there’s probably at least as big a learning curve to haunting as there is to being haunted. Maybe more.

  My tires slip on the wet roads, and as Drayton Hall draws nearer, the back lanes grow more pitted. The holes are filled with dirt and gravel that pings off my undercarriage, the small clinks playing background to the loud rumbles and flashes outside my windows. I squint, sweat forming on my face and palms even though the temperature is dropping along with the barometric pressure.

  The one thing I feel sure of is that Dylan Travis believes he’s my brother. His adoptive parents believe it, too, and if they took a baby from my mother, it’s hard to blame them. Why would they assume she’d lie about something like that?

  I press my lips together, taking the turnoff onto a dirt trail that winds around to the marsh that butts up to the Drayton property. At least I have a way to get in and out without putting Jenna’s job as the preservationist here in jeopardy any more than I already have.

  If Frank doesn’t know or won’t tell me about Dylan’s parentage, then maybe my aunt Karen will. It pisses me off to think that Karen could have known about Travis this whole time and not said a word, but that alone convinces me she didn’t have a clue. My aunt loves nothing more than to be the one to drop painful gossip on unsuspecting folks; if she’d guessed it would upset me, there’s no way she could have kept the secret this long.

  I throw the car into park and grab the rain jacket that I found in the front closet at my grandparents’ house out of the backseat, pausing for a moment to hold it to my nose and breathe in. After all these months, my grandmother’s scent clings with stubborn perseverance. I try to believe that slipping it over my head and flipping up the hood will make me as fearless and strong as Grams had been, but it doesn’t totally work.

  Grams would have told Mama Lottie where she could go, and where to stick her curse on the way there. Me? The bats in my belly make me seriously consider hurling into the soggy marsh, promising that I’m terrified. And not only for me. Right now, the lives of my cousin and her baby ride on my shoulders, as heavy as a herd of elephants.

  Beau’s soft, golden eyes appear in my mind, crinkling around the edges with hurt and betrayal. Despite the hot rush of pain in my chest at the reminder of what else this situation has cost me, I know that he’s another reason for me to be brave. I gave him up, and it can’t be for nothing.

  With one more deep breath and a kick in the rear over the fact that I still haven’t stashed an umbrella in the car, I shove open the door and step out into the bog. My rain boots sink up to the calf.

  “It had to be storming.” I spread my arms wide and turn my face up to the sky, and am immediately pelted with water in my eyes, nose, and mouth. I spit it out, glaring at the heavens. “Can’t a girl catch a single break?”

  As per usual, the sky and whoever resides there decline to answer. I doubt they even heard.

  “Bastards.”

  I trek forward as quickly as possible, stopping to check my purse twice to make sure that the jar containing the last bit of Drayton family DNA hasn’t somehow disappeared. It’s the reason I’m here, to give Mama Lottie the glob of hair so she can complete her curse on the Drayton family and remove the one from mine. As much as going back to her chafes, we can’t do it alone.

  That thought sits front and center in my mind as I slog through the marsh and step onto Drayton property. I skirt the edges, following the river around to the quiet, hidden spot where Mama Lottie prefers to linger in this world.

  We need her help. I have to do and say whatever it takes to secure it, happiness be damned.

  The last time I saw Mama Lottie, she was pretty pissed off about her curse not working. Her anger was frenzied, terrifying and huge, and as electric as the storm still swirling overhead. Tonight, though, she appears the moment I step closer to her favorite twisted old tree. Her aura feels calm.

  Too calm.

  My stomach twists, a wave of dizziness overtaking me along with the sensation that a volcano is about to erupt. An earthquake, or a tsunami, or a hurricane lurks just off the shore of my world, set to crash into me at any minute and knock everything so far sideways it can never find right-side up again.

  I put my hands on my knees, ignoring the clinging, sour scent of otherworldly power on the wind as well as the ghost stalking toward me, and try to pull my shit together for the hundredth time since I returned to Heron Creek.

  What finally does the trick is remembering that my world is already sideways. With the ghosts in my life determined to keep coming, maybe it’s past time for me to accept that off-kilter is the new orientation of normal, for better or for worse.

  “You’re late.” The voice, deep and guttural, hisses over the grounds like a hundred slinking snakes while real snakes, like the venomous African one she used to snare my attention—nearly killing Beau in the process—wind around her arms and ankles in various stages of agitation.

  I straighten up and look her in the eye, oddly detached from my fear now. Even if ghosts can’t kill people—which, I don’t know for sure because I keep forgetting to ask Daria—Mama Lottie’s refusal to help us with the curse could accomplish the same end result.

  She appears as unaffected by my attempt at bravery as she is by the squall overhead. Her hair is covered by a scarf, her body concealed by a loose, flowing garment with a faded floral pattern, and her feet are bare. Instead of sinking into the muck the way mine have, hers hover just above the ground. That, combined with the shimmering nature of her entire being, leaves no doubt as to exactly what she is.

  The undiluted power and menace she exudes makes my heart beat faster.

  “I’m sorry.” My mouth is so dry it’s hard to speak. “The storm.”

  “The storm is not the problem.” Her dark eyes flash, brighter than any strike of lightning and with the potential for more destruction. “You are the problem, Graciela Harper.
Perhaps Mama Lottie will decide you are not worth helping after all and leave you with the terrible curse on your family. Maybe make it stronger, to teach you a lesson.”

  I bite my bottom lip to stop from arguing with her. It would do no good, would likely do nothing but bolster her pride. “I know why the curse didn’t work. I brought something to fix it.”

  My offering seems to please her, and pacify her to a degree, but she doesn’t come any closer. My ghosts have touched me before, and the experience is always God-awful, like frozen leeches all over my skin. A shudder works its way down my spine at the thought of her hands on me.

  “Leave it,” she demands.

  “If I do, are you going to help us?”

  “Mama Lottie keeps her word. Ask around.”

  “Well, no offense, but everyone who knew you is dead.”

  “Not a problem for you, daft girl. When will you learn to be thankful for the gifts you’ve been given?” Her eyes glitter under a fresh bolt of lightning. “Anger God, you will.”

  I have no idea why she’s started talking like Yoda, or if I’m supposed to be learning lessons from her now on how to live my life. From where I’m standing, she didn’t do such a bang-up job with her own, carrying this much anger into the afterlife, but saying something would come off as a bit judgy.

  “I’ll work on it,” I say, aware before the last word leaves my lips that my tone contains too much sarcasm to miss.

  “You’d do well to work on your smart mouth, too.” The ghost’s gaze drops to the jar in my hands, empty except for a small gathering of dark hair at the bottom. “Why didn’t it work the first time? What did you miss?”

  “There’s a line of illegitimate Draytons,” I confess. “I didn’t know.”

  Her eyebrows shoot up, surprise clear in the deep grooves of her face. In the trees at my back, a gasp diverts my attention, and I whirl around, catching sight of the ghost of a little white boy. I’ve seen him out here before. His breeches are ironed and clean, and the horror on his face is unmistakable. Our eyes meet, his round and huge like saucers, and he shakes his head hard.