Girl, Haunted (Ella Dark #22)

CHAPTER FORTY SIX

The hours since they'd said their goodbyes to Sheriff Redmond and his ghost town had blurred together in a haze of debriefs, phone calls, and forms signed in triplicate. The gears of justice ground slow, but they ground exceedingly fine, and not even the FBI's golden girl could skip the song and dance. But now, with the finish line in sight and the promise of her own bed on the horizon, Ella could almost taste the jet fuel.

The airport was a special kind of purgatory. A limbo where the rules of time and space bent to the whims of the departure board. Ella felt like she'd aged a decade in the hours since they'd packed their things and made for Portland International, but the giant clock on the wall claimed it had only been eight hours.

Ella dodged a harried businessman yelling into his cell phone and sidled up to the newsstand tucked between a Starbucks and a Cinnabon. 'PSU TRAVEL MART,' the sign proclaimed in cheery green letters. And there, tucked among the breath mints and Sudoku books, was a spinning rack of newspapers.

Well hello there , she thought, angling towards the shop. Call it professionalism, paranoia, or plain old masochism, but Ella always checked the headlines after closing a case. Had to know how much the public knew – and how badly the press had mangled the truth this time.

She scanned the racks, absently noting the usual tabloid dreck. But one headline in particular caught her eye, splashed across the front page of The Oregonian.

‘'OREGON KILLER CAUGHT AS HAUNTED HOUSE BURNS',’ she read aloud, snagging the paper from the rack. The subheading below promised all the lurid details of Yamhill's house of horrors and the madman behind it.

Local haunted attraction goes up in flames... Oregon serial killer Vincent Marrow, 59, found among the wreckage... authorities tight-lipped about the incident...

Same song, umpteenth verse. Ella had seen this show before, hell, she'd taken more than a few turns in the center ring. The public always wanted answers, even if they were the wrong ones. And if those answers came wrapped in lurid bows of sex and violence, so much the better. Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

‘Journalism is going to hell,’ Luca said as he appeared at her elbow with a steaming cup in each hand.

‘You think?’

‘Yup. They could have gone with Murder He Wrote. Something catchy. Does it mention me?’

‘Nope. No names. Keep it that way.’

‘How am I supposed to get free drinks if they don’t mention my name?’

‘One, you don’t drink. Two, you’re not a celebrity. You’re a civil servant.’

Luca shrugged. ‘Fine, but I’m only in this game to get on TV. It happened for you.’

‘Maybe one day you’ll be on Dancing On Ice. Until then, let’s keep catching the bad guys.’ Ella refolded the paper and put it back on the pile.

‘You not buying that?’

Ella looked back at it, then at the suspicious-looking shopkeeper. ‘Should I?’

Luca fished out a dollar and pushed it across to the worker. He took the paper and stuffed it in his bag. 'It's not every day we make the front page. Maybe we could frame it, put it on the wall. Do that redecorating thing you're always talking about.'

The airport PA crackled to life. ‘American Airlines Flight 6282 to Washington D.C., your plane is now boarding at Gate C14. Please have your tickets ready.’

‘We’ll see about that. Ask me again when we’re home.’

Just a few hundred more steps and a fun little TSA patdown between her and blessed escape velocity. She hitched her bag higher and picked up the pace with Luca in tow.

Time to say goodbye to Yamhill and all the ghosts within. As she headed towards the gate, a sudden wave of irony hit her. Vincent Marrow had set out to create his own urban legends, and with sensationalist tabloids like the one in Luca’s bag screaming his name, it seemed he’d succeeded.