Read Not Quite Right (A Lowcountry Mystery) (Lowcountry Mysteries Book 6) Online
Authors: Lyla Payne
Not Quite Right (A Lowcountry Mystery) (Lowcountry Mysteries Book 6)
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
Going for Broke
(published in
Fifty First Times: A New Adult Anthology
)
LOWCOUNTRY MYSTERIES
Not Quite Mine
(May 31, 2016)
SECRETS DON’T MAKE FRIENDS
Secrets Don’t Make Lovers (September, 2016)
Young Adult Novels Written as TRISHA LEIGH
THE LAST YEAR
THE CAVY FILES
THE HISTORIANS
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
T
he 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.