Open Grave Read online

  Open Grave

  a Beacon Falls Mystery featuring Lucy Guardino

  CJ Lyons

  Contents

  OPEN GRAVE

  Introduction

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Epilogue

  OPEN GRAVE

  CJ Lyons

  CJ Lyons’ Thrillers with Heart:: to download the complete list in PDF click HERE or visit CJ at CJLyons.net

  LUCY GUARDINO THRILLERS:

  SNAKE SKIN

  BLOOD STAINED

  KILL ZONE

  AFTER SHOCK

  HARD FALL

  BAD BREAK

  LAST LIGHT

  DEVIL SMOKE

  OPEN GRAVE

  GONE DARK (coming 2017)

  RENEGADE JUSTICE THRILLERS, featuring Morgan Ames:

  FIGHT DIRTY

  RAW EDGES

  ANGELS WEEP (coming 2017)

  FATAL INSOMNIA MEDICAL THRILLERS:

  FAREWELL TO DREAMS

  A RAGING DAWN

  THE SLEEPLESS STARS

  HART AND DRAKE MEDICAL SUSPENSE:

  NERVES OF STEEL

  SLEIGHT OF HAND

  FACE TO FACE

  EYE OF THE STORM

  SHADOW OPS, ROMANTIC THRILLERS:

  CHASING SHADOWS

  LOST IN SHADOWS

  EDGE OF SHADOWS

  CAITLYN TIERNEY FBI THRILLERS:

  BLIND FAITH

  BLACK SHEEP

  HOLLOW BONES

  ANGELS OF MERCY MEDICAL SUSPENSE:

  LIFELINES

  WARNING SIGNS

  URGENT CARE

  CRITICAL CONDITION

  YOUNG ADULT THRILLERS:

  BROKEN

  WATCHED

  CO-WRITTEN WITH ERIN BROCKOVICH:

  ROCK BOTTOM

  HOT WATER

  SINGLE TITLE STANDALONES:

  LUCIDITY, a Ghost of a Love Story

  BORROWED TIME

  PRAISE FOR NEW YORK TIMES AND USA TODAY BESTSELLER CJ LYONS:

  “Everything a great thriller should be—action packed, authentic, and intense.” ~#1 New York Times bestselling author Lee Child

  “A compelling new voice in thriller writing…I love how the characters come alive on every page.” ~New York Times bestselling author Jeffery Deaver

  “Top Pick! A fascinating and intense thriller.” ~ 4 1/2 stars, RT Book Reviews

  “An intense, emotional thriller…(that) climbs to the edge of intensity.” ~National Examiner

  “A perfect blend of romance and suspense. My kind of read.” ~#1 New York Times Bestselling author Sandra Brown

  “Highly engaging characters, heart-stopping scenes…one great rollercoaster ride that will not be stopping anytime soon.” ~Bookreporter.com

  “Adrenalin pumping.” ~The Mystery Gazette

  “Riveting.” ~Publishers Weekly Beyond Her Book

  Lyons “is a master within the genre.” ~Pittsburgh Magazine

  “Will leave you breathless and begging for more.” ~Romance Novel TV

  “A great fast-paced read….Not to be missed.” ~4 ½ Stars, Book Addict

  “Breathtakingly fast-paced.” ~Publishers Weekly

  “Simply superb…riveting drama…a perfect ten.” ~Romance Reviews Today

  “Characters with beating hearts and three dimensions.” ~Newsday

  “A pulse-pounding adrenalin rush!” ~Lisa Gardner

  “Packed with adrenalin.” ~David Morrell

  “…Harrowing, emotional, action-packed and brilliantly realized.” ~Susan Wiggs

  “Explodes on the page…I absolutely could not put it down.” ~Romance Readers’ Connection

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  * * *

  Copyright 2017, CJ Lyons

  EdgyReads

  Cover design: Toni McGee Causey

  Stock photo copyright lassedesignen/Dollar Photo Club

  * * *

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  CJ Lyons and Thrillers with Heart registered Trademarks of

  CJ Lyons, LLC

  * * *

  Library of Congress Case # 1-4137658011

  With almost a million copies sold, readers can’t get enough of Lucy Guardino, everyone’s favorite Pittsburgh soccer mom turned kick-ass FBI agent!

  * * *

  Don’t miss any of Lucy’s adventures:

  SNAKE SKIN, a USA Today Bestseller

  BLOOD STAINED, a USA Today Bestseller

  KILL ZONE, a Suspense Magazine Book of the Year

  AFTER SHOCK, a novella

  HARD FALL, Winner of the 2015 Thriller Award

  BAD BREAK, a novella

  and Lucy’s NEW Beacon Falls Mysteries:

  * * *

  LAST LIGHT

  DEVIL SMOKE

  OPEN GRAVE

  GONE DARK (coming 2017)

  Everything a great thriller should be—action packed, authentic, and intense.” ~Lee Child

  Want to be the first to have a chance to read the new books? Sign up for my Thrillers with Heart newsletter HERE—and you’ll also get a free copy of the first Lucy adventure, SNAKE SKIN!

  Be sure to open the Thrillers with Heart emails; they’ll arrive every few weeks with info on contests, new books, and exclusive offers for my readers!

  Prologue

  “Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”

  ~ Martin Luther King

  May 17, 1954

  * * *

  Dr. Samuel Mann steered the Dodge Wayfarer down the corkscrew curves of the Pennsylvania mountain road. The late afternoon sun had been banished by the thick forest, its tall trees leaning together, old women gossiping in the breeze. The drive would have been fun if it weren’t for the logging truck in front of them riding its brakes, its load swinging back and forth, making passing impossible.

  “Samuel, slow down,” Jo said from the passenger side of the bench seat, reaching across sleeping Maybelle to tap his arm.

  Four-year-old Maybelle snuggled closer to him; she was of an age where she clung to Daddy. With his irregular, long hours spent at the hospital, she seemed always worried he might vanish from her sight. Josephine pulled Maybelle to her side of the seat, gi
ving Samuel room to focus on the road and the truck swaying past the centerline as it lumbered around each steep curve.

  The trees surrendered to the sky and sunshine greeted them as they plunged down one last switchback and reached the valley below. Finally room to pass, which Samuel did gleefully.

  Once clear of the truck, he shrugged his shoulders, rolled them forward and back, just like he did in the operating theatre when he’d been on his feet hunched over a patient for too long. He glanced at the clock on the Dodge’s dashboard; already four o’clock. “Told you we should have left your aunt’s earlier.”

  Jo inclined her head in a half-nod that acknowledged he was right without coming out and admitting she was wrong. “You were the one who insisted on staying for dessert.”

  “Polite thing to do. After all, she’s your family. They already see me as the usurper, stealing you away.” Not to mention he was several shades darker than Jo—something her conservative Cleveland family seemed to think placed him beneath her, despite his education and position. “Plus, it was mighty fine pie.”

  The magic word woke Maybelle. “Daddy, I’m hungry. Can we stop?”

  “I don’t know, ask our navigator.” The valley was narrow, filled with farmland that followed the curve of the mountain range behind them, stretching out north to south. Another set of mountains, not as high or steep, rolled up before them in the distance. Other than a few scattered barns and farmhouses, there was no sign of civilization.

  Samuel was a city boy. He loved DC with its hustle and bustle, constant motion. Even Cleveland was all right—although Jo’s family lived in a sedate neighborhood that, during their three days there for her uncle’s funeral, had seemed ruled by church ladies who showed up at odd hours, always in twos or threes with their hats and gloves, coming to visit.

  While Jo thumbed through the Green Book, he reached forward to spin the dial of the radio. Static, more static, the twang of a country-western guitar, then further down the dial the soft melody of Nat King Cole’s “Mona Lisa.” He left it there—Jo loved crooners like Cole.

  “Nothing until Altoona,” Jo announced, closing the book and returning it to the glove box.

  “Won’t be long,” Samuel assured Maybelle before she could protest. “Besides, I saw you sneak that extra piece of pie—or was it two?”

  Maybelle giggled and hid her face, holding up two fingers.

  The song finished, the station coming in a bit clearer now, and the afternoon news break began. “Our top story is from Washington, DC,” the announcer said. “The Supreme Court returned what is certain to be a historic verdict in the much-debated Brown versus the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas case.”

  “Turn it up.” Jo leaned forward, her right palm planted against the cross that hung between her breasts, clasping it against her heart.

  Samuel complied, hoping those nine white men had finally found the courage to do the right thing. Bad enough they’d heard the case twice now; people had been waiting since December for their decision.

  “Who’s Mr. Brown?” Maybelle asked. “Do we know him?”

  “Hush,” Jo said. “This is your future.” Jo taught elementary school in the District, where segregation was federally mandated; it wasn’t only the southern states with a stake in Brown.

  Samuel steered one-handed, noting signs of civilization rising up beyond the farmland ahead: an Esso station on the other side of a river. He stretched his other arm behind Maybelle’s shoulders, Jo taking his hand in hers as her lips formed soundless prayers. Jo and her family were AME back generations. Samuel considered himself a good Christian, even if he was only a wedding-funeral-Christmas-and-sometimes-Easter churchgoer. But after serving in two wars, he’d come to realize that his God was bigger than any building or date etched onto a calendar. The God he prayed to was always there for Samuel, even if He didn’t always answer Samuel’s prayers.

  He hadn’t told Jo—it was one of the few secrets between them—but lately he’d begun stopping in at the Quaker meetinghouse that was on his way home from the hospital. There was no preaching, certainly not the loudmouth, know-it-all type of hellfire and damnation type he’d been raised with in Georgia. No confession, no explaining, no bargaining, no penance. Instead, he’d found a shared silence…and strength.

  Jo wouldn’t understand or approve—especially since the Quakers he sat with in silence were white. For a teacher intent on bringing change to future generations, who’d spent her school holidays lobbying with the NAACP, and who’d taken vacation days last December to attend the Supreme Court hearings, she could be a bit closed-minded. Jo wanted her schools open, with equal funding and opportunity for all. Didn’t mean she ever wanted to actually associate with whites. Maybe because she hadn’t seen as much blood as Samuel had. Black or white, brown or yellow, there was no telling from blood.

  Samuel had seen more than enough fighting and bloodshed to fill a lifetime. First as a medic in the Second World War, then as an Army surgeon assigned to a battalion aid station in Korea. When he finally came home last year, he’d decided he was done fighting.

  Because this new war, this war no one spoke of that coiled and writhed beneath every polite conversation and occasionally reared up to strike with venomous ferocity, this war here at home frightened him…and wearied him. It was all so senseless. As nonsensical as grown men wearing pillowcases for hats, hiding their faces as they terrorized innocent people like his parents and grandparents.

  If nine white men in black robes could wave their magic pens and end this war, bring peace to the land, and protect his daughter’s future, he was perfectly content to let them.

  Jo disagreed. Said it was every parent’s responsibility, no matter where they lived, to get involved, take action. She meant every black parent, of course. Which sometimes seemed a bit hypocritical to Samuel, but he knew better than argue. Jo was more than a dreamer, she was a doer. She knew what she wanted for their daughter’s future, and she’d never give up fighting. It was why he loved her. She was so much stronger than he’d ever be.

  Confused by the sudden tension that gripped her mother, Maybelle turned her questioning expression on her father.

  “It means,” he told her, “that one day you’ll be able to go to any school you want. It means that you can grow up and be anyone you want to be.”

  She thought about that as the road wound through the fields, the Esso station beckoning up ahead across the river. They were close enough that he could start to make out a few houses, the edge of a town nestled in the forest at the base of the next mountain. He glanced at the map on Jo’s lap. Greer. Tiny dot alongside a river. He didn’t even remember driving through it on the way out to Cleveland.

  “Anyone?” Maybelle asked. “Then I’m gonna be a teacher like Momma and a surgeon like you, and a cowgirl and a singer and a pie baker.”

  “That all?” Samuel asked with a smile.

  “Well, sir, I’m gonna go live in that big white house everyone stares at and crowds around and takes pictures of. Then when I see those pictures, I can tell everyone that’s my house and when you live in that house, you’re the boss of everyone, so I can tell everyone what to do and when bedtime is.” She jerked her chin in a satisfied nod.

  Jo rolled her eyes toward Samuel. “In case you ever wondered if she’s your daughter.”

  “Don’t blame me. I’d say she takes after her momma, that’s for certain.” They shared a private smile above Maybelle’s head.

  “You all making fun?” Maybelle asked, squinting her eyes first at her father then her mother.

  “No, baby.” Josephine soothed Maybelle’s hair, patting down a few kinky strands that had come loose from her braids. “Just that, you know, the president lives in that white house and you can never be president. No Negro can.”

  Samuel turned his attention back to the road. It was one of the few areas where he and Jo disagreed. They both wanted to raise Maybelle with an honest view of the world, but sometimes Jo was brutal with the truth
. After all, his own folks still didn’t believe he could be a “real” doctor, saving lives of both coloreds and whites. Last time he’d seen them, his mother had taken him aside and whispered to him, “Be careful about being too uppity around all those white folks. Don’t put on airs, let them know you’re smarter than they are.”

  Of course, his grandparents—who’d all died when he was young, their bodies worn out before their time by decades of back-breaking work—never dreamed of his parents owning their own land instead of sharecropping for white men.

  “I don’t want to be no president,” Maybelle said.

  They crossed over a ratchedy metal bridge and passed the Esso station. Samuel slowed down as the road led them through a section of tarpaper shacks, white men sitting on porches staring slack-jawed while women hung laundry or worked in gardens. Ahead, he spotted larger houses, once proud Victorians and Queen Annes that had fallen on hard times, paint peeling, shutters hanging crooked.

  “You don’t want to grow up and be president of these United States?” he asked.

  “No, sir. President doesn’t know what’s right, sending daddies to war and getting them shot at. I want to make pies for the president. I’ll live in that white house, make pies as good as Gramama’s, and then I can boss him and everyone around just like she does.”

  Jo arched her eyebrows at that while Samuel stifled his grin. Jo’s mother did boss everyone around, and those who tried to resist, she plied with her pies until they fell silent and surrendered to her will.

  “And if the president don’t listen, then he don’t get no pie,” Maybelle finished in a shrill voice that sounded exactly like Samuel’s mother-in-law. He coughed to hide his chuckle.

  “Maybelle Henrietta Mann,” Jo rebuked. “You shouldn’t—look out!”