A Haunting at Hensley Hall (A Ravynne Sisters Paranormal Mystery) Read Online Free Page B

and leaned back with a sigh. Just lately, the traffic, the people the noise had become, well, irritating . But there were compensations…museums, galleries, theaters, restaurants, clubs and the shopping. The fabulous shopping! But now that the initial ‘rush’ had worn off, she began to think there was someplace else she’d rather be, though she hadn’t the foggiest notion where that was.
    She laughed and the driver glanced at her, speculatively, in the rearview mirror. Out of all her siblings…half and otherwise…she was most like Charlie. They both had gypsy souls. Neither seemed able to stay in one place very long, though Charlie had been settled for the past 3 years? Now she and Meg had entered some contest to win a Victorian House of Horrors, as Meg described it in her latest letter.
    It was always Meg that wrote, keeping in touch with everyone…sort of like the family ‘town crier’. She sounded so much happier now. Apparently, the divorce had gone smoothly, though they were still trying to recover the money Mitch emptied out of their bank account on his way out of town. With no children, it would all be final soon and Meg would be free.
    She remembered the first time she’d met her two half-sisters. She was five years old and Allyn only three, when they went to the airport to meet their plane. With a parent gripping each of her hands, Allyn in her mother’s arms, they had waited for the passengers to debark. She looked up at her dad and saw tears in his eyes. Her mother was smiling. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do, then she saw them and they were not at all what she had expected. Somehow, she had thought they would be children still, like her, someone to play with not grownups almost as old as her mother!
    Of course, they had only been teenagers…Meg shorter and rounder with a riot of dark blonde curls, while Charlie had been taller…much taller…with straight, silver blonde hair that spilled down her back. She looked like she’d stepped straight out of a storybook! Hunkering down, she had met her at eye level, and smiled. She always remembered her words. “Looks like I have another baby sister to look after” and she always had. She was the first one she’d called, when she’s got into trouble last year.
    She frowned as she slipped into that memory. She had reported Jared for harassing her and they’d blown her off with, “That’s not the story we heard!” She could just imagine what they’d ‘heard’. Jealous, possessive, unable to believe her ‘no’ meant just that, he had followed her for weeks, but he was a cop, one of their own, and she wouldn’t be allowed to smear his name or hurt his family with her ‘unsubstantiated’ accusations. Never mind that she wasn’t his first victim. The others were local women who had withdrawn their complaints for undisclosed reasons.
    They had said she ‘stalked and killed’ Jared, because that was what they wanted to believe. The stalked part was where they got it wrong. She had killed him. Blown a hole in his manly chest as he forced her up against the kitchen counter. She had spent many nights, trying to forget his look of surprise.
    It had been Charlie who had made them look at the forensic evidence: the broken pane in her kitchen door, the bits of glass the coroner had dug out of Jared’s lacerated elbow, the size twelve work boot prints found outside all her windows, which had matched Jared’s exactly.
    Charlie made them do their jobs with a quiet force that pushed everything out of its way. Then she had made a call to someone, an important someone, that stirred up everyone and set her free…all charges dropped.
    Now she was here. The Big Apple. Exactly where she had thought she wanted to be…a new recruit to the trendy crowd of the smart upwardly mobile. She had joined the wolf pack of ‘in control’, independent, savvy women from her office, as they trolled the clubs, looking for? She didn’t think they’d quite