Unquiet Ghosts Read online

  PRAISE FOR GLENN MEADE

  * * *

  “A riveting thriller in the tradition of Day of the Jackal . . . what a white-knuckler it is. . . . The good old-fashioned swashbuckling suspense never lets up. . . . A major accomplishment.”

  —Washington Post Book World on Snow Wolf

  “Rich in period detail, crisply plotted and paced, Snow Wolf runs well ahead of the pack.”

  —People on Snow Wolf

  “Consistently absorbing. . . . Deftly drawn characters. . . . The sweep of a historical romance and the power of a classic heroic quest.”

  —New York Times Book Review on Snow Wolf

  “Fast, sly, and slick, this thriller delivers the goods—tension, action, plot twists—until the smoke finally clears.”

  —Booklist on Brandenburg

  “Chilling. . . . Another literate and suspenseful thriller from an estimable storyteller who proves that beginner’s luck had nothing to do with his impressive debut.”

  —Kirkus Reviews on Brandenburg

  “With a plot that screams, a controversial edge, and characters with attitude and something to prove, this has all the makings to be the next Da Vinci Code.”

  —Publishers Weekly on The Second Messiah

  “A thrill a minute. A cross between Indiana Jones and Dan Brown. Thriller readers will love this book.”

  —The Midwest Book Review on The Second Messiah

  “Puts a fresh spin on the mystery surrounding the deaths of the Romanovs, in particular the possible escape of Princess Anastasia.”

  —Publishers Weekly on The Romanov Conspiracy

  Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster ebook.

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  FOR MY MOM, CARMEL MEADE, WITH LOVE

  There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.

  —ADRIENNE RICH

  PROLOGUE

  * * *

  Thunder Mountain, Smoky Mountains, East Tennessee

  11:45 p.m.

  Dwight McCoy liked to talk to God.

  He sat in his front porch rocker—angry coal-black clouds on the horizon, lightning spits sizzling from the dark heavens—and stared out at the approaching storm. He always looked forward to his weekend talk with the Big Man, but this time the goats were ruining his conversation. They were going crazy, bleating their lungs out.

  Dwight tried to ignore them as he took a drag on his joint and let the smoke fill his lungs. Usually he liked to pass a quiet Friday evening rocking in his chair on his shack’s front porch, sucking on a joint, his Bible on his lap, indulging in a one-way conversation. But the goats were messing up his evening.

  It would never have occurred to Dwight that in reality he was only three minutes away from meeting God personally. Or that all his prayers were about to be answered. But such was life, always full of surprises.

  The two goats on the lawn were tied to the front porch and kept bleating, getting agitated, then charging toward the porch rails, slamming their stumpy horns into the wood.

  “Easy up, boys. Easy, you hear?”

  Dwight heard a thunderous growl. He stroked his greasy beard and peered out past the mess of junk and crushed beer cans that decorated his lawn. High in the inky night sky, way out beyond his rusted thirty-year-old Chevy pickup and the mess of an ancient ruined tractor, storm clouds bubbled.

  A big one coming, by the looks of it. Dwight sipped from the mason jar, gargled, swallowed a mouthful of burning spirit, and let out a sigh.

  Man, that was good.

  Dwight always kicked off the weekend with some fiesta time—a mason jar of moonshine accompanied by a couple of really good joints. Relaxing on his front porch with a pair of goats and a banged-up old refrigerator full of beer for company was the perfect way to watch some dazzling summer storms. On the tar-black horizon, the show had already started: sizzling bolts of lightning, their volleys of thunder echoing in the darkness like cannon shot.

  Chewing the cud with God was part of Dwight’s enjoyment. Nothing too deep, mind, just the occasional whine about life or the kind of day he’d had on the ten-acre Smokies hill farm since Hilda had passed.

  When the ’shine or the spliffs weren’t up to scratch and it seemed as if God wasn’t listening, sometimes his goats, Barack and Obama, just sat there, listening. Dwight liked to talk to his goats, but tonight neither animal seemed in the mood for social chitchat.

  “Easy up, boys. Easy up, you hear?” he said again.

  The agitated goats were acting kind of strange. Head-butting the porch railing, the clack-clack of their clipped horns chipping the wood. Being tethered to the porch never usually irked them. But for the last few minutes they had been bleating their hearts out.

  “What you getting worked up about, fellas?”

  The goats paid him no heed, just kept head-butting the post. Clack. Clack. Dwight reckoned it was the approaching storm. Bad weather often got them riled, but tonight it was so bad it was getting on his nerves.

  “Settle down, old buddies. Settle down.”

  Dwight swallowed a mouthful of ’shine from the mason jar and wiped his beard with his grimy shirt sleeve. The homemade spirit burned his throat like a lit match but sure tasted good. He sucked deep on the spliff, savored the vapors searing his lungs. Saturday night fever, and all homemade, the weed grown in the woods behind him, the ’shine made in his own still.

  A frightening rumble of thunder echoed in the night sky, but he felt so relaxed he barely reacted. The storm wouldn’t hit here for maybe another five minutes, which gave him enough time to enjoy the fireworks. After that, the rain would hammer like bullets on the cabin’s tin roof. He sucked again on the joint, held the smoke in his lungs, let it out slowly.

  They said weed frazzled your brain, but Dwight didn’t care, not since the day Hilda went to cancer. From then on he figured he was on the downhill slope anyway, and weed would change nothing. Hilda had slipped away in her sleep after a year of agony. One minute breathing, the next lifeless as he clutched her hand. He talked with God about that, begged not to let him suffer as painful a going as his wife’s. Give him a heart attack, hit him with a Mack truck, whatever, just take him quick.

  Dwight grabbed his walking cane. He flicked the hook end to open the porch refrigerator. The light inside came on. Cans of Bud, milk, some provisions. But mostly Bud. He hooked out a Bud, grabbed it in the crook of his foot, kicked it into the air, and caught it in his palm, then banged shut the door with the tip of his snake boot.

  Not bad for an old guy. He hissed open the can, swallowed some cold amber. High in the Smoky Mountains, away from civilization, more thunderbolts sizzled, the storm coming closer. Clack. Clack. The goats took another bleating run at the rail post. Their distress was driving him nuts.

  They said animals sensed imminent danger. That in fear they moved up into the hills when tsunamis or hurricanes hit. He reckoned the goats sensed the approaching thunderstorm.

  “Settle down, fellas. Nobody’s going to get crisped.”

  At that precise moment, a booming thunderbolt echoed around the mountains, and the goats went crazy. Dwight looked up at the sky as something caught his eye. Weird.

  A spark of light spit out of the da
rk storm cloud. The spark blazed, like a glittering star. What the . . . ? Dwight squinted and felt his heart race. Was it his imagination, or was the object shooting toward him?

  For a moment he wondered if he’d drunk too much. Sometimes the moonshine caused him to have visions or to perceive the real meaning of existence. Once he’d decided to keep a notebook and pen by his bed, and when he woke in the night, he’d write down his jumbled thoughts, hoping to decipher the meaning of life hidden in his dreams, and fall back to sleep. Next day, sober, he’d read his scrawled notes: oil change due Friday, pay wheel tax, buy a packet of smokes and a gallon of milk. Packet of butt wipes for sensitive skin.

  Dwight rubbed his eyes and blinked. The spark blazed in the black sky dead ahead of him and got brighter, speeding out of the storm cloud. Whoever said drinking ruined your eyesight was lying, because Dwight saw the object glowing brighter and moving closer by the second. It was definitely coming toward him, whatever it was.

  A UFO? Some weird light phenomenon? Now it sparkled brighter, seemed to break apart. A piece of the object fell away, a ball of flaming light. Now there were two objects. Then the smaller one disappeared, its light dying like an orange emergency flare as it dropped toward Earth.

  But the bigger object kept hurtling toward him.

  “Holy cow.”

  Alarmed, Dwight pushed himself out of the rocker and went to turn to his cabin, to grab his shotgun. His survivor’s instinct was already telling him it was a total waste of time as the thing came screaming toward him like a banshee.

  He heard a swish of air and then a mighty thud when something hit the forest floor with a sound like an earthquake, shaking the ground under him, as if some unseen monster in the bowels of the Earth had just given a massive growl.

  The powerful impact blew Barack and Obama clear off the ground, sent the goats’ exploding carcasses flying through the darkness, as if sucked skyward by a tornado.

  The same force field plowed into Dwight like an artillery shell blast, shattering his cabin, turning it to matchwood, crushing every bone in his seventy-five-year-old body, and killing him instantly.

  All in all, Dwight McCoy could not have asked for a quicker and less painful death.

  1

  * * *

  I keep two photographs by my bed. They are my deepest wounds.

  One is a snapshot of my parents at a party celebrating my younger brother’s West Point graduation ceremony. Sweet, funny, twenty-one-year-old Kyle, his sapphire-blue eyes smiling for the camera, looking so handsome in his gray and white cadet’s uniform.

  In the photograph next to Kyle’s stands my colonel father, tall and proud, every inch the Army man, his uniform creases so razor-sharp they could cut tomatoes, every medal buffed and polished. We’re a military family, Appalachian settlers who come from a long line of battle-hardened Scotch-Irish warriors, the kind who seem to be born missing a fear gene.

  And standing between my father and my brother is my mother, Martha Beth Kelly. I often remember her with a vodka grin on her face as she danced the evening away, her wild red hair tossed, one hand raised like a crazed rocker, in the other maybe a joint if she’d gotten hold of one, more often a cocktail glass kissing her smudged lipstick.

  And always that look on her face, the one that told me there was no stopping her from making a drunken fool of herself, even as my father tried to coax her off the dance floor.

  My father, the courageous six-foot-three colonel who battled his way across Iraq to the gates of Saddam Hussein’s palace. Who fought hand-to-hand at Fallujah and lost his left foot in a grenade blast.

  Kyle and I adored my father. He was our idol. Someone gave my kid brother a miniature soldier’s uniform when he was six. He paraded up and down our backyard with his shoes polished and a stick in his hands for a rifle.

  I asked, “What are you doing, Kyle?”

  A smile lit up his face. “Playing cadet. When I grow up, I want to be a soldier just like Daddy.”

  Kyle was already into athletics, a stickler for competition sports, but easygoing with it. When my dad saw him marching solemnly in the yard, he said, “Cadet Kyle, what is your motto?”

  Kyle stood to attention, held a salute, and recited the cadet’s West Point code. “A cadet does not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.”

  My father beamed at me and said, “Looks like we got another one for West Point.”

  My father, who always makes me feel safe, even though I am an adult. Once in a Florida bar a few years back while I was on vacation with my dad, two big, steroid-muscled guys drinking beer wolf-­whistled at me and whispered a dirty remark as I passed them on the way to the restroom. My dad was over there in a second, right in their faces, his muscled arms bulging, his chest proud, spoiling for a fight, ready to beat the life out of anyone who taunted his daughter.

  He insisted that the idiots apologize. They did and slinked off like a pair of sorry kids, abandoning their beers. He’s that kind of father. He has his pride, takes no prisoners, and backs off from no one.

  A man who was never truly afraid of anything—except the fiery-tempered little woman from Temperance, Georgia, whom he loved and married but was never able to make happy no matter how hard he tried.

  And all because they could never share their deepest secret.

  * * *

  The two photographs I keep are side by side in a silver-toned metal frame. The second image is of my husband, Jack, and me and our two smiling, beloved children, Amy and Sean, then four and eight.

  The photograph showed Jack not in Army uniform, as so often in the images I keep of him, but wearing a Jimmy Buffett tropical shirt while on vacation at Myrtle Beach in South Carolina one blistering summer. It was a vacation meant to salve my husband’s mental wounds from a punishing deployment in Iraq—and it was three months before he and our children vanished, never to be seen again.

  Three months before those “terrible events” befell us all, as my father refers to our tragedies, his anguished face like granite whenever he talks about our heartbreak, which is seldom. For a hardened veteran who witnessed many die in battle and who rarely flinched recalling the experience, any mention of our family’s loss brings him to the edge of tears.

  And so I keep these photographs by my bed and not in the rooms downstairs, well out of his sight. The photographs do not make me cry, or at least not the way they once did.

  And although they will always be a reminder of my sorrow, my wounds are no longer searing but a healing scar. Grief is still my shadow, but now my world has changed.

  I have a new life.

  In time, I found a new husband and child to ease the pain of those I lost.

  * * *

  There are other photographs I hold sacred, of my kid brother and me growing up, enjoying holidays and vacations together.

  Kyle and I shared the same manic Kelly sense of humor, the same sometimes short-fused temper, the same taste in food and movies. We were born within eleven months of each other, so my father used to call us his Irish twins.

  Kyle was the perfect baby—blond, porcelain-skinned, good-humored. When I was four, for a time we shared a room together. On stormy winter nights when he was scared to sleep alone or afraid of the dark, Kyle would climb into bed beside me to seek refuge.

  “Ats, Amy. Ats.” As an infant, Kyle couldn’t pronounce “Thanks”; it always came out as “Ats.”

  I loved the soft feel of his puppy-fat cheeks, the angel kiss of his infant lips, and the scared-tight arms around my neck after he’d crawled in to snuggle next to me. For me, there is nothing quite so heart-stirringly touching as the hug of a child clinging to you out of fear, as if it connects us to a thread gloriously human and yet divine woven into our souls.

  For a long time, Kyle was the quiet one in our family. He’d tag along behind me, holding on to my sweater, head down and shy, hardly saying a
word. One Christmas at a family party when he was eight, he shocked us with an amazing crimson-faced rendition of my father’s favorite song, “Danny Boy.” Kyle’s sweet singing voice as angelic as that of a soloist in the Vienna Boys Choir.

  It wasn’t like Kyle to thrust himself into the spotlight, but someone discovered the reason: he was sneaking sips from my mother’s Irish whiskey and soda. For every childhood Christmas party afterward, carefully monitored to make sure he hadn’t touched the seasonal booze, he’d bestow his version of “Danny Boy” and bring everyone close to tears.

  As he grew older, it became Kyle’s shower song. Whenever he stepped under the steaming jets and the sounds of “Danny Boy” rang through our house, we would all stop and listen, for deep in his honeyed voice was a touching echo, a sound that my father teasingly used to say, like the bagpipes, “never failed to light a blazing bonfire under our Celtic chromosomes.”

  * * *

  Other images I keep are in photograph albums of the day I got married at age twenty-one at Cedar Springs Church in Knoxville, Tennessee.

  Snapshots of my children as infants and during their growing spurts, at treasured milestones in their short lives—vacations, weekends at the lake or the beach, the day a tooth was lost or when they’d dressed for Halloween or celebrated a birthday.

  First came Sean, barely ten months after Jack and I married. Shy little Sean, always eager to please even as an infant, who loved to be read stories and have his back rubbed.

  Three years later, I was pregnant again with Amy. She raged into our lives like a whirlwind, a spark plug of a girl, the exact opposite of her shy brother. A giggling rebel imp who never stopped talking, brimful of life, endlessly on the move.

  “Ain’t that girl got no off switch?” Jack used to joke.

  She seemed to have a powerful furnace burning inside her, until she collapsed into bed at night. Even then, she could never sleep in the dark. I guess my daughter always gave me trouble at bedtime. She insisted on a light blazing or would instantly wake, become anxious, and call down from her room if the landing light was ever turned off. As if, like a flower, she thrived on light and sunshine.