The Vanishing at Castle Moreau by Jaime Jo Wright

Author:Jaime Jo Wright
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romantic Suspense;FIC042060;FIC042120, FIC027110
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2023-02-13T00:00:00+00:00

twenty-one

Everything magnificently terrifying happened at night. This was a promise, tried and true, made by every frightening novel, every personal experience, and every ghost story ever told.

Daisy cursed this fact as she stood stock-still in the middle of her bedroom. The moon had hidden itself behind clouds tonight, and though her eyes were adjusted to the depths, Daisy still had a difficult time making out the objects in her room. The wardrobe, the bed, the desk were all bulky shapes. The door was closed, locked, yet even now the knob twisted one way and then the other.

Daisy held her arms around herself, fixated on the door. She was alone in this wing of the castle. Desolately alone . . .

There it was again—the rattle of the doorknob. She didn’t ask who was there. Daisy knew there would be no answer. She was alone. Alone with night phantoms.

The phantom woman.

It was a horrible time to recollect the title of Madame Tremblay’s novel. A horrible time to recall the ink drawing of the phantom poised over a sleeping child.

Mrs. Greenberg had told her once that spirits of the dead were not kept away by locked doors, or walls, or even by the prayers of a righteous man or woman. No. They were unstoppable demons of the night, wandering souls, aimless and determined to take the living into their merciless dangling between heaven and hell.

Daisy took small comfort that the door into this particular bedroom seemed to refute Mrs. Greenberg’s superstitions. And regardless of the inadequacies her previous guardian had applied to prayer, Daisy felt her lips move in an urgent plea that God and all His angels would descend on the creature outside her room rattling the doorknob.

The knob stopped moving.

Daisy sucked in a breath and held it.

Silence drifted through every crevice and every crack in the room.

She slowly released her breath, but as she did so, a scraping sound dragged along the floor just outside her bedroom. It sounded like nails against the floor. In her mind’s eye, Daisy could see the image of a ghostly woman being dragged from her bedroom door by an unseen figure, her dead fingernails scraping the wood, her face twisted in agony as the demon pulled her into a hellish unknown.

The scraping ceased.

Daisy held her body stiff. Motionless. As if they would sense the slightest movement.

She hated this place.

Her earlier interaction with Lincoln Tremblay had been a surprise, enjoyable, but this snuffed it out completely. The Tremblays might not have medieval dungeons in their Midwestern castle along the Mississippi, but it had something far worse. It had the ghosts of women who had disappeared.

Like Hester May.

In all that had happened with Elsie, Daisy had almost forgotten the missing Hester May, not to mention the other women from Needle Creek who were yet unaccounted for. All of them had last been seen near Castle Moreau.

It was their spirits that haunted these halls.

If Madame kept her husband’s heart in a treasure box, and pieces of Elsie’s skin

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