“You weren’t in touch with your uncle that often, from what I understand,” Leyton said.

  “That’s true. It was hard to keep in touch while I was on the kind of missions I was on and in the places I ended up.”

  Chapter 12

  After dinner, Emerson helped the CSF agents carry their luggage into their cabin. Jessie came with them, for her safety.

  “Tomorrow, I want to talk to the doctor who said your uncle had died of a heart attack,” Leyton said. “Jack can stay with Jessie. I want you with Chet and me because you know the doctor. In the meantime, Jack can try to hack into your uncle’s computer.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  Leyton looked at Jessie and she smiled. “I’m going to be writing. I hope Jack has something to do so he’s not too bored, if he can’t get into Emerson’s uncle’s computer.”

  “He’s happy to help with protecting you.”

  Jack nodded. “Yeah, that’s my real job. If you need help with brainstorming for ideas, I can do that too.”

  She laughed. “You’re on.”

  “And I’ll see if I can access Mr. Merriweather’s computer.”

  They all said good night, then Emerson and Jessie headed back to his home. “You know, I can help you with brainstorming.”

  She chuckled. “Oh, that’s great. Be forewarned, I’ll take you up on it.”

  “Did you want to do any more brainstorming in bed?” He was hoping one of these nights, she would just give in and stay with him.

  She patted his chest. “Not tonight. Night, Emerson. I’ll see you in the morning.” She kissed him but she was quickly pulling away. Maybe with her friends here, she suddenly felt uncomfortable about acting too intimate with him. They would be sure to tell her sister, he suspected.

  “Night, Jessie.” He kissed her tenderly and then they went their separate ways. He sighed as he undressed for bed.

  The next morning, the guys joined Jessie and Emerson to have eggs and sausage for breakfast. Then Emerson left with Leyton and Chet to see the doctor, leaving Jack with Jessie as she worked on her story. Emerson had taken his bag of tools to use on a return visit to the mausoleum after they finished questioning the doctor.

  When Emerson and the agents arrived at the clinic where the family’s doctor was working, he had a patient he was seeing. Leyton hadn’t wanted to make an appointment with him. They had badges and they said they were with CSF, and it sounded to Emerson like they were a special unit that was with the FBI.

  The receptionist called the physician and he had them come back to meet with him.

  Dr. Hennessey Jones was white-haired now and he still had the kindly face Emerson had remembered when he’d seen him on doctor visits when he was young.

  Emerson shook his hand and so did the CSF agents.

  “I know why you’re here,” the doctor said, taking a seat while the men sat opposite him.

  Emerson wasn’t sure if the doctor would try to cover up what he’d done or figure the gig was up, but he was kind of surprised that he would just come out and open up to them.

  Before Emerson could ask him why in the world he would falsify his uncle’s death, Leyton said, “Okay, tell us what you have to say.”

  “Don’t tell me you people don’t talk to each other.” The doctor folded his arms across his chest.

  Leyton opened his mouth and then smiled. “Witness protection. The U.S. Marshalls got here before us then. So Mr. Merriweather didn’t come to you to make up this story about his heart attack?”

  The doctor looked aghast. “No. He would never have done such a thing. He knows I wouldn’t do that.”

  “Had he ever approached you about doing that?” Chet asked.

  “No.”

  “Can you give us the name of the agents who needed the report that said Mr. Merriweather had died?” Leyton asked.

  “No. They produced badges like you did and then they said they had to protect his identity. They wouldn’t give me any details why he had to go into Witness Protection or I would have to be in it too.”

  But Emerson was thinking that the men who visited the doctor weren’t from the U.S. Marshalls Service. That the Marshalls would concoct their own story and not involve a local doctor.

  “I’m so sorry,” Dr. Smith said to Emerson.

  “Don’t be. I just hope he’s alive and well.” Emerson wasn’t about to say he had opened the coffin and found his uncle’s body wasn’t in there. “Thanks, Dr. Jones.” Emerson rose from his chair and the doctor and the agents all rose at once. He shook the doctor’s hand and then the other men did the same and they left the clinic after that.

  “Hey, before we do anything else, we’ll help you set the coffin back into place at the mausoleum,” Leyton said.

  “Okay, thanks. So what do you think about the Witness Protection scheme?” Emerson asked.

  “They weren’t U.S. Marshalls,” Chet said. “Not that I want to go there, but what if they were somehow involved in his death and made up the story that they were with the U.S. Marshalls Service? Then everyone who knew your uncle would believe he died of a heart attack and there was no foul play.”

  “Hell.” Emerson really didn’t want to believe his uncle was dead.

  “Another thought I had, would your uncle be capable of pretending to you that he was dead just so he could retire? What if you came home, but decided you didn’t want the headache of the resort and went back to your line of work?” Leyton asked.

  “We had discussed it. I had told him when he retired, I would take over the resort. I had always loved being up here when I had the chance to visit him and while I grew up here while living with my aunt and uncle.”

  “Would he have known what you were really doing?” Leyton asked. “It’s supposed to be top secret.”

  Emerson raised a brow at him.

  “Okay, so we have our own ways of learning of things. But you know what I mean. Your uncle ran a resort. He wouldn’t have the databases or connections to learn what you truly did. At least I don’t think he would,” Leyton said.

  “I came home in pretty bad shape a few times and had to convalesce, so he didn’t know what my job was exactly, but yeah, he did know it was dangerous.”

  “Okay.”

  Emerson directed Leyton to the cemetery and once they arrived, he told them where to park. Then he grabbed his bag of tools and they crunched through the snow to the mausoleum. He was almost afraid they would find his uncle’s body in the coffin this time!

  Then Emerson wondered—would Leyton say he could see his aunt’s ghost in the mausoleum? Not that Emerson really believed he could.

  Jessie was typing away on her story while Jack was watching out the window for signs of trouble. “Do you want some hot cocoa?” she asked.

  “Yeah, sure. So what’s going on between the two of you?” Jack asked, but he remained at the window on the lookout.

  “Emerson and me?” She shrugged and pulled her milk out of Emerson’s fridge. She found his double chocolate cocoa mix and made up two mugs of cocoa and brought them over to Jack and then sat down at the coffee table with hers. “I like him. A lot. I never thought I would like a good guy, but he’s a lot more fascinating than most of the ‘nice’ guys I’ve met who didn’t interest me.”

  “Thanks for the cocoa.” Jack stayed at the window and drank his hot chocolate. “What if he goes back to his former occupation?”

  She sighed. “It’s possible.” What if the thrill of excitement, adventure, and danger were what he really lived for. Then there was the matter of Emerson wanting to go after Smith for setting Emerson and his team up to be ambushed and slaughtered.

  “Are you going home for Christmas?” Jack asked.

  She smiled at Jack. “Okay, yes, I plan to and I asked Emerson if he would come too. And if his uncle turns out to be alive and he’ll be safe coming out there also, we’ll want him to. But it doesn’t mean anything for us as—well, I guess we’re dating. But it doesn’t mean a mating for us for sure.” She didn’t want the word to get back to her family that she was close to settling down with a guy finally. Her mother would be preparing a wedding cake for them pronto. “Emerson’s here by himself, his uncle is gone, he has no other family, the cabins are vacant, so there’s no reason why he shouldn’t come down and spend Christmas with a cougar family.”

  “I agree with you there. Especially since he is a cougar.”

  She got a call from Emerson and she was eager to learn what they had learned. “Hey, what happened with the doctor?”

  “He said U.S. Marshalls put my uncle in Witness Protection.”

  “Really? The doctor was duped!”

  “You think so too? We suspect they weren’t really U.S. Marshalls. We’re just at the mausoleum getting ready to put the coffin back in place.”

  “Okay, good. Nothing is going on here. Jack couldn’t access your uncle’s computer, but he has been helping me with my story.”

  “All right. Well, we’ll be there soon.”

  Then they ended the call and Jessie told Jack what they had learned from the doctor.

  Jack shook his head. “I’ll go back and try my hand at getting into Emerson’s uncle’s computer again.”

  “Hey,” Emerson said to Leyton, after they got the coffin and covers back in place. “Jessie was telling me that you have the ability to see ghosts.”

  Leyton smiled at him. “Oh.”

  “Yeah. She said you would make me a believer.”

  Smiling, Chet shook his head.

  “Are you really sure you want to learn the truth?” Leyton asked.

  “Yeah, sure.” Emerson just couldn’t see that any of it was real, but he was game.

  “Your aunt was named Elise, her given name, Givens. She married your uncle thirty-five years ago when she was twenty-one. She loved you like a son,” Leyton said.

  “You could have looked that up anywhere.” Emerson wasn’t convinced that easily, not that he really thought Leyton had looked into all of his past, but then again, he might have considering they worried about who Jessie was seeing, given her propensity to date rogues.

  “Your aunt said after your parents went missing, you stole a boat and went out to search for them all along the rugged coastline. It took them three days to find you, but even then you had provisioned yourself with food and water and clothing to last for a week or more. They knew you would turn out to be a survivalist.”

  “That was in the news.” Even though it would be something Emerson figured would be a little harder to discover since it happened so long ago.

  “Your aunt said you would be a skeptic.”

  “Why is she here? I would think she would have moved on.”

  “She returned when she heard her husband had died. But he wasn’t here.”

  “Also known.”

  “She said you loved chocolate, and would never eat her pumpkin or apple pies. But if she made you a chocolate cream pie, chocolate cheesecake, or chocolate mousse, you were all over it.”

  Emerson smiled. No one knew that but his aunt and uncle and his parents.

  “She also said you went through a phase when you were eleven where you ate only pizza or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. And you wore only black. No patterns or anything. No other colors. Just black.”

  Again, Emerson smiled. That was something else no one but his aunt and uncle knew about.

  “Does she know what Uncle Paul was planning to do? This charade with his death?”

  “She won’t say, but she did say that she approves of Jessie—for you. That you make a cute couple.”

  Emerson chuckled. “That could be coming from you.”

  “She says you were always hardheaded.”

  Emerson laughed. “What did I destroy of hers when I was eleven?” No one but his aunt and uncle knew about that either.

  “A wind-up clock. You took it apart because it wasn’t working and then you couldn’t put it back together again.”

  “Yeah. I didn’t think she would ever let me live that down. But my uncle saved the day by taking me to the store to get another one. I had to work it off even though I already did a lot of odd jobs around the resort.” And he realized then, he did believe Leyton had connected with his aunt’s spirit.

  “I miss you,” Emerson said to his aunt. “I miss Uncle Paul too. I wish I could let him know I quit my job for good and am ready to manage the resort if he wants to retire for good in Florida, but I want to know if he’s all right. That he’s truly not in trouble and having to hide his identity. And that if he wants to stay at the resort and just have fun while I manage the day-to-day business, I would like that too.”

  “She can’t say what’s going on. But she says she loves you both.” Leyton took a deep breath. “She’s gone.”

  Emerson let out his breath. “She wouldn’t say what had happened to my uncle.”

  “He would visit her though. She said you always came with him when you visited and spoke with her.”

  “Yeah. But wouldn’t he have said something to her about what he was doing before he left?”

  Leyton nodded. “I’m sure of it, but she’s keeping his confidence.”

  “She would. I can’t believe you can speak to ghosts.”

  Chet said, “Yeah, it took a lot for me to believe in it too. Then I learned Bridget, who I had worked with and wanted to date, could read minds. Except she couldn’t read Travis’s, another one of our special agents, whom she mated.”

  Emerson laughed. “That could be a problem.” He was thinking about Jessie and if she could have read his mind.

  “Jessie can’t read yours,” Chet said, “I suspect, it’s probably a good thing for you.”

  Emerson only smiled, but then he recalled the picture Jessie had taken of the two men in her cabin. “I have one other idea. Jessie took a picture of the two shifters. What if we run those by the doctor and see if he recognizes them as the men who went to see him about my uncle, who claimed to be with the U.S. Marshalls.”

  He showed the picture to Leyton and Chet.

  They both laughed. “They’re naked,” Leyton said, stating the obvious.

  “Yeah, I’m sure that will shake up the doctor if it turns out the men he saw were the same men who broke into the shed and cabin five.”

  “Let’s go,” Leyton said.

  When they went to the doctor’s office again, the receptionist looked surprised. “He’s in with another patient.”

  “We’ll wait,” Emerson said.

  When the doctor learned Emerson and the CSF agents were back, he shook his head. “You all don’t watch the old “Columbo” series, do you?”

  They all smiled.

  “We have a picture of a couple of men who dropped by the resort and wanted to know if they might look like the two U.S. Marshalls that came to see you,” Emerson said, showing the doctor the picture on his phone.

  The doctor’s jaw dropped for a second. He glanced up at Emerson and the other men.

  “Were they?” Leyton asked.

  “Uh, yeah. What’s going on?”

  “We’re investigating the case. That’s all you need to know,” Leyton said.

  “Thanks, Doc.” Emerson shook his hand again. Okay, this was really bizarre.

  After saying their good-byes again, they headed out to the car.

  “Okay, well, that’s a new one on me,” Leyton said.

  “More of the puzzle to decipher,” Chet said.

  When they arrived back home, Jack and Jessie greeted them.

  “What did you find out?” Jessie asked, sounding eager to learn what they had discovered.

  “The naked men in your cabin? They pretended to be U.S. Marshalls to get Dr. Jones to say my uncle died of a heart attack.”

  “So he’s alive,” she said, hopeful.

  “We hope so. Leyton spoke with my aunt.”

  “Wait, she’s deceased—he spoke to her ghost in the mausoleum?”

  Chapter 13

  Jessie couldn’t believe that Leyton saw Emerson’s aunt’s ghost. She knew Leyton could do such a thing, but she hadn’t thought Mrs. Merriweather’s spirit would be hanging around the mausoleum.

  “Yeah, Leyton said he saw her and conveyed some of her messages with me,” Emerson said, smiling at Jessie.

  “Oh, so did he convince you he can see ghosts?” She was hopeful.

  “My aunt did.”

  Jessie smiled. “Good. That could be an issue between us if you didn’t believe, when so many of my friends have special psychic gifts that I believe in.”

  “That would never have been an issue between us.”

  “That’s good to know.”

  Then Emerson got a call and he answered it. “Fitzgerald?”

  Florence Fitzgerald of CIA fame? Jessie wondered why she would be calling Emerson, and then she wondered if Flo had any idea where Smith was. If Emerson took off to chase Smith down, then what would happen to the resort? Even though no one was here—except for her and a couple of troublesome bears.

  “Uh, yeah. Okay.” Emerson glanced at Jessie.

  He looked so serious, she was certain he had word of where Smith had gotten off to and Emerson would be on his trail as soon as he could. But Jessie didn’t want to leave the resort until her time was up, and she was enjoying being here with Emerson.

  She couldn’t be selfish though. Smith could very well be out to kill Emerson and the others on the team. And she knew Emerson had to take Smith out if he could.

  Emerson couldn’t believe Flo was calling him, especially after she told the cougars of Yuma Town that he was Black Ops. “Yeah?”

  “Hey, I know you’re probably pissed off at me for revealing what you do to some of the cougars, but we’ve got your back. Tell me what had occurred on the mission.”

  Emerson explained all that had happened to him and his men.

  Everyone was listening to him in the meantime, waiting to hear what was going on and she said, “Okay, I’m trying to discover where he’s gone to. I’ve got all kinds of sources, but I haven’t found anything yet. I will let you know as soon as I discover where he is though. I’m sure you know as well as I do that he missed all but one of his objectives. And he will be out to terminate you, knowing that you will be planning the same thing for him.”