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  A Spirit Seeks Asylum

  The old abandoned buildings of the Twin Forks Lunatic Asylum have always fascinated and frightened clairvoyant Cass Donovan, but she never dreamed her psychic abilities would be put to the test there. Then the new owner of the site tells her he plans to renovate it and turn it into a boarding school, and he’ll pay Cass handsomely to determine whether the place is haunted! Cass accepts his offer, but her search for hints of old ghosts soon has her looking for clues among the living when the man who hired her turns up dead.

  Returning to the shuttered asylum looking for evidence of who may have wanted her client out of the way, Cass stumbles upon signs of yet another murder, even as she’s besieged by an onslaught of haunting voices from the past. When it comes to light that rival real estate developers have been hatching plans of their own for the property, Cass sees no shortage of motives for the murders, but she’ll have to find a way to quiet the disturbing voices from long ago and focus on the here and now, because whoever’s behind the killings has targeted Cass as their next victim . . .

  Title Page

  Copyright

  A Spirit Seeks Asylum

  Lena Gregory

  Copyright © 2021 by Denise Pysarchuk.

  Cover design by Dar Albert, Wicked Smart Designs

  Published by Beyond the Page at Smashwords

  Beyond the Page Books

  are published by

  Beyond the Page Publishing

  www.beyondthepagepub.com

  ISBN: 978-1-954717-43-5

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this book. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented without the express written permission of both the copyright holder and the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Contents

  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

  Books by Lena Gregory

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Cass Donovan closed her eyes, inhaled deeply, and lowered the mental barrier she’d so recently learned to erect to protect herself from being assailed by voices from the beyond. Now if she could just perfect a shield that would protect her from Bee’s incessant whining, she’d be set.

  “Well?” Her best friend, Bee Maxwell, poked her arm. If he kept it up, he wasn’t going to be her best friend for much longer. “Anything?”

  She huffed out a breath and slitted open one eye. “I said I’d tell you if I felt anything.”

  “Yeah, well . . .” He rolled his eyes in a true diva fashion only he could pull off and shivered daintily, or at least as daintily as a man who was better than six feet and two hundred-plus pounds could. “Standing here waiting for a spirit or ghost or whatever to reach out and say hello is giving me the heebie-jeebies.”

  Ignoring him, she closed her eye and returned to listening for any hint of an otherworldly presence.

  Bee shifted his heavily muscled frame from one platform shoe to the other and sighed.

  “Ugh . . .” She gave up, pulled out a chair from the long wooden table in the Old Madison Estate’s ballroom, and flopped into it. Truth was, it wasn’t Bee’s fault she couldn’t sense anything. It just wasn’t happening.

  Peering around the room from beneath his lashes, braced to run at the first sign of anything hinky, Bee hesitantly pulled out a chair. “Are you sure you won’t be able to get anything?”

  “Yup. Positive.” Which was unfortunate, since Bee had gone through the trouble of setting up all his camera equipment to catch a glimpse of a ghost for her first vlog, a venture he assured her would be a great income generator during the cold, hard winter months on Bay Island.

  He turned the chair and straddled it, folded his arms on the back, and rested his chin on his forearm facing her. “Nothing at all?”

  “Nah. I just can’t get a sense of anything. It’s as if all the ghosts packed up and took off for the Bahamas . . .” Wind howled, rattling the old windows, as if to prove her point. Heck, if she could, she’d take off to the Bahamas herself. “Or anywhere else warm.”

  “So . . . what’s the problem?”

  How should she know, since no otherworldly figures felt the burning desire to hang around and explain it to her? She propped her elbows on the table and cradled her head in her hands. That wasn’t fair. It wasn’t Bee’s fault this wasn’t working. He’d set up all of his lights, cameras, even some kind of thermometer that beeped whenever it detected any sudden cold spikes. So far, the only thing to set it off had been a particularly strong gust of wind that had infiltrated the room. And that had nothing to do with ghosts, just windows in the old mansion that needed replacing. “I don’t know what the problem is, Bee.”

  “Okay, okay.” He sat up straighter. “No need to get testy.”

  “I’m not—” Okay, that’s a lie. She was totally testy.

  “Exactly.” He pointed a finger at her.

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Point taken. “So. Now what do we do?”

  He shrugged as if their whole plan hadn’t just tanked. “Now we enjoy a nice, preferably warm lunch and wait to see if anything presents itself.”

  Easy for him to say; he’d be able to make his rent and mortgage payments come February and March. “And if nothing does?”

  “Then we’ll move on to the lighthouse. Even after we eat and I pack up all of my equipment, it should still be light enough to go in there. We just won’t climb all the way to the top.” Which would make Bee perfectly happy. Climbing up all those stairs in an enclosed tube wasn’t one of his favorite activities. Nor was it Cass’s. But the view from the top would be amazing and well worth the climb. At least it would be if they were visiting the Bay Island Lighthouse, which they weren’t.

  “I wouldn’t mind climbing to the top of the Bay Island Lighthouse, but no way I’m climbing to the top of Stony Bay Lighthouse in the near-dark.” They’d visited the old abandoned lighthouse before settling on the Madison Estate for their first vlogging attempt, and the creep factor in there was ridiculous, even for Cass. Bee’d nearly had a meltdown. “Those stairs are way too creaky and unsteady to climb in the daylight, never mind at dusk.”

  “We probably should have started there in the first place.” Bee sulked.

  Cass pinned him with a glare and lifted a brow. “Ya think?”

  “Wee . . . eell . . .” He pulled at the silver print silk scarf he wore draped around his thick neck. “What can I say? I figured since you conjured your first spirit in this very room, it would be a great place to begin.”

  “Mm-hmm. That, and the lighthouse terrified you.”

  He shot her a grin. “That too.”

  She laughed. Bee was her best friend in the world, and there was nothing either of them wouldn’t do for the other, but Bee’s level of discomfort with anything otherworldly sometimes made things difficult, considering Cass’s chosen profession.

  “All right, I admit it, you were r . . . r . . . ri . . .” He choked on the word.

  Cass leaned over and slapped him on the back.

  “Right.” He winced.

  Her gaze settled on the large stone fireplace where the image had hovered last winter. A spirit? Maybe. At the time, she hadn’t been sure what she was seeing, still couldn’t say with a hundred percent certainty it had been a ghost. But events since that time had convinced her ghosts were real and she could absolutely communicate with them, so she had to figure that first one had been as real as any that had come after. “Not really. Neither of us was right or wrong. This was a good try, and if this place was still abandoned, it probably would have worked. Who knows?”

  “I guess,” Bee agreed, though only half-heartedly.

  The new paisley print wallpaper, bright lighting, fresh coat of paint on the wainscoting, and cheerful music made the idea of spirits lingering less believable than the first time around, when Bee had spent considerable time dingying the place back up after the new owners had done similar renovations. “Wanna make a deal?”

  He tilted his cheek onto his arm and studied her. “D
oes it involve skipping lunch?”

  “Well, yes, but—”

  “No.”

  “Come on, Bee.” Ugh . . . now she was reduced to whining. When Bee had first suggested the idea of a vlog, Cass had been apprehensive. What if no one was interested? What if no one watched? But the more he’d wheedled her, the more she’d warmed to the idea, and now she really wanted to make it work. If she could get enough subscribers to generate some interest from advertisers, she might be able to keep Mystical Musings, her psychic shop on Bay Island’s boardwalk, afloat through the winter until spring brought a new influx of tourists from Long Island and New York City. “How about if I treat you to dinner at the place of your choosing before the group reading?”

  “Hmm . . . that’s not really fair. Considering it’s winter and there’s not much open.” He studied her for a moment. “But I suppose I could go for a nice juicy hamburger at the diner later.”

  “Yes! Thanks, Bee.”

  “Uh-huh.” He stood, returned the chair to its place, and took his camera off the tripod. “But since I’m skipping lunch, I get dessert.”

  “Sure thing.”

  “And I’m not talking the little dessert that comes with the meal.” He started packing equipment into cases. “I’m talking about a nice piece of cake or pie from the display case when you walk in. Those things are always talking to me, but I can never justify wasting the calories.”

  “That and you’re always full after your meal.”

  He shot her a grin over his shoulder. “That too, I suppose.”

  Cass helped him load everything into her car then drove the short distance to the Stony Bay Lighthouse. Dark clouds gathered over the bay, roiling, churning, whipping ice-cold wind and spray off the choppy water and casting them across the gravel parking lot. Whitecaps surged over the jetty.

  “Are you kidding me?” Bee grabbed his camera from the backseat and hopped out. “This is awesome!”

  Thunder rumbled, a deep angry sound that vibrated beneath Cass’s feet. A trickle of fear prodded her. Perhaps they should wait for another day. It was getting late, and they still had to go to dinner before the group reading at seven. Plus, Beast, her Leonberger, had already been left alone long enough. Any longer and it was almost guaranteed he’d get into some sort of trouble. Even though she’d take him to the shop with her for the reading, she’d need a few minutes to feed and walk him first.

  “I couldn’t have created a better backdrop.” With the wind whipping his bleached-blond hair wildly around his face, Bee snapped picture after picture of the gathering storm. “Hey, grab my video camera out of the trunk, would ya? I’m not going to set up everything just yet, but why don’t we try to get some footage before those clouds let loose all manner of fury upon us.”

  Cass finger-combed her long blonde hair into a ponytail and tied it with a band she yanked from the glove compartment, then dug out Bee’s video camera and handed it to him.

  He opened the passenger door and set his camera on the seat, then pointed toward the bluff. “Go stand over there and we’ll record your opening segment.”

  Cass glanced toward the bluff he’d indicated. Wind tore through the trees, their branches, long bare of leaves, swaying and rocking. Granted, it wasn’t a hurricane or anything, but what if the wind blew her off the bluff onto the rocks below. Images of another body, broken on the jetty not that long ago, popped into her head. “I don’t know, Bee.”

  “Oh, stop.” He rolled his eyes. “It’s not like I’m asking you to stand on the edge of a cliff or anything. Just stand beside the lighthouse; that way it’ll block the wind a bit.”

  She huffed out a breath. “Fine.”

  “Hey, who’s the creative genius here?”

  She laughed as she walked toward the lighthouse so he could get the shot he wanted. He wasn’t wrong. Bee’s designer dress shop, Dreamweaver Designs, stood just down the boardwalk from Mystical Musings. At this point, his annual fashion shows drew a good number of buyers from New York City to Bay Island each fall. If there was one thing Bee knew how to do, and do well, it was put on a show.

  She positioned herself beside the stairway that led to the front door, settling into a crevice along the stone wall. “Good?”

  “Nah, step out a little, so I can get the full effect of the raging storm in the background.”

  She did as he asked. Ice-cold drizzle hit her face and dripped beneath her coat’s collar.

  “Okay . . .” He held the camera as steady as he could against the wind. “Three, two, one . . .”

  Cass offered her most winning smile with her face already half frozen. “Hi. I’m Cass Donovan. Welcome to Mystical Musings, where today we’re going to ponder the existence of ghosts while we take a walk inside the old, abandoned Stony Bay Lighthouse in search of . . . well . . . we’ll have to see what we can find.”

  Bee stopped filming. He held his hand out, palm down, and rocked it back and forth. “Not bad, but we’re going to have to work on your opening line a bit. We can tweak it later, though. For now, let’s get inside before it starts pouring.”

  Fine by her. In some ways, the ice-cold rain that was predicted was worse than snow. As soon as the sun went down, the roads would ice over, and driving the winding road back toward town would be a nightmare. The last thing she wanted was to slide off the road. Again.

  Bee started the camera rolling again. She had to admit, the footage of her climbing the stairs to the big wooden door with the storm ramping up in the background would be dramatic. Now if she could just summon something once they were inside.

  The heavy door groaned as it swung inward. The odor from years of mold and mildew assailed her, instantly clogging her nose. The dampness sent a chill rushing through her. At least she thought it was the dampness.

  She moved into the center of the space, stood at the bottom of the circular iron stairway, and closed her eyes. Speaking out loud to summon a ghost seemed kind of weird, since it wasn’t how she usually made contact, so she simply opened herself and waited, despite Bee’s repeated complaints that it would look boring.

  Wind howled through cracks and crevices long in need of repair. Rain pelted the metal and glasswork above them. Floorboards creaked as Bee moved slowly around her, no doubt searching for the perfect spot to capture her expression the moment she sensed something. Of course, there was a better than good chance he’d run screaming into the night if anything actually did appear, but she gave him credit for trying.

  This wasn’t working. She huffed and opened her eyes.

  Bee lowered the camera. “Nothing?”

  “Nope. Not a whimper.” Maybe she was too preoccupied with thoughts of the evening’s group reading. Attendance had slacked off since before the holidays and hadn’t picked back up again after. Add the coming storm she hoped would hold off for a few more hours . . . She might be better off canceling and going home to snuggle on the couch under a nice warm blanket with Beast and watch a movie.

  “All right. Well, let me at least get some footage of you leaving, and then we’ll wrap it up for the day.” He repositioned himself at her back, across the room from the doorway. “Want to call Stephanie and see if she and Aiden want to meet us at the diner?”

  Cass’s other best friend, Stephanie Lawrence, had recently taken on a foster child she hoped to adopt permanently. The four-year-old suffered from autism, though doctors weren’t yet sure how severe since years of abuse interfered with their diagnosis. “Sure. You can give her a call when we get to the car. Aiden loves the diner.”

  “He sure does.” A warm smile spread across Bee’s face. He pointed toward the door. “Okay, I want you to walk across the room and pull the door open. Hopefully, the clouds out front will show through the doorway, then look back over your shoulder dramatically, keeping your expression serious as you look up the stairway, then turn and walk out.”

  Ugh . . . Sometimes Bee’s flair for the dramatic went too far. “Seriously? We didn’t even find anything here. Why bother?”

  Bee’s attention was already on his camera, though. “Because the outside setting is perfect. We can always come back later and try again. But what are the chances of getting a storm like this next time?”