Which gave Bronco some time.

From the corner of his eye he caught a glimmer of movement, a blur through the trees. Not the dog this time. Fender was right on his heels.

He felt his skin crawl. There had always been rumors of ghosts haunting the grounds, lost souls who’d found no escape from the tarnished history of the Beaumont family. Bronco, though he hated admitting it, couldn’t help believing some of the old stories that had been whispered from one generation to the next. Even his grandfather, a brawny no-nonsense Welshman had believed that tortured spirits moved through the stands of live oak and pine and had sworn on the family Bible that he’d seen the ghost of Nellie Beaumont, a seven year old girl who drowned in the river in the 1960s. Bronco knew nothing more than that her death had devastated the family. Glimpses of the girl had always been reported the same: A waif in a dripping nightgown, dark ringlets surrounding a pale face, a doll clutched to her chest as she forever wandered along the edge of the water.

And the sightings hadn’t stopped with Gramps. His father, too, and a man of the cloth had sworn he’d seen the ghost, though Bronco thought Jasper Cravens’s glimpse of the apparition had been the likely cause from his affection for rye whiskey rather than an actual viewing of a bedraggled spirit. And hadn’t he once, while sneaking through these very woods thought he’d caught sight of a pale, ghost-like figure darting through the underbrush.

He’d told himself, the apparition had been a figment of his imagination, but now, the thought of any kind of wraith caused the hairs on the back of his arms to ripple to attention.

“A crock,” Bronco reminded himself just as he spied a deer, a damned white-tailed doe, bounding through a copse of spindly pine.

He made his way toward the back of the house, through weeds and tall grass to the listing verandah that stretched across the rear of the house and offered a view of the terraced lawn and bend in the river. Quickly, across the rotting floor-boards he walked to the side door, the one his grandfather and the rest of the staff had used. He slid the key from his pocket, sent up a prayer for good luck, then slipped the key into the lock. A twist of his wrist and … nothing. The key didn’t budge.

“Shit.”

He tried again, forcing the key a bit. Shoving it hard. Once more the lock held firm.

“Goddamn it!” Just his luck. After waiting all this time, after planning and hoping and … this always happened to him! In an instant he saw his decades long dream of wealth disintegrate into dust. Maybe he’d have to break through the old plywood covering the windows. But that would take too long, be too noisy.