Peri Jean Mace- The Complete Series Read online

  Peri Jean Mace: The Complete Series

  Catie Rhodes

  Contents

  Forever Road

  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

  Epilogue

  Note from Catie

  Black Opal

  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

  Note from Catie

  Rocks & Gravel

  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

  Note from Catie

  Rest Stop

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Note From Catie

  Forbidden Highway

  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

  Epilogue

  Note from Catie

  Rear View

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Note from Catie

  Crossroads

  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

  Note From Catie

  Dead End

  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

  Note From Catie

  Dark Traveler

  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

  Note From Catie

  Wrong Turn

  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

  Note From Catie

  Last Exit

  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

  Author’s Note

  Let’s Be Pals

  About the Author

  Series Copyrights

  Forever Road

  Peri Jean Mace Ghost Thrillers #1

  1

  An inhuman shriek sliced through the pre-dawn darkness, stabbing at the haze of sleep coating my brain. My keys slipped from my fingers and clattered to the porch’s wooden floor. Cursing, I bent to retrieve them and dropped my backpack in the process. I shook my head, willing myself to wake up.

  Another furious wail echoed over the pasture behind Memaw’s house. Anger shooed away the last of my early morning fog. I glared at the lights blazing from the sixteen-foot travel trailer at the back of the pasture. A crash shook the trailer, and a male voice cried out in protest. A few coyotes in the pine forest howled at the disturbance. They had the right idea.

  “You can’t tell me what to do, you…you wall-eyed baboon.” She was so loud Rae could have been standing right next to me. Damn, that girl has a big mouth. And a nasty talent for insults.

  The muscles between my shoulder blades rolled into hard knots. My cousin was a pimple on the ass of my existence. If she kept it up, she’d wake Memaw, our paternal grandmother. If I went out there to tell her to shut up, she’d want to fight. Both options sounded almost as fun as running from an angry alligator. Almost.

  On cue, Rae let out another furious howl followed by a string of curse words.

  I left my stuff on the porch, vaulted the broken chain-link fence, and jogged across the pasture. My steel-toed work boots squelched and slapped on the mud, splashing my clean blue jeans. Of all the crappy ways to start a day. Rae couldn’t have driven me crazier if she brainstormed ways to do it.

  Halfway to the trailer, a light began to glow in the pine forest be
hind it. It stopped me in my tracks, but only for a moment. Rae picked that moment to escalate things.

  The trailer’s door slammed open and banged against the aluminum siding. Chase Fischer, sans pants, stumbled out. His naked ass glowed in the waning moonlight. I groaned. This can’t end well.

  I ran the last few yards to the travel trailer, doing my best to ignore the sounds and sights coming from the woods behind it. The odor of sweat and alcohol surrounded Chase, my earliest childhood and lifelong friend. It hurt to see him associating with my trashy cousin; I couldn’t even lie to myself about that.

  Rae charged from the trailer, her platinum hair a wild halo backlit by the trailer’s interior lights. Chase and I both took a step away from her.

  “Just go.” Her sandpaper smoker’s voice echoed against the pines. “You’re a clown and a monkey’s ass.”

  “Come on, sugar,” Chase slurred. “This dew’s cold on my bare feet. You don’t want me here, just let me have my pants.”

  He wasn’t the only one uncomfortable. There was no way to un-see this crazy scene. I redirected my gaze to the tree line, hoping to lessen the shock of it. Wrong choice. The air rippled with a cacophony of whispers as ghosts of the Palmore family clamored for attention. The lights in the woods glowed brighter, and a silhouette stepped to the edge of the forest, watching us. Fear crawled up my back and sat on my shoulders, so heavy it crushed the breath out of me. Coming so close to this part of the property was a serious error in judgment, Peri Jean. I usually avoided the place where the Palmore family perished over a century ago.

  I dragged my attention from the woods and stepped into the light spilling from the trailer’s open door. Knowing Rae would attack at the first show of weakness, I shoved my trembling hands into my pockets. How she felt okay acting this way mystified me. I was no prize, but I didn’t have drunken screaming matches in my grandmother’s backyard at the ass-crack of dawn. It all boiled down to respect. Rae possessed none. Not for herself or anybody else.

  “Your grandmother is still asleep, Raelene Georgia Mace.” I stated the obvious, but I knew no other way to convince her to stop yelling. “It’s not even dawn, yet.”

  Rae ignored me and ducked back inside the trailer. She returned holding Chase’s jeans and slung them at him with a grunt. The jeans crumpled at my feet. Stinging embarrassment prickled the back of my neck. I squeezed my eyes shut and wished myself out of the situation. When I opened my eyes, nothing had changed. I picked the jeans up and tossed them to Chase. He mumbled thanks, but I couldn’t even look at him. Why, you dumbass? Why?

  The air around the trailer cooled. That could only mean one thing. The ghosts responsible for the light show in the woods had found me. Fear stirred the coffee bubbling in my gut. I groaned at the tiny strip of pink and orange lighting the horizon’s edge. Full dawn, the only thing capable of chasing these nasties away, couldn’t come fast enough.

  Rae stomped to the edge of the wooden deck pushed against the travel trailer, every step screeching as the metal and wood rubbed together. Her loosely belted robe hung open, displaying her enviable, though fake, breasts. She twisted her mouth into a feral snarl and said, “What do you want, Looney Tunes?”

  “I want you to hold it down.” That only covered half of it. I wanted to run back home with my tail between my legs. With the ghosts here, I cursed myself for deciding to confront Rae.

  Rae looked down her nose at me and thrust out her jaw. I halfheartedly returned her glare, too distracted by the spirits swirling around me to put my heart into it. Ghosts gravitated to me like bugs to a bug light. Too bad I couldn’t zap them and make them go away. Instead, I lived a freakish horror show of feeling dead people’s emotions and seeing their grisly spirits.

  Rae and I squared off, each trying to intimidate the other into backing down. Chase took a few steps away from us and shimmied into his dew-wet jeans. He patted the pockets, evidently searching for his keys and cursed when he realized they weren’t there.

  “You know this stuff upsets Memaw.” Breaking the silence first lost me a little ground, but I needed to speed things up. A ghost from the long ago fire stood not six feet from me. His tattered clothes fluttered and flapped in the early morning breeze. I smelled the reek of charbroiled flesh so acrid I bit back a gag. Every muscle in my body knotted with tension. I couldn’t stop my teeth from chattering. A scream built in my chest, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to hold it back much longer.

  “You’re not the boss of me, Peri Jean Mace.” Rae propped her hands on her hips.

  A million replies, all smart-assed, came to mind. I swallowed them for the sake of brevity.

  “That’s true.” I let Rae win a small victory just so I could get away from the woods and the ghosts sooner. “Just do this for me, all right? I’ll owe you one.”

  “You mean a favor?” Rae slouched in her robe and looked exactly like what she was—an ex-con pushing thirty and living on her grandmother’s grace. Not that I’m any younger. Or that much more successful. Maybe I didn’t have much room to judge Rae. What I said next reflected my weakening resolve.

  “I’ll do you a favor if you’ll keep it down.” Oh, I know I’m going to regret this. How much remains to be seen. “Starting now.”

  Rae pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered them to me. My nicotine demon, which I’d been starving for the past two weeks, begged and pleaded. I shook my head anyway.

  “That’s right, you quit. I gotta quit now, too.” She lit her cigarette. The dim flame from her disposable lighter revealed bruises on her cheeks and underneath her eyes. I gasped, skin tightening, as I imagined how much a beating like that would hurt.

  “I told her to call the cops.” Chase kept a safe distance from us.

  “And I said I’d take care of it...boy toy.” Rae’s tone brooked no argument. Chase developed a sudden interest in staring at his bare feet. I averted my eyes, too. His love life had nothing to do with me and hadn’t for some time. It didn’t make minding my own business any easier. My heart ached for him and the stupid choices he made.

  The sun, at last, peeked over the horizon. The burned ghost man faded away with a scream in my head, although the stench of fire and roasted human flesh lingered in the air. Relief loosened my tight muscles and left me feeling giddy. If only all ghosts faded away at daybreak.

  The growing daylight illuminated more damage on Rae’s face and my throat constricted. A raised patch with a crisscross pattern decorated one cheek. Both eyes were black and puffy. Handprint bruises laced her neck, and her nose looked broken. Rae watched me look her over.

  “Who did that to you?” Despite my current irritation at Rae, fury filled me at the idea of someone beating her so cruelly. I wonder what she did to deserve it. Oh, Peri Jean, how shitty to even think that way.

  “Go inside and fix me some orange juice.” Rae jerked her head at the trailer. “I need to talk to Peri Jean.”

  Chase hung his head and slouched into the trailer to do his mistress’s bidding. It caught my attention Rae hadn’t asked for gin or vodka in her orange juice. No telling what’s going on. I bet my pinky toe I’ll be in the middle of it soon enough. I glared at her after Chase shut the door.

  “What?” She smirked, and that pissed me off.