Only the Dead Within

Book 2: Grave Diggers

by Lisa Childs

Genres: Ghost

Synopsis

Between mysterious missing persons cases, unsolved murders, and the menacing specter of an eternally blood-thirsty grave digger’s ghost, the town of Gold Creek, Michigan, has a grim reputation, and so does the wealthy, ruthless Gold family, who run the local funeral home and cemetery—and may be behind it all . . .

Yet another teen has gone missing from the Gold Memorial Gardens, and Child Protective Services Investigator Claire Underwood isn't giving up until she finds him. For Claire, solving the case is more than business. Years ago, she lost a friend in that cemetery.

Over time, the authorities deemed all the disappeared teens runaways, while local legend blamed the ghost of the murderous grave digger—much to the satisfaction of the Golds, also known as the “Ghouls.” Claire has always suspected the Golds were involved, including in some recent murders among their own. She went to high school with Noah Gold. He was very quiet, and very intense. Like someone with something to hide.

Noah is sick of being cast in the same light as his conniving, money-hungry family. He’s still a bit anti-social, but he’s just as determined as Clare to unearth the truth—and finally bury the legend of the grave digger. With a common goal, he and Claire join forces, but it’s a quest that puts them in mortal danger. Only with the help of the local sheriff—whose own brother vanished years ago—do they have a chance of surviving. Yet, the truth that awaits them is more terrifying than any ghost . . .

Release date: July 29, 2025

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 352

Sample

The wind whistled through the cemetery, hurtling leaves across the grass and the graves and even into the mouths of the swans that gurgled out water into the fountains. Tyler Hicks pulled up his hood and hunched his shoulders, bracing himself against the cold slap of that breeze. Bracing himself like he had to for other slaps.

Other blows.

He didn’t want to go back. But how much longer could he stay here before someone found him? His time was running out.

Mom kept leaving him voicemails and messages.

“You need to come home, Ty. You need to talk to that CPS investigator. Tell her what you told the other one.”

That everything was fine at home. The bruises were from a stupid fight at school. Or he fell down.

Or...

Anything but the truth.

He never told anyone the truth. Not even Noah, and he’d really wanted to. But he was so used to lying that he hadn’t been able to do it. Then Noah had fired him.

God, he wanted to talk to Noah, to tell him what he’d been too afraid to tell him before. Maybe that was why he was hiding here, sleeping in the equipment building that Noah didn’t know he still had the key for, and hanging out in the cemetery where he’d worked over the past summer.

Because he wanted Noah to find him. Not that CPS investigator. Claire Underwood. She’d left him a voicemail, too. “Tyler, I really need to talk to you as soon as possible. We can speak at your school with a counselor present or with another adult.”

Because he wasn’t an adult yet. He was only sixteen. That was why . . .

That was why he was trapped.

But what if Noah could be that adult? Maybe then Tyler would be able to tell the truth, finally, to him and to CPS investigator Claire Underwood. On the voicemail she sounded older than the last one he’d talked to, who must have been fresh out of college because she’d been young, like just a few years older than he was. She hadn’t realized he was lying, but maybe this one would if he agreed to talk to her.

Or maybe he would just stay here in Gold Memorial Gardens. He’d found enough places to hide. And at night, which it was now, he walked the grounds like the grave digger was rumored to walk them. Using the light of the full moon as his guide, Tyler continued through the cemetery toward the edge of the woods and lowlands where the cheaper plots were located, which was where the grave digger was buried. Years ago, before they had the special equipment they had now, some old man used to dig the graves by hand the night before funerals.

Tyler used the toe of his sneaker to clear the fallen leaves from a flat tombstone and revealed the words and numbers chiseled into the granite: Lyle McGinty 1899–1990. Despite all the time Tyler spent in the cemetery, he’d never seen the ghost of the old man other people claimed they saw here at night. He had seen a light a couple of times, something wavering in the distance in the cemetery that encompassed acres and acres of land in Gold Creek, Michigan. The light was supposed to be the old man’s lantern.

Tyler might have also heard a scrape or two, which was supposed to be the sound of the old man’s shovel hitting rocks and stones as he dug a grave.

The wind kicked up again, hurtling the leaves so hard that they stung his face. Tyler flinched like he did when that hand swung toward him, and he shivered, too, from the cold and the sudden fear. Thick clouds moved over the moon, blocking it from his sight, plunging him into darkness. Hell, he couldn’t see a damn thing.

Blindly, he fumbled in his pocket for his cell. When he pulled it out, the screen lit up with notifications of missed calls and texts. But he had no interest in returning any of those. Instead he intended to make a call, or maybe just send a text.

He scrolled through his contact to the Golds. Gigi. She was in his class at school, but they never talked. Either she was shy or a snob. Her brother, Toby, was probably in his contacts, too, and also that new girl, Sarah. She actually seemed pretty cool, especially for a kid who’d been homeschooled before moving here. But he couldn’t dump his problems on her; she’d been through a lot since she showed up in Gold Creek with her mom. The whole Gold family had been through hell since the old man had died a few weeks ago, so he really shouldn’t bother them. But Noah was the only adult Tyler wanted with him if he actually agreed to meet this new CPS lady. So he stopped scrolling at Noah. His fingers shook a little when he texted: I know you hate me, but I need to talk to you. Please.

He hoped Noah didn’t hate him, but Tyler knew that he’d really, really disappointed him. And that sucked. For both of them.

Noah didn’t have to give him a second chance. He didn’t even have to answer him.

Tyler let out a sigh and slid his cell back into his pocket. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered anymore. Even if Noah answered him back, Tyler was still trapped.

He wished he could just disappear like the ghost of the grave digger. Because while Tyler had seen that wavering light before and heard the scrape of the shovel, he had never seen him before. Well, he’d never seen anything other than some mist around that light. But that was just mist, fog, whatever. It hadn’t been a ghost. He hadn’t actually seen the ghost.

Until now. Until the clouds shifted away from the moon and Tyler saw what was standing right in front of him. But was this a ghost or a real person or something even worse?

The shovel swung toward him, the moonlight glinting off the metal blade. He didn’t even have time to flinch before it connected. Pain radiated through his skull, and there was a loud ringing in his ears. His knees buckled, and he dropped to the ground. But he was conscious, and he reached for his cell to call for help.

But before he could even pull the phone completely out of his pocket, the shovel swung toward him again and everything went black.

Gold Creek, Michigan, was a nightmare Claire Underwood had vowed to never relive. Yet she was driving through that nightmare right now, the headlights of her state vehicle barely penetrating the thick darkness of the night. The darkness made it hard for her to see the numbers on the mailboxes along the road. But she had to be close.

She’d actually been back in town a few weeks already. But nineteen years ago, when she’d made that vow at fifteen, she’d still been young and naive enough to think she could make a fresh start and leave the past in the past. And whenever she thought of it, she liked to pretend it was just a memory of a grim fairy tale. Just a bad story someone had made up. Fiction. Nothing that had actually happened, in a place that never existed.

But now she was finally where she needed to be, as the headlights illuminated the correct numbers on the side of a dinged up and rusted mailbox. She braked in front of it, but she didn’t turn into the driveway.

Not yet. She had to wait for backup. She had to abide by the rules, or she wouldn’t just be relocated, she might lose her job entirely. She snorted at the thought, though. Child Protective Services was always understaffed; they couldn’t afford to fire anyone unless that investigator wasn’t doing their job. Claire did her job, sometimes too well. So maybe she could have refused the relocation to Gold Creek without repercussions. But she hadn’t been willing to risk it.

And maybe some of the issues she’d been having were about this place, and she needed to come back to figure out what was real and what wasn’t. Or if she was even real anymore. As lights illuminated her back window, she glanced into the rearview mirror and noticed her own reflection first. While she was pale, she wasn’t a ghost. Her eyes were big, staring back at her through the lenses of her black framed glasses. And she’d bound her curly hair back with a clip. She looked real.

On the outside.

On the inside . . .

Red and blue lights flashed in her rearview. Just once, before the SUV that had pulled up behind her went dark. This was what she’d been waiting for. But instead of turning into the driveway, she pushed open her door and stepped out onto the crumbling asphalt of the street. This area wasn’t like other parts of Gold Creek, with the big houses on large lots where the roads were often repaved and well-maintained. She’d grown up around here where the long dirt driveways led back to small houses or manufactured homes sitting in the middle of unkempt acres. When she’d lived in this part of Gold Creek, the main road used to be dirt, too, like the driveways, with enormous potholes.

When she started toward the SUV, the driver side door opened, and she saw the emblem on the door. Gold Creek Sheriff’s Department. She’d been waiting for a deputy to show up before approaching this family again, but the person who closed the door and started toward her wasn’t a deputy. Luke Sebastian was the sheriff now, but he’d once been a kid like her who’d needed someplace safe to live.

“Claire, is that really you?” he asked, and he extended his arms as if he intended to hug her.

But Claire stepped back and held out her hand instead. “Sheriff Sebastian,” she said. “I’m surprised you even remember me.”

“Of course I remember you,” he said.

“I didn’t expect you to,” she admitted. But she had an idea why he had, because it was real. That nightmare. It had happened, and she wasn’t the only one who couldn’t forget it. “A lot of kids went through your parents’ house, and I was just there for a couple of months. I think you might have even been gone to the army or navy or whatever when I was staying there.” She remembered him, though, because he was one of the Sebastians’ success stories. He’d always stayed out of trouble and had devoted his life to service, first in the military and now in law enforcement.

“Marines,” Luke replied. “And I was gone for most of your stay, but my parents talked about you a lot back then—”

“I can imagine why,” she muttered. She shouldn’t have come back; it was clear too many people remembered what she’d spent the last nearly twenty years trying to forget.

“They still talk about you, Claire,” he said. “They’re really proud of you.”

She wasn’t a success story like Luke; she was just a survivor. She shrugged. “I’m surprised they remember me, with all the kids they had going through their house.”

“They remember every one of them,” he said with affection.

Clearly he believed that. After over a decade as a child protective services investigator, she wasn’t sure she did. The Sebastians might not have had as many short-term fosters as some families did, where kids stayed only until other family members could be located. The kids, who were just someplace for a few hours or days, were probably forgotten. Like she should have been, since she’d only stayed with the Sebastians a couple months. She wasn’t the only one who’d stayed for a short time, though; she’d had a friend who’d passed through that house quickly, too. And she still wondered where he’d ended up.

“That’s kind of them,” she remarked, then reminded him of why they were there. “I have been trying to track down Tyler Hicks. His school counselor reported seeing bruises on him. Not the first time.”

“You think it’s abuse?” He pointed toward the driveway. “Parents?”

“I don’t know what to think,” she said. “I haven’t been able to interview him.”

For some reason her new supervisor had ranked the case a priority two, which allowed seventy-two hours before initial contact and the interview. Claire had been trying to find him from the minute she’d been assigned the case forty-eight hours ago. The bruises, along with not being able to locate him, had Claire feeling like it should have been a priority one case, which allowed only twenty-four hours to make contact and ensure the child was safe. But her supervisor had, with great irritation, pointed out that the prior case had been closed on the family because there were no concerns of abuse. That investigator, who was no longer with CPS, had believed the kid’s story about a fight at school.

But Claire had been doing this a long time, so long that she didn’t really believe anyone anymore.

“So the parents aren’t letting you talk to him?” Luke asked.

“Mom and stepdad,” she said. “Dad skipped out a while ago. Mom insists that the kid, like his dad, has run off, probably crashing with friends, because he doesn’t want to rat out one of those friends over the bruises.” She snorted slightly, doubting that it was a friend he didn’t want to rat out.

“You don’t believe her?” Luke asked.

She shrugged. “I have often had parents try to hide their kids with other family members so that I can’t interview them.”

Luke sucked in a breath. “Oh, I didn’t realize that. I haven’t been the sheriff very long and have only gone out a couple of times with CPS before this. And in the Marines, as an MP, I had a few domestic situations I needed to investigate, but I guess there wouldn’t have been many places for them to hide their kids on the base.”

“I wouldn’t have thought there would be many places in Gold Creek, either,” she said. But she’d had a friend disappear never to be seen again. Had Peyton run away, or was he just gone?

Luke let out a shaky sigh now. “You’d be surprised.”

“Probably not,” Claire said. “Not after nearly a dozen years of doing this job.”

Luke whistled. “That’s impressive. From what I understood from other CPS investigators, people usually don’t last long in your career.”

She shrugged again. But what she really wanted to say was, “It helps when you’re already dead inside.” Because that was how she felt, how she’d felt for so damn long.

“Hello? Is there someone out here?” a female voice emanated from the darkness.

Claire recognized it from their calls. “Mrs. Buczynski, it’s Claire Underwood.”

“I saw police lights,” the woman said as she stepped out of the shadows into the light of the state vehicle Claire had left running on the street. Mrs. Buczynski’s home didn’t sit as far off the road as some of the others, but still she would have had to be staring outside to see that brief flash of lights before Luke had shut them off again. Mrs. Buczynski turned toward the sheriff. “Did you find Tyler? Is he in trouble?” She glanced toward the dark SUV then, as if trying to see inside it.

“Why would he be in trouble?” Luke asked.

The woman wrapped her arms around her thin body. Maybe she was cold since she wore only a flannel shirt over a tank top and jeans. Or maybe she was nervous. “I don’t know. I don’t know why he hasn’t been home, either, since the school started this whole misunderstanding.”

Claire held in her snort of derision. Misunderstanding. God, she’d heard that word so many times. This is just a misunderstanding. So you didn’t molest your child?

You didn’t strike them?

You didn’t treat someone dependent on you, someone you’re supposed to love, so horribly?

Sure, it was just a misunderstanding.

“You haven’t reported Tyler as missing,” Luke said. “Ms. Underwood is the one who came to me. Why haven’t you contacted me about your son?”

“I . . . I . . .” the woman stammered. “I thought he had to be missing seventy-two hours to report him.”

“Tyler is under eighteen,” Luke said. “You should have reported him missing immediately.”

The woman shrugged. “But he does this sometimes. Skips school, hangs out with his friends, crashes with them. If I called every time I didn’t know where he was, I’d be calling you all the time.” She glanced nervously at Claire then. “That doesn’t make me a bad mother. That’s just how it is with teenagers, Ms. Underwood. Do you have kids of your own?”

God, no. She wanted to say that, but she just shook her head and ignored where Mrs. Buczynski was going with that, where all parents went to—her being unable to understand parents since she wasn’t one. She didn’t have to have kids in order to know when they were being abused or neglected. She knew because she’d once been one of those kids herself. “So you haven’t heard from or seen Tyler since the school called CPS?”

The woman shook her head. “No. I think that spooked him. He didn’t like all the unnecessary attention and questions from . . .”

“The last investigation,” Claire finished for her.

The woman shrugged. “That was stupid then, too. The school overreacts.”

And this mother underreacted. Or maybe that was just because she knew exactly where he was and how he’d been hurt.

“Do you have anything on his phone?” Luke asked. “Any tracking devices?”

The woman’s eyes widened as she stared at the sheriff. Her eyes were dark while her hair was nearly white it was so bleached. “I . . . I don’t know.”

“Do you pay for his phone?” Luke asked.

She nodded. “Yeah, the only job he had was this past summer and it didn’t last long before that prick Gold fired him.” She gasped. “Guess I shouldn’t say bad stuff about that family in this town. But . . .”

Everybody always said bad stuff about the Golds, even back when Claire had lived here. They just never dared to say it to their faces, at least not to the older Golds. The younger ones had been taunted and called ghouls at school. But the older Golds had too much power in this town, definitely over the old sheriff and probably over this one, too.

“The Gold family has been through a lot,” Luke remarked softly and sympathetically.

Claire hadn’t been back long enough and didn’t care enough to listen to town gossip, but she faintly recalled something making the national news about the Golds. Even though she couldn’t remember exactly what it was, she didn’t ask. She wasn’t here about the Golds.

“We need to find Tyler,” she reminded his mother and the sheriff.

“Yes,” Luke agreed. “Mrs. Buczynski, if you pay for his cell phone, you can give me permission to have the company locate where it is, if you don’t have the app on your phone. Sometimes the app is installed and you might not know it. Can I see your phone, Mrs. Buczynski?”

The woman stiffened and her arms tightened around herself. “I . . . I . . .”

“Don’t you want to find your son?” Claire asked.

“Of course I do,” the woman replied, her thin body bristling with defensiveness.

She just didn’t want the sheriff to find whatever else she might have on her phone, Claire concluded.

“I will look only for the app,” Luke assured her. He must have drawn the same conclusion Claire had. “I won’t open your texts or any other private communications.”

The woman stood there, almost as if she hadn’t heard him, for a long moment. Then she finally pulled her phone from the back pocket of her jeans. “It’s not like I have anything to hide,” she said. “It’s just awkward having someone look through your stuff.”

Claire thought about the messages on her phone. There was nothing on it that was awkward or embarrassing. No sexting. Not even flirty texts. Mostly just work conversations, except for the coworkers who talked about TV shows and documentaries they’d watched.

“I promise, just the app,” Luke said.

She held up the cell to her face, probably to unlock it, and handed it to him.

“You do have the app,” Luke said. “And Tyler’s phone is on it.”

Had his mother lied about it then?

“I . . . I didn’t know that,” she said. “Could someone else have put it on there?”

“If your phone was unlocked,” Luke said. He touched the screen, pulling open the map that pinpointed the teenager’s location.

Claire didn’t need to read the address to know the location from all the little tombstones and crosses on the screen. “He’s at the cemetery.” There was only one in Gold Creek, because the Gold family had had the monopoly on death in this county for generations. Then that monopoly had extended to other areas in other states. Their local family business had gone national, maybe even international for all she knew or cared.

“What the hell would he be doing there?” his mother asked.

“Kids hang out there a lot,” Luke said.

So not much had changed in Gold Creek since Claire had lived here nearly two decades ago. Hopefully they didn’t also still disappear from the cemetery like they had nearly two decades ago. That was where Peyton had been heading the last time she’d seen him.

“Other kids, yeah, but not Tyler, not after that prick fired him,” his mother insisted.

Claire couldn’t help but wonder which prick she was talking about. Thanks to the old patriarch’s multiple marriages, there were a lot of Golds. “Who, specifically, fired him?” she asked.

“Noah,” Mrs. Buczynski replied. “He’s the one who takes care of the cemetery, the modern-day grave digger. Tyler was helping him with lawn maintenance and stuff. But for some reason the prick fired him and threatened that if he ever found Tyler on the property again, he would have him arrested for trespassing.”

“You don’t know what that some reason for his getting fired was?” Luke asked. “Because that seems like a pretty extreme reaction from Noah.”

Noah was a few years older than Claire was, but she remembered him as a high school senior to her freshman. And she remembered something else about him that unsettled her, too. So she wasn’t a bit surprised at how extreme he or any of the Golds had been. All of them were as odd as they were entitled.

Mrs. Buczynski lowered her head and stared down at the ground as if she couldn’t hold the sheriff’s gaze any longer. “I don’t know. But we should go get him, shouldn’t we?”

“I do need to speak with Tyler as soon as possible,” Claire said. She should have already interviewed him.

“Don’t I have to be there when you talk to him, like last time?” his mother asked.

The fact that she’d been present when he’d been interviewed last time might have affected what the kid had actually felt comfortable telling the previous CPS investigator.

“No, he just needs to have an adult with him,” Claire said. And she glanced at Luke. “I think the sheriff will qualify for that, as long as Tyler consents.”

“But I’m his mom,” Mrs. Buczynski said. “I should be the one protecting him.”

“He doesn’t need protection from me,” Claire assured her. “I just need to ask him a few questions and make sure he’s safe.”

“That’s all we all want, right?” Luke pressed the woman as he handed her phone back to her. “To make sure he’s safe. Ms. Underwood and I will find him and talk to him.”

“Bring him home,” Mrs. Buczynski said, her voice so sharp that it was an order, not a request.

But that wasn’t an order she could give. Claire needed to interview the kid, and then she would assess whether he would be returned to his home or removed from it. That was the job of a child protective services investigator, to make sure the child was safe.

The woman didn’t give her or Luke a chance to reply; she just turned around and headed back down her driveway toward the house with lights aglow in the windows except for where the silhouette of a man blocked the light. He was tall and broad. Maybe the stepfather.

“I’ll meet you at the cemetery,” Claire told Luke. It wasn’t a place she particularly wanted to go, especially at night. The only time she’d gone after dark had been another one of the many nightmare experiences she’d had while growing up in Gold Creek.

“Follow me there,” Luke told her.

“I remember where it is,” she assured him. Despite her efforts, she’d never been able to forget.

“I’d still like you to follow me,” Luke said.

She shrugged. I. . .