Dead of Night

Page 48

He shook his head, glanced away. “I don’t know what the hell is going on. But somehow, everything that’s happened is connected to you. You’re the key to all this.”
“To what?”
“The first victim’s name was Amber Gleason. Her last name used to be Hays. Does that name ring a bell?”
Sarah shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“Are you sure about that? Because we found a connection between the two victims. Amber Hays and Holly Jessup used to live right here in Adamant. They went to high school with your sister.”
Holly Jessup.
Sean was holding on to her arms now. Sarah knew that if she wanted to run, he would stop her. But it didn’t matter. She had no place to go.
His haunted eyes searched her face, as if looking for something to believe in. “Everything comes back to you, Sarah. Tell me how that blood got in your bedroom. Tell me why the only connection we can find between the two dead women is you. Tell me how you knew about those footprints before we found them on the first victim.”
“I can’t,” she whispered.
* * *
Sean watched Sarah walk back through the trees toward the house. He was torn by the desire to follow her back and the need to maintain a professional distance. But whatever perspective he’d managed to hang on to had pretty much been shot the moment he saw her.
He thought about the years they were together, all that baggage she’d carried around. The missing blocks of time, the hazy memories. Both easily explained by the pills.
But now, he had to wonder if it was something more. Something that even Michael Garrett had missed.
Two women were dead, two were missing, and her father’s throat had been slashed. By her own design or otherwise, Sarah was the catalyst for a nightmare scenario that reached from a tiny town in Arkansas all the way down to New Orleans. She was in big trouble, and Sean didn’t know how to help her. He didn’t even know whether or not to believe her.
The wind picked up, and he could hear the bells tolling in the distance. He followed the sound through the orchard and all the way across a field to the old farmhouse that was the site of Rachel DeLaune’s murder. He’d been there once before, although he’d never mentioned the trip to Sarah. He’d stood in the front room, in the exact spot where her sister’s life had ended, as he’d tried to put together what had happened. It was there in the house that Sean had begun to wonder if he really wanted to take his investigation any further. If the truth he uncovered might force him to make a terrible choice.
He climbed the porch steps now, the bells still clanging in the distance. The hinges creaked as he pushed open the door, and the floorboards sagged against his weight as he stepped through.
The house was cold and dim. The grimy windows filtered the weak sunlight, and Sean wished he’d brought a flashlight. He could barely make out the graffiti on the walls. Four-letter words and phone numbers scrawled alongside the fading satanic symbols.
He walked to the center of the room and knelt, his fingertips brushed across the dark stain on the floor. A chill swept through him, and the hair at the back of his neck lifted. He had the sudden feeling that he was no longer alone.
Slowly, he stood. Across the room, a door off a narrow staircase stood open and he walked over to peer up into the shadows.
“Someone there?”
He drew his gun and started up the wooden steps. At the top, another door opened directly into a bedroom. An old wardrobe stood against one wall, the mirrored door cracked and blackened with age. Clothes and books and what looked to be clumps of human hair were scattered across the sagging floorboards, and the stench of rotting flesh stopped Sean in his tracks.
A dead rat, he thought. He knew the smell of a human corpse and that wasn’t it.
Crossing the room, he opened the wardrobe. Nothing inside. Not even the carcass of a rodent.
He reached out to close the door, then froze. For a split second, he could have sworn he saw someone standing behind him in the mirror.
No one was there. Nothing but dead space.
Something scurried across the floors in the shadows. A rodent—very much alive, he thought.
He turned back to the mirror, and now he saw what he had somehow missed before. A message written backward on the wall behind him.
I am you.
Chapter 27
The body was released by the end of the week, and the funeral was held graveside at two o’clock on Thursday afternoon. The weather was beautiful, cloudless and warm, one of those late-winter days that seemed as if spring was right around the corner.
Sarah had gone to the mall the day before and bought a black dress with a matching jacket, and the weather was so mild, she hadn’t even thrown a coat over it. But it was chilly in the shade of the awning and she found herself shivering when the wind blew.
Tim Mason delivered the eulogy after all, but Sarah heard very little of the service. She was in her own little dream world, until he spoke the line “...survived by his daughter, Sarah,” and then she glanced up, her gaze meeting his for a split second before she looked away.
Her eyes strayed to the row of headstones nearby. Her mother, her sister and now her father. Everyone gone, but her.
Curtis stood in the sunshine, away from the crowd, and as Sarah watched, he knelt beside Rachel’s grave, hand on his chin, seemingly as deep in thought as she’d been a moment ago.
When he looked up, Sarah was struck for a moment by the sadness in his eyes, by the air of confidence and purpose that always seemed to be at war with whatever it was from his past that still drove him. Shaped him. She thought again about what he’d said when he drove her home from the hospital that day. One small thing done differently and we become someone else.
When was that moment for her? When had she become someone else?
She shivered as she stared at her father’s coffin, wondering what his last moment of life had been like. Wondering whose face he’d seen as he struggled for his last breath. And she thought of his words to her.
You did it. It was you.
Had he gone to his grave still believing her a killer? Had her mother?
Sarah looked up at the sky, cloudless and blue, and yet it seemed to her that twilight was already closing in. The sunlight spangling down through the trees had lost its warmth. The shadows had started to lengthen.
She looked at the faces all around her, wondering if one of them was the killer.
Or was the real killer the face that stared back at her from the mirror?
Sean, she thought. Please help me figure this all out.
But he had his own worries at the moment, not to mention his doubts about her. He’d gone back to New Orleans and she hadn’t seen him since.
As the minister’s words droned on, Sarah’s gaze returned to her father’s casket, and she felt the wrench of a long-forgotten memory, hazy now with the passing of time.
She couldn’t have been more than four at the time. She was in her bed, lying wide-awake listening to a strange noise coming from Rachel’s room next door...
* * *
Sarah got out of bed and opened her door. The noise was louder in the hallway. She padded on bare feet toward Rachel’s room and stood right outside the door.
The noise distressed her. She didn’t know what it was. She wanted to go wake up Mama, but she knew better. Her father would be mad, and he scared her when he got angry.
After a few moments, the sound stopped and she heard her father’s voice speaking softly. So softly, Sarah couldn’t tell what he was saying.
She wanted to turn and run back to her room before he caught her. He wouldn’t like it if he found her in the hallway. She wasn’t supposed to leave her room at night.
Mustn’t come out. Mustn’t tell.
The warning whispered through Sarah’s mind.
The door opened and she could see inside Rachel’s room. Her sister was lying on her side, not moving...not crying. Just lying there.
Her father came out of the room then and he saw Sarah in the hallway. Before he could say anything to her, she turned and raced back to her room. She jumped into bed and pulled the covers over her head.
As if that would protect her.
She heard his footsteps in the hallway. Pausing outside her door...
A moment later, he was at her bedside. He jerked away the covers and grabbed her arms, yanking her up off the bed.
“You little brat. You’ve been nothing but trouble since the day you were born,” he said in a cold, angry voice. A voice that made Sarah whimper.
“I’m sorry, Daddy.”
“Don’t call me that. It makes me sick to hear you call me that. I’m not your father. You hear me? You’re nothing to me but a goddamn mistake.”
Sarah tried to cower away, but he wouldn’t let her go.
“What did I tell you about coming out of your room at night? Huh?”
“You said not to,” she whispered.
“You do it again and see how long it takes me to get rid of you. I should have sent you away a long time ago. Should have shipped you off to a place where girls like you belong.”
Sarah knew what he meant. He’d told her before. He’d send her to a place for bad girls. A place where they locked you in a dark room and didn’t ever let you come out. Sarah didn’t want to go there. She was afraid of the dark. And she didn’t want to leave Mama and Rachel.
“I don’t like the dark,” she whispered.
“Then you mustn’t tell,” he said, his fingers digging into her arms.
* * *
Sarah walked to the far side of the cemetery and found a bench where she could sit and be alone. She pulled her jacket around her to ward off the afternoon chill as she watched a pair of cardinals flit through the branches of a magnolia tree. The memory had left her shaken and heartsick.
A shadow fell across her and she turned in surprise.
“You look like a woman who is about at the end of her rope,” Curtis said as he sat down beside her.
“What gave it away?”
“Your obvious preference for the company of the dead to that of the living, for one thing.”
“The dead can’t hurt you,” Sarah said.
“That’s true.”
She stared at her shoes. They were a little too high and a little too tight. She hadn’t noticed until now that her feet were killing her. She reached down and pulled off her shoes.
“You do realize it’s the dead of winter,” Curtis said. “I would warn you about catching your death, but that would seem like a really bad pun at the moment.”
“Yeah, it kind of would,” Sarah agreed. “Not to mention that a doctor should know better. Even I know that colds are caused from germs, not the weather, and I’m the slow one, remember?”
“You were never the slow one.” Something in his voice made Sarah glance up. The shade from the magnolia tree had deepened his eyes to jade as he looked out over the graves. “You were smart as a whip. Much brighter than anyone else I knew. You didn’t just see things, you observed them. You didn’t just watch people, you studied them. I think that’s why those portraits you used to sketch were so horrifying. You had a way of seeing things in people, hidden things that were not always flattering. And then you magnified those traits so that the likenesses became grotesque caricatures.”
“I never drew you that way,” she said.
“Thank God.” He glanced at his watch. “I hate to cut this short but I promised Gran I’d give her a hand this afternoon.”
“We hired a bunch of people for that. Esme shouldn’t have to lift a finger.”
“You really think she’s going to turn that kitchen over to strangers?”
Sarah winced. “Good point.”
“Do you need a ride?”
“No, thanks. I’d like to just sit here for a while. I’m not in the mood to face all those people. Half of them think I killed my father for his money. The other half...” She shuddered. “God only knows what they think. I hate all that whispering behind hands. Those long, speculative looks.”
“Since when do you give a damn about what anyone thinks?”
“I care what the cops think,” she said. “I’m not crazy about certain people thinking I’m a murderer.”
“Certain people like your father?”
The question was softly spoken, but it sent a hard chill up Sarah’s spine. She turned to Curtis, but she didn’t say anything, just watched him in silence.
“I overheard your conversation at the hospital the other day,” he said. “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but the old man made no effort to keep his voice down.”
“No wonder the police are so interested in me.”
“I didn’t tell them anything. And I don’t think anyone else heard the specifics, just that there were raised voices coming from the room.”