by L E Fraser
He crossed the dark backyard to the shed, grabbed half of the double door, and reached up to check the latch. A bit of fiddling and it clicked into place. His fingers felt wet, but it was too dark to see. Sighing, he pulled the other side closed, lifted the red door and jiggled it so he could get the sliding bolt to align with the latch and lock.
Worried about smearing whatever was on his hand on his clothes, Derek went to the porch light. Red paint covered the fingers on his right hand. He’d painted the shed on Sunday. Red pigments took over a week to cure properly, but it shouldn’t still be wet to the touch. Maybe there was something wrong with the chemical compound. He lifted his hand and sniffed. The coppery odour made his skin crawl.
“Shit.” He ran into the house and held his hand under the faucet. “Gabriella.”
She wasn’t in the kitchen.
“I cut myself on the fucking shed door.” Water ran from his fingers in a pale pink stream, but he couldn’t see a gash.
“How bad is the cut?”
Derek jumped. He hadn’t heard her enter the room.
She looked at his hand. “I don’t see anything.”
“Well, did you see the blood?”
She arched her eyebrow. “No.” She scanned the sink and examined his hand again. “There’s nothing wrong with you.”
He opened a drawer and rummaged around the contents.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Looking for a damn flashlight so I can check the shed.”
“We don’t have a flashlight up here. Nicholas took them downstairs to work on his computer.”
Frustrated, he slammed the drawer shut. “Well, isn’t that great. Why do you let the kids take whatever they want?”
“Maybe you clipped your finger,” she said. “Isabella always says water makes it look as if there’s more blood.”
“I don’t give a fuck what your sister says. Isabella this and Isabella that,” he mocked. “I’m sick of it.”
“There’s a tiny cut on your index finger, right there.” Gabriella twisted his finger to the side.
Derek saw a slice of broken skin. He remembered getting a paper cut at the office. It must have reopened. It was a lot of blood for a small laceration, but she was right. Mixing water with blood made it look worse. It wasn’t bleeding now and didn’t hurt.
He was opening the back door when her voice caused him to turn. “Off to the office?” She was shaking a bottle of nail polish.
Was that a smirk or was he paranoid? If she knew what he was up to, she should realize it was her fault. When she wasn’t hiding in the kitchen avoiding him and the kids, she was fussing with her fingernails. She spent hours filing and polishing them and spent a fortune on hand cream. It wasn’t as if she used her hands to pleasure him. Before they’d moved to separate rooms, she’d suffered through sex with stiff immobility, sucking in her breath with a cringe every time he touched her. It made him feel like an incompetent lover. Eventually it felt like rape and he gave up.
Without another word, he marched out the door. He might be better at dealing with her mood swings and weird behaviour if she was sexual. If they were intimate, maybe things would be different. Celibacy wasn’t natural for men. Her rejection made him insecure, which was why he sought other women. Still, he felt guilty. Everything about his wife made him feel like shit.
Derek was pulling into Sonia’s parking garage when something else hit him. When he’d returned to the house after checking the shed, his wife was wearing her usual prissy housecoat with her hair loose and held off her face by a hideous hair band that looked like a costume accessory.
Every day, her behaviour became more bizarre. He’d courted her because of her beauty and youth. Now she was ruining his life. He was going to have to do something about his ice queen.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Gabriella
SHE WAS DRAWING a skully board on the driveway, taking extra time to ensure the box lines were straight and the numbers resembled calligraphy. In the middle, she drew a beautifully rendered skull.
From behind her, she heard a voice and turned to see Joyce McNamara and her four-year-old sister, Sam.
“Hi Gabby, is Isabella home?” Joyce asked, avoiding her eyes by shifting her backpack off her shoulder and holding it by the strap.
Her sister’s friend didn’t like her. The feeling was mutual. Joyce was always trying to take Isabella away from her. “We’re going to play skully.” She glared at Joyce, intending to make it clear she wasn’t welcome to play.
“Ah… the buttons on your blouse are undone.” Joyce’s face flushed with colour and she tugged her bathing suit robe across her flat chest.
Gabriella glanced down to admire the way her breasts pushed against the top of her bra to display her cleavage.
“Jealous?” she asked smugly.
Joyce looked confused as well as embarrassed. “Ah, no, it’s just… never mind. Is Isabella inside?”
With a shrug, Gabriella put the chalk on the driveway beside the skully board and brushed off her hands.
A moment later, Isabella charged down the sidewalk like a bat out of hell. She sprinted across the street, narrowly avoiding a car that leaned on the horn.
“Hey,” Joyce said, waving. “We were walking home from the pool. Wanna come over to my house? We can make cookies.”
She was doing it again, trying to steal Isabella. No one would ever take Isabella from her. Gabriella pushed Joyce aside and faced her sister. “What took you so long? I was waiting.”
Isabella didn’t answer. She was staring at her as if she’d never laid eyes on her before.
Gabriella was about to show off the great job she did on the skully board when she noticed Joyce’s disgusting little sister sitting on it. Right in the middle, ruining the beautiful skull. The brat was scribbling all over the drawing she’d sketched with painstaking accuracy.
“Get off.” She grabbed the fucker by the hair and dragged her onto the grass. “Don’t touch, you little shit.”
Joyce ran over to kneel beside Sam who was crying. “What’s wrong with you?” she yelled. “She’s little. Leave her alone, you psycho.”
Gana growled low in his throat. Gabriella was lifting her hand to give the ‘attack’ command when she remembered she had to protect the dog. That was the promise she’d made. If Gana bit either of the McNamara bitches, their father would have her dog put down. More anger roared over her.
“She was just colouring on it.” Joyce helped Sam to her feet and picked up both their backpacks. “Skully is a stupid game that no one even plays anymore.” She crossed the driveway to stand beside Isabella. “I’m telling my dad.”
Gabriella grabbed Joyce’s shoulder, roughly spun her around, and punched her in the face. The backpacks dropped from Joyce’s hand. Her eyes flew open wide and filled with tears.
Sam bit Gabriella’s calf. With a bellow of pain, she picked the four-year-old up by her arm and hurled her. Sam hit the driveway hard and burst into tears.
“I hate you, you ruin everything!” Isabella tackled her to the ground.
Wrestling on the driveway, she twisted Isabella beneath her. “You have to love Gabriella.” She punched Isabella in the face, satisfied to see the skin above her eye crack open and blood pour from her nose. She hit her again, swatting at Joyce who was hanging on her back, scratching her neck and pulling her hair.
Filled with blinding rage, Gabriella stumbled off her sister and advanced on Joyce.
“Fucking bitch,” she snarled. “You’ll never take Isabella away from Gabriella.”
Joyce grabbed Sam’s hand and the girls ran away.
“You aren’t my sister,” Isabella moaned.
Gabriella knelt and whispered into her ear, “If you tell, you know what’ll happen.”
Standing, she brushed off her skirt and went into the house, leaving Isabella crying and bleeding at the end of the driveway.
GABRIELLA WOKE WITH a gasp, expecting to be in her childhood bedroom. H
er nightshirt was drenched in sweat, and her neck stung from Joyce’s scratches.
“It never happened,” she whispered. “I would never do that.”
But it felt so real. It felt like a memory of something that happened yesterday. Her heart was pounding with adrenaline, and she was experiencing a fading sense of rage.
Sitting in her bed, she ran her fingers through her long hair and winced. She must have pulled her hair during the dream because the side of her head hurt. Leaning over, she switched on the bedside table lamp and took long, deep breaths.
It was just a dream. She’d researched dreams and had a fundamental understanding of the science. She needed to calm down and approach it on an intellectual level. Never having been creative, Gabriella knew she did better with the analytical side of a problem. That was why she’d chosen to study biochemistry. Black and white made sense to her. She hated reading fiction, finding the storylines nonsensical. She loathed movies. Some people might consider cooking creative, but it wasn’t. Cooking was scientific. Perfect measurements of the right ingredients dictated the results. It was chemistry.
She scrambled out of bed and lurched to her desk. Okay, she thought, that was the first inconsistency. In real life, she’d never be able to draw a skull or create calligraphy-type numbers. Sitting at the desk, she opened her laptop and typed out what she recalled from the dream. She wasn’t going to save the document and didn’t care about the multiple mistakes she made. Typing was easier than writing, but organizing the letters was still a problem.
What did she know about the science of dreams? Speaking aloud, she murmured, “People only use a fraction of their brain’s capacity when awake.” She tapped her fingers against the desk. “When sleeping,” she continued aloud, “the brain’s untapped potential simultaneously creates and understands the dream world. It’s your subconscious motivated by emotion.”
Chewing on the corner of her lip, she realized she’d gone to sleep anxious over Tuesday’s upcoming dinner party and worried Sam McNamara was from her past.
Dreaming of brutally attacking a four-year-old child was because of her fear over someone discovering what happened to her as a child. That and the fact she didn’t want to have dinner with Derek’s friend. She’d created this awful false memory out of fear and anxiety.
Someone finding out about the abduction terrified her, but even if it turned out the woman was her childhood neighbour, the family had moved when Sam was young. She wouldn’t know what had happened. Gabriella relaxed. It was a stupid dream. As if she’d ever be out in public with her breasts hanging out like a gutter slut. Ridiculous. She closed the Word program, without saving her document, and put away the laptop.
Derek’s Sam McNamara couldn’t be the same little girl who lived down the street from her childhood home in London. Fate couldn’t be that cruel.
When she climbed into bed, the only thing nagging at her was that she did forget things.
She was dozing off when she jerked awake, recalling the sensation of falling when Isabella tackled her to the ground. The sense of falling snaps you awake from a dream. Yet… that didn’t happen.
The dream had continued. Like a memory.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Sam
“THEY LIVE IN Rosedale?” Sam asked.
“North in the Moore Park area.” With a heavy sigh, Reece turned off Mt. Pleasant Road. “I wish I’d thought up an excuse. There’s a documentary on the Discovery Channel I wanted to watch tonight.”
“You can watch it on demand or download it,” she said.
Reece was clean-shaven and wore a hint of aftershave. His sky-blue eyes shimmered in the twilight. From her position in the passenger seat, his dark eyelashes looked an inch long. Under his black T-shirt, his muscles bunched, and the one rogue tooth of his otherwise straight white teeth was showing. He was cringing.
“I don’t like Derek Martina,” he said. “He was an asshole in university, not to mention pushy and arrogant.”
Reece was always worried about hurting people’s feelings, and Sam wasn’t surprised he’d agreed to have dinner with someone he disliked. “I heard he’s being groomed by the Liberal caucus and plans to run for the Toronto Central riding,” she said.
His lip curled into a sneer. “That’s the rumour. McBride is stepping down from his seat. His wife has health issues, so Derek will try to take the Parliament seat in the by-election.”
“Running for MP is expensive. Does Derek have independent wealth?”
He glanced at her. “Not that I’m aware.”
Raising funds to run for office took guts. Derek needed well-connected friends and support in the caucus but also people to contribute campaign money. That explained the out-of-the-blue invitation. Derek was fundraising. Great. Wasting a perfectly good Tuesday night with a pontificating lawyer-slash-politician-slash-asshole wasn’t a pleasant proposition.
Sam gazed out the window at the passing houses. “I hope his wife’s nice. I bet I’ll be stuck with her all night. What’s her name again?”
“Gabriella.”
“What does she do for a living?” She hoped it was something interesting.
“Executive assistant to an advertising CEO.”
Oh boy, that sounded boring. “Any kids?”
“Yes,” he said dolefully.
Reece wasn’t a fan of other people’s kids. Sam laughed. “Little kids who will be hanging around insisting we communicate with them, or big kids who will use the dinner party as an excuse to ignore curfew?”
“Teenagers.” Reece grinned. “If we’re lucky, they’ll be off getting into mischief.”
He slowed down to peer at the house numbers. “Why don’t people make their house numbers bigger or better lit?”
“It’s the one with the lights on, and the house numbers all shiny and reflective by the front door.” She winked at him.
He grunted and pulled into the driveway of a large white two-and-a-half-storey Dutch colonial with dormer windows on the top floor.
They hadn’t even made it up the slate path to the black front door before a dramatic voice exclaimed, “Reece, my man.”
Snatching Reece’s hand from Sam’s grip, Derek gave it a vigorous pump. She noted that Derek placed his hand firmly on top, forcing Reece’s into the submissive lower position.
Before Reece could introduce her, Derek pounced, draping a cashmere-encased arm around her shoulders. “And who have we here?” His condescension was as overpowering as his cologne.
Sam squirmed out of his grip and offered her hand. Entirely for her own amusement, she twisted her hand up to force his below and caught the flicker of surprise and annoyance on his face.
“Look at the grip on this one.” He detached his hand. “Those are some scars. What did you do to yourself?”
She hoped he was too stupid to realize how rude his question was. “Happened when I dragged Incubus’ last victim out of the fire.”
“Ah yes, lone woman takes down serial killer. Two years ago, wasn’t it?” He walloped Reece on the back. “It’s good to see you, old friend. Let’s get this party started.”
Derek waved them into the living room. “Gabriella, come meet my good friend.”
Sam sat beside Reece on a loveseat and gazed around the room. Nestled in a nook adjacent to the fireplace was a gorgeous black grand piano. Strategically placed family photos in sterling silver frames decorated the top. Beneath a stunning Persian area carpet, dark hardwood floors gleamed. Waterford crystal lamps dazzled on cherry wood tables, and beautiful modern art was displayed just so. There were birthday cards on the pink marble fireplace mantel and a carved book landscape sculpture that Sam was sure was an original Guy Laramée.
The decor was creative and original, but the room was giving her a strange vibe. It was cold, artificial, too perfect.
Derek was speaking again. “Sam, I suppose becoming a PI is a natural transition after dismissal from the police force. How do you like it?” His tone was conversational, his expressio
n neutral.
Sam was stunned.
“Sam resigned from the force,” Reece said. “She’s writing her PhD thesis, in addition to being Toronto’s top private eye.”
That wasn’t true. She fell into PI work after Incubus murdered her sister. She was an accidental PI, and Reece knew that. She wasn’t sure she liked the job, which was why she was finishing her PhD.
Derek raised his eyebrows. “What are you doing your PhD in?” Before she could open her mouth, he waved his hand. “No, let me guess.” He tapped his index finger against his lips. “Something gals like, I bet.”
Sam didn’t bother masking her dislike. “Psychology.”
“Well, that might be useful in your line of work.” Derek turned to Reece. “Do you remember that gal at Western who hung around the criminology students? Man, was she hot. She took psychology.” Derek’s gaze shifted to the doorway. “Ah, here’s the lady of the house now.”
Gabriella was beautiful. Her dark hair hung in shiny waves down her back. Beneath stunning eyebrows, her large eyes were a shade of blue that looked violet. She was tall and boasted a great figure. She resembled a fashion model posing for a photo shoot with her perfectly tailored white silk dress, flawless makeup, and neutral expression. Breathtaking women didn’t intimidate Sam, but she was always curious why they put so much effort into their appearance. What a waste of time.
“The old ball and chain. She’s not much to look at but she can cook.” Derek winked at Reece and turned to his wife. “Speaking of food, where are the drinks and snacks?”
Before Gabriella could respond, a lanky young man sauntered into the room.
“I need some dollars,” he told his mother. “Where’s your purse?”
Sam expected his parents to correct the bad attitude and leaned back to watch the show.
“In the bedroom.” Gabriella’s words, spoken without inflection, matched her vague expression.