by Kay Hooper
“Hollis wants to live,” Bishop repeated.
“Even if it means struggling? Even if it means suffering?”
“Even if.” Bishop’s gaze was steady. “‘Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.’”
“Khalil Gibran.” DeMarco half nodded. “A quote well known among a lot of soldiers.”
“Yes. I don’t know if Hollis has ever heard it. You might offer it, if the timing seems right.” He barely hesitated before adding, “Because she heals herself, virtually all of her scars are on the inside now.”
“Virtually all?” DeMarco heard himself ask. “Even from the first attack?”
“Most of them are gone as well. But . . . She just had a complete physical, of course, in preparation to return to the field. The doctor reported there’s only one scar on her entire body now.”
“Do I need to know this?” DeMarco asked steadily.
“I think so. Because the scar isn’t in a place where Hollis has to see it every day. Where she has to repeatedly confront trauma from that original attack. It’s on her back, low down, on her left hip. An . . . almost perfect bite mark.”
DeMarco shifted in his chair in a very rare sign that he wanted to protest, wanted to stop this. Or wanted to take things apart with his bare hands.
“He’s dead,” Bishop reminded him, still quiet. “He’s dead, and Hollis helped make that happen.”
“Carrying the scars he left her with.”
“She helped destroy him. That matters. That’s part of what’s helped build that extraordinary strength of hers. That, more than the attack itself, set her feet on the path she’s been following ever since, with us.
“The absolute right path for her, because Hollis has a real gift for this work, a fascination and understanding for it that can’t be taught. And she has an instinct for finding and facing the sort of evil we too often face, without allowing it to corrupt her.”
“Because she’s seen true evil,” DeMarco said. “It can never hide from her, not for long. Never deceive her.”
“Yes. She also has a partner who knows far more than the average person about the trauma of war. And the demons that never quite leave us alone afterward.” He paused, then added, “She’s a survivor, Reese. You’re her anchor, but you can’t protect her from the pain. She has to get through this herself.”
“I want to help. To be more than an anchor.” DeMarco hadn’t realized he was going to say that, admit that, until he had.
Bishop nodded, matter-of-fact. “I know. And I think you’ll be a lot more than an anchor for her. You already have been, even if she’s still skittish about it.”
“And when she stops being skittish? If she does?”
“Oh, she will. She’s far too bright to . . . struggle for long against inevitability. Especially when she knows she’s better, even stronger, with you than without you.”
DeMarco frowned just a little. “And just how will she learn that lesson? We’re partners; we always work together and have since you first paired us. She hasn’t had to work on her own, without me, for more than a year.”
“The Universe puts us where we need to be.”
Beginning to feel more than a little grim, DeMarco said, “If there’s something I need to know about this case, Bishop, you’d better tell me now. If Hollis is hurt in any way because of something important you’re keeping to yourself—”
“There’s nothing I know.” Bishop hesitated uncharacteristically, then added slowly, “Just . . . something I feel.”
“Not a vision?”
“No. And nothing I can put into words. Except that Hollis needs to work . . . and both of you need to go to Clarity.”
—
THE CROSS HOME really did sprawl. By Mal’s count it had at least eight exterior doors, not counting the double garage that also boasted a doorway into the house, three levels in two sections of the house, and a rather wild assortment of windows: large, small, multi-paned, single-paned, circular—and at least two shaped like Gothic arches.
It had been constructed originally of brick, but over the years the other sections added had been faced with seemingly whatever material had been available or cheapest at the time: stucco, at least three different kinds of rock, two other shades of brick, and both cedar shakes and redwood siding.
It really did look as though it had been designed by an architect who’d been either on a drunken bender or high as a kite on some mind-altering substance. But no architect had designed any part of the Cross home, just different Crosses over different years with different needs and tastes, adding a room here, expanding a room there, modernizing bathrooms and kitchens. Hanging wallpaper that was dated before the glue dried, and laying carpet over the threadbare one underneath. And nobody had ever bothered to make the various additions match or complement the others.
Both overgrown shrubbery and unpruned trees too tall and too close to the house to cause anything but trouble made the place seem weirdly claustrophobic, and Mal couldn’t help thinking as he, three of his deputies, and Joe walked up the winding and slightly uneven walkway to what had been deemed the front door that it was difficult to blame Perla for wanting to leave.
If she had left.
Mal had learned to trust his instincts, and his instincts told him Perla had not left. That she was here, somewhere. Added to the heavy pit in his stomach was a weird, crawly sensation in his skin that was something new in his life. And so far, it only heralded bad things.
The porch light, billed to repel bugs but surrounded by a little flock of very-much-alive moths and other insects, glowed a dim yellow that seemed more ominous than welcoming. Joe led the way inside, merely walking through the unlocked door.
Mal sighed but didn’t bother commenting. Clarity was still one of those little towns where most people didn’t lock their doors, even at night, and even if their houses were miles outside town and mostly surrounded by what seemed a wilderness of forests and overgrown pastures.
Joe started turning on lights and was only on the third one when they all heard a frantic scrabbling on the mostly wooden floor, and Mal found himself holding a bundle of shaking, whimpering Yorkie. The dog had literally launched himself straight at the sheriff.
“Hey, Felix,” he said a bit wryly. An animal person by nature, he cradled the little dog easily, accepting with equanimity several almost frantic licks on his chin.
Joe eyed the two with a certain amount of indignation. “I never could make friends with that little brute. Swear I have scars on my ankles where he’s bitten me.”
Deputy Susie Dunlap, who despite her uniform looked distinctly unlike any kind of cop, being deceptively willowy and languid, with heavy-lidded brown eyes that gave her slightly angular face an oddly fascinating drowsy expression, said mildly, “Maybe you should stop calling him a brute. He’s just a little dog, Mr. Cross.”
“Easy for you to say,” Joe retorted darkly. “You don’t come home every day to a yapping attack.”
Mal frowned. “He wasn’t barking when we came in.” Shifting his hold slightly on the little dog, he added, “And he’s shaking like a leaf.”
“He never likes it if Perla goes somewhere without him,” Joe said somewhat dismissively.
Susie said, “I didn’t think she ever went anywhere without him.”
“No,” Joe said. “Hardly ever.” He appeared struck by that for the first time, and even more worried. “Hardly ever. Mal—”
“We need to search the place, Joe.” Mal would have put the dog on the floor, but the way Felix was trembling so violently bothered him. Felix really did seem frightened, and not only of being left alone. After a brief hesitation, Mal half zipped the light Windbreaker he wore against the faint nighttime chill of even a summer night in the valley and tucked the Yorkie inside.
“Seriously?” Jo
e demanded.
Without responding to that, Mal said, “Joe, show Susie where Perla left her cell phone, so she can get started trying to break the password. Then you and Ray start going through the house. Lower floors first, in every section. Then head down and check the basement areas. Brent, you’re with me.”
Deputy Ray Marx, who didn’t need a uniform to look imposing since he was six and a half feet tall and built like the linebacker he had been in college, and who had the deep voice to match his size, seemed utterly matter-of-fact when he asked, “What’re we looking for? I thought Perla had just run off again.”
They all ignored Joe’s halfhearted glare.
“Maybe she has, and maybe she hasn’t. Let’s make sure. Brent, you and I will take the upper floor and the attic. Joe, I know there are two sections, but you can get from one to the other without coming back down here, right?”
“Yeah, there’s a kind of hallway between them, across from the top of the stairs. Perla calls it a catwalk, but it’s not open, ’cept for a couple windows looking out the back.”
“Same thing with the attic?”
“Yeah. There’s only one doorway leads to the attic, and it’s roughly in the middle upstairs. Closed door, but real stairs, not the pull-down kind, and there’s a light switch, like I said. Plenty of light up in the attic.”
“Okay. Let’s get going. We’ll leave the lights on in here, and all stairwell lights, but once you’ve cleared a room, turn out the light and close the door.”
Deputy Brent Cannon, who was average height and sturdy and looked so much more like a stolid cop than any of the others he might as well have had COP tattooed on his forehead, said, “I was wondering how we’d keep it straight without a grid search. This place is . . .”
“Ambitious?” Mal suggested dryly.
“I was gonna say big,” Brent confessed.
“Yeah. Well, let’s get going. The FBI team ought to be getting to town sometime in the next couple hours or so, and I’d like to be there to meet them.” None of the deputies questioned the information, or even reacted to it, except for Susie, who briefly raised an eyebrow.
They split up, with Joe and Susie headed for the kitchen and Perla’s cell phone, with Ray wandering after them, and Mal heading for the main stairs with Brent close behind.
It wasn’t until they were nearly at the top of the stairs leading to the second level that Brent asked a low question. “Sheriff, are you expecting to find another . . . accident . . . here?”
Mal wasn’t surprised that Brent Cannon was the first deputy other than Emma to ask that question. The deputy had more law enforcement experience and education than most of the others, having not only graduated from Duke with a degree in criminal justice but also having nearly five years with the State Bureau of Investigation under his belt. He’d been born and raised in Clarity, but it was only the desire of his high school sweetheart and wife to move back here when she became pregnant with their first that had persuaded Brent to put on a uniform again.
Mal was glad he’d made that choice.
“I’m not sure what I expect,” he confessed to Brent. “I just know I’ve got a very bad feeling we’re not going to find Perla holed up at some motel this time.”
FOUR
“I guess we checked the Holiday Inn?”
“Yeah. She’s not there. Hasn’t been there, according to the manager, in at least a couple of months. And I checked every hotel, motel, and B and B within a hundred miles of Clarity just to be sure. Nada. No woman with her name or description has checked in.”
Brent said thoughtfully, “She doesn’t strike me as the type to hide right here in the house to give her husband a scare.”
“No, I would have said she wasn’t. And if she’s here, why is Felix not with her—and why’s he scared to death? He’s still shaking.” Without waiting for a response to that, since they had reached the top of the stairs and were just across from the arched opening that was the entrance to the “catwalk” hallway between the two halves of the second floor, he found the light switch and turned it on.
Just outside the hallway on the stairway landing was a single closed door, and Mal guessed that was the entrance to the attic.
The hallway had some colorful scattered rag rugs along the wooden floor and two round windows with a small table and a vase of silk flowers between them, and looked as odd as the rest of the house did.
Mal gestured with the hand not still cradling the dog snuggled inside his jacket. “You head right and I’ll take the left. Pretty sure that’s the door to the attic out here; whoever gets done with his section first, head up to check that out. If I remember right, it’s a big, open space with big windows at either end.”
“Is there an end?” Brent asked somewhat whimsically. “I sort of get why Perla keeps running off. This place is a little creepy, and I swear it looks bigger every time I see it. I wouldn’t be surprised if it grew all on its own after dark.”
“Yeah, I’m sure the house plus Joe is a bit much to take,” Mal replied absently, a more plainspoken response than he might have offered a different deputy.
They split up, and Mal discovered that his “section” was composed of half a dozen decent-sized bedrooms, all with a dizzying array of furnishings from different time periods. It would have taken a sizable housekeeping staff to keep a house this size as clean as it probably should have been, and neither Perla nor Joe had ever claimed to be a housekeeper; there was a layer of undisturbed dust over most everything, and the rooms held a musty odor of disuse.
Ignoring that, Mal cleared each bedroom methodically, checked out the two bathrooms—one of which had been done almost entirely in black-and-white checks, the tile walls as well as the floor, and made him feel a bit dizzy and nauseated—and found himself the first back at the attic door.
Even before Mal felt little Felix begin to tremble even more, his skin had that crawly sensation he had come to associate with finding bad things he didn’t want to find. But he opened the door and flipped the light switch, more relieved than he wanted to admit when bright light spilled down the neat but plain painted wooden stairs going up.
It looked perfectly normal.
Like the others he had a small but very bright pocket flashlight, which he hadn’t had to use as yet. And it remained in his pocket when he reached the top of the stairs to find the entire huge attic very well lighted by actual light fixtures, not bare bulbs. They were a peculiar mixture of styles, from a hanging wagon-wheel fixture with two burned-out bulbs to an extremely elaborate crystal chandelier sparkling as though all the crystals had been recently polished.
At some point in its history, maybe at several points, someone had taken a stab at organizing chaos, so in the right-hand section of the cavernous space, there were numerous areas where like items had been grouped together. There was a section of old trunks; at least three areas he could see that had groupings of old chairs and tables that were damaged or just unwanted or out of fashion; a wild assortment of mirrors reflecting light and odd bits of things in all directions since they were leaning up against two different walls; and a long metal clothes rack on wheels from which at least thirty or forty empty picture frames hung by their corners.
But Mal barely noticed all that, because as soon as he reached the top of the stairs, two things drew his attention. One was the fact that he could feel a fairly strong breeze that told him both of the big windows up here were undoubtedly open; given their placement at either end of this main section, they could and did provide a strong crosscurrent of air.
The other thing that drew his attention was a single red high-heeled shoe only a few steps straight out from the top step of the stairwell. It was one of Perla’s. Mal recognized it because she had worn it the previous Sunday. To church.
It was a very bright red shoe, and shiny, almost metallic, and it was sitting there as if someone had merely stepped out
of it and walked away. The toe was pointing to the left.
Felix let out a low, eerie sound that was as close to a howl as a little dog could ever make, and Mal automatically used his free hand to try to soothe him. The odd, mournful cry ended in a little whimper, and it was a sound Felix continued to make.
Mal could feel the hair standing up on the nape of his neck, even though every sense told him he and the dog were alone up here.
He turned slowly to the left, looking down a sort of walkway between stacks of boxes and bins lining this side of the attic. He could see the big casement window; one side was opened all the way inward, the other side almost all the way, filmy sheers placed there at some point fluttering as the breeze blew into the attic.
In front of the window and about three feet in was the second red high-heeled shoe, its toe pointing toward the window.
Bracing himself against whatever he was going to find, Mal walked slowly between the tall stacks of boxes and bins, absently still using his free hand to soothe the little dog, who continued to whimper miserably.
The cop in him noted that the floor was surprisingly free of dust, far more so than the bedrooms on the floor below. He also noted that the window seemed to have simply been opened, not forced in any way. No panes of glass were broken, and there was no sign in front of the window that any sort of struggle had taken place, not so much as a scuff mark.
Just those two red, empty shoes.
The lights in the attic didn’t extend to the outside, and as he reached the window, Mal could hear leaves stirring in one of the tall trees just outside.
He reached into his pocket for the flashlight and, being careful not to disturb the shoe or the placement of the windows, he used his elbow to hold the sheers to one side and pointed the flashlight out at the big oak tree.
At first, for a single baffled instant, he thought she was just up in the tree for some reason, far higher than was safe up here nearly at the roofline. He almost called out to her, because she was facing him, and her eyes were open.