Deadly Gift

by Heather Graham

  He started out the bedroom door, then paused.

  His Smith and Wesson .38 Special was locked in his briefcase. Did he need it to go to the office at this hour of the night?

  Hell, yes. Eddie was dead. Of course he needed it.

  He retrieved the gun, tucked it in his waistband, then silently started out.

  It was all that talk about banshees, Kat decided.

  She wasn’t afraid of the dark, and she wasn’t afraid of being alone. At least, she never had been before.

  Tonight, it seemed as if she was actually hearing a banshee.

  A banshee? It was as if she was hearing a hundred of them screaming, wailing, moaning, caterwauling in the dark. It was the wind; she knew that. The wind had started to pick up late this afternoon and had grown steadily stronger ever since. No rain, just wind.

  Maybe there was a storm coming in. Maybe they would even have snow for Christmas.

  The shadows seemed to be dancing an evil tango across the ceiling. It was the branches, bending and bowing to the wind, she told herself. But the howl of the wind was utterly unnerving. How could anything that sounded so much like a lonely scream of horror be natural?

  The house itself seemed to shake. To breathe in and breathe out.

  Kat tossed and turned. She needed to get some sleep. She needed to be alert and aware come morning so she could make sure her father stayed safe. He was doing well now, and at least he was home. He was back in the States, not across an ocean with that woman.

  The one sleeping in the bedroom down the hall. His bedroom. The woman he had married.

  For the thousandth time, she felt like crying. Her father had always been so wise. What had made him choose to marry such a tramp? She wished she could believe that Amanda was as harmlessly stupid as she seemed. The quintessential dumb blonde. No, that wasn’t fair; that was giving offense to blondes everywhere. But honestly…Her father was a smart man, one who loved culture and books. She wasn’t sure Amanda knew that books came in any form other than a shopping catalogue.

  Suddenly her attention was arrested by movement along one wall. It was as if a giant black creature with huge bat wings had descended and was spreading its evil shadow over the room. She felt pure, icy terror grip her. She didn’t dare to breathe.

  Flap, flap, scrape.

  Relieved, she let out the breath she’d been holding. It was just the old oak outside her window. The wind had pressed a branch against her window, and that had been silhouetted by one of the outside lights, creating the shadow she had seen. Even now, the oak was moving in the wind.

  Why didn’t the shadow move?

  That question was playing through her mind when she heard the creaking on the staircase.

  She burst out of bed. Someone was in the house. Eddie was dead, her father had been poisoned, and now someone was in the house.

  She couldn’t just stand there, shivering in the night. Zach was down the hall, and he was licensed to carry a gun. She needed to get Zach, and quickly.

  Weighed down by dread and a sense of terror greater than any she had ever known before, Kat found herself unable to run, but she forced herself to move, albeit slowly, despite the icy tentacles of fear wrapping around her limbs. She finally reached her door and started to open it. The old knob felt icy, and she could have sworn that there wasn’t just darkness around her, but a mist. As if something huge were breathing nearby. She swallowed hard and finally opened her door.

  Inch by inch, forcing herself to move, she made her way down the hallway. It had somehow gotten longer, and it was frigid and filled with the same mist, as if someone were exhaling hot breath into the cold air. She could hear it inhaling, exhaling. Almost like laughter. She was moving down the hall, and it was moving after her.

  Or it was in front of her. She wasn’t sure.

  She fought the rush of terror that attacked her at the thought of being stalked by some dark, amorphous danger. She didn’t believe in ghosts, didn’t believe in banshees, voodoo or vampires.

  But…

  She could feel the evil, the menace, cold as ice, like the touch of the Reaper’s hand, coming out of the dark and slipping around her neck.

  She wanted to close her eyes. She was terrified that a death’s head would suddenly appear before her, out of the mist, laughing in silent glee.

  At last she reached Zach’s door.

  The minute she grasped the knob, she felt stronger.

  She pushed the door open, feeling almost normal. She wasn’t going to get hysterical, she told herself. Wasn’t going to blurt out that the banshees had been crying outside her window, or that the Grim Reaper had been breathing down her neck in the hallway. She would tell him the truth, plain and simple.

  Someone was on the stairway.

  “Zach?” she called softly.

  No answer. For a moment, panic filled her again. It had already been here. It had gotten Zach.

  She rushed over to his bed before she could flee back to her room and hide in her closet. Somewhere out there, she knew, real danger lurked. A danger to her father.

  She reached down, trembling in fear at what she might find.

  And then she knew.

  Nothing had gotten Zach.

  He just wasn’t there.

  Eddie had been to dozens of Revolutionary War sites, and he had studied literally hundreds of maps. Nothing surprising in that, Zach thought. Eddie and Sean had spent days on end rehashing the Revolutionary War and participated in numerous reenactments.

  Zach followed Eddie’s online trail for an hour, until he realized that the words were blurring on the screen.

  He left the office, moving carefully down the steps.

  They were icy by night.

  He heard the crashing of the waves, the tinkling of the bells and mooring chains on the boats, and the whipping of the wind. Security lights blazed from nearby businesses, but beyond their reach the sea was pitch dark, except when the rolling waves lashed up and the whitecaps were caught in the multi-colored glow of the Christmas lights someone had strung along the docks. What should have looked cheerful instead created a miasma of eerie confusion across the surface of the water.

  It was cold. He wrapped his scarf more tightly around his neck, pulled his cap low over his ears and hunched his shoulders as he headed toward the car.

  As he moved, listening to the moaning of the wind as it rose and fell, echoing like a screaming harpy in the night, he was startled to hear something else.

  At least…he thought he heard something else.

  A footfall, coming from behind him.

  He swung around. Flags on houses and boats, Christmas decorations, all of them being battered by the wind, created a confusion of shadows. He could have sworn that he had heard a footstep, but there was no one behind him.

  Where could someone be hiding?

  Not a hard question to answer, actually. A pursuer could have ducked behind one of the cars still scattered around the lot. Behind a light pole. Behind the giant Santa that was wavering like a trembling jellyfish in front of a souvenir shop.

  But the sound had come from directly behind him. As if someone had followed him from the office.

  There was no one there now. He slipped his hand beneath his coat and set it on the gun in his waistband, then looked around again, slowly, carefully.

  No one. Nothing out of place that he could see. It was late on a winter’s night, the wind was growing wicked, he was tired, and his eyes were playing tricks. And still…

  It was bizarre, feeling this uneasy when there was nothing there to be afraid of. He was smart enough to be afraid of what was real—deranged people carrying weapons, for instance. But he had never been afraid of the wind, and he didn’t intend to start now.

  There was no one there. He was sure of it.

  He told himself that the wind had torn something loose from somewhere, and he had heard it hit the pavement before blowing off again, this time to oblivion. Determinedly, he strode to the car.

 
The drive back to the house was uneventful, but as he left the car and entered the house by the kitchen doorway, he was startled to feel a sensation of unease again.

  Now he was really being idiotic, he told himself. Even if there had been someone in the parking lot, they sure as hell hadn’t followed him here. And back there, the sound had been real, like a footstep on pavement.

  Here, it was just…

  A feeling. But it was almost palpable. Every hair on his nape stood up in warning.

  He paused just inside the door, closing it behind him as silently as possible. Then, even though it made him feel like a fool, he drew the gun from his waistband, certain that something was amiss.

  He moved through the kitchen carefully, then into the hallway, passing the formal dining room and Sean’s office, and entering the foyer.

  There, the feeling seemed to be like something thundering in his heart. No, it was his heart. As keyed and attuned to danger as it had ever been.

  Over there, a flurry of movement.

  A creaking on the stairs.

  “Stop! Right there, right now!” he shouted.

  Suddenly the staircase and foyer were flooded with light. Looking up, he saw a figure at the top of the stairs, indistinguishable in the glare of the lights it had had apparently just turned on.

  Simultaneously, someone gasped nearby, someone else shrieked near the bottom of the stairway, and an irritated woman shouted angrily from the doorway to the ground floor bedroom Sean O’Riley had taken over.

  As his eyes adjusted, he saw that Kat, wielding a frying pan, was standing at the bottom of the steps. Caer, standing just outside her own door, was apparently the one who had gasped. Not surprisingly, the irritated woman was Amanda O’Riley.

  And it was Bridey at the top of the stairway, standing there like an avenging angel with her hand still on the light switch.

  He had the gun drawn and aimed. He quickly flicked the safety back on and shoved the gun back into his waistband.

  “What the hell is going on?” he demanded.

  It was a mistake.

  They all started speaking at once, their voices rising in their efforts to be heard above one another.

  “Oh, my God, it was you!” Kat lashed out at Amanda, looking as if she were ready to go to war with the frying pan.

  “It’s my house, whether you like it or not!” Amanda shouted back.

  “It’s just that it sounded as if someone was creeping stealthily down the stairs,” Caer tried to explain.

  “I did not creep down the stairs, I walked, and I walked because I heard someone creeping—and that someone had to be you,” Amanda told Kat, her hands on her hips. Then she spun on Caer. “Or it was you, creeping around where you shouldn’t be. You were hired to be Sean’s nurse, not spend the night listening to Bridey’s ridiculous stories.”

  “Listen!” Zach commanded, and—miraculously—they all shut up.

  And then they all heard it, a sudden, hard slamming sound.

  “It’s the back door,” Zach said. The slamming came again and again, as if the wind was trying to rip the door off its hinges.

  He ignored the women and strode through the house, reaching into his waistband for the gun once again, automatically releasing the safety. He reached the rear door that led out to the back porch and the lawn that sloped to the cliff above the sea.

  The door was wide open, swinging on its hinges.

  He caught it and stepped out onto the porch, scanning the night. There was no sign of anyone anywhere. No sound of an intruder running away into the night. It looked as if the door had been left open, then caught by the wind.

  Which was impossible.

  They never left the door unlocked, much less open. The house had an alarm, but most of the time no one remembered to set it after Clara and Tom left for the cottage. He cursed himself beneath his breath; he should have thought of that and seen to it himself.

  From where he was standing he could see that the cottage was dressed with holiday lights, and that the drapes in the downstairs had been left open, so he could see Tom and Clara’s Christmas tree blinking merrily away.

  The wind rose again.

  Branches brushed against the house.

  The door was nearly ripped from his hands.

  He walked back in, closing the door firmly, then locking it. And setting the alarm.

  When he got back to the foyer, he saw that Sean O’Riley was up and out of bed in his pajamas. Kat was standing at a distance, tense as her namesake on the proverbial hot tin roof. Caer was in her blue nightgown, like a dark angel, and Bridey had come down the stairs to join everyone.

  Amanda stood by Sean; his arm was draped around her, but Zach had the feeling that Amanda had been the one to take his arm and put it over her shoulders.

  “Well?” Sean asked.

  “I don’t know,” Zach told him flatly. “I didn’t see anyone. The back door was wide open, but it doesn’t look as if anything was disturbed. I’ll call the police.”

  “You will not call the police, Zach.”

  “Sean—” he began.

  But Sean was adamant. “Every single body in this house was creeping around. Someone didn’t close the door properly, that’s all.”

  “Clara,” Amanda said with a sigh. “Sean, I think she’s just getting too old.”

  “Too old for what, Amanda?” Kat asked. “Dad, she isn’t any older than you are, is she?”

  “It’s not the age, it’s the mileage, and Clara is showing her mileage,” Amanda said, holding her temper and not matching the sarcasm that had slipped into Kat’s voice.

  “Clara is a member of the family,” Bridey said. “And that’s that,” she added firmly. “Besides, Clara didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Well, if someone didn’t break in, then someone did leave the door open,” Amanda said flatly. “And that someone had to have been Clara.”

  “No,” Bridey said.

  They all looked at her.

  “There’s a banshee in the house,” she said, looking around at all of them, shaking her head slightly and smiling, as if they were children and wouldn’t understand. “Haven’t you felt it?” she whispered softly.

  Cal silently set his boots by the back door, praying that he could hold the door against the wind, then close it silently. He let out a sigh of relief when he managed to do so.

  What a nasty night, he thought. Maybe the weathermen had it wrong again and there was a storm coming in. They had said that it would be a windy night, but that the morning would dawn clear and cold. He locked the door, glad to hear the bolt slide quietly.

  Then he tiptoed into the living room.

  And went dead still.

  There was someone in his house, standing right in front of him.

  A scream rose in his throat and burst free just as a person in front of him let loose with an even louder scream.

  He reached blindly for the light switch behind him and realized as the lights came on that he’d just been terrified half to death by his wife.

  She was clearly as astonished as he was, staring at him wide-eyed, her mouth still open as if she were about to scream again.

  Her boots were standing by the front door, and he realized that she, too, had just come in, and had been tiptoeing toward their bedroom in her stocking feet just as he had been.

  “You scared me to death,” he told her.

  “Me? I just about had a heart attack,” she told him.

  They stared at one another for a long moment. Then he frowned and asked, “Where were you? When did you go out? Why did you go out?”

  Her eyes opened wider, and then she frowned. “Wait a minute. Where were you? When did you go out, and why?”

  “I heard a…noise,” he said. “A moaning. I thought someone was hurt in our backyard.”

  She let out a sigh. “I heard it, too,” she told him. “I thought it was coming from the front yard, and quite honestly, I thought it was a wounded hyena, from the way it sounded.” She lau
ghed then with relief. “Oh, Cal.” She hurried to him, nuzzling into his neck. “I thought you were sound asleep. I was scared, but I thought someone was hurt, and I didn’t want to wake you.”

  He pulled her against him. “My brave girl. I thought you were sound asleep. Let’s check the locks and go to bed.”

  She smiled. “I have a better idea. I’m freezing, and that wind is still blowing like a mother. Let’s make a couple of hot toddies and then go to bed.”

  He kissed the tip of her nose. “I can one up that. Let’s check the locks, make hot toddies, go to bed and fool around. And then sleep late. And screw the business.”

  She frowned. “Cal, we can’t afford to screw the business, especially now, with Eddie missing, and Sean being sick and all.”

  He nodded. “Okay, we screw each other and not the business.”

  She laughed. “I doubt if we’ll have any charters tomorrow. But we do need to go in.”

  “Of course.”

  “Maybe we can go out by ourselves,” she suggested.

  “Sure, if you’d like,” he told her.

  She pulled away from him. “You check the doors, and I’ll make the toddies. And after that, well, we’ll need each other.” She wiggled her eyebrows playfully. He laughed and went to follow orders.

  10

  When Zach entered the breakfast room the next morning, Clara bade him a cheerful good morning as she set a plate of fresh-baked scones on the table.

  “Good morning, Clara. You are incredible,” he told her, reaching for one of the scones and eating it where he stood. He was ready to run out to the police station. He didn’t want to call; he wanted to be out of the house from now on when he spoke with Detective Morrissey.

  Last night, after Bridey’s eerie announcement, he had soothed her and urged her up to bed. Then, with Sean firmly ordered back to bed by all of them, he had gone over the house top to bottom.

  He had wanted to do so alone.

  Instead, he had done so with Amanda, Kat and even Caer following him around.

  He’d found absolutely nothing out of place.