by Gayle Wilson
“Ms. August,” he interrupted, but she went on, speaking over whatever he intended to say. Because it didn’t matter what he wanted to say. She didn’t want to hear it.
“Apparently there’s no one around to tell you the truth. I did, and you couldn’t deal with it. I let a little light into all this darkness, and you didn’t like the man who was revealed. But that’s not my fault, Judge Barrington. I didn’t make you a coward who stopped living three years ago. Jack did that. So why don’t you send Jack a package and leave me the hell alone.”
She saw and heard the depth of the breath he took before he answered her, but his face still revealed nothing.
“If you’re finished, Elliot will show you out, but I strongly suggest you follow my advice.”
He was angry. His features might not have changed, but his voice had. There was nothing like a blue-blooded Southern accent for expressing anger. She’d gotten to him all right. Since that had been her intent, she should be feeling a whole lot better than she was. Instead, she was disgusted with herself, ashamed of what she’d just said, and that made her mad at herself. What he’d done had been unforgivable, and so he deserved to hear everything she’d said if only because it was the truth.
“I’ll follow yours if you follow mine,” Kate said. “You called me a vampire, but I’m not the one who’s afraid of the light. As a matter of fact, I think we ought to let a little more light in on this situation. The real kind. A little daylight into your mausoleum.”
While she was talking, she walked around the velvet sofa to one of the long windows to the left of the fireplace. She jerked the bottom of the shade and released it, allowing it to fly up. She moved to the next one and sent it whirring to the top. She was a little shocked at how exhilarated she felt with the noise they made and with the flood of sunlight that invaded the room.
She moved behind Thorne Barrington, between his still figure and the fireplace, to the windows on the other side. She threw those shades upward with the same angry satisfaction. It was as bright now inside the room as it had been on the heat-parched street outside.
When she turned back to face the man who had so infuriated her, she realized that Barrington hadn’t moved. Despite the noise, he hadn’t turned around to watch what she was doing. Apparently he intended to make no response to her childishness, but the muscles in his broad shoulders and his back were rigid beneath the dark knit shirt.
Somehow she wasn’t quite satisfied with that Not enough reaction, she supposed. She walked back to where she had stood before, back to face the man who had sent her the package this morning.
“I guess I was mistaken,” she said, her tone revealing contempt. The black eyes were slightly narrowed, but they met hers unflinchingly. “All this light, and you still didn’t melt. Maybe you’re not a vampire after all.”
Barrington said nothing, his face set and controlled. Obviously, he didn’t intend to give her the satisfaction of a reaction, and now that her tantrum was over, she realized how childish she must have appeared, throwing up the shades of his windows and shouting at him about how he should live his life.
She had already headed toward the sliding doors when they opened unexpectedly. Elliot entered, silver tray, tall glasses of tea with fresh mint leaves garnishing the tops, linen napkins, the works. The best of the South, she thought, cynically. Real Southern hospitality.
“I don’t think I’ll be able to stay for the tea, but thank you anyway, Elliot,” she said, brushing by him. She just needed to be out of this room, out of Thorne Barrington’s house.
She heard the butler’s agitated exclamation behind her and the sound of breaking glass. She wondered if Barrington had thrown something, and knew that if he had, that would at least be some indication that she had gotten under his skin, threatened that iron control.
By that time she had reached the glass-paneled front door, but she turned back before she stepped through it, guilt and regret crowding her throat. What she had said had been unforgivably cruel, and in saying it, she had been both loud and rude, the only crimes a woman could be found guilty of in the South. She knew by the changes in the quality of light filtering through to the foyer that Elliot or Barrington was in the process of pulling down the shades she’d raised, returning the house to its eternal darkness. Hiding.
Three years hadn’t changed this situation, and her cruelty certainly wouldn’t She shook her head, ridiculing herself for thinking she could change anything here. A piece of the red confetti he’d sent her fluttered to lie on the hardwood floor. She left it there and walked outside into the sunshine.
Chapter Four
By the time Kate had driven home, whatever adrenaline rush had carried her through the confrontation with Barrington was fading. She wanted only to crawl back into the bed she had not had time to make and pull the covers over her head.
She had begun the process of extracting her keys from the bottom of her purse before she reached the door to her apartment, shuffling through the junk she had shoved into the black leather bag for safekeeping. When she found them, she looked up to insert the key into the lock and realized the door wasn’t closed. There was an inch of space between it and the frame, and despite her hurry this morning, she knew she hadn’t left it that way.
The terror that mushroomed in her stomach was almost as strong as her reaction to the fake bomb had been. Was it possible that whoever had sent the package was waiting inside? Not Barrington. Was it possible that the package had not been the sick prank she had accused him of, but something else? Someone else. Someone really dangerous.
But if someone were lying in wait in her apartment, she forced herself to reason, he wouldn’t have left the door open. That would be a dead giveaway of his presence, unless he was trying to do exactly what he had just accomplished—still trying to frighten her. And if that is the purpose, then damn it, he certainly is succeeding, she thought, pushing the door open enough to see into her small living room. At what the widening doorway revealed, relief washed over her.
Byron Kahler was sitting on her couch, thumbing through one of the magazines she’d arranged on the coffee table. He had looked up when she pushed the door inward, hazel eyes assessing, but he didn’t say anything.
“If I were Judge Barrington, I’d have you arrested for breaking and entering,” she said. She walked into the apartment and put her purse down on the table to the left of the door.
“I picked up a few tricks of the trade through the years,” Kahler said.
“And it seemed like a good idea to use them on my door?” She was relieved it was Kahler sitting on her couch, but a little surprised that he’d jimmied her lock to get in.
“I guess I owe you an apology,” he said.
“I’ll settle for an explanation.”
“When I got to your office, Garrison told me you’d gone home. He was concerned about you.”
“He sent you to check on me?”
“We have to talk about what happened anyway. Officially talk. I rang the bell, and when there was no answer…”
“You just broke in.”
“I was afraid you might have—I don’t know—gone off the deep end a little. When I couldn’t get you to the door, I decided it might be wise to investigate. I even thought that whoever had sent the package might have tried something else.”
She hesitated, weighing her feelings about the invasion of her privacy against the idea that he’d cared enough about her to come personally. “Thanks,” she said finally, almost grudgingly.
“You’re welcome,” Kahler said, “and you need a better lock. All it took was a credit card and a few seconds.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
She walked across the room and sat down on the love seat facing the couch. His eyes followed her, and knowing that questions were inevitable, given it was his job to ask them, she took a deep breath, trying to gather her control. When she thought she had found enough composure to talk, she looked up. The detective’s usually penetrating gaze
had softened, resting on her features with something that looked like compassion.
“You want to tell me your version of what happened?” he suggested. It took her a second to realize he meant what had happened at her office and not what she had done at Barrington’s mansion. There was no way he could know about that. Not yet.
“There’s not that much to tell. Trey brought the package in with the other mail. Plain brown paper wrappings. It was tied with string and had Barrington’s return address. I thought it was a gift, maybe even some kind of apology for Friday night.”
Kahler also couldn’t know about the judge’s appearance at the precinct house, but she decided not to get into all her reasons for opening the package, not unless he asked. “When I opened the box, it blew up in my face. It was filled with red confetti that went everywhere, all over the damn office.”
“We don’t think it was Jack, Kate, if that’ll make you feel any better. I sent the package to the lab. We won’t have the results for a couple of days, but I can tell you that in no way did it resemble what Jack sends. It worked through compressed air, just enough force to blow the lid and scatter the confetti.”
He was reassuring her, she realized, trying to make her feel less afraid. Only he wasn’t making her feel any better. He was only reinforcing the conclusion she’d already reached.
“I did have enough presence of mind to realize that Jack doesn’t fool around with confetti, Kahler. The only thing my package had in common with the others was they all blew up.” She paused, again fighting her anger against the man who had sent the package. “And that son of a bitch knows exactly how it feels,” she added “That’s the one thing I can’t get over. He knows, better than anyone, how I felt this morning.”
“You think it was Barrington?” Kahler asked, his voice expressing his surprise.
“Who else could it have been? He had motive—to get back at me for what I’d said to him, for coming into his house. The timing seems a little too coincidental not to implicate him. Who else would get his jollies scaring me spitless?”
“Nothing I know about Barrington would lead me to believe that he would do something like that.”
“Nothing you know?” she repeated, letting her sarcasm show. “Like the fact that he never leaves his house, not even to attend his father’s funeral. That he lives in the dark like some kind of—” She stopped abruptly, remembering all she had said to the man they were discussing. Like some kind of vampire. She remembered, too, Barrington sitting alone in the darkened room, the faint music floating out into the night like smoke. “Like some kind of creep,” she finished instead. “Face it, Kahler. He’s the one who’s gone off the deep end.” Her tone was bitter, but Kahler wouldn’t understand. He didn’t know about the folder with the pictures of the man she’d admired so long.
“Look, I know you’re angry at Barrington for having you hauled off the other night, but there are…explanations for some of those things,” Kahler said, his voice reasonable.
“He just sits there in the dark. What kind of explanation is there for that? What kind of explanation for the crap he pulled with the package? What kind of explanation?” she demanded angrily.
“We don’t know he sent the package, Kate.”
She laughed, a small, tight derision of sound. “Right,” she agreed sarcastically. “You may not know. If not His Honor, then who? Who else could it be?”
“Someone who doesn’t like your writing style? Hell, maybe somebody thinks you misused a semicolon,” Kahler suggested. The hazel eyes were carefully controlled, but his tone had lightened. “There are a lot of crazies out there, August.”
He was certainly right about that, Kate thought. Several of the letters she’d received about the series had contained graphic illustrations of bomb blasts, dismemberments and the like—crudely drawn but effective. As a matter of course, she had pitched them into the round file, but now she wondered if she should have saved them, turned them over to whoever in the police department was in charge of checking out the crazies.
“Lucky for us,” Kahler went on, “not all of them want to kill people. Some of them just like sending stuff through the mail. Dead rats or birds. Voodoo dolls complete with pins. All kinds of crap. Maybe even red confetti. This wasn’t Jack, but that doesn’t mean it has to be Barrington.”
“Why send it to me?” she asked. “Seriously.”
“Maybe someone’s been following the series. Maybe they didn’t like what you wrote. Who knows what sets people off.”
“You admire him, don’t you?” she asked. His eyes widened slightly at the comment, and she realized that her thoughts had outpaced the conversation. “Barrington,” she explained.
“What makes you think I admire Barrington?”
“You tell me to leave him alone. That he’s been through hell. You reject the obvious about the package—that Barrington was the crazy who sent it. You even defend the way he lives.”
“I’m not defending him, and you seem to have forgotten who we’re talking about. Barrington doesn’t need me to defend him. He’s got all the marbles. If he wants defending, he can afford to hire the best. That’s something you might want to remember before you start accusing him of this morning’s prank. That accusation would probably be grounds for some kind of suit.”
“So you’re telling me to ignore what happened today?”
“I’m telling you not to go off half-cocked. At least wait until the lab results come back. They might tell us something.”
“And they might not,” she said. She knew that the materials used in Jack’s packages had been frustratingly unrevealing.
One corner of Kahler’s mouth quirked, acknowledging that possibility. “It depends on how much the sender knows about how mail bombers are caught. They’ll at least let us see whether we’re dealing with an amateur. Until that time, I don’t think you’re in any real danger, Kate.” He smiled, and she thought how rare an occurrence that was. “Not if you get yourself a new lock. A dead bolt. A good heavy one.”
Kahler stood up, putting the magazine he’d been holding down on the coffee table between them. “Don’t worry,” he offered. “The last time I checked the statistics, nobody had ever been killed by confetti.”
She laughed, feeling better for his sardonic reassurance. It had helped to have Kahler here. She was even willing to forgive him for letting himself in. His eyes held a moment, and she found his rough masculinity more appealing than it had ever been before. He was a good friend, and he’d shown up at a time when she’d really needed one.
She walked him to the door. There was a brief, awkward moment when they reached it. It felt a little like saying good-night after a first date, unsure what the next move should be and who should make it.
“Thanks,” she said, trying to put an end to the awkwardness.
“I’ll let you know what the lab finds out,” he said.
She nodded, and he turned to go. “What kind of explanation?” she asked. The words had slipped out, not even in her consciousness before they were on her lips.
“What?” Kahler asked.
“You said there were explanations for some of the things Barrington does. I just wondered what you meant.”
“Off the record?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she agreed. “Just between you and me.” She felt free to accept his condition. This wasn’t information she wanted for the series. It was personal. What could possibly explain the change in Barrington from the assured, charismatic man in those pictures into the cold recluse she had met today?
“If you use any of this, August, if any of it ever gets into print…” Kahler paused.
“Off the record,” she said. “I swear. I just need to understand why.”
Again the hazel eyes studied her face, trying to read, maybe, the reason she needed to know. Feeling the intensity of that assessment, her own eyes dropped momentarily, and she forced them back up to meet his.
“Personal?” he asked.
She hesitated,
and finally she nodded. The muscles around Kahler’s mouth tightened, and then, with an effort she could see, he deliberately wiped the sudden tension from his face.
“Since the bombing, Barrington has suffered from migraines.”
“Migraines?” Kate repeated. “Headaches? What does that have to do with—”
“Apparently they’re…extremely severe, and they’re triggered by exposure to light.”
“Light?” she echoed, remembering the satisfying whir of the rising shades, the sudden blaze of summer sunshine she’d sent into the darkened parlor.
“I don’t understand all the mechanics,” Kahler went on, shrugging his shoulders. “From what I was told, they’re probably not related to his eye injuries, but to head trauma. Maybe damaged nerves or scar tissue. Maybe the speed at which his pupils react to sudden light. Maybe they’re even psychogenic. Nobody seemed willing to pin down a definitive cause, but nobody would deny the kind of trauma Barrington suffered could cause all sorts of problems. The headaches began as soon as the bandages came off, and they haven’t lessened in severity.”
“How severe?”
“The usual treatment for headaches as intense as the ones Barrington has is an injection of something powerful enough to knock the sufferer out until the migraine’s over. That’s what they did for the judge while he was in the hospital.”
“How long do they last?”
“For some people migraines can last several days. Given his situation, it makes some sense out of Barrington’s decision not to expose himself to that risk.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about this?” Kate asked. “We talked about Barrington. Why the hell didn’t you tell me?” Damn Kahler and his reticence.
“The information came from a friend, somebody at the hospital where the judge was treated after the bombing. Not Barrington’s physician, but somebody who knew about the case and owed me a favor. None of this is for public consumption, August. I told you. The guy’s been through enough.”