by Lisa Jackson
The dog lifted her head and yawned as Abby slapped on the bedside lamp. Her small bedroom was suddenly awash with soft illumination, headboard gleaming, shutters closed, her robe tossed carelessly over the foot of her bed where Ansel, curled into a ball of feline comfort, opened one eye.
“Oh, God,” she whispered, sinking back into the pillows. It had been a dream. A nightmare.
Always the same.
Whenever she was stressed, she dreamed about her mother and the hospital. Sometimes it was an out-of-body experience and she was actually looking down upon her younger self climbing the old staircase of the hospital, lingering at the stained-glass window at the landing, walking through the darkened hallway on the third floor, then opening the door to find her mother at the window. Other times, like tonight, she was actually a part of the drama, walking through the corridors herself, though always, she was young again. Fifteen.
Involuntarily, as she always did when she was startled awake by the dream, she made the sign of the cross over her chest and gathered in several deep breaths. Her heart rate began to slow thankfully as the nightmare slowly faded, shrinking back into her subconscious, but lurking, ready to strike again.
This was all that damned Montoya’s fault, she thought churlishly. If he hadn’t brought up the hospital and her mother . . . if he hadn’t been so damned sexy and disturbing . . .
Wrong-o, Abby. You can’t blame the man for doing his job, or for being appealing. Nuh-uh.
“Damn!” She tossed off the covers.
She glanced at the clock. Four-sixteen. Almost too early to get up.
Montoya’s warning echoed through her brain. Lock your doors. Set your alarm, if you’ve got one. If you don’t, then call a security company and have one installed ASAP.
“Well, I don’t have one,” she muttered under her breath.
Still agitated, she rolled out of bed and padded barefoot through the house, testing the doors and making certain each window was securely locked. Hershey followed after her, toenails clicking on the hardwood.
Maybe Montoya had a point. As it was, her security depended upon a friendly Lab who wouldn’t harm a damned flea, a revolver she’d never fired, and her own wits. “You’re doomed, Abby,” she chided herself. She also had stickers glued to the inside of the windows claiming that the house was protected by an alarm system connected to the sheriff ’s department, but that was a lie, one perpetrated by the previous owner. If anyone broke into her house, she was on her own.
“Get a grip,” she told herself and walked to the kitchen, where she grabbed a glass from the cupboard and turned on the faucet. She stared through the window as she first held the glass to her forehead to cool off, then drank half the water. As she swallowed, she saw her pale reflection in the window over the sink, beyond which the thick darkness of the forest shrouded any and all who might be lurking outside and watching her.
And who would that be, Abby?
Are you getting paranoid now?
Like her?
Like Faith?
Remember, your mother’s disease started as simple distrust and moved quickly into general suspicion and thoughts of persecution. Is that what’s happening to you, too?
“No!” Angrily, she tossed the last swallow of water into the sink.
Like mother, like daughter.
“Oh, shut up!”
Talking to yourself, Abby? Isn’t that what she used to do? Didn’t you see her in the kitchen, mumbling to herself, having conversations with herself? Isn’t that what customers at the antique shop used to accuse her of?
Leaving the empty glass on the counter, Abby refused to listen to the voice in her head. She was not like her mother.
Still wound up, she knew she couldn’t sleep, so she decided to go to the darkroom and check the prints she’d developed.
More to prove that she wasn’t afraid of living in this house than anything else, she threw on a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt, then grabbed her keys. Whistling to the dog, she walked through the kitchen and outside, where the bullfrogs croaked and crickets chirped, and she caught a glimpse of a cloud-shrouded moon. She locked the door behind her, leaving Hershey to guard the house. In ten short steps she was across the walkway and into the little studio.
The darkroom was little more than a closet with water piped to it. Shelves stored paper, bottles, tongs, chemicals, and trays marked for the various stages in the process.
These days she didn’t develop many of her own pictures because she had use of the lab next door to her shop off Jackson Square. For commercial work she primarily used her digital camera and computer. But for her personal black-and-white photos she liked to develop her own film.
It was soothing. Calming. And lately she needed all the soothing and calming she could get.
Several days earlier she’d processed the negatives from the roll of film she’d found in her old 35mm camera, which she’d replaced some time after her divorce from Luke. Curious about what was on the film, she’d clicked off the remainder of the roll the other day, filming Ansel on the verandah with the late autumn light fading through the trees. Later, she’d developed the negatives and created a contact print of the small pictures. She’d left that print clothespinned to a cord strung across the darkroom.
Intending to get back to the contact print after it had dried, she’d been derailed by Detective Montoya’s initial visit telling her about Luke’s murder. The news had knocked thoughts of the print from her head. Only now, in the wee hours of the morning, after that horrendous, recurring nightmare, had she remembered. Deep down she suspected that it was more than a need to see what was on the print, that she’d really been looking for an excuse to get out of bed and stay up, that the thought of falling into another fitful sleep might bring back the terrifying nightmare.
“Chicken,” she muttered under her breath, bending to her work.
She removed the contact print from the cord and carried it out of the darkroom to her desk in the main part of the studio. Adjusting a tension lamp for the best viewing, she found her favorite magnifying glass in a desk drawer and began carefully viewing each shot, smiling when she caught images of Ansel sleeping, or hunting, or hiding under the sofa. Slowly she checked each image to see that the subject was clear, the light right.
On the third strip, she gasped. “Oh, God.” She nearly dropped her magnifying glass.
Her dead ex-husband’s face looked up at her.
Smiling easily, showing just a bit of teeth, a hint of a dimple and a sexy twist of his lips, he stared up at her in bold black and white.
“Damn.” How had she missed it when eyeing the negatives?
She took a step back, as if she expected the image to suddenly morph into the man.
She’d forgotten she’d taken the shot, having snapped it before deciding to use her digital camera. Luke had wanted new head shots and she’d agreed to photograph him.
Shortly after that session she’d found out about Connie Hastings. She’d called her lawyer that afternoon, told Luke to move out, erased the images in her digital camera, and started the legal proceedings to end her marriage. She’d forgotten this one final shot.
How long had it been since she’d taken those pictures? Eighteen months ago? Two years? It didn’t matter.
“Time flies when you’re having fun,” she muttered to herself and noted that the picture was good. It captured Luke’s fun-loving, devil-may-care spirit, brought out the boyishness that she’d fallen in love with so many years ago.
And now it was useless.
Unless she wanted to give it to his parents.
Or did she even want to open that can of worms? His mother had never believed her son to be a womanizer, had hinted that a strong woman could hold on to “her man.”
“Forget it,” she said and made an X through the shot. There were other pictures, taken of Hershey, Ansel, and some of the wildlife she’d caught around her house. She would enlarge those later. She’d had enough fun f
or the night.
She locked the studio behind her and walked the few steps to the house. It was still dark outside, the frogs and insects making noise, dawn not yet streaking the sky.
Hershey was waiting at the door, resting on the mat, her paws supporting her big brown head. “You are a good girl,” Abby whispered, scratching the dog behind her ears and then saying, “I shouldn’t do this, so don’t tell anyone, okay?” Reaching into the pantry, she found a box of dog biscuits and tossed one to the Lab. Hershey caught it on the fly, then carried it into the living room, where she crunched the bone to bits.
“Come on, let’s go back to bed and see if we can get a few more hours of sleep.” The clock on the mantel showed that it was after five. Abby groaned. Sleep now would be nearly impossible and she had a nine o’clock consultation at the office, so she’d have to be up by seven-thirty at the latest. She headed off to bed again but Hershey, following after her, stopped short at the French doors.
“You need to go out?”
The dog just stared and slowly the hackles on the back of her neck rose. She growled low in her throat.
“Oh, don’t do this,” she whispered, Montoya’s warnings running through her brain. Had she locked the door behind her when she’d returned to the kitchen?
Abby turned off the lights so that the house was in darkness. She, too, peered through the window, but all she saw was the dark, dark night.
“It’s just a raccoon,” she said and the dog growled again. Low. Rumbling. A warning.
“Come on, Hersh, you’re freaking me out.” She thought of the gun in the bedside table and wondered if she would ever have the nerve to use it, to blow some intruder away.
Without snapping on a single light, she returned to the door leading to the studio and found it locked. She was safe. Right? She stared through the glass panels toward her studio and saw a shadow slip beneath the pooling light from the security lamp near the smaller building.
Her heart nearly stopped.
She froze, half expecting a man’s face to appear in the window on the door, the barest of inches from hers, only a thin pane of glass separating them.
But nothing happened. No face appeared. No dark figure scuttled through her line of vision. The shadow she’d seen didn’t return.
Get a grip, Abby.
No one’s out there.
No one at all.
The dog growled again and she felt a fear dark as the night.
And with it came a sense of foreboding.
A knowledge that whatever had begun with Luke’s death was far from over.
CHAPTER 9
“Pedro!” Sister Maria called, smiling and waving upon sight of her nephew.
Montoya was already feeling out of place in the foyer of the convent; hearing his confirmation name only made him more so. “Tia Maria.”
“What a surprise!” She slipped her arm through his and hugged him. She’d aged since he’d last seen her, and her once vibrant skin was now lined, her lips thin, her hands spotted, but she still had a strength to her, a vitality that snapped in her dark eyes. “Come on, come on, let’s sit in the garden and you can tell me what it is that brings you here. Though I’d love to think that you were just missing your old aunt, I have the feeling that there’s something more to your visit.” She patted his arm as she teased him, just as she had for as long as he could remember.
She led him through the long hallway, past mullioned and tracery windows that allowed the gloomy day to seep inside. At the bottom of a carved wooden staircase she pushed open a door to a courtyard where flowers in large cement pots had begun to fade. A center fountain sprayed water upward only to cascade down on an angel holding two vessels from which streams of water poured into a large square pool. Water lilies floated on the surface and goldfish swam in the shimmering depths.
Maria sat next to him on a stone bench under the protection of the cloister roof. In her profile he caught a glimpse of the girl she’d once been, a frightened teenager who, he’d overheard from gossiping family members, had found herself pregnant before she was twenty. Whoever had been her lover had remained her secret, guarded for nearly forty years, and what had happened to the baby, Montoya had never learned through the whispers of his mother and her sisters. Maria had never married. Instead she had joined this order of nuns where she’d sought refuge, solace, and, he supposed, forgiveness.
As clouds collected in the sky and the wind buffeted the Spanish moss draping from tall oaks rising on the outside of the cloister walls, they shared small talk about the family for a few minutes, catching up on relatives and sharing a laugh about the time when Sister Maria had caught him with his first girlfriend.
“But you’re all grown up now,” she said, angling her head to stare at him, the hem of her whimple falling over her shoulder. “And have you finally forgiven yourself for what happened to your . . . friend?”
“I’m not here about Marta,” he said quietly as a cloud passed over the sun.
“No? Why did you come here, Pedro? Is it something to do with the hospital being torn down?”
“Maria, my name’s Reuben, or sometimes I go by my middle name, Diego. No one calls me Pedro.”
“Just me,” she said with a smile. “And I’m not going to change. It’s a good name, you know. Pedro—Peter—is my favorite of all the saints.” She grinned. “You know what they say about old dogs.”
“I think you could learn new tricks if you wanted to.”
She laughed. “Okay, maybe. Just, please, don’t ask me to dance.”
“It’s a deal.” He relaxed a little. He’d always loved being around her.
She touched his knee. “So what is it? What do you want to know?”
“I’m not here specifically about the hospital’s demolition,” he said, “but I do have some questions about it. You worked over there, didn’t you?” He hitched his chin in the general direction of the sanitarium. “Around twenty years ago?”
Plucking at her sleeve, she nodded and watched the birds, a flycatcher and titmouse fluttering near the fountain. “I had an office there, yes. Shared it with a social worker.”
“Virginia Simmons?”
His aunt turned to face him. “She was one of them. Ended up quitting and marrying one of the doctors. Dr. Heller, I think it was.” She frowned at the mention of Heller, as if the very thought of him was distasteful. “No . . . I’ve got that wrong. It was Dr. LaBelle.” Her face registered her surprise as she put two and two together. “Oh, my stars. She’s the mother of Courtney Mary LaBelle, the girl who was killed the other night!”
“That’s right.”
Sadness touched Maria’s eyes. “I heard that she’d been murdered,” she said softly, resting her hands over the black folds of her skirt. “Such a shame. So that’s why you’re here. You’re investigating her murder. I think you should probably talk to Mother Superior. She knows more about Mary becoming a novitiate. I didn’t realize . . . how silly of me . . . I’d heard her name, met her, but it never registered that she was Virginia’s daughter.” She smiled sadly and said, “Sometimes . . . well, sometimes I forget.”
This wasn’t a surprise. He’d heard from his own mother that she was worried about her sister’s “confusion” or her “forgetfulness” and there was a question, though no one said it aloud, of Alzheimer’s disease or some other form of dementia.
Clearing her throat, Maria fingered the cross hanging from her neck and looked up when a gate on the far side of the cloister opened and a tall man with broad shoulders walked inside. He pushed a wheelbarrow while balancing a rake and broom across the empty pan.
“Who’s he?” Montoya asked, eyeing the man who wore dark glasses and a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. Around his neck was a headset for listening to music. A long, looping wire attached it to his pocket, where a small CD player or iPod lay hidden.
“The groundskeeper. Lawrence.” She patted her nephew’s hand as Lawrence, plugged into his music, began sweeping leaves from the
courtyard. “Don’t tell me you’re suspicious of him?”
“I was just surprised to see a man here.”
She chuckled. “Well, they do come in handy now and again, you know. As self-sufficient as we are here, most of us aren’t as young as we used to be and there are some duties that are more suited for men than a bunch of old nuns.” She grabbed his hand. “Sometimes, Pedro . . . er, Reuben, I think the world has become a very ugly place. Then I remember the words of the Father and they are a balm to me. Settle me down. Give me back my faith in humankind. That might be difficult for you, I know, because of what you do for a living.”
“Is that the reason?”
She gave his hand a squeeze. “You look like you could use a little of that faith now.”
“Probably,” he said, thinking he could use more than a little, but then faith for him was in short supply these days. He turned the conversation back to the path he was interested in: Abby Chastain’s mother. “Let’s go back about twenty years ago. You remember a patient named Faith Chastain?”
Maria’s face seemed to fold in upon itself. The lines in her forehead deepened. She locked her fingers. “A few days ago was the twentieth anniversary of her death,” she said, surprising him that her memory of the tragedy was so clear. “I’ll never forget it. I was the first one at her side. I’d been just starting out the door to the convent when I heard the sounds of groaning metal and shattering glass. And then the scream. That horrible, soul-jarring shriek of pure terror.” Maria rubbed her throat. “Faith’s family had just pulled up in their car. One of the girls was already inside, perhaps even up the stairs, yes, I think I passed her on the landing as I was coming down. The other daughter and Faith’s husband were still outside, fussing with a present for her, I think . . . though it was so long ago . . .” Her eyes clouded, and though she looked across the courtyard to the groundskeeper busy with his broom, Montoya knew she was seeing something else in her mind’s eye.