by Lisa Jackson
She was heading down the sweeping staircase of his home, moving quickly, one hand trailing along the polished banister. She didn’t so much as glance back at him.
“It’s not safe.” He had then managed to jerk the denim up his legs and over his bare butt as she reached the floor below.
“I’m a big girl, Cole.”
“Wait! Eve, this is nuts!”
She was at the door, purse slung over her shoulder, as he hurried down the stairs, still fiddling with his damned button fly.
“You can’t—”
“I can and I will.” She’d grabbed for the door handle, but Cole threw himself in front of it, barring her exit.
“Just…wait,” he’d demanded.
That had really infuriated her.
“You’re barricading me in?” she’d asked in disbelief. “These aren’t the Middle Ages! Get out of the way!”
“I’ve never trusted Roy.”
“You don’t trust anyone,” she’d shot back. “Even me, it seems. So cut out all this Machiavellian, macho, backwoods crap!”
That’s when he had made his biggest mistake: he grabbed her hard, his fingers circling her upper arms, holding her still.
“I’ll come with you.”
She had looked down at his taut fingers. “Let go of me, Cole,” she’d said in a curiously controlled voice. “So help me God, don’t you ever try to restrain me again.” When she met his gaze again, her eyes were filled with cold fury.
“What is it, Eve?” he’d asked, loosening his grip. He was at a loss to understand her. What kind of pull did Roy Kajak have over her? Childhood friend? Research subject? Or something more? Something deeper. Darker. Vastly more intimate.
“You’re way out of line here.” Her voice was low, threatening. “Way out. I’m leaving. You’re staying, and if you don’t let go of me this instant, I’m calling the police.”
He’d dropped her arms as if she’d stung him, watching as she snagged her cell phone from the side pocket of her purse.
“You’d call the cops on me?”
She didn’t answer, just had shouldered past him, cell phone still in hand, as she yanked open the door and hurried to her car.
Even now, months later, he could still hear the thud of her car door slamming shut, the cough and catch of her Toyota’s engine, and the angry squeal of her tires as she’d reversed out of the drive.
He’d stood stunned for about two seconds before closing the door, taking the steps back upstairs, two at a time. He’d then strode across his bedroom carpet, entered the closet, and hurriedly twisted the combination lock on the safe embedded in the back wall. His hand had closed over a handgun, and he hurried to his car, filled with confusion and fear for her safety. Whatever was happening wasn’t right. Eve was hiding something big.
And he knew a shortcut to the cabin.
CHAPTER 5
Streetlights glowed an eerie blue as Eve pulled up to the house she’d inherited from her grandmother. Her shoulders ached and her head throbbed, but at last she had arrived at the one place she could call home.
She parked in the drive in front of the old single-car garage. Nana’s old house stood alone, a covered porch leading from a door on its side to the main house, a three-story Victorian complete with the high turret her grandmother had used as an artist’s studio for as long as she could mount the spiral staircase. Even as a kid Eve had claimed the room as her own, and whenever she spent weekends or summers with Nana, she slept in the turret with its three-hundred and-sixty-degree view and easy access to the roof. In the summers, Eve had often sat outside on the old shingles, staring across other roofs and trees, imagining she could see across St. Charles Avenue, Magazine Street, and the area known as the Irish Channel, to view the Mississippi River—which, of course, was impossible.
Now she eyed the old house and smiled with relief. “We made it,” she said to Samson as she turned off the engine. First things first: let the damned cat out! Well, if not out, at least free of the cage and in the house. She would keep him inside for a few days, just to make certain he was reacquainted with the house, and only then would he have some freedom outside.
Glancing down at the clippings still littering the passenger seat and floor, she decided to leave them where they were for the time being. She wasn’t as panicked about them now. Later, she said to herself, hauling her purse and the cat carrier up the back steps to the porch and back door.
As much as she’d always loved this house, with its high ceilings, narrow halls, and smells of pecan pies, rich coffee, and dried flower sachets, she’d been as shocked as anyone that Nana had left the house to her, bypassing her own son and Eve’s half brothers as well.
Eve unlocked the back door and walked through a small mudroom before entering the kitchen. She switched on a few lights and wrinkled her nose at the smells of dust and mold that had settled into the old timbers in the time she’d been gone. There was also the pervasive smell of rot, and she had only to look under the kitchen sink to find garbage that had needed to be taken out months ago.
“Great,” she muttered, unlocking the cat carrier and watching Samson streak through the cage door. She spent the next fifteen minutes hauling out the trash, refilling the litter box, and setting out food and water for Samson then carrying in her things. After she’d hauled in her luggage and stacked it near the foot of the stairs, she returned to the car one last time and picked up the envelope and all the scattered clippings from the floor of the passenger seat. Just touching them made her feel dirty. Whoever had gone to all the trouble to cut these out, stuff them in an envelope, and wait for the right moment to plant them in her car had done so with a purpose.
He’d intended to scare her.
Why else break into the car and leave the envelope anonymously? Had it been at the gas station, where she’d perhaps forgotten to lock the car? That’s where she’d seen the man staring at her from behind dark glasses.
No doubt about it: she’d been followed.
He could be here right now. Watching.
Her head snapped up quickly, and she studied the empty street, the shadowy bushes skirting her house, the alley behind the garage. Her eyes and ears strained, but she saw no one, heard no scrape of shoes against pavement, felt no whisper of air movement, smelled nothing but the rainwater dripping from the broad leaves of the mountain laurel tree planted near the drive.
She shivered as she gathered all the papers and pressed the lock button on her remote. The car chirped, and its parking lights flashed as the Camry locked down. No more break-ins. She glanced over her shoulder and felt the hairs on the back of her neck lift. Who had done this? Had they followed her?
Everything looked safe. The houses flanking hers had warm lights glowing through their shaded windows. The night was quiet, few cars passing, just the soft sough of the wind whispering through the pecan, pine, and live oak trees in the yard. Still, looks could be deceiving. She was wary, nerves strung taut as she hurried inside and slid the dead bolt behind her with a satisfying thunk.
She placed the envelope and all of the pieces of paper onto the kitchen table, examining them from a distance, almost afraid to touch them. There were nearly thirty articles, all neatly trimmed with pinking shears, all pertaining to Faith Chastain’s tragic death.
Who had sent them to her?
Why?
What did a woman who’d been dead over twenty years have to do with her?
Struggling to make sense of it, Eve considered what she knew. Faith Chastain died at Our Lady of Virtues. The mental hospital where Eve’s father practiced. That massive brick building where she had played as a child, hiding from the nuns, spying on the patients.
Now Eve rubbed her hands together, tamping down a niggling anxiety. She asked herself: Don’t you intend to go back there, to wander through the hallways and rooms where you witnessed so much cruel abuse once called “treatment”? Haven’t you been fascinated with the old asylum? Isn’t it integral to your research? Don’t you
plan to compare the use of physical restraints, so common at Our Lady of Virtues, to some of the antipsychotic drugs used today? The question is, Who else knows? Why does he care? What is he trying to tell you?
Swallowing hard, Eve felt a little dizzy as she stared at the articles. If her theory was correct and someone wanted to either scare her from her research or…what? Warn her? Then why focus on Faith Chastain? A woman she didn’t remember.
Or did she?
Had Faith Chastain been one of the patients Eve had spied on as a child? Eve’s heart pounded a little faster and shame washed over her as she remembered lying to her father, telling him she was going to play outside on the swings, or take a walk through the woods, or go to the stables where a few horses were kept, when she’d really been intent on slipping through the hospital itself like a ghost, creeping through rooms and hallways that were supposed to be off-limits, ignoring all the rules.
It had been horrifying but fascinating to her as she witnessed patients in straitjackets or other restraints. She knew it wasn’t right, but at times the patients had frightened her. Some of them, perhaps, who had been given lobotomies years before; others who were the victims of electroshock treatment.
Her childish fears still had the power to embarrass her, and now her cheeks flushed. The patients she’d found so captivating, those she’d avoided, or those who had frightened her, had been ill, battling unseen demons. Of course she hadn’t understood their maladies or psychoses.
She’d been so uninformed. If not uncaring, then at least more concerned about herself than anyone else. The truth was, some of the more serious patients just plain creeped her out. They had been intriguing, but in a frightening way. Her interest in psychiatry was more than a career choice; it was a means to atone. With her injury and Roy’s death, she’d missed the spring semester but hoped to return to the university in the fall.
Shaking the thoughts aside, she turned her attention to the clippings. Someone obviously knew about her connection to the old hospital. But why would they care?
With a determined sigh, she walked to the table again, picking up the clippings one by one, scanning them and trying to put them in some sort of order. There were no dates on the articles and the best she could do was separate them by type of print—newspaper or magazine. She could search the articles on the Internet and planned to do so as soon as she had her modem hooked up again.
But not tonight. Not when her headache was building again after the long trip. She needed to sleep on this, maybe figure out what it meant. Rubbing her temples, she walked to the sink, where she let the water run for a couple of minutes while she scrounged in the cupboard for a reasonably clean glass. She swallowed two more tablets of aspirin, chased them down with cool water from the tap, then leaned over the sink and splashed more water onto her face.
Twisting off the tap, she found a terry-cloth towel in a drawer and dabbed at her face. Everything she’d gone through this day faded a bit as she glanced around the room where she’d spent hours with her grandmother. Pink tile, floral wallpaper in tones of green, gray, and pink, once-white cabinets, scratched hardwood floors—the kitchen hadn’t changed since she was a toddler who had needed to stand on a chair at the sink to play with a piece of pie dough as her grandmother created the sweetest pecan and peach pies Eve had ever tasted.
She smiled faintly as she remembered her hands and tiny apron covered in flour while her brothers—“the ruffians,” Nana had called them—played outside no matter what the weather. Even then there had been a distinction. Kyle and Van hadn’t been allowed to wear shoes past the mudroom or to “roughhouse” inside, whereas Eve had been given carte blanche to do nearly anything she wanted. She was Nana’s favorite and had been from the get-go. Even though Eve was adopted, Nana had still considered her special, solidifying the union between Terrence Renner and his wife, a woman who had come to the marriage with two sons sired by a man who had spent more years in prison than out. Though Eve’s father had adopted Kyle and Van, they had been surly preteens with attitudes at the time of the marriage—“Troublemakers and hooligans,” Nana snorted—while Eve had come into the family as a tiny infant.
It didn’t take a rocket scientist to understand why Kyle and Van had so little use for her. Kyle had grown into a brooding, unhappy man, while Van had spent his adult years thinking only of himself, a narcissist to the nth degree.
Eve knew now that the grandmother she’d worshiped was in reality a bigoted old woman who relished playing favorites. And it had only been exacerbated with Dorothy Gilles Renner’s death—when Eve’s grandmother spelled out in her last will and testament that the lion’s share of her estate would go to Eve. Token bequests had been left to Kyle and Van, while Eve’s father, Dorothy’s only child, had wound up with an abandoned farm surrounded by swampland and his father’s World War II memorabilia.
A bitter pill to swallow for all of the men in the family.
At the time of the bequests, Eve had wrestled with her conscience about the unfairness of it all and had finally decided that when she ever sold the old house, she’d make it up to her brothers.
But not tonight.
Now she was beat. She walked through the house, turning on table lamps. At the base of the stairs, she grabbed her largest suitcase and lugged it up the creaking wooden steps. The once-colorful runner leading upward was worn, just like the rest of the house, and sometimes Eve wondered if her grandmother had bequeathed her a golden goose or an albatross. Bringing the old house up to date while preserving its historic charm would cost a fortune, so for now the fraying runner, chipped pink tiles and fading wallpaper would remain.
On the second floor she paused, caught her breath, and frowned when she realized how weak she still was. All because of a would-be assassin’s bullet.
Cole.
Her lover.
Her confidant.
Her assailant.
Her stomach tightened into a hard knot as she envisioned his handsome, angry face glaring at her as he raised the gun and, in a flash of light and a splintering of glass, nearly killed her.
That’s how it was.
Wasn’t it?
Cole had tried to kill her….
“Bastard,” she whispered, shuttering her mind. She couldn’t go there tonight.
Walking into the master bedroom, she tossed her dirty clothes into a basket and hung the others up, wrinkles and all. She took one last trip downstairs, found Samson and held him close, listening to his deep purr rumbling against her body, feeling his long tail wrap around her torso.
“I’m sorry for that horrible, long drive,” she said. “You’re such a good, good boy. Forgive me?” The cat looked at her with wide gold eyes then rubbed his head beneath her chin and purred loudly. “So, here we are Samson. Now what’re we going to do? Hmm? Start over, I guess.”
And face Cole. No matter what.
The cat slid from her arms and hopped onto a window ledge near the kitchen table to peer into the night.
“Don’t get on the counters,” Eve said as she always did. “Or the table.”
After double-checking that all the doors were locked and bolted, she headed for the bathroom. Once inside, she locked the door, swabbed out the old claw-footed tub, filled it, stripped off her clothes, then climbed into the warm water.
Heaven, she thought, lowering herself to her chin, feeling the water caress her skin, soaking out the knots of tension in her neck and back. She closed her eyes. The water enveloped her, and over the sound of her own breathing she heard the sigh of the wind rustling the leaves of the magnolia trees in the backyard and the creaks and groans of the old house.
Cole’s image floated through her mind. A rugged if not handsome face, startling blue eyes that shifted color with the daylight, a blade-thin mouth that could flatten in silent anger or lift at the corners in amusement. She’d thought he was “the one,” if there really was such a thing—and she’d been wrong, she realized now as she reached for a cracked bar of soap.
> Dead wrong.
“Son of a bitch,” Cole swore as he drove out of the city. Thinking of Eve was getting him nowhere.
With a wary eye on the other traffic, he maneuvered his Jeep across the bridge spanning Lake Pontchartrain and was only vaguely aware of the miles of black water stretching in all directions. He tapped his fingers nervously on the steering wheel and, once he was across the wide stretch of water, drove through several small towns to a wooded spot where one of his few cousins still owned a mobile home. They’d played here as kids, but he suspected that Jim, long married and living near Philly with his wife and son, hadn’t been back in half a decade. He parked in the drive and waited.
Five minutes.
Ten.
No one appeared.
It was now or never.
Grabbing the tool kit, he pulled out a flashlight and locked the Jeep behind him. The night was cool, a fine mist rising through the trees and undergrowth of this bayou retreat. Cole pulled on a pair of thick gloves then vaulted the fence and walked toward the old house. It stood long and low, a once-white behemoth in the otherwise dark woods. Chancing the flashlight, he ran the beam over the aging aluminum and glass. The curtains were drawn, stains visible in the lining, spiderwebs tucked along the dirty glass where moss seemed to have somehow taken root.
No one had been here in a long time.
Aside from hunters or fishermen who had trespassed, he was probably the last one to walk around the old single-wide. There wasn’t even a sign of a campfire or broken lock to suggest that squatters had found the remote trailer.
Which was all the better.
Feeling as if time were chasing him, Cole hurried along an old deer trail until he came to a fork in the path. He turned unerringly toward the south and ended up at a dock where once his cousin had moored a dinghy. There was no longer a boat, and the pier was rotting, some of the boards missing. Cole shined his light across the dark water and heard a splash that was probably an alligator sliding from the bank.