Final Scream

by Lisa Jackson

  Despair stole into her heart, but she refused to give up hope. Damn it, she could be as stubborn as he. And she’d find a chink in his emotional armor if it killed her, though she was afraid that it was guilt, not love, that drove her.

  “Tell me about Marshall Baldwin.” Bill Laszlo caught up with Cassidy in the kitchen as she was pouring herself a cup of coffee. She glanced at an early copy of the Times, identical to the one she’d seen on the kitchen table at home. Chase had left the house immediately after their fight, refusing to let her drive him, taking an automatic pickup that he somehow managed to maneuver into town.

  “Baldwin died in the fire.”

  “I know that much. Hell, I wrote that story,” he said, motioning to the short article headlined ALASKAN BUSINESSMAN IDENTIFIED. “But who was he, really?”

  Cassidy stirred powdered cream substitute into her coffee. “I don’t know.”

  “Sure you do. Hey, watch out, that stuff will kill you. It’s loaded with preservatives and crap like that. Notice the word ‘nondairy.’”

  “Thanks for the tip,” she said, dropping her stir stick in the waste can.

  “So come on. You must know something about Baldwin.”

  “All I know is what I read in the papers, what you wrote. He’s an Alaskan industrialist. He owns some sawmills, a farm—potatoes, I think, a fishery and land. Gives a lot of money away to charitable causes.”

  “That’s just his publicist talking.”

  “Did he have one?”

  Laszlo was undeterred. “What I want to know is the man below the surface. Who was he really? The way I hear it, he has no family; isn’t that a hoot? All that money and not an heir—not even a will?”

  “Someone will claim his money.”

  “I hope so; I’d like to know more about him.” He reached for a cup on an upper shelf. “What’s Chase say?”

  Cassidy was cautious, but it didn’t hurt to tell Bill what she’d learned from Chase. “Just that Baldwin came down here to talk about having some lumber milled here.”

  “You believe that? When we’re shipping lumber to Japan? Don’t they have mills in Alaska? Doesn’t he own his own?” Laszlo poured himself some hot water and dunked a bag of herbal tea into his cup.

  He was asking the same questions she’d asked herself, but she wasn’t about to tell him about Chase selling out his interest in Buchanan Industries. Not yet.

  “Come on, Cassidy. Don’t kid a kidder. I know that before the fire you were ready to walk. Chase is married to the Buchanan fortune, not to you. Now, all of a sudden, everything’s hunky-dory, your marriage is back on track, and you’re trying to protect him.”

  Irritation edged her voice. “If you don’t believe me, call Chase.”

  “I have,” Bill said. “He’s not particularly chatty.”

  “Maybe it’s because his jaw is still wired together.”

  “And maybe it’s because he’s got something to hide.”

  She picked up her coffee and headed back to her desk. He started to follow. “Leave me alone, Bill, I’ve got work to do.”

  “So do I.”

  “Then do it, and stop pumping me for information I don’t have.”

  He ignored her as she wove through the partitions to her own desk. Selma wasn’t in yet. Wheeling his chair over, Bill plopped down next to Cassidy as she turned her attention to her computer screen and tried to tune him out. Damn the man. He wasn’t a bad reporter and persistence seemed to be his middle name. Picking up her cup, she sipped the coffee—a little stronger than she liked—and pulled up a story she’d started the day before.

  Bill dropped his wet tea bag in her trash. “Marshall shows up in Alaska in the fall of 1977.”

  “So?”

  “Less than two months after the fire here.”

  “I’m still not following you,” she said, her heart hammering so loudly she was afraid he could hear the wild knocks.

  “No family. No friends. Nothing. As far as I can tell, he didn’t have a dime to his name, not even a decent coat and he’s in friggin’ Alaska. Do you know how cold it is up there in November? He lands a job, gets credit at some company store so that he can buy some warm clothes and stays in the cheapest dive available. At the time he claims he’s twenty-two, but no one knows for sure. He could have been younger.”

  “Or older, if he’s lying.”

  “Don’t be obtuse.”

  “What’re you getting at, Bill?”

  “I’m working on the theory that Marshall Baldwin might have been Brig McKenzie.”

  Isn’t everyone?

  He watched her reaction, his gaze never leaving her face as he took a swallow of his tea.

  “That’s a big leap.”

  “I’d like to talk to Chase, face-to-face, and then to his mother. You know they think she was spotted up in the foothills?”

  “What?” Cassidy nearly spilled her coffee. “Someone’s found Sunny?”

  “Unconfirmed as yet, but two kids who’d been camping in the woods came home and told their mother they’d seen a witch; a gray-haired woman chanting in a small clearing. Now the kids could be lying, of course. I’m going to interview them when the police are through. And then there’s a farmer—Dave Dickey, lives out on his family’s homestead a few miles out of town. He admits to giving a woman with a cane—probably your missing mother-in-law—a ride. And guess where she ended up?”

  “I can’t.”

  “At your Mom and Dad’s place. That was the day she escaped; the day Marshall Baldwin died. I’m going to have a chat with Farmer Dave, too. Sooner or later the truth’s gonna come out, Cassidy, and the Times is gonna report it under my byline. So”—he stood—“if you find out anything, I’d appreciate it if you’d let me know.”

  Thirty-six

  “Where’s Sunny McKenzie?” Dena’s voice shook as she demanded answers of her husband. Rex was in the stable watching as Mac, the foreman who had been with Rex for as long as Dena could remember, drove his old truck away from the ranch. Dust and the smell of diesel filled the air.

  “I don’t know where she is.”

  “Like hell.” Dena’s anger was out of control. She felt the heat in her face, knew her lip was trembling in rage. For over a week she’d felt as if she were walking a tightrope, her stomach in knots. The pills her doctor had prescribed, little capsules that were supposed to “calm her nerves,” didn’t help much. She was already upping the dosage. “Look, Rex, I’ve put up with a lot over the years. I knew about you and Sunny—”

  He scowled defensively, his eyes sliding away, as if he were suddenly interested in the mares and foals grazing in a far pasture.

  She brazened on. This was her life, too, damn it. “For the most part, I turned my head, even though it hurt me, but I won’t allow you to harbor her around here somewhere. She’s an escapee from a mental hospital, for God’s sake!”

  Rex rubbed the back of his neck as he stared across fields dotted with the most expensive horses in the county. “Sunny’s the most sane person I know.”

  “Oh, for the love of St. Mary. Will you listen to yourself Rex? Sane? A woman who made her living reading palms, and listening to voices or seeing visions or whatever it was? Sane? She tried to slash her own wrists, for God’s sake! Why do you think Willie is a half-wit?”

  “’Cause he nearly drowned, that’s why,” Rex said, his cheeks reddening as he faced her. “And it’s my fault.”

  “Your fault?”

  “I should’ve claimed him from the beginning, or at least paid Frank McKenzie enough so that he could keep a decent place for his family.” Rex closed his eyes. “I’ve been a coward, Dena, afraid to tarnish my reputation, but no longer. I’m going to call Cassidy at the Times. Let her print the story.”

  “Oh, Rex, no—”

  “It’s time, Dena,” he said, offering her a kind, patient smile—the one he reserved for hotheads and neurotics. Oh, he’d changed from the man she’d married over thirty years before. He’d been strong, then.
Forceful. The most powerful man in three counties and now in his old age he seemed to be weakening, trying to make his peace, forever trekking up to the cemetery and reliving the past.

  “God’s punished me for my cowardice,” he said. “First Lucretia, then Buddy’s accident, then…then Angie.” His voice cracked.

  “God isn’t punishing you.”

  “Of course He is.” Rex lifted his hat, smoothed his hair and frowned as he squared the cap back on his head.

  “I won’t let you ruin my life. Or Cassidy’s,” she said.

  “The truth won’t ruin anything.”

  “The truth is that your first wife was a cold bitch who decided to end it all in the garage. As for Sunny McKenzie, she’s nothing better than a half-crazed whore—”

  “Stop it!” he hissed, startling a spindly-legged colt in the next paddock. The colt let out a frightened neigh and bolted. Rex’s big hands curled into fists. “Never, and I mean never, will you denigrate Lucretia, Sunny or Angie.” He stepped closer to her, his rage evident in the flare of his nostrils, his body stiff and seeming four inches taller than it had been only seconds before. Some of the old fire blazed in his eyes. “If I ever catch you badmouthing any of them, I’ll personally come at you with a belt and after that, by God, I’ll divorce you.”

  “But you couldn’t. Your faith—”

  His lips curled into a sneer. “Okay. If divorce won’t work, then I’ll kill you, Dena. It’s that simple. Somehow, I think God would forgive me.” He turned and strode into the stable and Dena, barely able to control her bladder, watched as he picked up the telephone extension. She leaned against the fence and, horror-stricken, overheard his part of the conversation as he spoke with Cassidy—their daughter—the one he’d barely noticed when Angie was alive—and told her to print everything about Sunny McKenzie and the fact that she’d borne Rex Buchanan a son, Buddy McKenzie, known as Willie Ventura, who from this day forward would be recognized as Rex’s son. He’d be called Willie “Buddy” Buchanan.

  “Oh, God, no,” Dena whispered, her knees weakening. She imagined the hidden smiles she would notice from the corner of her eyes as she slid onto her knees during mass; the whispers that would be just loud enough for her to hear Sunny’s name over and over again as she walked through town, the quiet little coughs and sniggers at the social functions she and Rex planned to attend. A part of her died in that instant. She would be mortified, humiliated, reminded that she was only Rex’s secretary who had been blessed with the good sense to get herself pregnant after Lucretia—sacred Lucretia—had died so that she could become the next Mrs. Rex Buchanan. But she’d always been second-best. Wife number two. She’d never had the hold over her husband that Lucretia still held, even after being dead for decades. Nor did she fascinate Rex as Sunny McKenzie, a half-breed palm reader, did.

  She heard him slam down the phone and then he was beside her again, squinting against the bright sunlight. All of his rage had disappeared. It was as if he’d just come from the confessional, or given a fifty-thousand-dollar check to a charity. “I’m relieved, Dena,” he admitted, smiling benignly again, no trace of the man who had threatened to kill her just minutes before. “This was long overdue.”

  He’s a simpleton. Somewhere along the road, he had lost that razor-sharp edge that had made him so successful. “Oh, God, Rex, you don’t know what you’ve done.”

  “I’ve cleared my conscience, dear,” he said tenderly, almost as if he meant it. “I’ve made my peace.”

  “And now what?”

  He glanced at the sky, clear and blue and still holding fast to summer. “I can die anytime God decides to take me.”

  Sometimes the tension in the house was more than Cassidy could take. The glowering glances, the short responses, the ever-present feeling that there was a storm brewing, right under the surface, whenever she and Chase were in the room together. The wires holding his jaw together had been removed. He buried himself in the work that a messenger brought from the office or in his physical therapy, which was twice daily now, the therapist coming each morning and late afternoon. Chase had insisted that he wanted to improve as quickly as possible. He’d push himself to be whole again.

  He avoided being alone with Cassidy and yet there were times when she was certain he’d been staring at her, not in hostility, but as if he were trying to figure her out. And he wasn’t as immune to her being a woman as he’d like to let on. She’d felt the heat of his gaze on her back when she swam in the lake, part of her daily ritual.

  Early each summer morning, when the sun was barely up, the water ice cold, the stars just beginning to fade, she’d carry her towel to the edge of the pond, let her robe fall into the sand and swim naked as she had for as many summers as they’d had the lake. When they had first moved back here, Chase would often sneak out to the water’s edge, watch her for a few minutes, then join her. They’d make love in the water or later, when he would carry her laughing back to the house and drop her, wet and chilled, onto the bed.

  Over the years, he’d stopped following after her, stopped showing any interest in her at all, stopped making love to her. She’d wondered if he’d taken a lover, but it didn’t seem his style and she never found any evidence nor heard any rumors to suggest he was involved with anyone else. She’d even asked him once, and he’d laughed at her. That night he’d made love to her. Not tenderly, but roughly, angrily, as if he were trying to exorcise some inner demons that he kept secret from her.

  Now he was interested again, she thought as she cinched the belt of her robe tight around her waist and hurried out the back door, letting the screen door bang shut. Her feet were bare as she followed the flagstone path that cut through the gardens and lawn before the stones gave way to a sandy trail curving through sun-bleached grass that brushed her calves and knees and bent in the breeze.

  As she had since the weather had turned hot, she dropped her robe under the tree, took three steps across the sandy strip of beach and ran into the water. Cold as an arctic storm, it nearly burned her skin. She dived deep, following the contour of the bottom of the lake, feeling her body tingle in the frigid depths before she rose to the surface, flinging her hair from her eyes and gasping with the cold.

  “Feel good?” Chase’s voice seemed to reverberate through the morning. He was standing at the edge of the water, wearing faded jeans with one leg cut out for his cast, no shirt and propped on one crutch. He’d given up his eye patch two weeks before.

  “Great.” She was treading water, aware that her breasts were white in the darkness, her nipples round and visible through the ripples. Just like Angie had been aware when she’d lured Brig to the pool all those years ago. “You should join me.”

  “I don’t think so. With the cast, I could drown.”

  “I wouldn’t let you,” she said breathlessly, and his face relaxed a little.

  “You don’t have to be my savior, Cass. You don’t owe me anything.”

  The wind whispered across the lake, stirring up the water as the gray light of dawn was fast turning golden over the ridge of mountains to the east. “I’m your wife.”

  He pinned her with his harsh glare. His face was beginning to take shape again. Though not the same, he was starting to resemble himself, the man she’d vowed to live with forever. “I shouldn’t have come out here.”

  “Why did you?” she asked, swimming close to the shore.

  “Couldn’t sleep.” His gaze never left her, and even in the cool water, she felt his heat. Her skin tingled as her toes found the sandy bottom of the lake. This attraction was something neither could deny, but they’d both ignored it. It was safer that way.

  “Neither could I.” She walked out of the water, twisting the moisture from her hair and acting as if it was nothing out of the ordinary to stand naked before him.

  “You haven’t had your swim.”

  “It’s okay.” Her robe was on the ground, but she ignored it. She studied him a moment and her throat caught, aware of the changes i
nside her, the feelings that she couldn’t tamp down and didn’t begin to fathom. Her skin tingled when he didn’t look away.

  “Chase—”

  He closed his eyes.

  She wrapped chilled arms around his middle and he quivered, the touch of her wet skin against his warm flesh sending a tremor through him.

  “Get dressed, Cassidy,” he muttered, though he didn’t say it with much conviction. “I’ve got coffee started.”

  “I don’t want coffee, at least not yet.” She angled her face up to his and saw the flare of interest in his eyes.

  “What do you want?”

  She didn’t have an answer. She just waited.

  His newly mended jaw, still partially wired, seemed to clamp down harder. “I can’t—”

  She kissed him then. Pressed her wet lips to the bare skin of his chest. There were scars on his skin, burn marks, scratches that had healed, but he didn’t flinch.

  “Oh, God.” The sound was torn from his throat. “No—”

  She didn’t stop and her tongue found his nipple.

  With a dry, desperate gasp, he wound his fingers in her wet hair and pulled her head back angrily. “Don’t start something you can’t finish,” he warned. “Cass, I—”

  Her fingers found the top button of his fly. With a loud pop his waistband opened and a series of snaps resounded like the ripple of muted gunfire ricocheting across water.

  “Don’t—I told you I don’t want you to touch me.” Rasping, painful words. Lies.

  “Chase, please, let me—”

  “No!” But she felt him surrender. The steely resolve wavered, and the crutch fell with a thud to the sand. Leaning against her, he balanced as his good arm surrounded her shoulders. Strong muscles dragged her close. “You’re dangerous,” he growled.

  “So are you.”

  They tumbled to the ground and she kissed his battered face feeling his lips against her own, tasting of him and losing all control. He was warm and hard and hot on this shimmering summer morning. While dawn chased the stars away, she held him close, loving him, feeling his hand touch her already-stiff nipple, sighing into his mouth.