by Jayne Castle
When the sedan disappeared around the corner, Drake made no move to start the car. Instead he continued to focus on the view of the shadowed garage. Alice did the same. Her brain seemed to have gone blank.
“Are we going to talk about this?” Drake asked evenly.
Alice took a deep breath. “Probably better if we don’t.”
“Maybe, but sooner or later we’re going to have to talk about it.”
“Stress,” she said. “It’s been a tough year.”
“That’s your excuse,” he said. “What’s mine? I was about to have sex with you in a parking garage.”
“I take it you don’t do that on a regular basis?”
“No,” he said. He gave that some thought. “Not that I’m against sex in a garage, or anywhere else, for that matter.”
The laughter welled up from out of nowhere. It swept through Alice in a cathartic kind of hysteria. She laughed until she cried. Houdini jumped down onto her lap and made soft little sounds. She clutched him close and sobbed into his fur.
Drake sat quietly until the tears stopped flowing. When it was over he handed her a tissue without saying a word.
“Thank you,” she mumbled.
She blotted up the last of the moisture from her eyes. An unfamiliar sensation came over her. It took her a moment to identify the feeling. She finally came up with the right words.
“This is going to sound weird,” she said, “but I feel much better now.”
“Good to know.” Drake started the car and reversed out of the parking space. “Speaking personally, I may never recover.”
She laughed again, but this time the laughter sounded right, at least to her ears. Drake flashed her a quick, wicked grin and drove out of the garage onto the street.
Houdini hopped up onto the back of Alice’s seat and bounced up and down a little, unable to contain his excitement.
“You’re such a little speed junkie,” Alice said.
Chapter 8
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER THEY DROVE THROUGH THE gates of a private airfield. A sleek, unmarked jet stood ready and waiting. Drake’s overnight bag and Alice’s two suitcases were removed from the trunk of the rental and stowed aboard.
“Are we going to fly all the way to Rainshadow?” Alice asked as they walked toward the plane.
“No,” Drake said. “There’s no landing strip on the island. No strip long enough for the jet on any of the neighboring islands, either. We’ll use the jet to get as far as Cadence and take a floatplane from there to Thursday Harbor. I’ve arranged to have a company boat waiting for us there.”
“Why not take the floatplane all the way to Rainshadow? I remember seeing floats landing in the bay.”
“The last I heard from my brother is that it’s not safe to fly anywhere near the island now,” Drake said. “The energy in the atmosphere is screwing up the instruments and creates mirages that are so bad a pilot can’t rely on visual cues.”
“Why isn’t any of this information about Rainshadow in the news?”
“Because the last thing we need are a lot of curiosity seekers trying to crash through the psi-fence into the Preserve. If that happens, we’ll end up wasting valuable time rescuing trespassers instead of locating the crystals.”
“Okay, that makes sense,” Alice said.
Drake escorted her up the steps into the cabin of the jet. He paused to speak briefly to the pilot and the copilot. Then he took the seat across from Alice. They fastened their seat belts.
Drake took the file he had confiscated from McCarson out of a briefcase and immediately became immersed in the contents.
Houdini tried to ride out the takeoff perched on the back of one of the seats so that he could see out the window. Alice grabbed him and held him in her lap until they were safely airborne. Then she released him. He bounded onto a seatback and gazed, enraptured, out the window.
“He likes to ride in anything that goes faster than he can,” Alice explained to Drake.
Drake did not look up from the file. “Who doesn’t?”
She smiled. There was something oddly endearing about Drake Sebastian when he was focused the way he was now. After a time he took out a pen, made a few notes, and closed the file.
“Find anything of interest?” she asked.
“Not much.” He handed her the folder. “But it’s your life. Maybe you’ll see something that looks wrong or weird.”
She opened the file and saw several photos of herself. A few had been shot while she was on stage. Those did not bother her. But most of the pictures had been taken when she was completely unaware of the camera. They sent cold chills down her spine. There were pictures of her coming and going from the various places she had lived in the past year as well as shots of her walking out of a grocery store, boarding a city bus, and sitting on a park bench, watching Houdini climb a tree.
“Geez,” she whispered, shaken. “I knew she was stalking me, but actually seeing the pictures her investigators snapped makes me feel sick to my stomach.”
“Don’t look at the photos,” Drake said quietly. “Read the file.”
She flipped through the handful of printouts with a wistful feeling. “Not much to my life, is there? No family. No permanent address after the orphanage. A bunch of different jobs. Several failed attempts at finding a husband through a professional matchmaking agency. One failed Marriage of Convenience. One MC husband dead under suspicious circumstances.” She looked up. “It’s kind of awful to see your whole life boiled down to a few pages like this.”
Drake watched her steadily through his glasses. “Did the matchmakers give you any reason for their failure to come up with a good match?”
“They were all very polite about it, but the reasons were obvious. Non-standard, high-rez talent combined with a lack of family background information was a nonstarter for most of the agencies. Boy, I sure wasted a lot of money on marriage brokers in the past few years. The few matches they did come up with didn’t work. I’ve had a lot of first dates that never got as far as a second date.”
“Count yourself lucky.”
She raised her brows. “Why is that?”
“I met someone about three years ago. We hit it off right from the start. Had a lot in common. She was also a light-talent. We registered with an agency. Lo and behold, we found out we were a near-perfect match.”
“What happened?”
“Her name was Zara Tucker, Dr. Zara Tucker. She was beautiful, brilliant, and charming, and she worked in one of the Sebastian, Inc. labs. She was the cause of the accident that made me day-blind.”
“How awful,” Alice whispered. “She must have been devastated by what happened. Is that why the two of you didn’t marry? She just couldn’t deal with the guilt of what she had done to you.”
A cold amusement edged Drake’s mouth. “Not exactly. More like she couldn’t deal with the fact that, in spite of what the matchmaking agency claimed, I decided that we were not a good match. She was furious. She grabbed an Alien artifact from the lab vault—a kind of psi-laser—and managed to fire a blast at my eyes.”
Alice caught her breath, horrified. “She was a psycho.”
“Oh, yeah. But to her credit, she hid it well.”
Alice shuddered. “Well enough to pass the matchmaking agency’s test? That’s surprising and more than a little unnerving. I’ve heard those tests are extremely accurate.”
“Harry and I conducted an investigation later. We found out that she bribed the agency consultant to rig the results of the tests. Zara was obsessed with marrying me.”
“Sounds like your perfect match and my ex had a few things in common.”
Drake surprised her by going suddenly thoughtful, as if she had made a significant observation.
“Yes, it does, doesn’t it?” he said. “And three of the four of us are light-talents.” He paused. “I’m assuming Fulton Whitcomb was not a light?”
“No.” Alice frowned. “You think the fact that three of the four people we’re talking about are
lights means something?”
“Probably not, but coincidences always interest me.”
“What happened to Dr. Tucker?”
“When she realized that we were never going to get married, she took her own life.”
“Suicide.” Alice closed her eyes briefly and then opened them to look at Drake. “Her death was supposed to be your punishment. She wanted you to feel guilty.”
“I believe that was part of it, yes. But who knows how a mentally ill person thinks?”
“How did she kill herself?”
“One day she simply went down into the catacombs without tuned amber and started walking.”
“They say that suicide-by-catacomb happens more often than most people realize. Did she leave a note?”
“Yes.”
“Blaming you?”
“Sure.”
“Did they ever find the body?” Alice asked.
“No. But they rarely do with catacomb suicides. Pretty sure that was deliberate, too. She wanted me to spend the rest of my life wondering if she was really dead.”
“Her final revenge.”
Drake’s smile could have been chipped out of glacial ice. “Yes.”
“Oh, man, you think she might still be alive, don’t you?”
“I don’t know.” Drake shoved his fingers through his hair. “That’s the hell of it. I just don’t know. In the course of our investigation, Harry and I pulled out all of the Sebastian, Inc. resources. Called in favors from the Federal Bureau of Psi Investigation and the local Guild boss. We found nothing that indicated that Zara Tucker might have faked her own death.”
“But nothing that proved she didn’t, either?”
“Right.”
“When did she disappear?”
“Nearly three years ago.”
“I dunno, Drake, that’s a long time for someone to stay lost while consumed with revenge. You’d think that if she was truly obsessed with you, she would have made some obvious move by now.”
“That’s what I keep telling myself.”
She watched him closely. “But in the meantime you haven’t registered with any more matchmaking agencies, have you? You’re afraid that if you do go into a Covenant Marriage and if Zara is still alive, she might reappear. You think she would be a threat to your wife.”
Drake gave her a long, considering look. “You’re right. That’s a very perceptive observation. The only other people who have figured that out are the members of my family.”
“Probably because they are the only other people who know the whole story.”
“Harry and the others in my family tell me I’m wrong to put my life on hold because of a threat that may or may not exist. They think that I’m the one who has become obsessed. They point out that if Zara is still alive somewhere, she’s probably in an institution by now. And if she did come out of the woodwork, my family has the resources to make her disappear again. For good this time.”
“But still you’re having a hard time moving on with that part of your life.”
Drake shifted in his seat, stretching out his legs. “Zara is my past. Let’s talk about yours.”
“What about it?”
He angled his head to indicate the folder on her lap. “Notice what is not in that file?”
She glanced down at the folder. “There’s not much here. What am I missing?”
“There is no information at all about Fulton Whitcomb beyond the fact that his body was found in his apartment. There’s no mention of your honeymoon from hell on Rainshadow.”
“Well, there’s no reason why Ethel would have gone into those details. She’s out to make my life miserable, not solve her son’s murder. As far as she’s concerned, I’m the killer. She wouldn’t waste time pointing an investigator in other directions.”
“True,” Drake said. “But everything in the case is linked to Rainshadow. You’d think that there would be something about that last trip in the file. If I were Ethel, I’d want to know exactly what happened on the island. And I’d also be asking questions about how Fulton was killed. Most of all, I’d want to know what was discovered that was worth murder.”
“You think like that because you are a logical, reasonable person. Trust me, Ethel is not logical or reasonable when it comes to her son’s death. Where are you going with this, Drake?”
“I’m not sure yet. But the focus on you makes me wonder if someone else is involved, someone who doesn’t want Ethel to look in another direction.”
A small shiver zapped through Alice. “The real killer?”
“It’s a possibility,” Drake said. “We need more information. And we’ll get it.”
“Okay,” Alice said. “Thanks.”
Drake studied her for a long moment.
“Do you know what I see when I look at that file?” he asked.
She smiled ruefully. “A misspent life? A person who can’t seem to focus on a career path? A woman who has been questioned in a possible homicide and declared unmatchable by a string of matchmaking agencies?”
“No,” he said. “I see a strong, intelligent woman who has managed to keep going in the face of some bad odds. I see a survivor.”
She thought about that. “Well, it’s not like a person has much choice.”
“There is always a choice,” Drake said. “And you keep making the choice to go forward. In my family we admire that kind of spirit.”
Chapter 9
RAINSHADOW MATERIALIZED OUT OF THE STRANGE MIST like a ghostly afterimage appearing after the real image has ceased to exist. A ring of dark fog encircled the island. The mist was crouched just offshore.
The island was always a forbidding sight with its sheer granite cliffs, darkly wooded interior, and craggy volcanic peak. To Drake it resembled some artist’s vision of an Alien fortress. But in the early and unnatural twilight that had swept over the island and the surrounding sea, it looked more surreal than ever, a landscape that could only exist in a dream.
“We’ve got a problem,” Drake said. He raised his voice to be heard above the roar of the cruiser’s engines and the mounting fury of a storm that had not existed until five minutes ago when it had erupted out of nowhere.
He was at the helm of the small, fast boat that they had picked up in Thursday Harbor a couple of hours earlier. He and Alice were both wearing life jackets. Alice stood beside him, holding her wind-whipped hair away from her face. Her expressive eyes were shielded by a pair of standard-issue sunglasses. She had put them on in Thursday Harbor to deal with the glare off the sea.
Houdini was perched on the ledge above the instrument panel, chortling gleefully as the craft rode up and over the crest of the raging waves.
“What’s going on?” Alice asked. She watched the island through the windshield. “Why does Rainshadow look so unreal? It’s like it’s in another dimension or something.”
Drake studied the bank of high-tech electronic navigation equipment in front of him. All of the displays were flat-lined.
“Or something,” he said. “Remember the mirage effect that I told you about? The optical illusions that make it impossible to get to the island by floatplane these days?”
“Yes, what about them?”
“Looks like the distortion has gotten worse since I last talked to Harry. There’s a lot of paranormal energy in the atmosphere. It’s knocked out my instruments. That fog must be the mist that Harry mentioned. It’s darker and thicker than he described it.”
Alice gave him an uneasy look. “The boat feels like it’s going faster.”
“It is. We’re caught in a current that is carrying us toward the island.”
“I understand now what you meant when you said there was some force stirring up the weather. I didn’t have a real fun time on Rainshadow the last time I was here, but it wasn’t this scary, at least not outside the Preserve.”
“The situation has obviously deteriorated significantly since I spoke with Harry four days ago. No wonder they told us in Thursday Harbo
r that the ferry service had been cancelled.”
He tried to ease the cruiser out of the surging current. The boat responded only minimally, making it clear they were not going to escape. He could feel the powerful energy of the water beneath the hull, forcing them toward the rocky cliffs. His job now was to keep the boat from capsizing before he could get close to a safe place to beach it.
“There’s no way we’re going to make it around the island to Shadow Bay,” he said. He kept one hand on the helm and used the other to open a leather-bound volume he had brought with him.
Alice peered at the book. “What’s that?”
“Nav charts of this area. Harry and I have both spent a lot of time exploring the shoreline around the island. In addition, the Foundation has a big collection of the old seafarers’ charts in the archives.” He flipped through the pages until he found the one he wanted. “Here we go. There’s a small natural harbor not far from here. Deception Cove. I’m going to try to get into it.”
“Then what?” Alice asked.
“We’ll go ashore. Can’t risk taking the boat back out into the open sea until things settle down. We’ll spend the night on the beach. Tomorrow morning, if conditions are still this unpredictable, we’ll have to walk around the shoreline to Shadow Bay.”
“That’s going to be a very long walk,” Alice observed.
“Given the rough terrain it will probably take a full day. The energy fence that protects the Preserve is set back several yards from the shore around this sector of the island though, so we won’t have to deal with the force field.”
He did not take his attention off the wild sea, but out of the corner of his eyes he could see the determined expression on Alice’s face. She was scared but he knew she would not panic. That was good to know. He did not have time to deal with panic.
Houdini was no longer chortling with glee. He seemed to sense that the situation had shifted from being a dust bunny thrill ride to something far more treacherous. When Alice reached out to scoop him up, he did not try to evade her grasp. He found his favorite perch on her shoulder and opened all four eyes.