by Lisa Jackson
Furiously, he tossed the frozen goods out of the ice box and onto the basement floor, his breath coming fast.
Beneath was a gray face. Brown eyes open. Crystals on the lashes and across the forehead and receding hairline.
Karl Vandell, he guessed, and then he was running up the steps, two at a time.
“And Detective Thronson?” Elizabeth asked. “What about her?”
“I heard you on the porch with her. I heard you tell her all the people you wished dead. She wasn’t going to give up. She thought I was you.”
“She had a picture of me . . . and she showed it to the staff at Tres Brisas. They said it was me.”
“That was a mistake,” Nadia said. “I wasn’t trying to get you in trouble.”
The gun had slipped a little and was aimed toward Chloe’s shoulder. Elizabeth swallowed against a dry throat. “Yeah? Well, you wore your hair like me. Must’ve been a reason.”
“How many times do I have to tell you? I love you. I don’t want to hurt you, but you’re making me do this. I wanted to go to Mexico with you!”
“Then let’s go. Right now. We can leave right now,” Elizabeth said urgently.
“I’m not a fool. I know you don’t love me, and that you’re just trying to find a way to get rid of me. But that’s not going to happen. Now, come on,” Nadia muttered, jerking Chloe toward the barrier fence and the gray ocean beyond.
“Don’t!” Elizabeth cried. “I will go with you. Maybe I don’t love you yet, but I could. I never loved Court the way I should have. Maybe I’m meant to be with you from now on. Just don’t hurt Chloe. I’ll do anything you want, but don’t hurt Chloe.”
“You love her, but you don’t love me.”
“Please . . . Nadia . . .” Tears formed and ran down Elizabeth’s cheeks. “Don’t take her over the fence.”
Chloe’s eyes were locked onto Elizabeth’s while Nadia glared at her with a mixture of frustration and yearning.
“You should have agreed to go with me,” she said. “We could be in Mexico already . . . Rosarito Beach . . . or Acapulco . . . or Puerto Vallarta. I don’t care! Have you been there? To the beaches?”
“Yes, they’re lovely. I want to go with you.”
“Liar! Why do you have to spoil everything!”
Elizabeth shook her head. She didn’t know what to say. Chloe had closed her eyes again, back into her self-induced coma of sorts.
“It’s his fault. Rex!” Nadia bared her teeth. “He’s the one you want to be with.”
“No, no . . . not Rex.”
“You keep thinking you can lie to me. You think I don’t know what love is? I cared about Karl, but I never loved him. I loved you. But I did care about him, and I’m sorry I had to let him go.”
“What do you mean?”
She sighed. “I know you don’t really care. You’re just trying to stall.”
“Tell me about Karl,” Elizabeth stated firmly. “I want to know.”
Nadia shrugged. “First I tried to reason with him, but he wouldn’t listen, so I had to tie him up and gag him. He said I needed help.” She laughed. “The whole fucking world needs help. So what? I believe in love, deep love. That’s what I believe in, and I told him that. But what did he do? Just like you, he was trying to stall. He did work a hand free and get it around the base of a bedroom lamp. Stupid man thought he could surprise me, but I’m the one with surprises.”
Elizabeth prayed Chloe was all right. The late afternoon sun was surprisingly hot. She could feel it digging into her scalp. Stay calm . . . relax . . . be careful. “What did you do to Karl?”
“I didn’t do anything. He did it to himself.”
“Where is he?”
“Oh, he’s at home, but don’t think he’s coming to your rescue, ’cause he’s not.”
“How much farther?” Ravinia asked as Rex tore west toward Corona del Mar. He was passing cars and driving like a maniac and hoped to God he would pick up a traffic cop so that he could lead him to the house.
“Too far.” He’d called the police, given them his name and number, and asked for a BOLO to put out on Nadia Vandell’s car, just in case Ravinia’s information was wrong. The dispatcher had sounded suspicious of him, saying he needed to talk to an officer. Rex snapped back, “The name’s Vandell. Just like it sounds. V-A-N-D-E-L-L. Karl or Nadia.” Then he bit the bullet and said, “There’s a human body in the freezer at their house. I’m betting it’s Karl Vandell. Send someone over there now.”
He’d hung up before she could ask anything more.
“Can’t you go faster?”
“What do you think?” he snapped.
Ravinia set her jaw and stared with laserlike intensity out the windshield.
Chloe suddenly spoke, her voice muffled against Nadia’s blouse. “You won’t hurt me, because if you hurt me, you hurt Mommy. And you love her.”
“You don’t know anything,” Nadia snarled. She shook Chloe hard, put the gun back to her temple, and hauled her over the fence like a ragdoll.
Elizabeth charged forward and Nadia said softly, “Stop,” in a voice that froze Elizabeth in her tracks.
“I’ll go with you,” Elizabeth pleaded. “I want to go with you!”
“Stop lying! You broke it, and there’s no going back.”
“Nadia, please. Give me a chance to prove my love. What do you want me to do? Just tell me.”
She cocked her head to one side. “You want to prove your love? Come on this side of the fence with me.”
“I will . . . but I can’t until you let Chloe go.”
Nadia gave a short laugh. “All I have to do is squeeze this trigger.” Her blue eyes danced dangerously. “Very little pressure.”
“No . . . no . . . I’ll do anything you want. God, please. Anything.”
“Then step over the fence.” She waited.
The sound of the ocean seemed to fill Elizabeth’s ears. She’d stalled as long as she could. She understood that Nadia intended to kill Chloe no matter what she said or did. Chloe was in the way . . . the true object of Elizabeth’s love . . .
She moved forward and eased a foot over the rail.
Behind Nadia and Chloe sounded a backdrop of thrumming waves and the occasional loud phumf of raging water hitting the rocks below before shooting upward. And from the other direction the sudden squeal of tires.
Nadia cocked an ear and so did Elizabeth who was halfway over the rail.
In that moment, Chloe bit down for all she was worth into Nadia’s gun hand, her jaws clamping hard into soft flesh.
The scream that hit Ravinia’s ears chilled her blood. She was out of the car and running toward the back of the house, but she couldn’t catch up to Rex who’d powered past her toward the women and girl on the other side of the fence. The other side of the fence!
“No!” Elizabeth shrieked as Nadia’s scream died and she suddenly grabbed Chloe around her throat. Elizabeth leaped forward as Chloe became a whirling dervish, kicking and biting and struggling against her captor, all at the cliff’s edge.
Ravinia was yelling, too, screaming anything and everything, as Rex vaulted the fence.
In slow motion, she saw Chloe break free just as Elizabeth slammed her body into Nadia’s. Rex grabbed at them as the two women fell to the ground and rolled as one toward the brink. “Elizabeth!” he roared.
Nadia held onto Elizabeth with a vise grip. “We’ll be together always!” she cried, jerking her body to the cliff’s edge, dragging Elizabeth with her.
Rex lunged for a leg, nearly connected, but missed as the women’s bodies were twisting and hurling left and right. Ravinia leaped the fence and grabbed Chloe, stumbling a little, getting an eyeful of churning white waves down, down, down below before pulling back.
Nadia’s free hand scrabbled for the gun she’d dropped when Chloe bit her. She slammed it against the side of Elizabeth’s head, but she couldn’t get any power behind it. Elizabeth was fighting like a wildcat, scratching at the woman’s face,
screaming and kicking. But they were moving inexorably toward the rim.
“Elizabeth!” Rex shouted, grabbing her leg.
Nadia bared her teeth and sought to aim for him, but Elizabeth was too strong, smacking her hand against the ground, loosening her grip on the gun. Enraged, Nadia clamped herself around Elizabeth and rolled her free of Rex’s grip.
And then they started to fall, Nadia’s leg and arm over the edge, the momentum carrying them. Chloe screamed in Ravinia’s arms and Ravinia was screaming, too.
The wolf came from nowhere. A silver shadow leaping the small fence with ease and launching at Nadia.
Ravinia shrieked, “No!!!” as Nadia and Elizabeth’s locked bodies twisted in midair. But it was an illusion.
It was the wolf in the air with Nadia. Rex yanked hard on Elizabeth’s leg and pulled her back to safety.
In another slow motion twirl, Nadia and the wolf went over the cliff, end over end, silver fur and blond hair, wildly flinging arms and sinewy, furred legs, a mouth open in a silent scream and sharp incisors sinking into human flesh.
Moments later, a small thunk echoed upward, faint amid the loud and restless waves.
Chloe wrenched free of Ravinia’s grasp to run to Rex and Elizabeth, the three of them holding each other tightly.
Heart heavy, Ravinia walked to the edge of the cliff and gazed down into the water as another phumf of water shot upward. Though her anxious eyes scoured the shore for long, long minutes, there was no sign of either Nadia or the wolf.
Chapter 35
The air was lung-freezing cold, the grounds hard as iron around Siren Song in the last week of January. The huge lodge looked down at Elizabeth somewhat balefully, she thought, though she could see it might have an austere charm during the summer. Leaves on the surrounding bushes had been iced by Jack Frost, each vein limned in white. The headstones in the graveyard behind the lodge were cold and gray, brooding under a low, winter sun. Grim, it definitely was, but the women she’d met inside the lodge, her cousins, had greeted her with open arms as if they’d been waiting for her all their lives when she’d walked through the gates.
She stood at the edge of the graveyard beside Catherine and Ravinia, who’d made the trip north with her, though she seemed even more anxious than Elizabeth to get back to California. She was making a life for herself there, bound and determined to be Rex’s assistant and partner in the private investigation business. Rex had come with them too, but was in a rental car outside the front gates, not allowed to enter as he was of the male gender, apparently one of Catherine’s damn near unbreakable rules.
He didn’t like it much, and neither did Elizabeth, but they had listened to Ravinia when she’d outlined the blueprint of what life was like at Siren Song. Both were trying to abide by the strange rules. Now Rex turned his thoughts to the time directly after Nadia fell.
Ravinia grew increasingly uncommunicative since the fight with Nadia on the cliff’s edge. She told them it was because the wolf was probably dead, and though neither Elizabeth nor Rex knew exactly what she was talking about, Chloe cried huge crocodile tears and said, “No, he can’t be. He just can’t be,” which seemed to be something they shared between them. There also seemed to be some kind of telepathic connection between her and Ravinia as Chloe had told Elizabeth that she’d called Ravinia and Rex to the house where Nadia was holding them.
When Nadia’s death, and the killings before it, hit the news, Vivian was beside herself, feeling halfway responsible for bringing Nadia into their Moms Group. She alternately begged Elizabeth to go back to the gym with her and pleaded with her to attend another Sisterhood session. Elizabeth promised to start back up with yoga, but she wasn’t interested in the Sisterhood. Nadia had hidden her true self amongst the other members, and Elizabeth didn’t feel comfortable there, anyway.
Detective Driscoll told Rex about the police investigation into Karl Vandell’s death and the murders of Channing Renfro and Officer Seth Daniels. It appeared that everything Nadia had said to the women of the Sisterhood was an out and out lie. Her adoptive parents revealed she didn’t even like children and didn’t intend to have any. Nadia had merely used the multiple miscarriage story to garner sympathy to find a way into Elizabeth’s life through Vivian. She’d joined the Sisterhood as a means to enter all their lives.
As for Karl . . . Nadia apparently killed him when he’d stopped being a reluctant assistant to her plans. His colleagues told Driscoll that Karl had initially welcomed her sudden interest in joining a women’s group, hoping it would stem her dark spiral down into obsession. He worried that she would become fixated on something to the point of neither eating nor sleeping. These colleagues believed that when he discovered her long-simmering, one-sided love affair with Elizabeth Ellis, she finally turned on him. Ligature marks were found around his wrists and ankles where he’d been bound and had struggled to free himself. It was believed he’d been deceased less than a day when Rex found his body.
But who was Nadia, and how did she have gifts? That question remained unanswered.
Ravinia told Elizabeth once again that she should go to Siren Song and meet her cousins and her mother. With the events of the past few weeks, Elizabeth was inclined to take what Ravinia said as truth, so she called Catherine on Ophelia’s cell phone and reached the woman who claimed to be her biological mother. That had been a weird and stilted conversation, but Elizabeth also remembered Detective Dunbar’s urging to meet them in person and so the trip was arranged.
They left Chloe in the Hofstetters’ care for the trip north and heard from Tara that Chloe and Bibi were getting along swimmingly. Without Lissa’s influence, the two girls had no problems. As far as Elizabeth knew, Chloe hadn’t exhibited any further signs of her gift, so she was hoping that with Nadia gone, the worst of Chloe’s “spells” would abate.
Rex stopped his musings to watch Catherine, Elizabeth, and Ravinia as they walked to the graveyard. It was just as Ravinia had said—long dresses and old-fashioned style; huge wrought-iron gates; an imposing wooden lodge with its blend of time past and modern touches; a long, potholed drive; a bevy of blond women; a wild and roaring ocean across a winding road. Catherine, herself, definitely looked like a woman from a different time.
The first meeting between Elizabeth and her mother had been as awkward as the phone call; Elizabeth wasn’t one to embrace and hug and neither was Catherine. But their mutual desire for space had worked for both of them, and they’d slowly relaxed in each other’s presence.
Many of Elizabeth’s ancestors were buried in the graveyard. Catherine walked her between the graves and pointed out different names, giving her a brief history of their lives. Ravinia didn’t say much as they wandered around. When Catherine was satisfied that Elizabeth was brought up to date, they walked to the back door of the lodge, but there Catherine had hesitated, looking back once more. Elizabeth and Ravinia stopped, too.
“Declan Jr.’s still out there,” Catherine said, turning from the graves toward the west and the ocean.
“You feel him, too?” Ravinia asked, waking up a bit.
Catherine shook her head. “Do you feel him? I just believe we’d know if he was dead.”
“I don’t know what I feel.” Ravinia backed off, turning away.
“You still think Declan Jr. will come after me?” Elizabeth asked Catherine.
“The boys in our family . . . seem to feel the gifts harder, and it becomes more dangerous with age. I don’t like taking chances,” she answered.
That was enough to give Elizabeth the willies and even Ravinia looked at her aunt and scowled as if she didn’t want to hear it, either.
“Come inside,” Catherine said, leading the way into the cavernous kitchen. She put a kettle on the stove and poured some loose brown leaves into a tiny basket and began steeping a pot of tea. Elizabeth expected some of her cousins to join them, but when she looked toward the living room, Catherine said, “I want to talk to you alone, so I asked them to give us some time.”<
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“You want me to leave, too?” Ravinia asked. She didn’t look happy about it, but sounded as if she would comply.
“No, I want you to hear this, too.” Catherine turned to Elizabeth. “I thought Declan Jr. had followed your scent to California, but it wasn’t Declan who came after you. It was a woman, which was something of a surprise, but now I think I know who she was. Lost Baby Girl.”
“What?” Ravinia had taken a seat at the end of the table. “Lost Baby Girl. What are you talking about?”
“There was a kidnapping a long time ago,” Catherine said in her precise way. “A woman who ran a private adoption agency had a baby stolen from her car. She’d put the baby in the car and then the phone rang inside the house. When she went to answer it, the baby was taken.”
“No cell phone?” Ravinia asked.
“It was twenty-five years ago,” Catherine said drily.
“This woman . . . who left the baby in the car . . . she was trustworthy?” Elizabeth asked tentatively.
“We’d used her many times.” Catherine looked at Elizabeth and then glanced away, and Elizabeth understood this same woman had been instrumental in her own adoption. “She was well-respected around Deception Bay. It happened so fast. No one knew what to think of it.”
“Where’s this story going?” Ravinia asked, but Catherine ignored her and kept talking to Elizabeth.
“Shortly after the Gaineses adopted you, this woman was brokering another adoption. She was only away from her vehicle a short amount of time, but it was enough for someone to steal the child. A baby girl. She was just gone, and no one ever saw her again. At the time, she was dubbed Lost Baby Girl by the press.”
Ravinia demanded, “Why have I never heard of this?”
“Because you don’t listen very well,” Catherine said to her, somewhat sharply.