No Less Days

by Amanda G. Stevens

  “I expect so.”

  “Besides, I’m a narcissist. Ask anyone.” Zac choked on a laugh. Pushed one hand through his hair, walked to the sink.

  If he’d killed the man, he was the greatest actor David had met—including James Cagney. But Hollywood professionals didn’t have a century to hone their craft.

  There had to be some way to be sure.

  David needed space away from both of them. Solitude to think. To pray. He went out into the backyard, left them to their strained silence. No, they’d have plenty to say the moment he was out of earshot.

  He paced from porch to tent and back again. Had God brought him to these people now because of Paul Tait? Was David meant to find the truth? And if they were guilty, how was he to bring them to justice? It all felt backward, though. Paul Tait would still be alive if Zac hadn’t fallen off that tightrope—of this much, the certainty ran deep in David’s bones. Simpler for the Almighty to leave things alone. Unless … this was more than a mission. Maybe achieving justice for a mentally broken victim was the mission, the thing David had to complete. Maybe if he did that, his Lord would accept him home.

  Or maybe he was doing this all wrong, and God would have preferred he call the police and leave it with them. He trudged to the porch and sat on a lower step.

  The door opened, and he looked up. Moira, her dark hair glinting in the porch light, her eyes shadowed. “I have to say all of this in the time it takes a male of the species to use the bathroom.”

  David motioned to the space beside him, and she sat, feet resting on the step above his.

  “You’re not like him. You’re men of action, both of you, but it’s a different sort. There are truths that paralyze him, that I think put you in motion.”

  “You’re not speaking very plainly for someone with only a minute to talk,” David said.

  Moira leaned forward and to one side, peering at what was once a flower bed. “What’s the chicken wire for?”

  “Turtle. She lives outdoors in the summer and about half the spring or fall when weather permits.”

  “I see.” A smile found her lips but not her eyes. She turned to face David. “He wants to go after this. To make himself into a detective or something, I don’t know, but you’ve got to refuse him. Let it go, and get him to do the same.”

  “Why?”

  A muscle pulled in her neck as she swallowed. She laced her fingers on her knees. The silence thickened.

  “Moira,” he said.

  “Because doing otherwise will hurt him.”

  He dangled his hands between his knees and breathed the crisp air. “I don’t see how, if the evidence will prove him innocent.”

  “Leave it to the police. Please, David.” The last words were nearly lost to the night, despite the lack of breeze.

  “Because they’ll solve it? Or because they never will, and you know it?”

  Tension drew her knees up to her chest.

  “You know something. Tell me what it is.”

  “What I know is that Zac did not do this. Now please leave it be.”

  She didn’t know him at all if she expected to persuade him now. He let the silence strangle around them, the way hands might have done to Paul Tait’s neck.

  “Moira, there’s a man dead.” The words fell from David like stones that, though fallen, didn’t lessen the weight of responsibility on him. “A man murdered, who couldn’t harm Zac or any of us.”

  “He did harm us.” Moira curled tightly beside him. “Caused Zac a night and a morning of pain, and might have undone us all with his brash mortal theories.”

  The door behind them opened. Zac’s footsteps joined them.

  David angled his head to watch Moira. Her teeth clamped onto her lip.

  “We could be out on a manhunt right now,” Zac said over her shoulder, eyes locked on David. “You don’t want this to end up some cold case in a filing cabinet.”

  “I don’t,” David said, and Moira shuddered.

  “And if we work it together, at some point we’ll get you proof of my innocence.”

  The more Zac talked, the more certain David was of that much.

  “We’ve got to have some decent instincts honed by now. Ever try to solve a homicide before?”

  “Not yet.”

  Moira sprang to her feet on the porch step and planted her hands on her hips. She faced Zac down with a tremble in her voice. “Don’t, Zachary. This isn’t our place.”

  “If the man’s dead because of me, then it is my place.”

  “How could it be because of you? How does that make any sense?”

  He sighed and rubbed his face. “I don’t know.”

  “So give up this childishness. Stick to baring your body and falling from impressive heights and signing autographs for teenagers.”

  The attack was transparent, shouldn’t have done more than bounce off the surface of Zac. Yet his face blanked as he took a step back into the door.

  Something in the words Moira had chosen was a bullet to pierce Zac’s armor, and Moira had used it. After asking David not to hurt him. It meant only one thing, and in a heartbeat’s time, Zac had retreated too far to see it—which she’d counted on. David stood and stepped up to her, crowding the little porch.

  “Did you kill him, or do you merely know who did?”

  “I don’t know what you’re—”

  “He was six inches taller, quite a bit heavier. You couldn’t have physically overcome him, not on your own.”

  “I didn’t do anything to Paul Tait, David.”

  And if Zac hadn’t either … The way she’d cried and cared for him after the stabbing, the way she looked at him, touched him, spoke of him—these things weighed more than the words she’d just used to attack him. She was being a woman, wounding to protect, or so she thought.

  But she wasn’t protecting only Zac.

  With a fifty-fifty shot, he might as well guess. He looked into her eyes.

  “Simon?” he said.

  “No, of course not.” The words were simple, easy. They held a hint of surprise that he would be David’s guess and not …

  The other option.

  Muscles in her face tightened. Her eyes darted to Zac.

  “What?” Zac’s voice broke. He’d seen too. “What?”

  She shrank against the wrought-iron rail. The poise of years, the hardness of necessity, the supplication from a few minutes ago—all fallen off her. She was porcelain now. And young.

  “Oh no.” Zac clamped his fists in his hair and pulled. “Colm?”

  “No.” The porcelain was cracking. “No, it wasn’t Colm.”

  Contrasted with the truth spoken a moment before, desperation in her words now marked them a lie. Zac’s hands fell to his sides, and he stared at her. As if she were a ghost, translucent while claiming to be the woman herself. She reached for him, and he pushed past her and David, down the steps into the yard, stood past the floodlight with his feet spread, his back to them.

  Moira had begun to tremble. “It isn’t Colm. It isn’t.”

  “You’re the one that talked to him on the phone,” David said. “You told him about the clearing. Paul Tait was a trespasser, and you sicced the longevite dog on him.”

  “The—what?”

  “Colm should have taken him somewhere else. The place of the killing gave too much away.”

  She closed her eyes, and twin tears dropped to her feet. Not an act. No point in that now. She opened her eyes and stared past David into the yard. Zac hadn’t moved. Silent tears dripped down her face.

  “Is he the only victim? Have others gotten too close to your secrets and had to be dealt with in kind?”

  The blade of David’s words sliced all of them, but someone here had to be willing to wield truth, to lance the infection that might be as old as Fisher Lake. Zac stayed motionless in the yard.

  Moira’s small frame shook. She gripped the railing and bent toward it, her breathing sharp. “Please, David, stop this. You don’t know wha
t you’re doing.”

  “I know I’m seeking justice for a man no one else will speak for.”

  “There’ll be no justice. Colm won’t allow it.”

  She was a few shallow breaths from hyperventilating. David’s own pulse quickened with concern, and he wrapped both arms around her and guided her to sit on the step. She was cold beside him.

  “Peace now,” he said. “Calm down, and tell us how you know these things.”

  Zac turned toward them, his mouth pulled into a grimace. Still he didn’t move toward her, but she kept her eyes on him as she spoke.

  “Colm told me. I never would have known. He came to me … to confess, though he’d never call it that.”

  “So you kept his secret,” David said.

  “I had to.”

  He looked away from Zac to find her caught on a quiet sob. “How’s that?”

  “It was best for everyone, David, and I don’t regret it.”

  Silence pummeled them as if complete. As if no bare trees across the yard rubbed their branches. As if no far-off traffic passed on a road they couldn’t see. Zac folded over, a slow collapse to his knees, hands braced on them and shoulders bowed.

  Moira dried her eyes and stood, solid now. She’d needed less than a minute to compose herself. She marched out into the yard. “Look at me, Zachary.”

  He did. Head lifting as if it weighed too much for his neck.

  “I knew what you’d say, you and Simon. That he had to be stopped, whatever it took. And I couldn’t do it, not to Colm.”

  His voice came firm and flat. “How many?”

  “What?”

  “David asked if Tait was the only victim, and you didn’t say yes.”

  She shuddered.

  Zac’s voice came with a lethal hush. “How. Many?”

  “I—I don’t—”

  “He’s had a hundred years!”

  “Paul Tait makes eleven.”

  “Dear God.” Zac’s arms came up to cover his head, face in the crook of his elbows as he bowed, face nearly to the ground. “Dear God, forgive us. Jehovah Elohim, forgive us.”

  Moira backed away as if a tongue of righteous fire might lash him out of existence. David stepped off the porch, but he was only halfway to them when something in the deepest center of his being flickered a warning. Be still. He halted.

  Long minutes, and Moira didn’t move either. Zac’s arms lowered, and his palms pressed into the grass. He straightened slowly, seeming bent under the weight of all his years.

  “I always wished for him to join us.” He kept his back to them, facing the dark beyond the reach of the porch light. “John—David. As if he needed us. And all this time we’ve carried this … this rotten burden around like Bunyan’s pilgrim and I never suspected it, I never sensed it….” He covered his face. “Dear God.”

  “Zac,” Moira said.

  “I’ve celebrated a hundred Thanksgivings with him.”

  Moira knelt at his side and touched his shoulder. He didn’t move toward her but didn’t pull away. “I’m sorry.”

  “For lying to me?”

  She flinched. Nodded.

  “Only for that?”

  “We protect each other, Zachary. I would have done the same for you.”

  “If I were a serial killer.”

  “You know I would.”

  He stood, looked down at her, his face drawn tight and gray, then turned and studied David as if measuring him for the first time against the sketches he’d memorized. “He won’t stop. Even if he did—eleven people slain.”

  Moira looked past him only at David. “It’s a sickness in him, a compulsion; if you knew—”

  “Eleven souls,” Zac shouted.

  The release in David’s spirit was like the squeeze of a father’s hand followed by a nudge to the son’s shoulder. Walk on. Speak.

  “Moira. See those souls.” The brogue thickened with every word he spoke, betraying the quake inside him. “How old might they have been—twenty, thirty, forty, fifty? Young ones, remaining meager years stolen. He cannot be allowed to rob another life, not one more.”

  She shook her head, kept shaking it as if she could undo the truth.

  Zac lurched forward a step then bent with his hands on his knees. Before Moira could touch him, he straightened again and traipsed across the yard, feet dragging over the grass, up the steps and into the house.

  NINETEEN

  Moira was a marionette, and Zac’s exit cut the strings. She slumped to the ground, knees folded under her, staring at the door. David took a step toward her, but she thrust an open hand in his face.

  “I’d like a minute, please.”

  Even huddled on the ground, she appeared steadier than Zac had. David went inside.

  Five paces from the door, Zac knelt at the edge of the rug, hands over his face. David looked toward the ceiling, cut off from the sky, filled with the irrational sense that the plaster and beams overhead had cut him off from the sky’s Creator as well. He drew in the heated air and breathed out a prayer along with it. Whatever happened now … Make my path straight.

  David dropped down to sit cross-legged on the floor several feet away from Zac. The man didn’t heed him, but David stayed beside him. Motionless. Wordless.

  In a minute Zac lifted his head and found David. The blue eyes were glazed. Zac shivered.

  David went to the living room and got the brown blanket from the back of the couch. Chenille, good and heavy. Weight on Zac’s body would anchor him. David draped the blanket around Zac’s shoulders and tucked it over his hands. They were cold. He sat again to stay at eye level.

  Zac blinked for the first time. “David.”

  “Aye.”

  “Eleven.” Another shiver. Another minute of quiet, and then Zac said, “How does he kill them? All the same way or … experimenting?”

  David maintained eye contact, tried to let Zac know each shaky word mattered to him though he had no answer.

  “Has he killed women too? Children?” Zac pulled the blanket tighter around him. A good sign. “I’m trying to make myself believe it. Colm. I—I’m trying to …”

  More silence. How long would Moira stay out there? Had she gone for a walk? A drive?

  Zac’s hands stirred, and he looked down at himself. He flipped a corner of the blanket toward David.

  “So you’re also a nurse.”

  A chuckle eased David’s chest. “Just a man who knows shell shock when he sees it.”

  Zac scoffed, shed the blanket, and stood up, firm on his feet. He strode to the window and gave a slow nod.

  “Where is she?” David said.

  “On her way to the airport, I’m sure.”

  David’s throat closed. He went to the front of the house, looked in the driveway. The rental car was gone.

  Zac followed him, stood over his shoulder, and looked outside with a shrug. “Like I said.”

  “Zac, if I’d thought she would disappear …”

  “She’s Moira. Our nomad, our illusionist who vanishes and pops up months later and doesn’t allow questions. She might do the same now.”

  “Will she warn him?”

  Zac turned away, cursing. He beat his fist on the wall once and then stood with his back to David.

  “We have to stop him,” David said.

  Zac gave a barking laugh. “What do you propose?”

  “First we find him. Then we take him into custody. Then we decide the rest.”

  A slow nod. A hard swallow. “Would you go quietly?”

  A flash of smoke, dirt trench in front of him, bodies on either side, rain and filth, blood and knowing he must never surrender. He shook his head.

  “Me neither,” Zac said. “And Colm … he’s as stubborn as Simon; he’s just quieter about it.”

  “This thing will take both of us. We’ll need your knowledge of him.”

  Another short bark. “We shouldn’t count on my knowledge of any of them, eh?”

  Not the point. “Can you do t
his to Colm?”

  The bitter glint faded from his eyes and left them almost as empty as before. “Eleven ghosts to put to rest. I’ll see it through.”

  “All right then.”

  Zac braced one hand on the wall and ducked his head. When he turned back, his eyes held a sheen. “Who were they? Where are the bodies? Why did he … why?”

  “We need to talk to Moira again,” David said.

  “She won’t tell us anything.”

  “She was about to. She wanted us to understand him. It’s with her we’ve got to begin. She’s listened to him explain his motives.”

  “Who gives a crap about his motives?”

  “Any insight could help us stop him.”

  A long sigh poured out of him. “Did she ask you not to investigate, before I came out on the porch?”

  “Aye.”

  “What reason did she give?”

  “You.”

  “You mean the police?”

  “Not only that.”

  Zac’s mouth firmed. “What did she say?”

  “That some things paralyze you.”

  Anger flashed behind his eyes. He cupped his fist in his other hand and paced. “And it’s a pitiful weakness to the woman who prefers flight to the far corners of the earth. Yeah, Moira can always move, if the direction is away from you.”

  “She’s not moving away from Colm,” David said.

  “She’s never slept with Colm.”

  Ah, well then.

  Zac cupped his fist again, pressing knuckles to palm. “Listen. We all would have stayed in contact, sure, but it would have been more peripheral without Colm. He’s been … the glue, keeping us together. Setting our meetings in stone, dates and places. I don’t know if there’s anyone on the planet I have less in common with than Simon. And Moira—she’s hard to get, David. She’s the one who’ll disappear, but she’s also the one who wants peace. Always, whatever the cost. Half the time she disappears, it’s because of some conflict. Usually between Simon and me.”

  David crossed away from the window, sank onto a stuffed chair. Zac perched on the edge of a couch cushion, hands still clasped, one in the other.

  “Moira …” He seemed to search for words then shook his head and leaned forward. “She’s protected a murderer and lied to me about it. What am I trying to do, justify her?”