Nobody said anything much while they ate, and Marisa finished as fast as she could. When it was over, Daddy said he was going out and left, and the rest of them gave a big sigh of relief.
She helped her mother clear the table while Tony did his home-work with them in the kitchen, and then her mother fixed her a bath. She was just getting out of the tub and her mother was just wrapping her in a towel when they heard Lucy barking outside.
“Your daddy must be home,” Mommy said with a sigh.
Marisa’s stomach got a knot in it.
A moment later came the sound of the kitchen door opening and slamming shut.
“Angie! Angie, you get your ass in here!”
Her mother was still crouched down beside her, still rubbing her with the towel. Her hands stopped moving and she went really still as she looked toward the kitchen. Then she stood up fast, but not before Marisa saw fear flash into her eyes.
“Get your nightgown on and get into bed. Tell Tony I said go to bed, too.” Her mother’s voice was quiet.
“Mommy.” Marisa wanted to hold on to her mother, but she was already gone, her skirt swishing as she moved fast down the hall. By the time Marisa had her nightgown pulled on over her head she could hear her dad shouting, yelling loud, nasty things. Her heart started beating really fast. Goose bumps rose up on her skin with a prickle. Trying not to listen, she picked up her medal and hung it around her neck, then went to get Gina. Hugging the doll close, she started for Tony’s room to tell him to go to bed. His door was closed. She thought he probably had it locked, which meant she was going to have to knock, which meant Daddy might hear and come into the hall and see her.
She felt all shivery inside at the thought.
A giant crash from the kitchen made her jump. Then her mother screamed, the sound so loud and shrill it hurt her ears, and her dad shouted. Marisa’s heart lurched as a terrible fear gripped her. There was a sharp bang, then another, like firecrackers going off in the house. An icy premonition raced down her spine.
“Mommy!”
She ran for her mother. A second later, Marisa found herself standing in the kitchen doorway, her eyes huge and her mouth hanging open as she looked at the most terrible sight she had ever seen. Her heart pounded so hard she could barely hear over it, and she had to fight to breathe. With one disbelieving glance she saw her dad lying facedown on the floor in what looked like a big puddle of bright red paint and her mother turning to face her with the front of her yellow sweater turning bright red, too, as though something was blossoming on it, some awful flower that was getting bigger by the second as it gobbled her up from the inside out.
Mommy. But Marisa was so terrified now that although her mouth opened and her throat worked, no sound came out.
“Run, Marisa,” her mother shrieked, her face white and terrible. “Run, run, run!”
There was another person in the room, Marisa saw, as beyond her mother something moved. Instantly she knew in her heart that it was one of the shadow people from the woods. Seized by mortal fear, she whirled around and ran like a jackrabbit with her mother’s screams echoing in her ears, darting through the living room, bursting out through the front door as the cool night air whooshed past her into the house, leaping across the wet grass that felt cold and slippery beneath her bare feet, flying into the darkness as the shadow person gave chase.
There was nowhere else to go: Sobbing with fear, she ran into the woods.
1
“You missed court! The judge chewed Kane out for being unprepared. She ain’t happy, and let me tell you, neither am I.” Scott Buchanan let fly before the door to his office, which Lisa Grant was, at his direction, closing behind her, was even all the way shut. Knowing she was at fault, Lisa still winced inwardly at the idea that their colleagues—no, her colleagues, because he was the boss—could hear every word.
“I had car trouble.” She should have been apologizing abjectly, she knew. She would have been, if her boss had been anyone other than him. Stomach tight, she stopped in the center of the spacious corner office to meet his gaze.
“Bullshit.” He stood behind his battered metal desk—no expensive mahogany for this district attorney, the blue-collar man’s friend!—glaring at her out of light blue eyes that were, on this Tuesday morning, slightly bloodshot, as though he’d tied one on the night before or, more probably, though she hated to admit it, been working until the wee hours. His short, thick tobacco-brown hair looked as if he’d recently run his hands through it from sheer aggravation. His thick brows beetled over his meaty nose. His square jaw looked even more pugnacious than usual. He had his suit coat off—it was draped over the back of his chair—and the contrast between his white dress shirt and pale blue tie and the tanned skin of his face and neck was marked. He was a wide-shouldered, muscular man of thirty-two who looked like what he was: the son of a no-account, chronically unemployed sometime mechanic, who’d done physical labor all his life until he’d managed to claw his way through law school.
“It’s the truth.”
His face tightened. “Come here.”
From the way he was looking at her she knew he meant it, so she complied, holding her head high as his eyes ran derisively over her, aware that her cool elegance in the face of his wrath and the already sultry late-June heat was maddening to him and taking at least a small degree of pleasure in the fact that this was so. At age twenty-eight, she’d been told often enough that she was beautiful to have a healthy sense of her own attractiveness, and she was perfectly sure he was aware of it, too. Her face was oval and fine-featured. Her eyes were large and caramel-brown, with a slight tilt to them. Her complexion had a naturally tawny tint that meant she only rarely had to resort to fake tans, and her hair, currently twisted into a chignon at her nape, was long, thick, and black as a crow’s wing. Her black linen pantsuit looked as though it had cost the earth, and never mind that it was two years old. It fit her tall, willowy form like it had been tailored to it, which it had. The sleeveless white shell beneath was silk. Wearing her expensive Louboutin heels, unmistakable because of their red soles, she still lacked a few inches of reaching his height of six-foot-one, but not many, which she devoutly hoped he found maddening, too.
“Look out that window.” As she reached him, he slid a hand around her arm just above her elbow, pulled her a few inches to her right, and yanked the cord of the dusty mini-blinds that covered the big window behind his desk. The blinds shot up with a rattle. Blinking at the sudden onslaught of bright sunlight, Lisa found herself looking out on busy Main Street, the building’s front entrance, and the nearly full parking lot. “That’s what I was doing about, oh, let’s say ten minutes ago, because I got a call from Kane saying you hadn’t shown up for court and I was checking to see if your car was out there in the parking lot. Know what I saw instead?”
It was a rhetorical question, and Lisa knew the answer even before he told her. Knowing he was looking at her, she had to suppress the urge to grimace.
“Loverboy in his red Porsche, dropping pampered Princess off at the door. Oh, and let’s not forget the five-minute-long good-bye smooch. Pretty steamy, especially when you’re a fricking hour and twenty minutes late. What, did the morning quickie run long?”
He let go of her arm. Head high, she moved away from him, walking back around his unbelievably messy desk to stand facing him across it.
“Go to hell.” Her voice was perfectly pleasant.
“You’re fucking fired.” His wasn’t.
“I’m sorry, okay? My car really did break down.” She desperately needed the job, or she wouldn’t have said it. “I had to call Joel”—the man she was currently dating, Joel Peyton, aka Loverboy—“to come and pick me up.”
“How about calling in to the office at the same time? Just to say, oh, I don’t know, you might be running late.” His voice dripped sarcasm.
In point of fact, she had called in and spoken to one of her fellow research assistants, Emily Jantzen, who had promised to grab the
needed material from her desk and hurry over to courtroom twelve to cover for her. She wondered what had happened to Jantzen. Something clearly had.
Whatever, there was no way she was getting Jantzen into trouble on her behalf.
“I’m sorry,” she said again.
Scott snorted. “You missed court. We don’t do that here in the DA’s office. That’s a big no-no with us.” He said it as if he were talking to a slightly stupid two-year-old. “Judges don’t like it when we look unprepared. I don’t like it. It’s un-pro-fessional. You ever heard that word before?”
God, she hated to grovel to him. “It won’t happen again.”
He gave her a level look, and she knew she was safe. From being fired, at least. Well, she hadn’t really thought he meant it.
“It better not. You probably don’t know it, having just come down from Mount Olympus like you have, but this here is called a job because we work. From eight a.m. on the dot until whatever time the work is finished. Pretty much six days a week. No excuses accepted. Got that?”
“Yes.”
“We have to have this talk again, and you’ll be out on your ass before the first wheedling little apology gets all the way out of your mouth. Am I making myself clear?”
It was all she could do not to shoot him the bird and turn on her heel. “Yes.”
“Great.” The phone on his desk began to ring. He picked it up, said, “Yeah. On my way,” into it, and hung up again, all without taking his eyes off her. “I don’t have the time or the patience to follow you around and make sure you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing when you’re supposed to be doing it, and I can’t spare anyone else to babysit you, either. Until further notice, you’re down in the basement sorting through the cold cases. When you get down there, you can send Gemmel up here to take your place. She at least has some kind of work ethic.”
That stung. “Scott . . .”
He was already shrugging into his light gray jacket and coming around his desk, heading for the door. Since everyone in the office called one another by their last names, that slip of the tongue had his eyes colliding with hers and holding them for a pregnant instant.
“Baby, you’re that close”—he pinched together his thumb and forefinger so that there was maybe half an inch of air between them—“to being out of a job, so I’d watch myself if I were you. I didn’t want to hire you in the first place. The only reason I did was because of your mom.”
The thought of mentioning that she probably liked being called baby, especially at work, even less than he enjoyed hearing her say Scott occurred, only to be instantly dismissed. To begin with, the first time he’d called her that had been roughly a dozen years ago, so despite the fact that he was a male DA speaking to a newly hired female attorney currently working for him as a research assistant, it wasn’t as demeaning as it might seem. Second, ticking him off any more probably wasn’t something she wanted to do right now. No, correction, something she should do. Because she wanted to. She definitely wanted to.
“She loves you, too.” As annoying as it was to admit, it was the truth. Her beautiful, kindhearted, gentle-souled mother, the owner of Grayson Springs, the storied, thousand-acre horse farm she had inherited from her wealthy parents, had taken an interest in the young son of a loser neighbor from the time he’d first started doing odd jobs for them for a couple of dollars when he was about twelve years old. From that time on, as he grew up, he had pretty much spent his summers and after-school hours working on their farm. Martha Grant had invited him into the kitchen to eat (the meals were prepared by Elsa, the cook, but a teenage farm worker wouldn’t even have been allowed inside the house without Miss Martha’s say-so) and seen to it that there was always work for him when he came looking for it, and had done countless other things on his behalf, most of which Lisa knew nothing about but suspected included making calls that got him the scholarship money he’d needed to swing college and beyond. That was why a month before, when the prestigious law firm she had worked for had gone belly-up in the bad economy and there had been no other jobs in the area to be had, she had swallowed her pride and come to him, the hunky former farmhand made good that she and her girlfriends from Lexington Country Day School, the priciest private school in Lexington, Kentucky, had once upon a long time ago wiled away many a summer afternoon ogling and teasing as he went about his chores. He hadn’t exactly been gracious, but he’d given her a job. As a research assistant, at just a little more than half her previous pay. It was, he’d said, the only position available. Take it or leave it.
She’d taken it. And she’d been doing a damned good job at it, too. The material that had been needed in court this morning—background information on the defendant, priors, forensic results, the impact statement on the victim—had been compiled in plenty of time, ready and waiting in a file on her desk for her to take with her to court.
Only fate in the form of the six-year-old Jaguar’s transmission had intervened, and she’d been stuck by the side of a narrow, leafy country lane in Woodford County until first the tow truck and then Joel had arrived.
“I’ve been meaning to get out there to see her. How’s she doing?” he asked as he walked past her.
“About the same. She doesn’t complain.”
“No, she wouldn’t. She’s a fine lady. Shame you take after your dad, isn’t it?”
Reaching the door, he opened it, then held it with ironic courtesy for her to precede him through it. Seething at the low blow—her parents were divorced, and her relationship with her federal-judge father was frosty at best—she barely managed not to stalk past him and out into the room where his administrative assistant, Sally Adams, sat at her desk. Silver-haired, plump, and good-natured, a twenty-year veteran of the prosecutor’s office, Sally instantly averted her eyes, pretending to be busy doing something on her computer.
“Hey,” Scott greeted two deputy DAs, David Pratchett and Sandra Ellis, who were waiting for him. Beyond them, in the big room with the cubicles, where a host of associates labored and her own desk was located, there was a collective rush as a dozen chairs rolled out of the aisle where they had been, Lisa was sure, congregated as those who occupied them watched the closed door and speculated on what was going on behind it, to disappear back into their assigned spaces. Everybody knew she’d been the DA’s morning whipping boy, of course, and they were dying to see how she’d taken it. But nobody wanted to be caught looking, or gossiping, by the boss.
“Chandler in Homicide sent word that Gaylin is ready to confess.” Ellis was breathless with excitement. An attractive, fortyish brunette, she was wearing a pale green summery skirt suit and carrying a briefcase. Gaylin, Lisa knew, was the crack-addled suspect who’d been taken into custody the day before, charged with murdering his own grandmother with a hammer when she wouldn’t give him any money for dope. The whole office was taking an interest in that one, herself included.
“Let’s go.” Joining them, Scott strode away without a backward glance. Sally dared to look up then, and gave Lisa a commiserating look.
“You okay? Whatever he said, don’t take it personal. He’s been in a really bad mood lately.” The fact that Sally was almost whispering said volumes, in Lisa’s opinion.
“I’m fine.”
“A little shaky” would have been a truer answer, but she wasn’t about to let it show. Returning Sally’s sympathetic smile with a quick, resolute one of her own, Lisa headed for the ladies’ room to give them time to get clear. The last thing she wanted to do right now was ride down in the elevator with Scott Buchanan.
It proved to be a mistake. Instead of riding down in the elevator with Scott, she was standing there in front of the elevator bank when a car going up arrived and opened to disgorge, along with half a dozen others, Kane and Jantzen. Assistant DA Amanda Kane, a hard-charging, pretty platinum blonde of maybe thirty who was wearing a sleeveless navy dress and carrying her jacket along with her briefcase and purse, looked tense. Research assistant Jantzen, an e
qually pretty but much softer sandy blonde just a couple of years out of college, who was clad in a bright print skirt and pink tee, looked miserable. Both of them spotted Lisa at the same time.
Jantzen’s eyes widened. Kane’s narrowed.
“Oversleep, Grant?” Kane glared at her. “I guess eight a.m. is a little early.”
“I’m sorry.” Lisa knew the apology was owed, and Kane’s annoyance was justified. It didn’t make her feel any better about it. Her stomach was still tight from her meeting with Scott, and this was just rubbing salt in the wound. “My car broke down.”
“Tell it to Buchanan.”
With that she swept on by. Trying not to let her chagrin show on her face, Lisa looked a question at Jantzen.
“As soon as you called, I rushed the folder over there just as fast as I could.” Jantzen spoke in a hurried, hushed voice. “I got there maybe ten minutes after court started. She wouldn’t take it! Said she’d already told the judge she was unprepared. If you ask me, I think she was just being as difficult as possible to get you in trouble. She is such a bitch.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” Lisa looked after Kane. She’d thought before that the other woman didn’t like her, but this was the first overt indication that she was right. Laying the whole sequence of events out before Scott in an attempt to point out that she was not the only one at fault here instantly occurred to her, only to be as quickly dismissed. It might get Kane yelled at, but it wouldn’t make her any friends, or even change Scott’s feelings about the screwup, which was, in the final analysis, still her fault. Besides, she wasn’t one to carry tales out of school. Her attention shifted back to Jantzen. “Thanks for trying, anyway. I owe you.”
An elevator pinged. This one, she saw at a glance, was heading down.
“No problem.” Jantzen smiled at her. The doors opened, revealing a couple of people already inside. Jantzen looked a little puzzled as Lisa moved to join them. “Where are you going?”
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