Forever...

by Jude Deveraux

  Slowly, without asking why he was so agitated, Darci hung up her jacket and his, made a trip to the bathroom, then returned to sit beside him on the couch and wait. Maybe if she was quiet and just waited, he’d tell her what had so upset him.

  “Read these,” he said, handing the pages to her.

  It took Darci several minutes to read the articles carefully and slowly. But when she’d finished reading everything he’d given her, she didn’t know what she was supposed to see. They were all sad articles about young women who had been in the Camwell area for one reason or another, then disappeared. One woman had been a photographer, taking photos of the old churches in the New England area; two others had been on vacation. One young woman had been staying at the Grove on her honeymoon.

  Although the stories were horrible in themselves, Darci failed to see what it was, specifically, that was so upsetting Adam. She looked at him in silent question.

  “Look at where the girls are from,” he said.

  She went over each article. “Virginia, Tennessee, South Carolina, and . . . this one is from Texas.” She still didn’t understand.

  “Now look at the photos.”

  They were all pretty girls, the youngest twenty-two and the oldest twenty-eight. But then didn’t all the photos of victims of serial killers and rapists and other sociopaths show pretty young women? she thought.

  “Each woman is blonde, small, and southern,” Adam said softly.

  Darci blinked at him, understanding at last.”Like me? Is that what you’re saying? Are you thinking that I am going to disappear next? Why would you think that? Is this why you hired me? To use me as bait?”

  “Don’t be absurd!” Adam said quickly, dismissing her exclamations as too ridiculous to consider. “Do you think I’d have brought you here if that were a possibility?” He took her left hand in his and looked at it under the light. “I’d like to know why that man nearly had a stroke when he saw your hand.”

  “Maybe his former girlfriend had moles on her palm, too,” Darci said as she pulled away from him, then got up and went into the kitchen. She wanted a moment alone to think. She was trying her best to remain calm through all that she was seeing and finding out, but it wasn’t easy. Small, blonde, southern women who’d disappeared in this area could be a coincidence, but it could also mean that, as Adam seemed to fear, she was a target.

  Or the target, she thought with a shiver of fear.

  Why, oh, why had Adam chosen her? Out of all those talented, educated women who’d applied for the job, why her?

  After she got herself under control, she filled two glasses with ice and Snapple lemonade and took them to the living room.

  Adam was sitting on the couch, staring at the articles in front of him with that same dark, brooding look that he’d been wearing when she first met him. She wished she could think of something to say to make him laugh, but at the moment, she could think of nothing at all funny. The faces of the missing young women seemed to fill her mind. “The way the man reacted to seeing my hand could have meant nothing,” Darci said quietly. “It could have been a coincidence or something unrelated to the witches. In fact, I don’t see how you can jump from some man in a phony-looking little store to women who have disappeared to—”

  She broke off when Adam got up, went to his bedroom, and returned with an address book. It was a little leather-bound volume that looked as though it had been around the world and back. When he opened it, she saw that the pages were worn and the addresses and phone numbers had been marked out and changed repeatedly.

  Adam flipped through it to the Ps, then picked up the phone and called someone. “Jack,” he said a moment later, “this is Adam Montgomery. I need a favor. Can you find out about the disappearances of four young women over the last four years in Camwell, Connecticut?” He paused and listened. “Yes, I know that the police believe that their disappearance had something to do with the reported practice of witchcraft in this area. And, yes, I’ve read everything that was published in the papers, but I also know what kind of investigations you guys do, and you always know more about a case than you tell anyone. What I want to know is, was there anything significant about the missing women’s hands? Specifically their left hands?” Again he waited and listened. “Okay, sure. Call me back on my cell phone,” Adam said, then hung up and looked at Darci. “He’s going to call me back as soon as he finds out anything.”

  “Is he a policeman?” Darci asked.

  “FBI.”

  “Oh,” she said, then paused. For the life of her, Darci couldn’t seem to think of any questions to ask him. FBI? The FBI was not something she’d encountered in real life. After a moment of silence, she put on her happiest face. “So what shall we do while we wait? We need something to calm your nerves. Maybe we should go to bed together and make mad love all afternoon. We could—” But the look Adam gave her made her stop talking. Obviously, he wasn’t in the mood to laugh right now. And the truth was that she was feeling a bit too nervous to talk.

  She soon saw that when Adam worried, he turned into a silent man who just wanted to be left alone. Again picking up the photocopied newspaper articles, he began to reread each one carefully. Moving to the chair beside the couch, Darci picked up the three magazines that were on the shelf under the coffee table and began to look through them, just waiting for the phone to ring.

  She thought that she’d been able to calm herself, but when the phone rang, she jumped so high that the magazines slid off her lap and hit the carpeted floor. Before the first ring stopped, Adam grabbed the little black phone off the coffee table, pressed the button, said, “Yes?” then listened.

  While Darci watched him, his face turned pale, and she wasn’t sure, but she thought that maybe there was a bit of a tremor in one of his hands. He said almost nothing, just listened and said, “Yes,” a few times. To Darci, it seemed like hours before he put the phone down. But even after he did, he still didn’t speak. Instead, he just sat there and looked at her.

  And Darci waited for him to speak. She desperately wanted him to tell her what the FBI agent named Jack had said, but she feared that if she asked, Adam might clam up and refuse to tell her. No, it was better to wait and let him volunteer information.

  But Adam didn’t speak. Instead, after several long, silent moments, he got up and went into her bedroom. Darci ran after him, and, standing in the doorway, she saw him open her closet door and pull out her ratty old suitcase. But after he looked at it, he went past Darci and across the hall to his bedroom, removed his two suitcases from the closet, then carried them back to her bedroom. Through all of this Darci watched him.

  It was when Adam had set his suitcases on her bed, opened them, and started putting her new clothes into them, that Darci placed herself between Adam and the open cases. “I want to know what’s going on!” she said, her voice full of all the exasperation and frustration she felt at being told so very little about what was going on.

  “No, you don’t,” he answered as he removed her navy blazer from a hanger and put the garment into the suitcase.

  “I do!” she said. “I do want to know!” To her horror, she realized that she was about to start crying. He was sending her away, but she didn’t want to return to New York, to her aunt and uncle. No, truthfully, she didn’t want to leave him. She didn’t want to be anywhere but here with Adam Montgomery. “Why are you firing me?” she asked, her voice full of the tears she was trying to hold back.

  “I’m not firing you,” he said calmly as he dropped two skirts into the case. “I’m protecting you.”

  “Protecting me? Why do you need to protect me?” When he didn’t answer, she said, “If you’re sending me away because of some moles on my hand, we could go to a doctor and have them removed. There are lots of alternatives to my leaving. We could stay somewhere else and just visit Camwell when we have to. We could—” When she saw that her words weren’t making him stop packing, she said, “Please don’t send me away.” Her voice was pleading, al
most desperate. “I need the money. I need....” She took a breath.”You don’t understand what this job means to me. I need—”

  “You won’t need anything if you’re dead,” Adam said flatly.

  “Please,” she said as she went to him and put her hands on his arm and looked up at him with big eyes that sparkled with unshed tears. “Tell me what the man on the phone said. At least let me know what’s going on and why I’m being sent away. You owe me that, don’t you?”

  Looking down at her, Adam had to resist the urge to draw her into his arms. Maybe he could use his own body to protect her. He took a deep breath, then sat down on the bed. “All right,” he said softly, not looking at her. He didn’t want to tell her anything so the words came out with difficulty. “I’m sure you know that in most cases the police keep something back, something that they don’t tell the public. That’s to protect them against—”

  “The Looney Tunes who admit to murders they didn’t commit,” Darci said as she sat down beside him on the bed.

  “Yes, exactly.” He gave her a weak smile. She was so very small, he thought as he looked at her; she’d be easy to subdue. “My friend in the FBI made a few calls, and he found out that in this case there’s been a major cover-up. Cover-up to the public, that is. The mayor of Camwell said that there’d been enough bad publicity about his lovely town, and he didn’t want any more. He didn’t want his town blamed for four murders and mutilations that no one could prove had happened in his town.”

  “Murder?” Darci asked, eyes wide. “Mutilations?” Involuntarily, her hand went to her throat.

  “Yes.” Again Adam had to fight an urge to put his arm around her protectively. But he didn’t want to soften what he was saying. She needed to feel the full impact so she’d understand the seriousness of the situation. “The girls disappeared in this area, but each young woman was eventually found. Dead.” He gave her a moment to let this sink in. “Their bodies were found, one by one, over a hundred miles from here, each one in a different direction away from Camwell.”

  “But what about. . . .”Darci began,her right hand rubbing her left.

  Picking up her left hand, Adam held it in his for a moment, then slowly turned it over and looked at the palm. “The disappearances of the women made headline news because they happened near Camwell, but their deaths got only back-page coverage because—”

  “Because other places aren’t tainted by an association with witchcraft so wherever the women were found wasn’t as exciting as Camwell,” Darci said, watching him as he held her hand in his. She wanted to put her head down on his shoulder and let him hold her. The images inside her head were frightening her.

  “Yes, exactly.” His voice was very soft, and his thumb was caressing her palm. “It wasn’t in the papers, but all four of the young women whose bodies were found had had their left hands amputated.”

  At that Darci nearly pulled away from him, but he held her fast. She must hear everything! “Their left hands were missing,” Adam continued. “Are missing. The hands have never been found.”

  Darci pulled her hand from his grasp and held it protectively in her right. “You think they were looking for something special?” she managed to say after a moment.

  “I think they were looking for you.”

  At this statement, Darci’s first instinct was to leap up and run from the room and get on the first plane out of Connecticut. But, instead, she closed her eyes for a moment and used her True Persuasion as best she could on herself. She needed to stay calm right now. She needed— She needed to know what was going on!

  Slowly, Darci stood up, put her hands on her hips and glared at him. “All right, Adam Montgomery, this has gone on long enough. I want to know why you chose me. And for what did you choose me? Out with it. Now!”

  Adam seemed to wrestle with himself before he spoke. “I guess I owe you that much,” he said at last. “In fact, maybe if you know more, you’ll be willing to leave peacefully.” He said the last word as though if he told her, peaceful or not, she was going to leave.

  “Do you remember the woman in the warehouse with me the day you interviewed for the job?”

  “The woman with the big eyes?” Darci said as she sat back down on the bed beside him.

  “Yes. Her name is Helen Gabriel, and she’s a psychic. She told me that she could find the correct woman to help me fight these witches, and when she said you were the one, I hired you.”

  Darci waited for several moments, but that seemed to be all the explanation he was going to give her. That’s all? she wanted to yell at him. That’s all you’re going to tell me? But she didn’t say that because she was sure that those words would make Adam refuse to say more. Instead, she decided to use one of the words that pushed his buttons. “I see,” she said as she stood up. “Then you were planning to sacrifice me.”

  “I was planning no such thing!” Adam snapped. “What an appalling idea. Do I seem like the type of man who—?”

  “Then you probably just meant to let them have me, so you could plan to rescue me at the last minute. Is that it?” She looked him hard in the eyes. “Are you undercover FBI? Is that how you can get secret information?”

  “If I were, I wouldn’t need to go to a library to get newspaper clippings about the missing women now would I?”

  “But you already knew about them, didn’t you? On that first night the waitress told us about the missing people— that’s what she said: people. But you knew they were female.”

  “What a memory you have!” he said, carefully not giving her any more information.

  “So if you don’t want me to be your bait, what do you want me for?” she asked, again glaring at him.

  After taking several moments to try to formulate an answer, Adam threw up his hands in defeat. “Okay, I didn’t want to tell you this yet. In fact—” He had to take a deep breath before he could continue. “The power of this coven of witches is based on . . . well, there’s an object, and as long as they have this thing, they’ll be powerful. My goal is to take this object away from them and thereby render them powerless.” After this, Adam gave a little smile, as if to say, There. Now you know everything.

  But Darci didn’t know even one percent of what she wanted to know. “So where do I come into this?” she asked. “What do I have to do with this ‘object’?”

  “Only certain people can open it,” Adam said brightly. “I can’t. This psychic, Helen, told me that if I put an ad in the paper, the correct woman would answer the ad and that she, Helen, would tell me which woman to hire.” Adam gave Darci another little smile. “My naive idea was that you would stay here in the guest house and wait until I found the object, then I’d bring it to you and you’d ‘open it,’ so to speak.”

  Clasping her hands behind her back, Darci began to pace back and forth across the room. She felt that Adam was telling the truth, but she also knew he was holding back a lot. She wanted to know what the object was, but she needed other information first.

  “Obviously, they know that someone is going to try to take this object from them,” she said. “And it seems that they know, basically, what I look like. If they know that, then there must be some prophecy or a prediction that says that a short, skinny blonde from the South with a moley left hand is going to take this object of power. I guess they’re taking no chances, so that’s why every short, skinny blonde from the South who gets near Camwell disappears.”

  Darci was quite pleased with herself for coming up with this deduction, but when she turned to Adam, he looked a bit sick. Without a word, he got up and went back to putting her clothes in his suitcase. “You’re getting out of here. You’re going home now.”

  “And I guess that that man in the store hasn’t already told the entire coven what he saw. Who he saw. So, yes, I’d better go away because I’m sure that whomever he told can’t talk to anyone in this town and find out that I’m from Putnam, Kentucky. And they couldn’t possibly find Uncle Vern’s apartment in New York. And, above
all else, I’m very sure they won’t be able to find a rich guy like you and use some witchcraft spell to make you tell them where I am.”

  “Don’t try to con me. You’re getting out of here and now!”

  “Then what?” Darci asked softly. “Some other short skinny blonde from the South disappears?” She took a deep breath. “Look, we can stop this thing. You and I together can do something about this. Wasn’t that your plan? Isn’t that why you hired me? We can—”

  “No!” Adam said. “We can’t do anything. You are going somewhere where you’re safe.”

  She blinked at him for a moment. “Does this mean that you plan to stay here?”

  Adam grabbed her new shoes off the closet floor and dropped them into the suitcase. “Let’s just say that I have a personal interest in solving this.”

  Suddenly, she’d had all she could take of his secrecy. “And what is that?!” she half shouted. “Why are you doing this? What is your big secret? Why can’t you tell me how your parents died? What demons in your mind, in your life, have driven you to go after these witches? What business is it of yours? Why is this so important that you hired a psychic to help you? And why me?! What did that woman see in me that says I am the one who can open this . . . this object?”

  She waited for his answers, and he seemed to start to say something, but then he walked over to the chest of drawers, pulled open a drawer, and removed her nightgown. She could see that he wasn’t going to answer her questions, and she wanted to scream in frustration. As always, he was going to tell her only as little as he could and only when he had to.

  “I have . . . personal . . . interest,” he said at last. He seemed to be calm, but she could see the vein throbbing in his temple; even this tiny admission was difficult for him.

  “Well, so do I!” she shouted.