Hidden Salem

by Kay Hooper

She was silent.

  “He died more than ten years ago, didn’t he?”

  It wasn’t really a question.

  “Yes.” Okay, so he knew that. But the fact that he was aware of that information didn’t particularly impress Nellie; her father had been a wealthy, powerful man, and such men made news when they lived. And when they died. Though it struck her as definitely odd that the message had even named Finn—if this was, indeed, him—since he would have been barely out of his teens when Thomas Cavendish had written the letter.

  “And the message he left for you, a written message he had notarized and held by a trusted lawyer, was to be delivered into your hands well before your thirtieth birthday.”

  “He told you,” Nellie said mechanically. “Long before I knew, he told you.”

  Finn didn’t deny that. Instead, blue eyes still intense, he said, “You wrestled with coming here. You waited for months. Your thirtieth birthday is coming up. January 15. Not long now. Why did you struggle against coming here? Because he wanted you to come here? Because he told you that you had to? Or because you felt you had to and didn’t trust your own instincts?”

  Nellie hoped she didn’t betray the surprise she felt at that. She was certain her father had been in touch with this man before he died, even shared the idea of the message, what was in the message. That made sense, even if she didn’t understand the why of any of this. And it would certainly be easy enough to share her birthday, or for Finn to find it on some public record. But the rest?

  How could he have known her reaction to that letter?

  How could he have known how she’d felt about it?

  “Nellie—”

  “Admit it. He was in touch with you before he died.”

  “Of course he was. That’s hardly the point.”

  Nellie thought it was a large part of the point. And so like her father to put her fate, apparently, into the hands of a stranger—a relatively young stranger at that time—and to tell that stranger personal things long before he bothered to tell them to his daughter.

  “You need my help,” Finn said.

  “Your help with what? With some mysterious errand my father chose to insist I figure out for myself? An errand he insisted was dangerous?” She kept her voice low even though there was no one close enough to overhear them. “I don’t see any danger looming over me. This seems like a perfectly pleasant little town, and certainly no threat to me.”

  “Appearances can be deceptive.”

  With an effort she hoped didn’t show, Nellie ignored that. She wanted to get up and leave, just walk away. And return to the B and B and pack and get the hell out of here.

  But she was bitterly aware that there was enough of her father’s stubbornness in her to prevent that.

  Dammit.

  She forced herself to smile casually. “I don’t have anything in particular in mind to do here, other than be a tourist and take a break from a hectic life. Sleep late, maybe do some hiking and riding, shop. Enjoy the scenery. So just what is it you propose to help me with, Mr. Deverell?”

  As if what he was saying was perfectly normal and even conversational, he said, “I propose to help you survive this visit to Salem, Nellie Cavendish. I propose to save your life.”

  * * *

  —

  GENEVA RAYNOR, AS just about all who knew her could attest, was a woman who could take care of herself. She got herself into trouble from time to time, sure, but she also got herself out.

  Usually.

  Right now, however, she was experiencing some highly uncharacteristic doubts. Because she had searched every single inch of her prison, every fraction of an inch, and could find no way to get herself out of here.

  Even where here was, was an open question. She had been in the woods north of town, watched by the sentinels, the crows, and then she had heard his voice asking a seemingly casual question . . . and then everything had gone black.

  She didn’t think he had hit her because her headache was not of the caused-by-a-blunt-instrument variety. She’d had enough of those to know. And she also thought she would remember a Taser for the same reason. So her bet was an injection of some kind.

  However he’d done it, he had knocked her out in seconds, leaving not so much as a bruise she’d been able to find. When she woke up, she had been totally alone in this place. And still was. She knew she was alone because she’d taken a chance and dropped her shields, in the beginning as soon as her head had cleared and several times since, reaching out in every direction, trying to touch another mind. Any other mind. And . . . nothing.

  She was alone, all right.

  Maybe in a cellar. Not a cave, she thought, because the beams in the ceiling high above her looked like floor joists to her. So probably a cellar. Or some other underground place, because the walls were mostly hard-packed dirt with the consistency of cement, walls that had been there a long, long time, like the floor, and there were no windows, no stairs.

  There was no exterior door, she was reasonably certain. What there was, was a single door in one relatively small section of the wall that was brick, a large, heavy door, dark, rough wood with big, thick iron hinges—of the kind one couldn’t just knock a pin out to loosen—bolted in place, and no doorknob or handle of any kind on her side. And even though there were no stairs or steps, the bottom of the door was a good two feet or a bit more above the hard dirt floor, which was another indication that it led into whatever building housed this cellar.

  Geneva habitually carried hidden on her person several small but useful tools; they had obviously searched her and had found all but one of them. The remaining tool, though narrow and slender, was exceptionally strong—but so far she hadn’t figured out a way to use it to escape her prison. It wasn’t a digging tool, and hard as she’d looked along the walls and floor, she had not been able to find a single crack or seam. Even the mortar of the ancient red bricks on that one section of wall refused to flake off under her careful touch, let alone chip. As for the door, she had cautiously sounded it with a series of careful knocks and was convinced it was both unusually thick and unusually solid.

  Still, she tore four of her nails painfully in trying to find something, anything, on her side of the door to grip, wedging them into the seam where the door should open only to find nothing to grip and the door unmoving.

  She might have thrown the single lidded bucket in the prison at the door in her rising frustration, but since its use was obvious and definitely necessary, she had not done that.

  Since she couldn’t wear a watch or carry a cell phone, and since her prison had no windows, Geneva had no idea how long she had been here, or what time it was. Unlike some other SCU members, she had never learned to compensate by developing a reliable clock in her head. And even if she had, there was no sunlight or moonlight to offer any aid.

  Her best guess was that she’d awakened here no more than two or three hours after she’d been knocked out, and after that . . . The rest of Wednesday night. Thursday at least, and maybe Friday. Was it Saturday yet?

  Maybe.

  The two large plastic bottles of water they had left for her were half-gone despite her sparing use, and the two large plastic lidded containers of a kind commonly found in grocery stores for food storage, one holding weirdly normal individually packaged sandwiches like those that usually came out of vending machines and the other holding a generous number of individually wrapped protein bars, were also depleted by at least a couple of days of hunger, she thought—again, despite her careful, sparing consumption.

  She had the healthy appetite of an active, athletic person, and aside from being a tall woman, her psychic abilities tended to require at least a normal amount of food as sheer fuel. She hadn’t reached the point where she felt drained, but she felt weaker than normal now because she’d restricted her rations, ignoring appetite, and that only added to her problems.
>
  She was hungry, she was frustrated, and she was chilled.

  Time was passing.

  The half dozen thick, tall pillar candles they had left, along with two boxes of matches in a plastic baggie, still had a reassuring amount of burning time left in them, because she’d been cautious enough to light only one at a time and sparingly; five nearly whole candles were left. Though the light of a single candle didn’t exactly brighten up her prison and further hampered her efforts to find a way out.

  And the dark corners were getting to her; her imagination was beginning to conjure things crouching in them, just glimpses from the corners of her eyes. And, of course, they were nothing but innocently empty corners when she took her candle and looked more closely.

  There was nothing in here with her.

  She was sure of that.

  Almost sure.

  She was also getting pretty damned tired of sleeping, when she wasn’t pacing and could at least nap, on the bare, lumpy, single twin-sized mattress on the dirt floor.

  They might at least have left her a pillow and blanket.

  It wasn’t exactly cold in her prison, certainly not as cold as the outside temperature; she judged this room to be almost entirely belowground, and it seemed to maintain a fairly consistent temperature in the low sixties. And she’d been dressed for the cold, so there was that. But to say she was comfortable would have been a gross misrepresentation of the truth. There might not be frostbite in the offing, but feeling constantly chilled was both uncomfortable and a considerable drain on her energy.

  Plus, there were the bugs. She hadn’t seen any bugs yet, but she had to be surrounded by them. Burrowed into the hard, hard walls, or lurking in the dark corners only to scurry away when she approached with her candle. She tried not to think about it, but she didn’t like bugs. Especially spiders, spinning their sticky webs and creeping across people’s faces in the night—

  Geneva drew a deep breath and let it out slowly, reaching for control even if it was only an illusion.

  She didn’t want to admit even to herself that she was scared, but she was. She was also mad as hell, baffled because she had even more questions than she’d had before, and since her fate was clearly in the hands of others, she had no idea if she would even leave this prison alive.

  The food might have reassured someone without an educated and experienced imagination, but that wasn’t Geneva. Just because they were feeding her now didn’t mean they intended to keep on feeding her.

  She could think of a dozen reasons why a captor would feed a prisoner for just a while and then stop—and none of them were good.

  To muddle up estimates like time of death and how long she’d been missing before she finally turned up, for instance. To starve her at their leisure, for whatever awful reason. Or maybe they’d put something in the food, the water, that was working on her even now, nibbling at her determination, her will, her strength, some kind of slow-acting poison or, perhaps worse, something that would alter her thinking, make her paranoid, even nuts . . .

  It was bad enough to have a vivid imagination; it was hell to have an educated and experienced imagination.

  And too many war stories that would have scared the living shit out of average people.

  Because even if she wasn’t as good as some others claimed to be at measuring the passage of time just by instinct or her very underdeveloped internal clock, the water and food and candles told her time had passed. Two days at least, was her guess. And not a sight or sound of another living soul.

  She thought about those now four bodies almost all the locals pretended hadn’t turned up deep in the woods, the bodies so mutilated there’d been no way to tell by looking who they had been or how long they had been out there, never mind how they’d been killed. That was what they’d briefly thought, the locals, a passing pity for careless hikers who’d gotten themselves killed slipping on winter-slick rocks or something like that.

  The militia had taken care of such accidents so quickly, quietly, and smoothly, Geneva had almost missed picking up anything about the first three dead during her first week here. If it hadn’t been for her brief telepathic encounter with the shaken hunter, she’d likely never have found that fourth body. Or what was left of it.

  As for what the locals believed, there had been only bare mentions of the unfortunate first three “hikers” noted in the December newspaper editions Geneva had one night quietly broken into the local library to check out.

  As for the remains she herself had found, no mention of him had appeared in the next day’s newspaper at all—though Geneva had picked up a few stray uneasy thoughts from townspeople since she had found that fourth victim. Not even the militia, it appeared, was able to keep the deaths absolutely quiet. And some unnerving details were getting out.

  Still, in those vague musings Geneva had picked up, it seemed either carelessness or wolves were always the culprits. It was what they believed, what they’d . . . been told? Sad, but those hikers had been warned not to hike way up there along the Trail unless they knew what they were doing, because all hikers were warned.

  And it was winter. Even the most experienced hiker had no business walking the Trail this time of year.

  Hikers. As far as Geneva could tell, that was totally accepted, that the dead had been hikers just passing by and, really, no concern of the people of Salem. It was one of the eerie things about this town. People who really did seem unusually, even unnaturally, undisturbed by horrible deaths in their general area and uninterested even in whom the bodies belonged to. In her experience it was just the sort of thing that made locals jumpy as hell even if the dead had been careless hikers.

  But not in Salem. Nobody seemed to be much interested in, far less affected by, the deaths.

  And no official actions had been visible. No statement or announcement. Nothing at all. The bodies just . . . vanished. And not a soul whose mind Geneva had touched seemed the least bit curious about that, never mind not being horrified. And that was just weird.

  Unnatural.

  Geneva shivered.

  She had felt a slight current of air coming from a finely meshed screen in the ceiling surprisingly high above her, a regular occurrence, but so far she had found no way of getting up there; it was well out of her reach. Not that reaching it was likely to help, since she judged it to be no more than ten or twelve inches square. And whatever lay beyond it was a mystery, since she never saw a light or any movement, or heard any sound.

  It was quiet. Too quiet. Silent.

  Silent as a grave.

  Dammit.

  And where the hell was Gray, anyway? Surely he’d come looking for her despite her message? She knew him well enough to be fairly certain of that. And he must have arrived in Salem by now; she knew where his drop point had been scheduled to be and it was only a few short hours of hiking from there. He should be here by now, and settled in, and following the planned routine of settling in, a tired hiker, and idly looking through the local newspaper because he always did that.

  So where the hell was he?

  For the first time in her life, Geneva, though she considered herself something of a loner, understood how solitary confinement could drive someone out of their mind.

  NINE

  After so carefully checking Geneva’s room, Grayson returned to the parlor and again occupied himself with his newspaper, a half-empty coffee cup on the table beside his chair. He heard Ms. Payton return to the desk from whatever errand had taken her away from it, even though she walked with a catfooted lightness that was rarely natural. Grayson decided absently that he had a nasty, suspicious mind.

  “Does she know when I’m arriving?” he had asked Bishop about Geneva.

  “Approximately. The day you should reach Salem if you encounter no trouble, but not the specific time, obviously. You could be delayed on the Trail for some reason.”

&nb
sp; “Makes sense. And she knows it’s me?” He’d immediately felt like an idiot asking that, but Bishop had replied as though the question was perfectly reasonable.

  “Yes, you were always the logical person to send. Aside from the physicality and experience required to hike in rugged terrain and make certain no one doubted you could have hiked the Trail, your spider senses are extremely well developed, and your empathic senses are near the top of our scale.”

  “And you’re so sure an empath and a telepath are going to find whatever’s going on in or around Salem?”

  “I’m sure you’re the right team to go looking for whatever’s going on in or around Salem.”

  A typical Bishop nonanswer. He would, of course, have his reasons for teaming Grayson and Geneva, but neither of them would likely ever know what those reasons were.

  Their last teaming had been a professional success, but as far as the personal went . . . Grayson was pretty sure he still had the scars. He thought that perhaps Bishop might be wrong about their pairing—even though he very rarely erred in those instincts—because he and Geneva were just too much alike.

  Most of the successful teams within the SCU, many long-term, worked so well because they complemented each other. A strength or weakness in one was countered by the other. Balanced. In abilities and skills, definitely—though not always in temperament. Lucas and Samantha Jordan, for instance, both had fiery tempers and had been known to “disagree” about something with a force that should have stripped the paint from the walls, and yet they were a deeply bonded, totally devoted couple and an excellent investigative team.

  But he and Geneva . . . He might have been able to best her at MMA, he thought ruefully, but he would have hesitated to bet against her even in that. Otherwise, they possessed many of the same skills and abilities. Their psychic abilities differed, but they both had hair-trigger tempers, generally under their control.

  Generally.

  But he still thought they made an odd team, and he was dubious of Bishop’s clear faith in them.