It tasted chalky in her mouth. Her stomach knotted with revulsion, and she quickly set the cup down again, to find Uncle John watching her with concern.
“I can’t believe I didn’t see it. My own daughter,” Leonora said in an aggrieved tone, as she had at least a dozen times since she and the rest of the family had met Nicky at the island clinic, where Dave the deputy had driven her directly from the Old Taylor Place. At the clinic, the knife wound had been identified as what it was, cleaned, and bandaged; she’d been diagnosed with a mild concussion, for which she’d been told to rest; and a sedative, which she hadn’t yet taken, had been given to her to help her sleep. She’d still been on the examination table when the call had come in confirming what she’d known intuitively all along: Karen was dead. That was when she’d gone numb, she remembered. After that, nothing had seemed quite real.
An hour later, she’d been released to her family. In the approximately forty-five minutes since they had arrived home, she’d showered—carefully, so as not to get her bandage wet—and tried not to think about the fact that at first the water running off her body and swirling away down the drain had been brown with blood, some her own, some undoubtedly Karen’s. After noticing that, she had gotten out of the shower much more quickly than she had originally meant to, toweled off, dried her hair, and dressed in a pair of silky pink nylon pajamas and, because she was freezing, a thick pink terry-cloth robe and a pair of white ankle socks. All the clothes belonged to Livvy, because the clothes Nicky’d been wearing when she was attacked had been taken for evidence, and her suitcase, along with practically everything else she had brought with her from Chicago, was still in the trunk of her rental car. The car was parked by the garage—she’d noticed it when they had arrived home from the clinic—but by the time she’d thought about her things and remembered that they were in the trunk, she was naked and wet. It had been easier après shower to simply wrap herself in a towel and scamper into Livvy’s room and help herself to her sister’s clothes. Livvy hadn’t objected: Her only reaction upon seeing Nicky padding into the kitchen in her clothes had been a slight narrowing of her eyes. To her surprise, Nicky had found wearing her big sister’s clothes oddly comforting, almost like going back in time to their teenage years, when if she’d really wanted to get back at Livvy for something, all she’d had to do was “borrow” some of her cherished clothes. As if some rule of ancient karmic payback was in effect, though, now Livvy’s things were miles too big, to say nothing of being Pepto-Bismol pink, which was definitely not Nicky’s color. Fortunately, the pajama pants came equipped with a drawstring waist, which she had cinched tightly, and the color was the least of her worries at the moment.
Her hand had lain in a puddle of Karen’s blood.
Nicky shivered, and of its own volition, the hand in question curled into a fist in her lap.
“Drink up,” Uncle John urged her again.
“You’re cold.”
“You never can see anything to do with family,” Livvy reminded Leonora impatiently while Nicky took another tiny sip of hot chocolate. “We could all be dying and you wouldn’t know it. You didn’t even know that Ben was screwing his head off with his secretary. Face it: You’re just not that psychic when it comes to us.”
“Olivia Jane.” Leonora stiffened in her chair to fix Livvy with an affronted gaze. “That’s not true.”
“Is too,” Livvy said, unrepentant.
“You forget I saw Harry all covered with blood, and Charlie sitting on a beach when he should have been in New York, and poor, dear Neil—well, you know how I saw your father.”
“They’re not blood kin, Mama. You can see them a little, but you can’t see blood kin. Not at all. It’s the truth, and you know it.”
“Even if your mother had seen what was happening with your husband, what good would it have done?” Uncle Ham intervened over his shoulder as he expertly cracked eggs into a skillet. They slid into the hot grease with a loud sizzle. The bacon, done now, lay draining on paper towels by the stove. The homey scent of breakfast filled the kitchen. It made Nicky’s stomach churn.
“I could have caught the bastard in the act.” Livvy closed the refrigerator door with more force than the action called for and shuffled toward the table. Like the rest of the family, she’d been getting ready for bed when the call to meet Nicky at the clinic had come in. She was fully dressed in the same clothes she’d been wearing earlier, only now her T-shirt was on inside-out and she had backless pink slippers—clearly the companions to the robe Nicky was wearing—on her feet.
“I’m sorry I didn’t see either one of you in trouble.” Leonora’s chin quivered. “I keep telling you, I’m blocked.”
“You’re getting better: You saw something tonight.” Uncle John’s tone was comforting.
“It was an imprint—a loop.” Leonora shook her head. “Sometimes terrible events leave their imprints on their surroundings. That’s obviously what happened in this case and thank goodness I was able to pick up on it, because otherwise, I was getting nothing. I wasn’t communicating with Tara’s spirit in the usual way at all. And Dorothy still didn’t come through.”
There was a forlorn note to her voice as she said that last.
“Here, you might want to put this on your forehead.
You look like you’re growing a horn.” Livvy dropped something—a bag of frozen peas, Nicky realized after blinking at it confusedly for an instant—on the table in front of her.
“Oh. Thanks.”
The bump on her forehead was big, having grown to about the size of a golf ball. That being the case, the peas were probably a good idea. She picked up the bag and applied it to the bump. In the meantime, Livvy walked around the table and lowered herself, grimacing, into her seat. The oak ladderback chair was old, having been around since they were kids, and it creaked warningly as she settled into it. All eyes immediately shot to Livvy, who fortunately seemed to be too preoccupied to notice either the protesting chair or the apprehensive looks on the faces of her family. Another attack of the “I’m too fat to live” blues was probably more than any of them could take, Nicky thought. Certainly, it was more than she could take at the moment.
“If I’d caught him in the act, I would have left him flat. Instead, he waited until I was pregnant, and then the bastard left me.” Livvy dug savagely into the banana pudding she’d extracted from the refrigerator. “Until then, I was Little Miss Clueless.”
“The eggs are ready,” Uncle Ham announced from the stove. “Who wants breakfast?”
“I do,” Livvy said, while Uncle John stood up to help Uncle Ham carry the plates to the table.
“Livvy, you’ve done nothing but eat for the past two months. You’re going to make yourself sick.” Leonora looked meaningfully at the pudding that Livvy was scarfing down.
“I’m going to make myself fat, you mean, don’t you? Well, too late, Mama. I am fat. And you know what? It doesn’t matter. I worked like a dog for years to keep my figure, and he left me anyway, and now I’m pregnant and big as a moose and I don’t care.” Livvy shoveled a defiant spoonful of pudding into her mouth, then reached for one of the plates that Uncle John had just brought to the table. “Bring on the bacon.”
“You’ll be sorry later on,” Leonora warned.
Livvy fixed her big blue eyes on their mother, opened her mouth wide, and shoved in an entire piece of bacon.
“Olivia.” Leonora’s tone made it a reproof.
“Leave her alone, she’s eating for two,” Uncle John said, sitting down. Uncle Ham, after bellowing at Harry to come and get it, took his place at the table, too.
“Not two. Two hundred. Pounds, that is,” Livvy said. “I only have ten more to go. Want to bet I make it?”
She took a ferocious bite of egg on toast.
Unreal, Nicky thought. Here her family was, having a perfectly normal—for them—conversation when she had been attacked and Karen had been brutally murdered just a few hours earlier. For her, the remembered hor
ror seemed to hang in the air like an icy cloud, and yet—the world just kept on keeping on.
“Eat,” Uncle John said, and tapped his fork against the edge of Nicky’s plate for emphasis. Automatically, she glanced down at the glistening fried egg on toast, at the two strips of crisp bacon, at the twisted orange slice he’d used for garnish. Perfection on a plate. She should have been hungry; she’d had nothing to eat since . . . breakfast? She and the rest of the team had made do with airplane food on the flight from Chicago. Karen had sat across the aisle from her, picking gingerly at an omelette. They’d meant to grab lunch when they landed, but as it turned out, they hadn’t had time. That tasteless airplane omelette had been Karen’s last meal. . . .
Nicky’s stomach turned inside out. Suddenly the hot, greasy smell of the food was more than she could bear.
Before she could do more than glance up from her plate, a brisk knock cut through the desultory talk that was still going on around her.
All conversation ceased as everyone in the room looked toward the sound. It came from the back door, which stood open so that the cool night breeze could blow in.
“Something smells good,” a male voice Nicky didn’t recognize said through the screen. Since it was bright in the kitchen and dark on the other side of the door, it was impossible to see who was there. “Mind if we come in?”
“That depends on who you are.” Leonora slewed around to look at the door while Uncle John got up to unlatch it. “And what you want.”
“It’s Dave O’Neil, Miz Stuyvescent,” Dave said in the drawling accent typical of area natives as he stepped into the kitchen.
It was, Nicky saw, Deputy Dave—and right behind him came his boss, the nasty cop. But he’d come to her aid back there on the driveway, so thinking of him as the nasty cop was probably something she might want to reconsider. “Barney Fife” was probably out now, too.
“I don’t think I had a chance to introduce myself earlier,” the no-longer-quite-so-nasty cop said, glancing around the kitchen. As she’d noticed when she had first heard him speak, he clearly wasn’t from around there. Yankee was the word that popped into her mind upon hearing him now, which showed her just how far back into her deep Southern childhood she had temporarily regressed. “Joe Franconi, Chief of Police.”
He was clearly taking everything in, and for a moment, Nicky imagined the scene from his perspective: the homely smell of breakfast still lingering in the air, the uneven thumping of the paddle fan overhead, the outdated avocado-and-gold kitchen with its dark cabinets and harsh lighting, countertops cluttered with eggshells and paper towels and the various implements Uncle Ham had used to cook with, the ancient black iron skillet that was one of Uncle Ham’s prized possessions still smoking slightly on the only modern appliance in the room, the six-burner, stainless-steel, professional-quality gas stove. In the center of the room, directly beneath the lazily rotating fan, the table stood, crowded with plates of bacon and eggs and hot-chocolate mugs and Livvy’s nearly empty pudding bowl. Around the table sat Leonora, who, having rid herself of the overdone makeup and purple caftan sometime before arriving at the clinic, was dressed in a very ordinary-looking blue-flowered shirt and matching slacks, her only makeup a barely-there trace of deep red lipstick, with a pair of the oversized tortoise-shell-framed glasses she wore when she took her contacts out slipping down her nose; Livvy, with most of her two-toned hair having now escaped from its wispy little knot to straggle toward her shoulders, her top on wrong side out, her face almost as pink as her top, her mouth crammed full of bacon, which she continued to defiantly chew; Uncle Ham, in a turquoise Hornets T-shirt and loose plaid flannel pants, a strand of his thinning red hair hanging limply across his forehead, his face flushed and sweaty from working over the stove; and Nicky herself, dressed in Livvy’s way-too-bright pink pajamas and robe, her undoubtedly pale and shiny face scrubbed clean of makeup, her still slightly damp hair pulled back and secured in a ponytail at the nape of her neck . . .
With a white plastic bag of frozen peas pressed to her forehead.
Realizing that, Nicky hastily lowered the peas, only to discover that the police chief’s eyes were on her. His mouth quirked slightly as his gaze touched on the plastic bag. Then his eyes slid back up to her forehead, and suddenly there was no trace of amusement at all on his face.
“John Nash.” Uncle John, looking as natty as he always did in the same black T-shirt and khaki slacks he’d been wearing earlier, introduced himself, distracting the police chief’s attention from the knot on Nicky’s head. As they shook hands, Uncle John nodded toward Uncle Ham and continued the introductions. “Hamilton James”—with a slightly sour expression on his face, Uncle Ham stood up, shook hands, and immediately sat back down again—“Leonora James Stuyvescent”—Leonora nodded regally—“Olivia Hollis”—Livvy swallowed and waggled her fingers by way of a greeting—“and I know you’ve met Nicky.”
“Yeah.” His eyes met hers again. As before, his expression was impossible to read. He had the kind of lean, hard-featured face that the harsh lighting sharpened and filled with shadows. It also picked up on lines around his eyes and mouth which she hadn’t noticed previously. The whites of his eyes were bloodshot, and his mouth was grim. He’d changed his dorky uniform shirt for a ratty black Chicago Bulls T-shirt that looked nearly as old as he was. It struck her as an odd thing to have done, given that he’d almost certainly been conducting some kind of investigation into what had happened, until it occurred to her that maybe he’d gotten blood on his uniform shirt.
Her blood . . . or Karen’s blood.
Suddenly, Nicky felt light-headed.
“Y’all know me,” Dave the Deputy said comfortably, which was true; he’d been a resident of the island for so many years that even Nicky, whose visits as an adult had been sporadic at best, could vaguely remember seeing him around. He wandered over to the table as he spoke and stood eyeing the food while Nicky, gripping her chair seat on the off chance that she might slide right off it if she didn’t, took a couple of discreet breaths as she fought to recover her equilibrium. “We’re real sorry to bother you at this time of night, folks, but . . .”
“So where’s the . . . oh,” Harry interrupted. Having finally managed to tear himself away from whatever program he was watching in the den, Harry paused in the doorway as he realized that there were strangers in the kitchen. His thick hair looked parchment-white under the fluorescent light, which also seemed to leach some of the golf-course tan from his face and made the lines running across his forehead and down his cheeks look deeper than they actually were. Dressed in rumpled khakis and a short-sleeved blue dress shirt, he had smallish blue eyes, a large, triangular nose, thin lips, and a square chin. About six feet tall and in reasonable shape, he was an attractive man for his age.
No surprise there: All Leonora’s husbands had been attractive. Physical beauty was important to her, and she wouldn’t have settled for anything less.
“Harry Stuyvescent,” Uncle John introduced him.
“Leonora’s husband. Harry, this is Joe Franconi. You know, he took over Barry Mead’s job.”
“I guess that would make you our new Chief of Police then.” Harry moved on into the kitchen and they shook hands. “Welcome to the island, Mr. Franconi. You’ve been on the job since—what? Christmas?”
“January. And call me Joe.”
His glance included everyone in the room in the invitation.
“Terrible business tonight.” Harry shook his head as he headed for the table. “Unbelievable thing to have happen.”
“That poor girl,” Leonora chimed in with feeling. “And to think it could have been my darling Nicky. . . .” She broke off, pressing her lips together, her gaze shooting to the bump on Nicky’s head. Her darling Nicky was keenly aware of the injury now. It was throbbing and swelling and felt as though it had grown to about the size of a tennis ball since she’d last checked it. Livvy was right, she decided, as all eyes in the room suddenly seemed glued to her
forehead. She felt as if she were growing a horn.
She had to resist the urge to clap the bag of peas over it again just to hide it from view.
“So, what’s going on?” Harry sat down at the table where his plate of bacon and eggs was waiting at his usual place, and directed his question up at Joe. “You got any idea who the sick bastard is who would do something like that?”
“Not yet,” Joe said.
“Harry!” Leonora frowned at her spouse. “Would you please watch your language at the table?”
That was rich, Nicky thought, coming from somebody who, when the occasion warranted, could and did swear like a sailor. Of course, there was a Yankee stranger in the room, and her mother was a great one for keeping up appearances.
“Oh. Right. Sorry, dear.” Harry, looking suitably abashed, subsided and turned his attention to his plate. In the six years he’d been married to her mother—Nicky never could manage to think of him as her step-father; she simply didn’t know him well enough—he’d clearly learned that the best way to deal with Leonora was simply to not resist her. She was a force of nature, not to be denied—at least not without a fight.
Nicky didn’t think any of them were up to any more fights tonight. At least, she knew she wasn’t. She was bone-tired, nauseated, physically and mentally hurting—and afraid to allow herself to acknowledge any of it. If she did, she would have to face the hideous truth of what had happened.
Karen had been butchered.
She shuddered inwardly as her mind immediately shied away from the thought.
“Can we offer you two some breakfast?” Uncle John asked, having moved back to stand behind his chair. “You don’t know it yet, Joe, but Ham’s the best cook in these parts, and he always makes plenty.”
Superstition Page 12