Since Brie knew that much, Becca saw no harm in telling her the rest. Brie listened attentively as she told about the hypnotism session scheduled for that afternoon.
“Poor girl.” Brie turned to stare out the window. “So much to face. I suppose her mom’s going with her to see the psychiatrist.”
“No. The older kids are in school and her mom has the younger ones. But if Claire needs her after the session, Mrs. Cavendish will go to the doctor’s office to pick her up as soon as Tommy gets in from school.”
“It would be a miracle if Claire actually remembers the details of that night. I think it’s the only way she’ll ever move on.” Brie squeezed Becca’s hand. “And now I think I should get out of here and let you get some rest.”
“That’s all I’ve done for days. I’m eager to get back to Threads and sew.”
GEOFFREY PIERCE STOOD outside Becca’s hospital room, listening to the conversation between her and Brie. He’d decided to come by and pay a visit to the recovering victim, but he hadn’t expected to learn so much without even talking to her.
Claire was getting her memory back. Becca was going on with her life. Or so they thought.
He hurried away as Brie wrapped up her visit. No need for him to be seen lurking in the hallway of the hospital, especially now that he’d already heard all he needed to know. Poor Claire. Poor Becca. Almost home free, then caught in the web.
DAVID SAT IN THE semidarkness of his catacomb retreat, feeling more and more like the subhuman freak the town saw him as. Becca had asked so little of him. So why hadn’t he been able to bend a little?
He wanted Becca in his life, already longed to see her face across the table from him, to hear her laughter echoing through the Bluffs. He ached to touch her, to kiss her, to stretch out beside her in the four-poster bed and hold her in his arms and make love with her.
Instead he’d let her walk out of his life. Tense and heartsick, he went to the computer and opened Manning’s files, scanning quickly back to September twenty years ago and the research project that had not been connected to any hospital or to the university. Subjects chosen from blood samples taken in routine physicals. The names of the women had been supplied by an unnamed contact in a local physician’s office. Three women had been chosen—all having the elusive gene W. All suspected of being direct descendants of Moriah’s Landing’s infamous witch population.
And, of course, Joyce Telatia had been in that group of three. But who had been the doctor conducting the research?
He’d gone through all the doctors at that time, one by one, gone back and looked at their pictures. None had matched the description Joyce gave in her diary. Even Leland Manning had not checked out, though he’d thought at first that he might.
He picked up the phone and punched in the number of Becca’s room at the hospital. At least he could check on her and see how she was doing, though he knew the real reason he was calling was just to hear her voice. The phone rang seven times before a floor nurse picked up and identified herself.
“I’m sorry, sir, Miss Smith has checked out of the hospital.”
“Do you know where she went?”
“No, but I did see her talking to Geoffrey Pierce in front of the hospital. Perhaps he gave her a ride home.”
Geoffrey Pierce. The name flashed across his brain as if it were lit in neon. Geoffrey had been a member of the secret society when David had first moved back to town, until he’d been voted out of the group five years ago. But he wasn’t a doctor.
Geoffrey Pierce. Mid-forties now. That would have made him the right age then. The hair color was right. As for the rest of the description from Joyce’s diary, it was difficult to tell. A man changed a lot in twenty years. But David had never trusted Geoffrey, always thought there was something inherently evil about the guy.
Could he have been the man that Joyce saw even though he wasn’t qualified to supervise the complete project, even though he was not actually involved in medicine at all? Why not? The society never followed any other standard procedures.
Geoffrey Pierce, a murderer? The missing piece.
And Becca was with Geoffrey Pierce now. Panic ripped through him with the force of a cannonball. Running on gut instinct and an overload of adrenaline, he went to the gun closet, unlocked it and took the shiny pistol from the case. He had to find Becca now. If Geoffrey was the killer…
But in his mind, there was no “if.” He knew it with the same certainty that he knew he loved Becca Smith. Now all he had to do was find her in time. And once he did, he would never let her go.
BECCA OPENED HER EYES and stared at a bare lightbulb that seemed to be circling over her like a buzzard waiting for lunch. Her vision was blurry, her mind thick with an impenetrable fog. She tried to move but couldn’t. Her arms were strapped to her sides, and her feet seemed leaden. She could hear breathing. Someone was nearby though she couldn’t see who it was.
“Where am I?”
“We’re in hell, Becca. Geoffrey Pierce’s hell.”
The voice infiltrated her consciousness. “Claire, is that you?”
“Yes. I’m only a few feet away to your right.”
Becca struggled to rouse from the lassitude that claimed her body, finally managing to turn her head enough to see the bed through the drug-induced haze that glazed her eyes. Claire was laid out on a gurney, her hands and feet strapped down. She had needles embedded in both arms, attached to tubes that appeared to be extracting blood from her body in slow but steady trickles.
Geoffrey Pierce. Her memory slid in and out of focus, letting her retrieve bits and pieces of information. She’d run into him at the hospital and he’d offered her a ride to the motel. She’d refused, remembering what Claire had said about suspecting Geoffrey. But he’d injected her with something that had left her weak and woozy. He’d put her in his car and tied her hands and feet, but hadn’t bothered to blindfold her as he’d taken back roads down the beach to the Pierces’ beach house.
He’d carried her inside and down to his basement lab. And then—her mind went blank. No, there had been another needle, plunged deep into her vein, and she’d started falling, and falling and falling.
“How did you get here, Claire?”
“When I got out of my car at the doctor’s office, Geoffrey was waiting for me. He’d come back for me to finish what he started five years ago. I think I always knew that he would.”
“Oh, my God. Not Geoffrey. Surely it wasn’t Drew’s uncle who abducted and tortured you.”
“But it was. He’s the monster, and he’s going to kill us both.”
Becca closed her eyes and floated away, into the clear blue water. Her lungs hurt and the salt burned her throat and her eyes. She kicked and fought as hard as she could, but Geoffrey just kept holding her down. She was going to die.
She shook her head, trying in vain to escape the drugs’ hold on her mind. She’d been in the hospital, not the water. “We’re not going to die, Claire. We can’t give up.”
“I can. I want to die. Soon. Before he starts to touch me and hurt me the way he did before.”
Her voice cracked and broke and she started to sob, a quiet, mournful sound that crawled inside Becca and squeezed at her heart. But still she didn’t want to die. There had to be a way out. If she could only move. If she could only clear her mind.
GEOFFREY’S OWN BLOOD ran cold as he stared at the results of the blood test. It couldn’t be, and yet it was. DNA didn’t lie. Becca Smith was not Becca Smith at all. She was Tasha Pierce.
He’d never wanted to hurt Tasha, had never expected her to be on the boat that night. He’d realized too late that she was. When he found her still alive in the water after the explosion, he’d panicked, fearing she could tie him to the deed. He’d tried to drown her, and ended up strangling her. If he’d left her body to be found by the authorities, they’d have found the marks on her neck and known she was murdered.
Young and scared himself, he’d thrown her lifeless body in the trunk of his car a
nd driven for hours, finally driving off the road in the middle of the night and burying her in a shallow grave he’d dug with a shovel he’d stolen from some farmer’s barn.
Tasha Pierce was dead and buried. He knew that much for a fact. Whoever, whatever, lay in that room down the hall wasn’t human. She not only had gene W, she had a witch’s powers. His insides quivered and his stomach did a free fall, sinking and jerking inside him. He jumped from the chair and ran to the bathroom. He was going to be sick. He was going to be very, very sick.
And then he was going to destroy the nefarious, inhuman creature that lay in the next room.
A few minutes later, he wiped his mouth on the back of his shirtsleeve and walked to the room where Becca’s body was strapped to the gurney.
“You shouldn’t have come back, Tasha. You should have stayed dead.”
I HAVE TO KILL YOU, TASHA. I have to kill you. Don’t you see? I have no choice now.
The words rumbled around in her mind, a storm that threatened to wash her away. And then the images started. The boat. The explosion. The mounds of suffocating earth.
She tried to scream as the memories flooded her mind. They were jumbled and mired in confusion, but they were there.
She was Tasha Pierce.
DAVID HAD RUSHED TO the Pierces’ beach house, not sure what he’d find, or if he’d find anything at all. Geoffrey could have taken Becca anywhere.
He skidded to a stop in the front driveway, jumped out of the car and ran to the door. Amazingly it was unlocked, even ajar a few inches. Pulling the pistol from the shoulder holster, he stepped inside. As silently as he could, he walked from room to room, keeping his back to the wall, ready to pull the trigger at a split second’s notice.
The house was richly furnished, the consummate bachelor’s pad. Large pillows on the couch, a big-screen TV and elaborate music system. A plush, furry rug in front of the fireplace. Nothing was out of place, and there was no sign of Becca or anyone else.
He’d been so sure that Geoffrey was his man back at the Bluffs. Now the dulling throb of possibility began to pound against his temples. Had he been wrong? Stopping in the kitchen, he leaned against the marble counter.
A door squeaked open behind him. He jerked around as a sleek black cat crept through the door, stopped to look at him, then walked right past and crouched in the corner to watch him. David walked to the door and peered down a set of steep steps that disappeared into a dark hole. And from somewhere below him, he heard the sound of a toilet flushing.
A new wave of adrenaline exploded inside him as he headed down the steps. The smells were familiar. Antiseptics, formaldehyde, alcohol. Geoffrey wasn’t a doctor, yet he had some kind of lab in his basement. The elusive pieces of the jagged-edged puzzle began to fall into place. Only now Becca was caught in the iron grips of their claws.
And Geoffrey Pierce was a far more practiced killer than Kevin Pinelle. He’d honed his craft two decades ago.
“PLEASE, GEOFFREY. KILL ME. Please kill me.”
Becca could hear Claire’s voice, but it sounded as if it were coming from deep within a bottomless pit. Becca herself seemed to be floating somewhere far above Claire, outside her own body. A gray shroud glazed her eyes, and the room spun slowly through a heavy blanket of fog. She tried to comfort Claire, but her tongue was thick and refused to move in her dry mouth.
“I’ll kill you, all right, Claire, in my own good time, after I make you pay for escaping the first time. But Tasha will have to die now. She’s a witch, you know. That’s why I have to drain the blood from her body and keep it pure. Once I find the secret of longevity, I’ll no longer be the poor Pierce relative, the one who never quite lived up to the family’s standard.”
Becca tried to focus, but all she could make out was shadows and streaks of light. Facts drifted in and out of her mind. Geoffrey Pierce was her uncle, but he was going to kill her. Was it because she loved David?
David. She closed her eyes and tried to pull up his image. So handsome he took her breath away. He’d kissed her on top of the Ferris wheel. She could feel his lips on her now. Warm. Sweet. He took her in his arms and they floated away. They’d be together always now.
“Okay, Miss Tasha. The fun is over. You have enough phenobarbital in you now, you won’t fight me when I drain the blood from your body. I can’t really kill you. I did that five years ago. You’re already dead.”
DAVID FOLLOWED THE SOUND of Geoffrey’s voice. The man was truly mad. Mad, but brilliant, so smart he’d gotten away with murder for twenty years. David would have to play it carefully, make certain there was no way for Geoffrey to get the upper hand. He was certain the man would kill both him and Becca without any hesitation.
David stopped just outside the door, took a deep breath, poised his trigger finger and pushed into the room where Geoffrey held Becca prisoner. “The game’s over, Geoffrey.”
“Well, look who came to the party. If it isn’t Dr. David Bryson, the hideous beast who stole the Bluffs from me.”
David saw Claire first, then caught sight of Becca in the periphery of his vision. Anger erupted inside him, driving him so near the edge he thought he might be going mad himself. “It’s over, Pierce. Your days of killing women and getting away with it have come to an end.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“I know you killed Joyce Telatia twenty years ago and the other two women, as well. For all I know you might have even had something to do with Kat’s mother’s murder.”
“No. I didn’t kill her. I found her dead. I stole part of her blood, though I was too drunk to do it right.”
“You tampered with the dead and got a real taste for blood. Is that the way it happened, Geoffrey? And you liked it so well, you abducted Claire fifteen years later.”
“You think you’re so smart, don’t you, Dr. David Bryson? But you don’t know half the story. Once a man kills, he has to kill again and again. Only I wised up after Joyce Telatia. I waited months between each murder, then I went out of town, from town to town, found women of the night that no one missed, anyway. But I would never have come after Becca if she hadn’t gotten mixed up with you and Claire. I warned her to stay away from you, in writing and in person. Too bad she didn’t heed my warning.”
“But she didn’t listen, so you tried to run her over the cliff.”
“Yes, but I didn’t know then that I was trying to kill a dead woman. Now I do. She’s dead, David. Dead.”
David stared at Becca. Her eyes had a blank, glazed sheen, and her arms hung limp at her sides. And in that second, he died a thousand deaths.
He raised the gun and pointed it at Geoffrey. The black cat sprang from nowhere, ran across the room and jumped on the top of Becca’s stomach. Its back went up, and it snarled and extended its claws.
“Where did that damn witch cat come from?” Geoffrey yelled as sweat broke out all over his body.
At that moment, Becca’s body jerked, a series of quick movements, and then she turned her face toward David. His heart slammed against his chest so hard he wondered if it had stopped beating before. “Put your hands in the air, Geoffrey. Now. Or not. I’m aching for you to give me one reason to shoot.”
“Then go ahead.” Geoffrey grabbed a syringe from the table and pointed the needle at Becca as if it were a dart. “A dose of cyanide and it’s all over. All it has to do is seep into her muscle tissue.”
“Put that needle down, or so help me, I’ll blow you away.”
The next thing David saw was the needle hurtling through space, heading straight for Becca. Geoffrey had struck the fatal blow, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.
Chapter Eighteen
David dived toward Becca in a futile attempt to shield her body with his, to take the cyanide for her. He was too late, but the black cat wasn’t. She jumped at the needle, avoiding the point but causing it to ricochet and miss its mark. The point plunged into the floor beside the bed a second before David landed on top of Becca.
David turned back toward Geoffrey, the gun still in his hand, but Geoffrey had disappeared. David could hear his footsteps pounding on the steps that led back up the basement steps and into the house. A minute later he heard a loud yell and then the clunking and bumping of something clattering down the stairwell.
By the time he reached the steps, Geoffrey was lying at the bottom of them, clawing at his throat as his body shook and gyrated in convulsions. A hypodermic needle was jammed into his heart. Apparently he’d taken an extra injection with him just in case David had followed. But he’d never made the escape. He’d tripped on something and fallen, plunging the cyanide-filled needle into his heart.
The convulsions stopped. It was too late to help him. Geoffrey had been killed by his own poison.
David turned to see the black cat sitting in the shadows, licking her paws and purring. He checked Geoffrey’s pulse just to be certain the man was dead. There was none. When he looked around, the cat had disappeared.
David hurried back to Becca. He held her in his arms for painful minutes before he could make himself let go of her long enough to call an ambulance. When he finished the call, he stopped at Claire’s gurney and whispered words of reassurance to her before taking Becca in his arms again.
“I know you’re too out of it to understand right now, but I love you, Becca, more than life itself. I want to spend the rest of my life with you if you’ll have me. I don’t want to live in the past. I just want to love you.”
“It’s okay, David. I’m Tasha.” Her words were slurred, her tongue thick from drugs, her voice no louder than a whisper. He wasn’t sure what she said, other than that it was something about Tasha.
“Don’t try to talk now, Becca. Just know how much I love you.”
But she opened her mouth again and he put his ear close to her mouth so she wouldn’t have to strain.
“I’m home, David. I’m finally home.”
THE FALL EXTRAVAGANZA was everything the people of Moriah’s Landing could have dreamed of—music, food, people dressed in costumes of the days when Moriah’s Landing was founded. The temperature was in the high sixties, the air brisk and carrying the scent of pumpkins and late fall blossoms. The sky was clear, alive with sparkling stars and a full harvest moon. The mysteries that had haunted the town for the last twenty years were solved, and now Geoffrey Pierce lay in the cemetery, not far from the grave of McFarland Leary.
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