by Rachel Lee
She shook her head slowly. She didn’t feel like it anymore. She felt exhausted, miserable, filthy and scared, but not hysterical. “I just want to shower. Why did you bring me here?”
“I want you someplace safe while I go take care of that old woman once and for all.”
“What—?” No. She cut herself off. Not right now. Right now she was going to get in the shower. Maybe then she would be up to questioning him about his plans. But now, right now…
His arms were suddenly there; his hands were suddenly helping. Some kind of dissociative state, she thought. She was numb, and she only thought she was coping.
Gently he stripped her filthy, sweaty clothes away, then his own. Gently he helped her into the shower, and gently he washed her from head to foot, using bar soap on her hair, but that was all they had, and anyway…anyway…
She never knew when she started crying.
Afterward, she remembered Ian lifting her from the tub, wrapping her in towels, drying her as tenderly as if she were a baby, and finally tucking them both beneath the warm covers of the double bed. There he cuddled her close and let her cry her eyes out.
“I thought I was dead.” Her voice was rusty, cracked, and her eyes ached from weeping.
“Me too. Oh, God, baby, me too.” His voice was a husky sound in the dark. Rough. “I didn’t think I’d get there in time. You kept falling asleep, and I couldn’t feel you….”
“That’s how you found me?”
“After dark. Before dark I tracked you. It was easy. But when it got dark…you remember that game where you’re blindfolded and trying to find something, and somebody directs you by saying you’re getting hotter or colder as you move? And then you’d fall asleep and there wouldn’t be any ‘hotter’ or ‘colder’ to guide me.”
“Something happened to Jeb. I heard him scream.”
“He’s dead.”
There was a finality to his tone that said he was sure of it. She didn’t question him further. “It was a trap. You were supposed to get killed.”
“I know. And you were the bait. I know.”
“But…the planes weren’t supposed to bomb there.”
“Yeah.” He paused and then squeezed her close. “It sure makes you think, doesn’t it? If she could do something about that, affect instrument readings or whatever…” He let the words trail away.
“What do we do now? Give up?”
“Screw that,” he said, steel running through his voice. “No. I’m going to put that bitch to rest for good, if I have to take that house apart board by board to do it.”
He touched her damp hair and patted her shoulder with the awkwardness she found somehow endearing. “Now, try to get some sleep,” he said. “I’ll be right here. Nobody’s going to hurt you, Honor. Ever again.”
That promise warmed her deeply and eased the last of the tension from her. In a little while she was asleep, surrounded by his strength, his heat, his promise.
Pink light edged around the corners of the generic white curtains on the windows and cast a rosy glow through the room. Honor sighed, trying not to think about the problems still facing them, and turned onto her back.
And looked in cat-green eyes. Ian was propped on his elbow, watching her, and he made no secret of what he was thinking. It was plain in his eyes, in the flush on his cheekbones, on his parted lips. He wanted her.
“Like hell on fire,” he said, in answer to her thoughts. “Like nothing I’ve ever wanted before.”
She turned toward him with no thought except that the man she loved wanted her and there was no greater joy on earth. All the horror of the day before faded away beneath the brush of his hands, the heat of his mouth and, finally, the weight of his body.
“I want you to stay here while I go back and get to the bottom of this.” He was lying on her, still joined to her, as the sweat on their bodies slowly dried. She was running her hands along his sides, but she stopped suddenly when he spoke.
“Why?”
“I don’t want to put you at risk again. Look what happened yesterday.” He lifted his head so that he could look down into her eyes. “She knows we’ve figured out that she’s hiding something. She tried to kill you. Tried to kill us both. You don’t think she’s going to leave it alone now, do you?”
“So you expect me to let you go back there and face it—her—alone?” Her voice was calm, but she saw at once that he wasn’t deceived. That was the tough part about dealing with a telepath.
Suddenly he grinned, and his incredibly boyish expression at once amazed her and warmed her to her very toes. “Don’t even try,” he said, his voice a deep rumble. “The better I get to know you, the easier you are to read. You’re not coming with me, and that’s that.”
Two hours later she was beside him in his Jeep. She’d just had to be stubborn, that was all. And had to promise to stick to his side as if she were attached by glue. Not that he would have hog-tied her in the room or anything. Ian wasn’t like that. He would never force her to do anything against her will.
But he could exact a lot of promises, and he had.
It wasn’t that she wanted to face that ghost again. At this point she was all but ready to abandon the house and spend the rest of her life paying off the mortgage. But she couldn’t let Ian face that thing alone. No way. If she had stayed behind, she would have chewed her fingers and climbed walls and finally called a cab to take her there anyway.
As they neared their neighborhood, Honor could have sworn she felt Mrs. Gilhooley, as if the old woman’s ghost were poisoning the air with evil. And for an instant, one long instant, she allowed herself to wish she was driving away from here, never to return.
She glanced at Ian from the corner of her eye and wondered what he was thinking. Wondered if he were reading her mind. Damn it, there ought to be some kind of flag he put up, so that she would know when her privacy wasn’t absolute.
But even as she had the thought, she cast it away as petty. She didn’t have a thing to hide, except possibly her anxiety that he would lose interest in her the moment the ghost was gone. And to tell the truth, she honestly couldn’t imagine him staying interested in her for long. Why should he? She certainly didn’t have anything a billion other women didn’t have.
“What are we going to do about Jeb?” she asked him as they jolted down the dirt road toward their houses.
“I already notified some people that he had been out there. They’ll look for him.”
“I wish I knew what happened to him. I was arguing with him, and he ran away into the woods, and then I heard him scream.” And the memory of that scream was going to stay with her for a long, long time. Ian’s hand settled comfortingly on her shoulder and squeezed. She gave him a grateful look.
“He probably tripped on something and broke his neck,” Ian said quietly. “But all I know for sure is that he was dead before I found you. I can’t explain how, but I just know when someone dies.”
Honor waved her hand dismissively. “Don’t even try. I probably couldn’t understand in a million years what it’s like for you.”
If it was possible, the shadows beneath the live oaks around her house looked even darker this morning, as if the Florida sun couldn’t penetrate them at all. As if they were doorways into another world.
“Listen,” Ian said. “You just wait at my place while I search.”
“No.”
He turned his head and looked straight at her with those odd green eyes. “No?”
“You taught me how to use that word,” Honor remarked as she shoved her door open. “No.”
Ian filled an insulated jug with water and ice, while Honor changed into clean clothes. Then they headed next door with the jug, a couple of crowbars and two flashlights.
He really meant it, Honor thought. He was going to take the place apart board by board if necessary. And she was darn well going to help him. Enough was enough. There couldn’t possibly be anything hidden in that house worth Jeb’s death. Worth the attempt to ki
ll the two of them.
The shadows sucked the heat from the day, and there was no mistaking the chill beneath the trees. It wasn’t natural, Honor thought now. No way should shade be this dank and cold.
The house was worse. Never in a million years would she have bought this place if she had felt then what she felt now. Mrs. Gilhooley’s presence was an evil miasma, haunting the entire house, her rage an almost palpable thing.
Honor instinctively glanced at Ian, thinking that if she could feel it, it must be much worse for him. His face revealed nothing, probably the best indicator that he was exercising a great deal of self-control.
“Let’s start in the attic,” Ian said. “Something about her antics yesterday made me think I was getting close.”
“Six of one…” Honor shrugged, leaving the sentence incomplete.
At the foot of the attic stair, the chill had grown almost arctic.
“Maybe you’d better go wait at my place,” Ian said as she recoiled from the cold spot. “Honor, really, all I’m going to do is wreck your attic. I can do that all by myself.”
She tried to smile, but couldn’t quite manage it. “I’m not leaving you alone. Quit suggesting it.”
“This doesn’t have anything to do with the way your dad raised you, does it?” he asked as he started climbing the stairs.
“Probably. All that stuff about not deserting your buddies got to me.”
He gave a small chuckle that was probably supposed to be humorous but didn’t quite make it.
Almost the instant they were both standing in the attic, the wind outside kicked up savagely. The roof creaked threateningly overhead, and branches tapped like bony fingers at the round windows.
“Probably building up to another afternoon thundershower,” Ian remarked as he set down the jug and the flashlights. “Okay. I started at that end yesterday and got as far as that one raised floorboard over there. That’s where we’ll start. The only question I have is, do you want me to nail everything back in place as we go?”
Honor looked around and shook her head quickly. “No, damn it. Let’s just get this done. I’ll worry about fixing things if we managed to get rid of her.”
“We might save some damage if you try to peer behind the lath with the flashlight. Chances are any place she used for hiding something would have been easy for her to get to, so it’s likely to be easy for us, too.”
“We wish.” She jumped a little as the tree limbs tapped on the glass again and realized they had lost the sunshine. Well, so what? Picking up a flashlight and a crowbar, she started where Ian indicated.
For a long time, the only sounds were the creaking of nails being pried up, and the clatter of boards being moved, along with the protesting groans of the roof as it was battered by the growing wind. Ian stopped once to take a drink and peer out the huge round window.
“Storm’s brewing,” he said.
“So what’s new?” She had her nose tucked into a small crack and was wishing there was some way to bend light so that she could get illumination in behind one of the thin boards.
“It’s a coastal climate,” Ian remarked. “We get more sun than Seattle, but we get our share of rain, too.”
“There’s been an awful lot lately.” At last she succeeded in figuring out that there was nothing in the small crevice. “It would sure help if we knew what we were looking for. A ring could be hidden almost anywhere. A diary, on the other hand—” A loud rumble of thunder made her look up. “More of that, too, I guess.”
“Yep.” There was a creak as he yanked up another board and a clatter as it fell aside. Wind gusted again, and for an instant it sounded as if hail were rattling against the windowpanes.
All of a sudden, lightning flared and thunder cracked deafeningly, the strike so close that the house shook and Honor felt her hair stand on end. At just that moment the attic stairs snapped up and closed with a slam nearly as deafening as the thunder.
Honor and Ian looked at each other across a space turned gloomy by the falling light. Neither of them wanted to comment on the stairs’ closing without human assistance. After a moment Ian turned his attention back to the hole he had just opened in the floor. A hollow drumbeat of thunder sounded again.
“Honor?”
She turned to look at him. “Yeah?”
“I found it.”
It was a diary, the cardboard cover mildewed, many of the pages stuck together from humidity and age. Neither of them even thought of going downstairs and getting comfortable with a beer. They sat cross-legged on the floor and used both flashlights for illumination.
“I’m almost scared to see what’s inside it,” Honor said as Ian used the tip of a penknife to pry pages apart. “I mean, if she could murder her husband, I hate to think what else she might have done. And there must be something she really wants to hide.”
A loud clap of thunder shook the house with its force as Ian lifted the flyleaf and gently folded it back.
“At least the atmosphere’s right,” Honor remarked, trying not to notice the way the shadows were deepening. “If we had candles, they’d blow out right about now.”
He answered with a soft chuckle, but kept his attention glued to the diary. These were the answers they needed, and everything else would have to wait. “Reading this could take a while. But at least it looks as if she didn’t write a whole lot on most pages.”
Nor was it a very thick or large book. It was, in fact, a fifty-page marbled black composition book of the kind that Honor had used throughout elementary school. The first page was given over to the rather childish inscription My Diary, Mary Jo Schmidt.
Inside, the pages were dated, and it was soon apparent that Mrs. Gilhooley had started this diary while she was still a little girl. And it was soon equally apparent that the horrors had started early. There were tales of mutilated frogs put in other children’s lunches. Later she wrote how she had drowned a little boy’s new puppy. And on each page there was more.
Honor shuddered inwardly. “It looks as if she only wrote down the terrible things she did. There isn’t anything else in here.”
Ian nodded. “A listing of her crimes, as if they were triumphs. And look how she gloats that no one ever suspected her.”
That was just as chilling as anything else, the way the child understood that her actions were wrong, hideously cruel. They weren’t simply acts of petty, childish vengeance, but instead were carried out only for the pleasure they gave her.
More than once Honor looked up and met Ian’s eyes, sharing their recognition that Mrs. Gilhooley had been twisted all her life.
The storm was drawing closer, growing worse. Rain rattled like machine-gun bullets at the two windows, and each gust of wind made the house groan. Neither of them noticed. As they turned the pages, one by one, they journeyed deeper into the darkness of an evil mind. Whatever had been wrong with Mary Jo Schmidt as a child had grown into something far deadlier as an adult. The incidents became rarer, but grew worse, until at last they found her description of killing her first husband.
I fixed it up so I could have Bill Gilhooley. Old Ted sure did look funny when he figured out I was pushing that ladder over. All the way down he just looked at me like he couldn’t believe it. Man always was such a fool. But now I can have Bill. Just have to wait a little while so nobody wonders.
And that devil spawn brat next door, I’ll fix him, see if I don’t. I’ll fix him good. He musta seen me push that ladder. It was funny, but nobody believed him. But I’ll fix him.
Honor edged closer to Ian, instinctively wanting to offer comfort, even though the scars were a lifetime old. He already knew all of this, and there couldn’t be any unpleasant shocks for him here, but still she wished she could make him feel better.
He didn’t seem to notice the gesture, though. He just kept turning pages and scanning them while the storm raged and the light faded to almost nothing.
“There,” he said suddenly. “I knew there was something else to that. I wonder
ed if the old woman ever knew the truth of that, or if Maggie lied about me on her own.”
Honor peered over his shoulder, squinting to read the faded ink by the yellow beam of the flashlight.
Maggie says it was Bill what got her pregnant. Swears he come to her room damn near every night.
“Bill?” Honor asked. “Her stepfather?”
Ian nodded. “Bill Gilhooley. Damn, that explains a whole lot, her knowing about that.”
I ain’t believing it. Gotta be someone else. Someone she’s protecting. Maybe that demon next door with his witch eyes.
There was more, a lot more, about finally forcing Maggie to swear it was Ian who had gotten her pregnant. Forcing the girl to swear that Ian had “witched” her and made her do things against her will. Bill Gilhooley himself helped with the “persuasion” that forced the girl to lie. It was hardly to be wondered that she killed herself. Or that Mrs. Gilhooley, her very own mother, had given her the rat poison to do the deed.
Ian closed the composition book. “I guess there’s no question what she’s been trying to keep hidden.”
“I guess not. It kind of makes you wonder, though, what kind of mind would do such things and then become so obsessed with hiding them, even after death.”
Ian just shook his head. He’d seen plenty of the worst people could do, things that made Mrs. Gilhooley’s activities seem like minor peccadilloes, but he didn’t claim to understand such people.
“Well,” he said, “it seems all we need to do is get this diary out of here and turn it over to the police. Then she won’t have anything to hide anymore, and maybe you can live here in peace.”
Instead of feeling relieved, Honor felt a piercing sense of impending loss. She could live in peace, and he could go back to his undisturbed solitude once he no longer felt honor-bound to protect her. The prospect was grim. And another thought occurred to her. “Won’t she get mad now that her secret is out?”