The Sullivan Gray Series Box Set

by H. P. Bayne

  “You really thought that would happen? No investigation?”

  “I was sixteen. I didn’t know anything back then.”

  “What about your parents? They didn’t bother to set you straight?”

  “I just told you they said they’d kick me out with my newborn child, no money, no job, no support. You think they cared whether I left my son on a doorstep? He wasn’t even a human being to them. He was nothing but a major roadblock for all their plans for me.”

  “What about his father? Did he ever consider taking Sully?”

  Lucienne uttered a low chuckle, free of humour. “What father? Listen, I was a teenage girl, and a pretty screwed up one at that. My parents were strict and I rebelled. I went through a phase where I slept around with what some people called the entire male half of the school population. Sullivan’s father could be virtually anyone. And let me tell you, when it became clear I was pregnant, not one of those boys approached me to see if the baby might be his. I sure wouldn’t have wanted someone that irresponsible or unfeeling in charge of my child.”

  “I hate to tell you this, but there were plenty of irresponsible, unfeeling people in charge of your child. At least until he was seven.”

  Lucienne looked away, her gaze flitting to the grave before moving off, her head turning just enough he couldn’t tell what she was looking at. But the way her shoulders slumped told him his statement had hit home, and he found that more difficult to swallow than expected. After all, he’d had fifteen years with Sully, enough time to watch him find a safe place to put the pain from his past—at least until Lockwood. At this moment, Lucienne had nothing but Dez’s words.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re right. You were a kid. You were trying to do the right thing.”

  “It doesn’t feel like the right thing.”

  “Look, Sully had a good life with us. We took care of him, made sure he found a way to be happy.”

  Lucienne looked back at him finally, a smile on her face belying the sheen of tears in her eyes. “I’m grateful to you. All of you. Thank you for that.”

  “There’s no need. We got as much out of it as Sully did.” Dez wasn’t about to go further down that road with a complete stranger, so threw out another question before Lucienne could get her own in. “These plans your parents had for you. Did you get there?”

  “I do well for myself, I suppose. I have a good job in IT that pays enough. But I’ve never stopped thinking about my son.”

  To the non-skeptical, Sully’s birth mother turning up at just this moment, just as Dez was struggling to figure out how to find his brother, might have seemed little more than a monster coincidence. But Dez was plenty skeptical and, as a general rule, hated coincidence. “You been here before?”

  “No.”

  “So why now? Why turn up at Sully’s grave two years after his death?”

  “I wasn’t able to find him before.”

  “How’d you find him now?”

  “I hired a private investigator,” she said. “He was able to secure information for me about the last name Sullivan was given. I was happy he’d been able to keep his first name—it was my grandfather’s name. Unfortunately, one of the first pieces of information that came up after learning his given last name was the obituary. It took me a while to screw up the courage to come here.”

  “Why not hire someone sooner, try to find him before now?”

  “I thought about it. Thought about it a lot. But I always came back to the same place. I’d given him up, and I wasn’t sure I had the right to search for happiness and forgiveness through him, or to interfere in whatever life he’d made for himself. And, perhaps most importantly, I wasn’t sure he’d actually want to see me. I didn’t know what I’d do if I met him and he told me he wanted nothing to do with me.”

  “Sully’s not like that. He’s one of the best people I’ve ever known. I don’t know how he does it, but he’s not one to stay angry. He doesn’t forget, mind you, but most of the time, he forgives.”

  “You’re referring to him in the present tense again.”

  Double damn. “I guess I am. Hard to get away from.”

  “You don’t need to explain to me,” Lucienne said. “I believe very strongly there’s something beyond this flesh and blood world too.”

  Dez didn’t say anything; at this point, he figured he’d better focus on getting his head screwed on straight before reopening his big mouth. Lucienne stepped into the silence.

  “Do you believe some people have a greater knowledge of a world beyond this one?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You said before you believe there’s something beyond this life. Do you also believe there are people who can see into the other side?”

  Dez stalled, trying to think through how best to answer. Of course, the answer was yes. But Sully had told precious few people about what he could do, and for good reason. Dr. Gerhardt had diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic suffering from episodes of psychosis and hallucinations. And Sully had spent much of his young life enduring the effects of being different merely because of his personal history and his shy, sensitive nature; the last thing he’d needed was for that other huge difference to become common knowledge.

  Even so, there was no denying the truth of what Sully could do. Dez had become a believer, albeit a reluctant one, early on.

  “Yeah, I guess I do.”

  “Sullivan was one of them, wasn’t he?”

  Crap. “Look, Ms. Dule, I’m not trying to—”

  Lucienne cut him off with a hand on his. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you or put you on the spot. Let me explain—and I believe I can because I think you know. I think Sullivan was able to, and I think he would have told you. What he didn’t know, what he couldn’t have known, was he got it from me. I’ve always been able to see and speak with the dead.”

  This time, Dez turned to Sully’s grave, as if he would find some clarity there. This conversation was fast going in a direction that had him regretting ever approaching this woman.

  “I’m not meaning to make you uncomfortable,” Lucienne said. “You don’t have to tell me about Sullivan. I can see you’re telling the truth about being protective of him, and I appreciate it very much. But I need you to know I share his ability.”

  “Why? It’s none of my business.”

  “It is your business. It’s your business because you love him.”

  “What’s that got to do with you telling me you see ghosts?”

  “Because I have never stopped seeing them. But I have never seen him. And the reason I think I have never seen him is because I don’t believe there’s anything there for me to see. Dez, my son is alive. And I think you suspect that too. Maybe ….”

  She paused, all but forcing his eyes back to hers before she continued. “Maybe you don’t just suspect. Maybe you know.”

  What he knew or didn’t know was nothing he was prepared to share, not with people close to him and certainly not with a stranger. Not without learning more about this woman, not without assuring himself she could be trusted with Sully. “I don’t know what it is you can see exactly, but I know what I saw. I stood right here two years ago, and I buried my brother.”

  “Are you so sure you did?”

  “What's that supposed to mean?”

  “How did he die?”

  Nothing in her tone suggested she harboured any of the heated anguish or cold dread he himself had felt when the cave had collapsed. She hadn’t experienced it when Sully failed to respond to his desperate calls or when Dez had bloodied his hands, arms and knees trying to shift unmovable rock until a punch from Forbes Raynor had knocked panic down to despair. Even though Sully had, in fact, managed to escape, the agony of that experience was still fresh in his mind.

  Without another word, he walked away from the woman, aware of Pax trotting along beside him.

  “Wait,” Lucienne called out. “Please.”

  He heard her following, felt her
hand on his arm as Pax growled a warning at her. Dez laid a hand on the dog’s head as he turned to face Lucienne.

  “What did I say?” she asked.

  “Just like that? Just like that, you want to know how he died, like it means nothing?”

  “It doesn’t mean anything because he’s not dead.”

  “I was there, all right? It destroyed me. You want to know how he died? He was crushed to death under a pile of rock. He was inside a cave we found as kids, one I’d taken him to a couple weeks before the collapse, thinking he’d be safe there for a while, at least until I could find something better. A crew spent four full days shifting rock and searching where they could get to. At the end of it, they told us there was no way anyone was alive down there, no way anyone could have gotten out.”

  “Then they were wrong.”

  For his part, Dez had a few questions about that, too, but he’d deal with it down the road, once he’d found Sully. “Come on. No heat signatures were down there. No one and nothing alive. They were certain.”

  “You can’t argue with a mother’s intuition, or the fact I have other ways of knowing things. Now, please listen. I need your help.”

  “I’ve got stuff to take care of. Important stuff.”

  “More important than saving your brother?”

  “What?”

  “It’s not just that he’s alive. He’s in danger. I know he is. Now, I know you’re a police officer.”

  “I was a pol—Hold on. How’d you know?”

  “The obituary. I ran internet searches on the people listed as family. I wanted to know as much as I could about the people who raised my son.”

  “But a few minutes ago, you acted like you’d never heard of me.”

  “I needed to be sure you were who you said you were. Like I said, my son is in danger and I’m afraid I might be, too. Dez, please, I need your help.”

  “Ms. Dule, I’m really—”

  “Please, Dez. As his brother. I need you to help me find Sullivan. Before it’s too late.”

  10

  Arguing with Lucienne was pointless.

  Dez hadn’t decided whether to confide in the woman about Sully’s sudden return, but he didn’t question their shared desire to find him.

  The real question was how to go about doing it.

  Dez walked the woman to her car in the cemetery’s parking area while Pax kept a short distance back, sniffing around a few trees and lifting his leg where he deemed necessary. Lucienne drove a white BMW X3, further proof she’d gone the distance fulfilling her parents’ wishes.

  “I’ll look for Sully,” he told her as she slid in behind the wheel. “Not because I believe you but because I’d hate myself forever if he needed me and I let him down.”

  The statement contained more truth than lie, so it rolled off Dez’s tongue in a way that didn’t make him feel like a guilty schoolboy.

  “Thank you so much,” she said. “Where do we start?”

  “We?”

  “Of course, we. He’s my son.”

  “No offence, ma’am, but I think I’ll be able to handle this on my own.”

  “That may be true, but I’m still going to help.”

  “Ms. Dule—”

  “Please don’t argue. I missed out on a whole life with Sullivan. I let him down in the worst way a mother can let down her child. You have to see I need to do this, for him and for me.”

  Dez knew all about letting people down, had spent much of his youth and his entire adult life shadowed by guilt and regret. And so he knew, loathe as he was to entertain company on this journey, he couldn’t refuse her this opportunity to make things right.

  “I’m going to need to speak to your P.I.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s somehow been able to connect dots we were never able to. I think it would be helpful.”

  In all honesty, in Dez’s opinion, the only truly helpful move right now would be finding an invisibility spell to enable him to pass unseen through the halls of Lockwood until he found Sully. But, should the alternative prove true and his brother not be there, Dez knew he’d need all the information he could get his hands on. If Sully had been targeted, there was a reason, and it was something Dez couldn’t get his head around given what little he currently knew. And if Sully was running from something other than Lockwood, there was a good chance it was connected to his past—a past some P.I. had apparently been able to unearth.

  “I’ll give him a call, see if he’ll agree to meet with you.”

  “You’re paying him. He’ll meet with me if you say so.”

  “I’ve already paid him, actually. But I’ll see if I can set something up, anyway.”

  Dez waited outside the car, watching as Lucienne dialled and held the phone to her ear, then repeated the process twice more.

  “That’s weird,” she said after the third attempt. “He’s not picking up. He always picks up.”

  “Maybe he’s in the middle of something.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Why don’t we just head over to his office? He’s got an office, right?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, we could try that.”

  “Let’s take my vehicle,” Dez said. “I have a feeling you won’t be wanting to vacuum dog hair out of your car. Anyway, I shouldn’t leave mine parked on the path over there.”

  He led the way to his SUV and held the back door for Pax to hop in before opening the front passenger side door. “Sorry about this,” he said as he swept the dog’s hair off the seat. “He sheds quite a bit and it’s kind of all over the place.”

  Lucienne climbed in, hair and dried dog drool notwithstanding. “That’s fine. I’ve got bigger problems.”

  Pax made a sound that was half-growl and half-bark.

  “He doesn’t like me, does he?” Lucienne said.

  “It’s not you,” Dez said, although he wasn’t sure that was altogether true. “He likes to ride shotgun.”

  Dez was circling the vehicle to get in himself when his phone rang. His heart gave an involuntary thump as he saw Eva’s name and image on the call display, a photo taken in happier times. She was wearing one of those beaming smiles she used to show so often, one she reserved for the old Dez, a guy neither of them knew anymore. Those had been carefree times in their marriage, hopeful ones.

  With any luck, he’d get back there, and to her.

  “Eva?”

  “Hey, I checked with Lockwood. Of course, they’re not able to provide names, but I asked anyway whether there were any warrants executed or if they’ve had any recent admissions. The woman I spoke to said no to both.”

  “Who did you talk to?”

  “No one in admin—for good reason. I don’t want this coming back to bite me in the ass. So are you going to let this go now that you know Sully isn’t there?”

  “We don’t know for sure.”

  “I just told you there were no new admissions.”

  “None they told you about.”

  “For God’s sake, Dez.”

  “Listen ….” He turned his back to the truck, enabling him to speak privately without fear of Lucienne reading his lips or his expression. For added measures, he took a few steps away and spoke quietly. “I came back to the cemetery where I was attacked last night.”

  “Did you report that yet?”

  “No.”

  “Go to the hospital?”

  “No. Listen to me. While I was looking around the spot where I’d been buried, I saw a woman standing next to Sully’s grave. She says she’s Sully’s mother.”

  “Damn it. Why didn’t you go to the hospital?”

  “Did you hear what I just said?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I heard you. That’s kind of weird, isn’t it?”

  “Her turning up when all of this is going on? Yeah, damn right it’s weird. I’m hoping you can run her name for me, see if anything comes up. Her name is Lucienne Dule. She says she was sixteen when she had Sully, so I figure that makes her about forty now. She
’s on the short side, blonde hair—”

  “Dez, no. You know damn well I can’t just run random searches on people.”

  “Eva—”

  “No. I was investigated too after all that stuff went down with you helping Sully two years ago. I’m still working my ass off to convince people I didn’t know what you were up to.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “At first. I’m not an idiot, you know. Sully doesn’t go back to Lockwood at the end of his pass and you come up with some cock-and-bull story that he got away from you. I know you—better than you know yourself.”

  Dez couldn’t argue with that logic. “So you won’t check her out for me?”

  “No!”

  “Okay, babe. Thanks anyway.”

  “Don’t call me babe … Snowman.”

  Eva disconnected the call, but left Dez dangling somewhere between disappointment and hope. She didn’t sound eager to help him out with what could prove to be another awkward request, that much was clear. But she had looked into the Lockwood angle, and there was still a chance she would oblige him on his second query too.

  Then there was the other thing. She hadn’t called him Snowman in close to a year and a half, her use of the pet name having dwindled and finally died an untimely death during those months after Sully’s funeral, when Dez had stopped taking comfort in his wife and gone looking for it in a bottle.

  He’d missed the name almost as much as he missed her.

  Dropping the phone back into his pocket, he pinched at the corners of his eyes to stem the threatening tears before returning to his vehicle.

  With Lucienne acting as guide from the passenger seat, Dez drove them across the Kimotan River to the city’s North Bank district.

  The flood had created uninhabitable shells of many of the buildings on the riverbank—those that hadn’t slid into the raging river—but plenty of work had been done in this district to tear down and start over. Dez suspected the quick rebuild had something to do with the fact this part of the city was within view of the glitzy city centre where KR’s displaced wealthy had sought refuge in newly built condo towers and, just to the west, ill-advised river-facing estates. They didn’t want their views tarnished by ruin, so efforts had been made to reestablish the North Bank as quickly as possible. That meant new middle-class homes and businesses fronted older parts of the neighbourhood, much of it remaining a classy throwback to the Victorian era when KR was first established. The new builds reflected the old, providing a uniform look to the area that pleased the rich who peered at it from the windows of their skyscrapers.