Dark & Dangerous: A Collection of Paranormal Treats

by Julie Kenner

  Vivien wasn’t displeased. Getting cabs in her area was often awkward, and she hadn’t wanted another trip on the tube with all this baggage.

  “If you’re sure.”

  “Sure I’m sure.”

  “How’s Angela?” Vivien asked, as, twenty minutes later, Lewis carried her bags downstairs to his vehicle, a ferocious-looking Jeep of some sort.

  “Ange? Oh, she’s off doing her accountancy.”

  “She’s an accountant?”

  “Well, yes. Couldn’t you tell?”

  “Not really.”

  “Scavengers has a lot to be grateful to her for. She got Connor’s books straight, and they were a mess. I guess she felt she owed him that. But clever lady, my woman.”

  Vivien no longer felt envy at Lewis’s praise of his wife. Oddly, now that she didn’t, she thought she detected a slight mockery in his tone—but Lewis was easygoing, it was only his way. Though why Angie owed Connor anything was a mystery.

  Once the bags were loaded, Lewis helped Vivien spring up into the Jeep.

  They drove off along West Camden Road.

  Lewis was Connor’s friend—presumably part of that “chosen” family Connor had mentioned. Vivien had liked Lewis from the first. She liked him now…only—

  There was something she couldn’t put her finger on today. Something slightly brash, and strangely also too hesitant in his manner. Despite the chivalrous lift. Nor did he chat as they drove. But some people preferred silence when they were at the wheel, especially in the heart of London.

  Vivien recollected that call he had made to her at Addie’s: “I didn’t know whether to tell you or not…” and then, “I’d better spill the beans.” She thought how he had also muttered, “Two of a kind,” enraging her by lumping her in with Connor.

  How wise Lewis had been.

  But what had he been going to say?

  That question hadn’t ever been answered. Now, did it matter less—or much, much more?

  They trundled now fast, now sluggishly, by Kensington Gardens, absorbed an orange afternoon glow, and a Hyde Park green as if newly painted. There were detours to add to the congestion. The Jeep swung easily into and out of them, and down side streets, until, emerging to pass the statue of Eros, they crawled back into south-flowing traffic. Despite the herds of vehicles, only buses—or perhaps tanks—seemed fit to take on the Jeep; it was a mighty beast indeed.

  Vivien had tried to enjoy the overground ride. But why was Lewis so edgy?

  She scolded herself. Why start worrying now?

  Oh, she was probably Connor–starved. After all, she had been five hours without him. Or perhaps Eros, since she had just passed by, had trickily fired one more invisible arrow of love into her breast.

  Despite everything, when they reached Coronet Square, Vivien felt an unexpectedly sharp apprehension rise in her. She had thought she was through with all that.

  As they went round to the door, Lewis’s own jollity seemed repaired.

  “Gather it wasn’t a burglar or vandal, then, last night?” he said, as she undid the front door with the keys Connor had left in her keeping.

  This was the first time Lewis had referred to the incident which he himself had reported.

  “No break-in. Just weird.”

  “Yes, I guess it would be pretty weird.”

  “How much did Connor tell you?”

  “Not much. But I was out last night. Went straight in to Scavengers this morning, and passed Connor heading out again. We hardly spoke—What’s up?”

  “I can’t get the door to open.”

  “Let me try,” said Lewis.

  He took the key and jammed it back in the lock. As he did this he pushed at the door with his shoulder. It gave. “Heat,” said Lewis, “makes the paint stick.”

  Vivien realized she hadn’t been breathing again—why not? Had she thought something had got in, blocked the door against her?

  The hallway looked normal: lights off, shafts of sun, the eight-sided room ahead, dining room to the left. No cupboard was open; nothing lay on a table or the floor.

  Lewis went by, carrying the bags.

  Don’t be silly, Vivien. Yes, doors stick in the heat. Sometimes. Just calm down.

  Lewis stood in the octagonal space as Vivien opened the French windows for some chance of air.

  Green and graceful in its lush July neglect, the garden looked only appealing.

  It was getting on for five. Just one and a half hours until Connor arrived.

  This morning, this place had seemed innocuous, cleansed and ordinary. But now, the atmosphere had subtly changed. There even appeared to be a scuff mark on one wall—had it always been there?

  Stop being a fool.

  “Thanks, Lewis. That was really helpful. Would you like some tea?”

  “I’d rather have a beer, Vivvy.”

  Vivien didn’t let him see her aversion to the abrupt, unwieldy abbreviation of her name.

  “Oh yes. I’ve got some for Connor. They won’t be very cold.”

  “I like ’em hot, Viv. Cold beer—that’s a U.S. taste.”

  Vivien took the bag of groceries along the hall to the kitchen. She hadn’t liked the nicknames—never did. Nor the slight superiority in his voice at the comment on “U.S. taste.” U.S. taste, Vivien thought, was often first-rate. And who wanted tepid beer, anyway, unless it was genuine real ale, or scrumpy.

  As she undid the beer bottle she glanced into the conservatory. All was peaceful.

  And down the path, hidden, Patrick Aspen Sinclair would be standing, handsome as a god. Like Eros—just a statue.

  Lewis ambled into the kitchen, which suddenly seemed, like that famous Western town, not big enough for both of them.

  He took the beer from her, gulped.

  Vivien put the kettle on for herself.

  “Yucko—do you drink that?”

  “Mint tea? Oh yes. Or there’s lemon and ginger, apple—”

  “No more! Please don’t tell me. You’re worse than Ange. At least she sticks to Ty-phoo.”

  “I like Ty-phoo as well.”

  Vivien put the tea bag into the mug and stood studying the kettle, which, of course, through being watched, would take twice as long to boil. Sympathetic magic did exist, everyone knew.

  She was realizing that Lewis, though she had partly wanted to detain him to keep her company here, was making her very uncomfortable.

  When he touched her bare arm, she nearly jumped across the stove.

  “Whoa, lady! Hey, you’re nervy today.”

  “Sorry. I just—”

  “Nervy, but never less than attractive.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Yes, I’m impressed, Vivvy. You impress me. Conn, too? Well that’s okay. I tell you what, forget tea, come and have a drink. There’s a great pub just—”

  Something cold filled Vivien’s solar plexus.

  “No, thank you.”

  “Yes, go on. Loosen up a bit.” His hands came unwanted and unplanned for, to the back of her neck. “You’re like a rock, here, lady. Is that what Connor does to you? Tightens up your neck like this?” He began to knead her shoulders.

  Revulsion shot through her. She moved away from him. “Lewis, I think—”

  “What? You don’t want to play? But you do. You like me, I’m likable.”

  “Yes, and you’re also married. I’ve met your wife.”

  “Angie doesn’t mind. She’s used to me and my girls.”

  “I’m not your girl.”

  “Too hooked on the great god Connor? I tell you, he ain’t such a bargain. All right, tell you what—even though you’ve been flirting and leading me on, I’ll let you off. I’ll settle for one kiss. How’s that?”

  Vivien, appalled, asked herself how she hadn’t seen this coming.

  “I won’t kiss you. You’d better leave, Lewis.”

  “Ah, she’s all angry now. Look, babe, that’s really all. One kiss. You won’t miss it—”

  In a horri
ble parody of Connor in the garden last night, Lewis was backing her against the wall.

  Vivien spoke quietly, intensely. “Move away. I mean it. Move away.” She thought of the kettle, boiling close by.

  Lewis hesitated, as if mind-reading the threat. He loomed over her. “Viv, I reckon, whatever else, you should know. Yeah, Connor is pretty, but he is bad news. I should have said all this before, insisted—but you’re going to hear me out now. He hasn’t told you what went on here. The woman he lived with in this flat, an actress. Ever hear of Kate Mortimer? Big on TV quite a while. Ever see a scar on his chest?”

  Panic slammed through Vivien’s body. Somehow she didn’t externally respond.

  “Well,” said Lewis, “put it this way, he got the scar, and poor old Kate—Well, Kate just vanished from our lives. Didn’t know that, did you. Didn’t know the police were very interested for a while in His Lordship Connor Sinclair?”

  Vivien stared at Lewis. She couldn’t see him through a mist—

  The kettle was boiling. Steam filled the kitchen.

  Someone spoke from the doorway.

  “Get away from her, Lewis.”

  Lewis lumbered round. “Ho! Connor. Connor saves the day. Again. Just been telling her about Katie.”

  “I heard you. The front door’s that way.”

  Lewis lurched back to Vivien again, his face all concern. It seemed he was the true actor. “Vivien, I tell you—watch out for yourself.”

  Connor spun Lewis around as if he were a doll. He slapped Lewis hard across the face, a contemptuous backhanded blow. “Get out.”

  Even more repulsive than the harassment and the violence was Lewis crumpling there, teary-eyed and cringing. “Sorry, Conn. Sorry. Bit of lunchtime boozing…Never suits me—”

  “Get the hell out.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t drive—”

  Connor said nothing. Lewis slunk across the room.

  Only then did Connor follow him out.

  Distantly, in a while, Vivien heard the front door slam.

  She leaned on the counter. She felt sick to her stomach. After a minute, she turned out the kettle.

  When Connor walked back in, she raised her eyes and said, almost wildly, “How did you—”

  “Get in? Nothing mind-blowing. There was another set of keys all the time.” His face, in its tan, was still very pale. He threw the second bunch up in the air, caught them with a jangle. “Someone, it seems, requested an extra set from Adelaide. They’ve been in the office all the time, cleverly filed in an unmarked drawer. Only, I didn’t know till this afternoon.”

  “Is Lewis all right?”

  “Don’t tell me you’re concerned?”

  “He just made an idiot of himself, that’s all.”

  “Did he? I thought it was a bit more serious than that.”

  “I’m trying to be fair. Why are you so angry?”

  “Why do you think?”

  “I don’t mean with Lewis. I mean angry with me.”

  “Again. Why do you think?”

  Vivien straightened. “I don’t know,” she said coldly. “Perhaps you should tell me. Or is that one more thing you’d prefer to keep to yourself?”

  As soon as the words were out she could have bitten off her tongue. Why had she said such a thing to him?

  The inner voice scrabbled in her brain, hissing: Because he keeps secrets from you. Because you know, in your innermost heart, you can’t trust him, however much you may wish you could.

  Vivien tried to steady her breathing. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “But you did.”

  “Connor, I didn’t know Lewis was going to behave like that…not any of it—”

  “No. Anyone else can always tell he will, but little Vivien, so naive, misses all the clues.”

  “Connor! You don’t think I encouraged him?”

  “Anyone’s guess what you did. He plays the field, but he doesn’t usually force himself on someone who’s unwilling. After all, you called up and asked him for a lift, apparently.”

  Vivien said, “I didn’t. He told me you’d suggested that—”

  “I hadn’t even told him you were going anywhere.”

  “Then, he must simply have found me in the phone book—I’d said I lived in Camden. He called round and guessed—” Vivien’s eyes widened “—yes, he did, he guessed when he saw the bags—” Connor looked at her. She remembered this look. “Connor,” she said, trying to keep a pleading note out of her voice, “why on earth would I be interested in Lewis?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Stop it.”

  “I didn’t start it. I turned up here early to surprise you. Well, we were all surprised.”

  Silence filled the kitchen, where the remnants of the steam still hung, wet as tears along the surfaces.

  “I suppose,” he said, “I have to tell you about Kate.”

  He didn’t now look at her, but through the conservatory glass at the garden. On the paths the shadows of birds rushed over, and were gone. So swiftly things could pass—could love fly away so quickly?

  “If you don’t want to talk about it, Connor…”

  “No, I don’t. But it seems, after he’s put so much poison about, I have to. My God, I’ve wondered in the past—It’s been him. He can’t keep his mouth shut. Painting me in the worst possible light—”

  “He said she—vanished.”

  “In a way she did.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “She’s dead. She died.”

  Vivien felt the kitchen, and the world, drop away. She hung in space, void and without words.

  “Yes, Vivien. She died, and she died here. And it was because of me. Is that enough for you? No? It’s all I’ll give you.”

  He turned. He cast the spare keys down on a counter. “I suggest if you stay here tonight, you lock up carefully. No one else will be trying to get in. You’re safe. Just don’t answer the door. Because it might just be Lewis, and then you might make another mistake.”

  Chapter 9

  After all, it was obvious, wasn’t it? Bury her head in the sand as much as she liked—and she had liked, hadn’t she? Connor Sinclair was not the lover of Vivien’s dreams. Maybe only of a woman’s nightmares.

  He had admitted it. Arrogant, because for some unknown reason, the law hadn’t been able to pin anything on him.

  Kate Mortimer was an actress Vivien had indeed seen once or twice in a TV drama. A good actress, with shiny blond hair and a delicate, serious face—almost a childish look, but a woman’s intense slate-blue eyes.

  Kate—K.

  To C with love from K.

  Emily had had an affair with the sculptor, Nevins. With whom had humorous, lighthearted Kate “betrayed” Connor? It wasn’t noble, but who knew how it had happened—maybe Connor, moody, sarcastic, difficult, had driven her to seek solace elsewhere.

  And Connor, like Patrick, had found out.

  As Patrick had killed Emily, Connor had killed Kate.

  K for Kate. K for killed.

  “Something bad happened to me when I lived here…and to someone else…”

  Yes, Connor, that would be quite bad, wouldn’t it. To find your lover preferred another man, and then to murder her.

  How had he escaped arrest? Presumably there hadn’t been enough evidence—it was impossible, without more of the facts, to decide. And why had Vivien never heard of this case? Oh, she didn’t bother with newspapers, or news items of this sort. Unworldly Vivien.

  Certainly Kate must have tried to defend herself. Somehow she had cut him, there across the upper-right pectoral, with a serrated knife whose purpose was probably to slice bread or fruit….

  And so, whatever else she could delay or conceal from herself, Vivien had seen—and felt—that ridged scar, where the jagged knife had gone in, where the subsequent stitches had held the wound together as it healed.

  But was it believable? Connor, so handsome, so self-assured, an amusing and kin
d companion, a wonderful and generous lover—?

  Yes. It was believable.

  Vivien saw before her his face, as she had first seen it. When he was in that mood, he was cold, cruel, indifferent—dangerous.

  Perhaps insane.

  She wouldn’t cry. There had been enough of that in her past.

  She wandered about the apartment for a formless while, picking things up and replacing them distractedly. When she unpacked one of her bags, looking for the extra bottle of water she had shoved in there, she noticed the absence of a shirt she had packed. It was one of the pet shirts she worked in—the black one. She had worn it when she was here that very first morning—

  An absurd new panic seized her. She began to throw her belongings out of both bags, searching—terrified by the loss of this piece of cotton.

  But it was the loss of Connor, she knew, that she was trying to understand—to refute.

  In the end, the shirt still unfound, Vivien sat down on the floor of the eight-sided room. The French windows remained wide open on the garden, where the hot coppery shadows of sunfall were beginning. In here, darkness gathered prematurely in knots of plasterwork above.

  Birds called. There seemed, as before, very little other sound. Only the unfamiliar creaking of Addie’s walls and floors, like the timbers of an anchored ship.

  Vivien put her head in her hands.

  You’ll get over this.

  She knew she wouldn’t. She was no good at “getting over” things. The very awareness and intensity that fueled her art worked havoc with her emotions.

  And she loved him. She always would love him, even though, now, she must teach herself to despise and fear him.

  She tried to visualize him killing Kate Mortimer. But it was an image of shadows. She couldn’t make him out—Not Connor. Never him.

  And if he were this madman, it was as if she still wished she could protect Connor from the very thing he had become—protect him from himself.

  Perhaps her judgment was wrong.

  No. Why else had he engineered the argument with her, walked out and left her? Once he had seen she must know, or that she could soon work it out, he had admitted it to her—and then he hadn’t dared remain.