Dark Storm

by Karen Harper

  “I think we have the story on what that thing has been doing. And despite what she says, Lexi will have a fit if we dissect it. I mean, she gives it baths, dresses it. She’d see it was cut up, taken apart... I wish we could just cut off whoever programmed it and has evidently been listening.”

  “True, we don’t need a meltdown.”

  “I think we can write a script that Lexi—all of us—could go along with. Like maybe Lexi could tell the doll that she wants to run away. That she’s alone with the doll somewhere. Of course, Lexi wouldn’t be waiting there, but we would. Maybe Ken, too.”

  “My love, not with this storm coming. We may not see the worst of it, but we’re going to get hit with something. Besides, Ken doesn’t have time for something like that.”

  “But maybe it could lead us to who took Darcy?” She sighed. “If there’s any chance the two things are related.” All she wanted to do was find her sister, and her tired brain was making connections and grasping at straws in a desperate attempt to make sense of everything that was happening.

  “Ken swore he’d charge us with interference, at the least, if we start mixing in again.”

  “But that’s just the point. With this storm and now trying to track what happened to Darcy—Larry Ralston’s death and who knows what else—as you said, Ken doesn’t have the time for something like this. Nick, I repeat, maybe we can find out on our own who’s behind this darn doll at least.”

  “Listen to me,” he insisted, and gave her a little squeeze. “We have Darcy back. Yes, she needs help, but she’s back and she’s alive. I’m going to consult with Steve’s lawyer so we can get his charges dropped. He admits he did have a row with Ralston, but left him very much alive. Then he intentionally picked a fight with a guy in a bar so that he had an excuse for his bruises. The fact the ME couldn’t exactly pinpoint the time of death doesn’t help, but we’ll find a way to defend Steve—and to help Lexi. That has to be enough for now.”

  “But it isn’t. Maybe we can find out where Darcy was and with whom. Because whoever had her could have killed Larry. The dolphin connection is too weird not to mean something. And those butterflies. I know Ken said he’d rattle Linc Yost’s cage again, but we could, too, so—”

  “No! We need to hunker down here, prepare for the storm. I can see your talking to Lexi about the doll, trying to convince her that someone bad is listening. But not something to lure the mastermind behind that doll—to bring him here.”

  “Bring him or her.”

  “You’re not thinking of Tara? Claire, springing traps like that can mean the trapper gets caught, too, so—I repeat—we’re going to sit tight here.”

  “I don’t think Will’s sitting tight, though. He was furious Darcy came back disturbed. I suppose you’re right about just hunkering down for now, but I really have a feeling Will isn’t. He seems kind of like a white knight ready to charge in when it comes to Darcy, and, even with Ken on the case, I think we need that. Longtime bachelor that Will is, I still can’t help but wonder if he could have been secretly in love with her.”

  * * *

  “Pretty strange to think how close we are to our loved ones,” Mitch told Jace as they flew out over the west coast of Florida toward the eye wall of approaching Hurricane Jenny, now a Cat 4 with winds at nearly one hundred fifty miles per hour. “Only we’re miles up, not miles away,” he added.

  They were using the pilot sound system, so their crew didn’t hear. The staff on board were ready to do their readings and assessments once they dropped the probes into the volatile atmosphere. They already knew that the waters of the gulf were so warm this late in August that it would kick up any precipitation into a deluge.

  As he scanned his readouts, Jace told him, “Now that they’ve got Darcy back, I’d like to think it’s a fairy-tale ending. Without an ogre under the bridge this time.”

  “You mean like when Lexi was kidnapped? Yeah, your little girl’s been through a lot. I’m sure she’s ecstatic to have her aunt back. And Markwood’s house is storm-ready, so I’m grateful they’re letting Kris as well as Brit stay there if this thing takes a westward turn.”

  “Here we go,” Jace said.

  The plane fought its way into the outer bands of the eye wall, then, finally, after a teeth-jarring ride, they entered the eye of the storm into the amazing peace and a sun-lit, blue-sky day. Damn, Jace thought, but these storms were like life—rough, then calm, then brutal again.

  * * *

  Claire could not stand the waiting for what would come next. She phoned Tara to be sure she was hunkered down. Nothing new or unusual there, though the woman told her she and her friend would probably go to a public shelter when they opened. Claire assured her that Darcy was making progress. When she shared that someone had pulled up the botanical butterfly attractions in their backyard, Tara was quite distressed.

  “Oh, what’s the message there?” she asked. “You just be careful, and keep an eye on Darcy, too. There is some piece missing to this puzzle, but even if we had it, would the picture fit together? Please give Darcy my best. I suppose—well, she won’t ever want to come back to work for me again and now she has her husband to worry about. But thank you for calling, and do let me know if there’s anything I can do, after the storm, I mean.”

  After the storm... The words echoed in Claire’s head. Would this puzzle be solved, the storms of life ever be over? At least her family bred strong women. Lexi had been through difficult times, as had Claire—Darcy, of course, even their poor mother. Three generations of her family’s women had had it tough, but they had fought back, each in her own way. And now Lexi had promised she would listen to Claire about the doll. Claire had promised Nick she would not try to lure the person pulling the doll’s strings out of hiding—yet—but she could at least mislead him or her.

  She went down to the Florida room where Lexi was sitting with the doll, though she didn’t have it on her lap and wasn’t holding it for once. Claire crooked her finger to request Lexi come to her and, without the doll, they went into the library while the TV weather station went on about the approaching storm.

  “Okay,” Claire told her, keeping her voice down even here. Nick had asked Heck to sweep the entire house for listening devices a little while ago, but she wasn’t taking any chances. “Are we ready to have your doll hear what we want someone who is spying on us to hear?”

  “Can’t we just say, ‘Why are you using my doll? Why are you such a bad, nosy person?’”

  “Wouldn’t it be a great world if people just told the truth and didn’t hide and do bad things?”

  “I want to be like you, Mommy, when I grow up. You know, like, be able to help people, like help Aunt Darcy, to be able to look at a person and tell what they are really thinking—if they really like me or not, if they tell lies.”

  Sadly, in this world, Claire thought, it took a lot more than body language to read people, sometimes even those you thought you knew.

  “All right, let’s make our plan,” Claire told Lexi, opening a piece of paper where she had printed their little script quite large. “We want to keep the doll away where she can’t hear us make plans for the storm. So you just say, ‘I am putting you to bed for a while because you are tired, Cindy. I will wake you up soon.’ But then, like you promised me, you put her to bed in your room and you and Jilly don’t say anything around her until after dinner—maybe longer.”

  “But what if she tries to talk to me?”

  “You just tell her you don’t feel good right now and, ‘Cindy, I’ll wake you up later, but you need to sleep now.’”

  “But not be dead, right?”

  Claire gasped. “No. We don’t want—I mean, no, just sleep.”

  * * *

  Claire soon felt like a party planner or maybe an air traffic controller as she coordinated where their “hurricane guests” would sleep away from windows, though she trusted the hurricane glass—well, mostly. But this was projected to be a big storm, and they were going to feel
the effects of it, even if they didn’t take a direct hit. The governor had declared a state of emergency. There had been mandatory evacuations of outlying islands and coastal buildings. Public shelters at Germaine Arena and the big First Baptist Church would be opened soon, and stores were out of necessities. Nursing homes were being evacuated, and the public was told to expect at least seven hours of hurricane-force winds wherever Jenny made landfall.

  But this really was the relative calm before the storm, Claire thought. Despite the fact they would soon have a houseful of people, Bronco and Nita had gone out again to bring food from their house and finish boarding up the windows. Kris and Brit had left together to pretty much do the same to Jace and Brit’s condo. Heck and Nick had gone to the law offices to, as they said, batten down the hatches there. So this last evening of relative calm, it was just, at least momentarily, Claire and the kids.

  Lexi smiled at Claire. “One good thing, Mommy, is that Heck didn’t have to hurt Cindy when he checked her out today. I hope her feelings aren’t hurt because she has to be alone a lot more now.”

  Yes, that was one break today, Claire thought as she hugged Lexi. Heck had made sure the doll didn’t have a hidden camera. What a great solution this had been to trust Lexi to understand, to help. She was her mother’s daughter indeed.

  * * *

  Both girls were exhausted, and Claire wanted them to get all the sleep they could before the howling winds and torrential rain hit, so she got them ready for bed. No problem with Trey. Amazingly, nothing bothered him when it was time to sleep.

  Claire had made another of several calls to the Behavioral Health section of the hospital, and this time had been able to talk to Darcy instead of the nurse or Dr. Spizer. Darcy had talked to Steve today, too, though he still had not told her he was out on bail for murder and had promised to see her tomorrow “come hell or high water.”

  “Glad this hurricane didn’t come calling when I was missing,” Darcy told Claire on the phone.

  “The hospital is a safe place to ride it out. Dr. Spizer says it’s all up to code.”

  “But I’d rather be with all of you. Steve says you’ll all be there together. Claire, I want out of here.”

  “But the doctor says you’re remembering more, and that’s good.”

  “None of it makes sense. None of it pinpoints a place or person. It’s—I keep thinking it’s like I was in a hospital while I was gone, but the police checked that out. Not in any hospital around here.”

  “A hospital, why? How? What do you recall that makes you say that?”

  “People in breathing machines—like those old iron lungs we saw in pictures when people had polio way back when. People in lab coats, like here. Blood tests, or something like that. They even found pinpricks in my arm by a vein, but so what, since they’ve stuck me for blood here and say I had some drug in me to make me forget. I hope it wears off.”

  “I’m sure it will. And when they release you, if you want, you are welcome to stay here instead of going home right away.”

  “Jilly and Lexi will start school right after Labor Day, so I’ll have to be home then. She can ride a school bus this year, but, like you and Jace—I mean, Nick—I’d rather drive her, drop her off and pick her up.”

  A mixed message there, Claire thought with a jolt. At least Darcy was clear on the details of Jilly’s new school year, but she had said Jace instead of Nick’s name.

  “I’ll call you soon, or you can call here,” Claire assured her. “I’ll be so happy to have my sister back.”

  “But I hear the phone lines may go down—cell towers, too, if it stays a Cat 4. I—I think I just heard that on TV.”

  “Stay safe, Darce. Love you,” Claire told her, sounding to herself as if they were kids comforting each other again.

  “Love you, too!”

  Claire headed for the kitchen, hoping again they’d have enough canned food if—when—the power went. At least Nita, Brit and Kris were bringing an ice chest with some of their perishables, and they’d have a lot of mouths to eat things up fast if the power went off. She planned to fry and bake meat right now so they wouldn’t have to worry about cooking it on the grill outside. They’d have a good old party, waiting for the hurricane to blow through.

  She thought she heard the doorbell, so maybe someone was back already. Their guests had plans to park down the street where there were no tree limbs to fall, but of course they’d bring their food here first to unload.

  It crossed her mind that the last time she’d opened the door alone, it had been Darcy, back from the dead—or at least, thank heavens, from the missing.

  She snapped on the light and looked out the library window.

  It was Will Warren, fighting the wind, holding plastic wrap around a large item. “Oh!” she cried aloud. “That painting!”

  She unlocked and opened the door, which nearly blew in on her.

  “Will? What are you doing out in this?”

  “My house isn’t safe, so may I leave this here? And I have a note on it that if anything happens to me, I want Darcy to have it since it resembles her.”

  “Here, bring it in. Of course. But what could happen to you? Where are you going to stay?” she asked, thinking what problem would one more person be, but something kept her from instantly inviting him. A vibe? A hunch, or her long-honed forensic psych intuition?

  “Just rest it here in the hall,” she said, helping him to bring it in and lean it against the wall. Together they closed the door against the wind. The blurry, plastic-muted image of his grandmother—of Darcy—stared out at her, holding her butterfly net.

  And then Claire saw what must have been making her nervous. Will was trembling—understandable enough with this dark storm coming—but it was more than that. From behind the wrapped portrait, he drew a gun and pointed it at her.

  27

  Claire just stared. It was a small, square black gun, but the pinpoint of its barrel seemed as big as a rain barrel.

  “It’s all right, Claire,” Will said, locking the safety bolt on the front door. “I’ve seen everyone else go out, waited. I swear to you I will not hurt you or anyone here, as long as you cooperate—help me. Now where’s that doll Lexi told me about on the phone?”

  “You—you talked to Lexi on the phone?”

  “Earlier today. What luck that she answered the phone herself, but I was calling your cell and she said you were in the shower. I told her—and she did remember who I am from story times—that I was friends with her aunt Darcy and that I had been helping you to look for her and to keep our phone call a secret.”

  Claire just gaped at him, trying to take in what he was saying—and what it could mean.

  “I assured her,” he went on, sounding both earnest and calm, “that her aunt would be fine, be home soon and that the person who had hurt her would pay for it. And I told her that was all a secret, too.”

  Thoughts bombarded Claire. Had Will been the one who planted the doll here through Nita? There had been newspaper articles about how Nick and Claire had helped their nanny, Nita, when a body was found in her house several months ago. Had he observed Nita, saw she was pregnant, then arranged for her to win the doll? To spy on them? So had he taken Darcy? If so, he might intend to destroy the doll now so it could not be traced to him. Strange, but despite the fact that gun was pointed at her, she didn’t think he’d shoot her. And yet she couldn’t take that chance. If only Nick or the others would get back soon, but then what would Will do?

  “It will save us time if I have the doll,” Will said.

  “I can go get it, bring it out here.”

  “Hardly. Claire, I know you are as smart as Darcy is sweet. I can’t let you call for help, and I don’t plan to wake the girls. Take me to the doll, and we won’t bother them at all. I assume from watching their bedroom light go out they’re in bed. It’s late.”

  “Were you watching from where you yanked up the butterfly flowers and bushes?”

  He frowned. “Never
would I do that, and you must not think so. But we’ll settle with who did soon.”

  Strange, but once again she believed him. Tara would never do that. Did that leave Clint Ralston or that Jedi lackey of his?

  “Will, I can’t take you to the girls when you have that gun.”

  “I’m here to help, really to show and tell you things so that you understand. So that you can tell Darcy when she’s better, tell Jilly, too.”

  “Tell them what?”

  “What I did for them—am going to do. Justice. You and Nick—that detective, too—all believe in justice, and you will have it. Do not be afraid and do as I say, and everything will go well. Now!”

  He raised the gun. “Get me that doll,” he said. “It’s served its purpose, and the girls have each other. They’ll get over its loss. Actually, you should have drowned that thing days ago, but I know you were looking for Darcy, too, and you probably thought the doll could distract or help the girls. But I have the answers. Now, move!”

  His voice, his tone, had changed. For the first time, she was terrified of him. Her thoughts flew to Trey, asleep in his bed in the nursery across from the girls’ room. Will hadn’t mentioned him, seemed unconcerned or ignorant about him. But what if this was a ruse and he tried to take or hurt the girls? Could she grab a lamp from Lexi’s dresser, hit him with it? Yet best not to wake the girls, alarm them—and maybe wake Trey, and then Will would have another way to make her do anything he wanted.

  “Do you just want the doll, and then you’ll go?” she asked, her voice quavering.

  “Yes, I’ll go. I need to give you answers, have you be my witness, then tell Darcy.”

  For some reason, as cryptic and confusing as that seemed, she believed him. Get him the doll. Listen to his story. Get him out of here. She suddenly knew with such conviction and clarity that he would not hurt the girls, hopefully not hurt her, either, if she was to be his witness, his mouthpiece. She only hoped that for some reason he did not hurt himself when all was said and done here. That portrait must mean so much to him. Was he giving away his dearest possessions? Was he going to make some terrible admission and then kill himself or someone else who had been behind Darcy’s disappearance?