by Melanie Rawn
“You’re an idiot,” she told him affectionately. “Where’s Evan?”
“Why am I an—no, don’t answer that. I thought Evan would be here already.”
“Haven’t seen him in a while. Go find him, okay, so we can get out of here?”
“That’s kind of what I wanted to talk to you about. . . .”
Eleven
A FEW MINUTES LATER, Holly eyed her cousin sidelong. “I see that Evan wants Lulah here to investigate and can’t get hold of her by phone, but did either of you happen to think of the obvious? To wit: just go outside the gates where the jamming probably won’t work?”
“Is that your tactful way of saying you’re not going home to be a conscientious mother to your children?”
“My children are conscientiously protected, thank you very much. I might not be able to do much of anything practical, but experience has taught me to stick around when there’s mag—when this kind of thing is going down.”
“Nice save,” he murmured. “But you’ll admit that somebody has to go home and keep an eye on the kids if Lulah’s coming here to help.”
“I’d nominate Louvena but I think that’s her third bottle of champagne. Send Jamey. And where’s my darling husband, anyway?”
“He was supposed to be here when I got downstairs.”
“I suppose he’ll turn up eventually. Why didn’t you ever say anything about a hidden staircase at Woodhush?”
“I forgot?”
“Stash the dimples back in the arsenal,” she advised. “I’ve been immune to them for over thirty years.”
People were taking their leave. Weiss stood at the ballroom doors, shaking hands and being charming. Holly wished she had sufficient magic to detect it in others; he certainly didn’t look like anything other than the businessman he presented himself to be. Then again, what did a Witch look like?
“If this was a movie,” Cam mused, “about eighty-five percent of the people in this room would be classified as ‘dress extras.’ ”
“What are you on about now? And what’s a ‘dress extra’?”
“People in a crowd scene with no lines to say who bring their own wardrobe—usually party wear of some kind. They’re background. They fill up a camera lens and create ambient noise, but they have nothing to do with the real action and dialog.”
Holly stared at him. “What brought this on?”
“I was just thinking that in a film they’re dress extras, but in real life, they’re witnesses.” He nodded toward Jamey, who was listening earnestly to Mrs. Paulet. “There were about three hundred people here tonight. They’re going to talk to between five and ten people each. There’ll be some overlap, of course. Call it seven—which is over two thousand, which in this county is enough to sway an election.”
“In the book business, it’s called hand-selling—if the people working in the store get turned on to a book, they give it the best shelf space, make the effort to point it out to customers.”
“The personal touch,” he agreed. “Voters have gotten cynical about campaign commercials—that’s why the ‘mute’ button was invented—and most of them don’t have the patience to sit through one of those so-called debates. They trust personal contact—but when they can’t get it for themselves, they’ll rely on the word of people they know. In short, unless he does something hopelessly stupid between now and November, Jamey just won himself a full term as District Attorney with upwards of sixty-five percent of the vote.”
“But you can’t do personalized politics at the presidential level, or senatorial,” Holly said. “Maybe it’s possible if you’re going for a seat in Congress. Anything else, and you’d run yourself ragged.”
“Or start running two and half years in advance of the election,” Cam added. “Thereby risking voter fatigue.”
“Trust me, nobody would ever get tired of looking at that face!”
“Well, no,” he allowed, blushing a little. She was about to ask what exactly had transpired earlier out in the garden when he asked with studied casualness, “So tell me—just how good is Evan?”
“Better than good. Great. Verging at times on the godlike.”
Familiar hands clasped her waist and a deep voice murmured in her ear, “ ‘Godlike’?”
She leaned back against her husband’s chest and purred, “At times.”
“How many times?”
“What makes you think you leave me with enough functioning brain cells to keep count?”
“Excuse me,” Cam said, “but I’m going to go elsewhere before I need dental surgery. Or insulin.” He gave Holly a mocking little bow and departed.
Holly turned in Evan’s embrace and smiled up at him. “Let’s take a walk.”
“Where to?”
“Whoever’s car is conveniently parked to get us past the front gates so you can make your phone call.”
“Change of plans. There actually is a working phone in this place. Landline at the front desk. They have to be able to call the fire department or whatever, I guess.”
“Aw, you were sneaking around without me!”
“I wasn’t sneaking. I don’t have to sneak. I have a nice big shiny badge.”
“And a nice big shiny Glock with ten rounds ready to go, but that’s not quite as subtle. What does Lulah say?”
“To send you home to watch the offspring. Yeah, I know,” he said quickly when she scowled. “That’s what I told her. So I asked Laura and Tim to head over.”
“Works for me.” The Houdek kids were familiar baby-sitters and the twins wouldn’t put up a fuss. Or so it was to be devoutly hoped. “She’d better get all those dinosaurs coaxed back into the box before they arrive, though. Did you tell her about the Woodhush stairs?”
“Do I look suicidal?”
“And here I thought you liked Cam!”
“He’s gonna get it anyway for not telling anybody he was coming home, so. . . .” He smirked. “How many times can she kill him?”
“How many times can she leave just enough of him alive to start the process all over again?”
“Not my problem,” he said with cheerful ruthlessness. Then, more seriously: “I called the office, too. Luther says a bunch of faxes came in from Richmond.”
“Forensics?”
“Finally. Except for the Gospel Baptist, dammit. Reverend Ferrers is already antsy about getting the official report for the lawsuit.” When she arched her brows, he elaborated. “The church is suing Louis LaPierre, who installed their fire alarms.”
“Not very well, evidently.”
“The Reverend gave me twenty minutes last week on how the guy sat in his office and swore on a stack in the name of Jesus the Savior that everything was absolutely perfect—and this was the afternoon before the fire!”
“I think that’s called ‘irony.’ Anything interesting in the other reports?”
“Well, except for the Methodist fire, there was no ignition. No source of fire, I mean. Accelerant in one case—the wood varnish at First Baptist—but no source.”
“Louvena’s right. These aren’t normal arsons.”
“Except for the Methodists,” he said again. “That one was a Zippo lighter and a gas-soaked leather-bound Bible. Pretty obvious. And it only took them six months to get back to me on that one,” he added snidely.
“Regretting your clout as a big, bad U.S. Marshal?”
“Only when it comes to getting forensics within a reasonable amount of time. Say, two hours,” he smiled. “Anyway, you’re right, and Louvena’s right, it matches what she was saying about the feel of the other fires. So I’m thinking the Methodist one was either a copycat for purposes unknown, or completely unrelated to the others and not a conscious imitation, or somebody decided it was just time for another fire.”
“Any reason you can think of for choosing the Methodists as a fake-out?”
“Not really. But here’s the thing. They must be clearing out the outgoing fax files in Richmond, because Luther also got a report on Poppy
Bellew.”
Holly drew back. “Oh, God—did they find her?”
“Yeah. In her car. But no sign of the four kids she said she had with her.” He hesitated. “Holly . . . her car went off the same road in about the same place where your parents died.”
She pulled in a long breath, aware of a sudden silence that was only inside her own head. After a moment, she said, “No wonder it took so long to find her. It’s all swamps and—” And a car gone off the road would sink fairly fast, and anyone inside would drown, all the while trying to find a way out, if they were even conscious after the skid and the impact—
Evan gathered her close. “I’m sorry, lady love. I gotta ask—was there anything about their deaths that put up any red flags? You know what I’m talking about.”
“You’d have to ask Lulah or Jesse. All I ever heard was that it was a bad stretch of road. I was only—Evan, I was about as old then as the twins are now.” And something she had deliberately never thought about demanded now to be recognized: the agony her parents must have felt, knowing they would never see their little girl again. “I don’t remember them,” she whispered. “I only know their faces from photographs. Everything they knew and loved, the people they were, the way they felt about each other, what they wanted to teach me—I only have other people’s descriptions. A chuisle—if that happened to our children—”
“It won’t. I swear to you it won’t.”
Holly sheltered for a moment more against him, then drew back a little. “Poppy could have let the four kids off someplace—or maybe they got out before—before the car went under.”
“She phoned Reverend Deutschman from a rest stop. There’s nothing between there and the place they found the car, no town, not even any houses. She wouldn’t abandon them, not when she’d asked him to look for families to take them in.”
“I don’t like this, Evan.” She rubbed her cheek to his white silk shirt, feeling the solid warmth of him beneath it. “If they did get out, they’d have nowhere to go, they wouldn’t know anybody—if they really were trafficked, they probably didn’t speak much English. They’d just . . . vanish.”
He rocked her from side to side for a moment, then leaned back to look into her face. “You want to go for that walk?”
“No, I think I just heard the first thunder outside. It’ll be raining in a few minutes. And I want to talk to Jamey—if Cam ever gets finished with him,” she added with a little smile, glancing to where the pair were standing oh-so-casually at the bar.
“Invite him to dinner tomorrow. Cam’s staying with us and doesn’t have a car, so there’s no escape.”
“Oh, he’d just hide in the barn or the tack room—or this staircase nobody but him ever knew about.”
“NICE SPEECH,” Cam offered.
“You’ve heard most of it before,” Jamey replied with a shrug.
“It’s acquired polish.” Like the rest of you, he didn’t add. The careless, instinctive elegance of the law student with money had become a sophisticated presentation of young professional on the rise. If he’d been beautiful back then, there weren’t words for him now.
“What happened out there tonight, Cam?”
He’d been waiting for the question. Not that it was particularly welcome, but at least he was more or less prepared for it. “Nostalgia. Just something we had to get out of the way.”
“Bullshit.” Jamey leaned back against the bar, propped on his elbows. “And even if that was true, we didn’t do anything that would’ve—”
“—relieved the unresolved sexual tension?” Cam interrupted. “Yeah, that was kind of dumb. It was dark, we were alone, relatively safe, and we weren’t in each other’s pants. What the hell’s wrong with us?”
Jamey gritted his teeth. “There are plenty of guys in the world who can say ‘You wanna exchange Hallmark cards or you wanna fuck?’ I’m not one of them.”
“Me, neither.” He laughed briefly. “Maybe that’s our problem.”
“We want more?”
“We want too much.”
“You know what I want? Everything.”
Cam shook his head. “I don’t know what that is.”
There was a small silence before Jamey asked, “You’ll be around for a while, won’t you?”
“At Woodhush. We could maybe . . . I don’t know, talk. . . .”
“Talk like we’re doing now, or talk like we did outside?” Jamey smiled, and the complexity of humor and unashamed sensuality caught at Cam’s throat.
“Uh . . . both?”
“You look like a couple of gunslingers checking out the crowd at a saloon,” said Evan—sauntering up to the bar as if his title and badge empowered him to ride a palomino down the dusty Chisholm Trail instead of a Chevy on the well-paved roads of Pocahontas County. “There’s laws around here against loitering with intent—so get past the loitering and on to the intent part, okay?”
“My God,” Jamey exclaimed, “you’re as bad as Holly!”
“Takes practice,” Evan allowed. “Have you clued him in yet, Cam?”
Cam was so shocked he couldn’t even splutter. Surely Evan couldn’t mean to include Jamey in exploration of a staircase that according to all the usual laws of reality didn’t even exist—
Evidently Lachlan had been taking Fiend Lessons from Holly. He grinned, his eyes saying he knew exactly what Cam was thinking and had provoked those thoughts on purpose. “Lulah’s been dealing with the twins since this afternoon. Cam’s going to give up his room for the night so she can get some peace and quiet, breakfast in bed tomorrow, a massage, the whole shebang.”
Cam rallied enough to ask, “And I’m buying?”
“You are,” Evan confirmed. “I gotta say it’s awful nice of you—the Westmoreland Inn ain’t cheap.”
Jamey looked suddenly thoughtful. “Before I forget, I’ve been meaning to ask for ages—didn’t anybody tell Weiss that the name’s spelled wrong?”
In all fairness, Cam couldn’t accuse Holly of giving Jamey Pedantry Lessons; he’d been born that way.
“HE’S A FAGGOT, isn’t he? Jamey Stirling, I mean.”
Holly was abruptly glad she wasn’t holding a drink; shock would have either sent it flying through the air or shattering to the floor.
“I’m right, aren’t I?” Erika Ayala continued. “I’ve heard things about almost everybody of note in this county—but especially about him.”
Guardedly, Holly turned to the woman and looked down about half a foot at the earnest, dainty face below white-blond hair. “Why do you ask?”
“I just don’t understand how people can let men like that into their homes, near their children—”
Holly nodded thoughtfully. “With all the diseases and so forth, you mean?”
“Well, of course. And besides that, they don’t reproduce, do they? So they have to recruit. Your little boy is still a baby, but just wait until he gets to be a teenager like my three. The worry a mother goes through when she knows people like that are around—”
“Oh, but I’m afraid you’ve got it wrong, Mrs. Ayala.” The mild tones of Ben Poulter came from Holly’s other side. “Homosexuals don’t recruit, but vampires do.”
He smiled broadly—and if there was a Lord of the Undead, he was definitely directing the special effects, for as Ben’s teeth flashed so did a crack of lightning outside, followed by rumbling thunder and the sudden drumbeat of rain. Holly barely heard it, because for the first time in her life she saw his canine teeth: sharp, pointed, and white as ice. For just an instant she was back in her bedroom at Woodhush, cringing away from a huge looming black bat—
But then Ben was just Ben again, who’d gone to school with her parents and her aunts, who was invited to come by Woodhush when Lulah decided to slaughter a calf or a pig, who had taken her and Cam out on summer nights to stargaze.
Erika faltered a step or two back and turned white to the lips.
Ben nodded politely as she skittered away on shaky legs, then turned to Holly.
“Awful woman. Gib was a nice kid, as I recall. I wonder how he ended up with her?”
“You are just bad, Ben Poulter,” she told him, trying not to laugh.
“In five minutes sh-she’ll be telling herself sh-she couldn’t possibly have seen what sh-she saw. It’s how we all stay safe, isn’t it? Your folk, and mine.” His shoulders hitched dismissively. “By the way, it’s just a guess, but I think sh-she thinks her eldest boy has a crush on Mr. Stirling.”
Holly felt her mouth gape unattractively open. “Troy? Really?”
“You didn’t notice him watching during the speech? Like he’d been thirsty for years and suddenly found—” He paused and smiled—not quite widely enough to display all his teeth. “Well, water, I suppose, to the rest of you.”
This time she did giggle. Ben patted her on the hand and went to join his sisters on their way out the doors.
Departures had slowed due to the rain and the chaos of parked cars. On the one hand, Holly told herself, this was a good thing—she and Cam and Evan would have an excellent excuse for lingering—but the mess outside would also delay Lulah’s arrival. She’d seen Tim and Laura leave as soon as they’d discarded their aprons, and figured they might be about halfway to Woodhush by now. Another forty-five minutes, she thought, and then they could all troop up to Cam’s room using the silly excuse Evan had dreamed up, and after that—
“Shit,” she muttered, seeing Gib making his way toward her. Why the hell didn’t he take his wife and her kid and just go home?
“Hi,” he said, not at all shy about strafing her bare legs with his gaze. “There seems to be a traffic jam out there. Let’s go onto the verandah and watch the rain.”
She asked herself Ben’s question. How had Gib ended up with Erika—who was close enough to be watching but not close enough to hear. When Gib’s dark eyes sought and found his wife, and a little smile twitched a corner of his mouth, Holly knew Evan had been right about the pair of them.
“I don’t think so,” she said in quiet tones.
“Holly!” His smile got wider—for his audience. “Are you still riled over what I said before? I didn’t mean anything by it. All I want—”