She had to hurry. She could hear footsteps behind her now. At least some of them had come into the passageway after her.
A few feet down the corridor she spotted another corpse. Paul Delacorte, his dead eyes still open and staring at her. “Scum,” she spit as she stepped over the body.
Up ahead, the light was greater. That was because the entire wall on the right side was gone, along with a huge chunk of the ceiling. Stepping through the debris into the light, Liz realized that she was leaving the secret passageway and returning into the main house. As she glanced around, she saw something else: she was stepping into her own room.
The place was soaked with water and strewn with plaster and broken glass, but her bed, along an interior wall, was just as she had left it not so many hours earlier. Her bureau remained remarkably untouched, with bottles of perfume still standing upright. But only a few feet away the entire exterior wall was gone, exposing a sheer drop down into the gardens. Liz saw with some shock that they were now nothing more than brown, glistening pools of mud.
Only then did Liz spot Nicki’s suitcase. Her heart broke. Her friend—who had come down here to support her. Liz thought she might dissolve into a blubbering mass of tears right there on the spot.
I’ve got to stay strong, she told herself. They’ll be in here after me at any minute. I’ve got to find a way down to the ground.
Her plan to escape via the roof hadn’t panned out. There’d been no way to get out there that Liz had found. Maybe she would have found some way if she’d gone in the opposite direction. But the only route out of the passage that she’d found had been through the broken wall that led into her own room. For a second Liz imagined Dominique moving through that passage in the weeks previous.
I heard her. I smelled her.
I wasn’t mad. I wasn’t hysterical.
It was all real.
Liz glanced down through the broken wall at the remains of the gardens. The drop was too high for her to jump. She’d surely kill herself, or break her leg, leaving her helpless against Hoffman and her minions, who would quickly descend upon her. Liz studied the broken beams and plaster. Was there a way she could shinny herself down? If she had time, she might have tied bedsheets together to form a makeshift rope to lower herself to the ground. But she didn’t have time. She could hear them coming for her now. They were running behind the walls. She had been a fool to try to go out this way. She should have risked going downstairs.
She looked again out the window. The only way was to jump . . . she’d rather take the leap and hope for the best than be snatched back by those monsters. Maybe the mud would cushion her fall.
But it was too late. A hand gripped her shoulder.
“Jumping would be a terrible mistake.” It was Roger. “Accidents like that could severely mar your pretty face.” He turned her around to face him and cupped her chin in his hand. “Look at what happened to Dominique when she fell off that boat and got caught in its rotors.”
“Don’t touch me,” Liz said, pulling away from him and standing precariously on the edge, poised to jump. She noticed Roger was alone; Naomi Collins had let him go; and none of the others had followed him in here. Still, he was as bad as all the rest of them. “I’d rather break my neck than die at the hands of you lunatics,” she said.
“But you see, darling, that’s why I’m here,” Roger said. “They agreed to let me reason with you. You can become part of us.”
“You’re lying to me. Not that I’d ever join your loathsome little group, but you’re talking bullshit. No way would Hoffman allow me to live. If I live, Dominique doesn’t come back.”
Roger leaned in conspiratorially. “After Hoffman ran off, we all decided that we didn’t need her. Variola was right. We’ll do things our way. We’ve learned plenty. Hoffman isn’t the only one who can call up a spell. We’ll overthrow Hoffman. It was my plan all along, and it can still come true.”
Behind him, Liz spotted movement. The door to her room was opening slowly, carefully, as if to not make a sound. Liz’s first impulse was to cry out, but something made her hold her tongue. She gave no indication of what she saw to Roger.
“I was always very reluctant about this idea of bringing Dominique back,” he was saying. “I went along with Hoffman only begrudgingly. But she had certain things on me, and so she made me do things. You know how she can be.”
“What did she make you do?”
“I had to kill those poor girls for their blood. I wasn’t happy about it, darling. Don’t think badly of me.”
“Audra . . . Rita . . . you killed them . . .”
“No, darling, just Audra’s friends. And then some tramp I picked up at a bar. It was Dominique who killed Audra. She was angry about her affair with David. That was how we learned that the blood is the life. Dominique tasted Audra’s blood, and we saw the effect it had on her. Ever since Variola had reclaimed her body from the sea and breathed some measure of life back into it, she’d been a mindless zombie. After she made a meal of Audra’s blood . . . well, some understanding returned to her eyes. Some intelligence flickered there. That’s why it was decided that we needed to find more blood for her.”
Liz glanced over at the door, careful that Roger did not notice. A small hand was coming around from the other side of the door
“And I didn’t kill Rita either,” Roger went on. “I don’t want you thinking I did.”
“Who did kill her then?”
Roger smirked. “You still fretting over David? Forget him, Liz. He’s a loser. How easily he was manipulated by all of us. Dominique had him under a spell for months, and during the time she’s been indisposed, Mrs. Hoffman took care of it.”
“You’re all mad. You’re all sick!”
“They are, darling. Not me. I got into this to be a successful art dealer, not a murderer. I refused to do any more of Hoffman’s dirty work after those first two girls, and only under great pressure did I agree to bring her poor Lana.” He smiled wistfully. “I didn’t even get to fuck her first. Oh, boy, when she found out I was a Huntington, she thought she’d hit the jackpot. I told her to meet me upstairs in that last room on the left. I wanted time for a little quickie with her before I slit her throat and drained her blood, but Hoffman was very insistent that Dominique was getting too difficult to control. Her body had grown stronger. She kept escaping from her room. We saw her that day, didn’t we, darling, in the sculpture garden? But her mind remained as weak as ever. She needed another transfusion. So . . .”
The hand grabbed on to the door and pushed it slowly, silently, into the room.
“I know I sound awful, darling,” Roger said. “But once we’re married, I won’t play around anymore. I promise.”
“Married.” Liz spit the word out like poison on her tongue.
But Roger’s eyes were far away and filled with madness. “Once Dominique promised she would marry me, too. She would divorce David and marry me. That was our plan. But no!” His face went dark. “How she taunted me! She knew I loved her! She knew that I wanted her to be with me forever. But still she taunted me with other men. She was always flirting. Always taking lovers . . .”
Liz could see the rage roiling in Roger’s eyes.
“David always got everything he wanted,” he seethed. “Everything! The best grades, the best positions on athletic teams, the leading parts in the school plays. I was always just in the background. All the teachers liked David and hated me. He even got the most beautiful woman in the world as his wife! But I wanted her! She and I could have been so powerful together.”
“Her coven made you rich,” Liz said calmly.
“I still have a deal with Papa Ghede,” Roger replied, his eyes twinkling.
“Variola always said that deals made with Papa Ghede for selfish reasons will backfire.”
Roger snorted. “Variola was a weak-minded fool! She never realized what greatness she could have achieved through her abilities.”
Behind them, the hand was followed b
y an arm, and then a bloated, twisted face. Liz saw it was Dominique.
She suppressed an urge to cry out as the once-beautiful woman slipped into the room. Dominique’s eyes were sparkling, but her face remained twisted and broken. She was not looking at Liz, however; her gaze was trained on Roger. Instinctively Liz sensed it was in her best interests not to warn Roger of Dominique’s presence. At this particular moment, who was to say who was Liz’s greater foe?
“We will destroy them,” Roger was telling her. “Come back with me now. They will all fall behind me when I give the word. Naomi, Karl, the Merriwells, the Claytons, Mrs. Delacorte . . . they are my friends, not hers. That’s why they let me go. They hate Hoffman, too. They will gather around us and we will destroy Hoffman once and for all.”
“And Dominique?” Liz asked, as the woman with the wild eyes slowly and silently made her way across the room. “What will you do about her?”
Roger laughed. “I killed her once before. I’ll kill her again.”
“You—?”
“That’s what Mrs. Hoffman had on me, darling.” He smiled almost comically. “You see, it was I who was on the boat with Dominique, not David.”
“But . . . the captain said he saw David . . .”
Roger gave her that dazzling grin of his. “We look an awful lot alike, my brother and I. You’ve said so yourself. Captain Hogarth saw me from up on the bridge, and just for a fleeting second. It was only natural he’d think I was David.” He laughed. “And convenient, too. Once this is all over, my love, we’ll pin Dominique’s death on David, too, when he’s tried for the murder of Rita.”
Behind him, Dominique suddenly revealed the knife she’d been concealing in the folds of her robe. Liz couldn’t muffle her horror any longer and let out a gasp. Roger turned around, but it was too late. Dominique lifted the knife over her head before bringing it down savagely, stabbing Roger in the back.
He let out a cry and staggered off to the side. Liz backed away from him, her hands covering her mouth, watching as one more unspeakable terror unfolded in front of her eyes. Dominique yanked the bloody knife out of Roger’s back. It made a horrible suction sound. Roger tried to speak, to say something to Liz, but he couldn’t form any words. A little sound burbled from his throat, and then he collapsed to the floor. Dominique, almost gleefully, leapt upon him. Her knife went in and out of him over and over again, blood spraying everywhere.
Liz turned. She knew she’d be the madwoman’s next target. The only choice left for her now was to jump.
80
The winds were blowing hard again as Joe and Aggie pulled into the driveway at Huntington House. “Half the roof is gone,” Aggie noted as the house came into view.
Palm trees lay uprooted all over the property. The once elegantly manicured gardens were ripped apart and smothered in mud. The place seemed utterly deserted and desolate.
But not for long. Joe had barely turned off his car when he spotted the garage door of the great house being winched up on its cord by a stocky, middle-aged man. He was struggling, breathing heavily. The electric door had to be opened by hand with the power out, and from the looks of it, this was not a man used to manual labor.
Joe and Aggie were quickly out of the car and hurrying up to the garage.
“Where you going?” he called to the man. “Roads are closed. The storm’s moving back in.”
The man’s clothes appeared disheveled. His eyes reflected fear when he beheld the police car that was blocking his way down the driveway.
“Aren’t you Lyndon Merriwell?” Aggie asked. “I’ve seen your picture in the newspapers.”
The man didn’t answer.
Joe nodded. “Yes, you’re a city councilman, aren’t you? What are you doing at Huntington House?”
That was when Joe noticed the blood on Merriwell’s shirt.
He shined his flashlight into the garage. There were others inside, standing beside Bentleys and Porsches and Mercedes Benzes. He recognized one of them as that weirdo artist who’d been showing her work at Roger Huntington’s gallery, and another one as Roger’s assistant.
“She tried to kill us,” Merriwell blurted.
“She killed my wife!” another man shouted.
“And my husband!” a stout woman added.
“Who killed them?” Joe asked.
“Mrs. Hoffman.”
Joe turned to Aggie. “Call for backup. Keep them here until then. I’m going inside.”
“Joe, if even a third of what Mrs. Martinez told us is true, it’s very dangerous in there.”
“That’s why I need to go in.” He turned back to Merriwell. “Who’s left inside?”
“Mrs. Hoffman, Liz, and Roger Huntington.”
Joe leveled his eyes at the man. “What about Dominique?”
The man said nothing. All of the people in the garage seemed to clamp their mouths shut at the same time.
“We know the truth,” Joe said, as he heard Aggie call in to the station. “We know Dominique Huntington is alive.”
He headed around to the side door of the house, his hand on the grip of his gun. All around him the wind blew ferociously, sounding once more like a freight train about to bear down on them all.
81
The car sped down the deserted street, swerving around fallen palm trees and vehicles left abandoned in the middle of the road. The driver gripped the wheel tightly. It was imperative he get to Huntington House as quickly as possible. Something bad was going on there.
He pulled into the driveway, but noticed the police car up ahead, parked in front of the garage, its blue light flashing. He backed out of the driveway and drove around the block.
He couldn’t go in through the front door, it seemed.
But there was a way to gain access to the property. A place in the back where the wall surrounding the estate was fairly easy to scale. He’d have to go in that way.
He parked in the street. The wind nearly whipped the door off his car as he got out.
82
“That’s enough, Dominique,” came the voice of Mrs. Hoffman, stepping into the room.
Liz was poised on the edge, ready to jump down into the mud. The wind threatened to push her over the side even without any effort on her part. Gradually the hurricane was regaining its full steam.
Mrs. Hoffman helped Dominique to her feet from where she knelt beside Roger’s body. The knife fell from her hand and clattered to the floor.
“Look at you, my darling,” Mrs. Hoffman said. “What a mess you’ve made.”
Dominique’s gray robe was drenched in blood. Her hands and her hair dripped with it.
Liz took a deep breath. She knew Hoffman wouldn’t let her live. She was going to jump.
“No need to kill yourself,” Mrs. Hoffman said, turning those cold eyes behind the plastic mask of her face in Liz’s direction. “I’m not going to harm you. The police are on their way. Maybe there’s a chance all of us can survive this unpleasantness.”
Liz just glared at her, while Dominique growled.
“Oh, my darling,” Mrs. Hoffman said, turning to the woman in the bloody robe. “Why don’t you go to our secret place and get yourself cleaned up? Put on your pretty white dress. The one you love so much. The one you look so beautiful in.”
Liz glanced out into the storm. If Hoffman was right, and the police were on their way, she wasn’t going to risk the jump. Hoffman almost certainly still had Roger’s gun in the pocket of her robe, and she might still kill Liz at any time. But for the moment, Liz backed away from the sheer drop down into the gardens. The wind was getting awfully ferocious now, and sheets of rain were whipping into the room.
She watched as Dominique walked obediently across the room, turning once to glare at Liz. Then she stepped over the debris into the exposed secret passage and disappeared.
“Now,” Mrs. Hoffman said to Liz, “let’s you and I talk.”
“You’re even crazier than I thought you were,” Liz replied, “if you think you
can somehow bargain with me, now that it looks as if the police are coming and you’re about to be caught.”
“I’m not bargaining with you,” Hoffman said, her voice icy with disdain. “I just wanted to get Dominique safely away. I’ve spent years protecting her. I’m not going to let them come in and find her.”
“Your secret place in the attic is destroyed,” Liz snapped. “Or hadn’t you noticed?”
Hoffman chuckled. “Silly little girl. You called yourself mistress of this house. And yet you never knew all of its secrets. Dominique and I have many secret places all throughout this house. I will keep her there, safe, and no one will find her.”
From outside Liz could hear the sirens of police cars, even despite the wind. They were near. They might have even been coming up the driveway of the house.
“You can’t believe this will work out your way,” she told Hoffman. “They will come here. They will find you and they will find her. They will see what you have done.”
Hoffman glared at her with those ferocious eyes. “Do you really think that I don’t know how to protect my precious Dominique? I have protected her ever since she came to this house, when those dark eyes bewitched me, and not with any magic, not with any vodou, but with the purity of her beauty and her magnificence. I won’t let anyone get to her. I have killed to protect her, and I will kill again. I killed Jamison when I figured he’d tell what he knew. Foolish boy. I copied his keys so I could have access to his apartment. I copied all the servants’ keys. If they were coming into this house, I had to make sure I had ways to control them.”
“You killed Rita, too, didn’t you?” Liz asked. “It wasn’t David at all.”
“She was a nuisance right from the start. I should have slit her throat a year earlier and saved all of us a lot of trouble.”
Dark Homecoming Page 33