Possessed

by Stephanie Doyle

  “Ahh.” She winced and gripped her stomach with her hand.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Cramps. Anyway, when Cassandra spurned Apollo, he cursed her. No one would ever believe her prophecies again. A hell of a thing to know you speak the truth, but to have no one believe you. I give my mother credit. She picked the absolute right name for me before she split.”

  He looked up from his continuing assessment of her body when she stopped talking. He knew she’d caught him looking at her, staring really, but he didn’t care. Maybe she would chalk it up as typical male perusal. With her elegant face, jet-black hair and green eyes, he had to imagine she was used to the attention.

  In fact it occurred to him that she was stunning. He hadn’t noticed that last night when he’d called her disgusting.

  The knife, he caught himself. He was supposed to be looking for a knife.

  “Do you mind if I use your bathroom?” he asked. “I want to splash some water on my face. It’s been a long night.”

  She hesitated. He could see it. But eventually she shrugged. “Sure. First door on the right.”

  He made his way down the short hallway and took the time to check the door on the other side of the hall. An unmade bed dominated the tiny space. Turning away from the room he stepped into the bathroom and shut the door.

  A small shower with a solid blue shower curtain. A toilet and sink. There was a faded bath mat on the floor, an oversize towel that hung from a rack and a toilet seat cover. All in soft blue. Simple and small. A far cry from his hundred-square-foot master bath.

  In fact, it reminded him very much of his first home. The same type of run-down apartment he and his father had lived in before his father had married Malcolm’s very wealthy stepmother. In hindsight, he knew that Lauren’s mother, Becca, hadn’t been as fabulously wealthy as she’d looked through the eyes of a twelve-year-old. But she’d had enough money to make everything easier. It had definitely been a step up for him and his father.

  A step that had led to him getting into the right prep school. The right college. Meeting the right people, making the right friends, so that when he was ready to graduate, it seemed the world was open to him, where for so long it had been closed. He and his dad were going to own their own business, make good money together.

  But that wasn’t to be.

  In a blink one day, his father was gone. A heart attack at a young sixty and it had been over in an instant. Becca died a year later of what Malcolm believed was a broken heart. It had been just him and Lauren, but it seemed like enough. Like family.

  He worked hard. For his father’s memory. For Becca’s memory, too. To make her proud of him and to assure her that the opportunities she had given him hadn’t been in vain. But mostly he worked for Lauren. He needed to know that he could give her everything that his father and Becca would have given her if they had lived. That she could have anything she wanted. Not that she ever asked for anything other than his time and attention.

  Now Lauren was gone and none of it mattered. And he was standing in a stranger’s bathroom looking for traces of blood in the sink.

  He saw only chipped porcelain.

  Turning the faucet on, Malcolm took a moment to splash some water on his face. It didn’t help wash away the images in his mind. Not knowing what else to do, he opened the cabinet above the sink and studied the contents. Sample lotions of varying sizes, a tube of toothpaste and an eyelash curler.

  Nothing extraordinary. No prescriptions for depression or mental conditions that he’d been hoping for. Nothing that told him she’d done it.

  Everything about her seemed to be simple. Except for herself.

  “You get lost in there?” she called to him.

  “Sorry.”

  He opened the door and brushed past her to the living room. He considered sitting but decided he needed to stay mobile, so he paced the length of the yoga mat and then stopped and turned. There was nowhere else to look, nothing else to do here, but he couldn’t seem to make himself leave.

  “What did you come here for, Malcolm?”

  So he hadn’t been subtle. That wasn’t a shock. “I told you. I wanted to talk.”

  “But so far you haven’t said a thing.”

  “What you told me…about the nurse…that’s something only a few people in this world would know about.”

  “Freaked you out, huh?”

  He nodded. It was either that or verbally accuse her once more of being a liar.

  She took a few steps closer and paused, her eyes glued to his. They weren’t just green, they were bright green like a fairy’s, he noted. Perfect for a woman who had the face of an elf.

  Elfin face, waiflike body, mythological name. Was she even real?

  “You’re wrong, you know.”

  “I don’t know what you…wrong about what?”

  “I didn’t kill your sister. Or the woman in the stairwell.” She paused and he saw her eyes lose focus for a second. “She wants you to know that you’re being stubborn. She says your stubbornness is always your undoing.”

  His whole being rebelled against her words. “Stop it,” he hissed. “Stop talking as if you can actually…stop it.”

  “And…there’s something else. Something in her apartment. Something there she wants me to find…”

  “I imagine there is,” he said, feeling the rage build. His suspicions weren’t unfounded. He knew that now. She needed to get back inside Lauren’s apartment. To get whatever it was she’d left there that would incriminate her. That must have been her game all along when she’d convinced the detective to let her talk to him. But how could she have known he would come here today? She couldn’t have.

  Cass’s eyes stayed on his. “I know why you came. You think I’m involved with her death. You thought you might find something here, but you’re wrong.”

  “Am I? Why do you want to get into her apartment? What did you leave there?” he demanded to know.

  “Nothing,” she stated calmly. “I was never in her apartment. I didn’t know Lauren.”

  “Liar. You knew about the nurse.”

  “She told me about the nurse last night. She told me about your suspicions today.”

  “That’s not possible.”

  “It is if you believe that I can communicate with her.”

  “I don’t.”

  She nodded slowly, as if she was coming to some kind of decision. “When you were thirteen you knocked a small hole in your closet wall so you had a place to hide the lone Playboy magazine you managed to score from your friend…Charlie.”

  “Son of a…” he breathed even as he shook his head in denial.

  “Lauren never told you, but she found the hole. She strongly believes that Miss April’s breasts were fake.”

  It was too much. Something inside his head snapped, and he leaped forward, reaching out and circling her delicate neck with his hand. She had to stop talking. He needed to make her stop talking. But he also needed to know. “Tell me how you’re doing this. Tell me!”

  “You’re hurting me,” she gasped, but she didn’t try to pull his hand away.

  The sound of her breath catching fizzled his burgeoning rage in an instant. And something else. An overwhelming feeling of peace and gentleness filled his body. It was as if Lauren herself had reached out somehow to make him back off. Like she was here, with him, instead of gone.

  Stunned, he saw his fingers digging into Cass’s soft neck and immediately released her. He watched as she stumbled back and then he looked down at his own hands in disbelief of what he’d done. In his life he’d never raised a hand to a woman. Had never hurt anyone who was weaker than he was.

  “I…I don’t…I’m sorry.” He moved toward her, but of course she backed away. “I swear I didn’t mean…I would never…”

  She ran a hand over her neck as if checking to see if he’d left permanent dents. Then, as if physically shaking off the pain, she refocused her attention on him. “I
still need to see Lauren’s apartment.”

  In shock, knowing he’d been a second away from true madness, he dropped down on the brightly colored futon and felt the cushion collapse under his weight.

  “Now,” she insisted. “We should go now.”

  He needed to think. He needed to find an explanation to what was happening-who this woman was and how she could possibly know the things she did. “The police have it secured as a crime scene.”

  “You said you have connections. Use them.”

  He raised his head and saw her still standing there looking at him. He expected disgust, anger, but there was none.

  “Why aren’t you calling the police on me? Or at least telling me to get out. I hurt you.”

  She shrugged. “Not badly.”

  “Does that matter?” he asked incredulously. Maybe having a man put his hands on her in violence wasn’t an unusual occurrence. He thought about the bruise under her eye last night. And now her lip was swollen. His gut twisted with revulsion, but this time it wasn’t aimed at her. Who could hurt such a fragile thing?

  Him, apparently. He shut his eyes in disgrace.

  Cass stepped toward him and knelt down in front of him. She started to reach out to touch him, but stopped herself and instead folded her arms over her stomach. He opened his eyes finally and met her gaze.

  “Look, you’re exhausted. And you’re the type of man who sees everything in black and white. I just threw a big gray ball in your face. Several, as a matter of fact. You flipped, but you’re over it now. Right?”

  “Who are you?”

  “You keep asking me that, but you don’t want to listen to the answer. That’s fine. Just trust that there’s something in your sister’s apartment and I need to find it. I think it could help.”

  “I couldn’t protect her.” He dropped his face into his hands. “She was so damn innocent, and I couldn’t even come close to stopping this from happening.”

  “I know. I know it’s eating you up inside. But you have to believe it’s hurting her more. She feels your pain and it’s just as hard for her to bear it as it is for you. You’ve got to let the guilt go.”

  He rubbed a hand over his face and stared at her hard. “I can’t believe you.”

  “Okay.”

  She made it sound so easy. But it wasn’t. None of this made sense and because none of it did, the only answer seemed to be to keep moving forward. To the next step, the next course of action. “You want to see her apartment?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded. “All right.”

  She stood and walked to the kitchen to grab the cordless phone. She tossed it to him. “Call whoever you need to call. I’m going to get dressed.”

  Malcolm stared down at the phone, everything she’d told him still running through his head. Then he smiled softly.

  “You’re right, Lauren. Miss April did have fake breasts.”

  Chapter 6

  H e won’t hurt you.

  Now that was irony for you. Cass had heard those words in her head at the same moment Malcolm’s hand had wrapped around her throat.

  Not that what he’d done had hurt exactly. It was odd. It had been so long since she’d had any kind of physical contact, anything beyond the occasional comforting gesture by Dougie-and even those she didn’t let linger-that it had startled her more than anything else.

  Then she saw in his eyes the rage and sheer despair that he was forcibly holding in check, and fear had crept in. Lauren told her it was going to be okay, and Cass chose to believe her.

  As soon as Lauren spoke to her, he seemed to snap out of it. As if…as if he had heard his sister, too. Or felt something.

  Cass leaned her head back against the soft leather headrest of the luxury car and wondered what his reaction would be if she asked him if he had also heard Lauren or maybe felt her presence in the room with them.

  Probably best not to do that while he was driving.

  Carefully, so as not to attract his attention, she shifted her eyes to her left and studied his stern countenance. He’d offered to drive the short distance and she’d accepted because the idea of walking even one block seemed too onerous a task. Looking back on that decision, she realized it hadn’t exactly been a smart one. Moments before, he’d attacked her. Hours earlier, he’d been suspected, albeit briefly, of causing a violent death.

  His dead sister vouching for him-what did that really mean? Cass never had siblings so it was hard to know how far loyalty would take them. Would the dead lie to protect someone who was still living? It was a sobering thought, but she quickly dismissed it.

  The dead had always been honest with her. It was the living she couldn’t trust.

  Reaching up to massage a pressure point at her temple, Cass closed her eyes and hoped to ease away her tension headache. The stress of everything that had happened in the past twenty-four hours had finally borne down on her until it was hard to distinguish the pain of contact with the dead from the real thing.

  Since this pain wasn’t going away as quickly as the former usually did, she had to assume it was the real thing.

  “You okay?”

  “Hmm,” she answered. It was the sort of noncommittal answer that hopefully didn’t elicit more conversation.

  “Seriously…If I hurt you…”

  “You didn’t.” She opened her eyes and looked at him directly, partly because she didn’t want him to think he’d actually scared her. Even though he had. And partly because she knew he was still freaked out by what he was capable of. There was absolutely no reason for her to put his mind at ease after what he’d done, but she knew he wouldn’t stop until he’d apologized a hundred more times.

  He wasn’t an abusive man. She knew it even without Lauren’s assurances. And that was why she’d agreed to get in the car with him in the first place.

  “It’s just a headache.”

  “Do you get them?”

  She eyed him suspiciously. “Sometimes. Like most people. It’s not like it’s related to…the thing.” An excellent way to describe her unique and awesome gift to a man who clearly did not believe.

  “Oh.”

  His cell phone rang and he reached for it in the console between them with the ease of someone who was used to navigating traffic and speaking on the phone at the same time. “McDonough,” he answered.

  He said nothing other than a brief thanks after a moment and snapped the tiny silver phone shut.

  “We have clearance to get inside her apartment.”

  “Wow. When you say you have connections, you mean it.”

  “I know people. It’s not like I bribed anyone,” he said quickly.

  Cass nodded. “Right. Black and white. White being lawfulness and black being crime. You definitely strike me as the law-and-order sort.”

  He turned to take in her expression. “And you’re not?”

  “I’ve been known to stray to the dark side from time to time. But only to survive.”

  “That’s interesting,” he commented.

  “Trust me, it sounds sexier than it is.”

  “It doesn’t sound sexy at all. A person shouldn’t have to ‘stray to the dark side’ to survive. That’s what family is for. To help.”

  “Maybe that would have worked, if I’d had a family.” That wasn’t really fair, Cass thought. She’d had a family. Her grandparents had cared. But ultimately they’d let her down, and that, she had a hard time getting over.

  There was a moment of silence. “I’m sorry,” Malcolm offered.

  “Please stop apologizing. You’re going to wear yourself out. Besides, it’s really not necessary.”

  “I do seem to be doing a lot of that around you.”

  “That’s because you’re a gentleman. It’s in your nature to apologize for things you can’t fix because it’s the only thing left to do. Admit it.”

  “I’ll admit that I hate not being able to fix things,” he replied.

  “Close enough.”

  She watc
hed his jaw tighten, but he didn’t comment further and she was grateful. They were almost there, and she needed to think about what Lauren had wanted her to find.

  Cass had received instructions from the dead before. Tell him I love him. Tell her the money is in the suitcase. Tell her not to forget to brush the dog’s teeth. Innocent instructions that meant nothing to her but invariably made whomever she was speaking to weep.

  This message, the way it sounded in her head, the way the image of Lauren shifted in her mind, it wasn’t something prosaic. It was important.

  They missed it. It’s in the apartment. You need to go there. Now.

  Assuming the “they” were the police, and the “it” was some kind of clue, Cass figured Lauren wasn’t wrong in her urgency.

  Two nights. Two women. Two murders.

  Shaking her head against the sudden rush of dread she felt, Cass figured she’d had enough of the silence. “What did you tell them, your connections, by the way? To get inside her apartment?” she clarified.

  “That I need to choose an outfit for the…for the funeral.”

  “Oh.”

  Funerals were so final. It was one of the most painful obstacles the living had to hurdle during their grief. Although it was better than the alternative. Not attending a funeral could leave a person without the necessary closure. Missing her grandfather’s funeral had been the biggest mistake of Cass’s life. It was easy to see that now. A year ago, it had been impossible.

  “They’re going to release her body from the morgue either this afternoon or tomorrow. I’ll need to make arrangements.”

  She could tell he was speaking more to himself than he was to her. “What about her mother?”

  Malcolm shook his head. “She died a few years ago. Not too long after my father. Other than a great-aunt on her mom’s side, I’m basically the only family she has. Had. God,” he breathed, rubbing a hand over his face roughly as though he could wipe away the pain as if it were dirt.

  He couldn’t. And there wasn’t anything she could say to make it better. She shouldn’t even want to try, given both his treatment of her and his suspicion that she was somehow involved. Not to mention nearly strangling her.