by Nancy Bush
So, this was his home.
Parking catty-corner from his house, she adjusted her rearview to keep an eye on him. Then suddenly his garage door went up and he walked back outside to the Jeep.
Quickly, she ducked down and prayed he would go the other way. She didn’t want his lights to wash over her car, possibly catching her in his headlights.
Her wish was granted and he turned down a separate street. Fast as she could, Lucky fired her engine, jammed the car into drive, turned in a neighbor’s drive and followed after him again. The Jeep was nowhere in sight when she reached the street and she momentarily panicked.
Then two cars ahead, she saw the black Cherokee drive beneath a street light. He was turning back toward Quarry.
Lucky eased in after him, glad for the protection of her medium-brown Chrysler. Her heart did a flip-flop. Had Carl realized she’d taken it? Maybe that’s what his trip outside with the sheriff’s man meant.
Examining her gas gage, she realized she needed to fill up and fast. She couldn’t afford to be stranded. That spelled disaster. Lucky followed the man into Quarry then drove past him to a fill-up station. When the young male attendant came out to help her, she asked for ten dollars’ worth, reaching inside her purse for the money.
He smiled at her as if they were friends, which kind of spooked her out. When he finished the fill-up and took her money, he said, “You ever gonna give Aunt Davinia a reading, Gemma?”
“Excuse me?”
“She said you would. I was just wondering when. My girl kinda wants one, too. She believes in all that stuff.”
Gemma. That bastard Kev from the PickAxe had called her that, too. Gemma LaPorte. The woman who lived at the farmhouse.
Lucky stared at the attendant. She was pretty sure she didn’t know him. And she sure as hell didn’t know what he was talking about. She was afraid to ask too many questions, afraid he might realize he wasn’t talking to this Gemma person.
The name sent a shiver across her skin. She could feel gooseflesh rise. It sounded familiar but her association with it wasn’t positive.
She had to get out of Quarry. She suddenly knew it as if someone had whispered the warning on the wind.
She was thinking of heading back to the west, but, as if it were meant to be, she suddenly saw Kev pull out of the PickAxe and barrel down the road in his El Camino as if the devil were on his tail. She followed.
It came as no serious surprise that he headed back to the house he’d cruised around before, turning off his lights as he entered the long driveway. The bastard. He meant someone serious harm. This Gemma person, most likely. She didn’t dare pull down the drive, so she went back to her turnaround, parked, then walked along the edge of the lane again, careful to keep close to the brush on the eastern side in case she needed to dive for cover. Her night vision wasn’t bad, and as long as she wasn’t surprised by a car she could keep on the trail of good old Kev without him knowing.
Kev’s vehicle was parked in the gloom at the end of the drive, far enough back from the house that the home’s occupants might not know he was there. No ringing the bell and yelling this time. He was sneaking up. Stealing around the shrubs that bordered the western end of the house, spindly, deciduous azaleas, their stalks bending forward as if reaching for this man bent on murder.
She wished, suddenly, fervently, that she’d brought her gun with her. She’d taken it from her last Hunk O’Junks’ glove box and, after replacing the bullets, stuffed it in the Chrysler’s, where it was sitting right now, out of reach.
Kev slipped around the back of the house. Hugging the edges of the Scotch broom, Lucky bent down and moved stealthily after him. She had no weapon, but the urge to take him down was a living thing inside her. She could sense what was in his soul. Blackness. Hate. Sadism.
He was crouching near the back porch, waiting. Lucky rose on the balls of her feet. She wouldn’t hesitate this time. She would hurtle herself on him, jab her knee into his crotch. Grab the man by the scrotum and yank with all her strength.
She hoped she killed him.
Before she could move, the door opened and a woman stood on the back porch. She held a poker in her right hand. In the soft yellow light streaming from the kitchen window, Lucky saw her profile.
She felt her muscles go weak.
Who?
“Get the hell off my property, Dunleavy,” the woman said coolly. “I’ve already called 911.”
Lucky pressed the back of her hand to her mouth. This woman…! She looked just like her. Just like her. And she sounded like her, too.
Good God…this woman…this Gemma was her twin!
Chapter Twenty-One
Gemma fought back her tiredness with everything she had. Earlier Tremaine Rainfield had told her in his most doctor-y voice that her fatigue was because she was accessing deep and painful memories and it took a whopping amount of energy—something nobody really talked about much in the psychology-biz apparently, until their patients felt like they’d been hit by a sledgehammer. To Gemma this felt more like the exhaustion of physical exercise.
She’d met with the younger Dr. Rainfield and he’d run her through his hypnosis exercises. She’d allowed him to try to put her under, truly believing she would be a poor subject. But then she’d suddenly woken up, her eyes flying open, sitting in the same deep, leather chair he’d pointed out for her to take.
Only it felt like a year had passed. Not forty minutes.
And Tremaine was gazing down at her with an expression she couldn’t read. So with the little energy she had left, she fought to tap into his emotions. It didn’t take much. What she sensed was a well of disappointment. His disappointment. Apparently things had not gone well.
Understanding, she said, “Not DID,” the first words out of her mouth after she awakened.
He looked away. “Well, it was never a certainty anyway,” he said.
Yeah, but you were counting on it.
“What happened?” she asked, then memory came back hard and fast, a fist to her solar plexus. She damn near doubled over.
Red. Blood. Searing pain. A looming figure with a mask. A medical mask, she recalled. Screaming.
“You grabbed your hip,” Tremaine said, his voice breaking into her nightmare.
She touched it again. The missing part of her hip bone felt like it was on fire.
Red. Bright red blood.
She remembered her grandmother. Or maybe just an older woman she’d assumed was her grandmother. Native American. Steeped in the old ways. While her children and their families lived in modern houses and shopped at grocery stores, Totu stayed in a one-room hut with Gemma, whom she’d taken in at the behest of…
Fuzziness. Gemma’s mother, maybe? Gemma couldn’t remember back that far. It was difficult enough to recall the old woman.
“I called her Totu,” Gemma said.
“She did the surgery?” Tremaine asked.
“Surgery?”
He pointed to Gemma’s hip. “May I look? From what you said I think you suffered some major trauma. An accident of some kind.”
Gemma had wanted to deny him. It felt like some secret side of herself was being violated, but she also wanted answers. She half-undressed and Tremaine examined her hip meticulously. When he ran his finger over the scar she shivered from the inside out.
“Was Totu Native American?” he asked.
“Yes. How…?”
“You called her Injun.”
“I did?” Gemma said, embarrassed.
“With affection. So, she must have allowed or encouraged you. Can you tell me more about her? She cut out a pretty large piece of your bone.”
“I don’t remember anything else about her,” Gemma murmured. That was the truth. She had no recollection of being put on the ferry and left by a woman who had taken her in, taken care of her.
She didn’t tell him about remembering the medical mask. That didn’t seem in keeping with Totu and she wanted to examine these new revelations away fr
om Dr. Rainfield.
“Why are you convinced it’s not DID now?” she asked him, when he’d finished asking more questions of her, and she’d asked more of him until they’d exhausted the subject of her recollections.
“No alternate personality emerged. No guilt. Nothing.” He gazed at her thoughtfully. “Other than the fact that you think you can read minds.”
Emotions, she thought, but didn’t say it.
“Your repressed memories appear to be rooted in trauma. The pieces missing all your life may simply be your coping device. Nothing really more than your strong need not to remember past pain.”
Gemma should have felt relief but mostly she experienced a sense of letdown. Nothing had changed in her life.
He went on to explain about the tiredness being related to her working through her problems, and Gemma, though she questioned that diagnosis, admitted she’d woken up recently after some deep, deep sleep that felt almost like a coma. She’d even woken up naked, which he’d found perfectly normal.
Maybe he was right. It did feel like things were coming to some kind of conclusion. Maybe that’s what her feeling of a future Armageddon had meant. Not a violent end as much as a finale of her old life. Maybe her new life was with Will.
She left his offices, headed home, her thoughts on the events of the evening before. At home she’d thought she might toil over them, waiting for Will’s call, but she went directly to sleep. Dreamless. Her subconscious working through the new memories, keeping most of them still under wraps, allowing only a little peek now and then. It angered her that she couldn’t access them all, even under hypnosis. But she’d gotten a lot of them. Enough to knock her out for most of the afternoon and evening.
She’d awoken to darkness. The red of her bedroom walls was shrouded in shadow. Good. She was going to change the color immediately. She wasn’t tiptoeing around her abilities anymore, whether they be good or bad. She was done with that. She just wanted to be normal.
The noise came from the back porch.
The hair on the back of her neck rose. Her heart started pumping hard.
Little Tim?
No. Something else. Someone else.
She tiptoed down the stairs in the dark and grabbed the poker. The kitchen light was on, spilling through the window to the back porch. One look and she saw who it was.
In a kind of cool, controlled fury she stepped onto the back porch and said, “Get the hell off my property, Dunleavy. I’ve already called 911.”
Lucky melted back into the shrubbery, her hands to her head, her stomach clenching. She had a twin. A twin. A twin! No wonder people confused her with Gemma. She could still see through the thin stalks. She couldn’t take her eyes off the woman with the poker.
A shudder went through her from the soles of her feet to the top of her head.
And almost as if this duplicate of herself could feel her, she watched Gemma turn her way and gaze directly at the spot where she squatted, her muscles and skin quivering.
“Did you hear me?” Gemma demanded. Dunleavy stood like a gaping moron.
She felt something, then. A whisper across her flesh. She glanced away, briefly, toward the underbrush.
And that’s when Dunleavy lurched toward her.
She swung the poker up like a golf club at the top of its arc. They glared at each other and Gemma sensed that he intended to do her real harm.
“Fuckin’ whore,” he muttered.
“One half-step closer and I’m calling the sheriff’s department myself.”
He reached out one leg and jiggled a toe, staggering a bit. She realized he was half drunk. “You’re a whore just like your mother. I know about her getting on her back for the judge. That’s how you got the land.”
“It’s my land.” Her voice was cold. “At least you got that right.”
He seemed to finally realize she meant business because he slapped the air at her and turned away. “Cunt,” he slurred out, clomping back to his El Camino.
Gemma damn near threw the poker at him. She was sick of listening to his filth, sick of his insinuations, sick of him. But as sick of him as she was, she still didn’t feel the same revolting fury and need for retribution that she did when she’d learned about Spencer Bereth. Him she’d wanted to kill.
Maybe she had.
But no. It hadn’t come out in her session with Tremaine Rainfield. No repressed guilt.
Unless she was even better at hiding it than she knew.
Dunleavy climbed in his vehicle and gunned the engine. Gemma looked past him, to the waving branches of Scotch broom. For a moment her breath caught. It looked as if someone were crouching there. Someone watching her. Then the image disappeared.
Feeling like she was being overrun by the heebie-jeebies, she slammed back inside the house, locked the back door, then systematically checked every other door and window.
Cunt. The word rolled around in Lucky’s head like a pinball, too awful to settle. She’d been called a lot of things. That being one of them. But whoever leveled the epithet at her generally found she wasn’t going to take it.
It was easier for her to concentrate on her own growing hatred for Kev than think about the woman who was her twin. She could feel a whole host of memories kicking around inside her brain, trying to escape, like cats inside a burlap bag. She refused to open that sack. Didn’t know what it meant. Was scared of what might be inside.
Instead she followed Kev away from Gemma LaPorte’s. She expected him to head back to the PickAxe but instead he drove to a 1970s split-entry with peeling gray-painted siding and sagging concrete steps that led to a door with a gold plastic sidelight. Lucky had stayed in her share of rundown places but she was faintly surprised Kev wasn’t doing any better, since he owned the tavern.
The answer drove right up to them. An older BMW, still looking pretty nice, screeched to a halt and a blonde woman stepped out. Lucky ambled the Chrysler past, rolling down her window and twisting her rearview to get a better look at what was transpiring with Kev and his angry wife/ex-wife/girlfriend/ex-girlfriend. The blonde started yelling immediately, the gist being unpaid child support.
Lucky drove to the end of the street and turned around in the driveway of another split-entry that was dark inside and out. By the time she returned to Kev’s he and his lady friend were just going inside the house. Before the door shut Lucky saw him backhand the woman so hard her head snapped around and she stumbled.
Lucky pulled the car to the curb across from Kev’s house and cut the engine. She sat in the Chrysler, immobilized by memories and a cold rage that was seeping into her thoughts. She pulled her .22 from the glove box. Memories swirled. The back of a man’s hand against her jaw. The doctor. The bastard her mother gave her to.
Gemma had escaped that fate. Her mother had given her to the old woman with the gray braids, she recalled. An Indian. It had been some kind of offering, from one crazy old bat to another. Before she’d killed the doctor she’d learned the truth, had extracted the information as best she could when the bastard was kind to her, which was seldom. Lecherous devil.
Her mother had walked away, though in time Lucky had known where to find her. She’d wanted her to pay for what she’d done, but had learned to her chagrin that the woman who’d borne her lived in her own inner world. She was pathetic and had maybe even felt like she was doing the right thing by giving up her girls for others to raise. Unfortunately, the doctor had been the wrong person. A secretive man with twisted, sexual needs that he visited on his young daughter. Ani. She’d wanted anonymity and had basically achieved it over time, leaving one part-time job for another as she moved up and down the coast, working mostly as a waitress. Picking up the odd skill here and there, like car-jacking. Learning to survive on her wits.
But Gemma…she’d been raised by someone who loved her, hadn’t she? Kev resented her, but Kev was a sadistic worm. Ani didn’t know what to think about Gemma. Her sister. She would think about that later.
But she knew wha
t to do about Kev.
Her emotions in check, she entered the unlocked front door and followed the screaming and ranting up a short flight of steps to the living room. Kev had his lover by the dark roots of her bleached hair. They both looked up in shock when she appeared.
“Gemma?” The woman’s voice trembled. Her chest was heaving from exertion.
Gemma. The sound of her sister’s name stopped her again. In that second Kev dropped his woman and came at her, one hammy fist brushing her jaw. Ani staggered back and lifted the gun.
“I’ll kill you.”
“Get the fuck outta here!” he yelled.
“Stop.” She aimed for his broad gut.
“Kevin! Kevin!” the woman howled. She stumbled toward them and Kevin pushed her hard, sending her flying. She crashed into a wall and slid down into a heap, moaning. Then he charged at Ani and she fired point blank. Three times. His body jerked with each hit and he looked stunned. “You shot me,” he said, thumping down to his knees.
Ani stared down at the man whose upper torso was starting to fall forward. A bubble of blood appeared at the corner of his mouth.
Quick as a cat, she slipped around him, down the stairs and out the front door.
Will rubbed his temples and snatched up his coat, heading for the door. He’d been grilled by the feds, who seemed to think his trip to Carl’s Automotive was suspicious. Earlier, he’d stopped at his house just long enough to get a call from his mom, who was confused about all the Halloween costumes the day before, no matter how Will explained about the holiday. “I know about Halloween,” she said, though clearly this was a missing piece. “But one was dressed like she worked for the Red Cross. All white uniform with little cap—”