by Nancy Bush
And underneath it all Will couldn’t escape the guilt he felt about sleeping with Ani. It was a small piece of the whole; he knew that. But it was vital. And though logic dictated he was innocent of betrayal, it didn’t mean Gemma would understand emotionally. He wasn’t even sure he did.
“I should have known,” he said as they pulled up to the house.
“You couldn’t have.” Gemma didn’t try to misunderstand. Her thoughts were obviously on the same path.
“I should have anyway.”
“I blame her, not you.”
Gemma threw open the passenger door and stepped out, closing her eyes and turning her face to the rustling wind. Faintly she smelled smoke.
“Will,” she said urgently, eyes flying open.
He was still inside, getting ready to turn the vehicle around and head back to the hospital. “What?”
“Fire.”
He practically leapt from the Jeep. The wind tossed the scent toward them. “Where’s it coming from?” he demanded.
“West. But there’s nothing there. Scrub brush. Until you get past the quarry to the woods.”
“Past the quarry to Lover’s Lane, then the woods,” Will corrected.
“It’s closer than that,” Gemma said. She turned north, in the direction of the Dunleavys’ property, thinking perhaps she was wrong. But there was nothing there.
“The quarry,” Gemma said.
Will turned to frown at her. She could see his expression in the light from the headlamps. “Why?”
She was helpless to answer, to explain. Sometimes she just knew things.
“Get back in,” Will commanded, and Gemma jumped into the passenger seat, slamming the door behind her as Will made a three-point-turn and blasted back up the drive and then ground gears, picking up speed on the highway.
“Wait. It’s right here. The access road,” Gemma declared. “Somewhere soon.”
Will’s headlights caught the spot between scrub brush. New tracks cut through the mud at the entry. Will turned in and bumped along, his headlights rocking in front of them. But as bad as the road was, it was obvious someone had cleared off the worst of the debris to make it passable.
They saw the orange glow and smelled the hot smoke long before they got to the base of the quarry. Gemma gasped as they came into the clearing and there, in front of them, was a dark, cone-like mound that stretched to the sky, eager flames working from the bottom, a gleeful, building roar.
“Oh, my God,” she murmured, a catch in her throat.
“There,” Will said harshly, pointing. Ahead of them, an ape-like figure in a dark coat and watchcap barreled away from their headlights. A white truck with an opened GemTop and tailgate sat to one side.
Will cut the engine, grabbed his gun and leapt from the Cherokee, running as soon as he hit the ground. Gemma scrambled outside. “Stop!” Will yelled to the man, slowing down and lifting the gun with both hands. To Gemma’s shock the man zigzagged and came back on Will, hitting him at the knees before Will could aim and fire. There was an ooof as they hit together. The man turned on him, slamming an elbow in Will’s ribs and they tumbled forward and thrashed together on the ground.
The gun, Gemma thought. Get the gun.
“Help me!” came a thin cry above the growing, dull roar of the fire.
Desperately, Gemma whipped around. Who? Where?
The smell of burning flesh caught her up short.
Someone was being burned alive!
She screamed and ran toward the fire, eyes stinging with smoke. Out of the corner of her eye Will was still rolling around on the ground with the heavier man. She half-turned toward them, then saw the back side of the pyre and Ani lashed to the burning sticks. There was another body partially engulfed in flames. Burning. Searing. The cooked smell making Gemma’s stomach revolt.
But Ani…
She charged forward, scrabbling at the thin cords tied around Ani’s wrists. Electrical wire? She yanked and yanked. Heard wood crack above the sizzle and the dull rush of the fire. Then she was overcome by smoke. Her head swam and she staggered back, coughing, hacking, down on all fours.
She had to help Ani…Will…her sister…her lover…
The wind roared down in a spiral, sending sparks and smoke upward in a funnel. Gemma tried to get to her feet but couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t see. On all fours she crawled toward the pyre but the heat was intense.
“Ani,” she shrieked, but a gale blew the words back into her throat along with ash and smoke. She turned away, coughing, forced backwards on hands and knees.
She thought she heard someone calling her name. “Will,” she croaked. “Will!”
The inferno grew wilder and hotter. She remembered her cell phone and dragged it from her pocket. Dialed 911. Couldn’t answer the dispatcher.
“Help. A fire,” she tried, but the wind snatched her words, her voice.
And then hands were helping her to her feet. Male hands. Will’s hands. She stumbled toward him and though she tried to walk he half-dragged her away. She buried her face in his coat. She was blind. Hot.
“Gemma,” he murmured. “Gemma. God, are you all right? Gemma!”
She tried to nod. They were outside of the core of fire, thirty feet away before she could look up to give him assurance. She glanced around for the man Will had been wrestling with. The psycho-burner.
“He got away. Ran toward the fire.” Will was shouting above the flames’ roar.
“Ani…I tried…”
Suddenly the man was raging toward them, charging like a bull, head down. Will pushed Gemma behind him. She screamed but no sound erupted. The man threw himself at Will hard and they hit the ground in a heap. “She’s a witch!” he bellowed. “A witch. She killed him and he can’t be saved until she dies!”
“Ani,” Gemma whispered, turning toward the pyre. She couldn’t see her sister from this angle. She could smell the searing flesh.
The man punched at Will, again and again, connecting with Will’s arm, head, torso, as Will sought a stranglehold on him.
But the man in the watchcap was strong and determined. He smacked Will hard and clambered to his feet, turning his face to the sky, roaring like a wounded animal. “All witches must die! Die by fire. Sent back to the fires of hell!”
Gemma shrank back but he turned to her, his eyes mirroring the flames.
Then he charged straight for her, a beast backdropped by the unholy orange light of the inferno.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“Stop, or I’ll shoot!” Will yelled harshly.
Her attacker didn’t hear him. Didn’t pay attention. Wild-eyed, he went after Gemma.
“You?” he muttered. “You!”
Gemma took an automatic step back. He charged her, grabbed her by the neck.
Blam. Blam.
She heard the shots, felt the man’s body react. But he didn’t stop. Grabbed her neck. Squeezing the life from her.
Blam.
Will was yelling. Yelling and yelling. Gemma saw spots in front of her eyes. Her fingers pried at his strong hands. Behind them the pyre was raging, and heat and smoke billowed out. Then Will was there, yanking the man back, warning him as he staggered away, sighting him down the gun which he held steadily between both hands.
“I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you.” The words were pouring from Will’s mouth as he followed the man with his gun.
Gemma’s hand was at her throat as she gulped air. She put out a hand—to what? Stop Will? Tell him to save Ani?
The staggering man went straight for the fire. To Gemma’s horror, he threw himself on the hellish inferno. Will ran forward but the heat was intense. He struggled, bent his head against the onslaught of heat, but could not move forward and was forced to retreat.
Then he was back with Gemma, his arms surrounding her. She buried her face in his smoke-saturated jacket. Instantly, she pulled herself free. “Ani,” she said. “She was on the pyre. Over there!”
She point
ed a finger to the opposite side of the raging pyre but as she did, it collapsed backward. There was no missing the smell of roasted flesh. Gagging, she stumbled away and vomited into the underbrush over and over again.
When she tried to go back again to save her sister, Will held her tightly. “She’s gone,” he told her. “She’s gone.”
Gemma dug her hands into her own hair. “He killed her! He thought she was me. I was the one who worked at the diner. I was the one with the uniform.”
“We don’t know that.”
“That’s why he kills them,” she cried.
“Gemma…”
“It’s my fault,” she said.
“You know that’s not true.” And then he held her close while she clung to him, her eyes burning from smoke and heat, her insides feeling sheared and torn.
She was still gripping him like a lifesaver when Will’s calls for backup and to the fire department were answered and emergency vehicles came screaming into the quarry. It was becoming a much too familiar sight.
Gemma watched through dull eyes as water from tanks atop the fire truck was shot in frothy arcs onto the pyre. For all the searing heat and roaring destruction, it took only minutes to put the fire out because the flames, fed only by the scattered limbs of the pyre, had not jumped to the wetter surrounding flora. The fire’s fuel was gone. Charred branches and small logs and ashes were left. And bone and flesh.
The fireman in charge came over to Will. “There appears to be two bodies.”
Will nodded, but Gemma said, “No, there should be three. A man’s and two women’s.”
“There’s a man’s body and a woman’s,” he said, then walked back to the other workers.
“Who’s the third?” Will asked Gemma.
“There was a woman’s body tied next to Ani’s. A dead body, before the fire.”
Will grimaced. “Ah. Heather Yates.”
“So, where’s Ani?”
They looked at each other. “Could she have gotten free?” Will asked her.
“I pulled on her wrists. They were tied with electrical cord. I might have gotten her hand free…maybe…But it was so hot!”
A car came barreling down the road, a latecomer. Will looked over, expecting backup. But the man charging their way brought a string of epithets to his lips. “Damn. He still has access. Musta picked it up on a scanner.”
Gemma looked around, confused.
“Get outta here, Burl,” Will said, striding to meet him.
The newcomer pointed a furious finger at Gemma, stabbing the air. “She killed Kevin! Shot him like a dog. Fuckin’ crazies. Fuckin’, fuckin’ crazies!”
“It wasn’t her,” Will said. He placed both palms on Burl’s chest and the older man shoved him aside, enraged.
“You don’t have me fooled!” he screamed at Gemma, his stabbing finger nearly poking her nose. “You did it. And you’ve cast your spell over stupid Tanninger here. But I know!”
“So help me, Burl,” Will warned tightly, “if you don’t back off, I’ll arrest you.”
He whirled on Will. “Bastard.”
“Bring it.” Will’s fists came up like a pugilist. “Bring it.”
The man warred with his own cowardice. Gemma read him easily. In the end, he threw Will the finger and swore violently and stomped off.
“Pardon your French,” Will yelled after him.
“What does that mean?” Gemma asked when he came back to her.
“Nothing. Come on. Let’s get out of here. I gotta check on Barb and then I want a hot shower and some sleep.”
“At my place?”
“If that’s okay with you…?”
She smiled and grabbed his soot-covered hand with her own.
Ani moved as if she were an old woman. She trekked back to the highway, forced to dodge into the underbrush at each new, approaching vehicle, crying out at the pain. The flesh on her back was burned. Her head felt like an aching stone on her neck. She hurt like she’d never hurt before.
When she reached the highway she was startled when a man suddenly appeared before her and she let out a short, stifled scream.
“Gemma,” he said. “What happened to you?”
“Who are you?” she asked dully.
“It’s me. Little Tim! You need some help? Let Tim help you.”
Little Tim was not all that little, and he didn’t seem like the brightest bulb, either. But salvation sometimes came in the oddest forms. “Can you help me get to my car? It’s up the highway a ways.”
“I don’t drive. But my mom does.”
“She has a car?”
“Uh-huh. You know she does.”
“If you could get me the keys…”
“She wouldn’t like that. She’ll help you. She likes you. Not like me, though.” He gave her a sly, sideways look. “I see into your soul.”
Despite the fact she was almost passing out, Ani could see into his soul as well. He was feeling a kind of puppy-love mixed with sexual attraction toward Gemma. Well, she could work that for all it was worth. “Get me the keys and I’ll kiss you like a man,” she said.
His eyes got huge. “Come on!”
“How far is it?”
He pointed. “Just over there.”
She didn’t know if she could make it.
She had to make it.
Had to.
With everything she possessed she gritted her teeth and walked along the road, diving into the shrubbery when a car passed, which Tim thought was a great game, before marching steadily toward his home.
Two days later Will watched them wheel Barb toward him in the hospital lobby. She was pale and looked like she’d lost ten pounds, but there was a tautness to her jaw that read like someone was going to get one hell of a piece of her mind. She looked past Will and said, “So, where’s your Siamese twin girlfriend? You sure as hell’ll come up with a whopping fish story to clear her name.”
The corner of his mouth lifted. “She’s working at the diner.”
“Really.”
“And the politically correct term is conjoined twins.”
“Of which the bad one got away.”
Will shrugged.
“I wish I’d been there to see you take on Burl,” she grumbled. “And I wish you’d knocked him flat.”
“Me, too.”
“How’re you gonna find her?”
“Ani? I don’t know.”
At the hospital exit Barb climbed out of the wheelchair and got to her feet. “Nunce was hanging around like he thought he was getting an award.”
“He was worried about you.”
“Yeah? He spent all the time talking about you. How you should run for election. How the department needs you, blah, blah, blah.” She gave him a look as he held the door for her, then sneered at his proffered hand. “I’m not an invalid. Any chance you’ll go after that job?”
“I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.”
“Falling in lust. That’s what you’re doing, you bastard,” she said without heat.
He laughed and Barb’s lips quirked.
“So, who’s the psycho-burner. Bartholomew what?”
“Bartholomew Haines,” Will told her. They’d tracked down the license number of the truck and learned it belonged to a deceased man named Ezekiel Haines, who’d been employed at Carl’s Automotive. A follow-up phone interview with Seth Bellarosso had given him an earful on both the brothers. Now he filled Barb in briefly on the relationship between Bart, Ezekiel, and Ani as far as Seth knew it. He finished with, “He thinks Bart was schizophrenic. Dimestore psychology, but something was way off with the guy. Rumor is, he killed their mother, a sometime prostitute around the town of Deception Bay. Tillamook County’s digging up the land around her house. He called her a witch. His relationship with her seemed to set the stage for the rest. He carted the dead bodies around in his truck before he found where he wanted to…burn them.”
“How long ago did the mom die?”
“About fiv
e years. I’m going to do a little research on my own. See if I can learn anything else.”
“She wear a uniform, the mom?”
“She worked as a waitress some.” He tried to help Barb into his Jeep but she slapped his hands away. Then her face drained of color and she had to hang on to the door. Will gave her his arm to lean on and she reluctantly accepted it.
Once they were both inside and Will had guided the Cherokee out of the parking lot, she said, “Too bad he’s dead. He might’ve been able to give you some answers about himself and this Ani twin of Gemma’s.”
“I talked to one of the mechanics at Carl’s, Rich Lachey. He had a lot to say about Bart, most of it just a bunch of bad-mouthing and supposition. But he said Bart’s brother used to imply that he had a sexual relationship with the mother, and that Bart had killed her because of it. Also, Ani may or may not have been responsible for Ezekiel’s death, but it looks like Bart blamed her either way.”
“So, he focused on Ani but somehow got her confused with Gemma?”
Will had a flash of remembrance of Ani atop his body. Confused. Yes. Making love to Gemma the past few days had buried the images but they were still there, lurking, like a disease in remission.
“There was a lot of confusion,” Will said. “Gemma followed Spencer Bereth out of LuLu’s and ended up putting her mother’s car in a ditch. Gemma’s friend, Macie, who owns LuLu’s, has a daughter who saw Bart then follow Gemma out of the diner at that same time. Looks like Bart thought Gemma was Ani and he tracked her to the hospital, but then got sidetracked by Inga Selbourne.”
“The uniform.”
“He was unraveling. Have you heard Dr. Tremaine Rainfield’s take on him?”
Barb snorted. “I didn’t know he’d gotten involved. Publicity-monger.”
“He’s still pushing that multiple personality theory. Says Bart may have suffered from several personalities. Called himself Wolf, according to Lachey. Like that proves anything.”
“Well, he was fixated on his mother.”
“That’s an Oedipal complex, not DID, or whatever the hell it’s called now.” Will made a sound of disgust. “Rainfield got his face on TV this morning, theorizing about Haines.”