“You can’t tell me, huh?”
Sighing, he turned slowly. “Look, this is…sensitive. Her life’s at stake. I can’t risk anything making her skittish right now.”
“Skittish?” She shook her head. “Young could single-handedly fill all ten slots in the Most Wanted list. She’s way beyond skittish.”
“Of him. Not of me.”
She nodded, her eyes narrow and brimming with intelligence. “You need her to trust you.”
“There’s not a reason in the world why she shouldn’t trust me. I’m on her side.”
“So am I. Just so you know.”
It was a warning. He heard it loud and clear.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Saturday
“It’s almost…anticlimactic, isn’t it?”
Beth was standing near the front door, watching the unmarked sedan roll away over the bare ribbon of road, carrying two of her house guests with it. Three days had passed since Bryan and Dawn’s encounter with Mordecai in the forest. Three days, and no sign of the man. The press had descended on the town when the wire services picked up her story. She’d been interviewed a dozen times, in between overseeing Will Ahearn’s work on the house. And then the press had left again. And still not a sign of Mordecai.
Josh stood behind her, his hands on her shoulders. God, she loved having him in her life. Close, reassuring, constant, dependable.
She trusted him, she realized. As much as she’d been determined to keep her guard up where he was concerned, he had worked his way around it, through it, beneath it. He was inside her now. In her heart, in her home, in her bed. She’d been in love with him for a while now. But the trust—that was new.
And a little scary.
“Anticlimactic in a very good way,” he told her. “When you consider what the climax could have been.”
She lowered her head. “I’ve been waiting a long time to finally face him down. To end this once and for all. Damn him. Three days, and not a sign he’s within a hundred miles.” The car carrying the two federal agents wound out of sight, and she turned as their boss, Arthur Stanton, came down the stairs.
Josh slipped an arm around her. Arthur stopped halfway across the room, set his suitcase on the floor and dropped a manila envelope on the coffee table.
“So you’re leaving, too?” she asked. “I thought you were going to stay one more night?”
“I was, but we’ve just had a sighting of Young.”
Her heart jumped, and she caught her breath. “Where?”
“Raleigh, North Carolina. He was at a Youth for Christ rally. Some of the cops working security there recognized him from the photo we’ve been circulating.”
The photo. She shivered, because it was emblazoned into her mind. Arthur’s people had taken an old photo of Mordecai, then used some sophisticated computer program to enhance it according to Bryan and Dawn’s description of how he had looked when they’d seen him. She’d been devastated when one of her own students identified him as the same man who’d been substituting for her social studies teacher for a couple of days—a Mr. Abercrombie.
God, it gave Beth chills to think that Mordecai could so easily get close to innocent children.
There were several versions of the sketch floating around now, with various hairstyles, lengths and colors, with glasses and without them. Mordecai’s piercing brown eyes, with their thick black lashes, never changed. Those eyes could look at once angelic and demon-possessed. They chilled her to the marrow, those eyes.
She sighed, blinking to clear the image from her mind. “What if it wasn’t really him?” she asked.
Arthur smiled reassuringly. “This is the third sighting in the Raleigh-Durham area, Beth. And the witnesses are reliable.”
“Almost too reliable,” she muttered. “It’s not like Mordecai to let himself be seen by police officers and county deputies,” she said. “Not unless he wants to be seen.”
“Don’t think we haven’t thought of that. But, Beth, we’re leaving you in very good hands. And it’s not as if you’re going to be sitting here like a glowing neon target, after all.”
“It’s not?” She saw the look Arthur exchanged with Josh, and she frowned. “What haven’t you told me?” she asked, looking up at Joshua.
“You haven’t told her?” Arthur asked. Then he snatched up the envelope he’d set down, brought it to her and thrust it into her hands.
“What’s this?” Beth asked.
“It’s your new identity. We’ve got a place all picked out for you.”
She lifted her brows. “Timbuktu?”
“Illinois. Right on Lake Michigan. You’ll love it.” He clapped a hand to Joshua’s shoulder. “I’ll check in every couple of hours. If there’s anything the least bit odd—”
“I’ll call. Don’t worry, we’ll be fine.”
“Just get her settled in the new place, Josh. Don’t waste any time.”
Josh thinned his lips as Arthur nodded to her, then dashed out the door. Then she stared up at Joshua and said simply, “I’m not going.”
“You have to go. Listen, it doesn’t have to be permanent.”
“No.”
“We have a plan.”
“A plan you didn’t even bother to discuss with me.”
“I told you we should have discussed it with her,” Jax said. She was in the kitchen, where she’d been making herself a sandwich from the leftover ham Beth had baked for dinner. She had half the sandwich left, clutched in one hand, and she took another bite before going on. While chewing, she said, “It’s really a great plan, Liz.”
“I hate being called Liz.”
“So you keep telling me.” She nodded at Josh. “Tell her the plan.” Then she took another bite.
“What plan?” Bryan asked, coming down the stairs from his room, Dawn at his elbow, as always. She’d barely taken her eyes off him since that night in the woods, even though Bryan was mostly recovered now.
“The plan.” Josh drew a breath.
“Yes, Josh, the plan,” Beth said.
He cleared his throat. “The plan is that I put you, Bryan and Dawn on a flight out of here. You’ll be on hopscotching flights, and at a couple of the stops, you’ll be changing names, so it would be impossible for anyone to trail you. Eventually, you wind up at O’Hare, where a van will be waiting to drive you to the new place. You don’t use the final new identity until you’re settled in there.”
“And where will you be?”
“Julie Jones McKenzie and her husband Sean will meet you there, to take charge of Dawn.”
“And I ask again, where will you be?”
“I’ll be here.”
“With me,” Jax said. “Only I won’t be me, I’ll be you.”
Beth blinked. “Come again?”
She moved closer, munching her sandwich and reached behind her to pull her long ponytail around with her free hand. She held it up.
Beth frowned. “It’s darker. You changed your color—that’s my color.”
“To. A. Tee.” Jax smiled. “I’m getting it cut this morning. Shoulder length, just like yours. And there’s a bottle of peroxide upstairs waiting for you.”
“Right. I’m going to bleach my hair.”
“You’re butterscotch. I’m platinum. When you leave here, honey, you are going to be platinum in a ponytail, wearing some of my clothes. And I’m gonna be a butterscotch babe.”
“You’re going to pretend to be me.”
“Brilliant, isn’t it?” Jax asked. “Josh came up with it.”
“It really is a great plan,” Bryan said.
Beth slid her eyes from his to Dawn’s. Dawn rolled her eyes, shook her head. At least one person in the room got this.
“So I’m supposed to sneak off to safety and leave another woman to take my place on the receiving end of Mordecai’s final vengeance.”
“Not another woman,” Jax said. “A cop. A trained police officer. This is my job.”
“It’s not your job, Jax,” Beth told
her. “It’s no one’s job. It’s not a job at all, it’s life. My life.” She slapped the envelope against Joshua’s chest and let go of it. He caught it as it slid toward the floor. “I’m not going anywhere. And if Mordecai is still in town and coming after me, then it’s me who will be here waiting for him.”
She turned and started for the stairs. “And if you guys keep trying to interfere with that, then I’ll be waiting for him alone.”
“Beth is right,” Dawn said. She’d been sitting on the bottom step, but she got to her feet now. “Besides, no one knows him like she and I do. No one else can hope to outsmart him the way we can.”
“There’s no we in this, Dawny,” Beth told her. “The second Julie can get here, you are outta here.”
“But—”
“I almost died trying to save you from him—twice now. Do you really think I’m going to let you hang around here risking your neck? I’d have sent you home by now if I thought wild horses could keep you from rushing straight back here. But once your mom comes…”
Dawn flinched, maybe because it was so unusual for Beth to refer to Julie as her mother—but she was, Beth reminded herself: morally, ethically, even legally now. Not Beth, not anymore.
“Look, it doesn’t really matter,” Bryan said, getting to his feet. He slid one hand over Dawn’s shoulder, squeezing her there. “Mordecai’s long gone anyway. The whole town knows it. They’re all planning for Maude’s memorial service now that things have settled down.”
Beth blinked, looking behind her to the bottom of the stairs, where the two teens stood. “But we decided to postpone that….”
Bryan nodded. “I know. Someone’s supposed to call you about it tonight. Maude’s friends and Reverend Baker all feel it should go on as scheduled.”
She sighed deeply, lowering her head. “That’s an even bigger reason for me to stick around,” she said. “For Maude. I owe her this much.”
Then she turned and moved on up the stairs.
Leaving.
She’d told the press she was leaving. Taking on a new name, a new identity, going back into hiding. But Lizzie wasn’t going anywhere.
Mordecai had given up on waiting for her to be alone in the house. She would never be alone in the house. And she would never relax or let her guard down. It was almost as if she could…feel him there.
She should. They were connected, he and Lizzie—their souls were bound. He felt her life, her breath, her blood, twining and mingling with his own as he sat in silent meditation in the garden shed, and he was overcome with longing.
Selfish, he told himself. He mustn’t give in, mustn’t risk revealing his presence. Especially now. The servants of the Beast had gone. Government men were so easily led. These had been no different. Highly placed men with secrets they preferred stayed hidden made excellent witnesses, he had found. And three such men had reported seeing him far away from here. Far away from Lizzie.
God, but he wanted to go to her.
Go, then. Sate your hunger for her this once.
Mordecai’s eyes opened as he slowly rose from the trancelike state. He lifted his head and saw that it was dark outside again. Had he been still so long, then? It had been midafternoon when he’d sunk down on the cold wood floor, folded his legs beneath him, closed his eyes. He started to rise, but his legs had been bent so long they didn’t obey him, and he fell to his knees again, wincing in pain.
Damn, what he wouldn’t give for a warm bed, a heated room for the night.
Soon.
Mordecai rose again, using a support beam to aid him. He’d grown hungry. Dinnertime had long since past. But now he had a greater hunger. And permission to assuage it. He wondered why his guides would allow him to risk discovery, but he had no doubt there were reasons. He moved to the shed’s window, looked through it at the darkened house.
“She’s not alone, though the government men have left.” He wiped impatiently at the dirt-streaked glass, then gave up and went to the door, pulled it open, stepped outside.
The house stood there. It was greatly improved now from its initial appearance. It had been repainted over the last three days. Missing shutters had been replaced and loose ones tightened. The porch no longer sagged in the middle. And the second-floor windows were shining clean and filled with clean curtains now, where before some of them had been streaked with dust and bare.
“The lady cop is there, still. The one from Syracuse,” he whispered.
She sleeps.
“And the boy, and that girl who is with him. Is there some reason I’ve never seen her face?”
She is unimportant.
“And the man.”
You hold the key to his demise. Go. Look upon your woman. We near the end of this journey, and time is short. And take your bag with you.
He blinked, looking back at the large black satchel inside the shed door, stored far from the kerosene heater. He could guess why they wanted him to take the bag with him, and he very nearly argued with them. Knowing he would be punished for that, he bit it back.
“The doors are locked,” he said instead.
Go to the back. Climb the tree there. And don’t think about questioning your instructions, Mordecai. Spirit knows far more than you do. Humble yourself and obey.
Mordecai sighed, but he didn’t question. He didn’t doubt. He took heart in the fact that the guides were telling him this journey was nearly over. He no longer cared so much how it ended. Taking up the bag, he closed the shed door and walked through the dying grass to the rear of the house. He went up to the maple tree that stood there and climbed it, though doing so was a challenge with the bag in one hand. As he made his way higher, he saw the wisdom of the guides, as he always did. An attic window stood within reach of a long, gnarled limb. He climbed out upon that limb, paying no attention to the way it gave under his weight, the way the tree groaned and cracked—no more than he paid to the cold of the night. The guides must be obeyed. If the limb broke and sent him to his death below, then there was a reason.
His palm pressed to the window, he tried to raise the sash, but it was locked. Something rattled, though, and he frowned, inspecting it more closely and seeing that the caulk around the windowpanes was old, crumbling. The glass didn’t sit tightly, and a little manipulating of the loosest pane soon had it coming free.
Reaching through, he unlocked the sash, opened the window, then climbed inside, pulling his satchel in behind him. It was that easy.
Setting the satchel on the floor and leaving it there, Mordecai crept through the house. He didn’t even need to ask which bedroom was hers. He felt her. He was drawn to her. Led to her. A magnet and steel.
The halls were pitch-black. Not a light had been left on, not in the entire house. So when he paused outside her bedroom door, gripped the knob, turned it slowly and pushed the door open, he saw nothing until the faint flickering glow from within caught his eye.
Candlelight.
It gleamed golden yellow, bathing her skin and the darker hands that slid over it.
Mordecai almost gasped aloud at the pain, as if a white-hot blade had slid neatly between his ribs. She was lying there, her arms and legs twined around the man, her hands pressing to his back, her eyes closed, lips parted, body writhing beneath him.
Damn her, he thought. Damn her for a lying whore.
His hand closed around the bone handle inside his boot. He drew the hunting knife out slowly, careful not to make a sound, and straightened again, with hatred and hurt burning his heart.
A single step forward. She moaned the other man’s name as his hips snapped against her, impaling her, defiling her.
They would both die. Here. Now!
No.
Mordecai clenched his jaw. He would not obey, dammit. Not this time.
You will obey. She will die for her crimes, Mordecai, just as we have always insisted she must—even when you rebelled and pleaded for her life. She will die. At your hand. But not yet. Not today.
Tomorrow, though, yo
u will bring her a taste of the pain she has brought to you this night. Tomorrow there is a blade you will thrust into her heart. Not the one in your hand—not at first. First, Mordecai, you will use the blade in your pocket.
He tightened his grip on the hunting knife, his fist clenching and unclenching almost like a spasm.
Put it away, Mordecai! And with the command came a blinding pain behind his eyes. He pressed a hand to his forehead, fast and hard.
“What was that?” Lizzie stopped moving, her voice a harsh whisper.
Mordecai backed into the pitch-black hall, pulling the door closed, not latching it, though, lest they hear. The pain faded. His body steadied, and he obeyed, bending to slide the knife back into his boot.
Now, take out the other blade. The one in your pocket.
Closing his eyes against his heartache, he thrust a hand into the pocket of the shirt he wore, and there he felt the folded scrap of paper. He took it out and remembered without needing to look at it. The newspaper clipping—the one showing that fornicator’s face, identifying him as the ATF agent responsible for shooting Lizzie all those years ago.
He leaned back against a wall, tipped his head upward. “Is it time, then? Is it finally time to destroy her?”
It’s time. You’ll leave that paper for her—we’ll tell you where. She’ll find it tomorrow. For now, return to the attic and fetch the bag, for you have more work to do. Once she has lost her lover, she must lose everything else she holds dear. Indeed, your work this night will cost her more than even you know. She will be brought to her knees, Mordecai. She will welcome death when you bring it to her. She will beg you to end her pain.
“The house?” he asked softly.
Yes. First the lover, then the house. And something even more precious to her than that. Tomorrow.
“But tomorrow is the day of the memorial service. Half the town will be here.”
Even better. Go now to the attic. Get the bag and begin your work. And, Mordecai, set the timer for twelve-thirty. Half past noon. Exactly.
Beth awoke in Joshua’s arms to commotion already going on in the house. She lifted her head from his magnificent chest and looked up to see him smiling at her.
Colder Than Ice Page 32