Wicked is the night

by Catherine Mulvany

  “I got tired of playing lab rat.”

  “So you took matters into your own hands.”

  “With Yelena’s help,” Nevada said. “She was the one who showed me how to avoid swallowing the pills that kept me in a zombielike state, the one who bought me a fake ID, then conveniently ‘lost’ her keys, the same keys I used to escape.”

  “Sounds like she was a good friend to you, kind and generous.” He cocked his head to one side. “So why do you look so sad every time you mention her name?”

  Nevada didn’t respond for a second. She couldn’t trust her voice not to crack. “They killed her,” she finally managed to say. “The men who’re following me killed her. That was the reward for her kindness. They tracked me somehow to her town house, showed up at the door. I managed to escape out the bathroom window. Yelena wasn’t so lucky.” Nevada began removing framed photographs from the wall, hoping to bury her guilt in a flurry of activity.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Trick said quietly.

  “She was like a mother to me,” she said.

  He gave her shoulder an encouraging squeeze. “She cared for you. I’m guessing you filled an empty spot in her heart.”

  “Maybe, but I can’t help thinking she’d have been better off if she’d never met me.” I will not cry. I will not cry.

  A vow that would have been easier to keep if Trick’s expression hadn’t been so full of kindness and sympathy. “You didn’t kill her,” he said softly.

  She tore her gaze from his. “I didn’t kill the truck driver or the waitress, either, but the truth is, they’re both dead because of me. In fact, if you were smart, you’d send me packing before you end up on the hit list.”

  Trick shrugged. “I’m living on borrowed time anyway.”

  She glanced back up at him in surprise. “I thought you didn’t believe in the Granger curse.”

  “I don’t”—he smiled a crooked smile—“but that’s no guarantee the curse doesn’t believe in me.”

  She turned back to the wall of photographs, trying to hide her response to his smile. He didn’t mean anything by it. He was only trying to comfort her. He hadn’t meant to trigger that weird, shuddery sensation in her stomach.

  What was her problem anyway? One second she was on the verge of tears, the next she was having a major lust attack. So what if Trick Granger was sweet and charming and devilishly good-looking? She didn’t have room in her life at the moment for any of those things.

  Studiously ignoring him, Nevada forced herself to concentrate on the wall of photographs. She gazed unseeingly for several seconds. Then, “Oh!” she said, too surprised to control her reaction.

  “What?” Trick moved up behind her, so close she could feel the warmth radiating from his body, so close she could smell the citrusy tang of his shaving gel, so close her traitorous body reacted in a number of inappropriate ways. As he leaned closer yet, peering at the wall, she forced herself to edge sideways, out of range of all that potent masculinity.

  “Ah, that explains it.” He tapped a photograph, the same photograph that had elicited her startled oh. “You found Blanche.”

  “Blanche?” What was he talking about?

  Her puzzlement must have been obvious in her expression. “Blanche,” he repeated. “My ghost. Your double.”

  “Your what? My who?”

  He lifted the framed photo from its hook and passed it to her. “Blanche Smith was the girl my ancestor murdered. She’s the ghost who haunts the place.”

  “Yesterday you called the haunted house rumors nonsense.”

  “Yesterday I was doing my best to talk you into taking the job.”

  “You lied.” Nevada wasn’t sure why that hurt so much. After all, she’d told her share of lies in the past week.

  Trick nudged the photograph with the tip of one finger. “Blanche isn’t dangerous. You probably won’t even see her. She only manifests at night and then all she does is cry.”

  Nevada met his gaze full on, surprised anew at the almost electric jolt of attraction. What would happen if he touched her? Kissed her? Her throat suddenly felt dry as dust. She swallowed hard. “You called her my double. Why?”

  “Blanche looks like you. Or rather you look like her. Not exactly, but there’s a resemblance.”

  “There is?” Nevada hadn’t really noticed the girl’s face. She’d been too focused on the amulet that hung around the girl’s neck, an amulet identical to the one Nevada had lost in her struggle with the truck driver. But now that she paid closer attention, she could definitely see what Trick was talking about. She and the dead girl could have been sisters. “Weird,” she murmured.

  “You think?” Trick laughed sharply. “Welcome to my life.”

  There had to be a connection, Trick decided, between the long-dead girl in the photograph and the girl standing next to him, a stunned and mildly wary expression on her face. Such a marked resemblance couldn’t be coincidence. But he didn’t buy the everyone-has-a-double theory, and reincarnation didn’t fit the facts, either. Wasn’t the whole point of reincarnation that the reincarnated person came back in a different body? “May I see that picture again?” he asked.

  Nevada passed him the photograph, and he examined it closely. Even with the old-fashioned clothing and hairstyle, Bla Shai="5nche Smith bore noticeable similarities to his new housekeeper. Idly, he turned over the framed photograph. The cardboard backing was stained and faded with age. Along the bottom edge, spidery, old-fashioned cursive spelled out four words: All my love, Blanche.

  An odd thing, surely, for a whore to write on the back of her official stable photo. Had there been more than a business relationship between Silas Granger and the young prostitute? A tiny frisson of alarm shivered down Trick’s spine, and for a second or two, he could almost swear he heard the echo of a sob.

  He made eye contact with Nevada. “Like I told Marcello, this can’t be coincidence. You’re here for a reason. We’re being maneuvered like pieces on a chessboard, you and I.”

  “Manipulated,” Nevada said, her expression unreadable. “Welcome to my life.”

  Nevada worked on the ground floor rooms until Marcello announced that dinner was ready—spinach salad, hard rolls with garlic butter, and chicken cacciatore. Marcello and Trick ate their meal in front of the television where a soccer game—Italy versus Brazil—was going strong. Nevada, no big soccer fan, opted to enjoy her dinner in the peace of the kitchen.

  Afterward, she migrated into the study, a room at the back of the house that Trick had told her had once been the brothel’s business office. Nevada hoped to find records that offered insight into the life—and death—of Blanche Smith, the woman who’d looked so much like her.

  But if there were records in the study, Nevada decided after a forty-minute search, they must be locked away in the safe. Of course, she hadn’t even realized there was a safe at first. It wasn’t until she’d examined the portrait behind the desk that she’d discovered what it hid.

  The man in the portrait, presumably Trick’s villainous or at least somewhat morally reprehensible ancestor, Silas Granger, gazed solemnly down from his ornate frame. A dark-haired man with pale, piercing eyes, long sideburns, and a handlebar mustache, Silas had been undeniably handsome.

  Trick was good-looking, too, but aside from the dark hair, there was no family resemblance. Trick’s face was harshly attractive rather than classically handsome, his cheekbones too wide, his nose too long, too aquiline, his chin too square. Only the fullness of his lower lip offered a hint of softness. Silas, on the other hand, was almost too handsome. Too perfect. Too Hollywood.

  With some difficulty—the frame was heavier than it looked—she removed the portrait from the wall and wasted fifteen minutes or so trying various combinations on the safe before finally giving it up as a waste of time. Maybe the correct combination was written down somewhere, perhaps tucked away in the big rolltop desk.

  But the desk was empty. Someone had cleaned it out long ago. All that remain
ed in the many drawers and pigeonholes was a thick layer of dust and a few desiccated insect corpses.

  Frustrated, she worked her way through the leather-bound volumes in the bookcase, hoping at least some of them would be business ledgers, but none were. There were books of sentimental poetry, a well-worn first edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter SScaher, two books on ornithology, and several devoted to practical medicine, with hints on everything from how best to treat a fever—willow bark tea and cold compresses—to how to set a broken arm—splints and bandages.

  But no ledgers. No records of any sort.

  This time when the prickling sensation on the back of her neck told her someone had her under surveillance, she didn’t panic. “You move very quietly for a man with a cane,” she said as she turned to find Trick standing in the doorway.

  “Rubber,” he said, which made her blink in surprise until she figured out he was talking about the tip of his cane, not a condom. “You’re still cleaning?” he asked. “It’s almost ten.”

  “Not cleaning. Playing Nancy Drew.”

  A startled expression flickered across his face.

  Score one for her team. “In an effort to dig up more information on my ‘double,’” she explained. “I didn’t mention this earlier, but the truth is, Blanche Smith and I have more in common than our looks.”

  “Oh?”

  “In her official stable photograph, Blanche is wearing an amulet.”

  “I hadn’t noticed,” he said.

  “Well, I did.” Nevada frowned. “And the strange part is, I had one just like it.”

  Trick raised an eyebrow. “Had?”

  “I lost it in my wrestling match with the truck driver.”

  “And you say your amulet was just like Blanche’s?”

  “Identical.”

  “Interesting,” he said.

  “More like frustrating. I follow the clues, but all I find are brick walls.” She sighed. “Who was Blanche Smith, and why do I resemble her so closely? I thought there might be some useful information in here—old records, something. I don’t suppose you know the combination to the safe.”

  He crossed the room without a word, worked the combination, then swung the door open. “Empty,” he said. “After the brothel went out of business, the family donated all the records to the Midas Lake Historical Society. My guess is, they didn’t want any reminders of the house’s dubious past hanging around.”

  “And yet they kept the pictures of the stable,” Nevada reminded him.

  Trick shrugged. “So they did.”

  Daniel glanced up as his housekeeper ushered Sarge Collier and Billy Branson into his home office. “Find her?” he asked, even though he knew already from their expressions what the answer was going to be.

  “No,” Sarge said. “Not yet.”

  “Did you check all the low-end motels as I suggested?”

  &ldquo Sth=quo;Low end, high end, and everything in between,” Sarge reported.

  “Homeless shelters?” Daniel said. “Church basements? Vagrant camps beneath freeway overpasses and bridges? Public parks? Alleys?”

  “No,” Sarge said.

  “Then go check, and don’t come back until you’ve exhausted all possibilities.”

  “If she hadn’t lost her tracking device…” Billy started.

  “But she did lose her tracking device,” Daniel said, pulling the amulet from his top drawer and dangling it from its broken chain.

  “And if we search everywhere you said and we still can’t find her, then what?” Billy asked, his tone edging perilously near rebellious.

  “Then I go with Plan B,” Daniel told him.

  “What’s Plan B?”

  “That’s where I prune back the dead wood and hire a couple of investigators who know what they’re doing.”

  “Dead wood?” Billy echoed blankly.

  Daniel smiled. “Emphasis on the dead.”

  FOUR

  Where’s Nevada?” Trick asked Marcello, who was busily tapping away at the keys on his laptop. He sat at the kitchen counter, not because the old barstool was a comfortable perch but because that position put him close enough to the phone jack to hook up his slow-as-molasses, landline Internet connection.

  “She said she planned to attack the library this morning.” Marcello glanced up, apparently took in Trick’s less-than-pristine appearance, and frowned. “Bad night?”

  Trick nodded without elaborating. Just the memory of the heartbreaking sobs that had gone on half the night was enough to set his teeth on edge. His room still reeked of the whiskey he’d used to dull his senses.

  “Taking a sleeping pill would make more sense,” Marcello said, as if Trick had given a full explanation.

  “Sleeping pills set the dreams free.” Nightmares, he meant. He poured himself a cup of coffee. “I want you to check something for me. Do a Google search or whatever.” Trick himself was virtually computer illiterate.

  “What am I supposed to be searching for?”

  “Two names. First, a woman named Yelena something who died recently in a home invasion. Second, a doctor who runs some sort of research facility.”

  “Does this doctor have a name?”

  “Presumably.”

  Marcello gave him a nasty look. “And it is?”

  &ldqu Vwido;Sorry. No clue. No, wait. His nickname’s Dr. Poison Apple.”

  “Most helpful,” Marcello said, heavy on the caustic wit. “Do you know what sort of doctor he is?”

  Trick shrugged. “A psychiatrist maybe.”

  “You have given me very little to work with,” Marcello complained. “A woman’s first name and—”

  “An uncommon first name,” Trick said.

  “In the U.S.? Yes. In Russia? No.”

  “Which works in our favor since I want you to limit your search to the U.S.”

  Marcello made a rude hand gesture. “As for this Dr. Poison Apple…” He raised both hands in mock surrender, then heaved an exaggerated sigh. “Are there any other miracles I can perform for your amusement?”

  “I’ll ignore your feeble attempt at sarcasm,” Trick said. “And yes, I’d appreciate one more miracle. I’d like you to do a general search for young women recently reported missing from private institutions.”

  “Mental hospitals, you mean?”

  “Possibly.” Trick frowned. “Though I doubt it. I think it will be some sort of research facility, Dr. Poison Apple’s research facility, to be precise. I suspect it’s a place that specializes in the investigation of psi powers.”

  “What are psi powers?” Marcello asked.

  “Extrasensory perception, telepathy, telekinesis, anything along that line. And you might want to cross-reference that search with the search for the recently deceased Yelena.”

  “You are trying to find out where Nevada came from,” Marcello said.

  Trick nodded. “Also who’s after her. And why. But I don’t want her to know what you’re doing, okay?”

  “I will exercise the strictest discretion.”

  Nevada sat on a lichen-covered boulder in the shade of a big pine, staring out across the water. She hadn’t realized the Granger mansion stood on the shore of a mountain lake. The water wasn’t visible from the house. Trick said they thought it had been originally but that in the years since the mansion was first built, the trees had encroached upon the view. And what a view. Steep, pine-covered slopes rose sharply from a crescent of sparkling water. Cobalt blue. The same color as Trick Granger’s good eye.

  She sighed. If only her life weren’t so unbearably complicated. If only…

  She remembered the gentle touch of his hand, the raspy rumble of his voice, the heart-melting charm of his smile.

  Damn it.

  “Damn it!” someone said behind her.

  She turned so sharply that she nearly gave herself whiplash, but there was no one in sight. Just trees, trees, and more trees. Silently, she slid from her rocky perch, prep [ky f wared to run back up to th
e safety of the house. The only problem with that plan was, the voice had come from the direction of the house.

  “Son of a bitch!” the unseen man shouted.

  If he was trying to sneak up on her, he was doing a lousy job of it, and that would seem to indicate that he wasn’t trying to sneak up on her, that, in fact, he wasn’t even aware of her. This theory seemed to be borne out when the man finally appeared, crashing through the lower limbs of a young pine, then sliding downhill on a slippery layer of pine needles, stopped only when he crashed into the rock where she’d been sitting. The surprise on his face would have seemed comical if she hadn’t been so rattled.

  “Well, hello,” he said. He glanced back over his shoulder. “You probably heard…sorry about that, miss. Didn’t mean to sully your ears. Didn’t know anyone else was around. Take my advice. Never try to hike in the timber wearing cowboy boots.” He raised one foot and tapped his sole. “Slicker than sn—” He stopped abruptly, censoring whatever he’d started to say.

  Slicker than what? Nevada wondered. Snail slime? Snowballs? Snake oil? She studied the man. He was tall. Even without the high-heeled cowboy boots he’d have been tall, even taller than Trick and Marcello, who both topped six feet by a good inch. She did a quick inventory: shaggy brown hair, gray eyes, beard stubble, and a smile that showed off perfect teeth. Good-looking and very much aware of it.

  “This is private property,” she told him.

  The smile faded. He blinked twice, perhaps surprised to find himself somewhere he hadn’t meant to go or perhaps just surprised to discover that his charm hadn’t worked. “Britt said—”

  “You’re a guest at the lodge.”

  “I am,” he said.

  “There’s a fence separating the two properties, but it doesn’t go all the way down to the lake. You must have come across below that.”

  “Didn’t mean to trespass on your property,” he said, and he sounded sincere. Nevada wasn’t sure why she didn’t believe him. Maybe because he was laying on the charm so thickly. Or maybe because she’d have seen him wandering onto Granger land if he’d crossed at the shoreline any time within the last half hour.