Wicked is the night

by Catherine Mulvany

  The veil was lifting. She knew it, and she was scared to death of what might be revealed. Dead, she’d said at the Smith mansion and then again under hypnosis. Dead.

  Someone knocked softly on her bedroom door. “Nevada?”

  She recognized Trick’s voice, recognized, too, his concern for her. She must have seemed like a maniac, fleeing the breakfast room that way. “I’m not feeling well,” she called.

  Trick didn’t take the hint. He let himself inside, then closed the door.

  “I want to be alone,” she told him.

  “Yeah? Well, I want two good eyes and my racing career back. Guess we’re both doomed to disappointment, huh?”

  “Trick, go away.”

  “Not happening, lady.” He sat on the edge of the bed and pulled her into his arms.

  She stiffened at his touch.

  “Nevada, relax. I’m not the enemy. I’m here to help. Look at me.”

  “No,” she said, feeling as stupid and childish as she sounded.

  “Look at me,” he repeated softly as he brushed the hair gently away from her cheek. “Look me in the eye. What do you see?”

  “The reflection of a crazy woman.”

  “Not crazy,” he said. “Just distraught. Try again, and this time go deeper.”

  Once again she met his gaze.

  “What do you see, Nevada?”

  Love. She saw love, but how could that be? How could he love her when he didn’t know who she was?

  “What do you see?”

  “Someone who…cares about me,” she said.

  He pressed a gentle kiss to her forehead. “That’s right. I care about you, and I want to help you, but I can’t do that if you won’t tell me what’s wrong?”

  “I’m scared,” she said.

  “I got that.”

  “I used to be afraid because I couldn’t remember, but now it’s even worse. The fear, I mean. Because now I’m afraid that I will remember.”

  “Great-aunt Leticia’s mention of the Smiths was the trigger, wasn’t it?”

  “No. Yes. I don’t know. Maybe. The Smiths and then the Snowdens.”

  “I think the Snowdens are involved. I think they’re part of what you’re so terrified to remember. I need to call Marcello,” he said.

  The invisible snake gave another vicious squeeze. “Why?”

  “I need him to do some research. Unfortunately, I left my cell phone lying on the dresser in my room. Will you be okay alone here for a while?” Even as he spoke, he extricated himself from her and stood up.

  Nevada had never felt so alone in her life, but she managed to nod.

  He crossed the room, then paused with one hand on the doorknob. “Promise me something?”

  “What?”

  “Promise you won’t run away again.”

  The thought had barely skirted the edges»irtdth of her mind. How had he known what she was thinking?

  “Promise,” he said, more forcefully this time.

  “I promise,” she said.

  And then he was gone, leaving her alone with her fears.

  Trick stared at his reflection in the mirror above the dresser, hardly daring to believe his hunch had panned out. “Could you repeat that?”

  On the other end of the line, Marcello patiently reread the newspaper account of James Snowden’s death.

  “A bullet through the temple, you say?”

  “A bullet from his own gun, yes,” Marcello agreed. “Because there was no sign of forced entry, it was eventually ruled a suicide even though he left no note.”

  “And it says his daughter found the body?”

  “Yes,” Marcello said. “You think Nevada’s the daughter, do you not, this Whitney Snowden?”

  “I think so, yes. You should have seen her face when she saw the room where Snowden committed suicide. She fainted, Marcello, just collapsed.”

  “James Snowden was a wealthy man, Trick.”

  “Your point being?”

  “If Nevada is his daughter, then why was she virtually abandoned in a research facility thousands of miles from her home? If she were traumatized by her father’s death, one would expect the family to have placed her under the care of a first-rate psychiatrist.”

  “The article doesn’t say anything about what happened to Whitney after she found her father’s body?”

  “No. I read you the whole thing.”

  “Then you need to keep searching,” Trick told him. “Dig up everything you can find on Whitney Snowden. On the rest of the Snowdens, too.”

  When Trick returned to Nevada’s room half an hour after he’d left to call Marcello, he found her still lying curled tightly in a fetal position in the center of the bed. “Nevada?” he said softly, not wanting to wake her if she’d fallen asleep.

  But she wasn’t asleep. When she sat up, turning to face him, her eyes looked enormous, dark and haunted. “Did I kill him?”

  “What? Who? Oh, you mean Snowden. No! Of course not. Why would you even think such a thing?”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. According to the newspaper article Marcello located online, James Snowden wasn’t murdered. He committed suicide.”

  Her face went completely blank, as if this were a possibility that hadn’t even occurred to her. “Suicide?”

  “That was the official finding.”

  &ld» wi;

  “He shot himself in the head.”

  She stared at him in confusion. “That doesn’t sound right.”

  “I thought you couldn’t remember, so how would you know if it sounded right or not?”

  “I can’t remember,” she said slowly, “but I can almost remember. It’s like when you recognize someone’s face, but the name eludes you, so you start running through the alphabet. Nine times out of ten you can zero in on the right first letter even if you can’t nail down the name.”

  “And suicide doesn’t sound like the right first letter,” he said.

  “Something like that.” She frowned. “What else did you learn?”

  “His daughter was the one who found the body. In the study,” he added.

  “The same study where I fainted.”

  He nodded, watching her closely.

  “And you think I’m the daughter?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Not for sure, but you know whether or not it sounds like the right letter.”

  “And if I am?” Her lower lip trembled. A look of fear rippled across her face. “Why would my family have institutionalized me? Because I murdered my own father. That’s the only scenario that makes sense.”

  “Why would you murder your father?” Trick asked reasonably.

  “Crazy people don’t need rational reasons for violent acts.”

  “Okay, but there are two huge gaping holes in that theory. You’re neither crazy nor violent.”

  “Maybe I lost my temper. Maybe I killed him, but it was an accident.”

  “And the family covered up the crime by making it look like a suicide, so you didn’t have to spend time in prison.”

  “It’s possible,” she said.

  He narrowed his gaze. “So why then, after saving you from prison did they incarcerate you in the Appleton Institute three thousand miles from home?”

  “Because they were afraid of what I might do next?”

  “That argument doesn’t hold water. We’ve already established that you aren’t violent.”

  “Not now,” she said. “But maybe I was before. The treatments I had at the Institute could have altered my brain chemistry.”

  “Okay,” he agreed. “You think about that. Run through the alphabet and see how it sounds.”

  Nevada didn’t say anything for a full minute.

  “It doesn’t compute, does it?” he said.

  <»t="r ap height="0%" width="5%">She shook her head.

  “Because you’re not insane and you never were. The only thing that sets you apart from ‘no
rmal’ is your psychic ability.”

  “Limited psychic ability,” she corrected him. “I have no control over it. The flashes just happen.”

  “Okay, consider this,” he said. “We have a young girl—you’d have been what five years ago? Eighteen? Nineteen?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “We have an eighteen-year-old girl who goes waltzing into her father’s study to talk to him about something and finds him dead, an apparent suicide. So naturally, she screams. Other people come running. And let’s say the first one on the scene is the person who actually murdered the girl’s father and set it up to look like a suicide. But the instant the girl sees the murderer’s reflection in that mirror on the wall of the study, she realizes what really happened and she goes berserk. Maybe she’s acting so wild and out of control that she has to be sedated. I mean, there had probably been previous incidents, psychic flashes that led to odd behavior. How difficult would it be to convince everyone that the trauma of finding her beloved father’s dead body had pushed her over the edge?”

  Nevada looked troubled. “Trick, I don’t know.”

  “We should ask Great-aunt Leticia to hypnotize you again. The barrier is weakening, I think. This time she might—”

  “No,” Nevada said. “Not now. I need to think. And I need to be alone,” she added pointedly.

  “But—”

  “Please.”

  He held her gaze for an endless moment.

  “Please,” she said again.

  So he left her alone. It felt wrong, but he did it anyway.

  Nevada spent the rest of the day in her room, not even emerging long enough for meals. Rivers, at Trick’s insistence, had carried first lunch and then dinner to her room, but she’d ignored both the butler and the food.

  Worried, Trick checked on her every half hour or so, and when night fell, instead of sleeping in his bed, he slept sitting up in a chair in the hall outside her bedroom door. Just in case.

  Daniel woke with a start in the middle night, unsure what had disturbed his rest. He reared up on his elbows, staring into the darkness and listening hard. At first, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Then he caught a sharp, medicinal scent and heard the whisper of the wind riffling through the leaves of the big eucalyptus tree outside his bedroom window, a window always shut and locked for security reasons, even on balmy spring nights like this one.

  What the hell? He stared in disbelief as the heavy brocade draperies rippled and swayed.

  But how? Who could have…?

  And then he smelled another scent. Smoke. More specifically, cigarette smoke.

  He whipped around. A shadowy figure, black against charcoal, and male judging by its bulk, filled one of the club chairs flanking the hearth. The man drew on his cigarette, and the end glowed orange-red in the darkness.

  Daniel groped for the Ruger he kept tucked between his mattress and box spring. Feeling more in control with the gun in his grip, he reached out with his left hand and turned on the light, hoping to startle his uninvited guest.

  But he was the one who was startled. “Collier? What the hell are you doing? How did you get in here?”

  “Crawled in through the window,” Sarge said. “That alarm system of yours is shit worthless, by the way. Took me all of five minutes to disable it.”

  “I’ll get my security people right on it first thing in the morning,” Daniel said.

  A slow smile curved Sarge’s mouth. “Who says you’re going to be around first thing in the morning?”

  “What are you talking about?” Daniel forced a laugh. “I’m the one with the gun.”

  “And I’m the one with the bullets.” Sarge extended one big hand palm up, and sure enough, there were Daniel’s bullets. “Not that the bullets would kill me anyway, but I’ve got to admit, they hurt like hell. Kind of like a cigarette burn. You ever have a cigarette burn?”

  Sarge’s avid grin and menacing tone set Daniel’s heart racing. Fear curdled his gut, and for a split second, he couldn’t speak. Then he realized that showing weakness would only encourage the bastard. He needed to go on the offensive.

  “What are you doing here, Collier? You’re supposed to be hunting my half sister.”

  “Right. Hunting, not being hunted.” Sarge took another pull on his cigarette.

  “Someone hunting you?”

  “The police, as if you didn’t know.”

  Daniel scowled, aiming for righteous indignation, though he wasn’t sure how close he came to his target. Righteous indignation was hard enough to pull off when you were fully clothed. Being naked in bed added a whole new level of difficulty. “How would I know?”

  “Because you’re the one who set them on my tail.”

  “Why would I do that?” Daniel asked, genuinely surprised. “You work for me. Do you seriously think I’d take a chance on your spilling your guts to the cops?”

  “If you didn’t blow the whistle on me,” Sarge said stubbornly, “then who did?”

  “Oh, let me take a wild guess,” Daniel said. “You left another mutilated corpse behind.”

  Sarge’s expression lost some of its cockiness.

  “That’s what happened, isn’t it? Only this time, someone must have seen you leaving and have given your description to the authorities. Or maybe”—Daniel paused for effect—“you didn’t take quite»uo;see enough blood, and the would-be corpse was the one who ratted you out.”

  “No way!” Sarge said. “That old guy was nothing but maggot food when I left.”

  “So I’m right. You have been feeding on humans again, even after I warned you.”

  “Old guy who owns the marina on Midas Lake caught me stealing a boat. Bastard threatened me with a shotgun. What was I going to do? Let him blow holes in me? Or worse, let him sic the cops on me?”

  “Someone sicced the cops on you anyway. That’s the kind of thing you’ve got to figure will happen if you leave a string of dead bodies everywhere you go.”

  “One old geezer is hardly a string,” Sarge grumbled.

  “Was it worth it?” Daniel snapped. “Did stealing the old man’s boat get you any closer to finding my half sister?”

  Sarge had the grace to look embarrassed. “She wasn’t there. I took the boat across the lake to the Granger mansion, the place she’d been staying before, thought maybe I could squeeze a little more information out of the Italian that Billy and I had interrogated earlier. Only he wasn’t there. No one was. Place was empty, locked up tight.”

  “You did go inside to be certain?”

  “Yeah, I did.” Sarge frowned. “House had an abandoned feel to it, like nobody’d been there in a while.”

  “And you know this how? Some special vampire sense?”

  “Yeah,” Sarge said. “My overdeveloped sense of smell.”

  Daniel raised his eyebrows in silent derision. “Right.”

  “Milk,” Sarge said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The milk in the refrigerator was sour, and there were no food odors in the air. When you cook, the smell lingers. No one had cooked in that kitchen for several days, maybe not since the last time I was there. Plus, there were a whole string of messages on the answering machine.”

  Daniel perked up. “I assume you had the good sense to pocket the tape.”

  Sarge shook his head. “No tape. It was one of those digital machines. Maybe there’s an easy way to forward messages to a cell phone or something, but I’m not that techno savvy.”

  “Damn it, Sarge!”

  He butted out his cigarette on the polished surface of Daniel’s two-thousand-dollar end table, then smirked. “So I just copied them off by hand. Not that they’re gonna help. Just a bunch of telemarketing shit.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Nevada was sitting at the table in the breakfast room of ¾v> the Pierce Street Edwardian, nibbling at a croissant and listening with half an ear as Trick’s great-aunt, today in a sleek little Betty Boop wig, droned on and on about the endangered Presidio clark
ia (Clarkia franciscana). Then, right in the middle of a rant about the shortsightedness of certain city officials when it came to choosing between protecting native species and promoting land development, she suddenly asked, “Why are you so angry with Patrick? You’ve scarcely spoken a word to him in the past two days.”

  “I’m not angry—”

  “I realize he’s been pushing hard to get you to remember the past, though any fool should realize that’s the absolute wrong approach. He needs to back off and give you some breathing room.”

  “But he hasn’t—”

  “Nonsense. I heard him haranguing you earlier.” Great-aunt Leticia paused, a spoonful of oatmeal suspended halfway to her mouth. “Oh my God! Perhaps I should follow my own advice. I’ve been bombarding city officials with my demands for the last six months, and where has it gotten me? Exactly nowhere. Maybe I need to back off and give them some breathing room. Or at least not pitch any more fits in public the way I did with that pompous ass George Westbridge at church last Sunday.” She carried the spoon to her mouth, savoring the cinnamon-and-honey-flavored cereal with every appearance of enjoyment. Then, in another of her abrupt switches of topic, she asked, “Have you decided yet on your costume?”

  “Costume?” Nevada echoed.

  “For the ball tomorrow night,” Great-aunt Leticia said.

  “What ball?”

  “The annual Bay Area Literacy League Ball. The BALL Ball. Get it?”

  “Yes, and I’m sure it’s an excellent charity, but—”

  “Our goal is one hundred percent literacy in the city of San Francisco. To that end we donate books to both city and school libraries and fund a free tutoring program open to students of all ages.”

  “Yes, admirable work, I’m—”

  “Crucial really, and none of it would be possible without the proceeds from the annual ball. Everyone who’s anyone attends, including prominent figures from the entertainment industry, doctors, lawyers, politicians, sports heroes, artists, musicians.”

  “It’s very kind of you to think of me, Miss Granger, but—”

  Great-aunt Leticia raised both beringed hands like an ambidextrous traffic cop. “Stop! No buts allowed, my dear.”