But he decided to let that be. Instead, he asked the question that kept tugging at him.
“Were you aware that a girl killed herself at the high school? That week that Cara was there?”
Ms. Lewis was suddenly a bit more still. “What does this have to do with the case you say you’re on?”
He held her eyes. “I don’t know. Do you?”
A strange look passed over the director’s face. She didn’t answer—quite. “That school was bad luck for girls.”
Roarke felt a prickling of significance. “Bad luck how?”
“Two of them dead in a month.”
The prickling became a four-alarm warning bell. “Two?”
“Ivy Barnes. You don’t know this? The girl who was burned.”
“Tell me,” Roarke said, through a dry throat. There was a pause, and he could sense she was gathering herself. He found himself bracing for it.
For the first time the director’s voice was soft. “Ivy Barnes. She was abducted by a man in an unmarked van while she was walking to school. He raped her and then set her on fire.”
Roarke was very still. “I’m sorry, what?”
Ms. Lewis looked at him straight on. “You heard me.”
The familiar blackness and sickness rose up in him, threatened to encompass him. He heard his own voice speaking, flat, completely disconnected from anything inside him.
“When was this?”
“It was June.”
This didn’t add up. “You said she died the same month as Laura Huell. June would have been five months after.”
“It was seven months before. Ivy lived for seven months. She died the week after Laura Huell killed herself.”
Roarke left the group home in a fog. He knew he had the line of his investigation, now. Whether he wanted it was a different story.
An inconceivably vicious attack on a girl from the school that Cara had attended. Another girl who killed herself the same month that the first girl died.
It’s connected. It has to be.
He stopped in front of the fountain with its battered angel, and looked at the scrap of paper in his hand, at the address and the name that Ms. Lewis had scribbled for him, saying just, “This is who you want to talk to about that.”
CARA
Chapter Twelve
Cara is still thinking of Laura in the Palmers meeting when she takes her seat for Chemistry.
The crew-cut man in the suit . . . and the blood on the floor.
Palmers.
The club Lethbridge had said she should join.
She becomes aware of eyes on her skin, the crawly feeling of being watched. She jerks her head up to see the jock, Devlin.
She relaxes . . . but not much. She has already made up her mind that she must speak to him, but he saves her the trouble. He gets up from his seat and comes over to the empty desk beside her. As he sits he shoots her what must seem to any Normal girl a killer smile and says, “I keep wondering, ‘Is today going to be the day?’”
“What day?” she asks, wary.
“The day that you talk to me.”
She sees the interest in his eyes, senses the opportunity there. She shrugs, as if she doesn’t really care.
“Why don’t you talk to me?” she says.
He spreads his hands. “Anything. What do you want to know?”
“What’s Palmers?”
He wasn’t expecting that. “Seriously?”
She looks back at him, impassive.
“Well, do you know what Wayfarers is?”
She shakes her head. She doesn’t.
“A bunch of guys. Businessmen from the town. Like a business club. They get together once a week and talk about charity work. Put money into stuff like Little League and the football team, and scholarships. Palmers is the high school version of it. But you don’t want anything to do with that.”
“Why?”
“Uh uh. My turn.”
His voice is light, teasing, but she freezes, instantly on alert. “What, then?” she asks stiffly.
“Did you really do time in CYA?”
She looks at him. It’s answer enough.
“What for?” he asks.
“Aggravated assault,” she says evenly.
His smile slips. “Are you serious?”
She just looks at him.
“You seem so . . .”
He is about to say Normal, she can see it. She stares him down.
Normal? Sane? Really?
“My turn,” she says tensely. “Why don’t I want anything to do with Palmers?”
He looks startled, but regroups. “Just—it’s a lot of old guys sitting around jawing about community and church. Total buzzkill. The only reason to be in it is the scholarship money.”
“Scholarships,” she repeats thoughtfully. And then the bell rings and she is spared further conversation as Mr. Pring calls the class to order.
At lunch she sits alone at a picnic table, hunched over. Chattering students pass, boys shoving each other back and forth, girls gossiping about the weekend. The picnic table, like every other at the school, is covered with graffiti. Gang talk, dumb jokes, crudely sketched genitalia. Elise is a cunt. Chloe S. sucks dick.
Cara takes her pen and scratches her own word into the table: Palmers.
Laura was in the Palmers meeting. And she was bleeding.
But she was also bleeding in Social Studies, she reminds herself. All this pain. Where is it coming from?
And then, suddenly, like in a dream when you think about something and it appears, she is there.
Laura.
Walking alone, remote as a sleepwalker, as if on another plane from the rest of them. Walking right past Cara. Past the row of picnic tables.
There is a darkness gathered around her. Cara can feel the dread like a vile, thick smoke, choking her.
Laura makes a quick, furtive turn toward the handball courts, and is gone.
Cara sits still, suddenly in turmoil. She knows that cutting school can get her written up, get time added to probation. But Laura is going somewhere and it’s lunchtime and Cara finally has a chance to know more, know something at least . . .
So she follows.
She leaves the rows of picnic tables, walks toward the handball courts, slips around the same concrete wall.
Ahead of her, Laura wends her way through the concrete maze of the tennis and handball courts, heading toward the athletic fields. Cara follows at a distance. The lunchtime chatter of students fades behind her, and a dry breeze picks up, swirling dust on the asphalt. At the edge of the football field, Laura slips under the bleachers, and makes her way along the chain link fence at the back of the school.
She doesn’t falter; she knows exactly where she’s going, and seems to have done it before.
Even staying far behind, Cara can see there is a gap in the fence between two metal posts, concealed by the frame of the bleachers. Not much of a gap, not one that an adult could squeeze through. But for a slim, pliable girl? Nothing easier.
Laura reaches the gap and squeezes out, then walks quickly to the sidewalk.
Cara waits inside the fence, behind the frame of the bleachers, to see what she will do next.
Laura walks down the sidewalk several dozen yards, and stops at the bus stop.
Cara hovers under the bleachers, thinking. She knows that the other girl isn’t going to a dentist appointment or anything sanctioned, or she would simply have walked out the front gates. But this is complicated, now, because Laura will see her following. She doesn’t know why it’s so important for her not to be caught following, but she knows it is.
She scoops her hair up, pulls the hood of her jacket up over her head, and thinks herself invisible. She knows very well that thinking does not make her invisible; she is crazy, not stupid. But it always seems that when she thinks invisible she does not draw attention to herself; rather she seems to blend in with very minimal notice.
The city bus turns the corner at the en
d of the street and rumbles to a stop, trailing black smoke. The doors whoosh open. As Laura is boarding in front, Cara takes her chance. She times her walk . . . darting down the sidewalk just as Laura will be climbing the stairs inside and feeding her money into the coin machine.
Then Cara boards the bus and pauses on a bottom stair where she is hidden from the bus passengers. She looks through the railing at the aisle. Laura is walking down toward the end of the bus, her back to Cara.
Cara bolts up the stairs, drops her money into the coin machine, keeping her back to the passengers as she pays the fare, then slides into the first front seat and slumps as low as she can go.
Hunched against the window, she looks up at the mirror above the driver. She can see Laura in a back seat, staring out the window as if in a trance. It seems entirely possible that she is so in her own world that she has not seen Cara at all.
The bus heaves its doors closed, and wheezes its way through town. Cara watches out the window at the passing residential streets, no idea where they could be going. Then the bus makes a turn and motors up into the foothills.
Up ahead there is a grove of dull green trees—olives, Cara thinks—and the brighter, feathery green of peppers.
And then there is a high stone wall with a glimpse of some kind of old building behind it, Spanish style, with white walls and wood beams and adobe-tiled roof, shaded by huge oaks and willows. A church? Whatever it is, it seems very old.
There are open iron gates in the stone wall, and iron letters on the arch above the gates read: The Mission.
And Cara knows this is where Laura is going before the bus’s stop bell rings.
Cara stays low in her seat, and as soon as the bus halts, she is up and out, keeping her back toward the aisle as she slips down the stairs.
She bounds out of the bus and walks quickly, right up against the side of the bus so that Laura will not be able to see her from the windows above.
She rounds the back of the bus and then darts to a cluster of trees she can hide behind.
She hovers beside the trees, watching.
The bus pulls off, leaving Laura alone on the sidewalk. She looks up at the gates for a moment, then walks slowly up to them and through, up the long drive toward the entrance, a shaded patio with heavy double wooden doors.
Cara moves to the pillars of the front gates. From here, she can see the building: there is a bell tower with a cupola, part of a church, connected to a long horizontal building with several arches along an outside corridor.
She thinks back, wondering. She has studied the missions in one of her classes before The Cage—sixth grade, maybe. But she can’t remember there being a Mission Las Piedras.
Laura seems to move more slowly, her steps growing heavier the closer she gets to the front doors.
On the front patio she reaches to ring a buzzer on the wall. She speaks something aloud that Cara can’t hear, then reaches for a door and pulls it open, and disappears into the building.
Cara moves forward, staring up at the building. It may not be a mission, but it looks just like one, with arched windows in whitewashed walls and buttresses of old, dark wood. The drive up to the building is graveled, lined with olive and pepper trees and desert flowers beneath: cactus and Mexican sage. Hummingbirds dart between the purple flowers.
There is another high stone wall to her right, and somewhere behind it she can hear the high, sweet voices of young children.
She sees a glimpse of movement at one of the arched windows. A figure, hovering as if watching her.
She feels cold dread as she stares up, not knowing if this is real or another vision.
It looks like a skeleton. But it is moving.
ROARKE
Chapter Thirteen
It was up in the foothills, in a grove of oak and pepper trees. A high stone wall surrounding a building with the adobe, timber, stone, brick, and tile construction of an early California mission: whitewashed walls, arched windows, wood beams like buttresses with painted designs.
Roarke left his car in the small private parking lot and walked toward the front entrance, a shaded patio with heavy double wooden doors.
To his right was a high stone wall with an immense arched wooden gate. Roarke was startled to see a very realistic-looking skull and crossbones embedded in the mortar above the gate. He stepped closer, looking up at it, and realized it was a real skull and crossbones, yellowed and splintering.
As he turned back to the main building, his eye caught a flicker of movement in an arched window and he swiveled to look. A shadow figure was watching him, dressed in what looked like robes. There, and then gone.
He moved up to the patio, rang the buzzer on the wall beside the heavy wooden front doors. One door clicked open, and he walked through it into a reception area with a floor of shining adobe tile. There was an instant, ancient presence about the place, a feeling like stepping back in time. It could have been a chapel, although he suspected there was a real one somewhere on the premises.
At the desk he asked the plainly dressed receptionist to see Dr. Dubrow, the name Ms. Lewis had scribbled for him.
“Do you have an appointment?” the receptionist asked pleasantly.
A woman’s voice spoke from behind Roarke. “That would be me.”
Roarke turned, and a woman stepped from a hallway.
She was in her late fifties, he thought, maybe on the other side of sixty. She had keen and luminous eyes, and an elegant face, the bone structure of a classic film star—although at the moment she looked as if she hadn’t slept in a month.
And she was a nun. The cowl headpiece was the only official part of her garment, but she was dressed in a dark turtleneck and slacks, with a long robe-like black cardigan, and spectacles hanging on a chain around her neck instead of a rosary. Her air of authority was unmistakable.
Another nun, Roarke thought, bemused. What is it with me and nuns?
It had been just two months since a prickly sister in Portland had helped him at a crucial stage of his investigation into Cara Lindstrom. Roarke had not darkened the doors of a Catholic church since he was twelve. But extremely lapsed, half-Catholic upbringing aside, he couldn’t help recalling Sister Frances’s words:
“Agent Roarke, we’re the same. We deal with good people and we deal with evil people. We hone our skills so we can separate the evil from the good, see what’s coming before it has a chance to do damage. It’s my work every bit as much as it is yours. We need to be able to name it to fight it.”
He’d thought of those words often in the last two months. It had been a rare moment of clarity in the darkest and most conflicting case he’d ever encountered. Maybe another nun was just what he needed.
So he resigned himself and spoke aloud. “Sharonda Lewis said you’d be able to help me.”
“Ah. Ms. Lewis. Then I suggest we do our best not to disappoint her.” The nun reached out to shake his hand, a surprisingly strong grip. “And you are?”
Special Agent was on the tip of his tongue, but he moved past it. “My name is Roarke. I’m following up on a case for the San Francisco office of the FBI, and Ms. Lewis said you may have information.”
“What case is that?”
Roarke wanted a clean interview, with no preconceptions. “I can’t say. But I need to speak to you about Ivy Barnes.”
The look on her face was completely uninterpretable. “I see. Well. Come into my parlor.”
She turned and walked down a long hallway with the same gleaming adobe tile, and doors of old oak off to both sides. She stopped at the last door and ushered him in. Roarke stopped to take in the room. Whitewashed walls were barely visible between tall, dark bookshelves crammed full of thick texts. An intricately patterned wool carpet lay over the tiles; there was a huge cluttered antique desk with an armchair in front of it, a couch against the wall.
She closed the heavy wooden door behind them. “Please. Sit.”
Roarke took the chair in front of the desk and the sister mov
ed to a sideboard where a coffee pot and coffee makings were set on a tray. She picked up a can and a scoop, looked toward him.
“Do you like it extra strong, industrial, or lethal?”
Roarke paused. Is she serious?
“You pick,” he said.
“Your funeral.” She put down the scoop and poured from the can.
Roarke watched her. “I’m sorry, is it Sister? Doctor?”
“I’ve always been partial to Your Grace.”
The line was delivered without a trace of a smile. Definitely a live one, Roarke thought.
She poured water into the coffeemaker. “It’s Mother, actually, but no need to stand on ceremony. The children call me Mother Doctor. They see this”—she half-turned to him, gestured to her name plate: M. Dubrow, MD—“and they draw their own conclusions.”
Mother Doctor. That’s one for the books.
And yet Roarke found himself warming to the crusty nun, feeling both intrigued and more relaxed than he’d felt in months.
“And what is this place, exactly? A clinic?”
“Our patients are children who have been severely abused. Some of them need medical care. All of them need spiritual care. Or psychological care, if you prefer.”
“Which do you prefer?”
“That would depend on what grant form I’m filling out.” She left the coffee to brew and sat behind her desk. Roarke had the sense she was steeling herself.
“So you want to know about Ivy Barnes. Sixteen years ago she was fourteen, a freshman at Las Piedras High. She was walking to school in the early morning when she was abducted by a man in a white van. He took her out to the desert, raped her for two days, and then set her on fire and left her to die.”
Roarke was completely still, his throat so dry he couldn’t even swallow.
“She didn’t die. Somehow she walked, or crawled, out of the desert and stumbled onto a highway, where a passing motorist found her and called the paramedics. Somehow they were able to save her. Her flesh was melted onto her bones. Even months later, she looked like a living skeleton.”
Bitter Moon (The Huntress/FBI Thrillers Book 4) Page 7