“Oh, she was such a nature enthusiast. She grew up in the country, out near State College, but when she and my dad married and he got the teaching position at Drexel, they moved to the city. I don’t remember her ever saying that she hated it, but we all knew she did. Every chance she got, she packed us into the car and drove us out into the country. Annie and I still laugh about Mom’s little nature moments. We’d be driving along the road and she’d slam on the brakes and point out the window with great excitement. Hawk in the tree! Herd of deer! Momma fox and kits! Swans in the pond!”
Mara laughed out loud, remembering her mother’s enthusiastic pronouncements. “And when we went up to the cabin, she never gave us a minute’s peace. There were times we’d be sound asleep, and she’d wake us up to see the hummingbirds at the feeder or a baby owl on the deck railing. And hike, omigod, did that woman like to hike. She drove us crazy, making us walk with her when we were little, but when we got old enough to protest, she didn’t force us. She’d just go off by herself. Annie and I just didn’t get it, you know, that she’d want to walk the same trails and see the same trees and the same caves over and over. But somehow she saw something new every day.”
“How old were you when she died?”
“Eleven.” Her voice softened. “When she realized that she wasn’t going to get any better, she couldn’t decide whether she wanted to die at home or at the cabin. By the time she decided on the cabin, it was too late, she was too sick to travel. In the end she said it was just as well. She knew that Dad would eventually sell the house in the city, but he’d never sell the cabin. And at least when we went there, we wouldn’t be thinking about her having died there.”
“And your father?”
“He and my stepmother moved to Las Vegas about nine years ago, after he retired. He died four years ago. And Mom was right about him never selling the cabin. He gave it to Annie and me outright. He didn’t set a foot in it after Mom died. We think he just couldn’t bear to be there without her, her presence is so strong.”
She paused, remembering.
“She used to bring us things from her walks. An eagle feather, a stone arrowhead, a pretty flower, something. I used to love those little gifts. I wish I’d told her—just one time—how much it meant to me that she always brought me those little surprises.”
“I’ll bet she knew.”
“I hope so. Sometimes it hurts so much to think about that time before she got sick. Sometimes I just wish I could reach across time and pull those moments into the present. . . .”
“You can,” he said as he pulled into the gas station. “That’s what memories are.”
He got out and filled the tank while Mara went into the station and bought two cans of soda from the machine and got directions to Hawk Mountain from the teenage boy who was manning the cash register.
They were just getting into the car when Aidan’s phone rang.
“Shields . . . Oh, hi.” He stopped at the side of the station’s lot and put the car into park. “What’s up?”
Mara watched his face crease, watched him bite the inside of his lower lip as he listened attentively to the caller.
“I don’t know.” He turned to Mara. “How far are we from Lyndon?”
“Maybe an hour and a half, a little more. Depends on traffic.”
He glanced at his watch. “We can probably be there by four.” He hung up the phone and shifted into drive, then turned onto the roadway, heading back toward the highway, his face solemn, his comments limited to brief questions that gave Mara no real clue as to what was going on.
“I take it we’re on our way back home?” she asked as he stopped at a red light.
“We are. There’s been an odd development.” He watched the light, rolled up toward the intersection slightly, eager to move. “It looks as if there’s been a break-in at your house.”
“How could that happen?” She frowned. “I thought the police were watching my house.”
“They were. However, while the police were swarming to apprehend the suspect who was caught breaking into the home of one of the other Douglases under surveillance—that was the arrest that John called about yesterday—someone slipped the lock on your back door. Your presence is requested in Lyndon so you can go through the house and see if anything was taken.”
“But I thought there were supposed to be extra guards on my house.”
“Looks like our boy is much smarter than anyone gave him credit for. The guy they arrested turned out to have been set up by Channing to lure the police to another address while he broke into your home.” Aidan accelerated to pass an eighteen wheeler. “But the big news is that Channing has been positively identified as having been in the Lyndon area for the past month. Mancini tells me that not only have his employer and his landlord identified him, but Mrs. West claims he was at her house the other day.”
“Holy Mother,” Mara exclaimed. “Is she all right?”
“She’s fine.”
“But I thought the police were supposed to be watching for anyone who looked suspicious.”
“Well, that’s the thing. He probably didn’t act in any way that set off anyone’s alarms.”
“What was he doing there?” she wondered aloud.
“You’ll be able to ask her yourself, soon as we get to Lyndon. I’m sure she’ll have a story to tell.”
Mara fell silent again.
“You know, you’re awfully calm about all this,” Aidan remarked. “Most people would be a little more nervous or upset, knowing that a serial killer has their name on his hit list.”
She continued to stare out the window.
“After all, it’s a pretty scary thing,” he continued. “I’d be scared. It’s okay if you are. I mean, most people would be hard-pressed to think of something worse than having a serial killer on their trail.”
“Of course I’m scared. I’d be an idiot not to be afraid of Channing, knowing what he’s capable of. But is this the worst thing that could happen to me?” She appeared to ponder the question.
“Actually, the worst thing that could happen to me already did.” She turned toward him. “Seven years ago. If I survived that, I can survive this.”
“Assuming that we can keep you alive until he’s caught,” Aidan replied solemnly.
“That’s your job,” she said softly. “And I’d trust you with my life.”
It was on the tip of his tongue to remind her what had happened to the last person who had so trusted him, but the words stuck in his throat.
He gunned the engine and sped toward the highway that would take them to Lyndon, determined that history would not repeat itself.
Mrs. West had a story, all right, and Mara wasn’t even out of the car before the woman set off across the driveway to tell her all about it.
“. . . telling me that the delivery from Walsh’s was light by a few flats. He brought them on back for me just as nice as you please,” Mrs. West was saying as Mara opened her car door. “Now, I know what I buy, and I knew that I hadn’t bought those extra flats that he was bringing by, for all he insisted that I had.”
“He didn’t hurt you or scare you, though, did he?” Mara gave her neighbor a hug.
“Oh, my, no. He was a perfect gentleman. I gave him a bottle of water. It was hot and he was sweating quite a bit. Hard to believe he’s a cold-blooded serial killer.” Mrs. West shuddered. “He seemed like such a nice young man. But that was him. I saw the sketch on television and I called the police to tell them that he’d been here just a few days ago. He was asking about the police being over at your place, but I didn’t tell him why, nope. I wasn’t born yesterday, you know. I figured it was no accident that you were going out of town with that friend of Annie’s who anyone with eyes in their head could see has federal law enforcement written all over him. Oh, there’s that nice Detective Crosby. He’s the one I talked to when I called the police station. He’s been here all afternoon.”
“Hello, Mara.” Evan Crosby walked up the d
riveway.
“Evan.” She nodded. “I understand someone’s been in my house?”
“Looks that way. Come on around back.” He motioned to her to follow him, paused, and took a long look at Aidan.
“Detective Crosby, Special Agent Shields.” Mara made the introductions without breaking stride across the drive. The two men nodded to each other and followed her.
“Has anyone brought you up to date on what happened here the night before last?” Crosby asked.
“Only bits and pieces from Agent Shields. Why don’t you give me a quick rundown?”
He did.
“So you arrested this man, Mulholland, thinking he was the Mary Douglas killer—”
“Just as the real killer wanted us to do. We think he’d somehow managed to figure out that you were his real target, and that you lived here, so he had to draw attention away from this house.”
“He would had to have known that if Mara had been the target, the police never would have left her unguarded,” Aidan noted as they walked into the back hallway.
“I think he figured out real fast when all three patrol cars left at the same time that she wasn’t here,” Crosby said dryly. “But I think up until that time, he hadn’t been certain, and figured that maybe two of the guards would have left, and he’d have been able to take out the third one. I’m thinking that once he realized that Mara wasn’t here, he decided to take advantage of the situation and let himself in.”
Mara snapped on one of the lamps in the living room. She walked through to the kitchen, not touching anything, her hands clasped behind her back.
“There’s nothing out of place,” she told Crosby. “Even the mail is right where I left it.”
She pointed to the counter, where a stack of mail sat, topped by an open magazine.
“I was thumbing through my college alumni magazine when Aidan—Agent Shields—rang the doorbell the other day. That’s the article I was reading, and that’s right where I left it.”
She walked back through the living room. “Nothing out of place here,” she said, and walked up the steps.
Five minutes later, she came back downstairs.
“It doesn’t appear that anyone was up there, either.” She walked back down the hall to her den. “Only one other place to look . . .”
She turned on the light and looked around the small room. This month’s bills were still in their neat pile. She sorted through them, found them all there.
“I don’t see that anything has been touched, but I’m sure you’ll be dusting for fingerprints.”
“We were waiting for you before we moved anything.” Crosby nodded. “We were able to lift some prints off a bottle of water Mrs. West had given him to drink. Luckily the trash had not been picked up. We’ll be comparing them to prints we took from the rooming house where he’s been staying.”
“You have no idea where he is now?” Mara asked.
“No. Chances are he hasn’t gone too far. He’s gone through all this to get to you. I doubt he’s going to back off now.”
“You still think he’s connected to Vince Giordano somehow?”
“I do. I just can’t piece it together.”
“You haven’t been able to place them together yet?” Aidan asked. “Haven’t been able to put them at the same place at the same time?”
“Actually, we did do that.” Evan Crosby looked pained. “They were both incarcerated at the county prison for an overlapping period of forty-eight hours, but we haven’t been able to determine when they could have met. They were housed in different wings, they were not on the same meal or exercise schedule, they were not in the library at the same time. In short, if their paths ever crossed, we can’t figure out where or how. But we are still looking at that. If these two have met, it was sometime during those forty-eight hours.”
“If he was at the prison, that means he . . .” Mara turned toward the detective.
“Right.” Crosby nodded with no small amount of embarrassment. “It means he’d been arrested. And yes, it was our department that picked him up. He’d been stopped for a traffic violation, and it turned out there was a warrant outstanding for someone else with the same name. He was held from the time of the arrest until Monday morning, when he had his moment in court. He was apparently able to prove to the judge that he wasn’t the man described in the warrant, and he was released after paying the traffic fine. Don’t think for one second that I haven’t been kicking myself in the ass ever since I realized we’d had him, right in our lockup.”
Crosby stopped and appeared to be thinking something over.
“Shit,” he muttered under his breath. He took out his cell phone and placed a call, still cursing softly. “It’s Crosby. Check the roster of prisoners who were transported to the courthouse in the van with Channing. Well, then, get someone back there to open the office. I need to see that list.”
Curtis woke up from an unplanned nap on the sofa and, momentarily disoriented, blinked a time or two until he got his bearings. Ah, yes. Mara’s cabin. At least, he hoped it was Mara’s.
He stretched, arms over his head, and repositioned himself lazily. A rumble from his stomach reminded him that it had been several hours since he’d eaten. A glance at the clock told him that an afternoon snack was the way to go. He sat up, rolled his shoulders to work out a kink, and was just about to get up and head for the kitchen when the telephone rang, jolting him as its ring battered the silence.
After the third ring, the answering machine picked up.
“Hey, are you there yet? Guess not. I tried to call your cell phone, but sweetie, you have to remember to recharge that battery every once in a while for the phone to work. Anyway, I’m on my way up there now, should be there in less than an hour. I’ll stop at the market and pick up something for dinner. See you soon. Love you . . .”
Channing sat still as a stone, listening to the voice. Who was the woman who had left the message, and who had she left it for? The only thing he knew for certain was that someone was on their way and would be there soon.
He rose and began to pace, his mind racing. Was it Mara? Or this other woman, this Anne Marie McCall whose name had been on the magazine label?
Either way, he could expect company within the hour.
He’d be waiting.
CHAPTER
NINETEEN
ANNIE DROVE ALONG THE NORTHEAST EXTENSION OF the Pennsylvania Turnpike, thinking about food, the music on the radio, the scenery. Anything other than being at the cabin. Without Dylan.
She’d forced herself to make the drive several times since Dylan’s death, but those times, she’d had the house to herself. She’d slept in the bed they’d shared, clutching one of the flannel shirts he’d left in the closet, broke out the envelopes full of photographs, drank too much wine, and did what she had to do to work some of her grief out of her system. Little by little she’d done that. But she’d done it alone. Tonight she would share the cabin with her sister, and his brother. She wasn’t certain she was ready to do that.
On the other hand, she was intrigued, dying to know what exactly had been going on between Mara and Aidan over the past few days, though she had to remind herself not to hope for too much. After all, they’d known each other for only a few weeks. But Mara’s noncommittal comments had been real teasers.
Wouldn’t it be nice, she thought as she exited the highway, if the two of them found each other. God knows Aidan’s punished himself long enough over Dylan’s death, and Mara, well, she’s shown little or no interest in anyone or anything since that despicable excuse of a husband of hers slunk off into the night and disappeared with her child. Annie’s blood pressure began to rise just thinking about it. A man like Jules could turn any woman off men permanently.
Bastard.
Annie adjusted the volume on the radio and scanned for something she felt like listening to. Finding nothing, she slipped in a CD and hit Play. Clannad. Sweet and sad and soothing. Just the thing.
She was sti
ll wondering if something was developing between Aidan and Mara, and thinking how pleased Dylan would have been if it were, when she turned onto Poor Farm Road. She passed old Mr. Keppler’s place down near the main road, noted that it was dark, as she’d expected. Two years ago he’d moved to Florida, leaving the cabin in the care of his grandson. Annie wondered idly if the grandson—he was in his thirties and owned a gas station someplace in New Jersey—ever visited the cabin. It would be a shame for it to just sit, unoccupied, year after year. It was a cute place, she was thinking, if somewhat small.
There was no sign of Mara or anyone else when Annie reached the McCall cabin. Maybe they got a late start, or maybe they stopped for dinner, Annie thought as she parked near the mailbox, upon the side of which was neatly painted the number of the cabin. Two. It had been a joke between her and Mara, since mail was never delivered here. One went to the local post office to pick up mail. She and Mara used to leave little messages to each other in the box. Annie opened the box and looked in, but of course there was no message from her sister. Looking around, she spotted a dandelion in the grass. She picked it and put it in the box. If, on a whim, Mara should look, as Annie had just done, there’d be something inside.
Swinging her overnight bag onto her shoulder, Annie picked her way over the stones to the steps leading to the deck. The late afternoon sun had dropped down behind the house, casting shadows from the tall oaks that grew along the ridge out back. She paused, looking up at the cabin. Funny, but she’d never studied it in this light before. It looked dark, and maybe just a little foreboding.
Ridiculous. She shook her head as she began to climb the steps. Of course it looks dark. It’s late in the day, the sun is beginning to set, the place is empty, there are no lights on, and the drapes are all drawn. Tough to look cheery with all that going on.
Well, she thought as she unlocked the front door, I’ll pull back the drapes and turn on a few lights, maybe set a fire in the fireplace, so that at least this place won’t look so gloomy by the time Mara arrives. Whenever that will be . . .
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