"My God, it can't be."
"But it is," she said. "I've come for you. And for Laura. Surely you knew that I would." She lifted her hand and aimed a sinister-looking gun threcdy at him.
"How?" It was the only word Cecil managed to say.
"How did I get inside the locked gates of the Upton compound?" the woman asked, smiling wickedly. "I used Jamie's remote control, of course. I found it in his pants pocket when I stripped him."
"Who are you?" Laura managed to ask.
"Didn't your father tell you about me? No, of course he didn't He's ashamed of me. But he should be ashamed of himself, because he hasn't been a very good father. A good father never would have allowed you to become involved with Jamie. He was a bad man. A bad man like you, Cecil. He deserved to die."
"Daddy?" Trembling from head to toe, Laura clung to Cecil.
"It'll be all right Laura," he prothised her, praying fervently that he could keep that prothise.
"He's right, Laura. Everything is all right, now that I m here. I'll make sure no one ever hurts my baby. I'm a good mother. I was always a good mother, but they took my little girl away from me. That wasn't right, was j«And Jazzy raised my little girl and told her she was her mother. Jazzy and Jamie were so…"
She stared from Laura to Cecil as if she couldn't quite remember who they were. If only he dared to jump her, Cecil thought, dared to go for the gun and y to stop her. But what if she accidentally shot Laura?
''That's not right, is it? Jamie was mean to you-" She pointed the gun at Laura and Cecil gasped. Then she pointed the gun back at him. "I killed him because he was mean to my baby. And you've been a bad father, Cecil. A very bad father. And Jazzy was a bad mother. It was wrong of her to take you away from me. She had no right to tell my baby she was her mother."
"Daddy, what is she talking about? Do you know her?" "Yes… Daddy… tell her what I'm talking about. Tell her who I am."
Andrea swung open the French doors and marched out onto the patio. She had given Cecil more than enough time to brood on his own. It was time they talked, time they made plans to protect themselves and their daughters. Whatever it took to keep the truth hidden, they must do it. If anyone in their circle ever found out about Margaret, it would ruin them. And it would destroy Laura. She hadn't invested twenty-four years of her life in Cecil's daughter to let it be for naught. She loved Laura, as much as it was possible to love another woman's child, and for Cecil's sake she had protected the girl. Of course, loving Laura hadn't been difficult at first, not when she'd been an infant and toddler.
"Cecil, where are you?"
No response.
Damn, had he gone off for a walk and not told her? She glanced around and suddenly noticed two rather odd tilings-Cecil's empty teacup and saucer lay scattered in broken pieces on the brick patio floor. And only a couple of feet away, one of Laura's house slippers rested upside down, as if she'd lost it while running.
An unnerving sensation fluttered through Andrea's stomach. Something was wrong. Terribly wrong. Laura wouldn't have taken a walk with her father without her slippers. She had such sensitive feet that she'd never been able to play barefoot as a child the way Sheridan had.
"Cecil!" Andrea shouted. "Laura!"
Oh, God! Oh, God! She had no idea what had happened, couldn't even imagine why she felt so panicky. But her instincts told her that her husband and daughter were in danger. Serious danger.
Andrea rushed back inside and screamed, "Dora!"
The housekeeper came running as fast as a woman her age could. "Yes, ma'am, what's wrong?"
"Have you seen my husband and Miss Laura?"
"No, ma'am, not since Miss Laura came by the kitchen and asked me where her father was. I told her he'd taken a cup of tea out on the patio."
"Call Sheriff Butler immediately and tell him that Mr. Willis and Miss Laura are Missing."
"What?"
''You heard me. Call the sheriff right now. Something terrible has happened to my husband and daughter."
She tried to be gentle with Laura, but the girl was afraid of her. That was his fault, of course. In order to keep from hurting Laura, she'd been forced to use the chloroform on her as well as on Jamie. No, not Jamie. Cecil. Cecil Willis. A bad husband. And a bad father.
She had taken them back to her cabin. Since she would be leaving town as soon as she finished what she'd come here to do, there was no reason she couldn't kill them here in the cabin she'd been living in for quite some hme. After all, she'd used an alias and a phony ID. And °nce she left Cherokee County, no one would be able ° trace her. She had new identities chosen for herself and her baby, with all the necessary papers to prove they were who they would say they were. And she could do as she'd been doing for two years now, charge every-dhng to credit cards, pay a little along, and then change identities and disappear. She had been waiting and planning, knowing that she would eventually be able to punish the ones who had hurt her, the ones who had taken her baby away from her.
Her baby. Where was her baby? She'd left her sleeping when she'd gone to get Cecil, but when she brought him and Laura back to her cabin, her baby was gone.
Think, think, think. She tapped herself on the temple. Jazzy has your baby. She's been pretending to be her mother. Jamie gave your baby to Jazzy.
No, that wasn't right. It hadn't been Jamie.
But Jazzy had taken her baby. Jazzy had to pay with her life. She'd hurt…
Who had Jazzy hurt?
Laura.
Jazzy had hurt Laura.
She leaned over Laura Willis, who lay sleeping on the sofa, and caressed the girl's soft cheek. It hadn't been too difficult to drag the girl from the car. She was small and slender. Getting Cecil into the cabin had been more difficult because he was bigger and heavier. But she had managed by sheer determination.
"I'm going to get Jazzy and bring her back here. I want her to watch me kill him, but before I end his life, I want him to hear her screams. I'll make them pay, baby, I prothise. I'll make them pay for everydhng they've done to us."
Jazzy staggered around in her office. She was a bit tipsy. Not drunk, just feeling very little pain. That dhrd shot of whiskey had soothed her. And the fourth had numbed her. What she needed now was to get upstairs to her bed and sleep for about a hundred hours. Once she'd slept, once she'd erased both Caleb and Jamie from her mind, she would be able to decide what to do. Tomorrow.
Lacy could close up shop without her. She'd done it numerous times. And there was no need to bother her. I'll just sneak out the back way and go home. Don't want nobody making a fuss over me.
"Who the hell would do that, Jazzy, you damn fool?" she hollered.
She placed her index finger over her lips. "Sh-be quiet. You're talking too loud."
What if when you go home you can't sleep? What if you're not drunk enough to pass out? You '11 be in the bed where you and Caleb made love for the first time. Will you be able to lie there and not think about him? H
ell, no! You '11 wind up crying, that's what you'll do. Because you're in love with him. In love with another damn Upton.
So don't go home. You 're part owner in a couple of dozen cabin rentals. Choose one that's empty and spend the night there. But which one? The one where Reve Sorrell stayed. I don't think anybody has rented that one again.
Jazzy stumbled across her office, back to her desk, stepping over scattered debris on the floor. She rummaged around in the desk drawers until she found a set of master keys to the rental cabins.
Now what was the name of the cabin where Reve had stayed? Pines something or other. Two Pines. No, Twin Pines. That was it.
She dragged her sweater off the clothes rack in the corner, inadvertendy crashing the rack into the wall. gnoring the total mess she'd made of her office, she utfed the huge key chain in her sweater pocket and headed for the door.
Music mixed and mingled with other honky-tonk sounds and drifted down the hallway. Jazzy glanced up the hall, saw no one, and then went straight toward the back door that led into the alley. Her car was parked at the end of the street, on the corner by the alley near the outside stairs that led to her apartment over Jazzy's Joint. She felt in her jeans pocket for her car keys and sighed when she felt them there.
She'd taken only a few steps when she thought she heard something. Hearing bogeymen again? Ignoring the sound, she kept walking up the alley, toward the street ahead. When she'd almost reached the street, she heard a noise again.
"Is somebody there?" she asked as she turned around, then gasped when she saw the dark figure step out of the shadows. "What do you want?"
"I want you, Jazzy," the woman said. "I've come to take you to your lover."
"Who are you? What the hell are you talking about?"
"I'm the mother of the child you stole. I'm the wife of the man you seduced."
Jazzy tried to get a better look at the woman, but all she could see in the shadowy darkness was the shimmer of blond hair. "You're crazy. I've never fooled around with a married man. And I sure as hell never stole anybody's baby."
"Lying won't help you. Not now."
The woman moved closer, close enough for Jazzy to see her face clearly and to recognize the wild-eyed creature pointing a gun right at her.
"We're going to take a little ride."
"I don't think so," Jazzy said.
"We can do this the easy way or the hard way," the woman told her.
"I'm afraid it's going to have to be the hard way.
Before Jazzy realized the woman's intent, she aimed her gun at Jazzy's midsection and fired. The bullet entered Jazzy's belly like a hot serrated knife, ripping her apart with fiery pain.
When Jazzy dropped to her knees, the woman came closer and stood over her. Jazzy couldn't believe this had just happened, couldn't believe this crazy bitch had actually shot her. Gripping her belly with both hands, she felt the warm stickiness of her own blood. Oh, God, please help me.
The woman grabbed Jazzy by her hair. Jazzy yelped. She took hold of the nape of Jazzy's sweater and started dragging her down the alley. Damn, for a small woman, she was strong as an ox.
"Where… where are you taking me?" Jazzy asked, knowing that she was on the verge of fainting.
"Back to my cabin, of course. I have Cecil and Laura waiting for us."
Cecil and Laura? Laura Willis and her father? Jazzy realized she was fading fast and her thought processes probably weren't working all that well, but none of what this woman had said made any sense.
You're going to die if you don't do something, Jazzy told herself. But what could she do? She was bleeding profusely and about half a minute away from passing out. Leave a clue. It's only a matter of time until somebody misses you and comes looking for you.
While the woman continued tugging on the neck of Jazzy's sweater, pulling her along the rough alleyway, Jazzy managed to muster enough strength to ease out the big key chain from her sweater pocket and slide it quietly down on the ground.
* * *
Chapter 29
Dallas Sloan knew the signs. It hadn't taken him long to recognize both the subde and the obvious clues when Genny's mind left this temporal plane and moved into a spiritual realm. Whenever one of her visions took her away, she often became very still and very quiet and her eyes would glaze over. Then when she became fully immersed in that place out of time and space, where she witnessed either the future or events occurring somewhere else at that very moment, she often fainted dead away. If she was asleep when a vision happened, her body would become rigid only moments before she began tossing and turning. And more often than not, she would wake screaming.
Tonight she'd been wide awake. They'd been removing items from the dishwasher and placing them in the appropriate cupboards and drawers before turning in for the night They had been talking and she'd just made a comment to which he had replied. When she didn't respond, he'd looked at her and realized she was fading away, leaving him.
"Genny?" He grasped her arm and shook her gently.
The ceramic dish she held slipped from her hand and crashed onto the floor. Dallas shook her again. No response. Damn, he hated it when this happened. Hated it because it scared him just a little. Admit it, Sloan, sometimes it scares the bejesus out of you. Even now, after months of knowing and loving Genny, of day by day becoming more and more telepathically linked with her, he still felt overwhelmed by her psychic abilities.
Suddenly he knew, without a word being spoken and a split second before it happened, that Genny needed him to catch her before she fell. As she swayed unsteadily on her feet, he reached out and grabbed her, men lifted her up into his arms. Using his foot, he slid one of the kitchen chairs away from the table, then sat down with Genny in his lap. Holding her rigid body securely, protecting her with every ounce of his strength, he spoke to her inside his mind, hoping he could reach her and give her his support. He'd found that if he could link with her while she was in that other world, she was able to draw power from him so that when she came out of her trancelike state, she wasn't quite as physically weak and emotionally vulnerable as she otherwise would have been.
Stay with me, Dallas, Genny pleaded telepathically. It's bad. Really bad. Oh, God… oh God. ''Jazzy.''
"What is it Genny?" he said aloud. "What are you seeing? Is something wrong with Jazzy?"
Silence.
I can't lose the connection, Dallas told himself. I have to stay focused on Genny, on helping her.
For what seemed like an eternity, he couldn't sense what she was experiencing and it made him wonder if something or someone had severed the link between •hem. Then, with a tidal wave of sensation, she touched him, touched his mind and drew him closer and closer. He held her tighter and shut his eyes. Darkness. Utter and complete blackness.
Hang on to me, she told him. Keep calling my name so that I can find my way back to you.
Dallas saw nothing. He heard and felt only Genny. She was all around him and inside him, a part of him. Her body trembled involuntarily, then she began moaning. When she thrashed about in his arms, he trapped her in his embrace, cocooning her. Her moaning turned to sharp, high-pitched keens. And then she dissolved like ice in the snow-slowly, languidly-her body going limp and her mouth silent.
He held her all the tighter, poured all his mental and emotional strength into her, quite certain what would happen next. Genny's eyelids flew open and her black eyes stared sighdessly off into space. A millisecond later, she opened her mouth and screamed.
"It's all right, sweetheart," he told her. "You've come back to me. You're here in my arms."
The Last To Die Page 38