Forever and Always

by Jude Deveraux

  Suddenly, the door was flung open and there was Darci. “What in the world are you doing hiding in a broom closet?” she asked. “And what are you so happy about?”

  “He’s here,” I said. “I know it.”

  Darci

  Chapter Seventeen

  “I WANT TO HEAR EVERY WORD,” I SAID AS I LEANED against the wall. Linc was in the shower in the men’s bathroom down the hall from his room. The door was open so we could hear each other, and I did everything in my power to not think of his naked body. I made a vow that if I ever helped anyone else it would be a woman or a man as old as Henry.

  After I’d rescued Linc from his hiding place in the cleaning closet (mists of his aura had been drifting out through the transom) we’d gone back to the Quarters to talk. We had just minutes before dinner so I wanted to hear whatever it was he was so excited about.

  He’d asked me about my day, but I didn’t tell him about meeting Henry. I hadn’t sorted that out in my own mind yet, so I could tell him nothing. To distract him, I told him about Amelia’s nightly wait for Martin—who never came. And he told me that the women had said that Amelia was waiting for her child, so I told Linc what Henry had said happened to Martin’s spirit, but I didn’t tell where I got the information. I felt Linc’s sadness at all of it, but like me, he knew love knew no color, race, or religion.

  “We’ll be there to meet her tonight,” Linc said, and I agreed, but I cautioned him that he had to do what I said. I’d know what Amelia wanted.

  “So tell me what you overheard from Sylvia and Mrs. Hemmings.”

  “Sylvia says Delphia and Narcissa think you’re a spy,” he said, then told me what he’d overheard the women say.

  I smiled and silently congratulated myself. I’d done a good job of directing everyone away from the truth of what I wanted. “Promise you’ll do what I say or I’ll make sure Amelia isn’t there tonight,” I said to Linc.

  “If she’s been showing up at that tree for a hundred plus years, how will you stop her?”

  “I have ways. I need your promise. I don’t want tonight messed up. No playing that I’m the slave she hates. Tell Amelia I’m your friend and must stay with you.”

  He promised he’d behave himself. Of course I wouldn’t do anything like send Amelia away, but I didn’t want Linc to know that. I just wanted to find out all we could from her, and when it came to ghosts, I had much more experience than he had.

  Once we’d settled it between us about Amelia, he thrust a toy tractor into my hand and I became nearly as excited as Linc. Yes, it was his son’s and yes it had been put there on purpose. Linc thought his son had put the toy in the room, but I knew this was the work of Devlin. The spirit wouldn’t tell me outright where the boy was, but it looked as though he was going to eventually lead us to the child.

  Under normal circumstances, if I’d held something owned by a person, I could have told where he was, but Devlin had put only what he wanted me to know in that toy. The child was well, was being taken care of, and he was being…

  I rubbed the toy and tried to figure out what I was seeing. Stubborn. The child was being stubborn.

  Stubborn about what? I wondered.

  All that was important was that I knew Devlin was helping—slowly and in his own way, but he was helping. I had no doubt that Devlin had arranged for Linc to overhear the women, and the spirit had made the women talk while sitting in the hallway near an open transom.

  “Someone wanted me to meet Henry,” I said.

  “Did you say something?” Linc asked as he turned off the water.

  “Just thinking out loud.”

  “So what do you think?” he asked. “Do you think the women were referring to my son?” He was standing in the bathroom door with only a white towel around his middle.

  I was very glad he couldn’t see auras because I’m sure mine must have looked like a fireworks explosion. It was a cliché but he looked better in person than on screen.

  Able to see auras or not, he knew what the sight of his beautiful body did to women. “How about a quickie before dinner?” he said, leering at me.

  I laughed and that dispelled what could have been an awkward moment between us. Turning, I went down the hall to his bedroom. “Yes, I think they were talking about your son. But I can’t figure out what power he has that these women want. Your grandmother was a healer but these women seem to want someone killed. It doesn’t make sense.”

  Linc was pulling clothes out of a chest of drawers. “Isn’t it all the same?” he asked. “Give sickness, take away sickness. Same coin; two sides.”

  He’d said the words while holding socks up to the light, but when he said it, we knew. He looked at me and I looked at him, and we knew.

  Yes, the child could heal, but as Linc had said, the opposite side of the coin was to give sickness. Pappa Al had told us that he and his wife had been offered a lot of money to make rich people well. How much more would they pay to make someone ill—ill until they’d died?

  Linc stood there in just his towel, holding his socks aloft, one navy and one black, and stared at me. “No hit man,” he said softly. “Nothing that could be traced back to them. No danger of being caught.”

  “Mrs. Hemmings wants her ex-husband’s new wife dead so he’ll return to her and Daddy’s money.”

  “Sylvia wants her rich old husband to die before the divorce is final,” he said.

  “But your son is stubbornly holding out so the women are—”

  “Waiting,” Linc finished. “They’re killing time by getting daily massages from the ‘world’s worst masseur,’ and they’re pretending to believe in fortune-telling done with a crystal ball someone found in the basement.”

  “Which just happens to hold something very powerful.”

  “But only you are weird enough to know that. Sorry. No offense.”

  “None taken.” I began to pace the room, thinking about it all, seeing how it all made sense. “Maybe the child is being protected by Devlin,” I said. “I don’t think the boy has the power to block me from finding him, but maybe Devlin does.”

  “Who is he anyway?” Linc asked, stepping behind the closet door to get dressed. “And don’t tell me that he’s anybody he wants to be.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, putting my fists to my temples.

  “So much information is going round and round inside my head. Or maybe no information is in my head. Who started all this? Who told you your son was missing in the first place? I think you were given the note while you were near my mother so she’d see it and ask me to help you. From the beginning someone has wanted me involved in this. Was someone waiting for something to happen to pull me into this, or was your son kidnapped to make me come here?”

  “If someone wanted you all he’d have had to do was call you and say, ‘I have information about your husband.’”

  I sat down on the edge of the bed. “That’s true,” I said.

  Linc sat on the chair and began pulling on his socks. “So tell me, are we any closer to finding my son than we were ten minutes ago?”

  I shook my head. “Not as far as I can tell.” I held up the little tractor. “He’s safe. I can feel that. He’s not in danger except—”

  “Except for what?”

  “Loneliness.” I looked at Linc as understanding came to me. “They’ve taken his mother from him and they’re telling him that if he doesn’t do what they want, his mother will be killed—like the woman in the newspaper was.” I stood up as I began to see things. “The woman who was in the car was a hitchhiker, a runaway. It was made to look like Lisa Henderson died so the child would have no legal guardian. The mother wasn’t killed because they needed something to threaten him with. ‘If you don’t do what we want, your mother really will be killed,’ that sort of thing.”

  “Who are ‘they’?”

  I stopped moving. “I don’t know. Something powerful is blocking me from knowing. I thought it was the child but—”

  “Whoa
,” Linc said. “The kid can heal and that’s all. That’s bad enough. I don’t want him to be some little freak with so-called powers.”

  I opened my mouth to bawl Linc out. I’d been a child with power, and my daughter and niece were children of power. I took a deep, slow breath. Because of my abilities, I’d had a childhood of extreme isolation and loneliness, and my children had to be isolated from other children. Unfortunately, what Linc was saying was right.

  “I don’t think your son has enough power to be called a freak,” I said, rubbing the tractor hard. “In fact I’m not sure he can do what it’s believed he can do. I think these women will be charged millions of dollars, and if the people they want dead don’t die, what can they do? Go to the police? Report the scam? They can’t very well say they paid a child to kill someone.”

  Linc finished tying his shoes and stood up. He was wearing taupe cotton trousers and a loose-knit taupe sweater that molded itself over his pecs. It was Adam’s sweater.

  “Stop looking at me like that,” Linc ordered, “and let’s go to dinner.”

  As we walked together, he took my arm in his. “Quit thinking so hard. You know, today I was ready to give up on all this, but I think there’s hope now.”

  I didn’t feel optimistic. In fact, I was feeling like an idiot. Maybe I’d been spoiled in my life because it’d always been easy for me to figure things out. There weren’t too many mysteries to me. I could feel a photo and tell whether the person was dead or alive, and I could usually tell where the person was. “Right now he’s taking a shower with a woman who used to work for him,” I’d once told my husband’s FBI friend. They couldn’t find the man but they easily found his former secretary—and he was with her.

  But this little boy had me stumped. I knew it was for a reason and I knew that some “force” was doing it, but I didn’t know who or why. I was sure that Henry and Devlin knew a great deal, but they weren’t telling.

  “Test.” The word rolled round and round in my head. What test? When? Who was doing the testing? And, most of all, when it came, would I pass?

  “Should I take Mrs. Hemmings?” Linc asked, meaning he’d sit by her at dinner and question her.

  But he sounded so serious and so much like his detective alter ego that I couldn’t help teasing him. “Can you take her? Are you big enough?”

  Linc didn’t smile. “Actually, I don’t think I am.”

  I laughed and we entered the house smiling.

  I didn’t know the six women guests as well as Linc did. In fact, I had unwisely dismissed them as of little consequence. I’d seen that they were a cold, heartless lot, but I think I’d stereotyped them and left it at that. They were women with too much money and too much time and nothing to do with their lives.

  As I took my place next to Sylvia at the table, I looked at the women anew. Each of them hated someone enough to pay a child to give that person a fatal illness.

  I looked at Mrs. Hemmings down the table. It was easy to see that she’d once been pretty, but she wasn’t anymore. She’d had too soft a life and it showed in her eyes and body. Her husband probably left her because he’d grown tired of her sense of entitlement. “Of course I should have anything I want,” I could almost hear her say. “My daddy protects me.”

  Beside me was Sylvia Murchinson and of the women, I disliked her the most. Whereas the auras of the other women had redeeming qualities in them, Sylvia’s did not. She was surrounded by the colors of sludge: gray-greens, murky browns, all swirled together with black. Sylvia Murchinson cared about no one on earth other than herself.

  It wasn’t easy to make myself smile at her and be friendly. I chatted with her and told her things that would confirm what she thought she knew about Linc and me. I told her I’d visited the local church that day and seen the cemetery. Over the second course, I lowered my voice and asked if she knew where a slave who’d led an uprising in 1843 was buried.

  She was totally uninterested. If I didn’t have my abilities, I think she would have picked up her plate and moved away. But I concentrated and made her stay where she was. Hers was a difficult mind to reach. She seemed to have made up her mind years ago and not all the True Persuasion in the world was going to change it.

  I willed her to tell me about her husband. If I could get her to talk about her hatred of him perhaps she’d reveal too much. I also willed her to like me so she’d tell me as much as possible.

  Finally, when we were served a plate of tough roast beef, she said, “I don’t mean to insult you, but did you know that you look very much like the Hillbilly Honey?”

  This was not where I wanted her to go. As I tried to cut the beef, I worked to turn her mind to other things.

  “I’m glad you aren’t the Hillbilly Honey because I was the one who told my husband to call her that.”

  I quit cutting but I didn’t dare look up. “Did you?”

  “Oh yes. My husband is Howard Murchinson, owner of the newspaper Secrets Revealed.”

  “The tabloid,” I said, barely able to breathe.

  “Yes. ‘Tabloid’ has become a derogatory term but I don’t mind it. You know, I never got any credit for anything I ever did for that man. Take the Hillbilly Honey, for instance. You know that book about her?”

  “Yes,” I managed to say.

  “I was the one who got it published. The poor kid who wrote it was barely out of college and he’d sent his exposé of this weird Kentucky hillbilly to every publisher in New York but no one would publish it. They said it was libelous and even that it was trash. Finally, he sent it to my husband, who I can tell you never read a book in his life, but I did and I thought the book was great. What a gold digger she was! I told my husband he should publish it. I said, ‘She’s your kind, a real hillbilly honey.’ You see, my husband was born in Tennessee.

  “You know the rest. The book came out and made millions. Of course the Montgomery family sued. After all, they had to protect their name, but my husband was prepared for that. He’d cooked the books. The sales were double what he reported to the court so he paid the Montgomerys, but it was nothing to what that book earned.”

  She was laughing, pleased with what she’d accomplished. When she put her hand on my arm, I had to take deep breaths. I wanted to set fire to her hand, to her entire body. For real.

  Oblivious, she kept talking, still under my spell of telling me secrets. “Then, when that woman’s husband disappeared, it was I who said she probably killed him. I knew Howard had made a lot from the original book, but he’d also had to pay a lot, and he didn’t like that. Howard doesn’t like to lose. And when the Montgomerys gave his money away to some charity, it was like they were saying his money wasn’t good enough for them to touch. I can tell you that Howard was furious.

  “He got all the Montgomerys back, though. Howard made the whole world believe the Hillbilly Honey had killed her husband. Oh! Look at the time. I have to go. Nice talking to you. Let’s sit together every night. I rather like you. Maybe we’ll be friends forever.”

  I watched her walk out of the room and, like a video, scenes played through my head. There was the misery that book had caused in my family. The Montgomerys blamed themselves for teasing me, but they’d done it with love, never animosity.

  My children! I thought, including my niece with my daughter. They’d had to endure taunts and ridicule. They’d seen the woman spitting on me. They were now living away from their mother because of what this woman had done.

  I looked at the back of Sylvia Murchinson’s head as she left the dining room. I could kill her, I thought. Right now, I could make her brain explode and any investigation would say it was “natural causes.” No one would ever know.

  Somehow, I managed to keep my temper intact. I watched her until she left the room, then sat there, unable to eat anything.

  Linc

  Chapter Eighteen

  I DON’T KNOW WHAT THAT CATTY SYLVIA MURCHINSON said to Darci, but it had a deep impact on her. Darci was sitting at the dinner
table but it was as though she wasn’t there. She ate nothing, spoke to no one.

  When the long meal finally ended, the women gathered around me, issuing invitations that ranged from lewd to of such loneliness they were frightening. I looked over their heads to Darci but she was still sitting at the table. The waitresses were clearing the dishes away around her, but Darci just sat, her hands in her lap, her eyes straight ahead.

  As politely as I could, I pushed my way out of the encircling women and went to the table where I leaned across to Darci. “Could you get those vultures off of me?” I asked. “True Persuade them to go away.”

  Darci looked at me as though she’d never seen me before.

  “What the hell did she do to you?” I muttered. The women were around me again, pulling on my arms and jabbering about what they wanted me to do with them and for them. They wanted me to go into town with them and go dancing. They wanted moonlight massages. They wanted skinny dipping in the pond.

  As I looked at them I saw how much work Darci did when she kept the women away. Except for Darci, these creatures would have been all over me, the only male here, even if I’d slept inside a sarcophagus in the crypt.

  But now Darci was keeping no one away. I put my hands on little Miss Burns’s shoulders, picked her up, and moved her to one side so I could make a pathway. I went around the table, took Darci’s hand and pulled. When she didn’t move, I picked her up in my arms and carried her to the dining room door.

  Turning back, I looked at the women and said that if any of them came near me tonight, she’d be taken off my massage list forever.

  They were reluctant but they didn’t follow me as I took Darci up to her room. Behind me, I heard hissing, and words such as, “Who does he think he is?” reached me, but they didn’t follow.