Haunting Rachel

by Kay Hooper

  There was nothing there.

  “Rachel!” Adam came up the stairs two at a time, his face pale and eyes almost wild. He had a gun, which he hastily stuck inside his belt at the small of his back as he reached her, so that he could put his hands on her shoulders. “Are you all right? Did he hurt you?”

  “No. No, I’m … fine.” She looked up at him. “Did you see? Did you see him?”

  “Yes,” Adam said. “I saw him.” And then he pulled her into his arms.

  As it turned out, Graham had been wrong about Simon being dead meat. He wasn’t happy, and he was in a great deal of pain, but he was very much alive when the paramedics wheeled him out.

  That made Rachel feel better. She didn’t know how she would have been able to bear it if a man had died trying to protect her.

  As for the man who intended to kill her, he was not as lucky as Simon. Then again, maybe he was lucky. The fall broke Graham’s neck.

  Which, Adam said viciously, would save the state a bundle and had probably made those in hell happy to see a new face.

  Rachel didn’t know how she felt about any of this yet. She was numb about part of it, about Graham’s massive betrayal and the incredible violence that had occurred here today. Yet there was a definite relief in the knowledge that it was over now, that finally her life could return to normal.

  And with that relief she found her mind dwelling instead on what she had seen at the top of the stairs.

  Tom?

  It was absurd, of course. Like the rose and the notepaper, the odd trip to the attic and the gift Tom had never given her, it had only been her imagination. Some trick of the light …

  Except that Adam had seen him too.

  Rachel couldn’t help remembering waking up on that early morning a decade before to see Tom standing at the foot of her bed. And she knew, she was absolutely certain in her own mind, that she had not dreamed that.

  He had come to her once in a moment of anguished farewell.

  Had he come to her again today, knowing somehow that she was in danger and needed him?

  Adam had seen him. And Nick might have seen him, since he’d been right behind Adam as they rushed into the house.

  They had all seen … a dead man.

  Rachel definitely didn’t know how she felt about that. On top of the emotions she had worked through, her feelings about Adam and Tom, her imagination working overtime, and the nightmares filled with tangled symbolism that had haunted her nights, to believe that Tom had actually come back to help her …

  For the first time, she had to wonder if it had been more than the voice of her own subconscious in those dreams and nightmares, if Tom had actually used that means to reach out to her, to try to help her, and warn her.

  And question her feelings about Adam.

  That was unnerving, to think that the first love of her life might be observing from some betweenworld, frowning over her choice of lovers.

  “I’m imagining things,” she muttered to herself. “Still imagining things. That’s just not the way it works.”

  Or was it? Did the dead watch over the living?

  “Here, Rachel—Fiona sent this in.” Mercy carried a tray into the study, where Rachel was curled up on the couch, wrapped in an afghan Adam had put around her.

  “She shouldn’t have bothered. She’s as shaken up as I’ve ever seen her,” Rachel commented, a little surprised by her own steady voice.

  “Well, she needs to be busy.” Mercy put the tray on the coffee table and sat down beside Rachel. She fixed her friend a cup of tea and handed it over. “And you need this.”

  Rachel sipped, then smiled. “Hot and sweet. You know, I’ve been drinking an awful lot of this stuff in the last couple of weeks.”

  Mercy eyed her thoughtfully. “Is that incipient hysteria or real, honest-to-God humor?”

  “The latter.”

  “Glad to hear it. Graham Becket isn’t worth a tear or a wasted regret.”

  Rachel frowned. “The guys are out in the foyer still talking to the police, aren’t they?”

  “Oh, yeah. Graham dropped the lockbox key when he fell, but the cops are more than half convinced they ought to keep it as evidence anyway. If I were going to bet, I’d bet on Nick and Adam getting it back.” Mercy fixed a cup of tea for herself.

  Rachel said, “Well, while they’re out there doing that, would you mind telling me how you guys showed up at just the right moment?”

  “That’s simple enough. Me.” Mercy, who had waited in the car until the shouting was over, grinned at her friend.

  “Thank you. What did you do?”

  “I found a note in Duncan’s personal computer files at the bank.”

  Rachel blinked. “I didn’t know he had any.”

  Mercy rolled her eyes. “Did he ever. I’d have turned them over to you eventually as part of settling his estate and clearing his things out of the bank, but when I realized Nick and Adam were up to something, it occurred to me that the only common denominator was Duncan. So I started going through the files on his computer. I thought I might recognize something odd more quickly than the rest of you.” She paused. “Of course, I also wanted to teach Nick a thing or two.”

  “Along the lines of—anything you can do I can do better?”

  “Something like that.” Mercy grinned again. “They were both really focused on the cloak-and-dagger aspects— which, to be fair, turned out to be where almost all the answers were. But I found one tiny little key among Duncan’s files.”

  “What was it?”

  “It was a note Duncan had made just a few weeks before his death. He’d been looking at some kind of storage property near the river, and he saw Graham come out of a seedy building—with Jordan Walsh. Something about what he saw bothered Duncan, even though he knew they knew each other. But the point was what his note told me. Nick had finally confessed about what was going on, what he and Adam were up to, and he told me who they suspected. He’d also told me they hadn’t found a sign of a connection between Walsh and any of Duncan’s friends. So I burst into Nick’s office and asked them if they knew about Graham.”

  Fascinated, Rachel said, “And then?”

  “When he realized that neither of the watchdogs they had guarding you had any reason at all to suspect Graham, and had in fact already let him come and go freely here, Adam went the whitest shade of pale I’ve ever seen and dove for the phone. In the meantime, Nick was pulling a couple of guns out of a drawer—guns in the bank! Can you believe that?—and the next thing you knew we were all in Nick’s car, breaking every speed law to get here.”

  “My God.”

  Mercy chuckled. “We picked up two squad cars along the way, which turned out to be handy.”

  Rachel took a healthy swallow of her tea, then said, “The cloak-and-dagger aspect. So that meeting today gave them some answers?”

  “Pretty much all of them, from what Nick told me on the way over here. Lots of lovely damning information about Walsh and his operations here in Richmond, all nice and neat on a computer disk. Unfortunately, though, the witness they thought they had turned out to be dead.”

  Rachel sighed. “With Graham gone, the witness gone —how much of this will ever come to light in court?”

  “Nick thinks most of it.” Mercy shrugged. “Your testimony is enough probable cause to start digging into Graham’s records—and what do you want to bet that, being an anal lawyer, he kept good ones? I bet he’ll hurt Walsh more than that other witness ever could. And then all those computer files the witness made copies of will give the prosecutors plenty of other places to dig. They’ll get him, Rachel.”

  “I hope so.”

  “They will. And in case you’re wondering, they’ll make it way too hot for him to even think about coming after you.”

  Rachel smiled. “It crossed my mind that I might be stuck here in the castle for a good long while.”

  “Not if Adam has anything to say about it. I gather he plans to take you away somewhere
for a while. Maybe on a honeymoon?”

  “He hasn’t said. Or asked, for that matter.” Rachel eyed her friend thoughtfully, smiling a little. “How about you and Nick?”

  Mercy widened her eyes innocently. “What about us?”

  “Ah. I thought so.”

  “Rats. What gave me away?”

  “Oh, just the way you talk about him.”

  “I gotta watch that,” Mercy muttered, then grinned. “I’ve got a bet with Nick that Leigh will faint dead away when I walk into the bank with a wedding ring.”

  “It’s that serious, huh?”

  “I chased the man ferociously until he caught me.”

  Rachel smiled at her friend. “I’m glad. He unnerved me for the longest time, but I have plenty of reason to be grateful to Nick.”

  “He’s a remarkable man.” Mercy shook her head. “Secretive as hell, though. I’m going to have to cure him of that.”

  “I have complete faith in you.”

  “Thank you. So do I, as a matter of fact.”

  Rachel laughed. “That poor man doesn’t have a chance, does he?”

  Walking into the study just then, Nicholas said with perfect calm, “If you’re referring to me, the answer is no.”

  Mercy gave him an innocent look than laughed. “What makes you think we’re talking about you?”

  “Just a hunch.” He put a casual hand on her shoulder, then looked past her at Rachel. “Not much longer now. The cops have agreed that your statement can wait for a day or two.”

  “Wow,” Mercy murmured. “I for one am impressed.”

  “Adam was … insistent,” Nicholas said. “In any case, they’re clearing out now. I know it’s been a hell of a day, but you should have some peace and quiet shortly. You can put all this behind you.”

  Rachel hesitated, then said, “When you and Adam came in, did you see what happened to Graham?”

  “Yes.”

  She looked at him, unsure how to phrase the question.

  Nicholas smiled slightly. “There have been times in my life when I know someone helped me. There was just no other way to explain it. Maybe we all have guardian angels. Whether they exist, or are who we think they are, doesn’t really matter, does it? In times of crisis, we somehow find a way to survive. It’s all that’s important, in the end. Survival.”

  “And asking no questions?”

  “Sometimes, that’s for the best. We don’t need to know all the answers, Rachel.”

  Mercy looked between them curiously. “Say what?”

  Nicholas glanced down at her, still smiling. “I’ll tell you later.”

  “You bet you will.”

  Rachel drew a deep breath, then smiled at him. “Did I say thank you?”

  “No need. We’ll have a lot to talk about, but that can wait.” He paused, then added seriously, “And you can feel safe in this house again, Rachel. We have men stationed outside, and this time they’re both close and very aware of who the enemy is.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’ll have your life back soon,” he promised her, “Walsh is about to find himself caught in a meat grinder. He’ll be too worried about his own hide to come after you again.”

  Rachel nodded, then looked past him as Adam came into the room.

  “They’re gone,” he announced.

  “And so are we.” Nicholas took Mercy’s hand and drew her to her feet. “We’ll go back to the bank and copy that disk, then personally deliver a copy to the D.A. Might as well get things rolling.”

  “Watch your back,” Adam warned. “We don’t know we weren’t seen at the meet with Sammy.”

  “We’ll be fine.”

  Mercy said to Rachel, “I’ll call you tomorrow,” then went out hand in hand with Nick.

  “How about that?” Adam said absently.

  “They’ll be good together,” Rachel predicted.

  “I imagine so. She seems lively enough. Gave Nick hell on the way over here once he told her—” He broke off.

  Calmly, Rachel said, “Once he told her about that meeting you two had today? It went badly, didn’t it? Mercy said something about a witness being dead.”

  Adam sat down on the couch beside her. “Nick’s informant was shot. Killed. But he lived long enough to tell us about the disk.”

  Rachel was afraid to try counting up the lives lost because Graham Becket hadn’t wanted to tarnish his sterling reputation. So she pushed that aside for the moment. “Did the police let us keep the key?” she asked.

  “It’s in my pocket,” Adam told her. “So we can go check out that safe deposit box tomorrow, if you feel up to it.”

  She didn’t know how she would feel tomorrow, but nodded. Another question was bothering her. “Adam, when you guys burst into the house, you had a gun.”

  “I still have, as a matter of fact.” Adam shrugged. “You’re safe here, Rachel, I promise, but I mean to be very careful nevertheless. At least until Walsh is too busy to give us a second thought.”

  Rachel leaned forward to put her empty cup on the coffee table, then sat back and smiled slightly as she looked at him. “Since when is an electrical engineer and designer comfortable with guns?”

  Adam drew a breath. “Well, I told you about meeting Nick in Rome.”

  “Yes.”

  “After that, I sort of helped him out now and then.”

  “But you were a college student.”

  “Most recruits are in college or fresh out. I wasn’t that young, Rachel. Besides, they used me mostly as a courier, and there wasn’t much risk involved in those assignments. A lot of foreign travel in the summers and during my breaks, but I enjoyed that.”

  “What about after South America? Was Dad right? Did you put yourself in dangerous situations after that?”

  “Maybe.” He shook his head. “At that point in my life, maybe I needed to risk to feel free. I don’t know.”

  “And now? You still work for them, don’t you?”

  Readily, he said, “Until this year, until Duncan was killed, I took an assignment every few months. It was travel outside the country, a break from my work that always seemed to reenergize me. I had a solid cover as a legitimate American businessman, and I was useful. It was still mostly courier work.”

  “But not always.”

  “No. Not always.”

  Slowly, she said, “I know I should be grateful, in a way. Your training and experience obviously left you with good instincts and quick reflexes, and I’d be dead if not for you.”

  Adam shook his head, but said, “However?”

  “However, if these past weeks have taught me anything, it’s that sometimes life can be dangerous enough even when we don’t go out looking for trouble.”

  He reached over and took her hand. “I know. Rachel, I’m out of that business now, and I don’t mean to go back.”

  She looked a little troubled. “What if it’s something you need?”

  “All I need,” he said, “is right here with me now.”

  Rachel managed a smile. “What about that company out in California?”

  “I’m thinking … we need an East Coast office. And Richmond is a great place for a business. You’ll sell one-of-a-kind designs in clothes, and I’ll sell electronic gadgets.”

  Before Rachel could respond to that, Fiona appeared in the doorway and announced belligerently, “I’ve got supper ready and you two need to eat. Miss Rachel, you haven’t had a bite since breakfast, and I don’t doubt Mr. Adam hasn’t either. So I don’t want to hear any arguing.”

  She vanished from the doorway.

  Adam looked at Rachel with raised brows. “Mr. Adam?”

  “The ultimate sign of approval,” she explained. “You’re in.”

  He grinned, then got to his feet and grasped her hands to pull her gently up and out of the afghan cocoon. “Fiona approves of me. How about that? I thought I was going to have to buy her diamonds or something.”

  “Diamonds wouldn’t have worked. So I’m glad
you didn’t waste your money.”

  He chuckled, then put an arm around her as they began heading for the dining room. They had to pass through the foyer, and though no evidence remained of what had happened there, Rachel knew he felt her tense a bit.

  “You’ll stay with me tonight?” she said.

  His arm tightened around her. “I was hoping you’d ask.”

  TWENTY

  hey retired to bed not long after supper, early enough that Cameron had not come in yet, and they decided to leave it until the morning to tell him what had occurred. Both Rachel and Adam were weary, and both fell asleep long before midnight.

  “Rachel. Come, Rachel.”

  She was instantly awake, and even as she lifted her head from Adam’s shoulder and looked down at his sleeping face, Rachel realized that what she had heard had not been spoken in the room, but inside her own mind.

  Her first impulse was to close her eyes and go back to sleep. But something was nagging at her, the vague sense of something left undone, unfinished. The voice in her mind, she thought, was only her subconscious prompting her once again.

  She slipped out of bed, careful not to wake Adam, and found the nightgown and robe she’d discarded—or Adam had—the night before. She put them on and paused only to run her fingers through her hair, then left the bedroom, closing the door quietly behind her.

  She had no idea where it was her subconscious wanted her to go, but when she glanced toward the far end of the hall, she was not surprised to see that the door to the attic was open once more.

  She went down the hall. It didn’t seem strange to her to be leaving the haven of a warm bed and Adam to respond to the proddings of her subconscious—which was, perhaps, the oddest thing of all. She turned on the attic lights and went up the stairs. The storage chest was open.

  This time, Rachel barely hesitated. She knelt before the chest and began lifting things out one at a time. Most were the usual mementos girls kept, like theater stubs and dried flowers and love letters. Ribbons from gifts. Tom’s football jersey from college. A half-finished box of Valentine’s Day candy. A book of poetry he had given her.

  They cost her no more than pleasant pangs of memory, which told Rachel more clearly than anything else had that she had finally left Tom in the past, where he belonged.