Grace was wearing her nightgown. It was pink, with white flowers. The hem was raised above her waist, and the bodice was unbuttoned and open, baring her breasts. Her legs were apart, just lying limply on the bed, and he was between them. He wasn’t wearing pajamas, just a pair of shorts pushed down around his knees. He kept saying he loved her, over and over, now moaning the words with every thrust of his body.
“I love you, Grace.... I love you....”
He was hurting her. She was crying. Her face was wet with the tears, and that whimpering sound she made was so filled with pain. So hurt. As if he stabbed her with a knife. As if he killed something inside her. The bed squeaked rhythmically now, and she bounced like a rag doll, limp beneath him while he hunched and thrust between her legs.
Until he finally groaned and jerked, bearing down on her as if he wanted to push her through the mattress, nail her to the floor beneath. So she couldn’t escape him. So she’d never escape him.
Then he collapsed on top of her, panting hoarsely, and for a few minutes all Nell could hear was her mother whimpering and her father breathing as if at the end of a marathon.
She wanted to look away, close her eyes. Why couldn’t she stop this? Why couldn’t she stop it?
Finally, Adam Gallagher raised himself off his wife’s limp body and sat back on his heels between her splayed legs, pulling his shorts up. And she immediately turned on her side away from him and drew her legs up, pressed them tightly together as if in a pathetic attempt to stop what had already happened. Shaking fingers pulled the pretty nightgown closed over her breasts and then clenched to hold the material, the buttons beyond her ability to manage. She was curled up like a baby, still crying in that awful way, still moaning the protest, the refusal, that he had ignored.
He put his hand on her hip and sort of rubbed her, smiling down at her as if he saw a sated, contented lover. “I love you, Grace. I love you.”
Nell could see her mother shiver and flinch away from his touch, but she didn’t open her eyes and, murmuring now, kept saying, “No ... no ... no ...”
“I love you.”
“No ... no ...”
Sickened, Nell turned away from the bed, trying desperately to fight her way out of the vision and back to a time when the man who had sired her was dead and gone and couldn’t hurt anybody ever again. Instead, when she looked toward the half-open door, she saw that she was not the only witness to the brutal marital rape.
Unnoticed by the two in the bed, the little girl stood in the doorway and stared at them, her mouth a silent, trembling O of shock and confusion. She was dressed for bed, her long dark hair mussed, and she stared at her parents as if at two horribly unfamiliar strangers that frightened her.
Hailey.
She was no more than four, Nell thought. Hardly old enough to understand what she had just witnessed—but just old enough for the experience to have a profound effect on her emotional, psychological, and sexual development.
While Nell watched her in numb horror, the visibly trembling little girl backed silently away from the door and retreated out of sight.
Her parents never knew she was there.
“Oh, God,” Nell heard herself say shakily.
Her own voice shattered the vision, and she blinked as the light of day seemed to flood into the room. The doorway was empty, and when she turned slowly to look at it, she found the bed equally empty and neatly made, the covers smooth.
She walked to one of the windows and stood gazing out, toward the south trail that led to the ruins of her grandmother’s house. Ashes of the past.
Was it all ashes?
Everything out there looked so bright and hard, so ... stark. None of the edges was blurred, softened, the way they always were in her visions. The present always set itself apart from the past and the future, always wore the clear and distinct stamp of now.
Now Adam Gallagher was nearly a year in his grave. Now his daughters were at last free of him. Or were they?
Staring out at the hard, bright edges of now, Nell thought about the vision. Hailey had looked to be about four, which meant that Nell was born within the next year. Had she just witnessed her own conception? Was she a child of rape, the fruit of a seed planted by force in her mother’s flinching womb?
Had her complete rejection of her father been as much instinctive as learned?
Jesus.
Nell leaned her forehead against the cool glass and closed her eyes. Her own pain and revulsion aside, what about poor Hailey? That twisted scene she had witnessed had undoubtedly twisted her as well, giving her an even more cruelly distorted idea of what love was supposed to be.
Was that why she had involved herself with sadistic men, had felt driven to satisfy their kinky needs?
Was that why she had killed them?
When Ethan Cole knocked on Nell’s door late that morning, he wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. Or what he felt about it. But since he’d spent more time than he wanted to admit telling himself he was a pro and could handle this interview like a pro, it was disconcerting to discover that the pep talk hadn’t done any good at all.
He’d forgotten how those green eyes of hers had the trick of stealing his breath—and of making him feel it was somehow very important that he help her.
“Hello, Ethan.” She glanced past him at the deputy leaning against the hood of a sheriff’s department cruiser, and added, “Want to come in? Or should we foil all the gossips and talk out there on the porch?”
“Goddammit, Nell,” he muttered.
Smiling slightly, she stepped out onto the porch and led the way to the sitting area to the left of the front door—which was in full view of the deputy. There were several pieces of black wrought-iron patio furniture, including a couple of chairs and a small table.
Nell sat down in one of the chairs. “I suppose Hailey must have gotten these. It was wicker in my day.”
“There’ve been a lot of changes since your day,” Ethan replied as he sat down.
“Yeah, I’ve noticed. How’ve you been, Ethan?”
“I’ve been all right, Nell. How about you?”
“Can’t complain. I hear you got married.”
“And divorced. You?”
“Neither. But you knew that.”
“Yeah, I ran the plates on your Jeep. Checked you out as far as I could without making it an official request.”
“And?”
“And nothing. No police record, not even a traffic ticket, and you pay your bills and taxes on time.”
“Nice to know my public record is clean.”
“And your private record?”
“Oh, that one’s a little more complicated.” Nell shrugged. “But isn’t that true of us all?”
“I guess so.” He nodded, then sighed. “Okay, now that we’ve got that bullshit out of the way, what say we talk to each other like it matters?”
She was still smiling faintly, but those green eyes were guarded. “Suits me.”
“I hear you’ve been seeing Max again since you came back.”
“Some, yeah.” She didn’t explain or elaborate.
“He tell you about these murders?”
“Several people have told me about them, Ethan. Nobody’s talking about much of anything else right now.”
“And so?”
“And so ... that’s really lousy for Silence.”
He eyed her grimly. “You’re going to make me ask, aren’t you?”
“Are you kidding? Of course I am.” But before he could do more than mutter a curse under his breath, Nell was shaking her head, and said much more seriously, “No, I owe you more than that.”
“You don’t owe me anything, Nell.”
“Don’t I? You never told Max, did you? About the night I left.”
“You asked me not to. I promised I wouldn’t. So I didn’t.”
“And my father?”
“I did what you wanted me to do with him too. Went to him and told him I’d seen you getting on a
bus out of town, that I’d found your car parked at the station.” Ethan paused briefly. “He thought you left with Max or planned to meet him somewhere, just like you figured he would. Took some time, but I managed to convince him Max was at the ranch and not planning to go anywhere.”
Gazing off at nothing, Nell said absently, “I knew he’d be more likely to believe that coming from a cop, even if you were Max’s stepbrother.”
Ethan said, “Like everybody else, Adam knew there was bad blood between Max and me. He knew I wouldn’t lie for Max. Never occurred to him that I might be lying for you.”
“Why did you do that, by the way? I’ve always wondered if it had more to do with hurting Max than helping me.”
“If I’d wanted to use it to hurt Max, I would have told him about it a long time ago.”
“Maybe. Or maybe just knowing you’d helped his girl to run away was enough. You had to know it would hurt him.”
“So did you. I mean, you had to know that turning to me for help in getting away would make running out on him even worse, at least in his eyes.”
“Yeah. I knew. So I’m glad you never told him that. And I’m still wondering why you helped me.”
He hesitated, waited until she met his gaze, and then said slowly, “The look in your eyes that night. I’d never seen anybody look so ... desperate. So afraid. I had no business helping you, of course, especially as young as you were. But I was young enough myself that I wasn’t thinking in practical terms. Besides, I didn’t doubt you were going to leave no matter what I said or did, and it seemed wisest to help you ... minimize the fallout.”
“You did do that. And I’m grateful.”
“Not grateful enough to send me a postcard somewhere along the way and let me know how you were doing.”
“Sorry about that. It seemed best to ... cut all my ties to Silence.”
“And did you?”
Her smile twisted. “I tried, God knows.”
He nodded slowly, his gaze fixed on her. “You must have known you’d have to come back here one day.”
“Yeah. I just didn’t think it would be so hard.”
“Hard because of the dead? Or the living?”
“Both.”
“Running away never really solves anything, does it?”
A breath of a laugh escaped Nell. “That depends on what you’re trying to solve.”
“What were you trying to solve, Nell?”
“It hardly matters now.”
“Doesn’t it?”
She drew a breath and let it out slowly. “Girls run away, Ethan. Especially from domineering fathers.”
“And boyfriends?”
“He was never domineering. And I told you then it had nothing to do with Max.”
“Nothing—except that you were frantic to make sure he was protected from Adam’s anger.”
“I just didn’t want him to blame Max. Or anybody else. My leaving was my decision.”
Ethan nodded. “Yeah. Except that you were scared out of your mind that night, Nell. And I’ve always wondered why. After all those years with Adam, what was the final straw? What happened to make you believe running away was your only option?”
“It’s a long story,” Nell said after a moment. “Maybe we’ll have time for it later. For now, I think we should concentrate on trying to find this murderer. That is why you came out here today, isn’t it?”
Ethan accepted the change of subject, though not without a faint grimace. “Just so you know, I don’t believe in this psychic bullshit.”
“In that case,” Nell said deliberately, “there’s obviously nothing I can do to help you.”
“Look, don’t give me a hard time about this, okay? We’ve hit one wall after another in this investigation, and I’m getting desperate. Hell, at this point I’d be willing to look at chicken entrails. Maybe you can look into your crystal ball instead and tell me something helpful.”
“I don’t have a crystal ball, Ethan. As for the chicken entrails, I doubt they’d be helpful. And—yuck.”
His mouth twitched, but he didn’t actually smile. “Well, do whatever the hell it is you’re supposed to do. Can you help me, or can’t you?”
Nell didn’t push it. “I don’t know. But I’m willing to try.”
He felt a jab of relief and tried to cover it up by not dwelling on the moment. “Great. So what’s the first step?”
“I’d like to see where Peter Lynch and George Caldwell died.”
“The first victim and the most recent. Why them?”
Nell had a ready answer. “Lynch because I want to see if I can pick up something after all this time; Caldwell because so far no deep, dark secrets have come to light—have they?”
“No.”
“Which makes his murder different from the rest, at least according to everything I’ve read and heard.”
“Okay.” Ethan looked at his watch. “We can check out George’s apartment anytime, but since Terrie Lynch is away for the afternoon and I have the key to the house, we should probably go there first.”
Nell stood up, trying not to betray a few twinges from protesting muscles since she didn’t want to have to explain why she was so stiff and sore.
Ethan rose as well but eyed her in sudden concern. “You sure you’re up to this? If you don’t mind me saying so, you’re looking a little fragile.”
So much for her ability to hide some things.
Nell smiled. “I’ve started going through the house, sorting and cleaning, and it’s something a lot like work. But I’m okay. Let me lock up the house, and then we can go.”
She made a couple of very quick calls while she was inside, but didn’t linger. Ethan waited for her on the porch, and when she rejoined him a few minutes later, she said, “I’m assuming you don’t want it known you came to the local witch for help.”
“Is that a question?”
“No. I’m just wondering if it was wise to bring along a deputy.”
“I can trust Steve Critcher to keep his mouth shut, or else I never would have brought him along.”
“Oh. I thought you might have brought him along to make sure nobody seeing us together could get the idea your interest in me was personal. You’re sort of between a rock and a hard place, aren’t you? If anybody sees us together, that is. Either they think their sheriff has gone to the local witch for a bit of psychic help in solving these murders, or else they believe they’re seeing a fascinating little romantic triangle.”
Ethan scowled at her. “And you’re so sure I give a shit what people think?”
“People? No. Max—yes. I think that at the end of the day, Max is the last man in the world you want to take on when it really matters. Which is exactly the same way he feels about you.”
Ethan stared at her, cleared his throat, and very carefully said, “I’ve questioned him about these murders, you know.”
“I know. I also know you’ve never seriously suspected him. When are you going to make peace with him, Ethan? Don’t you think it’s long past time?”
“I think this is something we don’t need to talk about right now.” Deliberately, he added, “Maybe we’ll have time for it later.”
“Maybe we will,” Nell agreed with a faint, rueful smile.
Galen watched the sheriff’s cruiser pull out of Nell’s driveway, and said into the phone, “The problem with this whole thing is that there are too many threads we have to weave into place.”
“I’ve noticed that. Any sign of our watcher?”
“Just the thing with the doll. Which, God knows, is creepy enough to keep all of us awake from now on.”
“I’ll second that. And Nell’s beginning to believe it might be Hailey?”
“Well, it makes sense, especially if we admit the possibility she could have inherited the family curse, after all. She’s connected to two of the victims for sure, plus Adam Gallagher. If Nell can link her up with Lynch and Caldwell ...” He sighed. “I checked in with Bishop. He’s not backing off t
he profile.”
“Backing off is hardly his style.”
“Agreed. Neither is being wrong. But if Hailey is the one we’re looking for—”
“Then he’s wrong. Wouldn’t be the first time. Won’t be the last.”
“And here I was thinking he was Super Fed.”
“Say that to his face.”
Galen grinned, even though he wasn’t feeling particularly amused. “Not on your life. Or, more to the point, on mine. Listen, Nell acted very calm about this doll thing, but I think she’s seriously freaked by it. She looked like death this morning, and what we found out at her grandmother’s place sure as hell didn’t improve the situation.”
“Did she tell the sheriff?”
“Not yet. I think she means to take him out there later and show him. Maybe Tanner too. I guess she figures it’ll explain a few things.”
“Doesn’t it?”
“Well, it ties up some loose ends in the past. But the present? Damned if I know.” He paused. “You said last night there’d be another murder. Anything on that?”
“Officially, no. Not a whisper I’ve heard anywhere in town.”
“But?”
“But I think it happened sometime during the night.”
“You don’t know who? Where?”
“No. And since it’s Saturday, we can’t count on the victim being reported missing because he didn’t show up for work. If he lived alone ... it may be some time before the body is found.”
“Shit.”
“I’ll let you know if I find out anything. In the meantime, keep a close watch on Nell. Aside from everything else, Sheriff Cole is a long way from being in the clear.”
“We need to figure out where he stands, and pronto.”
“Agreed. If you have any suggestions—”
Galen sighed. “No. Nell seems to think if she spends some time with him she’ll know. I’m not so sure. She isn’t a telepath, after all. Or a clairvoyant.”
“No, but she is able to get a sense of things, of people. Maybe it’ll be enough.”
“Want to bet her life on that?”
“No. But we may have to.”
The Lynch home was an older house that sprawled a bit on its five-acre lot, somewhat isolated in a neighborhood where cultivated fields and pastures tended to separate houses. So as far as Nell could tell, no one in the area took any notice when the sheriff’s cruiser pulled up in the drive.