Whispers

  “You’ve heard of blood money, haven’t you boy, well this is jizz-money—earned by your mother for spreading her legs for that rich son of a bitch. Remember that, Kane; no woman is worth losing your heart or your wallet. Scourge of the earth they are. Whores. Jezebels.” And then he’d begin to quote scripture, mixed-up verses that made no sense.

  Kane remembered the day his mother had left. “I’ll be back,” she’d promised, tears running down her cheeks as she’d hugged her son, clinging to him as if she knew she’d never see him again. “I’ll be back to take you away from him.”

  Pop had been sleeping, snoring away last night’s bender.

  Kane hadn’t so much as lifted his hands to hold her or wave good-bye. When she stepped into the long black car with its grim-faced driver, Kane had only stared at her with eyes accusing her of being a failure and a traitor.

  “I promise, honey. I’ll be back.”

  But it hadn’t happened. Her untruth had been just one more link in the tarnished chain of broken promises that had been Kane’s life. He’d never seen her again, never bothered to find out what had happened. Until now.

  And the truth stung—it stung like a bitch.

  He didn’t bother with a glass, just opened the bottle and took a long pull, then brushed off the chipped Formica with his coat sleeve, plugged in the computer, and sat at the metal-legged table where he’d taken most of the meals of the first twenty years of his life. The electric company must’ve come through and reconnected the old wires because the screen flickered and the laptop hummed in readiness.

  Snapping open his briefcase, he pulled out a file, thick with notes, clippings, and pictures of the Holland family. He dealt the photographs out like cards from a well-worn deck. First card faceup was the king of diamonds, old Dutch Holland, patriarch and would-be governor of the state, a man who claimed to be of the people, but, Kane knew, was more twisted than a sailor’s knot.

  Second was a picture of Dutch’s ex-wife Dominique, still model-beautiful, but living out of the country these days and, presumably, a source who might, for the right amount of cash, help him with his quest. Then there were the glossy prints of two of Dutch’s daughters, Miranda and Tessa. The final photograph, a snapshot, was of Claire.

  Too bad she was involved, and, he guessed, involved to her teeth.

  His jaw hardened at the two faces staring sightlessly from poses encouraged by some nameless but expensive photographer. He dropped the pictures of Miranda and Tessa, the oldest and youngest onto the table’s surface to join their parents, but he studied Claire’s picture more closely, a snapshot that he’d committed to memory long before. She was astride a painted pony, only the back and neck of which were visible. But Claire was caught square in the camera’s lens. His camera’s lens.

  Clear eyes, straight nose, wide cheekbones, and loose cinnamon brown curls framing an oval face. God, she was beautiful. Her smile was shy and enigmatic, a naive turn-on. Hell, he still felt it, that slightly elevated beat of his pulse whenever he thought of her, the girl who had everything, who had looked at him with disdain and pity.

  But not anymore.

  Now the tables had turned. He was the one in control. A twinge of conscience spiked his brain because he knew that what he was about to do might expose Claire to the most brutal of scrutiny. Her life would be turned inside out and shaken until all the dirt fell out, all the hidden secrets exposed like the bleached bones of a desert carcass.

  Too bad. If she got hurt, well, that was just part of life. The breaks. Sometimes pain couldn’t be helped. A man was dead, sent to a watery grave years before by someone who had lived in the house of Holland. Kane was determined to find out who had crushed Harley Taggert’s skull and hidden the crime for over sixteen years. He had personal reasons for this vendetta, reasons that went far beyond his pressing need to make a living, reasons that included his sincere belief that Harley might not have been the only victim in the lies and deceit that were hidden beneath the still surface of Lake Arrowhead.

  He flipped through a few pages of notes, then positioned the computer in front of him. Fingers moving deftly, he typed out the first page:

  Power Play:

  The Murder of Harley Taggert

  by

  Kane Moran

  He took another swig from his bottle and started writing. Even though his investigation into all the skeletons tucked discreetly away in the Holland family closets was just beginning, he realized that before he was finished, Harley’s murderer would face charges on a sixteen-year-old crime. Dutch Holland, the bastard, would have no chance of becoming governor of Oregon, and every single member of the Holland family, including Claire, would despise Kane Moran.

  So be it. Life wasn’t easy, and it sure as hell wasn’t fair. He’d learned that painful lesson years ago, and Claire had been one of his teachers. Besides, this, his exposé of the Holland family, was to be his revenge and catharsis.

  A new start.

  He tipped the bottle back again. A swallow of whiskey burned a fiery path to his stomach, and Kane wondered why, instead of a sense of elation, he felt a premonition of dread, as if he’d unwittingly taken his first step into hell.

  “I don’t care if you have to kiss Moran’s ugly ass or tie him up in lawsuits for the rest of his life. Find out something that we can use against him. Bribe him or kill the stupid bastard with your bare hands, Murdock! Just find a way to squelch the damned book!” Dutch slammed the car phone into its cradle. “Spineless cretin,” he growled, though in truth, Ralph Murdock, his attorney and campaign manager, was one of the few people in this world whom Benedict Holland trusted.

  Clamping down on the cigar jammed between his teeth, he floored the accelerator and his Cadillac shot forward, tires skimming on the narrow road winding through this stretch of old growth timber. The speedometer inched past sixty and mossy-barked fir trees swept by in a blur.

  Who would have thought that the ghost of Harley Taggert would rise now at this critical point in his life? And who the hell did Kane Moran, the man penning the story surrounding Harley’s death, think he was? The last time Dutch had seen him, years ago, Moran had been a mean-tempered kid with a chip on his shoulder the size of Nebraska, a hoodlum always in trouble with the law. Somehow he’d scrounged his way through college and he’d become a risk-taking fool of a journalist who, because of some damned wound, had decided to settle down back home in Oregon to write a book about Harley Taggert’s death.

  As his car shot over the summit, Dutch experienced the tightening in his chest again, that same old sense of panic that squeezed him whenever he thought of the night the Taggert kid died. Deep in the darkest reaches of his heart he suspected that one of his daughters had bashed in the boy’s skull.

  Which one? Which one of his girls had done it? His firstborn, Miranda, a lawyer working for the district attorney’s office, was ambitious to a fault, her pride unbending. She looked so much like her mother it was spooky. Randa had inherited Dominique’s thick dark hair and sultry blue eyes. He’d heard comments that Miranda was haughty, that she had ice water running through her veins, but she certainly wasn’t cold enough or stupid enough to have murdered the Taggert kid. No, Dutch wouldn’t believe it; Randa had been too self-possessed, a woman who knew what she wanted out of life.

  Claire, his secondborn, had been the quiet one, a romantic by nature. As a kid she’d been gawky, plain in comparison with her sisters, but she’d grown into her looks, and he suspected that she would be the kind of woman who, as the years passed, would look better and better. At the time of Harley’s death she’d been a soft-spoken athletic girl, the middle sister, one to whom he hadn’t paid much attention. She never gave him any trouble except that she’d fallen in love with Harley Taggert. Then there was Tessa. The baby. And the rebel. There was no reason she would have wanted Harley Taggert dead. At least no reason Dutch knew about. And even now that thought settled like a stone in his gut.

  Until recently, Dutch hadn’t lost much sleep
over the Taggert boy’s demise.

  Now, his fingers grew sweaty around the steering wheel. Claire, with her haunted eyes and smattering of freckles, wasn’t a killer. She couldn’t be. Christ, there wasn’t a mean bone in her body. Or was there? What of Miranda? Maybe he didn’t know his eldest as well as he thought he did.

  The sun was hanging low over the western hills, blinding him with its bright rays. He flipped down the visor. The road split and he turned toward the small town of Chinook and the old lodge he’d bought for a song.

  The Caddy shimmied as Dutch took the corner too fast, but he barely noticed as he slid over the center line. A pickup going the opposite direction blasted its horn and skidded on the gravel shoulder to avoid collision.

  “Bastard,” Dutch growled, still lost in thought. His youngest daughter, Tessa, was and always had been the maverick in the family. Blond and blue-eyed with a figure that, at twelve, had been obscenely curvaceous, Tessa had forever been the wild card in the deck that was the Holland family. Whereas Miranda had tried to please, and Claire had faded into the woodwork, Tessa had brazenly and willfully defied Dutch whenever she could. Knowing she was his favorite, she’d rebelled at every turn. Trouble—that’s what Tessa had been, but Dutch couldn’t believe, wouldn’t, that she was a killer.

  “Damn it all to hell,” he muttered as he chewed on the end of his cigar. If only he’d been fortunate enough to have sired sons. Things would have been different. Far different. God had played a cruel trick on him with these girls.

  Daughters always gave a man grief.

  Easing off the accelerator at the crooked pine tree, the one he’d planted a lifetime ago, when he’d bought this place for Dominique, he guided the car into the private lane leading to the estate. He’d been a lovesick fool at the time he’d set that little pine into the ground, but the years had changed him, worn that love so thin it had shattered like crystal hurled against stone.

  He unlocked the gates and drove along the cracked asphalt of the once-tended drive. The silvery waters of the lake winked seductively through the trees. How he’d loved this place.

  Nostalgia tugged at his heart as he rounded a final bend and saw the house, a rambling old hunting lodge that, nestled in a stand of oak and fir, rose three stories to look upon the lake.

  Home.

  A place of triumph and heartache.

  Thinking his wife would love it as much as he did, he’d bought the vast tree-covered acres for Dominique. From the moment she saw the rough timbers and open beams, she’d hated everything there was about their new home. Her appraising eyes had studied the steep angle of the roof, the cedar walls, plank floors, and pitched ceiling. She touched the wooden railing of the stairs, with its hand-carved banister and posts decorated with handcrafted Northwest creatures, and her nostrils had flared as if she’d suddenly come across a bad smell. “You bought this for me?” she’d asked, incredulous and bitterly disappointed. Her voice had echoed through the cavernous foyer. “This . . . this monstrosity?”

  Miranda, barely four, the spitting image of her mother, had eyed the old house solemnly as if she’d expected all manner of ghosts, goblins, and monsters to appear at any given second.

  “I suppose this”—Dominique pointed a long finger at the salmon carved into the lowest post—“is considered art?”

  “Yes.”

  “For the love of God, Benedict, why? What possessed you to buy it?”

  Dutch had felt the first premonition of dread steal through his heart. He spread his hands. “It’s for you and the girls.”

  “For us? Out here? In the middle of nowhere?” High heels clicked indignantly as she walked through the foyer and into the living room, with its vaulted ceilings and three chandeliers created by nesting dozens of deer antlers together. “Away from my friends?”

  “It’s good for children to grow up—”

  “In the city, Benedict, where they can meet other children their age, in a house that does them justice, where they’ll be exposed to culture and the right people.” She sighed, then, spying Claire toddling through open French doors where the back of the house flanked the lake, Dominique started running, heels clipping ever faster. “This is going to be a nightmare.” Snagging Claire from the covered porch before she was anywhere near the shoreline, Dominique turned and glared at her husband. “Living here won’t work.”

  “Of course it will. I’ll build tennis courts and a pool with its own house. You can have gardens and your own studio over the garage.”

  Tessa, the baby and always a fussy thing, gave out a lusty cry and wriggled in the nursemaid’s arms.

  “Shh,” Bonita, barely sixteen and illegally in the States, whispered to the red-faced cherub.

  “I can’t live here.” Dominique was firm.

  “Sure you can.”

  “Where will the girls learn French—”

  “From you.”

  “I’m not a tutor.”

  “We’ll hire one. The house is big.”

  “What about piano, violin, fencing, riding . . . oh, dear God.” She looked about to break down, her huge blue eyes suddenly moist, her manicured fingers pressed to her lips.

  “It will work, I promise,” Dutch insisted.

  “But I can’t possibly . . . I’m not cut out to be a maid . . . I’m going to need more help than just Bonita, here.”

  “I know, I know. I’ve already talked to a woman—Indian woman by the name of Songbird. You’ll have more than enough help, Dominique. You’ll be able to live like a queen.”

  She’d made a deprecating sound deep in her throat. “The Queen of Nowhere. Has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?”

  From that day forward, she’d hated living here, despised the lake, predicted that nothing good would happen anywhere near the sandy banks of Lake Arrowhead.

  As it turned out, she’d been right.

  Now Dutch cracked the window a bit farther, letting in the moist summer air. The water, spangled by the hot summer sun, appeared placid, incapable of causing so much heartache and agony.

  “Son of a bitch,” he muttered, cigar firmly between his teeth as he grabbed the bottle of scotch he’d brought from town, climbed out of his car, and waded stiffly through the thick layers of cones and needles to the front door. It opened easily, as if he’d been expected. The soles of his shoes slapped against the dusty floorboards, and he thought he heard a mouse scurrying to a dark corner.

  In the kitchen he rummaged through the cupboards and found a glass, dusty from years of neglect. He’d called ahead and the electricity, phones, gas, and water had been turned on. In the next few days the house would be cleaned from top to bottom, and his grown daughters would arrive, whether they wanted to come back or not.

  Wiping the glass with his fingers, he poured himself a generous shot, then climbed the stairs to his bedroom—the one he’d shared for years with Dominique. The bed, a massive four-poster was stripped bare, the mattress covered in plastic. He walked to the windows, opened the drapes, and, sipping his drink, glanced at the swimming pool, long dry, a nest of leaves and dirt clogging the drain. The pool house, positioned near the diving board, was locked up, had been for years. Then he looked past the pool to the lake he loved. Staring at the tranquil water, he felt dread, like the ticking of a clock, pound ceaselessly in his brain.

  What had happened so long ago? What would he discover? A shudder coursed through him. He tossed back his drink, felt the fiery liquor splash the back of his throat and warm his belly as he headed downstairs, away from this morgue, with its dark memories of old, disappointing sex and so little love. Christ, Dominique had turned into a bitch.

  In the den, he fished his wallet from his pocket, extracted a single page he’d ripped from the notepad on his desk, and stared at the three telephone numbers of his daughters. None would be glad to hear from him, but they’d do what he asked.

  They always did.

  He picked up the receiver, heard a click and a dial tone, and set his jaw.

&
nbsp; Damn Harley Taggert. Damn Kane Moran. And goddamn the truth, whatever the hell it was.

  Two

  “It’s not fair! We shouldn’t have to move. We didn’t do anything wrong. We’re not the perverts!” Sean glowered at his mother, his eyes partially hidden by his shaggy hair, his jaw tight and strong. A spattering of freckles bridged his nose despite his summer tan. Rebellion radiated from him in indignant waves, and his hands opened and closed into fists of frustration. In the glimmer of a moment he looked so much like his father, Claire wanted to fold him into her arms and never let go.

  “It’s just better this way.” She dumped the contents of the top drawer of her dresser onto the bed and stuffed her socks and underwear into an empty cardboard box, all the while wishing she believed her own words. The pain would eventually go away—it always did—but it would take time. Lots of time.

  “Dad’s the one who should be leaving!” Sean slumped onto a packing crate and frowned through the open bedroom window to the gnarled apple tree, where a tire swing swayed slightly in the breeze. The old whitewall was suspended by a fraying, blackened rope, a sad reminder of her children’s youth and innocence; innocence that had recently been destroyed. The kids hadn’t used the swing in years, and thin yellow grass had finally grown back in the ridges where their sneakers had once scuffed the earth bare. But that seemed eons ago, in a time when Claire had convinced herself that she and her small family were content, that the sins of the past would never invade their lives, that she could find happy-ever-after in this sleepy little Colorado town.

  How wrong she’d been. She slammed the empty drawer shut and started working on the next with a vengeance. The sooner she was out of this room, this house, the whole damned town, the better.