Final Scream

  “Of course I’m happy. Why wouldn’t I be?”

  She released his fingers. “You love your wife and son, but you’re not happy.” She saw his eyes narrow and color climb angrily up his neck. “You haven’t been happy in a long, long while.”

  “You don’t know a thing about me.”

  “I feel sorrow and suspicion.”

  “Who set this up? Roy? No, Harold. I bet it was Harold, wasn’t it?” he demanded, then when she didn’t respond, he grabbed her by the shoulders and pushed her backward, shaking her a little. “It was Harold Curtain, wasn’t it? That idiot! God damn that pompous bastard. I should have him fired—”

  “He has nothing to do with the words I speak. I only tell the truth, from my heart.”

  “Then you’re crazy.”

  “You came to me,” she said simply, and his fingers, digging deep into the flesh of her shoulders, loosened. “You came here because you are unhappy. Because you want to find a way to fix things with your wife, so that she will love you and trust you and sleep with you.”

  He sucked in his breath, and his fists clenched. For over a minute he said nothing and the air in the trailer seemed charged. “You don’t know—”

  “I know of your guilt. For the wedding night and…and the fire…the burned dress.”

  “God in heaven,” he whispered, his face suddenly white as death. “But no one knows—” He glanced nervously around the small room as if afraid they could be overheard. The blood pounded in the pulse at his neck, and his lips barely moved as he spoke. “Lucretia’s been here,” he said. “My God, she’s been confiding in you.”

  “I’ve never spoken with your wife.”

  “But she promised, made me swear I’d never say a word—”

  “I see your pain in your eyes, Rex Buchanan. I feel it in your hands.”

  “For Christ’s sake, what is this?” He stumbled backward, knocking over a chair, his faith in God shaken.

  “Do you want to know the future?”

  He’d hesitated. “I told you. I don’t believe in any of this hocus-pocus. It’s all…all just a pile of crap. I go to mass every week,” he said, his voice rising in near hysteria, his face suffusing with color again. He hooked a thumb at his chest. “I believe in God.”

  “I know you do. I see in your eyes that you’re a faithful man. What I do has nothing to do with God, nor with Satan. The dark one, he’s who you really fear, and Lucifer is not here. I’m not a witch.”

  “I should hope not!”

  “I can’t even explain what I see,” she said with a shrug. “If you want your money back—”

  “No, keep it. It wasn’t mine anyway. This was just a couple of guys’ idea of a joke. A bad one.”

  “So you’ve paid. Why not glimpse into the future?” She managed a reassuring smile for this wealthy man with his superstitions and guilt woven so tightly around his neck they were choking the life from him. “It might ease your mind.”

  She saw the sweat forming above his brow and felt his fear—for that was what it was. “If you don’t believe, certainly it won’t hurt to listen to me. After all, it’s only a joke, right? Innocent enough.”

  His gaze locked with hers, and she saw his hesitation, watched as he challenged whatever demons had a stranglehold on his heart. He straightened, then righted the chair. Again he was in control, a wealthy man who knew his own power. With a confident grin, he said, “Sure. Why not? Should be a kick.” He sat down again, stuck out his hand defiantly and Sunny wrapped her fingers around his palm. She felt his heat even then, the restless energy that pulsed through his blood, fed by his guilt and the temptation to cross the line between good and evil.

  His pain was all-consuming. She saw through it as clearly as if it had been mere ripples on water and she felt his sadness. “Your wife doesn’t love you,” she said simply, hurting for him.

  He started to pull away, but didn’t. “That’s a lie.”

  “She cared for you once, but something happened on your wedding night.” Sunny saw the stark images—fire and white satin, flowers and blood, a rumpled bed and heart-shaped bathtub. And she witnessed his guilt, a dark ugly veil surrounding the past, as surely as if she’d been in the hotel with him on his wedding night. “You did something—”

  His throat worked. “Never. She—”

  “You think she turned you away, because of…” She cringed as she saw it then, the violent, one-sided coupling, Rex drunk, Lucretia young and frightened. And then, in the intervening years, the cold shell Lucretia had built around her heart.

  “Oh, you’ve tried to atone,” Sunny whispered, wishing she could ease his agony and knowing even then that no one could, “but she won’t let you; she enjoys having power over you.”

  “It’s not like that!”

  Sunny didn’t argue, didn’t tell him that she saw the private torture in his soul, the bruises on his heart because his wife had rejected him, refused to love him. And beneath the hard muscles, fierce pride, rapier tongue, she glimpsed another man, a gentler man, a man who only wanted love. A wounded, misunderstood soul, not unlike herself. Sunny lifted her eyes to his, and their gazes mingled in the stillness of the hot trailer. She felt him tremble, felt her own suddenly frantic heartbeat.

  “She will never love you, but she will give you another child.”

  His eyebrows drew together. “Just one?”

  “Only one from this woman, though there will be others.”

  “No!” Rex stripped his hand from hers as if her fingers were suddenly white-hot and deadly. He jumped to his feet and backed to the door. “I love my wife,” he insisted, visibly shaken. “Do you hear me, I love her! I always will.”

  “I know,” she said kindly.

  “All this”—he motioned wildly at the table—“is nothing, just some kind of trick. You were probably told to say it, just to get me going. That’s it, isn’t it? Harold and the boys in investments, they put you up to it.”

  She didn’t bother to argue, just looked up at him with eyes that pierced into his soul and saw everything.

  “And my wife, she loves me. She does.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Oh, hell, I don’t know what I’m doing here!” He reached for the doorknob.

  “Examining your life,” she said.

  “It’s just a joke, okay? A goddamned joke. Now everybody’s had their laughs and it’s over.” He yanked hard on the door and stormed out of the trailer, leaving the door to catch in the wind and bang against the already scratched pink and white aluminum siding.

  He would be back. He was intrigued. As surely as water ran downhill, Rex Buchanan would return. Sunny knew it and wouldn’t try to prevent it. She couldn’t.

  He’d shown up less than a month later. They talked, drank coffee, listened to music, and she always told him his fortune. He scoffed at her predictions, of course, but he began to smile, his visits becoming more frequent. Sunny saw herself in his future; knew that if she didn’t refuse him, she would be emotionally tangled with him for life.

  But she couldn’t. She looked forward to his visits. He came only when he was certain they would be alone. They talked for hours. She never tired of hearing about his world of wealth and power or of discussing what was happening outside of Prosperity, in the rest of the state and in the world. His views were so much broader than her husband’s; his interests more varied. And though she knew she was wading in dangerous emotional waters, she couldn’t restrain herself. Wouldn’t.

  Though she fought her attraction to Rex, Sunny couldn’t stop the course of their destiny. She spent long hours of the night with Frank softly snoring on the double bed beside her, while she was awake and longing, her dreams focused on a man forbidden to her. Restlessly she stared out the small window of the trailer and silently cursed the desire she couldn’t seem to control.

  Frank was a good man, a steady worker, a person who, as long as he stayed away from liquor, didn’t raise his voice. He thought Rocky Marciano was a god, M
arilyn Monroe the sexiest woman alive, and he looked forward to the day when he could afford a color television.

  Rex, too, was a good man, a thoughtful employer, a person who would never stop adoring his cold wife. He and Sunny could never be together; she was married to a man who didn’t believe in divorce, and he was married to a woman he idolized. He looked forward to the day that Lucretia would forgive him, though it would never happen.

  At first Sunny ignored her wanton thoughts. She refused to dwell on her shameful lust. But as the weeks and months wore on, she began to listen for the smooth purr of his car in the lane, looked for him in a crowd in town, felt her heartbeat quicken at the familiar rap of his knuckles on her door.

  Unable to explain her fascination with him, she let her emotions run free and wild. In her dreams, she saw Rex’s face, and while making love to Frank, she imagined it was Rex claiming her body with his. Shame ate at her thoughts, but she couldn’t help herself and she believed in destiny; knew that the course of fate, once set in motion, was nearly impossible to alter.

  So when he first kissed her, in her shabby little trailer, she didn’t resist, and when he shoved her gently onto the couch, she let her knees give way. From that point on, his lovemaking was fierce, without tenderness. Like a starved man given his first meal, he made love to her, panting wildly, touching her everywhere, forcing himself deep into her.

  She knew it was a mistake, knew she was risking everything she owned to become a rich man’s mistress; but her marriage to Frank was little more than convenient, the trailer, though her home, certainly nothing she couldn’t give up.

  Rex’s visits became more frequent and he tried to buy her gifts—a gold bracelet, a turquoise ring, a new dress of silk—which she wouldn’t accept. Even the flowers he brought, though beautiful, could not stay. So she wore his baubles only while he was with her; she let his flowers scent the air while they were together, let him slip the pearl buttons through the fastenings of the beautiful dress that no one else would see, for when he left, he took everything he had brought with him. She wouldn’t accept payment—even a small token of his feelings—for making love to him.

  Because she knew that he didn’t love her. When she touched him, she sensed his hunger, even his gratitude for her; but he didn’t care for her the way he adored his wife. And Sunny would not reduce herself to the level of a paid whore. She would love him from a distance, content in their affair, until he tired of her; then, she promised herself, she would let him go.

  Sunny’s pain, after Lucretia had died and Rex had married Dena Miller, had nearly killed her. Though still legally married at the time, Sunny was alone—Frank had already left her. Yet Rex had turned to another woman. She’d never felt more betrayed.

  Now, years later, she stared at the walls of her tiny room in the hospital where Chase had seen fit to imprison her. Neat and clean, painted a soft, soothing green with built-in bookshelves, a twin bed, table and color television, it was, in many ways, much nicer than her old trailer parked close to a well on a scrap of property near Prosperity. But it wasn’t home. Would never be.

  The window was open, a breeze scented by roses whispered past the curved steel bars that were supposed to look like artwork but were lashed across the window for confinement.

  Each morning for the past week, as she’d stared through her window and looked beyond manicured lawns, trimmed rhododendrons and rows of oak trees to the tall mesh fence, she’d sensed trouble. Watching as the sun rose over the ridge of mountains to the east, she saw the first rays reflect gold on the morning dew and felt a chill as cold as death sneak up her spine. She’d known her boys were in danger, had, in her mind, glimpsed the fire that had destroyed the sawmill, but the images of flames and death were distorted, as if shimmering heat waves and black smoke had deliberately clouded her mind.

  Again she shuddered and wished she could escape. She wasn’t as far gone as they told her she was; true, her visions had become more frequent and violent, but when she was lucid she knew who she was and why she was here.

  Chase’s treachery still seeped into her soul like poison into a well. She’d always trusted him, believed in him, thought he had her—as well as his—best interests at heart. But he hadn’t. She’d become an embarrassment for him as he’d become more involved in the Buchanans’ business. He’d stopped visiting so often and couldn’t look her in the eye because he was plotting to have her committed, to get rid of her so that he wouldn’t have to explain that the crazy woman in the trailer by the creek was his mother, so he wouldn’t feel compelled to have her come and live with him in his fancy house. Rex, too, had turned his back on her, and without her children and her lover, she’d decided it was time to leave this earth.

  Glancing down at the inside of her wrists and the crisscrossing of scars fading against her dark skin, she grimaced. She’d worn those scars like medals from a war, a war she would wage until the day she died.

  But she couldn’t fight her battles from here; she had to find a way out of this place. She’d dreamed of escape often. Just last night she’d had a premonition, a peek through a window leading to the future, and in her mind’s eye she saw herself running through familiar fields and facing the devils of her past, those who had deceived her.

  She smiled though she felt no trace of humor. She would confront them all. And soon. It was only a matter of time.

  Twenty-seven

  “I thought you might be interested in this.” Gonzales dropped a charred wallet onto T. John’s desk. “Don’t worry, it’s been printed. So have the contents.”

  T. John set down his cup of coffee and picked up the burned leather. He didn’t have to ask. “The John Doe’s?”

  “Won’t be John Doe much longer.” Gonzales flashed a quick hard-as-nails grin then crossed to the window, staring out of the one-story office building and into the parking lot, where cars, trucks and motorcycles baked in the sun.

  “How about this?” Wilson opened what was left of the wallet and flipped through burned bills—hundreds, for the most part. Over three thousand dollars’ worth, and what had once been a driver’s license but was now barely a corner of the document. “What state’s this from? Alaska?”

  “Looks like it. We’re checking.”

  The picture—if there had been one—was burned off and some of the numbers were missing, but there were enough that, with some time and the cooperation of the Department of Motor Vehicles in the forty-ninth state, the identity of the man dying at Northwest General Hospital would soon be known. “Contact the state police, see if they’ve found any abandoned vehicles with Alaska plates—or for that matter, any cars. He could’ve rented one down here or bought a junker with the kind of cash he was carrying—and check the rental agencies, see if any cars are overdue, from Portland and”—he squinted at the license but the address had burned off—“all the major cities in Alaska.”

  “Already done,” Gonzales said. “And we’re sending this to the crime lab in Portland, see what they can reconstruct.”

  Good. They’d finally caught a break. Nearly everyone in town seemed to have an alibi for the night of the fire, especially the people who were at the top of his list of suspects—Rex Buchanan, Dena Buchanan, Felicity and Derrick Buchanan, Sunny McKenzie, Bobby Alonzo, even the parents of Jed Baker. He’d checked. The only person who didn’t have one was Cassidy herself and the two men in the fire. Finding people who had the time to set the blaze had been a son of a bitch.

  “Where the hell did you find this? I thought the boys had finished digging around down there at the mill,” he said, frowning at the charred wallet.

  Gonzales stretched his arms over his head and his back cracked. “That’s the strange part. We got it off a local.”

  Wilson’s head snapped up, and he pinned Gonzales with his hard glare. His pulse jumped a little. Gonzales was holding out on him. The shithead. He loved this little game of one-upmanship. “Someone around here?”

  “Yep. And we lucked out, too.”

/>   “How?” T. John leaned back in his chair until it creaked in protest and stacked his hands behind his head, waiting.

  “Our man here drank a little too much down at Burley’s. Someone had the nerve to call him a moron and he took offense, landing a right cross to the name-caller’s jaw.”

  “Who—who the hell is ‘our man’?” T. John asked, his patience wearing thin.

  “That’s the interesting part,” Gonzales drawled. “John Doe’s wallet was found in Willie Ventura’s back pocket.” Gonzales grinned widely, showing off more white teeth than any single human had the right to own. “Yes sir, it looks like the village idiot has a helluva lot of explaining to do, don’t it?”

  Cassidy switched off the monitor of her computer and rotated the kinks from her neck as she sat at her desk at the newspaper offices.

  After driving through the rain for nearly an hour yesterday, she’d gone home, taken a long bath and even drank a glass of wine before going to bed.

  But sleep had evaded her. She’d been restless and worried, her mind spinning with images of Brig, Chase, Rex, Sunny and Dena. Even Angie and Lucretia had wormed their way into her thoughts, and after tossing and turning for hours, she’d given up on sleep at three-thirty, gotten up and outlined a story on her desktop computer at home and then driven to the office.

  She’d been here alone before, but in these early hours, the connecting rooms seemed eerie. Or was it her imagination? Her body was tired, her mind restless, hyped up, and it probably didn’t help that she’d made her way upstairs to the employee kitchen and brewed a pot of coffee, listening to the hot water drip through the filter as she walked to the wide bank of windows and stared out at the small town where street lamps shimmered a ghostly blue and the stoplights in town, two that she could see from here, blinked brilliant red.

  Only a few cars drove past the storefronts of First Street, and the sidewalks were empty aside from a stray dog sniffing along the curb. The scent of coffee was strong, the pot chimed that it was through brewing and Cassidy poured herself a mug, then returned to the window where, as she lifted her cup to her lips, she spied a movement in the night’s shadows, a dark figure slipping around the corner.