“He can’t get them there,” Laura said.
“Why not? Because they have a gate?”
“He won’t attack them straight on. It’s not his game plan.”
“You think you know his game plan?”
Laura hesitated, then said firmly, “Yes.”
“Well, maybe you oughta tell the police then, so they can find him and put him back in the mental hospital.”
“They wouldn’t believe anything I said, and if I told them how I know, they’d think I was a psycho, too.”
“Okay, I’ll bite. How do you know?”
“This is off the record, right?”
He nodded wearily.
The bartender brought them two white mugs and an insulated pot of coffee. He poured them each a cup and left a bowl of sugar packets and a small pitcher of cream. Laura gratefully used up the time it took her to pour her coffee and add a bit of cream to think about what she was going to say.
Stirring the cream slowly, concentrating on it, she finally said, “Everyone thinks we’re a cult. We’re not.”
“You’ve already pointed out we have different definitions for the same thing,” he rejoined. “But I don’t care about semantics, anyway.”
“We’re just women who live together. In my case lived, past tense. We’re sisters,” she said, though the word felt alien on her tongue. Thanks to Justice Turnbull.
“Are you sisters? Real sisters, by blood?”
“Yes. Well, technically, I guess, some are half sisters. I, uh, I’m not really sure.”
He stared at her as if she were making it up.
“Seriously,” she said, then reminded him, “You asked.”
“And you live, lived with your aunt? That was the woman I saw at the lodge.”
She nodded, thinking back to the lodge, how safe she had felt there while growing up, but that had been a false sense of security. “My younger sisters live there now, well . . . some of them.” She took an experimental sip of her coffee. It was hot and chased away the chill that had been with her since leaving Siren Song.
“No brothers?” he asked.
“I had a brother who died, and another two . . . who left. . . .”
“Just left, never to be heard from again?”
She shrugged. How could she explain that she didn’t know, that there were many secrets held in Siren Song, secrets she, herself, couldn’t begin to understand? There was just no way this man would ever comprehend the complexities of life within the gated walls.
And maybe he shouldn’t. Maybe that was better.
“What about your mom and dad?” Harrison persisted. He offered a smile, then sipped from his mug.
“Mom and Dad,” she repeated, realizing how weird this was going to sound. “We never knew our fathers,” she said carefully.
“Fathers. Plural?”
“Off the record,” she said again.
“Yes, damn it!” he said with a shake of his head. “You might not claim to be a cult, but you’re sure as hell paranoid about the outside world learning about you.”
She sighed, wondered how much, if anything, she should confide. Probably nothing, but here she was. At Davy Jones’s frickin’ Locker. With a reporter. “Okay, listen, it’s . . . hard, okay? My mother . . .” How could she explain about a woman she barely knew herself, a mother who was distant, secretive, and dark? “I guess the easiest way to say it was that she was mentally unstable.” Laura rubbed at a stain on the table with her fingertips. “Mother—Mary—she took lovers fairly indiscriminately, or so my aunt has alluded. I remember a little bit of this, but mostly I pieced it together over the years. My mother had a lot of children, one after the other. Some of the first were adopted out, I think, and then something happened and that stopped.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know exactly. Catherine, my aunt, was ill for about a year and my mom was in charge and that didn’t go so well.” Laura shuddered, the interior of the restaurant easing to the edges of her vision as memories of the lodge surfaced again. She recalled a white-faced, angry Mary standing at the window on the upper floor, looking out toward the sea, tears running from her eyes and blood staining her long gown. . . . Laura had been on the shadowed stairs and, while her mother cried, she’d stayed mute, slipping silently downward, knowing that if she said a word, disturbed her mother, a terrible fury would be unleashed.
Now, with the smells of the deep-fat fryer reaching her nostrils and some laughter from a booth near the video poker machines jarring her, she blinked and found herself staring into the disbelieving eyes of Harrison Frost. Incredible, intelligent eyes. Sexy, even. But skeptical.
She cleared her throat, stuffed the unwanted memories back into a dark corner of her mind where they belonged.
“You don’t know what happened to Mary,” he prodded, seemingly intrigued.
She glanced away, couldn’t stare into his inquisitive, oh-so-male eyes. “The last time my mother was pregnant, she miscarried, and then she was attended to by a doctor, and then . . . not long after she was gone.”
“Gone?”
She was nodding, remembering the wind whispering through the old lodge, like the sinister chatter of ghosts slipping under the eaves. She was suddenly cold as a bitter arctic wind.
“Like dead?”
“Yes.” She cradled her coffee in her hands, her elbows on the table, as she tried to gain warmth through the ceramic mug.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think any of us, the sisters, do. At least no one’s said anything to me.”
“But someone does. Catherine,” he suggested.
“If she does, she’s kept it to herself.”
“But you’re sure?”
“Hey, I’m not certain of anything,” she snapped, because that was the God’s honest truth. “But there’s a graveyard on the property and Mary’s there.”
“In a private cemetery,” he clarified.
“Yes. It was all kind of secret at the time. My aunt was afraid of scaring us, but then she showed us the grave. After my mother, Mary, was gone, Catherine changed everything. The adoptions had stopped long before, and then Catherine locked the gates and the outside world from getting in. I was one of the oldest of my siblings, at least of the ones still at the lodge, and I didn’t like it much. I kept trying to run away, so Catherine bargained with me and I worked in Deception Bay, at a grocery store, for a while, and then I wanted to go to nursing school and I left when I was eighteen.”
“And you were the last one out?”
“Yes . . . I, well . . . yes. As far as I know, and Catherine would have let me know if things had changed. We write letters. Snail mail. They’re not exactly electronic there.”
Harrison nodded as he pulled out a tiny digital recorder from the pocket of his jacket.
“Hey, no.” She shook her head. “We made a deal, remember? No recording.”
He hesitated, then slipped it back into his pocket.
“It’s not on, is it?” she asked, about to march out of this dive. “You didn’t turn it on and leave it running like in the movies?”
“Oh, for crying out loud!” He retrieved the tiny device again and set it on the table. Its record light was dark, but to prove his point, he turned it over, opened the back, and removed the batteries. “Satisfied?” he asked.
“I guess.”
“Good, but I would like to take a few notes.” He dropped the disabled recorder into his pocket again and pulled out a notebook and pen. When she was about to protest again, he leaned across the table. “Look, we had a deal and I’m holding to it, okay? I’m not planning to blast your story all over the place, but I’d like to remember some points for a story about Justice when they catch him.”
Laura didn’t like it. “You’re making me regret talking to you.”
To her shock, he reached across the table and grabbed one of her hands. “Trust me,” he said, and his fingers were incredibly strong and warm. She felt a
n unlikely current of electricity slide through her veins and quickly retrieved her hand. His smile seemed as sincere as it was engaging. “I won’t do or print anything you don’t want me to. I promise. Unless it’ll help catch the bastard.”
There was the dilemma, the real reason she’d agreed to the interview. If Frost could help put Justice behind bars, then she’d do anything she could to help him and that included allowing him some insight into Siren Song. Once more, he was staring at her with his damned eyes.
Practiced charm. Again.
“But you’ll let me know first? Right? Before you do anything?” This wasn’t going exactly the way she planned. Not at all.
“Yes.”
She stared at him, wondering, really, if she could believe him.
No way, not with him scribbling notes. But there it was; he already had clicked his pen and flipped open his notepad.
“Back to your mother. Mary. Give me some background content. What was she like?”
“I don’t really know, honestly. She was a bit of a mystery to all of us. Catherine says that she and my mom fought about us all the time. Different philosophies about raising us. Catherine wanted austerity and my mother wanted free love.”
“How old were you when your mom died?”
“Ten, almost eleven, I think. I don’t really know. I was just a child, and it was kind of a taboo subject.”
He made a note, then said, “And that’s about the time Catherine locked the gates.”
“I think so, yeah.”
He shook his head. “That’s wild.”
More than wild, she thought as she took another sip from her cooling coffee, it had been necessary.
To keep the demons at bay.
CHAPTER 12
Justice awoke with a jerk that nearly lifted him off the makeshift bed he’d constructed of Cosmo’s heavy overcoat and his own Halo Valley uniform scrunched up and used as a pillow. The old oak floorboards beneath were hard as metal. His heart pounded harshly against his ribs as he sat up. Light filtered in gloomily through cracks in the siding and the one, dirty, cobweb-shrouded window on the western side of the building.
He needed transportation . . . he could—
The smell of sick perfidy filled his nose.
One of them was nearby!
The pregnant one.
His lips curled of their own accord.
The stench of her was calling to him to send her and her growing monster into the black abyss from where they sprang.
He felt his pulse jump, his heart begin to pound, and he began to sweat, though it was still the cool of the morning, the single window showing a foggy morning shroud through its dirty panes. All drowsiness left him, and he had a sudden sizzling vision of the thick and twisting evil that ran through the roots of their family tree. A snake that bored into them and poisoned their blood. It had been there for years. Generations. And it had found a home in the female heart and womb, sent straight from hell to do Satan’s bidding.
His flesh crawled. He’d seen it in the woman who’d given birth to him. Smelled it in the flesh of his sisters. Whores every one. Hiding like snakes under rocks . . . except the scent of this one was too strong. She was nearby.
He let the excitement build. He’d spent years in a fogged and frozen state, impotent, unable to do what needed to be done. Then there had been Jezebel. Outside the gates of their evil manse, he’d tracked her. Until she’d been allowed inside. Welcomed. Into the very heart of Siren Song, the vile spot from which he’d been tossed out like garbage. Along with the bitch who’d birthed him. He’d been forced to live through her subsequent pregnancy and the twisted mass of human flesh she’d borne. His sisters. The ones who had been closest to him by blood, much closer than the women who lived in the lodge now, who, he knew, were cousins of his, connected through the ancestors who had built the lodge . . .
Sisters . . .
He shuddered, thinking of them all. He’d been uncertain and inadequate until he’d caught up with and stabbed Jezebel. Then he’d known. His path was clear. But the mother bitch had descended into madness and was laughed at in the town. Reading palms and cards for money. Lying to feed herself. Wishing she could be back with them.
Though he’d never been told the truth—oh, no, it had been that witch of a mother’s intention to keep him forever in the dark, but he’d learned. She, that whore who’d borne him, had been cast out because she had lain with one of the black-hearted bitch’s men. He hated her as much as the rest of them. He’d almost killed her once. Now he had been given a second chance to get the job done.
It was God’s will.
He heard the scrape of talons on the roof, and then a solitary raven’s call. He blinked, rubbed a hand over the stubble on his jaw. He needed transportation. He was no more than a man himself, no matter what names they called him. Psycho. Schizo. Homicidal maniac. Nutcase. It scarcely penetrated any longer, though once upon a time it had hurt like they were driving nails into his eyes and ears every time one of his sisters rained their epithets down on him.
Bastard.
Stupid.
Retard.
Sicko.
They were no better. In fact, far worse.
He was more than willing to perform God’s will. His mission. He embraced the duty of killing them all. Each and every one, so the sickness that twined through them was banished forever.
He could count on no one else, he thought as he stood, feeling his full bladder and rotating his neck until it cracked. Justice was the only male in the family who’d lived to adulthood. The sisters had managed to kill them all. Every last male child. Aside from him.
Anger slid through his bloodstream and his teeth clenched at the unfairness of it all. His fists clenched until his veins showed in his wrists.
He was determined to avenge his brothers’ deaths.
And he was determined to be the last member of their cursed tribe left on earth.
Savvy pushed through the glass doors of Seagull Pointe and walked across a strip of industrial-grade blue carpeting to the front desk. She wasn’t in uniform, as she wasn’t exactly a deputy. She’d been a detective in Gresham, and she was a detective at the TCSD, and she didn’t like the conspicuous nature of the tan uniform. But she did have her badge, and she held it in front of the girl at the counter that separated the office area from the reception foyer. The lingering scents of coffee and bacon, leftover odors from a recently served breakfast, hung in the air, and a few of the residents still sat at tables in the dining area, a large room that jutted off the back of the main entrance. The receptionist stared at Savvy’s card as if she had no idea what to do.
“Detective Savannah Dunbar with the Tillamook County Sheriff’s Department,” Savvy said. “I’d like to see one of your patients, Madeline Turnbull.”
“Oh . . . uh . . .” She looked over her shoulder, as if hoping someone with more authority would appear, then, realizing that she was on her own, glanced at the clock mounted near the door. “Uh . . . let me call the director.” The receptionist, who looked all of eighteen and whose name tag read KERI, punched a button and waited. For nearly two minutes. “Uh . . . He must not be in.” She licked her lips nervously; talking to anyone official obviously worried her. She was off her stool and said, “Just a sec. I’ll get Inga for you.”
Whoever the hell Inga was, Savvy thought. She waited a few minutes and eyed all the plaques of excellence displayed proudly near the sign in/out sheet and a vase of silk flowers—roses and carnations.
Keri reappeared with Inga, presumably, and without bothering with introductions, slunk back to her stool.
“I’m Inga Anderssen,” the newcomer said. A middle-aged woman with blond hair going to gray, Inga was trim and direct and eyed Savvy carefully. “Our director, Darius Morrow, is unavailable. How can I help you?”
Savvy explained again about her mission, and Inga simply shook her head. “I’m afraid that’s impossible. Madeline can’t answer any questions for you. For the most p
art, she’s unaware of her surroundings.”
“I would like to meet her, all the same.”
“The media has already tried.” Inga’s voice held a certain amount of satisfaction. Clearly, the press had failed and she had prevailed.
“I understand why you would want to keep the media out, but I’m here in an official capacity.”
“And I told you, she’s unavailable.”
While Keri shuffled papers on the other side of the desk and an elderly couple pushed matching walkers down a hallway snaking off the central reception area, Savvy and Inga sized each other up. Savvy was very aware that her youth and looks worked against her more times than not in her job. “Are you going to make me get a court order?” she said with a smile, though her voice brooked no argument.
Inga looked her up one side and down the other. She wanted to battle. She really, really did. But it was clear to both of them that in the end, Savvy had the law on her side. With a pressing of her lips, followed by an indifferent shrug, she said, “Fine. This way,” then led Savvy down a hallway to the right, which in turn led to the nursing home part of the establishment. The assisted-living rooms were in the opposite direction, according to the signs posted on the walls.
Inga slowed at one of the rooms, then entered, leaving Savvy to follow.
Madeline “Mad Maddie” Turnbull lay in a hospital bed, her skin gray against white linens. The room was bare, not a personal item to be seen. No pictures in frames, no bouquets, no knickknacks from her previous life. A chair with a toilet seat and receptacle was parked beside the bed and a tray table angled toward her with a glass half filled with water and a straw. Even the window shade was drawn, and the room seemed cloying and dark, almost tomblike, the smells of urine and antiseptic unmistakable.