Ritual Sins

by Anne Stuart

  “I thought the police said it was another suicide.”

  “My boy thought too highly of hisself to end his life. Besides, I brought him up to believe it was a sin. And he sure as hell didn’t want to spend eternity at Marijo’s side—their six years of marriage was suffering enough.”

  “I thought you said Luke was eight when she died?”

  “He was. Jackson married Marijo when Luke was two.”

  The woman’s logic was appalling. “So what happened to this spawn of the devil after your son died?”

  “After Luke murdered him? The boy just took off, and good riddance. He knew that Jackson had a lot of friends around here, and not one of them had been partial to that scrawny little changeling except a few bleeding-heart teachers. And why they bothered, when he never showed up for school, was beyond me. But Luke lit out from here after the inquest. Didn’t even stop by to see me.”

  “What would you have done if he had?”

  “Kilt him,” Esther said flatly. “He must have figgered that out.”

  “Must have,” Rachel echoed. “And you never heard from him again?”

  “Nope. Not until I read about him in one of those newspapers they have by the checkout counter at the Piggly Wiggly. Heard he’d killed another man, and ended up in jail for it. Which is where he belonged. But now he’s got thousands of fool people handing him their money, thinking he’s Jesus Christ or something. For the sin of blasphemy he oughtta be destroyed, if not for all his other sins.”

  Esther looked like the woman to do it.

  Even the coffee was churning in Rachel’s stomach. She plastered her best social smile on her face, the one Stella had taught her to present to the world, no matter what. “I’m sure he’ll meet his just rewards,” she said in a soothing tone.

  “Is that what you are, missy? Are you going to right the wrong that was done to my son so many years ago?”

  Rachel just looked at her. “I think I’ll leave that up to you,” she said.

  Esther cackled. “You may think so, girly, but my money’s on you. I think you’re going to be the death of him, whether you want to be or not.”

  “I don’t want to be the death of anyone,” she said in a faint voice.

  “You don’t always get what you want,” Esther said. “You’ll end up killing him. Destroying him. One way or another.”

  Rachel never thought she would be grateful for the sweltering, smothering heat that folded around her when she stepped from Esther’s house. It felt as if Spanish moss was growing in her lungs, but she didn’t care. Being away from the fetid air that wicked old woman breathed was relief enough.

  She didn’t really want to be anyone’s destruction after all, not even Luke Bardell’s. He’d had a tough, tortured childhood. So what? Most of the people she knew had miserable families. So he’d killed, maybe more than once.

  Maybe he killed Stella, she reminded herself. Maybe he learned the taste for it and couldn’t let go.

  She couldn’t let go herself. Much as she wanted to drive out of Coffin’s Grove, away from Luke Bardell’s childhood and any pity she might have felt, she wasn’t ready to do it. Even knowing he was far beyond the need for pity, and that he wouldn’t thank her for it.

  Besides, she tended to reserve any stray pity for herself, she thought with a grim smile. Poor, pitiful Rachel.

  She didn’t want to drive back through the town and risk running into any of Luke’s protectors or detractors. She shouldn’t have come here in the first place—it only made her doubt her determination.

  There must be a roundabout way back to the highway. There was a pale gray line on the map, signaling a gravel road. She’d go that way, and circle back around the outskirts of the town.

  Esther was nowhere in sight when she left the house. Without thinking, Rachel stole a handful of tightly budded white roses, pricking her fingers as she did so, and dumped them on the front seat of the car. The streets were still, hot, and deserted as she drove away, and she took a deep breath of the artificially chilled air inside her car, hoping for the smell of roses to fill the air. Esther’s flowers had no scent.

  She had never been terribly good at following maps—Stella had always told her she was geographically dyslexic—and she hadn’t realized she’d be on the same road that ran by the graveyard. On instinct she stopped, scooping up the thorny flowers and taking them with her.

  She made it to Marijo’s headstone when she looked down at the flowers in her arms. They were crawling with tiny worms, eating their way through the pristine, satiny flesh of the scentless roses.

  She threw them away from her with a cry of disgust, away from the sweet simple wildflowers that adorned the plaque. Fresh flowers. Someone had visited the grave since last night.

  She looked around, at the dark, swampy woods that lay beyond the neat little graveyard. There was no one to be seen, no one was watching her. She would be driving through that swampy forest, assuming she’d read the road map right. Maybe she’d find the ghost of whatever had haunted her last night.

  She climbed back in the car and locked all the doors. She turned the air-conditioning on max, turned up the radio, and started to drive. It was some Christian rock station, with someone howling about the devil getting you in his clutches, and she snapped it off again with a shudder. She didn’t believe in the devil, or in God either, she supposed. She believed in evil, and evil lay in Coffin’s Grove, in the house of Esther Blessing. And it lived in Luke Bardell’s damaged soul.

  It was dark midday with the pine forest looming up around her. She could smell the dampness of the swamp, the sickness and decay, even through the air-conditioning. The road narrowed, and she could see stagnant pools of standing water glistening behind the trees. She wondered if they had alligators in there.

  Maybe she should turn back. Stella had been right, at least in that one area—Rachel had a lousy sense of direction. Maybe this narrow road was a dead end that would stop in a bog, and the car would sink down, taking her with it, disappearing without a trace.

  “Idiot,” she said out loud, slowing her speed to a crawl as she drove deeper into the thick forest.

  The trees were ancient, towering, turning the swamp into a dark, gloom-infested place, so different from the bright clean light of New Mexico. She couldn’t imagine two more disparate places. And that might be the key to Luke Bardell’s enigmatic nature. He had a swamp soul in a desert climate.

  She would have missed the house if she’d been driving any faster, if she hadn’t been considering finding a place to turn around and head back. It was very old, and the forest had already begun to take the land back. Vines crawled up the siding, Spanish moss hung like a curtain from the huge trees surrounding the place. It might have had paint, once, but now it was long gone, and all the windows were shattered by some vandal’s target practice.

  It was just a house, an abandoned house in the midst of a swampy forest. And yet she found herself pulling to a stop at the edge of the weed-tangled property.

  She turned off the car, and the icy air-conditioning died with a weary shudder. When she opened the door the damp heat blasted around her, wrapping her in a blanket of humidity. She was crazy to stop, but she couldn’t help herself.

  She knew whose house this was. She knew who had been found hanging in the tumbled-down barn by her eight-year-old son; she knew who had died inside. Despite Esther’s accusations, she didn’t know who killed him.

  She approached the house slowly, warily, picking her way through the tangled undergrowth. Her jeans felt clammy against her skin, and even the loose T-shirt clung to her body. It was hot, and yet she felt shivery, cold, frightened. And still she kept coming.

  The front door was long gone. It looked as if someone had beaten it down, years ago. Maybe the police, when they came out to check on another suicide. Maybe Jackson Bardell himself, looking for the traveling preacher’s bastard child he’d been left with.

  Inside the house it was as still as death, dark and smelling of m
old and rotting vegetation. Even in the best of times this house must have been dark and depressing, but now it was like a living creature, swallowing everything.

  It was a house of many small rooms, most of them empty of everything but trash. The largest room lay at the end of the narrow hallway, and a dim light from a glassless window cast a pool of illumination onto the stained floor.

  She stood over that spot, staring down. There was no mistaking what that stain was, whose life’s blood had flooded over these worn floorboards. Jackson Bardell had died there, either by his own hand or that of the bastard child who lived with him.

  It wasn’t a noise that alerted her. Just a sixth sense that prickled along her arms, chilling her. She looked up, and he was standing there, as if he’d materialized out of thin air. As he had last night, in her claustrophobic bedroom.

  “Hey, Rachel,” Luke Bardell said softly. And he came toward her, stepping onto the ancient pool of blood.

  13

  He looked strange, different, somehow more menacing with his face in the shadows. Gone was the loose white clothing he wore in New Mexico. Now he was dressed entirely in black, black jeans, cowboy boots, a black T-shirt. He looked strong, dangerously so. The messiah in the desert was threat enough—this man, with his sultry eyes and his lean, wiry body, flat out terrified her.

  “What are you doing here?” Her voice was harsh. She didn’t move—it wouldn’t have done her any good. Either he’d let her go or not, and trying to run for it would be undignified. He knew how much she hated him and everything about him. He couldn’t know for certain just how much he frightened her.

  “I was born here.” His voice was different too, with the barest trace of a seductive drawl. She hated Southern accents. “Not in this house, of course. But I spent most of my childhood right here.”

  He seemed oblivious to the decades-old bloodstain beneath his boots. He glanced around him, and she saw his hair was tied back with a black leather thong. “The question is, Rachel, what are you doing here? And don’t tell me you’re on vacation—Coffin’s Grove isn’t the tourist center of the world. As a matter of fact, their only claim to fame is me. Local bad boy turned spiritual leader.”

  “Cult leader.”

  “Whatever you choose to call it, Rachel.” He took another step toward her, out of the ancient stain, and she felt an irrational thread of relief. “You came here looking for me, didn’t you?” Again that low, erotic drawl.

  “Don’t flatter yourself. I thought you never left your inner sanctum. If I thought you were going to be here it would have been the last place I would have come.”

  “Your mistake,” he murmured. “As far as everyone knows I’m still back there, shut up in my meditation chamber, fasting and praying.”

  “Not everyone.”

  He tilted his head to one side, surveying her. Her stomach felt like it was caving in—the gnawing anxiety was knotting it. His faint smile made it worse. He was a different man outside the retreat. Even more dangerous.

  “I’ll have to do something about that, now won’t I?” He came closer still. He’d never struck her as a particularly well-built man, but the tight black T-shirt defined muscle and sinew to a degree that made Rachel’s mouth go dry.

  She did take a step back then. “Are you going to kill me?”

  “Why should I do that?” His voice was lazy. His eyes weren’t.

  “Because I could tell the truth about you.” She must be half-crazy, she thought. Giving him a reason for killing her.

  “I told you,” he came closer, “that no one would believe you. You have no proof.”

  “If I told the right people they could find the proof,” she persisted.

  He shook his head. “I don’t leave a trace when I travel.” He moved suddenly, his hand catching her neck as she came up hard against the rough wall, his thumb stroking her sensitive skin. “I could cut your throat and be back in Santa Dolores by dinnertime, and no one would ever know I was here.”

  “What about when they found my body?” she asked hoarsely.

  “They wouldn’t.” He leaned closer, so close she could feel his breath on her face. Taste the cigarettes he’d smoked. “There are swamps all over here. I know where the deepest holes are. You could drive a semi into some of them and it’d never be seen again.”

  She wouldn’t let her knees buckle. She didn’t know what the worse danger was, the threat of death or the slow, sensual caress of his thumb across her throat. “Why didn’t you do that with your father?”

  She thought it would make him back off. It didn’t. “You’ve been listening to Esther, haven’t you?” he murmured. “You should know better than that. She’s a crazy old lady; anybody could tell you that.”

  “Then you didn’t kill your father?” She didn’t blink. She didn’t dare.

  His smile was cool. He glanced back at the rusty stain that seemed darker than ever. “There was too much blood,” he said, ignoring her question. “Getting rid of a body is one thing, covering up the evidence is another. There were brains and bits of bone and skin all over the place.”

  Rachel’s stomach lurched once more. “Did you kill your father?” she persisted, refusing to back down.

  “If I cut your throat,” he continued in that calm, musing voice, “it would make a mess as well. I suppose I could strangle you, though I have more experience with a knife.” His smile was mocking, wolfish.

  “Did you?” Her voice was sounding a little ragged, but she wasn’t willing to let it go.

  For a moment his expression was blank. “I’ll tell you one thing for certain. I swear to you, I didn’t kill my father,” he said, his voice absolutely clear. And she found, to her amazement, that she believed him. A man she considered incapable of telling the truth, and she believed him.

  And then he smiled. Leaned closer, so that his lips brushed her ear as he whispered, “Of course, Jackson Bardell wasn’t my father.”

  That moment of trust shattered as quickly as it had appeared. She shoved at him in fury, another mistake. He was too close, and too strong. He caught her hands in one of his, jerking her away from the wall, toward him, her body smack up against him. “Don’t ask me if I killed Jackson Bardell, Rachel,” he whispered. “You might not like the answer.”

  She was shaking. He knew it, had to feel the tremors racking her body, but there wasn’t a damned thing she could do about it.

  He wrapped his other arm around her shoulders, holding her close against him while he kept her hands captive. “Why are you so scared of me, Rachel?” he murmured. “What do you think I’m going to do to you? You don’t really think I’m going to kill you, do you?” He waited patiently for an answer, and finally she shook her head.

  “And you’re not worried I’ll rip you off. I already have your money. You haven’t given up the fight, but you must have a pretty good idea that you can’t win. So what is it? You think I’m going to rape you? Every time I get too close you start acting like a trembling virgin sacrifice. I don’t rape, Rachel. It’s no fun, and it’s too easy.”

  “It wouldn’t be easy with me,” she said flatly.

  His smile was slow in starting, full of mocking disbelief, and if she had a hand free she would have slapped him. But she didn’t.

  And he was holding her much too close. His long legs were pressed up against hers, and the feel of them was disturbing. Almost as disturbing as his hips.

  “Then what are you afraid of?” he asked again, his voice low-pitched and sultry. “Afraid I’ll seduce you away from your Judeo-Christian beliefs and you’ll end up a fool like the rest of the people who believe in me?”

  “Is that what you think of them?”

  “They’d have to be fools, wouldn’t they, to believe in a con artist and liar like me? Tell me what you’re afraid of, and I’ll let you go.”

  She stared up at him, mesmerized, unable to break free from his hands, his body, the seductive power of his voice. He was waiting, with deceptive patience, for her answer, and
she knew he wasn’t going to release her until she told him something. Something close to the truth.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll tell you.”

  He waited, not releasing her. It had been a small hope, and she took a deep breath, then regretted it. Her intake of breath brought their bodies closer. “I’m afraid of being touched.”

  “Bullshit. You don’t like it, but you’re not afraid of it. You’re afraid of me touching you. Why? Afraid you might learn to like it?”

  She jerked away in rage, but he just kept her held tight against him. “Don’t flatter yourself.”

  “Oh, I don’t.” Somehow she’d gotten pushed up against the wall, his arm around her, holding her tight as he leaned against her. “But I have this gift. Or curse, you might prefer to call it. I can draw people to me. I can make them do things they’d never think of doing. I can make them my willing slaves. Is that what you’re afraid of, Rachel? Afraid you’ll be my slave?”

  “That’s not going to happen.”

  “What if I gave you your choice?” His voice was so low it rumbled in his chest. Against her trapped hands. “You can drop all your efforts against me. We can declare a truce, you can go back to your normal life, and maybe I’ll see about getting the Grandfathers to release some of Stella’s money. I can tell them Stella wasn’t compos mentis when she made that final will, that the pain and the drugs she was taking confused her.”

  “Will they listen?”

  “Of course. I thought you knew, I can make anyone do anything if I’m determined.”

  “Was she out of her mind with pain and drugs? Did you make her write that will?” She could hear her neediness, and there was no way she could cover it up.

  There was something unfathomable in his eyes. “I could tell you anything and you’d believe it. I could tell you what you desperately need to hear; I could give you back your mother when you’d thought you’d lost her. It would be so easy.”