Dangerous To Love

by Toni Anderson, Barbara Freethy, Dee Davis, Leslie A. Kelly, Cynthia Eden, J. Kenner, Meli Raine, Gwen Hernandez, Pamela Clare, Rachel Grant

  “Mr. McConnell?” Kirby asked.

  He steeled himself for it, for the request. The demand. Promise you’ll find my child.

  “Will you do something for us? Please?”

  Rising, he turned to face the man, seeing Lexie watching from a few feet away, stricken, as if knowing what was about to happen. The word No came to his mouth, came close to spilling out, but before they could, Walter made his request with quiet dignity and grief.

  “Will you please use whatever powers you have to tell us which of our daughters we’re going to be burying this week?”

  He remained very still, surprised, yes, but also angry at himself. He’d let his past fears and hang-ups dictate his present actions, and had almost done something heartless. Lexie had once accused him of being cowardly and in the moment that just passed he’d come about as close to it as he ever wanted to be in his life.

  “I’m not sure I’ll be able to,” he told the man, “but I will try.” Realizing he could do more than try, he added, “If I can’t, I do know someone who can help.”

  Olivia Wainwright would hate it. She used her abilities only in extreme cases, and then only because a cause of death couldn’t be determined due to the age or condition of whatever remains had been found.

  In this case, they knew the cause of death. And it was an awful, brutally painful one.

  If she came here and she touched that body, it would mean she would have to suffer that pain for herself. She’d have to endure whatever that teenage girl had endured in her final two minutes and ten seconds in order to allay these parents’ suffering.

  Honestly, he didn’t know if she would. He didn’t know that he would, in her place.

  Hopefully, though, it wouldn’t come to that. He had never tried actively tapping into the thoughts of someone he already knew was dead, though he’d certainly caught remnants and emotions they’d left behind. But it could work.

  And if it helped to end the suffering of the grieving people in this room—including Lexie—he was more than willing to try his damnedest.

  Sunday, 12:25 p.m.

  The new girl had apparently survived the night.

  He kept his eyes on the monitor, sitting in the kitchen where his mother had once busied herself baking nothing, and drinking away her humanity. Having watched all morning, he’d noticed right away when the crumpled form on the basement floor began to move.

  The surveillance system had video only, no sound, so he couldn’t hear what she said, but Vonnie obviously became very excited and spoke to her companion. The newcomer fidgeted, but didn’t try to roll over. Probably because of the small knife sticking out of her back.

  It certainly hadn’t been a death strike, just something quick and shallow to shock her. Nor had he intended for her to be unconscious for quite so long when he struck her in the head with an old wooden baseball bat. Well, he never had been much of a baseball player; sports had been Jed’s purview. Guess he didn’t know when to pull his swing.

  But no matter. She’d survived.

  The new one wouldn’t need to eat or drink yet, and should be kept hungry and thirsty to better break her and keep her docile. Vonnie, however, probably did require some nourishment, so he prepared her a liquid meal. And because he didn’t like the energy with which she’d been moving lately, and the quick responses during their last conversation, he opened a handful of capsules and dumped their contents into the drink before he stirred it up.

  “Ready for me, ladies?” he asked, glancing again at the monitor, seeing that Vonnie was still leaning down as much as she could, talking to her unmoving companion.

  Carrying the drink, he remembered his disguise. The mask lay on the counter, its jolly smile looking evil even before he put it on. He had enjoyed wearing the thing for the past week, but had also been looking forward to taking it off and revealing himself to Vonnie. She would undoubtedly lose what little sanity she had left when she realized who had taken her.

  “No, not yet,” he told himself. He didn’t want to give up the game completely while the Kirby girl had yet to be played with.

  “The Kirby girl,” he mused, realizing he never had found out which one he’d grabbed and which one he’d hacked the throat out of.

  Of course, he had intended to take Taylor, the one who drove the VW Beetle he’d seen last Monday night. Finding out which GHS student drove the car had taken almost no effort at all; he’d simply watched her get into it after the game Friday, hearing one of her friends call her by name just before she drove away.

  Problem was, when he’d tracked her down late last night, she hadn’t been alone. She’d had her twin sister with her and though he’d stalked them through the parking lot, and heard snatches of their conversation, he hadn’t heard enough to identify them. Some keys had been tossed between them, so he wasn’t even sure who usually drove the damned car.

  In the end, it hadn’t mattered. One was dead, one in his basement, so neither could say a word to anyone about having seen him last Monday night. Nor, he suspected, had they told anyone before now.

  “Definitely not,” he told himself. Vonnie—clever little Vonnie—had been right about that. If he’d been spotted, somebody would almost surely have come to talk to him by now.

  Still, better safe than sorry. He had learned at a young age to do whatever he had to in order to keep his secrets. As boys, he and Jed had gotten quite good at concealing what happened behind the closed doors of this house. Lying, hiding bruises, never letting on about the sadistic games their parents had liked to play with them in the basement.

  Jed’s father’s abuse had been raw and brutal.

  Hers—his own mother’s—had somehow been worse. To sit there and laugh, drunkenly reading them bedtime stories, even while the beatings and the rapes were going on . . . God, how he’d hated her. But they’d never told anyone.

  “Never let outsiders know your business.”

  Jed had shared his deep need for privacy, which was one reason they had kept their past relationship secret once he’d come back here to Granville. Nobody else needed to know his mother had once been married to Jed’s father. Like two soldiers who’d come through the same bloody battle, they had kept their horrific history just between them.

  Horrific. Yes, that was the word. He sometimes wondered how his stepbrother had survived, stayed sane, once it had been just him and his father in this house.

  He didn’t want to think about that. Jed was long past being hurt now.

  Enough. Time to visit the little women.

  Young Miss Kirby—Taylor or Jenny—was stirring, but not conscious yet. He needed to get down there and restrain her before she got to that point. So he donned the mask.

  He thought about wearing a hood, instead, but decided against it. It probably wasn’t necessary now, since his new visitor was as weak as a kitten. But next time, when she was more clear-headed, he might need to further his disguise. He’d taken care to never turn his back on Vonnie, fearing even the color of his hair might give her a clue to his identity. Once the other one was fully conscious, he’d have to be especially cautious.

  Making his way down the steep stairs, he stopped to unlock the first metal door. He stepped inside, turned, relocked it, and then proceeded down the narrow hallway, lit only by one bare bulb above his head. He had another small light he used when reading to his visitors, but it wasn’t on. It sat right outside the next heavy door, beside the stool on which he usually sat during his story-time visits.

  Hmm. He wondered what kinds of stories Miss Kirby liked to hear.

  Perhaps Arabian Nights. Oh, how he had loved that book as a child, partly because she had never read it to them. He’d read it on his own, pretending he and Jed could fly away on a magic carpet, far from Jed’s father and his whore of a mother. Never to return to this awful town.

  He had returned, though. And poor Jed had never gotten to leave.

  Slipping the key into the large, old-fashioned lock, he entered the cell. “Good morning, la
dies,” he said in his most cheery voice. “Sleep well?”

  “She’s in a bad way,” Vonnie said, not even attempting to be pleasant.

  “But she’s alive, right?” he asked. “She’s been moving, fidgeting all morning, so she can’t be too badly hurt.”

  “Please, you gotta let me help her.”

  He lowered Vonnie’s drink to a rickety old table that stood by the door. “Really? Do you think we should do something with her?”

  Vonnie watched him suspiciously from her cot. “I’ll do it. Just unchain me and I’ll take care of her.” Even from here he saw the way her throat worked as she swallowed. “I won’t try to run away, I swear. I just want to make sure she’s okay.”

  “Oh, how sweet! You helping a snotty bitch who would never even have spoken to you if you hadn’t transferred to her school. Nice little white girls from the suburbs don’t usually associate with your kind, you know.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  Oooh, kitten had her claws out. It was a good thing he’d spiked that drink, because Vonnie appeared to have regained some of her fighting spirit.

  “She’s my friend. She offered to drive me home last Monday night.”

  He sighed. “You probably should have taken her up on that offer, dear.” Then, thinking about it, he asked, “Do you happen to know which twin this is?”

  Her eyes grew rounder. “You don’t?”

  “No, I haven’t got a clue.”

  “Well, then, how do you know you got the right one, the one who might have seen you following me last week?”

  He laughed wickedly. That’s for me to know and you to find out.

  But why not let her find out now? If Miss Kirby here was playing possum and was a little more conscious than she appeared, he couldn’t think of a better way to coax a reaction out of her.

  “I don’t,” he told Vonnie, though his eyes remained on his other young friend. “But you see, it doesn’t matter. Because before I took this one, I slit her sister open and left her stone-cold dead on the ground. She won’t ever be talking to anyone again.”

  There might have been a twitch, maybe a tiny sound, but the unconscious girl did not cry out or scream or well up in tears. So she was really still unconscious. Little weakling.

  He wanted to describe how he’d hacked at the other one’s throat, and why. It hadn’t been entirely necessary. But it had given him a kick to think that, just as he didn’t know which girl he’d killed—since it had been dark and he’d had to work fast—the police might not be able to figure it out, either.

  He could easily find out which girl was lying on the floor by lifting her head and looking at her throat for the birthmark everybody in town knew about. But something about not knowing made it all the more delicious. Because, like all the other girls, it really didn’t matter who they were once they arrived in his basement. They were toys for him to play with—anonymous, nameless, mere instruments of his amusement.

  Vonnie was the only one who’d ever been more than that. Which would make the eventual breaking of her psyche all the more wonderful when it finally happened.

  Almost as wonderful was thinking how the Kirbys must be feeling.

  He’d originally considered taking both twins, but kidnapping two girls would have doubled the risk. Besides, he loved the idea of the Kirbys having to grieve for one daughter they knew was dead while at the same time holding out vain hope that the other might escape her sister’s fate. All the while not knowing which was which.

  It would be agonizing. And that simply delighted him.

  There was one more benefit: Making the identification difficult might keep people from wondering about a motive, trying to figure out if the dead girl had any connection to him.

  “Now,” he said, picking up the drink and carrying it over to the restrained teenager. “Drink up. You must be hungry, so I made you one of those instant meals. It’s very nutritious.”

  She said nothing, still visibly stunned by what he’d just said about the other girl’s sister. Funny, he wouldn’t have expected Vonnie to care so much. She was so smart, had been so determined all her life to get out of the awful nightmare in which she lived, he would never have imagined that looking-out-for-number-one gene hadn’t been clawed into her genetic code.

  “Lift your head,” he told her, guiding the flexible straw toward her mouth.

  She watched him closely, hesitating for an instant.

  “Come on, now, you have to drink or you’ll never be able to help your friend over there.”

  “Please don’t hurt her any more,” she whispered.

  “Do what you’re told and maybe I won’t.”

  That got her attention and she carefully sucked up a mouthful—a small one, like always, as if each time she knew he might have filled the glass with bug spray.

  “See? Nice and nutritious. Milk and vitamins,” he told her.

  She swallowed a mouthful, then sucked again, slowly, smart enough to know if she slurped she’d throw everything back up.

  He watched her down every drop, then, once she was finished, straightened and backed toward the door. “I guess our friend can stay where she is there for a little longer while I put together something for her to lie down on. Can’t very well chain her to the floor.”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t think ahead and have something made.”

  Sneering beneath the mask, he snapped, “Well, I’m surprised you were a stupid enough little bitch to let your mother trade you to a bunch of old men for drug money.”

  And with that, he left the room, slamming the metal door hard, the keys shaking in his hands. He hadn’t liked the reminder that he had forgotten to make up a place for his new guest.

  “Know-it-all,” he mumbled as he pulled off the mask. “Damned teenagers today, nothing but lip.”

  Sometimes the girl was a little too smart for her own good. Maybe he wouldn’t bring Vonnie anything to drink again tomorrow. Or the next day. See if she was quite so sassy when her tongue was so swollen and dry it would choke her if she didn’t turn her head to the side.

  “See how you like that!” he yelled before exiting the second door.

  Vonnie heard the echo of his angry yell, knew she had enraged him, but she didn’t respond. She was too busy listening, waiting for the sound of his footsteps to die away, wanting to be sure he wasn’t going to pop back in and surprise her.

  Think fast, girl; move quick. She had only a few minutes before the drugs he’d given her hit her bloodstream. She wasn’t stupid enough to think he had forgotten this time. His insistence that she drink every drop, and the faintly bitter taste of the last couple of sips, had convinced her he’d packed a massive dose in this latest cup.

  “Not gonna work, psycho-prick. You’re not gonna drug me again,” she muttered, twisting her head around to face the rough cement wall. She wished her hands were free, would give anything to be able to stick her fingers down her throat, but she didn’t have that luxury. Nor did she have time to waste continuing to try to work her hands out of the bindings.

  She had to get the drugs out of her system now, before she digested them. Because once she had, she would be useless, both to herself and to the girl lying helpless on the floor.

  Thinking of the awful things he’d done was enough to make the milk in her stomach churn, but no more. There was, however, one way to get rid of it for sure. She leaned close to the wall, and began to lick at the crumbling cement, tasting dirt and mold, thinking she probably wasn’t the first desperate girl who’d puked on this very spot.

  That did it. She started to gag, dry heaves racking her body, trying to bring up the small amount of nourishment in her stomach. But before she leaned over the bed to be sick on the floor, she heard a voice rising from the other side of the room.

  “Turn your face to the wall and do it into your pillow.”

  Shocked, she froze. “What?”

  “Hurry! He’s watching us.”

  It was Jenny . . . Taylor? Sounding not at
all woozy and unconscious, but alert and aware, though she hadn’t moved a single muscle, still just that lump of clothes and bones on the floor.

  “He’s got a camera on us, but I don’t think he has audio. If he did, he would have heard you talking earlier and would have known you aren’t sure who I am.”

  She opened her mouth to ask that very question—who was she?—but before she could, the other girl spoke again.

  “Now, unless you want him to know you puked up whatever he just made you drink, turn your head into the pillow and do it as carefully as you can.”

  Vonnie didn’t ask stupid questions, didn’t waste time telling the other girl how glad she was that she’d come to. She thought clearly, focusing only on the goal: getting out of here.

  Now, knowing she had a conscious ally—who wasn’t restrained in any way—hope bloomed in her heart and made her feel truly alive again for the first time in days.

  She might survive this. Might really make it out of here alive. Might live to see justice and gain vengeance and salvage the life she’d been so sure was already lost to her.

  With that goal in mind, Vonnie turned her head and forced herself to be sick right on her cot, hoping the violent convulsions of her body would be mistaken for shivers of cold.

  She also hoped she hadn’t waited too long.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Sunday, 1:40 p.m.

  Olivia refused to allow anyone into the room with her when she went to see the body.

  Lexie, who understood the woman’s reluctance, based on the little she knew of her abilities, had offered, even though she wasn’t really ready to see that sweet girl in death. So, of course, had Aidan. But Olivia had insisted on going in by herself.

  God, how Lexie wished Aidan had been successful when he’d tried to find the answers they sought. He’d spent a long time sitting beside the body, but had simply been unable to come up with anything. Not about who was lying dead in the next room, or anything about her twin sister, wherever she might be. So, as much as he’d hated to do it, he had contacted Olivia, then had gone out to the old plantation house to get her and bring her back here.