by Nancy Bush
He opened his mouth to explain but Claire stepped in, telling her about Cat and the circumstances that had pulled him into the investigation and how it had led to Deception Bay and Siren Song.
Dinah listened intently, jerking a bit at the mention of the cult’s lodge. Lang narrowed his gaze on her and said, “You’re familiar with Siren Song?”
“Anyone who lives here knows about them,” she side-stepped. “I still can’t get over that Claire let you into her space. All that compressed negative energy. It’s unhealthy.”
He slid a look out the rain-washed window in the direction of her home. “You some kind of New Age quack?”
“That’s one definition, I suppose.” Her mouth quirked.
“A quack’s quack?” He looked from her to Claire. “Beautiful.”
Claire held her tongue with a comeback, but with an effort, he could see. She said tightly, “You’re very quick to name call.”
“I’m a two-year-old inside. I’ve been told that before. In all my relationships.”
“You don’t seem like you’ve had many relationships,” Dinah said. “Not ones that count, anyway.”
“Oh. You’re a seer, too,” he said. “This gets better and better. Do your colleagues at Halo Valley know about her?” he asked Claire.
“Do you want to start a fight with me?” Claire asked.
“I’ve been trying all night, lady.”
Dinah said with amusement, “I think I walked into a lover’s quarrel. The ‘seer’ missed that one.” She started to head out.
“Don’t go. I’m on my way out.” Lang set his empty glass on the counter. “Thanks for the help, Dr. Norris. If Catherine of the Gates ever gets back to me, I’ll be sure and let you know.”
“You want to know about the Colony?” Dinah asked.
Both Claire and Lang turned to look at her, hearing something in her tone that arrested them both. She motioned for Lang to return and walked into the living room, curling herself into a chair, much like a cat, tucking her feet under her legs.
“What do you know?” he asked.
“Quite a lot, actually. My father wrote the book on them. Literally. He amassed a history of the Colony complete with old letters and newspaper articles. The works. And he knows Catherine personally.”
Catherine looked over the sea of blond female heads and felt every one of her fifty-seven years. Her own hair was going gray, still threaded with blond, but those strands were diminishing day by day. She’d done her best to keep them all safe. She would continue to do so. But the breach of Natasha’s disappearance was bringing the outside world too close. She hated the outsiders. Hated them all. They were too inquisitive and their sole aim seemed to be to strip Catherine and her charges bare of all their secrets. The outsiders called them the Colony and had latched on to the whimsical name of Siren Song for the lodge itself—Mary’s name for it. Both tags had been adopted by the women inside as well. They were the current generation of the Colony and they lived at Siren Song. So be it.
But Catherine wanted no further influence from them, and tonight’s meeting was called to ensure all of their agreement.
“Natasha has been found,” she announced.
There was a murmur through the crowd. Anxious faces turned her way. Catherine spread both notes on the table; she’d braved the rain to collect the second one.
“I am going to meet with the sheriff’s department,” she went on. “I should only be gone several hours. As ever, Isadora is in charge.”
“Lillibeth said there were two of them at the gate this time. The man, and a woman?” Ophelia said, her eyes bright. She was the youngest and the most interested in the outside world, an interest Catherine was desperately trying to quell.
“That’s right,” Lillibeth piped up.
“Let Catherine speak,” Isadora intoned. She was the oldest and the most like Catherine…the least like Mary.
Catherine glanced down at the second note. “The woman’s a doctor. Dr. Claire Norris. A psychiatrist.” That announcement met with silence and Catherine almost smiled. “She will not be treating any of us.”
“Is she Natasha’s doctor?” This was said fearfully from Cassandra, who worried almost as much as Catherine about the outsiders and their influence.
“I will find out.”
The girls—women, really, though Catherine had trouble thinking of them that way—asked more questions that she had no answers for. After a while the discussion dwindled and the girls trooped into the kitchen to finish the preparations for dinner. Lillibeth hung by Catherine, as she was always wont to do, but eventually Catherine turned her over to Augustine, who was the most nurturing of the group.
Catherine then mounted the back stairs to her room, an austere single room at the northwest corner of the upper hall with a view of both the front gate and the Pacific Ocean. The abandoned lighthouse was a deeper black shape in an already black sky. The island was an ugly hump of rock, also a faintly darker outline against the curtain of night. She could see a flicker of light from the island. Mary’s island, she thought grimly, though it was known on maps as Echo Island because of the way sound refracted off its sharply planed rock walls.
She stepped away from the windows long enough to scrape a long wooden match across the stone tabletop of her nightstand and light an oil lamp, waving out the match and replacing the glass surround. She then carried the lamp to a small wooden desk on the opposite wall from the bed and sat down in the matching chair. Picking up a modern ink pen and a cloth-covered notebook, she began making a list of items to buy while she was on her errand. Groceries. Paper supplies. New bedding, as some of the duvets were too worn to last out the winter. Catherine could appreciate ready-made items; she wasn’t as backward as the outsiders would believe. They even had electricity on the first floor and indoor plumbing.
But she had a wall to keep fortified. Lives to protect. If the outsiders should ever understand the extent of her girls’ gifts…
Disasters had already struck. Tragedies heaped one upon another. Lifetimes of troubles that had spilled over into these modern times despite Catherine’s best efforts.
There was an account of the Colony’s history, written down by a man who still set Catherine’s teeth on edge. One of Mary’s many lovers. A self-proclaimed historian who’d been old enough to be Mary’s father! A profligate who’d roamed the coastline and taken more women than any man had a right to, dropping children in his wake without a care. He’d wanted to be in the pages of the history he detailed. He’d known of the Colony womens’ powers and Mary’s inability to turn from Satan’s grasp, and he’d wormed his way into Mary’s bed, seduced her with grand gestures and his damn evil book that was filled with half truths and outright fiction. Oh, but Mary had wanted to believe! And what she’d done to be with him. The lies. The evil tricks.
The fornication.
Catherine squeezed her hands painfully together as she recalled her sister’s cries of ecstasy from wild sex acts with him…and so many others. It was only when Catherine wrested control of Siren Song away from Mary that the lives of Catherine and Mary’s string of children had settled into a righteous path.
But now Mary was gone and the historian was in a care facility, his brain riddled with as many holes as a block of Swiss cheese. She was glad he couldn’t remember. Glad he was no longer a threat to them. If she could have gotten her hands on his account, she would have destroyed the manuscript immediately, but by a series of events it had found its way to the local historical society, a group of well-meaning but fairly stupid do-gooders who had no idea what the Colony, and Catherine herself, were about.
She’d actually gone to the old church that was now the Deception Bay Historical Society and examined the book herself. They’d known who she was and had stared at her, so it had been impossible to steal the leather-bound scrapbook of notes and letters and fiction. She’d wanted to tell those wide-eyed women a thing or two. She’d wanted to negate everything about her family as lies. But sh
e’d kept her thoughts to herself, glad, at least, that the account ended with Catherine Rutledge and Mary Rutledge Beeman. No more names listed. None of Mary’s many female children.
The problem was, there could be more pages out there. Somewhere. Written down by either the historian himself or the doctor who had been entrusted with the book until his own death, whereupon it had somehow become property of the historical society. In that regard, Catherine would have preferred it was still in the hands of the historian himself; she could have found a way to get it back. Now it was public record. Compiled and collected and written down all in one place. Easy to access, if you knew what you were looking for, and it had already surfaced a year and a half ago and been pored over and examined, and people had come to her gates asking questions.
Catherine closed her eyes and sighed. She didn’t want to think about it anymore, but now there was this latest problem of Natasha. Natasha, who’d never been happy with Catherine’s precautions, who’d longed to join the outsiders though Catherine’s own visions, and Lillibeth’s instincts, had foretold of death and madness should Natasha be allowed to leave as others had in the past.
And then there was Natasha’s baby.
Lang sat on the edge of Claire’s couch, processing the history that Dinah had shared with them about herself and her relationship to the women at Siren Song. Dinah’s father, Herman Smythe—Herm, to his friends—had written an account of the Colony, and it was now at the local historical society. Herm, who was in his eighties, was currently living at a care facility outside Deception Bay, but he’d spent some time within Siren Song’s walls when he was younger.
Which basically added up to jack shit, when you thought about it.
“You want me to put that information on a note and throw it through the gate to them?” Lang suggested. “That’ll get me inside?”
Claire, however, was more encouraged. “Could we visit your father?” she asked Dinah.
“I don’t know how lucid he might be, but sure.”
“How old is he again?” Lang asked.
“Old enough to be my grandfather,” Dinah admitted. “He was a man of excess, in love and life. I know more about him from afar than as a true father. My mother raised me. Alone. He popped in now and again, was thrilled to see me for a good ten minutes or so at a time, but then he’d go.”
“Where’s your mother now?”
“Remarried. Moved to California last year. My mother is twenty years younger than my father.”
“And your father knew—knows—Catherine?”
“He knew Mary a lot better,” she said with pointed meaning. “It’s quite possible some of the women who live there are my half sisters.”
Chapter 16
“Your half sisters,” Lang repeated. He looked over the slim woman with her blond/light brown braid. “You’re one of them?”
“No.”
“Who are you?” he asked, feeling like there was more going on in this room than he’d been led to believe. “How do you know Dr. Norris?”
Claire intervened. “We’re neighbors. Friends.” She turned to Dinah. “You seriously think they’re your sisters?”
“I think my father had sexual relations with Mary,” she answered. “He’s as much as said so. He could be one of them’s father. Or several of them…it’s not clear.”
“Start at the beginning,” Lang said in his investigator’s voice, then, as a thought occurred to him, “Did you work at the local grocery store?”
She gave him a funny look. “The Drift In Market? No. Why?”
He shrugged.
“I’m not one of the girls from Siren Song,” she stressed again. “My mother was a local townie from Deception Bay who got swept up in romance by my father, but twenty years is a pretty big gap in age. The romance didn’t last. They split up not long after my birth. I was raised by a single mother. My dad has always just been around the area. I was never close to him emotionally, although we’re more like a father and daughter now that he’s in the care facility.”
“What happened to Mary?” Lang asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Your father’s book…” Claire said thoughtfully. “Do you think there’s anything in it that would help us in connecting with Catherine and the girls?”
Dinah shook her head. “Let me explain something. The girls you speak of are women. The oldest ones are in their thirties and they go down to, I don’t know, early twenties, maybe?”
“Cat’s in her early twenties,” Claire said.
“But I don’t really know them,” Dinah went on. “Nobody knows them. They stay in the lodge. There was a time when the state tried to go after them for lacking education requirements, and after a wrangle, Catherine allowed them to be supervised and take their GEDs. No problem there. They were well educated and passed easily. They keep to themselves by choice.”
Lang said, “All we want to do is talk to them.”
“Are they all Mary’s daughters?” Claire asked.
“Probably. Or Catherine’s, I suppose.”
“How many of them are there?” Lang asked her.
She shook her head.
“Would your father know?” he pressed.
“Maybe. You can ask him. Does it matter?”
“If Jane Doe’s one of their own, why aren’t they moving heaven and earth to get her back?” he demanded, half angry. “Catherine doesn’t let them leave, as a rule, apparently, so why hasn’t she come looking for her?”
Claire said, “Maybe they let her leave.”
“Why?” he demanded.
“Her pregnancy?”
“From what she’s saying,” Lang said, pointing to Dinah, “that’s not much of an issue after all. This Mary had affairs and a lot of children. Kinda flies in the face of this old-fashioned, morally strict life they supposedly live.”
“Mary’s affairs were long ago. And Catherine’s, too, if she had any,” Dinah said. “They do live an old-fashioned, morally strict life now.”
“The person who knows is Jane Doe,” Lang said. “If Catherine won’t talk to us, maybe she will. Soon.” He glanced at Claire. “She’s walking already.”
“There’s no guarantee,” Claire began, but Lang made a sound of frustration.
“A man is dead,” he stated flatly. “There’s a killer out there. I’m not going to wait around for Catherine to talk to me, or Cat to wake up and point the finger at her attacker.”
“What are you going to do?” Claire asked.
“I don’t know yet. Something.” He suddenly strode toward the mudroom, yanked on his boots, and threw on his jacket. “Thanks for the wine,” he said, then banged out the door into the wet and windy night.
Claire felt strangely bereft. She didn’t want him to go. Didn’t want to give up his maleness, for lack of a better word.
“He’s something,” Dinah said, pointedly looking at Claire.
“Don’t go there,” Claire warned and Dinah smiled.
“Would you like to talk to my father?” she asked.
Claire turned back to her. “Yes, I would,” she said without hesitation.
“Tonight? We could be there by seven thirty.”
“Well…” Claire set down her wineglass. “Why not? Let’s stop for sandwiches on the way. I’ll buy.”
Tasha allowed herself to be wheeled back to her room by Maria, careful to hide the clothes Gibby had brought to her beneath the wheelchair’s cushion. Gibby had wanted to shout to the whole world about how he’d helped her, but Tasha had shushed him into silence. She just hoped he would stay that way until she got away.
It seemed to take the night nurse forever to settle Tasha in and leave. Twice Tasha glanced fearfully toward the wheelchair because the cushion was tilted and lumpy and a tiny bit of fabric stuck out like a tongue. Tasha was nearly weak with worry that Maria would notice, but the nurse was completely oblivious as she talked both to Tasha and herself, finally dimming the overhead light on her way out.
In
darkness, Tasha slid out of the bed, feeling cumbersome and off balance. Sometimes she couldn’t believe she was going to have a baby. Rafe’s gift. The one Rita wanted so badly.
She had to leave tonight!
Fumbling around, she yanked the cushion off the chair and tossed it on the ground. Her fingers closed over the pants. She found the zipper and arranged the pants so that it was in front, then stepped first one leg, then the other, into the canvaslike material. Pulling them up, she smiled into the darkness. Pants. She was leaving one world behind, joining a new one.
She couldn’t get them zipped all the way unless she kept the waist under her protruding belly. Good enough, she thought, though the hemlines dragged on the ground. Gibby might be short, but there was still too much pant leg and she couldn’t bend over to roll them up. Feeling precious time slipping away, she sat down in the wheelchair and tried to perform the task, frustration and fear nearly boiling over. In the end she lowered herself to the ground and bent her feet inward to reach the hem. Quickly rolling the legs up, she then found her shoes and slid her feet into them.
Gibby’s shirt was next. She tossed off the hospital gown with disdain and buttoned up the plaid long-sleeved shirt. It nearly burst the buttons across her abdomen. Then tiptoeing to the door, she glanced both ways in the hall. No one around.
But how, how was she going to get through the locked exits? She couldn’t push her way out and if she even tried, alarms would sound. Distantly. In one or several of the staff rooms. She’d heard it before when Maribel had banged against one of the bars, crying that she was going to miss the bus.
Only the keycard and code would let her out noiselessly.
Could she risk turning on the light? she wondered. Just for a moment? Just to look at herself?
She debated, then finally flipped the switch, the room flooding with light. Quickly she examined herself in the mirror and smiled a bit in awe. She looked modern. Sure, the clothes were masculine, but it was so much better than either the hospital gown or the gingham or printed ankle-length cotton dresses she’d worn her entire life.
