Midnight Secrets

by Lisa Marie Rice

  Joe let out his breath slowly. The People’s Republic of China was behind the Massacre? If this news got out, it would mean war. A big, big war that would dwarf anything that had happened in Iraq and Afghanistan, which had been limited wars. This would be a war fought on land, sea and air, the US against a billion and a half people and a military of over seven million people, including reservists. A war with a nuclear power that also had a fleet of submarines with nuclear warheads that could cross the Pacific. A cold shudder ran down his spine.

  “But there were also individuals who earned big. And the one who earned the most—several billion dollars in fact—is a man who is very well-connected.” She glanced up at Metal, then at Joe. “And he was on the Senate Intelligence Committee, too, so our ex-CIA guy is right to stay off the radar.”

  The screen was coalescing, thousands of lines scrolling down, slowing, until one name was on the screen.

  Joe exhaled again. This was worse than anything anyone could have imagined because the name was a man who was supposed to have been Alex Delvaux’s vice president. Hector Blake.

  A cry came from the corner and Joe turned, goose bumps rising on his skin. Isabel. That was a cry of pain and shock. He whirled ready to run to her, reaching for the gun in his shoulder holster, ready to leap and throw his body over hers because Isabel in danger was his worst nightmare...

  But she wasn’t hurt, no one was attacking her. She stood and turned to him, her face utterly white. She swayed and he didn’t even feel his feet as he shot across the room to her, putting his arm around her, not as a sign of affection but to hold her up.

  Lauren was looking up at them, white-faced too. Jacko was by her side in a second.

  “The man, Joe. The man in my dreams. The monster of the Massacre.” Isabel pointed with a shaking hand at the drawing Lauren had made.

  Joe looked at the drawing

  “Hector Blake,” she said. “Uncle Hector.”

  Chapter Ten

  Isabel couldn’t have done it without Lauren.

  “I’m not very visual,” she apologized when they sat down in a corner. “I never have been. Unless it’s about food, I’m not very observant.”

  Lauren smiled and patted her hand. “My dear, who cares about being visual when you can produce food like that? No one cares. But I am visual so let’s see if we can do something here. You want that, don’t you?”

  “Oh God, yes!” Isabel said. A pang of anxiety pulsed in her chest. “More than anything. This man is in my nightmares, night after night after night. People don’t usually repeat their dreams. I’ve done a lot of reading up on it. A repeat dream is rare and is always anchored in reality in some way. So this man, this man I call the Monster, somehow exists in some way. Even though I don’t recognize his face and I never remember it when I wake up.”

  Lauren set herself up—a big pad over her knees, several different types of pencils, erasers, charcoal sticks. The tools of her trade just as knives and wooden spoons and pans were Isabel’s. “That’s where I come in. The human face is infinitely variable. Seven and a half billion people in the world and, except for twins, no two faces are alike. But there are also only so many variables. Face shape, cheekbone and chin shape, eyes, nose, mouth. So this is going to be a collaborative experience. You talk, and I listen. I’ve got a big pad because we’re going to strike out a lot. That’s the nature of the exercise. We’ll get a lot of things wrong before getting them right.”

  “Like kissing a lot of frogs before finding—”

  “A Joe?” Lauren asked, then laughed at the face she made. “Don’t be embarrassed. Joe’s worth kissing a lot of frogs for. He’s a really good guy.”

  “Yes.” Isabel sighed. “He is. In a way, he’s the reason I’m doing this, trying to exorcise a face I see in my nightmares. I long to get all of this out of my system because he deserves a sane, whole woman. Right now I’m a mess.”

  Lauren was testing the consistency of the pencils on the top left-hand corner. “Don’t worry about it,” she said absently, cocking her head as she studied the results. “Joe will take you any way he can get you. He’s crazy about you. Has been for months, I hear.”

  Isabel’s eyes opened wide. When she’d arrived she’d been a massive wreck. “Really?”

  Lauren looked up, studied her face. “You didn’t know? We knew the week you moved in that something big was going on with Joe.”

  “He didn’t make a move. He didn’t say anything to me. Most guys—” She stopped for a second because she didn’t want to sound boastful. But then Lauren was a beautiful woman. She’d have been hit on a billion times in her life. No one hit on Lauren now, not with big, bad Jacko glowering by her side, but before Jacko they must have, surely. She knew what that was like. Guys who were attracted usually weren’t shy about saying so or doing something about it.

  “He was in very bad shape,” Lauren said, her voice gentle. “You might not have noticed because he did his best to hide it, but Joe wasn’t anywhere close to recovery when you moved in. He’d only just begun putting himself back together. Jacko told me Joe said he didn’t have anything to offer a woman until he was in better shape. He had a good job right here at ASI but he fought them hard because he thought he didn’t deserve the job and the salary until he could work as hard as everyone else. Jacko says Joe didn’t dare make a move on you. But surely you noticed that your garden was in fabulous shape, he’d drive you anywhere if so much as a drop of rain fell and that your house was in a great state of repair.”

  “Yes, but—” Isabel’s head whirled. And she felt ashamed. Joe hadn’t wanted to make a play for her until he had more to offer? “Didn’t he see what shape I was in?” She met Lauren’s eyes, brimming with sympathy. “You have no idea what I was like. My head would spin for no reason and I had to sit down if I didn’t want to faint. I spooked at loud noises, I didn’t sleep at night but then sleepwalked my way through the day. I was constantly exhausted.”

  “You had and probably still have PTSD,” Lauren said gently. “No one better than a soldier to understand that. They all saw horrible things in the war. And frankly, I don’t think Joe cared that you were a mess. I think all he saw was that you’re beautiful and fascinating.” Lauren patted her hand.

  Isabel felt like hanging her head. The first month or two she hadn’t noticed much about Joe Harris other than the fact that he was an amazingly helpful neighbor and that she could count on him for just about anything. She’d been in a fog of grief and sadness. But Joe had had his own wounds that hadn’t stopped him from helping her every way he could.

  And while he had worked hard to put himself together, she’d just mourned and baked cookies.

  “I want to be better,” she said to Lauren. “I want to get myself together physically and mentally. I don’t want Joe to consider me a basket case. I need to move on if we’re to have a hope of being a couple.”

  Lauren straightened and held a draftsman’s pencil over the paper. “I think we can make a good start if we can nail this face you see in your nightmares. That would be a really good first step.”

  It would.

  Isabel struggled at first. She couldn’t pin down the features. And when she did, a wave of dread washed over her. He was a creature of her nightmares but the horror bled into the daytime. She had to fight not to wipe him out of her mind.

  Lauren walked her through it. “Shape of face?”

  Just thinking of that shadowy form with darkness for eyes made her shiver. “What?”

  “What was the shape of his face?”

  Lauren’s hand flew over the paper. Twelve face shapes appeared. “So, these are the basic shapes, barring major deformities. Which one?”

  Without thinking, Isabel put a finger on one. “This shape.” Long, narrow at the chin, broad in the temples. But she couldn’t have described it. The face still danced just out of reach of her consciousness.

  “Okay.” Lauren lifted the sheet away and drew on a new one. “These are some shapes of a mouth
.” Full lips, thin lips, top lip fuller, bottom lip fuller, wide, narrow...

  “Like that!” Isabel felt a pulse course through her system, because those thin, narrow lips were exactly like those of the man in her nightmares. Again, she couldn’t have verbalized it, but she recognized it.

  On another sheet of paper, Lauren drew hair, once Isabel said that the man’s hair was cropped short in an expensive cut and was salt-and-pepper. More salt than pepper.

  Lauren fit the hair over the shape of the face Isabel had chosen and added the mouth. A prickle ran up her spine. They were getting there. And the man looked...she cocked her head. He looked somehow familiar.

  Up to now she just thought the monster in her nightmares was some kind of composite representing the evil that had carried out the Massacre. Was the monster real?

  “Nose,” Lauren said, but before she could start drawing sample noses Isabel surprised herself.

  “Long, narrow at the bridge, finely cut nostrils.” Lauren looked up at her then her hands added...exactly the right nose.

  Isabel couldn’t breathe.

  “Eyes?”

  Isabel never saw the eyes in her nightmares but the answer came welling up from a dark place inside her.

  “Deep-set, slightly uptilted.” Though Lauren was drawing in black-and-white, she added, “Chocolate brown.”

  Because she knew who this was.

  Something was cracking inside her, some carapace that had enveloped her since the Massacre. The cracking open hurt. Faster than she could follow, her brain was making connections, filling in the dots. Filling in the holes that had plagued her since that terrible day.

  There was a connection between the monster in her nightmares and the monsters that had taken away her life. All these months, her nightmares had been trying to talk to her and she’d been too scared to listen. She’d tucked them away in the back of her mind until they broke out of the walls.

  Lauren’s hand stopped moving and she turned her head this way and that, frowning at what her hand had created. “Doesn’t he look...” She glanced up at Isabel. “Doesn’t he look familiar?”

  The walls had collapsed and the floods came. Isabel was frozen to the spot, head whirling. She felt dizzy and sick.

  “Isabel?”

  Lauren’s voice was sharp with worry. She reached out to Isabel but Isabel stood up, swaying. The band around her chest grew tighter.

  “Isabel, what’s wrong?” Lauren put a hand on Isabel’s shoulder.

  “Hector Blake.” Isabel’s voice was low and raw. The words hurt.

  “What?” Lauren glanced down at the drawing she’d made and blinked. “Oh. Yes. Wow. I’ve seen him on TV. It does look like him, doesn’t it?”

  But Isabel could barely hear Lauren above the buzzing in her head, so when she spoke, her voice was loud. The group huddled around Felicity’s computer lifted their heads and looked at her.

  “Hector Blake!” she shouted. “Uncle Hector.”

  Her head felt like it was splitting open.

  Joe was right beside her. She hadn’t even seen him cross the room. He opened his arms and she huddled against him because right now her skin wasn’t enough to keep her together. She was shaking so hard she was going to fly apart in a million pieces.

  Uncle Hector.

  He’d always just...been there. Her parents had been social animals with hundreds of friends and she’d grown up surrounded by people, Uncle Hector included. He wasn’t actually her blood uncle, but their families had been friends for generations and he’d grown up with her father.

  She didn’t really like him, never had. He’d always seemed so pompous and self-important, but then she didn’t always like her parents’ friends. She didn’t have to. There were plenty of other people around to like.

  She wasn’t even too sure her dad liked him. Her mom certainly hadn’t.

  Hector Blake, Uncle Hector.

  She was choking, shaking, trying to drag in air. Everyone was standing around her. Lauren and Felicity. Metal and Jacko and one of the two bosses. They were watching her as she fell apart.

  No.

  She stood straight, stepped back. Joe dropped his arms. He sensed she didn’t want the support. She had to be strong here. When she was standing apart, she wrapped her own arms around herself because she was the only one who could support her. She was the only one who could do this.

  Memories were flooding in, an unstoppable flow, that night now clear in her head, so clear it was as if she was reliving it.

  “Hector Blake,” she repeated, as if his name were some kind of horrible mantra. And she saw no surprise in anyone’s eyes.

  “Tell us, honey,” Joe said.

  “That night...” She stopped for a second, breathing heavily, breathing as if it was a job she had to do. No one shuffled their feet or coughed. No one betrayed any impatience whatsoever. They wanted to hear what she had to say and they were willing to wait for it, however long it took.

  That gave her courage.

  “It was about ten minutes to the time Dad was going to make his announcement. The evening looked completely spontaneous but three days of planning had gone into it, into the timing and what Dad was going to say. Everyone was excited. There was a lot of noise. People screaming, the piped-in music, it was like a wall of noise. But the planners knew that this would be the moment of maximum excitement before Dad made his announcement. And they knew there would be pandemonium when he finally threw his hat into the ring, officially. Dad’s advisors were all smiling, really happy. I’d gone out a couple of times with one of Dad’s press officers and I asked him if all this excitement was fake and he said no. He said a lot of people understood that they were on a trajectory that would take them straight to the Oval Office.”

  She’d shaken her head at that and decided then and there that there wouldn’t be a third date. This thirst for power wasn’t something she understood. She barely understood it in her own father, even though she knew that in him, it was mixed up with an idealistic sense of mission. For the aides and hangers-on of the new campaign, there was no mission, no ideals, just the whiff of power.

  She met Joe’s sober eyes, dark and steady. He was with her as she stepped into the past, into an unimaginably painful and brutal past.

  “All the family was up on the stage except for me and Jack. I think he’d gone to the bathroom. I had to take a call. My agent, calling from New York with an offer. I was talking to her, walking around the podium for an exit because we could barely hear each other, when—” She drew in a deep breath. This part was well-known. “When we were cut off. I was checking my cell, thinking to call her back and then all the lights went out. It was like someone had waved a magic wand and created darkness.”

  Her voice had gone up in a tremolo. She clenched her teeth, getting herself back under control. Or at least as much control as she could manage.

  “But there were candles on the front tables, an array of them. They were going to dim the lights and they’d threaded the floral arrangements with tea lights. My mom insisted because she loves—” Isabel’s eyes widened in horror. Her mom didn’t love candles anymore. Her mom was in the cold, cold ground. Together with her father and three brothers. Her throat spasmed and she had to cough to loosen it. “Loved. My mom loved candles. There were also big wax bowls with several tea lights inside, surrounded by the floral arrangements. Beautiful. But more than that, they shed light.”

  An eerie light, she remembered. Like footlights in theaters in the nineteenth century, lighting faces from the bottom, leaving features indistinct. Leaving the eyes in shadow.

  And at the same time the world came to an end.

  “There were—there were screams from all around the room. And a ripping sound.”

  “AK-47s,” Joe murmured.

  “Guns, yes,” Isabel said. “Machine guns. Those were in my dreams. There were men everywhere, it seemed. I couldn’t count them. Dressed in black, with black ski masks and black goggles. What you said was night vi
sion gear. Outside the front tables which were lit by the candles, it was pitch-black. So they could see in the dark and we couldn’t.”

  Her heart burned. Such a horrible cowardly thing. Shooting innocent people in the dark when they could see! Not even allowing for the possibility of anyone defending themselves, innocent unarmed people in the dark, against armed men who could see. “People were screaming in the dark, scrambling to get out of the way, and then they started falling. One masked terrorist planted himself on the other side of the tables with candles and opened fire on the podium. As if he were shooting ducks in a gallery in the county fair. Left to right.” She closed her eyes but the scene she’d repressed for months was painted on the inside of her eyeballs. Her memory had come roaring back to life and it was exactly as if she was living it again. “My mom, my kid brothers. Mowed down.” She shook.

  Joe put his arm around her and bent low to her ear. “Honey, you don’t have to—”

  Joe meant well but he was wrong. Isabel pushed away. “Oh, but I do, I do. Teddy—a bullet shattered his head. He dropped to the floor and there was only mist spattering my mom and Rob. Mom had already been shot but she was still on her feet. She was turning to put herself between the shooter and my father and Rob but the shooter got her in the back.”

  How could the memory have been wiped? How could she have possibly forgotten it? Dead people on the podium, her wounded mother, blood pouring from a shoulder onto her pretty cream-colored suit, turning with her arms wide, wanting to catch her kid brother except the only thing she caught was a bullet.

  “It sometimes took two bullets, but the guns killed everyone. Methodically, coldly. The gunman was making his way across the podium. Dad was struggling with—with Hector. Dad was trying to get to Mom and my brothers but Hector was holding him. Wait.”

  Isabel held up a finger and stared into the distance. No one in the room moved. No one even breathed.

  She ran through the sequence in her head. She almost didn’t believe herself, but the events rang true somewhere deep inside her.