Gold Promise

by Ninie Hammon

  She had gotten up before sunrise feeling good. Rested. Not a single nightmare about spiders. That in itself was a strange enough phenomenon that the paparazzi should have shown up with cameras blazing to capture the moment for posterity.

  She had a busy day all mapped out for herself that included waging war again with the attic, the one she'd been cleaning out the day Brice had blown out of her driveway, lights flashing and siren wailing, to answer a "child missing" call at Corruthers Elementary School. She'd abandoned the task for almost two months after that, but now that Brice's arm was no longer in a cast, he could help with the heavy lifting, and she'd decided to give it another go — determined to dig through the layers of generations of junk in search of artwork painted by Sophia Watford, the mysterious original owner of the Watford House.

  And she was going to watch Sparky this morning while T.J. kept his — drum roll, please! — final appointment with the skin graft specialist who'd repaired the damage wreaked by a brown recluse spider on T.J.'s left leg.

  Without even bothering to brush her teeth, she'd run her fingers through her hair, pulled it back into a ponytail with a red scrunchie — which she wore with blatant, in-your-face defiance because some teenager in the mall had disdainfully commented that scrunchies were like, totally out of style.

  She'd gotten her brand new running shoes out of the box, planning on following the four-mile route that would take her through downtown and out to the dock, put on socks—

  And everything ended there.

  She had no memory of putting on her shoes, but clearly she had. She looked down at them now. There were splatters of red paint on the right one and blue on the left. Another wave of nausea swept over her and she was afraid she was going to upchuck the lining of her stomach and other nearby internal organs, which was all she hadn't already throw up.

  "Excuse me … are you all right?"

  Ah, the obligatory good Samaritan, who always seemed to show up just when Bailey felt least capable of refusing help without sounding like a sociopath herself.

  Wanting to scream at the old woman with a bent back and a purse dog on a leash: I was just beaten, kicked and strangled. I've had better days.

  But she bit it back, smiled weakly, babbled about running too fast, morning too hot, and staggered away, aware that something about her was drawing the attention of others. Bailey did not want the attention of others. It was possible there was not a single person drawing breath on the planet who wanted the attention of others less than Bailey Donahue did.

  Then she saw the smear of red down her leg, from when she'd dropped the paintbrush — paintbrush! — and realized it looked like blood. She pointed at it, announced like a babbling magpie to anybody and nobody. "Paint … haha, it's just paint." Then she smeared it around so it was a blob of red rather than what appeared to be leakage from her femoral artery.

  Her breathing had returned to normal. She looked at the nearest street sign and groaned. She had run almost five miles — in a straight line, and now she had to walk back, sans the flash of rocket fuel that had propelled her forward.

  She reached for her cell to call — who? T.J. He was probably on his way to her house right now with Sparky.

  Well, then Brice. Or Dobbs.

  No, she couldn't call T.J., Brice or Dobbs or anybody else on her extensive contacts list which contained a grand total of six names ,and that included the place that changed the oil in her car and the pest control service she'd called so often to spray her house for spiders they now refused her calls. And, of course, U.S. Marshal Bernard Jordan, the man who moved her around like a knight on a chessboard. He had given her all three of his numbers — office, home and cell, insisted on being on her "emergency call" list. She couldn't call him, though, even if she'd wanted to and she absolutely did not. She couldn't call anybody because she hadn't stopped to gather up her cellphone when she bolted out of the house.

  No phone. No house key either. Fortunately, that wasn't a problem since she had left the front door standing wide open when she ran out.

  She turned and headed back toward her neighborhood, smelling the crisp autumn air, trying to enjoy the splash of riotously beautiful gold/crimson/yellow color on the foliage. Trying not to think about the still-wet portrait that waited for her on the easel in her studio. The portrait of a girl who had been murdered.

  Chapter Three

  T.J. marched across the yard and up the Watford House front steps with as severe a look on his face as he could muster, prepared to fasten a leash to the little apricot-colored golden doodle's collar and drag him back to the car and make him do the whole thing over. Only way he was gonna learn.

  The front door was open, so T.J. called in, "I'll be in directly, Bailey," and bent to hook the leash on Sparky's collar.

  There was no sound from inside the house.

  It was quiet, too. No sound of music. That girl did like to play loud rock songs that T.J. thought sounded like the wreck of a silverware truck.

  "Bailey, you in there?"

  Sparky yapped once. Just once. That wasn't the same thing as barking. One yap was communication. And it was as handy as those human words that had lots of meanings — like "aloha." The one yap could mean: "Help, there's a splinter in my paw." It could mean: "You set my honking pig toy on the counter last night so you wouldn't step on it when you got up to go to the bathroom and scare yourself to death — can I have it back now?" It could mean: "Let me out — quick, or clean up doggie pee off the floor."

  It could also mean "Something's wrong but I don't know what." That's what it had meant when T.J.’d left the house a couple of months ago to walk into a living nightmare. Somehow, Sparky'd known somethin' was comin'.

  Right now, it meant, "Open the door, Bailey, so I can come inside and lick your whole face."

  But Bailey didn't answer either T.J.'s call or Sparky's yap.

  Then T.J.’s mouth filled with spit and the copper taste of fear, like he was chewin' on pennies.

  Ever since the warm June night he and Dobbs had sat out front of this house and heard the gunshot when Bailey'd fired a bullet into her brain, he had watched the return to humanity of a lost soul. In the beginnin', he'd feared every time he opened his eyes it'd be to a day Bailey wasn't in, that she'd made good on the suicide attempt. But in the handful of months since then, the four of them — him, Bailey, Brice and Dobbs — had logged enough living to fill up a handful of lifetimes. He knew she no longer wanted to die.

  But Oscar might have other plans. Oscar was the name Sheriff Brice McGreggor had given the bullet her suicide attempt had lodged in Bailey's brain. The doctors had said Oscar might never cause her a moment's trouble and she could live to be one hundred. They'd also said Oscar could move just a hair, get dislodged by a blow to the head, or a sneeze. If that happened, Oscar would kill her instantly. She would never know what hit her.

  T.J. flung open the screen door.

  "Bailey! Bailey girl, you answer me. Where you at?"

  Crickets.

  He started to run through the house, calling for her. Instead, he looked at Sparky.

  "Find Bailey," he commanded.

  That was the game they played. Sparky would run all over the house, lookin' and sniffin' until he found her hidin' somewhere holding his favorite treat in the whole world — a hard-boiled egg.

  Sparky didn't go runnin'. He just stood lookin' up at T.J. with that face that somehow managed to look like he was smiling.

  Bailey wasn't here. If she had been, Sparky would have gone lookin', woulda found her even if she'd been … even if Oscar'd bit her.

  He felt a breath whoosh out and supposed he might have been holdin' it. Relief flooded through him in a warm tide that felt like hot chocolate on a snowy morning. Or straight Maker's Mark whiskey from a shot glass in the darkest ditch of midnight when the memories came screamin', pullin' him back into the nightmare he'd escaped all those years ago, and from the more recent one that'd provided his still-healing spider bite.

&nb
sp; So Bailey wasn't home. Where was she? He considered that as he went from room to room — just lookin' around, not scared anymore of what he'd find. The door was open and her car was in the driveway. He went upstairs and seen her purse on the nightstand by the bed. Her cellphone was beside it.

  Back downstairs, he went into the kitchen, where a cup of half-drunk coffee sat cold in the sink.

  Only one other place to look. And if he found there what he suspected he might find, it'd explain why Bailey'd gone runnin' outta here like her pants was on fire.

  On the floor in front of the door, he found broken glass, one of Bailey's collection of miniatures — a London phone booth. He stepped over the glass into the room where north light flooded in from the bank of windows, which was why Bailey'd picked the room to use as an art studio.

  Sittin' on the easel was a painting. A table with a bowl of fruit — way down at the bottom, totally dwarfed by the out-of-proportion window that took up almost the whole canvas. There was a … girl in the window. The paint was still wet.

  Chapter Four

  When Bailey turned the corner and started down her street, she saw T.J.'s old Ford pickup parked in her driveway.

  She'd have to tell him about the painting.

  And then they'd have to decide what to do about it.

  T.J. was sitting on the swing on her front porch with Sparky beside him, and as soon as the dog spotted her he leapt off the swing and dashed across the newly-mown grass toward her, his tail a wagging blur, a look of utter delight on his face. Could a dog's face show such things? Well, Sparky's could! If he'd been a big dog, he'd have bowled her over. But just twenty pounds of fluff that looked like thirty pounds of dog could do no more damage than to jump at her, begging/demanding to be adored.

  She obliged. Dropping to one knee she folded the wiggling, squirming animal into her arms, buried her face in the soft fur on the top of his head, and felt the horror of the living nightmare of being murdered retreat into the shadows where the wild things are.

  T.J. got up out of the swing and came across the grass to greet her and to peel Sparky off her.

  "Sparky, sit!" he told the dog, and the animal obediently plopped his backside down in a spot of bare dirt, his tail wagging so furiously it sent up a small cloud of dust. T.J. laughed and Bailey waved the dust cloud out of the air in front of her face and rose to her feet with what resembled a genuine smile.

  "Have a good run?"

  "No."

  "Didn't figure you did."

  "You saw the portrait." It wasn't a question.

  He put his hand on her shoulder.

  "I'm sorry." The affection in those two words brought unexpected tears to her eyes.

  "It's awful, isn't it?"

  "You don't know?"

  "I know what I … lived." She shuddered and he guided her up the porch steps to the swing.

  "Sit," he said and she obeyed as obediently as Sparky.

  "But I didn't look … I, you know, woke up with paintbrushes in my hands."

  In some ridiculous way she couldn't have explained, the fact that she painted portraits of "what hasn't happened yet" with both hands amazed her almost as much as the content of the portraits she painted. She let out a long breath as he sat down beside her and Sparky leapt up into her lap. She ran her hands through his fur. "T.J. … I was murdered …"

  "Strangled. I know. I saw."

  "I guess I need to see, too. I—"

  "Not just yet."

  "You don't have time to sit here holding my hand. You have a doctor's appointment, remember? You're going to be late—"

  T.J. patted his left leg, the site of half a dozen painful skin grafts.

  "I done spent half the mornin' lookin' for an excuse not to go. Ain't no way I'm passin' this up. You and me'll just sit here for a spell."

  She smiled a little. "I bet 'spell' was a word you had to exile from your vocabulary when you 'lost' your dialect."

  "It was for a fact."

  The smile faded. "Here we go again, T.J. It's been months since Macy Cosgrove. Just when I thought—"

  "It was safe to go back in the water …"

  "The great white is still cruising out there, waiting to bite me." Of course, she already knew the answer to the question before she asked it. "It always will be, won't it, T.J.? That shark is going to be circling my life … from now on. I'll never be rid of it."

  "Nope, I don't 'spect you will."

  T.J.'d studied the portrait for a long time when he'd walked into the room and found it there on the easel with the paint still wet. The initial shock was staggering and he was glad he got to be there with Bailey when she seen it "for the first time."

  He'd left the door to the studio open. The two of them walked together into the bright room, the cheeriness of the yellow sunshine belying the horror of the dark portrait that sat in the middle of the room, with two paintbrushes and gobs of paint splattered on the floor beneath it. She'd been avertin' her eyes 'til they stood in front of it and there was nowhere else for her to look. Even then, she lifted her eyes slowly — backing up emotionally from what she knew she was gonna see, digging her heels in.

  When she finally did focus on the painting, she looked like somebody'd slapped her. No, like somebody'd drawn back a boot and kicked her square in the belly with it.

  Bailey's hazel eyes, that was the color of a still pool reflecting the woods on the shore, widened until there was white showing all around. She stopped breathin', then let out a little squeak that carried with it a weight of horror and denial that musta been a strain for the tiny sound's shoulders to bear.

  Before them on the easel was the portrait of a nightmare. Literally.

  The center of the picture was a girl's face, though she'd been so badly beaten she was unrecognizable. Her hair was honey blonde, hangin' in long curls, and her eyes was open, a startling sapphire blue — but bulgin' out, with red stippling in the whites of 'em. Petechiae, the medical examiner on all the cop shows called it. Hemorrhaging in the blood vessels caused by the pressure of strangulation. Her pale skin was dotted with tiny brown freckles, like she'd been dusted with cinnamon.

  Hands crushed her throat, the thick fingers and wide wrist bones of a very large man. Her neck was so slender the man's fingers encircled it and lapped over, almost looked like he was holdin' a baseball bat. He had a pinky ring on his right hand, small and oddly delicate, with an intricately ornate gold band and a single diamond, a perfect oval stone, mounted to be flush with the band's surface.

  T.J. thought that the diamond made a statement — large, but not ostentatious, almost understated. The ring was tasteful, designed for somebody with a discerning sense of style. Its presence on the fat finger of the callous murderer was offensive, like findin' a single white rose in a pile of vomit.

  You could see the girl's neck and shoulders below the hands. And it appeared that the man was literally holding the girl out at arms' length in the air in front of him as he squeezed the life out of her with them fingers diggin' into her flesh.

  Her face was a ruin, nose smashed over onto her right cheek, lips split. Blood poured out her open mouth over broken, splintered teeth, too. That'd struck an emotional chord with T.J., almost seemed worse than any other horror. He had hit her, more likely kicked her, in the mouth so hard he'd knocked out most of her front teeth. That was either an act of a homicidal rage or of total indifference. T.J. figured the safe money was on indifference, a blow delivered casually by a man who'd done that before. That and worse.

  "Another man was chasing her." Bailey's voice sounded small and vulnerable. "She was running away and crashed into this one, the Beast, and he broke her wrist."

  She turned to T.J. "Have you ever broken a bone?" She didn't wait for him to answer. "I haven't. Worst injury I ever had was stitches on my knee after I fell off a bike when I was nine. I had no idea how bad a broken bone hurts." She swallowed. "Brice's arm when Melody broke it, I didn't appreciate the pain …"

  She took another breat
h, staring not so much at the portrait of the dead girl as through it, to a scene that was playing out in real life right behind it.

  "The broken wrist bones ground together when he dragged her along the floor by the hair."

  T.J. was more horrified than he was prepared to be, and he almost reached to stop her, to tell her we can talk 'bout this some other time, or how 'bout I fix you a nice cup of hot tea. But he stopped himself. However difficult it was for him to hear, it was a whole lot harder for her to tell. And indescribably harder for her to live it along with that poor girl with the broken teeth.

  Bailey was ramblin', rememberin’ bits and pieces, not makin' a lot of sense. Didn't matter. She needed to tack words onto it, look the monster dead in the eye and now was the best time, while the wounds was fresh, so wouldn't be openin' them up again to recall details later. Though she would. She'd remember a whole lot more about this experience than she wanted to.

  T.J. had thought 'bout that when he was a boy and his mama was paintin' the portraits that drove her mad. He could see she'd changed, was different from the moment she woke up after she was knocked unconscious in the Watford House kitchen. But at the time, he hadn't really understood that she was livin' the experiences with the people she painted. Toward the end, he figured it out, though. As an adult, he was introduced up close and personal to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Lived with it himself after … after what happened. He couldn't imagine that livin' an experience like this wouldn't leave Bailey so stricken with PTSD she couldn't get out of bed.

  But then, she blinked in and out of the mind of a monster a couple of months ago. She was a lot stronger than she looked.

  There was so many layers to this. So many layers.

  "She only says one thing … just looks across the floor and says, ‘Jeni.’ Like she was calling to someone, maybe … saying goodbye."