It was a blonde-haired white woman. Not Rachel.
He had to pull himself together. If the mere sight of a car similar to Rachel’s tilted his world upside-down, he was going to lose his mind long before all of this was over.
Seated in the Explorer, he called the salon on his Blackberry. Tanisha answered.
“You’ve got good timing,” she said. “I was about to call you. Rachel wants me to give you something.”
“You talked to her? When?”
“She called me about fifteen minutes ago. I don’t understand what’s going on, honey, but you need to come to the salon. When can you get here?”
Chapter 29
Driving fast enough to get a speeding ticket, Joshua arrived at Belle Coiffure.
It was early afternoon, and every chair in the salon was occupied. The air had been filled with the chatter of the stylists and their clients, but at his entrance, the women turned, almost as one, and checked him out, the volume in the room lowering during their impromptu inspection.
Joshua cleared his throat. Entering Rachel’s salon—or any place inhabited exclusively by women—had always made him nervous. Because of his height and broad-shouldered build, he tended to attract a lot of female attention, and their appraising looks brought back his memories of being an ungainly kid, the tallest one in his class, a target of merciless teasing from boys and nervous giggling from girls.
A series of unanswered questions heightened his uneasiness. What did these women know about Rachel? Did they know she had left? Did they think she had run away because of him? Did they think she had left him for another man?
He cleared his throat again. “Is Tanisha here?”
“She’s in the back making a call,” a young stylist on his left said. She smiled. “You can go on back there. We know you.”
“Thanks.” He felt their gazes on him as he went down the center of the room. He knocked on the Staff Only door.
Tanisha answered. She was talking on the phone, but she said to him, “Hey, honey. Come on in.”
She indicated a sofa for him to sit on, but Joshua remained on his feet. He was too wound up to sit.
He looked around the back office. He’d been in there a few times before when visiting Rachel, but he tried to view the space through fresh eyes. It might contain clues that could help him understand what was going on.
The area was furnished with a sofa, a handful of chairs, a television, and a coffee table on which were scattered magazines such as Essence and Black Hair. In an office enclosure, there was a file cabinet and two desks, one for Tanisha, the other for Rachel, a desktop computer sitting on each.
Joshua doubted Rachel would have stored any files of a personal nature on her work computer, since Tanisha probably had access to it. She would have been more cautious.
Photographs also cluttered Rachel’s desk. A couple of their wedding photos, and one of her beloved beach pictures. All shots that he had seen before, in their home.
Rachel’s desk had three drawers. As he wondered whether she had hidden something significant in one of them, Tanisha ended her phone call.
“You got here fast,” she said.
Joshua had mentally composed a list of questions that he intended to ask her, and he didn’t want to waste any time with small talk.
“So Rachel called you,” he said. “What did she say?”
“Not much.” Tanisha sat in one of the desk chairs, swiveled around to face him. “She said she was going to be away for a while, and asked if I could keep running things here at the salon.”
“Did she say how long she’d be gone?”
“I asked her. She wouldn’t tell me. I don’t think she knew herself, to be honest. She was real vague.”
“Where did she call you from?”
“I don’t know that, either, sorry. I asked her that, too, but she wouldn’t say, and nothing showed up on Caller ID.”
Joshua ground his teeth. He sat on Rachel’s desk chair, pushed up his glasses on his nose.
“Did she tell you anything useful?”
“It was a really brief call, Josh. She didn’t answer any of my questions. She said she was fine, and she wanted you to know that she was safe—and she wanted me to give you something.”
“That was my next question. What did she want you to give me?”
Tanisha produced a key from a ring that was clipped to her waist. She unlocked the bottom right drawer of Rachel’s desk and removed a black steel box that was about the size of a standard dictionary.
“This.” She placed the box in Joshua’s lap. A silver padlock secured the lid.
He lifted the box. It weighed perhaps five pounds. He shook it, and something shifted inside.
“What is this?” he asked.
“I thought you would know. I have no idea. I didn’t know she was keeping it in her desk.”
He tugged at the padlock. “Do you have a key to open it?”
“No, I looked.” She jangled her key ring. “None of these fit, either. I tried.” Redness flushed her fair complexion. “Sorry, I know I was out of line for that, but Rachel was talking so weird I was hoping to get some answers for myself, too.”
He smiled grimly. “And I was hoping to get some answers from you. I don’t know much more than you do.”
“This is probably none of my business,” Tanisha said, “but I know you’ve been treating Rachel well. I know you’re a good brother. But . . .”
“But what?”
“But Rachel has always been so secretive. She’s my girl and all, and we work well together, but our friendship is kind of superficial. She doesn’t let people in, if you know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean.” He was surprised that Tanisha had such insight into Rachel’s personality, but on retrospect, he shouldn’t have been surprised at all. Tanisha had known Rachel a couple of years longer than he had, and had worked with her daily. Her opinion of his wife was as valid as his.
“I could be way off base,” Tanisha said, “but in my experience, when someone tries to keep you from getting too close, it’s because they have something to hide.”
“What do you think she was hiding?”
“I don’t know, but let me tell you what happened yesterday, around lunch. Rachel was doing a client’s hair, and all of a sudden, she screams and touches her head, like somebody’s hit her.”
“Seriously?”
Tanisha nodded. “She tried to play it off and tell me that she got a migraine all of a sudden, but I knew she was lying. She came back here for a little while. I put my ear to the door—I know, I was being too nosy, but I was worried about her—and I heard her shouting at someone on the phone.”
“Who?”
“I thought it was you, actually, but that didn’t feel right to me. I’d never heard her so pissed off at anyone. Then, maybe fifteen minutes later, she left. She said she had to go to an appointment, but she looked to me like she’d been crying her eyes out. Of course, she wouldn’t admit it—she was keeping me at arm’s length, like she usually does.”
Joshua thought about when he’d seen Rachel at home yesterday, and the bizarre bout of tears that she declined to explain. What the hell had happened?
“So.” Tanisha clasped her hands together in her lap. “I don’t know what you can do with that information, but that’s what happened here. Whatever went down, it probably had something with her leaving so abruptly. When was the last time you saw her?”
“Yesterday evening. I think she’s in some kind of danger, but I’ve no idea from what, or who. She . . . she left me a letter . . . saying she was going away for a while.” He didn’t want to give Tanisha more detail. Iron bands of emotion had tightened across his chest.
Compassion softened her eyes. “I’m so sorry, honey. But take it from another woman. If a woman’s in trouble, a man usually has something to do with it.”
“Has she ever mentioned another guy, anyone that you can remember?”
Tanisha shook her head fi
rmly. “No way. In the three years I’ve known Rachel, you’re the only man she’d ever even dated. She’d say you were the most special man she’d ever met.”
“Obviously, not special enough to tell the truth,” Joshua said, under his breath.
“Come again?”
“Never mind. One more question: did Rachel dye her hair?”
“Oh, sure, all the time. Auburn was her natural color, but she liked to keep it dark. Why?”
“It was something I never knew about her,” he said softly.
“Between you and me, I get the feeling there’s a lot we don’t know about Rachel.” She smiled bitterly.
Joshua stood, putting the box under his arm. “Thanks for giving this to me, whatever it is. And thanks for talking to me about Rachel. It’s helpful.”
“I wish I had more answers for you. You love that girl to death. It’s all in your eyes.”
“Yeah.”
“God’ll work it out.” Tanisha closed her fingers around the gold crucifix that dangled from her necklace. “Stay faithful, honey. Let go, and let God.”
Joshua nodded absently—a ray of insight had struck him. He thanked Tanisha again and quickly left the salon, oblivious this time to the curious glances from the assembled women, walking as fast as he could without breaking into a run.
He knew where he could find the key to open the box.
Chapter 30
At home, Coco greeted Joshua excitedly, running in circles and whining to be taken outside for a walk, but the little dog would have to wait.
He switched on the lights in the kitchen and placed the box on the table.
When Rachel had left him the letter, she’d also left him a key. He’d placed both items in a kitchen drawer. Leaving the letter in plain view was too hurtful a reminder of what had happened.
He dug the key and letter out of the drawer. He skimmed the note, to re-read the passage that referenced the key.
While I am away, I must caution you to be careful. I’ll say it again—BE CAREFUL. I’ve left you a key. It will unlock something that I have a strong feeling you might need soon. I wish I was wrong . . . but you know how I sometimes get these feelings.
Joshua inserted the key into the padlock. It fit. He turned it, and the lock clicked open.
He took off the padlock and raised the lid.
A layer of black velvet concealed the contents. He grasped the edge of the fabric, peeled it away.
His heart beat soared.
A revolver lay inside, in a metal tray fitted to the weapon’s contours. The gun had a black rubber grip, and a stainless steel barrel about three inches long. Smith & Wesson was engraved on the side of the barrel.
Joshua didn’t know what he had been expecting—but he certainly had not been expecting this.
Slowly and carefully, he lifted the gun out of the tray. The tray rose at the disturbance, and he heard something shift underneath. He placed the gun on the table, and lifted out the tray, too.
There was a cardboard box of .38 caliber ammunition.
“Jesus. What’s this all about, Rachel?”
She’d clearly given him the gun for protection. But protection from whom?
This latest discovery was another piece in the mysterious jigsaw puzzle that was his wife. Why had she kept this gun at the salon? Had she been concerned that she’d have to put down her hairbrush and blow someone away? He tried to imagine Rachel, his sweet-tempered wife, wielding this lethal weapon, and it just didn’t fit into what he knew of her.
But as Tanisha had said, there was a lot that neither of them knew about Rachel.
He curled his fingers around the revolver’s black handle.
He’d never fired a real gun in his life. His only experience with firearms was of the toy variety: Laser tag, Paintball, video games. When he was a teenager, his dad had been a weekend outdoorsman and would go hunting for white-tail deer and quail, and he would want to bring Joshua along—but his mother had forbid it. She’d been concerned for Joshua’s safety.
Joshua cautiously touched the trigger. The thought of handling the revolver and actually using it for self-defense was almost as absurd as the idea of Rachel using the weapon. He was not a combative person by nature, would have rather fled the scene than engage someone in a violent confrontation of any kind, least of all a gunfight.
He opened the box of ammo and dumped a couple of rounds into his palm. They were shiny, silver, deadly.
Was the revolver loaded? He didn’t know, and didn’t know how to check. What was the point of him having a gun if he was clueless about how to use it?
He was tempted to pack the revolver in the box and shove it in the rear of a closet and forget about it, but Rachel’s warning whispered through his thoughts.
. . . you know how I sometimes get these feelings.
He vividly recalled her dead-on intuition about certain things. Look at how she’d known he would get the contract with the restaurant group, if he took her advice to call them at a particular time of day. It was one of countless instances in which she truly seemed able to foretell the future.
As he regarded the revolver—it was totally incongruous on the table beside the salt and pepper shakers—he hoped that she was wrong this time. But he wasn’t willing to bet against her. The accuracy of her track record was undeniable.
He’d better learn how to use the gun.
Chapter 31
Dexter had put over three hundred miles on the Chevy that day, driving from one place to another around metro Atlanta, and he had yet to find his wife’s residence.
He’d visited single-family homes, townhouses, and apartment complexes. He’d driven through the hood and upscale subdivisions. He’d been mired in gridlock, in various parts of town—this city had the worst traffic he’d ever seen in his life—for a cumulative total of maybe five hours.
But no luck.
He was convinced that he would know, intuitively, when he arrived at his wife’s home. The exterior details of the residence, and the neighborhood in which it was located, would be telltale indicators of whether he was at the right place. He knew his wife.
He would not lose confidence in his instinct. An ordinary man would have been ready to throw in the towel by this point, would have begun second-guessing his intuition and plotting a new name search to begin the tedious process all over again. Not Dexter. He was supremely confident in his strategy, and believed time would bear out the wisdom of his approach.
So he continued to drive, undeterred, crossing entries off the print-out after each unsuccessful visit. He interrupted his work only to eat. He got his meal from a Publix grocery store: he summoned the cloak of invisibility and then went inside, whereupon he grabbed a hand basket and filled it with three lemon-pepper rotisserie chickens from the deli, a family-size tub of potato salad, and a six-pack of Coke. He left, without paying for the items, of course, and no one stopped him.
The cold, gray winter afternoon had darkened into a frigid evening when Dexter began driving to the next-to-last address on his list. It was an apartment in College Park.
He hoped this would be the one, mostly because he had become annoyed with the rickety Chevy. He needed a car in better condition to navigate these twisty, hilly roads and to keep up with these maniacal drivers. When he’d bought the car, he hadn’t thought that he might have to drive cross-country to find his wife. That had been a mistake of planning on his part—he’d underestimated her fear of him, the lengths to which she would go to avoid him.
But she hadn’t gone far enough.
He was driving along on a busy, four-lane thoroughfare when the GPS system instructed him to hook a right at the next intersection. He made the turn, which plunged him down another of those stomach-flipping hills. At the foot of the hill, the road banked to the left, wove around a cluster of pine trees, and then unfurled into a long straight-away bordered by winter-ravaged trees and shrubbery.
A large sign came into view ahead, on the right: Forest Ridge Apartment H
omes.
A cold tingle traveled the length of Dexter’s spine. This was it. This was where she lived.
Entry to the complex was restricted by a set of electronically activated, wrought-iron gates. Big, red holiday bows adorned the centers of the gates. A call box, also garlanded in holiday finery, stood in front of the gateway, between the entrance and exit paths.
Dexter drove to the call box and lowered his window. Chilly wind hit him in the face. He squinted against the gust, studying the small gray display and the accompanying keypad.
Residents were listed by first name initial and last name; a three-digit code was beside each entry, so you could call the person you were visiting and ask them to buzz you inside.
Putting his thumb on the button, Dexter scrolled to the “H”s. He did not find any Halls.
Yet he knew this was where she lived. He knew it.
A white Honda Civic with a lighted, Papa John’s placard on its roof had pulled up behind him. The driver tapped his horn, impatiently.
Anger streaked through Dexter, but he checked himself. He veered to the right, out of the entryway, and stuck his arm out the window to wave the driver past.
The pizza delivery driver punched a code into the call box, and the gates began to swing inward.
Dexter pulled behind the Honda, only inches from the rear bumper, to fool the sensor system. He followed the car through the gate without incident.
“So much for security,” he said.
The complex was a maze of four-story buildings with stacked stone foundations and gray siding, accessible via blacktopped, debris-free roadways. The leasing office and a clubhouse stood off to the right, near a large fountain with an angelic sculpture centerpiece. A sign on the clubhouse advertised an upcoming holiday party for community residents.
His survey of the property cemented his belief that his wife lived here, or had, until recently. The gated entry offered the promise of safety that she would desire, and the environment was solidly middle-class: upwardly mobile single professionals and young families saving for their first homes would choose to live in such a place.
The Darkness To Come Page 15
