If it killed her. Which she hoped—no, prayed—it wouldn’t do.
But the thought of what might be waiting for her here made her pulse accelerate until she could hear the too-rapid beat of it drumming in her ears.
It was only for three weeks, she reminded herself, and she was going to take every precaution to make sure that she didn’t die, such as taking care that she was never alone, and staying nights with her family at Twybee Cottage, where the usual state of constant chaos and influx of visitors should be enough to keep her safe. For a tantalizing moment or two, as she’d been going over the travel arrangements, she’d considered staying in the Best Western on Highway 17 with Gordon, who was traveling with her as her cameraman and was at that moment driving the red minivan behind her, as they were going to take advantage of the remaining light to film the “live on tape” opening bit for Sunday night’s show before staggering off to their respective lodgings to recuperate from the rigors of a day spent traveling. But as appealing as the prospect of peace and privacy was, Nicky had decided to forget the hotel almost as soon as she’d thought about it. She knew herself well enough to know that she’d never be able to sleep for constantly picturing Lazarus508 creeping into her room in the middle of the night. The rest of the team, shaken by Karen’s murder, had been given the choice about whether to return to the island or not, and Nicky wouldn’t have blamed them if they’d chosen to stay away. But every single one of them had agreed to come when they were needed, which was for the hour-long finale in three weeks’ time. For the shorter preceding segments, Nicky would do her own hair and makeup. She’d done it lots of times before. But she’d be glad to have Tina and Cassandra and Mario, and Bob the cameraman, too, with her and Gordon nevertheless. She liked them, they were a good crew, and at this point, she felt as though there was definitely safety in numbers.
There had been no more e-mails, no more phone calls, no more communication of any kind from Lazarus508. But she couldn’t escape the feeling that he and she were somehow connected now. Every time she closed her eyes, it was almost as if she could feel him. And when she slept—which she did very badly—he stalked her dreams.
If it hadn’t been daylight still, she would have been nervous as hell about the spot they were getting ready to shoot. She would be standing in front of the Old Taylor Place, pointing out the spot beneath the pines where Karen had died, and she had almost died, for the folks at home.
Just thinking about it made Nicky’s stomach knot and her throat go dry.
So she deliberately put it out of her mind and concentrated, instead, on her driving.
The sun was getting ready to sink beneath the horizon, but it wasn’t gone yet. Since she was heading due east now, it hung low in the sky behind her, a bright yellow ball that radiated light and heat and limned the shaggy treetops ahead of her in neon orange. As she neared the center of the causeway, she could look to either side and see the Atlantic and the rush of frothy surf where it merged into the calmer, darker waters of Salt Marsh Creek. At this hour, the tide would be starting to come in, she knew. As it rose, the creek beneath the causeway was busy with cabin cruisers and houseboats and Jet Skis returning to their docks. The sky was just beginning to darken from the afternoon’s halcyon blue to indigo. Soon it would deepen to purple, and then, when the sun finally disappeared altogether, to midnight blue.
It would be night once more.
It was the nights that scared her. The killer was a creature of the night.
But he didn’t know that she was back, Nicky reminded herself as her heartbeat started to quicken at the terrifying images that conjured up. There was no way he could know she was back.
But as soon as Sunday’s program aired, he would.
At the thought, Nicky’s hands tightened on the steering wheel.
Maybe she should think about buying some pepper spray.
Maybe she should think about buying a gun.
Picturing herself packing heat, Nicky made a wry face. She’d never fired a gun in her life. Her best bet was to stick to pepper spray or some similar nonlethal weapon, and to being very, very cautious.
There was quite a bit of traffic on the causeway, most of it going the other way. Locals from off-island frequently spent Saturday afternoons at the beach and then returned to their homes on the mainland as the sun sank. Except for a few slightly seedy bars and the restaurants and lounges in the hotels, there wasn’t a lot of nightlife, which Uncle Ham, with his proposed restaurant-cum-nightclub, hoped to change.
Which had prompted her mother to call her about a TV gig, which had prompted Nicky to remember the Tara Mitchell murder, which had prompted her proposal at the staff meeting, which had led to last Sunday’s special and Karen’s murder.
Was life a series of terrible coincidences or what?
Her cell phone rang. Though she knew them well, the melodious tones were unexpected and made her jump. Fumbling for the phone, which was in the pocket of her elegant knit jacket because she now felt safer with her phone on her person rather than in her purse, she glanced nervously at the incoming number as she kept one eye on the road.
Her mother.
Considering other even more dire possibilities, her reaction to that was Thank God.
“Where are you?” Leonora wanted to know when Nicky answered.
“Just coming across the causeway. I’m going to stop by the Old Taylor Place to do a quick shot, and then I’ll be home.”
“Did you bring it?”
It being the spare blazer Karen had kept at work. Inexpensive black polyester, it had been overlooked in the hall closet when her things were being packed up after her death to be sent to her parents. Nicky had remembered it only this morning, when she had called her mother to tell her that she would be coming home and Leonora had expressed a need to have something personal of Karen’s to use as a possible aid to making contact with her. Although Leonora usually had no need for such conduits, the gravity of the situation made her willing to try anything at this point, including what she considered “primitive” methods, such as holding a possession of the deceased’s in her hands in an effort to pick up vibes from it.
“Yes,” Nicky said. “It’s a blazer. Do you think it’ll work?”
“It’s worth a try.” Nicky could almost see her mother’s shrug.
“Yeah.” Neither one of them was exactly exuding confidence.
“Nicky.” Leonora sounded worried. “I have a bad feeling about this. I wish you’d go back to Chicago.”
“Mama, we talked about this.”
“I know, but I’ve had a splitting headache all day. Practically a migraine, and you know I never get migraines. And I have this feeling. Like there’s a dark cloud hanging over me. Like something bad is getting ready to happen.”
Coming from Leonora James, this was not a pronouncement to be taken lightly. Nicky felt a prickling rush of goose bumps over her skin.
“Did you see something?”
“That’s just it. I can’t see anything. Anything at all. I’ve tried and tried and tried. Nothing is coming through—except this feeling. And that’s one thing that makes me worry so much. I’ve never, ever in my life been blocked like this. There’s something wrong, and I don’t know what it is, but you know how hard it is for me to see anything that has to do with family. What if it means that something’s going to happen to you?”
Okay, Nicky’s heart was knocking against her ribs now. Her one hand on the steering wheel—the other was gripping her phone—had tightened until she was practically white-knuckling it. If she wasn’t careful, what was going to happen to her was that she was going to crash through the guardrail and plunge into the deep, dark waters of the creek thirty feet below from sheer bad driving.
“You’re scaring me, you know,” Nicky said.
“Well, then, that makes us even, because you’re scaring me.”
Nicky hadn’t told Leonora about the e-mail yet, knowing that it would only make her worry. When she did—and she had to
soon, because it was part of the segment that was going to be broadcast on Sunday’s program—Leonora would go into orbit.
“I promise I’m going to be really careful.” Nicky tried for a soothing tone.
A beat passed.
“You’re going to give me a nervous breakdown, you know, you and your sister,” Leonora burst out. “You with your job where you go around chasing after murderers all day long, and her with her obsession with that piece of shit Ben Hollis. You know where she is right now? Out somewhere spying on him and that tramp he’s taken up with. Oh, she told me she’s going shopping, but I know her. I know what she’s up to.”
As far as Nicky was concerned, it was almost a relief to focus on Livvy for a moment instead of indulging in an all-new bout of worry regarding herself.
“When I get home I’ll talk to her, okay?”
“Always provided you live long enough,” Leonora said bitterly, and disconnected.
Nicky slipped the phone back into her pocket and then turned off the air-conditioning. Her mother’s feeling had left her chilled to the bone.
For a long, hard moment, she thought about taking her mother’s advice and just making a U-turn at the end of the causeway and heading back to the airport.
Then she remembered Carl. And Sid. And CBS. And Karen. If Nicky hadn’t suggested doing a show on the Mitchell murder, the Twenty-four Hours Investigates team wouldn’t have come to Pawleys Island in the first place, and Karen would be alive right now. That was the cold, hard truth that she’d been trying not to face for most of the past week.
But she had suggested it.
And now she owed Karen, too.
She was going to be really, really careful. But she was going to stay and see this investigation through.
For Tara and her friends. For Karen. And for herself.
Then Nicky had no more time to ponder, because she was over the causeway and at the intersection where she needed to turn left, and when she did, the Old Taylor Place came into view.
12
“AS YOU CAN SEE behind me, the yard is still cordoned off with yellow crime-scene tape,” Nicky said into the camera that Gordon had focused on her. Since the entire property was, as she had just noted for the audience at home, indeed still roped off with the plastic tape that warned away the curious, strung between green metal stakes that had been driven into the ground, she’d been able to get no closer to her goal than the street in front of the house, which, if truth be told, suited her just fine. In front of her, a wall of tall marsh grasses and a dense tangle of dogwoods and birches and crepe myrtle and spirea separated her from the steep bank that led down to the rising waters of Salt Marsh Creek. Behind her, queening it on its slight rise, the Old Taylor Place caught the last golden rays of the sun. It was the very picture of faded grandeur with its peeling white paint and boxy double porches and old-fashioned gingerbread trim. With the sky behind it the deepest of indigos now, and the live oaks with their silver beards of Spanish moss looming tall in the background, and the lengthening shadows of approaching twilight creeping across the overgrown yard, it looked like the quintessential haunted house.
Which, as far as Nicky was concerned, was just what it was.
It was not exactly where she wanted to be, especially since it would be dark in an hour and the idea of being at the Old Taylor Place after dark scared the pants off her. But she had to admit that having the scary haunted house where the crimes had taken place in the background made for damned good TV.
Anyway, five minutes and she and Gordon were gone.
“There, beneath the stand of Norfolk Island pines at the curve of the driveway . . .”
She couldn’t see through the camera lens, of course, but because they had discussed the spot in advance, she knew that Gordon would be taking a long view of the driveway leading up to the curve and then closing in on the pines themselves for a close-up of the lower branches. As for herself, Nicky couldn’t bear to look, lest she be overwhelmed by terrifying memories. Fortunately, she didn’t need to. All she had to do was keep her eyes on the camera, ignore the pounding of her heart and the nervous churning of her stomach, and get the job done.
“. . . is where Karen was brutally stabbed to death, and I was also attacked. Tonight, we’ll walk you through the crime, second by terrifying second. We’ll give you the real inside view, in a way no program or reporter has ever been able to do before, of a murder as we investigate the horrific slaying of our dear friend and colleague Karen Wise. Using what I know from my own experience as the intended second victim that night, we will reconstruct the crime for you and reveal secrets known only to those involved in the investigation. And we’ll take you inside the Pawleys Island Police Department, too, as they search desperately for who they believe at this point may also be the killer of three teenage girls fifteen years ago. Stay with us, and right after this break, you’ll hear how I got this”—knowing that the camera was focused on her again, Nicky touched the bruising around her eye—“and this at the hands of the man we’re calling the Lazarus Killer.”
Much against her instincts, which tended toward the frugal, Nicky had traveled in one of her best on-camera outfits, an expensive St. John pantsuit, in anticipation of just this moment. To begin with, the silky knit was thin enough to be cool, and it never wrinkled, which made the garments ideal for a long day of travel, which was to be followed immediately by some on-camera work. In addition, the pull-on construction of the pants made doing what she needed to do for this shot easy. With the air of a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, she pushed her single-button black jacket back behind her hipbone, pulled her white shell up a few inches, and shoved down the waistband of her black pants. Approximately six inches of creamy hipbone was exposed, along with the red-edged, scabbed-over slash where the killer’s knife had sliced through her flesh.
Just looking at it made Nicky’s chest tighten. But like it or not, her own wounds were part of the story, and she wouldn’t be doing her job if she left them out.
Besides, she reminded herself, the shock factor was key. The whole point was to grab the audience’s attention, whether it made her feel queasy or not.
She gave Gordon a couple seconds to get a tight shot of her hip before he refocused on her face again, and then she pulled her clothes back together and concluded with, “I’m Nicole Sullivan. Stay with me as Twenty-four Hours Investigates launches our own investigation into this horrifying crime.”
Gordon pushed a button and looked up from the camera. “That was great.”
Nicky summoned a smile for him. “Thanks.”
Gordon had been a trouper to come with her, and the last thing she wanted to do was have her lousy mood rub off on him. The thing was, she didn’t feel particularly good about what they were doing. The little spurt of satisfaction that usually came when she had just wrapped a spot that she knew was a ratings-grabber was missing, although she was well aware that she’d never been involved with a bigger ratings-grabber in her life. But as far as this story was concerned, the thrill was definitely gone, probably because the subject matter now hit too close to home. And then, she’d never been part of one of her own stories before, and there was that whole exploitation-of-Karen’s-death thing. To say nothing of the fact that basically every time anything moved within the range of her peripheral vision, she felt like jumping out of her skin. For the first time ever, being back on the island just felt wrong. The familiar warm, perfumed breeze seemed tainted now with a musky, half-rotted undernote from the marsh, the distant murmur of the ocean sounded more like a warning growl, and the bright crayon colors in which nearly everything on the island was rendered seemed inappropriately garish, like someone wearing red at a funeral.
The sense of homecoming that she always experienced upon returning to the island was gone, too.
It had been replaced by a gnawing apprehension that ratcheted up to an icy sinking sensation that she recognized as dread, as she squared her shoulders and turned around for a final, almost def
iant look at the house.
She would get past the feeling, she told herself sternly. She had to.
Because, like it or not, the Old Taylor Place, like the island itself, was part of the fabric of her life. Her earliest memories were of this island. They had been happy here once, she and Livvy and their parents. Every picture she had of her father had been taken on or around this island. When she remembered him, the island was there, too, its warmth and scent and exotic colors inextricably entwined with each precious moment that her mind could dredge up. She would not permit a crime, no matter how hideous and violent, to spoil those memories for her, to spoil this island for her.
The Old Taylor Place was just a house, after all, just a slightly run-down relic that had suffered the misfortune of being the site that an evil man had chosen for his crimes. The house itself was blameless. Nicky looked it over, absorbing such un-scary details as the untidy masses of overgrown pink-and-white oleanders crowding against the lower porch and the eight identical casement windows on each floor, and the slightly sagging black shingles . . .
As Nicky’s eyes touched on the roof, it hit her that something was off-kilter. In her quick scan of the house, she’d seen something that had registered with her eyes before it could be processed by her mind. As her mind finally caught up, her breathing suspended. Her eyes widened, her gaze dropped, and she looked disbelievingly at the second-floor window.
The corner one, Tara Mitchell’s bedroom window.
A girl was standing at that window, looking out.
Even though Nicky’s view was from the street, with the outside light now uncertain as the sky continued to darken, she could see the girl quite clearly. The golden-blond shade of the hair that flowed over the girl’s shoulders almost to her waist, the pale oval of her face, featureless at such a distance, the slim curves of her body dressed in what looked like a cream T-shirt and jeans—Tara Mitchell.
Nicky’s mind reeled. Her heart gave an uncontrollable leap. The world seemed to stop spinning on its axis as she stared upward—and then Tara Mitchell turned her head and looked back as though she had felt Nicky’s gaze.
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