Then she vanished.
Just like that. Poof. One minute she was there, the next she was not.
For a split second, Nicky stayed frozen, her eyes glued to the window, her mouth agape. There was nothing to be seen there now but dark, unfathomable panes of glass, glistening black and empty like the eyes of a fly.
“Gordon. Gordon, did you see?” Released from the spell at last, Nicky fell back a couple paces on legs that felt about as solid as rubber bands, practically babbling as she looked around for the cameraman. “Oh, God, tell me you had the camera running.”
“What? What are you talking about?” Gordon looked at her, clearly confused. As she had interrupted him in the process of tucking the camera back in its bag, it seemed pretty obvious that the camera had not been recording during the crucial seconds, which meant that there was no chance that he had gotten Tara Mitchell on film, even accidentally. But had he seen?
“I just saw Tara Mitchell in that bedroom window.” Nicky pointed. Even she could see that there was no one there now. Like all the other windows, it was at that moment reflecting the last orange burst of the sinking sun—no more, no less. “I mean, a girl. A girl with long, blond hair. Damn it, I’m sure it was Tara Mitchell.”
Gordon looked where Nicky pointed, then glanced back at her. Even in her agitated state, she had no trouble deciphering his doubtful expression.
“You saw something in the window?” he asked. “Besides a reflection, I mean?”
“Yes. Yes. Come on.”
Consumed with getting what she’d seen on record, Nicky charged toward the house. The yellow crime-scene tape didn’t even slow her down. A nimble hop, and she was over. A glance told her that Gordon was right behind.
“Set up right here.” Nicky stopped about three-quarters of the way up the weed-infested lawn, where she judged that Gordon would have the best view of the window in question. “I’m going to describe what I saw, and then I want you to focus in tight on that window. Then pan the house. Who knows, we might even get lucky and catch her on film this time.”
Gordon was already getting out his camera. “If we get a ghost on film, I’m retiring. I’d be able to put all three of my kids through college with the money I could make off of it.”
“BEST THING WOULD BE if this was some kind of boyfriend-girlfriend thing,” Vince said. He was walking Joe down the steps of a relatively modern three-story brick office building where the town council had just concluded an emergency meeting. Part of the commercial corridor across the causeway from the touristy part of the island, it was on the other side of Highway 17 from a strip mall featuring various outlet stores, doctor’s and dentist’s offices, and a pizza parlor. In front of the pizza parlor there were perhaps half a dozen parked cars. The rest of the parking lot was deserted. This time of year, things were slow. In a couple weeks, when the high season got under way, the shops would be busy until eleven.
Provided that the talk of a serial killer on the loose didn’t scare the tourists away.
“That would be best,” Joe agreed. They were just leaving a meeting in which Joe had updated the town elders on the progress of the investigation. As, so far, there hadn’t been a whole hell of a lot of progress, it hadn’t been an entirely happy meeting. The councilmen, all businesspeople, wanted the murder to just go away. Barring that, they wanted it solved yesterday.
“So?” Vince said.
Joe paused on the bottom step to look back at Vince, who was a step behind. It was twilight now, and the breeze blowing in from the ocean was picking up. Joe’s tie—he was wearing a navy sport coat, gray slacks, a white shirt, and a red tie—and the tails of his jacket flapped in the wind. “Boyfriend’s got a rock-solid alibi.”
“Shit.” Vince stuck his hands in the pockets of his khaki slacks and rocked back on his heels. He, too, was wearing a coat and tie, forest green and striped, respectively. Since reporters had started popping up on them without warning, they were all dressing better, Joe reflected. Talk about silver linings. “You sure?”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe some guy she hooked up with who wasn’t her boyfriend, then. In a bar or something. You know, one of those Looking for Mr. Goodbar things. Only not an island bar.”
“You’re fishing, Vince.”
“Damn it, Joe—”
Joe’s cell phone rang, interrupting. Not that Joe was sorry. Vince, the councilmen, practically every business owner he came in contact with, his neighbors—everybody on the island, it seemed—had their own theory about the murder, which they weren’t at all shy about sharing, and everybody wanted it solved. Not that anybody particularly gave a shit about a poor innocent girl viciously murdered in the springtime of her life. The consensus was that the thing had to be solved so the rest of the island could get on with their lives and the tourist season could happen unimpeded.
“Hang on a minute,” Joe said to Vince, holding up a silencing hand. Then, into his phone, “Joe Franconi.”
Joe listened, grinned, said, “I’ll be right there,” and disconnected.
“Gotta go,” he said to Vince.
Vince frowned. “You got to understand, Joe. There’s a lot at stake here. This thing is a monkey on our backs. We got to get it off. Whatever it takes.”
“I understand.” Joe started moving toward his cruiser, which was parked just a few yards away. He understood, all right. Vince and the rest of them wanted a perp ASAP. The right perp would be ideal. But ultimately, any halfway-plausible perp would do.
Just as long as the vacationing public could be reassured that the island was safe.
NICKY WAS SITTING, not very happily, beside Gordon in the back of a patrol car parked at the bottom of the Old Taylor Place’s front yard when she saw, through the rearview mirror, a pair of headlights coming toward them. It was a measure of just how dark it had become that the approaching car had its headlights on, she realized. A quick glance around confirmed it—the light was almost gone. The purple shadows that had enveloped them what seemed like scant minutes ago were deepening to charcoal gray now, and beyond the tangle of undergrowth, the surface of the creek glinted a smooth, shiny black. Looking at it, Nicky shivered.
She was trapped out in front of a haunted house where she had just, personally, for the first time ever, seen a ghost, and where just about a week ago she had almost been killed and her friend had been viciously murdered, in the damned dark, with rising black water nearby.
As far as she was concerned, scary didn’t get much more unnerving than that.
Even as she had the thought, from somewhere in the distance, the sound so faint that she could barely hear it over the nearer sounds of the night beyond the car and the people shifting, breathing, and exchanging desultory comments inside, a dog started to howl. Nicky listened to the mournful crescendo with widening eyes and a thudding heart as the memory hit her like a sledgehammer: A dog had been howling on the night Karen had died, too.
Okay, she’d been wrong. Scary had just gotten cranked up to a whole new level.
“Um,” she began, meaning to do her best to alert the two dunderheaded cops in the front seat to the howling dog. But the thought of trying to explain the significance to two men who had looked at her like she was a raving lunatic when she’d told them she’d seen a ghost in an effort to explain why she and Gordon had crossed the crime-scene tape was daunting, to say the least.
“Here he comes,” the cop in the driver’s seat said before Nicky could get out more than that one indeterminate syllable. She didn’t know him or his partner, which made trying to explain why she took ghosts way more seriously than they seemed to more difficult than it might otherwise have been. Under the circumstances, she decided to let the whole dog thing go in favor of trying to guess who he was. She knew who she was hoping for, anyway, although she probably shouldn’t have been hoping for any such thing.
The driver had called somebody on his cell phone after locking Nicky and Gordon in the car. As the conversation had taken place outside th
e car, and she and Gordon had been inside it, she hadn’t been able to overhear what was said. But that it concerned them was pretty obvious by the way the driver had kept looking in at them as he talked. Nicky had thought at the time that he was reporting the situation to somebody, and logic had dictated that the person he was reporting to was probably the Chief of Police. But it could have been his shift supervisor, too, or even his wife, whom maybe he’d called to ask what he should bring home for dinner.
“ ’Bout time,” his partner grumbled, and Nicky definitely agreed with that. At this point, the tension in the car was so thick, you could have ladled it into soup bowls. Nicky—with only an occasional assist from Gordon, who at times during their little walk on the wrong side of the law had seemed to be almost on the side of the cops—had argued, cajoled, and done her best to explain as they were marched down the yard and herded into the patrol car, finally falling silent only when the cops had threatened them both with handcuffs and arrest if she didn’t shut up—and Gordon had elbowed her hard in the ribs. Since then, she’d sat in stony silence, waiting for . . . she didn’t know what.
The same thing the cops were waiting for, apparently, because after the driver had finished his call, both cops had slid into the cruiser, and there they’d all sat.
Nicky had a feeling that this oncoming car—which she now saw was, as she had suspected, another police car—was what they were waiting for. As the vehicle they were in was facing away from the arriving car, she had to slew around in the seat to watch as the newcomer pulled to a stop behind them. A masculine figure got out and slammed the door. Nicky took one look and felt her pulse quicken—in a good way, this time.
It was too dark now to see his face—the back windows of the cruiser were tinted, which didn’t help—but there was just no mistaking that tall, lean form.
The first cop rolled down his window. Nicky heard the muted crunch of footsteps on gravel, saw a shape walk past her window, then found herself staring through the metal grille that separated the backseat from the front seat at Joe, as he leaned down to look in the driver’s-side window.
“I don’t believe it,” Joe said as their eyes met. It was almost full night now, and his face was in shadow, so she couldn’t really read his expression, but she could see the dark glint of his eyes. “What the hell are you doing here?”
Nicky was surprised by how very glad she was to see him—even under the circumstances.
“My job,” she said, sticking out her chin.
“Is that so.” His gaze moved from her to Gordon, who waved and said a wry “Hi there,” then back to the cops in the front seat.
“They were trespassing,” the driver said, and jerked a thumb toward the Old Taylor Place. “Up there.”
Nicky leaned forward so that her nose was just inches from the grille and spoke to Joe through it. “Could you please tell them we’re harmless and that they can let us go now?”
He flicked her a glance. “Depends.” To the driver, he said, “So, is trespassing all you’ve got?”
“That, and crossing police lines. When we got here, they were up there on the porch, taking pictures through the windows.”
Joe glanced back at Nicky.
“We were trying to catch something on film,” Nicky said.
“A ghost,” the driver said, his tone carefully neutral.
Joe glanced at her again. “Oh, yeah?”
There it was: skepticism in spades. She was getting fed up to the back teeth with it.
Nicky narrowed her eyes at him. “Yeah. I saw a ghost. You got a problem with that?”
“Nicky thought she saw a figure that looked like Tara Mitchell in the upstairs bedroom window when we were filming from the street earlier. We were trying to get it on camera,” Gordon intervened hastily. As he’d already told Nicky, he knew how these small-town Southern lockups went: Go to jail on the weekend, and you’d be there until some good ole boy judge got into the courthouse on Monday. And he did not want to spend the next two nights in jail. Neither, if she had any sense, did she. “Would’ve been a money shot if we could’ve gotten it.”
“But you didn’t.” Joe’s tone made it a statement rather than a question.
The one cop whose face she could see smirked. Nicky bristled.
“I know what I saw,” she said. “Could we please go now?”
“You got any problem with letting them off with a warning?” Joe asked. The other cops shook their heads. Joe looked back at Nicky. “Next time you see crime-scene tape, don’t cross it,” he said, and straightened away from the window. A moment later, he opened the back door.
Nicky slid out, followed by Gordon a few seconds later. Joe shut the door.
“Good job, guys,” Joe said to his subordinates. “Wait for backup, and when it gets here, you two go in and check out the house.”
“Sure.” The driver grinned at Joe and lowered his voice. “I got a question for you, though: If we find a ghost, should we arrest it?”
Nicky heard and stiffened. Gordon shook his head at her warningly.
“Call me.” Joe’s voice was dry.
“Will do.”
“Thanks for getting us out of that,” Gordon said, hefting his camera bag over his shoulder as he started walking toward his and Nicky’s vehicles. Nicky contented herself with shooting Joe a dirty look as she, too, started walking, heading toward her Maxima, which was some thirty feet away. Gordon’s van was about ten feet beyond that. Joe was wearing a jacket and tie, she noted, and looking handsome enough to almost make up for his rotten personality. Now that it was dark, though, she was more interested in getting away from the scary haunted house with the howling dog—which, incidentally was no longer howling—than she was in quarreling with Joe, or in drooling over him.
“Not a problem.” Joe fell into step beside her. Gordon was a couple paces ahead. “So you want to tell me why you’re not holed up all safe and sound in your apartment in Chicago?”
“I told you: I have a job to do. And just so you know, I saw what I think was Tara Mitchell’s ghost looking out of her bedroom window. And I heard a dog howling.”
“A dog howling?” Joe sounded faintly bemused.
“I heard a dog howling Sunday night. Right before I was attacked. And just a little while ago, I heard one again.”
“And that’s supposed to mean?”
She could feel him looking at her, but she refused to look back, marching along with her eyes straight ahead. The musky scent of the marsh grew stronger as she reached her car. It was full dark now, and a bass choir of bullfrogs was just getting keyed up somewhere near the water. Cicadas and katydids and crickets whirred, and mosquitos buzzed, one or two around her head. She waved at them absentmindedly, barely noticing. Bloodthirsty insects were the least of her worries at the moment.
“How do I know? I’m just telling you,” she snapped, curling her fingers around her car door handle. She jerked the door open, then paused—okay, she wasn’t stupid—to make a quick survey of the interior before sliding inside.
“You heading for the airport?” Joe asked, stopping beside the car to look down at her.
“Nope.” She shut the door and hit the lock button. As the sharp click sounded, she felt marginally safer.
Gordon was outside her door now, too. He had paused to say something to Joe. Lips tightening, keys already in her hand, Nicky rolled down her window.
“I’ll call you in the morning and we’ll set up a schedule for the day, okay?” she said to Gordon, the words brusque because she was in a hurry to leave. Besides being aggravated at Joe—and the other cops and Gordon and, basically, most of the rest of the world—for being such a doubter, she wanted to get out of there. Now that it was dark, the place was creeping her out to the point where she had cold chills running up and down her spine every time she glanced around.
“Yeah, okay,” Gordon said, and started walking again.
“So, where are you headed?” Joe asked her. “Somewhere far away, I hope.”
<
br /> “Home. Twybee Cottage.” She started rolling up her window.
“I’ll follow you,” Joe said. It wasn’t a question. It was, instead, more of a grim statement, with the unspoken corollary to make sure you get there alive.
Nicky’s finger paused on the button. The window stopped moving. Their eyes met through the gathering gloom.
She wanted to say “There’s no need.” Pride dictated that she say “I’ll be fine.” But nerves won out. Face facts, she told herself glumly: She was now officially afraid of the dark. She wasn’t going to feel safe until her fanny was parked inside her big, noisy, chaotic house right in the middle of her big, noisy, chaotic family. Having a cop follow her until she got there would make her feel a whole lot better, especially since the cop in question was Joe.
She might not especially like him right now, but she trusted him.
“Thanks,” she said. He nodded.
A few minutes later, the minivan with Gordon driving went past. Nicky pulled behind him, and Joe pulled behind her.
They lost Gordon with a honk and a wave at the first intersection, when he went west toward the South Causeway and she turned east toward the heart of the island. But Joe stayed behind her all the way to Twybee Cottage. She knew, because she snuck occasional glances in her rearview mirror just to make sure.
Nicky hated to admit it even to herself, but she was really, truly glad he was there. Still, she couldn’t help it: She felt as jumpy as a grasshopper in a field full of lawnmowers as she drove through the dark, past fields crowded with tall grass and scrub pine and palmettos, past oncoming cars that were no more than a brief flash of headlights before they were gone, and finally past the big, old houses that lined Atlantic Avenue, only some of which were starting to glimmer with a few dim interior lights.
Coming back to the island was much worse than she’d thought it was going to be, she was discovering. Everything was starting to creep her out.
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