He gave her a long, measuring look. “I left you two alone for less than an hour while I took care of hiring the security people. You learned an awful lot about her.”
“I like her,” she said. “She’s nice.” After a long silence, she asked, “What happened that day, John?” Janie had asked her if she knew the events of that summer day, and Teryl had shaken her head. The other woman hadn’t elaborated. She had simply gripped the chair’s armrests tighter and fiercely murmured, “It wasn’t his fault.”
A mile or two went by with no response; then he sighed, a soul-weary sound. “It was June, seventeen years ago. We were celebrating Tom’s graduation and the end of the spring semester with a family camp-out in the mountains. Our aunts and uncles and some cousins were there and, of course, our parents. I don’t remember exactly how it started. My dad wasn’t happy with my grades, he didn’t like the company I kept, he thought I needed direction in my life, I didn’t have enough ambition, I wasn’t working hard enough, I wasn’t taking school seriously enough. Whatever it was, it led to an argument. Everything led to an argument with him. I could be doing something, anything, and he would say I wasn’t doing it right. I’d change and start doing it his way, and he would say I didn’t have the balls to stand up for myself. So I’d go back to doing it my way, and he would say I was being disrespectful for ignoring his instructions, but, hey, that was what he got for raising a kid who was too stupid to know better. Nothing I did ever satisfied him, and that day was no different.”
Teryl thought about her father, sweet, loving, and always respectful. He would never dream of calling a kid stupid, would never have anything but praise for a kid who was trying even if he was always failing. He loved kids—all kids, not just the pretty ones or the smart ones or the easy ones. Sometimes the kids he loved best were the ones who were the hardest to love. The ones who needed it most. Like D.J.
“He’d been on my back all day, and I guess I was in the mood for a fight. I kept goading him, and finally he lost his temper. He slapped me in front of everyone there and told me to get out. He said I wasn’t going to ruin the weekend for Tom and Janie. They didn’t want me to leave like that, so they got in the car with me. Tom wanted to drive—he said I was too upset—but I wouldn’t let him. I was upset, and driving fast and recklessly was a hell of a way to deal with it.” He broke off for a moment, then continued in that same low, flat voice. “About five miles away I lost control of the car on a curve and drove off the side of the mountain. Tom died right away. Janie’s spine was crushed. I was thrown clear.”
Tears clogging her throat, Teryl wanted to ask him to stop, wanted to tell him that she’d heard enough. She didn’t want to know the rest. She didn’t want to hear how devastated he had been, didn’t want to feel even the smallest portion of his grief. She’d heard enough sad stories in her life, and she didn’t want to hear the rest of this one. But she couldn’t stop him. He needed to tell it, and, in some perverse way, because she loved him, she needed to hear it.
“We were taken to the nearest hospital, and arrangements were made to fly Janie to L.A. They sent a state trooper to the campground to tell our parents, but he got the names confused. He told them that Tom was alive and I had died, and he brought them to the hospital. I’ll never forget the look on their faces when they walked into the emergency room and saw me standing there.”
A fragment of conversation she’d overheard years before came back to her. The subject had been Rico, one of the foster kids her parents had eventually adopted, and the occasion had been the morning after his first night with the family. He had come to them from the hospital, where he’d undergone surgery to repair the damage his mother’s boyfriend had done; he had come bearing bruises, scars, casts, and stitches and an unholy fear of physical contact. There must be a special place in hell, her mother had said with a ferocity that had frightened Teryl, for people who hurt children. Twenty-two years later and more than twenty-two years wiser, Teryl could now fully appreciate her mother’s sentiment. She hoped John’s parents, especially his father, burned there.
“And that’s why you left home,” she said quietly.
“I had no reason to stay. They refused to believe it was an accident. They insisted I had acted out of jealousy and resentment. They wouldn’t let me go to Tom’s funeral or see Janie. I had to leave.”
Abruptly he changed lanes and exited the interstate. Teryl sat up and looked around at the bright lights of yet another town. “Do we need gas?”
“No, we’re stopping. You’re tired. You need a bed where you can stretch out and sleep.”
She automatically opened her mouth to protest. Instead, all she said was, “Thank you.”
They stopped at the first motel, and she waited in the car while he checked them in. The room he rented was luxurious compared to some of the places they’d stayed, but she was too tired to care. Before he got the door closed and locked behind them, she was pulling back the covers with one hand while removing her clothes with the other. She stripped down to her T-shirt and panties, crawled into bed, and laid her head on the pillow with a heavy sigh. This felt like such comfort after last night’s shabby motel, the flight, and the long hours in the car.
“Teryl?” John turned out the lights, undressed, then slid into bed beside her. She looked at him in the darkness.
“You know where he lives, don’t you?”
Simon. In the hours since leaving Janie in the care of her armed guards, they hadn’t mentioned Simon’s name even once. Teryl hadn’t even thought about him, hadn’t wondered where he was or if he knew they were still alive. She’d been too tired to care that he would try once again to kill them, too weary to wonder how or when or where. She just hoped she and John weren’t both so exhausted when he did try again. She hoped they had a fair chance of surviving.
Where Simon lived. Yes, she knew. When he had sent the change of address to the office, she had taken the time to locate it. The address was a rural route number, but a little checking had pinpointed for her exactly where that box number was. Feeling foolishly juvenile, she had driven out there a time or two, just to look, just to see where her idol was making his home. The hundred-year-old farmhouse hadn’t been exactly what she’d expected, but, she had reasoned, it was probably temporary. He’d moved in the middle of writing Resurrection; he probably intended to live in the old house until the book was finished, and then he would probably begin construction on the sort of home she had imagined him living in.
“Yes,” she answered softly, knowing what was coming and not wanting to hear it. “I know where he lives.”
“In Richmond?”
“Just outside.”
“Will you take me there tomorrow?”
“John—”
He laid his fingers over her mouth, silencing the argument she was about to offer. “Please, Teryl.”
Sighing forlornly, she pushed his hand away and gave the answer he wanted. The answer she hoped she didn’t come to regret. “All right, John. I’ll take you there.”
The farmhouse sat a few hundred yards off the county road in a shallow depression where the ground dipped low before climbing again on all sides. It was two stories, with a broad porch across the front and a steeply pitched roof in need of repair, with a long, snaking driveway better suited to the Blazer than the rental car that had brought them from Florida. The grass needed mowing, and the porch swing that should have hung in front of the bay window looked silly upended in the nearby flower bed.
There was no sign of a car. No sign of life.
He had lived in worse places, John thought, but he had a tendency to prefer better ones. He’d gotten a little spoiled that way.
“There’s no one home.”
Teryl turned from the house to him. “Now can we go to the police?”
“He’s probably got all my stuff in there.”
“What stuff?”
“My papers. My records. My contracts. I just assumed everything was destroyed in the fire, but he nee
ded it if he was going to pull this off. If he was going to succeed at becoming Simon Tremont, he had to know all the details of my business.”
“So instead of simply blowing up your house and trying to kill you, he broke in first and took the time to carry out everything relating to your work. Then all he had to do was bring it back here, put your files in his file cabinets, and voilà, instant history. Instant documentation.”
“Instant identity.” John stared at the house. It needed a coat of paint and an owner interested in upkeep and maintenance. Maybe Simon didn’t care about that sort of thing. Maybe, until he’d gotten John’s royalty check last month, he hadn’t had the money to fix up the place. Maybe since he’d gotten the check, he’d been too busy. Living someone else’s life might tend to be a demanding task, especially when that someone was famous. “I want to go in.”
“Oh, no, John,” Teryl groaned. “The man who lives there wants you dead. Have you forgotten that? What if he comes home and finds us in his house? What do you think he’s going to do?”
He gave her a steady look. “I just want to see if he has my papers. I want to know if he’s got my pictures.” If Tremont had taken the business stuff, he might have taken the personal stuff, too. “You don’t have to come with me. You can wait in the car, and if you see him coming, you can honk the horn to warn me.”
“The hell I can. He knows me, John, he’s seen me and talked to me, and he wants to kill me almost as much as he wants to kill you. If you insist on going inside, I’m going with you.”
He looked at her a moment longer, then shifted into gear, pulled into the driveway, and backed out again, heading back toward town. He didn’t go far, though, just a couple hundred yards to where another road angled off to the right, curving around before disappearing into the trees. He pulled up far enough that the car was obscured from view from the road, then cut off the engine. “You don’t have to do this, Teryl,” he said, giving her one last chance to back out. “You’ll be safe here.”
“I’ll be safe with you.” Still, as they walked away from the car toward the driveway, she slipped her hand into his and held on tightly.
The front door was locked; so was the back door. John didn’t think twice about breaking the glass in the door, reaching inside, and opening the lock. The door opened directly into the kitchen, a big square room with a table in the center, twenty-year-old appliances, and not so much as one dirty dish in the sink. The man who lived there was neat, almost compulsively so. John considered himself a better than average housekeeper, but even he never made things shine like this. Even he never lined up the spices on the counter in alphabetical order or turned the handles on all the coffee cups in the glass-fronted cabinets in exactly the same direction.
Clutching his hand with both of hers, Teryl followed him into the room, the broken glass crunching under her shoes. He swore he could feel her pulse in the tips of her fingers, and it was racing. She had never done anything illegal in her life, and she was terrified of getting caught—of getting killed. He was surprised that she hadn’t opted for waiting in the car. He was grateful that she had come with him.
There was no sound in the old house—no hum from an air conditioner or refrigerator, no ticking clock. The place was more than just quiet; it sounded empty. Abandoned. As if no one really lived there. They walked down the hall, past the dining room and an old-fashioned bathroom with a pedestal sink and crystal handles on the faucet. Just before they reached the stairs opposite the front door, they came to the room they were looking for.
There was a sturdy lock on the office door, bright and shiny in contrast to the ancient hardware of the knob and latch. Maybe there was someone in Simon’s life—a wife, kids?—from whom he was hiding his new identity. Funny, but John had never thought of Simon as having family or people who loved him. He had automatically assumed that this new Simon was every bit as alone as the old Simon—John himself—had always been. He had assumed that someone as crazy as Simon must be would have nothing to invest in a relationship as, for so many years, he hadn’t. But maybe he was wrong. Or maybe Simon was simply paranoid.
Whatever the reason for the lock, it wasn’t doing its job this morning. The door had been left open. Gaining entry was a simple matter of walking across the threshold. After hesitating only a moment, John did just that, pulling Teryl along behind him. Giving her a little push toward the front, he said, “Watch out the window for visitors, would you? But stay off to the side, out of sight.”
She was halfway there when suddenly she froze in place. “Oh, my God,” she whispered, staring in such horror that John’s blood turned cold. He moved to her side, expecting the worst—finding Simon dead?—but still utterly unprepared for what he saw.
In the recessed wall space between two built-in bookcases were photographs, a dozen or more, a damned shrine of them. Only one was framed, the one in the center, a posed picture of the sort found in college yearbooks. The others were held in place with thumbtacks, and they had been there long enough for the edges to curl, for the sun to fade the wallpaper around them.
And every single one of them was of Teryl.
Chapter Seventeen
She was young in the shots, eighteen, twenty, twenty-two. In this one she was walking across a parking lot, in that one sitting on a bench with friends, in the next one bent over a book in the library. In all of them except the yearbook shot, she was totally unaware of the photographer.
“I thought you didn’t know this guy.” His voice was little more than a whisper. It was the only way to contain the distaste, the disgust, the fear.
“I swear to you, I never met him before New Orleans!”
“Well, honey, he sure as hell knew you. These pictures are ten years old!”
Raising a trembling hand, she pointed to the yearbook photo. “Eleven. Eight. Seven.” The last one she pointed out was the most intimate. It included just enough of her clothing to recognize the gown of a college graduate. She seemed to be looking directly into the camera, her expression distant, pensive.
“Jesus, Teryl, he’s been keeping track of you all these years. Why? How could he get so obsessed with someone he’d never met?”
“He’s never met you,” she pointed out numbly.
“I know, but that’s different. He knew me through my books. How did he come into contact with you?”
“I don’t know.” With a shudder, she turned her back on the pictures and glanced around the room. Her face was pale, the color drained even from her lips. “Look in those file cabinets. See if what you need is in there.”
He watched until she stopped near the window seat before he turned to the tall wooden file cabinets. He hit pay dirt in the first drawer he opened: neatly labeled files held his contracts, his royalty statements, his correspondence with Rebecca and Candace Baker. The next drawer was the same, and the next and the next. Everything he’d thought lost in the fire was right here in Simon’s cabinets.
When he opened the final drawer in the fourth cabinet, things got even more interesting. There were no files there, just stacks of books—his books—that had been read and pored over until the spines were broken. Passages were highlighted in blue, pink, yellow, and green, and notes had been penciled into the margins. Each of the books resembled nothing so much as a textbook… which was exactly what Simon had made them. He had studied them in great depth, had virtually taken apart the stories and put them back together again. A folder of pages tucked between them showed how he had learned the structure, how he had mimicked the style, practicing over and over, never giving up until he got it right.
As John thumbed through Masters of Ceremony, a thin white envelope fell to the floor. He picked it up and opened it, removing the card inside. The front was a design of pastel swirls. Inside was yet another photograph, taped beneath the message in flowing black script: If you can dream it, you can be it. Underneath the snapshot, Simon had written his own message. I can be Simon Tremont… for you, Teryl. Christ.
Tearing the
picture from the card, he held it up. “Recognize this, Teryl?” It was different from the others. This one hadn’t been taken from a distance with a telephoto lens, it was a closeup, taken in her own house by somebody she knew.
She came away from the window, reached out, then decided against touching the picture. “I don’t… John, he couldn’t have been in my house with me. I would remember, damn it!”
“Maybe he wasn’t. Maybe whoever took this gave it to him.”
“That’s impossible. That picture was taken by…” Her words trailed off, and the little color that had returned to her face drained away again. Her hand unsteady, she took the photo from him and walked over to stand in front of the nearest bookcase. “Oh, God,” she whispered. “This picture was taken by D.J.”
D.J. Only yesterday, when he had been wondering how Simon had found him at Teryl’s house, he had so easily written off D.J. Rebecca had seemed so much more likely a suspect. She knew Tremont. She knew how to contact him. She had a vested interest in protecting him. For all he’d known at the time, for all Teryl had known, D.J. had had no connection to the man. She hadn’t even shown the most casual interest in him.
She had fooled them both. She knew him well enough to give him this snapshot of Teryl.
Helpless and confused, she looked at John, her expression a silent plea that she was wrong. “When she called Wednesday night, she was talking about this man, about how she’d done so much to try to make him love her. She’d never meant for anyone to get hurt, she said. She had never intended for anything ‘like this’ to happen, but she couldn’t reason with him. She couldn’t make him stop. Do you think… Jesus, John, do you think she meant Simon?”
He opened his mouth to speak, but before he could, another voice broke in. “Go ahead, John, lay it out for her in words simple enough for her to understand,” D.J. said coldly. “Tell her of course I meant Simon.”
Passion Page 41
