The Last Kiss Goodbye: A Charlotte Stone Novel

by Karen Robards

  She could see his face. His features. His eyes.

  He was scowling at her.

  “Jesus Christ, what part of ‘man with a gun’ did you miss? Run! Get the hell out of here! Get away from her!”

  Relief at his reappearance was tempered by a stabbing fear that it might be very brief. In all likelihood, this was just another flicker.

  Her throat tightened. Her eyes locked with his.

  “I can see you. Can you hold on?” Her voice was low and hoarse, the words meant only for him.

  “Who the hell knows?” He was almost completely solid now. Striding toward her, he made an urgent gesture toward the hall. “Go! That way! Run! If she’s got some guy after her trying to kill her, the last thing you want to do is get caught up in the middle of it.”

  “I can’t.” The urgency of the present reasserted itself like a thunderclap. Even for her own safety, she knew that abandoning her traumatized and endangered guest was beyond her, and knew, too, that the hard truth was that agonizing over him—over something she couldn’t control—was useless. Even as her heart was being put through what felt like a meat grinder, she had to leave him to the mercy (or not) of the universe and deal with the reality of the emergency in her kitchen.

  “What do you mean you—” This time his response actually started as a roar, only to fade as he grew fainter again “—can’t?”

  A knot formed in her chest. He was once again barely there.

  “Michael. If you get sucked back in, you need to ask for forgiveness. You need to pray.” The words were wrenched out of her even as she tore her eyes away from him, got a grip, and launched herself after the girl. She might not be able to stop what was happening to him, but maybe she could make a difference here, tonight, this minute, in the real world, for this endangered girl. And maybe, if he followed her advice, she could help him avoid the ultimate horror, after all. It might be the only thing she was able to do for him. Because the sad truth was, even if he did deserve eternal damnation, she couldn’t bear to think of him suffering it.

  Fool.

  He snorted. “Kinda late for that. Damn it, what the hell are you doing?”

  As she raced past him she saw that he was little more than a shimmer again now, and her heart sank.

  “What I can.” Instead of running into the hall as he’d clearly expected, she darted around the breakfast bar into the food preparation area, which was basically a narrow galley kitchen that looked across the open counter of the breakfast bar at the table and the back door beyond. The girl was there, in the process of snatching the phone from the kitchen wall. She threw a wide-eyed look over her shoulder at Charlie.

  “Who are you talking to? Oh, no, are you nuts?” The girl squeezed closer to the wall as though to put as much distance between them as possible. Of course, the girl could neither see nor hear Michael. Looking at things from her point of view, having the person she was counting on for help conduct a frantic, one-sided conversation with an unseen entity must be unnerving. Charlie sympathized, but there were more urgent matters to deal with. Like where the girl’s attacker was now.

  “How close behind you is he?” Casting another lightning glance out the windows—nothing to see but a whole lot of dark, plus silvery streaks as rain ran down the glass—Charlie felt her stomach cramp.

  “Close. I don’t know. It was dark.” As she gasped out the words, the girl looked at Charlie like she was afraid of her now, too.

  “I’m a doctor, okay? You can trust me.” Usually, when she was where anyone could overhear, Charlie was way careful not to talk back to the spirits who afflicted her, but this moment—Michael—was the stress-induced exception. God, he was gone again! Looking desperately around, she wanted to scream his name, but did not. Not only to keep from freaking the girl out, or to save herself from looking, um, nuts, but also because she knew that it would do absolutely no good. Taking a deep breath, she did her best to focus on the girl. “Who’s chasing you? Is it your boyfriend, or—”

  “No. You don’t get it, do you? He’s a killer.” The girl kept throwing quick, terrified glances at the door. “Oh, my God, is it 911 here?” Shaking visibly, breathing like she might hyperventilate at any second, she was already frantically stabbing an unsteady finger at the number pad. With her inky black hair streaming water and blood pouring down the right quarter of her face, she looked like something out of a nightmare—or a horror movie. The mere sight of her was enough to send goose bumps racing over Charlie’s skin—and convince her that whatever the details might prove to be, the girl definitely had been the victim of something horrific.

  “Yes.” Shooting more increasingly spooked glances out first the window in the door and then the big window behind the table—as dark as it was outside, with the light on in the kitchen anyone out there could see everything that was going on inside, she realized with a stab of dread—Charlie had an epiphany: there was a better way to get help fast. But first things first. Working hard to maintain the outward appearance of calm, she grabbed a handful of paper towels from the dispenser and thrust them at the girl.

  “Press that against the cut on your forehead,” she ordered. “Hold it firmly. Do it.”

  That last was in response to the girl’s hesitation, which manifested itself in a suspicious look from the paper towels to Charlie. As the girl did as she was told, Charlie left her to run for the cell phone in her purse, which she had dropped on the console table in the front hall when she’d rushed inside earlier. She knew from experience that here the response to 911 could sometimes be slow, and every instinct she possessed screamed at her that they needed help now.

  “This chick ain’t your problem,” Michael growled from behind her.

  Looking around, Charlie saw the shimmer that was him at the top of the hallway, and drew a ragged breath.

  “Did you do it? Did you pray?” she demanded fiercely.

  “Hell, no.”

  “Where are you going? Don’t leave me!” the girl shrieked after her. The echoing shrillness of it practically curled Charlie’s hair.

  “I’m not leaving you.” Charlie snatched up her purse. “I’m coming right back.” Then, at Michael, she snapped, “Pray, damn it,” and bolted past him.

  “Leave her,” Michael said furiously. “Run the fuck upstairs and lock yourself in your bedroom. You hear me? This whole savior complex you got going on is gonna get you killed.”

  “Savior complex?” Charlie was outraged.

  “Oh, yeah.” The shimmer appeared in front of her, blocking her path.

  “Go away,” Charlie snapped before she thought. Fumbling around in her purse in an effort to find her phone, a process that was slightly hampered by the fact that she was running and glaring at him at the same time, she dodged around him because that seemed more appropriate than running right through him, which she easily could have done, and immediately took it back. “I mean, stay. Only out of the way.”

  “Damn it, Charlie—”

  “Who are you talking to?” Sounding terrified, the girl hugged the phone to her ear. Holding the clump of rapidly reddening paper towels clamped to her forehead, she jiggled from foot to foot in nervous agitation as she watched Charlie dart toward her while conducting a running argument with something she couldn’t see.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Charlie snapped, her façade of composure on the verge of coming dangerously unglued. Sliding to a halt feet from the girl, Charlie found her phone at last and snatched it out of her purse.

  “A cell phone? Hell, I thought you were rooting around in there for a gun.” Michael was right behind her. “You do have a gun around here somewhere, right? Now would be the time to grab it.”

  Unable to reply, both because she didn’t want to be caught supposedly talking to herself again and because, in actual fact, she didn’t possess a gun at all and didn’t want to listen to him bitch about it, Charlie ignored that. Shooting increasingly paranoid glances out the windows even as she fumbled to call up her contact list, she listene
d as the girl gasped into the landline, “I need the police! Now! A man’s chasing me! He has a gun and he wants to kill me!” Then, to Charlie, who had just hit the button to call her across-the-street neighbor Ken Ewell the (armed) sheriff’s deputy, she cried, “They need the address! What’s the address?”

  “A death wish and a savior complex.” Despite the savagery of his tone, Michael’s voice in her ear would have been welcome if what he was saying hadn’t been so maddening. “Looks like the real question is, how many ways can you come up with to get yourself killed before somebody actually wins the prize?”

  Shut up, Charlie almost snarled, but managed to swallow the words in time so that the girl wouldn’t go totally ape. Heart racing, working hard to focus on the here and now and at the same time disregard the furious vibrations Michael was sending her way, she listened to the Ewells’ phone beginning to ring in her ear as she answered the girl in a carefully controlled voice, “23 Laurel Way.”

  “Take it from me, babe, being dead ain’t that fun.”

  A quick glare over her shoulder in the direction of that velvety drawl found Michael in heat vapor mode right behind her.

  Her gut twisted as she realized one more time how tenuous his hold on this world was.

  The girl repeated the address into the phone then moaned to the dispatcher, “Hurry! Oh, please, please, hurry!” while giving Charlie another mistrustful look. Taking a shuddering breath, she added to the dispatcher in a wobbly, barely there voice, “There are two other girls—they’re up there—they’re dead!”

  “What?” Charlie and Michael exclaimed in suddenly riveted unison.

  Instinctively shooting Michael a did-you-hear-that-too look, Charlie encountered nothing but barely there shimmer. Was he fainter than before? Oh, God, he definitely was. Panic made her feel cold all over. Remembering something he’d once said to her—about running water drawing him back from wherever he had been at that time—she hastily leaned over the sink and turned the faucet on full blast. Cold water gushed out, splashing into the sink, the whoosh of it adding just one more jarring note to the discordant background symphony of drumming rain and shuffling feet and gasping breaths, plus the rhythmic drone of a distant telephone ringing away in her ear.

  “Good thinking,” said Michael, and Charlie felt a rush of relief as the shimmer seemed to grow brighter and denser.

  “There were three of us.” The girl’s eyes were wide and haunted. She was talking into the phone but looking at Charlie, and besides the rampant wariness that Charlie knew was absolutely aimed at her, there was such fear in the girl’s expression that Charlie felt sweat start to dampen her palms. In response to something the dispatcher must have asked, the girl repeated her words, then added unsteadily, “I’m the only one left. He made me—he made us—”

  Tears filled her eyes, and she broke off with a shaky indrawn breath that turned into a sob. She trembled so violently that Charlie could hear her teeth chattering. Beneath the streaks of blood, her skin had gone beyond paper white to almost gray. If the girl hadn’t been wedged in the corner formed by the wall and the counter, Charlie thought that there was a good chance she would have collapsed.

  “You’re safe now.” Charlie felt a fresh well of fellow feeling: this kind of terror she knew. Safe might not be exactly accurate, but it was close enough: as long as there was breath in Charlie’s body, nobody was getting to that girl again. She would have put a comforting arm around her guest, but the girl shrank away from her—clearly, doctor or not, she wasn’t coming across as all that reassuring, for which she knew she had Michael to thank—and with some chagrin Charlie let her arm drop. She was doing her best to project steady strength, to ignore the rushing adrenaline that caused her nerves to jump and her heart to jackhammer. But the situation—Michael, the girl, the possibility that some kind of murderous lunatic was right outside—was making it difficult. Way difficult. As she processed the possibility that whoever was out there had killed two other girls, she felt a wave of fear threaten. What she had first thought was likely a case of domestic violence was starting to sound like something even worse.

  Something horrifyingly familiar.

  “At least get the hell away from the windows.” Michael’s voice held a note of barely controlled ferocity that made her breath catch. He, too, was clearly afraid—for her. “Unless you like the idea of giving some looney tune the chance to put a bullet in your brain, that is.”

  Oh, God, he had a point. Darting another fearful look at the black blankness of the windows, Charlie touched the girl’s arm, saying, “Probably we should try to get below the counter.”

  The girl jerked her arm away, and moved as far from Charlie as she could get, which wasn’t very far.

  “I don’t know,” she sobbed into the phone while fixing wary, tear-filled eyes on Charlie. “He was chasing me. Oh, I need them to hurry.”

  “See, that’s normal survival instinct. Teen-queen there spots trouble, at least she has the sense to try to get away from it,” Michael said. Charlie’s response was an aggravated thinning of her lips and a quick glare thrown his way. That’s when Charlie realized that she could see him again. Although he was still a little foggy around the edges, she was getting enough detail to know that he was looking at the girl like she guessed he might have looked at a live bomb.

  “We need to get down.” As Charlie gestured at the windows then dropped into a crouch, the girl’s eyes went even bigger than before. “He could shoot through the glass.”

  With one more terrified glance at the windows, the girl followed suit, letting her back slide down the wall, sinking down until she was folded in a soggy huddle with her chin almost touching her knees. A puddle was already forming around her as her eyes locked with Charlie’s. They were glassy with fright.

  “I don’t know,” she answered the operator. “They just need to get here. Please.”

  “Look, I …” Charlie began, meaning to conclude with, I’m on your side, only to be interrupted by the sound of the Ewells’ phone being picked up at last.

  “Hello,” Ken’s wife, Debbie, said in her ear.

  “It’s Charlie Stone across the street.” In the spirit of not wanting to further spook the girl, Charlie tried hard not to sound as panicky as she was starting to feel. “I need Ken over here right away. There’s a girl in my kitchen, and she says—” explaining the whole thing was going to be too complicated and time-consuming, and anyway Charlie still had no idea precisely what the whole thing was, so she cut to the chase, “there’s a man with a gun after her. We need Ken now.”

  “Cops going to get here any faster ’cause you’re hanging out with The Black Dahlia here in the kitchen trying to get yourself killed? Run upstairs and lock yourself in your bedroom and stay put until the po-po show up.” A solid-looking presence now, Michael planted himself between her and the girl. That was deliberate, Charlie knew, as was his aggressive stance. Whatever he was or wasn’t, where she at least was concerned he seemed to have a marked protective streak. Of course, since she was all that was anchoring him to the world of the living that shouldn’t come as a big surprise. “Damn it, Charlie, you’re not doing her one bit of good by sitting here looking into her eyes. You’ve done your Mother Teresa thing: you let her in. Cops are coming. So leave her to it and go.”

  Shooting him a shut-up-or-die look, Charlie gave a quick, negative shake of her head.

  “How far away are they?” the girl moaned to the dispatcher.

  “He’s in bed asleep,” Debbie objected. Of course, it was nearing midnight. In Big Stone Gap, that was late for decent folks.

  “Can you wake him up?” Charlie did her best not to yell on that last part, with indifferent success. At the same time she watched Michael disgustedly mime a gunshot to his own head with a thumb and forefinger and frowned direly. The frown was directed at Michael, of course, but the girl, whose eyes she had been holding until she had flicked that sharp stop it look up at Michael, shrank away. “I really, really need him. Like I
said, there’s a girl in my kitchen being chased by a man with a gun.”

  “Well, I guess.” There was a sound that Charlie interpreted as Debbie laying the receiver down. Over the still-open line, she listened to her neighbor calling to her husband. Who as far as she could tell wasn’t answering.

  Damn it.

  “I’m Jenna McDaniels,” the girl said into the phone on a shuddering intake of breath, in obvious answer to a question posed by the dispatcher. “I was kidnapped three days ago. The other girls are—uh, w-were— Laura Peters and Raylene Witt. There has to be somebody looking for us. Are the police even close?”

  Jenna McDaniels? Even caught up in the aftermath of a nightmare as she had been, Charlie had heard of the University of Richmond sorority girl who had vanished from a college-sponsored event just as preparations for the fall rush were getting under way: reports of the disappearance had been all over TV. But Charlie didn’t have the chance to do more than look at her with widening eyes, because a sound—a faint rattle from the direction of the back door—froze both her and Jenna in place. Suddenly as still as rabbits with a dog nearby, united by fear, they shot simultaneous panicky looks in the direction of the sound, to no avail: the solid base of the breakfast bar was in the way, preventing them from seeing anything beyond it. But for Charlie at least, there was no doubting what they had heard: the doorknob rattling. Her heart thudded in her chest. Goose bumps chased themselves over her skin. As she strained every sense she possessed in an effort to divine what was happening beyond that door, she tried to swallow, only to discover that her mouth had gone desert dry.

  This can’t be happening.

  “He’s here,” Jenna gasped on a note of purest horror, her hand around the receiver tightening until her knuckles showed white. The wad of paper towels she had been holding to her forehead dropped, forgotten, as her hand fell. Oblivious to the blood that still oozed from the cut, she shot Charlie a petrified look.

  Charlie knew exactly how she felt.