by EC Sheedy
“I seriously doubt that.” He jerked his head toward the door, then looked at her, “What’s the story here, anyway?” He looked around. “This place is a mess.”
She followed his gaze, welcomed the change of subject, used it to ease her gnawing worry about her friend. “The house has been on a downhill run since Delores bought it twenty-five years ago. Back then everyone attributed it to Delores’s”—she rolled her eyes—“decorating taste. But according to Gina, the real problem started after Delores’s third husband walked out on her with most of her bank account—maybe fifteen years ago; I can’t remember exactly. Gina called it the GDD, the Great Delores Depression, and said she was never the same after that. She fired the cleaning staff, rarely went out herself, and started ignoring the deteriorating condition of the house, wouldn’t allow anyone—even Gina—to touch it with so much as a feather duster.” Camryn scanned the room and sighed. She remembered once hearing Delores describe her decorating style as whimsical. Grotesque was more apt. The dimly lit parlor, with its overladen ashtrays, stained carpet, and ratty furniture, made you want to don an antiviral suit and a gas mask. The smell of stale tobacco and dust was so strong it was like thorns in your nose.
She thought of Gina, losing a baby, coming to this awful place, depressed and alone, and her heart ached for her.
Gina, obsessively neat and organized, had always loathed this house, and to say the mother-daughter relationship was strained was a gross understatement. Gina had once said, dramatically, that if she didn’t get out of “Misery Manor” and free herself from the talons of “Mother Dracula,” she’d go mad.
Perhaps she had.
Dan clicked his fingers, tilted his head. “Dan to Camryn. Anyone there?”
“Sorry.” Camryn pulled herself from her memories. “Anyway, to make a long story short, Gina left for college, then settled in Seattle to practice law. After that, she came to the lake maybe once a year. Her ‘guilt visit,’ she called it. Even then it was mostly to see Sebastian. He lived here, in a perpetual state of war with Delores, until maybe three years ago.”
“What the hell does he do anyway?”
“He’s a day trader. A successful one, I’m told,” she said absently.
They both heard the sound of a man’s voice, then a door slam somewhere in the house. Then absolute silence. No, not quite. Music, barely audible, floated into the room. The same chords repeating and repeating . . .
Unaccountably, Camryn’s heart pounded, and she had the insane desire to run. Her every instinct sensing trouble and pain.
She looked at Dan, who’d taken a pile of paper and magazines off a chair in the farthest corner of the room and settled into it with his glass of wine. He’d leaned forward at the sound of a door slamming from somewhere in the house, listened intently for a moment, then leaned back, his expression calm, his body relaxed.
“Looks to me as if we’ll be here a while,” he said, not a trace of impatience in his voice. “You might as well sit down and enjoy your wine.”
She nodded. He might be right about their having to wait for a time, but instead of drinking her wine, she set it beside the bottle on the cluttered coffee table and went back to the seat Gina assigned her, across the room from Dan. She stared into the blackness outside the window.
And thought of bullets . . .
Chapter 28
“Shush, they’ll hear you,” Gina said, closing her bedroom door too quickly and much too hard. At least he’d waited where she’d asked him to. A miracle, considering he’d become less and less obliging lately.
“Yeah, well, I don’t give a good goddamn. You’re crazy if you think I’m going down there. That guy hates my guts.”
“You have to come. Dan Lambert being here changes everything. I didn’t factor him in. I need you, Adam.” Gina’s voice was calm, but her insides rolled and banged like dropped drums. “There’s no risk. None. If we do this right.”
“You said you’d do it, Gina. This whole goddamn thing was your idea.” He glared at her, his eyes jumping with frustration, refusing to settle on her. He sounded like a petulant teenager.
“I will, my darling. All I want you to do is provide a distraction. Buy me a little time to get the second shot off.” She went to stand in front of him, ran her fingers along the soft cotton of his shirt front. She felt high, excited, frustrated, panicked. Wild. More alive than she’d been in months. The only thing that came close was an orgasm a la Adam. At that thought, she moistened her dry lips, rubbed her palms over his nipples, tried to kiss his chin. . . .
He pulled away. “Jesus, Gina, will you stop rubbing yourself against me like a bitch in heat. Can’t you keep your hands off me for five minutes? Give me time enough to actually think!” He ran a hand through his lustrous hair. She loved his hair. He turned his back, took a few steps away, leaving his hand to rest on the nape of his neck, head bowed.
Even from where she stood, a few steps away, she could hear his heavy breathing.
“Whatever you want, Adam,” she said, knowing she’d have her hands all over him forever when this night was done. In a way it was perfect—two birds with one stone. It wasn’t that Dan Lambert was a threat exactly, but he was a nuisance, determined as he was to keep Adam’s daughter. There was always the chance he’d cause trouble, delay Adam’s money. Their money. “All I want is for you to come into the room—noisily—about five minutes after I go back down to the parlor—”
“The parlor? You’re in Delores’s parlor?” He turned enough to look at her, seeming puzzled.
“Yes.” She skidded over his questioning interruption. “It’s simple enough, Adam. All I need is a moment’s diversion, and I’ll take it from there. Camryn first. Lambert second. I told you I’d do it, and I will. Then we’ll have everything we ever wanted. We’ll have this house. Money. We can live here forever—happily ever after.” She smiled. “Think of it. Your Lando problem solved, and us with the freedom to do whatever we want, whenever we want.”
He shook his head. “With two bodies buried in the basement.” He sneered. “Nice. Real nice. And who the hell said I wanted anything to do with this shit-house?” He made a full turn, put his hands on his hips, and glared at her. “And where the hell is Delores?”
It was as if her lungs collapsed. “Delores?” she repeated, suddenly feeling slow and stupid. Her mother. Where was her mother? Oh, yes . . . She took a breath. She should have expected this.
Adam and Delores. Delores and Adam.
“Delores, Gina. Where is she?”
“She, uh, went out. She said something about seeing Paul Grantman. You must have heard the car.”
His direct gaze wavered, but only for a second. “No, I didn’t hear a car. Where is she, Gina?” he repeated, his words slow, his eyes narrowed and suspicious.
Gina wanted to turn her back on him, but she couldn’t, couldn’t look away from his cold eyes. Adam. Her Adam. Asking about Delores. She couldn’t bear it. “Why do you care where she is?” She kept her voice soft and pushed back at the rage tearing into her chest. She could feel its claws, the heat of it, see its sharp, fatal brilliance before her eyes. “Why do you want to know?”
He hesitated, and she could see his hands shift and tighten on his slim waist. “Because she offered me a better deal—a bloodless deal—and I’ve decided to take it. I don’t want anyone dead, Gina. I especially don’t want Camryn dead. You got that?”
The brilliance in her mind, grayed, and shattered, letting fear and rage in on a roar, deafening her to her own thoughts. “You love her, don’t you? That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? You still want her. You’ve always wanted her.”
He shook his head. “There’s a leap. I don’t want to kill someone, and you think it’s because I want to take her to bed.”
“You fucked my mother, Adam. And if you’d crawl between her sheets, you sure as hell won’t say no to Camryn.” He studied her as if she were a dropped egg, a horrible mess that he didn’t want to clean up. “I shouldn�
�t have come to you. Shit. I always knew you were different from Holly and Camryn, but I didn’t know you were jackass crazy.”
Why did he have to speak their names, bring them into the room, like smug, sneering ghosts? There should be only her and Adam. Not Camryn, not Holly, not Delores—not a thousand nameless women Gina hadn’t met, would never meet.
Weariness sucked at her, engulfed her, sapped her energy. She’d tried so hard . . . Now, she was finished.
Color followed, the red of surging violence, the gray of disgust for what she was. Despair enveloped her, even as her mind skirted reason.
Adam didn’t love her—would never love her.
Through dark eyes she saw him, his excess of gifts, masculine beauty, grace, leanly muscled body, midnight smile . . . the latent consuming power of his sex. His lying words.
I hate him. I hate them all. All who’ve been given life’s unfathomable gifts—to love and be loved. Children.
Small, loving souls. Mine only tissue and blood.
Her brain blanked with the abruptness of a power failure, and the light of her mind, already diffused and dim, went out.
Hatred, bloody and sharp, dried her mouth.
Desolation coated her heart.
I can’t—won’t—take it anymore.
She stuffed her hands in her sweater pocket, wrapped her fingers around the comfort of death. “I’m different from anyone you’ve ever met, Adam.” She took the gun from her pocket.
Adam’s eyes fell to the gun, widened. “Jesus, Gina—”
“Don’t worry,” she said, calm flowering inside her, lightening her tone. “You’re going where you belong . . . to Mother, to Holly.” She lowered the gun to his groin. “And you might want to wait up, because Camryn will be along shortly.”
As will I. We’ll see you in hell, Adam. All of us.
She fired.
Dan shot to his feet. “What the hell!”
Camryn’s head snapped up. They both looked upward to the ceiling. To whatever was beyond it.
The harsh report of the gun coming from the far reaches of the big house had barely registered before the room filled with music: a clash of cymbals, a crescendo of violins . . . what sounded like the onslaught of a hundred-piece orchestra; its rush of sharps and flats, as if herded by the volume at which they were played, tripping over themselves, tumbling down the stairs and into the miserable parlor.
The gunshot attracted the ear. The music, thundering in its wake, filled it, leaving no room to comprehend.
Then…
Camryn rushed to the parlor door. “Gina!”
“Stop.” Dan caught her arm. “Wait.”
More shots! Closer than the first.
The music dying . . . dead. An even deadlier silence following in its wake.
“Get back.” Dan whispered, his voice low, urgent.
“But Gina …”
“Back, Camryn.” He hadn’t let go of her arm, and when she stood as if rooted to the floor, he pulled her, roughly and without apology, and put her behind him. He cocked his ear toward the door. “Listen.”
Nothing. Only the wind and the spitting rain against the windows, and a dense quiet that rested uneasily within the walls of the big house.
She stepped to his side, took a gulping breath. The air entered her lungs like broken glass, but it jerked her out of panic mode. She took another. “Gina might be hurt. We have to check.”
“We will.” Dan looked around the dim, cluttered room, took in the small-paned windows, narrow transom openings at their tops, no way out other than the door they’d entered by. “No phone. Damn.” He looked at her. “You?”
“In my bag. I left it by the front door.”
He cursed, again scanned the room.
Camryn already knew the room provided them no escape. She cracked the door a couple of inches, put her ear to it. No sound. But light, from the family room, what there was of it, brightened the carpet at her feet, adding wattage to the dimly lit parlor. “We have to get out of here.” She shot him a look over her shoulder. “We have to find Gina. See if she’s okay.”
The added light disappeared abruptly. “I’m very much okay, Camryn.” Gina gave the door a push, causing Camryn to stumble back, and walked into the room, kicking the door shut behind her. “I couldn’t find any cheese and crackers, so I brought cake.”
“Cake?” Camryn echoed stupidly. Her mind didn’t work fast enough to accept Gina’s sudden breezy entrance, grasp what it meant. She was aware of Dan moving into the shadow behind the gooseneck lamp.
“I made it this morning.” She smiled, but her eyes were fixed, like tacks in a corkboard. “I didn’t think it was for a celebration, but there you are!”
“You’re all right?”
“Couldn’t be better,” she said.
From gunshots to celebration. Everything was so wrong . . . this house. Gina.
“What’s going on here, Gina?” Camryn forced herself to a calm she didn’t feel, determined to get, if not control, at least a grasp of what was going on here. “Those were gunshots. What happened?” Gina set the cake beside her abandoned wineglass on the messy table and frowned. “I guess cake and wine don’t make a very good combination, do they?”
Camryn strode toward her, grabbed her by the upper arms. “Forget the cake. Answer me. For God’s sake, what’s wrong with you?”
Gina blinked but the smile she’d walked in with didn’t budge; it seemed frozen on her face. “I don’t know what you mean.” She pulled back from Camryn’s hold and slid her right hand into her sweater pocket. “I told you I’m fine. As a matter of fact, I feel better than I have in months. It helps when things crystallize, doesn’t it? When things get clear in your mind.” The last was said more to herself than Camryn, then she tilted her head, her too-bright, eyes, studying Camryn as if they’d lit on her for the first time, as if they hadn’t been friends for twenty years. “You were always the organized one, Camryn, always the get-everything-right one, so you should know how important clear thinking is. When you’re feeling low, get busy, take action—that’s what you used to say.” She amped up her smile. “You made everything happen, exactly how you wanted it. Except maybe the baby thing. And now you even have that, don’t you? You have Adam’s child.”
“Are you actually saying I had something to do with Holly’s death?” Shock took Camryn’s breath away.
“Oh no, I know you’d never do that. Not Saint Camryn. She’d never do anything as ba-a-d as that.” She giggled. “No, all Camryn has to do is wait around, and everything will work out. Adam says you’re the last good woman—or his last woman …” She paused, looked confused for a minute. “I never really understood what he meant by that.”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with you,” Camryn said, “but you’re my friend, Gina. All I want to do is help. But you have to tell me what’s going on. There were shots . . . upstairs, then you come down acting crazy. None of this makes sense.”
Gina’s fixed expression ignited. “I’m not crazy! Don’t say that! Don’t ever say that!” She looked through the shadowy room to where Dan stood silently, a large gray blur behind the lamp. “Come out where I can see you, Dan. Have some cake.” She smiled in his direction, but Camryn wasn’t sure she actually saw him. It was more like she sensed him, the way an animal would its prey. The smile she gave him was crooked, like a slash of carelessly applied lipstick.
Camryn watched her hand, sliding out of her pocket, slowly exposing her wrist, her knuckles—Camryn’s chest went drum-tight.
Was that—?
The sound of the front door opening, then slamming shut, snapped Gina to attention, her expression a haze of surprise, confusion, and panic.
“Gina? Delores?” a man’s voice shouted. “Why the hell don’t you two turn some lights on in this place?” Heavy footsteps came toward them, the solid thwack of sneakers on the hardwood floor.
Pale yellow light again flickered through the door to color the stained parlor carpet. Gina shoved
her hands deep into her sweater pockets. “Sebastian, what are you doing here?”
He ignored her question and tried the light switch on the wall inside the door of the parlor. Click. Click. He cursed again. “What’s with the damn lights?” He shook his head, looking irritated, then spotted Camryn; he nodded unsmiling in her direction. “Hey.”
“Hey,” she said back. With the image of what her friend had in her pocket front and center in her mind, Camryn was grateful only a three-letter word was required.
When neither woman spoke further, Sebastian walked to where the bottle of wine sat illuminated on the coffee table. He was reaching for it when he spotted Dan. He went gravestone-straight. “Okay.” He swung to look at Camryn. “What the hell am I doing here?”
Gina shot a cold gaze at Camryn. “You invited Sebastian?”
“I thought—” Dear God, she had no idea what she had thought, but she knew what she had to do. She took in a breath. “I wanted him here because I thought he:—we— could help you. But now”—she swallowed—“all I want him to do is take that gun out of your pocket.”
Gina’s eyes narrowed.
“Then,” Camryn continued, keeping her voice flat, “I want us to go upstairs and see what those gunshots were all about.”
Gina pulled out the gun.
“What the hell—?” Sebastian froze.
Dan snapped the gooseneck lamp up, shone its light directly into Gina’s face. The glare wasn’t much, but in the dim room, it was contrast enough that she raised the arm not holding the gun to shield her eyes.
Bolting from behind the chair, Dan made a dash to where Gina, now clearly illuminated by the focused lamplight stood, blinking—the gun glinting and wavering in her shaking hand. But the furniture in the room impeded him, giving her enough time to steady the gun. Aim it at him.
Camryn lunged for the gun. She was fast, but Gina was faster; she fell back, braced her back against the parlor wall, and fired.
The room, the people in it, hit STOP time and locked in place.
“Get back! All of you, get back!” Gina’s eyes, as wild as the shot she’d fired, bulged from their sockets. Her back was to the open door now, making her a silhouette, armed and dangerous. “Stay away from me.”
