by Kay Hooper
Holding her voice steady, Emma asked, “Trapped and panicked, according to your boss?”
“She’s alive,” Navarro repeated.
“Will you feel it when she dies?”
The stark question hung in the air between them for a long moment, until Navarro said reluctantly, “You’re more likely to feel it—to know—than I am. At least at first. Have you given up already, Emma?”
She wanted to say no, but Emma found she couldn’t give him an answer at all. Because somewhere deep inside herself, she had a terrible feeling that Jessie’s life could be measured in hours.
And there wasn’t a damned thing Emma could do to save her.
HE USED A Taser on her.
That was all it took, a blinding light fixed on her the moment the door swung suddenly open, and the darts of a Taser shooting out to stab her.
The next thing Jessie knew, she was trying to shake off the effects of the mini-electrocution even as she realized she was duct-taped to the bloodstained chair.
Naked.
At first, the lights blinded her, and she didn’t recognize his voice when he spoke to her from somewhere behind them.
“What I don’t get is why you came back here at all. You never gave a shit about this place, and couldn’t wait to shake the dust of it off your feet.”
“Fuck you,” she said.
Sounding amused now, he said, “Defiant to the end? Hey, I don’t really care, you know. Why you came back. And I am grateful that you set the stage so well for a repeat performance of your dramatic departure fifteen years ago. All you left for me to do was ditch your car.”
“It’s hard to ditch a car these days,” she managed.
“Not when the GPS system is disabled. I disabled yours before you drove it out of town. The same time I emptied the clip of your gun. I had a feeling you wouldn’t notice either one. You always were a little careless with details.”
“Fuck you,” she repeated.
He actually laughed. “And before I destroyed your tablet, I checked to make sure you hadn’t sent any nasty little reports back to that outfit you work for. I didn’t have time to work out your password and open that file, but it was easy enough to check the system and know it had never been sent anywhere at all.”
Thank God he doesn’t know I found his trophy box. That thought was followed by a more desperate one. Don’t let him wonder where I might have left a backup of the stuff on the laptop.
At least she had that triumph. Because if he had known she’d found the box, he would, undoubtedly, torture her until she told him where she’d hidden it. And Jessie had no illusions; hurt somebody enough and they’d tell you anything.
Anything to stay alive just a little while longer.
Trying to put that off as long as she possibly could, she said, “That doesn’t mean I didn’t tell someone. What—you think they’d send me here alone?”
“I think you came here alone. To find your past. Based on the questions you were asking some of us during the festival, that’s my guess. All that stuff about one party in a summer full of them. Who was there, what did we do, who was making out with who. Like you thought something unusual had happened, but couldn’t remember what it was. And, you know, that’s something I find really surprising.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yeah, that. I can’t decide whether it’s because you’re actually a real psychic, or if you’re just really good at blocking things out and rewriting your own past.”
Unable to help herself, she said, “What the hell?”
He made a tsk-tsk sound. “I guess connections matter. Because it must have taken a boatload of guilt for you to carry the burden all these years. Even if you couldn’t quite remember, it was still your burden, wasn’t it? You ran away, and took it all with you, so she could feel safe here. Sort of ironic that you ended up working for a place called Haven. Because that’s what you made sure Emma had here. Haven.”
Whispering now, Jessie said, “I don’t—you don’t—Who the hell are you?”
He stepped in front of one of the lights, in silhouette at first, and then turned another of the lights so she could see him. He was holding a very big knife. And he was smiling.
“I’m the devil, Jessie. Didn’t you know? Because Emma knew. Whatever she’s forgotten since, Emma knew. Fifteen years ago.”
THE SMELLS IN the room were liquor and sweat and sex, and something burning that could have been incense or grass or something she didn’t recognize. But she recognized the smell of his breath, because it wasn’t just whiskey; it was rotten eggs. Sulfur.
It was hell.
It was evil.
Jerked around, her face slammed into a door frame, maybe a fist or two, a blow, another, a cracking agony when a rib gave way. And then he was on top of her, inside her, thrusting and grunting, and she could feel her flesh tear even as it cringed away from him as something even more unnatural than the act of violence.
She was being held down for him, her ankles and wrists, and the others were laughing drunkenly, urging him on, daring him to “tear her up” and “teach her what it’s all about.”
She turned her head to try to escape the whiskey-soaked, rotten-egg smell of his breath, and through tear-blurred eyes she stared at the tattoo on the inside of his forearm.
A rose, wound about by a thorny cage.
Trapped.
“…show you,” he gritted out in a hoarse whisper, thrusting harder, faster. “I’ll show you. You won’t get away from me this time, Rose. You’ll never get away from me again.”
Lost in a haze of pain and confusion and terror, she could almost feel a part of herself trying to escape, trying to just…go somewhere else, somewhere this wasn’t happening. Be someone this wasn’t happening to.
And when he was finally done with her, dragging himself off her with a brutal laugh, when the others released her, she turned on her side and curled into a ball, hurting so badly she didn’t understand how she was even still alive and breathing.
“Hey, maybe we should take her home,” one of them said in a voice that was abruptly on the cusp of sober. “Or to a hospital. She looks…she looks pretty bad.”
Another voice laughed and said, “Yeah, you messed her up real good. The sloppy seconds are going to be—”
There was an odd gurgling sound, and then the evil one said, “Nobody else touches her. Got it?”
A cough, and then, “Yeah, yeah, sure, no problem. You ruined her for anybody else anyway, man, you really did.”
“Just get the hell out of here. And keep your mouths shut, both of you.”
There were sounds, footsteps, stumbling a bit, then the door opening and closing.
She felt his hot breath on her face again, but kept her eyes closed tightly and tried to be someone else.
“Not a word, you little bitch. Hear me? Not a word to anybody, ever, or I’ll make tonight feel like a day at the beach.”
She might have whimpered an assent; she wasn’t sure. But eventually the sour breath moved away, and there were more footsteps, and the door opened and closed.
She didn’t know how long she lay there, hurting, trying to catch her breath when every one stabbed at her. Her face hurt where he had slapped her at some point; she couldn’t really remember. Maybe he had punched her. Or one of the others had.
It was getting harder to remember the details.
She just hurt all over. And so badly inside.
After a long, long time, she managed to pull herself to the edge of the bed. It was even harder to breathe when she moved, but she forced herself to make the effort. She wanted to get out of here. She wanted to go home.
She wanted to forget this had ever happened.
She wanted to be somebody else.
The bedroom was strange to her, unfamiliar, but the bathroom door was open a crack, and somehow she managed to pull herself off the bed and stagger to it. The light was on, and it was bright. She squinted and avoided looking
in the mirror, just hobbled to the sink on legs that felt weak and so, so shaky.
She ran some water and bent over, gasping because of the pain that stabbed her with the movement. She cupped her hands and splashed water on her face. It hurt. And her fingers felt how puffy her eyes were, felt the swelling along one jaw and the pain in her nose.
She slowly straightened, the pain in her middle stealing her breath again. And looked in the mirror.
She saw Jessie’s horrified face, staring at her, heard her sister whisper, “Oh, my God, Emma…”
Jessie, she realized, was behind her, in the doorway.
Then she looked at her own reflection, and something in her mind and soul turned over with an agonizing twist. Both her eyes were nearly swollen shut, the bruising just beginning. Her nose was obviously broken, her lips swollen, the bottom one split in two places. Her jaw was swollen and turning bluish.
There was a vicious bite mark on her collarbone. And high on her left breast…
And that was when Emma Rayburn’s mind decided not to remember.
NAVARRO SAT BOLT upright in bed, hardly aware of the light of dawn struggling to push its way into his room. For a long, long moment he couldn’t breathe at all, and when he did it was with a harsh sound.
He threw back the covers and got out of bed, dressing quickly. He left his suite without bothering to take his key, intent only on reaching Emma as quickly as he could.
The inn was lit for the night, a few shaded lamps glowing in rooms dawn hadn’t yet reached. It was silent.
He went up the stairs two at a time until he reached the family floor, and even as he got there the door was opening and Emma, pale and grave, stood there. She was wrapped in a long, thick robe, and drew it about her even tighter as she turned silently and preceded him into the sitting room.
Lamps were lit in the room. She sat at one end of the couch, and her little dog immediately jumped up beside her and snuggled close with a soft whine.
Much as he wanted to, Navarro wouldn’t have dared touch her. Not then. He sat down on the chair closest to her, where he could watch her face, and be as near as he thought she could bear.
She began to stroke the dog, her gaze fixed on it. “You know,” she said, her voice curiously still. “Did you…Was it the dream?”
“Yes,” he said.
She swallowed. “The whole dream?”
“I think so.”
An odd smile twisted her lips. “Every summer. Every summer I was someone else. And I never knew why. Even when you asked me, I didn’t have a good answer. I just knew…I had to get away from here, and be someone else.
“And then I fell and hit my head, and started dreaming about…horrible things. And met you in St. Louis. And I started to…not want to be someone else anymore. Even in the summer.”
“It’s going to be all right, Emma. You’re going to be all right. You’re stronger than you know. You can handle this.”
“I didn’t remember,” Emma said. “Any of it. Even when Jessie came back, when she talked about that night, I didn’t remember it happened to me instead of her.” She looked at Navarro for the first time, honestly bewildered. “How could I not remember?”
“The mind protects itself,” he said. “Something it’s very, very good at doing.”
“For fifteen years?”
“Sometimes for a lifetime.” He held his voice steady with an effort, trying not to think about how she had been brutalized. “If you hadn’t fallen and hit your head, if your abilities hadn’t gone active, if Jessie hadn’t come home…maybe you never would have remembered.”
“Maybe that would have been better.”
“You remember now because you need to.”
“Do I?” She sounded lost. “Do I have to?”
Navarro hesitated, unwilling to offer platitudes. Instead, he said, “We are who and what our experiences have made us, Emma. For better or worse. You remember now because your mind decided you could handle the memories. Face them. And…”
Tears spilled silently from her wide eyes and flowed down her pale face. “And Jessie isn’t here to protect me anymore. Not in this life. I felt her go. I felt her die. She suffered horribly. Horribly. And—and she remembered. Right there at the end, she remembered it all. Even though it happened to me and not her, her mind was able to re-create what I endured. Even somehow to feel it herself. As if it had happened to her instead of me. She had carried those memories buried inside her since she ran away. But what he did to her tonight…it unlocked the door. That’s why I remember it now. She can’t carry the burden anymore. The guilt. The shame. The…overwhelming rage and pain. She carried all that buried inside her for fifteen years.”
“Why did she carry it at all?” Navarro asked softly.
“Because she blamed herself. My going to the party was her idea.” Emma didn’t seem to notice the tears that continued to fall. “She was my big sister, responsible for me. And that meant something to her. Dad was out of town for nearly a month on business. The housekeeper pretty much let us do what we wanted; it wasn’t her job to parent us, just to…be there. Jessie had been to those parties before, but I never had. She picked out my clothes. Did my hair. Makeup. Let me wear the earrings that had belonged to our mother. It was supposed to be…fun.”
“Emma…”
“I had to promise not to drink—that was the only rule. So I promised. And I didn’t drink anything but soda. Jessie’s the one who…Jessie drank. Victor egged her on; it seemed to amuse him. Then…then things get hazy…” She drew a breath and let it out slowly. “I think someone helped Jessie upstairs. I think I followed them, because I was worried. And she…she passed out.”
“In that bedroom?”
“I think so. She was out cold. And I was there. He wanted somebody. He wanted…me. For some reason, he wanted me, and I was there.”
Because he had to, Navarro asked, “Who was he, Emma? Who raped you?”
“I—I don’t remember that. I don’t remember his face. I don’t even remember the other two, the ones who…held me down. I remember the smells…and the sounds…and the pain. But I don’t remember who they were.”
“What about the rose tattoo?”
Emma nodded slowly. “I remember that. A rose surrounded by thorns. But I don’t remember ever seeing it again after that night. If he still lives here—”
“You know he does, Emma. Whatever memories and emotions Jessie had blocked for so long, she was beginning to recover. She was asking questions. Threatening him. Her memories were leading her straight to him. And he couldn’t let her expose him. Not only for what happened fifteen years ago, but for everything that’s happened since.”
“Killing. He’s been killing women.”
Quietly, Navarro said, “There’s no way of knowing when rape stopped satisfying him, but I’m betting when we find him, and uncover his past, we’ll find other women he brutalized who survived. Then something changed, and he began to kill.”
TWENTY
JULY 5
Emma reported her sister missing early on Sunday morning. And though Dan appeared doubtful, especially when Emma showed him Jessie’s note and reported what she’d told Patty at the pharmacy, he at least sent officers out to double-check the story.
It might have been because Emma was so pale and quiet that he was willing to go to the extra trouble. Or it might have been because of Navarro, standing silently at Emma’s shoulder.
Either way, by the time the church crowd turned up in a downtown area remarkably clean considering the chaos of the day before, most everyone knew that Jessie Rayburn had left Baron Hollow.
Run away again, some said.
Several people stepped forward to claim they’d seen her drive that little car of hers out of town toward the highway, and though there was some confusion about just when that was, at least two witnesses stuck stubbornly to their story that it was afternoon, during the festival.
“She left, Emma.” Dan shrugged. “She told people she was le
aving, she left you a good-bye note, and witnesses saw her leave. She’s an adult and she left. What can I do?”
Emma looked at Navarro, then quietly thanked the police chief, and they left his office. Outside, she said, “It’s a little difficult figuring out how to push him to look for her when he’s one of the suspects.”
They had figured out, starting with a list of men they knew Jessie had talked to during the festival, doing some math, and looking through high school yearbooks, that there were half a dozen possible suspects in what Emma had endured, given various ages and—as well as she remembered—which boys had tended to hang out together.
Navarro was keeping a close eye on Emma, unwilling to leave her even to look for Jessie, especially when he knew the search would be for her body. Not that he thought his abilities would be of any use to him; he was so focused on Emma that nothing else could get in.
Even though something dark was trying to.
Emma was calm, but it was a fragile, uncertain calm. Uppermost in her mind, what she was hanging on to with fierce determination, was the need to find her sister, and even though she had felt Jessie’s death herself, she continued to question that what she had felt was real.
“You don’t feel her?” She had asked him that several times already that day.
And he replied as he already had: “I’m feeling a lot of dark energy, but it’s…diffused. I can’t bring anything into focus.”
“When you reported in, your boss…She knew, didn’t she? She knew about Jessie. That she’s dead.”
Remembering Maggie’s voice, Navarro nodded, still wary of pushing Emma too far too fast. He believed keeping her focused on Jessie was the lesser of two evils; the murder of a sister she had barely spoken to in her entire adult life was tragic enough, but it wasn’t as likely to break her as the crushing weight of a horrifically traumatic event in her own past, newly remembered.
“She knew. And considering how badly Maggie takes the loss of any operative, much less one she cared about as she did Jessie, I’m giving her maybe twenty-four hours before she calls in the troops.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
