Paranoid

by Lisa Jackson

  “It’s nothing,” she said, as much to herself as Reno, even though she couldn’t help but feel a little niggle of anxiety, a tremor of fear as she righted the glass, sopped up what she could of the wine with some tissues. Then she snapped off the lights, crossed the landing in the darkness, and peered through the glass.

  It took a second for her eyes to adjust as she stared into the backyard.

  Nothing.

  The landscape was calm.

  Right?

  Or did a shadow move in the darkness of the yard below?

  She squinted, the dog tense beside her.

  Was that a figure crouching or the arborvitae moving in the breeze? Every muscle in her body tensed. Did it straighten, hidden in the shadows as it was? Oh, God. For a millisecond she was certain she saw the silhouette of a man and Luke’s image flashed through her brain; Luke as he might have been had he lived . . .

  “No!” she said aloud.

  Get a grip.

  There’s no one out there. No. One. What happened twenty years ago is over.

  But the hairs on the back of her neck lifted and her skin prickled and her heart began to pound. The image wavered, then disappeared—a shadow, a puff of smoke, nothing more.

  It isn’t Luke. It isn’t Luke’s ghost. It’s your own damned mind conjuring images that don’t exist!

  She bit her lip and saw no movement, heard nothing but the deep rumble in Reno’s throat.

  Snapping the blinds closed, she said, “It’s okay,” to the dog, who hadn’t let down his guard. Reno whined a bit and still stared at the window. But it could have been anything that had caught the dog’s attention: a squirrel, or the neighbor’s cat, even a skunk or raccoon.

  Or nothing at all.

  “We’re fine,” she said and walked into the bathroom, where she leaned over the basin and splashed cold water on her face.

  “There’s nothing out there,” she said, lifting her head to stare at her reflection in the mirror over the sink. “Nothing!” Her imagination was just running wild. That was all. “Pull it all together.” But the pale image staring back at her, water running down its cheeks and chin, looked scared as hell. “You can’t do this,” she warned the woman in the mirror. “You’re a mother. A single mother who needs a job. You cannot fall apart.”

  She gripped the edges of the sink and, closing her eyes, concentrated on her breathing.

  In.

  Out.

  In.

  Out.

  When she felt calmer, her rational mind taking over, she returned to the bedroom and opened the blinds again.

  The yard was empty.

  The dog now nuzzling his bed in the corner before curling into it.

  Everything was back to normal.

  But the man outside, the ghost . . .

  “Oh, for the love of God, Luke is not a ghost!” she muttered, angry at herself. This was insane. She was just stressed about the kids, about not having a job, about the anniversary of Luke’s death, about the articles in the paper, about trying to get along with her ex, about every damned thing.

  Get a frickin’ grip!

  She let out a breath as she walked into the office, nervously peered through the front window to see the street was empty. “Good.” Taking a deep breath, she let her gaze travel to her computer, open to Xander Vale’s Facebook page. The big man-child was still staring at her. “Stay away from my daughter,” she said and then heard herself. Dear God, when had she become her own mother?

  Wow. She wiped the remaining drops of wine with a clean tissue, wadded it, then tossed it in the trash. Then she closed down her search of Vale, making sure it was erased from her browsing history.

  Just in case.

  The dog began to make a racket again as she walked back into the bedroom, where Reno was on his back legs, trying to peer through the blinds. “Enough! Reno, down!” she ordered as her phone began to chime and vibrate on her nightstand.

  Immediately, she thought something had happened with the kids. Who else would be trying to reach her, as it was nearly midnight?

  She glanced down at the screen and noted it wasn’t Cade’s number that flashed on the display. In fact, it wasn’t any number she recognized.

  The text was a simple message, three little words. Yet they had the power to send a chill down her spine.

  I forgive you.

  What?

  Who? Who forgave her? For what?

  Dread crawled through her as she waited. A minute passed. Then another. She’d thought that someone would type in that they’d sent the message in error, but when that didn’t happen, she texted back:

  Who is this?

  Again she waited.

  The dog crouched on the floor, nose on the wall, eyes at the shuttered window.

  She licked her lips as the seconds strung into minutes.

  “Fine.” She called the number back and listened as the phone rang and rang and rang.

  No answer.

  Her heart was pounding and she told herself she was being ridiculous. It was a mistake; that was all. But the house seemed suddenly empty and the ticking of the clock downstairs seemed to resonate. Again Reno began to whine.

  “Hush!”

  She chanced another look, parting the blinds with her fingers and surveying the yard.

  Nothing. No ghostly image crouching in the night.

  “Don’t freak,” Rachel warned herself, but it was too late. Her nerves were strung tight, a headache beginning and the feeling that something was very, very wrong burrowed deep in her soul.

  CHAPTER 14

  The kids were asleep, Harper on the twin in the guest bedroom, Dylan on a daybed in the den. Cade grabbed a beer from the fridge and sat down at his laptop in the living room, some old cop drama playing silently on the television.

  Though he’d left the physical file for the Hollander case at the office, he still could access digital files and he just wanted to check a few loose ends before he called it a night.

  He’d found that Richard Moretti was going to be at the hospital on Monday, so he thought he’d try to locate the doctor and ask him about the night of Luke Hollander’s death. The discrepancy in the file was just a note. One of the EMTs who’d been in the ambulance had claimed that Luke was alive when he’d been left at St. Augustine’s, but that note had been crossed out and the ER doctor on duty, Moretti, had written that Luke had been DOA: dead on arrival. He’d been shot in the neck, clipping an artery, and he’d bled out, despite the best efforts of the emergency crew.

  It wasn’t much, but a little detail that caught his attention.

  Also, he knew from conversations with Rachel that after Ned had gotten his daughter into the police car, he’d followed in his own vehicle, and had made a stop at the hospital to check on his stepson, but it had been too late. Luke had already been gone.

  So as Rachel waited at the police station under the wary eye of a female officer, Ned had gone home to break the news to his wife and take her to the hospital before they’d both returned to the police station.

  Only then had Ned made his statement, which meshed with that of the second officer on the scene.

  Cade took a swallow from his bottle. He knew the rest of the story. Rachel had been arrested, a case had been brought against her, but she’d been acquitted. Her father had been her most vocal supporter.

  He thought about Ned Gaston, the father-in-law who’d sat in this very department. Cade and Ned had never been close, but maybe that wasn’t a surprise. Ned and Melinda had split within a year of Luke’s death and soon thereafter Rachel had gotten pregnant. With Harper.

  One strike against Cade.

  And there had been many more over the years. Not only had Cade and Rachel divorced and she’d accused him of an affair with Kayleigh, but also there was the fact that Cade was now, essentially, doing Ned’s job.

  Nope, there was no love lost between him and his ex-father-in-law.

  But that still wouldn’t keep him from talking to Ned abou
t Luke Hollander’s murder. He glanced at the newspaper lying on the coffee table and read the article about the homicide again.

  This piece was pretty straightforward, just the facts as they had been reported and, to Mercedes Pope’s credit, she didn’t embellish the facts, or report rumors, or write anything that was too inflammatory.

  But what was next? How could Mercedes sustain a series about the homicide and keep readers interested by merely repeating what everyone already knew?

  By changing her reporting and inflating the petty drama?

  And embellishing the story of Violet Sperry, a girl who’d been at the scene of the homicide, whose testimony had been crucial in the trial of Rachel Gaston, and who was now dead, the victim of another homicide, twenty years to the date of the first one.

  Surely that new mystery wouldn’t hurt circulation.

  Not that Cade believed Mercedes Pope was behind either of the murders.

  He was just damned sure she’d exploit them in order to sell a few more copies of the Edgewater Edition.

  Click-click.

  Shivering in the darkness, the air rushing through the building cold as death, Rachel squeezes the trigger.

  Click-click-click-click.

  She shoots again and real bullets whizz through the old cannery, though the muzzle of her gun remains dark as she squeezes off the rounds.

  Bullets keep flying. Not pellets, as Luke had promised.

  Her insides freeze.

  This wasn’t right.

  Click-click.

  Luke had said it was safe.

  Luke had lied to her, but why? This was a game. It wasn’t supposed to be real.

  “No,” she whispers, but she can’t stop shooting; she just keeps squeezing and the damned gun goes off, round after round.

  Click-click.

  “No!” Rachel cries. She turns, trying to run, trying to throw the gun away. Down the chute to the river, that’s it. Her heart thundering, her teeth gritted, she hurls the damned gun, throws it into the chute that opens to the Columbia. Hears it clatter against the rusting metal sides.

  But when she looks at her hands again, the gun is still clutched in her fingers.

  The same pistol?

  Or another?

  Real?

  Or fake?

  Panic strangles her.

  She hears a sound behind her, the scrape of a shoe.

  Spinning, she fires again, and again, and again.

  Click. Click. Click!

  Luke appears before her, staggering back.

  No!

  He is bleeding as he falls, his face ashen.

  “Oh, God. Luke! No, no, no!” She watches in horror as she sees the light in his blue eyes dim, his lids close.

  “No . . . no . . . I didn’t mean to—” Sobbing, she kneels beside him. He can’t be dead, can’t be. She feels as if her soul has been scraped raw as she touches his face. Cold. So cold. “I’m sorry. Oh, God, Luke, I’m so, so sorry.”

  At that moment, his eyes open and he stares at her. “Where did you get the real gun?” he whispers.

  “From you. You gave it to me.”

  “Did I? I don’t think so.” Before her disbelieving eyes, his face begins to rot, his skin curdling away from his teeth, blood oozing, his nasal cavity exposed, his eyes bulging.

  She screams and scuttles away, across the old plank floors, scrambling to her feet as she hears the others. Laughing. Screaming. Running.

  Yet over it all the decaying, horrific thing lying before her whispers in a hoarse voice, “I forgive you.”

  What? No!

  “Stop!” She pulls the trigger. Hard. On purpose. Aiming for the creature that had been Luke.

  Click. Click. Click!

  “I forgive you,” the thing says again, his hideous voice a rasp, yet somehow ricocheting off the walls of the cannery.

  “Stop! Just stop!”

  Rachel’s eyes flew open.

  Her own words echoed in her head even as they jarred her awake.

  Sweating, breathing hard, her heart pounding a frantic tattoo, she was lying in her bed, not at the cannery. Twenty years had passed. Luke was long dead. She was safe in her own bedroom. There was no gun. She wasn’t going to shoot anyone, ever again. There was no gun. She wasn’t going to shoot anyone. Not ever!

  Pushing her hair from her eyes, she felt beads of sweat on her forehead. In fact, her entire body was moist. Get a grip. For the love of God, Rachel, pull yourself together.

  At the foot of the bed Reno was curled in a ball, but he’d lifted his head to stare at her. As he always did when the onslaught of night terrors caused her to cry out. “Sorry,” she said as if the dog could understand.

  But she was sorry. So damned sorry. For everything that happened that night. If only she hadn’t gone to the cannery. If only she hadn’t gotten separated from Lila. If only she hadn’t had the wrong gun.

  What was it Luke had said in the nightmare? When she’d accused him of giving her the deadly, real pistol.

  Did I? I don’t think so.

  She’d wondered about that....

  If only she’d known more about guns.... Hell, she’d been a policeman’s daughter. She should have had some insight into what was real and what was not. But the truth was she’d never held a pistol before that night. Ned Gaston had seen enough damage with firearms to never allow one in the house. He’d even kept his own service weapon at the station.

  “Don’t do this,” she told herself, speaking to the dark room. It was over. Long over. Luke was dead.

  She eyed the clock: 2:47 a.m.

  Her phone was on the nightstand and she checked it.

  I forgive you.

  The cryptic message was still there and had slid into her subconscious and her dream. Unfortunately, it had become part of her nightmare.

  Click-click!

  She froze.

  Waited.

  Click-click-click!

  What the hell? Cautiously she threw off the quilt, crossed the room, and paused with her hand on the doorknob. Did she hear footsteps? Anything other than the—

  Click-click!

  From the bathroom.

  Steeling herself, she turned toward the bathroom, with its partially open door. A soft breeze slid into the room as she entered and sensed no one. She slapped on the light switch. As she did, the shade moved in the window, slamming against the sill twice.

  Click-click.

  No wonder.

  Because she’d cracked the window a couple of inches during her last shower, the shifting air was sucking the shade in and out, making the recurring sound she’d transferred to the firing of a pellet gun in her dream.

  She caught sight of her reflection in the mirror over the sink: white pallor, wild eyes, mussed hair, her own fears visible.

  “Oh, crap,” she said and shook her head, talking to the woman in the glass. “Harper’s right. You are a freak.”

  The reflection still looked scared as hell.

  “Get it together,” Rachel grumbled before shutting the window and starting back to the bedroom. But she knew sleep would be elusive, if not impossible, and still she was on edge.

  If she’d left this window cracked, what about the others?

  She had a routine she followed when locking the house for the night. She’d start in the basement, check the windows, cellar door to the stairwell, then head to the first floor, where she’d do the same, and finally double-check every room on the top level. She always stopped to engage the security system, but then reminded herself it wasn’t working, hadn’t been for months.

  Rachel slid into her slippers, threw on her robe, and, with Reno on her heels, went to the basement where she noted everything was secure. The door to the outside was locked and bolted, the windows were pulled tight and latched, one in the laundry room and two more in the storage area, which was overflowing and had been since they’d remodeled the attic into living quarters. No matter how often she sorted and organized the tax records, old schoolwork,
clothes that no longer fit, and a variety of old electronic equipment, the pile of plastic crates and boxes seemed to grow. She made a mental note to have Dylan work on it next weekend. He was always rooting around down here anyway.

  On the first floor, she checked both the front and back doors and the windows in the dining room, kids’ rooms, and kitchen as well as the living room and bathroom. As Reno brushed past her in the kitchen to get to his water dish, she noticed the old copy of the Edgewater Edition, the pages folded open to the article about Luke’s death in the cannery. Damn Mercy. Like a fishing hook dragging her deep into the sea, that resurrection of the details of Luke’s murder was taking her into dark places she’d tried for years to put behind her.

  The night terrors. The guilt. And now Violet’s murder and the unsettling text message.

  She tossed the paper aside, realizing she needed to do something about it. The newspaper retrospective was making it all worse.

  She had to talk to Mercedes, hold her to the facts and convince her to let the painful story go. Rachel couldn’t stop the nightmares or the horror over Violet’s death, but this news series, this was a devil she could grab by the horns.

  CHAPTER 15

  Going to O’Callahan’s hadn’t been her smartest move. Drinking her first mojito hadn’t been wise either.

  The second drink had been a mistake.

  And the third? A definite disaster. Maybe even a catastrophe, Kayleigh thought as she woke up on Saturday morning, her head pounding, her thirst reminding her she hadn’t tied one on like this for years. The room was shadowed, only the barest light of early dawn sifting past a rolling fog and the sheer curtains.

  After consuming the three—or had it been four?—drinks, she’d made the smart decision not to get behind the wheel. Rather than call an Uber car she’d made the not-so-smart decision to allow a much more sober Travis McVey to drive her home.

  So now she had two headaches, the one pounding behind her eyes, and the one snoring softly beside her.

  “Idiot,” she whispered.