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Serena Mckee's Back In Town

Page 11

by Marie Ferrarella


  “Keep this chair in place until the locksmith comes,” he instructed, easing out the door. He heard the legs scrape against the tile as she pushed the chair against the door.

  He called Kirk as soon as he got into the car.

  While Cameron was talking to Kirk, Serena was upstairs in her bedroom, answering her own telephone. It had begun to ring just as she reached the middle of the staircase. She ran to get it.

  She didn’t recognize the reedy voice on the other end.

  “Hello, is this Serena McKee?” The person coughed, and Serena thought it was a woman calling, but it was the kind of voice that initially left gender in question.

  “Yes.” She held the receiver in both hands, her pulse quickening. Instinctively she looked out the window, but Cameron’s car was just disappearing past the tall gates. She was alone. Squaring her shoulders. she asked, “Who’s this, please?”

  The person coughed again before continuing. “You don’t know me, Miss McKee. My name’s Edda Merryweather. I’d like to talk to you, if I might. I think you may find it interesting.”

  Edda. Where had she heard the name before? And then a fragment of a conversation echoed back in her mind. Serena snatched it up, working at it until it enlarged. “You’re Miss Judith’s sister-in-law. The police department’s secretary.”

  “Was,” Edda corrected. “Was their secretary. They retired me,” she said bitterly. “Said my health was poor. Just an excuse. I should know if my own health’s poor or not, shouldn’t I?” The sigh was cut short by another spate of coughing. The sound reminded Serena of one of her aunt’s friends who’d come to the funeral. The man had emphysema.

  “Are you all right?” Serena asked.

  “Yeah. Damn smog, that’s all.” Edda cleared her throat. Listening, Serena thought she detected talking in the background. And then it ended abruptly, as if someone had turned a switch. Or pulled a plug. “A body can only watch so much TV. Will you come to see me?” Without waiting for an answer, Edda rattled off her address.

  For lack of a pen, Serena grabbed an eyeliner from the top of the bureau and hastily wrote down the address across it. The sight of writing summoned a memory. Her mother was screaming at her for marking the wall with a blue crayon. It was hardly more than a dot. She couldn’t remember how old she was.

  Only that it wasn’t a long distance to fall to the floor when her mother hit her.

  Serena capped the liner. The street name was familiar. Edda lived in one of the older developments. “All right. I can be there in a little while.”

  “No, make it eleven,” Edda instructed. “I need time to put my face on. I don’t get many visitors these days.”

  Excitement and hesitation did a jig through Serena, changing and exchanging positions. Why was this woman calling her? “What’s this about, Mrs. Merryweather?”

  “I’ll tell you when you get here.” Serena heard what passed for a cackle, and then the connection was broken.

  Serena replaced the receiver, staring at it thoughtfully. She debated calling Cameron and telling him about the strange phone call, but then decided against it. It was probably nothing.

  And if it did turn out to be something, she’d tell him about it when she had something concrete to relate, not before. The old Serena would have gone running to him with everything. But the old Serena had relied far too heavily on everyone else but herself.

  That wasn’t going to happen again. She was her own person now, in charge of her own life and her own destiny. If it got lonely at times, well, everything came with a price.

  Serena looked out the window at the garden below. Working in it, tearing out the towering weeds and making way for the flowers, had made her feel better yesterday. But she didn’t need to take out bottled-up aggression anymore. She needed clues. There was something here, something someone didn’t want her finding. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have left a warning.

  She thought of the doll and tried not to shiver.

  If there was something here, she intended to find it, whatever it was.

  It was hard looking when you didn’t know what you were looking for, she thought, fighting impatience. The task was overwhelming and almost daunting at the outset. There was so much to look at, so many rooms to go through. Filled with nervous energy, Serena wanted to be everywhere at once.

  But that was impossible. Forcing herself to think logically, she took it one room at a time. It had been eleven years. If it took a day or two longer, it wouldn’t matter to anyone else but her.

  And to the real killer.

  She was only halfway through the books in the den when she heard the doorbell downstairs. The book she was flipping through slipped from her fingers to the floor.

  She wasn’t expecting anyone, Serena thought as she picked the book up again. The locksmith had already come, practically arriving in Cameron’s wake, and gone. Tension reared, snagging her nerves.

  This was ridiculous. Whoever came in last night hadn’t rung the bell. Anyone who wanted to harm her was going to come skulking in, not heralding his approach.

  Praying she was right, Serena hurried down the stairs. She was holding her breath as she went to the door and looked out through the peephole.

  Squinting her other eye closed, Serena had a fish-eye view of Kirk standing on her doorstep.

  She smiled to herself. It appeared that the cavalry was slumming today.

  Chapter 9

  “Cameron put you up to this, didn’t he?”

  Serena arched a brow, waiting for Kirk to reply as she closed the front door behind him.

  A smile played on his lips when he turned to face her. Kirk tried his best to look innocent. Surprisingly, he almost succeeded.

  “Cameron? You mean that tall, dark blond, dumb-looking guy?” Kirk shook his head, as if the description he’d just rendered meant nothing to him. “Never heard of him. I’m just here to look around and take a few photographs, if you don’t mind.”

  He’d never been invited inside the house while Serena’s parents were alive. The paths of the senior McKees and Callaghans had never crossed, except perhaps at one of the intersections running through the center of the city. There still was no such thing as “the wrong side of the tracks” in Bedford, but if there had been, Kirk’s parents would have resided there. They were as far removed from the McKees’ life-style as the North Pole was from the South.

  Photographs. Of her house. Serena couldn’t help being suspicious of the reason behind the interest. “Because it was the site of Bedford’s first murder?”

  Caught up in exploring, Kirk stepped down into the living room. He saw no reason to lie. After what she’d been through, Serena didn’t deserve lies, not even polite little white ones, aimed at sparing feelings.

  “Yes, and because the place has a majesty all its own.”

  The description struck her as being almost ludicrous. Shaking her head, Serena looked around. Her mother would have been horrified at anyone being allowed to see it this way. “Not at the moment.”

  Maybe she felt it was an invasion of privacy. Kirk could understand that.

  “I can take the photographs outside, if you’d rather. I see you’ve done a nice job on part of the front lawn.”

  Serena took the compliment with a shrug. “Just therapy.”

  “Whatever works,” Kirk replied mildly. “It’s nice when therapy can be productive.”

  He wasn’t poking around as if he were serious about it. Serena crossed her arms before her, eyeing him. “You didn’t come here to take photographs.”

  Kirk glanced down at his bulging camera case, stuffed with all the accessories he’d come to rely on so heavily. And then hooded eyes raised to hers. “I didn’t?”

  She almost laughed out loud. He didn’t do innocent very convincingly. “No. Cameron wants you to stay with me because he’s worried.”

  Kirk raised his shoulders and let them drop again, as if this were all news to him. “Can’t see why he should be. People come in and hang dolls with
nasty notes on them off our chandelier all the time.”

  Their eyes met and held for a moment. Maybe it was nice to have someone worry about her at that, Serena thought. As long as she remembered she couldn’t allow herself to rely on the person for any length of time.

  Serena inclined her head, surrendering. “How about I give you a tour of the place?”

  The grin on Kirk’s face was infectious. It was a visible sign of Rachel’s influence on him, Serena thought.

  “Sounds like a plan to me,” he agreed.

  Framing things he saw before him was second nature to Kirk. It had been ever since an intuitive high school shop teacher had pushed a camera into his hands and ordered him to shoot the entire roll of film before returning to class the next day. At times, Kirk viewed life as a collection of stills, passing by quickly. He knew what made a good photograph, and what wouldn’t. What would affect the viewer and what would leave him cold. The house on McKee Hill appealed to the darker side of human nature, the side both fascinated and appalled by emotions that fell under the realm of the seven deadly sins.

  A sin against God and man had been committed here in this once stately, regal house. What other things had occurred here, he wondered, things that were kept secret from the world beyond its walls?

  He thought seeing it through the eye of a camera might help pull some of the pieces together.

  After some hesitation, Serena agreed to allow Kirk to take photographs inside the house. Still, he asked her permission each time he raised his camera to his eye. That impressed her. While the Kirk Callaghan she remembered had never been as rebellious and rowdy as gossip and her mother would have wanted her to believe, he hadn’t been sensitive to the feelings of others, either.

  When and why had he changed? Was there actually something that existed in life that could touch you and make you open up, rather than retreat? Make you softer instead of harder? She truly wished she could believe that.

  Kirk lowered his camera. He’d been at this for over ninety minutes, going from room to room, asking questions, taking photographs. He figured he’d gotten enough to work with.

  Throughout it all, Serena had been his shadow, choosing to accompany him, rather than to let him roam around on his own. He liked her company, but wondered if it was only boredom that had her seeking his, or if there was another reason behind it.

  He slung his camera strap over his shoulder. “You’re looking at me the way I look through the lens of a camera. What do you see?”

  She hadn’t thought she was that obvious. The years had taught her to be subtler than she’d been as a girl. “Someone I know and yet I don’t.”

  “Happens when you come back after being away so long.” Leaving the second-floor sitting room—Serena had told him that her mother had loathed the popular term “bonus room” or, worse, “rec room”—Kirk went down the wide staircase.

  Serena was right beside him. “I think there’s more behind it than just time.”

  “Yeah, there is. I’m content now.” That seemed a paltry word to describe what he felt. “Hell, I’m happy now, after all these years.”

  “Rachel.” It wasn’t a guess, not after seeing them together last night. Seeing them and thinking that, if things had just been different, that might have been Cameron and her.

  And if she’d been born with feathers, she would have been a bird, Serena thought ruefully. Things were what they were, and it made no sense to yearn for what wasn’t and couldn’t be.

  “Rachel,” he agreed with feeling. He didn’t know where he would be without Rachel. Rachel had been his salvation—he knew that. Kirk looked at Serena, one former tortured soul recognizing another. “You should try it some time.”

  “Why?” She forced a cheery note into her voice.

  “Are you going to lend me Rachel?”

  The flippant answer fell a long way short of being an effective smoke screen.

  “I meant with Cameron.” While once he might have felt it wasn’t his place to butt in, Rachel and Cameron had shown him differently. When you cared, you meddled. And he cared a great deal about Cameron. “He was really caught up in you.”

  Serena shrugged, looking away. “All that died a long time ago.” She didn’t feel like telling him that it had been Cameron’s choice, not hers. After all, he was Cameron’s friend.

  He searched her face, trying to read her expression. “Did it?”

  “Yes.” There was a finality to the word, one that said that once something was lost, there was no going back to retrieve it.

  But Kirk had learned that wasn’t true. “Whatever you’ve done, you can undo.”

  “It didn’t die by my hand.” That had slipped out. Regrouping, Serena dismissed the conversation. “I hate to usher you out like this, Kirk, but I have an appointment to meet someone at eleven, so unless you’re content to rattle around here by yourself, let me walk you to the door.”

  Well, that was blunt enough, Kirk thought. It made him grin. Cameron was right, Serena wasn’t a shy, retiring little wallflower any longer. She stood up for herself and spoke her mind.

  “If it’s all the same to you, I’ll wait until you’re ready to leave,” he said nonchalantly.

  Serena laughed and shook her head. “You are a tenacious bunch of people.”

  He knew she was referring to Cameron and Rachel. “On behalf of all of us, I accept that as a compliment.” He grinned. “Cameron and Rachel taught me that’s what friends are all about.”

  Friends. There was that word again. Rachel had told her that they were friends last night. It felt odd, Serena thought. She wasn’t quite sure she knew what to do with friends anymore, not after years of self-imposed exile from the human race. Even with the relationships she did have, she was always just on the threshold, ready to bolt out the door when things hinted at taking a serious turn.

  Was it going to be any different here? This was the place that had been instrumental in shaping the person she ultimately became.

  “All right, ‘friend,’” she said. “It’ll just take me a few minutes to get ready.” Turning, she hurried up the stairs.

  Kirk began packing up his equipment. “You know—” he raised his voice so that it would carry up to her “—I really am going to use these photographs. The city council wants to put out a magazine on Bedford, its history, its future, that kind of thing. It’s in honor of Bedford’s centennial celebration, but maybe seeing photographs of this place might jar someone’s memory a little and make them come forth.” Maybe someone had been observed fleeing from the house that night, and whoever saw him—or her—hadn’t thought twice about it. It was worth a try. “Cameron tells me you don’t have a whole lot to work with right now, beyond a gut feeling and the doll.”

  She stuck her head out over the banister before retreating into her room again. “I don’t. And you might be right about it jarring someone’s memory.” She smiled her thanks. “I appreciate any help you can give me.”

  Kirk nodded. “No problem. For a friend.”

  For a friend. Maybe, Serena mused, returning to her room, if she heard it said often enough, she might even begin actually believing it.

  There used to be farmland all around the perimeter, Serena recalled as she drove into the Antelope development. The Bedford Company had staked this area out first to build on and make its initial mark. It had been a lone development standing surrounded by planted fields.

  She could remember the odor of cabbages filling the air at certain periods of the year. Funny how something so odious at the time could bring such a swell of nostalgia to her now.

  “Next thing you know, I’m going to be waxing poetic about the way the fertilizer smelled in the spring,” she muttered to herself. The smell of manure had been pungent, carrying for miles.

  Serena laughed at herself as she pulled up in front of Edda Merryweather’s house. Maybe her morning with Kirk had had the proper effect. Feeling heartened, Serena got out of the car.

  Edda lived in what had been one
of Bedford’s early model condominiums. The brown-and-rust-colored two-story house shared a common wall with its neighbor on the left. Ivy had long since claimed the other wall and was now on its way to devouring the roof, as well.

  In an earthquake, that would probably go a long way in holding the house together, she mused as she pressed the doorbell.

  After the third ring, Serena began to think that the former police-department secretary had forgotten all about their meeting. Or perhaps she’d just changed her mind about it and decided not to answer the bell.

  It wouldn’t have surprised her.

  Well, at least she’d gotten out of the house. She always felt better, Serena had to admit, if only to herself, leaving the house than she did returning to it. Crossing the threshold into the marble-tiled foyer still created an oppressive feeling within her.

  Serena began to fish through her purse for the keys she’d dropped in it. As she shook it to get a better look inside, the purse slipped from her fingers. Landing on the cracked walk, the contents spilled out at her feet. The keys fell on her shoe.

  “Well, that’s one way to find them,” she muttered under her breath.

  Bending down to scoop everything up, Serena hit her elbow against the door. The sound whack she received was forgotten when she realized the door was now standing ajar.

  That was odd, she thought. Rising slowly, Serena placed her fingertips on the door and pushed lightly until it completely opened. Voices were coming from the next room.

  Then Edda was home, Serena thought. The woman probably just hadn’t heard the bell.

  “Mrs. Merryweather?” Serena called out. “Hello? Mrs. Merryweather, it’s me, Serena McKee.” She felt a little foolish about this, but reminded herself that Edda had sought her out, not the other way around. “We had an appointment to meet today.”

  There was no answer, although she continued to hear people talking. Moving closer to the source, Serena realized that what she heard was a television program. A soap opera, by the sound of it.

 

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