by Anne Stuart
“Sure, Ma,” Sophie said, sounding singularly unenthusiastic. “That would be great. But you know I’m really busy right now anyway. I’m just about ready to be bumped up a class, and if I go away now I’ll have more catching up to do.”
“Honey, you’re already working on college level math.”
“That’s because you taught me to go for it, Ma. I just have to fill in the gaps with English and chemistry and I’ll be just fine. Give me three weeks and we can take off.”
“If we left then we’d be gone over Christmas.”
“I don’t think David is terribly invested in Christmas, do you? He doesn’t seem the type,” Sophie said.
“I think he’s been looking forward to a real Christmas with his first family.” She tried to keep the disappointment out of her voice. Christmas was her favorite thing in the world, and she loved going to strange, new places and celebrating it with local customs. The local custom here was probably The Festival of Coal.
“We’ll see,” she continued. “In the meantime I need you to stay close to home. Don’t leave the school with anyone but me or Maggie Bannister. Don’t walk home, don’t accept rides, and don’t let anyone but me get you from Maggie’s house.”
Sophie looked at her. “Not even David?” she asked.
Rachel thought back to Stephen Henry’s words. Don’t trust anyone. “Even David,” she said finally, the words tasting like acid in her mouth.
Too many people, people she distrusted, told her not to trust anyone. If the liars and tricksters warned her then the situation had to be pretty bad.
But they’d make it through. Sophie was too young, and as long as Rachel was vigilant she would be perfectly safe. Absolutely no one would want to harm her.
No, if they just kept their heads together and didn’t panic then everything would be resolved. And in fact, Sophie would like Christmas here as well. A traditional American Christmas was just as foreign as celebrating it in the Sudan or South America. And maybe the three of them would finally start feeling like a family.
In the meantime she simply had to stop thinking about Caleb Middleton, his dark warnings, and Stephen Henry’s odd behavior. She needed to get home, immerse herself in her darkroom, secure in the knowledge that Sophie was planted in front of the wide-screen television, and not think about anything but exposure and negatives and the safe, dark world of photography.
He was going to have to do something, Caleb thought, watching them head down the mountain. The stubborn redhead wouldn’t listen, and if he told her the truth she’d be even more resistant. She would believe it was some demented sibling rivalry or childhood vengeance.
There were a number of ways to get rid of her, short of kidnapping and dumping them five states away. If he could only think of something. Right now he’d tried every way of telling her and none of them had made a difference. Nothing would, short of the brutal truth, and the fact is, he had no proof. Nothing but circumstantial evidence that could lead to him as easily as it could to his brother.
Maybe he could sabotage her car. If she banged herself up a little bit then it was too damned bad. He’d like to bang her head against the wall to make her listen to him, and that was far from the only thing he’d like to bang, but she was too busy protecting David and fighting her attraction to him. His first plan had been to use that interest, enough to scare her into leaving, but that wasn’t getting him anywhere and besides, he was finding it all a little too tempting. Things were bad enough—he wasn’t going to take his brother’s wife, no matter how much he found himself wanting her. That would just convince the old biddies in town that he was exactly as David had painted. A jealous, treacherous lecher, who took everything David had ever wanted and more.
Nobody noticed that it was David who’d bought the architect’s house, three years after Caleb had picked up the man’s half-built disaster. He hadn’t stolen Libba away from David—they’d been secretly going together for a long time before David decided to put moves on her.
The problem was, he’d had such a hellish reputation that Libba hadn’t wanted to tell her mother, and they’d kept the affair, the first and best of his life, a secret. But David had known. There was no way he could have missed it. And when he started publicly courting her, public opinion swung directly against Caleb, as it had so many times before.
He wondered where Libba was now. He hoped to Christ she was happily married, with children. He hoped the scars had healed. Even with them crisscrossing the left side of her face she was still beautiful.
He’d been blamed for that as well. He’d been driving David’s car and David had followed. By the time he woke up in the hospital David had explained it all to everyone else…how his jealous older brother had chased after them, ramming their car with his trashy beater.
David had the story right. He just had the roles reversed. And Libba’s concussion had taken care of the rest of the truth.
He should never have taken the rap for the cat so many years ago. It still made him sick to think of it, no matter how many atrocities he’d witnessed overseas, but he couldn’t stand to see his apple-cheeked baby brother painted as such a horrific creature. So he’d made excuses—a spilled can of gasoline, a careless cigarette—and they’d bought it, sort of, looking at him funny and knowing he was lying. They just didn’t know who the lie was protecting.
It was too late to save David. He could no longer ignore the fact that he’d graduated to killing women, and by saying nothing, doing nothing, despite his suspicions, he was guilty as well.
But he wasn’t covering up anymore. Wasn’t walking away. This was going to stop, stop now, before anyone else got hurt.
But first he had to get Sophie and her mother out of the line of fire. Or they might be the next to go.
Stephen Henry Middleton waited until his personal assistant drove out of the driveway. Dylan was a charming boy—the generous salary Stephen Henry paid him was going a long way toward covering his college expenses, and he was smart enough not to notice anomalies. Or if he did, not to mention them.
The curtains at the front of the house were drawn, the lights were on, the doors were locked. No one would stop by unannounced, not his argumentative sons, certainly not his snooty daughter-in-law who liked to think he didn’t realize that she considered him a dirty old man. It amused him to play into it. In fact, he much preferred his sexual partners to be experienced, mature and male, though he kept that as one of his many secrets.
He set the brakes on his top-of-the-line wheelchair, kicked up the foot plates and rose. It was a good thing his house had wall-to-wall carpeting—there’d be no telltale scuffs on his shoes. He walked over to the small drinks table Dylan had set up, pouring himself a generous glass of his favorite Scotch, the one he never shared. Most palates were too unsophisticated to appreciate it. And besides, he wanted it all to himself. At his age he deserved to indulge himself.
He was going to have to do something about the current situation, though he wasn’t quite sure what. In his worst nightmares he could envision total disaster, but he firmly believed that things couldn’t be as hideous as they seemed. He simply wouldn’t let them be.
He was a selfish old man, lazy to a fault, greedy for attention and not particularly interested in other people’s needs, even those of his sons. He had no illusions about himself, not at his advanced age.
But he also didn’t want the extremely comfortable life he’d arranged for himself be shot all to hell by a nutcase for a son.
He moved into the sunroom, staring out through the dark, leafy houseplants, to the backyard and the rainy evening. He didn’t deserve that kind of lousy luck, and he preferred to think positively. A psychopath for a son would put a real damper on his golden years.
Therefore he simply wasn’t going to consider the possibility. Life was too good for him right now—he was waited on hand and foot, the attention was constant and flattering, and even if it looked like his sons had made some unfortunate choices, they couldn’t be as
bad as he suspected. Plus there was no way the college could kick a cripple out of his plush faculty housing.
Positive thinking, that was the ticket.
And he raised his glass to his reflection in the window, a silent toast, before he headed back to his chair.
11
Rachel had always liked working in the darkroom. It was a safe place, an isolated haven where magic happened, and when she was in there she could pretend that outside was sunny and warm.
She picked up the contact sheet and put it in the development bath, watching as the tiny pictures came into focus. People always wondered why she didn’t just use a digital camera, why she chose to immure herself in darkness when she loved the sun. She never bothered to explain. In this tiny section of the world she was in complete control. The rest of the world was crazy, but in here it was black and white.
She took the contact sheet out and hung it on the line she’d strung. Pictures of Silver Mountain, of Sophie and Kristen, their heads together, pictures of her new family.
Stephen Henry, right before his reading and the return of the prodigal son. He looked surprisingly tense, and she realized that he had stage fright. The man who craved the spotlight paid for his addiction with sick nerves.
There was one she’d taken of David when he wasn’t paying attention. It fascinated her. He was looking at something, Rachel couldn’t tell what, and the expression on his face was something she’d never seen. Almost sly. Avid. Needy.
What the hell was he looking at? The photo was taken in the kitchen, and as far as she knew there’d been no one in the house besides the three of them. And Caleb, of course.
So what had put that odd expression on his face, captured when he was unaware, a look she’d never seen again?
She went back to her most recent roll of film. She usually loved times like these, but for some reason she couldn’t get into her Zen-like calm. Not today. Today she didn’t want to shut out the world—she had to keep one part of her attention focused on Sophie in the next room. She needed to hear if someone came into the house and started talking to her. If the phone rang with bad news, if David returned home. She needed to hear if Caleb followed them down the mountain, if he came into the house, and she’d pull him into the darkroom and tell him never to come near them again….
No, she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t get in any dark, enclosed place with him, because the crazy mixed-up feelings inside her were stupid and wrong and dangerous. It didn’t do any good to deny it, to berate herself. The only way to get past it was to accept it for what it was, and then say no.
She wanted Caleb Middleton. It was that simple, that stupid and self-destructive. She’d spent most of her life blissfully free of emotional or sexual involvements, since they usually ended up being not worth the trouble. With just her and Sophie, traveling the world, she couldn’t afford to take chances, and relationships had been few and far between, and eventually she’d stopped even thinking about it. The first year after Jared had dumped her she’d been too mad to be interested. After that, too caught up in her miraculous daughter. Love and sex were for other people. She’d always thought when Sophie went off to college she’d consider looking around and seeing if she was interested again.
But that was before Tessa had been murdered and David Middleton had come into their lives like a white knight. Safe, sweet, so apple-pie normal and removed from their nomadic, communal-living ways that she grabbed on to him when he first made advances. He was everything their lives weren’t. He was safety. He was salvation.
He was boring.
And she was a shallow, evil bitch to even notice. And even worse, secretly she was responding to his rotten brother’s advances, no matter how much she was “no, no, no” like Amy Winehouse and rehab. Then again, Amy Winehouse really needed to go to rehab, and Caleb was the very last thing Rachel needed in her life.
Smarten up, she told herself, pulling the sheet out of the developer. There was no way she was going to risk the best thing that ever happened in her life for some irrational attraction.
Except David wasn’t the best thing that had happened, Sophie was. And if it hadn’t been for Tessa’s murder, maybe she wouldn’t have jumped into marriage with someone who was practically a stranger at such short notice. It was that damned impulsive streak, the one that made her run off with her teenaged boyfriend, flaunt her asshole father and wander the world. Ironic to think that same impulsive streak had pushed her into settling down sooner than she should have.
Enough. Maybe Caleb was right. Maybe she should just pack Sophie up and head out of town, no matter how much she protested. Just long enough to get her head on straight, long enough for—
The bright light of the opening door momentarily blinded her, and she let out a shriek as a day’s worth of work was instantly destroyed.
“What the f—?” She stopped midword. David was standing there, looking both sheepish and stern, an odd combination. She took a deep, calming breath. “David, the red light was on.”
“This couldn’t wait.”
Oh, shit. He had that professor who doesn’t believe the dog ate my homework voice going, and Rachel inwardly cringed. He couldn’t have known that Caleb kissed her. Or worse, that she’d kissed Caleb.
“I went to the lawyer, since you kept finding excuses. He said you never had him draw up the adoption papers.”
“Can we discuss this somewhere else?” she said, stalling for time. “Let’s have a glass of wine and talk about it.”
He looked at her, his baby-blue eyes flinty with anger. Funny, she couldn’t remember seeing him that angry before. “I take this very seriously, Rachel. You lied to me.”
“No, I didn’t,” she said, lying. Funny, when she’d spent most of her adult life trying to be scrupulously honest, avoiding everything but the gentlest of white lies. “I talked to Blanchard, and I simply told him to hold off for a little while. Until Sophie got more settled.”
“That wasn’t the impression he got.”
“I can’t be responsible for his impressions, David. I can only tell you what I said. This has all been a tremendous upheaval for Sophie, and I didn’t feel she was quite ready for one more huge change. I’m sorry I didn’t discuss it with you but I thought there was no big hurry. Unless you’re planning to murder me in my sleep so you can get your hands on my daughter.”
“Given the current happenings, I find that joke in very poor taste,” he said stiffly.
“Sometimes you can either laugh or cry.”
“I’d prefer if you’d do neither, particularly in public. Sophie told you she didn’t want me as a father?”
And lie number two. “Of course not! You know she thinks you’re wonderful. This was my decision. I thought things were happening too fast for her. We rushed into this marriage without a whole lot of thought—”
“And you’re regretting it,” he filled in. “Suddenly, when Caleb comes to town, you’re having second thoughts about marrying me.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she snapped. “We rushed into this marriage because we loved each other and I wanted to get Sophie out of San Francisco and you had to come back to Silver Falls, and we didn’t think living together was appropriate given your position at the college and Sophie.” She softened her tone. “We would have gotten married anyway—we just got married sooner. And it wasn’t a bad thing that we did, but there’s reasonable fallout and I want to make Sophie as secure as possible before making any more changes.”
He didn’t look appeased. “One more change isn’t going to make that much difference. Don’t you think knowing she has a father to count on in case anything happened to you would simply increase her sense of security?”
For a moment a stray chill ran across her backbone, distracting her. “Why would anything happen to me?”
“Accidents happen all the time, Rachel,” he said, patiently explaining to an idiot child. “You could get hit by a car while crossing the road, you could choke to death on a piece of pizza. You coul
d even be the random victim of a serial killer. There are no guarantees that anyone is safe from the evil in this world. Everyone, everything dies.”
He was sounding so pompous that her alarm faded. “I’m the wrong physical type for the Northwest Strangler. He likes young, thin blondes, not strapping redheads.”
He looked startled. “The Northwest Strangler?”
“That’s what they’re calling him. Apparently Sophie picked that up in school.”
“That’s ridiculous! Who came up with such a completely unimaginative name? For that matter, why do they think he only works in the Pacific Northwest? I don’t think he should have a pseudonym at all, like Ted Bundy, who you have to admit was the greatest of the serial killers.”
“‘Greatest?’” Rachel echoed, startled.
“At what he did,” he said impatiently. “Don’t play semantics with me, Rachel, you know you’d only lose. When you think of serial killers, what name comes to mind?”
“Jack the Ripper,” she said promptly.
She’d managed to surprise him. “You’re right,” he said, thoughtful. “And of course he was never caught. Maybe having an extra name isn’t such a bad idea. Too bad it’s such a boring one.”
“They don’t know enough about him to give a better description.” Despite the macabre oddness of the conversation at least they weren’t talking about the adoption anymore. “Maybe they could call him the Blonde Murderer. But that might suggest that he’s blonde, not his victims. Have they been able to link any other murders to the same man?”
David shrugged, some of his earlier irritation vanishing. “I gather there might be a connection between the murders of several young women, mostly college students, in Oregon and Western Washington, but as far I know they haven’t figured out anything definitive. Who knows, the killer might have traveled even farther afield.”
“I’d just as soon he would,” Rachel said, her stomach knotting. “Until he’s gone for sure it makes me nervous. Could we stop talking about this? I need to see what we’re going to have for dinner and I don’t want Sophie to see that I’m upset.”
