But Claude no longer looked defensive or even abashed by his ludicrous behavior. He’d probably be bragging about his quick-wittedness and heroism for months to come in every dive bar in town.
Lucas shot a professional look at the bed, although Adrienne knew him well enough to see pity and repulsion in his eyes. “Claude says she’s dead.”
“I’m almost certain she is,” Adrienne said tentatively. “I know I shouldn’t have, but I touched her. Just her neck and her wrist. There’s no pulse. She’s still warm. Her neck …”
“Someone slashed her throat?” Lucas asked in a carefully controlled voice.
“No. Her neck isn’t slashed. There’s just a hole. Like someone jabbed her with something. An ice pick, maybe. There’s a lot of blood.” Adrienne’s own throat tightened. She tried to swallow and couldn’t. Her voice wavered. “I didn’t touch the … wound.”
“All right, everyone out of here,” Lucas abruptly ordered in a commanding voice. “Go outside, but don’t leave the grounds. I’ll have questions after I’ve gotten some EMS people and the coroner up here.” He looked at Adrienne. “I’m sorry, but you and Skye might have to stay a while. Got two people dead in that car wreck, so everything will be slowed down.”
“It’s okay.” She tried to manage an air of bravado. “We have a thermos of coffee.” She began to tremble again. “We’ll be fine.”
“I’ll take care of ‘em,” Claude stated.
Lucas looked grimly at the man exhaling liquor fumes. “You just go back to your cottage, stop drinking bourbon, have at least two mugs of strong coffee, and for God’s sake, quit swinging around that damned ax! You look like a lunatic in a horror movie.”
“I wasn’t swingin’ it,” Claude returned petulantly.
“You were when I was coming up the hall. Now get outside and put down the damned thing before you hurt somebody.”
“Well, hell,” Claude muttered. “I was just protectin’ myself, like I said. You cops wanna have all the weapons and leave us civilians with just our bare hands for defense. You see where that got Miss Julianna.”
“Shut up, Claude,” Lucas said mildly, almost automatically. Adrienne smiled at Lucas weakly in a failed attempt to look brave, took Skye’s hand, and led her daughter from the room. Brandon, for once, followed meekly behind as if he were always the obedient and well-trained dog. Claude brought up the rear, muttering heatedly about his constitutional right to bear arms.
Outside, Adrienne had to use every bit of her willpower to keep from breaking into a run. All she could think of was getting herself and Skye away from the new nightmare world of la Belle Rivière where beautiful Julianna Brent lay dead with a gaping hole in her neck, and a jumpy-eyed Claude Duncan followed them still wielding his ax.
2
On television, the lead cop viewed the body of at least one innocent victim each week. He looked at it coolly and often made a clever remark to his partner before beginning the dispassionate routine of his investigation. But it had been a long time since Sheriff Lucas Flynn had seen a body, and as he looked down at the pale, beautiful corpse of Julianna Brent, he felt anything except dispassionate and clever.
Everyone had cleared the room fifteen minutes earlier. He’d made the necessary calls on his cell phone, then took a few minutes to clear his head from dealing with the carnage down on the narrow road where a pickup truck had managed to wipe out a small car, and brace himself to deal with more carnage in this elegant hotel room.
He turned off the small chandelier and stood stock-still in the room, barely breathing, absorbing the ambience. The morning fog had burned away and bright sunlight pressed against the windows, but it was blocked by drawn brocade draperies. The only light came from candles that had burned low. The room was filled with the scent of jasmine, now too strong to be as pleasant as it would have been a couple of hours ago. One candle flame flickered against a glass figurine of a girl in a ruffled gown standing on the bedside table next to Julianna. The sparkle of the opalescent glass finish made the figurine seem to waver, as if alive.
Lucas moved closer to the bed and sadly looked down at Julianna. Her perfect face looked unearthly, almost angelic, and the candlelight brought out the sheen of her copper-gold hair spread over her creamy shoulders. He knew that beneath the closed lids, the eyes were the color of sherry, large and long-lashed. She’d fastened those incredible eyes on him just last week as she leaned across his desk and told him she thought she was being followed, watched, stalked. She’d said she was in fear for her life. And he had done nothing.
Shame washed over him as he stood looking down on that lovely face still holding on to a vague flush of life. Three summers ago, before he was elected sheriff, he’d been walking down Riverfront Street with an annoying guy who’d decided they were best friends and tagged after Lucas whenever he saw him. While the guy jabbered, Lucas’s attention had been drawn across the street to a tall, willowy woman with a cascade of copper curls and a pair of skintight jeans. “Julianna Brent’s back in town, actin’ like she’s the queen of the world,” the guy had said in a snide voice. “Always did think she was better than everybody else, but she fell on her pretty face. Serves her right.”
Lucas, having lived in Point Pleasant only four years at the time and still considered a newcomer, was forgiven for not knowing Julianna’s story. The guy had launched into the saga with nasty vigor. “Her daddy run off and left her and her younger sister, Gail, when they was little. The mother, Lottie, went crazy. Or crazier than she already was. She had some bad experience up to the Belle that people say gave her mind a turn, but I couldn’t get the straight of it. Anyway, she never mistreated the girls or nothing, but she made a fool of herself on a regular basis. Came to town near naked one time. Said it was too hot for clothes.
“Julianna never seemed one bit embarrassed about the runaway daddy, the crazy mama, or the tumbledown shack she called home,” the guy had gone on with gusto. “Carried herself like a queen and people let her get away with it because she was so beautiful. When she was eighteen, she ran off to New York and damned if she didn’t make it as a model like she always said she would. She was hot stuff for a while, so my wife tells me. I don’t keep up with the fashion world myself.” At that he’d guffawed and jabbed an elbow in Lucas’s ribs.
“So she’s just back here visiting?” Lucas had asked.
“Hell, no. She got messed up on drugs. My wife says all them supermodels do.” Lucas pictured the guy’s wife—a brawny, glowering woman who worked at the local Farm and Feed Outlet—and doubted that she was an expert on the inner life of supermodels. “Julianna was using cocaine and maybe heroin. The wife says they snort the heroin so they won’t have track marks. So Julianna got all screwed up, freaked out on one of them fashion shootouts, then couldn’t get work ‘cause she was unreliable. She went into rehab, then came back here to rest. That’s what she said. Rest. So while she was here, she met this artist guy, Miles Shaw. Long hair, weird clothes, highfalutin’ ideas about art. You know the type. Doesn’t really work—just paints pictures. He used to date that Kirkwood woman that owns The Iron Gate. I always thought she could do a lot better. Anyway, after they broke up, Julianna married Shaw and stayed here in Point Pleasant But she’s still wild. I hear stories.”
“What kind of stories?” Lucas asked.
“Just stories” the guy said darkly, clearly not knowing anything concrete or he would have gone into every detail. “The other sister, Gail, seems fairly normal if not too friendly. She’s a waitress at Kit Kirkwood’s restaurant and dates that cop Sonny Keller. A deputy. Pretty steady guy. But Julianna’s another breed. The wife says she makes up stuff so she’ll seem more interesting. I think she’ll end up just like her mama.”
Lucas hadn’t actually met Julianna until he’d started dating Adrienne. The few times they’d run into each other at Adrienne’s home, Julianna had been charming, extroverted, a bit flirtatious, and in the process of divorcing Miles Shaw, who was not taking the breakup grac
efully. If he hadn’t fought Julianna so hard, Adrienne had told Lucas, they would have been divorced a year ago because Julianna had become bored with marriage to a talented man who would rather paint than spend a night on the town, and who wanted to keep her all to himself. Possessive, people said about Shaw. Lucas had thought that with a wife like Julianna, who wouldn’t have been?
There had been public trouble between them only once, though. One Saturday night, Julianna had summoned the police when a drunken Miles had hammered and shouted and cried at her apartment door. The next day, when Lucas talked to him, he’d acted genuinely humiliated and contrite. His record showed no similar previous behavior. Lucas had been glad when Julianna didn’t pursue further legal measures against her husband because he was certain she’d somehow provoked Shaw’s uncharacteristic outburst A long time ago, Lucas had been deeply in love and flatly rejected. He knew how Shaw must have been feeling.
“How did she die?”
The female voice cracked like a whip behind Lucas. He turned to see Ellen Kirkwood standing in the doorway, her face rigid, her gaze fierce. Behind her hovered her husband, usually the picture of handsome confidence but now looking almost meek with slightly hunched shoulders and eyes fixed on a point beyond Lucas’s shoulder.
“Julianna Brent was murdered, Mrs. Kirkwood,” Lucas said quietly.
“I know that. Claude called me.”
“He shouldn’t have.”
“Well, he did. How was she murdered?”
“We’re not sure yet.” The woman started forward, making for the body, but Lucas held up his hand. “Please don’t come into the room. We have evidence to collect.”
“It’s my hotel,” Ellen Kirkwood said challengingly. “I should think I have access to my own hotel.”
Lucas kept his face bland although her tone rankled. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Kirkwood, but this is a crime scene. I can’t let you in here even if this is your hotel.”
“Ellen, please.” Gavin’s usually energetic voice sounded thin and fatigued. Lucas had a feeling he’d been arguing with Ellen all the way to the hotel. Damn Claude for calling her, he thought. And damn Gavin Kirkwood for not keeping his wife away from the hotel. “We have to let the sheriff do his job,” Gavin continued, stroking his wife’s thin arm. “He has to find out who murdered this woman.”
“You keep calling her ‘this woman.” You know very well who she was.” Gavin flushed. Mrs. Kirkwood’s fine-boned, thin-skinned face seemed turned to stone, and her wintery gray eyes were hard as flint. “Do not talk to me like I’m a child, Gavin. I simply want some answers. I have that right.”
Lucas took a deep breath. “You certainly do, ma’am, but as of now I don’t have any to give you. I can’t even tell you how she was murdered except that there’s a deep puncture wound in her neck.” Gavin closed his eyes as if he were queasy. “We haven’t found a murder weapon.”
“Do you know who she was here with?” Ellen demanded. “Who she was, shall I say, sleeping with in my hotel?”
“We don’t know that she was here with anyone.”
“I should think that would be obvious. Don’t you, Gavin?”
Gavin Kirkwood jerked slightly, looking trapped. “How should I know, Ellen? Dear, please let me take you home. We shouldn’t be here.”
“He’s right, ma’am,” Lucas said firmly, wanting to shake Gavin. The man, as always, looked debonair and acted completely helpless. “There is nothing you can do, and I don’t have any information to give you, yet.”
“Ellen, please calm down,” Gavin pleaded. His handsome face had a sickly gray pallor beneath the perpetual tan. “You have to remember your heart. You’re not supposed to get upset.”
Ellen waved her hand impatiently. “I know I’m not supposed to get upset. I don’t need you to tell me that constantly. But I can’t help it. My God, Gavin, there’s been a murder!”
Lucas, reminded of the woman’s ill health, pushed down his anger at her haughty tone and tried to soothe her. “We’ll be doing the best we can, ma’am,” he said kindly. “We’ll find out who killed her and why. We just need a little time.”
“Time.” Suddenly, energy seemed to drain out of the woman. Her posture slackened, making her look at least two inches shorter and frail. The skin loosened around the aristocratic bones of her face, and her eyes grew vague, almost dreamy, as she looked around the room. “Time won’t help,” she went on in a voice like a frightened, haunted child’s. “Have you forgotten where you are? La Belle Rivière. It’s cursed, this place. Julianna’s mother knows it. Lottie. We were childhood friends, did you know that, Sheriff? And this place nearly killed her. Now it’s killed her daughter.”
“This place is over a hundred years old,” Gavin said tentatively. “Naturally people have died here. It doesn’t mean the hotel is haunted, Ellen.”
Ellen dismissed his words with a wave of her thin hand. “I know it’s not unusual that people have died in a place this old. But there have been too many deaths.” She fastened her unnaturally pale eyes on Lucas and he felt as if someone were closing a cold hand around his heart. “You see, la Belle Rivière is one of those cursed places on earth where death has found a haven. I wanted to destroy it before it could kill again, but I was too late.” She glanced at Julianna’s chilling body and gave another long sigh. “And I’ll probably always be too late, because la Belle will probably destroy me before I can destroy it.”
3
Almost two hours had passed before Adrienne and Skye finished the waiting, the questioning, and arrived back at their home on Hawthorne Way. When Adrienne pulled into the driveway, the slate-blue and stone house looked strange to her, like some calm haven she had left days or even weeks ago. She was surprised when they walked inside and she could still detect the faint scent of the rich coffee Skye had brewed that morning.
The house had been designed by an architect and built for her parents in the sixties. It was one story and had been sleek, even glamorously modern. Then her parents had built an addition in the seventies, another in the eighties, and the last in the early nineties. The additions had been the inspiration of her father, who had no architectural talent but a determination that the additions be built to his capricious specifications.
The resulting house now conformed to no particular style. It jutted at various odd angles, each addition looking like a branch growing haphazardly from the trunk of a tree. Her mother had made attempts to soften the lines with carefully placed shrubbery and lush rhododendron bushes, but the greenery could only do so much in the way of improvement. Most of her neighbors on Hawthorne Way were glad that at least the unfortunate house stood on over an acre of ground, far enough away from their own carefully designed upscale homes so as not to be too great a residential blemish.
When they died within months of each other four years ago, Adrienne’s parents had left the house to her and her sister, Victoria. Vicky lived in an elegant Colonial three miles away, but neither she nor Adrienne had wanted to sell, so Adrienne and Skye had moved from their cramped, square little cottage into the whimsical expanse of the family home and loved every misshapen line of it.
Inside, Adrienne locked the front door, which normally she never did when she was home during the day. She felt shaky, weak, nervous, and slightly disoriented, as if she’d been up for twenty-four hours straight and run a marathon as well. She couldn’t ever remember feeling as physically drained as she did at this moment.
Skye looked at her helplessly. “All I want to do is lie down on the couch, but I feel like we should be doing something important.”
“Such as?” Adrienne asked tiredly.
“Calling Julianna’s mother?”
“The police will inform Lottie Brent. I couldn’t bear to tell her anyway,” Adrienne said. “She adored Julianna.”
“What about Julianna’s sister?”
“I think the police or Lottie should tell Gail. She’s never liked me,” Adrienne said. “She thought I was jealous of Julianna. I believe hear
ing the news from me would be even worse for her. She’s so different from Julianna.”
“But she likes Kit.” Skye’s eyes widened. “Mom, when we saw Mr. and Mrs. Kirkwood at the Belle this morning, Mrs. Kirkwood said she hadn’t talked to Kit. Maybe Kit still doesn’t know what happened to Julianna and it would be awful if she heard from someone else.”
Adrienne stood quietly for a moment, thinking. Or rather, dreading. Skye was right. She should be the one to tell Kit of their friend’s death. But it wasn’t just a death, which would be bad enough. It was a murder. How could she break the news to Kit without upsetting her too much? There was no way. Besides, Kit had always been the strongest of the three of them. She could probably handle the tragedy better than Adrienne was doing.
Adrienne glanced at her watch. It was just after eleven. Kit would be at her restaurant getting ready for the lunch crowd. With almost dragging steps, she went to the phone and dialed the number of the restaurant After two rings, a cheerful, young female voice said, “The Iron Gate. May I help you?”
“I’d like to speak with Ms. Kirkwood.”
“I’m sorry but she’s not in. May I take your name and have her call you back?”
Adrienne knew Kit often used this excuse when she was too busy to come to the phone. “My name is Adrienne Reynolds. I’m a very close friend of Kit’s and there’s something important I need to tell her. Even if she’s busy, please ask her to come to the phone.”
“Ms. Reynolds, she’s really not here. I’ve worked here a year and I’ve never known her not to be in at this hour, but she called in and said she had something to do and she couldn’t come in until this afternoon.” The girl’s tone was sincere. “I’m sorry. I can leave a message for her.”
“That’s all right. I’ll try her cell phone. Thank you…”
“I’m Polly. You’re welcome. And good luck.”
Adrienne tried Kit’s home number and connected only with the answering machine. She left a message asking Kit to call her back. She then tried Kit’s cell phone with no luck.
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