That night she and Bill had shared together in the master bedroom flashed through her mind again. That sort of lovemaking didn’t just drop into a girl’s life every day. He was an amazing lover. The details were fuzzy, but she remembered the feelings he stirred in her, and the way her body had hummed the next morning from what he had done.
Good boy, bad boy. Which one was Bill?
“Katie, stop!”
She jammed on the brakes as hard as she could. Her mind had wandered while she was driving and she hadn’t seen the traffic light turning red. If Mel hadn’t been there with her then she would have rear-ended the car in front of her and maybe even pushed it into the intersection.
“Uh, thanks Mel. My mind was on the house,” she lied. Well, it wasn’t a complete lie.
“Maybe I should drive?” Mel asked. She was sitting relaxed in the passenger seat but Katie could see the tension around her eyes. They’d almost been in an accident, after all. “Unless you had some reason to do an emergency stop in this particular spot?”
Trying not to let her hands shake, Katie turned on her blinker. “Sure I did. The café is right here, and you wanted lunch.”
Her lame joke broke the tension and the two of them could laugh again. She might have left rubber on the pavement from her sudden stop, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t poke fun at herself for it.
Get your head out of the clouds, she told herself. You want Bill so bad then take him. But you’re most likely leaving tomorrow. What’s the sense in getting tangled up in a guy for one more night?
Maybe, another voice answered, having one more night is exactly the point.
She frowned and pulled the car up into the parking lot of the Meadowlark Café. This was why she avoided dating. Flipping houses was easy. Making love work? Now that was hard.
Chapter 10
The café was packed for lunch. Tables, stools at the counter, everywhere. Heather, the waitress who had slipped Katie the tidbit about Emily Knox being pregnant noticed them come in, and gave them a wink.
Mel sighed in obvious disappointment. “Well, it looks like we’ll have to go somewhere else to eat. Is there another place in town? Besides the pizza places, I mean. I’ve still got heartburn from that one we ate at the hotel.”
Katie knew there weren’t many choices in Port Cable but surely they could find something else... “Oh, wait. Quick, come with me.”
Threading between the tables, Katie led them over to a booth where she had recognized someone. Justina Knox sat there, nursing a cup of coffee, an untouched piece of blueberry pie next to her on the table. She didn’t notice them until Katie was sliding into the booth, pulling Mel in with her.
“Hello, Justina. Do you remember me?”
A fleeting smile came and went on Justina’s face and didn’t touch her eyes at all. “I do, dear. Miss Pearson, wasn’t it? You’re the woman who bought my house, and found my poor Emily.”
Katie nodded. Well, that confirmed it, then. Obviously Justina had identified the ring on the victim as the one belonging to her daughter. The body was Emily’s. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Knox. I can’t imagine how that must feel.”
“Thank you. Everyone has been so kind, but it’s still so hard to take in. My daughter dead, all these years...”
Her fingers wrapped around her cup, as if she needed the warmth from the hot liquid more than she needed food.
Katie’s heart went out to Justina. “Will you be all right? Do you have someplace to stay in town?” Even as she asked it Katie realized it was a foolish thing to say. Of course Justina had no place to stay. She didn’t live here anymore. “If you need to, I can fix up a room in your old house for you--”
“No,” Justina said flatly. “I couldn’t step foot back in that place. Not now. Not knowing... Thank you for the offer, Miss Pearson, but I simply can’t.”
“I understand. Mrs. Knox, did you know that Emily was pregnant before she ran away?”
The old woman’s sad eyes went wide. “What are you saying?”
“We went to see Emily’s ex-boyfriend just now. Miguel Sanchez. He confirmed it for us. Your daughter was pregnant.”
Justina brought her trembling fingers to her lips. “No. Oh, no. That can’t be. You say you spoke with Miguel?”
“You didn’t know?”
For a long moment, Justina closed her eyes. When she opened them again there was a hard light burning behind them. “A mother always knows these things, Miss Pearson. I know my daughter. I will not have you spreading lies about her like this.”
“What? No, that’s not what I’m trying to do at all. I just thought you should know--”
“What do you know about my family, hmm?” Her voice was rising, and around them other conversations were starting to taper off. People were watching them. “You are an outsider, Miss Pearson, and you don’t know anything at all! My daughter was a good girl. My husband was a good man! We had a good life until... Until...”
Without warning she shoved her coffee cup away, knocking it over and sending coffee spilling across the white tablecloth. Now everything in the room stopped, and all eyes turned their way.
“I will not have anyone saying a bad word about my family! We loved each other! You will not come into our town and say bad things about us!”
Katie tried to shrink down into the booth and disappear. When that didn’t work, she tried to explain herself again. “Justina, you knew she was pregnant, didn’t you? Do you know where the child is?”
“Shut up! Just shut up!” Screeching, Justina Knox slapped her hands down on the table. Silverware jangled as it bounced off paper napkins. “She was not. She could not have been! No one was ever alone with our daughter except--”
Her voice strangled in her throat, leaving her mouth hanging open and her eyes staring. Oh, dear God, Katie thought. She’s going to have a heart attack!
Instead, Justina snapped her mouth closed, and looked at all the people in the restaurant watching them. With a very slow, shaky breath, she shook her finger at Katie. “You should leave this town, Miss Pearson. You don’t belong here. My Emily didn’t deserve to be killed. If only we had known. Maybe if my husband Frank had known what had really happened he wouldn’t have taken his own life.”
“If Frank had known...? Justina, your husband was dead before Emily was killed. Emily ran away and came back after you and Frank split up.” That was the theory that she had crafted together from all of the pieces. It was the picture that seemed to fit. “After Frank died.”
Justina’s gaze was hard as stone. “No, Miss Pearson. The police don’t know how long Emily was dead exactly, but they know it was much longer than our house has been empty. She didn’t come back to town, Miss Pearson, because she never left. We were wrong, back then. Frank and I were wrong. Emily didn’t run away after all.”
Katie gasped. If she understood Justina correctly then she had been looking at this all wrong. She had the story completely backward. Emily hadn’t been killed by a squatter living in the abandoned Knox Estate. She hadn’t come back to town hoping to claim her family home.
More than that, there was no child of Emily’s to lay a claim to the house now.
Emily hadn’t gone away to college. She hadn’t run away from home. If the police were right, the whole reason Emily had disappeared was because she had been murdered. Right here in Port Cable.
Right in her own house.
Then...how did she end up in the wall all these years later? Why were there bad stains on the walls of two different rooms? Did Miguel actually kill Emily in a fit of rage, maybe after finding out she’d gotten pregnant?
Questions circled around in her head and piled up without answers to satisfy them. She sat back in the booth, not caring that everyone was staring or not.
Justina sniffed and picked up her spilt cup, moping at the mess she’d made with a couple of napkins taken from the metal dispenser on the table. “I understand you were looking for a big payday from my old house, Miss Pearson. So sorry to
spoil your plans. My daughter is dead, but let’s all worry about you, shall we?”
Mel shifted in her seat, emphatically talking with her hands. “It’s not like that. Katie doesn’t want to profit from your grief. Honest. We just wanted you to know what we’d found out.”
“I don’t want to hear it.” Justina patted at her lips primly with another napkin pulled from the dispenser, and then dropped it on the table. “I know the truth. No one can tell me any different. I’m leaving now, Miss Pearson. I hope you’ll understand if I say I never want to see you--either of you--again.”
With a slow, shuffling gait, Mrs. Justina Knox left them sitting there without another word.
“Well, she’s a bundle of fun,” Mel grumbled. She hid her face behind one hand as she turned to me. “I think we should go before she whips everyone up into a mob. I can’t to torches and pitchforks today.”
“She’s just upset,” Katie said. “She didn’t mean to yell at us.”
“Oh, I think she meant to yell. I think she meant to yell a lot.”
The conversations in the room had gradually started up again and now it was like nothing at all had happened. Nothing, Katie reminded herself, except one more piece of the puzzle. At least she wasn’t going to find a murdered child stuck in the walls of the upstairs bedroom. That had been her first thought as soon as Miguel confirmed that Emily was pregnant.
Thank God for small favors, she supposed.
Now she knew that the murder had taken place before Justina and Frank had divorced and left the Knox Estate behind. For a period of years people were living in the house, renting it, and no one wanted to stay. That’s what Justina had told her. How many times had someone tried to cover up the stain marking Emily’s death, only to have it seep back, she wondered? Did every tenant who rented the house start to feel the evil that was decaying in their walls?
Katie shivered. How many people had rented out the home without realizing its history? Now that she was involved all the freaky stuff was happening. Katie was beginning to think that she was a magnet for the weird and haunted. This wasn’t the first time she’d stumbled into a house with a dark story.
Could it be her, and not just coincidence?
She shook her head to clear it out of dark thoughts like that. Whatever the case may be, she needed out of this house. “Come on,” she told Mel. “It’s time to cut my losses and run, I think.”
“I’m with you, Katie. Just like I said before. I’ll help you get your stuff together and then we can find a liquor store in this town and drink wine in your motel room.”
Thank God for Mel. What would she do without her best friend? “What should we drink to when we get there?”
“Well, we could always take out a dictionary and start with the A’s.”
“Mel,” Katie scolded playfully.
“Appletini, apricot brandy, anisette, amaretto...”
“Seriously.”
“Black Russian, burgundy, bourbon...”
“Mel.”
“Fine. Then let’s toast to you, and let’s toast to me, and let’s toast to missed opportunities.”
“I’ll drink to that.”
“Amen.”
Heather the waitress came over, collecting the soiled napkins and the coffee cup and the untouched pie on a tray to remove them. “I’ll be back to take your order in a minute,” she said. “I know I told you to come back when you had gossip to share, but I didn’t think you’d want to become the gossip!”
Chapter 11
Somehow, deciding to give up on the remodel of the Knox Estate made Katie feel a world better. It was like she was shedding stress with each step on her way up the front steps. She slapped her palm against the solid front doors, and ran her fingers along the wallpaper of the entry hall. It was a nice house. It really was. It just wasn’t worth the effort.
“Is all your stuff in the bedroom upstairs?” Mel asked her.
“Yeah. Except for some tools and small things down here. It won’t take long to pack up.” Katie sighed as she looked around her. She hated to give all this up. It could have been a great house, when it was fixed up.
Mel put her hands on her hips, giving Katie a look. “Having second thoughts?”
“Kind of. It’s a beautiful place. If there wasn’t this terrible backstory tainting the house then I wouldn’t even hesitate.”
“Oh. I thought maybe you were disappointed that Bill wasn’t here waiting for us again.” Her smile flickered with her thinly veiled suggestion.
Truth be told, Katie did have to admit she was a little let down that Bill wasn’t here. Would that have made things easier or harder for her, she wondered. It had gotten to a point where she just naturally associated Bill with this house. Like the two of them were connected in her brain. Giving up one, would mean giving up the other.
She stopped at the bottom of the stairs and looked up. It was a dizzying sight, looking up three stories from the bottom. For just a moment she began to feel wobbly. The room spun around her and she lost her balance, sitting down hard on the stairs as colors ran and faded and everything changed.
Under her hand, the wooden railing felt strong and new. Her feet sank into plush carpeting that suddenly spread across the floor and the stairs leading up behind her. The air felt fresher and smelled cleaner. The wallpaper came alive with patterns of flowers and leaves that had been previously covered up under grime and years of dust.
From behind her, a girl’s pretty voice called out. “I’m leaving, Mom.”
The girl walked down the steps in a white dress and a light blue sweater.
She walked straight through Katie.
Her skin crawled. The sensation was unearthly. What was this?
The girl hummed and stopped a few steps away, twirling so that her skirt flared, her hands folded up to her chin with an almost childlike excitement. On a finger of her right hand a gold and diamond ring sparkled. Katie recognized the face and that long flowing hair from the photo Justina had shown her.
Emily Knox.
A dream. This must be a dream. But she wasn’t sleeping. Some sort of daydream, then. Katie stared, unable to turn away, as Emily stopped suddenly and stared off into the house. “Mom? Are you here? I’m going out.”
Dark shadows collected in front of Emily. She gasped and stumbled back a step, grabbing the pleats of her white dress. They collected and grew and became the shape of a man. He was blurry and indistinct, a black hole where Katie knew a person should be standing.
“You aren’t leaving, little girl,” the darkness said.
“Daddy, yes. I am.”
Katie stood up from her perch on the steps. This was Emily’s father, W. Frank Knox. In this vision—dream he was reduced to something like a visual embodiment of raw emotions. Anger. Rage. Jealousy.
“You will not leave this house!” Frank’s voice bellowed. “You’re going out with him, aren’t you? That Miquel character. I forbid it! I forbid you to leave with that boy!”
“Daddy, I love him! You can’t keep us apart.”
The darkness swirled out and grabbed hold of Emily’s arm. It was an action that spoke of violence, both old and recent.
“Ow! Daddy, you’re hurting me!”
“You are my daughter, and you will do as I say.” His voice hissed and sputtered, like static on a radio not quite tuned in properly. “If I have to lock you in your room until you see the light, then that’s what I will do!”
He began pulling Emily toward the stairs and although she struggled, her father was far stronger. Katie backed out of the way as the two apparitions inched closer, still arguing with one another.
“Daddy, let go! I want to leave. I want to be with Miguel!”
“You will not say his name in this house! I forbid it!”
“Where’s Momma? She won’t let you do this!”
“Your mother does as she’s told. It’s long past time that a willful child such as yourself learned to do the same. You will obey me, or you will suffer the
consequences!”
Inside the shadows something moved, and Emily screamed as her head was knocked backward by the hard slap of her father’s hand. Blood trickled from the corner of her mouth and dripped onto her white dress.
“To your room, now!”
“I can’t do this, Daddy. I have to go. I have to go with Miguel!”
Through her tears Emily begged her father over and over to let her go but it was no use. He was suddenly dragging her by the wrist up the stairs, on her knees.
“Stop fighting me!” her father roared.
“Don’t do this, Daddy, please.”
“You’re making this worse. Do as I say.”
“Don’t do this, please!”
“I am your father, and I will do as I please--!”
“Daddy, don’t hurt me! I’m pregnant!”
Katie gaped at the vision playing out like a movie in front of her. She wasn’t imagining this. She knew that much. Somehow she was really in the middle of this moment in time when a teenaged Emily Knox had told her father that she was with child.
Justina Knox had acted like her daughter being pregnant was a rumor. A lie. Nothing that she had ever heard about. She said that her daughter was too innocent to get pregnant.
Well. Apparently her father knew about it.
Sometimes things happened, even to good girls. Katie knew that from experience. Getting pregnant didn’t make Emily a bad girl, just a foolish one, to have allowed herself to be put in that position before she was ready to take care of a child of her own.
“Come on, Frank,” Katie whispered to him, even though she was sure they couldn’t see her. “You have to know your daughter is only trying to do what’s best for her and the baby. Stop hurting her!”
The shadows of Frank Knox’s ghost went perfectly still. It was as though Katie had managed to reach him through the obstacles of time and death. He would stop hitting her now. Things would be different between them. Love could make everything all right...
Sight Unseen Complete Series Box Set Page 19
