Under the Skin

by Vicki Lane

  At the other end, he could hear a confusing babble of sound and finally Elizabeth’s voice telling him to stay on the line.

  What the fuck is she up to? She said Gloria was going into Nigel’s salon— Is that the hairdresser guy who’s a friend of Joss?

  “I got a bad feeling about this,” he muttered, pulling his car out of the parking lot of the fast-food place where he’d just gotten a late and unsatisfactory lunch. Keeping the phone to one ear, he keyed the mic of the car radio to call the Sheriff’s Department.

  “Brenda—I need an address ASAP. A beauty parlor in downtown Asheville—guy who runs it is named Nigel … No, sorry, that’s all I’ve got … Probably a pretty high-dollar place … Well, do what you can and get back to me—this is top priority.”

  He pressed the cellphone hard against his ear and tried to make sense of what he was hearing: Gloria speaking pretty sharply to someone about an appointment … an unfamiliar male voice with a British accent—Nigel?—telling her she shouldn’t have come.

  Where the hell is Lizabeth? The voices seemed remote, even slightly muffled, as if the cell at the other end were concealed or—

  Holy shit—the concealed cellphone! It’s the Bolitar Ploy! Did she do this on purpose?

  Only a few days ago they’d been joking about the book he was reading. The Coben novel had reached a crucial moment and the hero—the improbably named Myron Bolitar—was in Big Trouble. But—and this was the part Lizabeth had nicknamed the Bolitar Ploy—Myron had left his concealed cellphone on with his psychotic sidekick listening in. There had been some discussion as to whether this so-called ploy would actually work …

  Hold on—there was another voice; male … female … hard to say—but it sounded familiar.

  “… my aunt Elizabeth,” the high-pitched voice was saying, “and my own loving little mother …”

  Sweet Jesus, it’s Joss. Phillip reached for the switch to activate his siren and emergency lights. “Get out of there, Lizabeth!” he shouted into the unhearing phone as the voices continued.

  Once again he keyed the car radio. “Have you got anything yet, Brenda?”

  He was on the Interstate now, emergency lights and siren going, speeding toward Asheville. The car radio crackled and Brenda spoke. “… Thirty-three Wall Street … near the intersection with Haywood and …”

  Time. How long would it take him to get there? And Joss was presumably armed. Oh, Jesus, what are you doing, Lizabeth?

  “Brenda, alert the Buncombe County Sheriff’s Department that we have a possible hostage situation at that address. I’m on my way.”

  Cutting the dispatcher short, he punched in the info on his GPS, silently thanking the department for this recent addition to his official vehicle.

  On the cellphone, the British male was speaking again, almost babbling—agitated words falling over one another.

  “… It was only a harmless scam—Joss was to pay me if it worked—if Gloria believed him. No harm done. I’d be making two people happy … and there’d be a little something for me … I’d got a lease on a salon in Arlington, Virginia—a really upscale place but I couldn’t quite swing it without a bit of a cash infusion. I knew Gloria would never miss twenty-five K. Once she’d accepted Joss, he was going to ask for help with some outstanding debts—maybe make it sound as though some thugs were after him. When she came through, he’d pay me—that was the deal we had.”

  There was a shocked exclamation from Gloria and then Elizabeth’s voice, much clearer than the others. The phone must be in her pocket or shoulder bag. Again he wanted to warn her but stayed silent so he could catch her words.

  “So, Nigel—what did you do that was worth that much money—aside from sending both of them to the séance weekend? Were you responsible for putting my sister in that box in the basement? She could have—”

  “She was never in any danger—never! It was all so that Joss could be a hero and ‘save’ his mother. And it wasn’t me. Jeremy, a friend of mine who works at the spa, did the abduction and he let me know the minute she was in place and I called Joss. Really, it was little more than a prank—”

  The agitated voice was interrupted by Joss. His tone was low and controlled but menacing.

  “Nigel, shut up. My mother and I don’t want to hear any more of your lies. Elizabeth, move away from the door and come over here with us.”

  Was he holding a gun on her? Something in the assurance of his words suggested that he was—on her or on Gloria.

  The New Stock exit flashed by. How long would it take the Buncombe County Sheriff’s Department to respond? He had said it could be a hostage situation—would they handle it right?

  Lizabeth. Stay cool. I know you will. I’m coming.

  The Brit was talking again—and his voice was easier to hear now.

  Damn! That meant that Elizabeth was closer to the others, that she had done as Joss had directed. Which also meant that Joss almost surely had a gun.

  “Joss, you know they’re not lies. We planned it all, sitting right here. I arranged the driver’s license—and that didn’t come cheap, since it was at such short notice. I was the one who knew the right date—you mentioned it yourself, Gloria, when you told me about your lost baby—”

  “Nigel, don’t make me say it again. There is no Joss. I’m Dana. I’ve always been Dana inside and now I’m transitioning so that I can be the daughter my mother wants.”

  What the fuck is this guy talking about? What transitioning?

  Phillip swerved around a lumbering school bus and shot onto the Patton Avenue exit ramp.

  “I’ve given it some thought,” the calm, ladylike voice went on. “I always knew I was meant to be a woman. The man I used to call Dad hated that. He tried so hard to make me just like him—hunting, sports—he even tried to get me to walk like him. Be a man, son, he used to say. But it was all a lie, all of it. Joss is gone now—and if there are none who remember Joss, then my little mother and I can go off together and begin again.”

  Mother of God, this lunatic is capable of anything. Phillip beat at his horn in frustration, forcing a minivan and two bikers up onto the sidewalk. Somewhere, not too far away, he heard more sirens added to the sound of his own.

  As he neared Haywood, yellow barriers directed him to an alternate route. Beyond the barriers, a costumed, banner-carrying crowd was swirling haphazardly after a marching band and several overcrowded floats.

  Phillip groaned and pulled his car into a loading zone. The noise was making it almost impossible to hear the voices on the other end of the cellphone but he kept it pressed to his ear as he checked the GPS system once more to pinpoint his location and the route to the salon.

  The situation was headed for a complete meltdown. On the phone it sounded as if all four were shouting at once—shouting, wailing, pleading—a confusion of words in his ear as Phillip hurled himself from the cruiser and ran in what he prayed was the right direction.

  The noise on the streets was almost tangible. He seemed to be pushing his way through dense masses of sound. And in his ear …

  And in his ear two shots sounded.

  As the reverberations died away, Joss spoke.

  “Soon it will be the way it should have been from the beginning—just my little mother and me … Don’t you understand? It had to be done to stop the lies. Say you understand, my little mother.”

  And the sound of weeping—inconsolable weeping. Then a woman’s voice: Gloria.

  “Lizabeth!” Phillip shouted into the telephone as he ran, elbowing his way through heedless groups of merrymakers. “Lizabeth!”

  XII~Amarantha

  Friday, May 20, 1887

  It was nigh on six o’clock and no Miss Cochrane. All my ladies was done and had gone back to make ready for the evening meal but still no sign of that feisty little somebody what had convinced me to lend her my keys. My treatment rooms and the tubs was all scrubbed clean and everthing was in readiness for the next day. Yet still she didn’t come.

&
nbsp; I begun to have a sickly feeling about it. Miss Cochrane knowed I must have them keys back to return to the head housekeeper afore I went home. She should have been back long since …

  So I decided to take a look. Once more I filled the little basin with rubbing oil and set before it, waiting to see what it might show me. In the quiet of the bathhouse I could hear my own breathing, seeming loud.

  The oil shivered under my breath and at first it was dark. I waited, trying to breathe slower and to see what came—trying not to lead it.

  The first picture that came weren’t Miss Cochrane—it was a little yellow-haired woman with her hair short cut, like they do when a body’s had a fever. She was wrapped in rags and closed up in one of those steam boxes they use for treatments. But it weren’t in a treatment room; it looked like to be in some dark cellar. The yellow-haired woman was scared most to death, poor thing, but somehow I knowed that this was a seeing from another time. Was I to go looking, I’d not find the yellow-haired woman—not now. And then I seen a tall woman with a long dark braid moving in the depths of the oil and I knowed she was coming after the other one.

  “Be still, honey,” I whispered to the one in the box. “Hit’ll be all right. Jest you sleep.”

  The picture begun to change and I saw the DeVine sisters and that feller they call their brother. They was all standing about and looking at something and the green one was carrying on like one thing. The purple one slapped her and the picture got hard to read—the sisters was in the dining room, and the brother was hauling poor Miss Cochrane down the back stairs and to the doctor’s special treatment room.

  I didn’t wait to see no more but lit out running for the back door of the hotel. Now I understood why I’d seen the picture from another time and I knew, sure as anything, that Lorenzo was aiming to put Miss Cochrane into one of them steam boxes. And there weren’t no one coming to get her out unless it was me.

  At this time of day there weren’t a soul to be seen there on the back porch of the hotel. Any other time and they’d be one or two of the housemaids or kitchen girls, taking themselves a little break—rolling a smoke or eating a cold biscuit. But at suppertime, all the outside staff had gone home and all the others was busy in the dining room or the kitchen. It takes a right smart of people to feed that many folks and get the food to them hot and all at once.

  I slipped through the screen door, not worrying about the squeak for the sound of nigh on three hundred people, all eating and talking at once, drowned out any little noise I might make. No one saw or heard as I hightailed it up the back stairs and ran down the long hall—past the offices and the parlors, the music room and the billiards room and the smoking room, and around the corner to where the gymnasium and the doctor’s special treatment rooms was.

  The door was shut but it opened when I turned the knob. I could hear the hiss and rattle of the steam pipes—the same ones that heated the hotel in winter—coming from the boiler. Now that the hotel had hot water in most of the rooms, the boiler run night and day, keeping a crew of men busy with bringing in wood to burn.

  The front room had all kindly of strange-looking machines but the hissing of the steam pipes was coming from the room beyond—the room with the steam boxes.

  At first I thought that I’d been mistaken, that she wasn’t there after all, but then I heard a groaning and a knocking and a weak voice calling for help.

  “I’m coming, honey,” I called out and ran like a crazy woman from box to box, wasting time by pulling the doors open till it come to me that they was all cold—but I was still hearing the hiss of the steam.

  They must have been several dozen of the plagued boxes and I ran along the row, just touching each long enough to know if it was heated. The knocking and the calling out had stopped by the time I reached the last row. And here too ever last box was cold.

  I stood there panting and swinging my head around, trying to think where she could be. I didn’t doubt the seeing I’d had—

  And then I saw in the corner of the room there was a pile of exercise mats. At first I thought they was laying across a table but then I saw the steam trickling out here and there.

  I ran to the corner and began throwing the mats off. The last of them was hot to the touch and damp from the steam. The hole where the person is supposed to stick their head out had been stopped up by the heavy pile of mats and through it I could just make out the striped bodice of Miss Cochrane’s dress.

  The devil who’d put her in there had jammed the latch so she couldn’t open it but I tore at it with all my strength and soon pulled her out of the steam-filled box. She was a mess—wet all over, red-faced, and her hair all a-straggle. But she was alive, coughing and gasping for air and saying words I’d not think to hear from a young lady’s mouth.

  I got her up and took her to the shower room for I was feared of what could happen if she didn’t get cooled down right quick. She sputtered and cussed some more as the cold water hit her but in time she begun to catch her breath and come back to herself.

  “Well, Amarantha,” says she when I’d got her out of the nasty wet clothes and into a bathrobe. “I found plenty of proof but as I don’t have it in my possession, it would be my word against theirs.”

  Miss Cochrane set there a minute, just a-fuming. She put me in mind of a little black hen I once had. That biddy purely hated the rain and would shake her feathers and fuss like one thing everwhen she got wet.

  Finally she said, “I don’t know—I’m very much of a mind to attend their lecture on Spiritualism and stand up and denounce them as the frauds they are. But I’m afraid that any accusation I might make could too easily be dismissed as the fabrications of a muckraking reporter.”

  She looked up at the Regulator clock on the wall. “Twenty after seven. Supper is almost over and people will be pouring out of the dining room soon. I’d better get to my room—I look such a fright. Oh, how I wish I could have—”

  “Miss Cochrane,” I said, for a thought was forming itself in my mind. “If you don’t care, I believe I might have an idea for a stunt that will be the undoing of those three.”

  I went to the cabinet in the corner of the room where I knew the supplies was kept. There I found a great tin canister of the talc the doctor sold in little envelopes for the easing of rashes. Then I picked up the bundle of Miss Cochrane’s wet clothes.

  She was looking at me all amazed but I just smiled and put a finger to my lips. “I’ll explain when we get to your room. And then I’ll fix you up so’s you can go to that lecture. And won’t they be surprised when they see you!”

  Chapter 36

  My Sister, My Hero

  Saturday, June 9

  Gloria and I stood frozen in place, watching as Joss looked from Nigel’s body sprawled beside the revolving chair to the gun in his—her—hand as if wondering how it came to be there. Under the blond hairdo—a perfect copy of Gloria’s, copper highlights and all— Joss’s face was drained of color, except for the bright lipstick and the two slashes of rouge—also a perfect duplication of my sister’s makeup.

  As Joss stepped down from the chair, he reached behind him with his free hand and tugged at the ties securing the pink cape. Pulling it off, he dropped it over Nigel with a flirtatious swirl. Then he looked at Glory and me.

  “He shouldn’t have tried to take the gun away from me. I really didn’t have a choice, did I?” He sighed and shook his head in peevish annoyance. “Well, anyhoo … we’ll just have to make the best of a bad situation, won’t we, girls?”

  To my dismay, I realized that Joss had exactly caught Gloria’s accent and mannerisms. What had been at first annoying, then almost endearing, in my sister was nausea-inducing seen through the deeply disturbing carnival mirror likeness that was Joss.

  I put one arm around Glory and hugged her to me. Her entire body was trembling but she managed to put an arm around my waist and give me a weak, terrified smile. Joss seemed not to notice. He was the center of his own tiny spotlight, strutting in hi
s finery and caught up in some fierce, sick game of make-believe.

  Putting a coy finger to his glossy red lips, Joss raised his newly shaped eyebrows in mock perplexity. “I wonder what dear old Dad would say if he knew I’d actually killed someone? Maybe he’d think I was a man at last. There’s irony for you.”

  He giggled. Stepping carefully around Nigel’s body, Joss studied his face and hair in the wall mirror once more. “Such a waste—he was a genius colorist, don’t you agree, my little mother? Look at those highlights—exactly like yours.”

  Gloria gulped. “Yes, they’re beautiful. But, Jo— I mean, Dana, hadn’t we better leave right away? There’s just a chance you and I could get out of here and to an airport. And then we could go anywhere you like—South America … or Thailand or … anywhere. But we need to go now. Don’t you hear the sirens?”

  Joss lifted his head, his dark eyes glittering with manic excitement. Mixed in with the carnival sounds there were, indeed, sirens. But whether they were wailing for us, I couldn’t say.

  I knew what my sister was doing: She hoped to get Joss out the door and away from me. Little Glory, whom I’d always dismissed as the most frivolous of lightweights, was showing unimaginable courage. In spite of that, I couldn’t let her slip out into those crowds with this delusional bastard who’d already killed once.

  “No, Glory.” I tightened my grip around her shoulders. “No way. You can’t walk out of here with him. You see what he’s capable of. He’s insane and god knows what he might do—”

  The ludicrously tall imitation of my petite sister snarled at me, the perfectly made-up face contorting into a hideous caricature. “You can shut your mouth, Aunt E. You’ve been against me from the beginning, haven’t you? We both know that.”

  With appalling clarity, I saw the revolver rise till I was looking down the black hole of the barrel. From a long way off I heard Joss say, “You’re another I need to be rid of.”

  There was a shriek. “Not my sister!” Gloria cried and I felt a jolt as she twisted free and pushed me to the side. At the same time, another shot rang out and I saw her collapse on the floor in front of me. Outside, the sirens were screaming and an amplified voice was shouting for Joss to put down his weapon and come to the door with his hands up.