Shiver

by Cynthia Cooke

  “I didn’t believe her. None of us did.” Something broke in the chief’s face, and Riley had to look away. “All these years, he’s been out there killin’ and I could have stopped it, I could have found justice for Tommy. Dammit!” The chief swept Devra’s books and all the papers from her file off his desk. “Mandy!” he bellowed.

  “Yeah, Chief,” she said a little reluctantly, as she swung her head in through the opened door.

  “Go into the bathroom and bring Miss Miller back in here.”

  Startled, Mandy stood rooted in the doorway.

  “Now!”

  “Could, Chief, but—er—she’s not here.”

  Riley looked up in surprise, his gut tightening as the implications of her words set in.

  “Then where the dickens is she?”

  Mandy’s eyes widened as her tone dissolved into a defensive whine. “She said she left something back at the hotel that she wanted you to see. She said she’d be right back. I’m sorry, Chief.”

  Chief Marshall looked at Riley.

  He shook his head. “There was nothing.”

  Mandy cleared her throat. “Would you mind if I take another look at that fax from New Orleans?”

  The chief handed her the fax. “Why, do you know him, Mandy?”

  “No, sir, but I’ve seen him.”

  The chief stood. “When? Where?”

  “Just a few minutes ago, lurking around outside on the sidewalk. Right before Miss Miller left.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Devra needed answers. She tried to focus on the winding road ahead of her, but tears kept filling her eyes and blurring her vision. She wasn’t sure when it had happened, but she’d fallen in love with Riley. She’d even started to believe her life was going to be different. That she wouldn’t have to live under a cloud of suspicion and danger, that they actually had a chance at a future together.

  She’d imagined Sunday dinners with his family, going for rides on Babe, boating across the bayou, making love day and night. Fresh tears rolled down her cheeks. They might even have had children of their own. But she’d been kidding herself, and now she would pay the price.

  She pulled to a stop in front of her parents’ home. This time, she wouldn’t leave until she learned the truth of who she was, and why they’d given her up and left her at the sanitarium. She turned off the car, then ran around the side of the house to the kitchen door. Through the window, she could see her parents sitting at the kitchen table, each lost in their own thoughts.

  Her mama looked up as she pulled open the door. “Devra, you came back,” she said looking pleased.

  Devra didn’t say a word, just walked into the kitchen and sat down across from them. “I need to know the truth. It’s just us now. Spill.”

  Surprise and confusion crinkled her mama’s brow. “What are you talking about?”

  Her papa just stared, his face a blank mask.

  Devra took a deep breath, then asked quickly before she lost her nerve, “Are you my parents?”

  Her mother gasped. “Of course we’re your parents. Your papa and I love you, Devy. I know you don’t believe that, but it’s true.”

  “You’re right. I don’t believe it. And the chief wants to know where I was born. Where did we live before we came here? How did I break my pinky?”

  Her mama’s eyes widened, her fingers fluttering up her neck to cover her mouth.

  “What happened to me?” Devra asked. “Who am I?”

  “We raised you,” her papa said. “We tended you when you were sick, we pulled you into our bed at night when you were scared, we love you.”

  “But are you my parents? Did you give birth to me? I need to know, because it’s the only justification I can find as to why you dumped me off in a mental institution and never came back.”

  An anguished moan ripped from her mama’s throat and her eyes filled with tears. Devra watched her, heard her, with an odd sense of detachment. A part of her knew she should back off, knew she should give her mama a chance to pull herself together, but she couldn’t. She’d lost too much of her life to give any more, and now she’d lost Riley, too. She sighed. “Please, just tell me the truth.”

  Her mama stood. “We need to tell her.”

  “Lydia,” her papa warned.

  “It’s time, William.” Lydia walked to the closet in the hall, opened it and pulled a metal box off the top shelf way in the back.

  “Don’t, Lydia,” her papa said, fatigue etching heavy lines into his face.

  Devra stared at her papa, then focused on the box in her mother’s hands. A strange trepidation kicked up her heartbeat. Her future was in that box, along with all the secrets from her past. It was the key to unlocking the nightmare that had been her life and, all this time, it’d been right there in the hall closet of her childhood home.

  “I have to, William. I should have years ago. We both should have.” With a thud, her mama dropped the box on the yellow Formica table, then fished in the drawer next to the refrigerator for the small key. Her hands shook as she turned open the lock and lifted the lid. Inside was a manila envelope that had discolored with time.

  Suddenly, Devra was finding it difficult to breathe. Her mama sat in the chair next to her. “Your papa and I promised the Lord to love you and protect you each and every day of our lives, and we’ve tried to do that. That is why we chose not to tell you what I’m about to tell you now. It’s only because we feel—”

  William grunted.

  “—I feel it would serve you better to know the truth about your past that I’m telling you now. Because behind it all, Devra, it doesn’t matter where you came from or who your parents were, because we are your family and you are loved.” Tears misted her eyes.

  Devra didn’t respond, couldn’t. A lump had formed in her throat making it difficult for her to swallow. With trembling fingers, her mama dug into the envelope and pulled out a yellowed photograph of a smiling man standing with his hands on the shoulders of a young boy. Sitting next to them was a woman bouncing a toddler on her knee. Devra took the picture from her mama’s fingers.

  As she looked at it, she thought she should feel something. Obviously, these people had some connection to her. But she didn’t feel anything but numb. “Who are they?” she asked.

  “That’s my brother and his wife,” her papa said.

  “You have a brother?” she asked, surprised.

  “He was killed a long time ago,” her mama said softly. “So was his wife.”

  Devra stared closely at the picture, at the little baby in the frilly white dress with a head full of tight yellow curls. “Is that me?”

  Her mother’s eyes closed as pain filled her face. “Yes,” she said softly, so softly Devra almost didn’t hear her. She stared at the baby a moment longer, awed by the happy smile and chubby little legs. Then she perused the faces of her real mother and father. They looked like such nice people. They looked as if they loved her. They looked as if they would have fought for her.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you weren’t my parents? Why didn’t you give me the chance, give them the chance to—” She’d meant for the words to come out strong, demanding, insistent, giving them no room to back down or retreat, but at the last moment, her throat tightened and tears filled her eyes.

  As they cleared, she focused on the boy in the picture. Something quivered inside her. “Who is the boy?” she asked, unable to keep the tremor out of her voice. Because she knew, deep down, she knew who the boy was.

  Her mama looked at her papa, who shook his head, his eyes imploring her to keep silent.

  “Tell me, Mama. Is this boy my brother?”

  She nodded, some secret pain aging her face and dulling her eyes.

  Devra stopped breathing. “I don’t understand,” she whispered. “Where is he? What happened to him?”

  Taking great pains, her mama opened an old newspaper article and smoothed it across the table.

  “You shouldn’t have kept that, Lydia,” Willi
am admonished.

  Devra’s stomach turned and the room tilted as the bold, black headlines leapt off the page. Thirteen-year-old Boy Bludgeons Mother and Father to Death. Baby Survives.

  “You are that baby,” Lydia whispered.

  RILEY TURNED to the chief. “We have to find her.”

  “Mandy, call Mrs. Hutchinson and see if she’s there. Call her parents, too, then put an APB out on Officer MacIntyre’s vehicle.”

  Riley quickly wrote down the color, model and plate number for her. A homicidal maniac was after Devra and if Riley didn’t act fast, he was going to lose her. An overwhelming sensation of helplessness overcame him. Evil wouldn’t win. Not again, it couldn’t.

  Riley stood to grab his jacket off the coat tree by the door and stopped. “Chief, she has my gun.”

  “What?”

  Riley’s cell phone rang from his pocket.

  “Riley.” Tony’s voice was triumphant. “John Miller’s last known residence is New Orleans, before that Miami, three years before that Portland and before that Seattle. Every city where one of our murders took place.”

  “She’s at her parents’,” Mandy called.

  “Tell them to keep her there,” the chief ordered. “We’re on our way.”

  Riley and Chief Marshall hurried out of the building to the chief’s car.

  “Sorry, Tony,” Riley said into the phone. “And before that?”

  “He lived in a mental institution in Idaho. They released him the year he turned twenty-three.”

  Riley’s blood went cold. “How old was Devra when he was released?”

  Riley could hear Tony doing a quick calculation. “Thirteen.”

  “We’ve got your man,” he said to the chief. “Released from an Idaho mental institution the year your son died.”

  “Riley, he killed his parents. And get this, there was a toddler in the house, but he didn’t touch her. It was Devra, Riley. She’s his sister.”

  “WHO WAS THAT on the phone?” Devra asked.

  “Mandy, down at headquarters. She wants you to stay here. The chief is on his way.”

  “On his way to arrest me,” Devra muttered. “For murders I didn’t commit. He killed Tommy.” She poked the picture of her brother. “He has the same evil eyes as the man I saw in the woods that day. I told you it wasn’t me, but you didn’t believe me. No one believed me. You were all so quick to throw me into an institution, to tell me I was sick.”

  “Devra,” her papa said. “We only wanted to protect you from whatever evil possessed this young man. He was a good boy, but he turned bad. He killed his parents, my brother, right after he turned thirteen. After what had happened to Tommy, we were afraid the same sickness had taken root in you. We were afraid the authorities would start poking around and everyone in town would know about the evil in your blood.”

  Devra looked at her papa and felt nothing but cold fury. How could he have been so misguided?

  “Where is my brother now?” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a shadow pass in front of the window. She turned, but it was gone.

  “Where he’s always been. At Willoughby’s Mental Institution in Idaho.”

  Devra frowned. “Are you sure he’s still there? When was the last time you checked?”

  “The local police checked out your story that a man had killed Tommy, but you barely had a description,” her mama said. “You had Tommy’s blood all over you, and the rock used to kill him was in your hand.”

  Devra blew her hair back from her face, grabbed the newspaper clipping and the pictures and slipped them back into the envelope.

  “Adopting you was the best thing that ever happened to your papa and me, even after everything that happened with Tommy. We love you now as much as we did the day we brought you home to us.”

  “You abandoned me.” She stood. “You dumped me off in that torture chamber and left me there without a second glance. You never even came for a visit.”

  “We did come,” her mama said softly. “We came every Saturday and watched you from outside the gate. We couldn’t bear to go through the week without seeing for ourselves that you were okay.”

  Surprised, Devra stared into her mama’s red, swollen eyes. “But I don’t understand. I never saw you.”

  “It was the doctors,” her papa said. “They were afraid our presence would disturb you. They said you hadn’t accepted your illness, that you were trying to hide it from them, and until you accepted you were sick, you wouldn’t get better.

  “You always looked so peaceful sitting under the trees, writing in your journal.”

  Emotion swelled in Devra’s chest and rose in her throat, making it hard to speak. “I hated it inside the sanitarium—the smells, the noise. I stayed outside as often as I could.”

  “We just wanted to help you. We were so afraid.” Her mother dropped her face into her hands and cried.

  “One Saturday, we drove up there and you were gone.” Her papa’s eyes reddened and watered. He turned away.

  Stunned, Devra sat back down. She’d never seen her papa cry. Not even the day he’d left her at the sanitarium. Tears spilled over onto her cheeks as her heart breaking overwhelmed her. She’d been wrong about them. All these years, she’d been so wrong. They did love her, they had cared.

  “We didn’t think we’d ever see you again,” her mama said, sniffling. “But here you are, a woman with a life of your own.”

  “It’s been a hard life, Mama. A life of always looking over my shoulder, always on the run.”

  “How can we help you, Devra?” her papa asked.

  “I should disappear. Go where no one can find me. Especially him.” She pointed to his picture once more. “What’s his name?”

  “Johnny. Johnny Miller,” her papa said with a small shake of his head.

  “Devra, you can’t leave,” her mama pleaded. “The chief is on his way.”

  “I’m not going to let them lock me up again. Chief Marshall is convinced I killed his son. But now I know different, now I know it was my brother.”

  “You can’t spend the rest of your life running and hiding,” her papa said. “You need to fight for your future.”

  She stared at him, afraid to trust the strength flowing through her. They believed her. “You sound like Riley.”

  Go back to the beginning and start from there. Riley’s words whispered through her mind. “I remember this house,” she said lifting the envelope. “The one in the picture. I dreamed about it earlier. I think it’s all coming back. I think I’m beginning to remember what happened.”

  “You were too young. Barely three.”

  “I remember the floor, the blood.” A shiver coursed through her. “I’m going back there.”

  “Let me go with you,” her papa said.

  She was tempted. But she knew what would happen if she did, and if she had to watch her papa die, she really would go insane. “I’m sorry, but this is something I have to do on my own. I’m going to find this brother of mine, and I’m going to take my life back.”

  “Please, Devy, let the authorities handle this,” her mama pleaded.

  “I wish I could. I wish I could trust them. But I don’t.”

  “What about that young man of yours?”

  “He doesn’t believe in me either.” The words hurt, but she knew in her heart they were true. She opened the screen door. “But I’ll prove them all wrong.”

  Without glancing back, Devra climbed into the truck, turned on the ignition and buckled her seat belt. As she pulled down the driveway, something behind one of the tall pine trees caught her eye. As she passed, she glanced behind it, but didn’t see anything. She was jumping at shadows, she thought as she settled deeper into her seat. She turned onto the main road, heading east away from Rosemont, away from the chief and away from Riley.

  Riley. He was probably furious at her. She pushed him out of her mind. The only chance she had of winning him back was to prove her innocence and for the first time in her life, she finally
had something to go on, she finally had hope.

  She adjusted her rearview mirror. Eyes as black as a Washington night sky stared back at her through the mirror, close enough to bore into her soul and burn her with those red glints of laughter. She stared, frozen. Her knuckles whitened as she gripped the steering wheel. Her vision shot back to the road, then back to the rearview mirror. He was gone. She imagined him, she thought, but was afraid to turn and look, afraid that she hadn’t imagined him and he was actually there, waiting for her.

  “What do you want?” she said, her voice quavering.

  Silence filled the space.

  He’s not there, she told herself. You imagined him. She slowed, gathering the nerve to turn and look, to see for herself that there was no one in the back seat.

  “You can run, but you can’t hide. Not from me.”

  Devra’s heart slammed into her chest. She refused to look in the mirror. He was there. God help her, he was in the car. Adrenaline surged through her. She hit the brakes hard. The Expedition lurched and spun onto the shoulder. Her head slammed into the steering wheel. Pain erupted across her forehead.

  She stayed like that for a long moment, afraid to move, afraid to see him. Fear quickened her blood and sent it roaring through her ears. She forced herself to lift her head from the steering wheel, to turn and look into the back seat—into the face of her nightmares.

  Into the face of her brother.

  He smiled—his teeth gleaming and white and perfect. “Peekaboo, Devy.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Stunned, Riley stared at William. “What do you mean she’s gone?” Fury doused with fear surged through him. “There’s a serial killer out there stalking Devra and you let her leave?”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. MacIntyre, but she doesn’t trust you.”

  “She said you don’t believe in her,” Lydia added.

  Riley cringed. He’d had his doubts, but he hadn’t said a word. How had she known?