Comes the Dark

by Celia Ashley

  Dan suppressed a sigh of relief he had no desire for Jamie to hear. “Maris is cleared, then?”

  “No. This man was a relative of hers. It’s conceivable they could have been working together. There’s the little issue of her coming to town a day earlier than she claimed. I need to talk to her. Where is she?”

  “I haven’t any idea. You know I don’t. And I need to find her as badly as you do. I’m afraid—” He couldn’t tell Jamie about the apparition imploring Dan to help Maris. Despite Jamie’s own experience with Maris—an experience he would likely dismiss—he would never believe Dan about something like that. “Maris had this sense of impending danger, of doom. She thought I was the one in peril, but she was wrong about that.”

  “Stauffer, you’re pitiful.”

  Dan persisted. “Any sign of her car?”

  “None.”

  “I’m going to look for it on my own.” Dan rose.

  Jamie did, too, closing his hand around Dan’s arm. “Don’t. We’re searching. I’ve put an all-points bulletin out. You need to stay clear.”

  Dan shoved Jamie’s hand from his arm, reaching past him to the desktop. “You dropped the ball by not putting the sketch of the guy I suspected was the hit and run driver in the papers. This is him. Maris’s cousin?” He yanked an enlarged mug shot from the paperwork on Jamie’s desk and shook it in Jamie’s face. “Age him, and you’ll find the guy who was in the hospital. That’s why he looked familiar to me. The family resemblance. And to her, too, though she couldn’t place the reason.” Or had she known him all along, her upset merely the result of him showing up at the hospital and accosting her in the elevator? Dan angrily dismissed the notion. “If he was the driver who tried to run her down, whether they were working together or not, his intention now is to eliminate her. We have to get to her before he does.”

  “And if the hit and run was a random occurrence, and she left with Robert Mabry?”

  Dan waved an arm in rejection. “What was it you kept saying about too much coincidence? This is the missing piece of the puzzle, Jamie. It has to be.”

  Heart racing, Dan hurried from Jamie’s office and back out to his car. Jamie followed, refusing to be left behind, specifically, because he didn’t trust Dan’s motivations. He sat in the passenger seat, mouth set in a grim line. Dan was grateful for the man’s company. Dawn was a long way off, and the dark hours of night could toy with a man’s psyche, especially when already troubled. Even though Jamie remained silent, his solid, angry presence was a comfort.

  Alcina Cove Nature Preserve had been a bust. Not a single car in the lot, not even the usual late-night parkers. Dan had continued up and down the roads, knowing his efforts were a waste of gas. As Jamie had pointed out before lapsing into silence, Maris could have a damned good head start on her way to Canada.

  “She’s not running. Not from me. Not even from you and your accusations. She’s innocent, Jamie. She’s hiding. Or we’re too late, and he got to her already.”

  “She took everything with her. There was no sign of force. Stauffer, you have to face up to reality. You’re wasting your time.”

  “Suppose she’s had another mental breakdown?” He didn’t like to think that, but the possibility existed, given the stress and her recent injury. “She could be somewhere contemplating the little she might have left of life before she ends it.”

  “And you want to save her. How the hell could the cool, calm, collected guy I’ve known for all these years fall in love with a whacko in a matter of days?”

  “Don’t call her that.”

  “Sorry.”

  “And I have fallen in love with her. I make no apologies for that.”

  Dan continued up the winding road toward the stretch where he’d stopped to show Maris the outstanding view. If her mental state was impaired, she might choose such a spot. The overlook was empty. Dan pulled the car to the side and got out, checking for signs a vehicle had recently been there or gone over the edge. It wasn’t a steep drop, but enough. His flashlight cut a swath through the darkness. Soon the light was joined by another. Jamie stood beside him, raising the electric torch above his head and aiming downward for a better angle.

  “I get it, Dan. I really do. I’m just doing my job.”

  “I know.” Dan lowered the flashlight to his side, staring toward the ocean flickering in starlight and the constant, rotating beam of the lighthouse, its tall, solid shadow black against the navy sky. “Shit.”

  “What?”

  “I know where she is.”

  Chapter 25

  Maris’s stress-induced memory loss had cleared. She sat with her back against the wall, her body jolting forward with every pounding beat of her heart. In the room above, two men argued, voices muffled by the thickness of the iron-bound wood of the trapdoor in the middle of the ceiling. It had taken her some time to locate the door in the dark. Now that she had, she avoided it, stayed in the corners, because she didn’t want finding her to be easy. Not this time.

  She’d realized in the past—hours, minutes, days?—that she was in the lighthouse. An underground storage cellar, most likely. The beating of the surf against the rocky base in a constant growl beneath her was discernible through the thickness of the stone structure.

  She’d fallen a few minutes earlier, trying to ease her position. The uneven stones of the floor, slick with damp, were her undoing. She was wet and cold, disoriented, and now bleeding from a cut on her lip. Through flaring nostrils, the iron scent of blood was strong.

  Out of the blackness, a finger traced her ear, touching the feather hanging against her chin. She froze. She’d felt no one come near. The space wasn’t large. She knew she was alone.

  “Who is that?”

  Be strong, child. He is coming. Hold on.

  “Aunt Alva? I don’t want him to. He’ll be killed. At least one of the men up there has a gun. Dan won’t know. He won’t be prepared.”

  Maris, I’m so sorry…

  What the hell did that mean? “You can’t let him come here. Stop him. Please, please stop him.”

  I am calling him here. It’s all I can do.

  “No. No!”

  The trapdoor lifted. A beam of light shot across the floor but didn’t reach her. “Who the fuck are you talking to?”

  “Myself.” Quickly, she scuttled as noiselessly as possible to a new position before the light found her. As of yet, neither man appeared willing to join her in the cellar. Better to keep it that way.

  “Of course you are.” The trapdoor slammed shut, plunging her back into darkness.

  “Aunt Alva?” she whispered. She received no response.

  On hands and knees, Maris made her way once more around the perimeter of the storeroom in search of a weapon. A useless task that kept her mind busy, made her believe she was doing something to save herself. But she would never be able to defend herself against both men. She likely couldn’t hold off one.

  When the man from the hospital had shown up at Dan’s door, she’d been shocked and wary, but willing to listen to him. After all, if he felt as guilty as Dan had hinted, she would accept his apology and exonerate him because she knew very well what guilt could do when it took control. But he hadn’t wanted to apologize. And he hadn’t only been at the hospital. He freely admitted within minutes that he had been the man in the house who had attacked Dan and fled, assuring her how easily he could have killed him instead. At gunpoint, he’d forced her to gather her things and accompany him out to her car when he made her drive. The other man followed in a car behind them. When they reached the lighthouse, she got her first good look at him. Covered in tattoos, he’d be hard to forget. He was the same man who had come to the door of her room at the motel.

  She had learned from eavesdropping on their loud conversation above that the man at Dan’s door was the one who had run her down. However, riddled with guilt over the incident he was not. The tattooed man’s job had been to watch Maris. From thei
r loud exchange, she understood he’d never been meant to approach her. The first man was angry about the fact he’d knocked on her door. Suddenly hearing Alva’s muffled name, Maris gasped and strained to hear more.

  “Ouch.” A sharp point had jabbed her palm. She felt around until she located what appeared by shape to be an ancient nail, about four inches in length. She placed it in her pocket and continued listening. Without warning, the overhead door opened again. Maris scurried back against the wall.

  “I said no!” The first man.

  “What does it matter?” The second, bearing the abundance of tattoos. “You’re going to kill her anyway. I might as well get a little something out of her beforehand.”

  Maris reached into her pocket and removed the nail, wrapping her fist around it, point sticking out the side by her pinkie for force.

  “You fucking idiot. It needs to appear to be a suicide.”

  Maris sucked in a breath. What the hell?

  “Rape will be evident on the body.”

  A leg swung into the opening, dangling down. The man’s body shadowed the room where Maris crouched, ready to fight with all she had in her. “Depends on how long she’s in the ocean, doesn’t it?”

  “I need her to be identifiable.”

  Suddenly, the man leaned forward, waving a flashlight around, the tattooed tiger on his neck momentarily highlighted until the beam came down and pinned her against the wall. “You hear?” he said. “He needs you to be identifiable. I’m not so sure I care about that.”

  So saying, he dropped down into the cellar with her.

  There was no preamble, no cat and mouse kind of game. He wanted it over, she supposed, before the man upstairs could stop him, and so he lunged at her without any hesitation. His mistake. She plunged the nail into the side of his neck as soon as his body came within striking distance. He jerked upright, struck his head on the ceiling, and collapsed back down, clawing at the rusted iron spike skewering his throat. Not deep enough. Still trying to pull it out, he rose up onto his knees.

  “You fucking cu—”

  An explosion rent the air, deafening her as she fell backward. The tattooed man sprawled across the stones, clearly dead.

  “I told him not to do it,” said the man above.

  Maris raised her gaze to the man’s face outlined grotesquely in the opening by the rolling flashlight of the dead one. She uncovered her ears. “Why did you do that?”

  “Would you rather I hadn’t? I finished the job you started. Birds of a feather we are, wouldn’t you say?”

  She rose onto her knees, moving away from the body. “Who are you?”

  “Your own flesh and blood, my dear.”

  Maris stopped. Her stomach coiled. “I’m sorry…what?”

  The gun he’d recently used reappeared. “Time for you to climb out of there. Up you go. Any other weapons you might have picked up from the debris down there kindly re-deposit on the floor.”

  He spoke as if they were discussing a grocery list. Maris made her way to the opening, bowed awkwardly as she crossed the floor. If she stayed down here, she didn’t stand a chance. Might not have one above, either, but at least she could pretend. “I don’t have anything else.” She yanked the pockets of her pajamas inside out as she stood below the man. He rose up, waving the gun in a slow arc to the right.

  “Can you pull yourself out? You look strong enough.”

  She managed, assisted by a fistful of her shirt in his hand, accompanied by a small tearing sound as he tossed her onto the floor above. She feigned a need to catch her breath as she looked around, attempting to assess the situation.

  “I couldn’t let him do that to you, you know.”

  “Yes, I know,” she said from her position on the floorboards. “It would have been inconvenient to your plan to make my death look like a suicide.” He laughed, startling her, the sound loud and familiar. She rolled onto her back, staring up at him. “You sound like…my father?”

  “Not your father. Not exactly. Your aunt, my freakish mother. Alva Mabry.”

  Oh God…

  Maris dug in her heels, pushing backward across the floor to increase the distance between them. “Alva didn’t have any children. She never married.”

  The man sat down on a decrepit chair. It appeared they were in the light keeper’s living quarters, long abandoned and falling to ruin. “Wrong. And right. Out of wedlock, I believe is the expression.” He leaned forward. “You and she weren’t the only gifted ones in recent generations. I have it, too. The Sight or whatever people are calling it nowadays. It frightened her because I’m male, or perhaps only made her jealous. Whatever the reason, she couldn’t stand to have me around. Got rid of me. While you, she nurtured like a little pet bunny, so soft and sweet and malleable.”

  Maris managed to gain her feet. He followed her movements with the muzzle of the handgun.

  “She used to write me letters. Told me about you. Like it wasn’t killing me, bit by bit, receiving letters from my mother while in prison and hearing nothing but enthusiasm over a child who wasn’t hers. She’d been oh-so-shocked when I chose to lead the life I did. What the fuck did she think would happen to her little boy? Rubbing you in did nothing to soothe my wounds, believe me.” He pulled a battered book from beneath his thigh and waved it at her. “And it wasn’t like you weren’t damaged goods. Just like me.”

  Maris stared at her diary in his hand. “You’ve read it? How much of it?”

  “All of it. I took it that night I was in your boyfriend’s house.”

  “But it was in my luggage.”

  “It was indeed.”

  “Which was in the room with me.”

  “Yes.”

  Maris shuddered at the knowledge this man had been in the guest room with her while she slept. How had she not known, not sensed him there?

  “I found the passages from your time in the nuthouse the most interesting. You blamed my mother just as much as I did. There’s a lot of time afterward where you didn’t write at all. They tell you to do that, those doctors? To keep track of your thoughts, learn to recognize your own instability before it got the better of you? Me, too. It doesn’t work, does it? Alva fucked us both up, didn’t she?”

  Unable to respond, Maris merely shook her head.

  “I suppose you think I should take pity on you because of that. But I lost the capacity for sympathy a long time ago.”

  “Is that…is that why you killed her? Because she turned her back on you? It wasn’t the money?”

  His head jerked up from a momentary contemplation of the diary. She could see the family resemblance now. No wonder he had unnerved her in the hospital. “What money?”

  “In Alva’s Will. She left the entirety of her three million dollar estate to be divided between direct descendants of the sisters’ bloodline. You and I are it. We’re all that’s left.”

  The wheels turned in obvious cogitation behind his eyes. Her father’s eyes. Her eyes. Alva’s eyes. Except the color. Where theirs were or had been gray as smoke, his were nearly black.

  He laughed again, with quick, breathless intensity. “God, why the hell didn’t I see that?”

  “Would it have made a difference, knowing she meant to take care of you in the end?”

  He rocked a little from side to side, his lower lip pushed out. “Nope, probably not.”

  Maris’s gaze darted to the open door behind him and back to his face. “You…you were in her house, weren’t you? You laid the cards into a new position on the table. Was there a message in the layout?”

  “For who? Alva? She doesn’t give a shit anymore. No, I was just fucking with the cops.”

  “And now? Why do you want me?”

  He smiled. “Because it’s your turn.”

  Maris backed against the wall. “Why? You can’t mean to kill me because you were resentful as a fully grown man of a little girl who had no idea who you were or that you’d been so hurt.”
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  He shook his head. “Uh-uh. That’s not why. I heard her call you in her dying moments. Not out loud. You know the type of calling I mean. And I knew—knew, understand?—that you were coming. I have no desire to go back to prison. So I kept an eye on you. That guy downstairs? He helped me a bit. We knew each other in prison. I watched the mistakes you made and tried to figure out a way to lay the blame on you. The cops did that for me. All I had to do was sit back and let it happen. Unfortunately, you saw me fishing on the jetty. I wasn’t certain you hadn’t recognized something in me—a similarity to family, a kindred gift, something—so I decided not take any chances. Hitting you with my car should have done the job, but I didn’t have enough speed.”

  Maris’s chilled body turned colder. She shivered.

  “Don’t be afraid. It won’t take long. You see, wracked with guilt over your aunt’s murder, you’ll decide to end it all. The three million dollars really makes this an easier decision all around.”

  “How do you know the police won’t suspect you, too? They were looking for family members. If you make an appearance to claim the inheritance when I’m gone, they’ll start checking into your whereabouts. You know they will. You said you’ve been in prison. That’s because you got caught. People aren’t stupid. Well, I suppose some are.”

  He rose, quivering with a barely contained wrath, the gun swerving back and forth in a grip that looked too tight for safety. “Don’t you say that. Don’t you dare say something like that about me.”

  “What makes you think I’m talking about you?” Maris demanded.

  “I don’t think. I know. You forgot what I told you already? I’m reading you the way you read that boyfriend of yours. Dan, is it? And a cop, too. Lovely.”

  Maris swore, lunging past him for the door at his back. He grabbed her arm and yanked her around, the gun against her ribs. “We’re going outside. Before it’s full light. I don’t want you floating around in the tide too long or battered up too badly against those rocks, but I don’t want anyone to see me with you either. Don’t need witnesses.”