Winter’s End: Winter Black Series: Book Nine

by Stone, Mary

  She turned her back on his approach, and Winter could tell she was enjoying the game of waiting for him.

  “Auntie Lynn!” the boy yelled, jumping into the air with excitement.

  For her part, Lynn acted as if he’d suddenly popped from the ground in front of her and gave a squeak that made the boy laugh. “You’re a sneaky little monster.”

  His grinned widened as he made his hands into claws and gave a big, raucous roar. “Auntie Lynn! Guess what!”

  Aunt Lynn?

  The name triggered memories, stories told to her long ago. Recognition flared. So, this was Winter’s great aunt, a woman Winter would have liked to have known. She looked quick, friendly, and open. But there was a world of pain hidden in her eyes. Heartache, trial, and sorrow marched hand in hand with her sweetness. Maybe it only made her all the more beautiful, the pain nothing more than a frame to showcase her uncommon grace and courage.

  “William Black!” The woman scolded the troublemaker with mock fierceness and knelt down to the boy’s eye level. “I swear, you will be the death of me, you surely will. Sneaking up on a body like that. That’s just rude.”

  Winter drew in her breath quickly, feeling the pain flutter in her chest at the name. Bill Black, the man who raised her, the man she’d been proud to call ‘Daddy.’

  William looked properly chastised, digging one bare toe in the grass, his head bowed under the onslaught of her words. Lynn grinned and flicked the boy’s nose with one long finger. “Now, what is it that I am supposed to guess?”

  “I caught a snake!” The boy raised his head, puffing out his chest with all the pride and self-confidence of a great hunter.

  There was nothing fake or pretend in her reaction this time. The shudder and contempt for such a pursuit were clearly genuine. “Good heavens!” She shook her head. “You need to let those things be, William. Someday, one of them will take a big bite out of you for your trouble!” She demonstrated by pretending to take a bite from his arm.

  Bill giggled and pulled his arm away.

  Aunt Lynn opened her mouth and took a breath to continue, but the words ended before they began. From the other side of the house, a door slammed. A screen door, by the empty rattling sound of it.

  A male voice boomed through the empty farmhouse. “Dammit, woman!”

  Winter caught her breath. In the logic of dreams and visions, the voice was as familiar to her as it was foreign. But the effect it had on Lynn was remarkable.

  The woman froze, a panic-stricken look running over her face.

  Winter knew that was the voice of Arthur, her husband, in the same way she knew the boy was her own father.

  “Where the hell are you?”

  “You run along home now, you hear me, William?” Lynn’s voice went quiet and cold. The fear in her eyes held weight. “Hurry! And don’t come back again until morning, you hear me?”

  “Lynn! Dammit!” It was Arthur, all right. Winter had seen family photographs, knew that fearsome countenance, all the more terrifying come to life. The fear came off Lynn in waves. He didn’t sound drunk, as he did most of the time. Now, he sounded weary and angry. “Get your ass in here!”

  Lynn’s thoughts ran through Winter’s mind. A sober and angry Arthur was much worse than a drunk and angry Arthur. And a drunk Arthur was bad enough.

  The boy lingered.

  For a moment, Lynn stared at him blankly, her eyes distant and strange. What did she see there in her mind’s eye? This much of her thoughts was a mystery. A memory perhaps, of something she couldn’t quite figure out how to escape. She blinked finally, seeing the boy still there. He was plucking at her arm in concern.

  “Go now!” She shooed the boy off, shoving him forcibly from her, and stood, smoothing her skirt and apron. She picked up the clothesbasket and walked into the house, her head held high and her back straight.

  Winter swallowed hard, realizing Lynn wasn’t as beaten as she’d first supposed. She felt the fierceness of Lynn’s resolve. The woman refused to enter the house already beaten down. It was a small defiance, but she clung to it hard.

  Arthur didn’t even wait for the door to close before attacking her verbally. “Well, there you are! Where the hell have you been?”

  Winter couldn’t hear the reply; her thoughts had gone back to Bill. She could see the child, half hidden behind the curtain of laundry on the line. He was already backing up, a look of abject terror in his eyes. Turned out that he had a right to look so afraid when the sound of flesh hitting flesh echoed over the fields, as did something that sounded suspiciously like a wooden chair being smashed into kindling. At the sound, Bill turned and fled to the edge of the cornfield.

  Blinking back angry tears, Winter watched the door to the house open and Lynn stumble free, holding her hand against her mouth to muffle her sobs.

  Bill watched her from the shelter of the cornfield as she fell under the starched white shirts and the bleached sheets that were still playing in the breeze, and the tiny radio that still spewed tinny rock and roll. A passing cloud obscured the sun, and the boy shuddered in the sudden darkness.

  She watched as Bill Black ran through the cornfield and back to his home like the devil himself was on his heels, his legs pumping, all thoughts of being the great snake hunter gone in a puff of fear. Arthur’s voice still echoed through the crops, as did the tears of Aunt Lynn. They seemed to follow him through the corn and past the tractor and all the way to his bedroom and under the bed.

  Lynn had died of natural causes, according to the archived newspapers, but it might be that the ‘natural” causes weren’t as natural as they were made out to be.

  Daddy.

  Her mind cried out against that thought. No. He was still her father. It didn’t matter what some journal said. Bill Black had been her father in every way that counted.

  Knock. Knock. Knock.

  The fields and the house all vanished as the door behind her rattled. Winter jerked awake, disoriented, not sure where she was. The door rattled again. In a rush, it all came back to her, riding the memory of the dream.

  Autumn. Autumn had come.

  “Hang on!” she called to the front door and levered herself from the chair to answer the summons. For a moment, she caught her balance against the wall as dueling images of her apartment and the farmhouse fought for her attention. It was as though she had to choose which reality to follow. She longed to comfort that boy. For a moment, she hesitated, lingering there, not quite ready to let the image go.

  It was too late. The dream boy wavered in her gaze, dissipating, an unsettled ghost drifting back to the netherworld. She shook her head and opened the door to see Autumn bundled in her coat, shivering in the icy December wind.

  Autumn’s smile evaporated when she took in Winter’s expression. “Winter? Are you all right?” She searched Winter’s eyes as though for some clue or reassurance. She dug into her purse and pulled out a small pack of tissues. Winter didn’t need to be told that her nose had started bleeding. She took a tissue and pressed it under her nose.

  “I…” Winter looked back to the chair, unsettled under such tight scrutiny. “I had a…dream…a vision.”

  The farmhouse had faded, but the apartment hadn’t yet taken on the solidity of the real. The last tendrils of the dream clung to her like the smell of smoke from a fire. The enormity of the vision struck her as she pulled Autumn into the apartment. She spoke quickly, desperate to get the words out before the images were lost to her completely, before dream sense was replaced by cold hard logic and reality.

  “I think I know how Kilroy was related to my father…to Bill, not to me.” She turned and headed back to the living room and grabbed her coat. “Something in the old interviews, a connection that no one put together or maybe it didn’t matter…I don’t know.” She clung to that farmhouse, that woman under the wash who wept and hid her face from her vision. She tried to pull out any detail, any idea, but the images were too faded and becoming less and less real by the minute.
/>
  “Winter!” Autumn snapped to get her to pay attention. “What are you talking about? What’s going on?”

  It took a long moment for Winter to recall her thoughts. It only occurred to her belatedly that Autumn hadn’t shared the same vision with her. “Right. Right. Sorry. Bill Black was related to Douglas Kilroy. Ah…Arthur and Lynn…dammit…” The vision hadn’t added a last name, and she couldn’t remember what it might have been, either from family history or from the investigation into The Preacher. Yet, it seemed the most obvious thing, as if she’d known it all along, but it wasn’t there for her to hold on to.

  She quickly outlined what she remembered, stripping the emotion from the dream, trying to recall the details the way she’d been trained to as an agent. She wasn’t entirely successful in her efforts because tears pricked at the corners of her eyes as she finished, her body longing to weep for this stranger who’d died so senselessly years before she’d even been born.

  “Have you told anyone this?” Autumn asked her when she finished.

  “No. It just happened now. Besides, I can’t enter a vision into evidence, and until I can remember the last name and connect the dots, it’s not worth much. But it gives us a lead of sorts.” Winter shrugged on her jacket. “And it gives us a starting point.”

  “What starting point? It’s a vision…” Autumn rationalized, then subsided at the look Winter gave her. “I know, I know, I’m the last person to cast doubts considering what happens when I touch someone, but that still doesn’t clarify a starting point.”

  “Dream or not, it at least gives us somewhere to look,” Winter argued as she headed for the door. She stopped, her hand on the knob, twisting to meet Autumn’s gaze. “We’re going to look at the time around when I was born, or when I was conceived. If we can nail down the family connection and maybe figure out what my mother couldn’t…who my father was, that should be enough to pursue and take to Max.”

  Arthur might very well be still alive too.

  Only she didn’t say that part out loud. Some things were better left unsaid.

  13

  Noah’s finger hovered over his phone while his mind worked on ways to delay making the call he needed to make. What was it, that old story about someone tying a sword with a single strand of hair from the ceiling and letting it hang, point down, over someone seated in a throne? He couldn’t remember the whole story, something he’d heard in high school or college. Now here he stood, finger poised over a tiny picture of Winter’s face on the screen of his phone, wondering what that story felt like from the point of view of the sword.

  He punched the screen and the phone obediently called the woman he loved.

  In the years he’d worked in law enforcement, he’d had to make tough calls before, but this one was personal. Aiden had offered to deliver the punch, but this was Noah’s load to bear. The phone rang, and Noah shrank even farther into the corner where he huddled, not quite far enough away from everyone else, and far too conscious of the words he needed to say. With the amount of foot traffic in the hallway, privacy was going to be a relative thing, but at least it wasn’t the closed and confined space of the conference room where Bree and Aiden were buried in papers and keeping an ear out for whatever he was going to say to Winter.

  The phone rang again. And again.

  For that matter, what was he going to say to Winter? He should have thought this through before dialing. Usually, it was better to just state the bad news, and not try to lead into it. Especially with Winter. She preferred the direct approach, her attitude being to just let it out and deal with the fallout as it came.

  Another ring. Where are you? Noah gripped the phone harder.

  “Hang on.” Winter’s voice barely registered, it was so quiet. She sounded distracted, like she wasn’t all there.

  “Hello?” Noah called into the phone. He listened as background white noise and silence echoed back at him. He checked his volume control, but he had it at max already. He could tell that the connection to her phone was strong. It sounded like the phone was in motion. Was she driving?

  “Hello?” he called into the phone. When there was no answer, he strained to pull out the slightest sound that might give him an indication of where she was. All he could hear was traffic in the far distance, muted. She could be anywhere.

  “Noah, I’m sorry. I can’t…”

  He pressed the phone harder against his ear, trying to hear her words.

  “Winter!” he called into the phone. What was she doing? He hated how frantic he was beginning to feel, but he supposed such feelings under the circumstances would be normal. Her lunatic brother had sent that video to her, by name. Finding her wouldn’t be difficult. He glanced down the hallway, noting he was still mercifully alone as he leaned into his corner, listening to Winter say nothing at all.

  Suddenly, on the other end of the phone, the background silence became the usual life-blood sounds of the city on full volume.

  “Hi!” Winter’s voice seemed bright and almost…cheerful, the single syllable blasting out his eardrum.

  Noah hadn’t realized how hard he’d been straining to hear what was going on until she’d come back. For a moment, he had to hold the phone away from his ear. What the hell? Not that he wasn’t happy to hear her sound upbeat and more her old self. It was just…well...that she was upbeat and sounding like her old self. Not the same Winter he’d seen only hours before.

  What the hell was going on?

  “Sorry about that. I was in a library and they don’t much like cell phones there.” Okay, yes, she sounded better than she had been for a while. Something was up.

  He stiffened and the breath he’d been holding left in a long, weary exhale. “It’s okay. Having any luck?”

  Her tone was making him nervous. Her independent investigation wasn’t on the books. In fact, Max would only turn a blind eye just so far. Up until now, Winter had been limiting her involvement, keeping her digging to public records and doing research anyone else would be able to do without being a member of the FBI. While that was still a little gray, it was certainly legal, and frankly, she’d been saving him and Bree some time. Even if she ended up with dead ends, they were dead ends he could avoid.

  “Maybe.” Winter’s tone felt elusive. She was holding something back. He knew her too well.

  “What have you got?” he asked carefully, shooting another glance down the hall, noting a figure at the end, who’d appeared and was talking through an open doorway to someone he couldn’t see.

  “Nothing yet,” Winter said a little too quickly, “but I might have an angle to figure out the relationship between Kilroy and…” Winter paused so long Noah thought that the call might have dropped, “and my brother.”

  Noah blinked. This was new. “Really? Anything definite?”

  “Not yet, but we’re looking into it. How are you doing? I haven’t seen a lot of you lately.”

  “I know, been working on this, might not make it home tonight.”

  Winter sighed. He hated that sigh. The past weeks had been particularly hard on their relationship, and he could tell her patience in this regard was starting to wear a little thin. How much of that was hidden resentment that he was still on the case and she wasn’t, or how much was the simple fact that she missed him? He wasn’t sure anymore.

  When she spoke, her tone was muted. “I understand, and for what it’s worth, I know a lot of what you’re doing is for me, and I’m grateful. I just hope we can get this all finished and get our lives back.”

  Noah nodded, even though she couldn’t see him. In the meantime, he still had a purpose to this call, one he’d been trying hard to ignore. He took a steadying breath, trying to work up the courage to jump in and say what he needed to.

  “I’m working with Bree and Aiden, and we’re working up enough evidence to try DNA testing on Kilroy.”

  There. It was out.

  “Okay.” Winter sounded confused. “Why not just get into the database? If it’s official
record, it’s—”

  “There isn’t any.” Noah interrupted her before she could wander down the same rabbit trail he and Bree and Aiden had been on half the day.

  Silence. Dead silence. God, he wished he could see her face and know what she was thinking.

  Desperate to fill the silence, he tried to explain. “No one filed DNA evidence after The Preacher was caught.”

  “But…t-there was a ton of DNA involved, t-that was the whole…” Winter tripped over her words before her voice faded mid-sentence.

  “Yeah.” Noah took a deep breath. “There was. There seems to have been some kind of screw-up. None of it was kept.”

  “Great. That’s just…” She blew out a long breath that created static over the line. “So, now what?”

  “You know the procedure as well as we do. We need enough evidence to convince a judge to let us dig up the old man and take a fresh sample.”

  Winter swore. Some of her word choices were particularly creative. When she wound down, she huffed out a breath, gathering herself before speaking again. “Can I help?”

  He smiled. While the words were laced with heavy frustration, he loved how she was able to pull herself back on task even after being hit out of the blue with one more thing going wrong.

  “Yeah, you can. I’m sending you a file for an e-signature. We have your DNA in the agent death files.”

  She sucked in a breath. “Don’t call it that.”

  “Sorry.” Noah was genuinely sorry. It had been a long and arduous few weeks, and his sense of tact was failing fast. The ‘death file’ was a maudlin gallows humor way of dealing with the idea that every agent risked their death every day on the job. The files that stored DNA for potential identification later were a constant reminder of that mortality. “We’re going to run your DNA against the sample we found in the saliva on Sandy Ulbrich. That should at least tell us if we’re on the right track. If that comes back as a positive match, maybe we can use that for an exhumation.”