A Shiver At Twilight (10 page)

“He started with the dog,” she said.

“I loved that dog,” another voice answered. It was the old man. His throat hung open where a bullet had ripped through the flesh and muscle. “Why’d he have to kill the dog?”

“I told him no, Daddy,” Sissy said. “He doesn’t like no.”

Sissy’s mother moved to stand beside her husband. Her horrible, shattered china-doll face moved in a lurching manner when she spoke. “I fed that boy,” she said as if his act of eating food she’d provided were the worst of his crimes.

Sissy looked at JD with dead eyes. “He killed the dog as a warning, but I didn't understand. I didn't understand how anyone could be so evil. But you know, don’t you JD?”

He wasn’t sure which was most disconcerting—her knowing his name or her speaking to him at all. “What are you talking about?”

“Your brother wanted that scholarship more than anything, didn't he?”

JD shook his head, trying to understand and then he remembered. Their own father had died of a heart attack during Bill’s senior year. There hadn’t been enough money from the insurance to cover all the debts he’d left behind and Bill’s plans for college had been snuffed with their father’s life. But there was a football scholarship and he’d managed to secure it.

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Who do you think his competition was?” Mike’s dad asked. “My son was smarter, better at sports, and for one goddamn time, being a minority worked to his advantage. But your brother doesn’t like to lose, does he? He’ll do whatever it takes.”

The truth of it rolled over JD like a killer wave. Mike’s case had been overturned years later when tests of Sissy’s fetus had yielded DNA that didn't match his own. The prosecution’s case that Sissy had been an innocent dove, touched only by her rapist, fell under that concrete fact and since all other evidence had been circumstantial, Mike had finally gone free. By then Bill was a college graduate.

“I told him no one would believe it, when the baby was born and it was white,” Sissy said, “but he said it wouldn’t matter then. He said by then we’d be married and we’d be heroes. Everyone would believe God had intervened.”

A shuffling sound turned JD around. Carly sagged against him, holding her wounded arm. Jillian backed away, her eyes large and terrified.

Bill stood at the stairs.

Dressed in black from head to toe, he wore rubber gloves on his hands. He’d tucked his pants into the tops of his black boots, his sleeves bundled tight at the wrists. All his hair had been shoved into a stocking cap with a mask that hid his lower face. But this was JD’s brother. He’d recognize him in any disguise.

“Why are you dressed like that?” JD asked, still hoping against all odds that the damning facts could be false. “Bill, what are you doing?”

The eyes peering from the ski mask looked distressed, but clear. “I’m sorry, JD. I didn't want you involved in this.”

“In what?” JD demanded. “Just what the fuck is this?”

Bill shook his head. “A mess. And now I have to clean it up.”

“You were going to make me lie for you, weren’t you?” JD said as the extent of his betrayal began to clear. His brother, a man he’d loved and worshipped like the father they’d lost when they were kids. His brother had murdered people. He planned to do it again.

“No, I wouldn’t have made you lie,” Bill said, his eyes round with sincerity. “I swear. You wouldn’t have been lying. You’d have come to the office. I’d have been there. It would have been the truth. I just didn't count on the girl.” He glared at Carly. “How did you know?”

“I called her,” Jillian said and there was a triumphant smile on her face.

For a moment, Bill faltered. “How?” he demanded. “I took your phone.”

“It doesn’t matter, Bill,” JD said. “Look at yourself. What are you doing?”

“It would have worked if it wasn’t for her.” Another threatening glare at Carly. “And you, you and your hero syndrome. Couldn’t just drive by, could you? Not JD. Always has to do the right thing.”

As Bill spoke, Mike’s dad moved to stand behind him. He reached over and yanked the stocking cap from Bill’s head. Bill shouted and spun, his panicked gaze swiveling as he looked for whoever had done it. JD realized he couldn’t see the ghost of Mike’s dad. Bill’s hat lay on the floor and he snatched it up. But when he turned around, Sissy stood right in front of him. He didn't see her either. She jerked his pants legs from his boots while Bill danced around, trying to escape her.

Then it was Sissy’s father’s turn. He yanked the tight band of the gloves up and down Bill’s hands with a grim and gruesome smile. The terror on Bill’s face would have been comical had the circumstances not been so horrifying. Finally Sissy’s mother approached, took the rifle from Mike’s dad’s hands and aimed it right at Bill’s head.

JD shouted, “NO!” just as she pulled the trigger. The sound reverberated through the house, echoing over and over. Bill screamed as a blast of air passed over his head, but he was unharmed. Still stunned, JD watched him pull a gun from the waist of his pants and frantically swing it left and right, not knowing where to aim.

It was a real gun. The one that had shot Carly. Rage began to replace the devastation, horror and disappointment surging inside JD.

“Get out of the way,” Bill said, deciding to make the people he could see his target. “Let me get this over with.”

JD stood in front of both women and stared at his brother with crushing disbelief.

“You’ll have to go through me, Bill. Are you so far gone that you’ll kill your own brother? Because I won’t lie for you.”

“Quit being a fucking boy scout. Get out of my way.”

JD launched himself at Bill, struggling to get the gun free. Bill fought hard but JD banged his wrist against the doorframe until he opened his hand. The gun clattered to the floor and slid across the room. Carly pushed away from Jillian and kicked it far out of reach.

It hurt JD to pound his fist into his brother’s face, but Bill seemed to have no such compunction and he fought a dirty battle. They grappled, hitting each other with blows that went deeper than flesh and bone. At last JD’s fist hit its mark and Bill’s head slammed back. He slid to the floor, unconscious.

Breathing heavy, JD looked down at his brother and he saw a stranger. The brother he’d loved no longer lived in this body and yet they were still blood. He wanted to stop the world and reverse it, wiping out the awful crimes Bill had perpetrated. He wanted to cry out at the insanity of what had happened and make it all go away. He couldn’t do the first anymore than he could the second. Instead he bent and bound Bill up with the ropes that had been used on Jillian, feeling numb as he did it. Carly left her friend beside the fire and came to stand next to him. She touched him gently, somehow understanding the pain that he still struggled to comprehend. What would he tell their mother?

“I’m sorry, JD,” she said.

He put his arms around her and held her, feeling solace in her touch. He was sorry too, sorry he hadn’t seen his brother for the monster he’d become. Sorry that so many had been hurt while he’d been blithely unaware.

He turned into the comfort Carly offered, burying his face in the crook between her shoulder and neck, letting her scent ground him. More than coincidence had brought them together and though the wreckage of his relationship with his brother would scar him forever, the balm of this woman’s love would help him survive it, because now, in this darkest of moments, he realized that what he felt for Carly would last long after the horrors of this night had faded. It didn’t matter how short a time they’d known each other, JD felt that forever would be theirs to cherish.

They shared a quiet moment that both of them knew would be just one of many in their future. Whatever bad things had brought them together, the good to come out of it would be found in their union.

With a deep breath, he bent to the inert body of his brother and patted his pockets, finding a knife and the tiny cell phone he’d been looking for. Bill always had the latest, greatest gadgets.

He flipped it open, not doubting for a minute that it would get a signal. Four bars appeared on the display. JD smiled sadly and dialed 911.

Even boy scouts needed help sometimes.

Preview of Haunting Desire

Chapter One

Nothing was going the way Shealy had planned.

“Dad, be reasonable. I just—”

“Reasonable?” Donnell O’Leary demanded, his face turning an alarming shade of red.

They’d just finished dinner and were leaving the restaurant as he spoke, his outburst drawing the eyes of the other patrons. Shealy had known her dad wouldn’t be happy about her plans, but she hadn’t anticipated this. She eyed his coloring with dismay. He’d already had one heart attack—she didn’t want to give him another.

“I’ve told you this before, Shealy,” he said in a tight, angry voice. “There is nothing for you in Ireland. Not one bleeding thing. No reason to go back. Ever.”

“I want to visit mom’s grave,” she said calmly. “And I don’t understand why that should upset you.”

“Why would you care about seeing her grave?” he exclaimed, as if the idea were too bizarre to contemplate. “She’s not even in it.”

For a moment, his words robbed her of a response. She knew her mother’s body wasn’t in the grave—after the awful automobile accident her body had never been found. But six years had passed since her death and Shealy needed closure that still hadn’t come. It was so unlike her father, so insensitive of him not to understand that. She’d been in the hospital when they’d held the funeral services and then her dad had packed them up and moved them to Arizona. She’d never even seen the place where her mother rested, in spirit if not in body.

But she didn’t want to explain to him why she was so determined to go there now. She couldn’t talk about the nightmares that chased her through the restless dark. Nightmares about her mother. Horrible, gruesome dreams that told the time had come to face everything she’d tried to forget. She needed to move on and that meant first going back.

“It’s not safe there,” her father stubbornly continued as she stepped into the warm night air outside of the restaurant.

“Safe? Dad, Ireland is ten times safer than Phoenix. Their crime rate—”

“It’s not safe for you, Shealy.”

The sharpness of his tone held a bite that stopped her on the shadowed blacktop. Somewhere in the back of her mind a strange tickling sensation began, creeping down her spine, making her skin pucker despite the summer heat that still held tight to the evening.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked. “Why wouldn’t it be safe for me?”

He avoided her eyes. “There are things you don’t know, Shealy.”

“So enlighten me.”

“Things that should not be talked about, not in the open. Not at all.”

Ah. Inside, she gave a sigh of relief and a mental eye roll as understanding hit her. For a minute there, he’d actually rattled her.

Donnell O’Leary was a conspiracy theorist to his wee Irish soul. He had issues and opinions about everything from underworld religion to common traffic laws. No doubt next he planned to spout about the Troubles or the Government or, God forbid, the Protestants.

“Dad, let’s try to stay within the bounds of reality. I’m talking about a trip to a civilized country. Two weeks in the land of green and blarney. I’m not headed for Juárez, for God’s sake. I’ll be back before you even know I’m gone. I’ve already got my ticket. I’m going.”

Donnell grabbed her arm as she moved past him and jerked her around to face him with a sudden violence that shocked her into silence. “Do you think I took you away from there on a whim? Do think I’d have ripped us both up by the roots if I’d had a choice?”

For a moment, she could only stare at him, noting his color, the spark in his eyes that almost looked like panic. Frowning, she said, “You told me we moved because of the doctors. The specialists at Mayo Clinic that Dr. Campbell wanted me to see.”

“Aye. And in part that’s true. But there’s more to it, things I’ve shielded from you. Things that are best left alone. Things you need to stay away from. Are you hearing me, girl? You are not. Going. Back.”

A gust of hot wind blew across the parking lot, chasing the echo of his anger. The restaurant had been packed when they’d arrived and they’d had to park in the back, by a dumpster. Now the lot was dark and deserted. The burned-out streetlight over their car left shadows rasping against the heated tar and whispering sounds scampering across the abruptly taut silence that followed.

She wanted to tell him to calm down. She was twenty-four years old and she didn’t need his permission, but an undefined feeling of threat prickled and poked at her. She opened her mouth to demand to know what these mysterious things he’d been protecting her from were, but an instinct as old as time silenced her and urged her toward the car. Pushing her to get out of the open.

“Let’s—”

“Shhhh,” he said. His eyes were wide, his expression frightened as he scanned the empty parking lot.