All Night Long (13 page)

He sat up slowly on the edge of the bed. Sweat plastered his tee shirt to his back and chest. He was wired; preternaturally alert. All of his senses were energized, battle ready.

He knew the sensation all too well. He also knew that the only antidote was to move around, work off some of the adrenaline and force himself to focus on something other than the dream.

It had been a bad one this time. He’d been back in the narrow lanes and dark alleys of an urban landscape that had been ancient before the United States had even been a gleam in the Founders’ eyes. There in the shadows he and his men played a deadly game of three-dimensional warfare, one in which the enemy could be anywhere—above, behind, in front or even in a maze of tunnels underground beneath your feet. There was no safe zone, no place where you could relax even for an hour or two and allow your overworked senses to recover. The only way to survive was to stay constantly alert and aware.

Don’t go there. Focus on something else. You know the drill. Fill your head with other thoughts.

He punched the little button on the side of his watch to check the time. In the green glow that briefly illuminated the dial he saw that it was ten minutes to one.

He got to his feet but did not turn on the light beside the bed. The last thing he wanted to do was awaken Jason, who was sound asleep on the couch in the front room. He went to the window and twitched the curtain aside.

Cold moonlight gleamed on the lake. The lights were off in the cabin that Maxine had rented to the hard rock aficionados. But every window in Irene’s cabin was still ablaze.

He knew exactly what he wanted to do to release some of the excess energy pounding through him. But he was pretty sure that it was against the rules for innkeepers to jump their female guests.

Hell of a dumb profession with rules like that.

He crossed the small space to the battered wooden desk that stood against one wall and powered up the laptop. Maybe doing some work on The Project would help take his mind off the aftereffects of the dream. That had been the whole point of creating The Project, after all. In simplest terms, the strategy was to replace one obsession with another. It sounded good in theory, and many nights it actually worked.

The computer screen winked on and glowed expectantly. He opened the file and paged through the text until he got to the chapter he had been working on all week.

The soft sound of a small car moving at low speed interrupted his thoughts. He stopped in mid-sentence and listened closely. If the guys in Cabin Number Six were driving into town to look for some excitement, they were going to be sadly disappointed. Harry’s Hang-Out was closed by this time.

He waited, but no beams speared the darkness. Whoever was at the wheel was driving toward the main road without lights.

“Damn.” He got to his feet and grabbed his jeans off the back of the chair. “There she goes again.”

He yanked on the denims, ripped a dark shirt off a hanger, shoved his feet into his running shoes and left the bedroom at a run.

Jason raised his head when he went past the couch.

“Where are you going at this time of night?” he mumbled sleepily.

“Out.”

“Right.” Jason dropped back down onto the pillow. “Knew when I saw the corn bread that you were a goner.”

S
he hated the thought of going back into the house, especially at this hour.

Irene stopped in the pool of darkness that drowned the steps outside the utility room and took the key out of the pocket of her trench coat. She had a flashlight with her, but she didn’t dare switch it on until she was inside. She had also taken the precaution of leaving her car parked out of sight down the road.

Tonight she did not want to risk being seen anywhere near the Webbs’ summer place. What she was about to do probably came under the heading of illegal entry, she thought. Sam McPherson was already unhappy with her. She did not want to give him a reason to try to run her out of town.

A ghostly breeze slithered through the trees. The interior of the house was drenched in night and shadow. Unlike last night, no light burned in the front room.

She unlocked the door, dropped the key into her pocket and held her breath as she moved into the deep darkness of the utility room. Closing the door very quickly, she removed the small, pencil-slim flashlight and switched it on.

As soon as the narrow beam sliced through the shadows she was able to breathe again.

She moved cautiously into the hall and went toward the staircase that connected the living and dining area to the upper floor. The darkness downstairs seemed especially dense. It took her a moment to realize that someone had drawn the curtains across the floor-to-ceiling windows after Pamela’s body had been removed. Sam, probably, she thought. His goal had no doubt been to deter morbid curiosity seekers, but the result was that she did not have to worry about a passerby noticing the thin beam of her flashlight.

It gave her an eerie jolt to realize that everything looked so
House & Garden
normal tonight. Surely there should have been some sense that a person had died here recently. But Pamela’s death had not involved overt violence or blood, she reminded herself, just booze and pills.

Booze and pills. One of the classic suicide strategies. What if she was wrong and everyone else was right? What if Pamela really had OD’d, accidentally or otherwise?

Okay, so call me a conspiracy theorist.

She did not linger downstairs. If Pamela had hidden any secrets before she died, they would be in her bedroom.

Over the course of the summer that she and Pamela had been close, she had come to know her friend’s bedroom almost as well as her own. She had spent hours upstairs in this house, listening to the latest music, talking about boys and reading an endless array of fashion and celebrity gossip magazines.

She climbed the stairs to the second floor and turned toward the bedroom that Pamela had used when she was a teen. The door was ajar.

That would not have been the case seventeen years ago. Pamela always kept the door closed in those days and with good reason. She’d had a lot of things she wanted to hide from her father and the housekeeper, including birth control pills, condoms and mysterious packets of what she claimed were designer drugs that she had purchased from dealers who hung out around her fancy boarding school.

Pamela had been very proud of the hiding place she had
crafted to conceal her treasures—so proud, in fact, that after swearing Irene to eternal secrecy, she had shown it to her.

A trickle of anticipation fluttered through Irene as she moved into the room. It was the memory of Pamela’s secret place that had lured her back here tonight. The odds of finding anything in it that might offer an explanation or an insight were slim to vanishing, but it was a place to start.

The curtains and shades had been pulled shut in this room, too. Relieved that she did not have to be overly cautious with the flashlight, she splashed the beam quickly around the space.

Shock drove out the sense of anticipation she had been feeling. A dark, edgy chill of déjà vu roiled her nerves.

Nothing had been changed.

She walked slowly into the room, unnerved. True, the downstairs had not been redecorated but at least it had always been furnished in an adult manner. Even seventeen years earlier Pamela’s pink-and-white bedroom had struck her as somehow too sweet, too innocent, for the sophisticated and worldly Pamela Webb. Tonight the canopied bed with its gossamer clouds of drapery and pink satin pillows seemed downright weird.

Another case of time warp, she thought. It was hard to believe that the room had never been redecorated. Surely Pamela had needed it for her guests on those occasions when she brought friends up to the lake.

Poor Pamela. Had she been so deeply attached to the memories of her girlhood that she could not bear to alter her old bedroom? Somehow that didn’t seem Pamela-like. She had been a risk-taker; always excited about the forbidden. And she loved fashion.

But Pamela had been a girl who lost her mother at the age of five, Irene reminded herself. Maybe some part of her had tried to cling to the memories of that shattered bond here in this room.

There was so much that she had never comprehended about Pamela, Irene thought. She did not even know why
Pamela had selected her to be her best friend that long-ago summer. At the time she had not questioned her good luck. It had been enough to bask in the reflected glow of Pamela’s dangerous, glittery light; enough to pretend that she, too, was a bad girl. But in hindsight, she had often wondered what Pamela had seen in her.

She crossed the room to the fairy-tale bed, selected one of the pink satin pillows and placed it on the nightstand. She propped the flashlight against the pillow so that the beam struck the light switch on the wall.

Reaching into one of her pockets, she took out the screwdriver she had brought with her. Very carefully she inserted the tip into one of the screws that anchored the light switch plate to the wall.

Pamela’s words the night she had revealed her secret hiding place floated through her mind as she worked.

“It’s such a guy thing, hiding stuff in the wall behind a light switch. No one would think that a girl would do it.”

Certainly not the sort of girl who lived in a pink-and-white princess room like this, Irene mused as she removed the second screw.

She put the plate and the screws down on the table and went back to work on the two screws that secured the switch itself. A moment later she was able to pull it away from the wall.

Pulse leaping, she grabbed the flashlight and angled the beam into the outlet box.

Light gleamed on brass. Her breath caught in her throat when she realized that she was looking at a key.

She reached into the outlet box and removed the small find. When she held it up to the light to get a closer look she was disappointed to see that it looked like an ordinary house key.

Why would Pamela keep a spare house key tucked away up here in her secret hiding place?

She dropped the key into a pocket and reached for the light switch plate.

She was tightening the last screw on the plate when she heard the sound of a door opening downstairs.

Her blood turned to ice in her veins.

She was no longer alone in the house.

T
he almost noiseless plop of the screwdriver falling onto the thick white carpet at her feet broke the trance.

Irene finally remembered to breathe.

In the darkness below, floorboards squeaked. Someone was moving through the house. The intruder was not turning on any lights.

A burglar, she thought. That was the most logical explanation. Some local vandal had decided to see what he could steal from a dead woman’s house.

She heard footsteps in the front hall.
Whoever was down there was making no attempt to be quiet. She prayed that meant he was not aware that there was someone else in the house. But if he was looking for cash and valuables, he would no doubt make his way upstairs sooner or later.

She had to get out before he found her. People who confronted burglars got killed. She had sometimes wondered if that was what had happened to her parents.

She pushed past the panic that was threatening to clog her throat and tried to concentrate. The only way out of the house from this floor was the staircase, the lower section of which ended in full view of the living and dining area. Whoever was downstairs would surely spot her if she tried to leave via that route.

She realized that the penlight was still blazing. Hastily she switched it off and then worked to fight the inevitable tide of fear that closed in around her together with the darkness.

She went down on her knees and groped for the fallen screwdriver. When her shaking fingers closed around the hard plastic handle she felt an inexplicable rush of adrenaline. The screwdriver wasn’t much, but it was all she had in the way of a weapon.

Don’t think like that. You’re not facing hand-to-hand combat here. You’re going to do the smart thing and hide until whoever is down there finishes whatever it is he came here to do.