Deadly Night (27 page)

“Isn’t Aidan meeting us here?” Vinnie asked, sounding nervous.

“No.”

“Maybe you should call him.”

She hesitated. Aidan was going to be angry. She hadn’t meant to come out here in the dark without him, but it had still been daylight when she had hatched her plan. Even now, it was only the fog that was making it so dark, wasn’t it? Then she looked at the clock and realized it was after five. He would be getting to the store soon, and he wasn’t going to be happy when he didn’t find here there. “You call him, Vinnie. Tell him to come straight out here when he’s done with whatever he’s doing. I’m sorry. I’m going to make you really late for work, but you can take my car.”

“It’s okay. The world won’t end.”

She got out of the car and took the first wreath, the one she had gotten for Henry.

“Give Aidan a call, then grab those flowers over there. They’re for Amelia.”

Kendall started walking toward the cemetery. She looked up and saw that the clouds were darkening and massing overhead. She almost turned back. But it wasn’t the ghosts she was afraid of.

The cemetery had never appeared more ethereal. The fog curled around weeping cherubs and praying angels. It cast pale gray shadows upon ancient stone monuments, and snaked through the pathways between the sarcophagi. Now and then it seemed to be gently hiding a broken stone, as if shielding the dead from the intrusion of the living.

She quickened her pace, watching as the gray mist parted for her footsteps, and headed for Henry’s grave, where she tenderly placed the flowers. “You were a good man, Henry. Thank you. If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t have Aidan. And I’m listening to you. I know you’re watching for the killer, that you’re trying to warn people at the bar.”

She touched the stone, said a little prayer and looked up.

Henry was there.

He was tall, his features bearing the hallmark of both sorrow and strength. His eyes were dark and knowing, caring. Suddenly he started gesturing wildly.

She frowned. “They’re flowers, Henry. A thank-you,” she said.

He was trying to shout, but his voice was just a whisper that mixed with the gray swirl of the fog.

Get out. Hurry.

She turned around, the hair rising at her nape. Someone was there. It was Vinnie, she decided, Vinnie being a jerk. He was wearing his stage costume, the hood of his cape pulled up to hide his face, and he was carrying a plastic Halloween knife that must have fallen out of one of the boxes she’d brought out last night. He wasn’t slashing it up and down, though, like a maddened movie monster. He was carrying it low and stalking her.

He moved slowly through the fog, as if this were a dream. He was being a showman, as always. But the dark and the mist were far too real, and she felt anger and fear mingling inside her.

“Vinnie, quit it!” she yelled, furious.

He was still coming for her, slowly, and she took a step backward and tripped over something, almost falling.

She looked down, trying to see what she had stumbled over, but the mist was heavy now, dark gray, making it hard to see. Whatever it was, it had been softer than a headstone or a tree root.

She peered through the mist, and there, beneath a weeping cherub and an angel with its face turned desperately up to the dark heavens, lay Vinnie, draped over a broken tombstone, like a piece of funerary statuary.

Like the weeping cherub.

And the praying angel.

Blood was trickling down his forehead.

She looked back at the figure coming for her, more quickly now. Weaving between the tombs. Past the statues of saints and angels and cherubs.

She started to run, but he was almost on her as she ran, blinded by the mist and the deepening darkness.

He reached for her, and she screamed, feeling the strands of hair ripping from her head as she somehow managed to escape. With no idea where to turn, she raced into the Flynn mausoleum and tried to slam and bolt the heavy iron door. It was almost closed, and she desperately threw her weight against it.

And then she realized she wasn’t alone.

Henry was with her. Henry, futilely attempting to throw his ghostly weight into the fray. She drew strength from him, but a crack remained, and her pursuer shoved a hand through and sprayed something at her. She staggered back and fell, the world spinning, no matter how hard she fought against the sensation.

Without her weight to hold it shut, the door opened, and Kendall backed away in terror, stumbling toward the altar, because there was nowhere else to go. Henry was gesturing frantically for her to keep away from the altar, but she had no choice, so she kept backing away, fighting the darkness that threatened to overwhelm her, as the hooded figure with the knife loomed ever closer.

She circled the marble altar, fighting desperately to stay conscious, to stay on her feet.

Her pursuer reached her, and she knew she was about to be stabbed.

But she wasn’t.

She was pushed.

And then she knew why Henry had tried to warn her away.

The floor behind her gave way with a loud scraping sound, and suddenly she was falling…

Falling, and landing hard in the sodden secret crypt that lay below the mausoleum. There was just enough light filtering down that she could make out the tombs, some single, some stacked, and some deep within the earth, just rotting coffins.

There was water on the floor, inches deep and seeming to flow around her.

Her eyes adjusted until she could see clearly, and a terrified scream escaped her lips as Sheila’s rotting, bloated head bobbed by in front of her.

The killer jumped down beside her then, and the soft laughter she heard was all too real.

As was the figure so very close to her now, wielding its deadly knife.

Aidan tried Kendall’s cell. No answer.

He tried the store, and Mason picked up. “Mason, it’s Aidan. I have to talk to Kendall right away.”

“She’s not here—try her cell.”

“I just did. She didn’t answer.”

“Try Vinnie. He’s with her.”

“With her where?”

“They were taking some stuff out to the plantation.”

“Shit!”

Aidan didn’t say goodbye. He sped past a Mazda on the highway as he dialed Vinnie’s number. No answer.

He hesitated briefly, praying that his instincts were right, and called Hal. Hal couldn’t be out at the plantation, because Aidan had just left him in his office.

It took him long seconds to be put through.

“Flynn, you’re really starting to get on my nerves,” Hal said.

“Hal, get some patrol cars out to my place now.
Please
.”

“What the hell is going on?”

I don’t know. But something is. A ghost just told me so.

“Just get them out there. There’s an intruder on the grounds, and I can’t find Kendall.”

“All right, all right,” Hal said, and hung up, but Aidan knew the man would do as he said.

He sped down the road to the house and jerked to a stop in the driveway, right behind Kendall’s car. She wasn’t in it, and neither was Vinnie.

He raced into the cemetery, pulling out his laser light. The fog was so thick that he couldn’t even see the low-lying markers.

“Kendall!” he shouted her name, then paused to listen for a response. That was when he heard a groan and, with renewed hope, tracked his light around the cemetery.

A cherub seemed to stare back at him, mournful and weeping. A trick of the light.

An angel looked despairingly toward heaven as Aidan searched desperately through the dense fog. Suddenly he spotted a black mass lying on one of the graves. He squatted down and touched it, and it groaned again.

Vinnie.

“Vinnie, what’s going on?” he demanded frantically. “Where’s Kendall?”

But Vinnie’s eyes didn’t open. There was a huge gash on his head, trickling blood.

Aidan stood, pulling out his phone again. He dialed 911 and asked for an ambulance, trying to maintain enough calm to explain the situation while searching frantically for any sign of Kendall.

The cemetery was empty.

“Mr. Flynn?”

The tentative, terrified voice was real. He trained his light in the direction of the voice and saw Jimmy, shaking like a tree in winter, standing there.

“It’s the ghosts, Mr. Flynn. It’s the bad ghosts!”

“Where are they, Jimmy? Help me. Where are they?”

Jimmy pointed, but it was unnecessary.

Because
she
was back. The woman in white. And she was standing by the family mausoleum, beckoning to him. But she wasn’t alone. Two men stood with her, one in a uniform of butternut and gray, one in deep blue, and all three of them were urging him to hurry.

He hurried.

Kendall staggered to her feet, facing the monster with the knife. She wasn’t going to die without a fight, but how did you fight a huge knife?

“I have you at last.”

The voice was familiar. Friendly.

“I’ve wanted you for so long.”

“Great,” she said, fighting the tremors in her voice. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I’ve been trying to tell you for some time, but I kept my distance. I thought that you’d be the biggest mistake. You have such passion, but sometimes great passion must be denied. On the other hand, genius must be rewarded.”

“You killed Sheila,” she said.

“Obviously.”

That voice…She knew it.

“You must understand. I’m considered a genius in my field…and my field has helped me so much. I know what they look for, when they find the dead. And I know that if they don’t find the dead, they don’t find what they should be looking for. And where better to keep the dead than where the dead should lie?”

“Jon Abel,” she said flatly.

“Of course.” He pulled off the hood. He looked just as he always did, and that was almost more frightening than anything else. He shook his head. “I guess I’ve gotten…hungrier lately. So many only come to me when they’re broken, old, mutilated. There’s something beautiful about death, you know. Especially death just as it happens. And the pressure of my job…”

“You’ve been killing for a long time,” she told him.

He scowled at her. “I was not so hungry then, as I said. But…when I discovered that there was actually a crypt below the family vault, it was suddenly so easy. Meant to be, you might say. Of course, I didn’t figure on the river and the water level—stupid, you say? Not really. In all this time, only two bones have ever washed out, and if it weren’t for your lover, no one would ever have known. And you know, the women I’ve…shall I say
loved?
Have actually been better off. Their lives were small, unimportant. They’re not the kind of women anyone would miss.”

“Sheila is missed,” she snapped.

“Well, yes, but Sheila…she was necessary. She was too interested in this place, in its history. I couldn’t take the chance that she would find out about this little…retreat of mine. There was a casket of remains, a soldier from that unfortunate business between North and South. The body was quite rotted, of course, but he’d kept a diary, which was very nicely preserved in a piece of oilcloth. He was quite an interesting man. He and I had quite a lot in common. Not only that, in his journal he talked about the way he disposed of corpses out here. It made things so much easier for me. And so—”

“And so Amelia saw lights,” she said.

He smiled. Just as Jon Abel always smiled. He still hadn’t changed.

The only thing that had changed was that now she knew, knew exactly what kind of monster he was. Knew that he could kill and, if his victims ever
did
turn up, fill in false reports.

He could stage a break-in at the coroner’s office.

“Okay, I’m sorry,” she said softly, “this will probably sound like an in—a ridiculous question to you, but
why?
”

“Because of the
hunger,
” he said, as if she should understand perfectly. “And I’m a genius, but you already know that. Not every man can be allowed to indulge the hunger, of course, but as a genius, I deserve to have what I want. And because so much of what I see in my work is so ugly, that’s why…lately…I’ve been hungrier. And that’s why I need the pretty ones, alive and afraid…. I’m tender with them at first, of course,” he said, walking toward her. But the knife was still down. He wasn’t going to strike, not just yet.

If only she could find something to use as a weapon.

He paused in front of her. “You see?” he said softly, indicating the body parts floating around her. “Death can be so ugly. But not at first. It takes the terror in a woman’s eyes and replaces it with peace, the peace that comes with death. And it’s beautiful, so beautiful. Until the rot comes. And there is no one who can stop the rot.”

From the corner of her eye, she saw an arm bone. Her heart quivered in her chest. It was still wearing the remnants of a black fleece sweatshirt.

He was close now, so close. He reached out, and she felt him touch her face. “You’re such a pretty one.”

Now or never.

She reached down for the bone and brought it up as hard as she could, striking him a tremendous blow across the face. He shouted hoarsely and recoiled, so she lifted her weapon to strike again. But he came back at her quickly, catching her arm with a surprising strength. He slammed her against the wall and held her there, but somehow she managed to retain her hold on her weapon.

“You don’t understand!” he told her angrily.

“I do,” she told him quickly. “You’re the one who doesn’t understand. The body rots, but the soul doesn’t.”

“What?” he demanded.

“I knew about you. The ghosts told me.”

He hesitated, stunned by her words.

“That soldier, Victor Grebbe. He killed women here. The ghosts knew it, and they knew it was happening again. But they don’t intend to let you get away with it. So if I were you, I’d get out of here now. I’d run away. You can hide. You can disappear. You’re a genius, remember? You deserve to live. But you need to get out—now—if you want to escape the ghosts.”

“The ghosts?” he said coldly.

“They’re here now,” she told him.

“You’re insane, do you know that?” His hand was twitching.