Mortal Crimes: 7 Novels of Suspense (115 page)

He stared at her solemnly. “You took off rather abruptly the other day. I made you angry and I hadn’t meant to. Seems I may have overstepped my bounds.”

She managed a smile. “Well, I may have overreacted.” With the sponge she rubbed at vinyl paste on her fingers. “I’m wallpapering. I guess I better get back to it. In this heat everything dries pretty fast. Thanks for stopping—”

“Wallpapering? I did a little of that in my college days. Yeah, rather enjoyed it too.”

She stared at him.

“That’s an offer to help, for what it’s worth.”

What the hell.
She’d be a fool to turn down a strong back and a pair of hands. Sophie was right, paranoia didn’t become her.

She opened the door for him. As she led the way into the kitchen, she made furtive tugs at her short blouse. In the sink a strip of wallpaper lay soaking. Robbi lifted the paper from the water, folded it, and slipped it into a plastic bag. From another bag she pulled out a wet strip, unfolded it, and moved to the wall in the laundry room. Jake followed.

They squeezed in behind the dryer. He held the paper while she climbed a stepstool. She aligned the border to the ceiling and together they smoothed the paper onto the wall. They worked side by side without speaking until the strip was up.

“We deserve a break,” Roberta said. She stepped down. “Iced tea okay?”

“Perfect.”

She filled two tall glasses with ice and sun tea. They took their drinks into the laundry room.

“How’s the book coming?” Robbi stepped on the stool again and lifted the paper he handed to her.

“Pretty good, thanks. Your input was a big help.”

In the limited space they shared, she was acutely aware of his arm brushing along her bare leg, the wiry hair tickling, rousing tiny shivers in her. Each time his skin made contact with hers, an image flickered behind her eyes.
Trees, a horse, the sound of crying
—mere flashes, yet she saw enough to know they were related to that incident in the woods. She tried to shake it off.

“Roberta?”

She peeled back a corner, realigned it carefully. “Hmmm?”

“I need your help.”

She looked at him quizzically.

“It has to do with what you saw at the time of your accident.”

“I don’t understand.” Another flash. This one crystal-clear.
The woman in white running through the forest.
Robbi blinked to erase the image.

“Do you have any idea who those people were?”

“Assuming it really happened?” she said with a tinge of sarcasm.

“Either way, Roberta, I’m not judging you or making evaluations.”

Robbi pressed the sponge to the paper so hard, milky water ran down her arm and the wall. What the hell was his problem? Why was he so concerned about what she saw—or had imagined she saw? Nothing had changed. He was a psychiatrist. She couldn’t confide in him. Especially not about her clairvoyance.

Jake’s arm pressed against her calf as he reached for another strip of wet paper.

The pink and green pattern of the vinyl in front of her became a forest of gray, brown, and green.

She heard the woman scream. She saw the tall, bulky man squeezing the life out of her.

The bright wallpaper swam into view for a moment, only to evolve again into the grayed hues of the forest.

With rain pounding at him, the man carried the woman’s body close to his broad chest. He stopped, knelt, and carefully lowered her to the ground. He reached out and pulled a dead, reddish spruce tree to one side. Beneath the fallen tree lay a bleached and weathered plank, its color blending with the soil around it. With his booted foot he lifted the plank, revealing a circular shaft lined with sheets of corrugated metal. A short distance down the hole was black. A dank odor wafted upward. The smell of death.

The man turned back to the woman. He tenderly removed the white dress and the delicate silver and gold chain from her ankle, then he lifted the body and gently lowered it down into the pit. A streak of lightning brightened the landscape. For an instant the stark light illuminated a grisly tangle of limbs and hair far at the bottom of the hole.

________

For the past several moments Jake Reynolds had carefully observed Roberta. When he’d reached for another strip of paper, he had touched her leg. She began to sway. He called her name, yet she gazed straight ahead with a look of fear and revulsion on her face.

When he put his arms around her and lifted her down from the stool, she didn’t resist. In the cramped quarters, the dryer on one side, the wall on the other, he held her. Her breath quickened. He could feel her heart beating rapidly.

Jesus, where was she?
Jake gazed down into her face, a face whose loveliness was even more apparent in her trancelike state. His arms tightened around her waist.

Suddenly she shuddered, then moaned low in her throat. A moment later, eyes clouded with confusion, she stared at him.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

She gently disengaged his arms and stepped back. “I—I felt dizzy for a moment,” she said, her voice breathy. “I guess I’m still pretty weak.”

He waited.

She smiled, looked away. “Well, I think I better give it up for the night,” she said. “Thanks for the help. It would have taken me hours to do this much.”

She was dismissing him.

They said good night at the back door.

Several minutes later, in his car at the corner stop sign, Jake let out his breath. Dammit, his main objective for dropping in on her had been to learn as much as possible about the woman in the woods—the woman with the ankle bracelet. He had gotten nowhere there.

But the trance? That was no fainting spell. She’d had some sort of vision. Her mother had hinted at something. Psychic?

Roberta was certainly being cautious. Her distrust of shrinks was obvious. He suspected that if she discovered her mother had asked him to treat her surreptitiously—something he would never undertake—it was all over.

He didn’t want it to be over. She intrigued him. Thoughts of her occupied his mind, and not all those thoughts were platonic. More than once that evening in her laundry room his libido had surfaced just watching her on the stool. When she’d reached above her head, her short top had inched upward, exposing the underside of her full lace-and-satin-clad breasts. Time and again his arm had brushed her bare legs. And finally, when she was in his arms…

Forget it, he told himself. In a few months she’ll be married and living thousands of miles away.

But then again—

An alarm far in the recesses of his mind went off. How long had it been since he’d allowed himself to become involved emotionally with a woman? He knew exactly how long. Three years. Since Susan’s death.

He rammed the gearshift into first, grinding gears, then pressed down hard on the accelerator. Slamming on the brakes, he barely avoided hitting the pickup entering the intersection. The driver laid on his horn. Jake cursed and drove away.

________

Roberta sat in a tight ball in the floral wing chair, wrapped cocoon like in the quilt from her bed. Although the house was still warm, she couldn’t shake a chill that racked her body. An hour had passed since Jake had left.

A deep pit with more than one body. How many? Three? Five?

Oh, God. Had the killer seen her? He had been moving toward her when she blacked out. Was it possible that Hanley, coming after her, calling her name, had scared him off? Was the killer looking for her right now, to silence her?

Roberta shivered.

A slight throbbing continued above her eyes. Absently rubbing it, she tried to visualize the killer. No clear image existed in her mind. Brief flashes, fragmented. A large man with dark hair and beard.

The throbbing over her eyes intensified. She rubbed it again, vaguely conscious of it. Suddenly fear stabbed her. What if, just by thinking about him, she was able to link with him psychically?

She felt a queasiness in her stomach.

What was he doing now? The pain grew. Had he hurt the latest woman he’d abducted? Would he strangle this one as well?

A thought came to her. During a clairvoyant episode, could she in some way communicate with the victim?

And then she knew she had to try.

She willed herself to go to him. The pain drilled deeper into her head. Think about him. Think about her. The headache intensified, making her weak, sick. She would feel herself becoming weightless, then firmly grounded. Again and again she attempted it, stopping when the pain became unbearable, only to try anew when it eased. An hour later, physically exhausted, mentally drained, she gave up and went to bed.

As she lay in bed, she decided there was no way in hell she could do this alone. She had to confide in someone.

Jake was nothing, absolutely nothing, like her father.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The top of Robbi’s head felt warm in the sun. She shook her hair out, leaned back on her palms, and sighed contentedly. “I should be working. Not sitting in the sun being a bum.”

Jake lowered himself beside her on the dock. He handed her a fishing pole, the line already in the water. “We have rules around here. Today’s rules are, number one, no talk of work. Can’t even think about it. Number two, the guest may not catch more fish than the host.”

She took up the slack on the line. “Sounds fair.”

“Besides, you did your work for the day. You appropriated me as a program speaker for the dance next week,” he said, rummaging around in a tackle box getting swivel, hook, and sinker for his own line.

She found herself staring at him, thinking how attractive he was. She suspected he was watching her as well, but with his eyes hidden behind the mirrored sunglasses, she couldn’t be sure.

That morning Roberta had shown up unexpectedly at Jake’s house at the lake. She’d found him in the carport tinkering under the hood of a gleaming black ‘40 Ford pickup. His slow, warm smile when he saw her approaching had produced a strange, sweet wrenching in her stomach.

Now, a half hour later, she felt relaxed, content, as though she’d been going there for years. She shifted her gaze and stared at the Hyatt Regency resort spread out along the shoreline to her right. A speedboat on another part of the lake and the perpetual shriek of a jay were the only sounds to break the stillness of the morning.

He loaded his own hook with red salmon eggs, then cast it into the water. After peeling off his polo shirt, he leaned against the corner piling, facing her.

“Why did you come up here this morning?” he asked.

“To find out why you keep popping into my life.”

“Do I?”

“It certainly seems that way.”

“Synchronicity.”

Roberta turned a puzzled face to him. “Enlighten me.”

“I believe we were meant to meet. We may each have pieces to a puzzle. Fitted together, they could form the whole picture.”

“That’s rather philosophical for a psychiatrist.”

He made no comment, but his lips stretched into a tiny smile.

“What pieces do I have?” she asked.

“I’ll know when you tell me.”

“So very cryptic. How will I know what it is that you want to hear?”

“Tell me everything you can remember about the man and woman in the woods. The woman in particular.”

The incident in the woods.
Synchronicity?
That was exactly why she had come to him, to talk about that day. A chill passed through her.

For the second time she told Jake all she could remember.

He had listened without interrupting, his head nodding occasionally. But when she finished, he seemed disappointed.

“That’s it? Think.”

She started to shake her head, then something flickered in her mind. She’d forgotten about the ankle chain. From the time she told her mother and sister about it until the other night when she’d seen the killer removing it and the white dress from the body, she’d completely forgotten about it.