Shrouded in Darkness (Shrouded Series) (2 page)

She glanced down at it and tensed. The photo had been taken almost three years ago in Boston on her twenty-fifth birthday.

Just before her divorce. She stood between Johnny and Malcolm, an arm around each. She looked happy. What a lie. She’d been anything but. That morning she’d had her last fight with Malcolm before moving out.

She polished off the rest of her wine and walked over to the fireplace to set her glass down on the mantel with a surprisingly steady hand. “Why the photo?”

“It’s not just the photo. He also gave me this.” Jake pulled something else from his pocket. Gold glittered against the lamplight.

A necklace with a large circular medallion.

Margot sucked in a lungful of air. Not just any necklace. Johnny’s. A gift she’d given him on his birthday. She raised a trembling hand, and Jake draped the chain across her palm. She lifted the medallion of a bull, signifying Taurus, John’s zodiac sign.

She turned it over and read the inscription on the back. “To the hero in the family. Love, Margot.”

A deep wave of emotion caught against Margot’s chest as she squeezed the medallion. “I...” She cleared her throat. “Where did you get this?”

Once again, shadows deepened around Jake as he stepped away from the light and Margot. He tucked the picture and wallet back into his rear pocket. “John gave it to me. He said that if I ever needed time to myself or needed a place to stay, I’d be welcome here. That I could rent a room for a while. He thought that if you couldn’t reach him for some reason, the picture and medallion would assure you I was legitimate.”

Questions, doubts swirled inside her head. She blinked as a fresh wave of pain pounded into her skull.

What did it mean? Was Johnny’s car accident something more? Impossible. Too crazy to even contemplate. No, for Johnny to give Jake his medallion told her just how much he trusted this man.

Unless, Johnny didn’t give it to Jake. She frowned. Which didn’t make any sense. Why would this man show up at her door with a stolen medallion? She had nothing to offer, no money, no fame...

“What about the motels in town?” she asked, stalling.

“I tried the two, but they’re both booked solid because of ski season.”

Margot opened her mouth to say something, then shut it. She didn’t like this. Didn’t like it a bit. What had Johnny been thinking? He knew she liked her solitude, that she’d come back home to get her life back together after the divorce, that she’d claimed the house as her own, even going as far as getting the paperwork together to buy out Johnny’s share. He’d never really been interested in the place. Other than the lab outside in the barn, which Johnny had built a couple of years before he’d joined Miltronics, everything else was pretty much her own.

When it came down to it, she could see Johnny making the offer. He’d always been the type to get caught up in someone else’s troubles. Now Johnny was gone, and it was just her. She could tell Jake no and it would be the end of it, but part of her wanted to say yes. After all, he’d known another side of Johnny. A side Margot never had the opportunity to see. Johnny’s work had been so important to him at Miltronics, yet he’d been so reticent on the subject.

“How long would you be staying? That is, if I decide to rent you a room.”

“One week. Two max.”

She rubbed the back of her neck. Two weeks. Not very long. At least she tried to tell herself that. She’d do one last favor for Johnny. Yes, and she’d also get a chance to add a few more precious memories of him. “I have a room on the ground floor in the back by the stairs. It’s not very big.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Fine. It’ll be a hundred twenty-five a week plus meals.”

He nodded and placed his glass on the desk. “I’ll get my things.”

Margot led Jake into the hall. In the foyer, he hunched down on one knee by his canvas backpack and swore.

“What’s wrong?”

“I must have left a zipper partially opened. It looks like some snow seeped inside. Can you show me the room? I need to check if my laptop’s okay.”

“Sure.”

As he followed her to the back room, she grew conscious of him directly behind, of his heavier steps, of his much larger frame, but most importantly, of his masculinity. Other than Johnny and the men at the gathering after the funeral today, it had been ages since she’d been alone with a man.

She was about to turn on the room light by the door, then thought better of it. Being touched once tonight by Jake was enough.

She stepped away from the threshold to give him plenty of space to enter. “Here it is. If you need anything...”

“Thanks,” was all he said as he walked inside. Not bothering with the light, he closed the door, leaving her in the hall to wonder how he could see inside there without bumping his shins on everything in his path.

Shrugging, she turned away and went back for her glass. She also picked up Jake’s untouched water. In the kitchen, she refilled her glass with wine and went upstairs to her room. She closed her door but didn’t bolt it. She couldn’t. For some stupid reason, this room didn’t have a lock, and she’d never bothered installing one.

Well, she wasn’t going to act paranoid and put a chair under the knob. After all, one of the reasons she’d moved back here was because of the lack of crime in the area. Her brother had always been a good judge of character, so if he had befriended Jake, it was good enough for her.

Margot quickly undressed, changed into her nightgown and slipped under the down comforter. In the dark, she sat up against the headboard and sipped her wine.

She thought of Jake directly below. What was he doing? Was he also lying in bed unable to sleep? What had driven him from the Boston area to come here of all places? Was he running from something or someone? A woman, maybe? She’d sensed his pain even though he’d hidden it well. Eventually, exhaustion and alcohol numbed her thoughts and pulled her lids closed.

Margot jerked awake. She lay there, heart pounding, mind struggling for a reason why. Then she heard it. From outside. A high, piercing cry. It sent goose flesh up her arms and legs and chilled her soul. Another cry ripped through the night, sounding more terrifying than the first. Such pain. So much pain in that one cry...

Silence followed. Thick and suffocating. Then it hit her. Marmaduke!

Margot had completely lost track of her cat. So focused on Jake, she could have easily missed Marmaduke slipping outside.

Snapping on the bedside light, she glanced over to the chair where Marmaduke slept at night and found it empty. Heart ricocheting against her ribs, Margot flung back the covers. Vivid memories of when she was a child drove her from the room.

At the age of ten, she’d stood frozen in the front yard, unable to stop the neighbor’s Doberman from killing her cat, Sassy, unable to close her eyes against the terror or her ears against the screams—screams similar to the ones she’d just heard.

There were coyotes out there, animals just as savage as any Doberman.

When Margot couldn’t find Marmaduke on either floor, she thrust her bare feet into a pair of boots and grabbed her jacket and a flashlight.

The second she stepped outside and closed the door, an angry, frigid wind slapped at her exposed face and hands and tore the breath from her lungs. She brushed at her hair as it whipped into her face, while snow pelted her from an impenetrable, black sky.

How could she possibly find Marmaduke in this mess? The outside light barely penetrated past the porch. Granted, she knew the property and how the front yard sloped downward to an outcropping of aspen intermixed with pine. If anything, Marmaduke would venture there or the barn to the left.

With the flashlight in one hand, Margot grabbed the shovel butted up against the wall for protection with the other hand. She paused at the bottom of the porch stairs and peered into the darkness. The idea of finding Marmaduke’s remains turned her stomach, but the fear of leaving him out in the cold, possibly wounded or even dying, urged her through the snow and past the porch’s illumination.

The cry of the wind, high and mournful, swept through the trees as Margot snapped on the flashlight. She aimed its beam down the driveway, where snow darted and whirled across the ground, and swept the light to the left.

That’s when she noticed another light, faint but distinct. It penetrated through the falling snow and barren trees from the barn window.

Someone was in the lab.

Whimpering, Jake lay naked on the linoleum floor in John’s lab. A million vicious talons pierced through his flesh and into the marrow of his bones. He wanted to die, to cave into the pressure. Another tidal wave of pain roared through his veins. He gasped and pulled himself into a fetal position.

The seizure had hit him just as he’d opened the door to the lab and turned on the light. He’d barely managed to get inside and shut the door before falling to his knees.

This attack was far worse than the other two. They’d hit him unexpectedly and with such savage intensity that they’d completely incapacitated him. Yet, they were gone after several minutes, as if he’d hallucinated each episode.

If only he’d kept his nose out of it, done his job, he wouldn’t be paralyzed on a cold, hard floor, in some lab in the middle of nowhere. But hell. His morals had interfered. Now he was paying for it. If only, if... Shit.

He would have done it all over again.

Over the pain, he heard the rattle of the doorknob.

Margot.

He couldn’t be found out. Not now. He’d left the light on. So damn stupid. He lay right, smack in the middle of the room. He’d be impossible to miss. She was going to ask questions, get suspicious. He couldn’t afford that. Not when she’d been married to Malcolm.

Jake focused on the space beneath the desk. Raking in a lung full of air, he dug his fingers into the linoleum and crawled across the floor. Every muscle screamed a protest. Sweat broke out on his brow.

Just as he pulled himself under the desk, another pain, more violent than the last, slammed into him. The unexpectedness of it tore the breath from him.

And in that instant, nothing mattered. Margot. Being discovered. Nothing but the pain and the knowledge that he was dying.

Margot paused on the outside of the lab door. She thought she’d locked the barn. But then...maybe she hadn’t. God, she didn’t know. Ever since Johnny’s death, she hadn’t been able to wrap her mind around a coherent thought.

She should call Carl, Greyson’s deputy, and get him out here, but Margot balked at the idea. Carl would just use it as another opportunity to make one of his lame passes. Then he’d give her that look of his and tell her to stop acting paranoid and lay off the alcohol. After all, nothing happened around here. Plus, who could possibly be interested in anything in the lab?

Unless Jake— Well, he had another thing coming if he thought he could waltz in here without getting her permission.

Curiosity, more powerful than any fear, eventually got the best of her. Inhaling a breath of courage, Margot shoved her flashlight into her coat pocket and opened the door. Lifting the shovel in both hands, she paused on the threshold and listened. She could have sworn she’d heard something. But the only sounds were her breathing and the hum of the refrigerator in the corner. Icy, winter air swept into the lab. She stepped inside and closed the door quietly. Nothing looked disturbed. Which didn’t explain the office light in the far back of the building.

“Is anyone here?”

Margot didn’t receive an answer, but then, she hadn’t expected one. If a thief was hiding somewhere, it was highly unlikely he’d come out and introduce himself.

Palming the shovel’s handle, she moved cautiously across the floor. The light from the office threw the far corners of the main room into grotesque shadows. The computers, vials, microscopes and other equipment cluttering the counter tops that ran against the walls on either side suddenly appeared menacing and unfamiliar. On those same counters, cages once holding mice sat empty. A number of stools butted up to the counters, while in the middle of the room sat a metal desk and large table with three computers, all now silent. The chrome refrigerator in the far corner continued to hum back at her. She dreaded the idea of going through its shelves, knowing she wouldn’t be able to make sense of anything inside.

Johnny had always kept this part of his life private from her—at least near the end. He’d probably given up explaining the validity of one of his hypothesis or some other theory after getting tired of seeing her eyes glaze over too many times. She’d never been able to grasp his conversations. They were like a foreign language and in school she’d been terrible with Spanish or French.

Tension cut across her shoulders as she stepped into the office in the back of the building. “Marmaduke, are you in here?”

No cat. No person. Completely empty.

She exhaled a shaky but relieved breath, turned off the office light and used her flashlight to retrace her steps back to the front door. Maybe all that wine had gone to her head after all. Maybe, just maybe, it had been an owl or a coyote and not Marmaduke, she reasoned, as she stepped outside and closed the door. The cat was probably safely asleep somewhere in the house, and she’d just missed him. Just in case, she’d double check the lab tomorrow in the light of day. Right now, she found the place too creepy.

As to the light, Margot hadn’t a clue. Maybe she just hadn’t noticed it on until tonight. God knows, for the longest time she hadn’t been interested in anything around her other than her books. Setting the shovel against the barn wall, Margot drew the lapels of her coat closer around her neck. She shuffled through the snow toward the house, all the while arcing the flashlight’s beam back and forth for signs of Marmduke, but she didn’t find him anywhere.

Once inside the house, she replaced her boots and jacket for a robe and walked into the kitchen where—of all things—