Silent Killer

Jackson Perdue stopped his car in front of the old home place. The last time he’d been here, five years ago, had been for his mother’s funeral. He had stayed in Dunmore three days, and that had been three days too long. Both he and Maleah had booked rooms at the Hometown Inn. Their stepfather had invited them to stay at the house, but Jack knew that Nolan had been relieved when they both declined his reluctant offer. When he left town, he had felt certain he would never return.

Never say never.

Things change. Life doesn’t stay the same. Nolan Reaves was dead. The old bastard had keeled over in his workshop behind the house eight months ago. Heart attack.

Funny thing was, Jack had thought the son of a bitch didn’t have a heart.

Neither he nor Maleah had come back to Dunmore for the funeral. He didn’t know who had hated their stepfather more, he or his sister.

Maleah had come down from Knoxville six months ago, hired a realtor and put their mother’s home up for sale. With the economy heading into a recession and real estate moving at a snail’s pace, there hadn’t been any offers on the three-story Victorian that had been in his family for four generations.

Jack turned off the engine, snatched the keys from the ignition and opened the driver’s side door. When his feet hit the pavement, he stretched to get the kinks out of his back and neck and pocketed the keys. Rounding the hood, he stepped up on the sidewalk and stared at his childhood home. His thoughts went back to a time when this place had housed a happy family, when his world had been filled with love and laughter. Before his father had been killed. Before his mother had married Nolan Reaves.

Jack left the city sidewalk and moved onto the brick walkway that led to the front porch. He stopped halfway to the porch and looked up at the windows on the left side of the second story, where his old room was located. He doubted anything of his remained. When they’d been here briefly for Mama’s funeral, he had gone no farther than the downstairs parlor. For the first twelve years of his life, this old house had been home. And for the next six years, it had been hell.

Could he actually live here again? Even if he got rid of everything that reminded him of his stepfather, he couldn’t erase the memories.

He hated the cold, austere gray color Nolan had insisted the house be painted. Mama had wept quietly when the drab gray and white covered the beautiful green, cream and rose that the house had been for generations, colors true to the time period. If he actually moved into the house, the first thing he would do was hire painters to take the Victorian back to her colorful roots. He would have the house repainted—for his mother.

“God knows I’ll never move back to Dunmore, but if I did, I wouldn’t live in that house,” Maleah had told him. “As far as I’m concerned, the house is yours if you want it.”

But that was the million-dollar question: Did he want it?

Maybe. He didn’t have to decide right away. He could stay here a few weeks and see how it went. It was either that or rent a motel room by the week. Not a pleasant prospect. Besides, if his new job didn’t work out, it would be easier to move on if he hadn’t leased an apartment or a house.

He had been at loose ends when Mike Birkett phoned and offered him the job. Otherwise, he probably wouldn’t have considered coming back to Alabama. He had been honorably discharged from the army last year, after four months in the hospital recuperating from a bomb explosion that had nearly killed him. The surgeons had reconstructed the left side of his face, neck and shoulder and had done a damn good job. Only those who had known him before the reconstruction would suspect that he’d been put back together piece by piece.

“Hey, the job is yours if you want it,” Mike had told him. “The pay isn’t much, but it’s in line with the low cost of living in Dunmore.”

“Let me think about it.”

“Come home. Take the job. Let’s get reacquainted. If after a few months you hate it, you can always quit.”

In the end, Mike had convinced him to give it a try. He’d known his old buddy had pulled a few strings to get him okayed for the position. Even though he was in really good physical shape now, he’d never be 100 percent ever again. Jack wasn’t sure he’d make a good deputy just because he’d been a top-notch soldier, but God knew he needed something to do, something to keep him sane.

He stepped up on the porch, faced the front door and paused. After taking a deep breath, he removed the house key from his pocket. He unlocked and opened the door, then walked inside. A whiff of muskiness hit him the moment he entered the foyer. The house needed airing out after being closed up for so many months. First thing in the morning, he’d open every window in the place. Since it was spring and the temps were in the seventies, it was the perfect time.

As if his feet were planted in cement, he found it impossible to move beyond where he stood just over the threshold. Glancing in every direction—left, right, up and down—he clenched his teeth together tightly. He could feel Nolan’s presence, could even smell a hint of the pipe tobacco his stepfather had used. Maybe this was a huge mistake. Maybe he’d been wrong to think that he could live here. It wasn’t too late to turn around, walk away from the house and rent a room for tonight.

God damn it, no! He wouldn’t let Nolan run him off, not the way he had when Jack was eighteen. Nolan was dead. Jack was thirty-seven, a decorated war hero, and this house was his now, his and Maleah’s, as it had once been their mother’s. If it was the last thing he ever did, he intended to erase Nolan Reaves from their ancestral home, starting with the old carriage house where their stepfather had doled out his own unique brand of punishment.

Catherine Cantrell had asked her best friend, Lorie Hammonds, to drive her by her old home, just outside the city limits. She and Mark had lived there for nearly six years before his death eighteen months ago.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Lorie asked.

“I’m sure. I have to face the past sooner or later.”

“But does it have to be today?”

Cathy sighed. Yes, it had to be today. One of the many things her therapist at Haven Home had taught her was that putting off unpleasant things didn’t make them go away. The sooner she faced it, whatever “it” was, and dealt with it, the sooner it ceased to be a monster hidden in a dark closet ready to pounce on her when she least expected it.

Lorie got out of her Ford Edge, went around the hood and met Cathy as she stood at the border of the street, her gaze scanning the porch. This was where Mark had been doused with gasoline and set on fire. This was where she had waited with him, praying with every breath, until the ambulance arrived. This was where her safe, contented life had ended. Eighteen months, three weeks and five days ago.

Every nerve in her body shivered; every muscle tensed. With her eyes wide open, she could see Mark as he had been that horrible day, his flesh charred, melted, his life draining from his body. She could hear his agonized screams and then the deadly silence that had followed.

She closed her eyes and took a deep, fortifying breath.

Lorie put her arm around Cathy’s quivering shoulders and gave her a reassuring squeeze. “Come on. Let’s go.”

Cathy opened her eyes and shook her head. “Not yet.”

“Don’t do this to yourself. Enough’s enough.”

“I imagine the new minister’s wife redecorated,” Cathy said. “No woman wants to live in a house decorated by a former owner.”

“The new minister is a widower with a teenage daughter. No wife.”

“All the same, this isn’t my house any longer. My things aren’t here. The home I created with Mark is gone.”

“Your furniture and other things are in storage,” Lorie reminded her. “When you buy a new place, you can—”

She turned quickly and faced her oldest and dearest friend. “Thank you for letting me stay with you until I find a place.” Lorie and she were BFF—best friends forever—their friendship going back to when they wore diapers. Their parents had been good friends, and they had lived only blocks apart when they were growing up.

“Your mother wants you to stay with her, you know.”

“What my mother wants isn’t as important to me as what I want.”

Lorie let out a loud, low whistle. “I don’t know what they did to you at Haven Home, but I like it. The old Cathy would never have said something like that and meant it.”

“The old Cathy no longer exists. I think she began dying the day Mark died.” She looked directly at Lorie. “I couldn’t say this to just anyone, because they wouldn’t understand, they’d take it the wrong way…but it took something as traumatic as Mark’s gruesome murder to finally give me the courage to become my own person.”

Mark’s death and a year of therapy.

Cathy took one final look at the porch and then ran her gaze over the neatly manicured lawn. “I’m ready to go now.”

She followed Lorie back to the SUV. She had faced one of many demons that she had left behind a year ago when she had checked herself in at Haven Home, a mental-rehabilitation center outside of Birmingham. After the first six months, she had become an outpatient but had stayed on as a part-time employee in the cafeteria. Her mother and Mark’s parents had visited her several times and had brought Seth with them. She had missed her son unbearably, but she had known living with his grandparents had been the best thing for him until she was able to provide him with a mentally stable mother.

Mark’s death had almost destroyed her, and only with Dr. Milton’s help had she been able to fully recover. She had gone into the intensive therapy blaming herself for Mark’s death and believing that his parents and Seth blamed her for not being able to save him. But Dr. Milton had worked with her until she had been able to admit to herself that the guilt she felt wasn’t because she blamed herself for not being able to save Mark. Realistically, logically, she knew that would have been impossible. She had done everything within her power. No, what Cathy felt guilty about, what she had had great difficulty admitting to Dr. Milton and to herself, was that she had never loved her husband. She had married him not loving him, and although she had tried to convince herself that she loved him, she hadn’t. She had cared deeply for him, had respected and admired him, but she had never been able to feel for Mark that deep, passionate love a woman should feel for her husband.

“Do you want to stop by J.B. and Mona’s to see Seth?” Lorie asked.

“No, not yet. I’m supposed to have dinner with them and Mother tomorrow, after church. I’ll wait until then.”

“J.B. and Mona may not give Seth up without a fight.” Lorie inserted the key into the ignition. “I took the liberty of hiring Elliott Floyd to represent you, just in case Mark’s parents aren’t willing to turn your son over to you now that you’re well.”

Gasping softly, Cathy snapped her head around and stared at her friend. “I don’t think a lawyer will be necessary. But thank you all the same. Seth is my child. I appreciate all that J.B. and Mona have done for him since Mark’s death, but you can’t possibly believe that they would try to take him away from me.”

Lorie shrugged. “You never know what people will do. If for any reason the Cantrells think you’re unfit to—”

“I’m fit,” Cathy said. “I believe that I’m better prepared to be a good mother to my son now than ever before, and I was a damn good mother in the past.”

Lorie eyed Cathy with speculative curiosity. “You are aware of the fact that you just said
damn
and didn’t blink an eye, aren’t you?”

Cathy smiled. “Surprised?”

“Shocked.” Lorie laughed. “Know any other forbidden words?”

“A whole slew of them. And sooner or later, you’ll probably hear me say all of them.”

“I want to meet your Dr. Milton one of these days,” Lorie said. “I want to shake his hand and thank him for releasing the real Catherine Nelson Cantrell from that holier-than-thou prison she stuck herself in trying to please her husband and her mother and her in-laws.”

“The days of my trying to please everyone else are over. I’ve come home to start a new life, not to rebuild my old one. I owe it to myself and to Seth to be strong and independent and live the rest of my life to the fullest, and that’s just what I intend to do.”

Nicole Powell dreaded going home to Griffin’s Rest. She and her friend, Maleah Perdue, had been gone a week, just the two of them alone in a Gatlinburg cabin in the Smoky Mountains. They had eaten out a few times and done a little shopping, but mostly they had kicked back at the cabin and done little or nothing. They had watched chick-flick DVDs, soaked in the hot tub, taken long walks on the nearby hiking trails and pigged out on the array of bad-for-you food they had purchased at a local grocery store.

The past year had been difficult for Maleah. Her older brother, Jack, had been critically wounded on his last assignment in the Middle East. She had spent weeks at his bedside, hoping and praying that he would survive. He had, but at a great cost. He had undergone several surgeries to his face and neck to rebuild what the explosion had ripped away.

During their stay at the cabin, Nic and Maleah had confided in each other, sharing things that they wouldn’t or couldn’t share with anyone else. In the two years that Nic had been married to Griffin Powell and had been co-owner of the Powell Private Security and Investigation Agency, she had become acquainted with all of their agents. Only a handful of their employees were women, and of those few, Nic had bonded with only two, Maleah and Barbara Jean Hughes.

“Have you decided what you’re going to do? Are you going to talk to Griff and tell him how you feel?” Maleah asked as Nic pulled her Escalade up in front of the huge iron gates at Griffin’s Rest. Two massive stone arches, with bronze griffins implanted in the stone, flanked the entrance.

Nic rolled down the window and said her name. The identification security system instantly recognized her voice and activated the Open function on the gates. This voice-ID system was new here at the Powell compound.

Once they were inside the estate and the gates closed behind them, Nic glanced at Maleah. “I can talk to him and try to explain, but he won’t understand.”