The Carson Springs Trilogy: Stranger in Paradise, Taste of Honey, and Wish Come True (41 page)

“Have I told you lately that I love you?”

She smiled. “I never get tired of hearing it.”

“Then you’ll be hearing it a lot.”

“That would suit me just fine.”

After a moment he let go of her hand and pushed himself to his feet—a bit unsteadily. “Help an old man to bed?” He’d had a little too much to drink, she saw.

She saw, too, how it would be in the years to come. There would be nights when it wasn’t about too much wine, when Wes would move a bit slower and lean on her more often. But for some reason the thought didn’t bother her.
In sickness and in health…

She rose, tucking his arm into hers. “My pleasure.”

Alice was woken before dawn by the trilling of the phone. She bolted upright in the darkness, her heart pounding, the room pitching and yawing.
Something’s wrong.
Why else would someone be calling at this hour?

She snatched up the receiver. “?Lo?”

“It’s me. Sorry I woke you.”

Her sister. Who wouldn’t be apologizing in a
real
emergency. Alice relaxed a bit, peering at the digital clock on the nightstand. “It’s three
A.M
. What the hell is going on?”

“I’m down at the police station.” Alice heard voices in the background, the muted jangling of phones. “It’s Finch. I’ll tell you all about it later on. That’s not why I’m calling.” Her sister took a deep breath. “It’s Mom. I’m worried about her.”

“Why? What happened?”

“Finch saw something tonight. Or I should say
someone.
Out at the convent. It’s a long story—I can’t go into it now. Let’s just say it might be who the police are looking for.”

Now Wes was awake, too, sitting up beside her, switching on the bedside lamp. “Who is it?” he asked groggily.

Alice cupped a hand over the receiver. “My sister.”

“What’s wrong?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out.” Alice dropped her hand. “Laura, what does all this have to do with Mom?”

“Maybe nothing. I’m probably just being paranoid. But I’ve been calling and calling, and all I get is a busy signal.”

“Her phone must be out of order.”

“I figured as much.” There was a pause in which Alice heard a door slam. “But I’d feel a whole lot better if someone checked up on her.”

“What about the police?”

“That seems kind of extreme, doesn’t it?”

Alice kicked off the covers. “I’m on my way.” There was no real reason for alarm, but she felt anxious nonetheless. She was reaching into her closet for something to throw on when she abruptly slammed it shut. If her mother
was
in trouble there was no time to waste.

Wes was already out of bed, peeling off his pajama top and tugging on his crewneck sweater from the night before. “I’ll drive.”

They were halfway down the hall when a sleepy voice behind them called, “What’s going on?”

Alice turned to find Ian in the doorway to the guest room, wearing only a pair of rumpled boxers. “Nothing,” she told him. “Just…my mom’s phone is out of order and Laura thought it’d be a good idea if we checked up on her. We’re probably overreacting but—”

Ian didn’t let her finish. “I’ll meet you out front.”

The air outside was cool. Wes was backing the Mercedes out of the garage when Ian appeared in jeans and a sweatshirt she couldn’t help noticing was inside out. Then they were in the car, tearing down the steep canyon road at a speed that normally would have had Alice bracing herself against an impact.

Instead, she urged, “Can’t you go any faster?”

“Not unless you want us all killed,” Wes answered calmly.

Ian leaned over the seat. “How much farther?”

Alice twisted around to meet his anxious gaze. “Couple more miles.” Because he hadn’t been out to her mother’s new house he didn’t know how isolated it was. “Can you imagine what she’ll think when we all come bursting in on her?”

“Alice, is there something you’re not telling me?” Ian’s eyes searched her face.

She chose her words carefully, not wanting him to panic. “Look, this probably has nothing to do with it, but Laura was at the police station when she called. It seems Finch is being questioned about someone she saw who they think might be the Carson Springs killer.”

“What does it have to do with Sam?”

“Nothing, I’m sure.” It came out sounding less than certain.

She didn’t need to add that a woman all alone out in the middle of nowhere would be at this killer’s mercy. Ian had gotten the message—she saw it in the grim set of his jaw.

“Christ,” he swore.

The road flattened and then they were swinging onto Falcon, where Wes bore down with a vengeance. The center line rushed up to wrap itself about Alice’s throat. If anything should happen to her mother…

I’d never forgive myself.

Sam remained perfectly still, the thudding of her heart seeming to come from somewhere outside her, from an ocean fathoms below the floor on which she crouched. She could hear the dog’s frantic barking—it sounded as if it were coming from the kitchen—an endless
roof-roof-roof.

That’s it, she thought. First thing tomorrow it’s back to your owner.

All at once it occurred to her there might not be a tomorrow, and that the dog was the very last thing she ought to be thinking about right now. She started as if from a trance, icy fingers closing about her heart. Please don’t let it be who I think it is. A thief she could handle. Anything, so long as the baby wasn’t harmed.

The barking abruptly ceased. That’s when she heard it: the faint crunch of broken glass. The invisible fingers squeezed tighter. She peeked up over the bed at the window, no more than a dozen feet away. If she could get to it and climb out…

She hadn’t completed the thought when she was scrambling over the bed and across the room. She tugged on the sash, but it wouldn’t budge. She yanked harder. Nothing.

Please God…oh please…

Hot panic clawed its way up her throat. Then she remembered the latch—locked!—and reached under the blinds, scrabbling wildly, metal slats clattering like cymbals.

The barking started up again. Now she couldn’t hear a thing other than the dog’s frantic roof-roof-roof. She glanced over her shoulder. The knife was sticking out from under the bed. She must have dropped it at some point, though she had no memory of doing so. Sam stared at it without really seeing it, a dreamy paralysis settling over her. Several seconds passed, seconds that to her were no more than a heartbeat.

The soft tread of footsteps just outside the door jolted her back into action. She shoved hard against the upper sash, and the window flew open, letting in a cool rush of air smelling faintly of cut grass. A faint pink blush lay along the horizon, like blood that hadn’t quite washed out.

Sam had one leg over the sill when a cold hand closed over her arm.

Ian was the first to see the broken glass. When he’d heard the dog barking some instinct had made him race around back while his dad and Alice tried the front door. Now he stared in horror at what was left of the sliding glass door. More glass, like a dusting of sugar, was embedded in the discarded brick nearby.

A powerful dread swept through him.

Ian ducked inside, yelling at the top of his lungs, “Sam!” He skidded a little on the broken glass, his shoulder knocking loose a jagged shard still embedded in the frame. It guillotined down, splintering at his feet and nearly severing one of his toes. He barely noticed. “Sam!” he yelled again, dashing through the kitchen into the next room. Outside, he could hear bushes rustling and the slap of soles against concrete as his father and Alice raced around the side of the house, no doubt summoned by his shouts.

Something large and hairy came hurtling out of nowhere. Ian froze in the doorway as a large yellow dog, half crazed with excitement, threw itself at him, barking frantically. “Easy, boy…” He pushed the dog away, which seemed more frightened than threatening. Where the hell was Sam?

As if in answer, he heard a muffled cry from down the hall.

The hand about her arm was cold. Icy as dead flesh. An image of Martin in his coffin flashed through her mind. But these fingers were alive. They yanked her off balance, and she tumbled to the floor with a breathless little cry. Reflexively, her knees jerked up to shield her belly.

Curled on her side, all she could see was a pair of blue pumps and skinny legs that traveled up, up before disappearing into the dark bell of a skirt. Then a face loomed into view. Horrid and bony, with hair blond and shiny as a doll’s and pale blue eyes that seemed to stare sightlessly. Sam had seen that face but couldn’t think where.

The woman began to recite tonelessly, “For a whore is a deep ditch, and a strange woman is a narrow pit…She also lieth in wait as for prey, and increaseth the transgressors among men…”

A knife glittered in her hand. Smaller than the one Sam had dropped—more like a switchblade.
Dear God.
She was inching away from it when a foot stamped down hard on her robe. Suddenly, she knew where she’d seen that face: at the convent, with Mother Ignatius.

“You’ve sinned.” The queer, pale eyes dropped to Sam’s belly. But not as if seeing her; as if looking through her. “And now His judgment is upon you.”

“You…you don’t even know me,” Sam gasped.

“You’ve lain with a man not your husband, and now you’re with child.”

Fury rose, momentarily eclipsing her fear. “Who are you to judge me?”

Incredibly, the woman shook her head as if in regret. “It’s the Lord’s vengeance, not mine. I am merely His instrument.” She spoke as quietly as if in church, making the sign of the cross. “Don’t be afraid. I will be quick and merciful as with the others.”

Others? Oh God.

The knife slashed down in a gleaming arc. Sam rolled away with a cry, feeling it tear through her robe, inches from her ribcage, before sinking onto the floor with a muffled
thud.
The room faded, then swam back into focus.

She grabbed for the knife, but the woman was quicker. She lunged to free it with a grunt of expelled breath that smelled faintly, and absurdly, of peanut butter. In her new, queerly heightened state of awareness Sam was acutely aware of everything—the scent of floor wax, a loose thread straggling from the quilt, the dust kitties under the bed.

I’m going to die,
she thought. And, strangely, that was okay.

Then she remembered the baby. She mustn’t let anything happen to the baby. She was rolling into a crouch when she heard a deep voice outside the room cry,
“Sam!”

Her attacker froze, knife suspended in midair. At that precise moment Sam’s gaze fell on the lamp cord snaking across the rug. She grabbed hold and gave a sharp tug. The lamp toppled to the floor, one of its bulbs exploding like a miniature bomb going off. The woman jumped back with a yelp, a tiny missile of broken glass embedded in her arm. She swatted at it as she might have a bee, blood trickling down her arm, smearing into something that resembled—Sam’s overtaxed mind made another nimble leap into the absurd—the Nike swoosh.

Then her mind clicked back into gear, and she was on her feet making a dash for the door. She’d have made it, too, if her feet hadn’t become tangled in the robe’s trailing sash. She stumbled and pitched forward, grabbing hold of the bed frame to keep from falling. The woman took advantage and lunged, tackling her about the waist. Sam struggled against arms stronger than hers, fighting to keep from being dragged to the floor. This time, if she went down, she’d die. Only the thought of the baby gave her a strength she wouldn’t have believed she possessed.

“Sam!”
Louder this time.

She shrieked, but only a high whistle emerged.

Down the hallway the
roof-roof-roof
of Max barking was a staccato beat to the thud of racing footsteps.

The scene was out of a horror movie. Ian, momentarily blinded by the toppled lamp’s glare, saw only the silhouettes on the wall, contracting and expanding like in some bizarre shadow play. Two figures caught, swaying, in what appeared a lover’s embrace. Then he saw that one of the figures was Sam. He barely recognized her.

She managed to struggle free. Her robe trailing from one arm, she bent to snatch something from the floor—a knife, he saw. She held it in front of her, arms extended, crying shrilly, “Not the baby. I won’t let you hurt the baby!”

Her attacker advanced—a woman in a blond wig skewed at an angle, lipstick smeared in a way that made her appear to be mordantly grinning. As she stepped in front of the lamp, her long shadow angled up the wall onto the ceiling: an enormous insect about to gobble its prey.

Then Ian was flying across the room, hurling himself at her. They grappled, and he felt a flicker of surprise at her strength: It was almost inhuman. His fist scythed in the roundhouse blow taught to him aeons ago by his father. There was a cracking sound, like a pencil snapping in two, and the blond head jerked back, eyes rolling to white. He caught a glimpse of pale red hair under the wig as she buckled to the floor.

Then Sam was in his arms, shivering, her teeth chattering as if with fever. “Sh-she…she…was g-going to hurt the b-baby.”

“The baby’s fine. You’re fine,” he soothed, stroking the back of her head. “Everything’s going to be okay. I’m here now.” He tightened his arms about her, nearly overcome by a wave of lightheadedness at the thought of how close he’d come to losing her.

In the storm that followed—his father and Alice bursting into the room, followed a short while later by the police—a single thought stood clear in Ian’s mind, like a beacon atop a lighthouse:
never again.
Never again would he be someplace else when he ought to be with Sam. This was where he belonged, this house…or some other. Man and wife, or live-in lovers. It didn’t matter. As long as they were together.

From the
Los Angeles Times

NUN CHARGED IN TWO DEATHS

In a bizarre twist, the arrest of a local nun in Carson Springs, CA, during what police are calling an assault with intent to kill, could lead to murder charges in connection with the stabbing deaths last summer of a homeless man and a popular high school teacher in town. Sister Beatrice Kernshaw, 35, was taken into custody charged with breaking and entering the home of Samantha Kiley, 48, a local business owner, and violently attacking her. “I’ll have nightmares for the rest of my life,” Kiley said, “but thank God no one was hurt.” The victim, four months pregnant, was admitted to the hospital for observation but released the following day.

Local authorities have uncovered evidence linking Kernshaw to the unsolved deaths of Kyle Heaton, 52, and Phoebe Linton, 31, and law enforcement sources say they expect the nun to be charged with their murders and with the attempted murder of Ms. Kiley. The suspect has been placed in the care of doctors at the Edith Brockwood Psychiatric Hospital in Ventura while she awaits trial. Experts have labeled her a paranoid schizophrenic with a history of mental illness. According to one family member, Kernshaw’s father reportedly shot himself to death in 1969 following his divorce from her mother. As a teen she spent several years at a Catholic home for troubled youths.

Born Bernadette Kernshaw in Portland, Oregon, she took her vows as a Catholic nun in 1974. Prior to her arrest she resided at Our Lady of the Wayside, a convent known for its honey, sold under the label Blessed Bee. The mother superior issued no comment, except to say, “We must all pray for Sister Beatrice.”