Twisted By Love, Reincarnation Tales, Book 1 (27 page)

* * * * *

You don’t pay attention to every twist and
turn when someone else is doing the driving. And Livie made several
wrong turns trying to get to his brother’s house. Once she’d gone
five miles down a road before realizing it was the wrong one. She
couldn’t remember the name of Wade’s street. If she had, she could
have mapped it on the Internet. As it was, she’d printed a map to
get her to Freedom, then winged it after that. Finally, in
desperation, she stopped at a gas station and asked the
minimarket’s attendant if he had any clue where Wade Daniels’ house
was, a farmhouse at the end of a road that was near the old quarry.
Bern had admitted he’d done his fair share of necking there, and
thank God he had because though the pimply-faced boy didn’t know
Wade, he knew that quarry.

She almost cried when she finally saw the
house, lights on in a couple of second-floor windows and over the
front door. It was a little before ten when she shut off the car
engine. Almost tripping on the steps in her haste, she stumbled
across the wooden porch and put her finger to the bell. The chime
rippled through the house. She pushed again, just to be sure.

Wade finally answered. He still wore a white
shirt and black suit pants.

The sight of her rendered him speechless.

“I can’t find Bern.”

He stared at her. There was a resemblance to
Bern, of course, but Wade had far fewer lines at his mouth, as if
he found little to smile about.

“What time did he leave?” she prompted.

“Wade, who is it?” Clare’s voice, drifting
down the stairs.

Then he seemed to shake himself. “The meeting
broke up about three. He didn’t hang around.”

“He never came home. He doesn’t answer his
phone.”

“And you drove all the way up here?”

“I didn’t have your phone number.”

“My God, Livie, what are you doing here?”
Appearing at Wade’s shoulder, Clare’s face was freshly scrubbed of
makeup, her green robe belted at the waist.

“She’s looking for Bern.”

“I thought he went home.” Clare echoed what
Wade had said.

Wade fished in his pants pocket, came out
with a cell, and hit a number. He held the phone to his ear.

“He’s not answering. Something’s wrong,”
Livie insisted. She could hear the panic rising in her voice.

When Bern didn’t pick up, Wade stared at the
phone. “You think he’s had an accident?”

Clare’s hand shot to her mouth.

How to say this so she didn’t sound
completely crazy? “When we took that hike on Saturday, up in Red
Cliff, we found a house. A rock house.”

“Rock house.” Nana stood on the stairs, a
cream-colored nightie swirling around her bony calves. “That’s what
people called it. I forgot that.”

“Go back to bed, Nana,” Clare said.

“What about the house?” Wade asked, urging
Livie on.

“I think he went back there.”

“Why the hell would he do that?”

“It had a cellar. He wanted to find out what
was inside.” It sounded ridiculous, and she couldn’t explain why
she’d decided Bern had gone back to that house, but Livie
absolutely
knew
he had.

Clare shook her head, clutching her robe
closed at her throat.

Wade pressed his lips together, nostrils
flared, and for a moment, he looked exactly like Bern when he was
thinking hard. “Let’s go find him.”

She almost sagged to her knees with relief.
Then she prayed she could find the house again.

* * * * *

Wade drove, and they’d picked up Jake on the
way. Being a contractor, Jake had several oversized flashlights and
torches. Livie rode shotgun so she could watch the highway for the
turnoff. She was terrified she’d miss it in the dark, but there it
was, off to the left. They bumped along the rutted track.

They found Bern’s Lexus parked by the
gully.

My God.
She’d been right. As she
climbed from the car, her heart felt like a big fist was squeezing
the blood from it. Jake and Wade followed, exchanging glances over
the roof, but neither of them said a word.

Livie led them up in to the hills by
flashlight.

“Are you sure this is the way, Livie? We
should follow the road.” Jake waved his torch over the seemingly
nonexistent trail as Livie made a turn and began a slightly steeper
ascent.

“I’m sure.” She could walk it with her eyes
closed. It was like taking the same route for your daily run. You
didn’t have to think, your feet knew. She’d take the time later to
wonder how
her
feet knew a path she’d taken only once.

She’d put on her tennis shoes before she left
the office, and Clare had given her a pair of sweats to wear. The
fit was snug and the legs too short, but it was better than wearing
her skirt and blazer. The night was cold, but the air was
thankfully still. The three-quarter moon drifted across the sky,
and a coyote howled in the distance, a lonely, mournful sound, as
if he’d lost his pack.

“What was Bern doing up here?” Wade said
behind her. “He didn’t mention anything about it before he left
this afternoon.”

She turned her head to answer as she walked.
“He wanted to know what was down in the root cellar.”

“What the hell for?” Jake’s voice carried
from his position as last in line.

Livie didn’t know. She simply remembered his
pale face, his burning stare, and the shudder across his shoulders.
“He dreamed about it.”

No one said anything.

With her next step, a rock slid out from
under her foot, and she stumbled.

Wade caught her arm. “Careful.”

She kept climbing. “Thank you for coming with
me.” She had to clench her teeth against the sudden need to cry.
She couldn’t panic now. She couldn’t let herself go. During the
long drive, she hadn’t let herself get hysterical. She wouldn’t
now. There was something comforting about having Bern’s two
brothers at her back. She still marveled that they’d simply
followed her into the dark night. It made her realize that they’d
do anything for their brother, no matter how crazy it seemed.

As they passed beyond the shadow of the rock
outcropping, the house suddenly appeared, a dark silhouette in the
night sky.

“There it is.” She scrambled up the hill,
using the rocks as handholds the way she had the other day,
switching the torch from palm to palm when she needed to. Pebbles
skittered down the hill in her wake, yet she heard the relentless
progress of the men behind her.

She crested the hill, stopping long enough to
catch her breath. Wade and Jake came abreast of her, staring at the
house.

“Someone should have torn it down long ago,”
Jake said softly.

Souls traveled together, Suze had said. Maybe
Jake had been to this place. She’d think about that later, too.

“This way.” She rounded the house, shining
the flashlight ahead of her until the cellar doors appeared in the
beam.

The padlock lay broken in the dirt. Rocks
were piled atop the corrugated tin. As if Bern had been trying to
seal it off.

Or someone had been trying to seal him
in.

“Help me.” Panic rose in her throat, choking
her, and she dropped the flashlight, stumbled, fell to her knees.
Big rocks, heavy rocks, piled high. Her nails broke. Her wrists
ached. Wade and Jake were beside her, grabbing, tossing.

“Bern.” She called. No one answered. There
was only the huff and puff of their labored breaths.

Then the doors were clear. Jake hauled one
back, Wade the other. Livie flashed her torch down into the
hole.

In the pool of light, Bern lay crumpled at
the bottom of the stairs.

Chapter Twenty-six

“I thought you were dead,” she whispered
against his lips. “Seeing you down there, I thought I’d die,
too.”

Sprawled on her bed with pillows all around
him, Bern hugged her tightly despite the ache in every part of his
body. His head, swathed in bandages, was the worst. The blow had
landed just above his ear, perilously close to his temple. A few
fractions of an inch, and they would have found him dead in that
cellar.

He’d been unconscious when the paramedics
pulled him out of the hole two nights ago and rushed him to the
hospital. After attending to his head, the emergency room doctor
forced him to stay the night. He had a concussion, needed watching,
twenty-four hours, yeah, yeah, yeah. All he’d wanted was Livie.

The police came Thursday morning, since he
obviously hadn’t put the rocks on those doors himself. Yet the
truth was that he hadn’t seen a damn thing. All he had was a gut
feeling that Toni was responsible.

The doctors had released him this morning,
and Livie took him home. He’d slept through the drive. He’d still
felt nauseous and had closed his eyes to stop the spinning. This
was the first moment he’d had alone with her. In the hospital room,
there’d been his brothers, Mom, Clare, even Nana. Before they’d
driven away, Wade had hugged Livie and folded her hand around a
slip of paper with his cell number and the house phone on it.

Christ. The lengths she’d gone to turned him
inside out.

Now, on her bed, he breathed in the flowery
scent of her hair and drew her warmth deep inside. “I’m sorry,” he
whispered.

“For what?”

“For telling the police I thought Toni was
responsible.”

She sat up. “You can’t help what you feel.
But you should have told me about the squirrel on your
doorstep.”

“I didn’t want to worry you.”

He’d told the police everything while Livie
listened. It was too late to determine anything about the squirrel.
As for the cellar, there wasn’t a shred of physical evidence, no
forensics to perform, unless you could pull fingerprints off a
bunch of rocks. If Toni had parked behind his car at the gully,
Wade’s car and the ambulance had obscured her tire tracks. All the
police could do was question her when they found her.

But
he
knew what she’d done.

“Toni couldn’t have known where you were,”
Livie said. “I didn’t tell her.”

She’d confessed that Toni had come to her on
Tuesday night. Two days ago, he would have railed at her for
keeping it a secret. But something had happened to him down in that
hole. He no longer cared about trivialities.

“She knew just like you knew,” he
insisted.

“It was an educated guess on my part based on
your reaction to the house.”

She’d been saying that for two days. It was
far more. Somehow they’d broken through to the past,
their
past. Down in that cellar, it had been like a regression hypnosis.
He’d seen. He knew. Livie’s mind had been opened, too.

So had Toni’s. He was sure of it. She’d been
there. She’d hit him, stolen his phone, and covered the doors with
rocks. She’d walled him in just like she had seventy years ago.
She’d left him to die down there.

“I talked to her that night,” Livie insisted.
“She was going to meet me for dinner. I was the one who said I
couldn’t make. There was no way she could have been up there,
too.”

He’d made it up to the house around four
o’clock. Livie didn’t talk to Toni until seven. Three hours would
have been enough to follow him up the hill, hit him, cover the
doors, and be back on the highway in time to take Livie’s call.
Livie had no idea where Toni had actually been at that moment,
except that she was in her car. Of course, that meant Toni had to
know where he was.

He was convinced she had.

Stretched out beside him, Livie leaned on one
arm, looking down at him.

“I saw things down in that cellar,” he said.
She waited, letting him go at his own pace. “I’ve been dreaming
about it,” he admitted.

She pursed her lips. “Since when?”

“Since you found Toni at my house. Something
happened that night, as if it were a trigger. I started dreaming
about being trapped in a cellar. In the dark. I died down
there.”

If he expected her to soften at that point,
she didn’t. “I know what you’re going to say. You recognized the
cellar up at that house. And you didn’t tell me.”

“I had to work it out.”

“And how did Toni fit into everything?”

It was time to tell her about the vision. He
hadn’t told the police. He couldn’t afford to let them write him
off as a crackpot. “I had a dream. No,” he corrected, “it was a
memory. She and I were married. We lived in that house. So did you.
I was going to leave her. It was right after Pearl Harbor because I
talked about the Japs. I was enlisting and never coming back. You’d
gone to San Francisco for a week.”

She tipped her head. “We used to meet out at
that rock below the house, didn’t we?”

“Yes.” He held her hand. “It was so clear. I
knew everything about us.”

“Like my regression to that little boy.”

He nodded. “Like it was really
my
past. She’d fallen off a horse a couple of years before, while you
two were out riding. It was supposedly your fault. She was always
sickly after that. But it was really her way of getting attention,
of keeping you in line, making you feel guilty, tying you to her.”
Binding the two of them to her.

“Just like Toni,” she whispered.

“When I told her I was leaving her, she hit
me with her cane. I don’t know how she got me into the cellar, but
she locked me in and walled me up behind the bricks.”

Livie parted her lips, stared at him. “That’s
why the border in the garden wasn’t finished. She used them.”

“I’m not crazy,” he said. “It was real. Even
the hate I felt for her was real. She let me die down there.”

“That’s why I could just shake you,” she said
through gritted teeth. “If you hadn’t been so hell bent on
protecting me by
not
telling me things you should have, I
wouldn’t have let Toni in that night. Maybe you would never have
been hurt. I certainly wouldn’t have let you investigate that
cellar by yourself.” She shook her finger at him. “No more secrets,
you hear.”