Unseen (14 page)

Will set his jaw and his resolve.

Gemma tore through the books in her bedroom but there was no diary to be found. She wandered down to the den but knew she would never have left the journal where it could be discovered by her mother. She glanced at all the books on the shelves but the only red ones she saw were paperbacks, and her journal was leather.

She thought she heard something on her porch and she flew to the front door and flung it open. The darkening evening sky met her, along with a breeze that skittered shriveled leaves across the wood flooring and sent them piling into the corners.

No mysterious message. No one seeing into her soul.

Returning to the kitchen, she fixed herself a meal of cheese, crackers, and apple slices and asked herself if she was ever going to purchase any groceries. She’d enjoyed Sally Van Kamp’s chicken casserole, and now had to return the dish—a face-to-face she wasn’t looking forward to—but she really needed to stock her shelves. The trouble was, shopping wasn’t high on her priority list and she only thought about it when she returned home alone, and by then she had no interest in going out again.

She was munching her last cracker when she was struck by a thought. Dusting off her hands, she climbed the stairs to the attic, which was filled with dust-covered boxes and cobwebs. After surveying the piles of stuff, she hauled open several boxes and found household paraphernalia—old knickknacks, vases, pictures—the kind of various and sundry items that fill garage sales every weekend, but no journal.

She returned downstairs and retreated to Jean’s—now her—office. Lost in thought, she didn’t immediately notice the two messages on her voice mail, but finally she saw them. The first was an imperious message from Davinia Noack demanding to have a reading; the second was from someone who merely breathed hard into the phone. She listened to them both again. The breather didn’t terrorize her, if that’s what it was meant to do. Instead, it sounded like someone was just trying to get up the courage to say something.

“Little Tim,” she said aloud. That was probably it. She didn’t want to think it might be whoever had left the note on her front porch.

Pushing that thought aside, she glanced at the bookshelves again. No red journals. Her eyes traveled over the spines of the volumes as her mind tripped down its own path. This room had been her office for months, now. Why wouldn’t she keep her journal here? If she still possessed it, she
would
put it here, wouldn’t she? Pull it out from its hiding place and put it on the shelves? She was sure she would.

So, where was it?

The answer was so obvious her gaze was stuck on the journal itself long before she jumped up to pull it down. Its spine was black and there was no writing on it. She pulled it out and saw that the book’s front and back leather was blood red.

Thoughts swarmed and her heart pounded as she flipped back the cover. In a child’s scrawl she read: Gemma Jean LaPorte. Her mother had bestowed her own name on her as a middle name. Originally, she’d wanted to change Gemma’s first name to Jean, but Gemma hadn’t responded well to the change, so Jean had become the middle one.

Rifling gently through the pages, Gemma sat down in the squeaking desk chair. With the journal in her hands, it felt as if she’d always possessed it. Apparently she had, as it was on the shelf big as you please. She just hadn’t remembered.

Catching some passages, her memories flooded back as if someone had lifted a gate. She suspected Dr. Rainfield was right, that the accident had done the most damage to her memory. Whatever problems she’d possessed since she was a child weren’t as bad as she’d feared. As she read blocks of text she remembered everything fully.

And it gave her back her past.

Thank you, Dr. Rainfield, for making me keep this.

The journal started when Gemma was about six, with Gemma drawing pictures and writing their names below the images: CAT, DOG, HORSE, CAMPFIRE, MASK. She examined the picture of the mask. It looked like a square with strings. Not much of a Halloween mask, if that’s what it was supposed to be.

Going further, she breezed over the years until high school, then remembered, with enough embarrassment to feel heat enter her cheeks, that she’d had a horrible crush on one of the Dunleavy boys. Jerome. Everyone called him Rome. But he’d been completely oblivious to Gemma’s feelings, thank God. He’d gone to work with his older brother Kevin, and they shared a business interest in the PickAxe, Quarry’s local bar and tavern. Kevin also shared his parents’ resentment of Gemma’s family over property rights. Though the property lines had been long established, the Dunleavys seemed to feel they’d been gypped in the final decision of who owned what and how much. Jean had ignored them, and Peter, quiet and reserved as he was most of the time, had warned Gemma to stay away from the lot of them. He felt they were small-minded, mean-spirited, and always felt slighted. Gemma had listened to this with half an ear because she knew Rome Dunleavy wasn’t like that at all.

Rome was engaged, she realized suddenly. To a woman Gemma didn’t know. They were planning to build on the other side of the Quarry and would, in effect, be Gemma’s neighbors.

Gemma flipped a few more pages and encountered Nate Dorrell. Now, with the clarity of hindsight, she saw that she’d jumped to Nate from her hero-worship of Rome Dunleavy. She’d graduated from high school and taken off with Nate as he joined the army. She’d lived in a one-room apartment just off base, and just barely made ends meet working at another diner. Now she closed her eyes and remembered the smells and sounds: the dull surf, the constant stream of traffic, the exhaust, the briny fog, the tolling bell that rang the dinner hour at a nearby halfway house for sometime criminals.

She recalled sex with Nate. Hard, fast, selfish. It wasn’t long before she was rethinking how much she wanted to have sex at all, but it didn’t matter. If he wanted it, it was on. For a long time she told herself she loved him and that was enough to keep the myth going. Eventually, she grew strong enough to say no.

Here her memory jumped. She couldn’t quite recall the events of their breakup, but it hadn’t been pretty. It might have even been physical.

Gemma thumbed to the end of the journal. She’d made a couple of last entries concerning her feelings about reading the future for Jean’s clients. Her final entry was a question:
When are you going to take matters into your own hands?

Her blood chilled. Maybe she already had.

Bang, bang, bang!

The journal flew from her fingers, the noise surprised her so much. Gemma scrambled to pick it up, her pulse fluttering. Someone was at the front door. Someone impatient.

She set the journal on the desk, drew a calming breath, then headed for the door, unlatching it and swinging it open.

Detective Will Tanninger waited on the other side.

“Detective,” she murmured, feeling her anxiety ratchet up another notch or two.

“Ms. LaPorte.”

His voice was cool. Cold. Gemma felt a tingle of fear skitter down her spine. Something had happened. Something had changed.

“What is it?” she asked, as she stood back and he entered the room.

“You went to the hospital yesterday.”

Her eyes widened. “No…I was in Quarry.”

“You went to Letton’s room. You talked my guard into leaving and then you entered the room intending to kill him.”

The detective looked hard as granite. His face was sharp planes and thin lips. He was angry. Angry at her. It was such a change from the quiet, if intense, man she’d met earlier that she hardly knew what to do or say. “I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think so?” he pounced, as if she’d just made an admission of guilt.

“Yesterday, I talked to you in the morning.”

“And you went to the hospital in the afternoon,” he said tautly.

“I would remember,” she answered, but they both knew that could be a lie.

“He saw your bruised face.”

Gemma’s hand flew to her cheek as if it had a will of its own.

“You tried to cover it with makeup, like now, but it’s still bruised.”

Her head felt cottony, her pulse fluttered. “I was home,” she insisted, as if from a long way away.

“All afternoon and evening?”

“I took a nap.”

“You’re going to tell me you don’t remember anything at all.”

Gemma stared at him. She could see a pulse jumping in his jaw, could feel his controlled fury.

And Gemma had a flash of someone else. Another man, whose angry eyes reached her before his fist did.

That brought her back with a bang and also snuffed out her fear. “Is this the way the sheriff’s department works?” she demanded. “Intimidation. Is this your bad cop role? Because it’s doing the trick. You’re scaring me. Actually, no. You’re pissing me off.”

“You wanted to kill him. You meant to do it. What stopped you?”

“You have all the answers. You tell me.”

“You knew he was going to die anyway, so you walked away.”

Gemma recoiled. “He’s dying? From his injuries?”

“His wife’s been called. No one thinks he’ll make it through the night.”

Gemma searched her feelings. She would have expected to feel something but her senses were deadened. She thought about responding but couldn’t think of anything to say.

Will leaned toward her, waiting. “Nothing?”

Gemma’s lips tightened. “You obviously think I’m going to break down and confess to something. I’m not. I don’t remember much about the day Edward Letton was run down. You don’t have anything on me. No car. No connection. Nothing other than the fact I was in an accident around the same time. So, if your reason for being here is pure harassment, get the hell off my property.”

Two bright spots of color burned in her cheeks and her hazel eyes glittered green. Will couldn’t decide if he was still angry or falling in lust. Maybe a little of both.

Will had interviewed innumerable suspects, witnesses, family members, and friends. He did it as part of the job, never thinking whether he enjoyed or disliked it. But now he could feel adrenaline running through his veins. He gazed at her hard. He wanted to push her, force her into a slipup. “You ran him down because you knew he was going to kidnap one of the soccer girls. You knew it ahead of time. You followed him to the fields. And you took him out before he could.”

Gemma said carefully, “I’m not sorry that girl is safe.”

He was fascinated by the way her lips moved, as if she were rounding every syllable just for him. “That’s not the issue.”

“It’s the only issue.”

“You can’t go around killing people.”

“So far I’ve only been accused of trying to kill one person,” she reminded him.

“So far,” he shot back.

Gemma sucked in a breath and glared at him. “I am sick and tired of being bullied. If you aren’t here to arrest me, then get out of my house!”

“I’m going to find out the truth.”

“Then get at it, detective!” She thrust a finger at the door, her own adrenaline singing through her.

Before Will could do anything his cell phone rang. He pulled it from his pocket and looked at the Caller ID. He suddenly knew what it was, knew what he would hear.

“Is it Letton?” he snapped to the caller.

Barb said, “He’s gone. Died about a half hour ago. His wife’s wailing all over the place. Wants you to nail the bitch that brought him down or she’s suing the department.”

“Let her sue.” He ended the call and shoved the phone in his pocket.

“What?” Gemma asked, her eyes glued to his face, her body tense, expectant.

“Letton’s dead.”

Chapter Eleven

Gemma was breathing hard, her shoulders sinking as if a puppeteer had let go of her strings. “He’s dead,” she repeated. The color seeped from her face and she moved woodenly to the couch, sinking like a stone into its cushions. “Oh, my God,” she murmured. “My God.”

Will, too, felt drained. And angry.

“I didn’t kill him.”

“Somebody did.”

“What do you want to hear?” she said with a return of spunk.

“That it’s not your fault,” Will threw back. “I want you to tell me anything! Anything at all. I want to hear that you saw what he was planning and your foot hit the accelerator before you knew what you were doing. I want to believe it was an accident.”

She regarded him cautiously. “I don’t remember.”

“Oh, come on!”

“Well, that’s your problem, then.” She thought about what she’d learned from Macie and Charlotte. That she’d charged out of the diner after someone. She could almost remember that. She could feel the heat of fury and rage that had fueled her flight. She remembered getting behind the wheel of a car. She remembered wanting to kill the bastard.

But that was it. A jumble of feelings and impressions and nothing more.

She
had
wanted to kill someone, however. That was fact.

Had she followed Letton to the soccer field and lain in wait? That felt wrong somehow, as if pieces were missing.

Had the scene in the diner been something else? Something outside the careful planning that had set up Letton’s death?

Tanninger’s cell phone rang again and he made a sound of impatience before yanking it from his pocket. He seemed torn as to whether he was going to answer it. Finally he turned a shoulder and said, “Noreen. What?”

She watched him carefully. There was something mercurial about him today. As if his control had slipped a little. She felt it in a primal way that touched into her feminine core, which thrilled her a little and pissed her off a lot more.

“I’ll pay for it when I pick it up,” he told her. “Keep the rental car for now.”

“What was that?” Gemma asked when he clicked off.

“Nothing.” He seemed to come back to himself. An ironic lift to his lips. “My mother put her car in a ditch.”

“Oh.”

My mother put her car in a ditch.

Will shrugged and shook his head, as if physically shoving aside his personal problems, and went right back to the issue at hand. “You’re right. Letton’s death is my problem.”

“I’m not sorry he’s dead,” she said with feeling.

“Neither am I.”

“I hope I didn’t kill him.”

“I thought you said you didn’t.”

They stared at each other.

Will wanted to kiss her; she could feel it. Her body responded with a surge of expectation that she hoped like hell didn’t show on her face. She wanted to kiss him, too. Wanted to grab hold of him and run her hands up his muscled back. Wanted to fit herself to him. It was irrational and so potent that she felt herself lean toward him just as he took a step backward, closed his eyes and clenched his fists.

When he opened them again they were both more in control.

Then he stated flatly, a warning she couldn’t miss, “Now it’s a homicide.”

The delivery girl drove a gray-and-brown truck that trundled down the road at a fast clip. The wolf kept behind her, several cars back. He’d picked her up outside the lane from the house across the field from his. He’d been waiting in his truck at a seaside lookout, the kind of place tourists pulled into to snap pictures. It wasn’t far from where he lived and was in sight of the farmhouse’s long, narrow drive, so when her truck reappeared on 101, he waited just long enough for it to disappear around a corner where the highway cut through a wall of granite, then he pulled out behind her.

She made a number of stops; he had to drive past her more than a few times to keep from being spotted, but she was walking to the back of the truck and never noticed. He was invisible. Nonexistent.

The thought burned through him. He’d always been invisible to the witch. She’d only seen his brother. Jealousy had raged bright inside him, a flame that seared through his veins. He could hear them through the thin walls night after night. Her moans. His short shouts of ecstasy. The floor shook and he secretively pleasured himself to the sounds of their desire.

One evening he saw her looking out the window, her back to him, her long hair a curtain to her waist. He was young, but old enough. So he came up behind her, his cock rigid, and pressed himself into her, his head resting on her shoulder. He could feel the starchiness of her dress and hear it crinkle. She whipped around as if he’d hit her with an electric shock and slapped him across the face, screaming.

“Bastard! What are you doing?” she shrieked and slapped him again.

He was too stunned and too humiliated to react.

Her face was contorted with revulsion. “Ever do that again and I’ll cut it off, understand?”

She shoved him in the chest and he staggered backward. She pressed him to the wall, her green eyes full of simmering fury. “I’m a witch. Don’t forget. I have powers and I will castrate you, you fucker.”

“You’re my mother,” he said weakly.

Her hand cracked across his face again, so hard that his head slammed into the cabinet and his ears rang. “I am not!” she raged.

“What’s going on?”

His older brother was framed in the doorway. He looked huge. His gaze slid to the dark-haired woman and back to the wolf. She turned toward him and stated, “I was teaching your brother a lesson. He came up behind me and shoved his cock against my ass.”

His brother glared at him with hot eyes. The wolf shook his head. He needed to tell his brother that all he wanted to do was share. That was all. He wasn’t trying to steal their mother from him.

“The witch is mine,” he whispered to Wolf.

She moved to his brother, her mouth slack and soft. “Oh, baby. C’mere, baby,” she crooned, her hands running over his neck and shoulders, her cheek pressed to his as her gaze continued to sear into the wolf’s.

The wolf had lost. He’d bowed his head and nodded. He would never come after the witch again, though he thought about it often. All the time. Incessantly.

He’d lost his chance to have her. That day. But in the end she’d been his.

He hoped she was burning in hell.

But there were other witches. And one of them. The One. Had killed his brother.

Witches had to burn. They had to pay. They had to be stopped.

He surfaced slowly, realizing he had followed the delivery girl to her company’s home base in Seaside. She was pulling through the chain link fence that surrounded the building, getting ready to turn in her truck.

Soon, she would be heading home.

All he had to do was wait.

In the middle of the night Gemma awoke from a restless sleep, a scream clawing its way from her throat.

My mother put her car in a ditch.

A ditch.

That’s what she’d done, too.

She’d run her mother’s car off the road and into a ditch.

By mistake.

An accident.

Fumbling for the lamp switch, Gemma was half-blinded when the light suddenly flashed on.

The dream fell away into insubstantial vestiges of itself, as if blown apart. But it wasn’t a dream. It was a memory. She could recall the fear, the rush of the road, the twist of the wheel. Highway 26. Toward the coast. Somewhere between here and Seaside. Or Cannon Beach. Or another place…

Had someone been chasing her?

Or, was she just tearing away after running Letton down?

And why had she raced past Quarry? Where was she going?

She touched her tender face. She’d slammed it into the steering wheel, or possibly the side window. The impact had been fierce.

She could almost remember. Almost. It was
right there
! Just out of reach.

Why couldn’t she grab it?

Maybe you don’t want to remember.

That sounded so much like the truth that she flung back the covers and clambered downstairs, desperate to get away from her own thoughts. The journal had only helped her so far.

The recent past was still a mystery. One she was less certain she wanted to unravel.

Wolf sat outside the witch’s apartment building. The siding was gray and wind-battered and looked like it could use a good caulking. The outdoor stairway rail had been recently shored up with a criss-cross wood brace that had yet to be painted. She was on the second floor and there was the one stairway up, and another probably at the back of the wraparound balcony.

He rolled his window down and cold air rushed in the cab, heavy with the scent of seawater. He realized, as if from a long, long way away, that he should be at work. He could fix things. He was good with his hands. He’d taken a job at his brother’s place of employment, but it was a loose arrangement. At work they all thought he was a little slow, and he let them. His brother had told his co-workers to knock it off, but they hadn’t listened. And now his brother was gone. Gone. But not to hell like the witches. His brother had looked out for him. In the end he’d turned against the mother-witch, too. Her death had bonded them.

He closed his eyes and tucked his chin into his chest. He could still draw the mother-witch to him if he tried. Could bring her close. He wanted to see the terror in her eyes. He wanted to clamp off her screams with the grip of his hands around her neck. He wanted to thrust himself inside her again and again. Bitch. Whore.

He was getting hard thinking about her. He pushed his mind further. A few more minutes. Then he would go after this witch.

She was there. Her green eyes glowing. Taunting him. “Bastard,” she whispered, grinning. “I am not your mother. I am a witch.”

In a red fog, the wolf climbed from the cab. He was dressed all in black except for a yellow baseball cap that advertised a trucking company. He walked around the back of the building, up the rear stairs. This witch’s door was in the center of the front of the building, too obvious. But there was a window on the side. Her bedroom, he guessed. He had a small tool in his hand, a jimmy. It wouldn’t take much to pop the window, but she would hear his efforts. He had to think, think…but the red fog was expanding and he was filled with mounting desire, like a thundering of approaching hoof beats.

He was about to rip out the window casing and deal with the problems therein when suddenly her front door opened and slammed shut. He heard her coming from the apartment to the back stairs. Before he could move she’d turned the corner to take the back stairs. He stepped back, head bent, stuffing the jimmy into the rear pocket of his pants. If she recognized him it was over. He would have to leave.

She nearly ran into him, then stopped short. “Oh! Sorry. I didn’t know you were there.”

“S’okay,” he mumbled, and moved past her as if he were going the opposite direction.

He could feel her gaze on him as he lurched around the corner she’d just come from, probably wondering which apartment he was heading to. He, in turn, wondered where she was going in her short, white skirt and hooker heels. Her Ford Focus was parked in the front lot.

He pretended to knock on the door one over from her apartment. If anyone answered, he would have to give up his mission entirely. He couldn’t afford to be seen. Couldn’t afford someone remembering the man with the hunched shoulders and uneven gait. The thought made his pulse beat in his temple; a building rage.

Luckily, no one responded to his knock, and by the time she whizzed around the back of the building in a different vehicle, a black Corvette, no less, he pretended to half turn away in disappointment. He didn’t think she even looked back. He’d been forgotten.

He went back to the window and jimmied the casing loose. The creaking and gentle pounding didn’t arouse suspicion. Now breaking glass, that was another matter. Everyone knew what that was and responded to it. But a bit of banging could be anything.

He slid the pane out with ease, then reached in and unlocked the window. After pushing aside the curtain and taking a hard look inside, he replaced the glass and went back to his truck. In her hot second car she’d gone to go fuck someone. She would put her feminine spell on him and pump away on his dick and he would think it was about the best sex he’d ever had.

But when the whore returned the wolf would burn her. He had cigarettes and matches in his pocket. He remembered the way the mother-witch blew smoke through her nostrils and opened her mouth to let it spill out in a lazy cloud. She would laugh and laugh at his naked desire.

He ached with need but he wouldn’t touch himself. This exquisite torture was for her.

And then his mind drifted…to the diner…to the one still living that he sought…

She’d walked in as big as life. The one he’d been looking for! Right there! Shoulder-length, light brown hair, several strands of which were stuck against her cheek. Her breath held as she reached up and brushed them away. Then the diner’s owner hooted and hollered about how glad she was to see her. Someone else had held up a red uniform and she’d seemed momentarily entranced by the color, but then she’d taken a seat at a booth at the end of the row. He could look her square in the face but he’d grabbed a menu and hidden behind it, heart thundering, knees trembling.

She was right there.
Right there!
He’d been hunting her but had lost her in Seaside. She’d disappeared and he’d cursed the fates that had suddenly taken her from him. It had taken a long time to find her. Weeks…months…years…

He’d worked his way east from the coast. Haphazardly. He knew she was a waitress, so he’d stopped at every eatery along Highway 26. He believed he could pick up her scent. She was a witch and they smelled a certain way. When she’d been with his brother he could always tell when she was near.

But he’d about given up.

And then one early morning there she was! Just like that. Not working, just coming in for a bite. He was so excited he nearly missed the fact that she had her eyes on a man in the booth across from him. She tried to disguise it, but she was tuned in to the guy in the baseball cap in a way that infuriated the wolf. He wanted to stand up and roar that the fucking witch had killed his brother. That she had to
burn
.