Whisper of Evil (25 page)

That was what bothered Nell most of all. Not just the eerie appearance of a doll on her pillow, but the appearance of this doll. Because there were lots of toys packed away in the attic, boxes and trunks filled with the things generations of Gallagher kids had outgrown. Lots of dolls. But this one had belonged to Nell twenty-five years ago.

And how had the killer known that?

Unless the killer was Hailey.

Nell didn't know if she would find answers here in the house, but she knew she had to look for them. Especially now. So as soon as she was dressed and had a couple of cups of caffeine in her system, she went upstairs. One of the two bedrooms she had most dreaded even going into, much less clearing out, was the one that had belonged to her mother, literally closed and locked from the day her mother disappeared until her father's death.

She stood at that closed door for at least a minute or two, trying to brace herself emotionally, then turned the knob and stepped into the room.

Though the house had been unoccupied since her father's death, Nell had arranged through Wade Keever to have a cleaning service come in about a month before her own arrival, so there wasn't nearly as much dust as there would otherwise have been. Still, the upstairs bedroom was eerily still, darkened because the drapes were still drawn the way her father had insisted they remain at all times, and smelled musty.

Nell went immediately to open the drapes and the windows, trying to tell herself the smothering sensation she felt was simply due to dust.

A part of her knew she should keep her guard up and avoid any impulse to stop and try to sense the room and its secrets; she was tired, too tired to fully protect herself, and she knew it. But she knew something else as well. She knew she really didn't have a choice.

Then I have to move faster.

Faster means you could get careless.

And slower means I could get dead.

She was running out of time.

Nell closed her eyes and took a deep breath, then turned away from the window, gazing at the morning-brightened room for the first time since her single brief glance through the door a couple of days before when she'd walked through to see what needed to be done.

Not even Hailey had been able to persuade Adam Gallagher to redecorate this room. It was exactly as their mother had left it more than twenty years before. Silver-backed brushes, dark with tarnish, lay on the dressing table between the two windows, and on a mirrored tray, cut-glass perfume bottles reposed, the stopper lying beside one bottle that had long since lost its contents to evaporation.

The remainder of the room was just as feminine, with delicate French furniture, frilly bedclothes, and soft, faded rugs on the wood floor.

Nell took a step toward the center of the room, drew another deep breath, and closed her eyes in order to concentrate. She had been so careful to keep her guard up in this house during all her waking hours that she'd been surprised only once, in the kitchen with that vision of her father walking through the room. Nothing since. And now it was hard to drop her guard when she was afraid of what she might see here. But what choice did she have? She had to know.

She had to know.

There was, here at least, no sense of everything being held at a distance away from her, no feeling that she was trying to peer through a veil. And almost the instant she forced herself to drop her guard, she felt it, the time-out-of-sync sensation of opening a door into time. Even before she opened her eyes, she heard a voice that scraped across her memories, leaving raw nerves and painful vulnerability behind.

I love you, darling.

Nell opened her eyes with a start.

At the edges of her vision was that softened, almost unfocused aura that always accompanied them, so that her attention was immediately directed to the center, as though to a stage. The bedroom was the same, yet vividly different, a bedside lamp providing the only light because it was night. It was late. And though her parents had slept in different rooms all the years Nell could remember, they were both here now.

Then.

"I love you, Grace." His voice was hoarse, panting, and his face was flushed and beaded with sweat. He was smiling, his gaze fixed on his wife's face. Her averted face.

Nell wanted to look away, desperately wanted to close her eyes, to stop this, but she had to look, had to see. She had to stand there only a few feet away from the bed where her father was raping her mother.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Grace Gallagher was crying, a quiet, broken sound.

Wrenching and pitiful. Like a puppy whimpering. Her arms were stretched above her head, her wrists held in the powerful grip of her husband. The covers were half off the bed, as if there had been a struggle, but the room was oddly still now. He was the only thing moving. He held her wrists against the pillow above her head with one hand, and the other hand was braced on the bed beside her.

Grace was wearing her nightgown. It was pink, with white flowers. The hem was raised above her waist, and the bodice was unbuttoned and open, baring her breasts. Her legs were apart, just lying limply on the bed, and he was between them. He wasn't wearing pajamas, just a pair of shorts pushed down around his knees. He kept saying he loved her, over and over, now moaning the words with every thrust of his body.

"I love you, Grace___I love you…"

He was hurting her. She was crying. Her face was wet with the tears, and that whimpering sound she made was so filled with pain. So hurt. As if he stabbed her with a knife. As if he killed something inside her. The bed squeaked rhythmically now, and she bounced like a rag doll, limp beneath him while he hunched and thrust between her legs.

Until he finally groaned and jerked, bearing down on her as if he wanted to push her through the mattress, nail her to the floor beneath. So she couldn't escape him. So she'd never escape him.

Then he collapsed on top of her, panting hoarsely, and for a few minutes all Nell could hear was her mother whimpering and her father breathing as if at the end of a marathon.

She wanted to look away, close her eyes. Why couldn't she stop this? Why couldn't she stop it?

Finally, Adam Gallagher raised himself off his wife's limp body and sat back on his heels between her splayed legs, pulling his shorts up. And she immediately turned on her side away from him and drew her legs up, pressed them tightly together as if in a pathetic attempt to stop what had already happened. Shaking fingers pulled the pretty nightgown closed over her breasts and then clenched to hold the material, the buttons beyond her ability to manage. She was curled up like a baby, still crying in that awful way, still moaning the protest, the refusal, that he had ignored.

He put his hand on her hip and sort of rubbed her, smiling down at her as if he saw a sated, contented lover. "I love you, Grace. I love you."

Nell could see her mother shiver and flinch away from his touch, but she didn't open her eyes and, murmuring now, kept saying, "No… no… no…"

"I love you."

"No… no…"

Sickened, Nell turned away from the bed, trying desperately to fight her way out of the vision and back to a time when the man who had sired her was dead and gone and couldn't hurt anybody ever again. Instead, when she looked toward the half-open door, she saw that she was not the only witness to the brutal marital rape.

Unnoticed by the two in the bed, the little girl stood in the doorway and stared at them, her mouth a silent, trembling O of shock and confusion. She was dressed for bed, her long dark hair mussed, and she stared at her parents as if at two horribly unfamiliar strangers that frightened her.

Hailey.

She was no more than four, Nell thought. Hardly old enough to understand what she had just witnessed—but just old enough for the experience to have a profound effect on her emotional, psychological, and sexual development.

While Nell watched her in numb horror, the visibly trembling little girl backed silently away from the door and retreated out of sight.

Her parents never knew she was there.

"Oh, God," Nell heard herself say shakily.

Her own voice shattered the vision, and she blinked as the light of day seemed to flood into the room. The doorway was empty, and when she turned slowly to look at it, she found the bed equally empty and neatly made, the covers smooth.

She walked to one of the windows and stood gazing out, toward the south trail that led to the ruins of her grandmother's house. Ashes of the past.

Was it all ashes?

Everything out there looked so bright and hard, so… stark. None of the edges was blurred, softened, the way they always were in her visions. The present always set itself apart from the past and the future, always wore the clear and distinct stamp of now.

Now Adam Gallagher was nearly a year in his grave. Now his daughters were at last free of him. Or were they?

Staring out at the hard, bright edges of now, Nell thought about the vision. Hailey had looked to be about four, which meant that Nell was born within the next year. Had she just witnessed her own conception? Was she a child of rape, the fruit of a seed planted by force in her mother's flinching womb?

Had her complete rejection of her father been as much instinctive as learned?

Jesus.

Nell leaned her forehead against the cool glass and closed her eyes. Her own pain and revulsion aside, what about poor Hailey? That twisted scene she had witnessed had undoubtedly twisted her as well, giving her an even more cruelly distorted idea of what love was supposed to be.

Was that why she had involved herself with sadistic men, had felt driven to satisfy their kinky needs?

Was that why she had killed them?

When Ethan Cole knocked on Nell's door late that morning, he wasn't entirely sure what to expect. Or what he felt about it. But since he'd spent more time than he wanted to admit telling himself he was a pro and could handle this interview like a pro, it was dis-concerting to discover that the pep talk hadn't done any good at all.

He'd forgotten how those green eyes of hers had the trick of stealing his breath—and of making him feel it was somehow very important that he help her.

"Hello, Ethan." She glanced past him at the deputy leaning against the hood of a sheriffs department cruiser, and added, "Want to come in? Or should we foil all the gossips and talk out there on the porch?"

"Goddammit, Nell," he muttered.

Smiling slightly, she stepped out onto the porch and led the way to the sitting area to the left of the front door—which was in full view of the deputy. There were several pieces of black wrought-iron patio furniture, including a couple of chairs and a small table.

Nell sat down in one of the chairs. "I suppose Hailey must have gotten these. It was wicker in my day."

"There've been a lot of changes since your day," Ethan replied as he sat down.

"Yeah, I've noticed. How've you been, Ethan?"

"I've been all right, Nell. How about you?"

"Can't complain. I hear you got married."

"And divorced. You?"

"Neither. But you knew that."

"Yeah, I ran the plates on your Jeep. Checked you out as far as I could without making it an official request."

"And?"

"And nothing. No police record, not even a traffic ticket, and you pay your bills and taxes on time."

"Nice to know my public record is clean."

"And your private record?"

"Oh, that one's a little more complicated." Nell shrugged. "But isn't that true of us all?"

"I guess so." He nodded, then sighed. "Okay, now that we've got that bullshit out of the way, what say we talk to each other like it matters?"

She was still smiling faintly, but those green eyes were guarded. "Suits me."

"I hear you've been seeing Max again since you came back."

"Some, yeah." She didn't explain or elaborate.

"He tell you about these murders?"

"Several people have told me about them, Ethan. Nobody's talking about much of anything else right now."

"And so?"

"And so… that's really lousy for Silence."

He eyed her grimly. "You're going to make me ask, aren't you?"

"Are you kidding? Of course I am." But before he could do more than mutter a curse under his breath, Nell was shaking her head, and said much more seriously, "No, I owe you more than that."

"You don't owe me anything, Nell."

"Don't I? You never told Max, did you? About the night I left."

"You asked me not to. I promised I wouldn't. So I didn't."

"And my father?"

"1 did what you wanted me to do with him too. Went to him and told him I'd seen you getting on a bus out of town, that I'd found your car parked at the station." Ethan paused briefly. "He thought you left with Max or planned to meet him somewhere, just like you figured he would. Took some time, but I managed to convince him Max was at the ranch and not planning to go anywhere."

Gazing off at nothing, Nell said absently, "I knew he'd be more likely to believe that coming from a cop, even if you were Max's stepbrother."

Ethan said, "Like everybody else, Adam knew there was bad blood between Max and me. He knew I wouldn't lie for Max. Never occurred to him that I might be lying for you."

"Why did you do that, by the way? I've always wondered if it had more to do with hurting Max than helping me."

"If I'd wanted to use it to hurt Max, I would have told him about it a long time ago."

"Maybe. Or maybe just knowing you'd helped his girl to run away was enough. You had to know it would hurt him."

"So did you. I mean, you had to know that turning to me for help in getting away would make running out on him even worse, at least in his eyes."