Whispers (25 page)

Reilly moved to the front window. A part of him considered getting back in the Jeep and going out to see if Chloe and Bill needed help, but he didn’t. He wasn’t their keeper and he didn’t want to end up with the job by default either. He heard footsteps on the stairs and turned to find the priest hovering halfway down.

“
Have they returned?” he asked.

Reilly shook his head. “Not yet.”

The priest nodded and then turned to go back up.

“
Wait,” Reilly said. “Did you ... Were you cooking while we were gone?”

The priest paused and looked back at Reilly with an expression of resignation Reilly didn’t understand. “No,” he said after a long moment. “It just started smelling like roast right after everyone left.”

“
Did you check it out?”

“
There was no need,” the priest said softly.

“
What does that mean?”

“
It means I knew there was no one in the kitchen, Mr. Alexander.”

He went back up the stairs before Reilly could think of what to ask next. The soft click of his door closing drifted down.

Reilly paced the ground floor a couple of times before discovering an ancient-looking guitar leaning against the stairway wall. He stared at it for a moment, wondering where it had come from. If it had been there all along, he would have seen it. Or maybe not. Hell, if it wasn’t attached to Gracie Beck, he wouldn’t have noticed a tank parked in the front yard.

He picked up the guitar and turned it in his hands for a while. It was a pretty thing, though obviously it had seen more years than he had. It had an intricate mother-of-pearl inlay on the rosette and, if he was guessing, he’d say the tuning pegs were all handmade. He strummed his fingers across the strings, smiling at the sound. Tuned, even. Bemused, he sat on the settee and let his fingers take over.

A little while later, he was back at the window, looking for the van. Chloe and Bill should have been back by now. He let out a deep breath and checked his watch. He’d give them ten more minutes and if they hadn’t shown up, he’d go. He went to the kitchen and stared out those windows for a few minutes, thinking about the priest’s words.
I
knew there was no one in the kitchen
. . .

Back on the couch, he once again picked up the guitar. The sound of music had always soothed him. When he’d been a part of Badlands, he’d been happy. For a while. Until Matt started shit with everyone else, showed up drunk and stoned, sometimes whacked beyond recognition. It hadn’t been fun then. It had almost been a relief to leave it behind. There were times when he’d wished he could leave Matt behind, too. But he owed Matt. Dead or not, he still owed Matt.

“
Nathan.” Chloe’s voice almost scared him out of his skin.

His head jerked up to find her standing in the room. “Jesus, where did you come from?”

“
Upstairs,” she said.

“
I didn’t think you were back.”

“
We just returned a little while ago. You must have been in the kitchen when we came in. We had to leave the van down the street and walk. There’ll be no getting out of town until the rain stops.”

Reilly nodded, angry at himself for the sudden guilt he felt at not watching out for them more carefully. They were not his responsibility, he repeated to himself. He ran his fingers over the guitar strings and said nothing.

“
May I talk to you for a moment, Nathan?”

“
Don’t call me Nathan.”

“
I’m sorry. I know it bothers you, but when I see you, the name is always in your mind. Did you know that?”

Reilly strummed a discordant note and ignored her.

“
You hate it because it was your father’s name and you hated him.”

He changed up the fingering and played another chord.

“
And now you resent me, because I’ve made you see it.”

“
Chloe, what do you want?”

“
I want you to help me.”

“
Help you what?”

“
Your brother, Matthew, when was it he began to change?”

Despite his determination not to, Reilly glanced up and locked eyes with her. How did she know he had a brother? More important, how did she know about the change?

Chloe hovered near the settee, looking frailer than he’d ever seen. He remembered that he’d thought her in her fifties the first time they’d met. Now she looked closer to seventy. How old was she really?

“
He wasn’t always such a monster, was he?” she asked. Her smug assurance was gone and the question came across as beseeching. “You never understood what happened, did you? And when he killed your father—”

Reilly stood abruptly, setting the guitar aside. “You’re crazy, lady.” But his heart was doing a jackhammer in his chest and his hands clenched into fists. Chloe stared back at him nervously, like a rabbit that’d been spotted by a predator in an open field. Reilly tried to tone down the hostility and said, “Matt didn’t kill our dad.”

She swallowed loud enough for him to hear, and he felt bad for scaring an old woman. But her next words didn’t hold the same sense of fear her expression did.

“
Covering up for him has always been a way of life for you, Nathan. You lied to protect him, even though he still had blood on his hands.”

Reilly was breathing hard and it took everything not to shout at her. Not to tell her to shut the hell up.

“
I’m not trying to hurt you. You were the good son. Then you were the good brother. Now it’s time to be a good man. Be a hero, Nathan.”

“
Lady, you’ve got the wrong guy. I’m nobody’s hero.”

She gave him another of those leveling looks. He wanted to stride out of the room. He wanted to get in the Jeep and plow through the river-filled roads until he could go no farther. But he couldn’t make his legs and feet cooperate. He stood there, like an insect trapped beneath glass, while she studied him.

“
My father was an abuser, too,” she said. She walked over to the picture hanging above the mantel and pointed at it. Each step seemed to cause her pain. How had she aged so much in so little time? Reilly found himself glancing around, looking for Bill. If something happened, like if she keeled over, he wanted Bill around. But for once Chloe LaMonte was alone.

“
That is my grandfather,” she said, pointing to a man who stood just at the corner of the picture.

The statement blew every other thought out of Reilly’s head. Her grandfather? Why would Carolina Beck have a picture of
Chloe’s
grandfather hanging in her house? He came to stand beside her and stare at the tidy man in the pinstriped suit standing just shy of the background. But examination of the old sepia print made her claim impossible to discount. She watched him as he noted the similarities she shared with the white man in the portrait. The shape of their eyes, the small, tucked ears, the pointed chin.

“
He is my grandfather.” She waited for a baited moment. Then she said, “And he is my father.”

“
What?” Reilly asked. “He can’t be both….”

But even as he said it, Reilly realized that he was wrong. It was possible that he could be both grandfather and father, it just wasn’t right.

“
You ask yourself, how could a man violate his own daughter? The answer is worse than you can imagine. In his mind, my mother was an animal, as was her mother. Animals do not have the rights of parentage. They have no rights at all.”

Reilly didn’t know what to say, but she didn’t seem to expect a response.

“
He was old when he came for me. But his hate and anger had turned him into something stronger than a man half his age.”

It took a moment for Reilly to register what she’d just said.
He was old when he came for me
... The bastard had impregnated her grandmother, her mother, and he’d come back for Chloe? It was sick beyond his understanding, but he didn’t think for a moment that she was lying. The raw shame in her voice was too real.

“
I was a young woman, still in school when it happened. It killed my mother, knowing what he’d done. Eventually, she died of her despair.”

A logical part of Reilly wanted to argue that someone couldn’t die of despair, but the night he’d stood in front of the mirror and shaved his head, his own anguish had felt great enough to kill him, hadn’t it?

“
Why are you telling me this?” he asked.

“
Hear me out. Please.”

Reluctantly, Reilly nodded.

“
For generations my family has told stories about this man. We thought he was dead once, but it was merely misplaced hope. My mother believed he could not be killed and that he haunts our family still.”

Reilly looked at the picture and back at Chloe. He didn’t know what to say.

“
My grandmother lived in this very place. Here, at the Diablo.”

Her pause felt more than weighted. It felt of things he couldn’t understand, things she didn’t want to explain. The heaviness of it filled the stillness until it seemed like sand, shifting, but so dense it held them both in place.

“
Why are you here, Chloe?”

She moved to the settee and sat down with an exhausted sound. Age hunched her shoulders and darkened the crescents beneath her eyes. When she spoke, it wasn’t to answer his question.

“
Even before I understood what there was to be afraid of, I knew my mother was frightened. It was in the way she’d watch the horizon, the way she checked the locks after dark during a time when people didn’t lock their doors. It was in the shadows of her eyes. We were like animals in a cage, trapped by our own fears. Our family stories told of how we’d tried to get away from him and how he always tracked us down and made us pay.” She looked at him. “Do you know what my mother’s name was? Misery. They named her Misery. She was a child born of pain and my grandmother wanted her to always remember that.”

“
That doesn’t make sense.”

“
No, it doesn’t. Sometimes sense cannot be made from violence. You, of all people, should know that.”

He nodded in acknowledgment, but he couldn’t quite meet her steady gaze.

“
I know that he still plagues my family. I know he plagues Gracie’s as well.”

“
Plagues? He can’t still be alive?”

“
Can’t he?”

Reilly broke free of the paralysis that held him. He took a step away from her, wanting to take several more. “If he was old when you were a girl, then he’d be over a hundred, hundred and twenty by now.”

“
His body, yes. But his spirit does not age.”

“
You’re talking about ghosts, now. You know I don’t buy it. I believe what you say about this sick bastard. But he has to be dead. He can’t hurt you or anyone else anymore.”

“
Believe what you like, but there is another world, Nathan Reilly Alexander, and it exists within our own. I have not the same gift as others—there is one who travels with me now who can see the past, sometimes even the future, just by touching another.”

“
The priest with the gloves?”

“
That’s right. My gift, my curse, is that
I feel
the spirits around me. Sometimes I can help them find the resolutions they seek. Sometimes I can only suffer alongside them.”

“
And you’re feeling these spirits here?”

“
Yes, Nathan. There are many here.”

Reilly couldn’t help the sound of disbelief that came from him.

“
That is not my only gift, though. I have visions. Terrible visions. I saw the murder of Gracie’s mother.”

“
She died in an accident, Chloe. You heard Gracie today.”

“
I heard her question how her mother had come to be there. I heard her marvel that her grandmother had known where to find her.”

Yeah, he’d heard that too. It was the kind of thing that gave Diablo Springs its haunted reputation.

“
I came here to warn Carolina before it happened. To warn her that her daughter was in danger.”

Reilly’s eyes widened. He knew Carolina Beck would not have taken kindly to this crazy old bat warning her about some vision of death. “She threw you out,” he said.

“
Yes. And after her daughter and the baby Gracie disappeared, it was I who told her where they would be found.”

“
And you’re trying to tell me that your grandfather”— Reilly paused and pointed at the picture—“that man there is the one who killed her?”

“
Yes.”

That brought another lengthy silence. Reilly liked the direction of this conversation less and less. And yet he felt compelled to learn more the way drivers feel compelled to look at an accident as they drive past.

“
Diablo Springs has been haunted by evil for years, Nathan. Your people talk of the Dead Lights as if they are some phenomena of steam and moonbeams. But I know why they are called that. There are more bodies in those caverns than you can believe.”

She was wrong there—he did believe the ruins were filled with dead bodies. Bodies, yes. But ghostly spirits ...

“
For years, in my youth,” she went on, “I tried to block out this place, the legends that were passed down through my family ... the pain that so marked us. I nearly succeeded. I nearly managed to wipe it all away.”