Whispers (31 page)

Jonathan nodded. He set the picture in his lap while he carefully removed his gloves and put them aside. Then, with a shy smile, he lifted the picture in one hand and reached for Gracie’s fingers with the other.

She didn’t know what she’d expected, but the gentle warmth was not invasive and she found herself at ease. She perched on the edge of the bed and watched his face as he closed his eyes and began to speak in a rapid, stream-of-conscious flow.

“
Her name is Carolina and she’s at a funeral. Her mother’s funeral. Ella? Yes. Carolina is crying, but inside she’s relieved. She’s glad her mother is dead.”

“
Why?” Gracie asked.

Jonathan went on as if she hadn’t spoken and Gracie realized he’d put himself in some sort of a trance.

“
Ella was always fearful. Superstitious. She kept such a tight watch that Carolina was afraid to breathe sometimes. She was crazy. That’s what she’s thinking. Her mother was crazy. Even on her deathbed, she’d been screaming about a curse. A family curse. A man named ... Jason ... Macon ... Aiken? Yes, Aiken. Carolina is frightened. Ella said he was in the Dead Lights. He didn’t stay dead. He didn’t stay dead.”

Goosebumps covered every inch of Gracie’s body. Who didn’t stay dead? Who was Aiken? What was he talking about? Jonathan’s voice rose and fell, becoming more strained, tortured.

“
She’s in the Diablo now,” he said. “She doesn’t think of Ella any more. She’s forgotten that he didn’t stay dead. Business is good.” A strange smile curved his lips. “Oh” he said. “She has famous guests. Eleanor Roosevelt is here. She’s thinking that the president’s wife is sleeping in a room once used by prostitutes and it makes her laugh.” The smile dimmed. “There’s a man now. His name is Jimmy and she likes him. He wants to marry her. She is happy. Happier than she’s ever been. He tells her about another place….”

Jonathan paused. Gracie could see his eyes moving beneath his closed lids. It was like REM, only he wasn’t asleep. He still held her hand, his fingers cool and dry.

“
Glenwood Springs,” he said triumphantly. “He tells her about Glenwood Springs and how business is booming there. He wants to expand. He wants to make the Diablo like that. There’s to be a wedding ... and a baby. Jimmy’s baby. She’s so happy. Happy. She’s making wedding plans ... but...”

His pause stretched and Gracie waited impatiently, wanting to press him, knowing it would do no good.

“
Chloe is here now.”

At first she thought he meant Chloe was in the room with them and she glanced over her shoulder, expecting to see the old woman. But then he began speaking again.

“
She’s come to warn Carolina. She... Chloe says there’s a curse and a man who didn’t stay dead. There’s a curse. We’re cursed. Carolina wants her to leave. Go away ... go away ... She’s at a funeral again. Jimmy is dead now. The springs ... underground caverns ... dynamite. An explosion ... it opened up a cavern and the water moved underground. Disappeared. Jimmy went with it. Dead. He’s dead. Dead Lights. The Dead Lights come. Every night they come. They’re looking for something. He’s looking for something. Has to find it. Has to find it. Looking for... someone ... It’s his. She’s his. Dead Lights. Dead Lights. Again and again. Dead Lights. He didn’t stay dead. It’s true. It’s true. Everything Ella said. The curse, the fear. He—”

“
What’s going on?” Zach asked, stepping into the room and scaring Gracie to death. She jumped to her feet with a yelp, yanking her hand out of Jonathan’s light grasp. The trance he’d been in was broken instantly. He came up and out of the chair, the picture frame he’d held slipping from his hand and falling to the braided rug at his feet. Gracie bent to pick it up, feeling dizzy and frightened.
Dead Lights. Looking for something.
What did it mean?

“
What are you guys doing?” Zach asked, staring back and forth between them.

“
Just talking,” Gracie said.

“
With
him
?”

Gracie gave Zach a hard look. “Yes. With Jonathan.” She smiled at Jonathan. “Thank you.”

His gentle eyes looked worried now. He nodded, leaned in and said in an undertone, “In the Dead Lights.”

As if that should answer her questions. He was almost through the door before she could think to stop him. Zach grabbed his wrist as he passed. Jonathan’s gloves were still clutched in his hand and he recoiled from the contact of Zach’s skin against his. He didn’t like to be touched unaware, Gracie realized. It was why he wore his gloves all the time. Zach let go as if he’d been burned and Jonathan hurried away.

Gracie stood awkwardly for a minute, too overloaded to think, to speak. What had he meant,
In the Dead Lights?
What had any of it meant?

“
What was he saying?” Zach asked.

“
He told me who my grandfather was, I think. A man named Jimmy.”

“
You didn’t know?”

Gracie shook her head. “My grandma was a very secretive woman. There was a lot she never told me.”

“
Why?”

“
I don’t know. I’ve never known.”

“
I heard him say he was looking for something.”

“
He was talking about….” She let out a breath and a half laugh. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know what he was talking about. He skipped around a lot, from my great-grandmother to my grandmother. I think this Jimmy must have been looking for the Dead Lights.” She shrugged. “Maybe they weren’t around back then.”

Zach’s eyes widened.

“
None of it made much sense.”

“
Well, I’m sorry I interrupted. I thought... I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

He looked very boyish when he said it, but the gleam in his eyes was very much man. Gracie shifted uncomfortably. “How are you feeling?” she asked.

“
I’ll live.”

“
You don’t look so good, though. You should go back to bed.”

He nodded, but said, “You want to tuck me in?”

Gracie laughed. “I think I’ll pass.”

“
Next time,” he joked, but there was more than a hint of seriousness in the comment.

Gracie let her breath out in a
whoosh
as he left. She looked at Juliet on the floor. “Yeah, right. That’s all I need,” she said.

***

IT was at least an hour later when Reilly came to find her. Analise still slept peacefully in Gracie’s old bedroom and the house was tomb quiet. She didn’t know where everyone else was, but for now, she didn’t care.

“
How’s it going?” Reilly asked, stepping in to sit on the edge of her bed.

“
Making progress, I suppose. She had a lot of pictures of my mom in here. I’d never seen any of them. It was like she’d tried to erase my mother after she died.”

Gracie picked up the one taken when she was a baby. She’d put it in her box and taken it out a dozen times. She couldn’t seem to bring herself to pack it away. She held it out to Reilly but instead of taking the picture he used her outstretched hand to tow her closer. Only after she’d sat down next to him, did he look at it.

“
Jonathan came in and talked to me earlier,” Gracie said.

“
About what?”

Gracie told him about the bizarre trance and the disjointed story he’d told. “In the end he kept repeating Dead

Lights and saying he was looking for something. I have no idea what it all meant.”

“
Huh,” Reilly said. When she tilted her head in question, he explained, “Zach had this crazy idea that there’s a pot of gold buried in your backyard. He thinks that’s why Chloe is here.”

“
Why do you think she’s here?”

“
Funny you should ask. She and I had a little heart-to-heart earlier. Although I don’t think there’s all that much heart left in Chloe LaMonte. She has some interesting theories, though.” He set the picture on the bed beside them and put his arms around Gracie’s shoulders, pulling her close as he spoke. His voice rumbled in his chest and created a comfort that eased her anxiety. “She was telling me—”

The sound of heavy footsteps in the hallway stopped Reilly in mid-sentence. He stood and went to the door. Gracie followed. Bill was moving up the hall, peering in every door.

“
What’s up?” Reilly asked him.

“
Have you seen Jonathan?”

“
An hour or two ago,” Gracie said. “He came to talk to me.”

Bill’s jaw dropped and his eyes widened. “He spoke to you?”

“
That’s what I said.”

“
About what?”

“
About—Why are you asking?”

“
Jonathan is missing,” Bill said.

Reilly shrugged. “He couldn’t have gone too far.”

“
Yes, I realize that. But the fact remains that I’ve checked every room in the house, with the exception of this room and your daughter’s room, Gracie. He’s nowhere to be found.”

“
I just looked in on Analise,” Gracie said. “He’s definitely not in there. And he’s not in here, obviously.”

“
You checked the porches?” Reilly asked.

“
Front and back.”

“
Okay,” Reilly said calmly. “Let’s start over, go through the house again. He’s got to be here.”

But thirty minutes later they’d gone through every room upstairs and down and there was no sign of Jonathan. His bag was still in his room, his bed neatly made, a Bible on the nightstand. But the man himself was gone.

“
What about the cellar?” Reilly said. “It’s the only place we haven’t checked.”

Gracie led them downstairs to the narrow door in the kitchen that opened onto a steep stairway. “It’s not really a cellar—it’s more a crawl space than anything,” she said, reaching for the string attached to the bare bulb that dangled overhead. The light came on, illuminating twelve rough wooden steps leading down to a pit as black as ink. “This is crazy. He’s not down there.”

There was a flashlight in a wall mount by the door. Bill pulled it free and switched it on. Juliet nudged in between their legs and started into the dark. The three were halfway down when the overhead bulb suddenly brightened and then dimmed, brightened and dimmed again. They paused looking up. The kitchen phone began to ring.

“
Hold on,” Gracie said and hurried up to answer it. But when she lifted the receiver the phone was dead. She tapped the hook switch and listened again. Nothing. Slowly she replaced the receiver and turned back to the waiting men. “It’s dead.”

But it began to ring again and each peal grew louder and louder. At the same time the kitchen lights blinked off and then on. Through the open door she could see the lamps in the front room doing the same. She lifted the receiver, but the ringing didn’t stop, if anything, it grew louder and faster.

“
What’s happening?” she said.

Reilly came up the stairs and took the receiver from her hand, listened, then hung it up, but it kept ringing until Gracie felt like her eardrums would pop. Reilly pulled the phone off the wall and disconnected the line that went in the back, but the ringing kept on.

“
What the ...”

The bare bulb in the stairway exploded, sending shards of glass in a rain over Bill. And the ringing stopped.

In the silence that followed, one by one, all of the lights that were on began to switch off until the gathering gloom of the late afternoon cloaked the first floor of the Diablo.

Gracie looked at Bill who stood frozen on the cellar stairs. “Are you okay?” she asked.

The hand that clutched the flashlight looked very white against the darkness, but Bill nodded.

“
That was weird,” Reilly said.

The understatement caught Gracie off-guard. She gave a shaky laugh. “Yeah.”

“
Come on,” Reilly said. “Let’s see what’s down there.”

The quiet had become ominous and Gracie didn’t want to go down into the darkness below. But somehow she managed to take the first step and then another, concentrating on the weak flashlight beam as she followed the two men down.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

June l896

Arizona Territory

WE’D been on the move since daybreak, following the sun as it arched across the sky. Sawyer kept us off the road, though how he navigated through the great openness I’ll never know. He seemed certain we were heading in the right direction, however, and none of us thought to question him. He could have led us to hell and we’d have followed.

I spent much of the time playing in my mind the kiss he’d given me, blushing at my own detailed memory. Inside, I was knotted up by recollections of the way his touch had moved me, had made me respond to feelings I didn’t even fully understand. It was as if I had two minds, one that kept me on this path and moving forward, another that wanted only to return to his arms and be held and kissed and awakened to the wonders of flesh.

My face grew hot again. I tried not to think of the way our passion had ended or the sting of his cold words.
I
don’t need a whore.
Well, I wasn’t one, but I’d offered myself as if I were, hadn’t I? I thought about this and wondered if perhaps I’d confused him as much as he’d confused me. I thought he’d pushed me away because I was acting like a whore. But as I examined each nuance of those moments together, I began to see another possibility. When he’d pulled back and looked at me, I know I saw the same startled ardor in his eyes that must surely have been in my own. But what had he been thinking? I’d just told him I would join the girls in their profession. Had he imagined that I was playacting while I was in his arms? Pretending to be carried away by the tide of needs that pulled us together? Performing to prove my point?