In the Waning Light (29 page)

. . . he told my PI that he saw a red VW van parked behind trees near the trail that led to this infamous make-out spot where Sherry Brogan was strangled . . .

Blake frowned. Who was the owner of this van? He reached for another photograph but stilled as he heard a noise outside, a clutter of rocks. Then came the snap of a twig, and a soft crunch of gravel. He became conscious of the pistol holstered at his back. Slowly, he replaced the box of photos and moved to the door. He listened. But all he could hear was the drip and plop of water. The distant rush of the swollen creek.

He reached for his weapon, and holding it ready, he flung open the door, waited. No more noise. He stepped out. Listened again. The world was all shadow and shimmer and shining with water in the moonlight. The light in Meg’s dormer was off.

A scuffle sounded on the bank. He spun toward the sound, heart hammering. A shadow, bushes moved. He heard a rattle of stones.
Someone scuttling up the path.

“Hey! Who’s there?” He ran toward the bank.

A car door slammed up on the coast road.

“Hey!” he yelled, scrambling up the twisting trail that snaked through the scrub up to the road. He popped out on the road, breathing hard, as tires squealed and brake lights flared momentarily at the end of the road.

Silence descended. Just the waving fronds of conifers. A shadow of a nighthawk across the moon. The moon silver on the bay.

Mouth dry, he slid his Glock back into his holster and peered down through the scrub toward the marina. From up here, through the branches, he could see yellow light glowing in Meg’s window now. She’d been roused.

As he took a step back toward the path, his foot kicked something soft. A black glove. He bent down to retrieve it and weighed it in his hand. Leather. Expensive. He scanned his surrounds again before making his way back down to lock the shed, moonlight showing his way.

Screaming rent the air. The kind of screams that gut the human in you. The kind that rise out of raw terror. A sound that bypasses the logic center of the brain and zings right into the nervous system. Meg raced
toward
the terrible sound, not away, even as her mind told her to flee. She scrambled wildly up the bank, hand over foot in avalanching white sand still hot from the sun’s radiation throughout the day. As she neared the dune ridge where scrub grew thick and the shore pines marched in hunched shapes across the sky, wind hit hard off the sea. Rain began to bomb down. It was turning to dusk, a strange purplish-orange quality in the sky—the kind that comes from distant forest fires and crackles with the electricity of simmering storms. The screams died. She stalled, the sudden silence even more terrifying.

Moving more cautiously now, her breathing ragged, she crested the ridge. And froze. In the strange waning light she saw . . . a thing of horror . . . Sherry, white and naked, splayed against black loam like a broken doll. All Meg could see was the bare, white body. Noise roared in her head. Her vision narrowed. Trees seemed to close in around her. Wind, rain began to lash hair against her face. She knew there were others, in the shadows.

See them, Meg. Try to see them . . .

She tried to peer harder. And then another sound snapped her to action: “Get her! Fuck! . . .
Stop
her—get her, or we’re all fucking dead!”

Meg turned and fled back down the dune, and into tussock that was land-mined with horse droppings. Twigs tore at her face. Saw grass sliced her legs.

She heard footfalls thudding behind. Heavy breathing. Louder.

“Meggie!”

She ran faster. Her toe caught under a root and her body slammed to the ground. For a second . . .
how many seconds?
. . . she couldn’t move. Rain pummeled her back. The sky darkened. She heard him coming closer. With Herculean effort she managed to scramble back onto her feet. She made for the south point. She knew where to hide, how to dive into water and disappear under foam and froth, and come up in secret under rock, in a grotto where there was a cave. A cave Blake had shown her. All she had to do was reach the beach, the water.

A hand grabbed her arm. She screamed and jerked free, tearing her shirt across her breast. He gripped her again, and swung her around . . .

His face. She saw his face.

Meg screamed from the bottom of her lungs.

The noise jolted her awake. She was shaking. Sweat drenched her body and soaked into her nightgown. Her breaths came shallow and fast. She got up on one elbow and reached for the lamp, clicked it on. Light flared into the dark, chasing away shadows. And she heard it . . . a screech of tires.

Not a scream.

Tires squealing.

Up on the road.

She sat fully up in bed and wrapped her arms tightly around her knees. She rocked, trying to calm her breathing. Each time the nightmare haunted her, there was a tiny bit more. And this time she’d seen. A face.

Geoff Sutton’s face.

It made no sense. She couldn’t trust the image. Meg knew just how fallible memories could be. She’d been looking into Geoff’s eyes under the dinner table as she’d flipped into a flashback. And now she’d inserted that image into her own memory. Her own daytime research, conjecture, experiences, were sliding into the nightmare of sleep.

She couldn’t trust her own mind. But it nevertheless rattled her. Raised questions she didn’t want to ask.

Knowing she’d never get back to sleep now, she got out of bed and took off her drenched nightgown. She dug a clean T-shirt out of her bag, pulled it over her head, and reached for her mother’s journal. She climbed into bed and leaned back against the pillows, opening the diary to where she last left off.

Emma and Tommy are home for spring break, and they came by again today. It heartens me so to see them both. Beautiful, strong. Sherry’s friends. It keeps my daughter’s spirit alive for me. And it helps me refocus on small things, like making coffee for her friends. Emma brought cookies today. Her mother baked them. Emma told me it was unusual for her mom to bake—she spends so much time at the pharmacy—so I better enjoy them. It made me laugh. She’s enjoying her studies so far, and plans to be a pharmacist like her mother, maybe even take over the small business on Front Street one day, if the big chains don’t gobble it up first.

I told them both I was investigating, that I was beginning to think Ty Mack might be innocent, and that I was doing everything I could to learn more, as fast as I could, before Jack’s trial come December. I asked if they had
any
idea who else might have wanted to hurt Sherry, if they could think for me . . .

Meg stilled. She lunged for her digital recorder, found the file of the interview with Emma she was looking for, wound it forward, and pressed play.

“Did my mother ever express any doubt to you guys about Ty’s guilt at that time?”

“No. I don’t think so. I don’t really recall . . .”

A blatant lie? Or had Emma truly forgotten? She rewound, hit play again. Emma’s “no” was curt and swift. What did that mean? How does one forget something like that? Meg turned the page in the journal, read further.

Emma is such a dear, sweet girl. When she went into my bathroom she came out with a worried look in her eyes, and she told me those pills I had in there were powerful. That mix. Tranquilizers, sleeping pills, anti-anxiety. She said her mom had spoken about some of that medication in particular, and how evidence was growing that it could cause depression, and worse. There was a suicide rate associated with those pills. She told me to be careful, maybe speak to my doctor about slowly coming off them, and taking up yoga, or maybe joining a group to talk through things. Tommy was supportive. He seemed worried, too. I think Emma will be good at her job one day. I think of Sherry and how she was planning to be a doctor. And the loss again becomes unbearable . . .

Meg scanned through her digital recorder and located the file with Tommy’s interview. She wound it forward, pressed play.

“She never told you about her suspicions that Ty might be innocent?”

“Never.”

Frowning, Meg wound the conversation a little further forward, hit play.

“Her suicide didn’t come as a surprise?”

“No, Meg. It did not. Emma was studying pharmacology, and she’d seen the collection of pills that your mom was taking in the bathroom. She told me what they were for—anxiety, depression, insomnia. Tara was on a bad cocktail . . .
”

Meg sat back, the Tommy interview replaying through her mind in its entirety.

“Emma proved to be a passive-aggressive. A pathological liar. She lied to me. Everyone. Even the police . . .”

An icy thought twisted through her mind: Could Emma have tampered with those pills? Meg scrambled over her bedding to reach her laptop. She fired it up, and punched in the names of her mother’s drugs. They came in capsule form. Capsules could be refilled, or tampered with. She inhaled, casting aside the idea—it was too extreme. Or was it? Because . . .
if
her mother had
not
taken her own life, someone else had. And the verdict had definitely been an overdose. Forcing someone to swallow an excess of pills would in all likelihood have left signs of a struggle, and raised flags in an autopsy. But what if capsules could be filled with increased levels of active ingredients? And the person who swallowed them had no idea how much medicine they were taking? And who better to do that than someone with some pharmacological knowledge and access. Was it even possible?

Meg made a note to call Emma. She had more questions now. She’d like to speak to Tommy again, too. Because her mother’s journal clearly indicated she’d told both Tommy and Emma that she believed Ty Mack could have been innocent. Her hand stilled at the sound of a crash downstairs. Her mouth turned dry. She sat very still, listening, those screeching tires earlier suddenly taking on new context. She heard another noise, a scratching, then a soft thump.

Quickly, she grabbed her robe. Belting it across her waist she went to the door and inched it open. It was dark down the passage, moonlight glinting through a window at the far end. She walked quietly along to Blake’s room, rapped at his door.

“Blake?” she whispered.

No reply.

She turned the handle, edging it open. “Blake?”

His bed was empty, his bedding a jumble. Her pulse quickened. Meg turned and hurried quietly to Noah’s room and edged open his door. He was sleeping soundly. No Lucy in sight.

She started down the stairs, sliding her hand down the railing for balance, bare feet quiet. She reached the bottom of the stairs, rounded the corner, and screamed as something lunged at her. It was huge. Shadowed. With horns. Her brain folded in on itself, unable to make sense, and she turned to flee . . .
run, Meggie, run . . .

The thing grabbed her, spun her around, and clamped a hand over her mouth. Moonlight caught his face.

Blake!?

“Shhhh,” he whispered, breath warm against her ear. “You’ll wake Noah.” He released her mouth slowly. She could feel his heart thudding against her body. “What in the hell were you doing sneaking up on me like that?” he hissed.

She stared up at him, heart jackhammering against her ribs, and she started to laugh. “What on
earth
is that thing on your head?”

“Shh!”

She clamped her hand over her own mouth,
snorting
as she tried to stifle her own laughter bubbling through her. He yanked the thing off his head and tossed it onto the counter.

“It’s my dad’s crab hat,” he said stiffly.

“It stinks.” She giggled again—like the child she’d always been inside—at the way his hair now stood up in comic tufts. A smile began to play over his lips, but it faded as he watched her laugh. A predatory intensity entered his gaze. His pupils turned dark, large, and an electrical heat began to thrum off him in waves. Meg’s laughter slowly quieted. She swallowed. Her heart stuttered as a molten, tingling heat leaked into her belly, and a gentle throb began in her groin, each delicious pulse matching the beat of blood through her veins.

He reached for her hands, and drew her to him, slowly, inexorably, giving her time to stop him, the question implicit in his pacing, in the darkening pools of his eyes. And when she didn’t resist, he yanked her firmly against his solid frame, his other hand sliding down her hips and cupping her buttocks. He pulled her pelvis up against his groin as he forced his mouth down hard on hers. She felt his erection pressed between them.

Heat exploded logic from Meg’s mind. She came up onto her toes, arching into him, opening her mouth under the crushing aggression of his hunger, her tongue tangling, fighting with his. He slid his hand into her robe, under her T-shirt, and down into the lace of her panties. He cupped her between her legs. His skin rough, hot. He moved the crotch fabric aside and she felt his fingers against bare skin. A groan slipped free from her mouth. He parted her with his fingers, touched her, and a wave of pleasure washed through her as her limbs began to shake.