Superstition (12 page)

“Okay, I’ve got a question for you guys,” Nicky said when the accolades had died down. She was leaning back against the center island, trying not to remember that her mother had said that fifteen years ago, there had been a puddle of blood about six inches from her right foot.
Tara Mitchell had been stabbed in this room. . . .
Nicky gave an inner shiver, found her gaze resting on the vivid scarlet roses that adorned the wallpaper, and tried her best to dismiss all thoughts of violence and gore from her mind. After all, the murders and the subsequent reports of ghostly sightings were the sole reason they were in the house to begin with. It was ridiculous, at this late date, to let the whole haunted-house thing start to freak her out. “Did somebody on our team get a little creative and fake those screams?”

A beat passed. Three pairs of eyes looked at her, clearly surprised.

“No way,” Bob said, his hand suspended over the lens cap he’d been tightening. “That wasn’t in the script. Anyway, here on location, we don’t have the technical capability to digitally come up with anything like that.”

“I’m not talking high-tech.” Nicky folded her arms over her chest and gave him a level look. “I’m talking somebody screaming.”

Bob frowned. “Not that I know of. ”

Nicky looked at Cassandra. She shook her head, her chocolate-brown eyes wide and innocent. “Girl, believe me, if I could scream like that, I’d be looking for a career in slasher movies,” she said, and took a swig from her Snapple. “Those were some eerie-ass screams.”

“
I
thought it was a ghost for sure.” Mario snapped a makeup case closed. “Gave me the—what do you call them?—Williams, let me tell you.”

He shivered theatrically.

“Willies,” Cassandra corrected.

“You mean it
wasn’t
some kind of paranormal thing?” Bob asked, his frown deepening. Like Nicky, the bulk of his experience was with hard news, and the idea that something on their program was less than authentic, once digested, wouldn’t sit well with him, she knew.

“I don’t
know
that it wasn’t,” Nicky said cautiously. “I’m just trying to make sure. Isn’t there some saying, like,
trust but verify
?”

“I never heard of that.” Mario, who, as a fairly recent immigrant from Guatemala, was constantly trying to perfect his English, looked interested. “Is that on one of your coins?”

“No,” Cassandra said. “It’s, like, a famous quotation or something.”

“Ah.” Mario nodded. His expression made it clear that he was storing up the expression for later reuse.

She’d known this group long enough and well enough to tell when they were lying, Nicky decided, looking from one to the other. They weren’t.

“Where’s Karen?” Nicky asked, as the next likely possibility occurred to her.

“She got a call on her cell phone and took it outside,” Gordon said. Pulling a camera dolly behind him, he’d entered the kitchen just in time to hear her question and jerked a thumb toward the French doors. “From the way she acted, it was important. I kinda got the impression that she was talking to His Highness the Head Honcho.”

His Highness the Head Honcho was Sid Levin,
Twenty-four Hours Investigates
’s executive producer.

“Oh, yeah?” Nicky knew she sounded apprehensive, but she couldn’t help it. Her job—her
career
—rose and fell on Sid Levin. “What did he say?”

Gordon shrugged. “Don’t know. You’ll have to ask Karen.”

“I will.” Nicky headed toward the patio. Her exit was hastened by the fact that Barney Fife and his little cop buddy entered the kitchen just as she reached the French doors.

“You guys need any help closing up shop?” he asked.

With one hand on the door latch, Nicky glanced over her shoulder to find his eyes on her. Gordon said something to him by way of a reply, but Nicky missed hearing it as she pulled the door open and stepped outside. She’d had enough stress and worry for one day, she thought as she closed the door behind her. She felt emotionally and physically drained, tired to her toes, used up, worn-out, empty. Dealing with the pain-in-thepatootie local fuzz was more than she could face at the moment.

Let somebody else do it for a change.

She stopped just outside the door as darkness and the sweet night air enfolded her. For an instant, she simply stood there on the small stone patio with her eyes closed, savoring the heady aroma of flowers and sweetgrass and the sea, the faint taste of salt on her tongue, the gentle wafting breeze. It was warm, even warmer than it had been in the house, but the breeze kept it from being hot. On this part of the island, the gurgle of the ocean was muted, distant: a backdrop for the calling of the night birds that nested in Salt Marsh Creek. Their fluting cries, along with the whirring of the insects and the rustle of the leaves high up in the trees, made an eerily beautiful chorus that was as much a part of her as her bones.

The night music of Pawleys Island. In all the years she’d been away, she’d never, ever forgotten what it sounded like.

Tonight, it called to her, made her think of ghosts—not the ghosts that might or might not be hanging around the Old Taylor Place, or the ghosts that popular tradition said had long walked the island, but her own ghosts: the ghosts of her past.

She had to hold them at bay only a little while longer, she reminded herself, even as, unwanted and unsolicited, they began to unspool themselves from the deepest recesses of her mind.
Her father . . . the boat . . . torrents of cold, dark water . . .

No.
She refused to remember. By this time tomorrow night, she would be safely back in her apartment in Chicago.

Mission accomplished.

It was a good feeling, and as she savored it, Nicky felt some of the tension that had built up in her neck and shoulders begin to ease. As impossible as it had earlier seemed, they’d done it: put on at least twenty minutes (and never mind that it was an hour-long show) of must-see
live
TV.

Pay attention, CBS.

With that thought, Nicky opened her eyes and looked around for Karen.

There she was. Nicky spotted her almost at once. The moon was brighter now, a pale white disk that gave off just enough light so that Nicky could see Karen’s slender shape walking slowly down the inky black asphalt path that was the driveway. It was too dark for her to be able to make out any details, but from the way Karen was moving, Nicky guessed that she was still talking on the phone: Her pace was slow, and there was a certain aimlessness to it that made her appear to be walking more for the sake of being in motion than with any destination in mind. Certainly, she did not seem to be heading anywhere purposefully, such as toward her car, which, like the others, was parked out of sight around the bend in the driveway.

After I ask her about the screams, I need to tell her she’s giving me a ride,
Nicky reminded herself, and crossed the patio to head down the driveway after Karen.

She felt herself growing tense all over again at the thought of what she might be getting ready to hear.

Please, let the news from Chicago be good.

Once she was away from the warm, yellow rectangles of light that spilled from the house’s windows, the driveway became unexpectedly dark. First, the solid bulk of the garage to her right, and then the trio of magnificent live oaks that stood sentinel beside it, blocked out the moon. The night sounds were louder now, as if being away from the house somehow amplified them. The breeze seemed to have picked up, so suddenly Nicky was almost chilly, despite her suit jacket. She could see Karen’s shadowy figure in front of her, moving into the bend of the driveway now, and she almost called to her to wait. Then she remembered that Karen was on the phone, probably on a business-related call, possibly even talking to the Head Honcho himself, and refrained. How unprofessional would she sound if the phone picked up her voice in the background, yelling at Karen to stop?

Nicky stepped up the pace, determined to silently catch her. A smile tugged at the corners of her mouth as she imagined how pleased the home office must be with how the program had turned out. Karen was probably listening to somebody—or maybe several different people—extol its praises. She could probably expect a congratulatory call herself, just as soon as she retrieved her phone from her purse and turned it back on again.

There was no—okay, almost no—possibility that the news could be bad.

As she hurried after Karen, Nicky made up her mind about something: Even if the screams turned out to be anything other than paranormal in origin,
she
wouldn’t be telling—not her mother, not the rest of the crew, not anybody. When and if she discovered the culprit—if there even
was
a culprit—she was going to impress upon them the wrongness of what they had done, and then swear them to eternal secrecy. That way, her mother’s integrity would be preserved, her wrath would be averted, and Nicky herself would not have to make any uncomfortable and possibly career-damaging admissions to anybody.

The show was over: Let it rest in peace. It would be best for all concerned if it was allowed to go down in the annals of television history exactly as it had been experienced by the viewers: with the origin of those chilling final screams forever a mystery.

Nicky had almost reached the bend in the driveway when she realized that she couldn’t see Karen anymore. She frowned and slowed her steps, peering intently ahead. A number of tall pines with shaggy branches that reached clear to the ground clustered together to her left a few paces ahead, just as the driveway made its swooping turn to slope down toward the street. One of the gnarled and bearded live oaks on the other side seemed to reach out toward the pines, its branches arching above the pavement some twenty feet overhead. The shadow that the trees cast was so dark that it seemed to swallow up everything, even the faint gleam of the asphalt itself.

Even Karen.

No, wait, there she was—a stray moonbeam glinted off something metallic deep in the shadow of the trees that could only be Karen’s cell phone. Karen was closer now—surprisingly close. She must have stopped to finish her conversation, and Nicky had been so deep in thought that she hadn’t noticed that she was rapidly catching up.

Relieved, Nicky hurried toward her. Darkness dropped over her like a blanket as she stepped into the shadow of the trees, and it suddenly became almost impossible to see anything at all. She realized that there was a reason for the thick gloom—the swaying canopy overhead completely blocked out the night sky—but that didn’t stop the prickle that ran over her skin as a breeze that was several degrees cooler than the night swirled around her, caressing her face, lifting the hair from the back of her neck.

Taking a deep breath, she inhaled the scent of pine, faint but unmistakable. The sounds of birds and insects and rustling leaves that she’d been so attuned to were muted now; so still was it there beneath the trees that she could hear the faint click of her own high heels on the pavement—the increasingly hesitant click as her pace slowed . . .

Karen had to be right in front of her. Why couldn’t she hear her talking?

To hell with it.

“Karen?” she called. Her heart was pounding, she realized with some surprise, and her breathing came fast and shallow. For what reason? She didn’t know. But . . . “Karen?”

No answer.

From somewhere in the distance, somewhere out there in the general direction of the marsh, rose the faint, lonely howl of a dog.

Nicky stopped dead as the hair stood up on the back of her neck.

“Karen?” she tried one more time, but even to her own ears her voice sounded weak. Her pulse raced; her skin prickled. The dip in the temperature sent a chill racing over her from her scalp to the soles of her feet. She could see nothing of her colleague now, not even the glint of Karen’s phone. The night sounds had mutated into a curious roaring that filled her ears. Darkness was all around her, darkness that now felt alive and threatening, darkness that suddenly seemed to be peopled with terrible things that meant her harm. She had the sudden overwhelming sense that someone—some
thing
—was watching from the shadows. . . .

An icy gust of air brushed her cheek. The sensation was almost identical to the one she had experienced in Lauren’s room. It felt, she thought as her heart clutched, like the touch of cold, dead fingers.

For the space of a heartbeat, Nicky couldn’t move as her breathing suspended and the bottom dropped out of her stomach. Then she turned and ran.

And not a moment too soon. Even as she fled, stumbling a little as her high heels slipped on the pavement, there was a sound, a rush of movement, an unmistakable sense of a
presence
hurtling along behind her. Someone—some
thing
—was chasing her, she realized to her horror. She could hear running footsteps, breathing, a kind of rustle as if two layers of cloth were rubbing together rapidly. Daring a glance over her shoulder, dreading what she might see but compelled to look, she saw nothing: It was too dark. But every instinct she possessed shrieked that she was in mortal danger.

It was closing fast.

Her heart thudded in her ears. Her knees went weak. Her lungs cried out for air, but she was so terrified that she couldn’t fill them, couldn’t breathe. Just ahead, beyond the shadow of the trees, she could see that the world was silvered with moonlight, that it was alive and warm and promising safety. But she was trapped in darkness—cold, stygian darkness that seemed to wrap itself around her and claim her, turning her feet to lead and making her feel as though she were running through the deep black water that was the stuff of her worst nightmares, as though she were moving in slow motion, as though she was caught up in one of those hideous dreams in which there was no escaping the monster in never-ending pursuit. . . .

A scream, sharp as a knife and quivering with fear, split the night.

Then something slammed hard into the back of Nicky’s knees, and she fell.