Superstition (38 page)

His hands dropped away from her face. “I’ve got a better idea. I investigate and you stay the hell out of the way.”

“It looks to me like you can use all the help you can get.”

“Not from you.”

Nicky bristled. “What do you mean, not from me? For your information, I’m a damned good reporter. In fact, I’m willing to bet I can investigate you into the ground. I know how to find sources, and I know how to get information out of them. I know where—”

The corners of his mouth quirked up in the merest hint of a smile. “Wait. Whoa. There you go again, getting all huffy over nothing. I’m not questioning that you’re good at what you do. I’m just telling you I don’t want your help. And the reason I don’t want your help is because I don’t want you putting yourself in any more danger than you’re in already. My worst nightmare is to get a call about a third victim and find out it’s you.”

There was a lot to object to in that speech, and Nicky caught every hackle-raising nuance as it was uttered. But what she also caught was the darkening of his eyes and the hard strength of his hands as they gripped either side of her waist. Her pulse speeded up.

“Oh,” she said, because she was suddenly too busy sliding her hands up over his chest to think of anything better.

“What I’m trying to say here is that I like you better alive than dead.”

“That’s romantic,” Nicky decided.

“Isn’t it?”

His head lowered, and Nicky felt her breath catch in response. He was going to kiss her. . . . She
wanted
him to kiss her.

She could almost feel the steam.

“Nick,” Livvy said from the general direction of the hall.

Joe’s head lifted, his hands dropped, and he looked past Nicky toward the doorway.

Ever impatient, Nicky was stopped in the very act of going up on tiptoe to hurry the kiss along, all her carefully reasoned-out caution having been blown to smithereens by the flash of real tenderness for her that she was almost sure she had just seen in Joe’s eyes. Thwarted, she glanced around at her sister with a “get lost or die” frown.

“Sorry.” Livvy folded her arms on top of her swollen belly and made an apologetic little face at her. The thing was, though, that she showed no signs of leaving. “Marisa wants to head home, and Mama thought Joe might want to listen to the tape before she goes.”

Joe’s face suggested that he felt a distinct lack of interest in the tape right at that moment. In consequence, the look Nicky gave him was severe.

“Livvy! Nicky! Are you all coming down?” Uncle Ham yelled from the bottom of the stairs. “Bring Joe.”

“We’re coming,” Livvy yelled back, and gave Nicky a pointed look.

“My mother can help you solve this thing if you let her,” Nicky said to Joe, accepting the fact that there was even less privacy to be had in her childhood home than on the beach, and abandoning all thought of persuading Livvy to leave so that she and Joe could take up where they had left off. Instead, she gave him a little shove toward the door. “Go on, go downstairs. So you don’t believe in ghosts. Fine. You don’t have to. But the least you can do is listen to the tape with an open mind.”

“You’re lucky,” Livvy said wistfully as Nicky walked past her. Joe was a few paces away, near the top of the stairs by this time, which placed him just out of earshot. “He’s hot.” Then her mouth twisted. “How did this happen? I was always the one who got the hunky guys, not you. And now look at me. And look at you.”

“You’re just going through a bad patch,” Nicky said. “It will pass.”

Livvy rolled her eyes. “You sound just like Mama. Come on, let’s go down.”

“HE’S BACK. He’s back. It’s him. He’s here.”

Once he knew what he was listening for, Joe could hear the voices distinctly. They were soft, feminine exclamations that popped up at various intervals throughout the audiotape, whispering over the primary action, repeating the same two-word phrases over and over. Unfortunately, that didn’t necessarily make what he was hearing germane to the investigation: As far as he could tell, he could be listening to just about any whispering female on the planet. How this group could tell that the voices belonged to a ghost at all, much less the ghosts of the three girls in question, was beyond him, but he kept that thought to himself. He listened politely, doing his best to keep an open mind—which was vital, because Nicky kept glancing at him—while battling the bone-deep weariness that made concentrating on anything at all, much less ghost voices on tape, an effort. As the tape neared the end, his efforts were rewarded in a way he would never have foreseen, which, in his opinion, went a long way toward proving the old adage that being lucky was better than being good—sometimes much better.

Forget ghost voices. What he heard, distinct from all the hullabaloo that was the program itself, was a phone call being answered by a real, live human being.

The phone must have been on vibrate, because he didn’t hear a ring, just a tiny click and then. . . .

“Hello?” a woman murmured.

A beat passed.

She said something that was unintelligible.

Another beat.

“I can’t hear you,” she said, a little louder. “You’ll have to speak up.”

Another beat.

“Oh. That’s [unintelligible].” She sounded surprised, even nervous. “What? There’s static . . . I can’t really hear.”

Another beat.

“Fine. That’s good.” A definite note of relief. “What? All right, I’m going to walk outside and see if that helps.”

“Stop the tape,” Joe said, as the action swept on without any repeat of the woman’s voice.

Marisa, clearly surprised, stopped the tape. Everyone around the table—because that’s where they were all seated, in a big, happy family group crowded in with the remains of homemade muffins and cups of coffee littering the tabletop in front of them—looked at him inquiringly. Joe suppressed a sigh. In the past, when he’d investigated a crime, he’d worked either alone or with a small, select cadre of seasoned law-enforcement types. Eight wide-eyed civilians, plus Dave, were not the people he would have chosen to share this type of sensitive material with.

But asking everyone except Nicky, whose help he needed, to leave the room was clearly a waste of time. Number one, they had all heard the tape, most of them before he had, as Marisa had apparently played it for Leonora and company while he and Nicky were on the beach. Number two, he’d seen enough of how Nicky worked to know that what she knew, her family would worm out of her soon afterward.

So he might as well forget from the outset any idea of keeping this particular detail secret to the investigation.

And chalk it up: Such were the hazards of conducting police work in paradise.

Several of the family members opened their mouths to speak as soon as the tape was switched off. A few whats and whys even made it out into the open air before he managed to shut them down. Reminding himself of a kindergarten teacher, Joe went “Shh!” with a finger pressed to his lips and a monitory glance around the table.

“I need a couple of minutes here,” he said.

The group goggled at him but obediently fell silent.

“Could you replay the last part, please?” he asked Marisa. She nodded and reached toward the tape recorder. Then, to Nicky, Joe added, “I want you to listen to the phone call in the background and identify the voice for me, if you can.”

At his signal, Marisa replayed the tape.

The dominant sound was a set of rapid footsteps and quickened breathing, echoed by a number of less distinct footsteps and some rustling, as if a whole group of people were moving in the same general direction at once.

Then, in the background, came the barely audible conversation that Joe had picked up on before.

It was short, only a few seconds, and when it ended, it was followed almost instantly by Nicky’s voice.

“We’re heading for the second floor now,” Nicky said on the tape, her voice clear and easily recognizable.

Joe signaled to Marisa to turn off the tape. The whole time he’d been listening to it, he was watching Nicky’s face. Even before he asked her who the speaker was, he was certain from her expression what her answer would be. As it happened, she didn’t even wait for him to ask.

“That was Karen,” she said to him, sounding as if her throat was suddenly tight.

He nodded his thanks to her.

“Could I have that tape, please?” he asked Marisa. Not that he needed her permission to take possession of it, just as he hadn’t needed Nicky’s permission to take her phone, her second phone, which he’d carried with him off the beach and which was now, hopefully, tagged and bagged down at the station along with the first. The tape, like the phones, was evidence and could be seized, but he always tried to be polite when possible. In Jersey, it hadn’t always been possible, but down here in paradise, politeness tended to work like a charm.

As if to prove his point, Marisa nodded and pushed the tape recorder toward him.

“So what was that?” Livvy burst out, looking from Nicky to him and back.

“That call must have been the reason she went outside,” Nicky replied, with the exact amount of concern for secrecy that he had expected her to show. Her eyes were on him rather than her sister. “There was static on her phone. Somebody called her and she couldn’t hear what they were saying, so she went outside to see if she could get better reception.”

Conscious that secrecy was a lost cause, Joe nodded confirmation at her. That was what he thought, too. He’d have to check the timing against the videotape to be sure, but what he’d just listened to had to have been the start of one of the last calls Karen had received.

That, to him, held more significance than the whispering of a hundred ghost voices.

None of the callers he’d interviewed had said anything to him about Karen going outside because of static.

BY THE TIME Joe left, after extracting a firm promise from Nicky that she wouldn’t so much as step outside the house without one of his men by her side, it was after four A.M. and only the family remained. After a little more desultory conversation, everyone finally surrendered to exhaustion and went off to bed. Once there, Nicky snuggled beneath the covers and kept her eyes tightly closed and tried to focus on pleasant things—like the warm familiarity of her childhood bedroom, and the lulling roar of the waves coming in, and the knowledge that her family was all around her—so that she could fall asleep. But it didn’t work. Nothing did. The terrifying thoughts and images would not be denied. Against her closed lids, she kept seeing the slick red shine of Karen’s blood as the headlights hit it, and the lumpy, white-wrapped shape that was what remained of Marsha Browning as her body was taken away on a stretcher, and the glow of Nicky’s own computer screen.

Dogs howling in the dark of night. . . .

The doggerel scrolled through her mind. She did her best to push it out, seeking desperately for something—anything—that might hold at bay the icy fear that raced along her nerve endings. Joe’s face popped into her mind’s eye: She could almost see his eyes darkening with tenderness for her. She could feel his arms around her, taste his kiss . . .

Warmth began to take the place of ice. If she could just keep on thinking of Joe . . .

“Nicky?”

Coming out of the darkness as it did, the whisper made Nicky start. Her eyes flew open as she realized that the voice was one she knew. If she hadn’t been so jumpy, in fact, she would have recognized it instantly.

“Mama?” That was what both she and Livvy had called Leonora as they were growing up. Only after Nicky had left home for college had she switched to the more adult-sounding “Mother.” Livvy never had. Now that she was home again, Nicky found herself reverting back—in lots of ways, including how she thought of her mother. Under the circumstances, “Mama” just felt right.

“You weren’t asleep, were you.” It was a statement rather than a question. Leonora was standing in the open doorway, hardly visible at all, a denser shadow in the darkness. “Are you all right?”

Nicky turned over onto her back, pulled the covers up under her chin, and said to the shadowy ceiling, “I saw Tara Mitchell’s ghost today.”

Leonora didn’t reply for a moment. Then she made a sound, as of a sigh or a deeply indrawn breath, and moved into the room. Nicky could hear her slippers shuffling across the hardwood floor. She didn’t have to see her mother to know what she was wearing: her zip-up terry-cloth robe over a nightgown. Seconds later, as Leonora sat on the edge of the bed, Nicky felt the mattress sink beneath her weight and smelled the pleasant lotiony aroma of her mother at bedtime. Though she could see the dark shape that was Leonora out of the corner of her eye and feel the warmth of her nearness, Nicky continued to look at the ceiling. To her surprise, she could feel her heart pumping faster. To talk to her mother about seeing a ghost was not easy, she was discovering. It felt uncomfortable, almost as if she was impinging on forbidden territory.

“Where?” Leonora asked. Her voice was quiet, in keeping with the hush of the sleeping house, but entirely matter-of-fact. Of course. For Leonora James, seeing a ghost—or multiple ghosts—was just another day at the office.

For Nicky, it was something else entirely.

Keeping her voice carefully even, Nicky told her mother about her experience.

“I’m not surprised,” Leonora said when Nicky had finished. “Or, rather, I’m surprised it took so long.”

“What?” Nicky’s eyes cut to her mother’s face, which she could now just barely—her eyes having adjusted to the gloom—discern. “What do you mean?”

“Have you really forgotten?” There was something in Leonora’s voice that made Nicky frown.

“Forgotten what?”

“I always wondered, you know. If you did it deliberately, or if it was some kind of involuntary defense mechanism. I finally decided that it was a defense mechanism.”

Nicky felt a cold niggle of apprehension and shivered. “What are you talking about?”

Leonora gave a rueful little chuckle.“Your father and I, we used to tease each other about how we’d produced two tiny clones. Olivia was—is—just like him. He was fair-haired and blue-eyed and so handsome and popular. A golden boy. Everybody loved Neal. Girls, boys, everybody. He was always, always the life of every party. You know what? I miss him still.
He
was my husband. These others—I guess I keep trying to replace what I had. But I’m finally realizing you only get to love like that once in a lifetime.”