Blood in the Marsh (5 page)

Nick’s eyes flashed. He took her by the shoulders and turned her to face him. “If we’re going to be honest then I think it’s my turn. I realized real fast that you don’t have a very high opinion of yourself, and after meeting your mother, I guess I can understand that. It’s hard to grow up in someone else’s shadow. But you’re not the ugly duckling you think you are. You’re not dull or uninteresting. You’re just not the shallow, superficial person most women your age—hell, most people are. You see things beneath the surface appearance and you feel things deeply. As far as I’m concerned, that makes you special. And just to set the record straight, I asked you out because I wanted to get to know you.”

She blushed and looked down and Nick bent over to look into her eyes. “Are you going to ask me to take you home now and never darken your doorstep again?”

“No.”

“Good.” He smiled and released her. “Then how about going with me somewhere? There’s something I think you should see.”

She gave him a puzzled look. “What?”

“You’ll see,” he started gathering up their trash. “Come on.”

That Same Evening—Brunswick, Georgia

Detective Michael Santera sat at his desk looking out the window at the street below. It was late Saturday afternoon. He and one other detective were the only ones on duty in their department. Michael wondered what kind of weekend it would turn out to be, but pushed the thought aside. One thing he had learned early in the game was that any good cop knows there are only two things you can count on. One is that something will always happen, and the other is that it can always be worse.

He watched the shadows grow deeper as the sun sank below the horizon. The sky was clear and cloudless. The calm before the storm. That phase brought other thoughts to mind. Thoughts about his old friend Nick suddenly showing up.

He hadn’t heard anything from Nick in a long time. There were times he had found himself wondering where Nick was, if he was even still alive. Other times he was glad he hadn’t heard from Nick. It tended to bring back too many bad memories.

Out of the blue, Nick had called and said he wanted to visit. He had shown up a few weeks ago. Michael was surprised to see him and even more surprised when Nick said he had decided to stick around for a while.

Since Nick was new in town, Michael had invited him to live with him. He had a nice little house in Brunswick and there was plenty of room. Nick accepted. He found work at a photography studio during the day and was performing his magic act at night. Both seemed like odd lines of work for Nick, considering his background, but then Nick wasn’t a man who was easy to predict or figure out.

Michael was still not sure that he was entirely comfortable with Nick being there. He and Nick went back a long way but Nick was the sort of man who always seemed to have secrets, and secrets made Michael uncomfortable.

But Nick was also the kind of man who liked to have fun and Michael had had more of a social life during the few weeks Nick had been around than he had the entire time he had been in Brunswick.

“Hey, Mike!” the desk sergeant interrupted his thoughts. “There’s an old fellow on the phone. Been calling for the last three days, bitching about someone stealing one of his prize calves. He’s driving us nuts, man. You want to talk to him or should I send a uniform over there?”

“What’s his name?”

The sergeant looked down at the clipboard in his hand. “Jim Black.”

Michael snorted a short laugh and smiled. “No, I’ll take it. I know that old man. He lives just up the road from my uncle.”

Taking the call, Michael told Mr. Black he would stop by on his way home. He wished the desk sergeant a nice weekend and walked outside. With the setting of the sun, a nice breeze had picked up, blowing in from the ocean, carrying with it the smell of salt and marshy soil.

Michael rolled the windows down in his car as he made the drive to Mr. Black’s house. It had been a long time since the days when he had played in the woods that separated his uncle’s land from the Black’s. So long ago, it seemed like a lifetime.

He stopped in the driveway, walked up on the porch and knocked on the screen door. It felt strange to be standing there. As he waited for a reply to his knock, he wondered if the old man would recognize him.

“It’s about time you got here!” an old, gravelly voice broke the silence.

Michael jerked around to see a dried, weathered face and frail, old figure standing at the corner of the house. The brown eyes were bright, staring at him irritably.

“Mr. Black?”

“What’cha doin’ standing up there on my front porch for? The hooligans busted up my barn not my house. I don’t keep no cows in the house!”

Michael smiled and shook his head. Mr. Black was still the same snappy old man he remembered from his childhood. He stepped down from the porch, wondering if the old man remembered the last time they had seen one another.

Silently he followed Mr. Black around the house and into the pasture. They hadn’t walked far before Mr. Black stopped and pointed to a pile of loose hay beneath a tin roof that jutted out from the side of an old barn.

“See! It was right there!”

Michael walked over and examined the ground. Among the numerous hoof prints and indentions from Mr. Black’s old boots, one other distinct print stood out. Reaching in his jacket Michael pulled out a small camera and snapped a couple of pictures.

“There’s plenty more of them down by the fence. Them gawl-danged hoodlums! They coulda took any other ‘cept my white one.”

“What was so special about the white one?” Michael could see that the old man was really upset.

“You’d think people would leave folks alone. Give’em some kinda respect. A man works hard all his life and what does he get? I was going to win me a blue ribbon. Never done that, you know. All them years I always wanted to.”

Michael figured the old man was talking about the county fair. It made him feel sorry for the old fellow. He thought about how the old man must feel as he followed him across the pasture. When they reached the fence, he took a few more pictures of the cut wire and then spotted something unexpected.

On the opposite side of the fence, a patch of ground had been scraped clean of all growth. A circle of white powder had been drawn on the ground. Inside the center, a pentagram had been fashioned from neatly stripped and carved sticks of wood and in the center of the pentagram was the severed head of a goat. Its eyes bulged and its tongue protruded from its mouth. The wide-eyed terror frozen in the eyes made Michael pause and stare as a cold chill raced down his spine.

“Oh! Them dang thangs.” Mr. Black waved his hand at the sight. “They been showing up all over the gawl-dang place. I found more of em back over in the woods where you used to play.”

Michael turned and looked at the man, surprised that he had remembered him and shocked over what he had found. “You want to show me the others?”

Mr. Black grumbled but stepped through the cut fence. “Always knowed you’d show up here again someday. Felt it in my bones. Well, come on, boy! Day’s a fadin’ and I ain’t got no hankering to be out here after dark with them crazy hooligans a wandering around.”

Michael could understand his feelings and walked a little faster.

St. Simons Island

“Why are we coming here?” Lyra asked as Nick pulled into the parking lot of one of the more fashionable shopping areas. “Everything’s closed.”

“I work here,” he said as he got out and opened her door.

“You do?” She followed him to the door of a photography studio. “Doing what?”

“Taking pictures, making prints, the usual.” He unlocked the door and turned on a lamp on the reception desk. “Come on.”

He led her into the back room. One side of the room was designated for the cameras, where the photographs were actually taken. On the other side was a long, lighted mirror mounted above a counter lined with cosmetics and hair products. On both sides of the counter were racks of clothes, ranging from bathing suits and shorts to evening wear, for both men and women.

“Why’re we here?”

“I want to show you something.” He took her hand and started to pull her toward the makeup area. She stopped dead in her tracks.

“Come on. It’ll be fun.”

She gave him a suspicious look then let him pull her along. He stopped at one of the clothes rack and plucked a floppy hat from on top. Turning, he put it on her head then pulled the brim down over her face and tilted her chin up. “Nope, definitely not you.”

Lyra laughed and took the hat off, handing it back to him. He pulled a soft aqua-colored dress from the rack and held it up in front of her. “Yeah, this is great. There’s a dressing room right over there. Go put this on.”

Lyra made no move to take the dress. “Come on, trust me,” he said with a smile. “Just think of it as playing dress-up.”

“I don’t know. I don’t think I…”

“Please?”

She sighed and took the dress. Going into the dressing room, she pulled off her T-shirt and jeans and slipped the dress over her head. It had a scooped neckline that was loose, hanging off the tops of her shoulders. A wide belt cinched her narrow waist. She kicked off her sandals and turned to look at her reflection.

“Hey! You dressed?” Nick called out.

Lyra frowned at what she saw in the mirror. He called to her again and with a grimace, she opened the door.

Nick’s eyes widened as he saw her. Without the baggy clothes he could see that she had a great figure. Her waist was very tiny, but her breasts were firm and full and her legs were spectacular.

He smiled as she walked over to him. “My lady.” He swept his hand in the direction of the makeup chair.

“What are you going to do?” She took a seat, looking at him in the mirror.

“Magic,” he whispered in her ear then turned her to face him.

She drew back as he picked up an eye-shadow brush. “Just close your eyes. I won’t hurt you.”

“Hold on. You’re going to put make-up on me?”

“Yeah, why?”

Lyra shrugged. “Just kind of an odd talent for someone who spent most of his adult life in the military.”

“Well, you know the campaign slogan. Be all you can be.”

“Including a make-up artist?”

“You going to make fun or me or have fun with me?

“Fine.” She sighed and did as he said. He ran the makeup brush lightly over her eyelids and after a moment had her open her eyes. Next, he applied a tiny bit of mascara to her long lashes, dabbed a smoky color of shadow along the outside corners of her eyelids then put a pale gloss on her lips.

“Now, don’t look,” he said as he loosened the elastic band from her hair. It fell free in a shining wave. Brushing it out, he let it fall loose around her face then stepped back to inspect his handiwork. With her hair loose and a hint of color around her eyes, she looked like something out of a beauty magazine.

“Okay, Lyra Seville. Look.”

Lyra looked in the mirror as he turned her around. Her eyes widened, resting on her reflection for a moment before looking at him in the mirror.

“Look at yourself. Do you see a plain, ugly woman in that mirror? No, what you see is you—the woman you’re afraid to let anyone else see. But you don’t see anything ugly. You see a startlingly beautiful woman with a terrific body.”

“That can’t be me! What did you do?”

Nick turned her around to face him. “I didn’t do anything. I just took down the wall you’ve been hiding behind.”

She looked down and he gently tilted her face up and smiled at her. “I saw who you were behind that wall the other night when I was on stage. I looked into those remarkable eyes and saw how beautiful you were, even though you tried so hard to hide it. There’s no reason for you to hide, you know. You don’t have to worry about not measuring up to your mother. She could never hope to be as beautiful as you. Just look at yourself. Women would kill to have your beauty, to be able to look the way you do without spending hours in front of their mirrors. And men would stop in their tracks, happy to just get a smile from you.”

She swallowed nervously and clenched her hands together tightly in her lap. “I…I’ve never felt…I mean, I…”

Nick leaned down and kissed her lightly on the cheek. “I know, but it’s time you did. Will you at least try?”

A long moment passed then she looked up into his eyes and nodded. She felt as if she were Cinderella, one moment the plain maid and the next a princess. And at that moment, Nick seemed every inch the handsome prince.

He smiled at her again and leaned down close to her face. She could feel his breath mingling with hers and her heart raced. His lips touched hers lightly for a moment then withdrew.

“Now, how about we have some fun?” He twirled her chair around.

“Doing what?”

“Playing dress-up. What should we be first?”

Lyra laughed and let him pull her up. “This is your idea. You choose.”

He grinned and pulled out a cowboy’s outfit and saloon girl’s dress. “Meet you at the saloon, ma’am. Gotta get my duds changed and set up the cameras.”

Lyra chuckled and took the dress.