Daughter of Darkness (6 page)

    He turned up the volume on the radio. An all-night talk show. A woman was talking about being raped and violated by aliens.

    The cabbie didn't seem to know she was there in the back seat. She sat up and said, "I have money."

    Two things happened at once: the cab driver let out an ear-shattering shout and the cab itself shot briefly to the right, into the oncoming lane. He quickly righted the vehicle.

    He turned around and looked at her and said, "You just scared the shit out of me, lady!"

    He had a nice face, kind of a baby face. He was probably in his late twenties and overweight by as much as fifty pounds. He wore a brown zipper jacket and a Cubs baseball cap. There was a vulnerability to him that she liked and trusted immediately.

    "I'm sorry," she said.

    "So now the gals are taking over, huh?"

    "Taking over?"

    "Yeah. You know, robbing cabbies."

    "Oh, no," she said, "that's not why I'm here."

    He watched her in his rearview mirror. She could see he was studying her, trying to decide for himself what she was really all about. He probably carted around a lot of really strange people in his cab. He probably knew a lot
about
really strange people.

    "I just need a ride," she said. "As I said, I have money." She held up a fistful of dollars, the same dollars the nun had found in her wallet tonight. "I'm sorry I scared you."

    "I guess I just didn't see you was all. All the cabbies gettin' killed lately, I'm just a little jumpy. So where's the address?"

    She told him.

    "Yeah, right, lady."

    "What? Is something wrong with the address?"

    "Not if you believe in fairy tales."

    "Fairy tales?" she said, baffled by his words.

    But before he could answer, his two-way radio began crackling. The dispatcher wanted to know if he could pick somebody up. He said that he already had a fare.

    After breaking the connection, the cab driver turned up the radio a little. A caller was saying that he found it strange that an alien race would travel all the way across the galaxy just to get laid. Especially with a different species. The cab driver chuckled.

    She sat back and stared out the window. They were on the Crosstown now. The rain was coming down harder. She had a bad headache. She couldn't remember her name. She felt utterly isolated. Maybe she shouldn't have left Coffey's. She liked him and he was certainly protective of her. She wanted to scream at the cab driver to turn off the nonsense radio program. She didn't want to be part of that world. She wanted to be part of Coffey's world again. His nice, warm smile. His nice, warm kitchen. His nice, warm guest bed. Why had the
presence
in her mind awakened her? Why had it given her this address? Where was she going anyway?

    She slumped back in her seat, cold and alone, and trying to block out the inane words coming from the radio show.

    She was trying very hard not to think about the man in the motel room, the dead man.

    

    

    Coffey wasn't sure why he woke up. A dream, perhaps. Or a nightmare.

    He lay in his dark bed, listening to fat, noisy raindrops fall from the eaves to puddles below.

    He did all the usual things when he awakened at this time of night. Scratched his chest, his groin, used left leg to scratch right leg. Thought of getting up to take a pee. Thought maybe he could hold it till his
official
waking up a few hours later.

    He wondered how the woman was doing. He felt good about her being under the same roof. He realized that this was a testament to his general loneliness. Here was a woman who might well turn out to be a murderer, but he was so taken with her that he didn't care. He didn't ever want her to leave.

    His bladder got insistent. He swung his legs out from under the cover and then off the bed. The hardwood floor was cold on his bare feet. Dressed only in pajama bottoms, he padded out of the room.

    He remembered so many middle of the nights when his daughter was an infant. He and Janice had taken turns getting up in the middle of the night to answer her cries. He could still recall the warm feel of her baby flesh against him and the sweet smell of her bottle formula and all her assorted belches, farts, and hiccups as he'd walked her around the kitchen, trying to get her back to sleep. Memory made him smile. Sometimes, when he was at work, he'd suddenly be overwhelmed by his feelings for her-how much he loved her and how much he feared for her. Life, especially infant life, was vulnerable to so many things-accident, disease-and even crazed ex-convicts. He wanted to hold her again in the middle of the night, love her, and protect her-as he had failed to protect her the night of her death.

    He went down the hall to the john. On the way, he passed the guest bedroom.

    He went into the john and did his business. Washed his hands. Dried them. And then started walking back down the hall.

    When he got to the guest bedroom, he paused. Listened. What did he expect to hear? It was unlikely that she snored like a truck driver. She was probably enjoying a nice, quiet, and exhausted sleep. With the things that had apparently happened to her, of course she'd be exhausted.

    But he had this feeling. Maybe it was his cop instinct. She was gone. That's what the instinct told him. He imagined the blond man he'd spotted at the motel breaking in and kidnapping her. But, no, Coffey had a good alarm system. No matter how good the blond man might be, Coffey would have heard something.

    She was gone. He knew that now. Knew it absolutely.

    But what if he was wrong? What if he opened the door and she was lying there awake? It might look like he was trying to put the moves on her. He wanted to her trust him, respect him. He didn't want to look like a sexual opportunist.

    There was only one way to find out if his instinct was correct. Open the door and peek in.

    He opened the door. Peeked in.

    In the shadowy room, he could see that the bed was made and that she was gone. He walked in, flipping on the overhead light, blinking in the sudden brightness.

    No sign of turmoil. Or forced entry of any kind. The windows were solidly in place. None of the furnishings had been pushed around.

    She had clearly walked out of his house of her own volition.

    He hurried to the front window, to see if there was any sign of her on the street. And that was when he saw the van. He recognized it immediately-the same dark Ford van that had been in the motel parking lot. With the strange small box on the roof. Now, with him clearly visible through the window, it suddenly swept away from the curb and moved on down the block into the gloom.

    Why would a van be following him? It obviously had something to do with the woman he'd found tonight. But what?

    

    

    She began dozing off and then waking up and then dozing off. Once, she woke up disoriented-not sure where she was-but the grinding idiocy of the call-in show soon fixed her location.

    This time, she woke up because the cab had turned off the expressway and come to a stop.

    She opened her eyes and realized that they were no longer in the city proper. Long stretches of grass and trees filled the windshield. As the cab began to move again, she saw, hidden in the gloom, vast houses set far back from the road and, for the most part, surrounded by imposing fences. Mansions. The majority of them were barred by gates.

    She said, "Are you sure this is the right place?"

    "It's the address you gave me," he said. "I just take orders, lady." There was no sarcasm in his voice.

    "But these are mansions." She was confused. Then she thought of her dream. And being a rich little girl. With Spock ears.

    "That's right. And so is the place you want to go to. In fact, it's the biggest mansion out here."

    She looked out the window. She was like a child overwhelmed by a spectacular sight. "I just don't see how this is possible." Why would she come here?

    "Well," he said, "we'll know soon enough."

    "Oh? How will we know?"

    "When we pull up to the gate, we'll have to identify ourselves. I don't look forward to waking these people up at this time of night, believe me."

    "Then if it's the right address-"

    "If it's the right address, they'll let you in."

    "And if it's not?" Her voice shook.

    He shrugged. "If it's not, we'll go somewhere else, I guess." More mansions. Endless fencing. The rain had let up. A quarter moon rode the tops of fir trees that seemed to be on all the estates. Silvered shadows.

    He slowed down, taking a right up a driveway that abruptly ended at a formidable gate.

    "Here we are," he said, nodding to the gate.

    She felt fear. She wasn't sure why. Did this place have something to do with the dead man in the motel room? Was this where he might have lived?

    "Don't drive off," she said.

    "Don't worry. I'll be right here."

    The night had gotten very chilly. She huddled inside her clothes. The air smelled cold and damp. She walked up to the gates. She could see the security camera peering down at her from its perch in an oak tree. There was an intercom to press.

    She thumbed the black button and said, "I need to know who lives here. I'm lost."

    There was no response.

    She looked back at the cabbie. The cab's engine throbbed. Needed a tune-up. It smelled of gas and oil, and the headlights were dirty.

    Then a woman's voice was saying, "Jenny! Jenny, it's you! It's me, Eileen!"

    She wondered who Eileen was.

    

    

    Eileen the maid knocked loudly, anxiously on the door of the master bedroom. She had to knock twice before there was any response.

    "Yes?" Tom Stafford called. He had come back to bed after an hour's work in his den. He was exhausted.

    "Something's-come up, sir."

    Stafford got up immediately and grabbed his blue silk robe, which he always left on the back of the antique Edwardian chair that sat on the far side of the ornate nightstand.

    "What is it, honey?" Molly said from the bed.

    "I'm not sure."

    "It's Jenny!" she said anxiously. "It's about Jenny!"

    By the time he reached the door, she was right beside him.

    Eileen was in a buff blue terrycloth robe. Her hair was in curlers. "Jenny's at the front gate! A cab brought her!"

    "Jenny!" Tom Stafford said, as excited now as his wife.

    "Just let them in," Stafford said. "We'll put some clothes on and meet them on the porch."

    "Yessir."

    Tom and Molly pulled on robes and slippers. They took the steps of the grand staircase like children, two at a time.

    Molly hurried around the large room with its divans and grand piano and empire curtains imported from Paris. She turned on every light in the room. The shadows fled.

    They tried waiting patiently on the porch for the taxi to appear. But they paced frantically and had to restrain themselves from running down the drive.

    They heard the cab work its way up the drive. And then she was there, getting out of the back seat of the cab. Their daughter Jenny. Molly wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry. So she did both.

    

    

    At first, the young woman wasn't sure who they were, the two people coming at her. But as they took her in their arms, and as the man whispered something to her and the woman laughed almost hysterically-

    She knew. Her name was Jenny Stafford. She lived here in the mansion. As her mother and father hugged her, her real identity came to her. It was almost like a divine message.

    She was Jenny Stafford. She was home.

    

    

    She was unaware of the dark Ford van parked just outside the gates of her estate…

    

    

    Gretchen Olson was seventeen the first time she escaped. She had been reading a crime novel (she loved crime novels, the gorier the better) about a prisoner escaping by crawling under a truck and hanging on to the grid system while the truck drove right through the gates.

    It worked perfectly for Gretchen. There was one difference. Gretchen wasn't escaping a prison, she was escaping a mental hospital. She had stabbed and hacked to death both her parents while they were sleeping. She was eleven years old at the time. The press marveled how such a sweet-faced little girl with white-blonde Dutch-boy hair (and who then weighed sixty-one pounds) could possibly inflict all the crazed damage she had.

    Anyway, her escape. After six years in the maximum-security psychiatric hospital, there were three things that Gretchen wanted to do: lose her virginity, get drunk, and drive a car very, very fast.

    Aunt Gwen secretly brought her money every monthly visit, Gretchen having convinced her that there were many ways to spend money in here, so she had more than four thousand dollars in cash when she rolled out from under the laundry truck one mile from the gates of the hospital.

    

    

    She had a ball in Chicago. She bought herself a discreetly sexy dress and started cruising the bars over near Wicker Park. She'd studied the Chicago papers and knew where the twenty-something crowds hung out.