Haunting Beauty (8 page)

Danni frowned, staring at the words but seeing in her mind the vision from this morning. The boy she’d seen in the grave—was that Niall Ballagh’s son? Who else could it be? But if it was the same boy, then how—
why—
had the vision placed Danni in that grave with him? He’d died twenty years ago, when she was just a child. She frowned, trying to remember more clearly exactly what she’d seen. But like a dream, it had faded into blurry bits and pieces.

And what about the rumors that the Book of Fennore had been found? Was that why her mother had shown it to her? Danni scrolled down, hoping there would be more to the article, but instead of text she found pictures.

The first was a grainy black and white. The caption read, “Niall Ballagh, only suspect in the Fennore Murders.” She hesitated for a moment before meeting the eyes of the man accused of murdering everyone in her family except her father, putting off for just one more moment seeing the man thought to have committed Danni’s
own
murder. Slowly, she lifted her gaze and looked into his face, knowing that at least two of the victims had been alive at the time he’d killed himself.

She shouldn’t have been surprised to recognize him. He was the man she’d seen in the cavern with her mother. Niall Ballagh hadn’t been threatening when she’d seen him then. In fact, he’d been just the opposite. She remembered how he’d held his hands out, palms up, trying to soothe whoever was in the shadows. Danni thought about that. The article said her father’s injury had made his memory unreliable. What had he really seen that night? What had he imagined—or thought he’d seen? Danni didn’t even remember him being in the cavern at all. He had to have arrived later, then. Maybe the vision had ended just before Niall Ballagh went nuts.

Niall Ballagh’s eyes stared back from the sepialike picture, shadowed with despair. Like Sean, he was a tall, solid man with broad shoulders, thick arms, and big hands. He stood on the deck of a boat, dressed in a raincoat and rubber boots. She leaned closer to her screen, trying to discern his features from the many shades of ivory and gray. His gaze was direct and piercing, his jaw set. No smile or glimmer of humor in the light eyes.

As she stared at him, she was filled with a host of conflicting emotions. The part of her that had grown up in foster care, never knowing a home she could call her own—that part thought death by his own hands had been too kind for Niall Ballagh. But there was another part of her, a piece that remembered the ravaged anguish on his face as he’d stood beside his son’s body, and that part couldn’t help but feel compassion.

Had the murderer of Niall’s son sent him into the rage Danni’s father witnessed? Perhaps her family had stumbled into a show-down, had become innocent victims to violence not intended for them. She tried to piece the possible scenarios together in her mind. Niall Ballagh might have gone berserk and killed Danni’s brother and wounded her father—but Danni and her mother got away—not knowing, perhaps, that her father was still alive. And maybe her father’s grief and guilt over not protecting them had later filled in the pieces his memory could not.

But, if it had happened that way, why hadn’t Danni and her mother returned home after they learned Niall killed himself? Why had they run to America? And why had her mother abandoned her there?

Questions.
Always questions without answers.

She rubbed goose bumps from her arms and moved to the next picture. This one was of her family. They were wearing the same clothes they’d worn in the snapshot Sean gave her, but the camera had caught them unaware, each of them lost in thoughts of their own. Without the fake smiles, they appeared somehow tragic.

Danni’s mother stood shoulders hunched, staring at something far off and unattainable. The breeze teased a strand of hair across her face and lifted the hem of her skirt. Beside her, Danni’s father was grim and distant, hands shoved deep in pockets, chin pointed to the thundering ocean. Sandwiched in the middle, Danni and her brother held hands, each of them stoic as they quietly waited. There was resignation in Danni’s expression—a mute and forlorn acceptance that made her wonder if she’d known what was to come next.

“Cathán MacGrath, pictured with wife, Fia, and their two children, victims in the Fennore Murders,” was all it said beneath the picture. But the photograph itself had already said so much more.

She stared at her father’s face for a little while longer, but it was the last photo, one that showed a teenaged boy leaning against a blackened boulder, that made a wall of ice come down hard around Danni’s gut. The pictured adolescent was both defiant and desperate, facing a gale that chapped his cheeks and gave his eyes a glittering sheen. He was tall, wiry, not yet grown into his big hands and feet. With his dark hair blown wild and his shoulders hunched forward, he seemed to straddle the lines between youth and maturity. Still, a shadow of the man he would become stared back at her.

Torn between bewilderment and rage, she looked into those insolent eyes. What game was Sean Ballagh playing with her? What lies had he told?

Slowly she moved to the caption, feeling as if she were falling into an endless pit as she read the words printed there.

“No,” she whispered, shaking her head while comprehension and disbelief battled within her. What it said couldn’t be true.

And yet . . . Danni thought of this morning, how he’d appeared at her door without warning. She’d never seen a car or heard an engine, even when he left . . . and in his passport photo he’d looked so young—nearly as young as he did here. When she’d seen him standing on the other side of the window . . . the feeling that he’d been conjured from her thoughts . . . and the strange stares from the two women and their children when she’d been talking to him in the store. It wasn’t they who’d acted strangely, it was Danni, talking to herself . . . and when the lady who liked tea sets had said she had plans for dinner, she’d been answering Danni’s question to Sean,
Will I see you later?

No, it was impossible, even for Danni, whose life had suddenly become so fantastic. It didn’t make sense. Except in a small dark corner of Danni’s heart it made perfect, horrible sense.

She read the caption under the photograph again, this time aloud, hoping the sound of her voice would bring new meaning to the words.

“Sean Michael Ballagh, picture taken days before his murder. His body and that of an unidentified woman were the only remains found.”

Chapter Five

T
HE bell hanging over the door chimed, bringing Danni back to the antique store and sanity in a jarring instant. Yvonne strolled in, cell phone pressed to her ear. A tiny woman with short, curly hair and a round figure, she could light up the room with her smile or bring storm clouds with her wrath. She was grinning now as she said good-bye and snapped the phone shut.

“Biedermeier birchwood
vitrine
. Two grand,” she announced proudly.

Disoriented, shaking, Danni didn’t move from her stool behind the counter. Her mind continued to stutter around what she had just read. Sean Ballagh was dead. Her Sean. The man who’d visited her twice now . . . bearing airplane tickets. She scrambled to her purse to see if the envelope had suddenly vanished. Oblivious of anything but her own excitement, Yvonne went on about the Biedermeier. She’d been on the hunt for one of the German cabinets since a customer of theirs had raved about seeing one in Sedona.

“It’s in near mint condition. One scratch down low and a broken drawer. Both can be fixed. Woman selling it is pissed off at her ex-husband and would have given it to me for less, but I didn’t want some court disputing the sale later. Did you hear me? Two grand for a Biedermeier.”

Yvonne dropped her purse in the drawer under the counter and crossed the store to adjust one of the blinds.

Realizing that Danni still hadn’t spoken, Yvonne finally turned and took a closer look. An instant later she was beside Danni. “What happened?” she demanded. “What’s wrong?”

Danni opened her mouth to speak, but where did she start? How could she possibly tell Yvonne everything that had happened? There was no way to explain without talking about the visions, and though she wanted to talk about them, wanted to tell Yvonne everything, she couldn’t bring herself to do it. It wasn’t that Danni didn’t trust her . . . it was something deeper. Something as ingrained as the in stinct to survive.

There was a reason why Danni had spent so many years being rejected by different foster families. Sean had asked her if she’d ever felt special. When she’d been younger, she’d known she was special, but she’d learned the hard way that
special
didn’t mean good. It meant weird. Unacceptable.

She remembered how it felt the first time she’d casually told her foster brother not to cheat in science anymore because she’d seen him get caught. He’d looked at her like she was a freak, laughed at her, and cheated anyway. When he was caught, he’d blamed Danni. He accused her of telling lies to the teacher and her foster parents believed it.

It took other lessons—all painful, all seared in her memory—before Danni finally came to understand that as long as she had visions, she’d be an outcast. And so she quit. She didn’t know how, but somehow she’d sealed off that part of her and kept it locked away in a place so dark, so deep that she’d forgotten it existed at all—until this morning’s wake-up call blew the hinges off the trapdoor and opened it all up again. Now she wanted nothing more than to figure out how to reinstate the lockdown.

A logical part of Danni knew Yvonne wouldn’t hold the visions against her. But logic had nothing to do with the way she felt just thinking of the disbelief that would surely fill Yvonne’s eyes if Danni were to tell her the truth.
Hey Yvonne, guess what? This guy I saw in a vision showed up today to tell me I had a family. Cool, huh, except I think his dad killed my brother—oh and I think the guy is really dead.

Yvonne would think she’d lost her marbles, and she’d be right.

“I’m not feeling that great today,” Danni said. “Would you mind if I went home?”

“Of course not. I hope you’re not getting the flu.”

“Me, too.”

“You need me to drive you?”

“No, I’ll be fine. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Congratulations on the Biedermeier.”

Even in her concern, Yvonne couldn’t keep the grin off her face. “Bet I have it sold before you get home.”

Any other day Danni wouldn’t have gotten away with the ploy, but today she was grateful that the usually astute Yvonne didn’t look any deeper than Danni wanted her to. Grabbing her purse and her laptop, Danni said good-bye and headed home.

Chapter Six

S
EAN didn’t know where else to go after he left Danni’s little antique store, so he walked, hoping the activity would loosen the hard knot of tension deep in his gut. It had been burrowing and coiling since the first time he’d laid eyes on her. It ached, it comforted.

How long had it been since he’d felt anything but the grief and shame his father had brought on them all that night so long ago? How long since he’d felt more than the shattered splinters of life festering beneath his skin? Longer than he could remember.

But when she’d opened her front door this morning, when she’d looked at him with her huge gray eyes . . . He’d felt something stir deep inside him. Felt it in every pore, every nerve, every part of his being. And he wanted more.

He’d been confused when his grandmother had insisted he come here to bring Dáirinn MacGrath home. He’d understood that Danni’s survival threw into doubt his father’s guilt and that bringing her back might clear the family name. But there’d been another reason Nana had sent him—one he couldn’t see or understand at all, one as mystifying as Nana was herself.

Whatever her reasons, though, they didn’t seem to matter anymore. They’d been eclipsed by his own wants and needs. He was here for Danni. Nothing more, nothing less.

He found himself standing in front of her house again and wasn’t the least bit surprised that his feet, like every other part of him, had chosen to come here. While Danni’s crazy little dog worked herself into a fury on the other side of the door, Sean made himself comfortable in the chair on the porch. The afternoon breeze danced through the shrubs and grass, bringing with it the fragrance of roses blooming in a neighbor’s garden. A few houses down, someone started a mower and soon the sharp scent of cut grass joined the mix. If not for the lunatic dog, it would have been peaceful, calming even. He leaned his head back against the wall, trying to block out the annoying barking. He needed some calm. He needed some perspective.

But all he could think of was the pale glow of her skin, the scent of her hair, the delicate shape of her ears. How it might feel to lean close to her, breathe her in like a fine wine. He remembered how she’d watched him with that bewildering anticipation. As if she’d been waiting for him. As if she’d expected him.

He shook his head, confused by the very clarity of the feeling.

He saw a flash of movement to his right and glanced over in time to see the yellow cat stalking him from the bushes. When it realized he’d seen it, the enormous creature bolted across the lawn and up the tree like the Hound of the Baskervilles was on its tail. Were all of Danni’s animals mad? At least the dog seemed to be giving up. She gave a final, hoarse yap and then there was silence.

He didn’t know how much time had passed with him sitting there, soaking in the tranquility of the place, before he heard her car turn down the street. A moment later she pulled into the driveway. He remained seated on the porch, unsure of what to do now that she was here, certain that he shouldn’t have come, but convinced he couldn’t have stayed away.

The day had warmed and she’d taken off the blue sweater, leaving just a thin white T-shirt and black trousers. Her hair had been twisted up and was held, he saw with amusement, by a pencil. She looked flushed, disheveled. Beautiful. As alive and earthy as the riot of flowers blooming all around him. As unattainable and mysterious as the fairies that lived beneath the hills of his homeland. He wanted to lose himself in her. Strange enough, he felt that in doing so he might actually find the missing pieces of the man he wanted to be.