Haunting Olivia (31 page)

“Let’s get her the hell out of here,” he said to Olivia, then headed for the steps.

It was over. Finally, blessedly over.

Chapter 25

The children were running in circles around a large green meadow, the boy flying a kite in the shape of an octopus, the girl blowing bubbles from a wand. They were young, maybe four or five. And they were different children from the last different children. Entirely different from the original ones. The boy and girl were laughing. They were happy. Olivia was running after them, her arms outstretched like an airplane. She was laughing too.

Happy too.

And then the girl and boy stopped short. Just stopped and looked at her, waiting.

“What?” she asked them. “Do you want some pineapple?”

They said nothing. Just waited. Watched her. No expression on their faces.

Were they shaking her? Why were they shaking her? How were they shaking her from three feet away?

“Olivia?”

She jerked up and realized she’d been asleep.

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Dreaming. She’d curled up on a chair in the hospital lounge. Kayla’s Hello Kitty watch was still clenched in her fist, so tightly it left an imprint. She glanced at it; it was almost 2 A.M.

Zach stood in front of her, pale and weary. He ran a hand through his hair. “She’s okay,” he said.

“She’s in a kind of shock and will need to stay a couple of days for observation. But she’ll be okay.

Physically anyway.”

“She’ll need some time to heal emotionally,”

Olivia said. “That was some ordeal. Especially with two adults beaten and bruised and handcuffed on the floor.” Olivia shook her head, tears threatening.

“She must have been beyond terrified.”

He squeezed her hand. “It’s all over now.”

She glanced up at him, afraid that it was over for her as well.

“How do you think she’ll feel about the pageant?” Olivia asked. Pearl and Colleen had come by the hospital to see Kayla, and they’d announced that after a committee meeting with the town coun-cil, this year’s pageant would be considered officially cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances interfering with the contestants’ ability to compete.

“All that hard work ruined by a girl with serious mental problems.”

“I think she just might start understanding something about process,” Zach said. “How it’s the doing of something that provides the real reward, not the prize.”

Olivia nodded. “You’re right.” She let out a deep breath. “Cecily was behind everything? How could one girl do all that? How could she be so seemingly HAUNTING OLIV IA

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normal, yet—” She let out a breath. She barely had the energy to speak the words.

“A detective was trying to explain it to me a couple of hours ago,” Zach said. “Something about psychopaths being highly functioning. I was so worried about Kayla I barely paid attention.”

“Are Taffy and Shelby going to be okay?” Olivia asked.

He nodded. “They both have broken ribs. Shelby’s leg is broken, and Taffy’s jaw is broken. Cecily had Shelby locked up in that room for a little over two weeks.”

“And her mother had no idea any of this was going on? That her daughter was completely insane?” Olivia asked. “It’s so hard to believe.”

Zach sat down next to her. “Cecily had a lot of people fooled.”

Olivia twisted her hair up into a knot atop her head. “What I don’t get is the timing. Cecily trashed the cottage the day I moved in? That makes no sense. She didn’t know of my connection to Kayla.

All of those early incidents—why would Cecily have targeted me then?”

“That stuff might have been the work of Johanna or Marnie,” Zach said. “We may never know.”

“Where is Johanna?” she asked. “What do you think Marnie did to her?”

“Maybe sent her away?” he suggested. “Maybe has her body stuffed in a bag in a closet? I have no idea.

No idea if she’s capable of that. I have no idea of anything anymore.”

She reached over for his hand and held it. He 298

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slipped it away and then stood up. “I’m going for more coffee. Should I bring you back a cup?”

She nodded and watched him go, so worried about his state of mind. He was very likely in a state of shock himself.

I love you,
she whispered softly after him.

Olivia put the cottage on the market. She’d spoken to her sisters, and they both were glad to see it for sale. Neither of them had good memories of that house, they’d told her. They’d be as happy as Olivia to know it was out of the family, irrevoca-bly changed into someone else’s home.

She stood on a patch of yellow grass across the road from the house, staring up at it, comforted by the “For Sale” sign on the front lawn. She’d come to say good-bye to a chapter in her life.

Her cell phone rang, and she hoped it was Zach telling her to come home.

Home. She had no idea where that would be.

What that even was. Home felt like Zach’s house, but even that would soon be no more. Zach had also put his house on the market. He’d told her he wanted to be out of Blueberry within the week, as soon as he could secure movers.

He said nothing about her coming with them.

Him and Kayla.

It had been four days since the night of the pageant. Since Cecily’s arrest. Since Kayla had been discharged from the hospital, in good health but shaky, scared. Emotionally scarred. Zach had told Olivia he was taking a solid month off from work.

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He’d recently finished a project for a client and wouldn’t be leaving anyone in the lurch.

What about me? she wanted to scream from the rooftops. What about us? But she didn’t want to add to his pressures. He was still in a state of shock over what could have happened to Kayla. If he wanted Olivia to join them in Marbury, he would ask. Perhaps he wanted her to go back to New York, to let him and Kayla be. They had been safe until she had arrived.

A car honked, and Olivia turned, surprised to see Johanna’s little red car pulling over in front of the house. Johanna got out of the car, her expression grim. She was oddly dressed, as though she forgot it was winter. She wore a sundress with a light cardi-gan over it and high-heeled sandals, her feet en-cased in white peds with pink pompoms. She also wore red earmuffs and orange wool gloves.

“Johanna, aren’t you freezing?” Olivia asked, hoping her voice sounded natural. From the way the woman was dressed, and her expression, plus the fact that she’d been who knew where for a week, Olivia didn’t want to take any chances on making her angry. They were alone out here; the nearest neighbors were a quarter mile down the road.

“I don’t feel a thing,” Johanna said, walking toward where Olivia stood across the road. She sat down next to her on the cold, hard, yellow grass, leaning back against the rocky hillside, and stared up at the house. “I like this view of the place,” she said. “I often sat here in the past month, just looking at it. Before you came, I would sit here and imagine it was mine.

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I was so sure it would be too. But then William left it to you.”

“Johanna, are you cold? I have a blanket in my car,” Olivia said.

“I don’t feel a thing,” she repeated. She glanced at Olivia. “Will you sell the cottage to me?”

“Sure,” she said. “You can put an offer in through your broker or through mine.”

“A broker? Olivia, don’t be silly. I don’t have any money.”

“Then how will you buy the cottage?” Olivia asked.

“You’ll give me a good deal. Say, four hundred?

That’s what I have in my checking account. I would have had more, but I finally paid February’s rent.”

“Let me talk to my broker,” Olivia said, hoping that Johanna didn’t have a knife or a gun hidden on her somewhere. The woman was oddly calm, but there was a maniacal quality to her serenity.

“I shouldn’t have trashed the house,” she said, kicking a mound of dirt with the heel of her sandal.

“Now I’ll have to spend a fortune renovating.”

“Why’d you do it?” Olivia asked.

“Because you didn’t deser ve it,” Johanna said, glancing at her. “You’re an ungrateful slutty opportunist, just like Marnie said. You were a bad daughter; then when your father died you came up here to take your inheritance. And Marnie’s boyfriend too. You deserve to die, Olivia.”

Johanna didn’t move. She sat there calmly, then began kicking the mound of dirt again. “If you’d been in the house the night I trashed it, I would HAUNTING OLIV IA

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have trashed you too. Slit you open with a butcher knife, maybe.”

“I loved my father, Johanna. I really did,” she said, but she finally knew it wasn’t true. She had loved him once, when she was very, very young. But she’d stopped loving him, stopped liking him, stopped expecting any kind of love from him when she was a girl, way before she’d gotten pregnant. He’d been a terrible father, plain and simple, to her and to her sisters, and whatever his reason for manipulating so many lives so that she would think her baby had been born dead, he’d had no right. The anger and bitterness she’d felt when she’d first learned what he’d done had been replaced by acceptance of her father for the man he was.

“Well, he didn’t love you,” Johanna said. “You were a big disappointment to him. Yet here you are, inheriting his house and just selling it when it should be mine.”

“If you didn’t want me to have it, why did you leave?” Olivia asked. “Because you left and didn’t collect the receipts, I got the cottage—and before the thirty days were even up.”

“That bitch Marnie threatened me,” Johanna explained. “She said I had a big mouth because I told you too much. She’s such an ass. Like if it was such a big deal, I wouldn’t have told her I told you what I told you.”

“So Marnie was angry because she was in on everything with you?” Olivia asked.

“I’m not allowed to talk about Marnie behind her back,” she responded, getting up. “You’re like the devil, Olivia. You get me to talk about things I’m 302

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not supposed to. Did you know that I’ve spent some time in mental hospitals? Marnie said she might have me committed again. That’s why I agreed to leave. Do you believe that she thinks I’m a bad influence on Brianna? She’s my niece! I love her!”

Olivia started to back away, but there was nowhere to go, nowhere to run. The hillside stretched in both directions for miles. And across the road was the cottage and forest on either side, the beach in back. She’d never make it to her car, even with Johanna in those sandals.

“I’m going now,” Johanna said. “I just wanted to come see the house one last time. Of course you had to be here to ruin it for me. Now I’ll think of you every time I think about the last time I saw the cottage. And I hate your guts.” She blinked a few times, as if to get rid of Olivia’s image. She cocked her head to one side. “You have his eyes, did you know that?

Your dad’s eyes. The color, not the shape.”

And then she walked away, as calmly as she’d come over. Olivia stood frozen, waiting to see the glint of a knife or the barrel of a gun. But Johanna walked to the car and got in, turned on the ignition, and rolled down the windows as though it were spring and not, say, thirty-six degrees. “Bye, Olivia. I hope you rot in hell.”

And then she jammed on the gas and turned the car in Olivia’s direction.

“Oh, God, no,” Olivia screamed as she ran. She could only run parallel to the hillside. There was nowhere to go.

Another car horn blared, and Johanna stopped HAUNTING OLIV IA

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short. Stopped short of pinning Olivia against the rocky hill.

Marnie and Brianna. Marnie shouted something to Brianna, then raced out of the car toward Johanna.

“What the hell are you doing?” Marnie screamed at Johanna.

“Taking care of what I should have before you blackmailed me into leaving,” Johanna said. “I should have strangled her when I had the chance—

when I left the noose.”

“Jo, come on with us,” Marnie said slowly. “We’ll go back to my house and talk, okay? She’s not worth it.”

“He should have left the house to me!” Johanna yelled, breaking down in sobs. “Why did he leave it to her? And look—she doesn’t even want it. She’s selling it. I could never afford to buy it. I should have killed the bitch when I had the chance!”

“Not in front of Bri,” Marnie hissed.

“Shut up,” Johanna said. “You’re a wuss. You couldn’t go through with any of our plans. You were just all talk. Well, I’m
not.
”

Johanna backed up the car, and in that instant, Olivia dove out of the way, falling on a shard of rock on the hillside. She tried to get up, but the pain was so intense, and her leg wouldn’t listen to her brain.

It was broken, she knew. And she was trapped. She inched as best as she could out of the way. Marnie screamed, “No!” and raced over to Olivia and began pulling her by the arms out of the way as Johanna slammed on the gas and drove at least fifty miles an 304

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hour toward Olivia as she half crawled, half let Marnie pull her out of the way.

Johanna’s car crashed into the hillside, the left wheel a foot away from Olivia’s leg. Marnie collapsed next to Olivia, her breathing ragged.

“Mom!” Brianna screamed, racing over.

“We’re okay,” Marnie told her daughter. “It’s over.

She can’t hurt anyone anymore.”

“Just like Cecily,” Brianna said.

Marnie nodded. “Call the police, honey,” she told her daughter. “And call Zach Archer.”

“Thank you,” Olivia said. And then ever ything faded to black.

The dream boy and girl were still waiting. They stood in the meadow, wildflowers at their feet. The boy held a coconut. The girl was eating a chocolate bar.

“What is it?” she asked them. “Do you need something?”

They said nothing. Only stood and waited. But for what?

The girl held out the chocolate bar, and Olivia wanted it, wanted it so badly. She never craved chocolate. The only time she’d ever craved chocolate had been when she was pregnant.

She reached for it, but though the girl didn’t move back, the chocolate remained out of reach.