Haven (15 page)

A chair. She was almost sure it was a chair.

Almost at the limit of her reach, she probed a bit farther and felt…hair. Long strands. Sticky.

Sticky with blood?

Her stomach heaved, but once again Carol managed not to vomit. Instead, she stretched out as far as she could, barely feeling the pain of her manacled wrist, and forced herself to follow the trail of hair across the chair’s seat.

She felt something else. At first, because her fingers were so cold, she thought that was why what she touched seemed so very cold. But then, as she pressed, then slowly explored, she realized she was touching human flesh that had been refrigerated. Or frozen.

She was touching a terribly beaten and swollen human face, and it was turned toward her.

A face. A head.

No body.

Carol Preston scrambled back onto her cot, not even aware now of the high-pitched keening sounds coming from her own throat.

NELLIE HOLT STRETCHED
luxuriously, gauged the lack of reaction from beneath half-lowered lashes, then sighed with more impatience than hurt. “You really are a bastard, Vic; you know that?”

“Why this time?” Victor Rayburn asked absently.

“We just had hot monkey sex in the middle of the afternoon, and both your hands are on your BlackBerry instead of my boobs.”

“Well, ‘had’ being the operative word,” he said, still without looking at her. “We
had
hot monkey sex. We’re done now.”

Nellie threw a pillow at him.

He ducked, proving both eyes hadn’t been on his cell phone, and tossed the small device aside as he reached for her, grinning.

She evaded him. “Oh, no, not now, you don’t. I’ve been insulted. No more hot monkey sex for you, buster.”

“How about hot doggie sex? Or even—”

“I’m sorry I started this,” Nellie announced, cutting him off before he could become even more outrageous.

He pushed her back onto the remaining pillows and let her know in no uncertain terms that hot sex of any variety was still very much on his mind.

“Okay,” she said at last and somewhat breathlessly, “I’m game if you are. But it
is
nearly four, and—”

“Oh, hell,” he said, sitting up.

He hardly sounded out of breath, Nellie noted ruefully. “Appointment?” she asked.

“Yeah; sorry.” He ran his fingers through dark hair and sent her an apologetic look from blue-green eyes. “I have a meeting with Emma at Trent’s office.”

Nellie banked pillows behind her as she watched him moving around the room, naked and unself-conscious, gathering his clothing. “How come you and Emma can only talk with a lawyer in the room these days?”

“You know Emma.”

“Yeah. And I know you. Better than most, I dare say. So what’s going on with you two?”

“Usual family shit.”

Since he hadn’t confided what sort of “usual family shit” was going
on between him and his cousin, Nellie opened her mouth to ask. But before she could frame the question in some innocent, undemanding way, he asked an entirely normal question of his own, so normal that she tried not to think he had deliberately cut her off before she could ask him anything more.

“Do you mind if I take a quick shower?”

“No, of course not. Go ahead. I left out clean towels for you.”

“Thanks, love.” He disappeared into the bathroom, pushing the door to behind him, but not closing it all the way.

Lying among tumbled sheets, Nellie thought about that. And about the careless endearment. He’d steam up her bathroom and half her bedroom before his “quick” shower was done. And as for the endearment, she was neither young enough nor naive enough to take it at surface value.

She was not Victor Rayburn’s love.

A month ago, even a year ago, she would have said with confidence that his love was himself, pure and simple. Vic Rayburn thought a lot of himself. It was part vanity, part arrogance, and an awful lot of confidence. He enjoyed being a Man to Be Reckoned With in Baron Hollow, a man with money and influence, a certain amount of power. A very good-looking man with charm and sex appeal oozing out of his pores.

A lucky “catch” if the woman wanted a fun time in bed.

But a very elusive lover if she expected anything more.

He suited Nellie perfectly.

A man who drove the right car and wore the right clothes and knew just how to make himself agreeable.

Nellie had wondered, once upon a time, what kept such a paragon
in a fairly boring little backwater town like Baron Hollow. But she thought she knew now.

Because here he was Victor Rayburn, and his opinion on just about anything mattered. He was from an old, established family highly respected in the area, with parents who had left him a couple of reasonably thriving businesses that other people ran for him, plus a very large house and enough land that it could almost be termed an estate, and numerous rental properties that brought in nice income.

But even with all that, most anywhere else he would be just another good-looking, charming man with a fair amount of money and an aversion to matrimony and other long-term relationships. Which meant he would be rather ordinary.

So Victor had chosen to be Someone Special in Baron Hollow rather than being Someone Ordinary in another place.

She was pretty sure that at forty he had thoroughly enjoyed his life to date, and that he had no regrets. But she was also pretty sure that something had changed recently, and even though Nellie was only a part-time reporter for their small local daily—and did that mostly for kicks—she’d caught the whiff of some kind of interesting story over the last week or so.

Though they’d never been on especially close terms, it was obvious that Vic and his cousin Emma were both harboring a new tension these days. Since…since sometime around when Jessie had arrived, now that Nellie thought about it.

Nellie frowned, trying to decide if the hostility between the cousins had begun since Jessie’s visit. She wasn’t sure. Nellie had barely been aware of Jessie when they were kids, and she’d caught only a glimpse or two of the other woman around town in the last few days.

Not that she’d expected anything else; Jessie hadn’t viewed her as a friend fifteen years ago, so it was highly unlikely she would view her as one now, and the feeling was mutual. Nellie had always been casual friends with Emma, but this being a small town and the both of them small-town women, they tended to see each other at various committee meetings or town events; theirs wasn’t the sort of friendship that involved lunches out or other deliberate social plans.

In any case, there was really no way for Nellie to know for sure whether Jessie had been the cause of tension between Victor and Emma unless she managed to corner Emma and ask her about it outright. But Emma had been uncharacteristically elusive, even slippery, in recent days, and Nellie had been granted no opportunity to satisfy her curiosity.

Especially since Victor had been evasive as well.

Nellie leaned forward, looping her arms around her upraised knees, and stared absently toward the bathroom door, watching steam curl out and begin to reach upward for the ceiling.

Jessie. Was she still the irresponsible, dramatic troublemaker she had been when she’d put her little Ford Mustang in gear and Baron Hollow in the rearview mirror at seventeen? Or had Jessie Rayburn changed as they had all changed in the ensuing fifteen years?

EVEN WITH THE
driven determination to break through, it took more strength than she thought she had left to do it again—and she had the suspicion that it would cost her.

She decided to think about that later.

When she did break through, she was more than a little surprised
to find herself where she was, though she wondered why she should be. She had worked out for herself that Jessie’s walls were up and reinforced with all her considerable will; for whatever reason, Jessie had closed herself to the spirit world.

This one was more open, even if she didn’t know it.

She had never even met Nellie Holt, but in this in-between place where she found herself, she knew this woman. At least up to a point. She knew who she was, her name, odd little facts about her.

She knew she could trust Nellie.

Even so, she hesitated. To find, in such a small, interconnected town, people she could be absolutely sure weren’t in some way involved…that was hard. Finding somebody who might actually care and help Jessie—and Emma—before it was too late was even harder.

So far, he had gotten away with killing for a long, long time; if that didn’t change, if he wasn’t stopped, he’d only grow bolder. He might decide he was truly beyond the law, that he’d never be caught.

Especially if he felt threatened, felt that he had no choice except to move swiftly to protect his secret. By taking the chance of changing his hunting methods.

By going after someone local.

Like Jessie. Jessie, who was busy uncovering a past that threatened his secret.

Jessie, who had a history of running away, and was so very vulnerable because of that.

Because who, really, would be surprised if Jessie disappeared, if she “ran away” again?

Not even her sister.

The spirit drifted closer, frustrated yet again because she knew her presence was unseen, unfelt.

It was humbling to watch the world go on without you, she had realized. Even in the best of times, it had to be that. But this wasn’t the best of times, and, dammit, she needed
help.

Someone had to stop him, and soon. Because once he got rid of Jessie, and perhaps even Emma…he could go on killing for years without anyone being the wiser.

This town needed help. All his future victims needed help. Jessie and Emma needed help. They needed someone or something to stand between them and the monster.

At the very least, they needed someone who
knew
the monster existed.

It would be so much easier, she thought, if she could just explain things. Lay it all out. Ten minutes of straight talk, even five minutes, would do it. Hell, two minutes and she could get an important point or two across. But even if she’d had the strength for that, and even if someone opened a door for her so she could have had those five or ten minutes, there were things the universe just didn’t allow.

Both the living and the dead had their own roles to play—and some things had to happen just the way they happened.

Still, she wasn’t entirely useless, even now. There
were
a few things she could do.

So she focused, concentrating as hard as she’d ever concentrated in her life, and did all that she could to offer what she knew all too well was a dangerously enigmatic warning.

Well, to be fair, Nellie mused, Vic hadn’t changed all that much in fifteen years.

In his entire life, really.

And she didn’t think Emma had changed. Despite going to the other side of the country to college, with scant visits home during those four years, she had returned to live in her family home when she could easily have gone elsewhere, still the friendly, sweet-natured, small-town girl she had always been, with a pleasant sense of humor and a career as a teacher that allowed her to take regular summer trips exploring the country and even the globe. But no matter where she went, she always came home. And she was still the girl who kept her mother’s single strand of pearls as a treasured heirloom.

She almost never wears them, though. I wonder why.

It was the sort of niggling question that had driven Nellie to write for
the local paper even though she didn’t have to earn her living; she certainly wasn’t wealthy, but frugal parents had left her a nice little inheritance and a house with no mortgage, so she was able to indulge herself with an interesting part-time job and quite a lot of very satisfying charity work in the community.

Right now, it was the niggling little question that was occupying her. She liked puzzles. She liked mysteries. She liked trying to figure things out, for a story or an article—or just her own satisfaction.

Working for the paper just gave her a legitimate reason to express her curiosity.

To poke my nose into other people’s business.

She leaned over and reached into the top drawer of her nightstand, drawing out a notebook and pencil. She turned to a fresh page and made a note to herself, not even sure she could come up with a good reason to ask Emma about the pearls—or her newly tense relationship with her cousin, for that matter.

Not that Vic and Emma had ever been really close, but they’d been at least outwardly casual with each other for as long as Nellie could remember. Even as young people, they’d seemingly gotten along, once the ten-year age difference wasn’t really a factor.

So what was going on now? And why did they need to meet at the office of the family lawyer to discuss something? It shouldn’t be inheritance stuff; Rayburn House as well as various other properties and funds had been left to Emma and Jessie when their father had died five years back, and Nellie could well recall Vic’s surprise that his uncle had left him a treasured classic car (which he now happily drove) because he hadn’t expected to be left anything at all.

As far as Nellie knew, Emma had never cared about that car, had certainly never
resented Vic inheriting it, and had most certainly had her hands full managing the bulk of her father’s considerable estate, especially with Jessie’s absence at the time—and since then.

The only change that might have affected the cousins’ relationship, as far as Nellie could see, had been Jessie’s sudden and—to her, at least—unannounced visit.

So what dust—or dirt—had been stirred up by the return of the prodigal daughter?

Nellie sat there with her knees drawn up, pencil tapping absently against the notepad for a few moments as she thought about that. She could come up with various ideas easily enough, because she had a lively imagination—really too lively for the newspaper business, her boss had told her more than once.

But the problem right now was that her ideas were all over the place, from simple to soap-opera dramatic; without a person or event to start her off, some inkling of what was going on inside the Rayburn family, there was really no reasonable way for her to guess.