Into the Fire (20 page)

He didn't bother denying it—the panic was too
strong. “Is she on her way home? Do you know where she is?”

“As a matter of fact, I do. She's stopping on her way back, but I have no intention of telling you where—”

“Shit.” He closed his eyes. “Did she go to Connecticut? To the Dungeon?”

The Duchess's silence was answer enough. He slammed down the phone, cursing himself and everyone he'd ever known. How stupid could he have been? Nate's message hadn't just been for him. It had been for Jamie, as well. Nate had always despised his little cousin, even before jealousy over Dillon had come into it. He would have known exactly what Dillon and Jamie had been doing the last few days, and his hatred would have grown to unmanageable levels. It wasn't just Dillon he wanted to kill.

If he didn't get to the Dungeon in time, Jamie was going to be dead. It would be no consolation that he'd tear Nate to pieces with his bare hands this time, to make sure no mistakes were made.

But it wasn't going to happen. He was going to get to the Dungeon before anything happened.

He had to.

T
he snow followed her east, like a hungry ghost, waiting to devour her. She kept expecting to drive out of the storm, but it kept pace with her, and when the finally turned on the AM radio in the old Cadillac, the weather reports weren't encouraging. The storm was moving east, and another one was coming up from the south to join it.

When she was young she'd loved snow. It covered everything with a beautiful whiteness, it closed schools and made everything a wonderland.

But now, for all its whiteness, it seemed a dark, oppressive thing, slicking the roads, shadowing the sky, drifts of doom and disaster falling around her.

It was early afternoon when Jamie finally reached the town of Danvers, Connecticut, but it was already growing dark. She got off the interstate and headed down the secondary roads, expecting something like her home in Rhode Island. Old colonial houses, stately trees, New England at its best.

The town looked deserted. The main street con
sisted of deserted storefronts, most of them boarded up. Some well-meaning person had put up Christmas decorations, but half the lights were out, so that the outline of the snowman looked like a question mark.

She stopped at a gas station, to gas up the ever-ravenous tank of the Cadillac, and was surprised to have someone appear to fill it, just as she was about to climb out of the car.

“I'll take care of that, ma'am,” the wizened old man said. “We're a full-service gas station. Want me to check your oil?”

“It's fine. I checked it last time I stopped for gas.”

“Sure is a beauty,” the man said. He had to be in his late sixties at the very least, old enough to have known a car like this in his youth. “How's she run?”

“Just fine.”

“Must have been restored by a master craftsman. You would have paid a pretty penny for this beauty.”

“It's a loan.”

The man let out a low whistle. “The guy must be in love with you, then. No man would let a car like this out of his sight for anything short of true love.”

Jamie's laugh was without humor. “I'm afraid he doesn't believe in true love. He believes in cars.”

“And there's a difference?” the man said. He had the name Wilfred embroidered across the pocket of his old-fashioned uniform. “This baby's worth fifty grand, easy. Be careful of her.”

Jamie blinked. The old man must be nuts—an old American car couldn't be worth that much. And Dillon wouldn't have let her take it if it was. Not to mention telling her to dump it when she didn't need it anymore.

“This town looks pretty dead,” she said casually, changing the subject.

“It is dead. Factory closed down twenty-five years ago, and each year more businesses close, more people move away. Used to be five gas stations in town—now I'm the only one left and I hardly have any business. Everyone's moved closer to the cities. Hell, even the rich folks who used to come here don't bother anymore. The land's useless for growing anything but tobacco, and no one wants to buy tobacco with all those do-gooders around trying to make rules for people that aren't any of their damned business.”

“People are like that,” Jamie said in a noncommittal voice, reaching into Dillon's wallet for a couple of twenties. It was a good thing he'd had plenty
of cash as well as credit cards in his wallet—the car seemed to go through a tank of gas every hundred miles, and it liked premium gas.

“What's a young lady like yourself doing in a ghost town like this?” Wilfred asked, topping off the tank. “We don't get many people wandering off the beaten track nowadays.”

She'd had long enough to come up with a variety of excuses, and she trotted out her favorite. “I'm looking for the ruins of an old place called Dungeness Towers.”

“The Dungeon? Why would you want to go there? Nothing left but a couple of towers ready to collapse and maybe a few ghosts. It's dangerous out there—the police posted the place years ago. Doesn't mean that kids don't still go out there to make out, maybe look for ghosts. But it's not a place for a lady. Especially not after dark, in the middle of a snowstorm.”

Jamie glanced out the huge windshield of the Cadillac. “I think the snow's stopped.”

“It'll start again,” Wilfred said gloomily. “What do you want with the Dungeon?”

“I'm a writer,” she said blithely, she who could never lie. “I'm doing a feature on the robber barons of Connecticut, and I've worked my way around to Dungeness Towers.”

“Robber barons? I guess you could call old James Kincaid a robber baron. He built the factory that kept everyone around here employed. He wasn't so bad, but that son of his was a cold-blooded bastard. He sold it off to some corporation who didn't give a damn about Danvers or the economy of a small town. He bought it for a tax break and closed it.”

“But the son still lived here, right? At the Dungeon. Died here, didn't he?”

“Yup. He and his wife. The place caught on fire one year, and the two of them were trapped in one of the towers. It was a snowy night, and the fire department couldn't get there until it was too late. That poor kid was sitting out in the snow, huddled up, listening to the screams of his parents as they burned to death. I always wondered what happened to that boy. Thing like that must have scarred him.”

The stinging sensation beneath her shirt was a sudden surprise, when she was close to forgetting about it. The scratches were closing up, healing, but every now and then she felt a flash of fire across her chest.

“It must have been hard on him,” she said neutrally. The young boy she'd grown up with hadn't seemed the slightest bit traumatized by watching his parents burn to death. She'd always assumed he'd been away from home when it happened. Not that
he'd actually been there, the only witness, the only survivor.

“If I were you I'd skip the Kincaids,” Wilfred said. “They were a doomed family, and there's nothing left out there that anyone wants to know about. Ten years ago some drug dealers camped out there, and the police suspected someone was running a chop shop out of the old garage, but they never caught anyone.”

“Chop shop?”

“The kind of place where they take stolen cars, strip them down and then send them out on the roads looking entirely different. It's quite a business, but you need to be fast and good to get away with it.”

Jamie clutched the huge steering wheel of the Cadillac. It shouldn't have surprised her—drugs and stolen cars were an obvious way for Dillon to have earned a living. Not so obvious for Nate, which was probably why they got away with it.

“I still want to check out the place before it gets dark. Take a few photos. The light's always best just before dusk.”

Wilfred shook his head. “Suit yourself, miss. The roads are in lousy shape—no one ever goes out there. Just don't say I didn't warn you.”

“I've got a cell phone if I get into trouble.”

“Won't do no good. There's no service around here. Too many hills, not enough people willing to let them put towers up.”

“Well, I expect I'll be fine. The only people out there would be ghosts, and I don't believe in them.”

“Don't you, miss? I wouldn't be too sure. People see lights out there sometimes, when no one should be anywhere around.”

“No ghosts,” she said firmly.

“Well, good luck, then. I'm afraid the motel down on Route 3 closed down a couple of years ago—the nearest place you'll find a room for the night is at least twenty-five miles away, near Cranston.”

And that was exactly where she should go, and she knew it. She'd been driving all day, she was exhausted, and it was growing dark. A smart woman would find a place for the night and start out the next morning, in the clear light of day.

But she'd already proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was a complete idiot. Why mess up when she was on a roll?

“I don't suppose you'd feel like telling me how to get to the ruins?”

“Hell, it's your funeral. Take a left at the corner up there. Used to be a stoplight but it broke and no one's gotten around to fixing it yet, so be careful of
the intersection. Not that you'll run into any traffic, anyway, not in this town. Head out that way for about three miles, and you'll see a narrow road off to the left. It'll be overgrown, and no one would have plowed. You probably won't even see it.”

“I'll take my chances. That's the driveway to the ruins?”

“If you could call it that. It's more than a mile long, and the farther in you go the worse shape the road is. I'd hate to see you hurt that pretty car of your boyfriend's.”

Boyfriend
. Such a strange, teenage word. There was a time when she would have given anything to have the Bad Boy of Marshfield, Rhode Island, as her boyfriend. No matter what anyone else said.

But hell, better late than never. Better five minutes of fantasy than the brutal truth. “My boyfriend will forgive me,” she said. “He loves me.”

Wilfred the Gas Station Man was right—she almost missed the turnoff. Getting through the intersection had been no problem, considering there were no other cars around to deal with the missing traffic lights, but the narrow path between the overgrown trees looked more like a path than a driveway. She was crazy to drive down that deserted road in the snowy dusk. But then, she knew she was crazy, from the moment she climbed into Dil
lon Gaynor's bed. From the moment she faced the fact that she was still in love with him after all these years, and part of her always would be, no matter what happened.

The Cadillac wasn't made for rough roads. She made it about a mile into the woods, the road getting narrower and narrower, when a downed tree stopped her. She managed to slam on the brakes in time, and sat in horror as the huge car continued to slide forward in the snow, stopping just inches before hitting the thick tree trunk that blocked the path.

She looked behind her into the darkness. There was no place to turn around—her only option was to back the huge car more than a mile down a twisty, overgrown road.

Which was what she was going to have to do, eventually. But in the meantime, she was this far. She might as well go the rest of the way, set her mind at ease. If Nate was still alive then he'd be there, waiting for her. He'd summoned her, and she'd always come when he called. He'd have answers, reasons for what happened. Reasons for carving words into her flesh?

But she couldn't be sure it was Nate. Maybe it was some sick act of Dillon's. Nate loved her—he'd never want to hurt her.

She turned off the headlights, and the forest was plunged into darkness. It wasn't yet four o'clock, but with the snow and the towering trees, no light penetrated into the overgrowth. She reached into the glove compartment, hoping for a flashlight, but came up with nothing, not even a registration. Lucky thing she hadn't been stopped, she thought grimly.

She flailed around under the front seat, and her hand wrapped around something narrow and cylindrical. She pulled it out, and then dropped it. It was a gun.

She turned the interior light on again to look at it. It had to belong to Dillon, and it certainly had to be illegal, since as far as she knew felons weren't allowed to own guns. She didn't like guns, but her father had, believing that everyone should at least know about them, enough to respect them.

Respect wasn't the emotion foremost in Jamie's mind, but at least she could recognize that it was well-oiled, cleaned and fully loaded. It was a nine millimeter with a clip, and she even knew how to fire the damned thing.

She reached back under the seat and came up with a box of bullets and the flashlight she'd been seeking. Did Dillon know he'd sent her off with a
handgun? Things had been crazy when he'd gotten rid of her. He'd probably forgotten.

Except that wasn't the sort of thing Dillon forgot.

She flicked off the lights again, pulled her cheap winter coat around her, and climbed from the car. She shoved the gun back under the seat. Who was she going to have to use it on—Nate? Dillon? Not likely.

Her discount-store boots were a far cry from waterproof, and the snow seeped through the vinyl as she made her way down the path. There were no tire tracks, no sign that anyone had been down here in the past decade. She had no reason to trudge onward, cold, miserable, frightened. But she kept going, until she could see the towers against the snowy night sky.

There were two of them. Or one and a half—the second one was little more than a pile of rubble, and the first looked about to collapse, as well. At the foundation of the towers lay a litter of deep pits and charred wood, twisted metal, broken glass. No one had touched the place since the fire that had killed Nate's parents so many years ago. Odd, when her mother would have been the executor of her sister's will. She would have thought Isobel would have restored the place or had it torn down, but she'd left it as it was. Why?

Maybe the pain and horror of their deaths had made it too difficult to deal with. Or maybe Isobel had kept it at Nate's request. There was no way of knowing.