Share No Secrets (11 page)

“Yes, Julianna was always a risk-taker,” Kit said faintly.

Lottie went on as if she hadn’t spoken. “But when the owl awakened me this morning, I knew her fate was sealed. I feel it’s my fault,” she ended on a quavering note. “I failed my own daughter.”

Kit felt silly but still couldn’t help asking, “When you had your intuition and you knew she was at the hotel, did you realize she must have been meeting a man there?”

Lottie remained silent.

“Lottie, if you know who she was with, you must tell the police.”

A wary look crept into Lottie’s faded eyes that made Kit uneasy. “The police will deduce for themselves that she met a man in that place. And they will blame Miles Shaw for what happened to her.”

“Maybe they should. He was still in love with her. He would have been wildly jealous of any new man she was involved with.”

Lottie shook her head. “No, dear. I know you used to care for Miles, so you must realize he’s a gentle, sensitive man.”

Kit’s face flamed at the mention of her old feelings for Miles. She had loved him deeply, but he hadn’t returned her affection with anything except friendship. She also knew that Miles had become Julianna’s from the moment he met her. He had been wildly in love with her. And Lottie was wrong. He wasn’t really gentle, at least not on the inside. He was full of turbulent passions. Maybe enough passion to kill Julianna for leaving him and becoming involved with another man.

“Lottie, the police will definitely look at Miles as a suspect,” she stated. “He’s probably their main suspect. He’s Juli’s ex-husband and he didn’t take the divorce well.”

“I know all that, dear. And I know Julianna was meeting a lover at the hotel. She shouldn’t have been seeing this person. It was wicked of her—the only deliberately selfish, cruel thing I’ve ever known her to do. But I
know
her killer wasn’t Miles. Still, I cannot go to the police.”

“If you know something, why can’t you go to Lucas Flynn? He’s reasonable. He’ll listen.”

Lottie touched Kit’s hand. “Dear, there’s so much you don’t know. And so much I do.”

Kit stared at the frail woman, dumbfounded and a bit afraid, when the back door of the kitchen opened. A busboy yelled, “We need you, Ms. Kirkwood.”

“In a minute!” Kit snapped impatiently.

“It’s awful important.”

Lottie smiled graciously. “You go tend to your business, dear. I’m really too tired to talk anymore. I’ll just sit here a little while longer, collecting my thoughts. I’ll be fine.”

“I gave Gail the night off,” Kit said, referring to one of her waitresses and Lottie’s younger daughter. “Shall I call her apartment and have her come get you?”

“No!” The single word ripped through the night. Lottie took a breath and said with forced calm, “I mean, that’s not necessary. She’ll be sharp and impatient with me because I’ve been out wandering all day. Really, Kitrina, I’m quite all right.”

Kit was not a physically demonstrative person, but she leaned over and placed a light kiss on Lottie’s forehead. That’s when she saw the rusty smears of dried blood on Lottie’s dress collar and across the shoulder seam. She also smelled I’ Heure Bleue, the expensive French perfume Julianna always wore while Lottie refused to wear scent of any kind. Kit’s heart leaped painfully in her chest, but she kept her voice tranquil. “I’m going inside now, but I’ll be right back with a cup of tea.”

As Kit walked into the restaurant, though, she thought about the blood on Lottie’s dress and the scent of Julianna’s signature fragrance, I’ Heure Bleue, that clung tenaciously to Lottie’s neck and face. Lottie was fastidious about her clothes and person. The scent and the stains couldn’t be left over from yesterday.

With a chill, Kit realized that Lottie had been in the hotel with Juliana that very morning.

Claude Duncan’s flaccid body seemed to sink into his ancient couch, his legs splayed, his right arm dangling over the side. A coffee table sat near him, laden with newspapers, candy wrappers, two empty pizza boxes, dirty paper napkins, and a notebook in which Claude had been attempting to write his novel. He was now on page 20 after two grueling months of work. A half-full bottle of bourbon stood by the couch.

On the small television across from him, a spaceship landed on an alien planet from which a distress call had been picked up. Claude loved this movie and had sat raptly through it countless times, always imagining himself as the handsome and heroic ship’s captain, but tonight he was oblivious. He’d accompanied a particularly greasy pizza with four cans of beer, then topped off the meal with two candy bars and several shots of bourbon. He’d gone to sleep feeling satiated and happier than he’d been since the death of his mother.

And why shouldn’t he sleep well? After all, things were finally going his way. He no longer had to worry about losing his job when the Belle was torn down. He didn’t have to go through the humiliating process of trying to find another job, of appearing polite, intelligent, and bright-eyed to potential employers who for some reason he couldn’t fathom always looked at him like he was something nasty on the soles of their expensive shoes. No, sir. Claude Duncan didn’t have to go job hunting. Claude Duncan had it
made.

For a while he’d been troubled by the fact that his good fortune depended on taking advantage of a tragedy. His mother had died when he was twelve and her memory wasn’t so clear to him anymore, but he did recall that she’d been pretty, kind, religious, and had tried to teach him never to profit from other people’s bad luck. And that’s exactly what he was doing. Profiting from bad luck. His father would never do such a thing.

Whenever Claude thought of his father, his stomach tightened with anxiety. His mother always said her husband was a good and fair man, but whose moral principles only a saint could live up to. She’d said it sweetly, but Claude had sensed gentle criticism in her words. Other people told him his father was admirable and a perfectionist. No one had ever said, more accurately, that Mr. Duncan was acrimonious, unreasonable, demanding, self-righteous and self-pitying. No one said he’d complained bitterly and loudly about the low intelligence and easy corruptibility of his miserable excuse for a son. Mr. Duncan’s outbursts on this subject usually came late at night, in the little cottage, away from the fine hotel guests. But Claude, not as lucky as the hotel guests, had always been exposed to his father’s contempt, although he’d never been able to analyze the problem clearly enough to put it into words, even to himself.

But for months now, since the elder Duncan’s death, the harsh edge of the world seemed to have softened for Claude. Now he never looked up to see his father’s disappointed, contemptuous blue eyes boring into his. He never went to bed at night feeling like a slimy, repulsive mistake that had wandered into his father’s perfect world. He never lay in bed wide-eyed into the night wishing he could awaken in the morning and magically see a new boy in the mirror—a handsome, highly intelligent, confident boy whose dazzling smile, piercing eyes, superior height, and wide shoulders, all mixed with an easy charm, naturally won his father’s respect Life had calmed and steadied for Claude since the death of his father. After the initial shock of the man’s quick demise from a severe heart attack, Claude had felt almost giddy with relief. He knew his near joy was shameful and he would never admit it to
anyone,
but it existed nevertheless. Still, he often escaped his fatherless but still boring life by taking refuge in his “hero” dreams.

Shifting slightly on the old wreck of a couch, Claude Duncan drifted into his favorite state—
sleep
—and began to dream. To his frustration, though, he could immediately tell this wasn’t a “hero” dream. True, he was aboard the huge spaceship he’d just seen on television—a cold, gray thing hurtling through an eternity of darkness with him deep in its metal bowels that dripped water condensation and occasionally rattled hanging chains with hooks used for unloading cargo. But in his dream, even though he was the captain, he was disoriented and terribly uneasy.

And he was not alone.

In his very own spaceship, Claude’s tall and muscular body sat huddled in a corner, arms clutched around his middle, his teeth beginning to chatter, his eyes darting fearfully around in the gloom. He knew people above were counting on him. They
always
counted on him, and why not? In the past, he’d never failed to invent a brilliant solution to whatever horrors space threw at them. Except for now. This time, to his complete shock and shame, all he could do was mutter over and over, “Monster under the bed,” in a little boy’s voice. “Don’t look at the monster under the bed/No, no, wish the monster stone cold dead.”

He squeezed his eyes tight. Tighter. So tight that lights began to dance behind the black shutters of his eyelids. He let out a tiny, pathetic moan. “No. Please. I’m the captain. I didn’t do nothin’ bad.”

“Didn’t you?”

His body jerked, then went perfectly still. Was that voice in his dream? It had to be. Vaguely, he knew this was
all
a dream, although it wasn’t his typical spaceship dream. And someone new was in this dream with him. It wasn’t one of his crewmen or anyone he could reach out and touch. Maybe it wasn’t even a
someone.
Maybe it was a
something
that flittered around him with the speed of a mosquito or hovered above him with the large, silently beating wings of a dragonfly.

He tried to call for Ripley, his second-in-command—tall, resourceful, and smart even if she was a woman—but she only called back to him in a garbled tone, “Get out of there! It’s coming!”

Claude thrashed in his tormented sleep. “It’s coming!” he mumbled loudly. “It’s coming!”

“Yes, it is,” a calm voice interceded, a voice whose placid tones did not fit into the dream. “But you shouldn’t be afraid.”

“I
am
‘fraid,” Claude wailed, still flailing, so drunk he couldn’t wake up. “I’m ‘fraid!”

“You’re afraid of the unknown. But the unknown isn’t always bad.” A strong hand closed around Claude’s left forearm and held it tight. “Poor muscle tone, Claude. You don’t work out.”

“I work! I work plenty doin’ ever little thing I’m s’ posed to!”

“Now, that’s not quite true, is it?” Dimly Claude felt something cold and sharp slip into the tender skin on the underside of his elbow. Then fluid coursed up his arm, pinching like ice, then moving like quicksilver, warmer, faster, shooting through him like something magical.

“What’re you doin'?”

“Giving you an injection to make you feel calm.”

Even in his befuddled state, Claude realized something awful, something fatal, was about to happen to him. He began to thrash weakly. “Gotta get up!” he abruptly shouted, his senses flashing back in a burst of panic. “Gotta get up! Gotta get up!”

He leaned forward, trying to struggle off the couch, but something pushed him back and held him down. He shook loose and tried to rise again, but his body wouldn’t cooperate. The hands let go of him and he fell backward, sliding between the edge of the couch and the coffee table. He struggled to draw breath, feeling as if someone were sitting on his chest. “You’re not from this world, are you?” he gasped out, saliva dripping down his chin.

“You’ve never known anything like me.”

“It’s the Belle. It brought you here a long time ago.”

“Yes. I belong to la Belle.”

Claude rasped in another breath and felt warmth between his legs. In shock, he realized he’d wet himself and felt absurdly embarrassed.

His companion leaned over him. “Have a little accident, Claude?”

He tried to focus on a face but he was too dizzy. Besides, he thought, it probably had no face behind that strange veil of netting it wore. He wasn’t imagining it, and the veil clinched identification for him. It was a supernatural
Being,
hiding a horrible face behind a sheet of net, trying to beguile him with a soothing voice that could become brusque and slashing in a moment, a voice that expected to be obeyed, just as Daddy’s had.

And predicted cruel punishments for when you didn’t behave. Predictions that always came true.

By now Claude was so drowsy he barely felt the Being sprinkle the remains of the half-bottle of bourbon on him, lightly at first, then letting it stream over his face and shoulders. A few moments passed. Then more liquid flowed, surely more than could have been left in the fifth of bourbon. His now fear-dried tongue actually darted out for one last taste of the sweet nectar.

And while his tongue was out, diligently exploring for the liquid Claude Duncan valued more than blood, the Being struck a long, wooden kitchen match and stared down at Claude’s drenched body, scummy beard, darting tongue. “How about a song?” the Being asked. “I know just the one.”

By now, Claude was too terrified to think rationally. He simply lay limp, a sack of blood and bones, and trembled. It wasn’t supposed to go this way. Finally I had it made, he thought with vague petulance. Things were turnin’ rosy for me. It wasn’t supposed to go this way!

The voice began to sing like Annie Lennox: “Sweet dreams—” Then it broke off. “Recognize the lyrics, Claude? Julianna’s favorite song. Sing along with me,” the Being invited airily as it moved backward, then threw a lighted kitchen match onto the alcohol-soaked face of Claude Duncan. Then another, then another. “Sweet dreams are made.”

The Being vanished. In a few moments, a not-quite-dead Claude managed a couple of tortured wheezes meant to be screams. But his voice was lost in the terrific heat Still tossing matches, the Being blithely abandoned Claude and his home. Finally, when Claude was no longer moving or even recognizable, the Being continued to sing “Sweet Dreams” until its voice faded into the cool darkness far beyond the blazing hell of the caretaker’s house.

“I can’t spend the night in the hospital,” Adrienne explained to a very young nurse with soft blue eyes that reflected every insecurity in her heart.

“You lost consciousness for a while, Mrs. Reynolds,” she replied in a good imitation of firmness. “In cases like yours, we insist that you spend the night in the hospital for observation.”