Superstition (15 page)

“You’ve got to help
Karen
.” She sounded on the verge of losing it. Her nails dug into his shoulders. Even through his shirt, he could feel the sharp crescents pressing into his skin. He had a brief flash of insanity in which he imagined those manicured nails sinking into the muscles of his bare back, and he gritted his teeth at the effort it took to dismiss it.

You need a woman, Franconi,
he told himself grimly as he bundled Nicky into the passenger seat.

“Get in the car,” he said to Tina, who had been bobbing along at his elbow, watching him and Nicky, wide-eyed, as if not quite sure whether or not he meant Nicky harm. At his words, Tina appeared to realize that he was on their side. At any rate, she nodded, ran around to the driver’s side, and got in.

“Lock the doors and drive on up to the house,” he said to Tina, who was now behind the wheel. He was leaning into the car, speaking across Nicky, who was looking up at him with eyes as big and round as Frisbees. “When you get there, start blowing the horn until somebody comes out. If nobody comes out, or if you don’t like the look of whoever it is who does come out, just sit tight until I get up there. Understand?”

Tina’s eyes were now as wide as Nicky’s, and she looked just about as scared. She nodded.

“Go,” he said.

His eyes met Nicky’s for the briefest of instants—her pupils were huge and made her eyes look shiny black—and then he shut the door and stepped back, listening for the click of the locks. He heard it, and then the car—it was a Dodge Neon, he saw—was on its way up the driveway.

Now for the SIG.

With the familiar weight of the weapon in his hand, he felt ready to take on all comers, but Nicky’s obvious terror stayed with him and made him cautious. Moving toward the pines, he reached the outermost tips of the shaggy branches and paused, his senses shifting to high alert. The scent of pine wafted around him, borne on the breeze. He heard the usual night sounds but nothing else, nothing out of the ordinary. Without the headlights for illumination, it was dark as pitch: He couldn’t see a thing. He didn’t have a flashlight on him, not a real one, but, he remembered with satisfaction, he did have one of those tiny penlight key rings. Under the circumstances, it would have to do. Fishing his keys from his pocket, Joe grabbed the thing, squeezed it, and eyed the narrow beam of white light that shot out with satisfaction. It wasn’t much, but it should be enough for what he had in mind.

He looked at the trees again.

“Police,” he barked in his best cop’s voice. “Come out with your hands where I can see them.”

Right.
Like he really expected that to work. Only in the movies did bad guys come out with their hands up. In real life, at least, in his real life, they either started shooting or ran like hell.

Still, he waited. The breeze stirred the branches, and the slight rustling sound of it was the only reply. Joe waited a moment longer, then sighed. Of course. Nothing was ever that easy.

Gun in one hand, penlight in the other, he started shining the light through the branches, peering in at the rough, gray trunks, the branches like dark, extended arms, the carpet of fallen golden-brown needles.

Beneath the third tree, he struck gold: Just within the outer edge of the branches, the tiny beam illuminated a trickle of viscous red liquid rolling slowly along a downward slope that ended at the driveway.

Not good.

His heart started pumping faster; his stomach tightened; his jaw clenched. Using the light, Joe followed the ominous trail upward until he found himself looking at a lily-white hand lying lifelessly in a pool of dark-red blood.

7

N
ICKY WAS IN SHOCK. She knew it, could tell from the way everyone else in the kitchen seemed to be far away, even though her mother and Uncle John were sitting right there at the table with her, and Livvy was at the refrigerator, and Uncle Ham was at the stove, frying up bacon and eggs, and Harry, having ventured into the center of the action just moments before to fetch himself a beer, was directly in her line of sight as, bottle in hand, he hot-footed it back into the relative peace and quiet of the den. It was just after two a.m. Monday morning, the start of a whole new week. She was scheduled to be on a plane to Chicago at ten-fifteen, and back in her office by three.

Karen was dead.

“Drink your hot chocolate,” Uncle John said, sounding as if he were at the other end of a long tunnel rather than directly across the table from her. The steady
fwump-fwump
of the ceiling fan echoed the pounding in her head. Funny, nothing really hurt: not the long but shallow knife wound just above her hipbone, not her bruised thigh that had endured a close encounter with Tina’s car, not her poor thumped head, not her scraped-up hands and knees. Maybe shock had something to do with that, too. “You need the sugar.”

Nicky nodded and looked at the cup, which was sitting on the table directly in front of her. The hot chocolate was thick and milky brown with a little puff of steam rising from it. Uncle Ham, who was arguably the best cook in the world, had garnished it with a dollop of whipped cream and some chocolate chips. Ordinarily, Nicky loved Uncle Ham’s hot chocolate. Right now, she thought she might throw up if she drank it. Drinking was easier than arguing, however, so she picked up the cup and took a tiny sip.

It tasted chalky in her mouth. Her stomach knotted with revulsion, and she quickly set the cup down again, to find Uncle John watching her with concern.

“I can’t believe I didn’t see it. My own daughter,” Leonora said in an aggrieved tone, as she had at least a dozen times since she and the rest of the family had met Nicky at the island clinic, where Dave the deputy had driven her directly from the Old Taylor Place. At the clinic, the knife wound had been identified as what it was, cleaned, and bandaged; she’d been diagnosed with a mild concussion, for which she’d been told to rest; and a sedative, which she hadn’t yet taken, had been given to her to help her sleep. She’d still been on the examination table when the call had come in confirming what she’d known intuitively all along: Karen was dead. That was when she’d gone numb, she remembered. After that, nothing had seemed quite real.

An hour later, she’d been released to her family. In the approximately forty-five minutes since they had arrived home, she’d showered—carefully, so as not to get her bandage wet—and tried not to think about the fact that at first the water running off her body and swirling away down the drain had been brown with blood, some her own, some undoubtedly Karen’s. After noticing that, she had gotten out of the shower much more quickly than she had originally meant to, toweled off, dried her hair, and dressed in a pair of silky pink nylon pajamas and, because she was freezing, a thick pink terry-cloth robe and a pair of white ankle socks. All the clothes belonged to Livvy, because the clothes Nicky’d been wearing when she was attacked had been taken for evidence, and her suitcase, along with practically everything else she had brought with her from Chicago, was still in the trunk of her rental car. The car was parked by the garage—she’d noticed it when they had arrived home from the clinic—but by the time she’d thought about her things and remembered that they were in the trunk, she was naked and wet. It had been easier après shower to simply wrap herself in a towel and scamper into Livvy’s room and help herself to her sister’s clothes. Livvy hadn’t objected: Her only reaction upon seeing Nicky padding into the kitchen in her clothes had been a slight narrowing of her eyes. To her surprise, Nicky had found wearing her big sister’s clothes oddly comforting, almost like going back in time to their teenage years, when if she’d really wanted to get back at Livvy for something, all she’d had to do was “borrow” some of her cherished clothes. As if some rule of ancient karmic payback was in effect, though, now Livvy’s things were miles too big, to say nothing of being Pepto-Bismol pink, which was definitely
not
Nicky’s color. Fortunately, the pajama pants came equipped with a drawstring waist, which she had cinched tightly, and the color was the least of her worries at the moment.

Her hand had lain in a puddle of Karen’s blood.

Nicky shivered, and of its own volition, the hand in question curled into a fist in her lap.

“Drink up,” Uncle John urged her again.

“You’re cold.”

“You never
can
see anything to do with family,” Livvy reminded Leonora impatiently while Nicky took another tiny sip of hot chocolate. “We could all be dying and you wouldn’t know it. You didn’t even know that Ben was screwing his head off with his secretary. Face it: You’re just not that psychic when it comes to us.”

“Olivia Jane.” Leonora stiffened in her chair to fix Livvy with an affronted gaze. “That’s not true.”

“Is too,” Livvy said, unrepentant.

“You forget I saw Harry all covered with blood, and Charlie sitting on a beach when he should have been in New York, and poor, dear Neil—well, you know how I saw your father.”

“They’re not blood kin, Mama. You can see them a little, but you can’t see blood kin. Not at all. It’s the truth, and you know it.”

“Even if your mother
had
seen what was happening with your husband, what good would it have done?” Uncle Ham intervened over his shoulder as he expertly cracked eggs into a skillet. They slid into the hot grease with a loud sizzle. The bacon, done now, lay draining on paper towels by the stove. The homey scent of breakfast filled the kitchen. It made Nicky’s stomach churn.

“I could have caught the bastard in the act.” Livvy closed the refrigerator door with more force than the action called for and shuffled toward the table. Like the rest of the family, she’d been getting ready for bed when the call to meet Nicky at the clinic had come in. She was fully dressed in the same clothes she’d been wearing earlier, only now her T-shirt was on inside-out and she had backless pink slippers—clearly the companions to the robe Nicky was wearing—on her feet.

“I’m sorry I didn’t see either one of you in trouble.” Leonora’s chin quivered. “I keep telling you, I’m
blocked.”

“You’re getting better: You saw something tonight.” Uncle John’s tone was comforting.

“It was an imprint—a loop.” Leonora shook her head. “Sometimes terrible events leave their imprints on their surroundings. That’s obviously what happened in this case and thank goodness I was able to pick up on it, because otherwise, I was getting
nothing.
I wasn’t communicating with Tara’s spirit in the usual way at all. And Dorothy still didn’t come through.”

There was a forlorn note to her voice as she said that last.

“Here, you might want to put this on your forehead.

You look like you’re growing a horn.” Livvy dropped something—a bag of frozen peas, Nicky realized after blinking at it confusedly for an instant—on the table in front of her.

“Oh. Thanks.”

The bump on her forehead
was
big, having grown to about the size of a golf ball. That being the case, the peas were probably a good idea. She picked up the bag and applied it to the bump. In the meantime, Livvy walked around the table and lowered herself, grimacing, into her seat. The oak ladderback chair was old, having been around since they were kids, and it creaked warningly as she settled into it. All eyes immediately shot to Livvy, who fortunately seemed to be too preoccupied to notice either the protesting chair or the apprehensive looks on the faces of her family. Another attack of the “I’m too fat to live” blues was probably more than any of them could take, Nicky thought. Certainly, it was more than
she
could take at the moment.

“If I’d caught him in the act, I would have left him flat. Instead, he waited until I was pregnant, and then the bastard left
me
.” Livvy dug savagely into the banana pudding she’d extracted from the refrigerator. “Until then, I was Little Miss Clueless.”

“The eggs are ready,” Uncle Ham announced from the stove. “Who wants breakfast?”

“I do,” Livvy said, while Uncle John stood up to help Uncle Ham carry the plates to the table.

“Livvy, you’ve done nothing but eat for the past two months. You’re going to make yourself sick.” Leonora looked meaningfully at the pudding that Livvy was scarfing down.

“I’m going to make myself
fat,
you mean, don’t you? Well, too late, Mama. I
am
fat. And you know what? It doesn’t matter. I worked like a dog for years to keep my figure, and he left me anyway, and now I’m pregnant and big as a moose and
I don’t care
.” Livvy shoveled a defiant spoonful of pudding into her mouth, then reached for one of the plates that Uncle John had just brought to the table. “Bring on the bacon.”

“You’ll be sorry later on,” Leonora warned.

Livvy fixed her big blue eyes on their mother, opened her mouth wide, and shoved in an entire piece of bacon.

“Olivia.” Leonora’s tone made it a reproof.

“Leave her alone, she’s eating for two,” Uncle John said, sitting down. Uncle Ham, after bellowing at Harry to come and get it, took his place at the table, too.

“Not two. Two hundred. Pounds, that is,” Livvy said. “I only have ten more to go. Want to bet I make it?”

She took a ferocious bite of egg on toast.

Unreal,
Nicky thought. Here her family was, having a perfectly normal—for them—conversation when she had been attacked and Karen had been brutally murdered just a few hours earlier. For her, the remembered horror seemed to hang in the air like an icy cloud, and yet—the world just kept on keeping on.

“Eat,” Uncle John said, and tapped his fork against the edge of Nicky’s plate for emphasis. Automatically, she glanced down at the glistening fried egg on toast, at the two strips of crisp bacon, at the twisted orange slice he’d used for garnish. Perfection on a plate. She should have been hungry; she’d had nothing to eat since . . . breakfast? She and the rest of the team had made do with airplane food on the flight from Chicago. Karen had sat across the aisle from her, picking gingerly at an omelette. They’d meant to grab lunch when they landed, but as it turned out, they hadn’t had time. That tasteless airplane omelette had been Karen’s last meal. . . .