Superstition (29 page)

Nicky narrowed her eyes at him. “Yeah. I saw a ghost. You got a problem with that?”

“Nicky thought she saw a figure that looked like Tara Mitchell in the upstairs bedroom window when we were filming from the street earlier. We were trying to get it on camera,” Gordon intervened hastily. As he’d already told Nicky, he knew how these small-town Southern lockups went: Go to jail on the weekend, and you’d be there until some good ole boy judge got into the courthouse on Monday. And he did
not
want to spend the next two nights in jail. Neither, if she had any sense, did she. “Would’ve been a money shot if we could’ve gotten it.”

“But you didn’t.” Joe’s tone made it a statement rather than a question.

The one cop whose face she could see smirked. Nicky bristled.

“I know what I saw,” she said. “Could we please go now?”

“You got any problem with letting them off with a warning?” Joe asked. The other cops shook their heads. Joe looked back at Nicky. “Next time you see crime-scene tape, don’t cross it,” he said, and straightened away from the window. A moment later, he opened the back door.

Nicky slid out, followed by Gordon a few seconds later. Joe shut the door.

“Good job, guys,” Joe said to his subordinates. “Wait for backup, and when it gets here, you two go in and check out the house.”

“Sure.” The driver grinned at Joe and lowered his voice. “I got a question for you, though: If we find a ghost, should we arrest it?”

Nicky heard and stiffened. Gordon shook his head at her warningly.

“Call me.” Joe’s voice was dry.

“Will do.”

“Thanks for getting us out of that,” Gordon said, hefting his camera bag over his shoulder as he started walking toward his and Nicky’s vehicles. Nicky contented herself with shooting Joe a dirty look as she, too, started walking, heading toward her Maxima, which was some thirty feet away. Gordon’s van was about ten feet beyond that. Joe was wearing a jacket and tie, she noted, and looking handsome enough to
almost
make up for his rotten personality. Now that it was dark, though, she was more interested in getting away from the scary haunted house with the howling dog—which, incidentally was no longer howling—than she was in quarreling with Joe, or in drooling over him.

“Not a problem.” Joe fell into step beside her. Gordon was a couple paces ahead. “So you want to tell me why you’re not holed up all safe and sound in your apartment in Chicago?”

“I told you: I have a job to do. And just so you know, I saw what I think was Tara Mitchell’s ghost looking out of her bedroom window. And I heard a dog howling.”

“A dog howling?” Joe sounded faintly bemused.

“I heard a dog howling Sunday night. Right before I was attacked. And just a little while ago, I heard one again.”

“And that’s supposed to mean?”

She could feel him looking at her, but she refused to look back, marching along with her eyes straight ahead. The musky scent of the marsh grew stronger as she reached her car. It was full dark now, and a bass choir of bullfrogs was just getting keyed up somewhere near the water. Cicadas and katydids and crickets whirred, and mosquitos buzzed, one or two around her head. She waved at them absentmindedly, barely noticing. Bloodthirsty insects were the least of her worries at the moment.

“How do
I
know? I’m just telling you,” she snapped, curling her fingers around her car door handle. She jerked the door open, then paused—okay, she wasn’t stupid—to make a quick survey of the interior before sliding inside.

“You heading for the airport?” Joe asked, stopping beside the car to look down at her.

“Nope.” She shut the door and hit the lock button. As the sharp click sounded, she felt marginally safer.

Gordon was outside her door now, too. He had paused to say something to Joe. Lips tightening, keys already in her hand, Nicky rolled down her window.

“I’ll call you in the morning and we’ll set up a schedule for the day, okay?” she said to Gordon, the words brusque because she was in a hurry to leave. Besides being aggravated at Joe—and the other cops and Gordon and, basically, most of the rest of the world—for being such a doubter, she wanted to get out of there. Now that it was dark, the place was creeping her out to the point where she had cold chills running up and down her spine every time she glanced around.

“Yeah, okay,” Gordon said, and started walking again.

“So, where are you headed?” Joe asked her. “Somewhere far away, I hope.”

“Home. Twybee Cottage.” She started rolling up her window.

“I’ll follow you,” Joe said. It wasn’t a question. It was, instead, more of a grim statement, with the unspoken corollary
to make sure you get there alive.

Nicky’s finger paused on the button. The window stopped moving. Their eyes met through the gathering gloom.

She wanted to say “There’s no need.” Pride dictated that she say “I’ll be fine.” But nerves won out.
Face facts,
she told herself glumly: She was now officially afraid of the dark. She wasn’t going to feel safe until her fanny was parked inside her big, noisy, chaotic house right in the middle of her big, noisy, chaotic family. Having a cop follow her until she got there would make her feel a whole lot better, especially since the cop in question was Joe.

She might not especially like him right now, but she trusted him.

“Thanks,” she said. He nodded.

A few minutes later, the minivan with Gordon driving went past. Nicky pulled behind him, and Joe pulled behind her.

They lost Gordon with a honk and a wave at the first intersection, when he went west toward the South Causeway and she turned east toward the heart of the island. But Joe stayed behind her all the way to Twybee Cottage. She knew, because she snuck occasional glances in her rearview mirror just to make sure.

Nicky hated to admit it even to herself, but she was really, truly glad he was there. Still, she couldn’t help it: She felt as jumpy as a grasshopper in a field full of lawnmowers as she drove through the dark, past fields crowded with tall grass and scrub pine and palmettos, past oncoming cars that were no more than a brief flash of headlights before they were gone, and finally past the big, old houses that lined Atlantic Avenue, only some of which were starting to glimmer with a few dim interior lights.

Coming back to the island was much worse than she’d thought it was going to be, she was discovering.
Everything
was starting to creep her out.

Nicky snorted. Was there any wonder? Within the last two hours or so since she’d arrived on the island, she had seen Tara Mitchell’s ghost and heard something that sounded like the Hound of the Baskervilles howl. And she could almost
feel
the presence of evil.

Good God,
she thought, appalled, as the words took on shape and substance in her mind—she was starting to sound like her mother.

That notion was so mind-boggling that she barely noticed that the Maxima was crunching up the pea-gravel driveway to Twybee Cottage until she swung around the garage and into the parking area and her headlights caught her mother, clad in loose black slacks and a short-sleeved floral blouse, upswept red hair gleaming brightly as the beams caught it, and her sister, wearing tight pink cropped pants and a pink-and-white gingham tent with her blond hair swinging loose around her face, leaning together into the open driver’s-side door of a big black Mercedes-Benz sedan that was parked alongside Livvy’s silver Jaguar. Since they both seemed to be looking at something in the Mercedes’s front seat, all she saw of them at first was their backsides. But as the headlights hit them, their heads came out of the Mercedes faster than corks out of a champagne bottle. Almost in perfect unison, they swung around to face the oncoming car, looking like deer caught in the headlights, their eyes and mouths identically big and round as sand dollars.

Nicky frowned. Sliding the transmission into park and killing the engine and lights, she got out. She’d seen her mother and sister in all their moods, and this one she recognized easily: extreme guilt.

“So, what’s up?” she called. The front end of the Maxima was between her and them as she walked toward them, which meant that she could see them only from about the hipbones up.

“Oh, Nicky, thank God it’s you.” Leonora sagged against the open car door behind her.

“You scared the
daylights
out of us,” Livvy added, throwing her sister a disgusted look before turning and thrusting her head back inside the car.

“Look what they’ve got me doing. Just look at this.” The tone was one of bitter complaint. The voice was Uncle John’s, and it came from somewhere on high. Glancing up, Nicky’s mouth dropped open. Framed by the glossy green leaves of the big magnolia by the porch, he was a good twenty feet off the ground, inching his way out along one of the arm-thick branches, one hand clamped around the smaller branch over his head, the other grasping a silver-bladed hacksaw that gleamed faintly in the yellow porch light. A metal ladder leaned against the trunk of the tree, mute evidence of his method of ascension.

“It’ll be a miracle if I don’t break my neck,” he added.

“Here’s the ice.” Uncle Ham banged out through the screen door, then checked on the porch for an instant as he first saw the Maxima, and then Nicky. “Nicky! Sweetie! Welcome home!”

“It’s not my fault.” Livvy said. She no longer had her head inside the Mercedes, and was instead leaning against the closed back door, one hand pressed to her swollen belly. Only Leonora’s backside now protruded from the car. Livvy looked appealingly at Nicky. “He called me
Shamu
.”

Uh-oh. Did somebody have a death wish, or what?

Uncle Ham was moving again, running down the back steps, bulbous white dishcloth presumably filled with ice clutched in one hand. Uncle John was moving, too, creeping farther out along the branch and asking plaintively if they thought that was far enough. Leonora had withdrawn from the Mercedes again and was shaking her head at Livvy, whose lower lip quivered ominously.

Nicky registered these things only peripherally because, as she rounded the hood of her car and got a full view of her mother and sister and the driver’s side of the Mercedes, her attention was instantly riveted by something else. A man’s feet in medium-sized black dress shoes were planted side by side in the pea gravel. His legs, in pin-striped black dress pants, rose from the feet to bend at the knee and then, at about mid-thigh height, disappeared inside the car. The interior light was on, and there was no mistaking what she saw, but still Nicky stared for a few seconds, dumbfounded. Then it hit her that there was indeed a man lying motionless on his back across the Mercedes’s front seats. It also hit her that she knew that car: She’d last seen it at Christmas, when her sister and her sister’s husband had arrived in it.

The supine man could only be her soon-to-be-ex-brother-in-law. And he had called Livvy Shamu.

“Ohmigod.” Nicky clapped a hand over her mouth as she hurried forward to survey the damage. It was Ben, all right. With her mother and Livvy blocking access to the car door, she couldn’t see much, but she got a glimpse of a (now pale as white bread) strong-featured male profile and meticulously groomed dark blond hair. His eyes were closed. His mouth was slack. His body was limp. Her horrified gaze encountered her sister’s. Her hand dropped away from her mouth. “Liv, what did you do?”

“Coldcocked him with a candlestick,” Uncle Ham said, not without a certain amount of satisfaction as he pushed past Nicky to hand the makeshift ice bag to Leonora. “I always knew she had the James temper in there somewhere.”

“I didn’t mean to really hurt him,” Livvy said in a small voice. “It’s just—I was upset. I was at our house, getting some of my things, and he came home and said I couldn’t take anything and then I went ahead and jumped in my car—it was pretty full by then—and took off, and he followed me all the way home. And then he started yelling about how
immature
I am and how Alison”—Alison being, as they all knew, the homewrecking bimbo—“is what he needs, and then he called me
Sh-Shamu.
”

Listening to Livvy’s voice quaver, Nicky would have given her brother-in-law a sharp kick in the kneecap if he’d been aware enough to feel it.

“And then she beaned him. We were having supper, and we all saw it through the window,” Uncle Ham said with relish.

“I was carrying Grandma’s candlesticks in from the car,” Livvy said to Nicky. “You know the ones.”

Nicky did indeed. A pair of pre-Civil War sterling-silver candelabra, they had held pride of place with a matching epergne on Livvy’s dining-room table since she’d married. They were about two and a half feet tall, and had to weigh at least fifteen pounds each.

Nicky stared at her sister, then looked at the motionless legs.

“Is he—?” “Dead” was what Nicky was going to say, but the sound of tires crunching up the driveway coupled with the sweep of headlights across the parking area made her jump and whirl around to face them. Everybody in the group—with the exception of Ben, of course, who was incapacitated, and Uncle John, who was up in the tree—followed suit with a collective in-drawing of breath.

“It’s Joe,” Nicky said, having just then remembered that he was behind her. “Joe Franconi. He followed me home.”

“The police chief?”
Leonora pressed a hand to her bosom.

“Look out below!” A magnolia branch as long as Nicky’s leg crashed down right in front of the open Mercedes door, making them all jump again.

“We’re going to tell Ben that a branch broke off the magnolia and hit him in the head. I don’t think he saw the candlestick coming,” Uncle Ham told Nicky hurriedly. “If he ever wakes up, that is.” Then, glancing skyward, he hissed, “Dammit, John, be quiet up there. Can’t you see what just pulled up the driveway?”

“Oh, shit.”

The cruiser had them all pinned in its lights now as it pulled up beside Nicky’s Maxima and stopped. She could only imagine the tableau they must present, with her, Livvy, Leonora, and Ham frozen in place beside the Mercedes and, in her case at least, staring bug-eyed in the newcomer’s direction. Guilt had to be written all over all of them. And that was before Joe got around to spotting Uncle John in the tree—or Ben’s legs sticking out of the car door, for that matter.