Superstition (6 page)

“Red hair’s a genetic marker. For all kinds of things,” Uncle John said. “Like decreased pain tolerance. I showed you that study. And—”

“That study was a load of crap.” Uncle Ham’s voice was tight. “All having red hair means is you’ve got red hair. Anyway, at least
our
hair color is natural.”

“Are you saying mine isn’t?”

“All I’m saying is this: Clairol’s Summer Blonde.”

“That package wasn’t mine, and you know it.”

Livvy, meanwhile, had apparently been struggling with her seat belt the entire time they’d been in the car.

“Ohmigod, it won’t fasten.” She let her breath out with a
whoosh
as though she’d been holding it. The sound was accompanied by the slither of the abandoned seat belt as it slid back into its moorings.“It doesn’t fit. I’m a cow—a
whale.
I could just
die
.”

Startled out of her preoccupation by the very real pain in Livvy’s voice, Nicky glanced at her sister through the rearview mirror.

“For God’s sake, Liv,” she said. “You’re seven months pregnant. You can’t expect to be a size six.”

“That . . . that
bitch
looks like she’s about a size two,” Livvy wailed.

“That bitch” was understood by everyone in the car to be the woman Livvy’s husband had left her for.

“You’re prettier than she is,” Uncle Ham said, wrapping a comforting arm around her shoulders. “Even . . .”

He broke off, apparently realizing the infelicitousness of what he’d been about to say. Livvy, no fool despite being supersized, supersensitive, and supercharged with hormones at present, didn’t seem to have any trouble filling in the blank.

“Even if I’m
huge
?” she guessed, on a note of quivering despair.

“You’re not huge,” Uncle Ham, Uncle John, and Nicky all said in instant, loyal unison.

“I am,
I am
.” Livvy burst into noisy tears. “I’m big as a damned
stadium,
and you all know it.”

A stop sign emerged out of the darkness. Nicky saw it, and the car proceeding through the crossroad it heralded just in time. She hit the brakes. The Honda screeched to a shuddering stop.

“We want to find ghosts, not be them,” Uncle John said after the briefest of moments, raising his voice to be heard over the sound of Livvy’s sobs. Ignoring him, and her sister, and everything except the necessity of making it to their destination in time, Nicky waited for the intersection to clear and then hung a left. They were almost there. . . .

“I don’t know how I let you talk me into this,” Leonora moaned to Nicky, seemingly oblivious to the hubbub in the backseat. “I can’t do a séance if I can’t
connect
.”

Her hands were sliding up and down her arms as if she was cold. Recognizing this from experience as a bad sign, Nicky started to feel the first real stirrings of alarm. Maybe there was more to her mother’s reluctance than sheer bloody-mindedness. Maybe she
would
get on camera and freeze. . . .

“You can do this, Mama. You have a true gift, remember?” Nicky did her best to stifle her own budding panic and keep her voice calm and reassuring—which wasn’t exactly easy, given the fact that her sister was having a meltdown in the backseat, her uncles were arguing about which one of them was most to blame for upsetting her, and her mother was giving every indication that she was going to unbuckle her seat belt and bolt at the next stop sign.

Not that Nicky meant to stop for it unless she absolutely had to. Number one,
they were so late.
Number two, she’d dealt with her mother’s histrionics before, and she was perfectly well aware of the lengths to which Leonora was willing to go.

If these
were
just histrionics. Which, if she was really, really lucky, they were. Once a camera was on her, Leonora would be fine. Nicky knew how her mother worked—and, knowing she deserved every bit of what she was getting, she reflected dismally. She’d been a fool to let her mother anywhere near anything that involved her career. But
Twenty-four Hours Investigates
had been tanking in the ratings, the producers had been desperately casting about for some way to provide a big boost in the numbers for the May sweeps, and her mother had called to ask Nicky if she could use her influence (“What influence?” Nicky had wanted to snort; Nicky’s show was about a one-point drop in the ratings from being cancelled, and she herself was one of three not all that highly regarded on-air reporters) to get her mother a well-paying, short-lived TV gig. The timing of these three occurrences had been close, so close that Nicky had had a eureka moment and connected them.

At the time, it had seemed like fate.

Now she recognized it as the recipe for disaster that it was.

Too damned late.

“Nicky. I haven’t even had a visit from Dorothy. Not in ages,” Leonora confided in a hushed tone that riveted Nicky’s attention faster than a shout would have done.

The glance she gave her mother was truly alarmed. Dorothy was Leonora’s Spirit Guide, and for as long as Nicky had been on this earth, Dorothy had been as constant a presence in her mother’s life as Nicky herself and Livvy and Uncle Ham.

“Mother. Are you telling me the truth?”

“Pinky swear.”

Ohmigod.
Pinky swear, that precious holdover from childhood. The pledge of truth that she, Livvy, and Leonora never violated. Pinky swears were never taken lightly. From one James woman to another, it meant that whoever said it was telling the absolute, total truth.

“Don’t panic,” Nicky said aloud, as much to herself as to her mother, as visions of Geraldo Rivera and Al Capone’s empty vault danced in her brain. Leonora, naturally, took that as a cue to panic. Digging her nails into her wrists so deeply that dark crescents formed around them, she dropped her head back against the seat and started panting like a very large dog in a very hot place.

Like hell?
The way she was feeling right now, Nicky wouldn’t take any bets against it. She should have flown in from Chicago days ago, should’ve known that trusting an airline to get her to her destination within any reasonable definition of “on time” was trusting too much, especially when she
really had to be there,
should’ve anticipated the bad weather that had caused the delay that had caused her and her crew to have to rent cars and drive from Atlanta, which had gotten them to their hotel on the mainland less than two hours ago—just in time to catch part of the regularly scheduled
Twenty-four Hours Investigates
for which Nicky had done the big (taped) setup for tonight’s special.

Live at nine—or not.

Nicky shuddered.

“Leonora, you’re going to hyperventilate.” Having apparently been monitoring the action in the front seat at the same time as he’d been contributing to the turbulence in the back, Uncle John leaned forward and passed Leonora a small paper bag. If it wasn’t the one he’d been holding over her mouth and nose in the house, it was its twin.

“Remember,” he said. “Just put it over your nose and mouth and breathe normally. Like I showed you in the house.”

Leonora grabbed it, pressed it to her face, and started breathing into it.

“Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale . . .” John encouraged her.

“Oh, God, I can’t let anybody see me like this,” Livvy wailed. “I look like Moby Dick. I know I wanted to come, but . . . Nick, you’ve got to take me home.”

Nicky was willing to bet that working for
60 Minutes
was never like this.

“Livvy—” Nicky broke off as the car crested a rise and the Old Taylor Place came into view. To her left, the western fringe of the island was swampy near-jungle. Tall marsh grass crowded close to the road, and the still waters of the creek beyond it gleamed faintly in the moonlight. To her right, the higher ground on which the houses were built was shaded by a thick canopy of live oaks, pines, and cypress. Unlike the pretty pastel bungalows in the center of the island where the year-round residents tended to live, the houses along Salt Marsh Creek were mostly big, older ones that predated the turn of the century. At present, most of them were still empty, awaiting their summer residents. In other words, except for the Honda’s headlights, the area should have been as dark as the inside of a cave.

But it wasn’t. The Old Taylor Place was lit up like the Washington Monument. Every light inside the house seemed to be turned on. Bright klieg lights illuminated the exterior. Half a dozen vehicles were parked in the driveway.

Nicky felt a small lessening of tension as she realized that everything looked just as it should for the upcoming broadcast—until she noticed the pair of police cars, blue lights flashing, that were parked on the shoulder in front of the house.

She was just frowning at them when her cell phone, which she had stowed in the console between the seats, started to ring.

“Yes?” she said into it, shooting an encouraging smile at her mother, who had lowered the paper bag and was now, with a cautious expression on her face, seemingly trying to breathe without it.

“Nicky, you’re not going to believe this,” Karen whispered over the phone. “They’re shutting us down.”

3

B
RIAN WAS GONE BY the time they got to the Old Taylor Place. That made Joe feel marginally—but not a whole hell of a lot—better. It had been almost two years now. He was beginning to think—fear—that Brian might be a permanent part of his existence.

The ramifications of which he didn’t even want to think about.

“They don’t have a permit. I told ’em to pack it up.” Vince greeted Joe and Dave on the porch with that information, one hand in his pocket jingling his keys, his shrewd little black eyes snapping with satisfaction. A massive man, he was about six-four and nearly as wide, with huge shoulders, chest, and belly atop oddly short legs. He had a thick head of salt-and-pepper hair, pugnacious features, and a lot of trouble just being still. Even after years spent in this motivation-sapping climate, he still brimmed with the kind of raw vigor and nervous energy that was as foreign to South Carolina as kudzu was to the North. At the moment, he was wearing a coat and tie and dress slacks, which made Joe think that—devout Catholic that Vince was—he’d been on his way to or from Mass. Or maybe not. Vince wasn’t a big believer in the island’s casual dress code under any circumstance.

Which was one reason Joe had pulled on the spare uniform shirt he always kept in his trunk before heading up the yard to the porch. Anyway, he kind of liked that uniform shirt: short sleeves, gray, with a big, shiny silver badge pinned to the breast pocket. In it, he felt like Andy Griffith.

“So they did need one?” Joe asked without much real concern. On the way over, it had occurred to him that the botched investigation, if indeed the investigation had been botched, hadn’t happened on his watch. What had or had not been done fifteen years ago was not his problem. Therefore, whether the program was broadcast or not didn’t particularly matter to him; he was simply on board with whatever Vince wanted. It was easier that way. Getting all worked up over things that didn’t really matter used to be part of his personality, but it wasn’t any longer. He’d left that part of himself, along with lots of other things, behind in Jersey.

“Hey, I’m the mayor. If I say they need a permit, they need a permit,” Vince said, his keys jangling harder.

Joe took that to mean that nobody Vince had been able to reach actually knew whether or not a permit was needed for this type of thing.

“Works for me,” Joe said.

The last vestige of twilight had faded away long since. Beyond the perimeter of the brightly lit house, the night was dark and quiet. A breeze blew in from the ocean; it smelled of the sea, of course, and also just faintly of flowers. The front door of the Old Taylor Place stood open, although the screen door was shut. Through the faint blur of its mesh, he could see into the wide entry hall all the way back to the curving staircase and into part of what he took to be the living room. Twelve-foot ceilings, dark wood paneling extending three-quarters of the way up the walls, gloomy shadows everywhere. Except for a few folding chairs and the TV crew’s equipment, as much of the house as he could see was bare of furniture. A bright light had been set up in a corner of the living room behind some kind of translucent white screen that was intended, he guessed, to diffuse its intensity. A group of people—not locals, as he could tell from their clothes, which, being mostly black and mostly business-friendly, were about as far from island mufti as it was possible to get—huddled together not far from the light. He could see only about a third of them, but it was obvious that they were conferring frantically about something, although in hushed words that he couldn’t actually overhear.

Three guesses as to what it was. They weren’t likely to be pleased about having the plug pulled on their program.

“Uh-oh, we got one on the move,” Dave warned under his breath.

A young woman with short, black hair had just detached herself from the group in the living room to move into the hall. She was frowning as she talked into a cell phone. Automatically, Joe registered that she was attractive, bone-thin in a white blouse, black skirt, and flat shoes, and not really his type. She was also headed their way.

“O’Neil. Go see what they’re up to in there.” Vince was charting the young woman’s progress, too. He glanced at Dave and jerked his head toward the house. “They’re supposed to be shutting things down.”

Dave nodded and headed into the house. The young woman, still talking on her cell phone, reached the screen door at the same time he did. Ever the gentleman, Dave ended up holding the door open for her. She shot him a sidelong glance rife with disdain as she passed through it onto the porch.

No gratitude there.

Just then, the sound of quick footsteps on the porch stairs made Joe glance around. His eyes widened slightly as he beheld the redheaded TV reporter ascending them two at a time. A motley collection of newcomers straggled across the lawn in her wake, all clearly headed toward the house. Behind them was the trio of klieg lights that had been set up about thirty feet from the house to light the exterior, causing their shadows to elongate until they stretched across the overgrown grass, almost all the way to the thicket of oleanders that hugged the porch. Joe beheld an older woman, redheaded like the reporter, in a long, flowing purple dress, leaning heavily on the arm of a short but muscular blond guy. A little behind them, another man, less bulky but also less toned, had his hand around the elbow of a heavily pregnant lady who seemed to be huffing and puffing with every step. But it was the reporter who was nearest—and closing fast, he discovered as his gaze snapped back to her. She was pencil-slim—slimmer than she had looked on TV—in a figure-hugging black skirt suit that made her absolutely killer legs look about two miles long, and tall heels that clicked loudly on the wood. Her shoulder-length hair looked dark in the shadows at the top of the steps, but then she gained the porch and strode into the glow of the klieg lights. He saw that her hair was indeed the true deep red it had appeared on TV. Earlier, though, it had hung straight to her shoulders, all smooth and shiny like a shampoo ad. Now it was disheveled, with one side pushed behind an ear and bangs straggling over her forehead. Her cheeks had acquired a hectic flush, and her previously luscious mouth appeared hard and tight. Her eyes narrowed as they focused on him and Vince, her lips pursed until they were downright thin, and she said something into the cell phone that she had pressed to her face.