The Night Visitor
Authors: Dianne Emley
Tags: #Fiction, #Romance, #Paranormal, #General, #Thrillers, #Suspense, #Crime
The Night Visitor
is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
An Alibi eBook Original
Copyright © 2014 by Dianne Emley
All Rights Reserved.
Published in the United States by Alibi, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
Alibi and the Alibi colophon are trademarks of Random House LLC.
eBook ISBN 9780804178938
Cover design: Scott Biel
Cover images: Comstock/Stockbyte/
Getty Images (woman); stevecoleimages/E+/Getty Images (mansion)
Author photograph: Bill Youngblood Photography
v4.0
ep
Truths that wake,
To perish never.
—William Wordsworth,
from “Ode: Intimations of Immortality
from Recollections of Early Childhood”
Contents
1
Junior Lara saw the doves and knew something was wrong. They were loose inside the loft, flying in crazy circles, their beating wings stirring the air, scenting it with musk.
A gust of warm wind blew through the open windows. It carried a trace of something sweet and earthy.
The back of Junior’s neck prickled. He stood with his hand against the edge of the antique elevator’s door, hesitating before stepping into his loft apartment.
“Anya? You here?”
He peered up the long staircase that led to the roof. The door at the top was open. He shouted up the stairs, “Anya!”
Looking around the loft, Junior saw Anya’s purse and two cell phones on the big library table. “You’re here someplace. You wouldn’t go off without your beloved cell phones.”
He knew what she’d done. She’d gotten bored waiting inside the loft and went up to the roof to see the doves, and she had left the door to the coop open. The light had drawn the birds inside. He’d told her that he was on his way, but she couldn’t sit still for a few minutes, and now his place was a mess. But where was she?
“Dammit, Anya.”
It was wrong. Wrong from the get-go. Anya was bad news. He knew it, but he’d done it anyway.
He flipped off the lights and started on the windows along one wall of the loft, working by moonlight. He shooed birds outside and cranked the tall casement windows closed. Two of his favorite doves landed on his head and shoulder and rode with him, cooing and picking at his hair.
The wind gusted. Screens that partitioned the bedroom scuttled against the concrete floor. Magazine pages rustled. Loose drawings took flight. Pencils and charcoals rolled. Paintings on easels caught the wind like sails. The doves had been calming but took flight anew, circling, the moonlight luminescent on their feathers.
Junior cursed when he caught his foot on a stack of canvases leaning against a table and they clattered to the floor.
“Can’t sit still and wait ten minutes, can you, Miss Diva?”
He reached a corner and stopped before going to the windows along the adjacent wall. The back of his neck prickled again. He resisted an urge to turn on the lights. He’d never get the birds out that way. But something was giving him the creeps. It wasn’t the doves. They’d done this before. It wasn’t the darkness. He often painted by moonlight, enjoying the still and quiet of the quirky old building in the desolate neighborhood. It wasn’t the hot wind. The Santa Anas made others edgy but energized him. It was something else. There was a vibration, a tension in the air, formless and weightless, but palpable. It had slithered beneath his skin and nagged the pit of his stomach.
He thought of his fiancée, Rory. He wanted her here. He hated having lied to her. Mistakes on top of mistakes. It was time to come clean and tell her everything. Now.
He brushed his pets off him and pulled a cell phone from his pocket. He brought up Rory’s number and was about to make the call when something caught his eye. He’d left easels set up in front of the windows beside a vintage sofa. One easel displayed the nude portrait he’d painted of Anya. On the second easel was a framed painting, silhouetted by the moonlight. He blinked, not believing what he now saw. The two paintings seemed alive, undulating in the wind. They’d been reduced to ribbons, the strips of canvas flying like the torn fabric of a kite’s tail.
“I know you had a problem with it, but son of a bitch, Anya.”
The wind quieted, settling the tattered canvases, only to scatter them again.
Junior crossed the room, heading for the shredded paintings. Near the sofa, he slipped. The floor was wet and slick. Pitching forward, grabbing on to the sofa to not fall, he skidded into something solid yet soft on the floor behind it. It was Anya.
Even in the dim light, he saw her sultry gaze. Her full lips were parted, and her dark hair was splayed around her head. It was the pose in which she’d been photographed thousands of times.
Junior realized that her face wasn’t shadowed but was covered with blood. He scrambled to get away, holding on to the sofa, fighting the suction pull of the blood. He sensed motion close behind him. It wasn’t the wind. It wasn’t the doves. Before he got to his feet, he was again falling.
There was a flash or a bang—he wasn’t sure which. He was suddenly on the cold, bloody floor but strangely distant from his senses. Anya’s limp form in the moonlight faded as darkness closed in. He grappled to fix a thought in his head, something to sustain him, to keep him here and away from the darkness.
Rory.
He focused on Rory. Scenes from their life together flashed through his mind. He seized them and held on tightly.
The darkness crept closer. He tried to hold on to the light, but bit by bit it ebbed until all that he had been was reduced to a pinprick. Then, life as he had known it was over.
2
Five Years Later
Daniel Lara burst into the lobby of the run
-
down hospital in the Lincoln Heights neighborhood east of downtown L.A.’s Chinatown. He shoved a rolled magazine into his jacket pocket, snatched a pen that dangled from a chain attached to a clipboard on the scarred wooden counter, and wrote his name on the visitors log in an illegible scribble.
The hospital’s lobby was a dingy rectangle floored in pocked linoleum. Steel-and- plastic chairs lined the walls. A television on a wall was tuned to a Spanish-language station. A Latino couple sat on the uncomfortable chairs watching it. A boy and a girl played on the floor with toys pulled from a bin in the corner.
“My man, Danny boy.” The guard looked up from the sports section of a newspaper. Danny had become such a fixture at the hospital that the guard was already making out a visitor’s badge. “Look at you, lady-killer. Pressed and prettied in a suit and tie. You got a date or somethin’?”
“Hey, Johnnie.” Danny took tissues from a pocket and wiped beads of perspiration from his forehead. He glanced at the clock on the wall behind the guard, rolling his feet from heel to toe.
“Give it up, Danny. Warm this old man’s dull night.”
Danny was wearing a dark suit that had belonged to his brother, Junior, plus a blue shirt he’d bought at Walmart that day and a tie he’d found in his brother-in-law’s closet. The suit jacket drooped from his bony shoulders. He’d gotten a haircut. His wavy, dark brown hair set off his features—still striking even after the weight he’d lost.
He coughed wetly into the tissues. “Johnnie, yesterday a reporter got in and took pictures of Junior. How’d that happen?”
“Man, I’m sorry ’bout that. Broadsided me. Wasn’t expecting reporters. Haven’t had to watch out for that sort of thing in a while. Corliss found the guy beside Junior’s bed. I was gonna tell your mom the next time she came by. I deleted the pictures off the guy’s camera. Think I did, anyway.”
