Wolf Moon Rising (40 page)

He, too, had a shotgun in his hands and fl anked by his hench-

men, he was fi ring at the sheriff ’s car parked by the pool, shak-

ing his fi st and bellowing words she could not understand.

“Go back!” Liz screamed at Quentin. “We have to stop

Daddy!”

“We can’t!” he hollered, “we’ve got to save the whiskey.” And

he gunned the engine.

Jackie found her voice. “A man back here’s been hurt,” but

Quentin ignored her, and Liz cried out over the cacophony.

“Just go around one more time! He’s out- of- his- mind drunk.

He’s crazy when he’s like this. No telling what he’ll do.”

But Quentin steered the car out of the drive and onto the

road. “We barely got out of there alive,” he shouted. “We’re not

going back!”

“No, no, we must!” Liz slid her body next to the door beside

Quentin’s, leaned in the window, and whispered something in

his ear. Jackie felt a pang of jealousy when she saw Liz kissing

Quentin’s neck, and she remembered their plan to run away.

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What ever she said to Quentin, he took his foot off the gas and

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stopped the car.

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“Please, my darling, just for me,” Liz said, pleading. “Turn

the car around. I can cover us.” And she lifted her revolver and

pulled back on the hammer.

Quentin backed up and spun the car, and Jackie fell against

the door, grabbing for the handle. Liz hung on to the window,

hitched her back against the mirror, and kept the gun aimed

toward the pool as they sped back toward the house. “Oh no!”

she cried. “What’s he doing?”

An enormous automobile was heading across the lawn.

Jamison Collins was in the back of a huge black Packard with

its top folded back, standing up in the rear seat like the dictator of a third world country riding in a motorcade. He still had his

shotgun and he was puffi

ng on a cigar. His face was red with

rage and his silver hair fl ashed in the moonlight.

Th

ere were two men in the front seat; the man behind the

wheel was wearing a pink waistcoat and the other man a plaid

jacket. Th

e Packard fl ew past the Duesenberg, then stopped and

backed furiously, its engine thundering. “Get the hell out of

here,” Jamison roared at his daughter. “Th

at goddamn Everclear

is 190 proof!”

Quentin pulled Liz into the car beside him and slammed

the door, and then he stepped on the gas. Jackie pushed the dy-

ing man off her and leaned out of the back window in time to

see Jamison Collins’s Packard bump over the grass toward the

pool house. As though he were an actor on the stage, Liz’s ele-

gant father stood up in the back seat, an imposing leading man,

his silver hair glowing, his shotgun at the ready, but now he had

a grin on his face like he ruled the world.

Just as his car neared the building, she saw him lean out and

toss his cigar in the air. Th

e red spark fl ew through the dark like

a tiny rocket, soared over the heads of the men smashing bar-

rels, and landed at the pool house door. Th

ere was an enormous

poof!
and a rolling ball of fi re fl ared in the sky, then an explosion rocked the ground. Th

e whole interior was suddenly alive with

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blue and orange fl ames fl oating out on the deck, lapping at the

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Lara Parker

tile, swiveling across the water of the pool and hovering over

the grass like a river of phosphorescence. She could see fi gures

dancing in black silhouettes against the blaze, their bodies gy-

rating to the music of the inferno, and the screaming never

stopped until they were too far away to hear it anymore.

The girls sat in the back of the careening car on the crates of

whiskey. “Th

ose guys weren’t the police,” Liz shouted over

the sound of the engine. “Th

ey were dressed up like cops, but

they stole those uniforms. Th

ey stole that police car. Th

ey’re the

Mafi a! Daddy’s warned me about them.”

Th

en Quentin chimed in. “Th

ey killed the real cops, execu-

tion style, but those cops were already on the lam, trying to take off with the hooch. I think a few innocent people may have bit

the dust back there, but not many.” He looked over at Liz and

winked. “If your daddy wasn’t a Collins . . .”

It wasn’t the romantic ride Liz had promised earlier in her

bedroom— her voice breathy with excitement— but a tense race

against time. Jackie clung to the leather armrest and held her

breath while the bleeding man bounced beside her on the seat. Th

e

green automobile roared through the night and showed what it

was bred for. Th

ey must have been going a hundred miles an hour.

“Hey, it’s okay,” said Quentin. “Th

ey all kept each other oc-

cupied long enough for us to get away with the Canadian.”

Jackie felt the man collapse against her and she leaned over

and yelled through the window. “Th

ere’s someone back here

who’s hurt,” but her complaint went unacknowledged. Desper-

ately, she tried to lift his body off hers, but he had her pinned

against the window. She yelled “Quentin! Liz! Help me!”

through the cowl, but they did not seem to hear her.

Images of the shootout at the pool were still fresh in Jackie’s

mind: the naked swimmers clinging to one another; the cops

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trying to herd them out the door, shouting orders though bull-

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horns; the sirens from the cop cars and the lights fl ashing. Jackie

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Dark Shadows: Wolf Moon Rising

had seen blood in the water and a body fl oating facedown. She felt along the leather of the seat and her hand found a sticky substance before she jerked it away, trying not to think about the wounded

man propped against her. With a mighty shove she pushed him

over on the seat. He did not seem to be breathing.

She had been frightened ever since the magic show. She

kept thinking of the magician everyone had gone off and left to

drown, the bulging eyes, the expression of astonishment. Th

e

glamorous party had turned into a nightmare, and nothing was

making sense. She hoped David was safe, and she clung to the

feeling that she should stay with the Duesenberg and he would

fi nd her.

At fi rst Jackie had thought she had escaped into a beautiful

dream. Her other lonely existence was a dim memory and she

dreaded going back to it. She was sharing everything with Liz,

who had embraced her as a confi dante and a sister, Liz who was

reckless and cynical and fl ippant and brave, a girl like no one

she had ever known. To be in her presence was to suff er pangs

of jealousy and inadequacy. She seemed so sure of herself, so

amused, and when her eyes fell on Jackie or she leaned in to

embrace her, a shock of electricity passed out of her and into the

younger girl.

As the car sped down the road, Jackie kept thinking of the

letter Quentin had written to Liz, a love letter that made her

ache with envy. Over and over in her mind she repeated the

words, “I would die for you. I would kill for you.” Imagine a man

of such moods, so handsome and virile, loving you in that way.

She thought of Liz in his arms, and her heart fl uttered in her

throat.

Now it was clear why Quentin had wanted to fi nd the por-

trait. It was enchanted; it aged while he remained young. She had

known a very diff erent Quentin in her own time, and she had

only met Elizabeth Stoddard once— a much older woman, re-

served and distant. Something melancholy about her. Was it the

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loss of her only love? To night they seemed so passionate, so

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Lara Parker

obsessed with one another. Liz had told her— smiling with gentle

assurance, something she knew she would never forget— that

someday she, too, would fi nd a great love. Because of those words, she thought a life still waited for her, if she could return to her own time.

Th

ey pulled into the drive of the Old House and Jackie al-

most failed to recognize where she lived. Th

e huge columns were

the same, and the high cornice, but the house was in a state of

severe decay— peeling paint and black mold on the brick and

cracked plaster; it was the Old House before the fi re and— of

course— before the restoration.

Once inside the gloomy mansion, which had no electricity,

only candlelight, she followed Liz through musty rooms fi lled

with dust and cobwebs to the basement and to a stairway to a

back entrance that Jackie had never seen.

Quentin had parked the Duesenberg by the secret door and

Jackie watched the men loading the bottles. Whiskey disap-

peared beneath the front seat as well, wrapped in burlap to keep

the bottles from breaking, and still damp from fl oating in the

sea. It all seemed so hard to believe, a schooner dumping crates

and wooden barrels overboard and letting them wash ashore,

where bootleggers could fi sh them out of the surf. It was even

more incredible that men would risk their lives to scavenge and

sell that same whiskey in the speakeasies.

Th

inking she would have to help if they were to return to

Collinwood, she began loading bottles as well, packing them

into a square sedan parked at the entrance, its back doors propped

open. It was a large black hearse with fl oral scrolls carved in ebony across the top molding and, on the sides, a relief of a double-

draped curtain pulled back with tasseled ropes where one could

peek in at the corpse. Except there was no body. Th

ere was a

coffi

n inside, but it was loaded with bourbon.

Th

ree workers were in a frenzy transferring bottles while

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she and Liz arranged them in rows. When the coffi

n was fi lled

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to the brim, they closed it up and then they placed glass jugs full

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Dark Shadows: Wolf Moon Rising

of a honey- colored liquid snugly around it, and bourbon whiskey

in barrels with the date stamped on the side. Th

ey covered the

jugs with a black cloth and added some barrels marked sugar,

rice, and flour behind the casket, before they bolted the

hearse’s door.

Jackie watched in amazement as Quentin lifted up the back

seat of the Duesenberg and stowed more bundled booze next to

the fl oorboards. To her surprise, the wounded man was gone.

“What happened to that man who was back there?” she

asked Quentin.

“Th

e bulls took him for a ride.”

“What?”

“Afraid he didn’t make it, Baby.”

Jackie felt faint. He was the man who had died in the car.

She had felt it that night with David when they had parked next

to the graveyard.
David.
Where was he? Anxiety fl ooded

through her. As engrossing as this pantomime of smuggling

was, somehow she had to shake it off and get back to him. Th

e

longer they remained in the past, the more dangerous it became.

Quentin walked around and fi lled the leather satchel hang-

ing on the back with several more bottles. One of the workers

got in the front seat with Quentin, the girls climbed in back,

and, with the top down, the Duesenberg took off behind the

hearse. As they drove off across the lawn, Jackie looked back

and saw the body of the man lying beside the road. Suddenly

the air in the car turned to water rushing through her ears.

From the back seat Jackie watched the speedometer creep up

from sixty to seventy- fi ve as the car hurtled down the road, the

shadows of trees fl ying past, the night air thick with moisture, a rank humidity that created a palpable heat. Th

e moon was a

white bowl, rough along the fading edge as though it were fi lled

with shaved ice. Jackie watched Liz’s face in the moonlight, the

wind ruffl

ing her golden white waves of short hair. Her skin

was as luminous as the moon, and her determined expression

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made her seem incredibly brave.

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Lara Parker

Th

ey were both thrown forward with a lurch when Quentin

cursed and stepped on the brake. Th

e car shuddered and swiv-

eled as it slowed to a stop behind the hearse, and Quentin

turned around and said under his breath, “It’s all right. Just stay very quiet, and let me do the talking. Pray they’re not bluenoses.

And look sad. A few tears of mourning from the girls would be

a welcome embellishment.”

Th

ough the windshield Jackie could see a row of motorcycle