Cloaked in Malice (23 page)

The FBI would have to give us dates.

Okay, so at the beginning of this particular vision, there had been a woman wrapped in—ack, a larger version of the white-on-white cloak—whose face I could sort of see. She
resembled
Paisley, though she might be older, like Paisley’s grandmother Rose, the Parisian double agent. Or Paisley’s mother, kidnapped the night Paisley wore her white mink-trimmed cloak?

Suppose the splash of white in the photo behind the little girl in the cloak was not a wedding dress but an adult cloak that matched Paisley’s? That would say mother
-daughter outfits to me, but Paisley called the woman being shoved in the limo Mama. And that woman had not been wearing a white cloak.

And suppose Paisley controlled all of this, even my visions. There was a psychic knowledge to her that troubled me.

In fiction, the cute child is rarely the killer, which was what should have worried me. This wasn’t fiction. Real life is scarier. And we’d been going against type from the beginning.

I had one certainty: The woman swallowed by the ocean did in no way resemble the woman who called a baby
jolie
. Her, I would recognize. Not Jolie, but her nanny, for want of a better word.

We’d have to concentrate on narrowing down the live ones—though, really, how many were still alive at the time of my original vision? Even when Bepah lived on the island, I’d bet the Dogpatch Gang were all dead, except for Bepah, new and grisly thought.

Was he one of them?

I kept forgetting to take into account the family’s illusive thread to Dolly, who happened to be ageless, and a relative, judging by looks. So if living to be a centenarian was in the family DNA, Paisley’s parents and grandparents could conceivably be alive, right?

Wrong. Probably.

Except for Paisley’s father, who practically died in front of me/her.

Meanwhile, my leather-clad feet were wet, because the whirlpool had taken control of the boat, in which I stood—alone.

What had I done in throwing the only sailor overboard, a killer, sure, but I knew nothing about boats. I was going down without my tucking trench coat.

“Mad, Madeira?” Nick called from inside the waterspout as I tried not to swirl too deeply away and into the sea.

The water receded, and I could breathe again. I opened my eyes and saw Nick, his expression filled with concern. He sat in the gravel driveway near the side door to the farmhouse, holding me in his arms, wiping the “sick” off both of us with
his
trench coat. At least one of them got used.

“Well, Mad, I have to say this for you. You never woke barfing from a vision before.”

“That’s what you think,” Werner said, looking down at us. “Are you all right, Mad? What kind of vision?”

“Where’s Paisley?” I asked.

“I said, what kind of vision?” Werner spoke in a lowered tone as he hunched down close to us. “Tell me about the vision, Madeira.”

Thirty

Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.

—CECIL BEATON

“It’s a vision quest, really,” Nick said. “New Age kind of beliefs, like when you feel your loved ones are nearby. She’s got this idea that she might actually see her mother’s spirit if she tries hard enough.”

Werner squeezed my arm. “Give up trying to be a psychic, Mad. You know your mom’s here for you.” He stood again. “And frankly, you suck at it.”

I breathed a sigh of relief.

The clueless detective looked around. “Where did you say Paisley went?”

“She ran screaming for the medics when Mad lost consciousness,” Nick said.

Werner tried to hide his amusement with a cough. “Lucky
you. You’re probably going to get your vitals taken by a coroner.”

“Oh, great.”
After I drown, I’m checked out by a coroner. Wait a minute, was I the drowner or the drownee?

Nick and Werner were too amused for my peace; I’d never seen them so in sync, the dopes. “
Shut
up!”

“Ladybug, I think this situation is called poetic justice.”

I shoved my way out of Nick’s arms, leaving him flat on his back in the dirt, while Werner backed away from me, and I stood to fend off the coroners, plural, hotfooting their way toward me, Paisley on their heels.

“I’m okay,” I said. “Fine now. I’ll get checked out by my own doctor.”

“Good,” the cute one said, “because we hate when our patients talk back.”

The hunky coroners turned away, chuckling over the inside joke—I noticed Paisley had brought all men—who went back to checking her out.

She adored the attention, but she’d grown up practically alone here, so I could see why she would.

She liked it so much, she was about to let
five
coroners listen to her heartbeat, not to mention the FBI agents who wanted in on the “findings.”

“Paisley, remember Mam’s warnings.”

She rebuttoned her blouse. “Right.”

Maybe she did need to start from first grade.

“Care to tell me what happened in that vision?” Nick asked,
pulling me to my feet, hooking my arm from behind and propelling me away from the
Paisley Does the Crime Scene Unit
show.

“Madeira,” Nick snapped. “You had me worried as hell. I thought you were going to choke.”

“I didn’t.
You
should
stop
using the word ‘vision.’ And by the way, you stink.”

“Your fault, Ladybug. There’s a shower upstairs,” he said, wiggling his brows.

“Sure, we can get the Bates Motel sign from the cellar and I can wear some of Paisley’s old clothes afterward—no flipping thank you.”

My brother came up to us. “Sis, Werner told me what happened, and frankly, you’re not riding in my car smelling like that.” He opened his backpack. “You want to wear fatigues or a T-shirt with cargo pants or jeans?”

“Fatigues,” I said, touched by my brother’s offer. “I didn’t know you guys wore fatigues.”

“It’s a costume. Comes in handy.” He handed them to me. “Go inside, get sweet-smelling again, and put them on.”

A costume, I thought…like…a Fed might dress like the military to find a spy, while a spy might dress like a mobster to commit crimes…or the other way around. And around.

Maybe the mob and the CIA, or whatever covert spy ring Rose belonged to, weren’t collaborating, just trying to pin the blame on each other.

“I’ve got my fatigues with me, too.” Nick leaned close. “Life partners can match.”

“It makes them look dorky and like they’re trying too hard,” I said. “But the thought of us doing it gives me the warm fuzzies anyway. Let’s throw caution to the wind. Do you two always carry spare clothes?”

“Almost always,” Alex said, “especially heading into woody areas and unfamiliar turf. Today seemed to call for fatigues, but sometimes we need to look like civilians, which is why you had a choice.”

“You use the downstairs bathroom, Nick. I’ll use the one upstairs.” I opened the squeaky screen door.

Nick saluted me.

My brother and some of their cronies snickered. One of the guys made an off-color remark about uncooperative broads.

I grabbed Nick’s punching arm, and held him on the steps beside me.

“That’s my
sister
you’re talking about,” Alex snapped, and the Feds scattered like civilians in Red Square.

Twenty minutes later, Nick kissed me good-bye while Alex put Paisley in the backseat of his black SUV. I rode shotgun—particularly bad wording today. As Alex cleared the gates and drove away from Nightmare Alley, Coffin Farm, whatever the hell it might be, I didn’t think I’d ever been so grateful to leave anywhere.

“My parents are dead, aren’t they?” Paisley said from the backseat. “And I don’t mean Mam and Pap.”

“What makes you say that now?” I asked.

“I never concentrated so much on graves,” she said. “I got to seeing flashes of a man’s body in the snow, and a last look on a woman’s face, a frantic look. She called a name I think was mine. Something’s telling me they were my parents. That Bepah brought me here to keep me safe from whoever killed them.”

“Getting your memory back on your own is good,” Alex said. “Good job trying, but don’t believe your first memories as being definitive. The pieces will start to fit together in time.”

“’Kay,” she said. “Thanks.”

The ferry the FBI had commandeered for the day left the dock right after we boarded, with Alex’s SUV being the only vehicle on board. I breathed a sigh of relief, and Alex squeezed my hand. “Want to go topside for some fresh air?”

“I’d hate to have Paisley wake up alone in here.”

He wrote Paisley a note and set it beside her on the seat, we closed the car doors gently, and I led the way to the top deck so the sun could erase some of the gloom I couldn’t help carrying with me. Gloom that Paisley had exacerbated with her unfortunately correct memories.

“That place left us with a lot to assimilate,” I said. “Have you ever before come up against such a jumbled mass of dark contradictions and horrific assumptions?”

“That’s a leading question, sis, but yes, and that’s all I’m going to say on the matter.”

I closed my eyes and held my face to the blue sky, the warmth of the sun, the sea breeze turning my hair into a salty tangle, and I appreciated the serenity of having my brother beside me. I leaned shoulder to shoulder against him, both of us pushing back, one against the other.

This was pretty much about as mushy as we got, but I felt hugged, and cherished. “I get it,” I said, knowing better than to acknowledge our bond. “Nick’s the same way about your work, but this time, I’m in, and I may have a few brilliant and unique observations of my own.”

“I’ll grant you that,” Alex said. “But I’m not sure Scanlon will want you at the debriefing.”

“I’ll offer my brilliant deductions to Nick later, then.”

I could tell by the way Alex crossed the deck and checked his phone that my brother was super antsy. Still, I waited for him to say so.

“Sis, would you mind if I called Dad and Fee to pick you up in New London, so I can go straight to New Haven and Trish without backtracking to Mystick Falls?”

“Of course not. That’s a smart idea,” I said, though he’d nearly finished his conversation with my dad by then.

We heard a scream, shrill and carrying, despite the reverberation of the ferry’s motor. “Paisley,” I said.

I ran down both sets of the ferry’s narrow, red metal stairs, my brother right behind me, before we reached his SUV. I pulled open the door a bit, but Paisley would have fallen into my arms.

Seeing that, I did a fake-distressed two-step, as if I didn’t know where to put myself, and finagled Alex into her path before I opened the door all the way, and she fell into
his
arms.

Otherwise, I would have read her again, and I couldn’t, not in front of my brother. I didn’t have the strength for the exercise or the explanation.

Alex eyed me like I was nuts, but he held her and patted her back, his arms stiff, his stance as awkward as any man deeply in love with his wife might find necessary in such a situation.

Frankly, Alex shushed Paisley like a trooper, or an uninvolved Fed.

“Her heart’s pumping erratically,” he said. “She’s really scared.” My brother made a motion like he wanted to give her to me, but I backed away.

“I remembered,” she said, “or dreamed…something. Blood on snow, I think, then I was lifted into someone’s arms and carried fast away. Gunshots rang out behind us.”

“Is that all?” I asked, looking for new details.

“Isn’t that enough?” Alex asked.

“No, she’s right,” Paisley said. “I
should
know more.”

She’d verified my vision, to a point. Hers had to have been a memory, of course. Because Paisley wasn’t psychic. Was she?

Thirty-one