Cold Sight (27 page)

He thought of the cake. He thought of the cash.

He thought of the bruises. He thought of the bones.

Finally he said, “Tell you what, honey, why don’t you wrap up a piece for me to take along. I just remembered, I have somewhere to be.”

And, he thought,
some
one
to be.

Granville’s chief of police.

Chapter 11

Saturday, 7:15 p.m.

It was full dark by the time they found the house.

Aidan had driven Lexie up and down Old Terrytown Road, pulling into a few overgrown, nearly forgotten driveways, checking out ruins that appeared to have been untouched by human hands for decades. There had been no recent tire tracks, no footprints, no signs of life. When they’d shone flashlights through the hanging doors or broken window frames, they’d seen rotting wood, half-fallen walls, nests left by wintering animals long since gone. The insides of the structures appeared far too flimsy and decayed to house any secret meetings.

They had been about to give up, ready to go back and pick up the others, who were still searching for human remains in the reeds and woods, when his phone had signaled he had a text message. It had been Julia, with some advice from Morgan:
Head back this way, go another quarter mile from where you are now. The driveway is intentionally concealed by a downed tree.

And they’d found it. Right where Julia’s ghostly friend had said they would.

“I would never have even realized this place was back here,” Lexie whispered, visibly shaken.

He had the feeling she hadn’t quite accepted Morgan’s existence. Now she was beginning to understand. The dead guy wasn’t always reliable, sometimes disappearing when Julia seemed to need him most. But whenever he came back, he always had excellent information. He was already two-for-two today.

“The way that driveway is hidden, we never would have found it,” she added.

“Which is exactly what they intended when they put that huge tree down.”

It had been hollow. And easily moved, once he’d known to look for it.

There were no “Private Property” or “No Trespassing” signs. Nor did any kind of fence or chain try to keep people out. The men who used this place didn’t want anyone thinking there was any property worth trespassing on deep in these woods, so they’d simply made all evidence of its existence disappear.

“Who would ever have imagined
this
was back here?”

This
was an elegant old plantation house. The exterior almost fully intact, it stood about three hundred feet off the main road, behind a thick stand of thorny, dense trees, all decorated with tangles of Spanish moss as twisted and gray as an old terrorist’s beard.

The two-storied structure, graced with columns and also with wide verandahs on both the bottom and top floors, had once been white. And it had once been beautiful.

Time and neglect had dulled the house to a mottled gray—the color most resembling a corpse’s skin on this moonlit night. Moss and vines had encircled it in a thick, woodsy embrace. Runners clambered in all directions, climbing toward the sky, looking like veins pulsing with green blood.

Though no longer conventionally beautiful, the place remained darkly stunning. Mesmerizing, in fact. Unnatural and mysterious, the old plantation had seemed to become one with the woods at some point over the past century, as if the Georgia earth had reclaimed the land on which it stood, and the old house along with it.

Lexie said something else, but Aidan didn’t answer; he couldn’t. Because he had a hard time hearing her. His mind had opened up as soon as they’d rounded a curve and spied the house. The tension had grown exponentially when they’d driven past several small, decrepit buildings that he suspected had once served as slave quarters.

Something in him had known, intuitively, that they’d found what they’d been seeking. The pounding in his head and the pressure in his chest couldn’t be denied. He wasn’t sure why yet, but already he felt this haunting place was tainted, so ripe with evil and ugliness, it might as well have come equipped with a poison sign.

Poisoned earth
.

Knowing there was much to discover, he’d let the connection happen, anxious to learn any secrets hidden in this strange, desolate hideaway. Now, parked right outside the front door, he heard a cacophony of whispers that lingered here, hanging in the air like the remnants of a woman’s perfume after she had passed through a room.

There were so many voices. Dozens. Hundreds. Each sharing thoughts, moments, memories, emotions.

None sounded like they were from today and he would bet anything not a single soul was currently inside that house. These thoughts and memories didn’t feel immediate; they were weeks, months, years, and centuries old.

But they were still vivid. They hit him hard. Jerking back in the seat, he didn’t fight it. He kept his body relaxed and flowed with the sensations, knowing they weren’t his, weren’t personal, and couldn’t harm him physically. This wasn’t his version of reality; it belonged to countless other people who’d come to this place before him.

His eyes dropping closed, his breathing became shallow and open- mouthed. He pushed back against the pressure, finally breaking free of it. Getting that flying sensation as his consciousness spewed up and over the entire area like a geyser, he began to search, seeking answers, or at least entrances into the past.

Beside him, Lexie’s worry grew to something almost tangible, and he knew she was watching, fearful, wondering if she should do something. But he couldn’t tell her he was all right, couldn’t let her know this was his version of normal. He just had to ride it out.

Feeling like he was being pummeled by tiny pebbles, he tried to evade the impressions that wouldn’t help him. He began to pick and choose the remnants, discarding the wispy, self-indulgent thoughts of Southern belles in their ball gowns, and the heartbreaking ones of the slaves who’d once worked the place. He ignored the smells of the fields and unwashed bodies, evaded the painful lash of the whip. Aidan didn’t let himself think about it or acknowledge just how doomed to darkness and suffering this genteel, lovely estate had been from the moment it had been conceived.

He moved forward, swirling through time, pushing on into decay and silence, when the grand old dwelling had been abandoned and the trees had thickened and closed in around it. A little further—memories of curious children, vandals, thieves. Breaking glass and falling beams. And every so often, rough male voices, as if despite the abandonment, over the decades the place had often been used by men looking to abuse women.

Finally, he entered a recent time. Modern. He heard ugly, cruel laughter and loud, twangy music. Smelled sweat and sex.

And he burned. For an infinitesimal second, he felt like his feet were being held over an open flame, his skin melting off his bones, though he had noticed no burned remnants or other evidence of fire.

A man’s voice, raucous and deafening, confirmed he had arrived in the present day. Aidan’s instinctive reaction was to lift his hands to his ears. Of course, that wouldn’t block out something that existed only as a memory inside his mind. Besides, he had to listen. He needed to.

Woo-ee, boys, would you look at that one? Look at those titties. Nothin’ store-bought about ’em. No plastic surgeon ever made anything so fine. Girl, come on over here and show my son here what you got between your pretty little legs.

Other voices joined in, talking about their delight in their oh-so-special club. Laughter and brutal lust made animals of men the world probably saw as decent. They’d been here a hundred and fifty years later, but the words and tone sounded the same as the echoes from the slave quarters.

These monsters had passed along their warped tastes to their own sons, keeping the cruelty alive generation after generation.

He groaned, overwhelmed by a sense of fear that had consumed that nameless, faceless girl, knowing why she was afraid. She had been abused—slapped, pushed, and dragged. Rough hands had torn at her clothes and forced her down. Anguish overwhelmed her.

Someone else’s tears burned Aidan’s eyes; another person’s screams wanted to erupt from his mouth.

He couldn’t do this for much longer.

“Vonnie,” he whispered, certain the key to her disappearance was here, needing to find it.

A new voice intruded, and suddenly it all became clear.

He’d
already
found her.

Mama, why? Why’d you do this to me? Please. No, please, don’t touch me! I don’t want to. Don’t make me! That hurts, oh God, Mama!

His eyes flew open as Vonnie’s voice—and everything else—disappeared. Aidan stared forward, unseeing. All the sounds, the words, and impressions settled into place in his mind, forming a picture, one he knew would never leave him. Just as the echoes of her tearful, girlish pleas would never leave him.

He understood now, saw the complete truth of this secret club and the men who came here. Saw what they wanted and what they did and who they did it to. They’d done it to Vonnie Jackson, long before she’d disappeared.

God, had that poor kid never had a happy day in her entire life?

“Aidan?” Lexie whispered. She reached for him, putting a hand on his arm, pulling back when she felt his undeniably tense body. He couldn’t stop fisting and un-fisting his hands, filled with anger he was desperate to release, as he’d released it against that thug in the alley earlier. Not at her, of course. God, no. But at the men whose voices he’d just heard.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

Taking a few deep, steady breaths, he nodded. His pounding heart slowed and he forced himself to relax, release his fingers, unclench his muscles. “Yeah.”

“What happened?”

Huh. He couldn’t explain it in a million years. Not to anyone, not even her, whose mind had melded with his the previous night. He didn’t know that he could find the words to describe what it was like to have hundreds of voices all talking in his head at once. Especially when those voices had revealed some of the ugliest, most vicious memories of their lives, things that would confirm the worst pessimist’s opinion of the vileness of the human race.

Sometimes he had to wonder if his parents had been right, and his ability was a punishment for some kind of original sin more than anything else. There were things he’d rather have gone to his grave not knowing. He desperately wanted to take a shower to wash clean the filth and corruption that seemed stuck to him now, as if he’d walked into a huge spiderweb and its stringy remnants clung to every inch of him.

Let it go. You know what to do.

He counted backward from a hundred, concentrating on the present, pushing all the rest away. There was only now, only this, only people to help, not sadness for those he couldn’t.

The one sure way he was ever able to get past something so traumatic was to focus on the good he did with his ability. The lost people he’d found, the terrified families to whom he’d provided answers and given closure.

He knew he could do at least one more good thing with it—find out what had happened to Vonnie and all the other missing girls who, he now suspected, had been subjected to the same pain, degradation, and rape.

Finally, he was able to move completely past it, his mind clearing and his fury dissipating. He no longer had to fight for control, for peace. He simply attained it between one breath and the next, the promise of doing something about what he’d heard—attaining justice—bringing him completely back to himself.

Beside him, Lexie was staring out the window, gazing at the moon-brightened shadows of the wind-whipped trees dancing across the front of the house. “This is the place, isn’t it?”

“Yes. We found the clubhouse.”

“How can something intended to be so lovely,” she whispered, “be so awful?”

“More awful than you can possibly imagine,” he replied, shaking his head slowly. “We should go. We need to pick up the others and bring them back here.”

She nodded, not asking any more questions, as if knowing he was simply incapable of answering them. “Good idea. That house is too big for just the two of us to explore.”

True. But that hadn’t been why he’d decided they needed to go get Julia, Mick, and Olivia.

He’d be willing to bet that old building contained an updated room—or several—probably lit by generator power, which contained all the modern conveniences sexual sadists would need. Bad enough for him, or Lexie, or anyone else to be exposed to any object in that room. He couldn’t imagine what it would be like for Mick, who, with a single touch, would see exactly how those objects had been used in the past. And who’d used them.

Hearing had been bad enough. Seeing it was more than he could stomach. But that was Mick’s gig, the reason he’d come here.

Even more disturbing, though, would be if they did find any human remains, Jessie Leonard’s or anybody else’s. Because then it would be Olivia’s turn to touch. Worse, it would be Olivia’s turn to take the place of the victim and
feel
everything she’d felt, for the last one hundred and thirty seconds of her life.

God, what an awful, dark power
.

Olivia Wainwright had died many deaths in the two years that he’d known her. The quiet woman had been stabbed, shot, strangled, drowned. Brutalized. He found it amazing she hadn’t ended up in a psych ward. Or—considering he sometimes wondered if being completely drenched in so much pain and death wouldn’t drive a weaker person to suicide—in the morgue.

Not Olivia. Instead, she kept coming to work every day, trying to solve those murders, help the people whose final two minutes and ten seconds she’d shared.

It shouldn’t come to that tonight, however. He doubted they’d find any remains. Not because he didn’t think any murders could have been committed in this place, but because he assumed anybody who’d committed them would have disposed of the evidence. There might be shallow graves on the property, but they wouldn’t find them in the dark.