Dark Dreamer (30 page)

“We found out about you within twenty-four hours. So we may not be the only ones.”

“You knew before the FBI director told you?”

Marvin made a scornful sound. “Not much happens in Quantico that we don’t know about. And when you and your sister appeared in that television footage of Cordwell’s arrest…that was all the confirmation we needed.”

It occurred to Phoebe then that people who made an art form of spying on others could probably find out anything they wanted if they had the power of the government behind them. The CIA probably knew everything about her. She would never have a private life again.

“What if I’m wrong about the bomb?” she asked, picturing a squad of men breaking down a door and terrorizing an innocent Arab American family on the strength of something she’d seen under hypnosis.

“You’re not,” Marvin said. “We authenticated a few details before we informed the Department of Defense. But even if you were, the deal stands.”

Phoebe contained her relief. One thing she’d learned, being around Marvin and his henchmen, was that wearing a poker face helped. “So, what happens now? We have this meeting, then what?”

“The attorney general will issue arrest warrants once he’s satisfied that we have reasonable cause.”

“But what if the terrorists try to do something?”

“Your friend Agent Jefferson is setting up the surveillance operation with Eve Kent as we speak. The suspects aren’t going anywhere without us knowing.”

Phoebe was happy they’d involved Vernell, and she could imagine Eve’s satisfaction with finally having the chance to catch some terrorists in the act. She hadn’t expected her session with Dr. Karnovich to yield any real information, but to her astonishment, she was visited by a Muslim woman who had died when the Twin Towers collapsed. Since then, the woman had hung around a mosque in Nashville where her son prayed. There she had overheard two men who belonged to an al-Qaeda cell. It seemed as if they were involved in something big. She took Phoebe to a place where they hid materials. These were clearly radioactive.

Marvin had been stupefied when she gave him the address and described the canisters. His hands had even quivered as he took notes. Even now his face gave away something of his disquiet.

Curious about his role, she asked, “Marvin, what exactly is your job?”

“Right now, my job is to deliver you to the meeting in one piece.”

“Thanks for sharing.”

Phoebe tried to imagine the man next to her going home to a wife, and children who called him Daddy and stretched their arms out so they could be flipped up into the air. No, she decided, there was just him. If he ever went home it would be to a neat apartment devoid of personality. He would have a flat-screen TV and a collection of workout DVDs. Instead of houseplants, his few polished surfaces would feature one of those mind puzzles and maybe a wedding photo of his parents in a modern silver frame, or people meant to look like parents so his real ones were protected. Was Marvin Perry even his name?

“Those men in the Black Hawk that day you came to Islesboro. They weren’t FBI trainees, were they?” she asked.

“No, they were Marines from a special ops unit we work with sometimes.”

Phoebe almost laughed. Only it wasn’t really funny. The CIA had sent in a team of military commandos to pick her up. Were they expecting a fight? Would they have marched her to their chopper at gunpoint?

Appalled, she asked, “Was that supposed to scare me?”

“Not at all.” Marvin seemed genuinely surprised. “Our assignment was to provide security.”

“Is that what’s happening now too?"  Phoebe gestured toward the cars at their front and rear. Each was full of agents. "It’s not like I’d try and escape or anything."

“Escape is not the primary risk."

Phoebe sighed. Marvin had already given her the scary lecture on abduction a few times and she didn’t want to get him started again, so she asked,  "Where exactly are we going now, anyway?"

“Our meeting is at the Pentagon,” Marvin informed her without inflection.

“The Pentagon?” Phoebe croaked. Wait till Cara heard about this. “I didn’t think people like me were allowed there?”

“You have a high security clearance, and we’re under DOD orders.”

Department of Defense. Phoebe was getting used to the weird acronyms and jargon. “Who’s the meeting with?”

“You don’t need to know at this time.”

*

“Un-fucking-believable.” Rowe stared around the shambles of her kitchen.

Every cupboard door was wide open, its contents smashed on the floor. Shards of glass and broken crockery extended from the sink counter to the wall cabinets on the far side. A couple of carving knives were buried in the door. The place looked like a tornado had hit it. Surely this was not Juliet’s doing.

Livid, she banged her fist on the counter and yelled, “Enough! This is my house, and I am not being driven out by a ghost who has toddler tantrums.”

She kicked a path through the remains of her favorite dinner set and wineglasses, shoved open the rotting back door, and stalked across the frozen yard to the carriage house. There, among her seldom-used tools, she found a crowbar, a sledgehammer, and some heavy suede gloves. She lugged these items back to the kitchen and set them on the counter, then hauled every freestanding piece of furniture outdoors, leaving only her refrigerator in the room. When she was done, she swept the breakage into a heap and wrapped the fragments in newspaper before filling a couple of huge trash bags with them.

“Okay,” she announced to the peeling walls, “you’ve had your turn. Now it’s mine.”

She pulled on her gloves, picked up the crowbar, and began systematically ripping out the cabinetry. Half of it was worm eaten, so it fell easily from the nails that held it in place. Fueled by rage, she carried the timber outside, hurling it onto a pile in the middle of the yard.

As the day progressed the pile grew higher until all that was left of her kitchen were bare walls and floorboards. Having a blast, she ripped out the back door and took a sledgehammer to the frame. Something about the way the door was recessed had always struck her as odd, but she had assumed poor building design. The wall on one side was a couple of feet deep, but on the other it was flush with the counter. Maybe there had once been a pantry, she mused, and it had been boarded over to provide a wall for a table and chairs. She scratched away some paint and paper and found bricks and mortar. Whoever had wanted to get rid of the pantry had made sure it was permanent.

Curious, she lifted the sledgehammer and took a swing at the bricks around the door frame, amazed when several easily caved in, revealing a hollow behind. She was about to open the hole up some more when a voice arrested her.

“Jeez, Louise.” Dwayne stepped into the room, his sky blue eyes wide below an advancing tide of carrot hair. Apparently his mother had been too busy to give him a trim recently.

“Dude, what’s up?” Earl lowered a couple of steel cases to the floor and sized up Rowe like he was mentally taking measurements for a straitjacket.

“I’m taking this wall out,” Rowe said. “I can’t wait for the builders to come in March. Whatever is in this shitheap of a room tried to kill me the other night.”

“Right,” Dwayne drawled in a soothing tone. “Let’s just stop for a moment and take a breath. Are you feeling okay?”

An excellent question.

“His mom’s a shrink.” Earl just threw it out there, rubbing his chin with a pudgy knuckle.

Dwayne manufactured a cough. “Uh…here’s what I’m thinking. We take some readings in here and maybe we discuss what you’ve found out about the Dancer and we try talking to her. Then we can tear the place apart if you still want to.”

Earl plucked one of the carving knives from the door. “Class five, my friends. Maybe even demonic.” He opened one of his cases and hauled out a bunch of photographs. Flipping through them, he said, “We caught a bunch of globules on film in here. Take a look.”

Rowe studied the example he handed over. Weird circular forms floated all over the picture as if light spots had rained on the camera lens. Amazed, she said, “This is the ghost?”

“Not exactly,” Earl answered. “It’s energy disturbance. When we get this shit on a photo, we know we’re onto something.”

“So, what have you got on the Dancer?” Dwayne asked her.

“A friend of mine was over here. She’s the sensitive type. She found something in the ballroom.”

Rowe led the para-nerds down the hallway, sliding her feet sideways to shift broken glass out of the way. She was thankful she’d left the dogs at Phoebe’s.

Earl gleefully helped clear their path. “Man, this entity really can’t handle being ignored. I’ve had girlfriends like that.”

Doubting it, Rowe opened the ballroom doors and counted the wood panels until she found Juliet’s hiding place. “The Dancer is Juliet Baker. She was pregnant.” Rowe removed the panel. “She hid some stuff in here. Her diary, some letters, and a few baby garments.”

“She was pregnant when she died?” Dwayne was agog.

“No. She had the baby, and her maid must have taken it to the Baker’s neighbor. Mrs. Adams adopted the child.”

Dwayne could not suppress his excitement. “Man, you’ve cracked this wide open. I’m guessing the baby is what it’s all about.”

“There’s something else. I don’t think it was Juliet who died in the snow. I think it could have been Becky O’Halloran, the maid. I think Mr. Baker killed the girl, and Juliet blamed herself, and that’s why her ghost is hanging around.”

Her companions stared at her, not quite willing to suspend disbelief.

“I don’t have any direct evidence.” Rowe avoided mentioning Phoebe. If the local paranormal community got wind of a psychic who was the real thing, they would never leave her alone.

Earl asked, “Why would Baker whack the maid?”

The pearl story would be a problem to explain without revealing Phoebe, so Rowe said, “He found out about the baby and went off. He killed Becky because she was the one covering everything up. Maybe he was trying to find out where the baby was and she wouldn’t tell him.”

“The bad-tempered type.” Dwayne ran with it. “Violent. Drinking, maybe.”

“And it turned out to be the perfect solution to his problems,” Rowe said. “He claims the body is Juliet’s and sends her off in disgrace to start a new life someplace where no one will ask any questions.”

“This is what the Dancer’s been trying to tell people.” Dwayne seemed convinced.

“Becky’s mother suspected,” Rowe said. “She must have thought her daughter was dead and that Thomas Baker did it. That’s why her letters are full of talk about his sin.”

“An exhumation,” Earl declared. “That’s how we can prove it. There are O’Hallorans all along the Midcoast. We could compare DNA with theirs and with your neighbors. That way we’d know for sure who’s buried in there.”

“Yeah, except how do we get a court order?” Dwayne frowned. “We need some actual proof that it could be Becky O’Halloran.”

“And we can only get that if we trace Juliet.” Rowe sighed. She had already thought this through and knew they were at an impasse. If the dead girl was Becky, that meant Juliet had vanished into thin air.

They shared a despondent silence for a few moments.

Eventually Dwayne broke ranks, his expression brooding. “How do we explain the activity in the kitchen? Did he, uh…kill Becky there? If he did, there could be blood. That would prove a crime had occurred, and if they matched the blood to O’Halloran DNA, we could have a case.”

Rowe pictured the maid as Phoebe had described her, tied up and left to die in the snow. How did that fit with Phoebe’s other vision of blood on the kitchen floor and someone chasing her out of the house? Did Baker attack Becky in the kitchen? Did he run outdoors after her and tie her up, leaving her to freeze to death so it would look like an accident? Where was Juliet when all of this happened?

She went through Phoebe’s account once more in her mind and was suddenly blinded by the obvious. She turned to Earl. “That recording you made in the kitchen. The voice that yells
Run
…” She got to her feet and the guys hastily followed suit. “I think I know what happened in there.”

They hurried along the hall to the kitchen. Rowe pointed at the hole in the brick façade. “There’s a cavity behind that wall. Let’s open it up.”

Her companions gave her strange looks, but who were they to question Rowe Devlin, horror queen? Carefully they tapped out brick after brick until they had opened up a hole large enough to admit their heads.

Rowe shone her flashlight into the cavity and felt the air flee her lungs. A mummified woman lay in a fetal position on the floor, enshrouded in a dusty nightgown. “Juliet,” she whispered.

*

“She probably lived for a few days after she was walled in.” The medical examiner indicated scratches on the woodwork around the bricks. “Actual cause of death is not apparent at this time.”

One of the detectives approached Rowe, a compact young woman with sparrow brown hair and bright dark eyes. “We’ll need to bring a crime scene team in, Ms. Devlin. I’m sorry for the inconvenience.”

“No problem.” Rowe was having trouble holding back tears. Surprised by the strength of her emotions, she said, “If you don’t mind, I’m going to step outside.”