Darkness Rising (The East Salem Trilogy) (27 page)

When the cab turned into Tommy’s drive, pausing at the gate, Dani pulled over, fifty yards behind it. There was nowhere for her to hide, she realized, but there was also no reason to hide. She started making her three-point turn to head back to the train station when she saw a figure get out of the back of the cab and walk to the intercom on Tommy’s gate. It was a woman wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap, with her blond ponytail looped through the hole in the back of the cap, but Dani knew from the way the ponytail bounced, and the way the woman bounced when she walked, and the way she smiled to the cabbie as she asked him to wait, that it was Cassandra Morton.

Dani stopped in the middle of the road, shocked, then jerked her steering wheel hard to get pointed in the right direction and stomped on the gas.

“Surprise!” Cassandra said. “What’s that?”

“This?” Tommy said. “Nothing.” He lowered the RAZ-IR PRO 2 he’d been pointing at his ex, closed the screen, and turned it off. Cassandra was still trouble, he knew, but according to the scanner, not of the supernatural kind. “What brings you here?” he said, trying to sound welcoming.

“You’ve got a home in me,” she said. “That’s what you said.”

“I did indeed,” he said, smiling gamely. “
If you ever need a place to stay, or to hide, I’m your man
,” he’d vowed—a long time ago. Usually people don’t take you up on offers like that. “Come in,” he said as he reached for her suitcase. “Here, let me get that.”

He lifted her bag and grimaced a bit for comic effect. As they stepped into the kitchen, Tommy congratulated himself for remembering to put Aunt Ruth’s guns back in the broom closet as the cab pulled up.

She looked around. “I like what you’ve done to the place.”

“You mean, cleaned it?”

“Tom, if this is inconvenient, tell me,” she said. “I know I should have called first, but it would have ruined the surprise. At least I knew when you called me and hung up last night that I wasn’t completely off your radar.”

“I called you? I didn’t call you.”

“Your private number is on my call log,” she said, confused.

“I must have pocket-dialed. Seriously, Cass—I didn’t call you.”

“Oh no,” she said, her mouth turning down. “I thought—”

“It’s okay, though,” Tommy said. “It’s all good. Don’t worry about it.”

“Is this a bad time?”

He couldn’t help laughing.

“Oh dear,” she said. “It
is
a bad time, isn’t it? Let me call the cabbie back before he gets too far.”

“Cass, it’s all right,” he said. “But yeah, it’s not a good time. It’s too much to explain right now. But it’s obviously not a good time for you either, is it?”

Cassandra was, generally speaking, a loving, caring person, but she was also accustomed to being the center of attention. Tommy had figured out early in their relationship how easy it was to change the subject, any subject, by putting the spotlight back on the actress who’d always been the prettiest woman in the room no matter how big the room was.

“You’ve heard?” she said.

“Only what I try not to read in the tabloids.”

“I thought you didn’t read the tabs.”

“Actually, Carl told me,” Tommy said. “He was one of those one-named Brazilian soccer guys, right? Like Kaka, or Poo-poo . . .”

“His name shall not be spoken,” she said.

Tommy nodded in agreement. “I thought you were in LA.”

“I’m going to be on Broadway,” she said. “I’m doing a month in
South Pacific
as Nellie Forbush. My agent says it’s something all us Hollywood types have to do these days. We’re required to go on all the talk shows and say how much we love the theater.”

“You don’t?”

“Right now, I’m terrified. Not just about what the critics might say. I’ve never sung in public.”

“You have a beautiful voice.”

“Well, that’s very nice of you to say. You are one of the few people who’ve heard it.” Her eyes fell on a woman’s purse on the counter. “Do you have a guest?” she said. “I really should have called. I’m so sorry.”

“That’s my aunt’s,” Tommy said. “But yes, I do have some people staying for a few days. You remember Carl?”

“I do. How is he?”

“He’s good. At least that’s what he wants us to think. He still has a few . . .”

“Demons? Don’t we all?” Cassandra said. “But I’m working on mine. I wanted to tell you I’ve taken a great many new steps since we last spoke. Apart from a One-a-Day Flintstones gummy vitamin, I am completely pill-free. I sleep like a baby and I exercise and I eat much better too. The tabloids hate me—they have nothing to say about me anymore. I’m completely boring.”

“That’s good, Cass. Really good.”

“I’ve started going to church again too,” she said. “With my schedule I can’t go every Sunday, but I go when I can. I like it. I still have a lot of questions, but I’m back on track, you might say. And I have you to thank for all of it.”

“You’re the one who made the changes.”

“Well, you never preached,” she said. “And I appreciate that. Unlike all the other men who’ve tried to tell me how to live. You just set a good example and trusted me to decide for myself.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” he said. An awkward silence followed.

“I was thinking I might stay the weekend and we could catch up,” she finally said. “But I guess that’s a no-go. I still might stay the weekend somewhere. You wouldn’t believe how good it feels to get out of the city.”

“I can take you over to the Peter Keeler, if you’d like.”

Cassandra saw the wooden box with the inlaid Celtic cross on the food island. “That’s beautiful,” she said. She moved to have a closer look and traced the cross and the circle with her little finger. “Where’d you get it? What kind of wood is it?”

“Tag sale,” he said. “Not sure what it’s made of. Let me get my coat and I’ll drive you.”

Trying not to rouse Cassandra’s curiosity, he casually picked up the box along with a stack of newspapers and brought them into the study. With a glance over his shoulder to make sure she hadn’t followed him, he moved a mirror on the wall to reveal a hidden safe. The man who’d built the house had been running a Ponzi scheme, but ended up swindling a Mexican drug cartel that was using him to launder their money, or so they thought. The Ponzi schemer had multiple reasons to be nervous, so in addition to the security system, he’d installed a large wall safe to hold his ill-gotten gains. Tommy’s friends had laughed when he’d showed it to them, and asked him if he had any revolving bookcases hiding secret passageways.

The safe had two dials, one with letters and the other with numbers. He’d had the combination changed to Bond 007. The safe contained his Super Bowl rings, a folder of legal documents including his will, his mother’s diary, his high school yearbook with the embarrassing heart drawn around Dani’s picture with a red Sharpie, and a book of poems he’d written in middle school that he should have burned a long time ago but couldn’t. He
put Abbie’s box in the safe, which he no longer thought of as safe, given the adversaries he was up against, but was saf
er
than anywhere else he could think of.

He grabbed a coat and walked back to the kitchen where he could hear his aunt talking to his ex.

“I’d introduce you, but I see you’ve met,” he said.

“Your aunt was just telling me about Dani,” Cassandra said. Tommy flinched, but then realized he was glad that Aunt Ruth had broken the news for him. “She sounds great. Are you going to let me meet her?”

“I don’t know,” Tommy said. “She’s been really busy lately. Maybe. Sure.”

“Well, then you must tell me
everything
about her on our way to the inn,” she said, grabbing her suitcase. “Your father is in Texas? How’s he doing?”

On the way to the inn they talked mostly about Dani. Taking care not to violate anything Dani might have told him in confidence, and steering clear of any issues she might consider nobody’s business but hers, or theirs, Tommy told Cassandra that he’d met the right woman and knew she was the best thing that had ever happened to him, or ever could.

“I’m happy for you, Tom,” Cassandra said, and sounded like she meant it. “You know what they say. Everyone has a purpose, even if it’s only to set a bad example. I do what I can.”

Despite the joke, Tommy knew Cassandra was glad for him. She hadn’t come hoping to rekindle a dead romance, but rather in the spirit of friendship, at a time when she really needed a “home.” By the time she’d finished describing the soccer star who’d dumped her, it was abundantly clear to both of them that she was much better off without him.

“Gosh,” she said. “Just talking to you about him makes me see how stupid I was. What was I thinking? It’s amazing how things can seem so clear when you have to explain them to someone else. I guess that’s what therapy is all about. Well, duh.”

“Just give it a rest before you fall in love again,” Tommy said. “Most people wait more than a few days for the smoke to clear.”

“That is most excellent advice,” she said. “I shall not rebound.”

“But don’t pass up any slam dunks either,” Tommy said.

At the Peter Keeler he checked her in under the fake name she always used, Tess Tosterone. It was the name of the first character she’d ever played, in a movie about women’s roller derby called
When Girls Collide
. While she used her cell phone to get a rental car delivered to the inn, Tommy asked the desk clerk if Julian Villanegre was in. It occurred to him that the art historian might know something about Abbie’s mysterious box.

When he was told that Villanegre had stepped out, Tommy asked her to give the Englishman a message, that they’d found an art object Abbie had left behind. Then he asked for Ben Whitehorse. The clerk at the reception desk typed that name in and then scrolled up and down before telling him that there was no one named Ben Whitehorse registered. He asked her to check again, and said he knew Ben was staying there because he’d helped him check in.

She searched again. “No one by that name. Sorry.”

He spelled it for her. “You said he was a sweet man,” he reminded her. “He thought you’d baked the Sara Lee muffins at the breakfast buffet.”

It didn’t ring a bell. She checked again. “Nope. Sorry. You’re sure he was here?”

“Well, I was,” Tommy said. “But now I’m not so sure about anything.”

22

At the train station, Dani checked her phone and saw a text from Quinn:
MISSED TRAIN. NEXT ONE IN 30. I PROMISE WAIT WILL BE WORTH IT
.

“Typical,” she said.

She called her office, Ralston-Foley Behavioral Consulting. The receptionist, a young woman named Kelly, told Dani that a trial at which she was scheduled to testify had been postponed again and another, involving a battered mother of four, had been settled with the husband pleading guilty. Dani asked to be connected to her office voice mail.

“Oh—before I do,” Kelly said, “you also got a letter. I mean an actual letter, on paper, with handwriting on the envelope. I’ve never seen one of those before.”

“Who’s it from?”

“Doesn’t say. The return address just says Starbucks Guy.”

Dani looked at her watch. If the traffic was with her, she could race to her office, pick up the envelope, and get back to the train station in time.

“Hold on to it, Kell. I’ll be there in ten.”

As Dani drove to her office, she asked herself again the question she’d been asking herself for the last four days—if someone was going to betray her, who would it be? She’d never suspected Tommy, but of all the people she needed to count on, he was the most important, and thus a betrayal
from him would hurt the most. She ran the syllogism through her head: 1) Cassandra came to see him; 2) it was highly unlikely that she’d come to see him if he hadn’t invited her; 3) he didn’t tell her Cassandra was coming; 4) therefore he had lied, by omission if not by commission.

She would not be in a relationship with someone who lied to her. It was that simple.

At her office, she took the letter from Kelly, thanked her, apologized for letting the work back up, promised she’d be in soon, and ran back to her car. She opened the envelope as she drove and shook out a single SD card, eight megabytes, black with no label. She stuffed it into her coat pocket as she pulled into the train station parking lot.