Don't Be Afraid

The entertainment center opposite the bed was closed. The TV dialogue was coming from the bathroom. Fantastic, Amy thought. The lawyer and her husband would arrive just in time to join the home’s owner in the master bath.

“Meredith?” she called, expecting the woman to step out the door screaming about invasion of privacy. Only she didn’t. “Meredith,” she called loudly, one last time before pushing open the bathroom door.

RED. This was the first thing she registered followed immediately by BODY, then BLOOD. The words screamed through her head as she stared at what had been Meredith Chomsky. She was hanging by her hands and her hair from the back wall. Her lower body was sprawled, legs akimbo, in the water, which was red.

It looked as if nails had been driven through her palms, which were shredding from the weight of her body. Her long blonde hair had been yanked up and also nailed, holding her head forward so that Amy could see the sightless red sockets where her eyes had been....

D
ON’T BE
A
FRAID

R
EBECCA
D
RAKE

PINNACLE BOOKS
Kensington Publishing Corp.
www.kensingtonbooks.com

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Table of Contents

Empty houses scared Amy Moran. They seemed to hold the lives and secrets in their walls of all the families who’d ever lived in them and there was something otherworldly, almost ghostly about that. Houses needed people in them to come alive. They needed voices and laughter and light, otherwise they were a shell of something and that something wasn’t pleasant.

It was ironic that she’d become a real estate agent, spending her workdays traipsing through the echoing hallways of vacant homes. Sometimes she wondered if their very walls could sense her desperation.

The farmhouse sat back from the road, hidden from the probing eyes of motorists by a grove of hemlocks. Amy turned into the gravel drive and sped up the wide lane, her Camry crunching along beneath the trees, until the house came into view. A classic New England colonial, originally as plain and spare on the outside as its Congregationalist builders. The years and increasingly affluent owners had not been kind. It was now a mishmash of architectural styles. Federalist fanlights, Greek Revival columns, and Victorian gingerbread, all unified by sunflower yellow paint and black trim, gave it the appearance of a giant bumblebee. Strangely enough, it was always featured on design shows about the area.

The buyer, a hale-and-hearty banker with too much money and far too little time to enjoy any of it, hadn’t wanted to do the walk-through. “That’s what I’m paying you for,” he’d told Amy and Sheila. His third wife enjoyed it, though. She wanted the house for weekend parties, though she complained about the location as if Sheila and Amy had done wrong by her.

“I really wanted something on the water,” she’d remind them every chance she got. She conveniently forgot that she hadn’t wanted the half-a-billion-dollar price tag that went along with property fronting Long Island Sound.

Sheila’s large, silver Range Rover wasn’t on the drive. Had she gone on to the closing? Why hadn’t she called?

Amy picked her cell phone off the passenger seat where she’d tossed it after trying Sheila at the last traffic light. At the same time she had been applying makeup and attempting to get her hair to stay in a hastily formed French twist.

She’d formed the apology in her mind, trying to reduce a chaotic morning and the demands of an asthmatic five-year-old into a simple explanation of how she could possibly be late for this, her first big closing. Not that she’d anticipated any sympathy. Sheila was a single mother, too, though her boys were older now.

Four rings, five, and still there’d been no answer. The light turned green and Amy had tossed the lipstick aside and accelerated with the phone still to her ear.

Seven rings, eight. Finally she’d hung up. Maybe Sheila had her phone off. Maybe she’d be waiting outside the house for Amy.

Only she wasn’t.

Amy put the car in park and ran as quickly as her heels allowed up the short flight of wide steps to the large black door. The lock box was still attached to the brass knob, but it was open and the door stood slightly ajar.

Amy pushed it open and stepped inside calling, “Sheila? Are you here?”

There was no answering shout. Amy’s shoes clicked loudly on the vast flagstone floor. The curtains were drawn in the large barren rooms adjoining the front hall and the foyer itself was gloomy. She turned on the light switch for the chandelier overhead, but nothing happened.

Swallowing hard, Amy moved forward, trying not to think about how dark it was, taking deep breaths to calm nerves already frazzled by being late.

“Sheila?”

Her voice seemed to echo in the empty hall and then it was swallowed up as she sank into the plush carpeting of the family room that adjoined the kitchen. The rooms were empty of furniture, devoid of everything but the sheer draperies blanketing the windows left by the soon-to-be previous owners.

There were tracks in the carpeting from the vacuuming done by the professional cleaning service, but a thin film of dust had already settled on the bare mantel sunk in the fieldstone fireplace.

The lights were on in the kitchen, a blazing swath across black granite countertops and a gleaming Viking range. Sheila must have been here, Amy thought, looking around for some sign of the older woman. Only there wasn’t one. A single drip of water came from the tap and splashed far below in the old-fashioned soapstone sink. The repetitive
plink
was the only sound.

She must have given up on Amy and headed for the office, but would she really have forgotten to close the door on her way out? That wasn’t like her. Amy pulled out her cell phone again and dialed Sheila’s number, walking out of the kitchen as she did so and back toward the front of the house.

She checked the front door and the floor, looking for a note, but didn’t find one. There was a short gap between punching in the number and the dull ring as it connected. A split second later, a muffled ringing echoed within the house.

Startled, Amy almost dropped the phone. It rang again and again and the ringing echoed back. Only it wasn’t the same ring at all. Amy moved toward the sound. It was coming from upstairs.

“Sheila?” she called again, mounting the carpeted steps. The ringing was louder once she was on the second floor. She tried to follow the sound, peering into open bedrooms. From one of the windows she caught a glimpse of something silver. It was Sheila’s Range Rover parked behind the house.

Amy stared down at it in shock for a moment while the phone continued its shrill beckoning. Then she tore herself away, following the sound. Not the next bedroom nor the one after that. It was coming from the room at the end of the hall. The one with the closed door.

The knob slipped in her palm, which was suddenly clammy, but the door swung open and there was the phone, practically vibrating on the windowsill. But Sheila hadn’t left it behind, because Sheila hadn’t left.

She was lying in the center of the floor where a bed had been, her arms stretched out to the sides, with her palms facing the ceiling as if they were catching the small pools of blood they held. Her legs were bound with what looked like her own nylons. Her eyes, or what had been her eyes, stared blankly at the ceiling as if looking for answers.

Amy stumbled backward, her mouth opening in a scream that came out like a siren, gathering momentum. She tripped in the doorway, struggled up and ran, hurling down the stairs and across the hallway, racing from the house as if she were being chased, the ringing of the phone echoing behind her. She didn’t stop running until she’d gotten out the front door and made it across the driveway and then she fell to her knees in the clean, sweet grass and threw up her breakfast.