Final Scream (28 page)

“She will never love you, but she will give you another child.”

His eyebrows drew together. “Just one?”

“Only one from this woman, though there will be others.”

“No!” Rex stripped his hand from hers as if her fingers were suddenly white-hot and deadly. He jumped to his feet and backed to the door. “I
love
my wife,” he insisted, visibly shaken. “Do you hear me, I love her! I always will.”

“I know,” she said kindly.

“All this”—he motioned wildly at the table—“is nothing, just some kind of trick. You were probably told to say it, just to get me going. That’s it, isn’t it? Harold and the boys in investments, they put you up to it.”

She didn’t bother to argue, just looked up at him with eyes that pierced into his soul and saw everything.

“And my wife, she loves me. She does.”

“If you say so.”

“Oh, hell, I don’t know what I’m doing here!” He reached for the doorknob.

“Examining your life,” she said.

“It’s just a joke, okay? A goddamned joke. Now everybody’s had their laughs and it’s over.” He yanked hard on the door and stormed out of the trailer, leaving the door to catch in the wind and bang against the already scratched pink and white aluminum siding.

He would be back. He was intrigued. As surely as water ran downhill, Rex Buchanan would return. Sunny knew it and wouldn’t try to prevent it. She couldn’t.

He’d shown up less than a month later. They talked, drank coffee, listened to music, and she always told him his fortune. He scoffed at her predictions, of course, but he began to smile, his visits becoming more frequent. Sunny saw herself in his future; knew that if she didn’t refuse him, she would be emotionally tangled with him for life.

But she couldn’t. She looked forward to his visits. He came only when he was certain they would be alone. They talked for hours. She never tired of hearing about his world of wealth and power or of discussing what was happening outside of Prosperity, in the rest of the state and in the world. His views were so much broader than her husband’s; his interests more varied. And though she knew she was wading in dangerous emotional waters, she couldn’t restrain herself. Wouldn’t.

Though she fought her attraction to Rex, Sunny couldn’t stop the course of their destiny. She spent long hours of the night with Frank softly snoring on the double bed beside her, while she was awake and longing, her dreams focused on a man forbidden to her. Restlessly she stared out the small window of the trailer and silently cursed the desire she couldn’t seem to control.

Frank was a good man, a steady worker, a person who, as long as he stayed away from liquor, didn’t raise his voice. He thought Rocky Marciano was a god, Marilyn Monroe the sexiest woman alive, and he looked forward to the day when he could afford a color television.

Rex, too, was a good man, a thoughtful employer, a person who would never stop adoring his cold wife. He and Sunny could never be together; she was married to a man who didn’t believe in divorce, and he was married to a woman he idolized. He looked forward to the day that Lucretia would forgive him, though it would never happen.

At first Sunny ignored her wanton thoughts. She refused to dwell on her shameful lust. But as the weeks and months wore on, she began to listen for the smooth purr of his car in the lane, looked for him in a crowd in town, felt her heartbeat quicken at the familiar rap of his knuckles on her door.

Unable to explain her fascination with him, she let her emotions run free and wild. In her dreams, she saw Rex’s face, and while making love to Frank, she imagined it was Rex claiming her body with his. Shame ate at her thoughts, but she couldn’t help herself and she believed in destiny; knew that the course of fate, once set in motion, was nearly impossible to alter.

So when he first kissed her, in her shabby little trailer, she didn’t resist, and when he shoved her gently onto the couch, she let her knees give way. From that point on, his lovemaking was fierce, without tenderness. Like a starved man given his first meal, he made love to her, panting wildly, touching her everywhere, forcing himself deep into her.

She knew it was a mistake, knew she was risking everything she owned to become a rich man’s mistress; but her marriage to Frank was little more than convenient, the trailer, though her home, certainly nothing she couldn’t give up.

Rex’s visits became more frequent and he tried to buy her gifts—a gold bracelet, a turquoise ring, a new dress of silk—which she wouldn’t accept. Even the flowers he brought, though beautiful, could not stay. So she wore his baubles only while he was with her; she let his flowers scent the air while they were together, let him slip the pearl buttons through the fastenings of the beautiful dress that no one else would see, for when he left, he took everything he had brought with him. She wouldn’t accept payment—even a small token of his feelings—for making love to him.

Because she knew that he didn’t love her. When she touched him, she sensed his hunger, even his gratitude for her; but he didn’t care for her the way he adored his wife. And Sunny would not reduce herself to the level of a paid whore. She would love him from a distance, content in their affair, until he tired of her; then, she promised herself, she would let him go.

Sunny’s pain, after Lucretia had died and Rex had married Dena Miller, had nearly killed her. Though still legally married at the time, Sunny was alone—Frank had already left her. Yet Rex had turned to another woman. She’d never felt more betrayed.

Now, years later, she stared at the walls of her tiny room in the hospital where Chase had seen fit to imprison her. Neat and clean, painted a soft, soothing green with built-in bookshelves, a twin bed, table and color television, it was, in many ways, much nicer than her old trailer parked close to a well on a scrap of property near Prosperity. But it wasn’t home. Would never be.

The window was open, a breeze scented by roses whispered past the curved steel bars that were supposed to look like artwork but were lashed across the window for confinement.

Each morning for the past week, as she’d stared through her window and looked beyond manicured lawns, trimmed rhododendrons and rows of oak trees to the tall mesh fence, she’d sensed trouble. Watching as the sun rose over the ridge of mountains to the east, she saw the first rays reflect gold on the morning dew and felt a chill as cold as death sneak up her spine. She’d known her boys were in danger, had, in her mind, glimpsed the fire that had destroyed the sawmill, but the images of flames and death were distorted, as if shimmering heat waves and black smoke had deliberately clouded her mind.

Again she shuddered and wished she could escape. She wasn’t as far gone as they told her she was; true, her visions had become more frequent and violent, but when she was lucid she knew who she was and why she was here.

Chase’s treachery still seeped into her soul like poison into a well. She’d always trusted him, believed in him, thought he had her—as well as his—best interests at heart. But he hadn’t. She’d become an embarrassment for him as he’d become more involved in the Buchanans’ business. He’d stopped visiting so often and couldn’t look her in the eye because he was plotting to have her committed, to get rid of her so that he wouldn’t have to explain that the crazy woman in the trailer by the creek was his mother, so he wouldn’t feel compelled to have her come and live with him in his fancy house. Rex, too, had turned his back on her, and without her children and her lover, she’d decided it was time to leave this earth.

Glancing down at the inside of her wrists and the crisscrossing of scars fading against her dark skin, she grimaced. She’d worn those scars like medals from a war, a war she would wage until the day she died.

But she couldn’t fight her battles from here; she had to find a way out of this place. She’d dreamed of escape often. Just last night she’d had a premonition, a peek through a window leading to the future, and in her mind’s eye she saw herself running through familiar fields and facing the devils of her past, those who had deceived her.

She smiled though she felt no trace of humor. She would confront them all. And soon. It was only a matter of time.

“I thought you might be interested in this.” Gonzales dropped a charred wallet onto T. John’s desk. “Don’t worry, it’s been printed. So have the contents.”

T. John set down his cup of coffee and picked up the burned leather. He didn’t have to ask. “The John Doe’s?”

“Won’t be John Doe much longer.” Gonzales flashed a quick hard-as-nails grin then crossed to the window, staring out of the one-story office building and into the parking lot, where cars, trucks and motorcycles baked in the sun.

“How about this?” Wilson opened what was left of the wallet and flipped through burned bills—hundreds, for the most part. Over three thousand dollars’ worth, and what had once been a driver’s license but was now barely a corner of the document. “What state’s this from? Alaska?”

“Looks like it. We’re checking.”

The picture—if there had been one—was burned off and some of the numbers were missing, but there were enough that, with some time and the cooperation of the Department of Motor Vehicles in the forty-ninth state, the identity of the man dying at Northwest General Hospital would soon be known. “Contact the state police, see if they’ve found any abandoned vehicles with Alaska plates—or for that matter, any cars. He could’ve rented one down here or bought a junker with the kind of cash he was carrying—and check the rental agencies, see if any cars are overdue, from Portland and”—he squinted at the license but the address had burned off—“all the major cities in Alaska.”

“Already done,” Gonzales said. “And we’re sending this to the crime lab in Portland, see what they can reconstruct.”

Good. They’d finally caught a break. Nearly everyone in town seemed to have an alibi for the night of the fire, especially the people who were at the top of his list of suspects—Rex Buchanan, Dena Buchanan, Felicity and Derrick Buchanan, Sunny McKenzie, Bobby Alonzo, even the parents of Jed Baker. He’d checked. The only person who didn’t have one was Cassidy herself and the two men in the fire. Finding people who had the time to set the blaze had been a son of a bitch.

“Where the hell did you find this? I thought the boys had finished digging around down there at the mill,” he said, frowning at the charred wallet.

Gonzales stretched his arms over his head and his back cracked. “That’s the strange part. We got it off a local.”

Wilson’s head snapped up, and he pinned Gonzales with his hard glare. His pulse jumped a little. Gonzales was holding out on him. The shithead. He loved this little game of one-upmanship. “Someone around here?”

“Yep. And we lucked out, too.”

“How?” T. John leaned back in his chair until it creaked in protest and stacked his hands behind his head, waiting.

“Our man here drank a little too much down at Burley’s. Someone had the nerve to call him a moron and he took offense, landing a right cross to the name-caller’s jaw.”

“Who—who the hell is ‘our man’?” T. John asked, his patience wearing thin.

“That’s the interesting part,” Gonzales drawled. “John Doe’s wallet was found in Willie Ventura’s back pocket.” Gonzales grinned widely, showing off more white teeth than any single human had the right to own. “Yes sir, it looks like the village idiot has a helluva lot of explaining to do, don’t it?”

Cassidy switched off the monitor of her computer and rotated the kinks from her neck as she sat at her desk at the newspaper offices.

After driving through the rain for nearly an hour yesterday, she’d gone home, taken a long bath and even drank a glass of wine before going to bed.

But sleep had evaded her. She’d been restless and worried, her mind spinning with images of Brig, Chase, Rex, Sunny and Dena. Even Angie and Lucretia had wormed their way into her thoughts, and after tossing and turning for hours, she’d given up on sleep at three-thirty, gotten up and outlined a story on her desktop computer at home and then driven to the office.

She’d been here alone before, but in these early hours, the connecting rooms seemed eerie. Or was it her imagination? Her body was tired, her mind restless, hyped up, and it probably didn’t help that she’d made her way upstairs to the employee kitchen and brewed a pot of coffee, listening to the hot water drip through the filter as she walked to the wide bank of windows and stared out at the small town where street lamps shimmered a ghostly blue and the stoplights in town, two that she could see from here, blinked brilliant red.

Only a few cars drove past the storefronts of First Street, and the sidewalks were empty aside from a stray dog sniffing along the curb. The scent of coffee was strong, the pot chimed that it was through brewing and Cassidy poured herself a mug, then returned to the window where, as she lifted her cup to her lips, she spied a movement in the night’s shadows, a dark figure slipping around the corner.

Probably someone getting to work early
, she thought, but there was something furtive in the way the person had moved from the lamplight. As if he’d been looking up at Cassidy and quickly scurried away.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she warned herself. Lately her nerves were stretched thin, her anxiety level at a fever pitch, that was all.
No one
was sneaking around peering at her, for God’s sake!

With a snort of disgust, she turned and headed downstairs to her desk. She flipped on the entire main bank of lights, illuminating the shared office space and telling herself to get a grip.

Back at her desk, she started checking through old files and printing out everything that was available on disk about the fire in the gristmill that had killed Angie and Jed years ago. She closed her mind to the terror her sister and Jed must have felt, to the fact that Brig had said he’d been there, to the mystery of Angie’s pregnancy—Cassidy couldn’t go there if she was to be objective and professional. She had to push her emotions aside and think clearly, use all of her training and reporter instincts.

She, like the police, couldn’t help thinking that the fire seventeen years earlier and the recent blaze at Buchanan Sawmill were related. The police said the incendiary devices were similar and both properties had been owned by her father…in one fire three lives, counting the baby’s, had been taken; in the other, two men had barely escaped with their lives and one might not make it.

So if the fires had been intentionally set—for what purpose? She clicked her pen as she thought.

Chase had refused to give her any information. Why? Was he guilty of something? Covering for someone? Or just didn’t know?

Having been married to her for so long, he had to realize she wouldn’t just let the matter die. And she hadn’t. She’d decided to do some investigating on her own. She already had detailed records of the first fire; she’d assembled her own personal file shortly after moving back to Prosperity, and now she’d keep a personal record of every shred of evidence, every suspicion, every rumor, every theory that was posed about the blaze at the sawmill.

She unlocked her file cabinet and pulled out her file on the original fire. It was a thick sheaf of papers, a collection of articles and references to television news stories and her own set of notes…but as she flipped through the yellowed pages, she had the sensation that they weren’t as she’d left them…the pages were out of place. She glanced at the notes she’d clipped to the front flap of the file—the list of all her information—then checked them against the articles in the file. Several were missing.

“Damn it!” she muttered under her breath. No one else had a key to the cabinet. So why were articles, three of them, missing? Who had taken them?
No one, Cassidy. You just misplaced them. Who would want them?

Was that it? Had she been careless?

She drummed her fingers on the desk and told herself it didn’t matter. She’d catalogued the stories, could get copies.

But why were they missing?

She felt a change in the atmosphere in the office, as if someone had opened a window and let in a rush of cold air. But she was alone. She looked around, saw no one and told herself she was being paranoid, when she heard footsteps in the hallway.

“Someone there?” she yelled, looking at her watch. It wasn’t even 6
A.M
. “Hello?”

Her pulse was pounding as she pushed back her chair and walked to the hallway, flipping on lights as she did. “Hey? Who’s there?” she said, but heard no response. No more footsteps. No heavy breathing. No fiendish laughter. “Oh, for God’s sake!” she muttered. She was tired and nervous, seeing figures lurking on the street, hearing footsteps, thinking someone had stolen from her files.

“Get a grip,” she told herself, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being watched somehow—the same uneasy sensation she’d experienced at the hospital. Sitting down at her desk again, she told herself that her case of nerves was because of Chase. She knew that he was worried and since whoever had intentionally set the fire was still at large…

Her skin crawled at the thought. She checked over her shoulder and wished some other reporter would come in early, so that she could have some company and chase away this ludicrous case of the creeps.

Forcing herself, she turned her attention to the most recent fire. What did she know about it?

Only that Chase had been working late; which wasn’t unusual, especially lately. He was known for his long hours; Derrick had always chided him for not paying enough attention to Cassidy, for “kissing up” to the old man, for being a workaholic.

Cassidy had always assumed Chase had been alone when he’d been at the office. The mill wasn’t currently running a graveyard shift, and there wasn’t even a night watchman or guard dog on duty. Chase had often told her that he did his best work late at night, alone, when everyone, including his secretary, had left for the day, when the phones didn’t ring and people didn’t stop by his office and interrupt him.

But this time he’d lied.

Just as he may have lied in the past.

She felt betrayed, but tried to keep her objectivity.

Obviously the other man had been with him. She doodled on a new page of a legal pad she always kept handy and made a big question mark on the lined paper.

Brig?

She’d convinced herself that Chase was with his brother, but she had to consider the fire with less emotion and tunnel vision. He could have met with someone else. But who?

Was the injured man the culprit, or had Chase decided to set fire to the mill? Or was it another, as yet unidentified, person—an employee who had been fired and held a grudge against Buchanan Sawmill, or someone with a personal vendetta? Someone who hated Chase? Or Rex? Or anyone with the last name of Buchanan?

Tapping the eraser end of her pencil against her notepad, she tried to imagine what had gone on that night. Was the fire arson, or was it attempted murder? That ugly thought ran like an electric current through her mind. Was someone deliberately trying to kill Chase?

Goose bumps crawled up her arm.

The door opened and she nearly shot out of her chair before realizing that, for the reporters and secretaries who liked to get to the job a few minutes early, it was time to arrive. She waved to the photographer as he and the receptionist entered together.

“Come on,” she muttered to herself. This was no time to freak out. She searched through the files, found the newspaper’s copy of the police report, then made a copy for her personal file.

By the time she returned to her desk, Bill Laszlo was waiting for her. Tall and lean, he looked like he ran the forty miles a week he was so proud of. Lately he’d become an exercise and fat-intake expert, and the twenty-five pounds he’d lost in the last two years were testament to his philosophy.

“You’ve been avoiding me,” he accused.

“No way. I’ve just been busy.”

“If you say so.” He didn’t look convinced in his stiff white shirt, black slacks, suspenders and matching tie. “I’ve been assigned to report on the fire and its aftermath.”

“I know. Saw your byline on the last piece.”

“I’d like to talk to you,” he said, resting a hip against her desk.

“I don’t know anything about the fire.”

He grinned, showing off teeth that were stained by tobacco, though he’d given up smoking at the beginning of his health kick several years ago. “Is that the same as ‘no comment’?”

“Really, you probably know more than I do.”

He glanced to the top of her desk, where her notes were visible. “But you’ve been thinking about it.”

“My husband was nearly killed.”

“I know. Bummer.” He scratched his jaw, still studying her doodles, and she followed his gaze, noting the question mark as well as Brig’s name. Without an excuse, she shoved the legal pad into a file folder. “You know, I’d like to talk to Chase.”

“You and every other reporter in this state.”

“How about I stop by the hospital this afternoon—”

“No.” He gave her a wounded look that she wasn’t buying for a second. “Look, Bill, I appreciate that you have a job to do—I probably understand it better than most people—but Chase is still recovering. He can only see members of the immediate family.”

“And the police?”

“That goes without saying.” She looked up at him. “So…what do you know about someone getting into my file cabinet.”

“What do you mean?” Was it her imagination or did a guilty look pass behind his eyes?

“I mean someone’s been snooping in my files, taking some articles and notes.”

“You’re the only one who has a key, right?”

“In theory,” she said, glaring up at him.

“What?” His hands flew to his chest. “You think
I
would stoop so low as to break into another reporter’s desk?”

“I’m just asking.”

“Cassidy…” he cajoled. “Are you sure?”

“Dead certain.”

His wounded look disappeared. “Seriously? Then we’ve got a problem.”

“At least one.”

“Sorry, I can’t help you with that. I have no idea who could have gotten into your things.”

“Humph.”

“But I’d still like a word with your husband.”

She managed an icy smile. “And the answer is still ‘no.’”