Finding Claire Fletcher (41 page)

I stepped toward her, but she remained unruffled, like a statue. “I’m here to see Sheila Johnson,” I said and marveled at how strong and certain my woman’s voice sounded when I felt nothing like that on the inside.

“Mrs. Johnson does not entertain trespassers,” the woman replied.

The statement sounded strange from the woman’s lack of inflection. Her words were clearly scripted. “I will call the police now,” she added without a hint of threat in her voice.

“Please do,” I said calmly. “While they’re here they can arrest Mrs. Johnson for aiding and abetting and obstruction of justice.”

For a fleeting second, confusion furrowed the woman’s brow and livened her dull eyes. Then she said, “Who are you?”

I lifted my chin. “Claire Fletcher. I’m here about Reynard.”

The woman swallowed. She waved a hand toward the double doors on her right. “Come,” she said.

She escorted me inside the large drawing room and waited for me to sit on one of the large brocaded couches positioned in the center of the room. “Wait here,” she instructed.

She was gone for ten minutes, and when she returned, her affect was as flat as ever. “Reynard is not here. Leave now.”

My fists clenched. I stood and my legs trembled with rage. I moved within inches of her and stared down into her face. “I want to speak with Mrs. Johnson right now,” I told her.

“Mrs. Johnson will not be meeting with you.”

“Reynard has kidnapped another girl. You tell Mrs. Johnson I want to know where he is, and I’m not leaving until I find out.”

The woman did not reply. She returned my stare. Something was working behind her eyes. Maybe she had thought I would simply leave. Maybe now she was deciding whether or not to return to Sheila Johnson for further instructions. A long, tedious moment passed. When she swallowed, the delicate brown skin of her throat quivered.

I broke eye contact with her when a movement behind her caught my eye. There was a crack in the double doors we’d entered through. A big brown eye peered through at me. The woman seemed unaware of the spy, all her concentration focused on my face. From the dark sliver between the doors, the eye held mine. The door cracked open a bit more, revealing the owner of the peeping eye. It was a young boy, no older than seven or eight, pale and thin with sandy blonde hair.

I opened my mouth to speak, and the boy pressed a finger against his lips in a
shhh
motion. He looked over his shoulder and back at me. Quickly, I cleared my throat, signaling my understanding. The door closed just as quietly as it opened. I looked back at the woman.

“Did you hear what I said?”

She didn’t respond.

I leaned in closer to her, the simmering rage in the pit of my stomach making me feel menacing for the first time in my life. “I’m here to see Sheila Johnson, and I am not leaving until I do. So you have a choice. You can stare at me all day or you can go tell your boss to get her ass in here, but keep one thing in mind—every second Sheila Johnson wastes with this stupid game could mean the difference between a thirteen-year-old girl living or dying. If she dies because your boss is too much of a coward to come out here and face one of her son’s victims, she will be held responsible and she will pay—trust me, she is going to pay this time.”

I was exaggerating a bit. I didn’t believe Reynard would kill Emily—he needed her to fulfill his perverted fantasies—but given enough time, he would murder her innocence and any chance she might have at a normal life. In the depths of the woman’s onyx eyes I saw confusion and something akin to fear. “Wait here,” she said before spinning on her heel and leaving the room.

Once she was gone, I counted to ten and crept into the hallway. I pulled the doors closed behind me and stood in the hallway listening. I wondered if I had imagined the small boy peering through the door when I felt a small hand slip into mine. I had not heard or seen him approach. Big, brown eyes stared up at me with solemnity. Again, a single finger crossed his thin mouth, urging me to be silent. I nodded.

I had no idea who he was—a grandchild or a child of a staff member, but his eyes told me to do as he instructed. He led me deeper into the hallway, past darkened walls and grim-looking doors. The house was both cavernous and cloying. I felt a whole-body shiver as we made an abrupt turn and entered a doorway that led to a staircase.

Still grasping my hand, he led me up the stairs. His footsteps made no noise. Beside his muted movements, my own steps caused slight creaks that sounded like thunderbolts cracking the silence. Again, I shivered and looked at the boy. For a moment, I wondered if he was real or if he was a ghost haunting the Johnson mansion, guarding its secrets.

We turned left at the top of the stairs. My feet sunk mercifully into plush mauve carpeting. Moving down the hall, we stopped at the third door on the right. The boy rapped once and pushed it open. He released my hand.

“Go,” he said.

I stepped inside and jumped when the door swung shut behind me. Another short hall lay before me.

A female voice that sounded like wind chimes called to me. “Come.”

I followed it into an apartment contained within the huge house. It was a world apart from the confines of the elegant, dark mansion, decorated in a southwestern motif. Colorfully braided rugs adorned the floors. Indigo beaded lampshades caught my eye. Native American shadow figures and pottery dotted the simple shelves and tables.

A pale, wafer-thin woman with long, thick chestnut hair lay on the couch. Her skin was ghostly pale, making her dark hair and ruby lips all the more striking. She wore a long white linen dress.

“Sit,” she commanded.

I dropped into a rocking chair across from her. I didn’t know what to say. I stared at her. She smiled, an enigmatic curve to her pouty lips, jarringly sensual and penetrating.

“You’re the Fletcher woman,” she stated.

“Yes.”

She appraised me, her eyes roaming up and down my body like hands. I shifted and straightened my spine.

“I’m here because—”

“I know why you’re here,” the woman cut in. “My mother stonewalled you.”

I nodded, inwardly startled to surmise that she was Sheila Johnson’s daughter. I searched her face for some resemblance to Reynard. There was nothing there save the simmering calculated hostility that glowed in her eyes.

The woman gave a short, humorless laugh. “That’s right. The Queen Mother expelled me from her loveless little womb, the same as Reynard.”

Hearing her say his name was strange—there was a lilt of familiarity to it but also contempt.

“My nephew keeps me informed of all visitors of interest to me. He’s a very good child in spite of this family’s influence. I’m trying to keep him that way.”

“By teaching him to sneak around and spy?”

She was more amused than defensive. “My dear, you do not grow up in this family, you survive it. Some things that I encourage are necessary evils.”

“Where are his parents?”

“His mother—my sister—is somewhere in Europe, spending a large quantity of the family fortune on things that will never change who she is or what”—a hesitation—“happened to her. His father? A week long fling in Barbados. God knows what became of him.”

“Tell me where Reynard is,” I said.

“I don’t know where he is, but I will help you. Patience, Claire Fletcher.”

“I don’t have time for this,” I blurted out, face flushed.

“So you think he’s taken someone else?”

Through gritted teeth, I replied, “Yes.” She said nothing so I repeated, “I don’t have time for this.”

The woman’s expression did not change. “What will you do when you find Reynard?”

I looked her straight in the eye. “Make him pay,” I said flatly. I had no idea how I was going to make my abductor pay, but I didn’t share that with her.

She smiled wide, revealing a perfect set of teeth.

“You’re his sister,” I said. “Which are you? Jane or Carolyn?”

“Carolyn,” she said. “But everyone calls me Lynn.”

I had the sensation of free-falling, my stomach suddenly defiant of gravity, floating somewhere up near my throat. My face must have paled considerably, because Carolyn—Lynn—Johnson arched one shapely eyebrow. She looked strangely pleased by my reaction, like a precocious child testing the tolerance of an adult and winning. I stared at my lap where my resting hands trembled.

“What?” she said. “He had to start somewhere, didn’t he? You know about my family so you must have read some police files, maybe even hired a private investigator. I’m guessing that wasn’t in your files.”

I shook my head.

“When you were brought in with that Ward girl, it was reported that you called yourself Lynn Wood. At least that was the name on the identification he’d provided you, according to the newspapers. Are you surprised?”

“
No,” I said, holding my stomach. “I’m nauseous.”

She swung her legs off the couch and sat up. “Yes, well so was I when it happened to me.”

“How long?” I croaked, not wanting to look at her but unable to turn away.

She cocked her head to the side. “Let’s see,” she said thoughtfully, as if she were trying to remember what she’d had for dinner the night before. “Three years. He tried my sister out first, but there was something he never quite liked about her. Of course, the fact that she hated him never entered his mind.”

“Yeah,” I muttered weakly, thinking of all the times I had railed at Reynard, howling my hatred for him, only to have him coo back at me with professions of love as though I hadn’t even spoken.

“Of course,” Lynn continued casually, “the whole time he was forcing himself on Jane, he was cultivating a very loving, protective older-brother persona in front of me. I had no idea what he was doing to Jane. She didn’t confide in me. Once I caught him…interfering with her, but I was far too young to realize what it meant. Before it started, he was wonderful to me. He talked to me, walked me to school, read to me before bed, showered me with gifts. I thought he was the most wonderful person in the world. He made me feel so safe. My big brother.”

“Oh God,” I whispered, horrified. Had it been worse for her? She would have been younger than I had been at the time he abducted me, violated by someone she loved, someone she trusted.

“It was very confusing,” she added, reading my face. “Horrible, painful, disgusting.” She used the same words that described my own experience, but her tone was flip, almost bored.

“Did you tell anyone?”

“Jane.” Lynn laughed derisively. “Her big idea was now that it had happened to us both, we could go together and tell mother.”

“She didn’t believe you,” I said.

Lynn’s dark eyes narrowed. “It wasn’t a matter of believing us. She already knew. She knew every single thing that was said and done in this house. She just didn’t care. We were not to mention it to our father—ever. She talked with Reynard, though I don’t know what she said. But the damage was done. He thought he was in love with me by then. He had delusions of the two of us marrying. It only stopped when he was sent away.”

“I’m going to be sick,” I said.

Calmly, she pointed to her right. “The bathroom is down the hall to the left.”

I scrambled down the hall and into the bathroom. I had no time to close the door. Everything I’d eaten that day came up with projectile force as I gripped the sides of the commode. It left me breathless. Heaving, I let my legs go slack and plopped onto the tile floor.

Moments later, a pale hand brushed past my left ear and gathered toilet paper from the roll. “Here,” Lynn said softly.

She flushed the toilet and perched on the edge of the bath tub. She crossed one long leg over the other and rested her chin in one hand, watching me. Her expression was an odd mixture of curiosity and detachment. Glancing at her, I realized that she found it very fascinating that I was sprawled on her bathroom floor, vomiting in her toilet.

“This was all about you?” I asked, blotting my lips on the toilet paper.

“Oh no,” Lynn said matter-of-factly. “My brother is a bona fide pervert. A pedophile. I just happened to be the first he thought he loved.”

I draped an arm over the lip of the toilet seat and rested my clammy forehead on it. “All this time,” I said, unable to suppress a shudder. “All this time you knew what he was capable of. How could you just turn him loose on society? All those girls. So many girls. Your mother knew. You knew. How could you let him go into the world knowing that he’d do the same thing to someone else that he did to you?”

Her face hardened. “How could you stay with a man who raped and beat you for ten years?” she asked quietly.

I drew my body up straighter. “That’s not the same.”

“Isn’t it?”

“You could have stopped him. Your family could have stopped him. There were over a dozen girls before he even got to me.”

“You could have left years before you found Alison Ward in that house. Why didn’t you?”

I didn’t answer. Tears stung the backs of my eyes. Lynn smiled again, a predatory turn to her mouth. “For someone so bold, I expected a little more.”

“It’s none of your goddamn business,” I snapped. I stood and splashed cold water over my face from the sink. Lynn stood and handed me a towel.