GRAVEWORM (8 page)

I’ll get Lisa back,
she thought.
I’ll get my sister back and God help that sick sonofabitch who put her through this, put me through this.

He’ll suffer.

The pain he will know.

And right then and right there, Tara knew this wasn’t some frustrated knee-jerk reaction, some half-baked vengeance fantasy that would never, ever happen. It was the real thing. The man who had taken her sister was going to die. And his death would be ugly beyond belief.

Knowing she was capable of something like that almost scared her.

Almost.

1:41 AM

About the time she was ready to leave, the phone rang.

The sound of it sheared right through Tara, piercing her heart like an icy needle. So soon. He was already calling back.

She snatched the cordless up. Her voice was flat, emotionless: “Yes?”

“
Hey, lady,” the party on the other end said. “You still up?”

For one crazy, reeling moment, Tara could not honestly remember who that voice belonged to. Her mind was filled with fuzzy images, all of them disjointed and terribly out-of-focus. Then it came. Steve. Steve Crews.
It’s
Steve, you idiot. Your boyfriend.
She swallowed down something like fear and said quite calmly, “Steve. I was just going to bed.”

“Well, now there’s an idea.”

She froze. She wasn’t at all sure how to answer that. Sexual innuendo. Play the game. “That sounds nice. But I’m too tired. Busy, busy day.”

“
Poor thing. When will I ever see you again?”

“
Not until the end of the week. Maybe Friday.”

He laughed. “That long. I’ll perish.”

“Keep your chin up.”

There was silence for a moment. Then: “Tara… are you okay? You sound kind of funny. Is everything all right?”

“
Yes. Fine. Really fine.” She sighed, trying to relax. “Bad day. Busy week. I’m okay.”

“
Maybe I’ll sneak over one of these nights and—”

“No! You can’t do that!”

“Whoa, lady! I’m just goofing around.”

She was breathing too hard and he must have heard her. “I’m sorry, Steve. It’s just that I-I-I-I-I’m a little on edge.” Had she just done that? Had she really stuttered like that? All this time she thought that was always bullshit when people did that in books and movies. But the syllables just kept coming, rapid fire. “I’ll make it up to you. I just need some sleep.”

“
Okay, I understand.” But it was in his voice that he didn’t understand at all. “You sure you wouldn’t like me to come over? Kick back with you?”

“
No. It’s late. I need to sleep. So do you.”

“
All right, Tara. See you.”

He hung up before she could say another thing and maybe that was for the best. Her mind was rushing in too many directions at the same time, thoughts tripping over themselves. The line of communication between her brain and her voice had been badly disarranged. She knew then she could not count on herself to say what she was thinking or think about what she saying.

Good God, nothing was making sense.

She wondered if it ever would again.

1:46 AM

She breathed in and out very slowly, trying to keep her world from spinning out of control any worse than it already was.

She saw Steve’s face in her mind and where once it had brought great joy, it now brought sorrow and pain. “I know I love you, Steve. I know you’d help me. You’d do anything for me and for Lisa. But I can’t take the chance of involving you. Of involving the police, the FBI. No one can do what has to be done now but me.”

Knowing this, she pressed her face into her hands and then screamed as loud as she could.

Hurry, Tara… the clock is running.

17

Steve tried to sleep after he talked to Tara, but it just wouldn’t come.

He laid there, balled-up with tension, still hearing Tara’s voice. There was a strange undercurrent there he did not recognize and could not put a name to. He knew her plate was full with two jobs and trying to raise her kid sister. It was a lot for anyone. She was worn thin only she didn’t see it or wouldn’t see it and if you told her to slow down, she got pissed-off and Steve had been on the receiving end of
that
more than once.

Maybe it was like she said.

Maybe she was just tired, a little frazzled.

Steve did not know. It made perfect sense, yet something about it simply did not wash and try as he might he could not leave it alone. The moon shined in the window. He listened to leaves blow up the sidewalk and wondered, wondered. There was something there. Something in her voice. And the after-effect of talking to her was like being amped-up on about two pots of very black, very strong coffee.

It’s almost two in the morning, dummy. You shouldn’t have called her so late.

No, he shouldn’t have. But he’d had the oddest sense of… disaster all night. He could not understand it or identify it. It was just
there.
Nagging at him.

“
It’s like she said,” he told himself again. “She’s tired. That’s all.”

But it just didn’t sit right with him.

He had been dating Tara going on two years now and in that time, besides falling in love and wanting very badly to marry her, he had learned to recognize her moods. He could sense them instinctively. That’s the way it got with couples, he knew. And that instinct was screaming in his head, telling him something was terribly wrong. On the phone she had sounded alternately depressed and edgy, drained and then almost giddy. Like her mind was so overloaded she was jumping emotional tracks pretty much at random. Not just moody peaks and valleys, but mountaintops and subterranean fissures. There had been something in her voice, something that alarmed him and he just could not get past it.

You’re just thinking that because you’ve had a bad feeling all night. You’re slanting the evidence to support you paranoia.

Yet… he didn’t honestly think so.

Several times now, he had gotten dressed and made it to the door before he pulled back and went inside. And once he had made it all the way out to his car. Her voice had not only unsettled him, but confused him. Something was telling him he needed to go to her and something else was telling him that would be a very bad idea.

She said she was tired.

She wanted to be alone.

They were not living together and Tara had firmly refused to discuss offers in that direction. But even though they were not under the same roof, their souls and minds along with their hearts had grown very close and they shared similar rhythms. They each understood when the other was needed and when the other needed to be given space. And Steve was getting vibes that told him to get over there without hesitation and others that told him to respect her privacy.

What to do? What to do?

His reasoning brain told him quite firmly to give her space, that if she asked him not to come over than he should do as she wished. But his emotional brain was sensing trouble and it demanded action.

God, he loved her and she pissed him off to no end.

Sometimes he wasn’t sure what he expected of her. Or of himself for that matter. But he guessed that he wanted her to relax, to quit making her life into such a fucking complex drama. He knew she had a lot going and Lisa wasn’t helping that much, but it was time to let down her hair
and
her defenses. He knew she cared about him, yet she refused to discuss marriage. The way he saw it, two people loved each other, they got married and lived together and that would set things right because two was always better than one, right? If they got married, she could quit fretting about her bills and quit one of her jobs or both for that matter. Steve was an accountant. A CPA. He made very good money. He wasn’t rich, but he was half-owner of an accounting firm and he pulled a very respectable salary that was, by Bitter Lake standards, pretty damn good.

But she didn’t want to get married.

She was haunted by the specter of her parent’s death and had taken the whole world upon her shoulders. She would provide. She would run the house. She would raise her sister. Because she really could do it all, just ask her, and if that transformed her into a moody, stressed-out bitch sometimes then people would just have to realize that it was their fault and not hers.

But that was Tara.

Once she got something in her head, you could not bend or sway her. She would juggle it all and get it done even if it meant physical and mental collapse.

I do love you, Steve. You know I do. But the marriage thing will have to wait. Lisa’s at a very sensitive and emotional stage in her life. Her mom and dad died. She’s still dealing with it even if she won’t admit to it. The scars run deep. I think us getting married would make her think she’s secondary in my life and I can’t allow that. I can’t put more on her than she already has. And if that means sacrificing my happiness, then you better believe I’ll do it. And I’ll do it without a second thought.

Tara.

Jesus.

She didn’t broke interference even if that interference was along the lines of a good old helping hand. She allowed Margaret Stapleton to come over and mind the store while she was working evenings, but even that concession had been hard-fought. If it hadn’t been for the fact that Lisa was drinking and smoking dope, on the fast track to go careening over the edge, Tara would never had even considered something like that.

She’s my sister.

She’s blood.

My family and my problems and I’ll handle it.

Obsessed? Fixated? Monomaniacal even? You bet. That was Tara. She was driven and if you got in her way she’d run you right over. The death of their parents had cut a wound in the fabric of the family and she would suture it up and stop the bleeding even if she had to use her own sanity as a clotting agent and her own body as a bandage.

But how much could she take on before she broke her back from the weight and strained herself to the point of physical and mental collapse? Sometimes she got so frenzied, she was an emotional wreck. She seemed to see the person in the mirror not as an individual or a creature with its own needs but as a convenience, a tool needed to do a job and she’d keep at it until that tool lost its edge. And if that happened? What then? She had no real family to depend on, just an aunt and uncle in Milwaukee, a few cousins in Indiana. No support system. No friends. Didn’t have time for them. She barely had time for him.

And if she crashed?

What then?

At least, if they were married, he could shoulder some of it and he had a sister here that would help. He could keep Tara on her feet before she wore those feet to nubs and fell face-first and couldn’t get up again.

But what about now? Right now?

There was pain or desperation in her voice and he had clearly heard it.

Yet, she did not want him to come over and was that because she really didn’t or because being Tara, endlessly proud and self-reliant Tara, that she could not admit to her need of anyone or anything? Experience told him that when this girl said no, it meant no. Don’t bother trying to second-guess her or hold her hand or protect her, let
her
come to the conclusion that she needed someone. If it was her idea, she wasn’t above admitting that she, like everyone else, could only do so much.

He knew that once she got rolling on something, she was positively neurotic in her devotion to the cause. Like her sister, for instance. But that also applied to just about everything. When he first met her at a business lunch with the Teamsters local, he had thought her very pretty, very sexy with her long brown hair and big blue eyes. She was long-limbed and capable, her eyes so intense sometimes you just had to look away so her gaze didn’t drill a hole right through you.

Steve had been interested.

But more than a little intimidated.

He’d heard through the grapevine that she was seeing another guy, Frank Duvall, a guy nearly twenty years her senior who was a building contractor. Steve figured that was that. He knew not to try and steal women away from other men. That was a good way to get your ass kicked or your tires slit. So he had left it alone.

But Tara hadn’t.

Over the next five or six weeks, she had pursued him relentlessly. Called him. Invited him to dinner. Sent him cards. Showed up at the office. She was smitten and nothing was going to stand in her way. That’s how they had hooked-up and how Frank Duvall had been kicked to the curb. Frank still glared at Steve, but he was adult enough not to take it beyond that. Something Steve was grateful for because Frank, though middle-aged with a paunch, was rugged from a life of hard work outdoors and he had a set of guns on him like a weight-lifter.