Mirror of My Soul (33 page)

Well, he’d seen some of her worst. Particularly a few minutes ago. She’d hurt him she knew, but he didn’t let go. And she hadn’t given back the ring. Her lips curved wryly and she almost laughed in the quiet solitude of her car.
That
had been the emotion in his eyes, damn him. Satisfaction. She’d ranted, stalled, lashed out. But she’d kept it. And she hadn’t said no.

Pulling into the alley by her house, she got out and locked the car. She was going to do something very unlike herself. She was going to go show the ring to Chloe and ask her what she thought of it, listen to her giggle and squeal. Gen was picking up a tea shipment in Miami, so when she got back she’d have another opportunity to go through it again. She liked the idea. They would talk about Tyler, Chloe making suggestive comments that would warm her insides because Marguerite knew the comments to be true and then some. The hold of the dream loosened further. She had the fleeting thought that maybe Tyler was right. If she’d just given herself some time the dream would have faded, and she could have enjoyed breakfast with them.

“Rich, handsome, great in bed and he loves me.” She said it out loud. Wasn’t that the fairy tale? Well, maybe they left out the “good in bed” part in the children’s version, but it was implied for adult ears to hear.

It was at the side door she remembered. Understood what had driven her from

Tyler’s house. Understood why she had known when she fled that she was right and he was wrong.

She wasn’t allowed fairy tales or fantasies. She wasn’t allowed anything good, anything that attracted excessive amounts of happiness, because it attracted the attention of darkness.

She remembered because the pane of glass in the door had been broken out and the door was not fully closed.

Chloe. Chloe was in Tea Leaves. Knowing she should call the police, knowing all the things she was not supposed to do, she went in because Chloe was inside.

The kitchen had been destroyed. Every dish was on the floor broken. Cakes and

cookies had been tossed on top of them and smashed with clear boot prints. She came quietly around the corner of her office, every part of her going still, watchful, pushing out everything that did not have to do with protecting Chloe. The instincts she’d kept honed for over twenty years, though time might have laid a veneer of false peace over them, came thrusting to the surface.

Her desk had been turned over. From the aroma, someone had urinated on it and

perhaps done something more among her papers. Squatted, took his time and defecated on her life. Her stomach muscles were tight, her throat thick. She would not allow herself to think, hypothesize, speculate. There was only now, the moment of hell come to claim her and she had to do what was necessary. Her bat was not behind her door.

166

Mirror of My Soul

She bent and picked up two shards of a broken cup that had wicked points, closed one in each hand where they wouldn’t be readily seen and eased into the main dining area.

A similar scenario. Tables and chairs overturned. One had been used to smash her wall display. Crockery from her XiYing original lay in pieces. Her eyes rested on the doll, the ceramic set that had been stomped into tiny pieces next to it. The doll’s face had been gouged out with a bloody screwdriver that was still in it, the porcelain shattered, twisted and stained with that blood.

He’d spent extra time on it. Knowing. The cold sickness in her stomach increased.

Her gaze covered the area. Found Chloe, her body stretched out on her side, blood on her face and a wet fist-sized circle of it staining her cotton shirt, the one that had a gold and black depiction of Buddha against a field of pale green. Her arm and right leg were bent back in a way that suggested they’d both been broken.

Marguerite quelled the immediate urge to run to her side, continuing her

examination of the room. Above the entry door a message had been smeared in what appeared to be blood. Chloe’s blood.

Let’s finish it.

Not at any moment had she considered the invader was a disgruntled drug dealer she’d driven from her park or someone seeking drug money, though the neighborhood had enough of both elements. She’d always known if anyone came for her, it would be him.

But the message told her he wasn’t here. Spell broken, she lunged to Chloe’s side, knelt and felt for her pulse. Felt like weeping at the faint flutter and when Chloe’s eyes opened. Her lips parted and Marguerite saw more blood, two teeth broken, dislodged.

Took in all the bruises on her arms and at her throat.

“Oh, Chloe.” She stroked back the girl’s hair, pulling out her cell phone to hit 911.

“Why did you fight him? You should have run, damn it. Yes, 400 Carolton Avenue. I’ve got an employee who’s been attacked and needs emergency medical attention. Yes, yes.” She answered the few questions, clicked off as Chloe fumbled for her hand.

Thank God Gen had gone to Miami to get the shipment. Marguerite had no

illusions that the two women here together would have made things better. Neither woman would have anticipated the insidious evil coming at them. They would have fought that much harder and likely both been dead. Chloe had lost so much blood, her mischievous face so pale, so strained as she tried to speak.

“Sshhh…Chloe. Please just rest. The ambulance is coming.”

Chloe made a noise of protest, so insistent that Marguerite felt the dread creep up in her shoulder blades. She bent down as Chloe pulled, so the girl could force out a whisper.

“Tina…Natalie. Asked if Natalie could help me while she…ran an errand.”

Ice gripped every part of Marguerite, rising up in her, taking over. It stopped all human functions, giving her only cold clarity. Focus.

167

Joey W. Hill

“He has Natalie.”

She looked at the message over the door. Nodded. Looked back down at Chloe and molded the girl’s bloody fingers around the cell phone. “They’re on their way, love.

You just stay put.” She could already hear the sirens. She had to go.

But a thought crossed her mind, making a crack in the frigid wasteland of her soul.

It didn’t surprise her that the only thing that could get through at this moment was Tyler. He’d been able to break through the constraints of her past time and time again, where no one else had.

She bent back down. “Chloe, can you remember something for me? It’s important.”

Chloe looked up at her through a haze of pain.

“Tell Tyler I loved him enough to live for him. Can you remember? It’s incredibly important.”

“Marguerite…don’t.”

She brushed a kiss over her friend’s forehead. Her friend. For the first time she realized that you didn’t have to believe someone was your friend for that person to be one. But she couldn’t look back and didn’t as she snatched up what she needed and sprinted for the car.

When she roared out of the neighborhood, she passed the ambulance. The red lights glinted briefly across her vision, washing crimson over the pale skin of her hands, tight on the wheel.

Let’s finish it.

168

Mirror of My Soul

The damn roses sensed his mood, knew to be defensive. That was the only reason Tyler could figure he had pricked his fingers three times in less than fifteen minutes. He never wore gloves, preferring to woo his thorny ladies with careful touches. He had his ear tuned to the phone, the portable and cell within easy reach. He was no better than her assessment of herself, acting like a lovestruck teenager.

She wouldn’t call tonight, he was fairly certain of it, for all that. He knew her well enough to know she needed to think. Needed space. But she had kept the ring.

Violet and Mac had left only an hour before, headed for home, Violet had been scheduled for a weekend work shift, so the sound of a motorcycle pulling up in the driveway surprised him. Mac was the only friend he knew who regularly used one. The ring of the cell phone jerked his attention away from that puzzle in a blink. Snatching up the phone, he recognized Violet’s cell number, squashed his disappointment.

“Tyler, where are you? Are you still in the city?”

“Yeah.” Mac, apparently having gotten his whereabouts from Sarah, came through the backyard, a grim set to his mouth. “Mac just got here. What’s going on?”

“Tyler, someone broke into Tea Leaves. They beat up Chloe pretty badly. She’s on the way to the hospital. Marguerite—”

Her next words came as quickly as the first, but for Tyler there was an abyss

between her name and that moment, as if he was teetering on the edge, straining for that opposite side but knowing that eternal darkness yawned beneath him. He was cognizant of Mac at his shoulder, the look in his eyes. “—wasn’t there when it happened. She called it in, though. Mac picked it up on the dispatch radio at home.”

“All right, I’ll head right over there—”

“There’s more. The perp kidnapped a little girl Chloe was watching named Natalie Moorefield. Chloe’s a tough kid. She wouldn’t let them put her in the ambulance until she told them all she knew. Marguerite’s gone after him.”

“What? How the hell does she know—”

“Chloe said he wrote something over the doorway. ‘Let’s finish it.’ Marguerite took one look at it, left Chloe her cell phone and was gone. Mac called me. I sent him to you right away but I went with a hunch and called the prison where her father was. They’ve released him, time served.”

“But she would have—” Tyler broke off, remembering Marguerite’s behavior when

he’d called her from Cape Cod that day. How she’d been so standoffish and prickly, then suddenly desperate in the dim quiet of her bedroom.

He doesn’t know where I am.

169

Joey W. Hill

How many women had said that? Believed it? Died believing it.

“Bank of Florida building. I’ll bet my life on it. We can be there in two minutes from my place.”

It was ten miles from his house but Violet wasn’t going to argue it. “I’ll call it in.”

Tyler broke the connection, headed into the house. Going to his office, he unlocked the gun safe, pulled on the dual shoulder holster and fitted it with his nine millimeter and his Desert Eagle. He slipped the licenses to carry the guns and extra clips into his jeans’ pockets. “Don’t say a fucking word to me about being a civilian.”

“Wasn’t going to.”

Rage and fear mixed together became hard, cold resolve. “He’s intending to take all three of them over. He’s sick as they come, Mac. The only thing he’s living for is to finish the equation. The child’s just a bonus, the bait to get Marguerite there.”

The two men left the house, hit the bottom step of the front porch together. “I gave her an engagement ring last night,” he said.

Mac glanced at him, understanding in his expression. “Then I hope you’re asking Violet to give you away, or she’ll be pissed.”

“Marguerite hasn’t said yes yet. She actually was kind of ticked off at me about it.

We have to protect her, Mac. At any cost. She doesn’t deserve this.”

Tyler strode out into the driveway. Mac didn’t reply, knew he didn’t need to. From the set of Tyler’s shoulders his mind had only one track now.

Mac’s VTX was parked next to Tyler’s Ferrari. “I
can
make it there in two minutes on this,” Mac said. “Where will they be?”

“The roof.” Tyler got in the car, slammed the door, fired the engine. “And you won’t beat me there.” The car spun out of the driveway.

Mac had feared for the life of his woman before, knew what it was to find that icy center of control and do things that no person under ordinary circumstances would survive. So he was not at all surprised when Tyler ran through stoplights at busy intersections without pausing, ran up on the shoulder to get past a garbage truck, took turns at velocities only an experienced driver and a car with the Ferrari’s engineering could successfully manage. He just hoped they wouldn’t be too late. If they were…

He leaped onto the sidewalk through the next intersection and then shot back out behind Tyler’s taillights, hearing the scream of brakes as motorists tried to avoid hitting them both.

…he was going to make damn sure Tyler didn’t get there before him.

* * * * *

A light drizzle was falling and it was always colder on top of the building. Natalie might need her coat. Turning up the collar of her rain gear, Marguerite stepped into the foyer of the Bank of Florida building, thinking that everything around her had a surreal 170

Mirror of My Soul

quality. All the colors turned up to high volume yet coated with a dull patina that made the world ugly, not vibrant.

Over the years, she had visited this building often enough that the indifferent security detail had accepted her as one of the corporate types. She’d even manufactured herself an ID that passed at a distance as one of those assigned to the major banking office housed in the building. Today her elegant London Fog rain cape worn against the outside drizzle and her determined step made her look as if she was just an employee coming in to do weekend work.

She needn’t have worried. The security officer was not there and the lock on the glass door that had to be deactivated with a buzzer after hours was not engaged. She peered over the edge of the horseshoe desk. Spots of blood were on the visitor’s log, marks that would have passed as ink stains to the unsuspecting mind. She hoped he was knocked out, dragged to a closet somewhere, but then she leaned farther over the counter, saw his body curled under the desk, his eyes staring. He clutched a note in stiff fingers, the print large enough to read, as if the guard had been turned into a macabre form of sign post.

Come on up.

She looked at the guard a full minute, reached down, closed his eyes. “I’m sorry,”

she said softly. To him. To his family. To the children whose photos were on the desk, who wouldn’t have him as they grew up. For them, it would be a tragedy, a loss. For her, it would have been a gift from God.

She straightened, went to the elevator, set it to go to the top floor. If she had died that day, a guard wouldn’t be dead. Natalie wouldn’t be in his hands now.