Moonrise (31 page)

“Because you had access to my therapist’s records,” she pointed out calmly.

“He told you that as well, did he?” Martin said with a sigh. “I’d underestimated him. Did you sleep with him, Annie? Did you make him lie on top of you in the dark and do just what you wanted, until you came with those polite little sounds you make?”

“No,” she said.

Martin’s face broadened in a smirk. “Good.”

“I went down on him in a car outside of Dublin.”

He slapped her. It shocked him, and he stared at his faintly trembling hand in surprise. She didn’t react.

“You surprise me,” he said after a moment. “And I surprise myself. I hadn’t realized it would matter so much to me. I’m not sure which I mind more, the fact that you slept with him or the fact that he could make you do those things. I think I really mind him more than you.” He leaned back, comfortable
on the leather sofa, watching her. “Where’s the letter?”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“Destroy it. We have to start afresh. Everyone who worked for your father is gone now. Including James. That just leaves me and the General. Between us we can build something even more powerful, and far more lucrative. That was the problem with your father. He wasn’t that interested in money—he just liked playing games with life and death.”

“Did he ever care about anything?”

Martin shrugged. “I think he had a passing fondness for me. And for you as well. He wanted us to be together, you know. He wanted you to be his adoring little daughter, but if you were determined to marry he decided I’d be the perfect mate. Not that I was his favorite. I think the person he loved most was James. The man who killed him.” He reached out to touch her, and it took all her nerve not to jerk away from the soft stroke of his hand. And then his fingers caught in the locket, ripping it from her neck with a cruel twist.

She didn’t make the mistake of fighting for it. “Into jewelry, Martin?”

He flicked it open with a perfectly manicured thumbnail and stared down at the neatly folded scrap of paper. He closed it again, tucking
it in his pocket with a satisfied sigh. “That takes care of that,” he said. “And now I just have to deal with you.”

She stared at him, at the man she’d married and once thought she loved. At the embodiment of her father’s evil. “Won’t that be a little difficult?”

“James isn’t the only one who can kill, Annie. The difference was he never enjoyed it.” Martin stroked her face. “I do.”

His hands were soft, warm against her chilled skin. There was no way she could get the locket back from him, no way she could stop him. She wasn’t even sure that she wanted to.

“Are you going to make it look like murder? Won’t that draw undue attention to this house?”

“Suicide, my angel. You’re going to throw yourself down the stairs where your father died. You’ve been distraught these last few months. You even left a suicide note in your own handwriting.”

“How did you manage that?”

“I still have my resources.” He took her hand in his. “Come, Annie. You don’t really want to wait any longer to join James, do you?”

She smiled at him, rising gently. And then she smashed the crystal goblet into his face.

She had a gun in the house, up in her room. She knew how to use it, and she wanted to. She wanted to kill with a fierce desire unlike anything she had ever felt before. She raced across the room, ignoring Martin’s scream of rage and pain, and scrambled up the long, curving stairs where she had once descended, the perfect bride.

The perfect bridegroom was racing after her, pounding up the stairs after her. It was dark, and she didn’t bother to turn on the lights. She remembered all too well another trip up those stairs in the darkness, with James behind her.

Martin’s hand caught her ankle, and she kicked backward, connecting, and he fell backward with a furious cry, falling back down the stairs. She didn’t believe for one moment that would stop him, and she kept going, racing into her third-floor bedroom and diving for the bedside table.

The gun was gone. She knocked over the light as she tried to turn it on, and she yanked the drawer out onto the floor.

“Looking for this, Annie?” Martin stood silhouetted in the doorway, and she could see the gun in his hand. He reached over and flicked on the light, and it took all her strength not to flinch at the sight of his bloodied, gashed face.

“I’m not pleased with you,” he murmured in a hypnotic voice. “Not pleased at all.”

“I imagine you’re not,” she said. “You’ll have a hard time explaining the condition of your face—”

“No, I won’t. I’m eminently resourceful—you should know that by now. I’ll simply drive my car into a tree. I won’t be wearing my seat belt, and I’m afraid I’ll sustain a few more cuts than you managed to inflict on me, but it should cover up any other signs of a struggle you might care to attempt. You are going to struggle, aren’t you, Annie? It wouldn’t be any fun if you didn’t.”

“You’re sick.”

“Oh, have we sunk to that level already?” he protested wearily. “I think I’m quite remarkable. It’s not that many ex-husbands who’d take a glass mashed into their face with such equanimity. I’m attributing it to your grief over James. He was a worthless bastard, but you somehow managed to reach him when no one else could. Just as he managed to … inspire you. It’s all quite fascinating for a student of human nature.”

“You consider yourself a student of human nature?”

“No, my dear. I consider myself an artist of death. Never on James’s level, but then, he’s gone now, isn’t he? The king is dead, long live
the king.” He reached down for her, and she braced herself, expecting pain. Instead he was eerily gentle as he helped her to her feet. “Let’s get this over with, shall we?” he murmured. “Unless you’d like to see whether there’s still a chance to make our marriage work.”

She laughed. “I’d rather die than fuck you, Martin.”

“And so you will, Annie. So you will.”

She had nothing left to fight with. No weapons, no energy. She’d given it all, and now she was spent. She let him take her arm in a solicitous gesture and lead her back down the winding steps in the dark.

It doesn’t matter
, she told herself. She was already dead. She’d died when James had. This was merely a formality.

He took her through the kitchen door, the kitchen where she’d tried to cook Thanksgiving dinner a lifetime ago. She could almost feel James’s presence watching her. Watching over her. She stifled a hysterical little laugh.

“What’s so amusing, Annie?” Martin inquired gently, leading her across the drive to the narrow staircase that led up to the porch. There was a cool autumn breeze dancing through the trees overhead, lifting her hair away from her face. She’d always loved fall.

“I was thinking that James would watch
over me now. Like a guardian angel. And then I thought he wasn’t particularly angelic.”

“You know,” Martin murmured, “I find I’m oddly jealous of him. I don’t like that.”

“You’re a child, Martin,” she replied, pausing at the foot of the stairs. She’d found her father there, stiff and silent in death. James had left him for her to discover. “You don’t play nice with the other children, and you don’t share your toys.”

“True,” he said lightly. “Up we go.”

They started up the steep, narrow steps. There was room for the two of them to travel side by side, but just barely. The screened-in landing at the top of the porch was shadowed in darkness, and she could just imagine James up there, hidden in the shadows, waiting for Father. Waiting for her.

“How did James manage to get my father up here?” she asked suddenly, more to herself. Not really expecting an answer.

“It was Win’s idea.”

She halted two-thirds of the way up, staring at him. “How do you know?”

“I was there, dearest. Watching, to make sure James didn’t become foolishly sentimental. After all, I had gone to a great deal of trouble to set the whole thing up. I didn’t want his nerve to fail at the end.”

“You set my father up?”

“Not exactly. He deserved to die, but then, most of us poor mortals do. I simply made sure those who had the power to see it taken care of found out about it.”

“You betrayed him.”

“As good a word as any.”

“Why didn’t you do it?”

“He wanted James. It was really quite touching, darling. Neither of them knew I was here, watching. They had an elegant dinner, a few brandies, and then they went for a walk. And when they reached the top of the stairs, Win asked James to kill him.”

“Don’t expect similar cooperation from his daughter.”

“Oh, I don’t, Annie. I’m hoping for a fight.”

A dozen more steps, and he was moving her up there, one step at a time. She looked up again, into the darkness, and she could imagine a tall, shrouded figure waiting there. Waiting to deliver death.

She looked at the man beside her, beyond hatred, beyond fear. His gun was pressed hard against her rib cage, and she knew there was nothing she could do. Except, perhaps, take him with her.

“So tell me, Annie,” he said. “Do you want to go down on me before you die? Just for old time’s sake, since you seem to have lost your aversion to the practice.”

“I’d rather suck a rattlesnake.”

The gun pressed harder. “I could make you.”

“That might be dangerous.”

He sighed. “You’re right, of course. Did I ever tell you that was one of the things I found most irritating about you? That you were usually right.” They’d reached the top of the stairs. Martin didn’t bother to glance into the shadows ahead of them. Annie did.

“Show time, darling,” he said. “Ready for a swan dive?”

“Get the fuck away from her, Martin.”

James moved out of the shadows, a bloody specter, limping, dark, vengeful. Martin stood there, frozen with shock for a brief, blessed moment.

And then Annie shoved him.

The railing splintered as he went down. His skull smashed on the cement block at the bottom. He twitched for a moment and then lay still.

The thick, dark ooze of blood looked black in the moonlight.

“You’re not dead,” she said to James.

“I feel like it.” He came closer, into the bright light of the moon, and she could see the dark blood that stained his pant leg, the scrape across his face. The sheer, utter weariness of him. He was alive, and he was hers.
In the midst of death and chaos, that was all that mattered.

His eyes met hers for an endless moment. There was no need for words. He didn’t touch her, he moved past her, slowly, painfully, down the narrow stairs with the broken railing. He paused partway down and looked back at her.

“Are you coming?” he asked.

“Where?”

“I don’t know. Away from here.”

Ireland, she thought. May you die in Ireland. Old and weary and at peace.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes.”

Rachel Connery didn’t want to be there. At the age of twenty-nine she’d made it her policy never to do anything she didn’t want, to always have a choice in matters. She
was
there by choice, she reminded herself grimly. It was simply a choice she wished she didn’t have to make.

The taxi had already pulled to a stop outside the sweeping expanse of Santa Dolores, home base to the Foundation of Being. Seventeen miles away from Albuquerque, it sat beneath the New Mexico sun like the peaceful retreat it purported to be. A compound devoted to meditation, enlightenment, combined with a hospice center to care for the dying.

Her mother had sought enlightenment behind those walls. Her mother had died there.

The cab driver had already opened her door, and she slid out, brushing imaginary dust off her silk suit as she glared up at the compound. She didn’t want to be there, she thought again. And they knew it.

“I can handle it from here,” she said, taking her battered leather suitcase from the driver and handing him a generous tip.

“Blessings,” he murmured.

“What?”

“Blessings. You’re one of Luke’s People, aren’t you?” the driver seemed momentarily confused, but his fist closed tight over the money in case she was inclined to snatch it back.

“No,” she said shortly. “I’m not.” And she marched toward the beautiful forged gate, her high heels firm in the dusty drive.

Luke’s People, they called themselves. She’d managed to blot that particularly ugly thought out of her mind, but now it was back. There was no more hiding from things she didn’t want to face. She’d never met the man, only seen him from a distance. But even across a crowded courtroom she could feel the poisonous strands of his charisma, like a spider’s web reaching out toward any stray creature who wandered into his path.

Luke Bardell, ex-con, wanted man, founder of what some people called a philosophy, others called a religion, and Rachel called a cult. The man who had mesmerized her dying mother into leaving twelve and a half million dollars to the Foundation of Being. And not a damned thing to the only child she’d ever had.

Ten years ago Rachel might have simply curled up in a tight ball and wept. But not now. She’d fought back, hard. Only to have her lawsuit thrown out by the first judge, her lawyers quit on her, and defeat wash over her like a bitter shower of acid. You can’t sue a religion. You can’t accuse a saint. Stella Connery was of sound mind when she made her will, she knew she was dying of breast cancer, and she’d made her decision.

And the Foundation of Being had been nauseatingly gracious in triumph. Surely Rachel would want to make a pilgrimage to the place where her mother had spent
her final, peaceful days, to the spot where she was buried. She could see the good that Stella’s money was doing, make peace with what the courts and her mother had chosen. The Foundation, and Luke’s People, would welcome the chance to share the blessings that had come their way.

Rachel would have rather eaten fried caterpillars. They certainly weren’t about to share the money that had come their way, that they’d wheedled and tricked out of a vain, dying woman. Stella and Luke had been lovers, Rachel had no doubt about that whatsoever. Stella had gone through men with a voraciousness that had left her only child awed and frigid in response. No good-looking man had been immune to Stella.