Shattered (19 page)

The door was unlocked.

Oh my God.

Completely unable to draw back now that she was so tantalizingly close, she refocused all her attention on what she was doing and cautiously pushed the door open. Her breathing ragged, her heart jitterbugging in her chest, she looked wide-eyed into the gloom of the empty kitchen. That first glance took in a wall of old varnished wood cabinets, figured wallpaper, and a faux-brick linoleum floor. Remembering the blood that supposedly had been spilled there, her eyes fixed on the floor--
could it possibly be the same one?
--and then she jumped a mile high as the first imposing notes of Beethoven's Fifth split the air.

My phone.

The relief she felt as she identified the sound was as palpable as the musty smell wafting toward her through the open kitchen door. Releasing the knob, digging her phone out of her pocket, she squinted at the display. The numbers were difficult to see with the house's shadow falling over her.

"Hello?" Unable to read the number that would tell her the caller's identity, she answered anyway. It could be the hospital or Joel or . . . well, since Scott had told her to take as much time as she needed off from work, there wasn't anyone she was trying to avoid, so it didn't matter.

There was no reply.

Frowning, she turned away from the door and started walking toward the edge of the deck in hopes of getting a stronger signal.

"Hello?" she tried again impatiently.

"I can barely hear you." The voice on the other end sounded as if the speaker was at the bottom of a well. So far out in the country, cell phone towers were few and far between. "Hey, it's Rinko. Where are you?"

She was just about to answer when a sudden rush of movement behind her snapped her head around. A gray blur exploded through the door. . . .

Screaming, heart leaping into her throat, she tried to get away, but it was too late. Even as the phone fell from her suddenly nerveless fingers to land with a clatter at her feet, something slammed hard into the side of her head.

Her knees collapsed, and she dropped like a rock into nothingness.

13

When Lisa opened her eyes again,
she found herself looking up into Jantzen's worried face. It was close, and shadowed, and framed by a patch of sky that was slowly turning purple far above it as the twilight continued to deepen.

"She's conscious," Jantzen turned her head to report with relief to someone behind her.

"Think we should call nine-one-one?"

Lisa recognized the anxious voice even before the face just beyond Jantzen's shoulder came clear enough to be identifiable: Rinko.

"I don't know." Jantzen touched her arm. "Grant, can you hear me?"

Lisa summoned all her resources. "Yes."

"What happened?" Rinko asked.

Frowning made her head hurt, so Lisa abandoned the attempt and stared blankly up at the two of them without replying as she tried to work that out for herself. She'd headed out to meet the insurance adjuster at Grayson Springs, then . . .

"You probably shouldn't move." Rinko had his phone out. She could see it in his hand. The fingers of his other hand hovered over it. "So, do I call nine-one-one or not?"

"I don't know." Jantzen seemed to be peering deeply into her eyes, which briefly baffled Lisa. "Her pupils look normal," she reported back to Rinko, and Lisa realized Jantzen had been evaluating her pupil size to check for a possible concussion.

Lisa, meanwhile, had started to shake her head in reply to Rinko's question but had to stop. The movement was so discombobulating that she had to briefly close her eyes again.

"Oh, crap," Rinko said. "Did she faint?"

"No." Lisa opened her eyes before Jantzen could reply or Rinko could get carried away with his cell phone. There was a reason she didn't want him to make that call, but just at the moment, with her brain frozen like a balky computer and pain hammering her skull, she couldn't think what it was. She made a tremendous effort. "Don't call anybody. Just give me a minute, would you please?"

Her voice sounded weak. Lifting an unsteady hand in an attempt to pinpoint the source of the pain, she found a bump the size of a Ping-Pong ball rising just above her right ear, and winced.

"Did you hit your head?" Jantzen asked.

This time Lisa didn't make the mistake of moving. She took a deep breath and tried again to remember. She'd found the Garcias' house. . . .

"What are you two doing here?" The sheer unlikeliness of Rinko's and Jantzen's presence struck her in mid-rumination. She was, she saw, as her surroundings finally swam into full focus, lying on her back in what had once been the Garcias' backyard. The ground was hard, and sharp blades of grass pricked her bare arms and legs. Hair tucked behind her ears, a worried frown on her face, her tiered yellow skirt pooled around her like the petals of a daffodil, Jantzen knelt beside her. Phone in hand, glasses slightly askew, collar unbuttoned, and tie at half-mast, Rinko crouched just behind Jantzen. There were others present as well, roughly half a dozen people she didn't recognize, surrounding her in a loose semicircle. They were standing--tall as trees, from her vantage point--all looking down at her with varying degrees of concern. Her first impression of them was of a jumble of sneakers, flip-flops, denim, bare legs, T-shirts, and weird hair. Teenagers: almost certainly the wayward lambs. She felt a sense of relief as she made the connection.

At least her brain seemed to be beginning to function again.

"We started talking about the case when I called it up on the computer to give you the address. Everybody kind of thought it would be pretty tight if we could figure out what had happened to the family after all these years. The first step, obviously, was to come out and look at the house they disappeared from." Rinko still seemed on the brink of dialing 911. He gestured with the phone still clutched in his hand. "Your car was here when we got here, so we knew you had to be here, too. I called your cell phone, you answered, and then--
wow.
That was some kind of scream you let out. You weren't anywhere out front, so we ran around back. You were laid out on the ground here."

"You looked really bad," a plump blond girl with raccoon eyes said earnestly. "Real pale."

"Ashley thought you were dead. She screamed, too." The boy's voice--he was a tall, lanky kid with spiky black hair--was taunting. "Like a little girl."

"Shut up, Matt." The blonde--presumably Ashley--glared at him.

"What? You did," Matt protested.

"Can it, guys," Rinko ordered, shooting them a quelling look.

The house was to her left, Lisa saw, as she glanced in that direction. That was what Rinko had been gesturing at, obviously. She lay in its shadow. From her position, it seemed probable that she'd fallen down the two shallow steps that were attached to the deck. Was that why she had screamed? The kitchen door was ajar, providing a glimpse into the dark interior. Seeing that, Lisa suddenly felt cold all over.

In a flash she remembered everything: She'd opened the back door of the house, and then her phone had rung. When she turned away to answer, something--
someone
--had attacked her.

"Somebody hit me. There was somebody in the house and I opened the door and I--"

She broke off as all of a sudden it occurred to her that whoever had attacked her was probably not far away. Jackknifing into a sitting position, she was assailed by a wave of dizziness so strong she swayed. If she hadn't felt such an acute sense of urgency, she would have slumped back down to the grass again and lain there unmoving for pretty much the rest of her life. Instead, fighting to clear her head, she braced a hand on the ground and glanced anxiously around.

"Did you see anybody? Somebody running away? Or maybe a car leaving? Anything like that?"

"No." They were all shaking their heads as the world finally stopped dipping and spinning around her and they came into focus again.

"There was no one here when we got here." Jantzen must have seen that she was having difficulties, because she put a steadying arm around her. Lisa accepted the support gratefully. "Just you."

"Okay, now I guess I really should call nine-one-one." Rinko started punching in the numbers once more.

"No!" The sharpness in Lisa's voice stopped his finger in mid-punch. He looked at her questioningly. "Don't call anyone. I don't need medical attention, I promise."

"At the very least we should call the police." Jantzen frowned at her. "If somebody hit you . . ."

"I may be wrong about that," Lisa lied desperately. As her thoughts became clearer, one thing she was fairly sure of was that she didn't want to call official attention to what had happened. Obviously she had surprised someone inside the house. It was possible that whoever it was had been in the midst of a random break-in, maybe a drifter or even a couple of kids or--well, somebody engaged on their own nefarious business that had nothing to do with her and just didn't want to be caught at it. It was also possible that her attacker had been inside the house for the same reason she had stopped by--because the Garcias had once lived there.

Is there a connection?

Yesterday she had taken the Garcia file home. Last night Grayson Springs had burned. Today someone inside the supposedly empty house the Garcia family formerly lived in had leaped out at her when she had surprised them and had knocked her unconscious.

Coincidence? God, she hoped so. Because if it was anything other than coincidence, she had stumbled onto something she was probably better off not pursuing.

If my interest in this case is stirring up such a reaction, it can only be because there is something there to find.

The thought lay before her like a nearly invisible thread. She mentally stared at it in the full knowledge that if she picked it up and followed it, it might lead her back to the answer to what had happened to the Garcias.

And why she looked so much like Angela.

Do I really want to know?

Every instinct she possessed screamed that the best thing she could do was just leave the matter lie.

Never ask a question unless you're sure you want to know the answer.
It was one of the first things she'd learned in law school.

Do I want to know the answer to this?
Ah, that was the question.

"Could we get out of here?" The other girl, who glanced around nervously as she spoke, had short black hair and a short denim skirt that revealed thin, knobby-kneed legs. "This place is starting to creep me out. Anyway, I told my grandmother I'd be home by dark."

"What difference does it make if you're home by dark or not if you're out getting pizza? It's not like you're going to be outside." A boy with a Veronica Lake-style sweep of medium brown hair gave the girl who had just spoken an impatient look out of his one visible eye.

"But we're not out getting pizza," the blonde pointed out. "We already did that. Now we're out here in the middle of nowhere, where there's maybe some kind of murderer on the loose, to check out a house where a family might have been killed. I'm with Sarah: I think we should leave."

"What, do you think there's been a murderer hiding inside the house for thirty years? What is this,
Friday the Thirteenth
?" a boy snorted. He was thin, with shaggy, fair hair, and Lisa recognized him with a quick widening of her eyes: Scott's nephew. What was his name? Oh, yeah. Chase.

"She didn't say that," the black-haired girl--Sarah--defended her friend. "Anyway,
something
happened to her." Sarah's eyes rested significantly on Lisa.

"I think I must have fallen down the steps and hit my head," Lisa said as all eyes turned to her. Until she had more time to think the possible ramifications through, she didn't want to get the police involved in anything to do with the Garcias, which was what was going to happen if she told the truth.

"So, you're saying nobody hit you? Nobody was in the house?" Rinko looked at her with a skeptical frown.

"My father's always saying I'm way too imaginative. I . . . thought at first that was what had happened, but now that my mind's a little clearer, I think I must have just fallen down the steps." Lisa tried offering a helping of apologetic smile to go along with that lie. The smile felt lopsided. God, she was developing the mother of all headaches, which was no surprise, considering the size of the bump. "I'm with Sarah--is that your name?--too. I think we should leave."

Sarah acknowledged her name with a nod.

"Oh, sorry, I thought you knew these guys." Rinko rattled off their names one after the other as he pointed to each kid in turn. "They're wicked smart, and they're going to be a big help with the files. We worked it out so that they're going to come in for a couple of hours a day a few days a week. And Jantzen's going to help, too. But this here is strictly extracurricular. You know, kind of for fun."

"Great." Mentally gritting her teeth against a fresh wave of dizziness, Lisa managed to stand up. Her head pounded, and the world swam around her, but she planted her feet and stood fast. Gingerly, she touched the bump and winced. She couldn't help it: She found herself once again looking at the house. "Um, maybe somebody could shut the door?"

"I'll do it." They all watched as Chase scampered up the steps to the deck. Reaching the door, he looked back at them. "You want me to lock it, right?"

Lisa had a lightning mental vision of herself returning to the house alone and, entering through the back door, which she had told Chase not to lock, exploring the interior of the house. Her verdict?

Not gonna happen.

"Lock it," she decreed.

Chase nodded, did something to the inner knob, which she presumed involved engaging the lock, and closed the back door. Only then did it occur to Lisa that maybe there had been some evidence of her attacker on the smooth brass surface, such as fingerprints. But the last thing she wanted to do was trigger an investigation, so she said nothing as Chase rejoined the group.