Stay Dead (3 page)

But Elise had the feeling being a drone
was
a bad thing. This was a test. “I want to be an artist.”

Anastasia smiled at Elise, and Elise jumped into her arms.

“Did you have an adult who was a major influence in your life?” Elise asked David as they both stared at the pool.

“You.”

“No, not me.”

“Yeah, you.”

“As a kid.”

“My mother.”

He and his mother were close. Elise liked that about him.

“My aunt was the only person who accepted me for who I was,” Elise said. “She was the only person who wasn’t afraid of where I’d come from.”

“See, I think that’s what this is all about. You had a near-death experience. That makes people reevaluate their lives. I get that. But the thing to keep in mind is that sometimes it makes us behave in uncharacteristic ways that don’t make a lot of sense.”

“Like this,” Elise said. “Like coming here. Now.”

“Like this,” he agreed. “I’ve been where you are now. I know how it messes with your head.”

“The plantation has been handed to me. It came when I most needed it, and you shouldn’t ignore something like that. So what if it’s irrational and out of character? What difference does it make? I’m a big girl. So I spend a week or two here and when I’m ready to go back to my place I go back.”

“You’ll go stir crazy.”

“You don’t know that.”

He shook his head, resigned. “I’ll get your suitcase.”

Down the hall from the kitchen were three bedrooms. The wooden floor creaked, and walls were bare to the laths and decorated with more framed art. At the end of the hall was a narrow door that took a person to the cramped servant stairs and the second and third level.

If things were still as Elise remembered, the second floor would look like a boarding house, with six rooms on each side of a narrow hallway. A couple of the rooms had been used as art studios back in the day, and Elise recalled walking in on a painting session for which her aunt was the model, lying in a pool of sunlight, completely naked. Nudity was an unheard of occurrence in Elise’s house. She’d gasped, and Anastasia had gracefully lifted a hand in languid greeting.

Now many of the windows were broken and boarded up, and Elise couldn’t help but wonder if the couch where Anastasia had reclined was still there. And the painting? What happened to the painting?

Beyond the studio, another flight of stairs led to a third story of mice and dust and planked flooring—an area of the house where Elise had been forbidden to go.

“Are you sure you want to stay in this room?” David asked, hefting her plaid bag onto a padded vanity stool.

“It’s fine.” Elise surveyed the space. Windows that overlooked dense trees, a sprawling king-size bed. More artwork on the walls. She remembered being read to in this room, cuddling up next to her aunt, and Anastasia’s two dogs at the foot of the bed.

“This will be the handiest,” Elise said. “It has a bathroom, and the kitchen is just down the hall.” She pointed. “Phone next to the bed.”

“So, no talking you out of this.” David stuck his hands deep in the pockets of his coat.

They both knew that wasn’t going to happen.

And then he did something very strange and very uncharacteristic. He approached Elise in a way he’d never approached her before. With serious blue eyes that transmitted more than friendship. Eyes that held a question she didn’t want him to ask. He reached for her in this tender way, a way that seemed to project and evoke longing.

There it was. The thing between them. Elise’s breath caught as she thought about how it would feel. His lips on hers. And more than a kiss. Much more. What would it hurt? What would it hurt to drop the screen of friendship?

David was old-world handsome. Classically handsome. She didn’t hold that against him, because it came in handy when they interviewed women, and sometimes men. Dark, straight hair with streaks of light brown that would vanish whenever he got a haircut, then reappear as the sun did its work. Beautiful skin, and an angular jaw that needed to be shaved again by late afternoon. Like now. And a mouth
. . .

That mouth turned up slightly at the corners, and he whispered, “Someday
. . .
”

For a brief second, Elise saw something in his eyes that was too deep and too scary. With David she always got the sense that he was hanging by a thread, and if he ever let go
. . .
And now he was inviting her to come with him.

She pulled back a little, but his hands were still on her arms. “Someday what?” she asked, hoping he would follow her lead to the land of safe.

He didn’t. “You. Me.”

“Highly unlikely.”

“What are you afraid of?”

“I’m not afraid.”

“You know what I mean.”

They stared at each other for a long time. And then they both laughed. Maybe too hard, but that’s how they did these things. That’s how they handled it.

The hair she’d put in a ponytail before leaving the hospital began to slip free, and dark strands fell around her face. David took note of her dilemma and came to stand behind her. Once in grooming position, he tugged the band free, swept back her straight hair with his palms, and redid the whole thing in a matter of a few seconds, giving her shoulders a there-you-go pat. He took rejection well.

CHAPTER 4

T
hat night Elise woke up thinking she was home. Thinking she was in her bed in the Garden District. She stared into the darkness, barely able to make out the shape of a painting above her. For a disoriented heartbeat, she thought the painting was a door, and she wondered what would happen if she opened that door. She got the sense that if she opened it she’d find something she didn’t want to find.

So odd. She didn’t remember a door in her room. And then she became cognizant of where she was. The plantation. Aunt Anastasia’s bed. That realization created a cascading sensation as her brain struggled to rearrange the puzzle that was the space surrounding her in the darkness.

The bed, with its feather topper, was almost too soft. Elise liked a firm mattress. And it smelled. Not bad, but like the vanilla and lavender oil Anastasia used to concoct.

“Try it, Elise. It’s so refreshing.”

Elise would put her finger over the brown bottle, tip it, and dab the homemade perfume behind her ears.

“The ears seem like a silly place for perfume,” Elise had said. “Why do ears need perfume?”

“Because men like to smell a woman’s hair,” Anastasia explained. “They want to bury their faces in your hair and press their lips just here”—she touched her niece—“just below your earlobe.”

“And you want to taste good for them?”

“You want to taste delicious.”

And maybe the bed smelled a bit like wine and smoke, as if the years of Anastasia’s life had soaked into the feathers. Elise remembered her aunt pulling her close, and the smell was like that. Like her arms and her clothes and her hair. The pillow, where Elise’s head was resting
. . .
Anastasia’s head had rested there. Elise found that knowledge both comforting and disturbing. She wanted to stuff the pillow under the bed, and she wanted to hug it and inhale deeply.

At one point, Elise drifted back to sleep and dreamed that a bouquet of gardenias rested on the small marble-topped table next to the bed. And later, during the night when she half woke, she could still smell them. That sickening and cloying and wonderful scent. She imagined shiny black ants crawling over petals.

Pain. Her pain medication had worn off. That explained the dreams. The weird thoughts. The constant waking.

With the crutches under her arms, Elise thumped down the hallway and was halfway to the kitchen when she heard a splash coming from the direction of the pool.

Her first thought was intruder, but her second was more logical. Someone else had probably been given permission to use the house. Or maybe her aunt’s open-door policy was still in play. But that theory didn’t keep Elise from returning to the bedroom to grab her gun.

She’d never tried to use crutches and hold a gun at the same time. She briefly contemplated putting the weapon between her teeth, but finally opted for slipping the shoulder holster over her nightgown.

Back down the hall, she leaned her crutches against the wall so her hands were free. She pulled out her Glock 17, then, favoring her good foot, lightly putting weight on the walking cast, she approached the pool room. Except for the cast, except for the shoulder holster, except for the gun, she would have looked like some heroine from a gothic novel in her white, sleeveless gown—a present from her daughter. Elise wondered if Audrey had been trying to tell her something.
Be more feminine, Mom. Be more like a regular mom.
Bake cookies and wear nightgowns made of cotton and a bit of lace.

Sometimes Elise thought she’d failed Audrey just as much as Grace had failed Elise. The long hours of work. The way she was never as present as she should be. Watching a softball game, her mind would wander to the cases on her desk. To the most recent crimes she and David were working.

Another splash.

The door to the pool room was inches from her shoulder. Deep breath, gun braced, Elise swung into the room, scanning with her eyes and the barrel.

In the center of the pool was a disturbance left by a diving body. As Elise watched, a black question mark rose to the surface. She blinked and stepped closer. Just a swirl. Just a shadow.

And then, not a yard from her feet, a person exploded from the water. Elise’s eyes and mind processed an aqua swimming cap with yellow flowers. A black bathing suit. The bathing suit that had been on the chaise longue earlier, and a woman all long and willowy, with white arms.

“Hello, Elise,” the woman said with lips as red as cherries, with a voice that was familiar in tone and inflection and softly Southern accent. “Welcome back to the plantation.”

Aunt Anastasia.

CHAPTER 5

T
his is where the woman in the gothic novel would swoon, then awaken to find some handsome lord in a black cape towering over her, possibly trying to loosen her corset in order to revive her. Elise didn’t swoon. Instead, she kept the gun pointed steadily at Anastasia’s head and demanded to know what the hell was going on.

Anastasia casually pushed away from the side of the pool, did a lovely sidestroke to the ladder, climbed out, grabbed a towel, and began to dry off, lifting her long, lovely legs one at a time. That’s when Elise noticed how young she was. Maybe in her late twenties.

Without looking up, the young woman said, “You can quit pointing that thing at me anytime.”

Elise remembered the gun in her hand. She lowered it. “You aren’t Anastasia,” she said.

“Of course not.” The woman pulled off the swimming cap and shook out a cascade of red hair.

Elise had never been attracted to females, but she was smitten right then and there. This had to be Melinda, Anastasia’s daughter, born after the family rift. Elise could see she had the same power as her mother. The uncanny ability to make a person—any person of any sexual orientation—fall head over heels within seconds.

Elise was glad the power had been passed from mother to daughter. The passing of the mantle. Not of root work, but something just as strong. Something people might have called feminine wiles fifty years ago. And just as Elise had sometimes diminished before her aunt, she now felt herself become less feminine, less attractive, older, more awkward, in front of Melinda. At the same time, she knew it wasn’t the lovely woman’s fault, which made her adore her all the more. And yet Elise was suddenly excruciatingly and painfully aware of her dark, drab, shoulder-length hair. Her body beneath the gown. Not willowy, not fat, but not as toned as it used to be. Riddled with scars that she laughingly referred to as her war wounds but that she now saw as defects. Not glorious things of which to be proud, but ugly damage.

And she thought of David. And in that moment of clarity she understood one of the reasons, maybe the biggest reason, she didn’t want their relationship to change, to move beyond what they had. She didn’t want him to see her body. And she particularly didn’t want him to see what Atticus Tremain had done to her.

It was different when you met someone at your peak, married, and grew old together. Midthirties certainly wasn’t old, but Elise’s abused body was on the downhill slide, and it would never be beautiful again. She wanted to be beautiful in David’s mind. She wanted him to imagine what it would be like, what she would be like. And that imagining would be so much more than they could ever have.

It was very unlike Elise to have such thoughts make their way to the surface of her brain. She didn’t care for them.

“I’m sorry if I startled you,” Melinda said. “I live in Savannah, but I often drop by to do laps in the pool.”

“Your mother loved to swim too.”

Melinda tossed the towel over the chair. “Listen.” Her face took on a let’s-be-frank expression. “I know why you’re here. Aunt Grace is contesting the will. You have to realize how ridiculous that is. I’m Anastasia’s daughter. And she and my aunt hadn’t talked since before I was born. Why wouldn’t she leave everything to me?”

“Grace led me to believe that they’d reconnected in the past several years.”

“Not that I know of. My mother never mentioned her. Her sister didn’t exist as far as Anastasia was concerned.”

“You’ve had no contact with Grace?”

Those lovely brows drew together in puzzlement. “None. Ever.”

Elise filed that away to ponder. “How long have the windows been painted blue?” she asked.

“Windows?”

“The windows and doors are painted blue.”

“Ah, I’m not sure.”

“Did your mother say why she painted them that color?”

“We never really talked about it. I just thought it was an artistic choice.”

“Structurally the building is in bad shape, yet she painted the windows and doors.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know. My mother did a lot of things that could be considered peculiar.”

“Did she ever voice any fears? Of people? Of
. . .
well, evil spirits?”

Melinda gave it some thought, and then shook her head. “Anastasia was fearless.”

“That’s how I remember her,” Elise said. Which made the blue trim all the odder.