Sweet Dreams Boxed Set (91 page)

He turned himself, his feeling of urgency growing. By the time he reached the house on Elizabeth Street, he was running.

At first, he was relieved to see the sheriff’s department car.

Then he saw that the dead man in it.

And the door to Colby Kennedy’s house gaping open.

He rushed in, his cell phone out, dialing 911 even as he entered the house.

There was a man on the floor in the parlor. He hurried to him, hunkering down.

Detective Mason.

There was blood pooled around him on the floor. But, when Quinn felt for a pulse, he found warmth—and a faint beat of life.

Mason had been cut; the slash, however, had missed the artery. Quinn quickly found a towel and wrapped it around the wound. As he did so, he lifted his head, a cry tearing from his lips.

“Danni!”

There was no answer. He could hear a siren coming; he couldn’t leave a dying man.

He couldn’t stay. He had to find Danni.

But, suddenly, he felt a weak touch on his arm. He looked down. Mason’s eyes were open. He was trying to speak.

“Zombie…gone…Danni…ran….”

Police burst into the house.

“Help him!” Quinn shouted.

And he was back out into the night himself.

***

Danni ran blindly at first—terrified, knowing that the thing was after her.

She realized where she was then, and where she had come from. She was close to Ralph Mason’s house on Angela Street.

Close to the cemetery—where a number of police cars were parked.

She ran toward the cemetery. But, when she arrived on the side street, the cars were gone. One ripped by her, its siren blazing.

Then another…and another.

She sucked in breath to let out a curse tear from her lips. Where were they all going?

In the growing dark, she could make out a figure.

And another figure, not far behind it.

She looped around the block and saw that the entrance to the cemetery had been left open.

Not surprising when the whole city was in panic.

The scraping sound came closer. If she ran straight down the block, she’d be easily seen.

And easily caught….

With all the police cars gone, there seemed to be little choice. She tore into the cemetery and ran quickly behind the old brick style tomb, hunching down behind it. She prayed that the zombie figure would walk on by.

But it didn’t. It paused at the entrance.

Then turned into the cemetery.

Moments later, she saw that it was coming her way, followed by one figure….

And then another.

Almost flat on the ground, Danni crawled away. There was a “stack” tomb just a few feet away. She made her way around it.

Then she heard whispering.

“She is in here; I saw her come in here.”

“No, she ran down the street!”

“Your fault—this got too carried away!”

She knew one of the voices. And the other…She wasn’t sure. Carefully, Danni looked around the cement of the tombs. Straight into the eyes of the zombie.

Somehow, she suppressed a scream. And she ran again, deeper and deeper into the cemetery. She still hadn’t seen the second figure.

In her mind, a question seemed to scream.

Why?

She knew now who was controlling the zombie nuns.

She turned a corner—and she realized that she’d managed to run in a circle—right back into the creature. She stopped, staring at it.

It was just an animatronic. It was stalled. Because the person running the controls didn’t see her yet! Then one of the hands raised.

Out of the corner of her eye, Danni saw a person. A person with a black box that looked almost like a video game control stick.

The zombie started to raise a hand. And Danni prepared to run, but she heard her name shouted—shouted with a thunder that seemed to tear the very air apart.

Quinn.

The zombie doll was moving. She backed away, ready to run, and fell over a gravestone. The zombie nun moved toward her, the skeletal fingers reaching out in the eerie shadows of graveyard.

She couldn’t run; she was on the ground. She could only roll, but could she roll fast enough to escape the razor-sharp fingers?

Reaching for her, grasping out….

And going dead still.

It wasn’t moving; it had stalled again.

Danni rolled and leapt to her feet and saw that Quinn was across the cemetery—over by a row of mausoleums. He was on top of the person wielding the controls.

“Quinn!” she cried, racing for him.

Suddenly she saw the second person; the one’s whose voice she hadn’t quite placed, moving toward Quinn, a massive branch held high with which to attack him….

Danni doubled her energy, leaping angels and cherubs, crying out in warning again.

“Quinn!”

She wasn’t going to make it; she wasn’t going to make it in time.

And then there was something behind her, something coming fast.
The zombie-nun, moving again!
But then, to her astonishment, the thing moved passed her. It moved past her at high, whirling speed.

And it flew straight into the figure heading for Quinn with such terrible menace. Twirling, flapping, deadly arms and fingers waving.

The person went down.

Danni reached Quinn who was rising then, dragging his quarry up with him.

“The box!” he told Danni. “The control!”

She made a dive for the black box. The zombie nun was wildly spinning and slashing at the second figure in the cemetery.

Danni tried to control it; at first, it went wilder.

Then she saw the off switch and hit it. She moved over to the prone figure.

Vanessa. Vanessa Green.

Vanessa was bleeding from a multitude of cuts.

She wasn’t getting up, not on her own. She lay in the grass, sobbing.

“She made me do it; she made me do it!” Vanessa cried.

And Danni turned to see that Quinn had shoved the woman who had originally been wielding the control box, causing the animatronic to run and whirl and kill.

Tracy Kennedy.

“Hey, you meant when you said you were coming home soon, huh? Had to get into your house, right?” Quinn said, his tone dry and sardonic. He sounded harsh. Of course. He’d been afraid—afraid for her, Danni knew.

“It wasn’t me!” Tracy cried. “It was the zombie nun—from the minute it came into the house, it told me that I had to do kill. It wanted me to control it—it’s evil.”

“Tracy, that’s pathetic,” Quinn said. “This isn’t even the zombie nun that was in your attic. This is one of the others.”

“Oh, don’t be an idiot,” Tracy snapped. “Don’t you get it? My husband had them all; they were in the attic. He managed to bribe a friend to stop the truck with the zombie nuns—he had them all the time. Toys in the attic. They were there…hidden by cardboard, shielded by boxes. They were there—all the time. And….”

She broke off. Danni could hear sirens coming close again. The police. Now, they were coming back to the cemetery.

“They made me do it. They’re evil! Evil exists. They made me do it!”

She was still shouting when the police came for the two women.

And then Danni could at last throw herself into Quinn’s arms.

Epilogue

It was sunset.

A glorious sunset.

Danni looked out the plate glass window of their hotel room to watch as the sky burst into a prism of colors.

She felt Quinn’s arms slip around her and she smiled.

Key West was wonderful, beautiful—spectacular.

Even if there had been zombie nuns running amok—controlled by a vicious woman.

Once Officer Sandy Burnett had come to take control, the story had come out. Vanessa Green had met Tracy Kendall through her husband and Kathy.

Vanessa had been bribed into helping with the absurd zombie-nun murder spree, convinced that she’d become a true star. She’d manipulated the animatronics at times when others saw Tracy—thus giving her an alibi.

And as for Tracy….

The motive they hadn’t understood had been greed. Mrs. Kennedy—Colby’s and Kathy’s mother—was suffering Alzheimer’s disease—and a host of other ailments. She wasn’t long for the world.

Kathy had been intended as the first victim—with the animatronic operated by Vanessa. Others had to die, too, of course, so that the real motive wouldn’t be known. With Kathy gone, when the elder Mrs. Kennedy expired, the old Victorian the family owned would go straight to Colby.

It was worth millions.

Greed. It had always been a key motive for murder. The animatronics had simply provided very bizarre weapons.

“She’s going to try to get off,” Danni murmured. “Tracy. She’ll keep up the claim that the nuns were evil—and that they made her do it. She’ll go for an insanity plea. And Vanessa…she’ll get an attorney to help her with the same plea, or help her to come up with some story about being terrified of Tracy. They killed four people and put three others in the hospital—and they could get off.”

Quinn pulled her closer to him. “No one is going to get off—not even Colby. He was guilty of bribery—and of stealing the zombie nun animatronics. When he learned the truth, I think he went a little crazy himself. He believes that once he owned the property, Tracy would have killed him, too. And he feels a horrible guilt; he just had to have all the zombie nuns. He admitted to the police that he did bribe the delivery driver and stole the other two nuns. I think they did make him a little crazy.”

“Will he do time?”

“I don’t know. He did—unwittingly—set it all into motion. But, whether he does time or not, he’s going to hate himself and perhaps punish himself worse in his mind than anything could that might be done to him by the legal system.”

Danni slipped her arms around his waist and looked up at him. “Do you think that the nuns were evil?” she asked him.

He smiled down at her. “Well, in the end, one didn’t harm either of us—it saved us.”

“True,” she agreed. “So, do they need to come back to the house on Royal Street?”

“No. Officer Burnett—soon to be Detective Burnett—has seen to it that they never go anywhere again. They’ve been shot up to ribbons—including the one in the boxes that ‘disappeared’—into Tracy Kennedy’s car.”

“Ah.”

“All that remains is to go home,” Quinn said softly. He trembled slightly as he held her. “When we can, of course, when we finish with all that still needs to be cleared up with the legal machinations. And, of course, Detective Mason is asking that you come by the hospital so that he can thank you—and beg your forgiveness.”

“He’s going to make it?”

“Thanks to you,” Quinn assured her, smiling. “And, of course, I’ve told Andrew Bracken that we will have lunch with him. He’s torn—horrified by everything that happened—and speculating on what will happen with his movie. Oh, he needs a new leading lady. I think he has his eye on you.”

Danni shook her head. “I think I’m done with robots, animatronics…and, definitely, I don’t want anything to do with an evil mannequin.”

She turned back to watch the sky as the sun fell in its palette of colors, leaning against his chest. “It doesn’t seem as if it should be quite right, seeing such beauty, enjoying it…when so much bad happened.”

She felt Quinn’s hesitation, then he said quietly, “We helped stop a lot of bad things, too, Danni. And, there will be more that happens in the world that’s bad. Evil, even—because we both know, people can be very, very evil. Thing is, that makes it so that you have to appreciate every moment in life that shows what good is all about. Like the sunset,” he added.

“Like the sunset,” she agreed.

She turned into his arms again and kissed him.

And the kiss became much more….

And beyond the window, the sun continued its descent, bursting with color, then fading into pastels, falling gently upon them as they enjoyed the good that could happen in life as well.

About Heather Graham

New York Times
and
USA Today
best-selling author Heather Graham majored in theater arts at the University of South Florida. After a stint of several years in dinner theater, back-up vocals, and bartending, she stayed home after the birth of her third child and began to write, working on short horror stories and romances. After some trial and error, she sold her first book, WHEN NEXT WE LOVE, in 1982 and since then, she has written over one hundred novels and novellas including category, romantic suspense, historical romance, vampire fiction, time travel, occult, and Christmas holiday fare. She wrote the launch books for the Dell's Ecstasy Supreme line, Silhouette's Shadows, and for Harlequin's mainstream fiction imprint, Mira Books.

Heather was a founding member of the Florida Romance Writers chapter of RWA and, since 1999, has hosted the Romantic Times Vampire Ball, with all revenues going directly to children's charity.  She is pleased to have been published in approximately twenty languages, and to have been honored with awards from Waldenbooks. B. Dalton, Georgia Romance Writers, Affaire de Coeur, Romantic Times, and more. She has had books selected for the Doubleday Book Club and the Literary Guild, and has been quoted, interviewed, or featured in such publications as The Nation, Redbook, People, and USA Today and appeared on many newscasts including local television and Entertainment Tonight.

Heather loves travel and anything have to do with the water, and is a certified scuba diver. Married since high school graduation and the mother of five, her greatest love in life remains her family, but she also believes her career has been an incredible gift, and she is grateful every day to be doing something that she loves so very much for a living.

Find Heather here:

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