The Glimpsing (29 page)

Janice sat in her modest eastside apartment, anxiously holding a phone in her hand.
 
She was worried.
 
Very worried.
 
The phone felt like lead in her hand, awkward and heavy.
 
She slowly brought it up to her ear, hesitated, and then hurriedly hung it up—for now a third time.

It had been six unbelievable days since Jack’s disappearance.
 
Six days without a sighting, a message, or even a body.

An investigation had been launched just less than twenty-four hours after he’d been reported missing.
 
Detectives had combed his house for clues, but found little.
 
There were no signs of forced entry, or of a struggle.
 
His cars were still in their garages.
 
A check of the airlines showed that he’d not hastily departed on some emergency flight.
 
It was as if the man had simply vanished into thin air.

Foul play had been assumed early on, although Jack had few real enemies.
 
But as one investigator pointed out, a man of Jack Parke’s stature and wealth didn’t need many enemies in order to be victimized.

Kidnapping was the early assumption. But when three days had passed without a ransom note or call from his captors, the theory was abandoned.

Everyone who’d had contact with Jack in the weeks leading up to his disappearance was brought in for questioning.
 
That included Mark Pirelli, six employees from Magnolia’s restaurant, two of Jack’s pilots, a stewardess, and no less than twenty-seven other employees from Parke Studios.
 
Janice and Gabrielle were also contacted.
 
They happened to be scheduled for questioning near the same time and, during their forty-five minute wait in the holding room, struck up a very pleasant friendship.
 
They exchanged numbers and promised to call one another at a future date.

Based on information given by Janice, Portia was brought in, although more as a matter of formality than anything else.
 
They did find her late visit to Jack’s house on the night of his birthday, and her appearance there the morning he went missing, mildly curious, but nothing was ever made of the matter.
 
A world renowned ex-supermodel was a poor excuse for a prime suspect.

Little more was gleaned from anyone else that could help determine Jack’s assailant.
 
The investigators were, however, intrigued to discover that Jack had been suffering hallucinations.
 
Janice, Gabrielle, and Donald Brayer, the waiter at Magnolia’s, had all testified of Jack’s vivid and sometimes violent hallucinatory episodes.
 
They recounted his dreams of Rose, the vision of the magnolia tree, and, most intriguing of all, the hallucination involving Thomas McCain.

Based on their testimony, it was now thought that Jack was suffering from mental illness.
 
Jacquie Parker and Dale Mobley, two noted police psychiatrist, surmised that under the influence of one or more of these hallucinations, Jack might have wandered off his property and gotten lost deep in the four square miles of forest behind his estate.

But that was before the discovery of the fingerprints.

They were found behind Jack’s wet bar, on a package of Russian-imported
Belomorkanal
cigarettes.
 
There was one thumbprint, and two partials of an index and middle finger.
 
The most surprising part, however, was not that they were found, but to whom they belonged.
 
According to the New York City criminal database, they were none other than those of Thomas L. McCain.

The discovery sparked not only a city-wide manhunt, but a national media storm.
 
It was believed that Thomas McCain, whose barbaric murder of Holly Grace had drawn comparisons to the hacked corpses of the Lizzie Borden case, had come out of hiding to murder Jack Parke, for what reason no one rightly knew.
 
Speculation ran the gamut from Thomas being a crazed serial killer who merely happened to run into Jack, to the wilder conjecture that Jack had been hiding Thomas from the police in his house for the better part of a year, until, quite obviously, something had gone wrong between them.

Janice, however, never once believed any of this.

It wasn’t that she didn’t think it possible that Thomas McCain had indeed murdered Jack—the fingerprint evidence was difficult to ignore—but she could not shake the feeling that something far more mysterious than the random act of a psychopath lay behind his disappearance.
 
She had a gnawing sensation—strong enough to keep her up at night—that Portia might somehow be involved, not only because of the ravaged skull she’d glimpsed in the woman’s face, but because of something else as well.

It had happened just before Portia’s arrival that unfortunate morning.
 
While cleaning Jack’s room, she had noticed something very peculiar about the painting Portia had given Jack.
 
In it was the faint impression of a third man.
 
He was standing just behind the bed, peering out with that same lifeless gaze as the other men.
 
But that couldn’t be, she had thought, because she distinctly recalled there only being two men in the painting.
 
Most peculiar of all, however, was whom this new habitué seemed to favor: Jack Parke himself.

But she couldn’t know that with any certainty.
 
The ringing of the doorbell had drawn her away before she could take a closer look.
 
And even if it was him, she could not be sure what it meant.

However, at this point, it really didn’t matter.
 
She’d already seen enough to know that something very strange was going on, actually had been since the night Portia gave Jack the painting.
 
Jack had glimpsed a woman in a red dress named Rose, and had possibly glimpsed a tree at Magnolia’s restaurant (if the newspaper reports of the vision he’d seen there were to be believed).
 
Add to that the appearance of a third man in the painting, and her own very disturbing glimpse of a skull in Portia’s face, and there could be little doubt that a supernatural explanation, not a natural one, better accounted for Jack’s disappearance.

It was that line of reasoning that had brought Janice to her living room on this late August evening, worriedly taking the phone in hand, then hanging it up again.
 
She felt it imperative that she start her own investigation, beginning with the one person who knew more about Jack’s experiences that last few days than anyone else: Gabrielle.

But taking that step, making that first call, was proving to be extremely difficult.
 
She was vacillating, and she knew precisely why.
 
Because it was already clear where the investigation would lead, to whom it would ultimately take her: to Portia, to the one person she now feared more than anyone on the planet.

Janice stared at the phone, which she had taken in her hand once more.
 
What if she was right?
 
What if Thomas McCain really didn’t kill Jack?
 
What if his disappearance was supernatural in nature?
 
Shouldn’t she do everything in her power to find the truth?
 
Of course she should, but doing so could bring some very unwelcomed consequences.
 
She might find herself face to face with forces she was ill-prepared to handle, forces that could even threaten her own safety, and that might be far more terrifying than the mere appearance of a skull in a woman’s face.

Janice took a deep breath, anxiously squeezing the phone in her hand.
 
After another moment’s contemplation, she once more moved to hang it up.
 
But thinking of Jack Parke, and that if he was alive, she might be his only hope, she slowly brought it to her ear, closed her eyes, and dialed Gabrielle’s number.

Jack was lost.
 
And without him, so was she.

Gabrielle sat quietly in a house that was not as large or lavish as one might have expected.
 
It was owned by a woman of enormous wealth, and yet it was the smallest on a sizeable parcel of luxury homes.
 
Its rooms were stylish, but not overly extravagant, awash in a décor of varying whites and crèmes, accented here and there with plum-colored pedestal vases and a number of large and exotic plants.
 
The woman had exquisite tastes.

Gabrielle had settled onto a plush vanilla loveseat.
 
Directly across from her was a lengthy oriental couch,
a delicate
beige in color with ebony trim.
 
Directly to her left was a rarely used fireplace.
 
A marble mantle lined with pictures stretched above it.

She gazed beyond it all as if it were all glass, her mind, as had often been the case in the past two weeks, drowning in a sea of contemplations about Jack’s whereabouts.

Of course, there had been promptings it was going to happen.
 
In the days leading up to his disappearance, that dark premonition had spoken in her ear, accosting her without mercy.
 
And yet when it did happen, and Jack was confirmed missing, it felt like a massive hole had been blown in her life.
 
Since then, she’d wept almost daily, dead to every emotion short of grief.

She’d expected the premonition, having delivered on its promise, to simply vanish, to fade away, much in the same way Jack had.
 
But what she could not understand was why it still remained, why the stink of its presence still stained the air, still spoke with those stool-colored lips, warning her it wasn’t over.

The weight of that truth seemed too much for her to bear at this point.
 
She was being scourged from both sides, first by the loss of Jack, and now by the certainty that some new terror loomed, and was waiting for her out there in the darkness of the future.

That was what had brought her to this house so frequently the past few weeks.
 
Only here did the voice of the premonition fade to almost nothingness.
 
Only here did she feel protected.

Still sitting there, she now thought about all the mistakes that had carried her to this unfortunate moment.
 
She truly wished she could go back in time, before that fateful morning when Jack had arrived at her house, before she’d fallen in love with him from afar, before she’d allowed her heart to betray her beloved friend.
 
She would have done so many things differently.

But she could not go back.
 
The past was as cold and hard as stone.
 
One could not change it any more than one could raise the dead.
 
But there was something that could be changed: the future.

She had two choices really.
 
Just two.
 
She could move forward, pretending her faithless deed never happened, burying it under the rug of her mind, where it would crawl out and haunt her for the rest of her life, or she could confess her sin, cleanse her conscience, doing the hard thing, yes, but the right thing still the same.

For Gabrielle, the choice could not have been any easier.
 
The time had come.
 
No more running.
 
No more cowering in fear of the consequences.
 
Confession didn’t need to be made.
 
It had to be made.

Today was the day; she knew it the moment she’d awoke, the moment the beauty of the morning filled her bedroom.
 
No more secrets.
 
Everything had to be brought out into the open.
 
Everything, even that fact that she was now—

“Hey,” a woman’s soft voice said.
 
“You okay?”

Gabrielle glanced up and peered at the oriental couch.
 
Her heart began to pound.
 
For sitting there, adorned in a pretty white dress, was Portia.
 
She was staring back, with sterile blue eyes.