The Summer Bones (34 page)

The room seemed to tilt occasionally, the effect being very distressful. Lying back down helped somewhat. Closing her eyes lessened the sensation of movement, and she did that, staying immobile.

That's how she was when the door opened slowly, the merest creak of hinges. Victoria lifted her lashes just enough to let a thin view of her visitor's face come into view. There wasn't much doubt as to who it would be.

Ronald said, “You didn't die.”

His voice was thick. From where she lay, he was a horrific figure—bloodshot eyes, swaying body, and careless bandages across his chin and nose that didn't quite hide the beginnings of blackened patches swelling with affronted tissue. It wasn't hard to surmise that the blood on her clothes was mostly Ronald's.

“No,” she said, clearing her throat twice to get the word out.

“I thought you would. Last night.” He had changed his clothes but they were mismatched and badly wrinkled.

“No,” she said again. Lying on the floor, she felt tremendously vulnerable, but she wasn't sure she could stand up.

Hands in pockets, he looked at her with empty eyes. “I was hoping you would.”

Ronald wanted her dead. She found the idea extraordinary. Her throat muscles worked to form the word, “Why?”

He didn't answer, but went on, pettishly, “I was sure you would. There was blood everywhere … some of it mine, of course, but the blow to your head was awful. When I tripped, you went flying into the frame of the door. I hit the glass, but you hit the metal doorjamb. It sounded like a gun going off.”

Her arm jerked convulsively where it lay across her stomach. The unmistakable slur to his words was frightening beyond what he was saying. His whole demeanor suggested intoxication of some kind. He barely kept on his feet.

“Ronald.”

“Emily is dead.” His mouth was slack. She caught a whiff of dried sweat on an unwashed body.

“I'm not her, Ronald. I'm not Emily.” Shakily she moved, trying to sit up, using her good arm. He didn't react, still standing with his hands in the pockets of his rumpled shorts as he watched her struggle. Her head felt like lead as she hauled herself to a sitting position and stifled a groan.

“Who is he?”

Victoria shivered. Her skin was clammy. “Who is who?”

“Who was screwing my wife?”

That old story.
She had made a grave error back at Benedict and Sims Interiors. She had underestimated the depth of his jealousy. “I don't know.” Her voice was weak.

“I think you do.”

“Ronald, please.”

“Tell me. If it wasn't Damon, Vicky, who was it? I want a name.”

It wasn't possible. “I need a hospital,” she said haltingly, breathing in through her nose. “My head hurts. I have the classic symptoms of a concussion, Ronald. Nausea, blurred vision—”

“You aren't listening to me.”

The tone of his voice stopped her cold. She sat there cradling her injured arm and blinking back the dizziness that swung through each couple of seconds. Her brother-in-law's image was like a blurred black-and-white photograph.

“You don't get it,” Ronald continued.

The truth was, she had gotten it. “You didn't die,” he'd said.
I was hoping you would.
Ronald Sims had murdered her sister. He was unstable. He had brought her to this house for a purpose.

Thinking about that purpose made her feel even weaker. Her mouth was dry. “Could I have some water?”

The request seemed to throw him. He blinked and swayed, grasping the doorknob for balance. Under the bruises and stick-on bandages, his face was doughy. “Water?”

“I'm thirsty.”

‘Thirst' seemed to be a concept he could grasp. He hesitated in the doorway before turning to leave. The lock clicked shut.

The lock to keep her—poor, weak, sick, hurting her—from escaping. What a laugh. He could lean a feather against that door and it would work as well.

Collapsing back to the floor seemed a good idea. Yet Victoria hung there on one arm, fighting the urge and battling her aching head. The concept of Ronald as a murderer was beginning to settle in like a lump of ice in her chest.
Emily had taken things too far.
Arrogant and elegant Ronald Sims was now a drugged-out fool who apparently considered kidnapping to be a normal act.

Groggily, she tried to gather whatever wits she had left. Escape was hard to manage when you couldn't stand or move easily. From a nearby easel, the painting of Damon watching Emily glimmered ominously from the canvas. Victoria stared back.

“God help me,” she whispered.

Downstairs, the doorbell rang as if he had decided he would.

* * * *

If thou faint in the day of adversity, thy strength is small.

It was the Bible, Proverbs, if Victoria remembered correctly. The quotation swum hauntingly into the moment as if some long-past flotsam from Bible school could actually help. Day of Adversity—if there was ever one, this might be it.

She was powerless, and who knew what Ronald would do next. He had declared openly that he wanted her dead.

Thy strength is small …

Nonexistent, more like.

Victoria turned her head and concentrated on examining her surroundings. Cupboards, easels, a few stools. From her position on the floor, the room was disappointingly sparse of furnishings. Not a weapon in sight, even if she was currently incapable of wielding one against a man of Ronald's size.

And he was intoxicated—drunk or high and skittering off on some vendetta that was completely engulfing his life and had been for some time—his growing jealousy over a young and vibrant wife, the covert following, the accusations, the public arguments. It was too easy to imagine his obsession flowering into the kind of titanic rage that Victoria had witnessed the day before—Emily, laughing and alive and taunting her husband into a single unspeakable act of violence.

She closed her eyes again. Breathed in through her nose and tried not to think of the decaying mess of putrid flesh and broken bone that the police had dredged out of the pond. She'd never seen the body, but her mind had conjured it up a thousand times. A thousand unwanted moments in which her loss and mortality starkly intruded on her life by virtue of her ungovernable imagination. Her sister returned to her now in nightmare horror and Ronald Sims was responsible.

Or was it Emily who was responsible?
The question was an echo, reverberating outward—Emily with her passion for games, for jealousy, for willful acts. Emily, who had married Ronald, specifically choosing the type of volatile mate who kept the level of excitement in her life at the peak she so craved.

At that moment Victoria blamed her dead sister. Despised her for putting her in this room, in this house, with Ronald.

Ronald.
Right now downstairs dealing with his visitor and certainly omitting the fact that he had kidnapped his sister-in-law and held her captive upstairs in his studio. It was insanity. It was foolhardy. It was the irrational act of someone who had lost all reason.

Getting to her feet was difficult. Victoria stood, swaying, and did her best to ignore the pounding in her head. One hand braced her temple as if it could lend support to unsteady legs. Morning sunlight had filled the studio like water gently pouring into an opaque jar.

She moved toward the shelves along the wall in halting steps, hoping Ronald would be kept busy by his early visitor. Screaming seemed out of the question with a headache sawing away at every nerve ending, even if the early doorbell ringer could prove a savior. Summoning the energy to see to her defense was effort enough.

Of course, Ronald hadn't conveniently left any butcher knives or loaded handguns lying about. Nor were there any heavy blunt instruments. There were shelves of paints and assorted other liquids in cans and jars. There were brushes, rags, and sponges, all too soft for damaging an opponent. She picked up a slender brush and held the wooden handle in her hand. As a weapon, it seemed inadequate, more a piece of art than a deadly implement, carved, curved, and easily splintered.

Forget the brush.
She dropped it on the floor and fumbled through the jars, knocking several over in her haste. The smell of mineral spirits became a heady entity. A viscous stream began to drip on the floor, unheeded.

She felt weak. Disoriented by pain, confusion, and fear. The strong smell didn't help matters. Victoria righted the dripping jar, nose wrinkling. A rainbow puddle swirled along the floor. Her eyes smarted.

Eyes. Swimming from the fumes.
Her hand hovered by a half-filled jar as a barely formed idea blossomed. Tossing the contents in Ronald's face might win her time if she were capable of darting past him through the door.

There is
only one problem. Darting.
The thought of it was ludicrous. She wasn't “darting” anywhere. “Walking” was a minor miracle.
So much for that brilliant plan.
In defeat, she set the jar aside and slumped against the wall, fighting the urge to weep with frustration and fright.
Ronald will not win,
she told herself firmly.

But she wasn't sure that was true.

* * * *

Ronald Sims watched his mother-in-law depart with jaded eyes.
Pushy bitch.

She got into her car, pulling a slender silk-clad leg inside just before she slammed the door with some force and drove away. He didn't care that he'd been rude or brusque. He didn't care about her trembling mouth or the needy eyes that gazed with horror at his mutilated face. Once, years ago after meeting her at a showing, he had contemplated sleeping with Jane Paulsen. That was before he'd met her daughter. Emily had obliterated the urge for any other women.

Except her sister—lying upstairs and none the wiser that her mother was the person leaning on his bell fifteen minutes before. Sweet and intelligent—that described Victoria—sweet, intelligent, and blind, not half the worldly person her sister had been.

Had been.

His heart was an ice-cold object lodged deep in his chest. It hurt now and then, when he remembered. Luckily, between the cocaine and the booze, that wasn't very often.

Cocaine.
The thought made him hungry. It helped the pain, too. He had his share of injuries from the day before, though it could have been worse. He moved toward the kitchen. He used to keep the plastic bag carefully hidden in the back of a drawer. Now it sat on the table along with a mass of unopened mail, a litter of crumbs, and several crumpled, empty cigarette packages that were a quarter full now, after last night.

He'd had no trouble convincing Jane that he'd fallen and injured himself, not since he undoubtedly reeked of alcohol already at this time of the morning. He smiled faintly as he staggered to the table and stretched a shaking hand toward a half-full tumbler of scotch. He had no idea what he was going to do with the half-conscious woman upstairs. But he did know one thing; he was not going to let her go until she told him what he wanted to know.

The liquid burned like fire going down his throat.

* * * *

The police, he saw, were just leaving. Damon stared at the glitter of broken glass. His gaze skittered back toward the little blue car parked at the edge of the asphalt and then to the wreckage of the door. He felt immobile, leaden, and impotent. If the drive to Indy had been a nerve-scraping lesson in self-control, this was worse. He took a deep breath, telling himself to not jump to conclusions.

A police officer walked past. Damon moved convulsively, motioning with his hand. “What happened here?”

“Excuse me?”

“What happened?”

The officer eyed him, reflecting the image back in his sunglasses. “Break-in, sir. Can I help you?”

“No. No, thanks.” Damon spotted Gail inside and was already moving away. He came to the doorway and saw the awful stains spread on the foyer carpeting. His chest felt tight. It was like he had woken to a twilight world, born of fatigue and disbelief, and was simply waiting for dawn to come banish the unwanted fears.

“Damon!” Gail, pale and overstrung, turned and saw him. There was no happiness in her greeting. Perhaps it was the sea of blood spots on the carpet between them that turned her off.

“Where's Victoria?” His feet crunched glass. The last police car pulled out of the parking lot, tires spinning hotly on the pavement.

“Victoria?” Gail blinked and shook her head. She was standing by the reception desk, one hand braced as if it kept her from collapsing. “How should I know? The office has been burglarized, can you believe it? After everything that's already happened, I'm up to my elbows in paperwork and insurance policies—”

“That's her car. She's disappeared and I've been looking for her.”

“What?”

“Out front. That's Victoria's car.”

“The blue one?” Gail swallowed, her mouth working. “Oh, God, I wondered whose car it was. I told the police I didn't know. With all this”—her hand swept outward in indication—”I guess I didn't think enough about it.”

He didn't know what to do. He said hoarsely, “What was stolen? When did this happen?”

“Stolen? Nothing yet … not that I know of. It happened yesterday. It must have.” Her eyes were tired and huge. “I stopped by in the morning and checked messages. Everything was fine then. I've been looking around, but—”

“How did they break in?” The words felt funny and thick, fumbling from his lips.

“I don't know. The police don't think the lock was forced, but I know I locked the door. I just came this morning and found it like this,” she said with another sweep of her hand.

The glass was broken outward. The bloodstains sprinkled and blotched from the inside out—a telling sequence. He said remotely, “Who else has keys?”

“I … I do. Emily did, of course. No one else.”

“Emily? And who has Emily's keys now, Gail?”