Whisper of Evil (24 page)

"I'm a cop," he murmured after a startled moment.

"Yeah, that'll be it," she said dryly.

"Shelby—"

"Look, Justin, we both want to find the truth. Isn't that all that matters?" She leaned forward to open the file folder on the coffee table. "Together we can work our way through these copies of birth records in half the time it'd take you to do it alone. I'm perfectly safe here with you. And if anybody does wonder why your car is parked in front of my house all night, well, we're both consenting adults, so whose business is it but ours?"

"In this town? Everybody's business."

Shelby grinned again. "True, but my point is that the killer, if he even notices, will just think you spent the night for carnal purposes. Right?"

"Yeah, probably." Justin only just stopped himself from saying the idea had crossed his own mind more than once in the past few hours.

"Well, then. The killer will have no idea at all that I'm even interested in this investigation, much less that I'm helping you. So there's nothing to worry about."

"I wish I could believe that," Justin said.

"You worry too much."

"And you don't worry enough."

She handed him half the birth records with a smile that had a peculiar effect on his blood pressure. "Maybe not, but I'm smarter than I look and if there's anything I know really well it's this town, so I will help you get to the bottom of this, Justin. Count on it."

Max drew a breath and tried to keep his voice even and unemotional. "So he smothered all of you."

"Smothered. Manipulated. Twisted our feelings. He was a master at using guilt, though I didn't recognize that for a long time. And without making a single direct threat, he had us—or me, at least—convinced that we would never escape him."

Slowly, Max said, "Which is one reason you never told anyone. You didn't see how anyone could have helped you, did you, Nell?"

She knew what he was asking. "No. It was never that I didn't trust you enough to tell you, Max, enough to ask for your help. I was just convinced there was nothing you could have done. Besides, what we had was… apart. I wanted to keep it separate from the rest of my life. Secret. It was mine, something I didn't have to share with him. With anyone else. A special… place that felt happy and safe. That felt normal."

Max reached across the table and pried one of her hands from around her coffee cup, holding it strongly. "I wish you'd told me, Nell. Maybe I could have done something. We could have left Silence together—"

She gently drew her hand away and sat back, both hands falling to her lap. "A lot of girls aren't very practical at seventeen, but I was, at least in some ways. Your roots were here. Your life was here. The ranch you were working so hard to build, to make a success. Your mother. How could I have borne it if I was the one to take all that away from you?"

"Nell—"

She shook her head to stop him and shifted the focus back to the strange and painful dynamics of her family. "Where my father was concerned, I felt almost… frozen. Unable to act, to take even a step to change things, change what I'd lived with every day since I was small. It just was.

"When I was hardly old enough to understand any of it, I can remember my mother pleading with my father. Telling him she couldn't breathe, that every time she turned around he was there, insisting she love him… a little bit more. No matter how much he was loved, it was never enough. Hailey adored him, did everything she could think of to please him, but he had this way of… smiling sadly whenever he was dis-appointed. And he was always disappointed. No one could have loved him enough to make him happy."

Max spoke with some difficulty, the words obviously not the ones he wanted most to say. "He was always so angry with other people, so hateful."

"I know. It's like he hated everything and everyone outside his own family. Inside, with the doors closed and the rest of the world shut out, he was very quiet, never raised his voice. But he was utterly relentless. We had to love him all the time. We had to tell him so, again and again, had to prove to him that we loved him. We had to love him so much there'd never be room in us to love anybody else."

Nell shrugged again. "There was no way I could understand any of it then, of course, not when I was a child. When he said he loved me, I thought it was true. I felt bad that I couldn't love him the way he loved me. I was a horrible daughter, I knew that, because I was happiest away from him and wanted to hide my true thoughts and feelings from him. I even believed it was in some way my fault that my mother had left him… and broken his heart."

"He told you that?"

"It was a daily litany, repeated with sad eyes and a shaking voice. He had loved her so much, and she had walked away from him. Away from Hailey and me, her own children. She hadn't wanted us. She hadn't loved us at all. Only he loved us."

"Jesus," Max muttered.

"Hailey was older when we lost our mother, but it was a critical age for her, those early teen years when everything matters… so much. So I guess it made sense to her that she should try to take the place of our mother in every way she could. She did her best to run the house, cooked and cleaned and minded me despite her jealousy of me—and loved our father with a ferocity he never recognized. That was the irony of it, you know. Hailey was always the one who loved him best, but he could never see it. He was too busy trying to make me love him."

Guessing, Max said, "Hailey looked like him. You looked like your mother."

"That was part of it. But mostly it was because I didn't love him. Just like my mother, I was trying my best to pull away from him. Trying to have room to breathe. Trying to have a life of my own. And he couldn't bear that. So he held on harder. He turned away from Hailey's love, maybe just because he never valued what was freely given—I don't know. I only know that she hated me as ferociously as she loved him."

Max tried to imagine what that must have been like for the sensitive girl Nell had been. Abandoned by her mother, resented by her sister—smothered by her father. Caught between two strong-willed people, Adam pulling her desperately toward him even as Hailey tried just as urgently to push her away. And all Max could see in his mind's eye was how she had been the summer he first noticed her: half shy and half wild, a cauldron of emotions bubbling just beneath the surface of her fey, secretive eyes.

Now it made sense. So much made sense.

In some ways hesitant with him, but hungry as well, tentative about touching or being touched, oddly surprised to discover pleasure. She had been so young, though, and he had assumed it was that.

But he had to wonder now if he had pushed too hard, if his deepening obsession with her, his growing impatience with the secrecy she imposed, had only added to the strain in Nell's young life. Until it became unbearable.

She got to her feet, moving slowly. Too slowly. As if everything ached. "I'm a little tired. Would you mind giving me a ride back to the house?"

Max didn't protest. He could see that she was tired, more than tired, and he didn't like the faint purple shadows beneath her eyes. He had the strong sense that she was nearing a breaking point, whether physically, emotionally, or psychically, and he was wary of doing or saying anything that might push her over that dangerous threshold.

The ride back to the Gallagher house was silent, and Max didn't try to break that silence. Nor did he bother asking or announcing his intention to search her house and check all the locks on doors and windows before he left her alone there; he simply did it.

She was waiting for him in the front hall when he was done, opening the door with a murmur of thanks, and she sounded so unutterably tired that Max almost left without saying anything else.

But he found himself turning around when he stepped onto the porch and heard himself asking a jerky question. "Nell, did you run away from him? Or did you run away from me?"

For a moment, he didn't think she would answer, but then she sighed and said, "Love, Max. I ran away from love. Good night."

She closed the door, and he heard the lock snap quietly and firmly into place.

From his place not twenty-five yards from the house, Galen watched Tanner's truck retreat slowly up the drive and turn on the main road back toward town.

On the whole, he would have felt better about things if Tanner had stayed the night.

With a slight grimace, Galen reached for his cell phone and placed a call. It was answered on the first ring.

"Yeah."

"I should get hazard pay for this," Galen announced without preamble. "This may be Louisiana in March, but the nights are still pretty chilly. Especially if you spend them in the woods."

"I gather Nell's home for the night."

"Looks like. And alone. Tanner brought her back here and checked out the house, then left. Not looking at all happy, by the way. In fact, if he's a drinking man, I'd say he was heading for the nearest bar."

"He isn't a drinking man."

"Figures." Galen sighed. "You know, I don't feel like much of a watchdog. If the threat to Nell is what we think, there's not a damned thing I can do to protect her from out here."

"There's nothing you could do even inside the house, not against a killer with the ability to project his mind's energy. She has to protect herself from the psychic threat."

Galen brooded for a moment, then said, "Thing is, that's not the only threat, and maybe not even the worst threat. If this bastard is watching her, he could see or hear enough to convince him Nell should be next on his hit list and go after her directly."

"Yes, he could. Which is why you're sticking close."

"And you?"

"What about me?"

"You know what I'm asking you, dammit. Would the killer have any reason to suspect you aren't what you appear to be?"

"I don't see how."

"Even so, watch your ass."

"I plan to. And you do the same."

Galen laughed. "Oh, hell, I'm invisible. I'm also not nearly as likely as the rest of you to set off this bastard's psychic alarms."

"No, but you're watching Nell, sticking close. And if he's sticking close as well…"

"Yeah, I know. But I'm being careful, and I doubt he's even noticed me."

"Still, don't forget we don't yet know what sort of capabilities we're up against. He might notice more than we could guess."

"There's a whole hell of a lot about this situation we don't yet know, and I don't like it," Galen stated flatly.

"Me either. Because there's one thing I do know. There's going to be another murder. Soon."

All his senses going into overdrive-alert, Galen stared toward the Gallagher house, keen eyes scanning, searching for any threat. "Do you know who?"

"No. But I know it won't be the last."

SATURDAY, MARCH 25

Nell.

She woke so abruptly that the whisper of her own name was still fading into silence. Her arms were outstretched, reaching for… what she needed. What she wanted so badly she ached with it. Her hands were shaking. She felt stiff, so tense her muscles protested with sharp twinges.

It always happened when the nightmares tortured her sleep, this awakening need to reach out for the missing part of herself. Like the phantom pains of a lost limb, something inside her ached to be complete. Because she wasn't whole, hadn't been whole since leaving Silence.

Nell knew that. And knowing didn't make it easier.

Thinking about it didn't either. She began to throw back the covers, turning her head to glance toward the window and the bright morning outside, and it was only then that she saw the doll.

It lay propped against the other pillow of the double bed, its plastic body rigid, its frilly dress yellowing from the passage of more than twenty-five years. But the golden ringlets were still neat, the round face still unmarked, and the wide blue eyes still as bright as they had been on Nell's fourth Christmas.

That familiar, feathery chill brushed up and down Nell's spine.

She reached over and slowly lifted the doll, holding it carefully. So light now, so small, yet then it had been nearly as large as she was herself A friend who had listened to the whispered secrets no one else had heard.

It smelled faintly of mothballs and dust.

"Eliza. What are you doing here?" She absently smoothed the doll's skirt, frowning.

How had it ended up on her pillow?

The doll had been packed away for so many years Nell had forgotten all about it, and she certainly hadn't dug it out because she didn't like sleeping alone. Even if she had known what trunk or box the doll had been packed in—and she didn't—she'd barely done more than stick her head in the attic so far anyway.

As for the possibility that someone else—some flesh-and-blood someone else—had placed the doll here during the night, how could that be? Galen was outside, and as long as he was, there was nothing coming uninvited either through the doors or windows.

At least nothing he could see.

There were no ghosts in this house, of that Nell was certain, no disembodied Gallaghers who had chosen to stay behind and haunt the place. So if she ruled out a flesh-and-blood visitor and a ghostly one, the only possibility left…

She felt another slow, crawling chill.

It wasn't a great jump of her imagination to think about the picture Shelby had taken and the consensus that it represented a highly disturbed mind—in all probability the mind of their killer—and to wonder: That… thing… had been watching her at least once; had it been watching her here in this house as well? Did that explain her growing uneasiness, the sleep disturbed by more than her dreams?

Was the doll on her pillow meant to freak her out, shake her, or scare her? If so, why? Because the killer knew why she was here? Because the killer knew… her?