Adam, Genevieve and Thor had gone to bed. The house was quiet. Christina stood at her bedroom window, looking out at the lawn.
She felt numb. She believed in Adam Harrison, and in Genevieve, her good friend, and in Thor. She had even come to believe in the ghost of Beau Kidd. And now…
And now she was exhausted, but she waited, thinking—hoping—that Beau would certainly make an appearance.
But he didn’t.
As she stood there, she saw Jed drive up and park. He didn’t get out of the car, though, just sat in it and stared up at the house.
Had she been waiting for Beau? Or Jed?
She left the window, walked downstairs, opened the front door and waved him in.
“I thought you might be sleeping,” he said when he got to the door.
A logical assumption, given that it was…what? Three or four in the morning?
“I’m awake.”
“So I see.”
“Are you coming in?”
He hesitated. “Yes. I wanted to…”
“To what?” There was a hard tone in her voice.
“I wanted to make sure you were all right,” he said.
She nodded. “I was with both my cousins, your cousin, Adam, Genevieve and Thor. Just being with Thor, I should have been okay.”
“Yeah,” he acknowledged with a smile.
He followed her inside, and she hesitated for a long moment, then started up the stairs. She heard him lock the door, then heard his footsteps on the stairs behind her.
In her bedroom, she closed the door, hoping Beau wouldn’t suddenly decide to make an appearance. Then she turned and stared at Jed. “Are you working for the cops now?” she asked him.
“No.”
“But you left because a cop paged you, right? The one who interrogated Mike?”
“Mike wasn’t actually interrogated.” He told himself he wasn’t lying, exactly. Mike hadn’t been interrogated—yet. And he certainly couldn’t break what he knew was a confidence and tell her that Mike was considered the chief suspect right now.
“But that cop went to his house—”
“Jerry—that cop—went to his house and asked him a few questions. That’s all.”
He spoke quietly, but the whole conversation still scared her. “Just because he was married to a missing woman, that does not make him guilty,” she said.
“You’re right. And they don’t have anything on Mike. Anything at all.”
“Because there’s nothing to have on him.”
“Christina, I don’t know what to say to you. I don’t believe in ghosts, including Beau Kidd’s, but I also can’t help but believe that I—like most of the rest of the world—made a mistake by believing he was guilty. But if I’m wrong and your house is haunted, if the ghost of Beau Kidd keeps visiting you, why the hell can’t he help in his own defense?”
She stared at him. “He saw Grace Garcia. He hoped she might still be alive. He went to her, and she was dead but still warm, so he figured the killer had to be close. He drew his weapon because he heard noise from the shadows. He thought it was the killer. He never meant to shoot his partner. The evidence against Beau was just as ridiculous as anything the cops could trump up now against either of my cousins. It’s grasping at straws. It’s circumstantial. No court in America would convict a man because he was once married to one of the victims.”
He turned away from her. “We should get some sleep,” he said softly.
“You’re staying?”
“Unless you’re asking me to leave,” he said, turning around to meet her eyes again.
Christina stood very still, staring back at him. “I never want you to leave. I guess you don’t know, but when we were kids, I had such a thing for you. You were a hunk on the football field, and then you were a hunk in uniform. But you were also my friend’s cousin, and then you got married. I knew some of what you were going through when Margaritte got sick, when she died. I guess we both knew what it’s like to lose the people closest to us, to feel as if we’re facing the world alone. Even to feel guilty, like why are we still here when they’re not?”
“Christina…” he murmured uncomfortably.
“No, listen to me. What I’m trying to say is that I’ve always been crazy about you and I still am, but the thing is…I don’t want you if you think I’m really crazy. I just wonder if maybe you don’t want to believe in me. You don’t want to believe in ghosts for the same reason I didn’t want to myself. It made me angry. If ghosts were real, why didn’t my mom come see me? Why can’t I tell my father one last time that I adored him, and I’m sorry about all those times I was a wise-ass and tried to sneak around! Why can’t I say thanks to Gran for believing in me, or my grandfather, who I swear visited me when I was a kid, but I’ll be damned if I’ve seen him anywhere since. You would want to believe in ghosts if you could see Margaritte one more time. But you’ll probably never see her. Because she was good and loving, and she doesn’t have anything to prove, to solve, by coming back. Beau is here because he wasn’t guilty. He wasn’t guilty then, and he isn’t guilty now. And he needs people to know that.”
He was staring at her, and she realized she’d said a hell of a lot more than she had intended to.
“Well,” he murmured.
“Well?” She tried to make the word a challenge, tried not to let her voice falter, tried not to show that she was terrified she had scared him off by proving herself desperate and far crazier than even he had ever believed.
“That’s a lot to think about,” he said huskily.
“Yes, I know.”
“Do I have to…respond to all of it tonight?”She shook her head.
He walked on over to her and pulled her into his arms. “I…”
“Yes?”
“Um…”
“Oh, come on. You must have something to say.”
“Maybe we all see and believe whatever we need to so we can get by, so we can go on,” he told her.
She frowned, and he spoke quickly again. “But when I see you, I see life. I see the promise and hope of the future. I see someone who bounced back from every wicked curve thrown her way. I see someone beautiful, strong, full of character, talent…and sexy. Did I say sexy?” he murmured, his lips teasing her earlobe.
It wasn’t exactly a declaration of undying loyalty.
“I see life,” he whispered again. “I see the prayer that I might find a life again myself.”
It was definitely enough.
She slipped her arms around his neck, returned his kiss and savored the pressure of his body against her own. She should have been exhausted, but adrenaline was racing through her.
It was like the first time….
Clothes ended up strewn everywhere. Kisses were openmouthed, wet, hot, awkward, sweet and flaring with hunger. Hands were everywhere.
Each touch of his naked flesh was more erotic than the last. She couldn’t believe it was possibly to love so hotly, burn so brightly. Ecstasy tore through her when his lips teased her navel, then tasted the flesh between her thighs, when his legs parted hers and he became like one with her, throbbing inside her….
She knew it couldn’t always be so hot, so frenzied. Sometimes it would be the way it was later, when they were both half asleep. When a slight touch stirred something in one of them, and a second touch stirred something in return…
Lazy, drowsy, they began to make love again, and for a while it was sweet and slow, before gaining momentum, becoming cataclysmic.
Darkness, she decided, was good.
Darkness meant not having to face the truth, but darkness meant trust, as well. Because in the darkness she did trust him. For the first time in her life, she was sorry when the first light of morning came to drive away the shadows.
But finally she slipped back into sleep, and in sleep there were dreams. Dreams of someone else, dreams in which she was someone else. Dreams that were far too real.
Tears streamed down her face.
She had been close, so close, to salvation.
Or maybe she hadn’t been. Maybe she was just hallucinating before dying. Maybe, until the very second that the life was snuffed from her body, she would believe, would hope…
Her agony was growing. Wrists, ankles, back…the pain was constant.
She needed to stop crying. Even her tears hurt.
And they brought an ever greater pleasure to the fiend who savored her degradation and humiliation.
Actors, actresses, performers…they thought they were so great, according to her killer, so much better than everyone else.
But he…he knew better.
18
C hristina was more than half asleep—mostly asleep, she decided somewhere deep in the recesses of her mind—when she heard a phone ringing. Then she heard Jed answer, heard him say that he would be along in a bit.
She opened one eye and looked at him questioningly as he flipped his cell closed.
“Katherine Kidd,” he told her.
“Oh?”
“She just heard about Angela McDuff being missing. She called to say that she’s sorry, that she wants me to come by. She wants me to bring Adam.”
“Good idea,” she said, trying to sound unconcerned.
“We can all go,” he said.
“No, she only asked for you and Adam.”
“Actually, I think she’d be happy if you came.”
“Why?”
“I think she feels that she owes you some kind of apology.”
“She doesn’t.”
At her side, he was silent for a minute. “She really thinks she saw her brother last night.”
Christina rolled over on her back. “I’ve got it! Here’s a theory for you. Beau really was a killer twelve years ago. Now he’s back, and even though he’s a ghost, he’s killing again. He has Katherine doing all the dirty work for him. She lures the victims, then he holds them prisoner down in his grave. Later on, she dumps the bodies.”