“Funny how easy it is to father an army of children, but you don't even have the spine to talk to your wife!” Noreen said under her breath.
“Just listen, okay,” he suggested, and let out a heavy sigh.
Noreen crossed her arms under her small breasts and jutted out her jaw defiantly, but held her tongue as he explained what he knew of Acacia and how he'd stayed out of her life, but when asked, acknowledged being a sperm donor.
“So you knew that he'd been involved with the fertility clinic?” Pescoli asked Noreen.
“That was so long ago,” she said. “But yes. I knew that Gerald . . .” She waved one bony hand. “That was different. Clinical. Nothing intimate. Not like having an affair and fathering children with whores!” The tears began again. She found a tissue and dabbed at mascara-stained tears drizzling down her cheeks. “I don't understand. That really doesn't explain why you're here. Even if, even if he did ... well, sire these women for lack of a better word. How do you even know that?”
“It's the one thing that connects the victims,” Pescoli said.
“Victims?” Noreen was torn between horror and disbelief. “Oh God! Why these women? Why now? And what does it have to do with him?”
Alvarez said, “That's what we're here to find out.”
Â
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Calm down,
Kacey told herself.
Eli has to be here. He has to.
“Eli!” she yelled, more loudly. “Eli, honey, where are you?”
Frantic, her heart racing with fear, Kacey searched the house top to bottom once more. Her flashlight was losing power, its beam weak as she moved slowly, room by room, calling out Trace's son's name. Her pulse was pounding erratically in her ears, dread propelling her as she swept the pale light under beds, into closets even, dear God, down the laundry chute to the basement.
Still no sign of him.
“Come on, Eli. Where are you?”
The house was getting colder by the second. Through the upstairs she went another time and there, in the third bedroom, she saw a crack, heard the whistle of air seeping through a window that wasn't quite latched. She tried to slam it shut, but it wouldn't catch.
Throwing her weight into it, she heard ...
what?
The skin on her scalp crinkled as she caught her breath and listened.
Another noise. From the floor below! Footsteps?
“Eli!” She slammed her knee against and old cedar chest as she raced to the hallway, then flew frantically down the stairs. The flashlight's faint beam bobbed and wobbled, casting shadows.
Around the corner and into the living area she ran, where the fire crackled and hissed and the corners were cloaked in darkness.
“Eli?” she said, her voice sounding loud, even echoing as the wind battered the house. “Honey?”
But she saw no one on the main floor.
Not Eli.
Not Trace.
Not the dogs.
But she
felt
a presence ... Something different, like the scent of fresh, night air clinging to the darkness.
Don't do this. Don't freak yourself out.
In a flash, the night she was attacked in the parking garage, sizzled through her mind. Brutal images of pain and fear.
Pull yourself together! Keep searching!
Where the hell is Trace's son?
Bracing herself, nearly wincing as she passed gloomy corners, she pushed herself through the kitchen and into the stairwell. The steps to the cellar squeaked and her nostrils filled with the dry smell of dust that had collected from years of neglect. Whispery fingers tickled her cheek. “Oh!” She nearly stumbled down the remaining steps as the cobweb brushed against her face and clung to her hair.
Quieting her racing heart, she scraped the barest of light from her flashlight over stacked firewood, the scent of raw cedar faint in the cold space where more old furniture and tools had been left to gather dust.
The flashlight was fading but she forced its thin stream of light under the stairs, and across shelves where old canning glassware and boxes of insecticides hid.
Scccrrratttch!
She nearly dropped the flashlight as a mouse, its eye catching the fading light scurried quickly into a crack in the concrete wall.
“Oh . . God . . . damn! Eli!” she called again, but heard nothing other than the pounding of her heart and somewhere far off, the sound of chains rattling in the wind and that nerve-stretching
thunk, thunk, thunk
of a branch pummeling the house.
She hated dark spaces, had all of her life. No, that wasn't true. Her real fear of the dark had come after the attack, when her assailant had sprung from the shadows.
Again, a horrid memory flashed through her mind and in that instant her knees nearly buckled. She grabbed hold of a post bolstering the stairs for support and in so doing dropped her flashlight. It rolled away, the light drunkenly spinning across forgotten chairs, exposed beams overhead and a wall of ancient, dirty cement.
Don't think about him. Push the attack out of your mind! It's over.
But now that the image was planted, she couldn't forget her assailant, how his hard, angry body had been as it pressed her to the concrete, how he'd smelled of some faint aftershave mingled with sweat and a trace of cigarette smoke. He'd been so big and strong ... built like ... the men she'd met today, her brothers! Some of them had that same strong, athletic build. Hadn't she thought of Judd as a football player, and even Lance, Clarissa's husband, had that same primal, nearly jungle catâlike quality?
The others?
What about Robert or Thane or the twins?
And they all had those cold blue eyes.
Heart pounding, breathing in shallow gasps, feeling the taste of fear in the back of her throat, she slid down the post, then crawled to the flashlight, scooped it up and after giving herself a quick mental shake, struggled to her feet.
You have to find Eli!
Shaken, she pulled herself together. Up the stairs she climbed.
Maybe he'd gotten out of bed and followed Trace to the barns. Perhaps he'd been disoriented . . . hadn't he called her “Mommy”? There was a chance the medication had caused him to sneak downstairs and outside ...
How?
Wouldn't you have seen him? Heard him?
This was ridiculous!
She needed help!
She threw on her coat, gloves, and boots, took the time to light the one candle she'd seen in the living room with an ember from the fire, then, with her phone clutched in her hand, she walked to the door and punched out Detective Alvarez's number.
What would she say? She'd lost the kid? Trace hadn't come back from the barns?
That was foolish.
She didn't care.
“Better safe than sorry,” she said, looking through the windows, feeling the seconds ticking by as the snow continued to pile and drift. When the detective didn't answer, Kacey hung up, didn't leave a message.
Not yet.
She'd find Trace first, she thought, pocketing her phone and opening the door to the cold, dark night.
As she stepped outside a wall of cold air hit her so hard it seemed to strip any warmth from her body. Her skin chilled immediately and she wished she'd taken the time to grab a scarf and hat. Over the keen of the wind, she thought, again, she heard chains rattling, like those on an empty flagpole, or the clinking sound of shackled prisoners walking.
All in your imagination. Keep moving.
Swallowing back her fear, she followed the trail of footprints she'd seen earlier that were nearly covered now, but she kept after them, not toward the barns, but around the corner of the house, past a snow-covered rhododendron bush to the side of Trace's home where more footprints had clustered.
It was impossible to confirm, of course, to make out anything definitive with the snow blowing over the area. Over the wind she heard the branch still battering the house. Looking up, forcing the dying flashlight beam skyward, she not only saw the pine slapping at the siding, she noticed one of those fire-escape ladders hanging from the window of the extra bedroom.
The ladder moved with the wind, its chains rattling like the bones of the dead.
Her heart plummeted.
She knew in a heartbeat that Eli, with his broken arm, had somehow slithered down this ladder and disappeared into the frigid, unforgiving night.
CHAPTER 35
N
oreen Johnson had sunk onto the piano bench, her shoulders hunched together, but, Alvarez observed, hadn't yet given up the fight. “For the love of God, Gerald, why couldn't you keep your pants up! First Robert, with that awful Lindley woman ... and of course you had to hire him so that I could be reminded every single day of your betrayal and now ... now another one? How could you?” Her cheeks flamed red.
“What's done is done,” Gerald said wearily. “We can talk about this later. For now, I think the detectives have some questions they want answered.”
“It's over!” she whispered. “Our life, the one we knew is over.”
Gerald cleared his throat and kept his tense gaze toward Pescoli and Alvarez. “What can I do for you, detectives?” he asked, leaning forward, hands clasped between his knees.
Alvarez took the lead, asking him a series of questions. Gerald Johnson swore he'd never met the victims, hadn't known they could be sired by him, hadn't even guessed it until Acacia had shown up earlier in the day. He had no idea if any of them had any enemies, but he was certain from his children's reaction earlier that they were as surprised as he.
Pescoli was keeping to herself, observing, though more than once, Alvarez caught her partner studying the screen that had appeared when the television clicked off. Maybe it was her way of calming her aggression, but just listening, not interacting was certainly out of character for her.
Alvarez took another quick look at the TV screen. Nothing out of the ordinary. The current photo was of a family portrait taken years before, with Gerald and Noreen twenty-five or thirty years younger, their children spread around them in matching outfits, the boys in white shirts, navy vests, and khaki slacks; the three girls in red dresses. Someone had added their names to the digital picture.
“We have nothing to tell you,” Noreen insisted, and sent her husband a silent message. She tried, once again, to call one of her children to no avail. “Where are they?” she whispered and closed her eyes. “Don't they know that we need them?”
Pescoli said, “You had seven children?”
“
I
had seven,” Noreen clarified, sniffing angrily. “Gerald obviously had a few more.”
“What happened to your daughters? Agatha and Kathleen?” Pescoli asked.
“I'd rather not talk about it.” Noreen's voice was a whisper. She closed her eyes, her entire face tensed as from pain.
“Agatha was our late in life baby,” Gerald said. “There were complications with the birth and we knew early on that there were issues. She would be mentally ... challenged. But she was . . .”
“An angel.” Noreen glared at Pescoli. “I don't see what this has to do with anything.”
“How did she die?” Pescoli asked.
Noreen looked like she didn't want to respond, but then reluctantly said, “It was an accident. I'd run to the store, hadn't been gone half an hour. Clarissa, she's the oldest, was supposed to be watching the younger ones . . .” She sighed and looked up, toward the window facing the front of the house, but Alvarez knew she wasn't seeing the snow falling outside. Her sight was turned inside herself, to a time she would clearly rather forget. “As I understand it, the boys were playing like they doâdidâthey've always been active. Aggie . . . she was supposed to be asleep. Taking her nap . . .” Noreen blinked and shook her head, dispelling the image running through her brain. “Oh, God, I can't do this.”
Gerald took up the narrative. “We don't know exactly what happened, but, as Noreen said, the boys were roughhousing, they had a wooden sword and were running up and down the stairs. Aggie woke up, walked out of her room with her blanket and one of the twinsâ”
“Cam,” Noreen supplied miserably.
“Bumped into her.” A muscle in Gerald's jaw worked. “She got tangled in her blanket and ... she fell down the stairs. It was an accident.”
Alvarez met Pescoli's gaze.
It was an accident. Like Shelly Bonaventure
accidently
took an overdose? Like Jocelyn Wallis
accidentally
fell to her death over a railing? Like Elle Alexander
accidentally
slid off the road into the river in her minivan? Or like Karalee Rierson
accidentally
skied into a tree?
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Frightened out of her mind for Eli, Kacey started for the barn.
She'd taken three steps through the knee-high snow, around the side of the garage, nearly at the gate separating the backyard from the barnyard, when she saw movement out of the corner of her eye.
Her heart squeezed.
Eli?
She turned.
No, much too tall, she realized as the dark figure of a man began to take shape, a man emerging from the back porch.
Trace?
Thank God!
Relief washed over her and she started heading his way. “Traceâ” she began to call when the sound suddenly died in her throat.
Fear congealed her blood.
Just the way he moved warned her. Caused the hairs on the back of her neck to stand on end. The falling snow blurred the image, but now that he was closer she knew he wasn't Trace. Dressed in black from head to foot, odd-shaped goggles over a ski mask, a rifle in one gloved hand, he started to jog toward her.
No!
She took off at a sprint, running, fast as she could through the thick powder, churning up snow, getting nowhere. She heard him behind her, coming ever faster. On level ground she might have had a chance, but she was breaking the trail and he was following. Gaining.
Oh, God!
Frantic, she yanked her phone from her pocket, hit redial and started to yell over the cry of the wind. “Trace!” she screamed but her voice was lost in the storm.
“Bitch!” he snarled so close to her and she plunged forward, bracing herself, knowing a bullet was soon to crack her spine.
Faster! Faster! Faster!
Adrenaline spurred her on.
“Trace!” she screamed again.
If only she had a weapon, a knife, a rock,
anything
!
Blam!
Pain exploded in the back of her head.
Her knees buckled and she fell forward. Arms flung out, stretched. Her phone spiraled into the air to plummet into a drift. Snow covered her face and her eyes felt as if they were jarred from her head.
I'm dying,
she thought, her brain on fire.
I've lost them all . . .
Blackness pulled at her consciousness and she expected the darkness to overcome her, yet she felt his hands upon her. Rough, circling her ankles, dragging her backward through the frozen snow and ice.
She heard him breathing. Swearing. Ranting.
“. . . supercilious bitch ... ruining everything . . . a doctor . . . yeah, right ... think you're so damned smart . . .”
She tried to fight, to struggle, but her brain wouldn't engage and she felt him drag her up the steps of the house, her chin bouncing on each icy ledge.
Bang, bang, bang!
Her chin split. Cartilage in her nose crunched. Pain ripped up her face. Tears sprang to her eyes and she moaned. A stinging, as if by a thousand yellowjackets had attacked her, pierced her skin. Blood trailed across the porch, following her into the house.
It was all she could do to stay conscious.
Who was he? she wondered, but knew it didn't matter. The fact that she wasn't dead already meant that he had plans for her ... ugly, horrific plans.
Think, Kacey, think! Don't give up. Don't let the darkness overtake you! Hang on . . .
He kept dragging her across the linoleum kitchen floor and into the den where the fire burned low, reddish embers glowing in the hearth. Then he rolled her onto her back. She felt the blood staining her face.
“I've waited years for this,” he growled and for the first time she realized she hadn't been shot. No way would she have survived a rifle blast to the head. But the butt of his rifle showed red stains and hairs where he'd slammed it into the back of her head. “God damn it, I wish I would have killed you the last time.”
In the parking garage,
she thought.
This man dressed in black was the same man who had attacked her years before! Who the hell was he?
“But then I wouldn't be able to savor it now.” The voice . . . oh, God, he was one of the twins! Cameron? Colton? Did it matter? He looked down at her through his black ski mask and she imagined he was smiling, feeling superior. “Take my time.”
She blinked, trying to stay focused.
“You're one of them, you know,” he said. “The âUnknowings'. Those Gerald spawned.
Females,
who are compromised
.
”
What?
The pain in her body was agonizing, but she was keeping lucid with an effort, her gaze surreptitiously searching for a weapon, anything she could use against him, though he was still holding her ankles in one big hand, his other clutching his rifle.
He was still railing, “Like Aggie with her âmental challenges' and Kathleen with her depression. Suicidal, they claimed. But it ran deeper. Much, much deeper. A genetic flaw. The flaw of all of Gerald's female offspring. It might not be evident early, but eventually it comes out.”
“That's crazy,” she said with difficulty, knowing somehow she had to turn the tables on him. “
You're
insane.”
He flinched, then shook it off. “Don't,” he warned, shaking his head. “Don't.” He drew in a shaky breath and she realized he was unraveling, what little grip he had on his mind was fraying second by second. His fingers tightened roughly over her ankles. “It doesn't matter what you think, Acacia. Never has. Because you're one of them. The ones that could ruin everything. The lunatic females.”
He was certifiable. He'd made up some crazy, nightmare fantasy about the female progeny of his father. “What about Clarissa?” she asked through painful, swollen lips.
“In time . . . it has to be all according to the plan . . . accidents . . . arranged at the right time . . .”
She had to get away from this maniac! She had to save herself and save Eli!
The fire popped loudly.
As if he realized he was rambling, he snapped his head quickly back and forth and the eyes that had been staring at her through his mask glared fiercely. “Enough of this! We're done here. It's over for you!”
Now!
With all her strength, Kacey suddenly twisted her entire body.
His fingers slipped around her ankles. “Shit!”
She was free!
Zeroing in on his crotch, she kicked upward.
Hard as she could.
Her boot connected with soft tissue.
“Oooooh!” She nailed him directly in the groin and he doubled over. “Shit!” He dragged in his breath so that it whistled through his teeth. “You . . . fuckin' . . . bitch!”
Quickly, while he was disabled, she scrambled backward, trying to get to her feet, bumping a shoulder into the edge of the couch, her mind still thick from the blow to her head. Where the hell was Trace? she thought wildly as she forced herself upright and sprang through the archway to the kitchen. She had to get away. Find Trace! Locate Eli! Oh dear God, had this monster already killed them both?
Her attacker was sputtering, muttering crazy invectives,
moving
! She heard his footsteps as he gathered himself.
“. . . son of a fuckin' bitch . . . I'll make you pay . . .”
Trace's phone was on the kitchen counter ... somewhere in the dark . . . if she could just get there ... snag it and run out into the night, she might have a chance! She could call 9-1-1, or Alvarez or . . . Her head still thundered, her mind was still thick, her face ached, but she lunged forward.
Click!
The distinctive sound of a rifle being cocked echoed through her brain.
“You're not going anywhere,” he said, his voice rough. “Not after all the years of waiting.”
The phone was less than three feet away!
She felt the cold barrel of the rifle pressing against her back.
“Move and I'll pull the trigger,” he promised.
She froze. Heard the moan of the storm outside. Wondered what her chances were. There were knives here ... sharp, deadly blades ... If she could just find them in the dark . . .
“A wound hereâ” The nose of the weapon swirled against her spine, in the small of her back, just over her buttocks, “will take a while to bleed out. And you'll feel it, the life oozing from you.”