Dark Homecoming (34 page)

T
he winds were blowing hard again as Joe and Aggie pulled into the driveway at Huntington House. “Half the roof is gone,” Aggie noted as the house came into view.

Palm trees lay uprooted all over the property. The once elegantly manicured gardens were ripped apart and smothered in mud. The place seemed utterly deserted and desolate.

But not for long. Joe had barely turned off his car when he spotted the garage door of the great house being winched up on its cord by a stocky, middle-aged man. He was struggling, breathing heavily. The electric door had to be opened by hand with the power out, and from the looks of it, this was not a man used to manual labor.

Joe and Aggie were quickly out of the car and hurrying up to the garage.

“Where you going?” he called to the man. “Roads are closed. The storm's moving back in.”

The man's clothes appeared disheveled. His eyes reflected fear when he beheld the police car that was blocking his way down the driveway.

“Aren't you Lyndon Merriwell?” Aggie asked. “I've seen your picture in the newspapers.”

The man didn't answer.

Joe nodded. “Yes, you're a city councilman, aren't you? What are you doing at Huntington House?”

That was when Joe noticed the blood on Merriwell's shirt.

He shined his flashlight into the garage. There were others inside, standing beside Bentleys and Porsches and Mercedes Benzes. He recognized one of them as that weirdo artist who'd been showing her work at Roger Huntington's gallery, and another one as Roger's assistant.

“She tried to kill us,” Merriwell blurted.

“She killed my wife!” another man shouted.

“And my husband!” a stout woman added.

“Who killed them?” Joe asked.

“Mrs. Hoffman.”

Joe turned to Aggie. “Call for backup. Keep them here until then. I'm going inside.”

“Joe, if even a third of what Mrs. Martinez told us is true, it's very dangerous in there.”

“That's why I need to go in.” He turned back to Merriwell. “Who's left inside?”

“Mrs. Hoffman, Liz, and Roger Huntington.”

Joe leveled his eyes at the man. “What about Dominique?”

The man said nothing. All of the people in the garage seemed to clamp their mouths shut at the same time.

“We know the truth,” Joe said, as he heard Aggie call in to the station. “We know Dominique Huntington is alive.”

He headed around to the side door of the house, his hand on the grip of his gun. All around him the wind blew ferociously, sounding once more like a freight train about to bear down on them all.

T
he car sped down the deserted street, swerving around fallen palm trees and vehicles left abandoned in the middle of the road. The driver gripped the wheel tightly. It was imperative he get to Huntington House as quickly as possible. Something bad was going on there.

He pulled into the driveway, but noticed the police car up ahead, parked in front of the garage, its blue light flashing. He backed out of the driveway and drove around the block.

He couldn't go in through the front door, it seemed.

But there was a way to gain access to the property. A place in the back where the wall surrounding the estate was fairly easy to scale. He'd have to go in that way.

He parked in the street. The wind nearly whipped the door off his car as he got out.

“T
hat's enough, Dominique,” came the voice of Mrs. Hoffman, stepping into the room.

Liz was poised on the edge, ready to jump down into the mud. The wind threatened to push her over the side even without any effort on her part. Gradually the hurricane was regaining its full steam.

Mrs. Hoffman helped Dominique to her feet from where she knelt beside Roger's body. The knife fell from her hand and clattered to the floor.

“Look at you, my darling,” Mrs. Hoffman said. “What a mess you've made.”

Dominique's gray robe was drenched in blood. Her hands and her hair dripped with it.

Liz took a deep breath. She knew Hoffman wouldn't let her live. She was going to jump.

“No need to kill yourself,” Mrs. Hoffman said, turning those cold eyes behind the plastic mask of her face in Liz's direction. “I'm not going to harm you. The police are on their way. Maybe there's a chance all of us can survive this unpleasantness.”

Liz just glared at her, while Dominique growled.

“Oh, my darling,” Mrs. Hoffman said, turning to the woman in the bloody robe. “Why don't you go to our secret place and get yourself cleaned up? Put on your pretty white dress. The one you love so much. The one you look so beautiful in.”

Liz glanced out into the storm. If Hoffman was right, and the police were on their way, she wasn't going to risk the jump. Hoffman almost certainly still had Roger's gun in the pocket of her robe, and she might still kill Liz at any time. But for the moment, Liz backed away from the sheer drop down into the gardens. The wind was getting awfully ferocious now, and sheets of rain were whipping into the room.

She watched as Dominique walked obediently across the room, turning once to glare at Liz. Then she stepped over the debris into the exposed secret passage and disappeared.

“Now,” Mrs. Hoffman said to Liz, “let's you and I talk.”

“You're even crazier than I thought you were,” Liz replied, “if you think you can somehow bargain with me, now that it looks as if the police are coming and you're about to be caught.”

“I'm not bargaining with you,” Hoffman said, her voice icy with disdain. “I just wanted to get Dominique safely away. I've spent years protecting her. I'm not going to let them come in and find her.”

“Your secret place in the attic is destroyed,” Liz snapped. “Or hadn't you noticed?”

Hoffman chuckled. “Silly little girl. You called yourself mistress of this house. And yet you never knew all of its secrets. Dominique and I have many secret places all throughout this house. I will keep her there, safe, and no one will find her.”

From outside Liz could hear the sirens of police cars, even despite the wind. They were near. They might have even been coming up the driveway of the house.

“You can't believe this will work out your way,” she told Hoffman. “They will come here. They will find you and they will find her. They will see what you have done.”

Hoffman glared at her with those ferocious eyes. “Do you really think that I don't know how to protect my precious Dominique? I have protected her ever since she came to this house, when those dark eyes bewitched me, and not with any magic, not with any vodou, but with the purity of her beauty and her magnificence. I won't let anyone get to her. I have killed to protect her, and I will kill again. I killed Jamison when I figured he'd tell what he knew. Foolish boy. I copied his keys so I could have access to his apartment. I copied all the servants' keys. If they were coming into this house, I had to make sure I had ways to control them.”

“You killed Rita, too, didn't you?” Liz asked. “It wasn't David at all.”

“She was a nuisance right from the start. I should have slit her throat a year earlier and saved all of us a lot of trouble.”

“You were going to let David take the rap.”

Mrs. Hoffman waved a hand in disgust. “David.” She said the name as if it were something dirty. “His philandering is what sent poor Dominique on her never-ending quest to stay beautiful. If only he had appreciated her . . . because no matter how old she got, she was always going to be the most beautiful woman to have ever lived. He didn't deserve her! After we are through here, and your blood has restored my beautiful Dominque, she and I will be together forever, without any of you sad, pathetic creatures around us. And that includes David.”

“The police will search this place from top to bottom after I tell them what's happened here.”

“You'll tell them nothing,” Mrs. Hoffman replied. “You'll do what I say.”

Suddenly there was a voice, calling from below: “Hello!”

Liz recognized it as Detective Foley's voice.

“Go ahead,” Mrs. Hoffman said. “Answer him. Tell him where we are.”

Liz attempted to shout out to him, but found she could not.

Mrs. Hoffman nodded. “Variola taught me so many useful tricks. Pity that she's not around anymore to see what a brilliant student I was.” She shrugged. “Well, I think she figured that out by the end.”

Liz gripped her throat, feeling the tightening there. It was getting difficult to breathe.

Mrs. Hoffman withdrew a small wooden doll from her robe. There was a ribbon tied around its throat.

“How very much I should like to just snap this doll's head right off,” she said. “But you see, my dear, I've got to keep you alive for a little while more. Just long enough to provide Dominique with one more drink.”

Liz tried to move, but found she was rooted to the spot.

“She's almost there,” the housekeeper said. “One more good long drink of your blood and she will be restored to what she was.”

Liz thought she might pass out for lack of air.

“We're up here, Detective!” Mrs. Hoffman suddenly called out the door. “Oh, please come quickly! Liz is hurt badly!”

As she spoke, Mrs. Hoffman switched the wooden doll into her left hand, while withdrawing Roger's pistol from another pocket with her right hand.

No
, Liz thought.
Foley's walking into a trap. And I can't warn him!

“Up here!” Mrs. Hoffman shouted, positioning herself against the wall so she could surprise the detective. “Please hurry!”

The wind screeched into the room at that moment, dousing them with water as if someone was heaving buckets at them. Liz's hair dripped down the sides of her face. The last of her perfume bottles on her dresser toppled over onto the floor. Her elegant white canopy bed collapsed as if it had been made with toothpicks. A couple of white satin pillows were caught by a whirlwind and drawn out into the storm.

Liz saw Foley appear in the doorway, his gun drawn. Mrs. Hoffman leveled her own gun at the detective.

What happened next took only a matter of seconds, but for Liz, time slowed way down. She saw every step, every tiny action, clearly and deliberately.

As Hoffman gripped the gun with both of her hands, she dropped the wooden doll. It went tumbling through the air to the floor.

Meanwhile, Detective Foley was glancing around the room, his eyes at first seeing nothing. Then he spotted Mrs. Hoffman with the gun and his expression turned to alarm.

Hoffman pulled the trigger. Foley had no time to duck or turn his gun to her.

But Liz had time. With the doll out of Hoffman's hand, Liz was suddenly free to move, and so she lashed out, both fists clenched, slamming them directly into Mrs. Hoffman's face. The monstrous woman screamed as she fired her gun.

Foley was hit. He went down in a spray of blood, his own gun firing uselessly into the ceiling. He collapsed onto the floor and was still.

Mrs. Hoffman was wailing. Dropping the gun, she covered her face with her hands and staggered across the room. “What have you done?” she cried. “What have you done?”

Liz looked over at her. As Hoffman removed her hands, her face broke away in a dozen pieces, as if it really had been a plastic mask all along.

“No!” Hoffman screamed, looking at herself in the mirror. What stared back at her was a ghoul with a pulpy red face and bulging eyes, sinewy muscles and veins exposed. No amount of plastic surgery—or magic—could help Hoffman now. She raised her head to the ceiling and howled like a wounded dog.

“Who would have thought a simpering little fool like you could destroy me?” She stumbled across the room as the wind raged. “What a world! What a world!”

Raising her arms in anguish and despair, Mrs. Hoffman let out a piercing scream, a sound that cracked the mirror and became one with the wail of the storm. Then, despite her best efforts to repel them, the winds took hold of her and sucked her out into the hurricane.

S
tanding under the overhang of the garage, doing her best to defy the encroaching winds of the storm, Aggie heard gunshots from the house, and then a terrible, unearthly scream.

“Joe!” she shouted into her handheld transceiver. “Joe, are you all right?”

Other police cars were now speeding up the long driveway.

“Hang on, Joe!” Aggie cried. “Backup's here.”

Behind her, the people were getting restless. “You've got to let us go,” Lyndon Merriwell said. “The storm is doubling back on us.”

“You're not going anywhere except with the officers who are arriving now,” Aggie snapped, turning to look at them with contempt in her eyes. “I know what you people are. Maria Martinez made a full confession. You're all going to be charged with accessory to murder, on God only knows how many counts.”

The people in the garage fell silent after that.

Out in back of the house, a man was scrambling over the wall. He dropped onto the grass and went running through the driving rain toward the house.

L
iz bent over the fallen police detective. She could hear his radio crackling.

Liz wished she knew how to work the thing so she could respond and let them know what happened. But it didn't matter: it sounded as if Detective McFarland was downstairs, and more help was on its way. Liz just needed to make her way down to the first floor and—

“Where is Mrs. Hoffman?”

Liz spun around. The voice was ragged and hoarse, but strong enough.

Dominique was standing in front of her, wearing a lacy white dress, the same one she wore in the portrait. Her face and hands were still bloody, however, and she was pointing Roger's gun at Liz.

“She fell,” Liz managed to say.

“You killed her.”

“No,” Liz said, her eyes focused on the gun in Dominique's hand.

She couldn't have come this far—survived everything thrown at her—and with salvation waiting for her downstairs—to get killed now.

But that appeared to be Dominique's plan for her.

“You tried to take my place,” the madwoman said.

“No,” Liz replied.

“This was my room.”

“Yes,” Liz said. “I should never have called it my own. I always felt you here, Dominque. It was always your room.”

“You married David.”

“Yes, but no one could ever take your place, Dominique. You are beautiful. You are enchanting and unique. I could never hope to be you, or as beautiful as you.”

“Beautiful,” Dominique repeated, almost trancelike.

“We're very different women, you and I,” Liz told her. “I could never be you. Just as you could never be me.”

“You're going to tell,” Dominique said.

“I'm not going to tell . . .”

“Yes, you are!” Dominique's voice shrilled in anger, like a child's. “You are going to tell about our coven!”

“No, Dominique, I won't—”

“I have to kill you.”

“No, please!” Instinctively Liz lifted her hands in front of her face.

“Dominique, stop!”

It was a man's voice that suddenly barked from behind her. Liz turned to look.

David.

It was David.

He stood in the doorway, drenched and windblown, his eyes wide and desperate.

“Dominique,” he said. “Put the gun down.”

“David,” Dominique said in a hoarse little whisper.

“You don't want to kill anybody,” David told her, stepping gingerly over Foley's body as he entered the room.

She just stared at him.

“We loved each other once, many years ago,” he said. “Do you remember?”

“Remember,” she said. “Love . . .”

“Give me the gun, Dominique,” David said.

“No!” She kept the gun pointed at Liz. “You cheated on me! You made me feel . . . old . . . ugly . . .”

“I'm sorry about that, Dominique. Very sorry. But you aren't old and ugly anymore.”

“Not anymore . . .”

“You are young and beautiful.”

“Young . . .” she repeated. “Beautiful . . .”

David took another step closer to her. Liz held her breath, terrified that Dominique would pull the trigger at any point.

“Look at yourself in the mirror,” David was saying. “Turn and look over there. See how beautiful your magic has made you.”

Dominique hesitated. But finally her eyes turned irresistibly toward the cracked mirror, though she made sure to keep the gun trained on Liz.

What she saw in the mirror made Dominique scream.

Her face was still twisted and broken. Her eyes were still protruding.

Dominique screamed again.

“Is that how you want to look for the rest of your life?” David asked.

Dominique was sobbing uncontrollably. The gun trembled in her hands.

“All your black magic couldn't help you,” David told her cruelly.

Liz braced herself. What was David doing? He was goading Dominique to kill her!

But he knew his wife better than she did.

“That is how you will look for all time,” he told her.

Dominique was sobbing. Tilting the weapon in her hands upward, she brought it in close to her chest. Then, in one swift, continuous move, she slipped the barrel into her mouth. Liz closed her eyes against the sickening explosion of gunfire.

That was when blackness overcame Liz as well, and she collapsed to the floor.