Dark Homecoming (9 page)

“D
arling!” David's voice crackled over the phone.

“Sorry I haven't called in a while. Have you gotten my emails?”

“Just one,” Liz said, her heart pounding in her chest as she heard David's voice.

It had been nearly two days since the police had been there, giving her the news of Jamison's death. How desperately Liz had tried to reach David after that. She couldn't call him, because he'd said his international mobile phone was out of service; he'd have to call her. But he had not done so. Except for one short email, telling her that he'd call soon, there had been no communication from David. Liz had been so worried that something had happened to him. “Oh, David,” she gushed. “I'm so glad to finally speak with you. Did you hear from the police?”

“Yes, and I told them that we knew nothing about that kid's death. Darling, don't freak about this, okay?”

“But now there have been two murders here . . .”

“No! Not there! Jamison died at his own apartment. His death had nothing to do with Huntington House. There is no connection, darling. None! The police can see absolutely nothing that links the two cases. You must understand that it's just a horrible coincidence and not let it freak you out.”

“That's what I keep trying to tell myself, David, but—”

“It's the truth, Liz.” He seemed impatient with her. “Darling, I really need you to be strong about this. I'm in a bit of a crisis over here. Two of our Dutch subsidiaries are near a melting point. And I'm dealing with a hostile takeover at our German company, and I just really need you to be strong and not get hysterical.”

“I'm not hysterical,” she said plainly.

“If the police come around again, just tell them that you've told them all you know, and ask them to leave you alone.”

“But I didn't tell them all I knew.”

“Of course you did!”

“No, David, I didn't tell them that the reason Jamison was fired was because he told me that Audra had been killed in my room.”

David sighed. “Well, I told them.”

“You did?”

“Well, I told them he was fired because he was telling you lies on your first day at Huntington House to frighten you. Things about Audra. I told the police officer who called me that the kid was impertinent and out of line. He agreed, and that was that.”

Liz hesitated. “David, are you certain there's no connection to—”

“There is no connection between Jamison's death and Audra's,” he interrupted. “None!”

“That wasn't what I was going to ask,” Liz said, in a very small voice.

“Then what?”

She hesitated again, then finally asked David what was burning through her mind. “Is there no connection between both of these deaths . . . and Dominique's?”

There was utter silence on the other end of the phone.

“David?” Liz asked.

“What can you possibly be thinking?” her husband finally responded.

“I never told you everything Jamison said that night.” She summoned the courage to say what she had been hiding. “He said that . . . he said that Dominique killed Audra.”

“Dominique! She's
dead
, Liz!”

“I think Jamison meant . . . her ghost . . .”

“This is crazy talk,” David snarled, “and I don't have time for crazy talk.”

“I know it is. But he said it, David. I was too . . . horrified . . . nervous . . . dismissive of it to tell you before.”

“So you think Dominique's ghost walks Huntington House, killing Audra and then floating over to Jamison's apartment to kill him too?”

“No . . . but I . . .”

“But what?” David snapped.

“Forget I ever brought it up,” Liz said.

“Good idea.” David was angry with her. “I have got to go, Liz. Please stop all this nonsense and I will be home as soon as I can.”

“Just a few more days, right, David?”

“It might be a few days longer now. This hostile takeover isn't going to be easy to manage.”

“But David . . .”

“Liz, don't you realize how important this is? How this is my big chance to prove to my father I know how to run the business?”

“Yes, I'm sorry. I know your work is important.” She could feel the sarcasm creeping into her voice. Even if she had wanted to hold it back, she couldn't. “Much more important than my little problems here at the house. Like dealing with murder investigations.”

“Liz, please . . .”

“It's
fine
, David.”

They hung up quickly after that, barely saying goodbye.

David might be angry, but now Liz was angry, too. How dare he be so cavalier about all this? She took a deep breath, strode over to the window, and looked out.

A storm was fast approaching, rolling up the coast. The clouds were deep brown, tinged with gold. The air was thick with moisture.

Liz smelled gardenias. The fragrance was unmistakable.

Dominique's fragrance.

But the gardenia plants had all been ripped out.

Liz headed out of her room. She would go mad if she stayed in there any longer. She gripped the bannister and started down the stairs.

Dominique's portrait stared at her from the landing.

It was enormous. Monstrous. Those big black eyes. That lustrous hair. Those big heaving breasts under that flowing white dress.

It was intolerable.

And it was coming down.

Liz found Mrs. Hoffman in the study, seated at a desk, going over a ledger.

“Might I have a word with you?” Liz asked.

The housekeeper looked up at her. “Of course.”

“In the garage are some of the framed photographs I brought with me, stacked against the far wall.”

Mrs. Hoffman gave her that rigid expression that passed for a smile. “Yes, I've seen them.”

“I'd like them brought into the house. I took them, and I'd like them hung in the house.”

“There's very little photography on the walls, as you've no doubt noticed,” Mrs. Hoffman said. “The Huntingtons have always preferred original paintings.”

“Well, there will be photography now,” Liz told her. “This is my house now. I'd like the photos brought in from the garage and I will direct where they will be hung.”

Mrs. Hoffman regarded her uneasily. “Very well. I'll have our caretaker, Thad, bring them in at once.”

“The largest of them—the shot of the volcano in Iceland—I'd like hung in the landing of the staircase.”

Mrs. Hoffman's hard plastic face looked as if it might crack. “But that's where the portrait of Mrs. Huntington hangs.”

Liz drew in close to her. She could feel the anger trembling along every fiber of her body like an electrical current. “I'm Mrs. Huntington now,” she said, very carefully, articulating each word.

“Of course you are.” Mrs. Hoffman closed the ledger and stood. “I might point out, however, that the portrait of the first Mrs. Huntington is nearly six feet tall and more than four feet wide. Replacing it with the photograph in question, which is, what, maybe three by two—?”

“Yes, that's the size of it.”

“Well, the landing is an awfully large space, and the photograph—which is quite lovely, I'm sure—will look rather small and out of place there.”

“That's where I want it.” Liz surprised herself with the calmness of her voice.

“Very well.” Mrs. Hoffman regarded her impassively. “And where shall I have the portrait of Mrs. Huntington hung?”

“It's going into the garage.”

Mrs. Hoffman visibly tensed.

“It's time we had an understanding, Mrs. Hoffman,” Liz said. “I mean no disrespect to David's first wife. But she's passed away. She's not here anymore. I am. And I simply don't find it appropriate that her portrait remains hanging in this house.”

“I see,” said Mrs. Hoffman. “I assume you've discussed this all with Mr. Huntington.”

“He told me I was in charge of the house.”

The two women held eye contact for several seconds.

“Very well, then, Mrs. Huntington,” the housekeeper said at last. “I'll get Thad to work on this request of yours immediately.”

“Thank you,” Liz said.

She watched as Mrs. Hoffman walked out of the room. She felt suddenly as if she might collapse, but she also felt good. Powerful.

Nicki would have been proud of her.

She stood there in the study, listening to the first rumble of thunder in the distance.

And then she smelled it again.

Gardenias.

Overwhelming. Overpowering the room.

“Y
ou've never spoken so much about your mother before,” Aggie said as she stood from the table where she'd been sitting with Joe to walk across the room and close the window. Rain was beginning to patter against the glass. Thunder rumbled on the horizon.

Joe shrugged. “Yeah, normally I don't like to remember. I guess these recent killings have brought all that back up for me again.”

Aggie returned to her seat. They were going through photographs on Joe's laptop of various boyfriends and acquaintances of Audra McKenzie, trying to see if any of them might have some connection to Jamison Wilkes. But conversation had drifted to Joe's mother.

“It must be so hard to live with that,” Aggie said, giving Joe a compassionate smile. “I don't know how I'd do it.”

“Thanks, Agg.” Aggie was a good friend and partner. People sometimes asked him why he and Aggie weren't an item. Quick, easy answer: partners should never be romantically involved. Second quick, even easier answer: Aggie was already happily married, and she and her husband had two kids. But even if neither of the above were true, Joe thought they still wouldn't have been involved. And it had nothing to do with Aggie.

It had everything to do with him.

Joe had had plenty of girlfriends in high school, back when he would race his car around town and smoke several joints a day. Even when he was at the Police Academy and started acting more responsibly, he'd dated a couple of girls, and at least one of them had thought they were getting serious. Joe had had to break it to her that it wasn't so. He just couldn't get serious with anyone. Sometimes Joe thought he had a chip missing—the chip that controlled commitment, or even the desire for commitment. He didn't want it.

And, as he'd just told Aggie, he was pretty sure that all went back to his mother.

“You were only eight years old,” his partner said, looking at him, her eyes shining. “What a thing for a little boy to see.”

“Thing is,” he told her, “it was like I had a sixth sense. Dad told me to go in and wake Mom. It was strange that she wasn't up before us. She always was. And so even as I walked over to her tent and pulled down the zipper, I knew she was going to be dead. Somehow, I just knew it. And she was—covered in—”

Aggie reached over and placed her hand over his. “It's okay. You've told me what you found. No need to relive it again, Joe.”

But it was too late. In his mind, he saw once more the inside of his mother's tent.

They had been out camping. They went every summer, the three of them, Mom, Dad, Joe. Mom cooked the fish her two guys caught in a nearby brook over an open fire. How Joe had loved to go camping with his parents.

But when he'd pulled down the zipper of Mom's tent, all he'd seen was bright red blood.

He'd first thought a bear got her. Mom was always talking about bears, worrying the animals would get them. But a bear would have simply torn her tent apart. No bear could unzip the tent, slip inside, then step back out and zip it closed again.

Only one kind of monster could do that.

“But I think the worst part,” Joe said, “was that the first person the police suspected was my father. Being a cop now, I know that's pretty standard. But back then, I was so angry at them for thinking Dad could have done such a thing.”

DNA evidence had ruled Dad out as a suspect. And his utter despair and near-catatonic grief was the punctuation point on that theory if anyone still needed convincing. When Dad died a couple years later of lung cancer—he'd never smoked a cigarette in his life—Joe secretly believed what had really killed him was a broken heart.

After that, Joe was raised by his grandparents in Greensboro. No wonder Joe had acted out after his parents' death, smoked too much pot. No wonder he had become hooked on cop shows on television, fascinated by tales of cold cases finally solved so many years later.

Because his mother's case was as cold as it got. No suspects were ever identified.

Every once in a while, Joe dug out his mother's file, poring over it for clues the original detectives might have missed. The cops up in North Carolina had been very good to send it to him, welcoming his help. But there was nothing. The DNA that was found linked to no one in any database. It was too inconclusive to give them much to work with, except to rule out who the killer was not. Mom and Dad had no enemies. They weren't controversial people. Dad was a construction worker. Mom volunteered at the United Church of Christ. The murder, the cops had concluded, had been utterly, horribly random.

“Well,” Joe said, “I guess it's back to looking at photos.”

But Aggie wasn't quite ready to let the subject drop. “I worry about you sometimes, Joe. I wish you would spend more time with Terry and me and the kids. Or join a group or something. Sign up for Match.com. Go to church. Anything. Find an activity other than police work.”

“Oh, I'm fine, Agg,” he assured her. “I'm on season three of
Breaking Bad
now. Walter White, Jesse Pinkman, and a bowl of popcorn are plenty sufficient for me after a hard day of tracking down killers.” He laughed.

“Joe Foley, you're not even thirty-five yet. You're handsome and smart. None of us are meant to be alone.”

“How do you know that? Maybe some of us are.”

“I do not believe that. I refuse to believe that.”

He shrugged. “It's a free country. You can believe what you want.” He clicked to the next photo. “Hey, is this the girl?”

Aggie looked down at the photo staring up at her from Joe's laptop. Dark eyes, dark hair. Very pretty. “Yep, that's her. Rita Cansino.”

“The one the bartender at Mickey's remembered seeing with Jamison the night he died?”

Aggie nodded. “Yes. He overheard them talking about Huntington House. And yes, Rita was working there when Audra was killed. We interviewed her.”

Joe scribbled her name down on a pad. “Well, looks like we'll be interviewing her again.”