Authors: Wendy Corsi Staub
“No!” Danny says forcefully. “We can’t go back. Not yet. We have to get to that place.”
Keegan nods.
Ned Hartigan sighs and keeps driving, inching the truck along the perilous stretch of highway that follows the coast.
Keegan thinks of what Hartigan told them. How Sherm had run into a suspicious character out here, a man who seemed to be using an alias—and claimed to be staying at the Bramble Rose. How Sandy Cavelli isn’t the only person who’s missing on the island this weekend. One of the part-time cops is gone as well, and the last place he was known to have headed was the old Gilbrooke mansion.
Oh, Jennie,
Keegan asks silently,
are you somehow involved in this? Where are you?
Beside him, Danny Cavelli beats a staccato rhythm on the dashboard with nervous fingertips. “How much farther to the house?” he presses as Ned slows the truck to creep around a sharp curve.
“Another mile or so, I’d say.”
Keegan groans inwardly. At the rate they’re going, and with the storm showing no sign of letting up, it’s going to take ages for them to get there.
And by then . . .
What if it’s too late?
“W
hat are you doing here?” Stephen asks, frowning.
Jasper crosses the floor to the parlor, saying, “I know you told me to wait, but I had to come right away, Stephen. Someone showed up at the house just after you left.”
“Who was it?”
“I have no idea,” Jasper tells him, moving to sit on the edge of the sofa. “I didn’t answer the door. I just left as fast as I could.”
“And what about that fat cop?”
Jasper hesitates only a mere second before deciding to lie. Stephen will never know. Not after they’ve left this island for good. “I took care of him first, just the way you said to,” he tells Stephen, sinking with relief onto the sofa cushion.
Everything’s going to be all right now.
He made it here, having driven dangerously fast over that treacherous highway. There were a few times when the sedan started to skid and he thought . . .
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“Excuse me?” Jasper looks up at Stephen, puzzled.
“Get up!” he barks and grabs Jasper’s arm, pulling him to his feet. “Can’t you see that I’m not finished here?”
“Oh, of course. I’m sorry.” Jasper looks from Stephen to Laura, who stands, looking pale, in a white, ridiculously low-cut wedding gown. He smiles at the thought of what Stephen’s going to do to her and can’t resist taunting her a little.
“It’s too bad you’re going to ruin that lovely dress with all that blood,” he says, grinning.
“Shut up, you idiot!” Stephen shouts and takes a menacing step toward Jasper. “Shut up!”
“But Stephen, I—”
“She’s not going to die like the rest. She’s coming with me.”
“What do you mean?” Feeling a tide of paranoia rising in his gut, Jasper looks at Stephen’s arm, which actually seems protective of the woman whose shoulder it rests upon. “You hate her, Stephen,” Jasper babbles, “remember?”
“I hate her
sister,
Laura. This is Jennie, her identical twin.”
In a flash, Jasper thinks back to the phone call—the woman who’d asked to speak to
Jennie
Towne. He should have realized then that the woman at the inn was an impostor, he thinks frantically. If he had, he might have been able to prevent this from happening . . .
He turns his troubled gaze back on Stephen. “But—” he begins.
Stephen cuts him off. “Let’s go out to the boat,” he says. “I need you to help me drag the others along.”
“The others?” The woman in the wedding dress speaks for the first time since Jasper arrived. “What others?”
“Nothing for you to worry your pretty little head about, darling,” Stephen says, looping his elbow around hers. “Come along. Jasper will get them.”
“Where are they?” Jasper asks, fighting back the urge to burst into frustrated tears.
“In the closet under the stairs. Now, make it quick,” Stephen says, and leads Jennie Towne toward the back of the house.
Jasper stands there, watching them go.
This isn’t how it was supposed to happen!
It was supposed to be just the two of them, he fumes, shaking his head. Not he and Stephen and some
woman.
Clenching his jaw, Jasper moves toward the closet and opens the door.
Inside, lying in a heap on the floor, are the three gory corpses, one belonging to the nosy kid Stephen had told him about, and the other two—Sandy Cavelli and Liza Danning—clad in blood-stained wedding gowns.
With a sigh, Jasper starts lugging the first corpse out of the closet and down the hall toward the back door.
S
tephen glances again at Jennie, who’s sitting on the narrow bed in the hold of his yacht, the
Aurelia.
The sea is churning from the storm, which causes the boat to rock wildly.
That, Stephen tells himself, is why Jennie looks pale. She must be getting seasick. He feels a little queasy himself.
“Don’t worry. . . . We’ll sail right out of this atrocious weather,” he promises, admiring the way she looks wrapped in his overcoat, which he’d insisted on giving her. After all, she can’t go around in this weather wearing only that skimpy dress.
He had seen the way she’d looked at his clothes when he’d taken off the coat. “It’s a shame I ruined my tuxedo with so much blood,” he had said. “But I won’t need it where we’re going.”
She had nodded and offered him a smile, and his heart had swelled with love for her.
She isn’t like the rest. She really does care about me.
In all his life, no woman had ever looked at him with anything other than repulsion in her eyes.
Laura.
Liza.
Sandy.
Lorraine.
And worst of all, his own mother, Aurelia.
All of them had used him to get what they wanted—even his mother. But for her, the attraction hadn’t been money.
It had been far more unsettling than that.
Stephen still shudders every time he thinks of the first time she’d ever called down the hall to him from her bedroom. “Stevie?” she had said as he passed by on his way to his room. “Can you come in here for a moment?”
He must have been all of ten years old at the time; but even then, he had somehow sensed, by the tone of her voice, the unspeakable thing that was about to happen.
Aurelia had been propped against her goose-down pillows, wearing a filmy pink negligee that plainly revealed her round, pointed nipples and the dark triangle at the base of her flat torso.
“Sit down,” she had said in a soft voice she had never used on him before.
Stephen sat, and tried to keep his eyes averted. “Where’s Father?” he had asked in a small voice.
“Who cares?” Aurelia dismissed Andrew with a wave of her hand. “I have no use for a man like that. He doesn’t give me the time of day—always has his head buried in that stupid paperwork. And he certainly doesn’t have the first idea how to satisfy a woman. Stevie . . .” she had added. “Do you want to touch me?”
“No, Mother.”
“You can admit it,” she said, sounding breathless. “Go on. You can touch me here . . .” And she had slid her fingers over his, bringing his hand up and resting it against her left breast. “You can touch me everywhere.
“You’d better do it, Stevie,” she’d added when he’d sat there, frozen, his heart pounding so hard he thought it would burst through his rib cage. “This is your only chance to touch a woman. No one else is going to let someone who looks like you near her.”
There’s a thumping sound on the boat deck overhead, and Stephen snaps out of his reverie.
“That’s Jasper again,” he tells Jennie, standing and glancing toward the steps that lead out of the hold. “I’ll be right back. I just want to go see where he’s . . . never mind.” He decides it’s probably best not to say the rest—
Where he’s putting the bodies.
Just in case Jennie Towne is the squeamish type.
He bends and plants a light kiss on her dark hair. “I’ll be right back, my darling. I love you.”
“I love you, too,” she says.
Her voice is trembling slightly, and he decides that she must be as overwhelmed with emotion as he is. Dear, sweet Jennie . . . he’ll make her his bride just as soon as they reach their destination.
Humming the wedding march to himself, Stephen climbs up to the deck and sees that Jasper is just depositing the third body—Sandy Cavelli’s—on the rocking deck.
He looks up at Stephen. “That’s it,” he calls with a grunt, straightening and wiping the mix of snow and sweat from his brow. “They’re all out.”
“Good.” Stephen is about to order him to go back to the house and clean up any telltale spots of blood when he catches sight of the distressed look on the man’s face. “What’s wrong, Jasper?”
“It’s just . . .” The little man pauses, then takes a deep breath and says, over the howling wind, “I must admit, Stephen, that I’m somewhat upset at this most recent turn of events.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Her,” is the shouted one-word reply, accompanied with a gesture toward the hold, where Jennie waits.
“Do you mean Jennie?”
“Yes. I thought it was going to be just you and me, Stephen.”
“You didn’t really,” Stephen calls, amused at the disillusionment on the man’s face.
Jasper hesitates, knits his brows. “I didn’t really . . . what?”
“You didn’t really think I was going to take you with me?” Stephen reaches inside his jacket and pulls out the pistol he’d tucked into his pocket earlier. He had been going to save it for later, when they were safely at sea, but . . .
Suddenly wild-eyed, Jasper looks in disbelief from the gun to Stephen’s face. “What are you going to do with that?” he asks, his voice reduced to a pitiful high-pitched whimper.
“Sorry, old boy,” Stephen shouts, cocking it and aiming squarely at Jasper’s head. “But I’ve run out of uses for you.”
With that, he pulls the trigger.
The shot pierces the violent roar of the storm, and Stephen’s lips curl into a satisfied smile as Jasper Hammel topples backward over the rail into the foaming water.
“T
he house is right around this next bend . . . there!” Ned says, pointing triumphantly.
Keegan leans forward, peering at the gothic monster rising in front of them. There are two vehicles parked in front, he realizes—both the police car and the black sedan they’d seen leaving the inn.
Danny Cavelli is out of the truck like a shot the moment Ned stops at the foot of the porch steps.
“Wait!” Keegan calls, hurrying after him and grabbing his shoulder to pull him back.
“Let go of me! My sister—”
“I know, but you can’t go rushing in there!” Keegan says as Ned comes slipping and sliding around the truck on the icy gravel. “You don’t know what’s going on inside. It could be dangerous. I’ll go first, and if it’s all right, I’ll wave you ahead.”
Danny starts to protest, but Ned interrupts. “Better listen to him, son. He’s right about not rushing in there. But maybe,” he adds, turning to Keegan, “it’s too dangerous for us to fool around here at all. Maybe we should just leave and—”
“I’m a cop,” Keegan says resolutely. “I’m trained in this kind of thing. But you two need to step back.”
“Fine,” Ned says, shrugging. “In fact, I’ll wait in the truck.”
“Good idea.” Keegan looks at Danny. “And you should—”
“Forget it. I’ll be right behind you.”
Realizing it’s not worth it to waste time arguing, Keegan gives a curt nod and says, “Fine.”
With Danny Cavelli right at his heels, he steps carefully up onto the porch and peers through the windows. His instincts tell him that the place is deserted, but the cars parked out front mean that at least two people are around here . . . someplace.
Reaching for the knob, Keegan is surprised to see that the door isn’t locked. He slowly pushes it open and steps inside just as Ned hollers something from the pickup truck.
Startled Keegan turns to see what’s going on.
Danny is already hurrying down the steps.
“What is it?” Keegan calls above the roaring wind.
“He says there’s someone out in back of the house by the boat dock!” Danny is already running awkwardly across the icy gravel toward the lawn that sweeps down to the water.
“Wait!” Keegan hurries after him, hearing Ned’s bellowed “Be careful!” coming from the direction of the truck.
Running on the snowy grass is far easier than it was to make his way across the driveway, and Keegan quickly overtakes Danny, grabbing his shoulder and forcing him to the snow-covered ground in front of a low shrub.
“Get your hands off of me!” he says, jerking under Keegan’s sturdy grasp.
“Just wait,” Keegan says, lying on his stomach beside Danny and pointing in the direction of the water. “We’re sitting ducks up here if anyone sees us. I just want to see what’s going on. Stay still and stay down, dammit.”
The younger man suddenly obeys, and Keegan can hear Danny’s heavy panting mingling with his own and with the roaring wind as he cautiously raises himself to peer over the top of the bush.
The lawn descends to a short dock that juts out into the water, and moored at the piling is a large luxury yacht. From here, despite the snow and darkness, he can make out the figure of a man standing on the deck. As he watches, whoever it is descends into the hold.
This whole thing could be entirely innocent,
Keegan tells himself.
But his sharply honed police officer’s instincts tell him that something sinister is going on.
And he can only pray that, somehow, Jennie is still safe.
“I
s everything all right?” Jennie asks, looking up to see Stephen framed in the doorway of the hold again.
“Everything’s fine,” he says with a beatific smile. “I just had to take care of something.”
“What?”
“Nothing for you to worry about.”
She nods, struggling to remain calm. He just killed Jasper Hammel. She’s certain of it. The sound of gunfire was as vivid as it had been that long-ago day at the Colonial Shopping Mall; and the moment she had heard it, Jennie had found herself on the verge of hysteria.