Shivers Box Set: Darkening Around Me\Legacy of Darkness\The Devil's Eye\Black Rose (5 page)

I wondered about the marble statues again. If those muscles were also the result of hammer and chisel work…

Then I thought about nothing but his hands, strong, gentle hands that he used to “see” his work.

“Where is he? This man who hurt you?” he asked.

His fingers brushed the worst of the scars. Across the full swell of my left breast, it traced for several inches, a long white line barely raised from the smooth skin around it. I remembered when it was red and angry and hurting. I felt the phantom of that pain now because of his empathy.

I looked at his face, startled by the tightness that had come over it. His brown eyes were heavy and his lips were pressed together. I could see the sharp angle of his jaw that indicated he had clenched it.

“He died in another robbery six weeks later. A security guard shot him.”

I remembered the relief I’d felt. And the disappointment. Six weeks into my recovery, I’d still been weak and hurting. A quick and clean death had seemed too good for the man who’d made me scream.

“Good,” O’Keefe growled.

He turned away to pick up his pad.

He drew furiously for a while, but gradually the process seemed to soothe him. Before long we were engaged in a give and take like nothing I’d experienced before. I lay exposed before him and I knew he’d draw more than my toned body. I couldn’t help that some of what his art might reveal was a sudden hunger for him in my startled eyes.

* * *

O’Keefe walked in the garden while I ate lunch. I didn’t know if he ate at all, but he showed me the kitchen before he paced off, and I found it as well stocked as could be expected. There was no iced tea and no dessert. In Virginia, no self-respecting kitchen would be without pie, even one owned by a mysterious bachelor. In my travels since the attack, I’d learned to adapt. While I devoured a turkey on rye and guzzled juice, surprisingly starved and dehydrated following a morning spent barely moving, he was out among the statues. I shivered at the thought of them welcoming him into their vine-clogged domain. Then, in an oddly erotic turn of thought, I thought about O’Keefe wrapped in a myriad of white marble limbs.

Yes. I know.

I needed a date.

It hadn’t been that long since I’d parted ways with a fellow runner who’d wanted to focus on training for a marathon in Madrid. Our time together had been lukewarm at best and warm and fuzzy only when the mood demanded.

My desire for O’Keefe indicated that I’d been wading in the shallow end of the pool for too long.

One soft touch from his nimble fingers and my body had recognized what he could do for me that no one had for a very, very long time.

As I finished my juice and washed my dishes in the sink, I heard the garden door echo from another part of the house.
The statues have let him come back to me
. A very odd thought that made goose bumps rise along my bare arms.

But my next thought was worse.

We’ve spent the morning on my top half…and now it’s time for the afternoon session
.

O’Keefe’s dark hair was heavy with the damp drizzle he’d strolled through while I ate. It highlighted the thick mass of waves and made it gleam. Then when we returned to his studio, his cheeks showed more color and his hands were cold as they brushed past my ear to loosen my hair and let it fall.

“Only the hair this time,” he said, before turning away.

It was uttered in a totally neutral and professional manner. Not hesitant. Not bossy. Not a request or an order.

Just an inevitable pronouncement of what was to be.

And yet I sensed that he wasn’t as professionally detached as he pretended to be.

I let the sheet slip to the floor and I curled my legs to the side as if I was going to pick up a book and begin to read. What I truly wanted was for O’Keefe to join me on the velvet settee. He hadn’t touched this time. Not to measure the slight curve of my lean hip. Not to gauge the softness of my thighs…or the temperature of other things.

He did position me several times, but each time he drew less until I sensed a frustration in him that I attributed to lack of progress.

“Am I doing something wrong?” I finally asked.

I was stiff and sore from long moments spent in the worst position yet.

“No,” O’Keefe said.

He jumped up and closed his pad.

“I’ve lost focus. Probably best to begin again tomorrow.”

I stood and gratefully stretched a cramp in my quad. It was 3:00 p.m. according to the grandfather clock that had just chimed in the hall. I’d been mostly naked all day. I didn’t reach for the sheet. When I straightened, I saw that maybe I should have. His dark eyes watched my movements. He had forgotten the pad in his fingers.

It was mutual.

It didn’t even matter to me if he’d wanted every woman he’d ever sculpted. O’Keefe wanted me. Maybe the attraction accounted for his loss of focus.

I could have grabbed for the sheet. Or him. Either would have been a cop-out. I could have hidden behind Egyptian cotton or a hard, fast lay and either one would have been a lie.

Because if I was ready to move on from safe relationships, then I was also ready for a real connection. O’Keefe was as real as it got. I saw it in the depths of his eyes. His empathy with my pain. His anger. His art. I had exactly one week to begin something I hoped might last much longer.

“Tomorrow then,” I said.

I scooped up the robe, but shrugged into nothing but the barely there panties and bra. I had been too careful with my bravery for too long. It was time to show some real courage.

I draped the robe over my arm, then I slowly walked away.

The beach was as neglected as the garden. I picked my way down a rocky staircase cut into the cliffs. Only my burning need to run after the inactivity of the day made me brave its crumbling, uneven treads.

Before the attack, I’d been in fairly good shape. I’d resisted second helpings of the ever-present pie. I’d met regularly with my favorite aunt—the same one who owned La Roux—for Zumba in Abingdon followed by unsweetened ice tea. The solitary running came…after. The need to be better and stronger outpaced my aunt’s ability to keep up. We still met occasionally when I was in town, but we’d never reclaimed the free and easy laughter and camaraderie of before.

She always asked about my jewelry and I always had nothing new to say.

The old iron rail wiggled in my grasp and I wished for nylon rope and a carabiner or two long before I reached the bottom.

I made it to the sand with my pulse elevated and sweat trickling down my back. I dutifully stretched, trying to find some Zen in the moment, but all around was discord and strife. The breeze was brisk after yet another storm and white caps crashed into the debris-strewn shore. Clouds roiled overhead as if the atmosphere of Thornleigh wanted to hold them and wring every bit of violence from them before they were allowed to trail away.

* * *

I only had time for two miles before darkness fell and I knew I needed light to climb safely back up to the house. Fortunately, running on sand would give me the maximum bang for my time-crunched buck. I’m never one to take a latte intermission in the middle of a run. Once I’m in the zone, even on a long stretch of coast that would have lured others with shells and never-ending views, I don’t stop.

Thornleigh proved to be the exception to yet another of my rules.

I came around a particularly challenging cove where overhanging rocks had sheltered the sand, making it dry and shoe sucking to the point that each stride was a pause I had to power through. Of itself, that wouldn’t have been enough to even slow me down, but in the V of the cove a beach cottage was revealed as I came closer. Wedged in a dip where jagged cliffs became hills that could be traversed by a long, winding drive that rose up behind and disappeared in the direction of the main house, the cottage waited.
Waited?
What a strange thought and, yet, I slowed, intrigued by the shabby little place so unexpected in the middle of nowhere. Though it faced the ocean, the cottage’s design was very like the clapboard farmhouses that dotted the countryside back home. As I drew closer, I noted that Virginia’s climate was obviously kinder. Here, the constant bombardment of sea gales had obviously taken their toll.

Peeling paint and loosened shingles and one shutter hanging by a thread gave the place the look of abandonment. I probably would have sped back up again if I hadn’t seen Mary on the porch. I startled, not because her presence was a sudden revelation, but because it wasn’t. She suddenly just was…silently standing there in the shadows. Her face too poorly lit to be seen.

She stood, still dressed in gray with her hands trailing down at her hips and her head oddly cocked to the side.
Listening to the waves?

I slowed my steps even more and continued toward her even though she didn’t seem to see me. She hadn’t been particularly warm at dinner the night before, but no nod or wave or word as I approached began to fill me with alarm.

Her posture seemed odd and her face as it was revealed seemed slack, as if she’d sleepwalked out onto the porch. Her eyes were unfocused and unseeing.

“Mary?” I called, too freaked out not to try to “wake” her. “Mary? It’s Sam from Thornleigh.”

I was close enough now to see when her unfocused gaze sharpened with a sudden clarity of thought. She finally saw me. She blinked and her whole body firmed and straightened.

“Hello,” she said as if startled, though I’d been in her line of sight for long minutes.

My aunt would have diagnosed daydreaming, or “woolgathering” as she would call it. But if she’d seen Mary’s weird stance…

There was something wrong with O’Keefe’s cook. Very wrong. Now I had to forget my run because I’d never forgive myself if the poor woman was in the middle of a stroke or breakdown with no one else around for miles and miles. The back of my neck prickled, but I moved closer.

“I went for a run and found your house,” I said.

I was at the stairs to her dilapidated porch now. They were crooked and worn and one had pulled free of its nails on one side. Nevertheless, I stopped and waited for the invitation to climb.

Mary blinked again and finally managed a slight smile.

“Don’t blame my salmon,” she warned.

“No. Of course not. It was light and delicious,” I assured her.
Not to mention mostly forgotten on my plate because of O’Keefe’s passion to sketch me by the fire!

“Miles barely eats,” she continued. She also shrugged as if it didn’t matter to her and finally waved me up the creaky porch steps.

“I noticed he was very lean,” I replied.

But it wasn’t really a conversation. Mary was already turning away and heading back inside as if I’d reminded her the cottage was there with its door standing wide-open. I followed, though I wasn’t asked. In fact, the screen door fell shut behind Mary because she made no effort to hold it for me when she passed through. She walked oddly with slow, measured treads and again her head was slightly cocked as if she listened to something I couldn’t hear.

“Is it? Your house?” I asked. I had pushed the door open to follow her. The hollow slapping sound it made as it closed sounded extra loud as the crash of waves was left outside. My eyes struggled to adjust to the dim interior of the place. An unpleasant odor wafted around me. It was old and it was the ocean, but it was also dampness and decay. I coughed. I couldn’t help it. My lungs simply didn’t want to let the reek inside.

There were no lights on even though the sun was setting.

Mary didn’t seem to notice. She continued across a warped wooden floor to a nearby workbench that sat where a coffee table should have been. I didn’t mind that she didn’t invite me to sit down. Not when I saw the condition of the sofa. Even in the gloom, I could see its upholstery was faded and stained. I looked up to see a water-damaged ceiling and surmised that years of drips had caused the sofa to go ruined and dank. Why had Mary ignored it?

She hadn’t noticed my disgust. She sat on the rotten couch and picked up her work where she’d left off. She was making a doll. It’s yet-to-be-membered body looked gruesome in her hands as she began to stuff its tiny, incomplete body. She didn’t look at me. She didn’t really look at the doll. She worked in a fugue, her eyes almost as unfocused as they’d been on the porch.

I had followed her into the room. Now I took a step back, but that proved to be a mistake because from that vantage point I could see into the neighboring room. Suddenly, Mary’s strange behavior took on horrific proportions as hundreds of tiny faces came into focus. Porcelain. Porcelain faces lined the walls from floor to ceiling in the adjoining room. Dolls. So many of them that they created a jumble of eyes and lips and noses and ragged lace and tiny hands and feet repeated again and again and again.

Hundreds?
Possibly thousands, and me in the middle of them all.

In the middle?

My God, I had walked into the next room. Drawn by my horror and my dismay, I had taken several steps without realizing I’d moved. I was now in the room with Mary’s dolls.

“Oh,” I breathed out and it was in no way appreciative. It was a desperate bid to process what I was seeing and to keep the stench out of my nostrils. Because here the rot and water damage was worse. All of the dolls that Mary must have spent years constructing were ruined, their decaying little corpses like zombie Kewpie dolls on display. Mary, it appeared, would sit at her worktable piled high with stuffing and…parts….each day, every day and into the night creating porcelain baby after porcelain baby, each one exactly like the others, only to place them lovingly here to mold.

They were all the same. The exact same doll created time and time again.

I inched back into the room where Mary still worked. From the corner of my eye, I saw her pick up more stuffing and jam it into the body she held in her hands.

This wasn’t a stroke and if Mary had had a breakdown it had occurred many, many dolls ago.

“Why?” I choked out, further smothered by the cotton fluff in the air.

“No one knows,” Mary answered, as calm and matter-of-fact as if we were talking about the weather on a sunny veranda in Richmond. “No one knows,” she crooned to the small headless baby in her hands.

I backed away. Slowly and carefully. There was no one in this room with a knife. No madman attempting to rob and hurt and kill and, yet, I was in danger. Adrenaline spiked in my veins and my feet went numb. Mary no longer seemed aware of my presence, but something told me that she might jerk her head toward me in a sudden fit of caring whether I stayed or left.

And I needed to leave.

I’d had a lot of training since the attack that almost killed me, and one of the things I’d been told to do was trust my instincts no matter how silly they might seem. A little aging lady making dolls in a cottage by the sea might not seem like something to run from, but every cell in my body was telling me otherwise.

The heavy wet scent of the place grew heavier and heavier. Fingers of moldy air seem to grasp at me to hold me there, to draw me back into the room with the dolls.

Mary was singing now. “Know…no…nooooooooooo.”

Her wavering voice was mournful, but it was also angry. Very, very angry.

I think I was running before I even hit the sand.