Wicked Lies (15 page)

“I wasn’t kidding when I said they have the best huevos rancheros along the whole damned coast.”

“I was thinking more of a fruit plate,” she said, smothering a smile as they walked between a couple of pickups both sporting toolboxes in their beds.

He gave her a sharp look and those hazel eyes glinted. “That was a joke, right?” he said, gesturing to the dilapidated building they were about to enter. Then, showing more dimple, added, “You’re funny.”

It
had
been a joke, because Laura was pretty sure Davy Jones’s Locker was the kind of establishment whose menu was scarce on fresh fruit; it looked like it catered to fried food and plenty of it. She was honestly surprised at herself; joking wasn’t her style, as a rule. She was too . . . cautious . . . to engage in that kind of repartee, that kind of flirting.

Flirting . . . Was that what she was doing? She almost winced.
Don’t be taken in by his charm. Do
not
trust him.

They headed up the broad worn steps together, and Harrison pushed through the door with its porthole window. Inside were wooden tables and benches and booths with red faux-leather seats lining the room on three sides. The fourth side was the bar, which, though its reddish laminate had a few chips and scars, looked surprisingly clean. Or, maybe that was just her impression since the bartender was wiping it down with a white cloth as they entered.

“Sit anywhere,” the barkeep said, and Harrison led her to one of the booths.

Surprisingly there were a number of people in the place, eating breakfast. It looked like a haven for construction workers of all kinds, and there was a lively conversation going on two booths over about the residential work, or lack thereof, in the area.

“I’m not going to say anything about my family,” she said after hanging her jacket on a peg located on the edge of the booth’s back. She slid into the seat across from him. “I’m not really sure why I agreed to this. I’m . . . I’ll figure that out later. But I’m not going to give you a story.”

“I think you need some breakfast. Two huevos?” he asked her.

She considered her stomach, decided it wasn’t rebelling at the thought, and nodded. “If they’re really that good.”

“They are.”

“Okay. So remember, anything I say is strictly off the record,” she warned again.

The handsome bartender, whose dark skin suggested a Hispanic or Native American ancestry and who doubled as a waiter, apparently, came their way. Harrison held up two fingers and said, “Huevos. Coffee. Two?”

“Sure,” Laura said. “With cream.”

“That’ll be it, then,” Harrison told the bartender. “Unless you have a fruit plate.”

“I got orange juice and other mixers.”

“Thanks, but no,” Laura said with a faint smile.

He nodded and headed back to fill their order. As soon as he was out of earshot, she asked Harrison, “Did you hear what I said?”

“I heard that you want to talk to me,” he responded, which made her lips part.

“I said anything I say is off the record!”

He leaned closer, and she felt herself automatically pull back. There was something too attractive about him, some facet of his personality that she suspected he knew about and was exploiting. “Let me tell you a few things. The media is going to be all over this story until Justice Turnbull is caught. Television, newspapers, the Internet . . . A psycho on the loose is big news. Right now reporters are digging through old reports on what took place a couple of years ago. Justice is part of your family. All of that’s going to be dredged up. Your family can’t escape it. Maybe you can, because you’re on the outside and no one seems to know about you, but the rest of ’em . . .” He slowly wagged his head from side to side. “That lodge isn’t a safe haven. It’s a target with a big red bull’s-eye on it. He’s after them, and that’s where they are.”

“He can’t get them there,” Laura said.

“Why not? Because they have a
gate?
”

“He won’t attack them straight on. It’s not his game plan.”

“You think you know his game plan?”

Laura hesitated, then said firmly, “Yes.”

“Well, maybe you oughta tell the police then, so they can find him and put him back in the mental hospital.”

“They wouldn’t believe anything I said, and if I told them how I know, they’d think I was a psycho, too.”

“Okay, I’ll bite. How do you know?”

“This is off the record, right?”

He nodded wearily.

The bartender brought them two white mugs and an insulated pot of coffee. He poured them each a cup and left a bowl of sugar packets and a small pitcher of cream. Laura gratefully used up the time it took her to pour her coffee and add a bit of cream to think about what she was going to say.

Stirring the cream slowly, concentrating on it, she finally said, “Everyone thinks we’re a cult. We’re not.”

“You’ve already pointed out we have different definitions for the same thing,” he rejoined. “But I don’t care about semantics, anyway.”

“We’re just women who live together. In my case lived, past tense. We’re sisters,” she said, though the word felt alien on her tongue. Thanks to Justice Turnbull.

“Are you sisters? Real sisters, by blood?”

“Yes. Well, technically, I guess, some are half sisters. I, uh, I’m not really sure.”

He stared at her as if she were making it up.

“Seriously,” she said, then reminded him, “You asked.”

“And you live, lived with your aunt? That was the woman I saw at the lodge.”

She nodded, thinking back to the lodge, how safe she had felt there while growing up, but that had been a false sense of security. “My younger sisters live there now, well . . . some of them.” She took an experimental sip of her coffee. It was hot and chased away the chill that had been with her since leaving Siren Song.

“No brothers?” he asked.

“I had a brother who died, and another two . . . who left. . . .”

“Just left, never to be heard from again?”

She shrugged. How could she explain that she didn’t know, that there were many secrets held in Siren Song, secrets she, herself, couldn’t begin to understand? There was just no way this man would ever comprehend the complexities of life within the gated walls.

And maybe he shouldn’t. Maybe that was better.

“What about your mom and dad?” Harrison persisted. He offered a smile, then sipped from his mug.

“Mom and Dad,” she repeated, realizing how weird this was going to sound. “We never knew our fathers,” she said carefully.

“Fathers. Plural?”

“Off the record,” she said again.

“Yes, damn it!” he said with a shake of his head. “You might not claim to be a cult, but you’re sure as hell paranoid about the outside world learning about you.”

She sighed, wondered how much, if anything, she should confide. Probably nothing, but here she was. At Davy Jones’s frickin’ Locker. With a reporter. “Okay, listen, it’s . . . hard, okay? My mother . . .” How could she explain about a woman she barely knew herself, a mother who was distant, secretive, and dark? “I guess the easiest way to say it was that she was mentally unstable.” Laura rubbed at a stain on the table with her fingertips. “Mother—Mary—she took lovers fairly indiscriminately, or so my aunt has alluded. I remember a little bit of this, but mostly I pieced it together over the years. My mother had a lot of children, one after the other. Some of the first were adopted out, I think, and then something happened and that stopped.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know exactly. Catherine, my aunt, was ill for about a year and my mom was in charge and that didn’t go so well.” Laura shuddered, the interior of the restaurant easing to the edges of her vision as memories of the lodge surfaced again. She recalled a white-faced, angry Mary standing at the window on the upper floor, looking out toward the sea, tears running from her eyes and blood staining her long gown. . . . Laura had been on the shadowed stairs and, while her mother cried, she’d stayed mute, slipping silently downward, knowing that if she said a word, disturbed her mother, a terrible fury would be unleashed.

Now, with the smells of the deep-fat fryer reaching her nostrils and some laughter from a booth near the video poker machines jarring her, she blinked and found herself staring into the disbelieving eyes of Harrison Frost. Incredible, intelligent eyes. Sexy, even. But skeptical.

She cleared her throat, stuffed the unwanted memories back into a dark corner of her mind where they belonged.

“You don’t know what happened to Mary,” he prodded, seemingly intrigued.

She glanced away, couldn’t stare into his inquisitive, oh-so-male eyes. “The last time my mother was pregnant, she miscarried, and then she was attended to by a doctor, and then . . . not long after she was gone.”

“Gone?”

She was nodding, remembering the wind whispering through the old lodge, like the sinister chatter of ghosts slipping under the eaves. She was suddenly cold as a bitter arctic wind.

“Like dead?”

“Yes.” She cradled her coffee in her hands, her elbows on the table, as she tried to gain warmth through the ceramic mug.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think any of us, the sisters, do. At least no one’s said anything to me.”

“But someone does. Catherine,” he suggested.

“If she does, she’s kept it to herself.”

“But you’re sure?”

“Hey, I’m not certain of anything,” she snapped, because that was the God’s honest truth. “But there’s a graveyard on the property and Mary’s there.”

“In a private cemetery,” he clarified.

“Yes. It was all kind of secret at the time. My aunt was afraid of scaring us, but then she showed us the grave. After my mother, Mary, was gone, Catherine changed everything. The adoptions had stopped long before, and then Catherine locked the gates and the outside world from getting in. I was one of the oldest of my siblings, at least of the ones still at the lodge, and I didn’t like it much. I kept trying to run away, so Catherine bargained with me and I worked in Deception Bay, at a grocery store, for a while, and then I wanted to go to nursing school and I left when I was eighteen.”

“And you were the last one out?”

“Yes . . . I, well . . . yes. As far as I know, and Catherine would have let me know if things had changed. We write letters. Snail mail. They’re not exactly electronic there.”

Harrison nodded as he pulled out a tiny digital recorder from the pocket of his jacket.

“Hey, no.” She shook her head. “We made a deal, remember? No recording.”

He hesitated, then slipped it back into his pocket.

“It’s not on, is it?” she asked, about to march out of this dive. “You didn’t turn it on and leave it running like in the movies?”

“Oh, for crying out loud!” He retrieved the tiny device again and set it on the table. Its record light was dark, but to prove his point, he turned it over, opened the back, and removed the batteries. “Satisfied?” he asked.

“I guess.”

“Good, but I would like to take a few notes.” He dropped the disabled recorder into his pocket again and pulled out a notebook and pen. When she was about to protest again, he leaned across the table. “Look, we had a deal and I’m holding to it, okay? I’m not planning to blast your story all over the place, but I’d like to remember some points for a story about Justice when they catch him.”

Laura didn’t like it. “You’re making me regret talking to you.”

To her shock, he reached across the table and grabbed one of her hands. “Trust me,” he said, and his fingers were incredibly strong and warm. She felt an unlikely current of electricity slide through her veins and quickly retrieved her hand. His smile seemed as sincere as it was engaging. “I won’t do or print anything you don’t want me to. I promise. Unless it’ll help catch the bastard.”

There was the dilemma, the real reason she’d agreed to the interview. If Frost could help put Justice behind bars, then she’d do anything she could to help him and that included allowing him some insight into Siren Song. Once more, he was staring at her with his damned eyes.

Practiced charm. Again.

“But you’ll let me know first? Right? Before you do anything?” This wasn’t going exactly the way she planned. Not at all.

“Yes.”

She stared at him, wondering, really, if she could believe him.

No way, not with him scribbling notes. But there it was; he already had clicked his pen and flipped open his notepad.

“Back to your mother. Mary. Give me some background content. What was she like?”

“I don’t really know, honestly. She was a bit of a mystery to all of us. Catherine says that she and my mom fought about us all the time. Different philosophies about raising us. Catherine wanted austerity and my mother wanted free love.”

“How old were you when your mom died?”

“Ten, almost eleven, I think. I don’t really know. I was just a child, and it was kind of a taboo subject.”

He made a note, then said, “And that’s about the time Catherine locked the gates.”

“I think so, yeah.”

He shook his head. “That’s wild.”

More than wild, she thought as she took another sip from her cooling coffee, it had been necessary.

To keep the demons at bay.

CHAPTER 12

J
ustice awoke with a jerk that nearly lifted him off the makeshift bed he’d constructed of Cosmo’s heavy overcoat and his own Halo Valley uniform scrunched up and used as a pillow. The old oak floorboards beneath were hard as metal. His heart pounded harshly against his ribs as he sat up. Light filtered in gloomily through cracks in the siding and the one, dirty, cobweb-shrouded window on the western side of the building.

He needed transportation . . . he could—

The smell of sick perfidy filled his nose.

One of them was nearby!

The pregnant one.

His lips curled of their own accord.

The stench of her was calling to him to send her and her growing monster into the black abyss from where they sprang.

He felt his pulse jump, his heart begin to pound, and he began to sweat, though it was still the cool of the morning, the single window showing a foggy morning shroud through its dirty panes. All drowsiness left him, and he had a sudden sizzling vision of the thick and twisting evil that ran through the roots of their family tree. A snake that bored into them and poisoned their blood. It had been there for years. Generations. And it had found a home in the female heart and womb, sent straight from hell to do Satan’s bidding.