Perfect Nightmare

Chapter Fifty-four

Andrew Grant was only vaguely aware of the brightening dawn outside the window of the small apartment he’d called home since his wife had thrown him out five years ago — not because of another woman in his life or another man in hers, but because of the kind of behavior he was indulging in right now. Not only was the small dining room table covered with copies of every report, note, and photograph that might be even peripherally relevant to the open house cases, but so also was the couch, the coffee table, and every other flat surface. All night, he had been sifting through them, moving relentlessly from one report to another, prowling through the mass of interviews, observations, and speculations like a hungry tiger sniffing for prey it knows is there but can’t quite pin down. But he was close, though it was his gut telling him he was almost there rather than his brain.

An invisible person.

That was what it boiled down to. Someone who could blend into even a small crowd so perfectly that even people who remembered he was there couldn’t quite recall what he looked like. That let out all the real-estate agents he’d talked to, and all the clients they’d brought with them. And all the couples who had gone through the houses, too. And all the singles who’d signed in — whoever he was looking for wouldn’t have signed the agents’ books at all. But at all three of the open houses he was now investigating, at least one person — and at the Marshalls’, three people — had remembered someone being in the house at the same time they were, though they couldn’t recall anything about him. “One of those guys you just don’t notice, you know?” someone had said. “Like a waiter when you’re at a restaurant. You know he’s there, but you don’t even look at him.”

A waiter…

What the hell did that mean?

His gut told him it meant something, but what?

As he reached for the mug of cold coffee he’d left on the windowsill, the police scanner in the kitchen, which had been droning intermittently all night with reports of domestic violence and drunken driving, suddenly came to life with a report of a fire. But it wasn’t the fire itself that caught Grant’s attention — it was the location: 35 Flinders Beach Road.

The coffee mug instantly forgotten, Grant went to the dining room table and picked up one of the twenty-odd reports he himself had made on this case over the last two weeks, this one in reference to the reward that had been offered for information about Lindsay Marshall. He stared at the name and address of the donor: Patrick Shields, 35 Flinders Beach Road.

Now Grant’s mind was racing. This wasn’t the first fire Patrick Shields had been involved in. Just last Christmas the man’s skiing cabin in Vermont had burned, killing his wife and both his daughters.

That fire had been deemed accidental, but now, as the address of tonight’s fire was repeated on the scanner, Grant’s skin crawled. One fire might be accidental. But not two.

He picked up his jacket from the chair by the door, and in less than a minute was driving out of the building’s garage, his mind racing.

Two girls and a woman had died in the fire in Vermont, and now two girls and a woman were missing.

And Patrick Shields’s house was once more burning.

But Patrick Shields? It made no sense — almost everything about Shields was memorable: he was good-looking, and always expensively dressed in the kind of clothes whose quality even he could spot instantly. And not just spot, either — actually notice, and wish he could afford.

But it wasn’t just that. At least until his wife and children died, Shields had always possessed the kind of self-confidence that only old money brings, which again always commanded attention.

Nothing like a waiter at all. The notion of Patrick Shields serving anyone—

Suddenly, the last piece of the puzzle clicked into place for Grant.

Serving… servant!

The word exploded in his mind like a bomb, and he switched on the siren and the flashing light of the bubble gum machine on top of the car and hit the accelerator.

Neville Cavanaugh.

A man who had spent most of his life being invisible!

Ten minutes later, Grant swerved into the driveway of Patrick Shields’s estate and skidded to a stop amidst two Camden Green police cruisers, an ambulance, and two fire trucks. But the house, looming high against the dawning sky, showed no signs of fire.

Getting out of the car and following the hoses the two fire crews were pulling around the end of the house, Grant stopped short when he saw the source of the flames. It wasn’t the house burning, but a far smaller structure, no larger than a child’s playhouse. And even at a glance, he was certain that neither the structure nor anyone who might be inside was going to survive. Already, smoke and flames were pouring up through a gaping hole in the roof, and as the firemen turned on their hoses, the entire roof collapsed. He saw the firefighters flinch as a storm of sparks and flames shot toward the sky, the fire feasting on the oxygen that flooded through the structure’s fatal wound.

As they began to douse the blaze, Grant looked around for Patrick Shields, but saw neither the estate’s owner nor Neville Cavanaugh. Was it possible that somehow both of them were inside the disintegrating playhouse?

Grant broke into a run as he started up the lawn toward the house. He’d come to the steps to the terrace that ran along the rear of the house when a set of French doors burst open and Kara Marshall stumbled out, pulling someone behind her. A moment later a third figure appeared, followed by a stream of smoke. All of them were choking and coughing.

Grant yelled back over his shoulder for blankets as he raced up the steps, and as the walls of the playhouse tumbled into the inferno that the fire hoses were just beginning to defeat, policemen and EMTs began swarming toward the house.

Lindsay Marshall collapsed into Grant’s arms just as he reached her, and he gently lowered her onto the terrace. While a policeman covered her with a blanket and an EMT began checking her for injuries, Grant recognized Ellen Fine, shivering in the morning light, wrapped in a blanket as another of the EMTs tended to her.

He turned to Kara Marshall then, who was crouched close to her daughter, clutching Lindsay’s hand and gently soothing the girl’s forehead. “It’s all right,” Grant heard her whispering. “You’re safe. It’s all right.”

Kara clung to Lindsay’s hand even as the attendants gently eased the girl onto a stretcher and carried her to the ambulance. There, they wrapped her up in yet another blanket and strapped her to the gurney. Another crew was doing the same thing with Ellen Fine. Kara stayed with her daughter, her fingers constantly caressing Lindsay’s hair, her face, her thickly blanketed shoulder. “It’s okay,” she kept saying, as much to herself as to her daughter. “It’s over.”

“I just want to go home,” Lindsay whispered.

“Soon, sweetheart.” Kara smoothed a strand of hair back from Lindsay’s forehead. “Very soon.”

As the attendants began to slide the gurney into the ambulance, she felt a hand on her shoulder and turned to see Andrew Grant standing behind her. As their eyes met, he took a clean handkerchief from his pocket and offered it to her. Kara took it, wiped the soot and sweat from her brow, then blew her nose. She crumpled the handkerchief and was about to get into the ambulance with Lindsay when Grant spoke to her.

“It was Cavanaugh, wasn’t it?” he asked.

Kara paused, then turned to face him, shaking her head.

Grant frowned, looking puzzled. “Shields?”

For a long moment Kara said nothing, her mind filled not only with the confusion of getting Lindsay and Ellen out of the playhouse and into the tunnel before the roof fell in on them, but on the madness that had culminated in the fire. Finally, she nodded. “He — He killed Neville Cavanaugh, too, I think. And another girl — her name was Shannon.”

“Shannon Butler,” Grant breathed, but Kara barely heard him.

“I know it was Patrick,” she went on. “But it was someone else, too. Someone not at all like Patrick Shields.” She fell silent for a moment, and when she spoke again, her voice was hollow: “I don’t know what happened. Isn’t that strange? I was there, and I really don’t know what happened, and I don’t think I’ll ever know. All I do know is that whatever it was, it’s over.”

One of the EMTs shut the door, then Kara scrambled in the other door, and a moment later the ambulance pulled away. As Grant stood watching, another ambulance pulled to a stop, to take Ellen Fine to the hospital, and then all that was left was the smoldering wreckage of the playhouse.

Feeling more tired than he’d ever felt before, Grant turned away, Kara Marshall’s words still fresh in his mind. Later today he’d go through the house, searching for the answer to the question she hadn’t quite asked, the answer that Kara herself obviously thought he’d never find: what exactly had happened?

Maybe she was right — maybe he never would find out.

Then, as he was starting toward the car, his cell phone came alive and he listened as an impersonal voice told him what had just been found at Claire Sollinger’s house, not far away. Sighing deeply, he started the engine. Kara Marshall, it turned out, had been absolutely right about one thing.

All of it, now, was truly over.