Where All the Dead Lie

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Taylor paced the sitting room, back and forth, back and forth. She couldn’t get his face out of her head. His eyes, empty and unseeing, looking right into her soul.

Taylor didn’t know what else to do. She called Sam’s cell phone, not caring that she was interrupting her work.

Sam answered on the fourth ring.

“Sorry, I was gloved. What’s wrong?”

“How did you know something was wrong?”

“You’ve got your voice back. Sounds like it hurts to talk, but that’s wonderful!”

“He’s coming for me, Sam.”

“Who is?”

“The Pretender. He’s here. He’s been following me around the castle.”

“Taylor, honey, you’re imagining things. You’re just over-tired. Overwrought. You need rest. You need sleep. Drink your tea and go to bed. Maybe back off the Percocets. They can make you a little goofy.”

“I’m not being goofy, Sam. I know it can’t be real. But it’s happening all the time now. It’s getting worse.”

There was a brief pause.

“What’s happening all the time? What are you talking about, Taylor?”

“It was my fault, Sam. It was all my fault. If it weren’t for me, you’d still be pregnant.”

“Taylor, honey, stop saying that.”

She did a lap around the room, stopping at the fireplace. She pulled her notebook from her back pocket and threw it in. The evidence needed to be destroyed. She had to destroy it all before it was too late.

“No, really. Maddee made me see, Sam. If I’d come straight to you, if I hadn’t waited, I could have stopped him. I could have saved you.”

Tears started down her face. She needed to confess. To be shriven. To have Sam chase all the ghosts away.

There was silence, then Sam sighed.

“Taylor. You need to listen to me. The very first thing he did was stab me. It happened hours before you knew I was missing. There’s nothing you could have done. Did you hear me? He stabbed me. Not you. You are not to blame for this. He was a sick man who chose to do what he did. Do you understand me?”

Taylor heard the words but they didn’t sink in. She couldn’t get her feet under her. She couldn’t erase the image of Sam, her eyes brimming with tears, the pool of blood at her feet.

“Taylor, I’ve got open bodies. I have to go back to work now. But listen to me. You have to stop internalizing all this. You have to let it go. You aren’t the only one having problems. The sooner you see that, the sooner you’ll be back to normal.”

The phone was a snake with bared fangs. She shut her eyes then opened them. It became a phone again.

Sam was right. This wasn’t all about her. She just needed to find a way to make everyone else understand that.

Sam hung up the phone, worried. Taylor had been drinking, without a doubt. She always got paranoid when she had too much to drink.

It was my fault.

Oh, God. A wave of despair crashed over Sam. In her darker moments, she’d said the very same thing about her girl, her best friend.

But she knew, in her heart, that she couldn’t blame Taylor. The Pretender was the one who’d made the choice. He’d kidnapped her. He’d knifed her in the abdomen. He was responsible. Not Taylor.

But something felt wrong about this. She’d sounded…scared, for lack of a better term. And that wasn’t something Sam ever saw in Taylor. Fear wasn’t an option for her.

She picked up the phone and let it dangle between her fingers. Taylor would kill her if she went behind her back.

Some things couldn’t be helped.

Sam dialed Baldwin’s cell. The voice mail kicked in immediately. She debated, then hung up without leaving a message.

She was being irrational. This was Taylor. Probably on a bender. And off on her own, with no support system to tell her things were fine and to put down the bottle.

Sam wrote her a note, encouraging her to lay off the alcohol and pills for a couple of days, see if her headache wasn’t some sort of rebound from the opiates, and went back to work.

She couldn’t face it anymore. Not now.