Whisper of Evil

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

"What reason did she have, Nell?" Max asked steadily. "Why would Hailey have wanted to kill your father?"

"Because she loved him."

Max frowned. "You're going to have to explain that to me."

She knew that, hut she had to do it in her own way. "You asked me what happened the night of the prom. One thing that happened was that Hailey told our father I was planning to go with you. A friend of hers worked in the boutique in town where I'd bought my dress. So she knew, had known for days, that I was going. She'd seen you and me out riding one day, so she put two and two together. And, being Hailey, was saving the knowledge to use when it suited her purpose. She'd told me she knew about it a couple of days before the prom, mostly to watch me worry, I think. So that's why I was upset that last day or two, because I knew she'd tell him and ruin everything."

Slowly, Max said, "I knew you two weren't close, but I didn't know there was so much tension between you."

Matter-of-fact, Nell said, "She could never forgive me for being our father's favorite."

"You hated him. Even then, you hated him."

"Yes. I hated him as much as Hailey loved him. Or maybe I loved him as much as she hated him." She shook her head a little. "There are some questions not even… time and distance can answer."

Max hesitated, then went on as if forcing himself to say things he'd kept locked inside for a long time. "You never would talk about it, but sometimes I got the feeling you were scared. Scared of him."

"I was."

"He hurt you."

"Not physically. And he never molested us, if that's what you've been thinking." Watching Max steadily, she saw by the flicker in his dark eyes that he had at least suspected her father might have been sick in that way. She shook her head. "No, he never laid a hand on either of us, Hailey and me. We were never even spanked as children. But we were… his. Not just his children, his daughters, but his possessions. Like his land and his house and his car — like everything else that belonged to him."

"Nell —"

"No one would ever love us more than he did. That's what he told us, every night of our lives, before we went to sleep. He'd sit on the edge of our beds and tell us. No one would ever love us more. No one would ever take care of us the way he did, protect us, watch over us. He was going to be the only man in our lives. The only man who mattered to us. He'd make sure of that. He would do… whatever he had to do to make sure of it. Because we were his. Forever."

"That's sick," Max said at last.

"Of course it's sick. Even more, it's evil. There's been a thread of evil running through my family for a long time, as much a part of us as the Gallagher curse."

"You aren't evil."

Deliberately, she said, "There's a dark place inside me, Max, and you know it as well as I do."

"Maybe what you see as darkness others would see as strength."

"Maybe. But others don't see everything, do they?"

He was silent.

Nell returned to the subject of her father. "A psychologist would probably say my father's… needs… came from the earliest rejections in his own life. From all accounts, his father actively disliked him, made no secret of it, and had the misfortune to break his neck on the stairs when his son was only a toddler, so that rejection was complete. My grandmother you know about, but what you don't know is that she was afraid of her son."

"Why?"

"She never would tell me. Never told anyone, as far as I know. But I think it was something she saw in one of her visions, a glimpse into the future that terrified her. Whatever it was, it caused her to reject him very early on."

"Is that why you were afraid of him? Because she was?"

Nell hesitated, then shrugged a bit jerkily. "Growing up, I had my own… visions. There were scenes I tapped into a few times, things that had happened in the past. I saw the darkness in him, saw how twisted his need for love was, how… all-consuming. I knew it was unnatural. Even before I was old enough to understand why, I understood that much."

"You were never close to him?"

"I wish I could say yes, but…" She shook her head. "By the time my mother came along in his life, he was determined he wouldn't lose anyone else he loved. So he held on to her as hard as he could. Held on to all of us. My earliest memories are of him… watching me. Hovering always nearby. My earliest nightmares were of being trapped, or being lost and knowing there was… something… stalking me."

"Christ."

Nell blinked, recalled from those cold memories, and summoned a faint smile. "Not especially pleasant to grow up that way. And confusing for a child. Because he never hit me, never threatened, never did anything to me a loving father shouldn't do. Except love me so much I couldn't breathe."

Justin lifted Charlie off his lap and with a final pat set the cat gently on the floor. "You realize, of course, that going through all these parish birth records is going to take us all night," he said.

"That's why I made coffee," Shelby said as she set the tray on the coffee table and joined Justin on the couch. "Plenty of caffeine and snacks to see us through."

Justin had certainly spent worse nights than sitting on a comfortable couch beside a gorgeous redhead, so he wasn't about to complain. But his innate professionalism demanded he make one last protest. "I'm still not entirely convinced that you should be helping me do this."

"Because it isn't my job?"

"Because it's my job. Because you're a civilian and shouldn't be involved in police matters. Because this is a murder investigation and I've got no business putting you in danger."

"I'm not in danger. I'm with you."

"Shelby, odds are we won't be able to stop this guy anytime soon. I mean, unless we find something incredibly revealing in these old records, we are no closer to figuring out who he is. Which means he could kill again. And if he did kill George Caldwell because the man knew something, then anybody involved in this investigation could certainly be at risk for that reason alone."

Still cheerful, she said, "In other words, by sticking my nose in I'm in danger of getting it lopped off."

"At the very least."

"I'm willing to risk that."

He stared at her. "I know you are. What I can't figure out is why."

"Didn't buy my fierce devotion to this town, huh?"

Justin blinked. "No. Sorry, but no."

"Or my rabid hatred of murder?"

"Dammit, I just know there's another reason."

Shelby grinned. "There is. Just like there's a reason aside from your job that has you putting in amazingly long hours trying to figure this thing out."

"I'm a cop," he murmured after a startled moment.

"Yeah, that'll be it," she said dryly.

"Shelby —"

"Look, Justin, we both want to find the truth. Isn't that all that matters?" She leaned forward to open the file folder on the coffee table. "Together we can work our way through these copies of birth records in half the time it'd take you to do it alone. I'm perfectly safe here with you. And if anybody does wonder why your car is parked in front of my house all night, well, we're both consenting adults, so whose business is it but ours?"

"In this town? Everybody's business."

Shelby grinned again. "True, but my point is that the killer, if he even notices, will just think you spent the night for carnal purposes. Right?"

"Yeah, probably." Justin only just stopped himself from saying the idea had crossed his own mind more than once in the past few hours.

"Well, then. The killer will have no idea at all that I'm even interested in this investigation, much less that I'm helping you. So there's nothing to worry about."

"I wish I could believe that," Justin said.

"You worry too much."

"And you don't worry enough."

She handed him half the birth records with a smile that had a peculiar effect on his blood pressure. "Maybe not, but I'm smarter than I look and if there's anything I know really well it's this town, so I will help you get to the bottom of this, Justin. Count on it."

Max drew a breath and tried to keep his voice even and unemotional. "So he smothered all of you."

"Smothered. Manipulated. Twisted our feelings. He was a master at using guilt, though I didn't recognize that for a long time. And without making a single direct threat, he had us — or me, at least — convinced that we would never escape him."

Slowly, Max said, "Which is one reason you never told anyone. You didn't see how anyone could have helped you, did you, Nell?"

She knew what he was asking. "No. It was never that I didn't trust you enough to tell you, Max, enough to ask for your help. I was just convinced there was nothing you could have done. Besides, what we had was… apart. I wanted to keep it separate from the rest of my life. Secret. It was mine, something I didn't have to share with him. With anyone else. A special… place that felt happy and safe. That felt normal."

Max reached across the table and pried one of her hands from around her coffee cup, holding it strongly. "I wish you'd told me, Nell. Maybe I could have done something. We could have left Silence together —"

She gently drew her hand away and sat back, both hands falling to her lap. "A lot of girls aren't very practical at seventeen, but I was, at least in some ways. Your roots were here. Your life was here. The ranch you were working so hard to build, to make a success. Your mother. How could I have borne it if I was the one to take all that away from you?"

"Nell —"

She shook her head to stop him and shifted the focus back to the strange and painful dynamics of her family. "Where my father was concerned, I felt almost… frozen. Unable to act, to take even a step to change things, change what I'd lived with every day since I was small. It just was.

"When I was hardly old enough to understand any of it, I can remember my mother pleading with my father. Telling him she couldn't breathe, that every time she turned around he was there, insisting she love him… a little bit more. No matter how much he was loved, it was never enough. Hailey adored him, did everything she could think of to please him, but he had this way of… smiling sadly whenever he was dis-appointed. And he was always disappointed. No one could have loved him enough to make him happy."

Max spoke with some difficulty, the words obviously not the ones he wanted most to say. "He was always so angry with other people, so hateful."

"I know. It's like he hated everything and everyone outside his own family. Inside, with the doors closed and the rest of the world shut out, he was very quiet, never raised his voice. But he was utterly relentless. We had to love him all the time. We had to tell him so, again and again, had to prove to him that we loved him. We had to love him so much there'd never be room in us to love anybody else."

Nell shrugged again. "There was no way I could understand any of it then, of course, not when I was a child. When he said he loved me, I thought it was true. I felt bad that I couldn't love him the way he loved me. I was a horrible daughter, I knew that, because I was happiest away from him and wanted to hide my true thoughts and feelings from him. I even believed it was in some way my fault that my mother had left him… and broken his heart."

"He told you that?"

"It was a daily litany, repeated with sad eyes and a shaking voice. He had loved her so much, and she had walked away from him. Away from Hailey and me, her own children. She hadn't wanted us. She hadn't loved us at all. Only he loved us."

"Jesus," Max muttered.

"Hailey was older when we lost our mother, but it was a critical age for her, those early teen years when everything matters… so much. So I guess it made sense to her that she should try to take the place of our mother in every way she could. She did her best to run the house, cooked and cleaned and minded me despite her jealousy of me — and loved our father with a ferocity he never recognized. That was the irony of it, you know. Hailey was always the one who loved him best, but he could never see it. He was too busy trying to make me love him."

Guessing, Max said, "Hailey looked like him. You looked like your mother."

"That was part of it. But mostly it was because I didn't love him. Just like my mother, I was trying my best to pull away from him. Trying to have room to breathe. Trying to have a life of my own. And he couldn't bear that. So he held on harder. He turned away from Hailey's love, maybe just because he never valued what was freely given — I don't know. I only know that she hated me as ferociously as she loved him."

Max tried to imagine what that must have been like for the sensitive girl Nell had been. Abandoned by her mother, resented by her sister — smothered by her father. Caught between two strong-willed people, Adam pulling her desperately toward him even as Hailey tried just as urgently to push her away. And all Max could see in his mind's eye was how she had been the summer he first noticed her: half shy and half wild, a cauldron of emotions bubbling just beneath the surface of her fey, secretive eyes.

Now it made sense. So much made sense.

In some ways hesitant with him, but hungry as well, tentative about touching or being touched, oddly surprised to discover pleasure. She had been so young, though, and he had assumed it was that.

But he had to wonder now if he had pushed too hard, if his deepening obsession with her, his growing impatience with the secrecy she imposed, had only added to the strain in Nell's young life. Until it became unbearable.

She got to her feet, moving slowly. Too slowly. As if everything ached. "I'm a little tired. Would you mind giving me a ride back to the house?"

Max didn't protest. He could see that she was tired, more than tired, and he didn't like the faint purple shadows beneath her eyes. He had the strong sense that she was nearing a breaking point, whether physically, emotionally, or psychically, and he was wary of doing or saying anything that might push her over that dangerous threshold.

The ride back to the Gallagher house was silent, and Max didn't try to break that silence. Nor did he bother asking or announcing his intention to search her house and check all the locks on doors and windows before he left her alone there; he simply did it.

She was waiting for him in the front hall when he was done, opening the door with a murmur of thanks, and she sounded so unutterably tired that Max almost left without saying anything else.

But he found himself turning around when he stepped onto the porch and heard himself asking a jerky question. "Nell, did you run away from him? Or did you run away from me?"

For a moment, he didn't think she would answer, but then she sighed and said, "Love, Max. I ran away from love. Good night."

She closed the door, and he heard the lock snap quietly and firmly into place.

From his place not twenty-five yards from the house, Galen watched Tanner's truck retreat slowly up the drive and turn on the main road back toward town.

On the whole, he would have felt better about things if Tanner had stayed the night.

With a slight grimace, Galen reached for his cell phone and placed a call. It was answered on the first ring.

"Yeah."

"I should get hazard pay for this," Galen announced without preamble. "This may be Louisiana in March, but the nights are still pretty chilly. Especially if you spend them in the woods."

"I gather Nell's home for the night."

"Looks like. And alone. Tanner brought her back here and checked out the house, then left. Not looking at all happy, by the way. In fact, if he's a drinking man, I'd say he was heading for the nearest bar."

"He isn't a drinking man."

"Figures." Galen sighed. "You know, I don't feel like much of a watchdog. If the threat to Nell is what we think, there's not a damned thing I can do to protect her from out here."

"There's nothing you could do even inside the house, not against a killer with the ability to project his mind's energy. She has to protect herself from the psychic threat."

Galen brooded for a moment, then said, "Thing is, that's not the only threat, and maybe not even the worst threat. If this bastard is watching her, he could see or hear enough to convince him Nell should be next on his hit list and go after her directly."

"Yes, he could. Which is why you're sticking close."

"And you?"

"What about me?"

"You know what I'm asking you, dammit. Would the killer have any reason to suspect you aren't what you appear to be?"

"I don't see how."

"Even so, watch your ass."

"I plan to. And you do the same."

Galen laughed. "Oh, hell, I'm invisible. I'm also not nearly as likely as the rest of you to set off this bastard's psychic alarms."

"No, but you're watching Nell, sticking close. And if he's sticking close as well…"

"Yeah, I know. But I'm being careful, and I doubt he's even noticed me."

"Still, don't forget we don't yet know what sort of capabilities we're up against. He might notice more than we could guess."

"There's a whole hell of a lot about this situation we don't yet know, and I don't like it," Galen stated flatly.

"Me either. Because there's one thing I do know. There's going to be another murder. Soon."

All his senses going into overdrive-alert, Galen stared toward the Gallagher house, keen eyes scanning, searching for any threat. "Do you know who?"

"No. But I know it won't be the last."

SATURDAY, MARCH 25

Nell.

She woke so abruptly that the whisper of her own name was still fading into silence. Her arms were outstretched, reaching for… what she needed. What she wanted so badly she ached with it. Her hands were shaking. She felt stiff, so tense her muscles protested with sharp twinges.

It always happened when the nightmares tortured her sleep, this awakening need to reach out for the missing part of herself. Like the phantom pains of a lost limb, something inside her ached to be complete. Because she wasn't whole, hadn't been whole since leaving Silence.

Nell knew that. And knowing didn't make it easier.

Thinking about it didn't either. She began to throw back the covers, turning her head to glance toward the window and the bright morning outside, and it was only then that she saw the doll.

It lay propped against the other pillow of the double bed, its plastic body rigid, its frilly dress yellowing from the passage of more than twenty-five years. But the golden ringlets were still neat, the round face still unmarked, and the wide blue eyes still as bright as they had been on Nell's fourth Christmas.

That familiar, feathery chill brushed up and down Nell's spine.

She reached over and slowly lifted the doll, holding it carefully. So light now, so small, yet then it had been nearly as large as she was herself A friend who had listened to the whispered secrets no one else had heard.

It smelled faintly of mothballs and dust.

"Eliza. What are you doing here?" She absently smoothed the doll's skirt, frowning.

How had it ended up on her pillow?

The doll had been packed away for so many years Nell had forgotten all about it, and she certainly hadn't dug it out because she didn't like sleeping alone. Even if she had known what trunk or box the doll had been packed in — and she didn't — she'd barely done more than stick her head in the attic so far anyway.

As for the possibility that someone else — some flesh-and-blood someone else — had placed the doll here during the night, how could that be? Galen was outside, and as long as he was, there was nothing coming uninvited either through the doors or windows.

At least nothing he could see.

There were no ghosts in this house, of that Nell was certain, no disembodied Gallaghers who had chosen to stay behind and haunt the place. So if she ruled out a flesh-and-blood visitor and a ghostly one, the only possibility left…

She felt another slow, crawling chill.

It wasn't a great jump of her imagination to think about the picture Shelby had taken and the consensus that it represented a highly disturbed mind — in all probability the mind of their killer — and to wonder: That… thing… had been watching her at least once; had it been watching her here in this house as well? Did that explain her growing uneasiness, the sleep disturbed by more than her dreams?

Was the doll on her pillow meant to freak her out, shake her, or scare her? If so, why? Because the killer knew why she was here? Because the killer knew… her?

That was what bothered Nell most of all. Not just the eerie appearance of a doll on her pillow, but the appearance of this doll. Because there were lots of toys packed away in the attic, boxes and trunks filled with the things generations of Gallagher kids had outgrown. Lots of dolls. But this one had belonged to Nell twenty-five years ago.

And how had the killer known that?

Unless the killer was Hailey.

Nell didn't know if she would find answers here in the house, but she knew she had to look for them. Especially now. So as soon as she was dressed and had a couple of cups of caffeine in her system, she went upstairs. One of the two bedrooms she had most dreaded even going into, much less clearing out, was the one that had belonged to her mother, literally closed and locked from the day her mother disappeared until her father's death.

She stood at that closed door for at least a minute or two, trying to brace herself emotionally, then turned the knob and stepped into the room.

Though the house had been unoccupied since her father's death, Nell had arranged through Wade Keever to have a cleaning service come in about a month before her own arrival, so there wasn't nearly as much dust as there would otherwise have been. Still, the upstairs bedroom was eerily still, darkened because the drapes were still drawn the way her father had insisted they remain at all times, and smelled musty.

Nell went immediately to open the drapes and the windows, trying to tell herself the smothering sensation she felt was simply due to dust.

A part of her knew she should keep her guard up and avoid any impulse to stop and try to sense the room and its secrets; she was tired, too tired to fully protect herself, and she knew it. But she knew something else as well. She knew she really didn't have a choice.

Then I have to move faster.

Faster means you could get careless.

And slower means I could get dead.

She was running out of time.

Nell closed her eyes and took a deep breath, then turned away from the window, gazing at the morning-brightened room for the first time since her single brief glance through the door a couple of days before when she'd walked through to see what needed to be done.

Not even Hailey had been able to persuade Adam Gallagher to redecorate this room. It was exactly as their mother had left it more than twenty years before. Silver-backed brushes, dark with tarnish, lay on the dressing table between the two windows, and on a mirrored tray, cut-glass perfume bottles reposed, the stopper lying beside one bottle that had long since lost its contents to evaporation.

The remainder of the room was just as feminine, with delicate French furniture, frilly bedclothes, and soft, faded rugs on the wood floor.

Nell took a step toward the center of the room, drew another deep breath, and closed her eyes in order to concentrate. She had been so careful to keep her guard up in this house during all her waking hours that she'd been surprised only once, in the kitchen with that vision of her father walking through the room. Nothing since. And now it was hard to drop her guard when she was afraid of what she might see here. But what choice did she have? She had to know.

She had to know.

There was, here at least, no sense of everything being held at a distance away from her, no feeling that she was trying to peer through a veil. And almost the instant she forced herself to drop her guard, she felt it, the time-out-of-sync sensation of opening a door into time. Even before she opened her eyes, she heard a voice that scraped across her memories, leaving raw nerves and painful vulnerability behind.

I love you, darling.

Nell opened her eyes with a start.

At the edges of her vision was that softened, almost unfocused aura that always accompanied them, so that her attention was immediately directed to the center, as though to a stage. The bedroom was the same, yet vividly different, a bedside lamp providing the only light because it was night. It was late. And though her parents had slept in different rooms all the years Nell could remember, they were both here now.

Then.

"I love you, Grace." His voice was hoarse, panting, and his face was flushed and beaded with sweat. He was smiling, his gaze fixed on his wife's face. Her averted face.

Nell wanted to look away, desperately wanted to close her eyes, to stop this, but she had to look, had to see. She had to stand there only a few feet away from the bed where her father was raping her mother.