Daughter of Darkness (40 page)

    She raced around the same places she'd covered only minutes before-bedroom, library, the room with the telescopes. Nothing-no Quinlan.

    And then she heard them. Far, far back she heard them. She tried to imagine what room they were in but couldn't. She began to slowly move toward their voices, drawn like a wild animal to a campfire on a cold night. Shelter and protection was what she needed. And only Quinlan could give her those things.

    She followed a long, carpeted corridor that moved toward a large window at the far end of the building. Through the window she could see the front of the commune, gates and guards and fencing that gave the commune the feel of a military outpost.

    The conversation grew louder. It wasn't conversation she wanted to hear.

    Priscilla was saying, "We have to face it, sweetheart. We need to move on and very quickly. The police'll be here by tomorrow asking questions. Everything would have been fine if that Coffey character hadn't gotten involved. But it's all coming apart and you know it. We can be in Paris by tomorrow night-way ahead of the cops."

    "I suppose you're right," Quinlan said.

    

    

    Gretchen was trying to read his mood by the tone of his voice. She couldn't. He sounded simply businesslike.

    "We'll be free, darling," Priscilla said. "No more of the commune bullshit keeping you tied down here. No more hiding our experiments. The Germans and the Russians'll be much more accommdating." There was a pause and then a long silence accompanied by a rustle of clothes. Kissing. They were kissing. Gretchen made a face and then tightened her small hand into a fist.
Bitch
.
You bitch
. No wonder Quinlan was always cheating on Gretchen. It wasn't his fault. She could see that now. Not his fault at all. Not with all these women throwing themselves at him. Deep down, Quinlan was probably a very faithful man. But how could he help himself? You couldn't hold men responsible, you really couldn't. Men were weak. They thought with their crotches. They could easily be led astray. No, this wasn't
his
fault at all.

    They were in the small office that Quinlan used late at night. For some reason, he liked the little hutchlike place. He only reluctantly let anybody in there. That's another reason Gretchen resented Priscilla. What right had she to be in here when Quinlan kept even Gretchen out? Pushy, that's what she was in there. Priscilla was one of those people who pushed and pushed and pushed until you finally had to give in and let her have her way.

    No more. That was going to end tonight. Indeed, that was going to end right now.

    Filling her hand with the .45, Gretchen kicked the partially open door so hard that it slammed backward against the wall.

    Then she went in, swearing at Priscilla and waving her gun around.

    

    

    There were no more screams.

    And there was no light either.

    Jenny stood in the doorway of the bathroom, trying to adjust her vision to the darkness. She knew the house very well, of course, and had a good sense of where things were. But still, between the screams and the loss of electricity, she was disoriented and frightened.

    She didn't call out. She knew instinctively that she needed to move away from the bathroom without giving away her position. She didn't know who had managed to get into the house-or what they'd managed to do once they'd
gotten
in here-but she decided to move about as quietly as possible.

    She moved down the hall toward the staircase, passing a grandfather clock that chimed the quarter hour. The sound was both familiar and alien. As she neared the staircase, she paused. Her parents' room was on her left. She had to look in there. She had just realized that she hadn't heard her parents' voices since before taking her shower. Which made the scream and the lights going off all the more sinister.

    She tiptoed across the hall. The door was closed but not locked. She opened it silently and peered in. In the pale moonlight, everything looked perfectly ordinary. The canopy bed, the huge European furnishings, the Chagall prints, the built-in giant-sized TV screen, the bathroom off the bedroom… This was how the master bedroom always looked. Then her eyes lingered for a time on the partially open door leading to the master bedroom toilet. Could somebody be in there?

    She didn't want to check, but she knew she had to. She crossed the master bedroom and stood before the bathroom door. She listened. A dripping sound from inside. The sink. A steady drip. Any other sound? She listened even more intently. No, no other sound.

    Of course, if someone were lying dead in there, they wouldn't make any sound at all.

    She put a tentative finger to the door and eased it inward. She peered inside. There were shadows that revealed only parts of the interior, like a modern painting-angle of cabinet mirror above sink, one water faucet, half of toilet, angle of towel rack. She saved the tiled floor till last and when she looked down she made a sick, sobbing sob in her throat.

    There were just drops of the stuff, and not very big drops at all, but she knew just what they were, the drops. And just what they signified.

    She pushed the door further inward and walked into the bathroom. Under other circumstances, going into the bathroom this way would have scared her. She would have been waiting for somebody to jump out from behind the door. But not now. Not since seeing the drops on the floor. She thought of her mother, her father. Wounded. Or dead.

    To make absolutely sure she was right, she bent down and touched a fingertip to the tiled floor. The stuff was still warm, smooth and warm between her fingertips.

    Then she saw the mirror. A bloody handprint. And then the walls. Bloody handprints all over, streaked down the buff-colored walls. She felt sick. Mother. Father.

    Then she saw the sink. Heavy swaths of blood on the white double-basins.

    Then the shower. This was the worst of all the places in the bathroom to confront. The shower door was opaque. It could be hiding anything. She could open the shower door and…

    She tried seeing through the opaque door but couldn't. A body could be lying dead on the floor of the shower and she wasn't sure she'd be able to see it. She became aware of blood smells now, tart, metallic, stomach-turning. Whose blood?

    She extended a hand to the shower door handle. Took a deep breath. Wished there were light. Wished she already knew what was waiting for her in the shower stall.

    She felt as it a trick had been played on her. That was her feeling when she opened the shower door and looked inside. Even cast in deep shadow as it was, the shower stall was clearly empty.

    

    

    All her fear, all her anxiety and-nothing. She was relieved, and yet vexed, too, because she still had no answer for the blood smears everywhere.

    She withdrew from the shower, withdrew from the bathroom, withdrew from the master bedroom. Stood now in the hall, looking around, listening. Nothing to see
or
hear. Her eyes settled briefly on the bay window at the far end of the hall, it had a window seat. As a small girl, she'd liked to sit there and watch the clouds and refashion them into different shapes-angels and sailing ships and big white fluffy dogs.

    Since she could find nothing helpful
inside
, maybe she could find something helpful outside.

    She wanted to change clothes, though. She didn't feel ready for a situation like this dressed in a robe and silk pajamas. She returned silently to her room, changed quickly into a blouse, jeans, and loafers.

    She was just leaving her room when she saw the shape in the shadows at the top of the stairs. Human shape. Could be man or woman. Impossible to tell from here. The shape was as dark and sinister as the shadows themselves. And then the shape was moving down the stairs. She thought of calling out, but she sensed that the shape hadn't seen her. So why give her position away?

    She hurried to the far end of the hall and the window seat. She looked out the window and what she saw made no sense at first.

    What was Ted doing here? There in the turn-around area in front of the garages was Ted's vintage red MG. He hadn't been there when she was downstairs talking to her parents. He must have arrived as she was taking her shower. Maybe they'd called and invited him out because she was home again and he'd been so worried. But, no. He couldn't have made it out here that quickly. And anyway, she couldn't believe that Dad would have let him in his house twice in just a few days. Even Jenny had to admit, for all his charm, Ted's self-absorption could get to you after a while.

    So what was he doing here?

    And then the significance of his car being here struck her.

    What if it was Ted responsible for the scream? For the blood all over the master bedroom?

    Ted had been in love with Molly for many, many years, and always would be. And Ted and Dad loathed each other. And always would. What if Ted simply snapped, couldn't take it any longer?

    The electrical lines had been cut. So had the phone lines. Ted was somewhere in the house, she realized-and then thought of the shape at the top of the staircase.

    If he had been up here…

    She needed to check the rooms at the other end of this floor.

    On her way, she stopped into the second floor den and picked up a bottle of brandy. Not because she needed a drink but because she needed a weapon. She was angry now, resentful of all of them, Ted and Quinlan and Priscilla. It was time she fought back,
really
fought back, and if that meant violence, so be it. She was tired of being a helpless girl woman. She had a need to be an adult. And to be treated like an adult. And that meant fending for herself. If she found out that Ted had hurt her folks in any way-

    She clutched the brandy bottle tightly and hurried down the hallway, slowing only when she reached the first guest room. The door was ajar. Moonlight traced the edge of the open door. She tried to peer inside without opening the door, but all she could see was angle of bed and bureau and window. No sign that anybody was in there.

    She pushed open the door. Before her lay the large canopy bed and the heavy last-century European furnishings that her parents had brought back from a trip a few years ago. Castle Dracula, her Mom had called this room. And it
was
an appropriate name. The whole room had that feel.

    She was three feet into the room before she noticed the dark drops on the tan carpeting. She watched where they led-directly to the bed. But they still didn't tell her much because the drapes on the bed were closed. It was impossible to see what was on the bed.

    She'd have to draw the drapes aside. Anxiety filled her chest. Heart racing. A skin of cold sweat on her face, arms and back. She did not want to open the drapes. What if…

    All she could think of was the red MG by the garage. Ted. She'd thought he was such a good friend and…

    She crept closer to the bed, almost unaware of moving at all.

    Being an adult. Taking responsibility for herself. That meant opening the curtains. Looking inside. Now.

    A few more steps, avoiding the drops of blood on the carpet, that chain of stains that foretold a terrible tale.

    Two more steps. Three more steps. Moonbeams through the mullioned windows. And the absolute stillness of this night. Two more steps. Three more steps. She reached the bed.

    Her hand reached out for the dark drape-when you slept with the drapes closed, you were halfway to a sensory deprivation chamber-and came away with something sticky and wet clinging to her palm. She had no doubt what it was as she held it up to the moonlight for inspection. All she wanted to know was to whom the blood belonged. And she knew she was about to find out.

    She reached out again for the drape. Her fingers anticipated the sticky feel of blood. She reached out for the drape and…

    

    

    That was when the scream came. At first, Jenny couldn't be sure from what part of the mansion the scream had come. But she quickly realized that the sound was fairly close by.

    Her impulse was to run toward the scream, see if she could help the person in danger.

    But she was here at the bed, the drape in her hand. If she hurried.

    She ripped the drape back and looked inside. A dark figure-almost a silhouette, a shadow-lay on the bed. She pulled the drape back even farther, so that moonlight exposed the interior of the canopy bed. She could not tell in that first awful moment who it was. But she could tell what it was sticking out of his forehead. A butcher knife. The one with the gently curved Scandinavian bone handle her mother had had made specially for the family.

    Only then was Jenny able to focus on the face of Ted Hannigan… The eyes were open in shock; blood from his forehead trickled down into his right eye. His mouth was wide open in a scream that would never be fulfilled. His hands were oddly peaceful, lying at his sides, fingers partly splayed. She took all this in within seconds of throwing back the drapes…

    And then the scream came again.

    She dropped the drape, letting Ted rest in peace. She felt terrible that she had suspected him of being the killer…

    She ran out of the room and down the hallway.

    There on the top of the steps stood a bloody figure she did not recognize at first, a figure whose clothes hung in blood-soaked rags, whose white body was scarred with long knife slashes and smeared with blood. The blood made the naked breasts and the exposed genitals obscene-they should have been beautiful and clean as they ordinarily were.