Last Whisper (42 page)

“Are you sure?” Stacy asked. “Don’t you want to take one more tour around the place and make sure you haven’t forgotten anything crucial?”

“Crucial things are sold at airports. All I want right now is to get away from this place.”

“Okay. You take Elise, she’ll feel safer that way, and the carry-on bag. I’ll take the big suitcase.”

Brooke went dry-mouthed with fear as they sneaked down the back steps—none too clean in spite of Harry’s protests about the hard work he did keeping the apartment house in order. Stacy flipped off the lights before she opened the door and they stepped into the dark alley behind the brick building. After the door shut behind them, they stopped, surveying their surroundings.

“There’s the surveillance cruiser,” Brooke whispered.

“I see only one guy in it and he doesn’t appear to have seen us.”

“I would never have thought to turn off the light before we opened the door.”

“Yes, you would have,” Stacy said absently, peering at the surveillance car. “The other cop is probably helping in the basement,” Stacy said.

“Whether there’s one or two men in the cruiser, we can’t get past it to the parking lot.”

Stacy went silent for a moment. Then she said, “We can’t
both
get past. But one of us can if he’s distracted. I’ll go up to his window and start talking. You go past on the other side. I’m afraid you’ll have to make two trips in order to get all the bags
and
Elise, but I think I can keep him chatting.”

“Are you sure?”

“Have you ever known of me to run out of things to say?”

“Well . . .”

“There’s your answer.” Stacy smiled, then turned serious. “I want you to put your stuff in my car.”

“Why yours?”

“Because if they realize you’re gone, they’ll be looking for your car, not mine. Besides, that isn’t even
your
car. It’s a rental.” Yes, Brooke thought, hers had been in the shop since Mia’s death. “Tonight I’ll drive you to the airport and I’ll turn in your car for you tomorrow.”

“
You’ll
drive me to the airport! Stacy, Jay will kill you!”

“Jay will yell at me. Besides, as you’re always saying, he adores me.” She gave Brooke an exaggerated wink. “Don’t underestimate my powers to soothe my husband’s temper.”

I’d never underestimate you, Stacy, Brooke thought as Stacy strolled over to the patrol car. The window must have already been down, because Stacy immediately propped her arms on the door and leaned inward slightly. Brooke heard the rumble of a man’s voice, then heard Stacy giggle. Now was the time for the first trip.

Brooke skittered to Stacy’s car with the large suitcase and the carry-on bag, opened the back door, piled the luggage on the backseat, then quietly closed the door. Skulking through the parking lot again, she saw Stacy still leaning in the window and heard the tinkling sound of her laughter. Brooke picked up Elise’s carrier and once again made a dash for the car, trying unobtrusively to signal Stacy as she ran. She scooted onto the passenger’s side and set Elise’s carrier on her lap. “It’s okay, sweetie. I hope in a couple of hours we’ll be headed away from this place.” The dog whined
slightly, then licked Brooke’s fingers through the wire door of the carrier.

Brooke’s heart pounded as she waited for Stacy. Was she doing the right thing, just running off like this? Would it be better if she waited until tomorrow, made a reservation . . .

And gave Zach twenty-four more hours to get to her or kill someone else in his pursuit of her? And what if the police for some reason wanted her to wait another day? What if they demanded to know her destination and word that she was thinking of going to Vermont leaked out?

Elise yelped and Brooke jumped as Stacy hopped into the car and burst out, “Told you I could do it!”

“The surveillance cop had to see you get in this car.”

“I was going to try telling him I just
had
to run to the drugstore—‘I’ll be right back,’ ‘please let me go,’ ‘I’ll be back before my husband knows I’m gone,’ et cetera. He was waffling, but I was sure he was going to say no. Then luck struck like a gift from Heaven.” Brooke waited. “The cops inside radioed for this guy to come in and help them with something! I couldn’t believe it. I told him I wouldn’t leave. I walked back inside the building with him and when he went sailing off for the basement, I ran out here. Didn’t you see me?”

“I wasn’t looking,” Brooke admitted sheepishly. “I got lost in my own thoughts.”

“I can’t believe it. One of my most daring exploits, and you missed it!”

“I’m sorry.”

“Oh, don’t be silly,” Stacy said, starting her car. “I’m just kidding. I think I’m giddy, actually, pulling off this whole scheme.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t be involved in this, Stacy,” Brooke said sincerely. “I can drive my car and you and Jay can pick it up sometime and return it—”

“Pick it up out of long-term parking when they just had a car stolen? They won’t let Jay have it.”

“He’s a police detective, Stacy. He’ll explain. Besides, he’s going to be furious with you.”

“It might take us days to get that car out of long-term parking, days you’d have to pay for. And I told you, I can handle Jay.”

“He’ll forgive little things, yes, but this isn’t a little thing.”

Stacy looked at her sternly. “No, this isn’t a little thing. This is about your life, maybe about other lives, too. If I can’t make him understand that, he can’t understand anything and I don’t care how furious he is.”

Brooke sighed. “All right. I’m too tired to argue. Actually, I’m too frightened to wait any longer to get out of this city and too nervous to trust my own driving. So, if you’re willing to take the chance . . .”

“I am.” Stacy crept out of the parking lot with the headlights off. “Just chill out and leave this to me, Brooke. I’ll get you where you need to be.”

A quarter mile away from the apartment building, Stacy turned on the headlights. They were free, Brooke thought. Finally, she was on her way to freedom and safety.

“We’re about twenty minutes from the airport,” Stacy said. “Want some music?”

Brooke nodded and Stacy slid in a CD of Celtic songs, beautiful, lyrical, dreamlike. After the tension of the day, sitting beside her grandmother for almost ten hours talking, then the shock of finding Eunice’s body, Brooke felt her eyelids growing heavy with fatigue. Slowly, she drifted off to the sounds of “The Moonlight Piper” by Carlos Núñez.

Brooke was dreaming of lying in her bed at the house on Holt Street, looking up at the stars her mother had painted on the ceiling, when she vaguely became aware of the car stopping. In a moment, Stacy was outside and opening Brooke’s door. “Trip’s over,” she said.

Brooke blinked twice and looked at her friend, standing tall and grim-faced in the light of the full moon. Silence surrounded her. “Stacy, this isn’t the airport,” Brooke said groggily.

“No, it isn’t.”

Brooke struggled to sit up straighter in her seat, to get her
bearings. She clutched Elise’s carrier even closer to her chest, like a shield, on a primal level sensing danger. “Where are we?”

Stacy stepped aside and swept her hand almost grandly at a small white house, the house Brooke had been dreaming of, the house where Zachary Tavell had murdered her mother.

“I’ve brought you home, Brooke,” Stacy said triumphantly. “I’ve brought you where you should have died fifteen years ago.”

“My home?” Brooke asked in bewilderment.

“Yes. I told you already.
This
is where you were supposed to die a long time ago.”

Oddly enough, Brooke felt as if her heart were slowing, not picking up speed in fear. This whole scenario seemed unreal, and for a moment, she thought she was still dreaming. She’d dreamed about the stars on her bedroom ceiling. Now she was dreaming about the entire house. Except that Stacy looked so real and this experience didn’t have the slightly fuzzy, dreamlike quality of the one before it. Brooke still couldn’t quite believe that Stacy had brought her to what had once been known as “The House of the Rose Murder,” but on the other hand, sharp points of realization as well as apprehension had begun to pierce her fog of confusion.

“Stacy, what are you doing?” She was surprised by the calmness of her voice. Not a quiver, not a break. “Why have you brought me here?”

“Because I’m taking you inside.”

“Why?”

Stacy suddenly looked impatient. “Why, why, why? I’ve said we’re here because we’re going in. That settles it.”

“Not for me.”

“Will this help?” Stacy had been holding her right hand behind her back. Suddenly she whipped her arm around and held it out stiffly in front of her. In her hand, she gripped a gun. “This is a Smith & Wesson Model 36LS. I know that in terms of firearms that means absolutely nothing to you, but you’re bright enough to know that it can kill you. You and your flea-bitten dog. Now get out of the car and march up to that house. And don’t try to run or do anything you consider smart and heroic, because I’ll be right behind you and have this gun pointed directly at your head.”

This cannot be happening, Brooke thought as she clambered from Stacy’s car, still holding tightly to Elise’s carrier. When Brooke emerged, she didn’t set the carrier back on the seat. She had a feeling Stacy would immediately shoot the dog if she did. Elise was safer with her.
Safe
. That was a laugh. No one was safe with her. No one ever had been, not even her own mother.

Brooke walked toward the house, glancing around slowly so Stacy wouldn’t think she was getting ready to bolt. She knew the neighborhood had gone downhill over the last few years, but she’d had no idea how much. It had never been one of the nicer neighborhoods in town, but it had been neat and presentable in its modest way. Now, even with just the glow of the moon and the few streetlights that had not burned out or been broken, the area looked downright shabby.

As they neared the porch steps, Brooke noticed the cracks in the badly chipped paint on the little white house, the empty urns that used to hold cheerful red geraniums, the shattered globe over the porch light, a light that always used to burn in welcome to guests. Brooke wondered how long it had been since a live bulb had been screwed into that socket.

“Place has changed, hasn’t it?” Stacy said suddenly. “It didn’t used to be a palace, but it looked a helluva lot better than this. Fifteen years ago, that is.”

“How do you know what this house looked like fifteen years ago?” Brooke asked. “You told me you lived in Ohio. Did you see photos of it in the newspapers?”

“I saw it in person.”

“Oh,” Brooke returned scathingly. “You were one of the tourists drawn to the spot of ‘The Rose Murder.’ ”

“No.” Stacy laughed softly. “I was hardly a tourist. Go in the house, Brooke.”

Brooke hesitated, feeling as if she couldn’t possibly take a step into that house with its horrible memories. Then she felt the barrel of the gun press against the back of her head. “I said, go in.
Now
.”

Brooke opened the door and took a step into almost total darkness. Almost. Enough light shone from the outside for her to make out the stairs—the stairs she had run down when she’d heard the shots, the stairs from which she’d seen Zach Tavell standing over her mother with a gun.

The house smelled stale. Brooke knew it had accumulated years of dust and mold and wood rotting from leaks that had never been fixed. But it also smelled of something else. Death. This house smells of death, she thought with a certainty she tried to quell. Anne Yeager Tavell had been murdered in this house fifteen years ago. It could not still smell of her death.

But it did, at least to Brooke.

“I made a few arrangements in here earlier today when I found out your grandmother was dying and I thought things might come to this,” Stacy said casually. “We can’t stand here in the dark and talk.” Light flared beside Brooke and she realized Stacy had bent down and turned on a battery-operated lantern. “There, that’s better, don’t you think?” Brooke remained silent and Stacy’s voice turned harsh. “I asked you if you thought that was better.”

“Much better.”

“I think so, too. Now for the others.” Stacy stepped in front of her and smiled. “And don’t think, Here’s my chance! While she’s lighting lanterns, I’ll make a break for it! It won’t work.”

“I didn’t. . . . I wouldn’t. . . .”

“Oh, of course you would. Anyone would. It’s just that anyone who did would end up dead. And our Brooke is too smart for that. So, you stand perfectly still while I turn on another lantern,” Stacy said as she stepped backward, gun pointed at Brooke’s face, stooped down, and turned on a lantern by the stairs, then repeated the process as she turned on a third lantern just inside the entrance to the living room. “Jay always says it’s like I have eyes in the back of my head. That was an excellent demonstration, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, I guess. . . .” Brooke ran her dry tongue over her parched lips. “Stacy, what is this all about?”

“They say some sisters can read each other’s minds. But we can’t. Maybe that’s because we’re almost stepsisters.”

“Stepsisters?”

“Yes. My birth certificate says my name is Lila Stacy Cox. It should have said ‘Lila Stacy Tavell,’ but Zach wouldn’t let my mother—her name was Nadine—put his name down as my father. She tried to tell me later that he was embarrassed because they weren’t married, but I always knew the real reason. He didn’t want any ties between us—between him and Nadine and me. He always figured one day he’d just take off and leave us with not even a connection on a shred of paper. And that’s exactly what he did.”

“Zach . . . Zachary Tavell is your
father
?”

“Yes. He was with my mother when she was really young. Some would say she was stupid, but she wasn’t—just naïve.” Stacy stood beside a lantern. The light shone up at her, emphasizing her height, her prominent cheekbones, the hollows where granite gray eyes burned down at Brooke with complete hatred. Brooke felt as if she were a little girl huddling in on herself as she clutched Elise’s carrier even tighter, although
it was becoming heavy and the timid dog inside was trembling with nerves. You tremble for both of us, Elise, Brooke thought, because I’m afraid to move.