Night’s Edge (22 page)

“Stay away!” she cried, grabbing the telephone, dialing O.

The door crashed open, and he surged toward her. She heard the line ringing, but he was too close. She dropped the phone, racing into the bathroom and slamming the door.

He kicked it in so fast and hard it hit her full in the chest, knocking her off balance, and she hit the floor. Her head cracked against the porcelain tub. And then it swam. She was dizzy, darkness creeping in around the edges of her vision.

“There, now. You won’t die dirty, buried alive, as they do. No, nothing so horrible for my lady.” He smiled down at her as he bent over her. “And you’ve already run the water. That was thoughtful of you.” He picked her up, lowered her into the bathtub. His palm to her face, he pushed it beneath the water.

She couldn’t breathe! Her arms flailed, legs kicked, but he held firm. And then the water rushed into her lungs. It was gentle, cleansing, soothing. Her body calmed, relaxed. And darkness crept over her.

And then she was standing there, in the bathroom, watching him. He was still leaning over the tub, she realized, puzzled. Then she looked past him and saw her own face in the water.

“He’s killed you,” a woman said. “He killed us, too.”

Sharon turned and saw them. Women, beautiful women, all around her. So many faces and soulful eyes. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

“We have to tell someone. He’ll keep on doing it until we make someone stop him.”

She nodded and turned to look at her husband again.

He was sitting on the floor beside the tub, his head lowered, sobbing.

And then he wasn’t her husband, and they weren’t in the bathroom. He was Jack McCain, sitting on the bottom steps in the hidden basement bunker, his head in his hands.

Kiley went to him, knelt in front of him. “Jack, it’s okay. It’s okay, it wasn’t real.”

He lifted his head slowly, blinked the confusion from his eyes. “Kiley?”

She nodded, and he pressed her face between his palms, pulled her to his face, kissed her lips over and over. “Jesus, you’re okay. I thought I—I thought I’d—”

“I’m okay. So are you, and you’re not Phillip Miller. You’re Jack. All that was—I don’t know, it was…it was someone else. It was the past coming in. Sharon Miller reliving it through us, so we’d finally understand.”

He nodded, holding her closer.

“It wasn’t real, Jack,” she told him.

“You’re right about everything but that.” He brought his head up, looking past her, into the darkness. “It was very real.”

She turned to follow his gaze, and she saw them. Faint wisps in the shapes of women. Some were more defined than others, mists shaping into faces and limbs and hands. Others were just vague shapes, silhouettes of light in the darkness. “God, there are so many of them,” she whispered. “But there were only four in the room.”

Jack rose, clasping her shoulder. “They’re buried in the back lawn.”

She closed her eyes. “Oh, God.”

“It gets worse,” he said softly. “He’s still doing it.”

Her head came up fast.
“What?”

“Phillip Miller isn’t dead, Kiley. He’s alive and well and living not far from here. And he’s still murdering women.”

And then she remembered. “The missing prostitutes from Albany. Oh, my God, Jack! We have to get out of here, we have to stop him and—”

There was a groaning sound, and a powerful crash, followed by light spilling in from behind. The trapdoor lay open, the way to the cellar clear.

Kiley met Jack’s eyes. “I am so sorry I ever called you a fraud, Jack. You’re—you’re so amazing it’s scary.”

He shook his head slowly. “Remind me to tell you later why you’re dead wrong about that.”

She frowned at him. But then she turned to look back at those shapes, the spirits of women, all of them. “It’s over. We’ll stop him. We promise. And then you can rest in peace.”

K
ILEY’S ENTIRE HOUSE WAS
surrounded in yellow police tape. Police cars, SUVs and vans lined the street, and heavy equipment growled and belched in the back yard. News crews were everywhere, but Kiley wasn’t giving any interviews. She’d written what she could about all of this in her latest column, and the rest was going into a book.

She stood on the sidewalk, watching the bodies being exhumed and carried in plastic bags out to waiting vehicles, one by one. Jack sat on the curb close beside her, fallen leaves in brilliant colors carpeting the sidewalk around him, reading the paper.

Officer Hanlon came over to where she stood. “They’ve arrested Phillip Miller. There were three women in his basement when they arrived.”

Jack looked up from the newspaper. Kiley’s throat tightened up. “Alive?”

“Yes. Thanks to you.”

She swallowed hard. “Thanks for telling me.”

Hanlon nodded and headed back to the house. Kiley looked down at Jack. “Well?”

He met her eyes, then refocused on the page and began reading aloud from her latest column. “‘So to sum it up, I’ve learned that not everything I don’t understand or believe in is necessarily make-believe. There are
good psychics, and there are bad ones. And the only way to judge which is which is by how they make you feel. If their advice helps you, heals you, answers a need you have, then they are as genuine as any minister, priest, pastor or shrink. I’m retiring from my former career of debunking everything I don’t happen to believe in. After what I’ve seen in my house, I know now that there is far more in this world than I will ever understand. And it humbles me to admit that the extraordinary and genuine skills and gifts of three psychics I called fakes—two of them in this very column—were what enabled me to find the truth about the women who were murdered and buried on my property, and to stop a killer at the end of a thirty-year spree. Those psychics were for real, even though I claimed to have proven otherwise. I will never question what I don’t understand again.’”

Jack folded the newspaper and got to his feet. “It’s wonderful. Your best column ever.”

She shrugged. “If a psychic as gifted as you are doesn’t know whether he’s a fraud or not, how the hell can I pretend to?” She shook her head. “I can’t believe you were as convinced you were a fake as I was, all this time. How can you have a gift like that and not know?”

Jack shrugged. “Chris knew. He knew all along. I guess it just took a case I cared this much about to make me aware of it.”

“Yeah? And what was it about this case that made you care so much?”

He gave her a slow, sexy smile, reached out to clasp her nape and pulled her to him for a long, lingering kiss. His lips moved against hers when he said, “I think you know.”

“No way,” she whispered back. “You’re the one who’s psychic, remember?”

“Right. So I suppose I have to spell it out for you.”

She sent him a smile and nodded. “Please.”

“I’m nuts about you, Kiley. I don’t know when I went from hating you to loving you—maybe it was from the very start. But I know I do.”

She nodded. “I was hoping you’d say that.”

“Why?”

“Well, I’m going to need a place to crash for a while, for one thing.”

He made a face at her. She smiled fully. “And you know, there is that pesky fact that I love you, too.”

“Do you?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

He kissed her once more, tucked her under his arm and led her back down the sidewalk toward the car. “When the police have finished here, we should have the other psychics in town come back here, do a cleansing ritual, make sure those spirits have made it across to the other side. They deserve to be at peace. God knows they’ve suffered long enough,” Jack said.

“I agree. But I have a feeling they made it just fine. I think they’re at peace now, Jack.”

“Yeah, I feel as if they are, too.”

They reached the car, and he opened her door for her.

“Where are we going?”

“My place, or I guess I should say our place now.”

She shot him a loving look. “You mean I can move in?”

“Yeah. Just one rule, Kiley.”

“What?”

“You can’t bring any ghosts with you.”

Barbara Hambly

For George…and Baby

“T
ESSA?”

Dim light shone at the top of the first long flight of stairs. Maddie Laveau hitched her duffle coat closer around her shoulders, glancing warily back at the plate-glass door onto East Twenty-ninth Street. Yellow streetlights glared through the glass doors into the narrow lobby, barely more than a widened corridor with a caretaker’s booth. Quincy the caretaker had gone home an hour ago at ten, which was just as well, since Maddie wasn’t in the mood for a forty-five-minute monologue on the subject of taxes and the Republican party. The place smelled of moldy carpets and cigarettes smoked decades ago. The street door had been locked, and Maddie had locked it again behind her the minute she’d let herself in with Tessa’s key.

But if her roommate had a key, she told herself—duplicated from that of another dancer, who’d duplicated it from one of the instructors who was no longer teaching at the Dance Loft—God knew who else in New York had them.

Heart pounding, Maddie mounted the dark stairs.

“Tessa, are you there?”

Silence. Though the Glendower Building had always given Maddie the creeps, it housed one of the most re
spected dance schools in the city. Maddie wasn’t sure why this was so—God knew there were other buildings in New York City, including the one she lived in, just as old, just as shabby, just as dingily lighted.

But from the first time she’d walked through its doors, twenty-two months ago now, it had made her nervous, as if there was always something there looking over her shoulder.

She climbed the long stairway quickly, two stories past the dancewear shop on the first floor and the storerooms and offices on the second, glancing repeatedly over her shoulder:
Like someone could have been hiding in the lobby?
A Barbie doll couldn’t have taken cover there. Someone had repainted the stairwell during the last remodeling in the eighties with the neutral pinks and grays fashionable then, but hadn’t stripped the old wallpaper underneath or put in modern lighting. The result was simply dingy, and Maddie guessed that underneath the gray industrial carpeting lurked layers of carpet tiles and the brown linoleum still visible on the upper floors. Uncovering the original wood, laid back in the 1890s, would be like revealing the stratification in some archaeological dig.

During the several months she’d taught belly dancing in one of the Dance Loft’s smaller studios, Maddie had always hated being in the building at night. Charmian Dayforth, the owner, seemed to have no qualms about handing out keys to students, instructors and the part-time office help that came and went with the speed of Hollywood wives. After seven and a half years of living in New York, Maddie moved through the building with great wariness, with one hand in her coat pocket curled around a can of pepper spray.

Her roommate, Tessa, had been in town exactly six months. And while the girl had a self-reliant barrio toughness to her, she
was
only eighteen.

Which was why Maddie was climbing the long flight of stairs from the lobby in the semidark at eleven-fifteen on a January night, after dancing all evening at the Al-Medina Restaurant on Lexington Avenue. The advanced ballet class officially ended at ten, but the instructor frequently ran late, especially now, with the auditions for the American Ballet Academy coming up.

With the auditions approaching, Tessa would stay on later still.

This was not a good idea, in a neighborhood that wasn’t anything to write home about…Not that Tessa had anyone back in El Paso to write home
to.

From the small and gloomy lobby at the top of the first flight of stairs, Maddie followed the light to the door marked
The Dance Loft
and pulled out the second of Tessa’s much-duplicated keys. The front office of the dance school was identical to the dozens Maddie had seen in Baton Rouge, in New Orleans and in New York over the twenty-three years since her first ballet class when she was five: threadbare carpet, plywood paneling, posters displaying the names of teachers. Rows of black-framed eight-by-tens of ballerinas floating weightless and serene onstage, or head shots scribbled with autographs. Looking at the little room through its glass door, Maddie had to smile as she put the key in the lock….

But the door wasn’t locked.

Damn it!
Maddie was shocked.
Tessa, for God’s sake, when you’re in here by yourself, lock the door behind you! Didn’t being raised by two drunks in a domestic demilitarized zone teach you any distrust? This is the big city!

Tessa’s dance bag lay in a corner of the big studio, where the fluorescents still blazed twenty feet above the sprung wooden floor. From the door, Maddie scanned the room. The mirrors threw back her own reflection, medium height and still slim, though she’d put on ten pounds since her own stick-thin ballerina days. Belly dancers might not get the respect ballerinas did, she reflected, but at least they didn’t have to starve themselves to get into productions. Her light-brown hair hung nearly to her waist, still curled into a maze of braids and twists, the jeweled clasps in it incongruous against the drab green duffle coat and jeans.

There was no sign of Tessa.

Bathroom
, thought Maddie. She walked over to the black canvas bag: pink silk pointe shoes repaired with duct tape, worn and holed knit warm-ups wadded into a ball, jeans hanging over the barre. They brought back to her so clearly the first time Tessa had slipped apologetically through the door of the Dance Loft’s front office last July, as if she expected to be thrown out for daring to breathe the air in there. “I’m Theresa Lopez,” she’d said in her soft voice. “Is there, like, a bulletin board where I can put up a notice asking if anyone needs a roommate?”

Maddie had shown her—the board was crammed with similar ads—and because it was midmorning and Maddie had just finished teaching her own class, she’d got her a cup of coffee and they’d sat on the spavined old sofa in the front office and talked.

Though there was ten years difference in their ages—Tessa was just eighteen—Maddie had liked her immediately. Maybe because her response to Maddie’s teaching belly dancing had been a heartfelt
“How cool!” instead of a condescending “Oh…like those girls in the clubs?” Maybe because of the careful expression in the back of those huge brown eyes that had identified Theresa Lopez as a survivor of the same sort of war that Maddie herself had, at that time, only recently gotten out of alive, though in Theresa’s case the enemy had been parents, and in Maddie’s case…

Sandy.

Maddie’s mind still flinched from the recollection of her ex-husband.

And the flinch woke her to the fact that a good five minutes had passed.

“Tessa?” The hall outside the Dance Loft’s front office was dim and it seemed like miles to the bathroom. When Maddie reached it and pushed the door open a crack, she saw that the room was dark.

Tessa wasn’t there. Hadn’t been there, at least not when Maddie had come upstairs.

Maddie stood for several minutes in the gloom of the hall, listening to the silence of the building around her.

Not empty silence. Silence that breathed, and listened.

Well, duh,
she told herself quickly,
Of course it’s not empty, Tessa’s here someplace….

But a part of her knew it wasn’t Tessa whose presence she sensed.

Maddie walked back to the office, checked the big studio again, hoping against hope she’d find Tessa there, folded into some impossible stretch and simply oblivious of the fact that it was now eleven-thirty.

Nada.
She called out Tessa’s name, hesitantly, but there was no reply from the other, smaller rehearsal rooms that the Dayforths rented to freelance instructors in tango,
Hawaiian, hip-hop and, yes, belly dancing…so long as they didn’t need them for ballet classes of their own.

Now truly uneasy, she let her bag slip down off her arm and knelt quickly to fish through the gaudy jumble of gold sequins and green silk for her cell phone.
Damn it,
she thought,
I knew this would happen
…without being precisely certain what “this” was. There was a miniflashlight in the bag, too—the electricity in the Glendower Building was notoriously erratic—and Maddie’s wallet, which she transferred to her coat pocket along with the pepper spray.

Getting into the ABA was one thing—Maddie knew well how few new students they took each year, and how, with a direct feed from the most prestigious ballet company in the country, they chose none but the absolute best.

Putting your life in danger was another.

Not, she thought wryly, that you didn’t do just that, cheerfully, when you were driven to succeed as Tessa was driven. She recalled her own teenage days of diet pills and bloodstained toe shoes. A few nights ago she’d come here at midnight, to see Tessa still in this studio, practicing
grand jetés
and
sautes de basque
back and forth across the huge floor with the gem-hard concentration of a gladiator training for a death fight. The younger girl’s brilliance was matched only by her hunger for perfection of technique, a hunger sharpened by a short lifetime of denial.

In that first conversation six months ago, Tessa had spoken only of parents who “think I’m crazy.” It wasn’t until later—a week after their first meeting, to be exact, when Charmian Dayforth had dropped Maddie’s two belly dancing classes in favor of another children’s
ballet class and Maddie had had to take a roommate to make ends meet—that Maddie had learned how hard that slim, dark-eyed girl had fought to dance at all.

Tessa knew the competition she was up against. Without a dime coming in from El Paso, she worked two jobs, getting up at four-thirty in the morning and putting in hours doing Mrs. Dayforth’s clerking, filing and phone answering in trade for her classes, wanting only to learn. There were nights when Maddie had come up to the school after her own gigs at Al-Medina or the Algerian Marketplace and had found her asleep from sheer exhaustion on the front office couch.

Maddie flicked on the flashlight, left her bag beside Tessa’s in the studio, stepped back into the dark hall.

“Tessa!” Her voice echoed in the halls, grating horribly on that watchful silence. “Tessa, can you hear me?” The flashlight was less than the length of her hand and had a beam that broke up a yard from the lens. It took her several minutes to find the light switches in the hall, and the dreary grayish glare was barely less depressing than absolute darkness.

Big studio, small studio, tap studio…dark. There was another big studio, though without the two-story ceiling, on the floor above, and a medium-size one where Maddie had taught her belly dance ladies the preliminary mysteries of isolation, shimmies and hip drops. Tessa was in neither of those, nor in the big changing room, though something that Maddie suspected was a rat darted out of sight under a locker. At that size she hoped it was a rat and not a cockroach, anyway.

That was another reason she disliked the Glendower Building.

Her heart pounded as she turned on the lights to the
stairway up and mounted the narrow carpeted steps. The two floors above the Dance Loft—she thought there were two floors, anyway—had been divided and subdivided and redivided over the course of nearly a century into a maze of small offices and tiny studios where a couple of fly-by-night music companies did business, along with three literary agencies and a handful of freelance computer technicians. There were little workshops and padded sound booths, reached by odd little passageways that turned back on themselves or dead-ended into blank walls; windowless cubicles surrounding dreary waiting rooms with names on the doors like Wild Adventure Tours—
as opposed to tame adventures?
Maddie wondered.

Maddie thought she’d covered the fifth floor—the one immediately above the two floors of the Dance Loft—thoroughly, trying every locked and silent door. But it was also completely possible that she’d missed a hallway or a whole section of doors. There was no way of telling.

There were definitely rats up here.

And a silence that seemed to look over her shoulder, waiting to grin at her if she turned around.

Grimly, Maddie turned on the lights of the next stairway up, pushing from her mind the question of what on earth Tessa would have come up here for. She wouldn’t have left her bag, wherever she was: Bloch pointe shoes cost upward of eighty dollars a pair.

Maddie was halfway up the stairs when the lights went out.

She cursed, froze as blind darkness shut around her, as if someone had dropped a blanket over her head. Damn the management and its cheap wiring—or were
the lights on some kind of timer to save money? Anger carried her through the first half minute while she dug in her pocket for the flashlight….

“Stand still, you little bitch.”

The whispered words came so soft that they might almost have been inside her head. Only they weren’t. She knew they weren’t.

Her heart constricted, then raced like a NASCAR engine as her hand scraped, pawed for the damn flashlight.
Oh, God, where the hell is it…?

“…little sluts are all alike…good for one thing…”

She couldn’t tell whether that thick, slurring voice was in front of her or behind her. But it was close, close and very clear, for she could hear the hiss of breath, smell a faint whiff of some cloying cologne laid over the stink of sweaty wool and alcohol.
Oh, God, where is that flashlight
…?