Rx Missing (Decorah Security Series, Book #10): A Paranormal Romantic Suspense Novel (3 page)

Mack clenched his fist under the table, ordering himself to stop making up conspiracy scenarios about everybody here. But he couldn’t shake the conviction that
someone
here had more information than everyone else.

You didn’t just plop down a bunch of people in a strange environment without keeping some kind of check on them.

Was there a way to trip up the person who knew what was going on? Make him or her reveal the purpose of this place? Or maybe they were all imposters—working a con on Mack Bradley.

He repressed a snort. It sounded insane—and pretty paranoid. Or maybe self-important was another way to look at it. But what
was
normal here?

Partly as a way to get his mind off himself, he made a list of the players—adding observations.

The crazy guy he and Lily had met was Jay Douglas. That was all they knew about him because he’d been too hostile to do more than cuss them out.

She was a nurse from Baltimore. Worried

Paula Rendell. Travel agent. Train to New York. Self-assured but nervous about the buzzard she’d seen flapping over the garden before disappearing into the woods.

George Roper. Insurance. Boston. Hot to get out of here.

Jenny Seville. Teacher. Catonsville. Hiding something.

Chris Morgan. Ski Instructor. Colorado. Angry and upset.

Ben Todd. Lawyer. Alexandria. No sense of taste—which had started in this place?

Tom Wright. Car salesman. Philadelphia. Sure of himself or pretending to be.

Mack Bradley. Fighter pilot. Cumberland and the Middle East.

Nine strangers in the “Hotel California”. Why were they here, and could any of them check out?

He kept mulling over what he knew. More of them were from the East Coast, if that meant anything. More of them were men.

“If this is India, how did we get here?” Wright, the car salesman, demanded. “And why India, for God’s sake? I never wanted to go there. Never even thought about it. Too dirty. Too many people. And cows wandering around, pooping all over the place,”

There were murmurs of agreement. Apparently only Paula Rendell had considered India as a prime vacation location.

“There are no cows in here,” Lily said.

“So far,” Roper answered.

Mack studied their faces. While they’d been sitting here, most of the men had gotten a grip on themselves and were putting on what he’d call a brave face.

Lily was also taking in the reactions, the way he was.

Chris Morgan, the ski instructor, looked at Jenny Seville. “You didn’t tell us what you were doing before you got here.”

“I’d rather not say.”

“Everyone else did,” George Roper pressed.

“We can skip it,” Mack said.

“Why should we?” Ben Todd, the guy with the taste buds missing in action asked. “We’re trying to get information.”

Jenny looked like she wanted to cry. “It’s personal.”

Mack raised his voice. “Leave her alone.”

“It could be relevant,” Todd insisted.

“It’s not,” she shot back.

Before the argument could go on, Wright, the car salesman, took up the narrative. “If we’re saying what we remember last, I was walking my dog and got caught in a thunderstorm.”

The statement, and what the others had said, gave Mack something more to think about. Nobody had been home eating dinner, sleeping or reading in bed.

Had they all left their lives around the same time? Or had some of them been in cold storage?

Cold storage? That was a nice way to put it. What if they were all dead? And then what? He could have died when he ejected. But then how had he gotten
here.

Could they all be on some kind of drug that was creating this illusion? Or what about mass hypnosis?

An old movie he’d seen flashed into his mind. No Exit, about three not very nice people trapped forever in a hotel room in hell.

Jesus! The outlandish possibilities were coming hard and fast. But maybe there were ways to get more information. If everybody was willing to give honest answers to questions.

“What season of the year are we all remembering?” Mack asked.

“Spring,” Ben Todd answered.

“Summer,” Jenny Seville said, maybe in an attempt to cooperate.

Before anyone else could answer, thunder boomed and a bolt of lightning struck so near the building that the glasses on the tables rattled.

Grant Bradley picked up the phone and dialed the local home improvement store. As he listened to the various extension options, he heard a click on the line.

Like the clicks every time he used the phone in the past few days. Someone was listening in to his calls. The government? Foreign terrorists who were holding his brother captive?

He snorted. He might have called himself paranoid if he hadn’t opened that coffin the night before Mack was scheduled to be buried in the family plot.

He’d charged over to undertaker, Neal Winston’s, house and started pounding on the door like a madman.

As the guy had stood blinking under the porch light, Grant started shouting, “Where the hell is my brother?”

Winston stared at him in consternation, obviously reluctant to offend a client. “Your brother? He’s in our best parlor.”

“Maybe that’s what you think, but there’s a dummy in the coffin.”

The mortician struggled to gather his wits. “Grant, take it easy. I know you’re upset, but . . .”

“Get dressed. Right now. You’ve got some explaining to do.” He hauled Winston across town to the funeral parlor, slammed the lid open, and pushed the mortician’s face into the empty box.

“Where the hell is my brother?” he repeated.

The man’s mouth gaped open as he stared at the dummy that was supposed to be Mack Bradley. From the way he looked, it was pretty clear he was just as surprised as Grant.

“Tell me what you know,” Grant grated.

“I . . . I got the notification from the Navy, the way I always do when it’s a case of a guy dying in action. They sent your brother’s body from Bagram to Dover Air Base, the way they always do. They asked that the casket remain sealed. They didn’t want me to do any cosmetic work on him.”

“Is that usual?”

“In cases where the body was badly damaged . . . yes.”

“Let me see the paperwork.”

“Now?”

“Yes. Now.”

Winston took him to the office, scrabbled through a file cabinet and pulled out a folder with official-looking documents.

Grant scanned them, the words swimming in front of his eyes. It looked like an official form, but something obviously wasn’t kosher.

“Cancel the funeral,” he growled.

“We can’t. It’s scheduled for tomorrow morning.”

“Listen, you lamebrain, what do you think—that you’re going to put that
thing
in the ground and pretend it’s my brother? Cancel the fucking funeral! ”

“What am I supposed to tell people?”

Grant thought about that. Maybe his brother wasn’t in the coffin, but suppose he was alive and it was dangerous for him if people knew what was going on?

“Tell people there’s been a mistake and Mack isn’t here.”

“Where is he? What am I going to tell everybody?”

“That you realized there was a mistake in the paperwork.”

“Okay,” Winston agreed, sounding like he would agree to anything so long as Grant Bradley didn’t strangle him.

Grant turned and stomped out of the building before he started throwing small objects around the office.

He didn’t even try to go to bed. Instead he sat in the living room of his large log cabin, nursing Scotch, straight up. It would have been better if he could have slept because all he could do was speculate with no more information. He began making phone calls as soon as any government offices were open. The conversations proved to be just as unsatisfactory as the one with Neal Winston.

Nobody at the Department of the Navy or the Pentagon knew anything. Or if they did, they weren’t saying.

After a week of being shuffled from one bureaucrat or secretary to another, he was angry and frustrated. Unable to concentrate on anything but his quest for information, he cancelled all the wilderness expeditions on his schedule. Family emergency, he’d told his disappointed clients.

Really, he’d known he couldn’t give anybody his best until he found out what the hell had happened to his brother—and why someone was hiding the truth.

When he hadn’t been able to get any information over the phone, he’d made trips to the Pentagon, Capitol Hill, and even Norfolk, where Mack had been stationed before he’d shipped out. All of the digging yielded no results. As far as anybody knew, it was a bizarre mistake. But how? And why?

Grant had just dropped the receiver into the cradle when the phone rang again, and he snatched it up.

When he answered, a clipped male voice said, “Mr. Bradley.”

“Yes.”

“This is Colonel Jack Wilson. I understand you’ve been inquiring about your brother, Lieutenant Commander Mack Bradley.”

He dragged in a breath and let it out. Finally, somebody was calling him back.

“Yes, sir. I was notified that he was killed when his fighter jet was hit by a missile. But his coffin was empty.”

“I’m sorry. The Defense Department is as distressed as you are.”

“I doubt it.”

“I do have some information.”

Grant felt a spurt of hope which was immediately dashed. Why should this guy know any more than anyone else?

“But I don’t want to discuss it over the phone.”

“Why not?”

“It’s a matter of national security.”

“How?”

“I think it would be better if we talk in person.”

“All right.”

“I’d like to meet at the Franklin Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, DC.”

Grant blinked. “Isn’t that kind of a strange place?”

“It’s a public venue, where we can have some privacy—and be sure nobody is listening in.”

He didn’t like it, but he said, “All right. When?”

“This evening, around eight.”

“I’m four hours from the city.”

“But you should be able to make it.”

“That’s closing time, right?”

“Correct.”

He wanted to say the situation sounded . . . unorthodox. But he was talking to a U.S. military officer, who was finally going to spill the big secret about his brother. Or was he?

“I’ll have to leave right now.”

“Thanks for your understanding.”

The line clicked off and he hung up. The phone call, the whole setup gave him a bad feeling. But if he didn’t keep the meeting, he might never know what had happened to Mack.

oOo

When the hotel stopped shaking from the nearby lightning strike, Mack jumped up. “I’m going to have a look outside. Why don’t you come with me?” he said to Lily.

She stood. “Yes. The buddy system.”

“Me too, man,” Roper, the insurance guy, echoed.

Mack worked to contain his annoyance. He’d seen an opportunity to be alone with Lily, and now Roper was horning in. On the other hand, the muscular guy looked like he’d be useful if they were attacked.

By whom? Or what?

That still remained to be seen.

“Okay. Everybody else, stay put.”

The car salesman, Tom Wright, tipped his head to one side as he stared at Mack. “Who made you the captain of the team?”

“Better if we don’t all put ourselves at risk,” Mack answered as he hurried toward the door. Lily and Roper followed.

“What risk?” Wright called after them.

“I wish I knew,” he answered over his shoulder.

He headed back the way they’d come, then stopped short as he looked up at the sky over the inner courtyard.

Earlier it had been the blue of a fine summer day. Now it was mottled by storm clouds, moving fast, blowing across the patch of sky he could see.

In the dappled masses above him, shapes writhed, struggling to make their presence known.

You always saw shapes in clouds, he told himself, but this was different. These looked like demons trying to break through a barrier. And they weren’t just the expected gray and white. Instead, as he watched, the colors turned vivid red like the sun had suddenly set on a tropical island. And then it turned dark, like a sudden storm was sweeping in. In the next moment, it was back to tranquil blue, before turning stormy again.

Lily made a strangled sound and pressed her shoulder to his. He put a protective arm around her, as though he could shield her from danger lurking above them.

Since he’d woken up in an unfamiliar bedroom, Mack had wanted to think he was in a real place. The sudden changes in the sky told him it couldn’t be real.

“Don’t you hear the music?” Roper asked.

Now that he mentioned it, there was a hint of music. Something classical, Mack thought.

“The Hall of the Mountain King,” Lily whispered.

“What?”

“By Edvard Grieg.”

“How do you know?”

“My parents liked classical music. My father had a CD of that.”

“Okay.”

“Where did all this come from—here?” Lily asked in a quavery voice.

“Here?” Mack asked. “Do you happen to know where we are?”

She gave him a startled look. “I was just speaking generally.”

“Okay,” Mack answered.

“Somebody’s doing it,” Roper said.

“That’s impossible,” she whispered.

Again Mack studied her. “Why is it more impossible than anything else?”

She swallowed hard, looking like she was trying to get a grip on herself. “I don’t know. I just . . .” She stopped and started again. “It’s supposed to be the sky.”

“So you expect it to follow the rules of the universe—as you know it?” Mack demanded.

“Yes.”

“Apparently it’s not true at the ‘Hotel California’.”

“The Hotel California?” Lily asked.

“As good a name as any,” Mack shot back.

They all stood where they were, gazing upward until the clouds began to clear. The show was over quickly. In moments the heavens were back to rich blue.

“Normal again,” Mack muttered. He looked back toward the hotel. “Maybe . . . as long as I’m here, I’d better check on that guy—Jay Douglas—we left in the office,” he said. “You all go back and . . .”

“What guy?” Roper asked in a sharp voice, suddenly on alert.

“We don’t know. When we first arrived, he attacked Lily. I tied him up. I want to see if he’s okay.”

“Attacked why?”

“I guess he became mentally unbalanced,” Lily said.

“Why?” Mack asked.

“How would I know?” she answered.

“I don’t like it,” Roper muttered.

“You think we do? I’d better check on him.”

Lily put a hand on Mack’s arm. “Buddy system. I’ll go with you.

“Right.” He turned to Roper. “Will you report back to the others? About the sky?”

“And tell them what we saw?” the other man challenged.

Mack turned his palms up. “I hate scaring them. But I guess we’d better be honest. I mean, they need to be on the lookout for anything. . . out of the ordinary—besides this whole setup,” he added.

The insurance agent nodded tightly.

“We’ll tell them about Douglas when we get back,” Mack said.

oOo

Like Prospero in the Tempest, Danny Preston landed in the midst of a storm. Not on an island in the Atlantic but in the woods outside the Mirador Hotel.

He’d made the sky look weird and used some spooky classical music an elementary schoolteacher had played for her class.

And he’d dressed for his own pleasure as a biker, with a shaved head, leather vest, scruffy jeans and heavy black boots. His bare arms were covered with tattoos, serpents, dragons, and a death’s-head dripping blood. A nice touch, he thought.

Although he’d talked a good game to the guy who had hired him for this job, he hadn’t been perfectly confident that he could get here at all. Now he was elated at his success. Of course, he wasn’t exactly in the hotel proper. He was in the woods on the other side of the wall that surrounded the manicured lawns and beautifully tended gardens. But he was going to get in there. Or lure some of the guests out here.

He’d always lived by his wits, and he came by his way of life honestly. His mom and dad had paid the bills as tag-team card sharks. That and pulling off some spectacular cons on puffed-up businessmen. Like the times they’d pretended that adorable little Danny had been injured on some company’s property—then gotten a quick settlement to keep the supposed safety hazard out of the papers.

He’d outgrown that kind of risky stuff long ago. And he vowed he wasn’t going to spend the rest of his life in federal prison like Mom and Dad. Which was why he was doing this job. Only, he didn’t completely trust the guy who’d hired him, and when he was finished with the gig, he’d have to disappear.

The cell phone in his jean’s pocket vibrated, and his face hardened. He’d just gotten here for Christ’s sake. And Mr. Smith was already calling him. Yeah, Mr. Smith. Like that was going to fool anybody.

He let the phone vibrate for another few seconds before answering.