Trace (TraceWorld Book 1) (18 page)

She thought quickly. She could throw herself at Vincent’s legs and topple him, but she’d have to do it such that he fell back and not forward so he’d be less able to shoot anyone. That would be tougher to manage, but still doable, especially if she caught him by surprise. Just as she thought this through, Maureen began to march toward them, her face set with cold anger. Grayson called her back sharply, but she ignored him.

“Don’t you point that fucking thing at me, Vincent,” she hissed. “You’re not—”

However she was going to finish that sentence they would never know. Vincent fired the gun, and Nola threw her arms around Vincent’s legs and pulled them down with all her strength. He fired two more times before landing hard on his back on the pavement. She sprang to her feet, saw that the gun was still in his hand, and stomped hard on his wrist, bringing her entire weight down on it. She felt rather than heard the crunch of bones.

Vincent screamed, grabbed her left leg in his free hand and yanked her off balance. She fell back herself, not sure if he’d still kept hold of the gun. If he had . . .

But it didn’t matter. Grayson tacked Vincent back down, banging his head hard on the road and wrenching the gun free. “Don’t fucking move,” he barked. He got up and stood over Vincent with the gun in one hand and his phone in the other, dialing. “Nola?”

She got up quickly as well, perhaps too quickly, as the houses seemed to whirl for a moment. “I’m fine. Watch him,” she said, looking warily at Vincent. It was an unnecessary warning; Vincent Kirke, his face twisted with the pain of his shattered arm bones, wasn’t going anywhere. “I’ll help Maureen.”

She hadn’t realized quite why she’d said this until after she heard her own words, when she fully registered the fact that Maureen had gone down.

Maureen had taken two of the three shots right in the chest. Nola kneeled beside her, trying to say comforting things about an ambulance that was on its way, about Vincent’s being caught, about how everything would get better soon, but she knew Maureen was beyond registering any of it. She was dying, Nola knew. Her heart was not capable of supplying blood to her brain, and it was only a matter of minutes. But for being as close to death as Maureen was, the woman’s body seemed to burst with life. Little convulsions shook her even while blood gushed unabated from her wounds. Her eyelids and lips trembled, her fingers twitched. “You were very brave,” Nola babbled. “You were braver than I could ever be. You did what was right. Culver would have been proud of you. He loved you. He loved you so much. You deserved his love. And he deserved yours. He loved you until the very end. He was a good man.” Did she really believe any of this? It sounded like a child’s fairy tale.
Some happily-ever-after
.

Then it was happening. Nola could feel it begin. Air choked in her throat as Maureen’s breath went ragged and then faint. Something was rising over Nola, something like a strong current or a huge wave, pulling her down, crushing her. She felt herself being dragged into the earth, the ground melting away like the last bits of light at dusk before darkness swallowed everything, before it swallowed
her
.

She heard a voice:
Let it happen, Nola. Don’t shut it off. Don’t turn away. Let it happen.

She sprang to her feet, breathing hard as if she’d been running for miles. She looked at the dead woman’s face and jolted back into the world. No darkness, no voices, solid ground beneath her. She stepped back from the body and turned away.

And came face-to-face with Grayson Bryant.

Grayson stood so still and silent he almost seemed to disappear. His eyes were open but unfocused, his face a pallid blank. She did not know how she’d imagined trace absorption would look, but it wasn’t this emptiness, this stillness. He might have been dead himself.

Like a sleepwalker suddenly jarred awake, he lifted his head, his eyes sharpened, and he looked at Nola.

For a second time, she turned away from him. She walked from the scene, toward the sound of the approaching sirens, so they would know where to go.

17

Someone searched my house. They might come after you. Call me. Be careful.

That was the text Grayson had sent while Vincent Kirke confronted Nola. “Too little too late, I guess,” Grayson said. The words were meant to sound sheepish, Nola suspected, but there was too much gravity in his voice—and in both their demeanors—for any sort of lightheartedness.

It had been a long night. Vincent Kirke was taken into custody. Nola and Grayson gave statements. Lynette Veesy was brought in for questioning. Maureen Bryant’s body was taken away.

Outside the police station, Grayson was trying to fill Nola in on how he and Maureen had come to be at Greenbriar at that crucial moment. Nola half-listened, keeping her eyes fixed down the road, toward the east, waiting for the first signs of dawn. She watched without any sense that dawn would bring relief or pleasure; it was only a way to mark the passing of time.

“I could tell right away someone had been through my things, especially the bookshelves,” Grayson said. “In particular, I could see one album of newspaper clippings had been taken out, gone through and put back. The clippings were all loose and they were sticking out from the top like someone had been reading them and jammed them back in quickly. Some of those clippings were about you. I know Lynette used to go through my things, but I always straightened them up afterward since she always left them a mess. I knew this was someone else.”

Saying nothing, Nola watched a crumpled page of newsprint listlessly circle the nearby alley, as if it, too, were waiting for something without any sense of hopefulness.

“Then Maureen came over, asking me frantically, or at least as frantic as she ever appears, if I got anything strange in the mail recently.”

Appears
. He always talked about the dead in the present tense, first Culver, then Maureen. Maybe it was because he’d taken their trace and he somehow thought that entitled him to believe they were still alive somehow—and to believe he had done nothing wrong.

“I hadn’t gone through that day’s mail, but as soon as I did I saw the envelope from Culver. She had one, too. That was when she told me what happened the night Culver died.”

Nola heard him dimly, but she could not stop thinking about Maureen. They probably didn’t take kindly to anyone turning rat in Southie, but that was how much Maureen had been affected by what she’d discovered about Greenbriar. All she wanted was to get away from that squalor and suffering and live a quiet, decent life. Greenbriar was as much her dream as Culver’s—possibly even more hers than his. And when her husband died, Vincent Kirke took advantage of her when she was most vulnerable. Yes, she had done wrong by going along with him, but she paid the price.

“We went to confront Kirke at his home, but he wasn’t there. Maureen figured he might be at the Greenbriar office, so that’s why we showed up.”

Still Nola said nothing. He seemed to feel the need to explain something, but so far he wasn’t even remotely close to the one thing that needed explaining.

“Those two detectives told me Lynette’s in the clear, by the way, in case you wondered,” he added wryly. “She didn’t know anything or do anything, or at least that’s what her daddy’s lawyer maintains, and I imagine the prosecutor will figure it isn’t worth pursuing. Besides, the fact that she wasn’t mentioned at all in Culver’s will is probably enough of a punishment.”

It was a moment when they both might have chuckled, but, of course, they didn’t. Instead, Nola suddenly blurted, “You’re getting a lot of money from all this, I’m sure.”

Nola wasn’t sure why she felt it necessary to make that point, true though it most certainly was. Grayson clearly didn’t care about the money. He was well-off on his own and had never been motivated by greed the way Vincent Kirke was. No, Grayson’s motivation was quite different—but equally damaging.

“I’m mentioned in both their wills, so yes, I’ll be a beneficiary. The bulk of it will go toward cleaning up Greenbriar and the rest will go to charities Maureen was involved with.” He said it in a matter-of-fact way, clearly having figured this out long ago and not simply trying to say something that would impress his generosity upon Nola. But as he waited for her to speak again, it was apparent that he was seeking something from her. Forgiveness? No. Grayson did not believe he had done anything wrong. Understanding? It was more than that: he wanted her approval. He still saw her as a potential kindred spirit.

The very idea made her turn to face him and finally confront him about the one thing she needed to know. “You were tempted.”

He said nothing.

“You thought about it,” she persisted.

Still only stone-faced silence.

“You thought about letting him kill me.”

He looked away before he spoke. “Yes. I thought about it.”

Shame. It was there in his voice. Yet there was something else, too: defiance.

“I figured out what those voices I heard were, Grayson,” she said. “They came from
you
. The voice is
your
voice. You’re the one who wants help. I can’t explain it logically or scientifically, but some part of you revolts when you take people’s trace.”

“I don’t hear those voices. Only you do.”

“Yes,” she said coolly, “because you refuse to listen. You make it seem like I’m the one who’s closed myself off. Maybe I have, but so have you. You’re doing it right now. You don’t want to hear what I’m saying. You just want me to go along with you.”

She let that sink in, and during the silence that followed she thought about the look she’d seen on Grayson’s face when Vincent Kirke pointed the gun at her. That mix of fear and desire, desire threatening to win. The memory filled her with a horror worse than the horror of getting shot. She didn’t ever want to need something that badly, the way Grayson needed trace. And yet, when are you more alive than when you would do anything for what you want? She had decided to fight for her life. She wanted to keep living. She didn’t want to live like Grayson did.

Grayson was just now starting to realize that.

“So I guess you’ll be the department darling again, huh?” he said. “Nola saves the day?”

“I didn’t save anyone. Maureen is dead.”

“But you caught the bad guy. Your white knight reveres you. And I guess you’ve chosen what side you’re on.”

As if on cue, Jack Dalton—the white knight himself—appeared. He stepped out of the building, saw Nola and Grayson, made a slight movement toward them, and then stopped. “I hope I’m not intruding,” he said quietly, “but I wanted to talk to you before you left, Nola.”

Grayson turned, saw the commander, and turned back to Nola with a hard glint in his eyes. Nola didn’t flinch under his gaze. “Go ahead and see it that way if you want to, Grayson. There are a lot of sides to take. I don’t have to limit myself to just one. But the only side you’ve ever cared about is yours.”

She left him without a further word or look and went up the stairs to see Jack, who opened the door to let her in. Whether he gave a warning scowl to Grayson or Grayson gave a cold sneer to him, Nola neither knew nor cared.

As soon as she was seated in Jack’s office, he blurted, “Nola, I’m sorry.” He held up his hand as she tried to interrupt (though she had no idea what she would have said). “No, let me continue. You were right all along. You sensed that Culver Bryant had died at his brother’s house. Even if you weren’t exactly sure what happened, you knew
something
had happened there, and we should have paid attention to that. Vincent Kirke would likely have gotten away with what he did if not for you. As Jeb Crawford no doubt would say”—a faint smile played on his face—“you saved our sorry asses once again. I hope you’ll continue to do so in the future.”

They were words that at one time would have made her swoon with pleasure. Now they only induced her to force a faint smile of her own, a sad one because she was pretty sure she didn’t see a future working with him. Jack would always follow the rules, and that was fine. He believed in the rules. That did not mean Nola had to. That didn’t mean she had to flout them for her own self-interest, either. She was different from Jack, but she wasn’t going to follow Grayson Bryant either. She didn’t really want to follow anyone at the moment.

She didn’t tell any of that to Jack, of course. “I’ve enjoyed working with the department,” was all she said.

“Well, I enjoy working with you, Nola.”

Not
we
, she noted.
I.
He seemed rather pointed about that, along with the present tense.
Enjoy
. As in, would like to continue to enjoy.

Her silence seemed to make him apprehensive. “Nola, don’t be offended by this, but the department can offer psychiatric counseling for what you just went through. It’s not a sign of weakness to need to talk about that kind of ordeal. I’ve seen twenty-year veterans so shaken by a shooting they could barely get out of bed in the morning. You’re a strong woman, but sometimes even the strong need help.”

Help me,
the voices had said. It seemed like a long time ago when she’d heard them. In truth, it had been mere days, but they were days that changed everything for her.

She smiled again. “I’m not offended. And I’m not afraid to ask for help. But I kind of think right now I just need to . . . I don’t know, do my own thing for a while.”

The words sounded lame even to her, but Jack seemed to understand what she meant. He lowered his eyes for a moment, staring at his desk. “OK,” he said when he looked up again, “but when a while has passed, I do hope you’ll come back.” He smiled the kind of smile that in a different situation would have hinted at flirtation. “We need you.”

Nola returned the smile.
No, you don’t
.
And I don’t need you.

___________

When she pulled into her parking lot, no one called, and no one appeared suddenly outside her car door. It was just after sunrise on a Sunday in October; no one else was up. Or at least that’s what Nola thought. As she made her way to the building entrance, she noticed something that stopped her in her tracks. Someone ahead of her, a woman, was sitting in a car, just sitting there. It was Mrs. Lafferty.