“Why don’t you tell me?”
“After I met Ashe Cain, things started happening to the kids who teased me and called me names.”
“What kind of things?”
“Nothing really terrible. Not until—” She glanced away. “Flat tires. Stolen wallets and keys. Stuff like that.”
“And you think Ashe was responsible?”
“I know he was. He showed me the things he took.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing, because I told myself those kids deserved it. And that’s my whole point. Ashe did what I secretly wanted to do.” Her eyes challenged him. “Now do you get it? If I’d wanted to create the perfect avenger, he would have looked exactly like Ashe Cain.”
“That doesn’t mean he wasn’t real,” Michael said.
“Then how do you explain why no one else ever saw him? Why no one else ever heard of him?”
“Maybe that’s the way he wanted it.”
“Maybe.” She twirled another strand of hair around her finger. Distracted. Agitated. “Do you believe that we all have the capacity for evil?”
Sharing a personal opinion or philosophical conjecture with a patient was never a good idea, but Sarah’s question was one Michael had wrestled with for years. “Yes,” he finally said. “I do believe that. But I also believe that in most of us, there is the ability and the desire to vanquish that side of our nature.”
“What if suppressing the memories of what happened to Rachel is my way of vanquishing the evil inside me? What if recovering those memories unleashes something I can’t control?”
Michael took a long time before he answered. “You can’t fight evil in the dark, Sarah. The only way you can truly defeat it is to bring it into the light.”
“You mean by remembering?”
“If that’s possible. But also by making peace with your past. It’s the only way you’ll ever be able to move on with your life.”
She gathered her jacket and purse and stood. “Something to think about,” she said in a tone that was deceptively lighthearted.
“We’ve still got some time,” Michael said. “Why don’t we finish the session?”
“No, I really have to go. I have a client coming in soon. We’re doing a dragon on his back—a custom design and very elaborate. Did I ever tell you what an honor it is to be allowed to tattoo the back? It’s the largest canvas on the human body.”
Michael got up to walk her to the door.
“You didn’t ask about my father,” she said.
“I’m sorry. How’s he doing?”
“Not well. The doctors say it’s only a matter of time. Weeks, maybe.” In the outer office, she tugged on her jacket before going outside. “Admit it. You think my father is somehow the key to all this, don’t you? You think the way he treated me as a child has turned me into a neurotic. And here I thought it was always the mother’s fault.”
Michael opened the door and they walked down the steps together. He watched her disappear through the gate, and a few moments later, he heard her car drive away.
Turning, he surveyed his ravished garden. Sarah was right. Everything was a mess now, but in another month or so, when the weather heated up, the color would come back. The banana trees would shed their brown leaves like a snake sloughing off dead skin, and wisteria would hang like a heavy curtain over the garden walls, perfuming the evening air with a nostalgic scent that always took him back to his days in the seminary.
But that had been a long time ago. Before Elise. Before his fall from grace.
Chapter 13
As soon as she let herself into the house that night, Sarah had the strangest sensation that something was wrong. Her purse in one hand and a bag of groceries in the other, she used her shoulder to flip the light switch, then glanced around.
The house was so still that even normal sounds—the furnace, the clock, even the whisper of her own breath—unnerved her.
Sarah was so attuned to every nuance of her home that she was sure she would have sensed if someone had been inside while she was out. It wasn’t that, but she couldn’t explain the disquiet nor could she make it go away. And as certain as she was that no one had broken in, she also knew that, for her own peace of mind, she would have to make the rounds through her house, a tense investigation she always dreaded.
Setting her purse and groceries on a kitchen counter, she walked through every room, checking all the doors and windows, looking inside closets and the shower, underneath the bed and behind every chair. Except for the two years with Sean, she’d lived alone for a long time, and a search through all the dark places was nothing new for her. By now, she knew herself well enough to accept that she wouldn’t be able to relax until she made a thorough sweep.
Everything was exactly as she’d left it that morning. No one had been inside. She was sure of it. But even after the search, that nagging unease persisted, and the sound of a car engine in her drive caused her to jump. She hurried to the window and glanced out. Headlight beams swung across her tiny front yard as the car backed out and headed down the street.
Just someone turning around. Nothing to worry about.
But Sarah was still jittery as she walked back into the kitchen, her palms unaccountably moist as she put away the groceries. For the first time in a long time, she wanted to call Sean, and the urge caught her completely off guard.
A storm of emotions ripped through her. Even after all these months, after everything he’d done, there were times like this when Sarah keenly missed having him in the house. The sight of him seated at the kitchen table going through a stack of files would have been especially reassuring on a night when her nerves were so frayed. When the last thing she wanted was to be alone.
He would have glanced up when she came through the door, taken one look at her face and got up from the table to give her a hug. “Rough session?” he’d ask.
Sarah would bury her face in his shoulder and tangle her fingers in his shirt as she breathed in the subtle, spicy scent of his cologne. That was the thing about Sean. For someone who spent most of his day dealing with death, he always smelled good. It was one of the things she missed most about him. The lingering scent of his aftershave in the bathroom, on his pillow. On her hands.
She stood in the middle of the kitchen, remembering his fingers in her hair, his voice in her ear, the comforting feel of his body pressed against hers.
“Better?” he’d say.
“Hmm, yes.”
Sarah opened her eyes and the phantom voice vanished.
Sean was gone and it did no good to look back. Besides, she was a grown woman. She didn’t need a man’s presence to help her feel safe in her own home. The little house on North Rampart had always been her sanctuary, and she had Esme to thank for that. Without her sage advice, Sarah would have blown through the inheritance from her mother within six months of her twenty-first birthday. But Esme had sat her down one day and given her a piece of her mind.
“What would your mama say if she could see the way you been carrying on? All that partying and carousing and acting like you ain’t got a lick of common sense. You waste your money on some ol’ boy and what you gonna have left when he up and leaves you? Nothing, that’s what. Now, you listen to me, Sarah June.” She shook a bony finger in Sarah’s face. “You use what’s left of your mama’s money and buy yourself a little house. That way when them ol’ boys take off like they do, you got someplace to go home to.”
It was the best advice anyone had ever given Sarah, and for once in her life, she’d had the gumption to follow it. But then, Esme had never steered her wrong. Sometimes Sarah thought Esme was the only one who had ever really cared about her.
Making another pass through the house, Sarah finally managed to convince herself that her edginess was just residue tension from her session earlier that day. She and Michael had gotten into some pretty heavy issues, and the exhumation of an old deep-rooted fear was bound to leave her feeling ragged. Sarah had never talked about that fear to anyone, not even to Michael, but Sean’s question had dug it out of a very bad place and now Sarah couldn’t ignore it.
What if Ashe Cain had only been a figment of her imagination? What if he was nothing more than an apparition she’d conjured at a time in her life when she’d desperately needed a friend—an avenger?
But if Ashe Cain wasn’t real, then who had killed Rachel?
That was the question Sarah had been dancing around in Michael’s office. Who was she trying to protect?
She glanced out the window over the sink, but she could no more determine shadow from darkness than she could separate the fantasies of her loneliness from the reality of her past. Sometimes Sarah wondered if she could trust any of her memories, if the unhappy details of her childhood had been manufactured simply to justify her bad behavior.
It was at times like these that she felt like a stranger in her own life and she realized that after all the years of searching, she still hadn’t the vaguest clue of who she really was. Might never know, because she was one of those people who would always be defined by the way others perceived her.
Getting out a bottle of wine, she poured herself a drink.
Why the hell did she keep doing this? Why did she torment herself with unanswerable questions?
If she’d learned anything about herself over the years it was that self-doubt inevitably led to self-destruction.
Already she felt herself on the verge of spiraling out of control, and she quickly lifted the glass to her lips, downing the wine in one gulp.
Ashe Cain was real. She had to believe that. She needed to believe it.
He’d been a troubled, psychotic boy who had done a very bad thing. He’d murdered Rachel in cold blood, maybe to avenge Sarah, maybe to fulfill some dark passion of his own. His motive hardly mattered now. It had been fourteen years since Rachel’s murder. If Ashe was coming back, he would have done so by now. Real or imagined, he was gone from Sarah’s life for good. She needed to believe that, too.
Pouring a second glass of wine, she washed down a Xanax, then carried her drink into the living room and checked her messages. The hang-up calls both annoyed and unsettled her. There had been a lot of them lately, and when she checked the caller ID, the numbers were all unavailable. Telemarketers, most likely.
Or someone checking to see if you’re home.
Sarah became aware of the silence again, and she switched on the television before curling up on the sofa to wait for the pill to take effect. Her muscles had just started to loosen when the phone rang, and feeling that first gentle tug of sedated relaxation, she answered without thinking.
“Hello?”
“We need to talk.”
Sarah’s gaze went to the clock in the bookshelf. Ten-fifteen.
“Sarah? Are you there?”
“I’m here,” she said on a long sigh. “But I don’t feel like talking tonight.”
“I can tell,” Sean said in exasperation. “But that’s too damn bad because there’s something I need to ask you. It’s about the crime scene the other night.”
Sarah rolled onto her back and threw a hand over her eyes. “You sound like a broken record.”
“I’m serious about this.”
“So am I. You’re killing my buzz and that’s very serious to me. Besides, I’ve already told you everything I know.”
“What about the footprints?”
She blinked in bewilderment. “What footprints?”
“You asked about prints the other night at the crime scene, remember? You wanted to know if we’d found any unusual prints around the house.”
A headache began to punch at Sarah’s brain. Shit. A moment ago, she’d been on the verge of a perfectly comfortable numbness, and now Sean was dragging her back to a dark, spooky place. She tried to resist because she really, really didn’t want to go back there. She’d already made that journey once today.
“What kind of prints were you talking about, Sarah?”
She pressed her fingertips to her temple. “What difference does it make? You didn’t find anything, did you?”
“Around the house? No.”
“Then why does it matter?”
“Because we did find them. Just not outside.”
Sarah’s mouth suddenly went dry. She reached for her drink, but her hand bumped the glass and she watched in fascination as the red stain seeped across the tabletop.
“There were bruises on the body in the shape of footprints,” Sean said. “Cloven footprints.”
Oh, Christ, not that.
“That’s what you were talking about, wasn’t it? How did you know about them, Sarah?” His voice was low and insistent. Edged with something Sarah didn’t want to name.
Her heart drummed in her chest. How had she known about those prints? “I didn’t know. How could I?”
“Then why did you specifically ask about unusual prints that night? It’s not a random question. What triggered it?”
She took a deep breath, tried to steady her voice. “It must have been the udjat you showed me. It reminded me of something.”
“What?”
She pulled in more air, drowning. “Sean, it’s late and I’m tired. Can’t we talk about this tomorrow? I just want to lie here and relax for a little while before—”
“Before what?” His voice sharpened. “Are you going out?”
“No.”
“Then I’d like to come over.”
“No. That’s not a good idea.”
“We need to talk about this, Sarah. We need to talk about a lot of things.”
No, no, talking about this was the last thing she needed. What she needed was to push the button and make Sean’s voice go away. What she needed was to get up and go grab a towel because the wine stain on the table kept spreading.