Читать книгу Possessed - Stephanie Doyle - Страница 11

“I’m really sorry. I had no idea he was going to go off on you like that,” Dougie said.

He had won the battle and was driving Cass home, her motor scooter tucked safely in the back of the Cherokee. After everything that had happened that night, she hadn’t put up much of a fight. It was late. At midnight, the neighborhood was sketchy, so she couldn’t imagine things improving at 3:00 a.m. It made sense. It just didn’t sit well with her to have to rely on anyone, even Dougie.

“He was definitely pissed,” Cass agreed. Although the word pissed barely scratched the surface of the man’s outrage.

“I didn’t think you would actually tell him about…you know.”

She shrugged. “I wasn’t planning to, but he kept pushing. And you know I don’t lie about that stuff anymore. Anyway, he never really even yelled. Just spoke to me in that kind of tone that makes you feel like you’re ten years old. I had this irrational urge to show him my ID and prove I was almost thirty.”

Dougie glanced over at her quickly, then focused again on the road in front of him as he navigated the narrow city streets around Logan Square. “He wouldn’t have believed it. When you’re fifty you’re not going to look thirty.”

She pointed to the thin, elfin nose that tipped up ever so slightly at the end. “It’s the nose.”

He laughed and made a right turn then slowed to a stop in front of her apartment building.

“You should move closer to Old City.”

“Ugh. I just moved to this place because you were on my case. It’s fine. I’m not saying I’m going out jogging on my own after midnight, but I haven’t had any problems,” she said.

He double-parked in front of her building. She hopped out and made her way to the trunk to get her scooter, but Dougie had beat her to it and was already lifting it to the ground.

“I can take it from here.”

He merely scowled at her and rolled the thing toward the building. It was only three stories tall, each apartment having its own entrance off of a series of cement steps. Hers was the basement apartment. Walking in front of him, she made her way down the steps and used her key to let herself in.

“Seriously, Dougie. I could have carried it,” she said as she stood back and let him set the scooter inside what she called the foyer but what was really part of the kitchen. “I do it every day. I’m not as weak as I look.”

“You look like you’re barely five foot and a hundred pounds wet.”

“Ah, ha! See how wrong you are. I’m five foot two and a hundred and four pounds wet.”

He chuckled and set the scooter aside, using the kickstand to stabilize it. He proceeded to check the place out, looking for bogeymen in the closets, she imagined.

“Where are the creatures?” His affectionate term for her cats.

“They’re probably on my bed sleeping.”

“Good,” he muttered.

“You really need to get over this paranoia.”

“They don’t like me.”

“Maybe that’s because you look at them and wonder why they’re not dogs.”

“All pets should be dogs,” he insisted.

“Spoken like a dog lover. What I don’t get is, if you love them so much, why you don’t just get one?”

He opened his mouth and then snapped it shut. “My schedule is too…whatever. Hey, check that out. Is that furniture?”

He was pointing to the futon she’d recently purchased that sat in the corner of her sparse apartment. The foyer off the door opened up to a small kitchen that was no more than a space with a stove/oven, a counter with a sink that held most of her dishes and a refrigerator. Beyond that was the living room, although living room seemed too fancy a name for the compact square area beyond the kitchen.

Dougie’s joke about the futon wasn’t completely off base. Cass liked to call herself a minimalist because it sounded as if there was a reason for the lack of furniture. Mostly, she just didn’t like clutter. She was a lousy housekeeper and the less she had, the less she needed to keep clean. Plus there were fewer places to leave dirty clothes.

She had a low Japanese-style table where she knelt to take her meals, a small TV to catch the evening news, a yoga mat that spread almost the length of the living room and some Pilates bands that she was incorporating into her workout. And now the futon. The cushion covering the oak frame was bright red and amazingly comfortable for napping.

Down a narrow hallway there was a bathroom on one side and a large closet that she liked to call her bedroom on the other. As a home, it wasn’t much, but the economic apartment and everything in it suited her needs. Which, in her mind, was all space and furniture were supposed to do.

She shrugged off her coat, hung it on a hook on the foyer wall and turned to putting the events, all of the events, of the night behind her. She didn’t kid herself that it would be easy. McDonough’s harsh words stuck with her.

How do you live with yourself?

Not easily, she thought, but not for the reasons he assumed.

Cass tried to be understanding. After all, his sister was dead and he was devastated. Sometimes people didn’t mean to hurt others, but they did anyway. No one knew that better than she did.

Or she could forget about trying to be sympathetic and just write him off as a jackass. Maybe not as noble that way, but it was a hell of a lot more satisfying.

“Is there going to be any fallout? From tonight, I mean. Can McDonough make trouble for you?”

“Like I said, he’s got connections with the mayor. If the mayor talks to the chief about you…The chief knows about what you do, but you know he’s never liked the idea. If the mayor brings heat…I don’t know.” Dougie walked over and sat on the futon. His expression indicated that he was as surprised as she had been at how comfortable it was.

“What is the connection with the mayor?”

“Business. McDonough is one of the up-and-coming contractors in the city. A real rags-to-riches sort. His dad was an ironworker who married a socialite, Lauren’s mother. Malcolm went to college but eventually got into construction. He made money by establishing a reputation for bringing in jobs for less. Then he started speculating and he was never wrong. He had all the right money contacts because of his stepmother. And the union loves him because they think he’s one of them.”

“But he isn’t?”

“What do you think?”

Hard to tell. There was something about the way he carried himself. The way his suit fit. It all screamed class, money and sophistication, making it hard to picture him in a pair of jeans with a hammer in his hand and a tool belt around his waist. Plus, with his short, dark blond hair, blue eyes and chiseled face, he would have to be described as classically handsome rather than ruggedly handsome. He wasn’t as tall as Dougie, maybe only six foot. Still, to her five-foot-two frame, he’d seemed rather large. Especially when he was standing over her, berating her and calling her disgusting.

Putting aside his appearance, however, there was definitely a hardness about him that acted in contrast to the sophistication. So, while she couldn’t readily see him with a hammer, something told her he knew how to use one.

“You sure he didn’t do it? I mean really sure?”

“Nothing’s for sure, I suppose. The messages are never that clear. But I got the feeling she was worried about him. Worried how he would handle her death. Like she knew it was too much of a shock for him to take in. If he was shocked by it, he couldn’t have done it. That and the story about the nurse and the blood…she told me that for a reason.”

“Maybe. Maybe he lost it, and the shock was about what he had done. There were bruises on the body. She was engaged in a fight with her killer for some time before he eventually stabbed her.”

“But the tongue thing…that was done after?”

Dougie winced. “Yeah.”

“That smacks of a process. Intent. Not something a man might do after he’d realized that he’d just killed his sister in a rage.”

He stood then and moved toward her, close enough to knock a finger under her chin. “Listen to you, Miss Detective.”

“Comes from spending too much time with you.”

“Ah, you can never spend too much time with me.” He smiled charmingly, then his gaze sharpened on her face. “Hey, McDonough didn’t get rough with you, did he? You’ve got a…”

“Bruise. I know. I bent over at work and bang. It’s nothing.” She pulled away a little, not wanting to encourage further inspection. Dougie didn’t know what it cost her to make contact, and she wanted to keep it that way.

He nodded. “I’ve got an idea. I know this bar that stays open until six in the morning for the restaurant people. We’ll go. We’ll have a few drinks, unwind and forget about McDonough and his sister.”

“I don’t think so. I’m really beat.”

He shoved his hands into his pants pockets. “You find an excuse every time I ask you out.”

“I do not. We’ve gone to lunch plenty of times.”

“Lunch, yes. But never dinner. Never drinks.”

“Dougie…” She sighed.

They’d covered this ground before, earlier in their relationship. She wasn’t sure why he was bringing it up again, but she knew that she didn’t want to have to rationalize why they couldn’t date. He didn’t know what had made their one night together such a disaster but she would never forget it. What had happened would always be reason enough for her to keep her distance romantically. There were times she thought it might be easier if she simply told him, but not tonight. Three contacts in the span of a few hours. It was a lot even for her. She was exhausted.

“All right. I’ll let it go. For now. But someday I’m going to convince you.”

No, he wouldn’t. He was trying to move on with his life. She granted him that. But he had no idea how much further he still needed to go before he’d be over his wife’s death. If he would ever be.

“Lock up behind me,” he said as he made his way through the kitchen to her front door. “And thanks for the help. My gut was telling me he was clean despite the ice man routine, but confirmation doesn’t hurt. You’re right about the tongue. There was something about it that smacked of…psycho-city.”

“Psycho-city.” She smirked. “There’s a technical term. I take it to mean you think this person is deranged.”

“I…I should shut my mouth. Who knows what this is. I don’t want to give you bad dreams.”

“Thanks for seeing me home.”

“Sure.” He paused for a second, but she was a good two feet away from him. Too far away to even attempt a move if that’s what he was thinking.

“She wants you to get some sleep,” Cass told him, understanding more than he did why he didn’t leave right away. “I connected with her briefly back at the station. She doesn’t think the insomnia will go away just because you’ve switched to nights. You’re not sleeping during the day, either.”

“I wasn’t going to ask.”

“Oh.” It would be a first if it were true. Dougie loved his wife. More than most, she supposed. Her death had almost killed him with grief. Cass often worried whether or not their friendship stemmed from the fact that she was his only link to sanity. His only link to Claire. She liked him enough that she didn’t dwell on it. He was her only real friend. If she had to give him a message from Claire from time to time to make him happy, she was willing to do it. But it forever prevented their relationship from going any further. “Well, she does. It’s why I mentioned it.”

He nodded, then turned, and she shut the door behind him.

Maybe it was some new phase of his recovery, she decided. Maybe he was truly ready to move on. If that was the case, she would be thrilled for him. He was a good man who deserved someone special in his life.

That person just couldn’t be her.

Turning the dead bolt and linking the chain, Cass thought about maybe asking him to lunch so they could talk about it. There was no way she was going to risk their friendship over one night’s weakness that for whatever reason he couldn’t seem to put in its proper place.

The locks secured, Cass turned around and smiled when she spotted her feline friends. Two shorthair Americans, one black, one gray, both with mint-green eyes. They practically materialized out of nowhere to welcome her home.

“Oh, I see. He’s gone so it’s okay to come out.”

They didn’t answer. They didn’t need to. They simply walked toward her, then through and around her legs, purring affectionately.

“Come on, girls. Let’s go to bed.”

She was about to bend down to pick them both up when she saw that the red light on her combo phone/answering machine hanging on the wall was still blinking. She had erased the message from Dougie earlier, which meant this had to be new. She didn’t know that many people, and it was too late for work to be calling.

Unless maybe it was Susie wanting to talk about what had happened or Kevin, the coffeehouse’s manager, checking in to see what exactly had gone on that night. Susie had called him right after she’d called the police.

Cass hit the button, heard the soft dulcet voice inform her that she had one new message, listened to the beep, and waited.

“Cassandra, it’s Dr. Farver. I would like to talk to you. I’ve been trying for some time. I’m surprised you didn’t let me know your number had changed. But…that’s not the point. I’m calling because there’s someone I want you to meet…”

She hit the erase button before he could finish. She didn’t have to listen to the rest of the message to know what he was going to say. She’d heard the same song often enough before, which had been her reason for not giving him her new number. Not that it had worked…obviously.

And the fact that he had called after 1:00 a.m. was no surprise. Once Leonard Farver struck upon a new idea or found a new candidate to research, he could be relentless. She knew that from experience.

Someone he wanted her to meet. More like someone he wanted her to read so he could test, monitor and poke at her. Not anymore. Cass had promised herself a long time ago that she was done being his lab rat despite what he’d done for her.

She waited for the guilt that usually surfaced anytime she blew him off, but this time she felt nothing. Exhaustion trumped guilt every time.

She made her way down the short hallway and let herself fall face forward into the double bed that took up most of the room. She could have gone with a twin bed and added a vanity or dresser, but the cats slept with her and they needed their space, too.

Bone-weary, Cass considered crashing in what she was wearing, but knew the discomfort of her bra would only wake her up later. Sitting up, she shucked off the shirt, toed off her sneakers and kicked out of her pants. Then sighed blissfully when she unhooked and discarded her bra. In nothing more than a pair of white panties, she scooted under the covers.

“Spook. Nosey.” She felt one then the other leap onto the bed. One settled by her feet, the other against her side. Their soft purring served as the best kind of lullaby. After what could have been only seconds, she felt her body and her mind drift off to sleep.

Cass dreamed she was at a ball. There were women in gowns and men in tuxedos. A champagne fountain emitted tiny bubbles in the center of the ballroom, and tables laden with all sorts of exotic foods surrounded a large dance floor. And she was on that dance floor, moving, spinning and twirling like a little girl playing Cinderella to the beat of an orchestra that played a waltz.

When Cass glanced down at her feet in amazement, knowing that she had never danced like this before, she saw that she was wearing sneakers instead of glass slippers. Black work sneakers coated with the dust of coffee beans and dry milk. She wore her apron and her green Salvation Army coat.

The ballroom now silent, she stopped, aware that everyone was watching her.

Looking to the side, she saw her grandfather on the edge of the dance floor, shaking his head. She couldn’t decipher his expression; she’d never seen it before.

Talk to me, Cassie. Please.

But she didn’t want to talk to him. Her grandfather was synonymous with betrayal. And worse—guilt. She didn’t want to ever have to talk to him again. She turned to leave, but a gasp from the crowd as Malcolm McDonough walked out onto the dance floor stayed her. It was his party.

She wanted to hide, she wanted to run, but her feet were stuck to the floor.

“Who are you? Why are you here?”

Cass opened her mouth to tell him that his sister had invited her, but before she could get the words out, the ballroom was gone and she found herself alone in an empty white room.

This place she knew. Here, she was comfortable. This is where they came to talk to her. Where she welcomed the dead who wanted to speak.

Cass stared at the door and wondered how she could be here, now, in her sleep. Was it possible that she was preparing to make contact? Part of her mind rejected the idea. The definition of a medium was being in the middle. A conduit between two people, one living and one dead. If the dead were trying to come through, then who did they want to talk to?

Her? In the dream, she’d seen her grandfather. But she’d always been able to block his connection. It had been so long since he tried that she thought he might have given up, if such a thing was possible of the dead.

The door to her room slammed open. Cass struggled to brace herself for the energy to hit her, but the image that was forming beyond the door had her gasping for breath. It wasn’t a man or woman.

It was a monster.

With a piglike snout and horns that burst out through its head, it reared back and shouted with a horrible reverberating baritone voice. It was the size of a man, had a powerful chest and stood on two legs. But hooves replaced hands, and fangs replaced teeth. It shouted again and the sound was as crippling as the pain of impact. In the room, Cass dropped to her knees.

When she looked up, she saw it was moving toward the door. The certainty that if that thing reached the entrance it would do what no one else had done and cross into her room filled her with a strange panic.

Struggling against a lethargy that pulled at her, Cass pushed to her feet and forced herself to move across the empty space. She reached for the door and watched as the thing on the other side stepped closer and closer, the whole time shouting indecipherable words at her. Instinctively, she did the only thing that seemed logical. She shut the door in its face.

As she let out a heavy sigh of relief, the white room faded away.

Cass woke up with a start, clutching the covers to her chest.

Someone had brought a monster from the beyond. Who? How?

The questions assaulted her, as did the essence of danger, which meant she needed to stop for a second and regain her mental balance. Using techniques she’d learned through yoga, she took a cleansing breath in and then let it out slowly.

Cautiously, she sat up in bed, wondering what the physical effects of the strange encounter would be. Although the pain was in her head, her body always manifested physical evidence of the contact. A bruise here or there, a bloody nose. This time the energy that had overwhelmed her had been intense. Her mouth hurt. With her tongue, she stroked her bottom lip. It was swollen as if she’d been hit.

Checking for her cats, who routinely slept at her side, Cass noted their absence. It was morning, early morning based on the hazy quality of light outside her single bedroom window, and earlier than she normally would have awoken. Typically, the girls never left the bed until she did. This morning they were gone. She wondered if she’d thrashed about during the strange dream.

“Spook? Nosey?”

No morning meow to signal they had gone in search of the dry stash that she left out in the kitchen. No galloping feet to suggest they had been caught napping on the new futon during what was supposed to be their nightly vigil. The silence was disconcerting. The memory of what she’d dreamed…experienced…made it that much more unsettling.

Cass rolled out of bed. Dismissing her discomfort, she found a robe in her closet and made her way from the bedroom down the short hallway to the living room.

She found her girls in the foyer, sitting silently, motionlessly, in front of the locked door. As she came to stand behind them, their two heads turned, one clockwise, the other counterclockwise, in her direction.

There was a message conveyed in their feline eyes. Cass thought maybe she was being dramatic, but, after what had happened, she didn’t think so. The lingering sense of evil still shook her, and she knew without a doubt that death waited for her on the other side of the door.