Paula Graves: Forbidden Temptation

“You were at the home of a murder victim. Why?”

She tightened her grip on the railing. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The police are knocking on her door right now to see if anyone else is home. You ran when you saw them coming. Why?”

Rather than answer, she turned and started up the steps.

He followed, his footfalls thudding close behind. “Was she your friend?”

She made it to the porch and turned to face him from above. “If you don’t leave now, I will call the police.”

He stopped, gazing up at her, a challenge in his smoky eyes. “Be my guest.”

She turned and went inside, slamming the door behind her. She flipped the dead bolt and rested her head against the heavy wood door, her heart fluttering with panic.

Who was he? Alice’s killer, coming here to taunt her? Whoever had been hiding in the shadows at the end of the side parking lot had seen her.

Had he chosen her as his next victim, after all?

Crossing the foyer on shaky legs, she peered at herself in the antique mirror over the narrow hall table. Her haunted expression gazed back at her, pale and wide-eyed but free of any sort of phantom veil.

Her legs felt boneless. She made it to the living room before her knees buckled. She fell gracelessly onto the sofa, slumping forward, her head in her hands.

If the gray-eyed man was the killer-and, really, why couldn’t he be?-he wasn’t what she’d expected. She’d imagined that a man who could brutalize a woman the way the killer had done must have some mark of evil, a coldness in the gaze or a cruelty around the mouth that would tell her “he’s the one.”

Rationally, she knew it didn’t work that way. The nice man who lived next door and kept his lawn mowed and his house painted could turn out to be the most twisted of killers, and nobody would have a clue. But she should have a clue. For whatever reason, she’d been saddled with this terrifying ability to foresee death. She should damned well be able to spot a killer.

For the past few months she’d been stumbling around in dark, feeling her way through a maze of sharp edges and dizzying pitfalls. As if witnessing Dillon Granville’s suicide had struck her blind, robbed her of the true-love veils and left her with a cruel facsimile, the death veils that now haunted her day and night.

Nearby, her cell phone trilled. She was tempted to ignore it, let the caller leave a message, but she had a business to run, bills to pay. It was probably Melissa with a question about the caterer or the floral arrangements-

Melissa. She had no idea Alice was dead.

By the time she found her cell phone, the ringing had stopped. The number on the display window belonged to her sister, Iris. She was leaving a message.

Rose crossed to the front door as she waited for the message indicator to show up on her cell phone, peering through the narrow glass panel to the right of the door. Rose saw no sign of the man who’d called himself Daniel.

The message light on her cell phone began to blink. She pressed the button, knowing what she’d hear. It had been almost two weeks since she’d last spoken to Iris, and her sister wasn’t used to being an outsider in Rose’s life.

“Rose, are you ignoring my calls?” Iris’s light tone couldn’t hide the dark current of hurt. “Lily’s thinking about hosting Thanksgiving dinner at her house. She said she and Casey are already planning a menu.”

Casey was her sister Lily’s stepdaughter. Lily’s visions had helped reunite Casey with her father, police lieutenant J. McBride. Lily’d fallen in love with the gruff cop in the process, marrying him not long after Casey’s return.

Rose had known Lily would marry McBride from the start. A true-love veil had told her so.

Dashing away tears with her fingertips, she started to dial the phone, resolved to call Iris and commit to being there for Thanksgiving. But another memory stopped her, a flash of shimmery silver slashed with deep crimson, hovering over Alice Donovan’s pretty features.

Iris and Lily knew she’d lost her ability to see true-love veils, but she hadn’t yet told them about the death veils. Even the thought of telling them made her cringe. The death veils made her feel dirty, stained by the miscalculation that had led to Carrie Granville’s death and Dillon’s suicide.

She shut off her phone, fresh tears of despair spilling down her cheeks. She didn’t know how to tell Iris or Lily what was wrong with her. She couldn’t find the words to explain how upside down her life had become since that nightmarish Christmas Eve in Bridey Woods.

A few months ago she’d moved her business and her life to Birmingham, where everyone was a stranger and nobody knew about true-love veils, Carrie and Dillon Granville or the fact that the nice wedding planner in the pretty old Southside house could tell them they were going to die within the next month.

Everything was different now. She was different.

The death veils had built an impenetrable wall between her and the two people she loved most in the world, and she didn’t know how to tear it down.

DANIEL COULD HAVE afforded a top-of-the-line hotel but had opted for an economy motel just outside the city, where he’d be left alone to pore over his files and notes uninterrupted. He’d had another option, of course; he could have gone home. His mother still lived in the same cozy Tudor in Forest Park where he’d spent his childhood.

His brother, Evan, a doctor, lived south of town with his beautiful wife and two children under the age of three. They kept an eye on his mother, made sure she was keeping up with old friends and doctor visits and not sinking into loneliness.

She was lucky to have Evan and his family. God knows what she’d do if Daniel was all she had to depend on.

Guilt tugged at the back of his neck, a familiar feeling. He had a lot to answer for where his family was concerned, and all he’d accomplished over the past decade wasn’t enough to erase the trouble he’d been when he was younger.

He’d stop by to check on her before he left town.

Meanwhile, he had the name of victim number three, thanks to his mystery woman. She’d knocked on the door of apartment 2-D. All he’d had to do was call up the address in a reverse directory and he had the name. Alice Donovan. A quick Internet search had connected her to a flower shop on Twentieth Street. He made a note in his day planner to stop by the place later that afternoon, see if the other employees could help him flesh out who she was and how she might have ended up at the mercy of a killer.

He’d had less luck with the dark-haired woman he’d seen at the pub the night before. He had her address now, but the reverse directory updated once a year. Apparently she’d moved into the house on Mountain Avenue less than a year ago.

He let it go, for now. Steve, his teaching assistant, had e-mailed some new information that needed his attention.

Steve had attached three new articles, two from Tennessee and one from Arkansas, all dated between six and nine months earlier. They filled in a gap between the Colbert County murders and the Texas murders he’d documented last year.

The killer he’d informally dubbed Orion, after the hunter in mythology, seemed to move around a lot. From job to job? Or did his job allow him to travel widely and at will? It was a question Daniel hadn’t yet answered to his own satisfaction. A traveling salesman would make a lot of sense, considering how widespread the murders were. But his crimes also seemed to indicate a certain level of trust on the part of his victims-he couldn’t have killed so many women without being caught if women were wary about him.

Maybe there wasn’t just one killer. Maybe he was all wrong and Orion was a series of different killers with similar M.O.s and signatures. It was possible, wasn’t it?