Jeffery Deaver - Praying for Sleep

“Oh, shit,” Robert muttered.

“Don’t worry.”

“What?”

“Oh, don’t take it so seriously. Every teenager gets a shock at some point. I’ll talk to her.”

“She’s just a kid.”

“Forget her,” Portia said offhandedly, then whispered, “Come on over here.”

“She’s going-”

“She’s not going to say anything. Hmm, what’s that? You’re still interested. I can tell.”

“Jesus, what if she tells Lis?”

“Come on,” she urged breathlessly. “Don’t stop now. Fuck me!”

“I think we ought to get back.”

Portia dropped to her knees and pulled his shirt away, taking him deep into her mouth.

“No,” Robert whispered.

He was standing, head back, eyes closed, shuddering uncontrollably and gasping when Lis stepped into the clearing.

Claire must have run into her almost immediately and Lis had either learned, or deduced, what had happened. She stood above the half-naked couple and stared down at them. “Portia!” she raged. “How could you?” Her expression of horror matched Robert’s perfectly.

The young woman stood and wiped her face with her bra. She turned to face her sister and with detachment watched Lis’s throat grow remarkably red as the tendons rose and her jaw quivered. Robert pulled up his running shorts, looking around again for his shirt. He seemed incapable of speaking. Portia refused to act like a caught schoolgirl. “How could you?” Lis gripped her arm but Portia stepped away abruptly. Meeting her sister’s furious gaze she dressed slowly then, saying nothing, left Lis and Robert in the clearing.

Portia walked back to the beach, where Dorothy was starting to pack up; the temperature had dropped and it was clearly going to rain. She looked at Portia and seemed to sense something was wrong but said nothing. The wind picked up and the two women hurried to gather up the picnic baskets and blankets, carting them to the truck. They made one more trip back to the beach, looking for their companions. Then the downpour began.

Moments later sirens filled the park and police and medics arrived. It was in a rain-drenched intersection of two canyons that Portia met her sister, red-eyed and muddy and disheveled, looking like a madwoman, being led by two tall rangers out of a flooded arroyo.

Portia had stepped toward her. “Lis! What-?”

The slap was oddly quiet but so powerful it brought Portia down on one knee. She cried out in pain and shock. Neither woman moved, and Lis’s hand remained frozen in the air as they stared at each other for a long moment. A shocked ranger helped Portia to her feet and explained about the deaths.

“Oh, no!” Portia cried.

“Oh, no!” Lis mimicked with bitter scorn then stepped forward, pushed the ranger aside and put her mouth close to her sister’s ear. In a rasping whisper she said, “ You killed that girl, you fucking whore.”

Portia faced her sister. Her eyes grew as cold as the wet rocks around them. “Goodbye, Lis.”

And goodbye it had been. Apart from a few brief, stilted phone conversations, those words had been virtually the last communication between the sisters until tonight.

Indian Leap. It was the first thing in Portia’s mind when Lis had invited her here this evening-just as it had reared in her thoughts when the subject of the nursery was raised, and, for that matter, every time Portia had thought of moving back to Ridgeton, which-though she’d never confess it to Lis-she’d considered frequently in the past few years.

Indian Leap…

Oh, Lis, Portia thought, don’t you see? That’s what dooms the L’Auberget sisters, and always will. Not the tragedy, not the deaths, not the bitter words or the months of silence afterwards, but the past that led us to that pine bed, the past that’s certain to keep leading us to places just as terrible again and again and again.

The past, with all its spirits of the dead.

Portia now looked at her sister, ten feet away, as Lis put aside the shovel and waded toward the front seat of the car.

The sisters’ eyes met.

Lis frowned, troubled by Portia’s expression. “What is it?” she asked.

But just then a low whistle squealed from the car’s grille. The engine choked, and kicked hard several times as the fan blade slapped water. Then with a shudder it died, leaving the night filled only with the sounds of the wind, the rain and the lilting music of a clever baroque composer.

“Well, I didn’t go for help because it’s over a half mile to the neighbors and if you’ve listened to the radio you know what kind of storm it’s supposed to be. I mean, doesn’t it make sense?”

The words fired from the pale mouth of the petite blonde. She’d stopped crying but was pouring down brandy from a dusty bottle in a medicinal way. “And anyway,” she said to Trenton Heck, “he told me not to and if you ever saw him you’d do what he told you. Oh, my Lord. All I kept thinking was, Lucky me, lucky me, I had communion today.”

Owen Atcheson returned from the side yard to the house’s tiny living room, where Heck and the fragile woman stood.

“Lucky me,” she whispered and tossed down a belt of liquor. She started to cry again.

“He just pulled one wire out,” Owen reported. He lifted the receiver. “I got it working.”

“He’s got my car. It’s a beige Subaru station wagon. An ’89. Apologized about ten times. ‘I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry…’ Phew.” Her tears stopped. “That’s what I mean when I call him strange. Well, you can imagine. Asked me for the keys and of course I gave them. Then off he went, squatting behind the wheel. Missed the drive completely but found the road. Guess I’ll write that vehicle off.”

Owen grimaced. “If we’d gone that way he would’ve come right to us.”

Heck looked again at the tiny skull, resting on the paper towel in which she’d handed it to him, unwilling to touch the bone itself.

“Well,” the woman continued, “you can find him on 315.”

“How’s that?”

“He’s going to Boyleston. Route 315.”

“He said that?”

“He asked me about the nearest town with a train station. I told him Boyleston. He asked me how to get there. And then asked me for fifty dollars for a train ticket. I gave it to him. And a little more.”

Heck stared at the phone for a minute. Can’t keep it a secret anymore, he thought. Not with Hrubek killing one woman and terrorizing another. He sighed and sucked air through bent teeth. Very conspicuous in Heck’s mind now was the thought that if he’d called Haversham like he’d thought of doing-after figuring out that Hrubek was heading west-they might’ve caught him before he got to that house in Cloverton. All law enforcers, Heck too, had inventories of times when their mistakes and failings had gotten other people hurt-times that occasionally returned hard and kept them from sleeping, and sometimes did worse than that. Though he was removed from the sorrow at the moment, he supposed that that woman’s death would be the most prominent in his personal store of those events, and he could only guess how bad it would later come back to him.

Now though he wanted only one thing-to see this fellow caught-and he snatched up the receiver. He placed a call to the local sheriff and reported Hrubek’s theft of the Subaru and where he seemed to be going. He turned to the woman. “Sheriff says he’ll send somebody out to the house to take you to a friend’s or relative’s, ma’am. If you want.”

“Tell him yes, please.”

Heck relayed this information to the sheriff. When he hung up, Owen took the phone and called the Marsden Inn and was surprised to find that Lis and Portia still hadn’t checked in. Frowning, he called the house. Lis picked up on the third ring.