Joanna Wayne - Behind The Veil

Becca blinked and tried to clear her eyes, but a couple of salty tears mingled with her fatigue, and she pushed away from the viewer. She’d had all she could take for one day. She glanced at her watch. If she hurried, she’d have enough time to locate and check out a couple of books that had been written on the history of witchcraft in Moriah’s Landing before she met Claire for dinner.

Bedtime reading sure to produce nightmares. So much for sleep.

THE AFTERNOON IN THE LAB had been totally unproductive, and David had given up on his current experiment after a couple of hours. He’d taken the secret passage that led from the library to an ancient world of darkness, always wondering when he did why he frequently found that world of black chambers studded with skulls and bones more welcoming than the one he lived in.

He’d stayed there the rest of the afternoon, perusing the mountain of meticulously kept notes that had once belonged to Dr. Leland Manning. Dr. Manning had been the major influencing factor in David’s decision to go into medical research. Now the man was in prison for conducting illegal and unethical experiments in genetic engineering. It seemed there was no explaining how far a man could go once he passed the line from reason to madness.

David exited the secret door and closed it behind him, leaving only a wall of bookcases where the opening had been. He crossed the library and started down the long hallway, the echoes of his footsteps a lonesome sound that always reminded him how different it would have been in the Bluffs had Tasha lived. He stopped at the door to the bedroom they would have shared.

Reaching into his pocket, he took out the key ring and fit the key into the lock, then hesitated as thoughts of Becca haunted his mind. So different from Tasha. Far less innocent. Spunky, instead. Determined. Direct. Full, rounded breasts. Sensuous, swaying hips.

His throat constricted, and he dropped his hand from the door. The room belonged to the past, to a love as pure as the white roses he scattered on the cliffs every week, and he wouldn’t defile it with the thoughts running roughshod through his mind now.

He hurried down the hall and descended the steps, not stopping until he reached the back door. Pushing through it, he breathed deeply, letting a rush of brisk, damp air penetrate to the deepest cells of his lungs.

“Is something the matter, sir?”

He turned at the sound of Richard’s voice behind him. “No. Should there be?”

“No, sir.”

David read the doubt in his butler’s eyes. It was uncanny the way the man read his moods—uncanny and at times extremely disconcerting. Not that David had ever considered himself a complex person. He simply did what he had to do in order to survive, a skill he’d been forced to learn at a very young age.

Reaching into his pocket, Richard retrieved a white handkerchief and dusted the seats of a couple of wrought-iron garden chairs. “Why don’t you have a seat, sir? Let me fix you a martini.”

“Not yet. I just want to watch the sun set.”

Richard settled in one of the chairs and undid the top button of his shirt. After five, he tended to be slightly more relaxed, though David had never requested or understood his need to be more formal during the day. It wasn’t as if they ever had unexpected guests drop by for tea.

“I thought the day went well,” Richard said. “I like Becca Smith. What do you think of her?”

The question caught him off guard. Not because he hadn’t considered it, but because he had considered it so frequently since the first night he’d spotted her leaving her shop, head high, unafraid even when she’d noticed him in the shadows. She’d looked him in the eye and met his gaze.

The moment lasted briefly, yet something strange and incomprehensible had passed between them. He’d felt it in every part of his body, and the unfamiliar feelings had left him so shaken, he’d missed his turn on the way home. Driving as if in a trance, he’d wound up five miles past the winding road to the Bluffs.

Now, weeks later, he still couldn’t get her out of his mind. In five years, no woman had elicited any interest for him. But with one look, Becca had cast a spell on him that he seemed powerless to break.

“She’s open and direct and she has lots of ideas for the Bluffs,” Richard said. “I think she’ll do an excellent job.”

“I don’t see any reason why she wouldn’t.” David stared at the horizon, at the sprays of orange-and-gold bands that painted the undersides of the puffy clouds. “I hope the two of you will be able to work together agreeably on this project.”

“I think she’d prefer working with you.”

“I doubt that very seriously,” David said, finally turning back to face his butler. “Besides, I don’t deal well with people anymore.”

“You deal well with me.” Richard crossed one leg over the other and leaned back in his chair. “I think you’d do fine with her. You’ll never know unless you give yourself a chance.”

David touched his fingers to the side of his face, bitterly aware of the effect it had had on the nurses in the hospital when they’d been forced to change the dressings on his wounds and deal with the countless skin grafts. And his face, as disfigured as it was, was no match for the blotchy red patches of skin that covered his stomach like some infectious disease. “My chances ran out five years ago, Richard. I’ve learned to live with the fact.”

“Have you?”

“Yes.” At least his mind had accepted the truth. Until Becca came along, his heart and body had, as well. Surely, in time, it would be that way again.

The wind picked up, tearing dry leaves from the branches of the trees and sending them flying in an avalanche of golds, reds and browns. “Fall has definitely arrived,” David said, past ready to change the subject.

“Yes. Time for McFarland Leary to rise from the grave.”

“The guy has been buried since the late 1600s. He’s probably already come back—as a handful of dust.”

Richard rubbed his right hand along his jaw. “Not if the locals are right. They say he was consort to a witch. When she caught him cheating on her with a mortal woman, she damned him to an eternity of torment. Not only that, but he still seeks revenge on Moriah’s Landing for claiming he was a warlock and sentencing him to death.”

“I know. I’ve heard it all since I was a child. He supposedly comes back every five years and kills a young woman or two, to exact revenge on the town and in hopes the sacrifice will appease the witch so that she’ll set him free. Mostly it’s a tale for the tourists, but I’m sure there are some poor superstitious folk in the town who actually believe that nonsense, even though the facts don’t bear it out. There have been no unsolved murders in town in twenty years.”

“There’s already talk in town that it was Leary who killed the woman whose body was found on Old Mountain Road last night.”

“How did you hear that?”

“I stopped at the grocers when I took Becca back to Threads.”

“And while they’re worried about a ghost, some dangerous lunatic is running around free.”

“So is the man who abducted and tortured Claire Cavendish five years ago.”

“Surely you haven’t succumbed to ghost tales.”

“No. I don’t believe Leary’s responsible for any of those horrors, but there’s something evil and angry in Moriah’s Landing. I can never put my finger on it, but it’s always present, as if the heart of the town is beating inside a madman.”

David had no argument for that. The evil was in the black heart of a killer who’d destroyed his world. The anger and the madness lived inside him. He took one last look as the rays from the setting sun glanced off the rocks along the cliff. “I think I’ll go for a walk,” he said, standing and stretching his weak leg.