Joanna Wayne - Behind The Veil

Stopping to admire the finished creation in front of the full-length mirror, she could almost imagine herself attending a ball in old England. It would be the perfect dress for the Fall Extravaganza. On that night the town of Moriah’s Landing would be transported back in time, to the way it had been the year it was first inhabited. The night would be magical, a celebration that would hopefully dispel the sense of danger and fear that prevailed every fifth year when McFarland Leary was said to rise from the grave. If everything went as planned, tourists from miles around would flock into the narrow streets to celebrate the town’s three hundred and fiftieth anniversary year in a spectacular evening of dancing, vignettes, music and food.

If all went as planned, they would return to their homes when the festivities were over—alive.

The dress slipped through Becca’s fingers, and she barely caught it before it fell to the floor of the shop. The uneasy feeling that had lurked just beneath her consciousness all day had leapt to the forefront, icy and onerous and threatening to squeeze the life from her lungs.

She hated these moments when she seemed to slip into the depths of some world far beyond the one she knew as a simple seamstress. She never told anyone about these experiences, the same way she never admitted that she was anyone but Rebecca Smith, a young woman with simple values and meager expectations. It was better this way, made her less of an oddity, gave people no reason to pity her or to speculate about her past.

She laid the dress across the worktable, then walked to the front window and stared into the grayness of twilight. The streetlights had come on along Main Street, tiny globes of illumination, blurred and dulled by the thick fog that coated the air. A black car pulled up in front of the liquor store next door and a tall man in a pair of worn jeans and a windbreaker climbed from the passenger side of the car and sauntered to the entrance. He nodded and waved when he caught sight of her watching through the window. She waved back.

Moriah’s Landing was ordinarily a quiet, safe town in spite of the popular tales of witches and warlocks and ghosts who rose from their graves to kill innocent women. She didn’t believe in such nonsense, anyway. Humans committed murders, and though the town of Moriah’s Landing had experienced its share of those, there was no reason to believe that evil still lurked in dark graveyards or strolled the rocky beaches at midnight.

No reason at all, unless you believed the legend of McFarland Leary, a man who’d been dead for centuries and still rose from the grave every five years to torture and kill innocent females.

Or if you bought into the stories that circulated about the monster on the hill. She closed her eyes, and the image of a lean, brooding man with swarthy skin and dark, piercing eyes walked through her mind. Thick hair fell across his forehead and hung past his ears, only half hiding the nasty scar that crawled down the right side of his face.

Dr. David Bryson. Living in the Bluffs, his formidable castle of stone and menacing turrets, guarded by hideous, lifeless gargoyles that bared rusted teeth and sharpened claws.

When she thought of danger and foreboding, his was always the face that appeared in her mind, and still the man intrigued her. She’d asked questions of all her friends, listened to the talk about him, watched for him, half hoping he’d materialize from the shadows when she walked home by herself after dark.

She’d spotted him one night just as she’d finished turning the key to lock the shop door. He’d been standing at the corner near her shop. She’d looked him straight in the eye, studied his features in the faint glow of the streetlight. Her heart had beat erratically, but she’d stood as if frozen to the spot, mesmerized, drawn to the man half the town claimed was a mad murderer.

The jangling of the telephone jolted her from her thoughts. She took a deep breath and forced the image of Dr. Bryson from her mind before she answered. “Threads. How may I help you?”

“Becca, it’s Larry Gayle. Some of us are heading over to the carnival tonight. Want to join us?”

She hesitated. “The weatherman is predicting thundershowers.”

“Aw, come on. It’s Friday night. Kat and Jonah are going, and if it rains, we’ll duck into one of the bars along the wharf.”

“In that case, count me in.” She hadn’t seen Kat nearly enough since her friend had fallen in love with and married Jonah. Jonah was with the FBI and Kat was one of the toughest private investigators around. Still, it had been a rough year for Kat. After twenty years, the man who’d killed her mother in Kat’s presence had finally been arrested. The first of the infamous Moriah’s Landing murders of twenty years ago had been solved. The last three had not.

“What time?” she asked, pushing thoughts of the murder aside.

“I’ll pick you up about seven,” Larry answered, “unless that’s too soon.”

Her gaze rose to the clock over the door. It was already a quarter after six, but it was only a ten-minute walk to the room she rented from the Cavendish family, and it wouldn’t take long to slip into a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt. “I’ll be ready.”

A few minutes later, she’d straightened her work area, hung her dress on a hanger so that the wrinkles could fall out and turned out the lights in the shop. Pulling the door closed, she fit the key into the lock and turned it, checking before she walked away to make sure the lock had caught and held.

There was little breaking and entering in Moriah’s Landing, but it didn’t hurt to be cautious, especially since she only managed the shop for the owner. One day she hoped to buy it, but for now she was content to have a job she enjoyed.

Picking up her pace, she turned off of Main Street and onto a narrow unlit side street. It was the one secluded area on her short walk home. It didn’t really frighten her, but still she always picked up her pace when she started down it. The lots on either side of the road belonged to one of the Pierces, but they had never built here.

The wind blew in from the ocean, sharp and damp and prickling her flesh. Not a great night for a carnival, but she was relieved not to be staying home tonight. The chilling presence that had haunted her all day began to swell into an almost palpable sensation as she rounded the last corner and walked beneath a canopy of tree branches and shadows.

If she believed in witchcraft, she would fear she was one, and that the chill inside her predicted the imminence of danger or death.

If she believed. But she didn’t.

DAVID BRYSON WALKED the rocky path along the edge of the craggy cliffs and stared down at the swirling water as it crashed against the treacherous rocks below. Once the sight had filled him with awe and excitement. Now it was only a bitter reminder that it was the place where he had lost his world.

Some claimed he’d also lost his sanity that horrible night five years ago, and perhaps they were the ones who understood best.

Instinctively, his hand moved to his face, and his fingers traced the jagged lines of the scar that ran from his right temple to below his ear. The facial disfiguration, his conspicuous limp and the hideous patches of coarse, red skin on his chest and stomach were always with him to remind him of the explosion.

Still, the plastic surgeons had worked wonders, rebuilt his face, transformed him from something so ghastly he couldn’t bear to pass in front of a mirror to something merely hideous. The doctors had saved his life even while he’d begged them for the release of death. To this day, he’d never fully forgiven them.

“Dr. Bryson.”

He turned at the sound of his name and located the lone figure standing behind the Bluffs. The man was no more than an outline in the deepening darkness, but David didn’t have to see his butler to recognize him. He knew the voice well.