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She could have told him she was thinking this whole thing a little too good to be true, and trying to figure out a way to find the catch in the entire offer without hurting Frankie’s feelings. Hell, they were just going to hand her a house? Something had to be off. If there wasn’t, she’d be an idiot not to take the job. Still, as she took the grand tour, liking the place more with every room she saw, she knew there had to be a downside.
Later, as they drove away from the house, Jax noticed a shape peering out from beneath the snow right beside the place. “Is that a foundation?” she asked.
Frankie glanced where she was looking and nodded. “That was the wing that had to be torn down. It was never part of the original structure, anyway. It was added on in the seventies—seventy-five, I think. Two-car garage and a game room on the ground floor, extra bedrooms up above.”
“So what happened to it? Why’d it have to go? Shoddy construction work?”
Frankie shook her head. “There was a fire couple of years back. Sad story, really. A woman was killed.” She narrowed her eyes on Jax’s face. “That’s not gonna spook you now, is it?”
“I don’t believe in ghosts, if that’s what you mean.” Right, so what was that little shiver up her spine just now? she wondered. And deep down in her brain an irritating voice said, “Hey, kid, maybe you just found your downside.”
Frankie brightened. “Good. Because I’d like you to spend your two-week vacation at the house,” she said. “You can shadow me on the job, get a real feeling for what it will be like to live and work here in Blackberry. After that, if you decide to take the job, the house is yours, rent free. If you stay five years, you get the deed, as well.”
“That’s an incredibly generous offer, Frankie. Almost too generous.” Jax faced the woman, reminded herself Frankie was something of a kindred spirit, and decided to stop pulling punches. “So what’s the catch?”
Frankie held her eyes, probably to make it clear she had nothing to hide. “No catch. It’s meant to be an offer that’s too good to turn down,” she said. “Of course, the pay isn’t the greatest, but it’s nothing to sneeze at, either. Best of all, Blackberry’s a safe place to be a cop. Nothing bad ever happens here.”
Jax crooked one brow. “Aren’t you forgetting your run-in with Mordecai Young last year? I was here for that, Frankie. Remember?”
Frankie’s smile died. “Not likely to forget. He murdered my best friend.” She sighed, shaking her head. “God rest your soul, Maudie Bickham.” Then she focused on Jax again. “That was a once in a lifetime event. Honestly, Jax, I mean it. Bad things don’t happen in Blackberry.”
Jax nodded, but she thought about the foundation, the fire that had burned a wing of the house. A woman had been killed, Frankie said. Surely that qualified as a “bad thing.” Jax wondered briefly if the pristine purity of Blackberry, Vermont was anything more than a convincing and beautiful illusion.
A nurse brought River back to his room, speaking softly to him all the way. He checked her name tag, but she was neither a “Judy” nor a “Jensen.” He wasn’t really sure why he was checking. When she got him to his room, he looked around—everything here was becoming familiar. The bed. The mesh-lined glass of the single window. The door to the tiny bathroom. He needed to remember what he had to do. That was all he struggled for. To remember what he had to do. Get away. Get out.
“There now, I’m so glad to see you’re feeling better this afternoon,” the nurse said, leading him to the easy chair, expecting him to sit down, he realized, when she paused there, just looking at him. So he did. Then she brought out the pills, as he had known she would. She poured water from a pitcher and handed him the tiny medicine cup that held the tablets.
Remember, he told himself. Remember what to do.
He took the pills, drank the water, swallowed them.
“Let’s see,” she chirped, as if she were speaking to a four-year-old.
River obediently opened his mouth, lifted his tongue, let her assure herself he’d swallowed the pills.
“Good, good for you, Michael.”
He could have told her to call him River. He’d started out correcting everyone here. No one had called him Michael since he was thirteen years old. Ethan’s dad had started it that summer after the rapids had gobbled up his canoe and spit him out onto the shore. But River didn’t care what anyone called him anymore. He wasn’t sure who the hell he was, anyway, so what difference did it make?
“Now if you put in a good night, you’ll get your privileges back tomorrow. You want to go to the community room, don’t you?”
He nodded, tried to force a smile, and just wished she would leave so he could try to make himself cough up the pills before he forgot.
“That’s good,” she said. “You just take it easy for tonight. You’ve had a hard day. Do you need anything before I go?”
“No.”
“All right then. Good night, Michael.”
“’Night.”
He waited until she had closed the door behind her. He heard the lock snap into place.
Focus. The meds—have to get rid of them.
He got to his feet and went into the bathroom, angry that hurrying wasn’t much of an option. He shuffled when he walked. Opening the toilet lid, he leaned over the bowl, stuck a finger down his throat, started to gag.
“Oh, now, Michael. That’s no way to behave yourself, is it?”
He straightened fast, but it made him dizzy, and when he spun around he fell, landing on the seat. Which turned out to be a lucky thing, because the orderly standing over him was swinging a knife at him. River’s clumsiness caused him to duck the blow that would have slit his throat.
He reacted with the instinct of a veteran cop, not a mental patient. It was almost as if he were standing aside, observing, silently amazed that his years of training hadn’t been entirely erased, even by the drugs. His body remembered. It didn’t need his mind’s coherent instructions to move; it just reacted. He drove his head into the man’s belly, shot to his feet as the guy doubled over, clasped his fists together and brought them down as one, hammering the back of the orderly’s head.
The man went down hard, his forehead cracking against the toilet seat on the way. And then he just lay there, not moving.
River stared down at him, shocked. His heart was pounding as hard as the drugs would allow.
The drugs! Dammit.
He grabbed up the knife the downed orderly had been wielding, long instinct refusing to let it lie there beside the man. Then he shoved the limp body out from in front of the toilet, and tried again to vomit. He managed to bring up a little. Enough, he hoped. Prayed. Let it be enough.
The orderly still hadn’t moved. The toilet seat was cracked, River realized, and so was the bowl underneath it. Water was seeping onto the floor.
River started to shake as he knelt beside the man, checking for a pulse. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to find it in his condition even if there had been one. So many drugs floating through his bloodstream—even if he had brought up the most recent batch. Still, he tried to find a pulse. But he didn’t think the man was alive.
He sank onto the floor, rocking back and forth, trying to organize his thoughts. He had to get out of here. He had to. But God, it was so hard to think. Maybe if he’d managed to avoid swallowing his meds for a few days. Maybe then he could have—
Not then. Now. You have to get out of here now.
Somehow, he latched onto a thought, a goal. And slowly, clumsily, he began to remove the fallen man’s clothes. All of them, even the lanyard around his neck with the magnetically stripped key card. The front of the card bore a photo of the orderly. His name had been Kyle. Kyle W. Maples.
It took forever, the better part of an hour, River thought, or maybe longer. But eventually, he was dressed in the orderly’s white uniform, with the hunting knife hidden in a deep pocket and the lanyard around his own neck. The orderly was wearing River’s own powder-blue patient pajamas. They were on him crookedly, the top inside out, but it didn’t matter. He’d done the best he could.
River lifted the dead man’s head by its hair, and grimacing, smashed his face on the toilet seat three times, hard enough to obliterate his features.
When he finished, he managed to empty the remaining contents of his stomach without any trouble at all.
Sighing, breathless, he turned to the sink, washed his face and rinsed his mouth. Then he wet his hands, smoothed down his hair as best he could, wiped the spittle from his chin.
Have to get out. But how? The door’s locked from the outside.
Get a nurse to open it. Get a nurse to come in.
Nodding, River hit the bathroom’s emergency call button.
After a moment, a nurse’s voice came on. “What is it, Mr. Corbett?”
He drew a breath, swallowed hard. He was forgetting something, more than likely. He wasn’t in any condition to plan an escape that would work. But he had to try. “I…I fell. I’m…hurt.”
He released the button and went back into the room, standing against the wall, beside the door. He could hear the nurse’s voice coming over the speaker, asking if he were all right, then telling him she would be there promptly. When the lock on the door clicked, he pressed his back to the wall, so that when the door swung open, it hid him.
The nurse paused in the doorway at the sight of the legs sticking out from the open bathroom door. Then she rushed into the bathroom, and he heard her whisper, “Oh, my God,” as he slipped out of his room and down the hall.
Within seconds, staff members were rushing toward his room, barely noticing one lone orderly in the corridor, moving in the opposite direction. He found the stair door, used the key card that hung from the orderly’s lanyard to unlock it, and took the stairs rather than the elevators. All the way down, all the way to the basement garage, where his footsteps echoed in the cool, exhaust-scented air.
God, it was getting harder and harder to walk. To focus. Maybe some of the meds had dissolved before he threw them up. Or maybe he was just tired. He didn’t know what to do next, and he groped in the orderly’s pockets as if for an answer. His hands closed around a set of keys, and he pulled them out and stared at them.
Car keys? They had a remote device on them. The kind with the button you could press to start your car from a distance, another to unlock the doors and yet another that had an emblem of a horn on it. Frowning, River pressed that button and heard, in the distance, two short beeps.
Blinking, trying to focus, he followed the sound, thanking his lucky stars. After a while, he hit the button again, and again the car’s horn sounded, guiding him in. It was a small Toyota. Yellow. He hit the unlock button and got behind the wheel. And he knew damn well he shouldn’t be driving, but he had no choice.
It was a strain to steer the vehicle. Had another car come along he would have surely hit it, or hit one of the parked cars trying to avoid it. But no other car came, and finally, he was at the gate, where a striped bar blocked his exit, and a little box with a blinking yellow light stood beside him.
He nearly panicked. There was a man inside the small booth, smiling at him and shaking his head, then he pointed at the box and held up a little card.
Right. Put the card in the slot in the box. That’s all. He took the lanyard off his neck, turned to thrust the key card into the box and banged his hand against the closed window. Swallowing his panic, he put the window down, tried again. He put the card into the slot. Pulled it back out. The gate rose. The man in the booth waved at him. River waved back, tried to smile, and struggled to steer the car out of the garage and onto the long strip of pavement that wound away from the Vermont State Mental Hospital.
He pressed the accelerator a little harder and left the place behind.
When he made it to the highway, he hesitated for one brief moment, wondering where on earth he was going to go where they wouldn’t find him. Because eventually, they were going to realize the dead man in his room was not Michael “River” Corbett. Hell, they’d probably call what he’d done back there murder.
That would be two on the list. Three, he reminded himself. He mustn’t forget—couldn’t forget—the baby. Three murders.
It didn’t matter if he was found, if he was caught, if he ended up dead—nothing mattered except learning the truth. He had to know what had happened the night of the fire. He couldn’t have murdered his wife and his child.
For a moment, as he sat there, turn signal blinking incessantly, he closed his eyes, and it came rushing back to him as if it were happening all over again.
He found himself lying on the lawn in the cool green grass, surrounded by searing heat and light and a stench that burned his lungs. Rex was there, licking his face, whining plaintively. And even as he slowly fought to grasp what was happening, he realized he’d had another damn blackout. Yet another episode when he lost minutes, sometimes hours of his life, only to return to himself with no idea of what he’d done during that time. He patted the dog’s head. “Okay, boy, okay. I’m back.”
But this time was different. He’d felt it even before he struggled to sit up, and then leaped to his feet at the sight of his beautiful home going up in flames.
He screamed his wife’s name, lunged forward, only to be clasped by a pair of strong hands that held him back. “Easy, Mr. Corbett. Easy. We’re doing all we can.”
He blinked up at the face of the firefighter, a young man, one he didn’t recognize, though he’d met most of the men in Blackberry by then. Rex was barking at the man, and he told the dog it was all right, to quiet down.
Rex sat obediently, but still whined every now and then.
“Thanks,” the firefighter said, and then the young man’s face changed. It turned ugly as he sniffed. Then he looked at the ground beside River’s feet and his eyes widened.
River looked, too. A gasoline can lay there, toppled onto its side, no cap in place. A high-heeled shoe lay beside it, bright orange in the flashing lights.
It might be Steph’s shoe. He didn’t recognize it, but God knew she had so many—maybe she got out already.
“Just why is it you’ve got gas on you, pal?” the firefighter asked.
River frowned, and then he smelled the gas, as well. Not just from the fumes that open can emitted. The smell of gas was coming from him. From his hands. From his clothes.
“I think you’d better come with me, Mr. Corbett,” the firefighter said. And then he took River by the arm and walked him toward the flashing lights of Frankie Parker’s police car, a black-and-white SUV.
A horn blew, jerking River from his muddled thoughts and gap-riddled memories. He looked into the rearview mirror and saw a car behind him, the driver waiting impatiently to get on the highway. Sighing, he flicked his own signal light off again, opting instead to take back roads. Less chance of killing someone. God knew he didn’t need any more blood on his hands. And he knew the way. He knew the back roads of Vermont so well he could find his way even from within the thick chemical clouds in his brain.
If he’d murdered Stephanie, he deserved whatever he got. But dammit, he had to know. He had to know the truth. And there was only one place where he would find it.
He had to go back home to Blackberry.
That was where all the secrets were buried.
2
“Stop!”
Dawn shouted the word and Bryan hit the brakes of her Jeep. It skidded a little on the road, then came to a stop right in front of the empty, beautifully painted Victorian house that sat alone a few yards away.
“What?” Bryan asked. “What’s wrong?”
He knew something was. Something had been wrong for months now, and she was running out of ways to deny it, or avoid it, or block it out.
She swallowed hard, tried not to notice the worry in his dark eyes, or the way his hair had fallen over his forehead, making her want to smooth it away. He hadn’t cut it since they’d started college. She liked it this way.
“Dawn?”
“There was something in the road….” She watched his face, knowing immediately there had been nothing there. Nothing he had been able to see, anyway. Certainly not a woman in a white nightgown, holding a baby in her arms. Certainly not that.
Closing her eyes, she shook her head. “Sorry, Bry. I—it was just a squirrel. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
He sighed in relief, seemed to relax visibly. “You’re wound awfully tight lately, Dawn. I’m really glad you’re gonna spend Thanksgiving break at the inn with Beth and my dad.” He smiled. “And me.”
She shrugged and chose to ignore the final part of his comment. He knew she needed to cool things off between them. He didn’t know why—pretended to accept her decision and be fine with it. But he wasn’t fine. She’d hurt him and she knew that. If there were any other way—
“You sure you’re okay?” he asked.
“Yeah. I get a little torn. It’s tough, trying to find time to spend with both families—breaks from college are few and far between.”
He nodded. “At least your adoptive mom is cool with you spending time with your birth mom,” he put in. “That helps.”
It also helped that her birth mother, Beth, was married to Bryan’s dad, Joshua. Or it would have helped, if she weren’t trying so hard to put some distance between herself and Bry—for his sake, mostly.
“Let’s get going. Beth and Josh are waiting for us,” she said.
Bryan set the Jeep into motion. But as they drove away, Dawn couldn’t stop her gaze from straying back to that dark, lonely house. And as she did, she saw the woman again, a filmy, nearly transparent shape in the night. Not real, Dawn knew. She wasn’t real at all. None of them were.
It’s not going to work, you know, she thought. You’re never going to make it work, Father. Never.
The best restaurant in Blackberry, the Sugar Tree, was a two-story log cabin with picture windows that looked out on to a rolling, snow-covered lawn. In the summer, the hostess told Jax, there were glorious flowers and blossoming trees, a tiny pond with a fountain in the center, and outdoor tables. But this time of year, all the fun was indoors. The second floor was loft-style on all four sides, leaving the center of the place open clear to the rafters. It was a hell of a place.
The hostess seated them at a table near the huge stone fireplace with a window nearby, leaned closer and said, “Welcome back to Blackberry, Lieutenant Jackson. We sure hope you like it enough to stay.” She sent her a wink. “Your waitress will be right over to take your drink orders. Enjoy your dinner.”
Jax lifted her brows and sent a look at the three coconspirators who sat around the circular table. “So, does the whole town know what I’m doing here?”
