AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“This isn’t working. You know it’s not working, but you won’t change. And you’re keeping secrets that are dangerous to us,” she accused.
“I’m not keeping secrets,” Catherine replied, surprised.
Cassandra’s blue eyes looked toward Catherine, but they weren’t seeing anything in the room. “There’s something about Lillibeth. . . .”
Catherine shut her brain down, focusing on a black wall inside her head. She didn’t want to go there. Not now. Not ever. And she couldn’t have Cassandra seeing things she shouldn’t. This was new and unsettling.
“You blame Mary for what happened to her. . . .”
“Who is he? Who’s coming?” Catherine demanded. “The one from the bones?” Then, “What did you tell Detective Dunbar?”
Cassandra stared at her but didn’t answer.
“Cassandra, I need to know.”
“Call me Maggie,” she said, suddenly standing erect. With a cold look that Catherine had never seen before on her expressive face, she stalked out of the room and away.
For a moment Catherine just stood there. She didn’t know how much of what Cassandra had predicted was the truth and how much was what she simply wanted Catherine to believe. Hearing the squeak of Lillibeth’s wheelchair, she turned her head, and moments later the girl appeared in the aperture between the kitchen and the great room.
In a dark blue dress, her hair in a golden plait down her back, her blue eyes full of questions, Lillibeth asked, “What’s wrong?”
Cassandra’s words echoed in Catherine’s mind. You blame Mary for what happened to her . . . . “Nothing’s wrong.”
“What did Cassandra see?”
“She said that Ravinia wants to leave.”
Lillibeth gave her a look. “Everybody knows that. What else did she see?”
“Nothing specific.”
Feeling a rising despair, Catherine fled upstairs to her room, but once inside she turned around and reversed her steps, heading down the gallery and past the girls’ rooms to the steep, narrow stairs that led to the third floor. She held her skirts in one hand and the rail with the other, climbing the full flight and feeling a little out of breath at the upper hallway. At the far end of that hallway was a set of double doors that led to a suite that was never opened. Mary’s suite, directly over Catherine’s head. No one ever went inside; Catherine hadn’t allowed it since Mary’s last lover staggered out after learning of Mary’s death and half fell, half ran down the stairs and outside and Catherine had locked the gates after him.
Now, however, she pulled a ring of keys from her dress pocket, unlocked the right-side door, and pushed it open. The shriek from its rusted hinges made Catherine jump in spite of herself. Quickly, she closed the door behind her and turned the lock from the inside. Then she faced the musty, unused room, leaning against the door she’d just locked for support.
A shag area rug in bright orange lay on the fir plank floor. A four-poster bed with a gold lamé bedspread stood in the center of the room, while wisps of silvery netting feathered from the canopy, waving in the breeze that Catherine’s entrance had created. It all looked fragile and weak; it would probably go poof and disintegrate if she touched it. She could count the times she’d entered this room since she and Earl had drugged Mary and taken her to Echo Island. She never liked entering it even when her sister was alive, especially during the heyday of Mary’s sexual activity, though there had been that time she’d sneaked in and rolled like a cat in heat upon the bed with the only man she’d ever loved.
Pressing her hands to her cheeks at the memory, Catherine walked quickly to the mirrored bureau, opening every drawer, searching inside and behind and beneath. Nothing. She then moved on to the vanity, with no success, and finally reached under armchairs and peered beneath the rug, though there was clearly nothing there. On her hands and knees she fumbled around under the bed, but all she disturbed were spiderwebs and dust bunnies, which made her sneeze six times in a row.
On her feet again, she walked to the closet, which was fairly small given the dimensions of the oversize room. She dug through shelves and folded clothes and hatboxes and kicked through the shoes lying haphazardly on the floor. She knew what she was looking for. A box. The matching one to the tooled-leather one where she’d kept the knife. She and Mary had each been given a keepsake box by their mother, and Catherine had kept hers in pride of place on her bedroom vanity while she was growing up. But Mary had squirreled hers away, and Catherine knew there were secrets inside, secrets that she now wanted to know more than anything. All these years . . . all these years! . . . and it suddenly felt imperative that she find the box and learn as much about Mary as she could. Both she and her sister had kept journals, though most of Catherine’s were full of the mundane moments in her life, the dreams of an adolescent girl who was shy around boys; while Mary, whose gift had driven her down a different path, had kept her journal secret and hidden away, and long after Catherine had given up on hers, Mary had kept writing. Once Catherine had come upon her, and Mary had screamed at her to get out, but not before Catherine had seen the words sexual power, and she’d known her sister was writing about her own dark desires.
For the first time ever Catherine wanted that journal. She was no longer afraid to see what it contained and felt with certainty—as if Cassandra had told her herself—that there would be something inside that would lead her to find out who had come to Mary at Echo Island. One of her lovers? One of her sons? One of her daughters . . . ? No, Mary’s only daughters outside of Becca and Lorelei were part of Siren Song, and none of them were capable of taking a boat through the treacherous waters to Echo Island.
Some stranger, then? Someone who knew how to navigate about the island? It truly wasn’t all that hard if you knew what to do and you had the strength to do it. Both were a necessity to avoid having your craft thrown against the rocks. At least that was Earl’s contention, and Catherine believed it. The foolish who set off for Echo ended up in real trouble, their boats smashed to smithereens, their lives at risk. There had been enough deaths to keep most people from bothering with the island, but there were always a few who took a gamble. The last attempt had been made by young men fueled by alcohol and the desire to prove something to their friends—a bad combination. All of them had failed spectacularly.
But someone had made it ashore. Despite what she’d told young Detective Dunbar, Catherine knew Mary had not committed suicide. Her narcissistic sister would never take her own life. It was just a question of who had.
He came from bones.
Shivering, she pushed that thought aside, even while she determined she was going to have to go through the adoption pages, which were undoubtedly with Mary’s journal, and find out what had happened to the boys.
CHAPTER 9
The rain slashed against his office window as the wind rattled the panes and whooshed around the corners of the building. Hale looked up and checked the clock. He’d done the same thing every minute for the last ten. It was almost two o’clock.
As if she’d heard the thoughts crossing his mind, he heard voices in the outside mezzanine and knew Savannah had arrived. Pushing back from his desk, he rose to his feet and smoothed an imaginary tie, as he wore an open-throated gray shirt and darker gray Dockers, decent enough for the office but sturdy enough when he went to the construction sites.
He opened his office door and saw Ella just finish
