Thursday, 5:45 a.m.
Until last night, nobody had ever read Vonnie Jackson a bedtime story.
Though she’d lived for seventeen years, she couldn’t remember a single fairy tale, or one kiss on the cheek before being tucked in. Her mother had always been well into her first joint, her second bottle, or her third John of the evening long before Vonnie fell asleep. Bedtime meant hiding under the bed or burrowing beneath a pile of dirty clothes in the closet, praying Mama didn’t pass out, leaving one of her customers to go prowling around in their tiny apartment.
They definitely hadn’t wanted to read to her. Nobody had.
So to finally hear innocent childhood tales from a psychotic monster who intended to kill her was almost as unfair as her ending up in this nightmare to begin with.
“Are you listening to me little Yvonne?” That voice was laced with so much evil it seemed to be an almost living, breathing thing, as real as the stained, scratchy mattress on which she lay or the metal chains holding her down. Her captor’s voice grew almost mischievous as he added, “Did you fall asleep?”
The man who’d kidnapped her always spoke in a thick, falsetto whisper, his tone happily wicked. Occasionally though, he got angry and dropped the act. Once or twice, when he’d spoken in his normal, deep voice, she’d feel a hint of familiarity flit across her mind, as if she’d heard him before, recently. She could never focus in on it, though, never place the memory.
Maybe she was crazy. Maybe she just recognized the twisted, full-of-rage quality that made men like him tick. She’d seen that kind all her life.
“Sweet little girl, so weary, aren’t you? I suppose you fell asleep, hmm?”
She shook her head. Even that slight movement sent knives of pain stabbing through her skull and into her brain. He’d beaten her badly.
“You must want to go to sleep, though.”
“No,” she whispered. “Go on. Don’t stop. I like it.”
Oh, no, she didn’t want to fall asleep. It was while she slept that he came in and did things to her. She’d awakened once to find him touching her thighs. Though his face had been masked—one of those creepy, maniacally smiling “King” masks from the fast-food commercials—he’d scurried out as soon as he realized she was fully conscious.
Maybe he’s afraid you’ll escape and be able to identify him.
Yeah. And maybe a pack of wolves would rip him to pieces in his own backyard tomorrow. But she doubted it.
“I don’t know, we’ve read quite a lot. I’m worried you might have nightmares—did you, last night, after hearing about the little piggies who got turned into bacon and sausage patties?”
She suspected the story didn’t end like that. If it did, parents who called it a bedtime story had a lot to answer for.
Vonnie swallowed, her thick, dry tongue almost choking her. “I’ll be fine.”
The words echoed in the damp, musty basement room in which she’d been imprisoned for . . . how long had it been since the night he’d grabbed her? And when had that been? Think!
Monday. He’d attacked her while she walked the long way home from a nighttime event at her new high school, to which she’d just transferred since they offered more AP classes than her old one. Mistake number one. Her old school had been a block from her crappy home.
“Well, if you’re sure, I suppose we can read a little more about those naughty children.”
Knowing he expected it, she managed to murmur, “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, dear. I’m glad you like this story. It’s no wonder their parents didn’t want Hansel and Gretel—awful, spoiled brats, weren’t they? Most parents hate their children anyway, but these two were especially bad.”
If it wouldn’t have caused her so much pain, she might have laughed. He hadn’t said anything she didn’t know. Her mama had made that clear every day of her life.
Most parents would be proud of their kid for doing well in school, but not hers. She’d said Vonnie had been stupid to transfer. Stupid and uppity, thinking getting into the National Honor Society mattered a damn when she lived on the corner of Whoreville and Main.
Normally she’d have been at work serving chicken wings by that time of night on a Monday. But no, she’d had to go to the meeting, had to act like she was no different from the smart, rich, white kids. She’d been cocky, insisting it was no big deal to walk home alone after dark through an area of the Boro where no smart girl ever walked alone. Not these days, not with the Ghoul on the loose and more girls missing from her neighborhood every month.
The Ghoul—the paper had at first said he was real, then that he wasn’t. Vonnie knew the truth. He was real, all right. She just wasn’t going to live long enough to tell anybody.
“Hansel and Gretel didn’t know that the starving birdies of the forest were eating up their bread-crumb trail, waiting for the children to die so they could poke out their eyes,” he read, not noticing her inattention. “It was dark and their time to find their way home was running out.”
Time. It had ceased to have any meaning at all. Minutes and hours had switched places: minutes lengthened by pain, hours shortened by terror of what would happen every time he came back from wherever it was he went when he left her alone in the damp, cold dark.
“Did you hear me?” he snapped sharply.
She swallowed. “Yeah.”
“Good. Don’t you fall asleep. I’m reading this for you, not for myself, you know.”
She suspected he wasn’t reading at all, merely Wes Craven-ing up a real bedtime story.
“Now, wasn’t it lucky that they were able to find shelter?” he added. “Mm, a house made of gingerbread and gumdrops and licorice. Imagine that. Do you like sweets, pretty girl? Want me to bring you some candy? Sticky, gooey candy?”
She swallowed, the very thought of it making her sick. Not that she wasn’t hungry. But the foul-smelling air surrounding her, filling her lungs and her nose, made the thought of food nauseating. She didn’t like to think about the other smells down here—the rank of rotten meat, the stench of human waste. And something metallic and earthy.
Blood. Had to be, judging by the rust-colored stains on the cement floor.
The stains had been the first things she’d noticed when she regained consciousness after she’d been kidnapped. This guy had killed before, and he would kill her. Vonnie didn’t try to comfort herself with thoughts of escape. It did no good to think about the last time she’d gotten herself out a horrid situation—which she’d been put in by her own mama’s greed.
Don’t go there, girl. Almost as much darkness down that path.
“Well, maybe the candy shouldn’t be too sticky,” he said, tutting a little. “I know your jaw must hurt from when you made me hit you. Maybe I could chew it up, make it nice and soft for you, then spit it into your mouth just like a mama bird with her little chick.”
Though she hadn’t thought there was anything left in her stomach, she heaved a mouthful of vomit. She forced herself to gulp it down. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing his mere words had made her sick. Giving the monster ideas to try on her when she finally did pass out was a stupid thing to do, and Vonnie Jackson might be beaten and chained, she might be poor and the daughter of a drug-addicted prostitute, but nobody had ever called her stupid.
“Why was she doing it, do you suppose? Why did she want them to eat all those sweets?” When she didn’t reply, his singsong voice rose to a screech. “Answer me!”
“Fattening them up,” she said, the words riding a puff of air across her swollen lips.
“Yes! You’re so clever; that’s what they say about you. Such a smart, clever girl who was going to escape her pathetic childhood.” He tsked, sounding almost sad. “And you nearly made it, didn’t you, Yvonne? Oh, you came so close! High school graduation next May, then off you’d go to college on one of your scholarships, never to see your slut mother or the hovel you call home again. All that work, all that effort. Wasted.”
She didn’t answer, didn’t flinch, not wanting him to see that his words hurt her. Getting out was all Vonnie had worked for, all she had dreamed of, for as long as she could remember.
“Ah, well, back to our story. Yes, indeed, the witch was fattening them up,” her captor said. “But do you know why?”
“Why?” she asked, though she didn’t want to know the answer, given the way he was turning these nightly stories into tales from his twisted crypt of a mind.
“You’ll just have to wait and see. Patience, sweet . . .”
His sibilant words were interrupted by the sound of banging coming from somewhere. Before Vonnie could even process it, she heard a clang of metal. The small sliding panel in the door, through which he watched her, talked to her, and tormented her, was slammed shut.
Another bang from above. She tried to focus on it. That noise, the way he’d reacted to it, was important, though it took a second for her to process why.
Then she got it. He had been startled. The creature had been surprised out of his lair by something unexpected. Or someone?
Oh God, please.
Hope bloomed. What if someone else was out there? He hadn’t taken her to the bowels of hell but to somewhere real, a place that other people could come upon. A mailman, a neighbor?
An internal voice tried to dampen her hopes. That might not have been someone banging on the door at all, merely a loose shutter or a tree branch. Besides, it was dark out, maybe even the middle of the night—no mailman worked these hours.
The police. Maybe they’re looking for me.
It was a long shot. But long shots were all she had right now. She didn’t think about what he’d do when he came back. Didn’t let herself worry if he’d find some new way to punish her.
No. Vonnie Jackson simply began to scream as if her life depended on it.
Thursday, 6:05 a.m.
Aidan McConnell awoke to the smell of gingerbread and the sharp, piercing sound of a woman’s scream. The scream ended the moment he opened his eyes. The smell did not.
It took him a minute to place the scent, which had invaded his head as he tried to grab some sleep just before dawn on Thursday. At first, in those early moments between asleep and awake, he thought he was dreaming of a holiday visit to his great-grandmother’s house. Her kitchen had always been rich with all the delicious aromas any sugar-deprived kid could desire.
But when he sat up on his couch and realized the cloying, sickeningly sweet odor of ginger and spice was filling every breath, he knew he wasn’t dreaming. He was connecting.
“Damn it,” he muttered, not wanting this, not now, not again. Not so soon after last night’s mental invasion. Bacon and sausage, for God’s sake. The reek of fatty, greasy pork had seemed to permeate every inch of air in his house a few hours ago, and now it was gingerbread.
Forcing himself to focus on his other senses, he stared at his desk, at the files, books, his laptop. There was a cup filled with colored pencils and a mug that read, “Psychics do it when they’re not even there.” A paperweight. An old-fashioned wind-up brass clock that dinged violently when the alarm went off. Normal stuff. Familiar stuff.
Aidan focused. He thought about the coolness of the brass, the heft of the paperweight, and how freshly brewed coffee tasted from the mug. He thought of the many sketches he’d made with those pencils, trying to capture images he’d seen while mentally connecting with someone before they shortened and finally disappeared from his mind like a shadow at high noon.
It didn’t work. Ginger. Sugar. But bloated, vile, thick and putrid.
He focused harder, rubbing the tips of his fingers across the grain of the leather couch, craning to hear the tick of that clock, ordering his other senses to combine and smother the smell. But still the stench enveloped him. He could taste gingerbread and candy now, rancid and rotten.
Closing his eyes, he gritted his teeth, resorting to his oldest tricks against the familiar invasion into his psyche. He visualized a sea of sturdy cement building blocks. One by one, he began piling them up, erecting the psychic barrier between his mind and the one he was unwillingly connecting with. Building mental walls in order to protect himself wasn’t just an expression when it came to Aidan, it was pure survival.
His great-grandmother had taught him the trick when he was little. The old woman had been like him: strange, seeing things she’d never seen, knowing things she couldn’t know. She’d been the proverbial skeleton in the family’s closet, though she wouldn’t allow herself to be banished. When she felt like it, she inserted herself into her family’s lives.
That was lucky for him. She had been the only one Aidan could talk to about his own unexpected, unwanted abilities. His parents had been appalled by them. His mother’s great-grandmother was the only one who’d understood and helped him.
And she’d made the best gingerbread. That smell.
“No, build, damn it!”
He mentally built, row by row, foot by foot, his head aching. The cement wall was almost to the clouds by the time the stench began to dissipate like steam off a mirror. Finally, he could breathe again, smelling nothing but the faintly old air of the closed-in house in which he lived.
He could also think again. Unfortunately, his thoughts went to one place: Who was it? Who had he met, touched, interacted with in the past, whose thoughts were filled with stink and rotting garbage? And gingerbread. Why was that person’s mind consumed with it—so consumed Aidan was overwhelmed by their thoughts, which translated into physical scents, from far away?
He didn’t doubt he’d met the person with whom he was connecting. He’d touched him or her; perhaps just a faint brush of hand against arm as they passed on the street. The sensory reactions were never this strong without personal contact. Studying a photograph or holding an item used by someone he was seeking might bring a quick sensation, a breathful of odor, a flash of mental imagery. But for it to go on like this morning’s nightmare meant skin-to-skin contact.
Thank God the scream hadn’t rung in his ears as long as the stench had filled his nostrils.
Maybe it wasn’t connected. Perhaps the scream had merely been a last remnant of one of his own forgotten nightmares. He preferred to think that, not wanting to imagine the scream was really happening anywhere else but in his own mind. Aidan didn’t want to picture the screamer in agony, desperate for help. His help.
“Forget it,” he muttered. He didn’t do that anymore. He did everything he could to stay in his own head these days, and out of everyone else’s. Where he’d once used psychic ability, he was now quite content to use his own highly tuned sense of intuition and reasonable deduction.
Right now, he reasonably deduced that the smell had been noticed and thought about by somebody he’d briefly met, somebody who was walking by a garbage dump. And the scream was a product of his own tortured memories running rampant in his dreams. Period.
The ringing of the phone came as a jarring surprise. First because it was so early, and second because he seldom received calls. He liked it that way, having isolated himself in this old house in Granville when he’d decided to get out of Savannah after everything went down so badly last year. He rarely shared the number, and when he saw who was calling he heaved a sigh.
Julia Harrington hadn’t given up trying to get him to come back to work for her. She knew he still had his fingers in a few pies, that he couldn’t completely stay away from the world of crime-solving, even if he did it without the “spooky” stuff, as she called it. As if she had room to talk about anything spooky, considering how she got her information.
“Hello, Julia,” he said as soon as he lifted the phone to his mouth.
“How did you know it was me? Admit it, you’re doing your psychic thing again, right?”
“Ever heard of a little invention called caller ID?”
“Oh, that. How mundane.”
“Welcome to the twenty-first century.”
“Come on, admit it, you miss me.”
Maybe. But no, he wouldn’t admit it.
Julia was one of the few people he kept in touch with from his old life. When everything had gone to hell with his last case, she’d been right there, standing beside him, ready to fight for his reputation if he asked her to.
He hadn’t asked her to. Though he’d appreciated the offer, Julia had her own issues. Ex-cop or no, she now owned a company called Extrasensory Agents, and led a team of psychic detectives. So she wasn’t exactly the most staunch and upstanding of character references.
“So, whatcha working on?”
“I don’t do that anymore, remember?”
“Yeah, uh-huh, sure you don’t. I thought about you the other day when I saw a story out of Charlotte about an ‘anonymous tip’ that led police to the killer of a local carpenter.”
He stiffened, wondering how she could possibly have connected that to him. “Reasonable deduction,” he admitted grudgingly. “Nothing supernatural about it. I hacked into the case file, read the witness statements, and found some inconsistencies.”
“Just can’t stay out of it, can you?”
“If by ‘it’ you mean dabbling in cold-crime-solving, I’ll admit I haven’t lost my interest. But as for the rest? Hell, yes, I can stay out of it. So you might as well not even start.”
“Hold on, before you go getting your excuses lined up about why you can’t come back to the real world, and have to keep wearing your hair shirt and indulging in self-flagellation . . .”
“That was a mouthful.”
“I’m just saying, don’t panic. I’m not calling to beg you to come back to work.”
He couldn’t deny a flood of relief. She didn’t want him for a job. Since his “retirement” she’d come to him a few times, strictly for advice, or so she said, trying to lure him into work via the back door of consultancy. But not this time. Which meant she was probably calling to try to reengage him in a social life, like she had a few weeks ago when she and two of her other agents had shown up at his door.
Aidan wasn’t the type who enjoyed surprise visits, nor did he ever go to beer-and-wings joints like the one to which they’d dragged him. Despite the fact that he’d almost had a good time, he had no desire to repeat the experience. Because even here in Granville, where he was a newcomer and a stranger, people knew him by reputation, and oh, how they did like to stare.
“Aidan?”
“Okay, so why are you calling?” he asked, not sure he wanted to know.
“I got a call last night from a reporter.”
“We don’t use that word anymore, remember?”
“Oh, sorry. I mean, I got a call last night from a lying, manipulative media cockroach.”
“Better.”
“It’s about the Remington case.” The words rode out of her mouth on a sigh.
“Wonderful.” Aidan lifted a hand to his face and rubbed at the corners of his eyes. Of all the names he didn’t want to hear ever again, Remington topped the list. “Go on.”
“He wanted to get in touch with you to see if you’d heard Caroline Remington tried to commit suicide last week, on the anniversary.”
“Jesus.” Aidan sagged against the back of the couch, a well of emotions surging through him. Anger, pity, frustration. Regret. Such regret. It was like his worst nightmare, only it just kept going and he couldn’t wake up from it.
“I know, it’s awful.”
He’d never even met Mrs. Remington; she’d been well protected by her husband from the minute their son disappeared. But from the pictures he’d seen in the paper, she looked like a pretty, fragile woman whose world had been shattered, leaving her confused and heartbroken.
“Is she all right?”
“Apparently. She took some pills, but her husband found her in time. I thought you’d want to know, in case the cockroach from the Morning News manages to track you down.”
Finding out his general location probably wouldn’t be too hard. He hadn’t made it a state secret that he was moving to Granville, fifty miles west of Savannah. Or that he was giving up his role as prominent author, speaker, and expert on psychic phenomenon to become a hermit.
But at least his number was unpublished and his address unlisted. Anyone wanting to reach him would have to do some digging, and hopefully the reporter wouldn’t bother.
Wishful thinking. In his experience, there was nothing too low for most reporters.
“I hate that this is coming up again,” Julia said. “I’m really sorry.”
“I figured it would, with the one-year mark. Besides, I’m not the one you should feel sorry for. Caroline Remington is.”
First, for the loss of her six-year-old son, and second, for being married to a controlling, manipulative bastard like Theodore Remington.
Thrusting the anger away, he forced himself to think of the fact that, even though he was a rich, spoiled, overbearing asshole, Remington was also a grieving father. He had good reason to bear a grudge against Aidan. Whatever petty revenge he’d taken, using his contacts and power to make Aidan’s life hell, it had been justified. After all, in Remington’s mind, Aidan had been responsible for his son’s death. And Aidan couldn’t entirely disagree with him.
“Aidan?”
He sighed heavily. “As if I have anything to add on that subject? Haven’t I said enough to and about that family?”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
He’d heard those words a thousand times in the past twelve months, since the Remington boy had been found dead, trapped inside an old antique freezer in his own grandmother’s garage. At least, he’d heard them from his friends and colleagues.
From strangers, the media, the boy’s parents? Not so much.
“You are not responsible; it was a tragic accident.”
Maybe. Probably.
Or maybe not. Sometimes he wondered, though, he couldn’t ask the questions the investigators should have asked back then. He had zero credibility and nobody gave a damn what a disgraced former psychic thought.
“What you do isn’t an exact science.”
“No, but if I had stayed out of it, maybe—just maybe—somebody would have thought about how much the kid loved to play hide-and-seek, actually done a proper search and found him in time, rather than going on a wild-goose chase into every orchard in eastern Georgia.”
All because when he’d focused all his thoughts and psychic energy on young Teddy Remington, he’d smelled peaches. He’d also felt the brittle spray of rain on his face, the press of hard wood against his back, and the sting of splinters puncturing his skin.
“You’re repeating your own bad press,” Julia insisted. “You didn’t send them running around like a bunch of idiots. You told them what you were feeling and Ted Remington decided what it meant—that his son had wandered into one of the local orchards and gotten lost. You didn’t put that boy in that freezer.”
“I sure as hell didn’t help him get out of it,” he replied, hearing his own bitterness.
“Look, if the cops had been doing their jobs, it wouldn’t have mattered if you had visions of a convicted pedophile snatching the kid,” she snapped. “Searching everyplace he could have gone, including his own damn grandmother’s house down the street, was the first order of business. They should have been fired for letting Ted Remington’s money and influence browbeat them in the wrong direction.”
They should have been fired. And he should have been run out of town on a rail.
At least one of those should haves had come true. Not that he’d actually been run out of Savannah; he’d left of his own free will. But the effect was the same—Aidan McConnell was no longer in the psychic business. Never again would he let himself be responsible for the well-being of someone else’s child. Not ever.
He’d had misfires before. Like Julia said, it wasn’t an exact science. There had always, however, been some bit of truth, some small element that had been correct, just misinterpreted.
But in the Teddy Remington case? Nothing.
“Aidan, are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Thanks for the heads up. I’ll charge my cattle prod.”
“Ha-ha. No torturing members of the press, as tempting a target as they may be.”
Considering how brutally the media had dissected him last year, stopping just short of accusing him of murdering a child, they were indeed a tempting target. Still, he said, “Got it.”
“We’ve got a lot of cases, Aidan. Let me know when you’re ready to get back to work.”
“Let me know when you’re ready to stop asking.”
“Not gonna happen.”
A bitter laugh emerged from Aidan’s mouth and he shook his head. “Ditto.”
Not gonna happen.