CHAPTER 11
Laura pulled into the parking lot at Davy Jones’s
Locker. The once red, now sort of pink shingled building looked
decrepit with a sagging roof and scarred wood plank steps and
porch. She’d never actually stepped foot in the place. When she was
younger, it hadn’t held one iota of interest for her. Since she’d
been back to the coast, she’d never had occasion to even think
about the place, but now here she was.
She had a moment in her car while she
watched Harrison Frost’s brown Chevrolet nose into the lot and
slide into an empty space at the far end from her car. Her heart
was pounding a strong, fast beat. A truth seeker. Could that really
be said of a reporter? Could that be said of Harrison Frost? He
seemed so . . . blunt . . . and yet . . . friendly. Or was that
just a ruse to get information from her?
Could he possibly be whom Cassandra
meant?
The skin on her forearms prickled. A
warning. She told herself to tread carefully; who knew Frost’s true
intentions?
She climbed from her car and locked it,
then watched as he skirted puddles that had formed in the gravel
lot. He wore jeans, a black T-shirt, and some kind of thin jacket
with a hood. He looked like half the teenagers in the area, she
thought, as he approached, but then nobody dressed up at the coast
unless they absolutely had to. Harrison Frost seemed to be taking
dressing casual to a new level.
He shoved a hank of brown hair from his
eyes as he reached her, but the wind gleefully grabbed at it. His
eyes were hazel with dark specks, and the smile on his lips was
meant to disarm her. He had the trace of dimples, and Laura found
herself comparing him to Byron, whose countenance was stern and
direct and whose eyes were laserlike; she’d often felt pinned
beneath their glare.
This guy was much more
approachable.
Or so he’d like her to
think.
She reminded herself to keep her guard
up.
“Thanks,” he said as a means of
greeting as he reached her. “For the record, I’m
buying.”
She almost laughed.
“I wasn’t kidding when I said they have
the best huevos rancheros along the whole damned
coast.”
“I was thinking more of a fruit plate,”
she said, smothering a smile as they walked between a couple of
pickups both sporting toolboxes in their beds.
He gave her a sharp look and those
hazel eyes glinted. “That was a joke, right?” he said, gesturing to
the dilapidated building they were about to enter. Then, showing
more dimple, added, “You’re funny.”
It had been a
joke, because Laura was pretty sure Davy Jones’s Locker was the
kind of establishment whose menu was scarce on fresh fruit; it
looked like it catered to fried food and plenty of it. She was
honestly surprised at herself; joking wasn’t her style, as a rule.
She was too . . . cautious . . . to engage in that kind of
repartee, that kind of flirting.
Flirting . . . Was that what she was
doing? She almost winced. Don’t be taken in by his
charm. Do not trust him.
They headed up the broad worn steps
together, and Harrison pushed through the door with its porthole
window. Inside were wooden tables and benches and booths with red
faux-leather seats lining the room on three sides. The fourth side
was the bar, which, though its reddish laminate had a few chips and
scars, looked surprisingly clean. Or, maybe that was just her
impression since the bartender was wiping it down with a white
cloth as they entered.
“Sit anywhere,” the barkeep said, and
Harrison led her to one of the booths.
Surprisingly there were a number of
people in the place, eating breakfast. It looked like a haven for
construction workers of all kinds, and there was a lively
conversation going on two booths over about the residential work,
or lack thereof, in the area.
“I’m not going to say anything about my
family,” she said after hanging her jacket on a peg located on the
edge of the booth’s back. She slid into the seat across from him.
“I’m not really sure why I agreed to this. I’m . . . I’ll figure
that out later. But I’m not going to give you a
story.”
“I think you need some breakfast. Two
huevos?” he asked her.
She considered her stomach, decided it
wasn’t rebelling at the thought, and nodded. “If they’re really
that good.”
“They are.”
“Okay. So remember, anything I say is
strictly off the record,” she warned again.
The handsome bartender, whose dark skin
suggested a Hispanic or Native American ancestry and who doubled as
a waiter, apparently, came their way. Harrison held up two fingers
and said, “Huevos. Coffee. Two?”
“Sure,” Laura said. “With
cream.”
“That’ll be it, then,” Harrison told
the bartender. “Unless you have a fruit plate.”
“I got orange juice and other
mixers.”
“Thanks, but no,” Laura said with a
faint smile.
He nodded and headed back to fill their
order. As soon as he was out of earshot, she asked Harrison, “Did
you hear what I said?”
“I heard that you want to talk to me,”
he responded, which made her lips part.
“I said anything I say is off the
record!”
He leaned closer, and she felt herself
automatically pull back. There was something too attractive about
him, some facet of his personality that she suspected he knew about
and was exploiting. “Let me tell you a few things. The media is
going to be all over this story until Justice Turnbull is caught.
Television, newspapers, the Internet . . . A psycho on the loose is
big news. Right now reporters are digging through old reports on
what took place a couple of years ago. Justice is part of your
family. All of that’s going to be dredged up. Your family can’t
escape it. Maybe you can, because you’re on the outside and no one
seems to know about you, but the rest of ’em . . .” He slowly
wagged his head from side to side. “That lodge isn’t a safe haven.
It’s a target with a big red bull’s-eye on it. He’s after them, and
that’s where they are.”
“He can’t get them there,” Laura
said.
“Why not? Because they have a
gate?”
“He won’t attack them straight on. It’s
not his game plan.”
“You think you know his game
plan?”
Laura hesitated, then said firmly,
“Yes.”
“Well, maybe you oughta tell the police
then, so they can find him and put him back in the mental
hospital.”
“They wouldn’t believe anything I said,
and if I told them how I know, they’d think I was a psycho,
too.”
“Okay, I’ll bite. How do you
know?”
“This is off the record,
right?”
He nodded wearily.
The bartender brought them two white
mugs and an insulated pot of coffee. He poured them each a cup and
left a bowl of sugar packets and a small pitcher of cream. Laura
gratefully used up the time it took her to pour her coffee and add
a bit of cream to think about what she was going to
say.
Stirring the cream slowly,
concentrating on it, she finally said, “Everyone thinks we’re a
cult. We’re not.”
“You’ve already pointed out we have
different definitions for the same thing,” he rejoined. “But I
don’t care about semantics, anyway.”
“We’re just women who live together. In
my case lived, past tense. We’re sisters,” she said, though the
word felt alien on her tongue. Thanks to Justice
Turnbull.
“Are you sisters? Real sisters, by
blood?”
“Yes. Well, technically, I guess, some
are half sisters. I, uh, I’m not really sure.”
He stared at her as if she were making
it up.
“Seriously,” she said, then reminded
him, “You asked.”
“And you live, lived with your aunt?
That was the woman I saw at the lodge.”
She nodded, thinking back to the lodge,
how safe she had felt there while growing up, but that had been a
false sense of security. “My younger sisters live there now, well .
. . some of them.” She took an experimental sip of her coffee. It
was hot and chased away the chill that had been with her since
leaving Siren Song.
“No brothers?” he asked.
“I had a brother who died, and another
two . . . who left. . . .”
“Just left, never to be heard from
again?”
She shrugged. How could she explain
that she didn’t know, that there were many secrets held in Siren
Song, secrets she, herself, couldn’t begin to understand? There was
just no way this man would ever comprehend the complexities of life
within the gated walls.
And maybe he shouldn’t.
Maybe that was better.
“What about your mom and dad?” Harrison
persisted. He offered a smile, then sipped from his
mug.
“Mom and Dad,” she repeated, realizing
how weird this was going to sound. “We never knew our fathers,” she
said carefully.
“Fathers. Plural?”
“Off the record,” she said
again.
“Yes, damn it!” he said with a shake of
his head. “You might not claim to be a cult, but you’re sure as
hell paranoid about the outside world learning about
you.”
She sighed, wondered how much, if
anything, she should confide. Probably nothing, but here she was.
At Davy Jones’s frickin’ Locker. With a reporter. “Okay, listen,
it’s . . . hard, okay? My mother . . .” How could she explain about
a woman she barely knew herself, a mother who was distant,
secretive, and dark? “I guess the easiest way to say it was that
she was mentally unstable.” Laura rubbed at a stain on the table
with her fingertips. “Mother—Mary—she took lovers fairly
indiscriminately, or so my aunt has alluded. I remember a little
bit of this, but mostly I pieced it together over the years. My
mother had a lot of children, one after the other. Some of the
first were adopted out, I think, and then something happened and
that stopped.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know exactly. Catherine, my
aunt, was ill for about a year and my mom was in charge and that
didn’t go so well.” Laura shuddered, the interior of the restaurant
easing to the edges of her vision as memories of the lodge surfaced
again. She recalled a white-faced, angry Mary standing at the
window on the upper floor, looking out toward the sea, tears
running from her eyes and blood staining her long gown. . . . Laura
had been on the shadowed stairs and, while her mother cried, she’d
stayed mute, slipping silently downward, knowing that if she said a
word, disturbed her mother, a terrible fury would be
unleashed.
Now, with the smells of the deep-fat
fryer reaching her nostrils and some laughter from a booth near the
video poker machines jarring her, she blinked and found herself
staring into the disbelieving eyes of Harrison Frost. Incredible,
intelligent eyes. Sexy, even. But skeptical.
She cleared her throat, stuffed the
unwanted memories back into a dark corner of her mind where they
belonged.
“You don’t know what happened to Mary,”
he prodded, seemingly intrigued.
She glanced away, couldn’t stare into
his inquisitive, oh-so-male eyes. “The last time my mother was
pregnant, she miscarried, and then she was attended to by a doctor,
and then . . . not long after she was gone.”
“Gone?”
She was nodding, remembering the wind
whispering through the old lodge, like the sinister chatter of
ghosts slipping under the eaves. She was suddenly cold as a bitter
arctic wind.
“Like dead?”
“Yes.” She cradled her coffee in her
hands, her elbows on the table, as she tried to gain warmth through
the ceramic mug.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think any of us,
the sisters, do. At least no one’s said anything to
me.”
“But someone does. Catherine,” he
suggested.
“If she does, she’s kept it to
herself.”
“But you’re sure?”
“Hey, I’m not certain of anything,” she
snapped, because that was the God’s honest truth. “But there’s a
graveyard on the property and Mary’s there.”
“In a private cemetery,” he
clarified.
“Yes. It was all kind of secret at the
time. My aunt was afraid of scaring us, but then she showed us the
grave. After my mother, Mary, was gone, Catherine changed
everything. The adoptions had stopped long before, and then
Catherine locked the gates and the outside world from getting in. I
was one of the oldest of my siblings, at least of the ones still at
the lodge, and I didn’t like it much. I kept trying to run away, so
Catherine bargained with me and I worked in Deception Bay, at a
grocery store, for a while, and then I wanted to go to nursing
school and I left when I was eighteen.”
“And you were the last one
out?”
“Yes . . . I, well . . . yes. As far as
I know, and Catherine would have let me know if things had changed.
We write letters. Snail mail. They’re not exactly electronic
there.”
Harrison nodded as he pulled out a tiny
digital recorder from the pocket of his jacket.
“Hey, no.” She shook her head. “We made
a deal, remember? No recording.”
He hesitated, then slipped it back into
his pocket.
“It’s not on, is it?” she asked, about
to march out of this dive. “You didn’t turn it on and leave it
running like in the movies?”
“Oh, for crying out loud!” He retrieved
the tiny device again and set it on the table. Its record light was
dark, but to prove his point, he turned it over, opened the back,
and removed the batteries. “Satisfied?” he asked.
“I guess.”
“Good, but I would like to take a few
notes.” He dropped the disabled recorder into his pocket again and
pulled out a notebook and pen. When she was about to protest again,
he leaned across the table. “Look, we had a deal and I’m holding to
it, okay? I’m not planning to blast your story all over the place,
but I’d like to remember some points for a story about Justice when
they catch him.”
Laura didn’t like it. “You’re making me
regret talking to you.”
To her shock, he reached across the
table and grabbed one of her hands. “Trust me,” he said, and his
fingers were incredibly strong and warm. She felt an unlikely
current of electricity slide through her veins and quickly
retrieved her hand. His smile seemed as sincere as it was engaging.
“I won’t do or print anything you don’t want me to. I promise.
Unless it’ll help catch the bastard.”
There was the dilemma, the real reason
she’d agreed to the interview. If Frost could help put Justice
behind bars, then she’d do anything she could to help him and that
included allowing him some insight into Siren Song. Once more, he
was staring at her with his damned eyes.
Practiced charm. Again.
“But you’ll let me know first? Right?
Before you do anything?” This wasn’t going exactly the way she
planned. Not at all.
“Yes.”
She stared at him, wondering, really,
if she could believe him.
No way, not with him scribbling notes.
But there it was; he already had clicked his pen and flipped open
his notepad.
“Back to your mother. Mary. Give me
some background content. What was she like?”
“I don’t really know, honestly. She was
a bit of a mystery to all of us. Catherine says that she and my mom
fought about us all the time. Different philosophies about raising
us. Catherine wanted austerity and my mother wanted free
love.”
“How old were you when your mom
died?”
“Ten, almost eleven, I think. I don’t
really know. I was just a child, and it was kind of a taboo
subject.”
He made a note, then said, “And that’s
about the time Catherine locked the gates.”
“I think so, yeah.”
He shook his head. “That’s
wild.”
More than wild, she thought as she took
another sip from her cooling coffee, it had been
necessary.
To keep the demons at bay.