Chills & Thrills Paranormal Boxed Set (4 page)

"I've got to go, Stephen." She slammed the cell
phone shut and hastily shoved it in her purse, then hurried to keep her father
from making a bigger scene than he already had.

"What is it, Papa?"

He fixed her with crazed eyes. "Zacharie! He wanna take
you
maman
out of her crypt!"

"What? Why?"

"Where did you hear that, partner?" Zach asked,
looking as if he knew, but didn't want to believe it.

"Blaspheme! Ellie be a good woman, and here he want to
keep her soul from heaven."

"Zach?" Liz said, moving to stand between the two
men.

Her father didn't look too stable, while Zach simply looked
flustered as he asked, "Who told you that?"

"Allain, that who! He telling everyone who
listen!" Her father's fists were balled, and Liz worried that one of them
would soon find its way to Zach's jaw.

"Well, it's a damned lie," Zach shot back, his
eyes narrowing.

"He saying you wanna prove I kill Jed! Kill that boy,
me, why would I wanna kill that boy?"

"Stop it, both of you!" Liz commanded, sotto voce.

She had no idea what this was about. Jed murdered? Her
father suspect? And why was Richard just standing there, grinning as though
this was the greatest show on earth?

"Papa." She touched her father's arm, startled
when he jerked around. But the minute he saw it was her, his expression
softened. The raised fists lowered.

"Ankouer kill Jed," he said with sudden sadness,
"just like you
maman
, and I ain't risking her soul to prove it.
Tell him, Izzy, tell Zacharie what be true." He whirled back toward Zach.
"You ain't pulling her body outta her eternal resting place, no way, no
how! Hear me, boy?"

"Whoa, partner," Zach said in a soothing tone, his
anger apparently under control now. "Nothing's going to happen.
Okay?"

"You'd better go, Zach," Liz said more sharply
than she intended. When he made no move, she added, "Now."

"Sure, sure." He took a few steps toward the door,
then stopped. "Trust me, Frank, I have nothing like what you're thinking
in mind." Then he nodded at her, a bitter smile pasted on his face.
"Have a good life, Liz Deveraux."

And though she knew it wasn't a heartfelt statement, Liz
surprised herself by whispering, "You, too, Zach."

She watched him make his way inside and through the crowd,
and kept her eyes on him, even though she heard Richard egging her father on.
Very soon, Zach tracked down the doctor, and from her vantage point, she saw
the conversation was heated, at least on Zach's side.

Which made her conclude that he'd told the truth. How much
better if he hadn't. A life waited for her in Chicago, where no one knew about
the warped world in which she'd grown up. She didn't belong in this town with
its undercurrents of hostility and superstition. But when Zach had walked
through those French doors, her joyous heart had betrayed how deeply she'd felt
his absence over the years and made her regret the lie she'd built about her
background. To let Zach back in would expose it, and she already felt exposed
enough.

"Ellie fight him with all her strength."

Her father's statement forced Liz to tear her attention from
Zach, and when she did, she experienced a flash of anger at the glint of
amusement in Richard's eyes. In defense, she put a protective hand on her
father's shoulder.

"Papa," she pleaded, "you don't know what
you're saying. You're overwrought."

"Where you learn those big words, girl?"

He'd had too much to drink. Although his stance was steady
and his voice clear, she could see the signs she remembered well from girlhood.

"You're tired. Let's go home so you can get some
rest."

"Not now, no. I wanna talk to Richard."

He raised his hand like a traffic cop's, the same warning
he'd used when she'd sass back as a kid. For an instant she felt uncomfortably
like that kid. I'm an adult now, she reminded herself, and her father needed
her to act like one. "Please come home."

"
Non
, it not my home."

"It is. I wanted you and Mama to have it."

She saw Richard taking it all in, not even bothering to hide
his interest. She looked over at him. "Could you give us a private
moment?"

"Sure, Liz. My other guests need me anyway." In
the space left by his absence, a gaping silence loomed.

"You embarrass me, girl," her father finally said.

"I'm sorry." And she was. She'd displeased him.
She was always displeasing him. The house had displeased him most of all, and
she wondered why she was so obsessed he take it.

"That old Fortier house . . . it all the time make you
angry with us cause we not live there." His dark eyes grew darker.
"When you give it, it seem you are shamed by who we are, where we live. It
cut you
maman
deep in the heart."

Liz almost gasped at that information. Her mother had never
told her that. She'd only said her father didn't want to move out of the bayou.

"No,
mon fille
, it not my home. I will not live
there."

He turned away, propped his elbows on the railing, and
stared in the direction of the swamp.

Three years. Three years, during which she barely spoke to
her parents because they refused to live in Zach's childhood home. Now her
mother was dead and they'd never heal that rift. Her father was the only one
she had left.

"I . . . oh, Papa, I wish I'd done it
differently."

He met her eyes, and in them she saw not liquor or dementia,
but deep love and compassion.

"I know that, Izzy. But go on now, go to that big old
house. I come in the morning to give you the stone and watch you drive away.
Cause, leave you must. Soon as you got that opal,
le fantome noir
, he is
gonna come for you. That why I say, run. Run fast, far away from Port
Chatre."

The leaden weight already bearing down on Liz's heart got
heavier. This was so crazy. There, she'd said it, if only to herself. Crazy.

She was tired, too. She'd made a red-eye flight from
Chicago, then driven the remaining distance in a rental car. She'd stared at
her mother's lifeless body in the casket for hours the night before, stood in
front of her crypt, wandered through the house of a man who used to torment
her, and listened to the cruel whispered remarks of his guests. But none of it
compared to the pain her father's words ignited.

"All right," she said wearily. "But will you
come by before you leave for the bayou?"

"Oui
."

She gave him a weak smile, kissed his prickly cheek, then
went to say good-bye to Richard. When her father got to the house, she'd try to
persuade him to come to Chicago with her. She'd put him in a quiet little
hospital for rest and treatment.

But how would she explain him? She couldn't. Not without
admitting the truth, which showed how completely she'd built her tangled web.

Expose herself or abandon him? Those were her choices. Both
sent her stomach into jitters.

Zach cut off the motor on the flat-bottomed aluminum boat
and let momentum carry him the final distance to the pier. A big, battered
aluminum craft was tied to a cypress mooring. It cried out for a new coat of
paint, and its lettering, which said DEVERAUX SWAMP Tours, was so badly chipped
that the V and the W were missing. Two pirogues, the canoe of choice in the
bayous, were lashed to the boat, one on each side.

The tall old cypress still stood, its twisting, moss-hung
branches reaching to the sky and sheltering the steep roof of the cabin. And
there, on a limb forking out over the water, a frayed and dirty rope swung in
the morning breeze. The tire was gone now, probably taken by water rot. He
wished his memories had gone with it. Ghosts of Izzy, laughing as she swung
over the water to jump when the tire hit its apex, floated around him.

She always came up laughing, too. That's what Zach
remembered most about her. She laughed all the time.

A crystal-clear image arose in his mind of the day he and
Jed had come across the Deveraux cabin while paddling into the backwaters.
Missus Ellie had come out on the dock, smiling, inviting them in for some cool
lemonade. Behind her stood a young girl, all curly haired and grinning, and
he'd been captivated by her sparkling spirit even then. She'd been barely
seven, he soon learned, closer to Jed's age, who was eight. But even at ten,
Zach recognized a link between himself and Izzy, one he'd come to believe could
never die.

He made a scoffing sound. So much for that conviction. In a
love that could never die, one partner didn't desert the other.

His boat hit the dock with a soft thud, breaking his
anguished train of thought. Water was high this year, covering all but the last
few steps to the dock. Spiderwebs glistened with dew beneath the final riser
and, choosing to avoid them, he stood on a seat and jumped from the boat. He'd
had that god-damn dream last night, and his skin still crawled. Spiders—who in
the hell dreamed of spiders? He knew some dreamed of snakes—a Freudian thing,
he'd heard tell—but thousands of creepy, eight-legged arachni-thingees? Maybe
he should get his head examined.

He discarded that thought. Everyone had nightmares, although
maybe not the same one, two to three times a week. And he could probably
attribute last night's dream to the excessive amount of Smirnoff's he'd downed
in the lounge at the Cormier Inn. To cope with his grief, he'd somehow found a
way to tuck Liz's memory into a small mental box, opened only when he had too
many under his belt, and then quickly closed when sobriety returned.

He had a hell of a time sleeping last night, thinking of
her. His insides still quivered from the shock of finding her alive. At the
time, he'd thought the day she'd run away was the worst day of his life, but
that pain hadn't compared to the torture of hearing she'd been found dead.

Why? he again asked himself. Why hadn't Frank or Ellie had
the decency to let him know it wasn't true, that even though Izzy had abandoned
him, at least she was alive? Why? And even more painful to dwell upon was the
question of why Izzy hadn't told him herself. She'd been the heart of his
heart, his soul mate. As corny as it sounded it was true. He'd known it even
then, and always thought that she had, too. So, why, why, why?

An osprey shrieked in the silence left by the killed boat
engine as if to remind him he was driving himself nuts with these questions. If
he kept it up, he would need a shrink. Then a roar as loud as a low-flying
airplane jerked him fully from his reverie. The wildlife lapsed into silence.
The day grew deathly still except for the slap of water against the rocking
boats.

Rutting alligators. He hadn't boated through a bayou in ten,
twelve years. Just his luck to come in May, right in the middle of mating
season.

Close by, frogs soon croaked. Something stirred in the
grasses, probably a nutria. He used to shoot those suckers, had once covered a
wall in his room with their pelts. He'd promised Izzy he'd make her a coat from
them for a wedding present, but he never—

He shook his head so hard he could almost hear his brain
rattle. There was no Izzy. She'd vanished twenty years ago. Now an unfathomable
woman named Liz claimed her place, which was almost as disorienting as learning
she'd been alive all these years.

Zach remained on the end of the dock for a moment, taking in
the changes to the house. Lots of gabby people at that wake, and several had
mentioned Frank's new prosperity. Here were signs they spoke of. The enclosed
second floor had been a screened-in room during the years he'd visited. An
expensive job, especially when you lived twenty miles into the swamp. He'd
spied power poles during his boat ride, and judging from the absent hum of the
trusty generator, the Deverauxs must have hooked up. He wondered if Frank had
paid the levy to have the wiring brought in.

Even more startling had been the news that they'd purchased
his old family house, then had never moved in, although according to the scuttlebutt
they kept it well maintained. And now Liz was staying there. He'd been sorely
tempted to make a call on her last, night, but just thinking of her roaming his
childhood home brought back poignant memories he'd prefer to avoid.

No lights were on. Zach headed for the door anyway. Maybe
Frank wasn't up yet or maybe he'd stayed with Liz. He peered in the windows,
but the shade trees filtered the morning light too much to see clearly. Should
he go in? Despite the remote location, breaking and entering was still against
the law, and he hadn't notified the Vermillion authorities he , was conducting
an investigation inside their parish.

But why should he have? He wasn't conducting an
investigation. He was here to apologize . . . and maybe, just maybe, check out
the doctor's wild accusations. He'd been furious at the man for spreading his
theory at the wake, but after listening to Zach vent, Allain had introduced him
to people who were more than happy to discuss Frank's change in fortune.

Where had the money come from? Even more, could it somehow
be connected with Jed's death?

Considering Zach's drug dealer theory, it wasn't a
completely illogical jump. But to think Frank would also kill his wife and
mother-in-law for the same reason, and some twenty years apart? That was
illogical.

He put his hand on the doorknob. It turned in his hand, but
he was unable to make himself open it. If Frank was inside, he'd be furious,
and they hadn't parted on the best of terms. And what if Liz was here? He
refused to admit even to himself that she was the primary reason he'd boated
all this way, but it was that thought that made him release the knob.

Not sure what to do next, he quite automatically reached in
his back pocket and pulled out a silver flask, unscrewed the cap and took a few
small sips of the vodka inside. As the liquor warmed his stomach he found it
easier to keep his mind off Liz.