Devil at Midnight (38 page)

“That is your choice,” Grace said.

“And if I
do
kill Mace and Oswald?”

Grace drew the pad of her thumb down the center of his lips, every whorl of its print now palpable to him. “You won’t stop me from loving you. I’m yours, Christian. No matter what you do.”

He stared at her until he was convinced she meant what she said. He had to embrace her then, if only to hide the tears that blurred his vision.

“I am yours also,” he vowed thickly against her ear. “I shall love you forever.”

Her arms were tightening around him, her throat echoing with a cry, when the darkest horror unfolded. Christian stumbled forward into the wall, abruptly holding nothing at all.

Grace had disappeared again, shocking his immortal heart into knocking frantically on his ribs. He told himself she would return, that this was no different from the other times she had gone. The faces of his friends rose within his mind, the empty chasm yawning in his life now that they were gone. Grace loved him, and she had promised him forever. She would not leave him when he needed her most of all.

He waited in the room above the goldsmith’s shop until morning, then through the next night as well. Nim Wei arrived, but he cursed her so vociferously that she left. It was three nights later, when he had to bury his father, before he admitted Grace was not coming back.

The black rage that filled him could have swallowed the world. This was his reward for loving? For trying to be an honorable man? He had called Nim Wei a devil at midnight, but he was stealing the title back. Heaven and its angels-along with everyone else who had wronged him—had better look to themselves.

Christian Durand was at last becoming his father’s son.

G
race became conscious of an assortment of throbbing pains. Her neck was so sore that even tensing her shoulders hurt. Her head felt like a sledgehammer was making a home in it. Her toes were icy, and her fingertips. Worse than any of these things, however, was the aching knot of loss in her chest, as if her best friend in the world had died. Even as she took note of the emotion, it dissipated. Oddly, she didn’t think she wanted it to fade.

She realized she was lying on her back in a bed with a sheet and blanket pulled over her. Sounds came and went around her: footsteps, voices, rubber wheels squeaking on a linoleum floor. Bit by bit, she sorted the noises out.

When she smelled cleaning solution, she knew she was in a hospital.

I was almost a real ghost,
she thought.
That’s why the cat could see me.

A second later, she thought:
What cat?

Having succeeded in confusing herself, she opened her eyes-a feat that took two attempts, due to her lashes being stuck together. She turned her head gingerly.

Grace’s mother slept in a vinyl chair pulled close to the side-railed bed. Helen Gladwell was wearing dark blue pumps, ladylike white gloves, and a pale blue polka-dotted dress with a belted waist. The long darts in the bodice faithfully conformed the rayon around the cone-shaped cups of her bra. For some reason, Grace thought she’d never seen an outfit so peculiar.

“Mom?” she said, the word scraping rough and strange from her throat.

Grace’s mother jerked awake and cried out.

“Grace!” she exclaimed, tears immediately springing from her green eyes. “You’re awake.”

Grace tried not to wince but probably failed when her mother clutched her hand and forearm with her white cotton gloves. Fortunately, her mother wasn’t paying attention.

“Grace, we thought we’d lost you! The medics tried to resuscitate you for six minutes. They told us you were as good as dead for a while.”

Grace cleared her raspy throat. ‟
Us
?” she asked, trying to steer her mother to what mattered. Regardless of her confusion about the cat, she hadn’t forgotten the incident that had sent her here. “Where’s Dad?”

Her mother choked on a sob, dabbing at her nose with a handkerchief. “I’ve left him. I finally have. I’m taking you to my sister’s. You never have to see him again, honey.”

Grace remembered running to her aunt before. Her mother’s older sister had a sour pursed mouth that liked nothing better than cutting at her sibling. According to her aunt, Helen never raised Grace right,
and
she’d gotten fat around the middle,
and
no wonder she couldn’t keep a man. Naturally, Grace’s father had found them there, and hadn’t taken more than an hour to convince Grace’s mother to reconcile with him.

“Don’t look at me like that,” her mother said.

Grace hadn’t been aware that she was looking at her mother any way at all. Now that she thought about it, though, she was feeling ... not calm exactly but steadier. Much steadier than she might have expected-as if her customary fear reactions had been short-circuited by her brush with death.

I’m not weak like she is
, Grace thought.
I could pretend
to go to Aunt Belinda’s, then run away. I’m practically eighteen. I bet plenty of girls live on their own at that age.

“Grace,” her mother castigated, a pout in it. She smoothed her perfectly curled red hair away from her face. “I couldn’t have known your father was going to throw you into that fireplace.”

You didn’t stop him,
Grace thought.
And I can’t count on you to try harder when he does it again.

She felt no need to say this aloud. She knew her mother couldn’t hear the truth. Instead, Grace patted the glove that still clutched her arm, marveling that she wasn’t even a bit angry. But maybe that made sense. Grace’s mother carried her punishments around inside her. Grace was going to be free.

“I’m fine now,” she assured her mother. “You have nothing to be sorry about.”

Grace meant every word she said. She might not be able to change the past, but she could change how her life unfolded from here on out.

T
wo Forks, Texas, was a long way from Hollywood. Grace’s boss, up-and-coming director Naomi Wei, had informed her the name of the town was “North Fork” back in the 1930s. Why they’d changed the
North
to
Two
was anybody’s guess. Maybe so visitors would think they’d actually find someone they wanted to eat with in this deadsville burg.

Grace grinned to herself as she turned the flamingo pink Plymouth Fury off the minuscule main drag. The urge to floor the V8 past the Dairy Queen was close to irresistible. Although Miss Wei had disappointed Grace by not buying a convertible, Grace had once pushed the boatlike car to an eye-popping 120 miles per hour.

Miss Wei might be eccentric, but she knew her fast cars.

The road Grace had turned onto wasn’t as well paved as the blacktop that cut through town. As sprays of gravel hit the custom whitewalls, Grace’s employer stirred sleepily in the passenger seat. Because Miss Wei had been anxious to reach their goal, they’d gotten an earlier start than usual for them: at least an hour before dusk. Miss Wei had immediately sunk into a doze, bundled like Greta Garbo in her long powder blue silk scarf and her glamorous cat’s-eye sunglasses.

“Thank God,” she said now, tipping up the glasses to take in the lollipop red shards of sunset that were melting on the horizon.

Miss Wei was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a day person.

“We’re close,” Grace told her, as always enjoying the moment when her boss woke up. From their first encounter in the LA diner where Grace had been waitressing, she’d liked Miss Wei’s company-in part because she was the sort of take-charge woman Grace wanted to be someday. “The cat at the Texaco said the Durand ranch is a mile west on the turnoff.”

“The
cat?
” Miss Wei repeated, her perfectly painted mouth pursing with her smile.

Grace never got over how youthful her employer looked—her face unlined, her figure trim-and never mind she claimed to be old enough to be Grace’s mother.

“
Cat
is what the kids say,” Grace informed her.

Miss Wei laughed softly. “As if you weren’t a kid yourself.”

Grace’s fingers tightened on the white steering wheel. At twenty-four and counting, she was hardly that. Sometimes she felt as if the sands in her hourglass were perpetually running out.

“Fine,” Miss Wei teased with her uncanny ability to read expressions. “You’re a woman of immense maturity and intelligence. Why else would I hire you?”

“Because I work for peanuts?”

“As I recall, I gave you a raise last week.”

Because she had, Grace smiled to herself. The increase in pay had been generous.

“I’m worth it,” she said blithely.

“You might be,” Miss Wei conceded in the same airy tone.

She seemed happy tonight, her short hair ruffling in the wind from the open window, her dark eyes sparkling for the challenge in front of them. Filmmaking might be difficult for women, but the “old boys” at the studios never intimidated her.

“You’re sure Mr. Durand is expecting us?” Grace asked.

“If he’s not, he should be,” Miss Wei answered, which wasn’t exactly a yes.

But it was too late to worry, because the Durand ranch’s wooden gate arched over the road ahead like a scene from a John Ford Western. The ground here was dusty. Flat as a pancake, too, with scruffy-looking grass a herd of dieting cattle could have starved on. An oil derrick poked up in the distance, black as night against the still faintly rosy sky, suggesting Mr. Durand could afford extra feed for his hungry cows.

“Longhorns,” Miss Wei said. “Christian raises Long-horn cattle. He’s one of the last holdouts.”

“They’re hardy,” she added when Grace lifted her brows at her. “Shorthorns and Herefords need too much pampering out here.”

“I didn’t know you were interested in ranching.”

“I’m not,” her employer said. “But it pays to know your quarry.”

Slowing as they got closer-because who knew if this Texas boy kept shotguns-Grace pointed the car toward a low-slung adobe house.

“Try the barns,” Miss Wei corrected. “Unless I miss my guess, Christian is in that one over there.”

The barns were a collection of worn-looking plank buildings. Grace parked in the rutted dirt beside the one Miss Wei had waved her arm at. Grace was wearing flats for driving, but her heels still sank into the dry earth as she got out. The wide double doors of the barn stood open. Caged bulbs were strung along the rafters to light the big space inside, though Grace wouldn’t have said they lit it well. If someone was in there, she couldn’t pick them out from the shadows yet.

Miss Wei came around the front end of the Fury and laid her cool hand on Grace’s sleeve. “Just let me do the talking. Christian Durand ... owes me his life, you could say.”

For some reason, this request increased Grace’s nervousness. She dried damp palms on her white pedal pushers, allowing her petite yet formidable employer to stride into the cavernous structure ahead of her. Grace followed more sedately and looked around.

Without question, this barn was a male domain. No cows resided between its walls, only a collection of automobiles of varying vintages and states of repair. Her mood improving, Grace spotted a 1950 Buick in the process of having its body “chopped” to reduce wind drag. The Harley-Davidson leaning on a hay bale also looked promising. Ever since Marlon Brando starred in
The Wild One
, motorcycles were big with kids.

Maybe her boss was onto something with this hare-brained idea.

“Christian,” Miss Wei called out. “It’s Naomi Wei. I’ve come to talk in person.”

Grace heard the clank of a wrench hitting the barn’s dirt floor.

She saw the man then, or his bottom half anyway. He was bent over the engine of a glossy black, two-seater, convertible Thunderbird. If the car hadn’t made Grace’s mouth water, the man’s behind in those Levi’s certainly would have. The metal-caged bulb above him shone a literal spotlight onto his butt. His legs were long and strong-looking. And the cowboy boots he was sporting didn’t hurt, either.