The pistol was cold against her stomach.
She imagined warmth. The gentle hand of Ethan Russell resting on her belly. The passion they would share. All the wonderful places they would visit once her divorce came through. The smell of him, and the taste of him, and the pure magic of his lips. She would put this business behind her, tonight, because what lay ahead was pure perfection.
Tonight it would end. No matter the cost. No matter the risk.
Doug Douglas waited in the shadows.
Amy was here. He heard the front door open and close. He heard Amy’s footfalls on the staircase.
April hadn’t wanted this to happen. Not this way. She had wanted something different. But Doug wanted something, too. And he needed what he wanted just as badly as April needed her revenge.
April never understood that. No one understood. People always told him what to do. First his parents, then his baseball coaches, then Amy, then a string of lousy bosses, and finally April. Nobody cared what he wanted. Everyone pushed him, prodded him, made him submit.
Submit. He hated that word. He wouldn’t hear it tonight. Tonight, everything would go his way. He was calling the shots.
Calling the shots. Funny, thinking that, with a gun in his hand.
Amy glanced at the note scrawled on the bottom of the map. It directed her to a room under the main part of the house, a room that adjoined the garage.
Some people might call such a room a basement.
Amy Peyton wasn’t going to let a simple word frighten her. She wasn’t April Destino. She wasn’t weak. Doug Douglas was the one who was weak. Amy was here to remind him of that. She was here to remind him of Todd Gould’s party, and Todd Gould’s basement, and the things that had happened there on a cold night in the winter of 1976. She was here to put Doug in touch with the hard-bodied eighteen-year-old he had once been.
She was sure that easily manipulated coward still lurked under all that flab. Tonight she would shut his mouth once and for all. She thought she had done that job in 1976. She hadn’t. But it would happen, tonight, any moment now.
She smoothed the sweater over the pistol, thinking it through. There had to be something Doug was afraid of losing, even if it was only his miserable life. She smiled. Life. That would be enough. For anyone.
Amy opened the door to the room that adjoined the garage.
And with that one simple action, everything went wrong.
The fluorescent tube flickered above, threatening to go out, but even in the dim light he could see that it was her. She stood in the doorway, a beautiful girl in a cheerleader’s sweater. A sizzle of dying light revealed frosted curls resting on blue wool. But it was her eyes that trapped him. The hard iron irises caught the flickering light and held it, and he realized that someone had clamped a vise around his heart.
She stepped into the room, one hand on the door, one hand close to her belly. The Six Million Dollar Man backed away instinctively. For the first time he realized that he was well beyond fear. He was terrified.
“Let me wake up, April. This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be.”
She smiled, moving into shadow, but her eyes were still hard and bright and unyielding. “I’ll admit that this isn’t what I expected. But I’m not here to play I games.”
“You mean I’m not dreaming?”
“Do I look like a dream?” She glanced around. “C’mon. I know you’re not alone. Olly olly oxen free! Let’s get everyone out in the open.”
Something inside Steve crumbled. “You promised that we’d be together, and I didn’t believe you,” he said, trying to sound calm and controlled. “I couldn’t, because I was so scared. When you died, I thought I’d screwed everything up because I couldn’t I believe. I thought I’d be all alone. But now you’re here…”
He stepped toward her. He had to explain. Because he knew now that what he had done was insane.
“Don’t be crazy!” She was reading his mind, and her anger was as palpable as a knife. “You know what’s going on. You’re not scaring me.”
“Calm down, April.” He took another step forward, angling toward the door, and she reacted instinctively, backing away from the door, into the darkest corner of the room.
Amy’s legs weren’t working right. Everything was wrong. This wasn’t Doug’s house. But it had to be. It didn’t make sense any other way.
But it wasn’t Doug’s house. Amy could see that. It was Steve Austin’s house. His pictures hung on the wall. Even in the dim light, she could see pictures of Steve on the baseball field in high school, posing with Bat Bautista and Doug. Other pictures showed Steve in uniform. And there was a diploma with his name on it.
And he was coming closer, and she couldn’t move. Her strength was slipping away.
She couldn’t allow that to happen. She reached under the sweater. Her fingers closed over the gun.
An icy buzz sounded above her, and the light brightened suddenly. For the first time she saw past Steve Austin’s shoulder, past the La-Z-Boy chair, into the shadows that draped the far side of the room.
Amy couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t. But she had to breathe, because she had to scream. April was screaming, and Steve knew that she had seen that thing propped in the far corner. He held out his hands. Open, conciliatory. “I didn’t understand. I didn’t know that you could come back to me. I wanted to believe, but you know how my head works. A + B = C. Simple, right? I thought I had to be with her to be with you.” He sighed. “You’ve got to try to understand that I love you. I only felt sorry for her. She was so sad. That woman you became. The dreamweaver. She was so alone…she was like your ghost.”
He wanted to touch her more than anything because touching her would prove that she was indeed real. But she wedged herself into the cement corner, pulling away from him, and her mouth remained an open red scream.
“No,” Steve begged. “Don’t be upset. I didn’t understand.” Again, he held out his hand. “I can explain. It’s not as crazy as it looks.”
But he knew that it was. His big hands pawed the air. He was afraid to touch her, afraid to do anything that might be wrong. He watched his fingers dancing in midair, unsure, his hands damned by pink fingernails rimmed with little halfmoons of black dirt. Graveyard dirt.
“She died and I couldn’t sleep. I thought that without her I couldn’t have you anymore. So I went to the graveyard…and I got her…and then I brought her here…”
Doug moved from his hiding place in the garage. Things weren’t going right. Amy was screaming, and Austin was babbling some crazy stuff that Doug couldn’t quite make out.
He had told April. He had told her that it wouldn’t work. Christ, she hadn’t even wanted him to be here. At least that was what she’d said. But with April you could never be sure. Just like with her suicide. Doug had wondered if she’d really go through with it. She had talked about it for so long; he had to admit that he’d been really surprised when she actually did it.
And now, here he was, going through with April’s crazy scheme. He hadn’t been sure if he’d do that, not even when he saw April lying dead in the coffin he bought for her, but the thought of getting to Amy had been enough to make his mouth water.
