He held up his hand and rubbed his fingers against his thumb.
“Money. From the raid on...”
He nodded.
“Good place for it.”
John turned around and stared down the hall to where the dormitory was. As memories bubbled up, his feet started in that direction before he had a conscious thought to go over to where he’d once laid his head. It was so strange being here again, remembering the loneliness and the fear and the nagging sense that he was totally different—especially when he was with other boys his own age.
That had always made it worse. Being around that which he should have been essentially identical to had alienated him the most.
Xhex followed John through the hallway, staying a little behind him.
He was walking silently, toe-heel in his shitkickers, and she took his example to heart, doing the same so that they were nothing but ghosts in the quiet corridor. As they went, she noted that although the physical plant of the building was old, everything was spotless, from the high-polish linoleum, to the much-painted beige walls, to the windows with the chicken wire embedded in the glass. There was no dust, no cobwebs, no chips or cracks in the plaster.
It gave her hope that the nuns and the administrators looked after the kids with similar attention to detail.
As she and John came up to a pair of doors, she could feel the dreams of the boys on the far side, the tremors of emotion that bubbled up through their REM sleep tickling her
John ducked his head in, and as he stared in at those who were where he had been, she found herself frowning again.
His emotional grid had... a shadow to it. A parallel but separate construct that she had picked up on before, but now found screamingly obvious.
She’d never sensed anything like it in anybody else and she couldn’t explain it... and didn’t think John was consciously aware of what he was doing. For some reason, though, this trip into his past was exposing the fault line in his psyche.
As well as other stuff. He’d been just like her, lost and apart, cared for by others out of obligation, not blooded love.
On some level, she thought that she should tell him to stop this whole thing, because she could sense how much it was taking out of him—and how much farther they had yet to go. But she was captivated by what he was showing her.
And not just because as a
No, she wanted to know more about this male.
While he studied the sleeping boys and got pulled into his past, she focused on his strong profile as it was lit by the security light over the door.
When she lifted her palm up and laid it on his shoulder, he jumped a little.
She wanted to say something smart and kind, put togther some combination of words to reach him where he’d reached her with this. But the thing was, there was more courage in these revelations of his than she had ever shown anyone, and in a world that was full of taking and cruelty, he was fucking breaking her heart with what he was giving her.
He’d been so lonely here and the echoes of the grieving were killing him. And yet he was going to soldier on because he’d told her he would do so.
John’s beautiful blue eyes met her stare, and as he tilted his head in inquiry, she realized words were bullshit in moments like this.
Stepping into his hard body, she wrapped one of her arms around the small of his back. With her free hand, she stretched up and captured his nape, pulling him down to her.
John hesitated and then came willingly, linking his arms around her waist and burying his face in her neck.
Xhex held him, lending him her strength, offering him shelter that she was more than capable of providing. As they stood one against another, she looked over his shoulders into the room beyond, at the small dark heads on their pillows.
In the silence, she felt the past and the present shift and mix, but that was a mirage. There was no way to comfort the lost boy he’d been back then.
But she had the grown male.
She had him right in her arms, and for a brief moment of whimsy, she imagined that she was never, ever going to let him go.
THIRTY-SEVEN
As he sat in his guest room at the Rathboone mansion, Gregg Winn should have felt better than he did. Thanks to some evocative camera shots of that soulful portrait down in the living room, coupled with some stills of the grounds taken in the gloaming, the brass back in L.A. was thrilled with the presell footage and was set to start running it. The butler had also come along nicely, signing the legal documents that gave permission for all kinds of access.
Stan the cameraman could perform a proctology exam on the damn house for all the places he could stick his lens.
But Gregg didn’t have the taste of victory in his mouth. Nope, he had a case of the this-isn’t-rights riding his gut and a tension headache that ran from the base of his skull all the way into his frontal lobe.
The problem was the hidden camera they’d put out in the hall the night before.
There was no rational explanation for what it had captured.
Ironic that a “ghost hunter,” when confronted with a figure who disappeared into thin air, needed Advil and Tums. You’d think he’d be overjoyed that for once he didn’t have to get his camera guy to fudge the footage.
As for Stan? He just shrugged it all off. Oh, he thought it was a ghost for sure—but that didn’t faze him in the slightest.
Then again, he could have been tied to a set of railroad tracks on some
There were advantages to being a pothead.
As the clock struck ten down below, Gregg got up from the laptop and went to the window. Man, he’d feel better about this whole thing if he hadn’t seen that long-haired figure roaming the grounds the night before.
To hell with that: Better that he hadn’t seen the fucker outside in the hall pulling a hallucination’s trick of now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t.
From behind him on the bed, Holly said, “Are you hoping to see the Easter bunny out there?”
He glanced over at her and thought she looked great propped up against the pillows, her nose in a book. When she’d taken the thing out, he’d been surprised to see it was the Doris Kearns Goodwin about the Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys. He’d have figured she was more a Tori Spelling-bio kind of girl.
“Yeah, I’m all about the cotton tail,” he murmured. “And I think I’m going to go down and see if I can get the bastard’s basket.”
“Don’t bring back any marshmallow Peeps. Colored eggs, chocolate bunnies, that fake fuzzy grass—all good. The Peeps freak me out.”
“I’ll have Stan come sit with you, ’kay?”
Holly’s eyes lifted from Camelot’s backstory. “I don’t need a nanny. Especially not one who’s liable to light up a joint in the bathroom.”
“I don’t want to leave you alone.”
“I’m not alone.” She nodded to the camera in the far corner of the room. “Just turn that on.”
