Haunted, page 7
Sighing, she glanced into the rearview mirror and caught a familiar sight—a black van—passing a semi and slipping behind the SUV tailing Ariel. The SUV didn’t bother her; it had just entered the expressway on the last on-ramp. But that van had been somewhere behind her since Barrett. She wasn’t certain, but it could be the one she’d noticed a couple of days ago in the parking garage of social services.
Usually the light and mist distracted her from details such as other vehicles, but like heat rising off the asphalt, the orange glow shimmered only on the road ahead as if leading her toward Armaya. The rearview mirror kept drawing Ariel’s attention from the light. Something about the van—maybe that the windows were tinted so dark that it looked as if there was no driver—quickened her pulse and added to her uneasiness.
Noting the exit for gas and food, she jerked the wheel, cutting in front of a minivan to maneuver her Jeep onto the off-ramp. The driver blared her horn, and Ariel lifted her hand in an apologetic wave. Then the horn blared again as a black van swerved onto the exit, too. Ariel’s heart kicked hard in her chest. Not good. This was not good. Why was someone following her?
The coffee churned in her stomach again. She would have been the easiest to find, staying in Barrett and keeping her name. Had her mother’s killer found her already? Or maybe it was as she’d hoped—maybe one of her sisters was looking for her. She might never know if she kept running.
She reached toward the passenger seat, where her purse sat. By the time she’d pulled up near a pump at the station, she had extracted a can of pepper spray from the leather bag. For a second she wished it were a gun, but as a teacher, she would have never felt comfortable carrying one. The pepper spray was dangerous enough that she’d always locked up her purse so the kids wouldn’t get a hold of it. But she didn’t have to worry about the children anymore, not unless she let David manipulate the school board into requesting her reinstatement. She wouldn’t ask him to intercede on her behalf, though. Since seeing her mother’s ghost, she wasn’t ready to go back. If she didn’t find out who was following her, she might never have the opportunity.
She clutched the canister tightly in one hand as she opened the door of the Jeep with the other. The mingled odors of gasoline and oil hung heavily on the air, thicker than the mist. After walking past the pumps, she rounded the corner of the painted white brick station, hoping that anyone watching her would think she was heading to the restrooms. A glance over her shoulder confirmed that the van had pulled into the parking lot, too, near the air pumps on the other side.
Ariel circled around the back of the building, where most of the paint had peeled from the old red bricks. She skirted the garbage-reeking Dumpsters, where flies buzzed, then edged toward the corner. Her heart thumped hard, the beat in her chest echoing in her palm as she tightly clutched the canister. What protection would the pepper spray be against a knife or a gun? Enough if she acted quickly?
She searched her brain for the knowledge garnered from the self-defense course she’d taken during college. But all she remembered was the advice to run as far and as fast from potential danger as possible, shrieking loudly.
Even knowing the advice she should be taking, she hunched over, then slipped around the corner, setting her feet softly and carefully on the sidewalk hugging the building so no loose gravel crunched beneath the heels of her boots. Slinking down low, she edged up the side of the black van until she neared the driver’s door. The sunlight reflected off only a sliver of glass above the door, as the window was down. Drawing in a quick, ragged breath, she stood and pointed the spray can into the open window. “Who the hell are—”
The dark eyes of the driver widened with surprise, followed by a darker shadow of guilt, then a flash of pride. “You caught me,” David said, a slight grin lifting his mouth.
Hands shaking, she lowered the can so she wouldn’t inadvertently spray him even though she was tempted. He almost deserved it for the scare he’d given her. Anger sharpened her voice as she asked, “Why were you following me?”
“I was worried about you,” he admitted, opening the van door to step out beside her. “You’ve been acting so strangely.”
Ever since the night her mother’s ghost had appeared. Despite the warm sweater she wore over her blouse, she shivered, then insisted, “I wasn’t running away again.”
His brown eyes narrowed with doubt as his voice softened with concern. “I was worried that you might. That maybe I put too much pressure on you with my proposal.”
She couldn’t deny that he had, but the pressure was on her to be honest, to put herself out there for the man she loved. Maybe taking him to Armaya was the first step; it might be easier to show than tell. That was the advice she’d always given her shy students to participate in class.
“This trip has nothing to do with us.” Not really, not until now. “I’m trying to find someone.”
“Let me help you, Ariel. Who are you looking for?” David asked.
She drew in a quick breath, but it didn’t ease the ache in her chest. “My mother.”
She was part of the reason for Ariel’s return to Armaya. Ariel needed to find out how her mom had died, and if it was, as she suspected, murder, to make certain that the killer was brought to justice. Hopefully he had already been caught and there was no threat to her or her sisters. But her mother’s image burned in Ariel’s mind, her arms flailing, her mouth open as if screaming or shouting a warning.
“You told me you were a foster child.”
She nodded. “That’s true, but I wasn’t an orphan.” Then. But she’d let him believe she was so that she didn’t have to answer questions about her family, not because she was ashamed of them but because it hurt too much to explain that they’d never looked for her. All they had had to do to find her was open the Barrett phone book. “I was put into foster care after I was taken away from my mom and split up from my sisters.”
“Sisters?” Shock cracked his deep voice. “You have sisters?”
“Yes. One older. One younger.” Women she wouldn’t know if she passed them on the street. Strangers.
“Do you know where they are?” he asked.
She shook her head. “No, but I remember where we lived when social services took us away from my mom. A little town just north of here—if it’s still there.”
His arms closed around her, pulling her close, offering that comfort he always instinctively knew she needed. His heart beat sure and steady beneath her cheek. More than the diamond on her finger, David was her rock. “I’ll go with you,” he said.
She didn’t want to lose him. Fighting against the urge to melt in his arms, she pulled back. She’d already shocked him with what she’d revealed; she could tell by how dark his eyes were, how taut his jaw was as she glanced up at him. “Maybe it’s better that I go alone.”
“Ariel, let me in….”
If she was ever going to accept his proposal, she had to. She drew in a deep breath, then nodded. “All right.”
But even as she agreed, she worried that once he learned the truth, she’d lose him.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me about your past before?” David asked as he closed his laptop and tossed it into the back of the van.
On the passenger side she settled against the contoured leather bench seat, the fabric soft and supple, unlike the cracked vinyl of the Jeep’s driver’s seat. But she stared longingly at her Cherokee as they left it in the carpool lot next to the gas station and headed back onto the freeway.
“It’s not easy to talk about,” she answered truthfully. Despite what she’d told him—mostly just her mother’s and sisters’ names—she’d left so much unsaid.
He reached across the width of the seat, covering her hand with his. “It must have been traumatic.”
Being torn away from people who actually understood and accepted her? She closed her eyes as the remembered despair pressed down on her chest, stealing her breath away. His fingers tightened around her hand, offering a comforting squeeze.
Why didn’t she feel comforted? Because his touch invoked memories of passion, images flickering behind her lids of the two of them entwined in bed? His hands moving over her naked skin, stroking her breasts, her thighs. Her pulse quickened but with more than sexual awareness. She felt an uneasiness, like when she’d noticed the van following her. Maybe it wasn’t fear of David’s rejection that had compelled her to keep her past secret. Maybe she feared David. He was a powerful man, used to getting what he wanted. He wanted her. Because he loved her, as he claimed?
Ariel didn’t trust love. After the rejections she’d suffered, she didn’t trust anyone or anything. Not even David. Maybe most especially David, since her feelings made her the most vulnerable to him.
“Ariel, are you okay?” he asked.
“Scared,” she admitted, being more honest with him than she’d ever been.
“Don’t be. I’m here for you.”
Now.
“I’ll always be here for you.”
How had he spoken to her unexpressed thought? Luck, deep knowledge of her…or something else?
She opened her eyes, to the thick smoke, to the orange glow. Was her mother back to warn her away from or to lead her toward Armaya? Gypsy for curse, it had probably been named for the Durikken curse, the special abilities that people mistrusted and mistook for witchcraft. But then, they really hadn’t been mistaken. Ariel’s ancestors had been witches. So was she.
She hoped the little town held the information she needed to find and warn her sisters. She wasn’t just worried about them, though. She was worried about David, too, about what she’d told him. Not enough but maybe too much. She tugged her hand free of his and clenched it into a fist in her lap. Trying to keep her past secret would alienate him, but telling him everything…
Damn her inability to trust.
“This could be a dead end,” David warned, his deep voice directed toward the windshield as he concentrated on the road. He’d turned off the highway a while back. “Are you prepared for that?”
She peered through the smoke to the image of her mother, her eyes burning with anguish, her mouth open as she tried to speak. Or scream? Ariel resisted the urge to shudder and assured him, “I’m prepared for anything.”
“I can vouch for that,” David said with a chuckle. “I never knew you carried mace.”
“Pepper spray.”
“I guess that might not have blinded me then,” he said ruefully.
She wasn’t about to apologize for protecting herself. “So you were following me because you were worried about me?” She shouldn’t doubt that he cared about her; he’d proven it again and again.
“Yes, I was worried,” he admitted again. “You were avoiding my calls, cutting yourself off from everyone—”
“So you thought I was going to run.”
He sighed. “I didn’t know what you were going to do.”
“I ran once,” she defended herself. At least it was once that he knew of; the other times she’d run away from foster homes before they could get rid of her by either sending her to another or locking her up in a psychiatric hospital.
“When you were overwhelmed,” David agreed. Speaking of Haylee or to her thoughts again?
“Yes…”
“I thought I had overwhelmed you again with my proposal,” he explained.
“It was a surprise,” she said, glancing down at the diamond, aglow with reflections of the orange light.
“I’m not rushing you,” he insisted. “Take all the time you need to decide.”
She wasn’t taking the time to make her decision; she was using it to avoid telling him the truth. She couldn’t give him an answer until she did. But first she had a question of her own. “So how long have you been following me?”
“From your house.”
“What about yesterday?” Had that been his van at Child Protective Services? She hadn’t studied it long enough to determine the make or model; those weren’t things she’d know anyway. But it had been black like his, and she’d suspected someone had been inside, hidden behind the dark tinted windows, watching her. She shivered again, as she’d done yesterday in the cold, damp garage.
He shook his head, but sunglasses concealed his eyes and whatever else he might be hiding from her. Once again she had a feeling she wasn’t the only one keeping secrets.
“I’m not stalking you,” he vowed. “I was driving up to your house, intending to talk to you, when you pulled out of the driveway. I didn’t consciously decide to follow you, but…”
“You did,” she pointed out. “I didn’t even know you had a van.”
He shrugged, his broad shoulders rippling beneath his leather jacket. “It belongs to the company, one of the fleet.”
But devoid of logo or brand. Why had he used it instead of his more luxurious Cadillac Escalade? So she wouldn’t recognize him? Was that the action of a man worried she was running away or a man wanting to follow her to know where she was going?
Her stomach churned with the doubts. She should accept him at his word. He wasn’t a stalker. He was the man who loved her.
“Do you recognize it?” David asked.
Love and concern? Probably not, she’d seen so little of it in her life. “What?”
“The town. We’re here.”
She glanced out the window. The assorted collection of frame and brick buildings sitting at the curb of cobblestone streets didn’t look much different from a dozen other small towns they’d passed through since he’d pulled off the highway. “No, I don’t.”
“Well, the Cooper listed in the Armaya property tax records doesn’t live in town.” That was what he’d pulled up on his laptop—tax records as well as more up-to-date maps. “We have a few miles to go yet.”
But those few miles of woods and fields didn’t do anything to jar Ariel’s memory. Whatever hope she had harbored dimmed, just like the orange glow that had led her north. Her mother was gone. “It doesn’t matter. They’re not here.”
She and her sisters had been taken away from this little town two decades ago. She wouldn’t find them in Armaya. The only thing she might find was her mother’s body.
“Probably not,” David agreed. “But someone in town might remember you and your sisters, might have kept track of the three of you.”
That was something else she was afraid of—that someone already knew where her sisters were.
“Why now, Ariel?” David asked as he turned toward her. The dark glasses concealed his eyes, so she didn’t know if curiosity or something else motivated his question.
“What do you mean?” She hated the suspicion coloring her perception of the man she loved. He’d never been anything but sweet and generous. Why did she doubt his motives? Because of the appearance of her mother’s ghost? Or was she using her mother to justify doubts she already harbored and had ignored until now?
“Why are you looking for your mom and sisters now?” he persisted.
She’d shared as much with him as she dared for the moment. If she told him the rest—about her special ability—he’d think she was crazy, as Margaret had and all those people before her.
“I just need to find them.”
“Did losing Haylee bring all that back for you, losing them?” he asked, his voice even deeper with concern.
Ariel expelled a little sigh. She was being ridiculous. “I really can’t explain.”
Because she’d have to tell him that she hadn’t really lost Haylee. She wasn’t sure why the little girl hadn’t left her yet; maybe she knew Ariel needed her as an anchor to hold on to during turmoil. But Haylee was in a better place, and every time she appeared to Ariel she seemed at peace.
Unlike Ariel’s mother, who was tortured even in death. Oh, Mama…
Ariel hoped to find her grave here in Armaya, assuming her body had been found. Just in case, she’d brought a spray of brown-eyed Susans, which she’d always picked for her mother whenever they’d stayed in Armaya. Regret pulled at her heart; she’d left them back in the Jeep.
“Don’t worry,” David assured Ariel. “We’ll find your family, wherever they are.” He pulled the van down a dirt road, gravel spewing from the tires as the vehicle bounced over ruts.
Maybe it was the cold air blowing from the vents, but a chill chased across Ariel’s skin. This was it. Where that truck camper had been parked that day. In a cornfield behind the old frame farmhouse that barely stood on a broken-down stone foundation.
“Here,” she said, her voice lifting with excitement. “Turn here.”
“You recognize it?” David asked as if he doubted her twenty-year-old memories. “But it doesn’t look like anyone lives here.”
It looked condemned, but that was how Ariel remembered it looking all those years ago. And an old man had lived in the house—her grandfather. Papa Cooper. He’d been too stubborn to do anything to keep up the house and property. They would only raise my taxes if I did. That was one of her only memories of the gnarled old man. He couldn’t be alive anymore. He’d been so old back then, so frightening, like a skeleton that moved and talked, far scarier than any of the ghosts she’d seen.
But she, her mother and sisters hadn’t stayed long or all that often at the farm, only coming by for fleeting visits. For parties. Another memory flashed through Ariel’s mind: picnic tables strewn about the overgrown yard, music playing, people dancing. Most of the people had probably been neighbors or friends, but Ariel remembered a couple of women who had looked like her mother. Her aunts. Why had neither of them taken Ariel and her sisters? Why had no one tried to keep them together?
She wouldn’t know any answers unless she asked the questions. There had to be someone here who could tell her what she needed to know, who could help her find her mother.
On the edge of the two-track drive, flowers bloomed among the overgrown weeds, their brown faces tilting toward the sun as their golden petals glowed like its rays. Needing comfort, she reached for her bracelet, to the worn pewter charm dangling from it. Despite the cool air in the van, the metal was warm, and as she stroked the charm, the light appeared, burning through the overcast clouds, shimmering in the mist that suddenly blanketed the old farm.
