Читать книгу: «Deadly Grace»

CHAPTER 1

Havenwood, Minnesota

Tuesday, January 9, 1979

She had no memory of her own death. No idea when it might have happened, or how, or how long she’d lain insensible in the netherworld between life and death. But when Jillian Meade awoke, she had no doubt she was in hell.

It was exactly as Reverend Owens had described in the fire-and-brimstone Sunday sermons that had terrified her as a child: acrid smoke that singed the nostrils and choked the lungs. A dry, searing wind that burned the skin like acid. Flying soot that stung the eyes so that she had to blink back tears to see. She was in a place of utter desolation, the darkness relieved only by the flickering of red and orange shadows writhing in the roiling smoke. A low vibration echoed around her, like the menacing growl of some great beast ready to spring for the kill.

And her bones ached, she realized. She was lying on a hard surface, and something was digging into her hip. Jillian shifted position painfully, and like a dreamer slowly awaking, she began to make out shapes in the murky shadows around her. She puzzled at what she saw. Furniture. She was on the floor, wedged into a corner, a tipped-over chair beneath her. She rolled to one side and pushed it away, the hellish light tracing the familiar spindles of its ladder back.

How many times had she sat on the hard, unforgiving seat of one of those chairs as a child, hands stubbornly behind her, fingers clenched around those spindles rather than around a spoon containing pale, woody lima beans or slimy Cream of Wheat? Stifling a cough, Jillian lifted her head. How was it that hell looked so much like her mother’s kitchen? The simple explanation was, of course, that she wasn’t dead, but back at her mother’s house in Minnesota. But why was she lying on the floor? Why was the house in darkness, except for that odd, menacing red flicker coming from down the hall? And why—

Oh, God! Fire!

“Mother!” Coughing and choking, Jillian tried to rise, but when she placed her hands on the ceramic tile floor, her palms, wet and slick, skidded out from under her. She propped herself on her elbows, instead, and screamed again. “Mother! Where are you?”

Blinking through tears, she could just make out the shapes of the other three kitchen chairs, still upright around the oval oak table. A thick, gray brume was circling the room, wafting across the face of the cabinets, undulating under the ceiling like toxic silk.

Avoiding her slippery palms, Jillian used her wrists and elbows to brace herself as she struggled to her knees. Through the archway leading to the front hall and the rest of the house beyond, the subtle pattern of the flowered Victorian wallpaper had taken on a gaudy orange glow. The fire seemed to be coming from down the hall, toward the living room.

She scrambled to her feet.

“Mother!” Her voice was a strangled bleat. A claw of pain ripped at her lungs, and she doubled over, spitting up thick phlegm, coughing and choking, hands on her knees. When the spasm finally passed, she held her breath and unrolled the collar of her turtleneck sweater, covering her nose and trying to take small, filtered breaths.

“Mother, where are you?”

This time there was an answer, but the voice she heard was deep and male. “Jillian? Are you in there?”

It was coming from behind her, she realized, at the back door. She spun around and saw a shadow at the high window. The door handle rattled, but it seemed to be locked. “Jillian!”

“Here! I’m in here!” She knew she should run and open the door. Or go and find her mother. Do something! a voice in her head bellowed. But she was frozen in place, disoriented and growing faint from the expenditure of scant oxygen.

The door handle rattled once more and then the shadow at the window disappeared. A split second later, a gloved fist slammed through the glass. The smoke stirred, twisting and swirling toward this new escape outlet as a great, padded arm reached through, easily grabbing the inside knob and turning it. As the door flung wide, Jillian was knocked to her knees by the rush of superheated air coming from behind her. The fire, fanned by fresh oxygen, was on the move.

“Jillian!”

A pair of hands hooked under her armpits, yanking her upward, and she found herself looking into Nils Berglund’s worried face. He was dressed in uniform, the fluorescent yellow stitching on his shoulder patches glowing in the dim light. His head was bare, and his cropped, snow-dusted hair sparkled in the flickering light as the flakes melted in the heat. He rose to his feet, lifting her easily along with him.

“What are you doing here? Where’s your mother?”

Jillian’s legs felt like rubber, and she was forced to wrap her fingers in the soft, padded bulk of his bomber jacket to keep herself from crumbling to the floor. “I don’t know! I was out cold, and when I woke up…” Another painful spasm seized her lungs and she choked on the smoke once more.

“Come on, let’s get you out of here!” Wrapping an arm around her, Berglund started for the door, half-dragging, half-carrying her with him, but after only a couple of steps, Jillian locked her knees and braced her feet—bare, she suddenly realized—on the hard tile floor.

“No, Nils! We have to find my mother!”

“I will, after I get you out of here!”

They were almost to the door, but she grabbed the rounded tile rim of the kitchen counter and steadied herself. “No, go now! I’ll wait here.”

“Outside, dammit!” he yelled, dragging her off the counter. He shoved her through the door and out onto the wide wooden back porch. “Get away from the house! The fire trucks are on the way. They’ll give you a blanket. Go!”

Not waiting for an answer, he left her there and ran back into the house. “Mrs. Meade! Grace! Where are you?”

Jillian wrapped an arm around one of the porch’s upright beams and drank a greedy gulp of fresh air, but it was too cold, too rich, and her lungs seized. Doubling over again, she coughed and hacked, gasping for air between each painful spasm that felt like a thousand tiny shards of glass slicing her lungs. Snow was falling around the house in great, feathery flakes, spinning and brilliant white against the black night. As Jillian struggled dizzily for air, the entire world seemed to be swirling.

Then, over the raspy sound of her own breathing, she thought she heard the faint wail of sirens. She pulled herself, hand-over-hand, along the freezing porch rail and looked out into the night through wind-whipped snow, ears straining. The half-acre lot on which the house sat was mostly wooded. At the far edge of the wood, as she searched for any sign of the fire trucks, she thought she saw something move—something or someone. But her eyes, smoke-stung and running with tears, couldn’t make anything out. One of the Newkirks, maybe? Was it the neighbors who’d called in the alarm?

A bang sounded from behind her and she spun on her heel. The storm door was swinging on its hinges, buffeted by the pressurized air from inside the house, slamming against the stucco siding. She reached out and grabbed it on the next swing, peering into the kitchen, blinking as smoke and hot air poured out from the inside.

“Nils! Can you see her?”

The only answer was the splintering of glass as the window over the sink just a few feet away on her left shattered and sent glass shards tinkling across the wooden decking. She ignored the sting on her feet as the smoke inside cleared briefly in the newly formed vortex of air. Nils was standing at the framed archway that led to the front hall, but no sooner had she spotted him than he dropped, disappearing from her sight line behind the kitchen table.

“Are you all right?” she called.

“I found her!”

Jillian held on to the storm door while she waited for him to bring her mother out, ducking her head briefly once or twice for a gulp of fresh air. The sirens were unmistakable now, a panicky caterwaul that pierced the cold winter night. She glanced over her shoulder. Through the spruce trees at the bottom of the drive she spotted red lights winking as the trucks rounded the corner at the end of Lakeshore Road and turned up the street toward her mother’s drive. Feeling was coming back into her legs, and the wooden planks were icy under her bare feet. She shivered, her jeans and black turtleneck sweater scant protection against the wicked night air.

Shifting her weight from one freezing foot to the other, she stuck her head around the door frame again. “Come on, Nils! Get out! The trucks are here!”

Silence.

“Nils?”

The smoke swirling under the ceiling was thick as soup now and dropping fast. Jillian hesitated for a moment, then drew a deep breath and ducked low, trying to stay under the worst of it as she headed into the kitchen, across to where she’d last seen him. Rounding the oval oak table, she saw his back, POLICE stenciled on his jacket in large, reflective yellow letters. He was crouched on the floor, and to one side of him a pair of stockinged legs lay akimbo, splayed feet shod in familiar, tiny black pumps. The pose was uncharacteristically awkward, but Jillian would have recognized those legs anywhere—veinless, smooth and remarkably girlish for a woman of sixty. A source of great pride to her mother.

“Oh, God, Nils! Is she—”

His head snapped up at the sound of her voice. “Jill, no!” His arm shot out to hold her back.

Too late.

Jillian froze as his body shifted and she saw what it had been hiding. She dropped to the floor. “Oh, my God! No! Mother!”

Her mother lay on the tile floor, head tilted strangely to one side, intense blue eyes staring dully into space, half-hidden under heavy lids. Her silver-blond hair was tucked up as always into a chignon at the nape of her neck, virtually unruffled except for a single strand that had come loose and lay across her slack jaw. Her mouth was open, as if she’d been struck dumb in midprotest. Jillian’s gaze dropped to the dark stain that had seeped across the front of her mother’s pale cashmere sweater. All color was obscured by the strange tinge to the light flickering from the hall, but she knew the sweater set was robin’s-egg blue, just like her mother’s eyes. Grace had been wearing this sweater as she sat in her favorite wing chair in the front room…. When? Only moments ago, it seemed, sitting there, large as life, her spine ramrod straight, held away from the chair back, her hands clasped delicately in her lap, knees together, legs crossed demurely at the ankles. Always the picture of a lady. Now, the sweater was ruined. Her mother was lying sprawled on the floor, and the irrational thought crossed Jillian’s mind that Grace Meade would be appalled to know she’d been found in such an ungraceful state.

“Let’s get out of here!” Nils yelled over the roar of the fire and the wail of sirens that were right outside now. He coughed, drawing in air that was rapidly becoming completely un-breathable as he gathered the small, limp body into his arms.

Jillian stood and pressed herself against the wall, repelled by the burden in his arms, yet unable to look away. Her gaze rose with him as he struggled to his feet. He was huge, her mother’s tiny form almost lost in the bulk of him.

He cocked his head toward the back door. “Get going! I’ll follow you!”

He shifted the weight in his arms for a better grip, and as he did, her mother’s head turned, those pale, dead eyes fixing Jillian with an accusatory glare. She recoiled, and as her knees buckled, she slid down the wall, landing with a thud on her backside.

“For Christ sake, get up!” Nils bellowed. “The fire’s spreading! The whole place is going to go!”

She wanted to run but she was nailed in place by the judgment she saw in her mother’s eyes. Nils hefted the body over one shoulder, freeing up a hand, and he used it to grip Jillian’s upper arm. She shook him off and turned away, squeezing her eyes shut. Anything but to look at the stare of that monstrous thing that was—but couldn’t be—her mother.

Mummy, no, please!

He grabbed her again, but she fought him off and scuttled down the hall, deeper into the house, moving toward the dull roar and the flickering light of flames that had now fully engulfed the living room.

“Jill! Get back here, dammit!”

Instead, she lay down on the threshold of the dining room, opposite the fire, pressing her cheek into its waxed and buffed cherry planks. The fire crackled in her ears, but beyond that sensation, which was more pressure than sound, she was aware of nothing. Her eyelids closed, and she gave herself over gratefully to whatever void she could find.

It wasn’t to be. Something clamped on to her arms, and she was lifted in two sharp yanks, first to a sitting position, then to her feet. She opened her eyes. Nils held her by the elbows, both of his hands free now of that other load. He shook her once, then again, all will had drained out of her. Her head flopped, her body limp, joints unstrung.

“Dammit, Jill, come on! Do you want to die in here?”

A sweet lassitude overtook her. Yes. Leave me alone.

He caught her face and cupped it in his hands, his wide, worried face filling her field of vision.

“Jill, please!”

He leaned toward her until their foreheads were touching, and he held her close, thumbs stroking her face. Then his head tilted and he kissed her, hard. She felt his lips on hers, and for a moment, she was seventeen all over again. The intervening years faded away, and they were Nils and Jill, inseparable, deeply, obsessively in love, the way it only happens the first time, when every experience is new, every touch a revelation. It all came back to her—the smell of him, the taste of him, the safe refuge of him.

When he pulled back and looked at her again, his expression tortured, she nodded. He got to his feet and extended a hand, and she reached out, ready to take it, until she spotted the dark stain on the left shoulder of his jacket. Blood, she realized, soaked deep into the padding. Her mother’s blood. She tried to push him away—push the blood away—only to realize that her own hands, too, were sticky and wet with it. She stared at them, horrified, and she screamed.

He grabbed her roughly. She fought him, scratching and kicking, but it was a hopeless mismatch. He was huge, well over six feet and even heavier now than he’d been in his high school linebacker days. He lifted her easily and was about to sling her over that same bloody shoulder when a lucky kick from her right foot connected with his groin. His grip weakened momentarily, and as he crumpled, Jillian pushed herself off his brawny frame and started to run. But before she’d gone more than a couple of steps, her bare heel hit a wet patch and skidded out from under her. She landed flat on her back on the hardwood floor, the wind knocked out of her.

She lay there for a moment, then rolled over—only to find herself right where Nils had laid down his bloody burden, face-to-face with her mother’s dull, half-lidded stare. Unblinking, it cut through her like a judgment.

She was, indeed, in hell, Jillian thought. Exactly where she belonged.