Born To Die (Alvarez & Pescoli)

Grace turned back to her. “Be careful,” she warned and, whistling to the dog, walked across the road to a spot where the ditch wasn’t quite so deep and a path curved into the surrounding forest.

“Weird,” Kacey said under her breath, still shaken up, then, with some effort, turned her car around and cautiously drove the last four miles to the house she now called home. The lane was piled thick with snow, but her car, dented though it was, churned through the white powder and drove easily to its spot in the garage.

It was nearly eleven by the time she let out her breath and listened to the engine tick as it began to cool. After climbing out of the car, she flipped on the interior lights to survey the damage.

A crumpled bumper on one side, a few scratches, and a small dent were all that had happened. Easily fixed. And she was lucky to have survived. The accident could have been so much worse. Telling herself to deal with everything in the morning, she locked the garage behind her and started for the back door. The night was still, snow gently falling, the path she’d broken earlier already partially filled with new snow. Yet she had no trouble following it, her boots stepping in the large prints she’d left earlier. On the porch she paused and looked around the yard. Why, she didn’t know, just an uneasy feeling that had been with her all night. The accident hadn’t helped, nor had the other driver’s quick exit.

What had Grace said? That the driver was “evil,” that he meant Kacey harm?

That’s ridiculous. Don’t go there! He was just another driver in a hurry. And yet she felt a chill deep in her soul and remembered thinking fleetingly that she’d seen the driver somewhere before. “Now you’re imagining things.” She let herself inside and made certain the dead bolt was secure behind her.

Snapping on lights, she had the ludicrous sensation that someone had been inside. “Oh, for the love of God.” Still, she eyed each room, stepping through the archways and doors as she unwound her scarf, then hung it and her coat on the hall tree near the front door.

No knife-wielding, masked boogeyman leaped out at her.

No dark shadow crossed her path.

No pairs of eyes glowed from behind the curtains.

Muttering beneath her breath, she headed up the stairs. One step down from the landing, she paused, certain she smelled something out of the ordinary lingering in the small alcove where a portrait of her grandparents was mounted on the faded wallpaper Kacey had sworn she would take it down. She hadn’t. The pale pink rose pattern had been Grannie’s favorite, and Kacey had had neither the time nor the heart to strip it from the walls.

She touched her finger to her lips, then brushed it over her smiling grandparents’ faces and wondered what they knew about the women who looked like her. Jocelyn Wallis and Shelly Bonaventure, “dead ringers” for her who had lived in the area.

She continued to climb the stairs. The third step from the top creaked as it always did, and Kacey smiled, remembering how she’d avoided stepping on that particular plank as a child, first considering it “bad luck” and later so as not to wake her snoring grandfather and light-sleeping grandmother as she snuck out of the house during those blissful, hot Montana summers, when the smell of cut hay and dust filled her nostrils and she rode her horse bareback through the moonlit fields.

It seemed an eternity ago, part of a childhood disconnected from the woman she’d become, the driven medical student who had been attacked by a madman and had nearly given up her career before it had gotten started.

Who was she kidding?

She’d never been the same since the maniac had leapt out at her in the parking garage.

Gone was any vestige of the girl who had raced her horse at midnight, or swung on a rope to drop into the river that cut through these mountains in summer, or hiked fearlessly through the surrounding hills.... No, between her mother’s constant criticism and that horrific attack, Kacey’s self-confidence had eroded.

She’d gotten some of it back over the years, even handling the failure of divorce with more spine than she would have expected, but still, deep inside, in a place she rarely acknowledged, there was a frightened shell of a woman, and right now she was rearing her scared, trembling head.

Don’t let it happen. Don’t let some weirdo derail you. Grace Perchant thinks she can talk to ghosts, for crying out loud!

Giving herself a silent pep talk and a hard mental shake, Kacey walked to the room she’d always occupied, never having moved into her grandparents’ bedroom. That had seemed sacrilegious somehow. Rather than turn on the light, she walked to the window in the dark and stared across the moonlit fields.

Again she felt an unlikely, malicious wind rush through her insides, though the room was perfectly still. She thought about the driver of the pickup that had hit her car, remembered seeing his fleeting face. Did she know him? Or had she, in that heart-stopping instant, been mistaken?

All in your mind, she told herself but didn’t believe it for an instant.

CHAPTER 16

“ Okay...no . . . wait . . .” Pescoli, seated across from Alvarez in a booth at Wild Will’s held up both hands and cocked her head. It was the day after Thanksgiving, and they’d agreed to meet at the local restaurant and bar located in downtown Grizzly Falls. “You had your fortune read in a teacup by a woman who wears matching sweaters with her dog, and then you stole the victim’s cat?”

“Adopted. Maybe temporarily.”

Pescoli stared at her as if she’d just sprouted horns. “Who are you, and where’s my partner?” she demanded, grabbing the ketchup bottle and pouring a huge glob on her plate. “The next thing I know, you’ll be claiming to be beamed up into a spaceship to face Crytor, or whoever he was, the alien lizard general who Ivor Hicks thinks captured him years ago.”

Alvarez played around with the remains of her tuna salad and decided she had to confess. If she didn’t, Pescoli might hear it from someone else. So she admitted going to Dan Grayson’s for Thanksgiving.

“For the love of God,” Pescoli said, stunned. “You barged in on his family Thanksgiving and—”

“I was invited, okay?”

“Out of pity.”