It was another familiar voice – the manager of Wakeman, a jolly man named Randall Jones.
“My usual walk,” she answered.
“It’s so hot, though! You be quick about it. I don’t want you passing out!”
“Or missing my ridiculous curfew,” she said.
“Yeah, or that,” Randall said with a bit of scorn.
She carried on with her walk, feeling the looming presence of the home fall away behind her. She felt an open space ahead of her, the lawn waiting for her. Beyond that was the sidewalk and, half a mile later, the rose garden.
Ellis hated the idea that she was nearing sixty and had a curfew. She understood it, but it made her feel like a child. Still, other than her lack of sight, she had it pretty sweet at the Wakeman Home for the Blind. She even had that nice man who came in to read to her once a week – and sometimes twice. She knew that he read to a few others, too. But those were people at other homes. Here at Wakeman, she was the only one he read to. It made her feel special. It made her feel like he preferred her. He’d complained to her that most of the others enjoyed romance novels or best-seller drivel. But with Ellis, he could read things he enjoyed. Two weeks ago, they’d finished up Cujo by Stephen King. And now there was this Bradbury book and —
She paused in her walk, cocking her head slightly.
She thought she’d heard something close to her. But after pausing, she did not hear it again.
Probably just an animal passing through the woods on my right, she thought. It was southern Virginia after all…and there were lots of woods and lots of critters living in them.
She tapped her cane out ahead of her, finding a weird sort of comfort in its familiar click click noise as it struck the sidewalk. While she obviously had never seen the sidewalk or the road alongside of it, they had been described to her several times. She’d also put something of a mental picture together in her mind, connecting smells with the descriptions of flowers and trees that some of the home’s aides and caretakers had given her.
Within five minutes, she could smell the roses several yards ahead. She could hear the bees buzzing around them. Sometimes she thought she could even smell the bees, covered in pollen and whatever honey they were producing elsewhere.
She knew the path to the rose garden so well that she could have made her way around it without the use of her cane. She’d lapped it at least one thousand times in the course of her eleven years at the home. She came out here to reflect on her life, how things had gotten so difficult that her husband had left her fifteen years ago and then her son eleven years ago. She didn’t miss her bastard of an ex-husband at all, but she did miss the feel of a man’s hands on her. If she was being honest with herself, it was one of the reasons she enjoyed feeling the face of the man who read to her. He had a strong chin, high cheekbones, and one of those southern drawls to his voice that was addictive to listen to. He could read her the phone book and she’d enjoy it.
She was thinking of him as she felt herself enter the familiar contours of the garden. The concrete was crisp and hard under her feet but everything else in front of her felt soft and inviting. She paused for a moment and discovered that, as was usually the case in the afternoons, she had the place to herself. No one else was there.
Again, she stopped. She heard something behind her.
Feel it, too, she thought.
“Who is that?” she asked.
She got no answer. She had come out this late because she knew the garden would be deserted. Very few came out after six in the afternoon because the town of Stateton, in which the Wakeman Home for the Blind was located, was a tiny speck of a place. When she had stepped outside fifteen minutes ago, she’d listened for the movement of anyone else who might be out on the front lawn and had heard no one. She’d also heard no one else on the sidewalk as she had come down to the garden. There was the possibility that someone could be out with the intention of sneaking up on her and scaring her, but that could be risky. There were repercussions to such behavior in this town, laws that were enforced by a tried and true southern police force that didn’t take shit when it came to local teens and bullies trying to pick on the disabled.
But there it was again.
She heard the noise, and the feeling that someone was there was stronger now. She smelled someone. It was not a bad smell at all. In fact, it was familiar.
Fear ran through her then, and she opened her mouth to yell.
But before she could, suddenly, she felt an immense pressure around her throat. She felt something else, too, radiating off of the person like heat.
Hate.
She gagged, unable to yell, to speak, to breathe, and she felt herself sinking to her knees.
The pressure tightened around her throat and that feeling of hate seemed to penetrate her, as pain spread throughout her body, and for the first time, Ellis was relieved that she was blind. As she felt her life slipping from her, she was relieved she would not have to lay eyes upon the face of evil. Instead, she had only that all-too-familiar darkness behind her eyes to welcome her into whatever awaited her after this life.
CHAPTER ONE
Mackenzie White, always on the go, was perfectly happy being confined to her little cubicle space. She was even happier when, three weeks ago, McGrath had called her up and told her that there was a vacant office thanks to a round of government layoffs, and that it was hers if she wanted it. She’d waited a few days, and when no one else had taken it, she went ahead and moved in.
It was minimally decorated, with only her desk, a floor lamp, a small bookshelf, and two chairs across from her desk. A large dry-erase calendar hung on the wall. She was staring at the calendar as she took a break between answering emails and making calls in her attempt to find details about one particular case.
It was an older case…a case linked to the single business card that she had on the dry-erase calendar, hanging there by a magnet:
It was the name of a business that apparently never existed.
Any lines of investigation that popped up were usually dashed right away. The closest they had come to getting anywhere was when Agent Harrison had discovered a place in New York that was a possible link. But that had turned out to be nothing more than a man who had sold old knock-off antiques in his garage in the late ’80s.
Still, there was the sense that she was this close to finding some thread that would lead her to the answers she had been looking for – answers regarding the death of her father and the apparently linked murder that had occurred earlier in the year, just six months ago.
She tried holding on to that sense of something being out there, dangling unseen yet somehow also right in front of her face. She had to on days like today when she’d had three possible leads die in their tracks via phone calls and emails.
The business card had become a puzzle piece to her. She stared at it every day, trying to figure out some approach she had not yet tried.
She was so enamored with it that when someone knocked on her office door, she jumped a bit. She looked to the door and saw Ellington standing there. He poked his head in and looked around.
“Yeah, an office setting still doesn’t suit you.”
“I know,” Mackenzie said. “I feel like such a fraud. Come on in.”
“Oh, I don’t have a lot of time,” he said. “I was just wondering if you might want to get lunch.”
“I can do that,” she said. “Meet me downstairs in about half an hour and – ”
Her desk phone rang, interrupting her. She read the display and saw that it was coming from McGrath’s extension. “One second,” she said. “This is McGrath.”
Ellington nodded and made a playfully stern face.
“This is Agent White,” she