LITMIR.BIZ

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into a search committee.

      “Hey,” Cliff said, grinning, “I don’t have far to go home.”

      “We’re staying in the stables anyway, kid,” Justin Binder told her. He had played a Yankee, and happily. His family hailed from Pennsylvania.

      Griffin laughed and gave her an affectionate hug. “You made me sober up, which is good. I am driving.”

      “Me, too,” John Ashton said. He held her shoulders and kissed her cheek. “Charles is just fine. I’m sure of it.”

      She thanked them all and said good-night, and they drifted away, some to the old outbuildings where they were staying, and some to their cars, parked in the lot out front and down the road.

      She stood on the porch with Beth and her grandfather.

      She couldn’t tell whether they thought she was being ridiculous or not, they were both so patient.

      Beth gave her a kiss on the cheek and said, “We still have about sixteen guests, and the household. I’ve got to get up early to whip up our spectacular plantation breakfast.”

      Ashley bid her good-night. It was down to her grandfather and herself, and Frazier was going to wait for her to be ready to head off to bed.

      “Something is wrong. I can feel it, Grampa,” she said.

      He set an arm around her shoulder. “You know … I have an old friend. I’ve been meaning to call him for a long time—tonight seems a good time to have a chat with him. If Charles really is gone, he may be able to help us. His name is Adam Harrison. I don’t know if you remember meeting him—I see him up in Virginia and D.C. sometimes. He worked for private concerns for many years, finding the right investigators for strange situations. Then the government started calling him, and his projects were all kind of combined for a while, civilian and federal. But he’s got a special unit now, and he’s got federal power behind him on it. His people are a select group from the Behavioral Analysis Unit of the FBI. I’ll give him a call. We’ll get someone out here to help by tomorrow. And if Charles turns up, no harm done.”

      She lowered her head. Adam Harrison. She knew the name. His unit had been involved in solving the death of Regina Holloway—it had been all over the media because she was a senator’s wife. And she knew, too, that Jake Mallory was part of that unit. She might not be a part of his world, but she hadn’t been able to miss it when she’d seen his name in the papers. She had broken off something that had been real with Jake, because he had terrified her … because he was certain that he had spoken with her father, after he had died. And now….

      Now Frazier was going to call Adam. Of course, it could come to nothing. She was panicking over a missing man because of an equally irrational dream.

      She looked out on the beautiful expanse of their property. The river rolling by. The moon high over the clouds. The vaults in the cemetery silent and ghostly and opalescent in the pale glow of night.

      Jake, I’m so … scared.

      Something was wrong. It was the oddest thing; she felt that she really understood the expression I feel it in my bones. Something wasn’t right about Charles’s disappearance, and she knew it.

      It was almost as if the past had truly merged into this eerie and haunting reality, and the collision of time here was not going to go away.

      Interlude

       He’d known for a long time what he’d had to do. The voice had been telling him for years.

       At first, of course, he had ignored it. The vision he’d seen of the past hadn’t been real. But then he’d known. He’d known who he was, and he’d come to know that the voice wouldn’t go away until he’d done what needed to be done. And he’d carefully planned it all out, though things had gone a bit strangely today. Didn’t matter, though, who was playing Marshall Donegal. It didn’t matter at all. Because, of course, an actor was just an actor.

       It was Donegal Plantation itself that needed to repay the old debt. That old debt could only be repaid one way.

       With blood.

       God bless a crowd. There was nothing in the world like mayhem, nothing like hundreds of witnesses to pull off an escapade such as he had planned, and to do it perfectly.

      There had been a horde surrounding them. One particular brunette was the right age, exceptionally pretty and with a Massachusetts accent. When she spoke, there was an r on the name Linda, and there was no r on the car she had “pahked” down the river road.

       She had giggled when she spoke to Charles, so it was easy to whisper in the man’s ear in his moment of greatest achievement and convince him that the girl was waiting to meet him.

       And in the madness surrounding everyone engaged in the action then, it was easy enough to meld into the crowd himself, and to swiftly disappear, and hurry to the river road.

       And there was Charles.

       He’d approached Charles with a smile.

       And, of course, Charles was smiling as well. At least he would go in a state of sheer happiness. It might even be a kindness. How many people got to die that happy?

       Poor, dumb Charles—he never suspected a thing. After the initial whack, he never even felt the prick of the needle.

       He’d thought it all out, exactly where he’d send Charles, because it all had to be done in plain sight. In plain sight, people never really knew what they saw.

       There were tourists heading to their cars. But they’d never notice two fellows in uniform chatting by a car. Not at an event like this. People liked to dress up.

       Maybe everyone wanted to be someone else, someone they weren’t.

       But to them, it would just appear that they were two cronies, faces covered by their broad-brimmed hats, leaning against one another as they chatted and laughed over a joke.

      Then … hide the body. Or if he had been seen, “help” an inebriated friend into a car.

      He would need more time for the pièce de résistance. Initially, it had taken him less than twenty minutes to stash Charles and rejoin all those rejoicing over the day.

       He had never felt more victorious. The difficult part, of course, would be to hide his anticipation for all that was destined to follow.

       It didn’t seem that anything could go so impossibly well.

       Ashley, damn her, though. Leave it to Ashley to be worried about Charles! Still and all, it did make the entire plan more exciting. Now, with the evening at a close, he was feeling elated.

       The place had settled down; though everyone had been willing to look for Charles, only Ashley had been really concerned. He had played with the idea of actually disposing of poor old Charles immediately, but now he was satisfied that he had decided he should make it something more dramatic—and allow time between the reenactment and the beginning of the end.

       Oh, he had worked with the others. He had searched so hard. There might have been just a few minutes when he feared someone would actually search the cars, but Charles hadn’t driven.

       It had almost been as if he’d been part of the plan.

       Now he sat next to good old Charles.

       This was necessary. The voice had said that it had to be done, and his ancestor

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