Well. It was taken care of now. No one had any reason to suspect she was working with the bad guys. She turned away from her reflection and returned to the bedroom. She went to the bed, watched Chad ’s sleeping form. He was snoring lightly. She prayed for him to turn over and see her in the expensive Victoria ’s Secret lingerie they’d picked out together from a catalog. It would arouse him. It always did. A good, energetic fucking might be just the thing to get him talking again. She pictured herself in his embrace, their bodies naked and covered with a sheen of sweat in the afterglow of love. The intimacy of the moment leading him to confide in her again, sharing his fears and telling her of the danger Jim claimed they were facing. And it would then be so easy to fuel the fires of that fear, manipulating him with her own show of terror.
They would run.
Rouse Jim, grab a few necessities, and get the hell out of Dodge.
Chad shifted position on the bed, rolling from his side onto his back. Allyson held her breath for a hopeful, tense moment.
He didn’t wake.
Damn.
Allyson pulled on a tiny silk robe and slipped out of the bedroom. As she moved down the hallway toward the living room, she paused at the doorway to the guest bedroom. The door was partly open, but the interior was dark. She could just vaguely make out the sleeping form of Mr. Jim, Lazarus, or whatever his name really was. She heard an intake of breath and thought for a moment that he might be awake. Awake and watching her watch him. Her heart raced at the thought. Without waiting to verify whether the man was awake or asleep, she hurried past the darkened doorway.
She retrieved Chad ’s laptop from his office and carried it into the living room. She settled into the plush sectional sofa and propped the little computer on her lap. She opened it and tapped the power button. The computer came out of hibernation mode to present her with a screen that offered the option of signing on to her desktop or Chad ’s. She moved the cursor to Chad ’s name and clicked on it. The desktop icons quickly loaded and she signed on to Chad ’s AOL account. She opened his mailbox and scrolled through the list of e-mails, looking for anything that might be from someone looking to tip him to Allyson’s true role here. She couldn’t imagine who might be in a position to do that, but paranoia drove her to periodically check his messages on the off-chance anything that needed intercepting did show up.
Seeing nothing out of the ordinary, she clicked over to his saved mail folder and opened the two-year-old e-mail from Dream Weaver. She read through it again, even though she knew the words by heart. And she felt again the familiar stab of ridiculous jealousy. Ridiculous because the woman seemed to be gone from Chad ’s life forever. And doubly ridiculous given the true nature of her own relationship with Chad.
But the feeling was there nonetheless.
The note read:
Chad,
Yes, I know it’s been a while since you’ve heard from me. Yes, I know you’re worried. I can tell because there’s about a gazillion e-mails jamming my inbox. I don’t even need to read them. The subject headers tell me all I need to know.
Sorry if that sounds cold. Sorry if I sound like a bitch. But you need to let go and move on with your life. Stop pining for me, because I’m telling you right now, once and for all, I am never coming back.
I don’t say these things to hurt you. I honestly don’t. It hurts me to say them this way. I’m trying to be forceful and firm-yes, bitchy-because I need you to accept the way things are. What we had isbroken and cannot be fixed. I’m broken. I love you with all my heart, more than I could ever love anyone else, but our lives are on very different paths.
Paths, Chad, that will never cross again.
This is the last time you will ever hear from me.Please don’t reply to this message. I’m cancelling this account and it will just bounce back to you.
Have a nice life, Chad. Please find someone nice and forget about me.
Goodbye,
Dream
Allyson closed the e-mail and clicked out of Chad ’s AOL account.
Dream Weaver. As usual, Allyson’s blood boiled at the thought of that gorgeous woman and her ridiculous name. That fucking cunt. Dream had put Chad through so much drama and strife. He always swore he was over her. But why, then, would he continue to save a two-year-old e-mail?
Cunt. Fucking cunt.
She’d been asked to keep an eye out for her, too. She wished the bitch had been the one to show up tonight. She would’ve called hell down on her without a second thought. But she’d been told from the beginning that Lazarus, as they still called him, was far more likely to one day grace Chad ’s door. And…
Allyson frowned.
Wait a minute…
Chad ’s name for the elusive Lazarus was Jim. It didn’t require a lot of thought to conclude that Jim was far more likely the man’s real name. Allyson clicked over to Google Web search and entered the following:
“Lazarus Jim House of Blood”
She clicked on the first search result, a two-year-old Chattanooga Herald story that recounted everything then known about what had happened at that remote mountain house. One paragraph stood out immediately. It told of the wild Internet speculation about the true identities of the men known as the Master and Lazarus. One theory in particular made Allyson gasp. She’d heard it before, of course, but had forgotten about it or dismissed it as obvious nonsense.
Now, however, she wasn’t so sure.
She clicked back over to the image search tool and with trembling fingers typed in the name of a dead rock star. The images of this man were plentiful. She scrolled through them before clicking on a thumbnail image of the man at his most grizzled-looking. His face was bloated from alcohol overindulgence. His hair was a big brown mane and he had a thick, bushy beard. The hair was shorter now and the beard was gone, but the penetrating eyes and high cheekbones were the same.
“Fuck-”
Jim. Lazarus. That voice…no wonder it’d seemed so naggingly familiar.
Allyson clicked out of the browser window and closed the laptop. She sat there in a state of numb astonishment for several more minutes.
Then a noise from outside the house-a metallic thunk-snapped her out of it. She set the laptop on the coffee table and surged to her feet, her heart thumping in her chest as she moved hurriedly through the living room and into the foyer. Adjacent to the foyer was a small sitting room lined with bookcases. She slipped into this room and moved to a big window that overlooked the front lawn. She moved the curtain back slightly and peered outside.
A big, dark-colored van was parked on the other side of the street. As she watched, two men clad entirely in black moved away from the van and crossed the street. Light from the streetlamps glinted off something shiny in the lead man’s hand. A pistol. Allyson’s breath caught in her throat. She made her shaking hand come away from the curtain. Without thinking about what she was doing, she raced out of the sitting room and headed back through the living room at full speed. Then through the kitchen to the door that led to the garage. She yanked the door open and reached for the light switch. Her hand froze on the switch.