Forever: A Novel of Good and Evil Love and Hope Read online

  Slowly, without asking why he was so agitated, Darci hung up her jacket and his, made a trip to the bathroom, then returned to sit beside him on the couch and wait. Maybe if she was quiet and just waited, he’d tell her what had so upset him.

  “Read these,” he said, handing the pages to her.

  It took Darci several minutes to read the articles carefully and slowly. But when she’d finished reading everything he’d given her, she didn’t know what she was supposed to see. They were all sad articles about young women who had been in the Camwell area for one reason or another, then disappeared. One woman had been a photographer, taking photos of the old churches in the New England area; two others had been on vacation. One young woman had been staying at the Grove on her honeymoon.

  Although the stories were horrible in themselves, Darci failed to see what it was, specifically, that was so upsetting Adam. She looked at him in silent question.

  “Look at where the girls are from,” he said.

  She went over each article. “Virginia, Tennessee, South Carolina, and . . . this one is from Texas.” She still didn’t understand.

  “Now look at the photos.”

  They were all pretty girls, the youngest twenty-two and the oldest twenty-eight. But then didn’t all the photos of victims of serial killers and rapists and other sociopaths show pretty young women? she thought.

  “Each woman is blonde, small, and southern,” Adam said softly.

  Darci blinked at him, understanding at last.”Like me? Is that what you’re saying? Are you thinking that I am going to disappear next? Why would you think that? Is this why you hired me? To use me as bait?”

  “Don’t be absurd!” Adam said quickly, dismissing her exclamations as too ridiculous to consider. “Do you think I’d have brought you here if that were a possibility?” He took her left hand in his and looked at it under the light. “I’d like to know why that man nearly had a stroke when he saw your hand.”

  “Maybe his former girlfriend had moles on her palm, too,” Darci said as she pulled away from him, then got up and went into the kitchen. She wanted a moment alone to think. She was trying her best to remain calm through all that she was seeing and finding out, but it wasn’t easy. Small, blonde, southern women who’d disappeared in this area could be a coincidence, but it could also mean that, as Adam seemed to fear, she was a target.

  Or the target, she thought with a shiver of fear.

  Why, oh, why had Adam chosen her? Out of all those talented, educated women who’d applied for the job, why her?

  After she got herself under control, she filled two glasses with ice and Snapple lemonade and took them to the living room.

  Adam was sitting on the couch, staring at the articles in front of him with that same dark, brooding look that he’d been wearing when she first met him. She wished she could think of something to say to make him laugh, but at the moment, she could think of nothing at all funny. The faces of the missing young women seemed to fill her mind. “The way the man reacted to seeing my hand could have meant nothing,” Darci said quietly. “It could have been a coincidence or something unrelated to the witches. In fact, I don’t see how you can jump from some man in a phony-looking little store to women who have disappeared to—”

  She broke off when Adam got up, went to his bedroom, and returned with an address book. It was a little leather-bound volume that looked as though it had been around the world and back. When he opened it, she saw that the pages were worn and the addresses and phone numbers had been marked out and changed repeatedly.

  Adam flipped through it to the Ps, then picked up the phone and called someone. “Jack,” he said a moment later, “this is Adam Montgomery. I need a favor. Can you find out about the disappearances of four young women over the last four years in Camwell, Connecticut?” He paused and listened. “Yes, I know that the police believe that their disappearance had something to do with the reported practice of witchcraft in this area. And, yes, I’ve read everything that was published in the papers, but I also know what kind of investigations you guys do, and you always know more about a case than you tell anyone. What I want to know is, was there anything significant about the missing women’s hands? Specifically their left hands?” Again he waited and listened. “Okay, sure. Call me back on my cell phone,” Adam said, then hung up and looked at Darci. “He’s going to call me back as soon as he finds out anything.”

  “Is he a policeman?” Darci asked.

  “FBI.”

  “Oh,” she said, then paused. For the life of her, Darci couldn’t seem to think of any questions to ask him. FBI? The FBI was not something she’d encountered in real life. After a moment of silence, she put on her happiest face. “So what shall we do while we wait? We need something to calm your nerves. Maybe we should go to bed together and make mad love all afternoon. We could—” But the look Adam gave her made her stop talking. Obviously, he wasn’t in the mood to laugh right now. And the truth was that she was feeling a bit too nervous to talk.

  She soon saw that when Adam worried, he turned into a silent man who just wanted to be left alone. Again picking up the photocopied newspaper articles, he began to reread each one carefully. Moving to the chair beside the couch, Darci picked up the three magazines that were on the shelf under the coffee table and began to look through them, just waiting for the phone to ring.

  She thought that she’d been able to calm herself, but when the phone rang, she jumped so high that the magazines slid off her lap and hit the carpeted floor. Before the first ring stopped, Adam grabbed the little black phone off the coffee table, pressed the button, said, “Yes?” then listened.

  While Darci watched him, his face turned pale, and she wasn’t sure, but she thought that maybe there was a bit of a tremor in one of his hands. He said almost nothing, just listened and said, “Yes,” a few times. To Darci, it seemed like hours before he put the phone down. But even after he did, he still didn’t speak. Instead, he just sat there and looked at her.

  And Darci waited for him to speak. She desperately wanted him to tell her what the FBI agent named Jack had said, but she feared that if she asked, Adam might clam up and refuse to tell her. No, it was better to wait and let him volunteer information.

  But Adam didn’t speak. Instead, after several long, silent moments, he got up and went into her bedroom. Darci ran after him, and, standing in the doorway, she saw him open her closet door and pull out her ratty old suitcase. But after he looked at it, he went past Darci and across the hall to his bedroom, removed his two suitcases from the closet, then carried them back to her bedroom. Through all of this Darci watched him.

  It was when Adam had set his suitcases on her bed, opened them, and started putting her new clothes into them, that Darci placed herself between Adam and the open cases. “I want to know what’s going on!” she said, her voice full of all the exasperation and frustration she felt at being told so very little about what was going on.

  “No, you don’t,” he answered as he removed her navy blazer from a hanger and put the garment into the suitcase.

  “I do!” she said. “I do want to know!” To her horror, she realized that she was about to start crying. He was sending her away, but she didn’t want to return to New York, to her aunt and uncle. No, truthfully, she didn’t want to leave him. She didn’t want to be anywhere but here with Adam Montgomery. “Why are you firing me?” she asked, her voice full of the tears she was trying to hold back.

  “I’m not firing you,” he said calmly as he dropped two skirts into the case. “I’m protecting you.”

  “Protecting me? Why do you need to protect me?” When he didn’t answer, she said, “If you’re sending me away because of some moles on my hand, we could go to a doctor and have them removed. There are lots of alternatives to my leaving. We could stay somewhere else and just visit Camwell when we have to. We could—” When she saw that her words weren’t making him stop packing, she said, “Please don’t send me away.” Her voice was pleading, al