Forever and Always Read online

  Suddenly, the door was flung open and there was Darci. “What in the world are you doing hiding in a broom closet?” she asked. “And what are you so happy about?”

  “He’s here,” I said. “I know it.”

  Darci

  Chapter Seventeen

  “I WANT TO HEAR EVERY WORD,” I SAID AS I LEANED against the wall. Linc was in the shower in the men’s bathroom down the hall from his room. The door was open so we could hear each other, and I did everything in my power to not think of his naked body. I made a vow that if I ever helped anyone else it would be a woman or a man as old as Henry.

  After I’d rescued Linc from his hiding place in the cleaning closet (mists of his aura had been drifting out through the transom) we’d gone back to the Quarters to talk. We had just minutes before dinner so I wanted to hear whatever it was he was so excited about.

  He’d asked me about my day, but I didn’t tell him about meeting Henry. I hadn’t sorted that out in my own mind yet, so I could tell him nothing. To distract him, I told him about Amelia’s nightly wait for Martin—who never came. And he told me that the women had said that Amelia was waiting for her child, so I told Linc what Henry had said happened to Martin’s spirit, but I didn’t tell where I got the information. I felt Linc’s sadness at all of it, but like me, he knew love knew no color, race, or religion.

  “We’ll be there to meet her tonight,” Linc said, and I agreed, but I cautioned him that he had to do what I said. I’d know what Amelia wanted.

  “So tell me what you overheard from Sylvia and Mrs. Hemmings.”

  “Sylvia says Delphia and Narcissa think you’re a spy,” he said, then told me what he’d overheard the women say.

  I smiled and silently congratulated myself. I’d done a good job of directing everyone away from the truth of what I wanted. “Promise you’ll do what I say or I’ll make sure Amelia isn’t there tonight,” I said to Linc.

  “If she’s been showing up at that tree for a hundred plus years, how will you stop her?”

  “I have ways. I need your promise. I don’t want tonight messed up. No playing that I’m the slave she hates. Tell Amelia I’m your friend and must stay with you.”

  He promised he’d behave himself. Of course I wouldn’t do anything like send Amelia away, but I didn’t want Linc to know that. I just wanted to find out all we could from her, and when it came to ghosts, I had much more experience than he had.

  Once we’d settled it between us about Amelia, he thrust a toy tractor into my hand and I became nearly as excited as Linc. Yes, it was his son’s and yes it had been put there on purpose. Linc thought his son had put the toy in the room, but I knew this was the work of Devlin. The spirit wouldn’t tell me outright where the boy was, but it looked as though he was going to eventually lead us to the child.

  Under normal circumstances, if I’d held something owned by a person, I could have told where he was, but Devlin had put only what he wanted me to know in that toy. The child was well, was being taken care of, and he was being…

  I rubbed the toy and tried to figure out what I was seeing. Stubborn. The child was being stubborn.

  Stubborn about what? I wondered.

  All that was important was that I knew Devlin was helping—slowly and in his own way, but he was helping. I had no doubt that Devlin had arranged for Linc to overhear the women, and the spirit had made the women talk while sitting in the hallway near an open transom.

  “Someone wanted me to meet Henry,” I said.

  “Did you say something?” Linc asked as he turned off the water.

  “Just thinking out loud.”

  “So what do you think?” he asked. “Do you think the women were referring to my son?” He was standing in the bathroom door with only a white towel around his middle.

  I was very glad he couldn’t see auras because I’m sure mine must have looked like a fireworks explosion. It was a cliché but he looked better in person than on screen.

  Able to see auras or not, he knew what the sight of his beautiful body did to women. “How about a quickie before dinner?” he said, leering at me.

  I laughed and that dispelled what could have been an awkward moment between us. Turning, I went down the hall to his bedroom. “Yes, I think they were talking about your son. But I can’t figure out what power he has that these women want. Your grandmother was a healer but these women seem to want someone killed. It doesn’t make sense.”

  Linc was pulling clothes out of a chest of drawers. “Isn’t it all the same?” he asked. “Give sickness, take away sickness. Same coin; two sides.”

  He’d said the words while holding socks up to the light, but when he said it, we knew. He looked at me and I looked at him, and we knew.

  Yes, the child could heal, but as Linc had said, the opposite side of the coin was to give sickness. Pappa Al had told us that he and his wife had been offered a lot of money to make rich people well. How much more would they pay to make someone ill—ill until they’d died?

  Linc stood there in just his towel, holding his socks aloft, one navy and one black, and stared at me. “No hit man,” he said softly. “Nothing that could be traced back to them. No danger of being caught.”

  “Mrs. Hemmings wants her ex-husband’s new wife dead so he’ll return to her and Daddy’s money.”

  “Sylvia wants her rich old husband to die before the divorce is final,” he said.

  “But your son is stubbornly holding out so the women are—”

  “Waiting,” Linc finished. “They’re killing time by getting daily massages from the ‘world’s worst masseur,’ and they’re pretending to believe in fortune-telling done with a crystal ball someone found in the basement.”

  “Which just happens to hold something very powerful.”

  “But only you are weird enough to know that. Sorry. No offense.”

  “None taken.” I began to pace the room, thinking about it all, seeing how it all made sense. “Maybe the child is being protected by Devlin,” I said. “I don’t think the boy has the power to block me from finding him, but maybe Devlin does.”

  “Who is he anyway?” Linc asked, stepping behind the closet door to get dressed. “And don’t tell me that he’s anybody he wants to be.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, putting my fists to my temples.

  “So much information is going round and round inside my head. Or maybe no information is in my head. Who started all this? Who told you your son was missing in the first place? I think you were given the note while you were near my mother so she’d see it and ask me to help you. From the beginning someone has wanted me involved in this. Was someone waiting for something to happen to pull me into this, or was your son kidnapped to make me come here?”

  “If someone wanted you all he’d have had to do was call you and say, ‘I have information about your husband.’”

  I sat down on the edge of the bed. “That’s true,” I said.

  Linc sat on the chair and began pulling on his socks. “So tell me, are we any closer to finding my son than we were ten minutes ago?”

  I shook my head. “Not as far as I can tell.” I held up the little tractor. “He’s safe. I can feel that. He’s not in danger except—”

  “Except for what?”

  “Loneliness.” I looked at Linc as understanding came to me. “They’ve taken his mother from him and they’re telling him that if he doesn’t do what they want, his mother will be killed—like the woman in the newspaper was.” I stood up as I began to see things. “The woman who was in the car was a hitchhiker, a runaway. It was made to look like Lisa Henderson died so the child would have no legal guardian. The mother wasn’t killed because they needed something to threaten him with. ‘If you don’t do what we want, your mother really will be killed,’ that sort of thing.”

  “Who are ‘they’?”

  I stopped moving. “I don’t know. Something powerful is blocking me from knowing. I thought it was the child but—”

  “Whoa