Page 66 of The Undead

It was mo late to douse the lights. By common unspoken consent we’d left everything burning—upstairs, downstairs, porch lights, everything. The dark reminded us of William. When the tapping footsteps came up the walk I went out into the entryway, where I waited while someone rang the bell and then pounded energetically on the door.

“Ms. Reilly? Open up, Ms. Reilly, it’s the police. Ms. Reilly!”

It was Maggie …

Adam’s hand came down hard on my shoulder, jerking me back into the living room. He shoved me against the wall, rattling the pictures, and held up a silencing finger. I nodded. He jerked his chin upstairs—toward the secret room.

I shook my head.

He pushed me, not gently, in that direction. I stumbled a few feet and stopped, feet solidly planted. Make me, I thought, and I know it showed in my face. My eyes ached—probably blazing red, as angry as hellfire. As angry as his were blank.

Before Adam could decide what to do with me, there was the sound of a key turning the lock. His eyes widened, and he spun toward the entryway.

“Well, well, well,” Maggie purred too sweetly. “Imagine finding you here, Adam ol’ buddy, right where she said you’d be. Wonder how much else she was right about.”

“How did you get in?” Adam asked. Stalling for time. Time for me to make it upstairs, out of sight.

I couldn’t move.She? Which she? Had Maggie seen Sylvia?

“If you don’t want uninvited guests, don’t leave the spare key under the mat, asshole. Come on, you’ve seen some cop shows, hands on the wall, feet apart.” He didn’t move. I felt the bloom of her rage like a nuclear mushroom. She took a step further, and from where I stood I could see the black steel of her gun gleaming in the bright lights as she advanced. I couldn’t see her yet.

She couldn’t see me.

Adam, moving like a sleepwalker, went into the entryway. I heard the rustle of his clothes as he leaned against the wall. She patted him down, quick nervous sounds, and then took a step backward. I could see a slice of butter-rich hair, a short braid that ran down a black-shirted shoulder.

“Okay,” she murmured, “okay, okay. No, you stay right there. Where’s Reilly? She around too?”

“No,” Adam said, a lifeless word. “She’s gone.”

“Lot of that going around. I’ve been talking to a friend of yours, Adam. A real informative friend, even if she’s a little hard to believe. She thinks you’re a real piece of work, everything from necrophilia to body snatching to murder. Now, I normally don’t buy this kind of shit, particularly not when the lady is half a quart low herself, but the fact of the matter was that I’ve been thinking about you, about the way things happen around you. And you know what?” Maggie took another step backward. I could see a sliver of her cheek now, cool and golden. “Your buddy Rebecca Foster said that you buried somebody else in my husband’s place. That after I identified the body you switched the corpses and took my husband off someplace—according to Foster, that could be for anything from a cold cuddle to a hearty fucking meal.”

“Michael was my friend,” Adam said, still in that lifeless voice. Foster. God damn that stupid bitch, she was the last thing we needed right now …

“Damn right Michael was your friend. And friendship is a thing of joy forever, isn’t it?” There was a meaty sound, the sound of Maggie slamming Adam against the wall. “They dug up the fucking body today.Where’s my husband, you fucker?”

I heard the sound of the safety coming off her gun.Snick.Smooth and oily.

When I stepped around the corner, the sight of her entered me like a knife—disheveled, panting with fear and rage, angry red dots glowing high on her cheekbones. She smelled of sweat and old musty clothes. Tendrils of hair had come from down from her braid and hung lank around her face, inappropriate feathery tendrils that didn’t hide the molten blue of her eyes.

She held the business end of the gun to the back of Adam’s head. He had turned his face to the wall, resting his forehead against the cool white wall; I couldn’t see any expression. His eyes were closed, as if he’d fallen asleep, and I could almost feel the yearning in him. She probably couldn’t kill him with that gun, but she could make him feel something other than his grief.

“Maggie,” I whispered. Her head turned, a convulsive snap, and her attention centered on me like an acetylene torch. I heard her heartbeat jitter arrhythmically and race faster. Aside from that, and the sudden uncontrollable trembling, she didn’t change expression. Her eyes were shocked, but her face was still stuck in a snarl. “Let him go, Mag. Everything’s okay.”

Not even I believed that, but it was the best I could come up with. And Maggie’s right hand slowly lowered the gun, slipping the safety back on automatically. She stared at me with uncomprehending intensity, eyes traveling from my head to my feet and back again, a slight frown building between those smooth eyebrows. Her heartbeat was too fast, and getting faster with every passing second.

The gun came up again—at me. A firing stance, one that the academy instructors would have approved wholeheartedly. Two-handed. Over the gun, her eyes were like a little girl’s, bewildered and blank.

“You died,” she accused me, in a tone so betrayed that she could have been accusing me of adultery. “Youdied.”

I didn’t say anything, didn’t even move. The gun wavered, as did the eyes behind it.

“Mike?” she whispered, less certain this time. Her voice broke on the word, as short as it was, and the wide blue eyes sheeted over with silver tears. “No. No. Youdied.”

There didn’t seem to be any short way to explain it, so I didn’t. I just extended my hand to her, waiting.

Maggie, cop to the end, didn’t give up her gun. She carefully put it in the holster behind her back, and then she reached out with tentative, trembling fingers to take my hand.

The warmth of her skin was a shock. So was the weight of her in my arms as my wife, the iron lady, the toughest of the tough, collapsed against me in a dead faint.

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