The Night Visitor
The Night Visitor is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
An Alibi eBook Original
Copyright © 2014 by Dianne Emley
All Rights Reserved.
Published in the United States by Alibi, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
Alibi and the Alibi colophon are trademarks of Random House LLC.
eBook ISBN 9780804178938
Cover design: Scott Biel
Cover images: Comstock/Stockbyte/Getty Images (woman); stevecoleimages/E+/Getty Images (mansion)
Author photograph: Bill Youngblood Photography
www.readalibi.com
v4.0
ep
Truths that wake,
To perish never.
—William Wordsworth,
from “Ode: Intimations of Immortality
from Recollections of Early Childhood”
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Dedication
Acknowledgments
By Dianne Emley
About the Author
1
Junior Lara saw the doves and knew something was wrong. They were loose inside the loft, flying in crazy circles, their beating wings stirring the air, scenting it with musk.
A gust of warm wind blew through the open windows. It carried a trace of something sweet and earthy.
The back of Junior’s neck prickled. He stood with his hand against the edge of the antique elevator’s door, hesitating before stepping into his loft apartment.
“Anya? You here?”
He peered up the long staircase that led to the roof. The door at the top was open. He shouted up the stairs, “Anya!”
Looking around the loft, Junior saw Anya’s purse and two cell phones on the big library table. “You’re here someplace. You wouldn’t go off without your beloved cell phones.”
He knew what she’d done. She’d gotten bored waiting inside the loft and went up to the roof to see the doves, and she had left the door to the coop open. The light had drawn the birds inside. He’d told her that he was on his way, but she couldn’t sit still for a few minutes, and now his place was a mess. But where was she?
“Dammit, Anya.”
It was wrong. Wrong from the get-go. Anya was bad news. He knew it, but he’d done it anyway.
He flipped off the lights and started on the windows along one wall of the loft, working by moonlight. He shooed birds outside and cranked the tall casement windows closed. Two of his favorite doves landed on his head and shoulder and rode with him, cooing and picking at his hair.
The wind gusted. Screens that partitioned the bedroom scuttled against the concrete floor. Magazine pages rustled. Loose drawings took flight. Pencils and charcoals rolled. Paintings on easels caught the wind like sails. The doves had been calming but took flight anew, circling, the moonlight luminescent on their feathers.
Junior cursed when he caught his foot on a stack of canvases leaning against a table and they clattered to the floor.
“Can’t sit still and wait ten minutes, can you, Miss Diva?”
He reached a corner and stopped before going to the windows along the adjacent wall. The back of his neck prickled again. He resisted an urge to turn on the lights. He’d never get the birds out that way. But something was giving him the creeps. It wasn’t the doves. They’d done this before. It wasn’t the darkness. He often painted by moonlight, enjoying the still and quiet of the quirky old building in the desolate neighborhood. It wasn’t the hot wind. The Santa Anas made others edgy but energized him. It was something else. There was a vibration, a tension in the air, formless and weightless, but palpable. It had slithered beneath his skin and nagged the pit of his stomach.
He thought of his fiancée, Rory. He wanted her here. He hated having lied to her. Mistakes on top of mistakes. It was time to come clean and tell her everything. Now.
He brushed his pets off him and pulled a cell phone from his pocket. He brought up Rory’s number and was about to make the call when something caught his eye. He’d left easels set up in front of the windows beside a vintage sofa. One easel displayed the nude portrait he’d painted of Anya. On the second easel was a framed painting, silhouetted by the moonlight. He blinked, not believing what he now saw. The two paintings seemed alive, undulating in the wind. They’d been reduced to ribbons, the strips of canvas flying like the torn fabric of a kite’s tail.
“I know you had a problem with it, but son of a bitch, Anya.”
The wind quieted, settling the tattered canvases, only to scatter them again.
Junior crossed the room, heading for the shredded paintings. Near the sofa, he slipped. The floor was wet and slick. Pitching forward, grabbing on to the sofa to not fall, he skidded into something solid yet soft on the floor behind it. It was Anya.
Even in the dim light, he saw her sultry gaze. Her full lips were parted, and her dark hair was splayed around her head. It was the pose in which she’d been photographed thousands of times.
Junior realized that her face wasn’t shadowed but was covered with blood. He scrambled to get away, holding on to the sofa, fighting the suction pull of the blood. He sensed motion close behind him. It wasn’t the wind. It wasn’t the doves. Before he got to his feet, he was again falling.
There was a flash or a bang—he wasn’t sure which. He was suddenly on the cold, bloody floor but strangely distant from his senses. Anya’s limp form in the moonlight faded as darkness closed in. He grappled to fix a thought in his head, something to sustain him, to keep him here and away from the darkness. Rory. He focused on Rory. Scenes from their life together flashed through his mind. He s
eized them and held on tightly.
The darkness crept closer. He tried to hold on to the light, but bit by bit it ebbed until all that he had been was reduced to a pinprick. Then, life as he had known it was over.
2
Five Years Later
Daniel Lara burst into the lobby of the run-down hospital in the Lincoln Heights neighborhood east of downtown L.A.’s Chinatown. He shoved a rolled magazine into his jacket pocket, snatched a pen that dangled from a chain attached to a clipboard on the scarred wooden counter, and wrote his name on the visitors log in an illegible scribble.
The hospital’s lobby was a dingy rectangle floored in pocked linoleum. Steel-and- plastic chairs lined the walls. A television on a wall was tuned to a Spanish-language station. A Latino couple sat on the uncomfortable chairs watching it. A boy and a girl played on the floor with toys pulled from a bin in the corner.
“My man, Danny boy.” The guard looked up from the sports section of a newspaper. Danny had become such a fixture at the hospital that the guard was already making out a visitor’s badge. “Look at you, lady-killer. Pressed and prettied in a suit and tie. You got a date or somethin’?”
“Hey, Johnnie.” Danny took tissues from a pocket and wiped beads of perspiration from his forehead. He glanced at the clock on the wall behind the guard, rolling his feet from heel to toe.
“Give it up, Danny. Warm this old man’s dull night.”
Danny was wearing a dark suit that had belonged to his brother, Junior, plus a blue shirt he’d bought at Walmart that day and a tie he’d found in his brother-in-law’s closet. The suit jacket drooped from his bony shoulders. He’d gotten a haircut. His wavy, dark brown hair set off his features—still striking even after the weight he’d lost.
He coughed wetly into the tissues. “Johnnie, yesterday a reporter got in and took pictures of Junior. How’d that happen?”
“Man, I’m sorry ’bout that. Broadsided me. Wasn’t expecting reporters. Haven’t had to watch out for that sort of thing in a while. Corliss found the guy beside Junior’s bed. I was gonna tell your mom the next time she came by. I deleted the pictures off the guy’s camera. Think I did, anyway.”
“Tonight’s the five-year anniversary of the shootings.”
“Damn. Been that long?”
Danny coughed again, holding the tissues over his mouth. The fit went on. He looked sheepishly at Johnnie, who was frowning.
“You see somebody about that cough?”
Moonlight.
Doves.
White shimmering.
Black.
Eyes soulless.
Wings beating.
The vision powerfully entered Danny’s mind. His eyes became distant as he saw the hospital lobby through a film of white doves in flight. Around and around they flew, circling in moonlight, their feathers glistening, their eyes black and shiny.
“Danny, hey. You all right?”
In his mind, Danny said, I know, bro. Been a long wait. But it’s gonna reach a conclusion tonight.
“Danny boy?”
“Yeah, yeah. Johnnie, look. Here’s a heads-up. There’re gonna be more reporters trying to get in here to see Junior.”
“Okay.” The guard considered Danny’s statement. “Why?”
“No. Really. Listen. You’ve gotta watch out. You’ve gotta be vigilant, man. Always.”
Johnnie looked hard at Danny. Junior Lara’s little brother was just twenty-two years old, but the years that had passed since Junior’s gunshot injury had taken a toll on Danny, more than on Junior’s sister or even his mother. Before the shootings, Danny had been a popular high school jock. Now he was gaunt, his skin was sallow, and his behavior had become increasingly strange. Lately Danny nearly lived in Junior’s hospital room. Corliss, the lead nurse in the subacute unit, had confided that Danny believed he could communicate telepathically with his minimally conscious brother. Johnnie had gotten used to Danny’s bizarre but harmless behavior, but tonight Danny was different. Edgy. What Danny was telling him now alarmed him, but he didn’t know where to go with it.
Danny again looked at the wall clock. He shoved his hands into his jacket pockets, where his fidgeting didn’t stop. “Junior’s not good. He’s…You know, he’s on his way out. I don’t want him bothered with all that mess. I need to know I can count on you. Huh, Johnnie?”
“What’s goin’ on, buddy? You seem kind of…I don’t know. Is something gonna happen or something?”
Danny smiled. His smile was still winning. “Something always happens. Just gotta go with the flow. Right, my man? Gotta go.”
He pushed through the swinging doors that led into the hospital.
“Hey, how…?”
Danny turned down the corridor and was gone.
Johnnie watched the doors swing on their springs until they fell still. He finished the question to himself: “How did you know about that reporter taking Junior’s picture? I haven’t seen your mom yet to tell her. Corliss probably called her. Yeah, that’s it.” Satisfied with his explanation, he returned to the newspaper.
3
Danny followed a familiar route to his brother’s room in the subacute unit, turning down a hallway and then another, as he savored the images in his mind.
Doves.
Flying.
Eyes.
Shining.
Blood.
Moonlight.
Gunshot.
Darkness.
“Bro, you’re troubled, but don’t be. Tonight is your night. Our night. Tonight, finally, justice for you. Vengeance for you. For our family.”
The nurses and hospital staff didn’t pay much attention to Danny. He was a frequent visitor.
He reached beneath his too large jacket and gingerly touched his lower back, wincing. He stopped walking, opened his eyes wide, and looked around with apprehension, as if he’d just discovered that the building was on fire. His senses were hyperacute. Every sight and sound was exaggerated and surreal.
He scrunched his eyes closed and blindly reached to support himself against a wall. He paused there, massaging his forehead, leaning forward, tipping toward the ground. He abruptly jerked upright, opened his eyes, and vigorously shook his head, trying to shed a feeling of profound disappointment.
Junior, I know what you’re up to. You’ve been trying all week, haven’t you? I was too dense to figure it out until now. You can’t reach her, man. You think the woman’s been spending any of her rich-ass, white-bread life over the past five years thinking ’bout you? She don’t care ’bout you, bro, but you still love her. That’s the part I don’t get. Woman blows away her own sister, shoots you in the head, and you still love her.
Danny said aloud, “If that’s what true love does to you, I’m glad I’m going out without having any part of it.”
4
Aurora “Rory” Langtry was standing in the Napoli Suite of the Villa del Sol d’Oro with her back to an antique mirror. Holding an ebony-framed hand mirror in front of her, she examined the rear of her head, grimacing as she tentatively touched her stiff hairstyle, which was held in place with a nest of bobby pins. It had been a mistake to let her hairdresser talk her into fashioning her long blond hair into a vintage updo.
At the sound of soft rapping, Rory dropped the mirror onto a settee, crossed the suite’s sitting room, and opened one of the double doors.
“There she is, the belle of the ball.”
“Aww…Thank you.” Rory leaned forward and gave Tom a peck on the lips, not wanting to get makeup on him or to muss hers.
He took her hand and pulled it to his lips. “I mean it. You look beautiful.”
She lowered her eyelids. “You’re going to make me blush. But, Tom…” She turned her back to him. “Look at my hair. I think I made a mistake.”
“I’d rather look at your ass in that gown.” He took in the way the pink, beaded silk revealed the curves on her tall, slender body, particularly when she leaned over the settee.
She was thirty, he
was thirty-two, and they’d just gotten engaged.
She continued studying herself in the two mirrors. “I told Kevin that I wanted something different. I didn’t expect senior prom circa…I don’t know, 1973. I look like an old PR photo of my mom, minus the red hair and false eyelashes.”
“I like your hair like that. It’s sexy. Shows off your neck.”
He walked to her, took the mirror from her hand, slipped his arms around her waist, and nuzzled her neck.
She giggled and staggered backward on her high-heeled Manolos until she was stopped by a library table. She slid her hands across his broad shoulders in his tuxedo jacket and up his strong neck, tightening her fingers in his dark brown hair.
He ran his hands around her hips. “What are you wearing under there?”
“That’s for me to know and you to find out.”
“Maybe I will.”
She yelped when the table he had pressed her against skidded on the Asian carpet, jostling the porcelain figurines arranged on top. She twisted in his grasp and attempted to steady the tottering ornaments.
“Isn’t breakage always blamed on the household staff?” While she was facing away, Tom took the opportunity to accost her from behind.