Sunshine and the Shadowmaster Read online

  “You left the light on,” she said. “You can’t sleep with the light on.”

  “I knew you’d be in. You always came in to say goodnight when I stayed here before.”

  Heather approached the bed and perched on the edge of it. “I’ll take your clothes now and put them in the washer before I go to bed.”

  He objected almost before she’d finished speaking. “No, never mind about doing that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because.” He looked up at the ceiling and then at her once more. “My dad said he’d be here real early. And he’ll want to get going. He won’t want to wait for my clothes to get dry.”

  Heather considered Mark’s reasoning, then conceded, “You may be right, but it only takes a half an hour to run the wash cycle. I’ll just wait up and switch them to the dryer before I go to bed.”

  “Please don’t do that, Aunt Heather. Just get some sleep, okay? I made enough trouble for you already tonight.”

  “It’s no trouble, Mark.”

  “It’s late. And I know you have to work tomorrow. It won’t hurt me to wear dirty clothes. So just go to bed, okay?”

  Heather was touched. He really was a very sensitive boy. And he was right. It was late and she was due in at work at six-thirty the next morning.

  She agreed, “Fair enough. I’ll leave your dirty clothes right where they are.”

  He smiled at her then, a wise, sad smile. She smiled back, thinking that his hair looked very black against the pillow. It was still wet from his shower. She wanted to reach out and smooth it a little, in a gesture that would have been a reassurance both to herself and to him. But she didn’t do it. Though he seemed resigned to his fate of being collected and returned to Monterey by his father, she sensed he would turn his head away at her touch.

  Since she felt he didn’t want her to touch him, she tried to reassure him with words. “Your father does love you.”

  “I know.” It was a reluctant admission.

  “He’s just...um...” Heather had no idea how to continue. She’d been raised in a family of complex and difficult men. But Lucas Drury was beyond even her experience. When he was seven years old, he’d stabbed his own father with a carving knife. And as a young man, he’d barely escaped doing hard time for assault and battery. Now, he was an international celebrity who wrote the kind of books that keep people from sleeping at night. The newspapers and entertainment magazines called him the Shadowmaster, a name that referred both to the spookiness of his stories and the fact that each one had the word “shadow” in the title.

  Heather had read all of those stories. She’d read the first one out of family loyalty, because Jason Lee’s brother had written it. But after that, she read them because, even though they often had her sleeping with the light on, they were absolutely impossible to put down.

  However, having read all of his books didn’t make her an authority on Lucas Drury himself. No, she hadn’t the faintest idea what made the man tick. So how in the world was she going to explain him to his ten-year-old son?

  Mark came to her rescue with a groan. “Oh, Aunt Heather. You don’t have to say anything. Like I said before, it’s not your fault, anyway. I know that.”

  Heather smiled. She’d come in here to comfort Mark, and ended up with him reassuring her.

  Mark added, “It’s just something I gotta work out myself, I guess.”

  “And I know you will—you and your father together.”

  He made a face at that. Lucas was still very much the bad guy in Mark’s mind.

  Heather dared to point out gently, “Maybe your father is a little hard to talk to, but what you did today—running away—was wrong and dangerous.”

  Mark pressed his lips together. “I told you. I can handle myself.”

  “That’s not the point. And I’m not finished.”

  “Okay, what?”

  “What you did was wrong and dangerous.”

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  “However...”

  “What?”

  “You are a great kid. An incredible kid. A smart, funny, wonderful, terrific kid.”

  His tan skin pinkened a little. She knew she had pleased him. “Sure,” he said, skeptical.

  “That’s how I know your dad’s an all-right guy.”

  “How?”

  “He’s raising you, isn’t he? And you’re turning out just wonderfully.

  “Oh, right. Gag. Puke.”

  “You’re much too modest.”

  “You’re blinded by my brains and good looks.”

  Heather laughed at that, and her glance fell on the night table by the bed. Mark had emptied his pockets there: a few crumpled bills, some change, a Milky Way wrapper, and a Swiss army knife.

  At the sight of the knife, Heather stopped laughing. The knife had been Jason Lee’s and he had prized it.

  She thought of her dead husband, holding the knife, remarking that the “damn thing’s got more attachments than a hound dog has ticks.” There were two metal files and a little pair of scissors, a corkscrew, a toothpick and tweezers—not to mention four different knife blades. On one end, at the place where the tweezers were stored, the surface had been chipped. Jason Lee used to rub his thumb on that chipped place, “For good luck,” he said. Then his light eyes would go misty and he’d tell her how someday he’d pass on that fine knife to their first son.

  But, of course, now there would be no son. So Heather had given the knife to Mark.

  Mark saw where she was looking. “I always take it. Wherever I go.”

  “Jason Lee would be glad.” Heather’s throat felt tight. It had gotten so she could think of Jason Lee most times now without that heavy surge of loss all through her body. But wrapping her mouth around his name could still be a challenge. Often when she did that, her throat would close up for a minute and the metallic taste of grief would slide along her tongue.

  “If you want to kiss me good-night, I guess you can,” Mark said, and she knew he sensed her sadness and sought to ease it by allowing her to touch him now.

  Heather put on a bright face. “Gee, thanks.” She bent and brushed her lips against his forehead. His skin was smooth and smelled of soap and a little leftover road dust. She stood. “Get some sleep now.”

  “Okay.”

  She went to the door and switched off the light.

  “Aunt Heather?” Mark said from the shadows across the room.

  “Hmm?”

  “If I lived here with you, I never would have run away.”

  His words made a lightness inside her. How lovely if that could really happen. The house was much too big for her now. And sometimes her loneliness was like a vast, empty space inside her. Having Mark in the house would fill up that emptiness.

  But of course, such a thing was impossible. Mark would never live with her. And Heather knew she had to say so.

  “Your place is with your father, Mark.”

  He said nothing to that. Only turned his face to the wall.

  Heather sighed and tiptoed out, closing the door quietly behind her.

  * * *

  The doorbell rang at five-thirty the next morning. Heather was still in bed, but awake. She was due at Lily’s Café in an hour. However, she had no intention of leaving the house until Lucas had come to collect Mark. So she was lying there staring at the clock, trying to decide whether to call her boss, Lily Tibbits, at home, or wait until Lily got to work herself to give her the news that her head waitress was going to be late.

  But now the problem was solved. Mark’s father was here and Heather wouldn’t be missing any work after all.

  The doorbell rang again. Lucas Drury was an impatient man. Heather jumped from the bed and shoved her feet into her slippers. Then she yanked on her robe and ran to let him in.

  When she pulled back the front door, dawn was just breaking on the horizon. Her brother-in-law stood on her porch, hands in his pockets, feet braced slightly apart.

  Heather blinked at the odd, momentar
y trick of the light, which made him seem slightly unreal, as if his body itself had been cut out of pure darkness. It appeared as if he had no face. Still, Heather had no trouble recognizing him. She knew him by his stance, by his height and leanness—and by the commanding set of his shoulders.

  “I got here as quickly as I could.”

  That voice of his, at once sophisticated and rough-edged, sent a little shiver skittering along the surface of Heather’s skin. The dawn light behind him grew a tiny bit brighter, enough that it seemed to wrap around him a little. Now she could begin to make out the shape of his mouth, his nose, the darker shadows where his eyes were.

  Lucas turned his head to the side. She saw his strong profile. Then he faced her again. His features retreated into darkness.

  “Well, may I come in?” The words were low, and almost teasing.

  Heather thought of one of his books, for some crazy reason. Shadowfall, it was called. In it there was a lonely vampire who lived in darkness, preying only on the hopelessly ill and the evil. And then one night, while stalking a murderer, he saved a woman of innocence and light. He found out where she lived by looking into her mind. He took her home. And after that, he tried to stay away from her, to protect her from himself.

  But her attraction was too strong. At last, he came to the window of her room in the deepest part of the night. And he asked her, “May I come in...?”

  “Heather?” Lucas said.

  She blinked. “Oh. Yes. Come on in.”

  Heather pulled back the door and moved out of his way. He stepped over the threshold, filling the room with his intensity and a faint, tempting scent, like sandalwood and something else—something indefinable, both spicy and exotic.

  The shades were still drawn and the room seemed very dark. So Heather went over and turned on the floor lamp beside the couch. The quick wash of light banished the shadows to the corners of the room.

  “There,” Heather said, rather unnecessarily, smiling nervously and squinting a little as her eyes adjusted to the brightness.

  Her brother-in-law remained standing near the door. Now, with the light, he was clear to her.

  He was all in black—soft pleated black slacks, a black sport shirt, black belt and black shoes. The lean, hard muscles of his arms looked very stark, somehow, against all that dark fabric.

  “You were still sleeping,” he said. He was looking at her tangled hair and the robe that she’d pulled so hastily over her summer pajamas.

  “No. No, I was awake. I was just lying there.”

  “I thought you had to be at work early. Is that right?”

  “Yes.” It was so strange. He seemed rather shy. She’d never in her life thought of Lucas Drury as shy. “At six-thirty. I work at six-thirty.”

  “Right.”

  “I was going to call my boss to say I’d have to be late. So I could wait for you to come get Mark, I mean. I was just lying there thinking about that.”

  “Calling your boss?”

  “Yes. Exactly. But now you’re here.”

  He looked amused, but in a nice way—a gentle, shy way. “Yes. Now I’m here.”

  “So I won’t have to call.”

  “Right.” He was silent, still smiling. And then something occurred to him. “Listen. About the way I acted on the phone. I’m sorry. I was pretty frantic about Mark and I took it out on you.”

  “Oh.” His apology warmed her. “Well, it’s all right. It’s Mark that matters.”

  “Yes.”

  She felt so strange, standing here talking to him. She hardly knew him, really. He had moved away when she was very young.

  And yet, this morning, he did seem different, nicer than usual, somehow. And since he seemed nicer, she dared to suggest, “Something really is bothering Mark, Lucas. He said he feels that you don’t listen to him.”

  She watched his face change, watched the gentle humor and shyness vanish. “Oh, really?” The words were cold.

  Heather remembered the way she had let Mark down last night. She didn’t want to do that again. She made herself go on, “Yes, he really misses you, I think, because you’re so busy all the time. He feels that you neglect him and—”

  “Is this the beginning of a lecture on parenting, Heather?” His silky-rough voice chilled her. His smile was as icy as an Arctic wind.

  Heather wanted to hunch her shoulders and slink away. But she didn’t. It didn’t matter if he disliked hearing this, or if she shook in her slippers when he gave her that freezing look. She had to say these things, for the sake of a wonderful kid who’d been so unhappy he was willing to hitchhike alone from Monterey in search of someone to listen to him.

  “This isn’t a lecture,” Heather said. “It’s just what Mark told me. That you don’t listen to him. That you’re too busy for him. You might think about that when you...do whatever you’re going to do, about his running away.”

  “All right, Heather. I’ll think about it.”

  She matched his condescending tone. “Thank you.”

  He regarded her for a moment. She had absolutely no idea what might be in his mind, but she refused to drop her eyes.

  She thought about Jason Lee again. How very different this man was from Jason Lee. Lucas was dark, tall and lean-muscled, where Jason Lee had been blond and husky. Lucas’s eyes were hooded, unreadable, his face all hard planes and angles. In Jason Lee’s face, there had still been the softness of youth. He’d smiled so easily, been in love with life and everything about it...

  “Now where is Mark?” Lucas spoke harshly.

  Heather put away her thoughts of her dead husband. “Still in bed. Come on. We’ll wake him up.”

  She turned and went through the arch to the dining room, not stopping to see if Lucas followed. She didn’t need to look, really. Though he moved as quietly as a stalking panther, she could feel the reality of him, filling the space right behind her.

  At the door to the bedroom, she knocked, then waited, poignantly aware of Lucas beside her.

  “Mark?” She knocked again.

  When he didn’t answer that time, Heather gently turned the handle and swung the door inward.

  It took her several seconds to register what she saw. The bed was neatly made, the T-shirt she’d given Mark to sleep in had been folded and laid on the chair in the corner. Mark himself was nowhere to be seen.

  Chapter Two

  “Where is he?” Lucas turned on her. “What the hell is going on?”

  Heather just stared at him, her mind still unwilling to believe the evidence of her eyes.

  “Where is my son?” Lucas demanded.

  Heather gulped. “I...I don’t know. This is where I left him. In that bed. Last night.”

  “Well, he damn sure isn’t there now.” Lucas strode into the room and threw back the closet door. Inside, there were spare blankets on a shelf, some winter jackets and four empty plastic hangers—but no Mark.

  Heather cast about frantically for some other place he might be. “The bathroom?”

  The house had once belonged to Lucas’s stepfather and Lucas had lived there himself for several years. He knew where the downstairs bathroom was and wasted no time in getting there, with Heather close on his heels.

  It was empty.

  Lucas took charge then. “Go upstairs,” he commanded. “Check all the rooms, the closets, everything. I’ll look around outside.”

  Heather didn’t argue. Before he’d finished giving the orders, she was headed for the stairs in the dining room. She searched the rooms upstairs thoroughly, calling Mark’s name as she looked, but she got no answer. With dread weighting each step, she returned to the first floor. She found Lucas in the bedroom where Mark had slept.

  “Nothing?” he asked flatly, when he saw the look on her face.

  She shook her head and tried to swallow down the lump that had lodged in her throat. “How about outside?”

  “The same.” Lucas ran a hand through his black hair. “I was just looking around. Seeing if he left any
thing that would tell us what’s happening here.”

  “And?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing.” He stared down at the neatly made bed. “I guess we can rule out kidnapping as a possibility, though.”

  Heather hadn’t even considered such a thing. “You thought maybe he was kidnapped?”

  “Not really, no. But it does happen.”

  “But not here. Not in North Magdalene.”

  He gave her a very patient look. “It happens everywhere. But the fact that the bed is made seems to indicate otherwise.”

  Heather tried her best to keep up with him. “Why?”

  “Mark’s a very neat boy. And making the bed before he ran away again is something he would do. On the other hand, if someone had taken him out of here by force, it’s highly doubtful they’d have stopped to straighten up the room first.”

  That made sense to Heather. And something else came to mind. “His clothes.”

  “What?”

  “Last night. I wanted to wash his clothes for him. But he wouldn’t let me. Now that I think about it, it was like he didn’t want me to take those clothes out of the room.”

  “Because he was planning to put them on again as soon as he thought you were asleep?”

  “Yes, I’ll bet that was it.”

  “So it’s pretty damn likely that he did run away again.”

  Heather had thought exactly that from the first. But Lucas was fighting it. And she supposed she could understand why. He’d driven all night, probably furious with Mark, but certain that he had the situation under control.

  But now Mark was gone again. The situation was not under control. Not in the least.

  “He has run away again, hasn’t he?” Lucas demanded.

  “Yes, I think so,” Heather answered gently.

  Lucas sank to the edge of the bed, leaned his elbows on his knees and looked at his black shoes. “Where would he have gone next?”

  Heather thought about that. “Maybe to my uncle Patrick’s.”

  Lucas looked up. “Why there?”

  “I have a cousin, Marnie, who’s Mark’s age. She and Mark made friends last winter.”