Trail of Dead (Scarlett Bernard #2)(43)

“When she was fifteen. The little girl was two, and Olivia’s mother was driving her to day care. It was eight in the morning, but she was stone drunk.” Will looked away miserably. “There’s a report in there somewhere, but that’s basically the important part. That was why Olivia initially left home, went to school.”

I put the psych report down gently, as if that might somehow make the little girl’s death less tragic. “And she eventually found a husband,” I prompted.

“Right. Or in this case, more of a sperm donor.” Now Will pulled a grainy photograph out of the materials. It was a head shot of a smiling man in his early forties. He had an expensive haircut and perfectly white teeth, with a weak chin and watery brown eyes. “Scott Powell. He was a video game programmer who also came from money. Olivia probably figured he’d be a good father, and she went after him hard. They got married when she was thirty-one, and that was right around when she left her doctorate program. She was going to start her family, do the whole fifties housewife thing.”

“But nulls can’t have kids,” I said. Nobody really understood why. Being a null isn’t a hereditary trait, like the witches, it’s just sort of a random-selection anomaly that crops up here and there in the human species. And for some reason, as long as nulls have been known to exist, they’ve never been able to conceive or carry a child. Although I still have to deal with periods like every other woman, which strikes me as unfair.

“No. I couldn’t get her actual medical files, but I know Olivia underwent all kinds of fertility testing. She wanted a family bad, Scarlett. When she found out she couldn’t have one…it destroyed her. She was already unbalanced, and this just broke what was left of her mind.”

Sudden insight. “How did her husband die?”

I was picturing Olivia pushing him off a cliff or poisoning his cereal or something, but Will said, “That’s the thing, Scarlett. He didn’t. At least, not then.”





Chapter 15


My jaw dropped. “What?”

Will pulled out a photocopy of some handwritten notes. “My guy found him hiding out in a little town in the Inland Empire, about ninety miles away. Esperanza. Powell begged the investigator not to tell Olivia where he was. He was terrified of her…Scarlett? Are you okay?”

My brain had stopped. Everything had stopped, actually, except my mouth. “What did she do to him?”

“He wouldn’t say, just that he threw money at her, got a divorce, and moved to Esperanza without telling her.

“She found him, didn’t she?”

Will’s eyebrows raised, but he just handed me a newspaper clipping with a familiar-looking masthead. “I found this a couple of months ago, after you spotted Olivia at the hospital.” It was an obituary from the Esperanza Herald, the twice-weekly paper my little hometown published. Scott Powell had died of an apparent suicide eight months earlier. I counted back on my fingers. Right after Olivia had “died” and been turned into a vampire. Will added, “I don’t know how or when she found him—”

“Years ago,” I broke in. I hardly recognized my voice. “Probably seven or eight. But she didn’t bother killing him then, because she’d found something else to interest her.”

I could feel Will studying my face. “What are you saying?”

I stabbed the clipping with an index finger. “This is my hometown, Will. She came for Scott, and somehow bumped into me.”

I didn’t actually remember bumping into Olivia or anything. Before I’d come to LA and had it all explained to me, I’d just assumed the weird feelings I got every now and then—my null thing—happened to everyone, the way everyone gets dizzy when they stand up too fast or gets a charley horse when their legs are cramped up. But I could still guess at when she had found me: after all, Olivia hadn’t taken me as a child, when I would theoretically have been more docile. She’d waited until I’d turned eighteen and come to LA to take out my parents. I was guessing that meant she hadn’t actually found me until late high school or so, and she’d decided to bide her time.

Although seriously, what the f*ck did I know?

“Scarlett? Scarlett!” Will shook my arm, and I focused on the room again. When he saw I was all right, he released me right away.

“What did you do?” I demanded.

He blinked in confusion. “Huh?”

I waved my hand over the papers that were scattered across the coffee table. “With all this. You had the fancy background check; you knew she was broken in the head, so what did you do?”

“I—I didn’t do anything,” he admitted, hanging his head. “The background check set off plenty of alarm bells, from a psychology point of view, but nothing that would convince Dashiell that Olivia was wrong for the job.” He scratched the back of his neck absently. “If I had showed him all of this back then, his takeaway would have been ‘oh, her mom’s a maid, she probably already knows a lot about cleaning.’ That’s how his mind works.” Will looked up to meet my eyes, and probably saw my jaw hanging open. “I’m so sorry, honey,” he said very gently, the way you’d talk to a child. “Are you all right?”

I might have been, if he hadn’t called me honey. Insistent tears prickled at my eyes, but I blinked them away. “No, Will. I am not all right. I am not. And you…you’re worse than Dashiell!” His eyes went wide, shocked. “You knew what she was, you knew she was out of her mind, and you had the humanity to care. You had to figure she was a loaded gun of crazy, but you just let her go about her nutjob business. You’re right, you could have stopped all of this. My parents—”