Promise Not To Tell(56)

“Use your camera,” Cabot said. “Get pictures of every page.”

“Okay.” Virginia was about to reach into her handbag for her camera when she remembered the smaller envelope. Unlike the larger envelope, it was yellowed with age. It, too, was unaddressed and unsealed. She opened it. A photograph slipped out and fell onto the bed.

It was a casual, candid shot showing two people, a man and a woman, standing arm in arm at the railing of a ferry. The skyline of the city of Seattle was behind them. The woman looked rapturously happy, practically glowing. The good-looking man who had his arm around her was smiling a warm, charming smile, but there was something reptilian about his eyes.

Virginia stopped breathing.

“Cabot,” she said. “Look at this.”

He came to stand at her shoulder.

“Shit,” he said. “Quinton Zane.”

“All these years I’ve tried to remember exactly what he looked like. I could never quite describe him because I saw him with a kid’s eyes. But, yes, I’d know him anywhere.”

Cabot took a closer look. “Is that Abigail Watkins?”

“I’m almost positive that it is. She looks about sixteen or maybe seventeen in this picture. That would make her a couple of years younger than when we knew her, but I remember that glorious red-gold hair. She was a spectacularly beautiful woman. Reminds me of Botticelli’s Venus. So innocent looking.”

“An easy target for a bastard like Zane.” Cabot turned over the photograph. “This is dated a couple of years before Zane went into the cult business. I wonder what —”

A thin, muffled explosion shuddered through the old floorboards.

Jolted, Virginia looked at Cabot.

“Did you feel that?” she asked sharply. “Earthquake?”

They were common enough in the Pacific Northwest, she reminded herself. But the tremor hadn’t felt like any earthquake she had ever experienced.

“No,” Cabot said. “Stay here.”

He was already moving, gun in hand, toward the door. He did a quick survey of the hallway.

“Clear,” he said over his shoulder. “But something is wrong. We need to get out of here now.”

Virginia hesitated. There was no time to take pictures of the letters or the old photo. She scooped up the whole lot and shoved everything into her handbag. She promised herself that she would apologize to the authorities later.

She rushed out into the hall. The second muffled blast sent another shudder through the old house.

“Gunshots?” Virginia whispered.

“No,” Cabot said. “Explosions. We walked into a trap.”

They made it to the top of the stairs just as the third blast rattled the windows. Cabot stopped on the landing and looked down.

“We’ve got a problem,” he said very softly.

Virginia saw the wisps of smoke unfurling up the staircase.

A fourth blast echoed through the walls. The old house groaned as though in mortal agony.

The fire exploded first on the ground floor. The roar of the flames was horrifyingly familiar. Virginia had heard it often enough in the hellish dreamscapes of her nightmares.

CHAPTER 38

Cabot holstered his gun, wrapped a hand around Virginia’s upper arm and steered her toward the nearest bedroom.

“We can use sheets to get down to the ground,” he said. “And just hope like hell that there is only one person out there. He can’t watch all four sides of the house at once. Odds are he’ll focus on the front door or the back door. Human nature.”

Cabot opened the door of the nearest bedroom. Virginia saw the flames leaping up the windows.

Panic threatened to choke her.

“Not that way,” she gasped.

Cabot hurried to the end of the hall and tried another room. He shut the door almost immediately.

“No good,” he reported. “The bastard rigged explosions around the perimeter of the house. The ground floor is engulfed.”

Virginia was vaguely aware that her heart was beating much too fast and she could scarcely catch her breath. Not because of the smoke, she thought. It wasn’t that bad on the second floor – not yet. It was smoke that killed you in a fire, and they still had a little time before they faced that death sentence.

No, it was raw fear that was roiling her senses. She and Cabot were trapped, just as they had been all those years ago when they were locked up in the barn that Quinton Zane had torched. But this time there was no Anson Salinas to come to their rescue.

“The fire is burning up through the house,” Cabot said. “There’s no way out from here or the third floor. Our only option is to go down to the basement.”

“Down?” Virginia gasped. “But that’s where the fire is.”

“It’s on the first floor, not the basement. Odds are he wouldn’t have tried to set the fire from down there. It’s concrete. There should be some sort of exit from there.”

“The old coal bunker,” Virginia said. “There are steps there now. But how do we get down to the basement? The staircase is functioning like a chimney.”

“The laundry chute.” Cabot grabbed her wrist and went swiftly back down the hall. He shoved open the door of the linen room. “It’s our only chance.”

Virginia followed him inside and slammed the door shut. She whirled around, grabbed some towels off the shelves and shoved them up against the bottom of the door in hopes of temporarily blocking the smoke that was now drifting down the second-floor hallway.