Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW

KENSINGTON BOOKS

Chapter One

Ava Garrison opened a bleary eye. From her bed, she heard the sound of voices beyond the big wooden door that stood slightly ajar.

"She doesn't even know what's going on," another woman agreed. Her voice was deeper and gruffer than the first, and Ava thought she recognized it, a headache pounding behind her eyes as the nightmare retreated into her subconscious. The pain would recede, it always did, but for the first minutes after waking, she felt as if steel-shod horses were galloping through her brain.

Inhaling a deep breath, she blinked. The room was dark, the curtains pulled, the rumble of the ancient furnace forcing air through the registers, muting the conversation beyond the heavy oak door.

"Shhh ... she should be awake soon ..." Breathy Voice again. Ava tried to place it and thought it might belong to Demetria, Jewel-Anne's dour nursemaid. For a woman not yet thirty, tall, slim Demetria always wore a severe expression that matched her harsh hairstyle, dyed black and pulled back, restrained by a heavy clip at her nape. Her only concession to whimsy, it seemed, was the hint of a tattoo, an inky tendril that curled from beneath the clip to tease the back of her ear. The tattoo reminded Ava of a shy octopus, extending one questioning tentacle from beneath its hiding spot of thick dark hair and tortoiseshell clip.

"So what is it? What's going on with her?" the second voice demanded.

Oh, Lord, did it belong to Khloe? Ava felt a jab of betrayal; she knew they were talking about her, and Khloe had been her best friend while growing up here on this remote island. But that had been years ago, long before fresh-faced and happy-go-lucky Khloe had turned into the unhappy soul who couldn't for the life of her let go of a love that had died so swiftly.

More whispering ...

Of course. It was almost as if they wanted to have her overhear them, as if they were taunting her.

Ava caught only phrases that were as crippling as they were true.

"... slowly going out of her mind ..." Khloe again?

"Has been for years. Poor Mr. Garrison." Breathy Voice.

Poor Mr. Garrison? Seriously?

Khloe, if it were she, agreed. "How he's suffered."

Wyatt? Suffered? Really? The man who seemed intent on being absent, always away? The man she'd contemplated divorcing on more than one occasion? Ava doubted her husband had suffered one day of his life. She could barely restrain herself from shouting, but she wanted to hear what they were saying, what the gossip was that ran rampant through the wainscoted hallways of Neptune's Gate, this hundred-year-old house built and named by her great-great-grandfather.

"Well something should be done; they're richer than God!" one of them muttered, her words thin and reedy as she walked away.

"For God's sake, keep your voice down. Anyway, the family's making sure that she gets the best care that money can buy ..."

The family?

Ava's head was throbbing as she threw off the thick duvet and her bare feet hit the plush carpet that had been cast over hardwood. Fir ... it was fir planks ... she remembered, planed by the sawmill that once was the heart of Church Island, named without a drop of modesty by that same great-great-grandfather who had built this house. One step, two ... She started to lose her balance and grasped the tall bedpost.

"Everyone in the family ... they need answers ..."

"Don't we all?" A sly little snigger.

Please, God, that it wasn't Khloe.

"But we don't own any part of this damned island."

"Wouldn't that be something ... if we did, I mean." The voice sounded wistful as it retreated.

Ava took a step and a wave of nausea washed up her throat. She thought she might throw up as bile teased her tongue, but she bit down hard, took a deep breath, and fought the urge to vomit.

"She's crazy as a loon. But he won't leave her," one of them, she couldn't tell which, said, and the words were as crippling as they were true. She silently cursed her cloudy memory, her fractured brain.

Once, she'd been brilliant, at the top of her class, not only a stellar student but also a businesswoman with the acumen of ... of ... what?

Gritting her teeth, she forced herself to the doorway and peeked out. Sure enough, two women were stepping down the stairs, their bodies slowly disappearing. But neither one was Khloe, as Ava's mind had suggested. They were Virginia Zanders, Khloe's mother—a woman twice the size of her daughter and the cook for Neptune's Gate—and Graciela, a part-time maid, who, as if sensing Ava in the doorway, glanced over her shoulder and offered a smile as saccharine as the iced tea that Virginia poured on hot summer days. Half the size of her companion, Graciela was petite, with lustrous black hair knotted at the base of her skull. If she wanted to, Graciela could turn on a brilliant smile that could charm the coating off an M&M. Today, her smile was more like that of a Cheshire cat, as if she knew some deep, dark, and oh-so-private secret.

About her employer.

The hairs on the backs of Ava's arms lifted. Like a snake slithering along her vertebrae, cold seeped down her spine. Graciela's dark eyes seemed to glint with a secret knowledge before both she and Virginia were out of sight, their footsteps fading.

With a quick push, Ava slammed the door shut, then tried to lock it, but the dead bolt was missing, replaced by a matching faceplate to cover the hole left in the door. "God help me," she whispered, and drew in a long, calming breath as she leaned against the door.

Don't give in. Don't let them make you the victim. Fight back!

"Against what?" she asked the dark room; then angry with her plight and her attitude, she stalked to the windows. When had she become such a wimp? When? Hadn't she always been strong? Independent? A girl who raced her mare along the ridge over the sea, who climbed to the topmost spire of the mountain on this island, who swam naked in the icy, foaming waters of the Pacific where it poured and swirled into the bay? She'd surfed and rock climbed and ... and it all seemed like a thousand—no, make that a million—years ago!

Now she was trapped here, in this room, while all those faceless people were speaking in hushed tones and assuming she couldn't hear them, but she could; of course she could.

Sometimes she wondered if they knew she was awake, if they were taunting her on purpose. Perhaps their soft, condoling tones were all part of a great façade, a horrible, painful labyrinth from which there was no escape.

She trusted no one and then reminded herself that it was all part of her paranoia. Her sickness.

With pain shooting behind her eyes, she stumbled to the bed and fell onto the pillow-top mattress with its expensive sheets, waiting for the pain to abate. She tried to raise her head, but a headache with the power to make her tremble stopped her, and she had to bite down so that she didn't cry out.

No one should suffer like this. Weren't there painkillers for this sort of thing? Prescriptions to stave off migraines? Then again, she took a lot of pills and couldn't help but wonder if the pain slicing through her brain was because of the medication rather than in spite of it.

She didn't understand why they were all out to torment her, to make her feel as if she were crazy, but she was pretty...