Walking After Midnight Read online

  OH, GOD. SHE COULDN’T DO THIS.

  She simply could not bring herself to touch the thing that lay there.…

  One touch. If his flesh was cold, that would be good enough. If he was cold, he would have to be dead. Wouldn’t he? Of course he would.

  Screwing up her nerve, Summer reached out to gingerly place a forefinger on his arm. His flesh was cold …

  His hand closed around her wrist in a move so fast that Summer didn’t even see it coming. One second she was touching him, and the next she was staggering off balance, jerked forward by a cold, dead hand. She gasped as the battered, bloody corpse came up off the embalming table at her like a vision out of Stephen King’s worst nightmare.

  Then she shrieked. The hand locked around her wrist tightened cruelly as he spun her around and twisted her arm behind her back. A chilled, hairy forearm clamped around her neck. He was immensely strong, and his body was cold, cold. The smell of death—rotting flesh? formaldehyde?—enveloped her as he did.

  Another shriek ripped out of her lungs. The arm around her neck tightened with vicious purpose, cutting off sound and air in one swift clench.

  “Scream again and I’ll break your goddamned neck,” the dead man growled in her ear.…

  “ONCE AGAIN, MS. ROBARDS DAZZLES HER AUDIENCE WITH A POTENT PIECE OF WOMEN’S FICTION.”*

  WALKING AFTER MIDNIGHT

  “Karen Robards masterfully creates a unique and memorable romantic suspense novel. The story is imbued with the perfect combination of humor and supernatural happenings.”

  —Affaire de Coeur

  “AN ENTERTAINING PAGE-TURNER.”

  —Brazosport Facts

  “WITHIN THE FIRST FEW PAGES, THE READER IS HOOKED … Robards writes with a brisk, action-packed style.”

  —Baton Rouge Magazine

  “THIS IS A MUST READ.”

  —Cadiz Record (Ky.)

  “MS. ROBARDS HAS DONE IT AGAIN with two totally opposite characters who ignite the pages of this extremely delectable and spicy story.… The antics of these two will have you hanging on the edge of your seat, turning the pages faster to enjoy the interesting way they elude everyone.”

  —Rendezvous

  “Great romance, a handsome hero, vicious villains and a plucky heroine …”

  —Ocala Star Banner (Fla.)

  Published by

  Dell Publishing

  a division of

  Random House, Inc.

  1540 Broadway

  New York, New York 10036

  “(I CAN’T GET NO) SATISFACTION”

  Written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards

  © 1964, Renewed 1992 ABKCO Music, Inc.

  All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

  “Ghostbusters”

  By Ray Parker, Jr.

  © 1984 Raydiola Music/Golden Torch Music-EMI Music

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Used by permission.

  THEME From GHOSTBUSTERS, by Ray Parker, Jr.

  Copyright © 1984 Golden Torch Music Corp. (ASCAP) c/o EMI Music

  Excerpt from The Last Victim © 2012 by Karen Robards

  Publishing and Raydiola Music (ASCAP)

  International Copyright Secured. Made in USA. All Rights Reserved

  Worldwide Print Rights administered by CPP/Belwin, Inc., and

  Raydiola Music. Used by Permission.

  Copyright © 1995 by Karen Robards

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address: Delacorte Press, New York, New York.

  The trademark Dell® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

  This book contains an excerpt from The Last Victim by Karen Robards. This excerpt has been set for this edition only, and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80139-5

  Reprinted by arrangement with Delacorte Press

  v3.1_r2

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  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

  Dedication

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Excerpt from The Last Victim

  1

  “Why can’t the dead die!”

  —Eugene O’Neill

  She hanged herself from a plant hook.

  One of those white, faux wrought-iron things that screw into the ceiling. It was guaranteed to support up to one hundred pounds. If she had weighed more than ninety-eighty pounds soaking wet, the darned thing never would have held and she would be alive today.

  That was almost funny, considering that she had had a phobia about getting fat—she was only five feet tall—and had spent her entire adult life on a rigorous diet to keep her weight under a hundred pounds.

  But then, such is life.

  Life. The spirit—for she was a spirit—dreamily contemplated it. As she did, she felt a tingling within, like the slow awakening of a blood-starved limb.

  Did she want to be alive again? The spirit pondered.

  How it had felt to be alive was hard for her to remember. It was as though she were viewing life from the perspective of an underwater swimmer, as though life were a bright day seen through a distorting veil of water.

  The underwater world was so much more real to her now that she was part of it. She was content here, in this floating, dreaming, distorting netherland that had been her abode for—how long?

  She didn’t know. Time had no meaning for her now. Simply, she had been here since she died.

  Since the night when her stockinged feet had rested on a cool metal desktop and a length of nylon rope had been looped around her neck. Since the night when she had choked and kicked and fought, fought, fought to breathe.…

  Memory was swamped by the emotions she had felt at that moment, which burst through now with dazzling clarity: terror, disbelief, despair.

  The water-veil cleared, and briefly she was back in the room where she had died, floating up near the ceiling, near the self-same plant hook that had done her in. Despite its grisly history, no one had bothered to take it down. It still curled like a beckoning finger against the clingy plaster, forgotten.

  Why was she here? What pull was so strong that it had sucked her back from her lazy swim throug
h eternity?

  A face flashed into her consciousness: a man, blond and handsome. Followed by another, swarthy and rough-skinned.

  With the faces came a name. Her name, from the life that had ended: Deedee.

  Deedee. She’d been dead, but now she was back. Not alive, but conscious.

  For a purpose. One thing she had learned was that everything had a purpose.

  While the purpose remained to be revealed to her, she drifted out across the ceiling into the endless night, content to wait.

  2

  Toilets were the pits. Especially men’s toilets. Nasty creatures, men: didn’t they ever hit what they were aiming at?

  Summer McAfee wrinkled her nose in disgust, tried not to think about just exactly what it was she was down on her hands and knees scrubbing off the floor, and plied her brush to the tile with a vengeance. The sooner she got the job done, the sooner she would be out of there.

  “I can’t get nooo SATISFACTION …” Summer crooned the Rolling Stones’ thirty-year-old megahit in a throaty undertone as she worked. So she sang off-key. So what? There was no one in the vicinity to hear. Bringing her Walkman was a no-no on this job, so she had no choice but to rely on her own less than musical voice for distraction. Not that it was working. Despite the imaginary presence of the mythical Mick, she was as twitchy as a tied shoulder for what must have been the tenth time in a quarter of an hour. Not that glancing around did much good. The rising Lysol vapors were so thick in the small rest room that she could scarcely breathe, let alone see through the tears that filmed her eyes. Maybe she’d gotten a little carried away with the Lysol, but the men’s room had been so darn filthy.

  Summer had enough vision left to assure herself that the rest room door was still solidly closed. As for what lay beyond the door—well, she just wouldn’t think about that. Whatever the creak was, it was certainly harmless. The building was over a hundred years old; of course it was going to creak. Harmon Brothers, a chain of funeral homes, was her struggling cleaning service’s biggest client. She was not about to blow the account over an idiotic case of the willies. Her worthless Saturday night work crew had failed to show up for the second time this month (she should have fired them the first time!). There had been no one else available to clean the flagship mortuary of the Harmon Brothers chain on such short notice. The bottom line was, the buck stopped with her. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d had to do an entire job by herself. In fact, when she’d started out, despite her bold claims to the contrary, she’d been Daisy Fresh’s sole employee: chief executive officer, chief financial officer, head of marketing, and cleaning lady, all rolled into one.

  That the place she was cleaning tonight was a funeral home shouldn’t matter, not to a professional such as she prided herself on being—but it did. It was two a.m., she was beyond tired, and her imagination was starting to go into overdrive.

  There were dead bodies in the other room. Rooms, rather. Three corpses, nicely laid out in coffins, ready for their funerals on the morrow. And one more, under a sheet in the embalming room.

  Maybe it was just her, but Summer was discovering that she had kind of a thing about being locked in a dark, deserted building in the small hours of the morning with a bunch of dead bodies.

  The key was not to dwell on it. Summer suppressed a shiver as she forced her errant mind to focus on the job at hand. The place between the base of a toilet and the wall was always the worst.

  “… good reaction. / And I’ve tried / and I’ve tried / and I’ve tried / and I’ve …”

  Creak. Creak.

  Summer almost swallowed her tongue along with the last tried. What were those sounds? Shooting an uneasy glance at the door again, she knew she was being ridiculous even as she did it. All right, so it was the dead—no, not a good word—the middle of the night, she was all alone in a restored Victorian mansion cum funeral parlor in the midst of a six-hundred-acre cemetery with four dead bodies, and she was letting the knowledge spook her. As long as she recognized that fact, and the sheer absurdity of it, she would be just fine. Corpses could not harm her, and there was no one else around.

  “I’m the only person alive in the whole damn place,” Summer said aloud, then made a face as she discovered that the knowledge did not make her feel appreciably better. At this point, the presence of another living, breathing human would be more than welcome.

  Finishing the third and final toilet at last, she sank back on her haunches with a thankful sigh and tossed her scrub brush into the plastic bucket nearby. It landed with a clatter that sounded abnormally loud in the echoing silence.

  Summer winced, but of course there was no one to hear and be disturbed by the noise. As it died away, silence once again reigned.

  It was probably the silence that was getting to her, she decided, giving her the feeling that a thousand unseen ears were listening and a thousand unseen eyes were watching everything she did.

  “I can’t get nooo …” This time the song was hardly more than a breath of sound, pure bravado really, and quickly abandoned. Unable to shake the uneasiness that gripped her, Summer gave up on the Stones. Perhaps such unreverent music in a funeral home was stirring up the spirit world.…

  How ridiculous! She was a thirty-six-year-old grown woman who had proven, time and again, that she could more than handle whatever life threw at her. Having survived the death of a parent, a failed first career, and a hideous five-year marriage, there was little left that could scare her. One thing was sure: She was not afraid of no ghosts.

  Or was she?

  If there’s something strange / in your neighborhood …

  The theme from Ghostbusters brought a flickering smile to Summer’s face as it popped into her mind. Maybe she should sing it for courage. But she didn’t think it would help—and besides, her contract with Harmon Brothers specified that Daisy Fresh employees were required to behave with dignity on the premises at all times. Her cleaning crew was not even allowed to bring a radio to this job, and she would not have invoked the Stones if she hadn’t been so thoroughly demoralized by various stray sounds that in bright daylight would have seemed like less than nothing.

  Summer’s smile twisted into a wry grin as her mind painted an almost irresistible picture of herself: There she was, five feet eight inches of well-padded, slightly-over the-hill woman, looking mousy as heck in the neat black polyester pants and tucked-in white nylon shirt that was Daisy Fresh’s uniform. Hazel eyes flashing, sweat-dampened strands of dark brown hair straggling loose from an off-center, precarious bun, yellow scrub bucket in hand, she was prancing through the funeral home toward the exit, punching the air with her fist and bellowing “Who ya gonna call …?” at the top of her lungs.

  Not a very dignified finale even in her imagination, she had to admit. But cheering. Very cheering.

  Grimacing—scrubbing a tile floor on all fours was hard on the knees—Summer got to her feet, placed a hand in the small of her back, and stretched. Peeling the rubber gloves from her hands, she dropped them into the bucket and frowned down at her stubby nails in disgust. She had once had the most beautiful hands.… But that was long ago, and her life was much better now even if her hands were not. How important were manicured nails in the whole scheme of life, anyway?

  Reaching for her supplies, she forgot about her hands. She had only to drape the paper Daisy Fresh banners over the toilet lids, gather up her belongings, and go.

  Her obligation to Harmon Brothers would be fulfilled, and the knowledge made her feel good. Not that she would have settled for anything less. Reliability was the company byword. Daisy Fresh always cleaned, and cleaned well, exactly where, when, and how the contract specified. That was why she was still in business after six years, when so many small janitorial services failed to last as many months.

  Securing the last banner, Summer picked up her bucket of supplies and headed toward the door. Pausing with her hand on the knob, she gave the rest room one final, satisfied glance. Two-tone gray tile sparkled. Sil
ver fittings gleamed. The mirror was spotless. On the shelf over the sink, a small glass vase held the single fresh daisy that was the company’s signature note. By morning, the Lysol fumes would have died away to a pleasantly fresh scent, and the bathroom, like the rest of the building, would look and smell pristine.

  And Daisy Fresh could chalk up another satisfied client.

  Genuinely smiling this time, Summer pulled open the door, flicked on the light switch on the wall outside, turned off the bathroom light, and stepped out into the solemn hush of the hall.

  Thick gray carpet muffled her footsteps as she walked the length of the narrow hall that ran along the back of the building, perpendicular to the larger center hall off which the viewing rooms opened. The rest rooms were along the back hall to the left, the embalming room along the same hall to the right. A rear door affording easy access to the overflow parking lot bisected the long back wall. A single glance assured Summer that it was still securely locked. Of course.

  It was her policy—company policy—to require employees to make a last, walk-through inspection of all jobs, to insure against faux pas such as forgotten dustcloths or lights left on. Harmon Brothers in particular was very strict about lights. The building was always dark when Daisy Fresh entered, and Mike Chaney, the general manager, had stressed that lights were to be turned on strictly as needed, to save on costs.

  Tonight Summer had followed standard procedure, though she’d been sorely tempted not to. Beyond the hall in which she stood the building was as dark and quiet as a vast, echoing cave. The silence was broken only by the low hum of the air-conditioning. Knowing Harmon Brothers’ penchant for cutting costs, she was vaguely surprised that the unit was kept running overnight. Nighttime July temperatures in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, which was nestled into the base of the Smoky Mountains, averaged around seventy-two degrees—not typical air-conditioner weather. But then, given the nature of Harmon Brothers’ business …

  Summer considered the effect of heat on dead bodies, shuddered, and quickly switched her mental focus to the few things that remained to be done before she could leave. Far be it from her to question Harmon Brothers’ decision to run the air-conditioning twenty-four hours a day.