Down the Rabbit Hole

Down the Rabbit Hole

J. D. Robb & Mary Blayney & Elaine Fox & Mary Kay McComas & R.C. Ryan



I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity

of regarding everything I cannot explain

as a fraud.

CARL JUNG


We’re all mad here.

LEWIS CARROLL





CHAPTER ONE




The dead were his business.

Over the years, he’d built a tidy fortune—though it was never enough, never quite enough—exploiting the dead and those who loved them.

He loved his work, reveled in it, and all the bright and shiny things his efforts amassed. But over and above the profit, or at least running through the dollars and euros and pounds, was sheer glee.

A man who didn’t laugh himself sick seven times a day didn’t know how to live.

One of his greatest amusements—and in truth he had so many—but one of his greatest was when the time came around to turn the living into the dead.

That time had come around for Darlene Fitzwilliams, she of the ebony hair and haunted blue eyes. Such a pretty creature. He’d thought so on their first acquaintance, and had thought the same a number of times over the past five months.

He might have kept her longer, as he did love pretty things, but she had committed the greatest sin.

She’d begun to bore him.

She sat now in the cluttered, colorful parlor of his cluttered, colorful house, as she had once every week for four and a half months. She called him Doctor Bright, one of his many names and as false as all the rest.

“Doctor Bright,” she said after sipping the tea he always provided, “I had a terrible argument with my brother this afternoon. It was my fault—I missed an important appointment with the lawyers regarding the estate. I just forgot. I was distracted, knowing I’d be coming here, and I forgot. Marcus was so upset and impatient with me. He doesn’t understand, Doctor Bright. If I could just explain . . .”

Bright lifted his dark, dramatic eyebrows. “What did your father say, dear?”

“He said it wasn’t time.” She leaned forward, all that hope and faith (and how tedious that had become) glowing on her face. “I’m so anxious to talk to him and Mama again.”

“And you will, of course.”

He sipped his tea, smiled at her. “Drink your tea. It will help open you to communications.”

She obeyed, biddable, boring girl.

“It’s hard not to tell him. And Henry.”

The tea made her talkative, a little giddy. The effects had amused him initially. Now he saw her as an excitable little mouse, scurrying everywhere at once. And he wanted to whack her with a hammer.

“I’m going to meet Henry tonight,” she continued. “He wants to set the date, and that’s something else I want to talk to Mama and Daddy about. They were so pleased when Henry and I got engaged. And then . . .”

“Transitions, a journey.” He played his fingers in the air as he spoke, watched her watch them dance. “Nothing more.”

“Yes, I know that now. It’s just . . . I want to share this with Marcus, and with Henry.”

“But you haven’t.”

“No. I promised you, and my father. You said I’d know when it was time, and I feel it is. I hate not being honest with the people I love, even for people I love. If Henry and I set the date tonight—that’s a kind of journey, too, isn’t it? Marriage.”

“And do you feel ready for that journey?”

“I do. Coming here, all I’ve learned, it’s shown me there aren’t any ends, just other paths. Before I came to you, everything seemed so dark, so final. And now . . .”

She beamed at him, her eyes wide and bright, and just going glassy. “I can never repay you for all you’ve given me.”

“It’s my gift to give. Regrettably, at a price.”