Darkness Becomes Her Read Free Page A

picture of the woman in a canoe matched the Jessie in the article, except she had blond, wavy hair. The camp was in Iowa.
    After several more false leads, he found her again, this time in Nevada six months ago. Again, involved in a Muscular Dystrophy Association function. So she definitely had a connection with the disease. But what was the connection to the horror he’d seen? Why was she moving around the country so often, changing her looks? He kept digging.
    He found three older mentions, all in the Boston area. In the two pictures, she had dark, long hair. At some point she started moving around and changing her looks. Why?
    Given an age in one of the articles, he dug deeper and found something alarming: eleven years ago Jessie Bellandre, aged fourteen, died from a fatal form of muscular dystrophy. Someone had made a tribute page to honor children who had passed on, trying to drum up sympathy and donations. There was no picture. He went through several steps of finding the woman who’d put up the page. She no longer maintained it, having moved on to other projects, and all she could tell him about Jessie was that she had been a foster child, thus the lack of a picture.
    Stymied, Lachlan stared at the tribute listing and then at the picture of her in the paper. They were the same age, or would have been. Both had lived in Boston. Now this Jessie—Magnus’s Jessie—had been resurrected as a woman who was clearly living a lie.
    He grabbed his cell phone to call Magnus, but stopped. His brother would say it was a coincidence, even though it wasn’t a common name, and that he was stretching things to match his crazy scenario. He needed more. He was going to have to hunt her down.

Chapter 2
    W henever Lachlan ventured out into the world, he felt like a vampire, pretending to be like the others he walked among. Jessie’s current residence wasn’t listed in the phone directory, but he had a piece of insider information: he knew where she worked.
    He walked into the store located in Annapolis, Maryland. It was damned hard not to seek her out the moment the door closed behind him and appear only mildly curious. No woman in sight. Bells dinged against the glass. The bittersweet sound of a violin flowed from somewhere in the back.
    A man walked out and asked if he needed help.
    Yeah, tell me what you know about the girl working for you.
    “Just browsing.”
    “I’m Glen, if you need anything.”
    Lachlan gave the man a nod and wandered over to an impressive display of electric guitars mounted on the far wall.
    Her voice reached out to him, like a ribbon wrapping sinuously around his stomach. It was soft and sweet and full of her smile. He could tell even before he saw her.
    “Look, you brought tears to my eyes, Charles. That was incredible.”
    Lachlan turned and felt a trip in his heartbeat at the sight of her. She was walking from the back with another woman and her young son, who was holding a violin case and beaming with pride. Smitten, too, judging by the way he looked at Jessie.
    Her eyes were misty, all right. She knelt down to his level. “When you’re a famous superstar, will you still remember the girl at the music store?”
    The boy laughed and gave her a quick hug.
    “Yeah, she has that effect on most of the males who come in here.”
    Lachlan turned to Glen, startled to see that the man was talking to him. Lachlan was about to deny the smitten part but laughed it off instead. He pretended to peruse the drum kits displayed in front of a wall of mirrors. Between the electric guitars that hung over them, he could watch her reflection. She was even prettier in person, her eyes glowing with sincerity and admiration. She wore slim black pants that outlined a luscious figure and a black top with grunge-style ruffles.
    She died eleven years ago.
    Or was pretending to be someone else. Either way, combined with what he’d seen in his projection, he didn’t like it, despite her innocent appearance. Likely, it was