The Devil You Know Read Free Page B

is still there, that all is well, that you don’t have to be alone.”
    “Until you can’t take it any longer?”
    “Yes. Even so. There comes the point where being alone is not such an unbearable state after all. So she left.”
    “That stinks, Barrett. I’m sorry.”
    He gave a small shrug. “Thank you. I appreciate your listening.”
    “She’s gone for good?”
    “She packed for an extended trip, took both maids along to look after her during the day, and went to the city about a month ago. Last week I got a card from some place in Florida so I’d know where to forward their mail.”
    “You write to Charles about this? He never said anything.”
    “No, I did not. Perhaps when you return you could let him know for me. I haven’t the heart to write. Family laundry, personal business, and all that.”
    “Sure. No problem.”
    He leaned back in the chair, looking introspective. “Though this is hardly familial. We never married, though I asked her. Just as well that we did not.”
    I couldn’t help but feel a tug of sympathy and not a little selfish concern for my own situation. I’d proposed to Bobbi until she’d told me to stop. She loved me, but wasn’t ready to take that step. Though our situation was different from Barrett’s, I couldn’t help but wonder if the same thing might someday happen to us.
    That lasted about three seconds, when I came to my senses. Bobbi and I were crazy about each other and had been through too much together. We didn’t have fights, either. It helped that she was usually right about things, while I rarely bothered to form an opinion in the first place.
    I tried to recall what I knew about Emily Francher. She was—with her determinedly reclusive nature and predilection for wearing layers of diamonds—eccentric, but hadn’t struck me as being very interesting. Barrett obviously cared for her, but I never saw what the fuss was about. The only spark in her that I’d noticed had come from the jewelry.
    She’d been bullied into marriage by her mother, ignored by her husband, and made a young widow not long after. The experience must have soured her on matrimony. Barrett may have overlooked that.
    And then what? Years later her young cousin murders her; she wakes up in a coffin, disoriented, not remembering her own death. Barrett had been overjoyed that she’d made the change from dead to undead, but Emily had a hard time taking it in; I’d seen that much in her eyes. Confusion, fear, denial, anger, and who knows what else in those earliest moments when everything you know has been flipped upside down and inside out. The memory of my own difficult resurrection still gave me the heebies.
    Escott and I left the next night, assuming Barrett and Emily would live happily ever after. Now I could see where things might have been less than perfect for them. They’d prepared for her possible return, but not Laura’s death and vicious crimes. How had that hit Emily? Did she blame Barrett? Did she blame herself? And why in God’s name had she continued to stay in this oversized museum with its bad memories? She must have decided a winter trip to Florida would blow out the cobwebs.
    “She’s coming back, though, right?” I asked.
    Barrett shrugged. “I expect she’ll return in the spring, but things are too broken between us to ever repair.”
    “You sure?”
    “I am. For all that I adore them, women are absolutely maddening, and damn me if I can understand any of them. I do know when one has ceased to love me. I just wish . . . .well, there’s nothing for it, it’s the devil of our condition.”
    “What is?”
    “That I cannot get roaring drunk and forget about her for a time.”
    Actually, he could. If he got enough booze into one of his horses or fed from a drunk human—but I wasn’t going to share that with him. I’d turned into a dangerous lunatic when it’d happened to me.
    “So you’ re going to stay on here a few more months?” I wanted to change the