Secret Sisters

by Jayne Ann Krentz

  Perspective was everything. And yet nothing. The predators were out there, regardless of the size of your world, Madeline thought. But so was friendship. You just had to reach out and make it happen.

  Maybe, just maybe, it was the same with love.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Abe snapped the stem off the last spear of asparagus and gestured proudly at the heap on the cutting board. “What do you say, boss? Do I get an A?”

  Jack looked up from the salmon fillets he was rubbing with a mix of spices. He glanced at the large pile of asparagus.

  “Looks good,” Jack said. “Now blot ’em dry with some paper towels, put them in a bowl, and toss them with a little olive oil and salt and lemon juice.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Abe held up both hands, palms out. “Easy for you to say. How much oil? How much salt?”

  “Just eyeball it.”

  “No way. I’m not screwing this up and taking the blame for any ensuing disaster.”

  “Okay, step aside, grasshopper,” Jack said. “I’ll handle the olive oil.”

  He washed his hands, dried them, and moved to the cutting board. He scooped up the asparagus and dumped it into a bowl. He drizzled the spears with olive oil, added some flaked salt, and squeezed half a lemon over the top.

  “Okay, they’re all yours,” he announced. “Line the baking sheet with parchment paper and spread the spears out on the sheet.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then I will get started on the hollandaise sauce.”

  “Wow. We’re trying to impress the ladies tonight, aren’t we?”

  “Got a problem with that?”

  “No, sir,” Abe said. “Got one more question for you, though.”

  Jack took the eggs and some butter out of the refrigerator. “What?”

  “Does this cooking thing make it easy to meet women?”

  “Not that I’ve noticed.”

  “Come on, women must find it romantic.”

  “Sometimes,” Jack said. He put the butter into a pan and set it on the stove to melt. “At the start. But the effect doesn’t last long. Sooner or later other stuff gets in the way, and then my ability to cook dinner loses its attraction. Turns out women are smart. They figure out right away that they can order in.”

  “The other stuff that gets in the way being your issues.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m no expert on relationships, but for what it’s worth, I don’t think Ms. Chase has a problem with you or your issues.”

  “She will.” Jack sliced open another lemon and squeezed the juice into a measuring cup. “Eventually. Why don’t you stop standing around doing nothing and slice up that loaf of sourdough bread I picked up today.”

  “That’s one of the things I admire about you, boss.”

  “What?”

  “Your sunny, optimistic outlook. It’s downright inspirational.”

  “I live to inspire my staff.”

  “Speaking for all two of us—Becky and me—we appreciate that.”

  Jack’s phone pinged just as he finished separating the third egg. He wiped his hands on the towel and unclipped the device.

  “Becky. About time you checked in. What have you got for me?”

  “Nothing that you can take to the police and certainly nothing that would stand up in court, but it looks like Edith Chase may have had a visitor on the night of the fire,” Becky said.

  Jack felt the old, familiar spike of adrenaline. “Go on.”

  “After the alarms sounded, the situation was the usual controlled chaos that you get in a major evacuation, but the safety procedures were in place and they worked.” Becky paused. “Well, except for the one fatality.”

  “Mrs. Chase. Go on.”

  “I finally managed to track down almost every member of the staff. One of the bellmen said that when the alarm went off, he was tasked with going door-to-door on the floor just below Mrs. Chase’s floor. He was busy getting people out of their rooms and into the stairwell. He had a list and he was counting heads to make sure he hadn’t missed a room. He was concentrating on his floor but when I asked him about the floor above, he said something interesting.”

  “I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop here.”

  “Right. By the time he arrived at his floor there were several guests already descending the emergency stairs. But just before he opened the fire door to go into the hall, he heard the stairwell door on the floor above open and close. He’s sure there was someone on the landing.”

  “Huh.”

  “He didn’t pay much attention because he was focused on his assigned floor. But at the time he assumed the person coming down the stairs was Mrs. Chase or whoever had been sent to make sure she got out safely. As you know, the penthouse occupies the whole top floor of that hotel. She was the only guest in that room.”

  “Did he see the person on the floor above?”

  “No. The bellman had a job to do and he did it. He went down his assigned hall and started banging on doors. I asked him if he thought the person he had heard on the landing above his floor was male or female. He said he just didn’t know. He assumed female because—”

  “Because he assumed it was Mrs. Chase.”

  “Exactly. Like I said, he didn’t stick around to make sure because he had his own responsibilities that night. After he found out that Mrs. Chase hadn’t made it out of the building, he told the investigators that he had heard someone in the stairwell, but from what I can tell, nothing was done with the information. Got a hunch no one thought it was important.”

  “The investigators probably assumed that, what with all the people and noise in the stairwell, the bellman had not heard correctly.”

  “You know how sound carries in an emergency stairwell,” Becky said. “It’s all the hard surfaces. In most stairwells you can hear people talking several floors above or below wherever you’re standing.”

  “Thanks, Becky. You’ve done some good work on this.”

  “That means a raise, right? And a company car?”

  “How about a gold star to stick on your computer?”

  “Self-sticking or do I have to lick it?”

  “If you’re going to get picky, you can forget the gold star.”

  “I’ll take whatever I can get,” Becky said. “Anything else I can do on this end?”

  “You said you’ve been able to track down almost every member of the hotel staff. Who’s still missing?”

  “The housekeeper who was assigned to the penthouse that day. She had to leave town shortly after the fire to take care of her elderly parents.”

  “Find her.”

  Jack ended the call and glanced up to see Madeline and Daphne standing in the doorway of the big kitchen. Madeline looked amused. Daphne’s brows were slightly elevated. Abe was focused on arranging the asparagus in a neat row on the baking sheet, but the corner of his mouth was twitching a little.

  Jack looked at Madeline. “Am I missing something here?”

  “Have you ever actually said good-bye before you ended a call?” Madeline asked as though she were genuinely curious.

  “I don’t like good-byes,” Jack said.

  “Because they’re a waste of time?” Madeline asked.

  “No,” he said. “Because they sound so damn final. I only say good-bye when I really mean good-bye. As in, I won’t be seeing that person again or at least I hope like hell I won’t be seeing him or her again.”

  They were all gazing at him now, evidently speechless.

  He put the egg yolks, lemon juice, salt, and a dash of cayenne into the blender and hit the on switch. Very slowly he drizzled in the melted butter. It wasn’t the classic way to make hollandaise sauce, but it was practically foolproof. He didn’t want any screwups tonight.

  “Dinner will be ready in tw
enty minutes,” he said over the roar of the blender. “Anyone else want another beer or a glass of wine?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Madeline ate the last bite of asparagus and put down her fork with a deep sense of satisfaction.

  “That was the best meal I’ve had in a very long time,” she said. “Possibly in forever.”

  “Fantastic,” Daphne declared. “Absolutely incredible. I want the hollandaise recipe.”

  Jack’s face was as unreadable as ever, but Madeline was pretty sure she detected a flicker of something that might have been gratification in his usually enigmatic eyes.

  Abe looked at Daphne. “Just to be clear, I did the roasted asparagus.”

  “Really?” Daphne looked impressed. “I’d love to have that recipe, too.”

  Abe beamed. “I’ll email it to you.”

  Jack got to his feet. “Let’s clear the table. We need to talk about a few things.”

  “What about dessert?” Abe asked, suddenly anxious.

  “It can wait a bit,” Jack said.

  Abe was clearly downcast by that news, but he did not argue. He rose and picked up Daphne’s plate.

  The dishes disappeared from the table. The men disappeared into the kitchen.

  Daphne looked at Madeline across the width of the table.

  “I could get used to this kind of service,” she whispered.

  “You and me both,” Madeline said.

  Jack and Abe emerged from the kitchen a short time later. Jack wiped his hands on a dish towel, sat down, and took out his notebook.

  Abe pulled out his phone and glanced at the screen. “Huh.”

  “What?” Jack asked.

  “Got a hit on that alert you had me set up,” Abe said. “The one about recent deaths within twenty miles of the ferry dock over on the mainland. There was a murder in the parking lot of an all-night diner eight miles from the dock. A woman was shot in the head. Looks like a drug deal gone bad.”

  Madeline got a chill on the back of her neck. When she looked at Jack she saw that he was sitting very, very still.

  “Did they ID the victim?” he asked.

  “She was carrying a driver’s license issued to an Anna Stokes,” Abe said. “Age thirty-two. Seattle address. Hang on, there’s a picture.” He whistled softly. “Say hello to Ramona Owens.”

  Abe put his phone down on the table so that they could all see the image on the screen.

  “That’s her,” Madeline said. “That’s the woman who claimed to be Tom’s granddaughter. The one who suckered us into going inside the maintenance building just before the explosion.”

  “You were right, boss.” Abe picked up his phone. “She was probably hired talent. Someone used her and, when she was no longer needed, got rid of her.”

  The chill that Madeline had sensed on the nape of her neck was now affecting the whole room. She was amazed that there were no icicles dripping from the tabletop.

  The atmosphere around Jack was the coldest place of all.

  “Find out everything you can about her,” Jack said. His tone lacked any vestige of emotion. He got to his feet and headed for the kitchen. “I’ll make some coffee. We’re going to be up late tonight.”

  He disappeared through the kitchen doorway. A moment later Madeline heard water running in the sink.

  A peculiar silence descended on the table. Daphne watched the empty doorway.

  “Is he okay?” she whispered.

  Abe frowned, glanced toward the doorway, and then leaned toward Madeline and lowered his voice.

  “He gets like that sometimes,” Abe said. “It just means he’s thinking about some aspect of the case that isn’t coming together the way he thinks it should.”

  Jack was certainly deep into his own thoughts, Madeline mused. But she was not at all certain that he was assessing facts and running scenarios—not just then, at any rate.

  She crumpled her napkin on the table, got to her feet, and went into the kitchen. Jack was at the sink, filling the glass coffeepot. He spoke to her without turning around.

  “The coffee will be ready in a few minutes,” he said.

  “Ramona, or whatever her name was, helped someone try to kill us,” Madeline said. “She may have been the person who killed Tom Lomax.”

  Jack poured water into the reservoir of the coffeemaker and stuck the empty pot on the hot plate. He pressed the on button.

  “It’s possible, but I doubt it,” he said. “I think we’re going to find out that the fake Ramona Owens was a low-level con artist who got in over her head.”

  “What does that tell us?”

  Jack turned around and lounged against the edge of the old tile counter. He folded his arms. “I don’t know yet, but this may be the break I’ve been looking for. The killer made a huge mistake.”

  “Why do you say that? It seems to me that whoever killed Ramona went out of their way to be careful. After all, she wasn’t murdered on the island. She was killed several miles inland in a scenario that made the cops think it was a drug deal gone bad. Furthermore, it sounds like she wasn’t carrying any Ramona Owens ID.”

  “The killer would have made sure of that,” Jack said. “But the problem for whoever is behind this is that you and I can identify the dead woman as the fake Ramona Owens. And now we find out that she was killed way too close to the epicenter of this thing. It was a mistake.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it spells out in a very large, very bold font that there has to be a connection between the woman who posed as Lomax’s granddaughter and someone on this island.”

  Madeline thought about that. “Xavier Webster?”

  “That would fit. Beautiful con artist gets manipulated by charismatic sociopath who is an even more talented con. Definitely one possible scenario. But I’ve made mistakes in the past when I’ve tried to narrow down the list of scenarios before I’ve had enough information.”

  “Abe will get more information. Daphne says he’s an artist with a computer.”

  Jack’s mouth twitched at the corner. “An artist, huh? Wonder how he feels about that. His goal is to be the white-hat, hard-core code writer who cracks the cold cases with his brilliant gaming programs.”

  Madeline thought about the way Abe’s eyes got a little warmer and a lot more intense when he looked at Daphne.

  “I think Abe’s okay with being called an artist,” she said.

  Jack turned and looked out over the top of the yellowed kitchen curtains and contemplated the night as though surprised to see that darkness had fallen hours earlier.

  “I’m going to get a little fresh air,” he said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  He turned away from the window, opened the door, and went outside into the shadows of the wraparound porch. Chilled currents of night air whispered into the room.

  Madeline watched through the window for a while, unsure of her next move. She was still struggling to categorize her relationship with Jack. For all that they had been through together in recent days, she was well aware that there was an invisible wall between them.

  Jack walked around the corner of the porch and was lost in the shadows.

  She wondered when he had become a loner. He evidently had a family that cared about him, but it was clear that Abe and the others had not been able to reach through the crystalline barrier that separated Jack from the rest of the world.

  Maybe the real problem was that Jack did not want to be rescued.

  She went to the arched doorway that separated the kitchen from the dining room. Abe and Daphne were sitting close together at the big table, studying whatever was on the screen of Abe’s laptop.

  They both looked up when she appeared in the opening. She knew they had heard the kitchen door open and close. Abe glanced behind her into the empty kitchen. His jaw tightened a little.
He turned back to the computer.

  Daphne’s eyes filled with sympathy, but she asked no questions.

  Madeline made up her mind.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said.

  She turned around, crossed the kitchen, and opened the back door. Closing it quietly, she wrapped her arms around herself to ward off the chill and made her way to the far end of the porch.

  Jack was braced against the darkness, his big hands gripping the railing. He did not turn around.

  She stopped about a yard away from him.

  “You knew that the woman calling herself Ramona Owens would probably wind up dead, didn’t you?” she asked.

  For a time she wasn’t sure that he would answer. She told herself that she probably should have stayed inside and let him deal with his own demons in his own way. But they had shared too much. There was a bond of some kind between them. She could not leave him to battle on alone, not tonight. So she waited, aware that she was trying to coerce an answer out of him with the unsubtle tactic of silence.

  “It seemed like the most likely scenario,” Jack said. “Her role as Lomax’s granddaughter had all the hallmarks of a carefully scripted, professional con. She was no amateur. She was hired to do a job. But she wasn’t the one behind this thing, so yeah, once her role was finished, her services were no longer required.”

  “I’m going to take a flying leap here,” Madeline said. “It occurs to me that predicting someone’s death—knowing there was nothing you could do to prevent it—would give a person a very cold feeling.”

  Jack looked at her for the first time. He did not speak.

  “I should have said that it would give any decent person that kind of feeling,” Madeline added. “It might make such a person wonder if the ability to put yourself in the mind of a killer means you might be capable of the act. Maybe it even makes you wonder if you’re somehow not the person you believed yourself to be.”