“Good.” She wasn’t quite satisfied yet, given how he had been pushing the agenda earlier. “Because if you have some sneaky idea up your sleeve…”
“Ellery.” He turned to face her at last. “It’s not a date. It’s just dinner. Okay?”
“Oh.” She searched his face and saw nothing that contradicted his words, and suddenly she was embarrassed. “Okay, then. Forget I said anything.”
She went to her bedroom and opened her drawers one by one, looking for something that might be nice enough for whatever four-star restaurant Reed was lining up. There would probably be a zillion pieces of silverware and the menu would be in a foreign language. “I’ll end up ordering brains or something,” she remarked to Bump, who lay sprawled on the floor. “Just you see.”
She pawed through all of her clothes and did not find anything that seemed suitable. Date or no date, it wasn’t like she had a lot of opportunities to wear fancy clothes. She flopped backward on her bed and stared at the blank white ceiling. Screw Reed Markham for even raising the possibility to begin with, she thought. It’s hard for all of us, he’d said, but he had no real idea what it was like. He hunted down the monsters and then got to go home to his nice house with his wife and kid. That he even thought it was possible for her to smile and make chitchat showed how clueless he was. She could date the same way a crocodile could run a horse race.
He wanted to know what kept her from going on dates? Well, she could give him an up-close and personal lesson, one nobody would ever learn from his damned book. She got up and stalked over to the stack of cardboard moving boxes she still had piled in the corner of her room. She slid out the bottom one and dug around until she found what she was looking for: a deep purple Lycra dress and knee-high boots—paid for by the Woodbury Police Department and left over from a one-night undercover operation she’d participated in when the chief had suspected the owner of the local bar had started dealing drugs out of his pool hall. Clothes that had never belonged to her, not really.
Ellery showered and changed into the unfamiliar outfit, tugging the dress this way and that in an effort to make it sit right on her body. Most girls had this routine down by the time they were fifteen, but the ritual was completely alien to her. She hadn’t been kidding with Reed when she’d told him she’d never been on a date. She hadn’t missed it, either, but now here he was insisting she give it a try. The dress had long sleeves and a high enough neckline that it did not show many of her scars. She owned exactly no makeup, only ChapStick, so she put that on and combed out her hair. Having been twisted in a knot all day, it now fell across her shoulders in soft waves. Ellery hesitated as she looked in the mirror—she never spent this much time looking at herself—and tentatively assessed her handiwork. She looked … normal? Like a woman who could be going out on a date, if she had been born into a different lifetime. A ghost of a person she would never be.
Hot tears stung her eyes. Screw you, Reed Markham, she thought. It’s showtime.
6
“This is all I own, so it’s going to have to do.” Her words came at him from across the loft, bouncing off the high, hard walls. Reed looked up from his computer and saw the shape of her, with her hair down and newly rounded edges, but he couldn’t make her come into focus. He slipped off his reading glasses and tried again, blinking in owlish fashion for a long moment as the vision coalesced. She was dressed to put the sizzle on a steak, with knee-high leather boots and a dark-colored dress that hugged her curves like a mountain road. “I—” He broke off in a stammer. “You—. Ah, yes. It’s fine.”
“Good.” She stalked to the window, pointed heels echoing on the hardwood, and he couldn’t help tracking her with his eyes, struck dumb by this new creature with flowing hair and legs that went all the way to the floor. She’d said she’d never once been out on a date, so it begged the question: who in the hell had she bought this outfit for? “Cab’s here,” she announced as she looked out the window to the street below. She turned her gaze to him, cool and assessing. “You’d better get cleaned up.”
Freshly shaven and with his tie once again knotted, Reed found himself in the back of a taxi, taking care to remain on his own side even as Ellery crossed her legs and showed off an expanse of long white thigh. She smelled like shampoo and leather, and the waves of her hair obscured most of her profile so he could not read her face. A tense, challenging sort of energy radiated from her, a mood he did not recognize, and it made him distinctly nervous. Outside, the landscape was alien, snowflakes like stars whooshing past the windows as they hurtled through the dark night. It was frigid when they landed, and they stepped carefully into the snowbound street. Reed poured money at the driver until the man seemed satisfied and waved them off. As the cabbie’s red taillights winked out in the distance, Reed realized he had failed to arrange for a ride home. Leaped into this without a fully formed plan, he lectured himself as he watched Ellery pick her way through the snowdrifts toward the restaurant. Very smart of you.
The steakhouse, Mooo…, looked like something out of a London fairy tale, with its dark wood exterior set off by decorations of cheery red branches, evergreen boughs, pine cones and white lights. The whole lot of it was half-buried in snow, which only added to the holiday aesthetic. Reed and Ellery hurried inside with a bluster of wintry air. “I can see why you were able to get a table at the last minute,” Ellery muttered in regards to the mostly empty restaurant as the male host approached with a wide smile.
The host took their coats while Reed surveyed the place. The white, modern design inside belied the pub-like exterior. It was well lit by large circular lamps that glinted off large starburst mirrors and a gleaming bar, but there were few other patrons around to take advantage. The storm had kept most sensible New Englanders indoors for the night. “Right this way,” the host said, and led them to a table for two by the windows.
Ellery regarded the white bone china and shining silverware with a tiny frown before carefully placing the starched napkin in her lap. “So this is where you go?” she asked him. “When you go on dates?”
“No, Boston is a bit out of the way from Virginia. I try to start out with something that doesn’t involve airfare.” At her scowl, he coughed and smiled. “You talk like I have some heavily stacked social calendar, some playbook to work from. I haven’t been on a proper date in ages.”
“So … just improper ones, then? Duly noted, Agent Markham. I guess these improper women must not rate a…” She paused as she picked up the menu, and her jaw fell open. “… sixty-two-dollar steak!” She shot him a glare across the table.
The waiter gave them a concerned glance, and Reed rushed to assure her. “Dinner is on me.”
She looked affronted. “I can pay for myself.”
“I know that,” he said, although he really didn’t. She was on leave from her job and he had no way of knowing what her finances were at the moment. “I just meant that since I selected the restaurant without input from you, it seems only fair that I pick up the cost.”
“I don’t want to owe you any more than I already do.”
“This isn’t about owing.”
She tilted her head, her gray eyes guileless. “Isn’t it?”
The waiter returned to take their orders, and Ellery selected the steak-frites for a more modest thirty-two dollars, while Reed ordered a New York strip with asparagus and braised carrots on the side.
“My mother would be appalled if she knew you’d just agreed to pay twelve dollars for one measly order of carrots,” Ellery said when they were alone again. “We used to get a two-pound bag for two bucks.”
“Have you talked to your mother recently?”
Ellery shrugged one shoulder. “She wants me to come home for Christmas. I told her I’d fly her out here. So that’s where we are—each of us stuck someplace the other one won’t go.”
Reed didn’t understand Caroline Hathaway, who had lost one child forever and yet seemed determined to keep the remaining one at arm’s length. Ellery�
��s mother still resided at the scene of the crime, the windows of her Chicago walk-up just one block from the park where Ellery had been abducted. Maybe Mrs. Hathaway looked out at the swings and basketball courts and remembered her kids playing there, but Ellery would forever have a different view. “Tell me about Daniel,” he said, and Ellery halted with the wineglass just in front of her lips.
“Why?”
“I never got to know him.” Her older brother had died of leukemia shortly after Ellery’s return, Reed knew, but he had never met the boy. He’d been low man on the totem pole back then, and interviews with the victims’ families were left to more experienced agents. When Ellery didn’t volunteer anything further, Reed tried again. “I’m just curious what he was like,” he said, taking up his own wineglass. “Besides, if you must know, this is how it usually works on dates. You talk and get to know each other.”
“This isn’t a date,” she reminded him, narrowing her eyes. “And you already know me. You literally wrote the book, remember?”
Reed felt an embarrassed flush go through him, as it always did whenever she brought up his bestseller about the Coben case. “It was hardly a comprehensive biography…”
“No,” she agreed, an edge in her voice. “It wasn’t.”
“You’ve raised a fair point, though—you should ask the questions. Anything you want, I’ll answer it.”
“Anything?” She eyed him speculatively, and he got that wiggly feeling in his belly again. He forced himself to sit still as she pondered the possibilities. “Why did you ask out Sarit in the first place?” she asked. “Was it because of the book?”
Reed shifted in his seat. Normally, women asked him why his marriage broke up, not how it got started. “I, uh, I guess you could say she asked me out, in a way. We met at the mayor’s benefit dinner and got to talking. Sarit was doing a piece on domestic violence and she wanted to pick my brain about the psychological makeup of the offenders, so she asked me out for coffee. She talked so much and so passionately about the women she was interviewing for her piece that her coffee just sat there, untouched, until it went completely cold. I didn’t care because I would have listened to her forever. She had this lyrical quality to her…” He broke off, remembering, and shook his head. “The book came later.” Reed could fill out an efficient report, a catalog of facts, but he was hopeless when it came to storytelling. Sarit’s keen sense of narrative flow and sharp eye for character detail had brought the book to life.
“Does she know you’re up here now?” Ellery asked.
“She knows,” Reed replied, with a tone that indicated Sarit was none too pleased about it.
The food arrived in a cloud of savory aromas, the elegant white plates weighed down with more than the pair of them could ever eat. A stack of golden fries. Thick, tender cuts of meat. Asparagus drizzled with house-made hollandaise. They each enjoyed a few bites before Ellery resumed her inquisition, sparing no quarter. “Do you think you’ll ever try to solve your mother’s murder?”
Her question caught Reed with a mouthful of ice water, which he choked on briefly before managing to get it all down. Ellery flashed him a chagrined grimace. “Sorry if that’s over the line.”
“No. I said to ask me anything,” he said, regretting every word of it. He picked at the edge of his napkin with his thumbnail for a moment as he considered how to answer. His birth mother, Camilla Flores, had been found stabbed to death in her apartment in Las Vegas when Reed was a baby. Reed had known she was dead all his life but hadn’t learned the details until he was an adult and petitioned his parents for the truth. Eventually, he’d been able to see the murder book for himself, thin as it was. Reed, then five months old and apparently named Joey, had been found in his cot by Camilla’s female roommate who’d walked in on the macabre scene. Reed still knew her initial statement by heart: I pushed open the door because the baby was crying, and there she was on the floor with a knife sticking out of her.
However many minutes had passed between the time Camilla lost her fight and Angela arrived home, it was just long enough for her killer to escape into history. The police had knocked on doors and rounded up a few local suspects, but never got traction with any of them. Absent any new leads, they more or less gave up.
“It happened more than forty years ago,” he told Ellery. “There’s nothing left to investigate.”
Ellery nodded as though she had expected that answer. “Is that why … is that why you went into law enforcement?”
He gave a thin, rueful smile at his obvious transparency. “If you can’t save the one you love, save the one you’re with,” he said, raising his glass in a mock toast. Then he froze as he realized the impact of his words. Her gaze traveled up to his and stopped there. It was rare enough, this lingering direct eye contact from her, that he forgot his manners and simply stared right back.
“What would you have done otherwise?” she finally asked, still watching his face. “If you hadn’t joined the FBI?”
“Oh, you know,” he said, looking away at last, gesturing vaguely with one hand. “I was very young, you see, so there were the usual teenage boy fantasies…”
She arched an eyebrow at him as she speared a bite of steak. “Aren’t you kind of living the teenage boy fantasy?”
“I was going to be a rock star,” he told her.
Her eyes widened and she leaned over the table toward him. “Get out. You’re not serious.”
“I was deadly serious. Why? You don’t see it?” He ran a hand through his hair to fluff it up and turned his head so she could admire his jutting jaw and strong profile.
She squinted and tilted her head to one side, making a show of studying him. “Mick Jagger?”
He turned back to her in horror. “Just how old do you think I am?”
She grinned and gave a girlish shrug that delighted him more than it should have. “The waiter only asked one of us for ID,” she pointed out.
Ellery would turn thirty next year, hardly a girl, but with her hair down and the lowered lighting, she looked younger than her years—which made him feel every one of his. “That’s because you’re dressed like a college student about to head out clubbing,” he informed her with a lofty tone.
She looked down at her chest, so he had to look, too. “I thought you liked my outfit,” she said, looking up again.
He held her gaze deliberately. “I never said I didn’t like it.”
“Oh. Well, then. Back to your imaginary rock band: which instrument did you play?”
“It wasn’t imaginary. Cow Ascension was very real, and I’ll have you know we rocked Tommy Tindler’s graduation party. I played the keyboard.”
“I’m sorry. Time out. Flag on the play.” She made a T with her hands. “Cow Ascension?”
“Brad thought up the name. You don’t like it?” He tried to look wounded.
She folded her arms over her chest. “I’m just trying to imagine the T-shirts.”
“Ah, well, I don’t think we ever got that far. Brad got early acceptance to Yale, and we lost our rehearsal space … his parents’ garage.”
“And now the world will never be treated to the musical stylings of Cow Ascension,” she said mournfully. “What a pity. Do you still play?”
The question drew him up short and his smile faltered. “A bit. Well. I, uh, I’d like to, but I had to leave the piano when I moved out. Tula’s taking lessons so it really makes more sense for it to stay with her.” He looked down quickly at his lap; the next part came out all in a rush. “It was the strangest feeling, you know, to close the door behind me, leaving everything I loved on the other side.”
He hadn’t talked about the divorce with anyone, not beyond the nuts and bolts mechanics with lawyers and mediators and all the people he’d paid to slice up his former life. He raised his head again and found Ellery watching him with clouded eyes. “Yes,” she said finally. “And when that door shuts, and you hear it click, it sounds so final—because you know.” She looked away toward the
outside, in the direction of her lost home. “You know you’ll never come back again.”
* * *
The restaurant turned out to be attached to a small boutique hotel, so Ellery wandered the intimate lobby while Reed talked with the concierge about the hope of finding a taxi. Outside, the storm had picked up again, swirling in the streets and banging on the windows like an angry guest demanding to be let in. After a couple of calls, the kind woman at the front desk found a taxi that was willing to make its way out, but it was “going to be a while.” Reed went to give Ellery the news, and he found her off in a shadowed corner, contemplating a black-and-white abstract painting that might have been a ballerina bending over, or maybe a pregnant penguin. “Daniel loved to draw,” she said as he came to stand next to her, looking at the art and not at him. “He had an amazing knack for capturing people. If I tried it, the noses came out wrong and the proportions would be off, but Daniel … he could sketch a person in five minutes flat, and it was like they came to life right on the page.” She glanced at Reed. “Not just what they looked like in their faces, you know, but like who they really were inside. Does that make sense?”
“I think so.”
She turned back to face the painting. “My mom didn’t want anything touched in his half of the room after he was gone, but I used to get out his sketchbooks and look at them when she wasn’t home. I even took one when I left for good, which I felt a little guilty about, but then why should I? It’s not fair that she gets to keep everything.”
He wondered briefly what it might have been like for her if Daniel hadn’t died, if Caroline had had the money or time or emotional wherewithal to deal with her daughter’s trauma. Ellery had survived. Once she was no longer dying, not in any way that could be measured, her mother had returned all her attention to the child she couldn’t save.
“Thank you for suggesting this place for dinner,” Ellery said abruptly. “You were right—it’s better than Burger King.”
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