“I’m Ethan. Ethan Thornton.” The lie came smoothly, honed by years of practice at using different names in different cities. Only this time, for the first time in memory, he felt the kick of conscience. “I have an interest in funerary art.”
“You have an interest in taking pictures of dead girls, too?” Reuben challenged. “Maybe setting up your own—”
As Marcus fixed him with another cold stare, Caitlyn cut him off. “Reuben, this is horrible enough without you pointing fingers. I’m sorry, Mr. Thornton.”
Reuben’s expression said he wasn’t, that he remained suspicious. But at least he backed off, muttering only a face-saving “Cops’ll be here any minute. Guess we’ll leave the questions to them.”
The three of them stood in awkward silence, avoiding eye contact as they waited for—and, in Marcus’s case, dreaded—the first sirens to pierce the delicate veil of birdsong.
Caitlyn glanced down at the body, then looked away quickly and hugged herself as a chill rippled over her flesh. “I’ve never seen someone—I mean, I was with my mother when she died of cancer. But that was nothing like this.”
Reuben took her arm and steered her toward a stone bench. “Here, why don’t you sit down? You’ve had a shock, and you’re still bleeding. And there’s no need to stand there looking at…it.”
“Her,” Caitlyn corrected, ignoring the damp slab of concrete he was indicating. “She’s still a person, isn’t she? We can give her that much, at least.”
Still a person. Soft and serious, her words slipped beneath Marcus’s armor, beneath the skin itself. And he couldn’t help but wonder, could a woman who found humanity in a grotesquely altered dead girl see a man like him, a man who’d fallen so far and so hard, as—
Too dangerous to go there, to allow himself to feel. At the moment, thinking was required. Thinking and watching until he finally found the right moment to fade into the background, to move on to the next city and forget those glassy, green eyes…along with their living mirror image in the face of Caitlyn Villaré.
Chapter Two
“Tell me more about the man who fled the scene before the officers arrived, the one who told you his name was Ethan Thornton.” In the airless interview room at the police station, Detective Lorna Robinson leaned her considerable weight onto her forearms, flattening her flesh against the table. With her cropped, red-streaked hair and her chunky wooden jewelry, she locked in on Caitlyn with a striking hazel gaze a few shades lighter than her rich brown skin. “Could you describe him for me again?”
“Tall and on the slim side. His eyes were almost black.” Caitlyn closed her own eyes in an attempt to find the words to describe him. Exhausted as she was from her interrupted sleep and the backwash of emotion, she wanted nothing more than to finish this discussion and go home. “His hair was wavy, long and dark brown.”
“How long, would you say?”
“It brushed his shoulders, I think. A little tousled but clean.” There was so much more Caitlyn couldn’t find the words for. How his hands were long and elegant as a sculptor’s. How his gaze shifted, stone to liquid, with currents of thought running deep and swift beneath the espresso-colored surface.
How the sight of him, the rich timbre of his voice and the way he carried himself had sent attraction knifing through her. But she said nothing, knowing the tidal pull could only be an illusion, that shock had been what left her quaking—the discovery of a body that looked more like a sister to her than dark-haired Jacinth ever had.
A need to call Jacinth had Caitlyn’s stomach clenching. But if she did, her older sister would rush home from the summer seminar she’d just begun teaching in Mississippi—and they desperately needed her earnings to pay the looming tax bill on the house.
Besides, Caitlyn was tired of being protected. Even more than that, she was sick of being treated like brilliant brunette Jacinth’s idiot blonde sister, despite the fact that she’d graduated with high honors from a well-respected theater program last year, and had gotten a successful business up and running, mostly on her own, within months of her arrival in this city.
“Still with me, Ms. Villaré?” Straightening, Detective Robinson tapped a pen against her notepad. “I asked, how was this Mr. Thornton dressed?”
Caitlyn frowned, considering. “His jeans were pretty faded. The shirt was loose, long sleeved, open at the throat. It was white, and kind of old-fashioned. He looked old-fashioned, too.”
The detective looked up from her scribbling. “I thought you said he was young.”
Caitlyn shook her head. “He was young, no more than his late twenties. It was just—the hair, the shirt. He might have stepped out of the Renaissance, or a pirate movie.”
Detective Robinson smiled. “You have a very different way of describing people, know that?”
Caitlyn shrugged. “Even storytelling has its occupational hazards. So what did Reuben tell your partner about Mr. Thornton?”
When he’d been ushered toward a different interview room, Caitlyn had protested, but Reuben had shushed her. The retired cop had told her in his brusque voice, Don’t worry, chère. It’s just procedure. And it’s not like either of us has anything to hide.
“Right now, I’m only interested in what you think.” Annoyance furrowed Detective Robinson’s brow. “You’re sure you didn’t see him leave? Or hear a vehicle or something?”
“At first I thought he’d gone off with one of the officers or something.”
“We’ll work on tracking him down. Would’ve made it a lot easier if he’d shown up in the system under the name he gave you.”
“You mean he lied?” She knew it was ridiculous, but Caitlyn took the deception personally. The stranger had looked straight at her, with those ink-dark eyes, and he’d lied to her point-blank.
A spark of humor lit the detective’s eyes. “You really are young, aren’t you, hon?”
Caitlyn barely had time to feel insulted before Robinson added, “I can tell you from experience, there’re plenty of citizens out there who aren’t too eager to get involved in police matters. For a whole variety of reasons.”
Caitlyn felt the blood drain from her face. “Of course, I understand that, but he—you don’t think he could have been the one who…?” She pictured the still-unidentified woman’s marble-pale skin, the gaping, bloodless mouth set in a voiceless scream. Had the man Caitlyn had literally run into after the discovery, the man who’d looked as stunned as she felt, really been a killer?
Was it possible anyone so handsome could do such ugly, sick things? Shivering, she hugged her arms, though the room was warm and stuffy.
“Too soon to say.” Pulling a card from the pocket of her dark brown jacket, Detective Robinson added, “But you hear from him or see him, call me—any time. It’s possible this man could pose a danger.”
An unspoken truth hung like smoke between them, and Caitlyn saw the reminder in the detective’s eyes of how closely she resembled the dead woman. Or how likely it seemed that the corpse had been deliberately altered to look like her.
Though Caitlyn still held out a thimble’s worth of hope, no one had suggested the resemblance was coincidental, especially after she’d described Eva Rill’s threats at her home last night—the same threats that had led Caitlyn to the body.
“Don’t worry. I’ll definitely call,” said Caitlyn, relieved to think the interview had finally come to an end.
But the detective wasn’t finished. “Let’s get back to the old woman,” she said. “This Mrs. Rill, was she acting strange on your tour last night?”
Caitlyn sighed. “I thought the black veil and the dress seemed odd. But we saw weirder last night—everything from piercings and a rainbow Mohawk to a bunch of handsy frat boys with more hurricanes than sense inside them,” she said, referring to a drink popular with Bourbon Street revelers. “So, no, I didn’t notice one quiet little old lady in particular.”
“Until she showed up at four in the morning to accuse you of theft.”
&
nbsp; When Caitlyn nodded, the detective wondered aloud, “How would she know where you lived in the first place?”
“Why don’t you ask her? I gave you her number at least an hour ago.”
Last night the old woman had insisted she take it down so Caitlyn could call her if she “decided to return” the missing ring.
“I went ahead and tried it after I showed you in here. The number’s to a mortuary over in the Garden District. They never heard of any Eva Rill.”
The female detective leaned in even closer, piercing Caitlyn with a needle-sharp gaze. “How ’bout you?”
Shocked by the woman’s sudden change in tone, Caitlyn snapped, “Me? Are you—are you insinuating that I know Mrs. Rill, or made up the story about her coming to threaten me last night? Why? Why would you think such a—”
Sound echoed through the small room as Detective Robinson tore a sheet of paper off her pad and then ripped it several times. “Let me show you why, Ms. Villaré,” she said as she printed large block letters, one to a scrap.
She turned the letters around, allowing Caitlyn to read: E-V-A R-I-L-L.
Leaning in, the detective asked her, “You’re absolutely certain you don’t have anything you want to tell me?”
“Like what?” Caitlyn shot back as she watched the dark hands rearranging letters, sliding them around like the pieces in a shell game.
Sliding them around until they spelled her own name: V-I-L-L-A-R-E.
AN OLDER SILVER CHEVY RUMBLED like low thunder beside the wrought-iron fence that hemmed in a Grand Lady. Or at least that was what his mother would have called the towering white plantation-style mansion, with its Greek Revival columns and elegant two-story veranda.
Beside the house stood a venerable live oak, its twisted Spanish moss-cloaked branches reminding Marcus of an old man scowling at the threadbare fugitive parked near his front door.
“Just keep driving,” Marcus told himself. But his gaze remained fixed on the Villaré house, a place that whispered his name more loudly than anywhere he’d wandered.
But then, New Orleans’s siren song had been calling from the first moments he had smelled the Mississippi River’s muddy perfume, heard the raucous strains of Preservation Hall jazz, and tasted the café au lait and beignets he’d sampled near Jackson Square. By the time he’d made it to the cemetery yesterday, what was meant to be a brief visit for a few shots had taken on the weight and texture of homecoming.
As well it might, for the New Orleans he’d left at the age of five was the last place he had felt safe. The last place his mother’s arms had ever held him.
Now it was the last place, the riskiest place, he could possibly be. And the Villaré mansion was by far the most dangerous spot in it.
Forget it. Forget her, breathed a voice he recognized as reason’s.
Yet after one last look around, Marcus climbed out of the car he’d chosen for its anonymity, a Chevy whose plates were regularly, if not quite legally, traded.
Beneath a steel-gray sky he approached the front gate, his palms sweating in the sultry afternoon heat. The tips of his fingers made damp impressions on the manila envelope containing the print. Not the photograph he’d gone to the cemetery specifically to capture, but an inadvertent image he couldn’t talk himself into ignoring any more than he could forget the two blondes, one living and one dead, he had seen this morning.
You still have time to turn around.
Iron hinges creaked and he was inside, telling himself he could be safe and away in seconds as he walked up the steps and knelt beside the oversized front door. Before he could slide the envelope beneath the mat and leave, the door cracked open as far as the chain latch would allow.
“Reuben’s calling the police now.”
His gaze snapped to Caitlyn Villaré’s face, peering from behind the door.
Rising slowly so he wouldn’t scare her, he offered her the envelope. “Camera’s broken, but there were shots still on the memory card,” he told her. “Including one I thought you might find interesting.”
Rather than reaching for the envelope, she scowled at him. “Why did you leave earlier? Why did you run from the police?”
He tried a smile. “Didn’t run. I just left. Who has time to waste getting tangled up with—”
“I don’t like being lied to, Ethan.” Her gaze intensified, breaching levies he had spent years building.
“All right, then.” He drew a deep breath and said, “I’m Marcus,” without understanding why. He hadn’t revealed his name in years now. Hadn’t thought he ever would again.
“How did you find me…Marcus?” she asked.
If speaking his real name after so long was a relief, hearing it on her lips brought such a rush of pleasure that he couldn’t speak until she began to close the door, apparently giving up on an answer.
“Your website had a number,” he explained, wondering what had happened again. “It was easy doing a reverse search on the net to find the address.”
“Of course,” Caitlyn murmured. “I guess that you and the old lady must have had the same idea. Jacinth really was right about not using our home number for the business.”
“She was right. It’s not safe.”
Caitlyn rolled her eyes. “Thank you, Captain Obvious.”
He snorted and then glanced over his shoulder. “Take the photo. Give it to the cops when they show up.”
“Why?” she asked. “What’s in the picture?”
He shook his head, while behind him, thunder murmured, an uneasy harbinger of predicted storms. “Nothing, maybe. Could be just another cemetery visitor. A widow, out to see her—”
“Let me have that.” The door strained against the taut chain, and Caitlyn’s hand shot out, pale and delicate.
Marcus knew he should shove the envelope at her and take off. But if her pit bull of an assistant really was here, wouldn’t he be pushing forward to deal with Marcus himself by now? Innocent as she seemed, Marcus suspected the sweet-faced blonde had lied to him about Reuben’s presence. Maybe she had lied about the police being on the way, too.
Looking into her vulnerable green eyes, he thought of lingering to find out if he was right. Then he reminded himself that his future and his freedom weren’t his alone to gamble.
But his instinct to protect wasn’t listening to reason, so he slid the eight-by-ten out of the envelope and pointed to a figure he hadn’t noticed out in the cemetery that morning. Using his laptop and a portable photo printer, he’d enlarged a detail near the margin: a tiny, shriveled woman peering from behind a houselike tomb. Silhouetted by the shadowed dawn, she’d been caught in the act of lifting a black veil from her face, a movement that revealed the furtive malevolence of her expression.
“I have to leave,” he said to Caitlyn, “but I thought you should have this. It may be nothing, but—”
“Wait, Marcus. Let me look at that.” Unlatching the door, she snatched the print from his hand and studied it intently, noticing that a smoke-gray Persian cat had emerged and was winding around her ankles. “This is my customer, from last night’s tour. The one who lost her ring.”
“The ring the dead woman was wearing?” he asked, putting together the pieces.
Caitlyn gave him an appraising look before nodding at the photo. “She stood right here on this doorstep at four this morning. Shrieking like a banshee that I stole the thing.”
Marcus glanced over his shoulder before saying, “To lure you to that cemetery. To that body.”
As the cat stared at him disdainfully, Caitlyn nodded. “I can’t think of any other reason. Did you see anyone else this morning? Any other people nearby?”
He opened his mouth to speak, then snapped it closed again to listen to the thinnest thread of sound. A sound that gradually grew louder, beneath the lightest pattering of the raindrops that had just begun to fall.
A siren, he realized as he backed away, head shaking. Obviously someone really had called the police after all.
“Wait!�
�� she called. “Don’t leave. I didn’t…”
But the spell had finally shattered. Remembering his obligations at last, Marcus had turned away already. He broke into a loping run, vaulting the low gate to save the second it would have taken to pull it open.
As he swung into the gray sedan, he jammed the key into the ignition, then drove off wondering if Caitlyn had been stalling him from the start. Intentionally delaying his departure until the police arrived to take him into custody.
Chapter Three
His grandmother had collected doll babies by the hundreds, which his mother had arranged on shelves around the room where he’d slept as a boy.
How he’d hated those damned dolls, staring at him through the days and nights. How he’d pleaded with his mother to box them up, to let him put up his sports pennants and his model racecars—the kinds of decorations he wouldn’t have to hide from other guys.
Year after year she had stubbornly refused, saying it would be disrespectful of Grandmama’s memory to hide them all away, and that the narrow bungalow—a damned shack, really—was far too small to put them elsewhere.
“Then keep them in your room,” he had at first demanded and then pleaded, tears streaking down his red face.
But they both knew she wouldn’t, that the men who visited her at night could never do their dirty business with all those glass eyes staring at them.
And after a while, it was all right. He grew used to his silent companions. Grew to prefer them to the classmates he couldn’t invite over anyway.
DRIPPING FROM THE RAIN, Reuben returned from the hardware store, and Caitlyn quickly filled him in about her visitor.
“You opened the door to that man? Spoke to him like some old friend?” Shaking his head, he set the rain-spattered bag with the new deadbolts he’d gone to buy, after insisting the house needed to be better secured, on the kitchen counter.
Like nearly every part of their white elephant of a legacy, the once-rich wood needed attention. But that she could ignore for now, unlike the faltering air conditioner that had left the whole house stewing in its juices.
Phantom of the French Quarter Page 2
