She leaned down into the cubbyhole beneath the Brian’s desk and pressed the button on the computer case. Along with the black carpet, he favored a black CPU, black flat-screen monitor, and even a black mouse pad. She paced while she waited for Christopher to come in. He finally did, a skeptical look on his face. “I’ve already checked his computer.”
“Let’s check it again. I’ll bet you were only looking for e-mails or maybe a suicide note, right?”
“Pretty much.”
He sat down in the tall-backed chair and pulled up the file organizer on the computer. What looked like a thousand file folders filled the left side of the screen. He clicked on Search and typed in Xanadu. Nothing came up.
He turned to her. “What was this word you ‘got’ from Brian? Sira?”
She found a notepad and wrote it every conceivable way it could be spelled. He typed in each version with no luck.
“Uh-oh,” she said, staring at the way she’d just written it. “Why didn’t I realize this before? Because I never wrote the word down.” She pointed at the spelling of Sira and then wrote it backward. “Christopher, it’s Aris! The mystery nurse.”
He gave her a patronizing look. “Are you sure this isn’t all in that pretty head of yours?”
“I—” She clamped her mouth shut for a moment, taken aback by his sort-of compliment. Better to ignore it, she decided. “I am not imagining this. All right, so most of what I have is in my…head, but only because Brian put it there. I did see her!” she added at his skeptical look. “So we know that Sira is a person, specifically a woman.”
“Yeah, we know that much.”
She waved away his sarcasm. “Well, have you searched for the last spelling yet?”
“Not with you distracting me.”
She settled back on the desktop again. “Yeah, like I could distract anyone.” Her mouth was in overdrive tonight. Her heart jumped at the look on his face, a look that disputed her statement. He shifted his attention to the screen and started punching keys. No results for Sira.
“What about deleted files?” she asked.
He trailed the mouse across the screen and checked the Recycle Bin and then did a more intricate search. “If someone deleted files, they knew what they were doing.”
“Just like she knew how to crash my computer. Why would Brian have erased our emails? Let’s check his in-box again.”
Several messages appeared, including some that promised to increase one’s penis size and decrease one’s mortgage rates. Two new emails were obviously hotel-related, and he forwarded them to Tammy through the hotel’s website address.
“He has two email addresses, one for the hotel and one personal, and they both dump into this in-box. The only odd thing I’ve found is this PC.” He tapped the case with his foot. “This is Alienware, systems for people who are big-time into serious gaming. I have friends who’d have orgasms at the thought of owning Alienware. But I didn’t find any gaming software or online games in his Internet history or Favorites list.”
“Maybe he was just thinking about jumping in,” she said. “Or considering investing.” She mentioned Brian’s question about whether she liked video games.
“Could be.” He turned the chair to face her. His casual posture belied the seriousness in his eyes. “Look, I’m sorry about…the thing upstairs. I just don’t want you to get any wrong ideas about me.”
She slid off the desk. “It was no big deal. A test, that’s all.” Then she walked downstairs to watch her regular television lineup and forget about her misguided ideas.
She wished she could totally lose herself in TV-land like she did when she was a kid. Charlie bought a television for her room, and she spent all her free time watching it. The Brady Bunch was her favorite: she’d pretend she was Jan. She carried it too far, coming home from school and having conversations with Alice and “her” siblings, relaying the events of her day to her two parents who listened with rapt attention. Charlie had once caught her in one of these dialogs, but he never commented on it. Probably didn’t care if his kid was nuts as long as she didn’t bother him.
She didn’t have make-believe conversations anymore, but she still sank into those imaginary worlds. She once caught herself thinking about what kind of baby gift to give Ross and Rachel on Friends. Of course, she’d never actually bought the gift. She wasn’t that nuts.
Once she was settled in front of the television in the family room, she couldn’t stop thinking about reality. She had opened herself up, faced the rejection she feared, and hadn’t died a thousand deaths. Only a few hundred.
And she had not felt the tingle of the nosebleed when she’d asked him to kiss her. Her experiment had worked; well, sort of. She’d probably cheated. After all, she had looked at all that muscle and those dark eyes and imagined him playing with five kittens.
Late that night, Christopher tossed and turned, unable to push dreams from his sleep.
“Dad, can’t I be the good prince, just this once? Please?”
Theodore LaPorte looked at his young son with a stiff smile. “The older son always has his pick of roles, and he chooses to play the good prince again. Don’t be a baby. Play your part.”
The first born, the boy who did no wrong. Chris’s parents held onto the old-line belief that the first born was the one who carried the family name and honor and took over the family business. Everything was black and white. If Brian was first, Chris was last. If Brian was good, Chris was bad. More than ever, he needed to at least pretend he was good. More than ever he needed to know his family still loved him.
“Dad, can’t you ask Brian to let me be good this time?”
The stiff smile gave way to the bitterness Chris suspected was just beneath the surface. “You deserve the role of the evil boy who kills his friend and destroys two families. That is your role.” He walked away, leaving Chris to deal with the guilt and pain by himself.
The year before he’d proven that badness dwelled inside him, not only to his family but to himself.
Christopher rolled over in bed, not sure if he was dreaming or merely being tortured by his memories. Moonlight pooled on the floor, telling him it was too early to get up yet. When he forced himself back to sleep, he once again saw his father’s face. This time it was pale and lifeless.
He stared at the man who had been his father, waiting to feel…something. All around him people cried or sniffled or railed at the injustice of the cancer that had taken his life. Christopher couldn’t force the sadness he knew he should be expressing. He’d given up acting a long time ago. The last several tableaux in which he’d been forced to partake, the cold mask of indifference was real.
“I’m surprised you bothered to come,” Brian said, walking up beside him. “The role of dutiful son doesn’t suit you.”
Christopher turned to his brother, the man with his eyes, but with lighter hair and two less inches of height. Those two inches may as well have been a foot in Brian’s eyes.
“Yeah, the role of do-gooder was always your suit.”
Brian’s mouth tightened. “If you’ve come for some kind of inheritance, you came for nothing. You’ll have to wait for me to die before you get a cent. You ruined everything, you know.”
“I didn’t come for anything, not for reconciliation or for money.” Christopher kept his gaze on the white lilies near the coffin. Why had he come? Because the man was his father. “As for ruining everything, you give me too much credit.”
Although Brian was now twenty-two, he sounded like a whiny little boy. “Dad couldn’t bear to see anyone else head his krewe when he got ill. Said I wasn’t ready for the responsibility.” He laughed, and the sound was as bitter as poison. “He left me the hotel, but not Xanadu. He made sure it was history before he died. I had one chance to be king, and you ruined it.”
“It was an accident.”
“You were always the troublemaker. Just ask Billy Franklin.”
Christopher stiffened at the mention of the name. “It’
s time to let go of the past.” Too bad he hadn’t.
“When are you leaving?” Brian asked.
“When I’m ready.” And that could not be soon enough.
As always, Brian had to have the last word. “The prodigal son returns. Too bad no one wants you here.”
Christopher sat up in bed, naked in the darkness. Maybe it was being in Brian’s old room that had brought the dreams. Or driving through his old haunts and finding them broken-down and dangerous, old friends gone or dead. Or maybe it was the tender spots Rita had touched with her words. No matter, he wasn’t chancing having more dreams.
He settled in at the small table that overlooked the darkened courtyard below and turned on his laptop computer. The gold beads Rita had given him were lying on the table in a figure eight. He picked them up, remembering her words about magic. Then he let them drop to the table where they skittered over the edge to the floor. For a while, he worked on gathering competitor data for an up-and-coming software company. After a bit, he got restless.
He changed email identities and became the Highwayman.
The faint glow from the laptop computer screen washed over the French doors, but didn’t reach the balcony outside. He watched, comfortable that he was invisible in black. Christopher had a stern expression on his face, but once in a while he stared off at nothing and that expression became troubled. Then he rubbed his face and returned to whatever he was doing on that computer.
Sira had wanted to come tonight. She wanted to take over as usual. She thought he wasn’t man enough to handle this. Damn her. Sira, as she called herself, thought she ruled the world.
In Xanadu did Sira, a stately pleasure-dome decree… She had changed Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” to fit her needs. She would spout off some part of it whenever it suited her.
He feared her, feared her power. But mostly, he feared that Rita and Christopher could destroy her.
He walked to the French doors outside the room Rita was sleeping in. The key to those doors felt heavy in his hand, and he rubbed the ridges against his gloved fingers. Time to pay a visit. He started to push the key into the lock when a sound stopped him.
The door to Christopher’s room opened, and he walked out. He didn’t look around suspiciously, so he hadn’t heard anything. He leaned against the railing and stared out over the courtyard. He didn’t see the shadow at the end of the balcony slinking farther into the darkness.
If he did…the shadow reached down and pulled the letter opener from his belt, fingering the edge. If Christopher dared walk this way, then an evil shadow would come to life…and take his.
CHAPTER 12
Mornings were Rita’s favorite time of day, when she looked forward to filling the hours with purpose and routine. But here in this strange city, in this strange house, she was back in that Jell-O again, trying to swim to a place she wasn’t sure existed. The least she could do was dress as though she had purpose, in pleated slacks and white blouse. It was all in the appearance.
She glanced in the mirror over the dresser. A no-nonsense appearance. Blah.
Christopher wasn’t up yet, or at least she guessed that he was still behind the closed door in his room. She started a pot of coffee and found a tray of pastries that Emmagee had obviously bought when she’d…made groceries. New Orleans was indeed a foreign city.
Restless, she found Christopher’s keys, left him a note, and drove to the hospital to talk to Brian. She told him about the weather and the parade she’d watched. If he was listening, he learned about the house she planned to buy someday in the neat, no-nonsense neighborhood. What she was thinking between her chirpy sentences, though, was how afraid she was that he wasn’t going to come out of this coma. How scared she was that they wouldn’t find the truth or figure out who Sira was. Seven days had already passed since she’d arrived and she wasn’t any closer to figuring that part out.
“I’m sorry I’m not more interesting.” She touched his hand, looking for any kind of response. Nothing. “I’m not even creative enough to make up stuff. But let me tell you about a friend of mine and her hospital phobia. Now, she’s interesting.”
When Rita returned to the house a while later, Christopher was leaning against the kitchen counter with a mug of coffee in his hand, his hair slightly rumpled from being towel-dried. He wore black jeans with fade lines that accented the tight roundness of his derriere; his gold sweater molded the contours of his chest. His feet were still bare, and she wondered if there wasn’t anything on the man that wasn’t sexy and then she stopped her thoughts right there.
“Good morning. You slept in late.” And see, he didn’t even bother to comb his hair, a sure sign that he doesn’t care to impress you.
“Couldn’t sleep last night.” That was all he offered. So much for chitchat. “Someone named Anna just called. She was all panicked because she’d just run over what she thought was a child. I told her to call the police.”
“No, no, no,” Rita said, rummaging in her purse to look up her number.
“But she said she’s not supposed to do that, so she’s been driving around in circles for an hour.” He lifted his eyebrow, but Rita was already dialing the number and walking around the corner.
She talked Anna out of the panic attack she’d worked herself into and eventually helped her drive to her destination without stopping. Twenty minutes later, she hung up and returned to the kitchen where he still indulged in his coffee.
“I take it she didn’t really run someone over,” he said.
She shook her head. “She has an obsessive-compulsive disorder that makes her think every time she hits a pothole or a speed bump in the road, she’s run over someone. So she circles back looking for them, and then she’ll hit another bump and it literally becomes a vicious circle. Plus it puts her into panic mode. We’ve been working on exposure therapy, where I ride in the car with her and we purpose run over potholes and bumps. She’d been doing well until her marriage also hit a pothole and that’s thrown her back in her therapy.”
“Do you deal with a lot of that kind of thing?”
“That and phobias and other oddities.” Out of respect for her clients, she didn’t want to get into too much detail, so she shifted the subject. “You match this house, you know.”
“What?”
“The colors you wear.” He looked down, then around. She said, “You never really left New Orleans. Think about it: the coffee you order, the accent.”
He contemplated as he took a sip of his coffee. “New Orleans is the woman you left behind and never forgot.”
Perhaps New Orleans hadn’t let him go. He probably felt at home in the city, but had he at his own home?
“Stop looking at me like that,” he said
She blinked. “Like what?”
“Like you’re analyzing me. Didn’t we get that straight last night?”
Her face flushed, and she lifted her hair off her heated neck. “It’s a habit. Analyzing, that is.” Not asking men to kiss her, not putting herself on the line only to get tromped on. “We have a lot in common.” He gave her a skeptical look. “With our fathers, I mean. We both had fathers we couldn’t reach. And now they’re gone.”
“But my father’s indifference stopped hurting me a long time ago.”
She winced at the unspoken side of that statement. “At least I found out why he was…the way he was.” She tried to force a casual smile of bravery. Okay, maybe the indifference did still hurt, but only a little. “When I finally mustered the courage to tell him, I found out he’d died of cancer two days earlier. I never got to make peace with him. Did you?”
“I let him go long before he ever died,” he said, and left it at that.
“Did you?” Before he could get defensive, she quickly said, “I worked through a lot of my anger and other hang-ups during my college studies, but I still needed to make peace with him. And I’d figured out what his problem was. I used to think that simply knowing the source of a person’s behavior was
the key to fixing the problem. I thought that if I explained it to him, he’d see the light. It doesn’t always work that way.”
He finished off his mug and then poured more for himself. As he started to put the pot back, he stopped and held it up in question. He was getting better at this host thing. His eyes were on her as he poured the coffee, though he knew when to stop pouring. He smelled of deodorant and shaving cream, intrinsically male scents that sent heat pooling inside her.
“What was his problem?” he asked.
“You really want to know?”
His eyes warmed for a moment. “Sure.”
Did she want to tell him? Well, she’d started it, hadn’t she? “In layman’s terms, Charlie was the victim of a sensual mother. From what I knew, Maura’s husband had ignored her, so she lavished all of her affection on her only son. She dressed in sexy clothes, moved like liquid. Once I started studying psychology, I figured out what had happened.
“When a man becomes an adolescent and starts having sexual feelings, if his mother is draping herself all over him, some of those feelings are transferred to her. He gets disgusted at himself for these wrong feelings and shuts them off. Because of that shame, he doesn’t date women or get into relationships with them; he feels like a freak. And when Charlie suddenly got custody of his young daughter…well, he didn’t know how to relate to a woman, even a girl, in a nonsexual way. It was probably the same kind of shame all over again, just the thought of having sexual feelings toward his own daughter. So he kept me at a distance.” She decided to turn the tables. “What about you?”
He put the coffee pot back on the burner. “I was a mistake, that’s all.” He met her eyes. “Did you say you were meeting Tammy today?”
“Yes,” she said, feeling cheated. Why did women always give so much more? They talked more, that’s why.
He was already walking out of the kitchen. “I’ll take you in to the Quarter. So you don’t get lost,” he added over his shoulder before heading around the corner.
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