Sex & Sensibility

by Shannon Hollis

  The chill of loss filled his gut as he acknowledged the truth of that. He tried to shake it off as he showed Petrie to the door. She paused on the steps outside.

  “Former law enforcement?” she asked, looking him up and down with a tad more than professional interest.

  He nodded, and she smiled. “I can always tell. What department?”

  “Santa Rita P.D. Invalided out. Took a round in the knee.”

  “Ah.” Her voice held sympathy. “Still, can’t be a bad gig, working for Singleton. Though this whole psychic thing is a bit irrational. I’m surprised you allowed it.”

  “She was good.” He could be as abrupt as Jay.

  Petrie’s gaze became flirtatious. “Maybe you can educate me. Bring me up to date. Say, over a drink down at the Pelican?” The Thirsty Pelican was a cop hangout close to the municipal pier. Griffin had gone there a lot after Sheryl. After he’d regained the ability to drive.

  “No,” he said. “But thanks. I have your card. I’ll send you a briefing by e-mail so you have everything documented.”

  Detective Petrie withdrew visibly into “sexless police officer” mode. “Right. Meanwhile, I’ll try to convince my lieutenant we should get a team down to that cottage to process it.”

  “Don’t waste your time. I’d suggest the beach house in Santa Rita.”

  Petrie shook her head. “Not our county.”

  “So what? They’ll assist you.”

  “Not for a missing person, especially if she’s not a minor and there’s no evidence of a crime. Like I said, I can make inquiries, check phone records, but no more. Unless evidence turns up that she actually has been kidnapped. Even then, you’d have to go to the Feds or CLEU.”

  CLEU.

  What were the odds that Tessa would already have called her sister about her firing? How close were they? Could Linn Nichols help?

  Probably not more than she already had, with the under-the-counter phone records. And Linn would be least likely of all to put the state’s resources to work for him if she knew he’d just helped to publicly humiliate her sister.

  Look what had happened the last time he’d done that.

  Griffin watched Detective Petrie drive off with a sense of relief. Then he walked around the back of the garage and climbed into his own truck. All he needed was a couple of hours away from here to clear his head, and then he’d get back on the case. He’d drive over to the beach house and go over it with a fine-tooth comb, without the beautiful distraction who might have made him miss something before.

  He signaled and pulled onto the highway northbound to Santa Rita. If it hadn’t been for Tessa, he’d probably have taken the good detective up on her offer of a drink and let nature take its course afterward. He’d have spent some time with her and then dropped out of her life, which had become his modus operandi for the past year or two. It was convenient, it was easy, and he didn’t have to engage the drive belt that connected his libido and his emotions.

  His emotions had engaged with a vengeance when Tessa had looked at him in the kitchen. He’d been so stunned by the collision between his need to keep his employer happy and his need to fold her in his arms and protect her from Jay’s anger that he’d just stood there, immobilized, and watched the trust and hope drain out of her when he didn’t step up to support her. His heart squeezed with pain in direct proportion to the pain he had caused her.

  When he’d received his shield and gun, he’d vowed silently that he’d uphold the truth and believe in “innocent until proven guilty.” That he’d fight on the side of the underdog. That he’d do the right thing, no matter what it cost him.

  He’d learned soon enough that police work didn’t lend itself to the first three in a lot of cases, so the shine had been rubbed off a lot of his youthful illusions pretty damn quick. But he still believed in the last one. It wasn’t easy doing the right thing sometimes. In fact, even knowing what the right thing was could be hard, especially when you were facedown in a filthy corridor with a hysterical crackhead waving a Walther at you.

  But he hadn’t done the right thing by Tessa. Of course he had checked out everything she’d said because that was his job. However he should have told Jay that this wasn’t because he didn’t trust her, but because it increasingly proved that her visions were accurate.

  With a sigh, he pulled into his driveway. His little house stood baking on its lot, the shutters closed against the sun so that it looked as if it were sleeping. Just like him. Pretending to be asleep, pretending to be unavailable, so no one would be tempted to knock on the door and make him feel again.

  Frowning at his thoughts, he collected the mail from the box and let himself inside. He was by nature a methodical, neat kind of guy who didn’t like a lot of stuff around, but what he had was always in its place where he could find it in a hurry. But the house felt even more spare and empty than it usually did. He had gotten used to Tessa’s sunny presence with him, and now that it wasn’t around, everything just looked dark and solitary.

  He pushed open the drapes and opened a few windows.

  An unopened soda was hiding in the back of the fridge, behind a rock-hard chunk of cheese. Popping the top, he took it into the backyard and, out of habit, looked over at the banana tree.

  Uh-oh.

  The damn tree, which had been growing despite his best efforts to ignore it, drooped disconsolately, its broad, serrated leaves turning jaundiced. “Aw, come on.” He didn’t care about the tree. But at the same time, he didn’t want to see anything die on his watch, either. He dragged the hose over to it and soaked the ground. “Don’t die on me now, you stupid thing. You’ve stayed alive to spite me so far.”

  The tree didn’t answer, but the water disappeared into the hard ground with a sound like a hiss of relief. He stood there, hosing it down and sipping the soda, until water puddled at his feet. Then he hosed the tree’s leaves for good measure.

  The action of attempting resuscitation seemed to spark the need for activity. He turned off the water and went back in the house. Petrie’s business card was still in his back pocket. With a sense that he needed to help set things right again, he flipped open his cell phone and punched in her number.

  THE ONLY THING different in the apartment was the pile of mail, which had grown, and the plants, which had not. Yesterday all Tessa had managed to accomplish was to haul a load of laundry down to the communal laundry room and bring it up again when it was done. Today she filled the watering can and attempted to bring the plants back to life. She should have had someone come in to look after them. But she’d left in such a hurry, so excited to have a job and someone to believe in her, that she hadn’t even thought about mundane things like what would happen to the African violet and the tray of herbs over the sink while she was gone.

  They looked the way she felt: drab and droopy and lifeless. And while a drink of water might go a long way to fixing their problems, it wouldn’t do much for hers.

  Once her few plants were taken care of, she picked through the mail, but there was nothing in there but bills, ads, and offers for credit cards it would be fatal to her skinny bank account to use. Her next-door neighbor had dropped his used copy of this week’s San Francisco Inside Out into her slot, which he did about once a week. She flipped its pages idly, pausing to read “Lorelei on the Loose,” a column that was usually amusing but today just didn’t interest her. It was about rich people who were famous for just that—being rich.

  Yawn.

  Then a photograph caught her eye at the bottom of the column, under a subhead that read “Trying to be Paris Hilton?” She blinked and looked closer. Under a neon sign that clearly read New York, New York, one of the biggest new casinos in Reno, patrons leaned over gaming tables. And there, front and center, were Christina and Trey Ludovic, photographed in the act of tossing the dice. Christina was laughing, and Trey, who hadn’t photographed as well as he had in the Christmas party picture, was looking every bit the middle-aged executive. Including the harassed expre
ssion and the unsmiling mouth.

  Tessa studied him for a moment. Something was bugging the guy, but what? The photographer? Worried that Daddy would read the paper and hunt him down like the dog he was? Her gaze dropped to the caption.

  “Last night at NY squared, who should storm the tables but rich girl Christina Singleton, on the arm of a guy both declined to name. Paris waited till she was twenty-one before she burst on the club scene. Christina’s obviously warming up with her companion’s luck at the Reno casinos.”

  That was why they hadn’t been at the beach house the day before yesterday, Tessa realized with sudden certainty. They’d gone to Reno. The question was, why? To pay their “Nevada taxes” at the slot machines? Or for another reason—one that involved drive-through chapels and ministers in spandex who sang “Love Me Tender” on request?

  She glanced around wildly. The sweater. What had she done with Christina’s cashmere sweatshirt? Her feet slipped on the bare wood of the floor as she dashed into the bedroom, where the pile of clean laundry still sat in its basket. Undies, tops, dress, shorts—aha.

  She tossed the sweater in the air and yanked it over her head.

  Come on, universe. Give me a sign. Do I jump in the car and redline the speedometer over the Sierra Nevada mountains, or have they hopped a plane already and begun a honeymoon in Tahiti?

  Nothing happened.

  Okay. That was okay. She should just go about her normal business and sooner or later something would come to her. It always had before. She just needed to be patient.

  But somehow the sense of urgency inside her increased. She couldn’t sit still. Instead, she found herself walking around the apartment, doing stretches, picking things up and putting them down again, all the time feeling as though time was ticking away and she was going to miss it.

  She had no idea what “it” even was. A plane? An opportunity? What?

  A door slammed and she whirled away from it.

  The blue-and-white-striped couch in front of the window with its ocean view looked soft and inviting, and she watched Christina drop onto it. The girl craved the embrace of something, even upholstery. Trey had left and he wasn’t coming back. The cotton covering the cheery yellow pillow soon became soaked with her tears. Before long she needed a tissue. Her thoughts sounded in Tessa’s mind. So what if they found something in the wastebasket. Trey was just being paranoid about leaving no traces. Mandy would understand that she just needed a little time here where it was quiet, where no one would ask questions. Where she could be alone to lick her wounds.

  Alone!

  Christina wailed and buried her face in the wet pillow. How was she going to face the rest of her life alone?

  Tessa came back to herself as suddenly as she’d left, sitting on a kitchen chair with her head buried in her arms and no memory of how she got there. She blinked and lifted her head, then patted herself to make sure her flesh and the sweater were real.

  Christina was back at the beach house. Tessa now knew the source of the feeling of urgency in her gut. She had to get down there before the girl decided to do something drastic or dangerous to herself. In her present frame of mind, freshly dumped and vulnerable, Christina might think a reasonable solution would be to go to a club and hit on the nearest male over thirty. Or she might call up her girlfriends and decide a cross-country trip back to Boston was the answer. In either case, the results could be disastrous.

  22

  TESSA YANKED a few clean clothes out of the laundry basket and stuffed them into her striped beach carryall. “Be good,” she told the African violet, then ran out of the apartment and took a bus to the garage where the Mustang was stored. She was negotiating traffic on the Highway 101 interchange when her cell phone rang.

  Linn, wanting to talk about fabric swatches.

  Jay, wanting to rehire her.

  Griffin, wanting to apologize for leaving her swinging in the wind.

  But it was none of the above. For once, her intuition had failed her.

  “This is Detective Petrie from the sheriff’s office,” a woman’s voice said crisply. “I understand you’ve recently been employed by Jay Singleton to help find his daughter.”

  “Yes.” She certainly hadn’t seen that one coming.

  “In what capacity?”

  “I’m a sensitive.” Tessa put the phone between her ear and shoulder, changed up into fourth gear and accelerated off the cloverleaf and onto the freeway. “I’ve been working with Griffin Knox, trying to trace Christina using psychometry and dream work.”

  “Uh-huh.” The woman’s voice was flat with skepticism. Even with the wind in her ears from having the top down, Tessa could hear it.

  “What can I do for you, Detective?” she asked, forcing herself to be patient. For all she knew, a person could be arrested for contempt of law enforcement officers.

  “Speaking of Griffin, I had a little chat with him yesterday. He suggested that I call you.”

  Yesterday? And it had taken this long for her to get around to it? “Did something happen?”

  “No, not to my knowledge. Why do you say that?”

  “I just wondered. Because Griffin doesn’t believe in what I do. He has no reason to ask you to call me unless something happened.”

  “I’ll have to disagree with you there. We agreed that he’d brief me on this case, but he suggested that the most efficient way to do that would be for you to talk to me.”

  “He did?” Tessa’s brain jogged along in first gear, trying to close the gap between the guy who’d fed her to Jay Singleton and this new guy who thought she had something to contribute. Or rather, the old guy of a couple of days ago who had worked with her and thought she was real.

  She couldn’t figure it out, and gave up. Detective Petrie was talking again, anyway.

  “He gave me some details that helped me map out their trail, and a list of Christina’s friends so we could collect phone records.”

  “We already did that.”

  Detective Petrie paused. “Maybe you did, but let me do the detecting now, okay? It is, after all, my job.”

  “Uh, okay. You’ll find a lot of calls to Oraia, a salon Christina goes to. She’s friends with the owner, Michelle, who apparently has been out of town for two weeks.” Except for one day, when she happened to be in the shop and talked to me.

  “What about her hangouts, places she and her friends go?”

  “They dance at Atlantis a lot. But we already went there, too. We were supposed to show her picture to the bouncers to see if they could identify Trey, but we already found out who Trey was through Michelle.”

  “Bouncers,” Petrie said slowly, sounding as if she were writing it down.

  “Detective, you don’t need to waste your time on all this. Christina is at Mandy’s beach house.”

  “Yes, apparently you already said that.”

  “No, not the other day. Today. Now.”

  “And how do you know this?”

  “I just saw her. In a vision. Trey just dumped her and she’s there all alone. Somebody needs to go and get her before she does something stupid.”

  “You saw her in a vision.”

  “Yes!” Was the woman deaf or had her cell phone cut out during all of that? “Did you hear what I said?”

  “Oh, yeah, I heard it. But Griffin Knox says that house is empty and has been for some time. I’m not about to go chasing off up the coast on the basis of a dream when there’s real legwork to be done.”

  “But we already did the—”

  “I don’t know what he was thinking. I was expecting real information. Uh, thanks for your time, Ms. Nichols.”

  “Wait—” But the dial tone was already buzzing monotonously in her ear.

  Tessa snapped the phone shut with a flick of her wrist and tossed it in her carryall.

  Stupid woman. Why did she bother with cops of any description, anyway? She could do this herself. She’d drag Christina home kicking and screaming if she had to. She’d show these pe
ople who had skills and who didn’t.

  Tessa put her foot to the floor and the Mustang leaped forward with a joyful roar.

  DETECTIVE PETRIE seemed to think that Tessa was their personal private joke.

  “…so then she tells me that our girl is back at the beach house, like I’m going to jump right in the car and hustle over there. I tell you, Griffin, you have my sympathy. I’m not sure how many peace officers would be able to handle Jay Singleton forcing them to work with a psychic. I mean, try to set foot in the Pelican once that gets around.”

  Cell phone to his ear, Griffin leaned on his sliding glass door and gazed out at the banana tree. Was it his imagination, or had the thing perked up a little? “She called with information and at the time, we—”

  But Petrie interrupted. “So look, I’m going to go talk with the owner down at the Atlantis. We’ll see how forthcoming he is when he gets a badge flashed in his face.”

  If she wanted to chase her tail following up empty leads, that was fine by him. Anything to get her out of his way. “Okay.”

  It was his own fault that she felt free enough to talk about Tessa like this. All he’d had to do when she’d come over to Jay’s was make it clear that Tessa had been helpful to the case. Then her attitude might have had, if not admiration, then at least not this smiling, elbow-in-the-ribs derision. But he had not stood up for Tessa. Once again, he’d withdrawn behind that wall he put up between himself and others, women in particular. He’d denied the connection, the chemistry they had—hell, he’d even denied the friendship that had bloomed between them as he’d recognized she was as smart in her way as he was in his.

  There were days when he just plain hated himself.

  You can change, you know.

  Why? His relationship with Sheryl had been no different. All Sheryl and he really had in common were sex and wedding plans. With Tessa it was sex and this case. That was nothing to base a relationship on.

  All women are not created equal to Sheryl. If you don’t give Tessa a chance, you might end up like that banana tree, all shriveled up and turning yellow.