While She Was Sleeping

by Diane Pershing

  “No. Oh, Lord. Get me out of this before I dissolve in a puddle at your feet.” She started to jump down, but he moved to place a hand on the counter on either side of her, effectively restraining her.

  It was time to be serious. “I stopped for the same reason I went on a walk,” he told her. “Something didn’t feel right, and I needed to work it out.”

  “Oh. What did you come up with?”

  He decided to give it to her with both barrels. “I don’t want to get involved with you, Carly, because you won’t tell me what’s going on. That’s the truth. And what’s also the truth is that I’m still attracted to you, as I guess you can tell. I want more, a lot more, of what we had last night. But I won’t initiate anything. It will be on your say-so, and only when you feel you trust me enough to come clean—” Pushing himself away from the counter, he shrugged; it was out of his hands. “If you ever do. If you don’t, I’ll say goodbye, and that will be the end.”

  Shock widened her eyes, then they clouded over with sadness. Folding her hands in her lap, she looked down at them. She nodded slowly. “I understand.”

  Gazing at the top of her head, where the pale blond hair parted to reveal pink scalp beneath, he clenched his hands a couple of times. He’d let her have it. Why didn’t he feel better?

  Because sometimes it was like that.

  He let out a sigh. “Good. Time for both of us to go to bed.”

  After another moment or two, she seemed to gather her composure around her. Without making eye contact, she hopped off the counter, swiping at the back of her sweats. “Where are some sheets?” she asked brightly. “I’ll make up the couch.”

  “I’ll do it.”

  Hands on hips, she faced him. “Are we going to do this again, Nick?”

  Again, he couldn’t help smiling. “Okay, we’ll make up the couch together.” He followed her to the next room.

  She folded the sheet corners the way they did in hospitals, he noticed, making sure everything was even and neat. “You had some pretty good training there.”

  “Some training you don’t forget.”

  “Your father?”

  “Yes sir,” she said emphatically. “The original tow-the-line-or-else dad.”

  Troubled, Nick shook out the blanket and let it fall onto the couch. “Couldn’t something be done about the abuse?” he asked her. “Someone be told?”

  “My father had a lot of influence in town.” She fussed with the ends of the blanket.

  “Why? What did he do?”

  She said nothing for a moment, then met his gaze with a startling directness. “He was the chief of police.”

  The breath left him then, as if he’d been sucker punched. “Good God.”

  She nodded slowly, as though she understood his reaction, then unfolded a clean pillowcase and stuffed a pillow into it. “We lived in a pretty small town, inland from Cape Cod. He was completely in charge of law enforcement. There were ten officers under his command and, no, there was no one to go to.”

  “The mayor? Social Services?”

  She shrugged, fluffed up the pillow. “His friends. But I never even thought I had a right to complain. When you grow up in a house like that, you think that’s how it is everywhere. I never talked about it to anyone, so I had no way of knowing it wasn’t.”

  “Where was your mother in all this?”

  Carly hugged the pillow to her chest and smiled wistfully. “She made us promise not to tell anyone. It was to be our secret. She would be shamed, she said, in front of the town. So it went on until—” she gave a dry laugh “—fate intervened and they were killed in a car crash.”

  How much should someone have to go through? Nick wondered. How many obstacles could a person overcome before they no longer possessed the strength to fight back? That curious tenderness toward her rose again in the vicinity of his chest. “Well, that sure explains why you didn’t exactly leap with joy when I told you what I did for a living.”

  Frowning, she perched on the arm of the couch. “About that, listen—”

  He held up a hand. “Tell me you’re not going to say you’re sorry.”

  “Are you kidding?” Her smile was rueful, but lacking in humor. “I’m never going to apologize for anything, ever again. Believe it or not, it’s something I’ve been working on. It feels like I spent my whole life being sorry for my very existence. I’m in this woman’s group, you know, assertiveness training and all that.”

  He raised his eyes to the ceiling. “God help us all.”

  “No, it’s really great,” she said earnestly “They’ve made me aware of how much I apologize. In fact, I thought I’d stopped doing that—they applauded me one time when I’d gone a whole two hours without saying it. But the group leader told me once that when you get into rough situations, or your stress level is high, you tend to revert to old behavior. And, I guess—” she offered another wry smile “—since Friday night, I’ve been under a lot of stress.”

  “You could say that.”

  Suddenly, Carly yawned, covered her mouth and smiled drowzily at him. “I think I need to sleep now.”

  She was totally drained, it was obvious. “Bedtime,” he said. Taking her hand, he led her into his bedroom, but she stopped at the doorway, her body stiff with resistance.

  “I’m sleeping on the couch,” she said. “Remember?”

  “No, take my bed.”

  “Nick, I meant it.” She yawned again. “It’s my turn.”

  Her eyes were wide-open in the dark. There was very little light, just a glow from the windows, casting phantom images over everything and giving them strange shapes. She stared at one dark silhouette then the other, at the dancing shadows on the ceiling for a while. Finally, she sighed and sat up.

  Carly had tried to sleep for the past couple of hours, but it was useless. Even dead tired, as she knew she was, there would be no sleeping any time soon. Maybe that quick nap was responsible. Or maybe she was afraid to fall asleep, afraid to remember any more.

  Rubbing her eyes, she reached over to turn on a lamp. Before she did, her hand stopped. Nick’s bedroom door was open. The light might disturb him. She scrambled off the couch and stood. What was she wearing? she wondered. She grabbed a piece of material and looked at it. Oh, yes. One of Nick’s undershirts and nothing else. Because she had nothing else. Why, she asked herself, during all the time she’d spent wandering around that day, why hadn’t she at least bought a pair of panties or a bra? It felt strange not to have the protection of underclothes.

  She wrapped the blanket from the couch around her and walked over to the door of Nick’s room. Faint moonlight shone through his curtains and she could see that he was sprawled across the bed, lying on his stomach. By squinting, she could discern the dark outline of his body, bisected by a much paler strip—his briefs, she assumed.

  He was a large man, quick-tempered, rough in so many ways. But surprisingly gentle sometimes. She felt a sudden yearning in her chest to be close to him, to crawl into bed with him, to run her hands over that tanned skin, those firm muscles. The surge of longing that went through her was part lust and part the need just to be held.

  But he’d set the terms, and he’d been right, she knew it. It was up to her.

  Still, it would be nice if she were the kind of woman who could get into the bed of a sleeping man and seduce him into waking up. But, all recent evidence of Saturday night to the contrary, she thought, she wasn’t that kind of woman.

  Careful not to make a sound, she closed the bedroom door. Then she switched on the lamp next to the couch and looked around for something to read. There was a Law Enforcers’ Quarterly, a Sports Illustrated, a few paperbacks by Robert Ludlum and Joe Wambaugh. Not quite the thing to relax her mind, she thought with a smile.

  The room was so stark. If she lived here, she would add some color. Cushions, a woven wall hanging. Hey, she told herself. Stop decorating. This is Nick’s condo.

  Shaking her head, Carly turned on the TV, kept the volu
me very low and clicked through all the stations till she found news. She sat cross-legged on the floor so she could see the picture clearly, hoping that something would come up about Pete Demeter’s murder.

  After about fifteen minutes, she was rewarded. A man with white teeth and perfectly sprayed blond hair spoke about the murder. On screen there were pictures of the yacht, then of the bloodstained floor. Carly’s stomach lurched at the sight. Yes, it was the same room she’d pictured in her flashback. There were the same small windows in the background, the white wooden floor, a hassock with a checkered pattern to the right.

  The camera showed a lone wooden armchair on a raised platform, standing in the middle of the room and facing the bloodstain. She’d sat in that chair, she was pretty sure. Alone on the chair, with no nearby table, no footrest, just a chair. Raised. A throne. As though she’d been royalty; no, as though she’d been on display.

  She closed her eyes for a moment to aid her concentration; she needed to flesh out the memory of sitting on that chair. In the background she heard the newscaster droning on about Demeter’s rise, how he’d been arrested but never tried, his suspected associations with other underworld figures. Carly opened her eyes in time to see a videotape of him waving confidently at reporters as he was being led into court, then again as he left a free man, a battalion of lawyers by his side.

  A still shot of a bride and groom were next. There was Demeter, his expression serious, looking intently at the woman, his Amanda, by his side. She wore a white, formfitting suit, her jacket open to reveal a low-cut blouse with a generous amount of cleavage. Her blond hair swung loose to her shoulders, and her smile was smugly amused.

  Carly froze for a quick second, then she moved in a little closer so the picture could come into complete focus. It was true, she thought wildly as her body went rigid.

  The bride was Nina.

  The late Amanda Demeter had been Nina, her sister.

  She stared at the TV screen. It was like seeing a fuller, sexier version of herself. The two of them had always been very alike, physically, if not temperamentally.

  “Authorities are still baffled by a piece of the puzzle,” the newscaster was saying. “After the death of his late wife, Amanda—”

  Nina was dead. Tears stung her eyes, even as she tried to listen to what the blond image on the screen was saying.

  “Demeter rarely left his yacht, which was watched at all times by two onboard bodyguards. Both have been cleared. All known close associates have been questioned and released by police today. It is assumed to be a gangland revenge killing, or part of a turf war. All that police will say is that the investigation is ongoing. When asked if reports that a woman was seen fleeing the yacht shortly before midnight are true, police spokeswoman Joan Tremayne stated...”

  The image on the TV screen jumped to that of a competent-looking black woman as she spoke into a sea of microphones. “A neighboring yacht owner, who asks to remain anonymous, said he heard gunshots, saw a woman in a short dress fleeing, and then called police. When asked if he’d seen any suspicious activity earlier, he said he had not.”

  The newscaster returned with a bland white smile. “And now, on a lighter note, today was Hog Day in—”

  But Carly had stopped listening. She’d been the one fleeing, she realized. She was the woman in the short dress.

  And Nina was dead.

  She’d tried to find her a few years ago, hired a detective to scout around. But there wasn’t enough money for a really thorough investigation. Carly had assumed her older sister didn’t want to be found because Carly might remind her of how awful their childhood had been. She used to block it out pretty effectively herself and hadn’t really blamed Nina.

  More tears flooded her eyes and she jabbed at them with the palm of her hand. A now-familiar wave of desolation came over her, even as another piece of the puzzle clicked into place—somehow, her looking so much like Nina had figured in whatever had happened on that yacht.

  She tried to think. through what that suggested, but she was too overwhelmed by her sense of loss. She turned off the TV and returned to the couch, where she huddled in one corner and cried softly. For her sister, and for herself. They’d never been close, but Nina had been the last member of her immediate family. Now she was truly alone. No siblings, no parents, no mate. The sense of abandonment deepened and a wave of loneliness hit her like a strong wind.

  She stared at Nick’s door. All she had to do was get up, walk to it and open it. How she wished she could cry herself to sleep on his broad shoulders.

  But...Nick still knew nothing about her connection with the Demeter murder. Thanks to her runaway mouth, he knew a lot about her past, but she’d kept the present situation to herself. The tenuous communication they’d built up this evening would crumble into pieces if he knew all she hadn’t told him.

  And he would have to turn her in, she reminded herself. She would be locked up. It was an option that was unthinkable.

  She thought briefly about running away, as she had this morning. But where would she go? And there was still the man with the gun.... Maybe he’d followed her here. Maybe—

  The voice in her dream! It had been the man with the gun at the airport. What had he said? What were the words? She tried to remember. Please, she prayed, come back, help.

  But they were gone.

  And so was her sister.

  Nina. Carly had hated her, resented her, loved her—her older sister, her only sister. Often, she admitted, she’d admired Nina for standing up to their father—the only one in the family who had. Their mother would cry and Carly would hide. So Nina had taken the brunt of their father’s rage, had run off at age seventeen, had changed her name and had wound up married to a gangster.

  Carly’s eyelids were swollen from too many tears, too little sleep; they felt weighted with sandbags. She lay back down on the couch, pretty sure she’d have no trouble sleeping this time.

  She sits in a chair, dressed in that tiny dress. A man kneels before her, worshipfully kissing her bare foot. “Amanda,” he keeps calling her. He is crying. The tears run down his face in small rivulets.

  Someone else is in the room—Carly can’t see anyone, but she senses it. It’s Richard! He has this annoying habit of clearing his throat with a series of three quick dry coughs, and he’s doing that now. She’d know that sound anywhere.

  She turns around in her chair to see where Richard is.

  A shot rings out, then another. She turns front in time to see the crying man fall over. Part of his head is missing. There is so much blood. Her stomach recoils and she thinks she’s going to throw up. But she is grabbed from behind and a gun is put in her hand She stares at the gun. The person in back of her takes her hand and lifts it, aiming the gun toward her head.

  Suddenly, there’s a thumping noise to her right, and the gun skitters across the floor. Her hand is released Behind her there’s scuffling; she turns around to see Richard, wrestling with someone on the floor. Carly can’t see who. “Go, go, go!” Richard is saying as he struggles with the other person.

  She does as he says, gets up from the chair, runs barefoot up the stairs to the deck down the gangplank.

  Running, running, for what feels like hours.

  Headache. Chilly. Dream state. Confused Who is she? Where is she? Heart thumping. “Amanda,” Her name is Amanda. She runs some more. Running for her life.

  Chapter 7

  At the sound of moaning, Nick was through his door in a heartbeat, crouching and coming in low while his gaze searched the living room for signs of an intruder. All his animal senses were on alert, but, as his vision adjusted to the light, he could see that Carly was alone, on the couch, crying in her sleep. He went to her, bent over and shook her shoulder gently. “Carly, wake up. You’re having a dream.”

  She sat bolt upright, a startled scream followed by more moans issuing in a tumult of sound from her gaping mouth. He sat on the edge of the couch and pulled her quaking body to him. “Carly,
it’s okay. I’m here.”

  “I didn’t kill him.” She sobbed into his bare chest.

  “What?” Now that his attack-defense response mechanism was no longer required, his still-tired brain was having difficulty functioning.

  “Nina is dead,” Carly said next.

  “Huh? Your sister?”

  She sobbed again. “Not me. Not me.”

  It got through to him then that something was terribly wrong. Under his touch, her arms trembled then tensed into rigid iron. More alert now, Nick shook her again. Her head bobbed back and forth like a rag doll as he did. “Carly? Who didn’t you kill? What about Nina? Tell me!”

  Pulling away from him, she stared as though looking through him. Her eyes were dry, both wild and vacant at the same time. He grabbed her chin. “What are you seeing? Tell me!”

  Awareness crept back into her gaze gradually until she was able to focus on him. She blinked her eyelids several times, then said, “I was dreaming.”

  Relieved, Nick let go of his iron grip on her chin. “No kidding.”

  “It’s okay,” she mumbled. The words came out slurred. “It was just a bad dream.” She got that faraway look again, and tears filled her eyes. “Nina is Amanda. Amanda’s dead.”

  Nick felt completely lost now. Nina was the sister. Amanda? That was how Carly had introduced herself Saturday night. What was she talking about? Was she hallucinating, babbling as an aftereffect of the drug? Or—he had to ask himself—was it possible she really was schizophrenic? Two people in one body? No. Not possible, this he knew, dammit, if he knew anything.

  Maybe, after all, Carly’s wild words were simply the result of a nightmare. Hey, he’d woken up mumbling after a few pretty bad ones of his own. But could he take the chance?

  He stood up, pulling her with him. “Come on, we’re going to the hospital.”