Both of them yawned in agreement.
We all trooped into the living room, and I collapsed onto the couch, the cordless phone within easy reach on the coffee table. I dreamed I was tied to a stake, in a Venetian piazza, with dried sticks piled around my feet. Danielle—but that wasn’t her name, and she was wearing the wrong face—carried a torch, and laid it delicately, almost gracefully to the wood…
I woke in breathless panic, groping for the jangling phone.
“S-Sonterra residence,” I choked out.
“I’m trying to reach someone named Clare Westbrook,” a woman’s voice said with a tinge of disappointment.
“Speaking,” I replied, still muddled. The dogs, lying nearby, looked up at me pityingly.
“This is Helga Jasper. My husband said you would be willing to pay five hundred dollars for some of Dr. McVere’s records?”
I sat up, pushed back my rumpled, sweat-dampened hair. I could almost feel the nightmare flames licking at my lower legs. “Yes,” I said. “Anyone named Westbrook—specifically, Clare or Vanessa.”
“Yes,” she said. “Clyde gave me that information. I’ll take a look and get back to you.”
My heart began to pound. “When?”
“As soon as I can, Ms. Westbrook,” Helga answered. “I need that five hundred dollars. I’ll have to go through the boxes, but I think the films are labeled alphabetically. I can look at it at the library, print copies, and fax the information to you. After you pay me, of course.”
“I’ll give you a hundred-dollar deposit,” I said firmly. “As soon as you send me a page or two, so I know they’re really my records.”
Helga hesitated. I waited her out.
“Okay,” she said, at some length. “Two pages. Then I want my money.”
“Of course,” I said, letting out a breath. We exchanged e-mail addresses, and I gave her the fax number. She promised to let me know if and when she found the files, and send them as soon as my down payment turned up in her PayPal account.
When Emma came home from school, two hours later, I was hunched over the computer in the office, waiting for an e-mail confirmation from Helga Jasper. I accessed my PayPal account during the lull, sent in the hundred dollars, and racked my brain, trying to remember the foster home Mrs. K had seen in her psychic flash, but no luck.
Emma laid a hand on my shoulder. “I hear you went to Deputy Dave’s funeral.”
I nodded. Since a lump had formed in my throat, this time of rage, I couldn’t answer. It seemed to me that he’d gotten off easy, the bastard, even if he was dead.
“Maybe it’s over,” she said philosophically. “Everybody at school thinks Deputy Dave was behind Father Morales’s murder, and the coyote killings, too.” She stopped and took a bite of her grilled cheese sandwich. “Busy guy.”
“That still leaves the skeletons in the basement,” I reasoned, after swallowing hard. The FBI was taking their time, IDing the remainder of them. “Oz Gilbride was a victim for sure. Danielle is still missing. And then there’s Doc Holliday, Micki, and—Suzie.”
We attract what’s inside us, dear, I heard Mrs. K say.
The computer did a musical riff, and I turned back to the monitor. Helga’s e-mail address popped onto the message screen, with “I Found It!” in the subject line.
I opened the e-mail and devoured it. I didn’t find your name, but I did come across a Vanessa Westbrook after some searching. She was cross-referenced with a Vanessa Gennaio. It was a thick file, so I need $23.50 for the extra copies. I’ll send the two pages, and as soon as I get notice from PayPal that your deposit arrived, I’ll fax the rest. Better put lots of paper in the machine.
Right on cue, the fax kicked in.
Three pages ground their way out, including a cover sheet from one of those public mailbox places. I scanned the other two pieces of paper. They looked like the real deal, and my stomach did a flip.
I went back to the computer, clicked to PayPal, lowered one of my bank accounts by another $423.50, logged off, and scanned the pages I had while I waited.
“What’s going on?” Emma finally asked.
“Long story,” I answered.
“Aren’t they all?”
“Research,” I said. “For a case.”
“You’re lying,” Emma accused, splitting the remainder of her sandwich into two pieces and giving one to each of the dogs.
“Okay,” I admitted without looking at her. The paper tray in the fax machine was a little low, so I opened a new ream and added to the supply. “I’m lying. I might be a twin. A slot-machine-playing junkyard owner’s wife is about to fax me your grandmother’s medical records.”
Emma sighed. “That’s just crazy enough to be true,” she said.
The fax machine started up again, sucking up a piece of paper for the cover sheet. I held my breath.
“Have you heard from Loretta today?”
“No,” I said, scanning the cover sheet and tossing it. “Why?”
“Just wondering when she’ll be back.”
I glanced at my niece. “Why?” I asked again. We all loved Loretta, but she’d traveled a lot ever since she met Kip, and we were all used to her periodic absences.
“I have to go to school all day, and Tony has a job. Esperanza always looks like she’s going to jump out of her skin, and she’s only here part of the time. We need somebody to keep an eye on you.”
I snatched page one of my mother’s medical chart from the fax machine and felt a peculiar, pitching sensation in the pit of my stomach as I scanned it. Name, address, height, weight—nothing I’d really wondered about. So why was my heart shinnying up my windpipe?
“I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself,” I said.
“Oh, right,” Emma scoffed. “You ought to be in protective custody.”
“If that’s what I have to look forward to when you finally become a cop,” I said, “you should go into cosmetology instead.”
“Very funny,” Emma retorted, but she was standing at my shoulder, peering at the second page of the file. I read the diagnosis notes.
Stomach flu. Prescribed bed rest.
“Stomach flu,” I muttered. “Try alcoholism, and she got plenty of bed action, if not much rest.”
“Clare?” Emma asked, looking at me as though I might have a fish bone caught in my throat.
I blushed. I’d been pretty honest with Emma about her mother’s childhood, and mine, but I wished I’d had a better grandmother to report on.
The information I was looking for came pages later—Pregnancy. High risk, considering acute alcoholism. Danger of fetal alcohol syndrome. So, Dr. McVere had finally caught on. Suspect twins.
“You were a twin!” Emma marveled. She was a born speed-reader, and not a bad snoop, either. She’d make a good cop, whether I liked the idea or not. “Holy Days of Our Lives!”
The last page came through, with a little, grinding sputter. My birth date seemed to stand out from the scribbles and typewritten information.
Twins delivered at 6:30 and 6:37 a.m., today.
Both female. One live birth, one stillborn.
Mother doing as well as can be expected, given the alcoholism. I suggested contacting Social Services, but the patient refused.
I sank into the desk chair, weak-kneed. And furious.
“Why didn’t she tell me?”
I already knew the answer, of course. Mom wasn’t into heartfelt exchanges—unless they were with drunken bikers she’d known for at least five minutes. She probably hadn’t told Gram or Tracy, either.
“What difference would it have made, Clare?”
I hadn’t told Emma, Sonterra, or Loretta about the other Clare. Only Mrs. K knew, and it was probably crazy to associate the hallucination with my stillborn twin, anyway.
“None, I guess,” I answered after a long time.
When Sonterra turned up, an hour later, I was in the kitchen, trying to make dinner from a recipe I found on the back of a soup can.
“Don’t wo
rry,” Emma said glibly from her place at the table, where she was doing homework. “It isn’t Easy Beef Surprise.”
Sonterra looked relieved. He took off his gun belt, put it in the usual place on a high shelf in the pantry, and crossed to the counter to kiss the side of my neck.
“What is that?” he asked, daring to glance into the mixing bowl.
“Some kind of meatballs,” I answered glumly.
“Let’s go out to dinner,” he said with a little grin.
Such a diplomat. Trouble is, I saw him wince before he suggested the restaurant.
“Great idea!” Emma cried, and the way she leaped to her feet reminded me of a sailor jumping up and down on the deck of a sinking boat, trying to attract the Coast Guard’s attention. “I’ve been wanting to try the Doozy Diner.”
“I was thinking of Tucson,” Sonterra said. “Do us good to get out of Dry Creek for a little while.”
I perked right up. “I’ll change.”
“Me, too,” Sonterra replied, indicating his uniform.
We shared the shower, after making sure Emma was still downstairs.
Sonterra leaned me against the wall, kissed me crazy, and proceeded to enjoy my breasts at his leisure. After that, he knelt and parted me, letting the shower spray tease the nub of swollen flesh he’d revealed.
I was already groaning by the time he took me into his mouth. I got the full treatment, and by the time he lowered me to straddle his thighs, there behind the shower curtain, I was in a delicious daze.
He shocked me out of the afterglow with one smooth, deep thrust, and within seconds, I was going off again, bucking on his lap, stifling my cries of release in the curve of his neck. He finally stiffened, with a groan, and I ground my hips to make it as intense for both of us as I could.
It took a while to recover, and then we soaped each other, and rinsed, and Sonterra used his fingers to make me come again, just to ensure a mellow mood for the rest of the evening.
Bastard.
“I found out something interesting today,” I confided to Sonterra, later that night, at the brightly lit restaurant on the outskirts of Tucson. Emma was whiling away the food wait by playing a video game in the entryway.
“What?” Sonterra asked with a sort of wary innocence.
“That I was a twin.”
He leaned forward, took my left hand, turned my plain gold wedding band with the pad of his thumb. “Wow,” he said, and I could tell he was trying to read me so he could react appropriately.
If I’d told Sonterra that aliens had landed in the front yard, set up camp, and made s’mores, or that I’d witnessed a case of spontaneous combustion at the supermarket, he’d probably have said, “Wow.”
“It makes me feel like a stranger to myself,” I said.
He moved to the chair beside mine. “Yeah,” he said. “I suppose it would.”
Emma glanced in our direction, looking worried.
“Something else happened, too,” I added, on a roll.
Sonterra slipped an arm around me, and my heart pinched. “Like what?”
“Mrs. K told me that I’m attracting all these dead bodies.”
“Mrs. K,” he said calmly, “is a crazy old bat.”
“It doesn’t happen to other people.”
“You’re not ‘other people.’ You’re Clare.”
“I’d just like to be ordinary.”
He grinned. “And your second choice would be—?”
The waitress appeared with our dinners. They looked a lot better than my aborted meatballs. Emma homed in from the video arcade.
We lapsed into what was, for us, regular dinner conversation.
“Forensics analyzed more of the bones Waldo hauled up from the basement,” Sonterra announced, buttering a dinner roll. “No specific IDs. Safe guess that they’re Mexican immigrants, given what Esperanza told us.”
I’d been about to attack my chicken-fried steak, but my fork slipped out of my hand and clattered to the floor.
The waitress, an observant soul, brought another fork. I waited until she was gone before I spoke again.
“So how come you’re spilling your guts all of a sudden, Sonterra? Usually, I can’t get a word out of you.”
“You told me about your twin. I figured it was only fair to cut loose with a secret of my own.”
“Some secret,” Emma observed wryly. “It’s probably going to be in the newspapers tomorrow morning.”
“Probably,” Sonterra agreed.
“You’ve got more than that,” I said suspiciously. He’d tossed me a crumb, but he was still holding out on me.
Sonterra wriggled his brows.
I considered stabbing him with the fork.
“Cut me some slack, Clare. You’re a lawyer. If I tell you what we have, the case could be compromised and the feds would hang me by my”—he glanced at Emma—“thumbs,” he finished.
“Just tell me if there’s any connection between the whole coyote mess and what happened to Doc Holliday and Micki.” I couldn’t bring myself to add Suzie’s name to the victim list, but I knew she was within an inch of being there.
“Nothing we can find,” Sonterra said.
“Somebody say something cheerful,” Emma put in.
“Okay,” Sonterra replied. “I hired Eddie Columbia today. He’s taking over Dave Rathburn’s job.”
I was happy for Eddie, but I had other concerns. “This is beginning to sound more and more permanent,” I said carefully. “I thought we were only staying in Dry Creek for six months.”
“I like Dry Creek,” Emma said.
“So do I,” Sonterra agreed.
“Do I get a vote?” I asked.
“Yes,” Sonterra said, as he and Emma exchanged glances, “but I think you’re outnumbered.”
“It’s not a bad town,” Emma reasoned, “and I love the house.”
“If you don’t mind bodies dropping on the other side of the back fence,” I said, “and bones moldering in the basement, it’s just wonderful.”
“Isolated incidents,” Sonterra said. He took my fork, cut off a piece of chicken-fried steak, swabbed it through the gravy, and held it to my mouth. “Things will settle down a little now.”
I took the steak, chewed, and swallowed. “Oh, really? What makes you think that?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
“I hate it when you get like this.”
“Yeah, I know.” He grinned, though there were shadows of sadness lingering in his dark eyes—sadness over Suzie’s condition, I knew, and Jimmy Ruiz. And all the nameless, faceless ones who had taken a chance on a better life and ended up lying facedown in the desert with bullets in their skulls.
I relented, remembering the fun we’d had in the shower, and touched his cheek. Sonterra brightened. “So,” he said. “Would it be okay if Eddie bunked on the couch for a while?”
Twenty-three
I met Loretta in baggage claim, at Tucson International Airport, around 10:30 A.M. the next day. She looked, as Gram used to say, like somebody who’d been dragged backward through a knothole.
Seeing me standing there, in expando pants and one of Sonterra’s sweatshirts, she smiled wearily. We’d spoken only once while she’d been gone, when she’d called to let me know when her flight would get in.
“How’ve you been?” she asked, while we stood waiting for her Louis Vuitton to dump out on the luggage carousel.
I was still raw, mostly because Suzie wasn’t any better, but things had settled down to a dull roar. No new murders. No bones, discovered in inappropriate places. No attempts on my life. “Sonterra hired Eddie Columbia to replace Deputy Dave,” I reported, “and he’s sleeping on the couch.”
Loretta arched an eyebrow. “Is that good or bad?”
“Somewhere in between,” I answered. “It’s nice to have him around, and a change of scene will help him. How’s by you?”
Suitcase #1 swung by, and neither of us reached for it. “Kip asked for a divorce,” Lorett
a said. The blue of her eyes seemed to deepen, to the color of bruises. She bit her lower lip. Shook her head at my unasked question. “It isn’t what you think,” she added quietly.
“And what do I think?” I inquired gently, as another bag went by. “If you don’t mind my asking.”
“Probably that it’s because of her. The other woman—she-who-must-not-be-named.”
A third Vuitton passed, followed by a fourth and final one. Loretta must have been traveling light—she owned a twelve-piece set. “Don’t tell me he’s decided to do the honorable thing,” I ventured. I wondered if he’d been bullshitting me, when he sent that heartfelt e-mail asking me to take care of Loretta.
“Okay,” Loretta replied, snagging a weekender off the carousel and setting it at her expensively booted feet. “I won’t tell you.”
I grabbed a second bag. “Like I’d let you get away with that.”
She sighed, and her shoulders slumped. Tentatively, I put an arm around her, squeezed.
“I must be the mother of all codependents,” she told me sadly. “I still love him.”
“Maybe you’re just a grown-up,” I said.
She blinked. Whatever she’d expected me to say, it wasn’t that.
“You ladies need some help with those bags?” a porter asked, pushing in close with a large, flat cart.
“Yes,” I told him, and pointed out the remaining two, which were still making the rounds.
“Where’s the lecture on pride and independence?” Loretta pressed, studying my face.
“You expected a lecture?” I countered, a little affronted.
“Of course I did,” my friend said.
Inwardly, I sighed. “No lectures forthcoming,” I promised. “Whatever you decide to do, fight for your marriage, or let it go, I’ll be rooting for you.”
“Thanks.”
“This all of it?” the porter interrupted.
Loretta did a glance count and nodded.
Fifteen minutes later, we were in the Hummer, with the bags loaded, ready to roll out of airport parking. I paid the lot attendant and merged with the traffic.
“Everything Kip and I owned is up on the block,” Loretta confided, putting on her Versace shades. “Except for the ranch house and about five acres surrounding it. His lawyers are handling all the arrangements.”
One Last Look Page 28
