“Don’t leave—”
He was gone.
“Me,” I finished forlornly.
Alone again.
Naturally.
I know I should have stayed put.
I should have called Jolie or even Andy Crowley.
But I didn’t.
I found my purse, banged out of the house, jumped into the Volvo, drove to the 101, followed it south to the 10 East.
I didn’t know I was headed for Cactus Bend until I took the exit, after an hour and a half on autopilot. A glance at the dashboard clock told me it was after 10:00 p.m. That jolted me, because up until then, I couldn’t have said whether it was night or day.
The big gates were shut tight at Casa Larimer.
I leaned on the horn.
Lights came on in the big house.
I honked again.
A figure sprinted down the sloping driveway, and I recognized Joseph.
He looked annoyed, when I caught a flash of his face in the headlights, but he opened the gates. I rolled down the window.
“I need to see the senator,” I said. I don’t know exactly what I intended to do at that point. Turn myself in, maybe. Or just ask for advice.
Joseph’s annoyance gave way to concern. “My God, Mojo—what’s the matter with you? You look—”
“I want to see my uncle.”
“He’s not here,” Joseph said quietly. He opened the car door. “Move over,” he said. “I’m driving.”
I was clearly not myself. If I had been, I would have told him he wasn’t doing anything of the kind. Instead, I moved to release my seat belt, discovered I’d never fastened it in the first place and scrambled inelegantly over the console into the passenger seat. It was only then that I realized I was still wearing my nightshirt and bathrobe. I was barefoot, too—I must have walked over the gravel in the parking lot at Bert’s without even feeling it. Not good, since there were usually broken beer bottles mixed in with the tiny, sharp rocks.
“Where are you taking me?” I asked. I could have had a career playing the dumb victim in B horror movies.
“I should take you to the nearest hospital,” Joseph said. “What the hell are you on, anyway?”
“I’m not ‘on’ anything,” I protested.
“You couldn’t prove it by me, lady.” Joseph shoved the Volvo back in gear and streaked up the driveway and around to the guesthouse, behind the manor.
“I’ll scream if you touch me,” I warned.
“Go ahead and scream,” Joseph said. “The senator’s away and Mrs. Larimer is upstairs, blitzed out on pills.”
He stopped the car, shut off the engine, got out and stalked around to my side. Pulled open my door.
I tried to hold onto the seat, but he grabbed me by the knees and cranked me around sideways. I was just about to make good on my decision to let out a real howler when he crouched and took hold of one of my ankles.
“Your feet are bleeding,” he said. “What the—?”
I started to cry.
“I killed my parents,” I said.
He lifted his head, looked full into my face. “You are certifiably nuts,” he told me, but there was a new gentleness in the way he spoke. “Come on, Ms. Sheepshanks.” He got to his feet, leaned in and lifted me off the seat and into his arms. “Let’s get you inside before you bring shame and degradation on the family name.”
I laid my head on his shoulder.
Like I said, I was not myself.
“I killed my own parents,” I said.
“Crazy as you are,” Joseph answered, “I seriously doubt it.”
“I remembered—”
“Joseph! What in the world is going on out there?”
Joseph stopped cold. We both looked up and saw Barbara Larimer staring down on us from what was probably the balcony of the master suite.
So much for the blitzed-on-pills theory.
“Mojo’s hurt herself,” Joseph said. “She’s upset. I was just taking her into the guesthouse.”
“Bring her in here instead,” Barbara ordered. “If she’s hurt, we ought to call a doctor.”
“It’s pretty minor,” Joseph told her.
“I might get blood on the carpets,” I added, trying to be helpful.
“Shut up,” Joseph rasped.
“I’m coming down there,” Barbara decided. “I’ll need my chair.”
Joseph swore softly. Then he said, “Right away, Mrs. Larimer!”
“Suck-up,” I said.
“Are you drunk?”
“I really, really wish I were.”
Joseph opened the front door of the guesthouse, carried me through it and set me on the swanky leather couch. That done, he flipped on a couple of lamps, took a better look at the bottoms of my feet and swore again.
“Stay here,” he said. “Right here.” He pulled my car keys from his pants pocket and jingled them for emphasis. “Read my lips. You do not have transportation.”
“Gotya,” I replied.
When he returned, Barbara was with him, motorized and very, very concerned.
Unfortunately, between the time of Joseph’s departure and their return, I’d dropped onto my side and fallen into a drooling sleep. I sat bolt upright when the sound of their entering jolted me awake, and wiped ineffectually at the spit stain on the leather couch.
“It looks like a nervous breakdown to me,” Joseph told his employer, who whizzed around the end of the coffee table to give me the once-over, up close and personal. “She’s been muttering some nonsense about killing her parents.”
“Go and call Dr. Henderson,” Barbara said to Joseph.
“Please, don’t,” I said. I’d driven for an hour and a half in my nightgown and bathrobe. I’d confessed to murdering my mother and father. Talk about a blight on the family name. I wasn’t up to the questions a doctor would ask.
“You’re not well, dear,” Barbara assured me. For a moment, I thought she was going to pat me on the head. “You need medical attention.”
I had planned—insofar as I’d done any planning at all—to tell my uncle what I’d remembered, leaving out the part Nick played in the revelation, of course, and ask him what to do next. In my confused mental state, I’d never figured Barbara into the equation at all. And I was not anxious to be alone with her.
“I’m really—just—drunk,” I said.
Joseph left the room. I heard the low murmur of his voice and knew he was summoning the medicos. If they brought a net, I’d make a run for it, sore feet or none.
“Drunk?” Barbara asked, sniffing delicately. “I don’t smell alcohol.”
I started to cry. Why hadn’t I called Jolie? Now I’d painted myself into a corner, and I might never get out. I would probably go to jail, even if I had been only five when I committed the crime. Uncle Clive would advise me to turn myself in, I was sure. And plead insanity.
Joseph came back. He carried a first aid kit in one hand.
“What did the doctor say?” Barbara wanted to know.
“He’s out of town,” Joseph answered, pushing back the coffee table, forcing Barbara to wheel back out of the way. “It’s a judgment call. We can look after her ourselves, or take her to the emergency room.”
“I’m not going to any hospital,” I said.
Prison, maybe. But no more hospitals.
“Well, I’d like to keep this out of the news if possible,” Barbara said practically. She tilted a lamp shade so Joseph could get a better view of my feet, which were now in his lap. He sloshed them with alcohol, and I winced and tried to pull away.
“Good luck,” Joseph said.
I wasn’t sure whether he was talking to me or Barbara.
“Everything will look better in the morning,” she said.
I heard the words like an odd, muffled echo, coming from the long ago and far away.
Everything will look better in the morning.
Scented hands, tucking me into a strange bed. I was small and scared. Earlier, a maid h
ad scrubbed me clean in a bathtub big enough to swim in, and before that, men in uniforms had asked me a lot of questions I couldn’t answer.
I wanted my mother, and the hopelessness of the longing was a giant, pulsing bruise inside me.
Everything will look better in the morning.
Back in the present moment, I covered my face with both hands.
“Are you all right?” Joseph asked.
I felt a peculiar tension in the air, looked up. It was coming from Barbara.
I knew what she was thinking.
Her husband was a state senator. A cinch for governor.
And now this crazy relative had turned up, just in time to ruin everything.
“I want to go home,” I said. “I can drive, really.”
“You’re not going anywhere,” Joseph replied flatly.
Where, I wondered, had he put my car keys?
He disappeared into the bedroom where I’d slept on my previous visit.
Barbara studied me intently. “I saw you on the evening news,” she said. “The interview in your sister’s driveway.”
“Sorry about that,” I answered. I’d mentioned that the senator was my uncle, I remembered that much. Chances were, I wouldn’t be invited along on any vote-gathering junkets.
Joseph came back. Lifted me off the couch and carried me out of the room.
“She hates me,” I confided, in a whisper. I hadn’t had anything to eat or drink since I’d arrived, but I felt rummy, as though I’d been drugged.
We reached the bedroom. The covers had been turned back, and Joseph laid me on the cool sheets.
“I’ll get you some water,” he said.
“I don’t want to ruin these sheets,” I told him, remembering my cut feet and swinging them over the side of the bed.
Joseph put me right back where I’d been before, and covered me up. “Forget the damn sheets,” he said. “You’ve got much bigger problems.”
“Are you going to call the police?”
“No,” Joseph said. “That’s for the senator to decide.”
“Do you think I could have some aspirin?”
“You probably shouldn’t take anything.” There was an “else” hanging on the end of that sentence, though Joseph didn’t actually say it.
I closed my eyes.
Opened them.
Barbara was sitting beside the bed.
Wheelchairs should make more noise. I was so startled that my heart shinnied into my throat, clawing like a kitten trying to get out of a sack.
“Good night, dear,” she said.
I managed a smile. “Good night,” I replied.
Barbara went out.
Joseph brought the water. Left again.
I heard the front door close in the distance.
I tried to sleep.
I couldn’t.
Where were my car keys? In Joseph’s pocket?
Or had he hung them on a hook inside the main house, possibly in the kitchen? If I went after them, I’d probably set off an alarm.
I couldn’t face that.
Desperate for something to do, I fiddled with the built-in remote on the bedside stand and switched on the plasma TV.
The news was on.
“A fugitive was laid to rest today in Cactus Bend,” a woman said, as the camera panned across the gathering at Lillian’s graveside. I saw Greer and Jolie and myself. The senator and Barbara, and a lot of strangers.
And there, leaning against the trunk of a cottonwood tree, almost out of camera range, was Geoff.
CHAPTER
18
I stared numbly at the TV, watched with half my brain as the graveyard segment filmed that morning during Lillian’s memorial service melted into a driveway shot of me, standing in front of Greer’s place. I caught only snatches of the things I’d said—He’s my uncle…except that sometimes I feel as though I’m on the verge of remembering…
I couldn’t seem to connect. It was like watching and listening to another person, who looked like me but wasn’t.
I shut off the set, with a motion of my thumb, and just as I did so, my cell phone chimed, from the separate and largely unexplored cosmos inside my purse.
Contact with the outside world!
I dived for it. Didn’t even take the time to check the caller ID first.
“I came home,” Tucker said, without bothering with a hello, “and you were gone. According to your note, you went back to your place. I’ve been there. You, on the other hand, are definitely not.”
Something odd flashed into my mind.
There’s a way into your apartment.
I don’t need a key.
Tucker didn’t have a key; he’d given it back, albeit reluctantly, a month before, when we decided to give each other some space. We hadn’t actually stuck to our guns on that score. I had a key to his place, because I’d been staying there—I’d used it to lock up when I went back with Jolie to get my things. But as far as I knew, it had been a one-sided exchange.
Which didn’t mean Tucker couldn’t have made a copy before the breakup.
Even more disturbing.
How had he gotten in, that morning when I found him in my kitchen, after he’d come back from the dead?
“Moje, are you there?”
“I’m here,” I said, letting out my breath.
There were a great many things I didn’t know about Tucker, like what he did for a living, for instance. The idea wasn’t easy to face, but it was within the realm of possibility that he was the one who’d made those mechanically distorted phone calls. He might even have arranged for the delivery of that almost-fatal chow mein.
But why? What motive could he have had for doing those things?
If he’d laced the chow mein with rat poison, why had he turned right around and helped me save Russell?
Maybe because he was after you, not the dog.
“How did you get into my apartment?”
“I’m not in your apartment. I’m on the road.”
“I mean that morning, when I thought you were—someone else?”
“When you called me Nick,” Tucker said. “Bert let me in. Mojo, what’s going on? Where are you?”
“I’ll ask the questions, if you don’t mind.”
He sighed. “All right. Shoot.”
Unfortunate choice of words, an instant reminder that I’d come to Cactus Bend to tell my uncle that I’d gunned down both my parents. Nausea swept through me.
“You’re not a cop. Allison told me, and I believe her, because she might be a jealous ex-wife, but she’s also a competent professional. So don’t deny it. You lied to me, Tucker, and that raises serious trust issues.”
“We’re not going to discuss this over the phone. Where are you, Moje?”
“Never mind where I am. We’re not going to discuss it in person, either. E-mail me, or something. Send me a fax.”
Not that I had a fax machine.
“Have you completely lost your mind?”
I was facing an uncertain future, to say the least. Either I’d be tried and sent to prison for the murder of my parents, or I’d be locked up in some hospital for the rest of my natural life.
Maybe Heather and I could room together.
Yeah, the odds seemed very good that I had lost my mind.
“Probably,” I said, limping around the room as I talked, getting used to the pain in the bottom of my feet.
I’d watch for the senator to come home, I decided, and when I saw him pull in, maybe I could find a way to slip into the house behind him. Locate my keys and get out again without setting off the alarm.
Cute trick. What I needed was The Damn Fool’s Guide to Burglary.
“Look, Moje,” Tucker said, “you’re really starting to scare me.”
“Back at you, buddy. I thought I knew you, and now I find out you’re not who you said you were.”
“Does this mean I don’t get to join the ranks of Sheepshanks, Sheepshanks and Sheepshanks?” The timbre o
f his voice was darkly amused.
I felt a pang at the reminder of all the things I wasn’t going to get to do, now that I knew I was a murderer. Sheepshanks, Sheepshanks and Sheepshanks was one of those things.
My promising career as a P.I. was over before it began.
I’d never get to spend the windfall from Nick’s mother, adopt a dog or a cat from the pound or figure out what to do with Bad-Ass Bert’s Biker Saloon.
Worse, I’d never go to bed with Tucker again.
“That’s what it means,” I said miserably. By then, I was in the living room, peering out the front window. I hung up the phone with a press of my thumb, set it down and watched as Joseph went through my car like a customs agent at the border.
The cell rang again, and I didn’t pick up.
Joseph locked the Volvo, tossed the keys in the air and caught them.
Headed for the house.
He stopped, near one of the tables lining the swimming pool, set the keys down and raised his cell phone to his ear.
I held my breath.
I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but the way he was gesturing indicated that the call represented some kind of unpleasant surprise.
I waited and watched.
Sure enough, he went into the house, evidently forgetting that he’d left the keys outside, on the table. I stared at them, glinting in the lights surrounding the pool, my heart skittering unevenly.
After about thirty seconds, I shut off my cell phone, dropped it into my bathrobe pocket, eased open the guesthouse door and dashed for the poolside table. Snatched up the keys.
I barely noticed the sting in the bottoms of my feet as I ran to the Volvo, zapped the locks from the fob and jumped inside.
I left the headlights off and drove slowly around to the main driveway. About the thousandth thing I needed was for Joseph to see or hear me and thwart my escape.
The gates presented a major problem.
They were closed.
I could crash through them, of course, but I suspected that technique worked better in the movies than it would in real life. I was sitting there, like a lump, wondering what to do, when I saw headlights swing off the main road, coming in my direction.
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