Читать книгу My Sister, Myself - Alice Sharpe, Alice Sharpe - Страница 9

Tess took the taxi directly from the airport to the hospital, traveling the dark, rainy, unfamiliar streets in a state of numb distraction.

All she could hear in her head was the impersonal voice on the telephone telling her a fantastic story she still didn’t believe. Well, she’d be at the hospital soon and then she’d know. Her stomach, which had been in a knot for hours now, clenched even tighter.

“This is it, lady,” the cabbie said, rolling to a stop outside a huge, well-lit building. Gathering her duffel bag, Tess paid her fare before stepping outside into a puddle the size of a wading pool. Her San Francisco blood was too thin for this coastal Oregon chill, she thought, as she hugged her coat close and fought her way through the pelting rain into the hospital lobby.

She knew she needed to go up to the third floor. Once there, she found the ICU waiting room and activated the intercom. “I’m looking for Katie Fields,” she said, saying the name aloud for the first time in her life. “I was told she’s here.”

“And you are?” the voice came back.

“Tess Mays. Theresa Mays. I believe I’m…expected.”

Within a few moments she was standing outside the curtained cubicle and because she’d been hurrying ever since the startling call came hours before, she pushed aside the soft-blue drapes without pause, stopping only as they swished behind her.

There was one bed in the dimly lit room. One slight figure, still as death itself, occupied the bed. Lights blinked on the monitors. If there were accompanying sounds, Tess didn’t hear them; blood rushing through her head obliterated everything but the wild thumping of her own heart.

She wasn’t aware when she dropped her duffel bag to the floor or when her shoulder bag followed. Pushing damp hair behind her ears, she slowly moved toward the bed, nerves like fire ants skittering up and down her spine.

Tubes led from the patient’s arm to an IV bag, her fingernails were torn and dozens of bloody scrapes crisscrossed her arms. As Tess’s gaze made it to the woman’s face, she paused, resting one hand on the guardrail as she peered down at the bruised and swollen features.

Familiar features.

It was true. Somehow, someway, she, a twenty-seven-year-old only child raised by a single mother eight hundred miles south of here, had acquired an unconscious identical twin sister.

Swaying, she clutched the side of the bed and murmured, “I don’t understand….”

She heard her own whispered words and, just like that, the beeping of the machines and a sound came from the shadows. She looked up as a man materialized from the far corner. Taking a step back, she covered her mouth with one hand.

“You’re Theresa Mays,” he said, his face coming into the light. Tess stared at him as he stared at her, a stalemate of sorts. But the fact that he knew her name finally made an impact and she dropped her hand.

He wasn’t a doctor, unless doctors at this hospital had adopted a dress code of jeans and black leather jackets, two-day-old beards and unruly jet-black hair. He appeared to be in his early thirties, a tall man with broad shoulders and features cut from a mountainside. The unsettled look on his face made Tess shudder. He held a rectangle of paper in his hand and he ran his fingers along the fold as he said, “I didn’t really believe it until this moment. You look exactly like her.”

“Who are you?” Tess said. “How do you know my name?”

“I’ve been expecting you,” he said, walking around the bed, his gaze never leaving her face. He was a big man, and Tess was a small woman, something that hit home every time one of her larger patients got rambunctious, like the Newfoundland jokingly named Mouse who outweighed Tess and liked to sit on her feet.

It finally dawned on Tess that the strongest emotion emanating from this man was confusion.

Join the club….

He produced a badge. “My name is Ryan Hill. I’m a detective with the New Harbor police force.”

With a glance back at the silent woman in the bed, Tess said, “Is this about…her…accident?”

“I worked with her father. He was my partner. I take it you didn’t know your father,” he said gently.

Tess shook her head. He was using the past tense, but her brain kept coming up with explanations other than the obvious one.

“I think you should read this,” Detective Hill said, stepping closer and handing Tess the paper. It was dog-eared and much folded as though read and reread a million times.

Tess took it almost reluctantly, unfolding it into a handwritten letter. She looked over at her unconscious sister again, then back at the letter, tilting it toward the light in order to see better.

My dear Katie,

If you’re reading this, I’m dead. Of course, being in law enforcement all these years has put me in harm’s way more often than most, so I guess it’s not too big a surprise. I want you to know any mistakes I made were my own damn fault. That said, you need to know something, Katie, something I swore I would never tell, but now, I don’t know, maybe that was wrong.

A pang of loss shocked Tess with its intensity. Looking up from the letter, she found Detective Hill’s gaze glued to her face. She said, “When…when did he die?”

“Ten weeks ago. December first.”

“And you’ve read this letter?”

“It was in Katie’s possession when she was hit outside her apartment building. One of her neighbors at the Vista Del Mar recognized her but didn’t know her name and there was no ID in her wallet. The investigating officer found the letter. You can see that Katie wrote your phone number on the back. That’s how we tracked you down.”

Tess flipped the paper over and found her San Francisco phone number written in a different hand. “I see,” she said woodenly.

He gestured at the paper and said, “Go on, finish reading it.”

Turning the page over again, she read:

I know I told you your mother died in childbirth, but that’s not the truth. Your mother didn’t die. We split up when you were six months old. Only there’s more. You had a twin sister, identical to you. When everything fell apart, your mother and I decided we’d each take one of you. We actually rolled the dice to see which of you girls went where. You were so alike, there was just no other way to do it. I’m sorry for never telling you, but your mother and I made a pact and I’m breaking it now only because if I’m gone it means you’re alone and I don’t want that. I heard your mother went back to her maiden name of Mays after the divorce. Caroline Mays. Your sister’s name is Theresa. I believe they resettled in California. Find them if you want, and if you do, well, tell your sister I’m sorry.

Forgive me, Katie.

Dad.

Ignoring the tears rolling down her cheeks, Tess refolded the letter. She looked up at Detective Hill, who regarded her with such empathy that it crumbled what little control she had left and she swayed on her feet again. Only, this time he caught her elbows in his strong hands and held her steady.

“There’s more,” he said in such a way that Tess understood at once that it wasn’t good. He dropped his hands and shoved them in his pockets.

“Not yet,” she murmured, wiping away the tears. “Give me a few moments.” Directing her attention back to her sister, she added, “Is she…is she going to be okay?”

“The doctor said he thinks there’s a good chance she’ll pull through,” he said. “Her brain waves are normal and her vital signs are decent. She hit her head hard when she went down, though—hence the concussion—but he said she could wake up tomorrow or next week. She’s got bruises, torn ligaments in her right leg—I gather it’s amazing her injuries aren’t worse than they are.”

“The person who called me said she’d been the victim of a hit-and-run. Has the driver come forward, have you found him yet?”

Detective Hill’s eyes shifted uneasily as though he fervently wished he could respond with a positive, Of course! Instead he said, “There’s not much to go on. There was one witness to the incident. A man walking his dog in the rain heard the impact and the squeal of brakes, but when he yelled, the driver, who had gotten out of the van, scrambled back inside and took off. Unfortunately, our witness is legally blind, but he can discern shapes and light. All he could say for certain was that the van was white. It didn’t help that it was pouring cats and dogs. He couldn’t tell if the driver was a man or a woman. There are a thousand white vans in New Harbor, Ms. Mays. Without a license plate…” His voice trailed off as he ran a hand through his black, glossy hair. “There’s a whole lot you need to know.”

Tess looked away from his gaze, staring at the bank of monitors, then at the face that was at once familiar and foreign—her twin sister. Her twin. All those years of loneliness and she’d had a twin the whole time.

And a father.

“Look, Ms. Mays—”

“Tess. Call me Tess.”

“Okay. And please call me Ryan. You must be beat. Why don’t I buy you a cup of coffee. This isn’t the right place to talk.”

“I need to call my mother. She needs to know about…Katie. She needs to…know.”

The curtains parted as a middle-aged nurse swept into the room, nodding at Ryan as though used to seeing him there. Her glance at Tess was followed by a double take.

“I’m…I’m her sister,” Tess said, trying the words on for size, flinching when she heard her voice utter them.

RYAN HILL STARED at the woman seated across from him. How could anyone look so much like someone else? And how could Matt Fields have kept a second daughter a secret all these years? Wait a second… Theresa Mays was the least of Matt’s secrets.

The duplicate daughter was currently polishing off a stack of chocolate-chip pancakes topped with ice cream and doused with chocolate syrup. As she wiped up the last of the melted ice cream with the last bite of pancake, the waitress refilled their coffee cups.

Anxious to get out of the hospital, he’d hustled Tess to a diner down the block, thankful the relentless winter rain had stopped for a few moments. He hated that hospital. Peter had died there—technically, anyway. His real death had occurred in a flop house down near the tracks.

But that had been twelve years ago and until very recently, Ryan had managed to put his kid brother’s miserable death and the part he himself had unwittingly played in that death behind him. This whole thing with Katie Fields had brought it back with a vengeance.

Tess finally put her fork down and, finding him looking at her, flashed him a guarded smile. “That was delicious.”

He nodded, glancing at the wall clock. It was straight up on midnight. When it came to the middle of the night, he was a cup-of-black-coffee kind of guy.

“What do you do?” he asked. “I mean for a living?” He was trying to figure out how a petite woman like this one managed a stack of pancakes doused in ice cream. Maybe she dug ditches, though the pearly white of her skin suggested she worked indoors. Her clothes didn’t look as if they belonged to a laborer, either. Tailored slacks fit her small but curvy figure perfectly, and the red blouse floating over her upper torso looked pricey. An executive of some type? If so, she was a far cry from her bartending, fun-loving sister.

“I’m a veterinarian,” she said, brushing a few strands of hair away from her heart-shaped face. Her shoulder-length hair was wavy. He tried to recall what Katie’s hair had looked like the last time he’d seen her but couldn’t. To him, Katie had always been Matt’s daughter, a nice enough woman he saw once or twice a year but never gave a second thought to when she was out of sight.

“Dogs and cats, mostly,” she added, her smile deepening as she apparently thought of her patients.

“I have a cat,” he said for no particular reason. Matt Fields’s secret daughter was an animal doctor? Didn’t a career choice like that take not only brains but conviction? Katie certainly was smart enough, but she always struck him as aimless. Because Tess looked like Katie, he’d expected her to be like Katie.

“You’re staring at me,” she said softly.

“Sorry.”

She didn’t respond but she looked unsettled and he didn’t blame her. Less than twenty-four hours before, she’d been unique in the world, or so she’d thought. And now…

He said, “Did you reach your mother?”

She took a sip of coffee as the waitress reappeared to whisk away her plate. “No.”

“She’s not at home?”

“She just got married last weekend. One of those whirlwind courtships. She and her new husband started out on their honeymoon to Seattle right after the ceremony, but I guess they haven’t arrived yet. It’s a long drive. I suppose they decided to take a side trip or two.”

“It sounds as though you don’t approve of your mother’s spur-of-the-moment romance.”

She blinked a couple of times and looked down at her hands. “My mother allowed one man to just about ruin her life. Now she expects another man to salvage it.”

“And you don’t believe in love at first sight.”

She looked up at him, her eyes a summer blue, large in her small face. “No. Do you?”

He smiled. “No.”

“You have to solve your own problems. You have to rely on yourself,” she said. “Needing other people is tricky.”

As a philosophy of life, it sounded lonely.

“Okay, let’s get it over with,” she said with a deep breath. “Tell me what’s on your mind.”

He folded his hands and adopted a serious expression, not hard to do since the topic was so grim. He said, “First, about your father—”

“Yes, my father,” she said, her face lighting up with an eagerness that touched him. “I want to know everything you can tell me about him. You said you were his partner. Tell me what he looked like, what he liked to do, start there, don’t start with his death.”

Matt Fields’s death had been exactly where Ryan had intended to start. Reining in the impulse to blurt out the worst, he said, “Let’s see. Your dad had graying brown hair and green eyes. About five-ten, 170 pounds. He was out of shape, didn’t take care of himself, especially toward…well, the last. He wore glasses to read. I’m not sure about his hobbies. He was private. He liked his work…”

Ryan’s voice trailed off. How well had he really known this woman’s father? A couple of months ago he would have answered that with a laugh; hell, a cop gets to know his partner pretty damn well in four and a half years.

But he hadn’t really known the guy at all. He knew that now. He suddenly recalled something he’d learned just recently. “Your dad liked to play the piano. He did it for charities, you know, in one of those little ensembles that perform at homes for the elderly or the disabled. Him and a couple of other guys. Nothing formal. It came out in the investigation afterward.”

This seemed to please her. She smiled into her coffee cup.

“And, well, he adored your sister.”

“But he never mentioned me?” she said, pinning him with that clear, blue gaze.

For a split second, Ryan thought of lying. He could make up a story and make her feel better and who would ever know? But he reached across the table and patted her hand. “I’m afraid not.”

“I used to fantasize about him, you know?” she said. “Mom absolutely refused to talk about him, called him a cad, said she didn’t even know his name, used him as a cautionary tale for premarital sex as I grew up. But I created stories about him anyway, larger-than-life-type fantasies. He was always searching for me in these daydreams, I was always just one day away from being found. And all the time, he knew more or less exactly where I was and didn’t give a damn.”

“I’m sorry—”

“No, please, don’t be sorry.” Looking him square in the eye, she said, “Tell me how he died.”

At last. Ryan took a deep breath and met her gaze. “A couple of months ago there was a fire. The woman trapped in the house was an invalid. Your dad—”

“The woman lived?”

“Yes. Your dad—”

“My father died a hero? This is what you’ve been wanting to tell me? That’s wonderful. Oh, you know what I mean, not that he died, but that he died trying to save someone. Still, I imagine his unexpected death made Katie crazy.”

He couldn’t let her go on this way. He said, “No, Tess. Not a hero.” For a second Ryan flashed back to that terrible night. By the time he’d arrived, the woman had been in the ambulance, her small dog yapping endlessly in a neighbor’s arms. Matt was already dead; it was assumed he’d answered the fire call. That was before anyone realized he’d arrived before the call ever came.

“Ryan?”

“What I’m trying to tell you is that your dad shouldn’t have been in that house. It was outside our district. He didn’t know the family.”

Tess looked puzzled. “Then how did he end up there?”

“Nobody knows for sure, but everyone suspects. He sent me off on a wild-goose chase. By the time I found out about the fire, he was dead. What you need to understand is that the fire investigator found an accelerant on scene. That means arson.”

He could tell she was beginning to sense the direction this talk was taking, and he hated himself for having to continue. He folded his hands together and pinned her with his gaze. “When a fire is purposely started, everybody involved gets investigated, and that includes the cops. Your dad died with huge gambling debts, Tess. I didn’t even know he gambled, let alone on that scale. He’d lost almost everything he owned. Once the newspapers caught wind of his involvement, other stuff started surfacing. Kickbacks, extortions, bookies. I didn’t know about any of it. I just thought he was a quiet guy. I didn’t know he was addicted or crooked.”

She stared at him with a deer-in-the-headlights gaze, tears blurring her lashes. “Are you sure?”

He nodded.

“You think my father started the fire?” She asked it as if she couldn’t believe she’d heard him right. “Why would he do something like that?”

“Someone must have hired him.”

“Who would hire a cop to burn down a house?”

“Someone who knew the cop was bent.”

“Such as?”

“In this case, the logical suspect is the widow’s stepson, a guy by the name of Nelson Lingford. A valuable art collection was mostly destroyed in the fire. Just a few paintings survived. If the insurance company can’t link this back to Nelson, they will have to pay up, and the widow will collect a good chunk of change. Since she’s relatively elderly, the money will go to Nelson.”

“But why wouldn’t he wait to inherit the collection itself?”

“Because it was about to be transferred to the museum to be assessed and catalogued. The widow was going to donate it—lock, stock and barrel. Once that had been completed, Nelson would have been out of luck. I don’t imagine anyone was supposed to know the fire was arson.”

“In other words, my father was supposed to make the fire look like an accident. So why not arrest this stepson?”

“There’s nothing linking him to the fire or your father. Look, Madeline Lingford’s late husband—Nelson’s father—was a longtime businessman in New Harbor. After he died, Nelson took over, but he doesn’t have his father’s scruples. Some of his dealings have teetered on the edge of the law. Let’s just say he’s made his share of enemies. From what I hear, a former friend of Nelson’s named Vince Desota lost his shirt on one of Nelson’s deals. Since it’s well known Nelson spent several evenings a week in residence at his stepmother’s house, speculation has it old Vince decided to instigate a little payback.”

“By destroying Nelson’s stepmother’s house?”

“And everything of value in the house, all of which would come to Nelson sooner or later, or so Vince probably thought. Like I said, it’s speculation.”

“So was Nelson Lingford at his stepmother’s house that night?”

“Nope. Begged off at the last minute to attend a concert. Interesting, huh?” He stared at her a second before continuing. “Tess, your father’s life was out of control. He apparently got caught in his own trap. They found receipts for a fuel can in his truck, the same kind found inside the house. They found a clerk down the coast who remembered him coming in and buying the damn thing. There was no fuel can at his apartment or in his truck or anywhere else except in that burned-out shell of a house. It was well known the widow was disabled and seldom left the place. A fire would kill her. Your dad would know that. I didn’t want you hearing it from someone else.”

“He tried to kill a woman?” Tess said, her eyes huge.

“I know it must come as a shock to you—”

“Oh, who cares about me? Poor Katie.”

At that moment, for Ryan, Tess Mays stopped being a novelty, stopped being a carbon copy of her sister and turned into an individual. He searched his mind for a few comforting words to offer and came up short. He couldn’t even reassure her about how Katie had taken it.

With a sigh he resolved to finish this. “That’s not the worst of it,” he mumbled at last, wishing the waitress would come back with the coffee and pour it over his head. He was suddenly freezing. Tess looked as though she was, too, and he fought an alarming desire to take her hands, to hold them close to his mouth and breath warm air on them.

“Tell me,” she said, not meeting his eyes. “Just get it over with. My father—”

“It’s not about your father,” he said, interrupting. He took a deep breath. “It’s about your sister.”

“My God, what has she done?”

“It’s not like that,” he said quickly. He scanned the diner out of habit before lowering his voice and leaning over the table. “I don’t think her ‘accident’ was an accident,” he said with a knot in his throat. “I think someone purposely tried to run her down.”

Tess gasped softly. “What are you saying?”

“I think someone tried to kill her.”