Читать книгу Whispers and Lies - Diane Pershing, Diane Pershing - Страница 11

Saturdays were always busy at the clinic and this one was no exception, beginning with euthanasia on a twenty-three-year-old, completely worn-out, part Siamese, part alley cat named Rose Tiger. After comforting the cat’s owner, Lou went on to caring for a terrier-schnauzer mix with mange, a Manx who’d been bitten by a spider and a terrified golden retriever who had gotten a chicken bone stuck crosswise between her upper teeth.

She was cleaning out the wounds of a cat fight victim when she was called urgently to the phone. Leaving the animal in Alonzo’s capable care, she went into her office and picked up the receiver.

“Lou?”

“Oh, hi, Nancy, what’s up?”

“Sorry to bother you like this but I have a huge favor to ask you.”

“Anything, you know that.”

“Molly is sick. Can you believe it? She has chicken pox, poor thing. Never had it as a kid and she hugged her nephew and the rest is history.”

“That’s awful,” Lou commiserated.

“Anyway, she’s my maid of honor tomorrow and she won’t be able to do it.”

A feeling of dread came over her. “Yes?”

“Please, please, please, will you do it? You were my first choice, remember? But that was right after your mom died, and of course you were in no shape to do anything like that. Now it’s a couple of months later and, well, I really, really need a maid of honor.”

“But what will I wear?”

“That’s just it. It works out great. You can wear Molly’s dress.”

“But she’s tiny.”

“So are you. I mean, not to be insensitive, I know it’s because of your mom and all, but Lou, you would have no trouble fitting into her dress now, trust me. I can get it to you today and Mrs. Crump from the cleaners says if there are any last-minute alterations, she’ll do them tonight. Please Lou.”

Tiny? She was tiny? There was a narrow mirror on one of the walls of her office—why, she had no idea—and Lou gazed at herself in it. It was true. As always, she was pretty short, but now she was also pretty thin. There were cheekbones where there had been none. No more plumpness around the jawline. Her neck looked longer now.

Tiny.

Lou found herself semipleased with the word, but also not. Tiny was a word that lacked, well, substance.

“Lou?”

“Yes? Oh, sorry. Of course I’ll do it.”

There was a huge sigh on the other end of the line. “Thank you, bless you. You are free tonight, aren’t you? I mean, you’ll have to attend the wedding rehearsal and the bridal dinner afterward, and that’s tonight. Yes?”

“Yes.”

Another relieved sigh. “I can’t tell you how much this means to me. So, will you be coming back to my place this afternoon? Oh, no, I can’t believe I haven’t asked you how you are. Have you been upstairs yet? Did the fingerprint guy come? Are you feeling okay?”

“I’m fine, Nancy, really. Yeah, he was there and he’s all done. He came downstairs and took my prints, too—he says for now they only found one primary set, mine we figure, and older, fainter traces of another, probably Mom’s. Whoever broke in, they were pros.”

“But how awful, to have your house broken into. So will you spend the night back at your place then?”

“I don’t know. I want to see what it’s like upstairs first.”

“Come here, okay? Really.”

Another night spent under the same roof with Will, sharing a bathroom, smelling his shaving soap? “I’ll have to let you know.”

“Well, either way, you’ll have the dress later this afternoon. And Molly wants you to know that the last time she tried it on was a couple of weeks ago and she doesn’t think you can catch chicken pox from a fabric after two weeks.”

Lou chuckled. “Tell her thanks and I already had all the usual childhood diseases.”

After she hung up, she gazed in the mirror again. Tiny. Petite. Feminine. There were lots of men who liked those adjectives when they applied to their women. Was Will one of them? He’d found her attractive, he’d said. Would he still say the same thing if she were her usual, not-tiny self?

He kissed me.

And so what? she told herself sternly, as she had been all day. He’d been honest with her, found her attractive—for all she knew, he probably found all women attractive—but didn’t want to start something that had nowhere to go.

Before getting back to her patients, she snuck one last look at herself. Yes, she most definitely was not the same old Lou McAndrews. And however ambivalent she might feel about the change in herself, at least now she would be able to do her best friend a favor—wear a dress that actually fit and maybe even look good in it. Hey, after opening her house and her arms to her last night, whatever Nancy needed, Lou was here to make sure she got it.

Will’s bedroom had last been updated in high school. At that point, as he’d sprouted up nearly five inches in one year, the twin bed he’d slept in while growing up had been traded in for a full one. There were large posters of Aerosmith and Bruce Springsteen on one wall, a movie poster from Top Gun on another; along a third stretched a huge banner for the Susanville Sluggers, his baseball team. The shelves of two narrow bookcases were filled with schoolbooks, some fiction and a lot of history and biography. There were CDs and tapes, even a few old LPs, although the needle on his record player had long since gone south.

At the moment, Will was pounding away on his laptop, which was sitting on the small corner desk in his bedroom, trying to sculpt some of his notes together into a loose first draft. But he was missing too much information.

He glanced at his cell phone, now recharging on the corner of his dresser. He’d tried Lincoln again this morning, at all three numbers, and there’d been no answer. He’d also tried a few other contact numbers for him—two ex-wives, his daughter Gretchen, a drinking buddy. No one knew where Linc was.

For a brief moment, Will considered calling the man’s brother, but the last time the senator and Will had spoken, Jackson DeWitt had let him know he wasn’t thrilled about this article that would draw more attention to his brother and, by extension, to himself. From what he could tell, the senator both cared deeply about and was exasperated by his younger brother.