Читать книгу Absolute Fear - Lisa Jackson - Страница 14

Streetlights glowed an eerie blue as Eve pulled up to the house she’d inherited from her grandmother. Her shoulders ached and her head throbbed, but at last she had arrived at the one place she could call home.

She parked in the drive in front of the old single-car garage. Nana’s old house stood alone, a covered porch leading from a door on its side to the main house, a three-story Victorian complete with the high turret her grandmother had used as an artist’s studio for as long as she could mount the spiral staircase. Even as a kid Eve had claimed the room as her own, and whenever she spent weekends or summers with Nana, she slept in the turret with its three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view and easy access to the roof. In the summers, Eve had often sat outside on the old shingles, staring across other roofs and trees, imagining she could see across St. Charles Avenue, Magazine Street, and the area known as the Irish Channel, to view the Mississippi River—which, of course, was impossible.

Now she eyed the old house and smiled with relief. “We made it,” she said to Samson as she turned off the engine. First things first: let the damned cat out! Well, if not out, at least free of the cage and in the house. She would keep him inside for a few days, just to make certain he was reacquainted with the house, and only then would he have some freedom outside.

Glancing down at the clippings still littering the passenger seat and floor, she decided to leave them where they were for the time being. She wasn’t as panicked about them now. Later, she said to herself, hauling her purse and the cat carrier up the back steps to the porch and back door.

As much as she’d always loved this house, with its high ceilings, narrow halls, and smells of pecan pies, rich coffee, and dried flower sachets, she’d been as shocked as anyone that Nana had left the house to her, bypassing her own son and Eve’s half brothers as well.

Eve unlocked the back door and walked through a small mudroom before entering the kitchen. She switched on a few lights and wrinkled her nose at the smells of dust and mold that had settled into the old timbers in the time she’d been gone. There was also the pervasive smell of rot, and she had only to look under the kitchen sink to find garbage that had needed to be taken out months ago.

“Great,” she muttered, unlocking the cat carrier and watching Samson streak through the cage door. She spent the next fifteen minutes hauling out the trash, refilling the litter box, and setting out food and water for Samson then carrying in her things. After she’d hauled in her luggage and stacked it near the foot of the stairs, she returned to the car one last time and picked up the envelope and all the scattered clippings from the floor of the passenger seat. Just touching them made her feel dirty. Whoever had gone to all the trouble to cut these out, stuff them in an envelope, and wait for the right moment to plant them in her car had done so with a purpose.

He’d intended to scare her.

Why else break into the car and leave the envelope anonymously? Had it been at the gas station, where she’d perhaps forgotten to lock the car? That’s where she’d seen the man staring at her from behind dark glasses.

No doubt about it: she’d been followed.

He could be here right now. Watching.

Her head snapped up quickly, and she studied the empty street, the shadowy bushes skirting her house, the alley behind the garage. Her eyes and ears strained, but she saw no one, heard no scrape of shoes against pavement, felt no whisper of air movement, smelled nothing but the rainwater dripping from the broad leaves of the mountain laurel tree planted near the drive.

She shivered as she gathered all the papers and pressed the lock button on her remote. The car chirped, and its parking lights flashed as the Camry locked down. No more breakins. She glanced over her shoulder and felt the hairs on the back of her neck lift. Who had done this? Had they followed her?

Everything looked safe. The houses flanking hers had warm lights glowing through their shaded windows. The night was quiet, few cars passing, just the soft sough of the wind whispering through the pecan, pine, and live oak trees in the yard. Still, looks could be deceiving. She was wary, nerves strung taut as she hurried inside and slid the dead bolt behind her with a satisfying thunk.

She placed the envelope and all of the pieces of paper onto the kitchen table, examining them from a distance, almost afraid to touch them. There were nearly thirty articles, all neatly trimmed with pinking shears, all pertaining to Faith Chastain’s tragic death.

Who had sent them to her?

Why?

What did a woman who’d been dead over twenty years have to do with her?

Struggling to make sense of it, Eve considered what she knew. Faith Chastain died at Our Lady of Virtues. The mental hospital where Eve’s father practiced. That massive brick building where she had played as a child, hiding from the nuns, spying on the patients.

Now Eve rubbed her hands together, tamping down a niggling anxiety. She asked herself: Don’t you intend to go back there, to wander through the hallways and rooms where you witnessed so much cruel abuse once called “treatment”? Haven’t you been fascinated with the old asylum? Isn’t it integral to your research? Don’t you plan to compare the use of physical restraints, so common at Our Lady of Virtues, to some of the antipsychotic drugs used today? The question is, Who else knows? Why does he care? What is he trying to tell you?

Swallowing hard, Eve felt a little dizzy as she stared at the articles. If her theory was correct and someone wanted to either scare her from her research or…what? Warn her? Then why focus on Faith Chastain? A woman she didn’t remember.

Or did she?

Had Faith Chastain been one of the patients Eve had spied on as a child? Eve’s heart pounded a little faster and shame washed over her as she remembered lying to her father, telling him she was going to play outside on the swings, or take a walk through the woods, or go to the stables where a few horses were kept, when she’d really been intent on slipping through the hospital itself like a ghost, creeping through rooms and hallways that were supposed to be off-limits, ignoring all the rules.

It had been horrifying but fascinating to her as she witnessed patients in straitjackets or other restraints. She knew it wasn’t right, but at times the patients had frightened her. Some of them, perhaps, who had been given lobotomies years before; others who were the victims of electroshock treatment.

Her childish fears still had the power to embarrass her, and now her cheeks flushed. The patients she’d found so captivating, those she’d avoided, or those who had frightened her, had been ill, battling unseen demons. Of course she hadn’t understood their maladies or psychoses.

She’d been so uninformed. If not uncaring, then at least more concerned about herself than anyone else. The truth was, some of the more serious patients just plain creeped her out. They had been intriguing, but in a frightening way. Her interest in psychiatry was more than a career choice; it was a means to atone. With her injury and Roy’s death, she’d missed the spring semester but hoped to return to the university in the fall.

Shaking the thoughts aside, she turned her attention to the clippings. Someone obviously knew about her connection to the old hospital. But why would they care?

With a determined sigh, she walked to the table again, picking up the clippings one by one, scanning them and trying to put them in some sort of order. There were no dates on the articles and the best she could do was separate them by type of print—newspaper or magazine. She could search the articles on the Internet and planned to do so as soon as she had her modem hooked up again.

But not tonight. Not when her headache was building again after the long trip. She needed to sleep on this, maybe figure out what it meant. Rubbing her temples, she walked to the sink, where she let the water run for a couple of minutes while she scrounged in the cupboard for a reasonably clean glass. She swallowed two more tablets of aspirin, chased them down with cool water from the tap, then leaned over the sink and splashed more water onto her face.

Twisting off the tap, she found a terry-cloth towel in a drawer and dabbed at her face. Everything she’d gone through this day faded a bit as she glanced around the room where she’d spent hours with her grandmother. Pink tile, floral wallpaper in tones of green, gray, and pink, once-white cabinets, scratched hardwood floors—the kitchen hadn’t changed since she was a toddler who had needed to stand on a chair at the sink to play with a piece of pie dough as her grandmother created the sweetest pecan and peach pies Eve had ever tasted.

She smiled faintly as she remembered her hands and tiny apron covered in flour while her brothers—“the ruffians,” Nana had called them—played outside no matter what the weather. Even then there had been a distinction. Kyle and Van hadn’t been allowed to wear shoes past the mudroom or to “roughhouse” inside, whereas Eve had been given carte blanche to do nearly anything she wanted. She was Nana’s favorite and had been from the get-go. Even though Eve was adopted, Nana had still considered her special, solidifying the union between Terrence Renner and his wife, a woman who had come to the marriage with two sons sired by a man who had spent more years in prison than out. Though Eve’s father had adopted Kyle and Van, they had been surly preteens with attitudes at the time of the marriage—“Troublemakers and hooligans,” Nana snorted—while Eve had come into the family as a tiny infant.

It didn’t take a rocket scientist to understand why Kyle and Van had so little use for her. Kyle had grown into a brooding, unhappy man, while Van had spent his adult years thinking only of himself, a narcissist to the nth degree.

Eve knew now that the grandmother she’d worshiped was in reality a bigoted old woman who relished playing favorites. And it had only been exacerbated with Dorothy Gilles Renner’s death—when Eve’s grandmother spelled out in her last will and testament that the lion’s share of her estate would go to Eve. Token bequests had been left to Kyle and Van, while Eve’s father, Dorothy’s only child, had wound up with an abandoned farm surrounded by swampland and his father’s World War II memorabilia.

A bitter pill to swallow for all of the men in the family.

At the time of the bequests, Eve had wrestled with her conscience about the unfairness of it all and had finally decided that when she ever sold the old house, she’d make it up to her brothers.

But not tonight.

Now she was beat. She walked through the house, turning on table lamps. At the base of the stairs, she grabbed her largest suitcase and lugged it up the creaking wooden steps. The once-colorful runner leading upward was worn, just like the rest of the house, and sometimes Eve wondered if her grandmother had bequeathed her a golden goose or an albatross. Bringing the old house up to date while preserving its historic charm would cost a fortune, so for now the fraying runner, chipped pink tiles and fading wallpaper would remain.

On the second floor she paused, caught her breath, and frowned when she realized how weak she still was. All because of a would-be assassin’s bullet.

Cole.

Her lover.

Her confidant.

Her assailant.

Her stomach tightened into a hard knot as she envisioned his handsome, angry face glaring at her as he raised the gun and, in a flash of light and a splintering of glass, nearly killed her.

That’s how it was.

Wasn’t it?

Cole had tried to kill her….

“Bastard,” she whispered, shuttering her mind. She couldn’t go there tonight.

Walking into the master bedroom, she tossed her dirty clothes into a basket and hung the others up, wrinkles and all. She took one last trip downstairs, found Samson and held him close, listening to his deep purr rumbling against her body, feeling his long tail wrap around her torso.

“I’m sorry for that horrible, long drive,” she said. “You’re such a good, good boy. Forgive me?” The cat looked at her with wide gold eyes then rubbed his head beneath her chin and purred loudly. “So, here we are Samson. Now what’re we going to do? Hmm? Start over, I guess.”

And face Cole. No matter what.

The cat slid from her arms and hopped onto a window ledge near the kitchen table to peer into the night.

“Don’t get on the counters,” Eve said as she always did. “Or the table.”

After double-checking that all the doors were locked and bolted, she headed for the bathroom. Once inside, she locked the door, swabbed out the old claw-footed tub, filled it, stripped off her clothes, then climbed into the warm water.

Heaven, she thought, lowering herself to her chin, feeling the water caress her skin, soaking out the knots of tension in her neck and back. She closed her eyes. The water enveloped her, and over the sound of her own breathing she heard the sigh of the wind rustling the leaves of the magnolia trees in the backyard and the creaks and groans of the old house.

Cole’s image floated through her mind. A rugged if not handsome face, startling blue eyes that shifted color with the daylight, a blade-thin mouth that could flatten in silent anger or lift at the corners in amusement. She’d thought he was “the one,” if there really was such a thing—and she’d been wrong, she realized now as she reached for a cracked bar of soap.

Dead wrong.

“Son of a bitch,” Cole swore as he drove out of the city. Thinking of Eve was getting him nowhere.

With a wary eye on the other traffic, he maneuvered his Jeep across the bridge spanning Lake Pontchartrain and was only vaguely aware of the miles of black water stretching in all directions. He tapped his fingers nervously on the steering wheel and, once he was across the wide stretch of water, drove through several small towns to a wooded spot where one of his few cousins still owned a mobile home. They’d played here as kids, but he suspected that Jim, long married and living near Philly with his wife and son, hadn’t been back in half a decade. He parked in the drive and waited.

Five minutes.

Ten.

No one appeared.

It was now or never.

Grabbing the tool kit, he pulled out a flashlight and locked the Jeep behind him. The night was cool, a fine mist rising through the trees and undergrowth of this bayou retreat. Cole pulled on a pair of thick gloves then vaulted the fence and walked toward the old house. It stood long and low, a once-white behemoth in the otherwise dark woods. Chancing the flashlight, he ran the beam over the aging aluminum and glass. The curtains were drawn, stains visible in the lining, spiderwebs tucked along the dirty glass where moss seemed to have somehow taken root.

No one had been here in a long time.

Aside from hunters or fishermen who had trespassed, he was probably the last one to walk around the old single-wide. There wasn’t even a sign of a campfire or broken lock to suggest that squatters had found the remote trailer.

Which was all the better.

Feeling as if time were chasing him, Cole hurried along an old deer trail until he came to a fork in the path. He turned unerringly toward the south and ended up at a dock where once his cousin had moored a dinghy. There was no longer a boat, and the pier was rotting, some of the boards missing. Cole shined his light across the dark water and heard a splash that was probably an alligator sliding from the bank.

Sweeping his flashlight’s beam over the shore, he located a solitary cypress tree with a split trunk. Bleached white, it stood a ghostly sentinel, and Cole sent up a silent prayer that it hadn’t been disturbed in the last year. Making his way to the far side, near the water, he found a hole between the bare, exposed roots. First he pulled on a pair of thick gloves. Then he tested the hollow by shining a light inside. He saw nothing, but it was dark, the slit in the roots barely larger than a man’s hand. He couldn’t be certain. Squatting closer to the bole of the tree, he withdrew a long-handled screwdriver from his tool kit and used it to poke and prod whatever might have taken refuge there. He didn’t want to surprise a sleeping water moccasin or other creature.

No animal hissed, barked, screamed, or flew from the opening, but his heart was pounding double-time all the same. He reached inside carefully and gently scraped at the dirt he’d piled inside until the tips of his gloves encountered something foreign. He smiled in the darkness. “Bingo,” he whispered, digging swiftly until he extracted a nylon fanny pack.

Slipping the unopened pack into his tool kit, Cole retraced his steps quickly, half running through the low brush and trees. He heard nothing save the sound of his own short breaths and thudding heartbeat. If anyone found him now, he’d have a lot of explaining to do.

Near the fence, he clicked off the flashlight, climbed over the old chain-link, and landed softly about twenty yards from his Jeep. Where he froze. Waiting. Catching his breath and watching for any hint that he’d been followed or that someone was nearby.

The seconds clicked by.

Nervous sweat trickled beneath his collar.

Somewhere to the east, an owl hooted softly, but he could see no figure in the darkness, detected no scent that shouldn’t be in the night air, heard no snaps of twigs or shuffling of feet.

Get moving. It’s now or never.

Ever alert, he started forward, and when no one jumped out at him, he walked quickly and surely until he reached his vehicle. He unlocked it, yanked open the door, and tossed his tool kit and dirty fanny pack inside.

He backed out of the lane carefully. No flashing red and blue lights were waiting for him, no burly cops with handguns or clubs. At the county road, he threw the Jeep into first and took off, eyeing the bag on the seat next to him. Only after he’d put five miles between himself and the single-wide and was heading through a small town on his way back to the city did he pull open the fanny pack zipper and reach inside. Plastic met his fingertips. He flicked on the interior light and caught a glimpse of the money. Fifteen tight rolls, each totaling a thousand dollars, banded and wrapped in a ziplock bag. Fifteen grand. Not exactly a king’s ransom, but enough to start him rolling again.

Blood money, he thought but didn’t really give a damn.

Montoya glared at his badge and flung it on the table. Sometimes the job just wasn’t worth it. In the kitchen, he opened the refrigerator, grabbed a beer, and popped the top. The room was chaos, as he was in the middle of a major remodeling job. Some of the plumbing worked, some didn’t, and the common wall that had separated his shotgun-style rowhouse from the neighbor’s had been torn down. Now, to keep the heat in, Visqueen sheeting separated the two identical halves that would soon merge into one living area. The kitchen would be double its current size; they would have two baths and a second bedroom.

Eventually.

After two swallows of his Lone Star, he sat in a caned-back chair and absently patted the big dog’s head. Hershey, his girlfriend’s chocolate lab, licked Montoya’s palm. Montoya grunted, “Good girl,” but he wasn’t really paying attention to Hershey as he looked over a copy of the file he’d made of the Royal Kajak homicide.

There had to be something they’d missed, some piece of evidence to tie Cole Dennis to the crime. Correction: some piece of evidence that they hadn’t fouled up—or lost. They’d had, in their possession, a torn piece of black fleece that had matched a rip in one of Dennis’s pullovers, but the scrap had been lost before it had been tested for blood splatter or epithelials or as a fit into the sleeve of a sweater they’d discovered in Dennis’s hamper. Trouble was, the pullover itself had no blood spatter on it, just a hole, so they had nothing concrete. And even if the missing piece were to suddenly turn up, it would be the only part of the shirt with incriminating evidence, so what were the chances of that? Still, it was a departmental screwup they couldn’t afford, especially with a man like Cole Dennis.

Which meant, apart from Eve Renner’s word, there was no proof Dennis had even been at the cabin.

“Damn,” Montoya muttered, shaking his head. They hadn’t had enough to hold the bastard, and their prime witness had come up with a severe case of amnesia.

So now Dennis was free.

Montoya wondered if Eve Renner had intentionally sabotaged their case. She and Cole Dennis had been lovers. But then why finger him in the first place?

Shoving stiff fingers through his short-cropped hair, he scowled so hard his face hurt. The thought of that slime-bag of an attorney walking on the homicide caused the stomach acid in Montoya’s gut to start roiling.

Hershey gave a short, high-pitched bark and lunged for the front door. Her tail was already pounding against the side of a chair, kicking up dust.

Abby was home.

Montoya’s bad mood eased a bit.

The front door rattled, opened, and Abby Chastain paused on the porch to shake out her umbrella then folded it and dropped it into the stand near the door. The dog went nuts, wiggling like crazy. As she stripped out of her raincoat and hung it on the curved arm of a hall tree, Abby caught Montoya’s eye. She flashed him a sexy grin that caused an immediate shot of lusty adrenaline to spurt through his blood. “Hi.”

“Back atcha.”

“Sorry I’m late, but I stopped for takeout. Just a sec…Hey, you. Miss me?” she asked her squirming dog, kneeling down to scratch the lab behind her ears. Hershey whined and pushed her head into her chest. “Yeah, me too.” If possible, Hershey’s tail thumped even harder. “Hey, slow down,” Abby commanded, nearly falling over and laughing.

Montoya couldn’t help but smile. His bad mood disappeared as she straightened and dusted her hands. “Now, that”—she motioned to Hershey—“is the kind of homecoming I expect, Detective.” She reached through the open door and pulled a white plastic sack and her portfolio from the porch swing, where she’d left them so that she could open the door.

“You want me to wiggle my fanny and whine at you?” Montoya scraped back his chair.

“For starters, yeah. And then, oh, I don’t know, you could nuzzle my face and lick me all over.”

She smiled at him. God, she was beautiful. Though she’d tied her hair back, some of the tousled red-blond curls had sprung free to frame her face. With a small mouth that was often in a thoughtful pout and eyes the color of aged whiskey, she got to him the way no other woman ever had. Now those eyes glinted naughtily. “And don’t forget to kiss my feet and tell me you’re crazy about me and that you can’t live without me.”

“And what would I get back?”

“Hmm. Let me think.”

In three short strides, he crossed the distance between them.

“What would you want?” she questioned softly.

“Careful,” he warned, “you’re wading in dangerous waters.”

One eyebrow lifted in wicked defiance. “My specialty.”

“Oh lady.” He barked out a laugh and shook his head. Wrapping his arms around her, he said, “Let’s forget dinner and go straight to bed.”

“No way. Not after I searched for a parking place for ten minutes, parked in a loading zone in desperation, and stood in line for the last order of Pad Thai. Sorry, but we eat first. But afterward…who knows?”

“You are so much trouble.” He kissed her hard on the lips. Felt her melt against him. When he lifted his head, she sighed. “Okay, so you’re persuasive, but, really, let’s eat first. I see no contractor showed up today.”

“Tomorrow. He promised.”

“Uh-huh,” she said, disbelieving as she eyed the wall of plastic behind the big-screen TV. Where there had been built-in shelves, there was now just a murky plastic barrier separating Montoya’s living space from the gutted living room that had once belonged to Selma Alexander. “Hey, what’s this?” She looked at the table where the files on Dennis were strewn around his badge. “Uh-oh, I heard about this. It was all over the news that Cole Dennis was released.” She walked into the kitchen, the dog at her heels, and untied the plastic bag she’d been carrying, then opened each individual container of food. As she scooped steaming noodles, vegetables, and chicken onto two plates, she added, “I know this goes against everything you believe in, but maybe you should just let this one go.”

Montoya shook his head. “I can’t. Cole Dennis is dirty, I know it.”

“But you can’t prove it.”

“Not yet.” He rubbed at his goatee as he followed her to the kitchen, where he rested his jean-clad hips against the counter.

“Sounds like a vendetta to me.”

“Call it what you want.” He took a swig from his long-necked bottle of Lone Star. “There’s got to be a way to nail the son of a bitch, and I intend to find it.”

Handing him a plate, she said, “Clear a spot on the table, and I’ll get the forks. Unless you want chopsticks…”

“Forks’ll do.”

“So, where’s Ansel?”

Montoya lifted a shoulder. “Beats me.”

She skewered him with a glare of pure gold. “Was he in when you got home?”

“Don’t know. I’m tellin’ ya, the cat hates me.”

“Honestly!” she said with more than a little exasperation in her tone. “You don’t try to be friends with him.”

“It takes two to tangle.”

“That’s ‘tango.’”

“Is it?” He grinned widely, and Abby sent him a scathing look, handed him the forks, and instructed him to set the table before heading off in search of the miserable gray tabby. Montoya wasn’t big on cats to begin with, and this one was a royal pain, but he tolerated it as Abby seemed bewitched by the damned thing.

A few seconds later she returned, the gray tabby in her arms. The cat was purring loudly as she rubbed his pale belly and made little loving sounds into Ansel’s flicking ears. The cat rotated his head and stared at Montoya with wide gold eyes and such a smug look that Montoya could almost believe the feline understood every word and was using it to his advantage. “Safe and sound, I see.”

“Cowering under the bed.”

“I’m telling ya, I didn’t do anything but walk in the door.”

“Sure, Detective,” she teased as the cat squirmed out of her arms and dropped to the floor, only to hide under the couch.

“Hate at first sight.”

“Don’t worry about it. Eat,” she said and pulled a couple of place mats from a nearby cupboard before slapping them onto the table.

Montoya grabbed a second beer from the fridge, and when thoughts of Cole Dennis regaining his freedom surfaced, he forced his mind from the case. Maybe he needed a break. He opened the bottle and handed it to Abby, added napkins and a bottle of soy sauce, along with knives, then settled into his chair across from her.

Their living arrangement was new enough to feel a little awkward at times. They’d gotten engaged and she’d moved in, and though they’d known each other only a short time, he was certain he wanted to live the rest of his days with her, a divorced woman whose life had been in chaos from the first minute he’d set eyes on her.

“Zoey called today,” she said, winding noodles over her fork.

Zoey was Abby’s older sister, who lived in Seattle. “How is she?”

“I asked her, and she said, and I quote, ‘More beautiful by the day.’”

“No problem with her self-esteem,” he said, but they both knew Zoey was referring to the plastic surgery that had helped erase the scars from a vicious attack that had left her nearly dead. Montoya didn’t doubt that Zoey’s face would heal, but he wondered about her psyche, if the terror of being held by a madman, her life in dire jeopardy, would ever be completely erased.

“She wanted to know if there had been any progress on finding out about our mother’s other child.” Abby set her fork down and stared straight at Montoya. “I told her I hadn’t found anything.” Tiny lines of frustration crawled across her forehead, and Montoya understood her agitation. Abby had grown up believing that she and Zoey were the only children of Faith Chastain, a tormented woman who had spent much of her adult life at Our Lady of Virtues Hospital, a mental asylum that had been closed for nearly two decades. Only recently had the mystery surrounding Faith’s death been solved and another revealed: Faith Chastain had borne another child. The autopsy report from the time of Faith’s death revealed a cesarean scar, one that hadn’t been there when Abby, as a young child, had caught a glimpse of her mother’s naked body.

So what had happened to the baby?

So far, no one had a clue.

Abby frowned. She pushed her plate aside and folded her arms over the table. “I’ve searched all the birth and adoption records for the fifteen years between my birth and my mother’s death. If she had a baby, it would have had to have been in those years. I came up with zip. What about you?”

“Nothing.” The department, of course, had nothing. No crime had ever been reported, so Montoya had phoned an old poker buddy, an ex-cop who was now a private detective. “I talked to Graziano last week, and he hadn’t found anything. But he’s still looking.”

“The only way we’ll find out anything is to go through all the hospital records.”

“Our Lady of Virtues was a private institution.”

“So? There have to be records. Somewhere.” She picked up her plate and carried it to the sink. Hershey was only a step behind. “And someone knows about them.”

He knew where this was heading, and he didn’t like it. “The church.”

“Bingo.”

He picked up his plate and set it on the counter next to the sink, where she was running water. “You want me to talk to the nuns out there?”

“You don’t have to do it. I will.”

“Abby,” he said softly, touching her arm so that she glanced up at him. “Maybe it’s time to let this go.”

“You want me to just forget that I have a brother or sister that I’ve never met?”

“The baby might not have made it.” They’d been over this ground before, but as always, she was stubborn as hell.

“Then let’s find out, okay?” She wiped her hands on a dishtowel and tossed it at him. He caught it with one hand as she pointed a long finger at his nose. “Look, Detective, I’m getting to the bottom of this. I can’t go on living the rest of my life not knowing. So either you help me or I go it alone. Your choice.”

“Okay, okay. I know. I’m with you.”

“Good.”

“I’m just telling you we might not find anything, or, if we do, you might not like it.”

“So what else is new?” She let out her breath and held up both hands. “Hey, sorry. I didn’t mean to pick a fight.”

“You didn’t.”

She smothered a smile. “I tried.”

“And failed miserably,” he teased.

“You’re impossible.”

“At least.” He snapped the towel at her rear. “Besides, I’ll get even with you later.”

“What? In the bedroom?” she asked, eyes widening in mock horror. Splaying the fingers of one hand over her chest, she added, “Whatever do you have in mind?”

“You’ll see…”

To his surprise, she reached around him, unclipped the small case attached to his belt, and in one swift motion dangled the metal cuffs in front of his face as she kissed the lobe of his ear. Her teeth scraped the diamond stud he always wore. “And so will you, Detective….”