The Night Before

by Lisa Jackson

  “You’ve got the wrong person,” Kelly said. She was wearing sunglasses and her hair was pulled away from her face. She didn’t bother to smile but, carrying her coffee, headed for the front door.

  “But if I could have just a few moments of your time.” The woman was trailing after her.

  “I told you I’m not Caitlyn Bandeaux.” Using her hip, she pushed open the glass door and, from the corner of her eye, caught the look of disbelief on Nikki Gillette’s face.

  “You’re not? Wait a minute. But . . .”

  “I said, ‘I’m not.’ ”

  “You’ve got to be related.” She paused, her eyebrows drawing together as if she was puzzled. “You know, you look enough like her to be her twin.”

  Kelly offered a smile that was meant to convey no shit, Sherlock. “You must be an investigative reporter. Look, I am Caitlyn’s sister and she’s going through a really rough time right now, so do everyone a favor and just back off, okay? Maybe when she’s . . . out of mourning or whatever she’s going through, she might talk to you. I wouldn’t, but she might.”

  “Listen, I’d love to talk to you or someone in the family.”

  Kelly sent her a look that said more clearly than words, drop dead, and kept walking. The pushy reporter started after her, and Kelly ducked around a corner, through a back alley and into the next street. Quickly she slipped into a shop displaying “collectibles,” where she caught a hard, unhappy glare from a salesclerk with blue cotton-candy hair and lips that were painted far beyond their natural line. The woman cleared her throat and glanced at the cup in Kelly’s hands just as she realized drinks weren’t allowed in the store. The persnickety clerk couldn’t do much about Kelly’s breaking one of the store’s golden rules as she was involved with another customer and a discussion of the value of some knock-off of the Bird Girl statue that Kelly figured was worth less than half of what it was marked. Nonetheless, Blue Hair was giving Kelly the eagle eye. As if she might try to shoplift some of this touristy stuff. Great. Just . . . great. With one eye on the front display window where she could view the sidewalk and street, Kelly pretended to show some interest in a faux antique telephone and an Elvis clock complete with swiveling hips. Blue Hair negotiated the deal and was ringing up her sale.

  Kelly made her move while the clerk was dealing with the credit card transaction. “Excuse me, do you have a rest room?”

  The clerk’s first inclination was to snap a quick, “No.” It was evident in her eyes, but she didn’t want to risk an argument in front of her customer, or to be confused in the middle of the sale. “Just a minute.”

  “Don’t bother yourself. I’ll find it,” Kelly said.

  “Wait a second. It’s not for public use—”

  Kelly had already dashed through a door near the back of the store that led through the storage room. Just to the side of the rest-room door, tucked between shelves loaded with boxes of merchandise, she discovered the back door. In a second she was outside, past a small loading zone and across the square.

  This was ridiculous. Running from reporters. Because she looked so damned much like her twin.

  As a kid she’d found it fun to play pranks on people who didn’t know them well, pretending to be Caitlyn. As a teenager she’d hated being confused with her identical sister. As an adult it was a just a pain in the butt. A big pain in the butt. Especially since Caitlyn was such a wimp. And a fool. Kelly didn’t know which was worse.

  She lit a cigarette and sipped from her drink as she headed back to the car. What the hell was she going to do about Caitlyn? Just wait for her sister to be arrested? Or until Caitie-Did opened her mouth to the police? Because she would. Kelly knew it, could sense that Caitlyn was cracking up again. Oh, sure, she was going through the motions, seeing a shrink, probably even on her way to taking antidepressants, or tranquilizers or some other mind-numbing drug. How about Valium? Or Prozac? Or a frontal lobotomy?

  Jesus.

  She took a drag on her cigarette and tried to think. She didn’t have time for Caitlyn to fall apart. She had her own life to live. Things to do. Some with her twin, some alone. But first things first. She had to make sure that she wouldn’t run into the damned reporter, or a policeman or an acquaintance of Caitlyn’s who couldn’t tell them apart. She just didn’t want to deal with all of that crap right now.

  Carefully, she backtracked a bit.

  It seemed that Nikki Gillette hadn’t managed to follow her, so she took a circuitous route back to the car, stubbed out her cigarette on the street and climbed inside. The leather interior was hot against the back of her legs, the steering wheel nearly burning her fingers. Quickly she twisted on the ignition and turned the air-conditioning up full blast while opening the sun roof, hoping to push the hot air outside. A woman pushing a stroller passed by on the street, and Kelly felt a tug on her heart. It seemed she’d never have a child of her own. It just wasn’t in the cards.

  Before you could have a child, you needed a man, and Kelly wasn’t in the market for one of those. She’d been through her share of heartaches, and most of the men she knew were losers. Take Josh Bandeaux. May he rest in peace. What a joke. There was no rest for the likes of her dead brother-in-law. A bastard if one had ever walked the earth. He’d even had the gall to come on to her. To her. His wife’s twin sister, for God’s sake. She’d put him in his place, of course, but she had the creepy feeling that he’d wanted not only to get her into bed, but to have Caitlyn there waiting for them. As if either she or Caitlyn would be interested in a threesome. What kind of sick male fantasy was that? Well, forget it!

  She managed to put the car in gear and ease into the afternoon traffic. Damn that Caitlyn anyway. Had she always been weird? Well, maybe a little bit. But things had gone from bad to worse after the boating accident. Kelly’s jaw tightened at the memory. An explosion in the motor, Caitlyn’s terrified screams, the boat collapsing in on itself and then all that water. Long, dark stretches of water.

  Her throat suddenly tight, she slowed for a red light.

  The boating accident.

  That’s when everything had really gone to hell.

  Adam was missing something. Something vital. And he was running out of time. He sat in the desk chair long after Caitlyn had left the office and stared at the corner of the couch where she’d sat. Sometimes frail, other times remarkably strong, she bared her soul to him and he had to fight the oppressive feeling that he was using her unjustly, that she was leaning on him, depending on him, trusting him, not suspecting that his motives were far from pure.

  “Hell,” he muttered.

  He needed to speed things up.

  His sessions with Caitlyn had gone well enough, but he hadn’t uncovered anything that he was hoping for. In fact he was beginning to think he was treading in waters that were rapidly deepening and darkening. Emotionally turbulent waters. Waters that could easily drown a man. He glanced at his wall of credentials and winced.

  Does the end justify the means?

  In this case, yes. And yet . . . he remembered her huddled on the couch, her arms drawn around her knees as she looked at the floor, studying the patterns of the carpet as she explained about her family. There was more to learn about her, so much more. She was complex and compelling and contradictory.

  And fascinating as hell. But she may not be the one. She may not be able to help.

  He turned in the chair and stared at Rebecca’s computer. There were no backup disks with Caitlyn’s name on them. Nonetheless, Adam had searched through them all. And nothing on the hard drive. At least nothing he could find. But there was a way to retrieve deleted files; he’d heard that from one of his computer-nerd friends. Always a way to get old information, sometimes even if the hard drive crashed. So all he needed now was some help. He wondered vaguely if there was a book entitled Computer Hacking For Dummies. If so, he needed a copy.

  He glanced back at her untouched coffee cup and remembered her holding it as if for warmth. In a room where the temperatur
e was pushing eighty. He suspected she wanted to talk about her husband. All the preliminary stuff about her family was important, to him, as a psychologist, and surely if he wanted to treat her, but she really wanted to talk about Josh Bandeaux, her marriage to him and his death . . . but first, Adam thought, to seem legitimate and to balm his conscience a bit, they had to lay the groundwork.

  So she was coming back tomorrow. He tented his hands and rested his chin on his knuckles. He’d encouraged the appointment. He needed to move things along faster.

  But there was another reason as well, one that he hated to admit to himself, one that he didn’t want to face. Caitlyn was a troubled and troubling woman. The simple truth was that he wanted to see her again and not necessarily as a psychologist to a patient, but more in the line of a man to a woman.

  Which was totally out of line.

  Dangerous to them both.

  If he were to get involved with her—with a patient—it could cost him his license.

  And if she were to get involved with him—with someone she trusted—it could cost her everything.

  The phone jangled.

  Sugar, dusting the television, stuffed her rag into a back pocket and snagged the receiver before the third ring. “Hello?”

  Nothing.

  “Hello? Hello? Who is this?”

  Again no answer. She thought about those incessant telemarketers trying to sell her everything from new telephone service to dildos. “Listen, I’m hanging up now!” She had another thought. Maybe it was some pervert who was in the club last night and had watched her dance. She’d had it. “Drop dead!” she ordered.

  “You drop dead,” someone whispered on the other end.

  Her blood turned to ice. She slammed the receiver down. “Shit.” She glared at the phone. Who had found her? She paid good money to have her number unlisted, but that didn’t keep the telephone sales people from finding her. Or the sickos. “Shit.” Then there was the weird call she’d gotten when no one had answered, but she’d thought she’d heard “Die, bitch,” just before Caesarina had come into the house injured. Her skin crawled. Were they related?

  The front door opened, then slapped closed.

  Sugar nearly jumped out of her skin.

  Cricket, looking as if she’d gone to hell and back twice in the last twenty-four hours, wandered in, dropping her backpack near the dining-room table.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Sugar demanded, still unnerved.

  Caesarina, thumping her tail from her hiding spot under the kitchen table, climbed to her feet. She stretched and yawned, then ambled over for Cricket to scratch her ears.

  “Jesus! What happened to her?” she asked, looking at the dog’s shaved neck and the stitched cuts. Yellow antiseptic and dried blood stained Caesarina’s skin. “Did she lose a fight with a grizzly?”

  “Don’t know. It was weird. I let her out in the morning and she came back all cut up and sniffing and snorting and scared as hell, which you know, isn’t like Caesarina. I ran her to the emergency vet, who claimed she was lucky . . . I thought maybe she’d been in a fight with a possum or a raccoon, but the vet thought the cuts looked like they’d come from some kind of blade, glared at me like I enjoyed spending my early mornings slicing and dicing my dog. She thought she’d gotten into something toxic, that she was acting like she’d gotten a snort of something she was allergic to or something. Oh, hell, the vet didn’t know.”

  “They’re all quacks down there,” Cricket said, patting the dog’s head.

  “Anyway, she’s alive and, even though she looks like hell, in pretty good shape.” Still, it was weird. The phone call, the attack on her dog . . . Sugar was unnerved. “So,” she said, turning back to the subject Cricket was avoiding. “Where were you?”

  “What’s it to you?” Cricket’s hair was in dire need of a brush, her makeup was all but worn off and her peasant blouse had a couple of stains on it. The edge of a tattoo peeked from above the waistband of hip-hugging jeans that needed to come face-to-face with a scoop or two of Tide. When she stretched, a belly-button ring glittered against her flat abdomen.

  “Don’t start with me, okay? As long as you live here, you answer to me and I’ve been out of my mind with worry.”

  “I’m not nine anymore.”

  “Oh, yeah, all grown up.”

  “Jesus. What’s got into you?”

  Sugar decided to wait a few minutes, until she’d calmed down, to tell Cricket about the phone call. It was probably just some loser from the club, someone getting his jollies by scaring her. No reason to spread the panic around. Not yet. Not until she’d calmed down. “I’m just jumpy today.”

  “So that’s my problem? I don’t think so. Just chill out.”

  “You could have called.”

  “And you could quit nagging,” Cricket shot back. “Leave me alone, okay?”

  Sugar took a deep breath. Shook off the terror that had, for a second, spread over her. “I didn’t mean to jump all over you.”

  “Good. Then just stop, would ya? Enough with the surrogate mom routine.” Cricket yawned. “We got any coffee?” She ran a hand through her short hair. Dyed red with magenta streaks, it was weird, but didn’t look bad. When it was styled. Which it wasn’t this morning.

  “It’s cold.”

  “Doesn’t matter as long as it’s got caffeine.” She half sleepwalked into the kitchen, found a cup and poured in some of the sludge that had been coagulating in the glass pot. Yawning again, she put her mug into the microwave and hit the start button.

  “You could make fresh.”

  “This’ll do.”

  “Where were you?”

  “Out.” Her gaze hardened, but she didn’t elaborate.

  “That much I know. Who were you with?”

  Cricket just stared at her. She looked so small and tired, almost world-weary, and Sugar felt a needle prick of guilt. She hadn’t done her job right; had failed. When their mother was killed, Sugar had sworn to take care of her younger siblings, but she’d made a mess of it. Dickie Ray was basically a small-time crook and con man, while Cricket, a hairdresser who had trouble keeping her appointments, had never blossomed to her full potential. But . . . if they could get their hands on their fair share of the Montgomery fortune, all that would change.

  Or would it? There was a chance that it was already too late. Damned Flynn Donahue. It was time to give that lazy lawyer a kick in the butt. She’d call him later today, but at the thought of picking up the phone she remembered the harsh, ugly voice so recently on the line.

  You drop dead.

  Who the devil had called?

  “Guess who came into the shop yesterday?” Cricket asked, completely oblivious to Sugar’s panic attack. She kicked off her sandals as the microwave dinged.

  “Who?”

  “Hannah-friggin’-Montgomery, that’s who.” Sugar’s stomach knotted. As it always did when she thought of the Montgomerys.

  Cricket chuckled as she grabbed her cup and padded barefoot to the back door. “I guess Hannah didn’t know that I’d switched over to Maurice’s.”

  Sugar grabbed a bottle of Diet Dr. Pepper, whistled to the dog and followed Cricket to the porch. Dickie Ray had rigged up a ceiling fan a couple of years back. Sugar switched it on while the dog walked down the wooden steps to nose around the fence line and scared up a couple of startled birds.

  Sampling her coffee, Cricket took a seat in the flimsy chaise, a relic from a particularly bountiful garage sale spree. “Hannah nearly fell off Donna’s chair when she saw me.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Made monkey faces at her in the mirror the entire time she was getting her foil weave.” Cricket slid a glance at her older sister to see if she was buying her story. Sugar wasn’t. “Okay, so I said ‘hi’ and ignored her for the rest of the two hours. What did you expect me to do?”

  “Make monkey faces,” Sugar joked.

  “I should have, but I don’t want to lose this job. As it is
, I probably cost Donna a major client. Got a cigarette?”

  “I thought you quit.”

  “I did. Mostly. But I’m tired and I could use a buzz.”

  “Have more coffee.”

  Cricket scowled into her cup. “It’s not the same.”

  “You’ll survive,” Sugar predicted and glanced at the weed-choked yard. The wheelbarrow was where she’d left it two days ago, half full of weeds, the bark dust thin around the shrubbery flanking the house.

  Curling one leg under her, Cricket asked, “You see him last night?”

  “Who?”

  “You know who. And don’t look so surprised. I figured it out on my own.” Cricket took a long drink, but her gaze was fixed steadily on her sister’s face. When Sugar didn’t answer, she added, “He’s using you, you know. If you think he’s gonna come in here and sweep you away and marry you, you’ve got another think comin’.”

  That much Sugar knew. “At least I was home last night.”

  “Too bad.” She ran a hand through her hair and grimaced. “I’m gonna shower and get down to the shop. Did I get any calls?”

  “No one who left his name.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “We’re getting more and more hangups.”

  “Wrong numbers?”

  “Maybe . . . some of them, but . . .” Sugar lifted a shoulder and decided not to worry her baby sister about the recent call that had made her skin crawl. “It’s probably nothing.”

  “I’ll bet it’s a weirdo from the club. You don’t exactly get the highest class of ‘clients’—isn’t that what you call ’em?—down at Pussies In Booties.”

  Sugar bristled. Felt that same old knife of shame, but pushed it down deep. “It pays the rent and puts money in the bank.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know, I’ve heard it all before.” Cricket drained her cup and forced herself to her feet. “Someday I’m going to have clients who tip me a hundred dollars, and I won’t have to take off my clothes to do it.”

  “I won’t hold my breath,” Sugar said, then immediately regretted the words as Cricket muttered something obscene and headed inside. A few minutes later Sugar heard the old pipes creaking as the water was turned on. She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. She’d had it with Cricket’s bad attitude. Where did she get off looking down at her older sister? If it hadn’t been for Sugar, Cricket would have been kicked around from one foster home to the other after their mother died. Worse yet, she could have landed in juvenile court half a dozen times for drinking under age, marijuana possession and other miscellaneous infractions. Cricket and the police had a long history.