Liz laughed out loud for the first time in a week. A week? She couldn’t believe seven days had passed since her confrontation with her neighbor’s son and his friends. “Isn’t that what Dad used to threaten us with when we were slow getting up in the morning?”
“Exactly. Neither of us is sure how much of each to use or which end it goes in, but we’re willing to experiment if it helps you get back on your feet.”
She laughed again. “You’re crazy.”
“And you’re not. So are you coming to Mom’s?”
Liz considered the steps involved in that sort of undertaking: shower, finding and putting on clothes, lacing shoes, locating the key to her car, driving said car through morning rush-hour traffic…no, the whole thing made her slightly queasy. “Next week. I promise.”
“Kate,” Alex called to someone apparently well across the room from her. “You find the molasses, I’ll get the cod-liver oil. See you shortly, sis.” Then she hung up.
Liz groaned and placed the phone back on the receiver on the wall of her kitchen. Her roommates, who were eating breakfast at the table across from her, stared as they chewed their highly sugared cereal. Liz had done her best to try to introduce healthy food into their diets, but Lydia and Reezira possessed firm opinions about what was “good.” Marshmallows and peanut butter were their favorite choices. The soy milk they poured over the brownish clusters was their concession to Liz.
“They come?” Lydia asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Good,” Reezira said. “They need shoot you.” She demonstrated by holding a pretend syringe to her arm.
A shot in the arm. “Somebody should,” Liz muttered.
She looked down at her pink Betty Boop pajama bottoms. She’d been wearing them for a couple of days now. Two? Three? She wasn’t sure. With the curtains closed and twenty-four-hour cable, a person could easily lose track of time.
But she’d done more than watch TV. She’d filled out every page of the adoption application. She had researched several adoption agencies that had been recommended by some of her online contacts. She’d talked to Jyoti—even though the cost of a phone call to India was a luxury she really couldn’t afford. Thankfully, Jyoti had eased Liz’s worries. Prisha was doing better. Still not totally out of the woods, but she was breathing easier and sleeping through the night again.
If only I were. The nightmares that had troubled her immediately after the rape had come back. This time there were more men involved in the violation. Different ages. Different colors and nationalities. She fought them off valiantly and usually managed to wake herself up before anyone touched her, but the fear lingered.
“I guess I’ll take a shower,” she said, trudging down the hall to her room.
She was just tucking a gray University of Nevada, Las Vegas T-shirt into her shorts when the doorbell rang. Her sisters never rang the bell.
Her pulse quickened as she hurried, barefoot, to the foyer, where Lydia was standing with the door slightly cracked. She was talking to somebody. Liz couldn’t see the person, but she could tell by Lydia’s body language something was wrong.
She walked to the door.
“Oh, Liz, there you are. I was hoping you were home.”
Crissy. No wonder Lydia was tense. “My car is in the driveway. Where did you think I was?”
Crissy glanced over her shoulder. “Um…yes, well, that’s just it. Your car hasn’t moved in days and I was worried. After what happened, I mean. You’re okay, aren’t you?”
“I’m fine. Just working from home. Was there anything else?”
She looked uneasy. “Um…no. Not really. Eli is back with his mother. Did your policeman friend tell you about the punishment we came up with for the boys? They worked all weekend at the church where the um…confrontation took place. Mowing, weeding, painting an old storage shed.”
Liz had heard, but she didn’t care. “That’s nice.”
“And we made Eli give his bike to Goodwill.”
Liz recalled the moment when David passed her the bike. Their hands had touched for a brief second. She’d thought about him a lot since that night. He’d promised to call, but he hadn’t.
“Um…Liz, I don’t know if I said how sorry I am this happened. My um…husband has strong opinions about certain subjects. It’s how he was raised. I…I don’t always agree with him, but I’ve made it a point not to interfere with how he talks to Eli. I’m only the stepmother and—”
Liz cut her off. She was sick of excuses. “You could be a positive influence in your stepson’s life. You could stand up for yourself, for women, for your daughter.”
Crissy’s face crumpled like a scolded child’s. “But I’m not strong, like you.”
“You’re as strong as you choose to be.” Why was she wasting her breath? Crissy didn’t get it. Maybe she didn’t want to get it. A sudden wave of fatigue made her sway.
Lydia reached around her for the door. “Go now. Leez busy.”
Reezira helped Liz to the couch. “I bring tea. Your tea. Taste funny, but good for you,” the earnest young woman said.
Liz was still sipping the strong hot beverage when Alex’s car pulled into the driveway. The calming herbs had helped settle the jitters that made Liz feel like she might jump out of her skin. She was finally ready to admit that David had been right about post-traumatic stress. The confrontation with the boys had opened the door to the devastating memory of that night in Bosnia.
One brief but loud knock preceded the arrival of her sisters and their mother. “Whoa, she’s dressed. Mom, you can put the fish oil away,” Alex said, shedding her sun hat. She dropped her designer shades on the hall table.
Yetta, who was carrying a purse large enough to be called a carpetbag, set the heavy-looking thing down and rushed to where Liz was sitting. “I made them bring me. This is serious, dear. You’re not yourself and I’m worried.”
“Why? I was a little shook up. Surely that entitled me to a couple of days of doing nothing.”
Reezira frowned. “She fights. In dreams. Bad.”
Liz hadn’t realized she’d been sharing her nightmares with her roommates. The fact caught her off-guard and left her feeling exposed. “The attack brought back memories. Bad memories. Something that happened when I was overseas.”
Kate and Alex exchanged a look that Liz knew well. All four sisters at one time or another communicated without words. They were connected deeply, whether they liked it or not. Hadn’t that been part of the reason Liz had fled to New Zealand after the rape? She’d known if she came home one or more of her sisters would have figured out what was bothering her. Her shameful secret would have come out.
Alex sat down beside her and took Liz’s hand. “Tell us. We’re your family. Your blood. You hurt, we hurt. Secrets are divisive. Didn’t we learn that with everything that Grace went through?”
Liz looked into her sister’s brown eyes, so like her own. “I was attacked in Bosnia. Two men. One held me down while the other…raped me. A patrol came by or the second one would have done it, too. I was dazed and bleeding. I had to crawl out of the ally where they dragged me. The military patrol didn’t see me. I couldn’t cry out because they’d bruised my windpipe. I would have frozen to death, but the Jeep backed up. I never found out why.”
Unburdening herself turned out to be easier than she’d believed possible. In the company of five women—five very different women, she found sanity, sanctuary and compassion. The two women who had experienced the worst of men—and life—relayed their own horror stories. Not in a competitive way—”My wounds are deeper than yours.” But rather the way good friends share problems and support each other—”I understand your pain because I’ve felt it, too.” Her sisters cried. And gave Liz hell for keeping her secret to herself so long. Her mother, in her divine wisdom, stayed silent, her comfort reaching Liz on a deeply subliminal level.
“The bottom line is,” Alex said later, when they’d switched from tea to wine, “you did th
e right thing last week. You stood up for yourself. For Romani and for women. You didn’t let those little commando brats get off free.”
Yetta nodded. “Alexandra is right, but you need to talk to Zeke. Find out if what that Crissy woman said is the truth. Were the boys punished and, more importantly, are they getting counseling?”
“What I want to know is, is the dad getting counseling?” Kate muttered. “Bigotry that deeply ingrained goes back generations.”
Liz saw her roommates look at each other, and she realized she hadn’t even considered how this ordeal might have affected them. They hadn’t been outside lately, listening to their music and sunbathing—two of their favorite pastimes.
“All right, Mom, I’ll go see Zeke at his office.”
“Tell about black car,” Lydia said.
“What black car?” Liz asked. The two woman were avid window watchers. Keeping an eye on what was happening on Canto Lane entertained them and made them feel safe. They knew the neighbors’ vehicles and also knew when strangers came around.
“Two men. Black car. Look in old truck,” Reezira explained.
Liz frowned. She’d had them keeping an eye out for David’s truck and he hadn’t been around in days. “Do you mean David’s?”
“Night you and boys…” She made a fighting gesture with her hands. “David—” she stroked a pretend mustache above her lips “—inside with mean lady.”
“Crissy?”
Lydia nodded. “We hear…” She mimicked the hideous screech the glove compartment door of David’s truck made. “We look. Different man. No hair. Go in black car.”
“Why on earth would anybody break into David’s truck?” Liz wondered aloud.
Her sisters looked each other. “Doesn’t he lock it?” Kate asked.
Liz pictured him reaching inside the open window on the day they’d had tea together. “His truck is so old I’m not sure it has locks.”
Alex chimed in. “Even if a person wasn’t worried about someone stealing his car, there’s the whole identity-theft thing. Insurance papers could tell a lot about an individual.”
Liz agreed, and suddenly got a nervous feeling in her belly. “That’s a good point. I’ll bring it up when I see him.”
“Speaking of which,” Alex said, grinning, “we think you should ask him over for dinner. I can’t remember the last time Liz went on a date, can you, Kate?”
Liz ignored the pair’s good-natured teasing. Every Gypsy knew that strange men in black cars were never a good omen.
“WHADDAYA THINK, BOSS? It’s him, right?”
The man behind the wraparound dark glasses surveyed the evidence laid out before him. He wasn’t impressed. They’d gotten no fingerprints from the handle of the shovel their operative had taken from the gardener’s truck, and the envelope stolen from the glove compartment had only revealed a post office box registered to one D. Baines. Their lab guys had managed to pull a partial off it, but the similarities in the sworls of the supposedly late Paul McAffee and a man named David Baines were far from conclusive.
David Baines had moved to Vegas six months after Paul McAffee died in an explosion that destroyed an empire. My empire, the man in the sunglasses added under his breath.
Was there anything about this coincidental timing that linked Baines and McAffee? Not really. Logic said such a leap seemed extreme. Foolish.
But Vincente Aurelio Conejo had never allowed logic to blind him to possibility—even after he changed his name to Ray Cross. If he had, he’d still be selling bootleg prescriptions out of the back of his van. No, Ray was a go-with-the-gut kind of guy. He took risks and followed his instincts. He never played by the rules, unless the rules worked in his favor. His renegade attitude had helped him amass a fortune.
The only time he’d gone against his gut he’d paid heavily for it. He’d trusted someone dear to him. So dear that Ray had begun to think of Paul as the son he’d never had. He’d opened his heart to Paul McAffee. Shared his secrets. His hopes. And, his idea for a drug that would make them both richer than any oil sheik.
“What do people desire more than money? More than sex? More than a luxury vehicle in the driveway of their five-thousand-square-foot house?” he’d asked the chemist he’d taken under his wing right out of college.
“Eternal youth.” That was the answer. Give them something that slowed—possibly even reversed—the aging process and people would gobble it up like candy. They’d mortgage their children’s inheritances to pay for it.
True, there had been setbacks in the development. A few tragic losses during the experimental tests. But a certain loss-to-benefit ratio was to be expected. Everyone knew that. How could Paul not have seen that the overall benefit outweighed the risks? Why hadn’t Paul trusted him? Believed in him?
Paul, the scientist, had read the research data differently. He’d theorized that the drug would be responsible for more birth defects than thalidomide—horrible, multi-generational birth defects that ultimately would cost the company every penny the drug earned and then some.
“We’ll be paying for this forever,” Paul had cried.
Forever?
How stupid was that? How could Paul have failed to see that the initial gain would have given them nine months’ worth of profit before any supposed birth defects showed up? It would have taken another three to five years in litigation before any court proved their drug had been responsible for the birth defects. Even if the Federal Drug Administration took their miracle cure off the shelves, the world market and black market would have continued to line their pockets with gold. In the time the courts would have taken to find either of them personally responsible, Ray and Paul would have reaped fortunes that could easily have insulated them from any fallout. They could have lived like kings in places that had never heard of their drug.
But Paul hadn’t seen it that way. He’d gone to the government with his research—the proof, he’d claimed—that the test results the company had provided the FDA were falsified.
Betrayal came in many forms.
As did retribution.
“Prepare the jet. I want to check this out myself. I would recognize Paul no matter what he did to disguise himself.”
Chapter Seven
Liz was glad Zeke had suggested meeting for coffee, instead of at his office. She didn’t carry the same antipathy toward law enforcement as some members of her family did, but she didn’t want to make a big deal over this. She’d done her part by reporting the incident, right? The rest was up to the families of the three boys who had hassled her.
“So, what happened to them? Some public service, I hear.”
They were sharing a table near the back of the room. No window seat for Zeke. From the first day she met him, she’d privately likened him to an old-West marshal. Not that he resembled one—his close-cropped hairstyle was very modern, but he carried himself with a certain dignity that went with a badge and a gun.
“Lip service for the judge’s benefit. Junior is a piece of work, just like his old man. The other two snots left my office crying. I’m pretty sure I got through to them. That Eli kid, though? I have a feeling I’ll be seeing him again.”
She watched him drink from the clunky white mug he’d asked for. Despite its trendy name, the Bean Pod wasn’t a hip place with forty versions of some microclimate coffee. It was a coffee/donut/sandwich shop that was popular with members of the police and fire departments.
“You know, I blame myself for this. I should have kept walking, but I sorta…snapped. Something happened to me in Bosnia, and I guess I’ve been harboring a lot of anger.” She gave him an abbreviated version of the incident, but she had a feeling Zeke could supply plenty of details on his own.
He set down his cup and let out a sigh. “If these kids fail to comply with our agreement, I’m filing this complaint. It would be up to the D.A. to decide if Eli gets tried as an adult. A trial could get ugly—for you. And we’d probably need to subpoena your friend.”
Yo
ur friend. Would David call himself that?
“Speaking of David, I need to get in touch with him and he doesn’t have a phone. I don’t suppose you still have his address, do you?”
Zeke’s look said he saw through her overly casual tone. She didn’t know whether to mention the black car or not. What if David was behind on his credit-card payments or owed some bookie money for a bad bet on the ponies?
She realized anything she shared with Zeke came down to trust. She and her sisters had adopted a sort of breathless wait-and-see policy where Zeke and their mother were concerned. Yetta deserved to move on with her life, but could they trust a gaujo cop to fit into their world? The jury was still out on that one.
“So, you need his address.” It wasn’t a question. “That’s why you called me.”
“Y-yes. And Mom suggested I talk to you about the incident so that I could get some closure. W-was that the wrong thing to do?”
He took another drink of coffee and let out a sigh before answering. “No, not at all. I was just a little surprised when you called. I know your family doesn’t reach out to the police easily, despite—or maybe because,” he added with a faint grin, “of what happened with Grace. But, I guess, I might have been hoping this was a social call, too.”
“Because of you and Mom?”
He nodded. “I like your mother.”
“I know you do. I think she likes you, too.”
Neither said anything for several moments, then Zeke said softly, “She invited me to Kate’s wedding.”
Liz hadn’t heard about that. She wondered if her sisters knew. Zeke obviously found this a significant development, and no doubt the rest of the Romani family would, too. She wasn’t sure what to say, so she went with her gut. “I’m glad. She’ll enjoy herself more with a date. Wish I had one.”
That almost-grin returned. For a second. Then he took his notepad, scribbled something and ripped out a page. He hesitated just a second before placing the note, facedown, on the table between them.
Liz reached for the paper, but he kept his index finger on it until she looked up to meet his gaze. “Before I give this to you, I want you to understand a few things. This man is not necessarily who he says he is. For one thing, he seems to have materialized out of nowhere four years ago. There are a number of possible explanations for this—mostly, bad.”
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