My Sister, Myself

by Alice Sharpe

  His leather jacket was cool and smooth against her cheek, but the man beneath was rock hard and warm. In the moment he’d looked at her, she’d seen his gray eyes flood with concern, his stern expression soften. His breath ruffled her hair, whispered by her forehead, and she closed her eyes. She said, “I wasn’t here. I came afterward.”

  “Let me get this straight,” he said with an edge to his voice. “You came into this apartment knowing it had been ransacked?”

  Her eyes popped open. She didn’t like that edge, probably, she admitted to herself, because she’d more or less earned it. Still, this man wasn’t her keeper, and the out-of-place attraction she’d been fighting a moment before fled in a wave of irritation as she shrugged herself free from his one-handed grip.

  As she searched the room for something on which to dry her tears, she said, “I knew the intruder was gone.” It amazed her that her voice sounded so strong. By all rights, it should be as shaky as her knees.

  “How did you know?”

  “It felt empty,” she said, spying a tissue box next to the overturned mattress. She climbed over the tangled knot of a pink quilt and snagged the box. Mopping at her face, she looked around the trashed room.

  He shook his head as he slipped his gun back into the shoulder holster he wore under his jacket. “It felt empty?”

  “Let it go,” she said, eyes flashing.

  He stared at her.

  “What are you doing here?” she demanded.

  “You weren’t at the hospital when I called. I asked myself where I’d go if I were you, and this is what I came up with.”

  “And scared me nearly to death!” she repeated, but it wasn’t the fear that rankled, it was the humiliation of having broken down in front of him. She was willing to do almost anything now to distance herself from that clinging vine, that needy, weepy thing she’d become in the aftermath of intense fear. Anything was better than that.

  “Well, no harm done,” she said briskly.

  “That’s right,” he said, a wicked gleam igniting his eyes, “no harm done. Except that I might have been the bad guy back for a second look.”

  Tess stared at her feet. She knew he was right, but she wasn’t going to let him see that. He’d already seen too much. She said, “I’m going to clean up this place. I don’t want Katie coming home to something like this. Maybe I’ll figure out what’s missing.”

  He regarded her with raised eyebrows. “How in the world will you know what’s missing in an apartment you’ve never been in before?”

  “I haven’t the slightest idea,” she answered. But she would know. She just wasn’t going to try to explain something to him she couldn’t explain to herself. It was like knowing Katie wouldn’t so easily quit trying to figure out who framed their father or that she lived on the second floor of this building. She just knew.

  “Well it’s immaterial, anyway,” he said, taking out his cell phone. “You can’t do anything in here until the scene is processed. So find someplace to sit down, and try not to touch anything else, okay?”

  She glared at him.

  “Please,” he added.

  Of course it had to be processed. “I’ll go sit on what’s left of the big recliner,” she said.

  He nodded as he spoke into the phone.

  RYAN ASKED EVERYONE who answered their door if they’d seen anyone or anything suspicious in the past thirty-six hours, since Katie Fields had been hit by that white van.

  No one had ever heard of Katie Fields. No one there knew the name of the tenant in 206. The manager would know, but he was off in Hawaii.

  The woman with the dog confessed she played music almost continually to cover the noise of her almost-deaf neighbor’s television. She did mention Frances from downstairs, who knew everybody and everything but who worked nights. The old grouch across from the elevator said, “I ain’t a snoop like some people.”

  One person wasn’t home, and the last one, the elderly lady with a hearing problem, admitted she had no idea who lived, “down at that end of the hall.”

  That was the trouble. Katie’s apartment was the last one on the left. The unit across from hers was empty, the lady with the dog told him, and had been for weeks. The unit under hers belonged to the vacationing manager.

  Ryan’s partner and a couple of guys from the lab were finishing looking through Katie’s apartment, but it was such a low priority that it was more or less being done because Ryan had asked. He didn’t expect the person who’d done this to have left fingerprints or telltale hairs.

  Which, he decided as he leaned against the wall in the hall, was just as well. He didn’t want to get warned away from looking into Katie Fields’s mishap. He wanted it to remain a hit-and-run and not get bumped up to attempted murder or linked to her father’s death.

  Jason came out and lit a cigarette, something he did more or less every ten minutes when possible. He was younger than Ryan by a year or two, chatty and full of himself, as different from Matt Fields as night is from day.

  “I can’t believe old Matt had himself another daughter,” Jason said, expelling a cloud of foul smoke.

  Ryan waved his hand in front of his face. “They probably have rules about smoking in this place,” he said. “Well, as we both know, Matt was full of secrets. You guys find anything?”

  “In that mess? Looks like there are two sets of prints. One all over the place, probably the victim’s, the other set belongs to the victim’s sister. You know how it is, people see an ambulance take away a victim and the next thing you know, some creep goes in and robs her blind, and everyone knows to wear gloves now. I don’t see a computer or TV or anything so maybe they took off with that kind of stuff. Ditto on jewelry. You ask the neighbors if anyone saw anything or if any of them are familiar with Katie’s apartment and can tell if something is missing?”

  “No one on this floor saw anything and no one had ever been invited inside, though one woman said she believed the apartment was rented furnished.” He gave Jason the name and workplace for Frances from downstairs. “You check her out. I’ll give it an hour or so for people to settle in for the night and try the rest of the ground floor, but I imagine it’ll be the same.”

  CSI came out of the apartment next. They shot the breeze for a few minutes, then left and Ryan stayed where he was, in the hall, thinking about going back inside.

  He kind of regretted getting so uppity with Tess, but she’d scared him to death, then touched his heart with her trembling and tears, then had turned into a smart aleck. He’d put her in her place because he needed to put himself in his place. He was determined to protect his late partner’s daughters whether they liked it or not, and he couldn’t afford to let this pretty veterinarian with the bluest eyes this side of Tahiti get in his way.

  Damn it, but he had to admit he’d enjoyed her moment of need. He’d liked her holding on to him like he was a lifeline. She’d felt good in his arms. A natural fit. Talk about screwy, but he’d been disappointed when she turned back into herself. And he knew this was crazy, counterproductive and downright dangerous for both her safety and his peace of mind, so he had to get ahold of himself and the situation and he thought he knew how to do it.

  Pep talk delivered, he pushed open the door and went back inside.

  She was down on her knees, stuffing pillow innards into a garbage bag. He rested on his haunches and held the bag for her so she could use both hands.

  “I’m sorry about all this,” he said.

  She glanced up at him. “Thanks.”

  “Tess, don’t bite my head off, but I think you ought to go home tomorrow.”

  She went back to work, moving from cushion stuffing to broken pieces of pottery too small to put back together again. At last she said, “I don’t think Katie intended on staying here long.”

  Obviously, she had chosen to ignore his suggestion. No matter, he would approach it again from a different angle. She wasn’t a fool, and she didn’t strike him as impetuous like her sister, but the
re was a hint of stubbornness reminiscent of Katie that might make getting rid of her tricky. He said, “What makes you think that?”

  “Your partner pointed out the lack of electronic equipment as though it might have been stolen, but I don’t think she had any. There’s no desk for a computer, there are no CDs lying around or tapes or cords or anything else. There’s no telephone jack. It’s still hard to tell, but I think Katie either traveled light or she stored most of her belongings somewhere and moved in here with just a few sentimental frills.”

  “I think you might be right. She wasn’t using her real name here, that’s obvious. She wasn’t making friends and visiting with the neighbors which strikes me as out of character for her. She was up to something.”

  “How about my father’s house?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I assume Katie no longer lived with him, but maybe she left most of her stuff at his place. He must have had a house—”

  “He did. A nice one, but it was repossessed by the bank for nonpayment. It was part of that noose-closing-in-on-him thing. Matt was living out of a suitcase at the end.”

  She looked pale. “I see.”

  Ryan wished he’d picked up just a little of his late partner’s secret-keeping abilities. “I know how to do my job,” he said. “You go home. I’ll keep you posted on Katie’s condition, and I promise you I’ll keep at this until the bitter end.”

  He took the plastic bag from her as they both stood. For a second they stared at each other. Out of the corner of his eye, Ryan caught a glimpse of their reflections in the window. He seemed to loom over her and yet she held her own, a slip of a woman dressed now in jeans and a sweater, her fair hair askew, her posture perfect. He had a sudden recollection of the feel of her body slammed tight against his chest.

  Tossing the bag aside, he made his way to the wall and closed the drapes against the night.

  “You can’t stay here,” he said, turning back to her.

  “Don’t start with me,” she warned, picking up a handful of paperbacks.

  “The lock is broken. Whoever did this might come back.”

  He saw a flash of terror cross her face. He’d put that terror there. Shame on him.

  “I have to stay,” she said at last. “I have to look through Katie’s things. If I’m going to go home in a day or so—”

  “So you agree to leave?” he asked hopefully, and yet with a peculiar sense of loss.

  “Yes, okay, I’ll go home. I know I’m not cut out to chase bad guys. Maybe I can get Katie transferred to a hospital closer to me or I can fly up here on the weekends—anyway, that’s why this may be my last chance…”

  Her voice trailed off.

  Her last chance to get to know Katie in case she didn’t recover from her injuries? Her last chance to get a feeling for a father who might very well have aspired to be a cold-blooded murderer? Her last chance to find missing pieces of herself?

  He’d gone and frightened her again. His feelings were raw and banging into each other, making him say and do things in an awkward, stilted manner. Still, no matter how disjointed his words and actions, his motive was pure—he would not let anything happen to Tess Mays, he would not let her down.

  “If you stay here tonight, I stay,” he said, expecting an argument.

  But she didn’t argue, in fact there was relief in her eyes and in her voice. “Okay.”

  “And tomorrow morning, you make arrangements to go back to San Francisco where you belong.”

  She nodded. “By then maybe we’ll have figured out how Katie went about her snooping.”

  “That’s right,” he said, glancing at the mess in which they stood. “We have our work cut out for us.”

  With that, he reached for his cell phone. He needed to get his neighbor to feed Clive. He needed to order takeout. He needed to do something, anything, other than look at Tess Mays and entertain thoughts that would get him absolutely nowhere.

  RYAN EMPTIED THE CONTENTS of the brown envelope he’d brought from the police evidence room onto the table between them. He’d eaten most of his hamburger and fries and half drunk the chocolate shake. He’d also talked to Jason. Frances from downstairs had slept the afternoon away. She hadn’t seen or heard anything unusual.

  The food choice had been Tess’s idea. Ryan had argued for Thai, but she announced she’d had a miserable day and that called for fast food.

  “Hand me an apple pie,” she said.

  He handed her the white paper sack and watched as she retrieved a warm pastry. “How do you stay so slim when you eat this kind of stuff?” he asked.

  She licked a glob of gooey apple from her lips. The action caused a wave of desire in his groin that hit him hard and unexpected.

  “I run. I work out,” she said. “Believe it or not, on a day-to-day basis, I’m not usually stressed like this so I don’t always eat like this.”

  “Allow me to clean up,” he said, standing quickly to bag their rubble, relieved to move away from the table—away from her.

  THE ENVELOPE CONTAINED a still ticking gold watch, a turquoise ring and earrings, a very small red purse on a very long cord Katie must have looped around her neck and shoulder containing no identification of any kind. The wallet was there, just no identification as though she didn’t carry any. She had thirteen dollars and twenty seven cents, and a short list of phone numbers with no names. There was also a cell phone, a pair of shattered glasses with black frames and a ring with five keys and a dolphin fob. One key got Katie in the Vista’s lobby door, Ryan explained, as it had also gotten him in. One opened her mail box, one opened her apartment, one started her car and the last one was unexplained though it was stamped with the number 119.

  “What about the glasses?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “There’s no correction in the lenses, there’s some question they’re even hers. I know I never saw her wear glasses. The officer on scene found them in the gutter and picked them up, but they might have been there for hours for all we know.”

  Tess flipped the phone open. The battery was low when she turned it on, but she flipped through the options until she could access the photo gallery.

  And sure enough, in among the photos of strangers, there was a picture of Katie and the same man—only twenty years older—as in the picture on the wall. It looked as if it was taken at a park during the summer.

  “The police picnic,” Ryan said, peering over her shoulder. “Katie asked me to take this. They’d just won the ubiquitous three-legged race.”

  Tess drank in the sight of the two smiling faces, one identical to her own, the other lost forever, and felt a knot form in her throat. “Have you checked the phone records?” she managed to say at last.

  “As in, Did she call her would-be attacker or snap a picture of a speeding white van?”

  “Something like that.”

  “No such luck. Very few calls, none unexplained except that last one made to me. As far as I can tell, the last picture is this one.” He clicked a few buttons and up came a tiny photo of a trophy.

  “Whose trophy?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. I can’t make out any writing. Too much glare.”

  Tess scrolled up a picture, hoping for something more meaningful and found a shot of a very young woman who looked slightly off-kilter. Maybe it was her eyes, Tess thought, looking closely. She appeared to be mentally handicapped. That was it. But she looked happy and friendly, and she was wearing a pointy pink party hat.

  “Who’s this?”

  “I don’t know. Obviously someone Katie knew.”

  Tess nodded absently as she clicked back to the photo of her sister and father, once again drinking in their smiles before the battery gave up the ghost and their images faded away.

  FOR TESS THE JOB at hand was bittersweet.

  The objects of Katie’s life lay shattered and torn in her apartment, the same way her body lay battered in the hospital. But there was a sense of the woman here, r
eflected in little things like the umpteen tiny packets of mustard, ketchup and taco sauce that filled a box in the fridge—they apparently shared the same love of junk food—the simple white dress hanging in the closet, the secondhand paperback mystery books.

  To her regret there were no additional photos. Not a baby picture, not a strip of goofy poses from the mall…nothing. There was no rent receipt with a name, no bank statement, no pay stub or tax forms. Katie had lived in New Harbor her whole life and yet Tess couldn’t find an address book or a note from a friend or the name of a dentist circled in the phone book. Nothing. The conviction that Katie had chosen this apartment from which to launch her investigation grew as the hours passed.

  The living room was soon back to as normal as it was going to get without a few purchases to replace the things that had been destroyed. Tess sat down in front of the bedroom closet and started putting the half-dozen pairs of shoes and the half-dozen empty shoe boxes back together.

  The moment she dumped a pair of leather boots—her exact size and even a style she would have chosen—into their box, she realized something else was stuffed beneath the layer of tissue paper on the bottom. She lifted the tissue, which had been taped onto a false bottom, then immediately looked over her shoulder to see if Ryan had come into the room. The coast was clear, but she closed the box, anyway. She’d caught a glimpse of what was hidden inside. Just a glimpse, but the objects looked personal and she wanted to study them without Ryan hovering nearby.

  Going back into the living room, she found he’d fallen asleep on the recliner. A few pages of sheet music lay scattered across his lap and spilled onto the floor as though he’d been looking at them when he drifted off. Tess approached quietly, gathered the papers without his waking, then stood staring down at him.

  Dark lashes fanned his cheeks. His mouth in repose looked soft and sensual. His head rested on one hand bent at the elbow and propped against the back of the chair, his long jeans-clad legs were crossed at the ankles.