It was, after all, how my father had met her all those years ago. When she was seventeen and stupid and he was thirty-four and wily.
“When did Detective Gruen give this to you?”
“When he coincidentally ran into me during my morning run.”
She tapped the kitchen counter. “You should call Mr. Ross about that.”
“Stevie, let’s focus on me being dead.”
She folded the paper back up. “Dru, I had no idea. This hasn’t been in the papers.”
“That’s how Roberto broke the trusts. Can’t hold money in trust for a dead woman. So I have to do whatever it is he wants me to do to get that money back.”
I couldn’t look Stevie in the eye as I said that, because she had to guess what the deal was: her or the money. And better than that, she knew me better than anyone, and she’d know I hadn’t fully made my decision yet.
“Or it’s worse than that,” she said. “This record is to notify someone else when your prints were run.”
“Roberto.”
She tilted her head to the side. “Maybe.”
Oh God. Maybe that record was in the database so that my father could find me. If that were true, I had about twelve hours to live, tops.
Stevie sat at the kitchen table with her computer and said, “Hm,” a lot.
The buzzer on the oven went off and Stevie didn’t bat an eyelid, so I slipped on the silicone potholders to take out the tray of what turned out to be mini-quiches. I wondered why she needed to make mini-quiches at seven thirty in the morning, but I never ask that sort of thing out loud. She might become self-conscious about her cooking and then never make these little hors d’oeuvres again. And that would make me cry.
“Seven years ago,” she said. “They did it on the QT too, it looks like. Someone would have had to go looking for the declaration using your formal name.” The ugly full-length version of my birth name that nobody ever used. I think the only place it had ever been printed was on my birth certificate. The first time someone had laughed at my name was kindergarten, and that was the teacher.
I finished chewing the spinach mini-quiche I’d snagged. Stevie took the moment to count the remaining morsels and then glare at me. I drank some water. “Don’t they have to wait seven years before declaring me dead?”
“It’s only three in New York.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” she said, her eyes darting around as she searched her data banks for the answer. “Do you think that’s important? Should I research that?”
“No. No, don’t. I’m dead? What happens to…everything I owned?”
“Gets divided up amongst family members, most likely.” She shrugged. “Maybe Roberto did something else with it. Or your mother, perhaps.”
“They have to give it back, right?”
She shook her head again. “If a person’s dead…that’s it. I guess you could try suing, but…”
Holy Zeus. I was disinherited. Unless I behaved myself. And even then it wasn’t guaranteed, was it?
And if my father was looking for me, I was so screwed.
I picked up the nearest glass and threw it as hard as I could toward the kitchen door, where it shattered and flew in a million different directions. Stevie sat there and looked at me, while all I wanted to do was smash more and more things, as though that would make things all better. “I need to go shower,” I said.
“I’ll clean that up,” Stevie replied.
I walked out of the kitchen before things started to get ugly. Roberto was right; I didn’t want to live this way anymore. I didn’t want to take care of Stevie, I didn’t want to wonder where we were going next, I didn’t want to spend one more second figuring out how to get us new identities and then burying the old ones six feet deep. I wanted to go home and live on Easy Street. Or, more specifically, Park Avenue in the 80s.
And if I hadn’t fallen to the place in my life where ten thousand dollars became an absolute fortune instead of, well, nowhere near a fortune, I wouldn’t be in this damned mess.
Of course, Stevie would have been long dead by this point, too.
There was a downside to damn near everything, wasn’t there?
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
EVERY HOUSE IN LA has a sign in the front telling you which security company they subscribe to and a sticker in the window warning would-be evildoers to stay the hell away. The problem for many people is, of course, nothing bad happens for the longest time, so they stop setting their alarms. Which makes it easy for someone like me to use the side gate to enter the cement-paved back garden, and once there, undo the latch on the sliding glass door into the kitchen. The broom handle that should have been wedged next to the door, preventing anyone from opening it, was up against the wall. Sloppy and dangerous. I decided I should have a chat with Anne about safety issues.
The coffee machine burbled and I was spreading the last of Anne’s strawberry jam on a piece of toast when she walked down the stairs at nine a.m. She wore a pair of yellow-and-green striped flannel men’s pajamas—men’s pajamas are a fashion disaster that should die out for all women, right this minute—and had one finger under the rim of her glasses, rubbing the sleep out of one corner of her eye, when she walked into the kitchen. She stopped after passing the refrigerator and stared at me.
“Care for anything to eat, or will coffee be enough?” I asked.
“What the hell are you doing in my house?”
I tilted my head toward the sliding door. “It was open. Your side door was also unlocked, but I’ve since locked it and put on the deadbolt.” I used my left foot to push one of the kitchen chairs out from the table and into her way. “Why don’t you sit down and join me?”
She started to reach for the nearby phone. “I’m going to call the police, thanks.”
I slid one of the pictures of Penelope and Anne’s Uncle Ian Jack into my hand. Anne’s voice trailed off. “Feel free to call after you and I have a bit of a chat.”
Her face showed the progression from disgust at seeing some kind of pornography, to recognition that she knew one of the people in the photo, to horror that she knew both of the people.
Anne backed into in the chair I’d pushed at her and the phone stayed where it was. I put the photo in front of her and she pushed it away, not wanting to spend a second more looking at it. “Where did you get this?” she asked.
“I was hoping you could help me with that,” I said.
The shock on her face was unmistakable. She’d never seen them before. She’d had no clue.
Perhaps prompting might help. “Turns out Colin had it.”
She kept wrinkling her forehead, which was going to give her serious lines in a few years. “What?”
I picked up the picture, glanced at it, and then put it face-down on the pile. “You can understand my confusion.”
She spread out the pile face-down. Maybe she was counting them. “There are others?”
I nodded and showed her. She glanced at the first few before covering her mouth. I turned the pictures back over.
“He had those?”
“He told me he was in trouble with Penelope. I think I now know why.”
Anne looked at me as though I were deeply stupid. “Who are you?”
I shrugged. “You first. When did you meet Colin?”
“About two months ago,” she said. “A little less.”
I nodded. “Right after he disappeared from Vegas. He knew Penelope at least eight months ago. Before he knew me, in fact. She knew him well enough to give him fifty thousand dollars then, ten of which he then turned around and gave me. And in case you’re wondering, that’s not my story, that comes straight from the cops. How did you meet him?”
She ran a hand through her hair, which was barely mussed enough to be called bed head, her eyes focused on her memories. “We met…we met at a club one night.”
“A club you usually go to?”
Her fingers pinched the bridge of her nose so hard she left f
ingernail impressions in the skin. “No. No, I was there to cover a band. I did a story on them for the Weekly.”
“Did Penelope know you’d be there that night?”
“You think she sent him there to meet me?”
I nodded. “I think that’s precisely what she did.”
Anne snorted. “Right. Because it’s so easy to guess how I’d react.”
“He was gorgeous. He was charming. He was witty. Anne, I married him, and I may have bought myself an arrest because I was so taken in by how attractive he could be. You think you were set up? Trust me, I’m way ahead of you.”
Her mouth opened and closed a couple of times. “Why would Penelope do that?”
If Anne didn’t know, she wasn’t going to like it. “If you helped him, she wasn’t involved. You rented his apartment. You got him his cell phone. Your name is on his utilities. With your name on everything, Colin could disappear on the spur of the moment, with not many clues as to where he’d been.” It was a good play. I knew how that trick worked. I’d done it enough times, to other people.
Anne looked as though she might throw up. Time to change the subject. I turned over a picture and covered everything but Penelope’s face. “How old is Penelope here?” I asked.
Anne took a closer look. Then she stood up, putting her hand up to her face as though that could hide what she’d seen. “I’m not sure.”
“Please. Take one little guess.”
She kept her back to me as she fumbled through the cabinet for a mug. She spilled the milk the first time she tried to pour it into her cup. Her fingers couldn’t get a good hold on the carafe. After a few seconds, she stood at the counter, not moving.
I said nothing and waited for her to get herself under control.
When she came back to the table, her cup of milky coffee in hand, I asked her again how old she thought Penelope was there.
Anne took a deep breath. “When we were in high school. Maybe eighth grade. Her hair was shorter then. Blonder. She said blonde hair would help her in auditions.”
Auditions. I’d heard of the casting couch but this was insane. I looked at the expression on Penelope’s face in the photo: complete boredom. Here she was, thirteen or fourteen, and she might have been doing math homework, if you didn’t see what the other person in the picture was doing to her.
I was having sex when I was fourteen. I’d thought it was fun. (Well, not the part with my stepfather Patrick. But I hadn’t thought about him in years.) Of course, I hadn’t understood at the time that an older man like Peter Quaid didn’t feel quite the same way about me as I felt about him. Even so, I couldn’t imagine being bored with sex by that age.
I turned the picture over again. “Dammit.”
Anne’s jaw trembled. Then, surprisingly, she started to laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
“Now I know why Penelope always had money in school. Her mom didn’t work much. Penny wasn’t getting any acting jobs and she wasn’t working at Starbucks. She said it was residuals from the TV show. And since her family was limited to her and her mom, how much money would they need, right?” Her face got serious again. “My God, my uncle?”
“Are you close to him?”
“No. But…still.”
“Were you and Penelope good friends in high school?”
Anne shrugged. “I thought we were.”
“This isn’t the kind of thing you can talk about, even with your best friend.” I wondered for a second what best friends did talk about together.
Focus on the problem at hand, Dru.
“Do you have any guess who might have taken these pictures? Where Colin might have gotten them?”
She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “He didn’t take them from Penny?”
I shook my head. “In fact, if I understand what Penelope was getting at yesterday—”
“You saw her?”
“Oh, yes. She said you were singing my praises.”
Anne snorted. Not gently, either.
Points to her for honesty. “I thought as much. But that is what she said. She wanted to talk to me about Colin. Then it seemed she wanted to seduce me.”
Anne’s eyes widened. “Really?”
Discussion about Penelope’s many and varied proclivities would have to wait until after I knew Anne a little better. “I’ll tell you about our conversation in a second. When she wasn’t trying to snog me, she told me Colin was supposed to get pictures for her. She thought he’d given them to her, and then discovered she’d been had. I found these yesterday.”
Anne tilted backward in her chair, balancing on the two back legs and making me somewhat nervous. She studied me, her brown eyes seeming to examine every inch of my face. Then she stood, the chair dropping to the floor with a bang. Anne had come to some sort of decision.
“The night he…died, Colin called me. Late at night. Did I tell you that?”
“No, as a matter of fact you didn’t. I told you he called me. You seemed devastated by that news.”
She picked the chair up and righted it. “I was afraid he’d called you to say the same thing he’d said to me. He’d never said it before.”
“Which was?”
“He told me he loved me.”
She had my full attention. “He said what?”
“I thought it was one of those things people say, so I said, ‘Oh, Colin, I love you, too,’ something stupid like that, and he was quiet for a second, and then he said, ‘No, I love you.’ And then he said the two of us needed to talk, really talk, after he’d dealt with a couple of things.” She pulled the chair out and sat down. “Guess it didn’t go so good.”
I have no idea how long I sat there, unable to speak. I could only stare at her, with her short brown hair and glasses and heart-shaped face and felt something, some knot of a feeling, unravel in my stomach. Was this jealousy? Was I jealous that Colin said that to her? No, I was certain it wasn’t. There were any number of feelings I’d had about Colin, particularly in the last two days, but ownership had never been one of them. Maybe it was shock? That he’d said that?
Then it dawned on me. What I was feeling was sadness. For her. For him. Because right after they’d talked, everything had gone to hell.
I expect things to go to hell. Other people tend to be more resigned to it. But surprisingly, I had one ray of light to offer Anne on this.
“Anne, I’m going to tell you something, and you can believe it or not, it’s up to you. But I knew Colin well enough. He never told anyone he loved them.”
She shrugged. “Who knows why he said it.”
I put my hand over hers and she stared at me, surprised at any sort of physical connection between us. “Anne, I don’t know why he originally talked to you that night at the club, or what kind of plan he and Penelope cooked up between the two of them. But I saw Colin with a lot of women, and he never bothered saying he loved them. Ever. Why he said it to you then, that night, who knows. But it wasn’t something he was in the habit of throwing out there, okay?”
It took a second for her to react, but when she did, it was total. She started crying, the kind of sobs where you can’t breathe in between the waves. She rocked back and forth, keening in a way I’d never heard before. It sounded much more natural and true than the stoic, solemn bravery I had seen so much of. She moved to the floor, no longer worried about balancing on the chair, and she cried. As soon as one wave of sorrow broke, a wave of fury and frustration would build up.
I got down on the floor and put my arms around her. Whatever her relationship with Colin had been like, it had hit her harder than a span of two months would have indicated. Was that possible, to fall in love like that, so hard, so totally? And what did that feel like? It seemed so unlikely. Most people can’t stop lying to themselves that long, let alone another person.
When she’d calmed down enough to cry quietly, I hunted down the nearest box of tissues and brought it back to the kitchen table. She took a few and blew her nose
into them. She kept blowing and wiping until I was sure she must have been dehydrated.
When she gathered up the bushel of used tissues, I said, “I thought telling you would make you feel better.”
“Don’t you understand?” Her face still contorted from crying, but she was smiling nonetheless. “It does.”
It took a few minutes more for her to gain control of herself. She washed her face in the kitchen sink and patted it dry with a dishtowel. She washed her glasses and wiped them with the same towel. Then she came back to the kitchen table and plopped down in her chair.
“Anyhow.” Her attempt to change the subject made us both laugh. “The reason I was telling you that was, he called from a number I’d never seen before.” She rattled it off. It had the Las Vegas 702 area code, but I didn’t recognize it. I shrugged and shook my head. “Yesterday, after you came by, I got curious. So I looked at the phone’s records.”
“And how did you do that?”
She rolled her eyes. “I’m a journalist. I’m magic.”
To be fair, getting a hold of a phone’s records is one of the easier ways to gather information. I liked Anne.
“And?”
“The phone number’s about eight months old. From last summer.”
“When Penelope met him.”
She licked a few drops of coffee off her lips. “Guess who the phone’s registered to.”
“Not Colin, I’ll guess.”
She shook her head.
After a few seconds, I gave up.
Anne leaned toward me. “You.”
You Know Who I Am (The Drusilla Thorne Mysteries Book 2) Page 18