Jami tipped her head. “Well, that’s specific.”
“I looked it up on the Internet.” Andrea was practically beaming, she was so pleased with herself. “I found out all about the Legion of Honor and everything there. Mrs. Spreckels donated all the stuff, like the Rodin statues.”
“Mrs. Spreckels?”
Andrea huffed. “Married to Mr. Spreckels? California sugar king? They even have a town down by Salinas, where they had a big factory.”
So that’s why they’d called the place Spreckels. “You learn something new every day.” Damn if it didn’t make Jami feel good. Despite Cole. She’d had an influence on Andrea. The remainder of the list beckoned. “I want to see the Louvre in Paris and walk where Tom Hanks walked in The Da Vinci Code,” she read aloud.
“There was a lot of kickin’ stuff in that movie,” Andrea explained.
Jami went on. “I want to go to the Smithsonian in Washington D.C.”
“They’ve got some paintings that aren’t just your basic old-fart stuff.”
Jami didn’t laugh. She didn’t even smile. Andrea was totally serious. Jami read the next item. “I want to see the Mesa Verde Anasazi cliff dwellings.”
“We studied them in history. It’d be a sweet trip.”
“I want to rock climb the Devil’s Tower.” Jami glanced up. “Where’s that?”
“Wyoming. Near Custer’s Last Stand. That’s in Montana, but they’re like right in the corner”—Andrea held her hands in a circle as if she had a map in front of her—“where Wyoming, Montana, and South Dakota meet.”
God. This teenager knew her geography better than Jami did. “That sounds fun.” Unless you were afraid of heights.
“I read about a group of girl scouts who did it. I could do it, too, if I practiced.”
“I know you could,” Jami answered sincerely. “What do your parents think of your list?”
The exuberance simply drained from the girl’s face like watercolors in the rain. “I didn’t show them.” She set Ruby in her basket, then stared at her shoes as if they had something written on them that only she could see.
“I’ll get your sketchpad before I leave,” Jami promised, trying to bring the girl back.
“That’s fine, gotta go.” Still looking at the floor, Andrea gathered her hair and began shoving it into her hairnet.
All right, so it was two steps forward and one giant step back. Jami just had to figure out how to make two giant steps ahead with only a tiny one back.
* * * * *
Christ, he had a headache. Back home at the end of the day, Cole turned on his shower, hot, steaming, and let it beat down on his stiff shoulders. Pretending nothing had happened was a hell of a lot harder than he’d thought. He’d smiled, joked, and laughed with Frank, doing his damnedest to ignore the hole in his chest where his heart should have been.
Jami had a right to expect something from him after he’d taken her to bed. He couldn’t even blame her for opening Stephie’s door. When you got intimate with a woman, there was the faith that you’d share everything about yourself.
Cole could never share what he’d done to Stephie.
So he’d spent the entire day pretending last night hadn’t happened.
If only he could get the scent of her out of his head, but even the steaming water pounding on his back didn’t obliterate it. He feared nothing ever would.
Chapter Twenty-two
That night, Jami woke to a dark room and Isadora’s face looming over her. Her pulse pounded in her ears, and her body was still in that weird dream state where her limbs were paralyzed. She couldn’t move a muscle, not even to scream.
“He’s in the attic,” Isadora whispered.
Her larynx started to work. “Who’s in the attic?” Jami whispered back.
“Mr. Rogers.” In the beam of Isadora’s flashlight—she hadn’t turned on the room light—her lavender nightgown almost seemed to make her hair glow purple.
“How do you know it’s Mr. Rogers?”
“I liked him. I’d rather think it was him than an evil spirit or a burglar.”
Jami’s thoughts exactly. Yet there was nothing in the attic to steal. She pushed the covers aside, sat up, and pulled her robe from the bottom of the bed. “You want me to check?”
“We should do it together. Here’s your weapon.” Isadora held up a fireplace poker. “I’ve got a skillet out in the hall.”
She had to be joking. “Let’s call the police instead,” Jami suggested.
Isadora straightened her spine. She still didn’t reach past Jami’s shoulder. “I refuse to be the little old lady who calls the cops at every shadow on the window.” She pursed her lips. “I’m not calling that nice Mr. Amory either.”
Thank God. Who knew what would happen if Jami went up in the attic with him again. They’d probably have full-on sex on a steamer trunk. Jami couldn’t stand another day like today. That kind of day after was worse than a hangover. She took the poker. “I won’t let you go up there alone.” She cocked her head. “But I don’t hear anything.”
“It was creepy footsteps.” Leading the way across the hall to the guest bedroom closet, Isadora flipped on the light and opened the door to the attic stairs. “It was not rats or mice,” she muttered as they climbed.
Without daylight streaming through the dormer windows, the attic was mostly shadow in the string of weak lights.
“Do you think the ghost is hiding?” Isadora whispered.
Jami took the flashlight from Isadora and shone it into the deep shadows. “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”
No one came out. Not even an apparition.
She scanned the light over the attic contents. “You know, I think some more of those drop cloths have been removed.” She could have sworn that big armoire was covered yesterday morning when she was up here with Cole. She shone the flashlight on it, the mirrored doors reflecting the beam back at them. “What’s in there?”
“Oh, just my minks and other furs. I put them away when people got upset about wearing animal skins.”
“Maybe someone’s trying to steal them for their cash value.”
Isadora snorted. “They’re not worth more than twenty bucks these days. People are afraid to wear them.”
Still, Jami opened the armoire. White cloth bags covered several stuffed hangers. “How many did you have?”
Even in the dim light, she detected Isadora’s blush. “A few,” she admitted, then dropped her voice. “Okay, I had a fetish for fur. I have a fox and a mink and a rabbit—”
Jami held up her hand and turned her face away. “Don’t tell me anymore.” All those poor little animals. “Does it look like any are missing?”
“Not really.”
“Well, someone’s been up here. The dust is disturbed all over the place.” True, Cole had run his fingers through the layers of dirt, but that much? “We should call the police and have them lift some prints.” There, that sounded official.
Isadora opened her mouth, closed it, parted her lips, took a deep breath, and finally let it out. “Not tonight.”
“Why not? They’re not going to think you’re crying wolf if there’s evidence someone has been prowling around up here.”
“No one’s been prowling around.”
“Isadora.” Jami waited.
Finally Isadora huffed. “If you must know, sometimes I come up here and touch my furs.” The little woman looked at the floor just as Andrea was prone to do. “I like wearing them and imagining I’m out on a night on the town with Tom Jones.”
Oh brother. “So it was you I heard up here the other night?”
“No. I don’t come up here at night.” She raised her chin with a defiant tilt. “I was here this morning, but it was Mr. Rogers tonight, I know it.” She took the flashlight from Jami’s hands and aimed it at the floor, lighting their path back to the stairs.
Jami could do nothing but follow.
At the top of the stairs, Isadora flipped off the attic
lights. “So I’m going to call an exorcist.” She threw a smile over her shoulder, the glow of the stair bulb turning her face a tad demonic. “Betty knows a really good one.”
Oh my God. Jami was living in a nuthouse. Then again, that was pretty much the same as living in her mother’s house. At least here, she’d never been compared to a cow.
* * * * *
For three days, Cole had done a damn good job of pretending nothing had happened, even if he did say so himself. Jami did a damn good job of being unaffected, too. She didn’t say a word on Monday, nothing on Tuesday, not even on Wednesday. Christ, it was a shitty way to treat her. Yet Cole didn’t know how else to deal. Of course, he could be a man, talk to her, try to explain...
But after school, instead of Andrea showing up for work, her father called to say she’d gone to visit her aunt in Fresno. Cole’s palms started to sweat.
She didn’t strike him as being the hand-wringing type, but Jami stood outside Frank’s office wringing her hands. She’d taken Mr. Bagotti’s call. “This doesn’t make sense. Andrea didn’t mention anything about the trip yesterday.”
“And she would have called me herself,” Frank said, rubbing the top of his bald head. “So I could get one of the other kids to fill in for her.”
The strangeness of it actually make Cole feel queasy, too.
“Something terrible’s happened,” doomsayer Frank intoned.
“Like what?” Cole tried to come off sounding disgusted because someone had to be Frank’s voice of reason, but his gut was roiling.
“I don’t know,” Frank burst out, his arms flailing. “It’s too terrible to even imagine.”
They were starting to attract attention from the other employees, heads swiveling in their direction, even the customers outside.
“Look, I’ll go talk to her dad after work tonight,” Cole offered. He wanted Frank calm. Next thing you knew, the guy would call the police. Yet Cole also wanted to know why Andrea had suddenly gone off to visit her aunt. It was definitely odd.
“I’ll go with you,” Jami said. No hand-wringing now, she gave him a militant stare as if she figured he’d argue. “If you go by yourself, you’ll just scare the poor man to death.”
Whether she meant that as insult or not, Cole had to agree she was right. “Fine.”
She physically drew back. “Oh.” A beat of silence. She obviously thought she’d have to do more convincing. “Okay.”
Yeah, he had a whole set of mixed up feelings about Jami, about what they’d done the other night, about wanting to take things all the way or running off in the opposite direction in stark terror. About Stephie and the sucker punch when he’d seen Jami standing in her room. Despite all that, he was still a reasonable guy. “Shall we drive together?” he asked, his smile a little too wide.
“That would be fine,” she replied, with an equally broad smile that looked like a sleek feline baring her teeth to take a bite out of his ass.
She said a whole hell of a lot with that one smile.
He should have talked about the other night with her. He knew that, but he couldn’t say anything that would make her understand why they simply weren’t meant to be. All that rot he’d rhapsodized about in his melodies was just that, rot.
In the end, she hung around Easy Cheesy to wait for him until he got off work, though Frank forced him out early, and not because they weren’t busy. Frank just wanted answers. Sometimes his heart was bigger than his good sense.
Jami was silent on the way over except to tell him to turn left or right. He found he didn’t like her silence, yet he’d behaved like an ass, and he deserved it. Apologizing wasn’t an option, though, better for her to think he was an ass.
Even if her scent in the truck cab made him nuts.
All hell, why not admit the truth? He didn’t have the guts to apologize because he couldn’t handle discussing Stephie with her.
The light was on by the side of the Bagotti’s front door. The concrete path had a few cracks in it that could have caught his boot and tripped him if he weren’t looking. Its green tones on the weathered side, the house yearned for a paint job as badly as Cole’s did. Chips had flaked off the railing, speckling the porch concrete below, and the rattan chairs needed a white wash to restore them. Cole stood one step down behind Jami as she pushed the bell.
At her ring, there came the pounding of feet from inside, and the front door exploded inward.
“Jami.” The boy grabbed her hand, looked over his shoulder briefly, then dropped it. “I’m not supposed to yank on people,” he said with the slightly accented speech of Down’s Syndrome.
“That’s okay, Darryl,” Jami assured him.
He wasn’t a boy, but close to being a man, yet he had the most innocently beatific smile Cole had ever beheld in his life. This was Andrea’s brother.
“Who is it, Darryl?” a woman called out.
“It’s Jami, Mom, and—” He glanced up, his gaze rising along Cole’s full height as his eyes slowly widened in awe.
Jami, without even looking, flicked a hand behind her. “This is Cole.”
“Hi, Cole,” Darryl said with much less enthusiasm than he’d greeted Jami. He shifted on his feet, anxious, as if big men made him uneasy.
“It’s nice to meet you, Darryl.”
His mom appeared behind him in the open door. A little frayed around the edges, the woman’s apron was clean but faded. In fact, she was clean but faded, her green eyes washed out to a pale jade, her skin a tad sallow, and her hair, which might once have been a lustrous brown, was now limp and lackluster. It wasn’t merely age, which he guessed to be early fifties; she simply seemed worn down to the nub. She’d obviously had her children later in life, and her energy for dealing with a teenager and a mentally challenged young man had been sapped.
“My husband’s not here.” She spoke quickly, looking at Jami. Cole got a bad feeling.
“Actually,” Jami jumped right in, “we were looking for Andrea, Mrs. Bagotti.”
Part of him wanted to push past her to search the house, but the smarter, saner half knew it would go easier with a little woman-to-woman conversation first.
“She didn’t show up for work at Easy Cheesy today,” Jami went on. “We were worried about her.”
“She’s gone to visit her aunt.” Mrs. Bagotti sounded like a parrot repeating her husband’s words.
But what about school, and why was it so sudden? He kept his mouth shut for the time being, but he did take the step up on the porch to stand beside Jami.
“Could we come in a minute?” Jami smiled reassuringly. “Mr. Fetterman, Andrea’s boss down at Easy Cheesy, just wants to make sure everything is okay.”
The woman tugged on her son’s shoulder. “Darryl, go to your room.”
Bug-eyed, his gaze tracking them as he turned, he did what his mom told him.
She folded her arms beneath her breasts, and the action hunched her shoulders. “I really don’t like to let strangers in when my husband’s not home.”
“Yes, I understand completely, but about Andrea...” Jami let the sentence trail off in appeal.
Just like that, the woman’s face crumbled. She burst into tears and rubbed the heels of her hands against her eyes. “We don’t know where she is.” Her words slurred, then she drew in a deep breath. “We put her on the bus for my sister’s just before lunch, but she didn’t show up at the other end.”
Jesus, he’d known it was something bad.
Jami stepped over the threshold to put her arm around the woman’s frail shoulders. Cole followed more slowly as she led Mrs. Bagotti to the sofa.
The room was like the woman, spotless but faded. Puzzle pieces lay strewn over the carpet next to a large flat tray with a partial construction of...King Tut?
“Now let’s see what we can do to help, Mrs. Bagotti,” Jami said, her tone comforting as she talked on. Cole couldn’t make out every word, but he didn’t think that mattered. Right now, Jami needed to calm Andrea’s mother.
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Damn, she was amazing. While he felt helpless before a woman’s tears, Jami jumped to give aid. She was probably one of those women who never mussed a hair while single-handedly plucking a puppy from the icy jaws of a raging river.
Why her fiancé dumped her, he couldn’t fathom. If only...
He didn’t dare think about any if onlys.
Something prickled the back of his neck. Darryl stood at the end of the hallway out of his mom’s sight. He rubbed a Rubik’s Cube round and round over his chest as he listened to the low murmur of conversation. Cole figured he was watching over her. With his dad out, Darryl probably considered himself the man of the family. Cole smiled, yet Darryl merely blinked. Maybe the kid was right to be wary of strangers. Especially him. Cole didn’t have a great track record with kids.
Finally, Mrs. Bagotti wiped her eyes with her apron hem. “I’m sorry.”
Stroking the woman’s back, Jami made a few more soothing sounds, then she went for the gusto. “Is your husband at the police station reporting her missing?”
Mrs. Bagotti shook her head, and this time she dabbed her nose on the apron.
Jami’s chest rose with a deep breath. “Don’t you think you should call the police?”
“My husband said no.”
Cole wanted to smash something. Didn’t this woman get it? Her daughter could have been kidnapped off that bus. Or worse. He wouldn’t even think about what that worse could be.
Chapter Twenty-three
Mrs. Bagotti’s hands twisted with nerves and fear. “My husband went to the bus station. She did have a ticket, and she did get on the bus. So he’s going to every stop along the way to see if anyone remembers her getting off before Fresno.”
Cole clenched his fists as Jami calmed herself with a deep breath. She would not steamroll the woman; that wouldn’t get them anywhere. She needed to remain calm, rational, but persistent. “Do you think Andrea ran away?”
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