Out of Nowhere

by Beverly Bird

  It shouldn’t matter, she chided herself. She hardly knew him. But she did know how to deal with hurt. “Wow. Aren’t you just the investigator? I’m so impressed my knees are weak. Can I go home now?”

  “In a minute. We need to settle something first.”

  “We’ve settled everything.” She put her own palms on the desk and leaned toward him so they were eye to eye. It took everything she had.

  “Not quite. I’m thinking now that Carmen’s killer has the Rose.”

  She thought about it and her heart stuttered a bit. “You think he was still in the house when I was?”

  “Yes.”

  “I hid in the pantry and then he picked up the stone once I was gone?”

  “If you don’t have the Rose, and if it wasn’t in the room, then that’s the only way it wants to work.”

  “If you find the killer, then I get my ruby back.”

  “And you get your heart’s desire. What’s your heart’s desire, Tara?”

  She lost her breath for a moment at the heat in his eyes. “That has nothing to do with anything.”

  “You said earlier that the ruby gives it to the woman who holds the stone.”

  “Well, I make my own good fortune.” She needed to move away from the desk. His eyes held her.

  “Of course,” he said quietly, “there’s also the matter of the curse on your head.”

  “There’s no curse. I didn’t give the Rose away.”

  “Ah, but you lost it. It flew right out of your hand. Doesn’t that scare you?”

  “Cluck again and I’ll deck you.”

  “Darlin’, my point is we’re on the same side.”

  Why, she thought, did those words feel like a caress? Her voice went a little hoarse. “There’s nothing more I can do for you.”

  “There is. I just want you available.”

  Heat slid through her. “For what?”

  “Questions. Answers. Information.”

  “You should have taped my statement. You’ve forgotten everything already, haven’t you?”

  “Work with me, Tara. I know nothing about that gem, but I know it will lead me to the murderer. I need you on this.” It was, he thought, as good a reason as any to keep her involved.

  Tara almost shivered but she bore down on the reaction. She had to break this moment. “If I do all that, can I go home?”

  He grinned. The look reminded her of a hot August sun settling into the secrets of the night.

  “Darlin’, if you do all that, you can have anything you want.”

  “Poor thing. She’s tired,” Fox said twenty minutes later, as though being chased up the corridor had worn the dog out.

  Tara looked over her shoulder into the pocket of his car’s back seat. The dozing Chihuahua cracked open one eye and growled at her.

  “Oh, shut up,” Tara said. “I’m bigger than you are and I know how to hold a grudge. I could decide to hurt you.”

  The dog’s growl changed to an outright snarl.

  Tara turned forward again, still not sure how she had ended up in Fox’s car. She agreed that cooperation was in the best interest of both of them but that didn’t deal with the fact that personally, on an inner level, Fox Whittington still made her…feel.

  She’d told him the truth to make him go away. Now she was in his Mustang.

  “That dog seems to understand English,” he said.

  “Sure.” She was grateful for what felt like a safe topic. “And I speak Swahili. By the way, it is the same dog.”

  “I doubt it. Let’s look at this analytically. What are the odds?”

  “About seventy million to one, just like that big interstate lottery. But someone always wins it eventually.”

  He chuckled. It made her own mouth want to curl into a smile. “So let’s say that I accept the fact that she was in Stephen Carmen’s library with you,” he continued. “Why? What was she doing there?”

  “At first I thought Stephen had gotten her to guard the Rose.”

  They both looked at the little dog in the back seat at the same time. “Nah,” they said simultaneously.

  “Well, she got out of the house in all that commotion and went wandering off,” Tara decided. “That we know. The front door was wide open, remember?”

  “But you’re talking Chestnut Hill to center city. That’s a long stroll.”

  “It happens all the time. Dogs can go great distances when they’ve a mind to.”

  In the back seat, the Chihuahua that Rafe Montiel had called Belle gave a high-pitched bark of agreement.

  “That,” Fox said, “is definitely weird. She…responds.”

  “Hey, you’re the one taking her home.”

  “If I drop her off at the pound, you know what will happen to her.” He dragged a finger across his throat. “Sayonara, Fido.”

  She would not laugh again. Tara laughed. “There are dog owners all over America who started out just that way.”

  “Not me. I happen to know a lot of people through my work. I’ll find a good home for her, but it’s not going to be mine.”

  “Is this some kind of Southern commandment? Thou shall not own a dog?”

  “How do you know I’m from the south?”

  “Oh, please.” She laughed again, then mimicked him. “Excuse me, ma’am.”

  “I do not have an accent.”

  “You have an accent.”

  “I’ve lived in Philadelphia for nearly eighteen years.”

  “Well, your heart is deep in the heart of Dixie.”

  Fox grinned. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d enjoyed a conversation with a woman this much. For everything he said, she found a way to come right back at him.

  Then he ruined it. “You were born and raised in Philly,” he recalled aloud.

  Her voice stiffened. “I never told you that.”

  Fox waited a beat, thinking it through. Honesty was always the best policy, at least to hear his mother tell it. “It’s the twenty-first century, darlin’. Every major police department has a good profiler on hand.”

  “You put a profiler on me?” It violated her. It terrified her. “To do what? Explain what I think, what I want, what I feel?”

  “That’s a layman’s misconception.”

  “Then what does a profiler do?”

  “Well, that. But they also put together the pieces of your life.”

  She began shaking. “How dare you?”

  “You were a suspect!”

  “Right. We went all through that. You thought I killed Stephen.”

  “I wanted to learn as much about you as I could so I could determine whether or not you killed Stephen!” He was angry. “You sneaked out of his house! How the hell much more incriminating do you want to make it?”

  “You just swore. You hardly ever swear.”

  He threw a sideways look at her. She had a really fine throat, he thought, long and elegant, but he was starting to have quite a few fantasies about choking her. “I swore because you irritate me,” he said. “You just don’t see sense.” But that, he realized, wasn’t entirely true.

  A week ago, he’d taken her for cold, calculating and cunning—a woman who would only see sense at the cost of any gentler emotion. Then he’d watched her eyes turn vulnerable while she’d picked anchovies off her salad. She’d given three thousand dollars’ worth of priceless toys to children she would never meet. She’d said things like she was the moon and the stars and the earth.

  He’d started discovering her layers. And he wanted to keep peeling them away. He wanted to get to the bottom of her, to find the truth at her soul.

  “What did you find out about me?” she asked, pulling his train of thought back.

  Fox kept his voice neutral. “When your mother died, she probably hadn’t seen your real father since the day you were conceived.”

  “Wrong, Sherlock.” Her voice was sharp as a blade. “I last saw my father when I was three.”

  He thought about that. He was definitely cat
ching on to her inferences. “You saw him. But did your mother?”

  She shot him a look that was full of dark, angry fire. “He caught up with me at the playground with my nanny. It was the first and last time I remember seeing him.”

  But she did remember, he thought, from an age when most memories were lost, or murky at best. The man’s visit had made an impact on her. “Scott Carmen never adopted you, never stepped in to fill the void.”

  “I can’t imagine why.”

  That attitude he thought he understood. “He never treated you like a daughter.”

  “Au contraire, Mr. Detective. He treated me precisely the way he treated his own son, which is to say that we were Mom’s responsibility and he had nothing to do with us. I’m sure there were times when he couldn’t even remember where Stephen came from, much less a scrawny little kid who came part and parcel with his bride.”

  There was a lot of bitterness in her tone. Fox wondered if she realized it. “You grew up wealthy.”

  “Scott and my mother were wealthy. I enjoyed the trickle-down effect. They sent me to college and I made my own silver spoon with Concepts, my marketing firm.”

  “You had an inheritance.”

  She paused a beat. “Not the single piece of it I wanted.”

  He wasn’t sure how to respond to that, then it didn’t matter. He turned onto Poplar Drive to find blue and red lights rolling rhythmically over the front of her high-rise. P.P.D. patrol cars clogged the street. There was little doubt in Fox’s mind that it all had something to do with the woman by his side.

  “Stay here.” He shot the Shelby into a no-parking space, hitting the brakes hard, and Tara leapt out of the Mustang. “Damn it! Wait a minute!” But she was already well ahead of him. He knew she wouldn’t have listened anyway.

  A police officer approached, trying to wave Fox out of the parking spot. Fox flashed his badge. “My case. Back off.” He ran to the entrance of the building. He found another cop in the lobby who kept pace with him. “What’s happened?”

  “There was a break-and-enter at unit 737. The intruder left the door wide open. Building security noticed it and called us but whoever decided to visit seems to be long gone.”

  Fox caught up with Tara at the elevator and the officer fell behind. She was stabbing her finger on the button. The doors slid shut as Fox stepped inside and the car moved upward with a small jolt.

  “It’s my place,” she whispered. “Isn’t it? The trouble is at my apartment.”

  “Yes.” When a sound of pure distress caught in her throat, he added, “It’s okay. I’ll take care of it. Calm down.”

  She rounded on him. “I am not some shrinking, Southern, hothouse flower! Where did you get the idea that I need you to take care of me?”

  Because Adelia always had. And because somehow, the lines between them were blurring. Because it was his nature to protect. All of it made his heart step up its pace and it wasn’t a comfortable feeling. He didn’t answer.

  They got off the elevator and jogged up the hall to her apartment. The sleek, cold lines of her living room were shattered. All the leather was slashed. The glass tabletops were pulverized. Even one of the windows was broken as though a fist had punched through the pane in fury. Tara didn’t seem to care. She made a single strangled sound and glanced around once, then she tore off down the hallway.

  The living room was nothing to her, Fox realized, but something important was down that hall.

  He followed her and knew immediately that here was the woman she really was. He watched her sink to her knees beside the bed, cradling the remains of something that looked like it might have been Mickey Mouse. A low keening sound came from her throat but he was so taken aback by what he found in her bedroom that he couldn’t immediately think of words that would comfort her.

  There were ivory-faced dolls strewn everywhere, wearing ripped and shredded satin and lace. This was her personal collection, he thought; here were the pieces she’d kept from what she bought at Toyland. There was a hope chest against one wall and a few of the dolls were heaped upon it. A lost arm lay dismembered and forgotten on the floor. Another’s head had been wrenched off.

  Photographs had been snatched from the walls and flung at random. The backs were torn out of most of the frames. One picture, already cracked with age, looked worse for a heel that had ground it into the carpet. Fox recognized Letitia Cole Carmen from newspaper photographs, and Anastasia Romney from her years on the stage. There was a very old, murky photo of a woman with ink-black hair and knowing eyes that he could only imagine was Tzigane. A spiderweb crack in the glass distorted the lower half of her face, but he had a feeling that her smile was wise as well.

  A string of pearls had escaped the carnage. It hung from an iron post of her headboard and that got to him most of all. The pearls weren’t artfully displayed but dangled there as though they had been in her hand recently and she had kept them close by in case she wanted to touch them again. He wondered who they had belonged to and knew it would be somebody dear.

  Here was everything her profile hadn’t told him.

  She looked up at him. “Find this guy, Blue Eyes.”

  “My name is Fox.” He felt absurdly compelled to make her say it but she didn’t seem to hear him.

  “He has the Rose,” she said, her voice cracking. “He killed Stephen. And now he broke Mickey into a million pieces. I want him.”

  “So do I, Dark Eyes.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “My name is Tara.”

  Something told him he was going to have a hard time forgetting that, even when this mess was long figured out and over.

  Chapter 7

  She needed to keep busy, Tara thought.

  One cushion had managed to escape total demolition and she picked it up and set it aside. She struggled to right the sofa.

  “You’re going to obliterate any fingerprint evidence left on that leather,” Fox warned. But then he came to help her.

  She looked at him quickly, surprised. His gaze was level on hers as though to remind her she wasn’t alone here. Tara steeled herself against a sweep of helpless yearning to believe it and pulled her eyes away. She laid the cushion on the sofa frame and sat on it. Then Rafe Montiel came into the apartment like a bull who had just seen red.

  Fox started to join his partner, then his gaze was tugged back to Tara. Her shoulders were hunched, her hands pressed between her knees. Her head was bowed and her dark hair spilled froward to hide her features. No, he thought, there was nothing cold, calculating or outrageous about this woman now. He motioned at Rafe to start sifting through things without him, then he went and knelt in front of the sofa.

  There were words he could have said to comfort her and he knew them all. But he found her fingers instead, prying her hand free from the vice of her knees to hold it in both of his. He didn’t know which part of this crushed her most so he waited for her to tell him.

  A single tear dropped on the pale silk drawstring pants she wore. “This is my home,” she said finally.

  “I know.”

  Her head finally snapped up. “No. You don’t. I made it home. It was mine.”

  “It’s still here. This is all fixable. This was no earthquake, no fire, no mudslide.”

  She jerked her hand from his—mostly, she thought, because it felt too good there. He’d known, somehow he’d known, that words wouldn’t comfort her as much as that strong hand to hold on to. She surged to her feet, then she spun back to him because she needed him to understand. He’d once thought she was a killer so he had to know now that life and all that went into it was precious to her.

  “I never had a home before. The house in Chestnut Hill—that was Stephen’s, his father’s, his family’s. I bought this with money I earned, not the inheritance.” She looked again at her wrecked and ruined living room and one hand came up to scrape her hair back from her forehead. “It was mostly empty for the better part of the first year. I didn’t want to rush out and buy furniture just to fill i
t. I bought one piece at a time so it would all be perfect. I put my stamp on it because no one could stop me.” Her voice lowered a notch. “I did it one piece at a time.”

  Fox thought about it. “All that waiting for the incredibly homey feel of glass,” he said deliberately.

  She looked at him sharply, then she gave a shaky laugh. “You’re good.”

  “Thank you.”

  “For a minute there, I almost felt sorry for myself.”

  “Not your style.”

  “I keep telling you that you don’t know what my style is.”

  And she was hellbent and determined to keep it that way, he thought suddenly.

  The Tara-rooms of this apartment were hidden in the back, he realized again. Her date book was filled to brimming with engagements she hadn’t once kept in all the time he’d watched her. She’d sent the toys to Father O’Neill’s church—and he would bet that they were an anonymous gift. She kept an emotional distance, one so seamless and complete that it took a man a while to realize that what he saw wasn’t necessarily what he got.

  Rafe chose that moment to come back into the room. “What I want to know is who the hell has that rock?”

  Tara moaned softly and sat down again hard.

  That was the catch, Fox thought. Tara didn’t have it. He didn’t have it, as she had seemed to think he did. It wasn’t in Carmen’s library. And now, looking around at the destruction of her apartment, it seemed a safe guess that Carmen’s killer didn’t have it, either.

  He had undoubtedly come to search for it when he didn’t get it at Stephen’s. It made such sweet, neat sense, Fox thought—sort of like the stepsister being the one to kill Carmen in the first place. And like that first scenario, it bothered him.

  “Stephen’s death and—before that—your fight with him for the ruby got a great deal of press,” he said finally. “It could be that someone broke in here to steal the stone, assuming you would have it now that Carmen is gone.”

  “No,” Tara said sharply. “Whoever killed Stephen wants the Rose as much as I do.” She looked around wildly at what that killer had done to her world. “He might have been there when I found the body but he didn’t pick the ruby up off the floor. He thinks I did. He can’t possibly realize I lost it again or he wouldn’t have come here.”