“Well, you’re not handling it.” Marty turned to Christopher. “Look, you’re upsetting her. Why don’t you leave?”
Yes, he should leave. Rita pulled the Kleenex away from her nose and saw the spot of bright red blood. Why was this happening? Her nose only bled in one situation. “I really don’t know anything, and if you won’t answer my questions about Brian’s condition, you should leave.” Dammit, she wouldn’t be able to find out on her own, though.
He stood there chewing his gum as though contemplating throwing her over his shoulder and hauling her off for further interrogation. Despite her nosebleed, that thought sparked something primal inside her. She squelched it and turned away.
“Rita.”
The way his voice wrapped around her name shivered down her spine. She didn’t want to turn and face him again, but she did anyway. He handed her a business card.
“I’ll be at the address and phone number on the back. In New Orleans.” He paused, his narrowed eyes telling her he knew she was holding something back. “If you decide you want to talk, call me.” His voice softened, thick as honey. “You’re the key to this mystery, Rita Brooks. I feel it in my gut. And I will find out the truth.”
He seemed to weigh whether to say more, but her friends must have swayed him. He left, without a scuffle, without Barb having to call security as she was poised to do. His words, soft though they were, pounded through Rita’s system louder than her heartbeat.
“What was that all about?” Barb asked.
“Just a misunderstanding,” Rita said, waving it off as she walked to her office.
Marty wouldn’t be so easy to deal with. “Spill,” she said as soon as Rita closed the door to her office. “And don’t tell me it’s just a coincidence that the name of his brother is the same as the one you said in your sleep. I saw the look on your face when you saw Christopher LaPorte. You were spooked—enough to get a nosebleed.”
Rita slumped in her chair, still trying to get a handle on it all. Marty was waiting, and by the way she tapped her fingers against her crossed arms, she wasn’t going to wait patiently.
She told Marty about meeting Brian through her eBay auction and their developing relationship. “It was nothing kinky. In fact, it was rather sweet. Romantic. He talks like a hero from a historical romance novel. He lives in New Orleans and manages a hotel. Marty, he made me feel so good. About myself, life, my future. I told him things I haven’t told anyone else. The fact that we were talking on the phone helped a lot. It was part of the appeal, I’m sure. But it was him, too. We were friends with a touch of something else. I was so sure he was going to change my life. I could feel it.” She could see Marty’s expression fall with each word. “I didn’t tell you because I knew you’d either warn me about all the crazies out there or think I was desperate. For the first time, I was being adventurous, and I liked it. I didn’t want you to talk sense into me.”
“You were desperate. And I would have warned you. There are a lot of crazies out there. Why would you have a relationship with someone you’d never even met?”
“It was Brian. And the physical distance made it easier somehow.” Easier to get past her fear of intimacy. “For the first time in my twenty-eight years, I felt ready to embark on an actual romantic relationship. Brian was the only man who has ever given me a sensual charge and made me feel safe at the same time. He bolstered my confidence and made me wonder if I could get over my little problem.” She dabbed at her nose and was relieved to see no blood on the tissue. “I was ready to fall in love with him before my accident. A little scared, but ready.”
“And you never told me, you little bugger. I share all my idiosyncrasies with you, and you hold back something like this. We’re supposed to be best friends, equally sharing our dreams, pain, and secrets.”
“I know.” It wasn’t fair, she knew that. “I would have told you once we met.” Rita felt that ache she’d been feeling whenever she thought of Brian lately, only now it was two-fold. “He wanted to meet, even invited me to New Orleans or offered to come here. I kept putting him off, but I was about to invite him here. When I didn’t hear from him, I thought he’d changed his mind or found someone else. Then Christopher LaPorte shows up. Yeah, I was spooked. He looks so much like Brian. It was just a shock, that and the news about Brian’s suicide attempt. It was too much to handle at once.” That must be why I had the nosebleed. “I can’t believe he tried to kill himself. I mean it doesn’t feel right. We talked on New Year’s Eve. He called me from the hotel. He sounded happy.”
Marty seemed to accept everything. That was only because Rita had left out the important parts: the man she’d seen in the gray place…and the fact that she’d never seen Brian LaPorte.
CHAPTER 3
Plain out, the woman was holding something back. Christopher slid into his winter coat as he walked to his car. Her reaction to Brian’s name screamed guilt and then shock when he dropped the news about the coma, and finally concern that went deeper than a casual, perfunctory interest.
She hardly looked like a heartbreaker, though. A professional woman with initials after her name. Soft and flighty as a hummingbird. Not Brian’s type, at least the type he used to go after. Brian only went for prettiest, best-connected girls, the kind Daddy would approve of. This Rita would not send a man into the abyss of suicide. It had nothing to do with her plain-pretty looks, or the soft curves he detected beneath her business attire. In those light blue eyes of hers, he saw vulnerability. The way her face paled when she saw him, the way her body stiffened. He’d been sure she knew something, but he didn’t like the way he’d used her trepidation against her.
You are used to intimidating people, after all. And you’re good at it, a voice reminded him. Normally it didn’t bother him.
He thought about trying to talk to Rita again, maybe wait at her apartment until she got home. He knew the information highway better than any virtual road. More to the point, he knew the by-ways that allowed him access into the private life of Rita Brooks. He glanced at the address he’d scrawled on a piece of paper, her home address.
Her email had come into Brian’s inbox last week. Just a few words: Brian, haven’t heard from you in a while. I was in the hospital but am home now. If you want to break things off, please at least let me know so I won’t worry. Simply signed Rita. The weird thing was, there were no other emails from her in his inbox. Old phone bills were gone, too. Christopher had tried to login into the account, but he wasn’t authorized.
He’d let her go for now. He’d been away from Brian too long. It was time to go the airport, back home to New Orleans.
No, not home. Not in thirteen years. Just a place now, a city torn between old-line social traditions, the past, and trying to rebuild to its past glory.
Maybe this whole Rita thing had been a waste of time. When that email had come in, he had wanted it to mean something, wanted this woman to give him the reason why Brian had tried to throw his life away.
Maybe you just wanted a reason to get away from that hospital and the lifeless form of your brother. Away from the realization that the man you’ve hated your whole life might die…and that you were the wrong person to be standing vigil by his bedside.
By the time he landed in New Orleans, it was late Wednesday night. The City that Care Forgot was gearing up for Mardi Gras. Natives had mixed feelings about the festivities that held New Orleans in its grip for the weeks between the Twelfth Night of Christmas and Shrove Tuesday, better known as Fat Tuesday. Those who stood to profit from it, of course, loved it. The krewes—the social clubs that went back decades—were getting ready to put on their parades, the culmination of a year’s worth of preparation, planning, and pageantry. The police dreaded it, the same way Christopher did, but for different reasons. He’d never been able to shake off the annual family ritual that had forever tainted the holiday. Or the bloodshed on his last New Orleans Mardi Gras.
The flow of traffic was already thickening like gravy. He fought impatienc
e as he headed to the hospital. Classic Aerosmith pounded from the stereo. He hadn’t seen Brian in a week, the time it had taken to track down Rita Brooks and to stop in Atlanta and cram in three business meetings for his website design business.
Sasha, the respiratory therapist, had Brian on his side and was tapping his back. To promote the movement of secretions in the lungs, Christopher remembered. She was talking softly to him, so softly he couldn’t hear what she was saying. He knew more about bodily functions and the risks of long-term unconsciousness than he ever wanted to.
He walked up behind her and caught the words, “come out of this–” before she turned and jumped. “You startled me!” She was trim woman in her thirties with blue eyes that held an almost too-bright shine. He thought she looked familiar, like someone from school maybe, but didn’t care enough to ask. She laughed a bit nervously. “I was talking to him, just making conversation. How was your trip?”
“Just got in. Anything changed?”
She shook her head, repositioning Brian to prone. “Brain injuries are the most frustrating. We don’t know how long he’ll be under or what he’ll be like when he comes out.” She patted Brian’s arm. “But you’ll be fine, won’t you? And you’ll tell us what was going on in that pretty head of yours before this happened.” She jotted down some information on his chart and hung it up. “Talk to him.” She patted Christopher’s arm the same way as she walked past him. “He likes to hear your voice.”
“How can you tell?”
“Just watch that monitor. The transducer measures his heart rate and blood pressure. Sometimes I see a change when I’m talking to him.” She started to leave, then paused at the door. “Did you…find what you were looking for?”
He shook his head, and she left the room.
He felt that familiar tightness in his chest every time he walked close to Brian. He opened his mouth, closed it again. Looked at the monitor. He wasn’t sure what he should feel. The golden boy was as pale as the sheets and blankets that covered his body. He looked like a robot, with all the tubes and wires and monitors. His eyes were taped over so they wouldn’t dry out. An endotracheal tube ran through his vocal cords and down his throat to assist his breathing. His white teeth weren’t showing in the cocky grin Christopher remembered. What did he say to a man he hadn’t spoken with in years? This man who wasn’t anything like the brother he had known?
On the surface, he had seemed a man with it all: handsome, polite and friendly, well off. But something had happened, slowly, according to those who knew him best. He had retreated from the society he had once thrived in.
Christopher wanted to know why…and how Rita Brooks fit into it.
She watched Christopher LaPorte standing by Brian’s bedside. He’d gone to Boston. He’d probably talked to Rita Brooks. Damn. If only that last email had been intercepted like the rest…if Rita had died in the accident. So many ifs. So far Christopher had accepted the attempted suicide theory. For his sake, she hoped nothing changed.
She’d been considering whether to return to Boston and finish Rita off but hadn’t wanted to leave Brian for too long in case he started to come around. So far, Rita hadn’t been a threat. If she came here…if she came, well, then everything would change. And Rita would have to die.
Rita forsook her comforting evening routine of immersing herself in Supernatural, Angel reruns, and the latest un-reality show, as she called them. Her reality was much more bizarre. First she searched the Internet for a news story about Brian’s fall. Though she found the New Orleans’ papers on-line, the articles weren’t accessible. Then she’d done a search on comas and spent four hours reading documented stories of recovered coma patients with memories of a different plane of existence. These people weren’t nuts. They were respected professionals who had experienced something incredible and strange.
No matter how unreal it all seemed, she couldn’t ignore the facts, and those facts screamed that Brian had tried to find her for a reason. Maybe people’s souls went somewhere while they were in a coma. The gray place. Maybe all those people she’d seen were also in comas. But while no one else was making any contact, he had sought her out. It was important. She closed her eyes and remembered how he’d squeezed her shoulders and stared into her eyes.
What did you tell me, Brian?
He found her. Put his hands on her shoulders. Her body seized as a barrage of images flooded her mind: the flash of a long knife blade, blood, everything so fast she couldn’t pick much more out. She could feel them, each image attached with an emotion: regret, forgiveness, sorrow…fear. This time she was able to cling to the last image. Fear pounded through her and made her hands clammy. She tried to call back the image. A dark night. A gold mask with black feathers highlighting green eyes. A physical struggle. Then the sensation of falling.
She slapped her hand to her chest, her eyes wide. If this connection was real, if that was Brian LaPorte, if she could believe any of it…
“He didn’t jump. Someone pushed him. That’s why he found me.”
Brian must know that everyone thought he’d jumped, probably because his loved ones held his hand and asked him why. Their voices pulled him from the gray place just as Marty’s voice had pulled her. So he’d found her and showed her these images.
Something kept niggling at her. She recalled the images again, trying to hold onto them frame by frame. They were as slippery as mercury. What was it that bothered her even more than the figure pushing Brian off the roof?
The mask.
She felt chilled as she pictured it: gold mask, black feathers, green eyes. She’d seen it before, she was sure of it. She closed her eyes, willing her brain to remember. The mask, the mask. Where had she seen it?
Her brain wouldn’t supply the answer. She leaned forward and rubbed her forehead. Brian had sought her out in another plane of existence. Did she believe that?
“Yes. I don’t know.”
That’s why she needed to go to New Orleans and see him for herself. If he was the man she’d seen while in a coma, then she would go to the police and convince them to investigate his fall.
Her heart was hammering now at the prospect, but she had no choice. Because if Brian was pushed, that meant someone had tried to kill him. Which also meant that someone might try to finish the job.
CHAPTER 4
Rita had two nights in New Orleans. After that every hotel room in or near town was booked as Mardi Gras celebration kicked into full gear. Joyce, her travel agent, suggested she wait until after Mardi Gras, but Rita couldn’t take the chance. Since making up her mind two nights ago, she felt an urgency she couldn’t describe. Joyce had pulled some strings and a chunk of Rita’s bank account and gotten her the last seat on a Thursday afternoon flight.
Sandwiched between a young woman and a middle-aged man on the Atlanta-New Orleans leg of the flight, Rita spent her time sketching the mask. Finally, she put away the pad and tried not to think about it for a while. The hum of the engines lulled her into a half-sleep state where images of the last few weeks scrolled across the movie screen of her mind.
She saw scenes from purgatory, the gray place, and her mother sitting next to her at the hospital. Officer Potter’s voice echoed in her mind: The other vehicle came up beside you as though he were going to pass but then slammed into the side of your car. The scene sprang into her mind.
A black SUV coming up beside her on wet roads. An idiot in a big hurry to pass her. But no, he didn’t want to pass her. He slammed into her car. She fought with the wheel. Why was he doing this? She looked his way for a second. In that second, she saw light reflecting off the gold of a mask and a spray of feathers.
“No, it can’t be. Can’t…”
As soon as she disembarked, she pulled out her cell phone and called Potter. Once she had him on the line, she introduced herself. “Any news on the case?” The last she knew, the police hadn’t been able to connect the teens to her accident. When he gave her the expected negative answer, she said, �
�I may have remembered something from the accident. Was the vehicle that hit me a black SUV?”
“Yes, I believe a black Ford Explorer, but I’d have to check.”
“I think there was only one person in the car. He did try to run me off the road. It was definitely intentional. And there’s something else. He was wearing a mask.”
“A mask? Like a Ronald Reagan mask? Ski mask?”
“No, this one was gold and had black feathers.” The masks were blurring in her mind now. She wasn’t sure if the one she pictured was from the accident or the one she’d seen while in a coma.
“Like a Mardi Gras mask, you mean?”
“Yes.” Mardi Gras. New Orleans. “That’s exactly the kind. Did you find anything in the SUV?”
“I’d have to look at the full report, though I know off-hand we found nothing useful. The owner of the vehicle has three children, so we found a lot of hairs, threads, toys…you name it, it was in there.”
“How about a feather?”
“I’ll have to check on that.”
She gave him her cell number.
“Is there anything else?” he asked, sensing the hesitation in her voice probably.
“Uh…no. Nothing I’m sure about. I’ll let you know if I come up with anything solid.”
Like that this same person had tried to kill a friend of hers in New Orleans. Then it hit her: He tried to kill me, too. She could hardly choke out the word goodbye. It took her five minutes to catch her breath as she made her way to baggage claim. She rubbed her sweaty palms over the soft fabric of her pants. Her matching blue shoes peeked out from beneath her cuffs. Keep it together. Brian needs you. That’s why he came to you.
The revelers had already been revving up on the plane, wearing their shiny beads and throwing back shots with smuggled liquor. They made imaginary toasts to each other at the baggage claim, strangers united in the spirit of celebration. Why did it have to be Mardi Gras, where fantasy and reality twisted together, where good became evil, and evil masqueraded as good?
What She Doesn't Know Page 3