Ethan was beginning to be awfully glad he was having this conversation. "No?"
"Uh-uh. There just, like, friends, you know? I mean, if Abby needs a guy to go with her to some foundation function or something, she calls David."
"Have you met David?" he asked.
"Sure. He's a loser. He's got beady eyes, and his clothes are, like, sick—you know?"
Ethan decided he didn't need interpretation for the teen slang. It stood nicely on its own. "So you don't think Abby was serious about him?"
Rachel snorted. "Are you kidding? Abby would never go for a guy like that." She shook her head. "But it's different with you. She likes you." Rachel gave him an affirming nod.
"I like her too."
"She gets all, like, hairy when you're around."
"Hairy?"
"You know. Like at Carlton's party. She, like, swooped on Harrison the minute he got cranky. The last time I saw Abby do that was when one of my teachers told her I needed therapy. She gets all crazy and defensive—like she wants to deck somebody."
"Ever seen her do it?"
"Slug someone? No. But I've seen her come close a couple of times."
"Your sister is pretty fierce about the people she cares for."
"And you," Rachel said. "She's fierce about you."
Ethan nodded. "I've noticed."
"So I was just wondering… I mean, if you guys aren't doing it, then what are you doing?"
"There's more to a relationship than sex," he said bluntly.
"I know."
"Glad to hear it."
She drummed her fingertips on the table. "I wasn't talking about that. I just want to know what you think is going to happen with you and Abby."
The look of determination in her eyes finally made him realize what Rachel was after. She was asking what his intentions were toward her sister. Ethan thought it over, then sat up straight in his chair. "I'm deeply involved with your sister," he told her.
"How deeply?"
"Long-term deeply."
Rachel contemplated his answer. "What are you going do about it?"
"We haven't decided yet. We're working that out."
"You live in California," Rachel pointed out.
"At the moment."
Her eyes widened. "Would you move here?"
"I don't know. How would you feel if I did?"
"It could be okay. Kind of weird, maybe. It's always been me and Abby."
Not a ringing endorsement. "Do you remember anything about your parents, Rachel?"
"Not really. It's always been harder for Abby."
"Do you remember anything about the night they were killed?" he asked carefully.
She shook her head. "Sometimes I think I should. Everybody said I was supposed to be really freaked or something. That whole closet thing—" She waved a hand. "I don't know. It's like it never really happened to me."
"No bad dreams?"
"No. I'm not even afraid of the dark."
"It's okay, you know—not remembering," he said gently.
She looked away. "It might have helped them catch the guy if I could have told them something."
"They put a lot of pressure on you, didn't they?"
"I guess. I do remember that we went to the police station a lot. I didn't like it there."
He could well understand that. "People would ask you a lot of questions."
"Yes. And they usually wouldn't let Abby stay with me."
Ethan could only imagine the terror that a three-year-old child must have felt. "When did it stop?"
"Abby made them. She had this huge argument with this one guy who was around all the time. She told him he couldn't talk to me anymore."
"And things got better."
"Yeah. Abby went to work a little after that. I was in day care a lot. She made me see a shrink for a while, just to make sure I wasn't, like, totally freaked."
Ethan nodded, thoughtful. "Do you ever talk about this with your friends, Rachel?"
"It comes up sometimes. I mean, nobody else ever had anything like this happen. They start asking a lot of questions when they realize I don't have parents—just Abby."
Just Abby, he thought. The center of her universe. No wonder his relationship with her sister made Rachel nervous. "You're always going to have Abby, you know," he told her.
"Sure. I know." She didn't sound convinced.
"Even if you get stuck with me in the bargain, it doesn't mean you won't have Abby."
She scrunched up her face. "I understand. It's just that… I don't really know what to do. I mean, Abby's never had a boyfriend before. Not like a real one. So it's kind of different."
Ethan heard the slightly wistful note in her voice and recognized it immediately. Loneliness. How well he knew the feeling. Rachel had had Abby to herself for a very long time, and the thought of sharing Abby was making her understandably anxious. "I can understand that."
"You're okay, though. It's not like you're a creep or anything."
He bit back a smile. "Thanks."
Rachel shook her head. "I didn't mean it like that."
"I know."
"My friend Barb, her mother is divorced. And Barb says that when her mother started seeing her stepfather, they kind of expected her to stay out of the way a lot." She pinned Ethan with a look too shrewd for her thirteen years. "Barb was always making plans to come over to our house and stuff—like she didn't want to be home on weekends."
"Must have been a pain for Barb."
"Yeah. I wouldn't like that," she told him.
"Then don't do it." He held her gaze. "No one wants you to."
She seemed to process what he'd said. "But, um, don't you guys want to, you know—"
"Sometimes," he admitted. "But I'm not going to kick you out of the house because of it."
"Oh."
A fragile bridge of trust seemed to have spanned the gulf between them. "However," he added, sensing that Rachel had exhausted the line of questioning, "there are a couple of rules."
Her expression turned wary. "What kind of rules?"
With a slight smile and a bit of surprise at his insight, he placed both of his palms on the table. "For starters," he said, "boyfriends have to be fed."
Rachel looked momentarily confused; then he saw her lips begin to twitch. "Fed?"
"Yes. That's a secret about men, Rach—you might as well learn it now. We're always less cranky when you feed us."
"Are you telling me that you're dating Abby so I'll cook for you?"
"No, but it's a definite plus." He tilted his head to one side. "I mean, think of the money I save not having to take her out all the time."
Rachel giggled. "Yeah, but you have to fly in from California."
He shrugged. "A small price to pay for your cooking."
"Wait until Abby sticks you with the grocery bill."
That made him laugh. "Expensive?"
"Huge," Rachel told him. "Monsieur Billaud only knows recipes with gourmet ingredients. I'm glad he pays me for working in the restaurant, 'cause otherwise there's no way we could afford the food." She gave Ethan a conspiratorial look. "Did you know that you can spend eighteen dollars a pound for certain kinds of steak?" She sounded horrified.
"I've heard."
Rachel shook her head. "I mean, Monsieur Billaud is really cool, mostly, but he's kind of freakazoid about stuff like that. I kind of have to seriously doubt that a T-bone from some butcher named Gaston is really all that different than a T-bone from Sam's Chop Shop."
"It's probably not. You're paying for the fact that he has a French name."
"Whatever. That's just bogus."
Ethan laughed. "Rachel, you're going to make some guy a great wife someday."
She shook her head. "I substituted cheaper pork loin once, and Monsieur never even knew the difference."
"No kidding?"
Her expression was sheepish. "No. There was this pair of shoes I wanted—Abby told me I had to pay for them myself."
; "So you used the pork money?"
"Yeah. I figured I could always just pretend like I screwed up the recipe."
"But you got away with it."
"I did, but I was way too nervous to ever try it again. Harrison had to go to a lot of trouble to get me these lessons. Monsieur didn't want to do it."
Ethan could well imagine. "And Baldovino wants to do it even less?" he asked, recalling the upcoming cooking competition.
"Baldovino likes older students. He probably won't take me," Rachel said pragmatically. "I mean, I can't study with him full-time because I have school, so he'd have to make special arrangements for me. It's a pain."
"But Billaud made it work."
"He did—and if the competition goes well, we'll see. I'm kind of nervous about it."
"When is it?"
"Next week. I should hear this week if they're even going to let me enter. Monsieur Billaud says there's a chance they won't, but the rules don't say you have to be eighteen or something, so it's kind of a technicality."
"Hi, Rach." Abby breezed into the kitchen from the living room. "Sorry, I was on the phone."
Rachel held Ethan's gaze for a second longer. The new camaraderie they'd established remained fast. She glanced at Abby. "That's okay."
Abby crossed to the sink to dump the contents of her glass. "Did you have fun with Kelly?"
"Yeah. Her parents are cool."
"Sorry it rained all weekend," Abby told her. "I guess you didn't get to go out on the lake."
"I didn't mind. They have this killer kitchen. Their refrigerator is the size of my closet."
Abby laughed. "I'm sure they ate well, at least."
"They can't wait to have me back."
"I'll bet."
Abby still hadn't looked at him, Ethan noted. She put the glass in the dishwasher, then glanced at her sister over her shoulder. "It's probably time we thought about dinner. Do you want to eat here or out?"
Rachel grinned at Ethan. "Out," she said. "Definitely out."
* * *
By the time Rachel was in bed that night, Abby knew she could no longer put off the inevitable conversation with Ethan. She hadn't been the only one, she'd realized, left reeling from the confrontation with Harrison on Saturday. Ethan had to be struggling with demons of his own.
"I think you have to talk to the police," Ethan told her as he stared moodily at the fire. Friday's thunderstorm had chased in a cold front, and though the rain had cleared today, there was an unseasonable chill in the air. Ethan had started a fire in her living room.
Abby tucked her feet beneath her on the sofa. "And tell them what?"
He sat on the opposite end of the sofa with his feet resting on the coffee table. His expression was brooding and fierce when he looked at her. "That whoever tried to break in here knows something about your father's murder."
She nodded. "And they'll try to pull the case files, then they'll discover the same thing I did ten years ago: nobody wants the truth to get out."
"How can you live with that?"
"How can I fight it?" she countered.
"We're going to get answers."
"Maybe." She glanced at the fire. "Maybe they'll be answers I don't want."
"I'm sorry you had to find out like this."
"How long have you known?" She couldn't quite keep the condemnation from her tone.
While Harrison's duplicity had stung, she'd understood his motives. With Ethan, the picture was less clear.
He sighed. "I suspected, but I wasn't able to fit all the pieces together until this week."
"That's what you were going to tell me at dinner Friday night, wasn't it?"
"Yes."
"It wasn't a complete surprise, you know—at least not the part about the money."
"I didn't think it would be."
"After my parents died, it took a really long time for the insurance issues to get straightened out. At the time, I didn't think about where all that money came from. I mean, they weren't wealthy, but the insurance money, and the sale of the house and the restaurant, left me and Rachel very secure."
"When did it sink in?"
"When I bought this house." She glanced at him. "I paid cash for it. Harrison found it for us, and helped with all the negotiations and the legal end of things. Eyebrows were raised when I turned up with that much cash."
"How old were you?"
"Twenty-five."
He nodded. "People started asking questions."
"A lot of them. I had to take a good look at my financial status for the first time, and things started to seem odd to me. I talked to Harrison about it. He assured me nothing was out of the ordinary."
"But you didn't believe him?"
She still remembered the conversation she'd had with Harrison that day. There had been something about his tone of voice that hadn't quite rung true. Abby hadn't pressed him, but the seeds of doubt had been firmly planted. "Not entirely," she admitted. "But I was no expert, and I wasn't sure I even wanted to know what it all meant. I did try several times to get to the bottom of it, but I never succeeded."
"Harrison should have told you the truth."
"Probably. But maybe I wasn't ready to hear it then."
"Were you ready now?"
"It doesn't matter," she said softly. "Does it?"
They lapsed into an uneasy silence. Abby gathered her courage and continued. "I guess that's why I don't see the point in talking to the police. What are they going to do?"
"Someone tried to break into your house, Abby. You can't ignore that."
"I'm not ignoring it, but I don't think I need to freak out about it either. I'm sure it was a warning and not a threat."
"Abby—"
"I mean, really, Ethan. I scared the guy off with an umbrella. If someone were trying to hurt me, it would have taken more than a whack across the nose to send him fleeing."
"He still threatened you."
"I know, and I'm not taking it lightly, but I'm certainly not going to cower. I refuse to do that."
He looked irritated. "The police can protect you."
Her laugh was humorless. "Do you really think the police are going to find out anything if your investigator can't? How much are you paying that guy, anyway?"
The remark hit its target. She saw him flinch. "It's not what you think," he told her. "After you came to San Francisco, I did ask Charlie for some background information. It was what he didn't find that worried me."
"What are you talking about?"
"All the pieces fit together until he got to your parents' murder. That's when things started to fall apart." He drummed his fingers on the back of the sofa. "Did you know that some of the people the police interviewed in the investigation, the people who were supposed to be your parents' close friends, barely knew anything about you? And no one knew Rachel had been in the closet that night."
"The police wanted to keep that part of it quiet—to protect her and the case. They weren't sure the killer knew she'd been there, and either way, it seemed wise not to let it get out."
"You had no one, did you?"
The absolute desolation in his voice made her heart ache. She shook her head. "It wasn't like that. It's true that Dad's poker friends weren't around, but the veteran community took in Rachel and me. That's like having an instant extended family. They handled the funeral arrangements, everything. Dad was buried with military honors, and I have no idea who cut through all the red tape to make that happen so fast. I was so devastated, and so young. I wasn't paying much attention."
"And by the time you could, the case was cold," he guessed.
"It was like hitting a stone wall. The police made a couple of token attempts, but nothing went anywhere. Finally, they just stopped calling. Then they stopped returning my calls. I sent a few letters, but what else could I do?"
"I'm sorry."
She took a deep breath and forged ahead. "I had to let it go or it was going to consume me. I don't know why this business has come up now
. My guess is that when you started asking questions, somebody got really nervous. If Harrison was trying to drain the company like he says—"
"He was," Ethan assured her. "I've had a group of people working on this, and there's no other explanation."
"Was he breaking the law?" she asked.
"No. He's too smart for that."
"But the stockholders—"
"The law doesn't require a company to turn a profit. They could have gotten out whenever they wanted. Most of the money he lost was his own."
"Oh." She stared at the fire again. The flames danced in merry torment—contained, but slowly and irrevocably eating away at the logs. Just like the anger that consumed Ethan, she thought glumly. "So he just sells now, and nothing happens."
"It's not quite that simple, but yes, eventually that'll be the outcome."
"And then it will be over." She let the words sink in, for his benefit and for hers. She turned her gaze to him. "Knowing who's responsible for my parents' death isn't going to bring them back. It would just give me someone to hate."
"You have a right to closure," he insisted.
She managed a sad smile. "I hate to break this to you, but there's no such thing as closure, Ethan. I never stop missing them. I never stop wishing things were different. I never stop hating what happened, or grieving because I lost them. But I can't have them back. Being an orphan is no fun, no matter how old you become. I can let that destroy me, or I can let it make me stronger." She shook her head again. "I used to think that if I only knew who had killed them, I'd feel better. But would I?"
"You had a right—"
She interrupted him. "No, really. Would I? I mean, then I'd have to know why he did it, or who he did it with. Now I find out that he was probably doing it for someone else. Would I have to see that person's face too? Would it change anything if I did?"
"Abby—"
"The answer is no. I had to face that fact one day or I would've gone crazy."
"Someone knows the truth," he pointed out.
"Someone knows part of the truth," she amended. "I doubt anyone but my mother and father really has the entire story. And they'll never be able to tell me." She reached out and laid a hand on his sleeve. "I can't spend my life worrying about that."
He turned toward her and she felt the energy flowing through him. "Good God, Abby, how can you just let them get away with it?"
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