Reaching out, Kateri snagged Merida’s wrist and turned her left hand over. The tip of her thumb had a notch-shaped scar where she’d used the screwdriver to pry the panel off the door to the attic … She whispered, “Merry. Merry Byrd.”
The woman smiled, nodded. She touched her chest. “Merida now. Merida Falcon.”
Kateri moved her chair closer to the table. Instinctively she lowered her voice. “You’re now a person who is mute? What happened to your voice? And what happened to your face? You were always pretty, but now you’re … gorgeous.”
Merida pulled the iPad close, typed, pushed the iPad across the table. “There was an explosion.”
“What kind of explosion?”
Merida made a flying motion.
“Airplane?”
Merida nodded.
“You always wanted to fly. You dreamed of flying.” When Merry had talked about her future, it always included somehow becoming a pilot and flying high above the clouds. “And your airplane exploded? On the ground? It had to be on the ground.”
Merida spelled, “Of course.”
“Right. So you had to have plastic surgery?”
“A lot.” Merida gestured up and down at her figure, then spelled, “Too much. Too much pain. Too much anger, too much resentment. Merry is dead. I am sorry.”
“Yes. I see.” The woman beside Kateri bore no resemblance to the bright, outgoing girl she had been so many years ago.
Linda stomped up with glasses of ice water. “You want anything, Sheriff? Ask your friend if she wants anything, would you?”
“I’d take coffee, black, and a Denver omelet. And you can ask my friend—she can hear, she’s merely mute.”
Linda leaned close to Merida and asked loudly, “You want anything?” She gestured like someone drinking coffee from a mug.
Merida laughed silently, then typed and passed the iPad.
Linda read it. “Bacon, crisp. Eggs over easy. Wheat toast. Hash browns. Orange juice and hot coffee?”
Merida slapped her hands together, pointed at Linda and nodded.
“You can hear, can’t you? There’s something to remember.” Linda walked away muttering, “Every time I turn around, we’ve got more weirdoes in this town.”
Kateri blushed for Linda. “I’m sorry. Honestly, we’re not all so rude here.”
Merida typed, “Better that then the oversolicitous kindness when they think because I can’t speak, I’m mentally challenged. Or unbalanced. I love that one, too.”
Kateri glanced around the café.
Everyone was watching them, openly or surreptitiously or avidly.
“You must get tired of the curiosity.”
“I’m used to it.” Merida put down the iPad and with her hands spelled, “You’ve changed, too.”
“Yes.” Remembering Merida’s casual explanation of her transformation, Kateri said, “There was a tsunami.”
“I’ve followed your career. I know about your … mishap. I never doubted you would triumph.”
Kateri’s eyes filled with tears again. Her campaign manager would tell her sheriffs didn’t cry. And usually, she didn’t; no woman survived what she’d survived without being tough as nails. But seeing her friend Rainbow shot and in a coma, then losing John Terrance while in hot pursuit, had created a relentless guilt and pressure. Now to have her best friend from so long ago appear and express such confidence in her—turned out Kateri was sentimental after all.
Linda whipped past and tossed silverware and paper napkins on the table, followed by cups of coffee. “You girls want cream or sugar?”
“Actually, I’d like sweetener,” Kateri said. “Do you want anything, Merida?”
Merida spelled, “Cream.”
“She’d like cream,” Kateri told Linda.
“I know!” Linda left and returned with cream and a small container full of pink, green and yellow envelopes. “You know, Sheriff, this stuff will give you bladder cancer. Food’ll be up in a minute.” And she was gone once more, headed away to torment the customers at the other tables.
“Why are you here? In Virtue Falls?” Kateri put one of the yellow cancer-causing packets into her coffee, stirred and took a sip. “The last time I heard from you, you were in Baltimore going to college.”
Merida considered her and chose her words carefully, utilizing sign language rather than the easier-to-use iPad. “My life changed.”
Kateri wasn’t really guessing when she said, “Not for the better.”
Merida shook her head.
“Why can’t you…?”
“Why can’t I speak?” Now Merida changed from sign language to the iPad. “My face—much of the damage was to my jaw, teeth and lips.” She kept her head down, typed rapidly without looking Kateri in the eyes. “The pain was terrific and I screamed so much … Well. You know what agony is.”
“I do.”
“By the time the pain was gone, the surgeries were over, the rehab … it was almost two years later. I just … couldn’t.” Merida picked up her coffee cup, but her fingers trembled and she put it back on the saucer.
Kateri thought about what Merida had said and what she wasn’t saying. “Technically you should be able to speak?”
She typed, “The doctors tell me there’s nothing wrong now.”
“Oh, my friend.”
Merida looked up, her eyes anguished, pleading. With her fingers, she spelled, “But you understand?”
In an odd way, Kateri did understand. She had suffered a catastrophe that changed everything: her livelihood, her affections, her pride, her appearance, her ambitions, her future. She had come away broken in so many ways; she had had to learn to deal with pain, to walk again, to live with limitations. Merida had a different limitation, one that was at the same time both emotional and real. “I do understand. But I am so sorry.”
“Don’t be. I’m free now. I’m content. Or I will be soon.” Merida smiled, a curve of the lips that reminded Kateri of Cruella contemplating a new coat.
The expression did not fit well on that flawless face, and Kateri remembered it had been twenty years since she’d last seen Merry Byrd and thirteen years since Merry had cut communication completely. Everything about Merry had changed: her appearance, her method of speaking, even her name. Kateri didn’t know this woman, this Merida Falcon, and that meant she should proceed with caution.
Linda arrived at the table, hands full of breakfast plates and eyes full of irritation. She slapped the plates down. “Eat ’em while they’re hot,” she ordered, and headed off.
Merida looked out the window, then typed, “Your officer is coming this way and he looks very serious.”
Kateri looked, too.
Rupert Moen was jogging across the street toward the Oceanview Café, his copper hair standing on end and blotchy red in his cheeks.
Kateri checked her phone. No missed messages. If John Terrance had resurfaced, all the officers would be running for their cars, sirens would be wailing and someone would have called her.
She started working her way through the omelet as quickly as she could.
Moen charged through the door and toward Kateri.
The whole diner went on alert.
When he got close, she chewed, swallowed and asked, “Emergency?”
“No. Gosh, no! Well, maybe. There’s this woman…” He caught sight of Merida. He stopped in his tracks. “Wow.” He mouthed the word.
Poor kid. He wasn’t equipped to handle movie star glamour in their little town.
“Ironic that he was struck dumb at the sight of you,” Kateri said out of the corner of her mouth.
Merida laughed silently.
Aloud, Kateri said, “Officer Moen, this is my friend Merida Falcon. Merida, this is Officer Moen, a very valuable member of the sheriff’s team.”
Merida smiled and nodded.
Moen tore the hat off his head and nodded back. And stared. And stared.
Kateri took the moment to eat a bite of toast. One thing she
knew about being in law enforcement—you ate when you could because you never knew when the next opportunity might be. “Moen, what’s the problem?”
He yanked his attention back to Kateri. “You have a visitor.”
Kateri’s fork hovered in the air over the plate. “At the police station?”
“Yeah … A lady.”
“What lady?” Why did he look like a meteor had landed in City Hall?
He looked around at the avidly listening customers. He leaned down and said softly, “A bitchy lady.”
Kateri drank more coffee, ate another bite of eggs. “What’s this bitchy lady’s name?”
“She refused to tell us. Said you’d know her.”
“Description?”
“Caucasian. Blond. Expensive. Thinks she’s important.” Now the true extent of Moen’s foot-in-mouth syndrome burst forth. “So mean I thought she must have PMS but Bergen said no, she was just scary. For sure. She scared the hell out of me. She’s waiting in your office.”
Kateri wondered how it was possible for Moen to drive a narrow mountain road and grin with excitement, but when he faced a malicious woman he displayed the hollow-eyed terror of a two-year-old on Santa’s lap. “Is there no one else in the station who can handle this woman?”
“No.”
That was blunt. “All right. I’ll come.” She handed Moen her toast, handed her card to Merida and said, “Text me. Let me know where you’re staying.”
Merida nodded, her eyes wide, as if seeing Kateri in action startled her.
Walking stick in hand, Kateri headed across the street and around the square to City Hall, Moen pacing beside her. She asked, “So do you figure this is an uppity tourist? Or a reporter who thought she could bully her way into a story?”
“I don’t think so.” Moen’s tone was ominous, but he chewed through the toast with relish.
As she entered the police department, she called, “Hi, guys, thanks for last night!”
No laughter. No teasing. Just a lot of quiet, tense officers avoiding her eyes, and mostly filling out their reports without being nagged.
Something had spooked them. Or someone had …
Kateri’s curiosity hitched up a notch. She stepped into her office, looked at the woman sitting before her desk, at the back of that blond, perfectly coiffed head—and almost backpedaled all the way to the Oceanview Café.
It was Lilith Palmer. Her very own wicked stepsister.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Merida watched Kateri and Moen leave. It had been good to see Kateri again, to reestablish the bond between them. It had been sad to see Kateri’s sudden wariness, too, but she supposed not surprising. She wasn’t the optimistic, hopeful Merry Byrd that Kateri had once known. Too many years of rigid self-discipline and meticulous plotting had changed her, made her cold, made her hard, made her a woman fired by fury and driven by vengeance.
Bending her head to her tablet, she brought up her spreadsheet and checked her figures. Last night, caught up in the excitement of putting her plan in motion, she had worked later than she meant to. Financial revenge would be satisfying, but if she handled this correctly, one man would be very sorry that he had ever crossed her path.
The door opened. A breeze swept through the diner.
Linda yelled, “Hey! You born in a barn? Shut the door!”
Merida glanced up.
There, holding the door open and viewing the diner and its customers as if they were a bucket of worms, stood Professor Dawkins Cipre. He looked the same as he had on the cruise: tall, white-haired, round-bellied, wearing a rumpled tan suit and a blue oxford button-up shirt with the top button open to accommodate his sagging, jowled neck.
Merida ducked her head. All too well she remembered those horrific days aboard the yacht: meeting Benedict, listening to Dawkins’s lectures until she wanted to fall into a coma, and dealing with Nauplius’s increasingly outrageous jealousy and aging temper.
“In or out!” Linda yelled.
Merida raised her iPad and peeked over the top.
Dawkins looked astonished to be addressed in such a manner, but he stepped in and let the door swing shut behind him. Again he looked around the café and before Merida could avert her eyes, he saw her.
She froze.
He looked her over.
Her iPad drooped.
His lip curled. Deliberately he turned his shoulder and headed to a far table. With his back still turned, he sat down and started texting.
He had snubbed her.
Or … or perhaps he hadn’t recognized her.
She put her hand to the buzzed side of her head. She brought the long strand in front of her eyes. She looked down at her outfit: a bright orange sleeveless T-shirt that showed off the colorful falcon tattoo on her left bicep, ragged jeans and her worn college-era Birkenstocks.
He really hadn’t recognized her. That shallow snob, that pompous academic, had looked at her, seen a badly dressed woman with hair dyed the colors of the United States flag and immediately decided she was not the kind of person with whom he wanted to associate.
She wilted with relief. Her disguise, such as it was, had passed the test.
But she couldn’t stay here and take the chance he would remember her. Standing, she gathered her tablet and purse, put a twenty on the table and hurried toward the door. She extended her hand to push it open—
And met Elsa Cipre coming in.
Merida tried to turn her head away, but of course, Elsa recognized her immediately. She never seemed as self-absorbed as her husband. She caught Merida’s outstretched wrist. “Helen!”
Merida shook her head.
“How good to see you. I never expected to find you in this little corner of the world. How did you get here?” She looked around the café, spotted her husband and said, “Dawkins is right over there. Come and sit with us.”
Merida shook her head more emphatically.
“Dawkins will be so pleased to see you again.”
Merida set her heels.
Without any seeming effort, Elsa dragged her toward Dawkins.
For a skinny, nervous academic, the woman had impressive upper body strength. “Dawkins, look who I found in this godforsaken town.”
Dawkins gave Merida his patented superior sneer, then visibly started. “Helen Brassard! I didn’t realize…” He rose to his feet. “Helen, my dear, we had no idea we would find you here.”
If I had known I would find you, I wouldn’t be here. But Merida couldn’t say it, didn’t sign it, smiled tightly. Pulling out her iPad, she typed, “Not Helen. I’m Merida now. I don’t tell anyone about my husband.”
“Why not?” Dawkins boomed.
Elsa lowered her voice. “Because of the money. Of course. We understand.”
Merida nodded.
“Do you still have your bodyguard? What was his name? Carl Klinger?” Dawkins didn’t know how to lower his voice.
“Carl Klineman, dear,” Elsa said.
Merida shook her head, put her finger to her lips.
Dawkins leaned forward and in a piercing whisper said, “You should get him back so you could use your real name. It’s not safe for you to be alone.”
Merida typed, “Most of the money went to Nauplius Brassard’s children. I don’t need a bodyguard for my small savings. What brings you to Virtue Falls?”
“I’m on sabbatical from Oxford and Washington State University begged me to come and lecture on French medieval poetry and its influence on the customs of romance and chivalry.”
Merida could see a free lecture coming at an unstoppable speed, and she clutched her backpack closer in preparation for a panicked escape.
Elsa didn’t wait for him to get rolling. Instead she stroked his ego. “They are so lucky to have you.”
“They know it.” Dawkins folded his hands over his belly. “The semester starts in August and until then, I gave in to Elsa’s desires and we’re touring the Washington coast. It’s very … picturesque.”
The way he said picturesque reduced the Pacific Ocean to the level of a lap dance.
“What are you doing here, Hele … Merida?” Elsa asked.
Merida typed, “I’m touring, also.”
“We should tour together!” Elsa exclaimed.
“That would be lovely, but I’ve taken rooms at the Good Knight Manor Bed and Breakfast for the next year and they’re nonrefundable.” Merida congratulated herself on a nice save.
“That’s where we’re staying!”
Fatal mistake.
“Dear Dawkins, couldn’t we extend our stay longer to visit with our Merida?”
Dawkins’s cheeks turned a slight purple that made him look like he was strangling. “Virtual Falls is ridiculously busy this time of year. And expensive. We barely got a reservation as it was!”
Gently, Elsa corrected him, “It’s Virtue Falls, dear.”
“I know that!”
Elsa smiled at Merida companionably, as if she expected her to understand Dawkins’s peevishness. Of course she would think that; she had seen Merida catering to her husband the same way Elsa catered to hers. What Elsa didn’t realize was that Merida had hated every minute of her servitude, and before she was done, someone would pay.
What was more, she couldn’t stand to sit by and watch this kind of abuse. It made her want to slap Dawkins—and Elsa.
Merida stood, gathered her tablet, touched her brow in a farewell salutation.
“Wait, dear! We should exchange phone numbers!” Elsa called.
Not while I have breath in my body. Merida again started toward the door.
Behind her, she heard Elsa say, “The poor dear was obviously overcome by our repartee. She must be missing Nauplius.”
Merida fled. She drove her car out to the beach, parked and walked along the sand, letting the wind, the salt air and the joy of being alone and at no one’s beck and call drive the distasteful memory of the Cipres out of her brain.
CHAPTER TWELVE
On occasions like these, Kateri wondered what kind of crapshoot was going on in the wonderful world of genetics.
Lilith had naturally blond hair that she styled in an upsweep with enough texturizing spray to make a Texas debutante coo with joy. Her fair, carefully tended skin glowed like an English maiden’s, and her makeup had been so carefully selected and applied one could not tell where the cosmetics left off and nature began. Her figure had been given the advantage of a lifetime of dance and a daily fitness regimen with a physical trainer. The only sign of Lilith’s age—she was thirty-nine—was mild wrinkling at the corners of her eyes and age spots on the backs of her hands, and she was so short—five-two—and thin that Kateri should be able to snap her like a toothpick.
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