Authors: EC Sheedy
Not even Gus . . .
But April intended to look out for Cornie, until Phylly showed up—and she’d do it without any help from big brother, Joe Worth.
Cornie had smiled at her idle threat about the motel soap, but the smile didn’t stick. “I don’t get it,” she said. “That guy’s her son. He’s my freakin’ brother. Which I find extremely weird, by the way.” She took another bite of her burger, chewed, then reached for the carton of milk she’d brought into the motel room along with her hamburger and April’s sorry excuse for a salad. “And you know, April, you should have told me I had a brother. I shouldn’t have had to find out by going through Mom’s things.”
“Which you shouldn’t have done in the first place, and something your mother is going to be seriously pi—ticked off about.”
“I had to do something. Her disappearing like she did? Not saying when she’d be back, that she had
‘'business to take care of
.’” Cornie pulled a disbelieving face. “Mom never has ‘business’ I don’t know about. Work or otherwise. She’s a production supervisor for Rusty—nine to five. Not exactly a traveling salesman type. And hell— heck, I’ve been paying our bills and running the house stuff since I was ten, ever since she figured out I could count better than she could.”
“Still, you should have left her stuff alone. Everybody has things in their lives they want kept private, Cornie. Even your mother.”
Especially your mother.
And my mother, too, she added to herself, the hole of worry in her stomach deepening. Because if being a mother meant giving you life, caring, and protecting you, Phyllis Worth more than qualified. Hard as the early years had been, Phylly never let April go. She’d held her, loved her, bandaged her scrapes, and healed her damaged heart. She’d raised April, haphazardly maybe, but as best she could, keeping her close through the good times and bad. “Tears and laughter,” Phylly had said to her once. “That’s what life is all about and knowing one is coming on the heels of the other is what keeps a woman sane—more or less.”
What April felt for Phylly was about gratitude, yes, but so much more. It was about loyalty—and love. Love given as a child to her very own guardian angel. And a bond that had grown stronger with every year they were together. If Phylly was in trouble, April would get her out of it—any way she could.
“Yeah, Mom has secrets all right, like a brother I never knew I had. She should have told me.”
“Maybe she should have, but now that you know, what’s the good of it? He’s not going to help us find your mom, and finding her is what we have to focus on.” April’s heart fluttered, and her thoughts went back to her growing concern, grown deeper since she’d talked to Rusty. After that conversation the faint hope that Cornie was overreacting—dramatizing—her mother’s disappearance had died.
Oh, God, Phylly, where are you?
“Yeah . . .” Cornie sipped more milk then she sighed. A thoughtful look replacing the defensiveness of a few moments ago. “I know Mom can be a certified flake sometimes, and at first I thought”—she shrugged—“it was just some guy she’d met. But, now I don’t think so. I don’t know what to think. She’s been gone almost a week, April.” Her gaze was wide when it met April’s.
“You’re just scared—”
“I’m not scared. I’m just, like . . . mad, I guess.”
“So because you’re mad—which I don’t believe for a second—you rifle through your mom’s things and hop a bus to Portland so you can make me ‘mad,’ too.” She tried to smile, lighten things up a bit.
“I didn’t know where else to go.” She attacked her burger again. How Cornie could eat like a ravenous wrestler and stay so thin bordered on the incredible. Lucky for her she was going to have the Worth height. “No one in Vegas would tell me anything,” she went on. “I didn’t plan on discovering some big family secret. But if Mom didn’t want me to find out, she shouldn’t have kept his birth certificate—or his business card.” She stopped eating. “Where do you suppose she got that anyway?”
“Can’t imagine.” But April knew Phylly kept track of her son, Joe. Always had. She’d had more than one friend check on him over the years, but even when she knew where he was, she never attempted to contact him. She’d been frantic when he’d left the army, because for a couple of years she didn’t know where he was. When a friend found him again settled in Seattle and brought back his card, Phylly had looked at it, held it to her breast, and cried for an hour.
Cornie tilted her head, eyed April, looking peeved. “I thought he might help, and I figured you’d know about him. That with a bit of pressure from a difficult teen—that being me—you’d cave and tell me stuff.” She finished her burger and wiped her mouth with the paper napkin. “So?”
“So, what?”
“Spill. Tell me the whole sad story of Mom’s teen pregnancy. Did her parents kick her out? What?” Her words sounded tough, uncaring, but her eyes were alive with curiosity and hurt.
April couldn’t help her. She knew about Joe, had since she was in her teens, but she didn’t know very much. Phylly might be a major motor mouth about everything else in her life, but never about her son. Or why she’d given him up. “I don’t know the ‘whole sad story,’ as you call it, and even if I did, Cornie, I’d tell you what your mother would want me to tell you.” April made a zero with her thumb and index finger. “Besides, I’ve done enough already, I went to see your long-lost brother, didn’t I?” She pushed her unfinished, thoroughly unpalatable salad away from her. “And that was an all-time bust.”
“It’s not your fault he’s an ass—”
“Cornie.”
She rolled her eyes. “Let me rephrase. It’s not your fault he’s a horse’s rounded rear end.” She frowned then and added, “You shouldn’t have told him you were his sister.” “Not exactly a lie, Cornie.” April had thought Joe thinking of her as a sister of sorts would be a good way of getting him on board. Major miscalculation. He wasn’t interested in her as a sister, and he sure as hell wasn’t interested in his birth mother. April didn’t want to admit to Cornie that she understood his bitter feelings, his bone-deep reluctance to dig into a part of the past long buried. You can’t heal the past, after all, so why try to resuscitate it. In that, she and Joseph Worth were on the same page.
“Dear God . . .
dess,
April. Don’t you get it? You wasted all that”—she made a sweeping gesture that took in April from her head to her toes—“by letting him think you were related.” She abandoned her food and got up. “You should have—”
April held up a hand. “I really don’t want you to finish that sentence. There’s way too much Vegas in you, sweetheart.”
Cornie widened her eyes theatrically, shook her head. “And I always thought
you
were the smart one. Guess there’s only one thing to do.” She went to her unmade bed and sat on the edge of it. “I’ll go see him myself.” She looked directly at April. “Did you tell him about me—his real-life sister?” The last sounded plaintive—a bit wistful.
“He was too busy showing me out of his office to give me the chance.” April pushed away from the table, rose, and walked to the bed. April knew—although Cornie would never admit it—that even in the confusion of her mother’s disappearance, she’d been excited about finding a brother. For a girl who’d never known her father—and had a series of uncles—it was natural. Cornie wouldn’t admit it, but she’d expected more from Joe Worth and she’d been disappointed.
Damned expectations. They let you down every time. April touched Cornie’s silky hair, which was nearly as long as her own, but Cornie’s was raven dark and ruler straight; her own blond hair had a tendency to curl. “His loss, Cornelia Vanessa Worth. Definitely his loss.”
Cornie shrugged, shifted from under her hand. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t care about that. What matters is Mom, and finding out what’s going on. He should help us.”
“He’s not a private investigator. He’s some kind of bodyguard. Calls himself a guardian. I honestly don’t know how much help he’d be anyway.”
“Maybe none, but he should try. He’s . . .
family.”
There was that mysterious word again.
“He’s
blood
, Cornie. That doesn’t make him family. We build those ourselves. Like your mom says, families are made, not born.” She paused. “I didn’t tell you, but when I spoke to Rusty, she said—” She hesitated, wondering how far she should go, how honest to be, or whether a well-intentioned lie would serve better than the truth.
Cornie donned her mulish look. “Don’t even think of not telling me everything—or repeating Rusty’s line about how I shouldn’t worry, everything will be fine—with no friggin’ explanation at all. I’m not a kid, so don’t treat me like one.”
April sighed. “No, you’re definitely not a kid.” Anyone as steeped in the inner world of the Las Vegas showgirl— which thanks to Phylly and her coterie of dancer friends, Cornie surely was—left kid status behind somewhere in the third grade. As April had, virtually growing up backstage, she’d had an up close and personal look at the good, the bad, and the ugly from the age of ten. April remembered it well. Backstage: Awash in bottles, jars, and atomizers; spangles and mile-high plumage; flesh-colored spandex, barely there thongs, and inch-long eyelashes. Not to mention PMS, cat-mean jealousy, angst, and naked ambition. Backstage was masquerade on overdrive, and it came with a full cast of witches, bitches, and angels. Phylly fell into the angel category, some shadows on her wings, but an angel nevertheless.
“Tell me what Rusty said, April. Everything.”
“She said she thinks your mother is being stalked. And that’s why she’s in hiding.” April thought this was as likely a scenario as any other, but what bothered her was that Phylly was no shrinking violet. It would take a very
special
stalker to make her cut and run. There’d been a lot of men in her life; Phylly would be the first to say “too damn many,” but she’d practically been living a nun’s life for the past few years, so whoever this guy was, the relationship had to be old. That left a lot of suspects. “A stalker’s a possibility,” she added, not wanting to add her own worried thoughts to Cornie’s.
“No way. Come on, April, Mom’s a drama queen. We’d be the first to know if she was being bugged by some guy. She’s had her share of ‘
stalkers'
over the years, and she wasn’t scared of any of them. She either took care of them herself or she called in her personal militia. Tommy. It would take Freddy Krueger—or worse—on her case, before she’d go underground like she has.”
Cornie was on the mark, as usual. The girl had no stars in her eyes when it came to her mother, but it didn’t diminish her love for her—or her fierce protectiveness. There were times April wondered which of them was the mother. “More like above ground,” April said. “She was being comped at Caesars when Rusty talked to her.”
Cornie’s face brightened then shadowed. “Was?”
“She left last night.”
“For where? No, don’t tell me. If she left Caesars—that’s Marcie’s place—she’d have gone to—”
“She went north. She went to Canada.”
Cornie blinked and her head jerked straight. “Canada,” she repeated as if she were struggling with a geography exam. “Why would she go there?”
April hid her own concern with a shrug. If she’d had any doubt Phylly was in trouble, her going to Canada laid them to rest. Phylly was Vegas through and through, so whatever—or whoever—made her leave had to be really, really bad. “I don’t know. She didn’t say.”
“Then how did Rusty know?”
“She used the company credit card, bought a ticket to Vancouver.”
“Vancouver . . . that’s in British Columbia. Just across the border.” Her eyes widened, something suspiciously like moisture coating their surface. Cornie, strong, stubborn, and super-smart, never cried. She quickly brushed away the tears. “Then we’re going there. It’s a three-hour drive from here tops.”
“And do what? Just because she flew to Vancouver doesn’t mean she’s staying—not that we’d find her among the two or three million other people who live there, I might add. All it means is she’s most likely on the west coast—somewhere.” April ran a hand through her hair, shoved it roughly behind her tri-studded ear. “Without a plan of some kind, it would be a complete waste of time running up there.”
“We have to do
something
.”
“I know.”
But Canada’s west coast?
She thought she knew everything there was to know about Phyllis Worth—the men, her time on the showgirl circuit, going from job to worse, and back again. But never once had she talked about anyone or anything in Canada. “Rusty made her promise to call us when she got wherever it is she’s going. We’ll wait for that call.”
Cornie shook her head and didn’t spare the vehemence. “Not good enough. In the note she left me, she said she’d call. That was days ago. No call. If we can’t go to Canada, we have to go back to Vegas,” she said. “We have to talk to every single person who knows Mom. Go through her stuff again. If there’s a link to someone there, we’ll find it.”
“I’ll go to Vegas,” April said. “And I’ll take care of it.” She didn’t add that Rusty said Phylly didn’t want Cornie in Vegas because she was concerned as much for her safety as she was her own. But it was past time for both of them to get out of Seattle, and this rotten motel room, which she’d only stayed in this long so she could humor Cornie—by making useless calls to Joe Worth—and figure out what to do. And the more she thought about it, the more obvious it was; it was important to find Phylly, but it was even more important to find out what the hell was going on. Put some kind of face on whatever trouble she was in. “I’ve got a friend in Portland, you can stay—”
Cornie shot to her feet. “No way. I’m going with—”
A loud knock interrupted. Probably the room cleaners. She headed for the door, already lost in thoughts of where she’d start back in Vegas—and how to make sure Cornie was safe while she was there.
She opened the door on the last person she expected to see.
Joseph Worth.
Chapter 5
Joe strode into the motel room without an invitation, put his hands on his jeans-clad hips, and eyed the two shocked women. Well, one woman and one kid. He shot a glance at Legs, and didn’t bother hiding his irritation. The woman had lied to him.