If Looks Could Kill (33 page)

"Ray would never forgive me if we let our world-famous author get murdered just as the public's about to find out where she is."

Chris wasn't sure she didn't want to just let her head sink right back down again. "Didn't take very long, did it?"

"It was bound to happen. It's going to get worse, too."

She leaned back against the front window so that her view was of the stars, still sharp in the dry air. Hundreds of them, shimmering and silent. Magnificent. Twinkle, twinkle little star... Her wish would have been to go back just two weeks. To have anticipated this, headed it off. To, for once in her life, have been able to step cleanly away from what she was. What she'd been.

"It's about to hit the fan," she said. "Isn't it?"

"From every possible direction." Somehow Mac had also managed to stuff a pack of cigarettes into the waistband of his shorts. He pulled them out now and lit one, not bothering to hide his shakes from her.

"In fact," he said, blowing the first lungful straight up in the air, "it already has."

Chris looked over to find that something new had taken hold in his expression. Something hard and careful, something that put her in mind of an interrogator rather than a protector. She knew what he was going to say even before he did. It made her feel so very tired.

"I thought we were going to be honest with each other," he accused without noticeable inflection.

"We tried," she admitted miserably, wishing she had a cigarette to hide behind. Wishing she had more than just a name to disappear into. Wondering whether a man who had spent his life comfortably situated within a constant code of right and wrong could really comprehend hers.

"Your name isn't Chris Jackson."

"No," she admitted, turning her attention to the windows of the old Jameson house across the street. "It's not."

"Why?"

She instinctively curled just a little tighter. "I changed it legally."

"I know."

The light was gathering just a little, pearling the glass in the windows behind which the Masons, who'd lived across from the How Do for ten years, fought every Friday night like clockwork. The town had long since tuned them out, knowing better than to interfere.

"How would you like to go through life with a name like Christian Charity Evensong?" Chris asked.

Mac took his last drag and crushed the cigarette out on the sidewalk. "Why lie about it?"

She looked over at him then, and saw that, unlike her, he was back in complete control. Eyes calm and quiet, waiting. Hands still. Posture relaxed. She felt a brief flash of resentment that his injuries had been
so
much smaller than hers.

"Same reason I let them all figure I'm a lesbian, I guess," she said as evenly as she could. "It's just easier that way."

"It's easier to make up a series of convoluted lies about being a foster child in L. A. than to admit that your mother's still alive in Springfield?"

That hit her like a mallet. Even knowing that it was coming. Knowing that it had to come, considering the kind of cop Mac was. Even so, Chris had fashioned her entire adult life knowing that any story was better than hers. And now he was going to want it. And with that awful sense of watchful silence still plaguing her, with the walls closing in from every angle, she knew she was going to have to tell him.

At least what he wanted to hear.

"I wasn't a foster child," she admitted. "I
was
in L. A."

"Doing what?"

She was almost able to smell the streets again, different streets, ragged, garish streets littered in dreams and spent reality. "Whatever it took to get by."

"How old were you?"

"Sixteen."

There was a tiny pause. Chris refused to look away from where the windows across the street were beginning to reflect, just a little, like an old television that had just been turned off and hadn't quite lost its glow yet. She couldn't bear to see any reaction on Mac's face. Distaste, disappointment. Worst of all, pity. She'd run screaming if she saw pity.

"And you really returned to Missouri when you were eighteen?"

"The rest of the story is true. I did get my degrees. Worked at bars and hospitals and cleaning services to get enough money. I did my time with DFS and flunked out when I couldn't deal any better with my clients' problems than I could with my own."

"No nuns."

"No nuns."

"No foster families?"

"Mine was bad enough. I didn't want to end up in something worse."

"Your mother was the one who had you on your knees?"

Chris did her best to stay where she was. It was the price she had to pay, after all. The lies had been collecting for years, balanced like the china she'd piled on her counter, ready to tumble with the slightest nudge. Well, Mac was nudging. And once Mr. Franklin really got going, he was probably going to give it all a big shove.

Chris should just tell Mac what it had been like. Should paint the picture of those dismal, dingy rooms that had never seen forgiveness or heard laughter. The heavy reek of pine cleaner and submission that clung to the air like old frying grease, the darker, mustier hint of rot that lay beneath. She couldn't. She couldn't tell anyone and keep from breaking something in fury.

"Chris?"

Chris wouldn't look away from the stars, the same ones she counted from her bed at night when she was trying to sleep. "I know I should have said something sooner," she said. "I just... I've been trying to get past it all for so long."

All of it. Every sordid, sorry secret that kept a person running for fifteen years. Every moment sweated out in the darkness.

"She made a prayer box," she found herself saying, choking on her own memories, the ones she couldn't forget no matter how hard she tried. "Fashioned from a little storage closet. About three by two, just big enough for a child to kneel on the hardwood floor with the door closed and the lights out as punishment." And beg for forgiveness. Promise never to do it again, even not knowing what the sin was that had precipitated this round in the box, with the terrors of Revelations filtering through the flimsy pressboard door along with the assurances that devils came out in the dark to bite children's feet and wrestle their souls to hell where the light would never return.

Well, the devils had come and taken her, and she'd been trying to live with it ever since.

"The day I walked out, my parents told me I was dead to them. I haven't heard from them since, nor have I wanted to." Chris shook her head. "I spent a lot of time in that box."

Trembling hard, Chris kept facing the sky, the clean, sterile sky, folded rigidly into herself where she couldn't be hurt. Even so, Mac reached over and wrapped an arm around her shoulder and she let him.

He didn't say a word, either in support or judgment. He didn't ask for more, which Chris appreciated, because she couldn't give it. Not another word, another picture. Even the ones he was going to need if he was to really understand the enigma of Chris Jackson. The most important ones. Right now, though, he bridged the distance between them in the chilly morning hours and let her rest her head on his shoulder. And Chris, unused to accepting comfort, for once did.

She didn't even hear the hurried footsteps. Neither, it seemed, did Mac.

"Chris? Chief? What are you two doing here?"

Chris felt Mac jerk to attention alongside her. She damn near came right off the pavement.

Mac recovered first. "What are
you
doing here, Victor?"

"And Lester."

"And Lester," Chris and Mac chorused together.

The pair stopped just feet away, a little out of breath, a little hyped up. "Oh, just checking on what's been going on. We saw the fracas at Chris's house. When Chris didn't come back, we thought we'd make sure everything was all right."

"It's fine," Chris offered as nonchalantly as possible, considering the fact that Mac's arm was still around her shoulder. "The chief and I were just discussing things before going home. Weren't we, Chief?"

Mac nodded. He didn't, however, relax.

"Oh," Lester retorted in a nasty voice. "Does this mean we don't have a new rumor for the town?"

"Lester," Victor admonished. "That's hardly appropriate."

"Neither is sitting on the street at dawn in your underwear," Lester assured him.

"I'm fine, Victor and Lester," Chris offered quickly, knowing how quickly the dummy could get out of hand. "I'll probably be home after I go to the jail and press charges against the reporter."

Chris could have sworn both faces lit up. "Reporter?" Victor asked, his voice childish with delight. "I'd be happy to bring him lunch, Chief. I could entertain him with a dramatic reading from
A Tale of Two Cities."

No real question of who'd play Carton, Chris thought dryly.

"He's a crime reporter," Chris said blithely. "Probably wouldn't know
A Tale of Two Cities
if it came out in the comics."

"Oh." Pause. Chris could have sworn Lester was giving her an assessing look. Just what she needed on top of everything else. "As long as you're OK."

"I'm OK."

"Then we'll be going on down to visit Mother, since we're out anyway."

By way of the jail. Poor Mr. Franklin. He was going to pay in ways he'd never imagined for breaking into her house.

Chris was still watching the odd little duo head on down the street when Mac spoke next to her.

"I don't remember his being up when I was over there," he said.

Chris turned to consider him. "Victor? He sees a lot when you don't..." Her voice trailed off when she caught sight of Mac's expression. Stomach sinking all over again, Chris turned to consider Victor's departing back. "No," she insisted. "It can't be Victor."

"Yes, it can," Mac said simply. "It can be any one of a number of people who know you very well."

And she'd just been thinking how Victor always managed to make her feel better. It seemed that Mac wasn't going to be finished until he took back all the peace she'd accumulated and left her back in the darkness.

The darkness.

The reaction was immediate. Automatic. Chris knew Mac could feel her tense up all over again, and would figure it was because she was upset about his accusation.

He'd be wrong.

She was reacting to another accusation. An old accusation she hadn't heard in almost fifteen years.

Without realizing it, Chris turned to look down the street to where the granite facade of the Missouri Farm Bank disappeared into the early morning gloom. She didn't know whether it was the feeling of being watched or the old story about the box, but her memory had coughed something up.

Something unnerving.

Something that would explain the silent intruders and feral smells and vague itches of recognition.

Something that she'd kept hidden away for so long she thought she'd forgotten it.

"Are you ready to go?" Mac asked, not making any move to go.

No, she thought. I don't want to take another step. I don't want to open that particular wound back up and look inside.

"Yeah," she said, her gaze still down the street, her legs suddenly as unsteady as her resolve. "Let's go see who knows me quite so well."

Chapter 14

"Where have you been?"

The line to New York crackled faintly. Chris could hear the buzz of sirens outside fifteen-storied windows and pictured the chaotic state of the office.

"What do you mean, where have I been?" Trey demanded, his voice as querulous as the siren.

Chris settled herself more deeply into her chair. "I'm sorry. It's just that a lot's been going on here. I've been trying to reach you."

"A lot's been going on here," he retorted edgily. "And it seems the police have also been trying to reach me. I've been hoping you just wanted me to have a new life experience by being a suspect in a bunch of murders."

"Not me," she protested, even though the weekend had sorely eroded her confidence. "The police. They can't figure out any other reason
Family Business
would be acted out."