Murder Melts in Your Mouth (19 page)

“Calm down!” He was panting, but determined. “I just need some sleep, get it? I need a couple of hours, and then I'll be able to think straight. So relax, will you? I'm not going to do anything, for God's sake. Understand?”

He waited until I nodded my head. Then he released my mouth.

“Just relax,” he said. “If you move, I'll wake up. And I might do something stupid like shoot you.”

I didn't like it, but I let him stretch out on the backseat and pull me against him until we were spooning. I hated that I was forced to lean my head against his chest. I could smell him, and he hadn't taken a shower in a while. He put one arm around me and gripped my forearm against my breast to hold me in place. Already, I could feel the heat of his body against mine.

Shakily, I said, “Please.”

“Shut up,” he said. “I'm not going to touch you, Nora.”

Stiff in his arms, I said with as much threat as I could muster, “Don't even think about it.”

“I won't,” he said. “After all, you're my sister.”

He put the gun on the floor and went to sleep.

I
've been kidnapped, I thought to myself.

Kidnapped by my brother.

Maybe I'd already known who he was. Certainly Libby had hinted, and long ago I'd accepted Daddy's affair, and maybe a tiny part of my brain had also acknowledged the possibility that somewhere I had another sibling. And now here he was.

Tierney Cavendish was not a Cavendish at all, but a Blackbird.

He fell asleep like a desk lamp being snapped off—exactly the way Emma did when she was exhausted or drunk or both.

I lay there thinking about Emma for a while, wondering if she'd truly decided to get an abortion if she was drinking only ginger ale. Perhaps she'd already reconsidered that dreadful choice. No doubt Michael had something to do with that. He'd tangle with a mountain lion to protect a child. And Emma was only slightly more dangerous than a mountain lion.

Eventually I was capable of thinking rationally about Tierney again, and how he must have felt about his father—Hoyt, that is, not Daddy—dying in a terrible fall.

And if Tierney hadn't killed Hoyt, and Lexie hadn't, either, who had?

Stewing over the possibilities, I listened to the sound track of a silly movie in which the same man played different parts—including all the women—but I couldn't see the screen from the backseat, so it made very little sense. Besides, I couldn't follow a story because of the tangled one already looping around in my head.

I listened to Tierney snore softly, and felt his chest rise and fall, and I thought of Michael with an intense longing.

Eventually I fell asleep.

And woke up when the movies were finished. I could hear car engines starting up around us, and the crunch of gravel under tires as people left the drive-in theater. I decided to throw caution to the wind. Stealthily, I reached for the cup holder where Tierney had dropped my cell phone. My hand found it in the semidarkness. Slowly, so as not to wake Tierney, I thumbed it open. I touched the
ON
button. A second later, the phone rang in my grasp.

Tierney woke.

Still holding me, he rolled my wrist over and looked at my watch. His voice was rumbly. “Jesus, it's three in the morning. Who calls you at this hour?”

“Let's find out,” I said. “May I sit up?”

He gave me a shove, and I straightened in the seat. Praying I'd hear Michael's voice, I answered the phone.

“Aunt Nora?” It was Rawlins. “That you?”

“Yes, honey, it's me.”

“You okay?”

“Moderately so. How's your grandfather?”

“Pretty good, I guess. We just got back from the hospital. They're going to keep him overnight. Well—until morning. I don't know. What time is it?”

“It's the middle of the night, darling. Thank you for taking care of everybody. You're my hero. He's really going to be okay?”

“I think so. Where are you?” he asked. “Mick's going nuts.”

“I'm fine. We're at the movies.”

“Huh?”

Tierney yawned and hauled himself to a sitting position. “Hang up.”

“Who's that?” Rawlins said. “You still with that guy with the gun?”

“Yes, but—”

“Hang up,” Tierney said.

“I've got to go, Rawlins, but everything's—”

Tierney took the phone and punched the off button so the screen went dead. He dropped it on the seat between us, and we sat looking at each other in the darkness.

He had Daddy's expressive brows and the same divot in his cheek that Libby had—not quite a dimple, but almost. And my eyes.

I hugged myself, trying not to be spooked by our similarities.

He shrugged, accepting.

“How long have you known?” I asked.

He shrugged again. “A while. I was a teenager when my mother told me.”

“Did she—I don't know—did she tell you gently?”

Tierney's cold smile flickered briefly. “Are we going to talk about our mothers now?”

“Shouldn't we?”

“My mother was a complicated person,” he said. “She didn't have it easy.”

“Like my mother, you mean.”

“Your mother is a natural disaster.”

“Welcome to the family,” I replied, giving him a shaky smile.

Which seemed to surprise him. He reached for the door handle and got out of the car. I climbed out of the other side, stretching my stiff limbs tentatively. The drive-in was deserted, except for the small mounds of trash everywhere. On the ground beside the car, I saw a used condom in a heap of spilled popcorn.

Tierney walked over to the trees, turned his back to me and relieved himself in the bushes.

I leaned against the car for a while, glad to be breathing fresh air. It was blessedly cool. I put my head back and looked up at the fading stars. A few clouds floated in front of the moon. I looked for Fred Flintstone.

Tierney returned. “I could use some breakfast. And I know a place that'll be open.”

When he started the car, Goldie Hawn sounded delighted we were back. “Turn left.”

I reached for the control panel and shut off the navigation system. I'd spent at least an hour staring at it from the backseat to guess how to turn it off.

Tierney said, “Maybe I'll like having sisters.”

He drove into Princeton and found a diner that probably catered to students with the munchies and truckers who needed strong coffee. A huge neon sign depicted a buxom girl on roller skates. She winked as we pulled into the parking lot. Tierney locked the gun in the glove compartment and put my cell phone in his pocket.

Together, we walked across the parking lot under a sputtering streetlight and went inside. The diner was empty at that hour of the morning, except for a ponytailed waitress who sat at the counter reading a tabloid newspaper and drinking an iced tea. She waved us into a booth with red vinyl seat cushions, and we looked at the menu, printed on the place mats.

I ordered a white omelet with mushrooms and whole wheat toast, then excused myself. In the bathroom, I washed as best I could and reapplied some moisturizer and lip gloss. My Furstenberg dress hadn't wrinkled, despite half a night spent curled up in the backseat of a car.

The perfect dress for a kidnapping.

When I returned to the table, Tierney looked surprised. “You didn't climb out a window and call the cops.”

“Not without breakfast.” I slid into the seat opposite him. Two cups of coffee had already arrived, and I reached eagerly for mine.

As I swallowed the first scalding sip, a wan streak of pink daylight glowed across the parking lot. Pink sky in the morning, sailor take warning.

I said, “You must have gone to college at Princeton.”

Tierney nodded and stirred sweetener into his cup.

“What was your major?”

“Girls. You can tell your father for me.”

Our father,
I almost said. Sitting there, looking across the table at Tierney, I could see a certain Indiana Jones quality that must have made the coeds hot.

He said, “I've been thinking about what happened at the Paine office. Trying to remember everything I saw.”

I sipped a little more hot coffee and lifted my eyebrows.

He said, “You mentioned there was a kid—an actor, right?”

“He's not a kid, exactly. Not very tall, but with big shoulders, long arms. He was wearing a baseball cap. Chad Zanzibar.”

“Wearing shorts? The kind that are falling off his butt? Does he dye his hair, maybe?”

I nodded. “Highlights. Did you see him?”

“Yeah. He was on his cell phone in the reception area when I arrived. I heard him talking to someone—really reading the riot act. About needing money for a production.”

“Yes, I think he and his grandmother are producers of a new movie.”

“He needed sixteen million dollars. He said so, very loudly, several times.”

“He thought he could get that kind of money from his grandmother. But now she's broke. Last night, she asked me about selling her jewelry. Which, in case your college studies skipped this chapter, is something women don't do unless they're desperate.”

“Does that give the kid a motive to kill Hoyt?”

I set down my cup. “You don't call him your father, I notice. Not ‘Dad' or ‘Pop' or anything but his first name. Has that been a lifelong thing? Or just since learning he wasn't really the man who—”

“I always called him Hoyt. It was easier that way.” Tierney drank more coffee. “I don't remember exactly when the Zanzibar kid left the Paine Building. But it was definitely after Hoyt went off the balcony.”

Our breakfasts arrived on platters as big as bicycle tires. Tierney's plate overflowed with eggs, peppers, fried potatoes and four slices of rye toast.

As he looked at his breakfast, he pulled my cell phone out of his pocket and pushed it across the table to me.

We ate, and I thought about the ordinariness of meals with my sisters. How strange it was to be sitting here having breakfast with my brother. My new brother. It was a new day, all right.

But Tierney soon lost interest in his breakfast. He sat back, staring at his plate and toying with his fork.

I said, “Why did you come to Blackbird Farm yesterday? Surely not for the purpose of kidnapping me.”

Silent, he shook his head. But I could see him wrestling with his thoughts.

“Then, what? To meet Daddy? Your real father?”

“No.” He set aside his fork and looked at me squarely. “Because I thought he killed Hoyt.”

“You thought Daddy might have pushed Hoyt off the balcony? No, that's not possible.”

He lifted his shoulders. “It's what I assumed. I overheard one of the Treasury agents say he was in the office. And once I knew that, I figured he was the one with a real reason to kill Hoyt.”

“What reason? Daddy had no—”

“Because of me,” Tierney said.

“But wouldn't it be the other way around? That Hoyt resented my father for having the affair with your mother?”

Tierney shook his head. “That wasn't how it happened, Nora. At least, that's not what I have been led to understand most of my life. Hoyt made an agreement with your father.”

“An agreement?”

“To help my mother conceive.”

I tried to comprehend what he was saying. “You mean, Hoyt wasn't…capable?”

Tierney gave a short, bitter laugh. “No, Hoyt wasn't capable of making babies. But he agreed that my mother should be allowed to have a child, so he approached your father—his friend—to help. It started out very civilized.”

I considered the kind of favor my father had given his friend, and wondered fleetingly—unfairly, perhaps—if he'd had an ulterior motive. I banished that thought as quickly as it came, trying hard to give him the benefit of my doubt. “But…how does that give Daddy a reason to kill Hoyt now? If they all agreed to—”

“The original agreement was drawn up and signed by all three of them. To guarantee your father would say nothing and make no effort to contact me, Hoyt and my mother put five hundred thousand dollars into an investment account. Your father was supposed to stay out of my life until I turned thirty. At that time, he was allowed to collect his reward. Actually, we were supposed to split it.”

My stomach began to roil as I thought of previous occasions when Daddy had access to large sums of money. “How old are you now?”

“Twenty-nine. Unfortunately, over the weekend I learned that Hoyt had raided that account some years ago. There's nothing left.”

“I'm sorry.”

Grimly, he said, “Me, too. Amazon Chocolate could really use some cash right now. I came to Philadelphia hoping to get my hands on that money early. I have a lot of people depending on me. I hate disappointing them. And, to tell the truth, I've got a little problem to fix with some nasty guys back in South America.”

“How nasty?”

“Are you familiar with the term crime lord?”

“Intimately.” I sighed. “You owe them money?”

“Yes. It's a natural part of the system there. A little bribery goes a long way. But if I miss a payment…”

“I understand. How does all this make Daddy a murder suspect?”

Tierney looked directly into my eyes. “Maybe I'm being presumptuous, but I'd like to think he was angry at Hoyt for stealing my inheritance.”

“I—well, that would be very noble.” I shook my head. “But I'm sorry to say, it's hardly in character for my father. I have to be truthful with you. If anything, Daddy's probably wishing he could have gotten his hands on the money himself.”