She Loves Me Not (24 page)

He wonders how long Leslie is going to stay tonight. Usually, when she visits, she's long gone by this hour.

Not that it matters.

He won't be venturing into the house again tonight.

Standing over her bed last night, watching her sleep for as long as he dared, should have been tantalizing enough to last him until tomorrow.

Tomorrow, when it snows.

But what if it doesn't? What if the forecasters are wrong again, or if this storm fizzles out before it reaches Long Island?

He can't wait any longer than twenty-four hours.

Rather than sating his blood lust, killing Isabel left him ravenous.

If it doesn't snow here tomorrow night as predicted, he'll just have to bring Rose with him.

There's plenty of snow on the ground in the Catskills. What's the difference if he brings her there alive? It might be nice to show her around David Brookman's cabin.

After all, he and Angela spent so many passionate hours there—when she wasn't feeling guilty, that is.

“If David ever found out I brought you up here . . .”

“Don't worry,”
he would say, kissing the worry lines on her forehead.
“He'll never know.”

They only used the cabin in January and February, when her husband was safely out of range, and relaxing at his condo and on the golf course in the Florida sunshine. Angela was supposed to spend the winter there with him, but she kept finding excuses to fly back to New York on weekends.

“I can't stay away from you,”
she would tell him, falling into his waiting arms at the airport.

“What did you tell him this time?”

“That I had to host a charity benefit. He'll barely notice I'm gone. He's too busy golfing with his father and all their rich buddies. You don't golf do you?”

“Never,”
he lied, kissing her neck.

Of course he golfed. He golfed, and he sailed, and he skied—rich men's sports, all of them. It amazed him, sometimes, that he and David Brookman had traveled in the same circles all their lives, but never met. Of course, David is a good ten years older and went to MIT; he, on the other hand, went to Berkeley, drawn to the bohemian northern California lifestyle—and of course, the fact that Father didn't agree with his choice. Not that there was a damn thing he could do about it. Mother was paying. Mother was always willing to pay, just as long as he stayed out of her hair.

A light goes on in an upstairs window. It's the bathroom, he knows. The shade is down, but it's a lace one that isn't entirely opaque. The silhouette of a woman is visible there, and she's getting undressed.

His pulse quickens. He eyes the lattice against the side of the house. It stretches nearly to the second floor, ending just below the bathroom window. If he used it as a ladder and put his face right up to the window, he might be able to catch a glimpse of Rose through the shade.

He moves swiftly, mounting the lattice with the agility of an acrobat. The snarl of bare wisteria vines make it a tricky climb, and he winces when a splinter embeds itself into the tender palm of his hand, but he presses on. He's nearly reached the top when he hears a car coming down the quiet street, slowing just in front of the Larrabee home.

He freezes, clinging to the lattice.

The car turns into the driveway below, the glaring headlights illuminating his perch like the sweeping searchlight from a prison guard tower.

Don't move.

Don't breathe.

Maybe whoever it is didn't see you.

But the car door opens abruptly, and a male voice calls sharply, “Hey! What the hell are you doing up there?”

A
fter testing the temperature of the brimming tub, Rose turns off the water. A little hot, but it will cool down quickly. She steps in gingerly and sinks gratefully into the rose-scented bubbles, leaning her head back against the edge of the tub.

It's still hot. Too hot.

Maybe if she—

What was that?

She distinctly heard a sharp thudding noise from somewhere outside.

She sits up quickly, the water sloshing around her, some of it splashing over the side and onto the mat beside the tub.

“Leslie?” she calls.

No answer.

Not surprising. Rose can hear her in Jenna's room on the opposite end of the second floor. The three of them are giggling in there, singing silly nursery rhymes. It's good to hear Jenna and Leo sounding so happy after today's trauma with the lost puppy. Thank God for Leslie.

Everything is fine,
Rose tells herself.
Just take your bath and stop being so paranoid.

Hah. Paranoid.

On her way to the bathroom, she made a detour to her bedroom. Just to make sure Sam's gun was still in the nightstand drawer. Just to make sure the bullets are still in the locked box in the top of the closet.

Both the gun and the bullets are just where Sam left them.

And you're not going to do a damned thing about it,
Rose tells herself sternly. She simply can't take the chance of keeping a loaded weapon anywhere in this house. Not with Leo here, there and everywhere, getting into things.

And anyway, she has no idea how to load a gun, and would be afraid to try.

Hitch would probably show you, if you really wanted to know.

But she doesn't.

She doesn't want to know.

Smiling at the sound of her children's laughter wafting in from Jenna's room, Rose sits back in the water.

Ouch!
It really is burning her skin.

Reaching for the cold tap, she turns it on to cool the tub down a little, disappointed when the loudly splashing water drowns out the laughing voices down the hall.

“A
nd the police never had any clue who might have done it?” David asks Olivia McGlinchie's parents, who shake their heads sadly.

They're seated together on the old-fashioned sofa opposite David's wingback chair, the husband's arm protectively around his wife's frail shoulders. David can't help wondering whether Joanne McGlinchie was always this delicate wisp of a woman. Judging by the framed family photos on the table, she wasn't. He suspects overwhelming grief robbed her frame of a few dozen pounds and put the gray streaks in her dark hair.

“The detectives on the case never even pinpointed a single suspect.” Ralph sighs. “When she disappeared, they treated the case as though she were a teenager who had run away. They looked at the situation—at this young woman who suddenly could see after a lifetime of disability—and they thought that she had probably gotten carried away with her new independence.”

“We told them she would never do that,” Joanne inserts, her voice unwavering, almost hardy, for the first time tonight. “Our daughter would never abandon her car in a parking lot and take off in the middle of a snowstorm. She would never leave us to worry for months on end, not knowing if she was alive, or—”

She breaks off, shaking her head. As her husband pats her shoulder, the dog at their feet stands and nuzzles his nose against the woman's leg, as though he senses her sorrow.

His name, the McGlinchies told David when he first arrived, is Buddy, and he was Olivia's Seeing Eye dog. When she regained her sight, she couldn't bear to part with him and kept him as her beloved pet. They found him hungry and distressed in their daughter's Port Richmond apartment after her disappearance.

David clears his throat, deciding now is as good a time as any to tell the McGlinchies that he owns a home close to the spot where their daughter's body was found. And that somebody opened and read the letter Olivia sent him through the donor agency.

But Ralph speaks first, resuming the account where his wife left off. “No, Olivia would never have put us through that hell. We knew something was wrong but there was nothing we could do about it.”

“We tried,” Joanne puts in. “Ralph bought a computer, and he learned how to use it. He sent Olivia's picture all over the Internet, asking if anyone had seen her.”

“Nobody had, but I found out that there are far too many people like us out there, desperate parents with missing kids,” Ralph says sadly. He takes a deep breath. “By the time our daughter was found, murdered, too many months had passed for the police to pick up anybody's trail. They tried, but—”

His wife snorts.

“They did try, I'm sure,” he repeats, patting her shoulder again. “They came here several times to question us, wanting to know all about her life, and if there was anybody we thought was suspicious.”

“And there wasn't?”

Ralph McGlinchie shakes his head. “She had so many new friends, once she regained her sight and got a place of her own, she started driving. She went to the city sometimes, and she started dating.”

“She had a boyfriend?” David asks.

“A few.” Her mother smiles. “She said it was a whole new ball game, dating when you could see what the other person looked like, and they could see you. She spent a lot of time on her appearance, you know. She started shopping, and wearing makeup, and paying attention to fashion. She went through what most girls experience when they're adolescents. It was such fun to see her that way. And she looked so beautiful. I know that coffee will be ready in a moment, but first . . . would you like to see some pictures of her?”

“Sure.” David nods politely.

In truth, he doesn't want the coffee his hostess insisted on brewing, nor does he want to see pictures. But it seems to be almost therapeutic for Olivia's mother to share her memories of her daughter.

Again, David wonders if his own grief for Angela might be tempered if he hadn't isolated himself in his lonely, sorrowful little world.

Joanne moves purposefully for the first time since David arrived, standing and crossing swiftly to the shelf beside the fireplace. She plucks a thick photo album from the end of a long row of them and carries it over to David.

“The first few pages show what she looked like before the surgery,” she says, as he opens the album. He murmurs appropriate comments as he peruses the photographs of a plain-looking young woman whose eyes, when they aren't obscured by dark glasses, betray her blindness in a vacant upward stare.

“This is her right after the bandages came off,” Ralph says, having come to flank David's chair with his wife. He turns on a floor lamp behind the chair, illuminating the page.

“She looks happy.” David scrutinizes the young woman's smiling face, telling himself that those are Angela's eyes twinkling up at him.

But they aren't. Not really. Olivia McGlinchie looks nothing like his late wife. Perhaps it would have been different to gaze into her eyes in person, but now, as he stares at the photo, David feels no connection to Angela; nothing other than sorrow for this poor girl's tragic death.

He flips through the pages as her parents describe various scenes: Olivia learning to drive, Olivia tossing a Frisbee at the Jersey Shore with Buddy, Olivia on the top of the Empire State Building with binoculars . . .

“This one was taken on her last birthday,” Joanne says, pointing to the last photo in the album, a group snapshot. “One of her newer friends sent it to us in a Christmas card a few months ago. She said she had forgotten she even took the picture and came across it when she had an old roll of film developed. She thought we might like to have it.”

The photo shows a collection of young men and women posing around Olivia, with a birthday cake in the foreground, covered in lit candles.

His hand poised to close the album, David says, “How nice. They must have thrown her a part—”

He stops short.

Shakes his head.

It can't be . . .

His heart pounding, he holds the album up to the light.

P
anting, his veins still pumping with adrenaline and fury, he gives Luke Pfleuger's battered, bloody corpse one last kick before leaving it on the ground at the foot of the lattice.

He turns to stride away, then curses under his breath.

The car, he realizes, is still in the driveway, motor still running, headlights on.

Certain it's only a matter of moments before somebody in the house realizes it's there, he contemplates slipping into the driver's seat and moving it. If only he had on a pair of gloves . . . But his hands are bare, and he can't risk leaving fingerprints on the steering wheel. The car will have to stay there. But he can at least turn it off, so that it'll take a little longer before Rose or her sister-in-law spots it.

He can hardly believe they didn't hear the scuffle, or Luke's strangled, gurgling gasps as the life drained out of him.

He untucks his shirt from his jeans and leans in the open car door. After wrapping his shirttail around his fingers, he grasps the key and turns it.

The motor's hum ceases.

He glances up through the windshield.

Pfleuger's body, the throat slit from ear to ear, is illuminated in the headlights's glow, the spotlight act in a macabre theater.

His only regret is that he couldn't use the monogrammed letter opener he stole from David Brookman's study to do it. It served him well with Olivia, and again this afternoon. But he left it behind, carelessly tossed into a thatch of pachysandra not far from Isabel's body, where the crime scene detectives will be sure to find it and assume her assailant accidentally dropped it as he fled. It will be all the evidence they need to arrest David Brookman as a suspect.

Brilliant. It saved him having to lug her body all the way to David Brookman's cabin.

Brilliant, too, that he thought to arm himself with a kitchen knife before venturing over here this evening. It was just a hunch—he never dreamed he'd need to use it. Luck is certainly with him tonight. He takes that as a sign that accelerating his plan was the right thing to do.