Stone Kissed (13 page)

“Eight o’clock?” Her voice was too loud, her frustration with his stupid infatuation with her cousin. But it served to call him back. “I’ll pick you up.”

His sigh was almost—but not quite—imperceptible. “No, thanks. I’ll drive.”

Cecily shrugged. No harm in letting him believe he was in charge for a little while. Men with delusions of power couldn’t bring themselves to fight against fresh-faced girls. This one might be smart enough to figure out she was taking his soul, and he would resist. But Grant’s life, like every other’s, would flow away on a last, desperate gasp.

Sometimes it made her sad.

***

“Grant, he’s not here.” Special Agent Derek Cardinal stood at Grant’s shoulder looking at his team down in the ravine.

Grant was as frustrated as Derek. Carl Benson
was
here. He knew it in his gut, even if he didn’t feel the resonance in his bones.

To make matters worse, Grant found himself obstructed, distracted and confounded at every turn. Special Agent Cardinal was good at his job, meticulous, and the people of Stewardsville were lucky he worked their territory. But he was also a bureaucrat who abided by every rule. The Johnson harpy was breathing down Grant’s neck and disturbing his focus. While she was attractive—desirable, even—something about her felt off in a way that Delia, with her known mental health issues, didn’t. Delia, herself, wasn’t speaking to him. With this search for Benson underway, work had all but stopped at Steward House.

His frustration seemed to bleed out into the search team. Most of the men and many of the women were still combing the woods along the ridge, but morale was low and expectations lower.

“I can feel it,” Grant said.

“Right. Your Spidey-sense.”

“It’s not that.” If Benson had been wearing something valuable—an antique gold ring or a pocket watch—maybe Grant would have resonated with it.

“No X-ray vision today?” Derek’s own frustration was evident.

The agent and Grant had a cautious alliance. They’d called Grant in over the years on a couple dozen fraud cases because his ability to identify treasures made him equally good at labeling forgeries. Although they used his skills gladly, working with Grant drove Cardinal nuts. Grant told the feds the truth and left them to find the chain of evidence.

He didn’t help for the good citizen awards—he’d never been one of those. But he hated to see crap passed off as the real deal. Only seldom did anyone try to pass a forgery off to Wolverton International once he made it clear he’d ruin them without a backward glance. And if Cardinal asked Grant for his opinion on an item, what of it? He needed to keep his senses sharp. It wasn’t as good as crawling through a smuggler’s cave or diving into a shipwreck, but it helped keep him from climbing out of his skin at the office.

The crane pulled the scorched, twisted remnants of Chief Benson’s cruiser out of the ravine and lowered it onto the bed of the long wrecker.

“We have no evidence he was even in the car. He’s probably in Mexico by now.”

On the opposite side of the ravine a portly man in a light blue windbreaker shoved his hands in his pockets and kicked at a rock. The searchers moved sluggishly, weaving aimlessly among the vines.

“His laptop show up?”

“No. It’s probably with him. On a beach.”

“IP address.”

Derek removed his sunglasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “He ditched it, Grant.”

“He’s not in Mexico.”

“He’s a cop. He knows how to hide.”

It felt wrong. It was rational, logical, but it still felt wrong. “How long?” Grant asked.

“We’re backed up and understaffed, Grant. You’ve got a weird little town here, but a suicide attempt and two missing persons do not a crime spree make. I’ll give it another day here but I think the computer guys will be the ones to find him. I bet everything we need to know is in the town’s checking account.”

Derek’s car pulled away, his departure a silent signal to the others. They flowed up out of the wood, nodding and saying their goodbyes. Grant stood in the growing chill of the mountain breeze and watched them go. His feet itched. He imagined the worms crawling through Benson’s skull in the sod below him.

Damn it, Derek was right. And he was becoming as fanciful as Delia.

Grant stomped the dirt and swept the mud off his forearm. He had to go clean up. Cecily Johnson promised to tell him things about Steward House even Delia didn’t know. He was curious to see what Cecily would say—and what she would do. “Anything,” she’d said. And he believed her.

“He can eat when and where he pleases.” Delia thrust the blue blazer in the paper bag. It wasn’t as if Grant answered to her for anything. He waltzed in and played
This Old House
, and he waltzed out again without bothering to tell her when he would or wouldn’t be in Stewardsville. And why would he? She was just a lackey who’d provided a bit of fun on the side. Though not, it appeared, quite enough fun.

“But she’s hollow,” Sophie insisted, and the statues fell silent. Delia’s hand stilled in the bag.

“How can that be?” Athena’s voice was uncharacteristically small.

“I can’t explain it, but I saw her sashaying up the sidewalk often enough, smearing her face against the shop window when your daddy had the place. She is…”

“Stop,” Brogan barked. “The child.”

“What does ‘hollow’ mean?” Bert’s ears twitched with interest.

“You all are as bad as Josephine with her brood. He’s got to grow up some time.”

“No, he doesn’t,” Delia protested, but it was pointless. They were stone. They only paid attention to soft-fleshed little her when it suited them.

“Hollow means soulless,” Romana explained. “Although I cannot say I’ve seen a hollow human, I agree with Sophie that Cecily Johnson comes close.”

“Kelsey says I shouldn’t let her talk to Father in the hospital.”

“I don’t like this talk,” Brogan said. “You take care of your da, young lady, if this woman’s trouble. But we’ll be leaving that other subject alone. Now, turn on some music.”

Bert scuttled across the floor to the docking station as Delia pushed open the door with her meager bag of clothes to donate. She’d downloaded the newest Lady Gaga CD for them. She didn’t know the lyrics well enough to be embarrassed yet, and she wasn’t sticking around to find out. She had an important errand, and she raced down the highway to the next county, determined to do—and think—only of what needed to be done.

When she reached the intersection to the drive to Fleur de Lis. Delia slowed down despite herself. Her headlights gleamed off the tasteful small sign with its old-fashioned script.

She’d never eaten there. When the Stewardsville senior class had their prom dinners, she’d been in D.C., holed up in her dorm or leaning against the base of the Virgin Mary in the garden. Her one real date with Grant had been aborted that night he confronted her father in the hospital and asked him all of the questions Delia had been too cowardly to ask herself.

The wheel of the car turned right and she pulled into the gravel drive up the bluff. She’d never seen Fleur at night at all. The stars were out, the moon was waxing, and she’d heard the view from the tables over the river bluffs was the best in three counties. When she dropped her head to the steering wheel in despair, her forehead hit the horn. The noise shocked her heart back to life and she slammed the car in reverse, her tires squealing on the pavement.

She didn’t need to see. She knew how it would be. Grant would be wearing his charming smile and Cecily would have poured herself into some fancy bra and a garter belt under a little black dress—silk, or cashmere. They looked perfect together. Cecily had lived in New York City, for God’s sake—she was the closest thing to a sophisticate Stewardsville ever had and ever would know.

Delia’s headlights caught and lost the glint of the mailboxes and the dangling strands of tree moss, and she rolled down the window, needing air to cool her face and slow her pounding heart. She passed the industrial area with its paper-mill stench to the dark and dicey neighborhood on the other side. A floodlight shone on her target and she parked behind him.

“Miss Delia,” St. Vincent de Paul said. “What brings you at this hour? We’re closed.”

“I’m not shopping. Just dropping off.” She lifted up the paper bag to show him. “How have you been?”

“Right as rain. Couldn’t be better.” His lip didn’t even twitch.

“Anything…new?” she prodded, which was a mistake. He began listing people by name and the number of bags and boxes they left in a heap next to the door behind him. He was, and always had been, a terrible gossip. She’d avoided most of his litanies through the years by coming during the day to shop for her school clothes. Tonight, however, she didn’t mind so much. It gave her a chance to collect herself, to slow her heart, to focus on what mattered, which was not Grant Wolverton pulling that razor-sharp bitch into his arms.

“The Hardcastle girl keeps bringing her outgrown maternity clothes,” St. Vincent said. “Makes no sense. She might need them again someday. She’s pretty. She could find a man to do right by her.”

Delia cut to the chase. “Are you able to move?”

“Pardon me?”

Delia poked her finger into the robe at his knee. “Can you move? Can you turn your head or move your hand?”

He was silent for a moment, and then he began to roar. “Young lady, I know you’ve been taught better.”

“I’m sorry, but it’s important—”

“I’m here where I was made to be, where I’ve always been and where I will be long after you are gone. You flit about like a moth now, but one day you’ll be as still as I am.”

“Yes, sir.” She nodded humbly, but it was too late.

“And furthermore—” he continued, but she turned her back on his voice chasing her car into the night.

He hadn’t reacted to her touch. The shadows were dark and deep in the moonlight. The twitch of his eyelid was an artifact of her paranoia. Probably.

***

Grant perched gingerly on the wrought iron restaurant chair. They sat at a glass-topped table on the patio overlooking the river, drinking the champagne she’d ordered in paper-thin glass flutes. Everything in Fleur de Lis was fragile. Everything but Cecily Johnson. She had the face of an ingenue, but she was dark and heavy in her black dress, her black eye makeup, her black scowl. She made Delia look like a firefly, light and luminous.

Cecily Johnson gave him what he asked for. She droned every fact about Steward House that Lars had dug out of the archives of the
Gazette.
Grant interrupt once with a question about the energy sources she’d mentioned. He didn’t know what he was digging for, but he also didn’t know why a small estate in a backwater town made him feel alert, alive and embraced. Neither, apparently, did Miss Johnson, because she’d smiled coyly and returned to her recitation.

“So, I hear you bowl.”

Grant roused himself. He had to make an effort. He was at dinner with a beautiful woman. But he’d used all his adrenaline crawling around in that damned ravine, and all he’d found was a strange puddle of graying mud on the edge of the woods.

It still bugged, him, that muck. When he dipped his fingers into it, he’d begun to shiver uncontrollably and quickly wiped his hands in the grass.

Was that her foot?

Good God, it was.

He’d never had a woman actually rub her toes up his shin before. He could see the appeal. Felt like a large foot, though—not petite, not birdlike like Delia’s. Delia’s second toe was slightly longer than her big toe, which nested nicely on his tongue. She’d undulated like a whip the first time he bit that toe. The second time too.

“Grant? Grant!”

“My apologies, Miss Johnson. It’s been a long day.” He looked down at the steak. He’d had two bites, but hers was gone. At this rate, they’d be here all night. Even though the days were long, it was already dark and he wanted to leave. He’d agreed to this dinner, but the sooner they were finished, the sooner he could get back to…his house.

She pushed her champagne flute at him. “You’ve worked so hard, looking for that poor man. You need this more than I do.” Her chair legs squealed in protest along the wood, and she was beside him, her breast brushing his arm. Delia’s breasts were much smaller, and her nipples were candy kisses.

His throat suddenly dry, Grant took a sip of the champagne. Cecily swooped in as he pulled the glass away, and she licked the corner of his mouth. She grasped his shoulder and twisted to face him, her lips crawling awkwardly to cover his own. She wasn’t the first drunk woman to drape herself across his lap, but she was the first to go barnacle on him. He pulled back.

“Grant, we’re two of a kind.” She smiled at him like a heroine at the end of a bad forties movie. “You have power in your blood and I…I do too.” Her voice was breathy, and she mashed her breast into his arm again.

“Miss Johnson, the search tired me out.”

She didn’t get the hint. Instead she slapped up against him, her chair scraping his shin. She sealed her mouth over his in a parody of a kiss, her tongue pressing down onto his like a doctor’s depressor stick. She tasted of steak and she made a weird keening noise in her throat.

Grant was rougher than he would have liked—rougher than he would have believed necessary—when he unlatched himself with a faintly audible
pop
and pushed her back.

“Really,” he repeated. “I’m tired. Let’s get you home.”

“You can come with me.” Her voice warbled, as if she were trying to sing the words instead of speaking them.

He felt a pulsing in his sternum, which he didn’t care for at all. “No. I’m on first search tomorrow. It’s time to go.”

***

Delia hadn’t meant to go back. She hadn’t meant to park at the bottom of the lot. She’d meant to drive on past Fleur de Lis and return to her apartment for a good night’s sleep.

When she got out of the car to circle around to the back of the restaurant, it was only because she wanted to see the moon reflected in the river. That was all she’d wanted to see.

They were backlit by the interior lights, two dark shadows on the patio that merged together into one. The pain in her chest was so great and tears obscured her vision, so she couldn’t even be sure it was them.

And yet, what her eyes couldn’t see, her brain could imagine. Pictures of Grant rising above Cecily, rolling with Cecily, kissing Cecily, kept Delia’s fingers in rigor on the steering wheel, kept her jaw clenched as she marched past the curious statues, kept her body bound in fetal position in the cell of her room, until just before dawn, when she finally slept.

***

“You got a call,” Athena said, when Delia stepped out of the shower shortly before lunch. She was hours late for work, but she doubted Grant would notice today. Was he even out of bed yet? What bed was he in? She knocked her forehead into the door frame to shake the thought out of her head.

“Who?” She tried to sound casual as she wrapped her towel around her chest.

“That nice girl, Kelsey. Your father has a visitor—Special Agent Cardinal. You should get over there.”

“Damn it.” She turned to the futon where she’d left her laundry but saw only her jeans.

“Here,” Bert said from behind her, and she whirled to see him holding her bra and underwear with his paws, while her T-shirt dangled from his left ear.

“Give me those, you brat.” She snatched back her clothes. She slammed the bedroom door behind her, then turned and picked up Chloris, the shepherdess, from beneath the corner of her bed and opened the door to set her on the futon.

“Thanks,” she whispered. Chloris, who was much more grounded than her sister, had silently stroked Delia’s hair with her tiny hand while Delia wept.

“Men are pigs,” Chloris said. “Put on some concealer. You’ve got bags under your eyes.”

“Please y’all.” Delia straightened her T-shirt. “Please stay in and be quiet. Mrs. Pevensky next door says she saw a prowler a couple days ago.” She stared hard at Bert.

“It gets boring in here.”

“Sweetie, I know. But I don’t know what will happen if anyone finds you. It won’t be good, though. I’m sure of it.”

“They plant you here, they plant you there. The scenery changes.” Romana sighed. “But the people are all the same.”

“Are we?” Delia asked, hearing the need in her own voice.

“No,” Athena said, glaring at Romana. “You’re different, Delia. You belong to us.”

***

To Delia’s surprise, the two men were sitting in the hospital room in silence. She gripped the door frame to catch her breath and take in the view of the brawny agent sitting in her chair, staring with her father up at the television. Instead of a court show, however, they were focused on footage of Bob Griffin, the newly promoted police chief, who explained in his perpetually bewildered voice that although they were calling off the search, they would continue to follow all leads.

“Moron,” her father rasped.

“We were all young once,” Cardinal said.

“Dad. What’d he ask you? What’d you say?” She turned to Cardinal. “What did he say?”

“Calm down, Delia.”

“Your father here was about to tell me about his friend. Did you ever meet Mr. Ailey?”

“No.”

He turned back to her father. “You may have been the last person in contact with Russ Ailey.”

“Maybe,” her father answered. “Not sure.”

“Did he mention leaving town?”

“No.”

“He didn’t share any plans with you.”

“Nope.”

“Did you fight about anything?”

Her father laughed. “Yeah. Basketball. He had crappy taste in teams.”

“What was he doing here?”

“Odd jobs.”

“You hire him?”

“Once or twice. He was handy.” Her father slumped back, the good side of his face collapsing into an old expression she recognized in spite of all of the new scarring. But unlike the child who had yet to learn how to read the curve of a carved lip, or the emotion in a flat stone eye, Delia knew now what she was seeing on her father’s face. He was lonely. He’d been lonely ever since her mother had died. Russ Ailey might have been the only friend her father had.

“What about Cecily Johnson?” Cardinal asked.

The name hit Delia in the chest like a shaft of rebar. She turned her face away.

“He worked for her some. She’s a pest. Damned greedy harpy.”

Delia couldn’t deny the small bloom of pleasure in her chest at her father’s words. “I thought…I mean, doesn’t she visit you?”

“No. Wouldn’t let her in if she did. She wanted your house, Delia. Wouldn’t let her have it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Said she’d make us a good deal. Like I don’t know my business.”

Delia felt the blood drain from her face and her fingers go cold. The agent must have seen it on her face, because he shoved the plastic chair toward her and stood.