“When did you notice them missing?”
“They were here yesterday. . . .” She closed her eyes so tightly her jaw clenched. Her hands, too, fisted, one around her key ring. “I checked just yesterday, and there were eleven dresses hanging right here.” Eyes flying open, she jabbed a long finger toward the empty rod. “Eleven.” The last word was weak. “Only eleven and now all gone.”
“Only eleven?” Bentz repeated.
“Yes.” She made the sign of the cross over her chest. “But there were twelve up here that I remember. I double-checked my notes, and one was missing yesterday.”
Montoya felt a chill as cold as a north wind whisper through his brain. “Sister Camille was wearing the twelfth,” he guessed.
“Yes.”
“And Sister Asteria the eleventh,” Bentz said, his gaze meeting Montoya’s. “Meaning that there are ten left.”
Montoya said, “Ten dresses, ten more victims?”
“Oh, please, no!” Charity gasped, but Montoya could tell the idea had already come to her; he was only reaffirming her worst fears.
“We’ll need that list of names,” he said. “Of anyone who once was an orphan at St. Elsinore’s.”
“And also the nuns who work there now. Some work with the kids and at the clinic, right?” Bentz asked as the reverend mother, in the sweltering quarters of the attic, nervously fingered the cross dangling from a chain at her neck.
“Yes, yes, of course,” she said, still shaken. Then with more conviction than he would have expected, she added, “I’ll get what you need right now.” She blinked and sniffed, as if tears were burning the back of her eyelids.
Anger?
Righteous fury?
Or guilt?
Who knew? And did it matter?
“Come along, then.” Some of the stiffness had returned to her spine, the determined, no-nonsense set of her jaw back again. “If Father Paul gives me any grief, any talk of legal issues, I’ll tell him to take it up with God!”
CHAPTER 37
It was late afternoon by the time Slade helped Valerie carry boxes down from the attic. Shadows were stretching long over the grounds of Briarstone, evening fast approaching.
The day had gotten away from her. She’d had some paperwork for Briarstone that couldn’t be put off any longer while Slade had called his brothers, checked on the ranch, then repaired a clog in the sprinkler system and worked on Valerie’s computer, debugging it, adding some memory, cleaning out files with her permission, and getting the damned laptop up to speed. She’d done some digging on the Internet when the computer was up and running and had found several O’Malleys in the phone book, looking for the elusive Mrs. Stan, but so far had struck out.
All the while, she’d been thinking about Camille’s disturbing diary—the images it had evoked and the cryptic messages she’d left for herself.
Which were probably nothing.
Yet they nagged at her, kept scratching at her mind, an itch that couldn’t be relieved.
Now she was at her desk, hanging up her phone after a call from a woman who apologized profusely for canceling her trip to New Orleans and her reservation at Briarstone for the weekend because her husband had been rushed to the hospital for emergency gall bladder surgery.
Slade had spent the last hour working on her laptop at the small table she’d tucked near the kitchen. A warm summer breeze drifted through the screen door, and Bo, making the weird high-pitched whine he always did while sleeping and dreaming, was lying just outside on the porch.
“This should work a lot faster,” Slade said, screwing the computer’s case into place.
“How do you know how to do this?” She motioned toward the laptop.
“What?”
“Fix the damned thing? Add memory? All of it?”
His grin was lazy and amused, his thin lips twisting. “You don’t think we have computers on the ranch?”
“Yeah, I know, but, I mean—”
“I told you that Bad Luck’s in the twenty-first century, right? And I’ve been a closeted geek for years,” he teased, glancing up from the screen. He slid his chair back and stood, still holding the screwdriver, stretching his arms high enough over his head to nearly touch the ceiling while listening to his spine pop.
“Really?” She tried not to notice that his shirt hiked up as he stretched, exposing those lean, hard muscles of his abdomen, the trail of dark hair that slipped beneath the waist of his jeans.
“You don’t remember?” He cast a surprised look down at her, one of his eyebrows arching.
“That you were into high tech?” she asked. “No.”
“I said ‘closeted.’ ”
She rolled her eyes up at him. “So it’s true. The wife is the last to know.”
“ ‘The wife’ hasn’t been around much lately,” he reminded her, and the barb was as sharp as the Pomeroy utility knife she was planning to use on the wide tape that sealed the five boxes she’d found in the attic over her small garage.
There it was between them.
The marriage.
The impending divorce.
She didn’t want to think about that, not right now. “So you really are the computer-genius cowboy?”
“Yes’m,” he drawled, twirling the screwdriver like it was a six-shooter, then holstering it into his jeans pocket. “Here at the BS Ranch—and that BS stands for Briarstone, don’tchaknow—we do it all. Everything from pulling calves to restoring laptops.” His crooked, decidedly sexy smile stretched wide.
“BS is right,” she said, and laughed for the first time in what seemed like eons. She also remembered why she’d fallen so hard and fast for him. Oh, Slade, she found herself thinking, if only we could start over—wipe the slate clean.
She realized then that she’d never stopped loving him.
Her throat caught for a second. What an idiot.
You can never go back. Didn’t she believe that old axiom? Her smile faded as she saw the empty years stretching out before her. Her parents and sister dead, her husband an ex and living at the Triple H, far, far away in a long-distant past. Oh, God, now she was getting maudlin.
Fool!
She felt her cheeks burn and prayed Slade had no idea what she was feeling.
“Let’s see what you think.” Slade carried the laptop to her desk, where he set it down. He was standing so near her she smelled a hint of his aftershave, and it brought back memories of lying in bed, his scent still lingering on the pillows long after he’d gotten up to feed the livestock. Irritated, she pushed the wayward memory aside.
He was standing half behind her, one shoulder nearly brushing her back, his face even with hers as he pushed a few buttons on the keyboard. “Try something.”
“Such as?”
He slid a glance at her from the corner of his eye. “Well, I was talking about a program on the computer, but if you have something else in mind . . .” His voice was low and suggestive.
“In your nightmares, Cowboy.”
“And yours, I’ll bet.”
“I’m not having this discussion with you!” She sounded tough, but inside she was melting.
His laugh was low. Mocking. As if he knew what she was thinking. She turned her head and noticed his belt buckle, right at eye level, the faded fly of his jeans, right above the top of her desk and slightly rounded.
Oh, great!
He was getting aroused, too?
Not good! Not good at all.
Quickly she turned her attention back to the computer screen. “Okay, hotshot,” she said, hating that she sounded slightly breathless. “Give me a demonstration.”
There was a pregnant pause, and she felt her cheeks burn.
“You can be such a bastard!” she said.
“And you love it.” His laugh was deep and rich, the timbre familiar.
“God, what an ego!”
Ignoring his amusement and his eye-level, jean-covered crotch, she reached for the computer’s mouse, plugged it in, and with a few clicks loc
ated the program she used for booking reservations at the inn. “Let’s see if I can cancel Mr. and Mrs. Miller’s rooms for the weekend.” She turned her mind away from the slight bulge at the front of Slade’s jeans and began working.
“You’re a tease, wife,” he said.
That makes two of us. “And you’re always thinking with your—Oh, never mind.”
“You were gonna say ‘heart,’ right?”
“Yeah, that’s it,” she joked.
He leaned closer and whispered into the shell of her ear, “You’re right. I am.” His breath was warm against her skin. Inviting. A second later, he brushed his lips across the crook of her neck, and she shivered inside, feeling a little tingle deep inside, right between the juncture of her legs, that sweet itch that always signaled the start of her sexual arousal, the beginning of a pulsating, hot throb.
Trouble.
If she turned her head, he would kiss her. And from there . . . oh, sweet God . . .
“I don’t think this is a good idea.”
“You’re right.”
“Slade . . .” She closed her eyes. Don’t do this!
She turned her head and felt his lips against hers, but he didn’t kiss her, didn’t press his mouth more urgently to her own suddenly willing lips. She opened her eyes and found him staring at her, pupils dark with desire, blue irises so thin they were barely visible. The pores on his skin, the stubble of whiskers starting to grow, all so close, and the scent of him, of aftershave and desire almost palpable.
She swallowed against a mouth as dry as an East Texas canyon in August.
Slowly he pulled his head away. “You know, Val,” he said, his voice a low whisper, his expression as serious as death, “I would never have cheated on you. Never.”
Tears sprang to her eyes.
“Not with Camille. Not with anyone.”
Her throat closed and she fought the urge to break down completely.
“I was tempted. Oh, man. I was tempted. But it wasn’t worth it.” He let out a long breath. “Nothing was. Because I knew that I’d lose you. If I would have done it, slept with her, it would have been just sex. Maybe even good sex. But with you . . .” He looked away, to the doorway where Bo was now standing on the other side of the screen. “Well, you know. We both do.”
“Oh, God, Slade . . .” A tear tracked down her cheek, and she dashed it away with the back of her hand. She couldn’t go down this path right now. She was too broken inside. Dealing with Camille’s death—no, her murder—learning that her parents might have kept secrets of her birth from her, that her entire life might have been built on stones that were crumbling, and having Slade return now, it was all too much.
Pull yourself together! Don’t be a whimpering, simpering weakling!
“I, uh . . . I think we should look in the boxes now,” she said, reaching for her utility knife and kicking back her chair. Trying to calm her wildly beating heart, she walked to the stack of boxes they’d brought into the living room from the garage.
Covered with a fine sheen of dust, taped and labeled, the five cartons represented all that was left of Camille’s life.
Of course, her sister had gotten rid of most of her things when she’d entered the convent, but still, these few boxes seemed a pitiful legacy for Camille’s vibrant life.
She knelt beside the first carton, noticed Camille’s bold, whimsical scrawl on one side, and read Bedroom.
“This looks like a good place to start,” she said, and flicking open the razorlike blade, sliced through the tape.
In her apartment, Constantina Rubino hung up the phone on her no-good daughter, then crushed out her cigarette. Ever since Giovanna—oh, excuse me, Jean—had taken up with her sorry excuse of a husband, her fifth, no less, and the worst in a long, unending line of pathetic excuses for men, she’d had little time for an aging, arthritic mother. At least this one had some money, or so Giovanna insisted, and the way she was flashing around gold and diamonds the last time she’d visited, maybe she was telling the truth.
For once.
At least she had Enzo and Carlo, two of the most wonderful sons in the universe, neither of whom had changed their names. And though they were married to gold-digging Protestants, they had both borne her grandchildren, a total of five, the precious darlings! It was true Enzo had divorced and married again, but who could blame him? His first wife was nothing better than a fancy-priced whore. If only he’d had the marriage annulled. She worried about that, the getting into heaven part. With a sigh, she made the sign of the cross over her ample breasts.
Unfortunately, Enzo and his wife lived in that hellhole New York City, and Carlo sold real estate in the desert, Scottsdale, Arizona.
Only Giovanna—well, whatever she wanted to call herself, the ingrate—was nearby.
With a groan, Mrs. Rubino hefted herself from her favorite chair and, using her walker, headed slowly into the kitchen where her sauce was simmering. Her bad hip pained her, but she ignored it and refused to take any of the drugs that the doctor prescribed. She didn’t want to get hooked on any of that poison. Oh, she took an Aleve now and again, and sometimes washed it down with a drop of wine, but nothing more.
Wincing at the pain, she stopped by the mantel of the electric fireplace Carlo and that wife of his, Misty—what kind of name was that?—had sent last Christmas. On the vinyl mantel—oh, it looked good enough to be real walnut—she had pictures of the darling grandchildren, and she smiled at them all. Of course, there was the 8 x 10 of her wedding day and her beloved Silvio, rest his soul. She was dressed in a white gown with a handmade lace veil, and he wore his dark suit. His eyes had been such a rich, rich brown, and his mustache, trimmed to perfection, had been as black as night in the photo. She touched his face and told him, in Italian of course, how much she loved him.
“Io l ’amo per sempre.”
One husband, one love, one marriage.
Never five.
She saw the picture of Jesus, his halo bright, and she smiled, again making the sign of the cross and whispering a quick Hail Mary. Then she made her way to the kitchen, using her walker, taking more time than she liked.
She turned off the stove and thought of the young woman who lived down the hallway. Yes, she was a whore; that much was evident by the amount of men who frequented the hallway between their doors, but Constantina was starting to believe the woman might be making a change.
Why, just last night, through her fish-eye peephole, she’d spied a priest leaving the apartment.
A good sign.
Maybe the woman was seeing her sins for what they were.
If so, it was up to Constantina to be a good neighbor, to help her leave her sordid life behind her. Yes, it was up to her to reach out to the young woman.
Humming to herself, she found a mason jar and filled it with her steaming sauce. It was so good that her friend Donna-Marie Esposito had told her over and over again at their Saturday afternoon gin rummy marathons how Constantina should market it, just like Paul Newman did. When Constantina, blushing, had remarked that she didn’t have Mr. Newman’s money, nor his fame, Donna-Marie had shooed off her arguments with her plump, beringed fingers. “So what? Your sauce is better than anything I’ve ever tasted, and that includes my dear departed aunt’s. I tell you, Zia Rosalia’s and that Mr. Newman’s can’t hold a candle to yours, my friend. Oh, wait!” She lifted her hands as if she’d just received a message from God himself. Hands clutched tightly around her cards, her rings caught in the light from the huge chandelier that hung over her dining room table. Her cigarette, an unfiltered Camel waggled between her fuchsia-glossed lips. “You could call it ‘Rubino’s Pure Old Country Italian’ and give that Newman a run for his money, I don’t mind saying. Newman? Definitely not from the old country. You could make a fortune. And by the way, ‘gin.’” She slapped her cards onto the table.
Blushing and smiling now, Constantina screwed on the top of the jar and paused to light another cigarette. She sat down and smoked
it to the filter—waste not, want not, her mother, God rest her soul, had always warned her nine children to remain frugal. Constantina would take that advice to her grave. She ground her Salem Light into an ashtray, washed her hands, and placed the jar of sauce into the handy basket attached to her walker; then headed to the front door.
It took a while. She wasn’t as young as she used to be, and that hip, oh, my, but she hitched her way to the woman’s—Grace, her name was—apartment, where music was blaring.
She rapped her large knuckles against the door, but it swung open. Unlatched. No wonder the music—something popular and definitely not Frank Sinatra—was so loud. What was it called? Hip-hop? Like a rabbit?
Young people today!
And what was that girl thinking leaving the door open in this neighborhood?
“Hello?” Constantina called. “Hello, Gracie?” She adjusted her walker and started into the room. “I brought you some of my spaghetti sauce. . . .” Where was she? Still in bed? The door was open, and Constantina had never seen a woman of ill repute’s boudoir. “Hello?” she called again, not wanting to startle Gracie or catch her dressing. “Gracie?” She angled her walker toward the door, and beginning to perspire, wishing she’d brought her pack of Salems with her, she pushed onward, through the opening to the room and—
She stopped short.
Saw the naked girl on the bed.
Grace’s lean body was a pasty gray color, her eyes open and bulged, the skin around her throat raw. Spread-eagle. Her breasts sliding to the sides, her muff of reddish hair shorn into some weird pattern. But she was dead.
Dead as dead.
Revolted, Constantina screamed as she’d never screamed in her life.
Obviously the girl had been strangled.
Murdered! Her life of sin coming back to her.
Oh, Mother Mary.
Making the sign of the cross wildly, her gnarled fingers shaking, she was certain Lucifer was lurking, snarling in the corners, taloned fingers ready to rip out Constantina’s jackhammering heart.
She tried to get out.
Fast!
Her heart was pounding so hard she thought it might give up.