Lover In The Shadows

“Did you now?” Indifferent once he’d learned what he wanted to know—the look of her when she was telling the truth—he turned his back to her. He glanced down the hall off the kitchen, but in the glass of the door he watched her reflection as he flicked the light switch. There was a very small, almost-imperceptible fleck of blood at the edge of the tab. But he saw it. Smelled the faint fetor of blood.

“Question number two?” She had wadded up the paper towel and clutched it between the small mounds of her breasts. Her hands were shaking again and her breasts trembled with the deep-down quaking he’d seen earlier.

“Ah, well, that’s an easy one, number two is.” Keeping his back turned, he reached into the pocket of his slacks.

Her shoulders hunched and her hands dropped to her sides, her suddenly relaxed fingers letting the wadded paper fall to her feet. She stooped to pick it up and he pivoted and moved in one step, trapping her while she was kneeling on the floor looking up at him.

“Do you know whose bracelet this is, Ms. Harris?” He held the gold chain in front of her.

She did. The dilation of her pupils gave her away. As he watched the blood drain from her face, he wondered distantly if she would lie.

Slowly, as if she’d aged thirty years in an instant, she rose to her feet and reached out to the shiny trinket. “Yes. It was my mother’s. And then mine. Where did you find it? I wear it all the time.”

She stopped, clamping her hands over her mouth, realization smacking her in the face.

“Well, Ms. Harris,” he said, swinging the bracelet back and forth, “therein lies a tale.” Pulling out a kitchen chair, he motioned for her to sit. “And since you’ve asked me a question, I’ll answer it and add one more of my own. Sit down, Ms. Harris.” He pushed her unresisting body into the chair.

Bonelessly she molded to the contours of the chair, in much the same fashion as her sweatshirt had shaped itself to her. “Go ahead.” Her hands were clasped in front of her, so tightly Harlan had the impression that if she ever let go, she would shake apart, all control lost.

He was tempted for that instant to force her hands apart and see what happened. The craving to see Ms. Molly spinning out of control was becoming increasingly strong in him. Too strong. It would warp his judgment.

He placed the strip of gold on the table.

She didn’t touch the bracelet.

“Before I tell you where we found this—” he traced it with his index finger and watched the muscles of her throat convulse once as she swallowed “—you tell me when you last wore it. Not a question, merely quid pro quo, as the man said.”

“You know I must have lost it yesterday.” Defeat shivered in her murmured answer.

“Possibly. Or last night?”

He waited, but she didn’t respond.

“Ah. Well, here’s your answer, Ms. Harris. It was hanging underneath the boards of your dock. Caught there. Right below where the first of the bloodstains appear. Interesting, isn’t it? But that’s a rhetorical question, Ms. Harris, not one of my final two.”

Nodding, she didn’t reply. He heard the click of her teeth, saw the narrow muscle along her jawline bunch into a small knot. She kept nodding.

“Question number three. Why did you fire your maid, who was also your friend?”

Still fisted, her small hands banged onto the table. The thin circlet bounced. “I don’t have to answer that.” The nails were chewed right into the cuticle.

Stress. Fear.

Guilt.

He stroked her narrow index finger, touching the ragged cuticle and staring into her eyes as he asked his last question. Very gently, so gently that he knew he surprised her, he said, “Question number four. If you wear that bracelet all the time, Ms. Harris, and you were inside sleeping the entire night, how did this bracelet get from your wrist—” he held up her right wrist, the bones as thin as the wishbone of a chicken, that easily snapped “—to the dock underneath Camina Milar while she was being murdered?”

CHAPTER THREE

Back and forth, the gold chain swung from Detective Harlan’s fingers.

Needing it as a reminder of all that she’d lost, she’d never taken the bracelet off, not even when she showered. She’d grown so accustomed to the feel of the metal on her skin that she no longer paid attention to it unless it snagged against her clothes. With her wrist cuffed in John Harlan’s strong fingers, Molly wondered why she hadn’t missed the bracelet this morning. Surely she should have noticed its absence from around her wrist.

But she hadn’t noticed much of anything, apparently. Hadn’t noticed herself strolling downstairs and picking up the butcher knife and—what?

She knew one fact that the harsh-faced man in front of her didn’t. The bracelet had been around her wrist when she’d gone to bed.

“Detective Harlan,” she began, fighting the cold numbness spreading through her, “are you arresting me?” She no longer had the will or the ability to fight him, not with the bracelet swaying in front of her, slipping around and around the detective’s long finger as he idly swung the gleaming strand and watched her with those opaque, gold eyes.

In that instant as he studied her with that unnerving, silent assessment, Molly had the oddest fancy that his eyes would glow in the dark.

She shook her head.

At some point in the last year she’d gone mad. There was no other explanation.

In the loneliness of the long days and nights since violence had ripped through her home, she’d lost whole chunks of her life. She no longer understood herself or her behavior. Her competent, organized existence had vanished the night she’d walked in and found her parents lying in the blood-spattered kitchen. Since that night, nothing about her life had been normal.

She understood nothing, felt nothing except the panic of an ever-tightening noose around her neck.

With her free hand she grabbed the neckline of her sweatshirt. It was so tight. “Are you arresting me?”

“I haven’t decided yet, Ms. Harris.” His smile taunted her. Still capturing her wrist in his warm fingers, he returned the piece of jewelry to the table, staring at it as it snaked across the bleached pine. Tipping his head toward the chain but not looking at her, he asked, “How much does a bauble like this cost, Ms. Harris? Two thousand?”

“I don’t know. My father gave it to my mother for their twenty-fifth anniversary.” Wearily she answered his question, understanding that he was listening for nuances of tone, looking for motives. Motives strong enough to send her out in the night to murder her friend. “I never asked.”

“Really? How very uncurious of you, Ms. Harris.” And now he looked down at her and smiled, a cold, calculating smile. “Three thousand, maybe?” His smile let her know he knew almost to the penny how much the bracelet had probably cost.

“I don’t know,” Molly insisted. She’d been right. Detective Harlan was playing games with her. She was out of her league. She tried to separate their joined hands but lacked even the strength to do that. She found a disturbing comfort in the chain of his fingers around her wrist. It was, after all, a human touch, the beat of his pulse hard and fast against her own racing beat, their two pulses joined in a momentary mating that thundered in her ears.

That was real—the sound of her own heart pounding to the beat of his, male to female in her sterile, clean kitchen, the sound of her blood dancing to the rhythm of his.

She’d been wandering for so long in a land where she no longer knew what was real, what was illusory, that Harlan’s hard grip around her wrist gave her a peculiar solace. She could understand for the first time the way captives began to turn to their captors, sunflower to the slow-moving sun overhead.

As the thought flashed through her mind, he pivoted and stared at her, his golden brown eyes fixed unblinking on her face. She was lost in the swirling depths of their changing color, the deepening, darkening pupils, and she sighed, willing for the moment to surrender to the darkness pulling at her.

So much easier. He’d told her it would be. Told her in his low voice that once she told him everything, she could sleep, rest. And she wanted to, needed to. He’d known the need driving her and spoken to it, seduced her with that promise, seduced her with the gleam in his gold eyes. Her head was falling forward; she was tumbling into that golden darkness, falling willingly, knowing she would finally find peace once she gave up her struggle.

She’d resisted that seduction earlier, summoned the last of her waning strength and will, but now…He’d promised her she could sleep. He’d promised her everything would be easier if she told him her secrets. Caught in the glow of his eyes, mesmerized by the pulse beat drumming loudly in her ears, Molly opened her mouth to tell him—tell him everything.

But the pounding, it turned out, was only the red-haired man she’d seen earlier at the bayou banging on her screen door. An illusion, after all.

Letting her wrist drop to the table, Harlan turned to the man, annoyance thick in his soft tones. “Well, damn you to hell, Ross. Your timing is…” He stopped and fingered the bracelet before he continued in a milder voice. “I hope to hell you have the damn search warrant.”

Drawing a shaky breath, Molly stood up. She glanced from the intruder to Harlan and back. It would be more comfortable to talk with the second man. There was nothing intense, nothing threatening in his open face. “You’re going to search my house?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Ross looked sheepish. “John was waiting for the warrant. It’s here.”

Pressing her clenched fists into her eyes, Molly waited. Footsteps clattered on her kitchen tiles, moved through her halls.