Almost Dead. Lisa Jackson
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appear in the rain-drizzled glass.
Paterno quit scribbling long enough to click the top of his pen as he thought. “Don’t you have some cousins, or half cousins?”
“My father’s cousins.” Her jaw hardened at the mention of the man who had sired her. Though Alex Cahill had been dead for years, Cissy had never forgiven him for neglecting her while he’d been alive. “Gran always called them the black sheep.” Cissy scratched the little dog behind her ears. “Monty, er, Montgomery, is still in prison, but his sister, Cherise, is around. I think her last name is still Favier. It’s hard to keep up. She’s been married a few times.”
The policeman nodded, as if he actually knew who she was talking about. Jack didn’t. Sometimes it seemed the longer he knew Cissy, the less he knew about her.
“They never got along with the rest of the family. I think they thought my grandfather did something underhanded and cut their grandfather out of the family fortune. Monty and Cherise never got over it.”
“Did your grandfather? Cut them out?”
She lifted a shoulder, and Jack realized she was trying to hold on to her patience. He saw the tension in her body, the slight narrowing of her eyes. She didn’t like Paterno and didn’t like his questions. “I don’t know. Gran would remember….” Her voice trailed off, and she cleared her throat. “Look, I really don’t know what more I can tell you.”
Paterno nodded and acted like he’d heard it all before, but it was news to Jack. The detective asked a few more questions, asking Cissy to check and see if any valuables were missing when she returned to Eugenia’s, then finally left. Jack walked him to the door and noticed that the KTAM van wasn’t blocking the driveway any longer.
Good news, at least for now. But it wouldn’t last long. Sooner or later, Lani Saito, or someone else who smelled a story, would be back.
He closed the door behind Paterno and watched as the policeman walked to his Caddy. Once satisfied that the detective wasn’t coming back, Jack returned to the living room, where the fire hissed in the grate and Cissy sat in the chair, petting the dog, still staring out the window. “So,” he said, picking up a framed picture of B.J. on his first birthday, one candle burning on a cake placed on the tray of his high chair. His eyes seemed twice their size as he stared at the cake in awe and amazement.
“So what?” she asked, not even looking at him.
He replaced the five-by-seven on the table. “Are you going to throw me out again?”
“Am I going to have to?”
“You don’t have to.”
She hesitated, as if there were just the tiniest chink in her armor. She slid her gaze to one side, and he had the good sense not to walk close to her, try to touch her, offer unwanted consolation and sympathy. “You keep pushing me.”
“No, Ciss, you’re the one pushing. You’re pushing me away.”
“And you know why,” she declared, throwing her arms up in defeat. “I am so tired of fighting. You can stay, Jack, on the couch—on one condition. No…make that two…on second thought, three conditions!”
Before he could argue, she held up a finger. “First, you leave early in the morning. You do not pass ‘go,’ you do not ‘get out of jail free,’ you do not expect to move in, and you just get the hell out before I get up.”
“Okay.”
A second finger shot skyward. “You walk the dog tonight.”
“The dog hates me.”
“Tough!” The third finger joined the others. “Before you leave, you find a way to fix the damned furnace.”
“You’re not calling a repairman?”
“It’s Sunday. The thermometer in here says the temperature is hovering below sixty-two, and the thermostat is set to seventy.”
“I’ll look at it.”
“Okay.” Cissy gazed at him uncertainly, as if unsure whether she’d won or lost. “Then, good. Good night, Jack.”
“Good night,” he said, but she was already striding out of the living room, across the foyer, then hurrying up the stairs, her bare feet nearly noiseless on the hardwood steps. Above, as she walked, the floor creaked. He heard a door open and shut, then watched a pillow and a sleeping bag come hurtling down the stairs. The sleeping bag bounced against the door of the closet in the foyer; the pillow skidded across the floor and stopped when it hit the back of the couch.
“Thanks,” he called up the dark staircase toward the landing.
“Don’t mention it.” A second later he heard the distinctive creak of the master bedroom door as it opened, then shut with a soft thud and a click of the lock. Obviously Cissy was taking no chances that he’d try to sweet-talk his way into their king-sized bed.
He wasn’t that deluded.
He picked up the sleeping bag, unrolled it, and tossed it over the slick leather cushions of the damned couch. Throwing the pillow toward one end, he surveyed his work. Not that great, but at least it beat the car, he thought as he walked into the kitchen, found the last beer in the refrigerator, and uncapped the bottle. After taking a long, not-that-satisfying pull, he carried a growling and suspicious-looking Coco outside, deposited her on the turf just off the patio, and waited in the cold drizzle for the damned dog to sniff every damned bush before she finally got down to her damned business.
“This isn’t exactly what I had in mind,” he confided to Coco as he carried her inside and found a dishtowel to wipe her tiny wet paws. For all his efforts, he was rewarded with a warning growl. He thought for a minute that the feisty bit of fluff might actually bite him. “Don’t even think about it,” he advised, and when he set the dog onto the floor, she scrambled to get away from him, nearly skidding as she headed for the stairs and ran up them as if she were a dog half her age and was fleeing for her life.
“Good riddance,” Jack muttered.
With one look up the darkened stairs, he returned to the living room, flopped onto the couch, and picked up the remote. He thought of the irony of his earlier assessment of the single life. Even married and in his own house, it wasn’t much different.
He clicked on the local news, and there, filling up the flat screen, was the last picture his wife had of her mother: Marla Amhurst Cahill’s mug shot.
You’re a fool!
Cissy peeled off her clothes, let them drop to the bedroom floor, then stepped into pajamas that had gotten at least one size too big for her over the last month. Her appetite had been off; the stress over the separation from Jack had cost her ten pounds she could ill-afford to lose.
And now he was downstairs.
Great!
Stupid, stupid, stupid. Tonight on the couch. Tomorrow up here in the bedroom? And then what? Are you going to forgive him just like that? Set yourself up for more heartache? Put yourself and B.J. on an emotional roller coaster for the rest of your lives? You can’t do it, Cissy. No matter how much you want to. Jack Holt is a player, plain and simple. He might not ever intend to hurt you, but if you let him, he’ll break your heart over and over again.
She couldn’t let him.
It was that simple.
She walked into the small master bath that she and Jack had carved out of an existing attic space, brushed her teeth and stared at a face she barely recognized. Her eyes, whiskey gold, as Jack had referred to them, were rimmed in running mascara, the whites shot with red veins from all of the crying she’d done since finding her grandmother on the floor of the foyer. Her nose was pink, a couple of damned zits daring to erupt on her chin, and her cheekbones more defined than ever. She scrubbed off all remnants of her makeup, dug in the drawer for acne cream she was way too old to be using, then gave up the search when she heard Coco