everything is just like I found it when I got here yesterday. I think I can show you why I’m so worried about my brother.”
“I don’t know that I can help you with your brother, Kansas.”
“I know. I understand that. But I’m really coming into this area cold—I don’t know anything. If nothing else, I’m hoping you could give me some leads or ideas.”
“I’ll try.” His forehead suddenly creased in a frown. “For starters, was the house locked when you got here? How did you get in?”
Kansas could have told him that she’d climbed on two suitcases and broken in by jimmying a window latch with a crowbar. But somehow she didn’t think Pax would be too quick to aid a helplessly impractical city slicker if she confessed such resourcefulness—or her willingness to commit breaking and entering without a single ethical qualm. “The house was locked, which reassured me at first. I mean, it seemed to indicate that Case planned to be away. But then I got inside...”
She ushered him around, trying to show him the house as it had first appeared from her own eyes. Her brother had barely had two cents to rub together. The place he’d rented was a long way from deluxe—just four rooms, all simply done in adobe and tile.
The red-tiled kitchen was no bigger than a walk-in closet, with aging appliances and a jutting counter that functioned as an eating table. “I had to clean up here. Case had left dirty dishes piled in the sink—which wasn’t untypical of him—but the food was just crusted on. When I opened the refrigerator, there was spoiled milk, lunch meat that had turned prehistoric...” She shook her head. “Maybe he’d planned on going somewhere, but not for this long. Not for three weeks.”
“Case wasn’t famous for planning ahead,” Pax said pointedly.
“I know he’s a little...impulsive. But he left so many other things just hanging.” She jogged ahead. Just off the kitchen was a utility room, where an aging washing machine and dryer were located. She showed Pax how clothes had been left in the washer, dried out but never transferred to the dryer. And then she zoomed past him toward the only bathroom in the place, where basic men’s toiletries were still strewn around the sink—toothpaste, shaving cream, razor, deodorant. “Everything he left is daily-life-necessity stuff—nothing he’d take for an evening, but positively things he would have packed if he’d planned on being gone for three weeks.”
“I think you’re right—the clues add up to a trip he didn’t plan. But that still doesn’t mean that Case disappeared in some frightening or scary sense, Kansas. He’s just a kid, and few kids that age excel at responsible choices. He could easily have made a spur-of-the-moment decision to take off.”
His voice reminded her of the nap side of velvet: soft, gentle, soothing. He probably calmed dozens of wounded critters with that sexy baritone, but it scraped against her feminine nerves like squeaky chalk. How was she ever going to get through to Pax if he persisted in being so logical?
“Maybe if I show you the bedroom,” she said in frustration, and then stopped so quickly in the middle of the hall that Pax almost ran into her. “No. Forget the bedroom.”
“Why?”
Because she had lingerie and clothes and her brand of “girl stuff” wildly strewn all through her brother’s bedroom. Because she was oddly edgy around Pax without exposing an intimately unmade, rumpled bed to his dark eyes. “Because,” she said, “there are just more important things to show you in the living room.”
“Okay,” he said, as gently as if he were talking to a skittery mouse.
She felt skittery. It wasn’t just this increasingly strange feeling she had around Pax, but the attack of anxiety raising again about her brother. Something had happened to Case. She knew it. And walking into the living room intensified that restless feeling of worry and panic tenfold.
She gestured toward the pots of dead plants on the tile floor by the sliding glass doors. “You can see those plants wilted and died from lack of water...which, again, made me think that Case had never expected to be gone for so long. But those plants are so weird, besides...I mean, they look like ugly weeds, hardly some charming little philodendron or standard houseplant. And I can’t imagine my brother taking the time to fuss with any plants—he never had a homemaker bone in his whole body. So that really struck me wrong, and then there was the letter—”
“What letter?”
She whisked around the worn tan couch and old, scarred bookcase. The living room was furnished with typical rental property decor—bland beiges and browns—so ordinary that she had no way to explain to Pax why the room first scared her. He couldn’t know her brother. Not the way she did.
Case had always been more into playing than deep thinking—yet there were books about mysticism and religions and heavyweight philosophy stashed all over the bookshelves and tables. A stained-glass pentagram hung from one window; a Tibetan prayer wheel was stuck on a shelf. Maybe the previous renter had left them, because Kansas couldn’t believe Case even knew what those symbols meant. The prints and posters tacked on the walls were all surreal unearthly scenes, wild and dark, and absolutely nothing like her brother’s taste. At least the brother she knew.
But the most disturbing thing for Kansas was the letter. At the far corner of the living room was a battered pine desk, where she’d found the letter yesterday—a half-finished missive, to her, in Case’s blunt scrawl and dated three weeks before. She picked up the white notebook paper, feeling such a huge well of anxiety that she could hardly swallow. “Case would never have left a half-finished letter. And it’s to me. He mentions a girl, Serena—actually, he brought up her name before—but I have no idea what her last name is. And most of the letter is about how he finally found a way to turn his life around, something he was serious about and committed to...but that’s when it ends. I don’t know what he’s talking about.”
She spun around to hand Pax the letter, expecting him to be right behind her—but he hadn’t followed her across the room. Instead he was hunkered down by the sliding doors, sniffing and then fingering the leaves of those long-dead plants.
“Do you know what those plants are?” she asked him.
“Yeah. I think so. It’s a plant called datura. Common enough in the desert. Some call it jimsonweed.”
“Why on earth would he grow a weed?” Kansas asked bewilderedly, and then sucked in a breath. “Don’t tell me it’s something like marijuana. I’d never believe you. My brother has faults—he can be wild and irresponsible and he doesn’t always think things through—but at heart, he couldn’t be more clean-cut. He was never the type to mess around with recreational drugs—”
“It’s not an illegal substance, Kansas. Nor is it a recreational drug.”
Since that was exactly what she wanted—and expected—to hear, Kansas should have felt reassured. Yet her heart suddenly seemed to be thudding louder than a base drum. Pax straightened, and then walked straight toward her and picked up the letter.
While he studied the letter, she studied him. Although Pax clearly wasn’t a man to reveal emotion in his expressions, she sensed something had changed. Likely he had only made this visit because she’d played out the role of a lady in distress, not because he really believed her brother was in trouble.
But there was something dead quiet about the way he read that letter. And when he finished, he glanced back at the plants.
