then, my thoughts had shifted to Lillian. Maybe she was having one of her good days. Even if she was, she wouldn’t be able to carry on a coherent conversation, but she could listen, and she always seemed to enjoy a surprise visit. I decided to shower, dress and motor down the 101 to see her.
“You’re a real comfort, Bert,” I teased, already on my way to the side door, which stood propped open to the still cool mid-April air. In another month, it would be so hot the asphalt on the highways would buckle.
“You didn’t have your coffee,” Bert called after me.
I doubled back, filled a disposable cup, stirred in sugar and powdered creamer and raised the brew in a toast as I went by. “Put it on my tab,” I said.
Bert grinned and nodded, and I stepped out into the sunny parking lot just as another Harley roared up, flinging gravel, and came to a noisy stop beside Bert’s bike.
Tucker Darroch, my most recent bad romantic choice.
He shut off the bike and gave a salutelike wave. Clad in jeans, scuffed black boots and a blue muscle shirt, which showed off his biceps to distinct advantage, Tucker was the complete opposite of Nick, at least when it came to appearance. He was six feet tall, square jawed, and his honey-colored hair was too long, falling in his eyes and curling at the nape of his neck, while Nick was of average height, compactly built and born to the boardroom.
Tucker looked like a Hell’s Angel. In actuality, he was an undercover cop.
We’d done a little undercover work ourselves, Tucker and I. That was the best part of our relationship. The rest of it sucked, unfortunately, and we’d agreed, three and a half weeks before, to cool it for a while. Tucker was just wrapping up a nasty divorce, and he and the little woman were still duking it out over custody of their seven-year-old twins, Danny and Daisy.
Just watching Tucker swing a blue-jeaned leg over the seat of that bike made my nerves twitch. I wanted to nod a noncommittal greeting, climb the stairs to my apartment and go on about my business, but I might as well have been wearing cement shoes.
Tucker approached, his hips rolling in that easy, death-to-women walk of his. He shoved his hair back from his face and looked straight down into my eyes. “Nice getup,” he said, hooking his thumbs in the back pockets of his Levi’s.
It took me a moment to realize he was talking about my clothes. “It’s a fashion statement,” I heard myself say. “Care for a translation?”
He grinned. “I’ll pass,” he said lightly, but his green eyes were watchful, and slightly narrowed. “You okay? You’ve got dark circles under your eyes.”
Between Bert and Tucker, I was pretty clear that the current look wasn’t working for me. “I’m fine,” I said, a little too quickly.
Tucker pretended to dodge a blow. “Excuse me for asking,” he said.
I finally got my legs working again, and made for the stairs. “Things to do, people to see,” I explained airily over one shoulder, concentrating on 1—putting one foot in front of the other, then repeating the process, 2—not spilling my coffee, and 3—not running back to Tucker and jumping his bones in the parking lot. “Nice seeing you again.”
He didn’t answer, but I felt his gaze on me as I mounted the steps.
LILLIAN WAS NOT having one of her good days, as it turned out.
She sat in her wheelchair, in front of the one window in her fusty little room, a shrunken and fragile figure, arthritic hands knotted in her lap. A worn but colorful afghan covered her bony knees, and a lump rose in my throat as I remembered the woman she used to be. Her stepdaughter, Jolie, had crocheted that afghan for her long ago, as a Christmas present. Lillian had been luminous with delight that day, her laughter rich and vibrant, her brain and body in working order. Those painfully curled fingers had been busy, competent, glistening with shopping-channel rings.
Lillian was my babysitter, before my parents were murdered.
Shortly after the killings, she’d been my kidnapper.
I swallowed the lump, blinked back tears and crossed the room to stand next to her, bending to kiss her lightly on top of the head.
“Hello,” I said gently.
She looked up at me, and for a moment recognition sparked in her sunken eyes. She grasped my hand, squeezed it with a strange urgency and made a soft sound that I chose to interpret as a greeting.
I dragged up a chair to sit knee to knee with her, opened the bag of doughnuts I’d picked up on the way down from Cave Creek and offered her favorite, a double-frosted maple bar.
She shook her wobbly head, like one of those bobble-figures they give away at baseball games, but her watery eyes were full of longing. Lillian had been an off-the-rack size 16 ever since I could remember, but now she looked almost skeletal, with big dents at her temples and under her cheekbones. It was as though her skull were eating its way to the surface.
I broke off a piece of the maple bar and held it to her lips. She took a nibble, like a baby bird being fed in the nest. My heart twisted.
Laboriously, Lillian gummed the morsel and swallowed.
“You look good,” I lied.
“Cods,” Lillian said.
I frowned. “Cods?” She wanted fish?
“Cods,” Lillian insisted.
“She’s talking about these,” a female voice put in, nearly scaring me out of my skin.
I turned to see a pudgy nurse’s aide standing by Lillian’s neatly made bed, holding up a familiar deck of cards. Of course, I thought. The Tarot cards.
I didn’t recognize the aide. The turnover was huge at Sunset Villa.
Lillian began to squirm in her chair, reaching with what seemed a desperate eagerness. “Cods!” she croaked.
“They’re the devil’s work,” the nurse’s aide said, with a self-righteous little sniff. She was overweight and looked like she might attend one of those churches where they drink antifreeze and juggle snakes. “Only thing worse is them Ouija boards, if you ask me.”
“I didn’t ask you,” I pointed out, crisply polite as I dropped the maple bar back into the bakery bag and went to claim Lillian’s deck. They were her most treasured possession, those creased and battered cards. When we were on the run, after my folks were killed, she’d sometimes given readings to pay for a tank of gas or a meal in some diner. They’d warned us, those cards, Lillian claimed, when somebody recognized my picture from the back of a milk carton, and the Tarot had predicted disaster if I married Nick.
I should have listened.
I took the cards and stared at the nurse’s aide, bristling in her flowered scrubs, until, in a minor snit, she turned around and left the room.
“Give,” Lillian demanded.
I handed her the cards, bracing myself to watch the inevitable struggle. Once, Lillian had plied that deck with the skill of a riverboat poker sharp, but that was when her fingers were straight and strong,
