If Looks Could Kill (51 page)

"Are you sure you're up for this?" Sue demanded.

Chris didn't bother to look up from where she was folding a hot-pink-and-green T-shirt for her overnighter. "I just got back from New York," she retorted.

Tired. She was tired. Too much time off her feet, too little privacy, too deep a grief. It had been nice of Dinah's family to wait on the memorial service until she'd been out of the hospital. Even so, she hadn't been out long. She still ached in funny places, still gauged the blood she needed by her easy fatigues.

It was going to get better; she knew it. For the first time she could remember, she was sleeping. Really resting without benefit of nightmares or suspicions or sudden surprises. She was able to walk back into her house without vomiting. She'd never live there again. But at least she wouldn't fear it.

And somewhere in that little dance in the darkness, she'd lost her overwhelming claustrophobia. A good thing, considering what she had in store for her today.

Not all better by any means. But working that way.

"New York's not the same as this," Sue protested, sincerely distressed. "Not the same at all."

"Even so," Chris said, "I have to be there. I have to have the closure, or it's not going to have been worth anything."

Sue threw up her hands in frustration. "I give up. Both of you teetering around like plague survivors, and you're gonna drive across the state. Go ahead. Get into a major accident. Lose all the blood this town donated for you and see if they care."

Chris couldn't help but laugh. "If we get into an accident,
People
Magazine will come interview you again and Ellen can sing "Tomorrow" for them," she promised.

Sue glowered at her. "It's not funny."

"What do you mean it's not funny? It's hysterical. Pyrite is the new norm in quaint middle-America. Ray is being considered for a senate seat, Victor's doing Letterman, and Harmonia Mae has been proposed to by a miner from Alaska who thought she looked handsome on the
Entertainment Weekly
special. And you say that's not funny?"

"You could have died!" Sue snapped, her eyes filling, her posture frustrated. "Both of you, damn it. You didn't see what that place looked like when they pulled you out. You didn't have to watch Tom get drunk after he had to helicopter the both of you out to St. Louis rather than lose you."

"Sue..."

"Don't Sue me," her friend retorted, her outrage withering into misery. "I've had a really rotten month."

Chris just gathered her in for a big hug. "It's all going to be OK now, though. Don't you get it?"

Sue sniffled a little. "Easy for you to say. I'm the one having nightmares this time."

Turning back to zip up her bag, Chris shrugged away the statement. "That's just because you're not used to the sight of blood."

"Not when it belongs to somebody I like."

"Well, think of it this way. We're fine, the town's back to normal..."

"You call the Chris Jackson addition to the Mobile Home Hall of Fame normal?"

"I never called the Mobile Home Hall of Fame normal. But all the attention has helped the economy, Harlan's attendance is down, and Mac's staying. Even after his whole family came down to harass him into going back to Chicago."

That, at last, brought the first real smile from Sue as the two women turned to the door. "My favorite part was when his mother told him that Pyrite was just too dangerous."

"It is," Chris retorted. "That's why he likes it here so much."

He hadn't had a chance to go fishing yet. That was the reason he'd given his mother, anyway. He'd also put a down payment on a big old Victorian over on Third. Chris had been invited to meet the twins. The idea terrified her. On the other hand, since getting out of the hospital she'd been staying at Harmonia's with Shelly. After that, seven year olds should be a breeze.

"I still can't believe it," Sue mused. "I mean, how that woman planned all those years to do this to you. How she really thinks she's your conscience."

Chris reached the door first and looked outside. Shelly and Victor were on the porch arguing with Lester about agents. Across the street Mrs. Peterson was arranging a wedding dress in the window of the dry cleaners, and three of the grade school girls skipped by giggling over something. Pyrite at its finest. Blessed normality.

The town would never be the same, but it would always be Pyrite. Chris couldn't imagine living anywhere else. Except maybe, if asked, Chicago.

Even the ghosts had begun to fade a little. "I never realized how much she depended on me in there," was all Chris could say.

It had all come out, of course. Spread across headlines, discussed on talk shows, dissected in police and psychiatric quarters. The police dispatcher who just happened to be a psychotic with access to her own investigation, who had been able to terrorize a town with lessons learned in C. J. Turner books. Disguises for wandering around the country, supplies for hiding out in abandoned mine buildings for days, computers for tracking credit card addresses.

Even the necessary equipment had come from the same shop Chris used. Mikes for listening in, recorders outside open windows for strange noises, modems for tapping into computers. Copied keys and crepe-soled shoes for breaking and entering. Perfectly planned, damn near perfectly executed.

All to deliver one message.

Well, Chris had received it. Maybe not the one Sandy had intended, though.

"So," Mac had asked the night before as they'd slumped together on Harmonia's couch. "What does this do to C. J. Turner?"

Chris hadn't even had the energy to move. "C.J.'s not going anywhere. She's just changing her outlook a little."

"How so?"

She sighed, enlightenment a heavier burden than she'd imagined. "Motive. That good and evil thing. I guess I always wanted there to be good people."

"You don't think there are?"

"I'm not sure anymore. It was just all easier when I thought that evil was exceptional. It isn't. It's small and banal and ordinary. And that scares me more than before."

Mac had turned his head just a little, brows gathered. "You don't call what happened to you exceptional?"

"That wasn't the evil. The evil was done fifteen years ago. And it was done because I was different. Because I threatened a comfortable norm. I mean, think about it. I was punished because I didn't cooperate, and Allen was abetted because he did."

"Are you still going to write about murder?"

"Not in my next book," she'd admitted, closing her eyes. "I think that one's going to be about obsession."

The perfect theme for the day. Especially this day when she was going home for the first time in fifteen years.

"Did you ever figure out how she knew about that one book?" Sue asked. "The one about Cooter?"

Chris shook her head. "A definite case for
Unsolved Mysteries."

Said more lightly than thought. Chris still wanted to know. She probably never would. The answers were locked up behind Sandy Baker's delusions. Her disjointed explanations about two sides of one person, of melded minds and unified purpose. The perfect timing of Chris's trips had been explained by Sandy's job at the Ritz. She'd just waited for Chris to show up to put her plan into action. But there was still
Family Business.
The one book no one could explain a connection to. Chris wondered. But she didn't ask.

"Chris!" Shelly yelled, not three feet away. "Mac's here!"

Chris saw. The cruiser pulled to a stop and Mac opened the door.

"I've seen better looking mugging victims," Victor allowed.

"I've seen better looking road kills," Lester countered.

Shelly was already straightening her hair. "I don't care. I still think he's spunk."

Chris laughed. She shoved open the screen door as Mac climbed out of the cruiser in his best uniform. His face still bore the ravages of his injuries. His poor mother had taken one look at him up in the neurosurgical intensive care unit in St. Louis and gone right into Gaelic. But even with the fresh railroad tracks that matched the set on the other side of his head and the residual swelling alongside his jaw, he looked better than anything Chris had ever seen. He looked alert and alive, and there was a lot to be said for that.

There was even more to say for the fact that after this fresh assault on the old brain cells, his memory was a little sketchy, too. It gave Chris a rather companionable feeling.

"Welcome back to work," Shelly greeted him.

"He's not at work," Sue objected. "He shouldn't even be on his feet."

Mac shot Chris a scowl. "Is she always like this?"

"Get used to it," she suggested, handing off her bag to him. "She now considers you part of the family."

Mac shook his head, but bent to give the tiny woman a kiss on the top of her head. "Thanks, Mom. I'll be a good boy and wear my seat belt."

"Don't forget me," Victor pleaded.

They were dropping Victor at Lambert in St. Louis for his flight to L. A. to do the Improv. And then, with several warrants in hand, they were headed for Springfield. Victor was throwing more luggage into the back seat for the dummy than himself.

"You sure you're feeling up to this?" Mac asked Chris gently.

She looked up at his ravaged face and thought how very interesting it would look now.

"Yeah," she admitted, even though she wasn't. Not really. Not ever. "I have to know if she really did it."

Mac nodded, excluding everybody else at the periphery. "We may never know," he warned her again. "Not definitely."

No more than a week ago, that statement would have sent Chris's stomach skidding and her heart into overdrive. Now she just nodded. "I know. But I'm tired of losing sleep over it. It's time to face it head-on, just like Sandy said. And there's only one way to do that."

"In that case," Mac said with a smile. "There's only one thing left to say."

"Chris Jackson, have you found Jesus?"

Chris's reaction was pure instinct. "Yes, Harlan," she admitted, turning toward him. "I have. And He told me to give you a message."

Chris didn't even have to think about it. She just reared back for the swing of her life. By the time she got to the end of it, she thought one of the bones in her hand might have been broken. Her head spun alarmingly with the sudden motion, and Harlan was sprawled in the sidewalk, eyes stunned, jaw slack.

Chris didn't even wait for a reaction.

"There's only one thing to say?" she echoed, turning back to Mac.

There was dead silence in front of her house. Across the street, several pedestrians slowed to an uncertain stop, and Chris was sure she heard at least one strangled murmur of surprise. Her attention was all on Mac.

Mac didn't seem to notice that there was a man on the ground. He held out his hand for her and smiled. "Let's go."

The End

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A MAN TO DIE FOR