Authors: Lisa Jackson
If She Only Knew (47 page)
“I wouldn't put it past Alex Cahill to have masterminded this whole sick scheme. He and the missus weren't always tight, you know. They'd split before and rumors were that neither one held very fast to their marriage vows. She had a fling with the brother before she and Alex were married and I talked to a maid who had been fired a couple of years ago. She's the one who tipped me off about the hysterectomy. From there I searched through old records. The maid told me that Marla might have had a quickie affair with her cousin, Montgomery, just to piss Alex off at one time” Janet tossed her bangs out of her eyes. “But through it all Marla and Alex stayed together. Because of love? I don't think so.”
“You think it was the money?”
“I'd bet my life on it.”
That much Paterno wouldn't argue, but he still wasn't convinced that Janet was anywhere in the vicinity of the mark. “How would Marla explain her pregnancyâthe real Marla.”
“Either the two women would trade places, which would be tricky because there are so many people living in that mansion, or, she could have worn pregnancy pads, the kind actresses wear. The she'd have to make sure no one saw her without her clothes. Faking morning sickness and all the other symptoms would have been relatively easyâshe could have even put on a few pounds just to round out her face. Remember, I think not only the husband but the family doctorâRobertsonâwas in on this.”
“Why would Robertson play along?” Paterno argued. There just wasn't enough to go on here, and yet . . . maybe.
“The same as everyone else. Money. The Cahill's give a lot to his clinic and Bayside and probably Phil Robertson's private retirement account.”
“You're sure about all this?” He rubbed the kinks from the back of his neck and gave Janet's idea some thought. She was never very far off the mark, but this time her theory seemed too far-fetched. “There are still a lot of holes to fill,” he said.
“Ya think?”
“More than a damned sieve,” he grumbled, but some of the story fit. His stomach was beginning to burn again and he opened his drawer, looking for his ever-present bottle of antiacid.
“Well, it's just conjecture until we prove it.”
“Jesus,” Paterno whispered, staring at Janet with a jaundiced eye. “I don't know if I'm buying it. There are just too many gaps.” He opened the bottle and popped four or five tablets into his mouth. “What if someone found out? How would Marla pull off the pregnancy scam? Wouldn't someone at the hospital or the house know and spill the beans? And what if Kylie balked, or had a girl . . . hell . . . this is just too damned unbelievable.” He chewed the antacids. They tasted like crap, but did the trick.
Janet's grin widened. She was so goddamned sure of herself. “Let's go see, shall we?”
He swallowed the pills. “You think you've nailed this one, don't you?
She snorted a laugh. “That's why I get the big bucks.”
“And the glory.” Paterno chuckled without much humor. “Don't forget the glory.”
“Never.”
Paterno swung his gaze to his bulletin board where the photos of the accident scene and Pam Delacroix's mangled, bloodied Mercedes were posted. “So why the accident? Why try to kill off Marla?”
“That, I don't know,” Janet admitted as Paterno turned his attention back to the pictures on Kylie Paris' drivers license. They looked enough alike to pull it off, and yet, there were too damn many unanswered questions. He tossed the license back to Janet. “Well, I guess we'd better find out if your theory holds water.” He felt a moment's satisfaction that at least they had something new to go on, thin as it was. “Let's go have a chat with Mrs. Cahill.”
“If that's who she really is.”
Chapter Nineteen
Clutching James as if she thought someone would snatch him from her arms, Marla leaned against the back of the elevator in the apartment building on Fulton Street. Over seventy years old, built of yellow brick, the apartment house was wedged between the University of San Francisco and Alamo Square, close enough to the house on Mount Sutro, the elegant old manor she'd called home ever since leaving the hospital. The elevator seemed eerily familiar, the smells and sounds of this tired building nipping at the worn edges of her memory.
Had she lived here? If so, how long, and how had she ended up as Alex Cahill's wife, or pretending to be his wife? She'd been in this elevator before. She knew it. At the thought, her legs turned to rubber and her throat went dry. Trepidation battled with curiosity. She needed to find out who she was, what was behind the door of Kylie Paris's apartment. Yet it scared her to death.
You have to find out. You have no choice.
Nick stood next to her. Gaze trained on the digital display of the floors, he waited as the elevator landed. His shoulders were tight, the cords in the back of his neck evident, the air thick.
James cooed softly against her neck and she closed her eyes. No matter what, she wouldn't give him up.
Never.
She'd die first.
The doors to the elevator car parted. Marla's heart jolted. She found herself staring into a long, oval mirror on the wall facing the elevator.
The woman in the reflection looked haunted. Tall and slender, gripping a baby as if she thought he might disappear into thin air, the image was a woman she didn't know. There were no more bruises on her skin, no visible stitches. Short mahogany-colored hair feathered around high, pronounced cheekbones, wary green eyes, arched brows and a straight nose dusted with freckles. A wide, sensual mouth trembled before her lower lip was caught between white, remarkably straight teeth.
Marla Cahill?
Kylie Paris?
Who?
She met Nick's eyes in the reflection, saw his iron will in the set of his jaw, the determination in the thin line of his mouth, the shadow of fear in his eyes. “Let's do this,” he urged.
She nodded. Fought the urge to run.
Lies. Her life had all been lies, she thought as, by instinct, she turned right and entered a hallway that was eerily familiar. Her heart thudded, her chest was tight, nervous sweat broke out on her back. “I've been here before,” she said to Nick, swallowing hard. “Damn it, I know it.”
They stopped at the door of 3-B. The place Kylie Paris called home. Nick knocked, rapping hard.
Not a sound issued from inside. No murmur of the television set, no scuffling of feet, no gasp of surprise, no eye in the peephole, no greeting warning the visitors that an inhabitant was on her way to the door. Nothing but silence. Dead air.
“What now?” Marla asked, standing on worn gray carpeting in this narrow, poorly ventilated corridor. The lights were dim, the whole feeling dingy and colorless. “I don't have a key.”
“Then we'll get one from the doorman.”
“How?”
Nick scratched at the day's growth of beard on his cheek. “Let's see if he thinks you're Kylie. Give me the baby and go downstairs, insist that you lost your key. See if he lets you in.”
“All right,” she said, certain that his ploy wouldn't work.
She was wrong. The doorman, who hadn't been at his post when they arrived, offered her a patient smile showing off a gap in his teeth, and produced a key from a locked box in a closet. Pushing seventy, with thick silver hair and an amused expression, he said, “You know, Ms. Paris, you should make a duplicate and hide it somewhere. What would you do if old Pete wasn't here to bail you out?”
“I don't know,” she admitted truthfully.
“Sorry to hear about your baby,” he added and she froze. “Terrible thing to lose one after carrying it so long.” Her insides turned to ice.
“Yâyes,” she said, her skin crawling. Had she told this man that her baby had died?
“Well, yer young yet, they'll be more.” He raised an eyebrow. “Next time maybe it would be better to get yourself a husband first.”
“Would it?” she snapped sarcastically, as if she'd done it a hundred times before.
He didn't so much as flinch. “It's what the Good Book says.”
“And doesn't it also say something about âJudge not, lest ye be judged'?”
“That it does, but me and the missus we've been married nearly fifty years, had our kids all four of 'em afterwards. A baby needs a mother
and
a father, but then, you already know that, I s'pose. Anyway, sorry about the loss.”
and
a father, but then, you already know that, I s'pose. Anyway, sorry about the loss.”
“Yes. Yes, of course, thank you,” she said and knew the blood had drained from her face. The doorman thought she was Kylie . . . and Kylie had been pregnant . . . oh, dear Lord.
Grasping the precious key, she backed away, then hurried up the shabby stairs rather than wait for the wheezing elevator. On the third floor she ran down the hallway to the door of 3-B where Nick, holding a sleeping James, was waiting.
“See what you can do if you put your mind to it,” he said with a smile.
“You wouldn't believe,” she whispered and told him her conversation with the doorman as she slid the key into the lock.
She stepped through the door and back in time.
With her first sweeping glance of the tidy apartment, a thousand memories assailed her. She froze, her heart thudding as piece by painful piece the memories of her life came into clear, sharp focus. Clutching the doorknob she saw a green corduroy couchâthe couch she recognized that she'd bought at a yard sale. An afghan was thrown across itâknit by her mother, not wasp thin, dour faced Victoria Amhurst, but a warmer woman who smelled of cigarettes and perfume laced with vanilla. Dolly . . . her name had been Dolly. “Mom,” she whispered, knowing the woman who had raised her was dead. Her knees threatened to buckle.
She wasn't Marla. Just as she'd suspected. Her name was Kylie Paris. And she'd been driving to Monterey the night of the accident, at the wheel of Pam's Mercedes, in an attempt to find her baby. Dear God, she knew, remembered why she'd been with Pam. Involuntarily she looked at James. Precious, precious child. It began and ended with James. After being released from the hospital, Kylie'd had the fight with Alex, figured out that he and Marla were keeping the baby hidden away in Monterey and asked Pam to help her.
But it had all gone wrong. Somehow the trip had been boobytrapped, as if it had been a setup! Alex had tried to kill her. He had to have been the one . . . and Marla . . . she'd been in on it, too. Kylie felt the blood drain from her face.
“Are you all right?” Tenderness and concern shone in Nick's eyes.
Kylie's stomach clenched and her throat worked. “This . . . this is my home,” she said, her voice hoarse, tears filling her eyes. She walked through the rooms remembering the double bed she'd bought with her first paycheck, from the bank where she'd worked before joining the securities firm; the bureau was an antique, she'd refinished it with her own hands; a Tiffany lamp was her prize, she'd paid a small fortune for the colored glass. She ran her fingers over the bureau and stared into the bathroom, pink tile and matching floor mats.
On the frame of the mirror was a magnet.
Whether you think you can or think you can't, you're right.
That saying had become her mantra, the code she'd lived by. And she'd lived here, alone, though there had been men in her life, a succession of lovers who had come and gone . . . Good-time Charlies, the kind of men she would never settle down with, because she had no intention of settling . . . for anything less than the best.
Now, she leaned against the doorframe to the bedroom and saw their handsome, strong faces in her mind's eye. Ronnie. Sam. Benton . . . and there were others . . . but none had touched her as Nick had. None had been near the man, or the lover that he was.
“You'd better sit down,” he suggested now, shifting James from one shoulder to the other. “And tell me what's going on.”
“I was just remembering,” she said, spying a window ledge where the one animal she'd owned, a stray tiger-striped cat with wide green eyes and the ability to destroy every pair of panty hose in her drawers, had often sat. She'd dubbed him Vagabond and he'd left two years after he'd shown up. Kylie had never known what had happened to him, though she'd searched for weeks, calling shelters and friends, neighbors and even the police. The SFPD hadn't been interested, of course, and she'd been left with the painful sensation that even her pet had abandoned her.
“Damn,” she whispered, vaguely aware of Nick watching her as she moved through the apartment. She opened a closet door. An array of cleaning supplies and equipment met her eyes.
In that second, with amazing clarity, she recalled the concrete and steel elementary school where she'd shone academically, making up for the fact that she'd been branded a bastard, a girl who didn't know who her father was. She'd matured early, before anyone else in her class, and the older boys had teased her. One even, near the end of the school year, had lured her into a janitor's closet and offered her ten dollars for a peek at the most bodacious breasts in all of Ben Franklin Elementary. It had been a dare and she'd never been one to back down from a challenge.
The closet had been stuffy, lit by a single bulb, surrounded by shelves filled with cleaning supplies, toilet paper and boxes of plastic bags. Three boys and Kylie had been wedged among the mops, trash baskets and fading posters of Farrah Fawcett and Raquel Welch.
“Come on, Kylie, why not?” Ian Perth had asked, his breath stinking, sweat pouring down his fleshy, red face.
“I heard you'd do anything for money,” Brent Mallory had added. He was sunburned, his teeth were way too big for his face, his blond hair stuck up at weird angles.
But it had been Lucas Yamhill, a tall, good-looking boy who had nearly convinced her. He was a freshman in high school but hung out with younger kids sometimes. His dad owned the local grocery store and another one in the next town south of San Leandro. “Come on, show us your titties. Ten bucks can buy a lot.”
She'd wanted to do it. Just to show creepy Brent and Ian that she wasn't afraid and because she wanted to impress Lucas. She would have loved to have flashed Lucas. Why not? And it was worth ten dollars.
So she had. Right there in that hot, tight closet, she'd lifted her T-shirt, tugged it over her head and let it drop onto the painted cement floor.
Brent whistled through his teeth.
With a flourish, she'd tossed her hair like the models in those shampoo commercials did and it swung free to her shoulders, then didn't move. Her cleavage was visible. That was enough.
“Hey, no fair. You're wearing a bra!” Ian complained, feeling cheated.
“That's right,” Brent agreed when he realized he'd been tricked. “I'm not payin' to see that. I've seen my sister parading around in her bra plenty of times.”
Lucas's evil leer caused a tingle to race through her blood. “I'll make it twenty if you let me take that off you.”
“Twenty-five,” she said sassily, beginning to perspire. “And not with those two watching.”
“For twenty-five and a private viewing, I want to touch.” His eyes, when they looked at her, had darkened from light brown to nearly black and there was another signal in his murky gaze. “I want to touch all of you.”
She felt a palpitation between her legs and a flutter of her heart. A billion butterflies took flight in her stomach. “Lose them,” she said about Ian and Brent.
“No way. I paid three bucks!” Ian folded his beefy arms over his chest, but Lucas was older and had convinced the others to scram.
Lucas closed the door behind them. The lock clicked into place. Kylie could barely breathe. Slowly Lucas removed two ten dollar bills and a five and placed them on top of an overturned bucket, smoothing the bills flat. He also pulled out a thin foil packetâone that held a condomâand set it on top. “I'll double it if you strip naked.”
“IâI don't know.”
“And I'll give you a hundred if you let meâyou know. Touch you.”
“Touch me?”
“Yeah.” His voice lowered. “You know what I'm talking about.”
She bit her lip. Shook her head. It was hard to breathe. But she was starting to understand . . . and it scared her.
“Have you ever seen a guy?”
“No.”
“I could show you,” he offered.
“Would I have to pay?”
His laugh had a dirty ring to it. “Nah. I'd like to touch you with it.” He was a big boy, a year older than his classmates, nearly fifteen. Almost old enough to drive. She swallowed hard. She was curious and she liked Lucas. He was popular. Athletic. Rich. “We could . . . you know . . . get it on,” he suggested silkily.
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