Sex & Sensibility (19 page)

They looked the way she felt: drab and droopy and lifeless. And while a drink of water might go a long way to fixing their problems, it wouldn’t do much for hers.

Once her few plants were taken care of, she picked through the mail, but there was nothing in there but bills, ads, and offers for credit cards it would be fatal to her skinny bank account to use. Her next-door neighbor had dropped his used copy of this week’s
San Francisco Inside Out
into her slot, which he did about once a week. She flipped its pages idly, pausing to read “Lorelei on the Loose,” a column that was usually amusing but today just didn’t interest her. It was about rich people who were famous for just that—being rich.

Yawn.

Then a photograph caught her eye at the bottom of the column, under a subhead that read “Trying to be Paris Hilton?” She blinked and looked closer. Under a neon sign that clearly read New York, New York, one of the biggest new casinos in Reno, patrons leaned over gaming tables. And there, front and center, were Christina and Trey Ludovic, photographed in the act of tossing the dice. Christina was laughing, and Trey, who hadn’t photographed as well as he had in the Christmas party picture, was looking every bit the middle-aged executive. Including the harassed expression and the unsmiling mouth.

Tessa studied him for a moment. Something was bugging the guy, but what? The photographer? Worried that Daddy would read the paper and hunt him down like the dog he was? Her gaze dropped to the caption.

“Last night at NY squared, who should storm the tables but rich girl Christina Singleton, on the arm of a guy both declined to name. Paris waited till she was twenty-one before she burst on the club scene. Christina’s obviously warming up with her companion’s luck at the Reno casinos.”

That
was why they hadn’t been at the beach house the day before yesterday, Tessa realized with sudden certainty. They’d gone to Reno. The question was, why? To pay their “Nevada taxes” at the slot machines? Or for another reason—one that involved drive-through chapels and ministers in spandex who sang “Love Me Tender” on request?

She glanced around wildly. The sweater. What had she done with Christina’s cashmere sweatshirt? Her feet slipped on the bare wood of the floor as she dashed into the bedroom, where the pile of clean laundry still sat in its basket. Undies, tops, dress, shorts—aha.

She tossed the sweater in the air and yanked it over her head.

Come on, universe. Give me a sign. Do I jump in the car and redline the speedometer over the Sierra Nevada mountains, or have they hopped a plane already and begun a honeymoon in Tahiti?

Nothing happened.

Okay. That was okay. She should just go about her normal business and sooner or later something would come to her. It always had before. She just needed to be patient.

But somehow the sense of urgency inside her increased. She couldn’t sit still. Instead, she found herself walking around the apartment, doing stretches, picking things up and putting them down again, all the time feeling as though time was ticking away and she was going to miss it.

She had no idea what “it” even was. A plane? An opportunity? What?

A door slammed and she whirled away from it.

The blue-and-white-striped couch in front of the window with its ocean view looked soft and inviting, and she watched Christina drop onto it. The girl craved the embrace of something, even upholstery. Trey had left and he wasn’t coming back. The cotton covering the cheery yellow pillow soon became soaked with her tears. Before long she needed a tissue. Her thoughts sounded in Tessa’s mind. So what if they found something in the wastebasket. Trey was just being paranoid about leaving no traces. Mandy would understand that she just needed a little time here where it was quiet, where no one would ask questions. Where she could be alone to lick her wounds.

Alone!

Christina wailed and buried her face in the wet pillow. How was she going to face the rest of her life alone?

Tessa came back to herself as suddenly as she’d left, sitting on a kitchen chair with her head buried in her arms and no memory of how she got there. She blinked and lifted her head, then patted herself to make sure her flesh and the sweater were real.

Christina was back at the beach house. Tessa now knew the source of the feeling of urgency in her gut. She had to get down there before the girl decided to do something drastic or dangerous to herself. In her present frame of mind, freshly dumped and vulnerable, Christina might think a reasonable solution would be to go to a club and hit on the nearest male over thirty. Or she might call up her girlfriends and decide a cross-country trip back to Boston was the answer. In either case, the results could be disastrous.

T
ESSA YANKED
a few clean clothes out of the laundry basket and stuffed them into her striped beach carryall. “Be good,” she told the African violet, then ran out of the apartment and took a bus to the garage where the Mustang was stored. She was negotiating traffic on the Highway 101 interchange when her cell phone rang.

Linn, wanting to talk about fabric swatches.

Jay, wanting to rehire her.

Griffin, wanting to apologize for leaving her swinging in the wind.

But it was none of the above. For once, her intuition had failed her.

“This is Detective Petrie from the sheriff’s office,” a woman’s voice said crisply. “I understand you’ve recently been employed by Jay Singleton to help find his daughter.”

“Yes.” She certainly hadn’t seen
that
one coming.

“In what capacity?”

“I’m a sensitive.” Tessa put the phone between her ear and shoulder, changed up into fourth gear and accelerated off the cloverleaf and onto the freeway. “I’ve been working with Griffin Knox, trying to trace Christina using psychometry and dream work.”

“Uh-huh.” The woman’s voice was flat with skepti
cism. Even with the wind in her ears from having the top down, Tessa could hear it.

“What can I do for you, Detective?” she asked, forcing herself to be patient. For all she knew, a person could be arrested for contempt of law enforcement officers.

“Speaking of Griffin, I had a little chat with him yesterday. He suggested that I call you.”

Yesterday? And it had taken this long for her to get around to it? “Did something happen?”

“No, not to my knowledge. Why do you say that?”

“I just wondered. Because Griffin doesn’t believe in what I do. He has no reason to ask you to call me unless something happened.”

“I’ll have to disagree with you there. We agreed that he’d brief me on this case, but he suggested that the most efficient way to do that would be for you to talk to me.”

“He did?” Tessa’s brain jogged along in first gear, trying to close the gap between the guy who’d fed her to Jay Singleton and this new guy who thought she had something to contribute. Or rather, the old guy of a couple of days ago who had worked with her and thought she was real.

She couldn’t figure it out, and gave up. Detective Petrie was talking again, anyway.

“He gave me some details that helped me map out their trail, and a list of Christina’s friends so we could collect phone records.”

“We already did that.”

Detective Petrie paused. “Maybe you did, but let me do the detecting now, okay? It is, after all, my job.”

“Uh, okay. You’ll find a lot of calls to Oraia, a salon Christina goes to. She’s friends with the owner, Michelle, who apparently has been out of town for two weeks.”
Ex
cept for one day, when she happened to be in the shop and talked to me.

“What about her hangouts, places she and her friends go?”

“They dance at Atlantis a lot. But we already went there, too. We were supposed to show her picture to the bouncers to see if they could identify Trey, but we already found out who Trey was through Michelle.”

“Bouncers,” Petrie said slowly, sounding as if she were writing it down.

“Detective, you don’t need to waste your time on all this. Christina is at Mandy’s beach house.”

“Yes, apparently you already said that.”

“No, not the other day. Today. Now.”

“And how do you know this?”

“I just saw her. In a vision. Trey just dumped her and she’s there all alone. Somebody needs to go and get her before she does something stupid.”

“You saw her in a vision.”

“Yes!” Was the woman deaf or had her cell phone cut out during all of that? “Did you hear what I said?”

“Oh, yeah, I heard it. But Griffin Knox says that house is empty and has been for some time. I’m not about to go chasing off up the coast on the basis of a dream when there’s real legwork to be done.”

“But we already
did
the—”

“I don’t know what he was thinking. I was expecting real information. Uh, thanks for your time, Ms. Nichols.”

“Wait—” But the dial tone was already buzzing monotonously in her ear.

Tessa snapped the phone shut with a flick of her wrist and tossed it in her carryall.

Stupid woman. Why did she bother with cops of any de
scription, anyway? She could do this herself. She’d drag Christina home kicking and screaming if she had to. She’d show these people who had skills and who didn’t.

Tessa put her foot to the floor and the Mustang leaped forward with a joyful roar.

D
ETECTIVE
P
ETRIE
seemed to think that Tessa was their personal private joke.

“…so then she tells me that our girl is back at the beach house, like I’m going to jump right in the car and hustle over there. I tell you, Griffin, you have my sympathy. I’m not sure how many peace officers would be able to handle Jay Singleton forcing them to work with a psychic. I mean, try to set foot in the Pelican once
that
gets around.”

Cell phone to his ear, Griffin leaned on his sliding glass door and gazed out at the banana tree. Was it his imagination, or had the thing perked up a little? “She called with information and at the time, we—”

But Petrie interrupted. “So look, I’m going to go talk with the owner down at the Atlantis. We’ll see how forthcoming he is when he gets a badge flashed in his face.”

If she wanted to chase her tail following up empty leads, that was fine by him. Anything to get her out of his way. “Okay.”

It was his own fault that she felt free enough to talk about Tessa like this. All he’d had to do when she’d come over to Jay’s was make it clear that Tessa had been helpful to the case. Then her attitude might have had, if not admiration, then at least not this smiling, elbow-in-the-ribs derision. But he had not stood up for Tessa. Once again, he’d withdrawn behind that wall he put up between himself and others, women in particular. He’d denied the connection, the chemistry they had—hell, he’d even denied the
friendship that had bloomed between them as he’d recognized she was as smart in her way as he was in his.

There were days when he just plain hated himself.

You can change, you know
.

Why? His relationship with Sheryl had been no different. All Sheryl and he really had in common were sex and wedding plans. With Tessa it was sex and this case. That was nothing to base a relationship on.

All women are not created equal to Sheryl. If you don’t give Tessa a chance, you might end up like that banana tree, all shriveled up and turning yellow.

“…meet you down there?”

“Sorry?” Griffin came out of his dark thoughts with a start. “What was that? I got distracted.”

Petrie—what was her first name, anyway?—chuckled with understanding. “I said, how about I meet you down there afterward? The music doesn’t start until nine. We can have a drink and compare notes. Say, around six?”

Down where? He’d completely lost track of the conversation. Didn’t matter, anyway. He’d sooner talk to his banana tree. Better yet, he’d sooner go to a whole convention of psychics and talk to them.

“I’ll give you a call when I’m done,” he said. “I have your cell number.”

“Good, that’s a date.” Then she paused a little self-consciously, the first human trait he’d detected in her. “I mean that in the time sense, not the social sense, of course.”

“Of course.” He said goodbye, disconnected and slipped the phone in his pocket. He’d make sure he was good and busy at six o’clock and conveniently forget to call.

His jacket hung on the coat tree by the door; the keys to the truck were on the coffee table. He grabbed both. He’d already told Jay he was going back to the beach
house to search it. And now it seemed Tessa was confirming that was the right avenue to pursue.

His stomach rumbled and he realized he’d skipped lunch. Not that there was much in the house to eat, since he’d been at Jay’s almost nonstop lately.

If Christina really was at the beach house, he was going to be eating a nice big helping of crow, anyway.

T
ESSA PULLED UP
behind the beach house, set the Mustang’s parking brake, and glanced at her watch. Wow. San Francisco to Santa Rita in an hour and twenty-eight minutes, not including the ten-minute stop at the In-N-Out for two cheeseburgers with no onion and extra pickles. Not bad for the old girl.

She got out of the car and followed the path around to the front of the house. It looked exactly as it had two days ago, except that this time there was a different air about it, a sense of life.

A sense of deeply unhappy life. Getting dumped was bad enough when you were a grown woman and at least had some tools with which to handle it. But getting dumped when you were still a teenager and only thought you were a woman was more painful still.

Tessa knocked and wasn’t surprised when no one came to open it.

She tried the handle and, to her surprise, the door swung inward.
Christina,
she thought with a smile,
rule number one with secret hideaways is “Always lock the door.”

She stepped inside and closed it, noting that the red light glowed on the alarm keypad. Christina had even disabled that. Was she thinking that Trey would come back and wake her, like the prince coming for Sleeping Beauty?

Not gonna happen, girl
. It would be more likely that some kid would walk in looking for a few portable electronic devices to sell at the flea market.

“Christina, it’s Tessa. I’m a friend of your—of Mandy’s. Can I come in?”

Silence.

“I know about Trey, sweetie.”

“Get out of here,” came a soggy voice from the bedroom.

“Your folks are worried about you.”

She climbed the stairs and, from the end of the hall, saw a figure rolled in a blanket and curled up on the yellow bedspread. Tessa walked into the bedroom and put the bag containing the hamburgers on the table where Griffin had—

She pushed that thought out of her mind and unwrapped the first burger. After biting into it and savoring the fresh lettuce and tomato and making good and sure Christina could smell it, she pulled out the fries and squeezed ketchup on them.

“Getting dumped sucks the big one,” she said, as though she and Christina had been buds for years and she was picking up a conversation where it had been interrupted. “What really sucks is building your life plan around the guy and then he treats it as though it’s nothing.”

From out of the folds of the blanket, two dark brown, suspicious, reddened eyes appeared. “What the hell do you know about it? Get out of here, bitch!” Then her angry gaze fell on the hamburger in Tessa’s hand.

Tessa ignored the name-calling and popped a couple of fries in her mouth. “You probably haven’t eaten since yesterday, right?”

Christina’s hostile gaze tracked the fries from their cardboard container to Tessa’s mouth.

“I got a burger for you, if you want it. Extra pickles, no onions.” Tessa nudged the bag and smiled behind her burger as Christina threw back the blanket and scrambled across the bed. She grabbed the second burger and had devoured half of it before Tessa could maneuver the fries out of the bag. When that was gone, she offered Christina the other half of her burger, and when she’d eaten that, too, figured the girl’s blood-sugar levels might be within human range once again.

“You owe me an apology for calling me a bitch,” she said, and smiled. If Christina was anything like her dad, a firm stand was necessary right from the start.

“You’re trespassing!” This was definitely Jay’s daughter.

“Your dad hired me to find you. And I brought you supper. Two reasons why I’m not technically trespassing.”

“My dad?” Christina frowned and poked a fry into the last of the ketchup as if she were stubbing out a cigarette. “Why should he care?”

“He cares. He’s been a basketcase ever since you left. Tell me he isn’t this cranky when he’s normal.”

The corners of Christina’s lips twitched, then turned down again. “He’s going to kill me.”

Tessa shook her head. “He’ll probably cry. I’m serious. It’s clear to me he loves you like nobody’s business, and I never met the guy before last week.”

Could it have been just last week that her biggest problem had been deciding on a thesis topic?

“I’ve been working with Griffin Knox to find you.”

“Griffin Knox? The security guy?”

“Yes. You see, I’m the one who got your blue cashmere sweatshirt.”

“My what?” The girl looked completely lost.

“The ice-blue Stella McCartney sweater that you gave to some charity a while back for a fund-raiser.”

Christina shrugged. “If you say so. What about it?”

Oh, to be so rich you didn’t even know what one-of-a-kinds you were giving away.

“Well, I’m a sensitive. I learn things about people when I touch something they owned, like a watch or whatever. I got your sweater at a thrift shop and started learning stuff about you in a big way. So your dad hired me to see if I could help.”

And I did. Even if no one believed me. Well, guess what, guys—I found her first
.

“You found me from my sweater? Are you like a bloodhound or something?”

Tessa laughed. “No, it’s more like I put on the sweater and a movie starts playing scenes from your life. Like when Trey bought those cotton scarves and tied you to the bed. Where was that, by the way?”

Christina’s eyes widened. “You’re bullshitting me.”

Tessa shrugged and waited.

“That was here in Santa Rita. He wanted someplace anonymous so we got a hotel. Then I remembered Mandy’s house from when she showed it to me once. She doesn’t know I watched her punch in the code on the door.”

And of course a girl brought up in houses that required expensive alarm systems would think nothing of remembering a key code.

“Have you had enough to eat?”

“Yeah. Thanks. I’m sorry I called you a bitch. You scared me.”

“You shouldn’t leave the front door open. He’s not going to come back.” Tessa tried to make her tone as sympathetic as possible. She was sympathetic. She had been in
Christina’s shoes a time or two herself, dreaming the exact same fairy-tale dreams. Learning they rarely, if ever, had happy endings.