Zeitgeist Read online

  “I don’t think so. I never took any photos of you, if that’s what you’re asking, and it’s not like I kept a stalker journal or anything like that. I brought my laptop with me, so they won’t have access to my search history.”

  “What search history?” She was surprised when he reddened.

  “County records. Your property, which is still in Neal Jamison’s name. Your utilities, all still in Jamison’s name. Valencia McDermott, which I searched yesterday afternoon before calling Darren.” He frowned at her. “You interest me.”

  “I wish I didn’t.” She wanted to snap the words, but they emerged on a sigh. If she hadn’t interested Grant, Chad wouldn’t have found her. She’d have found Chad.

  “I’m no psychic, but I have a feeling one day you’ll be glad you did.”

  She whirled her face toward him, staring at him in amazement. He said the oddest, most off-the-wall things! “Why in the world would I be glad?”

  “Think about it. Because I find you interesting, this fellow Chad is dead. That means you have one less enemy to worry about. You also gained an ally. You won’t admit it now, but between the two of us, we’ll be able to figure out why your brother wanted to kill you and your father, and we’ll be able to figure out how to bring him to justice. And you’re now on your way home after a three-year absence. You can’t tell me you aren’t looking forward to seeing your old home.”

  She deliberated on his words while taking the exit ramp. He was right about all of it. Chad’s death did simplify her life. She’d long anticipated the next time she encountered him, but always there’d been a prick of anxiety tainting her desire for revenge. She’d wanted to kill him, but knowing he was a professional killer had raised doubts about her ability to do so. As for two heads being better than one, she didn’t have a high opinion of Grant’s intelligence, but his skills as a novelist and as a researcher would be invaluable.

  And, yes, she was looking forward to seeing her old home. When Fiona took a left onto Summit Avenue from South Lexington Parkway, she felt a surge of pleasure and nostalgia at the sight of the familiar neighborhood. There was the governor’s mansion in the distance. There was her friend Vicki’s house. She wondered whether she still lived with her parents. There was the fire hydrant she’d run into with Daddy’s Porsche.

  And there was her home.

  Three stories constructed in smooth red brick with cream trim, steep-peaked roofs covered in scalloped clay tiles, a round turret with a cream conical cap at the southeast corner, a dormer window erupting from the front roof, three chimneys, large sash windows, and concrete steps leading up to a columned front loggia—how was it possible she could kill a man in the morning, standing over him, emptying her gun into him, and remaining untouched, yet six hours later, be moved to tears by the sight of a house?

  She wouldn’t cry. She needed to remember she wasn’t a prodigal daughter. There would be no welcome here, no fatted calf, only death if she were discovered. She turned into the narrow U driveway running up one side of the house, around the back, and down the other side. The garage bays were in the back, but their doors were electronic, and she no longer had a garage door opener.

  She wondered whether Whitley still had her Audi. She’d loved that car! Shaking her head to dispel the potential onslaught of good memories, Fiona pulled the Buick around the back, parking it on the concrete driveway, out of sight of the street and beside the French doors she’d last used when fleeing Whitley and Chad three years ago.

  “Nice house,” Grant stated, startling her.

  She’d forgotten he was there; that’s how close to sloppy she was becoming. “I suppose. Stay here. I’m going to try the door to see whether the old access code still works. If it doesn’t, we’re out of luck. The security system on this place is better than Fort Knox.”

  Fiona hopped out and approached the keypad, wondering as she did whether every action at this home would generate equally strong recollections, making her step back in time to relive her best and her worst memories. She keyed in the code and waited, her heart pounding, until she heard the corresponding click. She almost wept. The hardest part of her homecoming was over.

  After sliding open the door, she turned toward the car. Grant had begun piling suitcases on the driveway, and she picked up two, toting them in and returning for another load. It felt comfortable, like a familiar process in a long-term relationship. No words were spoken; they worked in tandem, like an old married couple returning from a long vacation. While she carried in the second set of suitcases, he finished unloading the backseat and the trunk, shoved the car keys into a pocket, and grabbed the last of their items, carrying them through the door and adding them to the pile she’d already made. She closed the door and locked it, and he stood and surveyed the room, Daddy’s “office away from the office.”

  Her gaze went to the desk, her safe haven from discovery, the cave in which she’d dwelt while listening to her brother pay her lover for having murdered her. When she felt Grant’s eyes on her, she looked away. “We should have thought to pick up food. I hope Whitley left us something in the refrigerator.”

  Grant was still looking at the desk, his brow slightly furrowed. He must have heard what Chad had said about her hiding under the desk. Maybe he interpreted the action as a sign of weakness, and maybe it had been a sign of weakness. However, she was weak no longer. She hoped he didn’t get the wrong impression. She wasn’t the same woman today she’d been back then.

  “Don’t use lights in any room without making certain the blinds and drapes are closed. The neighbors can’t see the car over the privacy fence, but they can see lights coming on and going off in the house.”

  He appeared reluctant to look away from the desk, taking his time shifting his gaze from it to her. “Do you have flashlights?”

  “This is Saint Paul, Minnesota. Power outages, especially in the winter, aren’t all that uncommon. There’s a drawer in the kitchen with flashlights, battery-powered lanterns, candles, matches, and lighters.” Fiona led the way into the kitchen. There were no changes here. It was still a gleaming montage of chrome and brushed metal efficiently arranged on a blush, ceramic-tile floor. Pulling open the refrigerator, she studied the contents. “Leftovers, lots of them. It looks like food from the wedding reception.”

  Without speaking, Grant joined her in carting platters of prawns, stuffed mushrooms, chicken kabobs, chocolate-covered strawberries, crab puffs, mini-quiches, and cheese cubes to the island counter. He dragged over bar stools while she searched for plates and cutlery. She’d been wrong about there being no changes in this room. Whitley had rearranged everything. Plates resided in the cupboard previously occupied by glasses; cutlery shone within the recesses of the old utensils drawer. She wondered why her brother would feel the need to alter the old arrangement. The action had the feel of erasure, of eliminating her father’s presence from the house. Or had the maid been responsible for the kitchen’s organization?

  No, not the maid. Fiona’s mother. Whitley was erasing her mother’s presence from the house.

  “Champagne?” she asked, pulling a bottle of Cristal from the refrigerator.

  Glancing up from the plate he was filling with assorted hors d’oeuvres, he looked at the bottle and raised his eyebrows. “As long as you’re buying.”

  “It’s on my brother.” She grabbed two champagne flutes and carried them to the table with the bottle of Cristal, popping the cork, and filling a glass for each of them. “This might be Dutch courage,” she mused. “The entire kitchen has been reorganized. Once we’re done eating, I want to explore, see what other changes Whitley made while I was gone. There may be answers there, or maybe I just want to see him through new eyes. Now that I know what he’s like and what he’s capable of, I might see significance in objects and arrangements I wouldn’t have noticed as an adoring little sister.”

  “And I can provide the outsider’s input,” Grant added before shoving a giant prawn into his mouth.

  “Even
tually, we’ll need to try to log in to the office computer. Information about his schedule should be there, and we need to know when he plans to return.” It occurred to Fiona she was talking to Grant as a co-conspirator might, planning and scheming with him instead of snapping at him. She wondered about the shift in her attitude toward him. Sometime between unlocking the house and carrying in their luggage, she’d misplaced her animosity.

  Panic rose. She couldn’t trust him. She couldn’t trust anyone again. Ever.

  She darted a glance at him and noticed he was watching her with a smile in his eyes. “Shucks. I wondered when you’d remember you’re supposed to hate me.”

  “And in the nick of time, too,” she remarked, forcing down her alarm. “Had I waited any longer, you’d have eaten all those prawns. Share.”

  He grinned and shoved the platter across the counter while taking a gulp of his champagne. “I had my eyes on those crab puffs, anyway. Help yourself.”

  Fiona eyed the crab puffs, suddenly certain those were what she’d wanted in the first place. When she looked up at him, she saw his amusement had deepened.

  Chapter 10

  Fiona returned the platters to the refrigerator and stacked their glasses and plates in the sink. “How recognizable are you as an author?”

  “Not at all. Why?”

  “We may be eating wedding food for the rest of our time here unless we’re able to sneak out for groceries.”

  “We might not be here long enough to worry about it. It depends upon how long he’ll be gone and what we’re able to discover. Where do you want to start your exploration?”

  “The bedrooms. A person spends over a third of his or her life in the bedroom, so that room would provide the clearest indicators about the type of man my brother truly is. We might even find some clues. A written confession to my father’s murder or a detailed explanation of what he’s been doing with the online searches would save us a lot of time. You find lanterns or flashlights—I’d tell you where they were if I knew—and I’ll grab the keyring I saw hanging in the office.” Fiona hurried to the office, plucking a ring studded with keys from a peg beside the door.

  Returning to the kitchen, she led the way to the wedge-shaped stairs rising from the center of the formal sitting room. “The best place to start will be with my suite on the second floor. I’m curious what a brother does with his sister’s room after he kills her.”

  “If I killed one of my sisters, the first thing I’d do is turn her bedroom into a game room,” Grant remarked from behind her.

  She paused with one hand on the railing and frowned down on him. “You can joke about that?”

  He looked taken aback, but not for long. “I suppose so. Sometimes you have to laugh at the horrifying to lessen its impact. There’s no understanding why a man would want to kill his father or his sister, and a person could go crazy wondering why. Then he’s succeeded in stripping you of the will to live, which is the same as killing you. You didn’t succumb, which says a lot about your character.”

  She thought about her first two years on the run. She’d succumbed, all right, but he didn’t need to know that. “I can’t joke about it yet, not while I know he still wants me dead. Well, not me, but Valencia. Chad asked for expenses on Valencia, so he must have contacted Whitley before he flew out to South Dakota.”

  “How do you know Chad requested expenses?”

  She stepped into the second-floor hallway and waited for him to catch up. “I heard him while I was hiding.” Anger crossed his face. “And if you say you’re sorry to hear that, I’ll hasten your descent down these stairs.”

  When he spoke, his voice was tight. “All right. Fair enough. I won’t say it. Which way to your bedroom?”

  Fiona stiffened at his choice of words. “Rephrase that. Try ‘which way to the room you used to call your own?’”

  “Yeah. What you just said.”

  “This way.” Fiona led the way down the hall, stopping before a door that used to have a smiling sun taped to the outside and, later, a “Keep Out” sign. Before looking for a key, she tried the doorknob. It turned easily. Whitley hadn’t locked it. In a sudden onset of cowardice, she realized she didn’t want to open the door. No matter what she saw in there, seeing it was bound to hurt. If Whitley hadn’t changed her décor, she’d be inundated with a wave of memories, good memories of uncomplicated days, worry-free nights, and a loving family. If he had, as Grant had suggested, turned it into a game room, she’d be hurt anew at how easily her once-beloved older brother had turned his back on her. She pushed the door inward and stood in the doorway, mute while her heart and mind cried out in protest.

  “May I step past?”

  Moving numbly, a mechanical vending machine dispensing its contents in response to the right amount of change, Fiona stood aside for Grant and listened to him curse. Her room had been ransacked. No, that wasn’t right. It had been wrecked. Everything breakable had been broken, shattered on the floor or smashed against the wall, resulting in an ankle-deep layer of rubble consisting of splintered wood, broken glass, crumpled plastic, wadded clothing, and shredded paper. Her life-sized portrait, the one Daddy had a local artist paint of her when she’d turned sixteen, the one that used to hang in the formal sitting room, had been slashed repeatedly and braced against her headboard. Someone had used black spray paint on the beige brocade walls, writing “slut” and “whore” in varying sizes on every exposed surface.

  Grant turned to her and studied her face. “Do you need to see anymore? This is making me sick. I’m about to lose my prawns.”

  Fiona faced him, raising her chin, anger stiffening her posture. How dare he be here to witness her shame? “You’ve seen enough of the slut’s room?” Without waiting for a response, she spun on her heel and stalked to the staircase, sitting on the top stair, curling her arm around the top baluster, and resting a heated cheek against the smooth, cool wood. She felt the old numbness return, the sense of detachment from reality she’d felt when she’d been hiding beneath a desk and listening to a beloved brother tell her lover to make certain he was current on his shots if he’d slept with her. She didn’t look up when Grant joined her, sitting on the opposite side, his hands resting on his knees.

  When he didn’t speak, a rare state of affairs for him, she broke the silence. “My actions, my behavior, got my father killed.”

  “I suppose you could say that,” he responded, his voice meditative. “If you were stupid.”

  She whirled on him. “Excuse me?”

  “That’s self-pity speaking. The woman I’ve been watching, the woman who has intrigued me for so long, isn’t a whiner. That’s what makes her so fascinating. She’s focused, incredibly self-disciplined. When I first met you and saw you working out and studying and practicing, I thought abusive ex-husband or ex-boyfriend. I admired the way you hadn’t allowed yourself to be beaten down. I admired the way you were fighting back.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  He responded with a question of his own, asking something completely off-topic. “Have you ever noticed when a woman has multiple sleeping partners she’s labeled promiscuous and when a man has multiple sleeping partners he’s labeled a womanizer? Tell me this, and please don’t hurt me before you answer, how many different men have you slept with in your life?”

  Anger rose, anger accompanied by astonishment at his impertinence. “That’s an extremely personal question.”

  He nodded. “It is. Humor me.”

  Fiona thought about it, working her way back to the first, Jeff, when she’d turned seventeen. “Five. Happy?” She watched his face and didn’t see disgust or lechery rise, but he may be skilled at concealing his emotions.

  “Are you familiar with the name Wilt Chamberlain?”

  Again, an odd subject change. She couldn’t follow his train of thought. She doubted anyone could, maybe not even him. “No.”

  “A famous basketball player before both our times. Every time Chamberlain slep
t with a woman, he made a checkmark in his day planner, which was like a Blackberry. One time, he slept with twenty-three women in ten days. He did the math, calculating that he’d slept with 20,000 women in his lifetime. He was proud of this, and no one ever called him a slut or a whore. He was a womanizer. Yet you sleep with five men, and instead of being called a manizer, you’re labeled promiscuous. It’s all a matter of perception.”

  Fiona considered his words. Grant was right. Five men weren’t all that many. One of her friends had thrown a party after reaching what she’d called the “Dirty Dozen.” “That’s really not relevant. Whitley’s perception was that I was promiscuous, and he hated me for it.”

  “I don’t think it’s that simple. You two didn’t share the same mother, did you?”

  “You make me dizzy with the way you change subjects. No, we didn’t share the same mother, and Daddy and Julia were divorced long before he met my mother, so don’t even think Whitley’s animosity toward me stems from my mother, the homewrecker.”

  “Not as a homewrecker, no, but he may have resented her taking over his mother’s role in the family. What happened to his mother? Is she still in the picture?”

  What he was saying made an odd kind of sense, given the rearranging she’d noticed in the kitchen. “I’ve never met her. I guess I always assumed she died or ran out on Whitley and my father. No one ever talked about her. Why?”

  “That’s a question we need to answer so we can figure out what motivates Whitley. A mother has a strong influence over a child’s maturation, and right now, I’m leaning toward your brother being a garden-variety sicko. He hates you, and I’ll stake my life on your never having given him any reason to hate you. He hated his father, too, enough to want to kill him. Apparently, killing the two of you wasn’t enough. Sometime after your supposed death, he went to your room and trashed it. It took a lot of rage to make that big a mess. Despite your supposed death, his hatred toward you lived on. That’s pretty sick, wouldn’t you say?”