Chapter 20
Miles tossed and twitched on the daybed in the studio. He felt hot, sticky and irritated. Wrangled into his worst nightmare: stuck under the same roof as Cindy Riggs. She was right upstairs, wearing only a chemise and thong set. He wondered if her pussy hair really was trimmed into a heart shape. He imagined sneaking into her room and demanding that she prove it. He’d showed her his. It was only fair.
Nah. She might tell him to piss off, at which point he would be obliged to fall into a yawning crack in the ground and die.
Worse yet. She might get that sultry look in her eyes that made him terrified and crazy, pull her panties off…and prove it to him.
Yeah, and then? His mind ran up against a wall of stark terror.
Having sex with her would be incredibly exciting. And the inevitable aftermath would kill him. He knew it. He fucking knew it.
Every time he closed his eyes, he saw her slender body twined around him, writhing. Coming, while he nuzzled her incredibly tender, soft tits. He’d had no idea it could be so easy to make a girl come.
Unless she was faking, of course. But why would she? It wasn’t like she gave a shit about his poor tender virginal ego, at this point.
It sure hadn’t felt fake. He’d felt every tremor, reverberating through his body. Every gasp, every clutch of her long nails.
And when she took him in her mouth, oh, God. Oh, God.
Connor was a sneaky asshole for getting him into this. He used every trick he had to stay out of that wacky little headcase’s way, and everywhere he turned, there she was. Shaking her tits in his face.
He groaned, rolling up onto the edge of the daybed. He’d whipped himself into such a frenzy, there was no point trying to sleep. He might as well make himself useful. He booted up his laptop, and clicked his way into the chat forum where Mina had been hanging out with Jared.
Hi anybody out there Im bored, he typed.
A handful of people responded. He exchanged banalities with them, letting time creep by. Deliberately not thinking about Cindy’s heart-shaped pussy hair. Jared finally appeared, oh thank God.
Mindmeld666: hey Mina lets do a u2u
They got into a private room. Jared got right to the point. Ive been authorized to offer you an invitation.
2 what?
A special place. The Haven. Heard rumors?
He had, in fact. Some mythical secret place where people learned amazing brain control techniques. He’d taken it for sci-fi bullshit. There was so much preposterous crap floating around in cyberspace.
Tell me more, he typed.
Dont want 2 talk about it online, Jared typed. I wanted 2 meet u and talk in person, but ur soshy I had no choice. My job is to recruit people like u.
Blushing, Miles typed coyly.
Don’t. Most people who come here pay huge money. We hand pick special ones like u. The guy I work for is a genius. U have 2 xperience it 2 believe it.
Who is he? Miles typed.
Mindmeld hesitated. Im not authorized to tell u that. I havent met u so how do I know if u r who u say u r?
Fair enough. Thats my problem 2, Miles typed.
Only 1 way 2 solve ur problem. Meet me?
The question scrolled out across the bright screen and waited.
A knock on the study door sent his heart off on a tizzy.
Fuck. What to do? Hide under the bed? Stop breathing and pretend to be dead? Shit.
“You awake?” Connor’s gruff voice sounded from the other side.
Not Cindy. Miles almost slid off the chair, unmanned by a combination of relief and disappointment. “More or less,” he called.
Connor opened the door. He was fully dressed, a SIG in his hand.
“I just got a call. The SafeGuard alarm in Erin’s mom’s house tripped. Thank God she’s in Hawaii. I called the cops, but I’m going to take a look. I want you to stand guard. Can you handle one of these?”
Are you kidding? I’m just a clueless gearhead, he wanted to yelp, but the part he’d been relentlessly training swallowed hard and nodded.
“I’ve put in some hours with Sean and Davy at the gun range. Let me just finish this.” Miles leaned over the keyboard and typed,
gotta go. Check back in 2 hrs?
Ur a tease, Mindmeld666 typed. Will check back. Bye4now.
He followed Con downstairs, and took the gun.
“Heads up,” Con said. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
Miles paced the foyer. His brain buzzed like a hive of bees. He couldn’t sit still. The house was dim, just the orange glow of streetlamps from the window. The gun felt heavy and strange and alien in his hand.
“Oh. There you are.” The soft voice made his heart jolt and skip in his chest. “I was just looking for you.”
He turned. Cindy’s body resolved out of the infinite shades of gray in the kitchen entrance. Just as he’d thought. A tight string tank. Not a thong, but those low-slung form fitted shorts were just about as bad.
“You should be sleeping,” he said.
“Can’t.” Her voice was fretful. “I’m wound up from the gig. We were hot tonight. Too bad you weren’t there. Holy cow, Miles. What the hell are you doing with a gun?”
“Guard duty,” he replied. “Connor’s gone off to check on your mom’s place. Somebody tripped the alarm.”
She tossed her head back, making her hair do that seductive swirl thing. “Someone has to protect us against the fanged monsters, right?”
He refused to let himself be needled. “The monsters are real, Cin.”
“You’re as bad as they are.” She sauntered close enough so he could smell her honey-vanilla scent. The details of her body came into focus in the dimness. He gulped, and looked out the window.
“Can I hold that gun for a sec?” Her voice was teasing.
“No,” he said.
She folded her arms over her belly and slouched against the wall. “Are you afraid I’ll sexually assault you, or something?”
“Connor asked me to guard this house until he got back,” he said tersely. “I’m goddamn well going to do it. So don’t bug me.”
Cindy slid down the wall until she sat on the floor, hugging her knees tightly to her chest. “Are you ever going to stop hating me, Miles?”
He let out a long, careful breath, trying to choose amongst the hundred thousand completely contradictory replies he could give to that statement. “I don’t hate you, Cin. I just hate the way you made me feel. I hated being your personal slave while all your dickhead boyfriends treated you like shit. I really, really hated that.”
“I’m not with any dickhead boyfriend right now,” she protested.
He shrugged. “It’s just a matter of time. I’ve got better things to do than run errands for you while you track your next dickhead down.”
She covered her face with her hands. “Nobody forced you to do all that stuff for me.” Her voice was small. “You could have just said no.”
“That’s true. That’s what I finally did, Cin. I just said no.”
She sniffled. “You hate my guts because of this morning, right?”
Oh, yeah. Right. He almost exploded in hysterical laughter. “No, Cin. I told you. I don’t hate you. I wish you well. All the best. Really.”
She chewed on that. “Wish me well,” she repeated. “I wish Great-Aunt Martha well. I wish all the poor children in the world well. I wish the humpbacked whales and the bald eagles and the panda bears well.”
He shook his head. “I’ve got nothing against whales or eagles or pandas, or Great-Aunt Martha. And I’ve got nothing against you.”
She covered her face with her hands. He was appalled to hear soggy sniffling sounds again. He clenched his teeth. “What do you want to hear? That I love you? I’m not going to say that. I had a crush on you, but I’m over it. I’m not letting you wipe your feet on me anymore.”
“I wouldn’t,” she whispered. “Ever again.”
“Wouldn’t what?” His voice hardened.
“Wipe my feet on you.” She brushed tears out of her eyes, sniffing hard. “I’m sorry if I ever did. I never meant to.”
The soft invitation in her trembling voice tore him to pieces. He wanted it so badly. His fantasy of Cindy, just how he wanted her to be. Grown up, chilled out, feet on the ground. And wanting him.
Fantasy, though. The key word here was fantasy.
He stood there, throat frozen with fear and pain, until the question in the silence between them became a flat, implacable answer.
Cindy let out a shaky sigh and got gracefully to her feet, padding through the kitchen. She stopped at the foot of the stairs. “Miles?”
He braced himself. “Yeah?”
“I wish you well, too,” she said. “I really, really do.”
She had a tone in her voice he had never heard before. She wasn’t trying to sock in a zinger, or impress him, or shock him. She wasn’t trying to jerk the world around until it was the way she wanted it.
Her voice was sad and flat. Facing reality. Dealing with it.
It almost made him change his mind. Having Cindy be real and straight with him was all he had ever wanted from the universe.
But she’d already vanished up the stairs. The fleeting moment was lost. He’d probably imagined it anyway, knowing how fucked in the head he’d always been about that girl.
Miles stared out at the lightening dawn. His heart felt heavy, a dead weight in his chest just like the gun in his hand, and a cruel, searing tightness in his throat, like someone was pulling a knot tight.
God help the fool who tried to assault that house on his watch. He would blow the fucker full of holes without a shred of remorse.
“He looks just like Connor.” Erin sounded smug.
Cindy squinted her eyes, still gummy from last night’s mascara, and took another swig of coffee as she tried to make sense of the grainy sonogram images of her little nephew. “I still don’t see what you see.”
“Imagine that you’re looking straight up, under his chin,” Erin explained. “See? There’s his lips, that’s his little nose…see it now?”
It finally slid into place. She got a sweet, shivery thrill of wonder.
“Wow. Oh, yeah. I see it!” She peered at it again. “Like Connor? Everything about this little guy is round, Erin. Nothing about Connor is round. I’ll concede that he appears to be a recognizable member of the human species, but he doesn’t look like Connor.”
“Oh, you’re hopeless.” Erin got up, and scooped French toast out of the skillet and onto a plate, slapping them down in front of her sister.
“You’ll make me fat,” Cindy complained, out of reflex.
“Don’t even start,” Erin warned. She set the butter and maple syrup down in front of Cindy with a sharp, eloquent thud. “Miles? How many slices of French toast for you?”
“Not hungry, thanks.” Miles’s remote voice floated to the kitchen.
Erin fixed Cindy with a speculative gaze. Cindy’s eyes slid away. She felt herself blush, for no reason she could figure. She hadn’t done anything to Miles last night except give him one more spectacular opportunity to reject her. Which he had done. So thoroughly, she had finally gotten a clue. Charm, tears, even sex, nothing worked with that guy. Her usual tricks had bombed out, big-time. Looked like she was going to have to bite the bullet. Get a dignity implant, or something.
There was a rumble of male voices in the foyer, and then Connor appeared in the door to the kitchen. He looked tired and grim.
“What’s up?” Erin asked.
“Nothing good,” he replied. He grabbed her, kissed her.
Erin poured a cup of coffee, which he took with a sigh of thanks. He sank down into his chair, rubbing his leg. “I got there right after the cops. I parked in the alley, so I almost cut him off when he bolted.”
Erin scowled. “Did you chase him?”
Con didn’t meet her eyes. He sipped his coffee.
“You macho idiot!” she scolded. “You’ll limp worse for a week!”
Connor sighed. “Couldn’t stop myself,” he said dolefully. “I got so close. But then he vaulted the Sizemores’ fence, and I was fucked.” He massaged his leg. “My days of chasing those bastards are over.”
“So? Did you see him?” Cindy asked. “Is he Sean’s guy?”
Connor shrugged. “Might be, might not. He was big, dressed in black. That describes a lot of lowlife scum who engage in B&E.”
“What did he take?” Erin asked. “Did he get Mom’s jewelry?”
“No. That’s what worries me.” Connor met her eyes. “He didn’t take anything. He’d deactivated the old alarm, but he didn’t cop to the SafeGuard one. He was there for twenty minutes. He didn’t take a thing. I think he was hunkering down. Waiting for somebody to come home.”
Erin shuddered, hunching down over her rounded belly and wrapping her hands around her coffee cup. “Why would he go after Mom, if it’s Sean’s guy? And not, say, us? Or Davy and Margot?”
Connor shook his head. “She’s an easier target.”
Cindy squirmed uncomfortably as she thought of her adventure with Porky yesterday. Her cell phone rang. She fished it out. The unfamiliar number made her belly twist. She picked it up. “Yeah?”
“Yes, is this Cindy? This is Bolivar.”
“Oh! Hi, Bolivar.” She padded into the living room, rummaging for pen and paper. “What’s up?”
“Look, I don’t want you to tell nobody I tell you this, OK? This is some bad shit here, and I don’t want no part of it.” He spoke so rapidly in his accented voice, she could barely make out what he was saying.
“Uh, yeah, I understand,” Cindy said. “Yes, of course.”
“That summer, there was three janitors. One was Fred Ayers. He died July, heart attack. There was another guy, Pat Hammond, a drunk. Died in a car accident. Then there was a Vietnamese guy, Trung. He left when the building closed, relocated up the coast. Town called Garnett. His daughter runs a grocery store there. I never talked to you. OK?”
Cindy scribbled it down on a Post-It note. “Sure,” she said. “The last thing I want is to make any trouble for you. Thanks, Bolivar.”
She hung up, and stared down at the square of paper. Her belly clenched. The moment had come to own up. And it wasn’t going to be pretty. Everybody was going to have a cow. Right in her face.
She walked towards the hum of conversation in the kitchen, and stopped in the door, gathering her nerve. Eventually, they fell silent.
“What have you got there?” Con gestured at the Post-It note.
She swallowed. “It’s a lead.”
Connor looked blank. “Huh?”
“The janitor at the Colfax. I teach sax to his nephew. I, um, asked him if he knew who was on the janitorial staff of the Colfax the summer Kev died. He asked around. Two of the men died that summer, weirdly enough. This guy,” she held out the paper, “is still alive. In Garnett.”
Connor took the scrap of paper, frowning at it.
“Bolivar told me that when he took the job, some people told him the place was cursed,” Cindy said. “I thought maybe that curse might have to do with what happened to Kev.”
Connor propped the scrap of paper up against the syrup. “I’ll be damned. What made you think of doing that?”
This was it. Into the valley of death rode Cynthia. She plopped her butt in the chair, breathed deep, and clenched her belly. “I, uh, thought of it yesterday, after I went to see Porky. He told me his housekeeper—”
Smash. Miles dropped the glass French press coffeepot. It cracked into several pieces, spattering scalding coffee all over the tiled floor.
“You did what?” Miles hissed.
“Who’s Porky?” Connor’s gaze flicked rapidly between them.
“Professor Beck,” Cindy supplied, in a small voice. She bit her lip, wrapped her hands around her belly, and braced herself.
Miles crouched in the deafening silence, gathering up shards of glass. He kicked open the kitchen screen door, went out into the yard. Nudged the lid of the metal garbage can open with his knee.
He lifted the chunks of glass high and hurled them with all his strength into the bottom of the empty can. Crash.
Cindy squeaked, digging her teeth into her lip almost till she broke the skin. Oh, boy. This was bad. And it was about to get worse.
Miles stomped back into the kitchen. He leaned over her, making her cringe back. “It’s a good thing I didn’t fuck you last night,” he said. “Or I would be that much more angry than I am right now.”
There was a shocked silence. Connor and Erin exchanged shocked, wide-eyed glances. Cindy pressed her trembling lips together.
Connor turned his glare on Miles. “What the hell were you thinking, telling your business to her?” he demanded.
“He didn’t,” Cindy whispered. “He wouldn’t. I overheard him, talking to you on the phone. I thought…I knew old Porky…so I went and asked him about Kevin. And the Midnight Project.”
“Oh, Christ.” Miles stormed out. The door to the study slammed.
Connor covered his eyes with his hand. “Sweet, holy Jesus. I cannot believe it. I just cannot believe it.”
Erin clutched her cup, staring into her coffee as if she were afraid to speak. She wouldn’t meet Cindy’s eyes. No moral support there.
No support anywhere. And no one to blame but herself. As usual.
“Do you want to tell me just what the fuck you thought you were doing?” Connor’s voice slashed across her rattled nerves, making her jump. “Were you, what, bored, Cin? Amusing yourself?”
“No,” she said. “I just…I know Porky. He’s a slimeball lech whose brain melts whenever he sees a pair of tits, so I just thought—”
“Thought? You?” Connor’s laughter was cruelly sarcastic. “You are aware, just for starters, that going alone to the houses of lecherous slimeball men and attempting to use your tits to influence them is a really excellent way to get sexually assaulted?”
“Oh, but I didn’t think that Porky would ever…the guy is really essentially harmless, so I thought—”
“Harmless? Yeah? And the mysterious visitor to your mother’s house this morning? Does that strike you as harmless?”
Cindy’s insides froze solid. “No way,” she whispered. “That can’t possibly have anything to do with—”
“Beck had access to your mother’s address through the school records. What did you tell him? How did you present yourself?”
“I—I just said, um, that I wanted to write a book about Kev,” she faltered. “I said that I’d found one of his old notebooks.”
“Notebook?” Connor clapped his scarred hand over his face. “She told him she had his notebook. No shit they came after her. Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
“Um…evidently not,” she squeaked.
He dropped his hand. His glare made her cower back in her chair. “You’ve put yourself on a hit list. You just made our lives that much more complicated. What’s this all about, Cindy? Do you need more attention? Did you think we needed more of a challenge?”
She shook her head. “No. I’m sorry.”
Connor slammed his scarred hand down onto the table, making the dishes rattle and bump. “Sure. Aren’t you always?”
“Connor? Cool it,” Erin said. “Back off.”
“Don’t even try to defend—”
“I’m not defending anyone.” Erin’s voice was sharp. “But I will not tolerate one of your temper tantrums, either.”
“You call this a temper tantrum?” he roared.
She glared at him, her soft lips primly compressed, arms folded over her protruding belly. “Yes,” she said, in her snippiest voice.
Con limped to the door and stared out onto the back lawn, his back to them. His long, lean frame was tense, vibrating. Radiating fury.
Erin cleared her throat. “OK. Well, Cin, since the damage is done, you might as well tell us what the man said.”
“Yeah, Cin. Tell us.” Miles’s voice came from the doorway, icy and sarcastic. “I’m twitching with curiosity as to what your tits can do.”
“Oh, but I think you already know, Miles,” Cindy retorted.
Miles’s face reddened, but at least that shut him up. Cindy wound her fingers together and squeezed til her knuckles went white. “Well, um, he didn’t tell me much. He said he didn’t know Kevin well. That the Midnight Project had to do with neurological research that folded due to lack of funding. That he didn’t know who funded it. That’s all. It’s just…” She hesitated, unsure if her feelings were worth sharing.
Erin made an exasperated sound. “What, Cin?”
“It was the vibes I got from him, more than anything he said,” she offered hesitantly. “When he first saw me, he came on real strong—”
“Fuck, Cin,” Miles burst out. “Are you insane?”
“No, just a slut,” Cindy said sweetly.
“Don’t get sidetracked,” Con snarled. “Keep your mouth shut, Miles. So? Go on. He was sliming you, and then?”
“And then I said the name Kevin McCloud,” she faltered. “And it switched off. Like, I mean, gone. I swear, the room got instantly colder. He stopped playing kneesies, stopped staring at my chest, stopped giving me compliments. It just…stopped. Boom, like that.”
Connor kept staring out the screen door, shaking his head.
Cindy pushed doggedly on. “So, I got to wondering what would make a really turned on guy suddenly switch off?”
“Fear,” Erin said quietly. “Guilt.”
Connor nodded. “We’ll be paying another visit to Beck. Real soon.”
His tone made her shiver. Sometimes her brother-in-law scared her.
“I want to know what that janitor in Garnett has to say,” she said.
“You’ll have to wait to find out,” Connor said. “You’re going to Hawaii to meet your mom. I’ll make some calls and arrange for twenty-four-hour bodyguard coverage for both of you while you’re there.”
Cindy’s mouth flapped. “But band camp hasn’t finished and I’ve got a wedding to play this weekend with the Rumors, and—”
“Forget band camp. Forget the Rumors. Forget anything written in your datebook. You canceled it all out when you provided an assassin with your mother’s home address. Miles, get onto the computer. Now.”
“Just a sec. I was just going to go have Mina tell Mindmeld to—”
“Forget Mindmeld,” Con snarled. “We’re working full time on this, all of us. I am sick of having assassins breathing down my family members’ necks. It makes me fucking tense.”
The savagery in Connor’s voice made Cindy cringe even further down into her chair. She felt small and stupid. “Sorry,” she whispered.
It was a mistake to have spoken. Con rounded on her.
“You have two things to be grateful for. One, that your mom is in Hawaii. Otherwise she would be dead. And two, that you stayed with us last night. Or you’d be dead, too. Or else begging for death.”
He flung open the door that led down to his basement workroom and stomped down the stairs. Miles stood there, probably trying to come up with his own parting slap, but he couldn’t top Connor’s, so he just dove down the stairs himself, leaving her alone with Erin.
She couldn’t meet her sister’s eyes. She wanted to disintegrate, on the spot. Erin never got into trouble like this. Or at least, when she did, it was never her own fault. She was smart, brave, sensible. All the stuff that her clueless little fluff-bunny sister wasn’t.
Cindy’s the beauty, Erin’s the brain, her mom said, but Cindy had seen through that crap from the start. Erin was pretty in her own right, which meant Mom’s statement was just a trick to make Cindy feel better about being, well, less brainy. At least she was cute, right?
Small comfort now. She buried her face in her hands.
Erin cleared her throat delicately. “Cin? Um—”
“Please. Don’t. You don’t need to scold me, too. I got the point.”
Erin’s chair scraped as she got up from the table. She walked out of the kitchen, leaving Cindy to dissolve alone.
She’d put Mom in danger? God, was it possible, that just going to bat her eyelashes at old Porky could have unleashed all this mayhem?
It would be a relief to everyone if she just disappeared.
She got up, with a vague notion of going up to the bathroom, to make that French toast sloshing around in her stomach go away.
She stumbled past the studio, saw the rumpled daybed where Miles had slept. She drifted in the door, staring at it. She’d come to his room last night. Not a plan, just a random slutty impulse, to slide into that narrow bed, just to see what those hard-muscled, hairy legs would feel like, twined through hers. Just to see what he said. What he did.
But he hadn’t been there. Just his laptop, glowing in the dark.
She sank down in front of the desk, wishing she were a better person. Smarter, less self absorbed. She wished she hadn’t hurt Miles’s feelings so badly. That she were the kind of person that Con could respect. Maybe even like.
She blinked at the computer screen. Letters typed themselves across the page. She got a ghostly shudder til she realized the screen was open to a chat room. Someone thought they were talking to Miles.
Mindmeld666: Hey Mina u still there? Want 2 meet me and C the Haven?
She ran her eyes up the screen, scrolled up, read the previous conversation. The Haven. That mythical place she’d heard of, like the school for mutants in the X-Men movies. It was real. How totally wild.
It occurred to her. Here was a place she could go where the assassin she’d unleashed upon her luckless family would never find her. No one would. She had no idea where it was, and Mindmeld had no idea who she was. Double blind anonymity. It sounded great right now.
She could lift the dead weight from her long suffering brother-in-law. Get away from all those scowls and scolds and disapproving glares.
And just maybe even make herself slightly useful in the process.
Her mind raced, excited. She could meet this guy, check out the place, suss out the vibe. If they were up to no good, she would send an SOS to Miles, cross her fingers and take her chances, like other grown-ups who did risky things. Dad had risked his life all the time to catch bad guys, before he’d gotten wound up with that scumbag Lazar. He’d done some good along with the bad. That didn’t cancel out the bad, of course, but maybe, in the end, it tilted the scales in his favor a tiny bit.
She wanted to do good mixed in with her bad, too. At least, she could try. They would worry, and be furious, but so what else was new?
If she got wiped off the face of the earth, it wasn’t like the world would stop. Her mom and Erin would be sad. Miles would be relieved. The Rumors would find another sax player. Life would go on.
Chances were, Mindmeld and the Haven were exactly what the guy said they were, in which case, well, bully for her. The Haven was all about expressing dormant brain potential, right? God knows, her brain was as dormant as they came. Who knew? She might even learn something. Stranger things had happened.
She reached out, poised her fingers over the keyboard. Hesitated.
Me again. I decided. Would luv 2 meet with u. Where?