Virginia stirred and eased herself to her feet. She was a little unsteady, but she could not recall the last time she had felt so good. Cabot lounged in the chair, utterly relaxed. There was just enough light seeping through the doorway of her room to let her see that he was watching her with half-closed eyes.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
She thought about it and then smiled, feeling pleased and more than a little smug. “Yep. I do believe I am okay. And you are positively brilliant.”
“I am? Well, I feel very good at the moment, but not sure what you mean by brilliant.”
“How did you know?” she demanded.
“How did I know what?”
“That a chair would be a solution to my issues?”
“Ah. The chair thing. Lucky guess?”
She waved that aside with a magnanimous sweep of her hand and began to pace the room.
“Somewhere along the line I must have begun to associate beds with panic attacks,” she said. “Some people can’t get on an airplane without having a panic attack. Maybe that’s how it is for me with beds.”
“Are you suggesting we should have sex on an airplane? Join the Mile-High Club? I’m willing to give that some serious consideration.”
She shushed him with another wave of her hand. “I’ve experienced some of my worst attacks while I was in bed. And then there are my commitment issues. A therapist would probably say that somewhere along the line sex and bed got fused into a trigger that set off my anxiety. I figured out a while back that I needed to be on top, but obviously that didn’t always work.”
“Are you sure you’re not overthinking this?”
She went back across the room, leaned down and kissed him on his forehead.
“You’re better than any therapist I’ve ever had,” she announced, straightening.
“Good to know. A possible career path for me if this PI gig doesn’t work out.”
He reached for her but she slipped away.
“I need to wash up,” she said.
She hurried into her own room, went into the bathroom and turned on the light. When she caught sight of herself in the mirror she was a little startled by her flushed cheeks, tangled hair and overbright eyes.
“Good news, Cinderella,” she said softly. “It’s after midnight, you just had great sex and there are no signs of a panic attack. You are almost normal, at least for tonight.”
She didn’t remember the sheaf of photocopied papers and the photo that she had found in Rose’s nightstand until she emerged from the bathroom. She crossed the room to the table where she had left her handbag. Unzipping the bag, she reached inside and took out the envelope and the papers.
She switched on the reading light, put on her glasses and shuffled through the photocopies.
A name leaped off the page. Kim.
Her euphoric mood evaporated in a heartbeat. Dread shivered through her.
“Cabot?” she called quietly.
He materialized in the doorway, zipping up his trousers. “Right here. Are those the papers and the photo you found in Gilbert’s nightstand?”
“Yes,” she whispered, stunned by what she was reading. “What with everything that’s happened since the explosion, I forgot about them until now.”
Cabot changed gears in an instant, transitioning from satisfied lover to intense hunter mode. He crossed the room to the table and looked down at the papers and the photo.
“I assumed they’d been destroyed by the fire,” he said.
“I shoved them into my bag on the way out the door. It was instinctive. I wasn’t really thinking.”
“You’ve got great instincts.”
“We’ll have to give these to the investigators when they arrive in the morning, won’t we?”
“If they want them. For all we know they may not consider them important. The dates on these letters go back a couple of decades.”
“Twenty-two years, to be exact,” Virginia said very evenly. “And they aren’t letters, they’re pages from a diary. The name Kim appears on some of them. I think it may be short for Kimberly.”
“Your mother?”
“Yes.” Virginia flipped through a couple more pages. “Hannah’s name appears as well. There’s also a Jacky.”
“My mother’s name was Jacqueline Kennington Sutter.”
Without a word, Virginia handed him one of the pages. He read a few sentences and then he put the paper down on the table.
“This isn’t just a collection of memories of life in Zane’s cult,” he said. “This is hard evidence. Your mother and mine, together with Hannah Brewster and Abigail Watkins, came up with a plan to steal from the devil himself.”