At the Midnight Hour (4 page)

Could this man be capable of murder?

Looking over at him, she couldn’t be sure. His face looked so harsh in the shadows, his eyes so cold. He had an aura of power around him, an aura of total control. And his features gave away nothing—no hint of softness, no hint of anything at all.

She shivered slightly on the sofa, and immediately his sharp eyes caught it.

“So, my dear Miss Guiness,” he drawled from across the room, “do you think I did it? Do you think I killed my wife?”

He shouldn’t be prodding. A part of him knew that. But he was tired and the brandy was rolling through his veins even as the bitterness gnawed at his gut. He wanted to know. He wanted to know what this beautiful, fresh creature thought of him. He wanted to see the disgust and horror in her eyes now, so he could replay it in his mind night after night after night. So he could block her out of his mind completely.

“I...don’t know,” Liz said at last, the words halting. She grappled for a complete thought. “I don’t know any of the details, so I guess I can’t come to any conclusions at all. I mean,
did
you kill your wife?”

It seemed like a rather inane question. Would a true killer actually answer yes? But she was still feeling frazzled and rather out of her league. It was the best she could do.

He smiled his mirthless smile once more.

“Would you believe me if I answered that?” he asked roughly.

“I don’t know,” she found herself uttering yet again. “I don’t really know you yet.”

She was trying to be honest, trying to recapture her hold on the situation. Perhaps he would at least give her credit for her honesty.

But he didn’t.

Instead, his face grew darker, and for a fraction of an instant, his grip on the brandy glass tightened until his knuckles grew white. Then abruptly, he set the glass down, his face returning to its traditional, dispassionate state.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said curtly. “It doesn’t matter at all. Now if you will excuse me, Miss Guiness. I believe I have some work to do.”

Then, just as abruptly, he turned and walked out of the library. She could do nothing but watch him leave, the doubt and uncertainty sharp and cold in her mind. For a minute, she wanted to call him back. She wanted to search his face for any kind of emotion at all, anything she could latch on to. Anything she could believe in.

Because she was far from home, in a dark house with echoing halls and moaning drafts. In a dark house with a child who rattled off death statistics, and a man who might be a murderer.

What had she done?

In a moment of crashing despair, she wished desperately that she could turn back the clock. It would be one year earlier, and she would be home in bed, curled in the warm embrace of her husband. She would stretch out and roll over, safe in the arms of the man she had loved to one extent or another, for all her life. And he would wake up, and brush her cheek and look at her with his warm hazel eyes. And...

And there was no going back. Nick was gone. It had taken her months to come to terms with that grim fact. At first, right after the murder, she hadn’t been able to eat, she hadn’t been able to sleep. Her oldest brother, Mitch, had flown in from his FBI job in D.C. to be with her. When he’d had to return, Cagney had taken a short leave of absence from the D.C. police to hold her hand. Even Garret, who served as Navy SEAL for classified missions that even Mitch couldn’t access information on, had come. He’d materialized one night in her bedroom, and talked her to sleep. When she’d awakened the next morning, he’d been gone. Finally, Jake, the Harvard man and middle brother, had called from Singapore or wherever he was making his latest fortune. He’d started a scholarship in Nick’s name and had told her jokes until she’d laughed through her tears.

Everyone had been there for her, but mostly, she’d had to acknowledge that her past was over. Nick was dead, and she was still alive.

She’d known then that she had to do something with that, had to build some sort of a new life. The girl from North Carolina wasn’t so fragile, she’d survived the worst so far. She would survive this, too.

She would do some checking on Mr. Keaton, she decided. Find out what kind of man he really was, and what indeed had happened to his wife.

Perhaps she would even find a clue as to what went on in those remote pale blue eyes of his in the dark hours of the night.

* * *

Whatever small progress Liz had made with Andrew quickly deteriorated with his father’s sudden appearance and then equally sudden disappearance. Liz tried to inquire as to the whereabouts of Mr. Keaton several times, only to be informed by Mrs. Pram that he was working and could not be disturbed. Which left her alone with a six-year-old prodigy who was deeply intent on ruining her sanity.

“Five thousand nine hundred and thirty-seven Americans die a day,” Andrew announced over breakfast the next morning.

“I see,” Liz replied patiently. She launched into her new tactic, formulated late the night before when it was two in the morning and she still couldn’t sleep. “And how many Americans are born?”

“That’s over two hundred people dead every hour!” Andrew continued intensely.

“Yes, but how many people are born?”

“That’s four people every minute! That...that means by the time you finish eating your eggs, forty people will have
died.
” His eyes were growing rounder in his agitation, and Liz was fast beginning to lose her appetite.

“That may be,” she said as calmly as she could while she set down her fork. “But I believe over
fifty
new babies will have been born in the United States alone in just the time it takes me to eat my toast.”

Andrew processed this information, his eyes blinking rapidly behind his glasses. “How many minutes does it take to eat your toast?” he demanded to know.

“Let’s say ten minutes, for simplicity’s sake.” Liz was beginning to get accustomed to Andrew’s ways by now, and sure enough, thirty seconds later he was spitting out the answer to his mental computations.

“You’re wrong!” he informed her haughtily. “With ten thousand, five hundred and one Americans born each day, that would be an average of roughly seven a minute. Thus, seventy, not fifty, Americans are born by the time you finish your toast.”

“Either way,” Liz observed, “more Americans are born than die. Perhaps you should spend more time dwelling on
that
statistic instead.”

He scowled, stubbornly pushing away his plate and folding his arms in a typical sulk.

“Come on,” Liz said resolutely, pushing back her own plate. “The weather is beautiful. Let’s go do something outside.”

“I don’t want to.”

“You haven’t even heard your options yet.”

“I don’t want to.”

“You don’t want to do anything at all?”

Andrew shook his head vigorously.

“How about climbing a tree? Wait, wait, let me guess. You don’t climb trees.”

Andrew nodded his head.

“Well, then, maybe we could just go outside and sit on the grass. I could read you a story, or better yet, you could read
me
a story.”

“I don’t read stories.”

“Well you must be reading something because there’s a suspicious glow under your door at night.”

“I turn out the light,” Andrew declared defensively. “The rule is lights out, and the light is out.”

“Ah, but lights out includes all lights. Even flashlights.”

His eyes flickered suspiciously, but he didn’t say anything.

“Well, you must be doing something with all those books you carry around with you. What was it you had yesterday?”

“The 1995 Universal Almanac.”

“You were reading the
Almanac?
”

“My father read the phone book when he was three,” Andrew told her proudly.

“I see,” Liz said, and nodded gravely. “So did you read the phone book, too, or did you decide to start with something that had a little more meat?”

Andrew looked a little less certain now, but after a bit, he nodded.

“Well, then,” Liz said abruptly, and stood up, “why don’t we go outside now, and you can tell me about what you read yesterday.”

“The grass is wet,” Andrew said immediately. “It will stain my suit!”

“Then wear jeans.”

“I don’t—”

“I know, I know, Andy.
You don’t wear jeans.
Well, I tell you what. Just for today, if you wear your jeans, I will wear my uniform.”

Obviously, the exchange had potential, for Andrew was now eyeing her crimson and jade skirt with a speculative eye.

“The whole uniform?” he questioned. “Even the tie?”

Liz sighed, and wondered how soon she was going to regret this. Still, she really wanted to get the child outside more—for both their sakes. “Even the tie,” she agreed.

“All right,” Andrew said at last with a decisive nod. “Deal.”

* * *

That was how Richard found them an hour later, both sitting on a blanket in the yard. He took in Andrew with an appraising eye, noting the jeans that looked brand-new and the sweater that was still creased from being folded in a box. His sharp blue eyes found Liz sitting straight and formal, with her legs curled primly to one side. Liz, who looked stiff and uncomfortable in her straight gray skirt, short gray jacket, starched white blouse and stranglingly serious black tie. Looking at her in this new restrictive attire, Richard frowned. And unconsciously, as a person might search for signs of familiarity in someone he knows but does not immediately recognize, his eyes scanned up and down her figure. It wasn’t until he noticed the large silver hoops in her ears that his forehead cleared.

“Hello,” he managed to say, and cleared his throat. They both looked up simultaneously, and it was hard to tell who was the more startled. Andrew’s eyes blinked several times in rapid succession, and Liz’s face registered shock. She, however, was the first to recover, reaching out her hand in welcome.

She’d told him to spend more time with his son, and now here he was. Even if she did have her doubts about him, even if he did sometimes scare her, she had to at least appreciate that. Besides, Andrew was watching.

“Welcome,” she said as casually as she could. “Andrew was just telling me about absolute zero on the Kelvin scale. Would you like to join us?”

Richard nodded, looking somewhat uncomfortable. He had recognized them from a distance, in fact it was Andrew’s hair that had given them away. In the bright burning light of morning, the boy’s fair locks had glowed like an angel’s halo—that is, if there were any such thing as angels or halos. And from a distance, as Richard had walked toward them, the child had looked so much like his mother, it had made his breath catch in his throat. Even now, up close, the blond, blond hair, the blue, blue eyes—it was Alycia all over again. Grimly he faced yet again the fact that he could spend all day looking for something of himself in the boy, and never find one trace. Not one.

Already regretting approaching them, Richard moved to the empty place on the blanket and sat down carefully in his brown slacks and long-sleeved oxford shirt. His eyes squinted uncomfortably against the brightness of the sun. It had been a long time since he had been outside on a day like this, something that did not go unnoticed by Liz.

“Andrew,” she prompted. “Go ahead and continue.”

The child blinked his eyes several times again, looking first at the rare presence of his father, and then back at Liz. He looked very nervous, Liz thought. Nervous, and not at all the haughty young man he pretended to be.

“Andrew,” she said again. “It’s okay.”

“Zero degrees Kelvin,” he said quickly, his round eyes still glued on his father. “That’s...minus 273.15 degrees Celsius, or minus 459.7 degrees Fahrenheit.”

Richard nodded. “Very good,” he told Andrew, and the boy sat back with a quick, almost shy nod of acknowledgment. “And where did you learn this?”

But Andrew just sat there, staring with uncertain eyes at the man before him.

“He read it in the
Almanac,
” Liz supplied after a bit. “It’s his newest choice in reading material. According to local legend, you, yourself, read the phone book at age three, something Andrew has taken very seriously.”

Once again Richard nodded his head. “So I did,” he said softly. “So I did.”

The lapse in conversation became awkward, and Liz searched to fill the void. “Andrew,” she said, “why don’t you ask your father about Geneva.”

But Andrew merely turned expectant eyes onto Richard, his mouth still tightly shut.

“I attended a conference of world scientists,” Richard said shortly. “We compared notes on some things, exchanged information on others. Really, it wasn’t anything exciting.”

Another lapse. Social graces obviously didn’t run in the family, Liz decided.

“And what project are you working on?” she asked presently.

“Capacitors.”

“Oh.” It appeared he wasn’t going to explain, so finally she gave up and asked, “What exactly is a capacitor?”

“Capacitors store energy in the form of an electric charge,” Andrew said suddenly. Both Richard and Liz looked at him in surprise.

“That’s right,” Richard said. “Capacitors store energy. For example, things like rechargeable shavers and batteries have them.”

Now both Richard and Andrew were staring at her with their blinking eyes. Miniatures, Liz thought abruptly. They looked like perfect opposites in their coloring and features, but in actual mannerisms, Andrew was a perfect miniature of his father, right down to the rapidly blinking eyes. Lord help her, she thought. She was having enough problems surviving one Keaton, let alone two.

“Perhaps Andy could visit you at your lab,” she suggested into the silence. Andrew immediately turned to Richard expectantly, and in that instant Liz feared she had made a grave mistake in even mentioning the idea. But then, after a long moment, Richard nodded slowly, and both she and Andrew breathed easier.

“That could be arranged,” Richard said quietly, and then, as if that was as much as he could take for one afternoon, he stood up quickly and dusted off his pants. “I have to go back to work,” he said curtly. “I will see you both later.”