Dead Dreams (4 page)

Then, even in the dimness, I noticed her eyes were glistening. “What’s wrong?” Was she ill after all?

“Shhh! They could still be here.”

“They? Who?”

“Shhh! Them, they, he….” She broke off, sobbing.

I turned on the bedside lamp, and she struggled intending to stop me. I jerked back when I saw her face. Blood dripped from one side of her head.

“My God! Sarah!” I exclaimed, even though I wasn’t the believing-in-God type. My parents were to be blamed for my aversion to God. Too many inconsistencies and unanswered questions. “What happened?” Her eyes welled up with tears, wild, looking about like a frightened deer.

“They’re—he’s after me. He’s going to kill me.”

“Who?” I jumped to my feet and rushed to the door. Thank goodness she’d shut it. I placed my ear to the doorjamb and listened. Were the burglars still outside? Sarah sobbed uncontrollably. Too loudly. “Shh! Sarah, are they still here?” I shook her in a vain attempt to keep her calm.

“Just one man. I don’t know. I rammed the door into his face when he dragged me by the hair.” She rubbed at a spot on her head. “I think he left, maybe.”

“We have to call the cops.”

“No, no, please. You can’t.” She pulled my arm when I reached for my yellow duffel by the foot of my bed, where my cell phone lay.

“We mustn’t. You don’t get it. Todd!” She said under her breath.

Todd? This was no ordinary sibling rivalry. This was beyond me. Sarah was hiding something. Regret filled me. I should have done some background search on her, as my mother has advised. Maybe one of those criminal checks could have saved me some grief, I told myself. What if she was a new release from a mental ward? How could I have confirmed she was sane and not suffering from schizophrenia? My mind lingered on the patch on her arm. Was she really who she said she was? I began to doubt that the bank book was even legitimate. It was just as well that she paid everything in cash. And Todd, her brother…how was he involved? What was he? Some hit man?

My mother would be livid if she knew about tonight. She might even force me to return home, bar my bedroom windows in that house of hers. Repunzel would have stood a better chance of escaping her tower. Perhaps it’d be better if we didn’t go to the cops. Things have a way of leaking back to my parents.

“We don’t know if your brother had anything to do with this. Could just be a burglar,” I said. I rummaged inside the yellow duffel for my cell phone, but this time Sarah yanked the bag out of my grasp and tossed it onto the bed.

“No cops! Which burglar would want to target us when there are those estate homes around?” She flicked her hand at the window and waved it about.

Good point. “Maybe the burglars know we don’t have an alarm system. Those big homes are armed to the hilt with serious stuff. It’s easier to rob the Pentagon.” Still, we were three stories up. It wasn’t as if our apartment was that easy to get to, either.

Sarah bit her lower lip, her frown deepening. “I’ll buy the alarm tomorrow. Later today. I meant to anyway.”

“Why would you even think your brother would want to hurt you?”

“Duh! My inheritance? And my trust fund?” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.

“Maybe you should move out, Sarah. Find a safer, or I should say, better-guarded place. Like the Pentagon.”

Her eyes widened, and suddenly I saw a frightened little girl staring at me.

“How could you say that? Joking at a time like this?” Her chin quivered the way my little sister Lilly’s would when she felt sorry about something.

I pressed my ear to the bedroom door again. “I’m going to check and see if anyone’s still out there.” I thought of asking Mrs. Mott for help but remembered her death.

“Wait!” Sarah rushed toward me and brought a hand out from under her green sweatshirt. She pointed a gun at me.

“Sarah!”

“I know how to operate this. It’s a Glock. And I have a license. All legit.”

“Don’t point that thing at me.”

“There’s a safety catch. See?” Sarah pointed to the Glock.

No, I didn’t see. Big consolation, that safety catch. “I don’t trust safety catches. Or guns.” Or you, I wanted to say. I went to unlock the door, but Sarah stepped closer toward me, the Glock still aimed at my chest. “Could we please set that gun on the edge, over there?” I pointed to the corner of the bed farthest from me. I used the voice I’d always practiced on my dog, Holly, when I wanted to sound firm.

“But, we might need it.”

“Why didn’t you use it on the thug?”

“He was too fast. I always hide it under my mattress. By the time I hit him and rushed to the bed to get it, he’d run to the kitchen. I couldn’t hear him.”

“So, he’s probably gone. We should look around and see what’s missing.” I jerked my chin at the Glock. “That baby stays on my bed.” If Sarah had made it safely to my room without any more attacks, the burglar was probably gone. Besides, I didn’t trust her waving that weapon around. Surely it was safer with that intruder than with Sarah and her gun.

As it turned out, I couldn’t have been more wrong.

We tiptoed across the hallway and except for the wind whistling through a crack in one of the windows, sounding like a banshee, the apartment was quiet as a graveyard.

“He must have cut the window with a glass cutter after climbing up the balcony,” Sarah whispered, even though we’d agreed no one was there.

Perhaps my potted honeysuckle, my mother’s housewarming gift that had grown wild had provided him with a good hold as he’d hauled himself up to our third-floor balcony. We stood still in the kitchen and strained our ears, but only the sound of the oak branch scraping the side of the building near the kitchen window disturbed the quiet of the night. He’d left no visible prints, no markings, nothing we could see.

“Let’s hope he left some DNA stuff,” I said. She looked blankly at me. How could I get her to see we needed to bring the cops in on this? I was willing to risk my mother finding out if our lives were at stake.

“Let’s check out your room,” I said, trying to sound brave.

Sarah gripped my arm, but I walked ahead of her.

Four of the drawers in Sarah’s bedroom were pulled clear off the dresser and were stacked in a neat tower on the floor. Except for a massive writing desk, the matching set of dresser with the drawers, and her white four-poster twin bed, she’d kept her room decor to a minimum. We rummaged through the stacked drawers.

“You didn’t hear him do this?” I motioned at the tottering drawers.

She shook her head. “My Rolex watch is missing,” she said after a while.

“Anything else?” That’s pretty paltry loot considering all the bother to break in.

She shrugged and led me to her closet. =

“What’s that?” I pointed to a huge black box hidden behind her cocktail-looking dresses, some long, some with flirty frills and most terribly short.

She pushed the dresses aside, knelt before the black box, and placed one hand on a knob. “My safe.”

So,
that
was what had lain in that humongous carton. Was the burglar after her treasure chest?

She twisted the safe’s knob, and after a few turns left and right and a click, she heaved the door open. One by one she removed velvet-covered boxes and opened them. One held fine jewelry, her mother’s diamond earrings, an heirloom from her Scottish great-grandmother, she said. In another lay a Mikimoto pearl necklace. She set these boxed treasures, which totaled about a dozen, by her foot after she checked their contents. She had numerous papers hidden in the safe, too. Most of them were rolled up like scrolls.

“What’s with all those in there?” I asked as I peeked over her shoulder and pointed at the trash.
Don’t tell me she litters in her own safe!

We’d always bickered about her lack of housekeeping standards. She left a trail of mess in her wake and tossed all sorts of paperwork everywhere: grocery receipts stuffed in kitchen drawers, ice cream wrappers on counters and tables. It was a pain picking up the pieces, literally. It must have been a headache for the maids who had to clean up after her in that huge West Virginian mansion she grew up in. But, things have a way of working out. Later, it was in her trash that I would discover answers that prevented me from running into the arms of my deceiver.

Sarah took out one of the scrolls and unrolled it. “Gawd! You never saw stock certificates before? Birthday presents from my dad, since I was two. They’re old. Coca-Cola, Apple. Oracle. The bluest of blue chips in here.”

I couldn’t imagine any toddler being thrilled at getting stock documents as presents. For the first time I noticed the safe was plugged into the wall socket and had a temperature control. Refrigerated? Sarah and her advance technology.

“Why’s your safe plugged in?” I knew nothing about safes. Some other closed boxes were arranged in the back.

“Humidity control.”

“We can’t ignore this burglary, Sarah. We have to tell someone. What if we get killed next time this thug breaks in?” Where had I placed Sergeant Charlene Twist’s card? It had probably gotten tattered in the wash, if it was still in my yoga pants.

“No! You don’t understand. You can’t trust anyone. My brother’s well-connected.”

***see below “We need to know if this is really your brother after you. The law’s here to protect you, if he’s up to this. Besides, didn’t you say if Todd’s caught in illegal or criminal actions, he’d lose his trust fund? And inheritance? That might take him off your back, if we have evidence that could nail him.”

Sarah searched inside one of the drawers on the floor. She brought out a dark green book, only about two inches wide by three inches long. “He didn’t get this.” She tapped it on her palm.

My face must have shown confusion.

“I keep tabs of all the places Todd’s been. Every trip he’s taken and dates.”

“Why?”

“Some of the places he frequents every two, three weeks. I think he has a girlfriend there, or someone special.”

“So, you hired a P. I. to track him? Perfect! We’ll hire the same guy to sleuth for us.”

“We can’t,” she said rather sharply.

My eyes glanced at the bedside clock on the dresser. Almost four thirty
. I have to be up already. Bummer.
“Why can’t we hire your P. I.?”

“He’s disappeared. I tried to get a hold of Jackson—that’s his name—after I saw your Craig’s List ad, and don’t get mad at this, but I wanted to be sure you’re a nobody so my brother or anyone else can’t find me. But Jackson’s secretary said he hadn’t reported to work for two weeks, and they didn’t know where he was. Not like him to just up and leave.”

So, she’d tried to do a background check on me. I should have played the same game with her. At least I would have landed with a saner roommate.*** I thought of Peter Salazaragain. His brother was a cop but worked as a P. I. now.. “I have to get ready for work. Pete Salazar can help.”

“Pete Salazar?”

“The guy at Stay Fit.”

“Ah, the guy who hangs onto your every word.”

“He does not.”

“I saw him gawk at you the day I was there.”

“That’s because he mistook you for me, and he was trying to see how alike we looked.”

She rolled her eyes and shook her head. “You’re so blind. Can’t you see he’s all eyes on you?”

It wasn’t that Pete wasn’t cute, what with his shaggy blond hair and deep-set eyes, but ever since my high-school sweetheart, Drew, had disappeared to New York and taken my heart with him, this bitter taste in my mouth always came up when my mind wandered to the
idea
of another boyfriend. Maybe I was one of those destined to be single forever. Like a nun. “Your imagination needs some reining in. Anyway, Pete’s brother can help. He’s a P.I.”

“You should go out with Peter some time. Or, are you still hung up on that rich little boy who ditched you in high school?” How’d she know I was thinking of Drew?
My face must be such an open book.

“He didn’t ditch me.” That was what I’d convinced myself. “Do you want to find out who just broke into our place, or not?” I glared at her.

Sarah wrung her hands as though they were wet rags. “Don’t say anything about my family’s history, or that it could be my brother doing this, okay? If word leaks out, Todd could press charges on me for trying to soil his good name. Slander or something.”