Key Trilogy (14 page)

“Those are their names. You can’t think it’s a coincidence that I dreamed those names and you found them today.”

“No,” Dana said carefully. “But isn’t it possible you came across the same site and the names stuck in your head?”

“No. I would’ve written it down. I would’ve remembered. I never heard them before the dream.”

“Okay.” Flynn patted her knee. “First, I’ll tell you I haven’t found any record of a shipping or moving company that serviced Warrior’s Peak. And no record of any company shipping furniture here for clients under Triad.”

“They had to get all that stuff in there somehow,” Dana protested. “They didn’t just click the heels of their ruby slippers together.”

“Just giving you the facts. The real-estate company didn’t make the arrangements for them, either. At this point, I haven’t found any trail leading Rowena or Pitte to the Peak. Not saying there isn’t one,” he continued before Dana could protest. “Just saying I haven’t found one through the logical sources.”

“I guess we have to look at the illogical ones.”

He shifted to beam at Zoe. “There you go. But I’ve got one more logical step to take. Who do I know who collects art seriously, someone I could use as a source? The Vanes. So I gave my old pal Brad a call. It so happens he’s heading back here in a couple of days.”

“Brad’s coming back to the Valley?” Dana asked.

“He’s taking over the local headquarters for HomeMakers. Brad’s got the Vanes’ passion for art. I described the painting to him, or started to. I wasn’t close to being finished when he gave me the title.
The Daughters of Glass
.”

“No, that can’t be. I’d have heard of it.” Malory pushed herself to her feet and began to pace. “Who’s the artist?”

“Nobody seems to be sure.”

“Just not possible,” Malory continued. “A major talent like that, I’d have heard. I’d have seen more of the artist’s work.”

“Maybe not. According to Brad, nobody seems to know much about the artist.
The Daughters of Glass
was last seen in a private home in London. Where it was, by all accounts, destroyed during the Blitz. In 1942.”

M
ALORY
closed herself in her apartment for two days. She submerged herself in books, telephone calls, E-mail. It was foolish, she’d decided, to run around chasing a dozen different angles and suppositions. Better—far better—to conduct the search with technology and systematic logic.

She couldn’t function, simply couldn’t
think
, in disorder. Which was why, she admitted as she carefully labeled yet another file, she’d failed as an artist.

Art, the creation of true art, required some mysterious, innate ability to thrive in chaos. Or that was her opinion. To be able to see and understand and
feel
dozens of shapes and textures of emotions at one time.

Then, of course, there was the little matter of possessing the talent to transfer those emotions onto a canvas.

She lacked the gift, on all levels, while the artist of
The Daughters of Glass
had it in spades.

The painting at Warrior’s Peak, or one done by the same artist, was the path. She was sure of that now. Why
else did she keep coming back to it? Why had she somehow in her dreams walked into it?

Why had she been chosen to find the first key, she thought, if not for her knowledge of and contacts in the art world?

She’d been told to look within and without. Within the painting, or another by the same artist? Did “without” mean to look at what surrounded the painting?

Opening a file folder, she studied the printout of the painting again. What surrounded the daughters? Peace and beauty, love and passion—and the threat to destroy it. As well as, she mused, the method to restore it.

A key in the air, in the trees, in the water.

She was damn sure she wasn’t about to pluck a magic key out of the air or from a tree branch, so what did it
mean
? And which of those three was hers?

Too literal? Perhaps. Maybe “within” meant she was to look inside herself to her feelings about the painting, both the emotional and the intellectual response.

Where the goddess sings, she reflected as she rose from her piles of research to pace. No one had been singing in the dream. But the fountain had reminded her of music. Maybe it had something to do with the fountain.

Maybe water was her key.

And, she thought in frustration, she might not have left her apartment, but she was still running in circles.

There were only three weeks left.

Her heart jumped at the quick
rat-a-tat
on her glass patio doors. There stood the man and his dog on the other side. Instinctively she ran a hand over the hair she’d yanked back into a ponytail sometime that morning. She hadn’t bothered with makeup or with changing out of the baggy cotton pants and tank she’d slept in.

Not only was she not looking her best, but she was pretty sure she’d dipped below her personal worst.

When she opened the door, she decided Flynn verified
that when he took a good, hard look at her and said, “Honey, you need to get out.”

She felt, actually felt, her face arrange itself in a sulk. “I’m busy. I’m working.”

“Yeah.” He glanced at the neat stacks of research materials on her dining room table, the pretty coffee carafe and china cup. There were small containers, all in matching red plastic, that held pencils, paper clips, Post-its.

A glass paperweight swirling with ribbons of color anchored a few typed pages. A storage box was tucked under the table, and he imagined she placed everything that related to her project inside it every night and took it out again every morning.

It was amazing to him, and oddly charming. Even alone and at work she kept things tidy.

Moe bumped her leg with his snout, then gathered himself to leap. Recognizing the signal now, Malory stuck out a hand. “No jumping,” she ordered and had Moe quivering in his desire to obey.

As a reward she gave him a congratulatory pat on the head. “I don’t have any—”

“Don’t say it,” Flynn warned. “Don’t say any food words. He loses his head. Come on, it’s great out.” He caught Malory’s hand in his. “We’ll go for a walk.”

“I’m working. Why aren’t you?”

“Because it’s after six, and I like to pretend I have a life outside of the newspaper.”

“After six?” She glanced down at her watch, remembered she hadn’t put it on that morning. It was just another sign that the efficient train of her life had jumped its tracks. “I didn’t realize it was so late.”

“Which is why you need to go for a walk. Fresh air and exercise.”

“Maybe, but I can’t go out like this.”

“Why not?”

“I’m in my pajamas.”

“They don’t look like pajamas.”

“Well, they are, and I’m not going out in them, and with my hair all horrible and no makeup on.”

“There’s no dress code for walking the dog.” Still, he was a man who had a mother and a sister, and he knew the rules. “But if you want to change, we’ll wait.”

HE’D
dealt with enough women to know the wait could be anywhere from ten minutes to the rest of his life. Since he’d learned to think of the female grooming process as a kind of ritual, he didn’t mind. It gave him a chance to sit out on the patio, with Moe flopped over his feet, and scribble ideas for articles in his notebook. In his opinion, time was only wasted if you didn’t do something with it. If the something was staring off into space and letting the mind drift on whatever current was the strongest at that moment, that was fine.

But since that current was how he might get his hands on Malory again, he figured it would be more productive all around to channel his energies into work.

Since Brad was coming back to the Valley, the
Dispatch
would need a solid feature on him, on the Vanes, on HomeMakers. The history of the family and their business, the face of that business in today’s economic climate, and any plans for the future.

He would handle that one himself, and combine his professional and personal interests. Just as he was doing with Malory. So he began to note down various aspects that described her.

“Blond, brainy, beautiful” headed his list.

“Hey, it’s a start,” he said to Moe. “She was picked for a reason, and the reason has to have something to do with who or what she is. Or isn’t.”

Organized. Arty.

He had never met anyone who managed to be both.

Single. Unemployed.

Huh. Maybe they should do an article on twenty- and
thirtysomething singles in the Valley. The dating scene in small-town USA. If he gave that to Rhoda, she might start speaking to him again.

He glanced up when he caught a movement out of the corner of his eye, and watched Malory walk to the patio door. It hadn’t taken her as long to transform herself as he’d figured it would.

He got to his feet, hooking a hand in Moe’s collar before the dog could leap on Malory. “You look great. Smell even better.”

“And I’d like to keep it that way.” She leaned down, tapped a finger lightly on Moe’s nose. “So, no jumping.”

“Why don’t we take a drive down to the river? Then he can run around like crazy.”

SHE
had to give him points. He’d managed to turn walking the dog into a date and had done it smoothly. So smoothly, she didn’t realize she was on a date until they were sitting on a blanket by the river eating fried chicken while Moe raced around barking hopefully at squirrels.

But it was hard to complain when the air was cool and fresh, and the light softening as the sun sank lower in the west. When it dropped beneath those peaks, everything would go soft and gray and it would be cooler yet. She would need the light jacket she’d brought along—at least she would if they stayed to watch the stars come out.

And how long had it been since she’d watched the stars come out?

Now that she was here, she wondered if the enforced hibernation, however brief, had accomplished anything more than creating a logjam in her mind.

She wasn’t an isolationist. She needed contact with people. Conversations, stimuli, sound and movement. And realizing that only made her understand how much she needed to be part of the workforce again.

If she grabbed the million dollars at the end of this
strange rainbow, she would still need to work. Just for the day-to-day energy.

“I have to admit, I’m glad you got me out.”

“You’re not a cave dweller.” He dug in the bucket for another drumstick when she frowned at him. “You’re a social animal. Take Dana, she’s more cave dweller than social animal. If you left her alone, she’d be perfectly happy holed up with mountains of books and a vat of coffee. At least for a few weeks. Then she’d need to come up for air. Me, I’d go nuts after a day or two. I need the charge. So do you.”

“You’re right. And I’m not sure how I feel about you figuring that out so soon.”

“Soon’s relative. I’ve spent, oh, about a year thinking about you in the past week. Given time and energy ratios. It’s been a while since I’ve given that much thought to a woman, in case you’re wondering.”

“I don’t know what I’m wondering. Yes, I do,” she corrected. “Why haven’t you brought up the key, or asked me what I’m doing about finding it?”

“Because you’ve had enough of that for now. If you’d wanted to get into it, you’d have brought it up. You’re not shy.”

“You’re right. Why did you bring me out here, away from town?”

“It’s quiet. Nice view. Moe likes it. There’s the slim chance I can get you naked on this blanket—”

“Try slim to none.”

“Slim’s enough to keep me going.” He dipped a plastic fork into the fast-food potato salad. “And I wanted to see if Brad’s moving in yet.” He looked across the ribbon of water to the rambling two-story frame house on the opposite bank. “Doesn’t look like it.”

“You miss him.”

“You got that right.”

She plucked a blade of grass, ran it idly through her fingers. “I have some friends from college. We were so
close, and I guess we all thought we’d be close forever. Now we’re all scattered and hardly see each other. Once or twice a year if we can all manage it. We talk on the phone or through E-mail now and then, but it’s not the same. I miss them. I miss who we were when we were friends, and that telepathy you develop so that you know what the other’s thinking, or what she’d do in some situation. Is it that way for you?”

“Pretty much.” He reached over, toyed with the ends of her hair in the same absent way she toyed with the blade of grass. “But we go back to being kids together. None of us are big on phone calls. Maybe because Brad and I end up on the phone through most of our workday. E-mail does the job. Jordan, he’s the E-mail king.”

“I met him for about ninety seconds at a book signing, in Pittsburgh, about four years ago. All dark and handsome, with a dangerous gleam in his eye.”

“You want dangerous?”

It made her laugh. He was sitting on a ratty blanket eating bucket chicken while his big, silly dog barked at a squirrel that was ten feet up a tree.

Then she was flat on her back, his body pressed to hers, and the laugh died in her throat.

His mouth
was
dangerous. Foolish of her to have forgotten that. However affable and easy he appeared on the surface, there were storms inside him. Hot, whippy storms that could crash over the unwary before they could think about taking shelter.

So she didn’t think at all, but let it rage. And let that secret part of herself, that part she’d never risked exposing, slide out. And take, even as it was taken.

“How’s this working for you?” he murmured as he fixed that amazing mouth on her throat.

“So far, so good.”

He lifted his head, looked down at her. And his heart shuddered in his chest. “Something here. Some big something here.”

“I don’t think—”

“Yes, you do.” Impatience, potent and unexpected, snapped out. “You may not want to think—I’m not real keen on it myself, but you do. I really hate using the obvious metaphor, but this is like turning a key in a lock. I can hear the goddamn click.”

He pushed up, dragged an unsteady hand through his hair. “I’m not ready to hear any goddamn click.”

She sat up quickly, brushed fussily at the front of her shirt. It threw her off balance that she could find his temper both irritating and arousing at the same time. “You think
I
want to hear one? I’ve got enough on my mind right now without you clicking around in my head. I need to find the first key. I’ve got to work this out. I need to find a job. And I don’t even want a stupid job. I want . . .”

“What? What do you want?”

“I don’t
know
.” She scrambled to her feet. There was a fury inside her. She didn’t know where it came from or where it needed to go. Turning away, she stared at the house across the river, folded her arms firmly over her chest. “And I always know what I want.”

“You’re one up on me there.” He rose, but didn’t go to her. Whatever was pumping inside him—anger, need, fear—was too unstable to risk touching her.

The breeze was playing with the ends of her hair, as he had. All those tumbling clouds the color of old gold, like something out of a painting. She looked so slim, so perfect, standing there, half turned away from him while the dying sun shot a thin line of fire along the rise of western hills.