Mind Tricks (25 page)

This time the heat in her cheeks
was definitely fueled by anger. The feverish pounding of her heart, though, was
100 percent fear. “I’m not hiding anything.” Aside from, oh, her ability to read
minds.

“You know,” he said
conversationally, “when most people lie, they look down to the right. And
you’re lying again, Ms. Draper.” He narrowed his gaze. “I wonder what else
you’ve lied about.”

“I’m not lying!” God, what would it
take to convince him?

And where had he gotten that
information that she and Jake had been seeing each other before Ginny’s death?
From someone who had a grudge against her or Jake?

First someone had kidnapped her
dog, and now false rumors were being spread about her and Jake. Enough was
enough.

She took a step forward.
Cooperman’s eyes widened at her sudden aggression. “Who told you about Jake and
me?” she demanded again, and reached out to touch him.

• •

Jake shook the fire investigator’s
hand and turned to look for Emma. Firelight danced across his neighbors’ faces,
giving their awed expressions a jaundiced glow. There she was—talking to
Cooperman.

That
wasn’t good.

He reached her side just as she
reached out toward the detective. Swearing silently, he wrapped an arm around
her shoulders, confining her. Police officers generally weren’t thrilled about
people making wild movements at them.

“What’s going on?” he asked her,
but he didn’t remove his gaze from Cooperman.

“Mr. Vant, I’m just getting ready
to ask your girlfriend here about your other girlfriend,” Cooperman said. “The
dead girlfriend, I mean. The one who’d been stabbed seven times and left like
garbage on the wharf.” The detective focused on Emma. “You want to be treated
like that, Ms. Draper? Because that’s the way you’re headed.”

Jake tried to shove down his
memories of the photographs of Ginny’s body—pale, bloodied, and sprawled
bonelessly on the sidewalk—but they rose up relentlessly, ghosts that refused
to be exorcised.

Encircled within his arm, Emma
shuddered. Christ, was she seeing his thoughts again?

His first impulse was to physically
pull away—preserve his privacy. Instead he sucked in a deep breath, cleared his
mind of Ginny, and tightened his hold on Emma.

Cooperman jerked a thumb at Jake.
“This guy’s bad news,” he told Emma. He paused. “But maybe you already know
that. Maybe you’re just as much bad news as he is. Maybe the two of you planned
the killing.”

“And maybe if you took two seconds
to think that through, you’d see what a crazy theory that is,” Jake said sharply.
“Emma and I barely spoke before this week.”

“Nice try, but I know different.”

Jake rolled his eyes. “My
confidence in your detective work has just dropped even lower. Good night.” And
he steered Emma back toward her car like a tugboat maneuvering a rudderless
barge.

“Don’t let him throw you,” he
whispered in her ear, and then pressed his mouth to her temple.

He half expected her to flinch
away, but she reached up and grabbed his wrist, anchoring him to her more
firmly. “He says someone—no, a few people—told him that we were friends
before.”

“But he’s wrong. We hardly knew
each other.”

She bit her lip. “What if we get
arrested?”

“Emma.” He turned her around so she
was facing the fire gnawing at the sky. “Look at that. That’s why we won’t be
arrested. There are too many strange things happening. I’m found drugged out
the night of Ginny’s murder. Brutus is stolen. My condo is set on fire. Maybe
they’re coincidences, but it must be giving the police and the DA enough
worries that they won’t toss us in jail.”

“Are you going to tell them about
you getting your memories back?”

Jake hesitated. “Like we’d
discussed earlier, I’m going to talk to my lawyer about it first.”

Shaking her head, she said, “That’s
just going to make them even more suspicious. They’re going to wonder why you
didn’t mention it to them tonight.”

Yeah, he’d thought of that. But
after watching Cooperman harass Emma, he had even less faith that the police
wouldn’t dismiss his story immediately. “The police only care about proof. And
my memories aren’t proof to them.”

“I can verify your memories. I saw
them, too.”

“And how do we prove that?”

“I’ll demonstrate by picking the
officers’ thoughts out of their heads like that.” She snapped her fingers.

“That proves you can read minds. It
doesn’t prove you’ve read mine.” He reached out and stroked his hand down her
sleep-mussed hair. “OK, let’s assume we do that. The best case scenario is that
the police believe you, we’re both off the hook, and they search for the real
killer. Worst case scenario? The killer now knows you’re telepathic.”

The blood drained from her face.

Crap. He grabbed her shoulders.
“Whoa. Don’t faint on me.”

“I’m not going to faint. But thanks
for completely freaking me out.” She twitched out of his grip and began walking
again toward her car. “And I had thought dealing with faithless husbands was
bad,” she muttered. “Now it’s killers.”

“Sorry,” he said, falling into step
beside her. But he was lying a little. He was sorry he’d freaked her out but
not that she now clearly understood the danger she could be in. He wanted to
prove his innocence, but he wouldn’t let Emma get hurt in the process.

She shook her head like she was
shaking off a bad dream. “I think I just got a glimpse of what you’ve been
living with for the past week. Very scary.”

“Or, as we say in Maine, wicked
scary.”

That flipped up the corners of her
mouth. “I think your Maine accent is cute.”

“Accent?
I
don’t have an accent, Miss North Carolina. But I’ll admit that
yours is cute.”

As they walked, the smell and the
glow from the fire began to recede, but the roaring of the flames gulping wood
and oxygen still pummeled the night. What had been his home for the past six
months would be only a mass of wet cinders by dawn.
 

“God, it’s been a heck of a night,”
she said after a long moment. “I’m sorry about your house.” She glanced back,
and the firelight bronzed her face.

He’d rather look at her than at his
home burning down. “Yeah, me, too. But it was only stuff. The fire marshal told
me that everyone got out. In fact, the only person they couldn’t locate was me,
which was why Mickey was so frantic when he called. Plus, the fire apparently
started in my unit.”

“Does the fire department think it
was deliberately set?”

“They were kind of cagey about
that.”

She stopped suddenly. “Do they
think
you
set it?”

“I think that was their first
impulse. But I have a very good alibi, who also happens to have a cute accent,
for the whole evening. They’ll probably call on you tomorrow to verify it.”

Tilting her head, she examined him.
“You seem remarkably calm about the whole thing. If my house was on fire, I’d
be going nuts.”

“Weird, huh?” Jake twisted to look
back at the flames. Good-bye, condo. It had never felt like a real home,
though. “I don’t know. I feel…free. Like now that all my stuff has burned up, I
can start clean. Anyway, it was just a few ugly pieces of furniture and a
couple hundred CDs.” He frowned. “And a really nice TV with a fantastic sound
system. Damn.”

She giggled. “What happened to
feeling free?”

“Well, I’d prefer to be free with
the TV, but I didn’t get much choice in the matter.”

“Don’t forget the kitten posters.
Your mom is going to be devastated that they’re gone.”

He tucked her under his arm again.
“Luckily, one of them escaped to your house today.”

“Luckily,
you
escaped to my house today.”

He dropped a kiss on the top of her
head, tasting the smoke that lingered in her hair. “That, too.”

Jake leaned back in his desk chair
and pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. He’d been trying to distract
himself with mundane items all morning—arranging the delivery of a boat to a
client, talking to his insurance company about the fire, phoning his parents to
assure them that he was all right—but what he really wanted to do was talk to
his lawyer about his returned memories. Unfortunately, as her chipper secretary
had told him, she would be in court most of the day. She’d call him first thing
tomorrow. Unless, of course, Jake got arrested. At which point she’d call back
as soon as possible.

An encouraging message.

At least he had Emma. Waking up
together, drinking coffee at her kitchen table…he could get used to that. In
fact, he couldn’t think of a better way to start the day. She’d seen him off at
the door with a kiss that had rolled his eyes back in his head. But it was her
casual “See you tonight” that had lodged in his heart.

Even the two new boat orders that
his salespeople closed today couldn’t eclipse that moment.

The scuff of a shoe on carpet made
him raise his head. His assistant Samantha stood in the doorway to his office,
her usual unruffled demeanor definitely, well, ruffled.

Jake’s insides went hollow. “The
police?”

“Huh? Oh. No, the police aren’t
here.” She stepped inside and then, for the first time since he’d hired her six
years ago, closed the door behind her. The upbeat chatter of the sales reps in
other offices along the hall smoothed out into a gentle murmur.

Her hand outstretched before her,
she approached him. Something metallic lay on her palm. Keys.

“These are Ginny’s,” Samantha said,
placing them on the desk so carefully that they didn’t even clink.

Three keys, set on a pink plastic
bracelet-style key ring, stared back at him. “Keys to what? And why do you have
them?”

Shoving her hands into her pockets
as if she was afraid Jake would make her take the keys back, Samantha said,
“Ginny and I belonged to the same gym. The day after she was killed, I went to
the gym at lunchtime. I was so stressed out by the police running in and out of
here, I needed to run it off. As I was coming back to work, the woman at the
gym’s front desk handed me these keys and said, ‘Ginny left these here
yesterday. Could you give them to her?’” Samantha shrugged. “I froze—I didn’t
know what to say. Apparently it wasn’t common knowledge yet what had happened
to her. So I took the keys, came back here, and dropped them in my desk drawer
and forgot about them.”

Jake also went to the same
gym—heck, the area had only two—and now that he thought about it, he could
remember seeing this pink bracelet keychain around Ginny’s wrist as she pumped
away on the StairMaster. “You forgot about them?” he repeated. Samantha never
forgot anything.

Her cheeks magenta, she looked
away. “Well, I wasn’t sure what to do with them, so I tossed them in the way
back of my desk drawer. Then I really did forget about them, until I had to
refill my stapler this morning. And I found the keys again.” She prodded the
keys with her forefinger as if testing them for life. “I’m giving them to you.”

“Thanks.” Maybe.

Something else to talk to his
lawyer about, though she’d likely tell him to hand them over to the police.

But instead of leaving his office,
as he’d expected she would, Samantha dropped down into the chair in front of
his desk. “There’s more.”

From her solemn expression, Jake
guessed that this next revelation was going to be the kicker. “More keys?”

“No, more that you should know. I
think Ginny was behind all the talk about the company having money problems.”
Before he could tell her that he had already realized that, she rushed on. “I
overheard her talking to someone a few weeks ago, and she said, ‘The story was
planted.’ It took me a while to figure out what she was talking about, and when
I finally did, I decided to tell you about it the next day. But then Ginny was
killed, and there seemed little point in mentioning it.” She hesitated, and her
gaze dropped. “To you.”

Ah. “Did you tell the police?”

“Yes.” Blowing out a heavy breath,
she said sincerely, “I’m sorry, Jake. I didn’t mean to. The morning after she
died, they were in here, interviewing all of us, and they were going on and on
about how she was an innocent flower of womanhood cut down in her prime.”
Samantha made a face. “They were trying to play on people’s sympathy, and I
just got so mad. Ginny clearly had no sympathy for the rest of us, since she
was trying to pull down the company with lies. I told them that to shut them
up. Of course, that didn’t work. And it probably made them suspicious of you,
since they kept asking me over and over if you knew what she’d done. I said you
didn’t.” She paused. “Did you?”

He nodded. “That’s what I planned
to talk to Ginny about the night we went to the Waterview. I wanted her to
explain herself.” He gave Samantha a smile meant to reassure. “But I’d told the
police that, too, so you’re off the hook.”

“Okay.” But instead of looking
relieved, she frowned and didn’t move from her chair.

Jake raised his eyebrows. “Is there
even
more
?”

Sighing, she said, “Yes. I think
Ginny’s missing briefcase is in her gym locker.”

• •

Emma stared at her phone, silent on
the wall. Ring, damn it.

Had Jake told the police about
regaining some of his memories? And of her part in it?

Her hand began to move toward the
phone, but she yanked it back. If she didn’t act so worried, maybe she wouldn’t
be
so worried.

But she was worried.

Worried…Ha. That was the
understatement of the year.

The breeze blowing in the open
windows had the warm, dusty smell of summer, but Emma rubbed her arms to soften
up the goose bumps there. Even back in Maryland, she’d never feared for her
life except in the darkest moments of the night, when her paranoia ran wild.
Now it was full daylight, beautiful as only summer in Maine could be, and she
was scared out of her mind.