Miranda's Revenge (10 page)

“Hot,” he said, and brushed her hair away from her face.

“What will we do about it?” she challenged.

Something in the jutting angle of her chin made him realize it meant more to her than she'd let on. There was more innocence in her than she wanted to claim. She played the cynic, but who was a cynic other than a fallen romantic? To disbelieve, one had to once have had faith.

So he gave her a grin and told a half-truth. “For a few days, we'll just dream, hmm? I have a race to run.”

“You mean, you can't…when…?”

“Can't is a strong word.” He felt himself coming under control and pulled away from her gently. Under cover of the crowded dance floor, they got back to their seats. “If I want to win, it's better to save my energy. Even…build it up.”

She tossed her head in saucily. “So, you're just using me to heat up your machine, huh?”

He laughed. “Only because you are very, very good at it.”

Sliding into her seat, she grasped her beer and took a long gulp. “Glad to be of service.”

He, too, drank deeply of his soda and glanced at his watch apologetically. “Speaking of that run, I need to get back—I need to get a jog in tomorrow morning, stay loose for Saturday. Can I walk you home?”

A softness bloomed in her dark blue eyes. She nodded. “That would be nice.”

He lifted a hand at the bartender on the way out. “'Night, guys,” he called. “Have a good one.”

The night was cool and starry, and as they headed into the residential district, it was also astoundingly quiet, the trees swishing in a high breeze, a faraway dog barking at some imagined creature in the hedges. Through the windows, they could see living rooms, dining rooms. Televisions flickering blue, heads on couches. An old woman sat on her porch with a dog at her feet. “Evening,” she said, her voice carrying easily across her damp grass to the sidewalk where they walked.

James held Miranda's hand and felt like he was in a play, in an imaginary world conjured up by some fifties television show. “This place is unreal,” he said.

“It is,” Miranda said, shaking her head. “I think that every time I come here. It's almost like it wants to seduce you or something.”

“Yes.”

She walked quietly beside him. “Desi says that the lady of the mountain calls certain people here.”

“That's what they say about Taos, too. And other people hate it. Hard to imagine anyone hating this place, though.”

“People do, though.” She paused. “This is my sister's house. Or at least it will be her house for another week or so.”

He halted, but didn't let go of her hand. Looking at the window instead of her face, tilted up toward his, he said, “Miranda, this has been one of the best days I've ever had. I mean that seriously. Thank you.”

Her husky voice said, “Me, too.” Raising on her tiptoes, she kissed his cheek. “Good night.”

He let her go. “Sweet dreams, Miranda.”

Inside Miranda found Juliet asleep on the couch, Josh's silly soft red dog snoring beside her. The television flickered without sound, and there were stacks of shower thank-you notes ready to be addressed. Feeling buoyant and alive, Miranda silently picked them up and carried them over to the table where another stack, already hand-addressed, awaited stamping. It was pretty easy to see where Juliet had left off. She made a cup of tea and bent over the task. A small thing she could do.

Juliet started awake about twenty minutes after Miranda had come in, and stiffly sat up. “How long have you been here?”

“A while. Why don't you go to bed properly? You need your beauty sleep.”

She shook her head. “If you don't mind too much, I think I'm going to go sleep with Josh. It's getting harder and harder to sleep in my own bed, without him. It's just…not right.”

“I do not mind in the slightest. I was surprised you were sleeping here anyway.”

“We want the wedding night to be special, to have a marker.”

“Then I think you have to stay here tonight, sweetheart.”

Juliet looked ready to cry. “I have nightmares sometimes.”

“About the rape?” Miranda moved to sit beside her sister on the couch, rubbing her shoulders lightly. Juliet bore it better than usual—none of the girls could manage casual touching very easily. Their mother had been so very terrible about it. It felt odd to Miranda to be rubbing her sister's shoulder blades, but she kept it up anyway, her hands feeling hot, as if they had medicine in them. And who knew? Maybe they did.

Juliet sighed. “Yeah.” She rubbed her face with both palms. “Yes. My therapist says it will get better as time goes by, and honestly, it is, but sometimes—one shows up. Less often when I'm sleeping next to Josh.”

Miranda smiled. “If I were a nightmare, I wouldn't want to cross Josh, either.”

Juliet laughed, and then to Miranda's complete surprise, she turned and gave her a big, hard hug. “Thanks, Mirrie. Maybe I can handle staying here if you're here.”

For one fleeting moment, Miranda felt the comfort of her sister's arms without fear, a safe and solid place where she might, if she required it, land. And Juliet would catch her. An unnamable emotion welled in her heart, closing her throat for a long moment, and Miranda—mistaking it for fear—pulled away in hasty panic. “Is there…um…anything you want me to do in the morning? I'm going to stop by and see Desi, of course, and I'm going to meet the sari guy sometime in the early afternoon, but I'm happy to run errands or whatever you need.”

Juliet gazed at her sister for a moment, then brushed a strand of hair from Miranda's forehead. “You have the best hair of all of us. Desi's is nice, but yours is like a magic cloak or something.”

“If it was, I would long ago have used it to make myself invisible.”

“No,” Juliet said, smiling gently. “You never wanted to be invisible. You want to be
seen.
”

Stung, embarrassed, Miranda pulled back. “No, I didn't. Don't.”

“Nobody who wears her red hair to her rear end is trying to be invisible.” Juliet grinned. “Nobody who wore a purple tutu and red fishnet stockings to school wanted to be invisible. Nobody who—”

“Okay, okay!” Miranda had to laugh. You might be able to posture around a lot of people, but a sister always called your bluff. “Maybe not.”

“It was because of our parents, of course. They ignored you, Mother and Daddy.”

“Except when they didn't.”

“Right.” Standing, Juliet yawned. “We should get some sleep so we can deal with them cheerfully tomorrow.”

“I'm pretty sure I can't do cheerful. I will strive, very hard, for civil.”

“I can live with that.” She picked up a piece of paper and peered at it. “Oh, I forgot—your skier called again. Where did you go anyway? You've been gone forever.”

“Um…” She smiled, abashed and trying not to show it. “I ran into James Marquez at the grocery store and we went up to the top of the mountain for a while. Then had a beer at The Poppy Seed.” Unconsciously she stroked her mouth, thinking of the light blazing off his shiny dark hair, the taste of his lips, the endearingly awkward way he moved his hips on the dance floor.

“Not a drop of chemistry, though, huh?” Juliet grinned.

“Well. Maybe one or two.”

“He seems like a nice guy.” She yawned again. “The skier is quite insistent that he needs to see you, too. Feast or famine, huh?”

“I guess.” Miranda took the paper with Max's number. “Did he say what he wanted?”

“Just that he had some things he needed to tell you and if you wanted to meet him tomorrow to give him a call.” She glanced at the clock. “Probably not at one-thirty.”

Stunned, Miranda stared at the clock. “Oh, my gosh! How did it get so late?”

“Time flies when you're having fun.”

“We need to go to bed.”

“I think I said that.”

J
ames had left several messages for various people in town the day before, and when he returned from his long, slow jog the next morning, there was a stack of messages waiting for him at the desk. He leafed through them as he rode up to his room, arranging them in order of importance. A judge wanted to buy him a cup of coffee, talk about the land issues surrounding Desi's land. Important. The cops had decided to talk to him about the evidence they'd collected—he grinned—a favor he'd called in from a senator, a guy he'd gone to school with.

And shockingly, Christie Lundgren, the skier, had agreed to meet with him as long as he didn't bring Miranda.

Fair enough. He punched in Christie's number before he even took a shower, and arranged to meet her in the coffee shop at the top of the mountain—her suggestion, not his—in an hour. He called the sheriff and agreed to meet the deputy in charge of the case at eleven, and then, frowning, he looked up the judge's name in his notes. Judge Yancy, the old judge who had offered to marry Desdemona after the murder, who seemed to be part of the land grab perpetrated by Biloxi and maybe some other shadow partners.

He also made a note to himself to check out the science behind the aquifer beneath the land. If it was worth billons as some of the articles said, a whole lot of people might be willing to kill for it.

Stripping off his sweaty vest and running shorts, he jumped under the shower. It was where he usually did his best thinking, in the shower, after a run. This morning, his head was packed with the silky red hair of a siren who'd danced him senseless the night before. All night, he'd tossed and turned, his body a furnace, thinking of her mouth, her delicate hands, her—

That was the trouble getting mixed up with a client. He couldn't think straight. And somebody's life was on the line if he couldn't find out who really killed Claude Tsosie and why. Rubbing his body dry, he wondered grimly if the “accident” yesterday had even been an accident. And a hit-and-run was an awfully big coincidence under the circumstances. And if it wasn't, then this was a lot bigger than a love triangle.

If it was a land grab worth billions, Desi's best course of action would be to sell the land to the government with stipulations of leasing and energy or water rights into perpetuity. He had a feeling only the government could protect her properly. When that much money was at stake, people would do anything. He needed to talk to her about the possibility.

He dressed in a simple white running T-shirt and a pair of khaki shorts, and stopped to comb his hair in the mirror. As he met his eyes there, he told himself the other thing he had to get done was to tell Miranda the truth about why he'd left the seminary. He didn't kid himself—this had the potential to be a serious connection, and he wanted everything out in the open.

Christie Lundgren was a pretty woman, and she was irritably fending off the advances of a square, muscular hiker when he arrived at the Top O' the Mountain Morning coffee bar. It wasn't his kind of place—too midcentury with all those little squiggles on parchment looking glass and mod-looking leather chairs. But he wasn't here for the decor.

“Hello, Christie,” he said, gesturing toward the seat next to hers. “I hope I am not late.”

“No, right on time.” She glared at the athletic youth and he slunk away with a shrug.

“Can't blame a guy for trying,” he said.

“I guess.” She gestured to the barista, who hurried over. “Do you want something?”

They ordered, plain coffee for James, a chai with soy for Christie. “So what do you want to talk about?” she asked.

“Let's move over to the window, huh? Little more privacy.”

When they were stationed on tall chairs overlooking the view of the San Juans all around them, sunny and brilliant in the morning, he said, “I just want to find out who really killed Claude. Desdemona Rousseau didn't do it, and I think you know it.”

Christie lowered her eyes. “I don't know if she did or didn't. I think there are things the police haven't bothered to ask about.”

“Yeah? Like what?”

“Like why are his paintings worth so much?” She twisted her mouth in disdain. “Have you seen them?”

“No.”

“They're not bad,” she said. “But it's not like he was some great artist. And he hadn't even been painting for that long, really. Only a few years. So why the big excitement?”

“Good question,” he said. “
Very
smart question. You have any ideas?”

She shook her head. “It just crossed my mind a few times. I heard somebody paid a hundred grand for one. That's just crazy.”

“Anything else you can think of?”

She took a long swallow of her chai, and looked into the distance. He saw the pain around her mouth and touched her arm. “It has come to my attention that he might have had a lot of women, not while he was with me, but before. While he was married.”

“Anybody in particular?”

“This wacko woman who is married to a dentist around here. They have tons of money, but she acts like—” She shook her head. “I don't know what. She's crazy. Alice something. She has—or had—a bunch of his paintings, too, and I think she sold some of them on the Internet.”

Her sorrow and pain and regret came radiating from her in almost visible waves. James waited.

“I really did love him, you know,” she said quietly. “Maybe it wasn't right or whatever, but I didn't date him even one time before he left his wife. He chased me for ages, and he was really smart and beautiful and he seemed to
see
me, you know?” She raised her eyes. “I think he loved me for real.”

Kindly, because it would not hurt anyone for him to say it just this minute, he said, “It sounds like he cared a lot for you.”

She nodded. “Have you ever had a really terrible broken heart?”

“It's the worst,” he said. “And I'm not going to tell you to get over it. Just let it be broken for a while.”

A single heavy globe of a tear rolled out of her right eye. She nodded. “I don't think Desi killed Claude. She was mad at him, but I think maybe she really loved him, too.”

“I think she did,” he agreed. “Listen, what do you know about the connection between Renate and Elsa?”

Christy frowned, obviously bewildered. “They're sisters. I knew them in Europe, with Max.” Suddenly she looked troubled.

“What is it?”

But she shook her head. “Nothing. Never mind. If you need anything else, just call me,” she said, and stood to put on heavy black sunglasses.

“Thanks.” He watched her walk away, tense and strong, her blond curls almost unnaturally shiny. In time, she would get over Claude Tsosie and find another lover. She was young. She would be all right.

He would light a candle for her.

Miranda slept till nearly nine, and jumped out of bed in a tizzy. Juliet had left a pot of coffee and some store-bought cinnamon rolls and a note that said she'd be off work around noon. She ran a small nonprofit and had built a strong staff over the past six or eight months, so could afford to take time off as needed for the wedding.
Go see Desi,
the note urged,
and call me with a report. I saw her this morning, but there is a lot to do.

She gulped the coffee, took a quick shower and then agonized over her clothes. She had brought little with her, but what if she had a chance to see James? It needed to be something beautiful. A blue silk tank seemed too fancy, a white T-shirt too low-key, a green peasant blouse entirely too sexy for meeting salespeople.

Finally, she settled on a simple shirtwaist dress made demurely sexy by the transparent floral print and an old-fashioned, forties-style slip beneath it. She wasn't a shorts kind of girl, and wasn't about to show off her paste-white legs in shorts in a town where everyone took their exercise in the outdoors. She'd look like a freak.

Smearing SPF 50+ sunscreen on every inch of exposed skin, she grabbed her purse and walked to the little hospital. The desk nurse directed her to a room on the second floor. When she got there, Tam was sitting next to the bed, reading aloud from some adventure story. He was a robust and wonderfully cheerful man, just right for the direct and sometimes gloomy Desi.

Speaking of Desi—Miranda's stomach flipped when she saw her sister lying there on the bed looking wan and bruised. Her face looked awful—purple and blue around her right eye—and her arm was immobilized in a temporary cast up to her shoulder. It always frightened her to see someone hurt badly, and the closer she was to the human, the worse it got. Her hands shook as she moved into the room, across the floor to Desi's bedside.

“Hi, honey,” she said. “How are you doing?”

“I've had better days,” she said with a wan smile. “But the baby is fine, so that's the important thing.”

“Oh, I am so glad.” She narrowed her eyes. “I think it's a very good thing there are saris on the way here. The scarf will offer a lot of possibilities. Not sure we can get even a sari around all this taping, though.”

“I have to wear something!”

“We'll work it out. I'm supposed to report back to Juliet what's going on, so give me the scoop. I also need to know where you'll be later. Are you going home?”

Desi shot a mutinous glance at Tam. “No, actually. I'm not allowed to go home for another day or two.”

“They want her to really rest,” Tam said, raising an eyebrow. “And I told them she wouldn't if they let her go.”

“You evil man, you.” Miranda touched her sister's hand. “Is there anything you need for me to do?”

“Thanks, I'm fine, honestly. Everyone has pitched in very kindly. The wolves are covered and Helene now has the dogs.”

“Want some magazines or books or something? I could bring my laptop in for you to watch movies on.”

Desi brightened. “The movies would be great. I never have enough time to watch them.”

In her purse, the cell phone rang. Miranda pulled it out and saw James's name. She didn't answer it, but a thrum of pleasure went through her when the message indicator trilled a minute later. To Desi, she said, “I'll give you a call when the guy gets here with the saris. And I guess I can give you some warning over Mother and Daddy, too.”

“I'm really looking forward to this,” Tam said, his Kiwi accent drawling.

“Oh, I'm sure we all are,” Miranda said. “When are you going to tell her about the baby?”

“I guess I have to tell them now, since the doctors keep talking about it. They'll hear it and know anyway.”

“That's a good idea.”

A head popped around the corner. “Are you Miranda?” the nurse asked.

“I am.”

“There's someone here to see you.”

Miranda wondered who even knew she was here. “I'll be back.”

Max, sturdy and blond and looking gigantic, waited in the plain chairs lined up against the wall. He rose when he spotted her, and objectively, she saw that he was a very attractive man, with gold hair glittering on his strong legs, those broad shoulders and classically handsome face.

But nothing in her responded to him at all. Not even the slightest quiver.

Uh-oh,
said the voice.

Surprised, she sought out the details of him that had so thrilled her in Europe—the blue of his eyes, his big hands—and…nothing.

Uh-oh.

“Hi, Max. What's up?” she said. Surely when he spoke, that accent would catch her, charm her.

“I have only been trying to call you for most of these two days. I was worried about you, your sister.”

Nope. Not even that gilded Continental accent could give her a shiver. She crossed her arms. “She's banged up, but she's okay.”

“Will you come walk with me? I found out some things you might wish to hear.”

“Really? Yeah, just let me tell Desi what's going on.” She dashed back to the room, grabbed her purse. “I have to go,” she said. “I'll explain later. Hey—you want a chai?”

“Now that sounds good. Thank you.”

“Where would you like to go?” Miranda asked as they headed out to the brilliantly blue and gold summer day. “Have you tried The Black Crown?”

“I have not.”

“It's only a few blocks. We can walk over there and have a cold drink.”

“Very well.”

Bizarre, Miranda thought. How could her grand passion just dry up and blow away like that? Was it as simple as chemistry?

The voice started to say
uh—
but she cut it off, slammed it into a box where it could go yell all it wanted without her listening. She was tired of thinking so much.

At The Black Crown, they took a seat in a booth near a bank of windows. Miranda ordered iced tea, and Max asked for lemonade. There were few customers so early—an obvious business sort at the bar, eating meat pie, a couple of girls chowing down on grilled cheese sandwiches, their packs at their sides. She thought, in a faintly distracted way, of how James said he'd never traveled that way. With his curious, open mind, he would enjoy it very much.