Price of Angels (5 page)

              “What’s going on?” he asked, tone harsher than he’d intended, and the paramedics snapped around to look at him: young guys, wide eyes, big arms.

              He wasn’t wearing his cut, so neither of them gave him the usual cautious look. One said, “A girl got attacked. One of the waitresses, I think.”

              There was a sudden, unexpected tightening in Michael’s chest. “Which one?”

              The paramedic shrugged. “Dunno. She’s got dark hair.”

              Holly. Shit.

              One of the cops was walking back toward the front of the building from the alley, talking into a walkie-talkie.

              “Hey,” Michael called to him, and he glanced up, looking harried and aggravated. “What happened?”

              He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, back down the alley. “Girl got–”

              “Yeah, I heard. I wanna know who it is.”

              The cop scowled at him, one of Fielding’s young flunkies.

              “I’m looking for my girlfriend,” Michael lied. “She works here.”

              The cop’s expression changed, became less pissed-off, and more careful. “The bartender inside says her name’s Carly.”

              “Carly?”

              “Yeah.”

              Not Holly.

              The relief had physical ramifications, a loosening of all his sore digging muscles. The release of a deep breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding.

              “Not Holly?” he asked, just to be sure.

              “I said Carly, didn’t I?” the cop snapped.

              Michael nodded. Not Holly this time, no. But it could have been.

I want to understand
, Holly wrote, because she couldn’t settle down and relax.
I didn’t know a man had it in him to refuse. Deny himself? Or else he doesn’t like me. Yes, that has to be it. He doesn’t like me. Then I won’t have another shot with him. No means no. What will I do? He was my best hope…

              The telephone on the end table rang beside her, startling her, sending her leaping from her spot on the couch.

              “Damn,” she murmured, pressing a hand to her stuttering heart. The journal had flown out of her hands and landed with a smack on the boards. She bent to retrieve it, closing it up tight and holding it to her chest, before she answered the old curly-corded landline.

              “Hello?”

              “Holly, dear,” Mrs. Chalmers’ voice filled her ear. “Are you alright? You sound out of breath.”

              “Fine, ma’am.” She took a deep breath and forced herself to smile, knowing the expression would work its way into her voice. “What can I do for you?”

              “Nothing,” the kindly old widow assured. “But someone rang the doorbell in front.”

              Holly hadn’t heard it, above the rumble of her TV. She felt something like panic twirl through her. She couldn’t afford to be so lax. Couldn’t miss a single sound, couldn’t let herself be surprised.

              “There’s a young man down here,” Mrs. Chalmers continued, “who’s here to see you.”

              “Oh,” Holly said, and all the breath left her, the panic heightening, closing around her windpipe with a relentless squeeze. So this was it, then. They’d found her, finally. It had taken longer than she’d expected, but it had to be them. She had no friends; she didn’t go on dates. There were only three possibilities as to who might have come ringing doorbells in the dead of night looking for her…

              “He said to tell you,” Mrs. Chalmers said, “that his name is Michael, and that he wants to ‘pick up where you left off.’ ”

              Holly released a deep breath, shoulders slumping, the terror turning loose in a rush that left her light-headed. “It’s Michael?”

              “That’s what he says, dear. Very stern-looking fellow.” Mrs. Chalmers lowered her voice to a whisper. “Unpleasant, really. But I told him I’d ring you and I told him he could wait in the parlor for you to come down.”

              Her relief was so great, she could have done cartwheels across her loft. Instead, she said, in a too-bright voice, “I’ll be right down to see him, Mrs. Chalmers, thank you so much.” As an afterthought: “I hope the doorbell didn’t wake you.”

              “Oh no.” The old woman made a dismissive sound. “I couldn’t sleep. I was doing my night baking again.”

              Holly thanked her once more, then hung up.

              And went straight to the bathroom mirror.

              She hadn’t showered yet, so her careful makeup was still intact. Her hair she’d tied up, though, and she’d changed into baggy gray sweatpants and a shapeless black long-sleeved shirt. It would have to do. She didn’t want to keep him waiting, especially if he wanted to “pick things up.” She didn’t know a man to care what covered her body. She pulled the elastic from her hair, shook it out so it fell in dark waves down her back, and stepped into her slippers before she disengaged all the locks and let herself out.

              She loved her slippers. About three bucks at Target, they were lined with fluffy fake Sherpa, and looked almost like real leather, if you squinted. They were soft. Comfy. She’d never owned a pair of slippers before, and she hadn’t been able to resist them, an impulse purchase when she was shopping for milk and detergent.

              Light, silent steps down both staircases, and her heart was hammering by the time she swung around the post at the foot on the main floor. The house was mostly quiet and dark around her, save Eric’s record-cutting noise and Mrs. Chalmers’ soft business in her back rooms. The foyer was illuminated by a series of table lamps, set on antique pieces flanking the walls. By their light, she had a view into the parlor, the front-most room of the house, one that had been kept as a public space where residents could meet with guests.

              It was a dainty, feminine room. Long, tufted white sofa against the far wall, bracketed by ornate rosewood tables, lamps with belled, beaded shades. A sequence of old portraits marched along the wall above; Mrs. Chalmers had no idea who any of the subjects were, just dead people, she’d said. In the bay window, two French-style chairs of pale blue velvet framed another rosewood table, another lamp. The floor-length drapes filtered the light from the streetlamps outside.

              This was where Michael was sitting, in one of the chairs in the bay window, one ankle propped on the opposite knee, so his jeans rode up and the spur strap of his heavy black boot was visible. He had his elbows resting on the arms of the chair, hands draped loosely over the ornate curves of wood. His head cocked a fraction at her appearance, eyes narrowing even more as he studied her with unself-conscious intensity.
People don’t look at other people like that
, she wanted to point out to him.
It seems rude
. He didn’t seem to care, though, just stared at her a long moment before he finally turned to glance at the chair beside him, and then back at her, a silent request for her to come sit down.

              She complied, sitting sideways so she had a view of his face beneath the ornate lamp shade, legs tucked up into the seat with her. She grabbed onto one of her slippers with her right hand, a small comfort. “You came,” she said.

              He lifted a hand, studied the dirt under his nails – dark dirt that she didn’t remember seeing at Bell Bar earlier that night – and frowned. “I was driving by the bar on my way home.” Somehow, she’d expected his voice to sound different here, in the place where she lived, more relaxed and less controlled. It didn’t. “And there were all these lights and sirens. Cops and EMTs.”

              His eyes flicked over, a quick, unreadable touch that made her feel warm on the inside. They were amber in the lamplight. Long-lashed and truly beautiful.

              “I thought maybe you were closing up tonight, so I stopped to see what was going on.”

              Her stomach flipped at his words. “You stopped to see me?”

              “I stopped because it looked like someone had gotten hurt. And someone had.”

              Just as soon as the spark had flared, it died, a familiar oily dread building up in the pit of her belly. “Who?”

              “One of the waitresses. Girl named Carly.” The touch of his eyes again. “She’s dead.”

              Holly felt the news strike her like a physical blow. Her lungs seized up, and her stomach cramped. She curled in on herself, pressed her forehead into the musty velvet back of the chair. “Oh no,” she groaned. “No. Oh my God, oh my God.” The tears pricked in her eyes; bile pressed at the base of her throat.

              She hadn’t ever had a friend before. In all her twenty-six years of life, she’d always been friendless. But Carly had felt like a friend. Finally. Like someone she could talk and laugh and joke with. Someone kind, who she liked, who seemed to like her back.

              Her first, maybe her last friend – dead.

              “Oh my God, Carly,” she whispered. “Please no.”

              It had been so many years since she’d felt the savage thrust of grief. It was bright and hot, the pain, arcing through the inside of her skull, forcing the breath out of her lungs. Her only friend was dead, and it was like that awful moment in the clearing in the forest, nose full of the rich, wet smell of upturned earth, the flower petals crushed in her hands. She swallowed, again and again, against the revulsion.

              Not true, not true, not true…

              Except that it was, because Michael wasn’t the sort of man to come searching for her on some dishonest whim. There was cruelty in the lines of his face, but not falseness. No liar in the world had ever been as surly as this man.

              Carly was dead.

              But she was equipped to handle the most awful of things, wasn’t she? Yes.

              “What happened?” she asked, sitting upright again, sniffling hard.

              Michael watched her a long moment, eyes moving back and forth across her face, his expression blank, before he sucked at one corner of his mouth, that little thinking face he made. He was trying to decide how much to tell her, she realized. He didn’t know how much she could bear to hear.

              “You can say it,” she said. “I won’t fall apart.”

              He studied her another moment, then nodded. “From what the cops could tell, she was taking the trash out the side alley door, and got jumped from behind while she was facing the dumpster. Her face got slammed up against the side of the thing. She had bruises on her neck, blood in her eyes. The one cop wouldn’t talk to me, but the young one would. He recognized me from around town. He said it looked like she got strangled to death, the marks on her throat. The broken vessels in the eyes. They won’t know if she was sexually assaulted till the ME gets done with her.”

              “And you’re sure it was Carly?”

              “Brunette. Little like you are. Bartender ID’d her.”

              Holly sighed. “Yeah, that’s Carly.”

              “I thought it might be better hearing it from me, than seeing it on the news in the morning,” Michael said.

              She nodded, managed to offer him a scrap of a smile. “It was. Thank you.”

              He continued to watch her, gaze never wandering from her face, the occasional blink the only sign that he was a living man, and not a mannequin.

              Holly slumped sideways against the back of the chair, exhausted by the news.

              “You were friends?” Michael asked. It was the first time, in their almost four months of acquaintance, that he’d ever asked her anything. This simple question shouldn’t have mattered to her, but it did, a small spot of warmth in an otherwise cold night.

              “Yeah.” She smiled, faintly. “I was supposed to close tonight and she was worried about me. She sent me home early, and covered the rest of my shift.”

              “Why was she worried about you?”

             
Because I was crying, because you said no
, she thought. But she said, “Because I was sad.”

              He frowned, just a little, brows drawing together over his very straight nose. “Sad.”

              “Even more now, because I might as well have killed Carly myself.”

              “That’s stupid,” Michael said, evenly, without missing a beat.

              Holly felt her brows go up. She stared at him, inviting him to explain, the guilt pounding inside her.

              “She offered to take your place, didn’t she? You didn’t do anything wrong. You had no hand in killing her, and if you’d stayed, it would be you dead, instead of her.”

              She shuddered. “Carly was a sweet person,” she said, though the idea of
it would be you dead
was making her lightheaded. “She didn’t deserve to die.”

              “But you did?” he asked, his voice relentless, too direct for this conversation.