What's in a Name? (12 page)

His pulse quickened at her words. He
tucked his finger under her chin, demanding she meet his gaze.
“Talk to me.”

“
I can’t.”

“
We’ve been through
that. Yes, you can. It’s one in the morning. Neither of us is
getting back to sleep for a while.” He waited. Her silence filled
the room and he finally broke it, staring at her when he asked,
“You’re Casey, aren’t you?”

She didn’t respond but he was right.
Everything alive had drained from her face.

He summarized the information
Hollingsworth had given him—the newspaper story and magazine photo,
how he’d been sent to check. Kelli sat, unmoving, while he
explained, and for a moment he feared she’d withdrawn the way she
had when Scumbag attacked her. When she finally spoke, it was more
of a whimper.

“
It hurts to go back.
Don’t make me. Please?”

The pain in her voice cut more deeply
than Scumbag’s knife. “My brain might be firing on half a cylinder,
but if I understand where you’re coming from, maybe I can help
think of a solution.” He set his hand next to hers. “Take my hand.
Squeeze as hard as you need to. We’ll do this together.”

“
I can’t.” Her voice
trembled, but her hand inched over, making tentative contact with
his fingers.

“
We can. We will.
Together.” An involuntary shudder ran through him. His fever had
shifted to chill mode and he clenched his muscles against the
shivering.

Kelli whisked her hand away. “You need
more ibuprofen. I’ll get it.” She wriggled away and padded toward
the bathroom before he could say anything.

Teeth chattering, he dug through his
duffel for something warmer to wear. His fingers wrapped around his
bottle of Scotch. He could use a drink. He set the bottle on the
night table and struggled into his sweatpants and shirt. Pain,
chills and fever notwithstanding, he wasn’t going to let Kelli off
the hook. He needed to hear her story—and she needed to tell
it.

Kelli returned with the pills and two
plastic cups of water, handing him one while she sipped from her
own. She looked calmer, with her hair damp around her face from
washing away the evidence of her crying jag. He saw her eye the
Scotch.

“
Help yourself,” he
said. “I think we could both use a drink.”

Without answering, she gulped the rest
of her water, then poured herself a generous shot. After taking
three ibuprofen, he did the same. Kelli crossed the room and
slouched into the chair. He watched her pound back half her drink.
She set the cup down, wiped her mouth and stared at him.

He took a sip of his own drink, feeling
the warmth course down to his belly. He wanted her back beside him
and cursed himself for giving her an excuse to get away. “Sit with
me?”

“
It’s easier here.”
She raked her fingers through her hair. “I don’t know where to
start. Everything got too complicated.”

“
How about the
beginning? Maybe what your mother named you when you were born?”
Crap, he wanted the light on so he could see her face. But he knew
why she’d moved away. Hiding—from herself as much as
him.

“
My real name? Karen
Christine Abbott. But that turned into Casey by the time I was
three and it stuck.” Her voice was a detached monotone, void of any
feeling.

“
So, you were Casey
Wallace.”

“
After I married
Charles, yes. But after the accident, I fell apart.
Totally.”

She stared into space. He waited and
finally, she spoke again.

“
Charles said I’d been
working too hard. Maybe I had. I normally worked from home, to be
with Luke. But the last few jobs had some out-of-town work and
Charles didn’t like me being gone so much. That Luke had to be left
with a sitter.”

“
Those can be tough
choices,” Blake said.

She leaned forward in the chair. “You
know, sometimes things seem to be going right, turning for the
better and then someone yanks the universe out from under you. The
last job I was on, the company decided they didn’t need me after
all and paid me half my fee for my trouble.”

“
Why did they let you
go?”

She shrugged. “I didn’t care. It meant
I could go home, take time off and mend some fences.”

He waited out another long silence.

“
I decided to make up
for my so-called neglect, and the three of us went on a picnic. We
had a great time and I told Charles I wasn’t going to take any more
out-of-town jobs until Luke was older. On the way home, I
remembered we were out of milk, so we stopped at a convenience
store. Luke was tired of being stuck in his car seat so Charles
brought him in to pick out a treat. They were in front, looking at
toys by the counter, and I was in the back at the dairy
case.”

She sipped her Scotch. “I don’t know
exactly what happened next. According to the reports, some thug
came into the store. He had a gun. Told the guy behind the counter
to empty the register or he’d shoot everyone. Apparently the store
had been held up five times in six months, and the clerk pulled a
gun from behind the counter. All I remember was a whole lot of
noise, a whole lot of blood, and Charles and Luke lying beside a
pile of potato chip bags.”

The pitch of her voice hadn’t changed.
It could have been a public radio newscaster reading a report.
Until her hand moved toward the table at her side and threw the
cup, whisky and all, across the room.

He worked himself off the bed and
limped to her side. He tried to scoop her up, but he simply didn’t
have the strength. She looked up at him, her eyes huge and bright
and everything inside him went hollow. He slipped her arm around
his waist and she got up and walked back to the bed with him. This
time she pulled all the covers back and sat alongside him, their
sweats the only barrier.

“
You’re lucky to be
alive,” he whispered.

“
If I’d been a better
mother, we’d all be alive. If I hadn’t been out of milk, we would
never have stopped in that store.”

“
You can’t blame
yourself.” He took her hand and she didn’t pull back.

“
Guilt doesn’t listen
to logic.”

Images of his father, of his brother,
flashed through his mind. He looked at Kelli until they went away.
“They caught the guy who did it, right?”

“
He was dead. The
clerk shot him. Forensics figured out whose gun shot who, that the
punk was high on meth and had a record, but what difference does it
make? They’re all dead.”

He squeezed her shoulder. “Go on. It’s
better to get it out.”

“
Somehow, I got
through the funeral and all the legal crap by pretending it wasn’t
me. It was like someone else could take over my body when I had to
do something. But I couldn’t stay in that apartment. Every time I
turned around, there was something to remind me of … them. I wanted
to run and hide. So I did.”

“
But your
family?”

“
My mom died the year
after Luke was born and my stepdad remarried and moved away not
long afterwards. Charles’ folks—I don’t think they cared. I was
tolerated—someone they put up with in order to see their son and
grandson. I think it was easier for them to deal with the loss by
blaming me.”

“
So you decided to
become Kelli Carpenter?”

“
No. That came later.”
Her voice was barely a whisper now. “First, I tried to forget who I
was. I even had a nose job.”

He turned her face to his and ran his
finger down her nose. “That explains why it was so hard for me to
see Casey in you. She had a fine nose—not the sort one would think
of having fixed.”

She relaxed a little. “Well, I needed
the surgery because of a deviated septum, but having the surgeon
tweak the shape helped me forget who I used to be. There was a
different person in the mirror. It helped.”

He squinted at her. “Nope. I still
don’t see you as the woman in the magazine picture.”

A hint of a smile came back. “I’ll bet
I know which one. I was three months pregnant in it—I had boobs
then.”

“
Tell me more. How did
Casey become Kelli?”

“
Did those files
Hollingsworth gave you say what I did when I was Casey?”

“
Nothing specific—only
that you worked with computers.”

She gave a cackle that might have been
a laugh. “Yeah—that I did. Founded a computer security company.
Trust me, I was good. I’ve been hacking since I was twelve. It was
no trouble to transfer funds from my bank accounts and get new ID
under my maiden name. As far as anyone could tell, my company
closed its doors. Casey Wallace got on a plane to South America and
never came back.

“
I took my computer
and not a lot else and went to a small town in New Hampshire. We’d
vacationed there when I was a kid and it felt … safe. I was Karen
Abbott, thinking I could go back in time and everything would be
good again.”

Blake took another sip of whisky and
offered the cup to Kelli. Karen. Casey. She downed the rest and he
refilled it. “Go on.”

“
There are still holes
in those next few months. I have nightmares, or flashbacks—I can’t
tell. I stayed there for months. Hiding. From me, mostly. Trying to
forget.”

“
You never really
forget, though, do you?”

She shook her head. “No. It just stops
hurting quite so much. And then one day, I was ready to live again.
I moved back to California, enrolled in Berkeley and studied
environmental biology. As different from my other job as
possible.”

She swirled the plastic cup in her
hand. “The real Kelli Carpenter was my roommate at Berkeley. She
decided to do missionary work in Africa. She fell in love with
someone in her group and wrote she wasn’t coming back. I met
Robert. I’d finally recovered enough to allow someone to get close.
Let myself think I loved him. Wanted—needed someone to love me, to
love someone. Fill the emptiness.”

She gave a muffled sob. “It was
semester break and we were camping down in Mexico, near Ensenada.
Just the two of us. A secret getaway.

“
I … don’t know when
things got … out of hand. We’d been hiking. And fishing. I’d cooked
dinner. All normal. After we ate, he … changed. Everything was
different. He was an animal.”

His breathing accelerated and he
struggled to keep it steady.

Her voice was choking now and the words
weren’t flowing as quickly. “He grabbed me. Ripped my shirt.
Started getting rough. Said I’d like it. I said no, but he kept …
kept—”

Blake could imagine what Robert must
have done. His teeth clenched at he thought.

“
I don’t need the
details. I get the idea.”

“
I don’t remember the
details. He wouldn’t stop.” She was gone now, somewhere else. Well
inside herself. He doubted she knew she was crying.

“
Shh. It’s okay.” It
could never be okay.

As if she hadn’t heard him, she
continued. “We’d been drinking. Wine. Too much, maybe. I grabbed
the bottle. He grabbed it back. It hit something and broke. I held
on and … so much blood. I caught his carotid, or jugular, or
something.”

“
Self-defense,” he
whispered.

“
Maybe, if you’re
thinking straight. But there’s no statute of limitations on murder,
and I don’t have enough faith in the system to risk it. Especially
in Mexico. All I could think of was running away. That’s what I’d
done before. I ditched his car about five miles from the border.
Then I walked across in Tijuana with all the rest of the tourists,
took a train to San Diego, and a bus back to school.”

“
Nobody missed
him?”

She continued in the same monotone. “It
was pretty rough terrain—I got rid of his wallet, shoved him into a
ravine. Figured by the time anyone found the body, assuming the
animals didn’t get it first, I’d be gone.”

He took her hand. Unlike his own, hers
was steady. “His car?”

She shrugged. “I left the keys. Some
locals probably made good use of it. Robert hadn’t told anyone we
were going, so if—when—anyone noticed he was missing, they had no
way to know where to look. He was a flunky in some big accounting
firm. I’d never been to his office, never met any of his
colleagues. I don’t think anyone knew we were seeing each
other.”

The ache in Blake’s chest wasn’t due to
his injury. Words couldn’t get past the thickness in his throat. He
pulled Kelli into his chest and massaged her neck. Let his fingers
graze her jawline, then move up to her temples.

She gave him a weak smile. “You sure
you want to stick with me? Men in my life have a way of dying
violent deaths.”

“
To quote a friend,
‘like white on rice’.” He rubbed circles on the palm of her hand
with his thumb. “Keep going.”

“
Since Kelli had
decided to stay in Africa, and I knew everything about her, I took
over her identity. I cut my hair, dyed it brown, started wearing
tinted contacts and glasses. Any records will show Karen Abbot
dropped out of school and disappeared. Kelli Carpenter transferred
from Berkeley to UCLA.”

She rotated the glass in her hands. “I
became an expert at hiding, being a loner. Jack Stockbridge
respects that and doesn’t pry. But there’s this constant fear
someone will find out I’m a murderer and that’ll be the end.”

“
Enough.” He took the
whisky from Kelli. “You need to sleep. So do I.” He made a
tentative move to leave the bed. Knowing it was the only thing to
do, knowing Kelli knew it, he still felt disappointed when she
didn’t cling to him, when she mumbled good night, turned away from
him and curled into a ball.