You Don't Know Me (29 page)

“Denise didn’t tell him?” Hayley was surprised. “He’s her shrink, and she didn’t tell
him?
”

“Guess not.”

Hayley was heartily glad that she didn’t suffer from Denise’s problems. Her sister was one screwed-up kook.

But Hayley had had all she could take of another delve into the past. “Maybe you ought to leave,” she suggested to Connor. “I can’t talk anymore.”

“You’ve hardly said ten words.”

“I’m not feeling all that chatty, okay? If you’re so interested in Denise, why don’t you go bother her?”

He considered her, as if he wished there were some other avenue of interrogation. But she was stonewalling him, and unless he just enjoyed her less-than-scintillating company, there was no reason for him to hang around.

Apparently, he came to this same conclusion because rather reluctantly he got to his feet and said, “You think Denise will finally give me Dinah’s address?”

“One can only hope.”

Her sarcasm brought a fleeting smile to his lips. The guy was just not going to give up, and it both scared and irritated Hayley. She had better things to think about—like an audition video that may have already been viewed by People Who Matter.

Her cell rang, and Hayley jumped as if she’d been stabbed.
Tonja!
Clicking on, she said eagerly, “Hello?”

“Hayley?” a voice whimpered. A feminine voice. Denise’s voice.

Instinctively, she knew this was a call meant for her ears alone. No Connor Jackley, no matter how badly he wanted to talk to her sister. “Yeah, this is Hayley,” she said offhandedly. She waved a silent good-bye to Connor who let himself out, moving so slowly that Hayley gnashed her back teeth together to fight back a scream of impatience.

“Hayley?” Denise’s voice had climbed an octave.

“I’m here. Shhhh. Calm down. What is it?”

“I think I’ve killed him.”

Surreal calm. “Who?” she asked, the hair lifting on her arms in a strange kind of
déjà vu.

“Lambert. Lambert Wallace. Can you—can you help?”

“Is anybody there with you?”

“No . . . I’m alone at Lambert’s,” she gulped.

“Give me the address,” she stated flatly, committing it to memory as Denise haltingly dragged it past her lips.

 

 

It took over an hour to find the place and when she did, Hayley inhaled a deep breath, expelling it slowly. A mansion, that’s what it was. A goddamn palace.

Lights blazed as she drove through the open gates to the quadruple-car garage. Her Rent-A-Wreck was like a neon sign, inviting gawkers to look and remember.

She could hear it now. Some little bratty kid with an overactive imagination. “I saw it! I saw it! I know exactly what it looks like. And it was there the night he was killed. I even memorized the license plate number! And I saw the killer! It was a woman and she drove up, went in the house, and pumped him with lead!”

Or whatever. Denise hadn’t exactly been specific.

She rang the front bell, fingers of apprehension dancing along the back of her neck.

Expecting nothing, she checked the door—and it opened beneath her touch. Quickly, she stepped inside, locking it behind her. Her heart beat so loudly she could hear it in her ears.

With the presence of mind of a seasoned criminal, she walked straight to the garage, found the button for the garage door, opened it, then calmly and efficiently drove her car into the only empty slot.

Then she was in the house again, listening for sounds of life. The place was quiet as a tomb. Literally. Shivering, she crept upstairs, searching the rooms until she stepped into the master suite at the end of the hall.

Denise sat on the floor, catatonic, wrapped in a blanket, smeared with blood. On the bed, a man lay facedown. So much blood. Pools of it.

Hayley’s senses swam.
Oh, Dinah, help!

“Denise,” she whispered, but there was no immediate response from her sister.

Steeling her resolve, Hayley used her standard trick of conscience, concentrating on her favorite pastoral scene, somewhere in the mountains of Oregon. Then she strode to the body and laid her fingers against Lambert’s neck.

Faintly, a pulse beat.

“He’s alive,” she said in relief. “Barely. But he’s not dead yet.” She saw the thunder egg and debated on whether to pick it up or not.

“This is just like before,” Denise said, her voice startlingly clear in the quiet room. “I killed him.”

“You did
not
kill him.”

“I wish Dinah were here. I don’t know where Dinah is.” A gasp, almost a cry. “Oh, yes, I do. She’s with John!”

“C’mon, let’s get you out of here,” Hayley said, getting the heebie-jeebies. She gathered Denise in her arms, helping her to her feet. Briefly, she considered dialing 911. Lambert Wallace needed help.

Then she saw the bruises on her sister’s face and arms, and she remembered Connor Jackley’s reaction to Lambert Wallace’s name.

“I hope he’s dead,” Denise stated chillingly.

“I’ll take you back to my place.” With that Hayley scuttled her out of the room and into the safety of her Rent-A-Wreck.

 

 

He felt irritated all over in a way he couldn’t analyze. Hayley had done that to him, and after examining the bareness of his refrigerator—furious with himself that there wasn’t even a bottle of water!—Connor slammed out of his apartment and decided to take Hayley up on her advice.

He would go see Denise.

He made the trip to Malibu in record time, swearing at traffic all the way. Hayley Scott bugged him. He sympathized with her desperate need to keep her past a secret; if half the things he suspected were true, those three girls had led a miserable existence. But couldn’t she let down a little? He
knew
that whole obsessive, goal-driven career stuff was her escape. One did not have to be a shrink of Dr. Stone’s caliber to figure that much out. But was he, Connor Jackley, ex-policeman, so all-mighty threatening that she couldn’t
give
just a little?

“Hell with it,” he muttered, pressing the button at the gates of the Callahan beachfront home. She wasn’t his problem anymore than Denise or the missing Dinah were.

No answer. Impatiently, Connor stabbed the button again, aware that he was acting out of character. What had she done to him, to make him feel this way?

He looked in the rearview at the faint lines still visible across his face.

“Goddammit!”

A man’s voice crackled over the intercom. “Yeah?”

“Connor Jackley,” he answered tersely, assuming it was Callahan. “I’d like to speak to Denise Callahan. I’m a private investigator.”

“Wrong place. She’s not here.” He was just as terse.

“Is she living here?”

“Not anymore.”

Confused, Connor hesitated. “I’ve got information about her family,” he went on cautiously.

“Is this the Indiana story, or have you talked to Hayley Scott?”

Connor’s brows lifted. “I’ve talked to Sheriff Gus Dempsey of Wagon Wheel, Oregon, where Denise spent most of her high school years.”

A pause. Then the voice asked cautiously, “What’s this about?”

“Maybe it would be better if we talked face-to-face.”

Another pause, then Callahan seemed to hear the enormity of the situation in Connor’s tone. “Shit” was his muttered reply, but the gates began to swing inward.

 

 

Writing, usually a welcome escape, was suddenly a huge pain in the derrière, and furious, Dinah scribbled madly over a page of notes then tore and tore at the whole paper until it was pieces of confetti.

“Damn. Shit.
Total crap
.”

Literary words. Necessary in times of great stress.

Frustrated, she prowled the hotel room until she couldn’t stand it any longer. Waiting for Denise’s psychiatrist to call was excruciating, and she wasn’t going to get any work done until she connected with Denise, no matter what she’d promised Flick.

So...

So she was going to the Malibu house on the off chance that John might be there. Sure, he’d been living there—sort of—with her, but since he’d tossed her out, she somehow couldn’t picture him rattling around there alone.

But she didn’t know what else to do.

Forty minutes later she took Uber to the gates of the house, which stood wide open. Clutching her purse, she debated on asking the driver to wait, but the open gates sure made it look like someone was home.

“Drive forward,” she ordered, and as the vehicle slid to a halt beside a car she didn’t recognize, Dinah’s pulse began to pound with dread. Whose car?
Another woman’s?

She climbed out and forced her legs to carry her to the front door. Ringing the bell, she called herself every kind of fool, then nearly bolted at the sound of John’s approaching footsteps on the tile foyer floor.

He threw open the door, and for a moment Dinah blinked in the light spilling from inside.

It was John. She could tell by the way he held himself, the turn of his head, his lean, cowboy ways.

I love you,
she thought a bit desperately.

“Well, if it isn’t
Dinah,
” he drawled in a way that sent gooseflesh rising on her skin. “Dinah Scott. My wife’s secret twin. Come on in and let’s get to know each other . . .”

 

He faced Dinah Scott in blessed numbness, inured to one more shock. His first thought was:
She’s so beautiful.
His second:
Her eyes hold more secrets than Denise’s.

He’d been pouring himself his second scotch, wondering idly if he were following in his mother’s alcoholic footsteps, had decided he just didn’t give a damn, and downed the drink, when the gate intercom buzzed and he unwittingly invited Connor Jackley, private investigator, into his home to talk about his ex-wife’s past.

He should have sent the guy on his way. Who the hell cared anyway? But he’d been seduced by those comments about Wagon Wheel, Oregon—Podunk, U.S.A., if he’d ever heard it. And let’s face it, just the mention of Denise’s name was enough to tickle his interest—and libido—though it hurt to admit.

But he hadn’t expected the tale. Nope. He hadn’t expected that.

A murder? With Denise at the center of the controversy? He should write the damn thing and sell it for millions.

He didn’t believe it for an instant. Still, Connor Jackley, ex-L.A.P.D., didn’t strike him as the kind of man who made colossal mistakes. And this would be a real biggie, were it not true. So he had to credit the man’s story as the truth. The murder part, that is. Denise’s involvement? That was another story.

“You think Denise killed her stepfather, Thomas Daniels, and hid the body in a culvert,” John had clarified, rolling the empty old-fashioned glass between his palms.

“I’d like to talk to her again.”

“You’ve already spoken to her, then?”

“Once.”

“About this.” John hated being redundant, but he was having a little trouble believing all this. Not once, in all her elaborate tales, had Denise mentioned Oregon as a place of past residence. Sure, there was that idiot who claimed to have fathered a child with her, but Denise’s lack of reaction to that story had made John discount it as just another nut searching for his fifteen minutes of fame.

Jackley nodded.

“You talked to her about living in Wagon Wheel and murdering her stepfather.”

“I told her Thomas Daniels was dead and that I was investigating,” Jackley agreed.

“And what did she say about that?”

“Is she living here, or not?” Jackley countered.

“That falls in the ‘or not’ category. She left.”

“Recently?”

“Yep.”

That seemed to get him thinking. Questions were racing through John’s mind, too. Like, did this have anything to do with Hayley Scott’s claims, or were the two stories coincidental?

“So you
don’t
think Denise did the dirty deed?” John asked.

“How long was she here before she left?”

“A month or two or three. You’d have to ask her.”

“She’s been
living
here for over a month?”

“What does it matter? You said the guy’s been dead for years.”

Did he really think Denise was capable of murder? No. No way. She was self-destructive, but she wasn’t a killer.

John had poured himself another scotch, bothered. The problem was, the idea had merit. Denise, damn her lovely eyes, was capable of anything.

“I had a different address for her,” Jackley muttered, frowning.

“Yeah? Where?”

“You wouldn’t happen to know how to get hold of her sister.”

John lifted a brow. “So you buy the Hayley Scott story?”

“If the story is that they went to school in Wagon Wheel until their mother died, then lived with their stepfather, I know it’s the truth. But there are a lot of gaps.”

“You
know
it’s the truth.”

He nodded. “She and her sisters lived with Daniels until he disappeared. I think they know why he disappeared, and maybe who murdered him.”

“Did you say
sisters?
”

“Hayley and Dinah.”

John started laughing. He couldn’t help himself. “Hayley and Dinah. Okay, I’ve met Hayley. Did she give you this cockamamie story, too?”

“The Deschutes County Sheriff, Gus Dempsey—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” John cut him off. “You told me about the sheriff. He filled you in?”

“He asked me to investigate Daniels’s death, and we both decided the best place to start was with his three stepdaughters. His wife, Nina, the girls’ mother, had died, and the girls were stuck together with their stepfather for a while before they left.”

“You know how many histories Denise has? I don’t believe any of this! You’ll have to ask her what the truth is, and good luck. I don’t even know if she knows anymore.”

“How can I reach her?”

“She checked into some motel.” John shrugged, remembering with a stab of regret their last acrimonious words. “At least that’s what she said she was doing.”

“She didn’t mention Lambert Wallace?”

John did a slow double take. “Lambert Wallace,” he repeated in a deadly voice. “What’s that bastard got to do with her?”

“You know him?” Jackley looked interested.

“We’ve crossed paths. There was a brief period when Wallace connected with my father.”

There was a hell of a lot more to the story than that, but John didn’t wish to elaborate. Lambert Wallace, craftier than a mongrel dog, had pushed all the right buttons with Sampson, setting himself up as the son Sampson deserved to have. Money and power were the lure, and Wallace nearly had Sampson eating out of his hand. Oh, they were going to make so many films together! With Lambert’s enormous personal funds and Titan’s powerful distribution and promotion—they couldn’t lose.

Sampson had nagged John about it. Thrown their relationship in his face. John would have liked to believe his own disinterest had finally made Sampson realize he was grooming Lambert Wallace for a position John neither wanted nor would ever take. But the truth was, the cracks in Lambert’s personality began to show and Sampson’s own shrewdness rescued him from dire consequences. For dire they would have been, if Lambert had gained the upper hand. The man was made of money, but rumors abounded. He was morally bereft and corrupt. No amount of good looks and surface charm could make up for his basic emptiness.

Sampson had been lucky.

“Denise is involved with him?” John demanded, his words a staccato rap.

“When I interviewed her, I got the impression she was living with him.”

“When was that?”

“A couple weeks ago.”

John stared. A couple weeks ago he and Denise were sharing a bed together. His skin crawled.

Something was sliding around inside his head. Some piece of information that made no sense. Something he’d meant to ask about earlier. He tried to draw it to the surface, but before he could, Jackley reminded him of what it was.

“Do you have Dinah’s address? I haven’t got hold of her yet.”

The words formed though he knew he was going to sound stupid. “Who’s Dinah?”

Jackley’s look was sharp. John watched him, could practically see the calculations taking place inside his head, knew he wasn’t going to like what he was about to hear.

“Dinah is Denise’s identical twin sister.”

And for the second time John threw back his head and laughed, half sheer amusement, half hysterical reaction, and then the doorbell pealed through the house.

He had exactly thirty seconds to digest Connor Jackley’s bombshell. Thirty seconds to put together information so sharp, it cut. Thirty seconds to understand that Denise, his lovely, lying ex-wife possessed a twin whom she’d neither spoken of, nor alluded to in any manner. Thirty seconds before he threw open the door and came face-to-face with her. He knew it was Dinah, as he’d known in some deep awareness of his soul, since he’d first encountered her sleeping in the guest room.

Now her lips parted in shock at his mocking, faux-friendly tone. And suddenly he truly believed and understood. He’d been sleeping with a stranger, and she’d never once uttered one word of truth.

The writing. The Corolla. The lack of makeup. The quirks of her humor.

It felt like a blow to his solar plexus. He could scarcely breathe.

“John . . .” she murmured.

Abruptly, he turned back to Connor Jackley who now stood in the archway, his expression grim as he gazed at the blond woman slumped in the doorway.

“Dinah?” he questioned, and she gazed at him blankly.

John couldn’t look. Couldn’t speak. He strode straight to the bottle of scotch, poured himself another more-than-healthy shot, then sank down at the kitchen table. He was worse than numb. He didn’t exist. It was unreality—and he welcomed it.

Jackley returned, and behind him, Dinah.

After a moment of silence, Jackley said, “I’m afraid Denise must still be with Lambert Wallace. I’m going over there now.”

“I’m going with you.” Dinah erupted into action.

The landline rang and all three of them jerked, as if caught in some nefarious act. John reached for it. “Hello?”

“Hey, you’re impossible to catch at work,” Susan Markson’s voice said easily. “I half expected voice mail. Guess what? I checked out that audition video you sent. Looks a lot like Denise, doesn’t she? She’s dynamite, John. I say go for it. You’ve found your Isabella.”

“Is it Denise?” Dinah whispered anxiously.

He glanced at her. Even in her current disarray—hairs falling loose from her ponytail, eyes dilated with fear, mouth quivering—she was an aphrodisiac too powerful to ignore. He hated himself. He hated her.

“John?” Susan queried into the silence. “Is this a bad time?”

“Send the DVD back to my office,” John managed to answer.

“Sure.”

“We’ll talk tomorrow.”

He wanted to laugh. Tomorrow. Work. The process of filmmaking. Hayley Scott as Isabella, John Callahan’s latest discovery.

Connor Jackley and Dinah—beautiful, lying bitch that she was—waited.

“We’ll all go,” John said, sliding the almost untouched glass away. He would deal with all of this later. That decent, chivalrous part of himself, which was only slightly tarnished, still recognized priorities. Lambert Wallace was scum and Denise was in his clutches—maybe where she wanted to be, but if there was a rescue squad, he was going to be a part of it.

 

 

Lambert Wallace’s house was brightly lit, squares of light illuminating the grounds from nearly every window. John and the private investigator, Connor Jackley, strode up to the front door but Dinah lagged behind.

She was in a cold trance. Everything felt sharp and dangerous. Memories danced of another time when she’d saved her sister. Only then no one knew. Then she could hide.

“Door’s open,” Jackley said tensely. He’d rung the bell and pounded hard on the door panels to no avail. Now, after the briefest of hesitations, he let himself in, John at his heels. Dinah followed at a discreet distance, every hair on her body standing on end.

The place was hollow, empty. She had no feeling of life. The men made a cursory examination of the main floor then headed upstairs. John never once looked at her. She couldn’t blame him.

Eight years ago she’d felt this same robotic oddness. Eight years ago she’d done what she had to do. She never dwelled on it. It was the past. She was the caretaker, and she’d done what she had to do.

Now she heard the muffled imprecation. John’s, she reckoned, for she was certain Connor Jackley rarely reacted to anything less than world annihilation.
Denise,
she thought fearfully, her steps quickening.

At the threshold to the master bedroom she stopped short, a gasp caught in her throat, choking her. Blood everywhere. Smears of it across the bed and carpet. Covering the head of the man who lay facedown atop the rumpled, brownish-red stained covers.

“He’s alive,” Jackley muttered tersely, his fingers at the man’s neck. Reaching for his phone, he called 911. Quietly relating the address, he shot a look Dinah’s way. She stared back silently. Where was Denise?

John was grim, surveying the scene as if he were too horrified to speak. Maybe he was.

On the floor, nestled in the folds of the sliding comforter, a familiar blood-encrusted object caught Dinah’s eye. The thunder egg, she realized with a jolt of her heart. The crystals were dulled brick-red and brown with sticky blood and hair.

A shudder ran through her from the soles of her feet to the crown of her head. John gazed at her, his eyes dark pits of emotional hell.

Maybe if he didn’t see it. Maybe if she took the thunder egg and kept it safe, . maybe she could still save Denise.

The thought gave her cold comfort. Denise had sneaked into the house. Denise had felt compelled to spy and steal rather than talk to her sister. Denise had to know about her and John.

“Where is she?” John rasped out.

Connor gazed at him, then at Dinah whose white face and bloodless lips revealed her agony.

He thought of Hayley’s mysterious phone call. He knew.

The thin, distant wail of the ambulance was the only sound in the cloaking silence while each of them concentrated on their own private thoughts.

 

 

The showerhead sputtered and spit, soaking the back of Hayley’s blouse as she leaned over her sister. She scrubbed furiously, so hard and fast it was almost spasmodic. Blood ran in pink rivulets off Denise’s hands and body. She sat under the spray, teeth chattering, body twitching, silent and staring. Nearly catatonic.

“Stop it,” Hayley whispered in her ear. “Damn it, Denise. Get a hold of yourself !”