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Chapter Thirteen
VINCE TOSCANA CAME OUT Of THE steam house for a breath of air that didn't taste of parboiled human being and saw in an instant that if he didn't move right now, his rapidly decreasing pool of suspects was going to scatter to the four winds before sunset. And considering the financial resources of even the poorest among them, those winds might well carry the guilty ones beyond his reach.
Vince raised his voice to bellow, "Hey, Mikey!" The young cop was standing barely ten feet away, but it wasn't for his benefit that Vince had shouted. Every tense face, guest and spa employee alike, was now turned in his direction. Vince could feel the taut vibrations humming off them from twenty yards away. If you touched any of 'em, they'd twang.
"Right here, Vince."
Vince lowered his voice to a more normal level but kept his eyes on the skittish individuals on the other side of yet another line of yellow police tape.
"Mikey, we gotta get some calories into these people. Let's get a di
A wayward draft from the room in back of them prompted both men to take a step farther into the air, and caused Vince to add, "Maybe nothing too meaty. And ask your ma's bakery to bring us half a dozen cakes for dessert. Tall, gooey cakes." The kind Vince's wife would let him eat only about once a year.
"Tea and biscuits," said Mike unexpectedly.
"Biscuits?" Jeez, Vince thought: Southern cooking. "Nah, that chocolate cake with the icing that's six inches tall, or a coupla key lime pies, that kinda thing."
"No, no, I mean like in Agatha Christie, they're always giving people what my sister calls comfort food. Empty calories, you know? Sweet tea and cookies, they make people feel better. 'Biscuits' is British for 'cookies,' " he added helpfully.
"Whatever you say, Mikey. I du
As the young man trotted off, filled with the righteous anticipation of shoving a lot of unhealthful food down people who'd paid a small fortune for gussied-up celery sticks, Vince found himself wondering if the kid's police training consisted of anything but murder mysteries.
Agatha Christie. Bah.
Caroline stood alone in the crowd of people watching the young policeman jog away in the direction of the dining room and wondered mildly who would be the first to break. She herself felt like a cello string wound beyond tight: Would a slight weakness in the string be where it snapped, or would the bridge itself give way?
It was lucky for Douglas that he did not touch her. As it was, even his tentative pronunciation of her name made her jump as if she'd come in contact with a live wire. Had he laid a hand on her arm, she probably would have belted him one.
"What!" she bit off.
"Caroline, I-" he began, then stopped.
He looked wretched, so miserable that she nearly leaned forward into him and wrapped her arms around his chest. Why, oh why did her body persist in this nearly pathological gullibility, this insane trust in a man who had done everything short of striking her? And why, if he was such a feeble excuse for a husband, did he persist in looking so forlorn, so lost, so… lovesick?
"Douglas, what is it?" she cried before she could stop herself.
For a moment it looked as if he might crumble; he started to reach for her, and then with a clash of mental and emotional gears that was almost audible, he stepped back, the impulse to affection violently squelched.
"What on earth… Oh. Oh, my God," she said softly as remembrance cascaded down on her. She'd set out to find Douglas the moment Raoul left her room, but had been interrupted by the discovery of Christopher Lund's death, distracted by yet another round of redundant paramedics, another influx of urgent police, the further jarring festoons of yellow tape across the manicured Phoenix landscape. With her husband's involuntary step away from her, it all came back: that absurd yet primally shattering scenario Raoul had confronted her with, a scenario that was even now inhabiting her husband's mind in its full, raw horror, leaving no room for anything but the overpowering need to protect his wife from knowing that she'd been sleeping with her brother. Setting Douglas free from the all-pervading taint of incest would lift the misery from his face, she knew that. But before she could free him, she had to know one thing.
"Doug, did you sleep with that woman?"
She saw the denial in his face before he could stop it. She also became aware of a number of interested listeners. She took Douglas's knit sleeve and led him away to a bench situated to look over the glittering lake. Neither of them noticed the scenery.
Caroline went straight to the heart of it. "Douglas, you are not my brother."
The impact of these words was too great even to register on his face. He simply sat there, gaping at her as if she'd said something in Swahili or Cantonese.
"Doug, I don't know who told you that you were, but Raoul de Vries gave it to me, and I had to laugh in his face. It's true I have a sibling somewhere, but it isn't you."
"Claudia told me. It was Claudia."
"She said it was because of the hand, right?" Caroline reached for her husband's left hand and held it up, lifting her own beside it against the afternoon sky. The length of the fingers was similar, and the separation of the little finger, but nothing else: Her nails, straight thumb, and narrow wrist were from a different genetic heritage than his short nail beds, slim knuckles, and slightly retrograde thumb. "My finger was smashed when I was a kid," she told him, then shivered involuntarily, brushed by the vivid twenty-year-old memory. A furious slam of the cabin door, a soar of pain that didn't stop throbbing until the doctor numbed it days later, and the indelible link it created in her mind between parental anger and great pain. An accident, but Caroline had never whined at her mother again, and she'd often thought the injury laid the foundation for a lifetime of repressed emotion. She shook herself and returned to the present. "We'll have DNA testing if you want, but tell me: Do you really think we could have been brother and sister without knowing it?"
Now his face took on an expression of dawning wonder. "I thought… Oh God, Caroline, I knew I'd never hold you again. That's why I sent you the cello-went looking for it and bought it back to take my place-because I could then feel that if your arms were around it, they were around me, too; that when the body of it rested between your knees…" Douglas seized her hand, put it to his mouth, and began to sob.
Caroline patted his hair absently with her free hand, then said, "Doug? Douglas, sweetheart, I'm sorry, but-you bought back my cello?"
He raised his head but laced his left fingers tightly through hers; their wedding bands came together with a faint tap.
"Yes. For you. It cost me a fortune because the woman loved it so much, so I had to pay even more than I thought I would, but it had to be the real one, to set you back on the road you'd been on before I-"
"How much, Doug? I have a reason for asking."
"Thirty-four thousand. Plus shipping."
"Thirty-four? My mother told me she'd paid twelve!"
"God, no. I did ask her to pretend it came from her. I thought you wouldn't accept it otherwise."