Now You See It (13 page)

“Enough! That is
e-
fucking-
nough
!” Gemma said. Mike had used that expression all
their lives, his eyes blazing green, and it had always stopped their youthful
spats cold. She was delighted to find out it worked just as well on posturing
males.

Brady looked as if he were about to start laughing. God, she
hated that. If he did, she just might punch him. Doug looked shocked, and she
realized she had never used any language stronger than “dammit” in his hearing.
Well, too bad about his country club sensibilities. At least the two of them
weren’t squabbling.

“Doug, I think you’d better go,” she said.

“I know how upset you are, Gemma. I’ll talk to you later—I’ll
keep checking in to be sure you’re all right.”

Gemma gritted her teeth but nodded and let him have his exit
line.

She closed the door behind him, shut her eyes and gave her head
a quick shake.

Now Brady did laugh. “Does he always treat you like a piece of
fluff?”

“A what?” She let the words flow past her. “
He’s
just well-mannered.”

Brady snorted derisively and then turned serious. “Hey, are you
all right?” He moved closer and rubbed her arms.

Strength and warmth seemed to flow into her from his hands, and
she dropped her head against his chest, breathing him in. Warm skin, sandalwood,
male. She could stay like this forever, pressed against him, holding him, being
held. Shutting out the world because this was home. She started to nuzzle his
chest, caught herself, turned it into a head-shake. “I don’t know why this is
happening, Brady. People are dying. I haven’t done anything to cause this. I
don’t understand.”

“People die, Gemma. People kill other people. It doesn’t
necessarily center on you, no matter what Doug the Sleaze there says about
it.”

“Doug the—”

“I know several Dougs. That’s how I keep ’em all straight.” He
reached to her face and brushed away a tear. “Hey, it worked for Homer:
‘Rosy-fingered Dawn,’ ‘Bronze-headed Achilles,’ and all that.”

She gave him a lopsided smile.

“Gemma, if this centers on anybody, it’s Ned. Not you. And
we’ll figure it out, or whoever it is will find whatever he’s hunting for, and
it will be over. I promise you.” His voice grew softer, but no less intent. “I
promise you.”

Gemma looked up at him, standing there all dark and angular and
intense. Watching her as if he were trying to hear through her head. She felt a
chill and turned away down the short hall.

He didn’t say a word, but padded silently after her into the
kitchen, so close behind her she could feel him inside her personal space. She
turned around to confront him, and he kissed her, firmly, exploring,
questioning, asserting—even before he brought his hands up to her face, into her
hair. A sharp jolt raced through her as his tongue slid against hers. Suddenly
she couldn’t get close enough to him. Then just as suddenly, she could. Nikki
whined, and Gemma had a clear flash of the dog trapped in the closet, and she
remembered telling Brady someone could stuff her in a closet just that way.

She broke away from him, confused. Even as he let go, she still
felt him against her. She stepped away, but got no sense of distance until she
had put a good six feet between them. She stood, blinking, trying to integrate
what was happening. “I—what just happened?” Her lips still tingled.

* * *

“I don’t know,” Brady said. It came out more harshly
than he’d intended. He read her doubt and wasn’t sure how to deal with it. Her
allure, whatever they were creating here, was so powerful. He needed her to
trust him. But he just plain needed her, even more.

“I’ve got some wine in the fridge,” she said. She still looked
blank and shocked.

“That won’t help. Hell, maybe it will.”

“I’m not sure where the glasses are. Um. Paper cups?”

Maybe it was time to tell her at least part of the truth.
“Wineglasses? Come with me.”

Halfway across the living room, their way was blocked by a
jumbled pile in the middle of the floor—a nightgown, a spiral notebook, a can of
tomato soup, a twenty dollar bill, some keys, and the Pegasus in its stone egg.
“Okay,” he said slowly. “This wasn’t here when we went to the kitchen.”

She dropped her eyes. “No.”

“You don’t have a poltergeist. They don’t move from house to
house. “

She shook her head.

“You want to tell me what this is?”

“Well, that’s the Pegasus you were holding the other morning at
my house. When it disappeared...” she stopped, looking mortified.

“You thought, what, that I’d taken it?” The insult hit quick
and sharp. “Did you think I’d taken your paperweight as some kind of romantic
souvenir?”

She blushed even harder and looked away. “No. I didn’t think
that. It never even occurred to me.”

“What about the rest of this?”

She snatched the nightgown up before he could touch it, wound
it around her hand and hugged the wad to her chest. “I bought this nightgown
when I got my first apartment. Those keys are from a car we owned when I was
pregnant.”

She swallowed hard and kept talking, but her voice grew softer.
“I don’t know about the baseball cap, or the twenty. Or those other things. I
thought I’d lost that notebook last month. When Ned and I were fighting and I
finally told him to leave.
”

She started to pick the things up. He beat her to the keys.

“Keys that sit around someplace look grungy. These look like
they’ve been used every day.” He paused, watching her. “Let’s try this again.
These things weren’t here when we went into the kitchen. They’re here now. I
don’t think you did this. Not alone. I think we did it together, when I kissed
you.”

“And I kissed you back. Oh, damn!”

“What?”

“Dammit, I thought that jolt I felt was passion, romance,
attraction, not—”

“Not what?”

“I
file
things,” she blurted.

“What?”

“I
file
things. I make them
disappear. Sometimes they come back. It’s not intentional. I can’t control it.
It would be great if I could, though, wouldn’t it? Mike always says it would be
like a Bag of Holding or a dimensional closet.” She tried a smile, but couldn’t
manage one. “It’s worst when I’m upset or distracted. Or I guess when I’m
really, um—”

“Does that mean whenever we make love things are going to fall
out of the sky on us?”

She didn’t want to think about going to bed with him right now.
She uncurled her toes and shied away from his last words. She half wanted to
laugh, half wanted to cry.

“I know what you can do, Gemma. I saw it happen. I saw a glass
of juice just disappear the other day when you lost your temper. That wasn’t my
imagination, was it.” It wasn’t a question. “And you and Mike are linked. I’ve
seen both of you reach for the phone before it rings.”

Gemma went absolutely still when Brady mentioned Mike. She held
her eyes and breathing under rigid control. “It runs in the family. Lots of
people do something like that.” She tried another grin, but it kept collapsing.
“We’re Irish.”

“So are thirty million or so other people in this country, at
last count.” He looked as if he were about to say something more, but seemed to
think better of it.

“The last few months before I drove Ned out, it got pretty bad.
Although—” she bit into her lower lip, “I got some control over it. Sometimes I
could control it just a little.” Brady’s left eyebrow shot upward.

“I scared him toward the end. One day—it was maybe six weeks
ago. Seems like a lot longer.”

“A lot’s happened in a short time.”

“Uh huh. I was unpacking groceries, and he was there ragging on
me. I put a can of tomato soup up onto the shelf. He yelled that he wanted it
for lunch. Right then. Stop the world, confirm his rule and serve him some
fucking lunch. I told him to fix his own fucking lunch, and he stomped to the
cabinet and slammed the cupboard door open so hard the handle put a ding in the
wall.”

“Let me guess. No soup for him,” Brady said in a Soup Nazi
accent.

“Nope. That can was
gone
.” She
smirked. “He started yelling, I don’t even remember what. And suddenly I knew I
could get it back. So I did. Some flukey combination of contempt, pissed off and
fed up, I guess. Anyway, I walked over and pulled the can off the shelf. I had
to reach up, but he was tall enough to see inside the cupboard.”

She bent down for the can of soup that lay half-buried under an
old UW Huskies baseball cap. “So I said something devastating like, ‘Oh,
puh-leeze,’ and put it back up on the shelf, and
filed
it. It blinked out as soon as I took my hand off it.” Gemma
looked at Brady out of the corner of her eye. “That was the only time I ever
remember winning an argument with him. He stopped talking to me. Two days later
he moved out.”

“Can you do it now?”

“No. I’ve tried, but I can’t. That was the only time it
happened that way since sixth grade. I used to think it was some kind of
punishment.” She rolled her eyes.

“Is that all? The, what did you call it,
filing
?”

“Isn’t that enough? It’s really hard to talk about this, you
know?

“Yeah, I do know. Trust me. And there’s the thing with
Mike.”

She nodded.

“Okay. There is something else, sort of. But I don’t think it
counts. The first instant I see someone, it’s as if I see their true face, just
a flicker. There’s a word the psychologists use,
micro-emotion
or something like that. Anyway, it’s gone very
fast.”

“Is it accurate?”

“Almost always. I ignore it, try to prove it’s wrong, or go out
of my way to give them the benefit of the doubt, but so far, I’ve always ended
up getting hurt.”

“What did you feel when you first met me?” he asked, his voice
sharp.

“I don’t know.”

He gave her a keen, implacable look. “You don’t need to try and
soothe me, Gemma. What did you see?”

“I didn’t see anything when I first looked at you.
Nothing.”

“Did you think that might be because you were seeing exactly
who I really am?”

“No. I thought I was submerging whatever was there in pure
lust. Okay? Are you satisfied?”

His only response was a wolf grin of pure male glee.

“I’d just found out my husband had been murdered, and I meet
this guy out of nowhere, and all I can think about is how he would taste.”

“That’s exactly what I was wondering about you. Exactly.”

She shook her head on a disgusted “tsk.”

“That’s not my usual first reaction to an attractive
woman.”

“Really?” The word positively dripped. All three syllables of
it.

“Really.” Three syllables right back at her. “I usually wonder
if they will, and what they look like without their clothes. Not always in that
order, but that’s one and two. Always. But not with you. Now why, do you
suppose, is that?”

“I don’t know why. That’s what has me so scared. It’s like one
day I turned my computer on and suddenly all these weird, terrifying things
started happening, and half the time, I’m afraid you’re one of them.”

He looked into her eyes. “No, I’m one of you.”

Gemma froze, then she swallowed. “Where’s that wine?”

“Right here.”

“A little alcohol makes it go away,” she said. “Like a sort of
damping field. Until I get really ripped. Then it can get downright scary.” She
started to hand him the bottle, but decided to pull the cork herself, and felt
less fragile for it. “So, if you’re one of ‘us,’ what do you do?” The cork came
free with a
pop!
and she looked around for the
plastic cups she’d brought from the market.

“A little of this and a little of that. What do your
wineglasses look like?”

“They’re balloon glasses, about so high. They’re in here,
somewhere,” she said, waving a hand at the boxes. “That’s okay. The cups will be
fine for now.”

He held up a finger. “Wait one.” He started running his hands
down stacks of boxes. In the middle of the third stack he stopped and shifted
cartons until he could extract the one he’d been after. Breaking it open, he
unwrapped two balloon glasses and dusted them out lightly before handing them to
her.

Gemma shot a look from him to the dozens of stacks of anonymous
boxes. She hadn’t even met him yet, when she packed the glasses the first time,
and he hadn’t been there the day the movers came and repacked everything. “You
really are. One of us, I mean. I can’t believe this. People like us aren’t
exactly thick on the ground. But you found me.” She felt her face heat up and
she looked away. “Does Mike know?”

“About me?” He lifted an eyebrow. “Yeah.”

“He never said anything.”

She felt more than saw a shift in Brady’s expression.

“No. He couldn’t.”

Well, that was clear enough.
Damn
spooks
. “Oh,” she said. “Navy buddies. Right. Still, you managed to
work together. Were you in Intel, too?”

He gave a “What cookie?” smile. “Electronics love me.”

“They hate me. I haven’t been able to wear a watch since I was
twelve.”

“I saw a watch on the floor by your dresser.”

“It’s just for show. It doesn’t work, but how professional
would a consultant look without a watch?”

He nodded. “Okay. You read faces and kill watches. And you move
things.”

“No. I don’t. I make them disappear. I used to move them
around, but not since I was twelve. When we were little, Mike and I used to
knock each other’s toys over, or make the mobiles in our room change direction.
But that was years ago.”

“Stubborn, too.” He stared pointedly at the pile of items on
the floor.

“Whatever happens, it’s always stronger when I’m upset. And
then the last few years, I began to wonder whether it was all in my head. Ned
was so skeptical, you know? He kept hammering at me about delusional behavior,
saying it was just a way to make myself—ourselves, Mike and me—seem important,
special.”