OVER HER DEAD BODY: The Bliss Legacy - Book 2 (21 page)

“Possibly, but not necessarily.” Gus studied her, and she swore he saw her heart pounding behind her ribs. His face impassive, he said, “There were other people in the house at the time.”

The blood drained from Keeley’s face, turned leaden in her chest. “You’re not—you can’t be implying—” She shot to her feet. “You think my mother was involved?”

“I’m not implying anything. And I’m not accusing. I’m saying she was here. Period.”

“My mother had nothing to do with this. Whatever went on here was between Mary and Dinah. If you don’t believe that, you can get out of this house. Now.” Her voice rose on the last word and more bubbled up under it. “I won’t listen to you malign my mother. I won’t!”

“Settle down, it’s not—”

“I will not settle down. My mother was a good—very holy—woman. A saint.”
Everything I’m not.
“She made one mistake. A simple error in judgment. She got involved with the wrong man, and he left her—pregnant and alone in a strange country. She spent her life making up for what she considered her
sin
.
She prayed, took care of me—loved me!—and went to Mass every day. She lived in grace and she died in grace.” She looked away, her face hot, her mind now so alive with heat and sparks, she couldn’t form any more words.

How dare he … How dare he …

The silence in the room hung thick and heavy, suspended perilously between her closed mind and Gus’s tightly closed mouth.

“Then you were lucky,” he said in a low voice. “My mother was a crack head who sold her daughter to her drug dealer.”

His flat statement entered the room like the eye of a hurricane—bringing an instant, numbing calm.

Keeley, still hot with temper, her mind still tumbling over her defense of her mother, didn’t immediately grasp his horrifyingly raw admission. If there were words to be said, she couldn’t find them.

She watched Gus draw in a long breath and run a hand along his scar, as he always did when he was thinking. “Look, I wasn’t accusing your mother of anything,” he said. “Nor am I accusing Mary or Dinah. I don’t know what happened here. Neither do you. But we won’t find out unless we face the facts.
All the facts.
”

She heard what he said, but it was the words that came before that made her legs rubbery and unreliable. She sat back down on the settee and looked up at him. “Tell me,” she said, “about your sister.”

“I don’t talk about it.”

“You just did.”

His mouth tightened to form a rigid line, as fixed on his face as the uneven scar running along his jaw. She waited, her breath unmoving in her throat. “April was nine,” he said. “I was twelve. I didn’t know it happened—how it happened—until it was too late. Connie—”

“Connie?”

“Our mother.”

“Oh.” Using her given name instead of the mother honorific was understandable, she thought, giving him a necessary degree of separation. From what she’d come to know of August Hammond, separation—apartness—was important to him. He wore solitude like a shroud.

“She told me April had gone to stay with a girlfriend of hers.” His lips twisted. “Aunty Rosa.” He glanced away. “I bought it.” He stood over her, perfect in his stillness, his face set in the guarded concentration demanded when calling on ugly memories. “I found out what happened when I learned I was the next to go. I heard Connie whining to her latest boyfriend. Not about what she’d done with April, but that she was getting less money for me.” He stopped. “The guy she was with told her she shouldn’t be surprised because, not only was I too old, which was risky, but—” His face, though it didn’t seem possible, tightened even more. “‘girls always brought more.’”

“Dear God.”

He looked at her, his expression savage. “Apparently God had other business, because I was due to be picked up that night.”

“What about your father? Where was he?”

“Steve had died of an overdose six months before.”

She managed a nod but couldn’t think of anything to say.

“He was no screaming hell as a dad, but looking back, I guess he was the watered-down glue that held our fine little family together. Occasionally working, occasionally straight and sober. When he died, Connie skidded downhill lightning fast, drugging out twenty-four/seven.” He looked at her with eyes bleakly ironic. “Addiction has no bottom, you know. Except getting dead.”

“What did you do?”

“I grabbed what I thought April and I would need, and took off. I knew the dealer. I’d seen him often enough. I figured I’d find him, get April back, and head out,” he said and shook his head. “Had no idea where.”

“And?”

“I found the guy, all right, but all I got for my trouble was a matched set of black eyes and assorted contusions.” He paused. “He told me to get lost, then helped me along by throwing me down two flights of stairs.

“I went back twice more. Got more of the same. The last time I paid him a visit, he was dead. Had a hole in his chest the size of a dinner plate.”

Again silence claimed the office. Keeley was lost in the images of a boy in a desperate and futile search for his sister. The silence was broken by the sound of the hall clock chiming eleven. When it stopped its chime, she said, “You never found her, did you?”

“No.”

“And you’ve never stopped looking.”

“No.” He raked his fingers through his hair, looked angry, then dropped his gaze from hers. “Sidetracked along the way, but no, I’ve never stopped looking.”

She hesitated before adding, “And you’re not … concerned—after all these years—about what you might find?” Keeley didn’t want to think about what might happen to a girl taken under those circumstances.

His eyes sparked, much as she expected her own had when he’d mentioned the possibility of her mother’s involvement in Mayday’s dreadful secret. “No. Whatever happened, she’s my sister.”

Keeley frowned when her next thought came, but she didn’t think about not verbalizing it. “Is that why you stayed with Dinah? So you could search for April?”

Her question chilled the room, and Gus didn’t look inclined to answer it. Finally he shook his head. “No. I stayed with Dinah for other reasons.”

Not enough. “Such as?”

“You really want to know?”

In for a penny …
She nodded.

“I stayed with Dinah for money, for sex, and to get off the goddamned street. That woman saved my sorry ass.” His eyes were unflinching when they met hers, challenging. “Dinah is rich and generous. I took advantage of both.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“Most people believe what they want to believe. Especially when the truth isn’t pretty.”

Keeley knew he was back to her mother, the ugliness at Mayday House.

“It’s late.” He headed for the door. “I’m going to check the house and go to bed.” His cold eyes met hers. “If you’re smart, you’ll leave this”—he gestured at the files on her desk—“and do the same.” End of conversation.

Keeley watched him go. The idea of Dinah, or anyone else, saving August Hammond refused to play through, although one thing was clear, in Gus’s mind he owed Dinah Marsden. He might not like it, but something in him wouldn’t let him escape it, which made it unbelievable he’d come here on behalf of her ex-husband. It didn’t make sense, because there wasn’t a chance Gus would turn on Dinah, for Hagan. Or her.

Yet, she trusted him.

She’d always thought herself a realist, pragmatic to a fault, but maybe Gus was right. Maybe she was one of those people who believed what they wanted to believe, when the truth was too frightening to contemplate.

She walked to her desk, sat down, and pulled the stack of files toward her, determined to work, but her mind refused to leave the enigma that was Gus.

Keeley didn’t know much about men, but she had a sense for souls, and she sensed his was a good one; torn and tattered, perhaps, but whose wasn’t?

She tapped her chin with a pen she’d picked up.

Then again, maybe she was seeing what she wanted to see, because she was starting to feel something for him—which wouldn’t do either of them any good, of course. No future in it.

She sat back in her chair, wooden and oddly regretful. Women thoughts, she decided, invading along with attraction and the insecurities that came with it. On the attraction issue, she was definitely pragmatic.

Gus moved in a different female-sphere than the one she inhabited, a sphere populated with beautiful, sophisticated, confident women—women who wore designer clothes, drank five-dollar cups of coffee, and knew exactly what they wanted.

Confident, Keeley was. But sophisticated? She wasn’t sure what the word meant, but she’d bet it was the polar opposite to a woman who’d gone from a nun’s habit to the khaki and cotton fashion of Africa. A woman dedicated to a rundown outdated women’s refuge in a small town.

Okay, so she liked the man, liked the way his mouth felt on hers, liked the way his kiss took her breath away. It was irrelevant. All of it.

They were mismatched, out of sync, and psychically incompatible. All the kisses in the world wouldn’t change that—because, like it or not, she’d have to watch those shifting loyalties of his.

They were too much like her own for comfort.

She opened a file and set to work.

Gus walked the perimeter of Mayday House three times. Still edgy, he went through the hedge to St. Ivan’s graveyard. It was a fairly decent night, no rain, just the ever-present threat of it embedded in the scudding clouds overhead. But tonight they were thin clouds, and few, so the moon had some say in the night’s lighting, giving it a pewter tone with a host of murky shadows. A horror-meister’s delight.

Looking at the haphazard headstones and grave markers, all of them slate dull under the moon’s scant light, he had a flash of envy for the people resting under them—finally out of reach of their demons and their anger. Their lust.

Fuck!

He should have kept his mouth shut.

He’d talked more about his life in the last hour than he had in his whole rotten life. Rubbing the back of his neck, he stared down sightlessly at the grave at his feet and admitted an unsettling truth.

He wanted Keeley Farrell. More than he’d ever wanted a woman in his life before, and it wasn’t about sex—that he’d handle. It was more—and it scared the bejesus out of him.

He was losing it, at the worst possible time. He had a chance, a real chance, of finding April, and he was screwing it up by spilling his guts to the last woman on earth he should be talking to about it. What had Hagan called her? The keeper of the keys. Yeah. She was that all right. And one of those keys might lead to April.

He had to get the information he needed. If it implicated Dinah, and after her reactions today, he was damn sure it would, he’d figure a way to handle it. Dinah was guilty of something; he just didn’t know what. Yet. The proof was buried in Mayday House—either in those endless files, or six feet under those weeds in the backyard.

His gut constricted, and he walked a few paces along the path between the graves. Keeley was right about one thing; it would take more than one woman to deal with the dead weight of a man’s body. There had to be an accomplice. Keeley’s mother? Maybe, but a real long shot; she had no stake in the game.

For now his money was on Dinah.

Why else would she have adopted Christiana out illegally? Paid off Mary Weaver all these years? And why did she still lie about having a kid? He shook his head. Hell, she’d even lied about where she was born. And in his experience lies didn’t sleep alone.

All speculation, Hammond. You’ve got no damn proof, and no way are you going to hang the woman before you do.

The trouble was, no matter how it turned out, Keeley got hurt.

His chest loaded up with lead, and he rolled his head to ease the tension in his neck. It was far too late in the game for him to develop a conscience, and a damned inconvenient time to go juvenile, get some weird goddamn crush on a nun.

Light exploded against his eyes.

He squinted against it.

“I’ll assume the best—that you’re not here to dig up the blessed dead for some nefarious scientific purpose.” The voice came from behind the light. “But may I inquire as to your purpose here?”

The light didn’t move; neither did the state of Gus’s blindness in the face of it. “Your graves are safe from me. I’m staying at Mayday House.” He lifted a hand to shade his eyes. “Gus Hammond.”

“Ah, yes, Keeley mentioned you.”

That surprised him, and while he was curious enough to wonder what she’d said, he didn’t ask. “And you are?”

The pierce of the light hit the ground, swept the grass on the grave between them. “Father Glen Barton. I run this show,” he said. “Although it doesn’t generally draw a crowd after midnight.”

Gus scanned the dreary yard, the tilting gravestones. “I can’t understand why not.”

His dry remark brought a brief chuckle. “Now that we’ve ascertained you’re not a grave robber, what brings you here at this—pardon the expression—ungodly hour of the night?”

“A late-night walk. Some air. I’ll be moving along now. Let you rest in peace.”

The priest laughed again. “I’d rather not that. Yet.” He took a step forward, offered his hand. As Gus took it, he added, “Fine woman, Keeley Farrell.”

“Excuse me?” Their hands unclasped.

The voice, as Gus’s eyes adjusted, now had a tall, dark shape surrounding it. The priest went on, “She was a fine nun, too. Or so I’m told.”

“I’m sure she was.”

“Good to think someone of her caliber will be running Mayday again. The world needs havens like that—and this graveyard. Good reminders.”

Gus bit on the last one. “Reminders of what?”

He turned his light on the gravestone between them. “That no matter what route we take, we all end up in the same place. Like the good lady resting here.” The name on the gravestone was Aileen Farrell. In the dark he hadn’t noticed. Or had he?

“On that upbeat thought,” Gus said, “I’m out of here.” He turned to go; talking to priests in midnight graveyards wasn’t his idea of fun. Plus he had a cellar full of records waiting for him. Keeley was probably already down there. No way would she take his advice and go to bed.