Truth or Dare (2 page)

The mental picture was a talisman that he carried against the dark forces of November that swirled around him. But part of him dreaded the future because he was pretty sure that sooner or later those forces would triumph and drive Zoe away from him.

He punched the lobby button.

“Sort of,” he said.

2

I
t had been a good day. She had not encountered any screaming walls.

For the vast majority of interior designers, “screaming walls” implied an unfortunate choice of paint color or a really bad window treatment. But for a
psychic
designer who happened to be acutely sensitive to the invisible aura left in rooms that had been scenes of violence or strong passions, the term “screaming walls” could be interpreted quite literally.

She had not set out in life with the intent of becoming an interior designer, Zoe reflected as she poured two glasses of wine. Her original plan had been to pursue a career as an art curator. But the murder of her first husband had changed everything.

She was the first to admit that she had lost control for a time
following Preston's death. What could she say? She had been a desperate woman. The cops had concluded that Preston had been shot by a transient burglar. The instant she had stepped into the cottage where the murder occurred she knew that was not what had happened. The walls had screamed bloody murder.

In her passion to see justice done, she had made the near-fatal mistake of telling everyone who would listen that Preston had been killed by someone close to him. In a desperate attempt to convince her scheming in-laws that one of them was to blame, she had told them that she could sense the terrible rage that the murderer had felt clinging to the walls of the cottage.

Big mistake.

Her wild claims of psychic talents had given her in-laws the excuse they needed to have her committed against her will to a very private, very exclusive psychiatric hospital. She knew that she was not insane when she had entered the place, but the ordeal of her stay there had very nearly turned the phony diagnosis into a reality. To this day, she still had nightmares in which she walked the halls of Candle Lake Manor.

Zoe put the two glasses of wine on a tray together with a plate of cheese and crackers. She picked up the tray and carried it out into the living room of her small apartment.

Ethan was on the sofa, leaning forward slightly, legs apart, elbows resting on his thighs. He wore a black crew-neck tee shirt and khaki pants. He held the remote loosely in one hand, absently clicking through the early evening news programs.

She remembered her first impression of him that memorable day six weeks before in October when she had walked into
his second-floor office on Cobalt Street. The interior designer in her had taken one look at him and concluded that he had a lot in common with his furniture: well-used and a little worn around the edges but definitely heirloom quality because of the solid, old-fashioned construction.

This was the kind of man who finished what he started; the kind who did not quit until the job was done. You'd have to kill him to stop him, and she did not think that would be easy.

The strong, solid, reliable part was okay, she had decided. What had worried her at the beginning were his eyes. They were amber-brown, enigmatic and intelligent; the eyes of a top-of-the-food-chain predator.

Their quickie Las Vegas wedding had been intended only as a short-term strategy to protect her from her wealthy relatives, who had a strong financial motive for seeing her dead. The decision to give the marriage a real try had come later, after all the excitement of nearly getting murdered had faded.

They had agreed to take things slowly; after all, they were well aware that each of them had brought a lot of baggage into this arrangement. It was a good bet that any reputable counselor or therapist would have advised against the marriage, and not just because it had been carried out in such haste.

Zoe wouldn't have blamed the professionals. The odds against a successful, stable relationship between an escapee from a psychiatric hospital and a man who had been married and divorced three times had to be somewhere in the vicinity of astronomically bad.

Added to those negatives was Ethan's opinion of psychics. It had been formed in the wake of his brother's murder, when a
charlatan who claimed to see visions had convinced Ethan's sister-in-law, Bonnie, that her husband was still alive. The emotional pain caused by the phony had been nothing short of devastating. Ethan's vengeful fury had been white-hot. Bonnie had confided to Zoe that she was amazed that the fraudulent psychic had survived Ethan's wrath.

And just to top it off, Ethan had once had a very bad experience with an interior designer.

But in spite of all the reasons why the marriage was probably doomed at the outset, Zoe thought, she and Ethan had decided to fling caution to the wind and take their chances. Probably because both of them had had a lot of experience with taking risks.

Up until the first of November she had convinced herself that they were going to win the big cosmic bet—they were going to make it. She had even invested in a new set of vibrant, chili-red dishes.

For the first couple of weeks of their odd marriage, they had shifted naturally and easily into a pattern that she would have described as “domestic” were it not for the fact that it was difficult to use that word when talking about Ethan. He was a lot of things, including smart, sexy and strong-willed, but he definitely did not invoke the sort of warm, cozy images implied by the term “domestic.”

Although she had kept her apartment at Casa de Oro, the two of them had spent every night together, usually out at Nightwinds, Ethan's pink monstrosity of a home. All the building blocks of a solid, stable relationship appeared to be coming together. They were learning to work around each other in the kitchen. They had discovered that they were both early risers.
Neither of them left their clothes on the floor. They both showered daily. What more could you ask for at the start of a marriage?

But things had changed with the advent of November. She sensed that Ethan was pulling back, putting some distance between them. He seemed restless and moody. She knew he wasn't sleeping well. The silences between them were no longer comfortable or companionable and there were more of them. He avoided her attempts to get him to talk about whatever it was that was bothering him.

It was as if they were involved in an affair rather than a marriage, she thought; an affair that was headed for the rocks.

Maybe it had been a mistake to start remodeling Nightwinds so soon. The decision to repaint had forced them to vacate the big house with its multiple bathrooms and large living spaces and move into her tiny apartment. Here there was only one bath and no place where either of them could go to be alone for a while.

She told herself that housing Ethan in this small, cramped space was akin to keeping a lion in a cage at the zoo. You had to expect that there would be some issues.

“How did Katherine Compton handle the final scene this afternoon?” she asked, setting the tray down on the coffee table.

“She wasn't happy about having her suspicions confirmed, but she was pretty cool about it.” Ethan clicked off the TV and set the remote down next to the tray. He picked up one of the glasses. “The hardest part for her is dealing with the fact that she allowed Dexter Morrow to get past her defenses. She told me that she felt like she'd been a fool.”

Zoe curled herself into the corner of the sofa and rested one arm along the back. “I can understand that. What did you say to her?”

He shrugged. “I reminded her that she was the one who called me and asked me to investigate Morrow. Whatever else she is, Katherine Compton is no fool. It may have taken her a while to face the problem, but in the end she took care of it like the gutsy executive she is. She'll be okay.”

“What about you?”

He had been about to take a swallow of wine but he paused, the glass a few inches from his mouth. “What about me?”

“This case seems to have gone very well. You said yourself that it was fairly routine.”

“It was.” He drank some wine and lowered the glass. “Morrow was greedy. When he started to smell the cash I was offering, he got careless.”

“If it was all so cut and dried, why is it bothering you so much?”

For a few seconds she thought that he was not going to answer her.

“Damned if I know,” he said finally.

She smiled slightly. “You know what I think?”

“No, but you're going to tell me, aren't you?”

“Of course. I consider it my duty as your wife, and you know how strongly I feel about the importance of communication in a marriage.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I think that, at heart, you're a romantic,” she said gently.

He winced. “Bullshit.”

“You had problems with this case because you knew that, in the end, your client was going to get hurt.”

“Clients get bad news from me all the time. Katherine wasn't the first and she won't be the last.”

“I know, but that doesn't mean that you like that part of the job or that you find it easy.”

He took another swallow of wine and settled into the opposite corner of the sofa. “You think maybe I'm in the wrong line of work?”

She nearly dropped the cracker she had just picked up off the plate. Her first thought was that he was joking. Then she saw his eyes.

“No,” she said. “I think you're doing the kind of work that you were born to do, the only kind that you can do.”

“Yeah?”

“Yours is a calling, Ethan.”

In spite of his obviously grim mood, his mouth twitched a little at the corner. “That's got to be the one and only time in the entire history of the world that anyone referred to the private investigation business as a calling.”

“In your case it's the simple truth. Tell me about what happened in that hotel room today.”

He ate a cracker with some cheese, took another swallow of wine and then started to talk. She listened while he described how he had lured Dexter Morrow to the room and how Katherine Compton had insisted on hiding in the bathroom against his recommendation.

“My biggest concern was that Morrow would want to use the
facilities before I got him to implicate himself,” Ethan said. “But I understood why she needed to be there so I agreed to let her wait in the bathroom. Luckily everything went smoothly. Like I said, Morrow was greedy. He didn't want to waste any time. But I sure as hell didn't offer him a beer or a bottle of water.”

“Good thinking.”

“Thanks. I was pretty proud of that bit of strategy, myself.”

He talked some more, eventually following her into the kitchen to finish his story. He lounged in the doorway, drinking his wine and watching while she put the finishing touches on the vegetable curry she had prepared.

Like a real husband
. The thought lifted her spirits.

There was one aspect of the tale that worried her.

“You're sure that Morrow won't be a problem?” she asked while she scooped the rice out of the rice maker and piled it into one of the new chili-red bowls. “He must blame you for ruining his cushy setup there at Compton.”

“I told Katherine that guys like Morrow don't hang around once the con goes sour, and that's the truth. He'll cut his losses and take off.”

Ethan sat down at the table. He examined the array of little side dishes containing curry condiments with what appeared to be real enthusiasm. Her spirits rose a little higher. Ethan's sister-in-law, Bonnie, swore by the old saying that the way to a man's heart was through his stomach. Maybe she was right.

Zoe put the platter of fragrant curry and the bowl of rice on the table. “Do you think Morrow felt anything at all for Katherine Compton?”

“Whatever it was, it wasn't strong enough to prevent him from betraying her for a couple hundred thousand bucks.”

“Obviously.” She got the salad out of the refrigerator, set it on the table and sat down across from him. “What a shame that Katherine was genuinely in love with Morrow.”

“She wasn't blindly in love.” Ethan picked up the half-finished bottle of wine and refilled their glasses. “When she realized what was going on, she did what she had to do.”

“Guess that's why she's a successful CEO of her own company.”

“Guess so.” Ethan ladled curry over the small mountain of rice he had put on his plate and helped himself to peanuts, raisins and chutney from the little dishes. “She also has the distinction of being my first major business client here in Whispering Springs, for which I am profoundly grateful.”