Deja Who (Insighter #1)(48)
“No, I panicked this morning when I listened to your first voicemail, Detective. As I told you.”
“Oh.” He consulted his notes again. “But you didn’t come here right away. You went to your . . . uh . . .”
“Future boyfriend, eventual husband,” Archer said, cheeks flushing just a bit. “We’re preparing to fall in love once she tackles a few problems in her life. You know how it is.”
“Not at all, actually.” Preston turned back to Leah. “So you panicked, but only enough to go see your boyfriend.”
“Yes, it was stupid.”
“Stupid?”
Argh. I know this is how they teach you to do it, all the boring repetition and the trick about repeating the last word in the witness’s statement, but I honestly would rather be getting one of It’s stupid clinic colonics right now. “Yes, stupid. I thought you were telling me Archer had been hurt. I panicked and broke my phone when I thought Archer was hurt. I put one shoe on and drove to Archer’s house and did a terrible parking job and left my keys in the ignition and the door open when I thought Archer. Was. Hurt.”
He glanced at her feet. “Yeah, I was going to ask you about that. But how would I have known to call you if Mr. Drake had been harmed?”
“You wouldn’t. Which is why my reaction was . . . wait for it . . . stupid. As I said, I panicked. When people panic, they are not especially bright, do not think clearly, make foolish decisions, and we are all prone to it. Or so I am discovering this week. No need to look so skeptical, Detective.”
“Was I?” he asked mildly, scribbling, scribbling.
“You know I’m capable of such behavior. Panicking. Overreacting. I . . .” She paused, gritted her teeth. “. . . blacked out for a bit. Earlier.”
“It sure seemed like that’s what you did.” Unspoken, but she could read him like a chart: convenient, too. The whole on-site team saw you go down, saw your brand-new lover oh-so-solicitously help you into another room where you could talk about God-knows-what until I followed.
“All right. I see it now.” That is goddamned enough. Doing your job is one thing. Willfully blinding yourself is quite another. Leah met his openly skeptical gaze, held his eyes. “It must be awful.”
“What?”
“You know, but you don’t know. You can’t ever escape the feeling that no matter how much good you do, it will never be enough. And what’s really maddening is you can’t figure it out, and you’re too scared to find an Insighter and ask.”
He looked at her. “What.”
“ReallynotthetimeLeah,” Archer muttered in one breath.
“Because really, you don’t want to know. What you did. Or didn’t do. You dream about it, though, don’t you?” she asked kindly. “And the dreams are like everything else. You can’t ever tell anyone. Of course not. But don’t worry, Detective Preston.” She dropped one eyelid in a slow wink. “Your secret is safe with me.”
First thought: That is an alarming shade of red he’s turning. I wonder when he last had his blood pressure checked?
Second thought: Huh. I’ve never been arrested before. Is he arresting me because he thinks I killed Nellie, or because I’ve made him scared and angry? Either way: this will be interesting. Better yet, it got her out of the room she hated above all others.
THIRTY-THREE
Clusterfuck!
Total, utter clusterfuck. And all Archer could do was sort of stare, horrified, and be pulled in—sucked in—like Leah’s rage and hurt was the damned tide and he was the hapless swimmer. And that made Detective Preston Jaws.
She’d been a block of ice once she recovered from her “it’s not a faint, dammit!” It was funny that the one thing in all this awfulness, the one thing about the murder that threw Leah and freaked her out was the realization that her mom, the poster mom for selfish maternity, tried to warn her only daughter as she was dying.
Her mother’s dying act had been selfless and Archer could see the exact second Leah made the connection; the color just fell out of her face and her eyes rolled up and then he was moving and sort of walking her out of the room, into the piano room. She never lost her feet but she wasn’t exactly all there, either.
He’d made her sit on the nearest bench and just sort of held her wrist to check her pulse (ninety-plus, yikes) and stroked her hair away from her face until her eyes came back and she was glaring at him and batting his hands away. Relief? Putting it mildly. It had been damn near joyful to have Leah back to her old grumpy chilly self.
And then shit got really weird. Even for a murder scene. Even for a murder scene when your mom had been murdered with your Emmy from when you were a resentful, talented child actor. That Preston cop was telling her all sorts of awful things, things that would have made anyone else throw up or cry or both, and Leah just got icier and icier. Archer wanted nothing more than to get her the hell out of there, back to his house, where he could comfort her and maybe even get her to laugh and kiss her until they were dizzy, which probably wasn’t the best way to deal with grief (if that’s what Leah was even feeling) but it wasn’t the worst, either.
And then it was like she was going out of her way to make the cop think she had guilty knowledge, when Archer knew she didn’t. And she kept calling the cop Aaron for some reason, and then made a whole bunch of guesses about him, except they probably weren’t guesses because by the time she was done Preston had the cuffs out.