A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(230)

“To her.” Cherokee completed Deborah’s thought. “Yeah. Right. But what did I ever...? No. When she used that oil, she didn’t think...She didn’t know...She didn’t realise...” Hi s voi ce di ed off.

“How did you know where to find us in London?” Deborah asked him.

“She had your address. If I had trouble with the embassy or anything, she said I could ask you for help. We might need it, she said, to get to the truth.”

Which was what had occurred, Deborah thought. Just not the way China had anticipated. She’d doubtless reckoned that Simon would home in on her innocence, pressing the local police to continue their investigation till they found the opiate bottle she had planted. What she hadn’t considered was that the local police would get to the opiate bottle on their own while Deborah’s husband would take a different tack entirely, unearthing the facts about the painting and then laying a trap with that painting as bait. Deborah said gently to China’s brother, “So she sent you to fetch us. She knew how it would be if we came.”

“That I’d be...”

“That’s what she wanted.”

“To pin a murder on me.” Cherokee got to his feet and walked to the window. Blinds covered it, and he jerked at their cord. “So I’d end up...what? Like her father or something? Was this some big trip of revenge because her dad’s in prison and mine isn’t? Like it was my fault she got the loser for a father? Well, it wasn’t my fault. It isn’t my fault. And how much better was my own dad, anyway? Some do-gooder who’s spent his life saving the desert tortoise or the yellow salamander or what-the-hell-ever. Jesus. What difference does it make? What the hell difference did it ever make? I just don’t get it.”

“Do you need to?”

“She was my sister. So, yeah. I God damn need to.”

Deborah left the bed and joined him. Gently, she took the cord from his hands. She raised the blinds to fill the room with daylight, and the distant sun of December struck their faces.

“You sold her virginity to Matthew Whitecomb,” Deborah said. “She found out, Cherokee. She wanted you to pay.”

He made no reply.

“She thought he loved her. All this time. He kept coming back no matter what happened between them and she thought that meant what it didn’t mean. She knew that he was cheating on her with other women but she believed that, in the end, he’d grow out of all that and want to be with her.”

Cherokee leaned forward. He rested his forehead against the cool pane of the window. “He was cheating,” Cherokee murmured. “But it was with her. Not on her. With her. What the hell did she think? One weekend a month? Two if she got real lucky? A trip to Mexico five years ago and a cruise when she was twenty-one? The *’s married, Debs. Has been for eighteen months and he wouldn’t f*cking tell her. And there she was hanging on and on and I couldn’t...I just couldn’t be the one. I couldn’t do that to her. I didn’t want to see her face. So I told her how it all came about in the first place because I hoped that would be enough to piss her off and break her away from him.”

“You mean...?” Deborah could hardly stand to complete the thought, so horrific it was in its consequences. “You didn’t sell her? She only thought... Fifty dollars and a surfboard? To Matt? You didn’t do that?”

He turned his head away. He looked down into the car park of the hospital, where a taxi was pulling into the loading zone. As they watched, Simon got out of the car. He spoke to the driver for a moment, and the taxi remained behind as he approached the front doors.

“You’ve been sprung,” Cherokee said to Deborah.

She insisted, “Did you not sell her to Matt?”

He said, “Got your things together? We c’n meet him in the lobby if you’d like.”

“Cherokee,” she said.

He replied, “Hell, I wanted to surf. I needed a board. It wasn’t enough to borrow one. I wanted my own.”

“Oh God,” Deborah sighed.

“It wasn’t supposed to be such a big deal,” Cherokee said. “It wasn’t a big deal for Matt, and with any other chick it wouldn’t have been a big deal either. But how was I supposed to know how China would take it, what she’d think was supposed to grow out of it if she ‘gave’ herself to some loser? Jesus, Debs, it was just a screw.”

“And you, in effect, were just a pimp.”

“It wasn’t like that. I could tell she had a thing for him. I didn’t see the harm. She wouldn’t ever have known about the deal if she hadn’t become a roll of human Glad wrap throwing her life away on a stupid son of a bitch. So I had to tell her. She gave me no choice. It was for her own good.”

“Like the deal itself?” Deborah asked. “That wasn’t all about you, Cherokee? What you wanted and how you’d use your sister to get it? It wasn’t like that?”

“Okay. Yeah. It was. But she wasn’t supposed to take it so seriously. She was supposed to move on.”

“Right. Well. She didn’t move on,” Deborah pointed out. “Because it’s tough to do that when you don’t have the facts.”

“She had the damn facts. She just didn’t want to see them. Jesus. Why couldn’t she ever let anything go? God, everything festered inside her. She couldn’t get past how she thought things should be.”