A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(4)

“Oh sure.” He scrambled to his feet as she passed him and went onto the porch. “Leather in the middle of a Santa Ana. Real comfortable. That makes sense.”

“That’s my last bottle of Pellegrino.” She dropped her camera cases just inside the front door. “I was looking forward to it all the way home.”

“From where?” When she told him, he chuckled. “Oh, I get it. Doing a shoot for an architect. Loaded and at loose ends? I hope so. Available also?

This is cool. Well, let me see how you look, then.” He upended the bottle of water into his mouth and examined her while he did so. When he was sated, he handed the bottle to her and said, “You can have the rest. Your hair looks like crap. Whyn’t you stop bleaching it? Not good for you. Sure not good for the water table, all those chemicals going down the drain.”

“As if you care about the water table.”

“I’ve got my standards.”

“One of which obviously isn’t waiting for people to get home before you raid their houses.”

“You’re lucky it was only me,” he said. “It’s pretty dumb to go off and leave the windows open. Your screens are complete shit. A pocket knife. That’s all it took.”

China saw her brother’s means of access into her house since, in Cherokee’s typical fashion, he’d done nothing to hide how he’d managed to enter. One of the two living room windows was without its old screen, which had been easy enough for Cherokee to remove since only a metal hook and eye had held it in place against the sill. At least her brother had had enough sense to break in through a window that was off the street and out of sight of the neighbours, any one of whom would have willingly called the police.

She went through to the kitchen, the bottle of Pellegrino in her hand. She poured what was left of the mineral water into a glass with a wedge of lime. She swirled it round, drank it down, and put the glass in the sink, unsatisfied and annoyed.

“What’re you doing here?” she asked her brother. “How’d you get up here? Did you fix your car?”

“That piece of crap?” He padded across the linoleum to the refrigerator, pulled it open, and browsed through the plastic bags of fruit and vegetables inside. He emerged with a red bell pepper, which he took to the sink and meticulously washed off before scoring a knife from a drawer and slicing the pepper in half. He cleaned both halves and handed one of them to China.

“I’ve got some things going so I won’t need a car anyway.”

China ignored the hook implied in his final remark. She knew how her brother cast his bait. She set her half of the red bell pepper on the kitchen table. She went into her bedroom to change her clothes. The leather was like wearing a sauna in this weather. It looked terrific, but it felt like hell. “Everyone needs a car. I hope you haven’t come up here thinking you’re going to borrow mine,” she called out to him. “Because if you have, the answer is no in advance. Ask Mom. Borrow hers. I assume she’s still got it.”

“You coming down for Thanksgiving?” Cherokee called back.

“Who wants to know?”

“Guess.”

“Her phone doesn’t work all of a sudden?”

“I told her I was coming up. She asked me to ask you. You coming or what?”

“I’ll talk to Matt.” She hung the leather trousers in the closet, did the same with the vest, and tossed her silk blouse into the dry-cleaning bag. She threw on a loose Hawaiian dress and grabbed her sandals from the shelf. She rejoined her brother.

“Where is Matt, anyway?” He’d finished his half of the pepper and had started on hers.

She removed it from his hand and took a bite. The meat was cool and sweet, a modest anodyne to the heat and her thirst. “Away,” she told him.

“Cherokee, would you put your clothes on, please?”

“Why?” He leered and thrust his pelvis at her. “Am I turning you on?”

“You’re not my type.”

“Away where?”

“New York. He’s on business. Are you going to get dressed?”

He shrugged and left her. A moment later she heard the bang of the screen door as he went outside to retrieve the rest of his clothes. She found an uncooled bottle of Calistoga water in the musty broom closet that served as her pantry. At least it was something sparkling, she thought. She rooted out ice and poured herself a glassful.

“You didn’t ask.”

She swung around. Cherokee was dressed, as requested, his T-shirt shrunk from too many washes and his blue jeans resting low on his hips. Their bottoms grazed the linoleum, and as she looked her brother over, China thought not for the first time how misplaced he was in time. With his too-long sandy curls, his scruffy clothes, his bare feet, and his demeanour, he looked like a refugee from the summer of love. Which would doubtless make their mother proud, make his father approve, and make her father laugh. But it made China...well, annoyed. Despite his age and his toned physique, Cherokee still looked too vulnerable to be out on his own.

“So you didn’t ask me,” he said.

“Ask you what?”

“What I’ve got going. Why I won’t be needing a car anymore. I thumbed, by the way. Hitchhiking’s gone to crap, though. Took me since yesterday lunchtime to get here.”