Blackbird (A Stepbrother Romance #1)(60)

“So?”

“So, my father died in a car accident when I was twelve.”

Eve’s voice goes cold. “Vic, not everything bad in your life ties back to my father.”

“Your mom died in a car accident. What kind of car accident?”

“I don’t…” she trails off. “We never spoke about it. If I asked he’d give me a few sentences, and if I bothered him…”

My hands rest on her shoulders. I can feel her shudder all the way up my arms. I squeeze, gently. She takes a deep breath. I can’t help myself and start playing with her hair. Annoyed, she tugs at my hand, but not very hard.

“That doesn’t mean much by itself,” Alicia says.

“Does he have a private office?” I ask. I leave out in my house.

“Yes, back at our house in Philadelphia. He never sold it. He lives there most of the time, now.”

I turn to Alicia. “Do you know where he is right now?”

“I’m not his assistant, but he’s going to some kind of a function tonight. He won’t be in town.”

“Okay,” I announce. “Just a little breaking and entering.”

Eve shrugs her shoulders under my hands. “I have a key.”

“Oh. Not so much the breaking, then. Just the entering.”

Eve giggles.

“Have you two eaten today?”

Eve starts snickering to herself. I can’t help it, I laugh a little, too.

“I’m serious. Kitchen. Now.”

There’s a command in her tone that I can’t ignore, for some reason. The two of us end up in her little kitchen, eating fresh pancakes while her kids watch cartoons in the next room over. They seem a little young to be on their own. Maybe half an hour later their father rolls up, and is startled to see Eve in the kitchen when he walks in. He doesn’t seem to know what to make of me. Alicia takes him aside to talk with him privately, away from us and the kids. I step away to make a phone call about my car. I have the towing company load her on a wrecker and bring her up to a garage I know that works on old General Motors cars. I’d do the repairs myself, but I don’t think I’m going to find the time in the next few hours. Once that’s done I sit at the table and feed Eve bites of pancake from my plate while she almost sits in my lap. We’re like teenagers again.

No matter what happens, at least I have this, right now.

It gets late faster than I’d like. I really don’t want Eve’s poor assistant tied up in this, so I ask her to drive us to a rent-a-car place where I pick up a nondescript Hyundai and we drive into the city. Eve’s old place isn’t actually all that far from mine, maybe a twenty minute walk, but a much nicer part of the city, all ancient row houses, big Victorians. True to her word, Eve has a key and we walk right in the front door. She locks it behind us and I lead the way, slowly. There’s no security system, or anything like that, but we leave the lights off anyway. It’ll be dark soon, and it’s already dark in the house. As I walk around, it strikes me how sterile everything is. This looks like one of those tour houses, where they invited people to walk through and gawk at old lamps. From the way Eve navigates the house, I’d say nothing has changed since she was a kid. She takes me around the corner from the entrance to a large room that takes up a whole corner of the house.

It reminds me, vaguely, of my father’s study, except the antiques are all fake. It takes a practiced eye, or growing up in a three hundred year old house, to pick up on these things. No computer, at least none sitting out.

“I was never really allowed in here,” Eve whispers.

I don’t know why she’s whispering, but I can see the fear making her tremble.

“What are we looking for?”

I shrug and start pulling at his drawers. Everything inside is inhumanly neat, like something out of an office supply catalog. Drawer after drawer.

The bottom one is fake, sort of. There’s a safe bolted into the drawer itself. I crouch down, poke at it. I have no clue what the combination might be. Damn it.

Eve taps my shoulder.

“Look.”

She’s pulled a scrapbook down from one of the shelves. She starts flipping through it.

Newspaper clippings?

I’m a little surprised to see anyone keeps stuff like this anymore. Eve whips through the pages in a flurry, skimming the articles glued to the pages. Finally she stops.

“This one is about my mother,” she says, calmly. “Here’s her picture.”

From the look on her face I can see she hasn’t seen many photographs of her mother.

“Police said it was a freak accident,” she says. Her voice tightens. “Her brakes failed and she hit a tree.”

“Her brakes,” I say.

“Jesus Christ,” Eve murmurs.

It startles me. She’s usually so proper in her speech, at least when we’re not, ah, in flagrante dilecto.

“Do you think…”

“That your father murdered your mother, then my father, and then tried to kill me, or us, the same way? Yeah, I do.”

“These articles don’t make any sense,” she says, sitting in a side chair to go over them. “I mean, the articles make sense but they’re randomly chosen. They’re from the business section, obituaries, there’s an article here about a missing person…” she trails off.