Heroes Are My Weakness(87)

“As a way of punishing you.”

He hunched his shoulders. “I’m getting cold. I’m going inside.”

The man who’d once stripped off his sweater and stood bare-chested in the snow was suddenly cold? “Not yet. Finish the story.”

“I already have.” He strode away from her and into the turret.

She pulled the photographs from her pocket. They burned her cold fingers. She gazed at them through the gray swirl of snow, then opened her hands. A gust of wind plucked at her palms and carried them away. One by one, they drifted into the muck at the bottom of the swimming pool.


AS SOON AS ANNIE WENT inside, Livia demanded her attention. Annie drew cartoons for her while her mind reeled from what she’d learned and brooded over what she still didn’t know. Predictably, Theo had only gone so far with his story. She’d have to pry the rest out of him. Maybe telling it would chip away at the icy wall he lived behind.

She planted a kiss on Livia’s head. “Why don’t you go do a puppet show for your stuffed animals?” She pretended not to notice Livia’s frown as she got up from the table.

Even before she entered the turret, she could hear rock music. She let herself into the living room. The music was coming from Theo’s office. She climbed the steps to the third floor and knocked but got no response.

The music was loud, but not so loud he couldn’t hear. She knocked again, and when he still didn’t respond, she tried the knob. She wasn’t surprised to find it locked. The message was clear. Theo had finished talking for the day.

She thought it over. The music switched from Arcade Fire to The White Stripes. Out of nowhere, the screech of a terrified cat ripped through the air, quickly followed by the kind of agonizing sound only an animal in the worst kind of peril could make.

The door flew open. Theo dashed out onto the landing looking for his cat. She slipped inside as he raced down the steps.

He had tossed his coat over the black leather ottoman that sat in front of his writing chair. His desk was neater than the last time she’d been here, but then he’d been doing most of his writing at the cottage. A few CD cases lay on the floor by the easy chair. The telescope stood in the window overlooking the cottage, but now she found the sight reassuring instead of menacing. Theo the protector. Trying to shield his mentally ill sister, rescue his crazy wife from herself, and keep Annie safe.

She heard his footsteps coming back up the stairs, moving with a slower, more purposeful tread. He appeared in the doorway. Stopped there. Gazed across the room at her. “You didn’t . . .”

She wrinkled her nose, going for cute. “I can’t help it. I have crazy-mad skills.”

His eyebrows slammed together. He advanced ominously into the room. “I swear . . . If you pull that on me one more time . . .”

“I won’t. At least I don’t think I will. Probably not.” Unless I have to, she thought.

“Just to ease my mind . . .” he said, through gritted teeth. “Where is my cat?”

“I’m not completely sure. Probably asleep under the studio bed. You know how he likes it there.”

Theo seemed to realize that—as much as he might want to do her just a little bodily harm, it wasn’t in his nature. “What the hell am I going to do with you?”

She went on the attack. “I’ll tell you what you’re not going to do. You’re not going to knock yourself out trying to take care of me. I appreciate the thought, but I’m able-bodied, relatively sane—at least in comparison—and I take care of myself. The way I’m doing it might not be pretty, but I’m doing it, and I’m going to keep on doing it. No heroics are necessary on your part.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

And maybe he didn’t. He seemed to view himself as the villain instead of the protector, but if she pointed that out to him, he’d likely dismiss it.

She plopped down into his writing chair. “I’m hungry. Let’s get this over with.”





Chapter Nineteen


GET THIS OVER WITH?” ONCE again his eyebrows went on a collision course. “You want to know if I killed Regan.”

The only way she could get Theo to tell her the rest was to goad it out of him. “Don’t play games with me. You didn’t kill her.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I know you, O master builder of fairy houses.” And she did. In so many ways she hadn’t until now.

He blinked. She cut him off before he could deny what he’d done for Livia. “You put your horror on the page. Now stop trying to distract me with all your phony menace, and tell me what happened.”

“Maybe I’ve told you as much as I want to.”

He sneered just like Leo, but she wasn’t put off. “You and Regan had both just graduated from college,” she said. “And not the same college. How did you manage to pull that off?”

“I threatened to ditch college altogether if she didn’t agree that we’d split up. I said I’d backpack around the world without telling anyone where I was going.”

She loved that he’d been able to do that much to protect himself. “So you went to different schools . . .” It didn’t take a crystal ball to figure out what happened next. “And you met a girl.”