As usual, Graden looked gorgeous. Tonight’s attire was a simple black crewneck sweater and jeans, but he made it look like an ad for GQ.
“Hey, Rache,” he said warmly as I walked through the door.
“Hi,” I said.
“Don’t you look fantastic,” he said with a smile, leaning in for a quick kiss and a hug, which gave me the chance to notice that he not only looked great but smelled great too.
“It’s so helpful that you work with men all day,” I replied.
On the way to the club, I gave him the rundown on the events of the past few days. I’d told him during a brief phone call that Bailey and I had wound up with the Bayer case but not what we’d learned since then.
“I have a vague memory of Zack’s murder,” he remarked. “From what you’ve said, it sounds like the evidence was good enough for a conviction. I guess the jury just didn’t want to believe a woman-”
“Especially one who looked like that-,” I interjected.
“-could do something that heinous,” he finished. “My theory about why women get a pass from juries is that men don’t like the idea that women can be that cold-blooded. Wrecks our little fantasy about female helplessness.”
“Hard to believe that fantasy survived Lorena Bobbitt,” I said.
“We’re a stubborn species,” Graden said as he pulled into the parking lot at the back of the club and found a spot right outside the door.
“Yet, surprisingly, you’re not extinct,” I observed. “But I’d guess you’re at least partially right. I think that’s why Lizzie Borden got acquitted.”
“She did?” he asked incredulously as he opened the door for me.
“She walked, and no one else was ever charged.”
Graden shook his head as he followed me into the bar. “Juries.”
“I’ll drink to that,” I said.
We ordered Ketel One martinis and a basket of fries. A great quartet that featured a smoking tenor sax had already started the first set. When our drinks came, we toasted to a great night, and I felt my engine slow as the vodka did its work. I leaned back to enjoy the music. The band swung into a slow, moody rendition of “One for My Baby.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that Graden was looking at me. We exchanged a slow smile that made a warm glow start in my chest and spread out all over. Would tonight be the night we made love? I thought I might finally be ready to go there-that is, I thought with a rueful inward smile, if Graden was in the mood. It wasn’t something I felt comfortable taking for granted. I’d discovered during my relationship with Daniel that although teenage boys were ready even if they were in a coma, grown men occasionally had down days. Not often, but they did happen.
Then the band started to play “Jordu,” and I let all thoughts float away as I sank into the music. The evening passed, warm, relaxed, and intimate. But as Graden and I got into his car, he seemed a little distracted.
Our conversation was minimal, but he reached out to hold my hand on the console between us-an unfamiliar gesture. What was going on? I’d been seriously considering inviting him up to my room, but by the time he’d pulled off the freeway and headed down Temple Street, I wasn’t so sure.
“Rachel, I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but I’d like to talk to you without a crowd around,” Graden said seriously. “Would it be okay if we talked in your room?”
I would’ve made a joke about it being an obvious line, but his tone told me he wasn’t in the mood. What the hell was going on? A breakup? Had there been a death in the family? Did he have a fatal illness? An evil twin? My mind filled with questions, none of them good.
“Sure,” I said. “Of course.”
Naturally, since I was dying to get this over with, the elevator took forever. When the doors opened, he put a gentle hand on the middle of my back to guide me inside, and when they closed, he left it there and looked down at me with soft eyes. I briefly returned his gaze, then looked away, more confused than ever.
We walked toward my room at the end of the corridor in silence. Barely conscious of my movements, I let us in, picked up the remote, and turned on the radio, which was permanently tuned to Real Jazz. The strains of Stanley Turrentine playing “Little Sheri,” one of my favorites, softened the brittle silence. I put my purse on the chair near the window and unbuttoned my coat as I walked to the couch. Graden took my coat and laid it down, then held my hand as we sat on the couch. When he finally spoke, they were the last words I expected-or wanted-to hear.
“Rachel, I want to talk to you about Romy.”
36
Hearing him say my sister’s name made my heart lurch painfully, and suddenly my throat tightened. For a panicked moment, I forgot how to breathe. When I finally drew air, I found myself light-headed and unable to hear over the rushing in my ears. Graden, his expression concerned, was saying something.
“What?” I said, momentarily confused and disoriented.
How could he know about Romy? I took some deep breaths and forced enough calm for the sounds to take the shape of cognizable words.
“…wanted to know more about you. I guess I should’ve just asked you directly.” He paused and stared out the window. “But then I thought, the case doesn’t have to stay unsolved. I know the local police up there did all they could, but we’ve got more resources. Hell, I know I could get some help from the FBI on this…”
I mentally curled inward, trying not to let his words conjure the pictures, but I knew it was hopeless. The wheels began to turn, pulling me under, and the day that perpetually lurked just beneath my consciousness replayed for the millionth time in heart-clutching detail.
It was my seventh birthday. Romy, an unusually sedate eleven, was cautious and patient from birth, a counterpoint to my more impulsive and reckless nature. And, unlike my friends’ older siblings, Romy almost never got annoyed by my constant bids for attention. I hadn’t needed my parents’ reminders that I was lucky to have Romy for an older sister.
Our little two-bedroom home in Sebastopol, north of San Francisco, stood on the outer perimeter of the relatively new development of unimaginative stucco ranch houses that repeated the same three styles throughout all ten square blocks. Young as I was, I nevertheless had a dim awareness that money was scarce. My mother’s job as a bank teller didn’t bring in much, and my father, who’d just finished a stint in the army, was in his first year in college, pursuing his dream of becoming an airline pilot. But ours was a neighborhood filled with young families struggling to get a leg up, so we never felt deprived.
And it was a kind of heaven for us. Young children poured out of every house at all hours of the day, shooed outside by overworked mothers who needed some peace and quiet. And in that place, there was plenty of “outside” to play in. Our neighborhood had been carved out of a broad expanse of woods and fields that still surrounded our development, so a child’s paradise of wilderness was just steps away.
For most of the kids, the biggest draw was the old abandoned house that stood in a clearing in the middle of the woods. The ramshackle hut burned a fire in the imaginations of all the neighborhood children, its hauntingly vacant windows staring out like sepulchral eyes. Rumor had it that the owners had been murdered and/or abducted by aliens…or was it that they’d been arrested for having killed, skinned, and eaten children…exactly our ages?
But that house hadn’t intrigued me. For me, the big thrill lay a half mile away in the decidedly unmysterious chicken ranch that filled the air with feathers, stench, and the squawks of roosters at all hours. It had horses, which I, being a typical young girl, loved, as well as pigs, cows, and one surly-looking bull. The owners would sometimes let me ride the older mare with the bushy forelock that looked like a teenage girl’s overgrown bangs. But I daydreamed about sneaking a ride on the bull-though even I knew enough to keep that particular goal to myself.