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“I can’t hear myself think with that blaring at me!”
He didn’t respond. He didn’t give a damn if she was stone deaf, he just hoped she’d quit yammering at him. He needed to be left alone. And he didn’t want to think about his mother. Or London. Or anything. He took another gulp of the brew. Most of the time he felt that everyone, including Trisha, was pumping him for information about the kidnapping, as if they could make him slip up and admit that he’d taken the kid. But why? And how? And where?
He didn’t trust anyone named Danvers. Maybe there was some truth about Polidori blood running through his veins, he thought with a sarcastic grimace. Wouldn’t that be something—if he really turned out to be Anthony Polidori’s son after all these years? It would explain a helluva lot—why he was Eunice’s favorite, for crying out loud. But he didn’t like the idea. Not a bit. It was true that Witt was a class A-1 bastard, no doubt about it, but Polidori was no better. For years the police had tried to connect him to organized crime.
“Turn that thing off!” Trisha screamed.
Zach ignored her request. “They have any luck trying to track down Ginny Slade’s relatives?” he asked. Jason had told him how they’d torn the nanny’s room apart. She seemed to be the key in the kidnapping. Her references had proved false and her family had all but disappeared.
“Not that I know.” Trisha angled her head, wrinkling her nose as she eyed her work. “But no one thinks she was in on it, otherwise she would have demanded money. And her checking account hasn’t been touched. Still has a couple of hundred dollars in it. She’s got savings, too, over at First National, I think. Nearly a thousand dollars. Still there.”
“How do you know so much?”
Trisha glanced at him a second. “I listen. At keyholes and open doors and air shafts.”
For the first time, Zach was interested in what his sister had learned. For years he’d thought Trisha totally self-absorbed. He assumed that she didn’t care about anything other than herself, her manicure, and her latest boyfriend or a new mind-expanding high. Though lately, come to think of it, she hadn’t gone out much. After the fiasco with Mario Polidori…Zach squinted at his sister. She was pretty, he supposed, with her thick reddish-brown hair and blue eyes. She wore too much makeup and her clothes too tight, but there was something about her that was appealing. For the most part, though, she was a pain in the ass.
At twenty, she was still taking art classes, had moved out of the house three or four times and had always returned with a broken heart, busted for drugs, or flat broke. Sometimes all three. The drug busts—mainly marijuana and once in a while a little hash—were handled discreetly and without arrest by good ol’ Detective Jack of the Portland police, and Witt had always covered her bad checks and escalating credit card balances. The broken hearts weren’t so easily mended. Trisha had a long track record of picking losers. Including Mario Polidori.
No matter what the circumstances of her latest source of rebellion, Trisha always returned—tail between her legs, fingers stretched toward Daddy’s wallet. Zach figured it was because the world, with its demand of rent and electricity payments, was too difficult for his sister. She was better off having Daddy pay the bills.
He leaned back in the chaise and regarded her. Already, she had a pinched set to her mouth that reminded him of his mother. In the past few years, ever since the Polidori mess, Trisha had changed. Zach didn’t know exactly what had happened between Mario and her, but he’d heard arguments that had reverberated through the timbers of the old house and Zach had guessed that Mario Polidori had used his sister to get back at Witt. Trisha had been an innocent, but more than willing, accomplice in the war of hate that had existed between the families for nearly a century. The feud didn’t seem to be stopping anytime soon. Not that Zach cared.
“You know, Zach,” Trisha said, spinning her easel around so he could see her work, a caricature of him as a laid-up, unshaven, generally slovenly teenager lying on a chaise lounge and swilling Coke. A blaring radio and can of Colt 45 were propped on a nearby table. “You’d better be careful.”
“Very funny,” he remarked, pointing at her picture.
“I’m not the only one who can see through you, you know.” She stuffed her charcoal back in its box. “Kat and Dad, they’re on to you. There’s a lot of talk about boarding school or sending you off to the ranch to and I quote, ‘work his butt off and keep him out of trouble.’”
“No way,” he responded. He gazed up at the thin clouds moving in from the west.
“Any way you look at it, boarding school or shoveling shit at the Lazy M beats MacLaren,” she said, mentioning the Oregon school for underage male criminals.
“Is that where they think I’ll end up?”
“I don’t know what they think, but it’s my guess, Zach. You haven’t exactly been easy to live with since you got out of the hospital and that stunt with the reporters—”
He grinned, rubbing the swollen knuckles of his fist with his other hand.
“—you’re not winning friends.”
“The guy deserved it.” Zach could still hear questions, see the cameras pointed at him as he’d tried to get out of Witt’s Lincoln and away from the reporter who had appeared from behind the hedge.
“Can you explain why you were attacked on the night your half-sister—”
He’d reacted and his fist had slammed into the guy’s jaw with a bone-jarring crunch. Blood had spurted. Pain had ricocheted up Zach’s arm and the man had fallen, groaning to the ground. There was already talk of a lawsuit.
Now, as if reading her brother’s thoughts, Trisha sighed and gathered up her easel.
“You think I kidnapped London?” he asked, telling himself he didn’t care one way or the other.
Shaking hear head and staring pointedly at the scar that still edged his face, she said, “I don’t know what you did that night, but you’re not telling the truth…not all of it, and you’re going to end up taking the blame for this one unless you come clean.”
The muscles in the back of his neck tightened because he’d thought the same thing. “Since when are you the goddess of virtue?” He took another gulp of beer, drained the Coke can and crumpled it in his fist.
Trisha pinned him with eyes that had seen too much pain for so short a life. “You don’t know anything about me, Zach. You’ve never even tried to get to know me, have you? Look, I was just trying to do you a favor, but forget it.” She headed back to the house. “I made a mistake. It’s your funeral.”
Katherine’s eyelids stuck together. Her mouth tasted like she’d been licking an ashtray and her head pounded above her temples. She forced one eye open and sunlight streaming through a partially open window, nearly blinded her. Groaning, she rolled over and wondered about the sadness that was a horrible weight on her heart.
