Heroes Are My Weakness: A Novel

“Me?” Theo was actually addressing the puppet.

“In my defense . . .” Crumpet sniffed. “You do have a history. I still haven’t recovered from the way you made Peter look up my skirt.”

“You loved that, and you know it,” Annie told her.

Theo shook his head, as if he were clearing out cobwebs. “How do you know I’m not the one who hung you up?”

Annie finally spoke directly to him. “Did you?”

This time he remembered to look at Annie. “It’s like your friend here said . . . I have a history.”

“And I wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d come home and found Crumpet and Dilly going at it in my bed.” She pulled the puppet from her hand. “But not this.”

“You still have too much faith in people.” His mouth twisted unpleasantly. “It hasn’t even been a month, and you’ve already forgotten who the villain is in your fairy tale.”

“Maybe. Maybe not,” she said.

He stared at her, then moved past her to the studio. “I have work to do.”

He disappeared without defending himself, without denying anything.


THERE WAS NO COZY DINNER for two that night, so Annie made herself a sandwich, then moved some of the boxes from the studio into the living room. Settling cross-legged on the floor, she opened the flaps of the first box. It was full of magazines ranging from upscale glossies to long-defunct photocopied zines. Some of them contained feature stories Mariah had written or stories about her. Annie listed the name of each magazine in her notebook, along with its publication date. It seemed unlikely that any of these were collectibles, but she wouldn’t know until she checked.

The second box contained books. She surveyed them for autographs and to make sure nothing important was pressed between the pages, then added the individual titles to her notebook. It would take forever to check all of this, and she still had two more boxes to sort through.

Although she felt better physically than when she’d come to the island, she still needed more sleep than normal. She changed into a pair of Mariah’s menswear pajamas and pulled her sock monkey slippers out from under the bed. But as she stuck her foot into the first slipper, she felt something—

She yelped and jerked her foot out.

The studio door banged open. A shudder wracked her body. Theo barged in. “What’s wrong?”

“Everything!” She reached down and gingerly plucked up the slipper between her thumb and forefinger. “Look at this!” She tilted the slipper, and a dead mouse tumbled to the floor. “What kind of depraved mind does something like this!” She threw the slipper down. “I hate this place! I hate this island! I hate this cottage!” She rounded on him. “And don’t think I’m afraid of a little mouse. I’ve lived in too many rat-hole apartments for that. But I didn’t expect some sicko to leave one in my shoe!”

Theo slipped a hand into the pocket of his jeans. “It . . . might not have been a sicko.”

“You think doing something like this is normal?” She was screeching again, and she didn’t care.

“Maybe.” He rubbed his jaw. “If . . . you’re a cat.”

“Are you telling me—” She glared at Hannibal.

“Think of it as a love letter,” Theo said. “He only gives these special gifts to the people he cares about.”

Annie turned on the cat. “Don’t you ever do anything like that again, do you hear me? It’s revolting!”

Hannibal lifted his rear quarters in a long stretch, then came across the room and nudged her bare foot with his nose.

She moaned. “Is this day ever going to end?”

Theo smiled and picked up his cat. He put it out of the room into the hall and closed the door, leaving himself inside with her.

She’d grabbed her robe from a hook on the closet door. As she wrapped it around herself, she remembered an incident she’d tried to forget. “You left a dead fish in my bed.”

“Yes, I did.” He walked over to inspect the life-size mounted photograph of the carved wooden headboard that served as the real headboard of her bed.

“Why?” she asked, as Hannibal yowled outside the door.

“Because I thought it was funny.” He ran his thumb over the top edge of the photograph, giving it more attention than it deserved.

She stepped past the mouse carcass. “Who else did you torture besides me?”

“Don’t you think one victim was enough?”

She upended a wastebasket over the mouse, then went to the door and let Hannibal back in so he’d stop yowling. She didn’t need a cozy chat with Theo tonight, especially not in her bedroom, but she had so many questions. “I’m starting to believe you hate Harp House nearly as much as I do, so why did you come to the island?”

He walked to the window and looked out onto the bleak winter meadow. “I have a book to finish, and I needed a place to write where nobody would bother me.”

She didn’t miss the irony. “How’s that working out so far?”

His breath fogged the glass. “Not my best plan.”

“There’s plenty of winter left,” she pointed out. “You could still rent a beach house in the Caribbean.”

“I’m fine where I am.”

But he wasn’t. She was sick of the mysteries surrounding him, sick of how powerless not knowing more about him made her feel. “Why did you come to Peregrine? The real story. I want to understand.”

He turned toward her, his expression as cold as the frost on the window. “I can’t imagine why.”

His haughty lord-of-the-manor act didn’t intimidate her, and she managed something she hoped resembled a sneer. “Chalk it up to my never-ending curiosity about the inner workings of a pathological mind.”

He lifted an eyebrow at her, but didn’t seem overly offended. “There’s nothing more unpleasant than listening to someone with a big trust fund and a book deal whine about how tough they’ve got it.”

“True,” she said. “But the fact is, you lost your wife.”

He shrugged. “I’m not the only man that’s happened to.”

Either he was covering up, or he was as emotionally detached as she’d always believed. “You also lost your twin. And your mother.”

“She took off when I was five. I barely remember her.”

“Tell me about your wife? I saw a photo of her online. She was beautiful.”

“Beautiful and independent. Those are the women I’m attracted to.”

Qualities Annie knew little about.

“Kenley was also brilliant,” he said. “Off-the-chart smart. And ambitious. But what attracted me the most was that fierce independence.”

In the game of life, the score was clear. Kenley Harp, 4. Annie Hewitt, 0. Not that she was jealous of a dead woman, but she yearned to be fiercely independent, too. And possessing extreme beauty along with a megabrain wouldn’t hurt either.

If it had been anyone other than Theo, Annie would have changed the subject, but their relationship existed so far outside the borders of normalcy that she could say what she wanted. “If your wife had all those qualities, why did she kill herself?”

He took his time answering—nudging Hannibal away from the overturned wastebasket, checking the latch on the window. Finally, he said, “Because she wanted to punish me for making her miserable.”

His indifference fit perfectly with everything she’d once believed about him, but no longer quite rang true. She spoke lightly, “You make me miserable, too, but I’m not going to kill myself.”

“Reassuring. But unlike Kenley, your independence isn’t a false facade.”

She was trying to absorb that when he staged his own attack.

“Enough of this bullshit. Take off your clothes.”