Frost headed for the door, and Lucy hesitated, as if there was more she wanted to say. He thought she wanted to ask him out, but he knew she wouldn’t. It was too easy to follow the path you were on, rather than looking for cross-trails that might take you somewhere scary. He was like that, too.
“Well, say hi to Shack for me,” Lucy said lamely.
“I will.”
“Hey, did you ever catch the guy that killed the old woman? You know, Shack’s original owner?”
“Yeah, that was easy,” Frost told her with a grin. “He showed up at a hospital about two hours after the murder. Bleeding profusely. He had cat scratches all over his body.”
8
Frankie waited for her sister at Zingari, which was their traditional meeting spot twice a week. She had a glass of Russian River pinot noir in front of her, along with an order of cozze. That was her dinner. The jazz bar was loud, with a nighttime piano and saxophone duo rising in a mellow beat over the voices of the crowd. A candle flickered on her table. She leaned back into the cushioned bench and watched the reflections of faces in the mirrored wall.
Pam was late. As usual. But it didn’t matter. She sipped wine and lost herself in the noise. The garlic mussels were perfect.
She checked e-mails on her phone. Most of the messages were business related, which she could answer in a sentence or two. Follow-up on articles she’d published in scientific journals. Queries from colleagues. Conference invitations from around the world. She’d spoken on memory reconsolidation on nearly every continent over the past decade. In her field, she was widely known, but her fame had also brought controversy. Many of her peers disagreed bitterly with the ethics of her treatments, and they’d waged an academic war to discredit her.
Frankie didn’t care. What mattered to her was the outcomes for her patients.
Fame as a therapist had other strange side effects, too. Every night, when she scrolled through her e-mail, she found messages from ordinary people. Some were harmless. Some were desperate. Others were hate mail she’d learned to ignore. She clicked on one as she drank her wine: You are playing God. You are going to Hell, and I am praying for your salvation.
She deleted the message, along with several others in a similar vein. She kept the e-mails from people who had read her book and wanted to share stories of how their own painful memories had taken over their lives. Many wanted help, and she could reply to those from her office in the morning.
There was one message left that she hadn’t opened. The e-mail had no subject line. When she checked the date stamp, she saw that it had come into her in-box only five minutes earlier.
Frankie opened the message, which contained one line: Remember me?
There was nothing else. No signature. No attachment. She checked the return address of the sender and saw, [email protected]
Frankie’s brow furrowed with puzzlement. Something about the message unnerved her more than the others. She wasn’t sure what it was. She’d received much worse from strangers. This was nothing. And yet— She realized what was bothering her. When she checked her name, she saw that the message had come to her personal e-mail account, not the business e-mail address from her website. Her personal address was private. She gave it out only to family and friends, and to a very small number of patients whom she considered at risk of suicide. Even when she muted her phone at night, that e-mail address was programmed to ring through and alert her to a new message.
“Fan mail?”
Frankie looked up. Her favorite waiter, Virgil, hovered over her table with a bottle of wine. He had a luxuriant wave of shock-white hair that even women envied. His dark eyes were wicked, and his lips curled into a permanent smirk. He was tall and wore a tight black shirt and black pants.
She put down her phone. The battery was low, so she removed a portable charger from her purse and connected it. “Someone’s praying for my soul again.”
“Well, you and me need all the help we can get,” Virgil replied. “I figure I’m on the smite list if God gets bored. I keep looking up at the sky for a lightning bolt.”
“This is California, Virgil. When the smite comes, it’ll be an earthquake.”
Virgil spread his long arms wide. “Did you feel that? Was that a tremor?”
Frankie laughed. Virgil could always make her laugh.
“More fruit of the vine?” he asked her.
“Definitely.”
Virgil refilled her glass. His pours were generous. She was a regular, and she tipped well. The other servers at the restaurant knew that Virgil took the table whenever Frankie, Pam, and Jason came in. Frankie liked him. He was a San Francisco party child, always short of cash and crashing with gay friends. He was technically homeless, but nothing vanquished his sense of humor, which Frankie admired. He was proof that you could still live off the kindness of strangers.
“Where’s your sister tonight?” he asked.
Frankie was about to answer when a voice called from behind him: “I’m here, I’m here!”
Pam threaded her way toward the table through the Friday crowd. She had a way of parting the seas as she walked. A shopping bag from Nordstrom Rack dangled from one finger. With a toss of her long bottle-blond hair, she slid into the chair opposite Frankie and gave Virgil a grin. She slid off her sunglasses.
“What should I have tonight, V?” she asked.
“Depends. Are we looking to flirt, celebrate, or get drunk?”
“All three.”
“Sounds like a Bellini martini,” he said.
“Done.”
Virgil left, and Pam gave an exaggerated sigh as she settled herself at the table and fluffed her hair. Every motion Pam made was designed to draw attention to herself. And it worked. Around the bar, men stole glances at her. Anyone looking at the two of them could see that they were sisters, but Pam got the attention when they were together. It was partly her looks. Pam had spent some of her college money on breast implants, and she dressed to show them off. Her legs had the golden glow of time in the sun. But it was her attitude, too. Something about Pam screamed of sex.
“Where’s Jason?” Pam asked.
“He had to work late.”
Pam shook her head. “All work and no play. You should play with that boy more.”
“Life’s not all about play, Pam,” Frankie said.
Her sister rolled her eyes. Frankie couldn’t blame her. Whenever she was with Pam, she lectured her like a child. It had been that way their whole lives. When Pam needed rescuing, Frankie was there, and Frankie in turn made her feel like shit. They may as well have been jealous teenagers.
As they sat there, Frankie heard her phone ping. She had a new e-mail at her personal address. When she checked her phone, she saw that it was the same sender as before. This time he wrote, I remember you.
Her sister read her frown from across the table. “What’s up?”
“Nothing.” Frankie put down the phone and put the message out of her mind. Someone was playing games with her. “Nothing at all.”
Virgil brought Pam her martini, which had an amber glow and an orchid flower draped over the rim of the glass. Pam took a sip and licked her lips with her tongue. “Perfect, Virgil. You are my savior.”
“Sorry, Frankie and I covered religion. We’re all going to hell.”
“Dibs on that,” Pam replied.
Virgil left them alone, and Pam eyed the crowd around them, taking a survey of the male faces. When someone smiled at her, she smiled back. Frankie wanted a report on Pam’s day, but she knew she’d have to drag it out of her.
“How did the job interview go?” Frankie asked.
Pam didn’t look back. “Fine. Great. I’m sure I got it.”
“Did you even show up?”
This time, Pam stared at her, and her look was deadly. “Excuse me?”
“Did you go, or did you blow it off?”
“Of course I went.”
“If I call, is that what they’ll tell me?”
“Call them,” Pam said. She took a sip of her drink and added, “It’s so refreshing that you trust me.”
Frankie shrugged. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”