He’d sent her an e-mail knowing that he had learned about it long after the funeral. No flowers to send—even if he had known where to send them.
Now, of course, he’d have to find Kelsey, wherever she was. Probably still in California—she had become a cartoonist, he’d heard. Naturally—she’d always been a good artist. He’d find a phone number; it was one thing to send sympathy in a note after the fact; it was quite a different matter to tell her about a death that way. He didn’t know what she would feel; Liam was pretty sure that she hadn’t seen Cutter Merlin since she’d left Key West.
“Odd,” Valaski announced.
“What’s odd?” Liam asked, walking toward the M.E.
“Looks like a coronary, but…”
“Yeah?”
“It looks as if he were…scared to death,” Valaski said.
“He was an old man, and he probably wasn’t under any medical care,” Liam said. “He might have been suffering from delusions.”
“Hmm,” Valaski said, agreeing. “Odd, though—a man who lived with a mummy, shrunken skulls, coffins and voodoo offerings. Stuffed animals. Bones. Petrified flesh. You wouldn’t think he’d scare easy.”
“He was old,” Liam said softly. Old and forgotten.
“Yes, of course. But what’s really odd…”
His voice trailed off, as if he were deep in thought. Or memory.
“Valaski?” Liam prompted.
Valaski looked up at him. He seemed to give himself a shake, physically and mentally.
“Nothing. Nothing, really. It’s just that… Well, he seems to be wearing the same expression I saw on his daughter’s face. You remember her. Chelsea Merlin Donovan. I’ll never forget. She was such a beautiful woman. She fell down the stairs—down that beautiful curving stairway right there. She died of a broken neck, and yet… Well, she had this exact same expression on her face. I remember it as if it were yesterday. Her husband was holding her, tears streaming down his face. She had fallen…and yet her eyes were open, her lips just ajar…and she seemed to be staring at the most terrifying thing in the universe. Just like Cutter here. Good God, I wonder what it was that they saw?”
1
Kelsey Donovan was at home, working beneath the bright light above her drafting desk, when her phone rang. She answered it distractedly.
“Yes?”
“Kelsey? Is this Kelsey Donovan?”
It was odd, Kelsey thought later, that she didn’t recognize Liam Beckett’s voice the minute he called, but, then again, it had been a long, long time since she had heard it, and they’d both been basically children at the time.
His voice was low, deep, confident and well-cultured, with the tiniest hint of the South. Naturally—they were from the southernmost city in the United States, even if that city had never been completely typically Southern or typically anything at all. Key West was an olio of countries, times, and people, and accents came from across the globe.
And still…
“It’s Liam.”
“Liam Beckett?”
“Yes, Kelsey. Hello. I’m sorry to be calling you. Well, I’m not sorry to be calling you, I’m just sorry because of…the news I have to give you.”
Her heart seemed to sink several inches down into her stomach.
“It’s Cutter, isn’t it?” she asked.
“I’m afraid so, Kelsey.” He was quiet a minute. “I’m afraid he died a couple of days ago. We just found him.”
A heart couldn’t sink lower than into the stomach, could it? It seemed that the depths of her body burned with sorrow and regret. It was human, she tried to tell herself, to put off until tomorrow what should have been done today. She hadn’t gone back.
Why in hell had she never gone back? She had meant to, she had promised Cutter Merlin, her only living relative, that she would do so. And yet…
Even after her father had passed away, there had been that dark, empty place that had made her afraid to do so.
“Kelsey? Are you there?”
“Yes, I’m here. I’m… Thank you. Thank you for calling me.”
“Of course.” He was silent, and then he cleared his throat awkwardly. “Well, there are matters, of course, that must be dealt with. The property is yours—and the decision on the final arrangements for his interment are yours as well, of course.”