“Asked you what?”
“What I said to Genevieve. No one else cared if I meant to clean up or not. That was really nice of you.”
“You could probably get yourself a real job, with or without Genevieve,” he said.
“Yeah? I have great references. ‘John Q. says I’m a great lay,’” she said dryly. She flushed, then dug into her small handbag. She produced a scrap of paper, a receipt from a coffee house, and scratched down a number. “If you think I can help you again, call me.”
He accepted the paper. “Thank you. Are you sure you don’t remember anything else about the car? Can you take a guess on the color?”
“Black. I think it was black,” she said. Then she sighed. “I’m just not sure.”
“Okay. Thank you. Really.”
She touched his face, her eyes soft. “No, thank you, sweetie. You treated me nice. Real nice. And I’m serious. You call me.” She gave him her dry smile once again. “And that wasn’t a come-on. Good night.”
She hopped out of the car.
He drove on down the street, past the site of the new dig. At night, it seemed huge, protected behind quickly rigged barbed wire. Hardly aware of what he was doing, he slid into a spot along the curb, stepped out of the car and started walking, making mental notes as he went.
Eileen Brideswell might just be right. Her niece had been working with prostitutes in the same area where a number of hookers had gone missing. She had been picked up by a dark, probably black, sedan off the street—in that same area. He needed Robert Adair’s notes; he needed to know if any friends of the other missing girls had seen them getting into a dark sedan.
He kept walking, using the time as he often did to make sense of what he had learned.
He found himself standing in front of Hastings House once again, as if brought there by instinct.
Well, that was crazy as hell. What could Hastings House have to do with the disappearance of Genevieve O’Brien?
The place just bugged him, that was all. He couldn’t shake the feeling that the blast had been intentional and Matt had been the intended target.
And that someone was getting away with murder.
He stood beneath the streetlight, staring at the house. It seemed to live and breathe; the old colonial windows were like eyes, the door like a mouth.
Unease filled him. Eileen Brideswell was right, he thought. Her niece had been the victim of foul play. Just as the prostitutes had been.
Someone was getting away with murder.
Just like at Hastings House.
At first Leslie slept deeply. Then, suddenly, she discovered that she was wide awake.
She glanced at her travel alarm on the Duncan Fife reproduction by her bed. Four in the morning. Much too early to get out of bed.
She plumped her pillow, but sleep wouldn’t come. After half an hour she sighed and gave up. She slipped on a robe and went quietly downstairs.
So far, she hadn’t gone into the room where the explosion had taken place. Was she ready for that?
Did she want to reach Matt?
In the entryway, she hesitated, then went into the first room off the entryway, now set up as a Colonial parlor. There was a love seat beneath the window, a table in the center of the room, a pianoforte to one side, and various chairs, along with a tea table. She stood there in the shadows and the diffuse glow cast by the the security lights. “Hello?” she said softly.
But the room was just a room, an image of a past that might or might not have been exactly as it was represented now.
She walked through the connecting door to the dining room, thinking that last night was now just a moment in history, like everything else.
Then she walked through the kitchen and back to the servants’ pantry.
The hearth had been rebuilt. She could almost imagine Matt standing by it the way he had that night. She could almost see herself nearby, held captive in a different conversation. In her mind’s eye, she could almost see…
But the room was silent. Just a room.
“Not even a Colonial gentleman here, huh? The lady of the house?” she said aloud.
Just an empty room.
She walked back into the kitchen, found the coffeepot and the coffee, and thought that if the supplies belonged to Melissa, the ticket-seller, she would make a point of replacing them. She set a pot of coffee on to brew. Upstairs, in her room, which wasn’t part of any tour, she had a television. She could sip coffee and watch an early-morning news show soon.
That settled, she hummed while she made coffee, thinking that she might turn and see a ghost at any time. But the coffee brewed, and she saw nothing. She found a large cup, filled it, added cream that she found in the artfully disguised refrigerator and headed back up the stairs.
She set her coffee down and turned on the television, then walked to the window and looked idly down at the street. Her heart stopped.
There was a man on the sidewalk, standing under the streetlight.
Matt.