“We’d love to hear about how you got out,” Noelle said. “But first, who was in there with you?”
“Another dried-up old prostitute,” Tallulah said, and despite the insult, there was obvious affection in her voice, and a heavy dose of sadness. “Iris. Real name, too, just like mine. Some people don’t believe my name is really Tallulah, but it is. Tallulah and Iris, we said. Iris and Tallulah. Sounds like one of those froufrou clothing lines for babies who don’t ever play in dirt. Poor things.” She looked away, but Noelle saw the brief flash of grief. She was pretty sure that expression had not been in response to the poor germ-insulated babies but rather to the mention of Iris.
Another prostitute.
Interesting.
“What happened to Iris?” she asked.
“She didn’t make it out,” Tallulah said. “They shot her in the back. She was behind me. Right behind me. We were almost to the door. Old bat was slow as molasses.” She put her face in her hands for a moment before sitting upright, expression grieved as her shoulders raised and lowered.
Stan arrived at the table with their drinks on a tray, and Noelle was grateful for the timing and that it gave Tallulah a chance to compose herself.
Tallulah picked up her drink and took a long sip through the straw. “Anyway, I was injured, but I made it out. They didn’t come after me. I was surprised, to be honest, but grateful too. The police went back the next day, and there was nothing there. Not a sign. They made it disappear in twenty-four hours. They said I must have the location wrong. There were no cages, no body of an old sweet prostitute with a heart as big as the moon.” That flash of pain again. “Nothing,” she said. “Not a damn thing.”
God, she couldn’t even consider what it would have felt like to leave without Evan. Everything—everything—about her life would be different. Noelle was intimately aware of the friendship and connection forged, and grieved for Tallulah. “How’d you manage to get out of the cages?” Noelle asked softly.
Her eyes brightened, heavy lashes bobbing. “I used my wits,” Tallulah said. “I engaged the guy with the key. I was always good with sweet talk. My gramps used to call me a silver-tongued devil, said I could sell ice cubes in a snowstorm.” She laughed. “I mighta done big things. Better things. But then drugs came along, and well . . .” She shrugged, and though Noelle could see she’d once been beautiful, time and poor choices had taken a toll. At least she still managed to be colorful, even if she was doing it in the back corner of a musty bar.
“So you engaged the jailer . . . ,” Evan said.
Tallulah nodded, taking another long sip of her drink and then looking off behind Evan into the gloom. “Yeah. I might not have even tried if I didn’t keep getting these gifts with my meals that reminded me of who my gramps had seen me as.” She looked at Evan, and her whole face seemed brighter. “It was almost like Gramps himself was sending me signs from above somehow, you know? You got this, Lula-bug, I heard him saying. Remember who you are. And I did. For a little while anyway. I did.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Evan dropped his duffel bag on the bed and walked to the window and then pulled the heavy curtain aside. The window was tinted, and so although it was midafternoon, it looked like it was early evening. Par for the course in a gambling town, where it was in the casinos’ favor to trick people’s bodies into thinking it was perpetual night. Perpetual party hour.
“So what do you think?” Noelle asked from behind him. He turned from the window, watching her for a moment as she sat down on the bed, opening a bottle of water and taking a swig.
“I think Tallulah experienced the same thing we did.”
“If she’s not making it up.”
“The police thought she was.”
She screwed the top back on the bottle, her expression thoughtful. “Evan, is it possible that the man you spoke with in prison, and/or Tallulah Marsh, read about what happened to us and used the details from our crime to fake their own?”
“To what end?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they were involved in something they were trying to cover up.”
“But both of them went to the police on their own. They weren’t arrested or even questioned for something else. I can’t think of a motive for faking their story. Especially since nothing ever came of it.”
“True,” she said. “But people fake crimes for different reasons. Just because nothing came from it doesn’t mean there wasn’t intention . . . to get attention or . . . who knows. People do weird things all the time for reasons that are hard to understand.”
He walked to the desk across from the bed and turned the chair toward her before sitting down. “But both of them? I had the same thought about Lars, even though my instinct was that he was telling the truth. But we have two people now who are telling similar stories.”
She nodded, biting at her lip, her eyes meeting his. Something moved between them, a current that made the hairs on his arms stand up. They needed to stop meeting in hotel rooms like this. The thought almost made him laugh. Pretend she’s your business partner, nothing more.
Right. You used to be more honest, too, Evan.
“Did you get the feeling Tallulah was lying?” he asked, forcing his attention back to the conversation at hand.
“No.” She sighed. “But now we have two people who might have been victimized by the same people, or group or whatever, as we were, and we still have nothing to go on. The police checked out the locations, and even if they missed something in both cases, so much time has passed that even if we could persuade the local authorities to reexamine the scene, any evidence would be totally destroyed by now.”
“The weird thing is,” he said, “the police didn’t believe Lars or Tallulah because of who they are. Their stories were easily dismissed. But we were different. We were noticed. The news showed up. Articles were written. If some sort of choosing was done, why choose two people who would be high profile?”
“Especially you,” she said softly. He didn’t deny it. As the son of Leonard Sinclair, Evan’s abduction was never going to fly under any radar.
“Maybe they didn’t mean to,” she said. “Maybe they didn’t know who we were. Or who you were.”
“But again, our connection.”
“Yes. You’re right, it’s off,” she said on a sigh.
He sighed too. He felt her frustration. “We need to find someone else. We need to build more of a pattern.”
“Well, I doubt Aria’s going to be so gung ho to dig through reports for you now,” she said. There was a note of bitterness in her tone the same way there had been that morning, and it made a well of hope open within him. She was jealous. At least a little. She uncapped the bottle again and took another sip.
“Probably not,” he agreed, suppressing the smile that threatened. “Any more thoughts about why your dad might have sold your mom’s ring and given the money to Dow?” he asked, changing the subject, since they’d run out of ideas on the current one.
“I racked my brain last night,” she said, massaging her temple. “It had to be for something extremely important to my dad. Of all the money problems he had, all the bill collectors that called our house, he held on to that ring through it all. I didn’t even know, but he did. I just can’t imagine what he let it go for. Nothing makes sense.”
“Like I said before, the only thing that makes sense is if he let it go for you,” Evan said. “You would have been important enough for him to sell your mother’s ring.”