She sat back and viewed him as if trying to see the real man.
Uncomfortable; he sometimes thought he didn’t know the real man, that he had allowed his aunt and uncle to create him in their images: in reflections of greed, gluttony and self-interest. If that was true … she should be afraid.
Merida made some kind of inner decision and sat up straight. She was no longer crying. She signed briskly and matter-of-factly. “I was in an accident. My face was badly damaged. Badly. I was unrecognizable and … grotesque. Nauplius arranged for me to … look like a normal person again in exchange for my service as his wife.”
“Wow.” That explained a lot in a horrible way.
“I signed a contract.”
“You were an indentured servant.”
“Exactly. Drink?” She offered him the bottle.
He took it and drank, appreciating the fact that she shared something lovers shared. Perhaps he was optimistic, but he would read her gesture as belief in him and his good intentions.
She signed, “Carl heard Nauplius say that a wife’s life ended with her husband’s death. Carl said he believed Nauplius put out a contract on my life, to be executed upon Nauplius’s own death.”
“That’s crazy!”
Merida waved her arm up and down her figure, then around her face, and nodded.
“Yes. If he … used your misfortune to create the woman he wanted, then … yes, he was crazy.” Benedict sorted through his thoughts, put some aside to examine when this crisis had ended. For now, the body next door was what mattered. “Do you believe what Carl Klineman told you? That Nauplius had placed a bounty on your head?”
“For a very long time, I had hoped for the day of Nauplius’s death, and prepared. When it came, I left. Vanished. Within twenty-four hours, a woman on Nauplius’s legal team was gruesomely murdered. Perhaps that means nothing. But she was beautiful and she was slashed to death.” Merida gave an exaggerated shudder. “So yes, I believe Carl.”
“Unless he did it.”
Merida nodded, up and down, the motion slow and exaggerated. “Carl said he knew a couple of the assassins Nauplius had investigated, but hadn’t been able to ascertain who was hired. Carl searched, found me here. He said he came after me to protect me. He said he wasn’t the only one who had found me. The contract killer had found me, too.”
“That’s when the killings started in Virtue Falls. Women. Faces slashed.”
Again Merida pressed the tip of her nose. “Carl wanted to take me away, help me vanish permanently. I didn’t trust him. How could I? All those years, he did Nauplius’s bidding. He watched me, kept me from escaping even for a moment. I couldn’t go out to shop, to eat, to work out, without Carl trailing after me.”
“Did you never try to escape?”
“You knew Nauplius by his reputation. Do you not believe he would somehow have found me and made me suffer? Made me pay for humiliating him in the eyes of the world, the runaway wife who left her aging husband and his fortune behind?”
“It would never have occurred to me that he would kill you. Although now…” Benedict considered what had happened recently in Virtue Falls. “Yes, Nauplius would have found a way to make you miserable.”
“So miserable.” She looked down at her hands, then slowly signed, “Also … I did sign the contract in good faith. Nauplius did what he’d promised—he rescued me from a life spent looking like a scary Halloween mask. After our marriage, every year, he put money into an account, showed me the proof, advised me on my investments but allowed me to invest as I wished. I believed it was completely likely I would outlive him and be free to live my life. And Nauplius said, with some justification, that Carl kept me safe. I was, after all, the wife of a very wealthy man and kidnappers are notorious for mutilating and killing their victims.”
“You believe Carl could have been the killer Nauplius hired—yet every night you sneaked through the hedge to spend time with Carl.”
She jerked, flung her chin up, as if Benedict had prodded her with an electrode.
Good. She was shocked. “Yes,” he said. “I saw you. Every night since I’ve arrived, no matter what else you’ve done—worked, visited with your friend Kateri, gone on a date with me—afterward you pulled on your most casual clothes and your black hoodie and visited Carl Klineman.”
“He could have killed me the first time he pulled me through the hedge, couldn’t he? But he didn’t. So I mostly believed he was sincere. Not enough to go with him, but enough to go to him when he wanted me to…” She erased that with a gesture. “He insisted I train in self-defense. He said if I wasn’t going to listen to him and leave Virtue Falls, I needed to be prepared to defend myself. Carl had taught me a little when Nauplius was alive. He almost got fired for that; Nauplius didn’t approve of a woman who could fight back. But over the last few nights, Carl sharpened my skills. I thought I was safe.” She smiled, but it was wobbly and rueful. “Until I threw a side kick at you and you blocked it.”
“It was a solid kick. But I’m a third degree black belt. Some nights of working with Carl can’t compete.” Benedict was factual.
“So I can’t compete against a black belt. But Carl Klineman was Nauplius’s bodyguard. He was the best. How did someone manage to kill him? Whoever it is—”
“Is scary.” She had a point, not one that he liked, and she had admitted something she did not intend. “I said you were using me, and I was right. You believed an assassin was after you and you were using me as a shield.”
“I believed Carl about the assassin, and yes, I used you as a shield.”
“Why?”
“You know why.”
He did. “Because I want you. So you trust me not to kill you.”
She scooted forward on the ottoman, signed with her hands between her face and his. “I also trust you to make me forget.”
“Forget what?”
“Forget everything but you.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Merida expected enthusiasm, passion, kissing, sex … forgetfulness.
Instead Benedict stood, walked to the window and looked out.
Feeling instantly stupid and rejected, she scrambled to her feet. Maybe, once she’d asked, he was no longer interested. Some men needed the chase. Benedict had not been that way before, but for them, “before” was many years ago.
Maybe, after hearing the sordid details of her marriage to Nauplius Brassard, he wasn’t interested. Or maybe he intended to kill her now. She wouldn’t have thought so, not without sex, but when it came to Benedict Howard, she had proved herself woefully inadequate in reading his character.
Still. She stood there, feeling awkward, thinking she should call the police herself, knowing she had just discovered a body, one she could not explain and didn’t dare try.
Benedict walked to the light switch and flipped it down.
Now, in the distance, Merida heard police sirens.