Express Male

скачать книгу бесплатно


“For my livelihood, I am,” she said. “And I work at Lauderdale’s to bring in a little extra. My real love is song-writing and composing. I haven’t sold anything yet, but I haven’t been pursuing publication for very long.”

Noah nodded slowly, his mind working fast. Maybe what Gestalt said was true. Maybe Lila really did believe she was this Marnie Lundy person. Maybe she’d believed it for the past five months. She appeared to have been living in this house for some time, and the cats obviously knew her well. When he got back to OPUS, he’d run a check on the name Marnie Lundy and see what came up. See if maybe she just appeared out of thin air five months ago.

What could have happened to Lila to drive her over the edge this way? he wondered. It must have been something heinous to have messed with someone as strong—and as dangerous—as she was.

“This house reminds me of the one where I grew up,” he said.

“Really?”

No, not really. He’d grown up in the lap of luxury. His parents had employed servants who lived in bigger houses than this. “Yeah,” he lied. “Except I spent my childhood in Cincinnati.” That much, at least, was true.

“That’s a wonderful city,” she said. “I have a good friend from college who lives down there and we still try to get together once a month, either here or there.”

Of course she did, Noah thought, marveling at just how deeply a person could clinically delude herself.

“Do you mind if I have a look around?” he asked. “It would almost be like revisiting my childhood.”

She smiled at that. “Go ahead. I have to feed Edith and Henry.”

He narrowed his eyes. “You named your cats Edith and Henry?”

“Actually, my father did. After Edith Wharton and Henry James. He was a professor of literature, specializing in the Gilded Age.”

Of course he was, Noah thought. Naturally Lila, who was the offspring of a showgirl hooker and didn’t even know the identity of her father, would create such a fantasy father when she was losing her mind. It made perfect sense.

“Well, I wouldn’t want to keep Edith and Henry from their dinner. Breakfast,” he quickly corrected himself when he remembered what time it was.

Lila took off through the dining room with the cats running alongside her, and Noah headed into the hallway to check out the gallery of photographs. Most of them were old black-and-whites of people he didn’t recognize. But others, not quite as old, made his stomach go tight.

Lila. As a girl. As a teenager. In this very house. In one shot, she was wearing a graduation cap and gown, even though Noah knew for a fact—or, at least, had thought he knew for a fact—that she never formally graduated from high school. But she didn’t look old enough to be in college in the photo. And there was a man standing beside her, bearded, bespectacled, old enough to be her father—maybe even her grandfather—with one arm slung proudly over her shoulder.

In another shot, an adolescent Lila was blowing out the candles on a birthday cake that said Happy 13th Birthday…somebody. Noah couldn’t make out the name from the camera angle. In another photograph, she was elementary-school aged, standing in the backyard with the garden hose arcing water above her, wringing wet and laughing. In yet another, she looked to be in middle school, wearing a full-length gown with a corsage on her wrist, a dark-suited boy the same age standing awkwardly beside her.

And then another, much more recent photo of Lila, at a time when she should have been working for OPUS. Instead, she was sitting on the piano bench not a dozen steps from where Noah stood, a Christmas tree behind her, a glass of what looked like eggnog in her hand and fake reindeer antlers lit with red and green lights on her head. Not at all the sort of whimsy in which Lila would indulge.

Panic rose in Noah’s chest, and he strode back into the living room, to the photographs on the mantelpiece, hoping they offered more insight. But his gaze strayed instead to the bookcase, falling on a row of high-school yearbooks. Hastily, he jerked down the one closest to him, dated 1987. He did some quick mental math. Lila would have been a freshman, so he opened it to look for that class. His attention went instead to the plethora of handwriting on the inside cover, dozens of different signatures, all looking like teenaged writing, all messages inscribed to “Marnie.”

Heat splashed through his belly. Shoving pages to the left, he found the freshman class and looked not for Moreau, but for Lundy. Sure enough, Marnie was there, looking just like Lila would have looked when she was in ninth grade. Except that, knowing what he did of Lila’s life when she was that age, her expression would have been sullen, angry and scared. Marnie Lundy fairly beamed from the page, an obviously happy, well-adjusted kid.

Noah pulled down the next yearbook and found Marnie Lundy as a sophomore, and the inside covers once again obscured by good wishes from what seemed to be the entire class. The next two yearbooks held more of the same.

“Agent Tennant, what are you doing?”

Noah spun around at the question and saw Lila—no, Marnie, he made himself admit—framed by her dining-room doors, staring at him as if she were very, very sorry she had allowed him into her house.

“I’m sorry,” he apologized. And then he laughed anxiously. Boy, was that an understatement. “I mean…” He faltered, studying her again. She was Lila. But…not. She looked like her, sounded like her, even moved like her. But she wasn’t her.

“You’re not Lila,” he said, knowing the declaration must sound ridiculous to her. “You really are Marnie Lundy.”

“I know that,” she said, her voice edged with impatience. “That’s what I’ve been telling you all night. I thought you realized it. I thought that was why you let me come home.”

He shook his head. “I didn’t realize it until this minute,” he told her. “I thought I was humoring a delusional agent who would break under the pressure of having to confront her delusion.”

“You thought I was crazy Lila?” she translated.

He expelled a single, humorless chuckle. “Yeah. Instead, I find that you’re…”

She settled her hands on her hips, shifting her weight to one foot, and glared at him. It was a gesture he’d seen Lila perform too many times to count. But it wasn’t Lila doing it this time.

Then another thought struck him. He and Zorba and Gestalt had told this woman all kinds of things tonight about OPUS, convinced that they were telling Lila things she already knew. Marnie Lundy knew some pretty sensitive stuff about the organization and Lila’s disappearance. She knew Noah’s name. She knew his code name. She’d seen their operation, if only from a limited standpoint. If she tried very hard, she might even be able to retrace her steps to the cabin in the woods.

“I’m what?” she demanded.

But Noah honestly had no idea what to say. Except maybe, “You’re not the woman I’m looking for.”

IT WAS MIDMORNING before Marnie’s head finally stopped feeling fuzzy over everything that had happened in the past twelve hours. In the meantime, Noah Tennant had requested and inspected as many of her personal documents as she could pull from her filing cabinet, from the deed to her house to her and her father’s wills to the checking account on which she had written thousands of checks over the past ten years. He hadn’t said much as he’d reviewed the documents, had only asked questions that she’d done her best to answer. But two interrogations in such a short span of time had left her feeling a tad raw emotionally, and coupled with the lack of sleep, she was growing more than a little irritable. Even a steady stream of herbal tea hadn’t been enough to soothe her. On the other hand, the coffee she’d fed to Agent Tennant had only seemed to sharpen his mind, something else that kind of ticked her off.

How could he look so cool and collected—and dammit, so handsome—when she felt like a world-class frump with only one half-functioning brain cell? And why, of all the things that should or could have been circling through her head at the moment, was it his voice of a few hours ago she kept hearing?

You’re not the woman I’ve been looking for.

Story of my life, she thought as she watched him on the other side of her dining-room table, studying her social security card again. She was never the woman men were looking for. Not in the long run. She was always too…something…for them. Too serious. Too dedicated. Too quiet. Too old-fashioned. Too focused. Too straitlaced. Too stuffy.

Not a single charge was true. Yes, she was all of those things from time to time. But never to a point where that was all she was. And she was other things, too, things men just couldn’t seem to see. She could be fun when the situation called for it. She could. And she could be witty and adventurous and outrageous, too. Really. She could. Honest. She’d just never met any men who made her want to be those things, that was all. The men she met were always too…something…for her, too.

“We’ll still have to run a check on you,” Agent Tennant said now, not looking up from her social security card. She’d noticed he’d come back to that little scrap of cardboard several times, as if something about it still bothered him. “There’s a lot I can learn about you from our sources that I can’t from all this.” He gestured toward the piles of paper records fanned out across the table.

Marnie narrowed her eyes at him. “Are you telling me you know more about me than I know myself?”

He was smiling when he looked up at her, but there was nothing happy in the expression. “Well, not at the moment. But by day’s end…”

She shook her head. “Unbelievable,” she said for a second time since meeting him. But again, unfortunately, it was easy to believe.

He studied her in silence for a moment longer, then picked up her birth certificate. It, like her social security card, had seemed to interest him more than anything else she’d presented for his examination.

“This is just a photocopy,” he said. “Do you have the original?”

She couldn’t see what difference it would make, but told him, “No. I don’t remember ever seeing an original, to be honest. I only needed the copy for school registrations and such. I imagine it’s packed away somewhere with my baby effects.”

“According to this,” Agent Tennant said, his attention falling to the document again, “You were born May first, nineteen seventy-two, to Elliott and Lucie Lundy.”

He glanced up again, and again, Marnie was struck by how very blue his eyes were. That, of course, made her notice again how handsome he was, and for some weird reason, she found herself wondering if he was married. Of its own volition, her gaze fell to the hand that was holding her birth certificate—his left. No ring. No tan line or indentation, either. Still, some married people didn’t bother with them. Then she reminded herself it was none of her business if Agent Tennant was married. More to the point, she further reminded herself, she didn’t care.

So why did she need to be reminded of that?

“You mentioned your father passed away,” he said, pulling her back to the matter at hand. Which was not his hand, she assured herself. “Is your mother still alive?”

“No. She died when I was a month old,” she told him.

“In a car accident. I have no memory of her, and my father never remarried.”

For a long moment, Agent Tennant said nothing. Then, “May first, nineteen-seventy-two,” he repeated. But softly, this time, and with some distraction, as if he were thinking about something else when he said it.

She couldn’t imagine why he’d find her date of birth so worthy of consideration, but he said nothing more and stayed quiet so long, Marnie began to feel a little uncomfortable.

Then she realized it wasn’t his silence making her uncomfortable—it was the intent way he was studying her face. He seemed to be most interested in her eyes, however, pinning his gaze there for a long time. Long enough to make heat swamp her entire system. Again.

“I need to borrow this for a little while,” he stated—not asked—as he held up her birth certificate. “I’ll get it back to you this afternoon. This evening at the latest.” He looked down at the papers on the table again and plucked her social security card from the assortment. “I’ll need this, too.”

“Okay,” she agreed reluctantly. Not that she got the feeling that she had much choice. “But why do you need them?”

“I can’t say for sure just yet,” he told her. “But I think, Ms. Lundy, that you and I both are going to be surprised by what I learn.”

Oh, Marnie didn’t like the sound of that at all. “I have to work tonight at Lauderdale’s,” she told him. “And I have students to teach this afternoon.”

“Tomorrow then,” he said. “We should talk then. Are you free in the morning?”

She nodded. “But I have to work at the store in the evening.”

He took a step backward, into her living room. But he continued to look at her face, as if he wasn’t able to look at anything else. “I apologize again for the inconvenience of last night.”

“Inconvenience,” she repeated blandly. “It was a lot more than that. You scared the hell out of me.”

He made a face that indicated he was genuinely sorry, and continued to watch her eyes. “I apologize for that, too.”

A shudder of heat wound through her at the relentlessness of his gaze. The way he was looking at her then…Hungry. That was the only way she could think to describe him. Like a man who’d been starved and neglected for years and had just stumbled upon a banquet.

He kept walking until he was at her front door, his attention divided between her birth certificate, her social security card and her. Marnie seemed to finally win out over the paper documents, however—and my, but wasn’t that a huge compliment, being more important than paper?—because he stuffed the former into his inside jacket pocket and studied her face again. Or, rather, she couldn’t help thinking, her eyes. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that he was seeing something—or someone—else.

“I’ll be back in the morning,” he said. “Around nine okay?”

“Fine.”

“We can talk more then.”

Marnie wanted to ask about what, since he seemed to already know, but decided maybe she wasn’t all that fired up to hear. There was still a chance, however small, that this was nothing but a bad dream. By tomorrow morning, she might wake up to discover Agent Noah Tennant didn’t exist anywhere outside her feverish imagination, so whatever he had to tell her didn’t, either.

And maybe, she thought further, she’d also wake up tomorrow to discover that an asteroid the size of Lithuania had crashed into Ohio, making this whole episode—not to mention Cleveland—moot.

Without a further word, Agent Tennant opened the front door and passed through it, closing it with a soft click behind him. Marnie moved to the big bay window to watch him make his way toward the plain black sedan he’d called to have someone bring to the house earlier. But he didn’t immediately start the car when he slipped behind the wheel, and instead pressed some buttons on his cell phone and put it to his ear. As he spoke to whoever answered at the other end, he studied both her birth certificate and social security card again, clearly reading off the information on each.

At one point, he glanced up to see Marnie looking at him out the window, and he stopped talking, as if he were afraid she might be able to discern what he was saying. Then, obviously realizing that was impossible, he began to speak again to whomever he had called. But he continued to watch Marnie watching him, and for several long moments, neither of them looked away. Finally, though, after ending the connection, he lifted a hand in farewell. Then he started the car and maneuvered it out of the driveway, and made his way down the street.

Not once did he look back.

CHAPTER SIX

ELLIE CHANDLER SAT cross-legged on her living room floor with an oversize mug of coffee in one hand and a sealed OPUS file in the other. She’d shed her suit and heels in favor of baggy brown cargo pants, a waffle-weave Henley the color of red wine and slouchy socks; her dark auburn hair had been shifted from the sophisticated French twist she wore to work to the loose ponytail she favored for home. Like a good agent—even though she wasn’t one yet—she’d followed Noah’s instructions and gotten a few hours of sleep before looking at the file, so now the noonday sun tumbled raucously through the window. Her belly was full of Krispy Kreme jelly-filleds, the coffeepot was full and she was about to embark on her first field assignment for OPUS.

Oh, yeah. Life was so good.

The sleek white envelope, Staples style #4673, if she knew her office paraphernalia—and it went without saying that she did—had nary a smudge nor crease to be seen, a testament to how seriously her boss took the job. Even more seriously than Ellie did, which was pretty hard to believe, since she took the job more seriously than anything. Noah never left the office before she did, and she generally never left her desk before six. She’d stay later, but she was always finished with her work by then, and if she got started on the next day’s too soon, she’d run out of things to do by lunchtime. Maybe someday, if she was very lucky, she’d be as overworked as her boss. Because she had her sights set on going straight to the top.