My Sister, Myself

Tess flipped the phone open. The battery was low when she turned it on, but she flipped through the options until she could access the photo gallery.

And sure enough, in among the photos of strangers, there was a picture of Katie and the same man—only twenty years older—as in the picture on the wall. It looked as if it was taken at a park during the summer.

“The police picnic,” Ryan said, peering over her shoulder. “Katie asked me to take this. They’d just won the ubiquitous three-legged race.”

Tess drank in the sight of the two smiling faces, one identical to her own, the other lost forever, and felt a knot form in her throat. “Have you checked the phone records?” she managed to say at last.

“As in, Did she call her would-be attacker or snap a picture of a speeding white van?”

“Something like that.”

“No such luck. Very few calls, none unexplained except that last one made to me. As far as I can tell, the last picture is this one.” He clicked a few buttons and up came a tiny photo of a trophy.

“Whose trophy?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. I can’t make out any writing. Too much glare.”

Tess scrolled up a picture, hoping for something more meaningful and found a shot of a very young woman who looked slightly off-kilter. Maybe it was her eyes, Tess thought, looking closely. She appeared to be mentally handicapped. That was it. But she looked happy and friendly, and she was wearing a pointy pink party hat.

“Who’s this?”

“I don’t know. Obviously someone Katie knew.”

Tess nodded absently as she clicked back to the photo of her sister and father, once again drinking in their smiles before the battery gave up the ghost and their images faded away.

FOR TESS THE JOB at hand was bittersweet.

The objects of Katie’s life lay shattered and torn in her apartment, the same way her body lay battered in the hospital. But there was a sense of the woman here, reflected in little things like the umpteen tiny packets of mustard, ketchup and taco sauce that filled a box in the fridge—they apparently shared the same love of junk food—the simple white dress hanging in the closet, the secondhand paperback mystery books.

To her regret there were no additional photos. Not a baby picture, not a strip of goofy poses from the mall…nothing. There was no rent receipt with a name, no bank statement, no pay stub or tax forms. Katie had lived in New Harbor her whole life and yet Tess couldn’t find an address book or a note from a friend or the name of a dentist circled in the phone book. Nothing. The conviction that Katie had chosen this apartment from which to launch her investigation grew as the hours passed.

The living room was soon back to as normal as it was going to get without a few purchases to replace the things that had been destroyed. Tess sat down in front of the bedroom closet and started putting the half-dozen pairs of shoes and the half-dozen empty shoe boxes back together.

The moment she dumped a pair of leather boots—her exact size and even a style she would have chosen—into their box, she realized something else was stuffed beneath the layer of tissue paper on the bottom. She lifted the tissue, which had been taped onto a false bottom, then immediately looked over her shoulder to see if Ryan had come into the room. The coast was clear, but she closed the box, anyway. She’d caught a glimpse of what was hidden inside. Just a glimpse, but the objects looked personal and she wanted to study them without Ryan hovering nearby.

Going back into the living room, she found he’d fallen asleep on the recliner. A few pages of sheet music lay scattered across his lap and spilled onto the floor as though he’d been looking at them when he drifted off. Tess approached quietly, gathered the papers without his waking, then stood staring down at him.

Dark lashes fanned his cheeks. His mouth in repose looked soft and sensual. His head rested on one hand bent at the elbow and propped against the back of the chair, his long jeans-clad legs were crossed at the ankles.

Her gut reaction to the sight of him sleeping stunned her with its intensity. She tried to drag her gaze away but she couldn’t. She’d never reacted like this to a near stranger, and it annoyed her at the same time fascinating her. Her heart fluttered. Her fingertips tingled with the desire to trace the line of his jaw and maybe kiss his throat, where she could see the healthy throb of his pulse.

She bet he’d had his share of love affairs.

Had he had one with Katie?

It didn’t seem likely. But if he didn’t find Katie attractive, how could he find her attractive?

Get a grip on yourself, she mumbled, and resisted the urge to smooth a lock of dark hair away from his eyes, knowing it was nothing more than an excuse to touch him and to start something she couldn’t, wouldn’t, finish. She turned to tiptoe back to the bedroom and the shoebox.

But first she examined the sheet music.

She, too, played piano. A smile lifted the corners of her lips as she noted she played some of these very pieces. There were many faded handwritten notes on the pages and even a scribbled date or two going back ten or more years.

My father’s music. She bit her lip as tears stung behind her nose.

Setting it aside, she sank to her knees and opened the shoe box again, carefully lifting out the false bottom.

The first item she encountered was a small bound notebook. She flipped it open, heart in her throat, thinking perhaps she had just come across a record of her sister’s findings.

But it wasn’t anything quite as handy as that. A notation in the front declared the small book belonged to Matthew Fields. Flipping through the pages, Tess saw a record of musical engagements, dating back many years, with names and addresses, presumably of the other musicians and contacts, along with comments about each performance. She flipped to a date two months before. The appointments continued on for several weeks, but the comments ended.

Her dad hadn’t been alive to perform, to comment, to plan ahead.

But three weeks after his death, the comments began again in a different handwriting along with records of coming engagements. And a name at the top of the page made Tess catch her breath.

Caroline Mays.

Her mother?

Caroline Mays was now the pianist taking the place of Matt Fields. Caroline Mays had to be the name Katie was currently using and she hadn’t known the name existed until she read the letter after their father died.

Tess stared at the name for a long time before closing the book and looking to see what else she would find. Along with a bank book made out to Caroline Mays and a few other important papers that had been missing from the apartment, there was an Oregon driver’s license made out to Katie Fields and another for Caroline Mays, a twenty-seven-year-old woman with bright-red hair and black frame glasses. Tess recalled the reddish hair at Katie’s hairline, just visible under the bandages, hair that Tess had assumed was stained with blood from her injury. Not blood, hair dye.

What form had Katie’s investigation taken? Who had she talked to, who had she worried to the point they tried to kill her? What was someone looking for when they tore her apartment apart? Had they found it? Why had Katie hidden her new ID along with her old one?

Tess picked up the little book again, turning to the date of Katie’s hit-and-run and found a note about a birthday party for someone named Tabitha. Was she the young woman in the party hat? Seemed a reasonable possibility. A few days before that Katie had played Mozart at a place called Bluebird House. The very next day, she’d been scheduled to play there again. Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” this time.

Tess put everything back in the box and went in to talk to Ryan, but he was still asleep. She sat down on a kitchen chair and watched him for a while.

What was it about him that kept her staring? She knew lots of attractive men in San Francisco, men who weren’t bossy and didn’t carry guns. Men who laughed more, men who worried less, men whose past didn’t seem to eat away at them.

She’d found none of those men interesting. This one she found fascinating and sexy and troublesome and didn’t have the slightest insight into why.

Unless it was because he was so different from her.

In the middle of all this speculation, she suddenly recalled the items she’d put back in the cabinet under the bathroom sink. Jumping to her feet, she went to look, and sure enough, found the small box whose importance she’d overlooked before.

Mountain Sunrise the label said, showing a woman with brilliant red hair climbing a snow-covered peak at the break of dawn.

Tess stared at the box for a long time as a plan flitted and floated like a windblown leaf through her head, taking form and substance until it seemed the most reasonable, the most obvious plan she’d ever come up with.

And the most dangerous.

Chapter Four

Peter called Ryan’s name.

Heart thumping wildly, Ryan ran through empty streets until he came to an old house, all the windows boarded up. Only the door stood open, a deep, black rectangle, gaping like a wound against the whitewashed planks.