Submission

“Um, hello. How are you?” I said lamely.

I looked around the room, but no one seemed to notice my sudden distress. I sat back down in my chair, the paperwork on my desk nothing but a blur as I tried to recall what had motivated me to get involved with this woman, who had caused far more trouble than she’d been worth.

“I’m sorry, Alan. I didn’t mean to call, but I had to.”

I opened my desk drawer, looking for aspirin to quell the headache that had been with me since I’d gotten up that morning and that had just doubled in size.

“I mean,” Astrid continued, “I just wanted to see how you were doing.”

“I thought we both agreed that further contact wouldn’t be wise.” My exact words the last time we spoke had been Talking to you again would be akin to professional suicide, but I didn’t like thinking the words, much less saying them again.

“I want to see you.”

“Impossible.”

“I’ll keep calling until you come over.”

I winced. “So call.”

Then I did something I also didn’t think was wise and hung up.

MOLLY SAT IN THE MIDDLE of her hotel-room bed. She’d showered and had on the hotel robe, her hair up in a towel, even though it was only six o’clock. The contents of the box of things she’d gotten from FBI agent Akela Brooks were spread out in front of her, her sister’s diary the focal point. But try as she might, she couldn’t seem to concentrate. Instead her gaze kept going to the key in her hand, and her mind kept retracing a path to her lunch with Alan Chevalier earlier.

She’d wanted to call him, tell him of her find. But they’d already agreed to meet at a nearby bar on Bourbon Street tomorrow night to trade any information either of them had come across, even though she had a pretty good idea she’d be the only one trading anything. She supposed it could wait until then.

Besides, she knew the instant she told him about the key he’d take it, and she’d likely never see it again, much less find out what was in the box it opened.

Of course, she actually had to find the box first if she hoped to learn anything, an impossible task given her outsider status in the investigation. Bus station aside, she wouldn’t know where to begin looking. After all, there was the little matter of the number that had been removed from the key.

How many lockers were at the bus station? Was there only one station or were there several? Did the airport have lockers? Could it be there?

“For all I know, the box could be in Toledo,” she said aloud.

She stretched out her arm and put the key on the nightstand, then rubbed the arch of her left foot. Lunch aside, she’d been pretty much upright all day, pounding the pavement in shoes that were made for walking but not to the extent she had walked in them. She had blisters on her heels, and her toes looked swollen to twice their normal size. So on the way back to the hotel she’d stopped inside a shop and bought comfortable flats, a couple of pairs of casual slacks and lighter-weight blouses, a wardrobe more conducive to the type of work she’d be doing in the days to come.

She’d also bought a flirty dress that she had no business buying. A deep-red number that looked more like a slip than a dress, really, and felt like a cloud against her bare skin—and left a lot of that skin bare to the naked eye.

It had to be the city. She’d never been one to dress so provocatively—not even when she was younger—much less give herself over to such an impulsive buy. She’d always been practical to the max.

No, the purchase would have been much more something Claire would have made, even if it meant maxing out a credit card. “Retail therapy,” she’d called it.

Molly had called it stupid. If you didn’t have the cash, you didn’t need the buy.

Molly certainly didn’t need the dress, yet she’d gone ahead and bought it anyway. Perhaps with thoughts of seeing the look on Alan’s face when she wore it.

She sighed and slid from the bed. What was she talking about? She wasn’t interested in the burned-out detective. She was the girl next door; he had a dark, edgy side. He appeared to have little ambition beyond what he was going to eat that day; she had a list of fifty things she hoped to accomplish before she was thirty and was aware of that list at all times. She put attraction and physical chemistry on the back burner; he put it out there for anyone to see, no matter the consequences.

Molly swallowed thickly. That was what she was really responding to, wasn’t it? The fundamental call of attraction. It had been there in his eyes as he’d sat across from her. No need for words, for his movements and expressions spoke for him.

She absently tidied up the room. She wasn’t used to that. That…knowing. More often than not she was genuinely surprised to find a man interested in her. Oh, not so much because she didn’t think she was attractive. But because in the Midwest, men—people in general, really—tended to keep their true emotions in check. Perhaps it was tied into pride. Or maybe she just wasn’t really good at reading emotions because she’d spent so little time contemplating her own.

But today had shown her that she didn’t need a degree in sociology and human behavior to know Alan Chevalier had been attracted to her.

Or that she had been just as attracted to him.

What remained was whether or not she acted on it. Because another thing Alan had made plainly clear was that she held all the cards. It was up to her to ante up or to fold and walk away from the table. He would not force her hand. Would not sandbag or bluff or try anything underhanded to get her to do what he wanted.

No. In his case, what you saw was what you got.

And Molly found something undeniably appealing about that. She really hadn’t encountered it since her sister. Whatever Claire had been thinking, feeling, you knew it the instant she did. While Molly didn’t believe in any sort of paranormal connection to her twin, they had been closely connected. Partly because of the emotional unavailability of their mother, who’d gone through her share of pain in her lifetime—the first and foremost her unexpected pregnancy with them when she’d still been in high school and no support system of her own when her family members had turned their backs on her.

While later on they’d grown apart, she and Claire had been tighter than tight while growing up.

And she was seeing the same potential in her attraction for Alan. She sensed the possibility for a connection that went beyond the physical.

And her need to explore that possibility loomed almost as large as her desire to find her sister’s killer.

OF ALL MY ACCOMPLISHMENTS, I counted my sisters as the most important.

Of all my failures, my sisters ranked number one by a long shot.

Years ago the department shrink told me that was to be expected. Most parents experienced mixed feelings when it came to their children. Both of us had known at the time that my family situation wasn’t supposed to be the topic of conversation; rather my shooting of a minor holding what had looked like a handgun but had turned out to be a water pistol was. But her psychological digging had turned up the conflicts I’d been facing at home.

Both of us had also known I wasn’t any kind of parent, either, although it was the role I’d been forced to take ten years ago, when I was twenty-six and my sisters were sixteen, thirteen and eleven. When my father had been targeted by carjackers and had decided his secondhand Mercedes was more important than his life and his wife’s, my stepmother’s. The incident was what had inspired me to become a homicide detective rather than a beat cop.

It was also what had made me the unprepared parent to two teenagers and a preteen.

My father’s family was among the first to settle here when my great-great-grandfather was assigned a judgeship by none other than Jefferson himself back in the early 1800s. With ancestors who were among the first important founders of the city, my father felt our family bore a certain responsibility. But his take was one I’d never really subscribed to. Probably because my own mother had been of questionable heritage (read: she’d been a stripper on Bourbon Street when my father had met her) and had thrown his unnamed title into his face when she’d left us both when I was four.

So when my father and his wife had died, I’d moved back into the mammoth house that had been in my family since my ancestors had moved down to Louisiana from the Boston area, and tried my best to be a surrogate parent to my three younger sisters.

It was that same house I now stood in front of, experiencing myriad mixed feelings.

Emilie and Laure still lived there. It was where Emilie had gotten married two years ago and now had a child of her own. A house that Zoe hadn’t seemed to be able to get out of fast enough when she was eighteen and moved to a dorm on the campus of Tulane. I rubbed the back of my neck, marveling at how similar her actions had been to my own so long ago. Before I was forced back into that house and into the role of “guardian.”

“Thank God you’re here,” Emilie said, opening the door at my first knock. “I still haven’t heard anything from Zoe. She’s not answering her cell phone, and Laure hasn’t had any luck getting anything out of her friends.”

It also appeared Emilie was having problems in other areas as she bounced one-year-old Henri on her hip, the toddler’s face red and damp from tears.

She led the way back to the kitchen, where they had always spent a great deal of their time. There, Emilie’s young husband, James, was making what looked like dinner by way of sandwiches, and Laure was on the phone, apparently talking to another of Zoe’s friends.

I put my hat on the rectangular table that sat six and shrugged out of my overcoat, taking Henri when Emilie thrust him at me.

“He’s teething,” she said.

I went to the sink and placed the toddler on the counter next to me while I washed my hands, then picked him back up.

“Is there some way you can trace her cell?” Laure asked, disconnecting from her call.