Deadly Deceptions. Linda Lael Miller

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ ex-wife, Allison, her head resting on his shoulder. Their seven-year-old twins, Daniel and Daisy, friends of Gillian’s, weren’t present.

      I knew what was going to happen, of course.

      Allison would need Tucker.

      And he would move back in with her, if he hadn’t already.

      Whatever had been starting between Tucker and me would be over.

      I tried not to care. I wasn’t in love with the man, after all. But we were definitely…involved.

      The service was ending.

      I squeezed Gillian’s small hand, cold but substantial, and then Helen Erland rose shakily from her seat and walked to the coffin. With a soft wail of sorrow that pierced the lining of my soul, she laid a single white rose inside.

      I felt Gillian pull away, and I tried to hold on, but it was no use. One moment the child was sitting beside me, the next she was standing at her shattered mother’s side, her little face upturned, her whole being crying out in a silent plea. I’m here, see me!

      What could I do?

      Rush up there and gather a child no one else could see into my arms? Drag her back to the rows of folding chairs that had been set up in the rear of the church to accommodate the overflow?

      There was nothing I could do. So I sat still, clenching my hands together, my face wet with tears.

      Helen Erland, understandably focused on the body in the coffin, was oblivious to her real daughter, standing right beside her.

      Gillian, I called, without speaking. Come back.

      She turned a defiant glance on me, shook her head and grabbed ineffectually at her mother’s hand. I was vaguely aware of a young woman at the periphery of my vision, a video camera raised to her face, and a slight shudder went through me.

      Enduring the actual funeral was hard enough. Who would want to replay it?

      Let this be over, I prayed distractedly. Please let this be over.

      Gillian vanished, and did not return to her chair beside mine.

      Tucker left Allison long enough to go to Helen, help her back to her place.

      I couldn’t stand any more.

      I got up and slipped out through the open doors of the church, doing my best not to hyperventilate. I would have given just about anything to have one or both of my sisters there, but Jolie, recently hired as a crime-scene tech by Phoenix PD, was going through an orientation program, and Greer was caught in the throes of a rapidly disintegrating marriage.

      So I was on my own. Nothing new there.

      I took refuge under a leafy ficus tree, grateful for the shade, one hand pressed against the trunk so I wouldn’t drop into a sobbing heap on the ground. I was dazed by the intensity of my mourning, and I didn’t trust myself to drive. Not right away, anyhow.

      The service ended.

      People flowed past, murmuring, the men looking stalwart and grim, the women dabbing at puffy eyes with crumpled handkerchiefs.

      The pallbearers, Tucker among them, carried Gillian’s casket to the hearse, waiting in the dusty street with its rear doors open like the black wings of some bird of doom, ready to enfold the child and carry her away into the unknown. The minister helped Mrs. Erland into the back of a limousine; I looked for Gillian, but she was nowhere around.

      When a hand gripped my upper arm, I was beyond startled. I could no longer assume I’d been approached by another human being—not the flesh-and-blood variety, that is.

      I turned and saw Allison Darroch standing just behind me, her eyes red rimmed from crying, her flawless skin alabaster pale. She had lush brown hair, pulled into a severe French twist for the occasion, and she wore a black sheath that accented her slender curves.

      “What,” she demanded in a furious undertone, “are you doing here?”

      I swallowed, stuck for an immediate answer. I couldn’t say I’d come to Gillian Pellway’s funeral because the dead child had practically herded me there. Especially not to Allison, who clearly saw me as the Other Woman, even though she and Tucker had been legally divorced for over a year before I even met him.

      Allison leaned in. “It’s sick—this is a little girl’s funeral—but you’ll do anything to get close to Tucker, won’t you?”

      I’d never labored under the delusion that Allison and I would ever be friends, but I did respect her. She was a good, if overprotective, mother to the twins, and in her capacity as a veterinarian she’d recently saved Russell, a canine friend of mine, from certain death.

      “I know Helen Erland slightly,” I said, with what dignity I could muster, considering I still felt as though I might faint, throw up, or both. It was true, too, which admittedly isn’t the case with everything I say. Helen clerked in a convenience store in Cave Creek, and I occasionally stopped in to buy lottery tickets or gas up my Volvo. “My coming here has nothing to do with Tucker.”

      “I don’t believe you,” Allison said.

      “Back off,” I replied, after reassembling my backbone vertebra by vertebra. “I have as much right to be here as you do.”

      Tucker appeared in the corner of my eye, handsome and anxious in his dark suit. His hair was butternut-blond and a little too long, like before, but he didn’t look like the undercover DEA agent I knew him to be. His normal uniform was jeans, a muscle shirt and biker boots.

      “Get in the car, Allison,” he said.

      She stiffened, gave me one more poisonous glare and walked away. Got into the big SUV parked at the curb.

      For a long moment Tucker and I just stared at each other.

      I figured it was his place to speak first, because he’d been the one to stumble into the hornet’s nest. On the other hand, there was a lot I wanted to tell him, because he was, after all, the only person in the world who knew I could see Gillian Pellway.

      I bit my lower lip and stood my ground.

      Tucker shoved a hand through his hair. Sighed. His green eyes were haunted, and I wondered how long it had been since he’d slept through a night. Certainly not since Gillian’s body had been found, if appearances were anything to go by.

      “Allison’s pretty torn up,” he said. “So are the kids.”

      I merely nodded.

      “She asked me to move back in. Just for a while.”

      Tucker had a condo in Scottsdale, but he wasn’t there much; when he was working, he tended to disappear into some mysterious underworld, one I knew little about.

      My stomach pitched, and bile scalded the back of my throat. I swallowed and nodded again.

      He moved as though he might take a gentle hold on my shoulders, or even pull me into his arms. Then, after glancing toward the SUV with its tinted windows, he looked at me again, his СКАЧАТЬ