Woman Most Wanted. Harper Allen

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СКАЧАТЬ fiasco at her apartment. Her gaze looked as if it could start a flash fire on the cracked Formica of the tabletop between them. “And you’re thinking the same thing.”

      She never should have let him persuade her to walk away from West and that deceitful old woman who called herself Mrs. Janeway, she thought in angry self-recrimination. She should have refused to leave, at least until she’d found out what they’d done with Zappa. Except that in the middle of her near-hysterical outburst she’d caught a glimpse of the expression, quickly veiled, on Matt’s face and for a moment she’d felt as if she’d actually taken a physical blow.

      His expression had frightened her. Suddenly she’d realized that she’d lost her only ally, and that the man she’d thought was on her side wasn’t even able to meet her eyes.

      He wasn’t meeting them now.

      “I don’t think you’re crazy,” he said a shade too heartily. There was a container of paper-wrapped toothpicks on the table, and he’d already mangled two of them. Now he stripped the wrapping off a third and snapped it in half. “It’s obvious that you’re a little confused, but that could be the result of a lot of things—stress, for example. It could be an aftereffect of the mugging.” The third toothpick lay in pieces by his coffee cup as he fell silent.

      Right from the start he hadn’t known what to make of her, she thought despondently. She’d seen him glancing dubiously at her ankle bracelet and tie-dyed dress, and even on the phone this afternoon she had the sinking feeling she’d come off as a flake. When she’d met him, she’d realized that Agent D’Angelo was just as alien to her as she appeared to him.

      It was no wonder he’d felt uneasy with her. It had been almost inevitable that he’d jumped to the conclusion that she was suffering from some kind of delusion.

      The phrase “just the facts, ma’am,” could have been coined for him. He was the perfect FBI agent, from his unobtrusive but well-cut suit right down to his gleaming shoes. Maybe he was just a little too good-looking to pass unnoticed in a crowd, but even there he’d done his best to conform. Not a strand of that thick black hair was out of place, and that sensuously full lower lip that seemed so at variance with the rest of the hard angles of his face was usually thinned in a tightly controlled line. It must have taken him years to submerge his own personality so completely, Jenna mused. Now he probably didn’t even have to think about it.

      But he’d slipped up once, and for a startling moment she’d seen past the conservative facade to the original Matt D’Angelo. The man she’d glimpsed had looked at her with a sudden flare of heat in those cool golden-brown eyes, and for a heartbeat his gaze had lingered searingly on her, as if he couldn’t stop himself. Then he’d pulled back with a visible effort, and she’d almost been able to see him convincing himself that what he’d experienced hadn’t been real.

      Just like he was trying to persuade her now.

      “Refill?” The waitress, a tired-looking woman in her late forties with a name tag that said Marg pinned to her uniform, was standing beside them with a full coffeepot in her hand and a mechanical smile on her face, but as she looked at Jenna her expression changed to one of interest.

      “Beautiful dress, honey.” Almost reverently she reached out and her fingertips brushed the thin multihued cotton. “I used to know a girl in the ’60s who designed and dyed her own—Tamara, her name was. She used to give them away.”

      “Tamara Seagull?” Jenna looked up eagerly. “She still does—this is one of hers. She lives on a commune in Vermont and barters them for produce and firewood. I traded a couple of bushels of tomatoes and a wheelbarrow-full of zucchini for this.” She laughed for the first time that evening, feeling suddenly as if she’d run into a friend.

      Matt was looking at them as if he didn’t know what they were talking about. She ignored him.

      “When I knew Tamara we were both still in our teens,” Marg the waitress said reminiscently. She set the coffeepot down on the table, forgotten, and her expression was faraway, as if her dingy surroundings had faded into the background. She smiled dreamily, and it was possible to see that she’d once been vibrantly pretty. “Everything seemed so simple then—she’d make her dresses, and I was going to set up a pottery studio. But then I met Dwayne and fell madly in love, and the next thing I knew, I was married and expecting a baby. Dwayne took a job for a few months at a factory, but he hated it, and two weeks after Debbie was born he took off. I never heard from him again.” She stared unseeingly through the steam-fogged window of the coffee shop to the darkness outside, and then blinked. Slowly she picked up the pot and one of the thick, chipped mugs. “I’ll never forget that summer. I still have one of the plates I made back then. But you wouldn’t even have been born in the ’60s—how do you know Tamara?”

      “My father and I lived on the Sunflower Commune for a while about three years ago,” Jenna said. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Matt frown uncomprehendingly. He probably thought the lifestyle she’d lived up until recently had died out with sit-ins and peace medallions, she thought impatiently. “It’s a well-respected artists’ colony now, with a self-supporting organic farm attached—their stone-ground bread is famous all over the state. They didn’t have a resident potter when I was there, though,” she added. Beside her, Marg bit her lip thoughtfully.

      “It’d take a while before I could turn out anything good again,” she said slowly. “But I’m a hard worker, and a bakery can always use an extra pair of hands. Since Debbie got married and moved away, there’s been nothing to keep me here.”

      She poured Matt another cup of coffee almost briskly, and her smile at Jenna as she left their table was nothing like the mechanical one she’d worn earlier. As soon as she was out of earshot, Matt spoke.

      “How’d you do that?” His voice was almost accusatory. He looked baffled. “I’ve seen agents with years of experience who can’t draw that much out of someone in hours of interrogation, but she spilled her most secret hopes to you after two seconds. Where’d you learn that?”

      Jenna shook her head, momentarily taken aback. “I didn’t learn that. It’s not a technique, Matt—I just thought she looked kind of lonely. And when she noticed my dress, she reminded me of the people I grew up with.”

      “Ex-hippies.” He couldn’t keep the skepticism out of his voice. “You really were brought up on communes? I didn’t know they still existed.”

      “It’s not that unusual,” she said with a spurt of defensiveness. “A lot of people still choose to opt out of mainstream society and live an alternative lifestyle closer to nature. It’s not as if we painted our bodies blue and sat around contemplating blades of grass all day.”

      “Well, it explains the ankle bracelet, anyway,” he muttered, and at that her temper flared.

      “And it explains what happened back at my apartment, right? I’m just an off-the-wall flake that lives in a fantasy world half the time, is that it?” She took a deep breath. “I know it must have seemed weird, Matt, but you’ve got to believe me—somebody went into my home today and completely changed everything!”

      Put like that, it did sound outrageous, she thought in sudden uncertainty. Why would anyone in the world want to discredit her? What threat was she to anybody?

      All of a sudden the answer was right in front of her. Her breath caught painfully in her throat as she considered her theory, examining it for flaws and finding none. Of course, she thought with growing certainty—that had to be it! And once she explained everything to Matt, he’d have to believe her, because with this СКАЧАТЬ