kitchen and introduced him to Mama Rose, the big redhead at the stove, who told him her casa was his casa, complimented Lily on having plucked a ripe one from the cutie-pie tree, then asked Lyssy if he was hungry.
“Starving,” he said, taking a seat at the beat-up, burn-scarred kitchen table.
Mama Rose slid a chipped dinner plate heaped with scrambled eggs and bacon in front of him, filled a mug with steaming coffee. “Thanks.” He lightened the coffee with half-and-half from a cow-shaped creamer and dumped in a few heaping teaspoons of sugar.
From the back of the house, they heard a toilet flushing loud enough to wake the dead. “One of these days we gotta get that fixed,” said Mama Rose apologetically.
“The prodigal daughter returns,” drawled a male voice from the doorway a few seconds later. A lanky man, handsome in a narrow-eyed Clint Eastwood sort of way, wearing flip-flops, a ratty bathrobe, and a khaki bush hat with the brim pinned up on one side, entered the kitchen, saw Lyssy for the first time, and turned back to Lilith. “Who the fuck’s that? You know better than to-”
“Hi Carson.” Lilith hurried over and threw her arms around him. He hugged her reluctantly, still glaring over her shoulder at the intruder. “That’s my friend Lyssy. We were in kind of a jam, we thought maybe we could hole up here for a couple days.”
Carson pushed Lilith away-but gently-and turned his glare from Lyssy to Mama Rose. In the way of old married couples everywhere, they exchanged a good deal of information in glance and gesture, the gist being: M.R.:
Lilith intercepted enough of the message to understand she and Lyssy were out of danger for the time being. She hurried back to Lyssy, stood behind him with her hand on his shoulder. “Lyssy, this is Carson-he and Mama Rose saved my ass up in Sturgis.”
“Pleased to meet you,” said Lyssy.
“That goddamn well better not be the last of the bacon,” was Carson’s greeting. Lyssy quickly transferred the surviving bacon strips from his plate onto a paper napkin, which he handed to Carson.
“Sir, you are a scholar and a fucking gentleman,” Carson said grandly, rolling the bacon up in the napkin, then gnawing sideways at the protruding strips as he pulled a chair out with his free hand, twirled it around, and straddled it backward, facing the table. “Any friend of Lilith’s…had better watch his ass.”
Sounded like humor; Lyssy forced a chuckle. He was more interested in why Carson had called her Lilith. It might have been a slip of the tongue, Lyssy told himself, or maybe a memory glitch-or perhaps Lilith
But deep down, he knew better. Because there was yet another explanation, one that accounted for all the discrepancies he’d been pretending not to notice and trying not to think about for the last twelve hours or so. Such as how the timid fawn he’d shown around the arboretum only a few days ago had been transformed into a bossy, fearless, outgoing, self-assured young woman with the vocabulary of a longshoreman.
“Lilith,” he echoed, from around a mouthful of scrambled eggs. “Lilith, Lilith, Lilith.”
“That’s my name,” she said, glaring daggers at him across the table. “Don’t fucking wear it out.”
3
On Thursday morning, Irene Cogan awoke disoriented, in a strange room. She heard snoring, looked over and saw, huddled under the covers of the queen-size bed next to hers, a mound that from the size and sound of it could only have been Pender-or possibly a hibernating bear. But this morning, unlike yesterday, everything came flooding back to her, from the hours under the spotlight at TPP Productions, to the slashed corpses in the living room, to the heartening discovery of the uninjured Corder girl, and the shock of finding the female psych tech’s body draped over the rim of the bathtub.
She and Pender had missed their flight, of course. Naturally the police wanted to debrief them, and poor Alison had begged them to stay with her until her aunt and uncle arrived-they may have been strangers to her but they were all she had. The newly orphaned girl had clung especially close to Pender, who gentled her like a horse whisperer, encouraging her to talk when she wanted to and sob when she needed to. It was Pender who’d first learned that the girl believed Lily had saved her life, spiriting her upstairs when Lyssy (as Alison still thought of him) went berserk with his knife.
But there were so many questions still unanswered. Lily or Lilith? Accomplice or victim? If she was Maxwell’s knowing accomplice, why had she bothered to save the girl from him? If not, why had she left Alison tied up on the floor of her closet instead of simply freeing her? And had she left voluntarily with Maxwell, or had he taken her captive? For Irene Cogan, who knew far too well what it meant to be abducted by Ulysses Maxwell, that was the most important question of all.
Rather than wait with Alison in the middle of a crime scene-a
After dining, if such a grand word applies to a meal at an all-night Burger King, Pender and Irene had shared a room in the Holiday Inn Express near the airport. No thought of hanky-panky, of course-Irene was still half in shock from the horrors she’d witnessed, and worried to distraction about Lily-but even having to listen to Pender snoring all night seemed preferable to spending the night alone knowing Maxwell was at large again.
The snoring broke off with a choked snort. Pender took off his sleep mask and popped out his earplugs, then sat up, naked to the waist, his barrel-like chest surprisingly firm, his belly slopping over the covers like a slag heap that had reached the angle of repose. His torso was white as paper, but both arms were tan from the biceps down-a golfer’s tan.
When he saw Irene looking over at him, he sang out a few bars of “Good Morning Starshine” in his surprisingly sweet tenor voice, then segued into “A Day in the Life” as he padded into the bathroom wearing only his pajama bottoms. As one of his old friends used to say of the man who was rumored to know the lyrics of every pop song recorded between 1955 and 1980: “Pender doesn’t just live his life, he also provides the sound track.”
In the first half-decade of the new century, motel chains were still vying to see which could provide the biggest complimentary continental breakfast spread. Irene had coffee and orange juice and nibbled at a bagel with cream cheese, while Pender, humming “Food, Glorious Food,” all but decimated the buffet.
And when his belly could hold no more, he filled the capacious side pockets of his madras sport coat with miniature muffins and pastries for himself and Irene-the rest of the passengers on the Southwest Airlines flight from Portland to San Jose would have to make do with salted peanuts and stale pretzels.
“A little pocket lint never killed anybody,” Pender assured Irene as they joined the line shuffling sullenly toward the airport security checkpoint.
“I’m sorry, what?”
“Never mind-nothing important.” He transferred his carry-on to his other hand, slipped his arm around her, gave her shoulder a squeeze. “How’re you holding up there, scout?”
She looked up at him, her eyes bloodshot from worry and lack of sleep, her complexion drained of color save for a tubercular spot of red high on either cheek. “Do you think Lily killed that woman in the bathtub?” Alison hadn’t been sure one way or the other-while continuing to insist that the girl had saved her life, she had admitted reluctantly to a vague recollection of Lily saying she had to visit the john, and of her mother giving her and her escort directions to the guest bathroom upstairs.
Pender shrugged. “Let’s wait for the forensics.”
Something in the way he said it, perhaps the impersonality, set off a spark in Irene. “Well I don’t
