apartment, not by yourself. You either stay with me, stay with him, let one of us stay with you, or if there’s someone else…”
“There’s no one else,” she snapped. No girlfriend or family or anybody she could call in the middle of the night and ask if she could crash for a while. But she didn’t like any of her other options, either.
“It’s settled,” Malcolm concluded. “Your place is too small and as I told you before, I’m not sleeping on that futon. I have plenty of room.”
“I can’t leave my cats for another day.”
“We’ll get them and we’ll bring them here. Cats love space.”
Cass looked to Dougie for help, but he was watching Malcolm with a stony yet resigned look. Part of her was tempted to tell Malcolm that she’d prefer staying with Dougie, but in the end she wasn’t ready to deal with Dougie on a personal level yet. Maybe she could forgive what he’d done, but she couldn’t forget it. Not right away. And besides, staying with him would mean regular contact from Claire. The energy it would take to keep her out would be draining. That wasn’t the case with Lauren.
“I guess I don’t have much of a choice,” she relinquished.
“In this, no,” Malcolm said. “I think more than enough women have lost their lives and their tongues to this murderer. Let’s go.”
They dropped Dougie off first and then headed to Cass’s place. When she unlocked the door, she did so with a smidgen of trepidation. But she concluded that if the killer was inside, waiting for her, she would have felt the monster by now. No tingles this time. No charged air.
“Let me.” Malcolm pushed in front of her and switched on the lights. The place was exactly as she had left it. No disturbances. No intruders. Just Spook and Nosey sitting together on the futon, keeping each other company no doubt until their mom came home.
They pushed themselves up and trotted over to greet her and get patted. First from her, then they wandered over to Malcolm. Obligingly, he bent down and stroked them in long, fluid movements.
Strong hands, Cass noted. Strong, but with the ability to show gentleness. Her pets lapped that gentleness up.
“Do you have a carrier for them?”
“I’ll get it.”
“Tell me where it is. I’ll corral them while you pack.”
Packing implied a significant amount of time. And he said it as if it were the most natural thing in the world for her to pack up and move in with him when she’d only known him for days. This morning they had stood across from each other and she’d said horrible things to him and here he was still petting her cats, who were purring so loudly, she thought they might shake apart.
“Why are you doing this? You don’t even know me.”
“Let’s put aside for a moment the fact that I don’t think that’s true.” He stood up and loomed over her. “I think we’re a lot alike, you and me, and if we had met under other circumstances…”
A harsh laugh escaped her throat. “You mean if you had just wandered into the coffeehouse someday. You in your thousand-dollar suit and ten-thousand-dollar watch. You would have taken one look at me behind the counter in my green apron and what? Fallen madly in love? Get real.”
“I would have noticed your eyes. Bright green and exotic the way they tilt up ever so slightly at the end. And your nose. I would have noticed how delicate and fine it is. How delicate your whole face seems to be. I might have ordered my coffee to stay rather than to go. I might have ordered a second cup.”
Her soft gasp was barely audible and she hoped he hadn’t heard it, but there was a look of satisfaction in his eyes that told her she hadn’t gotten that lucky.
“The point is we’ll never know. Instead we met at a police station with me at my worst. I wanted to throttle you, I was so angry. The next morning I came close to actually doing it. There really aren’t a whole lot of reasons for you to trust me. My one advantage is that currently you trust the detective less. I’m not going to let you stay here because I’m not going to risk your dying. That is the simple answer. Why I can’t risk it…that gets a little more complicated.”
That bothered her. “I think you believe if you save me it will erase the guilt of not saving your sister.” That was reasonable. That made sense. Nothing else.
“That is definitely a factor. And doesn’t that make it easy for you? Help exonerate me, Cassandra, and go pack.”
“Only two people I know call me Cassandra.”
“A shame. It’s really rather lovely.”
Cass didn’t know what to say to that. She didn’t know how to respond to any of it. He was making her nervous and making her think and she wanted to push him out the door and lock it behind him.
She didn’t scare easily. In fact, death wasn’t really something that frightened her at all. She knew too much about the peace and serenity that was to be found afterward. However, she also wasn’t stupid. There was a killer on the loose and it was hunting her. With a knife and a monster. Even if she found a way to avoid having her tongue cut out, she was pretty sure she couldn’t beat the monster.
“Their case is in the closet next to the bathroom. And their food. And you’ll need their litter. They’re not outside cats. Do you have some kind of box?”
Satisfied he was going to get his way, Malcolm was clearly willing to be accommodating. “I’m sure I have something that will work. If not, I’ll build them a box.”
He seemed so serious, she smiled. “Cardboard and a plastic bag as a liner will work just fine.”
Just then the phone rang and Malcolm seemed as startled by the intrusion as she was. Cass considered letting the machine pick up, but since she had only one regular caller these days, she figured she might as well talk to him.
“Hello?”
“Cassandra,” came the voice from the other end. One of the two other people to use her full name.
“Hi, Dr. Farver.”
“I just wanted to make sure you made it home all right. I was worried about you. You seemed upset, and I don’t think I did much to help.”
“I made it home fine. Don’t worry.”
“Okay. Well, it was good to see you. Mad said so, too.”
“It was good to see you and Mad.”
“Last chance to maybe come down and meet my student…”
Cass smiled into the phone at his near pleading request and this time she felt none of the guilt. “I can’t be swayed. But I will check in soon. I promise.”
And she meant it. Just because she wasn’t part of the institute anymore didn’t mean she had to leave behind the people she cared about. Malcolm leaned against the refrigerator in a negligent pose and watched her as she hung up the phone.
“Are you ill?”
Her brow furrowed when she realized she’d addressed Dr. Farver by name. “No, he’s not a medical doctor. He’s a psychologist who specializes in parapsychology. He founded and runs the Institute of Psychical Studies in Washington, D.C. That’s where I was coming from when I saw you at the train station.”
“Is he serious? I mean his work…”
“It’s legitimate. Funded by a lot of people who are less into science and more into the ‘unknown,’ but he takes his work and his research very seriously. I owe him a lot. He basically saved me. After my grandfather dumped me in the asylum, Dr. Farver found me and realized that I wasn’t crazy.”
“A believer.”
“Not really,” she mused. “He thinks I’m a telepath.”
“A tele-what?”
“Telepathic,” she repeated, using the more common term. “He thinks I can read minds. He doesn’t believe in an afterlife so it stands to reason he doesn’t believe that people from there would contact me. Instead, he thinks I can read people’s minds, access their memories. When a person dies, the living usually think about them more intensely, about their past together. That’s what he thinks I can do.”
“But you can’t.”
