The Naturals

CHAPTER 15

I woke up on Saturday at noon to two sounds: the shuffling of cards and the faint, high-pitched whir of metal on metal. I opened my eyes and turned over onto my side. Sloane was sitting cross-legged on her bed, a mug in one hand and the other dealing out cards: seven columns, a different number of cards in each one, all of them facedown.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

Sloane stared at the backs of the cards for a moment and then picked one up and moved it. “Solitaire,” she said.

“But all of the cards are facedown.”

“Yes.” Sloane took a sip from her mug.

“How can you play Solitaire if all of the cards are facedown?”

Sloane shrugged. “How can you play with some of them faceup?”

“Sloane is something of a card shark. Briggs found her in Vegas.” Lia stuck her head out of the closet. “If she skims the deck once, she can more or less track the cards, even once they’re shuffled.”

I registered the fact that Lia was in our closet. Metal on metal, I thought. Metal hangers sliding across a metal rack.

“Hey,” I said, taking a better look at Lia’s current attire. “That’s my dress.”

“Mine now.” Lia smiled. “Didn’t the FBI warn you that I have sticky fingers? Kleptomania, pathological lying —it’s all the same, really.”

I thought Lia was joking, but I couldn’t be sure.

“Kidding,” she confirmed after a few seconds. “About the kleptomania, not about the fact that I have no intention of giving this dress back. Honestly, Sloane is the klepto in this house, but this really is more my color than yours.”

I turned to Sloane, who’d ratcheted the speed of her game up a notch—or three.

“Sloane,” I said.

“Yes?”

“Why is Lia poking around in our closet?”

Sloane looked up, but didn’t stop playing. “Motivation is really more your domain than mine. I find most people somewhat bewildering.”

I rephrased the question. “Why would you let Lia poke around in our closet?”

“Oh,” Sloane said, once she took my meaning. “She brought a bribe.”

“Bribe?” I asked. And that was when I realized what, exactly, was in Sloane’s mug.

“You brought her coffee?”

Lia smoothed a hand over the front of my dress. “Guilty as charged.”

* * *

Sloane on coffee was a bit like an auctioneer on speed. The numbers poured out of her mouth rapid-fire, a statistic for every occasion. For eight hours.

“Sixteen percent of American men have blue eyes,” she informed me blithely. “But over forty percent of male TV doctors do.”

Watching TV with a hyped-up statistician would have been challenging enough, but Sloane wasn’t the only one who’d followed me to the media room after dinner.

“Her mouth says, I love you, Darren, but her posture says, I can’t believe the writers are doing this to my character—she would never get involved with this schmuck!” Michael popped a piece of popcorn into his mouth.

“Do you mind?” I asked him, gesturing toward the screen.

He grinned. “Not at all.”

I tried to tune the two of them out, but the effort was futile. I couldn’t get lost in the medical melodrama any more than they could, because all I could think—over and over again—was that Dr. Darren the Schmuck’s BPE simply did not add up.

“We could switch to reality TV,” Michael suggested.

“Roughly one percent of the population are considered to be psychopaths,” Sloane announced. “Recent estimates suggest that over fourteen percent of reality television stars are.”

“Whose estimates?” Michael asked.

Sloane smiled like a Cheshire cat. “Mine.”

Michael put his hands behind his head and leaned back. “Forget studying killers. Let’s arrest fourteen percent of all reality television stars and call it a day.”

Sloane slouched in her chair and toyed with the end of her ponytail. “Being a psychopath isn’t a crime,” she said.

“Are you defending psychopaths?” Michael asked, arching one eyebrow to ridiculous heights. “This is why we don’t give you coffee.”

“Hey,” Sloane said defensively, “I’m just saying that statistically, a psychopath is more likely to end up as a CEO than a serial killer.”

“Ahem.” Lia was the only person I knew who would actually say the word ahem to announce her presence. Once she had our attention, she looked at each one of us in turn. “Judd just left for a night on the town with an old friend. We have the house to ourselves.” She clasped her hands together in front of her body. “Living room. Fifteen minutes. Come prepared.”

“Prepared for what?” I asked, but before the question had fully exited my mouth, she was gone.

“That probably does not bode well.” Michael’s words didn’t sound much like a complaint. He stood. “I’ll see you ladies in fifteen.”

As I watched him walk out the door, I couldn’t help thinking that I’d spent most of my life as an observer, and Lia was the type to pull people off the sidelines.

“Any guesses what we’re getting ourselves into?” I asked Sloane.

“Based on previous experience,” Sloane replied, “my guess would be trouble.”

CHAPTER 16

Michael and Dean were already in the living room when Sloane and I arrived. In the past fourteen minutes, my blond companion had quieted, like the Energizer Bunny powering down. She took a seat on the sofa next to Michael. I sat down next to her. Across from us, Dean was sitting on the edge of the fireplace, his gaze locked on the floor, hair in his face.

Sofa, chairs, pillows, rug, I thought. And he chooses to sit on stone.

I flashed back to the first time I’d seen him, lifting weights and pushing his body to the brink. My very first impression had been that he was punishing himself.

“Glad to see you all made it.” Lia didn’t just walk into a room; she made an entrance. All eyes on her, she sank to the floor and stretched her legs out, crossing her feet at the ankles and spreading my dress out around her. “For your entertainment this evening: Truth or Dare.” She paused, raking her eyes over the rest of us. “Any objections?”

Dean opened his mouth.

“No,” Lia told him.

“You asked for objections,” Dean said.

Lia shook her head. “You don’t get to object.”

“Do I?” Michael asked.