other.
'I thought you were at home.'
'I dropped off my car at the shop. You mind giving me a ride home?'
She nodded, resting her shoulder against the wall.
'Here.' He held up a daisy he had probably picked from the overgrown yard. 'Brought you this.'
Sara took the flower, which was little more than a weed, and put it on the edge of the sink.
'Wanna talk about it?'
She moved the daisy, lining it up perpendicular to the faucet. 'No.'
'Do you want to be alone?'
'Yes. No.' Quickly, she closed the distance between them, wrapping her arms around, his shoulders, burying her face in his neck. 'It was so horrible,' she whispered. 'My God, it was just so awful.'
'It's going to be fine,' he soothed, rubbing her back with his hand. 'Don't let them get to you, Sara. Don't let them shake your confidence.'
She pressed into him, needing the reassurance of his body against hers. He'd been at work all day, and he smelled like the squad room – that odd mixture of gun oil, burned coffee, and sweat. With her family scattered, Jeffrey was the only constant in her life, the one person who was there to help pick up the pieces. If she thought about it, this had been true for the last sixteen years. Even when Sara had divorced him, even when she had spent most of her days trying to think of anything but Jeffrey, in the back of her mind, he was always there.
She brushed her lips against his neck, softly, slowly until his skin responded. She smoothed her hands down his back to his waist, pulled him closer in such a way that there was no mistaking her meaning.
He looked surprised, but when she kissed him on the mouth, he responded in equal measure. At the moment, Sara didn't so much want sex as the intimacy that came with it. It was, at least, the one thing she knew she was capable of doing right.
Jeffrey was the first to pull away. 'Let's go home, okay?' He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. 'I'll cook supper and we'll lay on the couch and…'
She kissed him again, biting his lip, pressing closer. He had never needed much coaxing, but as his hand slid to the zipper on her skirt, Sara's mind wandered to thoughts of home: the pile of laundry that needed to be folded, the leaking faucet in the guest bathroom, the torn shelf liner in the kitchen.
Just the thought of taking off her panty hose was overwhelming.
He pulled away again, a half-smile on his lips. 'Come on,' he said, taking her by the hand and leading her out of the bathroom. 'I'll drive you home.'
They were halfway across the lobby when his cell phone started to ring. He offered a shrug to Sara, as if he needed her permission to answer the phone.
'Go ahead,' she relented, knowing whoever it was would just call back – or worse, come find him. 'Answer it.'
He still seemed reluctant, but took the phone off its clip anyway. She saw him frown as he looked at the caller ID, then answered, Tolliver.'
Sara leaned back against the front counter, hugging her arms to her waist as she tried to read his expression. She had been a cop's wife far too long to think that there was any such thing as a simple phone call.
'Where is she now?' Jeffrey demanded. He nodded, his shoulders tensing as he listened to the caller. 'All right,' he said, looking at his watch. 'I can be there in three hours.'
He ended the call, squeezing the phone so hard in his hand that Sara thought it might break. ' Lena,' he said brusquely, just as Sara was about to ask him what was going on. Lena Adams was a detective on his squad, a woman who made a habit of getting herself into bad situations and dragging Jeffrey along with her. Just the sound of her name brought a sense of dread.
Sara said, 'I thought she was on vacation.'
'There was an explosion,' Jeffrey answered. 'She's in the hospital.'
'Is she okay?'
'No,' he told her, shaking his head as if he could not believe what he had heard. 'She's been arrested.'
THREE DAYS EARLIER
TWO
Lena kept one hand on the steering wheel as she scrolled through radio stations with the other. She cringed at the vacuous girls screeching from the speakers; when had stupidity become a marketable talent? She gave up when she hit the country music channels. There was a six-disc changer in the trunk, but she was sick of each and every song on each and every disc. Desperate, she reached into the floor of the backseat, groping for a loose CD. She fished out three empty jewel cases in a row, cursing more loudly with each one. She was about to give up when the tips of her fingers brushed a cassette tape underneath her seat.
Her Celica was around eight years old and still had a tape player, but Lena had no idea what this particular cassette contained, or how it had even ended up in her car. Still, she popped it into the dash and waited. No music came, and she turned up the knob, wondering if the tape was blank or had been damaged by last summer's scorching heat. She turned it up further and nearly had a heart attack when the opening drumbeats of Joan Jett's 'Bad Reputation' filled the car.
Sibyl. Her twin sister had made this tape two weeks before she had died. Lena could remember listening to this exact song nearly six years ago as she sped down the highway, heading back to Grant County from a drop-off she'd made at the Georgia
Bureau of Investigation's lab in Macon. The drive had been much like the one she was making today: a straight shot down a kudzu-lined interstate, the
She popped out the tape and turned off the radio.
Six years. It didn't seem like so much time had passed, but then again, it felt like an eternity. Lena i was just now getting to the point where her dead! twin was not the first thing she thought about when j she woke up in the morning. It usually wasn't until later in the day when she saw something funny or heard a crazy story at work that she thought about Sibyl, made a mental note to tell her sister, then i realized a split second later that Sibyl was no longer j there to hear it.
Lena had always thought of Sibyl as her only j. family. Their mother had died thirteen days after giving birth. Their father, a cop, had been shot dead! by a man he'd pulled over on a speeding violation, i He'd never even known his young wife was pregnant. As there were no other relatives to speak j of, Hank Norton, their mother's brother, had j-raised the two girls. Lena had never thought of her l uncle
