“Who are you?” I asked.
“Would you please sit?” she asked. “You look positively huge standing over me like that.” She scooted over a few inches.
I sat, warily, still holding the bedclothes. She kept the pillow in place. Between Jeri, Dallas, Winter, and Victoria, not to mention Libby, Dale, Rachael, Amyee, and the hooker, Holiday, at the Golden Goose, the past few days had been full of unexpected interactions with the fair sex—although fair sex, as in delicate, was beginning to sound like a misnomer of the first order.
“Who are you?” I asked again.
She pursed her lips at me, then yawned. “It might be better if we discussed it in the morning. I’m awfully tired, Mort. You too.”
“Oh, no,” I thundered. “No one sleeps. No one closes their eyes or so much as blinks excessively until I find out who you are.”
“Izzatso?” Her tone got huffy.
I folded my arms across my chest, blanket wadded in my lap, feeling more than a little huffy myself. “You got that right, Miss K.”
She sighed. “If you insist. My name is Kayla.”
Which didn’t mean a thing to me, but I liked it. It suited her. “Kayla,” I echoed, then followed up smartly with, “Kayla who? Mind telling me that?”
“Williams.”
I gave her a blank look. I didn’t know any Kayla Williams.
“Actually,” she said, “if you want to get picky, my name is Rosalyn Kayla Williams.”
I felt a chill travel up my spine on tiny feet, right to the base of my skull.
“Before Williams it was…uh, Sjorgen.”
Aw, shit. She was Jonnie’s kid.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“JONNIE’S KID,” I said.
A humorous light filled her eyes. “If I look like a kid to you, then yes.”
“Okay, his daughter.”
“You don’t look awfully thrilled about that, Mort.”
“Should I be?”
“I guess not. Probably not. One more person connected to Jonnie. I imagine you’ve had plenty of that lately.” She glanced around. “You wouldn’t happen to have like a nightlight or anything, would you? I can’t see your face very well.”
“It’s not that good a face.”
“And people think only women fish for compliments.”
“Just stating a fact, K—Kayla.”
“Well, if you believe it, I guess it must be true. One of those nightlight thingies? Maybe a flashlight? This is hardly the way to get acquainted.”
I dug a flashlight out of a nightstand and stuck it partway under a sheet, turned it on. The room took on a dim yellowish glow, hopefully not bright enough to attract the likes of Brian Williams, Katie Couric, or Wolf Blitzer—or a ragtag gang from Inside Edition.
“Better,” she said.
I stared at her. “Your hair was dark in a photo I saw recently.”
“Must’ve been an old one, about the time I was in middle school. Mom let me dye it black for my birthday. But haven’t you heard? Blondes have more fun.”
“Do they?”
“In fact, that’s a myth. I oughta know.” She twirled a lock of hair. “This is my natural color.”
“I know.”
Her eyes held mine. “Do you?”
“Got that when I was checking for bullet holes.”
She thought about that for a moment, then laughed. It was a nice, musical sound, without a trace of annoyance or dismay in it.
“What’re you doing here?” I asked.
“I needed a place to stay.”
That wasn’t an answer. “Why here, Kayla? Why me?”
“Why you what?”
“Was it because of Nicole?”
“Uh-huh. Indirectly, at least. She’s been away in Europe for a month, as you probably know. She doesn’t know I’m here.”
“Neither does the rest of the world. You’re a missing person, an enigma. Part of this puzzle everyone’s trying to figure out.”
“And I’d like to keep it that way. Dad disappeared and suddenly I was ducking reporters all over Ithaca. They were beyond persistent. It would be worse if anyone knew I was here in Reno. A lot worse.”
“But in spite of that you came back.”
“I had to.”
“Understandable. He’s your father.”
She hugged the pillow tighter. “It wasn’t that. I mean, he is, and maybe that’s part of the reason I’m here, but that’s not why I had to leave Ithaca.”
“Yeah? Why did you?”
She shivered. “How about I explain it in the morning? It’d take too long now.”
“You cold? Want me to shut the window?”
She smiled. “No. It’s still pretty warm out. Muggy. I’d forgotten the desert can get like this. Which, by the way, is one reason I’m dressed the way I am.”
“One reason? What’s another?”
“I haven’t worn clothing to bed since I was ten.” She shrugged. “PJs are uncomfortable. When you turn, they twist around you like those Chinese handcuff thingies.”
Dallas might’ve said the same thing. “How old are you, Kayla?”
“Thirty-four.” She tilted her head and smiled. “Relieved?”
“More than you’ll ever know.”
“Maybe not. Nicole told me you were a, well…something of a stick-in-the-mud.”
“She said that? My own kid?” That damn stockbroker heritage had surfaced again like a whale covered in old squid-sucker scars.
Kayla pursed her lips, suppressing a smile. “She didn’t mean it in a bad way, Mort.”
“Of course not. A stick-in-the-mud in a good way, what else?”
“Nicole loves you, Mort. A lot. She talks about you often. From everything she told me, I thought it would be safe to come here, you know, that first night. Then…” She shrugged. “You started finding all those heads and all hell broke loose.”
All those heads. Hell of a phrase. My own head was beginning to throb. I sensed nuances in Kayla’s words. I could tell I wasn’t picking up on even half of them. “Jonnie was your father, Kayla,” I said, trying to sound as nonjudgmental as possible.
She stared at her toes, wiggled them, then looked up at me again. “Dad and I weren’t close. We hadn’t been in a long time, since before I left for college. Once I left, I hardly ever came back, except for an occasional holiday. Weird, huh?”
“Maybe not. It all depends on the family.”
“My father…I don’t know, at times I had the feeling he
