“Care to elaborate on that?”
“Not really. I just didn’t like being around him all that much. He wasn’t like a…a father. He made me uncomfortable. And… well, we didn’t get along all that great, that’s all.”
She was fumbling. I felt she wasn’t telling me the whole truth. And I was tired, suddenly feeling the need for more sleep now that the adrenaline had worn off. And I had to see Jeri at ten, find out if I was still a trainee-PI, but questions kept popping into my head. Guess it was all the gumshoe training I’d had that week. Hard to turn a thing like that off once it gets to be second nature.
“How’d you get in?” I asked. “Or do you scrub windows and pick locks?”
She smiled. “They do look better, don’t they?”
“The neon’s never been brighter, the sky’s never been so deep a blue.”
The look Kayla gave me was not unlike the ones Dallas gives me on occasion. She said, “Nicole told me she lived with her mom after the divorce. Your divorce, I mean. She hid a key to your house under a brick in your backyard. You’d sometimes go out of town on an audit or something, places like Elko or Hawthorne, and she’d come here with some friends and have a party.”
I stared at her.
“No big deal now, right?” she said. “This was when she was sixteen or seventeen. Anyway, I got into Reno at dusk on Sunday. You weren’t home so I hunted around out back and eventually found the brick and the key, so I let myself in. I wouldn’t have done it…well, okay, maybe I would have, but at the time I didn’t have a choice. I didn’t have any money, just a ridiculous Citgo card. My only credit card. Good for gas, junk food, staying on the road. I guess I’ll have to break down and get a real credit card sometime, even though I hate the idea of credit, owing people.”
I was still way behind, miles behind, not catching up very fast, either. “Parties,” I said. “In my house.”
“Not big ones, Mort. She didn’t have the junior class over. No more than six or eight kids, from what I gathered.”
Six or eight kids, strangers, hormone-driven purveyors of pure mayhem—teenagers—here in my castle, running amok, doing God knows what. And I’d never known, Great Gumshoe to be. Jesus H. Christ.
“Mort?”
“Huh?”
“You okay?”
“Terrific, thanks.”
“She was a kid. They do things like that, you know. It’s part of growing up.”
“Yeah, sure.” I felt like the fat kid in gym class, the freckled donut-muncher whose glasses won’t stay on, last one around the track, shoelaces flapping, everyone pointing, laughing. The kid who ends up getting locked in his own locker. That kid.
“I let myself in,” Kayla said. “Showered, went to bed. I’ve never been so utterly over-the-top exhausted in my life.”
“Why? What’d you do?”
“Drove out from Ithaca—straight through, the whole damn way.”
“Christ, that’s over two thousand miles.”
“Twenty-seven hundred. I didn’t have money for a motel, and… well…by the time I got to Reno not even megadoses of caffeine were having any effect, I mean four No-Doze washed down with black coffee in Lovelock. I was seeing double. Or maybe triple. I lost count. I don’t know how I made it that last hundred miles, brain buzzing and dead, all at the same time. After I got in the house and had a shower, I got some valerian from your medicine cabinet.”
“I noticed.”
“It helped bring me down. Then…I went comatose. Guess I’d make a lousy long-distance trucker.” She paused. “I owe you a lot, I know. I’ll pay back every cent, I promise.” She yawned expansively. “I would tell you about it now, the Ithaca thing, I mean, why I left, but I’m exhausted. I’m still feeling the effects of the drive. And I didn’t get much sleep last night at that awful little motel.”
“Me either. I didn’t fall asleep until three last night.”
“You look it.”
“Thanks a bunch. You don’t.”
“Ah, chivalry. I love it.” She grinned at me.
“I’m serious. Tell me one more thing: Why’d you call yourself K in that note? Why not let me know who you were?”
“I didn’t know what you’d do. I mean, with Jonnie gone, in the news everywhere. I couldn’t risk having you tell anyone I was here, not before I had a chance to explain, face to face.” She smiled. “And I didn’t think you’d recognize me. Or turn me in as a stray, either.”
“Meaning—men don’t call the cops when they find strange, beautiful women in their beds with their clothes piled on the floor.”
“Well, they don’t, as a rule.”
“There’s a rule?”
“I’m sure there must be.”
“Anyway, I’m glad you found me so predictable.”
“You haven’t been predictable at all. I haven’t done windows in I don’t know how long. Could we sleep now?”
“One last question. You said your name is Williams now. Who’s that?”
“Why? You worried?”
“Damn right I am. That’s trouble I don’t need.”
“My ex. Clay. He’s nothing. A mistake I haven’t seen in ten years. I kept the name, that’s all. It’s an okay generic name, a lot easier to pronounce than Sjorgen.”
I looked into her eyes. “I want you to know this’s really weird, Kayla, you crawling into my bed like this, especially with me in it.”
She smiled. “I know. I tried the couch first. Did you know that thing smells like a dog?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“I mean it really stinks, Mort. It’s gross. You oughta get rid of it. Or have it fumigated.”
“It’s an heirloom.”
“The smell, too?”
“Okay, I could maybe have it cleaned.”
“And, it’s too short.”
“Another complaint I’ve heard before.”
She looked around the room. “So, um…maybe you’ve got a spare T-shirt around here I could borrow?”
She’d been sitting behind the pillow the whole time, otherwise naked from the waist up, relatively naked from the waist down too, showing no signs of embarrassment.
“Yeah, sure.” I got one from my dresser, one that she’d washed. I turned my back, waiting while she pulled it on over her
