Dead Certain - Mariah Stewart [61]
She squashed the pillow under the right side of her head and allowed her body to sink down into the too-soft mattress, listening to the dull hum of voices somewhere far away. Greer and Sean. She knew instinctively that they were talking about her. If she hadn’t been so damned tired, she’d have been tempted to sneak to the top of the stairs to try to listen.
Now, that’s something I haven’t done in a long, long time, she mused. Not since we were all together—Mom and Dad and Evan and I—living in the same house. We’d never given the voices a second thought, Evan and I hadn’t. We thought everyone’s parents argued at night after the kids had been tucked in. Thought all kids fell asleep to the sound of those hushed accusations, those angry voices touched with a quiet civility. There’d been a familiar comfort in the consistency of the hum of voices from the floor below. It wasn’t until after her father left that she began to understand the price of that comfort.
The voices below weren’t raised in anger, but there was a steady flow, a certain rhythm, to the conversation between sister and brother. There’d been questions she’d have asked of Greer earlier if they’d been more than mere acquaintances.
Amanda rolled onto her left side, thinking about her brother. She couldn’t imagine having grown up without Evan, couldn’t imagine having had suffered through her parents’ divorce without his calm, steady influence. He’d always been there for her. Still was. She smiled to herself, recalling his indignation at her being suspected in Derek’s death. Even knowing the admittedly damning facts against her, Evan had been infuriated that Sean Mercer—or anyone else—considered her capable of killing.
She sat up and dangled her legs over the side of the bed. Overtired now, she was unable to sleep, and yet lacked the strength to get up, dress herself, and go back downstairs. Not that she wanted to engage either Sean or Greer in conversation. She’d been living alone far too long to enjoy such intimate contact in the middle of the night. If the truth were to be told, she’d been mildly uncomfortable since the minute she stepped into this house.
For one thing, she wasn’t accustomed to sharing living space with anyone else. Sharing it with a stranger was that much more disconcerting. But she recognized that stubbornly insisting on staying alone, in her house, until questions were answered about the killings of two so close to her would have been folly. She understood that there was safety in numbers, and she was safer—theoretically—here, under the same roof with the sister of the chief of police, but even that knowledge didn’t make her much more comfortable with the situation.
For another, over the past year, she’d learned to rely upon herself for her strength and her safety. Allowing someone else to keep her safe smacked of a cop-out. But there was that little matter of a killer who’d already struck too close to home not once, but twice. In the end, she’d endure the discomfort of living under someone else’s roof, depending on the efforts of someone else to watch her back. She may not like the arrangement, but she wasn’t stupid.
She lay back down, flat on her back this time, and stared at the ceiling, wondering how long she could keep her eyes open. Closing them merely served as an invitation for the nightmare images to return, and she’d seen enough that day to last a lifetime. Marian on the floor, blood smearing her clothes and her chest and her throat and puddling under her head.
Marian, just a few days earlier, bringing Amanda tomatoes from her garden and gleefully confiding that her beefsteaks were a full twelve ounces heavier than the best her next-door neighbor had grown that summer. Marian, proudly showing off the treasures she’d bought at the house sale earlier in the week . . .
It just wasn’t fair, Amanda’s weary brain protested. It just wasn’t fair that good people