Locked rooms - Laurie R. King [173]
I wanted to talk to her, wanted in fact to grab her hard and demand what had set her on our heels so resolutely, but then I saw her glance at him, and in that one glance, it all became clear.
Even after all these years, and despite the self-control that was keeping her spine straight and her face untroubled, her weakness was the man beside her. For a brief instant, she looked afraid—not for herself, but for him.
She was not his sister. She might have been his willing slave.
My eyes went to him, as if mere appearance could explain such a lifetime of devotion: Robert Greenfield, my father's comrade-in-youth, who had inspired mistrust in my mother and open animosity in his ex-wife. An ordinary enough figure, other than the scarring on his face, and even that was hardly fearsome.
Standing at the front of the motor, Greenfield's curses only increased in volume, until one of the men nearby drew a length of filthy rag from about his person and held it up enquiringly in front of Dr Ming. Dr Ming deferred to Holmes, who turned to look at me, asking with his eyebrows if I cared to speak with the man before the police arrived.
Greenfield followed the sequence of glances until it ended up with me, at which point his curses strangled in his throat. “Jesus—Charlie?” he choked out, then looked at me more comprehensively. If anything, his face went whiter, and the internal murmur of something, there was something behind the—grew loud and louder in my ears.
“You . . . You must be the daughter. Mary. Christ, that hair, those glasses . . . I thought—” He caught himself up short, and tried hard to summon a crooked grin. “Did anyone ever tell you how much you look like your old man?”
“Before you killed him, you mean?”
The grin slipped for an instant before he retrieved it to buoy his protests, but I was not listening to his words. Instead, I was taken up with his face and the voice itself.
The burn that affected about half his facial skin had erased one eyebrow and part of the other, but had not gone deep enough to reach the muscles and tendons. Below the shiny scar tissue the movement was normal enough, albeit somewhat stiff on the left side.
And the voice—I knew that voice, slightly hoarse and with the flat Boston accent that my father had possessed in a much softer degree. The voice reached in and pulled out the hidden something, the room in my memory house that I had known was there, the key I had obediently set aside so thoroughly that I did not even see it.
“You said, ‘Don't be afraid, little girl,'” I told him. I had not meant to speak aloud, but the man blinked, so clearly I had.
“What?” he said.
“In the tent. When you came looking for my father and woke me up, you had no face, it was whiter than your face is now and even shinier, and I was frightened. You told me not to be afraid. But I should have been, shouldn't I?”
Greenfield looked at the men holding his arms and again tried to grin. “I was out doing rescue work and got burned, so I went to find your father and see how he was. He'd been a good friend of mine, before he married, and—”
“You were not doing rescue work; you were out robbing abandoned houses and stripping dead bodies.”
That silenced him.
“But that wasn't the only time,” I continued, speaking as much to myself, or to Holmes, as to Greenfield. “You were there when Father stopped for the tyre-change, weren't you? In Serra Beach. That's the thing I've been trying to remember the last few days, that I caught a glimpse of you behind the garage, slipping behind that big gum tree at the side. You'd been talking with my father, and when I finished lunch and went to find him and tell him we were ready to go, I saw the two of you, arguing. When my father turned and saw me, his face was red and his fists were