Shadows At Sunset - Anne Stuart [40]
“Take her upstairs, Rachel-Ann, while I check with Jaime.”
Rachel-Ann had said nothing as she took her sister’s arm and half dragged her up the winding marble staircase. It wasn’t until she’d shoved Jilly into the bathroom that she’d spoken. “You tell Grandmère about me and Richard and I’ll never forgive you. She’d fire Consuelo, for one thing, and she’d probably kick me out of the house, as well. And I don’t want to go and live with Daddy.”
“I didn’t think we had that choice,” Jilly said, her teeth chattering.
Rachel-Ann looked at her strangely. “I don’t know if you do,” she said, oblique as ever. “All I know is the only person who was in the pool tonight was you. Don’t you think we would have noticed if anything was wrong? As far as you’re concerned, you’re the only person who left the house at all. Understood?”
Jilly nodded, shivering.
There was no body in the pool. Jilly made herself walk down there the next morning in the blistering heat, knowing that if she didn’t go on her own her grandmother would force her. The water was crystal clear, the smell of chlorine was strong in the air. No weeds, no drowned faces, no fetid odor. If anyone had ever drowned in that pool it had happened in another lifetime, another reality.
But Jilly never went near the swimming pool again.
It came to her, though. In her dreams, she’d see her sister’s drowned face, the eyes wide and staring, the mouth open in a silent cry for help. Slime-covered branches would reach out of its murky depths for her, trying to pull her in. And she’d wake up screaming, as she did this night, the sound muffled in her pillow, as she was suddenly, blindingly awake in the pitch darkness of her bedroom.
Roofus lay on the floor, whimpering in sympathetic distress, and she reached down a hand to pat him automatically, rubbing behind his ears. Coltrane had known just where to rub him, as well. She’d always thought you could trust a man who liked dogs. Obviously she’d been mistaken in that basic belief.
Alan had hated Barkus, Jilly’s previous dog, and the feeling had been mutual. When Barkus had been found poisoned Jilly’s husband had said all the right things, but she couldn’t rid herself of the notion that Alan was secretly relieved. And once she’d accepted that fact, she knew there wasn’t any way she could stay with him.
But Roofus liked Coltrane. Maybe Roofus simply didn’t have any taste. Or maybe Coltrane wasn’t as bad as she thought.
Two days he’d been living at La Casa de Sombras. Two nights, sleeping just down the hall from her. He’d had a bed delivered sometime today, and she’d had every intention of confronting him and demanding what right he had to start buying furniture. In the end he hadn’t shown up at the house by late evening, and she’d gone to bed, deprived of her confrontation, both relieved and disappointed.
She climbed out of bed, piling her sweat-damp hair on top of her head. She wouldn’t be sleeping again that night, she thought wearily. It was 2:33 in the morning, and she knew from bitter experience that the rest of the night was shot. She pushed open the French doors and stepped out onto the balcony, into the cool night air, and stared down at the grounds.
The pool was hidden by the overgrown tangle of roses. She really should do something about it, she thought again. As long as it lay there, a veritable algae farm, then it had the power to haunt her dreams. If she just had it filled in then maybe the dreams would stop. She should have gotten over it by now.
She shook her hair free, feeling it settle down around her back like a curtain. She ought to go and have it all cut off, but for some reason her father hated it. Told her she looked like a hippie chick from the sixties. And Jilly merely smiled and let her hair grow longer. She’d always told herself her father’s approval or disapproval had no effect on her any longer. But she still didn’t cut her hair.
She leaned on the railing, staring down across the lawn, the Spanish tiles cool beneath